Damn the greedy employers of the Frosts.

Two adults and four kids, how did they manage without health insurance all these years? Medical care in the US is not exactly affordable.

OT to flo (just back from Canadian T'giving):

Re my Mac conversion:

Bought a miniMac, the cheaper one. Reason? I had just purchased a quality 20" LCD monitor, and did not want to scrap it. The basic miniMac was more than sufficient for my purposes. The iMac looks great, but was more machine than I need (Garage Band??? WTF???) ;) . The miniMac just sits quietly on my now-irrelevant PC.

Only glitches?- needed a DVI cord to plug the new monitor into the miniMac; needed a USB2 cable to plug the printer into the miniMac; the keyboard would not communicate to the miniMac, so I just bought a new Mac keyboard.

Otherwise, I'm sold. True plug'n'play, no drivers required, no security patches, no viruses-no Norton. Just brilliant.

What was the problem with the keyboard? Does the MiniMac take only USB?

Does the MiniMac have a floppy drive? I'm guessing it doesn't since it sounds pretty much "legacy-free".

FIBC

Dunno. I was using an old 6-pin keyboard, and bought a USB adapter that worked with the PC. But not the Mac.

MiniMacs have only Cat5/ethernet, USB and DVI ports. And plugs for sound jacks.

No floppy. Apparently, one burns directly to CDR. I haven't figured it all out, yet.

Or else just save on a memory stick.

Kind of hard to believe that 1.44 MB was big enough to store ANYTHING.

With my new (and already broken) 6.0 megapixel camera, that's enough space for exactly ONE image.

And this whole idea of having a huge "tower" filled with mostly empty space, for the sake of "upgradeability" is a waste for most home users. The MiniMac was a stroke of genius.

It's remarkable- 8"x8"x2.5" of pure, simple, elegant personal computing.

(ev likely views me as a complete naif, since Apple has been producing this product since, IIRC, ~1984....)

My E: drive (CDRW) doesn't seem to notice any discs that are put in it.

And my D: drive (DVD) which worked more or less OK, got its name overwritten by my Nikon software - the Nikon software calls itself the "D: drive". Weird.

Oh, you got a Mini! Cool! I've been thinking about one of those for my home office. I've got a crummy Windows computer in there now, but it has a nice 19-inch widescreen LCD. So a Mini might be a better buy for me than an iMac.

GarageBand: I'm sure the Minis come with it too. It's part of the iLife suite, so it comes with every Mac.

Hey, it's been a waste for me for at least 5 years, and I'm a giant nerd. I haven't bought a single expansion card in all that time, although I came close to buying a new video card once. For all practical purposes, the only "expansion" most people do is through their USB or Firewire ports.

Oh, you got a Mini! Cool!

For an awful second there I thought you were talking about one of those stupid Coopers...

I love those stupid Coopers, papijoe! It's a pity I'm so darn tall. For once, I envy short people.

Noooooooooo!

Actually, the Mac Mini is a very new product. It came out for the first time maybe...four years ago? Not that long ago.

Too late for Frank, but to EVERYONE else....do NOT install that shit software that comes with your camera....you do NOT need it for anything running an OS from Win 2000 forward...and I presume that includes Apple Orchard condiments too.

Just plug in an go through USB 1 or 2 port. Period. Your computer will assign a new drive letter to the camera automatically.

If you want to fancy things up, add only Photoshop Elements or CS3, plus a little software item called "Super Jpeg", and another called "Turbo Navigator" ....then you can see both the camera drive and the PC storage drive on one screen. Bada Bing Bada Boom!

That's a nice choice for a first Mac. You may find yourself shopping for an external hard drive soon.

I had been running a G4 side by side with a PC for several years using a single monitor and managing the PC from the G4 using MS RDC which is free at the Microsoft site.

Late last year I bought a mini for personal use. I chose a mini because - like you - I had a perfectly usable display to use. Mine came with a DVI/VGA adaptor.

Earlier this year I purchased a 17 inch iMac so I could work from my living room when convenient.

Be sure to have a look at NeoOffice, which is a Mac version of OpenOffice. It's free - they accept donations - and I use it mission critical.

My E: drive (CDRW) doesn't seem to notice any discs that are put in it.

Huh? Has Ev sat on it?

The E drive stopped working sometime before I installed the Nikon software.

It may be in part due to the tug of war that RealPlayer is having with WindowsMedia.

The only reason I haven't already deleted that virus known as RP is because sometimes I like to watch a DVD with the sound off, and listen to a music CD out of the other drive at the same time, and there doesn't seem to be a way to do this with WM alone.

Wow, you use NeoOffice? I read that it was a giant pile of Java GUI crap on top of OpenOffice, which itself is a giant pile of crap. Also, I hear the OpenOffice.org project is finally gearing up to do a real Mac release, which will render NeoOffice's existence essentially moot.

I'm not a heavy office suite user, though. Much more pressing for me is what text editor to use for programming. I've got iWork kicking around on my hard drive, and Office 2007 on Windows, in Parallels. But I never open up either one.

Stupid Windowsisms that I don't miss:
-Drive letters
-the Start Menu
-the System Tray/Notification Area/whatever Microsoft wants you to call it today
-the Registry
-the childish "My" Everything

So what do you call the drives, then?

Chris Pirillo Upgrades from Vista to XP

Disappointingly, there are no bloopers on this.

Well, at a very basic level, drives are "mounted" on the filesystem, at "mount points". The filesystem hierarchy starts at "/", and everything is attached to that tree under /, from external hard drives to CDs to network shares to my actual hard drive's contents. On a Mac, drives show up mounted in /Volumes if there's anything in them, and they also appear on the Desktop and as a source in the Finder's source list (by the name of the media inside them, not by some useless drive letter). So right now I have a CD in the drive and an external hard drive attached. Each has an icon on the Desktop, on the sidebar in the Finder, and can also be reached on the command line. Who needs drive letters? And furthermore, who needs them when there's no media in the drive? If I don't have a CD in my CD drive, why do I need an icon and a drive letter for it?

Same goes for a camera, a phone, a USB key, or whatever the hell else you might plug in. It appears on its desktop by its name, e.g. "evariste's iPhone" or "gym iPod" or "Hadzizakis" (my external Firewire hard drive).

Ah, I see... it's focused on contents rather than empty machinery. Makes sense.

Er, actually, the iPhone only shows up in the iTunes source list, not in the Finder.

Oh, wait a minute... I thought it had created some sort of "virtual" drive just for Nikon Picture Project. I was wrong - I realized that it's renamed the actual DVD drive as "D: Picture Pro".

WTF??

Exactly. In what way is it meaningful for your CD drive to be "E:\" and your camera to be "F:\" or whatever? It's pretty stupid. I can't believe they didn't get rid of it in Vista.

Oh, never mind... I got the brand wrong, it's actually pointing to my hard drive. But still, why a separate drive going to the same place?

By the way, you can manually reassign drive letters in diskmgmt.msc (Start->Run->diskmgmt.msc)

I'm using it with a fair degree of satisfaction. Gave up waiting for OpenOffice Mac. I use Neo to open .odt files on a PC hard drive and save them back to that drive with a backup on Mac.

So iWork doesn'tWork for you?

OK, it looked like one of the other drives was pointing to the C: drive. Fixed at least one now.

And this gave me a laugh... when I was doing that, my (long since expired) Norton popped up and identified Ad-Aware as a Trojan.

Haven't need for graphics processing, at least not for work. Thanks for the OO heads up. I see they have an Aqua Alpha available. I'll look at it.

I uninstalled Norton when I was going to get AVG because ev told me Norton doesn't play nice with others.

I keep meaning to get AVG or CA one of these days.

Neo is somewhat faster than OO Aqua at the moment.

I was thinking about getting a Mini to run on a decent size flat screen LCD for the living room. Just to run videos and music, perhaps even some image editing. I probably won't use it much for the internet since I like to have the TV on while browsing...

Are you self-employed? Do you have Individual Health Insurance? Or are you covered by an employer paid (partial or full) group plan?

Small business owners and the self-employed have to purchase Individual plans -- which, for a basic HMO plan, can cost close to $2,000-3,000 (or more) a month (that's premium, then there are co-pays, deductibles, etc.) for a family. That is, if they can even get coverage -- which the Frosts most likely can't because of their daughter's on-going, permanent health problems resulting from the automobile accident.

My husband and I are small business owners. We pay just under $15,000 a year in premiums, just for the two of us. And we count ourselves lucky because he had thyroid cancer 8 years ago -- and even though he is fully recovered with no trace of cancer, if we lost the insurance we now have he would not be able to get any kind of private health insurance, because of the pre-existing condition.

I think many people commenting here are quite naive.

Okay, time for some facts, boys. The Frosts don't pay $20,000 for "private schools" they have scholarships for the schools and pay $500 out of pocket. Furthermore, they paid $50,000 for the house in the 90's and the 400,000 is an Magical Malkin exaggeration of the current value of the home. Also, no one seems to mention the fact that the father has said he has tried to get private insurance but was rejected because of the pre-existing conditions--the accident that got the kid in a coma in the first place!

You haven't been following the discussion on the net very closely have you?

This place is going to be the new ev's bithday thread for a while, isn't it?

Last person out turn off the lights.

I'm off to bed, sleep well :-)