This has actually become very popular already in the Boston area, where Fenway Park sells out most of the Red Sox' season by February. While baseball is kind of a religion here, not everybody can fit in the church. Several local movie theaters show the local cable broadcasts on the big screens, sell concessions, and make it a fun time, from what i've heard. It's cheaper than tickets to the game, and moreover, for things like Red Sox-Yankees games, it's the closest most people can get. And yes, there is cheering, booing, heckling, etc. The local broadcasters like to have fun with the theater-goers by giving them marching orders to do 'the wave' and other things like that, and though nobody can see them, no one doubts that they're actually doing it. If it were in 3-d, i might consider it, but then again, i wait in line on a snowy december morning for tickets to the real thing.
After working 4+ years in support for some high-end software, that classification is dead on target with the exception of one addition: the people who want you to do their work for them/provide an excuse for them to not do their work.
This device would have gotten me fired, for sure, considering that dealing with 3 out of these 5 classes of callers caused me to become a real arrogant bastard on the phone.
ironically enough, it's considerably less wrong to love microsoft if you use a mac. sure, bill gates likes to make snide remarks about the mac os, and they do silly things like plugging their ears and pretending the ipod doesn't exist, but the fact of the matter is, mac users don't have to put up with the worst thing that microsoft does, and that's of course, windows.
and many of microsoft's products are quite good, and worthy of praise. i'm a content owner of a microsoft mouse, and have been pleased with it. the mac version of office, too, is a fine product (yes, i know word and its idiosyncracies are inherently awful, but it's a good mac version of word).
now i don't love microsoft. and i surely don't love this article, which sounds like it was written by a twelve-year-old who was inspired to expound upon his joy after discovering the menu animations in windows xp. but that said, perhaps people who aren't tied to windows are in the best position, to judge microsoft's products solely upon their merit for the task at hand. sometimes microsoft wins a fair fight. but at least when you're not on windows, when they're not the best option, there's no impediment to making another choice.
Actually, back when it was flying, the Concorde flights from New York would go supersonic right off of Cape Cod at around 8:45 in the morning, if i remember correctly. There was an audible but brief rumble where i was in south coastal Massachusetts, but it didn't even approach being a nuisance.
i used to work doing testing for another police/fire radio manufacturer, and there was indeed some concern about the effect of the energy transmitted from the devices. Not so much the handheld ones (anywhere from the cell-phone level 1.5W to a pretty powerful 5W), but the car-mounted ones. The mobiles (the ones in cars) are pretty powerful, 20, 40, or i think 60W (it's been a while), and we actually had stickers on them that warned people not to use them in some situations. Gas stations were one, but the most important warning was about using them in construction sites where blasting caps were present. Pity i didn't get to participate in that part of the testing...
The center of gravity's location relative to the center of lift is extremely important for pitch stability, if i remember correctly (sorry, i was a C student and it was 5 years ago). You could certainly envision that being a problem with considering not just where to put the water, but where to dump it from, and how much could be put in (in all likelihood, a fraction of a 747's vast interior volume could be practically used for this). Particularly when diving to fight a fire, it could be quite possible have the aircraft balanced in such a way as to never get the nose up again, because the elevators might not be able to exert enough force to get it level. If you've been on small puddle-jumper aircraft and been asked to move fore and aft to balance the plane, it's the same principle, except with the passengers all jumping out at the same time, figuratively speaking.
Theory of Wing Sections is the best book ever! Unfortunately, where I went to school, they failed to mention it, probably to keep it a secret so we'd buy the $80 and $90 dollar books for the sophomore and junior-level courses, not realizing until the capstone course senior year, that Abbott and von Doenhoff explain much of it better in a $15 book. It is indeed absolutely indispensable. Did I mention that it's wonderful?
Xfoil is pretty decent, too, but i never found it significantly more convenient than just keying in the xy points into a text file, and then reading those points into a spline in a Pro/E section.
Sadly, i've devoted a ridiculous amount of time to storage of my Lego bricks over the years, but have settled into a system that works, after abandoning several that were a little more ambitious. What i learned is that perfect organization is nice to build with, sort of, but requires way too much maintenance when you're disassembling stuff.
For instance, i used to have a bunch of little plastic drawer things like you use to store nuts and bolts, and had all the small pieces in there. Looked great, worked great until you had more than 10 of them out at a time. And it was a pain to disassemble stuff and re-sort them. It was a great idea in theory, though.
What i've settled on now is large, shallow buckets that fit neatly under a bed, with most regular and large pieces sorted by color therein: red, blue, black, etc, and then one bucket for all the cool new colors they've come out with lately. Then there's two other buckets. One is the 'mess' with assorted pieces that have been partially disassembled but left unsorted due to my own indolence/eagerness to start a new project. The other is where i dumped all the little drawers from the tackle boxes. All the small tools, little pieces, special pieces, etc. are now in their own bucket, which is a good balance between ease of finding and ease of maintaining.
It's really a matter of personal preference, though, and if you build a lot, you'll have to experiment to find what's right for you.
Does iTunes depend on the Safari rendering engine...?
Yes and no. It depends on the engine, called WebCore, IIRC, but it does not depend on Safari--Safari itself depends on WebCore, as does (in 10.3) Help and Mail. While this is in that regard akin to QuickTime, from what i've read, it's intended more as just another OS-level service. Do you worry about competition for providers of scroll-bars or combo boxes? Apple fan though i may be, it seems a strain to ascribe any sinister motive to Safari.
Actually, there was a theory going around that the entire series was truly about Gonk, and that it really should've been the Gonk Wars. Who knew a trusty EG-6 power droid could cause so much trouble? But alas, my only real disappointment with Attack of the Clones was the lack of the mighty Gonk. Sigh. i do hope he comes back in Episode III for some closure.
As amusing as that all is, A/C is a very common shorthand for aircraft (and the slash makes every bit as much sense as it does when referring to an air conditioner--none).
After spending 5 years chasing a BSAE in college, believe it or not, when i was done, 'aircraft' was the first thing i thought of when seeing 'a/c'. that said, i did think it was weird the first time i saw it.
While the article linked does indeed make it look somewhat shady, it's worth pointing out that a major weakness of his argument is that he implies (credibly) that this lab test commissioned by Apple is not trustworthy, and then compares it with tests by Dell and Intel, which he seems to present as implicitly true. How do we know that's the case? If Apple did indeed gain anything by mucking about with the configurations (and it sounds like they did), who's to say that they did anything more than offset similar mucking about on the other side of the fence?
Was there a 717? Yes and no. The 717 is currently (or maybe it isn't, anymore) the newer incarnation of the venerable DC-9/MD-80 design acquired via the merger with McDonnell. The MD-90/MD-95 was rechristened the 717 with little fanfare. Not sure if they're still selling it. i think that there was a late-model 707 that they also considered calling a 717, in the '60s or '70s or something, but thought better of. So, there is one, but it's not really a new and interesting plane.
Oh, wait, this answers my question and yours: http://www.boeing.com/commercial/717/flash .html
Ah, the Foodons. Pity they kept moving it earlier and earlier... i'd never before watched a saturday morning cartoon that made it seem like a good idea to have the first beer of the day at 9:30 am.
The thing is, you can totally picture the producers of it in the stereotypical boardroom setting: "Get this, it's like 'Pokemon' meets 'Iron Chef'--we can't lose!" And strangely enough, it's damned entertaining. Or maybe my standards have fallen...
And a little bit of some other movies too, probably, given the ambiguity of the main character's origins, the hordes of aliens, etc. i'd totally love to see a movie based on Marathon. They'd have to get a really good voice for Durandal, though (it'd have to be a voice, since text screens, so effective in the game, probably wouldn't do much for the average moviegoer). Maybe since Bungie now has a big huge sugar daddy, they can push for a Marathon movie, so as to sell a new X-box version of Marathon, and thereby advance their goals of world domination...
Since i work in a technical support capacity, i do have some experience with this. Most rational people would prefer to hang up the phone and go back to work with a solution that allows them to keep going.
A subset of people literally do persist in going after you even after you explain what is going on, unwaveringly pursuing the dubiously valuable trophy that is a bug report number. They'd rather be able to say they found a bug, and struck some kind of blow against their software-purveying oppressor, than to actually have a solution. They want a bug report and a fix next tuesday, rather than a way to keep working today. And usually, you give it to them, and let them wait for a fix that sometimes even comes, and they put off their work for a month. Which is probably the intent anyway.
So, the writeup is not entirely off base with that statement. For some strange deluded people, bugs are indeed cool.
http://homepage.mac.com/aaronsteele/PhotoAlbum7. ht ml
Re:They're just not saying, 'cause...
on
Baked Apple
·
· Score: 1
The screenshots show it running MacOS 9.1; i don't think any new machines have shipped with 9.1 since summer '01 or earlier, which probably makes this an original-rev PowerBook G4. It may be 2 years old, and only 400MHz... Which is not to say one will have a hard time finding a home for it, but may explain why she was willing to accept having to replace it (especially if she was in a store with the new ones staring right at her!).
Um, ok. There's really been a lot of anti-Beantown sentiment that's been stirred up as a result of the Macworld move. Not here so much as on other discussion sites/pages. It seems a little petty. This whole thing oughtn't be viewed as a slight against New York, or any other city--it boils down to this: Macworld used to be in Boston. It outgrew the facilities. Now there's a shiny new facility. Why not go back?
That said, IIRC, the 'Combat Zone' has been aggressively re-zoned out of existence going back to the 80's. If that's the kind of entertainment you seek, there's not so much. On the other hand, if you like good Irish bars, you're in luck.
It should be noted that the Green Line "D" trains to Riverside do actually have their own right-of-way that is unfettered by cars or traffic lights, and runs all the way out to Rt. 128. It's faster than the B and C lines, despite going twice the distance, as a result. They also do tend to 'express' trains occasionally especially on days where there are baseball games, although admittedly, this just means chugging through the stations slowly, ringing the bell and ignoring the glares of the people waiting. The T ain't the Metro in Washington, but it works. Some survey said that 25% of people in the Boston area take public transportation to work, which is apparently a very high percentage in the US.
i've got it running on my old iBook so far (an original 366), and it's pretty sweet so far.
i can confirm that the speed improvement is very striking indeed. this system is old, and has a crap video chip in it, and nevertheless, the UI is now pretty much as responsive as OS 9 was.
The CPU monitor is much happier, in general; there seems to be a lower baseline level of activity, although that is purely subjective at this point.
Battery life seems to be improved when the HD isn't thrashing (as in, i spent 2 hrs IM-ing the other night and only used 30% of the battery, but the rate when i play MP3s still seems unchanged).
The minimize/restore 'genie' and 'scale' effects are much, much, much smoother.
QuickTime playback is better (this was also helped by the earlier 10.1.5 addition of Rage Pro support).
iChat is nice enough. The speech bubbles are sort of cheesy, but if you have an icon that has a face, they're pretty funny in a silly sort of way. It's a little buggy, though.
The Search field in the Finder is indispensable.
The ability to set *smaller fonts* in the Finder is cause for celebration for those of us with old iBooks with 800x600 screens.
Mail is a lot more responsive, and no longer chokes on HTML emails.
The AirPort menu icon scrolls a little ticker with the name of the network you've connected to when you connect. Very spiffy, but only useful to those who use many networks.
The battery level occasionally gets confused; thinks it's empty when it definitely isn't.
Recent Items comes up less sluggishly.
All in all, it's a very good upgrade, particularly just due to the increased level to which it plays well with my admittedly ill-suited iBook. And two of the new toys, iSync and iCal are still coming, so don't forget to consider those as part of the value as well.
Right, i didn't intend to imply that you didn't understand, simply that your story illustrated something that really does cause a lot of trouble.
Naturally, not all support staff is competent or good. i've worked with some, and even been the stereotypical ignoramus-with-a-headset (once or twice). Regardless, even many of those who are not so well-informed probably are still trying their darnedest.
As for the 'script-readers', it's true that that's an indictment more of their organization than it is them, and the people on the phones probably take the heat for it. Based on my experience, it's counter-productive to minimize knowledge; the way we operate here is to share it, tell everyone that asks, so that we don't have to figure out the same thing twice. That's the key; if you don't know, someone does, and has written it down 95% of the time. Scripts aren't conducive to that, and maybe that's one of the keys to a competent support organization.
it's quite true that it's nice to be able to read/. ot work occasionally; it's perfect reading for waiting for calls to come in, so, there's a new sought-after career choice for slashdot addicts...
"if you just pretend to do what they're asking instead of actually doing it, it goes much more quickly. "
Well, it sounds as if you know what you're doing, but what about those who don't? There are a lot of people who call tech support who want a quick, easy fix, that do just what you describe; pretend to do something, lie and say it didn't work, and then call back (usually in 10 minutes, especially when the procedure you gave them should take 30.). Why? What good does that do them? Well, in my case, it usually means they want me to fix their files, or they want an excuse to complain. In the case of hardware support, i can only assume it's the latter, or that they are intimidated.
Snarky comments and the continuing stereotype of tech support people as minimum-wage or ignorant really makes our job tougher, needlessly. Sure, the stereotype is right in some places. But what about the legions of knowledgeable support staff who can no longer do their job, because the customers on the other end are sometimes preconditioned to assume that they will get no help, and just biding time until they can escalate the call to a manager.
We cannot help those who do not wish to be helped.
about 8 years ago now at RPI, there used to be a program that someone wrote and made available called XStalker. it had maps of every computer lab on campus (then all IBMs and Suns), correllated with the known hostnames of all those machines, and therefore could tell you where a certain user id was logged in, therefore, where they were (after all, so many of us rarely strayed from a computer). Pretty low-tech by comparison, but cool nonetheless. Couple this with the ease of constructing the standard user id from a last name and first initial, and you could find just about anyone. of course, i believe that capability along with the name is what caused it to be frowned upon.
Forgive me if i messed up any of the details; it was a while ago.
Slashdot Mirror
This has actually become very popular already in the Boston area, where Fenway Park sells out most of the Red Sox' season by February. While baseball is kind of a religion here, not everybody can fit in the church. Several local movie theaters show the local cable broadcasts on the big screens, sell concessions, and make it a fun time, from what i've heard. It's cheaper than tickets to the game, and moreover, for things like Red Sox-Yankees games, it's the closest most people can get. And yes, there is cheering, booing, heckling, etc. The local broadcasters like to have fun with the theater-goers by giving them marching orders to do 'the wave' and other things like that, and though nobody can see them, no one doubts that they're actually doing it. If it were in 3-d, i might consider it, but then again, i wait in line on a snowy december morning for tickets to the real thing.
After working 4+ years in support for some high-end software, that classification is dead on target with the exception of one addition: the people who want you to do their work for them/provide an excuse for them to not do their work.
This device would have gotten me fired, for sure, considering that dealing with 3 out of these 5 classes of callers caused me to become a real arrogant bastard on the phone.
ironically enough, it's considerably less wrong to love microsoft if you use a mac. sure, bill gates likes to make snide remarks about the mac os, and they do silly things like plugging their ears and pretending the ipod doesn't exist, but the fact of the matter is, mac users don't have to put up with the worst thing that microsoft does, and that's of course, windows.
and many of microsoft's products are quite good, and worthy of praise. i'm a content owner of a microsoft mouse, and have been pleased with it. the mac version of office, too, is a fine product (yes, i know word and its idiosyncracies are inherently awful, but it's a good mac version of word).
now i don't love microsoft. and i surely don't love this article, which sounds like it was written by a twelve-year-old who was inspired to expound upon his joy after discovering the menu animations in windows xp. but that said, perhaps people who aren't tied to windows are in the best position, to judge microsoft's products solely upon their merit for the task at hand. sometimes microsoft wins a fair fight. but at least when you're not on windows, when they're not the best option, there's no impediment to making another choice.
Actually, back when it was flying, the Concorde flights from New York would go supersonic right off of Cape Cod at around 8:45 in the morning, if i remember correctly. There was an audible but brief rumble where i was in south coastal Massachusetts, but it didn't even approach being a nuisance.
i used to work doing testing for another police/fire radio manufacturer, and there was indeed some concern about the effect of the energy transmitted from the devices. Not so much the handheld ones (anywhere from the cell-phone level 1.5W to a pretty powerful 5W), but the car-mounted ones. The mobiles (the ones in cars) are pretty powerful, 20, 40, or i think 60W (it's been a while), and we actually had stickers on them that warned people not to use them in some situations. Gas stations were one, but the most important warning was about using them in construction sites where blasting caps were present. Pity i didn't get to participate in that part of the testing...
The center of gravity's location relative to the center of lift is extremely important for pitch stability, if i remember correctly (sorry, i was a C student and it was 5 years ago). You could certainly envision that being a problem with considering not just where to put the water, but where to dump it from, and how much could be put in (in all likelihood, a fraction of a 747's vast interior volume could be practically used for this). Particularly when diving to fight a fire, it could be quite possible have the aircraft balanced in such a way as to never get the nose up again, because the elevators might not be able to exert enough force to get it level. If you've been on small puddle-jumper aircraft and been asked to move fore and aft to balance the plane, it's the same principle, except with the passengers all jumping out at the same time, figuratively speaking.
Theory of Wing Sections is the best book ever! Unfortunately, where I went to school, they failed to mention it, probably to keep it a secret so we'd buy the $80 and $90 dollar books for the sophomore and junior-level courses, not realizing until the capstone course senior year, that Abbott and von Doenhoff explain much of it better in a $15 book. It is indeed absolutely indispensable. Did I mention that it's wonderful?
Xfoil is pretty decent, too, but i never found it significantly more convenient than just keying in the xy points into a text file, and then reading those points into a spline in a Pro/E section.
Sadly, i've devoted a ridiculous amount of time to storage of my Lego bricks over the years, but have settled into a system that works, after abandoning several that were a little more ambitious. What i learned is that perfect organization is nice to build with, sort of, but requires way too much maintenance when you're disassembling stuff.
For instance, i used to have a bunch of little plastic drawer things like you use to store nuts and bolts, and had all the small pieces in there. Looked great, worked great until you had more than 10 of them out at a time. And it was a pain to disassemble stuff and re-sort them. It was a great idea in theory, though.
What i've settled on now is large, shallow buckets that fit neatly under a bed, with most regular and large pieces sorted by color therein: red, blue, black, etc, and then one bucket for all the cool new colors they've come out with lately. Then there's two other buckets. One is the 'mess' with assorted pieces that have been partially disassembled but left unsorted due to my own indolence/eagerness to start a new project. The other is where i dumped all the little drawers from the tackle boxes. All the small tools, little pieces, special pieces, etc. are now in their own bucket, which is a good balance between ease of finding and ease of maintaining.
It's really a matter of personal preference, though, and if you build a lot, you'll have to experiment to find what's right for you.
Does iTunes depend on the Safari rendering engine...?
Yes and no. It depends on the engine, called WebCore, IIRC, but it does not depend on Safari--Safari itself depends on WebCore, as does (in 10.3) Help and Mail. While this is in that regard akin to QuickTime, from what i've read, it's intended more as just another OS-level service. Do you worry about competition for providers of scroll-bars or combo boxes? Apple fan though i may be, it seems a strain to ascribe any sinister motive to Safari.
Actually, there was a theory going around that the entire series was truly about Gonk, and that it really should've been the Gonk Wars. Who knew a trusty EG-6 power droid could cause so much trouble? But alas, my only real disappointment with Attack of the Clones was the lack of the mighty Gonk. Sigh. i do hope he comes back in Episode III for some closure.
As amusing as that all is, A/C is a very common shorthand for aircraft (and the slash makes every bit as much sense as it does when referring to an air conditioner--none).
After spending 5 years chasing a BSAE in college, believe it or not, when i was done, 'aircraft' was the first thing i thought of when seeing 'a/c'. that said, i did think it was weird the first time i saw it.
While the article linked does indeed make it look somewhat shady, it's worth pointing out that a major weakness of his argument is that he implies (credibly) that this lab test commissioned by Apple is not trustworthy, and then compares it with tests by Dell and Intel, which he seems to present as implicitly true. How do we know that's the case? If Apple did indeed gain anything by mucking about with the configurations (and it sounds like they did), who's to say that they did anything more than offset similar mucking about on the other side of the fence?
Was there a 717? Yes and no. The 717 is currently (or maybe it isn't, anymore) the newer incarnation of the venerable DC-9/MD-80 design acquired via the merger with McDonnell. The MD-90/MD-95 was rechristened the 717 with little fanfare. Not sure if they're still selling it. i think that there was a late-model 707 that they also considered calling a 717, in the '60s or '70s or something, but thought better of. So, there is one, but it's not really a new and interesting plane.
h .html
Oh, wait, this answers my question and yours:
http://www.boeing.com/commercial/717/flas
Ah, the Foodons. Pity they kept moving it earlier and earlier... i'd never before watched a saturday morning cartoon that made it seem like a good idea to have the first beer of the day at 9:30 am.
The thing is, you can totally picture the producers of it in the stereotypical boardroom setting: "Get this, it's like 'Pokemon' meets 'Iron Chef'--we can't lose!" And strangely enough, it's damned entertaining. Or maybe my standards have fallen...
BEEFSTEAK!!!
And a little bit of some other movies too, probably, given the ambiguity of the main character's origins, the hordes of aliens, etc. i'd totally love to see a movie based on Marathon. They'd have to get a really good voice for Durandal, though (it'd have to be a voice, since text screens, so effective in the game, probably wouldn't do much for the average moviegoer). Maybe since Bungie now has a big huge sugar daddy, they can push for a Marathon movie, so as to sell a new X-box version of Marathon, and thereby advance their goals of world domination...
Since i work in a technical support capacity, i do have some experience with this. Most rational people would prefer to hang up the phone and go back to work with a solution that allows them to keep going.
A subset of people literally do persist in going after you even after you explain what is going on, unwaveringly pursuing the dubiously valuable trophy that is a bug report number. They'd rather be able to say they found a bug, and struck some kind of blow against their software-purveying oppressor, than to actually have a solution. They want a bug report and a fix next tuesday, rather than a way to keep working today. And usually, you give it to them, and let them wait for a fix that sometimes even comes, and they put off their work for a month. Which is probably the intent anyway.
So, the writeup is not entirely off base with that statement. For some strange deluded people, bugs are indeed cool.
Not on this page. It rather plainly says 9.1:
. ht ml
http://homepage.mac.com/aaronsteele/PhotoAlbum7
The screenshots show it running MacOS 9.1; i don't think any new machines have shipped with 9.1 since summer '01 or earlier, which probably makes this an original-rev PowerBook G4. It may be 2 years old, and only 400MHz... Which is not to say one will have a hard time finding a home for it, but may explain why she was willing to accept having to replace it (especially if she was in a store with the new ones staring right at her!).
Um, ok. There's really been a lot of anti-Beantown sentiment that's been stirred up as a result of the Macworld move. Not here so much as on other discussion sites/pages. It seems a little petty. This whole thing oughtn't be viewed as a slight against New York, or any other city--it boils down to this: Macworld used to be in Boston. It outgrew the facilities. Now there's a shiny new facility. Why not go back?
That said, IIRC, the 'Combat Zone' has been aggressively re-zoned out of existence going back to the 80's. If that's the kind of entertainment you seek, there's not so much. On the other hand, if you like good Irish bars, you're in luck.
It should be noted that the Green Line "D" trains to Riverside do actually have their own right-of-way that is unfettered by cars or traffic lights, and runs all the way out to Rt. 128. It's faster than the B and C lines, despite going twice the distance, as a result. They also do tend to 'express' trains occasionally especially on days where there are baseball games, although admittedly, this just means chugging through the stations slowly, ringing the bell and ignoring the glares of the people waiting. The T ain't the Metro in Washington, but it works. Some survey said that 25% of people in the Boston area take public transportation to work, which is apparently a very high percentage in the US.
i live in newton (MA, that is) and own a MP 130. it is not currently working, however, and i am unsure what is wrong. So, that makes, uh, one?
i've got it running on my old iBook so far (an original 366), and it's pretty sweet so far.
i can confirm that the speed improvement is very striking indeed. this system is old, and has a crap video chip in it, and nevertheless, the UI is now pretty much as responsive as OS 9 was.
The CPU monitor is much happier, in general; there seems to be a lower baseline level of activity, although that is purely subjective at this point.
Battery life seems to be improved when the HD isn't thrashing (as in, i spent 2 hrs IM-ing the other night and only used 30% of the battery, but the rate when i play MP3s still seems unchanged).
The minimize/restore 'genie' and 'scale' effects are much, much, much smoother.
QuickTime playback is better (this was also helped by the earlier 10.1.5 addition of Rage Pro support).
iChat is nice enough. The speech bubbles are sort of cheesy, but if you have an icon that has a face, they're pretty funny in a silly sort of way. It's a little buggy, though.
The Search field in the Finder is indispensable.
The ability to set *smaller fonts* in the Finder is cause for celebration for those of us with old iBooks with 800x600 screens.
Mail is a lot more responsive, and no longer chokes on HTML emails.
The AirPort menu icon scrolls a little ticker with the name of the network you've connected to when you connect. Very spiffy, but only useful to those who use many networks.
The battery level occasionally gets confused; thinks it's empty when it definitely isn't.
Recent Items comes up less sluggishly.
All in all, it's a very good upgrade, particularly just due to the increased level to which it plays well with my admittedly ill-suited iBook. And two of the new toys, iSync and iCal are still coming, so don't forget to consider those as part of the value as well.
Right, i didn't intend to imply that you didn't understand, simply that your story illustrated something that really does cause a lot of trouble.
/. ot work occasionally; it's perfect reading for waiting for calls to come in, so, there's a new sought-after career choice for slashdot addicts...
Naturally, not all support staff is competent or good. i've worked with some, and even been the stereotypical ignoramus-with-a-headset (once or twice). Regardless, even many of those who are not so well-informed probably are still trying their darnedest.
As for the 'script-readers', it's true that that's an indictment more of their organization than it is them, and the people on the phones probably take the heat for it. Based on my experience, it's counter-productive to minimize knowledge; the way we operate here is to share it, tell everyone that asks, so that we don't have to figure out the same thing twice. That's the key; if you don't know, someone does, and has written it down 95% of the time. Scripts aren't conducive to that, and maybe that's one of the keys to a competent support organization.
it's quite true that it's nice to be able to read
"if you just pretend to do what they're asking instead of actually doing it, it goes much more quickly. "
Well, it sounds as if you know what you're doing, but what about those who don't? There are a lot of people who call tech support who want a quick, easy fix, that do just what you describe; pretend to do something, lie and say it didn't work, and then call back (usually in 10 minutes, especially when the procedure you gave them should take 30.). Why? What good does that do them? Well, in my case, it usually means they want me to fix their files, or they want an excuse to complain. In the case of hardware support, i can only assume it's the latter, or that they are intimidated.
Snarky comments and the continuing stereotype of tech support people as minimum-wage or ignorant really makes our job tougher, needlessly. Sure, the stereotype is right in some places. But what about the legions of knowledgeable support staff who can no longer do their job, because the customers on the other end are sometimes preconditioned to assume that they will get no help, and just biding time until they can escalate the call to a manager.
We cannot help those who do not wish to be helped.
about 8 years ago now at RPI, there used to be a program that someone wrote and made available called XStalker. it had maps of every computer lab on campus (then all IBMs and Suns), correllated with the known hostnames of all those machines, and therefore could tell you where a certain user id was logged in, therefore, where they were (after all, so many of us rarely strayed from a computer). Pretty low-tech by comparison, but cool nonetheless. Couple this with the ease of constructing the standard user id from a last name and first initial, and you could find just about anyone. of course, i believe that capability along with the name is what caused it to be frowned upon.
Forgive me if i messed up any of the details; it was a while ago.