Re:Another great Quadra 840av easter egg
on
Apple Easter Egg
·
· Score: 1
Not an easter egg, that's the hardware failure sound. There were several different such sound clips on different models of Macs from the late 1980s to mid 1990s.
But there is no current Mac version of AutoCAD, Pro/E, or Microstation. Bad news if you're planning on designing a new aircraft carrier on your new Mac Mini...
I've been wanting a cappuccino-like PC since about 1999 but the specs don't impress me at all.
The Mac Mini is $500 ($479 for students) which is a ROCK BOTTOM LOW PRICE for Apple. They even managed to get a real GPU (Radeon 9200) in there and a DVI port. Why can't the Cappuccino have similar video and for a lower price?? I would really like a second PC like that. The only really decent SFF PC option is something like a Shuttle, which is about 6x - 8x the size of a Mini. Either that or a Mini-ITX system which is slower than a Mac Mini and still about 2x - 3x the size.
Every product could use a little more refinement. But before you say the Mac Mini needs refinement, I challenge you to try out. Get it in the original box, open it up, and try it out. It's a very smooth package.
Compare iMovie to MS Movie Maker and iPhoto to MS Photo Editor and you'll see that Apple has already done a lot of this "refinement" you speak of.
Personally I love the Mac Mini, but I know it's not for me. What I really want is a single processor G5 cube with graphics on an AGP or PCI-E card. I'd pay $900 - $1200 for it.
Does this provide any noticeable advantage over the normal builds? I can't imagine Altivec being a speed demon for web pages. Of course the network is going to be the slow link in the chain, but these builds do have two advantages: 1) Launch a little faster and render a little faster. 2) Nice nightly builds now use the Gecko 1.8 engine!
To me, the Mozilla nightlies are starting to feel faster than the Firefox nightlies, and certainly faster than Firefox 1.0 and 1.0.1.
Has anyone else noticed this, or is it just a side effect of my old hardware? It seems like Mozilla 1.8 will be noticeably faster than at least Firefox 1.0 and last night's Firefox Feb 26 build for sure.
Before you go turning your home into a datacenter, call your city's building department and insurance company first or you might void your policy and/or break some laws.
Actually the Powerbook 100 didn't even get produced for a full year, just 10 or 11 months (Oct 91 - Aug 92). And it had a predecessor, the Macintosh Portable. For the day it might have been cool, but it classifies as a luggable these days. And besides, It's not like Apple invented the laptop. Surely there were other better laptops at the time. Otherwise things would be different these days. The PowerBook 100 shipped at the same time the PowerBook 140 and 170 did. The PowerBook 100 was basiclly a microsized Macintosh Portable and was designed by Sony. The PowerBook 140 and 170 were larger, but also faster and were designed by Apple. The PowerBook 100's design goal was compactness, that's why it had an external floppy drive. I don't remember the original price, but the PowerBook 100 was very overpriced when it shipped. For about the same price as a PowerBook 100 + Floppy drive you could buy a PowerBook 140, which had an internal floppy drive and was faster and had a better screen. The PowerBook 140 also had a NiCad battery rather than the lead acid battery in the PowerBook 100. (Both had about the same runtime though). The PowerBook 100 flopped for price reasons. Apple cleared them out at Costco for $800, less than half the price of the PowerBook 140. That's how I bought mine. For abour $900 I had a shiny new thin PowerBook, external floppy drive, and a nice carrying case. That was an EXTREMELY good deal back in those days. I loved my PowerBook 100, it was a sleek little gizmo. Running Word 5 on it while sitting in a coffee shop was such a hightech, futuristic experience!
The PowerBook 140 and 170 sold well, REALLY well. Apple even sold a PC connection kit to help you sync up your PowerBook to your DOS or Windows 3.0/3.1 PC. For awhile Apple had almost half of the entire notebook marketshare. They were teh first company to put the trackball below the keyboard and inbetween "wrist rests". Prior to the PowerBook, trackballs were often clipped on to the side of notebooks. They shot themselves in the foot by not dropping their prices though. As PC notebooks got cheaper, Apple kept charging $1800 - $4000+ for their Notebooks. And when they finally did come out with the $1300 PowerBook 145b and PowerBook 150, it was just a warmed over PowerBook 140 that was already obsolete the day it hit the market.
Not only that, but the PowerBook 100 didn't even sell well when it was first released. For one thing, it was initially overpriced and was very underpowered compared to the PowerBook 140 and 170 which were released at the same time. Then, Apple cut the price to dump them and people were buying them to soup them up. Still, the PowerBook 100 had only a 6800 and used a lead acid battery whereas the other two machines had the 68030 and used NiCads. That's how I got my PowerBook 100, Apple was selling them at Costco for $800... half the price of the PowerBook 140 which was only slighty faster.
The 100 used a 68000 CPU, not the nuetered embedded 6800. Granted the PowerBook 140 and 170 were faster had had better screens, but they were also a little larger and thicker. Overall they were all pretty close in performance, size, and ability for the era. If you upgraded the ram to something other than the pathetic 2 MB, the 100 ran like a charm.
lead-acid battery if memory serves. It was either the 140 or the 160 that was the one you wanted back then. PowerBook 100 came out at the same time as 140 and 170. All had basicly the same formfactor, but the 100 was smaller and thinner with a slower CPU and an external floppy drive. The 100 shipped with a lead acid battery but its runtime was similar to the 140 and there were aftermaket batteries available. I had a 100, I loved it.
I would have chosen the 140/170 instead of the 100. The 100 was a one-time design that was never used again, made by Sony. The 140/145/150/160/165/170/180 was a design that redefined portable computing and was available for years. The PowerBook 100, 140, and 170 were all released at the same time. I remember the ad they ran in Time and Newsweek magazine -- it had a picture of Steve Wozniak and his son sitting on a park bench. Woz had either a 140 or 170 (same formfactor) on his lap and his son had the slightly smaller 100.
I liked the PowerBook 100. It was very similar to the PowerBook 140 and 170, but was smaller, thinner, and cheaper. (Due do it's lower quality screen, slower CPU, and external floppy drive). I used one for years until I replaced it with a PowerBook Duo 270c (Apple's thin dockable color notebook).
Apple calls their slot an "Airport Express slot" and they call their wirless card an "Airport Express card". They've never promised that it could do anything else.
Apple had high end "ColorSync" CRT monitors, just before the days of LCD. Their top end model had a calibtration button. Pressing it would cause the monitor to flash and buzz and flicker for a few minutes before finally settling down. Apparently it also had some sort of auto calibration like the Barco monitors.
No, this wasn't a deguass cycle, they had that feature too, but degaussing only took maybe 25 seconds max
I'd also like to add that most SANs serve one or two purposes:
1) SPEED! No need to access the data through a server. You can connect directly over fibrechannel.
2) Server redundancy. You might want to keep your data on a hardware RAID-5 box, such as the Apple Xserve RAID. You could then have two servers connected to the RAID. One server would be doing all of the work while the other would be a hot backup. In the event that the primary server dies, the secondary server could mount the RAID and take over. (This has been done for years with oldschool "high voltage" differential SCSI)
I know next to nothing about iSCSI and how it relates to all of this. I have only worked with oldschool differential SCSI and with FC.
Most of the SAN implemtations I've seen have used 2Gb FC_AL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop).
As long as all of the FC devices you use have fabric support, all you need a SAN filesystem and perhaps a metadata server and you're good to go.
One sample setup would be this: Brocade FC switch Xserve RAID (just the RAID box, not a server) Mac w/ FC card PC w/ FC card
The Mac, PC, and RAID box are each plugged into the FC switch. Now either machine can access the RAID directly through this FC SAN. There is no need for a file server / NAS.
However, you could (or might even be required to) add a server into this SAN. The server would be a "metadata server" to keep tabs on this big shared filesystem. It could also be used as a traffic cop / permissions manager / etc. But each PC or Mac connected to this SAN would still be able to access the RAID directly over fibrechannel. The server could be used as a generic file server (a "NAS") so that machines on the same LAN, but not on this FC SAN, could access the RAID indirectly.
Does this make any sense? It's hard to describe without drawing a picture.
Thats a bit rich coming from someone who is worshipping a COMMERCIAL ADVERTISEMENT for a FOR-PROFIT company. I mean come on, folks, Apple doesn't give a rats ass except that you buy their products. Good point! We should all sell our BMWs and buy used Kias. Then we should sell our PowerBooks and ThinkPads and buy used Avertecs.
Oh, but wait, Kia and Avertec are in business to make money too! Ack!
Quick, who has the detailed instructions for building an EasyBake Chip Fab??
Mac SE's use 720K drives? At least I'm pretty sure they originally did. The Mac 512Ke, Mac Plus, Mac SE, and Mac II originally shipped with 800 KB 3.5" floppy drives. These are similar to 720 KB 3.5" drives, but used an 800 KB format.
There was a later version of the Mac SE that did ship out of the factory with a 1.44 MB floppy drive.
System 6.0.8 (the last version before 7): http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_ Area/ Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Maci ntosh/System/Older_System/System_6.0.x/
System 7.5.3: http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Suppo rt_Area/ Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Maci ntosh/System/Older_System/System_7.5_Version_7.5.3 /
Does anyone know of a video of Steve Jobs' original NeXT Cube introduction from 1988? I read about it in the book, "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing" and it sounded like it was just as impressive as the original Macintosh introduction.
Another cool video would be the Pixar Imaging Computer, which, naturally, was also cube shaped!
Yes. Using a portion of system memory as the display frame buffer is taxing on CPU time and memory bandwidth and availability. 1024x768 is 786,432 pixels. If the display is set to 24bit "true colour" then 3 bytes per pixel are needed for the frame buffer, or 2,359,296 bytes. Often for best performance, 24bit is aligned to 32bit, typically wasting the 4th byte, so this becomes 3,145,728 bytes. Now multiply that by your refresh rate! 75Hz will be requiring 235,929,600 bytes per second of main memory to display a stable picture. Also take into consideration the caching of bitmaps that is done by the now long forgotten "Windows Accelerator" functionality of video cards and you have even more wasted memory.
It's even worse than that. Most displays (even Windows GUI desktop) are double buffered, meaning that they consume two full framebuffers. One is being written to by the display drivers to generate the next frame, while the previous completed frame is being sent out to the DAC.
Slashdot Mirror
Not an easter egg, that's the hardware failure sound. There were several different such sound clips on different models of Macs from the late 1980s to mid 1990s.
But there are better options:
Microspot Interiors, etc
Sketchup
VectorWorks 11.5
Form*Z
PowerCADD
VersaCAD
Cadintosh
But there is no current Mac version of AutoCAD, Pro/E, or Microstation. Bad news if you're planning on designing a new aircraft carrier on your new Mac Mini...
I've been wanting a cappuccino-like PC since about 1999 but the specs don't impress me at all.
The Mac Mini is $500 ($479 for students) which is a ROCK BOTTOM LOW PRICE for Apple. They even managed to get a real GPU (Radeon 9200) in there and a DVI port. Why can't the Cappuccino have similar video and for a lower price?? I would really like a second PC like that. The only really decent SFF PC option is something like a Shuttle, which is about 6x - 8x the size of a Mini. Either that or a Mini-ITX system which is slower than a Mac Mini and still about 2x - 3x the size.
Every product could use a little more refinement. But before you say the Mac Mini needs refinement, I challenge you to try out. Get it in the original box, open it up, and try it out. It's a very smooth package.
Compare iMovie to MS Movie Maker and iPhoto to MS Photo Editor and you'll see that Apple has already done a lot of this "refinement" you speak of.
Personally I love the Mac Mini, but I know it's not for me. What I really want is a single processor G5 cube with graphics on an AGP or PCI-E card. I'd pay $900 - $1200 for it.
Mac Mini also ships with Quicken 2005.
Does this provide any noticeable advantage over the normal builds? I can't imagine Altivec being a speed demon for web pages.
Of course the network is going to be the slow link in the chain, but these builds do have two advantages:
1) Launch a little faster and render a little faster.
2) Nice nightly builds now use the Gecko 1.8 engine!
Grab "FX-ppc7450-2005.02.27.dmg" for your PowerBook, it'll probably change your mind about Firefox versus Safari! :)
http://homepage.mac.com/krmathis/
To me, the Mozilla nightlies are starting to feel faster than the Firefox nightlies, and certainly faster than Firefox 1.0 and 1.0.1.
Has anyone else noticed this, or is it just a side effect of my old hardware? It seems like Mozilla 1.8 will be noticeably faster than at least Firefox 1.0 and last night's Firefox Feb 26 build for sure.
Before you go turning your home into a datacenter, call your city's building department and insurance company first or you might void your policy and/or break some laws.
Actually the Powerbook 100 didn't even get produced for a full year, just 10 or 11 months (Oct 91 - Aug 92). And it had a predecessor, the Macintosh Portable. For the day it might have been cool, but it classifies as a luggable these days. And besides, It's not like Apple invented the laptop. Surely there were other better laptops at the time. Otherwise things would be different these days.
The PowerBook 100 shipped at the same time the PowerBook 140 and 170 did. The PowerBook 100 was basiclly a microsized Macintosh Portable and was designed by Sony. The PowerBook 140 and 170 were larger, but also faster and were designed by Apple. The PowerBook 100's design goal was compactness, that's why it had an external floppy drive.
I don't remember the original price, but the PowerBook 100 was very overpriced when it shipped. For about the same price as a PowerBook 100 + Floppy drive you could buy a PowerBook 140, which had an internal floppy drive and was faster and had a better screen. The PowerBook 140 also had a NiCad battery rather than the lead acid battery in the PowerBook 100. (Both had about the same runtime though). The PowerBook 100 flopped for price reasons. Apple cleared them out at Costco for $800, less than half the price of the PowerBook 140. That's how I bought mine. For abour $900 I had a shiny new thin PowerBook, external floppy drive, and a nice carrying case. That was an EXTREMELY good deal back in those days. I loved my PowerBook 100, it was a sleek little gizmo. Running Word 5 on it while sitting in a coffee shop was such a hightech, futuristic experience!
The PowerBook 140 and 170 sold well, REALLY well. Apple even sold a PC connection kit to help you sync up your PowerBook to your DOS or Windows 3.0/3.1 PC. For awhile Apple had almost half of the entire notebook marketshare. They were teh first company to put the trackball below the keyboard and inbetween "wrist rests". Prior to the PowerBook, trackballs were often clipped on to the side of notebooks. They shot themselves in the foot by not dropping their prices though. As PC notebooks got cheaper, Apple kept charging $1800 - $4000+ for their Notebooks. And when they finally did come out with the $1300 PowerBook 145b and PowerBook 150, it was just a warmed over PowerBook 140 that was already obsolete the day it hit the market.
Not only that, but the PowerBook 100 didn't even sell well when it was first released. For one thing, it was initially overpriced and was very underpowered compared to the PowerBook 140 and 170 which were released at the same time.
Then, Apple cut the price to dump them and people were buying them to soup them up. Still, the PowerBook 100 had only a 6800 and used a lead acid battery whereas the other two machines had the 68030 and used NiCads.
That's how I got my PowerBook 100, Apple was selling them at Costco for $800... half the price of the PowerBook 140 which was only slighty faster.
The 100 used a 68000 CPU, not the nuetered embedded 6800. Granted the PowerBook 140 and 170 were faster had had better screens, but they were also a little larger and thicker. Overall they were all pretty close in performance, size, and ability for the era. If you upgraded the ram to something other than the pathetic 2 MB, the 100 ran like a charm.
lead-acid battery if memory serves. It was either the 140 or the 160 that was the one you wanted back then.
PowerBook 100 came out at the same time as 140 and 170. All had basicly the same formfactor, but the 100 was smaller and thinner with a slower CPU and an external floppy drive. The 100 shipped with a lead acid battery but its runtime was similar to the 140 and there were aftermaket batteries available. I had a 100, I loved it.
I would have chosen the 140/170 instead of the 100. The 100 was a one-time design that was never used again, made by Sony. The 140/145/150/160/165/170/180 was a design that redefined portable computing and was available for years.
The PowerBook 100, 140, and 170 were all released at the same time. I remember the ad they ran in Time and Newsweek magazine -- it had a picture of Steve Wozniak and his son sitting on a park bench. Woz had either a 140 or 170 (same formfactor) on his lap and his son had the slightly smaller 100.
I liked the PowerBook 100. It was very similar to the PowerBook 140 and 170, but was smaller, thinner, and cheaper. (Due do it's lower quality screen, slower CPU, and external floppy drive). I used one for years until I replaced it with a PowerBook Duo 270c (Apple's thin dockable color notebook).
Apple calls their slot an "Airport Express slot" and they call their wirless card an "Airport Express card". They've never promised that it could do anything else.
Apple had high end "ColorSync" CRT monitors, just before the days of LCD. Their top end model had a calibtration button. Pressing it would cause the monitor to flash and buzz and flicker for a few minutes before finally settling down. Apparently it also had some sort of auto calibration like the Barco monitors.
No, this wasn't a deguass cycle, they had that feature too, but degaussing only took maybe 25 seconds max
I'd also like to add that most SANs serve one or two purposes:
1) SPEED! No need to access the data through a server. You can connect directly over fibrechannel.
2) Server redundancy. You might want to keep your data on a hardware RAID-5 box, such as the Apple Xserve RAID. You could then have two servers connected to the RAID. One server would be doing all of the work while the other would be a hot backup. In the event that the primary server dies, the secondary server could mount the RAID and take over. (This has been done for years with oldschool "high voltage" differential SCSI)
I know next to nothing about iSCSI and how it relates to all of this. I have only worked with oldschool differential SCSI and with FC.
Most of the SAN implemtations I've seen have used 2Gb FC_AL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop).
As long as all of the FC devices you use have fabric support, all you need a SAN filesystem and perhaps a metadata server and you're good to go.
One sample setup would be this:
Brocade FC switch
Xserve RAID (just the RAID box, not a server)
Mac w/ FC card
PC w/ FC card
The Mac, PC, and RAID box are each plugged into the FC switch. Now either machine can access the RAID directly through this FC SAN. There is no need for a file server / NAS.
However, you could (or might even be required to) add a server into this SAN. The server would be a "metadata server" to keep tabs on this big shared filesystem. It could also be used as a traffic cop / permissions manager / etc. But each PC or Mac connected to this SAN would still be able to access the RAID directly over fibrechannel. The server could be used as a generic file server (a "NAS") so that machines on the same LAN, but not on this FC SAN, could access the RAID indirectly.
Does this make any sense? It's hard to describe without drawing a picture.
Thats a bit rich coming from someone who is worshipping a COMMERCIAL ADVERTISEMENT for a FOR-PROFIT company. I mean come on, folks, Apple doesn't give a rats ass except that you buy their products.
Good point! We should all sell our BMWs and buy used Kias. Then we should sell our PowerBooks and ThinkPads and buy used Avertecs.
Oh, but wait, Kia and Avertec are in business to make money too! Ack!
Quick, who has the detailed instructions for building an EasyBake Chip Fab??
Mac SE's use 720K drives? At least I'm pretty sure they originally did.
The Mac 512Ke, Mac Plus, Mac SE, and Mac II originally shipped with 800 KB 3.5" floppy drives. These are similar to 720 KB 3.5" drives, but used an 800 KB format.
There was a later version of the Mac SE that did ship out of the factory with a 1.44 MB floppy drive.
Where are the videos of Michael Dell demonstrating the latest Dimension Desktop?
Where are the videos of Carly Fiorina showing off the latest HP LaserJet?
Better yet, where are the videos of Xerox demonstrating the $36,000 Alto?
System 6.0.8 (the last version before 7):_ Area/ Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Maci ntosh/System/Older_System/System_6.0.x/
o rt_Area/ Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Maci ntosh/System/Older_System/System_7.5_Version_7.5.3 /
http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support
System 7.5.3:
http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Supp
For those who are curious, here's a photo of the beast:
/ images/pixar.jpg
http://www.3dnews.ru/documents/8124/pic-16.jpg
And another photo with a Sun E450 and Sun SPARCstation 5 for reference:
http://www.nenv.k.u-tokyo.ac.jp/bis/kaoru/kizai01
Does anyone know of a video of Steve Jobs' original NeXT Cube introduction from 1988? I read about it in the book, "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing" and it sounded like it was just as impressive as the original Macintosh introduction.
Another cool video would be the Pixar Imaging Computer, which, naturally, was also cube shaped!
Yes. Using a portion of system memory as the display frame buffer is taxing on CPU time and memory bandwidth and availability. 1024x768 is 786,432 pixels. If the display is set to 24bit "true colour" then 3 bytes per pixel are needed for the frame buffer, or 2,359,296 bytes. Often for best performance, 24bit is aligned to 32bit, typically wasting the 4th byte, so this becomes 3,145,728 bytes. Now multiply that by your refresh rate! 75Hz will be requiring 235,929,600 bytes per second of main memory to display a stable picture. Also take into consideration the caching of bitmaps that is done by the now long forgotten "Windows Accelerator" functionality of video cards and you have even more wasted memory.
It's even worse than that. Most displays (even Windows GUI desktop) are double buffered, meaning that they consume two full framebuffers. One is being written to by the display drivers to generate the next frame, while the previous completed frame is being sent out to the DAC.
It might look ugly to you, me, and many other slashdotters, but to mom and pop it looks just as "high tech" as XP or OS X.
I think it's good marketing, even though I wouldn't keep those defaults.