Any organization that has email service should get rid of their voicemail service for internal communication. Voicemail takes longer to get, it takes longer to listen to, and doesn't do anything for you that email doesn't.
Thank you and Amen. I agree; the only thing that saves me from really, really hating voicemail (more than I have, since the advent of email), is that we now have a VM-to-email system that sends me voicemail messages as email attachments. It still requires me to waste my time listening to someone stammer away on the phone when I could have skimmed their message in a few seconds on my screen in text form, but it beats having to pick up the phone and spend several minutes navigating through the prompts to retrieve my messages.
I understand there are some valid reasons for still having voicemail (people can send you one from anywhere, etc.) but they're rapidly dwindling as the number of places you can send email from grows.
I guess the solution is not to eliminate it completely just yet, but really to impress upon people that it's a nonpreferred method of communication, and should only be used when absolutely necessary.
Personally, part of my voicemail message is a warning that I don't check the system very often and that email is my preferred method of communication for anything sensitive.
I used to do similar things, but then we got a corporate instant messenging system, and I think it's a much better solution for the problem you're describing.
I only very rarely use the system to actually send messages to anyone, but we all use it constantly to see who's around and available. (You can set it to available, away, or "don't bother me", which is a nice addition to the standard available/away. In the third case it suppresses all incoming messages.)
I don't find it intrusive, and it keeps people from dropping by my cube when I'm on the phone or otherwise occupied, assuming I've remembered to change my indicator appropriately.
Frankly I think you could really just make a buddy list program without the instant messaging features and retain about 90 percent of the usefulness, at least in my situation (everyone in the same physical office, mostly).
Wow, if that's true, that's really a load of crap on their part.
I'll be honest, I play WoW from time to time and thus maintain my account there (so my character doesn't get dumped), but Blizzard has really begun to grate on me. They're starting to become one of those organizations that I just feel vaguely dirty for associating with, much less paying a subscription fee to.
I'd encourage anyone serving overseas at a military installation or embassy who's been given the shaft by Blizzard to publicize it as widely as you can; there's nothing that really inflames Ma and Pa Kettle like a corporation being dicks to troops overseas, and I could easily see an organization like Blizzard which is highly dependent on public opinion bowing to pressure and changing their policy in a hurry.
With a service like this, why bother pirating when you can legally download a song/album, listen to it 5 times and decide if you want to purchase it?
Because that involves purchasing it? Versus pirating it, which doesn't?
Seems like piracy is still ahead to me. Of course, there's always the risk of getting caught...
(Personally, I never much enjoyed the bulk of pirated songs because the quality sucks so much; whoever thought that 128kb/s MP3 was "CD quality" ought to be shot.)
Because the RIAA can't figure out how to touch them?
They're quasi-legal, probably honestly legitimate within Russia (at least insofar as Russia has any copyright law and enforces what it does have), and using it from within the U.S. seems to actually be a Customs violation and not a copyright one. Basically what you're doing is the same thing as going to Russia, buying a Beatles album (since nothing before 1974 or so is apparently under copyright there) and bringing it back into the U.S. So the government would have to catch you; the RIAA can't sue you directly, which is their M.O. for intimidation right now.
This is according to the learned scholars at Wikipedia, so by all means draw your own conclusions, but I think the point is that allofmp3.com is, for the moment, basically untouchable. I have no doubt that one of the many things the RIAA will work into its next law that it gets passed (with the help of their pet Congress-weasels) is to make it a capital offense to download content from another country with weaker copyright laws of the U.S., if that content would be illegal in the U.S.
In the United States, many supporters of AllOfMP3 have pointed to limited exceptions in US copyright law, most notably 17 U.S.C. 602(a)(2), which provides a personal use exception to the rule that importation of copyrighted items constitutes infringement. A corresponding exception does not exist in 602(b), however, which governs whether importation is prohibited. Under 603, where importation is prohibited, the federal government may seize or forfeit prohibited items "in the same manner as property imported in violation of the customs revenue laws." Thus, it appears possible that "importing" digital files from AllOfMP3.com does not constitute copyright infringement but does constitute a violation of customs law. There is no private right of action for violations of customs law, as there is for copyright law.
Whether downloading can be construed as importation is open to question. Importation is defined as a form of distribution of copies and phonorecords (17 U.S.C. 602(a)), which are defined as tangible objects (17 U.S.C. 101), which of course can no more be downloaded than a brick can be. So far, US Courts have not ruled definitively on the issue of whether unpaid downloading can constitute infringement on the part of the downloader. Moreover, there have been no rulings in U.S. courts to date regarding the specific legality of purchasing music from AllofMP3.com.
Just from previous long Apple/Mac experience, you really don't want to go with a.0 version if you can avoid it; personally I'm going to hold on to Jaguar until 10.5.1 comes out. The initial releases have always had a lot of very rough edges; from 10.0.0 on forwards, there have been a lot of new bugs in each version introduced that get hammered out in the.1 update. I've never seen why it's worthwhile, but then again I just don't seem to be susceptible to "early adopter syndrome" in general I guess.
If I were in your position, I'd grab one of the last Jaguar Macs right before the release of the new version. You'll get a coupon that'll get you the new version's install discs (and real install discs too usually, not "software restore" ones) but you'll be able to put it on at your leisure, after the first round of suckers have suffered through the growing pains inherent in a new release.
Agreed. Now, I'm probably a biased sample, because I normally use a Mac and have my work PC set up to give me as much of a 'Mac-like' experience as a PC can deliver, but I've also seen how other people around me have theirs set up, and they do this too:
Most people drag their frequently used applications into that little tray-type area to the right of the Start Menu. I'm sure there's an official name for it, but it's basically like a miniature Dock and just to the left of the hideously useless "Address" field. (BTW, anybody know how to make that crap go away? If I want IE, I'll launch it, thanks.)
The only times I go into the Start Menu are to shut down or restart (which would be better done by a real menu in a real menubar) or to access a program that I don't use very often (could easily go into the Applications folder). I think I'm pretty much the norm in this. The 14 applications which comprise maybe 95% of my Windows-computer-using time are all in that little bar.
Frankly, the Start menu just seems like a crummy idea, poorly executed. It tries to replace functions that would be more logical if they were separated into proper menus (a menu for system functions like shut down, restart, System-wide preferences; a menu for user functions like Search, Help, and Run; etc.) It's also not in the actual corner of the screen, so you have to hunt for it with the mouse, and honestly I just think it's a bad way to pick from a large list of Applications.
I think it's much easier to open a window and scroll through a list that way then have it appear in a giant menu that I have to carefully navigate through (because if you move off it, you get to restart! It's like playing Operation on your computer!). And at least with a real window, I can choose how I want it organized: in an Icon view that I can arrange however I want, or in an alphabetized list/grid/whatever.
The Start Menu just seems, and has always seemed to me, like a solution looking for a problem -- except that the problem has already been solved in better ways.
Agreed. Also, recall that Windows isn't exactly the Land of Standardization when it comes to shortcuts for everything else.
With a few exceptions, I can be guaranteed that any Mac app can have it's window closed with Command-W, quit by Command-Q, a new window created with Command-N, and hidden using Command-H. There are a ton of others, I could go on and on.
On my Windows machine, I've never bothered to learn the shortcuts because they're mostly too complicated to save much time. (Except for the applications that have adopted Mac-like shortcuts, only replacing the Command key with Control, there are quite a few of these now.) I know of a bunch of programs that use Alt+F4 to close a window -- who the hell ever thought that was a good idea? I have to move my entire arm to do that.
It's definitely Windows that could use some serious reconsideration of its shortcuts, dump a whole lot of cruft, and maybe get on par with what the MacOS has had for a while now.
I could accept Apple perhaps offering an option in System Preferences somewhere to reverse the behavior of the Command and Control keys, for Windows users that really can't stand using their thumb to use hotkeys, but I think ultimately Apple has a strength in its use of hotkeys, and they realize this.
Maybe the solution would just be to have keyboards that have a little switch on them for "PC compatibility mode" that swapped the keys (my KVMP switch does this, I use it to make my Linux machine more Mac-like, although I could probably do the same thing in software somewhere).
I guess it's a good thing that most people don't have 10,000 applications on their machine.
The OS really does scan the Application bundles for those plist files (although to be fair I'm not sure if it does it on startup or later, so I'm not sure when you'd experience the slowdown if you did have 10k of them). Even the most pimped-out Macs I've seen don't have more than a few hundred applications, definitely within the range of items that could be scanned without you noticing it very much at boot time.
There is really no "Registry" equivalent that keeps track of that stuff persistently, and that you'd need to modify during a deinstall the closest you could get is the user-defined preferences as to which application you use to open which type of document. (I can change the default for.html documents to Mozilla instead of Safari, for instance, or to TextEdit, if I wanted to.)
Any Application that puts stuff outside of the defined paths (/Applications/,/Library/Application Support/, and ~/Library/Application Support/ and maybe the preferences folders) should be considered broken, or at least poorly designed, unless it's intended for a "pro" audience who are comfortable doing their own deinstallation (Fink, for example, or other Linux-derivative tools).
I'm not sure if you're being intentionally thick or what. FCC regulations cover more than just how a device can be used, they affect every stage of its design, and the market that's controlled by the FCC is a pretty big one. You over in Europe may think that what the FCC does isn't relevant to you, but I can guarantee you if you turn over a few peripherals you have on your desktop, that you'll see "Tested to Comply with FCC Standards: For Home or Office Use."
Because hardware and device manufacturers don't want to have to make multiple versions of their product if they can avoid it, chances are they're going to make it compliant to the largest number of regulatory bodies that they possibly can. Hence why my mouse is manufactured in China but approved according to regulations in the U.S., Canada, Germany, the E.U. (separate from Germany), and a bunch of Asian ones I can't read. And that's without even counting the non-governmental certifications (UL, CE, etc.).
An FCC regulation that changes something fundamental about how electronic devices have to be made is almost sure to affect people everywhere in the world, just like the E.U. RoHS rules are going to change the stuff I buy here in the U.S., even if we as a country didn't give a damn about how much hazardous substances were in our electronics. (We do, we're just taking our time about it.)
So while the FCC doesn't have any direct authority outside of the U.S., it affects how lots of things which end up on the world market are made, and you'd have to be pretty naive to just ignore that.
You mean: The men who are interested in video games that don't snicker at fart noises or think pull-my-finger gags are funny will still buy one. (bold addition mine)
Remind me to dump any shares of Nintendo... because that is a very small market they have left. I'm not trying to insult intelligent people who play console games, but you have to realize that you're outnumbered by 14-year-olds, rednecks, and retards by a substantial margin. Have you been down to EA Games lately?
I've used Carbon Copy Cloner for my last two machines to move my data over from my old machine to the new (in Target Disk Mode). Works like a charm.
I've found it's way too obnoxious to recreate my whole system on a new machine, with the amount of stuff I have that the Apple utilities probably won't copy over (postfix configs, etc.) but I didn't want to just pull the drive from the old one and put it into the new machine (wanted to upgrade hard drives or whatever), so I've just cloned the drive onto the new machine and rebooted. Done this a few times.
I guess when I finally get an Intel Mac I won't be able to do it anymore, but I've really thought it's great -- all of the benefits of upgrading (better hardware) but without the few weeks of tweaking and resetting everything that I was used to doing after an upgrade. Basically it's like having the same "system" on the software side, but I've been able to take it through three complete iterations of hardware.
On the downside, you develop a lot of cruft this way, but I'm less concerned with that than I am with losing data or having to reconfigure something that I set up years ago and don't remember how to get working exactly the same way again.
Actually I think the FedEx/USPS commercials are a good parallel to Apple/"PC" ones.
The USPS is something people are (well, were; I think a lot of younger people are less so) very familiar with, and use often. As such, its flaws get a lot of exposure. Anything that's used by that many people, unless it's absolutely perfect, is going to be reviled. Everybody who's used the mail for long enough has an experience with a lost letter, mangled package, delayed delivery, or rude postal clerk.
PCs are in a similar position. They're the de facto standard, pretty much everyone has one on their desk and has experienced a BSOD, virus, trojan, malware, or general bizarre behavior. So they're easy to hate: you can get in front of any group of 10 people in this country, pretty much, and say "How many people have had their Windows PC crash?" and get a bunch of hands up. Likewise, if you asked "How many people have had their Mac crash?" and you'll be lucky to get one hand. There may only be one Mac user in the crowd, but it will look like they're superior regardless.
Similarly, if you asked a group of people "How many people have had a bad experience with the USPS?" you'll get a lot of hands, versus "How many of you have had a bad experience with FedEx?" and you'll only get a few.
Now, I don't want to take this comparison too far; I really do think that in terms of operating systems, Apple delivers a thouroughly superior product, and Windows sucks the big one. Personal experience of using both has led me to that conclusion, but it's not personal experience that is driving most people's perception of Macs and Windows PCs.
The result is that it's a lot easier for Apple to launch a successful hate campaign about "PCs" generally than it would be for Microsoft to do the reverse, because pretty much everyone has had some bad experience with a PC. It's easy common ground to find. Apples, to a lot of people, are a bit of an unknown quantity. They know they exist, but not a whole lot more about them; so if you just create a vague positive image, you can then compare it to the concrete bad image they have of PCs, and there's your commercial. Basically, it's Apple: 0, PCs: -1.
So, apparently their website is down right now, due to either a DDoS or Slashdotting (humm, that's kind of a redundant distinction, isn't it)... can you or some other BlueFrog user provide some insight into how their software works?
Is it something that works server-side? Or do you install it onto your desktop computer? And if it goes onto your desktop, does it work as a plugin for your email program, or what? And what email clients does it support, etc. etc.?
I'd be very interested in using it, but I don't use Windows and I've seen no indication as to what platforms it's available for or how it works.
Not necessarily; maybe if prices went up, Apple's "cut" would stay the same or even decrease in an absolute amount -- I'd imagine the record companies are mostly demanding that their share increase, and Apple's (for hosting) stay about the same. Thus by a percentage-of-total, Apple loses.
Or it could be something less direct: Apple knows if prices go up, some consumers won't buy from the iTMS and will just get CDs or some other distribution method instead. (This is the whole 'price elasticity of demand' thing, discussed thoroughly elsewhere in the thread.) We can assume the music labels know this also, and think they'll make more from an increase in prices than they'd lose in business. But because it works for the labels doesn't mean it works for Apple. Particularly when Apple's main business is in selling iPods, a pricing scheme which made CDs more attractive than digital downloads (which are tied into the iPod) hurts them down the road by not locking in customer.
Since we didn't sit in on any of Apple's meetings, we'll probably never know. But there are a whole lot of plausible self-interested reasons why Apple wouldn't want to see those prices go up, and at least to me they seem a lot more likely than Steve J. just deciding to stick it to the Man.
I like Apple as much as anybody and more than quite a few people, but I don't deceive myself into thinking that they're in it for anything other than their shareholders' sake. That doesn't mean what's good for Apple at some particular time isn't also good for me, as an Apple user or as an American consumer in general, but there's no reason why that always has to be the case. It's just a temporary, although nice, coincidental alignment of interests. Nothing more, and nothing less.
Alternately, you could go to England, or any of the other countries where bookmaking/oddsmaking is the legal method of taking bets on things like horse races, and probably take a class of some sort in how to do it. (Here in the U.S. we mostly use pari-mutual betting, which works differently and doesn't really require any skill on the part of the "house.")
The way I read it is that whoever is providing the University's connection to the rest of the internet has to support CALEA, but the University does not have to on its internal network. So the gateway to the 'net has to be tappable, but a connection that stays on the internal network and never strays out onto the Internet itself doesn't have to be.
That was my reading, although I suppose there could be other interpretations.
Where I went to school last, Internet service was provided to the campus by commercial telcos via leased lines, so it would be that telco that had to comply with CALEA, not the school itself. The network edges were pretty defined, and if you went down into the right basement you could basically find a box that was the "gateway" to each ISP's connection. What I'm not sure about would be a school where the definition between "local network" and "internet" was more vague; schools that have multiple campuses or locations but all using a single block of IPs could be argued to fit into either category. Also, I'm not clear how the networks at some larger universities (the ones that originally comprised the Internet) work. What if your connection to the Internet isn't through an ISP but just via a connection to another university on a leased line? What then, are they an ISP?
I think you're representative of the exception more than the rule. I think most people at ISPs, commercial PBXes, and large networks/LANs who have the power to permit snooping are most interested in these things:
1) Preserving their own physical security and safety 2) Preserving their own economic security and job... 3) Preserving other people's "freedoms"
There is a huge gap between 2 and 3. If you can even vaguely threaten their jobs, I have a feeling that most people will probably fall over themselves trying to comply with law enforcement. Frankly, I think that a very large percentage of people will just automatically comply with law enforcement at the expense of other people's rights, unless there's a clear disincentive for them not to. (I.e., if there is an explicit policy that says "anyone who assists anyone else in gaining access to the network will be immediately terminated, the only exception is a law enforcement official with a valid warrant, verified by legal," then perhaps people will have some backbone. However in that case I'd expect them to do only what was required to fulfill due diligence and preserve their jobs, and that only reluctantly, in the face of a well-worded request.)
I don't think, and certainly wouldn't trust, the majority of people in our society would refuse a request from anyone with a gun and a badge on some vague philosophical grounds about others' rights, particularly when the "others" in question are (alleged to be) terrorists or child molesters.
Somebody sideswipes your car and breaks your leg. As you're lying there with a compound femur fracture, you scream at the other person "For the love of God, man, that door panel is going to cost, like, a thousand dollars to replace! Weren't you even thinking about how much it would cost?! I can't afford that! If you had just waited until I was standing outside the car!"
Not that a person would be comprehensible with a compound femur fracture, but you get the idea. When your first reaction is the cost, it sort of implies that what's going on would be OK or at least closer to being OK, if that were removed. So to have the colleges put a pricetag on their objections is basically sending a message to Congress: "come up with $400 a student and you can have their freedom of speech, with our compliments."
No, and if you read the article it doesn't really say that certification is hurting anyone, just that they're not worth as much as they once were.
I suppose if you factor in the opportunity cost of getting a certification (versus doing something else with that time that's more "real world" experience) maybe it could be thought of as 'hurting' you, but I didn't see any indication that people are paying less for certified employees than uncertified ones. They're just not paying more.
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Any organization that has email service should get rid of their voicemail service for internal communication. Voicemail takes longer to get, it takes longer to listen to, and doesn't do anything for you that email doesn't.
Thank you and Amen. I agree; the only thing that saves me from really, really hating voicemail (more than I have, since the advent of email), is that we now have a VM-to-email system that sends me voicemail messages as email attachments. It still requires me to waste my time listening to someone stammer away on the phone when I could have skimmed their message in a few seconds on my screen in text form, but it beats having to pick up the phone and spend several minutes navigating through the prompts to retrieve my messages.
I understand there are some valid reasons for still having voicemail (people can send you one from anywhere, etc.) but they're rapidly dwindling as the number of places you can send email from grows.
I guess the solution is not to eliminate it completely just yet, but really to impress upon people that it's a nonpreferred method of communication, and should only be used when absolutely necessary.
Personally, part of my voicemail message is a warning that I don't check the system very often and that email is my preferred method of communication for anything sensitive.
I used to do similar things, but then we got a corporate instant messenging system, and I think it's a much better solution for the problem you're describing.
I only very rarely use the system to actually send messages to anyone, but we all use it constantly to see who's around and available. (You can set it to available, away, or "don't bother me", which is a nice addition to the standard available/away. In the third case it suppresses all incoming messages.)
I don't find it intrusive, and it keeps people from dropping by my cube when I'm on the phone or otherwise occupied, assuming I've remembered to change my indicator appropriately.
Frankly I think you could really just make a buddy list program without the instant messaging features and retain about 90 percent of the usefulness, at least in my situation (everyone in the same physical office, mostly).
Wow, if that's true, that's really a load of crap on their part.
I'll be honest, I play WoW from time to time and thus maintain my account there (so my character doesn't get dumped), but Blizzard has really begun to grate on me. They're starting to become one of those organizations that I just feel vaguely dirty for associating with, much less paying a subscription fee to.
I'd encourage anyone serving overseas at a military installation or embassy who's been given the shaft by Blizzard to publicize it as widely as you can; there's nothing that really inflames Ma and Pa Kettle like a corporation being dicks to troops overseas, and I could easily see an organization like Blizzard which is highly dependent on public opinion bowing to pressure and changing their policy in a hurry.
With a service like this, why bother pirating when you can legally download a song/album, listen to it 5 times and decide if you want to purchase it?
Because that involves purchasing it? Versus pirating it, which doesn't?
Seems like piracy is still ahead to me. Of course, there's always the risk of getting caught...
(Personally, I never much enjoyed the bulk of pirated songs because the quality sucks so much; whoever thought that 128kb/s MP3 was "CD quality" ought to be shot.)
They're quasi-legal, probably honestly legitimate within Russia (at least insofar as Russia has any copyright law and enforces what it does have), and using it from within the U.S. seems to actually be a Customs violation and not a copyright one. Basically what you're doing is the same thing as going to Russia, buying a Beatles album (since nothing before 1974 or so is apparently under copyright there) and bringing it back into the U.S. So the government would have to catch you; the RIAA can't sue you directly, which is their M.O. for intimidation right now.
This is according to the learned scholars at Wikipedia, so by all means draw your own conclusions, but I think the point is that allofmp3.com is, for the moment, basically untouchable. I have no doubt that one of the many things the RIAA will work into its next law that it gets passed (with the help of their pet Congress-weasels) is to make it a capital offense to download content from another country with weaker copyright laws of the U.S., if that content would be illegal in the U.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allofmp3#Legality_in
tech startups just love to give people free shit
Yeah! They just wanted to give you free stuff, right out of the kindness of their little hearts.
Yeah, I had a slight mixup in my large cats. I meant Tiger, 10.4 ...
Must have been engaging in a bit of nostalgia there.
Just from previous long Apple/Mac experience, you really don't want to go with a .0 version if you can avoid it; personally I'm going to hold on to Jaguar until 10.5.1 comes out. The initial releases have always had a lot of very rough edges; from 10.0.0 on forwards, there have been a lot of new bugs in each version introduced that get hammered out in the .1 update. I've never seen why it's worthwhile, but then again I just don't seem to be susceptible to "early adopter syndrome" in general I guess.
If I were in your position, I'd grab one of the last Jaguar Macs right before the release of the new version. You'll get a coupon that'll get you the new version's install discs (and real install discs too usually, not "software restore" ones) but you'll be able to put it on at your leisure, after the first round of suckers have suffered through the growing pains inherent in a new release.
I recommend enclosing a nubile young intern with your letter, but the postage can get a little expensive. Works wonders, though.
Agreed. Now, I'm probably a biased sample, because I normally use a Mac and have my work PC set up to give me as much of a 'Mac-like' experience as a PC can deliver, but I've also seen how other people around me have theirs set up, and they do this too:
Most people drag their frequently used applications into that little tray-type area to the right of the Start Menu. I'm sure there's an official name for it, but it's basically like a miniature Dock and just to the left of the hideously useless "Address" field. (BTW, anybody know how to make that crap go away? If I want IE, I'll launch it, thanks.)
The only times I go into the Start Menu are to shut down or restart (which would be better done by a real menu in a real menubar) or to access a program that I don't use very often (could easily go into the Applications folder). I think I'm pretty much the norm in this. The 14 applications which comprise maybe 95% of my Windows-computer-using time are all in that little bar.
Frankly, the Start menu just seems like a crummy idea, poorly executed. It tries to replace functions that would be more logical if they were separated into proper menus (a menu for system functions like shut down, restart, System-wide preferences; a menu for user functions like Search, Help, and Run; etc.) It's also not in the actual corner of the screen, so you have to hunt for it with the mouse, and honestly I just think it's a bad way to pick from a large list of Applications.
I think it's much easier to open a window and scroll through a list that way then have it appear in a giant menu that I have to carefully navigate through (because if you move off it, you get to restart! It's like playing Operation on your computer!). And at least with a real window, I can choose how I want it organized: in an Icon view that I can arrange however I want, or in an alphabetized list/grid/whatever.
The Start Menu just seems, and has always seemed to me, like a solution looking for a problem -- except that the problem has already been solved in better ways.
Agreed. Also, recall that Windows isn't exactly the Land of Standardization when it comes to shortcuts for everything else.
With a few exceptions, I can be guaranteed that any Mac app can have it's window closed with Command-W, quit by Command-Q, a new window created with Command-N, and hidden using Command-H. There are a ton of others, I could go on and on.
On my Windows machine, I've never bothered to learn the shortcuts because they're mostly too complicated to save much time. (Except for the applications that have adopted Mac-like shortcuts, only replacing the Command key with Control, there are quite a few of these now.) I know of a bunch of programs that use Alt+F4 to close a window -- who the hell ever thought that was a good idea? I have to move my entire arm to do that.
It's definitely Windows that could use some serious reconsideration of its shortcuts, dump a whole lot of cruft, and maybe get on par with what the MacOS has had for a while now.
I could accept Apple perhaps offering an option in System Preferences somewhere to reverse the behavior of the Command and Control keys, for Windows users that really can't stand using their thumb to use hotkeys, but I think ultimately Apple has a strength in its use of hotkeys, and they realize this.
Maybe the solution would just be to have keyboards that have a little switch on them for "PC compatibility mode" that swapped the keys (my KVMP switch does this, I use it to make my Linux machine more Mac-like, although I could probably do the same thing in software somewhere).
I guess it's a good thing that most people don't have 10,000 applications on their machine.
.html documents to Mozilla instead of Safari, for instance, or to TextEdit, if I wanted to.)
/Library/Application Support/, and ~/Library/Application Support/ and maybe the preferences folders) should be considered broken, or at least poorly designed, unless it's intended for a "pro" audience who are comfortable doing their own deinstallation (Fink, for example, or other Linux-derivative tools).
The OS really does scan the Application bundles for those plist files (although to be fair I'm not sure if it does it on startup or later, so I'm not sure when you'd experience the slowdown if you did have 10k of them). Even the most pimped-out Macs I've seen don't have more than a few hundred applications, definitely within the range of items that could be scanned without you noticing it very much at boot time.
There is really no "Registry" equivalent that keeps track of that stuff persistently, and that you'd need to modify during a deinstall the closest you could get is the user-defined preferences as to which application you use to open which type of document. (I can change the default for
Any Application that puts stuff outside of the defined paths (/Applications/,
In case anyone else was interested, here's the "offical" answer:
Where to Put Application Files
I'm not sure if you're being intentionally thick or what. FCC regulations cover more than just how a device can be used, they affect every stage of its design, and the market that's controlled by the FCC is a pretty big one. You over in Europe may think that what the FCC does isn't relevant to you, but I can guarantee you if you turn over a few peripherals you have on your desktop, that you'll see "Tested to Comply with FCC Standards: For Home or Office Use."
Because hardware and device manufacturers don't want to have to make multiple versions of their product if they can avoid it, chances are they're going to make it compliant to the largest number of regulatory bodies that they possibly can. Hence why my mouse is manufactured in China but approved according to regulations in the U.S., Canada, Germany, the E.U. (separate from Germany), and a bunch of Asian ones I can't read. And that's without even counting the non-governmental certifications (UL, CE, etc.).
An FCC regulation that changes something fundamental about how electronic devices have to be made is almost sure to affect people everywhere in the world, just like the E.U. RoHS rules are going to change the stuff I buy here in the U.S., even if we as a country didn't give a damn about how much hazardous substances were in our electronics. (We do, we're just taking our time about it.)
So while the FCC doesn't have any direct authority outside of the U.S., it affects how lots of things which end up on the world market are made, and you'd have to be pretty naive to just ignore that.
You mean: The men who are interested in video games that don't snicker at fart noises or think pull-my-finger gags are funny will still buy one. (bold addition mine)
... because that is a very small market they have left. I'm not trying to insult intelligent people who play console games, but you have to realize that you're outnumbered by 14-year-olds, rednecks, and retards by a substantial margin. Have you been down to EA Games lately?
Remind me to dump any shares of Nintendo
I just thought it was ironic that at the bottom of this page, when I was reading your post, was the quote:
If you flaunt it, expect to have it trashed.
Eerily appropriate.
I've used Carbon Copy Cloner for my last two machines to move my data over from my old machine to the new (in Target Disk Mode). Works like a charm.
I've found it's way too obnoxious to recreate my whole system on a new machine, with the amount of stuff I have that the Apple utilities probably won't copy over (postfix configs, etc.) but I didn't want to just pull the drive from the old one and put it into the new machine (wanted to upgrade hard drives or whatever), so I've just cloned the drive onto the new machine and rebooted. Done this a few times.
I guess when I finally get an Intel Mac I won't be able to do it anymore, but I've really thought it's great -- all of the benefits of upgrading (better hardware) but without the few weeks of tweaking and resetting everything that I was used to doing after an upgrade. Basically it's like having the same "system" on the software side, but I've been able to take it through three complete iterations of hardware.
On the downside, you develop a lot of cruft this way, but I'm less concerned with that than I am with losing data or having to reconfigure something that I set up years ago and don't remember how to get working exactly the same way again.
Actually I think the FedEx/USPS commercials are a good parallel to Apple/"PC" ones.
The USPS is something people are (well, were; I think a lot of younger people are less so) very familiar with, and use often. As such, its flaws get a lot of exposure. Anything that's used by that many people, unless it's absolutely perfect, is going to be reviled. Everybody who's used the mail for long enough has an experience with a lost letter, mangled package, delayed delivery, or rude postal clerk.
PCs are in a similar position. They're the de facto standard, pretty much everyone has one on their desk and has experienced a BSOD, virus, trojan, malware, or general bizarre behavior. So they're easy to hate: you can get in front of any group of 10 people in this country, pretty much, and say "How many people have had their Windows PC crash?" and get a bunch of hands up. Likewise, if you asked "How many people have had their Mac crash?" and you'll be lucky to get one hand. There may only be one Mac user in the crowd, but it will look like they're superior regardless.
Similarly, if you asked a group of people "How many people have had a bad experience with the USPS?" you'll get a lot of hands, versus "How many of you have had a bad experience with FedEx?" and you'll only get a few.
Now, I don't want to take this comparison too far; I really do think that in terms of operating systems, Apple delivers a thouroughly superior product, and Windows sucks the big one. Personal experience of using both has led me to that conclusion, but it's not personal experience that is driving most people's perception of Macs and Windows PCs.
The result is that it's a lot easier for Apple to launch a successful hate campaign about "PCs" generally than it would be for Microsoft to do the reverse, because pretty much everyone has had some bad experience with a PC. It's easy common ground to find. Apples, to a lot of people, are a bit of an unknown quantity. They know they exist, but not a whole lot more about them; so if you just create a vague positive image, you can then compare it to the concrete bad image they have of PCs, and there's your commercial. Basically, it's Apple: 0, PCs: -1.
So, apparently their website is down right now, due to either a DDoS or Slashdotting (humm, that's kind of a redundant distinction, isn't it) ... can you or some other BlueFrog user provide some insight into how their software works?
Is it something that works server-side? Or do you install it onto your desktop computer? And if it goes onto your desktop, does it work as a plugin for your email program, or what? And what email clients does it support, etc. etc.?
I'd be very interested in using it, but I don't use Windows and I've seen no indication as to what platforms it's available for or how it works.
Anyone want to clue me in?
Not necessarily; maybe if prices went up, Apple's "cut" would stay the same or even decrease in an absolute amount -- I'd imagine the record companies are mostly demanding that their share increase, and Apple's (for hosting) stay about the same. Thus by a percentage-of-total, Apple loses.
Or it could be something less direct: Apple knows if prices go up, some consumers won't buy from the iTMS and will just get CDs or some other distribution method instead. (This is the whole 'price elasticity of demand' thing, discussed thoroughly elsewhere in the thread.) We can assume the music labels know this also, and think they'll make more from an increase in prices than they'd lose in business. But because it works for the labels doesn't mean it works for Apple. Particularly when Apple's main business is in selling iPods, a pricing scheme which made CDs more attractive than digital downloads (which are tied into the iPod) hurts them down the road by not locking in customer.
Since we didn't sit in on any of Apple's meetings, we'll probably never know. But there are a whole lot of plausible self-interested reasons why Apple wouldn't want to see those prices go up, and at least to me they seem a lot more likely than Steve J. just deciding to stick it to the Man.
I like Apple as much as anybody and more than quite a few people, but I don't deceive myself into thinking that they're in it for anything other than their shareholders' sake. That doesn't mean what's good for Apple at some particular time isn't also good for me, as an Apple user or as an American consumer in general, but there's no reason why that always has to be the case. It's just a temporary, although nice, coincidental alignment of interests. Nothing more, and nothing less.
Alternately, you could go to England, or any of the other countries where bookmaking/oddsmaking is the legal method of taking bets on things like horse races, and probably take a class of some sort in how to do it. (Here in the U.S. we mostly use pari-mutual betting, which works differently and doesn't really require any skill on the part of the "house.")
So the Mac really does cause rectal bleeding for 94% of users?
Depends on what you're doing with it.
The way I read it is that whoever is providing the University's connection to the rest of the internet has to support CALEA, but the University does not have to on its internal network. So the gateway to the 'net has to be tappable, but a connection that stays on the internal network and never strays out onto the Internet itself doesn't have to be.
That was my reading, although I suppose there could be other interpretations.
Where I went to school last, Internet service was provided to the campus by commercial telcos via leased lines, so it would be that telco that had to comply with CALEA, not the school itself. The network edges were pretty defined, and if you went down into the right basement you could basically find a box that was the "gateway" to each ISP's connection. What I'm not sure about would be a school where the definition between "local network" and "internet" was more vague; schools that have multiple campuses or locations but all using a single block of IPs could be argued to fit into either category. Also, I'm not clear how the networks at some larger universities (the ones that originally comprised the Internet) work. What if your connection to the Internet isn't through an ISP but just via a connection to another university on a leased line? What then, are they an ISP?
I think you're representative of the exception more than the rule. I think most people at ISPs, commercial PBXes, and large networks/LANs who have the power to permit snooping are most interested in these things:
...
1) Preserving their own physical security and safety
2) Preserving their own economic security and job
3) Preserving other people's "freedoms"
There is a huge gap between 2 and 3. If you can even vaguely threaten their jobs, I have a feeling that most people will probably fall over themselves trying to comply with law enforcement. Frankly, I think that a very large percentage of people will just automatically comply with law enforcement at the expense of other people's rights, unless there's a clear disincentive for them not to. (I.e., if there is an explicit policy that says "anyone who assists anyone else in gaining access to the network will be immediately terminated, the only exception is a law enforcement official with a valid warrant, verified by legal," then perhaps people will have some backbone. However in that case I'd expect them to do only what was required to fulfill due diligence and preserve their jobs, and that only reluctantly, in the face of a well-worded request.)
I don't think, and certainly wouldn't trust, the majority of people in our society would refuse a request from anyone with a gun and a badge on some vague philosophical grounds about others' rights, particularly when the "others" in question are (alleged to be) terrorists or child molesters.
Huh? No, it's more like this:
Somebody sideswipes your car and breaks your leg. As you're lying there with a compound femur fracture, you scream at the other person "For the love of God, man, that door panel is going to cost, like, a thousand dollars to replace! Weren't you even thinking about how much it would cost?! I can't afford that! If you had just waited until I was standing outside the car!"
Not that a person would be comprehensible with a compound femur fracture, but you get the idea. When your first reaction is the cost, it sort of implies that what's going on would be OK or at least closer to being OK, if that were removed. So to have the colleges put a pricetag on their objections is basically sending a message to Congress: "come up with $400 a student and you can have their freedom of speech, with our compliments."
No, and if you read the article it doesn't really say that certification is hurting anyone, just that they're not worth as much as they once were.
I suppose if you factor in the opportunity cost of getting a certification (versus doing something else with that time that's more "real world" experience) maybe it could be thought of as 'hurting' you, but I didn't see any indication that people are paying less for certified employees than uncertified ones. They're just not paying more.