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No No No.

Apple Machines are not more expensive

The above is a link to a recent set of comparisons. Yes, you can always get a cheaper PC than a Mac, but if you spec the machines to be as equal as possible the Mac is cheaper. And that is withouttaking into account the unquantifiable benefits of OS X, no viruses, very few security problems etc. etc. etc. etc.

Let is stop here, Macs are not more expensive, but they are generally higher specced than most of the bare bones crap you see advertised for so little.

Yes, forms!

Not exactly the same, but look what SonicBoy did with his Sony Clie UX-50 and Fun Cam software.

Japan totally gets all it's cool from the United States, and our beloved Governor of California!

Here's proof!

GuyMannDude: But actually creating an episode of Star Trek, for example, is just not possible right now.

You might want to reconsider that ;-)

Fan-Made Star Trek Episode Available for Download

Starship Exeter

'Star Trek' reborn in online episode

The fresh episode is a digital product of a personal-computing revolution that has allowed amateur moviemakers to duplicate once-pricey television- and movie-production techniques on shoestring budgets.

But classic "Star Trek" special effects added an eerie air of authenticity. Some effects, such as certain phaser-fire and force-field scenes, were the result of a reflective camera attachment. Jimm Johnson digitally added others using image-editing software on his home computer. He also used his Apple iMac to create digital backdrops, such as star fields and the control- and screen-festooned walls of the U.S.S. Exeter bridge, and to winnow 16 hours of raw footage down to one 35-minute show.

He says each minute of the finished show required some 20 hours of painstaking digital editing. This involved mixing still and moving imagery with dialogue and other audio elements, such as a music culled from classic "Star Trek" soundtracks.

Anyone got a translation of the video he's got linked? I may try if I get really bored, but if there's someone who's got experience dealing with morse, it'd prolly be a lot easier for them.

The Message

Here is a screenshot (actually cut from the below-mentioned pdf).

JP

I'm not talking about a subscription. I want to update when I want to update, and I want to pay $30 for an entire automatic system upgrade.

Several of the previous posts have mentioned a shortage of local Linux suport. This could be a great opportunity for any un/under-employed slashdotters. Put up flyers and such advertizing your services doing Linux installs and maintenence. Not a terrible line of work, and there seems to be a demand.

This nice article on doing freelance technical support has lots of reccomendations and info on how to go through with starting something like this.

As do I. I think its an excellent phone with one caveat; It's too quiet when it rings. I don't like musical ring tones so I stick with the phone's old telephone style ring ring tone. Otherwise its a great phone. Make sure whatever you choose you get something compatible with Salling Software's excellent Clicker Application. It's a collection of scripts that allow you to use your bluetooth phone to control various Apps including iTunes and Keynote. Even use the phone as a pointing device, for which the T610's joystick is very useful.

As do I. I think its an excellent phone with one caveat; It's too quiet when it rings. I don't like musical ring tones so I stick with the phone's old telephone style ring ring tone. Otherwise its a great phone. Make sure whatever you choose you get something compatible with Salling Software's excellent Clicker Application. It's a collection of scripts that allow you to use your bluetooth phone to control various Apps including iTunes and Keynote. Even use the phone as a pointing device, for which the T610's joystick is very useful.

You're thinking of Starship Exeter.

I think you're joking. :) But if not, it's trivial to reset the passwords if you have an OSX install CD and physical access to the machine.
Reset Passwords

I've got the t610 and it is a great phone. I use it wiht my 12" PB G4 and the combination is fantastic.
The amount of integration is amazing and the whole process is _very_ easy.
I haven't had any problems with the key sizo or the screen brightness (at least no more than other screens)

Also, you can do some really cool stuff with Salling Clicker which is a great (and inexpensive) piece of software

One of the coolest features of Objective-C, also available in Java (though I'm no expert on Java), is introspection.

Through introspection, an object, or a class object (loosely, that's a static class instance for static methods of your class), can interrogate themselves for variable names and types as well as the functions they support.

Only with object introspection can you send message (aka, method calls) to objects who may or may not understand (aka, implement), said message.

With this, i've created a really nifty (and open source) SQLite-based object persistence library called Objective-SQL.

Basically, you just derive a class from my Objective-SQL classes and they can automatically instantiate themselves from SQL table rows through various Find* methods I've implemented in there. Simply change data member values and call [myObject commit] and voila.

Also, there is relational capabilities given a Category to the system NSString class that allows you to turn an object into a string reference, and this string reference back into an object automatically fetched from the SQL database.

One could derive the SQLTransport and redirect actual storage and retrieval to other SQL solutions, like PostGre, MySQL, oracle etc.

Some of the better advice I've seen written lately. Eliminated the need for me say most of what I have to say, learned in my years of being photo editor for a Midwest university weekly newspaper.

I can't stress enough just how unsexy but totally reliable and capable the Pentax K1000 is. I have NEVER seen one break. I've yet to change the battery (operates the light meter) in mine after ten years - and I bought it used. It's a totally manual camera, but intuitive, and it just "feels" good in the hand. Add to that the fact that you can find hordes of good quality used lenses for this body in any camera exchange.

Lots of folks are "upgrading" to digital and fully auto cameras, leaving reliable workhorses like the K1000, and its many accessories, cheaper than they've ever been for the beginner.

I'd have to agree, I took photo in high school and the camera pool we had consisted of Pentax K-1000s. I liked the camera so much that I went on to purchase my own.

http://homepage.mac.com/mattdenton/photo/cameras/p entax_k1000.html

And, I would guess, many OS X users were seduced by the oh - so - beautiful user OS X user interface. I don't use OS X, but I wish I did, at least, if it was open source. (I need to be able to hack my OS.)

OS X uses translucency, antialiasing, smooth shadows around windows, window warping, and 'fancy' things like the launcher bar thing (sorry, Mac users, I don't know the name of it!) at the bottom of the screen. Have you ever actually used OS X? Try it. Go to CompUSA or something and play around with a G5.

Apple's interface makes you forget you're looking at simply a matrix of pixels, which is displaying rectangular regions called 'windows'. The smoothness of everything *far* surpasses anything I have seen in X. I've used KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, IceWM, and others. I've tried hundreds of themes. I've made my own themes. But I still have no good visual cue where the bounds of the focused window are. The drop shadow is, IMO, a great feature. Your peripheral vision picks up the area of the focused window automatically.

I could go on and on, but the point is, some people *do* care about having a beautiful desktop. It is also a usability feature and can make a person more productive.

I spend 70% of my life looking at it, and I want it to be beautiful, dammit.

The difference between T610/616 is that the T616 gives up GSM900 support for GSM850 support. Both supports GSM1800 and GSM1900.
Dropping GSM900 support is NOT a good thing as the best GSM networks are the GSM900 ones. GSM1800 networks have poorer coverage, furthermore, fewer operators support it.

God bless Apple's case designers. :)

God bless Apple's case designers. :)

God bless Apple's case designers. :)

For a while I was obsessed with non-overlapping window managers, and ran a window manager called Ion for a while. It lets you split the screen into resizable panes, each with a tab. I actually ran this under Solaris with two monitors (not xinerama however). Screenshots here and here.

This may not be exactly what you want, but it's worth trying out especially on a limited sized screen.

For a while I was obsessed with non-overlapping window managers, and ran a window manager called Ion for a while. It lets you split the screen into resizable panes, each with a tab. I actually ran this under Solaris with two monitors (not xinerama however). Screenshots here and here.

This may not be exactly what you want, but it's worth trying out especially on a limited sized screen.

In preparation for the sites inevitable /.ing, I have prepared a mirror of the pictures and movies.

Mirrors:
Pictures
Movies

In preparation for the sites inevitable /.ing, I have prepared a mirror of the pictures and movies.

Mirrors:
Pictures
Movies

Film (given enough square inches) has a capacity that exceeds any commercially available digital sensor. for instance, our Heidelberg Tango scanner has a true scanning resolution of 10,780dpi. The photomultiplier tubes in the scanner (one each of red, geen, and blue) are looking at liquid-mounted film through optically clear mylar sheets from fractions of an inch away through a microscope lens. There's a picture of the scanner and some other info on our web site.

Combined with a scanner, gigapixels of resolution are easily available without upsampling, up-resing, or other resolution-creating tricks.

My 4X5 view camera with fine-grained slide film captures about 1.4GP usable resolution at 8bits per channel in a fraction of a second. Go to an 8X10 camera and film at that scanning resolution (5000dpi) and you quadruple the number of pixels - although Photoshop can't open the resulting file because it's too big.

Compared to digital composition, shooting on film and drum scanning is faster and cheaper if your time is valued as a professional. I don't expect that this situation will last forever, but this "gigapixel barrier" article ignores some very relevant options when there is plenty of time to make a photograph and quality is paramount.

I signed up and downloaded the files (300 MB each, as TIF with LZW Compression, Eastern and Western Hemisphere). I stitched the two together (photoshop 8 only) and created a file that had pixel dimensions of 43,200 x 21,600 (2.6 GB uncompressed). And each pixel is equivalent to about 1/2 mile. Not enough for any true detail at high magnification, but fun to scroll around on.

This translates to a file 12' by 6' at 300 dpi, overkill to say the least. But we printed it out at 4' by 8' here at work and used it as decoration for a blank wall. An incredibly impressive piece of art.

A small (600x600 pixel) cut of California at 100 percent

Maybe they could get Leonard Nimoy to pen the songs for the Hobbit movie.

He could use this as his resume for the job:
http://homepage.mac.com/evanbaumgardner/iMovieThea ter6.html

I simply had to make a blog entry commemorating all the wonderful remarks. (A disproportionately large amount of the "bashing" actually came from people who are, or were, or at least claimed to be, fans of Apple.) I wonder how many of the people named therein have since gotten iPods?

The video is bullshit. Its makers were looking to get attention, nothing more. "iPods's Dirty Secret: The Truth"

Here's a website with a nice counter to the dirty little secret. Not only has his ipod (and mine) lasted longer, but he has links to Apple's $99 replacement and 3rd party $49 replacement batteries.

http://homepage.mac.com/mike_richards/PhotoAlbum4. html

The first one should give you some idea of how big the horse is - yes those are people alongside!

Best wishes,
Mike.

opensourceCMS.com has working installations of many php/mysql content management systems, so you can try before you install.

I'd also like to echo others' recommendations of Six Apart's TypePad and Apple's .Mac for beginners. They're not cheap, but they're (nearly) idiot-proof.

When Google bought Blogger, I expected to see a .Mac-like service develop, but it hasn't happened yet (and may never happen -- at least not until after their IPO).

- opensourceCMS.com
- TypePad
- .Mac

http://www.mac.com/1/mac_faq.html

Q: Is .Mac available to Microsoft Windows users?

Customers cannot sign up for a .Mac trial account using a Windows machine, but they can sign up for a full .Mac membership.

If your family are using Linux, you're SoL, but from the context of the question (need an idiot-proof solution), I suspect this is not the case.

Set up the website using Dreamweaver (if you want. it makes it easier but it's not compulsory) and get them a copy of Contribute. The only tricky bit is keeping up the navigation.

Or buy them a Mac AND get .Mac + Contribute for a low low price :-)

You can see my review of CMSs as a presentation (PDF) here.

Unfortunately just about all open source CMSs leave a lot to be desired in terms of out-of-the-box architecture and usability.

• Don't use Plone/Zope, Drupal, Slashcode, etc. etc.
• Macromedia Contribute, though $$$$, might be a good solution because you can lock them out from messing around with the site, but there is still a learning curve for newbies
• Good blogging software like MT mentioned earlier would work well, along with something like Gallery for photos.
• Quite frankly, Mac.com seems to be the best out there. It's really easy to use. Of course, you need a Macintosh to make it worthwhile, but it really seems to be a good solution for what you're looking for.

This story does seem a little speculative and "odd". Did anyone actually check out this guy's resume where it can be "confirmed publically" that he works for apple? I don't know anything about this thinksecret site and how reputable it is, but a resume entry like this doesn't really confirm someone's employment to me:

Work Experience: Apple April 1999 to present

Changed the world an average of 6.79 times per day.

Hmmm... :)

How about this story?

I will link this until it is read!

No, but did you see my previous comment? What I "wrote" could be.

The server allows us through a google search to get to p0rn
but blocks.mac

I did.

Yeah, and here I thought that box unwrapping pics were only done by Apple zealots... :^)

Close! The way to compart the hardware is to use the compiler recommended by the Manufacturer for each product. Intel, for performance, would reccomend their own compiler while IBM, who contributed the G5 code generator to the GCC project, would recommend theirs (in this case, GCC.)

IBM's compiler is not GCC. Their C compiler for the PPC 970 beats the pants off of GCC, running some of the SPEC benchmarks several times faster (FP int). This is largely because IBM's optimizations for PPC processors got rejected from GCC for being too platform-specific.

I would like to see an official SPEC matchup between a dual G5 with the IBM compiler and a new dual Xeon with Intel's.

Apple's initial benchmarks were weird, too, because they compared a machine that would not ship for FOUR months (and I'm being generous here) to a 6-month old DELL unit. Fair would be to ask Dell for a sample of a machine to be released next quarter and test against that.

Yeah, they cheated there.

As it is, the P4, even crippled with HT turned off, BEAT the G5 with its faster bus in all the integer tests. By Apple's own admission.

Yup, though not by much. According to Veritest, though, they ran the tests with and without HT, and without HT was faster. This may be because GCC did not optimize correctly for HT, but then we're back in the compiler argument again.

Apple also installed a single-thread speed-demon malloc library on the Mac and, as far is I can tell, not on the PC, so they are definitely guilty of cheating. But they didn't cheat as much as you say, or more than anyone else cheats on their benchmarks. And in the US, you can say something is the best if you can make it look better than the competition without cheating more than the other guys do.

Close! The way to compart the hardware is to use the compiler recommended by the Manufacturer for each product. Intel, for performance, would reccomend their own compiler while IBM, who contributed the G5 code generator to the GCC project, would recommend theirs (in this case, GCC.)

IBM's compiler is not GCC. Their C compiler for the PPC 970 beats the pants off of GCC, running some of the SPEC benchmarks several times faster (FP int). This is largely because IBM's optimizations for PPC processors got rejected from GCC for being too platform-specific.

I would like to see an official SPEC matchup between a dual G5 with the IBM compiler and a new dual Xeon with Intel's.

Apple's initial benchmarks were weird, too, because they compared a machine that would not ship for FOUR months (and I'm being generous here) to a 6-month old DELL unit. Fair would be to ask Dell for a sample of a machine to be released next quarter and test against that.

Yeah, they cheated there.

As it is, the P4, even crippled with HT turned off, BEAT the G5 with its faster bus in all the integer tests. By Apple's own admission.

Yup, though not by much. According to Veritest, though, they ran the tests with and without HT, and without HT was faster. This may be because GCC did not optimize correctly for HT, but then we're back in the compiler argument again.

Apple also installed a single-thread speed-demon malloc library on the Mac and, as far is I can tell, not on the PC, so they are definitely guilty of cheating. But they didn't cheat as much as you say, or more than anyone else cheats on their benchmarks. And in the US, you can say something is the best if you can make it look better than the competition without cheating more than the other guys do.

The content on the sites you visit is not free. Someone has to go find the content you are looking at, prepare it to sell, etc.

I have disabled pop-ups, and I have adjusted my hosts file to block most major ad servers I also added a default style sheet to catch a bunch more ads.

Finally, if I go to a site that routinely annoys me with too much advertising that gets around my various quick fixes. Then i stop going there.

Advertising is a necessary annoyance of a supposed free medium. However, I am also free to disable it as I see fit. If it bothers you so much, do something about it. If not, quit bitching.

PS- I did not write the style sheet, and I would love to give credit/thank who ever did, but i can not find the original source in my bookmarks.

Here is a picture of the moon taken about five minutes ago while it is getting out of the Earch's shadow.
1 sec exposure, f/5.6, ISO 100, 300 mm, with a Canon EOS 10D.

Welcome to the club :)
I just recently bought a 12" PB and I'm loving it.

6) I have yet to figure out where the graphical FTP client is - so far I am largely just treating this like a Linux laptop and using a lot lof command line stuff.

Fetch is no longer included in the OS, and its not free. You can find freeware clients at Version Tracker. I've never found a need for a graphical client, since I use ftp so rarely.

Also check out Fugu. Its a graphical SFTP, SCP and SSH tunneling client. Its also under a BSD style license :)

8) The trackpad is not responsive - it is almost like accelaration is turned on, but I didn't see anything that would indicate that in any mouse menu.

This is less of a problem in Panther than it was in Jaguar, but the fastest speed is still too slow for some. There is a nice little freeware PrefPane wigit called MouseZoom that will let you increase the acceleration number above the max that the Keyboard & Mouse PrefPane will.

11) The spell checking thing doesn't let you bring up a quick selection of the word/words that it suggests - innstead you have to open the full spell window and then it wants to continue on - I miss the ability in Windows to right click and the first few words on that menu were the suggested words and you could just choose one and move on.

My advice: Invest in a Microsoft Bluetooth Mouse. Right clicking does bring up a list of suggested words (command-click has the same effect). The sweetest thing about the MS bluetooth mouse is that it has 5 buttons, so you can map Expose functions to the two thumb buttons. Having a scroll wheel is also something that I can't live without. Its also very nice to not have to plug in anything to use an external mouse.

Hope you find some of this useful.

• have information like appointments and addresses synched automatically when I bring my pda near my computer

It's a little program installed on your Mac and let you remote control your Mac including Powerpoint, DVD player, etc. via your BT phones.
Works on any Mac with BT, and SE BT phones except P800. Not sure about P900, though.

---

No, I don't work for Salling or know him personally (except with a few emails). I am just a happy user. That's all

Bluetooth isn't really adding a lot to our lives at this stage

You must not be a Mac user.