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Keying With The Enemy (10/4/00)
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Adding insult to injury is never a nice thing to do, even if the injury in question is really small. Did we say "small"? Make that "tiny." Personally, we never understood all the hubbub about how the four new keys on Apple's Pro Keyboard-- Volume Up, Volume Down, Mute, and Media Eject-- don't work on older Macs. Isn't something like that to be expected? In any event, some people made a big deal about it, including Apple. The company actually cancelled people's orders for the shiny new input device just because those four nifty-but-hardly-crucial keys were nonfunctional on all but the very latest Macs. Funny, we'd have thought that most people who ordered the Pro Keyboard did so to get a full set of standard keys, including a keypad and full-height cursor and function keys. Did anyone really buy one for the one-key Mute function?
In any case, here's where the "insult" part comes into play: according to MacWindows, if you hook up one of those Pro Keyboards to a USB-equipped PC running Windows 98 Second Edition, three of those four special keys work. Think about that for a second. Your Strawberry iMac DV? No go. That single-processor Power Mac G4/500 you bought in June? Out of luck. But plug your Pro Keyboard into some Dell or Compaq box which isn't even running the very latest operating system out of Redmond, and suddenly you can Volume Up, Volume Down, and Mute 'til your fingers bleed. (At least the Media Eject key apparently doesn't work.)
Sure, owners of older Macs can grab the "USB Device Driver" file off of a friend's new system as an unsanctioned but functional fix, or just download the latest beta from Apple's site. But "officially," as a community we're supposed to wait until "early 2001" for a software fix-- while Windows users get 75% new key support in an operating system released last year. Again, it's such a minor issue, it hardly seems worth getting into a foaming tirade about-- but we really hope that Windows supporting Apple hardware better than Apple does isn't the start of a disturbing trend.
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SceneLink (2591)
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 10/4/00 episode: October 4, 2000: Uncle Steve rallies the troops-- but there's more to the "no layoffs" promises than meets the eye. Meanwhile, United Airlines hopes to reduce the frequency of customer killing sprees by providing AirPort-compatible wireless 'net access at selected airports, and Apple's Pro Keyboard reportedly works better on Windows PCs than on most Macs...
Other scenes from that episode: 2589: All In The Name Of Progress (10/4/00) Everybody knows that Apple has secret underground labs in which legions of scientists are busily trying to reverse-engineer Steve's Reality Distortion Field, right? Well, several highly-placed AtAT sources have risked life, limb, and stock options (not that they're worth all that much right now) to tell us that the project entered a new research phase last week-- and that Apple's earnings warning and the resulting "Black Friday" stock tailspin are merely factors in that experiment... 2590: AirPort: The Only Way To Fly (10/4/00) It may sound crazy, but there just isn't much going on in the Mac world right now. The whole community is apparently recuperating in a numb coma following last week's financial hysterics, and the result appears to be a post-Expo-like lull in the action...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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