I have one. I bought it around the end of May. At the time they were running a promotion where the wireless keyboard was thrown in as a freebie. I have it connected via 802.11b. At first, the player wouldn't recognize any of the wireless cards I tried, including the Netgear card that is currently in the unit. While on hold with their tech support one day (friendly folks, but unfortunately they weren't able to solve my problem), I discovered that hitting CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE on the wireless keyboard gets you out of the GUI. I was able to hit ALT-Power on the keyboard (the power key is roughly where F1 should be) which took me to a console. Pressing enter logged me on as root. The machine runs something called 'busybox'. I dug around in the filesystem...apparently some configuration files that some symbolic links pointed to didn't exist. After creating/copying/editing some config files that looked like they might have to do with the wirless adapter and rebooting the box several times, it finally decided to recognize my wireless card, which made me happy.
That story aside...the box has potential, but the software currently leaves a lot to be desired. They haven't released an update in about two months. The playlist functionality is bad, and the software doesn't seem to be able to display letterboxed video--it distorts everything to 4:3. The box has a Windows-based server-side component that really needed to be implemented as a service, but they chose to implement as an application instead, so someone has to be logged on to your Windows box all the time for the server software to run. The AIM client and the web browser are, IMHO, fluff. They're there, they work, but few outside of the crackhead set would use them. The box also has some stability issues--if I leave mine on for more than 24 hours, it can't talk to the network card any longer, and a continuous stream of error messages are displayed on the console. The only way to fix it is a hard reset.
All that being said, I do use it to listen to MP3s on the stereo system in the living room. But if I had it to do over again, I think I would have bought an Audiotron instead.
IANAL, but from what I've seen, in the US pretty much anyone can sue anyone else for just about anything, and the defendant has very little in the way of protection other than hiring a lawyer and shelling out a lot of cash. Sometimes you're lucky and get a judge with a good innate bullshit detector who will grant summary judgement in your favor before the case goes before a jury, but they usually wait until the discovery process is completed (usually about a year and several thousand dollars in attorney's fees later). That's one of the problems with our tort system--the courts are extremely plantiff-friendly in the outset of a case. They tend to operate under the assumption that the plantiff's claims are true and leave it up to the defendant to prove otherwise. So you end up with lawsuits like SCO vs IBM, with the plaintiff making all sorts of outrageous claims, providing little (if any) evidence to support them, and getting all the publicity they can out of it. Later in the case (usually a year, sometimes more) it will all come crashing down around them, but the damage to the defendant has been done--they've been tied up in court for a year (if you don't think this is a big deal you haven't been through it), they've spent untold sums of money in attorney's fees, they've been publically embarassed by the whole thing, the plaintiff got lots of free publicity out of it, etc., etc.
So you're the defendant in one of these things. What are your options? While the case is active, about the only legal thing you can do is hire a lawyer, defend yourself as best you can, and try every way in the world to get the judge to dismiss the case before it bankrupts you (probably not applicable in IBM's case, but very applicable elsewhere) and hope the jackass doesn't appeal. Once it's finished, assuming you've won and have any money left, you can then sue the plaintiff (and sometimes his attorneys) for malicious prosecution and/or abuse of process. This will start up another lawsuit which will drag on for years and cost thousands of dollars, but it's about the only form of legal redress you have.
It goes without saying that the simplest way to put an end to this foolishness would be to just kill the plaintiff. Unfortunately, in addition to being illegal in most states, it's not always possible (esp. when the plaintiff is a company). Plus if they ever figure out that you did it, you'll be looking at more time in court and more attorney's fees. So that really isn't an option for most people who find themselves in these situations. But it's still nice to think about.;)
Your words could apply just as well to someone justifying plutocracy as the logical system of government for a nation -- the wealthy landowners get to make the decisions, because they literally own the country. Somehow, in these modern times, we've decided that that's just not acceptable anymore.
LOL...plutocracy is exactly the system that the United States runs under. Don't believe me? How many poor people (hell, even lower middle-class) get elected to public office...ANY public office, even if it's just the town council? How many of your congressmen and senators vote by what they believe to be correct, instead of how their lobbyi$t$ told them to vote? How many concerned citizen groups ever get listened to by elected officials?
In America, the people with money make the decisions...and those decisions are almost always to the benefit of the people with money.
My God, that was the smartest, most profound comment I've ever read on this site. And it even got modded up!;)
In all seriousness, work is much easier when you don't give a damn. That's my problem. I still care about my employer, even though I know I shouldn't and I know they don't care about me (or anyone else that works here). I try to be like Wally, but instead I'm usually more like Alice.
I suppose that makes it the right way to do it, now doesn't it. It's just a matter of what you're used to - for a while, menu bars in every damn app window on a windows box annoyed the fuck out of me. Deal with it.
Oooo, lookie here! It's a Mac Troll coming out from under the bridge. Quick, where are the torches and acid? And I suppose you think that because Apple did it that way, it's correct? Or because this Fitts fellow says so? I don't think Fitts ever had to use a touchpad, or he might have scrapped his so-called "law".
Ah yes. Well, Apple doesn't want to make it easy for the average use to use the root account, because the average user will probably do something stupid with it and break things.
Oh, now I'm an average user! And a *whiny* average user, at that! Forget that I've got a B.S. in computer science and that I've been a full-time Linux and NT sysadmin for seven years. (That's seven years *after* graduation, not working helldesk or running boxes at home or any other creative ways you little prats lie on your resumes.) I'm average because I really didn't give enough of a damn to look up how to delete a pesky folder in OS X, because I was too busy getting shit done and generally enjoying myself on my Windoze and Linux boxen. Woe is me!
You realize, of course, that in one fell response, you've summed up why the entire world hates Mac users. You should be on their next commercial or something.*
* the tone of this response would have been considerably different, had luphus not sounded like a complete bastard.
OS X is an 18-year-old user interface running on top of a 30-year-old operating system. The only reason anybody on Slashdot cares about OS X at all is because of its BSD foundation. The fanboi crowd on this site seems to have short memories with regard to the fact that prior to OS X, Apple had the only operating system still in widespread use that did not support pre-emptive multitasking or paged memory.
Hmmm...seems like just about every modern user interface other than MacOS uses these so-called "Windows-style" menubars, including KDE and Gnome.
The Mozilla folder should have had you UID, not someone else's. That OS X's problem. Obviously you forgot your root password. That is *your* problem.
From the time I took the iBook out of the box until this day, I have never been given the opportunity to set a root password. How can I forget something I never had the opportunity to set? And how is this my problem?
Just out of curiosity, have you actually ever used OS X? Or are you just one of the fanbois who don't have access to it, but cheer it on because it's BSD-based?
I've been using OS X for about 7 months. I've got a 600MHz G3 iBook with 256MB.
What I don't like about it:
The dock. The dock was a cool thing ten years ago, but the start menu/taskbar style of user interface is, IMHO, far better. (Apparently the KDE and Gnome folks think so, too.) OS X's dock is just...bizarre. I've used it for seven months and I'm still wondering why it works the way it does. Yeah, you can resize it, you can hide it, you can change the magnification levels, and it has animated icons. That's all well and good, but all the dock is really good for is *lauching* programs. It pretty well sucks for controlling those programs after they're launched. Want to close a running app from the dock? You have to click and hold the dock icon to pop up a menu, then select the menu option to close the app. Maybe it'll close, maybe not, in which case you have to mouse all the way up to the top of the screen, pull down the Apple menu, and do the Force Quit thing. I'm sure there may be keyboard shortcuts for these things, but the whole point of a graphical user interface is so people don't have to memorize keyboard shortcuts. And we won't even discuss using the dock to keep track of any open windows an app may have...
The menu bar. I hate, loathe, and despise the way OS X always puts the menu bar at the top of the screen. You can have an app that runs in a 320x240 window in the bottom right corner of the screen, but if you want to access that program's menu bar, you have to mouse all the way up to the top of the screen. Change window focus without meaning to? The menu bar at the top changes, which means the menu bar you wanted to access when your mouse pointer finally arrives up there may not be the menu bar you needed to access. Keep the menu bars with the window, not as a separate entity.
File permission strangeness. I have seen cases in OS X where I, as the only administrator of a machine, did not have permission to do things I needed to do, such as, but certainly not limited to: deleting folders, taking ownership of folders, and changing permissions on folders. Example: I run Mozilla nightly builds on my OS X box. After upgrading to a newer build, I was not able to delete the folder containing the old build through the finder. So I popped open a terminal window, did a cd to the directory containing the Mozilla folder, and did an rm -rf Mozilla/. Permission denied. I tried to do an su. Wrong password. (My account has admin privs anyway; I shouldn't need to do an su at all.) WTF is the root password on these OS X boxes, anyway? I tried to do a chown -R. Permission denied. I tried to do a chmod -R ugo+rwx. Permission denied. I do an ls -alF on the Mozilla directory. Turns out the owner of this directory is some obscure number (undoubtedly the UID of the user that did the build on another machine far, far away). So I've got this directory I can't delete. I've worked with UNIX variants for 12 years; this shouldn't be happening.
You can't really customize the user interface. Just because it works for somebody at Apple doesn't mean it works for me. 'Nuff said.
Touchpads and the general lack of a second mouse button. Okay, this really is more of a hardware rant than an OS X issue, but come on. There's a reason almost all modern mice have at least two mouse buttons; that's because a second mouse button improves the usability of the interface. Apparently they don't believe that at Apple, and thus I have to do a lot of clicking-and-holding to open up context menus. And whoever came up with those damn touchpads will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
What I like:
It's based on BSD, and the iBook is very small and light.
So the people making fake drivers licenses have to jump through some extra hoops...big deal. What problem is this solving? This smacks of gun control and Windows Product Activation...in that it just makes things more difficult for John Q. Public. Fake IDs will still be easily accessible.
Besides, don't we pretty much already have a national ID system? As in a Social Security Number?
...blame the city administrator.
Working for a municipality myself, I suspected this was probably the case before I read the supporting articles...they just confirmed my suspicion.
Basically, what you've got here is a situation where you've got a city administrator that doesn't know diddly squat about computers. I don't know anything about the guy, but I would guess that he's probably in his 50's and may have an accounting background (if he has any credentials at all). Like a lot of people in that type of position, he was being short-sighted and cheap. He got busted for it; lots of others don't. Their computer guy may have (and probably did) protested the city administrator's decision to let the maintenance contract lapse, but obviously, the final decision wasn't in his hands.
If anyone should lose their job over this, it's the city administrator.
The X-Box hasn't been around very long. The games just aren't there for it (yet). I haven't bought one primarily for that reason. The PS2, on the other hand, has been out over a year. It does have several games out (although none have compelled me to purchase one as of yet; I'm not a big fan of Japanese-style console games). The main reasons the PS2 sold so many units were brand recognition and compatibility with the PS1. If you'll recall, when the PS2 first came out (and probably the first six months or so afterwards), there were hardly and PS2-native games that people wanted--people mostly played PS1 titles on their new PS2s. The X-Box doesn't have the luxury of being compatible with an older console system, and the games aren't there yet.
I *want* to buy an X-Box, but I'm not going to part with $300+ if there aren't any games available for it that I can't live without. I think the X-Box hardware is vastly superior to any of the other consoles currently available, and I think that it has the potential to bring a new level of depth and complexity to console games that previously existed only on PC games. (Whether it will ever fulfill that potential is another matter.)
Bottom line: people buy consoles for the games. When the games are there for the X-Box, people will buy the consoles.
Slashdot Mirror
That story aside...the box has potential, but the software currently leaves a lot to be desired. They haven't released an update in about two months. The playlist functionality is bad, and the software doesn't seem to be able to display letterboxed video--it distorts everything to 4:3. The box has a Windows-based server-side component that really needed to be implemented as a service, but they chose to implement as an application instead, so someone has to be logged on to your Windows box all the time for the server software to run. The AIM client and the web browser are, IMHO, fluff. They're there, they work, but few outside of the crackhead set would use them. The box also has some stability issues--if I leave mine on for more than 24 hours, it can't talk to the network card any longer, and a continuous stream of error messages are displayed on the console. The only way to fix it is a hard reset.
All that being said, I do use it to listen to MP3s on the stereo system in the living room. But if I had it to do over again, I think I would have bought an Audiotron instead.
So you're the defendant in one of these things. What are your options? While the case is active, about the only legal thing you can do is hire a lawyer, defend yourself as best you can, and try every way in the world to get the judge to dismiss the case before it bankrupts you (probably not applicable in IBM's case, but very applicable elsewhere) and hope the jackass doesn't appeal. Once it's finished, assuming you've won and have any money left, you can then sue the plaintiff (and sometimes his attorneys) for malicious prosecution and/or abuse of process. This will start up another lawsuit which will drag on for years and cost thousands of dollars, but it's about the only form of legal redress you have.
It goes without saying that the simplest way to put an end to this foolishness would be to just kill the plaintiff. Unfortunately, in addition to being illegal in most states, it's not always possible (esp. when the plaintiff is a company). Plus if they ever figure out that you did it, you'll be looking at more time in court and more attorney's fees. So that really isn't an option for most people who find themselves in these situations. But it's still nice to think about. ;)
LOL...plutocracy is exactly the system that the United States runs under. Don't believe me? How many poor people (hell, even lower middle-class) get elected to public office...ANY public office, even if it's just the town council? How many of your congressmen and senators vote by what they believe to be correct, instead of how their lobbyi$t$ told them to vote? How many concerned citizen groups ever get listened to by elected officials?
In America, the people with money make the decisions...and those decisions are almost always to the benefit of the people with money.
In all seriousness, work is much easier when you don't give a damn. That's my problem. I still care about my employer, even though I know I shouldn't and I know they don't care about me (or anyone else that works here). I try to be like Wally, but instead I'm usually more like Alice.
Oooo, lookie here! It's a Mac Troll coming out from under the bridge. Quick, where are the torches and acid? And I suppose you think that because Apple did it that way, it's correct? Or because this Fitts fellow says so? I don't think Fitts ever had to use a touchpad, or he might have scrapped his so-called "law".
Ah yes. Well, Apple doesn't want to make it easy for the average use to use the root account, because the average user will probably do something stupid with it and break things.
Oh, now I'm an average user! And a *whiny* average user, at that! Forget that I've got a B.S. in computer science and that I've been a full-time Linux and NT sysadmin for seven years. (That's seven years *after* graduation, not working helldesk or running boxes at home or any other creative ways you little prats lie on your resumes.) I'm average because I really didn't give enough of a damn to look up how to delete a pesky folder in OS X, because I was too busy getting shit done and generally enjoying myself on my Windoze and Linux boxen. Woe is me!
You realize, of course, that in one fell response, you've summed up why the entire world hates Mac users. You should be on their next commercial or something.*
* the tone of this response would have been considerably different, had luphus not sounded like a complete bastard.
OS X is an 18-year-old user interface running on top of a 30-year-old operating system. The only reason anybody on Slashdot cares about OS X at all is because of its BSD foundation. The fanboi crowd on this site seems to have short memories with regard to the fact that prior to OS X, Apple had the only operating system still in widespread use that did not support pre-emptive multitasking or paged memory.
Hmmm...seems like just about every modern user interface other than MacOS uses these so-called "Windows-style" menubars, including KDE and Gnome.
The Mozilla folder should have had you UID, not someone else's. That OS X's problem. Obviously you forgot your root password. That is *your* problem.
From the time I took the iBook out of the box until this day, I have never been given the opportunity to set a root password. How can I forget something I never had the opportunity to set? And how is this my problem?
Just out of curiosity, have you actually ever used OS X? Or are you just one of the fanbois who don't have access to it, but cheer it on because it's BSD-based?
What I don't like about it:
The dock. The dock was a cool thing ten years ago, but the start menu/taskbar style of user interface is, IMHO, far better. (Apparently the KDE and Gnome folks think so, too.) OS X's dock is just...bizarre. I've used it for seven months and I'm still wondering why it works the way it does. Yeah, you can resize it, you can hide it, you can change the magnification levels, and it has animated icons. That's all well and good, but all the dock is really good for is *lauching* programs. It pretty well sucks for controlling those programs after they're launched. Want to close a running app from the dock? You have to click and hold the dock icon to pop up a menu, then select the menu option to close the app. Maybe it'll close, maybe not, in which case you have to mouse all the way up to the top of the screen, pull down the Apple menu, and do the Force Quit thing. I'm sure there may be keyboard shortcuts for these things, but the whole point of a graphical user interface is so people don't have to memorize keyboard shortcuts. And we won't even discuss using the dock to keep track of any open windows an app may have...
The menu bar. I hate, loathe, and despise the way OS X always puts the menu bar at the top of the screen. You can have an app that runs in a 320x240 window in the bottom right corner of the screen, but if you want to access that program's menu bar, you have to mouse all the way up to the top of the screen. Change window focus without meaning to? The menu bar at the top changes, which means the menu bar you wanted to access when your mouse pointer finally arrives up there may not be the menu bar you needed to access. Keep the menu bars with the window, not as a separate entity.
File permission strangeness. I have seen cases in OS X where I, as the only administrator of a machine, did not have permission to do things I needed to do, such as, but certainly not limited to: deleting folders, taking ownership of folders, and changing permissions on folders. Example: I run Mozilla nightly builds on my OS X box. After upgrading to a newer build, I was not able to delete the folder containing the old build through the finder. So I popped open a terminal window, did a cd to the directory containing the Mozilla folder, and did an rm -rf Mozilla/. Permission denied. I tried to do an su. Wrong password. (My account has admin privs anyway; I shouldn't need to do an su at all.) WTF is the root password on these OS X boxes, anyway? I tried to do a chown -R. Permission denied. I tried to do a chmod -R ugo+rwx. Permission denied. I do an ls -alF on the Mozilla directory. Turns out the owner of this directory is some obscure number (undoubtedly the UID of the user that did the build on another machine far, far away). So I've got this directory I can't delete. I've worked with UNIX variants for 12 years; this shouldn't be happening.
You can't really customize the user interface. Just because it works for somebody at Apple doesn't mean it works for me. 'Nuff said.
Touchpads and the general lack of a second mouse button. Okay, this really is more of a hardware rant than an OS X issue, but come on. There's a reason almost all modern mice have at least two mouse buttons; that's because a second mouse button improves the usability of the interface. Apparently they don't believe that at Apple, and thus I have to do a lot of clicking-and-holding to open up context menus. And whoever came up with those damn touchpads will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
What I like:
It's based on BSD, and the iBook is very small and light.
IMHO, the cons outweigh the pros.
So the people making fake drivers licenses have to jump through some extra hoops...big deal. What problem is this solving? This smacks of gun control and Windows Product Activation...in that it just makes things more difficult for John Q. Public. Fake IDs will still be easily accessible.
Besides, don't we pretty much already have a national ID system? As in a Social Security Number?
...blame the city administrator. Working for a municipality myself, I suspected this was probably the case before I read the supporting articles...they just confirmed my suspicion. Basically, what you've got here is a situation where you've got a city administrator that doesn't know diddly squat about computers. I don't know anything about the guy, but I would guess that he's probably in his 50's and may have an accounting background (if he has any credentials at all). Like a lot of people in that type of position, he was being short-sighted and cheap. He got busted for it; lots of others don't. Their computer guy may have (and probably did) protested the city administrator's decision to let the maintenance contract lapse, but obviously, the final decision wasn't in his hands. If anyone should lose their job over this, it's the city administrator.
The X-Box hasn't been around very long. The games just aren't there for it (yet). I haven't bought one primarily for that reason. The PS2, on the other hand, has been out over a year. It does have several games out (although none have compelled me to purchase one as of yet; I'm not a big fan of Japanese-style console games). The main reasons the PS2 sold so many units were brand recognition and compatibility with the PS1. If you'll recall, when the PS2 first came out (and probably the first six months or so afterwards), there were hardly and PS2-native games that people wanted--people mostly played PS1 titles on their new PS2s. The X-Box doesn't have the luxury of being compatible with an older console system, and the games aren't there yet.
I *want* to buy an X-Box, but I'm not going to part with $300+ if there aren't any games available for it that I can't live without. I think the X-Box hardware is vastly superior to any of the other consoles currently available, and I think that it has the potential to bring a new level of depth and complexity to console games that previously existed only on PC games. (Whether it will ever fulfill that potential is another matter.)
Bottom line: people buy consoles for the games. When the games are there for the X-Box, people will buy the consoles.