Interesting enough, my wheel has deteriated a bit, and when I wrote CS for Apple telling them about it, they said that what I was describing was "not a common problem" and that it didn't "inhibit use of the iPod" so it really wasn't a problem. I wonder why they released a touch-sensitive, non-moving wheel if it wasn't such a common problem.
I recall seeing somewhere online a tip for iPod scrollwheels which are too loose. You can pop the scrollwheel off and squirt a little of a certain kind of grease into the bearing. Cost: about $5.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I heard Steve say that the new features would be available to existing iPods. Since the new ones are not shipping yet anyway, I doubt that the new firmware is fully ready yet anyway.
They did this once already (iPod 1.1 added vCards, for instance)
Carbon is 9/X and Office 2001/Office v.X share most of the same codebase, but AFAIK, not all Carbon programs will run OK under both.
BBEdit Lite 6.1, for example. A very simple Carbon program, but if you go download it, you will get 2 versions, OS9 and OS X.
Carbon and Cocoa both make calls to Core Services, and it is possible to make calls directly to Core Services from Carbon or Cocoa. If you do that with a Carbon program, you will probably break OS 9 compatiblilty, because Core Services aren't there. It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft did that to speed things up and/or work around bugs in Carbon.
My.sig is just an observation. Everybody knows that the internet is the greatest source of free information ever. It is meant to be like the Douglas Adams quote about the Babelfish which said something to the effect of "by knocking down the barriers to communication, the Babelfish lead to more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
In the end, it is just something to keep in mind when you peruse the internet. It may all be true, from the author's point of view, but information on the internet rarely has a link saying "About the Author's agenda".
Actually, I think it had more to do with the Carbon APIs. Microsoft refused to rewrite Office in Cocoa, but it wanted to use some of the features from Cocoa. That is why the feature sets of Carbon and Cocoa have been converging.
Besides, when it came out, Office v.X was the most complex Carbon program to date. I'm sure Microsoft's Mac programmers found lots of bugs in the APIs and reported them back to Apple. Office v.X came out shortly after 10.1, and required 10.1 because it fixed a ton of bugs overall, but particularly with the Carbon API.
I think that is probably what Microsoft's contribution to OS X was.
Anyway, if Office v.X is not selling well, it is probably due to the OUTRAGEOUS price. $500? I bought it at the educational discount and that was still $200. I only paid $1500 for my iBook, I'm certainly not going to pay 1/3 of that again for Office.
Ford has a website for the Escape HEV which says that it is "coming in 2003". I heard Jan. 2003 a while back, but Ford has not committed to a firm release yet. Interestingly, the Escape HEV will be using a 5-stroke cycle engine instead of the usual 4-stroke cycle.
Some other people have mentioned Ford's Electric division TH!NK, which was a Sweedish company that Ford bought a few years back. They are selling the TH!NK City in some markets now, as well as two models of electric-assist bicycles, and a souped-up golf cart called the TH!NK neighbor, which is targetted at people in subdivisions with low speed limits.
The TH!NK website also mentions some other Ford products, like 50 EV Ford Rangers available for lease in S. Cal, and the upcoming Focus FCV, a hydrogen fuel cell Ford Focus which Ford has announced will go on sale to fleet buyers in 2004 and they hope to sell to the public in 2008.
3. The one PC platform box was a dual PIII 1.4Ghz. Not exactly the performance leader in dual CPU PC servers.
Actually, when it comes to 1U servers, it is. Go check Dell's website. The Poweredge 1650 is Dell's fastest 1U machine and it offers 1 or 2 1.4GHz Pentium IIIs. PIIIs are still commonly used in servers, because the P4 is a power hog and doesn't actually give you a speed boost. Remember that the PIII is actually about 50% faster than the P4 at the same clock speed. Intel's server optimized processor is the Xeon, and that is just a Pentium III with boatloads of cache. You can't find them in 1U servers, either.
4. The benchmarks were all runnning one server app, Xinet's own fullpress.
What exactly do you expect Xinet to use for benchmarking? They need to have an answer when people ask "what hardware runs your software best?" Read the article, it does not go around drooling over the XServe. It says how big of a shop each server is good for. It specifically says that the XServe is a good choice for small to medium size graphic shops. Nothing more. It is of significantly more interest how much the 2x1GHz XServe outperforms the 2x1GHz Powermac G4.
To quote from Xinet's site:
Why Publish These Tests?
Xinet believes it is important to publish current, accurate, detailed information concerning the performance of our software on the server platforms we support.
By publishing this data, Xinet hopes to assist customers in choosing the systems that are appropriate for their needs, and to ensure smooth integration of Xinet products into their workflows. Xinet's Benchmarked Configurations are the result of extensive testing in the dedicated Xinet lab. Xinet hopes customers will use this data as a guide to the performance they can expect from various server-based workflows.
Re:They don't need to GPL their own work...
on
DishPVR 721 Review
·
· Score: 2
You've made one mistake about the GPL.
If you distribute the binary, then you must make the source code available at no cost/cost of media. So Dish is required to provide source.
However, it sounds like they are still quashing a lot of bugs, and so I wouldn't expect the engineers to make a source release available until things have stabilized a little. People seem to be calling tech support and those people are not likely to know Linux from a hole in the ground.
Apple makes tons on the iPod. Not that long ago, the Apple Store was charging $99 for the VST Firefly 5GB firewire drive which has the same HD mechanism as the iPod. I'm pretty sure that it does not cost Apple more than $300 for the controller chips and the display. Remember, the iPod has been on the market for ~8 months now. They've paid off the R&D costs by now, and the components have only gotten cheaper, particularly the 1.8" Toshiba mechanism.
Now, when the iPod first came out, I belive that Apple was selling them with a low markup, but today they are probably making as much margin as they do on an iBook, and possibly more. The reason they are still so expensive is that the iPod still has no reasonable competition.
You are right about the Windows problem, though. It did have more to do with crappy 1394 hardware on many Intel platforms than with the filesystem access, but that is another reason that Apple would not want to get involved in writing a Windows driver, it would be just as difficult, and Apple would not get as much slack as M4 will.
Checking IMDB shows that John Rhys-Davies is playing both Gimli (the dwarf) and Treebeard (the Ent). I believe I read somewhere that he is only doing the voice of Treebeard.
I wonder if Steve's going to patch the iPod to make it incompatible with 3rd party software such as this?
Don't be silly. This software saves Apple a lot of trouble. It will shut up everyone who has been clammoring for Apple to provide windows software, but Apple doesn't actually have to support it.
The iPod is just a portable hard drive. The difficulty was getting Windows to be able to read the HFS+ filesystem, and the only thing that had to be reverse engineered was the iTunes File format.
When Mediafour first anounounced this product, they called it xPod. Apple asked them to change the name and they complied, but that was the only request that they made. If it helps Apple sell more iPods without having to pay for support, Apple wins.
I'm pretty sure that I read somewhere that Palm OS 5 could handle resolutions that were integer multiples of 160. I'm not sure if that means only 160x160, 320x320, 480x480, etc. or if resolutions of 320x480 are allowed.
However, the various OS licencees do seem to have some leeway to modify the OS for their own needs (e.g. Sony and their 320x320 and 320x480 Palm OS 4 devices and Handera with their 160x240 device).
This would be true if the only fuel cell design in existance was the one used on the space shuttle. However, there is a lot of work going into other fuel cell designs.
Platinum gets used a lot when cost is no object (like the space shuttle), but other designs can be used which are much more cost effective. The design used on the Space Shuttle is radically different than the stuff that companies like Ballard, Plugpower, and Siemens are working on.
Anyway, if there is enough platinum for all the catlytic converters in cars, there is probably enough for fuel cells.
There is a lot of debate about whether this license is "open source" or not.
There is no debate about APSL being an "open source" licence. The source is available, it does not cost anything, and you can make changes. ESR and the OSI have certified it as such.
What the debate is about is whether or not it is a "free software" licence. RMS and the FSF have rejected APSL from their certification because they don't like some of the provisions, such as the fact that if you redistribute the source with any changes, you must provide Apple with a copy.
Re:Not quite as good as 9.x yet
on
Apple Drops Mac OS 9
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This is a developer conference, not a user conference. The point is that all Apple developers should be targetting OS X now. If you want to target OS 9 as well, you can use Carbon, but Apple no longer wants developers using the Classic APIs. Porting from Classic -> Carbon is not trivial, but it is not a huge job either.
Apple will continue to update OS 9 a little, but no new features should be expected, only the occational bugfix and updates to CarbonLib so that OS 9/X compatibility will be maintained.
I expect that classic will become an optional install (not by default) sometime in 2003 and it will probably be wiped out all together by 2005.
Also, FWIW, OS 8 was going to be OS 7.7 but Apple decided to call it OS 8. There were not that many changes. It was certainly nowhere near the OS 9 to OS X shift.
Supposedly the PowerPC spec was written with both 32 and 64 bit processors in mind. I think IBM even uses some 64-bit variants for some of their "big iron".
From what I understand, the 32->64 PPC transition will be seamless, and 32-bit programs will run without a performance hit.
Update 10.1.4 delivers improved networking, security, and additional disc recording device support. Specific enhancements include:
Disc Recording Devices:
Updated and new support for Fast 10 SCSI drives, including the Pioneer 201 drive.
Expanded support for SmartDisk, EZQuest, and LaCie disc recording devices.
Networking Improvements:
Dial-up connections over PPP are more reliable and system responsiveness has been improved.
Significant improvement to file searching on local and remote volumes.
Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) services can be browsed on networks with 3Com routers.
Security Update:
BSD-based TCP/IP connections now check and block broadcast or multicast IP destination addresses.
Seems pretty clear to me from a end user perspective. This is what Software Update told me.
What sad times when "it didn't break anything" is what passes for a good review.
This is a bugfix release. It seems to only fix a few obscure bugs and most users shouldn't notice any difference. "It didn't break anything" is the best review possible for this kind of release.
The auto manufacturers know that gasoline is not the fuel for all time. A lot of work in the automotive industry is going into producing fuel cell powered automobiles, for example. Ford has announced that they are going to release a fuel cell version of their Focus car in 2004 (the Focus FCV) Actually, it is a fuel cell/hybrid electric car, because fuel cells take a while to strt up, and can't quickly change their power output.
Besides, even the "oil" companies know better.
They are amongst some of the biggest investors
in alternative fuel technologies. You can bet
that when hydrogen fuel becomes the dominant form,
ExxonMobil will be standing by to sell it to you.
All of the so called "oil" companies have realized
that they will be obsolete if they miss the "next
big thing", and so they would be perfectly happy
to sell you the "next big thing".
Re:Titanium is also very flexible.
on
The Sexiest Metal
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Oh Boy.
Puts materials scientist hat on
The TiBook is made from commertially-pure
(CP) Titanium. This is basically an unalloyed
grade and is very weak relative to the better 6-4 (6%Al-4%V) "aircraft grade" Titanium alloys.
This is the thing. Apple chose Titanium more because it was sexy than anything else. You see a lot of things advertised as "Titanium", and often times the Titanium plays no important role in the product. There are some golf balls out there that has some Titanium in one of the resins close to the core, but the Ti is not in metal form, and is really only there in minute quantities.
In fact, sometimes titanium overshadows everything else there. One of the responses mentions "Titanium" glasses frames that are very flexible. Those are not pure titanium. They are a 50-50 alloy of Titanium and Nickel. It is a "shape-memory alloy" which has the ability to deform easily by realigning the crystal structure when bent! and then shifting the crystal structure back when the stress is removed. They are way cooler than just titanium. They have been precision engineered to be superelastic.
Titanium may be sexy, but it is not always the whole story. The marketing people often latch on to it, but as it becomes more common (and it will), it will start to lose it's allure. A large part of the cost of titanium is in refining it from the ore, and I've heard about a few developments that might bring it closer to the cost of aluminum in that respect.
You know, I remember reading that somewhere too, but I just checked Toshiba's website and the specs they publish for the 1.8" embedded HDs. All of them (5, 10, & 20GB) are listed as 5mm thick, with the same height and width. Unless the specs on Toshiba's website are wrong, then it should be possible to put on in an iPod.
Start your engines geeks. First one with a 20GB iPod wins!
You did't read my post, did you? The price I quoted was for a firewire hard drive with the exact same 5GB 1.8" Toshiba drive as the iPod. $170 is expensive for a 5GB firewire HD.
I don't think Apple bought anything. They may have noticed that the people who had come up with ways to encode contact info into MP3 ID3 tags were getting a lot of attention.
From what I can tell, this upgrade lets the iPod recognize the vCard format and puts a visible folder on the iPod called "Contacts". Any vCards in that folder show up in the "Contacts" menu on the iPod. Simple as that, and much simpler than turning your contacts into silent MP3s.
The iPod apparantly has a pretty nifty OS with 2 ARM processors and 32MB of flash in it. It is probably capable of a lot of things (OGG support, perhaps). Don't expect Apple to come out with a dev kit for it anytime soon, though. I'm sure Apple does not want to have to support 3rd party software, and I think it is unlikely anybody would create a "killer app" for the iPod, other than the "killer app" that it already has. Most likely you would only see a few games.
That $400 price for the iPod HD was true when the iPod first came out, but the price has come down quite a bit. You can get a 5GB firewire drive based on that HD for as little as $170. Check out this
article at dealmac.com.
The real reason the 5GB iPod is still $400 is that people are still buying it. If Apple was having trouble selling them, the price would have dropped to $350 or $300. They are still hot, and there is still no comparable MP3 player on the market, period. Size, capacity, battery life, and firewire. No other MP3 player matches the iPod in all 4 of those categories. Until one does, Apple can charge what they damn well please. That is the free market at work.
Slashdot Mirror
I recall seeing somewhere online a tip for iPod scrollwheels which are too loose. You can pop the scrollwheel off and squirt a little of a certain kind of grease into the bearing. Cost: about $5.
Here are instructions: http://www.ipodding.com/modules.php?op=modload&nam e=News&file=article&sid=486
I hope that helps.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I heard Steve say that the new features would be available to existing iPods. Since the new ones are not shipping yet anyway, I doubt that the new firmware is fully ready yet anyway.
They did this once already (iPod 1.1 added vCards, for instance)
BBEdit Lite 6.1, for example. A very simple Carbon program, but if you go download it, you will get 2 versions, OS9 and OS X.
Carbon and Cocoa both make calls to Core Services, and it is possible to make calls directly to Core Services from Carbon or Cocoa. If you do that with a Carbon program, you will probably break OS 9 compatiblilty, because Core Services aren't there. It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft did that to speed things up and/or work around bugs in Carbon.
My .sig is just an observation. Everybody knows that the internet is the greatest source of free information ever. It is meant to be like the Douglas Adams quote about the Babelfish which said something to the effect of "by knocking down the barriers to communication, the Babelfish lead to more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
In the end, it is just something to keep in mind when you peruse the internet. It may all be true, from the author's point of view, but information on the internet rarely has a link saying "About the Author's agenda".
Besides, when it came out, Office v.X was the most complex Carbon program to date. I'm sure Microsoft's Mac programmers found lots of bugs in the APIs and reported them back to Apple. Office v.X came out shortly after 10.1, and required 10.1 because it fixed a ton of bugs overall, but particularly with the Carbon API.
I think that is probably what Microsoft's contribution to OS X was.
Anyway, if Office v.X is not selling well, it is probably due to the OUTRAGEOUS price. $500? I bought it at the educational discount and that was still $200. I only paid $1500 for my iBook, I'm certainly not going to pay 1/3 of that again for Office.
Some other people have mentioned Ford's Electric division TH!NK, which was a Sweedish company that Ford bought a few years back. They are selling the TH!NK City in some markets now, as well as two models of electric-assist bicycles, and a souped-up golf cart called the TH!NK neighbor, which is targetted at people in subdivisions with low speed limits.
The TH!NK website also mentions some other Ford products, like 50 EV Ford Rangers available for lease in S. Cal, and the upcoming Focus FCV, a hydrogen fuel cell Ford Focus which Ford has announced will go on sale to fleet buyers in 2004 and they hope to sell to the public in 2008.
Actually, when it comes to 1U servers, it is. Go check Dell's website. The Poweredge 1650 is Dell's fastest 1U machine and it offers 1 or 2 1.4GHz Pentium IIIs. PIIIs are still commonly used in servers, because the P4 is a power hog and doesn't actually give you a speed boost. Remember that the PIII is actually about 50% faster than the P4 at the same clock speed. Intel's server optimized processor is the Xeon, and that is just a Pentium III with boatloads of cache. You can't find them in 1U servers, either.
What exactly do you expect Xinet to use for benchmarking? They need to have an answer when people ask "what hardware runs your software best?" Read the article, it does not go around drooling over the XServe. It says how big of a shop each server is good for. It specifically says that the XServe is a good choice for small to medium size graphic shops. Nothing more. It is of significantly more interest how much the 2x1GHz XServe outperforms the 2x1GHz Powermac G4. To quote from Xinet's site:
If you distribute the binary, then you must make the source code available at no cost/cost of media. So Dish is required to provide source.
However, it sounds like they are still quashing a lot of bugs, and so I wouldn't expect the engineers to make a source release available until things have stabilized a little. People seem to be calling tech support and those people are not likely to know Linux from a hole in the ground.
Now, when the iPod first came out, I belive that Apple was selling them with a low markup, but today they are probably making as much margin as they do on an iBook, and possibly more. The reason they are still so expensive is that the iPod still has no reasonable competition.
You are right about the Windows problem, though. It did have more to do with crappy 1394 hardware on many Intel platforms than with the filesystem access, but that is another reason that Apple would not want to get involved in writing a Windows driver, it would be just as difficult, and Apple would not get as much slack as M4 will.
Checking IMDB shows that John Rhys-Davies is playing both Gimli (the dwarf) and Treebeard (the Ent). I believe I read somewhere that he is only doing the voice of Treebeard.
Don't be silly. This software saves Apple a lot of trouble. It will shut up everyone who has been clammoring for Apple to provide windows software, but Apple doesn't actually have to support it.
The iPod is just a portable hard drive. The difficulty was getting Windows to be able to read the HFS+ filesystem, and the only thing that had to be reverse engineered was the iTunes File format.
When Mediafour first anounounced this product, they called it xPod. Apple asked them to change the name and they complied, but that was the only request that they made. If it helps Apple sell more iPods without having to pay for support, Apple wins.
However, the various OS licencees do seem to have some leeway to modify the OS for their own needs (e.g. Sony and their 320x320 and 320x480 Palm OS 4 devices and Handera with their 160x240 device).
Platinum gets used a lot when cost is no object (like the space shuttle), but other designs can be used which are much more cost effective. The design used on the Space Shuttle is radically different than the stuff that companies like Ballard, Plugpower, and Siemens are working on.
Anyway, if there is enough platinum for all the catlytic converters in cars, there is probably enough for fuel cells.
There is no debate about APSL being an "open source" licence. The source is available, it does not cost anything, and you can make changes. ESR and the OSI have certified it as such.
What the debate is about is whether or not it is a "free software" licence. RMS and the FSF have rejected APSL from their certification because they don't like some of the provisions, such as the fact that if you redistribute the source with any changes, you must provide Apple with a copy.
Apple will continue to update OS 9 a little, but no new features should be expected, only the occational bugfix and updates to CarbonLib so that OS 9/X compatibility will be maintained.
I expect that classic will become an optional install (not by default) sometime in 2003 and it will probably be wiped out all together by 2005.
Also, FWIW, OS 8 was going to be OS 7.7 but Apple decided to call it OS 8. There were not that many changes. It was certainly nowhere near the OS 9 to OS X shift.
From what I understand, the 32->64 PPC transition will be seamless, and 32-bit programs will run without a performance hit.
I've heard it still works with the most recent OSX builds, but it only looks new because the site hasn't been updated for a year.
Seems pretty clear to me from a end user perspective. This is what Software Update told me.
What sad times when "it didn't break anything" is what passes for a good review.
This is a bugfix release. It seems to only fix a few obscure bugs and most users shouldn't notice any difference. "It didn't break anything" is the best review possible for this kind of release.
Besides, even the "oil" companies know better. They are amongst some of the biggest investors in alternative fuel technologies. You can bet that when hydrogen fuel becomes the dominant form, ExxonMobil will be standing by to sell it to you. All of the so called "oil" companies have realized that they will be obsolete if they miss the "next big thing", and so they would be perfectly happy to sell you the "next big thing".
Puts materials scientist hat on
The TiBook is made from commertially-pure (CP) Titanium. This is basically an unalloyed grade and is very weak relative to the better 6-4 (6%Al-4%V) "aircraft grade" Titanium alloys.
This is the thing. Apple chose Titanium more because it was sexy than anything else. You see a lot of things advertised as "Titanium", and often times the Titanium plays no important role in the product. There are some golf balls out there that has some Titanium in one of the resins close to the core, but the Ti is not in metal form, and is really only there in minute quantities.
In fact, sometimes titanium overshadows everything else there. One of the responses mentions "Titanium" glasses frames that are very flexible. Those are not pure titanium. They are a 50-50 alloy of Titanium and Nickel. It is a "shape-memory alloy" which has the ability to deform easily by realigning the crystal structure when bent! and then shifting the crystal structure back when the stress is removed. They are way cooler than just titanium. They have been precision engineered to be superelastic.
Titanium may be sexy, but it is not always the whole story. The marketing people often latch on to it, but as it becomes more common (and it will), it will start to lose it's allure. A large part of the cost of titanium is in refining it from the ore, and I've heard about a few developments that might bring it closer to the cost of aluminum in that respect.
Start your engines geeks. First one with a 20GB iPod wins!
You did't read my post, did you? The price I quoted was for a firewire hard drive with the exact same 5GB 1.8" Toshiba drive as the iPod. $170 is expensive for a 5GB firewire HD.
5GB iPod (refurbished) for $339 from store.apple.com (Click on "Special Deals"). Comes with the same 90 day warranty as a new iPod.
From what I can tell, this upgrade lets the iPod recognize the vCard format and puts a visible folder on the iPod called "Contacts". Any vCards in that folder show up in the "Contacts" menu on the iPod. Simple as that, and much simpler than turning your contacts into silent MP3s.
The iPod apparantly has a pretty nifty OS with 2 ARM processors and 32MB of flash in it. It is probably capable of a lot of things (OGG support, perhaps). Don't expect Apple to come out with a dev kit for it anytime soon, though. I'm sure Apple does not want to have to support 3rd party software, and I think it is unlikely anybody would create a "killer app" for the iPod, other than the "killer app" that it already has. Most likely you would only see a few games.
The real reason the 5GB iPod is still $400 is that people are still buying it. If Apple was having trouble selling them, the price would have dropped to $350 or $300. They are still hot, and there is still no comparable MP3 player on the market, period. Size, capacity, battery life, and firewire. No other MP3 player matches the iPod in all 4 of those categories. Until one does, Apple can charge what they damn well please. That is the free market at work.