Actually Apple uses the Firewire port on the iPod to provide power... So maybe, we should all just use firewire and ditch the power cable.
MAK
an example, and some experiences.
on
Open-Source Biology
·
· Score: 5, Informative
As a scientist involved in a largescale database (www.pbdb.org) that is trying to build a large collaborative project I can say a couple of things about my experience.
1. Working in groups can be very difficult... i.e., when people don't share the same priorities, or see the same sources of bias as important.
2. It can be very helpful... often times getting other people's perspective is very informative. Generally in science we get feedback at the end (publication review), but here it happens at all stages, including data collection. This is really good.
3. People tend to start off thinking that they need to protect and hide data, but once they start to share data they tend to become big fans of sharing data.
4. Data transparency is essential to good science, these type of projects make that more and more possible. It does not take people long to realize how useful it is to have open and easily excessible data.
5. It is very important to open code used in analyses. I am in the process of working on a couple of papers where we have written some code to perform some fairly complex calculations. While I would like to say I am a great programmer, reality has a way of intruding. Collaboration has vastly improved the code, and I fully intend to post the code when I am finished with it. (for fear of being slashdoted I will not post the URL here).
Perhaps I am in the minority here, but we are only talking a press passes. Apple would be within rights to deny press passes to any particular person or group. They are not restricting overall access, just special press privileges.
Clearly, this is still a bad pr move... at least among the mac fanatics. But let's be real, we don't go to the rumor sites to read apple press releases. We (or at least I) like to surf the rumors sites for the pure humor, and occasionally a tip into what apple's thinking. Knowing of course that until 48 hours before the announcements the "information" has is more than often wrong.
But let's remember... This is really only pissing off the people that run the "rumor" sites who enjoyed (and rightfully) one of the few perks they get. For the average rumor site surfer, it means nothing. For the average mac user... less than nothing.
I think that this move is in line with apple's move from mac fanatics to well informed macintosh advocates. While this might piss off some people, in the end, I think the over all trend is good for the OS...
I can ssh from the box with my cvs root, but I can no longer ssh to my box root, unless (get this), I am logged in and then start sshd (using system preferences). I can then ssh into the box until I log out when it stops accepting connections (It actually will accept connections, but will not accept the password).
Do you have a link to CVS issues? I have been running into strange issues with CVS and ssh on my computer... if I run CVS it kills my ability to ssh. If you can explain this I would be overwhelmingly pleased. Link?
Apple: http://developer.apple.com/internet/maco sx/cvsover view.html led me to belive this should work... but I have been having wierd issues.
So maybe I am an idiot, but does anyone know (i.e, have figures) that relate these to the memory types commonly in systems people actually have... (SDRAM).
For example... apple is moving from of PC133 SDRAM (current G4 systems) to PC2100 DDR SDRAM, what does this actually mean to an actual user?
The fine print of the netcraft survey points out that most of the Microsoft gains are the result of mass hosting places and hostname expirations (i.e. small numbers of people making decisions). I suggest that the trend is really quite flat. Will Apache sweep thew market... no, but Apache is much better possitioned, and I forsee the gradual errosion of Microsoft's server market...
The legal system perplexes me, and I think that there is some CYA happening here.
At the same time I think apple deserves credit for taking the recording industry head on. I think the Rip. Mix. Burn. ads of a couple years ago drew a line in then sand with the recording industry. Apple has a vested interest in keeping create types happy and supporting copyrights, but it also has a vested interest in ipods/itunes, etc. I think apple has taken a very sane position in saying that you can "Rip. Mix. Burn." and as part of that pointing out that various artists have chosen to not use the CD format. Some people are unaware that this is even happening.
>The audio discs are technically and legally not Compact Discs (CD format)
I am not sure how much this will really matter in the end, but apple's stance on Rip. Mix. Burn. Has been impressive and I wish them the best. Since I do firmly believe that fair use does mean I can play it on my computer and put it on an mp3 player.
I scanned in my 15 PhotoCDs. I found that if I tried to just scan them all that iPhoto would fail to import somewhere in CD 3, it would then crash. I would relaunch iPhoto and it would load them fine. After a couple times I decided to just quit iPhoto and relaunch it after doing 2 CDs and I had no additional problems. Good Luck.
I have been importing my PhotoCDs. Very glad that they are finally supported to some extent (iPhoto) under OS X. I may be the only one who used this excellent (if becoming obsolete) technology, but it is very nice to be able to access these images again.
People with a basic understanding of biomechanics will love the scaling of organisms. Giant insects/lizards (cannot begin to count the movies). Really small people (again more than one movie). Someday people will realize that sticking an animal on the photocopier and hitting enlarge does not make functioning organisms.
Does anyone know what it takes to become a primary or secondary evaluation platform? It would seem to me that it would be worth Apple's while to front the money / people to make OS X a primary or secondary evaluation platform...
Yes, MacOS X is the slowest (~1.5 times longer than windows). Consider the screen rendering model they are using... But is it unusable, that is a matter of personal optinion.
My 450MHz Cube (100Mbps ethernet) renders pages pdq. Even my 300MHz G3 ancient power book (10Mbps ethernet) is reasonable... but maybe I am less picky.
Translators All well and good until you have something like formulas... I have yet to find a translator that handles them well. Abiword, AppleWorks, whatever. Being a science person, loosing the formulas is a deal killer.
Apple should kill AppleWorks and start putting some people on OpenOffice. Think about it, a really nice native gui on OpenOffice... Apple could, and AppleWorks is never going to take over the world.
This is not ready for primetime. No plugins, don't even try to print. But when it matures I see it becoming quite a force. Who doen't like a nice light browser?
While I agree with the general feelings, especially among the/. community that Apple is doing the right thing. This is not an all roses situation for my favorite fruit company.
1. Apple is attracting a whole new set of users from the *nix ranks... This is great for many reasons.
2. Apple needs to work hard to keep the existing user base. A lot of MacOS users are still running OS 7/8/9 and a very happy. Moving to X is a learning curve. Totally different look/feel/operation. While I have gotten used to this, and in many cases I feel the changes are improvements, many people are happy with what they have because it works for them.
The traditional mac faithful feel left out of the change, so much is changing and X really only runs well on G4 hardware with lots of RAM. To the people who don't want a command line OS X does not offer much when you consider the changes that are being forced on them.
Don't get me wrong, Apple was right to make the move, but it is going to painful going for the next couple years getting people through the switch.... and Apple needs to make sure they don't loose the traditional faithful.
Unix for the masses, is a far cry from it is just easier damn it. Granted Apple is changing focus in recent PR, from the strengths of unix to "everything is [still] easier on a mac". While geeks will figure out that MacOS X rocks, the masses still need to be reassured.
As someone who has described a species (and a genus while we are counting) and someone who uses taxonomic literature all too frequently I feel like I can say a few things:
1. Taxonomy is really important. Most of biology rests on good taxonomy. 2. Good taxonomic work requires massive amounts of work and training. 3. Bad taxonomy is worse than no taxonomy. 4. Taxonomic work is massively under funded and under appreciated... and it will continue to be so... as long as the tenure system requires lots of high profile papers (which taxonomy papers are not high profile and they take a long time to write).
The more taxonomy is appreciated the better, and I really hope that they pull it off... But we have a better chance of microsoft embracing the open source software movement.
If you are willing to run Xwindows in addition to MacOS X you can get almost anything working... as other have suggested look into the fink project.
Pluses to Apple Hardware:
Fairly nice power management, I have not done the comparison, but I get decent (2.5 hours on a battery) off an old walstreet powerbook in OS X.
Nice wireless, Airport is a just another standard wireless card, but it works well out of the box.
I have had no problems attaching PBs to a number of external monitor and projectors.
In general they make nice hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Apple uses the Firewire port on the iPod to provide power... So maybe, we should all just use firewire and ditch the power cable.
MAK
As a scientist involved in a largescale database (www.pbdb.org) that is trying to build a large collaborative project I can say a couple of things about my experience.
1. Working in groups can be very difficult... i.e., when people don't share the same priorities, or see the same sources of bias as important.
2. It can be very helpful... often times getting other people's perspective is very informative. Generally in science we get feedback at the end (publication review), but here it happens at all stages, including data collection. This is really good.
3. People tend to start off thinking that they need to protect and hide data, but once they start to share data they tend to become big fans of sharing data.
4. Data transparency is essential to good science, these type of projects make that more and more possible. It does not take people long to realize how useful it is to have open and easily excessible data.
5. It is very important to open code used in analyses. I am in the process of working on a couple of papers where we have written some code to perform some fairly complex calculations. While I would like to say I am a great programmer, reality has a way of intruding. Collaboration has vastly improved the code, and I fully intend to post the code when I am finished with it. (for fear of being slashdoted I will not post the URL here).
As a point of information...
What does a press pass get you at MacWorld? Specifically in addition to what a "normal" pass gets you.
Perhaps I am in the minority here, but we are only talking a press passes. Apple would be within rights to deny press passes to any particular person or group. They are not restricting overall access, just special press privileges.
Clearly, this is still a bad pr move... at least among the mac fanatics. But let's be real, we don't go to the rumor sites to read apple press releases. We (or at least I) like to surf the rumors sites for the pure humor, and occasionally a tip into what apple's thinking. Knowing of course that until 48 hours before the announcements the "information" has is more than often wrong.
But let's remember... This is really only pissing off the people that run the "rumor" sites who enjoyed (and rightfully) one of the few perks they get. For the average rumor site surfer, it means nothing. For the average mac user... less than nothing.
I think that this move is in line with apple's move from mac fanatics to well informed macintosh advocates. While this might piss off some people, in the end, I think the over all trend is good for the OS...
I can ssh from the box with my cvs root, but I can no longer ssh to my box root, unless (get this), I am logged in and then start sshd (using system preferences). I can then ssh into the box until I log out when it stops accepting connections (It actually will accept connections, but will not accept the password).
I have no idea what the deal is...
Do you have a link to CVS issues? I have been running into strange issues with CVS and ssh on my computer... if I run CVS it kills my ability to ssh. If you can explain this I would be overwhelmingly pleased. Link?
o sx/cvsover view.html
Apple:
http://developer.apple.com/internet/mac
led me to belive this should work... but I have been having wierd issues.
So maybe I am an idiot, but does anyone know (i.e, have figures) that relate these to the memory types commonly in systems people actually have... (SDRAM).
For example... apple is moving from of PC133 SDRAM (current G4 systems) to PC2100 DDR SDRAM, what does this actually mean to an actual user?
MAK
The fine print of the netcraft survey points out that most of the Microsoft gains are the result of mass hosting places and hostname expirations (i.e. small numbers of people making decisions). I suggest that the trend is really quite flat. Will Apache sweep thew market... no, but Apache is much better possitioned, and I forsee the gradual errosion of Microsoft's server market...
The legal system perplexes me, and I think that there is some CYA happening here.
At the same time I think apple deserves credit for taking the recording industry head on. I think the Rip. Mix. Burn. ads of a couple years ago drew a line in then sand with the recording industry. Apple has a vested interest in keeping create types happy and supporting copyrights, but it also has a vested interest in ipods/itunes, etc. I think apple has taken a very sane position in saying that you can "Rip. Mix. Burn." and as part of that pointing out that various artists have chosen to not use the CD format. Some people are unaware that this is even happening.
It is important to make these stands.
>The audio discs are technically and legally not Compact Discs (CD format)
I am not sure how much this will really matter in the end, but apple's stance on Rip. Mix. Burn. Has been impressive and I wish them the best. Since I do firmly believe that fair use does mean I can play it on my computer and put it on an mp3 player.
I scanned in my 15 PhotoCDs. I found that if I tried to just scan them all that iPhoto would fail to import somewhere in CD 3, it would then crash. I would relaunch iPhoto and it would load them fine. After a couple times I decided to just quit iPhoto and relaunch it after doing 2 CDs and I had no additional problems.
Good Luck.
I have been importing my PhotoCDs. Very glad that they are finally supported to some extent (iPhoto) under OS X. I may be the only one who used this excellent (if becoming obsolete) technology, but it is very nice to be able to access these images again.
People with a basic understanding of biomechanics will love the scaling of organisms. Giant insects/lizards (cannot begin to count the movies). Really small people (again more than one movie). Someday people will realize that sticking an animal on the photocopier and hitting enlarge does not make functioning organisms.
/ 96 12LaBarbera.html
http://www2.uchicago.edu/alumni/alumni.mag/9612
http://wirelessdriver.sourceforge.net/
It is also posted on MacNN:
http://osx.macnn.com/news.php?id=13863
Does anyone know what it takes to become a primary or secondary evaluation platform? It would seem to me that it would be worth Apple's while to front the money / people to make OS X a primary or secondary evaluation platform...
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-3.1/criteria.html
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/data/loadtimes/daily_loa dtime.html
Yes, MacOS X is the slowest (~1.5 times longer than windows). Consider the screen rendering model they are using... But is it unusable, that is a matter of personal optinion.
My 450MHz Cube (100Mbps ethernet) renders pages pdq.
Even my 300MHz G3 ancient power book (10Mbps ethernet) is reasonable... but maybe I am less picky.
MAK
Translators All well and good until you have something like formulas... I have yet to find a translator that handles them well. Abiword, AppleWorks, whatever. Being a science person, loosing the formulas is a deal killer.
Apple should kill AppleWorks and start putting some people on OpenOffice. Think about it, a really nice native gui on OpenOffice... Apple could, and AppleWorks is never going to take over the world.
Ofcourse... that is a major selling point. The power of Unix, but still able to open/write the *.doc files for mother/boss sends you.
Works for me.
This is not ready for primetime. No plugins, don't even try to print. But when it matures I see it becoming quite a force. Who doen't like a nice light browser?
While I agree with the general feelings, especially among the /. community that Apple is doing the right thing. This is not an all roses situation for my favorite fruit company.
... and Apple needs to make sure they don't loose the traditional faithful.
1. Apple is attracting a whole new set of users from the *nix ranks... This is great for many reasons.
2. Apple needs to work hard to keep the existing user base. A lot of MacOS users are still running OS 7/8/9 and a very happy. Moving to X is a learning curve. Totally different look/feel/operation. While I have gotten used to this, and in many cases I feel the changes are improvements, many people are happy with what they have because it works for them.
The traditional mac faithful feel left out of the change, so much is changing and X really only runs well on G4 hardware with lots of RAM. To the people who don't want a command line OS X does not offer much when you consider the changes that are being forced on them.
Don't get me wrong, Apple was right to make the move, but it is going to painful going for the next couple years getting people through the switch.
Unix for the masses, is a far cry from it is just easier damn it. Granted Apple is changing focus in recent PR, from the strengths of unix to "everything is [still] easier on a mac". While geeks will figure out that MacOS X rocks, the masses still need to be reassured.
Sure... Keep telling yourself that, but I am afraid that you are very wrong.
As someone who has described a species (and a genus while we are counting) and someone who uses taxonomic literature all too frequently I feel like I can say a few things:
1. Taxonomy is really important. Most of biology rests on good taxonomy.
2. Good taxonomic work requires massive amounts of work and training.
3. Bad taxonomy is worse than no taxonomy.
4. Taxonomic work is massively under funded and under appreciated... and it will continue to be so... as long as the tenure system requires lots of high profile papers (which taxonomy papers are not high profile and they take a long time to write).
The more taxonomy is appreciated the better, and I really hope that they pull it off... But we have a better chance of microsoft embracing the open source software movement.
MAK
If you are willing to run Xwindows in addition to MacOS X you can get almost anything working... as other have suggested look into the fink project.
Pluses to Apple Hardware:
Fairly nice power management, I have not done the comparison, but I get decent (2.5 hours on a battery) off an old walstreet powerbook in OS X.
Nice wireless, Airport is a just another standard wireless card, but it works well out of the box.
I have had no problems attaching PBs to a number of external monitor and projectors.
In general they make nice hardware.