Yes, cool looking is good, cost effective high-quality production helps, but if the underlying functioning of the device is bad or mediocre, no cool looks will help! Under his CEO-ship Apple was run down to just barely surviving by his strategy & decisions.
Nokia has acquired a bad bad name in user support - in my region anyway. It failed to support its various OSs to the point where people bought a phone only to see it's platform abandoned months later. Burned customers look elsewhere! Apple's secret apart from great design, is a long term (free) support relationship to allow people to serious fall in love with the product. Even Microsoft has not achieved this, instead luring users with an ever changing way of doing stuff. In case of Nokia's demise - good riddance, well deserved.
RELIABILITY & RELIABILITY. The tangible quality of something which exists in the real universe beats the elusive bits. I think the community of IT engineers is to blame here - we need to do a better job. Especially software is far too dodgy!
forgot this aspect: Hydrogen generation - of course the source energy comes from the sun and the waves in the sea (also sun enegry) - a perfect marriage with electro voltaic cells and wave power generation.
Biofuels - wrong direction! Having a high value commodity compete with a low value one from the same resource in a planning and regulation nightmare! Not even considering the pending environmental desaster. But we have the solution: Hydrogen. It's one of the few short-term energy carriers readily available - days to months conversion cycle versus yearly or worse for biofuel or millions of years for fossils and billions for nuclear! Accordingly affected is the enrgy balance on the planet. Hydrogen production has a very efficient conversion rate - way beyond the alternatives for transportable energy. It also has extremely high energy density, good for travelling distances. H is volatile in concentration but not for long as is disperses harmlessly in seconds. This technolgy is very challenging to energy companies as its generation is essentially low tech. Africa can have its own plants - not good for American economy and that is the reason why there is no push towards it. We'll probably miss out.
In the mid 90's I personally heard Bill Gates state (at a developer address in Sydney) that: 'our main competion are not third parties but existing Windows OSs - they don't wear out' he went on to say: ' we will fix that in the future'. Say no more...
Now really! This is just ONE opinion of a single person. The fact that Jim Louderback has a platform to speak from doesn't mean he has ANY qualifications to make these judgements. In fact people like him keep disqualifying themselves all the time by their own embarrassing writings. Nothing but a Rant in this case!
Seems like a desperate move to me. I think market forces worked well for us users in this case - Seagate disappearing that is. I had stopped employing Seagate drives because they proved the most fault-prone by far. Both Quantum & Maxtor (now merged) had minor bad phases years ago, but both acknowledged and addressed problems right away. Badies in my book are (in order of badness): Seagate, Fujitsu, Hitachi/IBM. My fav is still Maxtor, with the least problems over many years, but I hear that their recent 160 SATA drives may be trouble...
It works as long as you have some flexibility with configuring. I can manage my domain on-line and have done this: first I specified a forward address for ALL received email. Then I created 5 rules for specific email names to forward to a second real address. The latter I check continuously. The first one occaisionally - just to make sure it catches nothing important. I get 100odd mails on the first address daily and at this stage only non-spam at the second. In case one of the good addresses starts getting spammed, I would simply eliminate it from the forwarding rules and replace it with a new one. Another trick that I have recently implemented is to have the spam-forward address configured to auto-reply with a suggestion to look at a webpage which displays a jpeg (!!!) of a valid address - to enable a human email poster to pick up a working address - this is a 'redundant' address (mail123@domain.com) just in case the robots get clever!
unless your Powerbook has USB2 stay away from anything but Firewire for the interface, HP has notoriously bad scanner software for Macs, Canon is much better and it's got to be single sided sheetfed (doublesided = no end of trouble). As a prep copy double sided material to single sheet. Scan at 100-150 dpi resolution and use Acrobat 5 or 6 to make the pdfs. If you're good at scripting (or ask a Uni script wiz) you can string it all together with AppleScript. If mastered you will become the Univerity PDF Producer! Don't underestimate that title - doing what you intend to is unique, extremely useful and will be highly valued!
Biggest drawback is running cost - the bulb alone costs $0.5-1 per hour. Hard to say what else wears out. I found pictures from LCD based projectors to hazy to enjoy. DLP pictures are better but if you have a powerful soumd system it can upset the little mirrors on the DLP and you see 'waves' as the sub booms. All this is not ideal yet. I'd like to see laser scanning projectors before I make my move.
Sometimes I find it curious to see you Americans struggle with your own prerogative: the free market enterprise. Don't you think that market forces will sort things out? Of course if your government (as well as other countries') keeps interfering by giving Microsoft special privileges it does skew things severely. So tell your government to foster equal competition between all players - let it NOT succumb to industry pressures to introduce 'standards' that favour a single player. Microsoft has excellent practices in persuading users to adopt and disseminate their formats. This is in no-one's interest other than Microsoft's. This is all trivial of course and self evident...
This may fit the bill: an Apple eMac with an Airport card. It can be setup as a router, you have bandwidth control, you can monitor what's going on and you can restrict access very effectivly I believe. Best would be if you could borrow one to try out.
Otherwise the Neatgear consumer routers can exclusive acces to entires in tables of MAC addresses - you could allow access on a subscriber basis, to be renewed once a month or so. I would also display the current password on the menu and change it daily.
Why such fuss about a journo having it off with himself! The most skippable of articles surely must be journalist's opinions, "investigations" or (dare they call it) "research". The press and web is full of these convulsions of the lowest of the low. These creatures are on par with salivating real estate agents and noise-spewing car salesmen. Utterly irrelevant!
lets face it - books were invented for paper publishing. Portable pixel screen devices have one page with little density in comparison. The mass of users determines what computers, pda's, cell phones etc are used for in an evolutionary process. It appears to me that the new devices are being used for abbreviated reading - notes and 'bites' of information - fast changing day to day stuff - that's where their strengths lie. Ebooks are a format pushed by industry, bound to fail like most such things by mass scruteny.
I suppose people for whom life is about pool better stay with games & virus boxes indeed. Meanwhile we Macophiles get on with our business and prosper...
If your congress members are elected as a result of campaign support by an industry and these members subsequently push pro industry issues, does this not mean that they might have deceived the voting public? This is assuming their official pre-election platform did not include their intended agenda to support the sponsor's aims. I believe this is a problem in governemets all over the planet. What can be done to hold these thugs accountable?
12" iBook quality is only so-so - thermal problems, screen backlight and the screen hinge. Thaey VERY hard to work on too. I look after some for clients. The old roundish ones don't go wrong much. The 17" iBook sofar has been great - none of the probs as with 12"s. In PC laptops I prefer Thinkpads - not the consumer series (i-series etc) though. The older R31s are pretty reliable and feel solid - they are being discounted in this country - $2000 AUS.
I can confirm the 600 series battery issue. I used to recommend Thinkpads in favour to other LapTops because of IBM's excellent local service. This has changed dramatically in the last year. LTs now are serviced interstate and usually take week or more to come back. This is as bad as Apple's Powerbook service and simply unacceptable for business users. I'd rather sell a No-brand LT now for the price of the average IBM repair job - users just take the chance and simply replace the LT when broken. I can see the day when chinese branded LTs cost less the an IBM battery.
after having looked at a number of the dedicated remotes I have finally settled on the Palm IIIxe with Omniremote ($20). This is one astounding combination. I am surprised it hasn't come up in any serious review. To me it beats them all! Not only can it learn any command by pointing the original remote device towards the Palm but it allows you to string commands to "Macros" assign these to freeform buttons on a number of screens that you can call up in a menu. And the best is that Omniremote can trigger macros according to timers. Anyway I'm wrapped!
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Yes, cool looking is good, cost effective high-quality production helps, but if the underlying functioning of the device is bad or mediocre, no cool looks will help! Under his CEO-ship Apple was run down to just barely surviving by his strategy & decisions.
Nokia has acquired a bad bad name in user support - in my region anyway. It failed to support its various OSs to the point where people bought a phone only to see it's platform abandoned months later. Burned customers look elsewhere! Apple's secret apart from great design, is a long term (free) support relationship to allow people to serious fall in love with the product. Even Microsoft has not achieved this, instead luring users with an ever changing way of doing stuff. In case of Nokia's demise - good riddance, well deserved.
It's really important that such legislation is tested. I'm glad though, that it's not in my backyard!
RELIABILITY & RELIABILITY. The tangible quality of something which exists in the real universe beats the elusive bits. I think the community of IT engineers is to blame here - we need to do a better job. Especially software is far too dodgy!
forgot this aspect:
Hydrogen generation - of course the source energy comes from the sun and the waves in the sea (also sun enegry) - a perfect marriage with electro voltaic cells and wave power generation.
Biofuels - wrong direction! Having a high value commodity compete with a low value one from the same resource in a planning and regulation nightmare! Not even considering the pending environmental desaster. But we have the solution: Hydrogen. It's one of the few short-term energy carriers readily available - days to months conversion cycle versus yearly or worse for biofuel or millions of years for fossils and billions for nuclear! Accordingly affected is the enrgy balance on the planet. Hydrogen production has a very efficient conversion rate - way beyond the alternatives for transportable energy. It also has extremely high energy density, good for travelling distances. H is volatile in concentration but not for long as is disperses harmlessly in seconds. This technolgy is very challenging to energy companies as its generation is essentially low tech. Africa can have its own plants - not good for American economy and that is the reason why there is no push towards it. We'll probably miss out.
In the mid 90's I personally heard Bill Gates state (at a developer address in Sydney) that: 'our main competion are not third parties but existing Windows OSs - they don't wear out' he went on to say: ' we will fix that in the future'. Say no more ...
Now really! This is just ONE opinion of a single person. The fact that Jim Louderback has a platform to speak from doesn't mean he has ANY qualifications to make these judgements. In fact people like him keep disqualifying themselves all the time by their own embarrassing writings. Nothing but a Rant in this case!
Seems like a desperate move to me. I think market forces worked well for us users in this case - Seagate disappearing that is. I had stopped employing Seagate drives because they proved the most fault-prone by far. Both Quantum & Maxtor (now merged) had minor bad phases years ago, but both acknowledged and addressed problems right away. Badies in my book are (in order of badness): Seagate, Fujitsu, Hitachi/IBM. My fav is still Maxtor, with the least problems over many years, but I hear that their recent 160 SATA drives may be trouble ...
It works as long as you have some flexibility with configuring. I can manage my domain on-line and have done this: first I specified a forward address for ALL received email. Then I created 5 rules for specific email names to forward to a second real address. The latter I check continuously. The first one occaisionally - just to make sure it catches nothing important. I get 100odd mails on the first address daily and at this stage only non-spam at the second. In case one of the good addresses starts getting spammed, I would simply eliminate it from the forwarding rules and replace it with a new one. Another trick that I have recently implemented is to have the spam-forward address configured to auto-reply with a suggestion to look at a webpage which displays a jpeg (!!!) of a valid address - to enable a human email poster to pick up a working address - this is a 'redundant' address (mail123@domain.com) just in case the robots get clever!
unless your Powerbook has USB2 stay away from anything but Firewire for the interface, HP has notoriously bad scanner software for Macs, Canon is much better and it's got to be single sided sheetfed (doublesided = no end of trouble). As a prep copy double sided material to single sheet. Scan at 100-150 dpi resolution and use Acrobat 5 or 6 to make the pdfs. If you're good at scripting (or ask a Uni script wiz) you can string it all together with AppleScript. If mastered you will become the Univerity PDF Producer! Don't underestimate that title - doing what you intend to is unique, extremely useful and will be highly valued!
Biggest drawback is running cost - the bulb alone costs $0.5-1 per hour. Hard to say what else wears out. I found pictures from LCD based projectors to hazy to enjoy. DLP pictures are better but if you have a powerful soumd system it can upset the little mirrors on the DLP and you see 'waves' as the sub booms. All this is not ideal yet. I'd like to see laser scanning projectors before I make my move.
Sometimes I find it curious to see you Americans struggle with your own prerogative: the free market enterprise. Don't you think that market forces will sort things out? Of course if your government (as well as other countries') keeps interfering by giving Microsoft special privileges it does skew things severely. So tell your government to foster equal competition between all players - let it NOT succumb to industry pressures to introduce 'standards' that favour a single player. Microsoft has excellent practices in persuading users to adopt and disseminate their formats. This is in no-one's interest other than Microsoft's. This is all trivial of course and self evident ...
This may fit the bill: an Apple eMac with an Airport card. It can be setup as a router, you have bandwidth control, you can monitor what's going on and you can restrict access very effectivly I believe. Best would be if you could borrow one to try out.
Otherwise the Neatgear consumer routers can exclusive acces to entires in tables of MAC addresses - you could allow access on a subscriber basis, to be renewed once a month or so. I would also display the current password on the menu and change it daily.
Why such fuss about a journo having it off with himself! The most skippable of articles surely must be journalist's opinions, "investigations" or (dare they call it) "research". The press and web is full of these convulsions of the lowest of the low. These creatures are on par with salivating real estate agents and noise-spewing car salesmen. Utterly irrelevant!
lets face it - books were invented for paper publishing. Portable pixel screen devices have one page with little density in comparison. The mass of users determines what computers, pda's, cell phones etc are used for in an evolutionary process. It appears to me that the new devices are being used for abbreviated reading - notes and 'bites' of information - fast changing day to day stuff - that's where their strengths lie. Ebooks are a format pushed by industry, bound to fail like most such things by mass scruteny.
I suppose people for whom life is about pool better stay with games & virus boxes indeed. Meanwhile we Macophiles get on with our business and prosper ...
If your congress members are elected as a result of campaign support by an industry and these members subsequently push pro industry issues, does this not mean that they might have deceived the voting public? This is assuming their official pre-election platform did not include their intended agenda to support the sponsor's aims. I believe this is a problem in governemets all over the planet. What can be done to hold these thugs accountable?
12" iBook quality is only so-so - thermal problems, screen backlight and the screen hinge. Thaey VERY hard to work on too. I look after some for clients. The old roundish ones don't go wrong much. The 17" iBook sofar has been great - none of the probs as with 12"s. In PC laptops I prefer Thinkpads - not the consumer series (i-series etc) though. The older R31s are pretty reliable and feel solid - they are being discounted in this country - $2000 AUS.
I can confirm the 600 series battery issue. I used to recommend Thinkpads in favour to other LapTops because of IBM's excellent local service. This has changed dramatically in the last year. LTs now are serviced interstate and usually take week or more to come back. This is as bad as Apple's Powerbook service and simply unacceptable for business users. I'd rather sell a No-brand LT now for the price of the average IBM repair job - users just take the chance and simply replace the LT when broken. I can see the day when chinese branded LTs cost less the an IBM battery.
after having looked at a number of the dedicated remotes I have finally settled on the Palm IIIxe with Omniremote ($20). This is one astounding combination. I am surprised it hasn't come up in any serious review. To me it beats them all! Not only can it learn any command by pointing the original remote device towards the Palm but it allows you to string commands to "Macros" assign these to freeform buttons on a number of screens that you can call up in a menu. And the best is that Omniremote can trigger macros according to timers. Anyway I'm wrapped!