Day: 17 December 2010

Message for WC from Bristow

2010-12-17 / / 0 Comments

Hello,

This is a message for the commenter “WC from Bristow” who posted a review of Mac OS X Snow Leopard on the Apple Store website on Decemer 11, 2010 (review posted below for SEO/reference).

I just wanted to let you know that your MacBook Pro is DEFECTIVE. I hope that by some strange chance you might read this before your warranty expires. There is a known issue with the GeForce 9400M graphics chips in the original unibody MacBooks with removable battery. There is random screen flickering. This is a hardware issue, and no matter what you do will not go away. If your laptop is still under warranty, and even if it’s not, take it back to Apple and demand a replacement. They will probably swap it for a new, current-generation MacBook.

Just a friendly suggestion from someone who went through the same frustration.

Not Impressed
  • Written by WC from Bristow
  • 11-Dec-2010

Snow Leopard brought some serious problems. Mail will chew up 50 to 75% of the processor just idling. Flashing video/screen on MacBook Pro 15″ when on low power video card setting causes me to run all the time in high performance mode so it does not flash… and now my battery lasts for an hour and a half if I am lucky. (in part because of the processor overloading of Mail). This adds 2 lbs+ to the laptop because I must now carry two extra batteries (and I do).

I spend a lot of time in Mail… and bugs like copying the email address and getting a bunch of extra garbage that needs to be trimmed after pasting is aggravating. Dock lockups, Browser lockups. Spinning beach ball of death with much greater frequency than normal Leopard. At points cascading chronic app crashing which is “cured” by rebooting the machine (a la Windows)

Hope that Lion brings some relief. Snow Leopard has fleas.

Vancouver says NO to bandwidth caps!

2010-12-17 / / 0 Comments

Vancouver’s city council says that Internet traffic metering discriminates against video and audio streaming providers.

Finally, some level of government is taking action against Bell and the CRTC’s decision! For those who don’t know, all of us Canadians are being ripped off by our broadband carriers. They impose arbitrary bandwidth caps and require end uses to pay premium prices for extra speed in order to up these limits.

Now, before you get all “well I never hit my cap, it must be all those BitTorrenting pirates. They should stop complaining and buy movies like the rest of us”, let me point out that there are a many ways of acquiring content with high bandwidth requirements legally online. To name a few, iTunes, Netflix, YouTube, as well as the websites of every national television network and radio station. Not to mention the loads of freeware/shareware and open-source software, digital downloads of proprietary operating systems and productivity software, SDKs, game demos, benchmarks, software updates, and even data transfer for business purposes. The list goes on and on and I won’t bother or even attempt to list more uses.

Point is, what is the purpose of having an “information superhighway” if some users are faced with arbitrary tolls and speed limits in addition to advertising?

How is streaming media supposed to render optical media obsolete if we aren’t free to consume it? How do we keep our systems up to date if we have to count the bytes downloaded for each update pack? How are we to move to video conferencing, VoIP, and social media with horribly limited upstream bandwidth?

Anyway, enough with the negativity. Thanks to Vancouver and openmedia.ca, there is a glimmer of hope for Canadian Internet users!

For more info, check out http://stopthemeter.ca/ .

via Canada: We might be America\’s hat, but we don\’t like caps.