ohhhh, OfficeLine... That combination of words makes my blood boil. We had OfficeLine in Tromsø (place I was born), and, goddamn, more pricegouging weasels is harder to find. A mysterious X% on top of every retail price. When a game costs 527NOK you know that its something fishy about their pricing schemes. I remeber the total shock of walkin into "Eplehuset"'s first store in Trondheim (where I live) and actually meeting a compentent person.
As an illustration, When i bought my iBook, I first went into OfficeLine in Tromsø with a long time mac user friend of mine, asked about the iBook, and I knew from the same friend that i could get a 20-something% discount fof the apple sales price if i paid 100$ for a one year ADC student menbership.
OfficeLine:
Me: Does MATLAB run on OS X (I really didn't know, turns out it did)? The OfficeLine guy: [blank stare]... goes to check on the computer, takes his time. Comes back with "I dont know" Me/My friend: Is it possible to buy form you and get the ADC discount? The OfficLine guy: [blank stare again] "What is ADC?" (I kid you not)
Eplehuset, about a month later Me: Im thinking of buying an iBook (my opeing line at OfficeLine as well) Eplehuset emplyee: Show me the iBook, and _really_ stresses that it is the exact same price as on Apple's webiste Me: Asks about the ADC discount Eplehuset emplyee: "No, you can only get ADC discounts directly from Apple, you should gove them a call", and hands me a buissness card with Apple Store's norwegian phone number. Me: Completly baffled by good customer service and knowledge of the sales person goes home and orders from Apple. And returned later for an iPod
Since then Eplehuset has opened in three new cities, and at least the shop in Trondheim is a certified Apple repair centre, making owning an iBook bought in 2003 right in the middle of a certain SN range a lot more pleasant.OfficeLine in Tromsø decided that a retail store accessible for the public was a waste of time. Closed the shop. moved to a warehouse and sells to buissness and educationl sector (they cant buy directly from apple) and sells overpriced Apple products in a corner of the DVD section in a bookshop.
It may be related to the fact that the law of conumer purchases only regulates the transaction between a person and a company. If you buy directly from apple i've experienced them to honour the law, but if you buy from a separate retailer the retailer might try to shift their cost over to you, since they cant claim a replacement unit from apple outside the one year warranty. That practice is of course illegal, but is allowed to flurish because people generaly accept the claims of the retialer. In fact some of these 3rd party retail outlets should be burned to the ground because of their insane extra apple premium, on top of the regular apple premium. 'Eplehuset' are the only ones which I have seen selling at applestore prices...
I think that is similar to the situation with mobile phone manufacturers, but with apple they have a consumer retial store which of course the mobile phone manufacturers don't have.
Actually, I've had luck (two or three times) with politly reminding the Apple guy on the phone that I am a resident of such a country (Norway) and the laws grant me a minimum of two years of warranty. They usually state that there is only a one year warranty, but fold if you "remind" them about the terms of the law. Products in general cost a fair bit more here (including apple products compared to other european countries), so i beleive they have factored this into their price.
What might make the norwegian law (forbrukerkjøpsloven (law of consumer purchases), google it and plug it into bablefish if your adventerous ) special is that it states that the rights defined in it cannot be signed away and contracts of purchase can only improve the rights granted not take them away.
Now, to get the mobile phone companies to respect the law the same way apple does...
I wish they would move the moderation scores closer to the post topics.(And lose the 'fancy' colapsable menus). I think the new theme is kind a 60-70% hit, nothing spectacular...
May i Point out that the Titanic was divided into compartments, but only in the vertical direction. No horizontal compartments, and hence since she sutained damage to critical_number_of_compartments + 1, trimming of the ship + water ingress allowed the remaing compartments to be progressively filled.
In Norway you earn your vacation from day one, if you work 100% for one year you have 25 days for paid vacation the next year. If you work below 100% you can take that number (25) and multiply it with the % of full time you worked and get your vacation days. And i dont think we can accumulate vacation from one year to the next.
Actualy i work i a building(s) which was designed around the concept that every office/room with people in it should have a window. you can say alot about the building, but yeah, we all have windows.
Essentialy the building is formed by rectangular building where each has a atrium/peghole in the middle which lets natural ligh into every office.
sorry, if I wasn't clear enough. But, yeah, it is the handsets that get locked to the operator code in the SIM card. And unlocking phones at back alley electronic stores are quite common in the UK i suppose, at least in the Newcastle area. Thats where i have seen it/have friends(very tech unsavvy) who has had it done.
In Norway it is phone unlocking is provided by law. It is not illigal to unlock your phone and sell it before the service contract runns out, but you cant stop the carriers from locking the phone to their SIM card code in the first place when they sell them with their service.
and as for the US carriers crippeling the handsets they provide? totaly unacceptable. My current mobile has some of its menues branded (if you know what im talking about, its not that unholy Entry thing), buts that all. Bluetooth and all features still work. Paid about 1/6$ for a Sony Ericson k700i (I have a expensive plan beacsue it is what actually fitts my usage best)
"Does anyone in the know have any idea if cell service will end up like landline service where you can pick out whatever phone you want and then use it with your provider?"
What contry/century do you live in? is it that bad in the US? That sounds awful, I actually feel kinda sorry for you. In scandinavia you normaly just buy your cellphone and put whatever SIM card you got from your cellular service in it and just go ahead and use it. Some phone companies will sell/give you phones which are tied to their operating code on the SIM card, but depending on where you live, you'll generally find backally electronic shops or people on messagboards who will unlock your phone for about 10-15$
btw. Norway (at least, probably larger parts of the world as well) has law provided number portability. This means that your current carrier has to "give" your phone number to whatever carrier you choose to sign up with. Takes about 10 buissnes days at the most. And the carriers are forced to rent away calltime on their networks to competitors (we have two national physical networks but about 5-7 providers.. i thing they keep aquiering one another)
"Can you show us an application that _requires_ a G4 or G5?"
Soundtrack and Final Cut Pro. Probably a lot more of the pro tools as well. Before you ask, i have a G3 iBook, Soundtrack throws (or should we say threw) up a "you dont have a G4 processor, you cheap bastard!" dialog box if you try to start it. (lets not get into why I would put Soundtrack on a iBook, let's just say I was curious)
I sceond that. I bought a cheap ps2 a few months ago. Im very happy with it, and as I have gotten more into console gaming I was considering to buy a ps3 if not on launch, during the first price drop. This recent crap from Sony has got me thinking about buying a Xbox360 instead when they come down in price. The way things are right now, I'will probably get a 360 if they dump the prices to compete against the ps3 when it launches.
I had the same problem. bunch of random files in random folders from my ipod. I used "Ex falso" to mass rename and move the files according to the id3 tag. Took about 10 seconds after figuring out how to use "ex falso" and setting the move pattern to Artist/album/XX -songname.mp3
I highly recomend the program. Uses a GUI and has a pretty easy to use (and fast!) rename system.
I think the Ubuntu way of thinking is that you should be happy with the latest stable release and backports if you are expecting a stable environment. As to the source.list questions, I dont know, I have been happy with a reasonably frequent release cycle, only using the unstable version the last weeks before it hits stable on my home machine, and jsut stable to stable for my work machine.
They state quite rigiorusly that the development branch/unstable is just that. however, you may have luck with changing the release and upgrading packages with "not so system core" dependecies. I think that this would be madness under the recent hoary to breezy development since a lot of core packages has seen a major revision jump.
Ubuntu's stabe distribution doesn't chage except from security updates once it's released. You should check with the upstream source which versions of the packages are considered stable, but i would assume that Ubuntu includes what is considered stable at the time of release. You could probably upgrade some packages by pointing apt at the unstable repositories once and then pointing it back to stable aftervards. Ubuntu doesn't follow Debian's "stable"/"unstable" way, they release a distribution with a codename, then they start work on another release (with a new codename) which I would consider the "unstable" branch. Ubuntu wont upgrade your stable distribution if you dont change the release name you are going to track. Warty is for all time, so is Hoary etc... and now we have Breezy comming up. So to upgrade from stable hoary to the new stable, breezy, you must change the release name in sources.list from hoary to breezy. Ubuntu wont feed you any "unstable" packages if you track/upgrade only "stable" release names
Ubuntu also has a backports project which brings a small selection of packages from a" unstable" release to a "stable" due to public demand for a new gaim/mono etc.. packages. But you will need to enable this manually.
I think tha gradparent is assuming you have set up your Ubuntu installation with the breezy repositories in sources.list. The updates you describe is todays updates in Hoary (which im currently using). Wait about a week and breezy should be ready for prime time
OSNews does indeed have its own rss feed. The new Safari will do something similar to what you are asking for. I have bookmark folders with only rss feeds in them, and the bookmark toolbar updates to refect if there are any new entries in the folders RSS bookmarks. The neat thing is you can have all the RSS feeds open in one tab, displaying headlines and article blurbs from many different sites as one. I have one named "Computing" which has the/. and OSnews feeds in it, among others. If I want to check out new computing news I open this bookmark folder and get all my computing news displayed as one feed in a (rater slick looking) Safari aggregated feed.
Maybe it only works if you only have rss bookmarks in a bookmark folder, but it has completly changed the way i reed web news. I open the Safari combined news feed and then read the articles, returning to the Safari rss page to check the oters.
Didn't think Safari RSS would be this cool, but damn, killer feature for me
"Well, I guess that's in the eye of the beholder. First thing I did on my powerbook was install ShapeShifter in order to excorcise every horrible, evil brushed-metal pixel from the UI."
You know you can remove the horrible brushed metal pixel look of cocoa application with IB? Just go into the app package and edit the.nib file Tfor your language. Its a bit akward, and doesnt work with Carbon apps like iTunes an QT player, but I got a nicer PodWorks, OsxVNc, and some more. Just look for the "has texture" option in the property inspector for the main window
"Native virtual desktops: yes, expose is nifty, but come on."
OSX has virtual desktops, but Apple doesnt provide a way to access them. I find DesktopManager (http://wsmanager.sf.net) to be the perfect OSX virtual desktop application.
Well, I have my own gripes with OSX but I'll save it for later
The Sea Shaddow design is not the most used stealth ship hull design. The Sea Shaddow is a ship designed for stealth in every way, not only radar as the Visby class. The design of the Sea Shaddow aims to lower its signature for both radar, wake and heat.
Norway has also designed a stealth missile torpedo boat Skjold
This is a surface effect ship, and you will have no problems spotting it on IR or seeing its wake. But you will have a *very* hard time seeing it on radar at all.
As for submarine sims, Silent hunter II aws released 2-3 years ago. You can play it in multiplayer with Destroyer Command. Play the hunter or the hunted.
Didn't Standard Oil also buy the railroad companies transporting oil and riase the prices for competitors? I think I remember something about that practice triggering the antitrust laws.
I *really* can't understand stories like this. I used Windows for years before first switching to Linux, and then to OS X, and I, nor anyone I know, had a fraction of the problems that you report having. I experienced at most one BSOD a month, and now, with Win XP chugging away on my P4, I've experienced no problems at all.
These stories comes from people wo never got past Win98. That line of MS OS-es was a POS, that same thing (reboot, reboot, reboot) made me try out Linux. Im quite happy with it as my main OS, but I haven't left the Windows world completly. I've only had Win2k/XP crap out on me about 3-4 times which wasn't due to a _realy_ shitty video driver.
But I think the grandparent is right, using (probably) Win98 was that bad, and can lead you to switch to Linux
IIRC he is a software developer for a norwegian firm (or a firm with a branch in Norway). He dropped out / took a break from high school and started working as a programmer just after the DeCSS shit hit the fan. Its a few years back so it is possible that he has completed high school and is (at least planning to) study CompSci at Univeristy level.
And by 2030 we'll most certainly have "bootstrapped" molecular manufacturing
I think you will find statements like that is overly optimistic. It's 25 years from now, you seem to think of 2030 as something out of Flash Gordon. Never predict the future by relying on future inventions. It' slike saying land will be in abundance in the future because we will have the ability to graft gills on humans.
While the techniqes you describe certainly is/will come about in laberatorys and research, its a far cry from industrial applications.
As an example: I recently searched for "definition of globalization" on goolge and when clicking on the 4th link i got a page with the advertising: "buy the defintion of globalization on ebay, the worlds largest online marketplace"
Slashdot Mirror
ohhhh, OfficeLine... That combination of words makes my blood boil. We had OfficeLine in Tromsø (place I was born), and, goddamn, more pricegouging weasels is harder to find. A mysterious X% on top of every retail price. When a game costs 527NOK you know that its something fishy about their pricing schemes. I remeber the total shock of walkin into "Eplehuset"'s first store in Trondheim (where I live) and actually meeting a compentent person.
... goes to check on the computer, takes his time. Comes back with "I dont know"
As an illustration, When i bought my iBook, I first went into OfficeLine in Tromsø with a long time mac user friend of mine, asked about the iBook, and I knew from the same friend that i could get a 20-something% discount fof the apple sales price if i paid 100$ for a one year ADC student menbership.
OfficeLine:
Me: Does MATLAB run on OS X (I really didn't know, turns out it did)?
The OfficeLine guy: [blank stare]
Me/My friend: Is it possible to buy form you and get the ADC discount?
The OfficLine guy: [blank stare again] "What is ADC?" (I kid you not)
Eplehuset, about a month later
Me: Im thinking of buying an iBook (my opeing line at OfficeLine as well)
Eplehuset emplyee: Show me the iBook, and _really_ stresses that it is the exact same price as on Apple's webiste
Me: Asks about the ADC discount
Eplehuset emplyee: "No, you can only get ADC discounts directly from Apple, you should gove them a call", and hands me a buissness card with Apple Store's norwegian phone number.
Me: Completly baffled by good customer service and knowledge of the sales person goes home and orders from Apple. And returned later for an iPod
Since then Eplehuset has opened in three new cities, and at least the shop in Trondheim is a certified Apple repair centre, making owning an iBook bought in 2003 right in the middle of a certain SN range a lot more pleasant.OfficeLine in Tromsø decided that a retail store accessible for the public was a waste of time. Closed the shop. moved to a warehouse and sells to buissness and educationl sector (they cant buy directly from apple) and sells overpriced Apple products in a corner of the DVD section in a bookshop.
It may be related to the fact that the law of conumer purchases only regulates the transaction between a person and a company. If you buy directly from apple i've experienced them to honour the law, but if you buy from a separate retailer the retailer might try to shift their cost over to you, since they cant claim a replacement unit from apple outside the one year warranty. That practice is of course illegal, but is allowed to flurish because people generaly accept the claims of the retialer. In fact some of these 3rd party retail outlets should be burned to the ground because of their insane extra apple premium, on top of the regular apple premium. 'Eplehuset' are the only ones which I have seen selling at applestore prices...
I think that is similar to the situation with mobile phone manufacturers, but with apple they have a consumer retial store which of course the mobile phone manufacturers don't have.
Actually, I've had luck (two or three times) with politly reminding the Apple guy on the phone that I am a resident of such a country (Norway) and the laws grant me a minimum of two years of warranty. They usually state that there is only a one year warranty, but fold if you "remind" them about the terms of the law. Products in general cost a fair bit more here (including apple products compared to other european countries), so i beleive they have factored this into their price.
What might make the norwegian law (forbrukerkjøpsloven (law of consumer purchases), google it and plug it into bablefish if your adventerous ) special is that it states that the rights defined in it cannot be signed away and contracts of purchase can only improve the rights granted not take them away.
Now, to get the mobile phone companies to respect the law the same way apple does...
Thanks,
A little messed up graphics, but now the comment scores are where they used to be
I wish they would move the moderation scores closer to the post topics.(And lose the 'fancy' colapsable menus). I think the new theme is kind a 60-70% hit, nothing spectacular...
May i Point out that the Titanic was divided into compartments, but only in the vertical direction. No horizontal compartments, and hence since she sutained damage to critical_number_of_compartments + 1, trimming of the ship + water ingress allowed the remaing compartments to be progressively filled.
In Norway you earn your vacation from day one, if you work 100% for one year you have 25 days for paid vacation the next year. If you work below 100% you can take that number (25) and multiply it with the % of full time you worked and get your vacation days. And i dont think we can accumulate vacation from one year to the next.
Actualy i work i a building(s) which was designed around the concept that every office/room with people in it should have a window. you can say alot about the building, but yeah, we all have windows.
y foto/FLY2000_Marintek_naert_32.jpg
Essentialy the building is formed by rectangular building where each has a atrium/peghole in the middle which lets natural ligh into every office.
its that ugly yellowish thing in the middle
http://www.ntnu.no/info/pressesenter/bildebase/Fl
sorry, if I wasn't clear enough. But, yeah, it is the handsets that get locked to the operator code in the SIM card. And unlocking phones at back alley electronic stores are quite common in the UK i suppose, at least in the Newcastle area. Thats where i have seen it/have friends(very tech unsavvy) who has had it done.
In Norway it is phone unlocking is provided by law. It is not illigal to unlock your phone and sell it before the service contract runns out, but you cant stop the carriers from locking the phone to their SIM card code in the first place when they sell them with their service.
and as for the US carriers crippeling the handsets they provide? totaly unacceptable. My current mobile has some of its menues branded (if you know what im talking about, its not that unholy Entry thing), buts that all. Bluetooth and all features still work. Paid about 1/6$ for a Sony Ericson k700i (I have a expensive plan beacsue it is what actually fitts my usage best)
"Does anyone in the know have any idea if cell service will end up like landline service where you can pick out whatever phone you want and then use it with your provider?"
What contry/century do you live in? is it that bad in the US?
That sounds awful, I actually feel kinda sorry for you. In scandinavia you normaly just buy your cellphone and put whatever SIM card you got from your cellular service in it and just go ahead and use it. Some phone companies will sell/give you phones which are tied to their operating code on the SIM card, but depending on where you live, you'll generally find backally electronic shops or people on messagboards who will unlock your phone for about 10-15$
btw. Norway (at least, probably larger parts of the world as well) has law provided number portability. This means that your current carrier has to "give" your phone number to whatever carrier you choose to sign up with. Takes about 10 buissnes days at the most. And the carriers are forced to rent away calltime on their networks to competitors (we have two national physical networks but about 5-7 providers.. i thing they keep aquiering one another)
"Can you show us an application that _requires_ a G4 or G5?"
Soundtrack and Final Cut Pro. Probably a lot more of the pro tools as well. Before you ask, i have a G3 iBook, Soundtrack throws (or should we say threw) up a "you dont have a G4 processor, you cheap bastard!" dialog box if you try to start it. (lets not get into why I would put Soundtrack on a iBook, let's just say I was curious)
I sceond that. I bought a cheap ps2 a few months ago. Im very happy with it, and as I have gotten more into console gaming I was considering to buy a ps3 if not on launch, during the first price drop. This recent crap from Sony has got me thinking about buying a Xbox360 instead when they come down in price. The way things are right now, I'will probably get a 360 if they dump the prices to compete against the ps3 when it launches.
I had the same problem. bunch of random files in random folders from my ipod. I used "Ex falso" to mass rename and move the files according to the id3 tag. Took about 10 seconds after figuring out how to use "ex falso" and setting the move pattern to Artist/album/XX -songname.mp3
I highly recomend the program. Uses a GUI and has a pretty easy to use (and fast!) rename system.
I think the Ubuntu way of thinking is that you should be happy with the latest stable release and backports if you are expecting a stable environment. As to the source.list questions, I dont know, I have been happy with a reasonably frequent release cycle, only using the unstable version the last weeks before it hits stable on my home machine, and jsut stable to stable for my work machine.
They state quite rigiorusly that the development branch/unstable is just that. however, you may have luck with changing the release and upgrading packages with "not so system core" dependecies. I think that this would be madness under the recent hoary to breezy development since a lot of core packages has seen a major revision jump.
Ubuntu's stabe distribution doesn't chage except from security updates once it's released. You should check with the upstream source which versions of the packages are considered stable, but i would assume that Ubuntu includes what is considered stable at the time of release. You could probably upgrade some packages by pointing apt at the unstable repositories once and then pointing it back to stable aftervards.
Ubuntu doesn't follow Debian's "stable"/"unstable" way, they release a distribution with a codename, then they start work on another release (with a new codename) which I would consider the "unstable" branch. Ubuntu wont upgrade your stable distribution if you dont change the release name you are going to track. Warty is for all time, so is Hoary etc... and now we have Breezy comming up. So to upgrade from stable hoary to the new stable, breezy, you must change the release name in sources.list from hoary to breezy. Ubuntu wont feed you any "unstable" packages if you track/upgrade only "stable" release names
Ubuntu also has a backports project which brings a small selection of packages from a" unstable" release to a "stable" due to public demand for a new gaim/mono etc.. packages. But you will need to enable this manually.
I think tha gradparent is assuming you have set up your Ubuntu installation with the breezy repositories in sources.list. The updates you describe is todays updates in Hoary (which im currently using). Wait about a week and breezy should be ready for prime time
OSNews does indeed have its own rss feed. The new Safari will do something similar to what you are asking for. I have bookmark folders with only rss feeds in them, and the bookmark toolbar updates to refect if there are any new entries in the folders RSS bookmarks. The neat thing is you can have all the RSS feeds open in one tab, displaying headlines and article blurbs from many different sites as one. I have one named "Computing" which has the /. and OSnews feeds in it, among others. If I want to check out new computing news I open this bookmark folder and get all my computing news displayed as one feed in a (rater slick looking) Safari aggregated feed.
Maybe it only works if you only have rss bookmarks in a bookmark folder, but it has completly changed the way i reed web news. I open the Safari combined news feed and then read the articles, returning to the Safari rss page to check the oters.
Didn't think Safari RSS would be this cool, but damn, killer feature for me
"Well, I guess that's in the eye of the beholder. First thing I did on my powerbook was install ShapeShifter in order to excorcise every horrible, evil brushed-metal pixel from the UI."
.nib file Tfor your language. Its a bit akward, and doesnt work with Carbon apps like iTunes an QT player, but I got a nicer PodWorks, OsxVNc, and some more. Just look for the "has texture" option in the property inspector for the main window
You know you can remove the horrible brushed metal pixel look of cocoa application with IB? Just go into the app package and edit the
"Native virtual desktops: yes, expose is nifty, but come on."
OSX has virtual desktops, but Apple doesnt provide a way to access them. I find DesktopManager (http://wsmanager.sf.net) to be the perfect OSX virtual desktop application.
Well, I have my own gripes with OSX but I'll save it for later
Norway has also designed a stealth missile torpedo boat Skjold
This is a surface effect ship, and you will have no problems spotting it on IR or seeing its wake. But you will have a *very* hard time seeing it on radar at all.
As for submarine sims, Silent hunter II aws released 2-3 years ago. You can play it in multiplayer with Destroyer Command. Play the hunter or the hunted.
nope, its called "if". name sucks, I know, but still they call themselves "if". They are also apparently quite prod about it.
Didn't Standard Oil also buy the railroad companies transporting oil and riase the prices for competitors? I think I remember something about that practice triggering the antitrust laws.
These stories comes from people wo never got past Win98. That line of MS OS-es was a POS, that same thing (reboot, reboot, reboot) made me try out Linux. Im quite happy with it as my main OS, but I haven't left the Windows world completly. I've only had Win2k/XP crap out on me about 3-4 times which wasn't due to a _realy_ shitty video driver.
But I think the grandparent is right, using (probably) Win98 was that bad, and can lead you to switch to Linux
IIRC he is a software developer for a norwegian firm (or a firm with a branch in Norway). He dropped out / took a break from high school and started working as a programmer just after the DeCSS shit hit the fan. Its a few years back so it is possible that he has completed high school and is (at least planning to) study CompSci at Univeristy level.
I think you will find statements like that is overly optimistic. It's 25 years from now, you seem to think of 2030 as something out of Flash Gordon. Never predict the future by relying on future inventions. It' slike saying land will be in abundance in the future because we will have the ability to graft gills on humans.
While the techniqes you describe certainly is/will come about in laberatorys and research, its a far cry from industrial applications.
As an example: I recently searched for "definition of globalization" on goolge and when clicking on the 4th link i got a page with the advertising:
"buy the defintion of globalization on ebay, the worlds largest online marketplace"
I guess you can buy anything these days...