Yeah, totally. What could possibly be easier than remembering 2211* commands off the top of your head, without having any reminder of their name, location, syntax, or dependencies at the time? That's of course ignoring the added simplicity of remembering shell aliases, your current directory, all your environment variables, invisible key bindings, context-sensitive tab completion, symlinks, named pipes, libraries, permissions...
Hey, I use a shell ten hours a day, I'm not disputing that there are very many things for which it's a fantastic tool. But carefully selecting how you measure "simplicity" in this way is just being gratuitously obtuse.
>Mhz to mhz, powerpc's are about %20 faster according to linux benchmarks.
I'd lay real money on those "linux benchmarks" not using altivec. And it's fairly likely that they _do_ use sse or similar.
The vector unit is the g4 line's greatest strength. And, at least if you're using any macos, it sees a lot of use. Benchmarks which don't take it into account will tell drastically less than the full story.
> On another note, the version of "free" ssh > included in OS X is not licenced for > commercial use, as you already know.
Um, openssh? So far as I know, it's licensed for any use whatsoever. You know differently?
> But that doesn't matter anyway because no > USB to Serial devices currently have drivers > for mac OS X.
You mean other than the Keyspan USB to serial adaptors which have had drivers available since the original release of X?
http://www.keyspan.com/support/macosx/usa/
> You might consider reasearch before you post > since you do not seem to have any real experience > on the platform and your only anecdotal eveidence > is an obvious fabrication.
I'm glad it's obvious to you. From my perspective, it looks as if I've been using the platform regularly since DP3, which I think was some time around mid-2000? Nearly as long as anyone who's not an employee of Apple, though my previous NeXTstep experience was fairly minimal.
>Like when a new Mac randomly chooses the startup disk and operating >system because it has never been started before, even just to do a >system check? Just a miniscule ammount of quality control and uniform >user experience would be nice.
Random? Pre-X macs came with exactly one operating system installed. Post-X macs from last year had two, and defaulted to 9; those from this year have two and default to X. What's random about this?
>Is it when AppleTalk grabs the printer port because it cannot see a >connection on the Ethernet, preventing you from file sharing or >printing?
Why would this prevent filesharing and printing? That's what appletalk did.
(Not to mention the outdatedness of this comment. Macs haven't had serial ports for what, three or four years now?)
>Is it having to use guesswork to manage each individual application's >memory usage because the operating system will not take care of it for >you?
This is basically the one complaint in this list which I will wholehearted grant you. Oldschool macos's manual, fixed memory management was unspeakably lame. A bigger problem than unprotected memory and cooperative multitasking, if you ask me.
Fortunately, as with nearly all the complaints in your list, it's not relevant any more. X deals with memory in the ways one would expect from any civilized unix implementation.
>Is it the hidden cost of OS X of running extremely poorly on the stock >memory provided with apples requiring you to "purchase" a smooth >running OS X for the price that apple sells their 200% markup memory >for?
More memory certainly helps, but there's no need whatsoever to purchase it from Apple, or to pay any unusual price for it.
>Is it the chipping paint on the TiBook, cracks in the Cube, useless >handles and front foot of the iMac, misaligned hinges on the clamshell >iBook, soft, easily scratched surface of the new ibook or flimsy >plastic catch mechanism on the G4 Tower, that requires so much force >to close that it is likely to break?
I've never owned a TiBook or cube, so I won't speak to those. I have, however, owned, used, or had occasion to open at least a dozen g3 and g4 towers, and have never found the latch mechanism to be anything other than smooth and convenient. Never yet seen or heard of one breaking.
And what do you find useless about the handle and foot on the old imac? Most imac owners I know regularly use one or both. And even if you don't use them, why are you offended by their presence?
>Is it the recalled power supplies, out of focus iMac CRTs, chronically >bad G4 motherboards, temperamental slot load drives, incomplete >software automatic software updates, type -43925 errors with no >explanation or documentation or the inability to use USB printer >sharing with dynamic addresses and again no documentation telling you >why it is not working?
The only one of these which I've ever known to be the case was the recalled powerbook power supplies. I actually had a wallstreet powerbook, so I got a new supply from apple for free. I never had an actual problem with my old supply, but I put its serial number into a web page somehwere, and they sent me a new one. I still use the old one and the new one to this day. I have a hard time being offended by this convenience.
>USB keyboards hubs constantly complaining of "not enough power" and >going bad crashing the system. Absolutely no spill protection in any >mac keyboard even though they were able to totally prevent a spill >causing any damage to a Apple IIc twenty years ago? Designed in >fragility so they can generate sales of a high margin item. A keyboard >with USB hub is 30 bucks. Apple's is $80.
Firstly, I've never run into "not enough power" or crashing issues, and I currently have eight usb devices connected at home.
Secondly, the response to your complaint about the keyboard prices is the same as your complaint about their ram prices: if it chafes you, don't use them. There's nothing nonstandard about them other looking nifty, so you can happily use that $30 keyboard. I personally use a kinesis.
>Bet also that the corrupted preferences adds to ease of use too. >Infinitely tall launcher just because you changed screen resolution, >inability to send mail and having to install an entirely new client to >let you setup an account again. Applications constantly reporting "I >see you are running 'blah-bah' for the first time" No OS provisions to >do a clean uninstall resulting in the machine accumulating more and >more stray files, forcing a clean OS install to get a measure of >sanity back. Rebuilding the desktop corrupting all your aliases, and >all the apple scripts you wrote to automate the bug fixes you have to >do on a daily basis because Apple will not fix them.
I could respond at length about never having experienced these problems, or having run into them only very minimally. But the shorter and more relevant answer is to point out that none of them are currently relevant, with the advent of X.
>Mac OS never enforcing any application privlages and no third party >software vender even vaguely willing to undertake that momentous task >because if Apple can't get something that fundamental right, how is >anyone going to fix it for them?
I'm not even sure what you mean by application privileges; do you mean protected memory? File permissions? More relevantly, do you mean anything which isn't now provided by X?
>Is it the crappy TCP/IP interface and application memory manager >interface that will not let you make changes out of order?
Yep, that was annoying. Good thing it was fixed a couple years ago.
>Is it the horrible window management that will not let you properly >maximize a window to use ALL available desktop space, forcing you to >give up screen real estate to "important" things like the taskbar, >dock, blank desktop, apple menu, and the inert top of the window?
(Without trying to figure out where you found a taskbar on your mac...)
What, so you want to be able to open a window to the exclusion of menubar, titlebar, and basic windowing interfaces? How would you ever expect to, say, close this window?
>I can build a PC out of parts and fully configure it in less man hours >than it took to write this post including the time it takes to sit >with my credit card and order the parts.
Great, congratulations; that probably means that's the right choice for you. Most people don't have this ability, nor want to spend a few unpleasant years and lots of money acquiring it.
>Pay extra to work out of the box. Bullshit. Pay extra for nothing but >image. I'll bet you own a 4? that has never beentoff the highwaytandra >Mac that sits on your desk looking pretty because if you EVER use it >you would run into the same troubles that I have had with Macs.
I've been a mac user and professional unix sysdamin for eight years now, mostly using the former to accomplish the latter. In that time, it's been common for me to use macs fourteen hours a day; these machines have run, at various points, macoses 7 through X, three different linux distributions, and openbsd. When I was running os9, my machines crashed about once a season; running production versions of X, this has dropped below measurability.
I won't deny that I enjoy the physical appearance of apple's hardware, but I buy it to get work done, and use it thoroughly.
>Is it the 20+ hours you have to put into a brand new machine because >it is not even close to being able to perform as advertised when you >pull it out of the box?
Really?
Last week, when a few hundred miles from home, I had need to access the serial console of lots of Sun hardware on short notice. So I ran out and bought an ibook, something I'd been meaning to do soon anyway.
The Windows-using admin with whom I was working started giving me instructions about downloading an ssh client.
"No need, openssh is part of the standard OS distribution."
So asks me how long I'll need to charge the battery before I can take it into the cage to get some work done.
"None at all, they sell them charged for this reason."
So I walk into the cage, plug into the serial consoles of the servers, and start jumpstarting them. In a while, he sees me starting to connect my ethernet interface directly to one on the machines. He starts to explain to me that this won't work, and that he'll go find me a hub or a flipped cable.
"It'll work just fine. The port on my machine will notice the flip, and turn itself into a flipped port automatically."
So in other words, I was able to accomplish what I needed with ten minutes in a store, and exactly zero minutes of setup and prep time afterward. And in fact even managed to save some time by taking advantage of the clever, small features which the platform offers. So tell me again how this is inefficient?
I think it can be agreed that an iPod would be an exceptionally poor purchase for anyone without a firewire port.
Fortunately, Firewire ports are actually very common... on Macs. Which, you may have noticed, is a market to which Apple tends to pay a notable amount of attention.
The iPod is not the cheapest mp3 player you can get, or the one with the largest capacity, or the smallest one. If you want any of those extremes beyond all else, buy something different.
But it's a good combination of all of those; it's smaller than any player without two orders of magnitude less capacity.
And it does have things not offered elsewhere; no other player transfers over firewire, automatically charges while transferring, offers ten hours of battery life, and performs as an external hard drive with speeds which make any part of its size realistically usable.
I can't really think of any other product which allows me to not only carry around a huge mp3 collection, but boot any mac up with _my_ OS, software, home directories, content. Not a bad freebie function on what was already a good mp3 player.
Uh, yeah. That's been the default desktop for all versions of OS X, and has been among the ones Apple included for a few years before that. "Quantum Foam" is its title, if I recall correctly.
Makes you wonder how much of the rest of your interface was ripped off from Apple, eh?
Actually, Apple's always made it quite a point to not purchase (or bribe) product placement.
And the reason all computers are shown from the back when possible is to avoid display refresh interlock issues.
The reason lots of macs end up in movies and television is because macs are used to make a lot of movies and television, so they tend to have them lying around.
Wow, so when you test kids based upon manual dexterity, those who've had training in manual dexterity do better? How astonishing!
You get what you're looking for. If the "intelligence" testing had involved critical thinking or articulation, I'd imagine the results would have been different.
And $400 is a bit too high, I'm afraid. It's not completely offensive, the thing does have some distinctive features: data and charging over firewire, ten hour battery, very small and light, and, for those of you who swing that way, seamless integration with iTunes.
I'm guessing that they'll drop the price to $300 after Christmas (perhaps at macworld expo in January), which will be more reasonable. Still a bit of a premium on a sheer dollars to bytes scale, but perhaps worth it for the other features.
There are two main reasons that Mac portables fare better against Intel systems than Mac desktops.
The first is that no one's going out and putting together their own laptop from individual parts. Desktop Macs actually compare very favorably to pre-made desktop systems from Dell, Gateway, Sony, etc. It's self-assembled machines that get to be a lot cheaper than any of these, but that's not relevant for laptops.
The other is that whole hardware/software harmony thing. Things like power management and docking behaviour are non-standardized enough that there are great benefits to having the same organization make the hardware and the software. Obviously this only applies if you're running Apple's software, rather than Linux, NetBSD, or OpenBSD.
The hosts file is in a fairly standard format; create it with a text editor, and save it wherever you choose, though Preferences would make sense. Select it in the TCP/IP control panel.
The catch is that I'm not sure that open transport considers 127.0.0.1 to be localhost, so you may have to use an invalid ip, or perhaps your own external interface.
Okay, I've restrained myself this long without asking: why are you still running old macos? Omniweb has every ad-avoidance feature that's been mentioned here, plus a few others, all conveniently in the browser itself. It can block:
images served from a different host than the html
images which match very common ad sizes
objects which match any of a list of regexes you supply
I used Linux exclusively on my desktop for five years (until Macos X was available). I found out about this "feature" about a month ago, when someone mentioned it to me. And y'know, I don't really feel bad about not having stumbled onto pasting text onto something that doesn't look like anything else on the system that responds to text, and doesn't give you the slightest clue about its nonstandard nature.
This is a classic case of using the application layer to attempt a hacky fix to problems at the lower layers. It's about as elegant as the fact that in DOS, individual programs dealt with wildcard expansion, because the shell was too stupid to do so. This had small benefits (being able to do: mv *.jpg *.gif) and huge downsides (having * work differently in every program, if it worked at all).
Implicit versus explicit copy is a separate issue from mouse signalled versus keyboard signalled copy. If you want to copy with the mouse, fine; you've certainly got enough buttons to be able to use a different one for copy and select.
But having to explicitly request copy rather than having it be an implicit part of selecting makes the clipboard much more stable and reliable, and therefore more useful.
The game which does a good job of depicting the non-zero-sum nature of
society is, well, Civilization. Not the more recent computer game, the
original board game implementation.
Players trade, and having a large quantity of a single resource increases
superlinearly in value. Thus it's to everyone's advantage to exchange their
naturally-balanced resources for more tightly focused monopolies.
Outright combat is sometimes necessary, but usually very inefficient, and
thus quite not the point of the game. The result is a good balance of
competition and cooperation... much like real civilization.
*If* your only goal is to further your carreer, the choice is easy: drop out now, and get a job. In my experience, companies are desperate enough to find someone with actual skill that they're giving the same jobs, at the same wages, to cs majors, cis majors, art history majors, and highschool dropouts. In fact, most employers are likely to be more excited by a few years of actual real-world experience than by even a very relevant degreee.
However, if you have goals other than furthering your carreer, consider sticking with the cs program. Knowledge for knowledge's sake and all that.
Either way, the cis program is probably a pointless compromise. If you're trying to impress an employer, don't bother; if you're trying to impress yourself, do it the hard way.
SCSI has many advantages over IDE. However, drive access speed is generally not among them.
SCSI allows you to connect non-drive devices (scanners and the like), allows you to connect more devices total, has a common interface for external devices, and devices exist to do RAID in hardware.
There is one way in which "speed" is related: with most IDE controllers found in intel boxes, the cpu needs to handshake every block sent over the bus. This may or may not slow down the transfer, but it sure as hell bogs down the cpu itself.
However, there's no reason that this needs to be the case for all IDE controllers. Specifically, the controllers used in Mac hardware do such handshaking themselves, much the way that a SCSI controller is expected to do bus arbitration. (This is actually _because_ of the fact that IDE came to the Mac much later than SCSI, so the controllers were more self-sufficient, to make them easier to integrate into the system.)
This does mean that the IDE controllers are more expensive than their Intellish counterparts. It still turns out to be more cost-effective, given the relative cheapness of IDE drives.
And, as many people have already pointed out, individual drives (or even pairs of them) are not generally capable of saturating either bus.
(And by way of history, IDE has been around in Apple machines for about five years now, and has been the default for over two.)
Funny, it had always struck me as the obvious choice. A fairly high percentage of Mac users have chosen that platform because they believe it to be technically superior, as opposed to simply because it's what everyone else uses. Without even addressing the issue of whether the platform actually is superior, what's significant is the larger number of people willing to be nonconformist, and right, rather than compatible, and wrong.
Linux users seem to share this attribute, often having spent years fighting against Windows-compatibility issues, because they felt that having an internally superior system was worthwile.
While non-tech artists, or luddite grandmothers are one stereotype of the mac userbase, they aren't the whole thing. It's important to remember that a very high number of mac users are quite technically competent, and have chosen the platform because of this, not in spite of it.
Actually, this is one of several reasons to use ssh 1.2.x, rather than the 2.x crap. With 2.x, they changed the licensing significantly, including narrowing the definition of 'non-commercial use.'
With 1.2.x, very many organizations, even for-profit businesses, are able to legally use it without paying any licensing fees. Read the licenses of both, to find out whether you can legally use them for free.
is: http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/061580empire.h tml
I'm trying to imagine a worse fate than being known for ages at That Guy Who Panned 'The Empire Strikes Back'. The guy who pointed out that it was 'nice and inoffensive,' although 'not, by any means, as nice as Star Wars.' The guy who claims that the only redeeming feature of this boring and apathetic film is Yoda. The guy who describes Harrison Ford as 'cheerfully nondescript,' but assures us that Mark Hamill will one day become a real movie star.
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Firewire also offers things like isosynchronous transfers, and a more flexible chaining topology.
IHBT. IWNPTHAND. TY.
Yeah, totally. What could possibly be easier than remembering 2211* commands off the top of your head, without having any reminder of their name, location, syntax, or dependencies at the time? That's of course ignoring the added simplicity of remembering shell aliases, your current directory, all your environment variables, invisible key bindings, context-sensitive tab completion, symlinks, named pipes, libraries, permissions...
Hey, I use a shell ten hours a day, I'm not disputing that there are very many things for which it's a fantastic tool. But carefully selecting how you measure "simplicity" in this way is just being gratuitously obtuse.
*items in my current path on my primary linux box
>Mhz to mhz, powerpc's are about %20 faster according to linux benchmarks.
I'd lay real money on those "linux benchmarks" not using altivec. And it's fairly likely that they _do_ use sse or similar.
The vector unit is the g4 line's greatest strength. And, at least if you're using any macos, it sees a lot of use. Benchmarks which don't take it into account will tell drastically less than the full story.
My w3m can beat up your links any day of the week! And I can use the mouse with Terminal.app!
> On another note, the version of "free" ssh
> included in OS X is not licenced for
> commercial use, as you already know.
Um, openssh? So far as I know, it's licensed for any use whatsoever. You know differently?
> But that doesn't matter anyway because no
> USB to Serial devices currently have drivers
> for mac OS X.
You mean other than the Keyspan USB to serial adaptors which have had drivers available since the original release of X?
http://www.keyspan.com/support/macosx/usa/
> You might consider reasearch before you post
> since you do not seem to have any real experience
> on the platform and your only anecdotal eveidence
> is an obvious fabrication.
I'm glad it's obvious to you. From my perspective, it looks as if I've been using the platform regularly since DP3, which I think was some time around mid-2000? Nearly as long as anyone who's not an employee of Apple, though my previous NeXTstep experience was fairly minimal.
>Like when a new Mac randomly chooses the startup disk and operating
>system because it has never been started before, even just to do a
>system check? Just a miniscule ammount of quality control and uniform
>user experience would be nice.
Random? Pre-X macs came with exactly one operating system installed. Post-X macs from last year had two, and defaulted to 9; those from this year have two and default to X. What's random about this?
>Is it when AppleTalk grabs the printer port because it cannot see a
>connection on the Ethernet, preventing you from file sharing or
>printing?
Why would this prevent filesharing and printing? That's what appletalk did.
(Not to mention the outdatedness of this comment. Macs haven't had serial ports for what, three or four years now?)
>Is it having to use guesswork to manage each individual application's
>memory usage because the operating system will not take care of it for
>you?
This is basically the one complaint in this list which I will wholehearted grant you. Oldschool macos's manual, fixed memory management was unspeakably lame. A bigger problem than unprotected memory and cooperative multitasking, if you ask me.
Fortunately, as with nearly all the complaints in your list, it's not relevant any more. X deals with memory in the ways one would expect from any civilized unix implementation.
>Is it the hidden cost of OS X of running extremely poorly on the stock
>memory provided with apples requiring you to "purchase" a smooth
>running OS X for the price that apple sells their 200% markup memory
>for?
More memory certainly helps, but there's no need whatsoever to purchase it from Apple, or to pay any unusual price for it.
>Is it the chipping paint on the TiBook, cracks in the Cube, useless
>handles and front foot of the iMac, misaligned hinges on the clamshell
>iBook, soft, easily scratched surface of the new ibook or flimsy
>plastic catch mechanism on the G4 Tower, that requires so much force
>to close that it is likely to break?
I've never owned a TiBook or cube, so I won't speak to those. I have, however, owned, used, or had occasion to open at least a dozen g3 and g4 towers, and have never found the latch mechanism to be anything other than smooth and convenient. Never yet seen or heard of one breaking.
And what do you find useless about the handle and foot on the old imac? Most imac owners I know regularly use one or both. And even if you don't use them, why are you offended by their presence?
>Is it the recalled power supplies, out of focus iMac CRTs, chronically
>bad G4 motherboards, temperamental slot load drives, incomplete
>software automatic software updates, type -43925 errors with no
>explanation or documentation or the inability to use USB printer
>sharing with dynamic addresses and again no documentation telling you
>why it is not working?
The only one of these which I've ever known to be the case was the recalled powerbook power supplies. I actually had a wallstreet powerbook, so I got a new supply from apple for free. I never had an actual problem with my old supply, but I put its serial number into a web page somehwere, and they sent me a new one. I still use the old one and the new one to this day. I have a hard time being offended by this convenience.
>USB keyboards hubs constantly complaining of "not enough power" and
>going bad crashing the system. Absolutely no spill protection in any
>mac keyboard even though they were able to totally prevent a spill
>causing any damage to a Apple IIc twenty years ago? Designed in
>fragility so they can generate sales of a high margin item. A keyboard
>with USB hub is 30 bucks. Apple's is $80.
Firstly, I've never run into "not enough power" or crashing issues, and I currently have eight usb devices connected at home.
Secondly, the response to your complaint about the keyboard prices is the same as your complaint about their ram prices: if it chafes you, don't use them. There's nothing nonstandard about them other looking nifty, so you can happily use that $30 keyboard. I personally use a kinesis.
>Bet also that the corrupted preferences adds to ease of use too.
>Infinitely tall launcher just because you changed screen resolution,
>inability to send mail and having to install an entirely new client to
>let you setup an account again. Applications constantly reporting "I
>see you are running 'blah-bah' for the first time" No OS provisions to
>do a clean uninstall resulting in the machine accumulating more and
>more stray files, forcing a clean OS install to get a measure of
>sanity back. Rebuilding the desktop corrupting all your aliases, and
>all the apple scripts you wrote to automate the bug fixes you have to
>do on a daily basis because Apple will not fix them.
I could respond at length about never having experienced these problems, or having run into them only very minimally. But the shorter and more relevant answer is to point out that none of them are currently relevant, with the advent of X.
>Mac OS never enforcing any application privlages and no third party
>software vender even vaguely willing to undertake that momentous task
>because if Apple can't get something that fundamental right, how is
>anyone going to fix it for them?
I'm not even sure what you mean by application privileges; do you mean protected memory? File permissions? More relevantly, do you mean anything which isn't now provided by X?
>Is it the crappy TCP/IP interface and application memory manager
>interface that will not let you make changes out of order?
Yep, that was annoying. Good thing it was fixed a couple years ago.
>Is it the horrible window management that will not let you properly
>maximize a window to use ALL available desktop space, forcing you to
>give up screen real estate to "important" things like the taskbar,
>dock, blank desktop, apple menu, and the inert top of the window?
(Without trying to figure out where you found a taskbar on your mac...)
What, so you want to be able to open a window to the exclusion of menubar, titlebar, and basic windowing interfaces? How would you ever expect to, say, close this window?
>I can build a PC out of parts and fully configure it in less man hours
>than it took to write this post including the time it takes to sit
>with my credit card and order the parts.
Great, congratulations; that probably means that's the right choice for you. Most people don't have this ability, nor want to spend a few unpleasant years and lots of money acquiring it.
>Pay extra to work out of the box. Bullshit. Pay extra for nothing but
>image. I'll bet you own a 4? that has never beentoff the highwaytandra
>Mac that sits on your desk looking pretty because if you EVER use it
>you would run into the same troubles that I have had with Macs.
I've been a mac user and professional unix sysdamin for eight years now, mostly using the former to accomplish the latter. In that time, it's been common for me to use macs fourteen hours a day; these machines have run, at various points, macoses 7 through X, three different linux distributions, and openbsd. When I was running os9, my machines crashed about once a season; running production versions of X, this has dropped below measurability.
I won't deny that I enjoy the physical appearance of apple's hardware, but I buy it to get work done, and use it thoroughly.
>Is it the 20+ hours you have to put into a brand new machine because
>it is not even close to being able to perform as advertised when you
>pull it out of the box?
Really?
Last week, when a few hundred miles from home, I had need to access the serial console of lots of Sun hardware on short notice. So I ran out and bought an ibook, something I'd been meaning to do soon anyway.
The Windows-using admin with whom I was working started giving me instructions about downloading an ssh client.
"No need, openssh is part of the standard OS distribution."
So asks me how long I'll need to charge the battery before I can take it into the cage to get some work done.
"None at all, they sell them charged for this reason."
So I walk into the cage, plug into the serial consoles of the servers, and start jumpstarting them. In a while, he sees me starting to connect my ethernet interface directly to one on the machines. He starts to explain to me that this won't work, and that he'll go find me a hub or a flipped cable.
"It'll work just fine. The port on my machine will notice the flip, and turn itself into a flipped port automatically."
So in other words, I was able to accomplish what I needed with ten minutes in a store, and exactly zero minutes of setup and prep time afterward. And in fact even managed to save some time by taking advantage of the clever, small features which the platform offers. So tell me again how this is inefficient?
Celluloid film does have a refresh rate: 24fps, for most American movies.
Same reason you often see helicopter blades appear to slowly spin in the wrong direction in movies.
I think it can be agreed that an iPod would be an exceptionally poor purchase for anyone without a firewire port.
Fortunately, Firewire ports are actually very common... on Macs. Which, you may have noticed, is a market to which Apple tends to pay a notable amount of attention.
The iPod is not the cheapest mp3 player you can get, or the one with the largest capacity, or the smallest one. If you want any of those extremes beyond all else, buy something different.
But it's a good combination of all of those; it's smaller than any player without two orders of magnitude less capacity.
And it does have things not offered elsewhere; no other player transfers over firewire, automatically charges while transferring, offers ten hours of battery life, and performs as an external hard drive with speeds which make any part of its size realistically usable.
I can't really think of any other product which allows me to not only carry around a huge mp3 collection, but boot any mac up with _my_ OS, software, home directories, content. Not a bad freebie function on what was already a good mp3 player.
Uh, yeah. That's been the default desktop for all versions of OS X, and has been among the ones Apple included for a few years before that. "Quantum Foam" is its title, if I recall correctly.
Makes you wonder how much of the rest of your interface was ripped off from Apple, eh?
Actually, Apple's always made it quite a point to not purchase (or bribe) product placement.
And the reason all computers are shown from the back when possible is to avoid display refresh interlock issues.
The reason lots of macs end up in movies and television is because macs are used to make a lot of movies and television, so they tend to have them lying around.
Of course, if you were using a real browser, you could just give it a list of regexes.
And have it not load images sourced from different domains than the html. And have it not load images of very common banner sizes.
But of course, that'd require running a real operating system...
Wow, so when you test kids based upon manual dexterity, those who've had training in manual dexterity do better? How astonishing!
You get what you're looking for. If the "intelligence" testing had involved critical thinking or articulation, I'd imagine the results would have been different.
And $400 is a bit too high, I'm afraid. It's not completely offensive, the thing does have some distinctive features: data and charging over firewire, ten hour battery, very small and light, and, for those of you who swing that way, seamless integration with iTunes.
I'm guessing that they'll drop the price to $300 after Christmas (perhaps at macworld expo in January), which will be more reasonable. Still a bit of a premium on a sheer dollars to bytes scale, but perhaps worth it for the other features.
There are two main reasons that Mac portables fare better against Intel systems than Mac desktops.
The first is that no one's going out and putting together their own laptop from individual parts. Desktop Macs actually compare very favorably to pre-made desktop systems from Dell, Gateway, Sony, etc. It's self-assembled machines that get to be a lot cheaper than any of these, but that's not relevant for laptops.
The other is that whole hardware/software harmony thing. Things like power management and docking behaviour are non-standardized enough that there are great benefits to having the same organization make the hardware and the software. Obviously this only applies if you're running Apple's software, rather than Linux, NetBSD, or OpenBSD.
The hosts file is in a fairly standard format; create it with a text editor, and save it wherever you choose, though Preferences would make sense. Select it in the TCP/IP control panel.
The catch is that I'm not sure that open transport considers 127.0.0.1 to be localhost, so you may have to use an invalid ip, or perhaps your own external interface.
Okay, I've restrained myself this long without asking: why are you still running old macos? Omniweb has every ad-avoidance feature that's been mentioned here, plus a few others, all conveniently in the browser itself. It can block:
images served from a different host than the html
images which match very common ad sizes
objects which match any of a list of regexes you supply
pop-ups other than in direct response to a click
I used Linux exclusively on my desktop for five years (until Macos X was available). I found out about this "feature" about a month ago, when someone mentioned it to me. And y'know, I don't really feel bad about not having stumbled onto pasting text onto something that doesn't look like anything else on the system that responds to text, and doesn't give you the slightest clue about its nonstandard nature.
This is a classic case of using the application layer to attempt a hacky fix to problems at the lower layers. It's about as elegant as the fact that in DOS, individual programs dealt with wildcard expansion, because the shell was too stupid to do so. This had small benefits (being able to do: mv *.jpg *.gif) and huge downsides (having * work differently in every program, if it worked at all).
Implicit versus explicit copy is a separate issue from mouse signalled versus keyboard signalled copy. If you want to copy with the mouse, fine; you've certainly got enough buttons to be able to use a different one for copy and select.
But having to explicitly request copy rather than having it be an implicit part of selecting makes the clipboard much more stable and reliable, and therefore more useful.
The game which does a good job of depicting the non-zero-sum nature of
society is, well, Civilization. Not the more recent computer game, the
original board game implementation.
Players trade, and having a large quantity of a single resource increases
superlinearly in value. Thus it's to everyone's advantage to exchange their
naturally-balanced resources for more tightly focused monopolies.
Outright combat is sometimes necessary, but usually very inefficient, and
thus quite not the point of the game. The result is a good balance of
competition and cooperation... much like real civilization.
*If* your only goal is to further your carreer, the choice is easy: drop out now, and get a job. In my experience, companies are desperate enough to find someone with actual skill that they're giving the same jobs, at the same wages, to cs majors, cis majors, art history majors, and highschool dropouts. In fact, most employers are likely to be more excited by a few years of actual real-world experience than by even a very relevant degreee.
However, if you have goals other than furthering your carreer, consider sticking with the cs program. Knowledge for knowledge's sake and all that.
Either way, the cis program is probably a pointless compromise. If you're trying to impress an employer, don't bother; if you're trying to impress yourself, do it the hard way.
SCSI has many advantages over IDE. However, drive access speed is generally not among them.
SCSI allows you to connect non-drive devices (scanners and the like), allows you to connect more devices total, has a common interface for external devices, and devices exist to do RAID in hardware.
There is one way in which "speed" is related: with most IDE controllers found in intel boxes, the cpu needs to handshake every block sent over the bus. This may or may not slow down the transfer, but it sure as hell bogs down the cpu itself.
However, there's no reason that this needs to be the case for all IDE controllers. Specifically, the controllers used in Mac hardware do such handshaking themselves, much the way that a SCSI controller is expected to do bus arbitration. (This is actually _because_ of the fact that IDE came to the Mac much later than SCSI, so the controllers were more self-sufficient, to make them easier to integrate into the system.)
This does mean that the IDE controllers are more expensive than their Intellish counterparts. It still turns out to be more cost-effective, given the relative cheapness of IDE drives.
And, as many people have already pointed out, individual drives (or even pairs of them) are not generally capable of saturating either bus.
(And by way of history, IDE has been around in Apple machines for about five years now, and has been the default for over two.)
Funny, it had always struck me as the obvious choice. A fairly high percentage of Mac users have chosen that platform because they believe it to be technically superior, as opposed to simply because it's what everyone else uses. Without even addressing the issue of whether the platform actually is superior, what's significant is the larger number of people willing to be nonconformist, and right, rather than compatible, and wrong.
Linux users seem to share this attribute, often having spent years fighting against Windows-compatibility issues, because they felt that having an internally superior system was worthwile.
While non-tech artists, or luddite grandmothers are one stereotype of the mac userbase, they aren't the whole thing. It's important to remember that a very high number of mac users are quite technically competent, and have chosen the platform because of this, not in spite of it.
Actually, this is one of several reasons to use ssh 1.2.x, rather than the 2.x crap. With 2.x, they changed the licensing significantly, including narrowing the definition of 'non-commercial use.'
With 1.2.x, very many organizations, even for-profit businesses, are able to legally use it without paying any licensing fees. Read the licenses of both, to find out whether you can legally use them for free.
is: http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/061580empire.h tml
I'm trying to imagine a worse fate than being known for ages at That Guy
Who Panned 'The Empire Strikes Back'. The guy who pointed out that it was
'nice and inoffensive,' although 'not, by any means, as nice as Star Wars.'
The guy who claims that the only redeeming feature of this boring and
apathetic film is Yoda. The guy who describes Harrison Ford as 'cheerfully
nondescript,' but assures us that Mark Hamill will one day become a real
movie star.