he was locked up in an unusually rough situation for his non-violent crimes. if he was on trial today i bet he would be hit with some patriot act violations and locked up as a terrorist.
i know a million other people face the same thing, but his is a case most people here should know about.
did you ever go to the store and pick up a cheapo blank and a super high grade? you can feel the weight difference. you can also tell with older movies that are sold for under $10... they always weigh nothing. VHS tape is magnetic media (like audio tape)... generally speaking the heavier it is the better the quality. the higher quality ones also will last through more playings/recordings. i am not sure if either are better for archiving though.
with CD-R media i have heard some claims that the black ones are good (look like a playstation game) if they will go to people that have a tendency to leave disks all over their desk... the black plastic lens keeps harmful light off the media surface.
test brands yourself... leave a few on your dashboard through the summer and see what the sun and temperature swings do to them.
you figure a lot of people that were happy to carry a Palm Pilot may have upgraded to a Treo (or one of the other Palm OS phones) and those do not count as PDA sales either.....
i have not carried my Palm in a few years, but if i was still willing to deal with the bulk of it i would have gotten a Treo already. my cell phone is not all that smart, but it keeps more contact info than just phone number, schedule, memo pad (to do list, shopping lists) and some other stupid things. i miss the Palm OS and the bonus apps.... but i do not miss the size of it.
how can you blast someone that's obviously creative and doing some tinkering in their spare time. why not go after 99% of the globe that sits on their ass drinking beer watching sports on TV. maybe if some of them had some motivation the world would be a better place. don't pick on someone that has a hobby that exercises their mind. go after all the people wasting their brains.... or the ones that take financial aid to go to college just to drink and fuck off for 4 years and end up doing some worthless job shuffling papers.
yes, and if you want to avoid the double lossy compression effect... you could always buy the song yourself?
if you want the song in a high quality sounding format, buy it on vinyl... that's what i do. i like the convenience of MP3/AAC files, but i really like the quality of vinyl. to me the difference between a good MP3/AAC and CD is not a big deal, neither have the sound and feel of vinyl.
i might be wrong, but doesn't digital cable actually only stream one channel to your box at a time? each box has an IP address (or the cable-net equiv) and as you change channels it requests the stream from that one channel. i dont think my house is always getting all 300 possible channels piped in. they are available, but not all actually feeding at once. it makes sense... you would need 1/500th of the bandwith that way.
i have no idea how many tuners can run at a time, but i am pretty sure if you have more than 4 or 5 cable boxes they run a second line, or some heavy duty line.
if that's the case, then this Verizon/M$ partnership really could take on cable companies. well, them or any of the other phone companies planning to roll this out in the next year or so (there are a few coming).
once you make your mix CD and burn it as an audio CD all DRM is gone. if you give that mix to your friend Todd and he rips it to his machine (Mac/M$?Linux/bla) there will be no DRM on it anyway.
iTunes has some limit to the number of burns a playlist can have...... but you can either change the playlist by mixing around one song, or take one burnt CD and just use disc copy on that "master" cd.
As we've said, it could be an error, but with two separate files both using containing the sub-string _g5_, one on Apple's site, the other on Avenue A's, this seems unlikely.
it's possibly a double typo, or an act of sillyness.... but who knows. it was written that way in two places. i don't think a G5 powerbook is coming anytime soon, and who knows if Avenue A would even have access to such information if it was. obviously somebody that does the Apple site saw it and let it go...
maybe it's just a funny prank so see if anyone is crazy enough to read the source code. the article has some speculation.
it is as much symbolic of the simplicity of the Macintosh's OS. yes there are keyboard/mouse shortcuts, but you can do everything you need to with click or click and hold. it makes it a LOT easier for newbies to use.
i am sure most power users of any platform go out and buy a mouse that they personally like. if it is to get a good size for their hand, or the number of buttons they want. personally i HATE sitting down to a computer (that is not mine) with more than 2 buttons and a scroll wheel. how would you ever know what the extra 5 buttons do till you start clicking them. hell, i even know people that really really liked the Apple hockey puck mouse.
i always saw it like a high end bicycle..... they don't ship with pedals. if you are buying a bike that expensive, you know what kind of pedals you want. the Mac ships with a great mouse out of the box so you can get started... but any power user is going to know what they want. i am somewhat surprised there is not an Apple branded scrolling mouse of some sort (rumors say they have had them in the R&D lab for years)..... maybe they think offering one is like saying the Mac got more complicated.
OS X supports multibutton scrolling mice out of the box. you just plug in a 2 button scrolling wheel and you do not even have to tweak anything in system prefs. setting 5+ button mice is cake as well (nice for exposé). it's not that Apple refuses to acknowledge the usefulness of the multibutton mouse.... they just know you do not NEED it to use a Mac.
if i still had it all i would have a very large pile of Sony broken bits. quite a few walkmen including Sony Sports and Outback models, minidisc players, car stereos.... etc. my brother told me he heard a saying "Sony makes the best equipment, as long as it has no moving parts". i could agree with that. their TVs and computer monitors are great. well, i never looked at the LCD/plasma displays too much but i know the CRT devices are among the best. the LCD/plasmas *look* darn good to me.
in addition to stuff i personally own, i have seen more than my share of Sony stuff at the college radio station i volunteer at. i do engineering work, so i deal with the broken gear. we never buy Sony if it's possible. non-commercial college radio is a pretty hostile enviroment. we have unpaid college students that do not take great care of stuff, and we are in a dusty basement area...... but the Sony gear just does not hold up like Technics or Tascam.
We had Technics SP-20 turntables that were at least 20+ years old, older than most all of our DJs. true workhorses, they lasted that long being used up to 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year. we sometimes have dead air slots, but they run at least 20 hours a day. that's damn impressive. they all spun 100% when they were pulled (still locked into perfect pitch). we replaced them in the last few years with Technics 1200s because we could no longer buy the toner arm replacement parts (they have not been available for at least 15+ years). the toner arms would get loose and molested from constant use, or things being dropped on them. we still today use the turntables alot, and the 1200 is the (club type) DJ standard. many DJs will lug their 1200s to shows including throwing them in the luggage compartment of an airplane. compare that to the CD players or minidisc decks we replace every 2 or 3 years.
because of our needs we often have very limited choices in products like CD players..... we still sometimes buy Sony ones and they always look nice, but they just don't hold up. we had ones right out of the box that were crappy (all 4 of them). they were looked at by the seller and even sent back to Sony. Tray loading players had a habit of eating CDs and in the process would put two deep grooves in the disc. ugh. we ended up modifying the players ourselves.
well a hacked cable card would be the same as a pirate digital cable box. i assume they exist? i have heard of pirate analog cable boxes, and ways to trick DSS boxes. if they do not exist now, i am sure they will.
one thing with digital cable boxes/cable cards is that they generally use something like a MAC address and that number is associated with your account. when you don't pay your bill they zotz the box(es), or when you change programming. you are effectively on a cable company private network so if they have the software they could possibly track down rogue devices..... though from the nature of the cable system it might take them a while to zero in on which actual house/apartment is using that device. that i am guessing from the stories of cable modem users' local networks including a printer hooked up to a neighbor's pc.
my brother has the Moto V710 and that phone allows the use of MP3 files as ringtones, but he has to load them on a tiny memory card and keep the card in the phone. this sounds like a realtively minor hop from that.
the available info says it syncs with your comnputer (cable or bluetooth). it mentions using a special cell phone playlist on your iTunes app to pick the songs to transfer over. in that case it sounds like MP3 or AAC, and i am guessing it will somehow allow the DRM'd iTMS songs you may have purchased.
being a Moto phone, i think it's safe to assume it will support iSync to keep your Address Book and iCal updated every time you connect to your computer. in one of the Steve Jobs quotes from a few weeks ago he mentioned being able to connect your phone to your computer and take your favorite dozen songs or so with you. they say paying for rintones is a multimillion dollar industry in the USA alone already. i don't know about others, but Verizon customers pay 99 now for a midi ringtone. if people will pay 99 for a midi ringtone, they will probably pay 99 to buy the AAC song from the iTMS. granted most people buy midi because they don't know how to make their own or how to get them on their phone... which makes you wonder if Verizon and others would allow this loss of revenue. granted Verizon themselves does not sell the tones, but they offer it through their "get it now" service that they make something from.
i never understood if this is supposed to just be for ringtones or do you plug in headphones to the phone and rock out? i know phone/mp3 player devices exist... even in the US
the iTunes issues are purely a legal snag. nobody can tell what will happen when a bunch of lawyers go at it....... well we can guess time delays will happen. the technical aspect of opening iTMS in another country/region is minimal. if Apple sells online there, they could set up the store in no time.
it seems most of Apple's delays are component shortages. they try to keep things under wraps so they do not fall prey to other glitches. i guess in the past they also would try to time releases for MacWorlds or other big events instead of calling for a media event just to release something new.
it's all about bulk pricing. when the first iPod came out the bare drives would cost an individual almost as much as a whole iPod. the drive in a USB2 case was the same as an iPod.
the rumored specs for the headless device are roughly that of the current $800 eMac. one theory i heard is that the eMac will be jumping to a low end G5. that would explain why a machine that's roughly an eMac (spec-wise) would be $200 or $300 less with no 17" crt. generally when Apple comes out with an update to a machine the pricing is about the same and the components hop. so the new G5 eMac will be $800 or $900 whenever it comes out. right now the eMac is the only desktop machine running G4 chips. granted Apple sells a lot of laptops relative to desktops (about 50/50 i think?) but they have everything worked out in the eMac. they just have to reshape it and box it up.
that is.... if there is any truth to the story at all?
well my case with my shared hosting company was weird. i was WAY under disk space, i have an app running to connect POP3 and get mail every hour and it leaves it on the server for one day then is removed. the repointed my mail's MX entry to disable:disable or something. i guess thinking it would deflect my spam? my account is for 10 gigs of bandwith and 1 gig of disk storage.
if the orig poster was running an old linux box as a mail server on a home network it might just get really annoying to deal with all that mess? as long as it is making it into the house it will have to be dealt with. bouncing it will just more than double the traffic because bouncing back bouncebacks will just bounce back again and go on forever till your wires melt. or maybe not.
well Xerox had no interest with the idea of a windos based GUI.... from what i understand (book probably had more details), the windo based GUI was concieved at Xerox and some suit thought it was a waste and ditched the project. Apple knew of the project and convinced Xerox to let them have what had been accomplished. Xerox had already written off the concept and probably had no fear of Apple and their home computer becoming a threat. Apple got access to what Xerox had done and put a lot of work into making it into what became the 1984 Macintosh System. it's not like they changed the graphics on it.
when you compare it to what IBM clones were running software-wise back then it was revolutionary. M$ copied the feel of the GUI and Apple legal pounced on it (settled out of court).
Apple really was the first to try to make a"personal computer". even Microsoft was just trying to apply the window based GUI to business machines. probably why Apple let them off easily (or so it seems in hindsight?). remember Steve and Steve from Apple were members of the homebrew computer club. they built the Apple I and Apple][ machines mostly for home users and eventually schools. Xerox, IBM, Microsoft etc were going after businesses and kind of laughed off the idea of computers in the home for regular people.
then you can track down one of the last G4 towers. they were just removed from the apple store a few months ago. i am sure some resellers still have them new, let alone the tons of used ones out there. i wonder if this would mean Apple is making standalone CRTs again? a $500 machine is not so cheap when you buy a $1200 LCD. that would leapfrog the G5 iMac in cost. this would suffer the same fate as the cube. the quality and cost of the Apple LCD screens make them no good for a budget machine.
pci slots would be nice, but honestly i bet way less than 1% of the buyers of the box would ever think to use them. i know a ton of Mac users and of all the people that own towers i would say only a few ever use the PCI slots. the machines always have adequate video, ethernet, audio etc etc etc. just about anything missing can be added to the USB or Firewire port. i know it is not the same, but i think Apple would be selling this to entry level computer users, not thrifty nerds.
even if you filter it to trash, you still have to deal with the volume of mail.
i actually just lost my email on my hosting (shared hosting) because i was GETTING too much email. they claimed my incoming mail was flooding out their servers.
this story submitter said they host their mail server so it's an inhouse hog of bandwith.
i don't think apple sent out press releases that they were filing papers about leaked info on a top secret project that will change the way home users play guitar forever.
anyone that reads Mac rumor sites know that Apple's legal dept regularly sends them letters demanding they take down stories, specs or pictures/drawings. that would be a non-story on here. also Apple internally makes tons of devices that never see the light of day (like a PDA recently). then there is downright false information on rumor sites.
this is about Apple legal hunting for one specific leak. they did the same thing a few years ago and caught "worker bee". someone on an earlier comment posted about that. that one guy kept a few rumor sites well fueled for a long time. i am guessing they want to catch whomever took his place.
garage band is a simple to use audio application that is part if the iLife suite (iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD, garage band). http://www.apple.com/ilife/
one of the rumor sites said the code name Asteroid was a joke on the term "breakout box". breakout and asteroid being old school video games. breakout box being a device that has the multiple A/V ports and connects to the computer with one cable.
they seemed to imply Asteroid and Q97 were internal codenames for the device, not knowing what the shipping name would be. it was implied the device could ship as soon as January's MacWorld expo, or in the next few months. i guess the assumption is that it might ship with the rumored iLife2. OS X 10.4 is due to ship in the next few months too.... and nobody seemed to know if iLife2 would ship with 10.4 or before.
but that crosshair is just an icon for pseudo-GPS..... i guess it goes out when they can not pinpoint you, but you can still yack away. i guess it means you are just in range of one tower or maybe two?
if you ever tried to use a real GPS in the car you will see what i mean.....
the article says the phone is NOT AN IPOD. we knew Apple made a version of Quicktime for cellphones. this makes it sound like the phone will just use Apple software to playback some MP3/AAC songs on your phone. a dozen songs requires very little flash memory. i would guess the phone would be able to play songs bought at iTMS. the fact that the article mentions putting songs on a phone via bluetooth/cable and how that would bypass the carrier, i guess that means we will not see iTMS shopping via cell phone.
maybe the rumors are way off and this is what the flash iPod is. the Moto V710 phone has a removable memory card you can put MP3 files on and play them as ringtones, or listen to them on the speakerphone. i guess headphones or a carkit would be possible too? who knows. you have to read the article knowing some are quotes from Apple and Moto and some is filler/speculation by Forbes. not to diss them, but it's possible they don't totally know and are off the mark with their speculation.
and i quote:
At the event, Jobs took pains to point out that the phone would not compete with Apple's popular iPod music player, but should viewed as an iPod accessory. "Wouldn't it be great if you could take a dozen of your favorite songs with you" on a cell phone, Jobs said at the time.
The companies said they plan to release a phone that will connect locally to computers unning Microsoft's Windows as well as Apple's Macintosh computers using a cable or a Bluetooth wireless connection.
Slashdot Mirror
maybe they are going to sell them online and see if they move any? or it's a typo.....
he was locked up in an unusually rough situation for his non-violent crimes. if he was on trial today i bet he would be hit with some patriot act violations and locked up as a terrorist.
i know a million other people face the same thing, but his is a case most people here should know about.
did you ever go to the store and pick up a cheapo blank and a super high grade? you can feel the weight difference. you can also tell with older movies that are sold for under $10... they always weigh nothing. VHS tape is magnetic media (like audio tape)... generally speaking the heavier it is the better the quality. the higher quality ones also will last through more playings/recordings. i am not sure if either are better for archiving though.
with CD-R media i have heard some claims that the black ones are good (look like a playstation game) if they will go to people that have a tendency to leave disks all over their desk... the black plastic lens keeps harmful light off the media surface.
test brands yourself... leave a few on your dashboard through the summer and see what the sun and temperature swings do to them.
you figure a lot of people that were happy to carry a Palm Pilot may have upgraded to a Treo (or one of the other Palm OS phones) and those do not count as PDA sales either.....
i have not carried my Palm in a few years, but if i was still willing to deal with the bulk of it i would have gotten a Treo already. my cell phone is not all that smart, but it keeps more contact info than just phone number, schedule, memo pad (to do list, shopping lists) and some other stupid things. i miss the Palm OS and the bonus apps.... but i do not miss the size of it.
how can you blast someone that's obviously creative and doing some tinkering in their spare time. why not go after 99% of the globe that sits on their ass drinking beer watching sports on TV. maybe if some of them had some motivation the world would be a better place.
don't pick on someone that has a hobby that exercises their mind. go after all the people wasting their brains.... or the ones that take financial aid to go to college just to drink and fuck off for 4 years and end up doing some worthless job shuffling papers.
yes, and if you want to avoid the double lossy compression effect... you could always buy the song yourself?
if you want the song in a high quality sounding format, buy it on vinyl... that's what i do. i like the convenience of MP3/AAC files, but i really like the quality of vinyl. to me the difference between a good MP3/AAC and CD is not a big deal, neither have the sound and feel of vinyl.
i might be wrong, but doesn't digital cable actually only stream one channel to your box at a time? each box has an IP address (or the cable-net equiv) and as you change channels it requests the stream from that one channel. i dont think my house is always getting all 300 possible channels piped in. they are available, but not all actually feeding at once. it makes sense... you would need 1/500th of the bandwith that way.
i have no idea how many tuners can run at a time, but i am pretty sure if you have more than 4 or 5 cable boxes they run a second line, or some heavy duty line.
if that's the case, then this Verizon/M$ partnership really could take on cable companies. well, them or any of the other phone companies planning to roll this out in the next year or so (there are a few coming).
once you make your mix CD and burn it as an audio CD all DRM is gone. if you give that mix to your friend Todd and he rips it to his machine (Mac/M$?Linux/bla) there will be no DRM on it anyway.
iTunes has some limit to the number of burns a playlist can have...... but you can either change the playlist by mixing around one song, or take one burnt CD and just use disc copy on that "master" cd.
the day after MacWorld, Apple reported its best quarter ever.s .html/
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jan/12result
it's possibly a double typo, or an act of sillyness.... but who knows. it was written that way in two places. i don't think a G5 powerbook is coming anytime soon, and who knows if Avenue A would even have access to such information if it was. obviously somebody that does the Apple site saw it and let it go...
maybe it's just a funny prank so see if anyone is crazy enough to read the source code. the article has some speculation.
it is as much symbolic of the simplicity of the Macintosh's OS. yes there are keyboard/mouse shortcuts, but you can do everything you need to with click or click and hold. it makes it a LOT easier for newbies to use.
i am sure most power users of any platform go out and buy a mouse that they personally like. if it is to get a good size for their hand, or the number of buttons they want. personally i HATE sitting down to a computer (that is not mine) with more than 2 buttons and a scroll wheel. how would you ever know what the extra 5 buttons do till you start clicking them. hell, i even know people that really really liked the Apple hockey puck mouse.
i always saw it like a high end bicycle..... they don't ship with pedals. if you are buying a bike that expensive, you know what kind of pedals you want. the Mac ships with a great mouse out of the box so you can get started... but any power user is going to know what they want. i am somewhat surprised there is not an Apple branded scrolling mouse of some sort (rumors say they have had them in the R&D lab for years)..... maybe they think offering one is like saying the Mac got more complicated.
OS X supports multibutton scrolling mice out of the box. you just plug in a 2 button scrolling wheel and you do not even have to tweak anything in system prefs. setting 5+ button mice is cake as well (nice for exposé). it's not that Apple refuses to acknowledge the usefulness of the multibutton mouse.... they just know you do not NEED it to use a Mac.
if i still had it all i would have a very large pile of Sony broken bits. quite a few walkmen including Sony Sports and Outback models, minidisc players, car stereos.... etc.
my brother told me he heard a saying "Sony makes the best equipment, as long as it has no moving parts". i could agree with that. their TVs and computer monitors are great. well, i never looked at the LCD/plasma displays too much but i know the CRT devices are among the best. the LCD/plasmas *look* darn good to me.
in addition to stuff i personally own, i have seen more than my share of Sony stuff at the college radio station i volunteer at. i do engineering work, so i deal with the broken gear. we never buy Sony if it's possible. non-commercial college radio is a pretty hostile enviroment. we have unpaid college students that do not take great care of stuff, and we are in a dusty basement area...... but the Sony gear just does not hold up like Technics or Tascam.
We had Technics SP-20 turntables that were at least 20+ years old, older than most all of our DJs. true workhorses, they lasted that long being used up to 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year. we sometimes have dead air slots, but they run at least 20 hours a day. that's damn impressive. they all spun 100% when they were pulled (still locked into perfect pitch). we replaced them in the last few years with Technics 1200s because we could no longer buy the toner arm replacement parts (they have not been available for at least 15+ years). the toner arms would get loose and molested from constant use, or things being dropped on them. we still today use the turntables alot, and the 1200 is the (club type) DJ standard. many DJs will lug their 1200s to shows including throwing them in the luggage compartment of an airplane. compare that to the CD players or minidisc decks we replace every 2 or 3 years.
because of our needs we often have very limited choices in products like CD players..... we still sometimes buy Sony ones and they always look nice, but they just don't hold up. we had ones right out of the box that were crappy (all 4 of them). they were looked at by the seller and even sent back to Sony. Tray loading players had a habit of eating CDs and in the process would put two deep grooves in the disc. ugh. we ended up modifying the players ourselves.
well a hacked cable card would be the same as a pirate digital cable box. i assume they exist? i have heard of pirate analog cable boxes, and ways to trick DSS boxes. if they do not exist now, i am sure they will.
one thing with digital cable boxes/cable cards is that they generally use something like a MAC address and that number is associated with your account. when you don't pay your bill they zotz the box(es), or when you change programming. you are effectively on a cable company private network so if they have the software they could possibly track down rogue devices..... though from the nature of the cable system it might take them a while to zero in on which actual house/apartment is using that device. that i am guessing from the stories of cable modem users' local networks including a printer hooked up to a neighbor's pc.
my brother has the Moto V710 and that phone allows the use of MP3 files as ringtones, but he has to load them on a tiny memory card and keep the card in the phone. this sounds like a realtively minor hop from that.
the available info says it syncs with your comnputer (cable or bluetooth). it mentions using a special cell phone playlist on your iTunes app to pick the songs to transfer over. in that case it sounds like MP3 or AAC, and i am guessing it will somehow allow the DRM'd iTMS songs you may have purchased.
being a Moto phone, i think it's safe to assume it will support iSync to keep your Address Book and iCal updated every time you connect to your computer. in one of the Steve Jobs quotes from a few weeks ago he mentioned being able to connect your phone to your computer and take your favorite dozen songs or so with you. they say paying for rintones is a multimillion dollar industry in the USA alone already. i don't know about others, but Verizon customers pay 99 now for a midi ringtone. if people will pay 99 for a midi ringtone, they will probably pay 99 to buy the AAC song from the iTMS. granted most people buy midi because they don't know how to make their own or how to get them on their phone... which makes you wonder if Verizon and others would allow this loss of revenue. granted Verizon themselves does not sell the tones, but they offer it through their "get it now" service that they make something from.
i never understood if this is supposed to just be for ringtones or do you plug in headphones to the phone and rock out? i know phone/mp3 player devices exist... even in the US
the iTunes issues are purely a legal snag. nobody can tell what will happen when a bunch of lawyers go at it....... well we can guess time delays will happen. the technical aspect of opening iTMS in another country/region is minimal. if Apple sells online there, they could set up the store in no time.
it seems most of Apple's delays are component shortages. they try to keep things under wraps so they do not fall prey to other glitches. i guess in the past they also would try to time releases for MacWorlds or other big events instead of calling for a media event just to release something new.
it's all about bulk pricing. when the first iPod came out the bare drives would cost an individual almost as much as a whole iPod. the drive in a USB2 case was the same as an iPod.
the rumored specs for the headless device are roughly that of the current $800 eMac. one theory i heard is that the eMac will be jumping to a low end G5. that would explain why a machine that's roughly an eMac (spec-wise) would be $200 or $300 less with no 17" crt. generally when Apple comes out with an update to a machine the pricing is about the same and the components hop. so the new G5 eMac will be $800 or $900 whenever it comes out. right now the eMac is the only desktop machine running G4 chips.
granted Apple sells a lot of laptops relative to desktops (about 50/50 i think?) but they have everything worked out in the eMac. they just have to reshape it and box it up.
that is.... if there is any truth to the story at all?
well my case with my shared hosting company was weird. i was WAY under disk space, i have an app running to connect POP3 and get mail every hour and it leaves it on the server for one day then is removed. the repointed my mail's MX entry to disable:disable or something. i guess thinking it would deflect my spam? my account is for 10 gigs of bandwith and 1 gig of disk storage.
if the orig poster was running an old linux box as a mail server on a home network it might just get really annoying to deal with all that mess? as long as it is making it into the house it will have to be dealt with. bouncing it will just more than double the traffic because bouncing back bouncebacks will just bounce back again and go on forever till your wires melt. or maybe not.
well Xerox had no interest with the idea of a windos based GUI.... from what i understand (book probably had more details), the windo based GUI was concieved at Xerox and some suit thought it was a waste and ditched the project. Apple knew of the project and convinced Xerox to let them have what had been accomplished. Xerox had already written off the concept and probably had no fear of Apple and their home computer becoming a threat. Apple got access to what Xerox had done and put a lot of work into making it into what became the 1984 Macintosh System. it's not like they changed the graphics on it.
when you compare it to what IBM clones were running software-wise back then it was revolutionary. M$ copied the feel of the GUI and Apple legal pounced on it (settled out of court).
Apple really was the first to try to make a"personal computer". even Microsoft was just trying to apply the window based GUI to business machines. probably why Apple let them off easily (or so it seems in hindsight?). remember Steve and Steve from Apple were members of the homebrew computer club. they built the Apple I and Apple][ machines mostly for home users and eventually schools. Xerox, IBM, Microsoft etc were going after businesses and kind of laughed off the idea of computers in the home for regular people.
then you can track down one of the last G4 towers. they were just removed from the apple store a few months ago. i am sure some resellers still have them new, let alone the tons of used ones out there. i wonder if this would mean Apple is making standalone CRTs again? a $500 machine is not so cheap when you buy a $1200 LCD. that would leapfrog the G5 iMac in cost. this would suffer the same fate as the cube. the quality and cost of the Apple LCD screens make them no good for a budget machine.
pci slots would be nice, but honestly i bet way less than 1% of the buyers of the box would ever think to use them. i know a ton of Mac users and of all the people that own towers i would say only a few ever use the PCI slots. the machines always have adequate video, ethernet, audio etc etc etc. just about anything missing can be added to the USB or Firewire port. i know it is not the same, but i think Apple would be selling this to entry level computer users, not thrifty nerds.
even if you filter it to trash, you still have to deal with the volume of mail.
i actually just lost my email on my hosting (shared hosting) because i was GETTING too much email. they claimed my incoming mail was flooding out their servers.
this story submitter said they host their mail server so it's an inhouse hog of bandwith.
i don't think apple sent out press releases that they were filing papers about leaked info on a top secret project that will change the way home users play guitar forever.
anyone that reads Mac rumor sites know that Apple's legal dept regularly sends them letters demanding they take down stories, specs or pictures/drawings. that would be a non-story on here.
also Apple internally makes tons of devices that never see the light of day (like a PDA recently). then there is downright false information on rumor sites.
this is about Apple legal hunting for one specific leak. they did the same thing a few years ago and caught "worker bee". someone on an earlier comment posted about that. that one guy kept a few rumor sites well fueled for a long time. i am guessing they want to catch whomever took his place.
garage band is a simple to use audio application that is part if the iLife suite (iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD, garage band). http://www.apple.com/ilife/
one of the rumor sites said the code name Asteroid was a joke on the term "breakout box".
breakout and asteroid being old school video games.
breakout box being a device that has the multiple A/V ports and connects to the computer with one cable.
they seemed to imply Asteroid and Q97 were internal codenames for the device, not knowing what the shipping name would be. it was implied the device could ship as soon as January's MacWorld expo, or in the next few months. i guess the assumption is that it might ship with the rumored iLife2. OS X 10.4 is due to ship in the next few months too.... and nobody seemed to know if iLife2 would ship with 10.4 or before.
.......since it's backordered, and won't help for christmas gifts.... and i'll forget this one exists in a few days anyway.
but that crosshair is just an icon for pseudo-GPS..... i guess it goes out when they can not pinpoint you, but you can still yack away. i guess it means you are just in range of one tower or maybe two?
if you ever tried to use a real GPS in the car you will see what i mean.....
maybe the rumors are way off and this is what the flash iPod is. the Moto V710 phone has a removable memory card you can put MP3 files on and play them as ringtones, or listen to them on the speakerphone. i guess headphones or a carkit would be possible too? who knows. you have to read the article knowing some are quotes from Apple and Moto and some is filler/speculation by Forbes. not to diss them, but it's possible they don't totally know and are off the mark with their speculation.
and i quote: