Even if it were just a rebranded linux distro, that's still a pretty big deal. The brand identity that Google brings to the table is no small thing, and would make many who currently disregard linx/open source to stand up and take notice. If they were to successful marry their search (and other) technologies into a desktop os, they would have something to distinguish themselves from the other distros.
No, I was talking about Star Wars Battlefront. Here's a blurb about the Mac version announcement, including system requirements.
It's a pretty fun game, especially for online play. (I rented the Playstation version and played for a few days.) From what I understand, it's pretty much just Battlefield 1942, except set in the Star Wars universe. A basic FPS, with land and air vehicles to pilot.
Can you point out one shipping game for the mac that the mac mini does not meet the requirements for?
Unfortunately, I can. Star Wars Battlegrounds requires 64Mb of video ram, but the Mini only has 32Mb. Well, I guess it's not shipping yet, so you are technically correct. But this is the first game that I checked the specs against the Mini, and was shocked that it wouldn't be supported. I was pleasantly surprised that most other games available for the Mac platform only require 32Mb at most.
Although, my expectation is that there will be a Mini rev. B sometime around June, that will up the graphics to 64Mb, and (hopefully) include digital audio out. This is pure speculation on my part, but it fits with the pattern of previous Mac models.
It's true that not all Macs can run linux. It's also true that not everything works completely in some distributions on a Mac. Yellow Dog is the most popular PPC distribution that is made specifically for running on a Mac. Looking at their support pages, it seems there are issues with ALSA sound. They don't yet have support documentation that describes the Mini, but the nearest relative would have to be the G4 iBook.
Here is what they have to say about running YDL on it.
SuSE also has a PPC distribution, but I get the impression it is geared more towards IBM's PPC based servers. At any rate, here is some information from them on the subject of Mac support. There are still other PPC distros that you can investigate the compatibility issues on your own.
Depending on what you'd like to do with linux, running it on a Mini may or may not be right for you. If you just want to tinker, and familiarize yourself with the platform, I'd say go for it. Because you've got one hell of an OS installed along side it with OS X. If you plan to try to get lots of different devices to work under linux on PPC, you're probably better off with x86 hardware.
To sum up, do your homework before you open your wallet. Ask yourself honestly what the purpose of running linux is, and what trade offs you might be willing to make if necessary. And finally, don't forget the OS X factor. You absolutely can't run that on the x86. And it's a really, really nice OS that can also give you an excellent unix experience, albeit a somewhat different experience than linux.
Yep, those guys are the the best I've found for upgrading Macs. I've bought a ton of stuff from them to upgrade my Rev. A G3, known affectionately as FrankenMac. It's got an upgraded (and overclocked) CPU from them, maxed out the ram with three 256mb sticks, upgraded to a 10k rpm scsi drive, pci usb & firewire cards, and a video ram upgrade. I also added a 10/100 ethernet card, but not from them. I've considered upgrading to a 1ghz G3 processor, and a 128meg ATI video card, but at this point, I'd rather put that money towards a shiny new Mac. This one just chugs along doing everything I ask of it anyhow. (It's currently running headless as an internet firewall/gateway and mp3 server.)
I've never understood where people are coming from that say you can't upgrade a Mac. This old bugger has the CPU in a ZIF socket, three PCI slots, IDE and SCSI on the motherboard, and takes standard ram. You can also get a cheap ($10) VGA converter to use any old monitor with it.
The firewire card I popped in was expressly labeled that it would not work in a Mac. But when I compared it to their Mac offering that was about 5x the price, they looked like the same card to me. So, I took a leap of faith that it wouldn't hurt my machine, and it was up and running, with no drivers to install, in a matter of minutes, and I've never had any problem with it what so ever. Definitely an example of a 3rd party gouging the Mac users. (Note: the firewire card was NOT purchased from OWC.)
Well, in order to help you make a fully informed decision, are you aware that several linux distributions will run on the Mini? So it would give you the ability to run linux and OS X.
I can't give a damn about those propriatery sharing systems
The iTunes sharing uses Rendezvous, also known as ZeroConf, and it is an IETF standard. It's already available on every other major operating system, including Linux, *BSD and Windows. And the actual transport protocol is daap, which is also available on the above mentioned operating systems. But ZeroConf is used for much more than just sharing music libraries. For instance, I set up a SuSE Linux workstation at my house about six months ago. Imagine my surprise, when I went to print something, and the default was the USB printer attached to my girlfriend's iMac. All configured and ready to go. Compared to the contortions I had to go through at work to set up printing from Linux in a pure Windows environment, I was floored.
You should really give iTunes a try. It's a great music library manager, and not just a front end to the music store and iPods. It's the one application that I really miss when I'm using my Linux machine.
Yep, a home built MythTV box is going to cost more than TiVo, and it's not exactly a plug and play experience. Here's an approximate breakdown of what I spent building mine:
$30 case
$70 motherboard (Shuttle MN31N)
$80 cpu (AMD Athlon XP 2500+)
$90 512 meg ram
$50 40 gig harddrive
$120 250 gig harddrive
$180 Hauppauge PVR-350
$80 DVD burner (not necessary, but nice to have)
Many, many hours getting the right combination of drivers, etc compiled
Now, before anybody jumps all over me and says I could have saved $x here or there, I should point out that I originally built the computer to be a linux workstation, and then decided to try my hand at building a DVR. Originally, I spent $335, including shipping, to put together a decent box to run SuSE 9.1. I went for the Shuttle mobo so I wouldn't have to buy a seperate graphics card or sound card. This board has a twin VGA nVidia GeForce4 MX with shared memory, Realtek ALC650 audio, and onboard 1394 and USB 2.0. It is capable of digital audio out with the addition of a $30 header board. I went with the AMD processor because I wanted good performance, without spending too much. The board supports anything from a Duron 700 up to an Athlon XP3000+ (or possibly higher, I think that's all that was out when the documentation was printed).
So, if you wanted to trim the price down further, you could find a motherboard with integrated graphics that has S-Video out, and then get the cheaper Hauppauge PVR-250 or another capture card. This will give up some quality, as the PVR-350's video out is allegedly much better than other graphics cards, but it's a trade-off for price. You could get by with a lot slower processor than mine. You can get buy with a lot less memory than I have. You could probably find a case for free or close to it.
Another possible route would be to start with a Shuttle bare bones system, and add a Hauppauge or other capture card into the one PCI slot. I hope to add more capture cards to my system, so I ended up ruling out this solution.
As far as the time I put into it, I consider that to be an education. Without a reason, I wouldn't normally get my hands so deep into the o/s internals. I learned a lot about kernel modules and how they work on this project.
If you decide to do this, I highly recommend it. But don't go into it thinking it's a way to get cheap TiVo. It's a way to have fun building a cool project that you will (hopefully) enjoy long after the building is done. I still take a lot of pride in my system, and really enjoy showing it off to guests. And it does a whole lot more than TiVo, I should add.
You are mistaken. My MythTV box, built around the Hauppauge PVR-350, has better quality encoding than TiVo. MPEG-2 recording at full SDTV resolution of 720x480, while an unhacked TiVo is limited to around half that.
You'd be amazed what some monkeys wearing ties can (and will) do with Access. And how many people will be willing to run part of their business on such an app.
I have a friend who runs a fairly successful consulting business by building apps for companies solely in Access. He's a pretty clever guy, so I'm sure he's good at it, but he has such a bias, he absolutely refuses to even look at (literally) Linux or MySQL or any other non-encumbered solutions. I think that he knows he's a god in his Access-world, but would be merely mortal and have a lot of catching up to do with any other type of solution.
And yes, he's run into scalability issues, which he solves by throwing more hardware at the problem, and reliability issues, which I don't know how he overcomes.
Anytime I mention an open source or other non-Microsoft solution, he launches into a speech about X being a fad that will never catch on. Of course, he's said the same thing about the internet in the past, and I suspect he still believes it.
I'm as excited as anyone else about Pages, but I think having a native office suite that is a drop in replacement for MS Office is critical to wider adoption of the Mac. It's been obvious for a while that no one is going to do it for Apple. What I feel they need to do is take the OO code, and set their best and brightest on the task of making it a seamless native Mac application.
They could even outsource it to the good guys at The Omni Group, who seem to have a handle on making beautiful Aqua applications, and have experience porting applications to the Mac platform.
At any rate, they need to be prepared for the inevitable dropping of Mac support from MS Office. Internet Explorer was just a warning shot, but now that Apple is poised to step further into Microsoft's perceived territory, retaliatory strikes are simply a matter of when, not if.
Because I don't run the mail server, since it's my.mac account. Otherwise I most certainly would. Anyhow, Mail.app correctly identifies them and tosses them into my Junk folder, so I only see them when I check for false positives, which are extremely rare.
I considered asking Apple to blacklist it, but I'm sure a sizable amount of.mac users have 'opted-in' to their spam, in the hopes of getting a free iPod or movie tickets or whatever bribe their currently offering.
Well, I'm pretty lucky, there. My mom (also an artist) has always been a Mac user, as well as the rest of my immediate family. In fact, I got my start with computers when my dad brought home an Apple ][+ back in 1980. So far, I'm the only member of the family that has ever owned any x86 hardware, and that's only been in the last year that I decided I wanted a box to do linuxy stuff on.
I also find it a pleasure to give the occasional support to my Mac using family, and a chore to support the "other" platform.
I swear, the next disposable $500 I get, I'm going to buy a Mac Mini, and loan it out to the non-believers in my girlfriend's family while I take their computers 'back to the shop' for repairs. Then they can have the option of having their old box back, or purchasing the loaner after using it for a week. (I'm only half kidding. I know this could backfire, but it'd be a fun experiment, and a win-win for those that switch, since they then move into the 'joy to support' category.)
I'm quite serious. I have yet to see a single pop-up ad, virus or trojan on my always on, trusty Macintosh. My girlfriend, who's not a computer geek by any measure of the word, was perplexed by what her relatives were talking about with all the problems they've been having with their computers. She once asked, "is it really that bad of a problem on non-Macs?"
Also, using my.mac account for my primary email, I get about five spams a day. And each and every one of them originate from the same company, that a 'friend' of mine signed me up so she could get some free movie tickets. (She is actually an ex-friend over this very issue... she went ballistic when I asked her not to give out my personal information or send me stupid forwarded joke emails. Her response back screamed I WILL NEVER SEND YOU ANOTHER EMAIL, EVER! and I said, "fine by me.") I could try to get rid of those five per day emails, but I'm afraid of increasing the amount by using their 'unsubscribe' link.
Well, the main difference between Apple's approach compared to the Microsoft way hinges on the word requires as opposed to utilizes.
I have a (slightly warmed over) Rev. A beige G3, that is running OS X 10.2 quite nicely despite it's extremely dated Rage II (upgraded to 6MB of vram!) onboard graphics. The iMac I am typing on right now is running the latest OS X 10.3 despite it's lowly Rage128Pro graphics (8MB vram in this powerhouse!). I'm still able to do everything I need to do on these machines, I just miss out on some eye candy.
When I hear of Microsoft forcing required hardware on people, it makes me wonder if they have some anti-Linux tricks up their sleeve. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if, down the road perhaps, these hardware requirements include a Palladium derived 'solution'.
I predict that competing spammers will start to register these domains out from under their brethren, in an attempt to steal their sales leads. While not directly helping the spam dilemma, at least the spammers will waste some time, effort and money in an escalating war between each other...
However, what if there was a way to lock the domain for a period of time if the domain is identified as a spam advertised site?
Report any landlord whose reply amounts to "tough shit" to a watchdog organization such as the BBB.
If the landlord doesn't want to play, he can just ask to see your low-voltage electrical contractors license.
Even if the landlord is cool about it, if the apartment is brick construction, you can forget dropping cable in the walls. And going through hvac ducts is against building code in many (most?) locales.
Also, it only has DVI out, so an adapter for RGBS would be needed if you plan to use an old CRT.
It ships with a converter. You should really check your facts before troll^h^h^h^h^hposting.
Apple still isn't cheap, they're just a little closer to affordable.
Well, the crappy Dell you keep pointing to is actually $499. Your $349 price is after mail-in rebate. By the time you factor in having to put up with that virus/spyware vector posing as an operating system, the Mac is a much better deal in many peoples mind.
How crippled is the version of OS/X that ships with Mac Mini? I was to understand it's to be somewhat like XP Home vs Pro.
Now you're just outright lying. Please. Show me a link anywhere that mentions a stripped down version of OS X. Else, begone Troll!
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Even if it were just a rebranded linux distro, that's still a pretty big deal. The brand identity that Google brings to the table is no small thing, and would make many who currently disregard linx/open source to stand up and take notice. If they were to successful marry their search (and other) technologies into a desktop os, they would have something to distinguish themselves from the other distros.
It's a pretty fun game, especially for online play. (I rented the Playstation version and played for a few days.) From what I understand, it's pretty much just Battlefield 1942, except set in the Star Wars universe. A basic FPS, with land and air vehicles to pilot.
Unfortunately, I can. Star Wars Battlegrounds requires 64Mb of video ram, but the Mini only has 32Mb. Well, I guess it's not shipping yet, so you are technically correct. But this is the first game that I checked the specs against the Mini, and was shocked that it wouldn't be supported. I was pleasantly surprised that most other games available for the Mac platform only require 32Mb at most.
Although, my expectation is that there will be a Mini rev. B sometime around June, that will up the graphics to 64Mb, and (hopefully) include digital audio out. This is pure speculation on my part, but it fits with the pattern of previous Mac models.
SuSE also has a PPC distribution, but I get the impression it is geared more towards IBM's PPC based servers. At any rate, here is some information from them on the subject of Mac support. There are still other PPC distros that you can investigate the compatibility issues on your own.
Depending on what you'd like to do with linux, running it on a Mini may or may not be right for you. If you just want to tinker, and familiarize yourself with the platform, I'd say go for it. Because you've got one hell of an OS installed along side it with OS X. If you plan to try to get lots of different devices to work under linux on PPC, you're probably better off with x86 hardware.
To sum up, do your homework before you open your wallet. Ask yourself honestly what the purpose of running linux is, and what trade offs you might be willing to make if necessary. And finally, don't forget the OS X factor. You absolutely can't run that on the x86. And it's a really, really nice OS that can also give you an excellent unix experience, albeit a somewhat different experience than linux.
I'll have you know, young whippersnapper, that the Kinks wrote and sang that song a couple of decades before there were any Pretenders.
I've never understood where people are coming from that say you can't upgrade a Mac. This old bugger has the CPU in a ZIF socket, three PCI slots, IDE and SCSI on the motherboard, and takes standard ram. You can also get a cheap ($10) VGA converter to use any old monitor with it.
The firewire card I popped in was expressly labeled that it would not work in a Mac. But when I compared it to their Mac offering that was about 5x the price, they looked like the same card to me. So, I took a leap of faith that it wouldn't hurt my machine, and it was up and running, with no drivers to install, in a matter of minutes, and I've never had any problem with it what so ever. Definitely an example of a 3rd party gouging the Mac users. (Note: the firewire card was NOT purchased from OWC.)
Well, in order to help you make a fully informed decision, are you aware that several linux distributions will run on the Mini? So it would give you the ability to run linux and OS X.
The iTunes sharing uses Rendezvous, also known as ZeroConf, and it is an IETF standard. It's already available on every other major operating system, including Linux, *BSD and Windows. And the actual transport protocol is daap, which is also available on the above mentioned operating systems. But ZeroConf is used for much more than just sharing music libraries. For instance, I set up a SuSE Linux workstation at my house about six months ago. Imagine my surprise, when I went to print something, and the default was the USB printer attached to my girlfriend's iMac. All configured and ready to go. Compared to the contortions I had to go through at work to set up printing from Linux in a pure Windows environment, I was floored.
You should really give iTunes a try. It's a great music library manager, and not just a front end to the music store and iPods. It's the one application that I really miss when I'm using my Linux machine.
Second runner up? Perhaps the Apple PowerCD. I actually used one of these and a set of Bose Roommates as my entire stereo system for many years.
- $30 case
- $70 motherboard (Shuttle MN31N)
- $80 cpu (AMD Athlon XP 2500+)
- $90 512 meg ram
- $50 40 gig harddrive
- $120 250 gig harddrive
- $180 Hauppauge PVR-350
- $80 DVD burner (not necessary, but nice to have)
- Many, many hours getting the right combination of drivers, etc compiled
Now, before anybody jumps all over me and says I could have saved $x here or there, I should point out that I originally built the computer to be a linux workstation, and then decided to try my hand at building a DVR. Originally, I spent $335, including shipping, to put together a decent box to run SuSE 9.1. I went for the Shuttle mobo so I wouldn't have to buy a seperate graphics card or sound card. This board has a twin VGA nVidia GeForce4 MX with shared memory, Realtek ALC650 audio, and onboard 1394 and USB 2.0. It is capable of digital audio out with the addition of a $30 header board. I went with the AMD processor because I wanted good performance, without spending too much. The board supports anything from a Duron 700 up to an Athlon XP3000+ (or possibly higher, I think that's all that was out when the documentation was printed).So, if you wanted to trim the price down further, you could find a motherboard with integrated graphics that has S-Video out, and then get the cheaper Hauppauge PVR-250 or another capture card. This will give up some quality, as the PVR-350's video out is allegedly much better than other graphics cards, but it's a trade-off for price. You could get by with a lot slower processor than mine. You can get buy with a lot less memory than I have. You could probably find a case for free or close to it.
Another possible route would be to start with a Shuttle bare bones system, and add a Hauppauge or other capture card into the one PCI slot. I hope to add more capture cards to my system, so I ended up ruling out this solution.
As far as the time I put into it, I consider that to be an education. Without a reason, I wouldn't normally get my hands so deep into the o/s internals. I learned a lot about kernel modules and how they work on this project.
If you decide to do this, I highly recommend it. But don't go into it thinking it's a way to get cheap TiVo. It's a way to have fun building a cool project that you will (hopefully) enjoy long after the building is done. I still take a lot of pride in my system, and really enjoy showing it off to guests. And it does a whole lot more than TiVo, I should add.
You are mistaken. My MythTV box, built around the Hauppauge PVR-350, has better quality encoding than TiVo. MPEG-2 recording at full SDTV resolution of 720x480, while an unhacked TiVo is limited to around half that.
I have a friend who runs a fairly successful consulting business by building apps for companies solely in Access. He's a pretty clever guy, so I'm sure he's good at it, but he has such a bias, he absolutely refuses to even look at (literally) Linux or MySQL or any other non-encumbered solutions. I think that he knows he's a god in his Access-world, but would be merely mortal and have a lot of catching up to do with any other type of solution.
And yes, he's run into scalability issues, which he solves by throwing more hardware at the problem, and reliability issues, which I don't know how he overcomes.
Anytime I mention an open source or other non-Microsoft solution, he launches into a speech about X being a fad that will never catch on. Of course, he's said the same thing about the internet in the past, and I suspect he still believes it.
They could even outsource it to the good guys at The Omni Group, who seem to have a handle on making beautiful Aqua applications, and have experience porting applications to the Mac platform.
At any rate, they need to be prepared for the inevitable dropping of Mac support from MS Office. Internet Explorer was just a warning shot, but now that Apple is poised to step further into Microsoft's perceived territory, retaliatory strikes are simply a matter of when, not if.
Because I don't run the mail server, since it's my .mac account. Otherwise I most certainly would. Anyhow, Mail.app correctly identifies them and tosses them into my Junk folder, so I only see them when I check for false positives, which are extremely rare.
I considered asking Apple to blacklist it, but I'm sure a sizable amount of .mac users have 'opted-in' to their spam, in the hopes of getting a free iPod or movie tickets or whatever bribe their currently offering.
I also find it a pleasure to give the occasional support to my Mac using family, and a chore to support the "other" platform.
I swear, the next disposable $500 I get, I'm going to buy a Mac Mini, and loan it out to the non-believers in my girlfriend's family while I take their computers 'back to the shop' for repairs. Then they can have the option of having their old box back, or purchasing the loaner after using it for a week. (I'm only half kidding. I know this could backfire, but it'd be a fun experiment, and a win-win for those that switch, since they then move into the 'joy to support' category.)
Also, using my .mac account for my primary email, I get about five spams a day. And each and every one of them originate from the same company, that a 'friend' of mine signed me up so she could get some free movie tickets. (She is actually an ex-friend over this very issue... she went ballistic when I asked her not to give out my personal information or send me stupid forwarded joke emails. Her response back screamed I WILL NEVER SEND YOU ANOTHER EMAIL, EVER! and I said, "fine by me.") I could try to get rid of those five per day emails, but I'm afraid of increasing the amount by using their 'unsubscribe' link.
I have a (slightly warmed over) Rev. A beige G3, that is running OS X 10.2 quite nicely despite it's extremely dated Rage II (upgraded to 6MB of vram!) onboard graphics. The iMac I am typing on right now is running the latest OS X 10.3 despite it's lowly Rage128Pro graphics (8MB vram in this powerhouse!). I'm still able to do everything I need to do on these machines, I just miss out on some eye candy.
When I hear of Microsoft forcing required hardware on people, it makes me wonder if they have some anti-Linux tricks up their sleeve. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if, down the road perhaps, these hardware requirements include a Palladium derived 'solution'.
However, what if there was a way to lock the domain for a period of time if the domain is identified as a spam advertised site?
Wardriving is an activity consisting of driving around with a laptop or a PDA in one's vehicle, detecting Wi-Fi wireless networks.
If the landlord doesn't want to play, he can just ask to see your low-voltage electrical contractors license.
Even if the landlord is cool about it, if the apartment is brick construction, you can forget dropping cable in the walls. And going through hvac ducts is against building code in many (most?) locales.
Sounds great. What city, might I ask?
An Apple logo?
It ships with a converter. You should really check your facts before troll^h^h^h^h^hposting.
Apple still isn't cheap, they're just a little closer to affordable.
Well, the crappy Dell you keep pointing to is actually $499. Your $349 price is after mail-in rebate. By the time you factor in having to put up with that virus/spyware vector posing as an operating system, the Mac is a much better deal in many peoples mind.
How crippled is the version of OS/X that ships with Mac Mini? I was to understand it's to be somewhat like XP Home vs Pro.
Now you're just outright lying. Please. Show me a link anywhere that mentions a stripped down version of OS X. Else, begone Troll!
Yep. I was really expecting a satellite radio iPod. Well, that's the last time I get my iRumors from Lindsey Lohan's sister.
And yes, Mac mini will take advantage of your two-button USB mouse with scroll-wheel and your favorite USB keyboard. Just plug them in.
Since you supply the mouse and keyboard, they've essentially nipped that perennial argument in the bud.