Sorry, pal, but I have never, in 20 years of telephone service in my name, purchased ANYTHING from someone who has called me without prior arrangement. This includes not only the aluminum siding and window replacement idiots who called me in my various apartments, but also credit card companies and wholesalers with whom I had "prior business relationships."
I do demand to be left alone. There is simply no reason for anyone who's selling anything to ever call me unless I've already engaged them and asked them to call. This is very simple stuff.
Uhh... no. it might be harassment for one person to call over and over and over and over... maybe yelling obscenities or threats or something...
I'm not so sure that one or two calls to the association that's largely responsible for making home life unpleasant for me, is wholly exempt from receiving a phone call from me. I have as much right to call them to complain about the actions of their members as they have asserted FOR DECADES in calling the rest of us.
Oh bullshit. My father was an electrician 30 years ago and owned a couple of very nice voltmeters (yes, they had been invented even back in the 'good old days')... inductive ammeters as well, and even glowey neon tubes that would show the presence of current.
you arranged for emergency power so you could post to freakin' Slashdot, but your fish are going to die? What is it that kills them? Tropical fish, can't be the heat...
I don't use this screensaver as a "screen saver". I use it as a "lock this terminal, leaving all my stuff open, cuz I really don't need to log, out, but I do want to prevent casual snooping when I'm not watching over the machine."
A beneficial side effect is that it prevents accidental things from happening, for examine, when the cat walks on the keys.
So they already have source code that works... tell me again why someone has to start from scratch in a "clean room" to build something that validates against the API ? I must have slept through that part.
Well, i came here to complain about that too. There's a long preface in which the author describes what follows as a PERSONAL perspective on things, and then commences to refer to the protagonist as "she." It's just too damn weird. I had to stop reading it.
this article would have been a lot more interesting if he'd trimmed 50% of the distracting BS, stories of Caesar hiring his relatives to play foosball, etc. I didn't say make it boring, i said that there are so many indirect references to things having nothing to do with pipelining that someone truly new to this material is going to have a hard time teasing it apart. just my opinion.
If that's how you measure credibility, you might want to rethink your standards. I didn't say I edit everything with pico. However, a short script, yes. Does the winner of the whose-dick-is-biggest/i-use-the-most-difficult-edi tor contest have the most cred?
I've used a Powerbook as my primary laptop for about 7 years now, and behind it (since Linux 1.2 or somesuch) has always been some group of *nix servers. I presently have a G4, new in Nov. 2001. I have always used my laptops and servers together for - writing and running net-connected server apps, and running my life (Quicken, e-mail, etc) and prefer a Powerbook for running-my-life stuff, by a big measure.
OS/X is very nice for someone wanting to do this. I prefer the behaviours of the Mac interface and applications and always have. So this is the best of both for me, since I often have a terminal window open while working on a GUI app (e.g. 5 mins ago before I took this break, coding in CodeWarrior, running the app from a terminal window and editing something w/ pico)...
The nice big screen is, well, nice and big. Sometimes too big. I have a courier bag for biking around with it, and a soft, snug case designed just to hold it - recommended if you're going to take it anywhere. Even if it's under your arm it seems to want to smack into things otherwise.
However sometimes the nice big screen is too damn big. If I were doing this again, I'd think about getting the smaller iBook. I do some video editing but it's not an everyday thing for me.... iBook at half the price but not half the speed, and I'd still have a nice machine for *just about everything* plus money left over for drugs.
It's easy to take from place to place - joining new wireless or wired nets, or switching to a projection display always works very quickly and doesn't screw things up.
Have had a smattering of kernel panics, but not much to get too excited about. Greatest issue seems to be that while that apps are stable and work well, they are not yet mature, but I like them.
I like the feel of the keyboard. I like the trackpad. I've purchased a tiny external USB mouse that I often use as well.
some issues:
case cosmetics: The outer edge of the case (the last 1/4" all around then keyboard, and around the screen as well) is not titanium. It's some cheapass painted crap. The paint wears off and then it looks like your $2,500 Powerbook has a skin condition.
Brittle power supply connector: The AC adapter socket built into this seems designed to snap of. It's very tight and very brittle. Once I heard the motherboard creak a few times, I learned to be plus ultra careful plugging it in.
Do not use if you have a pacemaker: The case is electrically live when plugged into the wall. Go measure one, or if you are sensitive to 60Hz, just run your finger across the titanium surface of one that's plugged in. Wrote to Apple. Wrote to the US gov't agency that oversees consumer safety. No replies.
Excellent marshmallow toaster: WHen it was new, it was quiet. When it was less new (6 mos) it started to be very warm when running. Now it runs extremely hot - the fan comes on a lot. I bought these nice ventilation stands for laptops, and they help a lot (and swivel -too cool), but the whole heat up thing is screwed up. heat
ln -s versus alias, what the hell? A minor point, or is it. If I `ln -s` to create a link, the Finder is perfectly fine with it. If I create an alias via the Finder, it puts the info in the resource fork rather than doing the Right Thing in the file system. What the hell is that all about?
And my battery died From the start, the promised 5 hours never materialized. Ever. More like 2 hours 45 minutes of runtime on a full charge. Then one day (after about 9 monhts) the battery decided that a full charge would mean 45 minutes of runtime, and that's how it stands now.
I am sending it in for warranty work next week. They can't promise it will come back with my data on it, so I have had to purchase an external hard drive to back it up to ($300) which sucks (yes, i was backing it up regularly to one of my Linux boxes via Retrospect, but I wanted a LIVE backup as well - this is my life and livelihood we're talking about!). It will be gone for a week. Not sure what I'm to do for a week while they have it. I hope that goes okay.
And I am going to have to purchase an Applecare warranty (another $300) for two more years of warranty coverage, considering the record of this thing.
In summary: Buy an iBook if you just want a nice portable computer that integrates nicely with *nix and other systems. Save the extra money for women, booze and Ticketmaster service charges.
That's the beauty of this "tradition"... it was invented DURING THIS CENTURY by DeBeers... not much of a tradition if you ask me, about the same as Secretary's Day and Sweetest Day.
Finally, someone on here is not just whining and whimpering about the injustice of it all, but actually doing something.
Thank you thank you.
It's really not that hard, folks, to make YOUR problems into THEIR problems. Using postage-paid envelopes to mail back complaints about the practice, and transferring business away from any company whose practices you don't like... these are fantastic ways to shift the problem from you, right back to the source.
You're overpaying and getting crappy service. Now if your time is worth $nothing, you should maintain the status quo. Otherwise, do what the rest of us have done and move everything elsewhere for less money, database access, and decent customer service.
I think it's worth the slowness to use a browser that has had ALL security problems cleared right up!
According to the upgrader, the IE 5.1.4 security update "resolves all potential security vulnerabilities in previous versions of Internet Explorer 5."
Whew, now that's a relief. I'll never have to think about brower security again.
That's what they wanted me to think after the 5.1.3 update back in November, too. Well I'm sure they've got it right this time!
What would stop someone from setting up a bunch of these things concealed in suspended ceilings and remotely controllable, offering service all over a metropolitan area just by staying in various hotel rooms and leaving behind some cleverly concealed hardware?
Um... hotel maintenance guys changing the light bulbs who notice them ($12/hr, $22 if union), interference from the fluorescent ballasts in the ceiling, trespass laws, theft laws (use of electricity that you're not paying for), metal-infused or metal-coated thermal class (reflects 802.11 nicely), the $800+ per node that you are putting at risk. Should I go on?
Look, this company is acting ridiculously thin skinned, unnecessarily... The world knows what flamage is... I see no BUSINESS basis for this suit, and on that premise, my OPINION is that it could not have possibly been in the company's interests to go anywhere near court with this. They should put their heads down and work hard. If the product is good, nobody will care what anyone else says about them, especially if it looks like flamage. And if the product sucks, then maybe they earned it.
As for me, no Xybernaut products for myself or my clients. I really can't support this sort of conduct. People should be a little more resilient than this. My God, there are places in the world where you can't feed your kids, where your house is a tin sheet... On the scale of "really bad things" I don't even see how this rates. Running to the courts because someone wrote something critical and poorly phrased? Lawsuits for ranting and flamage? Cases like this are making a mess of our country. (no, it's not like this everywhere).
Note to Xybernaut: Please don't sue me. I don't think you've acted like jerks. Or, if it turns out that I do, I'm certainly not going to say so here.
I'd rather take the optimistic view, that humans are genetically wired to trust one another... and some are wicked enough to take advantage of that natural tendency toward an expectation of trust and positive outcomes.
The matter of the dramatic increase in abuses of this trust over the last several years is another discussion altogether.
wanadoo.fr, chello.nl, all of.tw, all of.cn, all of.th are blocked from my servers, and good riddance. We catch several megabytes per week from those places, and it's nothing we want... massive unreadable binaries, old e-mail viruses... and no way to stop it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, pal, but I have never, in 20 years of telephone service in my name, purchased ANYTHING from someone who has called me without prior arrangement. This includes not only the aluminum siding and window replacement idiots who called me in my various apartments, but also credit card companies and wholesalers with whom I had "prior business relationships."
I do demand to be left alone. There is simply no reason for anyone who's selling anything to ever call me unless I've already engaged them and asked them to call. This is very simple stuff.
Uhh... no. it might be harassment for one person to call over and over and over and over... maybe yelling obscenities or threats or something...
I'm not so sure that one or two calls to the association that's largely responsible for making home life unpleasant for me, is wholly exempt from receiving a phone call from me. I have as much right to call them to complain about the actions of their members as they have asserted FOR DECADES in calling the rest of us.
Oh bullshit. My father was an electrician 30 years ago and owned a couple of very nice voltmeters (yes, they had been invented even back in the 'good old days')... inductive ammeters as well, and even glowey neon tubes that would show the presence of current.
Let me get this straight...
you arranged for emergency power so you could post to freakin' Slashdot, but your fish are going to die? What is it that kills them? Tropical fish, can't be the heat...
I don't use this screensaver as a "screen saver". I use it as a "lock this terminal, leaving all my stuff open, cuz I really don't need to log, out, but I do want to prevent casual snooping when I'm not watching over the machine."
A beneficial side effect is that it prevents accidental things from happening, for examine, when the cat walks on the keys.
So they already have source code that works... tell me again why someone has to start from scratch in a "clean room" to build something that validates against the API ? I must have slept through that part.
Well, i came here to complain about that too. There's a long preface in which the author describes what follows as a PERSONAL perspective on things, and then commences to refer to the protagonist as "she." It's just too damn weird. I had to stop reading it.
this article would have been a lot more interesting if he'd trimmed 50% of the distracting BS, stories of Caesar hiring his relatives to play foosball, etc. I didn't say make it boring, i said that there are so many indirect references to things having nothing to do with pipelining that someone truly new to this material is going to have a hard time teasing it apart. just my opinion.
If that's how you measure credibility, you might want to rethink your standards. I didn't say I edit everything with pico. However, a short script, yes. Does the winner of the whose-dick-is-biggest/i-use-the-most-difficult-edi tor contest have the most cred?
OS/X is very nice for someone wanting to do this. I prefer the behaviours of the Mac interface and applications and always have. So this is the best of both for me, since I often have a terminal window open while working on a GUI app (e.g. 5 mins ago before I took this break, coding in CodeWarrior, running the app from a terminal window and editing something w/ pico)...
The nice big screen is, well, nice and big. Sometimes too big. I have a courier bag for biking around with it, and a soft, snug case designed just to hold it - recommended if you're going to take it anywhere. Even if it's under your arm it seems to want to smack into things otherwise.
However sometimes the nice big screen is too damn big. If I were doing this again, I'd think about getting the smaller iBook. I do some video editing but it's not an everyday thing for me.
It's easy to take from place to place - joining new wireless or wired nets, or switching to a projection display always works very quickly and doesn't screw things up.
Have had a smattering of kernel panics, but not much to get too excited about. Greatest issue seems to be that while that apps are stable and work well, they are not yet mature, but I like them.
I like the feel of the keyboard. I like the trackpad. I've purchased a tiny external USB mouse that I often use as well.
some issues:
case cosmetics: The outer edge of the case (the last 1/4" all around then keyboard, and around the screen as well) is not titanium. It's some cheapass painted crap. The paint wears off and then it looks like your $2,500 Powerbook has a skin condition.
Brittle power supply connector: The AC adapter socket built into this seems designed to snap of. It's very tight and very brittle. Once I heard the motherboard creak a few times, I learned to be plus ultra careful plugging it in.
Do not use if you have a pacemaker: The case is electrically live when plugged into the wall. Go measure one, or if you are sensitive to 60Hz, just run your finger across the titanium surface of one that's plugged in. Wrote to Apple. Wrote to the US gov't agency that oversees consumer safety. No replies.
Excellent marshmallow toaster: WHen it was new, it was quiet. When it was less new (6 mos) it started to be very warm when running. Now it runs extremely hot - the fan comes on a lot. I bought these nice ventilation stands for laptops, and they help a lot (and swivel -too cool), but the whole heat up thing is screwed up.
heat
ln -s versus alias, what the hell? A minor point, or is it. If I `ln -s` to create a link, the Finder is perfectly fine with it. If I create an alias via the Finder, it puts the info in the resource fork rather than doing the Right Thing in the file system. What the hell is that all about?
And my battery died From the start, the promised 5 hours never materialized. Ever. More like 2 hours 45 minutes of runtime on a full charge. Then one day (after about 9 monhts) the battery decided that a full charge would mean 45 minutes of runtime, and that's how it stands now.
I am sending it in for warranty work next week. They can't promise it will come back with my data on it, so I have had to purchase an external hard drive to back it up to ($300) which sucks (yes, i was backing it up regularly to one of my Linux boxes via Retrospect, but I wanted a LIVE backup as well - this is my life and livelihood we're talking about!). It will be gone for a week. Not sure what I'm to do for a week while they have it. I hope that goes okay.
And I am going to have to purchase an Applecare warranty (another $300) for two more years of warranty coverage, considering the record of this thing.
In summary: Buy an iBook if you just want a nice portable computer that integrates nicely with *nix and other systems. Save the extra money for women, booze and Ticketmaster service charges.
The gravity-fed secrets are vulnerable to traffic analysis, but not content analysis... so it depends on how and what you're playing.
or just turn up the music at random times, and occasionally send a secret message during one of those noisy intervals.
Cohaaaaageeenn. You vill never get avay vit dis.
That's the beauty of this "tradition"... it was invented DURING THIS CENTURY by DeBeers... not much of a tradition if you ask me, about the same as Secretary's Day and Sweetest Day.
Ah, no... its market cap is around $38M even at $0.40/share
AccuRev.com ... supposed to be good stuff
Well, It's new to me, so my thanks to the reviewer.
I believe it's "Well, it's no trick to make a lot of money if all you want is to make a lot of money."
Congratulations.
Finally, someone on here is not just whining and whimpering about the injustice of it all, but actually doing something.
Thank you thank you.
It's really not that hard, folks, to make YOUR problems into THEIR problems. Using postage-paid envelopes to mail back complaints about the practice, and transferring business away from any company whose practices you don't like... these are fantastic ways to shift the problem from you, right back to the source.
Problematic?
No.
You're overpaying and getting crappy service. Now if your time is worth $nothing, you should maintain the status quo. Otherwise, do what the rest of us have done and move everything elsewhere for less money, database access, and decent customer service.
According to the upgrader, the IE 5.1.4 security update "resolves all potential security vulnerabilities in previous versions of Internet Explorer 5."
Whew, now that's a relief. I'll never have to think about brower security again. That's what they wanted me to think after the 5.1.3 update back in November, too. Well I'm sure they've got it right this time!
What would stop someone from setting up a bunch of these things concealed in suspended ceilings and remotely controllable, offering service all over a metropolitan area just by staying in various hotel rooms and leaving behind some cleverly concealed hardware?
Um... hotel maintenance guys changing the light bulbs who notice them ($12/hr, $22 if union), interference from the fluorescent ballasts in the ceiling, trespass laws, theft laws (use of electricity that you're not paying for), metal-infused or metal-coated thermal class (reflects 802.11 nicely), the $800+ per node that you are putting at risk. Should I go on?
Look, this company is acting ridiculously thin skinned, unnecessarily... The world knows what flamage is... I see no BUSINESS basis for this suit, and on that premise, my OPINION is that it could not have possibly been in the company's interests to go anywhere near court with this. They should put their heads down and work hard. If the product is good, nobody will care what anyone else says about them, especially if it looks like flamage. And if the product sucks, then maybe they earned it.
As for me, no Xybernaut products for myself or my clients. I really can't support this sort of conduct. People should be a little more resilient than this. My God, there are places in the world where you can't feed your kids, where your house is a tin sheet... On the scale of "really bad things" I don't even see how this rates. Running to the courts because someone wrote something critical and poorly phrased? Lawsuits for ranting and flamage? Cases like this are making a mess of our country. (no, it's not like this everywhere).
Note to Xybernaut: Please don't sue me. I don't think you've acted like jerks. Or, if it turns out that I do, I'm certainly not going to say so here.
I'd rather take the optimistic view, that humans are genetically wired to trust one another... and some are wicked enough to take advantage of that natural tendency toward an expectation of trust and positive outcomes.
The matter of the dramatic increase in abuses of this trust over the last several years is another discussion altogether.
wanadoo.fr, chello.nl, all of .tw, all of .cn, all of .th are blocked from my servers, and good riddance. We catch several megabytes per week from those places, and it's nothing we want... massive unreadable binaries, old e-mail viruses... and no way to stop it.
Creeps the hell outta me, but these guys claim they can do it already.
They even filed a patent