Compressing a 200-byte XML file down to two bytes may be impressive, but with all the overhead of XML (doctype tags, etc), that's pretty much an empty file. I'd love to see how this performs on a larger data file of, say, megabytes in size.
Ah, but iTunes is based heavily on SoundJam MP, which, according to AppleInsider, Apple bought, programmer and all. (Yes, it's a rumors site, but playing with iTunes easily confirms it.) So the good performance and quality are mostly inherited from SJMP.
Which probably means the end of the line for SoundJam, which is a shame because iTunes can't use skins, and it's not loading the SJ visualization plug-ins even though it has a folder for them.
The new PowerMacs come with CD-RW drives (as expected), except for the 733Mhz one which comes with a "SuperDrive" combo CD-RW/DVD-R (not to be confused with the "SuperDrive" high-density floppy drive). The top three models also come with the nVidia GeForce2 MX card, but a Radeon is available as an option.
OS X is going to be in stores on March 24 (don't have any idea what that date is), and going to be preinstalled on Macs in the summer. The Apple menu is back on the left side of the menubar, and holds general system-wide stuff. It's not configurable. Folders in the dock, when you click and hold, pop up menus of their contents. The buttons in the header in Finder windows are configurable. If the buttons are shown, opening a folder replaces the existing contents; if the buttons are hidden, a new folder is spawned. There is a new widget on the right side of the title bar of windows for toggling the buttons. A status bar ("2 items, 7.9 GB free") is togglable separately.
iTunes (which Jobs accidentally called "iMusic" once) is a mix of SoundJam MP and Radialogic's CD Master. Plays and rips CDs, burns CDs, for free. Go get it from your iDisk.
iDVD is quite interesting. It encodes MPEG2 video at half-realtime, and provides a slick, idiot-proof way to build DVDs. The options for menus are varied but limited, and in the demo there always seemed to be an Apple logo in the corner (ugh). There is a pro version of it called DVD Studio Pro, but it wasn't demoed. This is obviously derived from Apple's acquisition of Astarte's software.
The Titanium PowerBook is sweet. Widescreen LCD, slot-loading DVD drive, G4. Whoo whee!
Clean rooming might be a defense against copyright infringement, but it's not against patent infringement.
And actually, MS had nothing to do with the invention of TrueType. This was way back when Apple was feeling screwed by Adobe, so they decided to do a cross-licensing pact with Microsoft. Apple gave MS a license for TrueType, and MS gave Apple (IIRC) some PostScript clone (TrueImage, was it?). TrueType took off on Windows, since it was way better than anything the average PC-er had ever seen, but the clone that Apple got from MS never made it out the door.
Apple's font people haven't been standing still; take a look at http://fonts.apple.com/ for a whole bunch of nifty font toys.
Hey, memory isn't cheap, but not that expensive. Who are they aiming for? People who don't use their computers much don't need this extra memory. People who need all the memory they can get either are working with large amounts of non-compressible data (huge files like graphics, archives, etc.) or people who would be worried if compression failed.
And I still don't know how this works. If I ask for n bytes, and the hardware allocates me n/2 bytes, what happens if I load something non-compressible? Something has to give.
Wouldn't touch this with the 10-foot stick I keep around for these purposes.
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Huh? The version of Quicktime that comes with OS X is QT 5. And if you have a Pro key for it, you can see the large preview just fine.
Compressing a 200-byte XML file down to two bytes may be impressive, but with all the overhead of XML (doctype tags, etc), that's pretty much an empty file. I'd love to see how this performs on a larger data file of, say, megabytes in size.
Avi
Geez. And I was so happy when I found that one of my CDs wasn't in there. I put the data in, feeling so good that I was helping fill in the cracks.
What assholes.
Avi
Fire can do AIM just fine because it uses the libfaim library, which is GPL.
RTFP (http://www.epicware.com/fire-features.html)
Avi
The archive has the patch in .exe and .ips versions. If you have a Mac, you'll need an IPS patcher app to apply the patch. I found one at:
http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~cwright/ips/
and it seems to work fine for me.
Avi
Ah, but iTunes is based heavily on SoundJam MP, which, according to AppleInsider, Apple bought, programmer and all. (Yes, it's a rumors site, but playing with iTunes easily confirms it.) So the good performance and quality are mostly inherited from SJMP.
Which probably means the end of the line for SoundJam, which is a shame because iTunes can't use skins, and it's not loading the SJ visualization plug-ins even though it has a folder for them.
Avi
A few interesting points:
Avi
Clean rooming might be a defense against copyright infringement, but it's not against patent infringement.
And actually, MS had nothing to do with the invention of TrueType. This was way back when Apple was feeling screwed by Adobe, so they decided to do a cross-licensing pact with Microsoft. Apple gave MS a license for TrueType, and MS gave Apple (IIRC) some PostScript clone (TrueImage, was it?). TrueType took off on Windows, since it was way better than anything the average PC-er had ever seen, but the clone that Apple got from MS never made it out the door.
Apple's font people haven't been standing still; take a look at http://fonts.apple.com/ for a whole bunch of nifty font toys.
Avi
since it's nicely enclosed in a Windows executable, making it useless for we Mac folks
Just drop it on StuffIt Expander. It has no problem unpacking it.
Of course, you'll probably end up missing the EULA... :-)
Avi
Hey, memory isn't cheap, but not that expensive. Who are they aiming for? People who don't use their computers much don't need this extra memory. People who need all the memory they can get either are working with large amounts of non-compressible data (huge files like graphics, archives, etc.) or people who would be worried if compression failed.
And I still don't know how this works. If I ask for n bytes, and the hardware allocates me n/2 bytes, what happens if I load something non-compressible? Something has to give.
Wouldn't touch this with the 10-foot stick I keep around for these purposes.
Avi