Posted on 05/07/2008 6:57:34 PM PDT by HAL9000
Excerpt -
If you like to download the latest episodes of “Heroes” or other NBC shows from BitTorrent, maybe you shouldn’t buy a Microsoft Zune to watch them on.A future update of the software for Microsoft’s portable media player may well include a feature that will block unauthorized copies of copyrighted videos from being played on it.
~ snip ~
(Excerpt) Read more at bits.blogs.nytimes.com ...
microsoft’s great at marketing
and protecting their property rights,
but not so hot at building ‘puter software.
Yeah, they really suck.
Despite the fact that virtually nothing you do on a computer today would be cost effective (if it were even possible), without DOS and then Windows.
Yeah. Gosh, people can be so stupid.
I’ve yet to see a Zune in the wild.
You forget - without Apple, there would have been no reason for IBM to make the PC OR hire Bill Gates’ ripoff firm to make a copy of QDOS.
right. and there was no holocaust, too.
I’ve seen one. The owner was sitting there looking so forlorn... in a room full of iPod users.
He’s since gotten an iPhone and the Zune is gathering dust in the back of his car.
Um, remember? Apple II? 1979?
I see them all over the place, but then again I own and look for them when I am out and about.
If it were free, I might get one, if it had this feature.
This will sell like a car with a 70 mph governor.
Unless of course Congress helps with a mandate, then all media players will have this feature.
I dont see what the big piss is about the zune, I own one and have since buried my old ipod in the backyard. It has far superior sound, no DRM on purchased songs(unless you have the zune pass, but then again I get unlimited downloads), I can actually listen to the radio if I wish, the image quality on the screen beats any iPod except the touch, which is more of a PDA imo than a mp3 player anyways.
Typing this reply on a Powermac G5. Apple ain’t all they’re cracked up to be.
In order to use the Airport Extreme I have to take the frickin side off of this beast, despite the fact that Apple bragged on the packaging that the antenna is unnecessary.
My crappy dell laptop 1 foot away gets excellent reception on the same router just two rooms away.
Yeah, I know there’s an external antenna for it, another 30 bucks on top of the 85 I already paid for the Airport card. A bit ridiculous just to get the dern thing to work doncha think.
I really, really, really, don’t give any credence to the Mac braggarts anymore, this one experience has shown me all I need to know about Mac “superiority”.
Oooh, wow, you’re complaining about a 4 year old computer.
Now that said, please explain why five out of the six Dell Inspirons my client got from Dell last year can’t see a wireless network from 3 feet away?
blarney, that sounds like a convenient fact if I ever seen it.
I will tell you this if you are the IT for that company then you need to be fired if you cant fix a wifi issue.
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I am IT for the company.... and not even Dell can fix it. We’ve sent those five back for repair, even had Dell people on site after we complained and got our warranties upgraded for free.
Those Inspirons with Dell 1390 Wireless units just will not connect. Everything else in the building will. iPhones, iPod Touches, the VP’s daughter’s little Acer laptop, even those weird HP wireless printer servers which never worked all that well when they were first introduced - all of them work.
But these 1390-equipped Dells... will. not. connect. reliably.
I have two Homebuilt XP machines that are 5 years old, they’ve both been running constant with no reboot for over a year, and they have no problems with this ((enter extreme sarcasm zone)) “new fangled” WiFi router connections.
If age is the problem, then Apple REALLY screwed the dude I got this thing from.
I was really looking forward to having one of these machines, now I know they’re over-hyped. No doubt.
Damn, you’ve got a good eye.
Mr. Gates? Is that you?
“What?” he said innocently.
I sure as hell hope you aren't someone who is responsible for IT people. If you are, then I'm sure the company you work for is certainly looking for IT help since you have none. lol
No, age isn’t the problem, but there’s no sense in comparing old to new.
As for your G5 - is it completely stock including an *Apple* Airport card? Which card is it? Did you check to make sure it wasn’t one of the defective Airport cards they recalled a few years back?
I’m not really planning to buy any Microsoft products in the near future, anyway.
Zune is OK, I was commenting that if they put in a copyright filter I would not be interested.
There are many media players out there, some better and some worse than iPod. I still run a Rio pmp300 (as well as a couple others).
Not going to get into it, but my experience is that wifi’s are the easiest to trouble shoot and fix.
Then your experience is sadly limited.
That's generally true, but I've seen cases where some wireless devices just don't work that well, if at all.
It better not be, the Apple store installed the Airport Extreme Card yesterday.
I’m sure it isn’t the card, its the genius engineers who decided that it should be fine to enclose a 2.4 ghz antenna inside 50 lbs of aircraft aluminum. I have to wonder if they EVER tested the thing.
The SECOND I opened the side of the case, PING! WiFi connected.
Obviously style prevailed over substance, and the fact that the card alone cost 85 bucks chaps my arse. Another 10 bucks and I could’ve just bought a roll of Cat 5 cable and connected at 100 mb/s. Sheesh, Wireless is supposed to be easy, this is NOT endearing at all.
Actually, I’ve had little problems with PMG5 Wireless. The real problem children from Apple on WiFi were the old Titanium PowerBooks - they had real problems.
By the way, where did you see that Apple claimed you didn’t need an antenna on the PMG5.
By the way, you’re *supposed* to have the stock external Wifi antenna on the back of the unit. There’s a cable that runs from the front of the case where the Airport card resides. On the back of the case, there’s a little wireless antenna connector. There should have been a plastic antenna on the back of the unit, a T-shaped thing. Is yours missing? All of them came with this from the factory.
Even better than that is the Chi-pod, or the Chinese Ipod. You can get one off of ebay for $30 and for 4gig storage, it’s cheaper than anything else.
Got an antenna port, no antenna. The guy I got it from said it didn’t have AirPort installed so it didn’t come with one, and the folks at the Apple store said it didn’t need it. Plus it said on the Box “No antenna needed” and in the instruction manual they even do a Q&A:
Do I need to install an AirPort antenna?
No the antenna used by the AirPort extreme card is built in.
Well, I guess I HAVE to spend $110 total to get this bugger to connect Wireless. The sad thing is that I really don’t have ANY faith that for just $30 more it will finally work.
I saw one of those the other day. The owner brought it to me to fix at work - nothing I could do.
Pretty faithful ripoff hardware appearance wise. Can’t really say what the software was like, though.
The Airport Express manual means that the antenna came with *the computer*. No *additional* antenna need be installed.
The antenna was in the packaging that the G5 came in. You bought an incomplete computer. Your computer’s previous owner didn’t fully assemble the machine.
It’d be like buying a Dell laptop with no battery and then whining that the thing wouldn’t work without the power adapter plugged in - you bought an incomplete system.
Oh, I suggest you contact your computer’s previous owner to ask for your antenna. It’s not Apple’s fault, they shipped the unit with an antenna.
Well to make matters worse, I didn’t really even buy it. It’s payment in lieu of another debt, so It’s kinda free.
Still, the dudes at the Apple store put the thing in and I even asked them about the antenna, they said it doesn’t need it.
I will admit that I can’t really gripe too much about it since it’s “supposed” to have one, but nary an “expert” pointed that out until you. Can’t wait until I buy an external HDD, I imagine that may take 3 or 4 trips to the Apple store to get it working right.
Oh, by the way, your claim about the XP boxes running without reboot for a year? That means you’re at least a year behind on your updates... and it means that if I can get your IP address, I can own both of them with just a few commands.
Congratulations, you just advertised to the world that your XP boxes are wide open for net raping.
Nah. Just get a USB or Firewire unit, plug it in, and off you go. It really is that simple - unless you buy one of the cheaper ones, then you have to take the additional step of formatting it with Disk Utility. (The really cheap ones don’t come formatted sometimes.)
In all fairness to the Apple guys, that’s “vintage” hardware. They probably saw the cable leading away from the card slot and assumed it was like the iMac G5s (which have the antenna concealed in the case). Try them on the Mac Pro and they’d have done better.
It’d be like me taking an E-type into a new Jaguar dealership. They’d not know all the quirks of the old beast.
I’ve played around with Agere WiFi cards in laptops. These are not PCI type cards, they are cards like ram cards that fit into a slot under the covers underneath the unit.
There is a tiny connector port on top of the card for the antenna - no actual voltage runs through the antenna.
All you need do is connect just about any kind of wire to it. As long as it is 12-16 inches long, it should give you plenty of signal.
So find your antenna port, get a short piece of spare wire, strip the end and plug it in there. You’ll get a signal.
Too late now, the damage is done.
Good luck getting to them. I know they aren’t updated, but what they’re working on, I don’t want them to be. The simulations they’re running will be changed in a few months. Maybe I’ll update them then, but right now, they’re chugging along without incident. Why mess with a working configuration?
I’m 100% confident that no one is going to get to them behind the firewall, I only turn on the wireless to FTP some data files once or twice a week. If you can get there, I’ll give you one of them when this job is over ; )
Does it HAVE to look so dorky? I’m ever amazed at how proud Apple-phites are of the machines’ design. I had an exchange with a Freeper on another thread regarding the Mac I call the “Egg on a Stick”.
Yeah... but why would I *want* an XP machine? (says the man using a Mac Mini quite happily). :D
I have to scrap my plans to go out and buy a Zune.
Oh, wait....
Still looks better than the dorky giant rubber ducky antenna they put on the back of Dell desktops.
It’s sleek - for an antenna.
Do you mean the iLamp? The original G4 iMac was quite clever, but it went away as soon as a better form factor could be had.
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