You haven't the foggiest idea what Nyquist's theorem really means, do you?
A theorem, developed by H. Nyquist, which states that an analog signal waveform may be uniquely reconstructed, without error, from samples taken at equal time intervals. The sampling rate must be equal to, or greater than, twice the highest frequency component in the analog signal
;)
Which is why we sample music at 44.1KHz to play back audio up to 20Khz, for example.
You have a problem with language usage and logic, don't you? Also, you can only see your one narrow view, your own.
First you write:
Not like your G4 has a zif socket so you can upgrade the CPU when apple gets over their "problem".
and then you write:
The G4 1000 is available now:
Encore/ST G4
Pre-order now
Available August, 2002
SG4-1000-2M
$699.95
So, I can or I can't upgrade my processor? Also , preorder does not mean the same as "available now" D'Oh! The model out now runs on the 100Mhz bus machines... mine is a 133MHz bus. That upgrade will be out in September. I thought you have all these Macs and you don't even know the difference in the models!
Ok, let me use small words so you can follow. I can, and have, built my own PC. I have one in my house. It doesn't run Mac OS X.
My G4 runs Mac OS X, so that's the hardware I choose to use. Where is the "flaw" in my G4?
It runs great and has been running almost crash free for a year. And the applications I use on a daily basis run just as fast on the much "slower" Mac as the PC. I guess SGI and Sun have been ripping people off with pricey slow clocked RISC CPUs too, huh?
I could either buy a new G4 for $1600+, or a new CPU upgrade for half the price... ooh that's a tough one! And when the new G4s are out, they might use DDR SDRAMs, so my 1 gig worth of RAM would be of no use to me.
I have no interest in a new PIII CPU because it wont run in the G4, so I could care less if it's $104 or $1.50. And sorry, but the MPC 7450 at 1GHz is faster than the PIII at almost twice the clock speed. NASA did a good white paper on this. Sure there are faster x86 CPUs out now, but it doesn't stop my G4 from working.
You can post as many video editing benchmarks as you like, but I don't do video editing, and I can post Photoshop bench marks. Either way my computer works as fast as I need it... 20 seconds off a Photoshop filter does not make up for having to deal with Windows! Also most broadcast TV is edited on either SGI or Macs... nobody's complaining yet.
The world is not limited by the territory of USA. Not every country has CompUSA stores.
So, what you are saying is: "OS X update is free... on the USA territory".
I dont know, I dont live outside the US... from what I understand it was made available elsewhere. Frankly, I really don't care.;)
Explain to me, why and how the company (Apple), claiming itself as a leader of internet technologies, hesitates (or does not want) to release ISO images on their web (or ftp) sites, where I can download lots of other software update packages? And don't tell me that ISO is bi - it's not big when is published by Linux and BSD vendors.
Apple has many updates and even entire operating systems available for free download from their web site and FTP servers. You can still download Mac System 7.5 is you want to... for free, as disk images.
Apple said the 10.1 update would not be available as a download. part of the reason was the size, but the real reason was probably a hack that someone came up with that turned the update into a full installer. That would have let anyone install OS X 10.1 on a Mac that didn't have 10.0.x for free.
By the way, I hope you understand the different between "free distribution" and "free update". Can I ask in CompUSA for "installable from scatch distro of OS X"? I don't think so.
OS X is not free, but the 10.1 update was to people that already bought 10.0. And CompUSA *was* making CDs of the 10.1 upgrade for free if people asked.
OS X is not free. Unfortunately for both Apple and customers, it is not because Apple makes money on OS X (no way to cover OS distribution expenses with $130), it's because some very unprofessional people make decisions in Apple.
Why should it be free? They used to charge $90 for Mac OS. Is Windows free? Since it already comes with so many PCs, MS could just give it away. The hardware is paying for it anyway. That's your logic. Once a year Apple releases a new version of Mac OS, and charges for it. Six months later they have a free update, i.e. 10.0 -> 10.1. So 10.2 is a paid OS release, and the next one will be free.
This is not hard to figure out you know.
Also, Apple doesn't use ISO images, they use DMG files.
Don't even start on upgrade path. You paid 300 bucks for a 266 mhz sonnet card when you could have paid 200 bucks for a Ghz+ processor and motherboard. You ain't going to make it far on a 266mhz G3 on a 50mhz bus.
A true sign of ignorance is making assumptions... I paid $50 for a 266Mhz NewrTek card dumbass, and $100 for the 500Mhz XLR8 G3 card for my PowerCenter. I didn't have to buy a new motherboard or replace all the RAM inthe machine either. And the system bus on the PowerCenter is 66Mhz, not 50. You don't own any Macs, do you?
For $3500 new mac prices, you can buy a complete new system every 9 months for 5 years.
Oh yeah, I want to buy a $530 PC every 9 months! I don't know what you are smoking... I paid $1600 for my G4, with 384 MB of RAM, and an Ultra-SCSI card. Right now that will buy you an 800Mhz machine. Mine is older than that.
Macs HAD good hardware. Apple stopped funding hardware upgrades when they started on OS X. Now they have a great OS and crap hardware.
You just sit and make this stuff up right? Or are you off your medication? Apple still makes great hardware, but the CPU problem lies with Motorola. The Xserve is an example of the direction Apple is heading. Few things to keep in mind. The G4 CPU does not work well with DDR... Apple had to be creative to get that to work. The fast backside cache speed effectively negates the 133Mhz bus speed. Apple is about the only maker using 64-bit 133Mhz PCI slots, plus the main memory controller now communicated directly with the PCI bus. There are a lot of good things Apple is doing.
It's not your fault. They are just significantly behind. OS X is not "slow". the fucking hardware is.
My 466Mhz G4 runs OS X just fine, thanks. I have yet to have a problem doing anything I need to do on it. When running CubaseVST I have no problem getting 16 tracks of audio, with effects, and as many MIDI tracks, and still only have about 55% CPU utilization. It's not a race you know. A fast computer is not a substitute for having a small penis... People get so OCD over having the newest gear, if your machine works well for you it doesn't have to be the fastest/newest. That would be like buying a new car every year with a bigger engine. Will you get to that next red light any faster than the next guy?
I make a living on my computer and just because it's a year old and half the speed of the latest G4s hasn't caused a problem. And next month I can get a 1GHz CPU upgrade from Sonnet for about $600.
Return on Investment: Paying SEVEN TIMES AS MUCH for a computer that is HALF AS FAST
Yeah, whatever, that hasn't stopped anyone in the publishing or pro music fields from using Macs, and largly ONLY Macs. I know because I work in both fields.
Usable life: what is the usable life on a computer that is 2 years obsolete when you purchase it? Where did the "5 year mac" go?
Gee I dont know, at my one job we still have some 9500's and a 7100 with a 266Mhz G3 upgrade, these have been running 8 hours a day all week since like 1996. I still have my PowerCenter 132 with a 500Mhz G3, it runs fine. I could try and run OS X on these, but why bother?
What can you run on a PC from 1996?
Mean time between failure: based purely on OS X's upgrade cycle and time to install upgrades give you 99.8% reliability. But the spinning beach ball of death adds another few hour a year down...blah blah blah
I don't have any of these problems. In one year running OS X I have crashed 5 times. Even at work running OS 9 I crash maybe once every three weeks.
At home I run Photoshop and Quark in Classic, print to an Epson printer, burn CDs with two CD-RW drives... no problem here.
Must be operator error!
And just for the record I have 12 Macs. Most are very old and they still all work.
I and my family have been paying premium prices for Apple machines since the Mac Plus came out. What I object to is being ripped off, which is what Apple is doing to me.
This made me laugh... I doubt you even own a Mac, because when did Apple EVER have a discounted price for a yearly OS upgrade? NEVER!
I started on 7.5, and I paid for 7.6, 8, 8.5, 9, and X.
In that time frame I have owned a 6100, PowerCenter (clone) and a G4.
The only difference is that Apple used to charge about $90 for Mac OS.
If I cannot download ISO image of OSX for free then it's not free.
What, are you afraid to leave your house? I walked into CompUSA and said "please give me the 10.1 update." They did, with no exchange of money. That's known as "free!"
Once a year you get a major system release, and about six months later a minor free update.
So if you paid for 8.0, 8.1 was free.
paid for 8.5, 8.6 was free. (and 8.6.1)
paid for 9.0, 9.1 was sort of free ($19.95 for the CD)(and 9.1.2, 9.2, 9.2.2)
paid for 10.0, 10.1 was free.
Pay for 10.2.
Here's the thing people are missing. They are getting all hung up on the number of the release, and I think this is why Apple kept the code name Jaguar on it. It should be 10.5, but Apple wants to keep using "X" for a long time, and having "OS X (11.0)" doesn't sound right, so they will be taking baby steps for the numbers for a while.
As far as "is it worth $129?" Hell yeah! I played around with it at MacWorld Expo for a while, and it's an amazing upgrade!
Shit, I spend $100 on Starbucks every month or so...;)
Its a great pity that the ZIP technology is not as reliable as the three and one half inch floppy:
remember this? [grc.com]
I have to disagree with this somewhat.
I have an original SCSI Zip drive from 1996, and except for maybe 5 disks (which Iomega will replace free if I ever bothered to send them in) I haven't had any problems at all. I do remember the click of death problem, but never experienced it with any of the Zip drives I have used personally over the years.
On the other hand I have floppies as old as many of the Zip disks I have that are either unreadable, or if you try to erase and reuse them will fail during formatting.
It's no exaggeration to say that after the day I got my CD burner three years ago, I never touched my ZIP drive again except to take it out.
Yep. I took all my old Zips and burned them onto CDs. I still have about 30 Zips and just use a few for short term backups when I dont feel like buring a CD-RW. Or for sneaker net'ing them to another Mac in the same room. I also email files to my self.
I leave the drive hooked up because I get Zip disks every day from people.
This might also have to do with the fact that most floppy drives are never used - and thus dirty as hell.
I think some of the disk oxidize as well. I've had this happen on brand new floppy drives (I had to replace my drive on my old Mac) and I got errors trying to copy files off the old floppy disks
One last remark: many people think of it as a normal harddisk. Which it appears to be, but it does error correction and this error correction only works when formatted with the Iomega tools. This means you better not format it in ext2, NTFS or FAT32. That's asking for trouble.
This I knew. In fact it's a bad idea to do a "Long Erase" on a Jaz disk because of the way they map out bad blocks with only so many spare blocks in reserve. That was when I first had a problem with my Jaz (using the Iomega Tools software). The bad disk then damages the drive it seems.
I have had no problems with Zip drives at all. I had a few disks go bad, but stopped using them as soon as they started clicking. I have about 30 Zip disks, some of which I bought when the drive first came out. We have 2 100's and a 250 here at work and they work great too.
Yeah, I remember the Bernoullui drives. We have two SyQuest 200's here that died a while ago...
Macs have Iomega drivers in by default; what's stopping peecee makers? Heck, I'm pretty sure a small enough Mac OS installation can boot off Zip.
Yes you can do a minimal install on a 100MB Zip disk and boot from it, and still have room on the disk for utilities.
In fact Iomega Tools has a feature called RescueDisk that will build the bootable disk for you, copy the system files (32.6MB) and a file utility such as DiskFirstAid, and I still have room for a complete Norton Utilities install and things like DriveSetup.
This doesn't work with OS X yet, but since you can boot from OS 9 that's not a problem.
I have my original Windows 3.1 and 3.11 disks on floppy as well as MSDos 5.0 through 6.22. Not sure WHY I still have them, but I do.
I did too, but trust me, they probably dont work anymore. I tried using the Win 3.1 disks and got errors in the middle of the install. (My sister-in-law had an old laptop)
Strange...I have a 1Gig Jaz which I now use as a backup drive. I used it for about 3 years as a secondary harddisk. All my 8 Jaz disks work fine and have no errors. It has been reliable for over 5 years without any problems.
Wow, you are lucky then. I have a Jaz drive... once it was a few months out of it warranty it started the click-of-death and rendered two Jaz disks unreadable.
I sent it to Iomega, whom for $130 send me a refurb in return. This was an internal Jaz drive in an external case (from ProMAX).
The second one lasted about 6 months.. at that point I put it in a box in the closet. Damn thing cost me $500 at the time!
At work we have a 1GB Jaz, and it too is starting to show signs of problems.. like having trouble writing to disks. We only use it for the few times a client sends in a job on Jaz disk.
On the other hand, my Zip drive has been great, and it's one of the original SCSI units.
Personally, I wish someone would just invent a bigger piece of magnetic media, like ZIP or LS-120, and then put it into public domain or release the specs and let others clone it so we wouldn't have this problem.
The word is that Iomega has 650 MB Zips coming out soon. The drive will also read, but not write to the 250 and 100 MB Zips.
Until a solid replacement comes around to take the place of the floppy disk as a general utility disk, it will never die.
My G4 doesn't have a floppy drive, and I haven't bought a floppy since 1995, but I had to get a USB floppy drive because I still have clients that give me jobs on floppy every so often.
For the most part, I think Iomega Zip disks have replaced the floppy. 80% of all the work I get are on Zips, with the rest being on CD.
Ironically, most of the old floppies I have can't be read any more...
ok. how can "command-Shift-Click" be an easy thing to do? you are using two hands, and one of those hands is pushing more than one button. to me, any command which requires a compliment of 3 buttons being pressed at one time is *not* intuitive.
Think of it this way. It's like playing chords on a guitar. Sure, pressing single strings down is easier, but after a while you don't even think about having to press down six of them, with your LEFT hand, on different frets, and have to navigate your right picking hand to strike the correct string. And after a while you dont even have to look at your hand. Same as on a Mac.
I use the keyboard as much as I can, and after many years I know where to rest my fingers to press the left modifier keys, and the arrow buttons, and page up/down etc. People who type know where the keys are without looking (even me using two fingers), so how is pressing command-Shift any harder than shift W?
While I agree that a multi button mouse it faster for many (including my self), anyone can learn anything, if they do it often enough.
And on the Mac some things still need modifier keys, even if you have a five button mouse.
I do love middle clicking a link in Mozilla to make it open in a new tab though.:)
AFAIK, virtually all Mac apps that implement context menus (usually because of a port from Windows) make you hold down the button longer than a normal click length to invoke the menu. Does the amount of time spent by new users on differentiating the buttons really outweigh these?
Only web browsers do that click and hold thing. Everything else makes you press the Control key when you click. BTW Mac OS has contextual menus, and it's not a port from Windows!;-) Applications like Photoshop and Illustrator also have them, and they are also not ports of Windows apps, but alas, Quark does not.
I agree that a two button mouse is faster on a Mac.
But I know a LOT of Windows users that have no clue what the right button does, even though they use a PC everyday.
But the paradigm on Mac OS is the modifier key. Holding either Option (alt), Command or Control, or a combination of them changes what a mouse click or drag does. Option drag copies a file, while Command-Option drag makes an alias (shortcut). Different programs, like Photoshop, use modifier-click for different functions too.
Slashdot Mirror
A theorem, developed by H. Nyquist, which states that an analog signal waveform may be uniquely reconstructed, without error, from samples taken at equal time intervals. The sampling rate must be equal to, or greater than, twice the highest frequency component in the analog signal
Which is why we sample music at 44.1KHz to play back audio up to 20Khz, for example.
First you write:
Not like your G4 has a zif socket so you can upgrade the CPU when apple gets over their "problem".
and then you write:
The G4 1000 is available now:
Encore/ST G4
Pre-order now
Available August, 2002
SG4-1000-2M
$699.95
So, I can or I can't upgrade my processor? Also , preorder does not mean the same as "available now" D'Oh! The model out now runs on the 100Mhz bus machines... mine is a 133MHz bus. That upgrade will be out in September. I thought you have all these Macs and you don't even know the difference in the models!
Ok, let me use small words so you can follow. I can, and have, built my own PC. I have one in my house. It doesn't run Mac OS X.
My G4 runs Mac OS X, so that's the hardware I choose to use. Where is the "flaw" in my G4?
It runs great and has been running almost crash free for a year. And the applications I use on a daily basis run just as fast on the much "slower" Mac as the PC. I guess SGI and Sun have been ripping people off with pricey slow clocked RISC CPUs too, huh?
I could either buy a new G4 for $1600+, or a new CPU upgrade for half the price... ooh that's a tough one! And when the new G4s are out, they might use DDR SDRAMs, so my 1 gig worth of RAM would be of no use to me.
I have no interest in a new PIII CPU because it wont run in the G4, so I could care less if it's $104 or $1.50. And sorry, but the MPC 7450 at 1GHz is faster than the PIII at almost twice the clock speed. NASA did a good white paper on this. Sure there are faster x86 CPUs out now, but it doesn't stop my G4 from working.
You can post as many video editing benchmarks as you like, but I don't do video editing, and I can post Photoshop bench marks. Either way my computer works as fast as I need it... 20 seconds off a Photoshop filter does not make up for having to deal with Windows! Also most broadcast TV is edited on either SGI or Macs... nobody's complaining yet.
So, what you are saying is: "OS X update is free ... on the USA territory".
I dont know, I dont live outside the US... from what I understand it was made available elsewhere. Frankly, I really don't care. ;)
Explain to me, why and how the company (Apple), claiming itself as a leader of internet technologies, hesitates (or does not want) to release ISO images on their web (or ftp) sites, where I can download lots of other software update packages? And don't tell me that ISO is bi - it's not big when is published by Linux and BSD vendors.
Apple has many updates and even entire operating systems available for free download from their web site and FTP servers. You can still download Mac System 7.5 is you want to... for free, as disk images.
Apple said the 10.1 update would not be available as a download. part of the reason was the size, but the real reason was probably a hack that someone came up with that turned the update into a full installer. That would have let anyone install OS X 10.1 on a Mac that didn't have 10.0.x for free.
By the way, I hope you understand the different between "free distribution" and "free update". Can I ask in CompUSA for "installable from scatch distro of OS X"? I don't think so.
OS X is not free, but the 10.1 update was to people that already bought 10.0. And CompUSA *was* making CDs of the 10.1 upgrade for free if people asked.
OS X is not free. Unfortunately for both Apple and customers, it is not because Apple makes money on OS X (no way to cover OS distribution expenses with $130), it's because some very unprofessional people make decisions in Apple.
Why should it be free? They used to charge $90 for Mac OS. Is Windows free? Since it already comes with so many PCs, MS could just give it away. The hardware is paying for it anyway. That's your logic. Once a year Apple releases a new version of Mac OS, and charges for it. Six months later they have a free update, i.e. 10.0 -> 10.1. So 10.2 is a paid OS release, and the next one will be free.
This is not hard to figure out you know.
Also, Apple doesn't use ISO images, they use DMG files.
A true sign of ignorance is making assumptions... I paid $50 for a 266Mhz NewrTek card dumbass, and $100 for the 500Mhz XLR8 G3 card for my PowerCenter. I didn't have to buy a new motherboard or replace all the RAM inthe machine either. And the system bus on the PowerCenter is 66Mhz, not 50. You don't own any Macs, do you?
For $3500 new mac prices, you can buy a complete new system every 9 months for 5 years.
Oh yeah, I want to buy a $530 PC every 9 months! I don't know what you are smoking... I paid $1600 for my G4, with 384 MB of RAM, and an Ultra-SCSI card. Right now that will buy you an 800Mhz machine. Mine is older than that.
Macs HAD good hardware. Apple stopped funding hardware upgrades when they started on OS X. Now they have a great OS and crap hardware.
You just sit and make this stuff up right? Or are you off your medication? Apple still makes great hardware, but the CPU problem lies with Motorola. The Xserve is an example of the direction Apple is heading. Few things to keep in mind. The G4 CPU does not work well with DDR... Apple had to be creative to get that to work. The fast backside cache speed effectively negates the 133Mhz bus speed. Apple is about the only maker using 64-bit 133Mhz PCI slots, plus the main memory controller now communicated directly with the PCI bus. There are a lot of good things Apple is doing.
It's not your fault. They are just significantly behind. OS X is not "slow". the fucking hardware is.
My 466Mhz G4 runs OS X just fine, thanks. I have yet to have a problem doing anything I need to do on it. When running CubaseVST I have no problem getting 16 tracks of audio, with effects, and as many MIDI tracks, and still only have about 55% CPU utilization. It's not a race you know. A fast computer is not a substitute for having a small penis... People get so OCD over having the newest gear, if your machine works well for you it doesn't have to be the fastest/newest. That would be like buying a new car every year with a bigger engine. Will you get to that next red light any faster than the next guy? I make a living on my computer and just because it's a year old and half the speed of the latest G4s hasn't caused a problem. And next month I can get a 1GHz CPU upgrade from Sonnet for about $600.
Yeah, whatever, that hasn't stopped anyone in the publishing or pro music fields from using Macs, and largly ONLY Macs. I know because I work in both fields.
Usable life: what is the usable life on a computer that is 2 years obsolete when you purchase it? Where did the "5 year mac" go?
Gee I dont know, at my one job we still have some 9500's and a 7100 with a 266Mhz G3 upgrade, these have been running 8 hours a day all week since like 1996. I still have my PowerCenter 132 with a 500Mhz G3, it runs fine. I could try and run OS X on these, but why bother?
What can you run on a PC from 1996?
Mean time between failure: based purely on OS X's upgrade cycle and time to install upgrades give you 99.8% reliability. But the spinning beach ball of death adds another few hour a year down...blah blah blah
I don't have any of these problems. In one year running OS X I have crashed 5 times. Even at work running OS 9 I crash maybe once every three weeks.
At home I run Photoshop and Quark in Classic, print to an Epson printer, burn CDs with two CD-RW drives... no problem here.
Must be operator error!
And just for the record I have 12 Macs. Most are very old and they still all work.
This made me laugh... I doubt you even own a Mac, because when did Apple EVER have a discounted price for a yearly OS upgrade? NEVER!
I started on 7.5, and I paid for 7.6, 8, 8.5, 9, and X.
In that time frame I have owned a 6100, PowerCenter (clone) and a G4.
The only difference is that Apple used to charge about $90 for Mac OS.
What, are you afraid to leave your house? I walked into CompUSA and said "please give me the 10.1 update." They did, with no exchange of money. That's known as "free!"
Plus it came with the Mac OS 9.2.1 CD and a book.
Forget the name... it's not a point release.
And Win 95 to Win 98 was just a point release.. they just hid the name (4.0, 4.1)
This is a major rewrite of many parts of OS X... Apple wants to keep the number in the low 10's is all.
OS X had plenty of free "service packs" since 10.0. I paid for 10.0 over a year ago...
Hmmmm, I bought a Vovo 240... shouldn't I get a new one cheap??
9.0 - 9.0.1, 9.0.2, 9.0.3, 9.0.4
9.1 - 9.1.1, 9.1.2
You forgot 9.2 - 9.2.1 - 9.2.2
OK, here's the way it works with Apple.
Once a year you get a major system release, and about six months later a minor free update.
So if you paid for 8.0, 8.1 was free.
paid for 8.5, 8.6 was free. (and 8.6.1)
paid for 9.0, 9.1 was sort of free ($19.95 for the CD)(and 9.1.2, 9.2, 9.2.2)
paid for 10.0, 10.1 was free.
Pay for 10.2.
Here's the thing people are missing. They are getting all hung up on the number of the release, and I think this is why Apple kept the code name Jaguar on it. It should be 10.5, but Apple wants to keep using "X" for a long time, and having "OS X (11.0)" doesn't sound right, so they will be taking baby steps for the numbers for a while.
As far as "is it worth $129?" Hell yeah! I played around with it at MacWorld Expo for a while, and it's an amazing upgrade!
Shit, I spend $100 on Starbucks every month or so... ;)
I have to disagree with this somewhat.
I have an original SCSI Zip drive from 1996, and except for maybe 5 disks (which Iomega will replace free if I ever bothered to send them in) I haven't had any problems at all. I do remember the click of death problem, but never experienced it with any of the Zip drives I have used personally over the years.
On the other hand I have floppies as old as many of the Zip disks I have that are either unreadable, or if you try to erase and reuse them will fail during formatting.
Yep. I took all my old Zips and burned them onto CDs. I still have about 30 Zips and just use a few for short term backups when I dont feel like buring a CD-RW. Or for sneaker net'ing them to another Mac in the same room. I also email files to my self.
I leave the drive hooked up because I get Zip disks every day from people.
I think some of the disk oxidize as well. I've had this happen on brand new floppy drives (I had to replace my drive on my old Mac) and I got errors trying to copy files off the old floppy disks
This I knew. In fact it's a bad idea to do a "Long Erase" on a Jaz disk because of the way they map out bad blocks with only so many spare blocks in reserve. That was when I first had a problem with my Jaz (using the Iomega Tools software). The bad disk then damages the drive it seems.
I have had no problems with Zip drives at all. I had a few disks go bad, but stopped using them as soon as they started clicking. I have about 30 Zip disks, some of which I bought when the drive first came out. We have 2 100's and a 250 here at work and they work great too.
Yeah, I remember the Bernoullui drives. We have two SyQuest 200's here that died a while ago...
This was my first thought. I figure they want to compete with CDs... they must be loosing business to CD-Rs.
Yes you can do a minimal install on a 100MB Zip disk and boot from it, and still have room on the disk for utilities.
In fact Iomega Tools has a feature called RescueDisk that will build the bootable disk for you, copy the system files (32.6MB) and a file utility such as DiskFirstAid, and I still have room for a complete Norton Utilities install and things like DriveSetup.
This doesn't work with OS X yet, but since you can boot from OS 9 that's not a problem.
I did too, but trust me, they probably dont work anymore. I tried using the Win 3.1 disks and got errors in the middle of the install. (My sister-in-law had an old laptop)
I boot from a Zip disk most of the time for repairs, etc.
It has my system folder and all my utilities.
Wow, you are lucky then. I have a Jaz drive... once it was a few months out of it warranty it started the click-of-death and rendered two Jaz disks unreadable.
I sent it to Iomega, whom for $130 send me a refurb in return. This was an internal Jaz drive in an external case (from ProMAX).
The second one lasted about 6 months.. at that point I put it in a box in the closet. Damn thing cost me $500 at the time!
At work we have a 1GB Jaz, and it too is starting to show signs of problems.. like having trouble writing to disks. We only use it for the few times a client sends in a job on Jaz disk.
On the other hand, my Zip drive has been great, and it's one of the original SCSI units.
The word is that Iomega has 650 MB Zips coming out soon. The drive will also read, but not write to the 250 and 100 MB Zips.
My G4 doesn't have a floppy drive, and I haven't bought a floppy since 1995, but I had to get a USB floppy drive because I still have clients that give me jobs on floppy every so often.
For the most part, I think Iomega Zip disks have replaced the floppy. 80% of all the work I get are on Zips, with the rest being on CD.
Ironically, most of the old floppies I have can't be read any more...
No, the proper word for that is flaccid. ;)
Think of it this way. It's like playing chords on a guitar. Sure, pressing single strings down is easier, but after a while you don't even think about having to press down six of them, with your LEFT hand, on different frets, and have to navigate your right picking hand to strike the correct string. And after a while you dont even have to look at your hand. Same as on a Mac.
I use the keyboard as much as I can, and after many years I know where to rest my fingers to press the left modifier keys, and the arrow buttons, and page up/down etc. People who type know where the keys are without looking (even me using two fingers), so how is pressing command-Shift any harder than shift W?
While I agree that a multi button mouse it faster for many (including my self), anyone can learn anything, if they do it often enough.
And on the Mac some things still need modifier keys, even if you have a five button mouse.
I do love middle clicking a link in Mozilla to make it open in a new tab though. :)
Only web browsers do that click and hold thing. Everything else makes you press the Control key when you click. BTW Mac OS has contextual menus, and it's not a port from Windows! ;-) Applications like Photoshop and Illustrator also have them, and they are also not ports of Windows apps, but alas, Quark does not.
I agree that a two button mouse is faster on a Mac.
But I know a LOT of Windows users that have no clue what the right button does, even though they use a PC everyday.
But the paradigm on Mac OS is the modifier key. Holding either Option (alt), Command or Control, or a combination of them changes what a mouse click or drag does. Option drag copies a file, while Command-Option drag makes an alias (shortcut). Different programs, like Photoshop, use modifier-click for different functions too.