Slashdot Mirror

Doesn't matter anyhow. It's not like Apple is going to be a market player anyhow without iTunes...only 4.5% of the desktop market anyhow- not enough to worry about unless you're Steve J., or an Apple fanboy. (http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/07/20/halo/inde x.php)
Anything else is just hype and FUD.

RIM shares were up almost one per cent on Friday trading on the TSX. Analysts and fund managers who hold RIM shares say its looks increasingly likely that RIM will settle its ongoing patent dispute with NTP Inc. of Virginia, rather than see the service blacked out.

Also, one of TFA includes no information that would justify the comment that the USPTO is under pressure from congressmen to speed up its process of looking into the NTP patents. From the TFA:

The U.S. represents about 70 per cent of the BlackBerry market, and the prospect that a judge would issue an injunction closing down the service has business executives and political leaders wondering how they will get along without the devices. The U.S. government has even joined the dispute, arguing that BlackBerry's are vital to national security.

Right around the time the parties will be meeting in Judge Spencer's courtroom, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) may be moving toward a final resolution of the NTP patents at the heart of this dispute. Last December, the office issued another set of preliminary rulings that found NTP's patents to be invalid. NTP's response is due by Feb. 28. A report this week by analysts at investment banker Goldman Sachs noted that "NTP must prove that these patents contain new inventions on several key patents by Feb. 28 or face the PTO permanently rejecting the patents," the authors wrote. "If the PTO issues final rejections on any or all of the five NTP patents, this could change the course of the lawsuit. To the extent that patents are ruled invalid, we believe that it is likely that this would be considered by the District Court."

This article from the register show's how the new Intel Macs are only 1/4 faster (rather then 2-4 times faster as Jobs claimed) then their powerpc equivilants.

Full report here. Ouch! Iphoto is actually slower for some operations.

Slightly more ontopic - I've been reading that the mere presence of the fat binaried itunes on a powerpc mac can cause the disk utility not to run - stripping intel code from the binary fixes the problem.

Though it is becoming less and less inelegant, particularly with the inclusion of Vanderpool technology in the chips that the new macs are based on, you'll be better able to virtualize each OS into its own little world and not have to worry about some of the traditional costs of emulation, possibly...

Moreover, if you setup the systems to boot simultaneously then the startup lag you mention will barely be noticed -- especially given that OS X is reported to boot much more quickly on intel hardware than on the previous PPC hardware, the overall user experience will not be compromised, potentially if one simul-boots the two OS's side by side via some sort processor virtualization scheme. And with that, I have completely reached the limit (and stepped over) that which I can claim to know or understand on this topic =)

You can't boot OS X from a USB drive, dumbass. That was my whole point.

This article
http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/05/09/uwbbluetoo th/index.php

Dicusses the use of Bluetooth as a mediator between the different UWB implementations.

Will the Belkin/Freescale units interoperate with future products using Intel Wimedia? Or is the proposal in the MacWorld article just what is needed for speedier and wireless USB connections?

Any info on the security implications of carrying your precious "data" around on a high-speed wireless usb key?

Other than that I'd be very pleased to diminish the rats nest of cables and be able to place things like scanners independent of the computers location.

Note to self... mac guys are vicous... never talk down steve jobs with perceived common sense (common sense for computer nerds that is!) without absolute proof or risk get modded down to hell!

I personally thought it was common sense that the intel dual core processors were not 2-3x then the last generation of g5 processors. Here is why:

1)Intel's dualcore on pc has been less efficient then amd's. AMD's dual core at best came to about 70-80% efficiency. Intel's is worse so your not definately not getting 2x the performance.
2)The PPC970 (or whatever the latest version of the G5 was) by ibm is hella more ipc then the p4 and is probably near that of the yonah which is core used in the new dual core chips for apples.
3)Ars Technica (cpu analyzation gods of the interweb said so a week ago and the article was posted on this site).
4) This article supports that theory:
http://www.macworld.com/2006/01/features/imaclabte st1/index.php
Even among cpu heavy tests (filtration ones) we are seeing a increase of 1.84x on the best test. It's pretty safe to say that the average performance increase is not 2-3x, eh?

Also it seems one of my grandchilds (thread wise! i got no real kids!) of the modded down post mentioned his G4 laptop. Well that certainly is interesting but the G4 is vastly inferior to the G5 so that is expected. Not to mention numerous chipset and ram improvements to go along with it.

CPU benchmarks lie.

All they deal with is how fast a chip can do raw maths, not how fast a computer will perform real-world tasks. For a more true picture on how the new Intel iMac squares up against the older G5 iMac check out this article.

In real world activities for Intel native binaries the Intel Core Duo iMac scores on average only between 20% and 30% faster than the speed of the single-core G5 iMac - which is somewhat less than the 2x improvement. The absolute best improvement they got was 84% faster. I'd expect better improvement had they put a dual core G5 in there instead.

Performance of Rosetta translated PowerPC code was less than half the G5. This is pretty bad.

The Core Duo makes some sense in the MacBook, but not so much for the iMac or other desktop Macs right now.

At least not until we know for certain what's going to happen to their lens-system.

Here is an article that says, in part, http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/01/19/konica/ind ex.php/ that "Sony plans to use the Konica Minolta Maxxum/Dynax lens mount on these digital SLR cameras." It goes on to say that "Konica Minolta said the ability of existing customers to use their lenses with future cameras is one advantage of transferring the digital SLR work to Sony."
I think you are safe buying from Sony since it seems that all the existing Minolta lenses will still work on Sony's camera bodies.

In regards to the last sentence of the original post:

          "I'm still waiting for the most important benchmark: frames per second in molten core combat."

I just found the following posted in the MacWorld Editor's Notes (http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/2006/01/m waftermath/index.php):

          "Blizzard Entertainment was showing off a development build of World of Warcraft, its popular online role-playing game for Mac and PC, running on a 17-inch Core Duo iMac, and the results were impressive. Frame rates were considerably higher than an iMac G5, with averages running anywhere from mid-40s to mid-50s depending on the complexity of the scene, with almost all graphics options turned on."

Very interesting.

MacWorld covered many of these questions.

See http://www.macworld.com/2006/01/features/intelfaq2 006/index.php

(particularly the bottom of the page "Does this mean that Open Firmware is dead?")

What? You never tried this script http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/mac911/2005/08/ful lscreen/index.php You can watch fullscreen videos in Quicktime without paying a dime. Personally, I think mplayer isn't as good as quicktime in video playback. You can't seek to any position in video as easily as in Quicktime. Also, in QT you can pause the video and use your mouse-wheel to loop the interesting bits as many times as you want. Makes my pr0n viewing experience more enjoyable, especially considering the fact that you can use one hand :-)

One friend described the show as the iPod cover show. In fact the entire show should have just been called iPodWorld :(

vs

"This is Mac-world," Jobs said in emphasizing that Tuesday would be about Mac hardware and software and not at all about the music player that's had such a vital role in bolstering Apple's fortunes. And so it was that the iPod, usually at the center of any Apple news event, went through the day without a single update or new release.

MacWorld Article

Hrmmm... one of you is lying.

http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/2006/01/mi nistore/index.php?lsrc=mwrss

(I'm not happy about this being the default, it's not the normal "do the right/safe thing by default" that has been Apple's basic rule for features...)

        dave

I really don't think there are that many people drinking the MS kool aid. People have been switching to Apple desktops and *nix servers fairly steadily, but you're not going to see an overnight change because the cost of migration is so high

I'd say you're drinking the Slashdot kool-aid. Apple desktop market share is not growing in any significant way - still below 3%, and Windows Server 2000/2003 is gaining market share against *nix.

You can read the details here if you want but the point is that Mac sales are going up pretty rapidly and market share is sort of an inaccurate way to judge it for many reasons. As long as market share includes business purchases that typically don't favor Macs, then it's going to skew things against the Mac considerably.

Japan has been a hard market for M$ to break into. Like you said maybe when they release Halo 3, sales will pick up.

Here's another reference: Lukewarm Sales

the likelihood that this product will ever make it retail: very low you'd be much better off recycling an old laptop LCD screen to display a live RSS feed. Possible ways to do this: http://www.macmod.com/content/view/210/2 http://www.macworld.com/2004/08/features/thenextdo ityourselfmac/index2.php the ways to network this vary, bluetooth is the best alternative so long as distance isn't an issue, obviously cables would be too cumbersome, so an AirPort Card would be nice..a possible solution would be to mount the laptop whole and use it's AirPort Connection: http://www.macmod.com/content/view/467/1/ from here, it's a simple matter to use Apple Remote Desktop to log in to your laptop, and make it behave however you want...best part: you don't have to wipe your bum with ink! Now if only I had an extra ibook to sacrifice for this project. ________ Farty Pat probably will never get laid Hardware: iBook G3 500Mhz/640 MB RAM Nomad IIc .mp3 player 192MB Overactive pyloric sphincter. Bonzai!

...where "???" in this context is apparently "file a patent on hierarchical menus (!!!), almost literally identical in every way to the menu system iPod has used for several years prior". (And, if Creative's patent covers iPod's interface elements, then why were they also not denied their patent because of a preexisting Microsoft patent, as Apple was?)

Seriously, look at this thing:

Zen Vision:M demo

Click "Be entertained". and mouse over some of the items in the room. EVERY feature, except the FM tuner, is ripped off directly from iPod, and even looks almost identical to iPod. Every bit of the interface has iPod written all over it. Menu names, screen layout, and so on.

Product page

Specifications

(Not to mention that the Zen weighs 20% more: 5.8 vs 4.8 oz)

But what's missing?

Elegant integration with software (mostly iTunes, but also things like iPhoto, iMovie, and so on).

That, and about 92% market share.

he Apple market share is small, so there is less incentive for competitors to develop alternative products to Apple's own OS, media player, etc. Unlike Microsoft, Apple does not need to do anything to stymie or eliminate competition.


What about the Konfabulator/Dashboard story?

iTunes Music Store is using Web Objects. Macworld reports in this article that it runs on Xserve and Xserve RAID and every investor knows Akamai (AKAM) is the bandwidth provider.

Its interesting, irritating, and I guess expected. When an op-ed for a newspaper puts out financial numbers the post subject is fact. But when Merrill Lynch, one of the countries biggest financial institution puts out a report, Slashdot has a "?" to it. Check it out here.

What is the difference you ask? Well one doesn't say MS sucks and the other does. One compares both PS3/Xbox with numbers and the other doesn't give any. Anyone interested in more accurate PS3/Xbox 360 breakdown you can go here (or here to get the chart). Again these numbers are according to Merrill Lynch a leading investment firm, (not a newspaper or an op-ed).

Take a look at them before you flame me.

Meryl Lynch reported that the Xbox 360 could be as low as $250 this spring and MS would still make a profit. The revolution won't be out that soon, and when it does come out, chances are MS will only be charging a couple hundred dollars at the most. So unless the revolution starts at $100 at release, it will most likely be the same or more then the Xbox 360.

http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/11/03/console/in dex.php

Sony's design isn't going after most women with the PS3, but to be fair they are doing lots of things different (no x-box live-style service, taking huge losses for years on each sale of the system, etc.).

http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/10/20/esa/index. php

it will supposedly only run on Apple-made Intel hardware. you won't be able to buy a cheap PC from wal-mart and simply install os X on it, at least not unless you hack the thing apart first. see this faq for a quick introduction

to disable spotlight try spotless

and instructions on disabling dashboard.

System Requirements: (...) Windows 2000 or Windows XP

What's your point with the question, "All I have ever known is that to download music to your iPod or purchase music for your iPod you had to use iTunes - no execptions. Even books bought through audible.com needs iTunes to dowload the books to the iPod last time I looked"

Is it Apple's problem then that no one else writes programs to load music onto an iPod? How about Yamipod? I mean, what else are they going to do? Rely on Microsoft to write a program to upload music to their MP3 player? Does it bother you then that Sony uses SonicStage, Dell uses MusicMatch, and Creative uses Creative Media Source?

What's the problem with iTunes? Because it's free? Because it's crappy? Does that mean you don't use IE, either? Apple bought iTunes when it was called SoundJam, then released it as iTunes; and when it was first released, it was compatible with Rio, Creative, and Sony MP3 players; it was a generic MP3 jukebox written for Mac users because no one else would provide a decent one (sound familiar? Developers tend to forget about the Mac, so Apple usually takes it upon themselves to provide decent programs to their user base). Even as far back as last year, iTunes was compatible with OTHER mp3 players. I'm not sure if they still are, but I don't see why Apple would remove that functionality.

So why do we have to use iTunes? Because no one else (Microsoft, Creative, Sony, Dell, etc) is willing to write iPod compatible software. Only third parties who don't make MP3 players do.

So maybe I'll try again. You're asking, "Do I have to use iTunes to use an iPod?"

The answer is, "No you don't have to use iTunes to use an iPod". There are even WinAMP plugins for the iPod and people have also written tools to allow Windows Media Player to synch with the iPod. Why are you blaming Apple for the lack of iPod support from Microsoft and others? The iPod doesn't use secret sauce: All it does is create a database of all the songs to enable quick ID3 tag browsing without spinning up the harddrive, and it stores all the songs in a hash-table on the iPod to maximize efficiency and minimize tree depth.

More info on iTunes with other players.

Aspyr just announced today that it will be publishing Civ 3 Complete and Civ 4. Civ 3 has been on the Mac for awhile now and this looks like just a new edition which includes the two expansion packs. Civ 4 unfortunately won't be available until early 2006. Announcment at MacCentral

The number of reports is too large to discount, but plenty of people are saying there's no problem. It seems that some fraction of nanos are affected, but not all of them.

There was a problem with broken screens that Apple said will be replaced here. As for crazy scratches... perhaps they'll settle again. I seriously doubt the plaintiffs will get anything close to the battery settlement.

Hmmm... all of your links contain content from this year.

Are you an idiot? What about 2002/11 don't you understand in that link? Let me spell it out for you: in 2002, Jim Heid published a book called "The Macintosh Digital Hub". Here you go: Macworld 2002 Keynote. After 30 seconds of googling, I was able to find that article, which places the original reference from Apple as Steve Jobs' Macworld 2001 keynote. Or here are live notes from the 2001 Macworld keynote (which was in January, 2001, I might add).

Also, "years" means more than one. Look it up.

"Microsoft has been working on a digital hub strategy for close to 10 years." Ha. I worked at WebTV. I did presentations in the Microsoft Home. Their strategy has been all over the map. They have tried everything they can to weasel their way out of the computer room and into the living room. I wouldn't call it much of a strategy. Apple's Digital Hub strategy has been pretty focused and consistent: they want to manage all of your digital media, from music to photos to DVD. Apple says a lot of things that are inconsistent ("no video ipod"), but unlike Microsoft or Intel, if you actually follow what they *do* and not what they say, they are very consistent and have a very coherent strategy.

(oops, sorry - the second blockquote was dated July 21, 2005, referring to a report from Jupiter Reports, as reported in Macworld.

you're going cite the case where someone was charged (not convicted, just charged) for downloading dvd ripping software?

So is your argument that "it's not illegal if you don't get caught"? How do you know that the FBI isn't going to make an example of you next?

you'll cement your argument by documenting how there are no successful commercial products that require 3rd-party dvd-ripping software, such as the presumably non-existent Roxio Popcorn software (oh yeah, everyone uses Popcorn for ripping those non-copyprotected dual-layer dvds that they uh, produced themselves, and then uh, lost the original files, and then uh..??)

For one thing, System requirements: Mac. For another thing: "Popcorn copies DVD-Video discs, though Roxio is careful to point out that Popcorn does not copy encrypted or copy protected DVDs -- in other words, almost all of the commercial movies sold on DVD at retail stores." So where can I obtain such "3rd-party dvd-ripping software" without any laws being broken?

By contrast, since the fair use doctrine is not a defense to the act of gaining unauthorized access to a work, the act of circumventing a technological measure in order to gain access is prohibited.

One of the conditions of access to the work imposed by the copyright owners is that you play the disc only on DVD Video players licensed by the DVD Forum.

Or just maybe, one single device with one power adaptor and cord that goes that goes to a a spot on my desk. To make it even better, maybe design it so that all I have to do is set my smaller devices together near that spot on the desk and they would charge without my having to mess with all those incompatable and different connectors. Oh wait maybe I should just RTFA and look at the pretty picture.

Excellent link from the parent -- I have an electric toothbrush that charges the same way and I've always wondered how efficient it is. Apparently it isn't much worse than traditional adapters used for phones and such: about 70%.

However, if you look at the photo of the splashpower base, it looks as though the base itself uses an AC adapter (the cord appears to have a male DC-power connector). If that's the case then you really have to hits in the chain, and the system is ultimately 50% efficient (.7 for the adapter that powers the base, times .7 for the "remote" charging.) Right?

If video editing on the Mac is dead, and this is why Adobe pulled Premiere...

Why does Adobe continue to update AfterEffects on the Mac?

Probably, because AfterEffects is a viable product. Premiere died because it was too lame to compete with FCP. On Windows, the competition is lighter, so it survived there. But FinalCut-using editors still use AE for finishing, because it's a genuinely useful program.

Same thing with Maya. It's the best 3D package on the Mac. And the Mac accounts for about 25% of Alias' Maya sales. If Autodesk kills it, it'll be to their detriment.

According to this story at Macworld and the official MIT site, they will have 1 gig of RAM. Which should be more than enough for a stripped-down version of Linux.

Lynxpro, you hit the nail on the head... Intel may openly bless HD-DVD, but Apple's support of Blu-Ray, coupled with Apple's partnership with Intel means that Intel is going to wind up supporting Blu-Ray in some capacity -- at least as a supplier to Apple.

1. It's hard to pin down how many Linux installations there are, let alone users (or desktop installs.) But, people are trying.
   
   
2. It's hard to find the fraction of Linux users that play games. Some work can be done to estimate that.
   
   
3. Given some (probably unreasonable) estimates of the above, however, you can figure it out yourself.
   
   
4. Whatever the customer base for a Linux WoW, it has come a long way.
   

Steve Jobs recently addressed this issue:

Jobs also addressed questions on features that some of Apple's competitors are offering in their MP3 players, like having a radio tuner built-in. While many see adding a radio to an iPod as a useful extra feature, Apple's feedback is less vociferous than the noise generated by the company's critics, Jobs confirmed.

"We don't get a lot of customers asking for it," he said.

Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller pointed out that iPods now offer radio on demand. "Thanks to podcasting you can listen to radio shows whenever you want to," he said.

Jobs also warned of the challenge of offering extra features just for the sake of it, saying. "We are very careful about what features we add because we can't take them away."

The parent post mocks exactly the subject at hand. Authors & Publishers can also opt out of the Google Print search engine. Yet they are suing Google anyways. Here's a quote from macworld article: "Google does allow copyright holders to exclude their books from the program. However, traditionally, content users must have affirmative authorization from a copyright owner to use the copyrighted material, said Terence Ross, a partner and copyright law specialist at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, a Washington, D.C., law office. "Merely saying that if we don't hear from you we assume it's okay has never been accepted by any court and I doubt it would ever be accepted," he said. " http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/09/21/googleprin t/index.php I think Ross's point of view is rubbish.

To turn things around... Do you think all other consumer electronics companies are perfect and have never had class-action action suits filed against them?

London-based mi2g Intelligence Unit on Tuesday released a report that says Mac OS X and Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) Unix are the "world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environments." Linux operating systems offer the worst track record, according to mi2g, with Windows coming in second.

http://www.macworld.com/news/2004/11/02/mi2g/index .php

I just got the most recent issue of macworld

*goes to look for link*
Flip4Mac

You will have to fork over $10, but it will give you the abliity to play wmv files in quicktime.
Hope that helps!

Mod parent up. Here's an article about the Ricoh RDC-i700, dated 3/18/2002:

http://www.macworld.com/news/2002/03/18/ricoh/inde x.php

And a review from CNet, dated 6/28/2001:

http://reviews.cnet.com/Ricoh_RDC_i700/4505-6501_7 -6346147-2.html?tag=glance

Apple, on the other hand, has a lot more options
...
Culpepper said that generally the rule for a patent is the party that invented it first and then diligently worked toward building the product is going to get the patent.

Note, I personally do not think this is even worthy of a patent. Though if anyone is to get this patent, it should certainly be Apple who not only came up with the "idea", but also turned it into a viable consumer product. I don't think any "ideas" should be allowed to be patented. IMO, a company should not only have to come up with an idea/innovation, but should also have to implement it into a product ready for consumer "consumption". Anything short of that is just a thought IMO and certainly should not be allowed monopoly protection. I have tons of thoughts and some of them actually make sense, should I be allowed to pay some money and stop others from having the same freaking thought and implementing that thought? Damn, patents are broken!

The President of Creative explicitly stated in a later press conference that they do not intend to focus on going after Apple. Creative will focus on competing with products. However, Creative certainly will keep the patent option open and they refuse to comment on whether they have involved Apple in private discussions on the matter.

Source

http://share.skype.com/
http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/08/24/skype/inde x.php

"Intel processors provide more performance per watt than PowerPC processors do, said Jobs. "When we look at future roadmaps, mid-2006 and beyond, we see PowerPC gives us 15 units of performance per watt, but Intel's roadmap gives us 70. And so this tells us what we have to do," he explained."
"Starting next year, we will introduce Macs with Intel processors," said Jobs. "This time next year, we plan to ship Macs with Intel processors. In two years, our plan is that the transition will be mostly complete, and will be complete by end of 2007."