when i saw your post headline, i was momentarily excited (i get all my news from the fire ant gazette, dontcha know?). but the whole "have to have a sbux card" bummed me out. i have oft wondered how long starbuck's contract with t-mobile must be that they still charge $6.95 or whatever for an hour of internet service. many are the times that we are traveling and simply need to use the internet. starbucks was going to be my go-to place when they opted for free internet, but looks like we'll continue to drive around neighborhoods until we find a signal. :-)

Kyle, I'd hate to travel with you guys if the hoods you frequent don't even have a McDonalds! ;-)

Had my G-4 Mac in Starbucks on Saturday when I tried to open up Photoshop to edit some photos and found the Adobe updater program had detected a wifi connection and was trying to phone home for the new information, but couldn't because of the T-Moble pay firewall, and locked itself on update mode, even after multiple restarts there and back at the house, with a working wireless link in place.

Anyway, the end of this is I have to either figure out what script and/or library file is freezing up and locking me out of Photoshop, or I have to just dump the program and reinstall it. I give Apple, Adobe and Starbucks each about a one third share of the blame for this one. Next time, I'm either going to make sure I'm up online before I do anything with Adobe while on someone else's wifi, or I'm getting my coffee at the Cinnabun inside the Schlotzky's on Wadley, where I know the free wifi works.

I'm having a hard time seeing Apple's culpability in this, especially when Adobe makes such an easy target. Ever since Quark wised up to the value of at least playing like the customer is important, Adobe has taken the clear lead in the jerk-vendor market (and I'm not talking about Jamaican barbecue).

In any event...how annoying.

The McDs around here still make you pay for wifi.

Those dollar-hungry fiends!

Based on my iPhone experience, Harvest Caffe's WebBeams service isn't free. Wish it was...

Don't know about iPhone, but it's free (with a purchase) for regular laptop access. You have to ask for a code when you pay for your order.

Thanks, Eric. I didn't know that!

I've got your back, dude. ;-)

Eric, my only complaint with Apple is they should have put a "system restore" function into the original OS X system similar to one Windows XP has had since 2001. That's why my jury verdict earns them some of the culpability, since the laptop is running OS 10.4 and not 10.5, where the restore option on Leopard would be available.

Of course, given Adobe's persistence in trying to update itself come hell or high water no matter what you want it to do, restoring the computer back to it's pre-Starbucks status might not have done anything helpful long-term, since odds are the next time I'm at any store with paid wifi, the program will do the same thing again.

they should have put a "system restore" function into the original OS X

OTOH, maybe they need some kudos for making a system that never really needed a system restore! ;-)

I've never had to restore a system in my 20+ years of working with Macs. *knock on wood*

We've had to do it once here at the office, with a G-5 running OS 10.3 when it had some sort of internal conflict battle with (big surprise!) an Adobe program -- InDesign 2.0 in this case -- that scrambled something that no amount of script/library file deleting and program deleting/reinstalling could resolve. Any attempt to open existing InDesign files would cause an automatic shutdown.

Yea, this was far more an Adobe problem than an Apple problem, and if Mr. Jobs would put an Apple store within 300 miles of the Permian Basin we probably could have just driven it over and let one of the Genius Bar whizzes figure it out, but it was easier to do an external back-up and trash the whole thing, since the key files were all on the server. It just would have been easier to restore things within the system back to before the Adobe time bomb went off (meanwhile, the G-5 is about to be updated from 10.3.9 to 10.5.2, which is supposed to resolve some of the early Leopard problems so that we can start using the Time Machine and Time Capsule options).