To be honest, there are a lot of days now where I'm considering switching back to a 96ppi display. Every graphical image on the web is ~25% smaller with the 126ppi display. Every website designer thinks it's a bright idea to specify font sizes in pixels rather then points. (Thank goodness for Mozilla's ability to specify minimum font size.)
Even on a 96 ppi display this is hateful... and if you set a minimum font size then things often overflow places the developer didn't expect them to overflow and you lose text under layers.
On the Mac this whole problem is less of a problem, because you can always cmd-opt-+ to zoom in.
Then Steve Jobs can take his complaints about G5 powerbooks and shove them where the sun don't shine. If he really cared about the performance of the Powerbook he'd have taken that as "One More Thing" and he'd be all over Freescale to get him a working MPC8641D.
I probably wouldn't care if my menubar got a little smaller, but the 9pt type I use in my editor is about the limit of what I can comfortably work with.
Even on a CRT, where I get fake antialiasing from the analog nature of the pixels, 9pt text is uncomfortably jaggy. Even on OSX with antialiased characters. On an LCD anything less than 11pt makes me feel like I'm working on a Commodore-64 that's been hit with a shrink ray.
I don't want a higher resolution to cram more 9pt text on the screen.
I want a higher resolution so I don't need to cram 9pt text on the screen in the first place.
I am guessing that the reason Apple didn't jump is......the MPC8641 isn't out yet. It may never come out now. But why didn't they use the MPC7448, at least? 200 MHz memory bus would at least have given them a bit of a boost.
I don't believe they'll have Rosetta running at anything close to current G4 speeds by release, so holding back the PB to make Rosetta look like it's better than it really is... nah.
My hands aren't luminous, the touchpad isn't illuminated, and there's a lot more to go wrong with Apple's keyboard than IBM's. It's a technically good implementation of the wrong design.
Its funny that a lot of people are bashing the 'low res' powerbook screens. I want to know in comparison to what?
Thinkpads.
My 3-4 year old Thinkpad has more pixels on its 14" screen than the old 17" powerbook did on it 17" screen. It's still got a higher resolution screen than the 15", and I use it outside with no problems.
And it's got the best keyboard on any laptop currently made, bar none, while the Powerbooks (let alone the ibooks) have horrible flat soggy things that feel like I'm typing on a decomposing alligator.
Your neighbor with a "brand new Dell" screwed up. He bought a Dell. If you're buying a PC laptop, your choices are Toshiba, IBM^WLenovo, or Sony. And, really, unless you want an ultralight your best choice is still a Thinkpad. But after these three... anything else is cattle-class.
The new Powerbooks offer no real advantage to their predecessors, besides a wider screen.
The new powerbooks offer no advantage over their predecessors, other than fixing the biggest problem that Apple's laptops suffer from... the lousy resolution. Now how about a 1280x960 refresh for the 15" iBook, Apple? Oh, and get together with Lenovo and make some keyboards that don't suck.
I definitely agree. They still don't have as good a keyboard as the Thinkpad, and the Ultrabay is still a killer capability (though I'd happily give up the 1/10" advantage in thickness the new slim Ultrabay gives you in exchange for continued compatibility with older devices). Plus the 1-button mouse and the stupid illuminated keyboard (IBM has a grain-of-rice LED in the lid that illuminates the WHOLE keyboard instead of just outlining the keys).
Apple and IBM *did* get together on one of their early laptops. Maybe they can partner with Lenovo when they go Intel?
I don't want a PowerHungryBook G5, I want a Powerbook with an MPC8641 in it (assuming Freescale hasn't indefinitely deferred that in light of Apple's June announcement). There's nothing wrong with a G4 that dual 768 MHz memory busses won't fix.
Yeh, it was embarassing that my 14" Thinkpad had more pixels than the 17" Powerbook.
I wonder what all the people who argued that Apple wasn't doing higher resolution books for good technical reasons... like, they wanted to have a constant DPI on all displays... are going to say now?
You have no idea how the domain name system works.
DNS is controlled, at the lowest level, by the people who write and publish DNS software. In a way you can say that the root servers are defined by what Paul Vixie decides goes in the root cache of BIND.
Changing the DNS root servers your computer uses takes 5 minutes. There's dozens of "alternative roots", most of which exist to promote dome non-standard top-level domain, like ".dot" or ".cool". One of them, however, exists to provide an internationally controlled root that supports exactly the same domains as the official ones, in exactly the same way, but outside US control.
Paul Vixie's company is running one of the actual computers that implement this particular set of international alternate root servers.
So.
There is NO WAY that ICANN or anyone else could force any country to pay for access to DNS, because the root servers are deliberately NOT a single point at which DNS can be controlled. It's not technically possible.
Most third-party groups might complain about the price, but paying it puts them in a position to have few competitors.
And this is good for the consumer (or Apple) how?
What you're describing as an advantage for the manufacturers is precisely the problem with this program. It reduces the variety of devices compatible with the iPod, which is in the interests neither of the consumer nor Apple themselves. After all, the variety of iPod products is probably the main reason I bought *mine*.
The US wants to keep control for purely financial reasons. They want to gouge other countries for access, and allow the big telecoms to maintain their control on the flow of information at asinine prices.
Tens of millions, really, and not too many of them.
They're risking one of the biggest advantages the iPod has... the plethora of add-ons... for a tiny fraction of the profits they're making from the iPod.
other libraries that don't ship as fat libraries in Tiger, which includes, err, umm, all the X11 libraries in/usr/X11R6/lib
That's all open source software, and the client part of it is very portable.
unless you don't want to have to build 64-bit versions of the X11 libraries yourself
Given the amount of duplicate copies of crap commercial software often comes with (I've found multiple versions of Apache in ONE package), an extra copy of Xlib, Xm, etcetera is, well, trivial.
Apple substantially downplayed the video capability of the iPod
Indeed. The thing has lower resolution than my Clie, cost more, and is about the same size. But it has way more memory and plays music far better.
That "about" is a pretty big thing, though.
It's almost the same width and height. But it's 30% thinner. It's thinner than the iPod Mini was. It's only 1/10th of an inch thicker than the iPod Shuffle. And there's hardly any mention of that...
it's ridiclous to think that anyone would buy a Mac just to run Motif/X11 stuff
Who said anything about "just"? It's ridiculous to think that anyone would buy anything but a Mac to run all the rest of the software a UNIX user needs. I mean, OK, if you're buying a dedicated workstation you're going to go Alpha or something (though with the death of the Alpha there's really no competitive traditional UNIX left), but what about normal apps? Oh, I know lots of people stick with Motif/CDE/Gnome/KDE, but they're kinda Amish, you know?
unitl Apple has 64-bit API support (2007?), it's moot point anyway.
Apple has 64-bit API support, but not in code that calls the GUI frameworks. Since X11 code doesn't call the GUI directly... it talks to X11 through a message queue even if it uses shared memory... the shortcomings in OSX's 64-bit support shouldn't have an impact on X-based software.
they've finally merged the regedit/regedt32 functionality
Cool. It's a bit like giving a guy with a broken arm an aspirin, but it does reduce the pain a little. Codeine would be better, but he'd still have a broken arm no matter what you did with the registry.
I think whether a program is hooking itself in through Programs\Startup, registry run keys, win.ini or as a service, the operating system should warn you about it -- and not allow it unless you are running as admin
Ah. "Here's some codeine, but you gotta sit on this whoopie cushion before I'll give it to you".
Look, the real problem isn't that the registry makes it so hard to find stuff like this... though that's a problem. Once I've got my code running on your box, I won you. I'll find some way of coming back after you reboot no matter how hard you make it. Maybe I'll take one of the aliases on your desktop and redirect it to my code, or look for an application program that runs scripts, or change your home page in Internet Explorer to one that starts me up and then redirects back to whetever you had it set to. There's always another place to hide once you're in, and any OS will have the same capabilities.
I don't call them "problems", any more than the fact that I could steal some water from your outside tap a "problem" with your house... you'd have to so cripple your computer to prevent it from happening that it's clearly not where you want to start working on the problem.
The broken arm, the fundamentally screwed up design of IE and the desktop, will still be there. Deal with *that*, and then we can worry about Administrator and the Registry. That's why I started off with the comment that I largely agree with the original poster... the Registry is a problem, but it's not the whole problem, or even that big a part of the problem.
Not that I don't wish it and its designers sucked screaming down to the lake of boiling blood on a regular basis, mind you, but you have to keep a sense of perspective...
I agree with you that the other problems (particularly ActiveX, and the plethora of IPC mechanisms, and the lack of control over application bindings,...) are a much bigger part of the problem, but the Registry DOES make things worse.
The pains of the registry often have not much to do with the registry itself
The biggest pain of the registry here, as opposed to the "INI" files (which actually do allow hierarchical organization within the file system and protections on the files themselves), is that while there are an incredible number of tools (even some decent ones that come with the system) that people can use to examine, search, analyse, and otherwise keep track of things in text files... working with the registry is like building a ship in a bottle. Worse, it's like building it with two pairs of tweezers, one (regedit) that lets you search the bottle for bits of the ship but doesn't give you a good look at the bits themselves, and the other (regedt32) that lets you look at the bits in detail... but only one at a time.
If startup programs were stored in a file somewhere, it would be well-known quickly enough, and we would have just as many problems.
Startup programs are stored in the file system as well, under the Start Menu/Programs/Startup folder in your Profile. They're not as big a problem there, because they're easier to see and remove.
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To be honest, there are a lot of days now where I'm considering switching back to a 96ppi display. Every graphical image on the web is ~25% smaller with the 126ppi display. Every website designer thinks it's a bright idea to specify font sizes in pixels rather then points. (Thank goodness for Mozilla's ability to specify minimum font size.)
Even on a 96 ppi display this is hateful... and if you set a minimum font size then things often overflow places the developer didn't expect them to overflow and you lose text under layers.
On the Mac this whole problem is less of a problem, because you can always cmd-opt-+ to zoom in.
Then Steve Jobs can take his complaints about G5 powerbooks and shove them where the sun don't shine. If he really cared about the performance of the Powerbook he'd have taken that as "One More Thing" and he'd be all over Freescale to get him a working MPC8641D.
I probably wouldn't care if my menubar got a little smaller, but the 9pt type I use in my editor is about the limit of what I can comfortably work with.
Even on a CRT, where I get fake antialiasing from the analog nature of the pixels, 9pt text is uncomfortably jaggy. Even on OSX with antialiased characters. On an LCD anything less than 11pt makes me feel like I'm working on a Commodore-64 that's been hit with a shrink ray.
I don't want a higher resolution to cram more 9pt text on the screen.
I want a higher resolution so I don't need to cram 9pt text on the screen in the first place.
I am guessing that the reason Apple didn't jump is... ...the MPC8641 isn't out yet. It may never come out now. But why didn't they use the MPC7448, at least? 200 MHz memory bus would at least have given them a bit of a boost.
I don't believe they'll have Rosetta running at anything close to current G4 speeds by release, so holding back the PB to make Rosetta look like it's better than it really is... nah.
My hands aren't luminous, the touchpad isn't illuminated, and there's a lot more to go wrong with Apple's keyboard than IBM's. It's a technically good implementation of the wrong design.
Its funny that a lot of people are bashing the 'low res' powerbook screens. I want to know in comparison to what?
Thinkpads.
My 3-4 year old Thinkpad has more pixels on its 14" screen than the old 17" powerbook did on it 17" screen. It's still got a higher resolution screen than the 15", and I use it outside with no problems.
And it's got the best keyboard on any laptop currently made, bar none, while the Powerbooks (let alone the ibooks) have horrible flat soggy things that feel like I'm typing on a decomposing alligator.
Your neighbor with a "brand new Dell" screwed up. He bought a Dell. If you're buying a PC laptop, your choices are Toshiba, IBM^WLenovo, or Sony. And, really, unless you want an ultralight your best choice is still a Thinkpad. But after these three... anything else is cattle-class.
If only they had a touchpad equivalent of the mighty mouse...
What, a fake two-button touchpad that doesn't work right unless you take your finger off the touchpad before clicking the right side of the button?
I want a second button on the touchpad. Screw the cute effects.
The new Powerbooks offer no real advantage to their predecessors, besides a wider screen.
The new powerbooks offer no advantage over their predecessors, other than fixing the biggest problem that Apple's laptops suffer from... the lousy resolution. Now how about a 1280x960 refresh for the 15" iBook, Apple? Oh, and get together with Lenovo and make some keyboards that don't suck.
I was going to stick in 4 300Gb drives and a SATA RAID card, but now it looks like this will be impossible.
Why compromise the cooling of your computer instead of going with an external SATA case like this one
Doesn't Freescale have a G4 with a 200 MHz bus? Even if they can't get the MPC8641 yet, they could at least get a BIT of a speed bump there.
I definitely agree. They still don't have as good a keyboard as the Thinkpad, and the Ultrabay is still a killer capability (though I'd happily give up the 1/10" advantage in thickness the new slim Ultrabay gives you in exchange for continued compatibility with older devices). Plus the 1-button mouse and the stupid illuminated keyboard (IBM has a grain-of-rice LED in the lid that illuminates the WHOLE keyboard instead of just outlining the keys).
Apple and IBM *did* get together on one of their early laptops. Maybe they can partner with Lenovo when they go Intel?
I don't want a PowerHungryBook G5, I want a Powerbook with an MPC8641 in it (assuming Freescale hasn't indefinitely deferred that in light of Apple's June announcement). There's nothing wrong with a G4 that dual 768 MHz memory busses won't fix.
Yeh, it was embarassing that my 14" Thinkpad had more pixels than the 17" Powerbook.
I wonder what all the people who argued that Apple wasn't doing higher resolution books for good technical reasons... like, they wanted to have a constant DPI on all displays... are going to say now?
You have no idea how the domain name system works.
DNS is controlled, at the lowest level, by the people who write and publish DNS software. In a way you can say that the root servers are defined by what Paul Vixie decides goes in the root cache of BIND.
Changing the DNS root servers your computer uses takes 5 minutes. There's dozens of "alternative roots", most of which exist to promote dome non-standard top-level domain, like ".dot" or ".cool". One of them, however, exists to provide an internationally controlled root that supports exactly the same domains as the official ones, in exactly the same way, but outside US control.
Paul Vixie's company is running one of the actual computers that implement this particular set of international alternate root servers.
So.
There is NO WAY that ICANN or anyone else could force any country to pay for access to DNS, because the root servers are deliberately NOT a single point at which DNS can be controlled. It's not technically possible.
Most third-party groups might complain about the price, but paying it puts them in a position to have few competitors.
And this is good for the consumer (or Apple) how?
What you're describing as an advantage for the manufacturers is precisely the problem with this program. It reduces the variety of devices compatible with the iPod, which is in the interests neither of the consumer nor Apple themselves. After all, the variety of iPod products is probably the main reason I bought *mine*.
Have you tried a Palm or Pocket PC and Mobibook Reader?
The US wants to keep control for purely financial reasons. They want to gouge other countries for access, and allow the big telecoms to maintain their control on the flow of information at asinine prices.
Gouge countries for access to root DNS servers?
What the hell are you talking about?
Tens of millions, really, and not too many of them.
They're risking one of the biggest advantages the iPod has... the plethora of add-ons... for a tiny fraction of the profits they're making from the iPod.
other libraries that don't ship as fat libraries in Tiger, which includes, err, umm, all the X11 libraries in /usr/X11R6/lib
That's all open source software, and the client part of it is very portable.
unless you don't want to have to build 64-bit versions of the X11 libraries yourself
Given the amount of duplicate copies of crap commercial software often comes with (I've found multiple versions of Apache in ONE package), an extra copy of Xlib, Xm, etcetera is, well, trivial.
There's been lots of mp3 Audiobooks.
Fictionwise has been selling mp3 audiobooks for at least a year, maybe two.
Baen has been selling mp3 audiobooks and including them for free on CDs included in some volumes for about as long.
Apple substantially downplayed the video capability of the iPod
Indeed. The thing has lower resolution than my Clie, cost more, and is about the same size. But it has way more memory and plays music far better.
That "about" is a pretty big thing, though.
It's almost the same width and height. But it's 30% thinner. It's thinner than the iPod Mini was. It's only 1/10th of an inch thicker than the iPod Shuffle. And there's hardly any mention of that...
I was thinking "iPorn" would be appropriate.
Are we going to see Porncasting as the new trend?
it's ridiclous to think that anyone would buy a Mac just to run Motif/X11 stuff
Who said anything about "just"? It's ridiculous to think that anyone would buy anything but a Mac to run all the rest of the software a UNIX user needs. I mean, OK, if you're buying a dedicated workstation you're going to go Alpha or something (though with the death of the Alpha there's really no competitive traditional UNIX left), but what about normal apps? Oh, I know lots of people stick with Motif/CDE/Gnome/KDE, but they're kinda Amish, you know?
unitl Apple has 64-bit API support (2007?), it's moot point anyway.
Apple has 64-bit API support, but not in code that calls the GUI frameworks. Since X11 code doesn't call the GUI directly... it talks to X11 through a message queue even if it uses shared memory... the shortcomings in OSX's 64-bit support shouldn't have an impact on X-based software.
they've finally merged the regedit/regedt32 functionality
Cool. It's a bit like giving a guy with a broken arm an aspirin, but it does reduce the pain a little. Codeine would be better, but he'd still have a broken arm no matter what you did with the registry.
I think whether a program is hooking itself in through Programs\Startup, registry run keys, win.ini or as a service, the operating system should warn you about it -- and not allow it unless you are running as admin
Ah. "Here's some codeine, but you gotta sit on this whoopie cushion before I'll give it to you".
Look, the real problem isn't that the registry makes it so hard to find stuff like this... though that's a problem. Once I've got my code running on your box, I won you. I'll find some way of coming back after you reboot no matter how hard you make it. Maybe I'll take one of the aliases on your desktop and redirect it to my code, or look for an application program that runs scripts, or change your home page in Internet Explorer to one that starts me up and then redirects back to whetever you had it set to. There's always another place to hide once you're in, and any OS will have the same capabilities.
I don't call them "problems", any more than the fact that I could steal some water from your outside tap a "problem" with your house... you'd have to so cripple your computer to prevent it from happening that it's clearly not where you want to start working on the problem.
The broken arm, the fundamentally screwed up design of IE and the desktop, will still be there. Deal with *that*, and then we can worry about Administrator and the Registry. That's why I started off with the comment that I largely agree with the original poster... the Registry is a problem, but it's not the whole problem, or even that big a part of the problem.
Not that I don't wish it and its designers sucked screaming down to the lake of boiling blood on a regular basis, mind you, but you have to keep a sense of perspective...
I agree with you that the other problems (particularly ActiveX, and the plethora of IPC mechanisms, and the lack of control over application bindings, ...) are a much bigger part of the problem, but the Registry DOES make things worse.
The pains of the registry often have not much to do with the registry itself
The biggest pain of the registry here, as opposed to the "INI" files (which actually do allow hierarchical organization within the file system and protections on the files themselves), is that while there are an incredible number of tools (even some decent ones that come with the system) that people can use to examine, search, analyse, and otherwise keep track of things in text files... working with the registry is like building a ship in a bottle. Worse, it's like building it with two pairs of tweezers, one (regedit) that lets you search the bottle for bits of the ship but doesn't give you a good look at the bits themselves, and the other (regedt32) that lets you look at the bits in detail... but only one at a time.
If startup programs were stored in a file somewhere, it would be well-known quickly enough, and we would have just as many problems.
Startup programs are stored in the file system as well, under the Start Menu/Programs/Startup folder in your Profile. They're not as big a problem there, because they're easier to see and remove.