Slashdot Mirror

it's this kind of rewritting of history that pissess me off. Apple came to the USB game late. what they did different was that they dropped all legacy support at the same time. USB was intoduced in January 1996. the iMac shipped (with ONLY USB ports) in August 1997.

If Apple showed up late, Microsoft showed up later. USB support didn't show up on Windows until Win98. I suppose Apple was late to the game with Wi-Fi too... since somewhere someone was selling some crappy WiFi pci card that didn't half work on most PCs. Apple just came along, shipped WiFi in their iBooks, and here is the important part... made everything work flawlessly. Oh yeah, Apple was late to that game. Dell was much faster, coming out with their WiFi laptops about a year later.

Stop nitpicking like a hater. The guy is right. Apple can drive innovative new technology precisely because they control the process from end to end. Hardware, software, it all works together. No need to wait for some dip-shit third party company with a different set of priorities. Apple's greatest strength is that they make the whole widget. Anyone suggesting Apple would do better pinning its future on a company like Dell is a moron.

I'm not sure about an Usenet or email group, but the Apple support forums aren't all that bad. You don't generally get too many rude "RTFM" responses, and not all the questions are that basic, either. The basic forums can be very basic ("how do I get email?"), but there's some fairly technical questions that get answered from time to time as well. It's more of a question-and-answer format rather than a general reference guide, so I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for, but it might be worth making an account on.

At any rate, if you have a question regarding your mac, it's almost always worth searching there before you start looking elsewhere, because in many cases you'll find other people with the same problem -- oftentimes, other people with the same unresolved problem, but at least you'll know you're not alone.

http://discussions.apple.com/index.jspa

The MacNN forums are also good reading, although I think you will find it to be a little more rough around the edges -- if you ask a dumb question there, you'll get a lot more "RTFM" than on Apple's official forums. But on the bright side, stuff doesn't get censored by Apple in the same way that it occasionally does on the official ones.

http://forums.macnn.com/

You might also want to consider subscribing to a dead-tree magazine; some people may disagree but I find that MacWorld puts out an interesting article or two most months, and the 'Marketplace' section in the back often turns up interesting products. If you spend a lot of time online, it may be old news to you by the time it reaches your door, but if you aren't, it might be worth it. If you have a friend who subscribes they generally have very low-priced "add a friend" subscription deals.

Hope this helps.

This was attempted.

Back in the heady days of the late 1990s, I had one of the first MP3 players among my group of friends. It was a thing called the Pontis MPlayer3, and used MultiMediaCards for storage.

The two advertised methods for acquiring music were either ripping it on your computer and downloading it to the device (via a serial port -- oh, the pain), or buying albums on pre-flashed, read-only MultiMediaCards. I never saw any in stores, and the format seems to have gone the way of the dodo now, but at the time, Pontis and a few other manufacturers were pushing it hard.

You'd get the usual packaging and liner notes, but instead of a CD you'd just have the chip. It wasn't erasable, so unless you physically broke it, you'd have a backup forever. One of my friends who went to Germany actually bought some albums in this format, although what they were I can't tell you. I'm not sure about what DRM it had, if any; I think it must have been minimal, because the machine wasn't capable of playing back anything besides straight MP3 files. (Heck, it was picky enough about certain types of VBR joint-stereo encoding and ID3 tags.) Perhaps this contributed to the lack of titles I ever saw in the U.S.

I thought this was a neat concept; except that the player was a failure and MMC got nixed in favor of that abomination known as Secure Digital (which the Pontis wouldn't use), I think it could have had a future. As I recall, the format had some sort of cute-ish marketing name, but I can't find it now.

That was also the last time I decided to be an early adopter...

Now ask me if I think Apple did an ethical thing by flying into Creative's camp, pissing on their tent, and taking Creative's fair? share of Rio's MP3 player market. Hmm?

I view this as a first step in the dropping of Office on OS X and a retrenchment back to Windowsland. Afterall once the majority of Macs are Intel based there is nothing to stop people running the Windows version of Office under a virtualization product which means an extra Windows license. MS wins all round there. Not having to support a Mac development group and getting an extra OS sale.

MS will not do anything that might erode on their current position in the marketplace. Given the take up of Linux in the data centre they aren't going to give Linux a free ride onto the desktop.

They do have burn in, a more permanent type of burn in. I have a rear-projection TV and the manual indicates that in order to avoid burn-in, it should not be used with video game or computer systems for extended periods of time.

http://forums.macnn.com/89/macnn-lounge/302642/any way-remove-burn/ has a bit of discussion about burn-in on rear-projection tv's.

Clearly you've been smoking the good shit, and missed the quotes from the alleged 'hackers' saying that they wanted to penetrate the aura of smugness surrounding mac users and that the Mac/PC commercials made them want to burn out an eye with a cigarette. Find it here. If you'll ALSO note they claim that the drivers were third-party, but that the vulnerability existed on standard Apple-shipped drivers.

Perhaps if you had paid attention to what they were saying and not to all the hype you would have clearly known the circumstances that they claimed about the vulnerability.

http://www.macnn.com/articles/06/01/18/apples.holi day.quarter/

or here as well:

http://www.macnn.com/articles/06/01/18/apples.holi day.quarter/

Where the fuck do you Apple kooks get this crap! Apple's worldwide marketshare has been in a constant decline ever since Jobs took over.

Here's some more links on the subject

http://www.macnn.com/articles/05/12/02/safari.popu larity.growing/

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun 2006/tc20060615_080175.htm

http://www.macobserver.com/article/2006/07/19.18.s html

Explaination of the Myth of Market Share (Google Cache)

And to support my point, I offer this:

http://www.macnn.com/articles/06/08/09/ae.shows.on .itunes/

A&E programming on iTunes

Apologies. I posted the URL incorrectly. Here it is:

MacNN - Microsoft Group Policy for Mac OS X.

iTunes uses MPEG 4 Audio http://www.m4a.com/ for its encoding. There seems to be a lot of varying and conflicting opinions on the differences in audio quality (ie. here: http://forums.macnn.com/archive/index.php/t-158250 .html , here: http://www.xciv.org/~meta/audio-shootout/ ) but my university lecturer, who has been a professional sound engineer for a long time, has told me in the past that M4A is much better at preserving the original sound than MP3, with a 96kbs M4A file being equivalent to something like a 260kbs MP3. I'm not sure if he's right as I can't seem to find any supporting evidence but the general consensus from my googling, other than the last link I posted, seems to be that M4A offers a higher quality output than MP3.

If by "weighted rateing" you mean the iPod's signal to noise ratio (SNR), Apple doesn't post it on their website, but I did find this: http://www.cnet.com.au/mp3players/mp3players/0,390 36128,40062302-2,00.htm Note that most people can't tell the difference between a couple of dB, so most of the higher rated ones are fairly evenly matched, and I wouldn't be suprised if the results for those would change if the test was carried out again by somebody else. The lower ones are particularly bad, though; you would probably hear the white noise during the quiet parts of your music :)

The article sadly never expands upon Apple's own college offering, iTunes U, which is supposedly free for Colleges. Not only do students have access to music collections and the iTunes Music Store, but they also can listen to and download class lectures, professor podcasts, etc. They've recently added three more schools to the iTunes U roster including Duke, North Carolina Central University, and Butte College.

I only did one Google search, but easily came up with this old article from last October. I haven't really followed the case, but it's one reason why MS may have done this.

It's a pity Gates & Jobs couldn't join in rather then attempting to downplay the fine efforts of this group.

Which Jobs are you talking about? The only one I am familiar with (Steve), offered free Mac OS X licenses to this group for all the laptops. His offer was declined. You can argue all you want about his motives, but you really can't say that he "downplayed" anything.

Gates, on the other hand, mocked the group's effort.

and Jobs said, "let them eat paste!"

Sony has stated previoulsy that the PS3 will be able to run Linux and even Mac OS X from it's HDD. Plug in your USB keyboard and mouse, and although it doesn't have 1 or 2 gigs of ram like a modern PC, it has a processor that power wise crushes most modern PCs. I remember reading earlier tests from IBM that it had running at something comparable to 4 x 3.4 GHz Pentium 4s.

So if this dream does come true, the PS3 will be a _powerful_ open-source console/pc for $600. He's a link to an article, but it's in turn referencing an official Sony PDF that was released last year.

http://www.macnn.com/articles/05/08/04/sony.cpu.ti ger.compatible/
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/06/ 1820217
http://www.sony.co.uk/view/ShowArticle.action?arti cle=1121156666920

Now wouldn't that be cool? :)

Actually, Apple's iPod accounts for around 50% of the DAP market, which is certainly substantial and more than any other product (or company), but not the "80%+" you mention.

"But figures from the US show that Apple, the dominant legal download business in Europe and the US, retains just 4 cents from each 99-cent (55p) track sale while 'mechanical copyright' holders - generally the record labels, who own copyright in the song's recording - take 62 cents or more. Music publishers take the rest - about 8 cents."

But what price is "fair"? Apple says it is 99 cents a song. Of this, Apple gets a sliver--4 cents--while the music publishers snag 8 cents and the record companies pocket most of the rest. Even though record companies earn more per track from downloads than CD sales, industry execs have been pushing for more. One option is a tiered pricing model, with the most popular tunes selling for as much as $3. After all, the music honchos reason, people pay up to $3 for cell-phone ring tones, mere snippets of songs.

I've got an e815 from Verizon and I love it too. Apparently if you want the full bluetooth functionality on a Mac though, you have to first hack it on a PC.

It's not against their ToS to use it as a modem to connect to a dialup ISP, it's just not very efficient, I haven't tried it myself but I've heard of people only getting 11k connections, with a theoretical max of 14.4k.

It is sort-of against their ToS to use it to connect to their high-speed (144k) service. You run the risk that you *may* incur by-the-byte usage fees if you don't subscribe to the data plan. Reports vary about whether or not you'll ever be charged for this. I know some people who use it sparingly and never get charged. Others report that this only uses cell minutes off a NationalAccess plan as long as you're on a 1x network and not evdo.

If you're feeling lucky: Use ##DIALUP on the phone to enable dial-up networking, and you can connect by dialing #777 - Username: yourcellnumber@vzw3g.com / password: vzw

I have a PC, but I found this thread that talks about using Verizon dialup on a Mac:
http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?p=2614216
Which points to:
http://stevenfettig.com/mythoughts/archives/000189 .php
and
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050 501151747917
Both of which have more info on using an e815 (or a v710, the e815's even more crippled little sibling) on a Mac, and with Bluetooth.

I stand corrected. In my quest to find the link, I found that this is a rumor from an "insider". Apple is expected to make an API to run Mac applications on Windows. There was a lot of discussion about this rumor last week indicating that a lot of people don't believe anything from the macosrumors site anymore... I also found this in my search which indicates that just the opposite may be true. MS might be releasing an API to run Windows applications on multiple platforms. I can see them shifting from an OS vendor to "THE" application vendor as their next plan of attack. Since, at this point OSes are pretty much worthless when you consider how little distinction there is between them anymore for the average user.

Apple also needs something a little more robust, to offer such features as some PDA like functionality, games, or better video support (i.e. HD video out).

Now, let's look at ipod sales....
Let's presume that the 1GB shuffle is the 'average' purchase at $120. I have a hard time believing that it cost them more than $60 to make that thing at the volume they're being produced, so that would come to $60 gross profit per ipod (not to mention $95 profit on their $99 leather holders!).

Now, I'm looking at two MacNN reports that Apple will sell 8million ipods this quarter, and another 12 million ipods in the last half of 2005. That would give a total of over 20 million ipods in the last 9 months. [[ Hmm.. this would give an average of about 50 itunes per ipod.... ]]

So, 20million ipods times $60 profit per pod, and you have about $1billion gross profit in ipod sales (I doubt my estimates are any better than one digit's significance).

at least as important as itunes sales.

Now, let's look at ipod sales....
Let's presume that the 1GB shuffle is the 'average' purchase at $120. I have a hard time believing that it cost them more than $60 to make that thing at the volume they're being produced, so that would come to $60 gross profit per ipod (not to mention $95 profit on their $99 leather holders!).

Now, I'm looking at two MacNN reports that Apple will sell 8million ipods this quarter, and another 12 million ipods in the last half of 2005. That would give a total of over 20 million ipods in the last 9 months. [[ Hmm.. this would give an average of about 50 itunes per ipod.... ]]

So, 20million ipods times $60 profit per pod, and you have about $1billion gross profit in ipod sales (I doubt my estimates are any better than one digit's significance).

at least as important as itunes sales.

Looks like OS X 10.5 Leopard will be released before Vista then - due towards the end of this year. Previews are expected at WWDC in...er...August this year (damn Apple keeps changing it).

our argument seems to boil down to, "It's popular, so it must be better.

That's not what I said at all. I said, and I mean, that the criteria one can see here for evaluating the iPod, and other devices, are not criteria which can be used to judge whether or not a given product will succeed (an iPod "killer", for instance) because the criteria stem from a pedantic viewpoint one sees on Slashdot and other tech sites which does not at all reflect a wider or more generalized view. Nowhere have I passed judgement on either set of criteria: I am not saying one is better than the other. I am merely identifying mechanisms, noting their differences and extrapolating what those differences mean in a larger sense. There is nothing wrong with a technologically pedantic viewpoint, so long as one realizes that such a viewpoint is not shared by the larger mass of consumers which resolve marketplace success and failure.

Slashdot is "out of touch", as you term it, only in the sense that Slashdot's judgments as a whole are not very useful when wondering why the iPod is a success and other mp3 players are not. This is not limited to Slashdot: I wouldn't go to Macnn in order to discover why the iPod was a success either.

Anyone remember when Apple jacked their licensing fees for port access late last year and pissed off manufacturers? Just in case you dont: http://www.macnn.com/articles/05/10/11/made.for.ip od.licensing/

I haven't read anything that spoke towards manufacturers backing out b/c the licensing hike tho but I suppose economic theory implies some products getting squeezed out.

Is apple trying to squeeze out the market by marketing first-party schwag and jacking its fees?

I think a more compelling argument might be that they're just trying to squeeze every dime out of the ipod as corporately possible before the ipod loses its buzz. Between that and the fact that the silly boom box is yawn inducing (as opposed to being the killer accessory for the killer app) I'm not sold on apple's upcoming knick-knack dominance.

I'm not really a big fan of the 10% royalty fee however for accessories which use the universal docking connector.

This exploit is actually an example of a very old idea. A proof of concept can be found in this followup article from March 2004 (the link to the original article is already dead and buried), which also mentiones the need to visually identify executable files.

It's not an Intel motherboard, it's an Intel *chipset*.

unless you have some other datapoint, i think it's pretty clear it's an Intel motherboard.

Six Months? How about right now. OpenOSX has released their "Wintel" package updated for MacOS X on Intel. It features the BOCHS 'emulator' that will run all manner of Windows, Linux, etc. MacNN has the scoop It's $25 to download.

In fact, Apple is working with Microsoft to get Windows to boot on a Macintel through VPC. It seems like a virtual machine we will have.

http://www.macnn.com/articles/06/01/14/future.of.v pc.unclear/

I really don't want to get into a pissing war between you and an AC, but

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How do I enter the BIOS Setup utility on the Gateway 610 Media Center PC?

A: To enter the BIOS Setup utility, turn on the computer and begin pressing the F2 key in one-second intervals. If you complete this step successfully, the BIOS Setup Utility screen is displayed. If no screen is displayed and Windows starts up normally, repeat this step.

-----------
Also the Apple Intel Dev boxs seem to ship with BIOS.

Apple's Developer Transition Kit features a Pentium 4 660 processor running at 3.6 GHz.. run Microsoft Windows without issue.. feature a standard Phoenix BIOS

The AC may be wrong, but I havent seen anything to indicate that. If you could cite something, that would be helpful since I'm really interested in the Apple X86 Laptops but the EFI turns me cold.

soon? see http://www.macnn.com/articles/06/01/10/wow.to.supp ort.mactels/

How will we know?

Major and minor Mac news sites like Macintouch and MacNN always have someone in the audience blogging the Apple presentation in real time. Lately Apple's been blocking wi-fi connections during the presentation, but you still get the information immediately after it's over.

And if you don't know your numbers you aren't qualified to have an opinion. Apple does not have 90%+ control. No figures that I have seen, even Apple's own give them that much of the market. Furthermore, you keep bandying that number about without specifying which market. MP3 players? AAC players? Music distribution? Which market?

Just because you are ignorant of the facts does not make them any less true. To get even more technical, Apple clearly has monopoly control of the market because they are able to maintain pricing at levels significantly higher than all of their competitors without significant technical differentiation. That is de facto proof of a monopoly regardless of the specific market percentages - the demand curve for ipods slopes downward, not upward as it would if there was legitimate competition.

http://www.macnn.com/articles/04/10/12/ipod.market share.at.92/

The RIAA's monopoly appearance is merely due to the fact that they own so many copyrights. Would you call a tiny startup record company a monopoly in the same way you refer to the RIAA?

Yes. You really seem to be hung up on your misunderstanding of the RIAA members' monopoly as it applies to the market of music sales. RIAA members have a legally sanctioned monopoly on the most popular music. If their copyright was not legal sanctioned, they would have long ago been forced to allow secondary sources of the music they own the copyright for.

But apple doesn't have monopoly control.

No matter how many times you say this, it is still false.

Here's a link to the patent application , and here's an overview from MacNN (note that the link posted by MacNN appears to be invalid).

a) does Aperture support layers?

not in the sense that photoshop does. what exactly are you looking for here? this isn't a photoshop replacement, by any stretch of the imagination.

b) does Aperture have a clone tool/healing brush/patch tool? These are the tools I use most often for actual retouching.

it does. there is a simple spot/patch tool in the toolbar (check here). there is also a simple red-eye reduction tool that appears to work a bit better than the iPhoto equivalent.

c) does Aperture support 16 bit images? (My guess is it would pretty much have to in order to truly support RAW, but I don't think they specifically say it does anywhere.)

your guess would be right.

--

i've posted a mini-review over at macnn, but i haven't tested the raw conversion to look for the same issues that the ars reviewer found. overall application speed is something that apple addresses quickly, in my experience. i wouldn't be surprised to see a point upgrade for this app in a month or two.

As typical by this poorly organized and completely out-to-lunch company a great idea put together with horrible execution. Obviously companies try to launch products on their first day with a big media blitz. So far so good, they get the front page of Slashdot, many newspapers (http://seattle-pi.com/ articles and widespread coverage on mac news sites (http://www.macnn.com./

So, how about trying it? Well, you can go to the Rhapsody site, http://rhapsody.com/ and try to get to it. Well, NOTHING on the rhapsody.com site says anything about the web features. Nothing in the FAQ and the system requirements say Windows only. If you're going to launch a major new feature don't you think you would update your home page?

If you click to "TRY RHAPSODY" you come to a jump page and if you select either option, one says "Windows required" and the other says "Rhapsody is currently offered only on Windows..." Oh nice.

So, if you're super persistent, then you can go to http://real.com/ . You will notice the web page doesn't even load, and stalls somewhere around 50% loading of the 31 items on the page. Ooops, looks like their servers can't handle the load. Oh , some poor Sys Admin's pager is blowing off the hook right about now I'm sure. Real's CTO Mesrobian is probably trolling down the hallways with a bat clubbing engineers like baby seals and screaming like a banshee.

If you manage to find the small text link at the bottom of the real.com page "Rhapsody Unlimited for Mac" that page also barely loads. And then, there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to the 25 free trial without giving them your credit card number.

Horrible launch, a disgusting display of web marketing. My 15 year old sister could do 50 times better than this and she could create a website that looks more visually appealing than this blue and white patchwork.

Good luck Real, hope your servers recover and hope people come back to try it some other day when they can actually find the software.

hat will that be called, anyway? Sabretooth?

"Due to the use of this technique, users can no longer safely double-click MP3 files in Mac OS X. This same technique could be used with JPEG and GIF files, though no such cases of infected graphic files have yet been seen."

Apple's Powerbooks used DDR before the current rev (which uses DDR2).

I don't believe the new machines have more bandwidth than the previous ones, the memory bus is still driven at the same speed as before. They just switched to DDR2 because it runs at 1.8V instead of the 2.5V of DDR1 and so they saved a lot of power (witness the greatly increased battery life). DDR2 is also cheaper than DDR1 on the spot market now and soon probably will be cheaper on the contract market too (but not yet, hence the quad-proc G5 still comes with only 512MB RAM!).

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=274390

Altivec is used a decent amount I guess. But as to offloading a lot of work onto the GPU, didn't you see how 10.4.3 killed Quartz 2D Extreme (not that it was used before). Apple's efforts to farm out graphics to the GPU seem to have been less successful than initially hoped.

The G4 Powerbooks are usable, I use one everyday. But really, the G4 isn't very fast, compared to Pentium M or especially a dual Pentium M. Laptops stand to gain a lot in the Intel switch.

A year ago Apple computers made number 7 it the top list of supercomputers http://www.top500.org/lists/plists.php?Y=2004&M=11 the story of them losing ground when they were higher is http://www.macnn.com/articles/04/11/08/vt.falls.to .7th/

If I wanted to go with the easiest computer operating system to use, that is heavy on graphical user interface, I would pick a Mac. It said in the ranking list: "System X 1100 Dual 2.3 GHz Apple XServe/Mellanox Infiniband 4X/Cisco GigE / 2200 Self-made"

Yes, 35% is a huge cut. Unfortunately for Apple you've chosen to make up figures instead of find out the real ones.

Apple gets 4 cents for each sale. The labels take around 62 cents. The publisher gets 8 cents.

Here's 3 links on articles on how MS fired an employer who posted in his blog that Mac G5s were being delivered to MS.

Hyku
MacNN
Seattlepi

According to the pictures I'd seen so far it doesn't seem to have any buttons, or any markings for buttons, or where they might be.

I've got my flame-retardant jumpsuit close to hand just in case, but... this does seem like more style at the expense of actual usability. You have learn where the buttons are in the same way as Das Keyboard, but with this mouse you first have to realise that there *are* buttons.

Very stylish. Nil point for usability.

Uhm ... yes, it has. This was big news when the Intel switch was announced.

MacNN | Apple VP: Mac OS X will not boot on regular PCs

They'll sell the OS separately, as they do now, but it won't be usable on PCs.

I think you mean this, http://www4.macnn.com/macnn/articles/unixad.jpg, g included at no extra cost.

It will be crackable, but the 1% of the population that can do this isn't Apple's target market anyways.

Oh really? I guess you've never seen this ad then?