i have had an ibook for about a year, and i'm a very satisified customer, my next upgrade will certainly be an 12" powerbook. (I use linux on a monster-desktop)
what i haven't seen mentioned is that apple's education discounts are often pretty decent. my g.f. (who is a grad student) might "help" me get one, which where she is, is under $1700 with superdrive. when i spec out other portables with superdrive they usually seem to be currently ending up really close to that. plus i really like the hard metal case..... whenever i think of getting a portable for linux i'm always bummed about the wierd buttons and scrollwheels and stuff that i know i'll never quite get working under linux. heck, if i was going to get pc to run windows i'l still want one that was as simple, small, and cleanly designed as my ibook. the form-factor for me is something that i'm very comfortable with ergonomically.
credit authorization for trivial amounts
on
Cashless Society
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· Score: 1
today i went in to a starbucks and ordered a latte; i realized i didn't have enough cash and decided to pay with a credit card. the woman behind me did the same thing. it occured to me that for small transactions credit card companies could just allow the "gas station" thing, where you don't acutally have to sign if it is a trivial amount. it seems like that would be a lot more reasonable than adding something else on top that adds complexity and risk. as a former econ. guy, i have to say that a lot of the coments are very insightful. it doesn't take much flight of fancy to imagine the serious consequences of a system like this breaking down during, say, a national emergency or something. and duh, since it works like cash it has the drawbacks of cash (wealth is insecure, limit to what you can carry) and some of the hastles of credit cards (i've had card's erased!)
you didn't say what type of "hello world" app. you were trying to make. of course, on os x you can simply use ansi c and compile with gcc in the usual manner for a command line program. the main graphics apis are written in objective-c which is a short extention to the c language. if you are adept at obect-oriented programming, via java or c++, objective-c shouldn't take more than a day or so to grok. the objective c apis are also accessible from java in a couple different ways. pure java can also be used; it is one of several ways to write cross-platform software for mac os x. another is realbasic, a 3rd party tool which uses visual basic syntax and can build some limited windows executables. if you really love c++ for some reason, there is also the Qt library from trolltech. at the trolltech booth at macworld i saw a demo of their ide, which uses the same Qt widgets to build linux, mac and windows apps. (compiled for each platform of course) and yes, interface builder is the default (free as in beer) way to build cocoa/api interfaces. for many (most?) purposes, it is the best way build applications quickly. it creates binary archives of obj-c objects, which isn't nearly as mysterious as it sounds.
this may sound like a troll, but i'm always suprised at how few people on/. like linux. i use redhat on my pc, and os x on an ibook. i'm generally pretty excited about the commonality between platforms, even if it is mostly "under the hood". macs are a *nix operating system; they use unix utilites and have much in common with my redhat box. i'm very happy if i can write an app or shell script and have it run on both machines with little hastle. apple currently does a very good job (compared to other vendors) in supporting open standards. even though there are licensing issues, there is enough in common, that using a mac i feel like my programming effort isn't wasted. as a user example, i use CUPS to print to a printer that isn't technically supported. i also notice that most of the really techie stuff doesn't show up much in these discussions. the mac windowserver is the thing i most miss under redhat/x11. i'm not sure how it compares to the current MS windowserver. my experience using Adobe applications under Widows2000 is that it does a poor job in rendering text. i'm not technically adept enough to say exactly why, but applications such as InDesign actally do look a little better when scaling stuff on the mac. quartz extreme can (in some cases) partially offset the cpu slowness. i realize it's hard to benchmark something like "it renders the text more accurately", and i'm also suprised that people don't take that into account. the speed thing really isn't that important; it can be, and will probably be fixed. having open standards and a cool graphics api is what rocks!!
I'm typing this on an iBook with an extenal firewire disk. I actually have bootable systems on the drive, one of which is a clone of my internal disk. (backup) When I boot off of the firewire, things can go bad if the cable accidentally gets pulled out. We'll have to look at the options and see how the performance hit works in practice before any real judgements can be made.
There is a very real danger in commiting to use non-free software in the production of free software. I think this is due, in equal parts, to licensing and training issues. The fact that many people were unaware of some of the licensing details is perhaps the most disturbing thing about it.. IMHO, it is an ongoing commitment to free tools that keeps the free software out of licensing traps. It is precisely the people that see the advantages of BitKeeper over CVS that are most likely to code an alternative. Thus, having a license that says what types of software they can and cannot code should be unacceptable (offensive!) to all of us.
I've read that a Mac Classic had 512Kb of ROM.
If one held down certain keys on POST it would boot system 6 in a couple seconds. Does anyone know if this is really true?
If it is it must have been the only Mac that could perform this feat.
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i have had an ibook for about a year, and i'm a very satisified customer, my next upgrade will certainly be an 12" powerbook. (I use linux on a monster-desktop)
what i haven't seen mentioned is that apple's education discounts are often pretty decent. my g.f. (who is a grad student) might "help" me get one, which where she is, is under $1700 with superdrive. when i spec out other portables with superdrive they usually seem to be currently ending up really close to that. plus i really like the hard metal case.....
whenever i think of getting a portable for linux i'm always bummed about the wierd buttons and scrollwheels and stuff that i know i'll never quite get working under linux.
heck, if i was going to get pc to run windows i'l still want one that was as simple, small, and cleanly designed as my ibook. the form-factor for me is something that i'm very comfortable with ergonomically.
today i went in to a starbucks and ordered a latte; i realized i didn't have enough cash and decided to pay with a credit card. the woman behind me did the same thing. it occured to me that for small transactions credit card companies could just allow the "gas station" thing, where you don't acutally have to sign if it is a trivial amount. it seems like that would be a lot more reasonable than adding something else on top that adds complexity and risk.
as a former econ. guy, i have to say that a lot of the coments are very insightful. it doesn't take much flight of fancy to imagine the serious consequences of a system like this breaking down during, say, a national emergency or something.
and duh, since it works like cash it has the drawbacks of cash (wealth is insecure, limit to what you can carry) and some of the hastles of credit cards (i've had card's erased!)
you didn't say what type of "hello world" app. you were trying to make. of course, on os x you can simply use ansi c and compile with gcc in the usual manner for a command line program.
the main graphics apis are written in objective-c which is a short extention to the c language. if you are adept at obect-oriented programming, via java or c++, objective-c shouldn't take more than a day or so to grok. the objective c apis are also accessible from java in a couple different ways.
pure java can also be used; it is one of several ways to write cross-platform software for mac os x. another is realbasic, a 3rd party tool which uses visual basic syntax and can build some limited windows executables.
if you really love c++ for some reason, there is also the Qt library from trolltech. at the trolltech booth at macworld i saw a demo of their ide, which uses the same Qt widgets to build linux, mac and windows apps. (compiled for each platform of course)
and yes, interface builder is the default (free as in beer) way to build cocoa/api interfaces. for many (most?) purposes, it is the best way build applications quickly. it creates binary archives of obj-c objects, which isn't nearly as mysterious as it sounds.
this may sound like a troll, but i'm always suprised at how few people on /. like linux.
i use redhat on my pc, and os x on an ibook. i'm generally pretty excited about the commonality between platforms, even if it is mostly "under the hood". macs are a *nix operating system; they use unix utilites and have much in common with my redhat box. i'm very happy if i can write an app or shell script and have it run on both machines with little hastle. apple currently does a very good job (compared to other vendors) in supporting open standards. even though there are licensing issues, there is enough in common, that using a mac i feel like my programming effort isn't wasted.
as a user example, i use CUPS to print to a printer that isn't technically supported.
i also notice that most of the really techie stuff doesn't show up much in these discussions. the mac windowserver is the thing i most miss under redhat/x11. i'm not sure how it compares to the current MS windowserver. my experience using Adobe applications under Widows2000 is that it does a poor job in rendering text. i'm not technically adept enough to say exactly why, but applications such as InDesign actally do look a little better when scaling stuff on the mac. quartz extreme can (in some cases) partially offset the cpu slowness.
i realize it's hard to benchmark something like "it renders the text more accurately", and i'm also suprised that people don't take that into account.
the speed thing really isn't that important; it can be, and will probably be fixed. having open standards and a cool graphics api is what rocks!!
I'm typing this on an iBook with an extenal firewire disk. I actually have bootable systems on the drive, one of which is a clone of my internal disk. (backup) When I boot off of the firewire, things can go bad if the cable accidentally gets pulled out. We'll have to look at the options and see how the performance hit works in practice before any real judgements can be made.
There is a very real danger in commiting to use non-free software in the production of free software. I think this is due, in equal parts, to licensing and training issues. The fact that many people were unaware of some of the licensing details is perhaps the most disturbing thing about it..
IMHO, it is an ongoing commitment to free tools that keeps the free software out of licensing traps. It is precisely the people that see the advantages of BitKeeper over CVS that are most likely to code an alternative. Thus, having a license that says what types of software they can and cannot code should be unacceptable (offensive!) to all of us.
I've read that a Mac Classic had 512Kb of ROM. If one held down certain keys on POST it would boot system 6 in a couple seconds. Does anyone know if this is really true? If it is it must have been the only Mac that could perform this feat.