Letters to the Editor
mattwa33186
Published Letters: 432 Editor's Choice: 45
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It really isn't your fault
[Read the article: My laptop was stolen -- I feel like my life is gone!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You got and followed bad advice, likely from a source you trusted and who presented themselves as an authority in an area that is outside your expertise. You did do more than most, and if you had gotten better advice you would have been covered. Most people don't even think about backing up until after their first disaster.
Next time, go with online backups from a company you trust to be around for the rest of your life. Backup hard drives wind up staying too close to your machine, or not used enough, because you have to transport them back and forth and actually do something for them to be effective. Online backups just happen every time you use the internet. And use online tools to keep track of your personal life and manage your correspondence.
I'm pretty sure you'll be able to recover a lot of your papers and such, anything you submitted, off a server at your university. Talk to someone in their IT department about it. Disk space is cheap so everybody keeps everything forever now, and if you become a famous whateveritisyoudo they are going to want to have your papers there. You may have to suffer another lecture, but unless he's an asshole he'll let you off easy once you explain the whole situation and the measures you took. And he may be able to recover some of your stuff for you.
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Apple, masters of spin
[Read the article: Apple opens the iPhone to outside developers]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]They are going to "allow" third parties to add value to their product? How altruistic of them.
I wonder how much the SDK is going to cost? On top of the cost of the iPhone, of course.
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Interesting
[Read the article: How Comcast blocks your Internet traffic]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]First off, we have a law. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act. When I run uTorrent on a random port with encryption turned on, I have major performance issues. Just like another poster, when I VPN into work the performance issues go away. And any attempt to counter obsfucation or encryption, even on equipment you own, is a felony under the DCMA, as anyone who owns a Series 2 Tivo (or has overpaid for a Series 1 on eBay) knows. They must be using some kind of behavioral analysis to determine what kind of traffic is being generated, because encrypted traffic on a random port should be impossible to detect at the packet level.
I am currently stuck with Comcast, and they suck. They are underprovisioned for every service they offer in my area, and give me nothing but platitudes about how they are in the process of upgrading the network and they only bought out the old provider 3 years ago and these things take time and no, they will not credit my bill because my On Demand movie stopped playing 2/3 of the way through, because even though I pay them an outrageous amount of money every month this service is free.
Unfortunately, even if I move I am screwed because BellSouth ADSL is equally bad and the last time I checked DirectTV didn't offer a decent, affordable internet service to go along with their terrible (and expensive) TV offerings (they've partnered with BellSouth here).
The only viable solution I can see is to get together with your neighbors, as many as it takes to make it affordable but as few as possible, and order a nailed up connection from your local telco, like a couple of T1's or a T3. Then you can provision your own network the right way, instead of the lazy way. If you have an over the air HD antenna you'll be all set, except for having to now manage a network in your spare time because Comcast won't do it right.
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It is progress, of a sort
[Read the article: Steve Jobs: A touch-interface for the Mac?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I mean, BeOS had touch screen capability only 10 years ago, after all.
Why can't people understand that Apple is not a software company and never has been? Their hardware is gorgeous, a little pricey but it's great shit. Their software has always, always crippled their hardware. That's why they gave up on ever writing a decent operating system and went with FreeBSD. And that's also why every single groundbreaking improvement to OSX has been seen years before in another *nix operating system. The ability to steal source code instead of just stealing interfaces and usability concepts, like they did from Xerox for all those years, has taken Apple to a new level. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great, but lets please stop giving Apple screen credits as a developer when they have become an integrator.
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To whoever said they were willing to pay more for a superior operating system
[Read the article: Apple reports a Mac sales record]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Good news! That same operating system is available for free download at http://www.freebsd.org. That's where Apple got it.