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I stuck the MBP in one of my classrooms to use for presentation since I'm not using it otherwise and it annoys me because people buy these things and then expect me to support them. I can tell them all day long that I don't want to deal with Apple shit but the same people who whine about blowing...

That's the problem. Extra crap gets broken or lost.

Sure, you say that. Until you're in a place that doesn't have 802.11. Some of my customers don't. They really can't be doing it because of any serious cost savings. They aren't doing it to improve reliability. In the end I suspect they're doing it to drive the sale of a $30 accessory and to...

You clearly never had to support end users in the days of PCMCIA NICs.

So apparently the new Macbook ditches the ethernet port entirely. Who the hell thinks that's a good idea? On a "business" machine? Really?

That was genuinely, legitimately fascinating.

It's not that complicated. Protestants divide themselves over the tiniest points of ecclesiastic dogma. Which is why you can get eight or nine Baptist churches in a town of 10,000 and all of them will claim the other one is wrong.

From what I've read, Apple absolutely has a stranglehold on the supply chain for IPS display components that stems from the popularity of the ipad. I'm not sure if it applies to larger screens, but I guess a lot of options are off the table for companies that don't already own or control...

I don't even think anyone is offering that in a desktop display.

Obviously not, given the additional complexity of supporting iOS devices for general-purpose remote file access as we recently discussed.

Unfortunately, that comes at such a huge cost to basic functionality that the tradeoff is really not worth the hassle of dealing with the hardware. "General data storage" should be a fundamental function of a general purpose computing device and icraps fail at that.

You are asking me to care far, far too much about what people who are wrong about things think and do.

Don't get me started on this crap. I did have a productive discussion on the fact that I've managed to shepherd a customer into web-based solutions for everything they use except MS Office, something they barely need but think they have to have. I was able to demonstrate that their three most...

"Kids, From now on there are three ways of doing things: the right way, the wrong way, and the Oracle way." "Isn't that just the wrong way?" "Yes, but faster."

It's pretty painful waiting on the top-level forum. I'd say it's been slow for maybe a week.

That's harsh. I suspect you're right, if only because the market for expensive computing devices has shifted to tablets that have reduced expectations and different-from-Windows functionality associated with them. I think there's a lot of morons who would rather have an $800 ithing than an $800...

Given that Microsoft is propping up Nokia as its Windows Mobile hardware manufacturer of choice, why would HTC really want to make a huge investment in something that's pretty clearly a non-starter that's just going to be abandoned the minute Win8 is available on ARM and Medfield anyway?

The SHA-1 values represent a completely valid compromise simply because Rainbow Tables for values of up to X arbitrary digits have already been calculated. Since SpammedIn isn't storing the original password anyway, all bad guys really need is a collision between the hash value and an entry in...

Much like branches of Protestantism, once there's a schism, there does not tend to be a reunification. We now have Orthodox OpenOffice and Reformed OpenOffice and I'm sure someone or other can explain in great detail why the people on the other side are heretics and they'd rather die or use MS...

I don't really believe there's such a thing as a long term digital format.

I figure that I can either do the work myself or I'd rather have a depot tech with every part in the freaking universe at his fingertips doing it. U Apparently my MBP will be back Friday. So that's something. I guess.

There are a couple different issues that can keep Chrome, Picasa and the GChat desktop client from installing on Server 2008. One of them is a group policy change and the other is IIRC something to do with the uber-restrictive IE defaults on Windows Servers. At different times I've found...

Everyplace I've worked that had an issue with third-party equipment on-site, the issues were more about data access (don't bring in things that store data or access the internal network) and liability for disposal than about loss prevention. I always etch my name somewhere on my portable...

I'd probably just bring in my own stuff from home were I in your situation. Companies sometimes get pissy about that too, but it might be easier to stick a personal asset tag on it and make the case that it makes it easier to do your job than just suffer.

Given that I only see maybe a half dozen unwanted messages in a typical week, it's a rather significant portion of the total.

It could be worse: I have an acquaintance who is an auditor for the IRS. He has a US Government-provided Compaq laptop that is so old it has a Windows ME sticker on it.

I don't want to belong to a social networking site. At all. Ever. It's not about "more useful", it's about my disinclination to participate in the first place. I get two or three messages that make it through my filters every week. That's two or three messages I do not want. There does not...

The problem with Linkedin is that they Will. Not. Stop. Spamming. Apparently the only way to make yourself unavailable to linkedin crap is to belong to linkedin and turn it off. I've had invitations@linkedin.com blocked as a sender for ages, but I still get invited to join. I can't just block it...

Restoring dozens of open tabs is a perfectly valid reason to want an SSD or at least a Hybrid drive in your PC. It's not like EMC can't afford it. ;)

Linkedin is somewhere on my corporate death penalty list along with WD and nvidia anyway.

I have a pair of T61s that I'd like to continue to use in at least some capacity. Now I'm trying to decide if it's worth $100 - $150 to get new batteries for them or just let them go quietly into that good night with batteries that only maintain 50ish% of their original charge. I suspect that a...

The new start page maybe? It's the only thing I noticed.

I really want to see something in a next-generation screen before I really commit to buying a phone. 1280x720 in a Galaxy S3 certainly is impressive, but I wonder how much better off we'll be from one or two more rounds of product launches.

I wish.

So I need to noise proof my office. The building I'm in now used to be a bank. The acoustics are such that the person in the office in the opposite corner of the building can hear my laptop speakers at about 40% volume; I can hear our receptionist chewing right now, with the door to my office...

Probably not. They'll just tell us to do everything with Powershell.

As I said, no one is paying me so I don't care all that much. I think the issue is more that people are so used to getting huge game-changing functionality from web services for free and then get sticker shock when they want to use them to do real work. These are the same sorts of people who...

I understand it just fine. I just prefer the greater precision of degrees F.

You presumably had real science classes in high school and college. Why would you have to learn anything at this point?

The only metric scale I dislike is temperature.

The fact that the smallest category of users/devices the Zenprise people offer is 1 - 200 suggests that they're not going to be anything like reasonable or sane for pricing on a 15-user workgroup.

If there is one issue we might point to in all this, it's that Microsoft is being moronic any time it decides to "shift focus to consumers."

Today's iCrap conundrum: I have been asked to help find a secure data sharing solution for a small group of people. They're about 70% OSX in their office with a Server 2003 machine. They need remote access to a relatively large store of data, around 80GB. The data is mixed-format, not all...

You don't see value in universal acceptance of a standard system of measurement that can be derived from fundamental, observable principles?

... and the S3 will still be awesome-r.

You can temporarily lord your phone superiority over the rest of us. Especially ddrueding. ;)

The final preview is available now. Apparently it's buggy as all hell and they're still dicking around with the start screen.

In my experience, Lenovo sends a DHL van that brings me a box to put the impacted notebook in. The van arrives within a couple hours of the support call unless I tell them to wait on it. The DHL van takes away the notebook. Three to five business days later, the repaired notebook is back...

Cricket Wireless to undercut everybody on iCraps.

Oh but they said if I just drove two hours to the nearest Apple store I'd just have to wait in line for someone to work on it! I always wanted to set fire to a NeXT machine. But that's cause they had Magnesium chassis.