I have a laptop with a scrolling trackpad, and don't find the lack of tactile feedback to be an issue when scrolling with it.
The problem is, there isn't always a correlation between the number of "clicks" of the scroll wheel and the movement of the page. It varies from OS to OS, app to app, and sometimes document to document, depending on how scrolling is implemented. I do like the feel of "definiteness" that the bumps give, and I think a wheel without bumps might be disconcerting.
The current developer systems use a conventional BIOS, but Apple's engineers have said publicly that they have not yet decided on the final firmware. The developer guidelines exist to dissuade programmers from writing OF-dependent code.
From the comments Apple has made, they are looking at either OF or EFI in the final systems, with a slight preference for EFI.
Firstly, your subject line is patently false, per your link. PowerPC was introduced in 1994, not 1996
Let's look closer at those numbers (per your link.) Year...Share.....units (millions) 1991....11.2.........2.1 1992....12.. .........2.5 1993....10...........3.3 - PowerPC announced 1994....9.4..........3.8 - PowerPC shipped 1995....9............4.5 1996....5.1.... ......4.0
2004.....2.0..........3.5
Apple's market share peaked two years before PowerPC. It was in decline for two years before PowerPC. From the looks of things, PowerPC gave the Mac a temporary boost in unit sales, even though market share continued to decline. I would say, based solely on the numbers, that PowerPC had no discernible effect on the Mac's viability in the market.
- Difficult conversations, a book about confronting people in tough situations. - The argument clinic, Monty Python (If you've never seen it, watch it before reading this script. It's in the 3rd season, disc 9 of the boxed set). Also see the splunge scene in episode 6. - Games people play, Eric Byrne. A book on transactional analyis: a model for why people behave as they do in certain situations. - The informed argument, Robert Miller. Textbook style coverage of both proper and unfair argument tactics. - With good reason, Morris Engel. a short summary of common logic manipulations, explained with a sense of humor (over a dozen cartoons). - Why smart people can be so stupid, Salon.com
Hacking into these legitimate companies doesn't do anything to hurt the scammers.
If the vigilantes take down the scam site, then they may prevent some people from falling victim to it. It may not hurt the scammer, but it might protect the innocent.
And, frankly, these "legitimate companies" should do more to prevent the use of their services for fraudulent purposes. Say, writing a script to search though the hosted material for the phrase "bank account" and flag any occurrences for human review.
I can't say I approve of this behavior...but it might have a positive effect, as well.
I don't know about keyboards that use proprietary RF protocols, but the Bluetooth specification allows for the use of encryption.
I know that at least one manufacturer of a Bluetooth wireless keyboard claims "secure 128-bit, over-the-air encryption keeping sensitive information safe as it is being typed."
Even those products stamped "Made in USA" may not meet the DHS criteria.
For example, most (all?) Dell desktops are assembled in the US. Dell maintains factories here, whith US workers to put together the "custom-configured" hardware they're so famous for. (Dell laptops come from overseas like everyone else's.)
The components they assemble, of course, are all from overseas. The cases, motherboards, drives, memory, power supplies...almost always imported. The criteria in the bill specifies >50% domestic components, so they don't qualify.
Geeks and simple phones
on
Just a Phone?
·
· Score: 1
It astounds me how many members of the Slashdot crowd (usually quick to jump on the new and more-featured) appreciate a simple phone.
Maybe some Slashdotters' lives are already too complicated. Maybe they already have dedicated PDAs and digital cameras. Maybe they only use their phones to order pizza from their moms' basements.
Apple has several hundred thousand (possibly in the millions) affected systems out in the field.
And six reports of failure.
That's not a QA lapse. No quality-control testing procedure yet devised could have caught this.
Bad iBook logic boards were a QA lapse. White spots on PowerBook screens were a QA lapse. Both very expensive for the company (and its shareholders) due to the cost of warranty repairs and shipping.
On the macro scale, Apple's notebooks have as low or lower rate of failure than any other manufacturer. So says PC Magazine, year after year. Small consolation to those affected, but not a bad record to have.
This is just one of those things: LG made some faulty batteries, with a very small likelihood of a dangerous flaw. Neither Apple, nor LG, could have caught the flaw in their testing labs. Only once the systems were out in the field in volume did this become evident. That's the way it is sometimes.
The G4 iMac was nice when sitting on a desk, but the round base didn't offer much in the way of handholds. The manual actually suggested you lift it by the monitor's support arm. While carrying it, you supported the base with your other hand.
The iMac G5 presents a similar problem: large computer, small "foot." Anyone with two brain cells left could probably move it across the room if he had to, but how do you safely grab and move a $2000 slab-with-hinged-foot?
Naw, for true stupidity, you have to look at this FAQ.
Standard practice for consumer recalls: pull the products off the shelves. Contact resellers and tell them to do the same.
I'd expect any laptops Apple is shipping are not part of the recall. Any orders would probably be held up until new batteries are available.
If you've placed an order before the recall was announced, you should probably check it when it arrives. The recall covers models sold until "May 2005" so it's possible that bad batteries were already in the hands of the FedEx guys before the recall was finalized.
On the flip side, if they didn't decide on a recall, and someone were to get injured, they'd face a serious liability suit. "You already had six reports of failure, and yet your company did nothing. Your negligence is directly responsible for my disfiguring burns." Not a pretty idea.
Good business practices and fear of lawsuits often yield the same results. Which motivation you choose to ascribe depends mostly on how cynical you are.
Shouldn't it be that providers can say "Whoops, sorry, no 911 with our service", and that's it? [...] they really expect the same amount of service? The government should NOT be regulating this kind of stuff, IMHO.
For that matter, why should landline providers have to offer this type of service? Or cell phone companies? 911 isn't free. The spectrum, circuits, and caller-locating equipment costs money, all of which increases costs for consumers. Why must the government meddle in such things?
I almost never need these services. Why should the government force me to pay for them?
I say, if you want emergency services, you can get in your car and drive over to the fire station, hospital, or police department. Enough with this "911" and other expensive federal interference.
The CU site seems to focus more on services, as opposed to products. (Yes, I know Epinions rates services, too.)
CU is the publisher of Consumer Reports, which is the largest general-consumer product review magazine (they test TV sets, refrigerators, cars, and other things.)
What I wonder is, are they going to do anything meaningful with the opinions they collect? Normally, CR conducts random-sample surveys, which are a little more objective than simply collecting everyone's rants.
I have likewise heard that a large number of Lisa/Macintosh XL machines were buried. I read somewhere that they were hauled out into the desert and encased together in concrete.
I wonder if any of them, if extracted and cleaned up, would be functional today. They built hardware to be pretty rugged back then, and a concrete mausoleum combined with dry desert conditions would delay deterioration.
Very few companies have a hit product right out of the box.
Windows 1.0? 2.0? 3.0?
When Disneyland opened, half the equipment didn't work. Nor did any of the park drinking fountains.
And you don't buy a new model of car until it has been in production for at least a year.
Apple often gets burned because it revs up the marketing machine at launch time. Result: production backlogs, long delivery times, expensive FedEx shipping to meet delivery targets (Listen to the coference calls, you're a shareholder) heaps of bad press whenever teething problems come up, and expensive warranty repairs to fix the problems for each of the thousands of excited buyers who clamored for one the day it was released. Whereas Dell gets plenty of time to quietly fix any problems, and fewer early-production units in customer hands requiring returns.
The My freelance gig in front of a Mac trolls appear in virtually every discussion about Apple Computer. The troll claims to have witnessed taking 20 minutes to copy a 17 MB file from one folder to another and proceeds to question all Apple users as to their platform choice. It is a straight forward copy-and-paste from a weblog entry (http://www.kottke.org/98/11/my-mac-sucks) by Jason Kottke. It has also led to some very inspired and amusing parodies.
According to the organizations (JD Power, Consumer reports) who do objective studies of such things, the Prius has been more reliable, with higher owner satisfaction, that almost any other model.
Electronic systems are, in general, more reliable, with lower failure rates, than the mechanical systems they replace. They are also easier to service. (Though the repair bill may very well be higher, and specialized equipment may be necessary.)
This "software", as others have said, are not the same as the software we run on our PCs. The software quality standards are higher, and the testing is far more intense.
People lament the loss of simpler mechanical systems that can be fixed with know-how and a socket set. We publicize every example of a system failure we hear of. But the numbers don't lie: a 2005 model with a half-dozen embedded computers has a far lower incidence of problems than a corresponding 1970 model when it was new. You are far less likely to ever have to call a tow truck in your lifetime than your father/grandfather was.
Sensationalism is so much more fun than fact, though.
Why on earth (or in space) would you want a manned spacecraft like this to carry a payload? If you try to build a manned craft that can carry "schoolbus sized satellites" you'll end up with something like the space shuttle, only even more expensive and even less reliable.
This is a "space compact car" to carry humans up. The shuttle is a "space SUV" that is horribly inefficient as a cargo platform or a people-mover. "Space trucks" should be (and are) unmanned.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a laptop with a scrolling trackpad, and don't find the lack of tactile feedback to be an issue when scrolling with it.
The problem is, there isn't always a correlation between the number of "clicks" of the scroll wheel and the movement of the page. It varies from OS to OS, app to app, and sometimes document to document, depending on how scrolling is implemented. I do like the feel of "definiteness" that the bumps give, and I think a wheel without bumps might be disconcerting.
The current developer systems use a conventional BIOS, but Apple's engineers have said publicly that they have not yet decided on the final firmware. The developer guidelines exist to dissuade programmers from writing OF-dependent code.
From the comments Apple has made, they are looking at either OF or EFI in the final systems, with a slight preference for EFI.
Firstly, your subject line is patently false, per your link. PowerPC was introduced in 1994, not 1996
. .........2.5. ......4.0
Let's look closer at those numbers (per your link.)
Year...Share.....units (millions)
1991....11.2.........2.1
1992....12.
1993....10...........3.3 - PowerPC announced
1994....9.4..........3.8 - PowerPC shipped
1995....9............4.5
1996....5.1...
2004.....2.0..........3.5
Apple's market share peaked two years before PowerPC. It was in decline for two years before PowerPC. From the looks of things, PowerPC gave the Mac a temporary boost in unit sales, even though market share continued to decline. I would say, based solely on the numbers, that PowerPC had no discernible effect on the Mac's viability in the market.
NASDAQ is both. It's a "virtual" electronic exchange...no trading floor, no men in suits running around, but plenty of shares changing hands.
It's also an index of prices of the companies listed on it.
The vast majority of studies estimate the installed base of the macintosh at somewhere around three to five percent.
Incorrect.
The vast majority of studies estimate the market share of the Macintosh at somewhere around three to five percent.
Market share is about current sales volume relative to sales of other products.
Installed base is about deployed systems relative to other deployed systems.
If I own four Macs and buy a PC, then PCs have 100% market share in my home, but 20% of the installed base.
Dang, whats my upgrade path from Mac OS X 10.4?
Longhorn! Longhorn will be decades ahead of Tiger!
Um, literally. Decades.
- Difficult conversations, a book about confronting people in tough situations.
- The argument clinic, Monty Python (If you've never seen it, watch it before reading this script. It's in the 3rd season, disc 9 of the boxed set). Also see the splunge scene in episode 6.
- Games people play, Eric Byrne. A book on transactional analyis: a model for why people behave as they do in certain situations.
- The informed argument, Robert Miller. Textbook style coverage of both proper and unfair argument tactics.
- With good reason, Morris Engel. a short summary of common logic manipulations, explained with a sense of humor (over a dozen cartoons).
- Why smart people can be so stupid, Salon.com
Best. Citation. Ever.
Who is going to put in a report against them?
The scammers' ISP?
"This guy hacked one of our customers' sites! Lock him up!"
Hacking into these legitimate companies doesn't do anything to hurt the scammers.
If the vigilantes take down the scam site, then they may prevent some people from falling victim to it. It may not hurt the scammer, but it might protect the innocent.
And, frankly, these "legitimate companies" should do more to prevent the use of their services for fraudulent purposes. Say, writing a script to search though the hosted material for the phrase "bank account" and flag any occurrences for human review.
I can't say I approve of this behavior...but it might have a positive effect, as well.
I don't know about keyboards that use proprietary RF protocols, but the Bluetooth specification allows for the use of encryption.
I know that at least one manufacturer of a Bluetooth wireless keyboard claims "secure 128-bit, over-the-air encryption keeping sensitive information safe as it is being typed."
Even those products stamped "Made in USA" may not meet the DHS criteria.
For example, most (all?) Dell desktops are assembled in the US. Dell maintains factories here, whith US workers to put together the "custom-configured" hardware they're so famous for. (Dell laptops come from overseas like everyone else's.)
The components they assemble, of course, are all from overseas. The cases, motherboards, drives, memory, power supplies...almost always imported. The criteria in the bill specifies >50% domestic components, so they don't qualify.
It astounds me how many members of the Slashdot crowd (usually quick to jump on the new and more-featured) appreciate a simple phone.
Maybe some Slashdotters' lives are already too complicated. Maybe they already have dedicated PDAs and digital cameras. Maybe they only use their phones to order pizza from their moms' basements.
Apple has several hundred thousand (possibly in the millions) affected systems out in the field.
And six reports of failure.
That's not a QA lapse. No quality-control testing procedure yet devised could have caught this.
Bad iBook logic boards were a QA lapse. White spots on PowerBook screens were a QA lapse. Both very expensive for the company (and its shareholders) due to the cost of warranty repairs and shipping.
On the macro scale, Apple's notebooks have as low or lower rate of failure than any other manufacturer. So says PC Magazine, year after year. Small consolation to those affected, but not a bad record to have.
This is just one of those things: LG made some faulty batteries, with a very small likelihood of a dangerous flaw. Neither Apple, nor LG, could have caught the flaw in their testing labs. Only once the systems were out in the field in volume did this become evident. That's the way it is sometimes.
The original iMac had a handle.
The G4 iMac was nice when sitting on a desk, but the round base didn't offer much in the way of handholds. The manual actually suggested you lift it by the monitor's support arm. While carrying it, you supported the base with your other hand.
The iMac G5 presents a similar problem: large computer, small "foot." Anyone with two brain cells left could probably move it across the room if he had to, but how do you safely grab and move a $2000 slab-with-hinged-foot?
Naw, for true stupidity, you have to look at this FAQ.
Standard practice for consumer recalls: pull the products off the shelves. Contact resellers and tell them to do the same.
I'd expect any laptops Apple is shipping are not part of the recall. Any orders would probably be held up until new batteries are available.
If you've placed an order before the recall was announced, you should probably check it when it arrives. The recall covers models sold until "May 2005" so it's possible that bad batteries were already in the hands of the FedEx guys before the recall was finalized.
On the flip side, if they didn't decide on a recall, and someone were to get injured, they'd face a serious liability suit. "You already had six reports of failure, and yet your company did nothing. Your negligence is directly responsible for my disfiguring burns." Not a pretty idea.
Good business practices and fear of lawsuits often yield the same results. Which motivation you choose to ascribe depends mostly on how cynical you are.
Shouldn't it be that providers can say "Whoops, sorry, no 911 with our service", and that's it?
[...] they really expect the same amount of service?
The government should NOT be regulating this kind of stuff, IMHO.
For that matter, why should landline providers have to offer this type of service? Or cell phone companies? 911 isn't free. The spectrum, circuits, and caller-locating equipment costs money, all of which increases costs for consumers. Why must the government meddle in such things?
I almost never need these services. Why should the government force me to pay for them?
I say, if you want emergency services, you can get in your car and drive over to the fire station, hospital, or police department. Enough with this "911" and other expensive federal interference.
The CU site seems to focus more on services, as opposed to products. (Yes, I know Epinions rates services, too.)
CU is the publisher of Consumer Reports, which is the largest general-consumer product review magazine (they test TV sets, refrigerators, cars, and other things.)
What I wonder is, are they going to do anything meaningful with the opinions they collect? Normally, CR conducts random-sample surveys, which are a little more objective than simply collecting everyone's rants.
I have likewise heard that a large number of Lisa/Macintosh XL machines were buried. I read somewhere that they were hauled out into the desert and encased together in concrete.
I wonder if any of them, if extracted and cleaned up, would be functional today. They built hardware to be pretty rugged back then, and a concrete mausoleum combined with dry desert conditions would delay deterioration.
Very few companies have a hit product right out of the box.
Windows 1.0? 2.0? 3.0?
When Disneyland opened, half the equipment didn't work. Nor did any of the park drinking fountains.
And you don't buy a new model of car until it has been in production for at least a year.
Apple often gets burned because it revs up the marketing machine at launch time. Result: production backlogs, long delivery times, expensive FedEx shipping to meet delivery targets (Listen to the coference calls, you're a shareholder) heaps of bad press whenever teething problems come up, and expensive warranty repairs to fix the problems for each of the thousands of excited buyers who clamored for one the day it was released. Whereas Dell gets plenty of time to quietly fix any problems, and fewer early-production units in customer hands requiring returns.
According to the organizations (JD Power, Consumer reports) who do objective studies of such things, the Prius has been more reliable, with higher owner satisfaction, that almost any other model.
Electronic systems are, in general, more reliable, with lower failure rates, than the mechanical systems they replace. They are also easier to service. (Though the repair bill may very well be higher, and specialized equipment may be necessary.)
This "software", as others have said, are not the same as the software we run on our PCs. The software quality standards are higher, and the testing is far more intense.
People lament the loss of simpler mechanical systems that can be fixed with know-how and a socket set. We publicize every example of a system failure we hear of. But the numbers don't lie: a 2005 model with a half-dozen embedded computers has a far lower incidence of problems than a corresponding 1970 model when it was new. You are far less likely to ever have to call a tow truck in your lifetime than your father/grandfather was.
Sensationalism is so much more fun than fact, though.
I think you meant to say, "The ability to avoid annoying Flash advertisements."
And a stock install of OS X has this feature as well (until you install the plugin.)
Why on earth (or in space) would you want a manned spacecraft like this to carry a payload? If you try to build a manned craft that can carry "schoolbus sized satellites" you'll end up with something like the space shuttle, only even more expensive and even less reliable.
This is a "space compact car" to carry humans up. The shuttle is a "space SUV" that is horribly inefficient as a cargo platform or a people-mover. "Space trucks" should be (and are) unmanned.
A number of "quality" capacitor manufacturers have been having problems recently. There wasn't much Apple could do about it.
0 207018535.htm
0 3/ncap.html
References:
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Feb/bch2003
http://home.earthlink.net/~doniteli/index27.htm
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/feb