I can't tell the difference between a good product and a lousy one. Since there clearly couldn't possibly be anything wrong with ME, it must be all you people who are deluded. Therefore I shall use my rapier with to puncture you.
And you can tell something about a fellow with a Mustang and a Flowmaster 2. That is to say, he's someone who likes to have people look at him and think, 'gee, he must have a big...'
Yeah. Anyway. (It'd be different if they were at least decent cars. Oops, I forgot, you can't tell the difference.)
Indeed, and the reason for this is that the cloners were very limited in what they were allowed to do. They weren't allowed to design their own motherboards, for example, but rather had to buy them from Apple.
First: that's misleading. They bought motherboard DESIGNS from Apple, not motherboards.
Second: let's just look at this for a second. One of the StarMax machines included a custom-made PCI card with ethernet and something else (video? SCSI?) on it. The drivers were from Motorola. When the next version of the Mac OS came out, the card simply stopped working because of the way they'd written the drivers. Apple was called over the next week by hundreds of irate StarMax owners.
But I'm sure that if they had just been able to design their own motherboards, everything would have just worked fine and there wouldn't have been any problems with compatibility or anything.
As for the idea that the PowerTowers were the end-all and be-all of Mac-hood, only two things to say. One: they were cheaply made. Things broke. Hardware failed. The case was a generic PC case with flimsy drive-bay doors with plastic fittings that broke off under the slightest bit of pressure. The actual basic design was nice, but the execution *sucked*. And two, especially at that year's MacWorld Expo, PowerComputing sold significantly below cost, because they wanted to entice as many people away from buying a high-end Mac and into their camp. When Apple had really hired people on to cover the low-end while they tried to get the high-end business. Now, you can decide that this was a slimy thing for Apple to do, to try to get someone to shore up their weaknesses rather than steal their best customers. And that's a valid point of view, I suppose. But when it turned around and Apple saw a whole lot of lost sales to people who otherwise would have definitely been buying the highest-end Mac kit, they got miffed.
I would've too. And having worked on a number of Mac clones back then, as a techie, I have to say that none of them were engineered even as well as the PM8500. Which in and of itself was one of the most bone-headed piece of engineering as I have ever seen in all my days.
But at least it was STURDY bone-headed engineering.
There are several firewire RAIDs available, including one five-drive RAID-5 enclosure that, according to the tests I've seen, can burst more bandwidth than FW400 can provide.
Fortunately, it's a FW800 device. Or it can use SATA, though there's not much of a speed advantage for that over FW800 in this instance. It has USB2, too, but they suggested that you not bother. (The drives it uses internally are regular old ATA133, not SATA.)
Available at fwdepot.com. No, I'm not an employee, just a very happy customer.
You know, it's amazing how few geeks are willing to do that little thing. They've gotten used to being 'too smart' for the built-in help to be useful, so they never even use it when they've got a really simple, basic question. It's sad, because it often saves boatloads of time, and one can usually tell the difference between questions that will be answered in it and questions that won't.
Not always, though. I was setting up Mac OS X Server a while back, and I was banging my head against trying to get NAT (well, PAT, actually) working. I was configuring one thing at a time, hadn't gotten as far as email or firewall or web or anything like that, was just working on DHCP and NAT. Machines would get IP addresses but they couldn't get out to see the internet.
I was really getting annoyed, and before I went off and started googling for the answer, I opened up help and typed 'Why the goddamn hell can't I get NAT to see my network connection you pile of crap?'.
It gave me back a list of answers, the second of which was 'Can't Share Network Connection Using Nat', where it cheerfully informed me that since the firewall packet diverter was an integral part of NAT, it wouldn't work without the firewall service turned on.
Now, admittedly, it would've been a lot nicer if, when I'd turned on NAT with the firewall off, the system had said, 'Whoa, cowboy, that just won't work!' In fact, I think it's totally insane that it didn't. But I've got to admit, swearing at my computer in sheer frustration and having the computer, in response, tell me exactly how to fix the problem... that's a golden moment.
We've played a bit with software firewire RAID, but we're a lot happier with our firewire hardware RAID systems. RAID 5 three-drive case, hot-swappable drives with auto-rebuild-on-the-fly (even if the host computer is down, though of course it should never have to be). Cost? Under $900 for the case. Or if you want a five-drive solution, I think it's around $1400, and for that you get a case that is connectible via USB2, FW800, or SATA, and can be used as a mini-SAN since it can be connected via FW800 and SATA to two different computers at the same time. Pretty sweet.
We're using ours on Linux machines, and despite the hassles of getting firewire up and running, once we finally did (after two weeks of work), it works a treat; not a single problem. And of course it works great with our Macs and PCs as well. No extra software needed, just plug and play.
The Apple XServe RAID is cheaper and probably better-built if you're going for ten drives, but if you're going for three to five, or adding slowly, the firewire RAID cases are really, really sweet.
Firewire Depot has them, fwdepot.com. And no, I don't work there, I'm just a very, very satisfied customer.
I'm sitting here staring at a cute little thing I got for $8 at Radio Shack. It is a small black wall-wart (AC/DC adaptor, but this one is very, very light) with nothing but a little green light and a USB connector. It provides no-data powered USB for charging things.
Another alternative, if you really care that much, is to set up a server on the other end of the wireless network as a VPN server.
I did it just to see how well it would work, using my Mac OS X Server machine as the VPN server and my Airport-equipped laptop as the VPN client. It works just fine, and it only took about 5 minutes to set up. (But then, most of the rest (NOT all) of Mac OS X Server took about 20 minutes to set up in total, including installation, so that shouldn't be too surprising. The exception being the firewall, which has some profoundly looney defaults.)
Two electrolytic capacitors that dried out and went bad.
Now, that said, I have the original Airport and it still works fine after, well, what, three or four years of use? (I think I got it sometime in 2000 but I don't recall for sure.)
You stream music from your computer through your wireless network to your Airport Express. Then the music has to have SOME WAY to get from the Express to your stereo. That way is (for the vast majority of people) a eighth-inch stereo to dual RCA cable, or (for a few people) an optical cable.
I can see not including the optical cable, but a good 6 foot (or even 3-foot) eighth-inch to dual RCA cable, which couldn't cost Apple more than 15 cents, would have been a no-brainer. Everyone who uses this item as a music source for their stereo will need such a cable, except for those fussy few who have an optical in on their stereo. And probably even some of them will.
Yes, some people already have one. Yes, the rest can run down to radio shack. But what if you buy it at 8:45 on a saturday night, bring it home, and unwrap the thing. It's not like Apple to not have everything you really need in the box, ready to go. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth of the person doing the buying if they are all psyched up to try the new toy and they have to go shopping. It's 'batteries not included' on Christmas morning. It's just not wise. It makes me wonder why they did it.
In 10.2 and possibly 10.1 (and maybe the first one or two releases of 10.3?) Apple did put stuff into/usr/local. They don't now. All these people shouting 'they do!' 'they don't!' might consider that they could both be right.
And, since Apple did that when fink was setting up,/usr/local was NOT a good place for fink to install, because there were definitely things to be overwritten in there.
If my iMac keyboard gets a coke spilled in it I just pay $30 to get a new USB keyboard. If my iBook gets a coke spilled in it I'm without a computer for a week or worse, my shit 1-year Apple warranty ran out and I have to buy a whole new computer.
Well, actually: the powerbooks and ibooks are pretty good at keeping the keyboard isolated from the rest of the machine. I've seen three spills (including one of my own) and none have damaged anything other than the keyboard. However, replacement keyboard parts are still fairly expensive (unless you buy them on eBay or Craig's List), and the warrantee doesn't include acts of stupidity.
Mind you, the Applecare 3-year warrantee is a very good idea for laptops.
Believe me, I have a laptop where one of the keys broke and my warranty ran out. It will cost me $80 (plus FedEx shipping) to get a replacement keyboard and to install it myself I need to remove about 30 screws and every single component.
Of course, you neglect to mention that that's not an Apple laptop, because all the Apple laptops have easy-to-remove keyboards.
The iBook uses some back-assward tiny laptop drive which maxes out at 80gb and would run me about $350 from a catalog.
Ah yes, the back-assward 'standard laptop hard drive'. Which tops out at 80 gigs for $250. Or you could just get a damned external firewire case for $30, and that $150 hard drive you mention. And gee, if your machine breaks, you have all your important data in your external drive, which isn't a bad idea anyway.
The iMac hard drive spins at 7200 rpm. The drive for the iBook probably spins at less than 2400 to 3600 rpm (sloooooow application launch and disk cache).
You make my head hurt. But I do love the idea of a 2400 RPM hard drive. FYI, the iBook is a 4200 RPM hard drive, and most iMacs were 5400 RPM hard drives.
The iMac uses GeForce 5200 Ultra desktop graphics. The iBook uses Radeon 9200 Mobility. There is a very large difference there.
Actually, it's a modest difference, but a difference nonetheless. If you're a hardcore gamer, I'd go with a G5 tower because neither of these is good enough for you. If you're not, I'd say that either of them is.
The iMac includes a SuperDrive that can burn DVDs. The iBook has a normal combo drive that can only burn CDs.
Well, actually, the iMac that was being compared here only had a combo drive, same as the iBook. The iMac that had the superdrive was more expensive... just like the iBook with the superdrive.
The cost to upgrade the RAM in an iBook is nearly twice the cost of buying RAM for an iMac.
Adding a 512 mb module to an iBook: $89 Adding a 512 mb module to an iMac: $89 Noticing that both take the EXACT SAME RAM modules: priceless
(Actually, some G4 iMacs took PC2700, some took PC2100, and some took SDRAM (133), but they all took SO-DIMMs. The G4 iBooks all take PC2100 SO-DIMMs.)
I wonder if anyone actually believed anything you said? I suspect that most slashdotters giggled and tuned out when they saw you talking about 2400 rpm hard drives, but you never know.
You did. However, that's not to say it was true. Apple's sales figures indicate that their iMac sales were significantly better than analysts were saying they were, and the analysts were where you were hearing about the poor sales figures.
I try to point out stupidity wherever I see it. This is bogus.
The windows sites are all unvetted off-the-cuff posted comments, like Slashdot. macintouch.com takes reader submissions, EDITS them for spelling and grammar, tosses out the lousiest ones, and posts them.
This mostly explains the higher readability quotient. And the fact that people are trying to work up to the level of the previous posts explains the rest, and also explains the larger vocabulary.
Basically, this is a totally bogus way of proving something that we all know is true anyway.:-) - my first-ever smilie on slashdot.
You've run XP acceptably on 6 year old machines? Well, you are probably the only one in the world. Many PC-compatible 6 year old machines are limited in RAM to between 128 megs or so, which is not enough for XP. Basically, our three-year-old laptops (Dell business machiens, limited to 256 megs of RAM) are bad enough; I can't imagine what you'd do with a 400 mHz machine with 128 megs of RAM running XP. That's assuming it's still working; 2/3 of our three-year old (Dell) laptops have failed more than once in their third year of operation. Once the extended warrantee is up, they're getting pitched. On the other hand, all our Macs are doing just fine, except the laptop that got abused by an airline baggage handler. (Which I won't claim is anything other than luck... if you've got ten heavily used computers of any kind in a company and none of them have gone in for service in over three years, you're just plain lucky.)
As for apple locking things out of the BIOS, well, you're right that there are some six-year-old Macs that won't run Mac OS X without your using some little tricks to get them to work. However, MOST six-year-old Macs (the first generation of iMacs, the PowerBooks, the Blue & White PowerMac which was introduced in 1998) work fine with it, and all of them will take at least 512 mb of RAM, which is plenty. It's hard for me to blame Apple for not supporting the vintage 1997 (that would be seven years old, though some were sold in 1998) beige G3s, with their onboard SCSI, their ADB-connected keyboards and mice, and the (pathetic) Rage II+ graphics chips that many of them had. If you want them to work, you can get them to work, Apple just makes it clear that they're not supporting them.
Whereas if you buy a retail version of XP and install it on a 7-year-old PC and you call up Microsoft, they'll be happy to spend as many hours as you want on the phone with you to get it up and running. On your dime. Just remember that half your hardware is probably not supported by XP/2000 drivers, and that the tech support phone call is liable to cost you as much as one of those ultra-cheap PCs.
The problem with our full-time lawmaking body isn't that they think they need to continually make new laws. They often do; the world changes quite a bit. I might agree that they don't need to make quite as many as they do, but they certainly do need to make them.
The problem is that they never get rid of the old, useless, and ridiculous ones, nor update any of the old ones for new situations. So, for example, the state of California can sue Greenpeace for interacting with boats in harbor under a law that was intended solely to keep whores from going out to boats at anchor in the nineteenth century and plying their trade.
An apostrophe is used in a possessive. Always, with two exceptions. (This is current usage in the United States, as defined by the most recent version of Strunk & White. There are other opinions, but yours isn't even on the radar.)
The first exception is irregular pronoun possessives, such as 'its', 'her', 'their', 'my', and so forth. The only one of those that is confusing is 'its', unless you find it necessary to say 'their's bike'
Jason's bike is bigger than her bike, but my bike's tires are bigger than its entire frame. (Which is actually not a great example, because it's not 100% clear what the 'its' is referring to, but oh well.)
The second exception is the possessive form of a plural noun that ends in s. A decent but not perfect guideline here is that if you pronounce the possessive, the word ends in apostrophe-s, whereas if you don't, it doesn't.
If you're a normal American, you pronounce those both the same way, despite the fact that one is the possessive of dress and one is the possessive of dresses.
So, the dress's buttons [one dress] were ripped off in a freak salami accident.
She wanted to find the dresses' manufacturer [several dresses] but he had been deported to South America for execrable taste.
More examples:
My brother's [one brother] earlobes need to be waxed again.
My brothers' [several brothers] shares of the inheritance are currently sitting in a bank in Nigeria.
The media's terrible liberal bias was never more evident than when they all cooperated to destroy Al Gore. [Media is a plural, but since it doesn't end with an s, it gets an apostrophe-s. Same with, for example, women's, men's, etc.]
Where do names come into it? Well, there are some weird things with plural last names (the Joneses' car? The Jones's car? The Joneses's car?) but on the whole... nowhere.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. Anyway. (It'd be different if they were at least decent cars. Oops, I forgot, you can't tell the difference.)
-fred
Safari does a great job on that page, though.
-fred
Second: let's just look at this for a second. One of the StarMax machines included a custom-made PCI card with ethernet and something else (video? SCSI?) on it. The drivers were from Motorola. When the next version of the Mac OS came out, the card simply stopped working because of the way they'd written the drivers. Apple was called over the next week by hundreds of irate StarMax owners.
But I'm sure that if they had just been able to design their own motherboards, everything would have just worked fine and there wouldn't have been any problems with compatibility or anything.
As for the idea that the PowerTowers were the end-all and be-all of Mac-hood, only two things to say. One: they were cheaply made. Things broke. Hardware failed. The case was a generic PC case with flimsy drive-bay doors with plastic fittings that broke off under the slightest bit of pressure. The actual basic design was nice, but the execution *sucked*. And two, especially at that year's MacWorld Expo, PowerComputing sold significantly below cost, because they wanted to entice as many people away from buying a high-end Mac and into their camp. When Apple had really hired people on to cover the low-end while they tried to get the high-end business. Now, you can decide that this was a slimy thing for Apple to do, to try to get someone to shore up their weaknesses rather than steal their best customers. And that's a valid point of view, I suppose. But when it turned around and Apple saw a whole lot of lost sales to people who otherwise would have definitely been buying the highest-end Mac kit, they got miffed.
I would've too. And having worked on a number of Mac clones back then, as a techie, I have to say that none of them were engineered even as well as the PM8500. Which in and of itself was one of the most bone-headed piece of engineering as I have ever seen in all my days.
But at least it was STURDY bone-headed engineering.
-fred
There are several firewire RAIDs available, including one five-drive RAID-5 enclosure that, according to the tests I've seen, can burst more bandwidth than FW400 can provide.
Fortunately, it's a FW800 device. Or it can use SATA, though there's not much of a speed advantage for that over FW800 in this instance. It has USB2, too, but they suggested that you not bother. (The drives it uses internally are regular old ATA133, not SATA.)
Available at fwdepot.com. No, I'm not an employee, just a very happy customer.
-fred
So, you mean, actually use the 'help' command?
You know, it's amazing how few geeks are willing to do that little thing. They've gotten used to being 'too smart' for the built-in help to be useful, so they never even use it when they've got a really simple, basic question. It's sad, because it often saves boatloads of time, and one can usually tell the difference between questions that will be answered in it and questions that won't.
Not always, though. I was setting up Mac OS X Server a while back, and I was banging my head against trying to get NAT (well, PAT, actually) working. I was configuring one thing at a time, hadn't gotten as far as email or firewall or web or anything like that, was just working on DHCP and NAT. Machines would get IP addresses but they couldn't get out to see the internet.
I was really getting annoyed, and before I went off and started googling for the answer, I opened up help and typed 'Why the goddamn hell can't I get NAT to see my network connection you pile of crap?'.
It gave me back a list of answers, the second of which was 'Can't Share Network Connection Using Nat', where it cheerfully informed me that since the firewall packet diverter was an integral part of NAT, it wouldn't work without the firewall service turned on.
Now, admittedly, it would've been a lot nicer if, when I'd turned on NAT with the firewall off, the system had said, 'Whoa, cowboy, that just won't work!' In fact, I think it's totally insane that it didn't. But I've got to admit, swearing at my computer in sheer frustration and having the computer, in response, tell me exactly how to fix the problem... that's a golden moment.
-fred
We've played a bit with software firewire RAID, but we're a lot happier with our firewire hardware RAID systems. RAID 5 three-drive case, hot-swappable drives with auto-rebuild-on-the-fly (even if the host computer is down, though of course it should never have to be). Cost? Under $900 for the case. Or if you want a five-drive solution, I think it's around $1400, and for that you get a case that is connectible via USB2, FW800, or SATA, and can be used as a mini-SAN since it can be connected via FW800 and SATA to two different computers at the same time. Pretty sweet.
We're using ours on Linux machines, and despite the hassles of getting firewire up and running, once we finally did (after two weeks of work), it works a treat; not a single problem. And of course it works great with our Macs and PCs as well. No extra software needed, just plug and play.
The Apple XServe RAID is cheaper and probably better-built if you're going for ten drives, but if you're going for three to five, or adding slowly, the firewire RAID cases are really, really sweet.
Firewire Depot has them, fwdepot.com. And no, I don't work there, I'm just a very, very satisfied customer.
-fred
...Amazon.com?
They have these things called CDs...
-fred
I'm sitting here staring at a cute little thing I got for $8 at Radio Shack. It is a small black wall-wart (AC/DC adaptor, but this one is very, very light) with nothing but a little green light and a USB connector. It provides no-data powered USB for charging things.
It came with a charger kit for cell phones.
-fred
Another alternative, if you really care that much, is to set up a server on the other end of the wireless network as a VPN server.
I did it just to see how well it would work, using my Mac OS X Server machine as the VPN server and my Airport-equipped laptop as the VPN client. It works just fine, and it only took about 5 minutes to set up. (But then, most of the rest (NOT all) of Mac OS X Server took about 20 minutes to set up in total, including installation, so that shouldn't be too surprising. The exception being the firewall, which has some profoundly looney defaults.)
-fred
Two electrolytic capacitors that dried out and went bad.
Now, that said, I have the original Airport and it still works fine after, well, what, three or four years of use? (I think I got it sometime in 2000 but I don't recall for sure.)
-fred
It supports Ogg just fine. It can stream any format that QuickTime can read.
Honestly. I'm all for little jokes, but don't let's be misinformed, shall we?
-fred
Okay, let's go through this one more time.
You stream music from your computer through your wireless network to your Airport Express. Then the music has to have SOME WAY to get from the Express to your stereo. That way is (for the vast majority of people) a eighth-inch stereo to dual RCA cable, or (for a few people) an optical cable.
I can see not including the optical cable, but a good 6 foot (or even 3-foot) eighth-inch to dual RCA cable, which couldn't cost Apple more than 15 cents, would have been a no-brainer. Everyone who uses this item as a music source for their stereo will need such a cable, except for those fussy few who have an optical in on their stereo. And probably even some of them will.
Yes, some people already have one. Yes, the rest can run down to radio shack. But what if you buy it at 8:45 on a saturday night, bring it home, and unwrap the thing. It's not like Apple to not have everything you really need in the box, ready to go. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth of the person doing the buying if they are all psyched up to try the new toy and they have to go shopping. It's 'batteries not included' on Christmas morning. It's just not wise. It makes me wonder why they did it.
-fred
-fred
Canada is (apparently) just right.
-fred
Would you settle for a small fleet ill-tempered Toyota Celica? (Celicas? Celicae?)
-fred
In 10.2 and possibly 10.1 (and maybe the first one or two releases of 10.3?) Apple did put stuff into /usr/local. They don't now. All these people shouting 'they do!' 'they don't!' might consider that they could both be right.
/usr/local was NOT a good place for fink to install, because there were definitely things to be overwritten in there.
And, since Apple did that when fink was setting up,
-fred
MkLinux was still in active development well into the life cycle of the G3.
-fred
Mind you, the Applecare 3-year warrantee is a very good idea for laptops.Of course, you neglect to mention that that's not an Apple laptop, because all the Apple laptops have easy-to-remove keyboards.Ah yes, the back-assward 'standard laptop hard drive'. Which tops out at 80 gigs for $250. Or you could just get a damned external firewire case for $30, and that $150 hard drive you mention. And gee, if your machine breaks, you have all your important data in your external drive, which isn't a bad idea anyway.You make my head hurt. But I do love the idea of a 2400 RPM hard drive. FYI, the iBook is a 4200 RPM hard drive, and most iMacs were 5400 RPM hard drives.Actually, it's a modest difference, but a difference nonetheless. If you're a hardcore gamer, I'd go with a G5 tower because neither of these is good enough for you. If you're not, I'd say that either of them is.Well, actually, the iMac that was being compared here only had a combo drive, same as the iBook. The iMac that had the superdrive was more expensive... just like the iBook with the superdrive.Adding a 512 mb module to an iBook: $89
Adding a 512 mb module to an iMac: $89
Noticing that both take the EXACT SAME RAM modules: priceless
(Actually, some G4 iMacs took PC2700, some took PC2100, and some took SDRAM (133), but they all took SO-DIMMs. The G4 iBooks all take PC2100 SO-DIMMs.)
I wonder if anyone actually believed anything you said? I suspect that most slashdotters giggled and tuned out when they saw you talking about 2400 rpm hard drives, but you never know.
-fred
You did. However, that's not to say it was true. Apple's sales figures indicate that their iMac sales were significantly better than analysts were saying they were, and the analysts were where you were hearing about the poor sales figures.
-fred
I try to point out stupidity wherever I see it. This is bogus.
:-) - my first-ever smilie on slashdot.
The windows sites are all unvetted off-the-cuff posted comments, like Slashdot. macintouch.com takes reader submissions, EDITS them for spelling and grammar, tosses out the lousiest ones, and posts them.
This mostly explains the higher readability quotient. And the fact that people are trying to work up to the level of the previous posts explains the rest, and also explains the larger vocabulary.
Basically, this is a totally bogus way of proving something that we all know is true anyway.
-fred
That's right. And probably doing a better job.
-fred
You've run XP acceptably on 6 year old machines? Well, you are probably the only one in the world. Many PC-compatible 6 year old machines are limited in RAM to between 128 megs or so, which is not enough for XP. Basically, our three-year-old laptops (Dell business machiens, limited to 256 megs of RAM) are bad enough; I can't imagine what you'd do with a 400 mHz machine with 128 megs of RAM running XP. That's assuming it's still working; 2/3 of our three-year old (Dell) laptops have failed more than once in their third year of operation. Once the extended warrantee is up, they're getting pitched. On the other hand, all our Macs are doing just fine, except the laptop that got abused by an airline baggage handler. (Which I won't claim is anything other than luck... if you've got ten heavily used computers of any kind in a company and none of them have gone in for service in over three years, you're just plain lucky.)
As for apple locking things out of the BIOS, well, you're right that there are some six-year-old Macs that won't run Mac OS X without your using some little tricks to get them to work. However, MOST six-year-old Macs (the first generation of iMacs, the PowerBooks, the Blue & White PowerMac which was introduced in 1998) work fine with it, and all of them will take at least 512 mb of RAM, which is plenty. It's hard for me to blame Apple for not supporting the vintage 1997 (that would be seven years old, though some were sold in 1998) beige G3s, with their onboard SCSI, their ADB-connected keyboards and mice, and the (pathetic) Rage II+ graphics chips that many of them had. If you want them to work, you can get them to work, Apple just makes it clear that they're not supporting them.
Whereas if you buy a retail version of XP and install it on a 7-year-old PC and you call up Microsoft, they'll be happy to spend as many hours as you want on the phone with you to get it up and running. On your dime. Just remember that half your hardware is probably not supported by XP/2000 drivers, and that the tech support phone call is liable to cost you as much as one of those ultra-cheap PCs.
-fred
> He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
We're just waitin' for the 1950s-style witchhunts to come around again on the gee-tar...
--fred
The problem with our full-time lawmaking body isn't that they think they need to continually make new laws. They often do; the world changes quite a bit. I might agree that they don't need to make quite as many as they do, but they certainly do need to make them.
The problem is that they never get rid of the old, useless, and ridiculous ones, nor update any of the old ones for new situations. So, for example, the state of California can sue Greenpeace for interacting with boats in harbor under a law that was intended solely to keep whores from going out to boats at anchor in the nineteenth century and plying their trade.
-fred
An apostrophe is used in a possessive. Always, with two exceptions. (This is current usage in the United States, as defined by the most recent version of Strunk & White. There are other opinions, but yours isn't even on the radar.)
The first exception is irregular pronoun possessives, such as 'its', 'her', 'their', 'my', and so forth. The only one of those that is confusing is 'its', unless you find it necessary to say 'their's bike'
Jason's bike is bigger than her bike, but my bike's tires are bigger than its entire frame. (Which is actually not a great example, because it's not 100% clear what the 'its' is referring to, but oh well.)
The second exception is the possessive form of a plural noun that ends in s. A decent but not perfect guideline here is that if you pronounce the possessive, the word ends in apostrophe-s, whereas if you don't, it doesn't.
If you're a normal American, you pronounce those both the same way, despite the fact that one is the possessive of dress and one is the possessive of dresses.
So, the dress's buttons [one dress] were ripped off in a freak salami accident.
She wanted to find the dresses' manufacturer [several dresses] but he had been deported to South America for execrable taste.
More examples:
My brother's [one brother] earlobes need to be waxed again.
My brothers' [several brothers] shares of the inheritance are currently sitting in a bank in Nigeria.
The media's terrible liberal bias was never more evident than when they all cooperated to destroy Al Gore. [Media is a plural, but since it doesn't end with an s, it gets an apostrophe-s. Same with, for example, women's, men's, etc.]
Where do names come into it? Well, there are some weird things with plural last names (the Joneses' car? The Jones's car? The Joneses's car?) but on the whole... nowhere.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled Slashdot.
-fred