I have just one question for anyone who has tried YDL 2.2 - does your Airport card work by default?
By "work", I mean by default - not after dicking around, upgrading kernels, and searching google to find the right command line stuff to get it going.
Does the installer set it up for you? If not, my question is why not? Why is this so hard - there is only one Apple Airport card, and every Mac that has one uses the same driver, so what's the problem?
well, the iBook has some nice attributes. It has built in 802.11b networking and a nice long battery life. It's also very small and nice and lightweight if you're going to be carrying it around.
I primarily use it for editing HTML and ColdFusion pages (for which any editor of your choice will do), browsing, IM, and email on the go. For those tasks there is not much difference between it and a Wintel. It was also $999 which was attractive.
But honestly, unless you have some SPECIFIC reason to choose a Mac, I wouldn't bother. For example, if you do print publishing or video editing. If you want to play games, just word process, browse the web, etc. just get a Wintel.
I own an iBook, 500mhz, 640 MB RAM with OS X. It feels slower than a 500mhz Wintel with Windows 2000, and far, far, far slower than a typical entry level Wintel laptop (1ghz these days).
I still like it as a computer. But (unlike most Mac people) I'm not going to sit here and tell you it's twice as fast per Mhz than x86, because it's not. In fact, with OS X, it's not even as fast as x86 at the SAME clockspeed.
A basic example would be moving, resizing, and switching between windows. My computer has a Rage128 video card. Resizing and scrolling around windows is painfully slow. On a Wintel laptop with the same video card, windows refresh like lightning, scrolling and resizing happens in real time. Keep in mind this is a "fair" comparison - same video card, similar priced systems, with "heavy duty" operating systems (OS X and W2k)
There are a lot of good things about the Macintosh platform. But speed is not one of them. People who choose them have other reasons to stay with the platform.
Nonsense. If demand warrants it, they'll add more cells, just like they've been doing all along.
No way. If that were true, then Cingular Wireless would actually be USABLE in Los Angeles after 3PM. You're crazy if you think a cellular company is going to willingly spend money on infrastructure.
They will do so, but only when their level of service sinks far below what others provide. And since they are all fairly sucky, that can take a while.
In Los Angeles, Cingular is getting about to that point now. No one I know would ever sign up for Cingular because the service is so bad. Everyone jumps to a different provider as soon as their contract is up.
Just wondering if anyone has any inside information on the Ricochet network. They were purchased by Aerie networks, who claim they'll be offering service again "soon", for less than it was before!
At $50 a month for unmetered 128kbps (many subscribers got faster than that, too) Ricochet is easily the best way to get wireless data.
I see their transmitters hanging off lightposts all over my neighborhood, too. Every time I drive past one I'm reminded of what could have been...
My younger brother is 22 years old and plays EverQuest alot. He's away at school and I rarely see him, so I had no idea how bad his EverQuest addiction was.
Over the Christmas holiday, we all got together for a few days. He brought his tower computer, monitor, modem, etc. home and set it up in the living room. Now, despite being repeatedly asked NOT to tie up the phone line during the day, he played EverQuest during all his waking hours during the holiday. 10 people were staying in the house and could not make or receive calls.
But that wasn't the worst of it. Since so many people were there, I was sleeping on the floor 20 feet away from him with no walls in between us. He refused to turn off his speakers and the contstant tap-tap-tap of his keyboard was keeping me awake. It did not seem to make sense to him that others might want to sleep at 4 AM.
At midnight, then 1:30, then 3 AM, I asked him to turn it off and he refused. My mom came down and told him to turn it off and go to bed. Two hours later he was still playing. I told him to turn it off and he refused, so I pulled the plug out of the wall. This resulted in him screaming "You a-hole I was about to kill the blah blah monster and it only appears once a day and I wanted the blah blah enchanted armor" or some nonsense.
Of course the whole house was awakened. My mom came down and sat with him, explaining why he could not play anymore. You would think that would be the end and we all could finally sleep, right? Wrong. For the next half hour he sat there, CRYING LIKE A BABY while my mother tried to console him. I mean really crying, sobbing with tears and sniffles. He just could not cope with not being able to play anymore!
Let me remind you, he is 22 years old.
The time he spent playing EverQuest should have been spent enjoying the company of his family over the holiday, but he "choose" to spend it playing EQ.
Why? He is addicted. If he doesn't wake up and realize this, he probably will not graduate from University, but he does not care.
I want to install OSX. (Please, save your "Go to CompUSA you cheap bastard" and "piracy is killing the Mac" rants"--if you had any hope of convincing me, I wouldn't be posting here.)
I say copy away, dude. You already "paid" for OS X when you bought your iMac, which came with Apple premium R&D included in the form of a $300 price increase over what you would have paid for a Wintel.
Seriously, Apple fans always justify the price premium by insinuating that it's necessary in order to fund OS development, so since you've already paid by buying the hardware, why feel guilty?
You a-holes! You actually had me thinking there was a chance to make my iBook run OS X faster! Bastards!
The fact that I would get so excited over a potential 10% speed increase shows just how BADLY OS X runs on the iBook. The most hopeful are the most easily duped:(
I can't believe no one has posted a link to the Bumper Dumper yet. That's right - you too can get a toilet seat that hooks up to a trailer hitch for dumping comfort when you're out in the woods. Simply plug it in and park your truck over a hole.
Mods for Apple laptops are apparently incredibly popular in Japan - they have all kinds of stuff like replacement colored light up keyboards, etc. Not just one-off mods, but actual production parts that you can buy at retail.
There are plenty of links to replacement keyboards and such for other Powerbooks like the Wallstreet, Pismo, etc, but for some reason, nothing has appeared yet for the IceBook. Anyone have any links to cool mods for it? A keyboard would go great with a paint mod.
A link at the top of the 'preference editing form' takes you to this page: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/privacy/privacy-23.h tml, which states that the changes made to your account will not take effect for 60 days, giving you time to sswitch everything back to "no".
Still sleazy, but maybe not as bad as you think - they won't be spamming you right away, and you DO have the opportunity to decline between now and then.
You're confused. Pantone is not CMYK, and CMYK is not Pantone. I can print beautiful 4 color photographs, posters, etc. and never touch Pantone.
Pantone is a color matching architecture. You look in a Pantone swatch book, pick a color you like - say, Pantone 131. Now, in PageMaker or Quark or whatever, you can specify Pantone 131, and reasonably expect that the color that comes off the printing press will look like what you saw in the swatch book. Very useful, and great when you want to match a color across mediums. So your company can design their logo using "Pantone 4351", and expect a good color match between their business cards, letterhead, and annual report.
But you DON'T need to use Pantone colors to produce CMYK prints. You can produce beatiful, 4 color printed catalogs, posters, magazines, etc. and never touch Pantone.
There are color match swatchbook for CMYK, too - works exactly the same as described above, with Pantone. It's just that you have to specify C: 21% M 12% Y 45% K 5% instead of an easy to remember Pantone number.
So even if Adobe does have a patent on the Pantone algorithyms, that doesn't hamper GIMPs ability to output CMYK correctly, because seperating CMYK has nothing to do with Pantone.
Finally, I will point out that even if your magazine or whatever DID use Pantone, you could still use GIMP (if it supported CMYK). Why? Because full color photographs seperate cleanly into CMYK (no Pantone involved) EVEN IF you're also printing Pantone on the same page.
Seriously, there's no patent issue here. GIMP doesn't support CMYK because no one has written it yet. Probably because no one capable sees the need for it, and I agree, because no one in their right mind would even attempt to use Linux for print publishing, whether GIMP had CMYK or not!
If you're tired of downloading, RedHat base, etc. you ought to look into Debian. I've been running it on my iBook for well over a year now without any troubles. And with apt-get you really only install once and then just upgrade packages until your hardware stops functioning.
I don't know if you'll read this, but maybe someone else can answer. I'm willing to try Debian, but my general complaint with Linux on PPC is that nothing works. You have to install and then tweak, upgrade kernel, etc. if you want sound, modem, airport, etc to work.
When you suggest Debian, are you saying that it DOES work, or that it CAN BE MADE to work. Because that makes a big difference.
Maybe I'm a clueless newbie when it comes to Unix/Linux/BSD related stuff, but why would anyone use Yellow Dog Linux when you have Mac OS X, and its fully supported developer environment, tools, and user base that is greater than all flavours of Linux combined?
For one reason, Mac OS X is really slow. Linux runs FAR faster on my iBook. Makes OS X look positively pokey.
The bad news is basically nothing works under Linux. I tried Yellow Dog 2.1. After the install, I had no sound, no airport, and their "YUP" update tool plain doesn't work.
Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but given that they only have to make sure it works on 4 computers, I expect things to "just work".
There is NO patent stopping anyone from writing a CMYK plugin, and you know it.
CMYK color is based on a very simple principal - 4 colors of ink, that when mixed properly, form spectrum of printable colors in commercial printing. I can assure you that Adobe does not own that.
Anyone who wants can write a program to output CMYK seperations to film for commercial printing. The GIMP folks haven't done it yet for one reason - IT'S HARD.
I absolutely agree. It's a very small step from downloading a free program for a free OS to downloading the "cracked" version of a pay program for a free OS.
I think you already know the answer - Linux folks will happily copy commercial software if they feel they "need" to, just like Windows folks do.
Sadly enough, Gimp might be a powerful program for your web images work, however Adobe holds a patent when it comes to CMYK colors, which are a must if you want to do print work.
Are you suggesting that GIMP can't do CMYK because "Adobe has a patent" ? Patent on what? I have 5 applications installed on my computer right now that handle CMYK, and none are Adobe products.
The only reason GIMP doesn't handle CMYK is that no one has bothered to write it.
And there's not just doctors, mind you. Elevator repair people. People with rare blood types who carry pagers in case they have to give a transfusion in a hurry. People who are responsible for disabled relatives, who've hired a temporary caregiver so they can take a night off. Anybody who others are depending on, and just need to be available.
What did all these people do BEFORE cell phones and pagers? Answer: they stayed somewhere they could be reached.
Let's be honest, phones in movie theatres are a new problem, say, in the last 10 years.
Surely people who must be urgently reached in all cases can make other arrangements, just like they did prior to 1980. Examples:
Leave the number of the theatre with a babysitter, stay home when a fast response might be needed, check in periodically once not in the theater.
The other thing is, if a cell phone or a pager is being jammed, the device should tell the user ("Out Of Range" or "No Service" message) and you can make a CHOICE to either stay at that establishment (and face the possible consequences), or in the case of a movie theater...simply walk up to the manager before your movie starts and say "I would like my money back...I'm a doctor and I can't stay here because my pager is being jammed". Or if you are seeing a movie, call your hospital and leave the number of the theater with them...
Yes! Great idea. Every mobile phone I've ever used says "no service" in big letters when it can't get a usable signal, so no one can complain they didn't know their phone was being blocked. They can then make a CHOICE to not go to that establishment when they are on call, or make alternative arrangements, as you suggest.
Having auto-silent mode helps... but doesn't completely solve the problem. Some folks will feel the vibrating ring in the movie theater... AND ANSWER THE PHONE AND START A CONVERSATION.
I've said it elsewhere attached to a different article - first movie theater that blocks cell phone ringers and conversation and ejects patrons whose phone goes off during the show gets ALL my moviegoing dollars. I'll pay extra and drive across town.
The alternative is violence, and I predict an outbreak of violence against cell users in movie theatres within the next two years. I myself have been close to the point of violence, and I don't consider myself a violent person.
I know about control-click. Control click is dumb when just putting another mouse button would solve the problem.
Learning control click is actually worse from an interface standpoint - now I have to control click when on the road, and right click my regular mouse when "docked" at home or office. Stupid to have to think, even for a moment, about where I am before clicking.
Some good criticisms, but please drop the tired mouse argument. Yes everybody knows it, no nothing will change, yes OS X supports multibutton mice natively so just buy a USB one for $20 and throw the other one away.
Can you please let us all know how to replace the internal mouse on a laptop with a two button one? You can't. It needs to be BUILT IN to the computer, but Apple refuses. I can't use an external mouse on a train, bus, or car, which is where I use my laptop.
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By "work", I mean by default - not after dicking around, upgrading kernels, and searching google to find the right command line stuff to get it going.
Does the installer set it up for you? If not, my question is why not? Why is this so hard - there is only one Apple Airport card, and every Mac that has one uses the same driver, so what's the problem?
Interesting that the transmitters have not been taken down, huh? (at least in my neighborhood). That seems promising.
I primarily use it for editing HTML and ColdFusion pages (for which any editor of your choice will do), browsing, IM, and email on the go. For those tasks there is not much difference between it and a Wintel. It was also $999 which was attractive.
But honestly, unless you have some SPECIFIC reason to choose a Mac, I wouldn't bother. For example, if you do print publishing or video editing. If you want to play games, just word process, browse the web, etc. just get a Wintel.
And funny you should bring up dual display, since all Macs USED to be able to do that, until Apple started crippling them. (iBook).
I own an iBook, 500mhz, 640 MB RAM with OS X. It feels slower than a 500mhz Wintel with Windows 2000, and far, far, far slower than a typical entry level Wintel laptop (1ghz these days).
I still like it as a computer. But (unlike most Mac people) I'm not going to sit here and tell you it's twice as fast per Mhz than x86, because it's not. In fact, with OS X, it's not even as fast as x86 at the SAME clockspeed.
A basic example would be moving, resizing, and switching between windows. My computer has a Rage128 video card. Resizing and scrolling around windows is painfully slow. On a Wintel laptop with the same video card, windows refresh like lightning, scrolling and resizing happens in real time. Keep in mind this is a "fair" comparison - same video card, similar priced systems, with "heavy duty" operating systems (OS X and W2k)
There are a lot of good things about the Macintosh platform. But speed is not one of them. People who choose them have other reasons to stay with the platform.
No way. If that were true, then Cingular Wireless would actually be USABLE in Los Angeles after 3PM. You're crazy if you think a cellular company is going to willingly spend money on infrastructure.
They will do so, but only when their level of service sinks far below what others provide. And since they are all fairly sucky, that can take a while.
In Los Angeles, Cingular is getting about to that point now. No one I know would ever sign up for Cingular because the service is so bad. Everyone jumps to a different provider as soon as their contract is up.
At $50 a month for unmetered 128kbps (many subscribers got faster than that, too) Ricochet is easily the best way to get wireless data.
I see their transmitters hanging off lightposts all over my neighborhood, too. Every time I drive past one I'm reminded of what could have been...
Over the Christmas holiday, we all got together for a few days. He brought his tower computer, monitor, modem, etc. home and set it up in the living room. Now, despite being repeatedly asked NOT to tie up the phone line during the day, he played EverQuest during all his waking hours during the holiday. 10 people were staying in the house and could not make or receive calls.
But that wasn't the worst of it. Since so many people were there, I was sleeping on the floor 20 feet away from him with no walls in between us. He refused to turn off his speakers and the contstant tap-tap-tap of his keyboard was keeping me awake. It did not seem to make sense to him that others might want to sleep at 4 AM.
At midnight, then 1:30, then 3 AM, I asked him to turn it off and he refused. My mom came down and told him to turn it off and go to bed. Two hours later he was still playing. I told him to turn it off and he refused, so I pulled the plug out of the wall. This resulted in him screaming "You a-hole I was about to kill the blah blah monster and it only appears once a day and I wanted the blah blah enchanted armor" or some nonsense.
Of course the whole house was awakened. My mom came down and sat with him, explaining why he could not play anymore. You would think that would be the end and we all could finally sleep, right? Wrong. For the next half hour he sat there, CRYING LIKE A BABY while my mother tried to console him. I mean really crying, sobbing with tears and sniffles. He just could not cope with not being able to play anymore!
Let me remind you, he is 22 years old.
The time he spent playing EverQuest should have been spent enjoying the company of his family over the holiday, but he "choose" to spend it playing EQ.
Why? He is addicted. If he doesn't wake up and realize this, he probably will not graduate from University, but he does not care.
I say copy away, dude. You already "paid" for OS X when you bought your iMac, which came with Apple premium R&D included in the form of a $300 price increase over what you would have paid for a Wintel.
Seriously, Apple fans always justify the price premium by insinuating that it's necessary in order to fund OS development, so since you've already paid by buying the hardware, why feel guilty?
The fact that I would get so excited over a potential 10% speed increase shows just how BADLY OS X runs on the iBook. The most hopeful are the most easily duped :(
Yes, I'm serious, and yes, that link is real!
There are plenty of links to replacement keyboards and such for other Powerbooks like the Wallstreet, Pismo, etc, but for some reason, nothing has appeared yet for the IceBook. Anyone have any links to cool mods for it? A keyboard would go great with a paint mod.
Still sleazy, but maybe not as bad as you think - they won't be spamming you right away, and you DO have the opportunity to decline between now and then.
Pantone is a color matching architecture. You look in a Pantone swatch book, pick a color you like - say, Pantone 131. Now, in PageMaker or Quark or whatever, you can specify Pantone 131, and reasonably expect that the color that comes off the printing press will look like what you saw in the swatch book. Very useful, and great when you want to match a color across mediums. So your company can design their logo using "Pantone 4351", and expect a good color match between their business cards, letterhead, and annual report.
But you DON'T need to use Pantone colors to produce CMYK prints. You can produce beatiful, 4 color printed catalogs, posters, magazines, etc. and never touch Pantone.
There are color match swatchbook for CMYK, too - works exactly the same as described above, with Pantone. It's just that you have to specify C: 21% M 12% Y 45% K 5% instead of an easy to remember Pantone number.
So even if Adobe does have a patent on the Pantone algorithyms, that doesn't hamper GIMPs ability to output CMYK correctly, because seperating CMYK has nothing to do with Pantone.
Finally, I will point out that even if your magazine or whatever DID use Pantone, you could still use GIMP (if it supported CMYK). Why? Because full color photographs seperate cleanly into CMYK (no Pantone involved) EVEN IF you're also printing Pantone on the same page.
Seriously, there's no patent issue here. GIMP doesn't support CMYK because no one has written it yet. Probably because no one capable sees the need for it, and I agree, because no one in their right mind would even attempt to use Linux for print publishing, whether GIMP had CMYK or not!
I don't know if you'll read this, but maybe someone else can answer. I'm willing to try Debian, but my general complaint with Linux on PPC is that nothing works. You have to install and then tweak, upgrade kernel, etc. if you want sound, modem, airport, etc to work.
When you suggest Debian, are you saying that it DOES work, or that it CAN BE MADE to work. Because that makes a big difference.
For one reason, Mac OS X is really slow. Linux runs FAR faster on my iBook. Makes OS X look positively pokey.
The bad news is basically nothing works under Linux. I tried Yellow Dog 2.1. After the install, I had no sound, no airport, and their "YUP" update tool plain doesn't work.
Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but given that they only have to make sure it works on 4 computers, I expect things to "just work".
CMYK color is based on a very simple principal - 4 colors of ink, that when mixed properly, form spectrum of printable colors in commercial printing. I can assure you that Adobe does not own that.
Anyone who wants can write a program to output CMYK seperations to film for commercial printing. The GIMP folks haven't done it yet for one reason - IT'S HARD.
I absolutely agree. It's a very small step from downloading a free program for a free OS to downloading the "cracked" version of a pay program for a free OS.
I think you already know the answer - Linux folks will happily copy commercial software if they feel they "need" to, just like Windows folks do.
Are you suggesting that GIMP can't do CMYK because "Adobe has a patent" ? Patent on what? I have 5 applications installed on my computer right now that handle CMYK, and none are Adobe products.
The only reason GIMP doesn't handle CMYK is that no one has bothered to write it.
uh, yeah. 10.1.x is what I, and everyone else is using. It's still slow.
What did all these people do BEFORE cell phones and pagers? Answer: they stayed somewhere they could be reached.
Let's be honest, phones in movie theatres are a new problem, say, in the last 10 years.
Surely people who must be urgently reached in all cases can make other arrangements, just like they did prior to 1980. Examples:
Leave the number of the theatre with a babysitter, stay home when a fast response might be needed, check in periodically once not in the theater.
Yes! Great idea. Every mobile phone I've ever used says "no service" in big letters when it can't get a usable signal, so no one can complain they didn't know their phone was being blocked. They can then make a CHOICE to not go to that establishment when they are on call, or make alternative arrangements, as you suggest.
I've said it elsewhere attached to a different article - first movie theater that blocks cell phone ringers and conversation and ejects patrons whose phone goes off during the show gets ALL my moviegoing dollars. I'll pay extra and drive across town.
The alternative is violence, and I predict an outbreak of violence against cell users in movie theatres within the next two years. I myself have been close to the point of violence, and I don't consider myself a violent person.
Learning control click is actually worse from an interface standpoint - now I have to control click when on the road, and right click my regular mouse when "docked" at home or office. Stupid to have to think, even for a moment, about where I am before clicking.
Can you please let us all know how to replace the internal mouse on a laptop with a two button one? You can't. It needs to be BUILT IN to the computer, but Apple refuses. I can't use an external mouse on a train, bus, or car, which is where I use my laptop.