While you might have a point with Firewire and ADB, those are two hardware innovations by Apple being compared to Microsoft, which has been primarily a software company and whose hardware side has used established hardware standards. Basically, you are having to reach into an area in which Microsoft does not compete in order to find examples which provides Apple an unfair advantage.
Okay, how about AppleTalk? A zero-configuration networking protocol which has been superseded by Zeroconf (Bonjour) networking, essentially an improved version.
While the use of ADB in Apple computers was superseded by USB, USB was not created from ADB.
USB is most certainly an indirect descendant of ADB. ADB was a low-power serial bus designed for input devices and allowed daisy-chaining. USB is a low-power serial bus originally designed for input devices, which allows daisy-chaining, plus it is hot-pluggable and uses more sturdy connectors, to name two improvements.
...it'd probably just kill him if he found out someone hacked OSX onto some box then had volume control not work for instancce (I assume OSX has these problems just like any other OS...
Right now, building a Hackintosh is not unlike building a system to run NeXTStep back in the day... there's a list of supported (by OS X, not Apple) components to choose from, and you go from there. I just built one recently, and had to mess with a couple things to get everything working perfectly. Sound didn't work until I applied an edit to the DSDT (differentiated system description table) file for my motherboard, and added a custom kernel extension. I had to slightly edit an Apple kernel extension to get OS X to understand that my hard drives were internal and give them the appropriate icons. And I had to use a different ifconfig that can kick the network interface into promiscuous mode to get Bonjour networking to work.
I've got my Hackintosh set up so nearly all the "hacky" stuff is on a USB stick that has the EFI boot stuff OS X needs, the Chameleon bootloader, and the kernel extensions and stuff that fix the other issues. It's themed to look exactly like Boot Camp, and dual boots into Snow Leopard and Windows 7 (by default into OS X if I don't press a key to get the selection screen). The only thing it can't do is boot from a DVD, which as I understand it is a limitation of Chameleon that may one day be rectified, but booting from an 8GB USB key with the OS X install DVD copied onto it works great.
Putting it all together was pretty easy thanks to those who have gone before. I just had to do some googling, some downloading, some reading, and post a few questions on some forums when I got stuck.
If Apple ever does open up OS X to run on non-Apple hardware, I would guess they'd do much the same as NeXT did... you'd get a list of supported components to pick from, if you use something other than stuff on the list and get it to work, fine, but don't call Apple for help if you have problems.
I did some light testing with a similar setup with Leopard and XP on a previous Hackintosh I built about a year ago, and did not see the problems you describe... but it was only light, proof-of-concept testing, so maybe that's why. Thanks for the heads-up, I will be sure to clone my Windows drive before I let VMWare make any changes to it, just in case.
Well, I wanted a tower with internal expandability, but I don't have the kind of money to drop on a Mac Pro. I just built a pretty decent 2.83GHz quad core box with 8GB RAM for abut $1100. Took a bit of work and quite a bit of help from others to nudge me in the right direction when I got stuck, but I have a thumb drive configured with Chameleon that lets me boot and install Snow Leopard on the hard drive without having to make any changes to the actual running copy of OS X that would be broken by future OS updates. The only compromises I had to make were having to boot the SL installer from a copy on a thumb drive instead of the DVD, and having to put my NIC into promiscuous mode to get Bonjour to work.
I now have a computer that can dual boot Snow Leopard and Windows 7 (even with a GUI themed too look just like Boot Camp), sooner than Apple can sell me one (Windows 7 is not supported by Boot Camp just yet). The new version of VMWare Fusion comes out today, and that will let me also run my same, separate install of Windows 7 as a VM when I'm booted into OS X.
If you have another Mac, you can share its DVD drive across the network. CD/DVD sharing is built into OS X 10.6, and I think it was in 10.5 also. Apple also makes the software available to share a drive from a Windows PC. It even works for booting and OS reinstallation.
Likewise, if you have another Mac with firewire, you can also use its DVD drive via firewire target mode.
Or, if you're old-fashioned, any external USB or firewire DVD drive will most likely work.
...the average user is not very likely to get hit by it, fortunately. Hopefully they'll have a fix out quickly nonetheless.
Having said that, I'd like to ask the affected people why they weren't backing their systems up. When your system comes with a backup utility that you can literally turn on and forget about until you need it, it's pretty damned stupid to not use it.
Uh, yeah. The original post said that nobody complained about anything other than UI response and stability after WinMo 5.
The UI worked just fine on my phones when they took their little siestas, and the OS didn't crash or freeze. They just disconnected themselves from the network while appearing to be on it. Everything else worked. Unless you tried to make a phone call, you wouldn't even know anything was amiss. If you composed an email and clicked Send, it would go into the outbox and just sit there without complaint that it could not actually be sent.
Both times for me, and then the same thing happening to my co-workers? If it's hardware, that's some pretty shitty QA on HTC's part. I can't vouch for my co-workers, but I take good care of my electronics.
The UI reponse and stability issues are really all that anyone who owned a WinMobile phone after version 5 complained about.
Oh, really? How about when the phones look like they're on the network, with nice, full signal meters, appearing ready to make/receive calls and send/receive emails, but they actually are doing neither and will not until rebooted? That happened with me with two of the three company-issued WinMo phones* I've used in the past.
Believe me, it's a real treat when you're on-call over a weekend and come Monday morning everyone is asking you why you didn't answer the client emergency calls or respond to the downed server alerts that came in. Well, turns out those are pretty easy to miss when your phone never made a peep. After that happened to me twice I stopped trusting my WinMo phone when I have on-call duty, and started having emergency calls directed to my personal cell phone, and server alert emails sent to my personal mail account when I have on-call duty. This has happened to a few co-workers, too.
For two months now I have had my third company-issued WinMo phone, an HTC Touch Pro running 6.1, and I'll be damned if I'm going to trust it or any Windows Mobile-based phone, regardless of version, after being burned by its predecessors.
~Philly
* HTC PPC6700 running WM6.0 and PPC6800 running 6.1, neither with any software other than what they had out of the box.
I've got an old Apple LaserWriter Select 360 that I bought new in 1994 and still use. I had to replace one of the boards in it a couple years ago, but I salvaged the part from another dead one I had access to and did the surgery myself. Sadly, it is LocalTalk and parallel only, no Ethernet. I've been using it with an Ethertalk adapter for the longest time, but now Mac OS X 10.5 and newer no longer supports Ethertalk. I've tried a couple parallel print servers, but the quality of jobs printed through them does not compare to what is output natively.
I love that printer so much I'm considering keeping an old Mac around running Tiger just to serve it up to my other machines running newer OSes, but it would be nice to upgrade to a nice color laser with a faster engine and modern protocols. I'm only hesitant because, like you, I know it will be hard to find something manufactured today that will last me another 15 years.
That's my point, it's not VoIP directly from the handset like Skype-- which is what the commenters I was bitching about seem to think it does and therefore why it was rejected.
Because it's not VoIP from the handset, AT&T has no grounds to reject it (or declare it be hobbled by using wi-fi only, like Skype) over "concern for their network." They're rejecting it over concern for their profits.
Not really. Google Voice allows you to send and receive text messages for free, and offers low rates on international calling. AT&T makes a great deal of money from text messaging and international calls.
Theoretically you could drop your text messaging plan and just use GV (you can disable the forwarding of text messages to your 'real' AT&T phone number and just access received messages through GV). The unlimited text message plan from AT&T is $20/mo. That's $240 per year if one person cancelled their text plan in favor of GV. Multiply that times the number of iPhone users on AT&T's network and that's the maximum amount of money they could lose in a year just from GV's text messaging features. Granted, not every person is going to do that, but we're talking about a US cellular provider here-- they ruthlessly milk every last dollar from their customers, so they clearly see GV as a huge threat.
I don't make international calls, but I'd bet they're pricey from companies that charge 15 cents to send a 160 character text message. People who make international calls frequently are probably falling over themselves to switch to GV.
Google Voice stands to cost AT&T money. Apple won't lose a thing by offering it-- in fact, they stand to lose iPhone sales for rejecting it when apps for it are available on competing devices. In light of this, who is more likely to be the force behind the rejection?
As for the argument Apple is putting forward, that is just BS. If I put GV on my iPhone it's because I *want* it there.
And as for AT&T's argument, "Hey, look, we allow GV on other devices on our network!"-- No, it's not that they're allowed, it's that AT&T simply can't prevent them from being installed and used. Apple is the sole (official) gatekeeper to getting an app on the iPhone and under contract with AT&T, so it's clear they're doing AT&T's bidding here. I don't know why Apple is taking the lion's share of the blame by saying they're still evaluating it, but my guess would be some sort of quid pro quo with AT&T.
The whole thing stinks, and I hope the FCC realizes it and opens a can of whoop-ass.
~Philly
PS - Please learn WTF Google Voice does before commenting. It is NOT a VoIP application despite a dozen people saying or implying it is in their posts already.
Brian [on phone with Jillian]: Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh, you gotta hit, uh, "DVD" and then "menu" and then "select." Yeah... Yeah, the DVD needs to be face-up when you put it in. Uh huh. You should be able to see the words "Mr. 3000" Yeah... Still nothing? Is it plugged in? Okay, so, plug it in...
Bluetooth has always worked great for me. For the last 7 or 8 years I've used it to sync contact/calendar data between my Mac and whatever mobile phone I've had (I'm still an iPhone holdout). Plus I use it for file transfers between the computer and phone, and to tether to the phone to use its WWAN connection.
And I'm a huge fan of Firewire and hate that it lost out to USB. Firewire is a lot more versatile and was designed that way from the start (comes in damned handy as a network port between two Macs sometimes, because you can run TCP/IP over it). USB was never supposed to be much more than a new connection for keyboards and mice, and now they're shoehorning other capabilities into it that it was never designed for-- which IMHO never leads to good things. This line from the article particularly annoyed me: "I know of at least three people who purchased shiny new portable video recorders and were stuffed when they realised they'd have to upgrade their systems to support FireWire." Oh, noes! They have to spend a few bucks on a PCI card! The horror!!!! Seriously? Is this a real gripe? I mean, the cheapest Firewire card at NewEgg costs $6. A really good one will only set you back $40 or so.
Let's see, $150 million that the energy company executives can use to line their pockets, or to pay for something to prevent a disaster that might not really happen anyway but would cause damage that would be much more expensive to fix than prevent, and would cause utter chaos in the nation for an extended period of time.
There's only one outcome here. I don't know about you, but I'm gonna start outfitting my house like Chuck Heston's in The Omega Man.
I'm not slamming on the brakes, this happens even when gradually applying the brakes to slow from a reasonable highway speed down to off-ramp speed. Particularly when I hit the rim of a depression created by a manhole cover that's an inch or so lower than the road surface at the highway exit by my office.
If it happened when I was driving way too fast or not paying attention, I would have been in a collision by now.
...are the bane of my existence. I used to have a '94 Grand Am, and the ABS control chip failed in it-- a failure which manifested itself in a particularly terrifying way: Occasionally when I would attempt to apply the brake, the pedal would go straight to the floor and not actually activate the brakes. At all. I'd have to quickly take my foot off and reapply. Luckily it never happened in a situation where I would have had to slam on the brakes to avoid a collision. You can bet your ass I got that little problem fixed in a hurry, because there's no feeling like stepping on the pedal and finding that the brakes aren't fucking there.
Now, I drive a Scion Xa with what can only be called an overzealous ABS. If I'm braking and happen to hit a pothole or bump hard enough, the ABS is triggered and suddenly my stopping distance is not going to be less than the distance to the bumper of the car in front of me. Once again, the solution is to quickly take my foot off and then reapply. I have had to learn where the trouble spots are on the roads I frequent and brake very carefully when approaching them, always ready to lift my foot and then brake again if necessary.
I kinda wish ABS was something that could be toggled by the driver... it has its uses, but IME it's been more of a pain in the ass than a lifesaver.
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While you might have a point with Firewire and ADB, those are two hardware innovations by Apple being compared to Microsoft, which has been primarily a software company and whose hardware side has used established hardware standards. Basically, you are having to reach into an area in which Microsoft does not compete in order to find examples which provides Apple an unfair advantage.
Okay, how about AppleTalk? A zero-configuration networking protocol which has been superseded by Zeroconf (Bonjour) networking, essentially an improved version.
While the use of ADB in Apple computers was superseded by USB, USB was not created from ADB.
USB is most certainly an indirect descendant of ADB. ADB was a low-power serial bus designed for input devices and allowed daisy-chaining. USB is a low-power serial bus originally designed for input devices, which allows daisy-chaining, plus it is hot-pluggable and uses more sturdy connectors, to name two improvements.
~Philly
Firewire.
Apple Desktop Bus (which was copied and improved a bit by Intel, and named USB).
There's two.
~Philly
...it'd probably just kill him if he found out someone hacked OSX onto some box then had volume control not work for instancce (I assume OSX has these problems just like any other OS...
Right now, building a Hackintosh is not unlike building a system to run NeXTStep back in the day... there's a list of supported (by OS X, not Apple) components to choose from, and you go from there. I just built one recently, and had to mess with a couple things to get everything working perfectly. Sound didn't work until I applied an edit to the DSDT (differentiated system description table) file for my motherboard, and added a custom kernel extension. I had to slightly edit an Apple kernel extension to get OS X to understand that my hard drives were internal and give them the appropriate icons. And I had to use a different ifconfig that can kick the network interface into promiscuous mode to get Bonjour networking to work.
I've got my Hackintosh set up so nearly all the "hacky" stuff is on a USB stick that has the EFI boot stuff OS X needs, the Chameleon bootloader, and the kernel extensions and stuff that fix the other issues. It's themed to look exactly like Boot Camp, and dual boots into Snow Leopard and Windows 7 (by default into OS X if I don't press a key to get the selection screen). The only thing it can't do is boot from a DVD, which as I understand it is a limitation of Chameleon that may one day be rectified, but booting from an 8GB USB key with the OS X install DVD copied onto it works great.
Putting it all together was pretty easy thanks to those who have gone before. I just had to do some googling, some downloading, some reading, and post a few questions on some forums when I got stuck.
If Apple ever does open up OS X to run on non-Apple hardware, I would guess they'd do much the same as NeXT did... you'd get a list of supported components to pick from, if you use something other than stuff on the list and get it to work, fine, but don't call Apple for help if you have problems.
~Philly
I did some light testing with a similar setup with Leopard and XP on a previous Hackintosh I built about a year ago, and did not see the problems you describe... but it was only light, proof-of-concept testing, so maybe that's why. Thanks for the heads-up, I will be sure to clone my Windows drive before I let VMWare make any changes to it, just in case.
~Philly
Well, I wanted a tower with internal expandability, but I don't have the kind of money to drop on a Mac Pro. I just built a pretty decent 2.83GHz quad core box with 8GB RAM for abut $1100. Took a bit of work and quite a bit of help from others to nudge me in the right direction when I got stuck, but I have a thumb drive configured with Chameleon that lets me boot and install Snow Leopard on the hard drive without having to make any changes to the actual running copy of OS X that would be broken by future OS updates. The only compromises I had to make were having to boot the SL installer from a copy on a thumb drive instead of the DVD, and having to put my NIC into promiscuous mode to get Bonjour to work.
I now have a computer that can dual boot Snow Leopard and Windows 7 (even with a GUI themed too look just like Boot Camp), sooner than Apple can sell me one (Windows 7 is not supported by Boot Camp just yet). The new version of VMWare Fusion comes out today, and that will let me also run my same, separate install of Windows 7 as a VM when I'm booted into OS X.
~Philly
If you have another Mac, you can share its DVD drive across the network. CD/DVD sharing is built into OS X 10.6, and I think it was in 10.5 also. Apple also makes the software available to share a drive from a Windows PC. It even works for booting and OS reinstallation.
Likewise, if you have another Mac with firewire, you can also use its DVD drive via firewire target mode.
Or, if you're old-fashioned, any external USB or firewire DVD drive will most likely work.
~Philly
...the average user is not very likely to get hit by it, fortunately. Hopefully they'll have a fix out quickly nonetheless.
Having said that, I'd like to ask the affected people why they weren't backing their systems up. When your system comes with a backup utility that you can literally turn on and forget about until you need it, it's pretty damned stupid to not use it.
~Philly
Uh, yeah. The original post said that nobody complained about anything other than UI response and stability after WinMo 5.
The UI worked just fine on my phones when they took their little siestas, and the OS didn't crash or freeze. They just disconnected themselves from the network while appearing to be on it. Everything else worked. Unless you tried to make a phone call, you wouldn't even know anything was amiss. If you composed an email and clicked Send, it would go into the outbox and just sit there without complaint that it could not actually be sent.
~Philly
Both times for me, and then the same thing happening to my co-workers? If it's hardware, that's some pretty shitty QA on HTC's part. I can't vouch for my co-workers, but I take good care of my electronics.
~Philly
The UI reponse and stability issues are really all that anyone who owned a WinMobile phone after version 5 complained about.
Oh, really? How about when the phones look like they're on the network, with nice, full signal meters, appearing ready to make/receive calls and send/receive emails, but they actually are doing neither and will not until rebooted? That happened with me with two of the three company-issued WinMo phones* I've used in the past.
Believe me, it's a real treat when you're on-call over a weekend and come Monday morning everyone is asking you why you didn't answer the client emergency calls or respond to the downed server alerts that came in. Well, turns out those are pretty easy to miss when your phone never made a peep. After that happened to me twice I stopped trusting my WinMo phone when I have on-call duty, and started having emergency calls directed to my personal cell phone, and server alert emails sent to my personal mail account when I have on-call duty. This has happened to a few co-workers, too.
For two months now I have had my third company-issued WinMo phone, an HTC Touch Pro running 6.1, and I'll be damned if I'm going to trust it or any Windows Mobile-based phone, regardless of version, after being burned by its predecessors.
~Philly
* HTC PPC6700 running WM6.0 and PPC6800 running 6.1, neither with any software other than what they had out of the box.
I've got an old Apple LaserWriter Select 360 that I bought new in 1994 and still use. I had to replace one of the boards in it a couple years ago, but I salvaged the part from another dead one I had access to and did the surgery myself. Sadly, it is LocalTalk and parallel only, no Ethernet. I've been using it with an Ethertalk adapter for the longest time, but now Mac OS X 10.5 and newer no longer supports Ethertalk. I've tried a couple parallel print servers, but the quality of jobs printed through them does not compare to what is output natively.
I love that printer so much I'm considering keeping an old Mac around running Tiger just to serve it up to my other machines running newer OSes, but it would be nice to upgrade to a nice color laser with a faster engine and modern protocols. I'm only hesitant because, like you, I know it will be hard to find something manufactured today that will last me another 15 years.
~Philly
"Buy Windows 7 or we'll make you watch this video!"
I don't know about you guys, but I'd rather have Vogon poetry read at me.
~Philly
It's VoIP. Just not directly from the handset.
That's my point, it's not VoIP directly from the handset like Skype-- which is what the commenters I was bitching about seem to think it does and therefore why it was rejected.
Because it's not VoIP from the handset, AT&T has no grounds to reject it (or declare it be hobbled by using wi-fi only, like Skype) over "concern for their network." They're rejecting it over concern for their profits.
~Philly
Explain the loss to AT&T. Hard, isn't it?
Not really. Google Voice allows you to send and receive text messages for free, and offers low rates on international calling. AT&T makes a great deal of money from text messaging and international calls.
Theoretically you could drop your text messaging plan and just use GV (you can disable the forwarding of text messages to your 'real' AT&T phone number and just access received messages through GV). The unlimited text message plan from AT&T is $20/mo. That's $240 per year if one person cancelled their text plan in favor of GV. Multiply that times the number of iPhone users on AT&T's network and that's the maximum amount of money they could lose in a year just from GV's text messaging features. Granted, not every person is going to do that, but we're talking about a US cellular provider here-- they ruthlessly milk every last dollar from their customers, so they clearly see GV as a huge threat.
I don't make international calls, but I'd bet they're pricey from companies that charge 15 cents to send a 160 character text message. People who make international calls frequently are probably falling over themselves to switch to GV.
~Philly
Google Voice stands to cost AT&T money. Apple won't lose a thing by offering it-- in fact, they stand to lose iPhone sales for rejecting it when apps for it are available on competing devices. In light of this, who is more likely to be the force behind the rejection?
As for the argument Apple is putting forward, that is just BS. If I put GV on my iPhone it's because I *want* it there.
And as for AT&T's argument, "Hey, look, we allow GV on other devices on our network!"-- No, it's not that they're allowed, it's that AT&T simply can't prevent them from being installed and used. Apple is the sole (official) gatekeeper to getting an app on the iPhone and under contract with AT&T, so it's clear they're doing AT&T's bidding here. I don't know why Apple is taking the lion's share of the blame by saying they're still evaluating it, but my guess would be some sort of quid pro quo with AT&T.
The whole thing stinks, and I hope the FCC realizes it and opens a can of whoop-ass.
~Philly
PS - Please learn WTF Google Voice does before commenting. It is NOT a VoIP application despite a dozen people saying or implying it is in their posts already.
Microsoft has finally succeeded at copying the Apple Reality Distortion Field!
...hear Stephen Tobolowsky as Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day exclaiming "BING!" every time they read the word?
Also, does anyone else ponder why Microsoft's product names are either really generic and boring, or totally cheesy and cringe-worthy?
~Philly
Brian [on phone with Jillian]: Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh, you gotta hit, uh, "DVD" and then "menu" and then "select." Yeah... Yeah, the DVD needs to be face-up when you put it in. Uh huh. You should be able to see the words "Mr. 3000" Yeah... Still nothing? Is it plugged in? Okay, so, plug it in...
~Philly
Bluetooth has always worked great for me. For the last 7 or 8 years I've used it to sync contact/calendar data between my Mac and whatever mobile phone I've had (I'm still an iPhone holdout). Plus I use it for file transfers between the computer and phone, and to tether to the phone to use its WWAN connection.
And I'm a huge fan of Firewire and hate that it lost out to USB. Firewire is a lot more versatile and was designed that way from the start (comes in damned handy as a network port between two Macs sometimes, because you can run TCP/IP over it). USB was never supposed to be much more than a new connection for keyboards and mice, and now they're shoehorning other capabilities into it that it was never designed for-- which IMHO never leads to good things. This line from the article particularly annoyed me: "I know of at least three people who purchased shiny new portable video recorders and were stuffed when they realised they'd have to upgrade their systems to support FireWire." Oh, noes! They have to spend a few bucks on a PCI card! The horror!!!! Seriously? Is this a real gripe? I mean, the cheapest Firewire card at NewEgg costs $6. A really good one will only set you back $40 or so.
~Philly
Sweet Clyde, laugh derisively at them!
~Philly
...that Wired names their annual vaporware awards in honor of Duke.
~Philly
Let's see, $150 million that the energy company executives can use to line their pockets, or to pay for something to prevent a disaster that might not really happen anyway but would cause damage that would be much more expensive to fix than prevent, and would cause utter chaos in the nation for an extended period of time.
There's only one outcome here. I don't know about you, but I'm gonna start outfitting my house like Chuck Heston's in The Omega Man.
~Philly
Don't forget Go Corp.
~Philly
I'm not slamming on the brakes, this happens even when gradually applying the brakes to slow from a reasonable highway speed down to off-ramp speed. Particularly when I hit the rim of a depression created by a manhole cover that's an inch or so lower than the road surface at the highway exit by my office.
If it happened when I was driving way too fast or not paying attention, I would have been in a collision by now.
~Philly
...are the bane of my existence. I used to have a '94 Grand Am, and the ABS control chip failed in it-- a failure which manifested itself in a particularly terrifying way: Occasionally when I would attempt to apply the brake, the pedal would go straight to the floor and not actually activate the brakes. At all. I'd have to quickly take my foot off and reapply. Luckily it never happened in a situation where I would have had to slam on the brakes to avoid a collision. You can bet your ass I got that little problem fixed in a hurry, because there's no feeling like stepping on the pedal and finding that the brakes aren't fucking there.
Now, I drive a Scion Xa with what can only be called an overzealous ABS. If I'm braking and happen to hit a pothole or bump hard enough, the ABS is triggered and suddenly my stopping distance is not going to be less than the distance to the bumper of the car in front of me. Once again, the solution is to quickly take my foot off and then reapply. I have had to learn where the trouble spots are on the roads I frequent and brake very carefully when approaching them, always ready to lift my foot and then brake again if necessary.
I kinda wish ABS was something that could be toggled by the driver... it has its uses, but IME it's been more of a pain in the ass than a lifesaver.
~Philly