Where is the '-1, Factually Incorrect' mod when you need it?

1) Yes, all Apple devices now prompt for an AppleID when you first turn them on. There is a 'Skip' button that you apparently completely missed, though. It is not a hidden button.

2) Apparently you were unable to do a simple Google search to figure out how to create an iTunes Store account without a credit card. Apple has posted directions.

Or does reality not fit with the bad image you want to have of Apple?

Nothing annoys me more than trying to find news about something local and finding that the online local news source has covered their front page with (inter-)national news.

If your small-town newspaper has a website, remember that it is competing with CNN.com, BBC.com, nytimes.com, and everything else. Chances are you not going to do better international news than the "big boys". You are going to be carrying the same AP story as everyone else.

So where can you compete? The local news that CNN, et al, are not going to carry. Do not make your readers search your site just to get the local coverage they are looking for.

Places like WickedLocal.com (in Massachusetts) have it figured out, probably because most Massachusetts local newspapers did *not* figure it out. Patch.com is trying to do this on a bigger scale.

A lot of people are talking about NAS devices and so on, but they all come back to "filesharing" as the software portion of their solution.

I use Plex to serve out media and love it. Transcodes a Blue-Ray rip to my iPad. I hit pause and bring the movie up on my television and start where I left off. You can run the server on a Windows machine, a Mac, or even some NAS devices.

I can be on the road and bring up any movie I have.

Client-wise they have iOS, OS X, Windows, and Android.

I think you might be off by a factor of 10. I was definitely reading Slashdot for a while (month or so?) before signing up for an account, but I am not sure I remember a time before accounts. Maybe 1500 people signed up once accounts were created?

If I were at my home machine I could definitely figure out when Slashdot sent my "Welcome" message, but it was probably October of 1998.

The amount of time I spend on Slashdot has definitely decreased over the years, but I still load the homepage 2-3 times a day.

Happy 15th, Slashdot!

Damn newbies...

ObTopic: I agree with a previous poster, that Slashdot's comment system is the worst, except for all of the other ones. I do not post nearly as often as I used to, but for getting a relatively informed take on tech stories? Slashdot is hard to beat. I still read 3-4 stories a day. This is probably down from my maximum back in the early 2000s.

I do agree that Slashdot (and similar comment websites) tend to have a major issue of groupthink. It seems that to have a reasonable discussion on the Internet you not only need a niche subject matter, but also a well-done comment and moderation system. The downside is that both of these requirements tend to encourage groupthink.

Oh, and get off of my lawn!

My biggest pet peeve with Slashdot is that there is no "-1, Factually Incorrect" moderation. When I have moderation points I frequently have to use "Overrated" to fill that niche.

There are not a lot of times, but I have seen a comment that is simply wrong be moderated up (oftentimes a groupthink assumption that turns out to be incorrect).

I find the moderation system one of the best on the Internet. I wish when people had moderation Slashdot would ignore their preferences and instead show comments at "-1, Newest First" to avoid older, higher moderated comments from simply getting moderated even higher at the expense of newer comments that have not had a chance to get moderated up.

But that is just me.

And you should listen to me because I have a four-digit UID, damnit! And get off my lawn!

I have reported about 8 or so in the last year. A few have been fixed (usually as a result of several other people reporting they were having the same issue). I had to fix a couple of bugs myself. The other half were never fixed. One I reported in a Bugzilla type database and within 24 hours it was marked as "Closed" without any comment from a developer. The next release of the software had the same bug. One I reported on a forum for a closed-source application and immediate a dozen or so other users agreed with me (it was a memory leak, causing a background daemon to consume 10-15MB of additional RAM each day it continued to run). The company representative said that they could not reproduce the problem.

Most recently I reported a bug in an exercise tracking piece of shareware. The software imports data from Garmin's software and is able to do a lot more with it. Due to what the shareware developer sees as a bug in the Garmin software, distance for a given activity might change a bit on import. This is fine, and the developer goes to great lengths to explain the discrepancy and why he believes his calculations are more precise. I agree with him and continue to use the software. I eventually realize, however, that while the distance changes and the activity duration (time) stays constant on import, the pace for the activity does not agree with the distance/time. I report this and the developer responds that his software trusts and uses the pace value passed on input, and says that users would bother him to see why the pace value does not match what is in the Garmin software. He explains a way to change the value manually and marks the problem "Resolved".

Note that one of my activities was off by over 40 seconds per mile. What should have been a 6:57 min/mile pace was marked as a 7:49 min/mile. This is a very large discrepancy.

Not very reassuring.

I am another extremely happy customer of pair.com I have been using them for about ten years now and think I have seen a total of about ten minutes of downtime for my server in that time.

Good thing the xServe is not built for the "I need maximum performance in a 1U box", then.

An xServe, with OS X Server, is designed primarily for small businesses to get rid of their IT department by replacing their expensive IT guys and yearly MS CALs with an xServe and maybe one OS X tech. Generally a company with 1,000+ employees will not be using it, so the need for > 48GB RAM or multiple TBs stuffed into a 1U box really is not there.

Or are we just working with the "bigger numbers are better" argument?

I have no idea how far back the stolen data goes, but I was a student at Cornell in the mid-90's. I can assure you that Cornell does not have my current email address (my university address expired after I left), and they do not have my current mailing address, either - I never receive mailed solicitations for money.

On their FAQ page, they assure everyone that they contacted everyone who had their data stolen via email or USPS. I am not saying that I was necessarily one of the victims here, but I am sure that there are other people in the 45,000 for whom that is true.

The very last PowerBooks were sold October 2005 - January 2006. Not only that, but Apple announced the transition on 6 June 2005, or almost exactly four years ago.

If your PowerBook just expired its three year AppleCare, you must have bought your PowerBook *just* before the release of the MacBook Pros, and most certainly after Apple announced the transition.

Four years is a very long time for notebook computers. Apple gave you four years of full support after announcing they were planning on EOL PowerPC machines.

As far as security patches go, Apple continues to release updates and security patches for the previous generation OS. For example, with the release of Snow Leopard, support will cease for Tiger (OS X 10.4). Apple just last month released a security patch for Tiger (PPC). In addition, I believe all of the updates released recently for the various iLife products run on Tiger/PPC.

This means you should expect continued patches for your Leopard/PPC machine for at least the lifespan of Snow Leopard.

What confuses me most about your comment is your mention of a classroom of machines running MacOS 8. This proves that Apple software (and hardware) continues to be useful long after it has been EOL'd, but somehow your PowerBook will cease to be useful the minute Snow Leopard is released and is unavailable on your PowerBook?

I up and moved to St. Thomas, USVI because I wanted to stay closer to the East Coast. I moved for the exact reason you mention - why not? Moved down without a job and two days later had an interview and two days after that started working.

I worked afterschool at a private school. Job was 3pm-6pm on weekdays. I could walk there, and the pay covered my (expensive) rent and basic groceries/laundry/etc. I was not living high on the hog, but was paying the bills.

All in all I stayed on island for a year. It was really nice, but being far from everyone gets to you (it is a long flight just to Miami, much less any further inland) and you can only go sit on the beach with a few hundred tourists so often. The resident population is very divided - very low income and very high income, with little middle class. A lot that fall into the low-to-middle class tend to be highly transitory. After I had been there for over six months I almost became an "old timer" on the island.

I am glad I did it, but unless I came into a good amount of money I am not sure I would move back.

I am not sure what your nationality is, but a lot of Caribbean islands "belong" to various European countries. May not be difficult for you to move there.

Yeah, this page listing all of the security patches in every Apple update must surely not exist. You know, complete with links to knowledge base articles containing links to the CVE-IDs patched by that particular patch.

Posts like yours are the reason that Slashdot needs a "-1, Factually Incorrect" moderation.

I agree that Apple should have patched this a long time ago, but your argument that Apple does not care about security is just plan asinine.

I had considered wanting a camera with a GPS built-in, but there are so many times that it would not be worth it - any indoor shot, for example. Seems like a waste of upfront cost and battery life.

Instead I will use the GPS I already have, the camera I already have, and any one of a few different programs that will compare time stamps between the two devices and add the corresponding EXIF data automatically.

Right now I am using GPSPhotoLinker for OS X.

I use Sprint and was about 250m from the Washington Monument. While I had full bars the entire morning, texts were hit or miss - sometimes they went through, othertimes they did not. Calling was impossible. I tried calling twice and neither ever actually got through.

A friend with AT&T was able to get texting to work, but was not able to call nor to send a picture message.

All in all? I would not say they "survived".

Only in the sense that I can use my Sprint phone today, I suppose.