First off I'd like to say I have the largest practical thumb drive I could get my hands on. It's a 4gb SanDisk Cruzer Mini. I picked it because of the cavernous 4gb size, the VERY small profile for such a large drive, and the easily visible activity light. A lot of the time I was not able to plug in my old JetFlash 1gb into a machine because the drive was too big. It was long, it was wide, and it was thick. Some computers would not accept it because their USB ports were too close to the edge of the recess the ports were in, or the two ports were too close together and I could not use the jetflash and fit anything into the adjacent port. (a flash drive is useless if you have no mouse!) When they start selling an 8gb, I will have one that week.
Then there is the issue of boot-ability. Options on the mac are unfortunately very limited, because most older mac hardware cannot boot from a USB device, and most new mac hardware can only boot OS X, which due to a bug in the boot code, cannot boot USB. (it hard-resets the USB bus about 10 seconds into boot... doh!) So there is only a very narrow range of slot load iMacs that are new enough to support USB booting electrically, and are old enough to be able to boot OS 9. I have played with this, and it's a neat trick, but it's god-awful slow because those same iMacs also have 12mbps USB. None of the macs with 480 can boot OS 9, and you cannot add a USB HS card to an iMac so there you are.
As for my 4, it lives in my right pocket. I do mac desktop support for a school and having that drive in my pocket saves me hours of time and miles of walking. It contains mostly program tools, scanner and printer drivers, special maintenance scripts, copies of the "combo udaters" for OS repair, documents the school needs like the master addressbook, as well as a good 1gb of free space for data transfers. I also keep a fairly compact 2.5" external FW hard drive in my shirt pocket along with an isight firewire cable (very compact!) for the larger jobs. The firewire drive contains a bootable OS 9, OS X for PPC, -and- OS X for Intel. (it's a triple boot)
I wait for the day they come up with oh say... a 16gb *firewire* flash drive. Kanguru sells FW flash drives, but they are low capacity and absurdly expensive. That would allow me to do with just the flash drive what I now do with the two drives together.
If you own a car with "suicide doors", you do not open the door while you are going down the highway. The door design isn't defective. What's defective is the head of the owner that opens the door on the freeway.
It's so pathetic to see how many people insist that society is obligated to protect them from their own ignorance.
My box of q-tips has a specific instruction to not insert anything into your ear. Why? stupid people claim that unless we tell them NOT to do so, they will punch out their eardrum and then blame us for it. Just because it's easy for a product to behave contrary to what you want it to does not in itself make it defective. Would you say that the q-tip design is defective because you can manage to cram it several inches into your ear while trying to use it? If you can't figure out the obvious limits of a product you should not buy it.
I was going to include a larger list of examples of people doing stupid things and then trying to blame everyone on the planet for not saving them from themselves, but there were so many examples I couldn't bring myself to pick just a few.
It's too bad the original WRT54G is not available. I had to replace my wap because the old trendnet was not able to mac filter and I had a couple neighbors that I wanted to give access to but the entire neighborhood was apparently interested. (can you say.. slow internet? six of them were active on bittorrent all the time!)
I had a bit of a fight with the new 54g I just got. It decided to stop allowing me into the admin menu. 25 minutes on the phone with some gal (in India, of course) and we finally got it fixed. Required a firmware upgrade and repeated reboots and resets to finally clear it out where we could get in and get mac filtering working properly.
But yes 54g is nice. (the trendnet was cutting edge at the time... 802.11b/x, bet you have not heard of that?) I will be looking forward to N, but really, my internet connnection is slower than my G, so besides faster wireless access to my server, have I really gained anything? Not really. N won't be an improvement for me because I won't have a need for any of the speed increases it promises. There's no point in putting a firehose end on your garden hose. If I want faster access to my server I jack into gigabit on my desk where I am most of the time anyway. If I'm on the front porch I don't need to be copying gigabyte files.
That's what I call it. One place I worked, the main stats machine (PC) every now and then would not boot. I found out later that the fix was to lift it up off the ground one inch, press the power button, and drop it to the tile floor.
When I discovered that this was actually their written procedure, that HD got replaced that evening.
But serously, there really are people out there that naive to believe that, whatever the reason, if it works, Impact Maintenance is an accepted procedure.
Freezing hard drives also seems to be a point of contention. It does work. Not often, but it does work. If a drive refuses to spin up, or starts and immediately spins back down, there's about a 1 in 6 chance that cooling it will help long enough to get your data off.
My favorite though is the millenium falcon when Han smacks the dashboard to get it to boot up.
the market for this service has not materialized as had been expected.
Translation: not nearly as many people are willing to get jacked for $35/hr for internet access as we had believed.
Though on a completely different angle, at the rate things are going now, soon we won't be able to get on a plane with anything short of our underwear, and will have to fed-ex our luggage to our destination. What happened to the good 'ol days when the people were more scared of the public than the government was?
Maybe try my way. I have a powerbook and that same power pack as you do, and despite being 3 years old it's like new. When I stow it in my bag I retract the AC prongs and coil the white cord by hand at about a 5" diameter, just large enough for the pack to fit into the center of the coil. Then I just slip that into the bag.
Bending any wire arond a sharp angle at the same place day after day is a really quick way to ruin a cord. OR you can enjoy the convenience of the cord keeper on the pack, for about $79 a year.
Of course there are records. Even a "pay as you go" service still has to have contact with its customers in some way. Even if you have a disposable pre-pay cell phone the company still has to put an ESN (serial number) on the phone for their account tracking. With phones, when your prepaid phone runs out you simply throw it away and buy another one with more minutes. Here, you are staying with the service through each renewal, this makes you much easier to find. It would be akin to you wanting your cell phone calls to be totally anonymous but still going to radio shack once a month and cutting them a check.
Best scenario I suppose, you would stop down to the local office with an envelope of cash and your account number into the darknet and nothing more.
I am wondering how you are connected to the darknet though. I can only assume you have a standard internet connection and route into and through the darknet and exit somewhere else, a bit like Tor. If not, if the customers have a dedicated line into the darknet, that would be optimal for initial privacy and bandwidth, but now you have a hard connection to their network and this alone makes you easy to spot. They may not be looking for you, but they can narrow down the list of suspects really quick and your name will be on that list. That gives them quite an advantage to violate your privacy. From there, traffic analysis on your internet connection could identify you even if the traffic is encrypted.
I carefully wrap the cord around the rabbit ears on the brick
FYI, don't DO that.
Yes they are handy and look like a good idea, but you are bending metal (wires) at the same places, back and forth all the time. Ever done that with a coat hanger? What do you get? two coat hangers!
hah.. my mistake, balun - BALanced/UNbalanced. I am thinking baluns in antennas for some reason. Yes, ferrite bead, but a big one. The ones I usually deal with are the size of peas or smaller. These are the bigger variety, which iirc, the cord wrapped around so it passed through the bead twice. No doubt to stop the computer from generating interferance into your house's power grid.
Still though, I wonder who the clown was that had the brilliant idea to place that huge bead one inch down such a skinny cord? That has "stress point" written all over it in big, red letters.
That "little blue part" is a 1/8 watt resistor. You can read the color bands to determine its resistance value. It's probably 270k or so. It's there to detect ground faults I believe. I don't think it will charge without that. I am quite certain that if the shell is grounded, it will NOT charge. Ran into that as a manufacturing problem with the black powerbooks. There was a gold shield inside the computer around the connector, and it was too close to where th shell would be when plugged in. If it touched, you don't charge. The fix? Got a toothpick handy?
I believe these are two separate issues. Without having actually seen the adapter before it failed I cannot say for certain if it was showing signs of wear or not. If it was not showing signs of wear, then I would admit that apple may have more responsibility in the matter. But I expect we would find that the wire was heavily worn prior to the failure, and that it has clearly gone unnoticed by OP. If my car dies and I take it in and he asks me when the last time I changed the oil and I ask him what's that? Then we can conclude that I was neglegent in the care and maintaining/monitoring of my property. Same thing here. If the power cord on your vacuum has been run over one too many times and is fraying, don't go chase after Hoover when you run it over one more time and get shocked. Every piece of equipment will only last so long before it becomes unable or unsafe to perform its function, and the owner does have some responsibility to monitor it and repair/replace it when appropriate.
But yes as I said, Apple's power adapters are notorious for poor strain relief performance and I'm sure this leads to premature failure, but if you allow the damage to progress to the point of catching fire then you are really out of it. While there is not a problem in general with most power packs, it is a problem with laptop power packs in general because they are plugged and unplugged sometimes several times a day and the increased use leads to much faster wear and tear. I haven't seen any proof however that better materials are available that are not being used, so it's hard to condemn them just yet. Apple's "plugs into wall" design is very convenient and saves us a lot of cord to deal with, but also causes the user to pull the power cord at a sharp angle to the adapter, and this too probably contributes to premature failure. The cord is actually shorter than most laptop packs also, which probably makes matters worse trying to stretch the cord to the nearest table.
Not just that. When my wallstreet (g3 powerbook) started failing to charge, I noticed I could wiggle the cord where the DC jack was in the computer and it would work.
So I tore it apart to repair/replace it, and I was amazed that when I removed the plastic jacket of the cord, the outer braid (the ground conductor) of the cord fell to the desk in a pile of a milllion little 3mm long pieces of copper strand. The braid had just shattered from repeated bending, and when I just shook the cord there was NO copper at all left for a 1" span of the cord, it was all just in a pile on the desk. Sort of like when you take a coat hanger and bend it enough it breaks. Same thing happens to these adapters.
Moreso, the white insulating material between the braid and the inner (power) conductor was cracked all the way around in three places. If any of the bits of copper had found their way into any of these cracks I suppose I would have had the same problem the poster did.
In that case though the design was defective... they put that huge balun 1" down the cord from the computer jack, separated by a 3mm thick wire, what did they expect? They don't do that with any of the new cables thankfully.
Apple Authorized Service Provider. hey, that's me:) Certified to work on everything apple sells, warranty repair.
I have yet to see a single pack catch fire. And I've replaced quite a few of them. Damaged, yes. They definitely need to improve their strain reliefs, and magsafe is brilliant. But defective by design? Not from a safety perspective. They DO need to improve the strain reliefs though.
If one tire in 20,000 started to bulge on the sidewall after 30,000 miles, and the owner didn't notice it until 2 months later the tire blew, you can't blame that entirely on Goodyear. All products break, and the consumer does have a reasonable responsibility to identify a product that has failed and may create a safety hazard.
Now take the ibook g3 logic board recall. Now those I have seen maybe 4 dozen of. THOSE are defective. But THIS, this is just a blip.
Actually now that we have magsafe, I don't expect this to even happen once in a blue moon. The power cords are 2x as thick, and if you are a total yutz trying to use your macbook 5.95 feet from the wall using a 6.00 foot power cord, POP and out releases the magsafe before you can jack up your cord. Something tells me OP will just glue it in, break another cord, and cry for us some more.
Can't help directly but here's some backup. The power jack that apple uses is a modified headphone jack. if you remove the outer metal shell, it's a headphone jack plain and simple. My PBG3 cord failed at the plug, so I tore it apart, stripped back the cable, and reattached it. Worked fine, minus the metal shell. it is not required for power or charging, it's just a ground I suspect.
Finding an actual apple jack with the metal cowell around it could be very difficult. I don't think they sell them. (admittedly, apple would much rather you pay them $80 for a new pack than $2 at radio shack for a new end and repair it yourself)
Just a technical addendum. The white bricks are no longer produced in the 45w range. All new white bricks are 65w. This is most likely because the latter g3/4 laptops were all requiring more power than the early G3s. The 65's work fine on all the older equipment, (watts are drawn on demand, a 65 won't hurt a machine that took a 45 originally) so we just carry the 65's. I have replaced maybe five white packs that had the wire broken at the strain relief where this fellow had the problem, and as many more where the wire went at the DC jack end. Apple does need to improve the strain relief at both ends. I find OP's claim that there was "no visible damage before the fire" to be laughable. When I look at the picture I note immediately, the wire always comes straight out of the pack when it's new, and there is a good inch of cord needed to bend it 90 degrees without excessive force. But when you look at the picture, the wire is almost emerging at 90 degrees right out of the strain relief. Good money says he tends to plug the pack into the wall a long way from his ibook, and the cord is always being strained and pulled hard to the side, and was a direct cause of the cord damage and the fire.
Also of note, the "ufo" power adapters that shipped originally on the ibook G3s are much much worse. They are known for failure where the DC cord meets the computer plug and where the AC cord meets the connector that plugs into the pack. We have replaced many of them for failure at one of these two points. Though for all the macs I've worked on, I have yet to encounter a single apple pack that caught fire. This sounds like an isolated incident and someone trying to make a whole lot of noise, stomping about and shouting "defect, recall, save me!"
Given 50,000 production units of electronics, a couple of them are going to be bad. There is no escaping that. And yes, one of them might burn down your house. But a meteor might hit it first, and has roughly the same odds, OP needs to get over it.
Though I don't deny he needs to post about it, because this is how you find out about real issues. Now if we saw a dozen "me too" followups immediately we might want to look into this more, but right now we just have a blowhard.
I suspect that is why we see a lot of "innovative" ideas from Apple. They are spending a bundle on market research, and that extra cash they spend gives a return in coming up with intutitve and attractive designs.
Puck mouse excepted of course. I wonder how THAT one got past them?
If you want to run that list then fast, yes. It still takes windows god awful forever to just simply shut down. Startup time is excruciating. Applications launch slower also. Open a folder with 400 folders in it. Select all. Open. Now go get a sandwich while it tries to open them all. Windows faster? I think not. Mac isn't fastest, but it's not slow by any description, and is certainly faster than most. Whenever I am forced to use windows it seems I am forever waiting for a window to open (or draw!) and the hourglass owns the mouse most of the time. Part of what makes mac os 'feel' faster is that it is responsive almost all the time. Unless you have the colorful pinwheel, anything you click on is accepted. It may be a few seconds before it can get around to handling it, but you can click the buttons, drag the objects, or type as you need and they will be handled. When you have the hourglass on windows, whch happens quite a lot, you can't click or drag anything.
good. well, that's subjective, but any impartial comparison you read usually says somewhere in the article that yes, mac os is good. usually better designed, more intiutive, and easier to use. that's what most practical people look for in an os. Is it that much better? Or is it more image and window dressing than anything else? Hard to say for sure. What I do know is that the majority of people I know that work with mac os and some other os prefer the time they spend on mac os. There will always be zealots in either camp, but the impartials do seem to prefer mac, at least if cost is no object.
cheap. heck no. never has been, never will be. This is the odd man out in the "pick two". Like I said, you can't have all three. A lot of R&D and marketing is behind that Apple label, and that has to be paid for. I believe the mac users get their money's worth.
I could see this if noise in this area was an existing problem, but the dogs created a disturbance on a whole new level to this neighborhood. Almost all the neighbors within six houses of him in any direction called in complaints. We even got a few complaints from across the street and alley. This is not one person not being able to deal with a little change in the scenery, this is more like an airport being built in your back yard.
I know he was not deliberately tring to make us miserable, but when you live in society you have to make certain concessions on your behavior and the behavior of those you are responsible for, to make life reasonable for the rest of the people you have to be around. Whether you are trying to be a bad neighbor or if your lack of responsibility is causing you to be one despite yourself, you are still responsible for your behavior. 3rd shift or not, I should not have to deal with the next door neighbor's dogs barking nonstop every day.
well yes I suppose if mercedes wanted my business all they'd have to do is drop a zero off the end of the price tag I suppose.
Does that mean it's sensible for them to do?
Apple, like any business, sets their price point for maximum proffit. If they drop the price 10%, they will get maybe an 8% increase in sales, which will not quite make up for the drop in price, and their net proffit drops. If they raise the price 10%, they will get maybe a 12% drop in sales, which again cuts into proffit sufficiently to drop their bottom line below where it is now. I'm sure Apple spends a lot on market research to make sure they have selected the optimal price points for their products. Your decision as to whether or not to buy based on the current price affects the optimal price point, so a Macintosh's price is not actually set by Apple, it's set by me and you, the consumers.
You just want good hardware on the cheap. There's nothing really wrong with that until you start saying it would be to anyone's benefit besides your own.
In an ideal world, if you paid more for a product it would be better, higher quality. If you paid less for it, it would be a poorer quality. It doesn't always work this way, but that is still the general idea. Keep that in mind when you want to "have your cake and eat it too". Reminds me of the production manager's motto: "fast, good, cheap, pick two."
Though there is a littlee war the authors neglect to mention. If I am writing a blue pill virus vm, and I KNOW there is software out there that is trying to detect me, it's completely worthless. Since I own the machine at that point, I can modify the programs running, with impunity. That's like all the viruses that are out there right now that are more or less immune to Norton... they know what the "threat" is, and they plan accordingly, they know its weaknesses and simply sidestep right around it.
A vm that sees you load BluePillDetect.exe just goes in and twiddles a few bits here and there in the app before it actually puts it in the execute queue, or subtly mucks with its registers while it's executing. Now the program blissfully reports just what the VM wants it to report... "no VM detected.".
Now how are you going to get around THAT? If you are running on a totally owned system, you cannot tell me there is anything you can do that is guaranteed to work, especiially if you are using a commonly available tool that the vm author had access to..
You simply cannot win at their game if they are the ones writing the rules. You can claim victory for a day or two, until the VM authors get their hands on your tool and make the necessary modifications to their VM to cripple your tool, and then you are back to the drawing board.
The changes will allow home users to legally burn purchased movie downloads to special CSS protected DVDs, compatible with existing DVD players."
Last I heard, the whole point of the CSS system was to prevent us from making HIGH quality copies? So they are going to let us make DVDs, and yet be sure to prevent us from VCR'ing them... I know they're a little dim, but have they just TOTALLY LOST IT?
I repair macs for a living, and I have to say that (1) the macbook pros are probably the most prone to defect that we have seen in quite some time, and (2) of the macbooks, I have seen exactly ONE in for service due to a defect, and it was a little bit of tape in the wrong place making noise in a fan. If I had to buy a new mac today it would definitely be a macbook. It's interesting to see Apple release what are arguably both the best and the worst gen-1 products in their history, at the same time. I normally go with the "pro" line, but at least for now I am not looking at a macbook pro. They still are having a lot of issues with sudden shutdown. I get the impression that Apple themselves do not really know what the problem is - one was sent back to Apple to let them sort it out, and it came back, fixed, but my god you should have seen the list of parts they replaced. I think they just kept swapping out parts until it started behaving again. There are only about four original parts in the book now. You know when they replace a keyboard and internal frame members to try to solve a shutdown issue they are guessing. If you google for this issue you will find a lot of people that have had this problem, and so far nobody definitively knows what's causing it, just lots of speculation and lots of "they fixed it but it's still doing it."
if these tapes have been in some very rich person's "personal museum" for the last several years, the result of a quiet and large payoff to someone that had access to the archives. Things like this don't just "disappear", they "grow legs".
Slashdot Mirror
First off I'd like to say I have the largest practical thumb drive I could get my hands on. It's a 4gb SanDisk Cruzer Mini. I picked it because of the cavernous 4gb size, the VERY small profile for such a large drive, and the easily visible activity light. A lot of the time I was not able to plug in my old JetFlash 1gb into a machine because the drive was too big. It was long, it was wide, and it was thick. Some computers would not accept it because their USB ports were too close to the edge of the recess the ports were in, or the two ports were too close together and I could not use the jetflash and fit anything into the adjacent port. (a flash drive is useless if you have no mouse!) When they start selling an 8gb, I will have one that week.
Then there is the issue of boot-ability. Options on the mac are unfortunately very limited, because most older mac hardware cannot boot from a USB device, and most new mac hardware can only boot OS X, which due to a bug in the boot code, cannot boot USB. (it hard-resets the USB bus about 10 seconds into boot... doh!) So there is only a very narrow range of slot load iMacs that are new enough to support USB booting electrically, and are old enough to be able to boot OS 9. I have played with this, and it's a neat trick, but it's god-awful slow because those same iMacs also have 12mbps USB. None of the macs with 480 can boot OS 9, and you cannot add a USB HS card to an iMac so there you are.
As for my 4, it lives in my right pocket. I do mac desktop support for a school and having that drive in my pocket saves me hours of time and miles of walking. It contains mostly program tools, scanner and printer drivers, special maintenance scripts, copies of the "combo udaters" for OS repair, documents the school needs like the master addressbook, as well as a good 1gb of free space for data transfers. I also keep a fairly compact 2.5" external FW hard drive in my shirt pocket along with an isight firewire cable (very compact!) for the larger jobs. The firewire drive contains a bootable OS 9, OS X for PPC, -and- OS X for Intel. (it's a triple boot)
I wait for the day they come up with oh say... a 16gb *firewire* flash drive. Kanguru sells FW flash drives, but they are low capacity and absurdly expensive. That would allow me to do with just the flash drive what I now do with the two drives together.
It's a bit like the old style avertisements you used to see, but with a twist.
"Microsoft... puting users at risk since Windows 3.0."
Nothing new here. Here, tell you what. They're going to do it again in less than 2 months. bet me.
If you own a car with "suicide doors", you do not open the door while you are going down the highway. The door design isn't defective. What's defective is the head of the owner that opens the door on the freeway.
It's so pathetic to see how many people insist that society is obligated to protect them from their own ignorance.
My box of q-tips has a specific instruction to not insert anything into your ear. Why? stupid people claim that unless we tell them NOT to do so, they will punch out their eardrum and then blame us for it. Just because it's easy for a product to behave contrary to what you want it to does not in itself make it defective. Would you say that the q-tip design is defective because you can manage to cram it several inches into your ear while trying to use it? If you can't figure out the obvious limits of a product you should not buy it.
I was going to include a larger list of examples of people doing stupid things and then trying to blame everyone on the planet for not saving them from themselves, but there were so many examples I couldn't bring myself to pick just a few.
It's too bad the original WRT54G is not available. I had to replace my wap because the old trendnet was not able to mac filter and I had a couple neighbors that I wanted to give access to but the entire neighborhood was apparently interested. (can you say.. slow internet? six of them were active on bittorrent all the time!)
I had a bit of a fight with the new 54g I just got. It decided to stop allowing me into the admin menu. 25 minutes on the phone with some gal (in India, of course) and we finally got it fixed. Required a firmware upgrade and repeated reboots and resets to finally clear it out where we could get in and get mac filtering working properly.
But yes 54g is nice. (the trendnet was cutting edge at the time... 802.11b/x, bet you have not heard of that?) I will be looking forward to N, but really, my internet connnection is slower than my G, so besides faster wireless access to my server, have I really gained anything? Not really. N won't be an improvement for me because I won't have a need for any of the speed increases it promises. There's no point in putting a firehose end on your garden hose. If I want faster access to my server I jack into gigabit on my desk where I am most of the time anyway. If I'm on the front porch I don't need to be copying gigabyte files.
with its built-in camera... mug shot? no we don't need that, we have a printscreen. lets go get him.
Now when will they put a GPS in these things?
That's what I call it. One place I worked, the main stats machine (PC) every now and then would not boot. I found out later that the fix was to lift it up off the ground one inch, press the power button, and drop it to the tile floor.
When I discovered that this was actually their written procedure, that HD got replaced that evening.
But serously, there really are people out there that naive to believe that, whatever the reason, if it works, Impact Maintenance is an accepted procedure.
Freezing hard drives also seems to be a point of contention. It does work. Not often, but it does work. If a drive refuses to spin up, or starts and immediately spins back down, there's about a 1 in 6 chance that cooling it will help long enough to get your data off.
My favorite though is the millenium falcon when Han smacks the dashboard to get it to boot up.
the market for this service has not materialized as had been expected.
Translation: not nearly as many people are willing to get jacked for $35/hr for internet access as we had believed.
Though on a completely different angle, at the rate things are going now, soon we won't be able to get on a plane with anything short of our underwear, and will have to fed-ex our luggage to our destination. What happened to the good 'ol days when the people were more scared of the public than the government was?
Maybe try my way. I have a powerbook and that same power pack as you do, and despite being 3 years old it's like new. When I stow it in my bag I retract the AC prongs and coil the white cord by hand at about a 5" diameter, just large enough for the pack to fit into the center of the coil. Then I just slip that into the bag.
Bending any wire arond a sharp angle at the same place day after day is a really quick way to ruin a cord. OR you can enjoy the convenience of the cord keeper on the pack, for about $79 a year.
Of course there are records. Even a "pay as you go" service still has to have contact with its customers in some way. Even if you have a disposable pre-pay cell phone the company still has to put an ESN (serial number) on the phone for their account tracking. With phones, when your prepaid phone runs out you simply throw it away and buy another one with more minutes. Here, you are staying with the service through each renewal, this makes you much easier to find. It would be akin to you wanting your cell phone calls to be totally anonymous but still going to radio shack once a month and cutting them a check.
Best scenario I suppose, you would stop down to the local office with an envelope of cash and your account number into the darknet and nothing more.
I am wondering how you are connected to the darknet though. I can only assume you have a standard internet connection and route into and through the darknet and exit somewhere else, a bit like Tor. If not, if the customers have a dedicated line into the darknet, that would be optimal for initial privacy and bandwidth, but now you have a hard connection to their network and this alone makes you easy to spot. They may not be looking for you, but they can narrow down the list of suspects really quick and your name will be on that list. That gives them quite an advantage to violate your privacy. From there, traffic analysis on your internet connection could identify you even if the traffic is encrypted.
I carefully wrap the cord around the rabbit ears on the brick
FYI, don't DO that.
Yes they are handy and look like a good idea, but you are bending metal (wires) at the same places, back and forth all the time. Ever done that with a coat hanger? What do you get? two coat hangers!
hah.. my mistake, balun - BALanced/UNbalanced. I am thinking baluns in antennas for some reason. Yes, ferrite bead, but a big one. The ones I usually deal with are the size of peas or smaller. These are the bigger variety, which iirc, the cord wrapped around so it passed through the bead twice. No doubt to stop the computer from generating interferance into your house's power grid.
Still though, I wonder who the clown was that had the brilliant idea to place that huge bead one inch down such a skinny cord? That has "stress point" written all over it in big, red letters.
That "little blue part" is a 1/8 watt resistor. You can read the color bands to determine its resistance value. It's probably 270k or so. It's there to detect ground faults I believe. I don't think it will charge without that. I am quite certain that if the shell is grounded, it will NOT charge. Ran into that as a manufacturing problem with the black powerbooks. There was a gold shield inside the computer around the connector, and it was too close to where th shell would be when plugged in. If it touched, you don't charge. The fix? Got a toothpick handy?
I believe these are two separate issues. Without having actually seen the adapter before it failed I cannot say for certain if it was showing signs of wear or not. If it was not showing signs of wear, then I would admit that apple may have more responsibility in the matter. But I expect we would find that the wire was heavily worn prior to the failure, and that it has clearly gone unnoticed by OP. If my car dies and I take it in and he asks me when the last time I changed the oil and I ask him what's that? Then we can conclude that I was neglegent in the care and maintaining/monitoring of my property. Same thing here. If the power cord on your vacuum has been run over one too many times and is fraying, don't go chase after Hoover when you run it over one more time and get shocked. Every piece of equipment will only last so long before it becomes unable or unsafe to perform its function, and the owner does have some responsibility to monitor it and repair/replace it when appropriate.
But yes as I said, Apple's power adapters are notorious for poor strain relief performance and I'm sure this leads to premature failure, but if you allow the damage to progress to the point of catching fire then you are really out of it. While there is not a problem in general with most power packs, it is a problem with laptop power packs in general because they are plugged and unplugged sometimes several times a day and the increased use leads to much faster wear and tear. I haven't seen any proof however that better materials are available that are not being used, so it's hard to condemn them just yet. Apple's "plugs into wall" design is very convenient and saves us a lot of cord to deal with, but also causes the user to pull the power cord at a sharp angle to the adapter, and this too probably contributes to premature failure. The cord is actually shorter than most laptop packs also, which probably makes matters worse trying to stretch the cord to the nearest table.
Not just that. When my wallstreet (g3 powerbook) started failing to charge, I noticed I could wiggle the cord where the DC jack was in the computer and it would work.
So I tore it apart to repair/replace it, and I was amazed that when I removed the plastic jacket of the cord, the outer braid (the ground conductor) of the cord fell to the desk in a pile of a milllion little 3mm long pieces of copper strand. The braid had just shattered from repeated bending, and when I just shook the cord there was NO copper at all left for a 1" span of the cord, it was all just in a pile on the desk. Sort of like when you take a coat hanger and bend it enough it breaks. Same thing happens to these adapters.
Moreso, the white insulating material between the braid and the inner (power) conductor was cracked all the way around in three places. If any of the bits of copper had found their way into any of these cracks I suppose I would have had the same problem the poster did.
In that case though the design was defective... they put that huge balun 1" down the cord from the computer jack, separated by a 3mm thick wire, what did they expect? They don't do that with any of the new cables thankfully.
Apple Authorized Service Provider. hey, that's me :) Certified to work on everything apple sells, warranty repair.
I have yet to see a single pack catch fire. And I've replaced quite a few of them. Damaged, yes. They definitely need to improve their strain reliefs, and magsafe is brilliant. But defective by design? Not from a safety perspective. They DO need to improve the strain reliefs though.
If one tire in 20,000 started to bulge on the sidewall after 30,000 miles, and the owner didn't notice it until 2 months later the tire blew, you can't blame that entirely on Goodyear. All products break, and the consumer does have a reasonable responsibility to identify a product that has failed and may create a safety hazard.
Now take the ibook g3 logic board recall. Now those I have seen maybe 4 dozen of. THOSE are defective. But THIS, this is just a blip.
Actually now that we have magsafe, I don't expect this to even happen once in a blue moon. The power cords are 2x as thick, and if you are a total yutz trying to use your macbook 5.95 feet from the wall using a 6.00 foot power cord, POP and out releases the magsafe before you can jack up your cord. Something tells me OP will just glue it in, break another cord, and cry for us some more.
Can't help directly but here's some backup. The power jack that apple uses is a modified headphone jack. if you remove the outer metal shell, it's a headphone jack plain and simple. My PBG3 cord failed at the plug, so I tore it apart, stripped back the cable, and reattached it. Worked fine, minus the metal shell. it is not required for power or charging, it's just a ground I suspect.
Finding an actual apple jack with the metal cowell around it could be very difficult. I don't think they sell them. (admittedly, apple would much rather you pay them $80 for a new pack than $2 at radio shack for a new end and repair it yourself)
Just a technical addendum. The white bricks are no longer produced in the 45w range. All new white bricks are 65w. This is most likely because the latter g3/4 laptops were all requiring more power than the early G3s. The 65's work fine on all the older equipment, (watts are drawn on demand, a 65 won't hurt a machine that took a 45 originally) so we just carry the 65's. I have replaced maybe five white packs that had the wire broken at the strain relief where this fellow had the problem, and as many more where the wire went at the DC jack end. Apple does need to improve the strain relief at both ends. I find OP's claim that there was "no visible damage before the fire" to be laughable. When I look at the picture I note immediately, the wire always comes straight out of the pack when it's new, and there is a good inch of cord needed to bend it 90 degrees without excessive force. But when you look at the picture, the wire is almost emerging at 90 degrees right out of the strain relief. Good money says he tends to plug the pack into the wall a long way from his ibook, and the cord is always being strained and pulled hard to the side, and was a direct cause of the cord damage and the fire.
Also of note, the "ufo" power adapters that shipped originally on the ibook G3s are much much worse. They are known for failure where the DC cord meets the computer plug and where the AC cord meets the connector that plugs into the pack. We have replaced many of them for failure at one of these two points. Though for all the macs I've worked on, I have yet to encounter a single apple pack that caught fire. This sounds like an isolated incident and someone trying to make a whole lot of noise, stomping about and shouting "defect, recall, save me!"
Given 50,000 production units of electronics, a couple of them are going to be bad. There is no escaping that. And yes, one of them might burn down your house. But a meteor might hit it first, and has roughly the same odds, OP needs to get over it.
Though I don't deny he needs to post about it, because this is how you find out about real issues. Now if we saw a dozen "me too" followups immediately we might want to look into this more, but right now we just have a blowhard.
I suspect that is why we see a lot of "innovative" ideas from Apple. They are spending a bundle on market research, and that extra cash they spend gives a return in coming up with intutitve and attractive designs.
Puck mouse excepted of course. I wonder how THAT one got past them?
If you want to run that list then fast, yes. It still takes windows god awful forever to just simply shut down. Startup time is excruciating. Applications launch slower also. Open a folder with 400 folders in it. Select all. Open. Now go get a sandwich while it tries to open them all. Windows faster? I think not. Mac isn't fastest, but it's not slow by any description, and is certainly faster than most. Whenever I am forced to use windows it seems I am forever waiting for a window to open (or draw!) and the hourglass owns the mouse most of the time. Part of what makes mac os 'feel' faster is that it is responsive almost all the time. Unless you have the colorful pinwheel, anything you click on is accepted. It may be a few seconds before it can get around to handling it, but you can click the buttons, drag the objects, or type as you need and they will be handled. When you have the hourglass on windows, whch happens quite a lot, you can't click or drag anything.
good. well, that's subjective, but any impartial comparison you read usually says somewhere in the article that yes, mac os is good. usually better designed, more intiutive, and easier to use. that's what most practical people look for in an os. Is it that much better? Or is it more image and window dressing than anything else? Hard to say for sure. What I do know is that the majority of people I know that work with mac os and some other os prefer the time they spend on mac os. There will always be zealots in either camp, but the impartials do seem to prefer mac, at least if cost is no object.
cheap. heck no. never has been, never will be. This is the odd man out in the "pick two". Like I said, you can't have all three. A lot of R&D and marketing is behind that Apple label, and that has to be paid for. I believe the mac users get their money's worth.
I could see this if noise in this area was an existing problem, but the dogs created a disturbance on a whole new level to this neighborhood. Almost all the neighbors within six houses of him in any direction called in complaints. We even got a few complaints from across the street and alley. This is not one person not being able to deal with a little change in the scenery, this is more like an airport being built in your back yard.
I know he was not deliberately tring to make us miserable, but when you live in society you have to make certain concessions on your behavior and the behavior of those you are responsible for, to make life reasonable for the rest of the people you have to be around. Whether you are trying to be a bad neighbor or if your lack of responsibility is causing you to be one despite yourself, you are still responsible for your behavior. 3rd shift or not, I should not have to deal with the next door neighbor's dogs barking nonstop every day.
well yes I suppose if mercedes wanted my business all they'd have to do is drop a zero off the end of the price tag I suppose.
Does that mean it's sensible for them to do?
Apple, like any business, sets their price point for maximum proffit. If they drop the price 10%, they will get maybe an 8% increase in sales, which will not quite make up for the drop in price, and their net proffit drops. If they raise the price 10%, they will get maybe a 12% drop in sales, which again cuts into proffit sufficiently to drop their bottom line below where it is now. I'm sure Apple spends a lot on market research to make sure they have selected the optimal price points for their products. Your decision as to whether or not to buy based on the current price affects the optimal price point, so a Macintosh's price is not actually set by Apple, it's set by me and you, the consumers.
You just want good hardware on the cheap. There's nothing really wrong with that until you start saying it would be to anyone's benefit besides your own.
In an ideal world, if you paid more for a product it would be better, higher quality. If you paid less for it, it would be a poorer quality. It doesn't always work this way, but that is still the general idea. Keep that in mind when you want to "have your cake and eat it too". Reminds me of the production manager's motto: "fast, good, cheap, pick two."
Though there is a littlee war the authors neglect to mention. If I am writing a blue pill virus vm, and I KNOW there is software out there that is trying to detect me, it's completely worthless. Since I own the machine at that point, I can modify the programs running, with impunity. That's like all the viruses that are out there right now that are more or less immune to Norton... they know what the "threat" is, and they plan accordingly, they know its weaknesses and simply sidestep right around it.
A vm that sees you load BluePillDetect.exe just goes in and twiddles a few bits here and there in the app before it actually puts it in the execute queue, or subtly mucks with its registers while it's executing. Now the program blissfully reports just what the VM wants it to report... "no VM detected.".
Now how are you going to get around THAT? If you are running on a totally owned system, you cannot tell me there is anything you can do that is guaranteed to work, especiially if you are using a commonly available tool that the vm author had access to..
You simply cannot win at their game if they are the ones writing the rules. You can claim victory for a day or two, until the VM authors get their hands on your tool and make the necessary modifications to their VM to cripple your tool, and then you are back to the drawing board.
The changes will allow home users to legally burn purchased movie downloads to special CSS protected DVDs, compatible with existing DVD players."
Last I heard, the whole point of the CSS system was to prevent us from making HIGH quality copies? So they are going to let us make DVDs, and yet be sure to prevent us from VCR'ing them... I know they're a little dim, but have they just TOTALLY LOST IT?
I repair macs for a living, and I have to say that (1) the macbook pros are probably the most prone to defect that we have seen in quite some time, and (2) of the macbooks, I have seen exactly ONE in for service due to a defect, and it was a little bit of tape in the wrong place making noise in a fan. If I had to buy a new mac today it would definitely be a macbook. It's interesting to see Apple release what are arguably both the best and the worst gen-1 products in their history, at the same time. I normally go with the "pro" line, but at least for now I am not looking at a macbook pro. They still are having a lot of issues with sudden shutdown. I get the impression that Apple themselves do not really know what the problem is - one was sent back to Apple to let them sort it out, and it came back, fixed, but my god you should have seen the list of parts they replaced. I think they just kept swapping out parts until it started behaving again. There are only about four original parts in the book now. You know when they replace a keyboard and internal frame members to try to solve a shutdown issue they are guessing. If you google for this issue you will find a lot of people that have had this problem, and so far nobody definitively knows what's causing it, just lots of speculation and lots of "they fixed it but it's still doing it."
if these tapes have been in some very rich person's "personal museum" for the last several years, the result of a quiet and large payoff to someone that had access to the archives. Things like this don't just "disappear", they "grow legs".