OS X 10.4 is officially supported even on a Rage 128. I've seen sites claiming they can run 10.4 on Rage Pro's, although I don't think Apple supports that.
I finally just gave up my B&W rev.1. It had 10.3 on it at the time and ran great. It would run 10.4 just fine as well. It's about 6 years old...
I'm not sure what the ramifications are, but it must make a huge difference to astrophyicists, astronomers and the like. Anyone care to educate the rest of/. on why this is significant?
Well, first and foremost, it's important to understand exactly where the Milky Way "is" in relation to other galaxies that we can see from the outside and classify en masse. There are lots of theories about how bars form, are sustained, and how long they last. With this new precision about the bar in our galaxy, we can relate the much more detailed observations we have made (and are still making) of the stars and interstellar medium (gas, dust, etc.) in the Milky Way to these new bar parameters. Modelers can then in turn fold all this concrete data into their theories more reliably.
In addition, bars definitely change the stellar distribution and are suspected to have ramifications on the star formation and gas content in the region of the galaxy that they traverse. It's important to know that there is a bar in directions you're making observations in because your results may have to take the bar into account. Knowing exactly where it is and how it's oriented allows us to model effects from the bar out of observations that could be "contaminated" by concentrations of stars (and types of stars) or gas that are dynamically different than the bulk of the Galactic disk. So, the more we know about the bar, the more we can learn about the rest of the inner galaxy of our own Milky Way.
Actually, they were probably even smarter than that since from phase to phase, it's 29.5 days, not 28, which is I think what we're talking about here. 12 of those leaves 10-11 days at the end of the year. Go check out the first and last new moons of 2005 relative to the beginnings of the year (Jan 10 2005 and Dec 30 2005).
That's horrible syncing of the months to the seasons, which is primarily what we use them for--and what they were likely invented for in a predominantly agricultural society.
Actually, astronomically, the sun is passing through a 13th constellation nowadays. Not that that likely has any bearing on things astrologically, but there you go.
You have a valid point to some extent, but much of what you're talking about doesn't come from the scientific medical establishment - it comes from agenda-driven groups, corporate shills, and govenrment administrations who buy their propoganda.
Well, you're going to have to do a lot of convincing me that such fads are tremendously different from the bulk of ads from drug companies supposedly a part of that science community. When we're bombarded with messages that we need a secret, fancy-named product that we won't tell you what for--Ask Your Doctor!(TM)--to be smiling constantly and able to play frisbee with our dog, there's something seriously wrong with the the marketing of medical science.
The pressure to shorten the path of treatments to the market, the rate with which ones have been pulled due to serious problems in the last decade, and the amount of money and perks that flows to doctors and pharmacists to stump for products makes this (non-medical) scientist pretty damn skeptical about at least this aspect of "modern" medicine science.
You can play your music CDs in your car and on home stereo systems. iTunes also lets you make MP3 CDs, though iPod makes them a little less useful. Audio CDs play in CD players like the one in your car or home stereo. MP3 CDs play on Mac and Windows computers and in MP3-compatible car stereos and CD players. Data DVDs are great for archiving and backup, but they only work in your DVD-equipped Mac or Windows PC.
Just to be fair, that's in the Quicktime Player, not in Quicktime itself. There's plenty of other apps that throw full screen video up for you, even after processing by Quicktime...
Flawed for what? Your personal goal of finding "earth-like" planets?
A decade and a half ago, there was no measurable evidence--direct or indirect--of any planet around other stars. The goal has been to discover planets and then study solar systems. It's going pretty well, it seems. Finding earth-like planets, although neat and great for PR, is not going to be the primary short-term goal of these studies. It takes better and better instruments, which you have to prove are going to be viable. It also takes a long time collecting lots of good data and time to develop good models (that require the long-term good data to constrain them).
Strangely, your intuition is right about a lot of the "arguments" you make, but your conclusion is bizarre. Astronomers have ideas about how to search for planets, but those methods are still being refined, will get better with better instrumentation, and will get better with more time. But a few of these basic ideas have been pretty well established as being quite effective.
I literally just walked down to our loading dock and carried up my new DP 2.3 as the keynote started. I think it's a pretty good buy for the next 2-3 years, but I did buy it to replace my 6+ year old B&W G3 with the intention that it might last as long. Although I doubt I will be seriously lacking apps even in 4-5 years, by then we may see apps--especially ports, like games--that are better optimized on Intel OS X and that will never be optimized for PPC.
Definitely my fastest record for an obsolete box though:/
Like most of us that use and/or develop for open source. If no one was using it, it wouldn't be worth making, would it?
And they do this for PR purposes.
Uh huh. Jobs way back in the early NeXT days decided to lock onto BSD because it gave them good PR? They scrapped their whole OS five years ago and based it on an open source OS for PR? They include just about every major open source development platform out of the box for PR? Use the most highly respected open source complier to build their system for PR?
Uh, no. Well, I guess I'd like to think that the 1000's of people that made those open source products that Apple happens to use now actually knew what they were doing. In fact, I'm pretty sure they did. And, I'm pretty sure that somebody(s) at Apple notice that there's a hell of a lot of open source stuff that kicks ass and that is worth using. Even for average computer user Joe.
Oh yeah, and average computer user probably doesn't care two shakes about open source. The PR is certainly wasted on a large fraction of their potential customers. You're right. That's pretty stupid.
Your best protection remains, your hacking knowledge, and the knowledge you encourage your peers to have. Lord knows Apple users don't like these, too bad.
Yeah, Lord knows. That's why most of my tech/science colleagues/friends have migrated from Linux to OS X and do all their work and development there now. They hate that hacking stuff. In fact the first thing we do now is blow away all the open source crap. It's just there for PR anyway.
My fault, I forgot to set the sarcasm flag. A quick check in FreeBSD, khtml branches and you can see how much Apple contributed.
I know what you were saying. My response was calling you on that. I pointed you to Apple's contributions to the community. Lots of whining about format and absence of back-porting don't change the fact that the modified sources are out there and usable--amazingly--for the intended purpose that Apple took and forked/ported/adopted them for.
Welcome to open software. You take, use, munge, modify and/or port and then release for the next someone to take.
The post that started all this said "very closed proprietary system". That plain and simple FUD. I didn't say a Mac box was as open as Wintel hardware. I didn't say you could go off and buy a clone. Don't put words in my mouth.
I was pointing out that 90% of the important components and 99.9% of the components that all but hobbiest-Bob would replace during a machine's lifetime are standard off-the-shelf bits that you can replace at will without caring about what Apple decides to sell you.
I just ordered a Power Mac this week. I didn't like Apple's price on the RAM or video card offerings. So guess what? I left the min config in, and I'll install them myself. I'll save money, and I'll be getting something closer to what I want.
But let's not pretend that the Apple world is so wonderfully open.
Again, completely out of context for what I was replying to.
A "very closed proprietary system" (to me at least) would not allow you to have the option of running or developing applications for Cocoa, X11, Java, TCL/Tk, Perl, Python, and Ruby out of the box. Exactly how many of those are open and cross-platform? And with a few clicks and a bit of downloading you can throw KDE and Gnome in there as well.
I'm not arguing that Cocoa and its slickness does not tie you to the hardware that Apple sells. I'm arguing that you're not giving up all your freedom as the original post implied by drinking the cool-aid in the distortion field while using a Mac.
Jobs is there to make a buck as much Bill Gates. Don't put him on a pedestal and buy into everything he does.
Making money and open source are not mutually exclusive. Ask Redhat, SUSE, IBM, Nokia, etc. Even Mozilla/Firefox might not be where it is today without AOL's sustenance all those years.
When Apple makes crap, I don't buy it. And I didn't say anything about Jobs. Do you know for a fact that he's driving the support of open source and standards within Apple? Besides the injection of the NeXT base? I don't.
It's funny you made that comparison, because maybe MS isn't innovating the hardwares because MS doesn't make hardware?
You misunderstood me. What I'm saying is that there was a philosophy within Apple themselves that changed substantially from OS 9 to X. Especially with regards to stuff not made by Apple. They are not taking pseudo-standard stuff and making it proprietary (the MS embrace and extend). In fact, there are several instances where they have added to things and released them back into the wild.
Something also changed with the hardware. I don't know if it was for similar reasons or just purely economic, but in the last five years, the components for Mac hardware have become less and less Apple-made or -only.
The result on both levels is that your Mac can use way more parts, software and hardware, that "belong" originally to something else or were developed for something else than they ever could before (say, pre-2000).
Sure, the Darwin kernel is Free, but the crown jewels of OS X are not.
First, Darwin is an OS, not just a kernel. And although, no, Cocoa is not open, there are quite a few Apple developed technologies that are open source or standardized.
I can load Cygwin on Windows and run Free software too.
The point is that when you install Mac OS X, you are getting a ton of free (!beer) software already. When you install Windows, that's not the case. There is a fundamental shift here and that's what a lot of us are excited about and willing to support at various levels.
Yes, in addition, I can install a ton of other open source software that includes most of the KDE and Gnome suites. But that's not the biggest deal here.
Still, my complaint with Apple isn't so much about the software. Apple's iron first control over hardware bothers me more. I know killing the licensed clones was a business decision to save the company. I know the $499 Mac Mini makes this less of an issue. I just prefer more freedom and choice on the hardware side.
I just brought in a 6-ish year old G3 Blue & White for a student to use. It was my home machine for much of that time. Over that span, I installed 4 additional disks, upgraded the video card, installed a 3rd-party modem, upgraded the RAM (3rd-party as well), used a variety of keyboards and mice with it, and installed a 3rd-party firewire card.
Now I'm not going to sit here and claim that the hardware is the most flexible, but I call BS on "iron fist control" over anything but the motherboard. I had a myriad of non-Apple CPU upgrade options over the years but decided it just wasn't quite worth the cost.
And, to hammer this point home on their "iron fist", you know how many 3rd-party drivers I needed to run all that stuff under 10.3? Zero. All included with OS X. ATI occasionally leapfrogged over a system update for a performance tweak, but that's about it. About the only 3rd-party driver I ever needed was for a USB scanner.
it's a very closed proprietary system that can then be controlled by a single entity
The hardware? You mean because Apple takes a ton of commonly sold components and puts them together in their fancy boxes? Just like Dell and HP do? You mean because they've spearheaded most of the now commonly-used device interface standards?
The software? You mean because Apple puts a slick top on their completely open source, community-contributed Darwin OS? You mean because a fair number of their component technologies have been developed starting with existing open source projects? You mean because a fair number of their own in-house technology ideas have been opened either in source or in standard? You mean how there's only a few proprietary standards that they're using to store files, communicate on networks, or connect to devices?
There is a hell of a lot of difference between Apple and M$. You can argue about whether it's because of "who's on top" right now, but the stunning difference between even Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X and how the hardware has evolved in the same time wrt/ all the things I mentioned above suggests to me that someone (hopefully more than one) at Apple has a freakin' clue that's more than just trying to get on top.
And that being said, the/. crowd is not a mono-culture. Some of us actually believe that a company that consistently shows for the most part that they are interested in making products that excel in usability, interoperability, and security are OK to spend a penny on now and then. Because if we don't support those companies that do support open standards and practices and who decide occasionally to share their innovations in that medium, there's going to be nothing left but a incredible mess of crap.
Taking the price/performance ratio into account, PCs are generally slightly cheaper.
I'm not running SPEC or Doom3 benchmarks 24/7 on my machine. I use it. I want to be able to use it whenever I want. I don't want to waste my time (and money) with virii, spy-ware, and all the associated "defensive" crap that's needed over and above the basics of modern safe Internet-ing (i.e. firewall, etc.). I might want to tweak my config files to do something, but I don't want to have to. I want a UI that is by-and-large consistent. I don't want to even think one iota about hardware drivers, unless I decide that's something I want to mess with.
That's performance in my real life. The price/performance rating of LInux is pretty damn high since I'm a highly technical user. But even so, I'm finding my Mac(s) to be at least twice better performing. In the sense that I'm not wasting my time on things that I don't want to waste them on.
Slashdot Mirror
OS X 10.4 is officially supported even on a Rage 128. I've seen sites claiming they can run 10.4 on Rage Pro's, although I don't think Apple supports that.
I finally just gave up my B&W rev.1. It had 10.3 on it at the time and ran great. It would run 10.4 just fine as well. It's about 6 years old...
Is your control key broken?
Maybe, but perhaps defining the laws of physics created the universe :)
Well, first and foremost, it's important to understand exactly where the Milky Way "is" in relation to other galaxies that we can see from the outside and classify en masse. There are lots of theories about how bars form, are sustained, and how long they last. With this new precision about the bar in our galaxy, we can relate the much more detailed observations we have made (and are still making) of the stars and interstellar medium (gas, dust, etc.) in the Milky Way to these new bar parameters. Modelers can then in turn fold all this concrete data into their theories more reliably.
In addition, bars definitely change the stellar distribution and are suspected to have ramifications on the star formation and gas content in the region of the galaxy that they traverse. It's important to know that there is a bar in directions you're making observations in because your results may have to take the bar into account. Knowing exactly where it is and how it's oriented allows us to model effects from the bar out of observations that could be "contaminated" by concentrations of stars (and types of stars) or gas that are dynamically different than the bulk of the Galactic disk. So, the more we know about the bar, the more we can learn about the rest of the inner galaxy of our own Milky Way.
Actually, they were probably even smarter than that since from phase to phase, it's 29.5 days, not 28, which is I think what we're talking about here. 12 of those leaves 10-11 days at the end of the year. Go check out the first and last new moons of 2005 relative to the beginnings of the year (Jan 10 2005 and Dec 30 2005).
That's horrible syncing of the months to the seasons, which is primarily what we use them for--and what they were likely invented for in a predominantly agricultural society.
Actually, astronomically, the sun is passing through a 13th constellation nowadays. Not that that likely has any bearing on things astrologically, but there you go.
Well, you're going to have to do a lot of convincing me that such fads are tremendously different from the bulk of ads from drug companies supposedly a part of that science community. When we're bombarded with messages that we need a secret, fancy-named product that we won't tell you what for--Ask Your Doctor!(TM)--to be smiling constantly and able to play frisbee with our dog, there's something seriously wrong with the the marketing of medical science.
The pressure to shorten the path of treatments to the market, the rate with which ones have been pulled due to serious problems in the last decade, and the amount of money and perks that flows to doctors and pharmacists to stump for products makes this (non-medical) scientist pretty damn skeptical about at least this aspect of "modern" medicine science.
http://www.apple.com/itunes/burn.html
Just to be fair, that's in the Quicktime Player, not in Quicktime itself. There's plenty of other apps that throw full screen video up for you, even after processing by Quicktime...
Not for all of us. My 2G is out of the loop now. Sigh...
"...play a wicked ass game of pong"
Come on. At least get into the 90's here:
* Set the borg going on Angband and see how many levels/sec it can do.
"Interesting, but method is flawwed"
Flawed for what? Your personal goal of finding "earth-like" planets?
A decade and a half ago, there was no measurable evidence--direct or indirect--of any planet around other stars. The goal has been to discover planets and then study solar systems. It's going pretty well, it seems. Finding earth-like planets, although neat and great for PR, is not going to be the primary short-term goal of these studies. It takes better and better instruments, which you have to prove are going to be viable. It also takes a long time collecting lots of good data and time to develop good models (that require the long-term good data to constrain them).
Strangely, your intuition is right about a lot of the "arguments" you make, but your conclusion is bizarre. Astronomers have ideas about how to search for planets, but those methods are still being refined, will get better with better instrumentation, and will get better with more time. But a few of these basic ideas have been pretty well established as being quite effective.
I literally just walked down to our loading dock and carried up my new DP 2.3 as the keynote started. I think it's a pretty good buy for the next 2-3 years, but I did buy it to replace my 6+ year old B&W G3 with the intention that it might last as long. Although I doubt I will be seriously lacking apps even in 4-5 years, by then we may see apps--especially ports, like games--that are better optimized on Intel OS X and that will never be optimized for PPC.
:/
Definitely my fastest record for an obsolete box though
...misspelled "Cubs" as "Red Sox".
Holy Troll, Batman! I can't resist though :b
They take a lot, and gives a little back.
Like most of us that use and/or develop for open source. If no one was using it, it wouldn't be worth making, would it?
And they do this for PR purposes.
Uh huh. Jobs way back in the early NeXT days decided to lock onto BSD because it gave them good PR? They scrapped their whole OS five years ago and based it on an open source OS for PR? They include just about every major open source development platform out of the box for PR? Use the most highly respected open source complier to build their system for PR?
Uh, no. Well, I guess I'd like to think that the 1000's of people that made those open source products that Apple happens to use now actually knew what they were doing. In fact, I'm pretty sure they did. And, I'm pretty sure that somebody(s) at Apple notice that there's a hell of a lot of open source stuff that kicks ass and that is worth using. Even for average computer user Joe.
Oh yeah, and average computer user probably doesn't care two shakes about open source. The PR is certainly wasted on a large fraction of their potential customers. You're right. That's pretty stupid.
Your best protection remains, your hacking knowledge, and the knowledge you encourage your peers to have. Lord knows Apple users don't like these, too bad.
Yeah, Lord knows. That's why most of my tech/science colleagues/friends have migrated from Linux to OS X and do all their work and development there now. They hate that hacking stuff. In fact the first thing we do now is blow away all the open source crap. It's just there for PR anyway.
Would you type "paris hilton" into the google search on the ibook, follow a whole bunch of random links and download random stuff from there?
I could, but what are you expecting to happen? I expect my eyes might bleed a little, but my Mac will make out OK.
My fault, I forgot to set the sarcasm flag. A quick check in FreeBSD, khtml branches and you can see how much Apple contributed.
I know what you were saying. My response was calling you on that. I pointed you to Apple's contributions to the community. Lots of whining about format and absence of back-porting don't change the fact that the modified sources are out there and usable--amazingly--for the intended purpose that Apple took and forked/ported/adopted them for.
Welcome to open software. You take, use, munge, modify and/or port and then release for the next someone to take.
Ugh. What a complete red herring.
The post that started all this said "very closed proprietary system". That plain and simple FUD. I didn't say a Mac box was as open as Wintel hardware. I didn't say you could go off and buy a clone. Don't put words in my mouth.
I was pointing out that 90% of the important components and 99.9% of the components that all but hobbiest-Bob would replace during a machine's lifetime are standard off-the-shelf bits that you can replace at will without caring about what Apple decides to sell you.
I just ordered a Power Mac this week. I didn't like Apple's price on the RAM or video card offerings. So guess what? I left the min config in, and I'll install them myself. I'll save money, and I'll be getting something closer to what I want.
But let's not pretend that the Apple world is so wonderfully open.
Again, completely out of context for what I was replying to.
A "very closed proprietary system" (to me at least) would not allow you to have the option of running or developing applications for Cocoa, X11, Java, TCL/Tk, Perl, Python, and Ruby out of the box. Exactly how many of those are open and cross-platform? And with a few clicks and a bit of downloading you can throw KDE and Gnome in there as well.
I'm not arguing that Cocoa and its slickness does not tie you to the hardware that Apple sells. I'm arguing that you're not giving up all your freedom as the original post implied by drinking the cool-aid in the distortion field while using a Mac.
You mean supporting open source like how Apple have contributed to KHTML, or the oodles of codes they have injected into the BSD community.
Yes, those are good examples. Thanks.
Jobs is there to make a buck as much Bill Gates. Don't put him on a pedestal and buy into everything he does.
Making money and open source are not mutually exclusive. Ask Redhat, SUSE, IBM, Nokia, etc. Even Mozilla/Firefox might not be where it is today without AOL's sustenance all those years.
When Apple makes crap, I don't buy it. And I didn't say anything about Jobs. Do you know for a fact that he's driving the support of open source and standards within Apple? Besides the injection of the NeXT base? I don't.
It's funny you made that comparison, because maybe MS isn't innovating the hardwares because MS doesn't make hardware?
You misunderstood me. What I'm saying is that there was a philosophy within Apple themselves that changed substantially from OS 9 to X. Especially with regards to stuff not made by Apple. They are not taking pseudo-standard stuff and making it proprietary (the MS embrace and extend). In fact, there are several instances where they have added to things and released them back into the wild.
Something also changed with the hardware. I don't know if it was for similar reasons or just purely economic, but in the last five years, the components for Mac hardware have become less and less Apple-made or -only.
The result on both levels is that your Mac can use way more parts, software and hardware, that "belong" originally to something else or were developed for something else than they ever could before (say, pre-2000).
Sure, the Darwin kernel is Free, but the crown jewels of OS X are not.
First, Darwin is an OS, not just a kernel. And although, no, Cocoa is not open, there are quite a few Apple developed technologies that are open source or standardized.
I can load Cygwin on Windows and run Free software too.
The point is that when you install Mac OS X, you are getting a ton of free (!beer) software already. When you install Windows, that's not the case. There is a fundamental shift here and that's what a lot of us are excited about and willing to support at various levels.
Yes, in addition, I can install a ton of other open source software that includes most of the KDE and Gnome suites. But that's not the biggest deal here.
Still, my complaint with Apple isn't so much about the software. Apple's iron first control over hardware bothers me more. I know killing the licensed clones was a business decision to save the company. I know the $499 Mac Mini makes this less of an issue. I just prefer more freedom and choice on the hardware side.
I just brought in a 6-ish year old G3 Blue & White for a student to use. It was my home machine for much of that time. Over that span, I installed 4 additional disks, upgraded the video card, installed a 3rd-party modem, upgraded the RAM (3rd-party as well), used a variety of keyboards and mice with it, and installed a 3rd-party firewire card.
Now I'm not going to sit here and claim that the hardware is the most flexible, but I call BS on "iron fist control" over anything but the motherboard. I had a myriad of non-Apple CPU upgrade options over the years but decided it just wasn't quite worth the cost.
And, to hammer this point home on their "iron fist", you know how many 3rd-party drivers I needed to run all that stuff under 10.3? Zero. All included with OS X. ATI occasionally leapfrogged over a system update for a performance tweak, but that's about it. About the only 3rd-party driver I ever needed was for a USB scanner.
it's a very closed proprietary system that can then be controlled by a single entity
/. crowd is not a mono-culture. Some of us actually believe that a company that consistently shows for the most part that they are interested in making products that excel in usability, interoperability, and security are OK to spend a penny on now and then. Because if we don't support those companies that do support open standards and practices and who decide occasionally to share their innovations in that medium, there's going to be nothing left but a incredible mess of crap.
The hardware? You mean because Apple takes a ton of commonly sold components and puts them together in their fancy boxes? Just like Dell and HP do? You mean because they've spearheaded most of the now commonly-used device interface standards?
The software? You mean because Apple puts a slick top on their completely open source, community-contributed Darwin OS? You mean because a fair number of their component technologies have been developed starting with existing open source projects? You mean because a fair number of their own in-house technology ideas have been opened either in source or in standard? You mean how there's only a few proprietary standards that they're using to store files, communicate on networks, or connect to devices?
There is a hell of a lot of difference between Apple and M$. You can argue about whether it's because of "who's on top" right now, but the stunning difference between even Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X and how the hardware has evolved in the same time wrt/ all the things I mentioned above suggests to me that someone (hopefully more than one) at Apple has a freakin' clue that's more than just trying to get on top.
And that being said, the
I would have to upgrade everything on the Mac Mini...
Then it's not for you.
That doesn't change the fact that there is a $500 machine that runs OS X well out there. That's not expensive.
Taking the price/performance ratio into account, PCs are generally slightly cheaper.
I'm not running SPEC or Doom3 benchmarks 24/7 on my machine. I use it. I want to be able to use it whenever I want. I don't want to waste my time (and money) with virii, spy-ware, and all the associated "defensive" crap that's needed over and above the basics of modern safe Internet-ing (i.e. firewall, etc.). I might want to tweak my config files to do something, but I don't want to have to. I want a UI that is by-and-large consistent. I don't want to even think one iota about hardware drivers, unless I decide that's something I want to mess with.
That's performance in my real life. The price/performance rating of LInux is pretty damn high since I'm a highly technical user. But even so, I'm finding my Mac(s) to be at least twice better performing. In the sense that I'm not wasting my time on things that I don't want to waste them on.
The one you already own probably does the trick.
You bet it does. But, it wasn't free.
"Mac OS X = more elegant, easier, but much more expensive."
Than what? My toaster? Linux? Windows?
$500 nets you a machine that runs OS X, if you haven't been paying attention.
You're going to have to point me at a machine that runs Linux that's "free, Free" (as in beer).