Verizon PCMCIA Card Just Works 99
Apple God writes "I was a friend's house and he showed me his Verizion PCMCIA card for internet access. On a whim, I put it in my PowerBook, and it recognized the card and prompted me for authorization to configure the system for use with the card. I entered my password, and was surprised to see an icon in the menu bar for it. I clicked on this icon and selected connect, it worked! I had internet access. Here is a picture of the card that I used. When we checked Verizon's page, they only listed Windows compatibility. To make matters sweeter, my friend was shocked that it 'just worked' because he had to install drivers in XP before it would work."
Yeah, that happens... (Score:5, Informative)
I know my USB card, my mouse, and 2 of my ethernet cards are not officially mac-compatible, but that didn't stop them from working beautifully as soon as I pluged them in and powered on.
Re:Yeah, that happens... (Score:2)
I don't think you can get more standard than prism2-based 802.11b cards, but no prism2-based pcmcia card I've tried "just works" in OSX. You need to go purchase (that's right, purchase) the Aerocard drivers.
Re:Yeah, that happens... (Score:5, Informative)
There's also this open source Prism2 driver [sourceforge.net] for OS X.
Re:Yeah, that happens... (Score:2)
Re:Yeah, that happens... (Score:2, Interesting)
On Windows you need to start an install CD which copies half a dozen drivers (BT interface, several VCOM ports and lots of crap), 2 Windows hotfixes and a BT front-end application. Of course you also need to restart your PC. Overall, installing this thing on Windows takes about 10 minutes.
On OSX, the dongle is recognized instantly. No questions asked. Plug it in, it works. Fire up the Bluetooth Assistant, pair devices, that's it.
Re:Yeah, that happens... (Score:2)
Re:Yeah, that happens... (Score:1)
Drivers (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Drivers (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Drivers (Score:2, Interesting)
I've had to resort to using Quicklink Mobile from Smith-Micro to get our staff's cell phones to transmit data. Mind you, QLM works very well and is worth the cost, but I don't like being dependent upon them for cables -- especially if one dies and I can't just hit the Verizon store or other retailer to buy a replacement.
The problem, as I've been to
Re:Drivers (Score:1)
So, has (Score:2)
Re:So, has (Score:3, Informative)
In windows, they'll be hidden by the software package. When it connects, it opens the first serial port and dials an access number. That will answer with a PPP handshake. Authentication is CHAP. Once connected, the second port is opened, and AT commands are sent to poll the current signal quality.
On Linux, I need only plug the card in, and punch in the proper informat
Re:So, has (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So, has (Score:1, Informative)
the price of better quality gear is worth it. (Score:5, Insightful)
When that box was designed, it was by someone who gave a damn about quality of the parts. I am not suprised that Apple worked. They really are better built boxes.
Re:the price of better quality gear is worth it. (Score:3, Insightful)
I've heard a fair few excuses in my time but that one is pretty bad.
The fact that you've got so many sounds to me like you're looking for one that is a good one. Give the Apple a shot, you may find that afterwards you're not running nearly as many systems as you are now...
-- james
Re:the price of better quality gear is worth it. (Score:2)
Re:the price of better quality gear is worth it. (Score:2)
Re:the price of better quality gear is worth it. (Score:4, Insightful)
But rebuilding a 2000 era Dell system for my Sister it identified the monitor right off were my recent Gigabyte P4 board still would not. Same OS same method of install same installer (me).
That's not the least bit surprising to me, and it doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the components, it has to do with the age of the components and the age of the operating system. If you install an operating system released in 2003, it's pretty reasonable that it won't recognize/have drivers for a component first released in 2004.
Of course, this does show up what I think is a weakness in Windows' driver model the "must have a specific driver for every piece of hardware regardless of the fact that one generic driver can frequently handle lots of devices" problem. What probably happened here was that XP didn't have a good built-in driver for your video card, so it didn't know how to ask your monitor for the EDID data. Either that or maybe Windows has to have some sort of "driver" for each monitor? I hope not, because that's just insane. The system only needs a few bits of information about your monitor (hsync, vsync, max dot clock and name should do it, I think -- maybe some gamma stuff?).
So, I don't think this is an issue of quality hardware (though Apple's is), but quality software. An OS *should* just be able to use a device which complies to relevant standards, or is sufficiently similar to another device for which it has drivers (of course it has to know that the devices are similar, which may be a problem. That's why in Linux you see a lot of questions about which driver should be used with a piece of hardware).
Re:the price of better quality gear is worth it. (Score:5, Informative)
I have 6 devices that don't use all generic drivers: the ATA controller, network card, sound, AGP bridge and video card all from nVidia, and the Realtek NIC. Of those, I could use generic drivers for 3 of them, albeit with some loss of speed or functionaility.
NT has always had a layered architecture [osr.com] of class and port drivers; class drivers, provided my MS, implement the common functions for similar devices while port drivers handle communication with a specific device. A third-party video driver still depends on the generic video port [microsoft.com] driver. AFAIK, video cards support the VGA standard and that's about it; a standard VGA driver is the only generic video driver.
There are two ways to figure out which drivers go to which devices: the old way of loading possible drivers and asking each one if it sees any devices it supports, and plug and play which uses device IDs and
Re:the price of better quality gear is worth it. (Score:1, Interesting)
Bad example. Both the video driver and video miniport are card specific. In fact, the first line of your link is:
"NT-based operating system video miniport drivers are adapter-specific, kernel-mode drivers."
You've also got it neatly backwards, miniports are card specific, drivers are often not. SCSI host adaptors have a card-specific miniport, but the driver is generic and provided by microsoft.
The real reason for the miniport/
Re:the price of better quality gear is worth it. (Score:2)
There are three parts to a video driver: the video port driver, the video miniport driver and the display driver.
The video port [microsoft.com] driver is always videoprt.sys. It handles the functions common to all video devices; it is provided by Microsoft.
The video miniport [microsoft.com] driver handles communication specific to the device; the video miniport for my GF3 is nv4_mini.sys.
The display driver [microsoft.com] handles all rendering specific to a device. The display driver for my GF3 is nv4_disp.dll.
Only the display driver us
Re:the price of better quality gear is worth it. (Score:2)
GPRS networks also (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.whateversclever.net/sereview.php
Its nice when you can have a choice on Apple, you dont have to be locked down to 1 carrier and hardware.
What OS version? (Score:2)
Re:What OS version? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What OS version? (Score:5, Funny)
OS X keeps getting better at it... (Score:4, Informative)
Good to hear about the VZW cards. I use one on my Windoze lappy (my work made me take THAT computer!) and have also played with it on Linux. As for OS X I love the fact that most handsets, CDMA or GSM, seem to work over bluetooth or data cables right out of the box. They do a really good job on the seamless syncing too. Now if they will just get on the ball with SyncML then all will be well. Hell, world peace may even ensue, starvation and poverty could become a thing of the past and, um, ok perhaps not. But it would be nice ;-)
possible reason... (Score:5, Informative)
Were you running 10.3.5? Since those drivers were released a month before 10.3.5, I suspect they were included in it, and that would explain the card "just work"ing.
FWIW
Re:possible reason... (Score:4, Informative)
Yep, my install of 10.3.5 includes AppleVerizonSupport.kext 1.0.0 and AppleVerizonSupportKicker.kext 1.0.0 (which are probably what's included in the linked download). So there you have it--Apple wrote a special driver for that VZW card.
But it's still pretty cool that it Just Worked(TM).
Re:This is newsworthy? (Score:4, Funny)
Hmmm, perhaps you're right. Plugging things into a Mac system and having it "just work" is terribly terribly common.
Now, when someone plugs something into a Windows XP system and it "just works", that's newsworthy. I mean, come on, that sort of thing only happens once in a lifetime!
Re:This is newsworthy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is newsworthy? (Score:2, Interesting)
Nevertheless, nearly every piece of hardware I try on my XP box works first go. I certainly don't expect exotic hardware that wasn't released before XP, like my digital TV tuner, to work without installing drivers. But by the time the next Windows release is due, I expect this hardware to be not so exotic anymore, and that drivers
Re:This is newsworthy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Pity it isn't pointed out enough that if *nix/OSX doesn't have the driver, they're typically SOL until somebody cooks up one.
I'm going to get scorched pretty heavily for saying this, but there are upsides to MS's monopoly.
Re:This is newsworthy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or it may only have an Amiga driver... and the joke is on both of us.
Re:This is newsworthy? (Score:1)
Of course, for all I know it would have been just as hard on a XP system... and their duplex may also be broken.
Re:This is newsworthy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is newsworthy? (Score:4, Informative)
I plug in my digital photo camera to my iBook, and iPhoto already has the drivers for it, and it just works. I plug in my friend's brand new digital video camera through firewire, and iMovie accepts it just fine, and it just works.
On Windows I have to install a crapload of drivers to get these things to 'just work' on there. And Apple's iPhoto and iMovie actually work easier than the software that I have to install by the product makers on Windows.
Re:This is newsworthy? (Score:2)
As did my Radeon 9800 AIW PRO, my Network card, my sound card, my USB card, and my webcam.
The 2 wireless cards I have for my laptop just work, and the only Driver I need to install on my laptop is an updated Dell-Special radeon driver.
Re:This is newsworthy? (Score:1, Interesting)
Lots of devices work out of the box in XP. Many others don't. You are very fortunate because 7 out of your 8 devices worked. That is not the case, by far, of most XP users, for whom only around half work out of the box.
The point of the parent post is that the proportion of devices that "just work" for MacOS X is vastly superior.
Re:This is newsworthy? (Score:2, Interesting)
And my "needs" "condemn" me?
How about "I don't have $2k to drop on a Mac I won't get any use out of"?
$500 and I can build a top of the line PC.
Re:This is newsworthy? (Score:4, Insightful)
I hear this all the time, and I call bullshit.
Prove that you can make a top of the line PC for $500.
Find a place, and link to it, please, where you can get parts to build a PC with a P4 3.6 GHz/AMD 64 FX with an 800MHz front side bus, 4 GB RAM (or more if you can find a motherboard that supports more), full tower and power supply, GeForce 6800 Ultra/Radeon X800 (with max RAM available), the largest Serial ATA hard drive on the market at 7200 RPMs, a gigabit Ethernet card, and a SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro--all for $500 or less.
We'll not include a monitor or speakers, keyboard and mouse in the pricing. Nor will we include the price of an OS.
But those parts are what will make a truly top of the line non-server PC. You said top of the line, now show me how you can build that for $500 or less.
Re:This is newsworthy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Low high-end != top of the line.
Top of the line means biggest, best, fastest on the market.
The Radeon 9800 Pro, while an extremely good card, is no longer the top of the line from ATI. 1 GB of PC3200 RAM is not top of the line, when you consider most boards that support that much can support up to 4 GB of RAM. A P4 3.0 GHz is not top of the line from Intel, the 3.6 GHz is. Etc.
"Top of the Line" is not subjective, it means the top of the line products available by t
Re:This is newsworthy? (Score:1, Interesting)
You had to install Dell specific drivers... so if you have a HP you need to install different drivers? Sounds like driver hell to get the most out of your hardware, just about the opposite of what true plug 'n play should be. At least things kinda worked for you without the drivers...
If you need to run software that's only available in Solaris, you are condemned to buy
Re:This is newsworthy? (Score:2)
Drivers and USB (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows provides HID drivers, but does not provide drivers for any of the other stuff even though it could, which is why it needs drivers for almost any USB peripheral you plug in.
Mac and Linux have default drivers for a lot of the protocols which is why you can just plug things in and have them work.
And the relevance for this topic is that 5220 card is actually a USB controller with a USB modem and some other device (I forget which now) attached. Fortunately there are standard ways of talking to USB controllers as well.
So the real issue isn't being amazed at Mac/Linux not requiring drivers for this card, but why Windows is so damn broken by design that it does require them.
Re:Drivers and USB (Score:3, Funny)
Anyone who is amazed by Windows being broken needs to get out more often, and is also most likely to be surprised by Mac/Linux working easily.
Big deal (Score:3, Informative)
Heres how it goes. Acme the semiconductor company as an ethernet design in its IP, and sells the design, or wafers to other places which integrate it into their own chips and boards. They name it different. They sell their stuff, make specific drivers, sometimes change PCI IDs, and hope everyone depends on THEIR drivers. Some hacker realizes the two chips are the same, and adds the PCI IDs of one in the other to make a unified driver in Linux/BSD/whatever.
Joe Schmoe plugs card it, is impressed and posts a slashdot story.
Really makes me wanna post a slashdot story on how I ran Windows 2000 on a 21164 CPU.
Re:Big deal (Score:3, Funny)
I wish my ATM card would work in my powerbook. Just think of all the free money!
Re:Slow news day? (Score:2)
you are all trolls. I refuse to respond.
I was just thinking the same thing. Although it's amazing how much we say when we're not responding to people.
Saving Money on Support (Score:5, Insightful)
Sprint does this. With their cell service you can get PCS Vision. You're not supposed to use it to go online with your computer (official response is that it's an unofficial feature), but you can. On top of that, it's not supposed to work for Mac, but it does. There's even a PCS Vision modem script built into OS X that ends all the hassle.
The ever ellusive, unsupported feature within an unsupported feature! I imagine companies save some money by just saying "not supported" instead of training a Mac Support team (or rather, hiring one), but I'd be surprised to learn exactly what works on a Mac that isn't supposed to. Makes you wonder...
the apple is sweet (Score:5, Interesting)
Jeeze, the thing just worked, to quote the key phrase of this thread. At that moment, I knew I'd not be going back to solaris or linux anytime soon. After a year with the box, I've yet to plug in anything and find it not working right away.
Apple wants you to think that the GUI is the best thing about their OS, but that's wrong. The GUI is OK, mind you, but it's more awkward than GNOME in some respects. But the hardware support, that's the jewel.
Re:the apple is sweet (Score:2, Funny)
Re:the apple is sweet (Score:2)
yeah, and it's starting to piss me off! i mean, it used to be i'd get to spend hours figuring this stuff out. it was a fun mental exercise. now, that's all gone! networking equipment used to be the best, but we recently got an Airport Extreme at the office, and i'm crushed! we plugged it in, and i went to configure it, but it was detected before i could even find the admin tool. i figured getting the iTunes thing to w
lemonade from lemons (Score:3, Informative)
The reason for why hardware "just works" on all those non-Windows platfoms is simple: if OS vendors don't ship drivers with the hardware, you have to ship drivers with the OS.
Note that a lot of "driver CDs" contain a lot more than drivers: they contain documentation, setup utilities, etc. So, built-in support, whether on Macintosh or Linux or BSD, is often not as good as what you get from vendors. (OTOH, vendor CDs often install lots of garbage in addition to what you need.)
In the long run, we need more standard hardware interfaces, so that the low-level suff works for all hardware out of the box, but we also need to get vendors to support non-Windows platforms more.
and back to lomons (Score:2)
Having run a linux system for a while and having my graphics card not 'just work' with RH's default version of X, my experience is that the stuff that I want to use 'just works' with the Mac and is less likely to work with RH. That's not a complete story, but it is tell tale.
Re:and back to lomons (Score:1)
Of course, Apple's graphics cards work with Apple's operating system--they ship together. Duh. When you buy a Linux machine from a Linux vendor, the graphics card also "just works".
Re:and back to lomons (Score:3, Interesting)
On the Mac, I've had the same problem with the HD, but I didn't get shunted to some TUI to download the latest version before I could use the GUI.
Consider the nature of the article (Score:1)
Re:Consider the nature of the article (Score:5, Insightful)
I noticed this too.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Every time I plug something into it, it just works. I bought a Formac TVR video capture unit, and plugged it in. No drivers, it recognized it just fine and Toast even let me capture off it. My new mouse worked perfectly. I plugged in my USB printer, and it didn't even bother prompting me about it - I was simply suddenly able to print documents from anywhere.
I love this thing
Mike
A similar story (Score:2, Informative)
Anyways, it always seemed to have issues with my XP machine. I'd have to install drivers to begin with, but every once in a while it just decided to not work at all when I plugged it in. It ended up becoming a chore to get pictures off of the damn thing.
Then I tried plugging it into my iBook. I saw a "no name" drive instantly show up on my desktop, iPhoto opened and everything was perfect. I di
what? (Score:1, Insightful)
How fast is it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How fast is it? (Score:4, Informative)
USB playstation 2 adapter (Score:2, Interesting)
I plug it into my Mac.... And it worked. *shrug*
1xEVDO (Score:2)
Any idea who makes the card?
VZ Access links and card info (Score:2, Informative)
I'm a Verizon subscriber and I got curious a couple of weeks ago as to how to connect my TiPB to the 'net through my Nokia cell phone. The solution seemed to be a $50 cable and some modem scripts. Best speed would be 14.4K. This looks way better. The card pictured by the original poster is an Audiovox PC 5220 card. Here's the Verizon page for it:
Verizon Audiovox PC 5220 [verizonwireless.com]
The card is currently available (to Verizon customers) for $99 with a 2 year contract ($15 activation fee). If you choose to keep your
Re:VZ Access links and card info (Score:1)
why is this news ? (Score:3, Insightful)
What's so impressive with this article? "Guy buys computer where things Just Work, tries it out, learns that things do indeed Just Work. Film at 11."
At my job, we have two managers with Powerbooks and these Verizon cards, and have been using them to little fanfare for perhaps a year now, maybe longer. The only glitch I can think of was that the cards didn't work with when 10.3.3 came out, but they worked fine again with 10.3.4.
Things usually just work with Macs. Why bother making a headline out of what should be obvious to anyone that uses these computers ?
Re:why is this news ? (Score:1)
Re:why is this news ? (Score:2)
Verizon is NOTORIOUS for sticking ONLY to the windows compatiblity world.
Most of their phones don't even have bluetooth.
They just came out with one, but they disabled most of the bluetooth features. (I think they posted that on slashdot.)
The fact that a Verizon card "just works" is thus very un-expected. had you shared the fact that these cards worked with us when your 2 managers first found out a year ago, this story would be yours and all the fanfare that goes with it.
be faster next t
Why is this news? (Score:2)
PCMCIA? (Score:2)
Re:PCMCIA? (Score:1)