The dock is probably taking that much CPU time to draw that translucent menu over the updating "top" window...?
No the drawing is done in a dedicated process ("Window Server" I think, which is more like the X server then an X11 window manager). I think the dock shows a burst of CPU usage because the mouse is down there fiddling with stuff (there is a dock menu popped up for iTunes, right?)
Hopefully once Mac OS X sees widespread adoption, this will begin to change; part of the problem is that classic Mac OS was never designed for a multi-user environment at all.
Well it has been the default OS since the middleish of January so I would say it is seeing "widespread adoption".
I just gotta know... what do you use bluetooth for?
Basically the same stuff IRDA is used for, setting up PPP via a cell phone, sending files to lusers that can't use ethernet (or 802.11), and talking to a tiny number of printers...
So far none of the "cool stuff" like having the PDA use the cell phone's vibrate mode, or the like has surfaced (it is still a little nicer then IRDA for cell phone attachment...or would be if the BlueTooth was built into the laptop)
MS has not done an OSX version of, um, whatever their exchange client is. There are some third party ones that are not great. If you want to run the version for older MacOS that should work, but you will have to wait for OS9 to boot under OSX, and a lot of things will be totally different in the "OS9 box", like you will use the OS9 printer drivers... You could also use a PC emulator to run Windows, but that costs a fair bit of money and is not exactly fast.
b) my NTFS drives (for profile stuff)
Assuming these are "SMB shares" this works. The network browser kind of sucks, but in the finder you press Command-K (or click to "Connect To Server" in the "Go" menu), then ignore the browser part and type "smb://name-of-host/" and hit return, if needed it will prompt for user and password (defaulting user to your unix user name, and password to the empty string).
c) my SAMBA drives (for unix access)
See above (note OSX uses SAMBA, it is how it mounts the SMB shares above, and how it can be made to offer SMB shares out -- I don't think they give you a GUI for making SMB shares unless you buy OSX Server, but since you have edited the config files on your Unix box, you can fire up vi and do it again on the Mac...)
d) an X client (so I can connect to my multiple compute servers cross-site)
I'm pretty sure you mean "X Server", the thing that draws windows and stuff for you an "X client" would be "xclock", or "xterm". Whichever you mean though you can get free ones (XFree86 ports, or WierdX), or commercial ones. The XFree86 one works quite well, so I see no reason to do the commercial ones...
Honestly, is it really that easy to get OS-X up and running?
Open the box, turn it on, and it begs for a DHCP address right away:-)
To be honest it took me a little time to figure out what programs I liked and didn't, to decide which ones will live on the dock, and which ones will live in what directories, to decide I actually kind of like Apple's mail program and to set up filters for it.
It didn't require a whole lot of fiddling, but like anything, fiddling at least a little pays off.
BTW, the G4 iMac may be the star, but the other Macs get their fair share over at Amazon. When the G4 iMac came out and shot up the charts, 10 of the top 25 selling computers at Amazon were Macs. Of course it is easy for the Macs to get high on the charts now. The PC industry has fallen on its collective nose, and the only computers with serious appeal (and an OS that is both beautiful and powerful) are Macs.
Well, also if you want a Mac there are only a few to pick from. So given only 4 models (and only a few options within the models) you get more sales per unit. If you want a PC there are so many choices that maybe Sony gets the pick because you want FireWire, or maybe Asus because you want it cheap, or maybe...
(That said I really do like my Macs, they make great laptops)
Bet the Linux PPC crowd and companies like Yellow Dog could release a cheap CD with "Everything OS X is Missing".
Um, "off" doesn't mean "missing". Want sshd? Click "enable remote logins" in the control panel (or set SSHSERVER to YES in/etc/hostconfig). Want apache? Click "Turn Web sharing on" in the control panel (or edit some other thing in/etc). Want ntpd? Click "network time service" on in the control panel...
I don't think it comes with telnetd, but I turn that off. The only service it doesn't come with that I tend to run on my other Unix machines is a VNC server, and since my OSX box is a laptop, I wouldn't really use it (I would still like it though).
No, contrary to popular opinion Carbon can do everything Cocoa can do with the possible exception of the services menu...however it is harder to work with Carbon. Carbon also frequently has multiple ways of dong things like drawing text (it attempts to support all the old APIs) while Cocoa has pretty much just one way, but the one way does all the stuff (anti-alias, kerning, alternate rendering).
You are correct. I think it kinda sux that I pay > $3000.00 for a new computer and don't get the same app bundle that a person paying $899 does. Oh well..
Well you do get a handful of shareware apps with licenses which costs more then the $80 AppleWorks does...most of them are not all that great though (OmniWeb and GraphicConverter being the two I would pay for without the bundle...er, already did on my G3...).
For the most part I would rather have AppleWorks, but I guess they figure most people that will buy a TiBook will buy Office and thus AppleWorks isn't useful to them.
I think your delay is because of one of the more aggraviting features of the D30 - if you press the shutter the moment the autofocus is confused by something, it will refuse to take the picture. There should be some kind of override (say pressing the shutter release harder or something). Problem is that you lose pictures which would be useful to have even if the focus wasn't perfect, such as birds outdoors at f/22, which are going to be in decent focus no matter what you do.
There are several overides (and they are available on most EOS cameras, not just the D30). First in AI Focus the inital frame will be taken even if there is no focus lock. Second in MF mode as you say the camera does not wait for focus lock. Third if you use CF4 (I think 4 -- it is 4 on most EOS cameras) to assign AE only to shutter and AF to * then a full press of the shutter takes the picture even without focus lock. That is the mode I use it in because it makes the focus-meter-compose dance much quicker (at least in the M exposure mode). The huge downside is on the EOS-D30 you lose the ability to do flash exposure lock because that is on the * key! You also lose AE lock, but when you shoot in M there isn't an AE lock because it isn't needed.
As an aside except for the EOS-D30/D60 all EOS cameras over $1000 have a dedicated FEL button (EOS-3 and EOS-1v, and I thjink the old A3E, and old 1/1n/1RS).
Other than that and with continuous shooting filling up the buffer, I've never had any trouble with the D30's responsiveness.
I normally don't, but once in a while...
And it's probably just as well I didn't wait and get the D60, since the pictures would be double the size, and they're already plenty big. Or maybe that's a rationalization. You decide.
Well it isn't a slam dunk that's for sure. I think the pictures look somewhat better (esp at higher ISOs), and there is way more margin for cropping, but I'm glad I had the extra months of joy from the D30:-) If the D60 had better AF there is a chance I would buy one (and sell the D30, or keep it for backup).
This was originally for a long uptime server. Presumably, there wouldn't be any upgrades. Even so, most laptops nowadays have USB ports, so adding drives and other peripherals isn't that bad.
There may not be upgrades if the orignal equiptment is powerful enough to start with. Most of my PC "upgrades" are not done as I use them, but when they start service. That includes PC's I use for servers.
USB drives are amazingly slow and of minimal use to most servers -- you may as well use NFS over 100Mbit ethernet, it would be faster. A few laptops (Sony Viao, Apple iBook + TiBook + some G3 PowerBooks) have FireWire, but while it is much faster then USB drives, it is still fairly pricy.
Also USB or FW eliminates at least the "easially movable to another site" advantage, as well as the "built in UPS" (at least for most USB/FW drives, some to get all their power off the FW/USB).
I stand by my original statment, I don't think laptops make great servers in most cases.
If you're gonna report a story about a port, then make sure it's actually a port, and not a remake. Remakes, even using the same title (re: Hasbro Asteroids) aren't the same as the original, they always monkey with it, and it's never the same.
FYI the old "Foo 2000" series on the Atari Jaguar always had a "classic mode" that was fantastically close to the original - as close as anything that didn't just emulate the arcade hardware was going to get at any rate....
Uhm. Dude.... they STILL use elaborate artist conceptions
Right, but back then it was common for the back of the box to have no screen shots, or screen shots from a different (better looking) version of the game (like the C=64 version rather then the Apple II version...)
The article is not even clear on whether this development is supposed to be replacing RAM or hard disks. But either way, it cannot eliminate the need for rebooting. The primary reasons for rebooting are either to reset the operating system to a known state, or to upgrade low-level software (such as the kernel in Linux, or your web browser in Windows). Neither of these necessities go away with non-volatile RAM, regardless of how fast, cheap, or capacious it may be. These are software issues, and they need software solutions.
Well it is partly because most computer industry journalists are morons....and partly because this stuff might replace either or both RAM and hard disks depending on the price and speed.
If it is slow it won't replace RAM. If it is expensive it won't replace disks. If it is fast and cheap it will replace both, if it is neither it won't replace either. (in most systems that is, it might hit the target to replace FLASH in cameras, or...)
It might be hard for people working on this to tell how fast/cheap they will get it, worse yet they don't really know what disk and RAM prices and speeds will do.
The press release doesn't really go into detail, so I don't know how similar (or disparate) the respective IBM and Samsung solutions are. They do both have the same net effect for users: non-volatile main memory.
Pretty much, they might have different edge cases (MRAM might be as sensitive to outside magnetic fields as hard disks...resistor RAM might leak current if not touched for a few years), and they almost definitely will cost different amounts, which may spell life or death for them (unless there are significant speed/density differences).
This is cool stuff, but what hasn't been said is that as long as operating systems and applications leak memory, there will be a need for reboots.
True for the OS, not so much for apps because you can restart them without a whole reboot. Some even sort of do that on their own (at one point Apache's child processes would exit after X requests to prevent resource leaks from building up).
The reduced reboot time might be a big deal for laptops, but the nonvolatile nature of the new RAM types won't matter for desktops until the price is low enough to pose a threat to hard disks. It won't pose a threat to normal RAM until it's prices approach that too...which makes it disappointing that none of these articles address the estimated price of these technologies and the projected price of SDRAM and hard drives in 3 years.
True, Cisco bought Aironet. However, they do have additional features that enterprise customers demand. Imagine having hundreds of APs using MAC authentication - gonna put each new MAC in each AP? Will a Linksys accept 1000's of Mac entries? Not likely. We use Avaya (Lucent) APs where I work that cost about $800 (though I've seen them for $400 at one place recently) Why? They support use of an external RADIUS server for authenticaton.
FYI, the Apple AirPort Base Station also does RAIDUS auth. Plus my Cisco AP died about a year or so after I bought it and Cisco wanted $700 to fix it. $700. Feh. I replaced it with a $200 access point. Cisco's product didn't do anything useful for the extra cost, definitely costing 3x as much and only lasting a year isn't a great deal.
As for the M-1, I'd say their price point is justified for the market they target - people who want an AP they can add custom features to with ease.
And how will this make linux mainstream? It won't.
Well it might make it mainstream in the embedded market, which would at least give it more developers and drivers for odd things. It will help a but, but only indirectly.
I agree very much. Sun's philosophy is to market one line of computers that are very highly inter-compatible (Netra X1 with 1 CPU ---> Sun Fire 15K with >100 CPUs). Where else can you develop software on a personal workstation and feel comfortable that it'll run smoothly on the big-iron servers down the hall? I'm sure Sun is introducing the low-end Intel-based servers with big butterflies in their stomachs (it's sort of like a world-class French vineyard beginning to distribute Kentucky jug wine on the side).
That is how they work now...in the past they did make a 386 machine (the Sun 386i I think; as well as several PC-on-a-card products). In fact before they adopted the "all the wood behing one arrowhead" policy they made 680x0 machines, SPARCs, and the 386i all at pretty much the same time!
Of corse their 386 system only ran SunOS...or at least it was a pain to run anything else...and I think it had a "real" ROM monitor and all. Does anyone remember what the expansion bus was though, it was years before PCI.
Remember, the PS2 is already starting it's third generation of games, whereas both the X-Box and GC are starting to hit the second wave
Wouldn't the X-Box being a game PC (with somewhat less RAM and disk space then normal) really be on like it's 37th generation of games? Halo which you quote as a 1st wave X-Box release was a PC game until late in it's life...
Besides, as ALWAYS has been the case (why don't analysts EVER remember?) it's not over till it's over. Remember how dominant the Genesis was even AFTER the SNES was out for a year? Remember who won that one?
Total BS. While you save the upfront cost of loading the OS, the choice of OS does not affect the amount of memory required to store texture, model, and world data, which is the bottleneck for EQ.
That's true, but the OS also has drivers for all sorts of stuff resident, daemons, and in the case of windows spyware and the like. I could see needing 32M less RAM on a console. (And I remember when 4M was a lot of RAM for a Unix machine...)
Since this is a solid state storage device its performance will be that of a RAM. This is the main reason why solid state storage is so attractive. There will be no read/write heads etc...
Not all solid state stuff has fast writes. Look at FLASH for example, can be designed to read really fast, but in the general case you have to clear blocks before writing, and the clear is slow.
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No the drawing is done in a dedicated process ("Window Server" I think, which is more like the X server then an X11 window manager). I think the dock shows a burst of CPU usage because the mouse is down there fiddling with stuff (there is a dock menu popped up for iTunes, right?)
They do, as part of the "ProCreate" bundle with PowerBooks and (I think) PowerMacs you get licenses to a bunch of share ware things including OmniWeb.
Well it has been the default OS since the middleish of January so I would say it is seeing "widespread adoption".
Basically the same stuff IRDA is used for, setting up PPP via a cell phone, sending files to lusers that can't use ethernet (or 802.11), and talking to a tiny number of printers...
So far none of the "cool stuff" like having the PDA use the cell phone's vibrate mode, or the like has surfaced (it is still a little nicer then IRDA for cell phone attachment...or would be if the BlueTooth was built into the laptop)
MS has not done an OSX version of, um, whatever their exchange client is. There are some third party ones that are not great. If you want to run the version for older MacOS that should work, but you will have to wait for OS9 to boot under OSX, and a lot of things will be totally different in the "OS9 box", like you will use the OS9 printer drivers... You could also use a PC emulator to run Windows, but that costs a fair bit of money and is not exactly fast.
Assuming these are "SMB shares" this works. The network browser kind of sucks, but in the finder you press Command-K (or click to "Connect To Server" in the "Go" menu), then ignore the browser part and type "smb://name-of-host/" and hit return, if needed it will prompt for user and password (defaulting user to your unix user name, and password to the empty string).
See above (note OSX uses SAMBA, it is how it mounts the SMB shares above, and how it can be made to offer SMB shares out -- I don't think they give you a GUI for making SMB shares unless you buy OSX Server, but since you have edited the config files on your Unix box, you can fire up vi and do it again on the Mac...)
I'm pretty sure you mean "X Server", the thing that draws windows and stuff for you an "X client" would be "xclock", or "xterm". Whichever you mean though you can get free ones (XFree86 ports, or WierdX), or commercial ones. The XFree86 one works quite well, so I see no reason to do the commercial ones...
Open the box, turn it on, and it begs for a DHCP address right away :-)
To be honest it took me a little time to figure out what programs I liked and didn't, to decide which ones will live on the dock, and which ones will live in what directories, to decide I actually kind of like Apple's mail program and to set up filters for it.
It didn't require a whole lot of fiddling, but like anything, fiddling at least a little pays off.
Well, also if you want a Mac there are only a few to pick from. So given only 4 models (and only a few options within the models) you get more sales per unit. If you want a PC there are so many choices that maybe Sony gets the pick because you want FireWire, or maybe Asus because you want it cheap, or maybe...
(That said I really do like my Macs, they make great laptops)
Um, "off" doesn't mean "missing". Want sshd? Click "enable remote logins" in the control panel (or set SSHSERVER to YES in /etc/hostconfig). Want apache? Click "Turn Web sharing on" in the control panel (or edit some other thing in /etc). Want ntpd? Click "network time service" on in the control panel...
I don't think it comes with telnetd, but I turn that off. The only service it doesn't come with that I tend to run on my other Unix machines is a VNC server, and since my OSX box is a laptop, I wouldn't really use it (I would still like it though).
No, contrary to popular opinion Carbon can do everything Cocoa can do with the possible exception of the services menu...however it is harder to work with Carbon. Carbon also frequently has multiple ways of dong things like drawing text (it attempts to support all the old APIs) while Cocoa has pretty much just one way, but the one way does all the stuff (anti-alias, kerning, alternate rendering).
Well you do get a handful of shareware apps with licenses which costs more then the $80 AppleWorks does...most of them are not all that great though (OmniWeb and GraphicConverter being the two I would pay for without the bundle...er, already did on my G3...).
For the most part I would rather have AppleWorks, but I guess they figure most people that will buy a TiBook will buy Office and thus AppleWorks isn't useful to them.
Thanks for the tip. I may try it on PhotoShop.
There are several overides (and they are available on most EOS cameras, not just the D30). First in AI Focus the inital frame will be taken even if there is no focus lock. Second in MF mode as you say the camera does not wait for focus lock. Third if you use CF4 (I think 4 -- it is 4 on most EOS cameras) to assign AE only to shutter and AF to * then a full press of the shutter takes the picture even without focus lock. That is the mode I use it in because it makes the focus-meter-compose dance much quicker (at least in the M exposure mode). The huge downside is on the EOS-D30 you lose the ability to do flash exposure lock because that is on the * key! You also lose AE lock, but when you shoot in M there isn't an AE lock because it isn't needed.
As an aside except for the EOS-D30/D60 all EOS cameras over $1000 have a dedicated FEL button (EOS-3 and EOS-1v, and I thjink the old A3E, and old 1/1n/1RS).
I normally don't, but once in a while...
Well it isn't a slam dunk that's for sure. I think the pictures look somewhat better (esp at higher ISOs), and there is way more margin for cropping, but I'm glad I had the extra months of joy from the D30 :-) If the D60 had better AF there is a chance I would buy one (and sell the D30, or keep it for backup).
There may not be upgrades if the orignal equiptment is powerful enough to start with. Most of my PC "upgrades" are not done as I use them, but when they start service. That includes PC's I use for servers.
USB drives are amazingly slow and of minimal use to most servers -- you may as well use NFS over 100Mbit ethernet, it would be faster. A few laptops (Sony Viao, Apple iBook + TiBook + some G3 PowerBooks) have FireWire, but while it is much faster then USB drives, it is still fairly pricy.
Also USB or FW eliminates at least the "easially movable to another site" advantage, as well as the "built in UPS" (at least for most USB/FW drives, some to get all their power off the FW/USB).
I stand by my original statment, I don't think laptops make great servers in most cases.
FYI the old "Foo 2000" series on the Atari Jaguar always had a "classic mode" that was fantastically close to the original - as close as anything that didn't just emulate the arcade hardware was going to get at any rate....
Right, but back then it was common for the back of the box to have no screen shots, or screen shots from a different (better looking) version of the game (like the C=64 version rather then the Apple II version...)
Well it is partly because most computer industry journalists are morons....and partly because this stuff might replace either or both RAM and hard disks depending on the price and speed.
If it is slow it won't replace RAM. If it is expensive it won't replace disks. If it is fast and cheap it will replace both, if it is neither it won't replace either. (in most systems that is, it might hit the target to replace FLASH in cameras, or...)
It might be hard for people working on this to tell how fast/cheap they will get it, worse yet they don't really know what disk and RAM prices and speeds will do.
Pretty much, they might have different edge cases (MRAM might be as sensitive to outside magnetic fields as hard disks...resistor RAM might leak current if not touched for a few years), and they almost definitely will cost different amounts, which may spell life or death for them (unless there are significant speed/density differences).
True for the OS, not so much for apps because you can restart them without a whole reboot. Some even sort of do that on their own (at one point Apache's child processes would exit after X requests to prevent resource leaks from building up).
The reduced reboot time might be a big deal for laptops, but the nonvolatile nature of the new RAM types won't matter for desktops until the price is low enough to pose a threat to hard disks. It won't pose a threat to normal RAM until it's prices approach that too...which makes it disappointing that none of these articles address the estimated price of these technologies and the projected price of SDRAM and hard drives in 3 years.
More fragile, more costly, much harder to upgrade (room inside for zero extra drives! odd expansion RAM! One open PCMCIA slot!).
FYI, the Apple AirPort Base Station also does RAIDUS auth. Plus my Cisco AP died about a year or so after I bought it and Cisco wanted $700 to fix it. $700. Feh. I replaced it with a $200 access point. Cisco's product didn't do anything useful for the extra cost, definitely costing 3x as much and only lasting a year isn't a great deal.
That I agree with.
Well it might make it mainstream in the embedded market, which would at least give it more developers and drivers for odd things. It will help a but, but only indirectly.
That is how they work now...in the past they did make a 386 machine (the Sun 386i I think; as well as several PC-on-a-card products). In fact before they adopted the "all the wood behing one arrowhead" policy they made 680x0 machines, SPARCs, and the 386i all at pretty much the same time!
Of corse their 386 system only ran SunOS...or at least it was a pain to run anything else...and I think it had a "real" ROM monitor and all. Does anyone remember what the expansion bus was though, it was years before PCI.
Wouldn't the X-Box being a game PC (with somewhat less RAM and disk space then normal) really be on like it's 37th generation of games? Halo which you quote as a 1st wave X-Box release was a PC game until late in it's life...
Well that's true for sure.
I guess that explains the streamlining....
Isn't hoping MS will stop being shitheads a lot like hoping the government will stop taxing people?
That's true, but the OS also has drivers for all sorts of stuff resident, daemons, and in the case of windows spyware and the like. I could see needing 32M less RAM on a console. (And I remember when 4M was a lot of RAM for a Unix machine...)
Not all solid state stuff has fast writes. Look at FLASH for example, can be designed to read really fast, but in the general case you have to clear blocks before writing, and the clear is slow.