Just about the only thing non-commodity is the Apple Display Connector (ADC), which is basically DVI and USB bundled onto one cable, to make it easy to put USB ports on the monitor.
(Just a minor nitpick) ADC also brings power to the display too. It was a very nice solution for reducing the amount of cables on your desk.
Never seen an inkjet ink that I'd trust for more than a year or two. They always fade.
We all have our gripes about the post office, but seriously, they aren't so slow that you have to worry about letter not getting delivered because the address faded after a year or two.:-)
Ah, just that I haven't found many cases of people using it which makes it hard to get a sense of the maturity of the project. Though to see that you the author are indeed alive:-) and have updated the web page I may still pursue it as an option for an inexpensive monitor.
After googling around for info on the PCI Lynx chipset I found Nosy - A Snoop-Mode Driver (apparently promiscious mode is more commonly referred to as "snoop-mode" when dealing with FireWire) for Linux. It hasn't been updated for awhile though.
With the PCI Lynx card being a bit hard to find (FireWire Depot did appear to have some in stock) and the drivers being a bit sketchy I think we'll probably end up going with specialized equipement like the FireSpy 3850. I at least tried to find a way to do it on the cheap.:-)
where they could put things like a numeric keypad.
Because the regular keys would have to be off-center to fit the numeric keypad on one side (and as the laptop sits centered on your lap, you would then have to shift your hands to one side to type normally which is a bad typing position).
What happens if a Mac user puts one of these crap Sony disks into their computer?
Nothing. It looks and functions as a normal audio CD on a Mac.
Does the Sony DRM prevent Windows users who legally buy their CDs from playing the songs in their iPod?
Under Windows, yes it will prevent iTunes from ripping it and putting the music on your iPod. Several bands (and I believe even Sony) have instructions for copying music onto the iPod using Windows and they generally involve burning the included WMA files of the music on a regular CD and then reripping it (yes you will lose quality), but the much better solution (that they don't tell you about) is to just hold down the shift key while inserting the CD which will disable the autorun.bat script.
It's actually rather funny looking at their instructions because they'll have several pages of instructions for Windows machines to copy the music onto iPods and for the Mac, they just say "The audio CD will function normally and without restrictions on a Mac.".
Can it be IR? Really? Apple using outdated tech... what's next, the Vinyl iPod. OK, IR uses very little battery-power. That's the only plus I can see. Bluetooth is the industry standard and all new macs have it.
You can only have one active BlueTooth connection (people with BlueTooth keyboards or other utilities would have to disconnect everytime you wanted to just use the remote). It takes time to start/disconnect BlueTooth connections and you wouldn't really want to leave it connected all the time as it would suck the batteries dry (as you pointed out - infrared uses much less power). That and if you had multiple iMacs in your household they're be the whole thing of making sure the remote had connected to the iMac that you were currently sitting in front of.
Infrared is the correct solution for a remote control. Just point it at the Mac you want to control. Infrared also gives you the option of ditching Apple's control and using your standard Universal remote to control the iMac (and the zillion other things in your house that are already controlled via infrared )...
they don't support running other operating systems on their hardware
Wrong. Apple and OSF Research Institute started MkLinux to run atop PowerPC hardware. In addition, Apple ran AIX on some of their older servers.
and they have a long history of using proprietary and undocumented hardware components in their Macintosh platform.
In the early to mid-nineties yes they did. In the late nineties Apple switched this and moved to a completely open platform. They use OpenFirmware (which ( if you didn't pick up from the name) is open) instead of a proprietary bios, standard internal components PCI/USB/Firewire and standard RAM/HDs etc.
they are increasingly using standard PC components in their systems
Well, if you mean "increasingly using standard PC components" by "have been using completely standard PC components for quite awhile now", then yes, you'd be right on that part.:-)
Now I wonder: do software apps become legacy apps on the switch? I assume that Abode will not write Acrobat 9.x for MacIntel and 9.x1 for PPC.
They won't. XCode 2.1 lets you build fat binaries on either system. x86 can build PPC and PPC can build x86. It just works. And as long as you write half decent code (ie: don't make assumptions about endianess), typical applications work across both architectures without any problems.
Adobe (and any other Mac developer) isn't going to run out and buy all new Intel based Macs and drop all their old PPC Macs. They're going to continue to develop and use both architectures for a long time.
Sure, they're not any better than the Windows crowd in that regard. See e.g. this story about Halo.
Halo, IMHO, was a bit of a special case though. Mac users were promised Halo somewhere around 1999/2000. We saw it run on a G3 with a POS Rage 128 at MacWorld. We could taste it. Then Bungie, with no warning, dumps Mac users with no warning and sells out to XBox. It's like your Wife suddenly leaving you to sleep with the entire starting defense line of [insert favorite NFL team here]. Finally a couple years later she comes back to you; of course you're going to slap her around a little.
What am I to do if I wanted to buy my first PowerBook (and my first Mac) *this month*?
Just buy it anyway. It'll be at least a year until Apple introduces their x86 boxes. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) will be released in a year and that will run on your PPC laptop. Apple has said they're going to be shifting to a 18 month release schedule so if you bought your PB today it'll be at least three years that you'll be supported with the latest version of the OS. And that's just the bare minimum...
They are starting with Intel, but who knows what we'll see in a year. They've dumped Motorola, then IBM. They could just as easily dump Intel for AMD if they saw fit.
Plus Apple's delightful policy of "if your hard disk dies, you're free to buy all the music again!" Gee, thanks.
You know you are allowed to backup the music you download from iTMS? Apple encourages you to do it. In fact, they even make a utility "iBackup" that will do it for you! Though, I personally just use rsync myself.
Amazon is not going to give you new CDs if your car burns...
They may have been good to you you but they haven't been good to me nor my roommate recently.
About a year and a half ago they were responsive but they're support has gone down the tubes since. Right now I've got a ticket in asking about an IP address change of the server I'm on. This ticket is nearly four days old now and they still haven't replied to it.
Also, in the last year our server has been down about a total of more than three days due to hardware failures.
Their web configuration page could use some updating and it'd be nice if they moved their ticket system off of each individual box and onto a central server so you can still report tickets if your box is down...
but it's not all that useful if you want to have some more control over what is played.
You might want to check out the Keyspan Express Remote for the Airport Express. Just announced today, it plugs into your AE and you can control it. It might be what you're looking for.
The rules in the merchant agreement state that the card must be signed - blank cards can be signed right there, but anything other than a signature invalidates the card.
A signature need not take the form of one's name though. Any mark made with the intention of agreeing to or validating a document can be considered a signature. When the person wrote the words "Check ID" on their card they are making a mark with the intention of agreeing to the terms of the card.
Is it worth it to try and argue what a signature is with the 800 lb gorilla that the the Credit Card company is though? Probably not... It's probably easier just to get one of those CitiBank cards with your photo on it.
My company has looked at getting a SourceForge installation setup for our internal projects. While the response was gernally positive, SourceForge is an expensive product...
Just throwing in my experience since we evaluated SF Enterprise.
The facility I'm working at evaluated SourceForge Enterprise awhile ago (they wanted an arm and a leg per user) They also didn't seem that interested in letting us use an evaluation box. It was well beyond GForge (at that particular stage which was the early versions of 3) in terms of features. In fact one of the things we really liked was that it could search the contents of proprietary documents such as MSWord (more of a function of their Oracle backend rather than SF itself we think). From what we did get to use though, the administration and regular usage was very polished and easy to use.
We eventually went with GForge and avoided all of the setup by just buying the Bugopolis Project Station (GForge.org hadn't offered their suite of commercial support yet). It's served us fairly well (they've been extremely slow getting us updates, we're still at 3.21 I think), but though it looks like we're going to move to the GForge Group for commercial support.
Some of our developers have jumped right in and love it. Most of the older developers have resisted it (heck, it's like pulling teeth just to get them to use CVS and stop pigeon-holing verions of code around various systems (though, they also may not be using it because we haven't pushed it that hard, we're still in the beginning stages of updating policies)) but I think when we move to GForge 4 we'll start developing policies around it and pushing it harder and they'll come around.
An addition note: the SF guys made a bunch of follow-up calls and eventually found out that we went to GForge they were much more willing to get us an evaluation box and try and explore other pricing options with us... We'll be sticking with GForge though, version 4 is pretty much comparable with what we saw in SF Enterprise (or so it sounds from the release notes, haven't actually played with 4 yet).
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(Just a minor nitpick) ADC also brings power to the display too. It was a very nice solution for reducing the amount of cables on your desk.
Alternatively, they could just use their Bluetooth phone to send and receive faxes from their Mac.
I'd like to see them open up the .Mac XMLRPC schema so it'd be easier for users to roll their own .Mac.
Ah heck, lets just list a couple of things I'd like to see (which are completely unrelated to iLife):
Okay, I'm done... for now.
We all have our gripes about the post office, but seriously, they aren't so slow that you have to worry about letter not getting delivered because the address faded after a year or two. :-)
Actually, no BSD's have /proc. BSD's use sysctl. Linux uses /proc.
Ah, just that I haven't found many cases of people using it which makes it hard to get a sense of the maturity of the project. Though to see that you the author are indeed alive :-) and have updated the web page I may still pursue it as an option for an inexpensive monitor.
Thanks for the info! Very interesting...
After googling around for info on the PCI Lynx chipset I found Nosy - A Snoop-Mode Driver (apparently promiscious mode is more commonly referred to as "snoop-mode" when dealing with FireWire) for Linux. It hasn't been updated for awhile though.
With the PCI Lynx card being a bit hard to find (FireWire Depot did appear to have some in stock) and the drivers being a bit sketchy I think we'll probably end up going with specialized equipement like the FireSpy 3850. I at least tried to find a way to do it on the cheap. :-)
Because the regular keys would have to be off-center to fit the numeric keypad on one side (and as the laptop sits centered on your lap, you would then have to shift your hands to one side to type normally which is a bad typing position).
Nothing. It looks and functions as a normal audio CD on a Mac.
Under Windows, yes it will prevent iTunes from ripping it and putting the music on your iPod. Several bands (and I believe even Sony) have instructions for copying music onto the iPod using Windows and they generally involve burning the included WMA files of the music on a regular CD and then reripping it (yes you will lose quality), but the much better solution (that they don't tell you about) is to just hold down the shift key while inserting the CD which will disable the autorun.bat script.
It's actually rather funny looking at their instructions because they'll have several pages of instructions for Windows machines to copy the music onto iPods and for the Mac, they just say "The audio CD will function normally and without restrictions on a Mac.".
You can only have one active BlueTooth connection (people with BlueTooth keyboards or other utilities would have to disconnect everytime you wanted to just use the remote). It takes time to start/disconnect BlueTooth connections and you wouldn't really want to leave it connected all the time as it would suck the batteries dry (as you pointed out - infrared uses much less power). That and if you had multiple iMacs in your household they're be the whole thing of making sure the remote had connected to the iMac that you were currently sitting in front of.
Infrared is the correct solution for a remote control. Just point it at the Mac you want to control. Infrared also gives you the option of ditching Apple's control and using your standard Universal remote to control the iMac (and the zillion other things in your house that are already controlled via infrared )...
Not true. Apple's iTunes supports many MP3 players other than the iPod.
Another example of Apple supporting non Apple devices is iSync, which supports a multitude of phones that aren't Apple devices.
Wrong. Apple and OSF Research Institute started MkLinux to run atop PowerPC hardware. In addition, Apple ran AIX on some of their older servers.
In the early to mid-nineties yes they did. In the late nineties Apple switched this and moved to a completely open platform. They use OpenFirmware (which ( if you didn't pick up from the name) is open) instead of a proprietary bios, standard internal components PCI/USB/Firewire and standard RAM/HDs etc.
Well, if you mean "increasingly using standard PC components" by "have been using completely standard PC components for quite awhile now", then yes, you'd be right on that part.They won't. XCode 2.1 lets you build fat binaries on either system. x86 can build PPC and PPC can build x86. It just works. And as long as you write half decent code (ie: don't make assumptions about endianess), typical applications work across both architectures without any problems.
Adobe (and any other Mac developer) isn't going to run out and buy all new Intel based Macs and drop all their old PPC Macs. They're going to continue to develop and use both architectures for a long time.
Use iScroll2 which adds two-fingered scrolling of the new PowerBooks to older PowerBooks.
Halo, IMHO, was a bit of a special case though. Mac users were promised Halo somewhere around 1999/2000. We saw it run on a G3 with a POS Rage 128 at MacWorld. We could taste it. Then Bungie, with no warning, dumps Mac users with no warning and sells out to XBox. It's like your Wife suddenly leaving you to sleep with the entire starting defense line of [insert favorite NFL team here]. Finally a couple years later she comes back to you; of course you're going to slap her around a little.
Just buy it anyway. It'll be at least a year until Apple introduces their x86 boxes. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) will be released in a year and that will run on your PPC laptop. Apple has said they're going to be shifting to a 18 month release schedule so if you bought your PB today it'll be at least three years that you'll be supported with the latest version of the OS. And that's just the bare minimum...
Probably because AMD has limited fab capacity as compared to Intel. One of Apple's longterm beefs with IBM (and Motorola) was they could never keep up with demand.
They are starting with Intel, but who knows what we'll see in a year. They've dumped Motorola, then IBM. They could just as easily dump Intel for AMD if they saw fit.
Actually, as of a couple years ago Apple has been using Open Firmware which is a standard for boot firmware. It's IEEE 1275.
You know you are allowed to backup the music you download from iTMS? Apple encourages you to do it. In fact, they even make a utility "iBackup" that will do it for you! Though, I personally just use rsync myself.
Amazon is not going to give you new CDs if your car burns...
They may have been good to you you but they haven't been good to me nor my roommate recently.
About a year and a half ago they were responsive but they're support has gone down the tubes since. Right now I've got a ticket in asking about an IP address change of the server I'm on. This ticket is nearly four days old now and they still haven't replied to it.
Also, in the last year our server has been down about a total of more than three days due to hardware failures.
Their web configuration page could use some updating and it'd be nice if they moved their ticket system off of each individual box and onto a central server so you can still report tickets if your box is down...
An analogy I always found humorous was having a separate non-smoking/smoking section was like having a non-peeing and peeing section in a pool. :-)
You might want to check out the Keyspan Express Remote for the Airport Express. Just announced today, it plugs into your AE and you can control it. It might be what you're looking for.
A signature need not take the form of one's name though. Any mark made with the intention of agreeing to or validating a document can be considered a signature. When the person wrote the words "Check ID" on their card they are making a mark with the intention of agreeing to the terms of the card.
Here is some further reading dealing with digital signatures but touches upon what defines a signature. American Bar Association and The Journal of Information Law and Technology.
Is it worth it to try and argue what a signature is with the 800 lb gorilla that the the Credit Card company is though? Probably not... It's probably easier just to get one of those CitiBank cards with your photo on it.
Just throwing in my experience since we evaluated SF Enterprise.
The facility I'm working at evaluated SourceForge Enterprise awhile ago (they wanted an arm and a leg per user) They also didn't seem that interested in letting us use an evaluation box. It was well beyond GForge (at that particular stage which was the early versions of 3) in terms of features. In fact one of the things we really liked was that it could search the contents of proprietary documents such as MSWord (more of a function of their Oracle backend rather than SF itself we think). From what we did get to use though, the administration and regular usage was very polished and easy to use.
We eventually went with GForge and avoided all of the setup by just buying the Bugopolis Project Station (GForge.org hadn't offered their suite of commercial support yet). It's served us fairly well (they've been extremely slow getting us updates, we're still at 3.21 I think), but though it looks like we're going to move to the GForge Group for commercial support.
Some of our developers have jumped right in and love it. Most of the older developers have resisted it (heck, it's like pulling teeth just to get them to use CVS and stop pigeon-holing verions of code around various systems (though, they also may not be using it because we haven't pushed it that hard, we're still in the beginning stages of updating policies)) but I think when we move to GForge 4 we'll start developing policies around it and pushing it harder and they'll come around.
An addition note: the SF guys made a bunch of follow-up calls and eventually found out that we went to GForge they were much more willing to get us an evaluation box and try and explore other pricing options with us... We'll be sticking with GForge though, version 4 is pretty much comparable with what we saw in SF Enterprise (or so it sounds from the release notes, haven't actually played with 4 yet).
Just ensuring you see this as it sounds like you would appreciate this. :-)
The DVD Player will stay in full screen even when it's inactive.