Slashdot Mirror

If you count the educational discount as a true discount you're correct, but they did just go to the Apple online store and order 1100 of them at the same price any other education customer would get:

Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan talks about VT's G5 supercomputer

There wasn't any "extra" discount. Since most supercomputers are built by education, government or the military, the standard discount Apple happens to give is more like the actual price. I imagine all companies offer the same level of reduced price so it's a moot point. They paid going rate for them.

35-40 lines of code is cool, but zero lines of code is cooler. And soon you'll be able to pull a similar trick to build something like GIMP.

GUIs are for wimps. I perfer the Command Line!

I'm not asking for much. If the system recognizes a pattern (bunch of emails from a paricular last name; let's let the next one through the spam filter). Pattern recognition is quite simple in most programs.

Such as Mail.app in its spam filter. I don't know whether that technique can be used for other mail filters - the spam filter might have been told some information about spam to get it started, with subsequent reclassifications of purported spam as non-spam and purported non-spam as spam updating it, but I don't know whether it'd work without that sort of preloading.

If you train mail properly you can get up to 98% accuracy. It's training ability is what makes it far superior to a typical bayesian filtering system. More information can be found here: http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/05/18/s pam_pt2.html?page=1

You know of course that the creator of Be's most beloved feature, the BeFS, Dominic Giampaolo, now works for Apple. That new Spotlight feature in Tiger, looks to leverage a lot of his competence in that area.

Something similar to this is used in Mac OS X mail. I haven't read the article in a while (it was on /. a few weeks ago) but I think it's pretty similar. You'll probably find it interesting at least.

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/05/18/s pam_pt2.html

There is a somewhat interesting article where they more or less explain how the Mac OS X Mail application works regarding Spam:

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/05/18/s pam_pt2.html

Thanks for the info - looks interesting.

Fixed URLs (the first two got fscked up):
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/11/22/i tunes_perl.html
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/newsletter s/20021127.html

Applescript.

No seriously, if you have a laptop there, you can easily control itunes remotely. Heck, you could do it from a web page, if you wanted to.

There are a lot of wireless devices that work with OS X. Remote controls for presentations, PDAs, and Bluetooth Phones. With Applescript, and possibly without, depending, these could be adapted to control your music without a computer nearby. You wouldn't even need to have your laptop handy.

Plus, I suspect it's only a matter of time before several companies release controllers that work with this. It's an obvious soltuion, so I'm sure they'll be there.

You should look past the specs of the initial object and see what happens when you combine it with existing technologies, plus imagine the possibilities it opens up. I mean, I know it's great to have all the functionality out of the box, but we're geeks here, and it shouldn't take much tinkering to get it to work in any way you really want.

=Brian

I wanted to use the COM features in Office.X to link in some c++ code that I wrote. It turns out that Office.vX doesn't use the Darwin COM model and you can't make it.

Does the Office2004 COM interface play nicely with 3rd party developer tools like Xcode?

And, yet again, they would be doing a poor job of copying Apple.

The word emission generally means sending something out. Because of this argument, Hauser is a city located in Kootenai County, Idaho. After Idaho, the Liberals formed the government in Alberta for the first 15 years of the province's existence.

Yeah, those were random snippets from the Wikipedia. Who knows? Maybe this technology got around?

Grade: A+++

Or if you're curious about COM on Mac OS X:
Component Object Model (COM) Development on Mac OS X

And one more thing...

PBTOMAKE -- Xcode .pbproj to Unix Makefile

??

Why not, I hear you ask??

For anybody running Panther, here is a set of indespensible tips. I go through the steps outlined in that article about once a month, and it keeps my G4 laptop purring like a kitten. The steps about regenerating the prelink binding are especially relevant to performance.

http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?AutoReleasePool

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2001/07/27/c ocoa.html

>they could have spent far less on AMD gear and attained the same level of performance.

From Confessions of the World's Largest Switcher:
He looked at various architecture options and was in the process of buying Dells when the deal fell through. He also worked with IBM and AMD and couldn't get the price to match. The budgets were coming in at $9 to $12 million dollars.

So, in fact AMD's best price was about twice as much as Apple's standard educational price.

The impressive fact is not the overall performance of the VT G5 cluster, but that the price-performance ratio was better if they bought G5s at the standard Apple educational price (not some insane 1-time giveaway deal cooked up just for VT) than if they bought systems from HP, IBM, Intel, or AMD.

From How Virginia Tech built a supercomputer:
"Intel, HP, IBM, and AMD were all trying to come up with ways to work with us," says Lockhart."But the prices were out of reach and IBM's 970 chip would not be available in time to allow the new Virginia Tech cluster to be ranked."

From Confessions of the World's Largest Switcher:
He looked at various architecture options and was in the process of buying Dells when the deal fell through. He also worked with IBM and AMD and couldn't get the price to match. The budgets were coming in at $9 to $12 million dollars.

When Dell built a similar cluster for more than half the price ($3M vs. $5.2M for VT's), they got a cluster with less than 1/4 of the performance.

Of course, this "performance" is measured by a benchmark, and all benchmarks lie, and single-computer desktop usage doesn't look like large-scale cluster usage, but the fact is, this was not a matter of somebody deciding to buy Apple and blindly throwing a bunch of cash at it. The Apple offering had better price/performance for their needs.

I'm surprised no one's posted a link to this yet... O'Reilly's Mac Dev Center has a nice article on "the often misunderstood world of talking to your Mac" that goes over the existing speech (and speech recognition) interface.

A good overview of past and present, with a little bit of technical information there for AppleScripters too.

Its free, its pretty simple, and it works fast.

Firefox is a very nice browser. But, feature-wise it is considerably behind OmniWeb. And, I'm considering all of the plug-ins I've read about.

Try this

If nothing else works, try joining the Apple Developer connection. The link can be found here

Are you running the latest version of OS X. OS X 10.3 (Panther) has the IP over Firewire built-in. Before that it was available as an extension. If you are not running 10.3 then update and try again.

Also just saw this nice tutorial about this. Have a look and make sure you have done all the required steps. Also have a look though the comments.

I check all these daily:

MacInTouch
MacNN
MacMinute
MacFixIt
Mac OS X Hints
MacSurfer

Great software update resources:

VersionTracker
MacUpdate
OS X freshmeat

Other great sites:

O'Reilly Mac DevCenter
O'Reilly Mac OS X Page
Apple Mac OS X downloads
Apple Third Party Products Guide

Developer sites:

Mac OS X Developer Home Page
Mac OS X Developer Documentation
Darwin
OpenDarwin
fink

abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123ab c123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc1 23abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123 abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123ab c123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc1

Here it is:
Write Twice, Run Anywhere

Hmm, guess this means my submission a couple hours ago won't go through (dangit, Wired!)...

Here is the official press release and the list.

There is a lot of good points to note all around. The first is the G5 Terascale cluster at Virginia Tech at #3 (10.28 Tflops/s, 2200 CPU, Infiniband) is the first academic computer to break 10 teraflops/s. This extra performance was promised at Mac OS X Developer's conference last month. Not to sure if the price is a testament to Infiniband ($1.5 million cabling, cards, and routers) or the Macs ($4.2 million list).

Good thing too because in a surprise move the NCSA cluster made the list at #4 (9.82Tflops/s, 2500 CPU, Myrinet). This cluster is built using Dell's running Pentium 4 XEONs and Red Hat Linux! One subtle point to note is that they didn't get all the systems online in time (there should be 2900 CPUs, not 2500). I bet some programmer at PSC and an ex-Chief Scientist of SDSC is appreciating having a hand in edging out NCSA for #3--not to mention Apple beating Dell for #3.

The fastest Itanium cluster is at #5 (8.63 TFlops/s, 1936 CPU, Quadrics) which is looking like the odd man out boxed in by a PC based systems using Myrinet, the P4 Xeon above, and the most powerful Opteron system at #6 (8.05 Tflops/s, 2816 CPU, Myrinet). Another point of similarity:did I mention it's also using Linux?

And finally, It's easy to overlook #73, a single compute node of BlueGene/L (1.44 Tflops/s, 1024 CPU). Imagine 128 of these connected together and you have something that will easily take #1 when it's completed even if we handicap it 20-40%. As noted on SlashDot earlier, this will be running Linux.

This, like the parent post, is off-topic.

It's all useless though, it relies on an operating system with proprietary components, so the failure of one company can render the whole thing useless.

Terascale relies on the Darwin Kernel which is open-source, there is no evidence that any single component relies on the proprietary parts of the Mac OS X. The head of Terascale, who wrote the code that enables it, approached the Mac "reading the kernel manual first."

Like I said before, if you read between the lines, Terascale has nothing to do with Macs. It just happened that Apple was the only company that could deliver computers powerful enough for a cheap enough price in the window that Virginia Tech needed to make the Top500. That had nothing to do with Macs, or Apple, or Mac OS X--it had everything to do with price/performance (of the 970), opportunity (Infiniband, gap in the Fall Top500), and availability (of the G5). Let's not drag this down to a OS wars or platform wars. We are witnessing a sea change. Yes, there will still be Blue Gene/L and it's ilk (there are still Crays out there), but expect the Top500 list to be overrun with commodity desktop computer CPUs in the coming years.

To me, this represents a triumph of open source. Now lets pray that the patents applications don't prevent "the rest of us" from benefiting from it.

Not with the default Apache in OS X.2

WebDAV/iCal article

WebDAV also has DAVlocks enabled, with a 10 minute time out, so it does have a basic form of CVS.

WebDAV/iCal article

The sometime slugishness of the OSX Finder has been attributed by some to the fact that it was written in Carbon. There are some interesting discussions on this around the net.

So, are the changes to the Finder in Panther just an update or has it been re-written using the Cocoa APIs?

Be certain to read how to remotely control your^H^H^H^Hsomeone's Mac.
And yes, this is some shameless self-promo ;)

There are some things XP does from a usability point of view that is better than OS X and vice versa. For instance, in Windows I can rotate pictures from Explorer (i.e. Windows' equivalent of the finder). In OS X I have to launch some app to do it. Windows offers a user interface for customizing the interplay between file extensions, file types and MIME types. After a year of using it, I can't find such an interface for OS X. Windows XP can navigate directly into archives. OS X requires you to expand them into folders using Stuffit. XP allows me to directly write multisession disks. It is insanely complex on OS X.

That all said, I could make an equally long list of things OS X does better than XP. In my opinion they are roughly equal in usability. If you prefer the Unix infrastructure to the Windows one (as I do) then you'll prefer OS X. And you could make a case for better security (or at least fewer well-known exploits). But I certainly wouldn't sell anybody on OS X on the basis that it is much easier to use than XP. It isn't.

By the way, it takes 0 steps to see your files in either XP or OS X. The default view of both operating systems is of your desktop with your files on it.

O'Reilly's MacDev center

CocoaDev.com

Both have entry-level ProjectBuilder tutorials, including the famous one-line web browser (CocoaDev) and text editor (O'Reilly) tutorials.

While that may be true, that has no bearing on the fact that AltiVec is very powerful and can be used for scientific applications. Blast scores here (pdf). Also, check out this article from O'Reilly.

And be sure to check outSubEthaEdit This is the renamed Hydra. Okay, the new name is kinda funky, wouldn't MagrathaEdit have sounded better? And be sure to read the interview the the Coding Monkeys behind SubEthaEdit at O'Reilly. It is really amazing what a small group of programmers have pulled off. Give these guys another six months and they may be nearly feature competitive with BBEdit.

Lee Joramo

I thought Mac OS X was BSD-derived and largely compatible with Linux stuff, especially with something like Apache which is pretty vanilla, looking over Slash I doubt it's too horrible about its demands on a Unix-like platform. What caused the problems?

OS X is indeed BSD derived and actually includes a copy of Apahce right out of the box. All of the Unix tools one would need (MySQL, PHP) are avaialble for OS X. Not sure what could've caused the problem though.

What's interesting about the copy of Apache that ships with OS X is that it has a nice GUI interface, so those too timid to configure httpd.conf should still be able to cope.

Here's the writeup from this year's innovators contest:

• LaunchBar for Mac OS X uses a powerful, fault-tolerant abbreviation search algorithm and a sophisticated rating system to deliver fast, accurate search results from abbreviations typed on the fly. Intuitive and adaptive, LaunchBar allows a user to enter a range of abbreviations for any term. It analyzes the user's behavior and adapts rating criteria dynamically, so search results become more accurate as LaunchBar "learns" how to serve the user.

Bingo.

Don't think that O'Reilly doesn't know this either. Check out how many books, articles, and so forth they have published since OS X came out. I had the privilege a few months ago to have a sit down with the current editor of the Apple books, and from the way he talked it seems that O'Reilly is nothing short of ecstatic about the OS.

O'Reilly, IMHO, publishes by far the best books on the market. This is because they have excellent editors and scouts (for lack of a better word) to find very intelligent, very insightful people to write their books. I suggest people check out there dev sites more often; they are treasure troves of info

The O'Reilly Network

MacDevCenter.com

OnDotNet.com

OnJava.com

OnLamp.com

openp2p.com

osdir.com

Perl.com

XML.com

"Six Great Tips for Homemade Dot Mac Servers"

Among other helpfull things is a detailed explanation of OSX startup items (startup is totally different than other *NIX), A list of all the root folders and what OSX uses them for, and some caveats about symlinks and the finder.

O'Reilly's Mac Dev Center also put out a review here.

iCalendar is a standard, as was mentioned above. You can have a calendar hosted on a web server using apache and mod_dav. O'Reilly has a good piece on it. [http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/09/20/ ical_webdav.html]

The Geek Cruises certainly are great, I haven't gone on any but the list of luminaries that give presentations are impressive, and I've heard good things about them. Is the Ottawa YAPC turning into a marketing scheme at all? ExitCertified has been quite active & helpful for not only the local PerlMongers group, but also the Ottawa Unix Users' Group (OCUUG); as you'll notice from their Meetings page, they're actually held every month at ExitCertified. There's also substantial cross-pollination between ExitCertified people, the Ottawa Capital Linux Users' Group (OCLUG which hold monthly meetings just around the corner from ExitCertified, hmmm...), as well as PMs and some of the same suspicious characters can be seen at the Macintosh User's Group of Ottawa (MUGOO) (ahem, Jay et al)

These nefarious groups indeed seem to be as thick as theives. But if a firm like ExitCertified is devoting their time, office space, and personnel to so much in the local OSS/programming communities, haven't they earned the respect of our community? Just because they're an active company dosen't mean they're all bad. I wouldn't worry about the vacancies either; speakers were still being lined up for the local Open Source Weekend/Business Of Open Source Conference (BOSS) held a few weeks ago in the city and look who showed up.

Unless I'm moderating I usually just skim the top with highest scores first although I regularly work my way to the first posts at the bottom. Not to join on the bandwagon but moderation has gotten terrible so I've set all the negative moderations to have a 1+ value in my preferences. This in effect negates them so an article has as fair a chance of reaching me as any other not moderated. I haven't decided that all negative moderations are evil so I also haven't come to the conclusion that any moderation is worth my attention. I'll set my preferences to 2+ if that ever happens.

I follow up slashdot with a somethingawful.com chaser to set my mind at ease and to be reassured that getting aggrevated is futile since the internet makes you stupid.

After reading the day's feature, I then check their Awful Link of the Day. Unless it belongs to a very original freak or a freak ailed by something an acquaintance suffers from, I pass. If it can't give me ammo to tease friends I always opt for my own nomination, macosrumors.com

In the rare case of an update I'll read it for laughs unless it's a processor based update. I don't have a comedy chaser ready for those instances so there's no point in winding myself up into a murderous rage.

A quick stop afterwards at maccentral.com usually satisfies the need for real Mac news although I'm thinking of solely switching to macdevcenter.com since they have Mac Central updates on a sidebar.

The subject says "5 daily reads" and for now that's macdevcenter.com which I got into by following slashdot articles. This slot is always being contested and it's a good thing I only read The Filthy Critic on Monday. --- and then I got tired of proofreading my post

Unless I'm moderating I usually just skim the top with highest scores first although I regularly work my way to the first posts at the bottom. Not to join on the bandwagon but moderation has gotten terrible so I've set all the negative moderations to have a 1+ value in my preferences. This in effect negates them so an article has as fair a chance of reaching me as any other not moderated. I haven't decided that all negative moderations are evil so I also haven't come to the conclusion that any moderation is worth my attention. I'll set my preferences to 2+ if that ever happens.

I follow up slashdot with a somethingawful.com chaser to set my mind at ease and to be reassured that getting aggrevated is futile since the internet makes you stupid.

After reading the day's feature, I then check their Awful Link of the Day. Unless it belongs to a very original freak or a freak ailed by something an acquaintance suffers from, I pass. If it can't give me ammo to tease friends I always opt for my own nomination, macosrumors.com

In the rare case of an update I'll read it for laughs unless it's a processor based update. I don't have a comedy chaser ready for those instances so there's no point in winding myself up into a murderous rage.

A quick stop afterwards at maccentral.com usually satisfies the need for real Mac news although I'm thinking of solely switching to macdevcenter.com since they have Mac Central updates on a sidebar.

The subject says "5 daily reads" and for now that's macdevcenter.com which I got into by following slashdot articles. This slot is always being contested and it's a good thing I only read The Filthy Critic on Monday. --- and then I got tired of proofreading my post

"But lets not forget that as of a little while ago, Linux is on more desktops than MacOS is! [...] [Apple] dying a slow painfull death? Maybe."

Uhh... No.

While Linux desktop market share is slowly increasing, it would still have a way to go before it catches up. An IDC analyst recently predicted that in 2003/2004 Linux desktops would outnumber Mac desktops, but even with this liberal estimation Linux has yet to surpass the MacOS current shipments & installed base. Further, estimations like these do not take into account that more Linux success means more Mac success - the more people considering Liunx, the more are willing to consider MacOS X too (and vice-versa). The "momentum hump" for switchers to get over is the willingness to seriously consider an alterative to Windows; once they make that decision they are often willing to experiement with many systems.

There is also the recent phenomenon of what Tim O'Reilly describes as the migration of the alpha geeks. He has noticed over the last year that many of the influential core developers and stakeholders (the alpha geeks) in the open source movement especially are "choosing Mac OS X." Linux Journal Senior Editor Doc Searls seems to agree, and - will wonders never cease? - there's evidence of IT types now considering Mac solutions.

The reason that these influential adopters are important beyond their mere numbers is that often where they go, much of the industry goes too. Not necessarily resulting in huge market share, but in mindshare and driving a core part of the industry. In fact, contrary to what many people in this forum think, the almighty goal of market share is usually not a worthwhile central objective for a company such as Apple; read Dave Minter's The Myth of Market Share: Why Market Share is the Fool's Gold of Business for some much needed common sense in operating system market share discussions.

"But lets not forget that as of a little while ago, Linux is on more desktops than MacOS is! [...] [Apple] dying a slow painfull death? Maybe."

Uhh... No.

While Linux desktop market share is slowly increasing, it would still have a way to go before it catches up. An IDC analyst recently predicted that in 2003/2004 Linux desktops would outnumber Mac desktops, but even with this liberal estimation Linux has yet to surpass the MacOS current shipments & installed base. Further, estimations like these do not take into account that more Linux success means more Mac success - the more people considering Liunx, the more are willing to consider MacOS X too (and vice-versa). The "momentum hump" for switchers to get over is the willingness to seriously consider an alterative to Windows; once they make that decision they are often willing to experiement with many systems.

There is also the recent phenomenon of what Tim O'Reilly describes as the migration of the alpha geeks. He has noticed over the last year that many of the influential core developers and stakeholders (the alpha geeks) in the open source movement especially are "choosing Mac OS X." Linux Journal Senior Editor Doc Searls seems to agree, and - will wonders never cease? - there's evidence of IT types now considering Mac solutions.

The reason that these influential adopters are important beyond their mere numbers is that often where they go, much of the industry goes too. Not necessarily resulting in huge market share, but in mindshare and driving a core part of the industry. In fact, contrary to what many people in this forum think, the almighty goal of market share is usually not a worthwhile central objective for a company such as Apple; read Dave Minter's The Myth of Market Share: Why Market Share is the Fool's Gold of Business for some much needed common sense in operating system market share discussions.

Another good series of articles is by Kevin Hemenway. Apache Web Serving with OS X

don't forget Oracle 9i.