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yes, of cource i'm the flaimbait when the parent is the one with many outraged responces due to his FUD, and it's entirely my fault for pointing out that he's posting completely incorrect information http://www.barefeats.com/bootcamp.html OS X is faster than windows http://www.macworld.com/2006/08/opinion/dellmacpro followup/index.php Macs are in general cheaper or about the same price as equally configured pc's, though this is a hard thing to do if you put some work in to find a truly equally specced machine apples come out cheaper. and the argument about reliable hardware is moot, apple has not switched manufacturers, they still use asus and foxconn, they still use the same high quality pcb and they design all their own motherboards the same as before, the only difference is they order the cpu and chipset from intel instead of IBM/motorola. Some of those things may of been true of apple 10 years ago, but people need to open their eyes and quit with the blind faith, I run OS X windows and linux and each has their advantages, to label OS X a bloated toy thats not a real option is naive.

Maybe real gamers don't find Macs useful? The same article says that consoles have less piracy. I wonder why people would pirate less where there was more opportunity to do so. Oh my god! I need my thinking cap!

IDC says Dell (34.3 percent), HP (18.6 percent), Gateway (6.0 percent) and Apple (4.4 percent)

Gartner says Dell (32 percent), HP (18.9 percent), Gateway (6.2 percent) and Apple (4.6 percent)

Apple's US market share increased to between 4.6-4.8%, depending on who you ask.

Irrelevent to me either way, but if you are going to spout numbers please try to get them right.

The Xerox Parc entry at wiki does mention the stock deal with Apple. According to Chris Breen, Senior Editor, Macworld, the deal was 100,000 shares at $10, pre-IPO. Within a year, the stock was worth over $17 million.

Apple never saw Xerox' code, just the demos. Microsoft, however, had easy access to the Mac's development APIs and so forth as an early ISV which heavily influenced the design of Windows early internals. They licensed GUI elements from Apple for Windows 1.0. It was this agreement which cost Apple its Look & Feel lawsuit against Microsoft. Microsoft found a loophole and drove Windows 2.0 and later right through it. They had the better lawyers.

"no IT manager in his right mind will go with an office suite that doesn't support scripting"

Yeah, but:

"Microsoft also indicates that it is discontinuing support of Visual Basic scripting in the next version of Office for Mac, but on the flip side, the company said it's going to increase support for standard Mac scripting methods like AppleScript and Automator."

Stick that in your FUD pipe and smoke it!

From the intro: "this article claims that the PC and the TV provide two very different roles that aren't going to converge anytime soon."

From the article: "How come none of my Apple-loving geek buddies have Macs in their living rooms?

The article makes very easy predictions as if they are revelations. If the author had been paying attention to the computer industry he would not have harboured such wasted expectations for so long.

A year and a half ago Jobs was very clear about his intentions.

Jobs in 2004: "Well, we've always been very clear on that. We don't think that televisions and personal computers are going to merge. We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.

Well, they want to link sometimes. Like, when you make a movie, you burn a DVD and you take it to your DVD player. Someday that could happen over AirPort, so you don't have to burn a DVD -- you can just watch it right off your computer on your television set. But most of these products that have said, "Let's combine the television and the computer!" have failed. All of them have failed.

The problem is, when you're using your computer you're a foot away from it, you know? When you're using your television you want to be ten feet away from it. So they're really different animals."

I used the same reference in a recent post predicting the unifying element between tv and computer will be a video Airport Express, not an Apple livingroom computer, in response to a previous slashdot article suggesting forthcoming iTunes movie rentals.

Steve Jobs has long held that he does not envision the computer being television, nor the television being a computer. So if iTunes were used for movie rentals, how would the movies be watched? Is a video Airport Express waiting in the wings?

"Well, we've always been very clear on that. We don't think that televisions and personal computers are going to merge. We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.

Well, they want to link sometimes. Like, when you make a movie, you burn a DVD and you take it to your DVD player. Someday that could happen over AirPort, so you don't have to burn a DVD -- you can just watch it right off your computer on your television set. But most of these products that have said, "Let's combine the television and the computer!" have failed. All of them have failed.

The problem is, when you're using your computer you're a foot away from it, you know? When you're using your television you want to be ten feet away from it. So they're really different animals."

"You're completely full of shit. Intel has surpassed Altivec, benchmarks prove it. I don't know what you're babbling about the world cup for. Does Quad G5 excel at playing soccer?"

Real life having people watched soccer, billion+ plus. The excerpts from World Cup relied on 4 Quad G5s, a mission critical (paid content) and time critical job. Like I gave the clue, Workstations have different things to do. It does 1080p suitable (likely 2k) RAW editing, real time and serves them in at least 4 formats to recipients. Got me now? That is first time so many formats and so many platforms exist for distributing such content. First time they are paid content in some platforms such as 3G.

http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/06/22/worldcup/i ndex.php

"Finally, you have the gall to act as if a folding@home list means something. You are truly stupid. Here's a clue: If I had been running folding@home for 1 day with a quad G5 and for 5 years with a dozen pentium II's, who do you think would have the higher ranking? You are either stupid or you think everyone else is. I vote "a lot of column A, a little of column B".

I get HD content here and downsample them to SDI, once I had to output to Betacam SP which wouldn't allow a single frame loss. You consumer grade Intel fanboys are really don't know what you talk about.

Folding@home means very much. It is a real life , highly advanced scientific computation which does use whatever it can. It is the benchmark of benchmarks. Also it is not very popular in Mac community since many Macs are used in professional applications which really doesn't like something running idle at background.

Next time speak about machines you can afford and don't bitch/comment about professional workstations. Even Intel preferring professionals laugh at you since the machines they use has NOTHING to do with your Intel Core Duo crap. Go check http://www.tyan.com/ for a clue.

I didn't forget about answering to DRM. You just can't figure what it means putting a TPM/DRM chip to a computer by default. Also it includes your very polite , new Apple Intel cheap whitebox customer profile like name calling "dipshit". I would answer that but that time you would feel like calling FBI.

Also next time , dare to post your own nick and uid OK? It is lower than posting with AC.

Apple had internal investigations they could perform to at least try to find the information they wanted before filing a suit. The court correctly (in my opinion) ruled that Apple needs to pursue those avenues before granting their request.

Indeed, per this detailed analysis, "EFF, in its appeal on O'Grady's behalf, went so far as to argue that Apple should search the home computers of employees with access to the 'Asteroid' presentation, an invasion of privacy that you would normally expect to see EFF strongly oppose."

In nearly every case when using a hypervisor on top of such hardware (where there is a ring -1 for the hypervisor) the performance has beat native performance. Or put another way; using a hypervisor for virtualization provides you with virtualization with NO performance hit at all.

Care to back that up with actual data? Oh, that's right, you can't. You're talking out of your ass based on shit you read and naively believed.

Take a look at Macworld's review of Parallels. Notice anything? Oh yeah, in every case the virtual machine is slower than the same test running on bare metal.

Stop spreading misinformation!

Ubuntu runs Final Cut and Photoshop. Its great that I can run Maya and Shake unsupported on Ubuntu but uh I still need access to AE, Illustrator, Quicktime, my kona 3. I have Kubuntu on my PC but i am booted into XP most of the time. None of my color grading tools run linux. Hmmm Seems like most of Apples market can't even switch to Linux. Windows we could switch too. (shivers) Did you all see the announcement that the commercial version of WINE will run in OS X 10.5????
http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/06/30/crossover/ index.php

I'm waiting for the little light bulb to go off in your mind that explains to you the reason why Macs have a 4% worldwide market share.

Historical reasons laregly rooted in their reufsal to license the OS. Not issues with backward compatability. Their market share was low way before that came up.

My company does have a few Macs for specific tasks, and we couldn't even upgrade to OSX at all until a few months ago - let alone any "latest version" - because one of the apps we use, Media 100i, wouldn't work properly on OSX

Didn't they release a new version almost 4 years ago that took advantage of the features of Mac OS X?

If you have to upgrade your hardware and apps at the same time as you upgrade your OS, that is both a huge expense and a huge disruption to any company.

We've used quite a few iMacs and Powermacs which have gone from OS 8 up to 10.4.6. Occasisonally the software does change, but the vast majority of it has run fine in Classic. There are very applications that have problems with it. The one you use may be one of them, but they brought out an OS X native version years ago.

(I never tried it in compatibility mode, but was told not to) [...] Apple does not believe in backward compatibility

So, Apple has a compatibility mode (called Classic, by the way), but doesn't believe in backward compatability? That sounds a little contradictory. And you've heard of Rosetta haven't you? It features superb compatability across a different processor architecture.

Ha HA Ha HA HA HA HA Ha Ha

http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/06/05/appleindia /index.php

U send me no more jobs. U see increase back up in jobs and salary rates back in ur home toenwn.

Wat u say 2 dat?

U take ur offshore and u put it bck onshore.

U feed ur family. U buy macintosh computer 2 feed ur family.

U send me it.

It never ceases to amaze me how the "gamer crowd" completely discards the idea that maybe, just maybe, children shouldn't have access to all video game content

Actually, that's not correct - and is really a superficial symptom of what is being compained about. There is no problem with 'M' being on the cardboard box and retailers asking that people should be over 17+ (or at least make it appear plausible enough if there's no ID available.)

What we have seen, and object to:
- Outright banning of violent games, while movies and hockey don't receive the same treatment. While obscenities are not protected by First Amendment, Violence != Obscene unless you count 80+% of all literature to be just as obscene (including Little Red Riding Hood.)
- Banning excessivly violent game sales to minors, with criteria using traditional definitions of excessive violence. In that list provided (treating as is as opposed to the actual legislation), the list is poorly formed - identical offences are listed twice (decapitation, amputation, dismemberment and mutilation are subsets of aggrivated assault).
- Banning violent games sales, with absurd definitions of excessive violence. These absurd restrictions state that games should not allow assaulting cops - thus a criminal mastermind will gain an invulnerablity device as soon as he enters the police acadamy (and appears to otherwise keep his nose clean.) Some others restrict violence against women, which is one of the most sexist things I've seen since similirly treated males have no protection - at this rate, we might as well undo Sufferage and go back to the 1800s.
- Banning sales to minors based on ESRB rating. This does not work, since the ESRB is not infallible - they rated Oblivion as 'T' in spite of the maximum amount of Gore.
- Violence-as-porn bills. While this may be acceptable, it is completely moot since it provides an entirely inconsistant basis that varies from place to place. If children are allowed to watch cockfighting, why can't they play Command & Conquer? As a side note, these violence-as-porn must treat the work as a whole and the game must not have artistic, scienfic, or literary merit - most games already meet these criteria.
- And lastly, I am offended that these legislative bills don't attempt to ban the game of Chess. This game involves the equivalent of kidnapping high-ranking government officials by the players, and killing off their supporters - there is absolutly no reason why abstracted violence should be treated any differently than graphic violence.

In Ontario, I heard that there is legislation being introduced that restricts 'M' games to minors. While the one of the above argument applies, it's not as important since it does not carry as much weight in Canada. However, 'M' is a "soft" rating meaning that it may be worked around in some special circumstances.

And do the opponents of video game ratings apply their logic consistently? Do they also oppose movie ratings, and age limits on the purchase of porn, cigarettes, alcohol and firearms?

Video game ratings and movie ratings are not the same as age limits for porn, cigarettes, alcohol and firearms. The former are done by the industry, and the latter is done by the government.

If you are talking about opponents to video game legislation, then it's still something different. What is currently being signed into law is a hard restriction that makes no exceptions and keeps smacking head first into first-amendment challenges. Cigarettes, alcohol, firearms and automobiles are unsafe in a person too young - these are restricted as a public safety issue.

The only thing that really counts is the bit about porn - perhaps it is a double standard

Ever wonder why a game you want hasn't made it to the Mac, or the games that you're interested in may lack some features as their PC counterparts?

And if Macs supported games, would you buy one? If yes, then why don't you have one of them new intel Macs dual-booting Win XP? If no, shut up!

According to this article, parents already seem to oversee game purchases.

And anyways, isn't this what the ESRB was started for?

UT2004 at Macworld:

iBook G4 1.42, nVidia go5200 - 14.1 FPS
Macbook 1.83, GMA950 - 17.8 FPS
Powerbook 1.67, Mobility Radeon 9700 - 21.4 FPS
Macbook Pro 2.16, Mobility Radeon X1600 - 63.1 FPS

Your G4's got a Radeon 9600, and I would be surprised if it doesn't match the performance of the Macbook 1.83, if not better it. Why don't you give it a shot and post the results here?

Don't take the Xbench OpenGL scores Ars reports too seriously. In MacWorld's benchmarks with real-world OpenGL (UT2004), the MacBook Pro, with real video, delivered three times the framerate of the MacBook.

I was interested in that myself - it appears that for most things, the Intel graphics are significantly slower than the Radeon 9200 in the PPC Mac Mini (Benchmarks and here)

WRONG... episodic releases are exclusive. The game will be released for both the PS3 and the Xbox 360 on October 16th, 2007. The Xbox version will have "episodic releases" via Xbox Live.

CORRECT: Game will be an XBox360 exclusive, at least until the PS3 ships.

Note October above and November below:

"The full version of the PlayStation 3 will be priced at US$600 in North America and 600 (US$763) in Europe. It will first go on sale in Japan on Nov. 11, followed by North America, Europe and Australasia on Nov. 17."
http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/05/09/playstatio n/index.php

Apple finally broke the chicken and egg problem with their 30" Apple Cinema display. They built dual link into their entire product line in preparation for it's launch.

Jobs also introduced a new 30-inch display. The $3,299 display sports 2560 x 1600 pixel resolution, and works only in the Power Mac G5. It requires a new Nvidia GeForce graphics card in order to work, a $599 card that features dual-link DVI interfaces.

...and finally the latest generation of ultra-high end video cards now mostly support dual link.

From what I understand this new standard will be incapable of driving monitors at resolutions above what these 30" displays can do now. That's nice but DVI is there and prepared to surpass that. Why create a new standard that limits display size to a resolution that was reached a year before the standard is even released, especially when dual link support is finally taking hold and the original limitations of DVI are starting to melt away.

DisplayPort, LVDS, DVI, and HDMI comparison

So Google has made more from Child Porn alone than it's actual net yearly income?

Someone needs a crash course on income vs. revenue. Google's *revenue* is in the $2.25 billion range for a single quarter of a year. If they spent $1.65 billion per quarter in expenses, then their income would be around $600 million. The plaintiff (or whatever he is) is claiming that substantial amounts of *revenue* is coming from child porn.

Source: here

It would be, but that's NOT the kind of virus this was. It only modified executables which had been installed by drag-and-drop. At worst, you might have to re-install the infected apps.

Details: http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/02/17/leapafollo w/index.php

It's pretty obvious from the current Dell situation that Intel has tried to keep AMD out and that's illegal.

Source?

This is one of the best I could find that says Dell sticks with Intel for simplicity of product choices, supply, and they are OK chips. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/23/dell_amd_d efection/

If AMD should sue anybody, they should have sued themselves for not being a good enough chip supplier.

There is this company called Apple. They have made computers since the 70s with various chips in their computers, with none of the being Intel until a couple of products here lately.

Here's some good info regarding that decision: http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/09/15/intelvsamd /index.php

Apple chose intel for their products now, and based on their roadmap. IBMs chip roadmap and ability to meet demand was getting to be an issue.

I'm not brand loyal. I look at price, performance, compatibility, features, etc. Intel is the chip leader at this time for a reason.

1) they have been doing it longer, remember when AMD was just a knockoff of Intel chips?

2) Intel has a compiler division, AMD does not. Intel compilers generate fast code. Their compilers are free for non-commerical use. Their compilers work with Linux.

3) Intel makes motherboards and good specs for what other motherboard companies should do. Do a search sometime for amd motherboard chipset problem.

4) Intel has better manufacturing techniques and can crank out more chips than AMD can.

I have 80+ AMD opteron chips. They are pretty fast. I'm looking to buy a few hundred thousand dollars in equipment soon, and I'm equally looking at AMD Opteron, Intel x86/x86-64, and Intel Itanium chips. For my needs, I'm not sure which would be the best right now.

9th place might get you a playoff spot in the NBA and a shot at the big one, but in computers, 9th place is not so hot

Apple's either betting the company or ... more likely ... throwing in the towel in the computer business. Steve's desperately trying to morph the company into a gadget company and diplomaticly putting lipstick on a pig by quietly surrenduring to Microsoft. Apple will sell only sell computers that run Windows software. The mac eloquent mac faithful will once again sell this as "win" for all artistes and others amoung the dwindling non-windows users, but an overpriced computer with a matching purse will only have a small niche.

The winners? Microsoft and Linux ... leaving the big two to duke it out.

MacWorld lists the Airport as #13 on their anniversary list of top 30 Apple products. So there's a little more recognition.

"This will really help a lot of folks make up their mind whether to move over to the Mac," said Croll. "We think this makes the Mac even more appealing for all those Windows users who are considering the switch."

It would explain why Tevanian - the core guy behind OSX - just left Apple unexpectedly.

My proposal wasn't to encourage a new monopoly around Apple.

You might not want an Apple monopoly, but guess who does? If you think that Apple will pass up any opportunity to lock people into Macs over alternative platforms, you're deluding yourself. The only reason they can get away with it now is that Apple has as little marketshare as Linux.

Using, developing, and evangelizing for Linux right now, other than for your own personal fun, which I can't begrudge, is equivalent to voting for a third party candidate in the U.S. The best choice? Sure. But you're "throwing your vote away."

I would agree with you that Linux would be like a third party candidate if Apple had significantly more marketshare than Linux. But Macs do not represent nearly 50% of the country in the way a losing major party candidate does. They represent less than 5% of personal computers, with Linux not far behind. Furthermore, if Macs did have anything more than 20% of the market, you can be sure that many of Mac's porting problems would be solved by now, and the platforms that we'd need to encourage would be Linux and BSD. So, in reality, OS X and Linux are both "third party" candidates (should we say second?), since their marketshares are pretty similar.

I maintain my claim that people using Apple's closed office suite is a win for openness. Not directly, or immediate, but an important step. If enough people use Word Perfect, Apple's suite, or Star Office, that the general perception of a .doc as a universally readable format appropriate for exchange, archiving, etc decreases, then open standards and open source eventually fill the hole. (Initially, figuratively, in perception, and eventually, literally, in open source market share).

I can see why you're saying what you're saying, but it fails to solve the real problem. Is .doc a problem in itself? The problem is that it's closed. We need to replace that with, not another closed format, but an open one. ODF is what we ought to be pushing, not a second, equally problematic format.

> Microsoft stopped IE for Mac, not the other way around

I may have misremembered that, I won't deny. But I believe the back-room politics that went on were more complex than that. (Sources welcome.)

MS stopped developing IE 5 in 2003. That is (as far as I know) all that the public knows about why it happened, so it is possible (though extremely unlikely, IMHO) that any "back-room politics" happened. Look at it from Microsoft's perspective. That browser was doing nothing for them; they weren't even actively developing IE for Windows at the time! So, they just cut the umbilical cord in 2003 and it died in 2006.

In short, the problem here is that you think OS X is far ahead of Linux both in terms of marketshare and technology. Its marketshare is within a percentage point or two of Linux's. At the moment, I will say Apple has considerably more advanced eye-candy (i.e., a hardware-accelerated windowing system (Quartz)), but beyond that, I see little more that it offers (and Xgl will be catching up with Apple soon). Nearly every problem Linux has that Apple doesn't stem from one (or both) of two things: Apple charges (lots) of money for its computers, and Apple hand-selects the hardware that it software runs on. Linux has to deal with the same problem Microsoft has to solve (running on lots of generic hardware) without the marketshare and clout that Microsoft can use to get hardware manufacturers to develop their own drivers.

As a Linux developer, I want to respect Mac users as well, since I know what it's like to be on the receiving end of software not being ported to your platform. However, the program I'm working on at the moment, while it has been ported from Linux to Windows (partially d

Apple could thrust one hell of a spear into the beast by releasing osx on standard intel now or very quickly [...] Yes of course drivers would be a big issue [...]

Bad drivers (for tons of random hardware) is one of the top five reasons why Windows sucks so hard. Well-written drivers for a limited pool of supported hardware is one of several reasons why Mac OS X works so well. Why on earth would it be a good idea for them to switch from a really successful development model to a terribly problematic one?

Look at it another way: the vast majority of normal people (not this audience of slashdot-reading computer jockeys) aren't going to run out and buy Vista (along with the requisite handfuls of upgrade parts for their PC), they'll "upgrade" to Vista (eventually) by buying a new machine comes with Vista preinstalled. So... why not just buy a Mac instead? The prices are actually fairly comparable to similarly equipped (for example) Dell machines, but the hardware is really nicely integrated, and just plain pretty. And the operating system kicks Microsoft's butt seventeen different ways :-)

Apple could thrust one hell of a spear into the beast by releasing osx on standard intel now or very quickly [...] Yes of course drivers would be a big issue [...]

Bad drivers (for tons of random hardware) is one of the top five reasons why Windows sucks so hard. Well-written drivers for a limited pool of supported hardware is one of several reasons why Mac OS X works so well. Why on earth would it be a good idea for them to switch from a really successful development model to a terribly problematic one?

Look at it another way: the vast majority of normal people (not this audience of slashdot-reading computer jockeys) aren't going to run out and buy Vista (along with the requisite handfuls of upgrade parts for their PC), they'll "upgrade" to Vista (eventually) by buying a new machine comes with Vista preinstalled. So... why not just buy a Mac instead? The prices are actually fairly comparable to similarly equipped (for example) Dell machines, but the hardware is really nicely integrated, and just plain pretty. And the operating system kicks Microsoft's butt seventeen different ways :-)

It seems people who've actually tried HD on a new mini would disagree

http://www.macworld.com/2006/03/firstlooks/minifin al/index.php

For Technique, I recommend none other than Scratch DJ Academy, with Locations in NYC, Miami, and Los Angeles. They have week-long bootcamps in the summertime if you don't live close enough for their once-a-week class. You can learn on your own, but you take the chance of learning things incorrectly and it will take you much, much longer (one hour a week for six weeks equated to six to nine months of on-your-own our instructors told us). My experience there was very positive, I plan to return for more classes.

Tools are all up to you. By definition, DJs just beat-match two tracks together. Old skool DJs are all about vinyl, some are spinning on CD tables now, and some have adopted MP3 time-coded record setups like Scratch Live and Final Scratch.

If you don't have any equipment, you should know that the industry standards for tables are Technics 1200s (every club you might spin in will likely have those), but if you just want to get your feet wet and see if you like it, I'd recommend starting with Neumark's DJ in a Box, which comes with two tables, a mix, and some headphones. The equipment is ghetto for the most part, but for $350 (new) you can get a full setup and see if you're into it instead of dropping $1000-$1500 to see if it's your thing (though you can buy up stuff from Craigslist and eBay from losers who did that before you). My personal preference, since all my music has been MP3 since the late-90s leans towards standard turntables (I like to scratch) and a Serrato Scratch Live to spin my MP3s on vinyl.

If you're talking about musicial composition (you want to make your own electronica), there's a host of products with various specialties. The Apple camp gives you Garage Band free with iLife (free with new Macs) and there are tons of expansion packs. If you outgrow that, you can look at Logic Pro and then Protools when you outgrow that. There are packages for beat making, there are tons of tools on the PC. If you're just starting out and you're a Mac guy, start with Garage band before you look at anything else (go download NIN's "The Hand that Feeds" and remix it like the rest of us did).

It's fun stuff though man, good luck and enjoy.

You might want to wait a bit longer... Macworld notes that native video drivers aren't working yet:

http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/03/16/xponmac/in dex.php

Sorry try this
http://www.macworld.com/forums/ubbthreads/showflat .php?Cat=&Board=newsthread&Number=309449&page=23&v

There not going after nintendo because nintendo can protect themselves in court with thir own patent.
But with sony they will keep losing in courts and have to resort to geting patent office to overturn. but this will take too long and they would lose in courts before the patent is overturned.
But with nintendo they both can protect themselves in cort. Then both have to go to paten office at same time. Hence patents can be proved void at same time.

I wrote about this patent dispute before.
Immersion is making a claim for the principle of linking video to vibrations.
Furthermore making a claim to hold rights to technology that creates different vibrations for different videos eg a crash produces a different vibration to moving over rough ground.

All this technology was seen in Ataris OutRun video machiene 25 years earlier

You can read an article I wrote a while ago at:

http://www.macworld.com/forums/ubbthreads/showflat .php?Cat=&Board=newsthread&Number=309449&page=23&v iew=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1&vc=1

The reason Nintendo arnt being pursued is that they got a patent to protect their controler.
Its got nothing to do with the fact Nintendo has just a sinle vibrating motor at the centre. If this was the case how can immersion be going after video title makers also

The reason Sony is being pursued is that by the time they get the patent office to declare the patent invalid it would be too late.
Like last month when RIM had to pay out to NTP even thouh RIM had got the PTO to declare the patents invalid. The judge couldnt consider that the patents were invaid as it was too late.

I wrote about this patent dispute before.
Immersion is making a claim for the principle of linking video to vibrations.
Furthermore making a claim to hold rights to technology that creates different vibrations for different videos eg a crash produces a different vibration to moving over rough ground.

All this technology was seen in Ataris OutRun video machiene 25 years earlier

You can read an article I wrote a while ago at:

http://www.macworld.com/forums/ubbthreads/showflat .php?Cat=&Board=newsthread&Number=309449&page=23&v iew=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1&vc=1 [macworld.com]

The reason Nintendo arnt being pursued is that they got a patent to protect their controler.
Its got nothing to do with the fact Nintendo has just a sinle vibrating motor at the centre. If this was the case how can immersion be going after video title makers also

The reason Sony is being pursued is that by the time they get the patent office to declare the patent invalid it would be too late.
Like last month when RIM had to pay out to NTP even thouh RIM had got the PTO to declare the patents invalid. The judge couldnt consider that the patents were invaid as it was too late.

You can read an article I wrote a while ago at:

http://www.macworld.com/forums/ubbthreads/showflat .php?Cat=&Board=newsthread&Number=309449&page=23&v iew=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1&vc=1

The reason Nintendo arnt being pursued is that they got a patent to protect their controler.

The reason Sony is being pursued is that by the time they get the patent office to declare the patent invalid it would be too late.
Like last month when RIM had to pay out to NTP even thouh RIM had got the PTO to declare the patents invalid. The judge couldnt consider that the patents were invaid as it was too late.

BTW the only announced pricing I have seen is at least $1000.
http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/03/09/umpc/index .php
"Samsung plans to put the Q1 on sale in Europe before the end of June. The device will cost around 1,000 (US$1,190), it said."

Exactly what does this get you that a tiny subnotebook would not? Except looking like a dork as you stand around using it. Even using my PDA to read a lot, I prefer to sit down. If you are sitting down, a small notebooks is better has a real keyboard, holds itself up even in your lap to watch movies etc. With a tablet you have to hold it. Compare the size of the Samsung UMPC to the Sony VAIO. Almost the same, I would much rather have the Sony. Fold it and throw it in a bag. This thing will get scratched unless you carry it in a case....

Size:
Samsung Q1 UMPC: 779g 230mm x 140mm 7-inch touchscreen LCD
VAIO PCG-C1MSX: 998g 249mm x 152mm 8.9" LCD (only slightly bigger but real keyboard, bigger screen)

Jpgs:
http://www.engadget.com/media/2006/03/samsung_q1.j pg
http://www.transmetazone.com/articleimages/transva ioc1msx_perpspec2.jpg

More stuff on the VAIO, I think this one never made it to North america, but the could bring it back using the UMPC chips:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1 058

Put the same processor in each, which would you rather have, tablet or submini notebook?

This dispells a few myths about the chip.

More video RAM means more windows open with less swapping etc.. This is far, far more important to me and many Mac mini users than hardcore 3D game performace.

Look on the bright side, still better than the 4200 parallel ATA in previous minis.

There's some comments in the Ars Technica forum following the article which says that Spotlight indexes the data from your old machine, causing it to be a bit busy. Once that's over, you should be up to full speed (which they cite from the MacWorld review of a 2.0GHz MacBook Pro).

Macworld unscientific test (dvd playing) put the g4 at 4 minutes longer battery than the mac book pro.

They also have some benchmarks

http://www.macworld.com/2006/02/firstlooks/macbook firstlook/index.php

I suspect batterlife will varry depending if your running a native intel app vs a rosetta interpreted (ppc) app.

Here are some of the references. And your are right, it doesn't make any of the
situations less rediculous.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/08/15 6250
http://www.creative.com/zenpatent/
http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/08/30/creativeca ll/index.php
http://us.gizmodo.com/gadgets/portable-media/creat ive-set-to-sue-apple-your-mom-142104.php

• Some times people dismiss MacOS X (or Linux or any other platform, even some times Windows) based on false or dated information. It is true that lots of people wouldn't be able to do their work in an OS different from Windows, as you said. But in some cases, the people just don't know about the alternatives. For example, I have found several people who are surprised to know that there is Microsoft Office for the Mac, or Matlab, or Adobe's products.

Another example: All the mayor commercial medical image software packages run on Win 2000 or XP, and the most sofisticated ones cost $30,000 to $80,000 per station, so hospitals rarely have more than two of those. But it so happens that the best program in the sub $10,000 range is the one that I linked to before, a free, open source program that is Mac only, and that rivals even the high end ones in many tasks. Radiologists are going nuts over it because that gives them the possibility of having a DICOM workstation on every desktop (especially if you pair it with equivalent hardware, which costs around $6,000 to $8,000).

A final, more generic example: I frequently find people stubbornly using old, expensive proprietary software for which there are free alternatives that do a better job on Windows. They continue to use their old software because it's what they are used to and they just don't know there are better alternatives out there. That is precisely the problem in my workplace: we use Windows because before I came no one ever though that they had an option. We don't use any software for which there are no good Mac equivalents. Of course, I acknowledge that that's not the case everywhere.

• I won't change your mid, I know, but if your Mac experience was pre-Panther, let me tell you that things have changed a lot in the last three years. And also remember that the new Intel Macs will run Vista, so finally we will have a machine that can run MacOS X, Linux and Windows at native speeds. Regarding the cost, yes, Macs are more expensive, but not as much as you think if you make a careful comparison.
• And finally, I think you don't know about installing and uninstalling most programs in MacOS X: The program come in disk images (something like virtual thumb drives). The programs appear to be a single file. (They are actually a directory, but most users are oblivious to that fact). You can put that "package" anywhere, or even leave it in the image. To uninstall, you drag that package to the trash. You don't have to run an installer or an uninstaller. The program may create a preference file for each user and maybe cache files in perfectly specified places, but you don't have to erase them because they don't interfere with the rest of the system. The most important part is: they don't install anything like DLL files outside the package, and there will be no conflict with other versions of such a DLL file; also, they don't alter a systemwide database such as the registry, because such thing doesn't exist. Programs like this range from little utilities to full blown packages.

The prices aren't bloated (OK, maybe a bit for the high end PowerMacs but everything else is very reasonable). That article doesn't go too deep into how much time you spend maintaining Windows. If your time is worth anything, then there is really no comparison.

A second correction to your point 2 rebuttal is that OS X has never supported USB booting. This is a common misconception (http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/2005/06/u sbharddrives/index.php). There is even a knowledge base article about it somewhere. Only the newest Intel-based machines will support USB booting (http://theory.isthereason.com/?p=724).

Um, technically, "years" would be "at least two years", wouldn't it? I'm *sure* that would be untrue... all you have to do is check any Apple history website to see that you recall incorrectly. I think that there was a just over a year there where the only 'upgrades' were a price drop and a speed bump, but that counts as an upgrade, right? Actually, from my reading of the timeline, it looks like it was just almost exactly a year. Way to freaking long for a relatively small speed bump, but it was an upgrade. I think they started shipping with more memory for the same price at some point in there, too... usually when the hardware can't really be upgraded, there's at least a price drop or something.

Not that I'm wanting to defend Apple on the Powerbook here. It's been hobbled by the G4 and has not been really great-looking as a result since early 2005, but I'm not sure we can blame Apple for that... Freescale and IBM just failed to produce the chips they'd said they were going to, and both Intel and AMD started cramming P4s and other hot chips into laptops despite their power drain problems, then came up with some decent lower-power chips, which was actually somewhat unexpected I think. It was really just this past year that Powerbook sales started to suffer as a result.

Anyway, all I am saying that Apple does generally update their machines every six to eight months or so, or as changes in hardware allow... it's just that up until now, they've had to wait for IBM and Freescale, and that's grown to be a long, long wait... unacceptably long, so much so that Intel became an inevitable choice. I really *hate* defending Apple like that, but it sucks to see people talking trash about how Apple never updates their hardware when it's just not true, I felt I had to refute those simply incorrect statements. We should be knocking companies for things they *do*, ( like arbitrarily deciding which upgrade release means Quicktime users have to pay another $49 for a Pro version again ) , not stuff they don't do.

No, you are making the same mistake this guy made. You are severely underestimating what the MacBook Pro includes. You will find a more equilibrated comparison here, although admittedly that guy is comparing to an Inspiron 9400.

So, to return to your chosen model, you will need to add: WinXP Pro (come one, don't tell me Media Center edition actually is good enough for you!) ($149), the a/b/g wireless card ($25), Bluetooth ($49).

That brings the price (after rebates) to roughly $1600, but you still are missing a load of things that aren't an option on the Dell's website: an integrated webcam that's actually very good, faster Ethernet, better audio options (digital in/out, and I don't see any info about microphone or integrated speakers in the Dell), light sensors and illuminated keyboard (that's actually useful), remote control (you need to downgrade to Media Center edition to get the honor of configuring one), Magsafe, and a truckload of software that doesn't suck. Oh, and the Mac will run Vista, but the Dell will require nasty hacks to run Leopard.

In the end you are right, the Dell is still cheaper. But not nearly as by much as you think.