I already donate to SETI@home by way of the unused CPU time on my four Macs. The computation is our problem, the bandwidth is theirs.
I'm sure there are a lot of corporate sponsors with massive bandwidth who would love to endorse this project. Why would they target the general public for scant donations here-and-there when they can instead focus on just signing one deal with a big media conglomerate?
Sure, they lose their soul, but this is supposed to be in the name of science, right?
Random access is not what drew the consumer market away from DAT - it was pressure from the RIAA and regulatory bodies. DAT was cable of making a perfect digital copy of a CD. So many proposed taxation ideas and copy-protection schemes left DAT as a high-end solution.
Sony and Philips both went back to the drawing board, and each came up with something that didn't piss the RIAA off as badly: MD (Mini-Disc, by Sony) and DCC (Digital Compact Cassette, Philips). These formats store audio using lossy compression methods. Unfortunately DCC never caught on, even though its codec sounded way better than the original MD codec. MD's new codec is better, but still doesn't sound as nice (to my ears) as DCC did.
DAT as an audio format is also quickly dying, since CDR became so cheap and quick. Still nothing beats DAT for live 2-channel location recording.
The SMC Barricade will demand-dial a modem when the broadband connection goes down.
According to the instructions, you can set the modem to be the sole WAN connection, or you can have it only dial up when the broadband WAN goes down. Of course, you can also define basic PPP settings and modem init string.
(It also doesn't allow MAC address cloning, not necessary for dialup but often is when broadband is available)
That is a nice feature in the SMC barricade, but is not usually necessary for broadband provided you can make what ever computer have plugged into your cable modem do a DHCP Release. This causes the remote DHCP server to "take back" your IP address and stop associating it with your MAC address.
Then you're free to plug any piece of hardware into your cable modem, and your connection should continue to work fine.
One warning though: if you do plug a network router that doesn't do MAC address cloning, make sure it is able to do this "release" prior to having it discover its first IP address. If it cannot release, then you may have trouble with your ISP if you try to disconnect the router and operate without it.
Frankly, I'm looking forward to the upcoming Pegasos (www.bplan-gmbh.de) or AmigaOne (www.eyetech.co.uk) boards. At Euro 650 with a G4 400MHz, the Pegasos may not be the most cost-efficient motherboard on the planet, but when the price has a chance to decay a bit, it'll run NetBSD as fast as a G4 runs OS X... and both of those manufacturers are more likely to support open development, unlike Apple.
Yes but will it publish images from your digital camera to the web with one click? I buy computers to accomplish tasks, not run operating systems. Yep, they're using more CPU cycles for the GUI than they used to. So what?
Will Pegasos run Photoshop and MSIE? Will the AmigaOne have onboard FireWire so I can hook up my Camcorder, unplug it, then plug in a CDRW without having to reboot?
I'll admit that I'm a style whore, and in my setting an Apple display is worth the extra money for its appearance and its quality. But you're missing my point - I should not need to buy a third-party solution to connect a second Apple monitor to an Apple computer!
Yes, I can connect anyone else's display to that second port, but I guess it comes down to whether you're the type of person who cares if your computer system looks like a thrown-together jalopy rather than something that is intended to impress. I choose my clothing, my furniture and my car with attention to appearance, even though they do nothing more than keep me warm, give me a place to sit, and move me around. Still when I wear a suit my pants match my jacket!
Computer system aesthetics are particularly important where you want clients to feel comforable, especially in an artistic environment. I just don't expect a flaky, artsy songwriter to put confidence a piecemeal PC with an ugly beige case, a darker beige DVD-ROM, a gray CDR and a blue Zip drive. I know it works just as well, but I believe a person who spends hours or days nurturing a creative product through to fruition wants to do it using tools that feel inviting and deliberate.
And, you must admit, VGA is simply not the proper way to run a flat panel display. Even Apple has stated in promo literature that their LCD displays are great because of the all-digital video signal path. So a user has to contend with not only having mismatched appearance due to the monitors being different brands, but really the monitor connected to the VGA port should be a CRT!
Also don't forget: from an ergonomic perspective, an ideal dual-monitor system will use two identical monitors, so that as you move objects from one screen to the other their appearance doesn't change because one's a little brighter and the other's a little blurrier and more greenish. From the same perspective, I want identical video cards driving each monitor as well, because I don't want one screen to be more responsive than the other.
If Apple is going to boast about standard dual-monitor functionality then they should do it properly. ADC is just not practical.
I work in audio. I want raw performance power, and I want style - the equipment I use in my studio has to impress my clients.
The G4/DP 1 gig is a very appealing option, except:
I don't need a SuperDrive. I don't want a SuperDrive. Apple won't give you a 933 or 1GHz DP machine without a SuperDrive. Sorry but I'd rather save hundreds of dollars by simply not buying one!
ADC (Apple Display Connector) still really bugs me, and now they've really made it ugly. For those of you who aren't aware of Apple's hardware decision here I'm going to sum it up:
Apple created a proprietary connector, "ADC", for displays.
This connector carries power, DVI and USB along the same cable, reducing cable clutter.
The video card is a special one, with an extra set of pins at one end which connect to a separate power socket on the motherboard.
Without this power socket there is not enough juice fed to the card to power an entire display.
THEREFORE Your system can only work with one Apple display, because only one card slot has this power connection.
If you wish to power an Apple Display using a system with no ADC port, you can, but you need to buy an external solution worth hundreds of dollars, which plugs into a video card's DVI output, a USB port, and into mains via a line-lump style power supply; and combines all these signals into an ADC connection.
Such adaptors require a DVI output from your video card.
The new video cards available on these Macs have one ADC output and one VGA output. There is absolutely no way to connect any current Apple display to that second monitor port.
There is no less-expensive, single-port card available for your Power Mac G4.
If you want a second Apple display you would have to purchase a video card with a DVI output to go into an un-accelerated PCI slot, and the special multi-hundred dollar adaptor described above to connect to the second Apple display's ADC connector.
If you want to use a non-Apple display on the ADC port you must buy a sub-$100 adaptor which breaks the DVI video signal out of the ADC connector for a 'standard' DVI flat display.
To my knowledge there is no adaptor that will give you a VGA output from the ADC port.
What I'm getting at here is that Apple boasts that all the new Power Macs have support for dual monitors built in, but for a company who puts so much work into beautiful designs, they expect me to use two different, cosmetically mismatched displays! I don't believe that a VGA connector belongs on a flat panel due to inherent flickering issues, so that means a flat display on the ADC and a CRT on the VGA port. Ugly!
If I want two displays that look the same, I have to enter into an imposing combination of needlessly wasted PCI slots, buying redundant cable adaptors, and spending a lot of money!
I would love to have a DP 1 GHz with dual Apple 17" Studio displays. I really would. But the premium is too high.
Apple should bury ADC now and issue an admission of stupidity.
Apple did a great job of embracing standards with USB, and is arguably responsible for its success. Why they chose to suddenly abandon the DVI connector on Yosemite and original Sawtooth computers is a mytery to me. DVI was just catching on as a standard way of connecting flat panel displays. If Apple hadn't moved to ADC, we would have seen more Wintel video cards with DVI conectors on them now, because there would be more DVI-connected monitors on the market.
Apologies for the rambling post... ADC has bothered me right from the start and now these new dual cards seem like the ultimate inconvenience.
Oops, I should clarify: by "full, compressed, normalized tracks" I mean tracks which have had gain tricks done to them to maximize the apparent volume level. A common studio trick is to "compress" audio which has nothing to do with compressing digital files.
In the same sentence I refer to "20% to 40% compression" I am referring to file compression.
ZAP compression seems to vary based on the source material. I have found that a normalized (volume-maximized) recording of a full piece of pop music will typically not compress as well as, say, a recording of just a vocal track with lots of gaps of virtual silence.
On tracks like that I have seen compression ratios as high as 80% (5:1). But on full, compressed, normalized tracks, 20% to 40% compression is more the norm (about 1.5:1).
ZAP encoding is S-L-O-W though. On my G4/350 it usually takes longer than playback time.
PCM is not compression. It's just an encoding format. (PCM = pulse code modulation). The files are huge compared to MP3 because they're not compressed!:)
I use ZAP by emagic. Emagic is popular among pro audio types for their integrated audio/MIDI app "Logic Audio".
ZAP (an acronym for "Zero-loss Audio Packer") is, as its name implies, lossless, and the ZAP app has the ability to play back audio from a compressed archive.
The ZAP application compresses raw audio files to about 40-to-70% of their original size. This is much better smaller than typical.zip or.sit compression on audio files.
Archives can be made self-extracting. I find this useful if I do an audio project for which the files total about a gig in size but want to back it up to a single CDR.
Interestingly, I just looked at emagic's web site, and they do not have a link for ZAP. Maybe their site is incomplete, or maybe they have discontinued the product.
Apple is spreading its chips across the table. They have to keep asking themselves what people will want from a computer tomorrow, integrate those features into their OS and their hardware, and get it out the door before anybody else does.
The apparent "cool vs. functional" theme of this article is absurd, and obviously written by somebody who thinks it's still cool to aimlessly bash Apple.
Let's talk about functional for a moment, shall we? Here are some of Apple's thoughtful little extras which have appeared in the last little while:
First consumer PC with onboard 10/100 ethernet
Apple's laptops have auto-sensing ethernet ports so it never matters if you use a "straight thru" or "crossover" cable
First computers with integrated ieee 802.11 antennas
First computers with on-board 1394 (FireWire, an Apple innovation)
Laptop batteries with a gauge to tell you how much juice remains without turning on the laptop
Tower case with a door that opens downward to reveal all of the RAM and PCI slots and allow easy access to drive bays
First mass-marketed "legacy free" PC (the iMac), which is arguably responsible for saving USB from certain death
Consumer PC with standard, articulated flat panel display (turns monitor - "look at this, bob")
Cinema display, which for quite some time was the largest desktop LCD display available
Support since the Mac II series (198x) for as many monitors as you can connect, arrangeable in any way to form a large "virtual desktop"
Networking support built into EVERY Mac - not just as an option - since 1984
First consumer PC to ship with a mouse
First consumer PC to ship with 3.5" disks (and no option for 5.25" low-capacity behemoths)
First consumer OS to support CD ROM
First consumer OS to natively support proprtionally spaced fonts
These are off the top of my head. These are not gimmicks. These are not wowie-zowie cool add-ons from the special effects department. These are useful innovations, which Apple continues to deliver with every new product. These are genuinely useful technologies. This is function!
And hey - if these innovations happen to come in really nice plastics, that's cool... because I also don't want my computer to be an eyesore. You can poo-poo innovation and call it trendy all you want. I have no interest in paying less money for less of a computer, from a lesser company whose "me-too" attitude does nothing to advance the computer industry.
Saying that Apple has 4.5 % of the PC market is like saying Freightliner has only 2 % of the sports car market. People need to drive big trucks even while there are other types of vehicles on the road.
I'm a Mac user, and I don't buy 'em because they're cool - my G4 tower, my iMac and my iBook are all the best computers, the most functional things I could possibly use for what I want to do. No other machines could do my work faster.
I'm tired of hearing all the press - "will this save Apple", "is this Apple's comeback", "what Apple needs to do is" -- if you don't want a Mac don't buy one. 4.5 % of us will continue to buy 'em and continue to exist with our "cool" products.
Agreed. BUT - this is still a better scenario than trying to get a deal with a major. I use mp3.com as an example because it is the biggest site of its kind, however there are other, similar sites that don't treat the artist this way.
I admit I don't get enough plays for payback, so I am not going to participate in their little scheme. Still I believe in the principle of their system, and I am not opposed to mp3.com - let them do business the way they have to, because they have to make money too. If you're getting enough plays to merit payback, then $20/month = peanuts.
mp3.com has a near perfect model. Here you can download a staggering array of songs for free, in whatever genre you happen to like, and a lot of it is really good.
As long as you can get past the "I want to listen to what's popular" mentality that is shoved down our throats by radio (which cannot survive in its current state) and music videos (crap), mp3.com is a perfectly viable solution for listeners - you can find almost anything, and any Joe-Schmoe artist can put their music there.
mp3.com actually pays artists who get lots of plays, using money they (presumably) make from advertisers.
As a musician/composer/producer, I can honestly say that I believe that this is the future of music. The middle men (major labels, publishers, lawyers, distributors, retailers) have met their match, and will fall because they were so worry so much about "piracy" that they miss the big picture - up until now there has been just too much money in recorded music.
There is only a finite amount of money that the general populus will spend on music, and thanks to Napster and mp3.com (very different models), they have discovered its true value: next to nothing.
Because I'm good (yeah whatever), I plan to make only a small amount of money from people who listen to my recorded music. I see produced music only as a vehicle to gain respect and recognition, while live performance is what makes the big bucks. By big bucks I don't mean what Madonna currently makes in royalties, but enough to comfortably sustain my life as long as I choose to continue with this profession.
Why would I listen to the latest crappy single from Destiny's Child on popular radio when I can go directly into the genre of music I like on mp3.com, choose 20 artists in a genre I like, stream them directly to my desktop, and abort playback on the tunes that don't interest me? Then I can download the ones I like and burn 'em to a CD or copy them into my iPod. There is no better solution for the discerning music consumer.
It's no wonder there are so many Mac bashers here. While I'll admit I'm as much of a geek as the next guy, clearly this/. article is aimed at those who would "drool" over hardware, instead of drooling over solutions.
To put it in perspective, a system based on an Athlon XP and Nvidia Geforce card is useless on its own, without software to run on it.
Yes, there's lots of power there, but I think the ultimate Linux system is one that does what it's intended to do, not just one with all the best hardware. If the box is employed as a server, for example, then the Geforce is an irrelevant, extravagent, useless nicety. The processor's also probably not worth what you'd pay, considering you could get something a little slower for a lot less.
There are no "ultimate systems" - just ultimate solutions.
...sometimes it can be a distraction. When I drive a car I don't think about the valves and pistons. When I write something down I don't think about the ball in the pen. When I play piano I don't think about the counterweights on the hammers.
When I word-process I don't think about my boot sequence, and when I crop pics I don't think about my BIOS firmware revision. I thoroughly understand computer hardware, but if it can accomplish the task I want to accomplish, I feel no need to tweak it.
Today Apple announced really fast iMacs, so fast that they will be in direct competition with Apple's own Power Mac G4 series.
In order to really increase market share, and to increase the value of the current Power Mac G4 line, Apple should be selling their incredible Studio and Cinema displays at cost, or perhaps even at a slight loss.
By sacrificing the profit they make on these fantastic monitors, they immediately add value to the Power Mac line - after all, they don't work with any other computer anyway! (At least not without a very expensive adaptor). Apple's displays could be arguably less expensive to produce than competitors' much cheaper products, because they (Apple's displays) don't need power supplies, and they have no VGA connection (only DVI).
The effect would be twofold: the displays are arguably among the best LCD panels on the market, so peecee people who see them in action would say "you Mac users get all the best toys." Second, it would make purchasing an Apple display seem much less frivolous - right now (in Canada at least) an Apple Studio 15" display costs about twice what I would spend on the cheapest 15" LCD from LG or KDS. Yeah Apple's displays are a bit better, but I can't justify that!
Offering the displays at bargain-basement prices would also position the Power Mac G4 as a reasonable purchase instead of buying a new iMac. Case in point: an 800 MHz iMac (in Canada) is $2899 (with SuperDrive). A similarly equipped Power Mac G4/733 with a combo drive (no SuperDrive) is $3049, and a 15" Studio Display is $929 - for a grand total of $3978, and I still can't burn DVDs! (FWIW the Power Mac G4/867 with SuperDrive and 15" display is $4803).
Realistically the Power Mac G4/733 will probably be about as fast as the iMac G4/800, and my advantages would be PCI slots (so what) and gigabit ethernet (nice for servers but...)
This is a dark day as far as Apple's pricing grid is concerned, and this is the best possible solution I can think of for the sake of the Power Mac G4 at the moment.
For the record, Apple's 'Superdrive' is their CD-RW / DVD-RW combo drive. Not to be confused with their previous 'Superdrive' which was just a floppy drive that could do single-, double-, and hi-density versions of Mac- and DOS- formatted 3.5" diskettes.
The imation 'SuperDisk' format is a hi-capacity disk (120 megs), for which the drive is backward-compatible with standard floppies.
Did it occur to anybody here that maybe there will be a lot more to this morning's keynote? Since this article also appeared in print already, maybe it's not a leak - and Steve just has a little more up his sleeve.
Honestly, I'm sticking with G5. In 1999 when the G4 was introduced, Apple had deliberately misled the rumour sites to believe that the G4 was nowhere near production. Now, with the iMac bumped to a G4, it would really make sense that as of today the Power Mac as we know it will be G5. Perhaps that's what all they hype is about, and now this is a little wishful thinking: maybe the G5 is so stinkin' fast it's not funny.
Ultimately, yes, cars, if well-designed, should put as little thought as possible between driver and road. This is not intended to sound snarky, but it's obvious you're not a Mac user because you're used to your computer requiring that much tweaking.
A Mac user NEVER enters BIOS. There's nothing like it on a Mac (except maybe "Open Firmware" but that code is only entered for firmware updates. Because of Apple's hardware/software integration, you never need to have the BIOS auto-detect and assign letters and drive sizes, or go into some archaic menu-driven system to tell the computer what volume to boot from. It's all there, integrated, into the OS. You don't even need a disk eject button.
Put a display on a hammer that measures how much force is exerted, and a carpenter will take longer using that hammer because the display is a distraction. I like buttons and knobs too, but I don't like having more than necessary on my serious work tools.
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I'm sure there are a lot of corporate sponsors with massive bandwidth who would love to endorse this project. Why would they target the general public for scant donations here-and-there when they can instead focus on just signing one deal with a big media conglomerate?
Sure, they lose their soul, but this is supposed to be in the name of science, right?
Random access is not what drew the consumer market away from DAT - it was pressure from the RIAA and regulatory bodies. DAT was cable of making a perfect digital copy of a CD. So many proposed taxation ideas and copy-protection schemes left DAT as a high-end solution. Sony and Philips both went back to the drawing board, and each came up with something that didn't piss the RIAA off as badly: MD (Mini-Disc, by Sony) and DCC (Digital Compact Cassette, Philips). These formats store audio using lossy compression methods. Unfortunately DCC never caught on, even though its codec sounded way better than the original MD codec. MD's new codec is better, but still doesn't sound as nice (to my ears) as DCC did. DAT as an audio format is also quickly dying, since CDR became so cheap and quick. Still nothing beats DAT for live 2-channel location recording.
According to the instructions, you can set the modem to be the sole WAN connection, or you can have it only dial up when the broadband WAN goes down. Of course, you can also define basic PPP settings and modem init string.
That is a nice feature in the SMC barricade, but is not usually necessary for broadband provided you can make what ever computer have plugged into your cable modem do a DHCP Release. This causes the remote DHCP server to "take back" your IP address and stop associating it with your MAC address.
Then you're free to plug any piece of hardware into your cable modem, and your connection should continue to work fine.
One warning though: if you do plug a network router that doesn't do MAC address cloning, make sure it is able to do this "release" prior to having it discover its first IP address. If it cannot release, then you may have trouble with your ISP if you try to disconnect the router and operate without it.
Yes but will it publish images from your digital camera to the web with one click? I buy computers to accomplish tasks, not run operating systems. Yep, they're using more CPU cycles for the GUI than they used to. So what?
Will Pegasos run Photoshop and MSIE? Will the AmigaOne have onboard FireWire so I can hook up my Camcorder, unplug it, then plug in a CDRW without having to reboot?
Yes, I can connect anyone else's display to that second port, but I guess it comes down to whether you're the type of person who cares if your computer system looks like a thrown-together jalopy rather than something that is intended to impress. I choose my clothing, my furniture and my car with attention to appearance, even though they do nothing more than keep me warm, give me a place to sit, and move me around. Still when I wear a suit my pants match my jacket!
Computer system aesthetics are particularly important where you want clients to feel comforable, especially in an artistic environment. I just don't expect a flaky, artsy songwriter to put confidence a piecemeal PC with an ugly beige case, a darker beige DVD-ROM, a gray CDR and a blue Zip drive. I know it works just as well, but I believe a person who spends hours or days nurturing a creative product through to fruition wants to do it using tools that feel inviting and deliberate.
And, you must admit, VGA is simply not the proper way to run a flat panel display. Even Apple has stated in promo literature that their LCD displays are great because of the all-digital video signal path. So a user has to contend with not only having mismatched appearance due to the monitors being different brands, but really the monitor connected to the VGA port should be a CRT!
Also don't forget: from an ergonomic perspective, an ideal dual-monitor system will use two identical monitors, so that as you move objects from one screen to the other their appearance doesn't change because one's a little brighter and the other's a little blurrier and more greenish. From the same perspective, I want identical video cards driving each monitor as well, because I don't want one screen to be more responsive than the other.
If Apple is going to boast about standard dual-monitor functionality then they should do it properly. ADC is just not practical.
The G4/DP 1 gig is a very appealing option, except:
THEREFORE Your system can only work with one Apple display, because only one card slot has this power connection.
What I'm getting at here is that Apple boasts that all the new Power Macs have support for dual monitors built in, but for a company who puts so much work into beautiful designs, they expect me to use two different, cosmetically mismatched displays! I don't believe that a VGA connector belongs on a flat panel due to inherent flickering issues, so that means a flat display on the ADC and a CRT on the VGA port. Ugly!
If I want two displays that look the same, I have to enter into an imposing combination of needlessly wasted PCI slots, buying redundant cable adaptors, and spending a lot of money!
I would love to have a DP 1 GHz with dual Apple 17" Studio displays. I really would. But the premium is too high.
Apple should bury ADC now and issue an admission of stupidity.
Apple did a great job of embracing standards with USB, and is arguably responsible for its success. Why they chose to suddenly abandon the DVI connector on Yosemite and original Sawtooth computers is a mytery to me. DVI was just catching on as a standard way of connecting flat panel displays. If Apple hadn't moved to ADC, we would have seen more Wintel video cards with DVI conectors on them now, because there would be more DVI-connected monitors on the market.
Apologies for the rambling post... ADC has bothered me right from the start and now these new dual cards seem like the ultimate inconvenience.
In the same sentence I refer to "20% to 40% compression" I am referring to file compression.
On tracks like that I have seen compression ratios as high as 80% (5:1). But on full, compressed, normalized tracks, 20% to 40% compression is more the norm (about 1.5:1).
ZAP encoding is S-L-O-W though. On my G4/350 it usually takes longer than playback time.
PCM is not compression. It's just an encoding format. (PCM = pulse code modulation). The files are huge compared to MP3 because they're not compressed! :)
AIFF is non-lossy because it isn't compressed. It is not a codec, it's a file format for raw audio.
ZAP (an acronym for "Zero-loss Audio Packer") is, as its name implies, lossless, and the ZAP app has the ability to play back audio from a compressed archive.
The ZAP application compresses raw audio files to about 40-to-70% of their original size. This is much better smaller than typical .zip or .sit compression on audio files.
Archives can be made self-extracting. I find this useful if I do an audio project for which the files total about a gig in size but want to back it up to a single CDR.
Interestingly, I just looked at emagic's web site, and they do not have a link for ZAP. Maybe their site is incomplete, or maybe they have discontinued the product.
The apparent "cool vs. functional" theme of this article is absurd, and obviously written by somebody who thinks it's still cool to aimlessly bash Apple.
Let's talk about functional for a moment, shall we? Here are some of Apple's thoughtful little extras which have appeared in the last little while:
- First consumer PC with onboard 10/100 ethernet
- Apple's laptops have auto-sensing ethernet ports so it never matters if you use a "straight thru" or "crossover" cable
- First computers with integrated ieee 802.11 antennas
- First computers with on-board 1394 (FireWire, an Apple innovation)
- Laptop batteries with a gauge to tell you how much juice remains without turning on the laptop
- Tower case with a door that opens downward to reveal all of the RAM and PCI slots and allow easy access to drive bays
- First mass-marketed "legacy free" PC (the iMac), which is arguably responsible for saving USB from certain death
- Consumer PC with standard, articulated flat panel display (turns monitor - "look at this, bob")
- Cinema display, which for quite some time was the largest desktop LCD display available
- Support since the Mac II series (198x) for as many monitors as you can connect, arrangeable in any way to form a large "virtual desktop"
- Networking support built into EVERY Mac - not just as an option - since 1984
- First consumer PC to ship with a mouse
- First consumer PC to ship with 3.5" disks (and no option for 5.25" low-capacity behemoths)
- First consumer OS to support CD ROM
- First consumer OS to natively support proprtionally spaced fonts
These are off the top of my head. These are not gimmicks. These are not wowie-zowie cool add-ons from the special effects department. These are useful innovations, which Apple continues to deliver with every new product. These are genuinely useful technologies. This is function!And hey - if these innovations happen to come in really nice plastics, that's cool... because I also don't want my computer to be an eyesore. You can poo-poo innovation and call it trendy all you want. I have no interest in paying less money for less of a computer, from a lesser company whose "me-too" attitude does nothing to advance the computer industry.
I'm a Mac user, and I don't buy 'em because they're cool - my G4 tower, my iMac and my iBook are all the best computers, the most functional things I could possibly use for what I want to do. No other machines could do my work faster.
I'm tired of hearing all the press - "will this save Apple", "is this Apple's comeback", "what Apple needs to do is" -- if you don't want a Mac don't buy one. 4.5 % of us will continue to buy 'em and continue to exist with our "cool" products.
Agreed. BUT - this is still a better scenario than trying to get a deal with a major. I use mp3.com as an example because it is the biggest site of its kind, however there are other, similar sites that don't treat the artist this way.
I admit I don't get enough plays for payback, so I am not going to participate in their little scheme. Still I believe in the principle of their system, and I am not opposed to mp3.com - let them do business the way they have to, because they have to make money too. If you're getting enough plays to merit payback, then $20/month = peanuts.
mp3.com has a near perfect model. Here you can download a staggering array of songs for free, in whatever genre you happen to like, and a lot of it is really good. As long as you can get past the "I want to listen to what's popular" mentality that is shoved down our throats by radio (which cannot survive in its current state) and music videos (crap), mp3.com is a perfectly viable solution for listeners - you can find almost anything, and any Joe-Schmoe artist can put their music there. mp3.com actually pays artists who get lots of plays, using money they (presumably) make from advertisers. As a musician/composer/producer, I can honestly say that I believe that this is the future of music. The middle men (major labels, publishers, lawyers, distributors, retailers) have met their match, and will fall because they were so worry so much about "piracy" that they miss the big picture - up until now there has been just too much money in recorded music. There is only a finite amount of money that the general populus will spend on music, and thanks to Napster and mp3.com (very different models), they have discovered its true value: next to nothing. Because I'm good (yeah whatever), I plan to make only a small amount of money from people who listen to my recorded music. I see produced music only as a vehicle to gain respect and recognition, while live performance is what makes the big bucks. By big bucks I don't mean what Madonna currently makes in royalties, but enough to comfortably sustain my life as long as I choose to continue with this profession. Why would I listen to the latest crappy single from Destiny's Child on popular radio when I can go directly into the genre of music I like on mp3.com, choose 20 artists in a genre I like, stream them directly to my desktop, and abort playback on the tunes that don't interest me? Then I can download the ones I like and burn 'em to a CD or copy them into my iPod. There is no better solution for the discerning music consumer.
To put it in perspective, a system based on an Athlon XP and Nvidia Geforce card is useless on its own, without software to run on it.
Yes, there's lots of power there, but I think the ultimate Linux system is one that does what it's intended to do, not just one with all the best hardware. If the box is employed as a server, for example, then the Geforce is an irrelevant, extravagent, useless nicety. The processor's also probably not worth what you'd pay, considering you could get something a little slower for a lot less.
There are no "ultimate systems" - just ultimate solutions.
Let this be a lesson: watch out for the "VOTE FOR .NET" Outlook virus!
...sometimes it can be a distraction. When I drive a car I don't think about the valves and pistons. When I write something down I don't think about the ball in the pen. When I play piano I don't think about the counterweights on the hammers.
When I word-process I don't think about my boot sequence, and when I crop pics I don't think about my BIOS firmware revision. I thoroughly understand computer hardware, but if it can accomplish the task I want to accomplish, I feel no need to tweak it.
:)
In order to really increase market share, and to increase the value of the current Power Mac G4 line, Apple should be selling their incredible Studio and Cinema displays at cost, or perhaps even at a slight loss.
By sacrificing the profit they make on these fantastic monitors, they immediately add value to the Power Mac line - after all, they don't work with any other computer anyway! (At least not without a very expensive adaptor). Apple's displays could be arguably less expensive to produce than competitors' much cheaper products, because they (Apple's displays) don't need power supplies, and they have no VGA connection (only DVI).
The effect would be twofold: the displays are arguably among the best LCD panels on the market, so peecee people who see them in action would say "you Mac users get all the best toys." Second, it would make purchasing an Apple display seem much less frivolous - right now (in Canada at least) an Apple Studio 15" display costs about twice what I would spend on the cheapest 15" LCD from LG or KDS. Yeah Apple's displays are a bit better, but I can't justify that!
Offering the displays at bargain-basement prices would also position the Power Mac G4 as a reasonable purchase instead of buying a new iMac. Case in point: an 800 MHz iMac (in Canada) is $2899 (with SuperDrive). A similarly equipped Power Mac G4/733 with a combo drive (no SuperDrive) is $3049, and a 15" Studio Display is $929 - for a grand total of $3978, and I still can't burn DVDs! (FWIW the Power Mac G4/867 with SuperDrive and 15" display is $4803).
Realistically the Power Mac G4/733 will probably be about as fast as the iMac G4/800, and my advantages would be PCI slots (so what) and gigabit ethernet (nice for servers but...)
This is a dark day as far as Apple's pricing grid is concerned, and this is the best possible solution I can think of for the sake of the Power Mac G4 at the moment.
For the record, Apple's 'Superdrive' is their CD-RW / DVD-RW combo drive. Not to be confused with their previous 'Superdrive' which was just a floppy drive that could do single-, double-, and hi-density versions of Mac- and DOS- formatted 3.5" diskettes.
The imation 'SuperDisk' format is a hi-capacity disk (120 megs), for which the drive is backward-compatible with standard floppies.
Did it occur to anybody here that maybe there will be a lot more to this morning's keynote? Since this article also appeared in print already, maybe it's not a leak - and Steve just has a little more up his sleeve.
Honestly, I'm sticking with G5. In 1999 when the G4 was introduced, Apple had deliberately misled the rumour sites to believe that the G4 was nowhere near production. Now, with the iMac bumped to a G4, it would really make sense that as of today the Power Mac as we know it will be G5. Perhaps that's what all they hype is about, and now this is a little wishful thinking: maybe the G5 is so stinkin' fast it's not funny.
Ultimately, yes, cars, if well-designed, should put as little thought as possible between driver and road. This is not intended to sound snarky, but it's obvious you're not a Mac user because you're used to your computer requiring that much tweaking.
A Mac user NEVER enters BIOS. There's nothing like it on a Mac (except maybe "Open Firmware" but that code is only entered for firmware updates. Because of Apple's hardware/software integration, you never need to have the BIOS auto-detect and assign letters and drive sizes, or go into some archaic menu-driven system to tell the computer what volume to boot from. It's all there, integrated, into the OS. You don't even need a disk eject button.
Put a display on a hammer that measures how much force is exerted, and a carpenter will take longer using that hammer because the display is a distraction. I like buttons and knobs too, but I don't like having more than necessary on my serious work tools.