I'm sorry, but for the average user (and even myself) OpenOffice is not ready for prime-time. Please don't ruin the name of OpenOffice in the eyes of Mac users by making their first experience with it such a poor one (on other platforms I think it's a great Office alternative). Wait for OO to become a native OS X app and then appeal to Mac users.
I can't speak about the 30" displays, but I can tell you that I'm the owner of a Dell 2005FPW 20" widescreen display, attached to my PowerMac sitting beside my 17" Apple Studio Display. I've toyed with the 20" Cinema Displays at the Apple Store and they look great (ascetically even more so) but the Dell looks just as good, and AmandTech seems to agree; they both use the same panel, though different electronics beyond that.
The Dell has multiple inputs (DVI, VGA, Composite, and S-Video) switchable from the front panel, a three-year warranty, along with picture in picture capabilities and was only $369 after some coupons were applied compared to Apple's $799 price ($699 with educational pricing) and one year warranty. Yeah, it looks kind of ugly -- but I saved $300 and can attach my Mac Mini to VGA input while my PowerMac uses DVI.
Not usually a fan of Dell at all but they win this one in my opinion. As far as brightness is concerned this display is too bright for me . . .
Tell that to someone without a DVR... I was just digitizing VHS tapes the other day, and the memories came flooding back, of eaten tapes, tons of visual glitches, tapes deteriorating from age or repeated recordings, etc. Magnetic tape recording seems very iffy, even today.
I've been digitizing old reel to reel tapes, some going back as far as the early 60s, and have had a lot of fun.
Despite all of tape's problems, at least you can get your information off of it without too much hassle (tape baking). With DVDs and CDs one bit of corruption kills the entire work, making you wish there was just a drop out or two . . .
Though I'm totally opposed to regionalizing the Internet, I wouldn't mind if steps were taken to break it into smaller, localized communities so the feelings of the BBS days could be brought back. To this day I still telnet into an old local BBS . . .
There was a time when you actually knew half the people you were communicating with on-line in real life.
I know that some PPC Linux distros had trouble controlling the fan speed on G5 PowerMacs, causing the fans to run at full-speed continuously. If cooling is maintained by OS X on these machines, would one really want to bother installing Windows on them?
I haven't upgraded a CPU for like... ever. IMO ugprading is not worth it.
I don't know how this will play out post-Intel switch, but by simply replacing my 800mhz CPU with a 1.4ghz one my XBench scores are higher than the current Mac Minis, many iBooks, and some Powerbooks, and my machine is over three years old. Granted, I added a new video card, more RAM, and SATA along the way -- but those were all pretty minor incremental upgrades. When compared to some iMac G5s its performance isn't too shabby either. Also take into consideration that adding dual CPUs to a Mac that originally shipped with a single CPU doesn't require a motherboard replacement like in the PC world, and you get some serious speed boosts.
Assuming I don't splurge on a new system first, this machine should feel comfortable for a few more years. I've gotten way more life out of this machine than any PC I've owned.
Yet Windows Media Player and MSIE will no longer be offered... interesting...
They offered it long enough to convince content creators that deploying a media site based completely on WMP was a platform neutral decision, since a player existed for Mac. Once MS felt they proliferated that market to a satisfactory extent the plug was pulled.
Ross Ho's presentation at MacWorld was the epitome of mediocrity. She was totally non-enthusastic and either reading off a teleprompter or cue cards, with seemingly inappropriate posture at times. It was similar to watching a 15 year old girl present her high school research paper to the class. If a company is truly 'committed' to a platform why do they send out their least capable speaker? On top of that, she totally failed to discuss the cancelation of WMP for Mac, and address why the Flip4Mac solution was going to be a sound decision (i.e., ensure that MS was working with the developers to provide codec improvements in the future).
The MacBU hasn't done shit in about four or five years for the Mac platform, aside the migration of Office to OS X and one update. As it stands, the Mac version of Office performs horribly compared to its PC counterpart. How many of you can type faster than MS Word for Mac can spellcheck, on say a 1ghz machine? Pathetic. Right to left support has been in the Windows versions of Office since 1997 -- almost 10 years ago. Where is it in the Mac version? Why is it a pain jut to scroll through a 100 page Word document on a 800mhz Mac when it feels fine on a lowly 400mhz or less PC?
Since the MacBU acquired Virtual PC they've done virtually nothing with it, aside from getting SP2 to work with it. In the midst of Apple's transition to intel Ross Ho didn't even bother to talk about Microsoft's future plans for VPC on the Mac; one would think that's pretty important.
What did she discuss instead? A new version of Messenger. A new fucking version of Messenger. Who cares.
Seriously, what has the MacBU been doing for the past 5 years besides making incremental updates to Office? Absolutely nothing. The MacBU only exists to skate around anti-trust laws and milk Mac users for Office licenses. Their existence is convenient now, but in the long run they're just a disservice, locking Mac users into proprietary formats and ensuring Office's continued dominance in the form of cross-platform compatibility.
I wasn't a fan of RSS until Safari 2.0 came along. I have all of the sites I regularly visit that provide RSS feeds bookmarked in my bookmark bar. I then have Safari highlight all new articles for the day. Each day when I get home from work I just drop down to "view all RSS articles" and have a complete list of everything I can skin through real quick. Maybe 10% of the stories I click on; for the rest reading the summaries is good enough, just to get a feel for what's going on.
The problem isn't that RSS sucks, it's that nobody has really put it into an interface that makes it logical to use. Apple has come close to this, but even the way I read RSS feeds requires a bit of tinkering that most people aren't going to explore. Firefox's RSS capability are useless to me.
If there are two sites covering a similar subject, the one with RSS will win my readership. I seriously can't imagine browsing without it.
You're using a $500 software product with a $300 camera? There's something wrong here.
You're assuming he paid for the software, which he probably didn't. Not making a moral judgement here either way, but just saying -- people who warez stuff will do goofy stuff like go download ProTools when all they needed was Audacity, just because they can.
What are you defining as 'great?' It works nicely on my 1.4ghz G4 with 1gb of ram and a GeForce 4 Ti4600 until more than a few enemies are on the screen, at which point it slows down considerably.
"It's easy. It's live, and it has 'me' at the center of the universe," said Blake Irving, a Microsoft vice president who was on stage to demonstrate Windows Live.
Microsoft has the most obnoxious PR-speak of any corporation on earth. On the other hand, Google or Apple would just tell you what their product does and why you need it, usually in one sentence.
You don't know how on point you are with the search engine comment. The other day I was trying to find some help with Apple's Pages on Google and gave up in frustration after about 20 minutes. I'd imagine similar frustration would occur trying to find help on Google for Keynote (i.e. searching for Apple, Keynote, and whatever else).
mainly because at the time I was on dial up and it slowed things down significantly. I maintained that habit after acquiring broadband, but then quit.
Why? The minute I realize something is an ad I don't even look at it. For sites I visit regularly I psychologically know where to expect ads, and subsequently don't look at them. For example, the banner ad on Slashdot is not there to me; I've only noticed it while writing this because it's specifically about advertising.
As for other forms of advertisement, I turn away from the TV and do something else whenever a commercial comes on; I never sit and watch it. I've never purchased anything on-line as a result of a banner ad and doubt I ever will.
Other advertisement methods, like Salon.com's forced flash movie simply deter me from reading the content. I generally read the article summary and decide if reading it in full is worth one minute of my time; usually it's not -- occasionally it is. In either case the advertisement usually wouldn't effect my purchasing habits. I don't buy things because I saw them on TV; I research them, find which is best and cheapest, and then purchase.
Is M$ becoming a mass copy store...First Firefox (for IE7.0) then Apple OS X (for Vista) and now Apache (for IIS). Are they going out of business of innovation?
Where have you been for the last 20+ years? Microsoft has never tried an 'outside the box' idea in their life.
I'm in my mid-twenties, but was a DJ through middle school and into most of high school. Even when I was in the single digits I had a walkman around for small road trips, and was an avid music listener. There was rarely a time you could find me in middle or high school without a pair of headphones on. In college I would mainly listen to audio at mid-level volumes with a pair of Sennheiser headphones. Nowadays I use the iPod earbuds while riding my bike; my car stereo is pretty pathetic, so levels are never very loud there either.
I've expected that hearing loss would be inevitable, but so far I haven't noticed any problems. Perhaps it's because I've never continued to listen to music at levels where it's obviously uncomfortable.
If Apple had won, imagine the pain and suffering we would have gone through having only one supplier for both hardware and software. You can bet we would have lived with $10K computers for years in a stagnating market. It would have been an ugly battle until Apple was finally broken apart.
If Apple had won there would have likely been multiple architectures still in existence and in competition, giving everyone a lot more choices. Instead, everyone flocked to x86 because it was the cheapest, not necessarily because it was the best. If Apple had a 50% share of the market perhaps the Amiga and Atari ST would still be alive -- in some evolved form.
If the success of the PC is all based on a pure love for openness, why did the Amiga and Atari ST fail, and the Mac live on? The reason is Apple possessed an attention to detail and desire to empower its users through technology, and people were and still are willing to pay a premium for that. Through all the greed Apple has always had a subtle sense of altruism, that MS has never had. Steve Ballmer represents the soul of Microsoft; Woz and Jobs are still the soul of Apple: a combination between altruistic qualities and the assholenish required to stay alive.
Seriously, for me the downside of the Nano is the lack of FM tuner. Mp3's are great, but sometimes you just want to listen to radio.
Looks like you need one of these. The only radio shows I have any interest in listening to are on when I'm asleep or at work; this solves both problems.
If Apple had to scrap firewire from the Nano, either for price or space restrictions, how are they going to add an AM/FM radio? How about all of us, who are the majority I'd assume, who absolutely never want to deal with the staticy medium known as radio ever again? Why should we pay for the desires of a small few when you will be more than happy with something like an iRiver anyway?
Besides, the very nature of navigating radio voids the simplicity of the iPod's interface anyway. AM, FM, frequency scanning, memory presets. Integrating a radio would mean adding a UI for it that totally contradicts the rest of the iPod's navigation menus in logic.
Do you really think Apple fails to include a tuner because of FM piracy? The same people lame enough to record a song, crossfaded with another, and with a DJ yapping over it from the radio will load their favorite p2p app and get a clean copy in 2 minutes.
And they're geeks, so they're used to plunking down cash for computer upgrades and broadband upgrades more quickly than others.
Exactly, things they have to pay for to obtain.
The Linux desktop market is maybe 1 or 2%. Factor in those who would much rather use a p2p app to obtain music and it splits even further. Next, factor in those who hate the idea of any DRM or corporate control of their software or media, and your 2% shrinks again. Then, don't forget all those who won't touch anything unless the source is available. Beginning to see why it's a bad idea?
The general geek attitude is, "If no one does it the way I like, I'll figure out a way to make it happen, within my limited means." There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but there's a reason Midas and Monroe don't have to place ads during a gearhead program.
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I'm sorry, but for the average user (and even myself) OpenOffice is not ready for prime-time. Please don't ruin the name of OpenOffice in the eyes of Mac users by making their first experience with it such a poor one (on other platforms I think it's a great Office alternative). Wait for OO to become a native OS X app and then appeal to Mac users.
And as others have said, the design is awful.
Is available here.
I can't speak about the 30" displays, but I can tell you that I'm the owner of a Dell 2005FPW 20" widescreen display, attached to my PowerMac sitting beside my 17" Apple Studio Display. I've toyed with the 20" Cinema Displays at the Apple Store and they look great (ascetically even more so) but the Dell looks just as good, and AmandTech seems to agree; they both use the same panel, though different electronics beyond that.
The Dell has multiple inputs (DVI, VGA, Composite, and S-Video) switchable from the front panel, a three-year warranty, along with picture in picture capabilities and was only $369 after some coupons were applied compared to Apple's $799 price ($699 with educational pricing) and one year warranty. Yeah, it looks kind of ugly -- but I saved $300 and can attach my Mac Mini to VGA input while my PowerMac uses DVI.
Not usually a fan of Dell at all but they win this one in my opinion. As far as brightness is concerned this display is too bright for me . . .
Tell that to someone without a DVR... I was just digitizing VHS tapes the other day, and the memories came flooding back, of eaten tapes, tons of visual glitches, tapes deteriorating from age or repeated recordings, etc. Magnetic tape recording seems very iffy, even today.
I've been digitizing old reel to reel tapes, some going back as far as the early 60s, and have had a lot of fun.
Despite all of tape's problems, at least you can get your information off of it without too much hassle (tape baking). With DVDs and CDs one bit of corruption kills the entire work, making you wish there was just a drop out or two . . .
Though I'm totally opposed to regionalizing the Internet, I wouldn't mind if steps were taken to break it into smaller, localized communities so the feelings of the BBS days could be brought back. To this day I still telnet into an old local BBS . . .
There was a time when you actually knew half the people you were communicating with on-line in real life.
Isn't this kind of like trying to open the mummy's tomb? Nothing good can come out of it.
This is an early warning!
Wait for virtualization so all of Microsoft's inherent evil can be sandboxed into a self-destructing disk image of darkness and peril.
Why did they change it to D after all these years? D for DVD-ROM? Kind of confusing.
I know that some PPC Linux distros had trouble controlling the fan speed on G5 PowerMacs, causing the fans to run at full-speed continuously. If cooling is maintained by OS X on these machines, would one really want to bother installing Windows on them?
Even with all of this it took two full versions before OS X became useable, 10.0 and 10.1 were dog slow from what I understand.
I never thought 10.1 was extremely bad . . .
Slow compared to 10.2 onward, but not bad.
I haven't upgraded a CPU for like ... ever. IMO ugprading is not worth it.
I don't know how this will play out post-Intel switch, but by simply replacing my 800mhz CPU with a 1.4ghz one my XBench scores are higher than the current Mac Minis, many iBooks, and some Powerbooks, and my machine is over three years old. Granted, I added a new video card, more RAM, and SATA along the way -- but those were all pretty minor incremental upgrades. When compared to some iMac G5s its performance isn't too shabby either. Also take into consideration that adding dual CPUs to a Mac that originally shipped with a single CPU doesn't require a motherboard replacement like in the PC world, and you get some serious speed boosts.
Assuming I don't splurge on a new system first, this machine should feel comfortable for a few more years. I've gotten way more life out of this machine than any PC I've owned.
Yet Windows Media Player and MSIE will no longer be offered... interesting...
They offered it long enough to convince content creators that deploying a media site based completely on WMP was a platform neutral decision, since a player existed for Mac. Once MS felt they proliferated that market to a satisfactory extent the plug was pulled.
Ross Ho's presentation at MacWorld was the epitome of mediocrity. She was totally non-enthusastic and either reading off a teleprompter or cue cards, with seemingly inappropriate posture at times. It was similar to watching a 15 year old girl present her high school research paper to the class. If a company is truly 'committed' to a platform why do they send out their least capable speaker? On top of that, she totally failed to discuss the cancelation of WMP for Mac, and address why the Flip4Mac solution was going to be a sound decision (i.e., ensure that MS was working with the developers to provide codec improvements in the future).
The MacBU hasn't done shit in about four or five years for the Mac platform, aside the migration of Office to OS X and one update. As it stands, the Mac version of Office performs horribly compared to its PC counterpart. How many of you can type faster than MS Word for Mac can spellcheck, on say a 1ghz machine? Pathetic. Right to left support has been in the Windows versions of Office since 1997 -- almost 10 years ago. Where is it in the Mac version? Why is it a pain jut to scroll through a 100 page Word document on a 800mhz Mac when it feels fine on a lowly 400mhz or less PC?
Since the MacBU acquired Virtual PC they've done virtually nothing with it, aside from getting SP2 to work with it. In the midst of Apple's transition to intel Ross Ho didn't even bother to talk about Microsoft's future plans for VPC on the Mac; one would think that's pretty important.
What did she discuss instead? A new version of Messenger. A new fucking version of Messenger. Who cares.
Seriously, what has the MacBU been doing for the past 5 years besides making incremental updates to Office? Absolutely nothing. The MacBU only exists to skate around anti-trust laws and milk Mac users for Office licenses. Their existence is convenient now, but in the long run they're just a disservice, locking Mac users into proprietary formats and ensuring Office's continued dominance in the form of cross-platform compatibility.
I wasn't a fan of RSS until Safari 2.0 came along. I have all of the sites I regularly visit that provide RSS feeds bookmarked in my bookmark bar. I then have Safari highlight all new articles for the day. Each day when I get home from work I just drop down to "view all RSS articles" and have a complete list of everything I can skin through real quick. Maybe 10% of the stories I click on; for the rest reading the summaries is good enough, just to get a feel for what's going on.
The problem isn't that RSS sucks, it's that nobody has really put it into an interface that makes it logical to use. Apple has come close to this, but even the way I read RSS feeds requires a bit of tinkering that most people aren't going to explore. Firefox's RSS capability are useless to me.
If there are two sites covering a similar subject, the one with RSS will win my readership. I seriously can't imagine browsing without it.
You're using a $500 software product with a $300 camera? There's something wrong here.
You're assuming he paid for the software, which he probably didn't. Not making a moral judgement here either way, but just saying -- people who warez stuff will do goofy stuff like go download ProTools when all they needed was Audacity, just because they can.
Sega screwed up with the Master System . . .
The Master System was only a 'failure' in the US.
What are you defining as 'great?' It works nicely on my 1.4ghz G4 with 1gb of ram and a GeForce 4 Ti4600 until more than a few enemies are on the screen, at which point it slows down considerably.
"It's easy. It's live, and it has 'me' at the center of the universe," said Blake Irving, a Microsoft vice president who was on stage to demonstrate Windows Live.
Microsoft has the most obnoxious PR-speak of any corporation on earth. On the other hand, Google or Apple would just tell you what their product does and why you need it, usually in one sentence.
You don't know how on point you are with the search engine comment. The other day I was trying to find some help with Apple's Pages on Google and gave up in frustration after about 20 minutes. I'd imagine similar frustration would occur trying to find help on Google for Keynote (i.e. searching for Apple, Keynote, and whatever else).
Since /. updated I frequently have *two* of the same articles display in Safari's RSS reader, each beside one another. Why is that happening?
mainly because at the time I was on dial up and it slowed things down significantly. I maintained that habit after acquiring broadband, but then quit.
Why? The minute I realize something is an ad I don't even look at it. For sites I visit regularly I psychologically know where to expect ads, and subsequently don't look at them. For example, the banner ad on Slashdot is not there to me; I've only noticed it while writing this because it's specifically about advertising.
As for other forms of advertisement, I turn away from the TV and do something else whenever a commercial comes on; I never sit and watch it. I've never purchased anything on-line as a result of a banner ad and doubt I ever will.
Other advertisement methods, like Salon.com's forced flash movie simply deter me from reading the content. I generally read the article summary and decide if reading it in full is worth one minute of my time; usually it's not -- occasionally it is. In either case the advertisement usually wouldn't effect my purchasing habits. I don't buy things because I saw them on TV; I research them, find which is best and cheapest, and then purchase.
In reality, I'm probably a huge exception though.
Also, where's even a niche market for this product???
Multitrack recording.
Is M$ becoming a mass copy store...First Firefox (for IE7.0) then Apple OS X (for Vista) and now Apache (for IIS). Are they going out of business of innovation?
Where have you been for the last 20+ years? Microsoft has never tried an 'outside the box' idea in their life.
I'm in my mid-twenties, but was a DJ through middle school and into most of high school. Even when I was in the single digits I had a walkman around for small road trips, and was an avid music listener. There was rarely a time you could find me in middle or high school without a pair of headphones on. In college I would mainly listen to audio at mid-level volumes with a pair of Sennheiser headphones. Nowadays I use the iPod earbuds while riding my bike; my car stereo is pretty pathetic, so levels are never very loud there either.
I've expected that hearing loss would be inevitable, but so far I haven't noticed any problems. Perhaps it's because I've never continued to listen to music at levels where it's obviously uncomfortable.
If Apple had won, imagine the pain and suffering we would have gone through having only one supplier for both hardware and software. You can bet we would have lived with $10K computers for years in a stagnating market. It would have been an ugly battle until Apple was finally broken apart.
If Apple had won there would have likely been multiple architectures still in existence and in competition, giving everyone a lot more choices. Instead, everyone flocked to x86 because it was the cheapest, not necessarily because it was the best. If Apple had a 50% share of the market perhaps the Amiga and Atari ST would still be alive -- in some evolved form.
If the success of the PC is all based on a pure love for openness, why did the Amiga and Atari ST fail, and the Mac live on? The reason is Apple possessed an attention to detail and desire to empower its users through technology, and people were and still are willing to pay a premium for that. Through all the greed Apple has always had a subtle sense of altruism, that MS has never had. Steve Ballmer represents the soul of Microsoft; Woz and Jobs are still the soul of Apple: a combination between altruistic qualities and the assholenish required to stay alive.
Seriously, for me the downside of the Nano is the lack of FM tuner. Mp3's are great, but sometimes you just want to listen to radio.
Looks like you need one of these. The only radio shows I have any interest in listening to are on when I'm asleep or at work; this solves both problems.
If Apple had to scrap firewire from the Nano, either for price or space restrictions, how are they going to add an AM/FM radio? How about all of us, who are the majority I'd assume, who absolutely never want to deal with the staticy medium known as radio ever again? Why should we pay for the desires of a small few when you will be more than happy with something like an iRiver anyway?
Besides, the very nature of navigating radio voids the simplicity of the iPod's interface anyway. AM, FM, frequency scanning, memory presets. Integrating a radio would mean adding a UI for it that totally contradicts the rest of the iPod's navigation menus in logic.
Do you really think Apple fails to include a tuner because of FM piracy? The same people lame enough to record a song, crossfaded with another, and with a DJ yapping over it from the radio will load their favorite p2p app and get a clean copy in 2 minutes.
And they're geeks, so they're used to plunking down cash for computer upgrades and broadband upgrades more quickly than others.
Exactly, things they have to pay for to obtain.
The Linux desktop market is maybe 1 or 2%. Factor in those who would much rather use a p2p app to obtain music and it splits even further. Next, factor in those who hate the idea of any DRM or corporate control of their software or media, and your 2% shrinks again. Then, don't forget all those who won't touch anything unless the source is available. Beginning to see why it's a bad idea?
The general geek attitude is, "If no one does it the way I like, I'll figure out a way to make it happen, within my limited means." There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but there's a reason Midas and Monroe don't have to place ads during a gearhead program.