The numeric keypad allows for faster entry of lots of numbers. If you're entering a column of numbers into a spreadsheet, it's much easier to use the numeric keypad than it is to peck along the top of the keyboard.
If your work never requires you to type lots of numbers, you're right, there's probably no need.
Red Herring claimed 300,000 subscribers. At $35/subscriber/year, that's $10.5 million annually., or $338,000 in annual revenue for each of its 31 employees. From subscriptions alone!
It's just amazing to me that a company couldn't successfully run on that amount of revenue.
A while ago, Eating Well magazine got shut down because of problems with advertising revenue. This was a magazine with a fairly large loyal readership. They've started publication again, and the magazine is now entirely supported by subscriptions - there is no advertising at all. I happily pay a few dollars extra for a magazine that is 100% content (rather than 50% ads).
And you now have a company out there who believes they paid you fairly for a Flash job, and knows that you produced lousy, unmaintainable code. It seems to me like you shot yourself in the foot.
Re:Suit and Tie do not make the programmer.
on
Suit Up Or Ship Out?
·
· Score: 1
scratchy collars, wool suits in the summer
Perhaps you're wearing the wrong suits/shirts? There are plenty of shirts with non-scratchy collars, and plenty of summer-weight suits available . If you spend a little more money, you can get suits that are extremely comfortable (i.e. Brooks Brothers).
Although I agree that wearing suits in Texas in the summer probably sucks.
Doesn't it bug you to tell some stranger about yourself for no reason? When you walk into the shopping mall, is there someone standing at the door telling you you can't come in unless you tell them your salary? Then do they have someone follow you around with a clipboard writing down what stores you look in? Wouldn't that creep you out just a little bit?
Do you rent videos? The video store keeps a record of all the videos you've rented. Is this an invasion of privacy too? Is it ok because you're paying them for the videos?
most web site owners know it would drive users away from the web in droves.
The NYT website has 8.8 million visitors each month. They hardly have a problem with droves of users running away - quite the opposite.
that's why the NYT is so annoying.
Annoying. Ok. This I can accept. But why protest something just because it's annoying? Usually people protest for ethical reasons, but it doesn't seem like there's an ethical issue here - just a bunch of people who want something for nothing.
#1 First of all, your statement is false. The Slashdot site works perfectly without cookies or login. NYT does not. Slashdot is perfectly happy to accept my posts anonymously.
Sorry, I didn't know slashdot allowed non-user posts. My mistake.
#2 Registering to have an exlusive name to use when posting comments makes sense. To read a NYT article it does not.
This is entirely subjective. You don't want to register, so you don't think it makes sense. NYT wants to gather data, so they ask you to register. Would it make more sense if they charged $80/year to register and read their content, like the Wall Street Journal does?
#3 Having a Slashdot account provides me with desirable services such as being able to review my latest posts for responses. NYT registration does not.
An NYT registration provides me with the highly desirable service of displaying NYT articles, which I find even more valuable that Slashdot's features. Again, it's a subjective judgement of value.
#4 Slashdot doesn't even ask for, much less DEMAND info like my income, (general)address, age, profession, sex, etc. I don't recall if slashdot even asked for an E-mail.
True, but I don't remember using real information when signing up for NYT, and they don't seem to care, even after many years. They've never contacted me in any way.
(I skipped over a few of your points that weren't really criticisms.)
#7 Slashdot is THE ONLY cookie on my system. It is there because I find it useful. Cookies are a serious mis-feature, 99% of the time their use is not for the users benefit.
The NYT cookie is useful to me because it allows me to get to content that otherwise would not be available. I guess you just don't value that content as much.
#8 Any website that completely fails to function without cookies is BROKEN. Let me rephrase that - Any website that completely refuses to function without cookies is BROKEN. "Fails" implies design error - this generally results in a mostly-useable site. "Refuses" implies by-design, this often results in a completely broken site.
Again, this is a subjective judgement. 8.8 million people use the NYT website every month, so in some sense it is not broken - it functions exactly as the developers intended. Cookies have been around for seven years or so. Most people have them turned on. NYT decided it was a fair tradeoff to get the benefit of millions of registered users while losing the handful of people who refuse to accept cookies. A perfectly reasonable business decision.
#9 I trust slashdot's use of my information more than I trust NYT's use of my information.
Why?
#10 I trust NYT a hell of a lot more than I trust most other sites. Any success of the NYT system will only promote its use elsewhere.
And some more web content providers will stay in existence because they could target their content more accurately.
#11 The sole purpose of the NYT login is to snoop on people.
And to use that data to target content more effectively, improve site structure, fund content that readers enjoy, and target advertising more effectively.
#12 What would your reaction be if your local library or supermarket started requiring you to clip a photoID to your shirt in order to walk in the door?
The costs for a local supermarket to allow lots of customers through the door are minimal, because most customers buy stuff. This doesn't happen with a content website. NYT has chosen to make the investment in their online articles worthwhile by aggregating a small amount of data. I see this as a fair trade. You don't think there's enough value received to make giving away your data worthwhile.
#13 Throwing up barricades like that all over the internet is a BadThing. It impedes useful linking and free travel. That's not an internet, that's a balkanized-net.
#14 If someone wants to make information freely available, kudos to them. But making people jump through hoops for freely available information is obnoxious. If you're putting it on the web, put it on the damn web.
It sounds like you're just annoyed by the NYT policy, and don't think that you're getting enough value to make giving up your personal information worthwhile. For me (and 8.8 million others each month), it's definitely a good tradeoff.
The fact that you want bread for free doesn't make it unethical for someone to offer bread in exchange for your mailing address. Furthermore, a few hundred people choosing not to register is not going to change things. I was really hoping for someone who could explain the ethical dilema here - why should I be concerned?
But why protest? NYT has a great website, with great articles that are interesting to read. I created a login years ago, and so they're aggregating data on which articles I read. I don't get any email from them; they leave me alone. They don't sell my personal information or my email address.
It seems to me that there's nothing to protest - they give me a service for free, and in exchange, I let them keep track of the stories I read. This is not a privacy invasion. There's no injustice going on - it's a simple exchange.
You're a registered/. user, so the same thing could happen on this site. Yet I don't see you complaining about having to register to post comments here. What's the difference?
> I hear this conspiracy theory alot, but in the real world, how could they prevent a better technology?
Easy - the same way the automobile industry killed off the trolley industry - they bought up trolley systems in cities and shut them down. (It probably wouldn't be exactly the same tactic, but you get the idea.)
I think the biggest problem was that so much of the movie's focus was about being faithful to the book. Chris Columbus et al were so concerned with making the book's fans happy that they lost a lot of opportunities to make a better movie.
One of the reasons Fellowship of the Ring was such a great movie was that the screenwriters and director took real liberties with the _story_ to make it better for the film medium. Tolkien's books are not nearly as plot-driven as the Harry Potter series - there's a huge amount of character development and background information, providing a rich palette from which to draw when translating to another medium.
Jackson's team recognized this, and were incredibly faithful to Tolkien's vision of Middle Earth, even as they altered the plot of the story to fit into the new format.
While the Harry Potter books are great, they are ultimately children's books. They just don't have the enormous depth of Middle Earth; Columbus's team had a much less rich palette to draw on. I thought they did a good job with the look and feel of the place. But the simpler world, combined with rabid (and very young) fans demanding a movie very closely matched to the book, lead to a film that's perhaps not as strong as it could be.
It seems likely that some sort of intelligent caching will solve this problem. Storage is getting cheaper and cheaper. The practical solution may be to have "media mirrors" spread around on the net.
Imagine every ISP hosting a media mirror server that caches films. The copyright holders would probably cover the cost of the server; ISPs would host these servers to save on outbound bandwidth. New films could be automatically downloaded to the server. Older films, when requested by a user, would be downloaded on demand to the media server and then streamed to the user (or downloaded, for an extra fee).
The only films flying around the 'Net at large would be new films going from the content producer to these caching servers, and old films not already cached.
This is why it's so important to get on your state list, if one's available. A guy got a thousand dollars or so recently after he was called by telemarketers despite being on the statewide do-not-call list.
You know, the only way to get put on a do-not-call list is to say "Please put me on your do-not-call list". That's the only request they're legally obligated to honor. You can say "Don't call me again" until you're blue in the face; it has no effect whatsoever. It's not surprising your friend is still getting calls.
After about 8 months of consistently asking to be put on do-not-call lists, all telemarking calls to my home number stopped. (I also registered with the Direct Mail Marketing Association's telephone preference service, which may have helped.)
Some states have do not call lists (here's a list). While it can be fun to mess with telemarketers, I prefer to be left alone.
First, there's stability. The Mac, since I got it 2 months ago, has crashed or locked up at least 4 times. Stock hardware, stock OS X install with the latest updates. Twice a month is great if you're used to Windows, but for UNIX, it stinks.
It's unusual that you've had so many crashes under 10.1. I've only managed to crash 10.1 twice. Once, I was burning a CD on Server and tried to access an AppleTalk share. The other time, I was trying to run Quake I in Classic mode on 10.1 client. Sure, individual programs crash from time to time, but the whole system almost never goes down. This was not true of 10.0.x server, which had all sorts of problems.
Flakiness/weirdness. Occasionally I'll type a command at the tcsh prompt and it will coredump for no reason. "ls" gets a bus error or something. Then it works fine after that. This certainly isn't every day, and it always seems to work the next time, but it's not indicative of a truly mature OS.
Again, I have to wonder if you have a hardware problem. We have an iBook that came with a bad memory chip, and it exhibited lots of wierd behavior that disappeared when we replaced the chip and re-installed the OS. Other than that, on a half-dozen machines, we never see much weirdness (aside from the printing subsystem, which is horrible).
... Apple, being the king of ease-of-use, needs to improve the administration abilities in OS X. Easy gui panels for everything - not just a few settings like IP address, users, etc. Do it like IRIX but even better. (I may have read somewhere that OS X Server has a lot of this stuff - maybe Apple wants people to buy that to get all the admin stuff. Fair enough)
Yes, Server has a lot of this stuff. The Server Admin tool is great for administering most things, especially Apache. And you can still edit httpd.conf by hand if you want to - Apache just runs off of multiple config files. It'd be nice if it was easy to write and add modules for Server Admin (for things like mySQL); perhaps this will come later.
Moreover, many third party applications have taken this attitude from Apple and practically refuse to work if run by a non-admin user. Quicken was a real ordeal to get working so both my wife and I could run it and update the same data file from our respective accounts.
This is a bit of a pain, especially since admin users get notified when software updates are available. This can be quite confusing for someone who doesn't need to be an admin (but are set up as one because their programs need it.)
Also, I wish there weren't so many different installers used by various apps.
Yeah. Especially since every other OS has one and only one installer! I'm so glad Linux has standardized on one installer for everything;P
I've actually been to their store in Boulder CO; they're really comfortable. Much better than those thick-roped ones everyone seems to get. No more numb legs.
Re:They'll never get me
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 1
You forgot the option I use almost every week for adding new users on OS X - use Server Admin, that "little GUI tool", remotely. You just run it on any OS X machine anywhere on the Internet - provide a hostname, username, and password, and it's just like you're running Server Admin on the machine itself. Plus, it makes it really easy to set up virtual web hosts in Apache.
Visit the U.S. House representative list. Find your representative, and call. When I call, I usally do the following:
Say my name, and what city I live in.
Ask how Representative So-And-So plans to vote on the bill in question.
If the person you're speaking to indicates that your rep is voting for the position you agree with, say "Great - that's what I was hoping".
If you're told that your rep is voting the other way, say that you would urge them to support (or vote against, in this case) the bill in question, and give a sentence or two explaining why.
If the person you're speaking to doesn't know how your rep is going to vote, say "I'd like to urge Representative So-And-So to support (or vote against) this bill" and explain why.
Basically, what you're trying for is to come across as a reasonable voter who has an opinion. Your call will be logged, and your rep will get a report that 5 people called today urging him (or her) to vote against a bill, and 1 person called urging him to support another bill, etc. If enough people voice disapproval of the rep's planned vote, he may investigate further. If he doesn't know much about the issue, he may just go with the suggestion of the 20 people who bothered to call.
In Colorado, I am able to buy 100% wind powered electricity for an extra $3/month (over nuclear/coal/gas power). The US has tons of potential wind capacity. Aside from the noise created and space taken up by the generators, wind is just as good a power source as solar. And the public utility company here in Colorado is making enough money on wind power that they are able to profitably increase the number of wind generators each year.
What's key, though, is that this is a voluntary program. You don't have to pay extra for wind power. You can choose to stick with the old energy sources, if you want. But for a relatively small amount, you as an individual can contribute to the move towards better power sources.
This choice is what was touted as the "benefit to consumers" that comes with deregulation. In many other states, utilities are deregulated, but you don't get real choices when it comes to your power sources. So if you live in a state where you can choose a better source for your electricity, do it!
It may be because I'm using name-based virtual hosts that I've never needed to add anything to netinfo. I just use the "configure" option for the web server in Server Admin, add a new website (using the same IP but a different name/address/directory path). When I finish adding the new one, Server Admin asks if it should restart the web server for me.
Server admin actually generates a separate config file (/etc/httpd/httpd_macosxserver.conf) that lives side by side with the actual httpd.conf, and somehow the Apple version of Apache is smart enough to read both.
Note: I'm not looking at Server Admin right now, so the exact commands might be slightly different.
Speaking as a longtime UNIX (BSDi and Linux) user who's been running a production Mac OS X server for about six months, I can say that OS X is a breath of fresh air, simply for the Server Admin tool.
It's actually faster and easier to use the GUI to add, configure, and start a virtual web server than it was the old way (edit httpd.conf, apachectl restart). Some settings cannot yet be controlled using the GUI, but for those, I can easily edit the same old config file, the same way I've been maintaing Apache for years.
To be fair, Apple hasn't implemented everything in a way that's immediately intuitive (i.e. system startup script locations). And the documentation of some things (like system startup scripts) is nonexistent. But things improve with every release, and already I prefer maintaining OS X server to a linux box. (This was not the case until last fall's 10.1 release, though.)
-Alex
Indulge your creative muse
Want to double your desktop area by adding a second flat-panel display? Savvy creative professionals regard having two 22" Apple Cinema Displays as the ultimate in desktop efficiency -- the perfect visual environment for doing your best work. Of course, you can also combine a 22" Apple Cinema Display with a 15" or 17" Studio Display. Either way, all you need is a DVI video card like the ATI Radeon 32 MB PCI Card Mac Edition and the DVIator from Dr. Bott. Just pop open the Power Mac G4's easy-open side door, slip in the PCI card and connect the DVIator, and you're set.
I'm constantly plugging and unplugging my laptop ethernet cable (4x/day). The ends last about 3 months before the plastic tabs break off. Somehow, I think that ethernet cables won't hold up well enough for any serious music use.
Slashdot Mirror
The numeric keypad allows for faster entry of lots of numbers. If you're entering a column of numbers into a spreadsheet, it's much easier to use the numeric keypad than it is to peck along the top of the keyboard.
If your work never requires you to type lots of numbers, you're right, there's probably no need.
Red Herring claimed 300,000 subscribers. At $35/subscriber/year, that's $10.5 million annually., or $338,000 in annual revenue for each of its 31 employees. From subscriptions alone!
It's just amazing to me that a company couldn't successfully run on that amount of revenue.
A while ago,
Eating Well magazine got shut down because of problems with advertising revenue. This was a magazine with a fairly large loyal readership. They've started publication again, and the magazine is now entirely supported by subscriptions - there is no advertising at all. I happily pay a few dollars extra for a magazine that is 100% content (rather than 50% ads).
There are over 6400 native OS X applications, so release of OS X software could hardly be called rare.
Reduced eye strain.
And you now have a company out there who believes they paid you fairly for a Flash job, and knows that you produced lousy, unmaintainable code. It seems to me like you shot yourself in the foot.
Perhaps you're wearing the wrong suits/shirts? There are plenty of shirts with non-scratchy collars, and plenty of summer-weight suits available . If you spend a little more money, you can get suits that are extremely comfortable (i.e. Brooks Brothers).
Although I agree that wearing suits in Texas in the summer probably sucks.
Doesn't it bug you to tell some stranger about yourself for no reason? When you walk into the shopping mall, is there someone standing at the door telling you you can't come in unless you tell them your salary? Then do they have someone follow you around with a clipboard writing down what stores you look in? Wouldn't that creep you out just a little bit?
Do you rent videos? The video store keeps a record of all the videos you've rented. Is this an invasion of privacy too? Is it ok because you're paying them for the videos?
most web site owners know it would drive users away from the web in droves.
The NYT website has 8.8 million visitors each month. They hardly have a problem with droves of users running away - quite the opposite.
that's why the NYT is so annoying.
Annoying. Ok. This I can accept. But why protest something just because it's annoying? Usually people protest for ethical reasons, but it doesn't seem like there's an ethical issue here - just a bunch of people who want something for nothing.
Sorry, I didn't know slashdot allowed non-user posts. My mistake.
#2 Registering to have an exlusive name to use when posting comments makes sense. To read a NYT article it does not.
This is entirely subjective. You don't want to register, so you don't think it makes sense. NYT wants to gather data, so they ask you to register. Would it make more sense if they charged $80/year to register and read their content, like the Wall Street Journal does?
#3 Having a Slashdot account provides me with desirable services such as being able to review my latest posts for responses. NYT registration does not.
An NYT registration provides me with the highly desirable service of displaying NYT articles, which I find even more valuable that Slashdot's features. Again, it's a subjective judgement of value.
#4 Slashdot doesn't even ask for, much less DEMAND info like my income, (general)address, age, profession, sex, etc. I don't recall if slashdot even asked for an E-mail.
True, but I don't remember using real information when signing up for NYT, and they don't seem to care, even after many years. They've never contacted me in any way.
(I skipped over a few of your points that weren't really criticisms.)
#7 Slashdot is THE ONLY cookie on my system. It is there because I find it useful. Cookies are a serious mis-feature, 99% of the time their use is not for the users benefit.
The NYT cookie is useful to me because it allows me to get to content that otherwise would not be available. I guess you just don't value that content as much.
#8 Any website that completely fails to function without cookies is BROKEN. Let me rephrase that - Any website that completely refuses to function without cookies is BROKEN. "Fails" implies design error - this generally results in a mostly-useable site. "Refuses" implies by-design, this often results in a completely broken site.
Again, this is a subjective judgement. 8.8 million people use the NYT website every month, so in some sense it is not broken - it functions exactly as the developers intended. Cookies have been around for seven years or so. Most people have them turned on. NYT decided it was a fair tradeoff to get the benefit of millions of registered users while losing the handful of people who refuse to accept cookies. A perfectly reasonable business decision.
#9 I trust slashdot's use of my information more than I trust NYT's use of my information.
Why?
#10 I trust NYT a hell of a lot more than I trust most other sites. Any success of the NYT system will only promote its use elsewhere.
And some more web content providers will stay in existence because they could target their content more accurately.
#11 The sole purpose of the NYT login is to snoop on people.
And to use that data to target content more effectively, improve site structure, fund content that readers enjoy, and target advertising more effectively.
#12 What would your reaction be if your local library or supermarket started requiring you to clip a photoID to your shirt in order to walk in the door?
The costs for a local supermarket to allow lots of customers through the door are minimal, because most customers buy stuff. This doesn't happen with a content website. NYT has chosen to make the investment in their online articles worthwhile by aggregating a small amount of data. I see this as a fair trade. You don't think there's enough value received to make giving away your data worthwhile.
#13 Throwing up barricades like that all over the internet is a BadThing. It impedes useful linking and free travel. That's not an internet, that's a balkanized-net. #14 If someone wants to make information freely available, kudos to them. But making people jump through hoops for freely available information is obnoxious. If you're putting it on the web, put it on the damn web.
It sounds like you're just annoyed by the NYT policy, and don't think that you're getting enough value to make giving up your personal information worthwhile. For me (and 8.8 million others each month), it's definitely a good tradeoff.
The fact that you want bread for free doesn't make it unethical for someone to offer bread in exchange for your mailing address. Furthermore, a few hundred people choosing not to register is not going to change things. I was really hoping for someone who could explain the ethical dilema here - why should I be concerned?
But why protest? NYT has a great website, with great articles that are interesting to read. I created a login years ago, and so they're aggregating data on which articles I read. I don't get any email from them; they leave me alone. They don't sell my personal information or my email address.
/. user, so the same thing could happen on this site. Yet I don't see you complaining about having to register to post comments here. What's the difference?
It seems to me that there's nothing to protest - they give me a service for free, and in exchange, I let them keep track of the stories I read. This is not a privacy invasion. There's no injustice going on - it's a simple exchange.
You're a registered
> I hear this conspiracy theory alot, but in the real world, how could they prevent a better technology?
Easy - the same way the automobile industry killed off the trolley industry - they bought up trolley systems in cities and shut them down. (It probably wouldn't be exactly the same tactic, but you get the idea.)
I think the biggest problem was that so much of the movie's focus was about being faithful to the book. Chris Columbus et al were so concerned with making the book's fans happy that they lost a lot of opportunities to make a better movie.
One of the reasons Fellowship of the Ring was such a great movie was that the screenwriters and director took real liberties with the _story_ to make it better for the film medium. Tolkien's books are not nearly as plot-driven as the Harry Potter series - there's a huge amount of character development and background information, providing a rich palette from which to draw when translating to another medium.
Jackson's team recognized this, and were incredibly faithful to Tolkien's vision of Middle Earth, even as they altered the plot of the story to fit into the new format.
While the Harry Potter books are great, they are ultimately children's books. They just don't have the enormous depth of Middle Earth; Columbus's team had a much less rich palette to draw on. I thought they did a good job with the look and feel of the place. But the simpler world, combined with rabid (and very young) fans demanding a movie very closely matched to the book, lead to a film that's perhaps not as strong as it could be.
-Alex
It seems likely that some sort of intelligent caching will solve this problem. Storage is getting cheaper and cheaper. The practical solution may be to have "media mirrors" spread around on the net.
Imagine every ISP hosting a media mirror server that caches films. The copyright holders would probably cover the cost of the server; ISPs would host these servers to save on outbound bandwidth. New films could be automatically downloaded to the server. Older films, when requested by a user, would be downloaded on demand to the media server and then streamed to the user (or downloaded, for an extra fee).
The only films flying around the 'Net at large would be new films going from the content producer to these caching servers, and old films not already cached.
If your state doesn't have a list, push for one.
After about 8 months of consistently asking to be put on do-not-call lists, all telemarking calls to my home number stopped. (I also registered with the Direct Mail Marketing Association's telephone preference service, which may have helped.)
Some states have do not call lists (here's a list). While it can be fun to mess with telemarketers, I prefer to be left alone.
Actually, according to the article, it's $50 to connect in any city - $30 only gets you access in your own city.
If you're currently using iTools, it only costs $49 for the first year of .Mac. Just log in, and you'll see it.
First, there's stability. The Mac, since I got it 2 months ago, has crashed or locked up at least 4 times. Stock hardware, stock OS X install with the latest updates. Twice a month is great if you're used to Windows, but for UNIX, it stinks.
It's unusual that you've had so many crashes under 10.1. I've only managed to crash 10.1 twice. Once, I was burning a CD on Server and tried to access an AppleTalk share. The other time, I was trying to run Quake I in Classic mode on 10.1 client. Sure, individual programs crash from time to time, but the whole system almost never goes down. This was not true of 10.0.x server, which had all sorts of problems.
Flakiness/weirdness. Occasionally I'll type a command at the tcsh prompt and it will coredump for no reason. "ls" gets a bus error or something. Then it works fine after that. This certainly isn't every day, and it always seems to work the next time, but it's not indicative of a truly mature OS.
Again, I have to wonder if you have a hardware problem. We have an iBook that came with a bad memory chip, and it exhibited lots of wierd behavior that disappeared when we replaced the chip and re-installed the OS. Other than that, on a half-dozen machines, we never see much weirdness (aside from the printing subsystem, which is horrible).
Yes, Server has a lot of this stuff. The Server Admin tool is great for administering most things, especially Apache. And you can still edit httpd.conf by hand if you want to - Apache just runs off of multiple config files. It'd be nice if it was easy to write and add modules for Server Admin (for things like mySQL); perhaps this will come later.
Moreover, many third party applications have taken this attitude from Apple and practically refuse to work if run by a non-admin user. Quicken was a real ordeal to get working so both my wife and I could run it and update the same data file from our respective accounts.
This is a bit of a pain, especially since admin users get notified when software updates are available. This can be quite confusing for someone who doesn't need to be an admin (but are set up as one because their programs need it.)
Also, I wish there weren't so many different installers used by various apps.
Yeah. Especially since every other OS has one and only one installer! I'm so glad Linux has standardized on one installer for everything ;P
Some great hammocks for sale here.
I've actually been to their store in Boulder CO; they're really comfortable. Much better than those thick-roped ones everyone seems to get. No more numb legs.
You forgot the option I use almost every week for adding new users on OS X - use Server Admin, that "little GUI tool", remotely. You just run it on any OS X machine anywhere on the Internet - provide a hostname, username, and password, and it's just like you're running Server Admin on the machine itself. Plus, it makes it really easy to set up virtual web hosts in Apache.
Visit the U.S. House representative list. Find your representative, and call. When I call, I usally do the following:
Basically, what you're trying for is to come across as a reasonable voter who has an opinion. Your call will be logged, and your rep will get a report that 5 people called today urging him (or her) to vote against a bill, and 1 person called urging him to support another bill, etc. If enough people voice disapproval of the rep's planned vote, he may investigate further. If he doesn't know much about the issue, he may just go with the suggestion of the 20 people who bothered to call.
What's key, though, is that this is a voluntary program. You don't have to pay extra for wind power. You can choose to stick with the old energy sources, if you want. But for a relatively small amount, you as an individual can contribute to the move towards better power sources.
This choice is what was touted as the "benefit to consumers" that comes with deregulation. In many other states, utilities are deregulated, but you don't get real choices when it comes to your power sources. So if you live in a state where you can choose a better source for your electricity, do it!
Server admin actually generates a separate config file (/etc/httpd/httpd_macosxserver.conf) that lives side by side with the actual httpd.conf, and somehow the Apple version of Apache is smart enough to read both.
Note: I'm not looking at Server Admin right now, so the exact commands might be slightly different.
Speaking as a longtime UNIX (BSDi and Linux) user who's been running a production Mac OS X server for about six months, I can say that OS X is a breath of fresh air, simply for the Server Admin tool.
It's actually faster and easier to use the GUI to add, configure, and start a virtual web server than it was the old way (edit httpd.conf, apachectl restart). Some settings cannot yet be controlled using the GUI, but for those, I can easily edit the same old config file, the same way I've been maintaing Apache for years.
To be fair, Apple hasn't implemented everything in a way that's immediately intuitive (i.e. system startup script locations). And the documentation of some things (like system startup scripts) is nonexistent. But things improve with every release, and already I prefer maintaining OS X server to a linux box. (This was not the case until last fall's 10.1 release, though.) -Alex
From Apple's website: http://apple.com/powermac/graphics.html
Indulge your creative muse
Want to double your desktop area by adding a second flat-panel display? Savvy creative professionals regard having two 22" Apple Cinema Displays as the ultimate in desktop efficiency -- the perfect visual environment for doing your best work. Of course, you can also combine a 22" Apple Cinema Display with a 15" or 17" Studio Display. Either way, all you need is a DVI video card like the ATI Radeon 32 MB PCI Card Mac Edition and the DVIator from Dr. Bott. Just pop open the Power Mac G4's easy-open side door, slip in the PCI card and connect the DVIator, and you're set.
I'm constantly plugging and unplugging my laptop ethernet cable (4x/day). The ends last about 3 months before the plastic tabs break off. Somehow, I think that ethernet cables won't hold up well enough for any serious music use.