I don't play games, like ever. Last game I played was Age of Empires (original) and the Sim City's on my Apple.
I was excited for the new Sim City, and was going to buy a few copies for myself and my girlfriend. But after following the Reddit AMAA from the Maxis developers and their complete dodge of answering any questions regarding the totally stupid online only DRM that's being built into the game.
I'm no longer excited for the game and will not be buying it.
How many of these games on this list are purely online DRM playable only?
CentOS's release schedule has been really struggling recently. Release 6 was almost edging a 250 day delay over Red Hat.
CentOS have still to announce an official date for 6.1 to be released, which Red Hat released back on May 19th. There is a lot of uncertainty regarding CentOS releases and as such in my opinion makes CentOS not the ideal choice for the enterprise.
Other advantages are Red Hat's support services and the Red Hat Network (RHN) are second to none. RHN alone is what convinced us to pony up money for licenses.
The gist of the advantages are: better support, quicker updates/security fixes, easier and centralised management of multiple servers with the only disadvantage being a price tag.
This is another hidden benefit of Apple hardware that people don't readily consider.
Apple hardware is very hard to get in and out quickly, covertly, and without a few red flags being noticeable.
A couple of years (4+ now) ago when I sat in with Apple's instructor led hardware certification labs there were a small team of high tech crime investigators for the Australian Federal Police, and Australian Attorney Generals department attending.
They weren't interesting in passing the test, they had absolutely *no* interest in OS X, and they hated Apple hardware with a passion - why? Because it was damn hard to get in and out to get access to the hard drive. The '06 model iMacs (which at the time, was the current model) caused this guys to be furious with Apple, given you had to rip/tear the heat shield to get to the hard drive.
Being a predominate Apple technician at the time in Canberra, and given my reputation as being half decent I stayed in contact with a few of these departments, and still do to this day.
Even a little under a year ago I was (2010) I was personally requested to attend on-site to an unnamed department, to get a hard drive out and back in. What was normally a 45 minute on-site, turned in a *2 day* on-site as the team I was with (I was heavily supervised) had never worked on an Mac before, the matter was clearly urgent, and after removing every screw, the LCD panel, every cable, photos were taken and I was providing on-site training as to what every step I was taking.
Placing the iMac back to gather took the longest as I was stopped every few moments, asked to leave the room and then asked to come back into the room to continue. I suspect they were comparing the pull-apart photos to how I was placing the machine back together to ensure the machine was being placed together exactly as it was before.
While I never asked questions, a few months later the Australian Federal Police busted one of Australian's largest children pornography rings in Australia. I have the niggling feeling I was somewhat involved in this operation.
Disclaimer: I am now an owner of an Canberra, Australian based Apple Mac managed services business.
Mistake would be the understatement of the year. Apple f*%ked up royally on this one.
We manage two prestige advertising firms, one in Canberra and another down in Melbourne and the complaints are flowing, loud, and spitting from the mouth. But what's worse is, our customers are 100% right and they ain't shit all we can do.
The balls is deep in Apple's court on this one, and unlike the failed Xserve. The high-end video market is an area they do not want to drop the ball on, this industry laps up Apple hardware, is glued to the Apple suite and these guys pay up *big* bucks for managed services from Apple directly, the resellers and support vendors.
Sony definitely have a mountain to climb if any consumer is really going to believe in them again. They haven't just dropped the ball in regards to a few basement dwelling geeks, but have dropped the ball in-front of a crowd the tens of million.
The America Government isn't scared about any threats that releasing these photos may attract from foreign threats.
Your Government is scared of setting a precedent of being a truly open republic that allows the citizens to open their minds and come to their own conclusions.
Those in power would rather make the public live in fear thinking that your Government is doing anything, and everything in it's power to protect your borders when in reality it's stripping away your freedoms that you've fought so hard to establish.
American citizens need to wake up to the truth. The Government thinks it's own citizens are the threat, and you don't need to look too far to confirm this behaviour with the wire tapping, surveillance, border security, fear mongering and public deceit.
Wake up America. The world is getting sick of watching your own Government surpress everything that your constitution stands for.
Having previously worked several years for a technician role with a local Apple reseller, and now owning my own repair, support and Apple consultancy business (macexperts.com.au) I have worked on the insides of literally tens of hundreds, probably thousands of Macs from the G3, to the pain in the ass PowerBook 12-inches to the latest and greatest.
I can attest that build quality over the years has definitely suffered.
Specifically on the subject of thermal paste the original MacBook Pro's suffered from this exact same defect, causing heating problems and graphics issues that plagued *a lot* of customers. Apple's own internal documentation, replacement parts and Service Manuals stipulated that all three thermal tubes supplied were to be applied to each chip, when in fact and only after hundreds of repeat repairs it was acknowledged that too much thermal paste was applied. Specifically the "fix" was to only apply one tube to all three chips - presto! problem fixed.
My advice has always been: Do not purchase first generation of a major revision of Apple hardware, it will save you pain and problems down the track such as repeat repairs.
The University of Canberra, Australia I am currently attending has in the last several months moved to Microsoft cloud services for e-mail, and calendaring and it's a bit of a joke.
Being friendly with the I.T. department it's clear that the motivation was purely monetary related.
As from a usability standpoint, students hate it. Junk filtering is a complete joke and is a common occurrence for student to teacher emails to not be delivered.
Forwarding simply does not work as advertised, if you have a "Redirect to" and then "Delete" rule one-after the other it's common for the rules to 'switch' around and for the delete to happen first.
The services are constantly down for urgent maintenance, slow and buggy in anything but Firefox (some features completely missing, like being able to create mail rules)/Internet Explorer.
It's a big joke, and I can guarantee you that the USDA decision to move to these services would have come from the top ranks and I.T. made to keep their mouths shut regarding the decision, just like my University.
FUCK THIS SHIT, and fuck all the Apple astroturfers like Paska just below.
What has Slashdot editors posting Apple stories got to do with my opinion based in a market that I actively work in?
My opinion isn't some by-the-edge-of-my-seat observation, I work in the Apple industry for a company that is *not* Apple. We sell Linux, Windows, OS X, and push the right solution for the job.
The simple fact is the Apple solution is now becoming a lot more relevant then ever before, people want their products, and to ignore this (and if you want, fight it with a better/more open product) is just plain ignorance.
I work for a predominate Apple authorised reseller in Australia in an engineering role, as a result I get to hear feedback from every corner of the landscape. From consumer sales, small business, big business, government and educational.
The iPad, and just the talk around it, I have never experienced in my 7+ years in the I.T. industry, and 3+ years in the Apple industry.
I have no hesitation in saying that the iPad has a huge chance of being the game changer, it's launch officially brings the "PC" into being a commodity device that anyone can use.
Hell, just today with my desk behind our retail sales floor. I've had an old lady come in enquiring about pre-ordering it, just so she can check her email in Cambodia. Schools are talking about it, business is talking about it, but the most surprising thing is that the older generation, the type of folk who see computers as these big, ugly, hard machines to use are not just wanting them, they are consistently calling us each and every day to find out the latest news on them.
Apple will sell these things like absolute hot cakes, and the rest of the I.T. industry is going to be left scratching their heads as to why they didn't come up with this idea sooner.
Qantas is one of the world's oldest Airlines, and Australia's biggest airline. It also has one, if not the best, aviation safety record of any airline, ever.
I've been on the fence on who to purchase from to implement a few servers for a high-end client of mine. I've been deciding for 1 week on weather to choose Sun, HP or IBM.
I've now just ruled Sun out, I'm not wasting my money on such an immature company.
I've already wasted my money in a huge company that proved to be run by immature little bastards, which ended up costing me close to $11,000 USD in the long run - never again.
I work for a major, major, Australia Apple authorised Reseller with a service center that services many, many Macs.
Is Apple having problems? Nope. They did with the first batch of MacBook Pros, but since then, it's been smooth sailing.
Apple's biggest problems are the iBooks.
You also have to remember Apple are selling, a lot more Laptops then they have ever done in the past. Sales in Australia have skyrocketed so high that almost no-one can keep up with demand.
Not the best security, but would had saved our..
on
Mac Security Alarm System
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This setup may not offer the best line of security, but it would had saved the Macbook we have in our retail store. (Apple Australia)
We had a group of normal gentleman come in, two of them starting a conversation with our sales staff. The other gentleman who came in walked around to browse, and without being seen by our sales staff who were busying talking to the other man used bolt cutters to cut the metal wire security device and placed the Macbook in a bag and walked out.
This was all caught on video, but there's not much we can do now since we can't identify any of them.
Our store manager considered options to prevent this in the future but everything was just to expansive.
Until I implement our own in-house security system (Network based, if a local server is unable to ping a particular desktop/laptop it'll sound an audible alarm) I'll be installing this software on our Macbooks.
What about this situation, this has happened to me.
I resigned from my first 'big' job a few years ago at one of Australia's largest Television stations. I left on bad terms since. I had to give 4 weeks notice, which I did, and after the 4 weeks were up and I was legally unemployeed my former boss tried to legally force me into working Christmas and New Years - I declined and that left a bitter taste in his mouth
It's now been a few years on, and I state I worked at this place on my resume but give no telephone reference. When I apply for a job, 9 times out of 10 the place that is interested in me will ring up the station and my former boss will give me a bad rap.
The most noticeable difference I am seeing in this release is load times on my Powerbook. RC1 was hovering around 8-10 second initial load time and RC2 is now 1-2 seconds.
This was my one gripe with Firefox on OSX, and it now seems to have been fixed, and too my untrained eye it even seems to be quicker all-round over Safari.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't play games, like ever. Last game I played was Age of Empires (original) and the Sim City's on my Apple.
I was excited for the new Sim City, and was going to buy a few copies for myself and my girlfriend. But after following the Reddit AMAA from the Maxis developers and their complete dodge of answering any questions regarding the totally stupid online only DRM that's being built into the game.
I'm no longer excited for the game and will not be buying it.
How many of these games on this list are purely online DRM playable only?
Here's the direct link to the actual article and video: http://mashable.com/2012/10/02/ew-has-smartphone-inside/#92851Some-Chinese
CentOS's release schedule has been really struggling recently. Release 6 was almost edging a 250 day delay over Red Hat.
CentOS have still to announce an official date for 6.1 to be released, which Red Hat released back on May 19th. There is a lot of uncertainty regarding CentOS releases and as such in my opinion makes CentOS not the ideal choice for the enterprise.
Other advantages are Red Hat's support services and the Red Hat Network (RHN) are second to none. RHN alone is what convinced us to pony up money for licenses.
The gist of the advantages are: better support, quicker updates/security fixes, easier and centralised management of multiple servers with the only disadvantage being a price tag.
This is another hidden benefit of Apple hardware that people don't readily consider.
Apple hardware is very hard to get in and out quickly, covertly, and without a few red flags being noticeable.
A couple of years (4+ now) ago when I sat in with Apple's instructor led hardware certification labs there were a small team of high tech crime investigators for the Australian Federal Police, and Australian Attorney Generals department attending.
They weren't interesting in passing the test, they had absolutely *no* interest in OS X, and they hated Apple hardware with a passion - why? Because it was damn hard to get in and out to get access to the hard drive. The '06 model iMacs (which at the time, was the current model) caused this guys to be furious with Apple, given you had to rip/tear the heat shield to get to the hard drive.
Being a predominate Apple technician at the time in Canberra, and given my reputation as being half decent I stayed in contact with a few of these departments, and still do to this day.
Even a little under a year ago I was (2010) I was personally requested to attend on-site to an unnamed department, to get a hard drive out and back in. What was normally a 45 minute on-site, turned in a *2 day* on-site as the team I was with (I was heavily supervised) had never worked on an Mac before, the matter was clearly urgent, and after removing every screw, the LCD panel, every cable, photos were taken and I was providing on-site training as to what every step I was taking.
Placing the iMac back to gather took the longest as I was stopped every few moments, asked to leave the room and then asked to come back into the room to continue. I suspect they were comparing the pull-apart photos to how I was placing the machine back together to ensure the machine was being placed together exactly as it was before.
While I never asked questions, a few months later the Australian Federal Police busted one of Australian's largest children pornography rings in Australia. I have the niggling feeling I was somewhat involved in this operation.
Disclaimer: I am now an owner of an Canberra, Australian based Apple Mac managed services business.
Mistake would be the understatement of the year. Apple f*%ked up royally on this one.
We manage two prestige advertising firms, one in Canberra and another down in Melbourne and the complaints are flowing, loud, and spitting from the mouth. But what's worse is, our customers are 100% right and they ain't shit all we can do.
The balls is deep in Apple's court on this one, and unlike the failed Xserve. The high-end video market is an area they do not want to drop the ball on, this industry laps up Apple hardware, is glued to the Apple suite and these guys pay up *big* bucks for managed services from Apple directly, the resellers and support vendors.
Make. Believe, indeed.
Sony definitely have a mountain to climb if any consumer is really going to believe in them again. They haven't just dropped the ball in regards to a few basement dwelling geeks, but have dropped the ball in-front of a crowd the tens of million.
The America Government isn't scared about any threats that releasing these photos may attract from foreign threats.
Your Government is scared of setting a precedent of being a truly open republic that allows the citizens to open their minds and come to their own conclusions.
Those in power would rather make the public live in fear thinking that your Government is doing anything, and everything in it's power to protect your borders when in reality it's stripping away your freedoms that you've fought so hard to establish.
American citizens need to wake up to the truth. The Government thinks it's own citizens are the threat, and you don't need to look too far to confirm this behaviour with the wire tapping, surveillance, border security, fear mongering and public deceit.
Wake up America. The world is getting sick of watching your own Government surpress everything that your constitution stands for.
Wasn't it $75 trillion? The other 2 trillion must have gotten tied up in RIAA accounting practices.
I'm not seeing this functionality either from Canberra, Australia either by going directly to google.com, or google.com.au.
So it does appear that only US IP addresses are receiving this blocking feature which is s shame.
Having previously worked several years for a technician role with a local Apple reseller, and now owning my own repair, support and Apple consultancy business (macexperts.com.au) I have worked on the insides of literally tens of hundreds, probably thousands of Macs from the G3, to the pain in the ass PowerBook 12-inches to the latest and greatest.
I can attest that build quality over the years has definitely suffered.
Specifically on the subject of thermal paste the original MacBook Pro's suffered from this exact same defect, causing heating problems and graphics issues that plagued *a lot* of customers. Apple's own internal documentation, replacement parts and Service Manuals stipulated that all three thermal tubes supplied were to be applied to each chip, when in fact and only after hundreds of repeat repairs it was acknowledged that too much thermal paste was applied. Specifically the "fix" was to only apply one tube to all three chips - presto! problem fixed.
My advice has always been: Do not purchase first generation of a major revision of Apple hardware, it will save you pain and problems down the track such as repeat repairs.
The University of Canberra, Australia I am currently attending has in the last several months moved to Microsoft cloud services for e-mail, and calendaring and it's a bit of a joke.
Being friendly with the I.T. department it's clear that the motivation was purely monetary related.
As from a usability standpoint, students hate it. Junk filtering is a complete joke and is a common occurrence for student to teacher emails to not be delivered.
Forwarding simply does not work as advertised, if you have a "Redirect to" and then "Delete" rule one-after the other it's common for the rules to 'switch' around and for the delete to happen first.
The services are constantly down for urgent maintenance, slow and buggy in anything but Firefox (some features completely missing, like being able to create mail rules)/Internet Explorer.
It's a big joke, and I can guarantee you that the USDA decision to move to these services would have come from the top ranks and I.T. made to keep their mouths shut regarding the decision, just like my University.
I note that at this moment, the front page has
-- all separate, i.e. five stories.
FUCK THIS SHIT, and fuck all the Apple astroturfers like Paska just below.
What has Slashdot editors posting Apple stories got to do with my opinion based in a market that I actively work in?
My opinion isn't some by-the-edge-of-my-seat observation, I work in the Apple industry for a company that is *not* Apple. We sell Linux, Windows, OS X, and push the right solution for the job.
The simple fact is the Apple solution is now becoming a lot more relevant then ever before, people want their products, and to ignore this (and if you want, fight it with a better/more open product) is just plain ignorance.
I work for a predominate Apple authorised reseller in Australia in an engineering role, as a result I get to hear feedback from every corner of the landscape. From consumer sales, small business, big business, government and educational.
The iPad, and just the talk around it, I have never experienced in my 7+ years in the I.T. industry, and 3+ years in the Apple industry.
I have no hesitation in saying that the iPad has a huge chance of being the game changer, it's launch officially brings the "PC" into being a commodity device that anyone can use.
Hell, just today with my desk behind our retail sales floor. I've had an old lady come in enquiring about pre-ordering it, just so she can check her email in Cambodia. Schools are talking about it, business is talking about it, but the most surprising thing is that the older generation, the type of folk who see computers as these big, ugly, hard machines to use are not just wanting them, they are consistently calling us each and every day to find out the latest news on them.
Apple will sell these things like absolute hot cakes, and the rest of the I.T. industry is going to be left scratching their heads as to why they didn't come up with this idea sooner.
> Wait, who's Quantas?
Qantas is one of the world's oldest Airlines, and Australia's biggest airline. It also has one, if not the best, aviation safety record of any airline, ever.
I've been on the fence on who to purchase from to implement a few servers for a high-end client of mine. I've been deciding for 1 week on weather to choose Sun, HP or IBM. I've now just ruled Sun out, I'm not wasting my money on such an immature company. I've already wasted my money in a huge company that proved to be run by immature little bastards, which ended up costing me close to $11,000 USD in the long run - never again.
I work for a major, major, Australia Apple authorised Reseller with a service center that services many, many Macs.
Is Apple having problems? Nope. They did with the first batch of MacBook Pros, but since then, it's been smooth sailing.
Apple's biggest problems are the iBooks.
You also have to remember Apple are selling, a lot more Laptops then they have ever done in the past. Sales in Australia have skyrocketed so high that almost no-one can keep up with demand.
This setup may not offer the best line of security, but it would had saved the Macbook we have in our retail store. (Apple Australia)
We had a group of normal gentleman come in, two of them starting a conversation with our sales staff. The other gentleman who came in walked around to browse, and without being seen by our sales staff who were busying talking to the other man used bolt cutters to cut the metal wire security device and placed the Macbook in a bag and walked out.
This was all caught on video, but there's not much we can do now since we can't identify any of them.
Our store manager considered options to prevent this in the future but everything was just to expansive.
Until I implement our own in-house security system (Network based, if a local server is unable to ping a particular desktop/laptop it'll sound an audible alarm) I'll be installing this software on our Macbooks.
> I'm wondering if this would have gone ahead if Telstra was still owned by the Government. They're our biggest ISP.
51.8% of Telstra is owned by the Australia Government, that gives them the majority share.
"Pew Internet Project surveys between January and June in 2005 show that 67 percent of the adult American population goes online".
No it doesn't, what it shows is that 67% of the 6,403 people surveyed go online - not the whole population (280,000,000+) of America.
This is almost as flawed as running a survey on Slashdot and concluding that 91% of the American population have never had a girlfriend.
Quote from the Methodology section of the PDF:
"The total number of respondents included in the 2002 findings was 14,416 and for 2005 was 6,403."
"Keeping kids from nasties on the net"
Here, I have a much better suggestion - supervision your children while they use the internet!
What about this situation, this has happened to me.
I resigned from my first 'big' job a few years ago at one of Australia's largest Television stations. I left on bad terms since. I had to give 4 weeks notice, which I did, and after the 4 weeks were up and I was legally unemployeed my former boss tried to legally force me into working Christmas and New Years - I declined and that left a bitter taste in his mouth
It's now been a few years on, and I state I worked at this place on my resume but give no telephone reference. When I apply for a job, 9 times out of 10 the place that is interested in me will ring up the station and my former boss will give me a bad rap.
Is there anything I can do about this?
That's today you insenstive clod!
I for one live in the future, which puts December 3rd as, well, right now.
> I've seen Steve Irwin wrestle crocs larger than that ;)
Crickey! This Steve Irwin bloke sounds like he is an alcoholic.
Or he is just stupid.
Yes, I am Australian and no average Australian's don't try to wrestle crocs on a daily basis.
The most noticeable difference I am seeing in this release is load times on my Powerbook. RC1 was hovering around 8-10 second initial load time and RC2 is now 1-2 seconds.
This was my one gripe with Firefox on OSX, and it now seems to have been fixed, and too my untrained eye it even seems to be quicker all-round over Safari.
For those who are interested, link to the original application publication.