Folks wanted a video iPod for a long time. Maybe you didn't. But it has been requested and desired as soon as the iPhoto came out. Parents really want to show videos of their kids. Would I watch Jumanji or Twister on it? No. You also missed that they shrunk it down again. The 20GB is less than 1/2" thick. This is an improvement to the existing iPod line. It still has room to grow. It is still better than the competitors.
However..
You are seriously missing the big picture.
Apple has built a web, a network, of interconnected products, content, and services that has Apple at its heart. Cars with *iPod-only* connectors. iTunes, already the biggest distributor of legally downloaded music, now selling *current* TV shows. iTunes runs on Mac *and Windows*. iPods already have 75% of the mp3 player market, and they *only work with iTunes*. What's next? Well, Apple has built the remote already...
They can be downloaded the very next day after it airs.
If you figure that you can put 4 shows on a DVD, that's $8 (from the companies perspective) and they have no material or distribution or on-stock costs. A fair trade for the lower cost.
Plus! This would augment the Neilson ratings! Imagine if this were available when Firefly or Wonderfalls was airing. Fox wouldn't have been able to kill it off by repeatedly changing the schedule at the last minute. [rant](Didn't you get the memo? It was at 8pm today. Sorry, it was on Thursday this week. I wonder why the ratings are so low?)[/rant]
No, I'm being serious. There seems to be a strong cultural attitude that you "don't rat on folks". Almost like, "karma will take care of them".
I'm talking about business espionage, discrimination, falsification of research. I'm -not- talking about being a little loose with software licenses. The sort of nasty stuff that can hurt companies and people who are playing by the rules. Not just Diebold and Enron, but smaller companies too.
It seems to me that it's the ethical path to bring their foul activities to light-- police or their competitors. What laws, recompensation, protection or whatever would it take to persuade you to blow the whistle?
This is just something I've been thinking of lately but I don't have a good answer for. I remember being told about a company that "smuggled" a competitor's engineer into their offices regularly, to get the latest designs at great under-the-table prices. That seems so wrong to me. Another question: is this common?
For DVD ripping, you could use MacTheRipper (rips with DVD menus) or HandBrake (dead-easy rip to AVI/MPG).
Keep it uncluttered. Keep it neat, and the place will feel twice as large. Don't let cruft pile up. Leave a some empty space on each surface and around things that draw your eye.
I have about 300 cds taking up 70% capacity of three 6' IKEA cd towers. The empty space is staggered in the towers, and each is filled with a little "pretty". A bright red little box holds matches, another holds carving from my trip to Italy five years ago.. you get the idea. The cds add to the look.
I'm biased against DVDs, but I'd still say lose them. How many times can you watch a DVD? How many times can you watch 1000 hours of DVDs? (the horror!)
I imagine you want the 6x6 table for projects or gaming. Could you replace it with a fold-away or an extendible table? We're all curious, what it's for?
A single shelf near the ceiling, going around the room can look very nice, and feel comfortable. Ditch any books that you haven't cracked the cover of in three years. (be honest) You can buy or borrow the two or three books of the lot that you find you need a couple years from now. Ditch the ugly ones, the old and fading 8088 instruction set manuals.. keep the rest arranged neatly on the shelfs and use the extra space for decorative storage or photos. You can use colored boxes for in-view storage.
IKEA shelves have optional frosted or solid doors that you can use to hide tools, tech stuff, and camping equipment.
Don't stack boxes. You'll never open the bottom ones, so why not just donate their contents? You can get bin racks for the same purpose.
You can easily replace the DVD and CD players with a Mac Mini. A digital wall projector (if you have the money-- only about 100 DVDs worth) can replace a bulky TV, and looks really sharp at night for movies or gaming. If you don't have the wall space, set up a retractable screen. Mount the projector on the wall above the sofa, and for god's sake hide the cables!:)
Watch a couple of the Queer Eye shows for inspiration; every once in a while they do up a one-room home for a work-at-home artist type-of-show.
That doesn't address the problem of users bringing their laptops into the pristine office network after being on those filthy home networks.
Spyware and anti-virus help prevent only common viruses and spyware, but does not stop new viruses, or plug security holes.. (think about it). It also does nothing about customized trojans, say from a competitor, a mistress, a low-traffic malicious website.
Do you make sure that all users are running Adobe Acrobat 7.0.3? The latest Real Player? Otherwise, a targetted malicious PDF can be sent by a competitor or hacker to the users email, and bam! --hacked.
How do you protect the network when they do get infected, and bring the laptop into the office?
Actually, the next step is lucrative contracts for American companies for the design, building, testing, and maintenance of these anti-bunker and anti-bioweapons nuclear bombs. Which will boost the economy and create lots of geek-related jobs.
Since I installed the "GrApple (Brazil)" theme in Firefox on OSX, I haven't been bothered by the look and feel. Oh, occasionally it bothers me, but not everyday like it used to. (I still use Safari for ad-free sites.)
My workplace has a dozen people, very little turnover, and *must* use Windows because of a Windows-only primary application. However, security is very important in our industry. I hammered at them for weeks that IE and Outlook were the hackers primary targets, and had countless holes in them. The transition to Firefox went fairly smoothly-- I told them to use it for everything expect business-critical sites that required IE. I set up Adblock on Firefox and weeded out ads from the common sites.
Every week I send out a list of new security holes, and the impact. If it's an IE 0wn-u bug, I warn them not to open IE until the patch comes out. Every week, even if there are no new bugs, I warn them not to use IE, because there are still unpatched vulnerabilities.
I point out other businesses in our industry which have made the 5 o'clock news because they were hacked. And remind them not to open attachments or use IE, everytime. Or we could be next.
After a few months, everybody is using Firefox all the time, and they don't think anything of it. They do not open email attachments, they install patches when I ask them (I check).
--- Go to each computer and clean each one for viruses, spyware, bad cookies. Log the results. Post the results, but don't use names. You are not trying to embarrass anyone, just trying to show them how their systems have been obeying some other masters. Tear down their SEP fields. Discredit the "don't ask, don't tell" security policy. ("If I don't know my system is hacked, then it doesn't affect me.")
Put in a firewall. Log everything. Open up every legitimate outgoing port, for AIM, Folding@Home, whatever. Show them the attacks.
Show them logs from trojans phoning home. Chances are nobody is running a legitimate chat server, or is doing ftp or heavy traffic late at night.
Get them to *pay* for their software. (This may be the hardest.) As long as they are stealing software, Windows is an obvious, though short-sighted win. But when you point out the increase in piracy lawsuits, and get them to use only legal software, $3000 for Exchange (Exchange/CALS/OS) seems pretty pricy.
Switch out a couple systems (from volunteers) for Macs. They can coexist. I use my Powerbook 50% of the time at work.
Insist on installing OpenOffice on all systems, but that either MS or OO can be used. Insist that all Microsoft Office software be paid for. Ask them for reports or forms in PDF format, then act astounded that MS Office can't handle such a simple task. Insist that all software be paid for. Include 0wned bugs for Office in your weekly report. Mention at the cooler that the only viruses that exist on the Mac are Microsoft Office viruses. Point out new vulnerabilities found in Office apps, and what they allow into their systems.
Insist that all software be legit. Not pirated. After all, it's a lawsuit-happy world out there, and Microsoft is getting more willing to go after those pirates.
Expect the whole process to take a full year.
* Hammer home the security risks. Don't let them hide behind their lack of knowledge.
* Firewall-- first thing. Close off everything they don't use. Then tighten the worst holes.
* Firefox-- second thing. Your spyware scans should back you up. Mandatory install on every system, and lock down the settings in IE (using group policies on xp/2k workstations) every time you touch someone's system.
* Use the MSBA to scan all the systems weekly. It fairly automatic, but you get to see who's refusing to keep up with patches.
* Mandatory OpenOffice install, but optional to use. Request PDFs for the school website and forms.
* Hammer home the piracy idea. Lawsuits. Lawsuits. Lawsuits. Bad publicity. They are sending a message of lawlessness to the students.
Yeah. I'm as disappointed every time a pro-ID poster promotes his view on slashdot. Wanna be a Buddist? Go for it-- you aren't hurting anybody. Think purple crystals help your mellow? Blessings to you.
Believe in a religion that discriminates against gays, single moms, and wants to kill "towel heads" while promoting an absurdist "right to life"? Go to hell. Want to revert scientific education in America back a few decades with the ID meme? Shut up or read up.
ID viewpoints are not scientific (as they claim to be), and are harmful. They should be shot down. Relentlessly.
No. He has a point. Dell spends a lot of time (equals money) on virus/trojan related support calls. They either fork out the bucks for customer service, or not. And so the quality of customer support goes down, and so does their reputation. (Dell customer service is almost as bad as HP's desktop support.)
It would make "good business sense" for Dell to include free AV, with automatic updates for the life of the warranty. Then.. you can abandon your customer and step 3-- profit!
Yeah, yeah. I'm happy that these people are working tirelessly to find flaws in encryption algorithms in common use and publish the results. After all, I'd hate to think that some criminals got ahead of the good guys in compromising SHA.
/ minor sarcasm-- could you tell?// "He who can destroy a thing, controls that thing."
I'm in the process of rolling out a wiki for our workplace. Since it's my idea / my push, I've been using it exclusively for the last month or so while getting the training stuff done (there's higher pri stuff going on right now).
Anyway, I'm finding it really cool having a tasks page, and separate pages for each project. Makes it real easy to copy/paste from emails and docs, add bookmarks, even pasting into Word for status updates. Having the history is handy for reviewing what I've done. And it's all on the web, so accessible from home or remote offices as well as from work.
Bring it up at work; get at least one of your groups using a wiki. Once more people see the benefits, it'll be easier to get more people involved and then.. profit!! Until then, you can use it just for yourself.
MediaWiki is very well supported, and is increasingly adding business features, and is dead-easy to maintain. I almost went with TikiWiki (PHP) or Twiki (Perl)-- also good choices. ((MediaWiki isn't spaghetti code like the others, but the other two have more features than the Bat-mobile.))
I am so tired of having to play "Where's the latest copy of the Word document?" with our project plans. Having a shared wiki fixes that.
Look at existing logs from their website, or similar (friendly) websites. If they are building for a controlled audience (their employees), then they can do whatever works.
However, if the logs show access from non-IE browsers, then they have to justify why they are refusing to serve those people.
It's very easy to ignore. Just a tiny blue ball at the very bottom right.. and is auto-hidden half the time. It's taken months to train my coworkers how to check for updates.
Apple actually opens a window *gasp* and gets in your face about updating. That, and that most Mac users I know trust Apple updates (except for iTunes updates, which "always" tighten DRM).
Teach 'em Perl. Teach loops, pattern matching, and `exec` statements. These can be kept very english-like. The more adventurous students can explore either more advanced or esoteric Perl (to show them some Martian Perl, show some "Perl Minigolf" examples).
Perl is a quick and dirty way to automate anything. Running programs on a recurring basis, testing file structure and existence, querying SQL databases, accessing internet resources. Nearly any job involving running a computer program could be made easier using Perl. Perl is also cross-platform, unlike VB or Cocoa.
The thing I like most about teaching Perl is that you can start with a three line useful, working program. Then modify it to solve different problems, each time introducing a new concept or command.
Please make useful examples. None of those $car_object->turn_left() abstractions.
Hear hear! They also get a medal for best in game rationalization for extra lives. The game starts out as a story being told; when you die the narrator says "No no no.. that's not what happened."
System Shock 2 had resurrection chambers. A really lame concept (on par with Star Trek physics), but at least they tried.
I like Apple's config system over Windows. Programs are supposed to, and do tend to use the Apple config setting API, which saves them into an XML file named for the reverse domain, eg. com.apple.itunes. There's a GUI and command line tools to work with the settings files, but the best part (over the Windows registry) is that each application has its own file.
I dislike the Windows registry because it is a mess.. It can be really hard to migrate settings for a specific application in Windows, whereas it is often easier in Mac OS X.
Of course, apache and all the other Unix-native apps on the Mac still use the painful configs.
I bought the iPhoto for my partner last Christmas, partly expecting video playback sometime in the future via a software update.. After, someone had already done a "video" hack akin to a cartoon flip-book.
Re:I suppose it's too late, but
on
Longhorn Preview
·
· Score: 2, Informative
shoot.. You just described OS X (except for the system restore.. but then 95% of the programs you can remove simply by deleting them) The scaling feature is beta in Tiger, but it does allow each program to have it's own scaling factor, which I use to scale VNC separately from the web browsers.
The best bet is to avoid getting it stolen, not to try to recover it after the fact. If you care, personalize it a lot! Etch her full name into the cover, along with a message saying that it's stolen if not in her posession. Add a URL or phone number for anonymous tips. Maybe mention a reward. Make it value-less to steal.
You can get usable Windows laptops cheap. Just make sure that she has an effective backup solution. It would really suck losing a quarter's worth of homework and notes in the last week or so. She may also want to look into file encryption.
Of course, when it gets stolen, you can get her a Mac -- turn on FileVault, get.Mac for backups, be virus and spyware free, and get to setup secure guest logins for quick sharing with friends (in sight) without comprising data or security (much).
There have been well publicized theft recovery stories, a couple years ago, but thieves are learning to bypass those alarms. They avoid wireless networks while looking for incriminating documents, or just wipe/reinstall without booting up normally.
Slashdot Mirror
Folks wanted a video iPod for a long time. Maybe you didn't. But it has been requested and desired as soon as the iPhoto came out. Parents really want to show videos of their kids. Would I watch Jumanji or Twister on it? No. You also missed that they shrunk it down again. The 20GB is less than 1/2" thick. This is an improvement to the existing iPod line. It still has room to grow. It is still better than the competitors.
However..
You are seriously missing the big picture.
Apple has built a web, a network, of interconnected products, content, and services that has Apple at its heart. Cars with *iPod-only* connectors. iTunes, already the biggest distributor of legally downloaded music, now selling *current* TV shows. iTunes runs on Mac *and Windows*. iPods already have 75% of the mp3 player market, and they *only work with iTunes*. What's next? Well, Apple has built the remote already...
They can be downloaded the very next day after it airs.
If you figure that you can put 4 shows on a DVD, that's $8 (from the companies perspective) and they have no material or distribution or on-stock costs. A fair trade for the lower cost.
Plus! This would augment the Neilson ratings! Imagine if this were available when Firefly or Wonderfalls was airing. Fox wouldn't have been able to kill it off by repeatedly changing the schedule at the last minute. [rant](Didn't you get the memo? It was at 8pm today. Sorry, it was on Thursday this week. I wonder why the ratings are so low?)[/rant]
Maybe it's a new keyboard/mouse combo, like the recently bought-and-silenced Fingerworks keyboards?
What would it take for you to rat them out?
No, I'm being serious. There seems to be a strong cultural attitude that you "don't rat on folks". Almost like, "karma will take care of them".
I'm talking about business espionage, discrimination, falsification of research. I'm -not- talking about being a little loose with software licenses. The sort of nasty stuff that can hurt companies and people who are playing by the rules. Not just Diebold and Enron, but smaller companies too.
It seems to me that it's the ethical path to bring their foul activities to light-- police or their competitors. What laws, recompensation, protection or whatever would it take to persuade you to blow the whistle?
This is just something I've been thinking of lately but I don't have a good answer for. I remember being told about a company that "smuggled" a competitor's engineer into their offices regularly, to get the latest designs at great under-the-table prices. That seems so wrong to me. Another question: is this common?
I forgot to add..
For DVD ripping, you could use MacTheRipper (rips with DVD menus) or HandBrake (dead-easy rip to AVI/MPG).
Keep it uncluttered. Keep it neat, and the place will feel twice as large. Don't let cruft pile up. Leave a some empty space on each surface and around things that draw your eye.
Good luck!
I have about 300 cds taking up 70% capacity of three 6' IKEA cd towers. The empty space is staggered in the towers, and each is filled with a little "pretty". A bright red little box holds matches, another holds carving from my trip to Italy five years ago.. you get the idea. The cds add to the look.
0 2/15/
:)
I'm biased against DVDs, but I'd still say lose them. How many times can you watch a DVD? How many times can you watch 1000 hours of DVDs? (the horror!)
I imagine you want the 6x6 table for projects or gaming. Could you replace it with a fold-away or an extendible table? We're all curious, what it's for?
A single shelf near the ceiling, going around the room can look very nice, and feel comfortable. Ditch any books that you haven't cracked the cover of in three years. (be honest) You can buy or borrow the two or three books of the lot that you find you need a couple years from now. Ditch the ugly ones, the old and fading 8088 instruction set manuals.. keep the rest arranged neatly on the shelfs and use the extra space for decorative storage or photos. You can use colored boxes for in-view storage.
IKEA shelves have optional frosted or solid doors that you can use to hide tools, tech stuff, and camping equipment.
Don't stack boxes. You'll never open the bottom ones, so why not just donate their contents? You can get bin racks for the same purpose.
Trying to find the brand of my laptop stand (Travelrite), I came across this, which has some interesting hidable laptop desks: http://www.macopinion.com/columns/roadwarrior/05/
You can easily replace the DVD and CD players with a Mac Mini. A digital wall projector (if you have the money-- only about 100 DVDs worth) can replace a bulky TV, and looks really sharp at night for movies or gaming. If you don't have the wall space, set up a retractable screen. Mount the projector on the wall above the sofa, and for god's sake hide the cables!
Watch a couple of the Queer Eye shows for inspiration; every once in a while they do up a one-room home for a work-at-home artist type-of-show.
That doesn't address the problem of users bringing their laptops into the pristine office network after being on those filthy home networks. Spyware and anti-virus help prevent only common viruses and spyware, but does not stop new viruses, or plug security holes.. (think about it). It also does nothing about customized trojans, say from a competitor, a mistress, a low-traffic malicious website. Do you make sure that all users are running Adobe Acrobat 7.0.3? The latest Real Player? Otherwise, a targetted malicious PDF can be sent by a competitor or hacker to the users email, and bam! --hacked. How do you protect the network when they do get infected, and bring the laptop into the office?
Actually, the next step is lucrative contracts for American companies for the design, building, testing, and maintenance of these anti-bunker and anti-bioweapons nuclear bombs. Which will boost the economy and create lots of geek-related jobs.
Since I installed the "GrApple (Brazil)" theme in Firefox on OSX, I haven't been bothered by the look and feel. Oh, occasionally it bothers me, but not everyday like it used to. (I still use Safari for ad-free sites.)
My workplace has a dozen people, very little turnover, and *must* use Windows because of a Windows-only primary application. However, security is very important in our industry. I hammered at them for weeks that IE and Outlook were the hackers primary targets, and had countless holes in them. The transition to Firefox went fairly smoothly-- I told them to use it for everything expect business-critical sites that required IE. I set up Adblock on Firefox and weeded out ads from the common sites.
Every week I send out a list of new security holes, and the impact. If it's an IE 0wn-u bug, I warn them not to open IE until the patch comes out. Every week, even if there are no new bugs, I warn them not to use IE, because there are still unpatched vulnerabilities.
I point out other businesses in our industry which have made the 5 o'clock news because they were hacked. And remind them not to open attachments or use IE, everytime. Or we could be next.
After a few months, everybody is using Firefox all the time, and they don't think anything of it. They do not open email attachments, they install patches when I ask them (I check).
---
Go to each computer and clean each one for viruses, spyware, bad cookies. Log the results. Post the results, but don't use names. You are not trying to embarrass anyone, just trying to show them how their systems have been obeying some other masters. Tear down their SEP fields. Discredit the "don't ask, don't tell" security policy. ("If I don't know my system is hacked, then it doesn't affect me.")
Put in a firewall. Log everything. Open up every legitimate outgoing port, for AIM, Folding@Home, whatever. Show them the attacks.
Show them logs from trojans phoning home. Chances are nobody is running a legitimate chat server, or is doing ftp or heavy traffic late at night.
Get them to *pay* for their software. (This may be the hardest.) As long as they are stealing software, Windows is an obvious, though short-sighted win. But when you point out the increase in piracy lawsuits, and get them to use only legal software, $3000 for Exchange (Exchange/CALS/OS) seems pretty pricy.
Switch out a couple systems (from volunteers) for Macs. They can coexist. I use my Powerbook 50% of the time at work.
Insist on installing OpenOffice on all systems, but that either MS or OO can be used. Insist that all Microsoft Office software be paid for. Ask them for reports or forms in PDF format, then act astounded that MS Office can't handle such a simple task. Insist that all software be paid for. Include 0wned bugs for Office in your weekly report. Mention at the cooler that the only viruses that exist on the Mac are Microsoft Office viruses. Point out new vulnerabilities found in Office apps, and what they allow into their systems.
Insist that all software be legit. Not pirated. After all, it's a lawsuit-happy world out there, and Microsoft is getting more willing to go after those pirates.
Expect the whole process to take a full year.
* Hammer home the security risks. Don't let them hide behind their lack of knowledge.
* Firewall-- first thing. Close off everything they don't use. Then tighten the worst holes.
* Firefox-- second thing. Your spyware scans should back you up. Mandatory install on every system, and lock down the settings in IE (using group policies on xp/2k workstations) every time you touch someone's system.
* Use the MSBA to scan all the systems weekly. It fairly automatic, but you get to see who's refusing to keep up with patches.
* Mandatory OpenOffice install, but optional to use. Request PDFs for the school website and forms.
* Hammer home the piracy idea. Lawsuits. Lawsuits. Lawsuits. Bad publicity. They are sending a message of lawlessness to the students.
Yeah. I'm as disappointed every time a pro-ID poster promotes his view on slashdot. Wanna be a Buddist? Go for it-- you aren't hurting anybody. Think purple crystals help your mellow? Blessings to you.
Believe in a religion that discriminates against gays, single moms, and wants to kill "towel heads" while promoting an absurdist "right to life"? Go to hell. Want to revert scientific education in America back a few decades with the ID meme? Shut up or read up.
ID viewpoints are not scientific (as they claim to be), and are harmful. They should be shot down. Relentlessly.
No. He has a point. Dell spends a lot of time (equals money) on virus/trojan related support calls. They either fork out the bucks for customer service, or not. And so the quality of customer support goes down, and so does their reputation. (Dell customer service is almost as bad as HP's desktop support.)
It would make "good business sense" for Dell to include free AV, with automatic updates for the life of the warranty. Then.. you can abandon your customer and step 3-- profit!
Yeah, yeah. I'm happy that these people are working tirelessly to find flaws in encryption algorithms in common use and publish the results. After all, I'd hate to think that some criminals got ahead of the good guys in compromising SHA.
// "He who can destroy a thing, controls that thing."
/ minor sarcasm-- could you tell?
I'm in the process of rolling out a wiki for our workplace. Since it's my idea / my push, I've been using it exclusively for the last month or so while getting the training stuff done (there's higher pri stuff going on right now).
Anyway, I'm finding it really cool having a tasks page, and separate pages for each project. Makes it real easy to copy/paste from emails and docs, add bookmarks, even pasting into Word for status updates. Having the history is handy for reviewing what I've done. And it's all on the web, so accessible from home or remote offices as well as from work.
Bring it up at work; get at least one of your groups using a wiki. Once more people see the benefits, it'll be easier to get more people involved and then.. profit!! Until then, you can use it just for yourself.
MediaWiki is very well supported, and is increasingly adding business features, and is dead-easy to maintain. I almost went with TikiWiki (PHP) or Twiki (Perl)-- also good choices. ((MediaWiki isn't spaghetti code like the others, but the other two have more features than the Bat-mobile.))
I am so tired of having to play "Where's the latest copy of the Word document?" with our project plans. Having a shared wiki fixes that.
Look at existing logs from their website, or similar (friendly) websites. If they are building for a controlled audience (their employees), then they can do whatever works.
However, if the logs show access from non-IE browsers, then they have to justify why they are refusing to serve those people.
Good luck.
It's very easy to ignore. Just a tiny blue ball at the very bottom right.. and is auto-hidden half the time. It's taken months to train my coworkers how to check for updates.
Apple actually opens a window *gasp* and gets in your face about updating. That, and that most Mac users I know trust Apple updates (except for iTunes updates, which "always" tighten DRM).
Teach 'em Perl. Teach loops, pattern matching, and `exec` statements. These can be kept very english-like. The more adventurous students can explore either more advanced or esoteric Perl (to show them some Martian Perl, show some "Perl Minigolf" examples).
Perl is a quick and dirty way to automate anything. Running programs on a recurring basis, testing file structure and existence, querying SQL databases, accessing internet resources. Nearly any job involving running a computer program could be made easier using Perl. Perl is also cross-platform, unlike VB or Cocoa.
The thing I like most about teaching Perl is that you can start with a three line useful, working program. Then modify it to solve different problems, each time introducing a new concept or command.
Please make useful examples. None of those $car_object->turn_left() abstractions.
Hear hear! They also get a medal for best in game rationalization for extra lives. The game starts out as a story being told; when you die the narrator says "No no no.. that's not what happened."
System Shock 2 had resurrection chambers. A really lame concept (on par with Star Trek physics), but at least they tried.
The biggest cliche is extra lives.
Acceleration.
I like Apple's config system over Windows. Programs are supposed to, and do tend to use the Apple config setting API, which saves them into an XML file named for the reverse domain, eg. com.apple.itunes. There's a GUI and command line tools to work with the settings files, but the best part (over the Windows registry) is that each application has its own file.
I dislike the Windows registry because it is a mess.. It can be really hard to migrate settings for a specific application in Windows, whereas it is often easier in Mac OS X.
Of course, apache and all the other Unix-native apps on the Mac still use the painful configs.
The American Dilemma:
1. Life could be better.
2. Change is bad.
I bought the iPhoto for my partner last Christmas, partly expecting video playback sometime in the future via a software update.. After, someone had already done a "video" hack akin to a cartoon flip-book.
Guess we'll never see videos on the iPhoto now..
A demilich! Run away! Run away!
shoot.. You just described OS X (except for the system restore.. but then 95% of the programs you can remove simply by deleting them) The scaling feature is beta in Tiger, but it does allow each program to have it's own scaling factor, which I use to scale VNC separately from the web browsers.
:)
Enjoy your stay at WindowsWorld.
..and we have a winner!
.Mac for backups, be virus and spyware free, and get to setup secure guest logins for quick sharing with friends (in sight) without comprising data or security (much).
The best bet is to avoid getting it stolen, not to try to recover it after the fact. If you care, personalize it a lot! Etch her full name into the cover, along with a message saying that it's stolen if not in her posession. Add a URL or phone number for anonymous tips. Maybe mention a reward. Make it value-less to steal.
You can get usable Windows laptops cheap. Just make sure that she has an effective backup solution. It would really suck losing a quarter's worth of homework and notes in the last week or so. She may also want to look into file encryption.
Of course, when it gets stolen, you can get her a Mac -- turn on FileVault, get
There have been well publicized theft recovery stories, a couple years ago, but thieves are learning to bypass those alarms. They avoid wireless networks while looking for incriminating documents, or just wipe/reinstall without booting up normally.