Bruce F. Webster

When the iPad was announced, a major aspect of that announcement was the $30/month unlimited data plan from AT&T for the iPad.

Now, only two months after the iPad actually started shipping, AT&T is ending that plan as of June 7th, and I find it very hard to believe that Apple didn’t know this would happen, possibly before the iPad started shipping.

I ordered an iPad from the Apple Store back on May 22nd; it still has not shipped, which means that I am unlikely to get it before June 7th, and therefore will not even be able to ‘grandfather’ in under the $30/unlimited plan. There must be at least a few hundred thousand (if not more) people in the same position, all of whom ordered (and paid money) with the expectation of the availability of the $30/month unlimited data plan, but who will find that this data plan is no longer available when their iPads finally arrive. I do consider this classic bait-and-switch (and I’m not the only one);  I would not be surprised to see a ‘race to the courthouse’ from numerous law firms in an effort to establish class action lawsuits against Apple and AT&T.

I think that Apple is underestimating the anger, bad will and litigation that this move is likely to generate; I know I’m pretty appalled.  ..bruce..

Sorry for the hiatus. Since the end of March, I have been tied up with multiple engagements, one of which is more or less full time, while the others fill up most of the time leftover from the first one. It’s great to be this busy, and I’m learning lots of new and interesting things, as usual. But I’ve lacked the time and energy to keep up here. I will do better. Promise.  ..bruce..

I’ve actually been having this problem for some time, but I thought it might be some kind of hardware problem with the system. Now I think it’s Microsoft and/or ATI.

As noted below, last fall I bought an HP Pavillion desktop (quad-core 64-bit  processor, 8 GB ram, 1 TB hd) running Windows 7 (Home Premium 64-bit). It’s got an ATI Radeon 4650 with a chunk of dedicated RAM (512 MB, I think) and a 27″ HD display (1920 x 1080). It all worked more or less fine until a few months ago, when I suddenly started getting random Blue Screens of Death (BSODs), usually while playing a game or watching  a video for a while. Note that some of the games involved weren’t terribly graphic intensive (such as Civ4). Likewise, I had it happen while viewing a YouTube video embedded in a blog. Also note that I had no problems with the exact same games and video applications prior to that point.

As mentioned, I thought that the video card or something else might have gone flaky on me. I do have  a 3-year service warranty on the system, but didn’t want to drag my desktop in to where I bought it. I’ve been swamped for the last month, so I’ve largely ignored the problem.

However, it came up today while I was installing software for a new printer. There was an animated disk icon rotating on the screen, and — kablooey! BSOD! This time I went digging on Google, and I wasn’t happy with what I found. Poking around on several different forums, I found folks describing a variety of problems with ATI Radeon video cards and Windows 7 updates, including in Microsoft forums.

In particularly, I found a couple of posts describing pretty much the same situation I face, namely that things worked well for a while, but random BSODs associated with game and other video-related applications started up after a Windows 7 update sometime a few months ago.

Thank you, Microsoft. I was strongly considering converting over to all Apple hardware and software (with XP dual boot), but was seduced both by the low prices of Wintel hardware and the improvements of Windows 7 over Vista. Between this and my earlier problem, I’m starting to regret it.  ..bruce..

My newest computer (an HP Pavillion desktop, quad-core processor, 8 GB ram, 1 TB hd) runs Windows 7, which I find to be a significant improvement over Vista. However, I ran into a problem with it a week or so ago.

I was in the process of copying some files from elsewhere on my internal LAN onto my desktop’s internal drive — I believe I had two sets of copying going on, one from another laptop, another from a network hard drive. I was also downloading a new version of a particular software program that was already installed. The instructions for that program suggested uninstalling the previous version before installing the new one, so I started doing that as well. (Hey — Win7 is supposed to be a multi-tasking OS, right?)

The de-installation threw up an alert box stating that such-and-such a file could not be deleted due to permission issues. I clicked the ‘OK’ button (my only choice) and waited for the de-installation to complete or terminate.  It did neither, but pretty much hung without making any progress on its glowing green progress bar. I finally grew tired of waiting, brought up Task Manager, and killed the de-installation.

At that point, my desktop redrew itself, except that now almost all of the icons were missing. Uh-oh.

I keep most of my work in folders (not shortcuts, actual folders) on my desktop. Likewise, I tend to park files on the desktop until I decide where to to file them. l I immediately looked at the contents of “C:\Users\<username>\Desktop” and saw that it was empty. Completely empty.

I used a couple of different file recovery packages in an attempt to recover what had vanished. No luck. They found no deleted folders or files within the Desktop folder, and my efforts at doing more extensive scans ran for a few days straight — while still being less than 50% done — before I gave up. (Since getting the desktop, I had used it to collect vast file sets, move them onto external hard drives, then delete those sets. There were likely at least a few million deleted files with traces all over the 1 TB hard drive.)

Before you wag your fingers at me, I did have an external 1.5 TB hard drive to which I was running weekly backups. However, I had just a week or so before the glitch (and a few days after the last backup) moved my desktop system from the main floor to my office downstairs and had not re-attached that external hard drive. This means, of course, that I was able to recover the deleted folders, but the versions were about 10 days old. I didn’t lose a lot, but then, I’m not entirely sure what all I did lose.

Yesterday, I discovered that the same glitch had apparently emptied out the  “MyMusic” folder, wiping out my iTunes library. I restored much of that from my laptop (which had an older version of my iTunes library), but lost everything that I had purchased from the iTunes store and downloaded onto my desktop system.

I’m still not sure what happened. I did a fair amount of searching on the web for similar problems and found that other people had had the same thing happen to them. One posting suggested that my user profile may have been corrupted, but my efforts to fix things that way didn’t help.

I bought a second external hard drive for backups and plan to run them more frequently. I also rearranged things so that I no longer have actual folders within Desktop but only shortcuts to folders elsewhere.

Just a word to the wise.  ..bruce..

Click on the comic to see the full-size version.  ..bruce..