And they're taking what must be a pretty big loss just for the sake of having good business integrity.
According to the article over at MacCentral, nope. Apple doesn't expect the cost of performing the recall "to be material to Apple", and LG will be the one ponying up the costs.
Which, given this is the second time in a year LG has caused Apple to issue a recall on batteries, they ought to be doing.
I think the article just explained this rather bizarre move.
Naperville library officials [...]
The scanners, made by Naperville-based U.S. Biometrics [...]
Both in Naperville. How coincidental. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if U.S. Biometrics wandered into the library offices and said "y'know, if you buy our fingerprint scanners we might be willing to donate a fat wad of cash to the library. We'll even discount 'em for you."
Why else would a library -- likely strapped for cash, as most are -- suddenly feel the need for (expensive) biometrics hardware out of the blue?
Re:if('Virtual Light Machine' == 'God');
on
Xbox 360 Lightsynth
·
· Score: 1
I have to admit I was one of those massive skeptics when word came out that Microsoft was releasing a gaming console. Having actually owned one since a few months after it launched, though, I'm in love. The power supply issues aside, Microsoft put together an excellent system both from the hardware and software sides. Xbox Live works brilliantly, I've had nary a disc read problem, and unlike my PS2 (and PSX before it), I haven't had to replace any controllers due to failure.
Microsoft is definitely a hit-or-miss company, but when they hit something (and as you mentioned, they tend to do so with hardware), they nail it. For me, the Xbox captured the goodness of the Dreamcast (the Sega games didn't hurt;) in a much bigger, blacker package.
If the release price is reasonable enough, Xbox 360 will easily top my Christmas list. The potential of the system is great, and the lightsynth is just icing on the cake. Now if Unity would just make an appearance as an Xbox 360 game...
What you'll get when you sign up with the likes of Vonage, Packet5, or the other services is an ATA to connect both your WAN connection and your phone to. With the bare-bones ATA, you plug it directly into your cable or DSL modem, and connect any other devices (routers, etc) downstream of the ATA. This lets the ATA (a) avoid problems with NAT by being outside NAT and (b) keep your call quality up there by enforcing QoS limits on all non-VoIP traffic. The ATAs are also generally smart enough to loosen up the restrictions when the phone's not actually in use.
Vonage (Packet5 may be now as well, I can't recall) also offers an all-in-one solution that's a router and an ATA in one box. You can also pick up the combos yourself (Linksys makes 'em), but they tend to be tied to one specific service -- so do your homework before you sink the cash on a combination ATA and router.
If you dig around Apple's site, you'll eventually discover Clam AV is included with Tiger Server as its e-mail antivirus solution. It's not actually included with the client version of Tiger, but parity beyond software tools is generally maintained between the two versions (hence your new user).
As others have mentioned, it's a non-issue at this point.
However, the fault of there being no antivirus solution compatible with Tiger lies not with Apple (it's not their market), but with the antivirus vendors.
Tiger wasn't a secret. McAfee, Symantec, and even the smaller Mac antivirus vendors have access to OS seeding. They had more than enough time to put out a patch for Tiger compatibility. Or, to be more in line with the market, they could have had an entirely "new" version ready to roll for full price (and in the case of McAfee, probably another disastrous data deletion bug).
But for whatever stupid reason, they opted not to. If you feel naked, complain to your antivirus vendor of choice. One-person software shops had whole feature releases of their applications ready to launch with Tiger, but the antivirus giants have only committed to a nebulous "future release" being compatible with Tiger after the fact.
Granted, the only reason the average user can even buy McAfee Virex today is because Apple licensed it for distribution to.Mac subscribers. Prior to that, you had to buy it from McAfee corporate licensing, and single seats were going for something asinine like $175 since it wasn't aimed at the home market (and Virex sucked even more then).
Exactly! I love the repository revision numbers for testing purposes. When I build a release, Xcode bumps a plist value to the current repository version, and the users see that as the beta number. I don't have to worry about tagging a "release" in the repository for a beta, and I know exactly what to check out if a bug report comes in.
This is incredibly nice when you may have a half dozen or more different testing builds out at the same time, as I have in the past. It makes it much easier to do little one-off builds to squash one user's bug at a time.
Don't be silly. Scottsdale is too busy trying to figure out how to force home builders to make garages large enough for his and hers Hummer H2s.;)
Good luck to Tempe in pulling this off. It's one thing to make WiFi work for something the size of the Mill Ave shops, it's another entirely to make it work for an entire city without the whole thing going to hell in a handbasket. And you just know about the time they finish installing it an updated 802.11 standard will have come out that quadruples the speed.
Your guess seems sound, particularly when you consider it's only recently that Apple standardized on the 65 watt model for all their portables. Prior to that, iBooks and 12-inch PowerBooks shipped with a 45 watt adapter while 15"-and-up PowerBooks had the 65.
The Automator icon's always kinda freaked me out since Apple released it to the features page. Maybe it's just me, but it looks like the roboto's going to flip out any moment and whack someone with that pipe. I can see him smacking it against his hand as he walks down the street looking for trouble.
Back to the other topic at hand, Automator is very cool. Sure, you could accomplish almost everything it does with AppleScript, but this is certainly a better general audience approach. Once developers start writing their own Automator actions, then we'll really see utility take off.
Beginning April 29th, upgrade discs will probably be stuffed into retail stock. I've never purchased a computer from the Apple Store Online, so I don't know if they do the same.
Why is this modded flamebait? Perhaps the moderator is unfamiliar with the history of Apple.
Apple I, Apple II, early Mac: Jobs at helm. Apple is profitable. The Dark Ages: various people, not Jobs, at helm. Company bleeds cash. Apple nearly goes tits up. Repeatedly. Purchase of NeXT, return of Steve Jobs: Apple is profitable.
It may not be causation, but it sure as heck suggests a correlation.
First, it's only on a single high-end pro camera -- affecting only a select set of professional photographers...
It is for now, but Nikon has several new cameras, including consumer models, coming up. What's to say they won't all use the encrypted NEF as well in hopes of doing whatever this is supposed to do for them? After these cameras, there will be more cameras, any of which could meet the same fate.
Second, it's only white balance information. It's what the photographer told the camera about "white" or "gray" at the time of the shot, but it doesn't change the underlying image data. It's nothing that can't be recovered in the digital darkroom during processing.
While this is true, it's silly. If the photographer is taking the time to set the white balance from a grey card, he probably wants that data used. And while you might be able to get close in the digital darkroom, why put all the work into making the adjustment ahead of time only to throw it out and guesstimate during processing?
I've used Canon RAW Converter all of twice. While the results are good, Photoshop does better. Where it really counts, though, is speed -- ACR is many times faster than CRC in processing the file and updating previews. Where CRC chugs along if I dare touch a slider, ACR is almost instantaneous.
The other thing most people are missing, not being working photographers or dedicated enthusiasts, is workflow.
It's much faster to do everything from Photoshop and a familiar interface than it is to have to (a) preprocess using the vendor's software or (b) open it in Photoshop using the vendor's horrible plug-in.
Think of it like fueling your car: instead of pumping directly into the tank, you have to pump it into a gas can, wait for the pump to shut off, and then empty the gas can into your tank. It still gets the job done, but it's not nearly as easy.
No kidding. This U.S. has become the equivalent of a dog with its tail between its legs. Space Shuttle tragedies and terrorism didn't stop us before, but nowadays every shuttle is destined to explode and the next Osama Bin Laden is lurking in every shadow.
At this rate, newspapers might as well start running "Sun rose this morning" on the front page to lull us into safety from the deadly evil things waiting at every bend.
On the one hand, maybe it's relatively major news because they came down in a Russian capsule (but then again, this isn't the first time). On the other, buck up, America! We didn't get ahead in anything by sitting idly by because it's safer. Shit happens.
Now let's explore something, for crying out loud. Scientific discovery doesn't (usually) happen by itself.
It also served to further highlight the gigantic lack of internal consistency in the modern Trek universe as they step from this shiny high tech ship from "Enterprise" to the comparably crufty and spare Original Series-inspired ship.
I wondered from the first episode how they were going to handle the fact that the first Federation ship is a hell of a lot more advanced than later ones. I thought they were going to get away with not even addressing it, but then they went and put a TOS-style ship in the series.
Given the way Paramount works these days, they'll probably still solve it: 1. Evil Archer and The Naked Belly Crew are in one alternate universe. 2. Good Archer and The Technically Advanced SuperShip are in another. 3. The Original Series took place in yet another alternate universe, explaining away the technology differences.
And through subspace rifts, these can all come together and somehow inject Riker and Troi!
Someone just needs to take Trek out in the pasture and get it over with. Time travel and subspace rifts can't be a plot device every episode and still have a watchable series.
Me, I'll be counting my pennies and buying DS9 a set at a time.
Anyways, notice how Adobe is the only one complaining. I believe it is because Nikon's competing software (and software that other 3rd parties have made) has made Adobe Photoshop less relevant.
Nikon Capture is not Photoshop, nor does it approach the functionality of Photoshop. Sure, you can do some manipulations with it, but Adobe almost certainly isn't losing business to Nikon. Even if you shell out the hundred bucks for Nikon Capture, you're likely to hit the point where you need something, be it Photoshop or something else, rather quickly.
Of course Adobe's complaining -- they have teams of lawyers and billions of dollars. Most of the other companies affected by this are teeny tiny and may not even have taken the time to run the DMCA implications by legal (or, more accurately, "a lawyer" for many of the companies). You're Nikon -- who do you stomp on first? The juggernaut company with deep pockets who really should have known better with all those lawyers (easier to prosecute, and better payola if you win), or someone like Bibble Labs who's just a successful small-time developer with one product?
I'll probably never use it -- I can usually get it cheaper at Costco -- but I know people who would rather have the right ink just show up at their door. For people like my grandmother, who live out in the boonies, anything coming in the mail is awesome. It saves a trip into town, where what you need may not even be in stock or even offered by the store you drove an hour to go to.
Heck, every time I buy ink at least one color is out of stock. Why not just buy it from the Apple Store and rest assured it will all show up?
It's the Type-R obsession back to harass us all again. People, apparently including the parent to your post, have this silly notion that everything has to be "fully 64-bit" even when it serves no damn purpose (and even when it slows things down!).
64-bit is not a panacea. 64-bit is useful where it is useful, but that's not everywhere. Just like you don't ride around in a U-Haul truck around 365 days a year because it has a lot of room, you don't need 64-bit support in, say, TextEdit or the window manager.
What are you going to do with 64-bit addressing in a simple text editor or the window manager? Nothing. Nothing at all.
I drive a Jeep. It's got four wheel drive. I'm not going around complaining about how all the roads immediately around me are paved -- they don't diminish my ability to use my four-wheel drive when appropriate. So it is with 64-bit processors. Not everything needs to be optimized for them. Some applications won't see any benefit, and some may even see a performance decrease (kind of like how tooling around town in 4Lo just because you can will leave you without a drivetrain).
Do anyone really want a 64-bit version of TextEdit just so you can say your OS is completely 64-bit optimized? Give me a break.
If widgets lived on the normal desktop, you'd either (a) be making everybody's desktop more cluttered, by having/n/ more widgets on it, or (b) having them hit "close" boxes whenever they're done, and then go searching for the widget when they need to use it 5 minutes later.
This is exactly why I could never get "into" Konfabulator, despite trying it every time they put out a new version. Up until they added Konsposé, getting to your widgets if you weren't sitting at a clean desktop sucked. Or you'd accidentally activate widgets by trying to click outside of some other app. Or you could set them always-on-top, losing whole chunks of your screen.
For the stuff you just wanted quick access to now and then, there wasn't a good solution.
Even with Konsposé, I still found Konfabulator unusable. The shielding background it puts up was too opaque to work with data in applications, not to mention the background itself was ugly -- who chooses a barf-colored background?
I think Apple has finally done this right with the "instant access, instant exit" approach. I don't need those extra doodads all the time, and I don't want to have to deal with them. Another exciting bit was watching the demos and seeing how Dashboard dims out everything else but leaves it visible, allowing you to see data in your applications. If I want to crunch some numbers in the calculator widget, I can still read them in my open mail messages.
strangly enough last time I looked 2000 now costs more than xp.
This has been MS policy for years. It both covers the increased cost of supporting an OS no longer developed and encourages purchasers to buy the latest version. It also lines Microsoft's pockets nicely (making shareholders happy) when some customer absolutely must have an older version of the OS.
If I buy a powermac now, will I be able to return it , and purchase one of the newer models in two weeks?
If ThinkSecret isn't talking out its ass, you could -- but keep in mind almost anyone willing to sell you that computer, including Apple, is going to charge you a restock fee (not to mention 2 weeks is pushing the limit of many resellers' return policies).
If you need a Power Mac so badly, just buy one. The speed bumps aren't all that significant if they truly exist, so you wouldn't be missing much. And in the off chance that you order directly from Apple and new systems appear Real Soon Now, they've been known to hold orders and fill them with new merchandise.
They'd still have to pass inspection to be lived in, so it's not as if the walls are going to cave in and kill everyone simply because it was built by a robot. If the build quality sucks, it'll be condemned unless it's correctable.
Slashdot Mirror
And they're taking what must be a pretty big loss just for the sake of having good business integrity.
According to the article over at MacCentral, nope. Apple doesn't expect the cost of performing the recall "to be material to Apple", and LG will be the one ponying up the costs.
Which, given this is the second time in a year LG has caused Apple to issue a recall on batteries, they ought to be doing.
I think the article just explained this rather bizarre move.
Naperville library officials [...]
The scanners, made by Naperville-based U.S. Biometrics [...]
Both in Naperville. How coincidental. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if U.S. Biometrics wandered into the library offices and said "y'know, if you buy our fingerprint scanners we might be willing to donate a fat wad of cash to the library. We'll even discount 'em for you."
Why else would a library -- likely strapped for cash, as most are -- suddenly feel the need for (expensive) biometrics hardware out of the blue?
I have to admit I was one of those massive skeptics when word came out that Microsoft was releasing a gaming console. Having actually owned one since a few months after it launched, though, I'm in love. The power supply issues aside, Microsoft put together an excellent system both from the hardware and software sides. Xbox Live works brilliantly, I've had nary a disc read problem, and unlike my PS2 (and PSX before it), I haven't had to replace any controllers due to failure.
;) in a much bigger, blacker package.
Microsoft is definitely a hit-or-miss company, but when they hit something (and as you mentioned, they tend to do so with hardware), they nail it. For me, the Xbox captured the goodness of the Dreamcast (the Sega games didn't hurt
If the release price is reasonable enough, Xbox 360 will easily top my Christmas list. The potential of the system is great, and the lightsynth is just icing on the cake. Now if Unity would just make an appearance as an Xbox 360 game...
Mr. Drunken Batman uses ye olde Movable Type for all his blogging needs.
What you'll get when you sign up with the likes of Vonage, Packet5, or the other services is an ATA to connect both your WAN connection and your phone to. With the bare-bones ATA, you plug it directly into your cable or DSL modem, and connect any other devices (routers, etc) downstream of the ATA. This lets the ATA (a) avoid problems with NAT by being outside NAT and (b) keep your call quality up there by enforcing QoS limits on all non-VoIP traffic. The ATAs are also generally smart enough to loosen up the restrictions when the phone's not actually in use.
Vonage (Packet5 may be now as well, I can't recall) also offers an all-in-one solution that's a router and an ATA in one box. You can also pick up the combos yourself (Linksys makes 'em), but they tend to be tied to one specific service -- so do your homework before you sink the cash on a combination ATA and router.
If you dig around Apple's site, you'll eventually discover Clam AV is included with Tiger Server as its e-mail antivirus solution. It's not actually included with the client version of Tiger, but parity beyond software tools is generally maintained between the two versions (hence your new user).
As others have mentioned, it's a non-issue at this point.
.Mac subscribers. Prior to that, you had to buy it from McAfee corporate licensing, and single seats were going for something asinine like $175 since it wasn't aimed at the home market (and Virex sucked even more then).
However, the fault of there being no antivirus solution compatible with Tiger lies not with Apple (it's not their market), but with the antivirus vendors.
Tiger wasn't a secret. McAfee, Symantec, and even the smaller Mac antivirus vendors have access to OS seeding. They had more than enough time to put out a patch for Tiger compatibility. Or, to be more in line with the market, they could have had an entirely "new" version ready to roll for full price (and in the case of McAfee, probably another disastrous data deletion bug).
But for whatever stupid reason, they opted not to. If you feel naked, complain to your antivirus vendor of choice. One-person software shops had whole feature releases of their applications ready to launch with Tiger, but the antivirus giants have only committed to a nebulous "future release" being compatible with Tiger after the fact.
Granted, the only reason the average user can even buy McAfee Virex today is because Apple licensed it for distribution to
Exactly! I love the repository revision numbers for testing purposes. When I build a release, Xcode bumps a plist value to the current repository version, and the users see that as the beta number. I don't have to worry about tagging a "release" in the repository for a beta, and I know exactly what to check out if a bug report comes in.
This is incredibly nice when you may have a half dozen or more different testing builds out at the same time, as I have in the past. It makes it much easier to do little one-off builds to squash one user's bug at a time.
Don't be silly. Scottsdale is too busy trying to figure out how to force home builders to make garages large enough for his and hers Hummer H2s. ;)
Good luck to Tempe in pulling this off. It's one thing to make WiFi work for something the size of the Mill Ave shops, it's another entirely to make it work for an entire city without the whole thing going to hell in a handbasket. And you just know about the time they finish installing it an updated 802.11 standard will have come out that quadruples the speed.
Your guess seems sound, particularly when you consider it's only recently that Apple standardized on the 65 watt model for all their portables. Prior to that, iBooks and 12-inch PowerBooks shipped with a 45 watt adapter while 15"-and-up PowerBooks had the 65.
The Automator icon's always kinda freaked me out since Apple released it to the features page. Maybe it's just me, but it looks like the roboto's going to flip out any moment and whack someone with that pipe. I can see him smacking it against his hand as he walks down the street looking for trouble.
Back to the other topic at hand, Automator is very cool. Sure, you could accomplish almost everything it does with AppleScript, but this is certainly a better general audience approach. Once developers start writing their own Automator actions, then we'll really see utility take off.
Beginning April 29th, upgrade discs will probably be stuffed into retail stock. I've never purchased a computer from the Apple Store Online, so I don't know if they do the same.
Preinstalled, probably a week or two from Friday.
Why is this modded flamebait? Perhaps the moderator is unfamiliar with the history of Apple.
Apple I, Apple II, early Mac: Jobs at helm. Apple is profitable.
The Dark Ages: various people, not Jobs, at helm. Company bleeds cash. Apple nearly goes tits up. Repeatedly.
Purchase of NeXT, return of Steve Jobs: Apple is profitable.
It may not be causation, but it sure as heck suggests a correlation.
First, it's only on a single high-end pro camera -- affecting only a select set of professional photographers...
It is for now, but Nikon has several new cameras, including consumer models, coming up. What's to say they won't all use the encrypted NEF as well in hopes of doing whatever this is supposed to do for them? After these cameras, there will be more cameras, any of which could meet the same fate.
Second, it's only white balance information. It's what the photographer told the camera about "white" or "gray" at the time of the shot, but it doesn't change the underlying image data. It's nothing that can't be recovered in the digital darkroom during processing.
While this is true, it's silly. If the photographer is taking the time to set the white balance from a grey card, he probably wants that data used. And while you might be able to get close in the digital darkroom, why put all the work into making the adjustment ahead of time only to throw it out and guesstimate during processing?
I've used Canon RAW Converter all of twice. While the results are good, Photoshop does better. Where it really counts, though, is speed -- ACR is many times faster than CRC in processing the file and updating previews. Where CRC chugs along if I dare touch a slider, ACR is almost instantaneous.
The other thing most people are missing, not being working photographers or dedicated enthusiasts, is workflow.
It's much faster to do everything from Photoshop and a familiar interface than it is to have to (a) preprocess using the vendor's software or (b) open it in Photoshop using the vendor's horrible plug-in.
Think of it like fueling your car: instead of pumping directly into the tank, you have to pump it into a gas can, wait for the pump to shut off, and then empty the gas can into your tank. It still gets the job done, but it's not nearly as easy.
No kidding. This U.S. has become the equivalent of a dog with its tail between its legs. Space Shuttle tragedies and terrorism didn't stop us before, but nowadays every shuttle is destined to explode and the next Osama Bin Laden is lurking in every shadow.
At this rate, newspapers might as well start running "Sun rose this morning" on the front page to lull us into safety from the deadly evil things waiting at every bend.
On the one hand, maybe it's relatively major news because they came down in a Russian capsule (but then again, this isn't the first time). On the other, buck up, America! We didn't get ahead in anything by sitting idly by because it's safer. Shit happens.
Now let's explore something, for crying out loud. Scientific discovery doesn't (usually) happen by itself.
It also served to further highlight the gigantic lack of internal consistency in the modern Trek universe as they step from this shiny high tech ship from "Enterprise" to the comparably crufty and spare Original Series-inspired ship.
I wondered from the first episode how they were going to handle the fact that the first Federation ship is a hell of a lot more advanced than later ones. I thought they were going to get away with not even addressing it, but then they went and put a TOS-style ship in the series.
Given the way Paramount works these days, they'll probably still solve it:
1. Evil Archer and The Naked Belly Crew are in one alternate universe.
2. Good Archer and The Technically Advanced SuperShip are in another.
3. The Original Series took place in yet another alternate universe, explaining away the technology differences.
And through subspace rifts, these can all come together and somehow inject Riker and Troi!
Someone just needs to take Trek out in the pasture and get it over with. Time travel and subspace rifts can't be a plot device every episode and still have a watchable series.
Me, I'll be counting my pennies and buying DS9 a set at a time.
Anyways, notice how Adobe is the only one complaining. I believe it is because Nikon's competing software (and software that other 3rd parties have made) has made Adobe Photoshop less relevant.
Nikon Capture is not Photoshop, nor does it approach the functionality of Photoshop. Sure, you can do some manipulations with it, but Adobe almost certainly isn't losing business to Nikon. Even if you shell out the hundred bucks for Nikon Capture, you're likely to hit the point where you need something, be it Photoshop or something else, rather quickly.
Of course Adobe's complaining -- they have teams of lawyers and billions of dollars. Most of the other companies affected by this are teeny tiny and may not even have taken the time to run the DMCA implications by legal (or, more accurately, "a lawyer" for many of the companies). You're Nikon -- who do you stomp on first? The juggernaut company with deep pockets who really should have known better with all those lawyers (easier to prosecute, and better payola if you win), or someone like Bibble Labs who's just a successful small-time developer with one product?
Exactly.
I'll probably never use it -- I can usually get it cheaper at Costco -- but I know people who would rather have the right ink just show up at their door. For people like my grandmother, who live out in the boonies, anything coming in the mail is awesome. It saves a trip into town, where what you need may not even be in stock or even offered by the store you drove an hour to go to.
Heck, every time I buy ink at least one color is out of stock. Why not just buy it from the Apple Store and rest assured it will all show up?
It's the Type-R obsession back to harass us all again. People, apparently including the parent to your post, have this silly notion that everything has to be "fully 64-bit" even when it serves no damn purpose (and even when it slows things down!).
64-bit is not a panacea. 64-bit is useful where it is useful, but that's not everywhere. Just like you don't ride around in a U-Haul truck around 365 days a year because it has a lot of room, you don't need 64-bit support in, say, TextEdit or the window manager.
What are you going to do with 64-bit addressing in a simple text editor or the window manager? Nothing. Nothing at all.
I drive a Jeep. It's got four wheel drive. I'm not going around complaining about how all the roads immediately around me are paved -- they don't diminish my ability to use my four-wheel drive when appropriate. So it is with 64-bit processors. Not everything needs to be optimized for them. Some applications won't see any benefit, and some may even see a performance decrease (kind of like how tooling around town in 4Lo just because you can will leave you without a drivetrain).
Do anyone really want a 64-bit version of TextEdit just so you can say your OS is completely 64-bit optimized? Give me a break.
If widgets lived on the normal desktop, you'd either (a) be making everybody's desktop more cluttered, by having /n/ more widgets on it, or (b) having them hit "close" boxes whenever they're done, and then go searching for the widget when they need to use it 5 minutes later.
This is exactly why I could never get "into" Konfabulator, despite trying it every time they put out a new version. Up until they added Konsposé, getting to your widgets if you weren't sitting at a clean desktop sucked. Or you'd accidentally activate widgets by trying to click outside of some other app. Or you could set them always-on-top, losing whole chunks of your screen.
For the stuff you just wanted quick access to now and then, there wasn't a good solution.
Even with Konsposé, I still found Konfabulator unusable. The shielding background it puts up was too opaque to work with data in applications, not to mention the background itself was ugly -- who chooses a barf-colored background?
I think Apple has finally done this right with the "instant access, instant exit" approach. I don't need those extra doodads all the time, and I don't want to have to deal with them. Another exciting bit was watching the demos and seeing how Dashboard dims out everything else but leaves it visible, allowing you to see data in your applications. If I want to crunch some numbers in the calculator widget, I can still read them in my open mail messages.
strangly enough last time I looked 2000 now costs more than xp.
This has been MS policy for years. It both covers the increased cost of supporting an OS no longer developed and encourages purchasers to buy the latest version. It also lines Microsoft's pockets nicely (making shareholders happy) when some customer absolutely must have an older version of the OS.
If I buy a powermac now, will I be able to return it , and purchase one of the newer models in two weeks?
If ThinkSecret isn't talking out its ass, you could -- but keep in mind almost anyone willing to sell you that computer, including Apple, is going to charge you a restock fee (not to mention 2 weeks is pushing the limit of many resellers' return policies).
If you need a Power Mac so badly, just buy one. The speed bumps aren't all that significant if they truly exist, so you wouldn't be missing much. And in the off chance that you order directly from Apple and new systems appear Real Soon Now, they've been known to hold orders and fill them with new merchandise.
The Tiger specs at Apple.com state full OpenGL 1.5 support as a feature, so this is not an issue.
They'd still have to pass inspection to be lived in, so it's not as if the walls are going to cave in and kill everyone simply because it was built by a robot. If the build quality sucks, it'll be condemned unless it's correctable.