But what was the last revolutionary software product to come out first on the Mac platform?
Oh... I dunno. There was that whole Mosaic web browser thing, but I don't know what those guys were thinking... beat the PC version onto the Internet by two weeks. And then there's that Myst game... made entirely on Macs (Quadras at the time, actually), running StrataStudio.
I don't think the mouse is that bad... once you have a realization and find that it works better as a fingertip-only mouse, rather than full-palm, it becomes a joy to use!
I haven't read through the whole discussion here, so please excuse me if this is has already been said. I just feel the point needs to be made!
When Apple decided to charge the 500MHz price for the 450MHz system, they also threw in 128MB of RAM--for free--to compensate. At current prices, that just about makes up the original cost difference between the 500MHz and 450MHz model.
From: "Brad Bradley" Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 11:50:03 -0600 To: general@macnn.com Subject: The reality of the price thing
Something to try...
I went to the Apple Store and custom built a G4-450(G4/40/128/20GB/DVD-ROM/Zip/modem/AGP) like the one that I currently have on my desk. The total tab was $2849. That is $350 dollars more that I paid for my computer. Now factor in the problem created with rising RAM prices and another rise in chips that took the Tiwan earthquake hit and I think that Apple is doing the reasonable thing considering the market prices it has to pay for parts. They have to pass the price along to the consumer. The hit looks really big if you only price the pre-built configurations form Apple. The reality is that it is not nearly as bad as most are making it sound.
Oh, and for those that don't believe me I will gladly purchase your working 128 meg PC100 RAM modules from you for last summers prices of $122.00 so you can go purchase new ones form the Chip Merchant today for $342.00
Let me say that I'm not condoning Apple's handling of this matter. They should have contacted the affected customers via, first, email, and then if no response within 48 hours, telephone, asking them if they wanted to "trade" 50MHz for 128MB of RAM added to their system. As it is now, Apple can't deliver the 500MHz chips; if they'd asked their customers if they would be willing to trade MHz for MB, I'm positive that the reaction on Slashdot would have been damned near positive!
I think it is telling that Apple views its mission to make sure that the common user does not understand "the black box"
What's more important in the consumer market? That the consumer can use the product to reach an end or that the consumer knows exactly what internal processes achieve the end? Very few people could tell you how their CD player or VCR works--but they can easily use them to reach their. You shouldn't need to muck around, resolving driver conflicts, trying to get Linux to run with your video card, etc.
I don't see why everyone is so riled-up over this. Monsanto, Cargill, etc. have all been limiting generational growth and have been adding marking agents for years. This is standard practice in the seed industry. Why? A lot of R&D goes into the development of geneticlly engineered seeds and, like high-end 3d rendering software, its a vertical market prone to piracy. Yes, there are seed pirates. Any farmer with a combine (harvester), modern chemicals (40 gallons of FallowMaster = US$740 or so), and a seed cleaner can pirate and put out a product that is just as good as the big boys.
I know that OpenSource works just peechy for software, but it doesn't work for 'plantware'. Unlike OpenSource, the creation of a new breed of a seed isn't dispersed to darkened rooms across the planet, filled with hoh-ho wrappers and stacks of jolt cola in a proud attempt at making a bucky-ball. This is research laboratory stuff, folks. There are amazing start-up costs, costs to keep everything running, R&D, marketing (sorry, the farm economy isn't terribly wired yet), etc., etc. The seed companies need, to an extent, protect their investment and their product.
(This isn't to say that they're rat-bastards--they do overcharge and they could allow for only two generations.)
And who am I? Just a rural North Dakotan who has spent his entire life in a agricultural based economy. My father is a grain marketer for Benson-Quinn; when the elevator is short staffed, he'll still go load train cars. I've fixed fence. I've spent a day sitting in a combine actually doing something useful.
Ummm.... the general rule on the Mac is that you leave virtual memory on unless you really need the.5% of extra performance taken up by the overhead. As long as you're not pushing applications beyond your actual, built-in RAM, you really don't notice the speed hit, even in Photoshop.
On PowerPC Macs, having virtual memory on forces applications to leave their resource forks on disk rather than loading them into RAM. Resource forks can get mighty huge. Photoshop 5.5, for example, requires about 7000 K more RAM with VM off than it does on and I think Excel 98's RAM usage ballons by 11MB with VM off. (Then again, this is from the same company that brought us Microsoft RAM Gobbler 4.5, the web browser which, when left running for 6 hours, will suck every last bit of RAM for itself.)
Of course, I always turn VM off when doing a render:-)
Typical Slashdot reaction -- anything remotely bad happens to Apple and it's immediately Apple's fault. Steve Jobs could have a cold and, by gawd, Apple is going to go down the crapper.
Let's look at this at face value, okay?
This is not Apple's fault. Does Apple fab or design the chips? No. That's Motorola, hence this is Motorola's fault
Motorola isn't the only company that occassionally has problems with their chips--How late is Merced? AMD doesn't have a clean record either...
The 500MHz + systems aren't even shipping yet. This is complaining about a problem with product foo when product foo hasn't even been tested as it will ship let alone shipped to the public.
I'm not saying that this isn't a bad thing -- just saying that everyone is making it out to be far worse than it actually is.
I know this is way off topic, but the comment about "publicity" jarred this thought: Andover, SlashDot and Rob got mentioned in the latest copy of Wired (7.11) on page 99. Keen.
I'm using InternetExplorer 4.5, mainly because it has the closest standards support, much better in the CSS-1 arena when compared to Netscape 4.7.
However, IE's JavaScript is horrid, often going nut's on Microsoft's own pages. (Now that's just plain humorous.) From a pure, 'sane application' stand point, IE is evil. Nasty memory leaks which Microsoft describes as features, not bugs -- mainly IE's tendenacny to use all available RAM on your system as a RAM cache, eventually hanging the machine.
Over the weekend, I added yet another hard drive to my PowerCenter Pro 210. (A Mac clone for the uninitiated.) The PCPs shipped in a mid-tower case with three 5.25" accessible drive bays on the front bezel, one 3.5" drive bay not accessible through the bezel, and a bracket under the power supply that lets you hang two 3.5" drives for internal RAID. Nifty.
My problem is that I've run out of drive bays. CD-ROM, Zip, Jaz all are in the 5.25" bays with two, 9.1GB UltraSCSI (part of the upgrade...) drives doing the RAID thing, and an old 2.0GB drive in the final 3.5" bay.
Solutin? Yank the floppy and -- presto! -- one last 3.5" drive bay. I don't miss it at all... I don't even/have/ any floppies anymore. The Zip, Jaz, CD-RW, Travan, and Syquest work quite well, thank you:-)
It's also rumored that the next serie of PowerBooks will ship sans fan, eeking out maybe another 30 minutes or so of battery life. Keen. I just want the damned BookCovers back from the 1400s. We have one at work (newspaper) along with a solar panel that sits in the bookcover spot. If you work near a sunny window, you can easily go all day without plugging it in.
Huh? You're using floppies for long term storage? Your problem isn't a lack of a floppy drive -- it'd be a lack of any salvageable data on the floppy itself. What is MTBF for a 3.5" floppy? 2 days?;-)
This is all very odd; no offense to our Australian friends, but if you were going after a foreign stock market, wouldn't you take Tokyo, London, or Berlin?
4.7 and still the CSS sucks... gods know we can't cascade elements properly!
And on a Mac note, Netscape still hasn't updated to the latest version of the Mercutio MDEF. Using an old copy of the MDEF with MacOS 8.5 + will cause crashes. It takes like 30 seconds to fix in ResEdit and can be done for free... yet a year later, Netscape still hasn't fixed the problem! Argh!
I've been playing with the betas of MacOS 9 for a bit and one of the nicest new features is a direct search of online auction sites like eBay using Sherlock II. Last I heard Microsoft is also planning to add similar functionality in InternetExplorer 5.0 for the MacOS (and presumably 5.x for Windows as well).
It'll be interesting to see how eBay handles this one, seeing as how a Sherlock plugin just taps into a remote search engine using their own code--it just calls their perl, PHP, etc. from your local machine. I don't know if eBay could really get irked about this, seeing as you'd technically still be using their search engine.
The other posts didn't quite nail it. The reason there isn't a G4 iMac is rather simple--the iMac is a machine targeted at the consumer market and, hence, gets the smaller, slower, less expensive (and cooler) chip.
I admit, the keyboard really bites, but the mouse isn't so terrible bad. It's quite small, being only about 1.5" in diamter. The mouse is very smooth and light to the touch, making it easy to use with your fingertips instead of your whole hand. I actually like it more than my tradational Apple mouse.
If the greedy record companies could find a method to secure the data on, say, a UDF formatted CD-ROM, why not distribute albums in the form MP3s? If you want to release a normal length album, just use one of the 3.5" CDs (yes, they exist) which should easily hold an hours worth of music. That would cut costs even more, thus satisfying greed.
Another thought: Complete Discographies on one CD. I've already done this with my Pink Floyd, Simon and Garfunkle, Beatles, etc... I just think it would really be cool to have it all on one CD from the record label. (For the packaging, you know!)
I must say I do support the right of the artist to maintain control and profit from their music and works--as it is now, I think the record industry takes more money from the artists than pirated MP3sever could. Why not abolish the labels entirely, give the artists control of their music, and allow the artists to hire the labels mainly as promotional and manufacturing devices?
Any guesses if French Mac lovers will be able to do something about this as the iBook ships en masse?
You have to remember that the AirPort card is an optional card, not part of the motherboard itself. If all else fails, Apple simply won't ship the iBooks or G4 desktops with AirPort cards.
And rumor has it that Apple is working on an AirPort base station with more oomph. I've heard 150m (~~450 feet) plus.
Found some more info on IEEE 802.11 and, specifically, Apple's Airport.
Macintouch has a very goodreport on wireless networking, which should satisfy even/. readers with its thoroughness and technical nature and is, amazingly, platform agnostic for the most part.
Slashdot Mirror
Know what I'm thinking???: Two Guys, A Girl, and a Linux Box ;-)
But what was the last revolutionary software product to come out first on the Mac platform?
Oh... I dunno. There was that whole Mosaic web browser thing, but I don't know what those guys were thinking... beat the PC version onto the Internet by two weeks. And then there's that Myst game... made entirely on Macs (Quadras at the time, actually), running StrataStudio.
I don't think the mouse is that bad... once you have a realization and find that it works better as a fingertip-only mouse, rather than full-palm, it becomes a joy to use!
I haven't read through the whole discussion here, so please excuse me if this is has already been said. I just feel the point needs to be made!
When Apple decided to charge the 500MHz price for the 450MHz system, they also threw in 128MB of RAM--for free--to compensate. At current prices, that just about makes up the original cost difference between the 500MHz and 450MHz model.
From MacNN:
Let me say that I'm not condoning Apple's handling of this matter. They should have contacted the affected customers via, first, email, and then if no response within 48 hours, telephone, asking them if they wanted to "trade" 50MHz for 128MB of RAM added to their system. As it is now, Apple can't deliver the 500MHz chips; if they'd asked their customers if they would be willing to trade MHz for MB, I'm positive that the reaction on Slashdot would have been damned near positive!
I think it is telling that Apple views its mission to make sure that the common user does not understand "the black box"
What's more important in the consumer market? That the consumer can use the product to reach an end or that the consumer knows exactly what internal processes achieve the end? Very few people could tell you how their CD player or VCR works--but they can easily use them to reach their. You shouldn't need to muck around, resolving driver conflicts, trying to get Linux to run with your video card, etc.
I don't see why everyone is so riled-up over this. Monsanto, Cargill, etc. have all been limiting generational growth and have been adding marking agents for years. This is standard practice in the seed industry. Why? A lot of R&D goes into the development of geneticlly engineered seeds and, like high-end 3d rendering software, its a vertical market prone to piracy. Yes, there are seed pirates. Any farmer with a combine (harvester), modern chemicals (40 gallons of FallowMaster = US$740 or so), and a seed cleaner can pirate and put out a product that is just as good as the big boys.
I know that OpenSource works just peechy for software, but it doesn't work for 'plantware'. Unlike OpenSource, the creation of a new breed of a seed isn't dispersed to darkened rooms across the planet, filled with hoh-ho wrappers and stacks of jolt cola in a proud attempt at making a bucky-ball. This is research laboratory stuff, folks. There are amazing start-up costs, costs to keep everything running, R&D, marketing (sorry, the farm economy isn't terribly wired yet), etc., etc. The seed companies need, to an extent, protect their investment and their product.
(This isn't to say that they're rat-bastards--they do overcharge and they could allow for only two generations.)
And who am I? Just a rural North Dakotan who has spent his entire life in a agricultural based economy. My father is a grain marketer for Benson-Quinn; when the elevator is short staffed, he'll still go load train cars. I've fixed fence. I've spent a day sitting in a combine actually doing something useful.
Ummm.... the general rule on the Mac is that you leave virtual memory on unless you really need the .5% of extra performance taken up by the overhead. As long as you're not pushing applications beyond your actual, built-in RAM, you really don't notice the speed hit, even in Photoshop.
On PowerPC Macs, having virtual memory on forces applications to leave their resource forks on disk rather than loading them into RAM. Resource forks can get mighty huge. Photoshop 5.5, for example, requires about 7000 K more RAM with VM off than it does on and I think Excel 98's RAM usage ballons by 11MB with VM off. (Then again, this is from the same company that brought us Microsoft RAM Gobbler 4.5, the web browser which, when left running for 6 hours, will suck every last bit of RAM for itself.)
Of course, I always turn VM off when doing a render :-)
Typical Slashdot reaction -- anything remotely bad happens to Apple and it's immediately Apple's fault. Steve Jobs could have a cold and, by gawd, Apple is going to go down the crapper.
Let's look at this at face value, okay?
I'm not saying that this isn't a bad thing -- just saying that everyone is making it out to be far worse than it actually is.
I know this is way off topic, but the comment about "publicity" jarred this thought: Andover, SlashDot and Rob got mentioned in the latest copy of Wired (7.11) on page 99. Keen.
Actually, I was thinking script kiddy.
Installed M10 on my Mac but it kept kicking out 'Cannot Create Profile' errors. Hmmm... and I made sure to move my Communicator Profiles folder.
I'm using InternetExplorer 4.5, mainly because it has the closest standards support, much better in the CSS-1 arena when compared to Netscape 4.7.
However, IE's JavaScript is horrid, often going nut's on Microsoft's own pages. (Now that's just plain humorous.) From a pure, 'sane application' stand point, IE is evil. Nasty memory leaks which Microsoft describes as features, not bugs -- mainly IE's tendenacny to use all available RAM on your system as a RAM cache, eventually hanging the machine.
Over the weekend, I added yet another hard drive to my PowerCenter Pro 210. (A Mac clone for the uninitiated.) The PCPs shipped in a mid-tower case with three 5.25" accessible drive bays on the front bezel, one 3.5" drive bay not accessible through the bezel, and a bracket under the power supply that lets you hang two 3.5" drives for internal RAID. Nifty.
/have/ any floppies anymore. The Zip, Jaz, CD-RW, Travan, and Syquest work quite well, thank you :-)
My problem is that I've run out of drive bays. CD-ROM, Zip, Jaz all are in the 5.25" bays with two, 9.1GB UltraSCSI (part of the upgrade...) drives doing the RAID thing, and an old 2.0GB drive in the final 3.5" bay.
Solutin? Yank the floppy and -- presto! -- one last 3.5" drive bay. I don't miss it at all... I don't even
It's also rumored that the next serie of PowerBooks will ship sans fan, eeking out maybe another 30 minutes or so of battery life. Keen. I just want the damned BookCovers back from the 1400s. We have one at work (newspaper) along with a solar panel that sits in the bookcover spot. If you work near a sunny window, you can easily go all day without plugging it in.
OEM... OEM... disclaimer: I'm not sure if anyone has shipped a slot player OEM, but I believe Apple is the first major manufacturer to do so.
Huh? You're using floppies for long term storage? Your problem isn't a lack of a floppy drive -- it'd be a lack of any salvageable data on the floppy itself. What is MTBF for a 3.5" floppy? 2 days? ;-)
This is all very odd; no offense to our Australian friends, but if you were going after a foreign stock market, wouldn't you take Tokyo, London, or Berlin?
To paraphrase the great Gary Larson...
4.7 and still the CSS sucks... gods know we can't cascade elements properly!
And on a Mac note, Netscape still hasn't updated to the latest version of the Mercutio MDEF. Using an old copy of the MDEF with MacOS 8.5 + will cause crashes. It takes like 30 seconds to fix in ResEdit and can be done for free... yet a year later, Netscape still hasn't fixed the problem! Argh!
I've been playing with the betas of MacOS 9 for a bit and one of the nicest new features is a direct search of online auction sites like eBay using Sherlock II. Last I heard Microsoft is also planning to add similar functionality in InternetExplorer 5.0 for the MacOS (and presumably 5.x for Windows as well).
It'll be interesting to see how eBay handles this one, seeing as how a Sherlock plugin just taps into a remote search engine using their own code--it just calls their perl, PHP, etc. from your local machine. I don't know if eBay could really get irked about this, seeing as you'd technically still be using their search engine.
The other posts didn't quite nail it. The reason there isn't a G4 iMac is rather simple--the iMac is a machine targeted at the consumer market and, hence, gets the smaller, slower, less expensive (and cooler) chip.
I admit, the keyboard really bites, but the mouse isn't so terrible bad. It's quite small, being only about 1.5" in diamter. The mouse is very smooth and light to the touch, making it easy to use with your fingertips instead of your whole hand. I actually like it more than my tradational Apple mouse.
If the greedy record companies could find a method to secure the data on, say, a UDF formatted CD-ROM, why not distribute albums in the form MP3s? If you want to release a normal length album, just use one of the 3.5" CDs (yes, they exist) which should easily hold an hours worth of music. That would cut costs even more, thus satisfying greed.
Another thought: Complete Discographies on one CD. I've already done this with my Pink Floyd, Simon and Garfunkle, Beatles, etc... I just think it would really be cool to have it all on one CD from the record label. (For the packaging, you know!)
I must say I do support the right of the artist to maintain control and profit from their music and works--as it is now, I think the record industry takes more money from the artists than pirated MP3sever could. Why not abolish the labels entirely, give the artists control of their music, and allow the artists to hire the labels mainly as promotional and manufacturing devices?
Just a thought...
Any guesses if French Mac lovers will be able to do something about this as the iBook ships en masse?
You have to remember that the AirPort card is an optional card, not part of the motherboard itself. If all else fails, Apple simply won't ship the iBooks or G4 desktops with AirPort cards.
And rumor has it that Apple is working on an AirPort base station with more oomph. I've heard 150m (~~450 feet) plus.
Found some more info on IEEE 802.11 and, specifically, Apple's Airport.