While the parody is funny, the creator lifted one of the "switch" commercials in its entirety. I'd be more up in arms if he reshot the commercial in the same style and Apple sent the C letter.
I get a call from Irvine, a 949 area code, from a mortgage firm, Cambridge something-or-other. They called in a period of a few days: my phone, my smartring number, both cellphones, and my parents also received the same calls on all their phones.
All these numbers are unlisted. The caller (machine) leaves caller ID info and has at one time called at 10:15PM. The caller never responds to voice and disconnects, unless an answering machine picks up and it leaves a sales pitch.
They left this pitch on me and my wife's cell phones' voice mail. Always a glutton for punishment, I called ATT customer service to notify them about the telemarketer calling their cell phone customers. The drone on the other end accused me of giving out my cell number to them. After lengthy explanations of the problem, and that all my phones are hit on a weekly basis, and that many of their customers are probably putting up with this, I gave them the caller ID info, and told them to feel free to review the archived voice mail on my account.
The rep taked to a supervisor and said they would contact their legal department and "look into it". None of them at the time seemed to be aware of any laws prohibiting telemarketing calls to cell phones. It seemed like they couldn't care less and were genuinely suprised I took the time to complain, but I never got another call on any of my cell phones from that company.
My other pet peeve is people "fishing" for fax machines to spam, I get odd calls at 2-5am once a week that are obviously fax machines (beep tones). God forbid I leave my fax on by accident, one junk fax will get through and they start calling every damn day at those times. All this from junk fax firms conveniently located in the Bahamas.
Back in the old days, I had a Tekram VLB IDE card that had 4 DIMM slots that allowed up to 16MB of cache, up to 4 drives, and can span across a set of two drives. While that may not seem like much, back when this was used in the 486/DX2-66, Windows 3.1, OS/2, 250MB HDD days, it was wonderful.
After exiting windows, the cache held pretty much everything it needed to fire up windows or any recently exited program again from the DOS prompt, in only a second or two, without accessing the actual disk hardware.
A secondary hardware cache may not be all that bad an idea, with RAM being as cheap as it is nowadays.
No, they were guerillas. There are plenty of "terrorist" happenings during (and before) the revolutionary war. Tarring and feathering notwithstanding:
Here's a good quote from a "loyalist" publication. Note that the source this came from listed it as "propaganda", but then again, history is made by the victors:
The rebels have hitherto been infamous for their wanton cruelties. Their brutal treatment of Governor Franklin, and many other persons of distinction whom I could mention, their barbarity to loyalists in general, and at this present hour hanging men for acting according to the dictates of conscience whipping men almost to death because they will not take up arms publicly whipping even women, whose husbands would not join the militia their confiscations, fines, and imprisonments; these things which they daily and indubitably practice, very ill agree with the character of humanity so lavishly bestowed on them by this writer. Nothing but a long, very long series of conduct the reverse of this can wipe off the infamy which they hereby incurred.
Odd, I have that piece (and the CD of "The Planets" and yes- I listened to it a few times) but for some reason I could not place it as Holst. The only blatant use of "Mars" I remember from the movies was in AFAIR, "The Right Stuff".
The bit of music I remember from "Aliens" and the trailers is the particular 8 seconds they always seem to play, and those 8 seconds do not remind me of the piece.
That does explain my confusion over why that music cropped up a lot on trailers, even crossing over to other studios aside from 20th. That was a real head-scratcher until you explained why.
I believe the dubious honor of the "A method of celebrities killing themselves by tree implantation while on skis" patent goes to a Kennedy. Which is funny or tragic depending on how you look at it.
I was an "early adopter" of DSL in my area and simply got the business DSL service for our home. After prodding both the drone that set up the order, and the tech support crew, I was told basically I can do whatever I want with the service provided I simply don't break any laws/set up a pr0n site/send spam.
In fact, once I explained I was supplying my own mail and web server, they seemed happy to accomodate sending these services to my box vs. their hosting services.
In return, the only time I would call to gripe is to complain about the DSL line being down.
Yes, it costs more, but the freedom is refreshing. (2x residential rate, but I split the costs with another party on the same property)
I would also like to add that for nearly a year they screwed up the billing and we didn't get a bill for nearly 8 months. When we would send in payment anyway, they would cut us a refund check and send it back. After the initial 8 months, they found out about the billing problem and fixed it. Billed us for 2 months and called the other 6 months a wash.
I never expected that, especially from a phone company
When you've produced nearly 1/3rd of the cars on the road in the US you can expect a lot of people to not like you =]
That 1/3 number must be an overall average. I live in Los Angeles, and travelled to various locations in the US, and I can say that about half (or more) of the passenger vehicles on the road in LA are imports, with a significant number of them either a Civic, Accord, Camry (usu. gold-colored) or a Corolla. The other half are SUV's
In the south, imports are much rarer, but then again, about half of the passenger vehicles are trucks (with or without "puppy crusher" mods).
In the northeast, like Philly lots of US-made cars also predominate the roads.
However, NeXTSTEP, Openstep, etc. ran on NeXT, Hp, Sun, and Intel hardware. There was also supposedly a PPC port collecting dust as well. The software had FAT binaries that would allow one application to run on any of the above platforms. Some of the vestiges of this are still in OS X. While OS X is PPC-only, there is nothing to prevent Apple from porting OS X to another platform.
In the older NeXTSTEP/Openstep days, there were vendors (Canon) that released NeXTSTEP workstations that were Intel 486/Pentium systems with hardware chosen for maximum compatibility. All Apple would need to do is release a "supported hardware spec" with a shopping list of popular components.
Vendors would(should?) jump at the opportunity to build OS X compatible boxes, provided they lose their fear of MS screwing them over. With the proper hardware selection, people could get a kick-ass Wintel and OS X dual-boot box.
I'm just waiting for the Mac home server to come out with Inkwell and voice recognition built in. $10k for the modular, expandable setup and you get your talking home running computer from a million science fiction stories. The technology should be affordably in place by OS 11 and it'll get folded into new home construction costs.
Oh, great. You are giving me the chills, since the first thing I thought of reading your post was that old book/movie "The Demon Seed"
Wait, wait. How do you define "computer-illiterate?" I am a diehard home Mac user, and I use it to... run my web browser, email software, and games, and also a couple other things (AIM, IRC, iTunes).
Um, yeah, but you are here on Slashdot. Both ends of the "curve" are here, not the middle. The technophiles at one end, and the trolls (making up for the clueless users) on the other.
Consider also that the programming environment was way beyond it's time. In 1988, you had a programming environment that has a lot of aspects found in tools that came much later, like drag & drop GUI elements. Hit a button, and you have your UI prototype/skeleton.
The problem aside from lack of apps, was the price, Cubes were going for $8K, AFAIR, and that was pricey. Some of the killer apps were the first WYSIWYG Wordperfect, and Lotus Improv. Other great apps like Mathematica and Framemaker were also released.
This isn't to say there wasn't any problems with design, the optical drives were expensive, slow and clunky. Jobs had the right idea to carry your whole environment with you (OS, Apps, Data) on an optical disk. Now that I think of it, the same thing lives on today in a different way on the iPod. Anyhow, the optical was later an option, and a floppy was added to the cube.
I cut my teeth on one of these in the early 90's. I rescued a Cube from my college and used it as my Unix workstation for all my programming classes. It made life more pleasant working at home rather than fight for lab machines.
Do what I do to my wife in such situations. Telnet over to her machine and command a remote shutdown (she uses OS X) and get it from Kazaa via my OS X box or via VirtualPC.
Family squabbles always lead to lots of "downtime" on the ADSL line when hubby is sysadmin.
You are right, I apologize. Apple obviously has no idea what products are compatible with its operating system. I looked a bit on Google and such for independent sources. I did find some info on some websites. But as you'll say, these websites also cover Macintosh news, products, ads and other issues because they are Mac-related fanboy sites and they support the Apple "cult". Therefore, they are all biased.
Sadly, independent sources cannot be found. Better Homes and Gardens and Reader's Digest haven't done a Mac review in ages.
I did find a couple of sites you will find that aren't biased towards Macs, but the have no lists either.
Of course Apple says everything works best with Apple. Does this surprise anyone? Can we see what an independent source says?
Since when is a hardware compatibility list not a proper info source? There were no vague claims of compatibility, it mentions specific brands and model numbers. Get a clue.
Re:PCs only might cost more due to being useful
on
Macs Are Cheaper than PCs
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· Score: 2, Informative
A lot of those nice digital cameras and MP3 players will not work on Macs. But they will work on PC's. That is hundreds of dollars saved just by the Mac being less useful.
If you define "nice" MP3 player as transferring data over a parallel port, then yes. If you define "a lot" meaning the cheapo sub-$120 digital cameras, then maybe, I suggest you do a bit of research, and you'll find out mostdigital cameras work fine, and brand name MP3 players work fine as well, without crappy bundled software like RioPort.
All this thread has shown me is a sampling of attitudes various slashdotters have against employers/employees.
There's the "employer was using you" crowd
There's the "disloyal fsck" crowd
There's the "moral high horse" crowd
There's the "take what you can get" crowd
Not so suprising is the amount of bitterness being shown. The dot-com bust must have hit the audience here hard.
There's little real advice being given here. I can't give any either, but I can tell you my story.
I worked for a large defense contractor. This job was quite hard, involved lots of travel, and I averaged 80+ hours a week (up to 120 hours at times). But, the job was fun too. After the crunch in the contract schedule, there was still a bit of travel, and the hours dropped to 60 or so a week. I was busy, but getting tired. I looked around at other employers and got an offer that involved no travel, little or no overtime, and as their best-and-final offer, a modest increase over my current salary.
When I went to give notice to my boss, I was told to hold off and listen for a counter-offer. I agreed to wait and was later offered a substantial increase over what even the other company offered, much less travel and overtime, and a retention bonus payable in one year. I turned down the employment offer from the new company, and their best-and-final offer was suddenly up for renegotiation. I told the company's representative I would not listen to any counter-counter offers, and I was turning down the employment offer. I stayed because I liked the job/coworkers.
Fast forward five months. The contract is causing the company to bleed, and the contract is likely to be scaled back or cancelled. A proposed merger is causing engineers to start leaving in droves. My contact at the other company has them make yet another offer, besting my current salary. Seeing the writing on the wall, I submitted my resignation. I was again asked to stay and renegotiate my salary. I refused to entertain my employer's counter-offer (pointing out to the HR person what happened 5 months earlier) and forfeited the upcoming retention bonus.
I am now at the new company, and after getting over the "corporate culture shock" all is well.
My old company? The merger was approved, the contract cancelled, and my former coworkers reassigned/scattered/laid off.
Hrrm, something tells me that 950 million is somehow equal to the number of blank CDRs sold during the same period, no?
Well a reuter's aricle states that CDR sales passed the 1 billion mark in 2000.
Looking at the article, it seems that 95% of CDRs are used to pirate music... and now there's another article! They state that now 1.9 billion units were churned out in 2001. How can the number of pirated discs created somehow exceed production/sale for CDRs for that year? Did blank CDR sales double?
Hrrrm, with the above posts asking about "Mac compatibility" the Fuji website claims PC & Mac compatibility. I wonder how much "modification" Logitech did to the Smalcamera reference design? Probably little or none. The Japanese drivers still would not work unless you can either "spoof" the camera model/manufacturer, or hack the driver. Interesting nonetheless.
Assuming can be a bad thing. Why the heck can't they just have the camera register itself when connected to the USB port like one of those keychain USB devices? Is showing up on the desktop as a new removable drive all that difficult, or are they so set on adding crapware to (presumably) nag you to order prints? The review mentions nothing, but the Logitech website mentions a downloading application and Windows-only compatibility.
Slashdot Mirror
While the parody is funny, the creator lifted one of the "switch" commercials in its entirety. I'd be more up in arms if he reshot the commercial in the same style and Apple sent the C letter.
I get a call from Irvine, a 949 area code, from a mortgage firm, Cambridge something-or-other. They called in a period of a few days: my phone, my smartring number, both cellphones, and my parents also received the same calls on all their phones.
All these numbers are unlisted. The caller (machine) leaves caller ID info and has at one time called at 10:15PM. The caller never responds to voice and disconnects, unless an answering machine picks up and it leaves a sales pitch.
They left this pitch on me and my wife's cell phones' voice mail. Always a glutton for punishment, I called ATT customer service to notify them about the telemarketer calling their cell phone customers. The drone on the other end accused me of giving out my cell number to them. After lengthy explanations of the problem, and that all my phones are hit on a weekly basis, and that many of their customers are probably putting up with this, I gave them the caller ID info, and told them to feel free to review the archived voice mail on my account.
The rep taked to a supervisor and said they would contact their legal department and "look into it". None of them at the time seemed to be aware of any laws prohibiting telemarketing calls to cell phones. It seemed like they couldn't care less and were genuinely suprised I took the time to complain, but I never got another call on any of my cell phones from that company.
My other pet peeve is people "fishing" for fax machines to spam, I get odd calls at 2-5am once a week that are obviously fax machines (beep tones). God forbid I leave my fax on by accident, one junk fax will get through and they start calling every damn day at those times. All this from junk fax firms conveniently located in the Bahamas.
After exiting windows, the cache held pretty much everything it needed to fire up windows or any recently exited program again from the DOS prompt, in only a second or two, without accessing the actual disk hardware.
A secondary hardware cache may not be all that bad an idea, with RAM being as cheap as it is nowadays.
Here's a good quote from a "loyalist" publication. Note that the source this came from listed it as "propaganda", but then again, history is made by the victors:
The bit of music I remember from "Aliens" and the trailers is the particular 8 seconds they always seem to play, and those 8 seconds do not remind me of the piece.
That does explain my confusion over why that music cropped up a lot on trailers, even crossing over to other studios aside from 20th. That was a real head-scratcher until you explained why.
I believe the dubious honor of the "A method of celebrities killing themselves by tree implantation while on skis" patent goes to a Kennedy. Which is funny or tragic depending on how you look at it.
I last read that the Mac release is pending, but that was 2 years ago.
I'm still waiting, and hell ain't getting any colder. At least Apple is up front about killing Windows support.
Lots of action film trailers use that musical score from "Aliens" where they blow up the atmosphere processor.
Granted its a great score, but does just about every trailer have to use it?
I was an "early adopter" of DSL in my area and simply got the business DSL service for our home. After prodding both the drone that set up the order, and the tech support crew, I was told basically I can do whatever I want with the service provided I simply don't break any laws/set up a pr0n site/send spam.
In fact, once I explained I was supplying my own mail and web server, they seemed happy to accomodate sending these services to my box vs. their hosting services.
In return, the only time I would call to gripe is to complain about the DSL line being down.
Yes, it costs more, but the freedom is refreshing. (2x residential rate, but I split the costs with another party on the same property)
I would also like to add that for nearly a year they screwed up the billing and we didn't get a bill for nearly 8 months. When we would send in payment anyway, they would cut us a refund check and send it back. After the initial 8 months, they found out about the billing problem and fixed it. Billed us for 2 months and called the other 6 months a wash.
I never expected that, especially from a phone company
In the south, imports are much rarer, but then again, about half of the passenger vehicles are trucks (with or without "puppy crusher" mods).
In the northeast, like Philly lots of US-made cars also predominate the roads.
In the older NeXTSTEP/Openstep days, there were vendors (Canon) that released NeXTSTEP workstations that were Intel 486/Pentium systems with hardware chosen for maximum compatibility. All Apple would need to do is release a "supported hardware spec" with a shopping list of popular components.
Vendors would(should?) jump at the opportunity to build OS X compatible boxes, provided they lose their fear of MS screwing them over. With the proper hardware selection, people could get a kick-ass Wintel and OS X dual-boot box.
The problem aside from lack of apps, was the price, Cubes were going for $8K, AFAIR, and that was pricey. Some of the killer apps were the first WYSIWYG Wordperfect, and Lotus Improv. Other great apps like Mathematica and Framemaker were also released.
This isn't to say there wasn't any problems with design, the optical drives were expensive, slow and clunky. Jobs had the right idea to carry your whole environment with you (OS, Apps, Data) on an optical disk. Now that I think of it, the same thing lives on today in a different way on the iPod. Anyhow, the optical was later an option, and a floppy was added to the cube.
I cut my teeth on one of these in the early 90's. I rescued a Cube from my college and used it as my Unix workstation for all my programming classes. It made life more pleasant working at home rather than fight for lab machines.
Me, my car, a GPS and a Vaio laptop running Netstumbler.
I came up with real scary numbers of unsecured sites, especially around the commercial/office areas of the West San Fernando Valley.
Family squabbles always lead to lots of "downtime" on the ADSL line when hubby is sysadmin.
How does the megahertz myth apply to this?
Sadly, independent sources cannot be found. Better Homes and Gardens and Reader's Digest haven't done a Mac review in ages.
I did find a couple of sites you will find that aren't biased towards Macs, but the have no lists either.
There's the "employer was using you" crowd
There's the "disloyal fsck" crowd
There's the "moral high horse" crowd
There's the "take what you can get" crowd
Not so suprising is the amount of bitterness being shown. The dot-com bust must have hit the audience here hard.
There's little real advice being given here. I can't give any either, but I can tell you my story.
I worked for a large defense contractor. This job was quite hard, involved lots of travel, and I averaged 80+ hours a week (up to 120 hours at times). But, the job was fun too. After the crunch in the contract schedule, there was still a bit of travel, and the hours dropped to 60 or so a week. I was busy, but getting tired. I looked around at other employers and got an offer that involved no travel, little or no overtime, and as their best-and-final offer, a modest increase over my current salary.
When I went to give notice to my boss, I was told to hold off and listen for a counter-offer. I agreed to wait and was later offered a substantial increase over what even the other company offered, much less travel and overtime, and a retention bonus payable in one year. I turned down the employment offer from the new company, and their best-and-final offer was suddenly up for renegotiation. I told the company's representative I would not listen to any counter-counter offers, and I was turning down the employment offer. I stayed because I liked the job/coworkers.
Fast forward five months. The contract is causing the company to bleed, and the contract is likely to be scaled back or cancelled. A proposed merger is causing engineers to start leaving in droves. My contact at the other company has them make yet another offer, besting my current salary. Seeing the writing on the wall, I submitted my resignation. I was again asked to stay and renegotiate my salary. I refused to entertain my employer's counter-offer (pointing out to the HR person what happened 5 months earlier) and forfeited the upcoming retention bonus.
I am now at the new company, and after getting over the "corporate culture shock" all is well.
My old company? The merger was approved, the contract cancelled, and my former coworkers reassigned/scattered/laid off.
Well a reuter's aricle states that CDR sales passed the 1 billion mark in 2000.
Looking at the article, it seems that 95% of CDRs are used to pirate music... and now there's another article! They state that now 1.9 billion units were churned out in 2001. How can the number of pirated discs created somehow exceed production/sale for CDRs for that year? Did blank CDR sales double?
Hrrrm, with the above posts asking about "Mac compatibility" the Fuji website claims PC & Mac compatibility. I wonder how much "modification" Logitech did to the Smalcamera reference design? Probably little or none. The Japanese drivers still would not work unless you can either "spoof" the camera model/manufacturer, or hack the driver. Interesting nonetheless.
Assuming can be a bad thing. Why the heck can't they just have the camera register itself when connected to the USB port like one of those keychain USB devices? Is showing up on the desktop as a new removable drive all that difficult, or are they so set on adding crapware to (presumably) nag you to order prints? The review mentions nothing, but the Logitech website mentions a downloading application and Windows-only compatibility.