And 640 K should be enough for anybody. You don't do much international travel, do you?
L.A. to Sydney (Qantas): 14 hours.
New York to Hong Kong (Continental): 16 hours.
Chicago to Hong Kong (United): 15 hours.
Singapore to London (Singapore Airlines): 13 hours-- somewhat longer if you go the other way.
No, it's a hardware thing. I haven't taken the time to check my facts (ffff--wha?) but I seem to remember that the memory controller on the G4 motherboard automatically parallelizes accesses to memory, reading from and writing two more than one bank at the same time. If the number of banks of RAM in the machine is of the proper divisibility, really high degrees of interleaving can be achieved.
Yes, that's EXACTLY what NFS does. Shared-storage SANs try to do the same job in a different way.
Despite what you might think, the primary difference between NFS and a shared-storage SAN isn't the medium; one uses gigabit Ethernet and the other gigabit Fibre Channel. The different is the presence of the server in an NFS environment.
The server listens for mount requests and grants or denies them, and it responds to requests for data by reading the data from the disk, marshalling it, and shipping it off to the client.
In a shared-storage SAN, these functions have to be performed in some other way. A common approach is to nominate one machine on a SAN to be the "metadata server." Any disk operation that doesn't involve reading or writing actual data blocks goes through the metadata server over Ethernet.
For example, if you were doing a "cat" on your workstation, the "cat" program would first do a "stat()" to see if the named file is there, then a number of "read()"s to get the data. The "stat()" call would result in the disk driver sending a set of SCSI commands to the disk to get data out of the file's inode, and the "read()" calls would get blocks of data off the disk.
In a shared-storage SAN environment, these two calls would be handed differently. The "stat()" call would be handled through communication with the metadata server over Ethernet, while the "read()" calls would access the disks directly with SCSI-over-FC commands.
In an NFS environment, the NFS server would take care of both of those things; the NFS client would have to worry about neither.
Some SANs use a dedicated metadata server (like Sanergy) while some have a complex and pretty darn cool scheme for nominating a metadata server dynamically (like CXFS).
Maybe that helps shed some light on why my opinion is that shared-storage SANs are more trouble than they're worth.
The word "SAN" can mean two very different things: switched access to storage, or shared access to storage.
The simplest kind of SAN has a number of computers and a number of storage devices all connected to a fibre channel switch. Each computer gets some of the storage for its own private use. No two computers ever mount the same filesystem at the same time.
The advantages of that kind of SAN are mostly physical: buy a bunch of storage and put it on the SAN, then allocate it to the computers "softly," by changing LUN mapping and such, rather than by running new cables.
If that's the kind of SAN you're talking about, I'd say go for it. The IS group that manages the SAN will take care of some of your problems for you-- maintaining the RAID hardware, namely-- but in all other ways it'll be just like direct-attached storage.
The other kind of SAN allows multiple computers to mount the same filesystem at the same time and access its data over fibre channel. This is a lot more complex, obviously, because your storage software has a lot of work to do: keeping buffer caches consistent, managing file locking, propogating metadata updates, and on and on.
This kind of SAN requires a special driver, like Sanergy or Centravision or CXFS. (Google 'em.)
They're often more trouble than they're worth, especially if you start talking about large storage clusters (8 nodes or more). I'd avoid these.
You left out your time. I don't know about you, but my time is worth about $500 an hour to me-- I did the math once, a couple of years ago, and that's how it worked out.
Buy a Mac. Plug it in. Go. I'm not sure what I have to say to make you understand that this is valuable.
I customize the G4 with everything I would want total cost: 8800.00 dollars!
I tried reproducing your experiment:
2 x 1 GHz PPC G4
1.5 GB RAM
2 x 72 GB Ultra160 SCSI drives
22" Apple Cinema Display
iPod
Zip 250
GeForce 4 MX
UltraSCSI PCI card
internal modem
Apple Pro speakers
AirPort card
Cost: $8,803.
Now, then, let's be fair. Take out the iPod (sheesh; they're great, but don't use one to artifically inflate the price of the Mac) and the 2 x 72 GB SCSI drives and the Zip drive (does anybody still use those things?).
Cost: $6,105.
Now drop the Apple Cinema Display because, while it's a gorgeous item, it's $2500! Also, I believe that the Mac will perform better with 1 GB or 2 GB of RAM instead of 1.5 GB; something to do with interleaving. Drop 512 MB of RAM and save another $200.
Cost: $3,406.
I'll be damned! The computer I want really *does* cost about $3,000!
Where are the crazy features? How about four little feet that walk around to amuse the user? Or a spout that collects humidity to make a wicked glass of iced tea every few hours?
I just picked one up at the local Apple store. When I got it hope, it jumped out of the box, handed me a card, and ran around my neighborhood. The card said, "I have been trained to gather fruit for you."
*munch, munch* Quite possibly the world's finest dog^H^H^Hcomputer.
I just bought a dual 500 G4 PowerMac about 1 1/2 years ago for $3,000 w/ an ATI Rage Pro 128. Now I can get a dual 1Ghz PowerMac w/ a GeForce4 for $3,000. Awesome!
I've heard it said many times, and I'll repeat it myself: the computer you want always costs $3,000.
(I've heard another version that names a cost of $5,000. I guess that guy's computer is just a little more than I really want.)
You can choose which API you wanted to work with. You can quite happily combine Carbon, Cocoa, the BSD layer, Java and X-Windows into the one application.
Almost. The one big thing that I've found OS X to be lacking is the dlopen()/dlsym() API for dynamic loading of shared objects. This certainly won't be a big deal for most people, but it's made it a litle harder for me to port some of my existing code to OS X.
Buildings glowing from within? This is terrible for astronomers... the added light pollution would further ruin the viewing conditions for many great observatories.
Maybe that wouldn't be so bad. I say, the sooner we got astronomers off the surface and up to the far side of the moon, where they belong, the better.
Yeah, that's a pretty common situation: manage a bunch of servers and their storage with a SAN and use NFS or SMB or AppleShare to get the data to the desktop.
The big problem with SANs is scalability. Fibre Channel ports on an FC switch are very expensive compared to Ethernet ports on a network switch. Also, if you have 10 clients hitting the same storage system, it tends to thrash pretty inefficiently. Connecting the same storage system to one server means all access to that storage goes through the server's I/O buffers.
This, of course, doesn't even get in to the problems of SAN token passing and file access arbitration. Computers on a SAN act as a tightly coupled cluster; daemons on each server communicate with all the others to prevent any two servers from trying to write to the same disk blocks at the same time. Extending that architecture to dozens or hundreds (or more!) clients is challenging, to say the least.
So running FC straight to the desktop wouldn't be a great idea in most cases.
Taking Ethernet to the storage is a different idea entirely. The idea is called iSCSI, and it involves running SCSI protocols on top of TCP, so clients can access disks over the low-cost Ethernet network. It requires special drivers for your OS that present the iSCSI interface to the OS like a SCSI device, and that encapsulate the SCSI commands sent by the OS and user space programs inside a TCP connection to a storage device on the other end.
iSCSI storage systems must have some kind of a computer (usually embedded) that control them; in the case of IBM's iSCSI product, it's a Pentium III running Linux. In this way, iSCSI devices aren't very different from NAS devices; only the protocol for communicating with the client is different.
The thing that's great about servers, though, is that they can do more than just provide file services. They can provide storage management and backup, and run applications. When compared with a big enterprise-wide server cluster that provides databases and file services and backup and HSM and whatever else, iSCSI appliances seem kinda primitive.
Oh, you are going to get so flamed for this. Just comparing FireWire and Gig E in this way means that you must fundamentally misunderstand one or both of them.
Your life would have been so much easier if you'd just said:
"I'm not a hardware guy, but at first glance it would seem more efficient to eliminate Firewire altogether and equip peripherals with Fibre Channel ports, ultimately moving all wired communication to a unified standard. Am I missing something?"
Then we could have an intelligent discussion about crosstalk and carrying power and data on the same cable. As it is, you're just going to get things thrown at you.
What the business model studies fail to take into account is that open source software goes both ways. A company that develops it may not be able to recover some costs directly, but, on the other hand, that same company may also use free software created by others without paying anything for it.
Net economic result: zero.
Which explains why lots of people believe it's impossible to make money in Free Software.
However, I'm pretty sure that something will come along (maybe Vivissimo (check my spelling on that)) that will supplant's Yahoo's tried-and-true categories.
Your spelling blows.;-) It's "Vivisimo."
It's pretty cool, too. Just for fun I typed in "infinite reality" (without quotes) to see how it handled that.
Here are the categories it gave me:
Graphics
Universe
Philosophy
Existence
Science
Idea, Help
Buddhism
Book, Channel
Biography, Theology
Arts
Not too bad. Google's search was better; the "I feel lucky" button took me right to SGI's Onyx2 page. But the way vivisimo parsed the input and assigned categories was pretty cool.
What do you mean by work? If the people doing the work and happy and the people using the products are happy then it works. Who else matters?
I think a business that works can be pretty clearly defined as one that survives. A business can't lose money and survive; if it does, then it's not a business. It's a church or a dot com or something.
The socialist ideal (don't flame me yet!) of a world in which we all work for love and money isn't important is a neat idea and all, but that's not the world we live in. In order to live, I have to make money, because despite my constant protestations to the contrary my bank won't give me my car and my house for free. Can't understand it myself. I explained to them how residences and transportation should be Free (as in libre) and free (as in gratis), and I forwarded them some of Stallman's writings, but they just don't seem to get it.
So I'm stuck being a part of this whole "economy" thing. Therefore I must wedge myself into a situation in which somebody gives me a fairly substantial amount money on a regular basis. We call these situations "jobs."
Jobs are provided by companies to people based on the premise that the company will be able to take more money in than it gives out. Come to think of it, maybe that's why my house wasn't free....
Anyway, if the company that pays me (say, Red Hat, although it isn't) gives out more money than it takes in, eventually it will run out of money. The people who work for the company (say, Red Hat) will be faced with the sudden, unpleasant realization that their houses aren't Free (as in libre) or free (as in gratis). They've gotta find another one of those "job" situations so they can make their mortgage payments.
Poof. The company (say, Red Hat) disappears.
I'd say that's how I define "works." If it doesn't do what I just described (the "poof" part), then it "works."
I think a certain number of typos in a book that I pay for should allow me to receive a refund.
Knuth still offers a bounty for every error-- typographical, factual, logical, whatever-- found in any of his books. If I recall, the bounty for errors in TAOCP is up to $2.56 per item.
The result? Pretty damn near error-free books. Go, capitalism.
just so you know, comparing a linux company to a car company is ver different.
Actually, it's a much better analogy than you realize. The cost of the materials and labor that goes into producing a single car is nothing-- a few thousand dollars at the very most, and the vast majority of that in labor costs-- compared to the tens of millions of dollars spent to conceptualize and design that car model.
To my knowledge, nobody's ever done a cost-accounting for, say, Red Hat Linux 7.2. Let's say it cost a grand total of $6 million to produce Red Hat 7.2, going all the way back to Linus's spare time. Your plan for recouping those costs and eventually making a profit is called a business model, and the jury is still very much out on whether it can be made to work.
But really, who cares? After all, you can't spell analogy without anal.
A MAN OF FIFTY NINE YEARS IS NOT OLD. HARRISON IS MIDDLE-AGED. NOT OLD.
WHILE I AGREE-- Ahem.
While I agree with you in principle, 59 will be considered "middle-aged" when the average lifespan is 120. Since the average lifespan hovers around 72, depending on your gender and nationality, 59 is, unfortunately, Getting On Up There.
I know that MacOS apps don't need that 2nd button, but WTF are you supposed to do if you want to run Linux or run *nix apps on OSX?
The right-mouse-button click is emulated by holding down the "control" key and clicking. (Actually, it's the other way around. The right mouse button sends the computer a control-click.) So for OS X apps, do a control-click instead of a right-click.
XDarwin takes it one step further, offering mappable keyboard-mouse combos for X button event emulation. Go to the XDarwin screenshots page and look at the second screenshot.
And, of course, there is the favorite option of one-button-basher-haters: spend the $30 and buy a f*cking external three-button USB mouse.
A minor nit: the Ti PowerBook has actually got an AirPort card built in already.
Bzzt. The Ti PowerBook has an AirPort antenna built in already, just like the iBook and iMac. You can purchase PowerBooks from Apple that have the AirPort installed at the factory, but that's not the same as built-in.
The titanium powerbook is an awesome piece of kit. Shame on those that don't have one.
Yes, the Ti PowerBook has a lot going for it. Yup, it's thinner than thin. Uh-huh, beautiful screen. Ooh, built-in Gigabit Ethernet. Pretty fast, too, and it comes with a combo DVD-ROM/CD-RW. Hard to beat.
But it's not perfect. To install an AirPort card, you have to skin it completely. And the sexy titanium skin is so thin, it scratches and dents very easily. And titanium is one of the most conductive metals on the periodic table; after an hour, the bottom of the laptop gets hot enough to make your thighs and the palms of your hands really uncomfortable. The joke going around the office after we bought ours was that Apple was planning to make the next one out of copper.
It's an awesome laptop, but in my opinion it's just a little bit too delicate. I love my iBook. I throw it in my backpack and hit the road. Over $1,000 cheaper, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Ten hours should be plenty for any flight...
And 640 K should be enough for anybody. You don't do much international travel, do you?
L.A. to Sydney (Qantas): 14 hours.
New York to Hong Kong (Continental): 16 hours.
Chicago to Hong Kong (United): 15 hours.
Singapore to London (Singapore Airlines): 13 hours-- somewhat longer if you go the other way.
No, it's a hardware thing. I haven't taken the time to check my facts (ffff--wha?) but I seem to remember that the memory controller on the G4 motherboard automatically parallelizes accesses to memory, reading from and writing two more than one bank at the same time. If the number of banks of RAM in the machine is of the proper divisibility, really high degrees of interleaving can be achieved.
Isn't this what NFS is?
Yes, that's EXACTLY what NFS does. Shared-storage SANs try to do the same job in a different way.
Despite what you might think, the primary difference between NFS and a shared-storage SAN isn't the medium; one uses gigabit Ethernet and the other gigabit Fibre Channel. The different is the presence of the server in an NFS environment.
The server listens for mount requests and grants or denies them, and it responds to requests for data by reading the data from the disk, marshalling it, and shipping it off to the client.
In a shared-storage SAN, these functions have to be performed in some other way. A common approach is to nominate one machine on a SAN to be the "metadata server." Any disk operation that doesn't involve reading or writing actual data blocks goes through the metadata server over Ethernet.
For example, if you were doing a "cat" on your workstation, the "cat" program would first do a "stat()" to see if the named file is there, then a number of "read()"s to get the data. The "stat()" call would result in the disk driver sending a set of SCSI commands to the disk to get data out of the file's inode, and the "read()" calls would get blocks of data off the disk.
In a shared-storage SAN environment, these two calls would be handed differently. The "stat()" call would be handled through communication with the metadata server over Ethernet, while the "read()" calls would access the disks directly with SCSI-over-FC commands.
In an NFS environment, the NFS server would take care of both of those things; the NFS client would have to worry about neither.
Some SANs use a dedicated metadata server (like Sanergy) while some have a complex and pretty darn cool scheme for nominating a metadata server dynamically (like CXFS).
Maybe that helps shed some light on why my opinion is that shared-storage SANs are more trouble than they're worth.
The word "SAN" can mean two very different things: switched access to storage, or shared access to storage.
The simplest kind of SAN has a number of computers and a number of storage devices all connected to a fibre channel switch. Each computer gets some of the storage for its own private use. No two computers ever mount the same filesystem at the same time.
The advantages of that kind of SAN are mostly physical: buy a bunch of storage and put it on the SAN, then allocate it to the computers "softly," by changing LUN mapping and such, rather than by running new cables.
If that's the kind of SAN you're talking about, I'd say go for it. The IS group that manages the SAN will take care of some of your problems for you-- maintaining the RAID hardware, namely-- but in all other ways it'll be just like direct-attached storage.
The other kind of SAN allows multiple computers to mount the same filesystem at the same time and access its data over fibre channel. This is a lot more complex, obviously, because your storage software has a lot of work to do: keeping buffer caches consistent, managing file locking, propogating metadata updates, and on and on.
This kind of SAN requires a special driver, like Sanergy or Centravision or CXFS. (Google 'em.)
They're often more trouble than they're worth, especially if you start talking about large storage clusters (8 nodes or more). I'd avoid these.
You left out your time. I don't know about you, but my time is worth about $500 an hour to me-- I did the math once, a couple of years ago, and that's how it worked out.
Buy a Mac. Plug it in. Go. I'm not sure what I have to say to make you understand that this is valuable.
I customize the G4 with everything I would want total cost: 8800.00 dollars!
I tried reproducing your experiment:
2 x 1 GHz PPC G4
1.5 GB RAM
2 x 72 GB Ultra160 SCSI drives
22" Apple Cinema Display
iPod
Zip 250
GeForce 4 MX
UltraSCSI PCI card
internal modem
Apple Pro speakers
AirPort card
Cost: $8,803.
Now, then, let's be fair. Take out the iPod (sheesh; they're great, but don't use one to artifically inflate the price of the Mac) and the 2 x 72 GB SCSI drives and the Zip drive (does anybody still use those things?).
Cost: $6,105.
Now drop the Apple Cinema Display because, while it's a gorgeous item, it's $2500! Also, I believe that the Mac will perform better with 1 GB or 2 GB of RAM instead of 1.5 GB; something to do with interleaving. Drop 512 MB of RAM and save another $200.
Cost: $3,406.
I'll be damned! The computer I want really *does* cost about $3,000!
Where are the crazy features? How about four little feet that walk around to amuse the user? Or a spout that collects humidity to make a wicked glass of iced tea every few hours?
I just picked one up at the local Apple store. When I got it hope, it jumped out of the box, handed me a card, and ran around my neighborhood. The card said, "I have been trained to gather fruit for you."
*munch, munch* Quite possibly the world's finest dog^H^H^Hcomputer.
I just bought a dual 500 G4 PowerMac about 1 1/2 years ago for $3,000 w/ an ATI Rage Pro 128. Now I can get a dual 1Ghz PowerMac w/ a GeForce4 for $3,000. Awesome!
I've heard it said many times, and I'll repeat it myself: the computer you want always costs $3,000.
(I've heard another version that names a cost of $5,000. I guess that guy's computer is just a little more than I really want.)
Given the context of the conversation, he was most likely talking about the Quicktime API which is proprietary.
Maybe you're confused. The API is fully documented.
You can choose which API you wanted to work with. You can quite happily combine Carbon, Cocoa, the BSD layer, Java and X-Windows into the one application.
Almost. The one big thing that I've found OS X to be lacking is the dlopen()/dlsym() API for dynamic loading of shared objects. This certainly won't be a big deal for most people, but it's made it a litle harder for me to port some of my existing code to OS X.
Buildings glowing from within? This is terrible for astronomers... the added light pollution would further ruin the viewing conditions for many great observatories.
Maybe that wouldn't be so bad. I say, the sooner we got astronomers off the surface and up to the far side of the moon, where they belong, the better.
Yeah, that's a pretty common situation: manage a bunch of servers and their storage with a SAN and use NFS or SMB or AppleShare to get the data to the desktop.
The big problem with SANs is scalability. Fibre Channel ports on an FC switch are very expensive compared to Ethernet ports on a network switch. Also, if you have 10 clients hitting the same storage system, it tends to thrash pretty inefficiently. Connecting the same storage system to one server means all access to that storage goes through the server's I/O buffers.
This, of course, doesn't even get in to the problems of SAN token passing and file access arbitration. Computers on a SAN act as a tightly coupled cluster; daemons on each server communicate with all the others to prevent any two servers from trying to write to the same disk blocks at the same time. Extending that architecture to dozens or hundreds (or more!) clients is challenging, to say the least.
So running FC straight to the desktop wouldn't be a great idea in most cases.
Taking Ethernet to the storage is a different idea entirely. The idea is called iSCSI, and it involves running SCSI protocols on top of TCP, so clients can access disks over the low-cost Ethernet network. It requires special drivers for your OS that present the iSCSI interface to the OS like a SCSI device, and that encapsulate the SCSI commands sent by the OS and user space programs inside a TCP connection to a storage device on the other end.
iSCSI storage systems must have some kind of a computer (usually embedded) that control them; in the case of IBM's iSCSI product, it's a Pentium III running Linux. In this way, iSCSI devices aren't very different from NAS devices; only the protocol for communicating with the client is different.
The thing that's great about servers, though, is that they can do more than just provide file services. They can provide storage management and backup, and run applications. When compared with a big enterprise-wide server cluster that provides databases and file services and backup and HSM and whatever else, iSCSI appliances seem kinda primitive.
There's more info on iSCSI on IBM's web site.
So, to sum up, it sounds like the way things are in your network is a pretty good way of doing things.
Oh, you are going to get so flamed for this. Just comparing FireWire and Gig E in this way means that you must fundamentally misunderstand one or both of them.
Your life would have been so much easier if you'd just said:
"I'm not a hardware guy, but at first glance it would seem more efficient to eliminate Firewire altogether and equip peripherals with Fibre Channel ports, ultimately moving all wired communication to a unified standard. Am I missing something?"
Then we could have an intelligent discussion about crosstalk and carrying power and data on the same cable. As it is, you're just going to get things thrown at you.
So very close.
What the business model studies fail to take into account is that open source software goes both ways. A company that develops it may not be able to recover some costs directly, but, on the other hand, that same company may also use free software created by others without paying anything for it.
Net economic result: zero.
Which explains why lots of people believe it's impossible to make money in Free Software.
However, I'm pretty sure that something will come along (maybe Vivissimo (check my spelling on that)) that will supplant's Yahoo's tried-and-true categories.
;-) It's "Vivisimo."
Your spelling blows.
It's pretty cool, too. Just for fun I typed in "infinite reality" (without quotes) to see how it handled that.
Here are the categories it gave me:
Graphics
Universe
Philosophy
Existence
Science
Idea, Help
Buddhism
Book, Channel
Biography, Theology
Arts
Not too bad. Google's search was better; the "I feel lucky" button took me right to SGI's Onyx2 page. But the way vivisimo parsed the input and assigned categories was pretty cool.
MODERATORS: Please spend a point on the parent of this comment. It was written by an AC and probably won't get read by many people. That's too bad.
Stupid "can't comment and moderate in the same topic" rule....
What do you mean by work? If the people doing the work and happy and the people using the products are happy then it works. Who else matters?
I think a business that works can be pretty clearly defined as one that survives. A business can't lose money and survive; if it does, then it's not a business. It's a church or a dot com or something.
The socialist ideal (don't flame me yet!) of a world in which we all work for love and money isn't important is a neat idea and all, but that's not the world we live in. In order to live, I have to make money, because despite my constant protestations to the contrary my bank won't give me my car and my house for free. Can't understand it myself. I explained to them how residences and transportation should be Free (as in libre) and free (as in gratis), and I forwarded them some of Stallman's writings, but they just don't seem to get it.
So I'm stuck being a part of this whole "economy" thing. Therefore I must wedge myself into a situation in which somebody gives me a fairly substantial amount money on a regular basis. We call these situations "jobs."
Jobs are provided by companies to people based on the premise that the company will be able to take more money in than it gives out. Come to think of it, maybe that's why my house wasn't free....
Anyway, if the company that pays me (say, Red Hat, although it isn't) gives out more money than it takes in, eventually it will run out of money. The people who work for the company (say, Red Hat) will be faced with the sudden, unpleasant realization that their houses aren't Free (as in libre) or free (as in gratis). They've gotta find another one of those "job" situations so they can make their mortgage payments.
Poof. The company (say, Red Hat) disappears.
I'd say that's how I define "works." If it doesn't do what I just described (the "poof" part), then it "works."
I think a certain number of typos in a book that I pay for should allow me to receive a refund.
Knuth still offers a bounty for every error-- typographical, factual, logical, whatever-- found in any of his books. If I recall, the bounty for errors in TAOCP is up to $2.56 per item.
The result? Pretty damn near error-free books. Go, capitalism.
just so you know, comparing a linux company to a car company is ver different.
Actually, it's a much better analogy than you realize. The cost of the materials and labor that goes into producing a single car is nothing-- a few thousand dollars at the very most, and the vast majority of that in labor costs-- compared to the tens of millions of dollars spent to conceptualize and design that car model.
To my knowledge, nobody's ever done a cost-accounting for, say, Red Hat Linux 7.2. Let's say it cost a grand total of $6 million to produce Red Hat 7.2, going all the way back to Linus's spare time. Your plan for recouping those costs and eventually making a profit is called a business model, and the jury is still very much out on whether it can be made to work.
But really, who cares? After all, you can't spell analogy without anal.
A MAN OF FIFTY NINE YEARS IS NOT OLD. HARRISON IS MIDDLE-AGED. NOT OLD.
WHILE I AGREE-- Ahem.
While I agree with you in principle, 59 will be considered "middle-aged" when the average lifespan is 120. Since the average lifespan hovers around 72, depending on your gender and nationality, 59 is, unfortunately, Getting On Up There.
The rest of what you said is pretty much right.
When sites like drbizzaro.com and its partners give away so much product for free...
That sound you hear is the drbizzaro.com web server exploding into a gazillion pieces.
I know that MacOS apps don't need that 2nd button, but WTF are you supposed to do if you want to run Linux or run *nix apps on OSX?
The right-mouse-button click is emulated by holding down the "control" key and clicking. (Actually, it's the other way around. The right mouse button sends the computer a control-click.) So for OS X apps, do a control-click instead of a right-click.
XDarwin takes it one step further, offering mappable keyboard-mouse combos for X button event emulation. Go to the XDarwin screenshots page and look at the second screenshot.
And, of course, there is the favorite option of one-button-basher-haters: spend the $30 and buy a f*cking external three-button USB mouse.
A minor nit: the Ti PowerBook has actually got an AirPort card built in already.
Bzzt. The Ti PowerBook has an AirPort antenna built in already, just like the iBook and iMac. You can purchase PowerBooks from Apple that have the AirPort installed at the factory, but that's not the same as built-in.
ee cummings writes:
dual monitor is built in on the powerbooks, i would guess also on the iBook, but i'm speculating there.
My iBook lets me mirror the LCD on the external monitor, but that's all.
(Score:-1, Offtopic)
The titanium powerbook is an awesome piece of kit. Shame on those that don't have one.
Yes, the Ti PowerBook has a lot going for it. Yup, it's thinner than thin. Uh-huh, beautiful screen. Ooh, built-in Gigabit Ethernet. Pretty fast, too, and it comes with a combo DVD-ROM/CD-RW. Hard to beat.
But it's not perfect. To install an AirPort card, you have to skin it completely. And the sexy titanium skin is so thin, it scratches and dents very easily. And titanium is one of the most conductive metals on the periodic table; after an hour, the bottom of the laptop gets hot enough to make your thighs and the palms of your hands really uncomfortable. The joke going around the office after we bought ours was that Apple was planning to make the next one out of copper.
It's an awesome laptop, but in my opinion it's just a little bit too delicate. I love my iBook. I throw it in my backpack and hit the road. Over $1,000 cheaper, too.