OS X is fine--not fast, but usable--on non-accelerated hardware. OS X takes advantage of, but doesn't require, any fancy hardware. We' got 10.4 running on a bunch of 400-533 MHz Macs with non-Quartz Extreme graphics cards at work. I don't think virtualization would be a problem. iMovie ran fine in 10.2 on my 300 MHz beige G3 with 384 MB RAM. It dropped frames on display but the actual captures and renders were fine. Besides, for servers it wouldn't be a problem. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if virtualization was one of the big "Aha!" features in 10.5 Server.
And what I think will happen is that no one will give a shit since mass adoption won't happen until all players will work with both formats, just like DVD (+/-) R(W). Seriously: who, with a limited budget, an ounce of technological awareness, and any memory of history is running out to buy any kind of HD shiny-disc-based player today? (Not counting people who buy PS3s since anyone who buys one is buying it primarily to play games.)
- of course iPods will EVENTUALLY be flash-based, same way that LCDs have pretty much displaced CRTs in the computer monitor market. But it'll be a couple years at least. I'd say HD-based iPods will be with us until at least until Summer 2008. There's a big difference still between 2 GB, 8 GB, and 80 GB. Not everyone needs a ton of storage on an iPod, but some people really, really do, and they won't settle for smaller. Flash iPods are higher-capacity than the very first HD-based iPod, but that doesn't mean no one's buying the bigger ones. Apple can make plenty of money on 100 and 120 GB iPods before they've got to switch designs.
- don't look for ANY new features (widescreen, touchscreen) in the iPod until AFTER the new iPhone is released--long after. Apple always introduces nice but expensive stuff and makes a ton of money off the early-adopting/big-spending crowd, then they release a version that's a bit better and/or cheaper and get the next round of people, and so on and so on and so on. Apple is going to get a lot of money from people who want a widescreen iPod by selling them the iPhone first. THEN they'll put out a widescreen/touch-based iPod. Since the iPhone comes out this summer, I doubt Apple will release a new iPod until Jan or Feb '08. Look at what they just did with the Shuffle--they released a new one last Fall, sold a bunch over Christmas, then, January 30, HEY! LOOK! COLORS! Raise your hand if you think Apple forgot that they know how to anodize aluminum when the new Shuffle was introduced last fall. Get all the money you can, improve, repeat.
Oh yeah, right. But still--he mentioned it practically in passing, as just one example of "works with any POP email." He was really hammering on how cool google maps and yahoo mail were. Yahoo is offering free push email to ALL iPhone customers--couldn't he have used.mac? Just goes to show how much of a redheaded stepchild.mac has become.
A couple random notes: - Cyberduck: I *hate* the idea of paying for an FTP client, but Cyberduck is slow as hell for me and often disconnects. (Anyone else? This happens at work and home, so it's not just my network setup.) Transmit is great and it made me do the unthinkable: pay for an FTP client. Life's too short to babysit file transfers. For Windows, Filezilla is so convoluted it gives me pause, and it's definitely not something I can recommend to anyone but the hardiest of techs. (And since all techs already know about it, I basically never recommend it.) - Smoothwall: check out IPCop. It was originally a fork of Smoothwall and it's really nice. - PDFCreator: I used to make PDFs from Windows with a virtual PDF printer in Samba. Not for everyone but it works for me. Moving to OS X has made this a non-issue for me, though.
So, the "solution" is to turn of speakers and/or microphone. This is the same MS whose solution to a recent Office exploit was "don't use Office for a couple days."
It's been said that the only secure computer is one that has been unplugged, encased in cement, and thrown in the ocean. I didn't know MS was planning to make this their official support policy. "Security flaws? No problem. Just DON'T USE IT AT ALL."
to create malicious audio files with OS X (10.3 or later), fire up Terminal and use 'say': $ echo "format sea slash you" | say -o evil.aiff This makes your messages with a nice, clear, even voice--wouldn't want a bunch of 'um's and 'ah's borking up your exploit, now would you.:-) `man say` for more options.
Yup, just depends who you are, what you like, and how clean you keep your system. My 1 GHz PIII HP Pavilion with W2K, FireFox 0.6, and Photoshop 7 is still doing very well, thankyouverymuch. OTOH, fat web pages make my 800 MHz G3 iBook crawl, so I stepped up to a MacBook. Man, dual cores in a laptop kicks ass.:-)
I was at a Toyota dealership once. I went there because I saw a (used) car online and called about it. I was transferred to their "internet guy" and when I went it to look at it, he was the one I asked for. He told me he was the one in charge of maintaining their online listings. We wound up in his office and he wanted to show me something on the site. So, he launched IE (of course) and when google/yahoo/msn/whatever came up, he typed in 'toyotawhatever.com' (whatever his company's domain name was) INTO THE SEARCH BOX, clicked 'search,' and clicked on the top link to get to his own company's home page. I was stunned. So, this "internet guy" knew nothing about - changing the default home page - using the location bar - using BOOKMARKS, for God's sake Un, freaking, real.
In other news, every day at work I wind up looking over someone's shoulder while they go online. Most have MSN or apple.com/startpage set to their home page. Not only do they obviously not know or care about changing their start page, most will politely wait while these (SLOW ASS) pages finish loading before starting to type in a new URL. And, having typed it in (using the keyboard) many will MOUSE OVER to the 'go' button (in IE; thank GOD Safari doesn't have one*), rather than pressing the return key WHICH IS ALSO ON THEIR KEYBOARD. Arrgh. Watching lusers on the Web is like listening to someone drag their fingernails along a chalkboard.
* this good act is cancelled out by the fact that the status bar is off by default. One of the first things I teach new web users: turn on the bar and PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU'RE CLICKING ON!
Since I've never needed support for W2K, I'll let you know... never.
Seriously, I won't use Vista until a) some app I want requires it or b) I buy a new computer that comes with it. Since I primarily use OS X, it's entirely possible that I'll never have a Vista machine at home. That said, I did run the beta on a pretty nice Dell (no Aero, but otherwise good) and I just see no reason to move to it. There is literally not a single thing about it that appeals to me. The only thing that W2K lacks that would make it better in my mind is fast user switching. Back when W2K was the main machine in my house, that is. Now my main Windows box is a Parallels VM.
My company, OTOH, *loves* MS and I'll probably be using Vista at work in a couple months. That's the plan, anyway. We'll see how it turns out.
Well, I seem to remember him saying in 2004 that spam would be solved within 2 years.
My TV is fine, Gates. Get back to work fixing my inbox--it's overflowing because of all those shitty Windows computers you put out that are now spam zombies.
Gates needs a better dictionary. I won't consider it a revolutionary change until if affects MOST TV's. Yeah, there's lots of cool stuff you can do with an Apple TV, a TiVo, an HTPC, a Myth box, a tuner card, the iTunes Store, YouTube, and all the networks that are posting their shows online after they air. HOWEVER--this still does not affect MOST people. TiVo is the best thing that ever happened to ME, TV-wise, but most people still don't have any kind of DVR. IT'll take 5-10 years for THOSE to become common, and they've been out for almost 10 years now. Tuner cards for Macs and PCs came out OVER a decade ago. So the chances of online video truly revolutionizing TV on a large scale is still quite a ways off--DEFINITELY more than 5 years off.
"Revolutionary" does NOT mean "some cool shit that a few geeks can do."
Besides, didn't Gates say he'd stop spam by 2006? My TV is fine, Gates, get back to fixing spam--my inbox is overflowing because of your fucked-up easily-exploitable boxes.
Re:Not so much that you need an iPod to listen
on
Norway Outlaws iTunes
·
· Score: 1
Oops, I stand corrected. Turns out Apple will no longer let you convert purchased songs like that. Interesting.
Re:Not so much that you need an iPod to listen
on
Norway Outlaws iTunes
·
· Score: 1
What do you do? You set your Import preferences to AIFF or WAV, then you right-click on songs and say 'Convert to (AIFF|WAV)', then you play those on your new player. Sure, the files are 10x bigger, but iPods have gotten over 10x larger since their introduction. So just pop those bad boys onto your 200 GB SanDisk when your iPod dies in 2010.
Or, just have your iPod's battery replaced. Apple will do it for $100, others will do it for $50.
Funny. It's not like Apple pulled a bait-and-switch here. The iPod came out in October 2001 and the iTMS opened in April 2003, but according to Wikipedia, the iPod did not dominate the market until October 2004. So Apple became the dominant player AFTER releasing this locked-in situation. So what's the problem? People knew all along what they were getting into and STILL pushed Apple into the #1 spot by a huge, huge margin.
Or my interest in it, anyway. Once upon a time, PCs were huge, but had lots of wasted space. You could put them into a smaller box, or make them really tiny once motherboards were all integrated and you could do the whole thing without PCI cards sticking out. I used several SFF Compaq Deskpros over the years and they've all been great--fast, small, cheap, and bulletproof. Then along come tiny ATX boards and neat machines can be made even smaller.
Then along comes the Mac Mini and in the last two years I've seen lots of "We took a Mac Mini and stuck it in something bigger" and I'm like, what's the point? I've got two Minis and they're great. (Though I'll buy a Mac Pro next time they're revved because I need a little more juice (mine are G4s) and a lot more disk than these little guys can hold.) I also plan to play around with a PC mini clone I saw somewhere, or maybe one of these little guys that Cringley recently had some fun with.
Couldn't agree more. I've been using Safari's for ages and it's great. (Edit -> Spelling -> Check spelling as you type.) It works in HTML textareas (like Slashdot's 'Comment' box) but not text boxes (like the 'Subject' box.) Still, for all the webmail I use and forum posting I do, it's great. What's best about it is it goes into the systemwide dictionary (~/Library/Spelling/en) so if I add a word in, say, TextEdit, the next time I'm writing about it in a browser it doesn't get flagged.
Yes, I know, but it's still a lot, and it won't be available in Europe or Asia until 2008. And from what I've read on Slashdot the last few years, European and Asian phones are much cooler than what we currently have here in the US, so the iPhone won't be as much of a step up in those areas.
Slashdot Mirror
OS X is fine--not fast, but usable--on non-accelerated hardware. OS X takes advantage of, but doesn't require, any fancy hardware. We' got 10.4 running on a bunch of 400-533 MHz Macs with non-Quartz Extreme graphics cards at work. I don't think virtualization would be a problem. iMovie ran fine in 10.2 on my 300 MHz beige G3 with 384 MB RAM. It dropped frames on display but the actual captures and renders were fine. Besides, for servers it wouldn't be a problem. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if virtualization was one of the big "Aha!" features in 10.5 Server.
And what I think will happen is that no one will give a shit since mass adoption won't happen until all players will work with both formats, just like DVD (+/-) R(W). Seriously: who, with a limited budget, an ounce of technological awareness, and any memory of history is running out to buy any kind of HD shiny-disc-based player today? (Not counting people who buy PS3s since anyone who buys one is buying it primarily to play games.)
...and I'm always right... ;-)
- of course iPods will EVENTUALLY be flash-based, same way that LCDs have pretty much displaced CRTs in the computer monitor market. But it'll be a couple years at least. I'd say HD-based iPods will be with us until at least until Summer 2008. There's a big difference still between 2 GB, 8 GB, and 80 GB. Not everyone needs a ton of storage on an iPod, but some people really, really do, and they won't settle for smaller. Flash iPods are higher-capacity than the very first HD-based iPod, but that doesn't mean no one's buying the bigger ones. Apple can make plenty of money on 100 and 120 GB iPods before they've got to switch designs.
- don't look for ANY new features (widescreen, touchscreen) in the iPod until AFTER the new iPhone is released--long after. Apple always introduces nice but expensive stuff and makes a ton of money off the early-adopting/big-spending crowd, then they release a version that's a bit better and/or cheaper and get the next round of people, and so on and so on and so on. Apple is going to get a lot of money from people who want a widescreen iPod by selling them the iPhone first. THEN they'll put out a widescreen/touch-based iPod. Since the iPhone comes out this summer, I doubt Apple will release a new iPod until Jan or Feb '08. Look at what they just did with the Shuffle--they released a new one last Fall, sold a bunch over Christmas, then, January 30, HEY! LOOK! COLORS! Raise your hand if you think Apple forgot that they know how to anodize aluminum when the new Shuffle was introduced last fall. Get all the money you can, improve, repeat.
Oh yeah, right. But still--he mentioned it practically in passing, as just one example of "works with any POP email." He was really hammering on how cool google maps and yahoo mail were. Yahoo is offering free push email to ALL iPhone customers--couldn't he have used .mac? Just goes to show how much of a redheaded stepchild .mac has become.
Until they do, I recommend S5.
Are you kidding? .mac BLOWS. Hint: did Steve Jobs even mention .mac during the freaking iPhone introduction?
.mac isn't going onto Apple's own product, no way in hell is Pixar going to use it just because of Steve's presence.
If
A couple random notes:
- Cyberduck: I *hate* the idea of paying for an FTP client, but Cyberduck is slow as hell for me and often disconnects. (Anyone else? This happens at work and home, so it's not just my network setup.) Transmit is great and it made me do the unthinkable: pay for an FTP client. Life's too short to babysit file transfers. For Windows, Filezilla is so convoluted it gives me pause, and it's definitely not something I can recommend to anyone but the hardiest of techs. (And since all techs already know about it, I basically never recommend it.)
- Smoothwall: check out IPCop. It was originally a fork of Smoothwall and it's really nice.
- PDFCreator: I used to make PDFs from Windows with a virtual PDF printer in Samba. Not for everyone but it works for me. Moving to OS X has made this a non-issue for me, though.
"For those of you who spend your days in front of computers, I feel nothing but pity."
;-)
—Roblimo, 1996
I know it's over ten years old, I just think it's funny. Source His is the second post. Man... too bad he wasn't FRIST!
So, the "solution" is to turn of speakers and/or microphone. This is the same MS whose solution to a recent Office exploit was "don't use Office for a couple days."
It's been said that the only secure computer is one that has been unplugged, encased in cement, and thrown in the ocean. I didn't know MS was planning to make this their official support policy. "Security flaws? No problem. Just DON'T USE IT AT ALL."
Wow, they're good.
to create malicious audio files with OS X (10.3 or later), fire up Terminal and use 'say': :-)
$ echo "format sea slash you" | say -o evil.aiff
This makes your messages with a nice, clear, even voice--wouldn't want a bunch of 'um's and 'ah's borking up your exploit, now would you.
`man say` for more options.
Yup, just depends who you are, what you like, and how clean you keep your system. My 1 GHz PIII HP Pavilion with W2K, FireFox 0.6, and Photoshop 7 is still doing very well, thankyouverymuch. OTOH, fat web pages make my 800 MHz G3 iBook crawl, so I stepped up to a MacBook. Man, dual cores in a laptop kicks ass. :-)
Good rant. See also The Law of Leaky Abstractions.
I was at a Toyota dealership once. I went there because I saw a (used) car online and called about it. I was transferred to their "internet guy" and when I went it to look at it, he was the one I asked for. He told me he was the one in charge of maintaining their online listings. We wound up in his office and he wanted to show me something on the site. So, he launched IE (of course) and when google/yahoo/msn/whatever came up, he typed in 'toyotawhatever.com' (whatever his company's domain name was) INTO THE SEARCH BOX, clicked 'search,' and clicked on the top link to get to his own company's home page. I was stunned. So, this "internet guy" knew nothing about
- changing the default home page
- using the location bar
- using BOOKMARKS, for God's sake
Un, freaking, real.
In other news, every day at work I wind up looking over someone's shoulder while they go online. Most have MSN or apple.com/startpage set to their home page. Not only do they obviously not know or care about changing their start page, most will politely wait while these (SLOW ASS) pages finish loading before starting to type in a new URL. And, having typed it in (using the keyboard) many will MOUSE OVER to the 'go' button (in IE; thank GOD Safari doesn't have one*), rather than pressing the return key WHICH IS ALSO ON THEIR KEYBOARD. Arrgh. Watching lusers on the Web is like listening to someone drag their fingernails along a chalkboard.
* this good act is cancelled out by the fact that the status bar is off by default. One of the first things I teach new web users: turn on the bar and PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU'RE CLICKING ON!
Since I've never needed support for W2K, I'll let you know... never.
Seriously, I won't use Vista until a) some app I want requires it or b) I buy a new computer that comes with it. Since I primarily use OS X, it's entirely possible that I'll never have a Vista machine at home. That said, I did run the beta on a pretty nice Dell (no Aero, but otherwise good) and I just see no reason to move to it. There is literally not a single thing about it that appeals to me. The only thing that W2K lacks that would make it better in my mind is fast user switching. Back when W2K was the main machine in my house, that is. Now my main Windows box is a Parallels VM.
My company, OTOH, *loves* MS and I'll probably be using Vista at work in a couple months. That's the plan, anyway. We'll see how it turns out.
I remember seeing a big target on a Target when I was flying into Atlanta (I think.)
Well, I seem to remember him saying in 2004 that spam would be solved within 2 years.
My TV is fine, Gates. Get back to work fixing my inbox--it's overflowing because of all those shitty Windows computers you put out that are now spam zombies.
Gates needs a better dictionary. I won't consider it a revolutionary change until if affects MOST TV's. Yeah, there's lots of cool stuff you can do with an Apple TV, a TiVo, an HTPC, a Myth box, a tuner card, the iTunes Store, YouTube, and all the networks that are posting their shows online after they air. HOWEVER--this still does not affect MOST people. TiVo is the best thing that ever happened to ME, TV-wise, but most people still don't have any kind of DVR. IT'll take 5-10 years for THOSE to become common, and they've been out for almost 10 years now. Tuner cards for Macs and PCs came out OVER a decade ago. So the chances of online video truly revolutionizing TV on a large scale is still quite a ways off--DEFINITELY more than 5 years off.
"Revolutionary" does NOT mean "some cool shit that a few geeks can do."
Besides, didn't Gates say he'd stop spam by 2006? My TV is fine, Gates, get back to fixing spam--my inbox is overflowing because of your fucked-up easily-exploitable boxes.
Oops, I stand corrected. Turns out Apple will no longer let you convert purchased songs like that. Interesting.
What do you do? You set your Import preferences to AIFF or WAV, then you right-click on songs and say 'Convert to (AIFF|WAV)', then you play those on your new player. Sure, the files are 10x bigger, but iPods have gotten over 10x larger since their introduction. So just pop those bad boys onto your 200 GB SanDisk when your iPod dies in 2010.
Or, just have your iPod's battery replaced. Apple will do it for $100, others will do it for $50.
Funny. It's not like Apple pulled a bait-and-switch here. The iPod came out in October 2001 and the iTMS opened in April 2003, but according to Wikipedia, the iPod did not dominate the market until October 2004. So Apple became the dominant player AFTER releasing this locked-in situation. So what's the problem? People knew all along what they were getting into and STILL pushed Apple into the #1 spot by a huge, huge margin.
Or my interest in it, anyway. Once upon a time, PCs were huge, but had lots of wasted space. You could put them into a smaller box, or make them really tiny once motherboards were all integrated and you could do the whole thing without PCI cards sticking out. I used several SFF Compaq Deskpros over the years and they've all been great--fast, small, cheap, and bulletproof. Then along come tiny ATX boards and neat machines can be made even smaller.
Then along comes the Mac Mini and in the last two years I've seen lots of "We took a Mac Mini and stuck it in something bigger" and I'm like, what's the point? I've got two Minis and they're great. (Though I'll buy a Mac Pro next time they're revved because I need a little more juice (mine are G4s) and a lot more disk than these little guys can hold.) I also plan to play around with a PC mini clone I saw somewhere, or maybe one of these little guys that Cringley recently had some fun with.
iTunes plays videos fullscreen.
Couldn't agree more. I've been using Safari's for ages and it's great. (Edit -> Spelling -> Check spelling as you type.) It works in HTML textareas (like Slashdot's 'Comment' box) but not text boxes (like the 'Subject' box.) Still, for all the webmail I use and forum posting I do, it's great. What's best about it is it goes into the systemwide dictionary (~/Library/Spelling/en) so if I add a word in, say, TextEdit, the next time I'm writing about it in a browser it doesn't get flagged.
Too bad MS Office uses its own dictionary.
Yes, I know, but it's still a lot, and it won't be available in Europe or Asia until 2008. And from what I've read on Slashdot the last few years, European and Asian phones are much cooler than what we currently have here in the US, so the iPhone won't be as much of a step up in those areas.
Thanks much for the link. I'm working on a little thing about how copyright law (etc) has been abused recently.