On the Mac what I do is use Disk Utility to take the CD and make an image file (.DMG) of it. Then I stuff it away and put an alias of the.DMG in the Startup Items - allowing the CD images to automount. It works just fine, but it's a pain to set up.
The apps can't really tell the difference between a mounted disk image and the actual disk, so it works. The irritant is that the complete install for all these apps installs everything onto the HD anyway, the disk check is really just for copy protection. And it's so easily bypassed (at the expense of twice the disk space used total), that it's just stupid in the first place.
My not-quite 2-year-old son has been "using" an old iMac for a few months now. He used to watch my wife and I on our computers, and would scoot up to take the mouse from us and try clicking things. So I took a 4-year-old iMac we had around, set it up minimally, and installed a few kids' programs (Jumpstart Preschool, Finding Nemo, and a couple of others), and set it up so he could just wake it up, grab one of the programs in the Dock, and go to town with it.
He mastered it very quickly. Now he calls it his "Mac-y", and asks to use it almost daily. We let him have a half-hour or so at a time, and he's picked up a decent amount of skill very quickly. He likes doing letter drills the most.
Funny anecdote: one of the first times we let him use it, he was having a little trouble pointing the mouse properly. I went to help him position it, and he pushed my hand away and said "No!". After a minute, he figured it out himself. Now I help him with very little and don't volunteer it - I wait for him to ask.
And a pet peeve: Why do all kids' programs require the CD to be present? Don't you know we can't trust a toddler with a CD? I have to make.DMG files out of each one, and have them automount at startup so he can use all his programs.
Back when I wrote the apps, I was working in the field doing tech lackey-type work. I was already a "guru" by the standards of the time, particularly on Macs, but I had only dabbled in programming before that point. The only code I ever hacked on in those days was dBASE - I did a little commercial work at it but I sucked.
For me, the joy of HyperCard was the combination of a plain English-like language with a tool that did most of the dirty work for me. You could deliver about 90% of a working HC-based app quickly, and there were XCMD's you could easily work with to handle almost anything not provided by the native HC environment.
It probably didn't make me a better user - it sure as heck didn't make me a better programmer. I still suck at general-purpose HLL programming. But as you said, it was just plain fun to actually create usable programs on my Mac. There's HyperCard derivatives out there, but it's just not the same as the original. Bummer.
I had an original Newton MP back when they came out. About a year or so ago, I bought an old MP2100 for nostalgia's sake. It's amazing just how advanced Newton was for it's day, and still is today. On more modern hardware and with a better screen, a revised Newton today would be an absolute killer. It's a pity it was killed, but then again, it was John Sculley's baby so it was easily killed by the new regime. Bummer again.
The California offices are a legacy of their last major acquisition before eMachines - ALR. Gateway bought ALR back around the mid-90's in order to kickstart themselves into the server market. I think someone decided that they'd be more of an industry "player" if they were in California, where all the action supposedly was. That and I think Ted Waitt was sick of shovelling snow.
What's kind of interesting is that at one time, Gateway and Dell (back around when Dell was still called PCs Limited) were roughly equal competitors, selling virtually all their computers through ads in computer magazines and 800 numbers. Gateway futzed around, buying companies, opening retail stores, and being relatively late to the Internet. Meanwhile, Dell focused on squeezing every nickel out of the supply chain, minimizing inventory, and embracing the Internet early as a sales tool.
(Ironic note - Dell built their original e-commerce site using Apple's WebObjects)
As a result, Dell is now the biggest PC maker on the planet, and Gateway is, well, Gateway. They are the perennially beleaguered PC company that most people accuse Apple of being.
The only "software" I ever created from scratch was HyperCard-based. I built a guitar tuner and a lotto game player (input state rules to a randomizer), both of which got a decent number of Compuserve downloads back in the day. I also used to hand out a version of my resume as a browsable stack, which was kind of cool and helped me get a few Mac-related jobs as well.
Of course, I stopped writing stacks entirely by about 1991 or so, and haven't written more than a shell script since. But I still have fond memories of it as a tool and environment. It's a pity that HyperCard died when it did (really about 10 years ago), but it was always the "neither fish nor foul" of Apple products.
Seriously, I read about this yesterday on FC - I'm kind of surprised to see it here, too. While an occasional tech-centered show on a cable channel is one thing, having a channel devoted to it is another. Comcast may be able to make something of it, but more likely they'll just wind up taking a couple of the better shows and splicing them in elsewhere.
It's almost exactly the same as the Zaurus SL-5500 from 2002.
Except my Zaurus includes a built-in, sliding keyboard while you have to pay extra for a clip-on one on the Royal.
Well, Sharp hasn't exactly lit the world on fire with the 5500 (nice, but the 5600 is much nicer), so Royal's chances with a virtually identical package for more money than a 5500 can be had for today?
At my old company, I switched from Dell (bad support problems) to Gateway back in 2000. I bought their systems for the next couple of years, until forced into Compaq/HP by our corporate parent - but in my experience I was getting better quality systems in the old Gateway E-series desktops for less money than the Compaqs were costing. And when I or one of my techs called Gateway, we got to talk to a human who'd actually not make us go through all the clueless support hoops that a Dell or HP would. If we diagnosed a problem, the Gateway tech would actually believe us and send the part (if we needed it) withough giving us a line of BS.
And they'd also send us a real live sales rep who'd come to visit us a few times a year and show us the actual roadmap, so we could forecast our ordering appropriately. Dell and Compaq wouldn't bother doing that for us because we weren't big enough to justify actual face time (we had about 150+ users).
Nowadays, though, as I mentioned above what's left of my old company is living La Vida HP, reliability problems and all. And I've got my own place now, and I used Dell systems to set up my training lab (even though I can't stand 'em), because I just couldn't pass up the $150/box I was saving over the equivalent Gateway. Bummer. But that's the market position Gateway's been in. The big companies don't take them seriously versus Dell, HP, and IBM, and the little price-conscious companies can't afford them. At least eMachines helps them in the price-fixated marketplace.
That worked for me, too. She wanted a computer, we got her an iMac, and she talked Dad into a cablemodem.
Several years later, she now has an eMac with Panther, burns discs, and single-handedly forces websites to make their sites Mac-usable.
Of course, it helps that my wife and I use Macs at home, as do my sister and her husband, and my wife's family as well. There's a big support system in place.
I even use one in my office to do the bookeeping and such.
But it does want to be a lot cheaper than $1400 or so for a bunch of huge hardbound books. When CD-ROM based encyclopedias and the Internet combine to give you almost all the same information, but more current and easier to access, the big hardbound dead-tree version is history.
This just demonstrates it. I'm surprised the revenue dropoff hasn't been even steeper. The future for the encyclopedia makers is not in book publishing, it's in research licensing. There's a lot of quality research tied up in them, that people will pay for in the right places. Finding them is another story, though. Good luck!
I have three phones, all linked on a family plan. We keep two of them here in Massachusetts, and one is with my wife's parents in southern New jersey. But all three have local MA numbers. They were originally with T-Mobile, but I moved them to Cingular in late January. There were no major problems with the port - my phone and my wife's phone went over within a few hours, and the third phone ported a day later. For the day it took, dialing their number from a landline would fail, but dialing it from one of the already ported cells would work fine.
No problems since, either. And the GSM service up here is better with Cingular than it was with T-Mobile.
Back to the future here - I remember all the criticism of the Macintosh Portable back in 1989 when it came out. "16 pounds!" was the cry. But what it had was the first active matrix LCD and a big honkin' lead-acid battery that would run forever (for the time).
Of course, I think Apple sold like ten of them.
It's kind of funny that it's taken 15 years to get back to the 16-pound laptop again. Go figure. You knew this was coming, though, when Apple and all the Wintel companies started going to 17" screens. Someone was bound to try it.
Back in late 1991, I was working for a now-defunct Mac reseller, and I specialized in imaging sales/support. At that time, digital cameras were something everyone said were coming, but hadn't hit the market yet (with a few extremely high-end exceptions). I spoke on the state of the market at an ASMP regional meeting that fall about it, and a guy from Kodak was there. He brought their (then) brand-new Kodak DCS for us to see. It used a Nikon 8008 body with a digital back, attached by cable to a box with the hard drive, battery, and all the electronics. It cost around $10k and was just hitting the market then.
Later, in 1992, I went to work for an ad agency. We did a lot of food and product photography, and the cost/time lost to conventional film was really difficult. The nearest pro lab was about 10 miles up the highway, so we had a minimum of 2-3 hours for turnaround.
Then Kodak came out with the DCS 200 - all the features of the DCS in a single device - no tether. Sure, it was kind of flakey - the SCSI connection was prone to problems, the color balancing wasn't great, and the Photoshop plugin was awful, but I bought one. It cost nearly $10k as well.
Over the next year or so, we bought four more. And the speed difference helped us get so much business that all those cameras were occupied 10+ hours per day. We exploded in size and revenue, driven by what digital cameras could do even then. Later, we bought a couple of Leaf medium-format models for high-end work, but the Kodaks were the bread and butter of the company even a couple of years ago - years after I left.
The company that built those cameras - if you didn't catch it before, was Kodak. They saw the promise of digital photography in the media and pro markets way ahead of virtually everyone. You still see tons of their pro gear at any sporting or news event. The thing that Kodak is struggling with is the consumer market transition, but I think everyone in the film business is struggling with it as well. It's happening much faster than most people (myself included) ever expected.
I certainly wouldn't bet against Kodak succeeding, though. They may not look like quite the same company when it's over, but they'll still probably be the same relative to the new market that they were in the old one. In the digital world, you still need to print and archive your work, and that's where a lot of the profit can lie. There's also still a film market out there that can be milked for years to come, and a graphic arts business that they can keep servicing, too.
Of course, I believe anything that the Standard has to say. Didn't they go out of business a while back, too?
My old company got bought a couple of years ago, and this past year decided that management wasn't needed anymore here. So I got dumped (so did a lot of other folks), and after six months with only a handful of interviews, I decided to take matters into my own hands, started up my own business (consulting, training, security, and custom training - not the kind that's being talked about here), and as I get started it's been promising enough that I'm happy with the decision.
But during those six months, were there plenty of positions that I was amply qualified for? Absolutely. I'm also a non-degree holder, though, and that was most likely a factor in my resume's landing in so many circular files over that time. When times are tough and there's a lot of unemployed out there, it's likely that folks in a position like mine or yours are the ones who lose all the tie-breakers, regardless of how well we might actually do in the job.
When you have a dozen or so job seekers, you look real hard at each one. When you have 50, you sort 'em quick - the ones who don't match every criteria perfectly don't even make the first cut. The last time I looked for work in a down market (in the early '90s), it was much lower-level work, so the job was pretty easy to get. But times change and so did my experience and qualifications - still never had a finished degree, though, and that's a factor now. Ironically, I don't have all the certs, either - I was too busy dealing with things for real and sending my employees out for their own certs. They may have been smart guys with certs, but they still came to me for help solving the problems thay couldn't handle themselves.
But by the certifications=qualifications theory, it should have been the other way around. At least, HR resume filters will assume that.
Of course, working for myself I don't have to deal with that so much anymore, but it could turn out to be an issue again someday. It all depends on the timing, I guess.
I have a 2-year old TiBook, and I had a toilet seat iBook before that, and I don't feel at all bad about running MacOS X on any of 'em. If the hardware really craps out and it's not worth fixing, I'll yank the drive, put it in a $50 Firewire enclosure, and use it as a spare drive for my new system (or in my case, my desktop iMac).
If I don't like the engineering behind one model, I can get a different model. There's two different iBook form factors, three different PowerBooks, one tower Mac, three iMac sizes, and one CRT model. The prices of Apple's hardware platforms range from about $800 (Combo Drive eMac, no extra RAM) to well over $3500 (PowerMac G5-dually 2 GHz and a real nice LCD monitor) I figure I can find something adequate for my use among those choices.
And no, MacOS X may not be Free (as in beer) software, or completely Free (as in speech), but it's a darn sight closer than any other comparable desktop OS with equivalent or higher market share. How much of their source code does Microsoft give away under any variation of an Open Source license?
So MacOS X doesn't run on generic Intel hardware. It's not ever going to. Get over it, folks - Apple makes money by selling Macs, not by selling boxed OS's to users. If they went to the trouble of OS X for Intel, who'd buy it, anyways? A handful of Slashdot readers? Whee.
If you like Apple software, suck it up and buy the Apple hardware it runs on. If you like Apple hardware but Apple's not Free enough for you, download Yellow Dog or one of the other PPC Linux distros and blow OS X away. Either way, don't whine about it.
I dunno about the Aztek itself, but I drive its corporate cousin (the Chevy Venture), and my friend Rob drives the Aztek's nicer-looking fraternal twin (the Buick Rendezvous - the minivan for people who don't want to admit they have a minivan). We both like 'em just fine. I saw the Aztek at an auto show when it was first being introduced, and after clambering around in it a little, I was pretty interested. But my wife hated the looks, and I was a little put off by the relative lack of power and the (initial) non-availability of AWD.
So i wound up getting an Olds Bravada instead, only to swap it out for the Venture when the kid needs overwhelmed the Olds. The GM minivan platform that they base the Aztek, Rendezvous, and the minivan triplets on isn't a bad platform at all, it's just that the Aztek has the "love it or hate it" looks.
As for some of the other cars in this discussion, back in the early '80s when I was in high school, I dated a girl who had a Corvair. Nice car, even though Ralph Nader made his bones on it. My friend Pam had a 4-door Chevette that had trouble getting uphill when fully loaded with passengers, and I had two friends with VW bugs. One of them actually had one with an automatic transmission. I think there may have been about six of them made, total. I drove my Dad's Olds '88, which was a pretty good car. We had the one with the V-6, not the crappy diesel.
One time some of my friends and I decided to make the guy with the automatic Bug think his car had been stolen. So we picked it up and carried it away. It was easier than jimmying the lock.
When he found it, though, he figured out that I'd been the ringleader for that stunt and got me back by doing donuts on my lawn. My folks were not happy. But the car was so light, he couldn't do too much damage.
Actually, I knew that (though others may not have), as TiVo also gets and provides stats themselves - Nielsen would be kind of redundant anyway when TiVo provides better info. I was never a Nielsen house, but I do have TiVo.
But it's funnier when you blame CowboyNeal somehow...
As a 'BZ' listener, I can tell you that Gary LaPierre isn't the first person they've had do this. Ever since David Brudnoy (their evening talk show host) had his first severe bout with AIDS back in the mid-'90s, they've had him working his show from a home studio they built him in his Back Bay condo. The WBZ studio is out in Allston, along the river next to Harvard's stadium. When Brudnoy was essentially unable to leave home during his recovery, having the home studio let him continue broadcasting.
Some guests would work with him from the WBZ studio, some would go to his condo instead for the show. You couldn't tell which was which. David's going through some more health issues right now (a bout with a rare and nasty form of skin cancer), so he hasn't been on the air much lately, but if he recovers he'll go back to working from home like before.
As for Gary LaPierre, he's a radio newscaster who's been around in Boston practically forever. As long as he's reading the stories, it really doesn't matter one whit to me where he is physically - he's still the voice I'm used to on the local news station. If he's earned it, more power to him. I wish I could work from Florida right now!
The first MP3 I downloaded was "Torn" by Natalie Imbruglia. Until then, I really didn't put much music on my computers at all. I was an early SoundJam buyer before Apple bought the product and turned it into iTunes, though.
Nowadays, I have about 2500 tunes on my main Mac in the house that I sync to an iPod. I've probably downloaded no more than a dozen or so from P2P services, tops. Most of them are ripped from my old CD's, and I've probably bought about 4-5 singles and 5+ albums from iTMS since it opened.
Then thing for me isn't so much how much I've downloaded as it is how quickly I took my music habits digital once I started the process. It's been literally a couple of years since I used my ancient stereo - I've used my DVD player's MP3 playback capability a few times, and other than that all the music in the house is either on my iPod or streamed off one of the computers.
All the actual CD's in the house are stashed away in a drawer down in the basement, because they've all just become bits.
Well, for starters, there's a lot more kids under ten than there are Slashdotters. Millions more.
And the electronic products are expensive, relatively low-margin products that can only make them money if they sell lots of them. While Good Old Plastic Blocks are incredibly cheap to make, can be sold for a huge markup, and appeal to a lot more than just folks who want retro toys.
I'm sure they'll still make some money off the licensed stuff for the time being, but licensed products have higher costs and since they're designed to be used for specific things they aren't really as interchangeable as standard Legos. And they cost the buyer more, too.
Mindstorms may be wicked cool, but Lego needs to make a profit. They made lots of money selling plain old blocks, then they decided that they needed to grow into other areas to survive. It didn't work.
I'll miss the cool stuff like Mindstorms, but in a couple of years when my son is old enough to play with Legos I'll be buying them for him. And he won't miss the robotics at all, I suspect.
HP only uses Compaq now as a consumer-level brand. There _is_ no Compaq anymore, just Compaq computers you can buy at retailers.
All the major Compaq business and high-end brands (like Proliants and iPaqs) are now HP-labeled. There is no HPQ brand, nor will there be - eventually, the Compaq label will likely wither away and die. It's likely that this deal extends to HP and Compaq-labeled equipment.
I know that was a joke (and a decent one, at that), but I must point out that there's a significant difference between AOL paying their money to mail you a nigh-infinite quantity of CD's and some a-hole spammer making you and AOL both pay to process and read their Viagra spam.
And to give AOL a little credit, even they are making fun of all the CD's they mail out in their most recent TV ads.
Though it makes my head hurt to see Jerry Stiller and Snoop Dogg in a commercial together. That's just wrong on so many diffferent levels...
Yeah - the bags that you can buy "off-the-shelf" at the Apple Store are the Chinese bags. Custom bags are SF-made, as are all the messenger bags (like my Bolo), and their smaller/accessory bags. The iPod cases are made in China, as are the laptop-specific bags. I don't know if the laptop sleeves are made in China nowadays or not, but mine (2+ years old) wasn't.
Even sneaker companies like New Balance have some of their shoes and products made overseas, despite their strong pro-US manufacturing philosophy. The economics are pretty harsh. If you service a mass market, you're likely to send at least some portion of your business overseas - it's a sad reality of a global economy.
The flip side of it is that companies like Timbuk2, New Balance, and others have at least a stated goal to keep as much manufacturing here as feasible, along with the business aspects of the company as well. New Balance employs a lot of people here besides the ones in China, and a good number of the people here are making shoes. I can live with that. And I buy New Balance's shoes.
Timbuk2 makes some bombproof messenger bags - I've kept my PowerBook in one when I ramble about for the last two years, and it's held up great. You can custom-design your bag online, as well, which is most cool. If you prefer stock, they keep several types/styles in stock, and some are carried at the Apple Stores.
Mine is a Bolo with a few goodies and a center divider. I made mine with waterproofed canvas (unfortunately, they don't offer that fabric anymore), and I also have a sleeve for the 15" PowerBook as well. It's the best bag I've ever owned, and if I ever get another PowerBook I'll just make sure to buy a sleeve to fit. The sleeves have handles, too, for a little extra protection.
Timbuk2 also makes the best iPod holders, as well - and they make a handy case for a 1900-series iPaq handheld, too, along with a couple of SD cards. And their custom bags are US-made, which I find to be a nice bonus.
Slashdot Mirror
On the Mac what I do is use Disk Utility to take the CD and make an image file (.DMG) of it. Then I stuff it away and put an alias of the .DMG in the Startup Items - allowing the CD images to automount. It works just fine, but it's a pain to set up.
The apps can't really tell the difference between a mounted disk image and the actual disk, so it works. The irritant is that the complete install for all these apps installs everything onto the HD anyway, the disk check is really just for copy protection. And it's so easily bypassed (at the expense of twice the disk space used total), that it's just stupid in the first place.
My not-quite 2-year-old son has been "using" an old iMac for a few months now. He used to watch my wife and I on our computers, and would scoot up to take the mouse from us and try clicking things. So I took a 4-year-old iMac we had around, set it up minimally, and installed a few kids' programs (Jumpstart Preschool, Finding Nemo, and a couple of others), and set it up so he could just wake it up, grab one of the programs in the Dock, and go to town with it.
.DMG files out of each one, and have them automount at startup so he can use all his programs.
He mastered it very quickly. Now he calls it his "Mac-y", and asks to use it almost daily. We let him have a half-hour or so at a time, and he's picked up a decent amount of skill very quickly. He likes doing letter drills the most.
Funny anecdote: one of the first times we let him use it, he was having a little trouble pointing the mouse properly. I went to help him position it, and he pushed my hand away and said "No!". After a minute, he figured it out himself. Now I help him with very little and don't volunteer it - I wait for him to ask.
And a pet peeve: Why do all kids' programs require the CD to be present? Don't you know we can't trust a toddler with a CD? I have to make
Back when I wrote the apps, I was working in the field doing tech lackey-type work. I was already a "guru" by the standards of the time, particularly on Macs, but I had only dabbled in programming before that point. The only code I ever hacked on in those days was dBASE - I did a little commercial work at it but I sucked.
For me, the joy of HyperCard was the combination of a plain English-like language with a tool that did most of the dirty work for me. You could deliver about 90% of a working HC-based app quickly, and there were XCMD's you could easily work with to handle almost anything not provided by the native HC environment.
It probably didn't make me a better user - it sure as heck didn't make me a better programmer. I still suck at general-purpose HLL programming. But as you said, it was just plain fun to actually create usable programs on my Mac. There's HyperCard derivatives out there, but it's just not the same as the original. Bummer.
I had an original Newton MP back when they came out. About a year or so ago, I bought an old MP2100 for nostalgia's sake. It's amazing just how advanced Newton was for it's day, and still is today. On more modern hardware and with a better screen, a revised Newton today would be an absolute killer. It's a pity it was killed, but then again, it was John Sculley's baby so it was easily killed by the new regime. Bummer again.
The California offices are a legacy of their last major acquisition before eMachines - ALR. Gateway bought ALR back around the mid-90's in order to kickstart themselves into the server market. I think someone decided that they'd be more of an industry "player" if they were in California, where all the action supposedly was. That and I think Ted Waitt was sick of shovelling snow.
What's kind of interesting is that at one time, Gateway and Dell (back around when Dell was still called PCs Limited) were roughly equal competitors, selling virtually all their computers through ads in computer magazines and 800 numbers. Gateway futzed around, buying companies, opening retail stores, and being relatively late to the Internet. Meanwhile, Dell focused on squeezing every nickel out of the supply chain, minimizing inventory, and embracing the Internet early as a sales tool.
(Ironic note - Dell built their original e-commerce site using Apple's WebObjects)
As a result, Dell is now the biggest PC maker on the planet, and Gateway is, well, Gateway. They are the perennially beleaguered PC company that most people accuse Apple of being.
The only "software" I ever created from scratch was HyperCard-based. I built a guitar tuner and a lotto game player (input state rules to a randomizer), both of which got a decent number of Compuserve downloads back in the day. I also used to hand out a version of my resume as a browsable stack, which was kind of cool and helped me get a few Mac-related jobs as well.
Of course, I stopped writing stacks entirely by about 1991 or so, and haven't written more than a shell script since. But I still have fond memories of it as a tool and environment. It's a pity that HyperCard died when it did (really about 10 years ago), but it was always the "neither fish nor foul" of Apple products.
That and Pippin.
I figured they were toast when the bubble popped.
Seriously, I read about this yesterday on FC - I'm kind of surprised to see it here, too. While an occasional tech-centered show on a cable channel is one thing, having a channel devoted to it is another. Comcast may be able to make something of it, but more likely they'll just wind up taking a couple of the better shows and splicing them in elsewhere.
It's almost exactly the same as the Zaurus SL-5500 from 2002.
Except my Zaurus includes a built-in, sliding keyboard while you have to pay extra for a clip-on one on the Royal.
Well, Sharp hasn't exactly lit the world on fire with the 5500 (nice, but the 5600 is much nicer), so Royal's chances with a virtually identical package for more money than a 5500 can be had for today?
I don't think I like those odds very much...
At my old company, I switched from Dell (bad support problems) to Gateway back in 2000. I bought their systems for the next couple of years, until forced into Compaq/HP by our corporate parent - but in my experience I was getting better quality systems in the old Gateway E-series desktops for less money than the Compaqs were costing. And when I or one of my techs called Gateway, we got to talk to a human who'd actually not make us go through all the clueless support hoops that a Dell or HP would. If we diagnosed a problem, the Gateway tech would actually believe us and send the part (if we needed it) withough giving us a line of BS.
And they'd also send us a real live sales rep who'd come to visit us a few times a year and show us the actual roadmap, so we could forecast our ordering appropriately. Dell and Compaq wouldn't bother doing that for us because we weren't big enough to justify actual face time (we had about 150+ users).
Nowadays, though, as I mentioned above what's left of my old company is living La Vida HP, reliability problems and all. And I've got my own place now, and I used Dell systems to set up my training lab (even though I can't stand 'em), because I just couldn't pass up the $150/box I was saving over the equivalent Gateway. Bummer. But that's the market position Gateway's been in. The big companies don't take them seriously versus Dell, HP, and IBM, and the little price-conscious companies can't afford them. At least eMachines helps them in the price-fixated marketplace.
That worked for me, too. She wanted a computer, we got her an iMac, and she talked Dad into a cablemodem.
Several years later, she now has an eMac with Panther, burns discs, and single-handedly forces websites to make their sites Mac-usable.
Of course, it helps that my wife and I use Macs at home, as do my sister and her husband, and my wife's family as well. There's a big support system in place.
I even use one in my office to do the bookeeping and such.
But it does want to be a lot cheaper than $1400 or so for a bunch of huge hardbound books. When CD-ROM based encyclopedias and the Internet combine to give you almost all the same information, but more current and easier to access, the big hardbound dead-tree version is history.
This just demonstrates it. I'm surprised the revenue dropoff hasn't been even steeper. The future for the encyclopedia makers is not in book publishing, it's in research licensing. There's a lot of quality research tied up in them, that people will pay for in the right places. Finding them is another story, though. Good luck!
I have three phones, all linked on a family plan. We keep two of them here in Massachusetts, and one is with my wife's parents in southern New jersey. But all three have local MA numbers. They were originally with T-Mobile, but I moved them to Cingular in late January. There were no major problems with the port - my phone and my wife's phone went over within a few hours, and the third phone ported a day later. For the day it took, dialing their number from a landline would fail, but dialing it from one of the already ported cells would work fine.
No problems since, either. And the GSM service up here is better with Cingular than it was with T-Mobile.
Back to the future here - I remember all the criticism of the Macintosh Portable back in 1989 when it came out. "16 pounds!" was the cry. But what it had was the first active matrix LCD and a big honkin' lead-acid battery that would run forever (for the time).
Of course, I think Apple sold like ten of them.
It's kind of funny that it's taken 15 years to get back to the 16-pound laptop again. Go figure. You knew this was coming, though, when Apple and all the Wintel companies started going to 17" screens. Someone was bound to try it.
Back in late 1991, I was working for a now-defunct Mac reseller, and I specialized in imaging sales/support. At that time, digital cameras were something everyone said were coming, but hadn't hit the market yet (with a few extremely high-end exceptions). I spoke on the state of the market at an ASMP regional meeting that fall about it, and a guy from Kodak was there. He brought their (then) brand-new Kodak DCS for us to see. It used a Nikon 8008 body with a digital back, attached by cable to a box with the hard drive, battery, and all the electronics. It cost around $10k and was just hitting the market then.
Later, in 1992, I went to work for an ad agency. We did a lot of food and product photography, and the cost/time lost to conventional film was really difficult. The nearest pro lab was about 10 miles up the highway, so we had a minimum of 2-3 hours for turnaround.
Then Kodak came out with the DCS 200 - all the features of the DCS in a single device - no tether. Sure, it was kind of flakey - the SCSI connection was prone to problems, the color balancing wasn't great, and the Photoshop plugin was awful, but I bought one. It cost nearly $10k as well.
Over the next year or so, we bought four more. And the speed difference helped us get so much business that all those cameras were occupied 10+ hours per day. We exploded in size and revenue, driven by what digital cameras could do even then. Later, we bought a couple of Leaf medium-format models for high-end work, but the Kodaks were the bread and butter of the company even a couple of years ago - years after I left.
The company that built those cameras - if you didn't catch it before, was Kodak. They saw the promise of digital photography in the media and pro markets way ahead of virtually everyone. You still see tons of their pro gear at any sporting or news event. The thing that Kodak is struggling with is the consumer market transition, but I think everyone in the film business is struggling with it as well. It's happening much faster than most people (myself included) ever expected.
I certainly wouldn't bet against Kodak succeeding, though. They may not look like quite the same company when it's over, but they'll still probably be the same relative to the new market that they were in the old one. In the digital world, you still need to print and archive your work, and that's where a lot of the profit can lie. There's also still a film market out there that can be milked for years to come, and a graphic arts business that they can keep servicing, too.
Of course, I believe anything that the Standard has to say. Didn't they go out of business a while back, too?
Welcome to my world...
My old company got bought a couple of years ago, and this past year decided that management wasn't needed anymore here. So I got dumped (so did a lot of other folks), and after six months with only a handful of interviews, I decided to take matters into my own hands, started up my own business (consulting, training, security, and custom training - not the kind that's being talked about here), and as I get started it's been promising enough that I'm happy with the decision.
But during those six months, were there plenty of positions that I was amply qualified for? Absolutely. I'm also a non-degree holder, though, and that was most likely a factor in my resume's landing in so many circular files over that time. When times are tough and there's a lot of unemployed out there, it's likely that folks in a position like mine or yours are the ones who lose all the tie-breakers, regardless of how well we might actually do in the job.
When you have a dozen or so job seekers, you look real hard at each one. When you have 50, you sort 'em quick - the ones who don't match every criteria perfectly don't even make the first cut. The last time I looked for work in a down market (in the early '90s), it was much lower-level work, so the job was pretty easy to get. But times change and so did my experience and qualifications - still never had a finished degree, though, and that's a factor now. Ironically, I don't have all the certs, either - I was too busy dealing with things for real and sending my employees out for their own certs. They may have been smart guys with certs, but they still came to me for help solving the problems thay couldn't handle themselves.
But by the certifications=qualifications theory, it should have been the other way around. At least, HR resume filters will assume that.
Of course, working for myself I don't have to deal with that so much anymore, but it could turn out to be an issue again someday. It all depends on the timing, I guess.
Basically, no. I don't feel one bit guilty.
I have a 2-year old TiBook, and I had a toilet seat iBook before that, and I don't feel at all bad about running MacOS X on any of 'em. If the hardware really craps out and it's not worth fixing, I'll yank the drive, put it in a $50 Firewire enclosure, and use it as a spare drive for my new system (or in my case, my desktop iMac).
If I don't like the engineering behind one model, I can get a different model. There's two different iBook form factors, three different PowerBooks, one tower Mac, three iMac sizes, and one CRT model. The prices of Apple's hardware platforms range from about $800 (Combo Drive eMac, no extra RAM) to well over $3500 (PowerMac G5-dually 2 GHz and a real nice LCD monitor) I figure I can find something adequate for my use among those choices.
And no, MacOS X may not be Free (as in beer) software, or completely Free (as in speech), but it's a darn sight closer than any other comparable desktop OS with equivalent or higher market share. How much of their source code does Microsoft give away under any variation of an Open Source license?
So MacOS X doesn't run on generic Intel hardware. It's not ever going to. Get over it, folks - Apple makes money by selling Macs, not by selling boxed OS's to users. If they went to the trouble of OS X for Intel, who'd buy it, anyways? A handful of Slashdot readers? Whee.
If you like Apple software, suck it up and buy the Apple hardware it runs on. If you like Apple hardware but Apple's not Free enough for you, download Yellow Dog or one of the other PPC Linux distros and blow OS X away. Either way, don't whine about it.
I dunno about the Aztek itself, but I drive its corporate cousin (the Chevy Venture), and my friend Rob drives the Aztek's nicer-looking fraternal twin (the Buick Rendezvous - the minivan for people who don't want to admit they have a minivan). We both like 'em just fine. I saw the Aztek at an auto show when it was first being introduced, and after clambering around in it a little, I was pretty interested. But my wife hated the looks, and I was a little put off by the relative lack of power and the (initial) non-availability of AWD.
So i wound up getting an Olds Bravada instead, only to swap it out for the Venture when the kid needs overwhelmed the Olds. The GM minivan platform that they base the Aztek, Rendezvous, and the minivan triplets on isn't a bad platform at all, it's just that the Aztek has the "love it or hate it" looks.
As for some of the other cars in this discussion, back in the early '80s when I was in high school, I dated a girl who had a Corvair. Nice car, even though Ralph Nader made his bones on it. My friend Pam had a 4-door Chevette that had trouble getting uphill when fully loaded with passengers, and I had two friends with VW bugs. One of them actually had one with an automatic transmission. I think there may have been about six of them made, total. I drove my Dad's Olds '88, which was a pretty good car. We had the one with the V-6, not the crappy diesel.
One time some of my friends and I decided to make the guy with the automatic Bug think his car had been stolen. So we picked it up and carried it away. It was easier than jimmying the lock.
When he found it, though, he figured out that I'd been the ringleader for that stunt and got me back by doing donuts on my lawn. My folks were not happy. But the car was so light, he couldn't do too much damage.
Actually, I knew that (though others may not have), as TiVo also gets and provides stats themselves - Nielsen would be kind of redundant anyway when TiVo provides better info. I was never a Nielsen house, but I do have TiVo.
But it's funnier when you blame CowboyNeal somehow...
What do you think of the possibility that Star Trek: Enterprise may be cancelled?
- "Who cares? Kirk rules!"
- "Who cares? Picard rules!"
- "Berman sux. I expected it any day."
- "Ahh... I just watched it for the hot Vulcan chick anyways."
- "I just wait for the Trek movies."
- "That's horrible, I just decided that Crusher was cool because he runs Linux, now this!"
- "It's all the fault of CowboyNeal and his Nielsen-connected TiVo!"
As a 'BZ' listener, I can tell you that Gary LaPierre isn't the first person they've had do this. Ever since David Brudnoy (their evening talk show host) had his first severe bout with AIDS back in the mid-'90s, they've had him working his show from a home studio they built him in his Back Bay condo. The WBZ studio is out in Allston, along the river next to Harvard's stadium. When Brudnoy was essentially unable to leave home during his recovery, having the home studio let him continue broadcasting.
Some guests would work with him from the WBZ studio, some would go to his condo instead for the show. You couldn't tell which was which. David's going through some more health issues right now (a bout with a rare and nasty form of skin cancer), so he hasn't been on the air much lately, but if he recovers he'll go back to working from home like before.
As for Gary LaPierre, he's a radio newscaster who's been around in Boston practically forever. As long as he's reading the stories, it really doesn't matter one whit to me where he is physically - he's still the voice I'm used to on the local news station. If he's earned it, more power to him. I wish I could work from Florida right now!
The first MP3 I downloaded was "Torn" by Natalie Imbruglia. Until then, I really didn't put much music on my computers at all. I was an early SoundJam buyer before Apple bought the product and turned it into iTunes, though.
Nowadays, I have about 2500 tunes on my main Mac in the house that I sync to an iPod. I've probably downloaded no more than a dozen or so from P2P services, tops. Most of them are ripped from my old CD's, and I've probably bought about 4-5 singles and 5+ albums from iTMS since it opened.
Then thing for me isn't so much how much I've downloaded as it is how quickly I took my music habits digital once I started the process. It's been literally a couple of years since I used my ancient stereo - I've used my DVD player's MP3 playback capability a few times, and other than that all the music in the house is either on my iPod or streamed off one of the computers.
All the actual CD's in the house are stashed away in a drawer down in the basement, because they've all just become bits.
Well, for starters, there's a lot more kids under ten than there are Slashdotters. Millions more.
And the electronic products are expensive, relatively low-margin products that can only make them money if they sell lots of them. While Good Old Plastic Blocks are incredibly cheap to make, can be sold for a huge markup, and appeal to a lot more than just folks who want retro toys.
I'm sure they'll still make some money off the licensed stuff for the time being, but licensed products have higher costs and since they're designed to be used for specific things they aren't really as interchangeable as standard Legos. And they cost the buyer more, too.
Mindstorms may be wicked cool, but Lego needs to make a profit. They made lots of money selling plain old blocks, then they decided that they needed to grow into other areas to survive. It didn't work.
I'll miss the cool stuff like Mindstorms, but in a couple of years when my son is old enough to play with Legos I'll be buying them for him. And he won't miss the robotics at all, I suspect.
HP only uses Compaq now as a consumer-level brand. There _is_ no Compaq anymore, just Compaq computers you can buy at retailers.
All the major Compaq business and high-end brands (like Proliants and iPaqs) are now HP-labeled. There is no HPQ brand, nor will there be - eventually, the Compaq label will likely wither away and die. It's likely that this deal extends to HP and Compaq-labeled equipment.
I know that was a joke (and a decent one, at that), but I must point out that there's a significant difference between AOL paying their money to mail you a nigh-infinite quantity of CD's and some a-hole spammer making you and AOL both pay to process and read their Viagra spam.
And to give AOL a little credit, even they are making fun of all the CD's they mail out in their most recent TV ads.
Though it makes my head hurt to see Jerry Stiller and Snoop Dogg in a commercial together. That's just wrong on so many diffferent levels...
Yeah - the bags that you can buy "off-the-shelf" at the Apple Store are the Chinese bags. Custom bags are SF-made, as are all the messenger bags (like my Bolo), and their smaller/accessory bags. The iPod cases are made in China, as are the laptop-specific bags. I don't know if the laptop sleeves are made in China nowadays or not, but mine (2+ years old) wasn't.
Even sneaker companies like New Balance have some of their shoes and products made overseas, despite their strong pro-US manufacturing philosophy. The economics are pretty harsh. If you service a mass market, you're likely to send at least some portion of your business overseas - it's a sad reality of a global economy.
The flip side of it is that companies like Timbuk2, New Balance, and others have at least a stated goal to keep as much manufacturing here as feasible, along with the business aspects of the company as well. New Balance employs a lot of people here besides the ones in China, and a good number of the people here are making shoes. I can live with that. And I buy New Balance's shoes.
Timbuk2 makes some bombproof messenger bags - I've kept my PowerBook in one when I ramble about for the last two years, and it's held up great. You can custom-design your bag online, as well, which is most cool. If you prefer stock, they keep several types/styles in stock, and some are carried at the Apple Stores.
Mine is a Bolo with a few goodies and a center divider. I made mine with waterproofed canvas (unfortunately, they don't offer that fabric anymore), and I also have a sleeve for the 15" PowerBook as well. It's the best bag I've ever owned, and if I ever get another PowerBook I'll just make sure to buy a sleeve to fit. The sleeves have handles, too, for a little extra protection.
Timbuk2 also makes the best iPod holders, as well - and they make a handy case for a 1900-series iPaq handheld, too, along with a couple of SD cards. And their custom bags are US-made, which I find to be a nice bonus.