I would have believed 970 PowerMacs in production but definitely not 970 based Powerbooks. That goes double because there's even more rumors of 15" Powerbooks based on the G4 but all aluninumized waiting to be shipped to Apple's stores and other retailers. If you've noticed there's a dearth of 15" Powerbooks in stock anywhere that sells them.
Besides June production doesn't mean a June release or even announcement date. Apple likes to build up stocks of computers before selling them. Building and shipping computers in the same month would be a ridiculous strain on their resources. As for a June announcement, see the Osborne computer company.
WWDC isn't exactly a place Steve Jobs likes to announce hardware products, it is really the wrong venue for such announcements. MacWorld Expo is a much better place to do things like that and is only two months away. It's not really a secret Panther developer previews are going to be released at WWDC which will likely be SJ's keynote subject. MacOS and related software ought to be and typically is the subject of SJ's WWDC keynotes. Not hardware announcements.
Did the WiFi proponent groups launch an orbit hype satellite to grab all this ridiculous hype for WiFi? I really don't see why WiFi seems to be the solution to all bandwidth and connectivity problems that exist in the world.
WiFi is not however a decent means to connect lots of other wireless devices. WiFi requires too much power for small devices like cell phones or digital cameras. It lacks the ability to hand off connections to other base stations which makes it an inane choice for large scale wireless internet access. It is a horrible method for connecting a large number of users in a small area because of collision detection schemes it uses. It is also a horrible idea for any amount of reliable long range communication, the part of the spectrum allocated to WiFi is unlicensed and thus anything is allowed to transmit there and must accept interference.
I suspect the WiFi interest group hype hounds have been working overtime to declare the death of any emergent technologies WiFi might in some way ever compete with.
Re:from the descriptions, Bluetooth won't help
on
The Death of Bluetooth?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Depending on the situation BT capable printers can indeed make sense. If you want to print from anywhere in your house a 802.11 print server is probably going to be your best bet. Say you had a printer that was JUST out of USB range and only a single printer you wanted to print from, an 802.11 print server is overkill. For a little more than it would cost you for the extra long USB cables and USB hub you could pick up a BT printer adapter. You can keep a clean looking workspace and yet be productive.
My new 12" Powerbook has Bluetooth built into it. I didn't go looking for it nor was it a selling point of the computer but it is there. The next cell phone I buy is likely going to have Bluetooth in it as well, much to my enjoyment most likely. Bluetooth is ending up in all sorts of devices people are buying without them having to run out and pick it up. What you're seeing today is much like USB's rise several years ago. Slowly systems were released with USB available in the standard package which provided reason for third parties to develop USB hardware, they had a market to sell to.
Laptop and some desktop manufacturers are creating this demand with Bluetooth right now. I agree it may take some time for BT to become ubiquitous but the groundwork has been and is being laid now. In my case I'm going to end up with a Bluetooth camera/computer pair when I get a new phone. I'll likely look for more BT devices after that. Now that you can find PCs with BT as a standard feature I think people are looking at BT devices a bit more just as I am. It's on its way out and is quickly becoming ubiquitous.
In the mid-eighties Steve Case was running a little company called Quantum which was an online service for the Commodore 64. By January of 1986 Q-Link had about 10,000 users. By 1987 Quantum's stock was on the decline and the company was facing an inability to pay back its loans. In '86 Steve Case moved to California for three months in an attempt to convince Apple to let Quantum build an online service for them.
Apple as you said had been running a system called AppleLink. This was a system for retailers and sales reps to keep in contact with all that was going on at Apple. The system was run by General Electric Information Services and was pretty successful at keeping its intended audience up to date. The top brass began to think an extended system might allow them to lower their customer support costs by allowing direct access to technical documentation and the like. This was the system Steve Case was in California to nab the contract for.
He managed to convince Apple to let Quantum develop and run the system. Quantum was going to produce the software and were granted the right to use Apple's logo as long as they made the program LOOK like an Apple product. Problems arose pretty quickly after a while. Quantum in Steve Case fashion wanted to package APE with new computers for free or sell it through direct marketing (mass mailing). Apple said that option was a no go, they didn't want to give software away for free. The service debuted at Apple Fest in 1988 and was $35 annually and $6 night time and $15 day time IIRC. The service had a fair number of users and was for the most part a success as far as Apple was concerned.
Quantum however decided to end their relationship with Apple. Because of the logo deal signed Apple had to pay $2.5m to Quantum to relenquish rights to use of the logo. This set Quantum up very well for the short term. In 1989 Quantum changed the name of the service from AppleLink to America Online.
Later Apple wanted to be rid of the costly AppleLink service run by GE. They decided they wanted a service not only for intracompany communication but an experience for their customers as well.
They approached AOL due to their history with APE. Apple bought the APE code from AOL to develop it further on their own with AOL providing the actual service. Apple added content from third parties and provided e-mail and other services to contend better with existing services like AOL and CompuServ. As I recall the service was announced sometime in January 1994 and went into operation around June. From the rusty confines of my mind I seem to recall the monthly fee was about $8.95 (maybe 8.99) with a couple hours included. Night time hours were $5 and daytime minutes were $8.
The service was aimed at all the people running around with Macs and Newtons and up until then relatively unused modems. NewtonMail was provided through eWorld as was e-mail for regular Macs. The interface was spacial and pretty fun to use. Any Mac enthusiast who could afford to had an eWorld account. Due to budget cuts a Windows version was never released and the service shut down altogether in 1996. Apple's problems elsewhere caused serious problems for eWorld.
I believe eWorld was the service the grandparent post was talking about. AppleLink did not get spun off from Apple however. Quantum ended their partnership and relabeled their service of their own volition. They had been playing Tandy and Apple against each other by developing similar services for both systems, the Tandy system called PC-Link. Apple was under the impression Quantum was giving their full attention to their contract when in fact they had a similar agreement with Tandy. APE failed because Apple and Quantum did not want to market the service and software the same way.
A cheaper chip does not mean a lower cost. Wintel PCs don't cost anything because 1) their design and manufacture is done by third parties and 2) there are no profit margins. When you buy a computer from Dell they make next to nothing on the actual hardware sale. Their profit comes from you adding RAM they overcharge for, a monitor they overcharge for, a printer they overcharge for, and software they overcharge for as well as a customer service package that is rarely worth the money you pay. Dell is a company that takes an order, buys machines made by an ODM, customizes the system according to your order, and then ships it. Dell makes their money by being very good at streamlining that process. Dell is not a manufacturer, they are a retailer.
Apple is a real manufacturer as well as a retailer. They design and manufacturer (sometimes under contract like with Quanta) their own equipment, then sell it to you or manage retailers selling it to you. Apple's business model looks a lot more like HP and Sun's busines model than Dell or Gateway's.
Assuming the level of third party support is based on the chipset is ridiculous and short sighted. BeOS, OS/2, Solaris, NeXTStep, and Linux have run or do run on x86 processors. They receive or received little in the way of third party support. By your reasoning they ought to have tremendous amounts of third party support, none of them do or ever have had it. Linux has a pretty large user base and still can barely manage to get even closed source drivers from equipment manufacturers. The chipset means squat, the OS environment is the important part.
The non-Windows nature of MacOS and Linux in terms of API is what keeps third parties from supporting the operating systems. Get a clue. If you have the same API on different ISAs you rarely need more than a recompile to get a piece of software working. Think about the PPC, SPARC, and MIPS ports of various Free OSes. As long as the API is the same porting is rarely a big issue between architectures. Porting from one API to another API is a pain in the ass however. For a commercial organization it is also expensive and rarely worth the cost. You can either write your own compatibility library or port your program to a new API. Neither of these is worth while for most software companies.
Apple switching to x86 chips would only mean a lot of companies would have to recompile their applications or start providing fat binaries. They might retain a good portion of their third party support since using wrapper scripts in.app files is pretty damn easy to do and Mach-O executables fully support the fat binary technology. That is however within the same API. Someone thinking that Apple using x86 chips instead of PPC chips is going to make it any easier to port from the Win32 API to Cocoa is fooling themselves. If you think switching APIs is easy just because a new processor is used you're fooling yourself or don't know what the hell you're saying.
Saying PowerPC development has hit some sort of plateau is also foolish and a bit absurd. IBM is running full force with PowerPC development and has been for many years. Motorola is also working hard on PowerPC chips, they've made several advances with their PowerQUICC architecture since its introduction. Also since its inception the G4 (74xx) series chips have seen a large number of improvements and modifications. The current 745x chips are tremendous improvements over the original 7400 chips. IBM has the PowerPC 970 coming out RSN which is a huge contender to the performance throne AMD and Intel squabble over. The 970 and later 980 are scaled down derivitives of the POWER4 and POWER5 designs respectively. You obviously have little knowlege of PowerPC processors so it isn't a good idea to go around talking about lacks in advencement in the architecture.
The point was there are backup solutions that don't require a $99/yr fee to use. Backup is a cool application but if you've already paid a bundle for a nice computer a $99.Mac membership might not be exactly what you're looking for in terms of price/performance. A cheapo vhost offers more disk space, upstream bandwidth, and typically better uptime than.Mac for the same or a lower price. Unfortunately iDisk has an unfortunate habit of going down at inopertune times. You're aldo in a bind if your public files on your iDisk receive one too many requests, everyone at that point is blocked out from accessing them.
I'm not a riverologist but my understanding is between the Yangtze's tributaries and itself it is one of the siltier rivers in the world. The high silt content of the river is what makes the Three Gorges region a good farming local, regular floods of the river replenish the soil in the area. It is local farming and development which has made the region such a danger to live in. Industrial and residential buildup on the shores of a river that regularly floods is a stupid idea and reflects some of the more inane central planning policies in the Chinese government.
Left to its own devices the reservoir will silt over within a few short years according to some engineers. Even if it is regularly dredged it is predicted the silt buildup in the turbines is going to cause regular downtime which means huge swaths of developed area will go without power or heavy reductions in residential power to keep industrial districts fed. If the spillways fill up with silt which many people agree is very likely, serious stress problems could crop up.
Like you mention about Florida, regions downstream from the TGD are facing a slew of environmental guesses as to the total effect of the dam. Not only will downstream inland areas be greatly affected but so will regions framing the South China Sea which is fed by the Yangtze. Over a number of years it is not infeasible to imagine large sections of the coastline receding. Tell will tell I suppose.
Using cron, rsync/ftp/smbclient/curl, and tar will do the same thing as long as you've got a server waiting somewhere to upload the files to. The Backup utility is indeed cool but a shell script can pretty easily do the same. If you remember to stick a blank CD in the drive every week you can have tidy CD backups as well.
Uh, there's a few plausible alternatives. The money could have been better spent on constructing more energy efficient buildings for homes and businesses. It also could have gone into building localized power generation using solar, geothermal, wind, and small scale hydroelectric plants. Energy efficient housing goes a tremendous way in reducing the amount of power any urban area needs to maintain itself. Energy efficient policies and buildings in businesses also help out a great deal in reducing peak power demands off the utility grid. If efficient buildings and renewable electricity and heating sources are utilized the net effect is extremely low levels of pollution for equivilent levels of comfort as dirty inefficient systems.
The dam is going to devastate the local ecology to a degree not seen since the Aral Sea debacle. Most of the rivers feeding the Three Gorges are heavily polluted and hundreds of factories are being flooded by the dam. Despite cleanup efforts it is inevitable that hazardous industrial chemicals are going to end up floating about in the reservoir. Add the industrial waste to that created by the ocean frieghters navigating the new reservoir and you've got a gigantic cesspool in the middle of the country.
Besides the pollution the local wildlife is going to end up wiped out. Without the silt in the river being distributed down its bed the fish will have nothing to eat if the pollution doesn't kill them first. The Baiji dolphin is also on the list of animals to be impacted as they hunt through the river's silt for food as well. Water fowl that feed on the fish that won't be there will also begin to die off unless they manage some heavy migration. Even if they manage to find new food sources their numbers are going to dwindle drastically. Worst is the people in the area that depend heavily on the river's fish stock. They're going to have a signifigant food source closed off to them which means more food imports to the area which will only exacerbate the poullution problems.
Of course there's the potential for a massive flood. The dam is already showing signs of wear. Saying the dam is earthquake resistant in a misnomer. Natural earthquakes pose less of a problem than the masses of water in the reservoir putting pressure on the local tectonic system. Also the massive build-up of silt in the reservoir is a distaster waiting to happen. A small earthquake that normally wouldn't damage the dam stands a decent chance of causing a mudslide in the silt bed. Megatons of silt crashing to the basin floor will cause pressure waves that can seriously damage the dam.
A number of proposals and arguments are on the books and the project was started despite them. Most proposals suggested a smaller number of power stations could be built on the Yuangtze's tributaries. They could have provided as much power as the single dam without the ecological damage and vast potential for a catastrophic flood. The lakes and wetlands downstream from the Three Gorges area also are able to hold more water than the reservoir but allow but better distribution of the water.
The dam is most definitely a political show of pride than it is a practical solution to a problem. Save for ocean freight in Chongquin the alternative solutions to the TGD provided everything the TGD did for a lower cost and less economic and ecological impact. It is arguable that Chongquin NEEDS the ocean freight, it is polluted and choked as it is, adding to those facts is not a very good idea. The corruption brought to light in the project of late and the total silencing of opposition to the project should tell you this whole plan is nothing more than the world's biggest political stunt.
If your system does not require this update or if the update is unsuccessful, the update application displays one of the following alert messages:
"Your computer doesn't need this update."
Your computer has a different optical drive model and doesn't need this update. The application quits without changing anything on your system.
"Your drive firmware is up-to-date."
The firmware in your Combo drive doesn't need updating. The application quits without changing anything on your system.
If that does not answer your questions I don't think providing detailed hardware specifications are going to answer them. If you download the update and it gives you a message like..."Your computer doesn't need this update." that should say to you that your computer doesn't need the update.
As for specifics, how long have you been using Macs? I'm having a hard time remember any time Apple gave a detailed answer to a hardware problem. As far as I remember they've always gone with the "firmware update" problem instead of specifically detailing the bug. You'd think you could logically parse through the available information for troubleshooting.
Do you have a Powerbook?
No) Go away.
Yes) Go to next question.
Does your Powerbook have a combo drive?
No) Go away.
Yes) Download the firmware update.
Did the firmware update fix your problem?
No) Contact Apple.
Yes) Go away.
I didn't have a problem) What the hell are you complaining about?
We do indeed have a bit to fear from deadly viruses but the probability a virus is going to wipe our species out is probably somewhere around an asteroid impact wiping us out. Of all the bajillions of viruses only a fraction kill us with impunity and as our understanding of them increases their ability to kill us diminishes. This is not to say we're technologically immune to disease, we just understand the process a bit better now than we have.
You've gone so far beyond the realm of the here and now that I doubt you can see the planet Earth any longer. The music on a CD is not yours for you to do with you please, you have never at any point been free to do as you will with that music. You can't say that because a stricter method of content control has been implemented on iTMS' music files than on a CD that they are less free than music off a CD or tape. You can copy the bits off a CD, you can copy the bits of a.m4p file. You can give someone a file and disown it (de-authorize your computer) and let them have it forever. You can sell a CD to your friend. The only thing the.m4p file doesn't allow is for you to make endless verbatim copies of the song to distribute to friends and strangers with no recompense for the copyright holder.
Your analogy is entirely flawed, you've got a dumb slippery slope argument that you're trying to turn into an appeal of emotion. You can hit anyone you please for any reason you please, the consequences of said action differ depending on the circumstances. The differing consequences of the action of hitting someone are the same as fair use terms of copyright law. DRM is not a technology that doesn't allow you to make copies of music, it controls the disemination of the actual musical content stored in particular bits. It is not comparable to an implant, which is a loaded term all by itself, in your body preventing you from hitting people. The DRM controls proposed by various groups would be better compared to retaining the ability to hit people but not having the ability to do them any damage.
Besides that entire tangental argument, the copyright protections on m4p files are not true DRM. They are more CYA measures to quote a previous poster. The mild protections on m4p files are designed to only let the owner of a file listen to the music and share it with a small number of friends or other computers she uses. At any point the owner of the song can give that music to someone else as long as she removes her computer from the authorization list. This concept is analguous to giving a CD to someone and not owning it anymore. Back before widespread use of MP3 encoders and CD writers the medium of the CD disc itself was enough to dissuade massive amounts of copying which was fine with copyright holders which utilmately want to control their copyrights. Now the medium of a CD disc is tivial so more artificial means have to be used for copyright holders to be OK with selling their copyrighted works.
Did you miss something really big? There was no term of use change. The documentation for iTunes has always stated that streaming outside of one's subnet was not possible, it isn't until now that this has been implemented. When I frist read about people being able to connect to iTunes outside of the system's subnet I thought it was total BS because it was contrary to the documentation.
Had a bunch of cheapskates not written any utilities to rip streams to MP3 files this would have likely never been an issue for Apple to fix. Unfortunately people turned a cool iTunes feature into a P2P stealing application. The only thing you CAN share via iTunes is music and unless you've got a large collection of music you've made all that music is copyrighted by somebody that isn't you.
The sharing crap has nothing to do with Apple's Music Service, you can burn all of those to CD your heart desires. You don't need an iPod to transport your iTMS music to work and back but it is a cool toy to own. You can use a CD-R, DVD-R, Zip, iDisk, e-mail, Freenet, or any other transport medium to move all that music as long as you authorize the target computer to play the files. De-authorize it when you quit, get fired, or switch workstations.
The plaintext data is NOT yours to do with as you please. You don't own any part of it and thus really have no "rights" to do as you please. If Apple or someone else encrypted my file system to prevent me from accessing my own property you'd have a point. Since the DRM scheme only manages data I never had any rights to except fair use you have no point.
Not likely, I only use my cell phone for outgoing calls. My phone never beeps, buzzes, or hums when I get a call. When I get a chance to sit about I check my voicemail and call people back who were thoughtful enough to leave a message. My cell phone is pull content only. That distance speck of light is the rest of the world waiting for you to pull your head out of your ass.
There's also the small issue of all the 3G standards proposed being entirely incompatible with the TDMA based GSM towers already in place. Upgrading a tower to be 3G compatible requires an complete overhaul of all the transmission equipment. It's costing corporations all over the world millions if not billions for licenses just to spend money to upgrade their cell infrastructure.
Utilize the "Off" button and voilà, your cell phone is now a pull-content device. Some phones allow you to pretty easily only accept calls from a selected list or no one at all. A lot of people use their cell phone for an outgoing only communication device.
You're making up an Apple announcement regarding the 970. Apple's said nothing about the processor. Like Motorola's G5 the only words being tossed about regarding the processor are from industry rags.
You need to lay down your crack pipe. I got my 12" Powerbook a few weeks, from an Apple Store no less, after they were announced. The first couple rounds of web orders began arriving that week as well. The BTO orders obviously took longer to deliver because of a customs issue with the AirPort Extreme cards out of Taiwan. I wouldn't call that failing to deliver, BTO items always have a variable delivery date. The 17" Powerbooks have been out for a while now and delivered when they were supposed to have been delivered. The 1.42GHz PowerMacs also delivered on time. In fact most companies make announcements for products that they will be delivering months after the announcement date. This benefits Apple more than it detriments them in a majority of cases.
The PowerBooks and PowerMac are hardly rumors. I don't think that word means what you think it means. As for the G5, Apple's never made a G5 announcement ever. The only talk of the G5 has come from industry press rags commenting on Motorola's slide shows. Apple "failing to deliver" the G5 is as ridiculous as Ford failing to deliver flying cars. If you want to bitch about something pick something from the realm of reality, not your imagination.
I think you're alluding to the problem Apple had in delivering the 500MHz G4 several years back. I really don't think the situation is in any way similar to the situation at that time. IBM is doing better now than it did for most of the 90s, when Motorola couldn't deliver the 500MHz G4s they were doing about as bad as they could be. The health of Apple's suppliers directly relates to the health of Apple.
I don't think you can point out a product released in the past five years they haven't delivered on. I'd really like for you attempt it however.
Rule 26(a) of civil court procedings states parties must disclose their evidense before the case goes in front of the bench IIRC. That is how people get court orders to look at internal and otherwise classified corporate documents.
I wish Apple would do a bit more advertising of their low level frameworks like vecLib. One of the more common AltiVec misconceptions is that is simply will not handle double precision floating point operations. It can handle them but not at the register level like it can SP operations. If Apple would make more noise about vecLib and their other frameworks I think we might see XServes and AltiVec patches for serious number crunching apps in much larger quantities.
I agree with you about Objective-C. I'm hoping that its exposure due to Cocoa will begin to spurn more interest in it. In the open source world C++ has a horrible reputation and thus there's little emphasis on OO software design outside of Java and Ruby developer circles. When one considers the ease of extension of the Cocoa and thus OpenStep frameworks it is hard to imagine Objective-C not being more popular than it is.
For open source development OO programming to me makes a great deal of sense. Extensions to programs can be released as separate entities in compliance with restrictive licenses. Extensions can be written for applications even if they don't have a specific extension API. Bug fixes, performance improvements, and feature enhancements (especially feature enhancements) can spread throughout a system much faster than otherwise.
High resolution textures are unnecessary at low display resolutions. A high resolution texture just means any particular display pixel has a really wide range of colors it can be. Packing a metric assload of pixels into a few inches square is not going to allow your eye to differentiate between two individual pixels. A GameBoy or PSP held at a comfortable distance from your face is not going to give you the same apparent pixel size as a television viewed from a comfortable distance.
Besides the LCD's size there's color problems as well. The screen is light by a solid state EL backlight which at the absolute best is only going to provide a 100:1 contrast ratio. Coupled with the limited colors a small LCD can reliably produce means you've got serious display fidelity issues. Trying to display high resolution textures with a ton of color information onto that sort of screen is yet again a waste of time. The subtle difference in hue between two shades means nothing on such a small screen with such crappy lighting. Packing those textures into a game is a waste of time and effort.
For video clips the screen is hardly acceptable save for brief prerendered cutscenes. Imagine trying to watch the video for FF7 on a two inch screen. You'd lose so much detail from the small size and crappy lighting you'd be hard pressed to tell Tifa from Barett during most of the cutscenes. If you've ever watched video on a color handheld television you'd know what this is like. You'd be as disappointed as the people who bought Archos Jukeboxes thinking they could watch their DiVX porn on them only to be sadly mistaken.
You've done nothing to defend your prepostition that high resolution textures are relavent on a small handheld device, you've merely restated your premise. A graphics professional ought to realize that the medium is going to dictate the amount of detail you're going to put into a particular work. There's no reason to work with billboard size works at more than 10dpi because they're viewed from so far away any more color information would be lost on the observer. Likewise there's no reason to work with high resolution textures when your output size is going to be a fraction of the size of a single texture.
You're making the same argument with regards to audio. There's very little reason to have 24-bit 96KHz audio on a device with two crappy quarter inch speakers covered by a plastic grill. There's little reason to have as much as 22KHz sound out of such speakers. A game packing 11KHz sound and reusing as many parts of a clip as possible would be making much more efficient use of the system than a game packing CD quality sound. Some lossy psychoacoustic compression and you can fit a ton of audio onto any given storage medium. It is simply not necessary to pack all that video and audio information onto a device that can never properly represent it.
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I would have believed 970 PowerMacs in production but definitely not 970 based Powerbooks. That goes double because there's even more rumors of 15" Powerbooks based on the G4 but all aluninumized waiting to be shipped to Apple's stores and other retailers. If you've noticed there's a dearth of 15" Powerbooks in stock anywhere that sells them.
Besides June production doesn't mean a June release or even announcement date. Apple likes to build up stocks of computers before selling them. Building and shipping computers in the same month would be a ridiculous strain on their resources. As for a June announcement, see the Osborne computer company.
WWDC isn't exactly a place Steve Jobs likes to announce hardware products, it is really the wrong venue for such announcements. MacWorld Expo is a much better place to do things like that and is only two months away. It's not really a secret Panther developer previews are going to be released at WWDC which will likely be SJ's keynote subject. MacOS and related software ought to be and typically is the subject of SJ's WWDC keynotes. Not hardware announcements.
Did the WiFi proponent groups launch an orbit hype satellite to grab all this ridiculous hype for WiFi? I really don't see why WiFi seems to be the solution to all bandwidth and connectivity problems that exist in the world.
WiFi is a decent but not necessarily great means to bridge a wired Ethernet network to remote nodes. It works pretty damn well in my house letting me browse the web or stream music. It also works decently as a way to connect to the internet from a Starbucks or internet café. For situations where I'm remote but stationary WiFi is a cool way to connect to the otherwise wired network.
WiFi is not however a decent means to connect lots of other wireless devices. WiFi requires too much power for small devices like cell phones or digital cameras. It lacks the ability to hand off connections to other base stations which makes it an inane choice for large scale wireless internet access. It is a horrible method for connecting a large number of users in a small area because of collision detection schemes it uses. It is also a horrible idea for any amount of reliable long range communication, the part of the spectrum allocated to WiFi is unlicensed and thus anything is allowed to transmit there and must accept interference.
I suspect the WiFi interest group hype hounds have been working overtime to declare the death of any emergent technologies WiFi might in some way ever compete with.
Depending on the situation BT capable printers can indeed make sense. If you want to print from anywhere in your house a 802.11 print server is probably going to be your best bet. Say you had a printer that was JUST out of USB range and only a single printer you wanted to print from, an 802.11 print server is overkill. For a little more than it would cost you for the extra long USB cables and USB hub you could pick up a BT printer adapter. You can keep a clean looking workspace and yet be productive.
My new 12" Powerbook has Bluetooth built into it. I didn't go looking for it nor was it a selling point of the computer but it is there. The next cell phone I buy is likely going to have Bluetooth in it as well, much to my enjoyment most likely. Bluetooth is ending up in all sorts of devices people are buying without them having to run out and pick it up. What you're seeing today is much like USB's rise several years ago. Slowly systems were released with USB available in the standard package which provided reason for third parties to develop USB hardware, they had a market to sell to.
Laptop and some desktop manufacturers are creating this demand with Bluetooth right now. I agree it may take some time for BT to become ubiquitous but the groundwork has been and is being laid now. In my case I'm going to end up with a Bluetooth camera/computer pair when I get a new phone. I'll likely look for more BT devices after that. Now that you can find PCs with BT as a standard feature I think people are looking at BT devices a bit more just as I am. It's on its way out and is quickly becoming ubiquitous.
Um, no.
In the mid-eighties Steve Case was running a little company called Quantum which was an online service for the Commodore 64. By January of 1986 Q-Link had about 10,000 users. By 1987 Quantum's stock was on the decline and the company was facing an inability to pay back its loans. In '86 Steve Case moved to California for three months in an attempt to convince Apple to let Quantum build an online service for them.
Apple as you said had been running a system called AppleLink. This was a system for retailers and sales reps to keep in contact with all that was going on at Apple. The system was run by General Electric Information Services and was pretty successful at keeping its intended audience up to date. The top brass began to think an extended system might allow them to lower their customer support costs by allowing direct access to technical documentation and the like. This was the system Steve Case was in California to nab the contract for.
He managed to convince Apple to let Quantum develop and run the system. Quantum was going to produce the software and were granted the right to use Apple's logo as long as they made the program LOOK like an Apple product. Problems arose pretty quickly after a while. Quantum in Steve Case fashion wanted to package APE with new computers for free or sell it through direct marketing (mass mailing). Apple said that option was a no go, they didn't want to give software away for free. The service debuted at Apple Fest in 1988 and was $35 annually and $6 night time and $15 day time IIRC. The service had a fair number of users and was for the most part a success as far as Apple was concerned.
Quantum however decided to end their relationship with Apple. Because of the logo deal signed Apple had to pay $2.5m to Quantum to relenquish rights to use of the logo. This set Quantum up very well for the short term. In 1989 Quantum changed the name of the service from AppleLink to America Online.
Later Apple wanted to be rid of the costly AppleLink service run by GE. They decided they wanted a service not only for intracompany communication but an experience for their customers as well.
They approached AOL due to their history with APE. Apple bought the APE code from AOL to develop it further on their own with AOL providing the actual service. Apple added content from third parties and provided e-mail and other services to contend better with existing services like AOL and CompuServ. As I recall the service was announced sometime in January 1994 and went into operation around June. From the rusty confines of my mind I seem to recall the monthly fee was about $8.95 (maybe 8.99) with a couple hours included. Night time hours were $5 and daytime minutes were $8.
The service was aimed at all the people running around with Macs and Newtons and up until then relatively unused modems. NewtonMail was provided through eWorld as was e-mail for regular Macs. The interface was spacial and pretty fun to use. Any Mac enthusiast who could afford to had an eWorld account. Due to budget cuts a Windows version was never released and the service shut down altogether in 1996. Apple's problems elsewhere caused serious problems for eWorld.
I believe eWorld was the service the grandparent post was talking about. AppleLink did not get spun off from Apple however. Quantum ended their partnership and relabeled their service of their own volition. They had been playing Tandy and Apple against each other by developing similar services for both systems, the Tandy system called PC-Link. Apple was under the impression Quantum was giving their full attention to their contract when in fact they had a similar agreement with Tandy. APE failed because Apple and Quantum did not want to market the service and software the same way.
A cheaper chip does not mean a lower cost. Wintel PCs don't cost anything because 1) their design and manufacture is done by third parties and 2) there are no profit margins. When you buy a computer from Dell they make next to nothing on the actual hardware sale. Their profit comes from you adding RAM they overcharge for, a monitor they overcharge for, a printer they overcharge for, and software they overcharge for as well as a customer service package that is rarely worth the money you pay. Dell is a company that takes an order, buys machines made by an ODM, customizes the system according to your order, and then ships it. Dell makes their money by being very good at streamlining that process. Dell is not a manufacturer, they are a retailer.
.app files is pretty damn easy to do and Mach-O executables fully support the fat binary technology. That is however within the same API. Someone thinking that Apple using x86 chips instead of PPC chips is going to make it any easier to port from the Win32 API to Cocoa is fooling themselves. If you think switching APIs is easy just because a new processor is used you're fooling yourself or don't know what the hell you're saying.
Apple is a real manufacturer as well as a retailer. They design and manufacturer (sometimes under contract like with Quanta) their own equipment, then sell it to you or manage retailers selling it to you. Apple's business model looks a lot more like HP and Sun's busines model than Dell or Gateway's.
Assuming the level of third party support is based on the chipset is ridiculous and short sighted. BeOS, OS/2, Solaris, NeXTStep, and Linux have run or do run on x86 processors. They receive or received little in the way of third party support. By your reasoning they ought to have tremendous amounts of third party support, none of them do or ever have had it. Linux has a pretty large user base and still can barely manage to get even closed source drivers from equipment manufacturers. The chipset means squat, the OS environment is the important part.
The non-Windows nature of MacOS and Linux in terms of API is what keeps third parties from supporting the operating systems. Get a clue. If you have the same API on different ISAs you rarely need more than a recompile to get a piece of software working. Think about the PPC, SPARC, and MIPS ports of various Free OSes. As long as the API is the same porting is rarely a big issue between architectures. Porting from one API to another API is a pain in the ass however. For a commercial organization it is also expensive and rarely worth the cost. You can either write your own compatibility library or port your program to a new API. Neither of these is worth while for most software companies.
Apple switching to x86 chips would only mean a lot of companies would have to recompile their applications or start providing fat binaries. They might retain a good portion of their third party support since using wrapper scripts in
Saying PowerPC development has hit some sort of plateau is also foolish and a bit absurd. IBM is running full force with PowerPC development and has been for many years. Motorola is also working hard on PowerPC chips, they've made several advances with their PowerQUICC architecture since its introduction. Also since its inception the G4 (74xx) series chips have seen a large number of improvements and modifications. The current 745x chips are tremendous improvements over the original 7400 chips. IBM has the PowerPC 970 coming out RSN which is a huge contender to the performance throne AMD and Intel squabble over. The 970 and later 980 are scaled down derivitives of the POWER4 and POWER5 designs respectively. You obviously have little knowlege of PowerPC processors so it isn't a good idea to go around talking about lacks in advencement in the architecture.
The point was there are backup solutions that don't require a $99/yr fee to use. Backup is a cool application but if you've already paid a bundle for a nice computer a $99 .Mac membership might not be exactly what you're looking for in terms of price/performance. A cheapo vhost offers more disk space, upstream bandwidth, and typically better uptime than .Mac for the same or a lower price. Unfortunately iDisk has an unfortunate habit of going down at inopertune times. You're aldo in a bind if your public files on your iDisk receive one too many requests, everyone at that point is blocked out from accessing them.
I'm not a riverologist but my understanding is between the Yangtze's tributaries and itself it is one of the siltier rivers in the world. The high silt content of the river is what makes the Three Gorges region a good farming local, regular floods of the river replenish the soil in the area. It is local farming and development which has made the region such a danger to live in. Industrial and residential buildup on the shores of a river that regularly floods is a stupid idea and reflects some of the more inane central planning policies in the Chinese government.
Left to its own devices the reservoir will silt over within a few short years according to some engineers. Even if it is regularly dredged it is predicted the silt buildup in the turbines is going to cause regular downtime which means huge swaths of developed area will go without power or heavy reductions in residential power to keep industrial districts fed. If the spillways fill up with silt which many people agree is very likely, serious stress problems could crop up.
Like you mention about Florida, regions downstream from the TGD are facing a slew of environmental guesses as to the total effect of the dam. Not only will downstream inland areas be greatly affected but so will regions framing the South China Sea which is fed by the Yangtze. Over a number of years it is not infeasible to imagine large sections of the coastline receding. Tell will tell I suppose.
Using cron, rsync/ftp/smbclient/curl, and tar will do the same thing as long as you've got a server waiting somewhere to upload the files to. The Backup utility is indeed cool but a shell script can pretty easily do the same. If you remember to stick a blank CD in the drive every week you can have tidy CD backups as well.
Uh, there's a few plausible alternatives. The money could have been better spent on constructing more energy efficient buildings for homes and businesses. It also could have gone into building localized power generation using solar, geothermal, wind, and small scale hydroelectric plants. Energy efficient housing goes a tremendous way in reducing the amount of power any urban area needs to maintain itself. Energy efficient policies and buildings in businesses also help out a great deal in reducing peak power demands off the utility grid. If efficient buildings and renewable electricity and heating sources are utilized the net effect is extremely low levels of pollution for equivilent levels of comfort as dirty inefficient systems.
The dam is going to devastate the local ecology to a degree not seen since the Aral Sea debacle. Most of the rivers feeding the Three Gorges are heavily polluted and hundreds of factories are being flooded by the dam. Despite cleanup efforts it is inevitable that hazardous industrial chemicals are going to end up floating about in the reservoir. Add the industrial waste to that created by the ocean frieghters navigating the new reservoir and you've got a gigantic cesspool in the middle of the country.
Besides the pollution the local wildlife is going to end up wiped out. Without the silt in the river being distributed down its bed the fish will have nothing to eat if the pollution doesn't kill them first. The Baiji dolphin is also on the list of animals to be impacted as they hunt through the river's silt for food as well. Water fowl that feed on the fish that won't be there will also begin to die off unless they manage some heavy migration. Even if they manage to find new food sources their numbers are going to dwindle drastically. Worst is the people in the area that depend heavily on the river's fish stock. They're going to have a signifigant food source closed off to them which means more food imports to the area which will only exacerbate the poullution problems.
Of course there's the potential for a massive flood. The dam is already showing signs of wear. Saying the dam is earthquake resistant in a misnomer. Natural earthquakes pose less of a problem than the masses of water in the reservoir putting pressure on the local tectonic system. Also the massive build-up of silt in the reservoir is a distaster waiting to happen. A small earthquake that normally wouldn't damage the dam stands a decent chance of causing a mudslide in the silt bed. Megatons of silt crashing to the basin floor will cause pressure waves that can seriously damage the dam.
A number of proposals and arguments are on the books and the project was started despite them. Most proposals suggested a smaller number of power stations could be built on the Yuangtze's tributaries. They could have provided as much power as the single dam without the ecological damage and vast potential for a catastrophic flood. The lakes and wetlands downstream from the Three Gorges area also are able to hold more water than the reservoir but allow but better distribution of the water.
The dam is most definitely a political show of pride than it is a practical solution to a problem. Save for ocean freight in Chongquin the alternative solutions to the TGD provided everything the TGD did for a lower cost and less economic and ecological impact. It is arguable that Chongquin NEEDS the ocean freight, it is polluted and choked as it is, adding to those facts is not a very good idea. The corruption brought to light in the project of late and the total silencing of opposition to the project should tell you this whole plan is nothing more than the world's biggest political stunt.
If that does not answer your questions I don't think providing detailed hardware specifications are going to answer them. If you download the update and it gives you a message like..."Your computer doesn't need this update." that should say to you that your computer doesn't need the update.
As for specifics, how long have you been using Macs? I'm having a hard time remember any time Apple gave a detailed answer to a hardware problem. As far as I remember they've always gone with the "firmware update" problem instead of specifically detailing the bug. You'd think you could logically parse through the available information for troubleshooting.
Do you have a Powerbook?
No) Go away.
Yes) Go to next question.
Does your Powerbook have a combo drive?
No) Go away.
Yes) Download the firmware update.
Did the firmware update fix your problem?
No) Contact Apple.
Yes) Go away.
I didn't have a problem) What the hell are you complaining about?
We do indeed have a bit to fear from deadly viruses but the probability a virus is going to wipe our species out is probably somewhere around an asteroid impact wiping us out. Of all the bajillions of viruses only a fraction kill us with impunity and as our understanding of them increases their ability to kill us diminishes. This is not to say we're technologically immune to disease, we just understand the process a bit better now than we have.
You've gone so far beyond the realm of the here and now that I doubt you can see the planet Earth any longer. The music on a CD is not yours for you to do with you please, you have never at any point been free to do as you will with that music. You can't say that because a stricter method of content control has been implemented on iTMS' music files than on a CD that they are less free than music off a CD or tape. You can copy the bits off a CD, you can copy the bits of a .m4p file. You can give someone a file and disown it (de-authorize your computer) and let them have it forever. You can sell a CD to your friend. The only thing the .m4p file doesn't allow is for you to make endless verbatim copies of the song to distribute to friends and strangers with no recompense for the copyright holder.
Your analogy is entirely flawed, you've got a dumb slippery slope argument that you're trying to turn into an appeal of emotion. You can hit anyone you please for any reason you please, the consequences of said action differ depending on the circumstances. The differing consequences of the action of hitting someone are the same as fair use terms of copyright law. DRM is not a technology that doesn't allow you to make copies of music, it controls the disemination of the actual musical content stored in particular bits. It is not comparable to an implant, which is a loaded term all by itself, in your body preventing you from hitting people. The DRM controls proposed by various groups would be better compared to retaining the ability to hit people but not having the ability to do them any damage.
Besides that entire tangental argument, the copyright protections on m4p files are not true DRM. They are more CYA measures to quote a previous poster. The mild protections on m4p files are designed to only let the owner of a file listen to the music and share it with a small number of friends or other computers she uses. At any point the owner of the song can give that music to someone else as long as she removes her computer from the authorization list. This concept is analguous to giving a CD to someone and not owning it anymore. Back before widespread use of MP3 encoders and CD writers the medium of the CD disc itself was enough to dissuade massive amounts of copying which was fine with copyright holders which utilmately want to control their copyrights. Now the medium of a CD disc is tivial so more artificial means have to be used for copyright holders to be OK with selling their copyrighted works.
Did you miss something really big? There was no term of use change. The documentation for iTunes has always stated that streaming outside of one's subnet was not possible, it isn't until now that this has been implemented. When I frist read about people being able to connect to iTunes outside of the system's subnet I thought it was total BS because it was contrary to the documentation.
Had a bunch of cheapskates not written any utilities to rip streams to MP3 files this would have likely never been an issue for Apple to fix. Unfortunately people turned a cool iTunes feature into a P2P stealing application. The only thing you CAN share via iTunes is music and unless you've got a large collection of music you've made all that music is copyrighted by somebody that isn't you.
The sharing crap has nothing to do with Apple's Music Service, you can burn all of those to CD your heart desires. You don't need an iPod to transport your iTMS music to work and back but it is a cool toy to own. You can use a CD-R, DVD-R, Zip, iDisk, e-mail, Freenet, or any other transport medium to move all that music as long as you authorize the target computer to play the files. De-authorize it when you quit, get fired, or switch workstations.
The plaintext data is NOT yours to do with as you please. You don't own any part of it and thus really have no "rights" to do as you please. If Apple or someone else encrypted my file system to prevent me from accessing my own property you'd have a point. Since the DRM scheme only manages data I never had any rights to except fair use you have no point.
Not likely, I only use my cell phone for outgoing calls. My phone never beeps, buzzes, or hums when I get a call. When I get a chance to sit about I check my voicemail and call people back who were thoughtful enough to leave a message. My cell phone is pull content only. That distance speck of light is the rest of the world waiting for you to pull your head out of your ass.
There's also the small issue of all the 3G standards proposed being entirely incompatible with the TDMA based GSM towers already in place. Upgrading a tower to be 3G compatible requires an complete overhaul of all the transmission equipment. It's costing corporations all over the world millions if not billions for licenses just to spend money to upgrade their cell infrastructure.
Utilize the "Off" button and voilà, your cell phone is now a pull-content device. Some phones allow you to pretty easily only accept calls from a selected list or no one at all. A lot of people use their cell phone for an outgoing only communication device.
You're making up an Apple announcement regarding the 970. Apple's said nothing about the processor. Like Motorola's G5 the only words being tossed about regarding the processor are from industry rags.
You need to lay down your crack pipe. I got my 12" Powerbook a few weeks, from an Apple Store no less, after they were announced. The first couple rounds of web orders began arriving that week as well. The BTO orders obviously took longer to deliver because of a customs issue with the AirPort Extreme cards out of Taiwan. I wouldn't call that failing to deliver, BTO items always have a variable delivery date. The 17" Powerbooks have been out for a while now and delivered when they were supposed to have been delivered. The 1.42GHz PowerMacs also delivered on time. In fact most companies make announcements for products that they will be delivering months after the announcement date. This benefits Apple more than it detriments them in a majority of cases.
The PowerBooks and PowerMac are hardly rumors. I don't think that word means what you think it means. As for the G5, Apple's never made a G5 announcement ever. The only talk of the G5 has come from industry press rags commenting on Motorola's slide shows. Apple "failing to deliver" the G5 is as ridiculous as Ford failing to deliver flying cars. If you want to bitch about something pick something from the realm of reality, not your imagination.
I think you're alluding to the problem Apple had in delivering the 500MHz G4 several years back. I really don't think the situation is in any way similar to the situation at that time. IBM is doing better now than it did for most of the 90s, when Motorola couldn't deliver the 500MHz G4s they were doing about as bad as they could be. The health of Apple's suppliers directly relates to the health of Apple.
I don't think you can point out a product released in the past five years they haven't delivered on. I'd really like for you attempt it however.
Rule 26(a) of civil court procedings states parties must disclose their evidense before the case goes in front of the bench IIRC. That is how people get court orders to look at internal and otherwise classified corporate documents.
I wish Apple would do a bit more advertising of their low level frameworks like vecLib. One of the more common AltiVec misconceptions is that is simply will not handle double precision floating point operations. It can handle them but not at the register level like it can SP operations. If Apple would make more noise about vecLib and their other frameworks I think we might see XServes and AltiVec patches for serious number crunching apps in much larger quantities.
I agree with you about Objective-C. I'm hoping that its exposure due to Cocoa will begin to spurn more interest in it. In the open source world C++ has a horrible reputation and thus there's little emphasis on OO software design outside of Java and Ruby developer circles. When one considers the ease of extension of the Cocoa and thus OpenStep frameworks it is hard to imagine Objective-C not being more popular than it is.
For open source development OO programming to me makes a great deal of sense. Extensions to programs can be released as separate entities in compliance with restrictive licenses. Extensions can be written for applications even if they don't have a specific extension API. Bug fixes, performance improvements, and feature enhancements (especially feature enhancements) can spread throughout a system much faster than otherwise.
High resolution textures are unnecessary at low display resolutions. A high resolution texture just means any particular display pixel has a really wide range of colors it can be. Packing a metric assload of pixels into a few inches square is not going to allow your eye to differentiate between two individual pixels. A GameBoy or PSP held at a comfortable distance from your face is not going to give you the same apparent pixel size as a television viewed from a comfortable distance.
Besides the LCD's size there's color problems as well. The screen is light by a solid state EL backlight which at the absolute best is only going to provide a 100:1 contrast ratio. Coupled with the limited colors a small LCD can reliably produce means you've got serious display fidelity issues. Trying to display high resolution textures with a ton of color information onto that sort of screen is yet again a waste of time. The subtle difference in hue between two shades means nothing on such a small screen with such crappy lighting. Packing those textures into a game is a waste of time and effort.
For video clips the screen is hardly acceptable save for brief prerendered cutscenes. Imagine trying to watch the video for FF7 on a two inch screen. You'd lose so much detail from the small size and crappy lighting you'd be hard pressed to tell Tifa from Barett during most of the cutscenes. If you've ever watched video on a color handheld television you'd know what this is like. You'd be as disappointed as the people who bought Archos Jukeboxes thinking they could watch their DiVX porn on them only to be sadly mistaken.
You've done nothing to defend your prepostition that high resolution textures are relavent on a small handheld device, you've merely restated your premise. A graphics professional ought to realize that the medium is going to dictate the amount of detail you're going to put into a particular work. There's no reason to work with billboard size works at more than 10dpi because they're viewed from so far away any more color information would be lost on the observer. Likewise there's no reason to work with high resolution textures when your output size is going to be a fraction of the size of a single texture.
You're making the same argument with regards to audio. There's very little reason to have 24-bit 96KHz audio on a device with two crappy quarter inch speakers covered by a plastic grill. There's little reason to have as much as 22KHz sound out of such speakers. A game packing 11KHz sound and reusing as many parts of a clip as possible would be making much more efficient use of the system than a game packing CD quality sound. Some lossy psychoacoustic compression and you can fit a ton of audio onto any given storage medium. It is simply not necessary to pack all that video and audio information onto a device that can never properly represent it.
Use Apple's vecLib framework, it supports single and double precision operations via the AltiVec unit. Linky linky.