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what are you talking about?

When Apple received an award at the Grammy's, Steve Jobs said, ""If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own." (More info here) So as far as we are concerned, Apple has publicly stated that people have the right to manipulate data, be it music, movies, or whatnot, that they own the rights to.

Serial ATA is 1200 Mbps while Firewire is 400

Apparently FireWire is up to 800 mbps now. Can Serial ATA do device-to-device transfers without CPU intervention? If not, cut your bandwidth in half.

Apple also did not invent Firewire, it was a standard ratified by the IEEE. Thus, the reason it is called IEEE 1394.

Apple invented FireWire and submitted it to IEEE. What makes you think they didn't? From the page I linked to:

Apple invented FireWire in the mid-90s and shepherded it to become the established cross-platform industry standard IEEE 1394. FireWire is a high-speed serial input/output technology for connecting digital devices such as digital camcorders and cameras to desktop and portable computers.

>Why is it people think they can just make up whatever crap they want about apple and people will believe it?

I didn't author any of those links. Sorry you seem to think the entire world is against you (including PBS).

>The G4 Cube had no quality problems that I've ever heard of

Please search the web a little, and/or read more magazines, or talk to more people. Your choice.

I'll provide you with some G4 Cube problem links:

One
Two
Three - Admittance from Steve Jobs himself that G4 Cubes don't have the quality users expect from Apple
Four
Five

And so on. It doesn't matter if they were cracks or mold lines -- either way they show a lack of quality assurance. If this were my car and Apple said "Oh, those ripples on the bodywork are just caused by the type of paint we used" I'd still say it stinks.

>ARe you really so stupid you believe what you're shovelling?

Are you so blinded by your mac fanatacism that you can't admit Apple could have made mistakes in its engineering of the G4 Cube?

>You cant even remember the show, and what steve said was "Mcirosoft, just doesn't have a sense of style"

You can't remember the part where he ignores Woz, his partner, for the company. A total lack of sympathy is an emotional problem, IMHO.

Not to mention the Newton thing -- what's your excuse for that? Or did you skip over it because you have no answer and are again blinded by Mac zealotry?

Nah, in Windows XP at least the firewire port on my soundblaster audigy automatically showed up in network connections with tcp/ip enabled. nothing proprietary. And lots of devices use that feature, like digital video cameras that can wire pictures directly to a firewire-enabled printer without the use of an intermediary PC.

• http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0004/26.usb.sh tml April 26, 2000 - "FireWire already operates at 400 Mbps and is expected to reach 800 Mbps and 1600 Mbps later this year."
• http://www.macworld.com/2000/08/news/usb_vs_firewi re.html August 2000
• http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/USB2.html Undated, but apparently soon after USB 2.0 was announced:"FireWire will go to 800 Mbps this year or next, and 1.6 Gbps probably in another year or so after that. USB 2.0 is not born yet... in fact, it isn't even yet fully conceived -- it is more a dirty thought in someone's mind. "

• http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0004/26.usb.sh tml April 26, 2000 - "FireWire already operates at 400 Mbps and is expected to reach 800 Mbps and 1600 Mbps later this year."
• http://www.macworld.com/2000/08/news/usb_vs_firewi re.html August 2000
• http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/USB2.html Undated, but apparently soon after USB 2.0 was announced:"FireWire will go to 800 Mbps this year or next, and 1.6 Gbps probably in another year or so after that. USB 2.0 is not born yet... in fact, it isn't even yet fully conceived -- it is more a dirty thought in someone's mind. "

Yeah, Steve Jobs has never acted like a petulant child before, so why would he now?

>Just because so many kiddies online are so emotional about things

I'm sure not when it comes to Apple. I don't use one, and never plan to if the company continues its hard-line "PC is crap, but we'll develop for it anyways" stance. It just seems so incorrect and wrong. Perhaps that's just me getting emotional, though.

>steve jobs must be super sensitive as well.

There was a PBS special explaining that he does have an emotional problem of some sort... Or so it would appears. I think it was called "Geeks" or "Nerds" 1.0.

>What he DOES care about is quality products

Ask a G4 cube owner about that...

>Why do people believe such rumors?

Because Apple said it best themselves: They "think different." ie: They don't follow common business sense all that well, just well enough to (sort of) survive.

Yes, and no.

It's hard to argue that something sucks when it's free and being compared to something that's not free.

However, I'd use photoshop anyday over gimp, based on the interface alone, without even going into the capabilities.
The photoshop palette windows (or whatever they're called) are fantastic, easy to use, useful. The menu system isn't convoluted. It looks like the rest of the operating system. It looks like one app, with a common workspace.
Gimp - it looks like a bad port of a worse linux interface. Come on, use windows menus and styles. It doesn't seem like one application, with all of the different windows, most of which are useless. Don't tell me it's a Linux app, if you want it to be better than photoshop, we have to go with the app that uses the same OS as photoshop.

Then there's the text editing capabilities. You can do so much more in PS 6 with text than in Gimp - balloon, scrunch, drop shadow with a click, outline, gradient overlay, pattern overlay, inner shadow, etc. In gimp, well, you can resize text.

And don't display articles about professionals using gimp over photoshop that are from sourceforge and gnomedesktop. That's equivilant to a link to a slashdot editorial proclaiming how popular linux is. Go out and buy a graphics art design magazine at borders. They talk about photoshop and nothing else, because it is the industry standard. There is nothing in the graphics art world that needs doing that photoshop does not do that gimp does. Gimp has a selection of the features that make photoshop great, implemented poorly.

Here are some links to professionals that use photoshop (and I trust these people more than some dude on gnomedesktop): popular photography imaging insider Mac World Mag Fortune Magazine Fotophile.

Gimp is not, and never was intended to be a photoshop replacement. I'm not saying it's a bad program. Actually, for being free, it's very nice. But don't compare it to photoshop. If you think gimp is better than photoshop, you've never done any graphics art design.

~Will

N.B. Links lead to two different threads on Macworld forums for those interested.

N.B. Links lead to two different threads on Macworld forums for those interested.

They were definately using Mac Powerbooks:

"Hackers PowerBook 540, clear PowerBook Duo 2300" http://maccentral.macworld.com/famous/movies.shtml

"Okay, so some liberties have been taken with technology (an Intel P6 chip powers an Apple PowerBook)..." http://www.filmcritic.com/misc/emporium.nsf/ddb549 0109a79f598625623d0015f1e4/b0177d0276fcfd878625623 d0019334a?OpenDocument

Not so anecdotal evidence would suggest that users are not taking up OS X in droves. How anyone could use OS 9 at all is beyond me but that's the reality. Apple has already told developers to only do OS X development. The sad fact is that for the market share apple has, doing (what in the case of the drivers at least) is a total re-write is not a super high priority for alot of companies.

You forgot that Adobe owns a patent on tabs (see here) so that may be a no-no ;)

Yeah, no one like the US Army.

Dipshit, you have an embedded space in that URL, and lear to use HTML tags.

http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/9901/29.upgrad es.shtml

• Osnews
  
• MacIntouch
  
• Zdnet
  
• Macworld
  
• MacCentral

• Osnews
  
• MacIntouch
  
• Zdnet
  
• Macworld
  
• MacCentral

First off, Doom ][ outsold the original Doom by a fair amount. And the actual numbers for Doom ][ are something in the neighborhood of 1.8 million copies (Myst has sold more than 5 million copies and the Sims more than 6). As the first link states, lots of people got the Doom demo, but since you had to mail order Doom when it first came out sales were not that high.

Secondly, at the time Doom came out (1993) there were quite a few machines that could run it. Even measly 386 DX's could and it ran quite well on my 486 DX 33. By the time Doom ][ came out a year later with the same engine and only slightly more cpu intensive maps, virtually everyone could play it.

Quake on the other hand had mediocre single player compared to Doom, graphics that were technically superior and cool but looked like crap till people had 3d cards with 16 bit color and high res, and required a Pentium 100 or better to run well at a time when Pentium systems were significantly more expensive than 486's.

Also, much like how the first Doom episode was easily distributed via BBS's and floppy disks, the first episode of Quake was sold on CD for $5 and was also downloadable off the Internet, so some people may never have bought anything more.

The last thing is that Doom had numerous 3rd party addons, map packs, editors, Final Doom and everything else that further drove the Doom craze. Everybody and their brother was playing Doom, getting extra Doom levels, etc. Quake sold less copies, mapping was more difficult, etc. so there were fewer people creating maps and there was only the one official addon pack. Frankly, Quake single player wasn't that fun compared to Doom. Quake 2's single player focus still didn't help, it's got a horrible single player aspect.

Gotta watch those quotation marks!

Yep. Several versions of gyro-mice have been around for years. I bought a Gyropoint Pro II several years ago, which is shaped like an egg, presumably to feel more natural when you're holding it in your hand. It's not made for desktop use, only handheld.

Judging from this review from 1998, my model's been around for at least four years. I originally bought it because I developed tendonitis from using my standard desktop mouse, so I was looking for alternatives that might be easier on my arm.

I found the gyro-mouse to be annoying to use, though. It doesn't have the precision of a regular mouse or trackball device, and every minute or two the pointer starts to drift in one direction. To stop the drift you have to recalibrate it by pressing a couple of buttons or setting it down for about 5 seconds.

It's not suitable for use with most applications because of these problems. Web browsing is about the only thing I'd consider using it for, and even for that purpose I find it to be not worth the bother. I don't know if the newer models work better or not.

For conference room or auditorium presentations, though, it would be great. The range that the mouse will work from the receiver is advertised at 75 feet, which seems about right--possible even a bit conservative--based on the tests I did with it when I first bought it.

I briefly considered mounting it on a helmet, with the buttons rigged to a glove. However, it turns out that your head is a lot more jittery than you might think. I couldn't keep the pointer stable using my head. I have much finer control with my hands.

The parent is currently modded as 'troll', but this is the reality. The Mac market share as a whole is considered by many companies to be insignificant and not worth the development time to support. Remember the World Cup.

I don't know first-hand about FireWire printers, but the FireWire ports seem to be used more for somewhat "specialty" items that need the grunt FW gives. There are plenty of audio and video devices that utilize and depend on FireWire.

At the very least, many musicians use external FW drives to stream digitial audio to, making it very easy to take that raw data to another machine for mix-down, collaboration with other artists, &etc. I'm guessing the video production folks do the same thing.

Don't forget about the various digital media players out there. Very few of these are going to be USB in the future.

I don't know first-hand about FireWire printers, but the FireWire ports seem to be used more for somewhat "specialty" items that need the grunt FW gives. There are plenty of audio and video devices that utilize and depend on FireWire.

At the very least, many musicians use external FW drives to stream digitial audio to, making it very easy to take that raw data to another machine for mix-down, collaboration with other artists, &etc. I'm guessing the video production folks do the same thing.

Don't forget about the various digital media players out there. Very few of these are going to be USB in the future.

Apple Switches Processors and Steve Jobs Gets Vindication!

I can't help but speculate...

Two pundits have predicted recently that Apple will go to Intel within two years. Steve Jobs, when asked if Apple would go to another processor, said that once the transition to OSX is complete we'll have options, and we like options.

Most OSX apps are written in Carbon right now. Jobs has been in love with Object Oriented Programming since he started NeXTand now that the OOP benefits of NextStep are part of OSX he should be thrilled, right? Wrong. Most current OSX apps are written in Carbon, not the slick Object Oriented OSX Native Cocoa environment.

If Apple "switched" to another processor, (pun intended) they could use that transition to force app developers to rewrite in Cocoa since Carbon is (correct me if I'm wrong, and you know you want to) OS9/PowerPC dependent.

Jobs' beloved Cocoa, the current incarnation of the NextStep development environment he's been preaching about for lo these many years, would become the Mac standard. Objective C would be the rage and Steve would be vindicated.

Watch it happen!

----------------
http://blogs.salon.com/0001159/

Apple Switches Processors and Steve Jobs Gets Vindication!

I can't help but speculate...

Two pundits have predicted recently that Apple will go to Intel within two years. Steve Jobs, when asked if Apple would go to another processor, said that once the transition to OSX is complete we'll have options, and we like options.

Most OSX apps are written in Carbon right now. Jobs has been in love with Object Oriented Programming since he started NeXTand now that the OOP benefits of NextStep are part of OSX he should be thrilled, right? Wrong. Most current OSX apps are written in Carbon, not the slick Object Oriented OSX Native Cocoa environment.

If Apple "switched" to another processor, (pun intended) they could use that transition to force app developers to rewrite in Cocoa since Carbon is (correct me if I'm wrong, and you know you want to) OS9/PowerPC dependent.

Jobs' beloved Cocoa, the current incarnation of the NextStep development environment he's been preaching about for lo these many years, would become the Mac standard. Objective C would be the rage and Steve would be vindicated.

Watch it happen!

----------------
http://blogs.salon.com/0001159/

Some info on Saddam buying Playstations...

You might also be thinking of Apple's TV ad with tanks and a G4. From the commercial:

"When the Power Mac G4 became the first personal computer to cross the threshold of one billion floating-point operations per second (also known as a gigaflop), it entered the rarefied realm of supercomputing- and got the attention of the U.S. government. The Pentagon regards supercomputers as "strategic technology"- in effect, making the Power Mac G4 a weapon that shouldn't fall into the wrong hands."

To answer your question, I'd say that you are observing a Microsoft marketing tactic. Halo has been pretty darn finished for the Windows and Mac platforms for some time now. It was closer to completion for those platforms before they even began to port it to xBOx. Microsoft needed a killer app for their console, so they bought the whole company that had made Halo... Bungie. Then they made the Halo -> xBOx port priority one. They are intentionally delaying the release of it on other platforms because they want its exclusivity on xBOx to drive sales of their console. Microsoft certainly didn't buy Bungie to make a profit off Halo. Any revenue generated from sales of the game on other platforms will be used to defray the original cash outlay to buy Bungie.

Bye bye GPL!

You dirty hippie bastards just lost another tool to use to create theft!

Altruism? That's some archaic word from olden times, right? These days, the almight $ is your god!

Been following the coverage on Mac Central and Jobs just announced it, seems the terms are the same as what was stated in the above mentioned faq.
anyone want lerxst@mac.com? I guess it'll be available in the near future :-(.

Skip the CNET article. Check out the MacCentral summary of the WSJ article. It sounds like two executives of the two companies are actually talking smack to eachother. Not anonymous. Kevin Browne says they're gonna have to reexamine their relationship with Apple if Apple's gonna keep doing what they're doing.

Of course, this is all what everyone expected back when the contract lapsed. Everyone except me. I thought MS would be smart and keep making their mad bank off Mac software. Apparently they'd rather get dirty and fight. MS spreading FUD. "Oh, iduno, maybe we can't support Office:mac anymore..."

A MacCentral article says ...the Wall Street Journal has published a scathing article about the state of Mac OS X adoption and how it has affected some Mac software publishers -- chief among them Microsoft Corp.

The article also has some good quotes from Apple and mentions Corel and Adobe.

As for Microsoft's opinion that Apple isn't pushing Mac OS X hard enough? Well, that just sounds like a software company's opinion of a hardware company. Apple's shipping machines with Mac OS X as the default OS and has made plenty of announcements about the sunsetting of Classic Mac OS. Apple's money comes from selling machines, so that's all they need to do.

And how does Microsoft intend to "steal Apple's thunder?" By simply by making announcements of its own versions of what Apple has been doing with tremendous success for years. Movie trailers will continue to be in QuickTime format, MPEG-4 is still QuickTime, and Apple will continue to sell 802.11b harware in addition to their robust and easy-to-use software.

If Bill thinks he's going to lead the game, he'd better try to get out in front on a thing or two.

The original iMac had a so-called Mezzanine slot that allowed people to upgrade the iMac's paltry 2megs of ATi Rage (iirc) video. The revision B iMac no longer had the slot soldered in, but still had the place on the motherboard -- and some companies offered to solder in a slot so you could install video card upgrades (the Voodoo 2 was the only one I'm aware of, but that was a big upgrade, esp in 1998).

Apple didn't exactly deny the slot was there, but they weren't too excited to show it off (it's not in the iMac Rev. A's specs page) -- they made a pretty concerted effort to make sure people knew the slot wasn't supported. Wasn't long until the motherboard was changed and the slot was gone completely. Funny to think they were probably only saving a few cents to take the soldered slot off the mobo for Rev. B, but 2 times a million iMacs starts to add up!

Go to any Bestbuy or Circuit city that happens to have a Mac section, and you'll find one or two Mac Zealots there to 'encourage' people toward buying a Mac.

Why wouldn't Microsoft just write an XBOX->DX8 wrapper?

No need, the graphics API on the XBox is DirectX.

See

• http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0003/14.xbox.s html
• http://www.digit-life.com/articles/xbox/
• http://www.activewin.com/faq/x-box.shtml

As an added bonus the networking APIs are the same DirectPlay APIs on the PC.

I don't think Ozzy Osbourne would be the best advocate for the rights of the music consumer, since his new CDs feature Key2Audio copy protection., a decision that he himself reportedly approved.

Apple's market share is increasing, and they are one of the few consistently profitable hardware companies. I don't always agree with Steve's decisions either, but there's a chance he knows what he's doing.

Remember, in the end MS is out there to make money. Ruling the world is just a means to that end.

WebBench runs 60% faster on an Xserve than on a comparable IBM eServer running Linux. BLAST runs up to 19 times faster than on a comparable Sun Fire. Disk I/O is 50% faster than on a comparable Dell PowerEdge.

I know it is kewl to doubt everything on /. but perhaps you can show benchmarks that dispute these numbers?

I last read that the Mac release is pending, but that was 2 years ago.

I'm still waiting, and hell ain't getting any colder. At least Apple is up front about killing Windows support.

3) Apple has close ties to Disney (mostly via Pixar), and Disney brings with it all sorts of baggage (MPAA and such).

This isn't too true anymore, as Pixar's getting out
of its deal with Disney, ostensibly because Disney's
a bunch of double-dealing bastards. And Mike "I am
a human ass" Eisner's "Create a theft"
speech pretty much says how the powers that be at
The Other Evil Empire feel about Lil' Stevie...

Here are some of Apple's other acquisitions this year:

Prismo Graphics
Film Logic
Zayante
Nothing Real

Bare Feats has some benchmarks:

http://www.barefeats.com/pb8.html

As does PowerBookCentral:

http://www.powerbookcentral.com/features/ibookvspb g42.shtml

And of course Macworld has benchmarked the machines:

http://www.macworld.com

The hard part is that it's more expensive to own a Mac than it is to own a PC.

You fell into the trap: Macs are more expensive to BUY, but less expensive to OWN.

I have macs running that are 8 years old [and older] and they still work just as well as they did when they came out of the box. Nothing has been replaced in these, I just added some more RAM. That's something you don't usually see in wintel machines... instead you see planned obsolescence.

Apple's products aren't cheap, but they last.

For data that has to be online but is not accessed by anyone and needs to be read only, a dvd drive *is* the cheaper solution. The cost of a 200 disc dual drive firewire dvd changer sits around $1500 (and they could be cheaper, this was the first price I found . . I don't remember the exact size of a dvd, but its somewhere around 4gig. 4*200=800. To get 800 gig out of hard drives, you'd need at least 6 160gig eide drives which would cost you about $225 each. This is $1300, and you'd have to get one of those 3 channel eide raid controllers . ..thats another 100 bucks. So, I either have fast access for lots of files I don't need fast access for, or for the same price I get something that I can make very cheap duplicates of to keep off site.

But the bad news is towards the end of the article, when it comes to availability. Isn't it always the case with new products thatr look darn cool, and pre-announcements to make them even more desirable?

• The Gigabeat MEG50JS will go on sale in Japan on June 22.[...] Toshiba said it has plans to put the Gigabeat on sale in the U.S. and then Europe although the company has not decided on a schedule for an overseas launch.

Dammit, why are none of my friends in Japan for the World Cup. If only ....

MacCentral has a related Interview with Marc Andreessen here.

Catch Phrases for me were:
You know what WAP stands for; it's the sound a WAP cell phone makes when you throw it in the wastebasket.
and
My attitude is, everybody should try competing with Microsoft once in their life. Once.

Enjoy the read.

Newer has also announced such an upgrade.

This is bad news by any reasonable definition. Note that the official FAQ still says "we are planning a simultaneous PC/Macintosh/Linux release for Neverwinter Nights, with all three versions to be included in a single box."

Also note that Macsoft expects it will take them two months to finish the Mac version, not including the toolset. No clue how long the toolset would take if they decide to port it at all. Third, note that Bioware has never released a single Mac (or Linux) demo appliction, or even a screenshot of a partial prototype.

For comparison, other porting houses like OmniGroup and Westlake can plow through an entire port, starting from raw Windows-only DirectX-based source code, and turn out a complete Mac game in the same amount of time.

The obvious conclusion is that Bioware has spent the past three years working solely on the Windows version, and their claims about parallel simultaneous development were a crock.