It's sad to see this target the part of Apple (geniuses) that is filled with people who genuinely want to help people. Worse yet, geniuses are specifically instructed to not deviate from pre-written answers to a lot of these questions, thus making any sort of discussion impossible. Instead of all these fools going through all the effort of making appointments, trekking to a store, waiting for their appointment, making their speech, then trekking home, why don't they just send a letter to sjobs@apple.com? Or write the record labels that put these restrictions into place at the beginning? At least then it'll be directed towards someone who can actually effect change, and it won't be at the cost of keeping tech support from people who actually need it. As long as the Defective By Design project continues to prefer showboating to actually effecting change, I'll continue to not take them seriously. Unfortunate, given that I'm on the same side as them.
Having read much of the press coverage, the discussions in the forums and the statements from both Apple and the Oxford people, I feel it may be appropriate to note that it appears that Oxford is the one at fault here, not Apple. Oxford's press release complains that Apple changed something about the way the OS interacts with the drives, but there's no mention anywhere of Apple actually breaking out of the FW800 standard. This, paired with the fact that Apple released no bug fixes and it was Oxford that issued fixes, seems to point a pretty big finger at Oxford for relying on Apple's code's behavior and not the FW800 spec itself. Tsk tsk. Open standards are open for a reason, guys.
Your info is out of date and wrong. Check any site stating the specs of present Power Macs and you will find that the Power Macs being sold for some time now to not be using PC133, but the same DDR SDRAM as many of your stated Intel mobos.
Perhaps you missed the "and" between those two qualifications. You are only a spammer if you make $1,000 from an e-mail AND intentionally forged headers. So it does not in fact say you'd be a spammer as you claim.
Will we see Mac OS X running on two different platforms/CPUs?
It sure looks like it. Heck, they did it before with Mac OS 7 and 8, it ran on both Motorola 680x0 and PowerPC architecture. There was a bit of growing pain then, given that PowerPC binaries wouldn't run on 68k machines, and then there were "fat" binaries (which would run on both), but it wasn't terrible and people got through it in one piece in the end. Now, obviously that wasn't the same as a shift from 32-bit to 64-bit computing, but it looks as if there will be similar binary compatability issues again, so it's probably worth looking backwards in time to the introduction of the Power Macs with their new-fangled PowerPC processors.
I know for a fact that this is really bad news for the city that I live in. Sprint owns all the phone lines here, and are notorious amongst local residents and (especially) businesses for being extraordinarily slow (as long as weeks) making installations and repairs. While Sprint does offer DSL in town, they masquerade IPs and have rather unreliable speeds. A regional telco exists that provides almost flawless service (less than an hour of downtime in the past two years) and gives you real IPs so that us geeks can operate servers and other nonsense on them. Suddenly, it appears as if this telco may no longer be able to service us and we'll have no comparable alternative to it.
When I signed up for their service, they had me a modem at my house and another ready on their end within 24 hours. I then sat for nearly THREE MONTHS waiting for Sprint to get off its ass and turn over the phone line, which as I understand it is a completely computerized process that requires almost no effort on their part. Sprint wouldn't talk to me because I wasn't technically a customer (the other telco was, they said) and all the other telco could do was keep asking them over and over to turn over the line. Finally, after running around in circles for months I had a lawyer friend of mine fax them a letter threatening legal action, whereupon the line was turned over less than 24 hours after sending the fax.
Since then, the wait hasn't been as long, though it's still generally between two and three weeks, which is unreasonably long for a 5-minute (if that) action. I can't imagine what it would be like here if Sprint wasn't even forced into competition with this other telco.
As I talk to several of the artists on Planet 's roster on a regular basis and am good friends with one of the two label managers, I didn't just make that statement up about the artists being more accepting of MP3 trading. Sure, they'll be upset if you grab the MP3s and don't buy the record, and you shouldn't do that. I don't condone that behavior. But the fact that so many of these labels' releases are so often out of print and/or difficult to find, it's quite common that you couldn't buy the record even if you wanted to.
There's been a very significant underground electronic music movement gaining momentum extremely rapidly for the past six or seven years that has been dubbed intelligent dance music (IDM) by the media and the music generated is almost entirely computer-based. Aphex Twin is the name from the genre that most people have heard, along with somewhat lesser-known but still easily found artists like Squarepusher, Autechre, Boards of Canada, -ziq, etc. This is without any doubt one of the most innovative groups of artists around, and their influence has been noted by and heard in the music of N*Sync, Michael Jackson, and Radiohead, just to name a few bands.
Computers are definitely the center of musical creation in this genre, to the point where one of the genre's biggest issues at present is the artists trying to figure out how to make their performances more interesting than them just standing in front of a laptop moving the mouse around. In addition to the use of computers, the internet is also a major component of the artists' music-making and distribution processes. There have been numerous collaborations that have been created by sending audio tracks back and forth via ICQ, each artist changing and adding to it and then sending it back. In addition, the labels' web sites and accompanying message boards are freqented very regularly by both fans and artists alike, and much of the genre's direction is discussed and even determined there. Also, because the genre is so mall at present, record pressings rarely exceed more than a few thousand so it is very often difficult to find out-of-print records, so file-sharing tools like AudioGalaxy and SoulSeek come to the rescue. Trading MP3s is far more acceptable to the artists in this genre than it is to those in more popular ones.
For a taste of the genre, check out these record labels:
Check out the artists Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, -ziq, Kid606, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Venetian Snares, Plaid, and Leafcutter John, just to name a few.
Hmm, maybe I just fell comatose for the press release, but as far as I know there are no dual Athlon XP boards out there. From what I understood, that was the whole point of the Athlon MP: multi-processing capabilities.
I'm hearing everyone say, "Oh, this might be Atlantis!" But if it's even half as old as they think it is (assuming it's a city at all), how on earth could Europeans (or anyone in that part of the world) have known about it in Plato's time or even earlier? It's all the way across the Atlantic, and there's no reason that I know of that knowledge of any city could have travelled across that ocean then.
Er, I think you misunderstood what happened on those G4s, because Netscape for Mac (or for any other OS, as far as I know) has never had that behavior. If you used Netscape to download NCSA Telnet, the most it can do is have StuffIt Expander decode the binhex or macbinary file. StuffIt Expander, in turn, will not and can not launch a program it decodes. Now, as for having to call telnet from Netscape, all that means is that Netscape knew where NCSA Telnet was on your hard drive. So, when you use Netscape to open the location telnet:foo.com or whatever (I forget the exact syntax), it opens it and tells it to connect to whatever host you told Netscape to connect to. This problem is not caused by MacOS, StuffIt Expander, or anything other than IE 5.1.
I hate to do the whole self-promotion thing, but this conversation couldn't be better suited for what my employer does. We've developed a really nice, FreeBSD-based secure mail proxy that uses a DNS-based public key infrastructure and S/MIME encryption. It works with any SSL-capable mail client (Netscape, Outlook, Pine, etc.) and provides the user with a transparent encryption process from the moment that the first bit of their message leaves their workstation until the last bit is received by the message's recipient. At no point is the message transferred unencrypted. One of our system's greatest features is that it allows you to send messages to people who don't have our service and still have the message be encrypted for the whole trip. Rather than getting too far into the technical details here, you can check out our product's technical details for yourself.
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It's sad to see this target the part of Apple (geniuses) that is filled with people who genuinely want to help people. Worse yet, geniuses are specifically instructed to not deviate from pre-written answers to a lot of these questions, thus making any sort of discussion impossible. Instead of all these fools going through all the effort of making appointments, trekking to a store, waiting for their appointment, making their speech, then trekking home, why don't they just send a letter to sjobs@apple.com? Or write the record labels that put these restrictions into place at the beginning? At least then it'll be directed towards someone who can actually effect change, and it won't be at the cost of keeping tech support from people who actually need it. As long as the Defective By Design project continues to prefer showboating to actually effecting change, I'll continue to not take them seriously. Unfortunate, given that I'm on the same side as them.
Having read much of the press coverage, the discussions in the forums and the statements from both Apple and the Oxford people, I feel it may be appropriate to note that it appears that Oxford is the one at fault here, not Apple. Oxford's press release complains that Apple changed something about the way the OS interacts with the drives, but there's no mention anywhere of Apple actually breaking out of the FW800 standard. This, paired with the fact that Apple released no bug fixes and it was Oxford that issued fixes, seems to point a pretty big finger at Oxford for relying on Apple's code's behavior and not the FW800 spec itself. Tsk tsk. Open standards are open for a reason, guys.
Your info is out of date and wrong. Check any site stating the specs of present Power Macs and you will find that the Power Macs being sold for some time now to not be using PC133, but the same DDR SDRAM as many of your stated Intel mobos.
Perhaps you missed the "and" between those two qualifications. You are only a spammer if you make $1,000 from an e-mail AND intentionally forged headers. So it does not in fact say you'd be a spammer as you claim.
Will we see Mac OS X running on two different platforms/CPUs?
It sure looks like it. Heck, they did it before with Mac OS 7 and 8, it ran on both Motorola 680x0 and PowerPC architecture. There was a bit of growing pain then, given that PowerPC binaries wouldn't run on 68k machines, and then there were "fat" binaries (which would run on both), but it wasn't terrible and people got through it in one piece in the end. Now, obviously that wasn't the same as a shift from 32-bit to 64-bit computing, but it looks as if there will be similar binary compatability issues again, so it's probably worth looking backwards in time to the introduction of the Power Macs with their new-fangled PowerPC processors.
I know for a fact that this is really bad news for the city that I live in. Sprint owns all the phone lines here, and are notorious amongst local residents and (especially) businesses for being extraordinarily slow (as long as weeks) making installations and repairs. While Sprint does offer DSL in town, they masquerade IPs and have rather unreliable speeds. A regional telco exists that provides almost flawless service (less than an hour of downtime in the past two years) and gives you real IPs so that us geeks can operate servers and other nonsense on them. Suddenly, it appears as if this telco may no longer be able to service us and we'll have no comparable alternative to it.
When I signed up for their service, they had me a modem at my house and another ready on their end within 24 hours. I then sat for nearly THREE MONTHS waiting for Sprint to get off its ass and turn over the phone line, which as I understand it is a completely computerized process that requires almost no effort on their part. Sprint wouldn't talk to me because I wasn't technically a customer (the other telco was, they said) and all the other telco could do was keep asking them over and over to turn over the line. Finally, after running around in circles for months I had a lawyer friend of mine fax them a letter threatening legal action, whereupon the line was turned over less than 24 hours after sending the fax.
Since then, the wait hasn't been as long, though it's still generally between two and three weeks, which is unreasonably long for a 5-minute (if that) action. I can't imagine what it would be like here if Sprint wasn't even forced into competition with this other telco.
As I talk to several of the artists on Planet 's roster on a regular basis and am good friends with one of the two label managers, I didn't just make that statement up about the artists being more accepting of MP3 trading. Sure, they'll be upset if you grab the MP3s and don't buy the record, and you shouldn't do that. I don't condone that behavior. But the fact that so many of these labels' releases are so often out of print and/or difficult to find, it's quite common that you couldn't buy the record even if you wanted to.
There's been a very significant underground electronic music movement gaining momentum extremely rapidly for the past six or seven years that has been dubbed intelligent dance music (IDM) by the media and the music generated is almost entirely computer-based. Aphex Twin is the name from the genre that most people have heard, along with somewhat lesser-known but still easily found artists like Squarepusher, Autechre, Boards of Canada, -ziq, etc. This is without any doubt one of the most innovative groups of artists around, and their influence has been noted by and heard in the music of N*Sync, Michael Jackson, and Radiohead, just to name a few bands.
Computers are definitely the center of musical creation in this genre, to the point where one of the genre's biggest issues at present is the artists trying to figure out how to make their performances more interesting than them just standing in front of a laptop moving the mouse around. In addition to the use of computers, the internet is also a major component of the artists' music-making and distribution processes. There have been numerous collaborations that have been created by sending audio tracks back and forth via ICQ, each artist changing and adding to it and then sending it back. In addition, the labels' web sites and accompanying message boards are freqented very regularly by both fans and artists alike, and much of the genre's direction is discussed and even determined there. Also, because the genre is so mall at present, record pressings rarely exceed more than a few thousand so it is very often difficult to find out-of-print records, so file-sharing tools like AudioGalaxy and SoulSeek come to the rescue. Trading MP3s is far more acceptable to the artists in this genre than it is to those in more popular ones.
For a taste of the genre, check out these record labels:
Warp Records
Planet
tigerbeat6
Check out the artists Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, -ziq, Kid606, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Venetian Snares, Plaid, and Leafcutter John, just to name a few.
Hmm, maybe I just fell comatose for the press release, but as far as I know there are no dual Athlon XP boards out there. From what I understood, that was the whole point of the Athlon MP: multi-processing capabilities.
I'm hearing everyone say, "Oh, this might be Atlantis!" But if it's even half as old as they think it is (assuming it's a city at all), how on earth could Europeans (or anyone in that part of the world) have known about it in Plato's time or even earlier? It's all the way across the Atlantic, and there's no reason that I know of that knowledge of any city could have travelled across that ocean then.
Er, I think you misunderstood what happened on those G4s, because Netscape for Mac (or for any other OS, as far as I know) has never had that behavior. If you used Netscape to download NCSA Telnet, the most it can do is have StuffIt Expander decode the binhex or macbinary file. StuffIt Expander, in turn, will not and can not launch a program it decodes. Now, as for having to call telnet from Netscape, all that means is that Netscape knew where NCSA Telnet was on your hard drive. So, when you use Netscape to open the location telnet:foo.com or whatever (I forget the exact syntax), it opens it and tells it to connect to whatever host you told Netscape to connect to. This problem is not caused by MacOS, StuffIt Expander, or anything other than IE 5.1.
I hate to do the whole self-promotion thing, but this conversation couldn't be better suited for what my employer does. We've developed a really nice, FreeBSD-based secure mail proxy that uses a DNS-based public key infrastructure and S/MIME encryption. It works with any SSL-capable mail client (Netscape, Outlook, Pine, etc.) and provides the user with a transparent encryption process from the moment that the first bit of their message leaves their workstation until the last bit is received by the message's recipient. At no point is the message transferred unencrypted. One of our system's greatest features is that it allows you to send messages to people who don't have our service and still have the message be encrypted for the whole trip. Rather than getting too far into the technical details here, you can check out our product's technical details for yourself.