Slashdot Mirror

January 25, 1996: "Whether they stand alone or are acquired, Apple as we know it is cooked. It's so classic. It's so sad."

Office 2008 for Mac exists now, and yes it doesn't have VBA. However, VBA will return to Office in the next release.

See http://www.macworld.com/article/133393/2008/05/vba.html?t=201 for details.

It's an interesting strategic move to bring VBA back despite it being a complete re-write from what I've heard. They must reeeeeeeally need it to stay competitive with OO and similar apps.

http://www.macworld.com/article/133293/2008/05/consumer.html

(and years and years of evidence prior to this putting Apple firmly in the #1 spot for tech support), I'd say that YOU are in the minority. Perhaps Apple support "isn't all that great" but considering it gets an 83 to Lenovo's 66, Dell's 60, Toshiba's 54 and Gateway's 51, I'd say there's nothing better.

"The modus operandi is to send the university - or Internet provider - a list of IP addresses on their networks that the RIAA claims was used for illegal file sharing. It then demands the institution to turn over the identities of the individuals to whom the IP addresses were assigned to."

As the article goes on to say, in some cases the IP address is in a single-occupancy dorm room, but others could be in public areas.

This is why I oppose mandatory log-ins on campus computers. The IT folks like to think that they "have control" by requiring log-ins, but in fact they are playing into the hands of the RIAA or the FBI by making it possible to identify users based on log-in and IP address.

It is easily accessible from the keyboard, just follow these instructions to have a keyboard combo lock your screen.

"Jobs is yet to see a demand for the device and is unimpressed with the existing video players on the market. Speaking today at Apple's annual European conference, Apple Expo in Paris, he said: 'Whether people want to buy a device just to watch video is not clear--so far the answer's been no. Devices that do video... have not been successful yet. No-one's figured out the right formula.' However, he didn't shut the door on a video playing device. 'One never knows,' he added.

I invite you to check Macworld discussion at
http://forums.macworld.com/thread/98919?tstart=0

I have never seen a thing like that. Macintosh community hates them so much after that disastrous stupid statement that I STILL get new message alerts after 2 months as people keep commenting how stupid they are, Verisign bribed them, MS lapdog, eBay is scam.

This is a OS that loads ocsp on startup to check the SSL certs at core OS level:
Apr 22 09:07:29 quad /usr/sbin/ocspd[1735]: starting (system.log)

EV matters? How much it cost to a commercial site at size of Paypal? Does Paypal feel their consumers are insecure instead of using FREE data from community powered services like http://www.phishtank.com/ ?
Post a job listing for Cocoa/Carbon, Objective C developer. Cough some money and distribute your plugin. Don't use "No XUL" as excuse, it is easy to watch current URL on Safari. ICQ from 2003 can still read it.

The 7.4 Quicktime upgrade hosed Premiere Pro on two machines. I had to back out of the last security fix to get SSH to work again.

To summarize, your Premiere installation was broken by QuickTime because "Adobe products don't write the headers until it renders the movies" and your SSH was broken because you installed a hack that the developer admits had a bug that caused the issue.

Your problem isn't the operating system or that you're living on the bleeding edge of updates. Your problem is that you use software from two third-party developers that had bugs. Not Apple's problem.

It's obvious who's behind it. The most insightful comment on the earlier story went something like this: If Apple is so hell bent on protecting its IP and enforcing its license terms, then why are they selling off-the-shelf copies to anyone who plunks down the cash?

Apple sells disks of Leopard for the same reason Microsoft sells Windows disk, so people can upgrade the OS.

Psystar. PsyOps. Nothing but Jobs looking to drum up more support for sales and mindshare. Mindshare is probably more important for Apple lest they lose their niche cult status and drop out of sight completely.

Buzz, 2008 calling. Macs are gaining in market share, and have been for more than a year. In early 2007 it was 5% now it's 8% (TFA linked to is dated 3 January 2008). In June 2007 laptops or notebooks market share was 17.6 (TFA is dated 21 August 2007).

Psystar. PsyOps. Nothing but Jobs looking to drum up more support for sales and mindshare. Mindshare is probably more important for Apple lest they lose their niche cult status and drop out of sight completely.

There's no need for Apple to drum up sales as they are growing quite well without this.

Sherlock 3, which ripped off the 2002 Macworld award-winning Watson and was bundled with OS X 10.2, and

Dashboard, which ripped off Konfabulator and was bundled with OS X 10.4. Yes, we all know about Desk Accessories, and suggesting that Konfabulator ripped off Desk Accessories is moronic.

Of course, Apple is not a monopoly and I'm not sure if the makers of Watson and Konfabulator were "competitors." However, they did get fricked by Apple.

Cnet: March 2004
"Apple, Adobe drifting apart"
http://www.news.com/2100-1012-5181434.html

"Adobe's Mac products lately have waned in performance compared to their Windows counterparts. He believes Adobe is gradually withdrawing resources from OS X development in hopes of moving customers to Windows, because it's cheaper to support one platform."

Apple.com: WWDC 2005 -
"Apple to use intel microprocessors by 2007"
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/06intel.html

Macworld: Jan 4 2007
"Adobe products return to Mac"
http://www.macworld.com/article/54661/2007/01/premiere.html/

"Specifically, Apple's decision to use Intel-built chips in its hardware gave Adobe the opportunity to start from scratch, Hayhurst said. The company was able to build the type of application it wanted to, instead of porting old code over to the Mac platform. The end result, Hayhurst added, is a fast performer."

Aka, we're using the code from our current PC product (since they're identical), but we want to make our Mac customers feel special.

Seems pretty straight forward. Adobe dumped support for Apple because their PPC chips were underpowered and their market was being cut into too much to be profitable, and once Apple went intel, support came back within a single product cycle.

Shouldn't those accounting laws prevent an iPod software updater from installing new functionality without charging the user money? Safari isn't a bug fix, it's a totally new app... Shouldn't Apple again be forced to charge users an upgrade fee? Or was that total bullshit Steve?

As of the 1.1.3 firmware userspace apps no longer run as root. It's also absurd to think forthcoming changes in the 2.0 firmware won't lock this access model down any more. As per the documentation, apps will be run in sandboxes which can and will control the sort of access they have to resources.

I'm only trying to exclude the guy who generally doesn't copy, but once got a mix tape from his girlfriend. Things like routinely pirating software, using a P2P network, or borrowing a friend's CD to make a copy are all included.

In which case, I'd feel quite comfortable claiming a majority of - and at the very least a statistically significant minority - of under-30s are regular copyright infringers. That's going by (my understanding of, at least - I'm not a native) the US's copyright laws. In places like Australia where it's only relatively recently become legal to record (most) things off TV, or format-shift CDs you own onto MP3s, the proportion would be even higher (for example, for the first year or two the iPod was out in Australia, as good as 100% of owners would have been copyright infringers).

Heck, I'd feel comfortable claiming that even 20 years ago a significant minority were regularly copying/lending friends cassettes (/CDs, if you were rich), or recording songs off the radio (and it's certainly difficult to see much difference in principle between either of them and P2P).

As for personal experience bias, take a look at some figures. The first hit I got for "worldwide iPod sales" is a Business Week article from 2004 that puts the global annual sales for such players at 17 million units. Unless you think annual distribution has increased by more than an order of magnitude in the interim, there is no way that everyone under 30 has an iPod or similar, even in first world places like the US, western Europe and Australia.

I have to confess I'm not particularly interested in doing any in-depth research around this topic. However, this article would suggest that mp3-style music players have, indeed, gone through a massive growth phase over the last few years. Apple _alone_ has apparently offloaded ca. 135 million iPods in the last 3 years. Don't forget that most mobile phones today come with an MP3 player, too - it's not just about dedicated devices.

Also, do not forget personal CD players, minidisc players (*very* popular in some parts of the world) and even the good old fashioned cassette walkman.

Basically, I don't consider it even slightly unreasonable to say that the vast majority of under-30s have some sort of "personal audio device" and wouldn't feel particularly nervous about expending that to say a majority of under-40s as well (although it would probably get a bit thin at the upper end of that scale).

... would it be possible for Apple to realize who their customers are and restore the ability to do two-way copying of MP3 (non-AAC, really) songs in iTunes? That got yanked a while ago, and it's an irritating functionality loss. There are alternatives (hat tip: MacWorld), but Apple's customer control tactics are almost as bad as the record companies'.

... would it be possible for Apple to realize who their customers are and restore the ability to do two-way copying of MP3 (non-AAC, really) songs in iTunes? That got yanked a while ago, and it's an irritating functionality loss. There are alternatives (hat tip: MacWorld), but Apple's customer control tactics are almost as bad as the record companies'.

Well since you mentioned apple:
http://www.macworld.com/article/3272/2002/01/g3osx.html

OS X for the G3 did not support DVD playback or openGL hardware acceleration that was available with OS9.

The iPhone (and I assume the Touch), have the headphone jack slightly recessed the plug won't work, unless it is straight with no excess rubber/plastic around the plug.

Rhapsody.

News flash: portability is expensive. It costs money and processing power. And they have to pay Jon Ive a mint because he designs lots of cool doodads for Apple. I'm impressed that Apple convinced/strongarmed Intel into a CPU package shrink just for them. But it's not as fast as the other Core 2 Duos currently in the lineup:

Another article here.

Uhhh, already happened dude. Office 2008 is now for sale and is stripped of all VBA. They are telling people to macro in AppleScript (puke).

Here is a Slashdot story submission that helps explain why corporations have not adopted Firefox. The submission was rejected: "008-01-09 02:36:24 Mozilla gets a new CEO (Features,Mozilla) (rejected)".

Many people depend on Slashdot to help them learn about important events in computing. But this event hasn't been covered, and apparently is being ignored: It appears that Firefox does not have more market share because Firefox development has been very poorly managed.

Here is the Slashdot story submission:

Winifred Mitchell Baker has given up her position as CEO of Mozilla.

Firefox is now partly a profit-making effort. There has been considerable discussion about the possibility of Firefox issuing stock and becoming a public corporation. Firefox made a profit of $47,000,000 on revenues of $67,000,000 in 2006.

That enormous profit percentage that raises a question: Why did Firefox take in $67 million, but only spend $20 million? What is happening with the rest of the money?

Firefox development has been glacially slow. For example, in 6 years the CPU hogging and memory hogging bugs are still not fixed (although there has been considerable improvement).Thunderbird development has been abandoned. Opera is able to restore sessions, but the Firefox session restore feature throws away URLs if response is slow. Why is that, when millions of dollars are spent on development each year?

Firefox makes money when people use it to visit ads. Google pays because Firefox uses Google as the default search engine. It seems likely that a profit-making Firefox will eventually prevent add-ons like AdBlock Plus that stop the display of ads which many users find annoying.

The former CEO, Winifred Mitchell Baker, has no technical knowledge. She is a lawyer. She took the job when no one thought there was money in development of Netscape/Firebird that became Firefox.

Will the new CEO manage better? Or will Firefox development begin to be unfriendly to the user so that it will make money?

"All the DRM stuff aside, point 3 is wrong. WMA is a lossy format, so you can't have a "lossless" conversion. Whenever you convert from lossy->lossy there will always be quality degradation. It's unavoidable unless you have a lossless file as the source."

If you purchase an encoded file that has already gone through a lossy compression that's just your fault for buying it. The rest of that statement is incorrect. To convert from any file to lossless does not degrade the content since the conversion to lossless is "lossless". The ipod supports lossless file formats so this is in no way lossy->lossy as you have stated. It is the same quality as the originally purchased file, witch again, was your fault for buying in the first place.

You can read up on this at: http://www.macworld.com/article/43560/2005/03/classicalipod.html

FYI: http://www.macworld.com/article/52416/2006/08/leo64.html

Of course you will need a 64-bit processor such as the Core 2 Duo or the Xeon.

I think we are kinda not understanding the console wars. This is NOT the same thing as the HD war, whereas there will be a winner and a looser. Even if Sony comes in third in console sales, if they sale enough (what they have sold is nothing to be ashamed about, its actually quite good for a console thats only a year old, its just not selling AS WELL IN THE US as the other two. I wish I had a site to point to, but Sony is actually doing quite well in Japan) there will be games and exclusives. This is why I hate the phrase "console wars" as I think its clear from history that not coming in first does not mean that you will fail. Look at the Sega Genesis. While not selling as good as the Super Nintendo, that does not mean the Genesis was a failure. The PSP has a 25% market share, that does not mean its a failure. Shoot, nowadays I see way more people with PSPs than DSs.

That does not mean that there haven't been failures in the gaming market. I think we can point to Colecovision, Intelevision, the Atari 7800, Sega 32x, Sega CD, Sega Saturn, and 3DO as being failures. IMHO, Sega did not fail at first from not having top market sales or developers, Sega failed because they kept releasing new systems and it scared people from buying new systems. However, according to wikipedia, the Saturn did extreamely well in Japan, outselling both the Playstation and the N64.

According to this article on Macworld (btw, Happy Birthday PS3), the console has over 200 games available for it (although I swear that I have not seen that many games), but if that is true, 200 games in a year, over 5 million units sold in under a year, and a major push for the BluRay market, I would not say that the PS3 was a failure, nor do I expect it to die, but rather come stronger over the coming year.

If only they'd ship the ModBook! Since the ModBook has been delayed, I wonder if that has anything to do with Apple.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ModBook/
http://www.macworld.com/2007/01/firstlooks/modbook_fl/index.php/
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/01/11/unofficial_mac_tablet_draws_record_crowd_at_macworld_high_res_photos.html/

I don't think it's correct to call the Mac port native, either. It uses Cider, which is basically the same thing. In some cases, it is possible to use one game's Cider wrapper (e.g., Heroes of Might and Magic V) to run other Windows games, although a no-CD crack may be required. I've also read on some forums that the registration program for the Mac version of Madden NFL '08 does not recognize it as a Mac version. You have to register as if you're running Windows.

Blah, blah, blah (Oh, yeah, please enter your administrator password here:__________________, and your Windows XP Key here:_____ _______ _______ ________ _______, then copy this line to an email and send it to me. After verifying your entry, I will send you free naked pix of Brittany and Paris*)

Much silly discussion of the difference between a trojan and a virus, and comparisons of stupidity between Mac, Windows and Linux users. Yawn. Worthless, under the circumstances.

Here's the most important thing. How hard is it to remove from the machine? Will the OS require wiping to remove it? Will expensive software have to be purchased to clean it off?

No. A bit of Terminal work will suffice. http://www.macworld.com/2007/10/firstlooks/trojanhorse/index.php. The guy who wrote this deliberately infected his machine and then cleaned it off.

The biggest problem with Windows Malware isn't just that there is so much of it--it's that it is such a PITA to remove once somebody screws up and gets their machine infected. Well, actually, that may not be such a problem. I get a lot of business cleaning off malware on Windows machines.

*The naked pix will be of the designated geographical regions of France, using Google Earth--what were you thinking I was going to send?

But easy to remove.

You know why? Cuz right now I can pick up the phone and get a functional drive and disks that can hold 1.6TB each with a shelf life of like forever. And of course speeds of 120 MB/s reading. This 18 months stuff isn't going to cut it.

Maybe Aunt Tillie went to Best Buy and bought a Logitech peripheral to use on her Mac?

...if it's not possible to make some sort of "virtual folder" in OS X which contains content which matches a search criteria? Is it?

Very much yes. They're called "smart folders", and they provide a live, constantly-current view of anything on any number of filesystems that matches any Spotlight query. So you can define views based upon everything Spotlight knows about--which is basically everything.

You can either use the standard spotlight interface and then just declare that you want any query as a persistent smart folder, or you can write your own raw queries by hand. As with so much of osx, whichever tool you prefer.

Linux != UNIX != OS X

Sorry, but your friend was wrong. Try reading the actual news stories, like this one: http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/10/16/drmfree/index.php

Gears of War and UT3 are coming to the Mac, according to Epic's Mark Rein. Leaving it out of the news post is just an oversight.

So Steve has killed the clonemakers, or has he? Power Computing is absorbed, Motorola is getting out of the Mac business and taking a $95 million charge, while IBM will apparently cut off its Mac production for OEMs. But somehow Umax got a license for MacOS 8.0, as did Powertools. These two companies were able to succeed where IBM and Motorola couldn't simply because they were willing to pay dramatically higher royalties to Apple. It's not that Jobs was adamantly opposed to clones, but that he wanted Apple to make as much profit from each clone as it did from its own production.

"But sure, now that we're branching of and controlling our destiny, that puts us in a position where we could put ourselves back on the [Mac] platform definitively again," said Jarrard." From this MacWorld article.

WRT to the linked Infoworld article in the post: it's out of date, Apple has since released the source to the Intel Mac OS X kernel.

Not that this will change anyone's opinion one way or the other.

A bricked iPhone can be returned for a full switch... Correct me if I am wrong, but its not like they can tell the phone has been "unlocked", as I have not opened this phone in any way, and as such have not voided any warrenty on the hardware.

If you check the comments here, you see one particular comment of interest:

Check you IMEI number on the back against the one on the activation svreen (behind the "i"). If you see 004999010640000 on screen you are screwed (for now).

You see, they can tell,

This is the problem. THe free sim unlock changed everyone's IMEI to 004999010640000 - so they are now checking the IMEI to when it was first activated to the SIM to ensure a match, and if you look on the back of your box, you'll notice your original IMEI #.

Me - well, I guess it sucks if you've paid a lot of money, and now you're surprised or something. "Real owner of proprietary system in taking advantage of rights SHOCK!!" It's like people acting surprised that Microsoft installed a stealth update that's wrecked a few systems, even when they turned off automatic updates. Perhaps a few more people will now understand why closed proprietary is intrinsically evil, regardless of whether it's actually convenient for you right now or not.

You can sometimes get dramatic speed improvements by disabling the Dashboard entirely. See http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macosxhints/2005/08/disabledashboard/index.php for how to do it.

I have a dual-proc G5 machine and I disable Dashboard, just because I don't use the thing and have never found it really useful.

The article doesn't do Apple credit I think. Apple may not be doing well in the desktop world, but they are right there with the big boys when it comes to notebooks. Here is an article that tells us that Apple's notebook market share was 17.6 percent in June 2007. But having said that, I also must say that I think Apple's policy to only sell their hardware in their own stores and in 'Apple certified retailers' is a way to make certain that they won't get a large marketshare on the desktop. Apple's policy ensures that people can not really compare Apples and other computers side by side, and people who own Apple computers will continue to be considered hip, or weird, or stupid, depending on who you ask. O, and one more thing! Here in the Netherlands Apple certified the Media Markt to sell their computers. In Enschede a few iMacs and notebooks are cramped on some shelves that are just behind the computer the employees always use to check availability and prices of the things they sell. That means there is no space for customers to have a good look at the beautiful iMacs et al. that are displayed there. I asked a Media Markt employee a few questions about the new iMac, and he turned out to know next to nothing about it. He even admitted that. If I were Apple I would make damn certain that the people who sell my hardware in 'certified' shops know their stuff, and put my precious hardware on display in an easy to reach place. My experience at the Media Markt made me decide not to buy the iMac there but online. I'd rather wait a few weeks than have to do with clueless salesmen.

Work with a company you feel you can trust, but certainly always take the approach that good fences make good neighbors... (Meaning, Trust, but Verify) ... As long as Jobs is at the helm at Apple, though, I personally would never worry one bit about this sort of thing happen... He as a person is trust worthy in my opinion...

Are you smoking crack? Apple the next Microsoft. See http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/09/07/newms/index.php for an analysis of Apple as a monopolist.