When Apple first announced the switch to Intel, there were various comments here and there about... "does Apple get to walk away from the AIM (Apple-IBM-Motorola) alliance with any IP ?"
No one (except the members of the AIM alliance) know for sure who has the rights to what. Wouldn't it be insanely funny if Apple got the rights to Altivec because IBM could not meet the agreed to performance timetables. I know this is really blue-sky conjecture, but that would make the MacTel chips scream. Especially with the watt/performance bumps.
Activity Monitor should help spot processes that are using the CPU heavily.
you betcha ! Crank up some old moldy (and poorly behaved) system 7/8 app under classic. See if you can get it to crash (which shouldn't be all that difficult). Then kick back and watch 'truBlueEnvironment' red-line the CPU usage on Activity Monitor. weeeeeeeee!
Hacking it is one thing... blabbing about it to the whole world is quite another. And you just knew that it would get plastered all over every geek site on the planet (and maybe a few beyond the asteroid belt). Apple saw a big-fat NDA violation here and they are going after the folks that did it. It is just like the thinksecret bit, someone can't keep their mouth shut and then all hell breaks loose.
Will someone from Intellon PLEASE call Central Florida Electric Coop (like we're only 60 miles away up here) and get them to run field trials of this. There are many places out here in the woods where Helllsouth is thumbing their collective nose at customers screaming for DSL. If the coop sees a good reason to server their members (not just customers, we are all members of the coop) I think this could be a great thing. Just as long as the hardware can survive a typical season of Florida lightning storms lol.
I still prefer wired networks because I am not pleased with the proliferation of electromagnetic radiation. We are going headstrong in a forward direction with our heads buried in the sand. I do not believe we spend much time investigating the effects of this stuff.
I'm with you. I would much rather have wired bBand than wifi, but... where I live the ILEC is taking a rather head in the sand attitude towards bringing DSL out here (like, "theres way more cows than people, so we don't see value in putting a DSLAM in the SLC" attitude). So I have POTS... or I can put up an 80-ft tower to see over the trees to the local ISPs wifi spot. But seeing as how he has been zotched twice in the last 5 days by lightning, I dunno. maybe WiMax has better hardware for protecting a hub antenna 300-ft up a 600-ft tower.
Valid points all. Not all retailers are that incompetent. The ones that are, will get killed by the scammers when the competent ones fight back (thereby flushing the scammers to the guy down the street). Front line retail is hell, the scammers are part of it. If you don't shut them down, you will eventually go bankrupt. Would I want to pay a restocking fee because the USB cable I bought was too short ? Hell no, but it would make me select the product more carefully next time.
I mean, haven't you ever had to return something because it was the wrong item or it didn't do what it or the ads claimed it would do? Are you telling us that you wouldn't mind paying the restocking fee for it?
Why should brick and mortar retailers be any different than the online retailers ? Many online retailers are now specifying a restocking fee. Go look at the Apple Store... buy something there and pay a restocking fee (it was 10% or 15% last time I checked) if you decide to return it. That has a effect of reducing returns and it (hopefully) causes folks to be a little more careful in their selections (of course some folks have way too much money, so they don't care one way or the other). If the online retailers are executing that much better than the local stores, then the local stores are going to have to make up for it one way or the other... I would suspect higher shelf prices to cover the added costs.
Considering that all the WM receipts that I have seen over the past few years have a bar-code on the bottom, I don't think this would go very far.
WM receipts are bar-coded. They track back to the data warehouse at Home Office in Bentonville. Likewise at Target. I have not checked K-Mart recently (partly because most of the KMs around here got axed). The place that exposures happen is when stores take back stuff without a receipt or where it has been opened and riffled or substitute contents put inside the box.
If the stores are going to protect themselves, they need to have trackable receipts *and* they have to refuse stuff that has no receipt.
I can't tell you how many times I have seen stuff on a WM clearance pile (in the toy dept right after Christmas) with a Toys R Us loss control tag stuck to the bottom of the box. Obviously, the WM clerks are taking the stuff without a receipt and not looking over the package for obvious signs that it came from somewhere else (prolly because the person taking it back received it as a gift and would rather have the cash).
I wonder which is cheaper... to invest millions in anti-theft technologies, advanced databases, embedded serial numbers, RFID, etc., or just take the tiny loss each quarter due to cheaters and have a Walmart-style greeter hand out anti-theft flyers with attached coupons at the door or something.
Yeppers. I heard about some folks doing a scam a couple of years back... Target ran a nationwide ad for a toy item and screwed up the pricing (normal $50, ad said $25) but decided to honor it. Some folks went out and bought them, then cruised down the street to WM and returned them for MSRP (because thats what the WM scanner rang up). Not having receipts, WM would only give them WM store credit (which I suppose they used to buy groceries).
IMHO, the best way for stores to slow down these type of scams is to impose a restocking charge on all returns (esp those over a minimal amount, say $10). The customers will hate it, but it would take some of the profit out of the scam. And profit is what the scam is all about.
Interesting subject... I got my first iPod the other day (yeah I'm behind the bleeding mob). Since I could not do anything with it until the iBook arrives, I mounted it on the desktop of an old iMac and poked thru the hidden directories... The preferences file contains a RegionCode... hmmmm.
1. Design something insanely great 2. Have the suits write a patent that is both comprehensive and confusing 3. Have it made in China (where rumors are not allowed) 4. Drop it on everyone out of the clear blue sky 5. Support both Mac and Windows 6. Profit!
and lo, Teh Steve has finally figured out how to smack Teh Bill at his own game.
Apple (and the RIAA) knows that it basically has a monopoly of the online music business and that people accept FairPlay as a DRM method.
Something to remember in all of this is that the paradigm between the iPod and iTMS could evolve into a paradigm that we now experience between inkjet printers and ink carts. Eventually the iPod (which is currently perceived as the costlier of the pair) will end up being (almost) a throwaway. Inkjet printers started out expensive (much more so than the carts). Now they are almost give-aways to lock you into that manufacturers carts. I think the music devices are heading that way. When it happens, Apple will license FairPlay (the player side of it) to other companies on a royalty basis and continue to rake in the cash from the iTMS downloads.
Apple's OS only got great and user friendly once they allowed/embraced the CLI.
Actually there was a 'stealth' command line interface from about 1988 until OS-X. They called it MPW and told everyone it was a development environment. Some of us knew different. I wrote dozens of tools to do interesting things under MPW (as well as scripts to run them). Not a 'true' command line like we have now, but it was quite usable.
"Method and apparatus for image compression and manipulation"
Inventors: Atkinson; William D.
Assignee: Apple Computer, Inc. (Cupertino, CA)
Filed: September 30, 1982
Awarded: November 11, 1986
Also known as the basis for 'Regions' (and region calculations). Note the date filed, and the dates being discused in this topic, etc.
That is correct. What most people don't know is that the 128K Mac almost ended up with Twiggy drives as well. If anyone has a 128K (possibly even a 512K) original Macintosh, Pull the back cover off. You may have to remove the motherboard to see this (its been a few years, so I don't recall exactly). The metal frame that holds the front plastic bezel has punchouts in it for a 5.25" drive. So the decision to go with the 3.5" drive in the Mac was made fairly late in the design cycle.
Quite a number of years back, I attended one of the early MacHack's in Ann Arbor. Late one night, one of the Apple engineers (who had been around for the birth of the Macintosh) told the story about how they got the Sony 3.5" drive included. Apparently Steve wanted the Twiggy drive. Someone (not sure who) was doing the 3.5" drive development on the sly without letting Steve know about it. To do all this, they had to have someone from Sony there to work with them. One day Steve was seen coming down the hall... so they stuffed the little guy from Sony into a closet to avoid a ruckus with Teh Steve ! In the end, the SS-SD 400K Sony drive prevailed (over the, IIRC 360K, Twiggy drives). I have a hunch that getting the 3.5" drive in the Mac had something to do with replacing the Twiggy drive in the Lisa.
HP was able to sell them at places like Fry's and Circuit City.
Also WalMart and Radio Shack. When I checked WM a few weeks back (right after the new color iPods were released, they had... 20GB b/w screen (HP branded), 4GB mini (HP branded) and 512MB shuffle (no sign of HP branding). So maybe Apple is now direct distributing to WM.
I believe that the iBook's external display is only supposed to mirror what is on the primary laptop display, but I believe that this can be hacked to work as two discrete displays.
Oh really ? Do you have a link to that ?
One disadvantage of the iBook vs the Mac mini is that the mini can drive a DVI monitor, whereas the iBook cannot (at least not without going through a VGA conversion to get there).
So you know. All Mac monitors now and always have been (and I assume will always be) about 100 pixels/inch.
ummm.. No. If you do the math, the 1024x768 display on the 14.1" iBook works out to 90-91 dpi. The 1024x768 on the 12.1" iBook is about 106 dpi. Most of the Apple Cinema Displays (flatscreens) appear to be running about 100 dpi. The original Mac's were 72 dpi (+/-). Due to my eyes, I run both my existing CRTs at no more than 75 dpi. The dot density on the flatscreens is going to be a huge problem with older folks or anyone who have eyesight issues.
I am most curious to know how the various Apple flatscreen displays (laptop or cinema) look when run at less than optimal resolution.
There's hardly any hardware available to read these tapes anymore. Proprietary format, ancient tape drives and undocumented data formats make this a huge problem.
I find this a little hard to believe. True, most mainframe shops are now on cartridge drives, but there have to be 9-track tape drives out there somewhere.
The 9-track tapes would have been 6250, 1600 or 800 bpi (I think there might have been a 256 older density somewhere along the way). I'm not sure if the 7-track tapes would read on a 9-track drive or not. I used to have a 9-track drive (sold it about 10 years ago) connected via SCSI to a Mac SE/30. The company that sold it also had PC drivers. Reading/Writing on a Mac was real easy. My best recollection is that a 2400-ft 9-track tape at 6250 bpi would hold about 150 MB of data.
A more serious issue is how these tapes have been treated over the years. Proper treatment for 9-track tapes is to wind/rewind them every so many years (otherwise you get magnetic cross-print between adjacent turns of tape. I wonder if these tapes have been correctly treated over the years.
Lastly... there are plenty of people still around (waves hand madly!) who have actual experience with tape formats (IRG, IBG, labels, filemarks, etc) who would be very happy to donate spare time writing code to de-block the data and move it off to HDs.
Re:RAID 0+1 vs RAID 1+0
on
Basics of RAID
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Keep one thing in mind about adding more drives.. Mean Time Between Failure falls as a function of how many drives you are using. If the drives are rated at 50,000 hours MTBF and you run a 2-drive mirror, you now have a MTBF of 25,000 hours on the array (not on a single drive). Likewise 4 drives would drop it to 12,500 hours. This is not a bad thing, just expect that with more drives spinning, the odds that one of them will woof is greater. Law of averages kinda thing.
Slashdot Mirror
When Apple first announced the switch to Intel, there were various comments here and there about... "does Apple get to walk away from the AIM (Apple-IBM-Motorola) alliance with any IP ?"
No one (except the members of the AIM alliance) know for sure who has the rights to what. Wouldn't it be insanely funny if Apple got the rights to Altivec because IBM could not meet the agreed to performance timetables. I know this is really blue-sky conjecture, but that would make the MacTel chips scream. Especially with the watt/performance bumps.
Now who on earth could he be referring to ? :P
you betcha ! Crank up some old moldy (and poorly behaved) system 7/8 app under classic. See if you can get it to crash (which shouldn't be all that difficult). Then kick back and watch 'truBlueEnvironment' red-line the CPU usage on Activity Monitor. weeeeeeeee!
Hacking it is one thing... blabbing about it to the whole world is quite another. And you just knew that it would get plastered all over every geek site on the planet (and maybe a few beyond the asteroid belt). Apple saw a big-fat NDA violation here and they are going after the folks that did it. It is just like the thinksecret bit, someone can't keep their mouth shut and then all hell breaks loose.
Will someone from Intellon PLEASE call Central Florida Electric Coop (like we're only 60 miles away up here) and get them to run field trials of this. There are many places out here in the woods where Helllsouth is thumbing their collective nose at customers screaming for DSL. If the coop sees a good reason to server their members (not just customers, we are all members of the coop) I think this could be a great thing. Just as long as the hardware can survive a typical season of Florida lightning storms lol.
will be Elvis Costello
The two tracks most likely to be purchased by the Apple legal department will be...
Watching the Detectives
and
Goon Squad!
I see several possible varients on this theme...
1) This could replace the Mac mini (or be an even lower level entry machine).
2) This would explain (partially at least) why Apple bailed to Intel (because the Apple/PPC market was about to have its lunch eaten)
3) iTunes/iTMS/iPod on PlayStation (yet another way to push music sales)
The plus side to this 'rumor' is that Teh Steve had Sony President Kunitake Ando onstage for the SF 2005 SteveNote.
On the minus side, there appears to be some friction between Apple and Sony wrt Sony being on the iTMS/Japan.
Only time will tell.
I'm with you. I would much rather have wired bBand than wifi, but... where I live the ILEC is taking a rather head in the sand attitude towards bringing DSL out here (like, "theres way more cows than people, so we don't see value in putting a DSLAM in the SLC" attitude). So I have POTS... or I can put up an 80-ft tower to see over the trees to the local ISPs wifi spot. But seeing as how he has been zotched twice in the last 5 days by lightning, I dunno. maybe WiMax has better hardware for protecting a hub antenna 300-ft up a 600-ft tower.
OMG, all they need to do is put a hard-shield around the glass tube ;P
Valid points all. Not all retailers are that incompetent. The ones that are, will get killed by the scammers when the competent ones fight back (thereby flushing the scammers to the guy down the street). Front line retail is hell, the scammers are part of it. If you don't shut them down, you will eventually go bankrupt. Would I want to pay a restocking fee because the USB cable I bought was too short ? Hell no, but it would make me select the product more carefully next time.
Why should brick and mortar retailers be any different than the online retailers ? Many online retailers are now specifying a restocking fee. Go look at the Apple Store... buy something there and pay a restocking fee (it was 10% or 15% last time I checked) if you decide to return it. That has a effect of reducing returns and it (hopefully) causes folks to be a little more careful in their selections (of course some folks have way too much money, so they don't care one way or the other). If the online retailers are executing that much better than the local stores, then the local stores are going to have to make up for it one way or the other... I would suspect higher shelf prices to cover the added costs.
WM receipts are bar-coded. They track back to the data warehouse at Home Office in Bentonville. Likewise at Target. I have not checked K-Mart recently (partly because most of the KMs around here got axed). The place that exposures happen is when stores take back stuff without a receipt or where it has been opened and riffled or substitute contents put inside the box.
If the stores are going to protect themselves, they need to have trackable receipts *and* they have to refuse stuff that has no receipt.
I can't tell you how many times I have seen stuff on a WM clearance pile (in the toy dept right after Christmas) with a Toys R Us loss control tag stuck to the bottom of the box. Obviously, the WM clerks are taking the stuff without a receipt and not looking over the package for obvious signs that it came from somewhere else (prolly because the person taking it back received it as a gift and would rather have the cash).
Yeppers. I heard about some folks doing a scam a couple of years back... Target ran a nationwide ad for a toy item and screwed up the pricing (normal $50, ad said $25) but decided to honor it. Some folks went out and bought them, then cruised down the street to WM and returned them for MSRP (because thats what the WM scanner rang up). Not having receipts, WM would only give them WM store credit (which I suppose they used to buy groceries).
IMHO, the best way for stores to slow down these type of scams is to impose a restocking charge on all returns (esp those over a minimal amount, say $10). The customers will hate it, but it would take some of the profit out of the scam. And profit is what the scam is all about.
Interesting subject... I got my first iPod the other day (yeah I'm behind the bleeding mob). Since I could not do anything with it until the iBook arrives, I mounted it on the desktop of an old iMac and poked thru the hidden directories... The preferences file contains a RegionCode... hmmmm.
Are iTMS songs region restricted like DVDs ?
1. Design something insanely great
2. Have the suits write a patent that is both comprehensive and confusing
3. Have it made in China (where rumors are not allowed)
4. Drop it on everyone out of the clear blue sky
5. Support both Mac and Windows
6. Profit!
and lo, Teh Steve has finally figured out how to smack Teh Bill at his own game.
Something to remember in all of this is that the paradigm between the iPod and iTMS could evolve into a paradigm that we now experience between inkjet printers and ink carts. Eventually the iPod (which is currently perceived as the costlier of the pair) will end up being (almost) a throwaway. Inkjet printers started out expensive (much more so than the carts). Now they are almost give-aways to lock you into that manufacturers carts. I think the music devices are heading that way. When it happens, Apple will license FairPlay (the player side of it) to other companies on a royalty basis and continue to rake in the cash from the iTMS downloads.
Actually there was a 'stealth' command line interface from about 1988 until OS-X. They called it MPW and told everyone it was a development environment. Some of us knew different. I wrote dozens of tools to do interesting things under MPW (as well as scripts to run them). Not a 'true' command line like we have now, but it was quite usable.
"Method and apparatus for image compression and manipulation"
Inventors: Atkinson; William D.
Assignee: Apple Computer, Inc. (Cupertino, CA)
Filed: September 30, 1982
Awarded: November 11, 1986
Also known as the basis for 'Regions' (and region calculations). Note the date filed, and the dates being discused in this topic, etc.
That is correct. What most people don't know is that the 128K Mac almost ended up with Twiggy drives as well. If anyone has a 128K (possibly even a 512K) original Macintosh, Pull the back cover off. You may have to remove the motherboard to see this (its been a few years, so I don't recall exactly). The metal frame that holds the front plastic bezel has punchouts in it for a 5.25" drive. So the decision to go with the 3.5" drive in the Mac was made fairly late in the design cycle.
Quite a number of years back, I attended one of the early MacHack's in Ann Arbor. Late one night, one of the Apple engineers (who had been around for the birth of the Macintosh) told the story about how they got the Sony 3.5" drive included. Apparently Steve wanted the Twiggy drive. Someone (not sure who) was doing the 3.5" drive development on the sly without letting Steve know about it. To do all this, they had to have someone from Sony there to work with them. One day Steve was seen coming down the hall... so they stuffed the little guy from Sony into a closet to avoid a ruckus with Teh Steve ! In the end, the SS-SD 400K Sony drive prevailed (over the, IIRC 360K, Twiggy drives). I have a hunch that getting the 3.5" drive in the Mac had something to do with replacing the Twiggy drive in the Lisa.
Also WalMart and Radio Shack. When I checked WM a few weeks back (right after the new color iPods were released, they had... 20GB b/w screen (HP branded), 4GB mini (HP branded) and 512MB shuffle (no sign of HP branding). So maybe Apple is now direct distributing to WM.
Oh really ? Do you have a link to that ?
One disadvantage of the iBook vs the Mac mini is that the mini can drive a DVI monitor, whereas the iBook cannot (at least not without going through a VGA conversion to get there).
ummm.. No. If you do the math, the 1024x768 display on the 14.1" iBook works out to 90-91 dpi. The 1024x768 on the 12.1" iBook is about 106 dpi. Most of the Apple Cinema Displays (flatscreens) appear to be running about 100 dpi. The original Mac's were 72 dpi (+/-). Due to my eyes, I run both my existing CRTs at no more than 75 dpi. The dot density on the flatscreens is going to be a huge problem with older folks or anyone who have eyesight issues.
I am most curious to know how the various Apple flatscreen displays (laptop or cinema) look when run at less than optimal resolution.
Actually, as of today, the only remaining Mac with less than 512MB standard is the eMac (still at 256MB).
I find this a little hard to believe. True, most mainframe shops are now on cartridge drives, but there have to be 9-track tape drives out there somewhere.
The 9-track tapes would have been 6250, 1600 or 800 bpi (I think there might have been a 256 older density somewhere along the way). I'm not sure if the 7-track tapes would read on a 9-track drive or not. I used to have a 9-track drive (sold it about 10 years ago) connected via SCSI to a Mac SE/30. The company that sold it also had PC drivers. Reading/Writing on a Mac was real easy. My best recollection is that a 2400-ft 9-track tape at 6250 bpi would hold about 150 MB of data.
A more serious issue is how these tapes have been treated over the years. Proper treatment for 9-track tapes is to wind/rewind them every so many years (otherwise you get magnetic cross-print between adjacent turns of tape. I wonder if these tapes have been correctly treated over the years.
Lastly... there are plenty of people still around (waves hand madly!) who have actual experience with tape formats (IRG, IBG, labels, filemarks, etc) who would be very happy to donate spare time writing code to de-block the data and move it off to HDs.
Keep one thing in mind about adding more drives.. Mean Time Between Failure falls as a function of how many drives you are using. If the drives are rated at 50,000 hours MTBF and you run a 2-drive mirror, you now have a MTBF of 25,000 hours on the array (not on a single drive). Likewise 4 drives would drop it to 12,500 hours. This is not a bad thing, just expect that with more drives spinning, the odds that one of them will woof is greater. Law of averages kinda thing.