Slashdot Mirror

Untimely Ripp'd asks: "Satellite broadband has been available to PC users for half a decade, and still is not trivially available to Mac users. It can be done, but it's always an unsupported hack, or it requires buying expensive extra hardware and software. I cannot understand why Hughes and the other providers would refuse to spend the relatively few dollars necessary to develop a couple of device drivers and glue libraries. Time after time, the vendors have said, 'it's coming,' but it never does, and the promise eventually goes away. (Earthlink's FAQ page no longer says that Mac software is being developed, for example). I'm not gung-ho on conspiracy theories, but the only explanation I can figure is that they're either being paid or bullied. Does anyone know of any serious tech hurdle that would make it cost more than $100K or so to develop the necessary software?" this article mentions one-way Mac service coming online from OWC in a future expansion, along with nationwide service. A comment from that story does mention a simple solution, but why is it that Satellite service, even one way satellite service, depends on Windows-only software? What other solutions have Mac users resorted to when they wanted their Macs connected?

Steve Cowan writes "According to an article at MacCentral, Red Hat has announced that they will produce a GNUPro toolchain and cross compiler for AltiVec-enabled PowerPC processors (such as that found in the Power Mac G4). It will be interesting to see just what kind of performance gains this will bring, because many believe that the full potential of AltiVec is far from tapped."

MasterOfDisaster writes "According to c|net, and this article on maccentral.com, Apple will release "four new, single-processor Power Mac G4 models, all using a 133MHz system bus, and ranging in speed from 466MHz to 733MHz" as well as MacOS 9.1 and several other things, next Tuesday at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco."

If you have been interested in Apache on Apple's new OS X operating system, this article on Mac Central offers a short description on what is up with it. Even before this article I was (and still am) interested in seeing how hard it is going to be to keep your copy of Apache current. And just how many modifications were required to make it work with OS X?

If you have been interested in Apache on Apple's new OS X operating system, this article on Mac Central offers a short description on what is up with it. Even before this article I was (and still am) interested in seeing how hard it is going to be to keep your copy of Apache current. And just how many modifications were required to make it work with OS X?

citizen_bongo writes "MacCentral reports that Apple has filed suit against unnamed individual employees of Apple and of other companies who were trusted with Apple trade secrets. The suit names 25 "Does" and surely will increase if Apple "uncovers" any more people in the conspiracy. This comes after the leak by ATI on the new Apple product line and the leaks surfacing about the Cube weeks before the MacWorld Expo." The irony is that if Apple's legal hadn't gone after the sites with Cube images, everyone woulda ignored it or thought it a hoax.

mblase asks: "According to a recent MacCentral article, one of the benefits of Mac OS X's NeXT-based roots is that "since Mac OS X is BSD based, the ports shouldn't be too difficult. The hardest part, according to Robert Palmer, will be writing the GUI (graphical user interface) front end to make administration easy." My question is, is this likely to happen? Will UNIX developers want to port their applications to an operating system that costs more in hardware and OS software both? Or is the demand likely to come from the other direction -- OS X server admins who want the stability and popularity of established UNIX applications, even if the graphical front-end Mac users have come to expect may be less than ideal? This will doubtless be a big issue for Apple as they tout Mac OS X as a server platform for the future."

nik says: How about "larger installed userbase"? Assume Linux has ~ 7 million users, and the BSD's have about 3 million (both those numbers are on the conservative side). Apple's probably going to ship 10 million or more OS X boxes in the next year or so, and porting most software is going to be no-brainer (particularly if it's already in the Free, Net, and Open BSD ports and packages collections).

kono was among the hoards of folks who noted that Tenon is gonna be releasing a tightly integrated X11 Server for MacOS X, which should greatly increase the potential for those of us hoping have a desktop that we could conceivably share with our graphic designer MacOS fanatic girlfriends.

Stefan MacGeek writes: "Nvidia, the manufacturer for 3D graphics chips has closed an OEM deal with Apple. Future Macs will use Nvidia graphics chips. Nvidia has recently presented the GeForce 2 MX, their first chip suitable for use in Macs. It is not yet known if Nvidia will take over as Apple's main supplier of graphics chips from ATI. Source: The German computer news site Heise " Here's a link to the story itself, und wenn Sie Deutsch nicht können, continue your scavenger hunt at Babelfish. This sounds great for Macs and their users. One thing to keep in mind though: the article cautions that it's unclear whether nVidia chips will be installed as full-fledged video cards, or integrated as in previous Macintosh models. [Updated 8 July 3:00GMT by timothy] An alert Bethor points to this MacCentral story in which Nvidia denies the whole thing, claiming that such news is at least months in the future.

Stefan MacGeek writes: "Nvidia, the manufacturer for 3D graphics chips has closed an OEM deal with Apple. Future Macs will use Nvidia graphics chips. Nvidia has recently presented the GeForce 2 MX, their first chip suitable for use in Macs. It is not yet known if Nvidia will take over as Apple's main supplier of graphics chips from ATI. Source: The German computer news site Heise " Here's a link to the story itself, und wenn Sie Deutsch nicht können, continue your scavenger hunt at Babelfish. This sounds great for Macs and their users. One thing to keep in mind though: the article cautions that it's unclear whether nVidia chips will be installed as full-fledged video cards, or integrated as in previous Macintosh models. [Updated 8 July 3:00GMT by timothy] An alert Bethor points to this MacCentral story in which Nvidia denies the whole thing, claiming that such news is at least months in the future.

Bauwolf writes "According to MacCentral, Corel has bought some of MetaCreations' graphics products. Does this mean I'll have Painter running on my Linux box and Kai's Power Tools plugins for the Gimp soon?" Don't forget Bryce.

Maktoo writes: "According to MacCentral, the June 2000 issue of MacTech magazine will include a CD containing a 'SuSE for PowerMac' Linux distribution. The full distribution will be available from SuSE at that time as well. It's nice to see SuSE coming to the PPC market!" It'd also be nice to see some less expensive PPC systems.

lvillalt writes: "Three Axis Interactive is porting Nanosaur (a 3D Mac game) to Linux, using the Quesa 3D graphics library." Nanosaur seems like one of the best reasons to buy a Macintosh -- smooth action, good controls, nice textures, and action suitable even for small kids. But if you can put Nanosaur and a close-enough-to-Aqua theme on a Linux box, the premium for The Real Thing suddenly looks a little steeper. However, no release date yet.

An anonymous submission tells us that MacCentral has a story about the start of the annual Usenix conference, where Apple's Darwin Open Source OS reportedly received a warm welcome as a new member of the BSD operating system family.

An anonymous submission tells us that MacCentral has a story about the start of the annual Usenix conference, where Apple's Darwin Open Source OS reportedly received a warm welcome as a new member of the BSD operating system family.

Jodin writes "Well known Mac columnist (and former Apple employee) Andy Ihnatko wrote a little piece about what Linux means to him and to the Mac community as a whole. As usual, Andy takes an interesting angle as to how Linux emplowers the individual and justifies the geeks."

Maccentral is running an interesting article about the devel of Netscape 5 for the Macintosh. After making IE the default browser on Macs, Netscape obviously had some lost ground to cover. But apparently based partly on the Open Source evangelizing of Mozilla, Netscape was able to get them to come around. Things went so well that Apple is even donating some of the code: ColorSync, Key Chain support, and NSL. The story features the requiste talk about NGLayout as well, for those interested. Check out the actual story for more information.

David Patton wrote in to send us a link to MacCentral where you can read about a sort of Change of heart on the part of Apple. Apparently they are inviting the French Linux Association to demo LinuPPC and MKLinux and the Apple Expo in Paris.

Cheekyboy sent us a link to an article at Mac Central about Four G3s outprocessing a CRAY over at UCLA. Mind you the Cray in question is 8 years old...

Cheekyboy sent us a link to an article at Mac Central about Four G3s outprocessing a CRAY over at UCLA. Mind you the Cray in question is 8 years old...

Scott Elyard has written an interesting editorial on the Myth of the Fall of SGI. A lot of us have written SGI off as obsolete- and they've made their share of silly blunders in the last 6 mos ( Search Slashdot for SGI to read about some of them). But Scott doesn't think so. Read what he has to say about the future of a company that a lot of us have forgotten about.

The following is an editorial by Slashdot Reader Scott Elyard

The Myth of the Fall of SGI

Silicon Graphics (SGI) machines have been on my desktop for more than two years now, but I was in love with the platform for many years before that, when I was demoed the power of the Onyx Reality Engine^2 at the Advanced Visualization Lab at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1994. Back then, I was just starting to get into 3D graphics.

My background is basically writing and art, and I have spent a lot of time studying the history of special effects. This is basically my bias: I love the company, and their product. I am not a UNIX guru, and most of my computing experience is logged on MacOS machines, and this continues to be true, if only because a 7-lb. PowerBook is lighter (and more portable) than an SGI Indy with an LCD display panel. I am not as technical as most people, and although more technical than most in my profession, I remain first and foremost an artist uninterested in technology for it's own sake.

This article intends to address the Myth of SGI's fall; some have argued that SGI isn't a cool company, that they don't produce cool products anymore... which is hard to argue against because "cool" is difficult to quantify. I think it's cool that I don't have to learn an overwhelming amount of UNIX to be productive on an SGI. I think the 3D responsiveness is absolutely fundamental to what I do, and naturally, I think that's cool. I think that of all the UNIX vendors that advertise their graphics support, SGI is legitimately worth every penny, and I think that's cool too.

The SGI in the Media Myths page provides some good points and counterpoints to a lot of the hype deployed against SGI.

Despite this, I admit to possessing reservations about SGI's migration to Merced. Actually, it's not all that different from Apple's migration from the 68000-series CPUs to the PowerPC more than four years ago. I wonder why a company would commit to a processor technology that isn't due to be availble until mid-2000, when there are 64-bit alternative processors available now, and in the case of the PowerPC, nearly ready

But then, a lot can happen in a mere 2 years' time in the computer industry. SGI might change their minds. Or Merced might be better than we all think.

An SGI running Windows NT, however, is another matter. I'd never use it. That doesn't make it a bad idea for SGI to produce an NT workstation with O2-class graphics (or better) for people, who, say, want to run LightWave 3D on something with better OpenGL accelleration than an Intergraph machine will give you (and as a user of this extraordinary application, I'd like to confirm that the rumors of horrible UNIX support Newtek has for their products are true; I continue to use it as a sort of love the sinner--hate the sin sort of thing).

Some have suggested that this somehow spells doom for SGI as a company, and I don't really see it. Most of SGI's revenue comes from CAD/MCAD markets, a market into which Windows NT has made significant inroads. How does it not make business sense for the premiere graphics hardware company to address this market more fully?

Since SGI is hardly abandoning their version of UNIX (IRIX, wherein lies 100% of their exisitng user base), the implication appears to be that once a company starts selling systems with Windows NT installed, so starts a downward spiral into bankruptcy. Something often omitted from this picture is Digital, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and any other company that sells Windows NT-based systems that have yet to file for Chapter 11 since doing so.

And, despite the slowing in growth of the company itself, SGI's survival is hardly at stake. Apple has been through far worse and survived with less than half the loyalty I'd expect from an SGI customer. I often wonder about the media's apparent need to spell doom in large letters across every headline; it makes for great copy, but it's poor journalism. Let's not forget SGI's merger with Cray Research, or OpenGL, or MIPS or WebTV or the Sony Playstation or the Nintendo 64 (the latter three use MIPS processors) to say nothing of an amazing desktop and deskside/rack-based product line. With these sorts of assets at hand, is this really a symptom of a struggling company? While it might be debatable as to how many times and how often SGI has dropped the ball in business and technical matters, there's simply no basis for assuming the company is going to die.

I am not afilliated with SGI except as a customer. If you go to my website you will not find the gamut of rotating logos, Powered by SGI, Made with MacOS, or what have you, because I've never believed such things have any place in my company's literature. Whenever I am asked, however, I endorse the SGI as a solution for working in 3D, because it works better than anything else I've tried.

No, it's not free. But some of the best things never are, and it's so seldom you seen anything in the computer industry that's actually worth the asking price.

Paul Ammann writes " If you follow this url, you will see a story that IBM is getting ready to ship PowerPC chips that will kick some Intel butt. Now if we can only get the FTC to keep Intel busy for a while, IBM and Apple could both reclaim their positions from the early 80s."