Apple is making the transition to Intel processors (which does NOT mean that MacOS X will run on commodity x86 hardware).
Why? Steve mentioned a lack of a PowerPC roadmap. Leander at Cult of Mac mentioned possible Intel DRM to enable iTunes for Movies. Everyone mentions that we haven't seen a PowerBook G5.
Why now? We all know that Apple's going to take it on the chin in the Mac hardware sales division. But Apple can take that hit right now. It has the well-known $4 billion in reserves. And it also has the iPod and iTMS - which have been bringing in a large percent of Apple's profits lately. With iPod running high for, well, the next year or so, that can prop up the Mac division through the transition slump.
The judge won't grant their injunction, and will probably toss the entire thing. But in the meantime, TigerDirect is suddenly getting a whole lot of free (minus the cost of filing the suit) publicity...
iPhoto never "killed" Photoshop Elements - iPhoto came out before Photoshop Elements was ever released, and there was never a Mac version of PE. If anything, iPhoto created the demand for Photoshop Elements, as Windows users were casting about for an iPhoto-like app on their platform.
iDVD and GarageBand, if you haven't heard, require a DVD drive to install. Not because Apple's trying to make you buy combo-drive machines, but because there's so much damn stuff (themes for iDVD, music and loops for GB) that otherwise you'd be schlepping through 7-8 CDs to install 'em.
(Ignoring the religion and focusing on solutions...)
You have two seperate problems
Email is one. For that, you want to get your arse on an IMAP server. This will allow your mail to "live" on the server (with only a local cache on the various boxes choose to log into). Heck, moving your email to IMAP will even allow you to install SquirrelMail on an apache/php system someplace, configure it to connect to your IMAP server, and then you even have web-based email.
Contacts/ToDo/Calendar is another problem.
iCal is, frighteningly enough, among the first major-publisher apps to use "standards based" file formats (in iCal's case, it's the iCalendar format). Outlook XP and Entourage v.X use MS-proprietary file formats. There is no way to easily transfer data *directly* between the apps. They may both bear the MS name, but the development teams are adequately siloed that they may as well be entirely different products.
As as previous poster mentioned, your best bet to go between Outlook XP and Entourage is going to be a Palm-based PDA (Palm, Handspring, Clie) with an Outlook conduit on the PC side. That will take care of your to-do, contacts, and calendar between those two apps.
Later, when iSync comes along, that same Palm will be able to sync your XP data with the Jaguar-internal apps: AddressBook and iCal.
That is, I'm afraid, the best option available for you. Chances are great that you can find an old Visor dirt-cheap on eBay (a used Handspring Visor will be your cheapest USB-based Palm solution.) Your serial number will get you the Handpring PC download with the Outlook conduit.
Nope - Jaguar's been the code-name for the pending OS X update for quite some time now. QuickTime 6 is to be integrated into the Jaguar release (and is being held by licensing issues)
Far too many admins focus on the process of being an admin, rather than on serving customers. On platforms and products rather than solutions.
Far too many Windows-only admins have been trained as MCSEs, and that training emphasizes a one-world homogenous platform. Products and platforms. "Here's Windows - and the things you can do with it," rather than, "What do you need to do, and how can Windows help you do that?" The thought processes of these admins (and I've seen this time and time again in 14 years of being a sysadmin) takes the cant of "how can I convince my customers to work this way?" The way that the MS tools provide.
It's the wrong question. The wrong approach.
The user is the customer, not the enemy. They pay you to solve their problems, so give them solutions. It shouldn't matter what platform - Mac, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD - what should be at issue is what provides the best solution for the customers needs.
Apple makes the lion's share of their profits from selling hardware, not software, so additional operating system choices only increase the number of potential customers.
The only way it could negatively impact Apple's bottom line is by lengthening the upgrade cycle; a useable Linux system is less resource-intensive than a tricked-out OSX system, thus keeping "older" Macs in use longer rather than requiring the users to buy new hardware. Even then, one could argue that those "older Mac" users are people who wouldn't have the money for a newer system anyways - so it simply increases the number of Macs in use.
On second thought, an exceptionally strong Linux presence on Mac might pull some open source development muscle away from OS X development. But that kind of impact would be several years in the making...
But remember, not only is it good to exercise choice - it's also good to encourage the proliferation of choice. (Huh?)
If you like Mandrake's work at providing a feature-rich Linux distro for the Mac, be sure to give 'em some money (ie, consider buying some CDs) so they'll see reason to keep up the excellent work!
Or, conversely, acknowledging popular hacks as features that customers want to see in their products.
Apple actually has a long history of this - and in many cases they've actually compensated the orginal "hack" author. WindowShade, an Apple Menu with submenus, a single control panel for Internet-related prefs - these are just a few hacks that were either freeware or shareware that ended up becoming MacOS features.
iTools Webmail may just be the latest - there were already sites like imapple.net offering web-based access to iTools accounts (via IMAP clients like IMP and SquirrelMail). Apple may have realized that (since they really couldn't cut IMAP access), it was in their better interest to make a clean local (fast) webmail implementation.
Let's consider that quickly-slammed cool factor. Apple's Webmail has the following features (available without paying an additional fee):
5MB of data storage (vs 2MB for Hotmail)
No frigging ads
Can be accessed via any IMAP/POP client
No frigging ads
Can set a "vacation" autorepy message
No frigging ads
Will allow you to forward your email elsewhere
Did I mention no frigging ads?
Granted, Apple's hand may have been "forced" by websites such as imapple.net that were using IMP and SquirrelMail to provide access to mac.com email accounts, but Apple's implementation is fast, clean, and imposes minimally on the users.
Although you have to use a Mac with at least OS9 to sign up for iTools, you can access the mac.com email via web or POP/IMAP client from any platform, and the iTools disk space and HomePage storage (20MB) is acessible via any platform that supports WebDAV.
That's much better support of open standards and ease-of-access than Hotmail, Yahoo!, GeoCities, you name it.
DOS attacks are rarely about sophistication - it's pure destructive potential. Script kiddies bragging on IRC channels about the number of "zombies" they've managed to acquire via the latest script that some grey-hat with genuine skills has written - eventually the bragging gets to a point where they have to do something with all their proudly acquired toys. Usually against some other l337 haxxOR who has impugned their skills.
Save rather than beating each other senseless (which would be so, so much more preferable), they're compromising systems and using them as their weapons - costing users and admins hundreds of work-hours so they can prove something.
Hell, at least "tagging" doesn't take down the damn company server.
Re:Implications for Solar Power
on
Stopping Light
·
· Score: 1
Good replies. I did comment that I was playing "blue-sky sci-fi author" - take one little development and run with it. But it's good to see the serious consideration.
I'm wondering why they wouldn't just contract out with the Government and move the operation to a secure military installation somewhere in the DC area.
There are already enough (valid) concerns in the international community that the US has too much control over much of the Internet. That's part of why the government got out of the biz of running these services, and contracted them out.
Locating them in a government installation would raise all those old concerns again, in a rather valid fashion. The USA isn't the sum total of the 'Net, after all...
Implications for Solar Power
on
Stopping Light
·
· Score: 0, Insightful
So here's an interesting thought.
We can stop and "store" light.
So play blue-sky sci-fi author for a moment. Enormous dirigibles floating above the cloud layer, absorbing and storing light until "full", then coming to ground and offloading the light they've "mined" into solar cells (which no longer have to be laid out in flat arrays covering enormous fields) for conversion into electricity.
Hasn't that always been one of the problems, after all? There's plenty of bright, uninterrupted light available in the upper atmosphere, but the thought was always to convert it to electricity *up there* and somehow transmit the energy to ground level.
Interesting to note is the concept art and storyboarding for Blade II, some of which is available at the Blade 2 website. A lot of work was done by Mike Mignola (best known for his Hellboy comics, but also one of the big concept artists behind Disney's animated Atlantis), some creature design was done by Wayne Barlow, and characters such as Reinhart and Lighthammer were done by Tim Bradstreet.
Blade II had a lot of very interested potential that, unfortunately, wasn't realized (in favor of some way-over-the-top computer-enhanced fight scenes). Sad to see this concept work go to waste - I'd almost be interested in an "Art Of" book, based on some of the sketchs and artwork available on the website.
Starcraft and Warcraft II are both older, yes. Also arguably simpler than Diablo II, more directly related to the WarCraft III development cycle, and (most importantly) both are stable products.
Diablo II and LOD, on the other hand, was being actively patched and updated until December of last year.
And Unreal Tournament... well, the OSX port is entirely unsupported - it's a "in my spare time" project from the president of Westlake Interactive, and still hasn't progressed past "Preview Release 2".
Handspring is recommending that Visor users refrain from using Palm's release of Desktop 4.0, mostly because Handspring hasn't done their own testing with the new software.
However, it's working fine with my Visor Platinum. Just one gotcha - the Palm distribution tries to install update files (which, obviously, don't work on the Visor). The solution is to delete or rename the "PalmOS Updates" folder from the folder that the Palm Desktop application is stored in (it can't find the updates, so doesn't install 'em. Simple.)
As was pointed out on another website, MacOS X hadn't even shipped in public beta form when Diablo II was released. While I'm sure that the OSX updates for WarCraft II, StarCraft, and Diablo II are mostly applications of things Blizzard developers have learned as part of the WarCraft III development cycle, it's still very good of Blizzard to release those efforts to the Mac gaming public.
Then again, I'd also wager that Diablo II (and LOD) has sold enough copies to recoup Blizzard's investment at this point - and the goodwill they're generating amongst the OSX-using community will just translate into additional sales for WarCraft III when it hits the bricks. Not much, granted (I'm realistic about MacOS market share), but every bit helps, neh?
I've got an end-luser who claims that, when she opened up the email attachement she received (bad luser, bad!), it brought up an image of the statue of liberty flipping off the viewer.
Granted, I haven't felt like offering up a system for sacrifice to verify, but it goes well with the earlier comment that things linked back to a pro-WTC 2600 site...
It really shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone - contrary to what the Sales Droids at any of the big guys will tell you (M$, IBM, Sun, you-name-it), the tools listed have been proven by fire to be stable, usable, and scalable.
Heck, just imagine the time lost ramping up for demand when you have to wade your way through moronic purchasing and license agreements. (MS) Or when you have to wait for a proprietary hardware manufacturer (SUN) rather than going to the fastest local parts shop for some motherboards and drives. You take out all the silly stuff, and your time is spent where it's important - configuring and tweaking these fire-tested solutions to maximize your investments in hardware and bandwidth.
Looks like a good article to have at hand the next time some suit comes and tries to sell the Dean on a the "efficiency" of a homogenous, proprietary "whole campus" solution.
A rock colliding with the earth can create a near nuclear explosion.
Uhm... nope. The kinetic energy of the impact, given a large enough mass, can rival the energy released by a nuclear device. But the explosion itself is not generated by a nuclear reaction - you won't irradiate the area, there won't be an EMP.
Besides, Nuclear Winter sounds so much niftier than Big Rock Winter. Same end result, tho.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple is making the transition to Intel processors (which does NOT mean that MacOS X will run on commodity x86 hardware).
Why? Steve mentioned a lack of a PowerPC roadmap. Leander at Cult of Mac mentioned possible Intel DRM to enable iTunes for Movies. Everyone mentions that we haven't seen a PowerBook G5.
Why now? We all know that Apple's going to take it on the chin in the Mac hardware sales division. But Apple can take that hit right now. It has the well-known $4 billion in reserves. And it also has the iPod and iTMS - which have been bringing in a large percent of Apple's profits lately. With iPod running high for, well, the next year or so, that can prop up the Mac division through the transition slump.
The judge won't grant their injunction, and will probably toss the entire thing. But in the meantime, TigerDirect is suddenly getting a whole lot of free (minus the cost of filing the suit) publicity...
iPhoto never "killed" Photoshop Elements - iPhoto came out before Photoshop Elements was ever released, and there was never a Mac version of PE. If anything, iPhoto created the demand for Photoshop Elements, as Windows users were casting about for an iPhoto-like app on their platform.
Downloadable?
iDVD and GarageBand, if you haven't heard, require a DVD drive to install. Not because Apple's trying to make you buy combo-drive machines, but because there's so much damn stuff (themes for iDVD, music and loops for GB) that otherwise you'd be schlepping through 7-8 CDs to install 'em.
Yeah, right. Download that.
(Ignoring the religion and focusing on solutions...)
You have two seperate problems
Email is one. For that, you want to get your arse on an IMAP server. This will allow your mail to "live" on the server (with only a local cache on the various boxes choose to log into). Heck, moving your email to IMAP will even allow you to install SquirrelMail on an apache/php system someplace, configure it to connect to your IMAP server, and then you even have web-based email.
Contacts/ToDo/Calendar is another problem.
iCal is, frighteningly enough, among the first major-publisher apps to use "standards based" file formats (in iCal's case, it's the iCalendar format). Outlook XP and Entourage v.X use MS-proprietary file formats. There is no way to easily transfer data *directly* between the apps. They may both bear the MS name, but the development teams are adequately siloed that they may as well be entirely different products.
As as previous poster mentioned, your best bet to go between Outlook XP and Entourage is going to be a Palm-based PDA (Palm, Handspring, Clie) with an Outlook conduit on the PC side. That will take care of your to-do, contacts, and calendar between those two apps.
Later, when iSync comes along, that same Palm will be able to sync your XP data with the Jaguar-internal apps: AddressBook and iCal.
That is, I'm afraid, the best option available for you. Chances are great that you can find an old Visor dirt-cheap on eBay (a used Handspring Visor will be your cheapest USB-based Palm solution.) Your serial number will get you the Handpring PC download with the Outlook conduit.
Best of luck!
Nope - Jaguar's been the code-name for the pending OS X update for quite some time now. QuickTime 6 is to be integrated into the Jaguar release (and is being held by licensing issues)
Far too many admins focus on the process of being an admin, rather than on serving customers. On platforms and products rather than solutions.
Far too many Windows-only admins have been trained as MCSEs, and that training emphasizes a one-world homogenous platform. Products and platforms. "Here's Windows - and the things you can do with it," rather than, "What do you need to do, and how can Windows help you do that?" The thought processes of these admins (and I've seen this time and time again in 14 years of being a sysadmin) takes the cant of "how can I convince my customers to work this way?" The way that the MS tools provide.
It's the wrong question. The wrong approach.
The user is the customer, not the enemy. They pay you to solve their problems, so give them solutions. It shouldn't matter what platform - Mac, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD - what should be at issue is what provides the best solution for the customers needs.
Apple makes the lion's share of their profits from selling hardware, not software, so additional operating system choices only increase the number of potential customers.
The only way it could negatively impact Apple's bottom line is by lengthening the upgrade cycle; a useable Linux system is less resource-intensive than a tricked-out OSX system, thus keeping "older" Macs in use longer rather than requiring the users to buy new hardware. Even then, one could argue that those "older Mac" users are people who wouldn't have the money for a newer system anyways - so it simply increases the number of Macs in use.
On second thought, an exceptionally strong Linux presence on Mac might pull some open source development muscle away from OS X development. But that kind of impact would be several years in the making...
But remember, not only is it good to exercise choice - it's also good to encourage the proliferation of choice. (Huh?)
If you like Mandrake's work at providing a feature-rich Linux distro for the Mac, be sure to give 'em some money (ie, consider buying some CDs) so they'll see reason to keep up the excellent work!
Or, conversely, acknowledging popular hacks as features that customers want to see in their products.
Apple actually has a long history of this - and in many cases they've actually compensated the orginal "hack" author. WindowShade, an Apple Menu with submenus, a single control panel for Internet-related prefs - these are just a few hacks that were either freeware or shareware that ended up becoming MacOS features.
iTools Webmail may just be the latest - there were already sites like imapple.net offering web-based access to iTools accounts (via IMAP clients like IMP and SquirrelMail). Apple may have realized that (since they really couldn't cut IMAP access), it was in their better interest to make a clean local (fast) webmail implementation.
Granted, Apple's hand may have been "forced" by websites such as imapple.net that were using IMP and SquirrelMail to provide access to mac.com email accounts, but Apple's implementation is fast, clean, and imposes minimally on the users.
Although you have to use a Mac with at least OS9 to sign up for iTools, you can access the mac.com email via web or POP/IMAP client from any platform, and the iTools disk space and HomePage storage (20MB) is acessible via any platform that supports WebDAV.
That's much better support of open standards and ease-of-access than Hotmail, Yahoo!, GeoCities, you name it.
DOS attacks are rarely about sophistication - it's pure destructive potential. Script kiddies bragging on IRC channels about the number of "zombies" they've managed to acquire via the latest script that some grey-hat with genuine skills has written - eventually the bragging gets to a point where they have to do something with all their proudly acquired toys. Usually against some other l337 haxxOR who has impugned their skills.
Save rather than beating each other senseless (which would be so, so much more preferable), they're compromising systems and using them as their weapons - costing users and admins hundreds of work-hours so they can prove something.
Hell, at least "tagging" doesn't take down the damn company server.
Good replies. I did comment that I was playing "blue-sky sci-fi author" - take one little development and run with it. But it's good to see the serious consideration.
I'm wondering why they wouldn't just contract out with the Government and move the operation to a secure military installation somewhere in the DC area.
There are already enough (valid) concerns in the international community that the US has too much control over much of the Internet. That's part of why the government got out of the biz of running these services, and contracted them out.
Locating them in a government installation would raise all those old concerns again, in a rather valid fashion. The USA isn't the sum total of the 'Net, after all...
So here's an interesting thought.
We can stop and "store" light.
So play blue-sky sci-fi author for a moment. Enormous dirigibles floating above the cloud layer, absorbing and storing light until "full", then coming to ground and offloading the light they've "mined" into solar cells (which no longer have to be laid out in flat arrays covering enormous fields) for conversion into electricity.
Hasn't that always been one of the problems, after all? There's plenty of bright, uninterrupted light available in the upper atmosphere, but the thought was always to convert it to electricity *up there* and somehow transmit the energy to ground level.
Maybe we'll just be able to mine the light.
Scary.
Interesting to note is the concept art and storyboarding for Blade II, some of which is available at the Blade 2 website. A lot of work was done by Mike Mignola (best known for his Hellboy comics, but also one of the big concept artists behind Disney's animated Atlantis), some creature design was done by Wayne Barlow, and characters such as Reinhart and Lighthammer were done by Tim Bradstreet.
Blade II had a lot of very interested potential that, unfortunately, wasn't realized (in favor of some way-over-the-top computer-enhanced fight scenes). Sad to see this concept work go to waste - I'd almost be interested in an "Art Of" book, based on some of the sketchs and artwork available on the website.
Starcraft and Warcraft II are both older, yes. Also arguably simpler than Diablo II, more directly related to the WarCraft III development cycle, and (most importantly) both are stable products.
Diablo II and LOD, on the other hand, was being actively patched and updated until December of last year.
And Unreal Tournament... well, the OSX port is entirely unsupported - it's a "in my spare time" project from the president of Westlake Interactive, and still hasn't progressed past "Preview Release 2".
Handspring is recommending that Visor users refrain from using Palm's release of Desktop 4.0, mostly because Handspring hasn't done their own testing with the new software.
However, it's working fine with my Visor Platinum. Just one gotcha - the Palm distribution tries to install update files (which, obviously, don't work on the Visor). The solution is to delete or rename the "PalmOS Updates" folder from the folder that the Palm Desktop application is stored in (it can't find the updates, so doesn't install 'em. Simple.)
As was pointed out on another website, MacOS X hadn't even shipped in public beta form when Diablo II was released. While I'm sure that the OSX updates for WarCraft II, StarCraft, and Diablo II are mostly applications of things Blizzard developers have learned as part of the WarCraft III development cycle, it's still very good of Blizzard to release those efforts to the Mac gaming public.
Then again, I'd also wager that Diablo II (and LOD) has sold enough copies to recoup Blizzard's investment at this point - and the goodwill they're generating amongst the OSX-using community will just translate into additional sales for WarCraft III when it hits the bricks. Not much, granted (I'm realistic about MacOS market share), but every bit helps, neh?
I've got an end-luser who claims that, when she opened up the email attachement she received (bad luser, bad!), it brought up an image of the statue of liberty flipping off the viewer.
Granted, I haven't felt like offering up a system for sacrifice to verify, but it goes well with the earlier comment that things linked back to a pro-WTC 2600 site...
Heck, just imagine the time lost ramping up for demand when you have to wade your way through moronic purchasing and license agreements. (MS) Or when you have to wait for a proprietary hardware manufacturer (SUN) rather than going to the fastest local parts shop for some motherboards and drives. You take out all the silly stuff, and your time is spent where it's important - configuring and tweaking these fire-tested solutions to maximize your investments in hardware and bandwidth.
Looks like a good article to have at hand the next time some suit comes and tries to sell the Dean on a the "efficiency" of a homogenous, proprietary "whole campus" solution.
Uhm... nope. The kinetic energy of the impact, given a large enough mass, can rival the energy released by a nuclear device. But the explosion itself is not generated by a nuclear reaction - you won't irradiate the area, there won't be an EMP.
Besides, Nuclear Winter sounds so much niftier than Big Rock Winter. Same end result, tho.