Seriously, aside from upgrading the RAM, what else needs to be upgraded in this computer? I would guess that most people who are buying the Mini have another Mac or a PC or two. I fall into the latter group (my Mini is the first Mac I've ever owned) and find that it's much more effective to use the resources of my PC's (large hard drives for storing huge files, DVD burner for writing movies created with iMovie+iDVD) than to use the mini's. And with the Microsoft Remote Desktop Connector, I can pull up a full Windows XP desktop on my Mac whenever I need it, which is becoming increasingly less and less. (Oh, and using a Firewire cable to network between my PC and my Mini gives me transfer speeds that make the hard drive and not the network connection the bottleneck point!)
but with my new mac mini, i can relive [sic] my bsd glory days with additional drop shadows and window animations! i don't know if that really counts as a bsd, though...
Are you saying that if the interface is too pretty or intuitive it doesn't count as being a real *BSD experience? If/when linux grows an interface as functional, beautiful, and elegant as Mac OS X, will it no longer qualify as being a "real linux experience?" If a rose by any other name is still a rose, then a *BSD variant with any other GUI -- like say, the Macintosh variety -- should still be *BSD... especially since most *BSD users seem rather indifferent to graphical user interfaces from what I gather.
Funny you should say that. I just bought my first Mac this weekend and have been exploring the.Mac service among other things. A thought that hit me: if/when the.mac TLD comes up for competition, how badly do you think Apple will want to control it?
For what it's worth, I managed to easily and quickly open up my Mini with a simple putty knife (and no scratches to the plastic or aluminum!) and sure enough, there was a 256MB stick of Samsung PC3200 RAM (Apple advertises these as coming with PC2700). I removed that stick and replaced it with a 512MB PC3200 (CL 2.5) Mushkin stick (my WinXP Pro box will have to do with only one of two of these sticks for now), replaced the cover and booted up. The performance increase was noticeable and immediate; the NewEgg.com order for a 1024MB stick of PC3200 goes out tomorrow! (Supposedly the Mini will only use PC3200 at PC2700 speed, but when the PC3200 is only $4.50 more at NewEgg, why not get the faster chip?)
I did snap a couple pictures with my Nikon D70 but I decided against posting them since there are already several links to pictures of deconstructed minis in various places on/. and I presume nobody reading this is all too interested in either the RAM stick that was in my Mini or the putty knife used to open up the box...
I bought my Mac mini this morning (waited in line in the 18 degree temps outside the Apple store in Kansas City so I could be fifth in line!) and have been working with it all day. Of the more interesting things I've noticed: System Profiler indicates that I have 256MB of PC3200 RAM installed... and I thought these things came with PC2700! I am going to buy myself a putty knife and will get back later with info and a picture or two of what I find inside...
For you PC (ab)users (I'm now in recovery on this point!) who are sitting on the fence wanting to get one of these but don't want to loose the functionality of all your Windows software, have no fear. Just go download the Windows Remote Desktop Connector and get cooking. Among the neat features, you can map the drives on your Mac to the remote PC allowing you to move files back and forth between the PC and the Mac with the utmost of ease!:-)
Fair enough -- but I am picking on an easy and unsophisticated target in AOL (ab)users because they typically embody the essense of the clueless computer user. Give 1,000,000 of these dolts Suse, Mac OS X, Sun Java Desktop, or what-have-you-*nix, this is the group that would be stupid enough to get thier machines jacked up.
THAT SAID, my original question was more fundamental to the operating system not to the technical savvy (or lack thereof) of the user base, and why linux and unix like systems don't seem to have as many infections. I particularly pick on Mac OS X in this query because they would logically be the leasy savvy of users on a *nix based system and should render the "savviness of the user" arguement moot.
So the overly-simple answer of "there is not enough popularity/market share" to target them is more or less accurate? I didn't think this was the case -- even though I realize there is no amount of destruction impossible to a determined idiot-user...
Okay, slightly OT, but answer me this: why is it that Linux and Unix based systems (like Mac OS X) don't have problems with spyware and viruses? The popular argument by Windows fanboys is that because there is not enough of a market share for *nix to matter to malware authors. I've read it also has to do with package management on *nix, and that you cannot just simply execute a script or binary on a *nix system? TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, what is the strait answer here?
Tracking cookies were the only thing MS anti-spyware didn't find, and there is nothing in the documentation about MS antispyware going after such items.... so in other words it performed as advertised -- and needs improvement.
That said I am switching to Mac and leaving this spyware crap behind me.
How about just installing the Windows Remote Desktop Client for Mac and remote onto your headless PC? I went tried this out at a local Mac store this past weekend -- the guy walking the floor did a double take when he saw that I had a full Windows desktop (my machine at home) running on a PowerBook... apparently he was not aware of this functionalilty.
You either totally missed what I was getting at or you are trying to make a pathetic joke. Are you seriously comparing the VIA processor to a Pentium M or G4? I was talking about a miniscule computer, not miniscule performance.
You also clearly didn't catch the implication that I have no absolutely no interest in building a mini PC (and neither do people who don't read slashdot, are not machinists, and don't have a hardon to mold plastics for CPU cases). My point is that it would be very nice to see someone do a tasteful imitation of the Mac mini and that Sonoma sounds like the right platform to build on for that purpose.
Now that the Mac mini is out, if Apple sells millions upon millions of units it should only be a matter of time until one of the PC makers will come out with a mimic of it (like, say, Asus who is making the Mac mini in the first place).
It seems to me that Sonoma would be an ideal chipset to cram all of the functionality into a pint-sized box as small as, or slightly larger than the Mac mini. If the box has about as clean of a look to it, did away with the PS2, serial, and parallel ports, was user serviceable, and had room for a standard 3.5 inch SATA drive, I think it would do really well -- even if it weren't clad in anodized aluminum. Ahh... perchance to dream!
I do remote administration of server services of several Windows Servers in my job. Typically I don't pull up a desktop but I connect with a graphical tool that is running on *my* machine that talks to a server process on the remote machine (SqlServer Query Analyzer and Enterprise Manager; IIS MMC Controller; Computer Manager; Active Directory's MMC control thingie). In these cases, there is no interaction with the GUI interface of the remote server since the GUI tool is running on *my* workstation.
(And and even if the server were in a currently-non-existant command-line mode, there's no reason why the window server process couldn't be spawned on an as-needed basis -- like when I pull up a remote desktop of the server.)
I use FLAC for full quality archival, stored on my computer on the *other* 160GB HD. The way HD prices are dropping (less than $80 for 160GB; less than $200 for 300GB on NewEgg.com as I compose this response) pretty much anyone should be able to fit their entire collection on a large secondary drive (unless you have an exceedingly large CD library or are rather enthusiastic about offering "backup services" to all of your friends for their CD collections).
When I want to go mobile with my music, I transcode to VBR mp3 since I can pack more music/GB that way; give the portable music player industry a few years and we'll have iPods packing upwards of 200GB and then we'll just dump our FLAC library to the iPod and goove out in lossless mode.
Slightly OT, but something that would also help to boost performance in Windows Server would be a mode in which the Graphical environment/window server is never even loaded, similar to unix/linux command line mode.
Because the code is open source, FLAC will be around forever and available on whatever OS/Platform you want to use it on if you feel like compiling the software.
Another reason it's going to be around and much more prevalent as time goes on is that the compression is so good and the speed/resource usage figures are so attractive. When I rip CD's to FLAC I am limited to 40x by my burner (CPU utilization is around 20-25%). When I rip the same CD to ogg, I top out under 30X because the processor has reached 100% utilization.
Fast. Free. Efficient. Frugal with the CPU. What else do you need?
The Mac Mini will be a perfect X-Terminal to use with a Linux box in another room...
Or it would also be great for connecting to your Windows boxes using the Windows Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac. Supposedly one of the target audiences of Mac Mini are PC users who have an iPod; this will allow them to pull up a Windows terminal on the Mac without bothering to emulate hardare.
When my coworker saw the posting yesterday he mentioned something about CrazyJoe being "one of the most popular thiefs" in UO (I suppose he was referring to "thief" as a role in the game? I don't know). Any chance he *knew* the auction would likely get cancelled? I don't doubt he would give any money he collected to the Red Cross, but shucks, if eBay shuts you down and you didn't keep receipts of who gave you the gold... sounds like a masterpiece in in-game robbery to me: get people to willingly hand over their gold and be glad they did!
I'll admit I'm being tongue-in-cheek in the above, but I also know there are real dirt-bags out there collecting tsunami money for themselves and not for anyone in Asia -- we'll begin hearing about it on the news soon I am sure...
Leaving a Windows box with your grandmother is "fine" as long as she never turns it on or never connects to the internet... Linux may not be userfriendly, but considerably more "fine" than Windows.
Charges of elitism mostly come from people who never liked the Mac to begin with.
Actually, I thought it was the unix hacker with "1337 5k1ll2" who didn't like the idea of anyone joining his circle... that he would feel vulnerable and threatened if anyone else dared to understand the high level black magic he wielded...
I agree with the parent poster: if the Mac crowd were not wanting anyone else to join, why all the switch ads? If they don't want intruders in their O/S, why do they hang out for free in the Mac section of CompUSA and Microcenter answering shoppers' questions (better in some cases than the actual Apple employees who work there!)?
Is there another company that inspires viral marketing quite like Apple? Do you think Microsoft could have made Ellen Feiss a celebrity? (actually, it was complaining about a Microsoft product that was the impetus for her bit -- but that's a whole other topic). Apple xenophobes... yeah right!
>> On a more personal note as a VB.NET developer...
> Well, you're looking at it from the wrong level. > Using VB.NET, you're stuck with Microsoft, as are > your users.
Not true. BASIC as a language family is just generally sneered at, which is somewhat laughable in my opinion. Granted, nobody does kernel development in VB nor should they -- that's not the purpose of VB. As a rapid application development language it a great choice. The language is simple and clean -- perhaps too simple to be seen as useful by some? I know there are projects like KBasic, RealBasic, and VB.NET support for Mono, but they are always pooh-pooed. The fact is, for making quick and dirty programs with simple GUI's that get REAL WORK done, there are few languages that are better (and it's not something that can really be done in C/C++). And you're not limited to quick and dirty either... you can build out very large and very complex systems with great performance using BASIC -- it's all in the talent of the designer/developer, which makes it no different in this regard from C/C++/et al.
Someone just got finished telling me in another thread (the speil on Vadalia Desktop) that the linux community is all about choice and is not interested in competing with Windows. If that is the case and the truth, why do you even care about a story like this, or care that M$ thinks they are competing with you? After all, it's all about freedom of choice isn't it -- or it is only about choice as long as the choice is Linux?
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Seriously, aside from upgrading the RAM, what else needs to be upgraded in this computer? I would guess that most people who are buying the Mini have another Mac or a PC or two. I fall into the latter group (my Mini is the first Mac I've ever owned) and find that it's much more effective to use the resources of my PC's (large hard drives for storing huge files, DVD burner for writing movies created with iMovie+iDVD) than to use the mini's. And with the Microsoft Remote Desktop Connector, I can pull up a full Windows XP desktop on my Mac whenever I need it, which is becoming increasingly less and less. (Oh, and using a Firewire cable to network between my PC and my Mini gives me transfer speeds that make the hard drive and not the network connection the bottleneck point!)
but with my new mac mini, i can relive [sic] my bsd glory days with additional drop shadows and window animations! i don't know if that really counts as a bsd, though...
Are you saying that if the interface is too pretty or intuitive it doesn't count as being a real *BSD experience? If/when linux grows an interface as functional, beautiful, and elegant as Mac OS X, will it no longer qualify as being a "real linux experience?" If a rose by any other name is still a rose, then a *BSD variant with any other GUI -- like say, the Macintosh variety -- should still be *BSD... especially since most *BSD users seem rather indifferent to graphical user interfaces from what I gather.
Funny you should say that. I just bought my first Mac this weekend and have been exploring the .Mac service among other things. A thought that hit me: if/when the .mac TLD comes up for competition, how badly do you think Apple will want to control it?
For what it's worth, I managed to easily and quickly open up my Mini with a simple putty knife (and no scratches to the plastic or aluminum!) and sure enough, there was a 256MB stick of Samsung PC3200 RAM (Apple advertises these as coming with PC2700). I removed that stick and replaced it with a 512MB PC3200 (CL 2.5) Mushkin stick (my WinXP Pro box will have to do with only one of two of these sticks for now), replaced the cover and booted up. The performance increase was noticeable and immediate; the NewEgg.com order for a 1024MB stick of PC3200 goes out tomorrow! (Supposedly the Mini will only use PC3200 at PC2700 speed, but when the PC3200 is only $4.50 more at NewEgg, why not get the faster chip?)
/. and I presume nobody reading this is all too interested in either the RAM stick that was in my Mini or the putty knife used to open up the box...
I did snap a couple pictures with my Nikon D70 but I decided against posting them since there are already several links to pictures of deconstructed minis in various places on
I bought my Mac mini this morning (waited in line in the 18 degree temps outside the Apple store in Kansas City so I could be fifth in line!) and have been working with it all day. Of the more interesting things I've noticed: System Profiler indicates that I have 256MB of PC3200 RAM installed... and I thought these things came with PC2700! I am going to buy myself a putty knife and will get back later with info and a picture or two of what I find inside...
For you PC (ab)users (I'm now in recovery on this point!) who are sitting on the fence wanting to get one of these but don't want to loose the functionality of all your Windows software, have no fear. Just go download the Windows Remote Desktop Connector and get cooking. Among the neat features, you can map the drives on your Mac to the remote PC allowing you to move files back and forth between the PC and the Mac with the utmost of ease! :-)
Fair enough -- but I am picking on an easy and unsophisticated target in AOL (ab)users because they typically embody the essense of the clueless computer user. Give 1,000,000 of these dolts Suse, Mac OS X, Sun Java Desktop, or what-have-you-*nix, this is the group that would be stupid enough to get thier machines jacked up.
THAT SAID, my original question was more fundamental to the operating system not to the technical savvy (or lack thereof) of the user base, and why linux and unix like systems don't seem to have as many infections. I particularly pick on Mac OS X in this query because they would logically be the leasy savvy of users on a *nix based system and should render the "savviness of the user" arguement moot.
There are plenty of AOL users on Mac OS X... but they get virii and spyware too -- or does the obscurity of the platform shield them from thier sins?
So the overly-simple answer of "there is not enough popularity/market share" to target them is more or less accurate? I didn't think this was the case -- even though I realize there is no amount of destruction impossible to a determined idiot-user...
Okay, slightly OT, but answer me this: why is it that Linux and Unix based systems (like Mac OS X) don't have problems with spyware and viruses? The popular argument by Windows fanboys is that because there is not enough of a market share for *nix to matter to malware authors. I've read it also has to do with package management on *nix, and that you cannot just simply execute a script or binary on a *nix system? TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, what is the strait answer here?
Tracking cookies were the only thing MS anti-spyware didn't find, and there is nothing in the documentation about MS antispyware going after such items.... so in other words it performed as advertised -- and needs improvement.
That said I am switching to Mac and leaving this spyware crap behind me.
How about just installing the Windows Remote Desktop Client for Mac and remote onto your headless PC? I went tried this out at a local Mac store this past weekend -- the guy walking the floor did a double take when he saw that I had a full Windows desktop (my machine at home) running on a PowerBook... apparently he was not aware of this functionalilty.
You either totally missed what I was getting at or you are trying to make a pathetic joke. Are you seriously comparing the VIA processor to a Pentium M or G4? I was talking about a miniscule computer, not miniscule performance.
You also clearly didn't catch the implication that I have no absolutely no interest in building a mini PC (and neither do people who don't read slashdot, are not machinists, and don't have a hardon to mold plastics for CPU cases). My point is that it would be very nice to see someone do a tasteful imitation of the Mac mini and that Sonoma sounds like the right platform to build on for that purpose.
Now that the Mac mini is out, if Apple sells millions upon millions of units it should only be a matter of time until one of the PC makers will come out with a mimic of it (like, say, Asus who is making the Mac mini in the first place).
It seems to me that Sonoma would be an ideal chipset to cram all of the functionality into a pint-sized box as small as, or slightly larger than the Mac mini. If the box has about as clean of a look to it, did away with the PS2, serial, and parallel ports, was user serviceable, and had room for a standard 3.5 inch SATA drive, I think it would do really well -- even if it weren't clad in anodized aluminum. Ahh... perchance to dream!
I do remote administration of server services of several Windows Servers in my job. Typically I don't pull up a desktop but I connect with a graphical tool that is running on *my* machine that talks to a server process on the remote machine (SqlServer Query Analyzer and Enterprise Manager; IIS MMC Controller; Computer Manager; Active Directory's MMC control thingie). In these cases, there is no interaction with the GUI interface of the remote server since the GUI tool is running on *my* workstation.
(And and even if the server were in a currently-non-existant command-line mode, there's no reason why the window server process couldn't be spawned on an as-needed basis -- like when I pull up a remote desktop of the server.)
I use FLAC for full quality archival, stored on my computer on the *other* 160GB HD. The way HD prices are dropping (less than $80 for 160GB; less than $200 for 300GB on NewEgg.com as I compose this response) pretty much anyone should be able to fit their entire collection on a large secondary drive (unless you have an exceedingly large CD library or are rather enthusiastic about offering "backup services" to all of your friends for their CD collections).
When I want to go mobile with my music, I transcode to VBR mp3 since I can pack more music/GB that way; give the portable music player industry a few years and we'll have iPods packing upwards of 200GB and then we'll just dump our FLAC library to the iPod and goove out in lossless mode.
Slightly OT, but something that would also help to boost performance in Windows Server would be a mode in which the Graphical environment/window server is never even loaded, similar to unix/linux command line mode.
Because the code is open source, FLAC will be around forever and available on whatever OS/Platform you want to use it on if you feel like compiling the software.
Another reason it's going to be around and much more prevalent as time goes on is that the compression is so good and the speed/resource usage figures are so attractive. When I rip CD's to FLAC I am limited to 40x by my burner (CPU utilization is around 20-25%). When I rip the same CD to ogg, I top out under 30X because the processor has reached 100% utilization.
Fast. Free. Efficient. Frugal with the CPU. What else do you need?
The Mac Mini will be a perfect X-Terminal to use with a Linux box in another room...
Or it would also be great for connecting to your Windows boxes using the Windows Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac. Supposedly one of the target audiences of Mac Mini are PC users who have an iPod; this will allow them to pull up a Windows terminal on the Mac without bothering to emulate hardare.
That deep down, in places CowboyNeal doesn't like talking about, he's really a luddite.
When my coworker saw the posting yesterday he mentioned something about CrazyJoe being "one of the most popular thiefs" in UO (I suppose he was referring to "thief" as a role in the game? I don't know). Any chance he *knew* the auction would likely get cancelled? I don't doubt he would give any money he collected to the Red Cross, but shucks, if eBay shuts you down and you didn't keep receipts of who gave you the gold... sounds like a masterpiece in in-game robbery to me: get people to willingly hand over their gold and be glad they did!
I'll admit I'm being tongue-in-cheek in the above, but I also know there are real dirt-bags out there collecting tsunami money for themselves and not for anyone in Asia -- we'll begin hearing about it on the news soon I am sure...
Lemme guess: in Korea, only old people run lin... oh screw it. This joke is getting too old already.
Leaving a Windows box with your grandmother is "fine" as long as she never turns it on or never connects to the internet... Linux may not be userfriendly, but considerably more "fine" than Windows.
Charges of elitism mostly come from people who never liked the Mac to begin with.
Actually, I thought it was the unix hacker with "1337 5k1ll2" who didn't like the idea of anyone joining his circle... that he would feel vulnerable and threatened if anyone else dared to understand the high level black magic he wielded...
I agree with the parent poster: if the Mac crowd were not wanting anyone else to join, why all the switch ads? If they don't want intruders in their O/S, why do they hang out for free in the Mac section of CompUSA and Microcenter answering shoppers' questions (better in some cases than the actual Apple employees who work there!)?
Is there another company that inspires viral marketing quite like Apple? Do you think Microsoft could have made Ellen Feiss a celebrity? (actually, it was complaining about a Microsoft product that was the impetus for her bit -- but that's a whole other topic). Apple xenophobes... yeah right!
>> On a more personal note as a VB.NET developer...
> Well, you're looking at it from the wrong level.
> Using VB.NET, you're stuck with Microsoft, as are
> your users.
Not true. BASIC as a language family is just generally sneered at, which is somewhat laughable in my opinion. Granted, nobody does kernel development in VB nor should they -- that's not the purpose of VB. As a rapid application development language it a great choice. The language is simple and clean -- perhaps too simple to be seen as useful by some? I know there are projects like KBasic, RealBasic, and VB.NET support for Mono, but they are always pooh-pooed. The fact is, for making quick and dirty programs with simple GUI's that get REAL WORK done, there are few languages that are better (and it's not something that can really be done in C/C++). And you're not limited to quick and dirty either... you can build out very large and very complex systems with great performance using BASIC -- it's all in the talent of the designer/developer, which makes it no different in this regard from C/C++/et al.
Someone just got finished telling me in another thread (the speil on Vadalia Desktop) that the linux community is all about choice and is not interested in competing with Windows. If that is the case and the truth, why do you even care about a story like this, or care that M$ thinks they are competing with you? After all, it's all about freedom of choice isn't it -- or it is only about choice as long as the choice is Linux?