I bought one of those as a collector's item, and it was in amazing condition for its age. Considering everything that it came with, and the incredibly good condition of it all, it was probably the best deal I ever got on eBay.
Those machines suffer from the Y2K bug, however. I looked into it just out of curiosity (I consider mine a 'museum piece', to be kept original) and at the time there was a thriving enthusiast community-- a few of whom came up with a hardware fix for it (IIRC).
I heard the Model 1xx series was very popular with field reporters for a very long time due to their toughness, battery life, and ease of replacing batteries (it just takes a few AA's). They would use the acoustic coupler modem to transmit stories written in the field back to their offices for editing and publication.
...brought the arcade home in ways that even the Colecovision couldn't...
If I had points, I'd mod you up for this nod to the Colecovision. Definitely the best home conversions of arcade games available until the NES came along.
...and the theater was PACKED. I don't think it was sold out, but it was close-- and this was in the largest auditorium in the multiplex. Say what you will about the movie, but the marketing for it was absolutely perfect from the word go, in terms of building anticipation. People were stoked to see this, probably from the moment that weird, untitled teaser nearly stole Transformers' thunder 6 months ago. They showed an unusually large number of trailers before starting the movie, and the audience was getting really restless and jeering when the last two green bands appeared instead of the "And now, our Feature Presentation" graphic. A huge cheer went up when the Bad Robot logo finally hit the screen.
(Spoilers ahead, so consider yourself warned...)
As for the movie, loved it. The first 20 minutes were a little slow, but we do need a little time to get to know the characters and settle in before all hell breaks loose. The "ShakyCam" stuff was just this side of annoying, because it's hard to really get a good look at some things when they're all over the frame-- of course, that's probably the intended effect, to induce in the audience some of the "what was that, what the HELL is going on???" confusion that the characters are feeling. The camera's viewpoint also sucks the viewer in and makes you feel like you're there-- in the tunnels, my heart was pounding; same with the scene in the park after the chopper crash, when Hud retrieves the camera and the monster is standing over him-- I was sitting in my seat holding my breath and thinking "OhGodpleasedon'tlookdown, ohGodpleasedon'tlookdown!" It was so quiet at that moment in the theater, I think that was true of most of the audience. There were definitely some effects shots that evoked memories of 9/11 and made me shudder a bit, especially given the 'you are there' viewpoint, but it wasn't gratuitous-- just about the right amount of mayhem you'd expect when a 25 story tall monster is smashing its way through Manhattan.
I will probably catch it again with friends at some point, because nobody wanted to go with me to the midnight show, and I just really want to get another look at it.
It's 2008 and people are still going to the store? Do people have so much disposable time and so little else they could do with many extra hours a month that they still go shopping in an actual store? Do they look forward so much to driving around, dealing with parking, shopping carts, lines, people, their bratty kids, aisles, noise and lugging things around?
Food is pretty much the only thing I *don't* buy online, but I've got it down to a science. I go food shopping at 11pm on Friday or Saturday night... park nice and close (in one of the 'please reserve this spot for parents with small children' spaces), no bratty kids running around yelling and being ignored by their stupid parents, and only occasionally an inconsiderate moron blocking the aisle with their cart... I'm in and out in under 30 minutes, usually.
And I don't need any stupid computerized shopping cart. List goes on a post-it, I tear a small notch next to the items as I put them in the cart. This is one place where technology does not need to be applied (read: shoehorned in needlessly). Especially not by a bunch of half-assers like Microsoft.
Damn you for beating me to making the reference while I was looking up the relevant passage!
"Then there was a slight whisper, a sudden spacious whisper of open ambient sound. Every hi fi set in the world, every radio, every television, every cassette recorder, every woofer, every tweeter, every mid-range driver in the world quietly turned itself on. Every tin can, every dust bin, every window, every car, every wine glass, every sheet of rusty metal became activated as an acoustically perfect sounding board. Before the Earth passed away it was going to be treated to the very ultimate in sound reproduction, the greatest public address system ever built. But there was no concert, no music, no fanfare, just a simple message."
Point is, if they don't take steps to fix what's wrong with Vista and be very public about how they know there have been problems and they are working hard to fix them, the branding won't mean a whole lot.
Some would say it's already too late, because a year later SP1 has not yet appeared in Windows Update to fix the problems and even non-techie people are now at least dimly aware of the "Vista = bad" meme.... they may not know specifics, but they have heard that it's generally considered something to avoid if possible. That's a complete disaster for Microsoft, because their bread and butter has been selling mediocre product to those non-techie types via amazing marketing. If marketing can't dispel the notion those people have that Vista is a trouble-prone POS that makes new computers run slowly, Microsoft is in trouble.
If Mac OS X sells a PC version for around 300 bucks
An extra $170 over the cost of a copy of OS X right now does not compare to what they make on the sale of a Mac. Especially when you factor in stuff like Applecare extended warranties.
They would also have to add antipiracy measures like activation and serial numbers to OS X, which everyone would bitch about, just like they do with Windows. Ease of licensing is another thing Apple likes to tout over Microsoft, though not as publicly as they do ease of use. OS X Server's $1000-for-unlimited-CALs is a better example, though not one pointed at consumers. As a Mac sysadmin, I love that I can just buy a multi-user license for OS X client and not have to worry about serial numbers or activation or any of that crap-- Vista doesn't even have an activation-free corporate versions, now companies have to put a damn activation server in to take care of that.
In spite of the added antipiracy measures, illegal copying would still be rampant. You think people who don't want to pay for a Mac are going to happily fork over $300 for a DVD with code on it? People don't even want to spend $20 on a DVD movie when they can download it illegally for free! As things stand right now, a Mac is also basically a hardware dongle required to run OS X. Sure, OS X can be illegally downloaded and installed with some difficulty on non-Apple machines if you're determined to do it, but the situation would be much, much worse if they sold OS X for generic x86 machines.
Drivers? It can be done... Windows did it, Linux did it... so?
Microsoft spent 20 years trying to get plug and play working as well on Windows as it works on a Mac, and they still aren't there (though XP is pretty good). As for Linux, I see an awful lot of bitching on different forums about not being able to find drivers, drivers not being up to snuff, etc. And personally, I've tried a couple different versions of Ubuntu and cannot get my main monitor to display its native 1280x1024 resolution no matter what I do.
As long as Apple keeps selling Macs and making money doing it, they aren't going to do what you "But I don't wanna buy a Mac!" whiners want. And based on their last few quarters, they are going to keep on selling Macs and making money doing it-- the trendline is unmistakable. They've got mindshare right now thanks to the iPod halo effect and their clever TV ads, and Microsoft helped them sell a lot more Macs thanks to Vista being late and lousy.
So please, for the love of God, surrender your pointless pipe dream and just save up some damn money to buy a Mac if you want to run OS X. I'm tired of reading all these posts bitching about how you all wanna run OS X on your homebuilt rigs.
Being Windows Vista the crap that it is, I don't understand why Apple doesn't release a Mac OS X version for the PC.
Because Windows suffers for its "it'll run on damn near anything" design. It's designed for lowest common denominator, and it's impossible to test every possible combination of hardware.
Mac OS X has the "it just works" reputation it does because it's written for very specific hardware and can take full advantage of all the capabilities of that hardware. As soon as you can install OS X on any shitbox you can cobble together, you lose that.
The closest you'd ever get would be like the post-black-hardware NeXTSTEP days, when the OS supported certain motherboards, CD drives, etc, and you had to use what was on the NeXTSTEP HCL, or you were SOL. But don't hold your breath-- since Apple makes most of their money from hardware sales, they'd be cutting their own throat. Like when they allowed Mac clones and the cloners nearly bled them to death.
Microsoft has done the "when Windows version n+1 ships, immediately admit that Windows version n was crap" thing since Windows 95 appeared.
Maybe this time they're just being more aggressive about it, since XP is so firmly entrenched and all the compelling features that would have driven Vista upgrades were stripped out so they could actually ship it. They can market it all they like, but it's already got the reputation of being a trouble-plagued, warmed-over version of XP with a GUI that's a bad attempt at copying OS X's.
The other one that always gets me is car commercials. 90% of all car commercials show the vehicle being used in an illegal manner with often unreadble text at the bottom stating "Closed course. Professional driver."
A few years back, there was a commercial for some SUV or other where the vehicle was depicted driving vertically up the side of a skyscraper. For some reason, that merited a disclaimer stating that it was a special effect and not actually possible to do that, so don't try.
Conversely, the Chevy ads that ran this summer as a Transformers movie tie-in did not have a disclaimer stating that Chevrolet vehicles do not transform into sentient robots.
Given those two examples, I really have to wonder where the necessity-of-disclaimer line is drawn.
This is hardly the first time Unsanity's stuff has caused problems with a new version of OS X. If people are too damned dumb to uninstall their unsupported-hack add-ons before upgrading, that's their problem, not Apple's.
And no matter how much better OS X is than Windows w/r/t the "it just works" aspect, things can and do still go wrong sometimes. A little pre-upgrade basic system maintenance never hurts (at least repair permissions and verify/repair the target disk from Disk Utility on the Leopard CD), and neither does making a bootable clone of the system in case you have to revert.
One of the main reasons Vista has been so maligned is because it was ridiculously late and Microsoft was desperate to save face... so they started stripping out promised features and shipped it before it was truly ready. The bad reviews were legion. Word of mouth has spread. Even non-technical people have heard of Vista's bad reputation... I've lost count of the posts I've seen on here where someone mentions their surprise that their mom or whoever remarked something on the order of, "Vista? Isn't that the bad one?"
By holding Leopard back until they were sure it was ready, Apple has laid the groundwork for an even bigger opportunity. There are a lot of people out there who flat out don't like or don't want Vista. Delayed or not, if Leopard gets good reviews in the media and the word of mouth is positive, that's going to give a nice boost to Mac sales.
...if local ISPs simply refused to route packets from zombied boxes then their owners would soon work out they had to do something.
Yeah... unfortunately that something would be "switch to another ISP that doesn't have a zombied-box-cutoff policy."
You don't expect people to actually take responsibility, do you? Ha!
So basically that policy would never work unless all ISPs adopted it. But nobody ever will, because they'd have to add support people to deal with the cutoff victims, which would impact their profits, and we all know that when you're a telco, profits are more important than happy customers.
This isn't a very good analogy because the Apple hardware is locked to only a few configurations whereas Windows is "expected" to run pretty much anything that gets past the bios. With all sorts of weird, poorly written drivers. With whatever keyboard, mouse, joystick, video card, network card... hardware widget any Chinese manufacturer ever stamped out.
I read this and wonder why everyone magically expects OS X to work so much better in the same situation, if all the anti-Apple-hardware whiners got their wish and Apple sold it for generic x86 machines. No OS that has to support "lowest common denominator" with dodgy third party provided drivers is going to work like OS X does running on a limited pool of Apple-branded hardware.
Also the single mouse button on the unit makes it harder to use the thing away from a desk and that external mouse.
You merely need to check one checkbox in the preferences to enable right-clicking. After that: One finger touching the trackpad = left click Two fingers touching the trackpad = right click
MUCH better than two physical buttons IMHO, because I don't have to worry about moving my thumb to the left or right to make the appropriate click. When I used non-Apple laptops I would always have to look down or feel for the separation between the buttons to make sure I was about to click the correct one. I know of quite a few switchers who think Apple's way is superior to two physical buttons for much the same reason.
The best way to learn how to fix Macs is... by fixing Macs!
Use yours. Eventually you'll have a problem with it that you'll need to fix. Use Google and sites like the ones mentioned in the previous replies. Do the same for your friends who have Macs. You'll get good pretty fast. When you buy a new Mac, keep the old one as a testbed. Blow it up and fix it repeatedly. Read sites like MacOSXHints.com, MacGeekery.com, MacEnterprise.org and AFP548.com daily. Hell, even some of the Mac gossip sites have decent tech talk going on in some of their forums.
Apple does have formal training courses, but they are pricey, and practical experience is the best teacher. For example, I'm completely self-taught. I got my first Mac in the fall of 1991, and I never looked back. I've earned my living providing Mac support since 1994, and started getting certs in 2003 or so. I currently hold Help Desk Specialist, Technical Coordinator, and System Administrator (the Apple equivalent of MCSE) certifications.
IMHO Apple certifications mean more than Microsoft ones at the moment, because I don't think you can buy Apple exam answers from shady sites just yet, and there certainly aren't cheesy tech schools turning out real-world-experience-free Apple "certified" graduates by the hundreds like there are MCSE mills. The only way to get Apple certs at the present time is to actually know your shit.
You can get more info on Apple certifications here.
I'm not exactly sure what Apple uses under the hood to accomplish it. I don't think it's rsync, because I've fooled with the rsync built into OS X and I get errors frequently, but their home syncing works great.
When you have a mobile user account (i.e. a network account with a local copy of the home folder on the workstation), it will sync every so often (frequency and exactly what is synced/skipped can be configured on the server end, and the user can kick it off manually from the client end). To the best of my knowledge, the sync is bidirectional, so if you log into another machine with a mobile account and modify the server copy, the changes will be reflected on the mobile copy at next sync. It makes my life easier because if a laptop user's machine gets lost, stolen, damaged, or destroyed, we've automatically got a backup copy of the data on it up to the last time it was synced.
In the event of conflicts, the user is presented with a dialog asking which version to keep, including file size and modification date.
Note that I'm not suggesting you throw out your existing hardware and buy Macs to get this feature, but maybe look into exactly how it's done on the Mac and see if you can duplicate it on your systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Your buddy should have posted to /. that he was online, not you... he totally blew the best **NO CARRIER** joke opportunity ever!
~Philly
I bought one of those as a collector's item, and it was in amazing condition for its age. Considering everything that it came with, and the incredibly good condition of it all, it was probably the best deal I ever got on eBay.
Those machines suffer from the Y2K bug, however. I looked into it just out of curiosity (I consider mine a 'museum piece', to be kept original) and at the time there was a thriving enthusiast community-- a few of whom came up with a hardware fix for it (IIRC).
I heard the Model 1xx series was very popular with field reporters for a very long time due to their toughness, battery life, and ease of replacing batteries (it just takes a few AA's). They would use the acoustic coupler modem to transmit stories written in the field back to their offices for editing and publication.
~Philly
..."Thou shalt not watch 'the big game'"?
Remember, you can't use the name unless you cough up money to the NFL! It's trademarked!
...brought the arcade home in ways that even the Colecovision couldn't...
If I had points, I'd mod you up for this nod to the Colecovision. Definitely the best home conversions of arcade games available until the NES came along.
~Philly
Just blanking a site is lazy.
--
This space intentionally left blank.
Irony, thy name is gnick.
...and the theater was PACKED. I don't think it was sold out, but it was close-- and this was in the largest auditorium in the multiplex. Say what you will about the movie, but the marketing for it was absolutely perfect from the word go, in terms of building anticipation. People were stoked to see this, probably from the moment that weird, untitled teaser nearly stole Transformers' thunder 6 months ago. They showed an unusually large number of trailers before starting the movie, and the audience was getting really restless and jeering when the last two green bands appeared instead of the "And now, our Feature Presentation" graphic. A huge cheer went up when the Bad Robot logo finally hit the screen.
(Spoilers ahead, so consider yourself warned...)
As for the movie, loved it. The first 20 minutes were a little slow, but we do need a little time to get to know the characters and settle in before all hell breaks loose. The "ShakyCam" stuff was just this side of annoying, because it's hard to really get a good look at some things when they're all over the frame-- of course, that's probably the intended effect, to induce in the audience some of the "what was that, what the HELL is going on???" confusion that the characters are feeling. The camera's viewpoint also sucks the viewer in and makes you feel like you're there-- in the tunnels, my heart was pounding; same with the scene in the park after the chopper crash, when Hud retrieves the camera and the monster is standing over him-- I was sitting in my seat holding my breath and thinking "OhGodpleasedon'tlookdown, ohGodpleasedon'tlookdown!" It was so quiet at that moment in the theater, I think that was true of most of the audience. There were definitely some effects shots that evoked memories of 9/11 and made me shudder a bit, especially given the 'you are there' viewpoint, but it wasn't gratuitous-- just about the right amount of mayhem you'd expect when a 25 story tall monster is smashing its way through Manhattan.
I will probably catch it again with friends at some point, because nobody wanted to go with me to the midnight show, and I just really want to get another look at it.
~Philly
It's 2008 and people are still going to the store? Do people have so much disposable time and so little else they could do with many extra hours a month that they still go shopping in an actual store? Do they look forward so much to driving around, dealing with parking, shopping carts, lines, people, their bratty kids, aisles, noise and lugging things around?
Food is pretty much the only thing I *don't* buy online, but I've got it down to a science. I go food shopping at 11pm on Friday or Saturday night... park nice and close (in one of the 'please reserve this spot for parents with small children' spaces), no bratty kids running around yelling and being ignored by their stupid parents, and only occasionally an inconsiderate moron blocking the aisle with their cart... I'm in and out in under 30 minutes, usually.
And I don't need any stupid computerized shopping cart. List goes on a post-it, I tear a small notch next to the items as I put them in the cart. This is one place where technology does not need to be applied (read: shoehorned in needlessly). Especially not by a bunch of half-assers like Microsoft.
Damn you for beating me to making the reference while I was looking up the relevant passage!
"Then there was a slight whisper, a sudden spacious whisper of open ambient sound. Every hi fi set in the world, every radio, every television, every cassette recorder, every woofer, every tweeter, every mid-range driver in the world quietly turned itself on. Every tin can, every dust bin, every window, every car, every wine glass, every sheet of rusty metal became activated as an acoustically perfect sounding board. Before the Earth passed away it was going to be treated to the very ultimate in sound reproduction, the greatest public address system ever built. But there was no concert, no music, no fanfare, just a simple message."
~Philly
...but referring to a product as "an Edsel" now is to call it a failure.
Googling "Vista Edsel" shows I'm not the first person to think of the similarities between the two: http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2007/082307backspin.html
Point is, if they don't take steps to fix what's wrong with Vista and be very public about how they know there have been problems and they are working hard to fix them, the branding won't mean a whole lot.
Some would say it's already too late, because a year later SP1 has not yet appeared in Windows Update to fix the problems and even non-techie people are now at least dimly aware of the "Vista = bad" meme.... they may not know specifics, but they have heard that it's generally considered something to avoid if possible. That's a complete disaster for Microsoft, because their bread and butter has been selling mediocre product to those non-techie types via amazing marketing. If marketing can't dispel the notion those people have that Vista is a trouble-prone POS that makes new computers run slowly, Microsoft is in trouble.
~Philly
If Mac OS X sells a PC version for around 300 bucks
An extra $170 over the cost of a copy of OS X right now does not compare to what they make on the sale of a Mac. Especially when you factor in stuff like Applecare extended warranties.
They would also have to add antipiracy measures like activation and serial numbers to OS X, which everyone would bitch about, just like they do with Windows. Ease of licensing is another thing Apple likes to tout over Microsoft, though not as publicly as they do ease of use. OS X Server's $1000-for-unlimited-CALs is a better example, though not one pointed at consumers. As a Mac sysadmin, I love that I can just buy a multi-user license for OS X client and not have to worry about serial numbers or activation or any of that crap-- Vista doesn't even have an activation-free corporate versions, now companies have to put a damn activation server in to take care of that.
In spite of the added antipiracy measures, illegal copying would still be rampant. You think people who don't want to pay for a Mac are going to happily fork over $300 for a DVD with code on it? People don't even want to spend $20 on a DVD movie when they can download it illegally for free! As things stand right now, a Mac is also basically a hardware dongle required to run OS X. Sure, OS X can be illegally downloaded and installed with some difficulty on non-Apple machines if you're determined to do it, but the situation would be much, much worse if they sold OS X for generic x86 machines.
Drivers? It can be done... Windows did it, Linux did it... so?
Microsoft spent 20 years trying to get plug and play working as well on Windows as it works on a Mac, and they still aren't there (though XP is pretty good). As for Linux, I see an awful lot of bitching on different forums about not being able to find drivers, drivers not being up to snuff, etc. And personally, I've tried a couple different versions of Ubuntu and cannot get my main monitor to display its native 1280x1024 resolution no matter what I do.
As long as Apple keeps selling Macs and making money doing it, they aren't going to do what you "But I don't wanna buy a Mac!" whiners want. And based on their last few quarters, they are going to keep on selling Macs and making money doing it-- the trendline is unmistakable. They've got mindshare right now thanks to the iPod halo effect and their clever TV ads, and Microsoft helped them sell a lot more Macs thanks to Vista being late and lousy.
So please, for the love of God, surrender your pointless pipe dream and just save up some damn money to buy a Mac if you want to run OS X. I'm tired of reading all these posts bitching about how you all wanna run OS X on your homebuilt rigs.
~Philly
Being Windows Vista the crap that it is, I don't understand why Apple doesn't release a Mac OS X version for the PC.
Because Windows suffers for its "it'll run on damn near anything" design. It's designed for lowest common denominator, and it's impossible to test every possible combination of hardware.
Mac OS X has the "it just works" reputation it does because it's written for very specific hardware and can take full advantage of all the capabilities of that hardware. As soon as you can install OS X on any shitbox you can cobble together, you lose that.
The closest you'd ever get would be like the post-black-hardware NeXTSTEP days, when the OS supported certain motherboards, CD drives, etc, and you had to use what was on the NeXTSTEP HCL, or you were SOL. But don't hold your breath-- since Apple makes most of their money from hardware sales, they'd be cutting their own throat. Like when they allowed Mac clones and the cloners nearly bled them to death.
~Philly
This is an old, old tactic.
Microsoft has done the "when Windows version n+1 ships, immediately admit that Windows version n was crap" thing since Windows 95 appeared.
Maybe this time they're just being more aggressive about it, since XP is so firmly entrenched and all the compelling features that would have driven Vista upgrades were stripped out so they could actually ship it. They can market it all they like, but it's already got the reputation of being a trouble-plagued, warmed-over version of XP with a GUI that's a bad attempt at copying OS X's.
~Philly
No need to make one, the Sega Genesis had the same port. I have used a Sega cable successfully with my C64.
~Philly
Last year, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates [insisted] that the fact it requires a hand crank for power would make it difficult for children to use.
Safe bet ol' Bill never had one of these, then.
~Philly
Comcast seems like a pretty field, where naked women tend to my every need.
Until you try to seed torrents, then they tie you down and use a strap-on on you.
The other one that always gets me is car commercials. 90% of all car commercials show the vehicle being used in an illegal manner with often unreadble text at the bottom stating "Closed course. Professional driver."
A few years back, there was a commercial for some SUV or other where the vehicle was depicted driving vertically up the side of a skyscraper. For some reason, that merited a disclaimer stating that it was a special effect and not actually possible to do that, so don't try.
Conversely, the Chevy ads that ran this summer as a Transformers movie tie-in did not have a disclaimer stating that Chevrolet vehicles do not transform into sentient robots.
Given those two examples, I really have to wonder where the necessity-of-disclaimer line is drawn.
~Philly
Pics here.
This is hardly the first time Unsanity's stuff has caused problems with a new version of OS X. If people are too damned dumb to uninstall their unsupported-hack add-ons before upgrading, that's their problem, not Apple's.
And no matter how much better OS X is than Windows w/r/t the "it just works" aspect, things can and do still go wrong sometimes. A little pre-upgrade basic system maintenance never hurts (at least repair permissions and verify/repair the target disk from Disk Utility on the Leopard CD), and neither does making a bootable clone of the system in case you have to revert.
~Philly
One of the main reasons Vista has been so maligned is because it was ridiculously late and Microsoft was desperate to save face... so they started stripping out promised features and shipped it before it was truly ready. The bad reviews were legion. Word of mouth has spread. Even non-technical people have heard of Vista's bad reputation... I've lost count of the posts I've seen on here where someone mentions their surprise that their mom or whoever remarked something on the order of, "Vista? Isn't that the bad one?"
By holding Leopard back until they were sure it was ready, Apple has laid the groundwork for an even bigger opportunity. There are a lot of people out there who flat out don't like or don't want Vista. Delayed or not, if Leopard gets good reviews in the media and the word of mouth is positive, that's going to give a nice boost to Mac sales.
~Philly
Here's a mirror:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html
...if local ISPs simply refused to route packets from zombied boxes then their owners would soon work out they had to do something.
Yeah... unfortunately that something would be "switch to another ISP that doesn't have a zombied-box-cutoff policy."
You don't expect people to actually take responsibility, do you? Ha!
So basically that policy would never work unless all ISPs adopted it. But nobody ever will, because they'd have to add support people to deal with the cutoff victims, which would impact their profits, and we all know that when you're a telco, profits are more important than happy customers.
~Philly
This isn't a very good analogy because the Apple hardware is locked to only a few configurations whereas Windows is "expected" to run pretty much anything that gets past the bios. With all sorts of weird, poorly written drivers. With whatever keyboard, mouse, joystick, video card, network card ... hardware widget any Chinese manufacturer ever stamped out.
I read this and wonder why everyone magically expects OS X to work so much better in the same situation, if all the anti-Apple-hardware whiners got their wish and Apple sold it for generic x86 machines. No OS that has to support "lowest common denominator" with dodgy third party provided drivers is going to work like OS X does running on a limited pool of Apple-branded hardware.
~Philly
Also the single mouse button on the unit makes it harder to use the thing away from a desk and that external mouse.
You merely need to check one checkbox in the preferences to enable right-clicking. After that:
One finger touching the trackpad = left click
Two fingers touching the trackpad = right click
MUCH better than two physical buttons IMHO, because I don't have to worry about moving my thumb to the left or right to make the appropriate click. When I used non-Apple laptops I would always have to look down or feel for the separation between the buttons to make sure I was about to click the correct one. I know of quite a few switchers who think Apple's way is superior to two physical buttons for much the same reason.
~Philly
The best way to learn how to fix Macs is... by fixing Macs!
Use yours. Eventually you'll have a problem with it that you'll need to fix. Use Google and sites like the ones mentioned in the previous replies. Do the same for your friends who have Macs. You'll get good pretty fast. When you buy a new Mac, keep the old one as a testbed. Blow it up and fix it repeatedly. Read sites like MacOSXHints.com, MacGeekery.com, MacEnterprise.org and AFP548.com daily. Hell, even some of the Mac gossip sites have decent tech talk going on in some of their forums.
Apple does have formal training courses, but they are pricey, and practical experience is the best teacher. For example, I'm completely self-taught. I got my first Mac in the fall of 1991, and I never looked back. I've earned my living providing Mac support since 1994, and started getting certs in 2003 or so. I currently hold Help Desk Specialist, Technical Coordinator, and System Administrator (the Apple equivalent of MCSE) certifications.
IMHO Apple certifications mean more than Microsoft ones at the moment, because I don't think you can buy Apple exam answers from shady sites just yet, and there certainly aren't cheesy tech schools turning out real-world-experience-free Apple "certified" graduates by the hundreds like there are MCSE mills. The only way to get Apple certs at the present time is to actually know your shit.
You can get more info on Apple certifications here.
~Philly
I'm not exactly sure what Apple uses under the hood to accomplish it. I don't think it's rsync, because I've fooled with the rsync built into OS X and I get errors frequently, but their home syncing works great.
When you have a mobile user account (i.e. a network account with a local copy of the home folder on the workstation), it will sync every so often (frequency and exactly what is synced/skipped can be configured on the server end, and the user can kick it off manually from the client end). To the best of my knowledge, the sync is bidirectional, so if you log into another machine with a mobile account and modify the server copy, the changes will be reflected on the mobile copy at next sync. It makes my life easier because if a laptop user's machine gets lost, stolen, damaged, or destroyed, we've automatically got a backup copy of the data on it up to the last time it was synced.
In the event of conflicts, the user is presented with a dialog asking which version to keep, including file size and modification date.
Note that I'm not suggesting you throw out your existing hardware and buy Macs to get this feature, but maybe look into exactly how it's done on the Mac and see if you can duplicate it on your systems.
~Philly