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I've run OS X ony my home Macs for nearly 5 years now. (It was my great experience with NeXTSTEP back in '94 that let me know OS X is the only place I needed to be.) My XP box at work crashes hard or needs to be reset by me several times a month. Leaving it on at a stretch, I sometimes see unexplainable lags in responsiveness. It's a painful contrast.

Something that amuses me is the fact that OS X crashes out so infrequently (about once every 18 months) that when it does happen, I immediately assume I must have a hardware problem. That really is a testament to the solidity of an operating systemthat you might expect the hardware to go before the software crashes. And that's not to say I've had any hardware issues to speak of (outside of dropping an iBook onto a tile floor...)

Windows (and Linux) folks are really missing out, in my somewhat humble opinion. I'm most content with my G5, iBook, and new Mac mini.

blakespot

it has a standard PCMCIA slot which will accept an ethernet or wireless card - drivers available online, but you'll likely still need a machine that can connect over serial to do the initial install. there's a number of shareware and open source apps for pc, mac and linux that you can use to sync data, contacts, etc. links below

i have a 2100 that i sync up over my 802.11 network at home.

for that matter, you may be able to save your documents on the a pc flash card, and pop that into your laptop or other device that accepts such cards. i'm doubtful of this, tho, since the newton os stores everything in "soups" instead of a traditional filesystem - built from the ground up to use flash memory instead of spinning media.

anyhoo, specs for the emate are here:
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/messagepad/s tats/emate_300.html

emates for $50 here:
http://macsruscomputers.com/apple-newton.html

nsync software here:
http://homepage.mac.com/nowhereman77/hacks/newton/

another similar package here (tho it may be defunct now)
http://www.everchanging.com/newton/

if you've got one, subscribe to newtontalk for a very active and helpful community of newt users:
http://www.newtontalk.net/

I believe nSync is a solution on the mac (modern) side... it may be portable to Windows (it's open source).

The XML part of XmlHttpRequest is a bit misleading - you don't have to use XML and parse it in the client. If you use a server process that generates an HTML fragment, you can replace the innerHTML of a target id easily.
I made a JAH example to show how easy this is.
JAH stands for Just Async HTML

I wonder what the expectations were for anyone that is disappointed by Spotlight.

I started off my Tiger use by messing around with Spotlight. "Wow, all the emails I ever sent to [name]!" "Cool, any word document that has [project] in title!" etc.

Then I thought about some of the complex and hard to maintain folder hierarchies I have. The folder system made it generally easy to find my files, but only if I was using them in a manner that I had expected when I started the organization. Spotlight could be the answer, I thought.

So I took a non-critical directory nest and used my existing folder system and Automator to quickly add spotlight comments to the files. (Select all files in [proj_A directory], add [proj_A] comment to files.)

Now I could hit command-space and type in a key phrase or two and get all the files in a nice menu. Clicking on "show all" brings up a nice, and constantly updated finder window for the search. Ah, now we're getting somewhere.

So I created some smart folders based on current criteria (and a few theoretical cases). Woo! Now I have a dynamic directory structure! Add a few custom Automator plug-ins (so I can right click files and do expected actions like "Move file to [dir] and add comment [helpful metadata]".)

Smart folders (driven by Spotlight) in email is pretty handy also. A couple weeks ago my wife and I were having our yard landscaped. This, naturally, involved a lot of emails back and forth with the landscapers over plant choice, guidelines, schedules, etc. So rather than setup a rule and folder for something temporary; I right clicked on the landscaper's email address and clicked "Create a smart folder". Ta da! Now I don't even have to care where the email goes, any email from the landscapers is all grouped together. When the work was finished, I deleted the smart mailbox and the clutter was gone. I still have their emails in my general sub-inbox should I have to refer to something. All emails and advice are still just a quick spotlight search away. For example: "water magnolia" to find the watering advice for our new tree.

And then there's iPhoto. With the help of the excellent iPhoto Keyword Assistant I have been diligently adding metadata to all of my digital photos. While KA fixes one of iPhoto's big shortcomings (an awful interface to the keywords, especially if you have a lot); using the keywords was still clunky. You have to start iPhoto, open up a special sub-window and then click on the keywords you want. This interface is barely acceptable when you only have a dozen keywords; when you have five dozen it is quickly painful.

Spotlight fixes this. It includes searching by iPhoto keyword!* So I can start up a spotlight seach, type "obx sunset" to see all the sunset pictures I've taken at the Outer Banks. Or "munich" for all the pictures of Munich, or "munich cathedrals" ... you get the idea. Sure if you haven't been using keywords until now you have your work cut out for you (although KA again comes to the rescue with a nice interface for adding new keywords). But if you have, then Spotlight is incredibly and totally awesome! Those searches bring up the standard spotlight results page, I can browse the returned pictures and even run a nice slideshow: all without even launching iPhoto!

* There have been reports of problems with this working for some people, and I was one of them. It seems that when spotlight finishes it major index, it still has some indexing tasks left in the background and iPhoto keywords are one of those. I noticed that a spotlight keyword search only worked partially at first. Any photos I had recently worked on or added were in, and sporadic other photos as well. So I created a keyword called "temp" and added it to every photo, then deleted it. After that all of my photos were indexed.

Spotlight has even changed how I launch applications. I used to have a dock chock full of any applications I might launch.

Apparently, nobody here RTFA, much less his resume, hence the reason why nobody noticed that this guy earned his bachelors, masters and Ph.D. from Brantridge University, a suspicious diploma mill. I think such blind support to this guy will undoubtedly harm the cause he's defending.

Which is at this address. Anybody has shared with him a classroom at the Brantridge University? Or at Oxford, for that matter?

Jupiter? Yeah, we at AlienClick [mttp://1.3.9.27.81.243] can do that. In fact, all these worlds can be yours for $39.99 per line, except Europa, which has been reserved by a prior bidder.

be seen without a telescope

So we could still make a deal if aliens drop by wanting to buy Jupiter.

Only on /. could an AC accuse a clown of having a "dead inner child".

Yup, no children here.

H.264 can make clean HD content flow at as low as 2mbps at 720p

Here's a web page with samples encoded at HD resolution as low as 1 Mbps, and that's for 1080p. The half-HD res samples (which are just a bit smaller than 720p) come out at 256 kbps. Yeah, that's less than what you get with H263 at lower-than-SD res.

http://homepage.mac.com/kyuha/.Pictures/Killzone_b ug.jpg

Time for you to shut the fuck up fanboy.

...and do it mostly without dups.

This script or one like it can page your "normal" two-way pager, sense whether you got it, and only send via Iridium if not. You can't rely on Iridium only, esp. in areas with many obstructions, because the network can't ask the pager if the message was received -- that is, it is one way only and therefore less reliable.

http://homepage.mac.com/jogomu/jgm.org/snpp_iridiu m.html

If you're happy using wxWidgets, there are now bindings for Squeak (http://homepage.mac.com/rgayvert/wxsqueak.html).

And of course Squeak has an incredible web development framework - Seaside (http://seaside.st/). Try the tutorial -- you will be blown away!

There is a lot of interesting development happening in Squeak at the moment; if you've not played with it in the last couple of years, it's well worth giving it some attention. If you're having trouble getting into Squeak, have a look at some of the tutorial material on http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/377 .

Now it's become downright scary. *sigh*

clicky!

> I don't think the concept of the trinity could be considered nitpicking. It is the thing that most differentiates Christianity from the other Abrahamic religions.

I diagree on two counts:

1. Christ = Messiah is the fundamental belief that differentiates Christianity from Judaism & Islam.

2. Trinitarianism is but one, very successful branch of Christianity. At one time, most Christians were non-trinitarian, but that was a long time ago and mixed up in Imperial politics. Today there are still a few Unitarians.

I think you missed the point here!

I do regret not getting what I was looking for a 12in Transmeta laptop. but I do think the iBook has some redeaming fetures, "it is stable" the i-software meens nothing to me and I can manage my photos quite easly and more universaly with gphoto (That is what I like). the two apps I look for are mail clients and browsers (that was pitched to me in the Apple store) and I don't know anyone who would lone me there Mac to beet to death. as for more unix like WTF are you talking about?

I guess I did miss the point. Remind me, what is it exactly? I sure can't tell from you post above.

*MY* point is that you should have known what you were getting into. If you were at an Apple Store (or CompUSA, or Frys, or a local Apple dealer...) you had the opportunity to try before you buy.

As for email, I can't comment much there, I use gmail.com for that. I personally like Safari, but I use Firefox more often. I suppose you could try Thunderbird. I use the latest G4 optimized nightly builds from here:
http://homepage.mac.com/krmathis/
http://homepage.mac.com/ozjason/moz/

If Firefox isn't what you need, then I guess that pretty much leaves MSIE. Maybe you should have bought a Dell and used MSIE + Outlook 2003.

What do you mean by gphoto? gphoto, libgphoto, and gtkam are only for transfering photos. Did you mean the GNOME Photo Collector?

I think you missed the point here!

I do regret not getting what I was looking for a 12in Transmeta laptop. but I do think the iBook has some redeaming fetures, "it is stable" the i-software meens nothing to me and I can manage my photos quite easly and more universaly with gphoto (That is what I like). the two apps I look for are mail clients and browsers (that was pitched to me in the Apple store) and I don't know anyone who would lone me there Mac to beet to death. as for more unix like WTF are you talking about?

I guess I did miss the point. Remind me, what is it exactly? I sure can't tell from you post above.

*MY* point is that you should have known what you were getting into. If you were at an Apple Store (or CompUSA, or Frys, or a local Apple dealer...) you had the opportunity to try before you buy.

As for email, I can't comment much there, I use gmail.com for that. I personally like Safari, but I use Firefox more often. I suppose you could try Thunderbird. I use the latest G4 optimized nightly builds from here:
http://homepage.mac.com/krmathis/
http://homepage.mac.com/ozjason/moz/

If Firefox isn't what you need, then I guess that pretty much leaves MSIE. Maybe you should have bought a Dell and used MSIE + Outlook 2003.

What do you mean by gphoto? gphoto, libgphoto, and gtkam are only for transfering photos. Did you mean the GNOME Photo Collector?

We erected a tribute page on our website in his honor:

http://www.studentgroups.ucla.edu/abs/douglasadams /

Two years later, we finally ran our Big Event, with Bill Nye the Science Guy and Dr. Jill Tarter of SETI fame. We opened with a dedication to Adams. Here are pictures from the event:

http://homepage.mac.com/uniace/PhotoAlbum21.html

http://homepage.mac.com/leperous/.Pictures/quiet.j pg

$129 for a lousy system upgrade?

I switched from Eudora 5.2 for Windows to Mail.app in 10.3 (thanks, Eudora Mailbox Cleaner), and I'm generally pleased. However, I'm on a lot of mailing lists at work, and it already takes a few seconds to open some of my mailboxes on a 1.8GHz iMac G5. I was hoping for some improvement in 10.4.

There are a few shareware apps to help this process.

Unfortunately, that's also the only way to maintain active iPhoto libraries across multiple disks. You can stick a library anywhere, even on a subfolder of an iPod, but since iPhoto doesn't allow "import in place", you can't have photos from multiple drives show up in the same library. Inserting burned media with albums on it works great - the keyword assignments and dates all merge nicely together with the current library and un-merge when you eject the disk - but of course those are archives, not active libraries, so it's not the same thing.

As an aside, if you're interested in making more meaningful filenames from your digital pictures automatically, check out "jhead".

I invoke it on everything I drag off the media cards, like so: "jhead -exonly -nf%Y%m%d-%H%M%S-%f *.JPG"

http://homepage.mac.com/stuart621/dalek.mov Looks cool.

It looks like there is an XP client for iDisk.

Were these the same guys that did the country medley of Radiohead songs called Rodeohead?

Click

Those urine and feces filled "blue ice" bombs from airplanes?

I'll think I'll stay inside with my new toy instead

Who needs a *person* to play video game music when player pianos these days run on MIDI files? Witness our hack at a hotel in Texas.

Click here to see

The video was funny, the song was really good.

I really like anti-war messages that aren't packaged in your typical angry punk song.

And for further amusement: America (Fuck Yeah!) We Stand As One

Windows-D hides all your apps.

Windows-R brings up the run window.

The only things I've changed:

ctrl-alt-g puts focus in the Google Deskbar.

The Google Deskbar is a part of a side-docked not always-on-top toolbar with my quicklaunch & desktop, with large icons that I can use like a dock. So no matter where I am, ctrl-alt-g gives me access to the stuff I don't want cluttering my taskbar.

If it's always-on-top, then you can't use fitts the way that XP is designed for, which is fantastic.

I'm pretty happy with the setup. My only complaint with Windows is that the text-editing shortcuts aren't the same as MacOS, so my fingers do all the wrong things when I'm typing on either system. Both operating systems have passable text-editing key commands, I just can't learn either one since they're different. If only they both had emacs-mode, I'd just learn it the emacs way.

Anyway, here's a picture of how it works out for me on xp. That's what it looks like when I've popped up my toolbar with ctrl-alt-g.

In spite of the recent trackpad isses, PowerBooks are selling like iPods(yes, hot cakes have been replaced by iPods).

Take the / off the end of the link, like this and it should come up

I hate replying to my own posts, but oh well. One of the follow-ups to me had the link to the information (albiet with a trailing slash that shouldn't have been), however some yo-yo felt that was somehow redundant. Whatever.

Let's see what happens when google sends these chaps one of these: these.

Of particular interest to these guys should be the section entitled "No Automated Querying."

Here's a website with both txt and pdf of the order to pull my app that parsed google news:

http://homepage.mac.com/fahrenba/gn/gn.html/

Apple is a software company, that just so happens to expect the best when it comes to hardware and peripherials.

BZZZT! Apple is a hardware company (check out the third row of slides) that's in the enviable position of being able to control the software that runs on its products.

I was happly using my Dual 2 Ghz and 30" screen when all sorts of nasty things happened. Which is a rarity for us Mac users as you all know.

1: Netstat hung process

2: Mail hung

3: Finder reboot wouldn't load menu bar

Nothing worked until I actually changed my network settings, then everything cleared up. I jumped on my 56k and chatted with Comcast after waiting almost a hour.

I simply said "What happened, something big?"

Comcast: "Yes we know, all our DNS servers are down"

http://homepage.mac.com/hogfish/PhotoAlbum2.html

Cute try, but you haven't seemed to figure out the difference between marketing specs and actual tests. Yes, marketing says they should last about 500 cycles so heavy users should generally get about 2-3 years out of them. (Obviously some people will get more.) But the reality is that many people have much less actual time with them and have even sued over it.

As for the total hours, sure some people can get up to 12 hours (often only in the first year) on the generation 4 and 5, but if you read some of the above you'll see some as low as 4-5 hours, and often 8 hours is a typical normal accomplishment. You'll even notice some of the above links report the iPod mini is supposed to get 12 hours but testing suggests it only gets about 7 hours.

We can argue about actual numbers and conditions like crazy, but the point is that real people are getting less than the marketing suggests and a good number have general battery problems.

As far as replacement, yes, you can crack it open yourself using 3rd party battery sources, but a proper battery replacement (they aren't made to be opened) costs $99 from Apple (see above link).

Even more importantly, the actual dollar and length of life is not really the main issue. The point is that iPods have battery problems. It's easy to find all over the internet. While this isn't a big problem with some people, it certainly means that not only "dumbfucks" (as the grandparent post said) have objections to the iPods and there are legitimate reasons to believe that they aren't the best.

Posted 2 new prank calls ranging from yoda being compared to michael jackson, child molester and a drunken quiz show host, although the caller doesn't seem to notice and believes it's egit, to earn tickets to the screening of star wars. click the link above or here to listen http://homepage.mac.com/bugdave/iMovieTheater17.ht ml

Yes, here's photos of FOSE 2005 I took today, including OS X Tiger shots:

http://homepage.mac.com/blakespot/PhotoAlbum28.htm l

blakespot

Here are 3 pranks calls made to the pay phone next to them inline. The other 2 are linked at the top on the same site.

http://homepage.mac.com/bugdave/iMovieTheater15.ht ml

a friend and i got ahold of the pay phone number outside of the Theater where they are lined up. We pranked em a few times and put the audio of it online for all to hear... here's a link the other pranks are on the same page....

http://homepage.mac.com/bugdave/iMovieTheater15.ht ml

blakespot

It could take off if stuff like this below existed in XP platform:

http://homepage.mac.com/jonassalling/Shareware/Cli cker/

Not saying anything more but check it.

Also god help those poor "dongle" buyers have to install that more-evil-than-virus BT stack. If I wasn't using Mac, nobody, repeat nobody could make me buy anything named "bt" and install on x86. You know why? Installed to my bros x86 laptop running XP. If you ever get into such situation, get some non chemical tranquilizers first I say ;)

OS X got central, system based support for BT. Carrying "framework" scheme. Thats why you will see more mac bt users than PC ones based on percentage.

Doesn't change "Salling" is a genius though :)

As has been pointed out, nobody agrees on exactly what set of features constitutes "object-oriented". "OO zealots will choose some subset of this menu by whim and then use it to try to convince you that you are a loser."

You can claim that, and in modern use it may be true. But the term "object oriented" was invented by Alan Kay to describe the programming model of Smalltalk. It wasn't used for Simula, which was the first language which was OO, not until Alan Kay coined the term. The far more elegant retort is this classic anecdote. I trust you'll read it before you reply. :)

I don't know why you bring up Lisp in this sense- CLOS happened way after Smalltalk. Sure, the first Lisp came about in the mid- to late-1950s. But McCarthy didn't invent CLOS. My assertion that Smalltalk was "first fully OO" language doesn't mean I dislike Lisp. Lisp is Smalltalk's most immediate intellectual anscestor, and if not for Lisp we'd all be using really shitty languages like C++, but most likely worse ones.

And yes, you can emulate/do OOP via lambdas pretty easily, but it gets messy quick without any proper inheritance, etc. Lisp and C are both capable of doing OOP, but neither are OO languages. By "Lisp" I don't mean Common Lisp w/ CLOS, ISLISP (which has a simpler OOP system built-in), or one of the other small-time Lisp implementations with a built-in OOP system, rather the pre-CLOS lisp that would pre-date Smalltalk, which first took proper form in the late 70s with Smalltalk-78 and then -80. Smalltalk-72 had the same OO qualities, but the language changed quite a bit between 72 and 80.

But if you want to get in a who did it first pissing contest, you'd do a lot better refering to Simula rather than Lisp. You make like Lisp a lot more than Simula, but it was the first language with features we'd call OO.

Sure, as long as you don't care about it looking like a normal app. It doesn't use Gtk+ or Qt on Linux, or Windows widgets on Windows, or Aqua widgets on the Mac. Stuff you write in Squeak feels even less native than Javascript on a webpage, and that takes some doing.

OK, for some folks maybe support for wxWidgets isn't enough. For the wxSqueak support, we've only got OS X and Win32 right now, but if you're talking about shippable apps, those are the two most important platforms. If you've never used wxWidgets, I'll fill you in: it's a cross-platform and multi-language widget set that gets you GUI support on Windows, Mac OS X, and plenty of Unixes.

So yeah, it's great if you're doing CS research and don't care how ugly or hard to use it is (I never could figure out what all the million different window-title-bar-buttons do). If you want to actually write an app to do something for people, it sucks.

Don't get me wrong, I think the default Squeak look is ugly. But like I cited with my own screenshots, it doesn't have to be. You can even get a boring native look via wxSqueak if you like.

As for the titlebars, I'm wondering if you're thinking of something else. There is minimize (aka collapse), maximize, close and the window menu. Same four buttons as Windows has, and most X11 WMs have the same four. Though if you're a minimalist using ionwm maybe that is a bit upsetting. For for newbies, it sure beats having them learn a pagefull of key-commands to do basic window management, wouldn't you agree?

Why is their user interface system not worth a bucket of warm spit? Or rather, since it can't be used to write normal apps, why are so many Squeak advocates trying to convince me that I'm a loser for not using Squeak?

No one said you were a loser. If you want to waste your time, be my guest. Just don't get so upset when some of us would rather not.

You think GNOME/KDE think about shipping a product for a user? Their dev community is no different than Squeak's, though quite a bit larger. I point you too the big "debates" that raged a month or three ago about what the users want in their DE vs what the developers feel like putting in.

Hear hear!

I was in a vaguely similar boat, though I can't ever claim to have been a Linux sysadmin - certainly not outside the home anyway. All our machines at home were Windows XP, mostly self-built, and we had Linux for NAT, etc. But all the machines were a constant hassle. The only thing I can be thankful for is that this was before spyware and its ilk got really big, so I never had to deal with much of that.

Anyway, I got an iBook in 2002, after playing around on a very sexy PowerMac G4 server (it had 1.25GB RAM, which was not unimpressive at the time). Looking back now, it was quite crude - Internet Explorer for the web browser, no X11, no Quartz Extreme - but I still switched, and haven't looked back.

Granted, it's a little weird if you're coming from a Linux-centric background - each UNIX has its own ways of doing things and Darwin is no different in this respect - but you can still get down to the nitty-gritty and write your own ipfw configuration if it floats your boat. And, though Fink seems slightly stagnated of late, running KDE on your Mac is just plain cool (from a "because you can" point of view, anyway).

Keep an open mind - I know a friend of mine was a little upset at first because he couldn't start Apache with apachectl start. I was a little terse with him in reply, pointing out that Apple, champion of the GUI, could hardly expect a horde of headstrong OS9 GUI diehards to open up a Terminal to start a web server. Once I pointed him towards the Sharing tab, all was fine.

The wireless implementation is unparalleled. Having taken my first steps in the WiFi world on a Mac, it pains me to use Windows' or Linux efforts (the latter I am having particular trouble with at home). Bluetooth is beautiful - you will, I am sure, find BluePhoneElite and Salling Clicker amusing if not essential toys. iPhoto is really, really nice; iMovie HD is just totally cool...

You almost take it for granted in fact. I installed iTunes on a friend's Windows XP machine the other day, and she was almost bowled over (she has rather poor balance) by the simplicity of iTunes. I now think of it as nothing special, but to someone who has suffered under WiMP for so long, it is truly refreshing.

In the end, all the machines at home now are Macs, save for one Linux server which still does NAT, mostly for my amusement so that I can continue to hack when I want. But I really think you hit the nail on the head with this...

I mess around with things enough at work and home. When I want to play, I have plenty of things to play with. But I want something that I don't have to think about unless I want to. I don't want to have to edit a single god damn configuration file to accomplish the above tasks.

I think I can sum it up succinctly with a line that is sure to appeal to at least the more mature and competent (i.e. less l33t t33n h4x0r) type that reads /. "Hack 'cause you want, not 'cause you have to." Hacking actually becomes fun again. And surely that's something quite hard to put a price on?

iqu :)

So rather than being a futuristic "Saved by the Bell"

So my whole plan was to make some joke about Spock being wildly in geeky Vulcan-love with Uhura, like Screech's character and Lisa. Of course, I wanted to do a great job of this, and thought I'd google for plotlines to make it work better.

Then I found a description of continuity lapses in "Saved By the Bell".

If I ever thought Trek freaks were out of hand, I have now seen worse.

I found out there's a catch with both YM and GM: a single mail has a size limit of 10 MB incoming or outgoing, and file transfers can be slow. While there were hacks such as GmailFS, that can't beat the speed and reliability of flash drives. Web mail has been a good alternative for floppies for awhile, but the increase to 1GB doesn't help that much, and most people will probably not come close to filling it all up.

Yahoo! Briefcase is free and seems to allow files larger than 10 MB (without splitting it ofcourse). By the way these services show how awful Apple's .mac account iDisk offer is in comparison.

I agree that would be great.

I wrote a Perl script to import FLACed shows (like the ZIP files found on archive.org), which you may find useful. (It's not as cool as native FLAC support would be, but it gets the job done.) In particular, it parses the metadata stored in the archive's .txt file and applies it to the imported tunes.

http://homepage.mac.com/mark_abbott/Projects/iTune s%20Scripts/index.html