As nice as it would be to see iLife '06, I think there will first be a universal version of iLife '05 and iWork '05.
That way Apple can grow the market for paid upgrades to iLife '06.
A distributed computing project (ala SETI) which relied on Linux could run this way.
If this were Cooperative Linux that might be an avenue worth exploring.
However, the article describes running Linux under QEMU, which the author admits is "slooooooooowwww."
Apple customer support is the worst I have ever encountered...
Over an eighteen month period, I have been without a working machine for three months
I found the Apple phone support to be quite good: reasonable hold times, unscripted techs. who stayed on the phone with me reboot after reboot, and appropriate escalation.
However, the people doing the mail-in repair were terrible; so bad, in fact, that I was eventually given a brand new iBook.
It was two revs. newer, but that would have been cold comfort if it had been my primary computer.
The iBook AppleCare is plenty expensive as it is, but I would pay another $50 - $100 if it included on-site service.
Re:Terrestrial HDTV receiver
on
CNET's HDTV World
·
· Score: 3, Informative
For those wondering whether over-the-air DTV reception is an option, check out AntennaWeb.org.
It tells you the direction and distance of your stations' transmitters, and gives an estimate of the type of antenna required.
If you want to know what content is actually HD, one option is CheckHD.
One thing we've learned from (HT|SG|X)ML is to separate content from presentation.
While OpenDoc does focus largely on presentation, there is room for more than one medium.
An electronic version of a document may use a color picture, whereas the print version may be constrained to black and white for cost reasons.
In the future, the same constraint may apply to videos: the OLED paper costs ten times as much as the pulp paper.
If you select a range of cells, copy it, and make another edit, Excel loses what you copied.
Yeah, Steve Maguire talks about this in Debugging the Development Process.
He claims that, "most people never notice that [Excel's clipboard is] different."
I'm certainly not most people, because I've always hated it.
Maybe Jobs doesn't like his apps being called fat?
OS X 10.4 uses fat binaries.
For example, Apple recently botched a security update by failing to ship a fat binary for the BSD layer.
This is what it's supposed to look like:
OS X calls these fat binaries, which 10.4 supports for the ppc and ppc64 architectures.
The switch to Intel will add i386 and, presumably, x86_64.
However, the article states that Intel compilers will not support ppc.
At Apple's WWDC, Steve Jobs made much of the simplicity of building universal binaries, an extension of the fat binary concept.
It will be interesting to see if ISVs that use ICC deliver them.
It should still be possible, but it may not be the one-click operation that Steve promised.
Almost certainly.
I tend to think of the Radeon 9200 as comparable to the GeForce FX 5200, although the latter does support Core Image.
The first Google hit for ati 9550 is a DriverHeaven review, which someone mentioned on one of the rumor site forums.
It shows the 9550 soundly beating the 5200 in every benchmark.
The 9550 continues Apple's tradition of shipping bottom-of-the-barrel video cards, but at least the iBook has a dedicated 3D card, unlike some value notebooks.
I'm surprised you mentioned Buy.com, which has had a 2.93/10 customer satisfaction rating at www.resellerratings.com.
Scanning the reviews at Reseller Ratings, there is a suspicious flood of negative reviews regarding canceled orders on or around 20 June.
If these reviews are not outright spam, they are likely the result of a pricing error (e.g., a $1,000 item being sold for $100).
That said, the rating history isn't all that great, either.
My experience has been satisfactory, and I will continue to buy books from Buy.com.
(I, too, avoid Amazon because of its patent aggression.)
Perhaps the electronics department does not do as good a job, but why would I order electronics anywhere else but NewEgg?
Ubuntu looks promising, but it almost releases too often. A longer support period is welcome.
One thing I'd like to see is a looser coupling of the apps. and the O/S.
I'm happy with a five year-old version of Windows, because I can trivially install new applications.
Linux distributions encourage one-stop shopping, which is nice at first, but I shouldn't have to upgrade the entire O/S to get a newer version of Emacs.
You can upgrade components piece meal; however, you lose some of the benefits of a tested distribution.
I thought I had seen some Pi savant on Letterman, recently, but he wasn't Japanese.
It was Daniel Tammet, the world's fourth ranked.
An interesting guy, and quite articulate.
What you have to understand about Eric is his belief that open source is a superior development process.
He states:
As far back as 1998, I suspected that allegiance to the GPL is actually evidence that open source developers don't really believe their own story. That is, if we really believe that open source is a superior system of production, and therefore that it will drive out closed source in a free market, then why do we think we need infectious licensing?
In effect, Eric is saying something like: if you're innocent, why do you need a lawyer?
Much has been made of the difference in philosophy of the "free software" and "open source" camps (too much, perhaps); this is a pretty clear statement of Eric's perspective.
since microsoft no longer supports [Windows 2000], i dont get any new features
While it's a little annoying that Microsoft is tying IE to the O/S, who has a longer support period?
Will Apple give you a copy of Safari 2.0 for your OS X 10.1 system?
Will Red Hat give you an RPM of Konqueror 3.4 for your RHEL 2.1 system (to say nothing of RHL 9)?
Vendors are adding functionality to the base O/S to make upgrades more compelling.
If anything, Microsoft is late to the game in exploiting this.
When was the last time that Apple sold a computer with only 128MB of RAM? Back in OS9 days?
According to the Wayback Machine, the iBook came with 128MB as recently as September 2003 (shipping with OS X 10.2).
The eMac came with 128MB as recently as April 2004 (shipping with OS X 10.3).
I certainly haven't noticed any keyboards with individually weighted keys, but I've been using mainly the same keyboards since before that article was published.
It seems like a good idea, and I'd think there would be less resistance than to a contour keyboard, like the Kinesis or Maltron.
Thanks for that list.
I've tried a few power supplies that were advertised as quiet, but I've suspected that I need to go fanless.
As I read the Phantom review, I was reminded that I neglected to install the AMD Cool 'n' Quiet driver after my last Windows reinstall.
That was good for about ten degrees C, at idle.
I have the 3700BQE, which has four convenient drive trays.
However, if I use more than one drive, the case resonates.
the mini could make Apple the first serious contender to mass-market full-length HDTV content over IP
That may be true, but it won't be the current mini.
As another poster pointed out, the mini's hard drive and processor are not up to the task of HD.
Consider the recent hardware launches.
Apple waited until the release of 10.4 to put half-decent video cards in the iMac, eMac, and base Power Mac.
When Apple introduces on-demand video, it will introduce a new machine to match.
iTunes could potentially play OGG or WMA files via a new codec component provided by a third party
There is such a component.
However, QuickTime 7 broke it.
I don't know that Apple is helping the project, but it seems to be aware of it.
See the most recent comment on bug #1144430, "Ogg Vorbis Support Broken in Tiger," which includes comments from the QuickTime engineering group.
I would love to make the switch, but I am not sure I could justify it.
I know it is all subjective, but what is a good reason to switch away from WinXP?
I can't tell you why to switch, although the fact that you "would love to" is probably a start.
I got an iBook G4 at home, because I was intrigued by OS X, and because it was actually competitive on features and price for its part of the market.
I bought it shortly before I became more interested in digital photography, and iPhoto has been a nice bonus.
No regrets, so far.
I got an iMac G5 at work, because I've increasingly been doing Unix development, and it was cumbersome working on a Linux box via SSH and SMB.
I seriously considered switching from Windows to Linux, but there was a comfort level with OS X that I've never quite reached with Linux.
Also, I wanted a new computer, and I thought it would be easier to get a 20" iMac approved than a desktop and comparable monitor.
I haven't completely switched, but I wouldn't be surprised if I never buy another PC.
I'm seriously considering a Power Mac G5 at home.
Depending on how much we spend on our next house, it may sit next to a 30" Apple Cinema Display.
I switched from Eudora 5.2 for Windows to Mail.app in 10.3 (thanks, Eudora Mailbox Cleaner), and I'm generally pleased.
However, I'm on a lot of mailing lists at work, and it already takes a few seconds to open some of my mailboxes on a 1.8GHz iMac G5.
I was hoping for some improvement in 10.4.
We're shipping GCC 4.0.0, which we compiled from source for Darwin 8.
Putting aside the flippant aspersions, for the moment, it would be frightening if Apple was actually shipping GCC 4.0.0 next week, considering the lead time for testing, manufacturing, etc.
Until a couple of days ago, there was no GCC 4.0.0; snapshots and CVS versions (betas, if you will), but not an actual 4.0.0.
(The one Tiger box to which I have access is barfing on SSH, so I can't check the version string.)
I would humbly suggest that, if you presume to invoke the royal "we," you refrain from deriding "the Gnu people" on whose "open-source stuff" OS X depends.
All you need is access to the output to reencode and share. Copyright cops detect the share, lift whatever watermark may be in the stream, finger the device and revoke the key.
I don't think this scheme involves any kind of watermarking of the decrypted data.
That would be too expensive.
The idea of revocation is to protect the exclusivity of licensed keys.
If a key shows up in DeAACS, or some unauthorized player, the key's owner can be punished.
windows 2000 server [is] 5 years old and still in production
Whereas Windows is just an O/S, a Linux distribution is an O/S and a pile of applications.
This is often considered to be an advantage, but it can be liability, when it comes to long release cycles.
For a lot of situations, I'd be comfortable deploying Linux 2.2, glibc 2.1, and even Apache 1.3.
I wouldn't necessarily be as comfortable with the Python 1.5, PHP 3, etc., to say nothing of the desktop components.
I could build newer versions of the required components, but what do I do when I find that GCC 2.95 can't build it?
Slashdot Mirror
As nice as it would be to see iLife '06, I think there will first be a universal version of iLife '05 and iWork '05. That way Apple can grow the market for paid upgrades to iLife '06.
If this were Cooperative Linux that might be an avenue worth exploring. However, the article describes running Linux under QEMU, which the author admits is "slooooooooowwww."
I found the Apple phone support to be quite good: reasonable hold times, unscripted techs. who stayed on the phone with me reboot after reboot, and appropriate escalation. However, the people doing the mail-in repair were terrible; so bad, in fact, that I was eventually given a brand new iBook. It was two revs. newer, but that would have been cold comfort if it had been my primary computer.
The iBook AppleCare is plenty expensive as it is, but I would pay another $50 - $100 if it included on-site service.
If you want to know what content is actually HD, one option is CheckHD.
One thing we've learned from (HT|SG|X)ML is to separate content from presentation. While OpenDoc does focus largely on presentation, there is room for more than one medium.
An electronic version of a document may use a color picture, whereas the print version may be constrained to black and white for cost reasons. In the future, the same constraint may apply to videos: the OLED paper costs ten times as much as the pulp paper.
Yeah, Steve Maguire talks about this in Debugging the Development Process. He claims that, "most people never notice that [Excel's clipboard is] different." I'm certainly not most people, because I've always hated it.
OS X 10.4 uses fat binaries. For example, Apple recently botched a security update by failing to ship a fat binary for the BSD layer. This is what it's supposed to look like:
Apple's GCC has built-in support for fat binaries: If I had the right SDK installed, I could have added -arch i386. Building fat binaries with GCC and ICC will probably require the use of lipo(1).OS X calls these fat binaries, which 10.4 supports for the ppc and ppc64 architectures. The switch to Intel will add i386 and, presumably, x86_64. However, the article states that Intel compilers will not support ppc.
At Apple's WWDC, Steve Jobs made much of the simplicity of building universal binaries, an extension of the fat binary concept. It will be interesting to see if ISVs that use ICC deliver them. It should still be possible, but it may not be the one-click operation that Steve promised.
Almost certainly. I tend to think of the Radeon 9200 as comparable to the GeForce FX 5200, although the latter does support Core Image.
The first Google hit for ati 9550 is a DriverHeaven review, which someone mentioned on one of the rumor site forums. It shows the 9550 soundly beating the 5200 in every benchmark.
The 9550 continues Apple's tradition of shipping bottom-of-the-barrel video cards, but at least the iBook has a dedicated 3D card, unlike some value notebooks.
Scanning the reviews at Reseller Ratings, there is a suspicious flood of negative reviews regarding canceled orders on or around 20 June. If these reviews are not outright spam, they are likely the result of a pricing error (e.g., a $1,000 item being sold for $100). That said, the rating history isn't all that great, either.
My experience has been satisfactory, and I will continue to buy books from Buy.com. (I, too, avoid Amazon because of its patent aggression.) Perhaps the electronics department does not do as good a job, but why would I order electronics anywhere else but NewEgg?
One thing I'd like to see is a looser coupling of the apps. and the O/S. I'm happy with a five year-old version of Windows, because I can trivially install new applications. Linux distributions encourage one-stop shopping, which is nice at first, but I shouldn't have to upgrade the entire O/S to get a newer version of Emacs. You can upgrade components piece meal; however, you lose some of the benefits of a tested distribution.
I thought I had seen some Pi savant on Letterman, recently, but he wasn't Japanese. It was Daniel Tammet, the world's fourth ranked. An interesting guy, and quite articulate.
Much has been made of the difference in philosophy of the "free software" and "open source" camps (too much, perhaps); this is a pretty clear statement of Eric's perspective.
And which hand do you think should type the "6"?
While it's a little annoying that Microsoft is tying IE to the O/S, who has a longer support period? Will Apple give you a copy of Safari 2.0 for your OS X 10.1 system? Will Red Hat give you an RPM of Konqueror 3.4 for your RHEL 2.1 system (to say nothing of RHL 9)?
Vendors are adding functionality to the base O/S to make upgrades more compelling. If anything, Microsoft is late to the game in exploiting this.
According to the Wayback Machine, the iBook came with 128MB as recently as September 2003 (shipping with OS X 10.2). The eMac came with 128MB as recently as April 2004 (shipping with OS X 10.3).
I certainly haven't noticed any keyboards with individually weighted keys, but I've been using mainly the same keyboards since before that article was published. It seems like a good idea, and I'd think there would be less resistance than to a contour keyboard, like the Kinesis or Maltron.
I have the 3700BQE, which has four convenient drive trays. However, if I use more than one drive, the case resonates.
That may be true, but it won't be the current mini. As another poster pointed out, the mini's hard drive and processor are not up to the task of HD.
Consider the recent hardware launches. Apple waited until the release of 10.4 to put half-decent video cards in the iMac, eMac, and base Power Mac. When Apple introduces on-demand video, it will introduce a new machine to match.
There is such a component. However, QuickTime 7 broke it. I don't know that Apple is helping the project, but it seems to be aware of it. See the most recent comment on bug #1144430, "Ogg Vorbis Support Broken in Tiger," which includes comments from the QuickTime engineering group.
I can't tell you why to switch, although the fact that you "would love to" is probably a start.
I got an iBook G4 at home, because I was intrigued by OS X, and because it was actually competitive on features and price for its part of the market. I bought it shortly before I became more interested in digital photography, and iPhoto has been a nice bonus. No regrets, so far.
I got an iMac G5 at work, because I've increasingly been doing Unix development, and it was cumbersome working on a Linux box via SSH and SMB. I seriously considered switching from Windows to Linux, but there was a comfort level with OS X that I've never quite reached with Linux. Also, I wanted a new computer, and I thought it would be easier to get a 20" iMac approved than a desktop and comparable monitor.
I haven't completely switched, but I wouldn't be surprised if I never buy another PC. I'm seriously considering a Power Mac G5 at home. Depending on how much we spend on our next house, it may sit next to a 30" Apple Cinema Display.
I switched from Eudora 5.2 for Windows to Mail.app in 10.3 (thanks, Eudora Mailbox Cleaner), and I'm generally pleased. However, I'm on a lot of mailing lists at work, and it already takes a few seconds to open some of my mailboxes on a 1.8GHz iMac G5. I was hoping for some improvement in 10.4.
Putting aside the flippant aspersions, for the moment, it would be frightening if Apple was actually shipping GCC 4.0.0 next week, considering the lead time for testing, manufacturing, etc. Until a couple of days ago, there was no GCC 4.0.0; snapshots and CVS versions (betas, if you will), but not an actual 4.0.0. (The one Tiger box to which I have access is barfing on SSH, so I can't check the version string.)
I would humbly suggest that, if you presume to invoke the royal "we," you refrain from deriding "the Gnu people" on whose "open-source stuff" OS X depends.
I don't think this scheme involves any kind of watermarking of the decrypted data. That would be too expensive. The idea of revocation is to protect the exclusivity of licensed keys. If a key shows up in DeAACS, or some unauthorized player, the key's owner can be punished.
Whereas Windows is just an O/S, a Linux distribution is an O/S and a pile of applications. This is often considered to be an advantage, but it can be liability, when it comes to long release cycles. For a lot of situations, I'd be comfortable deploying Linux 2.2, glibc 2.1, and even Apache 1.3. I wouldn't necessarily be as comfortable with the Python 1.5, PHP 3, etc., to say nothing of the desktop components. I could build newer versions of the required components, but what do I do when I find that GCC 2.95 can't build it?