Man, those damn things are everywhere. When I walk from my house to the closest T station [1], I go by two Dunkin Donuts, and it's only half a mile or so. It wouldn't surprise me at all that, if all the DD's in the Boston metro area were plotted out, there would be no point in the city that was farther from a Dunks than a couple of hundred meters/yards or so.
If only the T had such good coverage, maybe it wouldn't be such a long walk to a train station:-)
Of course, the classic New England synopsis was the old[ish] Saturday Night Live skit with Adam Sandler, "How D'ya Get There." It was a game show where contestants had to describe to the host how one would get from point A to point B in New England, how many Dunkin Donuts there are between Hartford and Boston, etc. "Contestant number one, how would you get from Woosta to Dorchestah?" "Why would anyone want to go to Dorchestah?" *ding! ding! ding!* "Wicked good job, brotha, you ah right!"
----
[1] "The T" is short for the MBTA, the organization that run the Boston area public transit system. Generally, "the T" implies the train, but sometimes people use the term for the buses or ferries. The MBTA's logo is a circled (T), like the copyright (C), but (obviously) with a different letter:-)
When searching for an address, I've taken to just searching Google for it. The search is recognized as an address, and the top two links are for Yahoo & MapQuest; each gets opened in a new browser tab for comparison. Sometimes I prefer one, sometimes I prefer the other, but being able to have them side by side so easily gets the job done nicely.
Random recent observations, based on things I happened to be searching for earlier today:
Given an address in Dorchester MA, Yahoo couldn't find it and gave me a generic map of the city; MapQuest got it just right, and had a properly zoomed in map of the street I was looking for.
Given an address in Somerville MA, both sites were able to find the address, and gave a map with substantially the same magnification. However, Mapquest was the only one that indicated one way streets, which is kind of critical info when figuring out how what route you'll have to take.
Given an address in Paris FRA, Mapquest gives up, but Yahoo will automagically redirect to yahoo.fr and the map you were looking for. It's a different site, different layout, all in French, etc -- but the info you're looking for is available from Yahoo, and it wasn't from Mapquest. (On the other hand, Google was also a letdown here -- it's search term parser doesn't seem to be able to do anything useful with a foreign address. Maybe this example would work on google.fr...)
Subjectively, I kind of prefer the web design on the Yahoo map site. But then, they used to drown me in popups. But then I stopped using browsers where that's an issue, so it doesn't matter again. MapQuest isn't so bad if you click the "Big Map" button over on the right side of a given map, but the setting doesn't seem to be sticky across searches, and it really ought to be a user preference controlled by a cookie.
For searching for domestic addresses, neither Yahoo Maps nor MapQuest has completely won me over. Searching both is easy enough that, barring a site redesign on the Mapquest side or a software upgrade on the Yahoo side, I for one will probably keep using both.
Does anyone know of any good alternatives to the "big two"? Or how about for international addresses -- is Yahoo good enough for addresses in e.g. Canada or Europe, or are there better local alternatives? I've seen streetmap.co.uk cited a lot by Londoners, but I don't know what people tend to use elsewhere, or if streetmap.co.uk has any major competition.
iTunes Music Store has sold 1 million songs since its release on the Windows platform on October 16. Also of note is the 1 million downloads of the iTunes music program itself.
Ergo, purchases only just keept pace with the number of new downloads, and there was a sizable existing user base over on the Mac side, it seems clear that far more people are getting the software but not using it to buy anything.
It would be interesting to know what the trends are like on the Mac side. Were the Mac users downloading a million songs a week? If so, then the Windows users didn't download any -- that's probably no more accurate or meaningful than the "million downloads, million songs" correlation.
It's possible to lie with statisticss, sure, but it's also possible to tell the truth -- in fact, you often can't tell thee truth unless it can be backed up with numbers. It would be interesting to see how much of a bump the Windows launch really brought, and how the trends on the Mac & Windows sides will continue to evolve over time...
I thought it may have been in the sense of "I met Michael Jackson in 1983. He seemed innocent enough at the time."
Or substitute into the same line O.J. Simpson, or Phil Spector, or Robert Blake, or Kobe Bryant, or any other celebrity that has been formally accused of being a less than 100% innocent person.
I've noticed that iTunes.exe does seem to be very sensitive to the amount of horsepower available, and ram in particular.
My fiancee and her sister have near-identical Toshiba laptops. Both have 1.4ghz Celeron chips, both are running WinXPsp1. The software and configuration on the two machines is similar in most respect. The only difference is RAM: my fiancee's has been upgraded to 512mb, while her sister's is at the stock 256mb.
My fiancee's higher ram machine has no problem establishing a connection to my Mac to share my mp3 library.
Her sister's can only establish a connection if no other applications are running (right after booting seems to help), and the playback quality seems to be a bit flaky compared to the other computer.
My Mac, of course, works just fine, but then it would, wouldn't it?
My hunch is that when the specs say that iTunes needs a lot of ram, they really mean it. For whatever reason, a memory bottleneck seems to be enough of a choke to prevent acceptable network performance.
My suggested fix, barring a patch from Apple to make iTunes less resource hungry, was to just buy another stick of ram -- but then it's not my computer... *shrug*
Is your Mac running iTunes 4.0.1? I had the same problem, and sharing wouldn't work as long as my Mac was running 4.0. Upgrading to 4.1 fixed the problem immediately.
Well for anyone that delayed "upgrading" to iTunes 4.0.1 because they didn't want to lose the internet sharing capability, the game is over: if you want to share between the Mac & Windows versions of iTunes, you need at least 4.0.1 on the Mac & 4.1 on the Win machine to make it work.
Right now, my fiancee's WinXP machine is happily running iTunes, but it's unable to see any network shared libraries. When I come over to my Mac, I can see her shared library, but if I try to select it I get an error message: 'The shared music library "May's Music" is not compatible with this version of iTunes.'
So for anyone that was clinging on to that version but wants to integrate PCs into the iTunes party, there doesn't seem to be a choice but to upgrade iTunes to 4.0.1 or 4.1 and lose the 'net sharing capability. Bummer.
Hopefully, the tarball I'm making will continue to work alongside the updated version, if I ever decide to share between work & home...:-)
But photos like this can be notoriously deceptive. I saw a fascinating show a few years ago about photographed UFO incidents, and there were some really interesting examples. To name a couple that I still remember:
Several people claim to have seen a pure white diamond shaped object that flies around the sky in an erratic zig-zag pattern, and they have video evidence to support their claims. The catch though is that all of the videos were recorded with the same model of Panasonic camcorder, and it just so happens that part of the focusing mechanism for this camera is a diamond shaped aperture. It turns out that, under certain lighting conditions, this lens apparatus will produce a diamond shaped lens flare effect -- which is exactly what these people were interpreting as a UFO.
In another case, an Air Force pilot had video of a bright object that seemed to be fltting lazily along with a passenger plane (I want to say it was the Concorde, but I'm no longer postive about that.). As the AF pilot flew in formation alongside the passenger jet, this mysterious object would apparently dance around the jet, sometimes flying ahead of it, sometimes falling back, sometimes seeming to do loops around it. The catch though is that the film was recorded with the sun at the AF pilot's back, and there was a bright reflection of the sun coming off the plane's fuselage. It turned out that it was always possible to visualize a perfectly straight line from the center of the image, through the relection flare, annd then to the mysterious "object" (sorry if that makes no sense, I can't describe it any better that in prose & ASCII art won't help much either). Basically, the AF pilot was having a hard time keeping the camera trained directly at the jet, so as the view moved around, the "object" moved in tandem, relative to the reflection on the plane's body. Again, the object wasn't real at all -- it was an artifact from the camera's optics and the lighting conditions at the time.
Now neither of those cases quite apply here of course -- the kid who took the first picture claims to have seen the phenomenon first, then took the photo, so it's not a lens optics issue and there's no reason not to accept his word here.
Still, the lighting conditions were peculiar: it was dusk, and the Concorde -- which flew at an unusually high altitude -- was effectively sunlit from below. Additionally, it looks like it was a pretty cloudy day, so there seems to have been a lot of moisture in the atmosphere for the aircraft to interact with.
Between those three factors -- unusual aircraft, lit from below, with a cloudy sky -- it doesn't surprise me that the visual effect created would be out of step with imagery usually expected.
Barring more information, it seems to me that the less unorthodox interpretation is to accept that this may well have been the Concorde, and not some other aircraft or other "object" or phenomenon.
Do you have some other explanation in mind, or do you just find the suggested explanation unconvincing?
The real fix for number portability is, of course, some kind of phone number DNS service. If laypeople got a better understanding of what DNS allows for IP networks, and then realized how much nicer that kind of service would make the phone system, no one would care about number portability. A few years ago when I learned about DNS, I thought this was the best change that could happen to the phone system (no more angst over area code changes, etc), but I'd forgotten about it until now.
Where is the thread about this ENUM thing? I'd like to read about it...
Anyway, I don't know how things are with Sprint, but I made two big changes to my years-old Cingular plan over the past few months -- first upgraded my phone, then had a line added for my fiancee -- and they didn't make a big deal about the "new activation" clause either time. If you've been a long-time customer, they'll probably be willing to cut you some slack. They may force you to sign up for a multi-year contract, but they probably won't hit you with a fee.
He runs his business out of his home, and isn't listed in the phone book. Every couple of years, I give him a call. If he did what you recommended, I would never be able to find him.
Yeah, but you just described how he's unlike the earlier commenter: he's trying to be at least somewhat anonymous. He may feel that he has enough of a loyal customer base to avoid seeking out new customers, and he definitely doesn't seem to feel it's necessary for him to advertise or publicize his services. Not that there's necessarily a problem there -- I'm sure a lot of people keep their little thriving mom & pop home businesses going this way -- but the parent commenter was describing a much different situation where he's taking on a personal expense to help transition his customers over. The comparison doesn't quite work.
That said, I agree with you -- number portability has a place, and some people would much prefer being able to keep one number than to have to tell people about a new one. Area code changes are annoying enough, having to get people to change cell numbers is even worse.
I've been a happy Cingular customer since the summer of 2000. My original contract was for a year or two (I forget at this point), but I altered my plan several times during the span of that contract and they never gave me a hard time about it. Once the first contract ran out, my plan continued under the plan I was using until I asked them to change it again, and eventually they offered me a free phone upgrade for being a three year customer.
I had no problem signing up for another two year contract last summer, and have already altered my plan twice since then. The first change was a switch from a standard "nights free, days count against your minutes" plan to a cheaper set of "anytime" minutes, because I was never going over the daytime limit anyway -- the operator at Cingular's call center suggested this when she noticed that my calling pattern didn't have any use for 5000 off-peak minutes when I wasn't even using 1000 minutes per month. The plan was cheaper than the one I was under previously, and it better fits my needs -- and it was their idea.
The other plan change made since entering my new contract was when my fiancee cancelled her phone service and signed up for a different line on my account. She has been with several different phone companies and has never been happy with any of them, but I've had Cingular (nee Cellular One) all that time and have never had a complaint.
The only thing that kept her from signing on with my account sooner was the prospect of being able to take her old number to Cingular when portability kicked in at the end of the year, but by the end of her contract she was so fed up with her Death Star Logo provider that she cancelled & switched the day her contract expired. (And as an aside, it's just as well -- by great cooincidence, her new number is one digit off from mine, which is way easier to remember than her old one was:-).
Maybe I've just lucked out, but at this point I continue to be a pretty happy customer with Cingular -- and the ability to change rate plans whenever and however I'd like has been a big part of that. I've seen enough headaches out of the policies with two or three of the other providers that, barring some big changes between now and the next time I'm ready for an upgrade (and maybe number portability wiill have catalyzed some changes by then), I intend to stick with Cingular for a while.
<disclaimer>
Your mileage may vary. Selection & service quality may vary by area (I'm in Boston). Aside from being a customer, I am in no way affiliated with Cingular and have nothing to gain by any reader choosing any cell phone company, Cingular or otherwise. If Cingular chooses to pay me for saying nice things about them, I'm not so scrupulous that I wouldn't say "yes" to any offers, but I'm not on their payroll as of this writing. Yadda yadda yadda...
</disclaimer>
Is there any particular reason that the original poster mentioned the name of the Czech Republic, rather than the English word "check"? At first I thought it may have been some kind of pun on research done in Prague or something, but no -- a quick scan over the BBC article and I see no mention of any places other than the UK and USA.
Simple, typical Slashdot spelling, or some kind of dangling reference?
Ahh, if only it were a real word though. Perhaps you meant this:
$ dict Rediculous
No definitions found for "Rediculous", perhaps you mean:
web1913: Pediculous
$ dict Pediculous
1 definition found
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Pediculous \Pe*dic"u*lous\, a. [L. pediculosus.]
Pedicular.
$ dict Pedicular
1 definition found
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Pedicular \Pe*dic"u*lar\, a. [L. pedicularis, fr. pediculus a
louse: cf. F. p['e]diculaire.]
Of or pertaining to lice; having the lousy distemper
(phthiriasis); lousy. --Southey.
So, "pediculous". Yep, that must be what you meant...;-)
There were like 15 million TurboTax returns in 2001 - and 5.5 million copies of TurboTax sold.
This does not mean that there were 10 million pirated copies of TurboTax. This means that people did their own taxes and their mom's taxes and maybe their neighbor's taxes with the software they bought. I don't care what the EULA says, that is not piracy. You don't have to buy a new copy of Microsoft Office each time you write a letter.
Just to give another example, my dad is a CPA, and has been using TurboTax to help prepare tax returns for his clients since the late 80s. His annual legal copy of the software is responsible for many tax returns every year, (dozens? I'm not sure, I don't dig through his files, but I know that he works for many families every year) and I'm sure he isn't the only accountant to be using one legally purchased copy of the tax software to prepare returns for all of their clients every year.
Still, it was an exotic standard, if an "official" one. Give me at least that much -- in the end, Apple seems to have been the main & only vendor using it...:-)
No no no! See how I put "proprietary" in quotes? Do you see how I mention that other vendors also use OF? Did you catch how I mentioned that there's nothing stopping AMD from adopting OF on their platform?
I realize that OF is an open standard. Really.
It's just that OF is a de jure standard, formally codified and supported by a variety of vendors, while the x86 spec is a de facto standard, consistent only with itself but, because it happens to be the platform used by 95% or whatever of the market, is the one that is dominant.
The fact that OF is more open kind of doesn't matter if the vast majority of systems out there are using something else...:-/
Still, it's not as bad as it used to be. As far as I can tell, the only really proprietary parts on a modern Mac are the CPU, motehrboard, the power supply, and maybe the video card. In the case of the video card, it's only "proprietary" because the systems are Open Firmware based (like Sun, SGI, and maybe some others), and the video card has to be able to talk to the rest of the system -- but it uses the same AGP bus that x86 uses, and my impression is that there's no reason that the "Mac" cards wouldn't work just fine if (say) AMD ever designed an Open Firmware based x86 platform.
Beyond that though, it's all standard hardware. Same RAM, same hard drives, same PCI bus for expansion, same peripherals on the USB & Firewire ports. And so on.
It used to be much worse than that, in the days up to the blue & white G3, with the Nubus architecture, "standard but exotic" SCSI bus for hard drives, etc. Moreover, above the hardware level, they've gotten very good about using standard protocols & formats for nearly all of the system, and have offered up their new developments to be used as open standards (e.g. Rendezvous).
While it's annoying that they can get away with charging so much for the proprietary parts that they still control, at least these parts are generally pretty reliablee & most people don't have any problems. And the rest of the system is just so much nicer than anything that could be run on x86 that I for one am willing to take a chance on what Apple has to offer, knowing that if anything does go drastically wrong, the fix can be ridiculously expensive compared to the same repair on the other site.
It's not so simple to just drop a new power supply into a Mac. The supply on the G4 Powermac is not, as far as I can tell, identical to or compatible with the standard ATX supplies that x86 machines use -- the part in question is both proprietary and expensive. Your advice would be perfectly reasonable if we were talking about an x86 box, but we aren't, and there's the rub.
I had a G4 that refused to boot, and when I brought it to Microcenter to be repaired they informed me that if it was a bad power supply, the part would be something like $200. When I asked if the $30 ATX supplies they have could do they job, the answer was a clear "no" -- which even they seemed disappointed by. In the end, the problem turned out to be the motherboard, not the power, and replacing that would have been about $500. I ended up getting a new G4 instead of paying that much to keep an old machine alive.
Unfortunately, my new Mac has exactly the symptoms that are described in this discussion: normally the machine runs just fine, but every now and then when I reboot it it will just refuse to turn back on. The power light will throb briefly, the power supply fan will spin up, and the machine makes a few other chirps & squeaks -- but it never gets as far as spinning up the hard drives, and the "Mac chimes" never get played. At that point, the fan willl keep spinning until you turn the machine off, but nothing further will happen. However, if it gets past that point -- if the hard drives turn on, and the Mac chimes sound off -- then the machine comes right up and there are, as far as I can tell, no other issues at all.
The only "solution" I've found so far, aside from not turning the machine off if I can help it, is to just be patient: Hit the button, wait for it to start. If it doesn't, turn it back off & wait some more. Try again. if it still doesn't work, wait longer. It seems to help a little bit if I make sure that the machine is completely stopped (no fan noise, etc) before trying to turn it back on again, but that's no guarantee -- it just helps the odds a bit. It's not just the quick turnaround though: once the machine sat off overnight & still wouldn't start up right away in the morning without going through the try, fail, retry nonsense for five or ten minutes.
Elsewhere in this dicussion it was suggested that it may help to hit the Power Management Unit button on the motherboard while the machine is turned off & unplugged. It's worth a try I suppose, but I'm a little unclear as to how this is supposed to help, or if it will help. Another poster points out Apple support document 95039, which seems closer to the mark and definitely sounds promising. I'll have to try those steps & see if it helps...
I'm curious about that too. My brother is a teacher, and I'm curious what he would have to do to take advantage of the discount. Possibly, nothing.
It used to be that companies would offer steep discounts on software for educational customers, but you would have to verify your credentials in order to get that discount (e.g. buy from a campus bookstore, and have to present your student ID at purchase time, etc).
Now though, at least some companies seem to be a bit more lax about this. For example, I regularly see the student edition of Microsoft Office XP advertised in the local newspaper & area stores for around $100 to $150, while the full version -- which I almost never see advertised -- can be more than double that. The student version only has part of the suite, but it's the part that most Office users would want anyway -- Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook. My fiancee bought a copy of this edition when she got her computer a year ago, and the clerk at the register didn't do anything at all to verify if she's actually a student. I assume that most of the people buying this edition of Office aren't actually students, but the fact that it apparently sells much better than the full edition has encouraged Microsoft to avoid slaying this particular golden goose.
Maybe the same is going on with Apple. As far as I can tell, they don't do much or anything to enforce the restrictions on the educational discount program. Maybe they see it as a small leak that allows for a bit higher sales than they would have gotten had such a program not been available; that is to say, if they started enforcing the "are you really a student or educator" rule more closely, they might lose too many sales to be worthwhile.
*shrug* In any case, I'm going to have to talk to my brother, and find out if he's interested in buying an operating system that won't run on any computer in his house...:-)
Amusing, but that actually applied to me at my last job. I wanted to use a Mac as my desktop machine, but they would only requisition new ones for the graphic design department, and I was a sysadmin. The only way I was able to get one for myself was to pull an old beige G3 out of a supply closet. The machine had previously been used as a scanning & print server for said graphic designers, but they were all using new equipment now and the G3 was gathering dust in a closet.
It wasn't too hard to get Jaguar installed, and once up & running the performance really wasn't that bad (especially since most of the work I was doing happened in an SSH session in the Terminal). The machine in question was 300mhz and had 320 mb of ram, which is better than some of the still supported iMacs. The only real problem was that the hard drive was small & crowded, which meant that once the machine started using too much virtual memory, applications would begin to thrash, then crash, and the only fix was a reboot (which would magically restore 30% of the disc space). Putting in another old hard drive helped avoid this most of the time, but ancient SCSI drives with decent capacity weren't easy to find, so I was kind of stuck with this arrangement.
Still, had that machine still been my primary one, I would have liked to upgrade it to Panther when it comes out. But that's not an option (on several levels), so c'est la vie. I'm sure that there are some others in this kind of situation though, and now they'll have to accept Jaguar as their ceiling OS. There are valid reasons for this (the beige G3s probably had archaic firmware that Panther wouldn't be able to work with), but it's still going to be unfortunate for some people.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean masshole :-)
:-)
Man, those damn things are everywhere. When I walk from my house to the closest T station [1], I go by two Dunkin Donuts, and it's only half a mile or so. It wouldn't surprise me at all that, if all the DD's in the Boston metro area were plotted out, there would be no point in the city that was farther from a Dunks than a couple of hundred meters/yards or so.
If only the T had such good coverage, maybe it wouldn't be such a long walk to a train station :-)
Of course, the classic New England synopsis was the old[ish] Saturday Night Live skit with Adam Sandler, "How D'ya Get There." It was a game show where contestants had to describe to the host how one would get from point A to point B in New England, how many Dunkin Donuts there are between Hartford and Boston, etc. "Contestant number one, how would you get from Woosta to Dorchestah?" "Why would anyone want to go to Dorchestah?" *ding! ding! ding!* "Wicked good job, brotha, you ah right!"
----
[1] "The T" is short for the MBTA, the organization that run the Boston area public transit system. Generally, "the T" implies the train, but sometimes people use the term for the buses or ferries. The MBTA's logo is a circled (T), like the copyright (C), but (obviously) with a different letter :-)
When searching for an address, I've taken to just searching Google for it. The search is recognized as an address, and the top two links are for Yahoo & MapQuest; each gets opened in a new browser tab for comparison. Sometimes I prefer one, sometimes I prefer the other, but being able to have them side by side so easily gets the job done nicely.
Random recent observations, based on things I happened to be searching for earlier today:
For searching for domestic addresses, neither Yahoo Maps nor MapQuest has completely won me over. Searching both is easy enough that, barring a site redesign on the Mapquest side or a software upgrade on the Yahoo side, I for one will probably keep using both.
Does anyone know of any good alternatives to the "big two"? Or how about for international addresses -- is Yahoo good enough for addresses in e.g. Canada or Europe, or are there better local alternatives? I've seen streetmap.co.uk cited a lot by Londoners, but I don't know what people tend to use elsewhere, or if streetmap.co.uk has any major competition.
This is interesting:
Ergo, purchases only just keept pace with the number of new downloads, and there was a sizable existing user base over on the Mac side, it seems clear that far more people are getting the software but not using it to buy anything.
It would be interesting to know what the trends are like on the Mac side. Were the Mac users downloading a million songs a week? If so, then the Windows users didn't download any -- that's probably no more accurate or meaningful than the "million downloads, million songs" correlation.
It's possible to lie with statisticss, sure, but it's also possible to tell the truth -- in fact, you often can't tell thee truth unless it can be backed up with numbers. It would be interesting to see how much of a bump the Windows launch really brought, and how the trends on the Mac & Windows sides will continue to evolve over time...
Ahh, I see.
I thought it may have been in the sense of "I met Michael Jackson in 1983. He seemed innocent enough at the time."
Or substitute into the same line O.J. Simpson, or Phil Spector, or Robert Blake, or Kobe Bryant, or any other celebrity that has been formally accused of being a less than 100% innocent person.
I've noticed that iTunes.exe does seem to be very sensitive to the amount of horsepower available, and ram in particular.
My fiancee and her sister have near-identical Toshiba laptops. Both have 1.4ghz Celeron chips, both are running WinXPsp1. The software and configuration on the two machines is similar in most respect. The only difference is RAM: my fiancee's has been upgraded to 512mb, while her sister's is at the stock 256mb.
My fiancee's higher ram machine has no problem establishing a connection to my Mac to share my mp3 library.
Her sister's can only establish a connection if no other applications are running (right after booting seems to help), and the playback quality seems to be a bit flaky compared to the other computer.
My Mac, of course, works just fine, but then it would, wouldn't it?
My hunch is that when the specs say that iTunes needs a lot of ram, they really mean it. For whatever reason, a memory bottleneck seems to be enough of a choke to prevent acceptable network performance.
My suggested fix, barring a patch from Apple to make iTunes less resource hungry, was to just buy another stick of ram -- but then it's not my computer... *shrug*
Okay, I'll bite -- why do you say that Sesame Street's Bob seemed innocent "at the time"? Does he have some kind of criminal record?
Uhh, speaking as a naive east coast boy, couldn't it "clearly" be the University of California at San Diego?
This spontaneous commentary thing might not be such a hot idea, eh Michael?
Ouch. Yeah, that's the feature that the 4.0.1 update "fixed"... :-(
Is your Mac running iTunes 4.0.1? I had the same problem, and sharing wouldn't work as long as my Mac was running 4.0. Upgrading to 4.1 fixed the problem immediately.
Well for anyone that delayed "upgrading" to iTunes 4.0.1 because they didn't want to lose the internet sharing capability, the game is over: if you want to share between the Mac & Windows versions of iTunes, you need at least 4.0.1 on the Mac & 4.1 on the Win machine to make it work.
Right now, my fiancee's WinXP machine is happily running iTunes, but it's unable to see any network shared libraries. When I come over to my Mac, I can see her shared library, but if I try to select it I get an error message: 'The shared music library "May's Music" is not compatible with this version of iTunes.'
So for anyone that was clinging on to that version but wants to integrate PCs into the iTunes party, there doesn't seem to be a choice but to upgrade iTunes to 4.0.1 or 4.1 and lose the 'net sharing capability. Bummer.
Hopefully, the tarball I'm making will continue to work alongside the updated version, if I ever decide to share between work & home... :-)
But photos like this can be notoriously deceptive. I saw a fascinating show a few years ago about photographed UFO incidents, and there were some really interesting examples. To name a couple that I still remember:
Now neither of those cases quite apply here of course -- the kid who took the first picture claims to have seen the phenomenon first, then took the photo, so it's not a lens optics issue and there's no reason not to accept his word here.
Still, the lighting conditions were peculiar: it was dusk, and the Concorde -- which flew at an unusually high altitude -- was effectively sunlit from below. Additionally, it looks like it was a pretty cloudy day, so there seems to have been a lot of moisture in the atmosphere for the aircraft to interact with.
Between those three factors -- unusual aircraft, lit from below, with a cloudy sky -- it doesn't surprise me that the visual effect created would be out of step with imagery usually expected.
Barring more information, it seems to me that the less unorthodox interpretation is to accept that this may well have been the Concorde, and not some other aircraft or other "object" or phenomenon.
Do you have some other explanation in mind, or do you just find the suggested explanation unconvincing?
MOD PARENT UP. AND GRANDPARENT.
The real fix for number portability is, of course, some kind of phone number DNS service. If laypeople got a better understanding of what DNS allows for IP networks, and then realized how much nicer that kind of service would make the phone system, no one would care about number portability. A few years ago when I learned about DNS, I thought this was the best change that could happen to the phone system (no more angst over area code changes, etc), but I'd forgotten about it until now.
Where is the thread about this ENUM thing? I'd like to read about it...
That's fsiciaatnng :-)
Anyway, I don't know how things are with Sprint, but I made two big changes to my years-old Cingular plan over the past few months -- first upgraded my phone, then had a line added for my fiancee -- and they didn't make a big deal about the "new activation" clause either time. If you've been a long-time customer, they'll probably be willing to cut you some slack. They may force you to sign up for a multi-year contract, but they probably won't hit you with a fee.
Yeah, but you just described how he's unlike the earlier commenter: he's trying to be at least somewhat anonymous. He may feel that he has enough of a loyal customer base to avoid seeking out new customers, and he definitely doesn't seem to feel it's necessary for him to advertise or publicize his services. Not that there's necessarily a problem there -- I'm sure a lot of people keep their little thriving mom & pop home businesses going this way -- but the parent commenter was describing a much different situation where he's taking on a personal expense to help transition his customers over. The comparison doesn't quite work.
That said, I agree with you -- number portability has a place, and some people would much prefer being able to keep one number than to have to tell people about a new one. Area code changes are annoying enough, having to get people to change cell numbers is even worse.
I've been a happy Cingular customer since the summer of 2000. My original contract was for a year or two (I forget at this point), but I altered my plan several times during the span of that contract and they never gave me a hard time about it. Once the first contract ran out, my plan continued under the plan I was using until I asked them to change it again, and eventually they offered me a free phone upgrade for being a three year customer.
I had no problem signing up for another two year contract last summer, and have already altered my plan twice since then. The first change was a switch from a standard "nights free, days count against your minutes" plan to a cheaper set of "anytime" minutes, because I was never going over the daytime limit anyway -- the operator at Cingular's call center suggested this when she noticed that my calling pattern didn't have any use for 5000 off-peak minutes when I wasn't even using 1000 minutes per month. The plan was cheaper than the one I was under previously, and it better fits my needs -- and it was their idea.
The other plan change made since entering my new contract was when my fiancee cancelled her phone service and signed up for a different line on my account. She has been with several different phone companies and has never been happy with any of them, but I've had Cingular (nee Cellular One) all that time and have never had a complaint.
The only thing that kept her from signing on with my account sooner was the prospect of being able to take her old number to Cingular when portability kicked in at the end of the year, but by the end of her contract she was so fed up with her Death Star Logo provider that she cancelled & switched the day her contract expired. (And as an aside, it's just as well -- by great cooincidence, her new number is one digit off from mine, which is way easier to remember than her old one was :-).
Maybe I've just lucked out, but at this point I continue to be a pretty happy customer with Cingular -- and the ability to change rate plans whenever and however I'd like has been a big part of that. I've seen enough headaches out of the policies with two or three of the other providers that, barring some big changes between now and the next time I'm ready for an upgrade (and maybe number portability wiill have catalyzed some changes by then), I intend to stick with Cingular for a while.
<disclaimer> Your mileage may vary. Selection & service quality may vary by area (I'm in Boston). Aside from being a customer, I am in no way affiliated with Cingular and have nothing to gain by any reader choosing any cell phone company, Cingular or otherwise. If Cingular chooses to pay me for saying nice things about them, I'm not so scrupulous that I wouldn't say "yes" to any offers, but I'm not on their payroll as of this writing. Yadda yadda yadda... </disclaimer>
Is there any particular reason that the original poster mentioned the name of the Czech Republic, rather than the English word "check"? At first I thought it may have been some kind of pun on research done in Prague or something, but no -- a quick scan over the BBC article and I see no mention of any places other than the UK and USA.
Simple, typical Slashdot spelling, or some kind of dangling reference?
THE WORLD MUST KNOW.
Ahh, if only it were a real word though. Perhaps you meant this:
So, "pediculous". Yep, that must be what you meant... ;-)
Just to give another example, my dad is a CPA, and has been using TurboTax to help prepare tax returns for his clients since the late 80s. His annual legal copy of the software is responsible for many tax returns every year, (dozens? I'm not sure, I don't dig through his files, but I know that he works for many families every year) and I'm sure he isn't the only accountant to be using one legally purchased copy of the tax software to prepare returns for all of their clients every year.
I stand happily corrected :-)
Still, it was an exotic standard, if an "official" one. Give me at least that much -- in the end, Apple seems to have been the main & only vendor using it... :-)
No no no! See how I put "proprietary" in quotes? Do you see how I mention that other vendors also use OF? Did you catch how I mentioned that there's nothing stopping AMD from adopting OF on their platform?
I realize that OF is an open standard. Really.
It's just that OF is a de jure standard, formally codified and supported by a variety of vendors, while the x86 spec is a de facto standard, consistent only with itself but, because it happens to be the platform used by 95% or whatever of the market, is the one that is dominant.
The fact that OF is more open kind of doesn't matter if the vast majority of systems out there are using something else... :-/
:-)
You are, of course, exactly right.
Still, it's not as bad as it used to be. As far as I can tell, the only really proprietary parts on a modern Mac are the CPU, motehrboard, the power supply, and maybe the video card. In the case of the video card, it's only "proprietary" because the systems are Open Firmware based (like Sun, SGI, and maybe some others), and the video card has to be able to talk to the rest of the system -- but it uses the same AGP bus that x86 uses, and my impression is that there's no reason that the "Mac" cards wouldn't work just fine if (say) AMD ever designed an Open Firmware based x86 platform.
Beyond that though, it's all standard hardware. Same RAM, same hard drives, same PCI bus for expansion, same peripherals on the USB & Firewire ports. And so on.
It used to be much worse than that, in the days up to the blue & white G3, with the Nubus architecture, "standard but exotic" SCSI bus for hard drives, etc. Moreover, above the hardware level, they've gotten very good about using standard protocols & formats for nearly all of the system, and have offered up their new developments to be used as open standards (e.g. Rendezvous).
While it's annoying that they can get away with charging so much for the proprietary parts that they still control, at least these parts are generally pretty reliablee & most people don't have any problems. And the rest of the system is just so much nicer than anything that could be run on x86 that I for one am willing to take a chance on what Apple has to offer, knowing that if anything does go drastically wrong, the fix can be ridiculously expensive compared to the same repair on the other site.
Everything is a tradeoff, ya know?
It's not so simple to just drop a new power supply into a Mac. The supply on the G4 Powermac is not, as far as I can tell, identical to or compatible with the standard ATX supplies that x86 machines use -- the part in question is both proprietary and expensive. Your advice would be perfectly reasonable if we were talking about an x86 box, but we aren't, and there's the rub.
I had a G4 that refused to boot, and when I brought it to Microcenter to be repaired they informed me that if it was a bad power supply, the part would be something like $200. When I asked if the $30 ATX supplies they have could do they job, the answer was a clear "no" -- which even they seemed disappointed by. In the end, the problem turned out to be the motherboard, not the power, and replacing that would have been about $500. I ended up getting a new G4 instead of paying that much to keep an old machine alive.
Unfortunately, my new Mac has exactly the symptoms that are described in this discussion: normally the machine runs just fine, but every now and then when I reboot it it will just refuse to turn back on. The power light will throb briefly, the power supply fan will spin up, and the machine makes a few other chirps & squeaks -- but it never gets as far as spinning up the hard drives, and the "Mac chimes" never get played. At that point, the fan willl keep spinning until you turn the machine off, but nothing further will happen. However, if it gets past that point -- if the hard drives turn on, and the Mac chimes sound off -- then the machine comes right up and there are, as far as I can tell, no other issues at all.
The only "solution" I've found so far, aside from not turning the machine off if I can help it, is to just be patient: Hit the button, wait for it to start. If it doesn't, turn it back off & wait some more. Try again. if it still doesn't work, wait longer. It seems to help a little bit if I make sure that the machine is completely stopped (no fan noise, etc) before trying to turn it back on again, but that's no guarantee -- it just helps the odds a bit. It's not just the quick turnaround though: once the machine sat off overnight & still wouldn't start up right away in the morning without going through the try, fail, retry nonsense for five or ten minutes.
Elsewhere in this dicussion it was suggested that it may help to hit the Power Management Unit button on the motherboard while the machine is turned off & unplugged. It's worth a try I suppose, but I'm a little unclear as to how this is supposed to help, or if it will help. Another poster points out Apple support document 95039, which seems closer to the mark and definitely sounds promising. I'll have to try those steps & see if it helps...
I'm curious about that too. My brother is a teacher, and I'm curious what he would have to do to take advantage of the discount. Possibly, nothing.
It used to be that companies would offer steep discounts on software for educational customers, but you would have to verify your credentials in order to get that discount (e.g. buy from a campus bookstore, and have to present your student ID at purchase time, etc).
Now though, at least some companies seem to be a bit more lax about this. For example, I regularly see the student edition of Microsoft Office XP advertised in the local newspaper & area stores for around $100 to $150, while the full version -- which I almost never see advertised -- can be more than double that. The student version only has part of the suite, but it's the part that most Office users would want anyway -- Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook. My fiancee bought a copy of this edition when she got her computer a year ago, and the clerk at the register didn't do anything at all to verify if she's actually a student. I assume that most of the people buying this edition of Office aren't actually students, but the fact that it apparently sells much better than the full edition has encouraged Microsoft to avoid slaying this particular golden goose.
Maybe the same is going on with Apple. As far as I can tell, they don't do much or anything to enforce the restrictions on the educational discount program. Maybe they see it as a small leak that allows for a bit higher sales than they would have gotten had such a program not been available; that is to say, if they started enforcing the "are you really a student or educator" rule more closely, they might lose too many sales to be worthwhile.
*shrug* In any case, I'm going to have to talk to my brother, and find out if he's interested in buying an operating system that won't run on any computer in his house... :-)
Amusing, but that actually applied to me at my last job. I wanted to use a Mac as my desktop machine, but they would only requisition new ones for the graphic design department, and I was a sysadmin. The only way I was able to get one for myself was to pull an old beige G3 out of a supply closet. The machine had previously been used as a scanning & print server for said graphic designers, but they were all using new equipment now and the G3 was gathering dust in a closet.
It wasn't too hard to get Jaguar installed, and once up & running the performance really wasn't that bad (especially since most of the work I was doing happened in an SSH session in the Terminal). The machine in question was 300mhz and had 320 mb of ram, which is better than some of the still supported iMacs. The only real problem was that the hard drive was small & crowded, which meant that once the machine started using too much virtual memory, applications would begin to thrash, then crash, and the only fix was a reboot (which would magically restore 30% of the disc space). Putting in another old hard drive helped avoid this most of the time, but ancient SCSI drives with decent capacity weren't easy to find, so I was kind of stuck with this arrangement.
Still, had that machine still been my primary one, I would have liked to upgrade it to Panther when it comes out. But that's not an option (on several levels), so c'est la vie. I'm sure that there are some others in this kind of situation though, and now they'll have to accept Jaguar as their ceiling OS. There are valid reasons for this (the beige G3s probably had archaic firmware that Panther wouldn't be able to work with), but it's still going to be unfortunate for some people.
Oh well, there's always Linux :-)