Having played around with Gizmo for the past few hours, the answer seems to be "the interface."
For lack of a better way to describe it, it's Skype, but with all the interoperable goodness using SIP offers. It's a little easier to work with than the majority of SIP softphones out there. You get the ease-of-use of Skype with the flexibility of being able to dial any SIP URI. I've already used it to call into my Asterisk box, and it's all hunky dory.
For the telephony geeks (myself included), Gizmo's probably not a big deal. There's nothing I gain from using Gizmo that I can't do with my Asterisk server and a softphone (except the ability to call Gizmo users, which I'm sure will be possible in the near future).
On the other hand, Gizmo would be just the thing for people like my parents. Big friendly buttons, an easy-to-use interface and phonebook, and none of the bizarre things X-Lite likes to do.
I get offers from American Express for exactly that a couple times a year: pay a token amount per month for the service, have access to a lawyer for simpler functions.
It seems like a rip-off to me, given the limitations of the services they can provide, but I suppose it could be worth it if you're drafting up legal papers on a continual basis.
Very true about T9, and newer phones are even featuring "type-ahead" these days so 435 will get you options of help, hell, hello... Heck, it even seems to be frequency-weighted on my phone, so the most likely candidate is the first one to pop up.
I can understand using abbreviations when you're trying to overcome the length limitations of standard SMS (160 characters), but (a) modern phones work around SMS limits like magic and (b) I have never, in writing text messages, exceeded the 160-char limit. I've used SMS fairly extensively, between it being my sole link to my girlfriend when she was in the hospital and the best way to reach dear ol' dad since he's always with patients.
I've actually seen people write software documentation (both Open Source and plain ol' shareware) in SMS shorthand style. Drives me up the wall. Meanwhile, I regularly consult Apple's Documentation Style Guide to make sure my own documentation is familiar to users, and utilize the Chicago Manual of Style for nearly anything else. Maybe I'm just anal, but the marketplace doesn't seem like an appropriate venue for SMS/IM-speak and regional vernacular.
In the land of Sanrio, what would be more reassuring than the idea that Hello Kitty's ears are saving your life? Imagine the cross-branding possibilities!
Also note the ears are "expected to help slow the train more quickly than conventional brakes" (emphasis mine) -- not necessarily replace more traditional means of braking.
Besides DVForge guys offered DLO to manufacture and sell PodBuddy, but they refused. Personally I fail to understand this.
I'd refuse too were I DLO, given the previous history of Jack Campbell's business ventures and the fact I already had a shipping product. The guy has claimed design of a desk he had nothing to do with (and wasn't even a reseller for). People have had their DVForge SightFlexes fail and opened them only to find a tangled mess of shoddy wire and solder nowhere near the FireWire spec. He sold a marked-up "laptop stand" that anyone could buy at Walmart as a plate holder for a couple bucks. And let's not forget the "Write a virus and I'll pay you $50 grand!" incident.
Why would I want to plunk down $23,000 on a product I've already designed and brought to market long before DVForge even announced theirs? I've already got the product of my own design, and I know what's in mine -- I don't know what's in DVForge's. Is it as crappy as some of their other products?
It's possible Mr. Campbell has turned a new leaf, but the onus is upon him to prove that to the community at large. Once burned, twice shy and all that.
I agree the PodBuddy is nicer looking than the TransPod -- but anyone can paint a pile of dog shit gold, too.
Nobody (*), for example, would claim that you could just simply take a picture of a landscape, turn it black and white with photoshop, and have something that compares to Ansel Adams.
True; you left out the hours worth of dodging and burning.;)
Many photogs will die. Many have evolved. A lot of photographers have gone one of two ways: 1. Release the originals after a set date. Most prints from a wedding are going to be sold in the first 6 months to a year, so the photographer retains the originals and the rights for this period. Once it lapses, he forks over the stuff so you can do it yourself. 2. Charge for time and release the originals immediately. Don't expect to sell prints, jack up prices accordingly, voila.
Photographers who are still back on the old model are going to be screwed in the very near future. Once in a while I consider getting into wedding photography, and I sure as hell wouldn't want to be the codger hoarding your negatives until the hereafter while everyone around me is evolving with the market.
True. And many cameras even embed their serial number in the EXIF data.
EXIF is trivial to edit yourself, of course, but the dedicated will find a way to circumvent anything. Sometimes they'll even be assisted, as was the case when a Kinko's clerk told me to just use a razor blade to slice off a copyright years ago.
Costco and any local professional labs would be glad to take his business, without constantly questioning his right to his pictures. As long as all you're wanting is untouched prints, most pro labs aren't much more expensive than Wal-mart (but you'll pay for their expertise if you want hand-tuned adjustments). If he's using something like Walmart.com to upload his pictures to a local store now, many many local labs offer a similar service.
As for digital watermarking... it doesn't help. It can't help. Most reproductions aren't coming from the photographer's original digital files, but from scans of prints. Even if you've got the photog's original files, it's trivial to strip out embedded watermarks or metadata (even accidentally). The only solution then is to physically add a big ugly visible brand to the pictures, and that just sucks. Depending on the complexity of the brand and the original image, a dedicated person could still edit it out (or just crop it).
At the big boxes (Wal-Mart and drug stores) I've dealt with, the (or at least one) litmus test for portraiture is simple: does the background resemble background paper? If yes, they'll refuse it. A Walgreens employee told me this outright when refusing to print something of mine I wanted a quick copy of.
Nevermind the fact anyone can go buy a roll of seamless background paper for $30 or that many portrait photographers also do outdoor poses.
Then again, given the "quality" of some "professional" portrait photographers' work (I just got a flyer in the mail from one yesterday... yikes!), I suppose they can't really judge based on the quality of the image itself.
stuff like contexts in java where you can have a session context and store objects in it? Yes, you can store objects in a session context. Sample and gotchas here at the RoR wiki.
Also is there something that sync's sessions from one server to another to support load balanced environments? More than something, there are numerous ways to support this. You can store you session data in temporary files on the server (the default), share it using Distributed Ruby, store it to the database for retrieval... So yes, your applications can be load balanced across multiple servers while maintaining session data.
Scott Barron did some benchmarking of the various methods, if you're interested in that sort of thing as well.
Rails is a Web 2.0 AJAX-enabled test-driven RAD environment in the MVC paradigm! (Bingo!)
More seriously... Rails is a rapid web application development framework. It's written in the Ruby language, hence the "Ruby on Rails." It abstracts things quite well, leaving you to worry about actually implementing the program logic (and site design) rather than managing database connections, writing getter and setter methods, sanitizing user input, and all that oh-so-fun stuff.
If you've got QuickTime, the "Show, Don't Tell" video does a pretty good job demonstrating the very basics of what Rails can do. The video is fairly large and best viewed outside a browser window.
I went from zero knowledge of both Ruby and Rails to a full-featured application in less than a week, so I'm happy with it.
iWork is, officially, the inchoate replacement for AppleWorks. iWork is also, functionally, not a replacement for Office. You're comparing the wrong products.
AppleWorks offered a word processor and light DTP solution, spread sheet software, and presentation software. iWork is currently composed of a word processor and DTP solution (Pages) and presentation software (Keynote). Apple said when iWork was released that it was the beginning of a replacement for AppleWorks.
What's missing from iWork? Spreadsheet capabilities.
What does the name "Numbers" suggest? Spreadsheet capabilities. Crunching the numbers.
The only part of iWork today that's even vaguely a replacement for part of Microsoft Office is Keynote -- it gives PowerPoint a run for its money. Pages, however, is not a Word competitor in any sense of the word. Is it great for Grandma to write a letter or Mom and Dad to make a family newsletter? You bet. Pages doesn't even begin to approach the functionality of Word, though. It probably never will, either; business wasn't the target market for AppleWorks, and Apple hasn't (to this point) been positioning iWork as such either.
Numbers will likely be a capable spreadsheet solution, but I doubt it'll be chasing Excel off business desktops anytime soon.
Seconded. While the Zeldman book is an entertaining read and a nice overview, it's not exactly loaded with examples and it doesn't really take you soup-to-nuts for either developing from scratch or converting an existing site. There are a lot of nice chunks, but they're almost always floating alone rather then ever assembling into a whole. I don't feel it was a waste of my money, but it's not the sort of book I regularly pull off the shelf. You could probably get more practical information by reading A List Apart for free.
Bos and Lie's book, on the other hand, is wonderful. I borrowed it from my local library after finishing DwWS, and it really is "The Indispensible CSS Tutorial and Reference." One of Eric Meyer's CSS books (not the fish book) was another good read, but I can't find the one I'm thinking of at the moment.
Maybe you've heard of this operating system called Darwin. It's what Apple builds Mac OS X on top of. Included in the Darwin project's CVS repository are a variety of hardware drivers, including those for... Mac touchpads! This is why there are a variety of enhanced touchpad drivers available for PowerBooks and iBooks.
It's not a simple port, but your development cycle's a lot shorter when you already have a fully working driver in front of you.
And with the exception of the most recent Powerbooks, the touch pad isn't "proprietary hardware." It's just another Synaptics touch pad. The same can be said for most of their machines' bits, actually -- really, Apple designs the motherboard, loads it up with mostly off-the-shelf parts (Motorola modems, TI firewire chipsets, Intel NICs), and that's that. Most of your "proprietary hardware" is stuff like the tilt sensor and the keyboard backlight controller, neither of which are particularly vital to have running under any OS. Why reinvent the wheel when a quality part already exists?
And I'm with the other poster: a touchpad for gaming?! Surely you jest.
On a completely off-topic note, would you happen to have any suggestions on a particular brand or installation company for a new swamp cooler? I've been using AC all year because my ancient evap finally rotted enough that it's worthless.
I miss freezing to death. Instead, the AC's been running for probably an hour straight now trying to maintain 79.
I know it's like shooting fish in a barrel to find problems in a C|net article, but why not?
Apple has used IBM's PowerPC processors since 1994...
Nitpick: More accurately, "Apple has used PowerPC processors since 1994." The way C|net wrote it, it sounds like IBM is the only game in town until you make it halfway down the page.
The earliest PowerPC chips were from IBM, the G3s were from either Moto or IBM, and G4s were from Moto (and now Freescale). Only with the G5 has it come back to IBM's PowerPCs in a big way.
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Apple was considering switching to Intel
No, the Wall Street Journal did not. The Wall Street Journal's rumor page -- on par with such publications at The Sun and the National Enquirer, and not intended to be taken as factual -- printed this as a rumor. Not that this stopped Reuters or anyone else from reporting it as fact.
Keep also in mind that the shadowy mystery figures in the rumor are "two industry executives with knowledge of recent discussions between the companies" -- not Apple or Intel employees. Maybe it's Darl McBride and one of his other personalities!
"I don't know that Apple's market share can survive another architecture shift. Every time they do this, they lose more customers" and more software partners, he said.
Apple has changed architectures once, from the 68K to PowerPC. This change was, for the most part, completely transparent to users and developers. Why would they lose customers over something so painless? Next thing you know Detroit will be losing customers because their latest cars have a V8 and anti-lock brakes where last year's models had a V6 and a dashboard Jesus.
Even if you count OS 9 to OS X as an "architecture" change, nobody was forced into it and OS X did and does still run OS 9 -- and earlier -- apps.
Apple shipped 1.07 million PCs in the first quarter, and its move to Intel would likely bump up the chipmaker's shipments by a corresponding amount, McCarron added.
In other news, transferring $1.07 from your checking account to your savings account is likely to raise your savings balance by $1.07.
WiMax? Sure. ARM? Sure. Hell, might Intel even be getting into the PPC biz? Stranger things have happened.
If Steve Jobs stands on the stage at the Worldwide Developers Conference and announces Apple's moving to x86, Satan will rise up from the underworld and devour the souls of every innocent puppy and kitten. And then emit the fart that ends the world. This is, of course, completely unlikely to happen, as we all know Satan prefers chunky peanut butter to the souls of small animals.
True, but the small footprint of the Mac mini leaves a lot of room for external drives.;)
I kid, I kid, but seriously -- it's not like drive and enclosure vendors haven't realized people want something that still looks cool and orderly. It used to be that walking into Fry's for a USB or FireWire enclosure meant walking out with something hideously ugly with weird lines and no way of stacking. Now it's next to impossible to find enclosures that don't have "stackable design!" as a feature and still manage to look nice.
And while you do lose some space using external drives, you gain a lot of flexibility since they can be added and removed hot in essentially unlimited quantities.
I never liked the idea of external drives either, until my first Mac (an iBook) forced me into using them. Now I wouldn't trade the instant expandability and the flexibility of easily moving a drive from one computer to another for anything. Not even the miniscule amount of desk space (on an already cramped desk) the enclosures take up.
Whaddya mean "3 for 3"? As we all know, the Phantom is running on commodity x86 hardware! It'll be out any day now with a vast library of games, really...
The PS3 is using the "Cell processor", which is reportedly based around a POWER5 PowerPC clocked at 3.2GHz.
The Xbox 360 is also using a PPC (with 3 cores) clocked at 3.2GHz.
The G5 hasn't yet hit those kinds of speeds, and the Xbox 360 is using (a) 64-bit processor(s).
Complete wild-assed-guess: the Xbox 360 is also using a POWER5 CPU. The fact that both consoles just happen to be using 3.2GHz PPCs is rather convenient for IBM, so they may well be using the same cores in different packaging. That would keep it nice and easy to produce all their sundry PPC product lines...
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So, why would you want to use Gizmo?
Having played around with Gizmo for the past few hours, the answer seems to be "the interface."
For lack of a better way to describe it, it's Skype, but with all the interoperable goodness using SIP offers. It's a little easier to work with than the majority of SIP softphones out there. You get the ease-of-use of Skype with the flexibility of being able to dial any SIP URI. I've already used it to call into my Asterisk box, and it's all hunky dory.
For the telephony geeks (myself included), Gizmo's probably not a big deal. There's nothing I gain from using Gizmo that I can't do with my Asterisk server and a softphone (except the ability to call Gizmo users, which I'm sure will be possible in the near future).
On the other hand, Gizmo would be just the thing for people like my parents. Big friendly buttons, an easy-to-use interface and phonebook, and none of the bizarre things X-Lite likes to do.
Yup.
I get offers from American Express for exactly that a couple times a year: pay a token amount per month for the service, have access to a lawyer for simpler functions.
It seems like a rip-off to me, given the limitations of the services they can provide, but I suppose it could be worth it if you're drafting up legal papers on a continual basis.
A safe bet is always on Rob Enderle or John Dvorak, take your pick. ;)
It is easier! It's 5 letters shorter, don't you see? ;)
Very true about T9, and newer phones are even featuring "type-ahead" these days so 435 will get you options of help, hell, hello... Heck, it even seems to be frequency-weighted on my phone, so the most likely candidate is the first one to pop up.
I can understand using abbreviations when you're trying to overcome the length limitations of standard SMS (160 characters), but (a) modern phones work around SMS limits like magic and (b) I have never, in writing text messages, exceeded the 160-char limit. I've used SMS fairly extensively, between it being my sole link to my girlfriend when she was in the hospital and the best way to reach dear ol' dad since he's always with patients.
I've actually seen people write software documentation (both Open Source and plain ol' shareware) in SMS shorthand style. Drives me up the wall. Meanwhile, I regularly consult Apple's Documentation Style Guide to make sure my own documentation is familiar to users, and utilize the Chicago Manual of Style for nearly anything else. Maybe I'm just anal, but the marketplace doesn't seem like an appropriate venue for SMS/IM-speak and regional vernacular.
Kawaii neko-chan air brakes, activate!!!
In the land of Sanrio, what would be more reassuring than the idea that Hello Kitty's ears are saving your life? Imagine the cross-branding possibilities!
Also note the ears are "expected to help slow the train more quickly than conventional brakes" (emphasis mine) -- not necessarily replace more traditional means of braking.
Besides DVForge guys offered DLO to manufacture and sell PodBuddy, but they refused. Personally I fail to understand this.
I'd refuse too were I DLO, given the previous history of Jack Campbell's business ventures and the fact I already had a shipping product. The guy has claimed design of a desk he had nothing to do with (and wasn't even a reseller for). People have had their DVForge SightFlexes fail and opened them only to find a tangled mess of shoddy wire and solder nowhere near the FireWire spec. He sold a marked-up "laptop stand" that anyone could buy at Walmart as a plate holder for a couple bucks. And let's not forget the "Write a virus and I'll pay you $50 grand!" incident.
Why would I want to plunk down $23,000 on a product I've already designed and brought to market long before DVForge even announced theirs? I've already got the product of my own design, and I know what's in mine -- I don't know what's in DVForge's. Is it as crappy as some of their other products?
It's possible Mr. Campbell has turned a new leaf, but the onus is upon him to prove that to the community at large. Once burned, twice shy and all that.
I agree the PodBuddy is nicer looking than the TransPod -- but anyone can paint a pile of dog shit gold, too.
Nobody (*), for example, would claim that you could just simply take a picture of a landscape, turn it black and white with photoshop, and have something that compares to Ansel Adams.
;)
True; you left out the hours worth of dodging and burning.
It's coming down to evolve or die.
Many photogs will die. Many have evolved. A lot of photographers have gone one of two ways:
1. Release the originals after a set date. Most prints from a wedding are going to be sold in the first 6 months to a year, so the photographer retains the originals and the rights for this period. Once it lapses, he forks over the stuff so you can do it yourself.
2. Charge for time and release the originals immediately. Don't expect to sell prints, jack up prices accordingly, voila.
Photographers who are still back on the old model are going to be screwed in the very near future. Once in a while I consider getting into wedding photography, and I sure as hell wouldn't want to be the codger hoarding your negatives until the hereafter while everyone around me is evolving with the market.
True. And many cameras even embed their serial number in the EXIF data.
EXIF is trivial to edit yourself, of course, but the dedicated will find a way to circumvent anything. Sometimes they'll even be assisted, as was the case when a Kinko's clerk told me to just use a razor blade to slice off a copyright years ago.
Costco and any local professional labs would be glad to take his business, without constantly questioning his right to his pictures. As long as all you're wanting is untouched prints, most pro labs aren't much more expensive than Wal-mart (but you'll pay for their expertise if you want hand-tuned adjustments). If he's using something like Walmart.com to upload his pictures to a local store now, many many local labs offer a similar service.
As for digital watermarking... it doesn't help. It can't help. Most reproductions aren't coming from the photographer's original digital files, but from scans of prints. Even if you've got the photog's original files, it's trivial to strip out embedded watermarks or metadata (even accidentally). The only solution then is to physically add a big ugly visible brand to the pictures, and that just sucks. Depending on the complexity of the brand and the original image, a dedicated person could still edit it out (or just crop it).
At the big boxes (Wal-Mart and drug stores) I've dealt with, the (or at least one) litmus test for portraiture is simple: does the background resemble background paper? If yes, they'll refuse it. A Walgreens employee told me this outright when refusing to print something of mine I wanted a quick copy of.
Nevermind the fact anyone can go buy a roll of seamless background paper for $30 or that many portrait photographers also do outdoor poses.
Then again, given the "quality" of some "professional" portrait photographers' work (I just got a flyer in the mail from one yesterday... yikes!), I suppose they can't really judge based on the quality of the image itself.
stuff like contexts in java where you can have a session context and store objects in it?
Yes, you can store objects in a session context. Sample and gotchas here at the RoR wiki.
Also is there something that sync's sessions from one server to another to support load balanced environments?
More than something, there are numerous ways to support this. You can store you session data in temporary files on the server (the default), share it using Distributed Ruby, store it to the database for retrieval... So yes, your applications can be load balanced across multiple servers while maintaining session data.
Scott Barron did some benchmarking of the various methods, if you're interested in that sort of thing as well.
Rails is a Web 2.0 AJAX-enabled test-driven RAD environment in the MVC paradigm! (Bingo!)
More seriously... Rails is a rapid web application development framework. It's written in the Ruby language, hence the "Ruby on Rails." It abstracts things quite well, leaving you to worry about actually implementing the program logic (and site design) rather than managing database connections, writing getter and setter methods, sanitizing user input, and all that oh-so-fun stuff.
If you've got QuickTime, the "Show, Don't Tell" video does a pretty good job demonstrating the very basics of what Rails can do. The video is fairly large and best viewed outside a browser window.
I went from zero knowledge of both Ruby and Rails to a full-featured application in less than a week, so I'm happy with it.
iWork is, officially, the inchoate replacement for AppleWorks. iWork is also, functionally, not a replacement for Office. You're comparing the wrong products.
AppleWorks offered a word processor and light DTP solution, spread sheet software, and presentation software. iWork is currently composed of a word processor and DTP solution (Pages) and presentation software (Keynote). Apple said when iWork was released that it was the beginning of a replacement for AppleWorks.
What's missing from iWork? Spreadsheet capabilities.
What does the name "Numbers" suggest? Spreadsheet capabilities. Crunching the numbers.
The only part of iWork today that's even vaguely a replacement for part of Microsoft Office is Keynote -- it gives PowerPoint a run for its money. Pages, however, is not a Word competitor in any sense of the word. Is it great for Grandma to write a letter or Mom and Dad to make a family newsletter? You bet. Pages doesn't even begin to approach the functionality of Word, though. It probably never will, either; business wasn't the target market for AppleWorks, and Apple hasn't (to this point) been positioning iWork as such either.
Numbers will likely be a capable spreadsheet solution, but I doubt it'll be chasing Excel off business desktops anytime soon.
Seconded. While the Zeldman book is an entertaining read and a nice overview, it's not exactly loaded with examples and it doesn't really take you soup-to-nuts for either developing from scratch or converting an existing site. There are a lot of nice chunks, but they're almost always floating alone rather then ever assembling into a whole. I don't feel it was a waste of my money, but it's not the sort of book I regularly pull off the shelf. You could probably get more practical information by reading A List Apart for free.
Bos and Lie's book, on the other hand, is wonderful. I borrowed it from my local library after finishing DwWS, and it really is "The Indispensible CSS Tutorial and Reference." One of Eric Meyer's CSS books (not the fish book) was another good read, but I can't find the one I'm thinking of at the moment.
If an estate attorney is sending you an unexpected package and all that's in it is a book on CSS, I'd hardly call that serendipitous.
Maybe you've heard of this operating system called Darwin. It's what Apple builds Mac OS X on top of. Included in the Darwin project's CVS repository are a variety of hardware drivers, including those for ... Mac touchpads! This is why there are a variety of enhanced touchpad drivers available for PowerBooks and iBooks.
It's not a simple port, but your development cycle's a lot shorter when you already have a fully working driver in front of you.
And with the exception of the most recent Powerbooks, the touch pad isn't "proprietary hardware." It's just another Synaptics touch pad. The same can be said for most of their machines' bits, actually -- really, Apple designs the motherboard, loads it up with mostly off-the-shelf parts (Motorola modems, TI firewire chipsets, Intel NICs), and that's that. Most of your "proprietary hardware" is stuff like the tilt sensor and the keyboard backlight controller, neither of which are particularly vital to have running under any OS. Why reinvent the wheel when a quality part already exists?
And I'm with the other poster: a touchpad for gaming?! Surely you jest.
On a completely off-topic note, would you happen to have any suggestions on a particular brand or installation company for a new swamp cooler? I've been using AC all year because my ancient evap finally rotted enough that it's worthless.
I miss freezing to death. Instead, the AC's been running for probably an hour straight now trying to maintain 79.
'kldload' is probably the closest equivalent and OS X doesn't have it (just checked).
OS X kernel modules are kernel "extensions," so the tools are all kext*. kextload, kextstat, and kextunload.
But yeah, no dice on "well let's just load up FreeBSD drivers." Not gonna happen.
I know it's like shooting fish in a barrel to find problems in a C|net article, but why not?
Apple has used IBM's PowerPC processors since 1994...
Nitpick: More accurately, "Apple has used PowerPC processors since 1994." The way C|net wrote it, it sounds like IBM is the only game in town until you make it halfway down the page.
The earliest PowerPC chips were from IBM, the G3s were from either Moto or IBM, and G4s were from Moto (and now Freescale). Only with the G5 has it come back to IBM's PowerPCs in a big way.
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Apple was considering switching to Intel
No, the Wall Street Journal did not. The Wall Street Journal's rumor page -- on par with such publications at The Sun and the National Enquirer, and not intended to be taken as factual -- printed this as a rumor. Not that this stopped Reuters or anyone else from reporting it as fact.
Keep also in mind that the shadowy mystery figures in the rumor are "two industry executives with knowledge of recent discussions between the companies" -- not Apple or Intel employees. Maybe it's Darl McBride and one of his other personalities!
"I don't know that Apple's market share can survive another architecture shift. Every time they do this, they lose more customers" and more software partners, he said.
Apple has changed architectures once, from the 68K to PowerPC. This change was, for the most part, completely transparent to users and developers. Why would they lose customers over something so painless? Next thing you know Detroit will be losing customers because their latest cars have a V8 and anti-lock brakes where last year's models had a V6 and a dashboard Jesus.
Even if you count OS 9 to OS X as an "architecture" change, nobody was forced into it and OS X did and does still run OS 9 -- and earlier -- apps.
Apple shipped 1.07 million PCs in the first quarter, and its move to Intel would likely bump up the chipmaker's shipments by a corresponding amount, McCarron added.
In other news, transferring $1.07 from your checking account to your savings account is likely to raise your savings balance by $1.07.
WiMax? Sure. ARM? Sure. Hell, might Intel even be getting into the PPC biz? Stranger things have happened.
If Steve Jobs stands on the stage at the Worldwide Developers Conference and announces Apple's moving to x86, Satan will rise up from the underworld and devour the souls of every innocent puppy and kitten. And then emit the fart that ends the world. This is, of course, completely unlikely to happen, as we all know Satan prefers chunky peanut butter to the souls of small animals.
I sincerely doubt c|net would have published this story, using the words they did, unless they were really, really sure.
;)
While they do have a few letters in common, C|net is not CNN.
True, but the small footprint of the Mac mini leaves a lot of room for external drives. ;)
I kid, I kid, but seriously -- it's not like drive and enclosure vendors haven't realized people want something that still looks cool and orderly. It used to be that walking into Fry's for a USB or FireWire enclosure meant walking out with something hideously ugly with weird lines and no way of stacking. Now it's next to impossible to find enclosures that don't have "stackable design!" as a feature and still manage to look nice.
And while you do lose some space using external drives, you gain a lot of flexibility since they can be added and removed hot in essentially unlimited quantities.
I never liked the idea of external drives either, until my first Mac (an iBook) forced me into using them. Now I wouldn't trade the instant expandability and the flexibility of easily moving a drive from one computer to another for anything. Not even the miniscule amount of desk space (on an already cramped desk) the enclosures take up.
Whaddya mean "3 for 3"? As we all know, the Phantom is running on commodity x86 hardware! It'll be out any day now with a vast library of games, really...
This is complete speculation, but...
The PS3 is using the "Cell processor", which is reportedly based around a POWER5 PowerPC clocked at 3.2GHz.
The Xbox 360 is also using a PPC (with 3 cores) clocked at 3.2GHz.
The G5 hasn't yet hit those kinds of speeds, and the Xbox 360 is using (a) 64-bit processor(s).
Complete wild-assed-guess: the Xbox 360 is also using a POWER5 CPU. The fact that both consoles just happen to be using 3.2GHz PPCs is rather convenient for IBM, so they may well be using the same cores in different packaging. That would keep it nice and easy to produce all their sundry PPC product lines...