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I have a little site that lists, describes, and links to a bunch of open-source projects available for the current MacOS. Starting the site and getting it linked from Macintouch was all it took for me to contribute my little bit of open source advocacy to the Mac community, and I strongly recommend similar routes for people with messages of their own. It's easier than you may think.

In the year I've been maintaining the site I've received enough feedback from people to convince me that open-source projects have as much of a place in closed-source OSes as open ones. It's all good.

J
MacOS Open Source

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You see, I tried to save some money by using generic PC100 memory and it didn't work. The problem I found is that the machine needs 2/2/2 timed memory sticks, and higher quality=better stability. You might end up looking at the PC133 rated memory, going a bit over the specs with generic stuff may help resolve potential timing issues. I was lucky that I was able to exchange the memory I bought for better quality memory and the dealer ate the cost since I had specified that it must be Mac G3 compatible on the purchase order. The frustration of having 4 brand new blue G3's all crashing because of bad memory was a lesson to me, you get what you pay for.

The other area which you must be very cautious in is video cards. The quality of the mac drivers will be critical to your success. Currently ATI is the only one that seems to be in the game right now but those ATI rumors persist.

The things which will work with little hastle are most USB devices, just have to check if the manufacturer supports the Mac. 95% of IDE DMA/33 or DMA/66 hard drives will work, the problem might arise with the apple disk tools not being able to format the drive. I wouln't buy a hard drive any larger than the biggest one apple offers to avoid that potential hazard. Monitors are safe, apple dropped their proprietary monitor connector a few generations ago thank god. Watch out with printers. Some of those cheap as dirt printers on the market are brain dead so without a supported driver they are table art. A postscript printer is the native mac printer type but postscript doesn't come cheap, and it doesn't come with inkjets until they get to large format. If you don't need perfect prints (not doing publishing) just get a printer which is supported. Epson seems to be one of the better injet manufacturers for mac support.

Stuff that doesn't work well: Anything in that braindead cheap group of junk equipment like winmodems. Most add on PCI cards do not have mac drivers even though the mac supports the PCI slot standard. DVD decoders, TV tuners, some SCSI cards. First step would be to check a prospective devices manufacturer driver page. Some devices are supported on the mac but don't ship in a box that comes with drivers or any clue that it might be mac compatible. Lots of multimedia software is the same way. There are many educational and low end multimedia titles on the PC shelves that are hybrid discs with the code for both mac and PC computers on the same disk.

Here are some links to mac news pages which you might like to dig through the archives for. All 3 tend to run feature articles when new OS and hardware come out to gather problem reports and solutions which I find very useful.
www.macfixit.com
www.macnn.com
www.macintouch.com

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Yes, completely.

The story circling on sites like Macintouch is that, despite press releases suggesting otherwise, there is no Mac IE team at Microsoft anymore, as they've been reorged into a WebTV group.

I can only guess that the fact that OS X is shaping up to compete with Windows with Unix-like features is one of the data points Microsoft used to axe the Mac IE project.

Oh, and for the record, Microsoft has been making Unix software for years. They worked on XENIX with SCO (which is why you see a MS copyright notice on OpenServer). They've even made versions of IE for Solaris and HP/UX, in a very half-assed, security-ignorant, binary-only way, since 4.0.

But wait! There's another way, as noted on Macintouch. You can get an old version of the QuickTime player -- QuickTime 2.5 -- and convert QuickTime -> DV with that! Apple no longer distributes QT 2.5, but you should be able to find a copy floating around online (a quick search on Google turned up the goods for me), or you might have an old copy of QT on and old system CD or something.

After doing the conversion, just put the DV file in the Media folder of your iMovie project, and you're all set!

But wait! There's another way, as noted on Macintouch. You can get an old version of the QuickTime player -- QuickTime 2.5 -- and convert QuickTime -> DV with that! Apple no longer distributes QT 2.5, but you should be able to find a copy floating around online (a quick search on Google turned up the goods for me), or you might have an old copy of QT on and old system CD or something.

After doing the conversion, just put the DV file in the Media folder of your iMovie project, and you're all set!

2 week old news. Actually it works with System 8.6 or later. There is a report with user experiences on Macintouch, including a lot of hardware compatability data.

We picked up a Canon S10 just before Christmas and I'd recommend it highly. I've been frankly astonished by the quality of the images, having worked with several other digital cameras over the past couple of years. Printing on an Epson 740 on glossy paper is as good or better than photos you get from a regular photo-finishing place. True, it doesn't have interchangeable lenses and stuff but it's small enough to put in your shirt pocket! Here's a good review.

(unfortunately normal 3 button ADB mice are extinct.)

This product is covered in today's macintouch

http://www.macintouch.com/macattack.html

for details.

-matt

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Wha? TV & Movie Theme Songs? Oh yeah....

According to users at macintouch, the Airport BaseStation IS a wavelan card, check out www.macintouch.com/airport.html

The Airport Base Station is simply an Wavelan card (Supposedly Wavelan Gold), a modem, and a 10 BaseT adapter with some microprossesor taking care of everything. I believe you can simply talk to it over TCP/IP, so it should be OS idependant. All this for a scant $300, (close to the cost of the Wavelan card)
See www.macintouch.com/airport.html for more details, and hackers reports about airport.

Macintouch is reporting that the PCI version is already supported by the company's existing Macintosh drivers. You can read the FAQ yourself. No doubt, if there is enough interest, drivers for AGP Macintoshes will be forthcoming.

Sounds like you need help finding the Macintosh Product Guide

...how many manufacturers make hardware for your appletosh?

Try out the Hardware section.

You want a cdburner for your mac

I already have one, thanks. A Yamaha with Adaptec Toast.
Adaptec lists over 150 Mac-compatible CD-R/RW drives in their database (select toast from bottom menu).

a floppy drive?

iFloppy
SuperDisk
Addonics
Teac

a G4 upgrade?

PowerLogix
Newertech

where do you guys come up with this stuff?

I'll send you to Microsoft's own website for more information about that little feature called meta-data.

Or read how the Microsoft Annual report was written on a Macintosh.

It's so funny when people talk about things they know nothing about.

Macintouch reports: "Apple has reversed the cancellation of existing Power Mac G4 orders, according to impeccable sources, and is calling back customers to explain."

The cancellation has been reversed.
Read it at MacInTouch.

Macintouch reported people started receiving Apple Store orders of Sawtooth 450 MHz G4's around Sept 24.

The older Yosemite based 400 MHz systems were showing up even earlier.

Found some more info on IEEE 802.11 and, specifically, Apple's Airport.

• Macintouch has a very good report on wireless networking, which should satisfy even /. readers with its thoroughness and technical nature and is, amazingly, platform agnostic for the most part.
• And Farallon has a compatibility matrix for its SkyLINE products. You can also get a copy in Acrobat format.

Actually the Ultra IDE implementations on the G4s, with the factory drives, apparently do sustained reads and writes at about 20 MB/s. At least according to Macintouch.

I think there will be a steady need for new features as broadband reaches more and more people. Just as the Internet has caused many applications to become "net aware" and spawned many new features (such as your CD player to fetch track names from CDDB) the next level of access will do even more. I'm sure we'll all be disappointed someday when our favorite app doesn't yet support voice recognition, or application sharing over the internet, or doesn't support the newest lossless graphic standard.

Not to mention that we havne't run out of ideas in the hardware arena yet either. Take a look sometime at the discussion over on Macintouch about Connectix not taking advantage of the Altivec instructions in the next version of Virtual PC. These people really are clamoring for every speed increase they can get, and the company does not want to bother to re-code it for free of course. As long as there is new hardware, there will be new software written to take advantage of it.

On the flip side, of course I haven't really found anything new that I use in Microsoft Office since Office95 came out, unless you count Microsoft Frontpage as being part of the office suite. But, like I mentioned above, voice recognition, video-on-demand, and the ability to use VERY large amounts of data in your work without worrying about the amount of bandwidth of your audience will change a lot of things, I'm sure.

http://www.mklinux.org

I'd like to clarify this a bit, if I may. According to information reported on MacInTouch, the block was put in place as a temporary measure because of technical issues. Apple is currently working on an update to resolve these issues, and remove the block. They can't make an official statement regarding this yet, because they can't afford a fiasco if it takes a bit longer than expected, or doesn't work right, or what not. Until it's done, they have to maintain the official position that it's not upgradeable.

Wait a little bit before you start tearing into Apple. This is not a done deal.

-Snibor Eoj

Read the report at http://www.macintouch.com/g4reader. html#compete.

-Snibor Eoj

http://www.macintouch.com/

What apple did was release a firmware patch which makes the computer check to see if its using a G3 cpu before allowing startup (it's not a patch to the normal ROM - if it had been, any idiot would have been able to reverse the patch, as the MacOS ROM is a file on the disk on recent Macs).

It was known before this batch of G3s even shipped that they'd be G4 upgradeable, but apple released a software patch which seems to prevent g4 upgrades. OH NO!! Not a software patch! The treachery! They'll never get around THAT! Apple knows the futility of this.

Lets look at what Apple actually has done for their customers, upgrade-wise. The long lived family of PCI powermacs, the [789][356]00 series, all have processor daughterboards, which are replaceable, all the way up to G3 or even potentially G4 CPUs. Earlier powermacs can be upgraded to G3s with "L2-cache" upgrades (a CPU on a card fits in where the L2 cache normally goes, and overrides the existing CPU). Apple's G3 desktops all have zif sockets for easy and cheap upgradability. Apple's entire line of desktops uses one type of socket. I think that's pretty good. How many different sockets do you get across the pentium/ppro/p2/p3/celeron/k6/k7-athlon? How many such cpus can be used as an upgrade for one of the other cpus?

I own one of the first PowerMac G3/400s (Blue & White). I remain quite confident that by the time I want to upgrade it, G4 upgrades from third party companies like XLR8, newertech, and powerlogix will be waiting for me.

Here is some more info on what this thing can do: http://www.macintouch.com/ny1999wirel ess.html.

This is a bit of annoyance, since so many people seem to think the iMac was such a grand leap forward, that it's entirely unlike other Macintoshes. For a while, the page for Yahoo! Pager referred to "iMac OS 8.5," and the morons at Bell Atlantic tried to tell some poor saps that iMacs were of fundamentally different hardware.

So the better headline would have been "higher-end Macs" rather than "iMacs and G3s."

The real news with OS X Client is "Cocoa". Check out Macintouch for notes from May's WWDC. Its oversimplfying somewhat, but essentially, its a cross-platform API for x86, IA-64, and PowerPC.

I suggest you read this article. It has very specific details of the big fight against bellsouth



http://www.macintouch.com/adslbell.html


AP

I've forced IP NetRouter to map out the necessary RTP/RTSP ports as described on Macintouch's QT4 feedback page, but it can only map out ports for one machine at a time! It's okay for now because the other people in my office don't care/know about streaming video, but if it's this much trouble to get one machine to view a stream, quite a few people are going to pass over QT4's streaming features.

I've also been informed that Apple has made available the source code to compile a RTP/RTSP proxy. This is no good to me, because it only works on 'nix. My software router's a Mac. Does anyone know of another solution?

They're working on a Linux version of AudioCatalyst 2.0

Go to Macintouch and scroll down 3/4 of the way.

From http://www.macintouch.com/mxs.html:

Eric Raymond, president of The Open Source Initiative, said, "We see that Apple really gets it." He had reviewed the Apple Public Source License, producing some changes in the original draft, and said that it now is "strictly conformant" with open source principles.

If there's a problem with Apple's "almost-free" software license, Raymond don't seem to notice, and may have even contributed to the problem...

After hashing it out in the earlier Apple/Darwin thread, I'd prefer that Apple use the GPL -- as I said, I want Apple to do the right thing -- but if someone can prove infringement, and it can't be worked around, then no one can use the software, under the GPL.

Who "wins" in that case?

Jay (=

Henry Knorr wrote a little bit about this on the Macintouch site.

"IEEE standards may include the known use of patent(s), including patent applications, if there is technical justification in the opinion of the standards-developing committee and provided the IEEE receives assurance from the patent holder that it will license applicants under reasonable terms and conditions for the purpose of implementing the standard. This assurance shall be provided without coercion and prior to approval of the standard (or reaffirmation when a patent becomes known after initial approval of the standard). This assurance shall be a letter that is in the form of either a) A general disclaimer to the effect that the patentee will not enforce any of its present or future patent(s) whose use would be required to implement the proposed IEEE standard against any person or entity using the patent(s) to comply with the standard or b) A statement that a license will be made available to all applicants without compensation or under reasonable rates, with reasonable terms and conditions that are demonstrably free of any unfair discrimination." from MacInTouch which also has several links to patent and other IEEE information. Maybe you sould get the bylaws chaged...