This happened to me as well. A series of mysterious iTunes charges popped up all over my CC statement, totaling hundreds of dollars.
The charges all show up as "1800-APPLE-XYZ" or some such. Call up that number, and there's a recording that refers you to itunes.com/cc (or whatever). On that site, it refers you to the useless 1800 number.
When I contacted my credit card's fraud hotline they said they had been having all sorts of problems with fraudulent charges at iTunes. Mysterious charges, and they (Chase) could get no answers from Apple.
Since Apple wouldn't reverse the charges, I had to file a fraud claim, and get a new card. A big hassle for me. By the way, this was in the Spring of 2010.
IANAL, but if there is a history of fraudulent activity and the vendor has ignored it, then yes, I'd say they have some responsibility "to check every 99 cent transaction."
The XBOX 360 begs to differ. Where exactly is the open source video game console that is dominating the home market? Linux and FOSS more broadly has done some incredible things, but let's be real.
I dont disagree with you that the TV landscape is different than what it was years back. STB reform in 1996 as a part of the Telecoms Act would have probably been a very good thing, promoted innovation, and saved people a lot of money.
1) But, I still think this good news. A good STB/Netfix Device/DVR/htpc-lite would be a nice addition to the home entertainment world. I'm optimistic about what a Google TV STB device could do. A PS3 doesn't do all of this, and for general consumers one dead simple box would be really useful.
2) And... Sports. The number one reason people still subscribe to TV (don't have the stat, but I assure you its out there.) People will continue to pay for sports broadcasts, and I want them to be able to use whatever STB they want to watch their pro sports.
Your two year-old laptop battery dies, and the first place you go is to blame the operating system? And the fact that it no longer works in any OS doesn't give you any hints, either? Come on, this isn't the toughest mystery you'll face this week.
I don't know about GP, but the laptop I bought for going back to grad school came preloaded with Vista and included a Win7 upgrade coupon. When the disc arrived and I installed it, the machine wasn't more than 4 months old. I had the exact same experience and the battery went from functional to a brick in about two weeks after win7 hit the hardware. Fortunately for me, HP shipped me a replacement battery. It's an anecdote; not data, but it might be part of a larger trend.
I played with BeOS in 99. Admittedly not extensively. But I did give the free edition a whirl. Sure there was cool stuff there to see, but your assumption that I never actually used it is pretty arrogant, don't you think?
I was rooting for Be back in the day, too. I thought the BeBox was one amazingly cool little machine. And if the management at Be hadn't been so borish, they might have been bought out by Apple in the end. Too bad they didn't take the deal that was offered them at the time.
The whole point is, both in my dissing Haiku and in the Be fanboy's dream world, we're always talking in hypotheticals. What if things turned out differently, etc. Or, to quote you "One day... there will be a fully open source BeOS. That's when it gets really interesting."
"The real value of this post is showing how far the haiku project has come" What you left out was "...in recreating a 5 year old OS in a world where desktop technology has come a long long way in the meantime." Again, where are the Expose/Kompose features? You sneer at drop shadows, but they're more than just eye candy. They help the user determine which windows are on top of which others.
Things like this really do great on my nerves. People really should wake up and smell reality. Even if Zeta/Haiku turns into a usable OS, where's the support? Software? Will my obscure PCI cards work? I'd only ever play with Haiku on a spare box made of odds and ends anyway. Precisely the sort of things that won't be supported. Sadly, isn't it?
Sure, you can point to this or that piece of software that's available, but what's missing is choice. It's not enough for me that Mozilla might exist for a platform, I want Opera, and a KHTML-based browser. Call me picky or even scatterbrained but I like to use one app one day and another the next. I might use Mail.app today and Thunderbird or Evolution tomorrow. This sort of variety is completely lacking in Be.
If you want to spend your time with one of the efforts to ressurrect Be, I won't stop you, but don't claim that Haiku version 1.0 is genuine news that belongs on/.
It's not impressive. There's no interesting modern eye candy a la Expose or Kompose, etc. Does Haiku's window manager offer anything other than win 95-era usability? Nope.
It's irrational Be-worship. It's rampant in some corners of the internet. We're usually spared from it here, but not always.
This is pure OSNews.com fodder.
News for nerds maybe... hardly stuff that matters.
CS Lewis sort of jumped around in the timeline. Some of the books are prequels to others.
Wikipedia has a comparison of the published order versus the story's chronology.
If Disney ends up filming each of the Chronicles, how do they manage to continuity? The characters are going to grow up and the boys' voices will predicibly change before they can film the prequels. Or are they going to hire different actors, breaking continuity.
I imagine it was a business decision. Everyone's heard of "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe" but "The Magician's Nephew" might not be as well known.
Overall, I'd say the trailer shows promise, though.
I can't find the link right away, but Asa Dotzler has said on his weblog that no, 1.0.x downloads do not count towards the 50 million. Queue up another several tens of millions if that were the case.
Also, the numbers could just as well be skewed in the opposite direction, since some people might only have 'switched' when their distribution was updated. Perhaps a small number for sure, but definitely a realistic possiblity.
Since you're getting a 7200 RPM drive you can really get around the Mini's biggest performance headache other than the 256 MB of ram -- its slow-ass laptop drive.
Mac OS X can boot from any FW HD, so connect your mammoth HD using Firewire, use http://http//www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html Carbon Copy Cloner to move your System folder over, and watch your Mini guzzle NOX.
Also, its a shame that they don't offer a bare-bones setup with no HD. I'd rather just pull the 160 giger out of my windows box and have the mini take over file serving. Alas.
It's also worth asking if the pricing makes a lot of sense. Pay $500 for the mini, then another $99 for a ram upgrade, plus $150 or so for the hub. As cool as it is, it's not the most economical venture. And I'm taking for granted a spare USB Keyboard and mouse.
Sure, this the 10-year aniversary of RealPlayer doing streaming or whatever, but it was 2 years ago (4.28.03 I think) that Apple opened the iTMS for business.
I see a Press Release flame war ensuing, touting the million or so subscribers that Real claims to have vs whatever million number of songs iTMS has served up.
Also, Real might be launching some new digital music service to take the steam out of Jobs's crowing over his pet project.
I recently downloaded Real One Player for Mac OS X and I can personally attest to the fact that they have serious quality issues to iron out.
I dl'd the player to listen to the Final Four streaming. I live in Germany and miss sports back home. While the basketball games streamed just fine, anything with video stuttered. Often I lost the connection completely and the clip started over, only to flake out again half way through.
Another grievance: If you clip on any news piece from the CNN NewPass you can't just watch the video, a browser window pops up directing you to a CNN story on exactly the same topic. If I wanted to read the news I wouldn't have opened Real in the first place. What if I want to have the news on casually in the background while I check my email? I'm out of luck.
I use a university connection and get pretty good (though by no means wonderful) performance. By all accounts, I should be able to stream video with no trouble.
It might be that RealPlayer had trouble with my proxy. It might be that I'm an international user. I'm not sure why either of these facts should be issues in the age of broadband. I should be one of Real's target niche customers. Hell, Glaser once said in an email that he started the sports ____Pass service because he was tired of missing home baseball games.
A final complaint: When I tried to cancel the service I was told to call a 1-888 number. As an international customer this didn't make sense. Why should I have to pay to make a call to cancel a free trial? Their online help was nearly useless, and I had to submit a question with their email support twice before the service was canceled.
Even if the engineering department were not the real of old (alas, nothing's changed), their marketing folks are still swine.
I rest my case.
Does this bring memories of the dreaded "Hi I'm Bill Gates Chairman of Microsoft and we're testing a new email tracking system..." spam?
I couldn't count the number of times my well-meaning but technologically-inept relatives sent around chains for free gift certificates to the Cracker Barrel and monochromatic clothing stores, or worse 'for each email you pass on $.10 goes to this kid dying of cancer.'
I'm always pleasantly surprised with what AMD cooks up in addition to their x86 business.
AMD is a much more interesting company that we geeks often realize. Too often we think, AMD=Athlon/Opteron, but I find their gadgety endeavors really interesting.
Apple's Airport (and maybe extreme/express, dunno) has a tiny AMD processor , and as the parent points out, now their playing with MIPS archs. A friend of mine worked at the fab in Dresden and said that a third of their operations had to do with flash.
Call me a fanboy, but I sure do like the AMD kool aid. They make neato products and deserve mucho respect.
I, too, was impressed until I tried the driving directions.
I do like the fact that it doesn't try to tell you were every Denny's along the way is, but if you don't put in an accurate address, it just gives up.
Eg, I tried to get directions from my house to 1219 Kenan St. When it didn't find 1219 Kenan, it's only recommendation was that I check the address or try adding a zip code.
This is the company that brought us "Did you mean... ?" See, maybe something like "Did you mean 1291 Kenan St?" might have been nice. I might have mistyped. Or even if not, it doesn't matter that I want to go to 1219, 1291 is probably close enough, and I'll get directions there.
I can understand why some people are angry at AOL, and why all of NS's exemployee's are still peeved at them. However, from what I've read NS8 will use a tweaked version of the Gecko in Moz 1.7.5/FF1.0 and anything that might increase the marketshare of standards-based browsers is a good thing. And if AOL can use its muscle to drive even 2% of users over to Gecko, it will be a huge accomplishment.
And I think NS8 represents a challenge to IE users, not existing Firefox users. I don't see it as stealing marketshare (or even potential marketshare) from Firefox, and even if it does, its still less marketshare for IE. Netscape, if managed properly, presents another flank in the battle for desktop browsing. They are allies, people, not the enemy. Sure, they could be doing some things better, but let's give them a chance to win over some new users before we hang them out to dry.
And to those who would say that AOL should give more to the community, we shouldn't forget that they did pour a shit tonne of loot into NS/MoFo. There are plenty of reasons to be pissed at AOL/NS, but we shouldn't attack them for this.
This also allows the Mozilla Foundation to redirect what they were spending on his salary. They can hire another code monkey or spend it on just about anything. BenG is one of the old-school Mozilla pros and now another young gun can take his place.
It's not the reviewer's job to find an audience for the game -- that's the marketing dept's job.
Gamepro was a journalistic publication. They're job was to report on the industry, not to be lackies for 3DO like Tripp wanted.
Assuming most of the people that just read that article on Salon were not subscribers, does the massive influx of ad-viewers (ie ad $$?) cancel out the cost of/.-ing? A zero-sum game, or do they make/lose money?
Just curious, and sorry for the OT post.
I agree that skins are seriously overrated, but I think the look and feel of iChat is lousy all the same. AdiumX's beauty is its simplicity. It's small, utilitarian, and not at all flashy.
But yes, iChat does do some things quite well. If I had a nice webcam or had mac-using friends I could voice chat with I'd use iChat a lot more.
A real design short-coming in iChat is when, say, a friend comes to visit and wants to log into AIM quickly -- you have to logout, then go to preferences, then change the username/pass. It would be no trouble at all to add one button that says "log on as a different user." What's more, afaik, there's no smart account manager for iChat to switch between various aim accounts that users of this computer might want to login as.
Becaue as another poster pointed out, there's no readily available mac binary for gaim right now.
If someone wants to experience gaim on os x the answer is AdiumX. While I might not have answered the question that directly in the previous post, how's this for two reasons:
I prefer AdiumX because it has a more simplistic, elegant design than Fire does by default. Your buddy list takes up less screen real-estate in AdiumX, for example. Also, though they are no real use to me, someone might want the extra protocols that gaim/adiumx supports that Fire doesn't.
While I don't know anything about videoconferencing, the audio technology that is used in Yahoo chat/messenger is a proprietary windows-only format.
The only way you'll be able to audio chat with friends on Yahoo from anything other than a windows client depends on someone opening said format, or Y! ditching it for something more x-platform friendly.
While its true there's not a readily available binary of 1.0.0, you can always use fink/darwinports to get the latest stable binary, which right now is.8.2.1 here.
I agree, its misleading, and the gtk2/x11 port is butt-ugly, it does work.
A better question might be: why should I prefer it to adiumx [adiumx.com]? Adium is essentially a mac-friendly gaim.
Adiumx has a really straight forward user interface, and feels very mac-like. It supports a laundry list of protocols, but keeps things simple yet powerful in terms of UI.
True, you won't find all the gee-gaws from iChat AV a la video/teleconfrencing, but it's a well written program that does IM extremely well (much better than iChat... *cough* tabs, easily set up for multiple users of the same computer, etc *cough*).
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This happened to me as well. A series of mysterious iTunes charges popped up all over my CC statement, totaling hundreds of dollars. The charges all show up as "1800-APPLE-XYZ" or some such. Call up that number, and there's a recording that refers you to itunes.com/cc (or whatever). On that site, it refers you to the useless 1800 number. When I contacted my credit card's fraud hotline they said they had been having all sorts of problems with fraudulent charges at iTunes. Mysterious charges, and they (Chase) could get no answers from Apple. Since Apple wouldn't reverse the charges, I had to file a fraud claim, and get a new card. A big hassle for me. By the way, this was in the Spring of 2010. IANAL, but if there is a history of fraudulent activity and the vendor has ignored it, then yes, I'd say they have some responsibility "to check every 99 cent transaction."
The XBOX 360 begs to differ. Where exactly is the open source video game console that is dominating the home market? Linux and FOSS more broadly has done some incredible things, but let's be real.
I dont disagree with you that the TV landscape is different than what it was years back. STB reform in 1996 as a part of the Telecoms Act would have probably been a very good thing, promoted innovation, and saved people a lot of money. 1) But, I still think this good news. A good STB/Netfix Device/DVR/htpc-lite would be a nice addition to the home entertainment world. I'm optimistic about what a Google TV STB device could do. A PS3 doesn't do all of this, and for general consumers one dead simple box would be really useful. 2) And ... Sports. The number one reason people still subscribe to TV (don't have the stat, but I assure you its out there.) People will continue to pay for sports broadcasts, and I want them to be able to use whatever STB they want to watch their pro sports.
Your two year-old laptop battery dies, and the first place you go is to blame the operating system? And the fact that it no longer works in any OS doesn't give you any hints, either? Come on, this isn't the toughest mystery you'll face this week.
I don't know about GP, but the laptop I bought for going back to grad school came preloaded with Vista and included a Win7 upgrade coupon. When the disc arrived and I installed it, the machine wasn't more than 4 months old. I had the exact same experience and the battery went from functional to a brick in about two weeks after win7 hit the hardware. Fortunately for me, HP shipped me a replacement battery. It's an anecdote; not data, but it might be part of a larger trend.
Sorry, I need a minute. Have to run to the bathroom...something in my eye. Just thinking about it gets me all bleary-eyed.
I played with BeOS in 99. Admittedly not extensively. But I did give the free edition a whirl. Sure there was cool stuff there to see, but your assumption that I never actually used it is pretty arrogant, don't you think?
I was rooting for Be back in the day, too. I thought the BeBox was one amazingly cool little machine. And if the management at Be hadn't been so borish, they might have been bought out by Apple in the end. Too bad they didn't take the deal that was offered them at the time.
The whole point is, both in my dissing Haiku and in the Be fanboy's dream world, we're always talking in hypotheticals. What if things turned out differently, etc. Or, to quote you "One day ... there will be a fully open source BeOS. That's when it gets really interesting."
"The real value of this post is showing how far the haiku project has come" What you left out was "...in recreating a 5 year old OS in a world where desktop technology has come a long long way in the meantime." Again, where are the Expose/Kompose features? You sneer at drop shadows, but they're more than just eye candy. They help the user determine which windows are on top of which others.
Things like this really do great on my nerves. People really should wake up and smell reality. Even if Zeta/Haiku turns into a usable OS, where's the support? Software? Will my obscure PCI cards work? I'd only ever play with Haiku on a spare box made of odds and ends anyway. Precisely the sort of things that won't be supported. Sadly, isn't it?
Sure, you can point to this or that piece of software that's available, but what's missing is choice. It's not enough for me that Mozilla might exist for a platform, I want Opera, and a KHTML-based browser. Call me picky or even scatterbrained but I like to use one app one day and another the next. I might use Mail.app today and Thunderbird or Evolution tomorrow. This sort of variety is completely lacking in Be.
If you want to spend your time with one of the efforts to ressurrect Be, I won't stop you, but don't claim that Haiku version 1.0 is genuine news that belongs on /.
It's irrational Be-worship. It's rampant in some corners of the internet. We're usually spared from it here, but not always.
This is pure OSNews.com fodder.
News for nerds maybe ... hardly stuff that matters.
If Disney ends up filming each of the Chronicles, how do they manage to continuity? The characters are going to grow up and the boys' voices will predicibly change before they can film the prequels. Or are they going to hire different actors, breaking continuity.
I imagine it was a business decision. Everyone's heard of "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe" but "The Magician's Nephew" might not be as well known.
Overall, I'd say the trailer shows promise, though.
I'll be able to play Tekken and Ridge Racer on my Bandai Pippin @World!
Also, the numbers could just as well be skewed in the opposite direction, since some people might only have 'switched' when their distribution was updated. Perhaps a small number for sure, but definitely a realistic possiblity.
Mac OS X can boot from any FW HD, so connect your mammoth HD using Firewire, use http://http//www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html Carbon Copy Cloner to move your System folder over, and watch your Mini guzzle NOX.
Also, its a shame that they don't offer a bare-bones setup with no HD. I'd rather just pull the 160 giger out of my windows box and have the mini take over file serving. Alas.
It's also worth asking if the pricing makes a lot of sense. Pay $500 for the mini, then another $99 for a ram upgrade, plus $150 or so for the hub. As cool as it is, it's not the most economical venture. And I'm taking for granted a spare USB Keyboard and mouse.
I see a Press Release flame war ensuing, touting the million or so subscribers that Real claims to have vs whatever million number of songs iTMS has served up.
Also, Real might be launching some new digital music service to take the steam out of Jobs's crowing over his pet project.
Just a thought.
I recently downloaded Real One Player for Mac OS X and I can personally attest to the fact that they have serious quality issues to iron out. I dl'd the player to listen to the Final Four streaming. I live in Germany and miss sports back home. While the basketball games streamed just fine, anything with video stuttered. Often I lost the connection completely and the clip started over, only to flake out again half way through. Another grievance: If you clip on any news piece from the CNN NewPass you can't just watch the video, a browser window pops up directing you to a CNN story on exactly the same topic. If I wanted to read the news I wouldn't have opened Real in the first place. What if I want to have the news on casually in the background while I check my email? I'm out of luck. I use a university connection and get pretty good (though by no means wonderful) performance. By all accounts, I should be able to stream video with no trouble. It might be that RealPlayer had trouble with my proxy. It might be that I'm an international user. I'm not sure why either of these facts should be issues in the age of broadband. I should be one of Real's target niche customers. Hell, Glaser once said in an email that he started the sports ____Pass service because he was tired of missing home baseball games. A final complaint: When I tried to cancel the service I was told to call a 1-888 number. As an international customer this didn't make sense. Why should I have to pay to make a call to cancel a free trial? Their online help was nearly useless, and I had to submit a question with their email support twice before the service was canceled. Even if the engineering department were not the real of old (alas, nothing's changed), their marketing folks are still swine. I rest my case.
I couldn't count the number of times my well-meaning but technologically-inept relatives sent around chains for free gift certificates to the Cracker Barrel and monochromatic clothing stores, or worse 'for each email you pass on $.10 goes to this kid dying of cancer.'
Heaven help us.
AMD is a much more interesting company that we geeks often realize. Too often we think, AMD=Athlon/Opteron, but I find their gadgety endeavors really interesting.
Apple's Airport (and maybe extreme/express, dunno) has a tiny AMD processor , and as the parent points out, now their playing with MIPS archs. A friend of mine worked at the fab in Dresden and said that a third of their operations had to do with flash.
Call me a fanboy, but I sure do like the AMD kool aid. They make neato products and deserve mucho respect.
I do like the fact that it doesn't try to tell you were every Denny's along the way is, but if you don't put in an accurate address, it just gives up.
Eg, I tried to get directions from my house to 1219 Kenan St. When it didn't find 1219 Kenan, it's only recommendation was that I check the address or try adding a zip code.
This is the company that brought us "Did you mean ... ?" See, maybe something like "Did you mean 1291 Kenan St?" might have been nice. I might have mistyped. Or even if not, it doesn't matter that I want to go to 1219, 1291 is probably close enough, and I'll get directions there.
Just a thought.
I can understand why some people are angry at AOL, and why all of NS's exemployee's are still peeved at them. However, from what I've read NS8 will use a tweaked version of the Gecko in Moz 1.7.5/FF1.0 and anything that might increase the marketshare of standards-based browsers is a good thing. And if AOL can use its muscle to drive even 2% of users over to Gecko, it will be a huge accomplishment.
And I think NS8 represents a challenge to IE users, not existing Firefox users. I don't see it as stealing marketshare (or even potential marketshare) from Firefox, and even if it does, its still less marketshare for IE. Netscape, if managed properly, presents another flank in the battle for desktop browsing. They are allies, people, not the enemy. Sure, they could be doing some things better, but let's give them a chance to win over some new users before we hang them out to dry.
And to those who would say that AOL should give more to the community, we shouldn't forget that they did pour a shit tonne of loot into NS/MoFo. There are plenty of reasons to be pissed at AOL/NS, but we shouldn't attack them for this.
This is only good news.
It's not the reviewer's job to find an audience for the game -- that's the marketing dept's job. Gamepro was a journalistic publication. They're job was to report on the industry, not to be lackies for 3DO like Tripp wanted.
Assuming most of the people that just read that article on Salon were not subscribers, does the massive influx of ad-viewers (ie ad $$?) cancel out the cost of /.-ing? A zero-sum game, or do they make/lose money?
Just curious, and sorry for the OT post.
But yes, iChat does do some things quite well. If I had a nice webcam or had mac-using friends I could voice chat with I'd use iChat a lot more.
A real design short-coming in iChat is when, say, a friend comes to visit and wants to log into AIM quickly -- you have to logout, then go to preferences, then change the username/pass. It would be no trouble at all to add one button that says "log on as a different user." What's more, afaik, there's no smart account manager for iChat to switch between various aim accounts that users of this computer might want to login as.
If someone wants to experience gaim on os x the answer is AdiumX. While I might not have answered the question that directly in the previous post, how's this for two reasons:
I prefer AdiumX because it has a more simplistic, elegant design than Fire does by default. Your buddy list takes up less screen real-estate in AdiumX, for example. Also, though they are no real use to me, someone might want the extra protocols that gaim/adiumx supports that Fire doesn't.
Just a few thoughts.
The only way you'll be able to audio chat with friends on Yahoo from anything other than a windows client depends on someone opening said format, or Y! ditching it for something more x-platform friendly.
Translation: Don't hold your breath.
I agree, its misleading, and the gtk2/x11 port is butt-ugly, it does work.
For gaim on osx I prefer adiumx [adiumx.com].
Adiumx has a really straight forward user interface, and feels very mac-like. It supports a laundry list of protocols, but keeps things simple yet powerful in terms of UI.
True, you won't find all the gee-gaws from iChat AV a la video/teleconfrencing, but it's a well written program that does IM extremely well (much better than iChat ... *cough* tabs, easily set up for multiple users of the same computer, etc *cough*).
And it's not resource intensive.