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A Basket Full of Apple News
active8or writes "During hit keynote at MacWorld San Fransico, Steve Jobs introduced the new tools from Apple. One, iDVD was a very powerful tool for making DVDs at home, and iTunes a powerfull MP3 and music ripping, writing, playing environment....for free. This seems to follow their new "killer apps" strategy. In addition, a 733 MHz G4 was introduced, and the entire line got a update. ". The new powerbook looks awesome (if only it had 3 mouse buttons).
Apple made a good marketing choice in comparing it to the Vaio. Let's instead compare the $2,599 G4 PowerBook to a customized P!!! Dell Inspiron, $2,598...
Okay, now both have 128 MB RAM, the processor speeds are 400 vs. 800, both have 10 GB disks, both have DVDs, and both have Ethernet (the Dell on a PC Card). The screens are 15.0" for the Dell vs. 15.2" for the Apple. The Inspiron has twice the video RAM.
So, overall, pretty equivalent machines, for identical prices.
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
I started a thread about this on comp.arch if anyone is still interested.
Eh, those of us who use Unix with XFree86 can just use the program "xclipboard" to create arbitrary numbers of different clipboards, save their content to disk, and edit them in place before pasting.
This page lists three ways to get it.
BTW: your "?" and "!" keys seem to be flaking out and repeating themselves unnecessarily.
*BUT* who can say how well the authoring software will cope with fancy menus, anamorphic video, alternate sound and text tracks, etc.
An excellent point. After all, what's a DVD without some kind of DVD Digest / menu system? iDVD comes with it's own, basic menu authoring system. Each screen can have 6 items (including folders, which can hold 6 more items, ad nausium). Great for basic usage.
The key here is basic. This will come bundled with the SuperDrive, just like iMovie came with the iMacs. But, if you want to get fancy at all, they also have a complete dvd authoring utility (DVD Studio Pro 1.0) which the pro can purchase for a mere $999 to make all the great stuff you see coming from the studios. Just like you can purchase Final Cut Pro 1.2.5 for $999 for regular QT files.
All in all, I was impressed with the basic functionality of both iDVD and iTunes. The PC coule really use something like this. But, then again, if Microsoft controlled all the hardware, I'm sure you'd see some pretty nifty stuff along these lines as well.
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Not to mention that one new option for the G4 Desktop (and standard on high-end prebuilts) is the "SuperDrive"... a single-tray, multiple-laser drive that basicly combines CDRW and DVD-R. Yes kids, real DVD-R, play it in your consumer $150 DVD deck. Apple sells DVD-R blanks for $10 at store.apple.com. Probably can find them cheaper elsewhere.
Does anybody know why they removed the Schwe slot? Did they just figure that your memory is allocated better in OS X so you don't need the Schwe slot?
If only it had 3 mouse buttons.
You got both hands on the frickin' keyboard anyhow.
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
Before it gets flying too thick, take a look at buying a 533 G4 for $2199 and adding a SECOND processor for a lousy $300, from the Apple Store as a "Build to Order" option. Total=$2499, including 128 RAM, 40 G HD, CD-R/W, Nvidia Card, and Gig-E.
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$tar -xvf
OS X *is* MP, kinda.
If it's a BSD program,
or if it's a Cocoa (OPENSTEP) program,
or if it's a Carbon program written to the MP library (other Carbon apps will NOT be MP aware),
or if it's a Classic program (99% of the software available for OS X right now) - we still don't know if MP library is supported under Classic. . . if so, then same limitations as Carbon, but if not, Photoshop, even WITH MP libs won't be MP aware on OS X in the classic environment, until Adobe releases this carbon port of Photoshop (which was supposedly done in two weeks by an intern two years ago - where is it now?)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Sorry, this is wrong on multiple counts. First, Aqua or any other GUI takes essentially zero CPU time if you're not actively using it. For example, the iMac behind me is running Mac OS X Beta with a (transparent) terminal window running top. dnetc is using 98% of the CPU, Window Manager is using 0.6%. Second, Aqua is not mandatory. You can drop to a text console and do everything from there, or telnet or ssh in.
Apple should be spending time making an OS X server that actually lets you remotely administrate the server, with an optional GUI in case you can't
Which is exactly what they did.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
The Sun ULTRA2 (or maybe ULTRA1?) can do two NTSC size MPEG2 streams at once using the "VIS extensions" (which are a bit like AltiVec, SSE/SSE2/3DNow/all the other SIMD extensions). I don't know if that includes an audio track, or disk I/O. The ULTRA2 is many years old and no longer sold by Sun. I assume the newer systems can do a way better job.
Note: the Ultra2 may not be all that fast, but I think the PDIST (or PDIFF?) instruction is extreamly MPEG2-codec-centric and helps make up a lot of ground in this benchmark.
If PacMan had affected us as kids we'd be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to electronic music
Um. I am sitting in a darkened office (none of us likes having the overhead flourescents on), I've got a skittles dispenser on my desk and I'm listening to an MP3. Oh yeah, cube-land does kind of resemble the PacMan maze.
Are you sure PacMan didn't affest us?
If you think Apple has problems now, just imagine the problems they'd have if they catered to those who ask for - no, demand - software for free.
(and yes, I know the different between 'free' and 'Free' in opensource/free-software parlance)
Apple is a business. If you can provide them with a good reason to see you as a viable market, I'm sure they'd be happy to consider it. Until then, they're not going to waste developer resources while there's more important work to be done.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- Jeff
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No matter how much Apple benchmarks Photoshop, it's still not a significant metric of overall system performance.
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It's significant when half of Apple's target market spends most of their day in an Altivec-enhanced Photoshop, don't you think?
- Jeff A. Campbell
- Jeff
Yes, there is a "region zero" code for DVDs which is playable anywhere. The recent re-release of Carl Sagan's Cosmos on DVD uses this code. I sure hope iDVD will allow you to pick that as your region code when burning a DVD.
Free Hans!
I'm tempted to get one of these myself. If it lives up to the hype, I will finally be able to eliminate Windows and free up all that disk space. It promises to do all the things I've kept windows around for, but better and all that disk space would be nice as an export directory. Though this is not a substitute for Free software, I'm tempted.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Umm... nVidia has no plans right now, but you can get an nVidia...err...3dfx Voodoo 5 for the Mac in PCI version. That should be sufficient.
Apple's Tech Info Library (http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n24 940) says,
"Note: In compliance with the MPAA, DVD-R discs with CSS-encrypted video data cannot be read."
You can watch either standard on computer screens all over the world.
But for playing it on a consumer DVD player it needs to be in the frame rate (25/30) and line number (~600/~500) of the TV it's playing it on.
When sending your baby movies to the grand parents, you'll certainly have to consider whether they're in NTSC or PAL parts of the world.
Interestingly, the PAL world is futher divided by PAL-SECAM, which is used in France and a few other places. It has a different color encoding scheme, and maybe also audio difference (don't remember). But since the frame rate and line numbers are the same, both formats use the same discs. The players put out the different signals.
Your thinkpad a21p also weighs 7.5 pounds, and does not have built-in ethernet. I love my built-in ethernet on my Vaio z505. Ethernet is rpetty much required these days: anyone who doesn't have it built into their laptop computer is going to have to shell out for a cardbus card to get it. The PowerBook (and the vaio) are also jammed full of industry-standard ports like infrared, ieee-1394, and USB.
The product is called the "FireBox 400" from Procomp and is reviewed here at tom's hardware. It allows you to connect any ATA IDE device to a firewire bus ... very cool.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
While Jobs announced 667 and 733 MHz machines, they will not be available until "February". In the special world that is Steve Jobs keynotes "right now" have been known to mean "in three months, if you're lucky", so what "February" really means in this case is anybodys guess.
Only the 466 and 533MHz are actually possible to buy "now".
How well does it run X?
My 770Z with the 1280x1024 screen has a fantastic display, but it's a bit sluggish to move windows around.
Still, I wouldn't trade it for anything but another ThinkPad. I wish the powerbooks had pointing sticks instead of those horrid touchpad things. I always wind up activating them by accident, ugh.
D
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Bzzzt!!!
I've been replacing hard drives in my Macs since 1993; I put a whopping 120MB hard drive in my SE/30 to replace the factory-installed 40MB.
A few years ago, I replaced the factory-installed 1GB hard drive in my PowerBook 1400 with a 3GB hard drive.
Sometime this year, I'll probably replace the 10GB hard drive in my iMac with an 80GB hard drive (or I'll use one of those recently announced ATA/100-to-FireWire cases).
Spread your anti-Apple FUD somewhere else.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
> Because Mac OS updates will trash non-apple drives.
Can you provide specific examples? Recent or not.
I was kinda wishing steve would tape a few G4 Powerbooks under the seat like he did with the clear optical mice last time. I liked how he had "Sex" to describe it. I guess they are reaching out to another group of people....
"Your just jealous because the voices only talk to me"
Everyone, please, calm down and listen!
I know all of this stuff seems amazing. In fact, most of it really is. What you need to understand, though, is that your 'oohs' and 'ahhs' are not your own.
You are currently under the power of Steve Job's mind-control marketing skillz.!
Now, there is only one way to possibly get out of this situation before Steve has you drinking Kool-Aid and chanting about the glory of NeXT.
First, go to the Apple Store. Now, pick out one of the super-hype systems that amaze you so much.
Play with it.
Configure it.
Now, once you've selected every possible option, and loaded this potentially-yours Apple with all the goodies that make these machines so great, look at the price.
There you go, you're back to normal. These systems are damn cool, but it's probably time to pass...
(Oh, btw... I am an Apple owner and user, so please keep the flaming down...)
--
Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
Maybe Jobs is more hip to genuine scientific innovation than you ;)
it's a nice little addition, but i think the best part of all the Aqua changes was that it showed Apple actually listened to the user feedback. that's a very good thing.
some animations of the changes can be found at the recently updated MacOS X Theatre.
my favourite change is that it appears the dock can be moved to the right or left side of the screen! i'm a litle surprised Apple didn't make this available through a option+click+drag, but i guess they want to shield all those newbie users from dramatic changes to the interface :). at any rate, it's nice that it's available as a hack from the terminal. the dock on the right will make it feel more like Windowmaker/NeXTStep and that's good news to me! :)
- j
Maybe this time it will stick... most of you guys prolly don't recall but when NeXT machines first came out they had Magneto Optical disks on them.
At the time these were like 3-5k drives... but somehow Steve managed to confuse someone into selling them to him cheap enough to make them standard on Cubes. Now it looks as though he has done it again with DVD-RW. Hopefully this time it will stick around...
--- I do not moderate.
http://stream.apple.akadns.net/keynote_010901_ref
The quality of the streaming video is much better if you use QuickTime 5 PR2 (get it at apple.com/quicktime/preview).
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
First of all, "Drag and drop" doesn't mess with your clipboard, so the X behavior is NOT the same.
Secondly, talking about "drag and drop" in response to the "inability to replace" criticism is apples and orages, to put it nicely. MacOS and Windows provide drag and drop IN ADDITION to, and INDEPENDENT OF the clipboard. Whereas in UNIX desktops, if you select some text in your word processor, it automatically erases whatever was in the clipboard. I think the point you were trying to make is that drag and drop, and the X clipboard are so close in functionality that they are mutually exclusive. WhereasMacOS and Windows provide two different mechanisms that are useful in different ways, increasing the usability of the system.
The lesson is this. Say that "copy and paste" is a wrench, and "drag and drop" is a pair of pliers. Bear with me... Both tools are similar. You can turn a nut, poorly, with a pair of pliers, and you can bend a sheet of metal, poorly, with a wrench. (that is to say, any task involving movign around text can be accomplished, after a fashion, with either mechanism.) But you're much more productive if you have access to both tools. If the tools are independent (as in MacOS and Windows) you can accomplish more complicated things, like (metaphorically speaking) holding one end of something with the pliers while turning the other end with a wrench. (or keeping a couple of important sentences in the clipboard while rearranging other sentences using drag-and-drop.) What X gives you is a monstrous "multi-tool" with a wrench on one end and a pliers on the other, made so that you can't use both at the same time. (or, while you try to move sentences around with drag and drop, your clipboard disappears. Useful, that.)
As for "having to hold the mouse button down," well, it's not hard to map one of your plethora of mouse buttons to a drag-lock. "Mechanisms, not policy," remember?
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
However I think you are way off the mark on your power comments. The PowerBook and most other laptops practically sip electrical power. That is, they don't use a significant amount. If you want to go off on someone, try your neighbor who leaves the lights all over his house and his television on all the time, your friend who runs his dishwashing machine half-empty, the guy with the RWD Canyonero that contains more metal than 100,000,000 PowerBooks ever will, and people who hose off their driveway instead of using a broom. I think you can find a more worthy inefficiency target than people who use PowerBook computers.
With an affordable DVD burner, you don't even need DeCSS.
You can do a track by track clone of a DVD and get a perfect copy if you have a DVD player and burner in the same system.
Netflix + new Pioneer Superdrive = big DVD library. Wait until you are buying DVD blanks on spindles like we do with CDRs.
I predict the first lawsuit will be filed within a month.
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nuclear iraq bioweapon encryption cocaine korea terrorist
Steve Jobs claims that the MPEG-2 (encoding) CODEC that iDVD and DVD Studio Pro use is "much faster than any other". He claims that most other software encoders for MPEG-2 run at about a 20:1 ratio, while the CODEC Apple has can encode at about a 2:1 ratio on a G4... that is, 30 minutes of video can be encoded into MPEG-2 format in about 60 minutes.
That's fine and dandy, but how fast are other software encoders out there? Are they really as slow as 20:1? Perhaps they're even faster than Apple's 2:1 claim? Curious.
1000BASE-T creates a 250 megabit full duplex channel on each of the four pairs of wire in a CAT-5 cable. The nodes on each end of the cable transmit and receive in the same frequency band. They use hybrids and echo cancellation, much like a high-speed modem, to separate the transmitted signal from the received signal. A 3COM paper on the subject is available here.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Apple sells the same systems all over the world and goes to great lengths to see that it works everywhere. Besides, the main application is (supposedly, at least) as a medium for your home movies.
You'll probably have to pick NTSC or PAL though. Or have both side by side.
And it only writes 4.7 Gig, which is about 1 hour of video.
The iDvd info pages are up now.
- 1" thick titanium case (13.5x9.5x1)
- Weighs 5.3 pounds
- 5 hour battery life
- 400 or 500 MHz PowerPC G4
- 15.2-inch diagonal widescreen (3:2 ratio) display
- Slot-loading DVD drive
- Up to 1GB of RAM
- Up to 30GB of disk space
- Built-in Airport antenna
With the full release of OS X just around the corner (March 24 I hear), this thing is looking really nice - the uberlaptop. Light, decent battery life, sleek, powerful - and with OS X, it's even UNIX. Plus, who doesn't want a portable widescreen DVD player?The price cuts were also no big surprise - of course the audience cheered, but the press had been giving Apple a beating for the past month or so about soft sales. "Soft Sales? Price Cut!" Apple had already been doing it in the form of rebates.
Even March for OS X was no surprise - CNET called it "late", but that's pretty much what people have been expecting.
Steve always gives a good show, though.
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Klactovedestene!
A few interesting points:
Avi
I remember back when the original Mac "superdrive" was a 1.44 MB auto-inject/eject floppy drive that would read and write Mac and PC format HD floppies (it was "super" compared to the 400/800KB DD Mac-only drives that were its predecessors). Now we get 4.7GB per disc - super-schweet! You've come a long way, baby...
My only caveat - does the DVD authoring include CSS-free and region-free options? Can you rip & copy DVD's with it? I'd hate for something this cool to be locked into the MPAA's riduculous regime....
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
Why the fuck would you give your computer illiterate dad Photoshop? Besides which if you don't like Apple's don't fucking buy them. Maybe to you a computer is "a tool" but to a good deal of people it is just another part of a home entertainment idea. Most end users shouldn't even be exposed to the complexities of computers that X forces on them. Macs are excellent for people who don't care. Computers are around to do things for people, not the other way around.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Steve Jobs is so much cooler than Bill Gates. I think Jobs would actually kick your ass if you called him a dork, while Gates would just mouth off about how he is not/has never been/and doesn't see how he could be a dork.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
Apple tried to do this today by comparing performance between a 733MHz Power Mac system and a 1.5GHz Pentium 4. The Mac won handily. Naturally, Apple probably chose the operations that made the Mac look best, but that still implies a G4 is comparible to a Pentium with, say, 1.5 times the MHz.
Also to note, Jobs implied that iDVD was only possible because of AltiVec. He said that usually software encoding takes 24 hours to encode a one hour MPEG2 video. Using AltiVec, they're doing it in just 2.
If this is 'true', then the usual criticism that Apple has picked a few specifically favourable benchmarks -- and hence the only thing macs are faster at is a few Photoshop filters, and encoding DVDs -- then that criticism begins to sound a bit lame.
It would be a little bit like someone sitting in a Rolls, being overtaken by a Ferrari, paw pawing the Ferrari because it's 'only good at speed'.
But let me be reminded that I know nothing about highly optimised encoding of DVD on similarly priced x86 chips... maybe they can do the same, I dunno.
As CEO of Pixar and semi-major player in Disney Movies Steve is part of Hollywood, and probably even a member of RIAA.
So that would make any attempts to subvert their interest intriguing. But there's probably a catch in the fine print.
ummm...how about try just about any Mac site you can think of:
...and don't forget the "big" news sites like:
Mac Slash (they even use Slash!)
Xlr8yourMac
Macintouch
News.com
and
MacWeek
Doh!
I finally decided about 3 months ago to try actually getting one of them to work (I only have unix systems) and after about 20 minutes had it working quite well using imwheel.
Now, not only does this work on web pages but it gets bound with the PageUp/PageDown so it's very handy with tons and tons of other applications (IRC, terms, editors, hell.. I even have used it with vi)
Now I'm stuck buying damn wheel mice because I found them to be very useful - you sound like you really haven't used them that much, or given them a fair chance - I know this because I used to sound just like you, before I got used to them.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Pay for it fucko. Apple makes alot of money selling Quicktime for a paltry 30$. Linux zealots scream for software to be free if not sourced. If you convince a company those millions of users will pay for the software they will make it.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The gigabit ethernet is plenty useful now, if you move huge files around, like a lot of Apple's customers. Apple has had gigabit ethernet standard for quite a while because people asked for it.
The Mac can also take 1.5 GB of RAM and boot from any fixed or removable disk attached to the system through SCSI, ATA, FireWire, or USB. The PCI bus is over 200Mbs, suitable for high-bandwidth video-editing cards. It has 2 FireWire ports, comes with iMovie, iTunes, an optical mouse, and analog and digital display connectors. The fan inside the box turns itself off when the box gets cool enough, like during sleep. It wakes up completely in one second when running Mac OS X. The CPU daughtercard is upgradable (for real). The motherboard is on the drop-down door, so it's easy to get at it and put in RAM or an AirPort card. Oh yeah, it has antennae inside the box and a slot for a $99 AirPort card that turns the box into a wireless client or a base station for other machines. Pretty good-looking boxes, too.
From my standpoint $10 still qualifys as a high cost of media deterrent. I can buy most movies that have been out more than a month or two for $12-15 at Best Buy. Why would I rent a DVD at a cost of $3.50 so that I could burn it onto a $10 DVD blank? Despite the "perfect digital transfer" I've saved $2 at best, don't have the case or chapter guide and have the movie on media that scratches more easily. Sounds to me like playing by the rules is still the better choice to me.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
Important Note: Power Mac G4 and PowerBook G4 computers introduced in January 2001 are not compatible with Mac OS X Public Beta.
--
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You are a fucking moron.
The first thing that struck me when I read the article was the iDVD and iTunes bit. I did a double take.
Steve Jobs is not as dumb as a lot of people say he looks. Not only is he including tools, standard, to manipulate two of today's more popular media formats, but he's doing what very few other major computer manufacturers are not... not bowing to the interests of Holywood (at least that we know of, and there's no reason, given Apple's past track record, that they would). You can bet your asses that the MPAA & RIAA aren't happy with this.
And for that, I have to congradulate him.
Here's my brief review of iTunes. I'm comparing it (indirectly) to other Mac MP3 players, such as SoundJam, Audion, and MACAST (formely MacAmp).
iTunes kicks ass.
Functionally, it has more cool features than most other MP3 players. The CD burning ability is really great and intuitive (just build a playlist, and hit the Burn CD button), but it unfortunately does not support my CD burner (Ricoh 7060A). The interface is very pretty, although some people may miss skin support. I haven't checked the quality of iTunes-encoded MP3s, but all the right options are there, and it of course automatically gets track info from CDDB when ripping songs from CDs.
Its "Browse" button organizes MP3s in a heirarchial fashion by Artist, Album, and Song, in a manner I haven't seen in other MP3 players.
What's missing? Support for my CD burner would be nice. It would also be good if ID3 tag info could be edited directly in the playlist window, instead of by opening a "Get Info" window for the song. Other than that, a great first version.
You can see the notes I took at my homepage and Drop.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
> until Adobe releases this carbon port of Photoshop
... kind of like the way the Cincinnati Reds used to always open the baseball season. It will be the first big product release, and it will give all those Photoshop-all-day-long Macs out there a good reason to want to run OS X right away.
... that's pretty good, considering how incomplete Carbon was at that time, and how different the two operating systems are.
> (which was supposedly done in two weeks by an
> intern two years ago - where is it now?)
Photoshop will probably ship the same day as OS X
The two-week update of Photoshop was what was required to get a demo up and running on Mac OS X
The Darwin kernel is a modified Mach 3.0 kernel, with SMP.
You want to replace a 7 watt 733MHz G4 chip that you could hide in your hand, with a 50 watt 1.2GHz monster that is a little faster for some tasks and a lot slower for others? You understand that Apple's towers have one little fan that turns itself off when it's not needed, right?
From the Apple page.
Just 1 inch thick and weighing a mere 5.3 pounds, the PowerBook G4 is a heavyweight in an ultralight body-the world's first notebook computer made of 99.5% pure grade CP1 (meaning commercially pure) titanium.
It's nice to see that Apple has taken a cue from the rest of the marketing world, and decided to try and convince us that titanium is the next cure for cancer/solution to world hunger/answer to all your spiritual questions.
But my God, that laptop does look sweet. It's interesting, though, that it takes Apple to give us a "wide screen" laptop like this. I wonder how long before we start seeing Dell's and IBM's like this?
Hopefully these next two quarters Apple will kick some serious ass against its competitors. In my skewed perception of the world I think out of most other contenders they offer the best OEM package you could ask a computer company for. They've got beaucoup RAM and hard drive space, really fast processors (dispite a low clock speed compared to Intel and AMD processors), and all the built-in extras you need for just about anything. To boot you even have the option of making your box a dual 533 machine. I bet in a few months Newer and Sonnet will come out with dual processor upgrade cards for older G4 Macs. One thing I wish Apple would emphasize is its support for delveopers. The ADC provides beaucoup resources for anyone wanting to develop MacOS software. They ought to also make some inroads into putting Mac programming into the classroom. A good deal of schools teach C on Windows and Unix but I've never heard of any using Macs (although there probably are some). The disadvantage to the ADC is it can be fairly expensive (Select membership is 500 bones). I think they ought to offer a public version of their student membership (which is 99 bones). One thing Apple users miss out on is the amount of little pieces of software (good IRC, FTP, or NNTP clients for instance) that users of other platforms take for granted.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
For those who complain about the "inability to replace" with the middle mouse, I will have to point out (yet again) that the X behavior is exactly the same as the much-lauded "drag and drop" except you don't have to hold the damn mouse button down as you move to the drop site. If you don't believe me, please think about it more carefully... What you are actually complaining about is also a limitation of "drag and drop", which is even worse. At least X lets you rearrange the windows to locate the drop site!
To defend against people throwing things at you during office meetings. Since, considering you are carrying a Mac, will probably happen. :)
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Seriously, wasn't there a time when chip makers actually did this to make their chips look faster?
Sorry for the self-promotion, but there's full coverage including live keynote news, impressions of the keynote, and a PB G4 vs Sony Vaio comparison, at http://www.themacjunkie.com.
- - I'm Johnny Badnote, arch-fiend, villain, slime. The public didn't like my songs and so I turned to crime. - -
Except that it makes sense on the macintosh - remember the whole "verb" thing that went into the design... verbs with the left hand, manipulation with the right? Your "verb" is "context", your manipulation is "click". Easy. Just like hitting Apple-Q with the mouse in the right hand.
Apple has crippled the free/consumer iDVD app to support just 1 hour of video per DVD-R disc. The full DVD Studio Pro package from Apple ($995, same cost as Final Cut Pro) does not have this limit.
How do you get past this sorta crippleware crap? Write letters. Boycott. Use linux DVD solutions. Whatever it takes. No one is forcing you to buy a G4 with a DVD-R drive and forcing you to use iDVD.
> when they should be focusing on speed
... OS 9 is not getting any faster when it has only three months of service left as the current OS ... OS X Public Beta is not performance-tuned ... it's a beta.
... OS 9 is not getting any more reliable when it has only three months of service left as the current OS ... OS X Public Beta is obscenely reliable already.
... not just for the looks, but also for things like the fact that all Macs have easy-open doors for users to install RAM, even the notebooks (the keyboard pops-up).
... introduced the first CD-ROM, first CD-R/DVD-R combo, first consumer UNIX, invented FireWire, open sourced the core of their commercial OS (where is Windows, where is OS/2?).
... these devices that surround us are getting better-looking.
...
> and reliability.
Speed
Reliabilitiy
Yes, Mac OS 9 is stretched to the breaking point. So, what? Mac OS X is 10 weeks away and runs more Mac OS 9 apps than Windows 2000 runs Windows 98 apps. Plus, there are lots of updated apps coming.
Also, to say that Apple's only innovation is candy colors is really ignorant. All of their computers have AirPort and built-in antennae, optical mouses, no fans except in the tower (which has one little one that turns off when cool), more than twice the notebook battery life of their nearest competitor, the biggest shipping LCD display, numerous industrial design awards
Geez, they also invented pull-down menus, drag and drop, overlapping windows
AND, what if their only innovation was candy colors? I read an article from the head of some plastics association who said that Apple had driven the plastics industry forward by creating translucent, transparent, textured, colored, and intricately-shaped plastics. That's a great innovation
Give them a break already
Change "Apple" in your post to "Sun", and change "multimedia" to "enterprise management". Now, see how much sense it really makes.
Mac OS X comes out in three months, and the new version of Mac OS 9 that came out today (9.0 became 9.1) is so unexciting to everybody in the Mac community that it didn't even merit a mention in the Steve Jobs keynote. Don't you think that represents a factor that might mitigate against positive sales performance? It's not that people aren't willing to pay what Apple's asking, it's just that everybody and their brother is hanging on as long as they can for the start of this new era for the Mac.
I mean, did you rush out and buy a Windows NT 4 Service Pack 5 machine just three months before Windows 2000 shipped? Did you grab a new Windows 3.1 machine in April of 1995? Nobody wants to buy a machine and then upgrade the OS to a dramatically different version only a few months later.
Apple gives the Quicktime player away to everyone in order to entice them to buy the $30 unlocked version. Why not follow the same strategy with Linux?
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
Buried in the (deserved) hype surrounding the new hardware is the OSX improvements. Airport and printing support is fixed. The apple menu is back. The dock is now resizable and has a hierarchical pop up feature. The os9 finder is sortof back, with it's multiple windows (if you want it).
e x p e c t d e l a y . c o m
As far as I could tell from the two hour long quicktime they all have slots for a second CPU, but jobs didn't think supply would match demand on the faster CPUs and they are not offering the second CPU except thruough channel partners (read "very expensave").
He also seemed to say the G4 PB wasn't actually available until the end of the month. Which sucks because I want to return my G3 one right now for the G4 :-)
Of corse the G4 one also says it won't run OSX-PB2, so I may have to wait two months for the real relase...
-jon
Remember Amalek.
I liked aqua the way it was!
It wasn't mac classic, it was something new, a hybrid between *nix and mac, and better than any of the themes I had on my linux boxen...
I'm not sure... if the PB doesn't break in March, I may just keep using it, debug code and all.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
As part of the announcements, Apple will be selling blank DVD-Rs for $10 each. One of the arguments against DVD piracy has been the high cost of blank media. Poof!
So can I put a DVD in one machine, send via ethernet to another with a superdrive and make a copy?
Think we'll ever see something like this in a Sony?
Steve M
What 6 months? Count along with me:
1) January,
2) February,
3) March.
Its not all of March, its March 24th, and part of January's already gone. Its like 2 1/2 months.
As for not being MP, they're selling dual processor and OS X is based on Darwin which is Open BSD which IS MP. And Carbonized apps will be able to use MP in MP machines.
As cool as the Titanium notebook is, it isn't likely to be MP anymore than the Sony Vaio.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Willy
The actual price of the Apple Cinema Display is $3,999.
That being said, fans of slick and elegant design, both within the systems themselves and in the operating system software and applications aren't going to be impressed with your system. After all, it has to run Windows, Linux or BeOS; all three simply do not have the sleek elegance of the Mac operating system. (Be comes close but has virtually no applications).
The only operating system I like better than MacOS X is SGI, and unfortunately the software's too expensive. Better Photoshop on the Mac (especially with MacOS X versions coming out) than a four-version old Photoshop on SGI.
In all honesty, I think people focus too much of on money. In my view, the elegance makes Macs well worth the extra dough.
D
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Looking thru the thread I see two camps... the Mac folks that are cheering and the anti-Mac folks that are saying Apple is way behind and time to get rid of any sort of benchmarks. I use practically every platform out there and really only use macs for video work (we have several sawtooth G4s at work for editing). To be totally honest, the only time I have ever seen a PC be faster for such work is with "slim" editing packages that look to be designed for performance only. Premiere (ugh, is it *still* around?), Avid, and many other full packages run equally fast or even a bit slower (especially for encoding) on ~1 GHz PCs than they do on a 500 MHz G4. Provided you have enough RAM and aren't crippled with a slow or small drive.
There are certain things I don't even consider when looking at a Mac.... games for example. I'm thrilled to see Apple using nVidia graphics, but I still wouldn't buy a Mac for games. It's fun to launch Quake3 and play a quick deathmatch on the G4s over lunch at work. The G4s and their Rage 128 play it pretty well at 640x480, but it's sure no Geforce2 on a PC. Ditto for these "MS Word Scrolling Tests" that a lot of the professional magazines do. I can't recall any time I've scrolled more than 2 or three pages at full standard scroll speed. I usually page down, drag the scroll thumb way down, jump to page x, or search.
Benchmarks these days are silly. Buy the best machine for the job. Dunno what machine that is? Ask around and read some professional level magazines. Have some machines demoed to you.
Personally, want a linux box? Get x86 or Alpha. Want a huge nutty server? Get a Sun or SGI. Want games? Get a console or a PC. Want Video? Get a G4 (or an SGI Octane2 or Onyx2/Onyx3000 if you want to do uncompressed 1080i HDTV). Get over the benchmarks.
Mac OS 9.1 was also released, but it wasn't mentioned at the keynote. Got to Apple's Mac OS 9 page and see for yourselves!
Supreme Lord High Commander of the Interstellar Task Force for the Eradication of Stupidity
1. Seemingly interminable wait while the redundant (albeit proximate) contextual menu loads and (finally) appears.
A long wait? Hmm... you've got some issues... (or your runing win 98/ME/2k with 32 MB of ram)try defragging, or install tweak UI and REMOVE all the usless (to you) functions from the context menu. That will speed it up tons
2. Scrolling. Also redundant and not terribly accurate either. I never use it.
This is just silly. the scroll wheel is great, especially for Web browsing. You can also set the # of lines you wish to scroll in the Control Panel. This should solve the accuracy problem.
C'mon, a 1 button mouse is not very usefull. Even most Mac Zealots will agree that Apple needs a better mouse.
um.. I done, you can stop reading...
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
OK, I too lust for a cube instead of my G4, but then I take a cold shower and the feeling passes.
One thing people should keep in mind when they discuss prices of Macs is that it's always inaccurate to compare with Windoze boxes. With a Mac, you're always getting 24-bit color, sound input and output, and, of course, the world's best and most mature GUI. Nearly all Macs come with video input (used to be those coax connector thingamies, now I guess it's a different interface). All this was true back when a "multimedia" PC meant that it had a CD-ROM drive and 8-bit color. The cheapest PCs are still the ones that lack all these extras.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews
Find free books.
I'm making all three of those statements. The attitidue is evil because its existence justifies the 'human nature' response. I feel messages like this are dangerous. Like Sherwin Williams' "Cover the Earth" logo, with a can of paint covering the globe. To me, that's a dangerous message to people who don't take the time to think objectively. The same goes for the shameless promotion of SUVs and high-power yet inefficient engines. There's a huge market for glamorizing waste exploited all over the place.
//e. Now I work for an x86-centric company, and have used PC's since the early 80's because I couldn't afford a Mac. Yet I've always considered Apple to be a thinktank leftist artistic movement in the corporate PC environment. I know, I know, Apple is trying to make a profit just like everyone else, but they've always been so upper-class about it, where IBM, Dell, Gateway, etc, all seem so lo-brow. To see Apple try to cater to lowbrow markets is what bothered me. "Think Different" is intellectually, environmentally and politically significant (albeit grammatically incorrect). "Power to Burn" is so WWF.
Now on to Apple. First, as stated by another post, Apple is very energy star compliant. Credentials: I have always been a fan of Apple, and learned on an early
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https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
the cinema display can be used on things other than a mac. First buy the belkin adc-dvi-d cable.
:}
Second, install a dvi-d equipped video card. (I have a number nine card in my box at work with this output.)
viola (that's french)
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
"Middle mouse button paste" (and the automatic selection->copy) of X is exactly the same as Drag and Drop! EXACTLY!
Therefore, a proper implementation would merge this behavior with any drag and drop behavior and use the same buffer. While a seperate buffer should be used for the ^X^V cut/paste operations.
Unfortunately there are a lot of X programs (my own stuff included) that use the same buffer for the middle mouse click and for the ^X^C. This is what my original message was about, and it is a problem. However too many people seem to think the middle-mouse stuff is cut/paste and should be seperate from drag & drop, when in fact they are identical and the original X behavior, while cut & paste is the "new" stuff for X. Unfortunately event the drag & drop standards for X have fallen into this so that the only compatable thing to do is have THREE buffers (selection, "clipboard", and "drag and drop"). Very few programs use the SELECTION buffer as well (many of them consider it more drag & drop than the clipboard, too), forcing the same buffer to be used if you want ^X^C to work between programs.
please. like fdisk is a good example of a capable program.
use Ranish Partition Manager.
if that doesn't get it, use debug to really wipe it.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
A) The people all over the world behave that way. The Americans don't have a monopoly on wasteful behavior. For example, people in China dump waste into the Yellow river. People in India do the same thing to the Ganges. People in developing contries waste natural gas through poor training (and laziness, it takes a while to light a gas stove.) If they could afford it, Europeans and Asians would waste just as much as Americans do. If you don't believe me, then go to Bankok, Thailand. You'd think you were in LA, sans the tight air-control standards. (BTW, I'm not talking out my ass, I've *lived* in these places)
B) Don't get *me* started on democracy. There is a reason for the electrol college which you stupid populists don't seem to get. (BTW, I'm a rabid democrat.) The electrol college assures that the majority does not totally outweight the minority. Do you really think that the politicians would give a damn about the jews in Florida if it weren't for the electrol college? How about blacks, arabs, and other minorites? Of course not! If it was just population, then they'd only be playing up to the white majority. The debate over majority rule was settled two hundred years ago during the first few presidencies. A general concensus was made (by politicians *far* more qualified than Hilary Clinton) that while the majority did in fact control the country, their power had to be kept in check to protect minority rights. The whole American democracy is based on checks and balances (and if you jaded Americans think that the US democracy is overrated and corrupted, try living in Asia or parts of Europe...) Well, welcome to one of these checks.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The 533s have a second processor option--add one for $300, at the Apple Store. That makes a DP 533=$2499, with all the other goodies, like a 133Mhz bus, CD-R/W, iMusic, and iMovie.
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$tar -xvf
Seems they've dropped their line about multiprocessors, since the only model that ships with them is the 533 MHz model. I can't seem to find any information on if they include an empty socket or not for the other configurations... I'd hope so, because honestly, it seems cheaper if they'ed just manufacture all G4 motherboards with two sockets rather than having to have two separate lines of motherboards in their assembling plants...
Past that, though... I want one. Either a powerbook G4, or powermac G4... If it turns out to be the powerbook, though, i'll advise myself to hold off a few month, lest any kinks arise...
Why in the world would this me marked as a troll? Was it because I spely 'skills' with a 'z'?
Ah well, so much for a sense of humor...
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Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
The dock has always been resizable and you could always turn on multiple windows in the OS X finder, although why you would want to is beyond me.
cheese logs keep my wang warm at night.
it seems that you need the $3499 model to get it. its not even available as a choice to upgrade in the custom configurations of the other models...
This is because the drives are quite scarce right now. This technology will eventually filter its way down to the other product lines, as DVD and FireWire did.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Yelling it doesn't make it so. I just opened up my text editor, selected a paragraph, and DRAGGED it above another paragraph. The two paragraphs switched locations. I tried the same in emacs using hte middle-button buffer. Now I have two copies of the paragraph I selected. That's EXACTLY the same? Unfortunately there are a lot of X programs (my own stuff included) that use the same buffer for the middle mouse click and for the ^X^C.
So even in your own programs, which implement ^C^V, when I select something it erases my ^C clipboard buffer. That's DIFFERENT BEHAVIOR from what drag&drop does.
Your proposed solution is all right, but until things work that way, don't go around screaming that everyhting is "exactly the same," because it isn't.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
Because they are assuming no one will pay for the Linux version. Lots of people pay for the unlocked version of Quicktime which makes it profitable. Linux users are by far historically against paying for any set of 1's and 0's stored on their hard drives. If you pay for it they will develop it. Which is why I originally said you need to convince Apple people will indeed pay for the Linux port of Quicktime in order for them to develop it. Porting it will cost a fair deal of money (there is alot to port) as well as more licensing fees they'll need to pay for CODECs.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
That'll only happen if Apple can get it through Joe Average's thick skull that actual performance is only partly a function of MHz. This might be a little easier than it would have been if Intel hadn't shot itself in the foot with the Pentium-4.
(No offence meant to anyone out there named Joe Average.)
the point is: macOS is designed for one button mice. Winders is designed for 9buttons/3wheels/2levers/1footpedal mice. linux gui-makers fell into the the "more-is-better" mentality somewhere after that.
2 1337 4 u!
The picture here shows the clock in the menu bar.
Steve M
it would seem they have silently released a new version of os x server that is the same rev as mac os x
see this page
the animal doesnt even have opposable thumbs, focker!
1) A second clipboard.
For those of us who use Unix an Linux with mice that have three, or more, buttons, the third button is very useful. Just highlight something then middle click and it pastes. That on top of the, what is now standard in GUIs, ^C (or ^X) and ^V you have two clipboards. It can become very useful very quickly.
Also if you use Enlightenment then each of the three buttons displays a different menu, each equally useful.
Frankly, I have ideas for what the fourth button on my Logitec Mouseman+ should do but I just don't have the skill to implement it, yet.
Although quite a bit can be done with one mouse button I would rather just right click on something to bring up a menu rather than click, hold, and then drag in order to get the same menu with just one button. To each his/her own though.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
If you let me pick the benchmark, I'll happily show you a 333 Mhz PII beating up on a 733Mhz PPC. Have you ever looked at the fine print in PPC benchmarking from apple? 98% of the time it's photoshop. Why? Because there is a special instruction set (Altivec) that speeds up some operations significantly.
They don't quote industry-standard SPEC numbers. STREAM? Nope. No matter how much Apple benchmarks Photoshop, it's still not a significant metric of overall system performance.
As I see it, the only reason such benchmarking works is because people WANT to believe Apple is faster
Megahertz is certainly not everything. But it's also not nothing, especially when the microarchitectural aggressiveness of the cores being compared are similar, as they are in this case.
Actually, I found the installer for iTunes on my iDisk. Load yours to get the installer. . . As for OS 9.1 update . . .
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Because middle-mouse click allows the user to cancel by not doing the paste at all, this move behavior is not necessary. I actually think a copy behavior would be more useful and consistent (since that is what is done between programs). Middle-mouse also allows the user to select, delete, and then paste, allowing drag&drop to do either a copy or a move by the user's choice.
As you point out, there are big problems with the same buffer being used for middle-mouse drag&drop and cut/paste, as selecting something wipes out the users cut, since in middle-mouse terms the user has just started a drag. In Windows drag&drop this is not a problem because click that starts a drag is not needed to edit text otherwise, and I suspect Windows users would never notice if drag & drop replaced the clipboard contents.
Unfortunately through historical failure to notice that middle-mouse click is different from cut/paste, we are probably stuck on X with the same buffer used for both.
BUT, I do think a single buffer could be used, if it was not changed when a selection is done (or the drag is started), but rather when the focus exits the buffer, (or even better it should change at the moment the middle-mouse/"drop" is done but this cannot be done on either Windows or X). I am working on implementing this behavior in fltk right now.
do you have a crack habit? back in, what, 94, apple changed the hardware architecture completely. the os programmers emulated every aspect of m68k in the ppc versions of the os up until 8.1... now they've got a completely re-engineered os with two new api sets plus a backwards compatibility solution for the old os...
2 1337 4 u!
a) people, probably so (try to talk about environment to anyone in Scandinavia though). governments, nope. US government is trying to buy its quota of pollution from poorer countries, instead of complying with international treaties. Check out environmental policies in more environmentally advanced European countries (pretty much the entire EU).
>>>>>>>>>>>
We're not a dictatorship, the government can't just *force* everyone to comply. The people have to choose to do so, and like the people of India, China, and parts of Europe, they don't want to.
b)nothing a good 2-turn system could not solve
>>>>>>>>>>>
You heard it here folks. A crucial problem of the US democracy was solved by a one-liner from an AC that wasn't even capitalized and punctuated correctly!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
There's absolutely nothing about iDVD that couldn't have been done by Compaq on Windows. Compaq is supposed to be offering the SuperDrive as a $995 option in a few months. Compare their solution to Apple's ... I can almost see what the software will look like right now ... like something from Creative Labs, no doubt, with a too-busy interface.
... he scores".
Apple is first in this because they took steps to create the software and offer the drive first. Nobody else even knew what "home DVD's" would look like. Apple are not even taking advantage of Mac OS X, yet. All this stuff runs on Mac OS 9, for now. Sometimes you just have to say "he shoots
Here is one page explaining the formats
http://www.alkenmrs.com/video/standards.html
You're right in that there are 7 subbranches of PAL, but SECAM is as I described it. Is uses 625 lines and 50Hz just like PAL.
something else unannounced...the new Mac OS X Server with Aqua...Looks neat...
http://www.apple.com/macosx/server/
-aaron
Now one quick mention on ergonomics. 2-3 buttons mice are actually less ergonomically friendly. Think about it. When you start getting quick with 2+ buttons mice you don't use your pointer finger for all the keys. You'll use your middle finger (or ring finger for the people with smaller hands). You pointer finger is still up in the air or at least barely touching the mouse, ready for the next click. What that means is you are no longer resting your hand on the back of your mouse. You're now having to pull upwards on your hand, causing stress at the wrist (your wrist moves better downwards than upwards, assuming your palm is down). A one button mouse uses just one finger to click, allowing the rest of you hand to sit at rest. Apple's optical mouse (Pro Mouse) makes the whole front surface of the mouse a big button, allowing you ro press down whereever you feel more comfortable. It actually makes sense. Now that aside, I would love a good mouse with 2-3 buttons for Quake and UT! :-)
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