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Massive WWDC Rumor Roundup
An anonymous reader writes "MacRumors.com posted a massive rumor roundup of all the major rumors surrounding Apple's World Wide Developer's Conference which starts next week. There's been talk of 970 PowerMacs, PowerBooks and Panther... seems like the biggest uncertainty is whether or not 970 PowerMacs will ship or not."
they HAVE threatened legal action on quite a few rumour sites recently - Think Secret's still got 2 pulled stories on it's front page.
That was classic intercourse!
" Estimated initial clocks are 1.4-1.8. An dual 1.8 (3.6 total) 970 wouls be CONSERVATIVELY equal to a 9 GHz P4. Make sense yet why this is important?"
This is absolutely ridiculous. IBM have already published provisional SPEC scores for the PPC 970 @ 1.8Ghz, if I remember rightly, the scores were about equivalent to the top of the range Opteron. If Apple use 2x 1.8 Ghz 970s in their top machine, it'll be very fast, but hardly bettr than it's x86-64 equivalent.
That was classic intercourse!
People, pay attention. The 15" powerbook was held back because Jobs promised to support MacOS 9 until ... this summer. With that constraint off, it can get the new technologies that are not supported in MacOS 9 (bluetooth, airport extreme). That doesn't mean it's getting the 970.
"Dual rpocessors give a 70% speed increase at best."
Err... nope. Dual processors give a 100% speed increase at BEST.
That was classic intercourse!
"I've heard from others that this is also true of regular (non-VPN) NFS mounts as well."
/Volume/NFS directory if you do then your terminal will hang (Thus wishing you can run the same application twice). Now it is time to admit defeat so you reboot the system. But all the applications close except for the finder. Thus it will not reboot. Last step it to hold down the powerbutton until forced power off. Wait 30 seconds power it back on and run FSCK and wait. That is my only Major Issue with OS X
Happens to me all the time. This is what I normally do.
On my powerbook.
Mount a NFS drive at work.
At the end of the day. I close the lid (Putting the laptop to sleep)
When I get home I open the lid (auto detects I am on a new network gives me a new IP adress)
Opps my NFS drive is still mounted but their is no routing to it.
Now when any application tries to read it you get the spinny sprial ball. And it will never end. If you are lucky you may get to the terminal and do a reboot but never try to unmount the drive or even go to you
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I've had the same problem myself. One recommendation I can provide is to try mounting the NFS share using the "NFS Manager" program... When using this program, you can tinker with lots of parameters that are normally more difficult to experiment with at the command line. For example, you can adjust some of the timeout parameters that should give you a little more leeway in the event of getting the spinny beach ball of near-death. It's not a complete solution by any means, but it does seem to help some. All of us with this problem should write Apple to have them fix it.
About the only other advice I can provide is to remember that you have a mount active, and then unmount before leaving work (easier said than done, of course).
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I'd also point out that he is VP of Hardware Marketing, not Hardware. (i.e. Engineering)
Random is the New Order.
Yes. This happens with AFP-mounted drives too. I file a bug report with every point release of the operating system and I get the same response "We know about it". It must be a serious issue or they woulda fixed it by now. It's a real black eye on an otherwise exceedingly stable and usable (in my hands at least) operating system.
I've managed to figure out that the system is trying to re-establish communication with the drive, but it just fails to ever throw in the towel. Interestingly, when this happens, all carbon-based applications seize up, but Cocoa-based apps and all CLI applications continue to be functional.
If I could only find out what process what responsible for the hang, maybe we could kill -9 it with extreme prejudice and not have to force a reboot, but I've had no luck with that.
ThinkSecret is implying Safari 1.0 is close to Golden Master, and they are quite reliable. I think they've mentioned image blocking and special tab features too.
Random is the New Order.
For all that its worth, I can confirm that there is at least one tier 1 distrubitor who has large backorders of PowerMacs which would help support the theory of a revision bump, or a model replacement. I guess we'll all know the truth in a week though, so I'm trying to avoid getting my PPC970-based hopes up.
About the only other advice I can provide is to remember that you have a mount active, and then unmount before leaving work (easier said than done, of course).
I learned that after a long time. But before that I usually just re-launched the finder (either from the command line or the command-option-escape menu. That would get rid of the missing network drives and not really disrupt the system too much.
Hank! White!
"...The Velocity Engine is in the 970 so it's pretty clear that Apple is going to be using it..."
What does this prove? IBM has stated that they are going to use the 970 in their own Linux systems, and AltiVec support for linux exists and has been implemented.
In addition, Steve Jobs apparently is satisfied with the G4 roadmap.
We'll know for sure in a week. Well, maybe the night before if we're lucky.
(tig)
"We do not inherit the land from our ancestors"
"We borrow it from our children"
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
That's an inherent UNIX problem. It's got to do with uninterruptable code in the VFS layer. Solving it is a very high priority, but it's also incredibly difficult without completely rewriting the filesystem implementation code.
It might be interesting to see the addition of an optional garbage collector added to Objective-C for newbies to use but engineered in such a way to make it optional for those Objective-C veterans who want to make their work execute more efficiently.
There is. It's called "autorelease."
it'd be great to see a global user interface macro recording feature
No, no. We had that in System 6. Nobody used it. There's zero reason to put this in.
Cocoa has automatic garbage collection in-built by default. It's just not perfect, so it's better (but not easier) to mark/release.
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
(Check dell.com, see no SATA machines shipping, concludes that PATA is alive and well for now.)
I don't think you understand Apple's hardware strategy -- if it doesn't sell machines, they'll use the most bog-standard generic commodity parts they can find. You'll never see a Mac with the sort of bleeding-edge features found on "enthusiast" x86 mobos.
Apple will switch to SATA -- about 3 months after the rest of the industry. If new machines ship this month, they will be using PATA drives. If you're very very lucky, there might be internal SATA ports.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
This problem is not limited to NFS. I often connect to drives at work from home using AFS. If I forget to unmount them before closing the lid on my powerbook, and then wake my computer up later, quite often (but not always) the Finder hangs with the spinning ball. Sometimes a force quit of the Finder or even the machine itself is the only way out of it. By the way, I believe FSCK runs automatically on startup (this was added at some point with the 10.2 updates). Compare the times it takes to reboot a machine that you've forced a restart vs. the time after a normal shutdown.
It's still ATA-100 (faster than any drive, anyways), but it supports the larger (130GB+) hard drives
There's also the ATA-66 controller and the ATA-33 controller (for the CD/DVD drives).
On the subject of what rumors have been pulled by Apple legal, squiggleslash writes:
Actually, stories about G5 Macs have also been pulled from www.macbidouille.com, as has www.macrumors.com and www.osnews.com and tech-report.com. All of these were about 64-bit offerings being shown at WWDC.
Now, whether Apple Legal had these pulled because they were accurate, or merely scurilous but potentially hurting hardware sales, is another question.
Babar
also Apple WILL be at MWNYC this year, just no Steve Jobs keynote.... today IDG announced
Not the same as Steve Jobs i guess, but it sounds like he will probably be repeating a lot of what happens next week.... but tuned down to consumer-speak. The NYC conference is being geared more towards consumers and creative people. Kind of makes sense since it's just a month after WWDC. Since theya re targetting the creative Mac users, it seems like all the more reason to keep the East Coast Expo in NYC instead of the northmost edge of the megalopolis.
Usually at WWDC the kinds of announcements that get made are software. If new hardware is announced it's from a software implications viewpoint. They may demo cool new boxes, but they aren't generally announcing ship dates or showing off new plastic cases.
The exception is when they have nothing in the way of new software or architecture announcements. (The Powerbook G3-500 release is the only example I can remember of a major product announcement at WWDC; and the other announcements at that WWDC were highly underwhelming.)
The big news is Panther. Apple hasn't told most of us what will be in Panther so the idea that they will muddy the waters by fuelling a bunch of consumer-related hysteria when what they really want is to get people excited about a new OS release seems to me to be far-fetched.
I'd be looking for a demo of the PPC970 (or an unnamed chip) but not a product release.
Then again, WWDC has become more and more like a pure marketing exercise as the years have gone by and the leaks have been plugged. The days when you could stand around with system engineers being told about the year after next's OS changes and the current OS's most egregious unfixable bugs seem gone (or maybe they just won't talk to me any more).
There isn't any difference between the desktop G4 and the mobile G4. At all. They are the same chip.
Try that with your Pentium 4. Oh wait, they did, and then called it 'SpeedStep.' In other words, the Pentium Steps your Speed DOWN when on battery, making it mHz to mHz slower than a G4 laptop.