I have owned 4 Macs, and never bought AppleCare (it might not have been availabel in my country at the time I bought them). Maybe I am lucky, but I never had any problem that AppleCare would have covered. The only thing I remember was a (partly) broken video board on a 6100 in its 5th year, so not covered by AppleCare anyway.
By the way, all of my machines were desktops. Laptops may be exposed to more hazards...
We've had it for years, its been handy to take my number between networks without problems, but the whole cost of cross network charges is a pain.
You are mixing two things:
Number portability: a Very Good Thing that telecom regulation authorities should keep on enforcing.
High roaming costs: happens when there is not enough competition between telcos (or worse, secret agreements to keep prices high). This is a matter of antitrust authorities.
I could solve this problem by re-installing a non-corrupted 10.2.3 over the corrupted one. But this was only possible because I had a second disk on my Mac, on which I installed a new 10.2, from which I could re-install 10.2.3.
Conclusion: always have a second partition or disk! This was useless at times where MacOS could be booted from CD/floppy/Zip, but not anymore with OS X.
Exactly the same thing here... I haven't found a solution yet, but I think I know WHY this stupid thing happened:
When I double-clicked the.dmg file, it went through approx. 30% of the checksum and then stopped. No error message (like "corrupted file"), it just stopped. I re-tried 2-3 times, same thing.
Next time, I hit the "skip" button. The disk image was created, the installation went smoothly, but my machine didn't boot afterwards.
I have yet to figure a solution:
I can't re-install 10.2 over it (downgrade 10.2.3 to 10.2), it says that the disk already has a newer version than the one to install.
I can't install a fresh 10.2 on my second hard disk, because I only have the "upgrade" CD.
So here I am, back in OS 9...
Any suggestion? I mean, except to enjoy Christmas with my children instead?
Pascal
Re:Good, and when do we gets enumerated types?
on
Java Gets Templates
·
· Score: 1
If have seen many of these solutions. You end up with a 30 lines long class that does a little better than what a good enum would do in one single line.
By "good" enum, I mean something akin to what exists in Ada / Pascal / Modula / Eiffel, not the lousy C/C++ construct.
Pascal
Good, and when do we gets enumerated types?
on
Java Gets Templates
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
After years of discussions, Sun aknowledges that, although life is possible without generics, it is often better with them.
Now, how many years do we have to wait until they do the same with the good old enum type?
Altova sweating? Maybe, but also all the companies trying to make the ultimate general-purpose XML editor that:
Takes as input a formal definition of the XML syntax you want to edit (in DTD, XML schema, etc.)
Guides you in editing a valid document, and nothing else.
Judging by the usability of the existing editors, I begin to wonder if this is just FEASIBLE, including for Microsoft.
By the way, Altova recently introduced such an editor (called "Authentic"), which is just rebranding of what XML Spy did...
Total coincidence: I was listening to Powaqqatsi as I read the slashdot story, in the middle of an XSLT/XML debugging session. Not only is this an excellent record, but it is very well suited to software development work!
Big projects are organized around the emotional needs of managers and the technical capabilities of specialists. For generalists and inventors, small projects are more fun
For our company, the project was only 5 persons, so I didn't have the drawbacks of a big project.
What made the project interesting is the required robustness of the code: you have to do it cleanly, there is simply no other way. You know in advance that your code will have to be modified after the satellite is launched and the first telemetry results are available.
This is in contrast with other projects I took part to since then, especially in web development: your project is expected to have a lifetime of 2 years, hence nobody really cares about the quality of the code, you don't have time to cleanly design the architecture, etc.
No, XML is just a family of languages. You might however want to have a look at SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), a XML-based format for (surprinsigly) vector graphics. See also here
Drawing tools are beginning to be able to save also in SVG format. We may soon see open source tool that natively save data in SVG format...
I would be very, very surprised that MS would have done anything on the project. For obvious reasons, ESA subcontracts job only to ESA-members (european countries + Canada).
As far as I know, the only use of MS technologies in the ENVISAT project is limited to MS Word and Excel...
I was the project manager for the ground-level processor of one of the instrument (AATSR if you really want to know which one), so I think that I can provide first-hand information:
The data volume for our instrument was a mere 5 GB per 100 minutes orbit, hence approx. 3 GB/hour. This instrument is considered as low-volume for data size, the bigger instrument having approx. two orders of magnitude more data!
The design of a satellite such as ENVISAT takes years. It is true that today, one would probably design things differently. Ah, how easy it would be to know 5 years in advance how a system should be designed...
This satellite is purely for civilian usage, no spying or whatever. All results will be available to buy (or download for low-resolution images). If ENVISAT would have military aspects, I would certainly not be allowed to talk about it freely on/.
All data analysis software was developed in C++. It runs on IBM AIX clusters, but with the goal of being UNIX platform agnostic. No Linux (yet?), sorry, but many open source components were used. ESA is paranoid about vendor lock-up.
Must I add that it was fun to work on such a project?
Slashdot Mirror
I have owned 4 Macs, and never bought AppleCare (it might not have been availabel in my country at the time I bought them). Maybe I am lucky, but I never had any problem that AppleCare would have covered. The only thing I remember was a (partly) broken video board on a 6100 in its 5th year, so not covered by AppleCare anyway.
By the way, all of my machines were desktops. Laptops may be exposed to more hazards...
Really a good hunch, this one...
:-)
So good that I can't help but wonder if SCO reads Linux Today
You are mixing two things:
I could solve this problem by re-installing a non-corrupted 10.2.3 over the corrupted one. But this was only possible because I had a second disk on my Mac, on which I installed a new 10.2, from which I could re-install 10.2.3.
Conclusion: always have a second partition or disk! This was useless at times where MacOS could be booted from CD/floppy/Zip, but not anymore with OS X.
Pascal
When I double-clicked the .dmg file, it went through approx. 30% of the checksum and then stopped. No error message (like "corrupted file"), it just stopped. I re-tried 2-3 times, same thing.
Next time, I hit the "skip" button. The disk image was created, the installation went smoothly, but my machine didn't boot afterwards.
I have yet to figure a solution:
I can't re-install 10.2 over it (downgrade 10.2.3 to 10.2), it says that the disk already has a newer version than the one to install.
I can't install a fresh 10.2 on my second hard disk, because I only have the "upgrade" CD.
So here I am, back in OS 9...
Any suggestion? I mean, except to enjoy Christmas with my children instead?
Pascal
If have seen many of these solutions. You end up with a 30 lines long class that does a little better than what a good enum would do in one single line.
By "good" enum, I mean something akin to what exists in Ada / Pascal / Modula / Eiffel, not the lousy C/C++ construct.
Pascal
After years of discussions, Sun aknowledges that, although life is possible without generics, it is often better with them.
Now, how many years do we have to wait until they do the same with the good old enum type?
Pascal
Takes as input a formal definition of the XML syntax you want to edit (in DTD, XML schema, etc.)
Guides you in editing a valid document, and nothing else.
Judging by the usability of the existing editors, I begin to wonder if this is just FEASIBLE, including for Microsoft.
By the way, Altova recently introduced such an editor (called "Authentic"), which is just rebranding of what XML Spy did...
Total coincidence: I was listening to Powaqqatsi as I read the slashdot story, in the middle of an XSLT/XML debugging session. Not only is this an excellent record, but it is very well suited to software development work!
BTW I never saw the movie...
Movies often open in the US 6-9 months before they show in Europe.
Not true anymore. The delta between US and Europe has shrunk to a few weeks, thus reducing the need for DVD zoning. That's the reason.
Their mission is to develop an open standard for how wireless phones can be used on any network
My Ericson GSM phone works perfectly on any network (including the US ones), thank you. I just have to manually switch from 900-1800 to 1900 MHz.
Pascal
Big projects are organized around the emotional needs of managers and the technical capabilities of specialists. For generalists and inventors, small projects are more fun
For our company, the project was only 5 persons, so I didn't have the drawbacks of a big project.
What made the project interesting is the required robustness of the code: you have to do it cleanly, there is simply no other way. You know in advance that your code will have to be modified after the satellite is launched and the first telemetry results are available.
This is in contrast with other projects I took part to since then, especially in web development: your project is expected to have a lifetime of 2 years, hence nobody really cares about the quality of the code, you don't have time to cleanly design the architecture, etc.
No, XML is just a family of languages. You might however want to have a look at SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), a XML-based format for (surprinsigly) vector graphics. See also here
Drawing tools are beginning to be able to save also in SVG format. We may soon see open source tool that natively save data in SVG format...
I would be very, very surprised that MS would have done anything on the project. For obvious reasons, ESA subcontracts job only to ESA-members (european countries + Canada).
As far as I know, the only use of MS technologies in the ENVISAT project is limited to MS Word and Excel...
- The data volume for our instrument was a mere 5 GB per 100 minutes orbit, hence approx. 3 GB/hour. This instrument is considered as low-volume for data size, the bigger instrument having approx. two orders of magnitude more data!
- The design of a satellite such as ENVISAT takes years. It is true that today, one would probably design things differently. Ah, how easy it would be to know 5 years in advance how a system should be designed...
- This satellite is purely for civilian usage, no spying or whatever. All results will be available to buy (or download for low-resolution images). If ENVISAT would have military aspects, I would certainly not be allowed to talk about it freely on
/.
- All data analysis software was developed in C++. It runs on IBM AIX clusters, but with the goal of being UNIX platform agnostic. No Linux (yet?), sorry, but many open source components were used. ESA is paranoid about vendor lock-up.
Must I add that it was fun to work on such a project?