One of the interesting things about the move to 64-bit is that unlike going from IA32 to AMD64 on Windows, on Mac OS X there is no speed boost from targetting the G5. All the speed boosts you're ever going to get from compiling for a G5 are there and enabled in Panther; all you get from moving your app to 64-bit is 64-bit addressing, and as such, a slight drop in speed. This will hopefully be offset by the fact that your app actually needs more then 4GB of memory space. This sort of makes 64-bit apps less neccessary/desirable then it does in the PC world.
Grab a copy of TimeSplitters Future Perfect - it's got a built-in map editor, and right from inside the game you can hop on Live and upload or download maps, rate other peoples, etc. User created content isn't dead - developers are just too lazy to support it properly.
Also, last I checked $20 for a pretty nice-looking expansion pack is not a bad deal - most expansion packs come out at around $30-$40. And if you think about it you only have to buy the $20 once and you can install it on as many Xboxes as you want without paying extra, whereas over Live you have to have a Live subscription to download, and while you keep your content if you cancel Live, if your Xbox dies, you're SOL unless you sign up for Live again.
Don't have many friends, do you? Don't have a Live subscription eh?
Halo 2 will be a constant fixture in my/my friends' Xbox for years to come. At least, until Halo 3 comes out:-) Not for the single player campaign (which was good, but nothing truly remarkable), but for the multiplayer, which is (I do firmly believe) the finest console FPS experience made to date (with the arguable exception of Halo 1).
Lastly, according to Bungie, it's not stated but hinted that the Halo X-Pack disk will have the downloadable content that Live subscribers will get for free. This way if you don't subscribe to Live you won't be left out in the cold. You could also sign up for a free trial or borrow a friend's Live account but this will mean you don't have to.
The very page you just linked to shows a near-doubled increase in framerates between the 6800GT and the 6800GT SLI at 1600x1200, all options on. That's not negligable where I come from. Now, granted, not everybody's playing at those resolutions, but a lot of people are. For them SLI does provide a much-needed (if expensive) boost of speed.
You also completely neglect the fact that it makes a lot of sense to pick up an SLI motherboard and one video card, and then later on down the line when new games come out that your video card can't handle or you get a new 24" widescreen flatpanel, you can pick up that extra video card, slap it in and have twice the framerate.
You are completely, totally, 100% missing the point. This shouldn't be something you have to worry about in the first place. You take a Mac, plug it in to the network, and you don't get infected - There aren't even any services turned on by default to infect *through*. Care to explain to me why in the hell a consumer operating system is leaving ports open all over the place for services nobody cares about or uses? More importantly, can you explain to my mother? "Turn on the firewall," you say. Can you also explain to her why the computer runs in an unsafe mode by default? "Get the updates," you say. Can you explain to her why in the world Windows doesn't check for updates when you first turn it on? (The first thing Mac OS X does when you turn it on is, you guessed it, check for updates and offer to install them in a large window that's not likely to be ignored, and easy to be dismissed if you don't want it hanging around).
The problem is that Windows is inherently unsafe out of the box, and requires work to make it safe - whereas all other operating systems are designed to be safe out of the box and require delibarate steps to make them unsafe. SP2 has made steps in the right direction but it's still not enough. And I don't know what Microsoft can do to make it safe - if SP2 wasn't enough then what will be?
You can find a lot more interesting info surrounding the launch of the Mac at Andy Hertzfeld's Folklore.org. Probably most relevant would be the story about this very moment in time, The Times They Are-a Changin'./karmawhore
You can do that. Set your iPod to manual syncing, and it will preserve everything that's currently on the iPod and will allow you to manually add songs from any computer and create and manage playlists. You will still not be able to copy songs off the iPod; for that you'll need separate software.
The mandatory installation of QuickTime is because, well, iTunes REQUIRES QuickTime - QuickTime is more then just a media player, it's actually also a large chunk of Apple's Carbon APIs ported to Windows. iTunes uses QuickTime as a porting layer of sorts, as does much Apple software that runs on Windows. So you literally cannot run iTunes without QuickTime.
Your best bet with regard to the audiobook thing is to convert it to AAC instead, then rename the file to ".m4b" - there's no DRM encoding on it, but it will allow you to use the audiobook specific features by tricking iTunes into thinking it's a downloaded file.
Just curious where you saw this - I don't recall which expo it was but I saw it live via the stream when it happened, and would like to see it again if you have a link handy.
"Any company with advertising tactics such as theirs is bound to piss me off..."
And what "advertising tactics" do you disagree with? Not sure what you mean by that.
"They are using OSS stuff for the primary intent of making money..."
Umm. Hate to break it to you, but I'd have to say that there's thousands of companies out there who're using open source to make money. Some do it by taking open-source software and providing services, as hosting providers or Google does. Some do it by taking open-source software and bundling it into a package, as Apple, Red Hat and Novell do. Some do it by taking open source software and programming for it, such as myself. But either way there's plenty of people making money off of open source.
"It just seems like apple's help has been bare minimum and not in areas that really count."
I don't know... the major patches to things like KHTML, CUPS and GCC seem like more then the bare minimum - they could've just forked it and thrown it on the server in some tarball, but instead they at least try and foster an open development community. They could've just taken the BSD-licensed code they use and never give back, but instead they've released it as a full open-source operating system, usable on both PCs and Macs. And they do have quite a few interesting open source projects grown in-house, such as QuickTime Streaming Server (which does much, much more then just stream QuickTime), OpenPlay and Rendezvous (which is an amazing piece of work that I wish more developers and hardware makers would seize on). Just because you don't use them doesn't mean they're not there.
"That's why I like the GPL better than BSD and LGPL and such, it prevents that kind of stuff from happening...."
I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about. The GPL does NOT prevent this kind of thing from happening. Go look at www.apple.com/opensource/ - half the software on there is true blue GPL software. Just because it's GPL doesn't mean you can't include it in commercial software. The GPL just prevents you from taking open source and closed-sourcing it in any way, shape or form - if you make the source available you're not in any trouble.
I dunno... I'm an Apple fan and I guess I don't disagree with you too much, I'm all for more open standards and open source software. And while I belive that the people in the trenches at Apple have their hearts in the right spot, I'm sure the marketing guys are seizing it and doing what's neccessary purely for the sake of profit. But I don't think that Apple is quite the demon you make them out to be. And Mac OS X really is quite nice.... you could always just pick up an iBook from eBay...;-)
...until I noticed that the PocketPC version is just a delayed dictation device - it records, then you transfer it to your desktop computer and it's the host computer that actually does all the speech recognition.
I don't know if I'm really interested in WoW. I've tried several other MMORPGs, namely EverQuest and Anarchy Online (after the first few months of chaos) and while the idea intrigues me, I haven't really found one that grabs me. They all seem mostly like just running around engaging in boring combat. AO had an interesting backstory and unniverse but didn't really grab me gameplay wise.
I dunno, maybe WoW is different, but I'm not really inclined to spend $50 to play it for thirty days and find out I hate it. I'll wait for the free trial, or someone I live with to pick it up and play on their account.
Anyone else out there have any opinions on WoW for MMORPG-hating humans? Just curious to see what other people think.
The guide is set in Grid mode by default, which is horrifically slow. Bring up the guide and press the Enter key on the remote to bring up the Guide options, and set it from Grid mode to whatever the other option is - this is what standalone TiVos default to and it is light-years faster. It may take a little getting used to but most TiVo owners tend to prefer the TiVo style as opposed to the grid (I know I do).
I disagree - while we don't know exactly how it ties into Halo 2, the fall of Reach (which takes place directly before and immediately after Halo 1) happens right in the middle of the sound files being played, which means that they most certainly have something to do with Halo. The current spec is that it will detail how exactly the Covenant found earth, but that's just speculation. At the very least, it's a very interesting bunch of backstory and details of a very detailed world that we'll only get to see a very small part of in the games.
One other spolier tidbit (stop reading if you don't want ilovebees spoilers!) - one of the main characters' father is a Spartan 1.0, and John-117 (aka Master Chief) is a Spartan 2.0 - only a tangential link, but a moderately interesting.
Hmm... Couple weeks ago. I moved my old PC into another room for the family to use. Had to create a bunch of users - and gee, there's Limited User with absolutely no privelages whatsoever to even run games with, and Administrator with full access privs... and I'm too lazy to set up runas commands for everybody. (Of course, that decision came back to bite me on the ass earlier today when I had to go through and clean up all the viruses and spyware on there... still, I just denied access to IE and installed SP2, so I'll give everyone one more go before I start tightening down the thumbscrews.)
Or I could take the computer I'm currently writing on - XP Pro, only ever set up one user on it during the install, and guess what kind of privlages I have?
Or how about the Dell I did a spyware cleanup, virus removal (all kinds of horrible trojans) and installed another 512MB of RAM on earlier today? I don't recall Stinger, Spybot or the SP2 installer asking me for any passwords or telling me I couldn't alter critical system files...
Note that I *do* realize there's a difference between Administrators as a group, and Administrators as a user - the latter basically being root, the former being more equivelent to wheel - except there's almost nothing Administrators (the group) can't do. Which is really, really stupid IMO.
Sorry if I'm coming across a bit hardass - but IMO this is a really stupid thing MS does and I'm the one stuck with cleaning up after their mess. (Of course, it does pay me... so why the hell am I complaining anyway?:-)
Yeah, that's all well and good - except for the fact that Windows sets up users by default as administrators, as does every OEM to ship a Windows PC, and without any explanation as to why this is or why it might just be a bad idea.
Until Microsoft stops shipping the OS wide-open for anyone to do anything they want, these kind of attacks will continue. Apple's gotten it much more right in this regard - even as a Mac user I don't think Mac OS X is particularly more secure then any other *nix or even Windows (just less analyzed), but at least Apple doesn't ship with any services turned on or allow admin users willy-nilly access over the entire system (most admin settings and files require password confirmation before continuing - not foolproof by any means but a huge step in the right direction), as do most good Unices these days.
I want to rent games online. I also want to rent movies online. Until a service exists wherein I can do both these things with the same subscription, nobody gets my business.
On touchpads, I find the best way to do fine movements is to just pivot your thumb - not exactly moving it, but just roll your finger while maintaing contact with the pad. I've shown this technique to several people and they all agree that it does allow for a finer control - might want to try that. (It works somewhat better on laptop trackpads with the tip of the index finger but it does work with the iPod and your thumb).
Can you explain to us why exactly it is you need to upgrade? If your solution is in FM6, and works fine, why upgrade?
I work for a major database developer in the Rochester area. Our largest example is a manufacturing plant that's running entirely on Macs and Filemaker. The entire plant is on FM3/4, running on 6100s, 7100s, some 8500-era w/G3 upgrade cards, and a few G5/G4s for people who need them. At any given point in time there will be 30 people working in the database at once. The entire business has been running on FM for over 15 years.
You know what? Thing works fine. We just upgraded from an older G3/733 to a dual processor 1Ghz machine and run FileMaker Server 3 in Classic.
So upgrade if you must, but first make sure it's actually justified. Remember, not all proprietary software is bad - if the only reason you want to use open source is because it's open source, that's one of the worst reasons I could possibly think of. Pick the right tool for the right job. If you need to get data out, look into FM6 Unlimited and using XML/XSLT transforms, or web formats that a script could process - FileMaker's not a dead-end format by any means. Also check into FX.php - once you get stuff into PHP there's almost no limit to what you can do.
Slashdot Mirror
NO CARRIER+++
No wonder he commited suicide, the guy's on dialup!
But where are the hot flight attendants with the skimpy outfits?
;-)
I see no such thing.
For those of us who don't speak mangled Perl, what does it do?
One of the interesting things about the move to 64-bit is that unlike going from IA32 to AMD64 on Windows, on Mac OS X there is no speed boost from targetting the G5. All the speed boosts you're ever going to get from compiling for a G5 are there and enabled in Panther; all you get from moving your app to 64-bit is 64-bit addressing, and as such, a slight drop in speed. This will hopefully be offset by the fact that your app actually needs more then 4GB of memory space. This sort of makes 64-bit apps less neccessary/desirable then it does in the PC world.
Grab a copy of TimeSplitters Future Perfect - it's got a built-in map editor, and right from inside the game you can hop on Live and upload or download maps, rate other peoples, etc. User created content isn't dead - developers are just too lazy to support it properly.
Also, last I checked $20 for a pretty nice-looking expansion pack is not a bad deal - most expansion packs come out at around $30-$40. And if you think about it you only have to buy the $20 once and you can install it on as many Xboxes as you want without paying extra, whereas over Live you have to have a Live subscription to download, and while you keep your content if you cancel Live, if your Xbox dies, you're SOL unless you sign up for Live again.
Don't have many friends, do you? Don't have a Live subscription eh?
:-) Not for the single player campaign (which was good, but nothing truly remarkable), but for the multiplayer, which is (I do firmly believe) the finest console FPS experience made to date (with the arguable exception of Halo 1).
Halo 2 will be a constant fixture in my/my friends' Xbox for years to come. At least, until Halo 3 comes out
Lastly, according to Bungie, it's not stated but hinted that the Halo X-Pack disk will have the downloadable content that Live subscribers will get for free. This way if you don't subscribe to Live you won't be left out in the cold. You could also sign up for a free trial or borrow a friend's Live account but this will mean you don't have to.
The very page you just linked to shows a near-doubled increase in framerates between the 6800GT and the 6800GT SLI at 1600x1200, all options on. That's not negligable where I come from. Now, granted, not everybody's playing at those resolutions, but a lot of people are. For them SLI does provide a much-needed (if expensive) boost of speed.
You also completely neglect the fact that it makes a lot of sense to pick up an SLI motherboard and one video card, and then later on down the line when new games come out that your video card can't handle or you get a new 24" widescreen flatpanel, you can pick up that extra video card, slap it in and have twice the framerate.
You are completely, totally, 100% missing the point. This shouldn't be something you have to worry about in the first place. You take a Mac, plug it in to the network, and you don't get infected - There aren't even any services turned on by default to infect *through*. Care to explain to me why in the hell a consumer operating system is leaving ports open all over the place for services nobody cares about or uses? More importantly, can you explain to my mother? "Turn on the firewall," you say. Can you also explain to her why the computer runs in an unsafe mode by default? "Get the updates," you say. Can you explain to her why in the world Windows doesn't check for updates when you first turn it on? (The first thing Mac OS X does when you turn it on is, you guessed it, check for updates and offer to install them in a large window that's not likely to be ignored, and easy to be dismissed if you don't want it hanging around).
The problem is that Windows is inherently unsafe out of the box, and requires work to make it safe - whereas all other operating systems are designed to be safe out of the box and require delibarate steps to make them unsafe. SP2 has made steps in the right direction but it's still not enough. And I don't know what Microsoft can do to make it safe - if SP2 wasn't enough then what will be?
...will it be published on September 19th?
You can find a lot more interesting info surrounding the launch of the Mac at Andy Hertzfeld's Folklore.org. Probably most relevant would be the story about this very moment in time, The Times They Are-a Changin'. /karmawhore
You can do that. Set your iPod to manual syncing, and it will preserve everything that's currently on the iPod and will allow you to manually add songs from any computer and create and manage playlists. You will still not be able to copy songs off the iPod; for that you'll need separate software.
The mandatory installation of QuickTime is because, well, iTunes REQUIRES QuickTime - QuickTime is more then just a media player, it's actually also a large chunk of Apple's Carbon APIs ported to Windows. iTunes uses QuickTime as a porting layer of sorts, as does much Apple software that runs on Windows. So you literally cannot run iTunes without QuickTime.
Your best bet with regard to the audiobook thing is to convert it to AAC instead, then rename the file to ".m4b" - there's no DRM encoding on it, but it will allow you to use the audiobook specific features by tricking iTunes into thinking it's a downloaded file.
Just curious where you saw this - I don't recall which expo it was but I saw it live via the stream when it happened, and would like to see it again if you have a link handy.
"Any company with advertising tactics such as theirs is bound to piss me off..."
;-)
And what "advertising tactics" do you disagree with? Not sure what you mean by that.
"They are using OSS stuff for the primary intent of making money..."
Umm. Hate to break it to you, but I'd have to say that there's thousands of companies out there who're using open source to make money. Some do it by taking open-source software and providing services, as hosting providers or Google does. Some do it by taking open-source software and bundling it into a package, as Apple, Red Hat and Novell do. Some do it by taking open source software and programming for it, such as myself. But either way there's plenty of people making money off of open source.
"It just seems like apple's help has been bare minimum and not in areas that really count."
I don't know... the major patches to things like KHTML, CUPS and GCC seem like more then the bare minimum - they could've just forked it and thrown it on the server in some tarball, but instead they at least try and foster an open development community. They could've just taken the BSD-licensed code they use and never give back, but instead they've released it as a full open-source operating system, usable on both PCs and Macs. And they do have quite a few interesting open source projects grown in-house, such as QuickTime Streaming Server (which does much, much more then just stream QuickTime), OpenPlay and Rendezvous (which is an amazing piece of work that I wish more developers and hardware makers would seize on). Just because you don't use them doesn't mean they're not there.
"That's why I like the GPL better than BSD and LGPL and such, it prevents that kind of stuff from happening...."
I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about. The GPL does NOT prevent this kind of thing from happening. Go look at www.apple.com/opensource/ - half the software on there is true blue GPL software. Just because it's GPL doesn't mean you can't include it in commercial software. The GPL just prevents you from taking open source and closed-sourcing it in any way, shape or form - if you make the source available you're not in any trouble.
I dunno... I'm an Apple fan and I guess I don't disagree with you too much, I'm all for more open standards and open source software. And while I belive that the people in the trenches at Apple have their hearts in the right spot, I'm sure the marketing guys are seizing it and doing what's neccessary purely for the sake of profit. But I don't think that Apple is quite the demon you make them out to be. And Mac OS X really is quite nice.... you could always just pick up an iBook from eBay...
It's already happening, dammit - I have a roommate whose phone blares some annoying-ass punk rock song in mono badness. He's with Cingular, I believe.
...until I noticed that the PocketPC version is just a delayed dictation device - it records, then you transfer it to your desktop computer and it's the host computer that actually does all the speech recognition.
No wireless. Less space then a Nomad. Lame.
I don't know if I'm really interested in WoW. I've tried several other MMORPGs, namely EverQuest and Anarchy Online (after the first few months of chaos) and while the idea intrigues me, I haven't really found one that grabs me. They all seem mostly like just running around engaging in boring combat. AO had an interesting backstory and unniverse but didn't really grab me gameplay wise.
I dunno, maybe WoW is different, but I'm not really inclined to spend $50 to play it for thirty days and find out I hate it. I'll wait for the free trial, or someone I live with to pick it up and play on their account.
Anyone else out there have any opinions on WoW for MMORPG-hating humans? Just curious to see what other people think.
The guide is set in Grid mode by default, which is horrifically slow. Bring up the guide and press the Enter key on the remote to bring up the Guide options, and set it from Grid mode to whatever the other option is - this is what standalone TiVos default to and it is light-years faster. It may take a little getting used to but most TiVo owners tend to prefer the TiVo style as opposed to the grid (I know I do).
I disagree - while we don't know exactly how it ties into Halo 2, the fall of Reach (which takes place directly before and immediately after Halo 1) happens right in the middle of the sound files being played, which means that they most certainly have something to do with Halo. The current spec is that it will detail how exactly the Covenant found earth, but that's just speculation. At the very least, it's a very interesting bunch of backstory and details of a very detailed world that we'll only get to see a very small part of in the games.
One other spolier tidbit (stop reading if you don't want ilovebees spoilers!) - one of the main characters' father is a Spartan 1.0, and John-117 (aka Master Chief) is a Spartan 2.0 - only a tangential link, but a moderately interesting.
Halo 2 better be the second coming of your favorite messianic figure then
:-)
Funny that...
This makes me laugh. I'm not sure why. Nonetheless, you get a gold star.
Hmm... Couple weeks ago. I moved my old PC into another room for the family to use. Had to create a bunch of users - and gee, there's Limited User with absolutely no privelages whatsoever to even run games with, and Administrator with full access privs... and I'm too lazy to set up runas commands for everybody. (Of course, that decision came back to bite me on the ass earlier today when I had to go through and clean up all the viruses and spyware on there... still, I just denied access to IE and installed SP2, so I'll give everyone one more go before I start tightening down the thumbscrews.)
:-)
Or I could take the computer I'm currently writing on - XP Pro, only ever set up one user on it during the install, and guess what kind of privlages I have?
Or how about the Dell I did a spyware cleanup, virus removal (all kinds of horrible trojans) and installed another 512MB of RAM on earlier today? I don't recall Stinger, Spybot or the SP2 installer asking me for any passwords or telling me I couldn't alter critical system files...
Note that I *do* realize there's a difference between Administrators as a group, and Administrators as a user - the latter basically being root, the former being more equivelent to wheel - except there's almost nothing Administrators (the group) can't do. Which is really, really stupid IMO.
Sorry if I'm coming across a bit hardass - but IMO this is a really stupid thing MS does and I'm the one stuck with cleaning up after their mess. (Of course, it does pay me... so why the hell am I complaining anyway?
Yeah, that's all well and good - except for the fact that Windows sets up users by default as administrators, as does every OEM to ship a Windows PC, and without any explanation as to why this is or why it might just be a bad idea.
;-)
Until Microsoft stops shipping the OS wide-open for anyone to do anything they want, these kind of attacks will continue. Apple's gotten it much more right in this regard - even as a Mac user I don't think Mac OS X is particularly more secure then any other *nix or even Windows (just less analyzed), but at least Apple doesn't ship with any services turned on or allow admin users willy-nilly access over the entire system (most admin settings and files require password confirmation before continuing - not foolproof by any means but a huge step in the right direction), as do most good Unices these days.
But of course not Windows.
I want to rent games online. I also want to rent movies online. Until a service exists wherein I can do both these things with the same subscription, nobody gets my business.
Hear that Netflix?!
On touchpads, I find the best way to do fine movements is to just pivot your thumb - not exactly moving it, but just roll your finger while maintaing contact with the pad. I've shown this technique to several people and they all agree that it does allow for a finer control - might want to try that. (It works somewhat better on laptop trackpads with the tip of the index finger but it does work with the iPod and your thumb).
Can you explain to us why exactly it is you need to upgrade? If your solution is in FM6, and works fine, why upgrade?
I work for a major database developer in the Rochester area. Our largest example is a manufacturing plant that's running entirely on Macs and Filemaker. The entire plant is on FM3/4, running on 6100s, 7100s, some 8500-era w/G3 upgrade cards, and a few G5/G4s for people who need them. At any given point in time there will be 30 people working in the database at once. The entire business has been running on FM for over 15 years.
You know what? Thing works fine. We just upgraded from an older G3/733 to a dual processor 1Ghz machine and run FileMaker Server 3 in Classic.
So upgrade if you must, but first make sure it's actually justified. Remember, not all proprietary software is bad - if the only reason you want to use open source is because it's open source, that's one of the worst reasons I could possibly think of. Pick the right tool for the right job. If you need to get data out, look into FM6 Unlimited and using XML/XSLT transforms, or web formats that a script could process - FileMaker's not a dead-end format by any means. Also check into FX.php - once you get stuff into PHP there's almost no limit to what you can do.