Worse, the MacOSX Help files are nicely written, but there are so few of them that help is very close to useless. It will tell you how to copy a file, but for anything more complex you're basically SOL.
Yeah, no kidding. I refuse to give up my little iMac keyboard, the original laptop-style one that came with a Bondi. It's just comfortable for my hands. Well, my new Quicksilver at work requires the use of the Pro Keyboard to open the goddamned CD burner and get at the tray.
Try using Mac Help to find a solution for _that_. As best I can tell, I have three options:
1) Use the Pro Keyboard
2) Run Classic mode _solely_ for the Disk Eject app that comes on the install disk.
3) Use the eject feature of iTunes when I need to open the drive.
I'm using number three at the moment, but it's still not exactly optimal. Generally, Apple is able to make their case designs attractive and interesting without sacrificing utility. The whole "remove the eject button" idea is ludicrous, though.
(Yeah, I know, pointless rant triggered by nothing in particular. But it's a sore point.)
I ran Debian briefly on a Mac Quadra 950 I had kicking around - it was all right, but being more of a BSD guy, I preferred NetBSD.
I actually installed NetBSD on the very same machine you're asking about, a Q700. Go to my site (www.roadflares.org) and check in the "hardware" section for details.
Anyone remember the other theme based PC's and what happend to them? Barbie ring a bell?
I was at the Rochester, NY Hamfest a few years ago and some poor bastard was trying to sell a U-Haul full of the printers that were supposed to be packaged with the Barbie PC. I don't know where he got them from, but I'll never forget watching him plead with people that a printer with pink casing a huge flowers all over it was still a decent purchase.
Please, when can we get just a little bit of simple code in the bootrom to do that initial installation over the net?
When you get pretty much anything but an x86 architecture machine. I installed OpenBSD on my iMac and on my ancient Sun IPC without any media at all -- just netbooted them from the firmware, picked up the software from my NetBSD box, and took it from there.
It really is pretty surprising that the whole boot ROM / BIOS setup for the Intel architectures hasn't changed a whole lot since I built my first 286.
How do I get to the store for education? Even at $79 (the regular price), it's reasonable, but I couldn't find any mention of a Windows version. Is that only available through the education store?
I noticed, as you did, that the PC requirements are missing from the normal store but present in the regular store. So I called 1-800-MY-APPLE to ask about that, and sat on hold for a while listening to truly shit music. I gave up after a while without getting through, but they ought to be able to answer the question for you.
Value not only refers to cost of the machine but the quality within.
That's why I buy Apple gear. But try explaining the concept of a price premium for value to a bunch of 1337 h@x0rs living in mom's basement, running a system cobbled together from CompUSA free-with-rebate parts, an untested bleeding edge kernel grafted onto the TurboLinux install from the CD they found in the dumpster behind Barnes and Noble's.
Yeah, I know, Flamebait. I've been at the cap too fucking long anyway.
Here's an interesting little secret for Mac OS and Windows users looking for a good office suite. AppleWorks 6 is only _39 dollars_ from the Apple Store for Education. Runs on Windows, Classic Mac OS, and natively on OS X. That's what I'm running on my home and work machines. And the filters for MS Office are top notch.
Come to think of it, you could buy AppleWorks instead of MS Office for your machine now, and use the money you saved on the license to buy this _entire_ budget system. And a monitor. And a NIC. And all the other parts people mention are missing from the currently Slashdotted article.
I know, and on my iMac (running YDL 2.0) it was a mess. X was crashing left and right, even on the default desktop (KDE) and without changing a whole lot of anything. I reinstalled a couple times, it didn't fix it.
OS X, on the other hand, is both significantly more stable _and_ handles most of my hardware correctly. (Linux couldn't see my Firewire CDRW, while OS X can't see my cheapass printer. Sort of a tossup.)
However, to get off the tangent, my original comment was aimed at the fellow looking for a solid *nix on a sub-$1000 machine. OS X on one of the bargain $799 iMacs is a great choice.
It would be educational to see what system LinuxHardware could come up with with a $1000 spending cap, and a requirement that it reach a 60-day uptime under constant use.
An iMac running OS X, would be my suggestion.
Oh, it has to run Linux? Yeah, good luck with that.
The article seems Slashdotted, but from the summation I can only assume that this is another desktop x86 setup.
I'd rather like to nominate the iBook as the portable Linux dream system of the year. The TiBook is a little too flimsy for a clumsy oaf like myself, but the iBook is an indestructible, lightweight, brilliantly engineered machine. There's an Apple on the outside, but even if you eschew OS X for Linux, it's still the best bang for your buck in laptops from 2001.
Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera, Netscape 4.0+, and IE 5.0+ fully support PNG.
OmniWeb seems to as well - that's what I'm using to post this on my Mac OS X box.
And, just to keep this on topic, my vapor vote goes to IPv6. I hear deployment is still just around the corner. In the mean time, I still can't get a guaranteed static IP at any price from a cable or DSL provider here in Buffalo.
Supposedly IPv6 will have enough addresses to give one to each of the angels dancing on the head of the proverbial pin. Can't wait.
The introduction of the new domains like.biz, and increasing internet development in parts of the world, will counter the abandonment of existing domains.
Somehow, I doubt it. The new TLDs really don't seem to be working out for anyone -- I haven't seen a single ad or packaging or anything directing me to someone's.BIZ address, and I sure don't know anyone who has registered one.
I suppose the "we got COM, NET, and ORG, gotta get BIZ!" people like CompUSA might be able to help counter the trend, but I don't think there's enough of those greedy bastards to do it.
Good thing, too. I knew things were getting out of hand when someone squatted my domain.
Maybe I'm a freak, but I don't really like FPS or RTS games. For LAN party goodness, I'd have to recommend driving games as my weapon of choice. Check out the Carmageddon series in particular -- it's like really fast, angry bumper cars.
I'm posting this from Mac OS X using OmniWeb. I've been using my brief Christmas vacation to get my home machine running just the way I like... this is the first time I've seriously tried to avoid using Classic or booting into Mac OS 9.2. There's just one thing I can't get working.
I have a three button mouse on my iMac, and I can't find a way to map the buttons to anything other than the default! The left button is "click" and the right button is "ctrl-click," which is fine. But on OS 9 I map the middle button to "option-click," and I can't find a way to do that in X. Does anyone have any ideas?
--saint
(before you ask, option-click switches to the application whose window was clicked on while automatically hiding the application that you just used. It's a great time saver, and I want it to work quite a bit. Not enough real estate on a 15 inch iMac monitor, you know?)
Both HP and Compaq seem to be treating their unix offerings as an afterthought compated to cheap shitty PCs and winprinters.
A friend of mine just ordered a copy of Tru64 for the Alpha he bought on eBay -- took him almost an hour to explain to the Compaq sales droid on the phone what Tru64 was and what hardware it ran on.
When pretty much every architecture but the PowerPC and the x86 went tits-up, I knew things were getting bad. But when someone from the company that now owns DEC didn't know what "Unix" was, that's when I realized how boring this industry has really gotten.
I find Irix to have the sweetest desktop out there of any Unixes I've ever used (Gnome and KDE pundits may repectfully disagree). Hell, even the cases they put their machines in are works of art.
Sigh. And every CS student I've got interning for me says I'm a clueless pansy for using an iMac with OS X at home.
I worked at Barnes and Noble for a while a couple Christmases ago, and here's how their gift card system worked:
When you got the card, it was preauthorized with a certain amount of money in a certain account number, like any other debit card. The account number was on the magstrip of the card, was printed on the card, but was _also_ printed on the gift receipt that came with the card.
Now, all that was necessary to redeem the gift card was that number. But most people just tossed the second receipt. Which meant that a quick swipe through the trash outside the store doors could probably yield a few hundred dollars worth of gift card credit as yet unredeemed.
Nice, eh? Even when we told people expressly not to do it, they still did. Wonder how many got burned.
You may also want to look into the BSD's... all of them have a very bland base install and all of them run the latest greatest stuff.
I ran my server (blue.roadflares.org) for months handing HTTP and SMTP for my domain on a 230 meg hard drive in a Quadra 700.
That's ancient, to those of you who don't use Macs. Roughly equivalent to a low end 486.
The operating system? NetBSD.
If you've got _seriously_ old hardware, like that Quadra, or the 486 that's serving roadflares.org now, or the IPC I've got here, try Net or Open BSD. They run like champs.
I don't know about slackware, but debian does the job admirably. I love it and no it's not really hard to set up.
I really don't quite understand where Debian got its reputation for having such a difficult installer. I mean, sure it's a bit tough for Mom and Dad to puzzle out, but for anyone with any sort of *nix experience its a piece of cake.
And yet, these are the people always bitching about the supposed difficulty.
Hell, look at me; I'm a total newbie to Linux, more of a BSD guy. I decided to try out Debian for the m68k on a wacky old Mac I had lying around, and managed to get everything up and running without too much of a hassle. And if an idiot like me can do that on a weird hardware platform (Q950 Mac with the SCSI problems) and an OS that he doesn't understand, anyone savvy enough to have heard of Debian ought to be able to pull it off.
IBM hardware is some of the best out there unfortunately it does come at a premium price.
Funny, that sounds a lot like Digital's home PC offerings.
Well, if IBM gets out of the business, there goes the last brand (aside from Apple) I can actually recommend to people in good faith. So far as I can tell, every other brand is equivalently crappy, but I've never had a problem with IBM gear.
Oh, well. Time to go buy some poorly constructed components, I suppose.
Lame ducks? Ought to go great with that Greased Turkey from last month, eh?:)
Anyhow, as the submitter, I probably ought to clear up what I meant by "Lintel." Obviously, I meant people running Linux on x86 hardware. Also, I believe the lintel is the top bit of a window frame, the part above the window itself. It was just a little pun, that's all.
So people can stop typing the "An Athlon is not an Intel product! j00 suX0r!" posts. Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair here, educational versions of the MS office suites usually run only $25-$50...
Lo and behold, I was in CompUSA yesterday looking for remaindered Dreamcast games, and they have the student version of Office XP.
149.99. That's American dollars.
Wow. What a travesty. No wonder everyone I knew in college wrote their thesis on a warezed copy.
--saint
Worse, the MacOSX Help files are nicely written, but there are so few of them that help is very close to useless. It will tell you how to copy a file, but for anything more complex you're basically SOL.
Yeah, no kidding. I refuse to give up my little iMac keyboard, the original laptop-style one that came with a Bondi. It's just comfortable for my hands. Well, my new Quicksilver at work requires the use of the Pro Keyboard to open the goddamned CD burner and get at the tray.
Try using Mac Help to find a solution for _that_. As best I can tell, I have three options:
1) Use the Pro Keyboard
2) Run Classic mode _solely_ for the Disk Eject app that comes on the install disk.
3) Use the eject feature of iTunes when I need to open the drive.
I'm using number three at the moment, but it's still not exactly optimal. Generally, Apple is able to make their case designs attractive and interesting without sacrificing utility. The whole "remove the eject button" idea is ludicrous, though.
(Yeah, I know, pointless rant triggered by nothing in particular. But it's a sore point.)
--saint
I ran Debian briefly on a Mac Quadra 950 I had kicking around - it was all right, but being more of a BSD guy, I preferred NetBSD.
I actually installed NetBSD on the very same machine you're asking about, a Q700. Go to my site (www.roadflares.org) and check in the "hardware" section for details.
--saint
Anyone remember the other theme based PC's and what happend to them? Barbie ring a bell?
I was at the Rochester, NY Hamfest a few years ago and some poor bastard was trying to sell a U-Haul full of the printers that were supposed to be packaged with the Barbie PC. I don't know where he got them from, but I'll never forget watching him plead with people that a printer with pink casing a huge flowers all over it was still a decent purchase.
--saint
Please, when can we get just a little bit of simple code in the bootrom to do that initial installation over the net?
When you get pretty much anything but an x86 architecture machine. I installed OpenBSD on my iMac and on my ancient Sun IPC without any media at all -- just netbooted them from the firmware, picked up the software from my NetBSD box, and took it from there.
It really is pretty surprising that the whole boot ROM / BIOS setup for the Intel architectures hasn't changed a whole lot since I built my first 286.
--saint
How do I get to the store for education? Even at $79 (the regular price), it's reasonable, but I couldn't find any mention of a Windows version. Is that only available through the education store?
I noticed, as you did, that the PC requirements are missing from the normal store but present in the regular store. So I called 1-800-MY-APPLE to ask about that, and sat on hold for a while listening to truly shit music. I gave up after a while without getting through, but they ought to be able to answer the question for you.
--saint
Value not only refers to cost of the machine but the quality within.
That's why I buy Apple gear. But try explaining the concept of a price premium for value to a bunch of 1337 h@x0rs living in mom's basement, running a system cobbled together from CompUSA free-with-rebate parts, an untested bleeding edge kernel grafted onto the TurboLinux install from the CD they found in the dumpster behind Barnes and Noble's.
Yeah, I know, Flamebait. I've been at the cap too fucking long anyway.
--saint
an office suite $150
Here's an interesting little secret for Mac OS and Windows users looking for a good office suite. AppleWorks 6 is only _39 dollars_ from the Apple Store for Education. Runs on Windows, Classic Mac OS, and natively on OS X. That's what I'm running on my home and work machines. And the filters for MS Office are top notch.
Come to think of it, you could buy AppleWorks instead of MS Office for your machine now, and use the money you saved on the license to buy this _entire_ budget system. And a monitor. And a NIC. And all the other parts people mention are missing from the currently Slashdotted article.
--saint
Good luck with what? iMacs run Linux.
I know, and on my iMac (running YDL 2.0) it was a mess. X was crashing left and right, even on the default desktop (KDE) and without changing a whole lot of anything. I reinstalled a couple times, it didn't fix it.
OS X, on the other hand, is both significantly more stable _and_ handles most of my hardware correctly. (Linux couldn't see my Firewire CDRW, while OS X can't see my cheapass printer. Sort of a tossup.)
However, to get off the tangent, my original comment was aimed at the fellow looking for a solid *nix on a sub-$1000 machine. OS X on one of the bargain $799 iMacs is a great choice.
--saint
It would be educational to see what system LinuxHardware could come up with with a $1000 spending cap, and a requirement that it reach a 60-day uptime under constant use.
An iMac running OS X, would be my suggestion.
Oh, it has to run Linux? Yeah, good luck with that.
--saint
The article seems Slashdotted, but from the summation I can only assume that this is another desktop x86 setup.
I'd rather like to nominate the iBook as the portable Linux dream system of the year. The TiBook is a little too flimsy for a clumsy oaf like myself, but the iBook is an indestructible, lightweight, brilliantly engineered machine. There's an Apple on the outside, but even if you eschew OS X for Linux, it's still the best bang for your buck in laptops from 2001.
--saint
So, we put a target (like a beer bottle, or a toilet plunger, or anything else that is skinny and stands up)
I think I smell a career move for Callista Flockhart.
--saint
a home environment where you write reports, surf the net, share files on your favorite p2p program, a PC would be a more appropriate solution.
Appleworks.
OmniWeb.
Limewire.
All running on my iMac, running OS X. You trolling bastard. Look, no Microsoft!
--saint
Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera, Netscape 4.0+, and IE 5.0+ fully support PNG.
OmniWeb seems to as well - that's what I'm using to post this on my Mac OS X box.
And, just to keep this on topic, my vapor vote goes to IPv6. I hear deployment is still just around the corner. In the mean time, I still can't get a guaranteed static IP at any price from a cable or DSL provider here in Buffalo.
Supposedly IPv6 will have enough addresses to give one to each of the angels dancing on the head of the proverbial pin. Can't wait.
--saint
if he's someplace everyone else fled years ago he won't have as much competition as he would in the major cities
See, I just knew there was a reason that I moved back to Buffalo.
Must have been the lovely weather, along with the thriving economy.
--saint
From the Netcraft survey:
.biz, and increasing internet development in parts of the world, will counter the abandonment of existing domains.
.BIZ address, and I sure don't know anyone who has registered one.
The introduction of the new domains like
Somehow, I doubt it. The new TLDs really don't seem to be working out for anyone -- I haven't seen a single ad or packaging or anything directing me to someone's
I suppose the "we got COM, NET, and ORG, gotta get BIZ!" people like CompUSA might be able to help counter the trend, but I don't think there's enough of those greedy bastards to do it.
Good thing, too. I knew things were getting out of hand when someone squatted my domain.
--saint
Maybe I'm a freak, but I don't really like FPS or RTS games. For LAN party goodness, I'd have to recommend driving games as my weapon of choice. Check out the Carmageddon series in particular -- it's like really fast, angry bumper cars.
--saint
I'm posting this from Mac OS X using OmniWeb. I've been using my brief Christmas vacation to get my home machine running just the way I like... this is the first time I've seriously tried to avoid using Classic or booting into Mac OS 9.2. There's just one thing I can't get working.
I have a three button mouse on my iMac, and I can't find a way to map the buttons to anything other than the default! The left button is "click" and the right button is "ctrl-click," which is fine. But on OS 9 I map the middle button to "option-click," and I can't find a way to do that in X. Does anyone have any ideas?
--saint
(before you ask, option-click switches to the application whose window was clicked on while automatically hiding the application that you just used. It's a great time saver, and I want it to work quite a bit. Not enough real estate on a 15 inch iMac monitor, you know?)
Both HP and Compaq seem to be treating their unix offerings as an afterthought compated to cheap shitty PCs and winprinters.
A friend of mine just ordered a copy of Tru64 for the Alpha he bought on eBay -- took him almost an hour to explain to the Compaq sales droid on the phone what Tru64 was and what hardware it ran on.
When pretty much every architecture but the PowerPC and the x86 went tits-up, I knew things were getting bad. But when someone from the company that now owns DEC didn't know what "Unix" was, that's when I realized how boring this industry has really gotten.
--saint
I find Irix to have the sweetest desktop out there of any Unixes I've ever used (Gnome and KDE pundits may repectfully disagree). Hell, even the cases they put their machines in are works of art.
Sigh. And every CS student I've got interning for me says I'm a clueless pansy for using an iMac with OS X at home.
Double standards rock, eh?
--saint
I worked at Barnes and Noble for a while a couple Christmases ago, and here's how their gift card system worked:
When you got the card, it was preauthorized with a certain amount of money in a certain account number, like any other debit card. The account number was on the magstrip of the card, was printed on the card, but was _also_ printed on the gift receipt that came with the card.
Now, all that was necessary to redeem the gift card was that number. But most people just tossed the second receipt. Which meant that a quick swipe through the trash outside the store doors could probably yield a few hundred dollars worth of gift card credit as yet unredeemed.
Nice, eh? Even when we told people expressly not to do it, they still did. Wonder how many got burned.
--saint
You may also want to look into the BSD's ... all of them have a very bland base install and all of them run the latest greatest stuff.
I ran my server (blue.roadflares.org) for months handing HTTP and SMTP for my domain on a 230 meg hard drive in a Quadra 700.
That's ancient, to those of you who don't use Macs. Roughly equivalent to a low end 486.
The operating system? NetBSD.
If you've got _seriously_ old hardware, like that Quadra, or the 486 that's serving roadflares.org now, or the IPC I've got here, try Net or Open BSD. They run like champs.
--saint
I don't know about slackware, but debian does the job admirably. I love it and no it's not really hard to set up.
I really don't quite understand where Debian got its reputation for having such a difficult installer. I mean, sure it's a bit tough for Mom and Dad to puzzle out, but for anyone with any sort of *nix experience its a piece of cake.
And yet, these are the people always bitching about the supposed difficulty.
Hell, look at me; I'm a total newbie to Linux, more of a BSD guy. I decided to try out Debian for the m68k on a wacky old Mac I had lying around, and managed to get everything up and running without too much of a hassle. And if an idiot like me can do that on a weird hardware platform (Q950 Mac with the SCSI problems) and an OS that he doesn't understand, anyone savvy enough to have heard of Debian ought to be able to pull it off.
--saint
IBM hardware is some of the best out there unfortunately it does come at a premium price.
Funny, that sounds a lot like Digital's home PC offerings.
Well, if IBM gets out of the business, there goes the last brand (aside from Apple) I can actually recommend to people in good faith. So far as I can tell, every other brand is equivalently crappy, but I've never had a problem with IBM gear.
Oh, well. Time to go buy some poorly constructed components, I suppose.
--saint
I propose the term "Lamdux".
:)
Lame ducks? Ought to go great with that Greased Turkey from last month, eh?
Anyhow, as the submitter, I probably ought to clear up what I meant by "Lintel." Obviously, I meant people running Linux on x86 hardware. Also, I believe the lintel is the top bit of a window frame, the part above the window itself. It was just a little pun, that's all.
So people can stop typing the "An Athlon is not an Intel product! j00 suX0r!" posts. Thanks.
--saint