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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."
But I believe "G4" is not the name of the processor that will be in the replacement machines...
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
2. Get mentioned at Slashdot.
3. Everyone jeers and boos.
4. ???
5. Loss
Loss? Apple has been posting underwhelming but definite profits (almost) without fail for every quarter in the last three years. Name five other companies that have done that. On second thought, given the economic landscape, those profits are not really underwhelming. Still, it was a useful post. Thank you for attempting to add to the Apple Death Knell Counter. Given the likes of John Dvorak as your potential company on that list, your parents must be very proud.
The simple truth is that Apple matters. There are things they innovate (like Quicktime, the Newton, and Firewire, etc etc etc) that are ahead of their time. They also can take existing markets and make something far and away better than what is there (iPod being the most recent example). What's more, they can take someone else's technology and make it acceptable (USB, anyone?) And they also can produce things that change the way you think about 'X'. In this latter category I'd put the GUI, Quicktime, and most recently the Music Store. I have completely changed the way I look at music, thanks to the iTMS and my iPod.
As long as they keep this up, and I don't see why they can't, they will matter and will draw people who want to speculate about the latest and greatest.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Same goes for some other technologies being introduced now. Nothing worse than a system design that is obsolete before it hits the shelves.
Another question about the PowerBooks is what CPU will they have? It could either be a G4 or some version of the PPC 970 (as reported by some rumor sites). In my opinion the PowerBooks will use a G4 class CPU since the current 970 probably lacks energy saving features.
Now, that leads to a scary possibility. There are no new 970s. Panther's just an incremental update. The new 15" PowerBook replacement is a 15.4" PowerBook with the same-old G4 as always. But Apple, in their infinite wisdom, has decided that a webcam is the "next big thing" and are convinced that Jobs demonstrating a $400 webcam with an in-built 10G HD will suitably wow the entire world.
It might happen. And, given the success of the iPod, which is "only an MP3 player", they may even be right about the "iCam"... ;-) It'll suck to be a Mac user though after that...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I like Safari because it is quite pretty. Nevertheless, there's no ignoring the fact it currently does less than the Gecko-derived browsers so it hasn't quite done enough to become my default browser yet.
Cheers,
Ian
Damn, never have mod points when you need them.
While I'm open to improvements in the OS, especially in the interface consistency and configuration tools area, the biggest thing I'm looking for is essentially a host of bugfixes in OS X's networking.
The Samba support is buggy -- it can't browse as well as a Windows box, and when talking to a Unix box it doesn't understand the concept of group priviliges most of the time, requiring you to re-save documents 5 to 10 times before it will decide you have write permissions.
Networking in general has big issues--PPCP VPN support improved with 10.2 but if you have a mounted drive over Samba over a VPN and the connection drops--you're pretty much in a race to see if you can shell into your machine to issue `reboot` before some runaway process hogs the entire machine and takes down every other service. I've heard from others that this is also true of regular (non-VPN) NFS mounts as well.
So truly robust networking support for those of us in mixed environments would make my life So Much Easier You Wouldn't Believe It.
In a past slashdot thread, I predicted that people would be sorely disappointed because Apple would wait to demo new iApps, unveil new prices and cases for new hardware, and keep GUI changes under wraps until they can make a bigger splash to a more consumer audience. Things may be different this year because of their falling out with the MacWorld Expo organizers and so much consumer attention has been focused on WWDC by the Mac fan sites. I won't try to predict what consumer focused changes will appear at wwdc. In the past the biggest announcements were those designed to affect developers in the biggest way, if that holds true, this is what I'd like to hear about:
I'd be happy if we saw official Apple support for Cocoa bridges other developers have created such as Camel Bones (Cocoa/Perl) and PyObjC (Cocoa/Python) as officially supported as the Java/Objective-C bridge.
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. Memory management headaches are the biggest difference between the simplicity of Cocoa and other more "popular" languages like Visual Basic (and heck, even Apple's old Hypercard).
Apple went a long way in Jaguar toward re-engineering the bowels of the user interface architecture (HIToolbox) to unify Cocoa and Carbon. I'm sure Panther will see this effort finished, but it'd be great to see a global user interface macro recording feature added now that there's one robust, well-thought and well implemented API underneath.
What would be bigger news to me than any sort of user interface bauble (like the fabled "piles") would be an announcement by Apple that it was completely updating the Mac OS X online help system. They've done a great job of trying to make it easy to get to, but it's very slow and very awkward to use. Any improvements in this area would be very welcome for users and developers.
While new Macs, new iApps, and new user interface trinkets could debut here or at any other Apple event, this is the only time of year Apple really focuses on making geeky, developer relevant announcements. I hope this WWDC doesn't disappoint in that regard.
There seem to be quite a lot of slots "to be announced" at the WWDC, especially for tuesday...
Is this normal? Could these be demonstrations of new products? Ideas, anyone?
I'd like to see a few issues addressed. Yet oddly enough, they all seem to involve Microsoft:
1) The whole Virtual PC thing. Is Apple going to talk to developers to find ways to continue to run Windows on the Mac should MS decide to kill VPC?
2) Safari/IE. MS is killing IE for the Mac. Many sites currently don't look so hot, or don't even work, on non-IE browsers. How will this be addressed? Safari "giving in" to IE-style rendering?
I do also expect some yummy hardware announcement, I just have no idea what it is. It's beyond speculation, but whatever it is, I'll be happy.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Better than that... in some cases, the decrease in context switching (among other things) can give a greater than 100% increase. I've seen such a thing happen before.
While there were a few rumors of an Apple browser before Safari came out, few people expected it to be based on open source Konqueror.
I'm wondering how big a surprise a behind the scenes port of Open Office to the Mac would be.
In the situation where someone just woke up and didn't have their coffee. It seems that they are saying the new PowerMacs cases will be a matalic color as well as 10.3 using more of the brush metal theam. I can only assume that they want to OS to look more like the case itself and vise versa. Which is basicly what they have been dooing OS up to 10.2 have been on Macs that were normally White in color but now the new ones are becoming more metalic as well as the powerbooks so the New OS will look like the case thus making the brush metal theam fit with the computer.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
For just navigating thru menus and windows and general GUI stuff my 33MHz 68040-based NeXTStation Turbo Color slab feels about the same speed as my dual G4 800 Mac!
Don't knock the '040!
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
He didn't say 'if nothing interesting happens, they're dead,' but rather 'if there are no 970's, they're dead' which is rubbish because Apple makes more than just professional Macs, they've plenty of cash and there can be interesting things happening aside from the 970.
They wouldn't think it's okay, but Apple survived the Amelio era, haemorrhaging billions, yet still being alive. They're considerably healthier now than they were then.
A define profitable as them saying in their quarterly financial statements that they're making a profit.
The Velocity Engine is in the 970 so it's pretty clear that Apple is going to be using it and we know that if IBM hasn't already started volume production of the 970 but now, they will before the end of the year. If they didn't and Apple didn't have another good chip to switch to, then there would likely be sufficient bad publicity and loss of faith from professionals to cause them serious problems, but the WWDC is not the turning point.
When did I say questioning Apple was flamebait? I think he was being over-dramatic and got modded up for it, but I wouldn't say it was flame bait and neither is your post. I think your point about profitability is valid for instance. Just because some people are zealots doesn't mean all are.
Part of the fun is speculating on what Jobs will pull out of his ass this time. Security is so tight at Apple, any hint of what is to be is big news.
It is a game Mac users and others enjoy. Jobs is into the joke too. Watch his presentation, it is sheer entertainment. We know to expect the unexpected, and would be disappointed if the rumor sites were right.
Even if you are not into Macs, it is worth it to watch his presentation. You will be learning from the master.
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I know what you mean---my 25MHz '040 NeXT Cube is still my main machine for doing TeX and PostScript work.
The really painful thing is the comments from Mac developers when they first tried out OpenStep 4.2 on decent white boxes in preparation for what was then called Rhapsody...
``windows vanish (instantly) (after clicking the close box)''
``feels rock solid''
``man I hope the real thing performs this snappily''
There was recently a post to comp.sys.next.advocacy from a guy who got OpenStep running on a something.something GHz box w/ 1GB or DDR or somesuch RAM.... may have to think 'bout setting up something like that myself, thoough I'd really miss the cool old-style NeXT keyboard....
William
i
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
In the interests of Slashdot's non francophile readers and despite the fact that I might screw up some of this translation, here is what that item says:
Grek sends us evidence (lit. testimony) that not only confirms rumors of the release of PPC 970 machines, but but also this time for servers.
I would remind you that the WWDC last year was the the time when Steve announced the first generation of the XServe in addition to Jaguar. This year, Panther will be there, but it remains to be seen if there will aslo be a speedboat for the XServe at the WWDC. [sorry, I'm not sure how to translate "une vedette de la WWDC]
Now, I do not find the logic here completely compelling; this could be just a price drop, or an announcement about software improvements or what have you, but WWDC wouldn't be a silly place to announce changes in the server line by any means.
Babar
My advice is check the mount options for NFS shares on your OS. These you pass to the mount command or put in your fstab. The key ones to look for, under Linux, are:
- bg - if you don't put this in your fstab, and your machine can't find a server when it boots, you'll find actually getting into your machine close to impossible under certain circumstances.
- soft - What happens if a server goes offline and your programs try to access a file? They'll get an error? right? Nah, unless you set "soft" as an option, your machine will sit there trying to access the server and never quit. Too bad if you have a file open on a no-longer-available NFS server, you're going to have to reboot and do it the long, slow, way where you manually dismount your other filesystems, making root "read only". If you can. Check out soft, it saves a lot of trouble.
- intr - now, the fact this one's not default makes you want to meet the person who set the defaults for NFS access and mete out strong violence upon their most precious bits. If a program's trying to do something in NFS, and it can't reach the server, you'll want to kill the process, right? I mean, that's fricking obvious. That's SO fricking obvious that a child of one, who's never used Unix, and whose first words were "Com. Mand. Dot Com" will be able to tell you that. But noooooooooooooooo you have to TELL the effing kernel SPECIFICALLY that you're going to actually want to KILL HUNG PROCESSES otherwise it will NOT BLOODY WELL LET YOU. Linus, if it was YOU that set the BRAINDEAD default to NOT "intr", then here, now, ahtside! Otherwise give the bastard who did this a slap for me, cheers. But anyway, to cut a long story short, "intr" will allow you to kill hung processes that were waiting on NFS traffic that'll never arrive. You definitely want to set this in your fstabs and mount -o options. Even if you ignore bg and soft, please, set this one.
"man nfs" in Linux will list these options and many more. At the very least use -o bg,intr unless you've got a very good reason to do otherwise.OS X users are SOL, unfortunately, as I can't see anywhere in the OS where you can set these options except, presumably, if you want to do low-level by-pass-the-Finder stuff which creates a whole new kettle of worms. Kettle of fish. Can of worms. Something like that.
Funny thing is that with these options set, and with either common passwd files across your machines or a well set up kerberos, NFS becomes an absolute joy to use. Yes, NFS. You heard me right...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.