It seems that someone missed this, and that "piles" is actually the "Expose" feature in Panther. I got to play with this last night, and it is pretty cool even though it ran like shit (and was expected to) on my spare G4/350 with a feeble video card.
~Philly
Re:I think you missed the clue train.
on
G5 Benchmark Roundup
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I can certianly build it cheaper.
Well, good for you. You, however, are in a very small minority of PC users. The majority either don't want to be bothered building their own machine, or do not have the expertise to do so.
I hate the standard Dell vs. Apple price comparisons.
The only fair comparison is "purchased, manufacturer-supported, finished product" vs. "purchased, manufacturer-supported, finished product," not "purchased, manufacturer-supported, finished product" vs. "commodity components cobbled together by end user probably using a pirated copy of Windows."
Additionally, my reply was addressing the original poster's claim that a certain Dell box was faster and cheaper.
The quality is fine when you do DC, and there is the option of using it privately, with the "obnoxiously loud" speaker turned off. My phone always has that speaker off except when I'm in the car.
DC is significantly faster than placing a regular cellphone call. When you're talking back and forth with other co-workers in the field all day long, that time adds up pretty quickly.
How is a regular mobile phone *not* an "unlimited-range walkie talkie"?
The DC feature facilitates *instantaneous* communication, a regular mobile phone doesn't. There are many situations where I wouldn't take the time to place a mobile phone call, but I will beep someone on the DC.
IME, DC is also less of a distraction to use when I'm driving. Even with a headset and voice dialing, I don't like to talk on a mobile phone while I'm driving-- but I don't mind using the DC at all even though I have to actually hold the phone to use it.
I know it sounds mad, but it's a fundamental tenet of this new religion. Here, software is not made by armies of "Microserfs" employed by a giant corporation, but by armies of volunteer programmers who "donate" their code to the public domain. By making underlying source code available to all, many hands and minds work on the software to improve it - hence "open source".
and later on:
My own installation was a breeze - at the beginning. Mandrake "partitioned" the PC's disk so it could "dual boot" to either Windows or Linux.
"People" who gratuitously overuse words in "quotes" too much these days give me Austin Powers "flashbacks" which make me "laugh."
Are you crazy? I work for a consulting firm, and the Nextel phones changed our business when we got them because we were able to communicate much more easily with each other when in the field than we were with ordinary cellphones.
Having what is basically an unlimited-range walkie talkie is great.
~Philly
I think you missed the clue train.
on
G5 Benchmark Roundup
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The machine that a dual 2GHz G5 trounced in all the real-world app tests was a Dell with dual 3.06GHz Xeons. Notice, I said "real-world app tests," not the questionable benchmarks. You can dispute the benchmarks, but it's hard to argue the performance differences I saw with Photoshop, Mathematica, etc. The Dell was flat-out dusted.
If a dual 3.06GHz Xeon system was shown to be slower than the dual 2.0GHz G5, please explain how a Dell with only dual 2.4GHz Xeons (which is what I presume you meant) is faster.
The Dell dual 3.06GHz Xeon system has been repeatedly spec'd out in recent/. discussions at ~$4000 in configurations comparable to the G5's. I just did it myself. I configured my Dell PWS 450 by selecting two 3.06GHz Xeons, downgrading to 512MB of RAM, upgrading to a 120GB hard drive (still smaller than the G5's 160MB), upgrading to the cheapest drive that could write DVDs, adding a modem, adding a FireWire card, and subtracting a monitor. Components not specifically listed here were left at their default settings. Final price: $3772.
Since the bone-stock G5 is $3000, please explain how the dual Xeon costing $3772 is cheaper.
BTW, the exact Dell system above configured with 2.4GHz dual Xeons is $2522, not "under $2000" as you seem to have claimed.
I know the iSight comes with brackets for Apple products, like the laptops, the iMac, and the LCD displays. Are any of those brackets adjustable or do they look like they would work on third-party stuff? I've got a ViewSonic LCD that I'd like to put the camera on.
maybe something that will work with apples iChat AV?
To loosely quote Jobs at the WWDC Keynote: "Right now, iChat AV is Mac only, but we expect to work toward interoperability as our competitors copy it."
I'd expect AIM to work with it first due to Apple's relationship with AOL, with YIM coming after that.
The best KVM experience I got is with a manual USB KVM, which connects my G4 and my home-built Athlon box running XP Pro.
I tried upgrading to a powered USB KVM that had its own GUI, but I ended up returning it. I'm a lefty, and I like to have both mouse buttons set to "click" and pressing the wheel set to "context"-- the KVM intercepted this and refused to let the thing work any other way than left-click/right-context. The mouse would just appear as a generic two-button mouse to my computers.
Apparently the trick is to just use the plainest KVM you can find, if you want your computers to see the mouse as it actually is. The ones chock-full of whiz-bang features are designed with a rack of generic winboxes in mind, so the possibility that someone will want/need more than left-click/right-context functionality is not a consideration.
I bet some legal action will be taken against the reporter who did the "hacking," while nobody will even think about holding any school officials accountable for their stunning negligence. I shudder to think what a pedophile with a WiFi-enabled laptop could have done with access to that kind of info. Cripes, it could have really turned into a serious NAMBLA convention out there.
I know this much, if I were a parent of a kid at that school I'd be raising holy hell about this and calling for the heads of people in the school administration. Starting with Superintendent Mary Frances Callan, who was quoted as saying, "I don't see this as such a huge news story." WHAT??? Bitch, you should be on your knees thanking God that this was uncovered by a reporter and not some scumbag who got a kid's address from that wide-open network of yours and found himself an ideal victim!
I used a DOS machine from '85-'91 and thought it was pretty hot shit. When I started college in the fall of '91, the school required incoming students to have access to a Mac.
Since my existing computer was then almost six years old and showing its age, my parents opted to loosen the purse strings and buy me a Macintosh LC. Within fifteen minutes of getting it out of the box and up and running, I knew I was gonna be a Mac user for life (sorry, Apple-haters, but there was no consumption of Kool-Aid involved). Not long after that I got my first look at Windows 3.1, and I couldn't believe what a half-assed Mac knockoff it was. Microsoft has made great strides with Windows over the years, but they still can't touch the synergy between hardware and software that Apple achieves. That synergy means much more to me than raw speed, and I'm more than happy to pay for it.
Therein is the basis for the holy wars, IMHO: The Mac people don't understand why the Windows users are eating dogfood when they could be having filet mignon, and the Windows people don't understand why anyone would choose to pay more for a computer that they perceive as working the pretty much the same as a much cheaper Windows box.
These days, I make my living as a system integrator. I support Windows and Macs, but specialize in Macs-- slightly difficult because my Mac clients seldom need me. I own several Macs and a couple PCs, but my main machines are a G4 and an iBook-- after a long day dealing with Windows (which "just stops working" from time to time), it's damned nice to come home and use my Macs (which "just work"). In my experience, more often than not, people who have really used both OSes for an appreciable amount of time prefer the Mac.
Yup, yesterday, within a minute of installing 1.0.
Some stuff still needs fixin'
on
Safari 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The only problems I have with Safari are:
1) It does not render the Outlook Web Access from Exchange 2000 properly. This may just be because those Microsoft ass-clowns have coded it specifically for IE, it may not be Safari's fault.
2) One of my larger corporate clients uses some crap web proxy that Safari doesn't like-- http sites load okay, but https sites do not work at all. They don't even try to load. I dunno if there's some authentication issue or what, but I know all my settings are set properly, and everything authenticates fine for http. One of these days perhaps I'll steel myself to talk with one of the corporate help desk script monkeys and see if I can't find out what proxy it is so I can submit a bug report.
I'm going to reserve judgment on the G5 case until I see one in person. I don't think the photos can really do it justice.
I still think that the Quicksilver is the best looking Power Mac ever sold, but that won't stop me from replacing mine with a G5 when my bonus check makes its way into my greedy little hands in December.
where they assuming that Apple users can't distinguish right from left ?
I don't know about Mac users, but I know plenty of Windows users who can't seem to tell right from left. If I only had a nickel for every time this exchange has taken place during a tech support call I have taken from a Windows user:
Me: "Okay, now right-click on that icon to bring up the context menu, and select 'Properties' from it." Them: "Ok, I clicked on it, but the icon just goes dark." Me: "Did you click, or right-click?" Them: "What do you mean, 'right-click'? Me: "Right-click, as in, click the right mouse button." Them [astonished]: "You mean it does *something else*???"
Let me tell you how Apple came to use the horrible, one-button mouse. When they were developing the Lisa and Mac, they were also hiring scads of employees to do admin & custodial jobs and other non-techie stuff. Many of them had never touched a computer before, and Apple used them for testing to find the optimal number of buttons on the mouse. One is the correct number of buttons for the uninitated user, as borne out by usability testing. When people get used to their machine and learn the ins and outs of the OS, they can cough up a couple bucks for a multi-button mouse with lots of bells and whistles.
Finally, I do believe that recent changes to Apple's nomenclature indicate that the new towers to be announced Monday will include a multi-button mouse with a scroll wheel-- the mouse that comes with the consumer level systems has been changed from "Pro Mouse" to just plain "Mouse," and I think the new keyboard that has begun shipping with those systems is likewise simply named "Keyboard." This could indicate that the "professional" desktop Macs are going to ship with more feature-laden mice and keyboards than the machines aimed at Grandma and other first-time computer users.
The rest of Apples site would say "3 USB Ports" not "Three". Also, Apple have a long standing habit of using Firewire instead of USB 2.0. I take this as one point impossible
Once again use of the verbal "One" instead of the numeric. Only one FW800 port? Why would Apple stick with FireWire 400 anyway? I mark this impossible
Oh, yeah? That's what's shipping in the current G4: 2 FW400, and 1 FW800. Since 800 is rather new, people will be more likely to need more 400 ports for their existing devices-- plus it would be dumb to make someone have to 'waste' an 800 port on a 400 device. For now, 2 of the older standard makes sense.
- Bluetooth & AirPort Extreme ready
Likely
Again, thank you, Captain Obvious-- since this is how current G4s are shipping.
Re:The Apple We All Know and Love
on
iBox Episode 2
·
· Score: 1
An example is monitor spaning on an iBook..although the video chipset is capable, they intentionaly disable it, so if you want it, you have to buy a higher priced Powerbook.
Or, you could just follow these directions and get desktop spanning on the iBook in about 2 minutes by making a minor change to a firmware setting.
Slashdot Mirror
Look here.
It seems that someone missed this, and that "piles" is actually the "Expose" feature in Panther. I got to play with this last night, and it is pretty cool even though it ran like shit (and was expected to) on my spare G4/350 with a feeble video card.
~Philly
I can certianly build it cheaper.
Well, good for you. You, however, are in a very small minority of PC users. The majority either don't want to be bothered building their own machine, or do not have the expertise to do so.
I hate the standard Dell vs. Apple price comparisons.
The only fair comparison is "purchased, manufacturer-supported, finished product" vs. "purchased, manufacturer-supported, finished product," not "purchased, manufacturer-supported, finished product" vs. "commodity components cobbled together by end user probably using a pirated copy of Windows."
Additionally, my reply was addressing the original poster's claim that a certain Dell box was faster and cheaper.
~Philly
The quality is fine when you do DC, and there is the option of using it privately, with the "obnoxiously loud" speaker turned off. My phone always has that speaker off except when I'm in the car.
DC is significantly faster than placing a regular cellphone call. When you're talking back and forth with other co-workers in the field all day long, that time adds up pretty quickly.
How is a regular mobile phone *not* an "unlimited-range walkie talkie"?
The DC feature facilitates *instantaneous* communication, a regular mobile phone doesn't. There are many situations where I wouldn't take the time to place a mobile phone call, but I will beep someone on the DC.
IME, DC is also less of a distraction to use when I'm driving. Even with a headset and voice dialing, I don't like to talk on a mobile phone while I'm driving-- but I don't mind using the DC at all even though I have to actually hold the phone to use it.
~Philly
From the article:
I know it sounds mad, but it's a fundamental tenet of this new religion. Here, software is not made by armies of "Microserfs" employed by a giant corporation, but by armies of volunteer programmers who "donate" their code to the public domain. By making underlying source code available to all, many hands and minds work on the software to improve it - hence "open source".
and later on:
My own installation was a breeze - at the beginning. Mandrake "partitioned" the PC's disk so it could "dual boot" to either Windows or Linux.
"People" who gratuitously overuse words in "quotes" too much these days give me Austin Powers "flashbacks" which make me "laugh."
~Philly
i think direct connect is pointless and stupid.
Are you crazy? I work for a consulting firm, and the Nextel phones changed our business when we got them because we were able to communicate much more easily with each other when in the field than we were with ordinary cellphones.
Having what is basically an unlimited-range walkie talkie is great.
~Philly
The machine that a dual 2GHz G5 trounced in all the real-world app tests was a Dell with dual 3.06GHz Xeons. Notice, I said "real-world app tests," not the questionable benchmarks. You can dispute the benchmarks, but it's hard to argue the performance differences I saw with Photoshop, Mathematica, etc. The Dell was flat-out dusted.
/. discussions at ~$4000 in configurations comparable to the G5's. I just did it myself. I configured my Dell PWS 450 by selecting two 3.06GHz Xeons, downgrading to 512MB of RAM, upgrading to a 120GB hard drive (still smaller than the G5's 160MB), upgrading to the cheapest drive that could write DVDs, adding a modem, adding a FireWire card, and subtracting a monitor. Components not specifically listed here were left at their default settings. Final price: $3772.
If a dual 3.06GHz Xeon system was shown to be slower than the dual 2.0GHz G5, please explain how a Dell with only dual 2.4GHz Xeons (which is what I presume you meant) is faster.
The Dell dual 3.06GHz Xeon system has been repeatedly spec'd out in recent
Since the bone-stock G5 is $3000, please explain how the dual Xeon costing $3772 is cheaper.
BTW, the exact Dell system above configured with 2.4GHz dual Xeons is $2522, not "under $2000" as you seem to have claimed.
~Philly
I know the iSight comes with brackets for Apple products, like the laptops, the iMac, and the LCD displays. Are any of those brackets adjustable or do they look like they would work on third-party stuff? I've got a ViewSonic LCD that I'd like to put the camera on.
~Philly
maybe something that will work with apples iChat AV?
To loosely quote Jobs at the WWDC Keynote: "Right now, iChat AV is Mac only, but we expect to work toward interoperability as our competitors copy it."
I'd expect AIM to work with it first due to Apple's relationship with AOL, with YIM coming after that.
~Philly
The best KVM experience I got is with a manual USB KVM, which connects my G4 and my home-built Athlon box running XP Pro.
I tried upgrading to a powered USB KVM that had its own GUI, but I ended up returning it. I'm a lefty, and I like to have both mouse buttons set to "click" and pressing the wheel set to "context"-- the KVM intercepted this and refused to let the thing work any other way than left-click/right-context. The mouse would just appear as a generic two-button mouse to my computers.
Apparently the trick is to just use the plainest KVM you can find, if you want your computers to see the mouse as it actually is. The ones chock-full of whiz-bang features are designed with a rack of generic winboxes in mind, so the possibility that someone will want/need more than left-click/right-context functionality is not a consideration.
~Philly
...shoot the messenger here?
I bet some legal action will be taken against the reporter who did the "hacking," while nobody will even think about holding any school officials accountable for their stunning negligence. I shudder to think what a pedophile with a WiFi-enabled laptop could have done with access to that kind of info. Cripes, it could have really turned into a serious NAMBLA convention out there.
I know this much, if I were a parent of a kid at that school I'd be raising holy hell about this and calling for the heads of people in the school administration. Starting with Superintendent Mary Frances Callan, who was quoted as saying, "I don't see this as such a huge news story." WHAT??? Bitch, you should be on your knees thanking God that this was uncovered by a reporter and not some scumbag who got a kid's address from that wide-open network of yours and found himself an ideal victim!
~Philly
I used a DOS machine from '85-'91 and thought it was pretty hot shit. When I started college in the fall of '91, the school required incoming students to have access to a Mac.
Since my existing computer was then almost six years old and showing its age, my parents opted to loosen the purse strings and buy me a Macintosh LC. Within fifteen minutes of getting it out of the box and up and running, I knew I was gonna be a Mac user for life (sorry, Apple-haters, but there was no consumption of Kool-Aid involved). Not long after that I got my first look at Windows 3.1, and I couldn't believe what a half-assed Mac knockoff it was. Microsoft has made great strides with Windows over the years, but they still can't touch the synergy between hardware and software that Apple achieves. That synergy means much more to me than raw speed, and I'm more than happy to pay for it.
Therein is the basis for the holy wars, IMHO: The Mac people don't understand why the Windows users are eating dogfood when they could be having filet mignon, and the Windows people don't understand why anyone would choose to pay more for a computer that they perceive as working the pretty much the same as a much cheaper Windows box.
These days, I make my living as a system integrator. I support Windows and Macs, but specialize in Macs-- slightly difficult because my Mac clients seldom need me. I own several Macs and a couple PCs, but my main machines are a G4 and an iBook-- after a long day dealing with Windows (which "just stops working" from time to time), it's damned nice to come home and use my Macs (which "just work"). In my experience, more often than not, people who have really used both OSes for an appreciable amount of time prefer the Mac.
~Philly
I'm positive I set everything correctly. It all works correctly in MSIE on the same machine, http and https alike.
~Philly
Just curious, have you tried it recently?
Yup, yesterday, within a minute of installing 1.0.
The only problems I have with Safari are:
1) It does not render the Outlook Web Access from Exchange 2000 properly. This may just be because those Microsoft ass-clowns have coded it specifically for IE, it may not be Safari's fault.
2) One of my larger corporate clients uses some crap web proxy that Safari doesn't like-- http sites load okay, but https sites do not work at all. They don't even try to load. I dunno if there's some authentication issue or what, but I know all my settings are set properly, and everything authenticates fine for http. One of these days perhaps I'll steel myself to talk with one of the corporate help desk script monkeys and see if I can't find out what proxy it is so I can submit a bug report.
~Philly
I'm going to reserve judgment on the G5 case until I see one in person. I don't think the photos can really do it justice.
I still think that the Quicksilver is the best looking Power Mac ever sold, but that won't stop me from replacing mine with a G5 when my bonus check makes its way into my greedy little hands in December.
~Philly
Apple is still selling the OS 9 bootable G4s. Look under the "Apple Products" sidebar on the store's front page.
Single 1.25GHz for $1299, dualies for $1599.
~Philly
Get it here.
~Philly
Here. Refreshes every 60 seconds.
Here's the post the way it SHOULD look. Damn Submit button's too close to the Preview button!
----------
Damned if I can find the actual cartoon online, but most Dilbert fans know the one I'm talking about:
"The software has found your credit card number and is placing orders for new products it thinks you need... please wait."
~Philly
Damned if I can find the actual cartoon online, but most Dilbert fans know the one I'm taking about:
"The software has found your credit card number and
is placing orders for new products it thinks you need... please wait."
~Philly
where they assuming that Apple users can't distinguish right from left ?
I don't know about Mac users, but I know plenty of Windows users who can't seem to tell right from left. If I only had a nickel for every time this exchange has taken place during a tech support call I have taken from a Windows user:
Me: "Okay, now right-click on that icon to bring up the context menu, and select 'Properties' from it."
Them: "Ok, I clicked on it, but the icon just goes dark."
Me: "Did you click, or right-click?"
Them: "What do you mean, 'right-click'?
Me: "Right-click, as in, click the right mouse button."
Them [astonished]: "You mean it does *something else*???"
Let me tell you how Apple came to use the horrible, one-button mouse. When they were developing the Lisa and Mac, they were also hiring scads of employees to do admin & custodial jobs and other non-techie stuff. Many of them had never touched a computer before, and Apple used them for testing to find the optimal number of buttons on the mouse. One is the correct number of buttons for the uninitated user, as borne out by usability testing. When people get used to their machine and learn the ins and outs of the OS, they can cough up a couple bucks for a multi-button mouse with lots of bells and whistles.
Finally, I do believe that recent changes to Apple's nomenclature indicate that the new towers to be announced Monday will include a multi-button mouse with a scroll wheel-- the mouse that comes with the consumer level systems has been changed from "Pro Mouse" to just plain "Mouse," and I think the new keyboard that has begun shipping with those systems is likewise simply named "Keyboard." This could indicate that the "professional" desktop Macs are going to ship with more feature-laden mice and keyboards than the machines aimed at Grandma and other first-time computer users.
~Philly
But the actual name is "Power Macintosh G5," as opposed to Canon's "Powershot G5."
IIRC, that was Apple's defense when they announced Mac OS 9.0 and Microware (makers of OS-9) took issue with it.
~Philly
- Three USB 2.0 ports
The rest of Apples site would say "3 USB Ports" not "Three". Also, Apple have a long standing habit of using Firewire instead of USB 2.0. I take this as one point impossible
Yeah, except the current G4s have USB 2.0 hardware onboard, Apple just restricted it to USB 1.1 operation.
- One FireWire 800, two FireWire 400 ports
Once again use of the verbal "One" instead of the numeric. Only one FW800 port? Why would Apple stick with FireWire 400 anyway? I mark this impossible
Oh, yeah? That's what's shipping in the current G4: 2 FW400, and 1 FW800. Since 800 is rather new, people will be more likely to need more 400 ports for their existing devices-- plus it would be dumb to make someone have to 'waste' an 800 port on a 400 device. For now, 2 of the older standard makes sense.
- Bluetooth & AirPort Extreme ready
Likely
Again, thank you, Captain Obvious-- since this is how current G4s are shipping.
~Philly
"FireWire... it's the honest choice"
An example is monitor spaning on an iBook..although the video chipset is capable, they intentionaly disable it, so if you want it, you have to buy a higher priced Powerbook.
Or, you could just follow these directions and get desktop spanning on the iBook in about 2 minutes by making a minor change to a firmware setting.
Works great.
~Philly