Two years ago I was on vacation and staying with a friend when her pet rat decided to chew through my iBook G4/800's power cord. I wrapped a piece of duct tape around it and it seemed to be OK, but a few days later I plugged in the power cord and heard a clicking sound coming from the adapter brick. The inner insulation had been breached, and the two wires were touching.
I cut and stripped the wire with a pair of fingernail clippers, twisted it back together, and wrapped it back up with the duct tape. Several months ago the duct tape came loose and the wire shorted again. I re-spliced it, and wrapped it with Scotch tape, which was all I had on hand at the time. About a month ago the Scotch tape started coming off (as I had known it would), so I retaped it with white electrical tape.
I do freelance IT work, and haul my iBook everywhere. My power cord gets unplugged, wound up, stuffed into a backpack, unwound and plugged in somewhere else pretty frequently. Even when completely shorted out, all it did was make a clicking noise. The adapter brick can get pretty warm, especially when it's not well ventilated, but not uncomfortably so.
Please keep in mind that most of us never have a problem, even in unusual circumstances.
I'm fairly certain it was a Dvorak column, back around 1994ish or so, that suggested that instead of using version numbers, software vendors should just use years, like car manufacturers do. Well, look what happened - not everyone does it of course, but starting with Windows 95 (still referred to as Windows 4.0 at that time), a lot of things have been named with a year instead of a version number.
Exactly! Notice that Slashdot's new comment system uses AJAX, but doesn't advertise itself as AJAX, it just says it's the new comment system. Some of Google's recent projects (Google Maps, GMail, etc.) don't advertise themselves as AJAX, they just work.
as a dialup user I find it a huge pain in the ass, though I think it would still suck even if I had better bandwidth
I can see how it would be annoying on dialup, because it loads all the comments on the page (truncating the really long ones) right away, thus making the whole page take much longer to load.
(I read at -1, and I have to adjust the threshold for each thread? Fcuk that!).
Wait a minute, what? You read at -1, does that mean you always see every comment in its entirity and just manually scroll past any you don't care about? That's perfectly fine, but it completely negates my previous criticism about making the page take longer to load, since you're loading all the comments anyway. And what's this about adjusting the threshold for each thread? You can change your default thresholds in your user preferences - that's what user preferences are there for!
It reappears when you mouseover the comments (it's not a time delay). I'm not on the "low res" version; as someone else said it only covers up the left sidebar and doesn't really get in the way (originally it spanned across the top and was really horrible; this is much better). There's probably a bug with the "low res" version they haven't addressed yet.
I agree that having it reappear all the time is annoying. They should make it stay gone when you close it, then have an obvious way to show it again when you want (currently I know of no way to re-show it aside from hovering the mouse over a comment, which is bizarre behavior).
Anyway, other than that, the rest of the AJAX stuff is nice.:-)
6. The web used to serve up documents- That is a bad idea: Serving up data would is a better idea
Serving up documents is not a bad idea. Taking data that is not a document, mangling it into a document and serving it up is a bad idea. Round peg in square hole, and all that.
AJAX is not a fad. People aren't using AJAX just because it's AJAX. It's not for buzzword-compliance, although it has become a buzzword. It's not for adding useless frills, although it can be used for useless frills. AJAX is a tool to enable web developers to build sites that are actually better for the user, in a very real way. Better functionality, better usability, overall a better user experience. Things that simply weren't possible to do before.
Slashdot's new comment system uses AJAX to make my Slashdot experience better. They're not done with it yet, but what they've got so far makes it easier to browse Slashdot. The link to read the rest of a very long truncated comment now loads the rest of the comment inline into the page, instead of reloading the entire page like it used to; I can read replies without opening the links in a new tab and switching back and forth like I used to, I can even change my thresholds without reloading. Sometimes I like to open several articles on my laptop and read them when I'm offline; that works better now. Next will be a more convenient way to moderate, and a better way to write replies.
Will AJAX go away? Sure, after a better technology comes along. But until then, AJAX is genuinely useful.
Yeah, Bare Bones has excellent support, I've reported several bugs to them (a couple were my own mistakes) and not only do I get a personal response, but usually the bug is fixed in the next release (and the release notes contain a complete list of everything they fixed in each version). Sometimes they've sent me a beta version to verify that the bug has been fixed before releasing it to the public.
I think I should mention that while the current implementation of Cmd-Tab switching on Mac OS X is fantastic, Apple's previous attempt (beginning with Mac OS 8.5) was positively awful. I always disabled it, and used a third-party solution instead.
Guess which third-party solution?
The Microsoft Office Manager, a utility included with Microsoft Office (and, I think, available as a free download, although I could be mistaken) whose primary function was to put a quick-launch menu at the top of the screen with a list of all Microsoft applications. It included a command-tab task switcher that, while not nearly as pretty, worked about as well as Cmd-Tab in OSX does today.
Posts should be modded on they say, not on who said it. If you feel a comment should be modded up, go ahead and mod it up, even if the poster was anonymous.
Yes, we should all drive far enough back that, with reaction times included, we can still come to a complete stop even if they had infinite deceleration but, in the real world, that's called "leaving a space for someone else to pull in to" and doesn't actually work.
It may vary by region, but here (Pacific Northwest) it actually does work. Most people will stay in their own lane. A few people will pull in front of you, in which case you just back off and let them in; it's not that many people and will only delay your arrival by a matter of seconds. If you're in the left lane and able to maintain a speed equal to or faster than the car to your right, the chances of someone pulling in front of you like that are smaller than you think (if the cars in the next lane wanted to go faster they'd be in the left lane already, and the cars behind you can't pull in front of you to cut you off because the cars in the next lane are going slower than you are).
Try it. It makes things much safer, faster, and more comfortable for everyone behind you, and only rarely pisses people off (who shouldn't be on the road anyway).
If a user bought two crappy Dells in a row, computer #3 would be an HP or a Gateway, but you're illustrative of the fact that Apple's established customers will just keep buying Macs.
He's not buying all these machines - he bought one, and the rest have been warranty replacements.
i noticed nothing was said about the finder.. shame.
Yes, that omission seems rather conspicuous. It's almost as if Apple has something to hide.
Oh wait, Jobs said they do!
My money's on significant improvements to the Finder, and they didn't want to show it off because they don't want Microsoft stealing it yet. I'm hoping they fix network integration; I have all kinds of weird problems accessing SMB volumes, and FTP has never really worked at all. But I'm sure there are all kinds of UI improvements they've been working on, that they want to keep under wraps. I certainly hope so - Lord knows there's room for improvement in that area!
At the keynote, they showed entire stacks of iPhoto photos being "undeleted", which means after being "deleted" they were lying around, taking up space.
The idea is, they're taking up space you weren't using anyway. Most newbies don't use more than 20-40GB, but 160GB and larger hard drives are cheap now. Or, say you plug in a 300GB external FireWire drive, and set it to do incremental backups to that every night. It's customizable, they just didn't show you all the options.
That may be true for Intelligent Design, but for actual Creation Science it really does work more like this:
1. God did it 2. Unexplained evidence (how did God do it?) 3. Testable hypothesis 4. Testing of the hypothesis 5. Alternative explanation for the evidence 6. Revision or rejection of the hypothesis 7. Go to step 4, while still keeping step 1 in mind
Forgive me for referencing a Jim Carrey movie in a science/theology discussion, but do you remember the scene in "Bruce Almighty" where Carrey pulls the moon closer, because he wants the view to appear more romantic, and the following morning he hears news reports about all the damage that was caused as a result of severe tidal activity or whatever? You can't just mess with stuff, without having unintended consequences all around you... so, if God wanted to do something like, say, cover the whole planet in water, without destroying the universe, the easiest way to do it would be to use natural processes. Remember that God is timeless, so if he wanted a global flood in 2,000 BC, he could set natural processes in motion beginning at the time of Creation that would result in a global flood at the appropriate time. What were those processes? How did God do it? What can this teach us about the physical world we live in?
The O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) is a good place to meet open source types. If you have money, buy a booth in the exhibit hall; if not, show up and tack your info up on the job board (they set up a buletin board outside the exhibit hall for this purpose). O'Reilly also has an opt-in e-mailing list for attendees.
So hang on... you're complaining that you can't download the tool to prevent IE7 from being automatically downloaded, because you don't have WGA. But it sounds like they won't let you download IE7 itself unless you have WGA, so this sounds to me like a non-issue!
Also, I don't want to discourage you from buying a MacBook Pro, but perhaps for now you should just forget about IE and simply run Firefox?
Maybe this is an oversimplified solution, but why couldn't Microsoft just "push" CSS fixes to their older browsers? I realize web developers (like myself) already have a slew of hacks and patches to handle the broken CSS of IE 5&6, but surely a company with as many bright engineers as Microsoft could figure out a way to patch the old browsers without breaking pages that use the hacks.
IE6's rendering engine has been mostly consistent for about 5 years now. Web developers know what's broken, and how it's broken, and how to work around the problems. If a certain bit of CSS code behaves a certain way on IE and a different way on everything else, I can use conditional comments to use one stylesheet on IE and a different stylesheet on everything else so that all browsers look the same. If that one bug gets fixed by itself, then IE will still be using my hacked stylesheet, but now it will display the page wrong (just like Firefox or Opera would if I gave them the same hacked stylesheet).
IE6 has been so broken for so long that we really don't WANT them to fix it one piece at a time. What they're doing with IE7 is far better. Of course, ideally, they'd make IE7 pass Acid2, but this is definitely a step in the right direction. If they patched rendering bugs in IE6, it'd be a nightmare.
I can't speak to Microsoft Update, but as for Apple, the problem is this:
If you tell it to ignore/hide/delete/whatever the iPod updater, it will never bother you again about that specific update. The next time they release a new iPod update, it will present you with the option to install the new updater. Also, unlike other updates, the iPod updater is an application that pushes a firmware flash to an iPod; it does not update software that is already installed on your Mac. As far as I know, there's no way to make it quit bugging you every time they release a new update.
However, if your grandmother doesn't want to be harassed about updating GarageBand, she should probably uninstall GarageBand, and then Software Update will never bother her about it again. Just because she doesn't know what it is doesn't mean Apple shouldn't try to fix the bugs in it for her.
* Too small and painful. I have pretty small hands, but the MM is still too short. My hand was falling off the back and causing me to adopt an awkward position.
It's the same size as Apple's Pro mouse, which they've been shipping since about 2000 or so (it's gone through a couple of minor revisions, but the same basic size/shape). It works for most people.
* Cable is ridiculously short. Fine with a Mac keyboard, but no good without an extension cable in most other configurations.
Did you happen to notice this article is about the new Bluetooth version?
Personally I won't buy one because I can't right-click without lifting my left finger.
Is it possible to buy the Japanese SMB2, as a cartridge I can play in my NES? Did the Japanese system use the same cartridges, or was there a slight difference?
Yes, I know you can use an emulator, or Super Mario All-Stars for SNES. I'm not interested in an emulator at the moment, and I don't have a SNES.
So assuming the cartridges are compatible, where can I buy one?
Slashdot Mirror
Laziness, mostly. :-)
Two years ago I was on vacation and staying with a friend when her pet rat decided to chew through my iBook G4/800's power cord. I wrapped a piece of duct tape around it and it seemed to be OK, but a few days later I plugged in the power cord and heard a clicking sound coming from the adapter brick. The inner insulation had been breached, and the two wires were touching.
I cut and stripped the wire with a pair of fingernail clippers, twisted it back together, and wrapped it back up with the duct tape. Several months ago the duct tape came loose and the wire shorted again. I re-spliced it, and wrapped it with Scotch tape, which was all I had on hand at the time. About a month ago the Scotch tape started coming off (as I had known it would), so I retaped it with white electrical tape.
I do freelance IT work, and haul my iBook everywhere. My power cord gets unplugged, wound up, stuffed into a backpack, unwound and plugged in somewhere else pretty frequently. Even when completely shorted out, all it did was make a clicking noise. The adapter brick can get pretty warm, especially when it's not well ventilated, but not uncomfortably so.
Please keep in mind that most of us never have a problem, even in unusual circumstances.
Now that you mention it, I'm not entirely sure. The "Read the rest of this comment..." link is AJAX, but the rest probably isn't.
Thank you. I'm glad someone else understands this.
I'm fairly certain it was a Dvorak column, back around 1994ish or so, that suggested that instead of using version numbers, software vendors should just use years, like car manufacturers do. Well, look what happened - not everyone does it of course, but starting with Windows 95 (still referred to as Windows 4.0 at that time), a lot of things have been named with a year instead of a version number.
Exactly! Notice that Slashdot's new comment system uses AJAX, but doesn't advertise itself as AJAX, it just says it's the new comment system. Some of Google's recent projects (Google Maps, GMail, etc.) don't advertise themselves as AJAX, they just work.
as a dialup user I find it a huge pain in the ass, though I think it would still suck even if I had better bandwidth
I can see how it would be annoying on dialup, because it loads all the comments on the page (truncating the really long ones) right away, thus making the whole page take much longer to load.
(I read at -1, and I have to adjust the threshold for each thread? Fcuk that!).
Wait a minute, what? You read at -1, does that mean you always see every comment in its entirity and just manually scroll past any you don't care about? That's perfectly fine, but it completely negates my previous criticism about making the page take longer to load, since you're loading all the comments anyway. And what's this about adjusting the threshold for each thread? You can change your default thresholds in your user preferences - that's what user preferences are there for!
It reappears when you mouseover the comments (it's not a time delay). I'm not on the "low res" version; as someone else said it only covers up the left sidebar and doesn't really get in the way (originally it spanned across the top and was really horrible; this is much better). There's probably a bug with the "low res" version they haven't addressed yet.
:-)
I agree that having it reappear all the time is annoying. They should make it stay gone when you close it, then have an obvious way to show it again when you want (currently I know of no way to re-show it aside from hovering the mouse over a comment, which is bizarre behavior).
Anyway, other than that, the rest of the AJAX stuff is nice.
6. The web used to serve up documents- That is a bad idea: Serving up data would is a better idea
Serving up documents is not a bad idea. Taking data that is not a document, mangling it into a document and serving it up is a bad idea. Round peg in square hole, and all that.
AJAX is not a fad. People aren't using AJAX just because it's AJAX. It's not for buzzword-compliance, although it has become a buzzword. It's not for adding useless frills, although it can be used for useless frills. AJAX is a tool to enable web developers to build sites that are actually better for the user, in a very real way. Better functionality, better usability, overall a better user experience. Things that simply weren't possible to do before.
Slashdot's new comment system uses AJAX to make my Slashdot experience better. They're not done with it yet, but what they've got so far makes it easier to browse Slashdot. The link to read the rest of a very long truncated comment now loads the rest of the comment inline into the page, instead of reloading the entire page like it used to; I can read replies without opening the links in a new tab and switching back and forth like I used to, I can even change my thresholds without reloading. Sometimes I like to open several articles on my laptop and read them when I'm offline; that works better now. Next will be a more convenient way to moderate, and a better way to write replies.
Will AJAX go away? Sure, after a better technology comes along. But until then, AJAX is genuinely useful.
Yeah, Bare Bones has excellent support, I've reported several bugs to them (a couple were my own mistakes) and not only do I get a personal response, but usually the bug is fixed in the next release (and the release notes contain a complete list of everything they fixed in each version). Sometimes they've sent me a beta version to verify that the bug has been fixed before releasing it to the public.
I think I should mention that while the current implementation of Cmd-Tab switching on Mac OS X is fantastic, Apple's previous attempt (beginning with Mac OS 8.5) was positively awful. I always disabled it, and used a third-party solution instead.
Guess which third-party solution?
The Microsoft Office Manager, a utility included with Microsoft Office (and, I think, available as a free download, although I could be mistaken) whose primary function was to put a quick-launch menu at the top of the screen with a list of all Microsoft applications. It included a command-tab task switcher that, while not nearly as pretty, worked about as well as Cmd-Tab in OSX does today.
It took Apple a very long time to get it right.
Posts should be modded on they say, not on who said it. If you feel a comment should be modded up, go ahead and mod it up, even if the poster was anonymous.
Yes, we should all drive far enough back that, with reaction times included, we can still come to a complete stop even if they had infinite deceleration but, in the real world, that's called "leaving a space for someone else to pull in to" and doesn't actually work.
It may vary by region, but here (Pacific Northwest) it actually does work. Most people will stay in their own lane. A few people will pull in front of you, in which case you just back off and let them in; it's not that many people and will only delay your arrival by a matter of seconds. If you're in the left lane and able to maintain a speed equal to or faster than the car to your right, the chances of someone pulling in front of you like that are smaller than you think (if the cars in the next lane wanted to go faster they'd be in the left lane already, and the cars behind you can't pull in front of you to cut you off because the cars in the next lane are going slower than you are).
Try it. It makes things much safer, faster, and more comfortable for everyone behind you, and only rarely pisses people off (who shouldn't be on the road anyway).
If a user bought two crappy Dells in a row, computer #3 would be an HP or a Gateway, but you're illustrative of the fact that Apple's established customers will just keep buying Macs.
He's not buying all these machines - he bought one, and the rest have been warranty replacements.
i noticed nothing was said about the finder.. shame.
Yes, that omission seems rather conspicuous. It's almost as if Apple has something to hide.
Oh wait, Jobs said they do!
My money's on significant improvements to the Finder, and they didn't want to show it off because they don't want Microsoft stealing it yet. I'm hoping they fix network integration; I have all kinds of weird problems accessing SMB volumes, and FTP has never really worked at all. But I'm sure there are all kinds of UI improvements they've been working on, that they want to keep under wraps. I certainly hope so - Lord knows there's room for improvement in that area!
At the keynote, they showed entire stacks of iPhoto photos being "undeleted", which means after being "deleted" they were lying around, taking up space.
The idea is, they're taking up space you weren't using anyway. Most newbies don't use more than 20-40GB, but 160GB and larger hard drives are cheap now. Or, say you plug in a 300GB external FireWire drive, and set it to do incremental backups to that every night. It's customizable, they just didn't show you all the options.
That may be true for Intelligent Design, but for actual Creation Science it really does work more like this:
1. God did it
2. Unexplained evidence (how did God do it?)
3. Testable hypothesis
4. Testing of the hypothesis
5. Alternative explanation for the evidence
6. Revision or rejection of the hypothesis
7. Go to step 4, while still keeping step 1 in mind
Forgive me for referencing a Jim Carrey movie in a science/theology discussion, but do you remember the scene in "Bruce Almighty" where Carrey pulls the moon closer, because he wants the view to appear more romantic, and the following morning he hears news reports about all the damage that was caused as a result of severe tidal activity or whatever? You can't just mess with stuff, without having unintended consequences all around you... so, if God wanted to do something like, say, cover the whole planet in water, without destroying the universe, the easiest way to do it would be to use natural processes. Remember that God is timeless, so if he wanted a global flood in 2,000 BC, he could set natural processes in motion beginning at the time of Creation that would result in a global flood at the appropriate time. What were those processes? How did God do it? What can this teach us about the physical world we live in?
The O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) is a good place to meet open source types. If you have money, buy a booth in the exhibit hall; if not, show up and tack your info up on the job board (they set up a buletin board outside the exhibit hall for this purpose). O'Reilly also has an opt-in e-mailing list for attendees.
But you just missed it.
So hang on... you're complaining that you can't download the tool to prevent IE7 from being automatically downloaded, because you don't have WGA. But it sounds like they won't let you download IE7 itself unless you have WGA, so this sounds to me like a non-issue!
Also, I don't want to discourage you from buying a MacBook Pro, but perhaps for now you should just forget about IE and simply run Firefox?
Maybe this is an oversimplified solution, but why couldn't Microsoft just "push" CSS fixes to their older browsers? I realize web developers (like myself) already have a slew of hacks and patches to handle the broken CSS of IE 5&6, but surely a company with as many bright engineers as Microsoft could figure out a way to patch the old browsers without breaking pages that use the hacks.
IE6's rendering engine has been mostly consistent for about 5 years now. Web developers know what's broken, and how it's broken, and how to work around the problems. If a certain bit of CSS code behaves a certain way on IE and a different way on everything else, I can use conditional comments to use one stylesheet on IE and a different stylesheet on everything else so that all browsers look the same. If that one bug gets fixed by itself, then IE will still be using my hacked stylesheet, but now it will display the page wrong (just like Firefox or Opera would if I gave them the same hacked stylesheet).
IE6 has been so broken for so long that we really don't WANT them to fix it one piece at a time. What they're doing with IE7 is far better. Of course, ideally, they'd make IE7 pass Acid2, but this is definitely a step in the right direction. If they patched rendering bugs in IE6, it'd be a nightmare.
I can't speak to Microsoft Update, but as for Apple, the problem is this:
If you tell it to ignore/hide/delete/whatever the iPod updater, it will never bother you again about that specific update. The next time they release a new iPod update, it will present you with the option to install the new updater. Also, unlike other updates, the iPod updater is an application that pushes a firmware flash to an iPod; it does not update software that is already installed on your Mac. As far as I know, there's no way to make it quit bugging you every time they release a new update.
However, if your grandmother doesn't want to be harassed about updating GarageBand, she should probably uninstall GarageBand, and then Software Update will never bother her about it again. Just because she doesn't know what it is doesn't mean Apple shouldn't try to fix the bugs in it for her.
If you're embezzling the bright pink notes instead of the gold ones, that might explain why you're not winning.
* Too small and painful. I have pretty small hands, but the MM is still too short. My hand was falling off the back and causing me to adopt an awkward position.
It's the same size as Apple's Pro mouse, which they've been shipping since about 2000 or so (it's gone through a couple of minor revisions, but the same basic size/shape). It works for most people.
* Cable is ridiculously short. Fine with a Mac keyboard, but no good without an extension cable in most other configurations.
Did you happen to notice this article is about the new Bluetooth version?
Personally I won't buy one because I can't right-click without lifting my left finger.
i thought the "lost levels" included in later releases of SMB was the japanese mario 2.
That was Super Mario All-Stars on SNES, not released for NES.
Is it possible to buy the Japanese SMB2, as a cartridge I can play in my NES? Did the Japanese system use the same cartridges, or was there a slight difference?
Yes, I know you can use an emulator, or Super Mario All-Stars for SNES. I'm not interested in an emulator at the moment, and I don't have a SNES.
So assuming the cartridges are compatible, where can I buy one?