Are people really using their mice that far away from the USB port on their computer?
Sure they are. And it may just be a matter of desk height. I'm 6'6", and wanted the desk to be comfortable seated or standing. So in my case, the tower lives on the floor and my desk surface is mounted at 42". The keyboard cable doesn't reach (bought an extension), the iPod dock only does because I moved it forward on the desk, and the mouse thankfully lives on the keyboard hub. That's to say nothing of institutional uses, where the computer's locked away in an equipment closet and you're presenting from a lectern.
Beyond that, though, there's a whole lot to be said for the tidiness of wireless. You may not be affected in what you do by the number of cables you have to juggle, but it's a pain to need your Wacom tablet only to find it's decided to form an impenetrable cable fortress with your scanner, mouse, and card reader. And then you still need to find somewhere to move the keyboard out of the way. Problem easily solved if mouse, keyboard, and tablet are all wireless.
BrowserCam has actually evolved beyond its old "here's a screenshot of how your page renders" strategy. You can now, for a fairly reasonable fee (especially if you go the group buy approach), access their systems live via VNC.
Granted, you'll have to deal with the latency of VNC over the Internet, but it is a solution for people who need more interactivity than old-school BrowserCam but don't want to purchase and maintain another system themselves.
I think HD will make porn look worse, not better...low-def analog tv has a way of hiding the wrinkles, so to speak.
I was thinking the same thing when I saw this story.
In other words, this would be prime time to invest in Apple, Adobe, Avid, and manufacturers of softening filters for video production. To counter the rode hard and put away wet (eh... heh) factor of many porn stars, the studios will almost certainly have to invest in new production and post-production solutions. Get in on the bottom floor now!
Cheaper and easier. No pairing your remote with your computer (something the technical set can do easily, but not necessarily ma and pa), and even at large volumes Bluetooth chips are still quite a bit more expensive than plain ol' IR.
WTF is the use for a RAW workflow tool in that? you're already at 8-bit lossy to begin with and Aperture won't make your image any better endowed.
Simple: Aperture isn't a RAW workflow tool.
It's a digital imaging workflow tool. The fact that it can deal with RAW images directly, with versioning and all that jazz, is merely but one of the benefits of the tool as a whole.
More important to a lot of us in photography-land is the fact that there's now something much more resembling a light table than what the industry has offered up to this point. Aperture is an excellent tool for editing: you can rapidly move through an entire shoot or multiple shoots, arrange photos into spreads and stacks, and separate the wheat from the chaff. This is a comparatively ugly process in other products like iView, Portfolio, and iPhoto.
Many pros, particularly sports shooters, work in JPEG because they can cram many more pictures into the same space and the "quality" issue is largely moot to their print target. Sure, they're not taking full advantage of every feature Aperture has to offer, but they're getting their money's worth out of the features that matter to them.
If an amateur with a consumer-level camera takes enough pictures that they feel Aperture will help them stay organized, it's their $500 to spend. It may well be the best money they spend all year. Would it really make a difference in the suitability of Aperture if he purchased a Canon 20D and left it in green square (full automatic) mode, just to say he had a "better camera"?
Much of what would normally be considered "Southwestern," such as Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, in fact fell to US West, which later became Qwest.
Prior to the breakup, service in Arizona and much of the southwest (all of the four corners states and then some, I believe) was provided by Mountain Bell. US West also kept that brand around for a while before branding things with their own name.
Sadly, as bad as US West's service was at times, they've got nothing on modern-day Qwest. That was an awful merger so far as I'm concerned as a customer. Where US West had been working to roll out all sorts of new services (DSL among them), they just got sat on after Qwest staged their hostile takeover. USWest had intended to have our neighborhood qualified for ADSL late in '99. Only in May of this year did we finally qualify for anything but IDSL.
Until Cox finally got in the game with reasonable cable internet, one out of every three or four houses in my area had a Sprint satellite broadband dish on the roof -- most of them, like my house, had been waiting for Qwest to make good on USWest's promises.
"That's our spirit of service inaction," indeed.
Kind of like when the VDSL goes down and the answer from Denver is "we're aware of the outage and will have someone diagnosing it within 8 hours." Thanks. That's helpful. At least they finally fixed the "it's raining, no internet for any of you" problem...
"Make a print? How about using the drop-down menu under FILE and clicking on PRINT? Is that so off-the-wall? These programs assume that you are a dolt... these programs are in fact harder to use than Photoshop because of the rigmarole you have to go through to do a simple chore."
I do wish I know what mythical programs he was trying to use for his photos; I can't think of one popular home photo app off the top of my head that stashes the Print option somewhere secret.
Photoshop (stretching "home" here) has it in the File menu. Photoshop Elements has it in the File menu. Photoshop Album has it in the File menu. Picasa has it in the File menu. Photomeister has it in the File menu. iPhoto has it in the File menu (and duplicates it in the Share menu, for that matter). The software Nikon and Canon provide with their cameras has it in... you guessed it! The File menu!
Dear PC World Readers, printing is so hard when it's in the same place it is in every other application! How on earth will I ever print my lovely pictures?
Um... yeah, John.
I tried to listen to This Week in Tech for a while, but once Leo brought Dvorak on as a regular that was the end for me. This kind of crap is why.
Speaking of Yahoo Toolbar, I specifically deselected it the last time I installed Yahoo Instant Messenger.
Imagine my surprise the next time I popped into Internet Explorer to check something and a pop-up window didn't fire. Yahoo Toolbar had in fact been installed without my permission, and better yet didn't default to being one of the visible IE toolbars. Had I been, say, my parents, I would never figured out why the hell the Interwebs wasn't working.
An invisible toolbar I specifically requested not be installed silently blocking pop-up windows? That's awesome! I wish I had the foresight to make my software that great!
It makes me laugh when people like Ken "The Incredible Internet Guy" Leebow spout off about how great Yahoo is and how they should make more software and hardware. I can see it now... "Listen to music on your new Y!Pod, featuring Flash advertisements between every song!"
The servers mainboards have some chipset named "ServerWorks" never heard about those, it is not Intel, nVIdia, VIA or SYS. I guess the lowest bidder wins, and DELL are putting a lot of crap in their products.
ServerWorks chipsets are fairly common, and not bottom-of-the-barrel crap from some random Taiwanese company. ServerWorks is presently a division of Broadcom focused on high-end server applications. They're most common in large processor configurations (quads, 8s, etc.), with Intel having taken over of a lot of the low end (single- and double-processor) with their own stuff. For reference, Sun uses them in their Opterons, HP uses them in their Xeons... they're quality product, quite popular, and not terribly inexpensive.
I have my beefs with Dell, but they're not shafting you on chipset quality by using a ServerWorks set.
In the meantime, Newell says he believes that Steam-like systems will be extremely helpful for developers on the new consoles due to their ability to provide updates and new content.
I'm sure that's the kind of thing Microsoft loves to hear after spending the lifetime of the Xbox being absolutely rabid about games not being allowed to patch themselves. MS has put a lot of effort into trying to keep their console running finished products, not hack jobs that aren't playable until three patches down the road, and now Valve wants to foist bug fests upon console players.
Maybe -- just maybe -- this type of plan will finally beat Valve over the head with a clue stick. After the abortion that was Half-Life 2 and the abomination that is Steam (interesting idea, crap execution), I'd be really happy to see them get back to the ground they seemed to be breaking with Half-Life.
On top of it all, on what planet is Gabe living where everyone has broadband enough to want to patch their Valve console games over and over? I can do other things on my computer while it downloads patches. On a console, you get to stare at a progress screen until it's done. No good. Especially not at 50 bucks a pop for console games.
Dunno about that, my iPod has hfs+ filesystem. I'd have to assume, therefore that they are only paying license fees for the fat versions of the iPod
Ah, but that's where it gets sticky. For a couple years now, iPods have shipped formatted with HFS. The moment you connect them to a Windows computer, though, you're prompted to reformat them in FAT. Every iPod is then of course potentially a FAT iPod, and any licensing agreement with Microsoft would likely have that fact worked into it at great expense.
Even several generations ago when iPods shipped in "Mac" and "Win" versions, there was no guarantee they'd actually be used on those systems. Many people bought Windows-ready iPods (e.g., from stores that only sold the Windows version) and then reimaged them for use on Mac systems.
It's the good old "potential for violation" bit Slashdotters are so fond of.
At this point, the majority of WiFi VoIP phones are supporting WEP and only WEP, which seriously limits their utility as more and more people (and corporations!) move to WPA. Heck, the bleeding edge have already moved from WPA to WPA2, leaving such phones even farther in the back of the dusty closet. Cisco apparently added WPA support to the 7920 firmware at some point, but even that phone was WEP-only for a good long while.
Better yet, you don't have to look very hard to find stories about non-Cisco handsets barfing on WEP 128, and stories about handsets being basically unusable with any form of WEP enabled.
As for voice encryption: SIP as it's commonly used right now merrily transmits unencrypted data via RTP. It wouldn't be difficult to record both sides of a conversation unnoticed. You wouldn't want to do, say, telephone banking transactions at a public hotspot with your WiFi phone.
Yeah, I'm thinking the same thing. Then he also wouldn't have the mess of cabling on the counter which looks absolutely awful (as does, for that matter, the display he/his father chose to use). One power cable from the iMac and you're done. Or the power cable and one ethernet cable, not this goofy-looking "bunny hop" nonsense.
I'm going to presume dear ol' dad is a widower or divorced, as I have yet to meet a woman who would allow that in her kitchen.
Moreover, I'm waiting for that Mac Mini to get toasted. Under cabinets (where it's dusty) with a heater? Best location evar! Dust only settles when it's not disturbed, and now he's gone and thrown something with a fan in a dusty, closed space. This should go swimmingly.
I dig it. I rolled myself a CRM application in a week from zero knowledge of Ruby or Rails, and I'm currently developing an application I'm hoping to launch to the public by the end of next month.
It's a nice, speedy way to get to whatever ends you want to achieve. Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails is very helpful so far as getting started goes. Wish it had been around when I was getting started.
Scalability's a component I haven't dealt with yet, but there are a bunch of high-traffic Rails-based sites out there and servers are cheap.
Even better, it only works properly in Internet Explorer! Awesome, now I can really stick it to those fools using Firefox and Safari. Just try to close those overlays by clicking on the X. Muahaha.
The maps are from 1996, too, when the economy was way better than today and we backed up all the surface streets instead of driving on the non-existent freeway. Awesome, dude, it's like a friggin' time machine!
Build native my default, but PPC will last
on
New Apples Next Week
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Isn't the "not checked by default" box the one that says to compile for x86? So by default it compiles for PowerPC, and you can turn on x86 compilation if you want?
Not quite. The default for builds in Xcode is to build for the architecture of the machine you're running on. So on PowerPC-based Macs, it defaults to PPC on and x86 off. On an Intel Mac, it would default to x86 on and PPC off.
Still, it's braindead simple to make most apps universal. Check the box and you're done, whether you're building on an Intel Mac or a PPC Mac.
I completely agree with you -- PowerPC systems will be actively supported for a long, long time. As a developer, it's incredibly trivial for me to support both platforms. And given the lifespan of the typical Mac, you have to support both platforms because a huge chunk of the potential customer base will on PPC for several years to come.
Being burned as many times as Apple has, the explanation Steve Jobs presented certainly makes sense to me. I love the design of the PowerPC, but damned if the suppliers haven't bitten Apple in the butt repeatedly.
PPC hasn't exactly been stagnation-free for Apple with the G3, the G4, and now the G5. Even worse, though, are the shortages Apple has run into with nearly every new system launch because suppliers -- often IBM or Motorola -- weren't able to churn components out fast enough.
Intel has the capacity to make smooth launches happen. And that, when you talk to users and Mac journalists, is only a good thing. Shawn King of Your Mac Life sounds like a broken record every time a new Mac comes out because Apple can never fill orders. As an investor and a fan of the platform, that's not good news. You've got to capture the market while it's fresh. Repeat customers dig the hype of a new product, but once the dust settles they may decide they can keep going along with their current Mac. And switchers... "Hey, we've got this cheap introductory Mac for you" only works when you have enough product for people to actually buy it.
Intel's got a hell of a thing going with the Pentium M. If the derived desktop processors work as well as they're claiming, this will be a huge move for Apple.
Depends on your profession. There are a ton of vertical market apps that don't have Mac versions, which means at best they still have to shell out for VirtualPC with Windows XP. At worst, VirtualPC won't be sufficient and you'll have to buy a low-end PC anyway.
For people who can't or don't telecommute, it's usually very easy to move over to the Mac. For people who do telecommute, VirtualPC usually worms its way in unless you work in a Mac shop.
My dad pines for the kind of capabilities I have with iLife '05, but between his side business, his profession, and my mom's telecommuting needs, a Mac just isn't a good option.
I can vouch for a lot of the newer tech stuff being absolute crap. I check 'em out regularly in hopes of being able to recommend them to people, but no dice.
Windows Server 2003 for Dummies was a new low, in my opinion. The whole book was pretty much a verbose version of "you do X from the X snap-in." The Win2K3 Server help can tell you more than that, and it's free with the OS.
Their general life stuff is much, much better. The computer stuff should mostly be avoided like the plague.
As for network wiring, get yourself [...] an Ideal Rachet Telemaster. Yes you can get cheaper crimpers, but they suck and you'll hate yourself for trying to save $15.
Hell yes! I picked up the Ratchet Telemaster several years ago when I was wiring my home network, and it's a wonderful tool. I can't recommend it enough. Between the ratchet and the soft grip, it makes it easy and comfortable to terminate even a ton of cable.
I really should have picked up a jacket cutter to go with it, though. I tried both the high-tech "pocketknife" and "plier-wire-cutter" methods, and they sucked. It's doable, but nowhere near as simple as the clip-spin-done method of some of the nicer dedicated cutters.
Ack, not masking tape! Get some sort of proper tagging solution instead. You'll have masking tape gooze on your cables forever if you leave it on there for a while, not to mention the tape will eventually become brittle and your helpful labels will just crack off and fall to the floor the first time you bump them.
Slashdot Mirror
Are people really using their mice that far away from the USB port on their computer?
Sure they are. And it may just be a matter of desk height. I'm 6'6", and wanted the desk to be comfortable seated or standing. So in my case, the tower lives on the floor and my desk surface is mounted at 42". The keyboard cable doesn't reach (bought an extension), the iPod dock only does because I moved it forward on the desk, and the mouse thankfully lives on the keyboard hub. That's to say nothing of institutional uses, where the computer's locked away in an equipment closet and you're presenting from a lectern.
Beyond that, though, there's a whole lot to be said for the tidiness of wireless. You may not be affected in what you do by the number of cables you have to juggle, but it's a pain to need your Wacom tablet only to find it's decided to form an impenetrable cable fortress with your scanner, mouse, and card reader. And then you still need to find somewhere to move the keyboard out of the way. Problem easily solved if mouse, keyboard, and tablet are all wireless.
BrowserCam has actually evolved beyond its old "here's a screenshot of how your page renders" strategy. You can now, for a fairly reasonable fee (especially if you go the group buy approach), access their systems live via VNC.
Granted, you'll have to deal with the latency of VNC over the Internet, but it is a solution for people who need more interactivity than old-school BrowserCam but don't want to purchase and maintain another system themselves.
I think HD will make porn look worse, not better...low-def analog tv has a way of hiding the wrinkles, so to speak.
I was thinking the same thing when I saw this story.
In other words, this would be prime time to invest in Apple, Adobe, Avid, and manufacturers of softening filters for video production. To counter the rode hard and put away wet (eh... heh) factor of many porn stars, the studios will almost certainly have to invest in new production and post-production solutions. Get in on the bottom floor now!
Cheaper and easier. No pairing your remote with your computer (something the technical set can do easily, but not necessarily ma and pa), and even at large volumes Bluetooth chips are still quite a bit more expensive than plain ol' IR.
If it ain't broke...
WTF is the use for a RAW workflow tool in that? you're already at 8-bit lossy to begin with and Aperture won't make your image any better endowed.
Simple: Aperture isn't a RAW workflow tool.
It's a digital imaging workflow tool. The fact that it can deal with RAW images directly, with versioning and all that jazz, is merely but one of the benefits of the tool as a whole.
More important to a lot of us in photography-land is the fact that there's now something much more resembling a light table than what the industry has offered up to this point. Aperture is an excellent tool for editing: you can rapidly move through an entire shoot or multiple shoots, arrange photos into spreads and stacks, and separate the wheat from the chaff. This is a comparatively ugly process in other products like iView, Portfolio, and iPhoto.
Many pros, particularly sports shooters, work in JPEG because they can cram many more pictures into the same space and the "quality" issue is largely moot to their print target. Sure, they're not taking full advantage of every feature Aperture has to offer, but they're getting their money's worth out of the features that matter to them.
If an amateur with a consumer-level camera takes enough pictures that they feel Aperture will help them stay organized, it's their $500 to spend. It may well be the best money they spend all year. Would it really make a difference in the suitability of Aperture if he purchased a Canon 20D and left it in green square (full automatic) mode, just to say he had a "better camera"?
Much of what would normally be considered "Southwestern," such as Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, in fact fell to US West, which later became Qwest.
Prior to the breakup, service in Arizona and much of the southwest (all of the four corners states and then some, I believe) was provided by Mountain Bell. US West also kept that brand around for a while before branding things with their own name.
Sadly, as bad as US West's service was at times, they've got nothing on modern-day Qwest. That was an awful merger so far as I'm concerned as a customer. Where US West had been working to roll out all sorts of new services (DSL among them), they just got sat on after Qwest staged their hostile takeover. USWest had intended to have our neighborhood qualified for ADSL late in '99. Only in May of this year did we finally qualify for anything but IDSL.
Until Cox finally got in the game with reasonable cable internet, one out of every three or four houses in my area had a Sprint satellite broadband dish on the roof -- most of them, like my house, had been waiting for Qwest to make good on USWest's promises.
"That's our spirit of service inaction," indeed.
Kind of like when the VDSL goes down and the answer from Denver is "we're aware of the outage and will have someone diagnosing it within 8 hours." Thanks. That's helpful. At least they finally fixed the "it's raining, no internet for any of you" problem...
"Make a print? How about using the drop-down menu under FILE and clicking on PRINT? Is that so off-the-wall? These programs assume that you are a dolt... these programs are in fact harder to use than Photoshop because of the rigmarole you have to go through to do a simple chore."
I do wish I know what mythical programs he was trying to use for his photos; I can't think of one popular home photo app off the top of my head that stashes the Print option somewhere secret.
Photoshop (stretching "home" here) has it in the File menu.
Photoshop Elements has it in the File menu.
Photoshop Album has it in the File menu.
Picasa has it in the File menu.
Photomeister has it in the File menu.
iPhoto has it in the File menu (and duplicates it in the Share menu, for that matter).
The software Nikon and Canon provide with their cameras has it in... you guessed it! The File menu!
Dear PC World Readers, printing is so hard when it's in the same place it is in every other application! How on earth will I ever print my lovely pictures?
Um... yeah, John.
I tried to listen to This Week in Tech for a while, but once Leo brought Dvorak on as a regular that was the end for me. This kind of crap is why.
Speaking of Yahoo Toolbar, I specifically deselected it the last time I installed Yahoo Instant Messenger.
Imagine my surprise the next time I popped into Internet Explorer to check something and a pop-up window didn't fire. Yahoo Toolbar had in fact been installed without my permission, and better yet didn't default to being one of the visible IE toolbars. Had I been, say, my parents, I would never figured out why the hell the Interwebs wasn't working.
An invisible toolbar I specifically requested not be installed silently blocking pop-up windows? That's awesome! I wish I had the foresight to make my software that great!
It makes me laugh when people like Ken "The Incredible Internet Guy" Leebow spout off about how great Yahoo is and how they should make more software and hardware. I can see it now... "Listen to music on your new Y!Pod, featuring Flash advertisements between every song!"
Retch.
The servers mainboards have some chipset named "ServerWorks" never heard about those, it is not Intel, nVIdia, VIA or SYS. I guess the lowest bidder wins, and DELL are putting a lot of crap in their products.
ServerWorks chipsets are fairly common, and not bottom-of-the-barrel crap from some random Taiwanese company. ServerWorks is presently a division of Broadcom focused on high-end server applications. They're most common in large processor configurations (quads, 8s, etc.), with Intel having taken over of a lot of the low end (single- and double-processor) with their own stuff. For reference, Sun uses them in their Opterons, HP uses them in their Xeons... they're quality product, quite popular, and not terribly inexpensive.
I have my beefs with Dell, but they're not shafting you on chipset quality by using a ServerWorks set.
Thick as a pencil and much more fun.1
1 Do not nervously bite iPod nano.
I give that a week on the site before it mysteriously disappears as did the iPod shuffle's similarly humorous footnote:
About the size of a pack of gum(1)
(1) Do not eat iPod shuffle.
In the meantime, Newell says he believes that Steam-like systems will be extremely helpful for developers on the new consoles due to their ability to provide updates and new content.
I'm sure that's the kind of thing Microsoft loves to hear after spending the lifetime of the Xbox being absolutely rabid about games not being allowed to patch themselves. MS has put a lot of effort into trying to keep their console running finished products, not hack jobs that aren't playable until three patches down the road, and now Valve wants to foist bug fests upon console players.
Maybe -- just maybe -- this type of plan will finally beat Valve over the head with a clue stick. After the abortion that was Half-Life 2 and the abomination that is Steam (interesting idea, crap execution), I'd be really happy to see them get back to the ground they seemed to be breaking with Half-Life.
On top of it all, on what planet is Gabe living where everyone has broadband enough to want to patch their Valve console games over and over? I can do other things on my computer while it downloads patches. On a console, you get to stare at a progress screen until it's done. No good. Especially not at 50 bucks a pop for console games.
Dunno about that, my iPod has hfs+ filesystem. I'd have to assume, therefore that they are only paying license fees for the fat versions of the iPod
Ah, but that's where it gets sticky. For a couple years now, iPods have shipped formatted with HFS. The moment you connect them to a Windows computer, though, you're prompted to reformat them in FAT. Every iPod is then of course potentially a FAT iPod, and any licensing agreement with Microsoft would likely have that fact worked into it at great expense.
Even several generations ago when iPods shipped in "Mac" and "Win" versions, there was no guarantee they'd actually be used on those systems. Many people bought Windows-ready iPods (e.g., from stores that only sold the Windows version) and then reimaged them for use on Mac systems.
It's the good old "potential for violation" bit Slashdotters are so fond of.
At this point, the majority of WiFi VoIP phones are supporting WEP and only WEP, which seriously limits their utility as more and more people (and corporations!) move to WPA. Heck, the bleeding edge have already moved from WPA to WPA2, leaving such phones even farther in the back of the dusty closet. Cisco apparently added WPA support to the 7920 firmware at some point, but even that phone was WEP-only for a good long while.
Better yet, you don't have to look very hard to find stories about non-Cisco handsets barfing on WEP 128, and stories about handsets being basically unusable with any form of WEP enabled.
As for voice encryption: SIP as it's commonly used right now merrily transmits unencrypted data via RTP. It wouldn't be difficult to record both sides of a conversation unnoticed. You wouldn't want to do, say, telephone banking transactions at a public hotspot with your WiFi phone.
Yeah, I'm thinking the same thing. Then he also wouldn't have the mess of cabling on the counter which looks absolutely awful (as does, for that matter, the display he/his father chose to use). One power cable from the iMac and you're done. Or the power cable and one ethernet cable, not this goofy-looking "bunny hop" nonsense.
I'm going to presume dear ol' dad is a widower or divorced, as I have yet to meet a woman who would allow that in her kitchen.
Moreover, I'm waiting for that Mac Mini to get toasted. Under cabinets (where it's dusty) with a heater? Best location evar! Dust only settles when it's not disturbed, and now he's gone and thrown something with a fan in a dusty, closed space. This should go swimmingly.
I dig it. I rolled myself a CRM application in a week from zero knowledge of Ruby or Rails, and I'm currently developing an application I'm hoping to launch to the public by the end of next month.
It's a nice, speedy way to get to whatever ends you want to achieve. Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails is very helpful so far as getting started goes. Wish it had been around when I was getting started.
Scalability's a component I haven't dealt with yet, but there are a bunch of high-traffic Rails-based sites out there and servers are cheap.
FAT32-formatted by default, USB cable (which became a moot point), HP logo added on the back, and a longer phone support period than Apple.
And the HP packaging.
Technologically, they're completely identical.
Celine Dion.
Now I need to go bleach my brain, as simply mentioning her name has caused that horrific "Titantic" song to lodge itself in my brain once more.
Even better, it only works properly in Internet Explorer! Awesome, now I can really stick it to those fools using Firefox and Safari. Just try to close those overlays by clicking on the X. Muahaha.
The maps are from 1996, too, when the economy was way better than today and we backed up all the surface streets instead of driving on the non-existent freeway. Awesome, dude, it's like a friggin' time machine!
Isn't the "not checked by default" box the one that says to compile for x86? So by default it compiles for PowerPC, and you can turn on x86 compilation if you want?
Not quite. The default for builds in Xcode is to build for the architecture of the machine you're running on. So on PowerPC-based Macs, it defaults to PPC on and x86 off. On an Intel Mac, it would default to x86 on and PPC off.
Still, it's braindead simple to make most apps universal. Check the box and you're done, whether you're building on an Intel Mac or a PPC Mac.
I completely agree with you -- PowerPC systems will be actively supported for a long, long time. As a developer, it's incredibly trivial for me to support both platforms. And given the lifespan of the typical Mac, you have to support both platforms because a huge chunk of the potential customer base will on PPC for several years to come.
Being burned as many times as Apple has, the explanation Steve Jobs presented certainly makes sense to me. I love the design of the PowerPC, but damned if the suppliers haven't bitten Apple in the butt repeatedly.
PPC hasn't exactly been stagnation-free for Apple with the G3, the G4, and now the G5. Even worse, though, are the shortages Apple has run into with nearly every new system launch because suppliers -- often IBM or Motorola -- weren't able to churn components out fast enough.
Intel has the capacity to make smooth launches happen. And that, when you talk to users and Mac journalists, is only a good thing. Shawn King of Your Mac Life sounds like a broken record every time a new Mac comes out because Apple can never fill orders. As an investor and a fan of the platform, that's not good news. You've got to capture the market while it's fresh. Repeat customers dig the hype of a new product, but once the dust settles they may decide they can keep going along with their current Mac. And switchers... "Hey, we've got this cheap introductory Mac for you" only works when you have enough product for people to actually buy it.
Intel's got a hell of a thing going with the Pentium M. If the derived desktop processors work as well as they're claiming, this will be a huge move for Apple.
Depends on your profession. There are a ton of vertical market apps that don't have Mac versions, which means at best they still have to shell out for VirtualPC with Windows XP. At worst, VirtualPC won't be sufficient and you'll have to buy a low-end PC anyway.
For people who can't or don't telecommute, it's usually very easy to move over to the Mac. For people who do telecommute, VirtualPC usually worms its way in unless you work in a Mac shop.
My dad pines for the kind of capabilities I have with iLife '05, but between his side business, his profession, and my mom's telecommuting needs, a Mac just isn't a good option.
I can vouch for a lot of the newer tech stuff being absolute crap. I check 'em out regularly in hopes of being able to recommend them to people, but no dice.
Windows Server 2003 for Dummies was a new low, in my opinion. The whole book was pretty much a verbose version of "you do X from the X snap-in." The Win2K3 Server help can tell you more than that, and it's free with the OS.
Their general life stuff is much, much better. The computer stuff should mostly be avoided like the plague.
As for network wiring, get yourself [...] an Ideal Rachet Telemaster. Yes you can get cheaper crimpers, but they suck and you'll hate yourself for trying to save $15.
Hell yes! I picked up the Ratchet Telemaster several years ago when I was wiring my home network, and it's a wonderful tool. I can't recommend it enough. Between the ratchet and the soft grip, it makes it easy and comfortable to terminate even a ton of cable.
I really should have picked up a jacket cutter to go with it, though. I tried both the high-tech "pocketknife" and "plier-wire-cutter" methods, and they sucked. It's doable, but nowhere near as simple as the clip-spin-done method of some of the nicer dedicated cutters.
Ack, not masking tape! Get some sort of proper tagging solution instead. You'll have masking tape gooze on your cables forever if you leave it on there for a while, not to mention the tape will eventually become brittle and your helpful labels will just crack off and fall to the floor the first time you bump them.
...And it generally won't be usable if you're on a shared, rather than dedicated, hosting plan.
It's also very dependency-heavy and a hell of a lot of overkill for this kind of project.