Having people bitch that they cant afford Photoshop to edit pictures of their grand kids is just dumb. There are lower end packages that cost less then 50$ which will serve their purposes just fine.
Actually they tend not too, for example they lack the ability to mask out part of an image to run a unsharp mask on (many even lack the full unsharp mask). Many also lack multiple levels of undo (which is far more useful to the untrained dabbler). Many also have no layer support either.
The GIMP is a notable exception, it comes quite close to PhotoShop in most areas. It doesn't look to have the same color space handling, and last I tried it the trace tool was nowhere near as good. However it is amazingly cheaper then PhotoShop:-)
Bottom line, if you think the software costs too much then you don't really need it. Go use something else, be it Gimp or Adobe Image Effects. Dont bitch and moan about the cost of Photoshop and don't condone the piracy of the software
That part is true, something being overpriced seldom gives one the right to steal it (food might be an exception - it is at least an understandable).
Maybe something like grab a serial cable, hook up one end to the comp and the other end to a set of LEDs and then write a device driver that lights up the LEDs based on whether the webserver is server or the mail server is getting mail or something.
Simpler with a parallel port (and a bunch of LEDs, like a volume meter)...still there is a problem with debugging both a new driver and new hardware at the same time....
In any case, I would think it'd be easier the other way, that Linux has more drivers than BSD. Maybe he should try your suggestion in the opposite direction?
Well, if he wants to be a Linux kernel hacker starting with the BSD kernel isn't going to be the most helpful thing in the world...of corse BSD could use more kernel hackers, and it might be easier to make it "big time" in the less competitave BSD world (except some of the BSD hackers have been doing this for a very long time and are very good at it...like since the early 80s...which is why they can do so much with so many fewer people...)
If he really wants to be a Linux kernel hacker, he'll be better off taking a driver from *BSD, even if it is for a device Linux already has, and porting it. He will learn more about Linux that way then the other way around (I use BSD machines more frequently, so it would benifit me more for him to become a BSD kernel hacker, but...)
A good starter project is a device driver for something simple. Even easier is if you find a device Net/Free/OpenBSD supports and Linux doesn't, port the driver, that way there is somewhat less code to write.
That could be harder for you then me since Linux has so many drivers now (I started with 386BSD 0.0, so there were maybe 15 supported devices...my friend and I ported the MACH SoundBlaster driver). If all else fails, write a driver for something that already has a driver.
After that you can wonder off into the kernel proper and do some "real" stuff. I did IP traffic shaping, but someone seems to have done that to Linux already...
Yeah... But I was expecing something a bit bigger than this and photo orginising software.
Not just photo orginising, but flawed photo orginising software (makes a poor digital shoebox for my digital negitaves).
[rotating the iMac screen]
Well, if Apple don't do it. I'm guessing that someone else will release a app/hack to do so.
The software wouldn't be so hard, but it won't be useful unless you can rotate the LCD so I don't think we will see it...
Do you know if Mac OS X has heibernation? IE, when it saves the RAM to HDD and fully powers off.
I have never seen a reference to it, and wake up is way too fast for it to be in use (wake up appears to be less then a second, i.e. when I open the lid on my laptop the backlight is on before the lid is all the way up, and the scrren image is there -- I think it takes maybe 3 seconds before it responds to input though). Maybe there is something in some control panel I didn't see that enables it though.
Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"
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· Score: 2
When did Microsoft ever have a monopoly on the desktop market. The public schools here, have always run Apple.
I guess the answer to your question is, the same government protection that led to McDonalds' monopoly on fast-food, and Walmart's monopoly on cheap retail stores.
The legal definition differs from the mathmatical one. Mathmatically if the entire USA used Microsoft, except you then there would be no monopoly (well there is no mathmatical definition that I know of, but this seems like how it would work). Legally Apple having a 5% market share (with no sign of rapid advance), and "all others" having about 1% seems to be close enough to "all the beans".
So if 94% is enough, what is safe? Beats me, and that's one of the lame things about anti-trust law, it is hard to know when it applys to you, so you don't know exactly when you by law must stop doing all manner of things that just a moment ago you were required by your contract with your shareholders to do.... (the non-lame thing about anti-trust law is it has vastly reduced the number of monopolies and effectave monopolies).
I guess the answer to your question is, the same government protection that led to McDonalds' monopoly on fast-food
McDonalds doesn't have a 95% lead, there are not 20 McDonald's for evey one Burger King, plus both BK and Wendy's have a lot of stores, maybe less McD's all by itself, but "close enough". I can't eat at any of those places, but if I could I would have 3 or 4 to pick from, all roughly the same distance.
Walmart's monopoly on cheap retail stores.
Something makes me think they don't have 95% of that market either. It's harder to tell which retail stores are cheap just by glancing, so I don't really know though.
This seems very much a chicken/egg sort of argument - is it that Apple doesn't care about making the hardware hackable because Mac people don't hack hardware, or is it that all the hardware hackers stick to PCs because it's so hard and unrewarding to hack Mac hardware?
Probably not, the towers are modestly hackable, and the old clones were very hackable. Plus, in fact, the hardware hackers were very happy with the unexpandable 128K Mac. They made money upgrading them for people to 256K...
I've never actually seen a dead pixel on a quality Laptop from _any_ company.
They were more common in the past. About five years ago I had a DEC VERSA with a bad pixel in the lower left. I also have a SGI with a bad pixel closer to the center, I mostly don't notice it except when the screen saver kicks in.
I'd say that purchasing Apple equipment is a pretty safe bet.
This isn't flamebait, but isn't this the situation with all laptop vendors?
Well, laptops with a separate screen would be basically unmanageable and useless. A LCD iMac would not be significantly less useful if the screen were detachable.
Of corse this doesn't matter a whole lot since the screen on the iMac can come off without oo much trouble, and AppleCare (3 hear hardware and software support) costs half as much on the iMac as it does on the laptops.
add ram or a card (things they can still do on the new iMac)
As long as "a card" is always 802.11, and "memory" is never more then one stick.
External drives (FireWire) can also be added, which will quite fast, but more costly then adding a 2nd drive to a PC, and look kinda ugly out on the desk rather then in the case.
Mac users, especially, have no reason to cannibalise their old machines since every Mac comes with all the components - Apple doesn't sell "bare bones" systems.
You can take the old disk and put it in a new tower (as a second disk), not much else though.
One nice thing about all the FireWire Macs is you can make them act like a FW drive, so you can mount your old desktop or laptop on your new one and pull out all the files you want. That makes the upgrade process way way simpler and faster then setting up file sharing and moving the files over the ethernet, and maybe safer depending on what the network is hooked up to. Not a killer feature I admit, but nice.
With the exception of the logic board (motherboard), open a Power Mac desktop and you'll find the same Matrox IDE drives, the same nVidia video, the same SDRAM, and similar expandability
Well, no AGP (but I do think it has a 66Mhz 64bit slot), and more PCI slots tend to be free since the network sound and all are on the motherboard.
Remember the old days where every computer maker made a PC and their own OS? Only Apple does that now for mere mortals (Sun, SGI, and other unique non-Windows PCs excluded but acknowledged)
Well, Sun does sell the Netra X1 for less then Apple sells the new iMac...so any "mere mortals" that are happy with a command line can get one. They are great rack mount headless servers...
Hardly! In an ideal world I'd like them to bring that back too (w/ modern processor and OS X). But in the end the Cube didn't sell well enough to justify its one-off design (with all the corresponding unique elements).
FYI, the Cube does have a modern CPU, the G4 (only up to about 500~550Mhz though, so not as fast as the new iMac, or high end PowerBook). That is in fact the real reason it's price was so high (Er, at least that's my theory). Either the G4 was quite costly to Apple at the time (I kind of doubt this), or they wanted to keep the G4 prices all in the Pro line.
And selling iHubs would expand their marketshare further upstream, to people who need a slightly more serious computer.
I'm not sure there is a huge market there, definitely not as large as the people that want something more expandable like the G4 towers. Unfortunately the towers are rather overpriced, esp now with the G4 iMacs. Either their price has to come down, or they need a much faster CPU...
The trouble with LCD iMacs is the education market. Schools don't buy iMacs just because they are cheaper than iBooks, they buy them because they are more durable.The abuse that a computer takes in a school setting is enough to make me cringe
FYI, a lot of schools do but iBooks. Enough so that there are 3rd party carts that lock 35 or so iBooks up and charge them. As others have said the CRT iMacs are also staying at least for now (I think that has just as much to do with price though)
Do you know why Microsoft has dominated the industry? It's precisely because they have provided compatibility with everything[...]Apple, on the other hand, is notorious for leaving their older users out in the cold and saying "Tough sh**. Upgrade."
Um, so why do I have PC games I can't play, but my 1999 Mac will run MacDraw 0.9, even though it has a different CPU, color hardware, and I'm using OSX which is rather a bit different from the original...
I do admit Apple seems more prone to tell older hardware owners that they are no longer supporting the old hardware then MS does. I may have a distorted opinion there since I only got a Mac in '99 so the rather atypical upgrade to OSX is the only one I have seen (well, plus the one from B&W to color when I was in High School).
I also know Apple is rather notorious for not supporting undocumented APIs, that's why the don't document them (actually what they normally break isn't function calls, but variables so they are not even something the intended to provide and then backed out of, but the internal workings of the OS). As a programmer I'm in strong approval of that. It prevents either a build up of unsupported APIs you need to find out about from somewhere to be competitive, or to plow through nine or more official APIs all a bit different to do basically the same thing (not that having Cocoa plus Carbon is exactly a single API, but...).
Yeah, Ok, I buy that it doesn't have ports the older Mac's don't (ignoring the single extra USB). Er, does the old iMac have a VGA out? No, not a huge deal, but kinda nice. One of Apple's digital outs would have been better though....
I really just speculated on that since I was going to talk about the buttons anyway.
I can't see a power button on the monitor. I'm guessing there is one of the keyboard, along with the eject button. It would still make sense to have it on the unit as well.
I agree an eject on the case seems like a more useful place. However it is modestly more irritating if you press the "hard" eject only to have the computer produce a dialog saying "you can't eject the (thingie) because it's busy, you are still doing (whatever your doing) to it".
You have to keep in mind where people expect these buttons to be.
Really? Remember this is Apple, the first company I know of to remove the eject button/door for floppies (and on their first Mac no less).
It isn't what Apple hyped it up to be. It's just a new mac with a neat display mounting and case, but that's all.
I don't think Apple could have released anything that went beyond the hype. I don't recall a lot of rumors saying the iMac was now a G4 and could take the SuperDrive. Of corse I mostly ignore the rumor sites.
What would have been innovative was if they had a few ports on the front. That way, when Joe User come to plug in his handycam/digital camera/iPod, he dosn't have to lean over the desk, and wrestle with the computer just to plug it in.
Nice, but not innovative. Sony has been doing it for years (and I assume others as well). Personally I would like them on the side like the "old" iMac. They are mostly out of the way and look decent, but are easy to get too.
Someone else has said that it would be neat if you could rotate the LCD 90 degrees, and the video card could have an option to go into portrait mode.
That was one of my first thoughts on seeing it in person and moving the display around, except I figure Quartz should be able to correct for any amount of rotation, not just 90 degrees:-) That would be just the right amount of uselessly cool I think. (not the 90deg, that's really useful, I do it on my PowerBook a lot)
How about an IR port on the front? A lot of people still have gadgets that use IR (my Palm for example). Since it's sitting on the desk, and not below it, and IR port would be in the right spot.
Wouldn't bug me, but I wouldn't use it with my Palm (er, Visor). I've never used the IRDA on my PowerBook, I don't think my Viao has one, never got it to work right on my printer, and the only time I recall using it on my DEC VERSA was to do network games (before 802.11), and a few times under Unix to run PPP mostly to see if it could be done, some for fie transfers.
BTW, I have a win2k box, I use the power button to put it into hibination/suspend. I thing it makes more sence that way, than having it turn strait off or reset. I'm sure the old iMac I used did something similar. Does it not on your laptop?
Giving a quick push brings up a dialog with Restart, Sleep, Cancel, Shut Down (default). I don't use it since closing the lid puts it in sleep and I seldom remember it when I want to shutdown or reboot (since I have only done that three times since 1999 - of corse there have been more reboots after installing software, but that has been from clicking on the installers "Ok, reboot now").
FireWire isn't all that common on PCs, but other then that, I donno.
Examples: Power button on the back (?!!), no eject button on the CD drive.
There is an eject on the keyboard, not sure about a power though, there might be one. Personally I don't power down my Mac, just suspend it. Of corse mine is a laptop, I would do the same for the desktop, but having the power button would be nice.
The other Apple displays have a power button on the display, maybe they did the same here?
Re:A monopoly by definition is not a free market
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Broadband Obstacles
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· Score: 2
Define inept. Did you read the post about the guy who runs a small ISP providing DSL service, and is going under because the monopoly on local phone service prevents him from getting lines installed into his customer's house? (hint: no, you didn't. Go back and read it.) Is this guy just running a rinky-dink ISP that takes forever in getting service up - and is therefore inept? But what if the telco drags their feet installing local phone lines for non-telco ISPs, thereby putting them out of business, while providing service lickety-split for their own ISP service? Isn't that an abuse of the free-market system? (hint: yes, it is.) And furthermore, it's an abuse that only a monopoly can employ. Which brings us back on-topic: are monopolies a good thing - despite the fact that they are technically legal, as you so cluefully have already mentioned.
Let me clear something up, I'm not saying the RBOCs beat the DSL providers because the DSL providers are inept. I'm saying monopoly is not in and of itself illegal because there are many benign ways they can come about.
In fact if you read some of my other posts on this very thread you will see me asserting many of the things the RBOCs do are illegal for a monopoly to do.
This post is just about why I think monopolies are and should continue to be legal (which I didn't say anyone clearly state), which is different from what they should be prohibited from doing, and why.
Are monopolies a good thing? Not very frequently, and not here. I would like to see one company in charge of the monopoly installed wiring and central office space, and other companies paying it for access and providing services over it. Not one company that owns that, and uses it to make money, and rents it out when forced. Congress didn't ask me, nor did they pay much attention to the letters I wrote them.
Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"
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Broadband Obstacles
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· Score: 2
I thought that the AT&T monopoly was due to enforcement of patent laws against its competitors; in other words, the federal government did not "grant" AT&T a monopoly in the sense that it granted the Post Office a monopoly, but rather, allowed the monopoly to evolve naturally based on existing US patent law, as interpreted by the courts and legal system of the day.
No, a number of firms asserted they had telephones that worked without Bell's patent. I think most or all were found to be in violation, but by that time the patent had run out and they merely payed money. There may have been some that licensed the patent, but I'm not sure since Bell not only wanted a lot of money, but also control. Many more just waited for the patent to expire before they got into the market. The telephone didn't take off overnight, it took quite some time!
The monopoly was granted after the patents ran out (and I think it was actually granted to both AT&T and GTE, but my memory is hazy). The monopoly really was a Post Office style monopoly, it was an order that no one else could build a public phone system. In exchange things like universal service were demanded, and low "consumer" rates. So AT&T had high long distance and business rates and low consumer ones (which mostly was "corrected" in the late 80s), we still have universal access though (I assume in part because the RBOCs are still pretty much monopolies).
Note the ban was on public phone systems, so you did get things like internal railway telephones, like the Southern Pacific Railway INternal Telephone network, which later became SPRINT...look at their network map, a lot of their major fiber runs are still along railways...of corse same with many other LD telcos since railways are some of the few long haul right of ways...but with SPRINT a lot of that is historic.
However doing that over a dial up it may make snes to buy a CD, or have someone with more bandwidth burn one and mail it.
Re:A monopoly by definition is not a free market
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Broadband Obstacles
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· Score: 2
Perhaps this is true in the land of corporate greed, but monopolies are illegal in nearly every civilised/developed country.
Unless you are trying to imply that the USA is uncivilized it may come to a shock to hear that monopolies are legal in the USA.
It is legal to have almost all of a market. What's illegal is to act in anti-competitive ways after you are a monopoly, but not before. It is legal for a small player to try to keep other out of a market, but if you are almost the only player it is illegal to do most things that keep others out of the market.
It would be hard to make having 95% of the market illegal, after all the first company in any market has 100% of that market! Also it shouldn't be illegal for a company to beat other inept companies, right?
Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"
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Broadband Obstacles
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The myth that captalism leads to monopoly is utter and complete nonsense, and dangerous indeed. In every case, monopoly power can be traced to some form of govenrment protection.
Capitalism doesn't lead to monopoly, nor does it prevent it. What government protection led to Microsoft's monopoly of the desktop OS market? Or the office suite?
The only thing I can think of is the normal copyright protections, and also the laws preventing us from storming Redmond and killing them all:-) (I have some friends there I do hope we really wouldn't take out our ire that way)
What does a CD subscription to BSD get you that is better than a network download? Besides bandwidth reduction, always a good thing, what are the "pros" of buying one?
Not a whole lot in general, some of them give money back though. It's cheaper just to download the ISO and send your money directly though.
There is also a DVD subscription, which again contains nothing you couldn't download. However it has all the tar balls for the ports, and the full CVS history of the distribution. That's pretty cool. Still if you have all the bandwidth in the world it isn't anything you can't fetch on your own.
I've considered subscribing to BSD, especially for pre-built ports, since I run BSD on a couple of very old machines, but I would be very interested hearing about the value of doing so.
I'm not aware of any that have pre-built ports (other then the normal packages stuff), but there are multiple places selling subscriptions, so who knows.
Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"
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Broadband Obstacles
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· Score: 2
It's actually rare for a smart person to get caught.
I'm sure the uncought people tend to be smarter, but I'm not sure there is enough uncought criminals to assert that it's rare for the smart people to not get cought.
At least if you stick to real crimes, not victomless ones.
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Actually they tend not too, for example they lack the ability to mask out part of an image to run a unsharp mask on (many even lack the full unsharp mask). Many also lack multiple levels of undo (which is far more useful to the untrained dabbler). Many also have no layer support either.
The GIMP is a notable exception, it comes quite close to PhotoShop in most areas. It doesn't look to have the same color space handling, and last I tried it the trace tool was nowhere near as good. However it is amazingly cheaper then PhotoShop :-)
That part is true, something being overpriced seldom gives one the right to steal it (food might be an exception - it is at least an understandable).
Simpler with a parallel port (and a bunch of LEDs, like a volume meter)...still there is a problem with debugging both a new driver and new hardware at the same time....
Well, if he wants to be a Linux kernel hacker starting with the BSD kernel isn't going to be the most helpful thing in the world...of corse BSD could use more kernel hackers, and it might be easier to make it "big time" in the less competitave BSD world (except some of the BSD hackers have been doing this for a very long time and are very good at it...like since the early 80s...which is why they can do so much with so many fewer people...)
If he really wants to be a Linux kernel hacker, he'll be better off taking a driver from *BSD, even if it is for a device Linux already has, and porting it. He will learn more about Linux that way then the other way around (I use BSD machines more frequently, so it would benifit me more for him to become a BSD kernel hacker, but...)
A good starter project is a device driver for something simple. Even easier is if you find a device Net/Free/OpenBSD supports and Linux doesn't, port the driver, that way there is somewhat less code to write.
That could be harder for you then me since Linux has so many drivers now (I started with 386BSD 0.0, so there were maybe 15 supported devices...my friend and I ported the MACH SoundBlaster driver). If all else fails, write a driver for something that already has a driver.
After that you can wonder off into the kernel proper and do some "real" stuff. I did IP traffic shaping, but someone seems to have done that to Linux already...
Not just photo orginising, but flawed photo orginising software (makes a poor digital shoebox for my digital negitaves).
The software wouldn't be so hard, but it won't be useful unless you can rotate the LCD so I don't think we will see it...
I have never seen a reference to it, and wake up is way too fast for it to be in use (wake up appears to be less then a second, i.e. when I open the lid on my laptop the backlight is on before the lid is all the way up, and the scrren image is there -- I think it takes maybe 3 seconds before it responds to input though). Maybe there is something in some control panel I didn't see that enables it though.
The legal definition differs from the mathmatical one. Mathmatically if the entire USA used Microsoft, except you then there would be no monopoly (well there is no mathmatical definition that I know of, but this seems like how it would work). Legally Apple having a 5% market share (with no sign of rapid advance), and "all others" having about 1% seems to be close enough to "all the beans".
So if 94% is enough, what is safe? Beats me, and that's one of the lame things about anti-trust law, it is hard to know when it applys to you, so you don't know exactly when you by law must stop doing all manner of things that just a moment ago you were required by your contract with your shareholders to do.... (the non-lame thing about anti-trust law is it has vastly reduced the number of monopolies and effectave monopolies).
McDonalds doesn't have a 95% lead, there are not 20 McDonald's for evey one Burger King, plus both BK and Wendy's have a lot of stores, maybe less McD's all by itself, but "close enough". I can't eat at any of those places, but if I could I would have 3 or 4 to pick from, all roughly the same distance.
Something makes me think they don't have 95% of that market either. It's harder to tell which retail stores are cheap just by glancing, so I don't really know though.
D'oh! Ok, just went to the apple store and it says 4X AGP for the current G4 towers...so for the record I was quite wrong.
Probably not, the towers are modestly hackable, and the old clones were very hackable. Plus, in fact, the hardware hackers were very happy with the unexpandable 128K Mac. They made money upgrading them for people to 256K...
They were more common in the past. About five years ago I had a DEC VERSA with a bad pixel in the lower left. I also have a SGI with a bad pixel closer to the center, I mostly don't notice it except when the screen saver kicks in.
I agree.
Well, laptops with a separate screen would be basically unmanageable and useless. A LCD iMac would not be significantly less useful if the screen were detachable.
Of corse this doesn't matter a whole lot since the screen on the iMac can come off without oo much trouble, and AppleCare (3 hear hardware and software support) costs half as much on the iMac as it does on the laptops.
As long as "a card" is always 802.11, and "memory" is never more then one stick.
External drives (FireWire) can also be added, which will quite fast, but more costly then adding a 2nd drive to a PC, and look kinda ugly out on the desk rather then in the case.
You can take the old disk and put it in a new tower (as a second disk), not much else though.
One nice thing about all the FireWire Macs is you can make them act like a FW drive, so you can mount your old desktop or laptop on your new one and pull out all the files you want. That makes the upgrade process way way simpler and faster then setting up file sharing and moving the files over the ethernet, and maybe safer depending on what the network is hooked up to. Not a killer feature I admit, but nice.
Well, no AGP (but I do think it has a 66Mhz 64bit slot), and more PCI slots tend to be free since the network sound and all are on the motherboard.
Well, Sun does sell the Netra X1 for less then Apple sells the new iMac...so any "mere mortals" that are happy with a command line can get one. They are great rack mount headless servers...
Bad example, the G4 actually does really really well on RC4....but point taken anyway.
FYI, the Cube does have a modern CPU, the G4 (only up to about 500~550Mhz though, so not as fast as the new iMac, or high end PowerBook). That is in fact the real reason it's price was so high (Er, at least that's my theory). Either the G4 was quite costly to Apple at the time (I kind of doubt this), or they wanted to keep the G4 prices all in the Pro line.
I'm not sure there is a huge market there, definitely not as large as the people that want something more expandable like the G4 towers. Unfortunately the towers are rather overpriced, esp now with the G4 iMacs. Either their price has to come down, or they need a much faster CPU...
FYI, a lot of schools do but iBooks. Enough so that there are 3rd party carts that lock 35 or so iBooks up and charge them. As others have said the CRT iMacs are also staying at least for now (I think that has just as much to do with price though)
Um, so why do I have PC games I can't play, but my 1999 Mac will run MacDraw 0.9, even though it has a different CPU, color hardware, and I'm using OSX which is rather a bit different from the original...
I do admit Apple seems more prone to tell older hardware owners that they are no longer supporting the old hardware then MS does. I may have a distorted opinion there since I only got a Mac in '99 so the rather atypical upgrade to OSX is the only one I have seen (well, plus the one from B&W to color when I was in High School).
I also know Apple is rather notorious for not supporting undocumented APIs, that's why the don't document them (actually what they normally break isn't function calls, but variables so they are not even something the intended to provide and then backed out of, but the internal workings of the OS). As a programmer I'm in strong approval of that. It prevents either a build up of unsupported APIs you need to find out about from somewhere to be competitive, or to plow through nine or more official APIs all a bit different to do basically the same thing (not that having Cocoa plus Carbon is exactly a single API, but...).
Yeah, Ok, I buy that it doesn't have ports the older Mac's don't (ignoring the single extra USB). Er, does the old iMac have a VGA out? No, not a huge deal, but kinda nice. One of Apple's digital outs would have been better though....
I really just speculated on that since I was going to talk about the buttons anyway.
I agree an eject on the case seems like a more useful place. However it is modestly more irritating if you press the "hard" eject only to have the computer produce a dialog saying "you can't eject the (thingie) because it's busy, you are still doing (whatever your doing) to it".
Really? Remember this is Apple, the first company I know of to remove the eject button/door for floppies (and on their first Mac no less).
I don't think Apple could have released anything that went beyond the hype. I don't recall a lot of rumors saying the iMac was now a G4 and could take the SuperDrive. Of corse I mostly ignore the rumor sites.
Nice, but not innovative. Sony has been doing it for years (and I assume others as well). Personally I would like them on the side like the "old" iMac. They are mostly out of the way and look decent, but are easy to get too.
That was one of my first thoughts on seeing it in person and moving the display around, except I figure Quartz should be able to correct for any amount of rotation, not just 90 degrees :-) That would be just the right amount of uselessly cool I think. (not the 90deg, that's really useful, I do it on my PowerBook a lot)
Wouldn't bug me, but I wouldn't use it with my Palm (er, Visor). I've never used the IRDA on my PowerBook, I don't think my Viao has one, never got it to work right on my printer, and the only time I recall using it on my DEC VERSA was to do network games (before 802.11), and a few times under Unix to run PPP mostly to see if it could be done, some for fie transfers.
Giving a quick push brings up a dialog with Restart, Sleep, Cancel, Shut Down (default). I don't use it since closing the lid puts it in sleep and I seldom remember it when I want to shutdown or reboot (since I have only done that three times since 1999 - of corse there have been more reboots after installing software, but that has been from clicking on the installers "Ok, reboot now").
FireWire isn't all that common on PCs, but other then that, I donno.
There is an eject on the keyboard, not sure about a power though, there might be one. Personally I don't power down my Mac, just suspend it. Of corse mine is a laptop, I would do the same for the desktop, but having the power button would be nice.
The other Apple displays have a power button on the display, maybe they did the same here?
Let me clear something up, I'm not saying the RBOCs beat the DSL providers because the DSL providers are inept. I'm saying monopoly is not in and of itself illegal because there are many benign ways they can come about.
In fact if you read some of my other posts on this very thread you will see me asserting many of the things the RBOCs do are illegal for a monopoly to do.
This post is just about why I think monopolies are and should continue to be legal (which I didn't say anyone clearly state), which is different from what they should be prohibited from doing, and why.
Are monopolies a good thing? Not very frequently, and not here. I would like to see one company in charge of the monopoly installed wiring and central office space, and other companies paying it for access and providing services over it. Not one company that owns that, and uses it to make money, and rents it out when forced. Congress didn't ask me, nor did they pay much attention to the letters I wrote them.
No, a number of firms asserted they had telephones that worked without Bell's patent. I think most or all were found to be in violation, but by that time the patent had run out and they merely payed money. There may have been some that licensed the patent, but I'm not sure since Bell not only wanted a lot of money, but also control. Many more just waited for the patent to expire before they got into the market. The telephone didn't take off overnight, it took quite some time!
The monopoly was granted after the patents ran out (and I think it was actually granted to both AT&T and GTE, but my memory is hazy). The monopoly really was a Post Office style monopoly, it was an order that no one else could build a public phone system. In exchange things like universal service were demanded, and low "consumer" rates. So AT&T had high long distance and business rates and low consumer ones (which mostly was "corrected" in the late 80s), we still have universal access though (I assume in part because the RBOCs are still pretty much monopolies).
Note the ban was on public phone systems, so you did get things like internal railway telephones, like the Southern Pacific Railway INternal Telephone network, which later became SPRINT...look at their network map, a lot of their major fiber runs are still along railways...of corse same with many other LD telcos since railways are some of the few long haul right of ways...but with SPRINT a lot of that is historic.
You could try ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/IS O-IMAGES/4.4/ for ISOs, and FreeBSD.org, look on the upper right for notes on installing.
However doing that over a dial up it may make snes to buy a CD, or have someone with more bandwidth burn one and mail it.
Unless you are trying to imply that the USA is uncivilized it may come to a shock to hear that monopolies are legal in the USA.
It is legal to have almost all of a market. What's illegal is to act in anti-competitive ways after you are a monopoly, but not before. It is legal for a small player to try to keep other out of a market, but if you are almost the only player it is illegal to do most things that keep others out of the market.
It would be hard to make having 95% of the market illegal, after all the first company in any market has 100% of that market! Also it shouldn't be illegal for a company to beat other inept companies, right?
Capitalism doesn't lead to monopoly, nor does it prevent it. What government protection led to Microsoft's monopoly of the desktop OS market? Or the office suite?
The only thing I can think of is the normal copyright protections, and also the laws preventing us from storming Redmond and killing them all :-) (I have some friends there I do hope we really wouldn't take out our ire that way)
Not a whole lot in general, some of them give money back though. It's cheaper just to download the ISO and send your money directly though.
There is also a DVD subscription, which again contains nothing you couldn't download. However it has all the tar balls for the ports, and the full CVS history of the distribution. That's pretty cool. Still if you have all the bandwidth in the world it isn't anything you can't fetch on your own.
I'm not aware of any that have pre-built ports (other then the normal packages stuff), but there are multiple places selling subscriptions, so who knows.
D'oh! Yes, I did.
I'm sure the uncought people tend to be smarter, but I'm not sure there is enough uncought criminals to assert that it's rare for the smart people to not get cought.
At least if you stick to real crimes, not victomless ones.