Right.... and how well does the latest OS run on that top of the line PowerPC laptop? My five year old Sony Vaio runs Windows 7 very nicely, but for PCMCIA support I am running XP on it. This is a PentiumM 1.7GHz with 1.5GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive. It wasn't cheap at the time, but it runs well.
My main laptop is a Fujitsu P1620 ultra-lightweight - 1.0kg with battery. I can cope with the small keyboard and can read the 9" screen. It is 2.5 years old and runs Win 7 Business like a charm. Comparing Mac laptops to cheap PoS PC laptops is hardly a fair comparison.
I went back to university this year and I was surprised to see how few macs there were and how many netbooks running XP or Win7 were around. Admittedly this is at a technical university, and the design students are at a different campus. The one place I have seen more mac laptops than PC laptops is at the IT helpdesk with dead harddrives. Must be something about the all black Macbooks...
My local council pays for aerial photography to identify pools that have been built without permits and to detect trees that have been removed illegally (can't cut them down if there is a vegetation protection order on them). I guess some of the cost is recovered by making the images available to Google Earth. Yes, the data goes the other way to that in the story. When I access the council GIS the photos are two years fresher than the ones on Google Earth and are higher res, but that might be due to the photos getting better every year.
I've used aerial photos from other councils in South East Queensland for my work and these were also better than Google Earth
Pool regulations in Queensland are more for safety purposes (as well as building permit purposes) as fences need to comply with Australian Standards. There are moves a foot to charge an annual fee to every poolowner to cover the cost of regular inspections, and knowing where all the pools are would be key to this.
New Zealand has a very low 'cost of compliance' for taxation. Each tax $ collected costs half what it does for the Aussies to collect. The tax law is also nice and simple in NZ. I used to complete a paper tax return in 10 minutes (and that was writing out the two copies). It takes me about 45min-60min to complete an Australian tax return using the free E-Tax software, and I'd hate to think how long it would take on paper, with the supplementary return as well.
In Australia you get a Notice of Assessment telling you what is owed or will be refunded after you do the return telling them what was earned, what your deductions are and any other tax offset. The thing is there is a piece of paper telling you what needs to be settled by the end of October. Australia hasn't figured out that you can take tax from interest when banks pay it to you, so if you have savings you end up paying tax. If there is more than about $2000 of tax to pay, you go onto quarterly tax payments (called PAYG, but the same as NZ's provisional tax). One day they might catch up with NZ to simplify things
I pronounce 'metre' met-re when in New Caledonia, and meat-ter when in an English speaking country (or a close semblance, such as 'Stralya).
We can tell the difference between a Newton-metre and a Newton-meter. One is a unit of torque and the other is a force gauge (yes, there is a 'u' in gauge) that reads in Newtons.
At least the meter/metre thing is minor in that there are the same letters - the hood/bonnet, trunk/boot, fanny (quite different meanings!) are much more amusing. What non-US English speakers don't like to let on is that we understand the US English words just fine because of TV and movies - it is much more fun to be an arse about it (which is quite different to being an ass - hee haw).
Do you mean 'Am I often a pedantic person?', because that two word sentence didn't have the requisite verbs and nouns. If so, yes.
Given the difficulties of controlling boats, giving the limit as 20m or 70' would make more sense. If the photographer knows metric then they can get 1.2m closer:-) Or does rounding to tens not work in feet - does it have to be rounded to the nearest 12 for non-metric people to understand (and do they have six fingers on each hand?)
It's a friend of the litre:-) The rest of the world had to make some concessions for the US to adopt metric, and the alternative spelling for metre (meter) and litre (liter) was one, and the capital L as a symbol for litre/liter was the other. The unit for volume is not named after a person, so should be lower case, but some found it too confusing and thought it might be a 1 (one).
Anyway, if you can hold position on the water to within a metre you are doing VERY well.
The two posters below got it right. The whole point was that the US Coast Guard issued the release in metric, but the news article was in feet. It might surprise those in the US but the metric units are actually the preferred units now. Road drawings are metric, and there are official km/h speed signs available for use.
The official announcement was that the exclusion area was 20 metres, not 65 feet. I would have thought that most people reading Slashdot would be able to do the conversion -- if not, go ask a six year old how to do it. Good too see that the US forces are starting to think metric.
Well I've found no problems with support for CD since most people want EPS with text exported as curves and it does that fine.
A friend's Mum used Corel Draw for the drawings in New Zealand Standards and for technical work at the University where she worked. I've used it for designing brochures (full offset print, bleed etc), business cards and posters.
I've never used Corel Draw on a Mac and once tried a demo on Linux and that was not pretty. I guess it all what you're familiar with, but I did try to give Illustrator a go since it was easier to get through a university here. There was too much of a mindset difference, so I went back to what I know. My wife did the same -- when she got a new computer she had CD put on it instead of AI.
Photoshop makes sense, so I use that when I can, but it is GimpShop for me at the moment for financial reasons.
It isn't called 'Adobe Intimidator' for nothing! I learnt Corel Draw at university (CD 3) and have used it ever since. I couldn't get my head around Illustrator, and with CD being available where I worked or studied, why bother?
LN2 bombs are fun. I only made a few of these with 600ml coke bottles when some cryogenic power electronics experiments were being performed. The fun stopped after we were busted setting them off by a technician. There was more commotion than we expected because the concrete pad (nice and level) we selected happened to be the loading bay of the dangerous goods store. Oops.
Two stories: First one: Friends of mine worked in the theatre game and would often have left over dry ice from shows. After one show closed they were setting off dry-ice bombs at a party. Apparently one went off just as a taxi drove past, and the driver feared for his safety so called the cops. A policeman turned up, wanted an explanation, and a demo was arranged. It took some time for the bottle to go off, and when it did the cop was quite alarmed. His response: don't do them after 10pm.
Second one: same friend's father works for the forensic science people. A person was charged with blowing things up with CO2 bombs and they were trying to replicate the device. The suspect claimed to get them to go off after 15min, but the scientists were not getting them to go within 45min. Son said to Dad: you need to add water to the dry ice. Difficult silence followed.
When burying bottle bombs, make sure it isn't next to the rooster that was dispatched a week earlier. GF and her father (now wife and father in law) found that was a bit yucky.
Search on YouTube for 'Frozen Explosions' for some fun with CO2 bombs, including in a swimming pool and launching drum lids
One place I worked at had a very large, but disfunctional, IT department. They loved themselves, but achieved very little, and what they did achieve cost the other business units a fortune.
The decision was taken to break IT up into its functions. Design was handled by Engineering, operations & help desk was handled by Operations and repairs were handled by Field Services. This meant that Engineering dealt with server design as well as 330kV transmission lines & substations. Same for ops and field services - the divisions reflected the type of work, not the particular thing being worked on.
As far as I can tell from talking to people that work there, this system was worked out OK.
How could McKinnon 'commit crimes in the US' when he's never been to the US? All comes down to the definition of Commit doesn't it?
I guess the British retailiation would be to sue a US newspaper for Libel in the UK (under the equally stupid laws there).
I've never been to the US, but something confuses me about the SSN.
How can a number that you are required to give to every man and their dog (driver licence, student enrolment etc.) even be considered secret enough that it proves ID?
Perhaps the (ab)use of the SSN is why the Australian Government specifically prohibit the use of a tax file number as an identifier by anyone other than the Tax Office and only financial organisation have the right to ask for it (and none can compel, but they have to tax high if you don't give the number over). The driver licence number has become a default ID number here, and although most credit application forms ask for it I've still got new credit without including my licence number.
Sometimes using low-level swearing has more effect. If everyone in the office regularly uses 'fuck', then when you drop/break something and say 'poos and wees' that really gets some attention.
'Fuck' is a useful stress relief word, but when overused is indicative of a poor vocabulary. It is more satisfying to tear someone down using 'polite language', especially as it frustrates any superficial complaints that could be laid against you. Smiling at when they fire up in return magnifies their displeasure (i.e. it gives them the shits in a bit way).
I've stayed in a few motels in rural Queensland (Dalby and Chinchilla). They had free WiFi or Ethernet, which varied in speed depending on the number people hammering their 512k DSL connection at once. One place had a paid service, but it was a rat hole.
The hotels in the capital cities want to charge like wounded bulls - Adelaide and Melbourne hotels were bad like that. I use a 3G prepaid for times like that, and given that $30 gives me 2GB of traffic for three months, it isn't a hardship.
NZ hotels and motels were better, with the Copthorne in Oriental Bay (Wellington) having free Ethernet based internet and a motel on the waterfront in Napier doing the same with generous allowances.
I've found that a few places that do have WiFi have WEP enabled to stop drive-by downloads, and others stick to cabled Ethernet.Coffee shops and bookshops don't generally offer free WiFi here, so most people on the move have 3G of some sort.
From the wording of the judgement, it sounds as if you were the City heavy vehicle supervisor and your manager came along and demanded the keys for a very large tip-truck and you refused because they didn't have a heavy vehicle licence that you would be charged with vehicle theft.
It sounds like the procedures in place at SF City were weak. In the truck analogy, the rules may require the keys be handed to management when requested, but only a suitably licensed driver could use those keys and operate the vehicle (there are rules like that, they're the Road Rules). Perhaps the IT Dept. needed something equivalent whereby management could possess username/password but were not permitted to use them unless appropriate qualifications/certifications/competencies were held.
Terry sounds a bit like the truckie that thinks no-one else can drive as well as he/she can so refuses to hand over the keys to 'their' truck. If there were IT admins working for the city that had the appropriate alphabet soup behind their name then management (which goes all the way to the mayor) could provide the access details to those people for specific tasks.
Now, for the Tui's advert: 'Yeah, Right...' The PHB is going to use the passwords to have a play themselves to remind themselves of the 'old days', forgetting that when they were trained in MIS they were using punchcards and teletypes, and networking was something that you did at parties. I can see why Terry did what he did, but the letter of the law can be a PITA sometimes. Does California have the equivalent of the GSA that could go through the SF City Council like a dose of the salts and clean things up?
Since it appears that the BD encryption has been hacked, what is to stop people encrypting their discs with the key of a major studio if they want to distribute pressed discs? I can't imagine that a group of naughty people wanting to distribute some propaganda is going to be too concerned about IP violations if the message being promoted was not all that savoury.
So basically the BluRay people thought that by banning unencrypted (plain) pressed discs (which was perfectly fine with DVD) then someone BD rips would be stopped. Instead all that they've achieved is to make it hard for legit users of the format to do what they should be able to, and the unauthorised duplicators are ripping the discs to alternate formats anyway.
Perhaps you as a retailer can explain to those of us not in the USA the basis of this returning habit that people have?
Here in Australia, and in New Zealand, you generally can only return goods if they are faulty or not fit for the purpose intended. There are some exceptions (clothing mainly), but in general, 'you bought it, you own it' -- especially for electronics. If something is opened in the shop there's no way we touch it.
Prices in the US seem pretty cheap compared to here, so how is the cost of returns managed? What sort of hardware can be returned anyway? I've seen comments on the 'net about people returning iPads because they're waiting for the 3G version and that really surprised me, as there's no way any shop would do that here.
I guess there is no such thing as buyer's remorse in the US.
Early-mid 90s actually:-) Hacking was still the goal of getting into systems that you weren't meant to, or doing things that you weren't meant to.
The BBCs had remote control capability (*REMOTE) and remote viewing (*VIEW) which were restricted applications, but there was the 'Advanced Econet programming manual' which documented the APIs. A copy of that was worth something:-)
We also discovered network sniffing by monitoring a certain memory location where the bytes on the Econet appeared. To capture traffic for an entire lunch hour required learning about paged memory access and efficient ways of storing data (just the user names and passwords used with *I AM). Yes we were up to no good, but we learnt a lot at the time. One thing the school did which was quite clever was to have physical access restrictions to the admin Novell network -- all of the PCs & 10Base2 outlets on that were in locked staff-only areas. Any 'playing' that pupils did was really only affecting each other (pranking) rather than doing anything really naughty. The admin PCs were discless terminals that booted through the LAN so were quite secure as well (that might have been tested when access was obtained once...)
While the experimenting wasn't pure in intent, we did learn a lot and I have an appreciation for computer security now!
I did part time computer support for the computer classroom at the high school I went to (yes this was awhile ago, and the computers were BBC Model Bs or BBC Master Compacts) while I was at university.
I was told that I was offered the position because I had been one of the chief troublemakers when I was a pupil and I'd kept my predecessor on his toes and so it was thought that I'd be able to keep things in order:-) The previous guy (also a David) went on to work for a small company in the UK called ARM and designed a processor that could work with 16b and 32b instructions (US Patent 5740461) -- the 'Thumb', which is the T in ARM7TDMI.
I'm glad that I had such a good 'adversary' to go head to head with:-)
Working with the classroom computers helped when I applied for a more general PC admin role at a school closer to the university. Running a Novel network was quite a different experience, esp. when the 'standard' computer of the day was a 486DX-33 and the school was running discless XTs @ 8MHz.
The actual mechanism of 802.11a/b/g/n is a standard -- nothing wrong with that.
Things get interesting internationally because the 2.4GHz ISM band is defined differently in each country (but loosely based around the three ITU regions). There is a good reference list on Wikipedia. For example, most of the world can use channels 1-13, but North American users are limited to channels 1-11 at full power (12 & 13 can be used at reduced power -- but that's too complicated for most people so the channels are restricted). Spain used to be limited to channels 10 & 11 and France to 10-13, but this has been changed as the two countries harmonise with the rest of Europe.
The nice database at Linux Wireless lists frequencies and power levels. Israel is listed as having a 2.4GHz band of 2402.000 - 2482.000 MHz with a max power of 100mW. The US band is 2402.000 - 2472.000 (narrower) with a maximum power of 500mW (much higher). If the iPad is actually running 0.5W at 2.4GHz I can see why the Israeli authorities will be a bit cranky. Australia & the UK have the 100mW limits, but people in NZ with iPads (such as @lisatickledpink) will be fine since the power limit is 1000mW (woo hoo!)
If Apple had been sensible and limited the power output to 100mW across the board then there would be no trouble with WiFi across borders, and perhaps that is what most laptop manufacturers have done (to avoid the wifi cards being ripped out at Customs)?
I think the Soviets tried the 'one store for anything' approach, as memory serves I don't think it worked too well.
If you don't want any choice in where you get your apps from, buy an iPhone. Presumably since you have an Android phone, choice, flexibility and openness matter.
I've bought programs for PalmOS and Windows Mobile (5 & 6) from PalmGear, PocketGear and the like. It wasn't difficult, payment was straightforward and 'it just worked'. Perhaps if people find that too complicated then they need to get an iPhone, and make sure they get rid of that complicated PC and buy a Mac and only use the software that Apple provides (since it would be too complicated to go shopping for anything else).
Slashdot Mirror
Right .... and how well does the latest OS run on that top of the line PowerPC laptop? My five year old Sony Vaio runs Windows 7 very nicely, but for PCMCIA support I am running XP on it. This is a PentiumM 1.7GHz with 1.5GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive. It wasn't cheap at the time, but it runs well.
My main laptop is a Fujitsu P1620 ultra-lightweight - 1.0kg with battery. I can cope with the small keyboard and can read the 9" screen. It is 2.5 years old and runs Win 7 Business like a charm. Comparing Mac laptops to cheap PoS PC laptops is hardly a fair comparison.
I went back to university this year and I was surprised to see how few macs there were and how many netbooks running XP or Win7 were around. Admittedly this is at a technical university, and the design students are at a different campus. The one place I have seen more mac laptops than PC laptops is at the IT helpdesk with dead harddrives. Must be something about the all black Macbooks ...
My local council pays for aerial photography to identify pools that have been built without permits and to detect trees that have been removed illegally (can't cut them down if there is a vegetation protection order on them). I guess some of the cost is recovered by making the images available to Google Earth. Yes, the data goes the other way to that in the story. When I access the council GIS the photos are two years fresher than the ones on Google Earth and are higher res, but that might be due to the photos getting better every year.
I've used aerial photos from other councils in South East Queensland for my work and these were also better than Google Earth
Pool regulations in Queensland are more for safety purposes (as well as building permit purposes) as fences need to comply with Australian Standards. There are moves a foot to charge an annual fee to every poolowner to cover the cost of regular inspections, and knowing where all the pools are would be key to this.
New Zealand has a very low 'cost of compliance' for taxation. Each tax $ collected costs half what it does for the Aussies to collect. The tax law is also nice and simple in NZ. I used to complete a paper tax return in 10 minutes (and that was writing out the two copies). It takes me about 45min-60min to complete an Australian tax return using the free E-Tax software, and I'd hate to think how long it would take on paper, with the supplementary return as well.
In Australia you get a Notice of Assessment telling you what is owed or will be refunded after you do the return telling them what was earned, what your deductions are and any other tax offset. The thing is there is a piece of paper telling you what needs to be settled by the end of October. Australia hasn't figured out that you can take tax from interest when banks pay it to you, so if you have savings you end up paying tax. If there is more than about $2000 of tax to pay, you go onto quarterly tax payments (called PAYG, but the same as NZ's provisional tax). One day they might catch up with NZ to simplify things
I pronounce 'metre' met-re when in New Caledonia, and meat-ter when in an English speaking country (or a close semblance, such as 'Stralya).
We can tell the difference between a Newton-metre and a Newton-meter. One is a unit of torque and the other is a force gauge (yes, there is a 'u' in gauge) that reads in Newtons.
At least the meter/metre thing is minor in that there are the same letters - the hood/bonnet, trunk/boot, fanny (quite different meanings!) are much more amusing. What non-US English speakers don't like to let on is that we understand the US English words just fine because of TV and movies - it is much more fun to be an arse about it (which is quite different to being an ass - hee haw).
Do you mean 'Am I often a pedantic person?', because that two word sentence didn't have the requisite verbs and nouns. If so, yes.
Given the difficulties of controlling boats, giving the limit as 20m or 70' would make more sense. If the photographer knows metric then they can get 1.2m closer :-) Or does rounding to tens not work in feet - does it have to be rounded to the nearest 12 for non-metric people to understand (and do they have six fingers on each hand?)
It's a friend of the litre :-) The rest of the world had to make some concessions for the US to adopt metric, and the alternative spelling for metre (meter) and litre (liter) was one, and the capital L as a symbol for litre/liter was the other. The unit for volume is not named after a person, so should be lower case, but some found it too confusing and thought it might be a 1 (one).
Anyway, if you can hold position on the water to within a metre you are doing VERY well.
Three words in reply: Mars Climate Orbiter
The two posters below got it right. The whole point was that the US Coast Guard issued the release in metric, but the news article was in feet. It might surprise those in the US but the metric units are actually the preferred units now. Road drawings are metric, and there are official km/h speed signs available for use.
The official announcement was that the exclusion area was 20 metres, not 65 feet. I would have thought that most people reading Slashdot would be able to do the conversion -- if not, go ask a six year old how to do it. Good too see that the US forces are starting to think metric.
Well I've found no problems with support for CD since most people want EPS with text exported as curves and it does that fine.
A friend's Mum used Corel Draw for the drawings in New Zealand Standards and for technical work at the University where she worked. I've used it for designing brochures (full offset print, bleed etc), business cards and posters.
I've never used Corel Draw on a Mac and once tried a demo on Linux and that was not pretty. I guess it all what you're familiar with, but I did try to give Illustrator a go since it was easier to get through a university here. There was too much of a mindset difference, so I went back to what I know. My wife did the same -- when she got a new computer she had CD put on it instead of AI.
Photoshop makes sense, so I use that when I can, but it is GimpShop for me at the moment for financial reasons.
It isn't called 'Adobe Intimidator' for nothing! I learnt Corel Draw at university (CD 3) and have used it ever since. I couldn't get my head around Illustrator, and with CD being available where I worked or studied, why bother?
LN2 bombs are fun. I only made a few of these with 600ml coke bottles when some cryogenic power electronics experiments were being performed. The fun stopped after we were busted setting them off by a technician. There was more commotion than we expected because the concrete pad (nice and level) we selected happened to be the loading bay of the dangerous goods store. Oops.
Two stories: First one: Friends of mine worked in the theatre game and would often have left over dry ice from shows. After one show closed they were setting off dry-ice bombs at a party. Apparently one went off just as a taxi drove past, and the driver feared for his safety so called the cops. A policeman turned up, wanted an explanation, and a demo was arranged. It took some time for the bottle to go off, and when it did the cop was quite alarmed. His response: don't do them after 10pm.
Second one: same friend's father works for the forensic science people. A person was charged with blowing things up with CO2 bombs and they were trying to replicate the device. The suspect claimed to get them to go off after 15min, but the scientists were not getting them to go within 45min. Son said to Dad: you need to add water to the dry ice. Difficult silence followed.
When burying bottle bombs, make sure it isn't next to the rooster that was dispatched a week earlier. GF and her father (now wife and father in law) found that was a bit yucky.
Search on YouTube for 'Frozen Explosions' for some fun with CO2 bombs, including in a swimming pool and launching drum lids
One place I worked at had a very large, but disfunctional, IT department. They loved themselves, but achieved very little, and what they did achieve cost the other business units a fortune.
The decision was taken to break IT up into its functions. Design was handled by Engineering, operations & help desk was handled by Operations and repairs were handled by Field Services. This meant that Engineering dealt with server design as well as 330kV transmission lines & substations. Same for ops and field services - the divisions reflected the type of work, not the particular thing being worked on.
As far as I can tell from talking to people that work there, this system was worked out OK.
How could McKinnon 'commit crimes in the US' when he's never been to the US? All comes down to the definition of Commit doesn't it? I guess the British retailiation would be to sue a US newspaper for Libel in the UK (under the equally stupid laws there).
How can a number that you are required to give to every man and their dog (driver licence, student enrolment etc.) even be considered secret enough that it proves ID?
Perhaps the (ab)use of the SSN is why the Australian Government specifically prohibit the use of a tax file number as an identifier by anyone other than the Tax Office and only financial organisation have the right to ask for it (and none can compel, but they have to tax high if you don't give the number over). The driver licence number has become a default ID number here, and although most credit application forms ask for it I've still got new credit without including my licence number.
'Fuck' is a useful stress relief word, but when overused is indicative of a poor vocabulary. It is more satisfying to tear someone down using 'polite language', especially as it frustrates any superficial complaints that could be laid against you. Smiling at when they fire up in return magnifies their displeasure (i.e. it gives them the shits in a bit way).
The hotels in the capital cities want to charge like wounded bulls - Adelaide and Melbourne hotels were bad like that. I use a 3G prepaid for times like that, and given that $30 gives me 2GB of traffic for three months, it isn't a hardship.
NZ hotels and motels were better, with the Copthorne in Oriental Bay (Wellington) having free Ethernet based internet and a motel on the waterfront in Napier doing the same with generous allowances.
I've found that a few places that do have WiFi have WEP enabled to stop drive-by downloads, and others stick to cabled Ethernet.Coffee shops and bookshops don't generally offer free WiFi here, so most people on the move have 3G of some sort.
It sounds like the procedures in place at SF City were weak. In the truck analogy, the rules may require the keys be handed to management when requested, but only a suitably licensed driver could use those keys and operate the vehicle (there are rules like that, they're the Road Rules). Perhaps the IT Dept. needed something equivalent whereby management could possess username/password but were not permitted to use them unless appropriate qualifications/certifications/competencies were held.
Terry sounds a bit like the truckie that thinks no-one else can drive as well as he/she can so refuses to hand over the keys to 'their' truck. If there were IT admins working for the city that had the appropriate alphabet soup behind their name then management (which goes all the way to the mayor) could provide the access details to those people for specific tasks.
Now, for the Tui's advert: 'Yeah, Right ...' The PHB is going to use the passwords to have a play themselves to remind themselves of the 'old days', forgetting that when they were trained in MIS they were using punchcards and teletypes, and networking was something that you did at parties. I can see why Terry did what he did, but the letter of the law can be a PITA sometimes. Does California have the equivalent of the GSA that could go through the SF City Council like a dose of the salts and clean things up?
Since it appears that the BD encryption has been hacked, what is to stop people encrypting their discs with the key of a major studio if they want to distribute pressed discs? I can't imagine that a group of naughty people wanting to distribute some propaganda is going to be too concerned about IP violations if the message being promoted was not all that savoury. So basically the BluRay people thought that by banning unencrypted (plain) pressed discs (which was perfectly fine with DVD) then someone BD rips would be stopped. Instead all that they've achieved is to make it hard for legit users of the format to do what they should be able to, and the unauthorised duplicators are ripping the discs to alternate formats anyway.
Here in Australia, and in New Zealand, you generally can only return goods if they are faulty or not fit for the purpose intended. There are some exceptions (clothing mainly), but in general, 'you bought it, you own it' -- especially for electronics. If something is opened in the shop there's no way we touch it.
Prices in the US seem pretty cheap compared to here, so how is the cost of returns managed? What sort of hardware can be returned anyway? I've seen comments on the 'net about people returning iPads because they're waiting for the 3G version and that really surprised me, as there's no way any shop would do that here.
I guess there is no such thing as buyer's remorse in the US.
The BBCs had remote control capability (*REMOTE) and remote viewing (*VIEW) which were restricted applications, but there was the 'Advanced Econet programming manual' which documented the APIs. A copy of that was worth something :-)
We also discovered network sniffing by monitoring a certain memory location where the bytes on the Econet appeared. To capture traffic for an entire lunch hour required learning about paged memory access and efficient ways of storing data (just the user names and passwords used with *I AM). Yes we were up to no good, but we learnt a lot at the time. One thing the school did which was quite clever was to have physical access restrictions to the admin Novell network -- all of the PCs & 10Base2 outlets on that were in locked staff-only areas. Any 'playing' that pupils did was really only affecting each other (pranking) rather than doing anything really naughty. The admin PCs were discless terminals that booted through the LAN so were quite secure as well (that might have been tested when access was obtained once ...)
While the experimenting wasn't pure in intent, we did learn a lot and I have an appreciation for computer security now!
I was told that I was offered the position because I had been one of the chief troublemakers when I was a pupil and I'd kept my predecessor on his toes and so it was thought that I'd be able to keep things in order :-) The previous guy (also a David) went on to work for a small company in the UK called ARM and designed a processor that could work with 16b and 32b instructions (US Patent 5740461) -- the 'Thumb', which is the T in ARM7TDMI.
I'm glad that I had such a good 'adversary' to go head to head with :-)
Working with the classroom computers helped when I applied for a more general PC admin role at a school closer to the university. Running a Novel network was quite a different experience, esp. when the 'standard' computer of the day was a 486DX-33 and the school was running discless XTs @ 8MHz.
Things get interesting internationally because the 2.4GHz ISM band is defined differently in each country (but loosely based around the three ITU regions). There is a good reference list on Wikipedia. For example, most of the world can use channels 1-13, but North American users are limited to channels 1-11 at full power (12 & 13 can be used at reduced power -- but that's too complicated for most people so the channels are restricted). Spain used to be limited to channels 10 & 11 and France to 10-13, but this has been changed as the two countries harmonise with the rest of Europe.
The nice database at Linux Wireless lists frequencies and power levels. Israel is listed as having a 2.4GHz band of 2402.000 - 2482.000 MHz with a max power of 100mW. The US band is 2402.000 - 2472.000 (narrower) with a maximum power of 500mW (much higher). If the iPad is actually running 0.5W at 2.4GHz I can see why the Israeli authorities will be a bit cranky. Australia & the UK have the 100mW limits, but people in NZ with iPads (such as @lisatickledpink) will be fine since the power limit is 1000mW (woo hoo!)
If Apple had been sensible and limited the power output to 100mW across the board then there would be no trouble with WiFi across borders, and perhaps that is what most laptop manufacturers have done (to avoid the wifi cards being ripped out at Customs)?
If you don't want any choice in where you get your apps from, buy an iPhone. Presumably since you have an Android phone, choice, flexibility and openness matter.
I've bought programs for PalmOS and Windows Mobile (5 & 6) from PalmGear, PocketGear and the like. It wasn't difficult, payment was straightforward and 'it just worked'. Perhaps if people find that too complicated then they need to get an iPhone, and make sure they get rid of that complicated PC and buy a Mac and only use the software that Apple provides (since it would be too complicated to go shopping for anything else).