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April Fools Day is an absolute nightmare for a news guy like me, because its become a grand tradition for some companies that use the Internet as one of their primary methods of communication to send out phony press releases announcing products that dont really exist or new services they have no intention of offering. By the end of the day, Im usually shell-shocked at trying to figure out the real stuff from the hoaxes. And I always wake up on this day just a bit gunshy.

Clear your screen
The price alone is priceless
Smoooth
Jobs joins IKEA
Into the Woods

Xserve shipments soar 119 percent

And on the storage side:

Oracle endorses, uses Xserve RAID (2)

And I can only speak for ourselves, but we're using Xserves in our datacenter, but not for serving Macs or Mac heavy networks: just as general purpose UNIX servers, with very nice administrative capabilities.

Xserve shipments soar 119 percent

And on the storage side:

Oracle endorses, uses Xserve RAID (2)

And I can only speak for ourselves, but we're using Xserves in our datacenter, but not for serving Macs or Mac heavy networks: just as general purpose UNIX servers, with very nice administrative capabilities.

Why not just link to a reference. As far as I can tell, the story is really dull, it looks like people are mad at him for reselling furniture. ...!... BFD

The really funny thing is, they'll continue to deny it in the face of things like this and this.

That's why I took a couple week hiatus from even posting here. That, and the fact that after hundreds of points of positive moderation, all it took was a couple of factually correct posts in a story about John Gilmore modded down to "-1, Troll" to get me literally banned[1] from posting to slashdot for a week.

Real nice.

[1] And yes, that really is the full story. These posts - 1, 2, 3 - got me banned from posting, even as three other posts in the same story got moderated to +5: 1, 2, 3. Sure, I could have worked my way around the "ban", but what's the fucking point? To post to a place where you're not wanted and opposing ideas are shouted down?

Hmm, I beg to differ.

POWER is not an older artitecture, but a contemporary server architecture, in contract to PPC's desktop architecture.

This article, linked from the Power Architecture Resource Center site, imples that the PPC970, aka G5, is derived from the POWER4 artictecture:

... Sinharoy noted during his presentation that the PowerPC 970, the processor that drives Apple's G5, was derived from the Power4 design, suggesting that such a step would be logical again as IBM engineers refine the Power5 design. The PowerPC 970 strips one processor core from the Power4 design and also includes several other connection and multiprocessing sacrifices to make the chip small and affordable enough for desktop use.

Therefore, porting from PowerPC (G5) to POWER (5) would be like porting to run on the PPC G6+, which sounds useful to me, at least!

Right after Apple released the iMac back in 1998, everyone started jumping on the "all-in-one" PC thing again. A new company at the time, eMachines, tried to market a near copy of it called the eOne PC. They were slapped with injunctions in the US and Tokyo shortly after that and later forced to stop production.

The review for the eOne is still up on epinions, along with a stock photo: eOne Photo

Daewoo tried something similar. They both got the smack down. See here.

Do you remember when Cobalt Networks was about to sue Apple over the Cube? Because of Cobalt's Qube design? Only to find out a few months later Apple owned NeXT at that point, which created the original Cube. At that point Cobalt changed their tune and decided suing might not be so smart. Some Cobalt info.

The reason for suing is brand dilution. When you make a look-a-like, you're copying a design that's identified with the product. It's the same reason stores brand soda tries to have similar color schemes to Coke, or Pepsi. You identify the product by the colors, shapes and patterns of the packaging or product itself.

I get what the Taiwanese company is doing. They would have been better off sticking to knock off Nintendo games though. I'd guarantee Apple already knows about the knock off at this point, and we'll probably be seeing lawsuits within a week or two.

According to several developers Macworld talked to who are currently working on OS X applications, anytime the OS can take advantage of the AltiVec engine, it does. This ensures that the parts of the OS that can utilize AltiVec, such as working in the new user interface, experience a significant increase in performance.

Too bad the story submitter and the slashdot editors have worked together to give us a dollar amount an label it a server unit number, but still.... when looking at server deployments, I'm going to guess that if you're just looking for percent increases in units shipped, nobody this past year is going to beat XServe numbers.

These statistics are always hard to digest, though... what segment of the server market are we talking about, what constitutes a server, is that UnixTM or does BSD/Darwin count, etc... I always have more questions than such articles are prepared to answer.

Still, any increase in Linux sales is good news.

Media Centers and digital video players

Oppenheimer articulated Apple's current philosophy when it comes to "media center" computers -- PCs designed to work in the living room as a component of a home entertainment system, recording video, playing back music and more. While Oppenheimer admitted some consumers may be interested in media center PCs and that a Mac mini might be suitable, he said that "most customers" would prefer to have a more powerful computer in their office or den and leverage wireless networking to stream content to their home entertainment system.

As a practical example, Oppenheimer pointed to AirTunes -- a feature of iTunes that works in conjunction with Apple's AirPort Express wireless networking hub. The AirPort Express features an audio jack that can connect to the home entertainment system using a mini jack or a digital optical cable. Music can then be streamed from the computer playing iTunes to the stereo.

The iPod won't be getting video capabilities any time soon if current players are any indication, said Oppenheimer. Today's crop of portable media viewers are too bulky to carry as comfortably as the iPod, yet have screens he said are too small to enjoy a movie the same way you would on a TV or laptop. "Our view is that they've failed in the marketplace," said Oppenheimer.

Umm...Timbuktu used to recover stolen iMac

"Quartz uses the PDF drawing model for imaging"

"Quartz - Adobe Imaging Model (PDF)"

Quartz - "Display PDF"

"Quartz is Mac OS X's new 2D graphics system based on Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF)."

But perhaps the best source would be Apple itself:
"Based on version 1.4 of the Portable Document Format (PDF) specification the same standard that drives the professional publishing industry Quartz is the name for Panthers revolutionary composited windowing system. Take one glance at the Panther screen and youll see crisp graphics, anti-aliased text, liquid transparency, and photo-realistic drop shadows. The technology behind this unparalleled graphic rendering quality is Quartz.

Uncompromised beauty
Even when you print or save to a PDF file, the Quartz engine makes sure the quality of your image is never compromised. Your PDF file or your printed document retains its transparency and 3-dimensional elements so that it looks just as its supposed to look.

From PostScript to PDF
Using industry-leading PostScript-to-PDF conversion technology, Panther translates Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) and PostScript data to high-quality PDF. Because this technology is integrated into Quartz, any Panther application can benefit from it by drawing images on screen from high-resolution PostScript/EPS data instead of low-resolution bitmap. And this also means that you can print PostScript-quality documents on all printers, even on non-PostScript devices by always using hi-res data Panther makes sure your documents always look their best, no matter what printer you use."

Another one from Apple:
"Quartz is a powerful graphics system which forms the foundation of the imaging model for Mac OS X . Quartz offers a sophisticated two-dimensional drawing engine and an advanced windowing environment. Quartz's feature-rich drawing engine leverages the Portable Document Format (PDF) drawing model and offers Mac OS X applications professional-strength drawing functionality. Quartz's windowing services provide low-level functionality like window buffering, event handling/dispatch as well as dynamically creating the translucency and drop shadow effects found in the Aqua user interface."

Um, Apple deliberately killed off OS9 bootability years ago. You know, something about getting rid of support for that old obsolete OS in favor of the OS they're putting 100% of their effort into for the last three years or so... if you want to keep using your old (and I would assume, since it's so old) unsupported software, keep using your old machine. Nobody's stopping you. However, If you'd like to join the 21st century with it's promises of proper memory management, system stability, and all that, and all the cool new non-ADB/SCSI klunky old hardware, please enjoy your new system.

...their share from iTunes downloads can't be that bad.

Reference link: here.

Wow, record time. Mods got an itchy trigger finger today?

Listen, the original iTunes was crap - I'm sorry. I'm a long-time Mac user and today's iTunes is worlds ahead of the original incarnation they put out.

Here's an old review. They didn't even add an equalizer (standard on MP) until the second release! Everything that makes the program useful today was lacking when they first released it. The only thing this had going for it was the fact that it was free - and, thankfully, that it got a lot better.

An excerpt from MacCentral's article on Cell:

"Cell is primarily designed for digital-home applications, but the chip can be used with a wide variety of programming models and could conceivably wind up in any number of systems, Kahle said. The companies are working with open-source compiler developers to create software development tools for programmers, he said."

While this isn't the same as Apple releasing GCC contributions, what open-source compiler could they realistically be talking about besides GCC? At the very least this seems to support the idea that Cell could be an incredible Linux platform, but ultimately if Cell lives up to 1/10th of the hype that was released today, and is indeed fully compatible with the POWER instruction set (implied but not verified), It sounds like Apple would be insane not to use it.

-=(Lord Crosis)=-

I don't know where this analyst gets his information, but:

"Cell will probably consume around 30 watts of power, similar to the Emotion Engine processor in the PlayStation 2 console, said Peter Glaskowsky, a technical analyst with The Envisioneering Group in Seaford, New York. This is also similar to the power consumption of Intel Corp.'s Pentium M processor."

This from the MacCentral article on Cell.

-=(Lord Crosis)=-

Unless the hardware is an original Apple I. One went for 50 grand. But you can expect between 20 and 30 large.

http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/2005/01/mi niapplesandoranges/index.php --Here is the link to the article which was SUPPOSED to be above and which i forgot to paste in before.

Find a PC for the same price with comparable features. Most people point to Dell/HP/etc boxes. They always end up having crappy integrated graphics cards, and things like that. You won't find a PC for a comparable price. (Remember to factor in software. The mini comes with OSX, which has software for everything, and for what it doesnt have, it also comes with iLife '05, and a few games too. Windows boxes come with WindowsXP, which has um, solitare, spider solitare.. and then CD's full of shareware. Boo.)

For proof, read here

the Mac mini has all of the design features that made the Cube nice - lack of a fan, and a small form factor.

The Mac mini does have a fan. Look at the part labelled "K" on this page.

Belkin external battery pack

Both Belkin and Griffin offer voice recorder attachments, but I don't think the quality would be comparable to minidisc recording - more suited to lectures than concerts. This review also mentions that there is a generic microphone adapter, but I think you may still be limited to low sample rate WAV recording.

Even Apple is catching this wave:

Xserve sales up 119% in third 1/4 '04, trend likely to continue.

Another review, picking up some unfortunate problems with multiple page layout and PDF exports on non-Apple machines. It does sound like an excellent beginning to a great package, but it's very much 1.0 at the moment. I'm not sure I'll be getting the iWork suite straight away after reading the reviews, but I'm definitely going to keep a eye on it.

Personal pet hate about many programs - rubbish WYSIWYG, which applies to so many word processors and most definitely OpenOffice and KOffice. My old Atari ST running Papyrus could get it right, providing a pixel-perfect version of how the document would print on-screen, and now with Quartz and Pages it looks like I'll be able to do some half-decent document processing without spending a fortune. Assuming, of course, Apple fixes the bugs soon. :-)

Quote from Mac World Article:

"contrary to rumors around the Internet, Apple has told Macworld that you can even do it yourself without voiding your warranty "unless you break something when you open it.")

Yep...and its a weakness exploited by a FireWire drive! '24' stops nuclear Armageddon with WiebeTech http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/01/25/wiebe24/in dex.php

The Mac Mini specs also say that "Memory, AirPort Extreme and internal Bluetooth upgrades must be performed by an Apple Authorized Service provider; fees may apply.". In light of the assurances in the article this may not be true for memory but it certainly is for the other components.

If you check out this forum thread you can see that
http://www.macworld.com/forums/ubbthreads/printthr ead.php?Cat=&Board=UBB37&main=290448&type=thread

Crucial already offers a 1 GB Ram upgrade for $227. Much cheaper than the Apple upgrade and you can put it in yourself.

It actually has a fan . One fan. One lonely fan. (See figure K).

Granted the fan doesn't run all the time...or does it? In any case the Mac Mini I played with was very very quiet.

Um... yea.

That would have been last year. You know, 20 years ? 1984-2004 ?

It did go by with a remarkable lack of fanfare from Apple, though. A few words from Steve on the anniversary. There was a "20th Anniversary Macintosh", but it was for the 20th anniversary of Apple ( back in '97 ), not of the Macintosh.

It wasn't like they made special machines or threw a big party or anything. Steve did show a remake of the 1984 video at MacWorld, but it wasn't a huge deal. It seems they were busy with OS X and iPods or iTunes or GarageBand or something else Insanely Great(TM).

Ah, you're one of those "hardcore gamerz" I keep hearing about. That's cool. I don't have that kind of time or cash to blow on constantly updating PC games and graphics cards, but power to you, buddy!

Anyway, you can google as well as I can, but you're not buying an Apple computer ( or anything else non-Windows compatable ) no matter what, right ? I mean, waiting for DoomIII another couple of months would kill you. Me, I'm still happy with UT2004, but I understand where you're comming from.

I did a quick search just because I was curious, and yea, C&C Generals was out, oh, early last year sometime.

No CS, though, you'd have to ask Seirra about that one, but there are lots of _similar_ ( some might say, better, though I wouldn't know ) games available, though I know that doesn't do it for you.

For me, getting things done is the (main) purpose of having a computer. Not games or tinkering. So my main home PC runs OS X, while my old Wintel machine sits unused in the corner. With OS X sales being what they are, a _lot_ more game companies are targeting the platform, but it's not going to approach the PC gaming market anytime soon- and I don't think that's Apple's goal.

I bought my Mac mini this morning (waited in line in the 18 degree temps outside the Apple store in Kansas City so I could be fifth in line!) and have been working with it all day. Of the more interesting things I've noticed: System Profiler indicates that I have 256MB of PC3200 RAM installed... and I thought these things came with PC2700! I am going to buy myself a putty knife and will get back later with info and a picture or two of what I find inside...

For you PC (ab)users (I'm now in recovery on this point!) who are sitting on the fence wanting to get one of these but don't want to loose the functionality of all your Windows software, have no fear. Just go download the Windows Remote Desktop Connector and get cooking. Among the neat features, you can map the drives on your Mac to the remote PC allowing you to move files back and forth between the PC and the Mac with the utmost of ease! :-)

See halfway down this page. The fan doesn't look like your typical el cheapo fan. Maybe someone recognizes it?

I think you're over-estimating the animosity between MS and Apple, if indeed there's much at all.

Of course, they compete with eachother, but what you describe doesn't sound like my interpretation of Apple and MS's behaviour.

The Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft have a very close relationship with Apple. They're not just some MS developers who've been told to bash out some Mac knock-offs of Windows software. They're all long-time Mac developers who want to make the best Mac software they can. The spin-off of the MacBU to a separate division meant that they could work on making Mac software, not Windows ports. As this article explains, before the creation of the MacBU, the Win & Mac versions of Office shared 80% of the same technology. The result? Shoddy, un-Maclike software which no-one liked and few bought. The MacBU now works every bit as closely with Apple's technologies as it does with MS's.

Office:Mac (both v.X and 2004) are very nice programs. They're not perfect, but they bring a very usable, feature-rich, Mac-specific Office suite to the platform.

Apple would not benefit one single bit from making the MacBU's software unprofitable for Microsoft. iWork is not a replacement for Office. Keynote's a very nice alternative to PowerPoint, sure. But one app does not an Office-suite make. Pages is clearly not in the same space as Word. If you need Word, you won't buy/use Pages. If you don't need Word or can't afford Office, Pages is a sensible choice. If Pages is aimed at those who don't need or won't buy Office, it's hardly a competitor, is it?

Just as Pages is not a drop-in replacement for those who need Word, any rumoured spreadsheet app will not be a drop-in replacement for those who need Excel.

Apple aren't in the business of making 'temporary, difficult alternatives'. They're about fulfilling user's needs (with the caveat that, like all corps., they don't always get that right!).

Sony: DRM fears cost us the portable digital music market

• RAM - Mini=256 Dell=256[Shared]
  
• Max RAM - Mini=1Gb Dell=512
  
• HD size - 40Gb for both
  
• Optical drive - Mini=Combo drive Dell=DVD reader
  
• Warranty - Mini=1 yr. Dell=90 day
  

What the fuck is up with (anti)fanboyism anyway? Do you get a check every week based on your amount of brand loyalty? Do you get kickbacks from Dell for infultrating and spreading the name? Discount airfare? A $1 off coupon for your chicken McNuggets? A cheap rate at Chuck-E-Cheese for your upcoming 13th birthday?

Seriously.

Also, never mind any of these details.

(Yes, there're more then two paragraphs in that link, but you can take some asprin later and feel better.)

Just for clarification:
IDG World Expo produces the Macworld Expo event. The site in question macworldexpo.com is their site, used for event registration, schedules etc.
Macworld.com, Macworld Magazine's website, remained up through the keynote (with some slowdowns), and provided live coverage of the event. Linked to from a previous /. story.

Disclosure: I work for Macworld Magazine.

They have another imaging technology that they purchased from AT&T called DjVu. They've Open Sourced the viewer for that technology under the GPL.

I believe an encoder/decoder is also available under a GPL license, though LizardTech doesn't appear to be happy with the GPL because they are pro software patents, and the GPL is not. The encoder/decoder may or may not be a fractal engine, someone more knowledgeable will have to answer that question.

LizardTech may be involved in a squable over the JPEG2000 technology. Something to do with patent litigation.

= 9J =

Joke's on you, they didn't.

Visual inspection of senior West Wing staffers shows that a high proportion of them run OSX laptops.

Sun's announcement on CNET News.com

Follow-up on MacCentral

I see the appeal of a lower cost mac. If it's going to be as thin as rumored, I'd really consider it. I'd definately would like to play the latest games.

Unfortunately, DOOM 3 will require a G5... http://www.macworld.com/news/2004/11/03/doom3/inde x.php

So maybe I could use the new thin Mac as a reason to go out and upgrade my current desktop into the gaming machine my girlfriend always wanted me to have.

Apple drove IBM to create the 64-bit home runs PowerPC 970 and 970FX, chips that, similar to the 601, appeared in Apple hardware in record time. Power Mac G5, Xserve G5, and OS X did for Mac users what even the brilliant AMD can't do without Microsoft's help: migrate users to a 64-bit platform without one bump. Just as intriguing, Apple, IBM, and the public partners that sign IBM's open license could carry Mac users all the way to Power without the suffering that blocked users' migration from x86 to Itanium.

An interesting article and commentary about this Power 5 stuff related to Apple.

An interesting article and commentary about this Power 5 stuff related to Apple.

Granted half off is great. But that pricing has been scaled back to only count for "new releases" on the Real site now. You can only sell so much at a loss for so long before you put yourself out of business. BuyMusic.com is a prime example that the whole "pricing is everything driving the market" concept is false too.

Lowest price is Real, on a handful of tracks. Greatest selection is Apple. Greatest portability, depends on what you choose for your portable device. My preference goes more in this order: Quality, non-MS proprietary products, selection and then price. I don't see myself as an "Apple zealot", but I am very anti-MS in most of my views.

You are right that it is Real's choice to break other licensing models to make their files compatible on as many devices as they like. It's also Apple's prerogative to break this functionality as they choose. Apple didn't hide the fact that they would do just that. A day after Real had their press conference to announce their intentions, Apple said that the next revision of their software would break Rhapsody, and that is what they did.

I find it most amazing that nobody seemed to mention, or care, that this happened for nearly a month. The update was made available November 18. Funny that now it's news. Just goes to show how few people appear to be using the Real service to begin with.

It's also rather interesting to see that this hasn't had much of an affect on Apple either. They just announced their 200 millionth downloaded track. No other seller seems close to this kind of volume yet.

Please don't take the drone comment to heart. I just have an issue with people calling anybody that defends Apple's right to do business the way that they choose as a zealot. Which is how I took your previous comments.

In DSL, different straining materials are applied to the top of the transistor layer and then etched away from where they aren't needed or from where they can even degrade performance. Materials that create tensile strain to benefit N-channel transistors are applied across the surface of the wafer; chemical etching then removes those materials away from the P-channel transistors.

Subsequently, a layer of material for compressing the silicon lattice, which benefits the P-channel transistors, is applied and etched. The materials for straining N-channel or P-channel transistors can be applied in either order.

"On the P-channel transistors, you want to increase the density of atoms because the holes can move more quickly," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight 64.

Kepler did not disclose the materials used but said they were fairly conventional nitride films and inexpensive. Plus, applying the straining materials after the transistor layer is complete is easier.