The cheapest Wintel Desktop they list is a Compaq EVO D510 2GHz P4 256/40GB CD at 1,149.00. The Compaq has more RAM and a three year warranty but inferior display/graphics combo and no firewire.
They also offer amazing specials on Apple products. When the second generation TiBook came out I got a first generation one for $1,700. I also got an iPod for $230 back when they retailed for $399.
Yep, you guessed it... B-tree was basically spaghetti: reformat and reinstall time. I've seen it happen a few times before: the most spectacular being a crash during a defrag. Basically, nothing pointed to the right file: all the icons were there, but the info in them was basically noise.
Next time have them try DiskWarrior.
"Instead of patching the original directory, it quickly builds a new replacement directory using data recovered from the original directory thereby recovering files and folders that you thought were lost and that no other program could recover."
Sounds like it would have fixed your machine. It fixed an OS X boot disk of mine which NDD 7 had completely chewed. A few files ended up recovered to a "Recovered Files" directory, but at least I still had them. The damn thing booted right up.
I have heard mention of Apple licensing technologies from XEROX, but I have never seen documentation. I don't think it happened because, According to Cyberlaw, when Apple sued MS the"Ninth Circuit recognized that "protection extends only to those components of a work that are original to the author, although original selection and arrangement of otherwise uncopyrightable components may be protectable." They "upheld the denial of protection to certain GUI items because of Apple's admitted heavy borrowing from iconic treatments in the Xerox Star and an IBM Pictureworld research report. The Ninth Circuit also found that even if certain folder and page icon designs were original to Apple, they "added so little to the mix of protectable material that the outcome could not reasonably be affected."
That said, I don't see how Apple "stole" anything from PARC. The two systems are pretty different.
Jef raskin been pushing GUIs at Apple for at least a couple of years at that point, and was already a couple of months into the Macintosh project. He had taken his Mac proposal straight to Mike Markula because the Steves had never been excited about his GUI work. In the late sixties at Carnegie Mellon (and long before Star/Alto), raskin did his PhD. thesis on object oriented graphic interface. He even called the system he described in his thesis "Quickdraw."
Steve Jobs got the idea for a new operating system from Jeff raskin and his Macintosh team who were busy developing one. Then he went to PARC to get a different perspective.
The Xerox trip was important to the evolution of the Mac in that it probably influenced some of Jobs decisions. In particular, the choice of a mouse as the pointer device, which raskin opposed. Raskin himself was pretty familiar with PARC's work. He had spent a fair amount of time there before coming to Apple and was friends with several PARC people. IIRC, there was a substantial gap between the PARC visit and Jobs' Mac coup, time he spent working on Lisa.
For the most part, the PARC story is just a Jobs authored mythology designed to paint himself as the spiritual father of the Mac.
As with many such breakthroughs, the Mac was an appropriate implementation of technologies and design concepts which had been developing simultaneously in several places.
My guess is the licensing story is an embelishment of the truth that Apple had XEROX's corporate level permission to tour PARC sans NDA.
You are absolutely correct. However, the Nobel Foundation corruptly obscures this fact and treats the "Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel" just like a real Nobel Prize on its web site. The award is totally politicized, disproportionately awarded to the U of Chicago school, and frequently goes to fringe cranks like Ronald Coase.
The great economist Gunnar Myrdal, who sat on the board of the Bank of Sweden, argued for the prize's abolition. In 1974 Myrdal shared the award with Freidrich Hayek. Basically, Myrdal felt that if ideologue hacks like Freidman and Hayek won the prize it was meaningless.
The Jaguar Samba implemention is fine for non-routed networks. However, browsing only works on local subnets. If you try to add a WINS server to cross subnets you can only browse the WINS server itself. For some reason, this is not big news, even though Apple heavily touted SMB browsing as a Jaguar feature. They seem to be dragging their feet on a fix, although they document it dep inside this technote.
I don't like either the little knob or the trackpad.. The knob is too fiddly, and I'm always brushing the palm of my hand on the pad..
OS X has an "Ignore Trackpad While Typing" option which pretty well eliminates the accidental trackpading which used to plague me. You'll find it it the trackpad tab of the Mouse panel in System Preferences.
For example, they could adopt HyperTransport, which would make multiprocessing affordable, easy to design around and most of all, leading edge, which is important to some people.
I think there is a good chance they will move to hypertransport since they are a member of the consortium.
No, the way Apple killed the clones was by denying them ROM licenses. It wasn't the OS -- it was, in fact, proprietary hardware.
Not according to Gil Amelio's book. Actually, Apple dropped the custom ROMS just a couple of months after they reneged on the clone OS licensing agreements. They moved the ROMS into RAM, loading them off a file in the System Folder. At that point, an OS license became a ROM license.
Still--a good ship commander could maneuver Ol Ironsides faster than Victory and could get off some damn good shots because it would take longer for Victory to turn (she is, after all, a huge ship-of-the-line),
Sure, although I suspect the range advantage of of all those high mounted 12-pounders would allow Victory to shred Constitution's rigging before she could pull any fancy maneuvers.
and the Americans were reknowned for their skill at gunnery.
It is the Persian wars thing of freeborn men defending their polis from whip driven slaves. Not that American citizens were substantially more free than British citizens, but American sailers certainly were more free than their British counterparts. Like the Persians, the Royal Navy drove her men into battle with whips. In fact, many British seamen were actually kidnapped Americans. American sailors were two year enlistees while the Limeys were lifelong slaves.
That, and the fact that British Frigates were typically designed more for their sailing qualities than their battle qualities, made all the difference in the War of 1812.
This quote from a seaman aboard the HMS Macedonian regarding her 1812 battle with the USS United States pretty well sums it up,
Our men were all in good spirits; though they did not scruple to express the wish that the coming foe was a Frenchman rather than a Yankee. We had been told, by the Americans on board, that frigates in the American service carried more and heavier metal than ours. This, together with our consciousness of superiority over the French at sea, led us to a preference for a French antagonist.
So the question is, how many guns were fore and aft of Victory? 'Cause that's where I'd use a superfrigate like Constitution to blow a few chunks out of Victory.
Well, I believe the 68-pounders were mounted on the forecastle, so the bow was pretty much off limits. Unless you could get close enough so they couldn't be depressed enough to hit you. I'm not confident that was possible. Not sure about the stern. Crossing your opponents stern was probably always a good tactic if you could pull it off. At Trafalgar, Victory destroyed Vilaneuve's flagship Bucentaure by getting her 68-pounders aft of her.
In RC, this would be fun. But a little grape pointed at Constitution from high above would make for a Bad Day in the real world. Fun to ponder the possibilities, you know?:)
To be honest get a little queesy thinking about it. I mean, modern combat is scary enough. Fighting inside an inflamable, splintering coffin with five foot ceilings, filled with noxious black powder smoke is almost unimaginably terrifying.
I like sailing as much as the next guy. But being decapitated by a yard long burning splinter kinda sucks.
Frankly, I'm quite fed up with the heat generated by x86 chips, but I swore off propriatary Apple hardware after Apple killed off the PPC clones. We'll see what other options present themselves.
You are mistaken about Apple hardware. Apple's architecture is as open and documented as any on the market. It just isn't as common. I can't think of a single proprietary component. Maybe the bridge chips. The word proprietary is thrown around so freely it is in danger of losing all meaning. Apple didn't kill the clones by denying them access to proprietary schematics. They did it by denying them licenses for the proprietary OS. Killing the clones didn't make the hardware any more proprietary.
OTOH, I now get your point about the USB ethernet adapters and A/AUI.
Why not build some serious fighting sail, like the HMS Victory (in history, commanded by the most famous and victorious commander in his day, Admiral Horatio Nelson), and pit it against America's jewel, the USS Constitution.
In real life it wouldn't be much a of a fight. Constitution's only chance would have been running away. She literally wasn't in Victory's weight class. Constitution displaced 2,200 tons to Victory's 3,500. Constitution carried thirty 24-pounder cannon and twenty-four 32-pounder short range carronades, plus a pair of 24 or 18-punder bow chasers. Victory boasted thirty 32-pounders, twenty-eight 24-pounders, thirty long 12-pounders, 14 short 12-pounders and two 68-pounder carronades. The 68-pounders, loaded with a single sixty-eight pound ball and 500 musket balls, were devastating at Trafalgar.
Ol' Ironsides was tough, but she wasn't invulnerable. Victory would have handily dispatched her in single combat.
Oh, yeah, those are *really* common. How about Apple's AAUI-to-10BaseT Ethernet adaptors, if we're going to be getting into corner cases?
Apple hasn't made a desktop without an RJ-45 Ethernet port for seven years. Likewise, what do the relative volumes of a 1994 6100 and some circa 1998 PII have to do with this guy's point? I think it is pretty obvious he was talking about reasonably recent hardware.
I apologize. My comment wasn't really aimed at you. I was merely venting my frustration at the oppressive slashdot establishment. Your post added to the discourse. I didn't know there was an updated xterm binary package much less a GIMP one. I'll need to check up on such things more often.
I think it was really the HIPAA thing that was bugging me. Slashdot should tell me it loves me more often.
Isn't this what I said in my original post? I even included a link (albeit OS X GNU, not sourceforge) to the binary installer. I am starting to feel unheard.
When the new Windows SP EULAs came out I posted a response about how it would be a HIPPA violation for me to accept it. Nobody replied and I received no moderation. Last week, my point shows up as a headline here and all of the sudden everybody has an insight. Slashdot is just a boys club isn't it?
Apple's ultimate plan is to ditch Carbon like a hooker bad case of genital warts. Carbon ties Apple to the Motorola PPC platform which is looking more and more like an evolutionary trichordate (good potential, slow development causes it to be overwhelmed by the competition).
They like to say that (or used to anyway) but I don't see how it is possible. Many developers have custom interface elements (sliders, dials etc.), refined over many years to have very precise behaviors. Cocoa can't replicate these behaviors; no widget set can. If Apple dropped Carbon we could kiss apps like Digital Performer goodbye. Porting it would be prohibitively expensive for a small company like MOTU.
Sadly, there is no X11 support in Mac OSX--X11 on OSX requires a separate download. It works acceptably well, but it is not well integrated with the OS. Also, when you upgrade to Jaguar, your X11 installation breaks and you need to reinstall it.
The only thing I noticed breaking was xterm. I downloaded the source and recompiled it under gcc 3.1 without incident. No need to reinstall XFree86.
I agree it would be nice if Apple bundled XFree86. However, installing it is not hard. Fink aside, you can get an OS X binary package from the OS X Gnu guys.
Talking about AppleTalk within this discussion is disingenuous or at least ignorant. Mac OS 9 (1999) introduced AppleTalk over TCP/IP (Macs speaking AppleTalk over plain TCP/IP networks), and Mac OS X 10.2 (today) does all the tricks that AppleTalk used to do over plain TCP/IP (using Rendezvous a.k.a. ZeroConf, also a standard). In short, AppleTalk is memory. Why don't you complain about the Newton or something?
You are confusing AppleTalk with Appleshare. AppleTalk is a protocol stack including datalink (LLAP, ELAP, TLAP), transport (DDP), network (ATP, AEP,NBP,RTMP), session ( ZIP, ASP, ADSP) and application/presentation (AFP, PAP) protocols. What you are calling AppleTalk over TCP/IP is actually AFP (Apple File Protocol) over TCP/IP. This is commonly called Appleshare over IP or simply Appleshare IP (as in AppleshareIP, the Apple server product).
I wouldn't exactly say AppleTalk is memory either. OS X still supports it, and until Rendezvous printers start appearing, it is still pretty damn useful.
IMHO, you're nitpicking a bit. I do understand your point - but you're taking "proprietary" quite literally. On the other hand, in the world of computers, people typically use "proprietary" to designate the fact that the hardware is developed by a single vendor, using standards they invented themselves.
That bastardization of the definition essentially renders it meaningless. If we accept it we are saying that thousands of copylefted applications are proprietary. Is python a proprietary language? How about C? Whether a standard is maintained by a for profit corporation or a non-profit association is of no consequence. If it is open it is open. Many of those standards maintaining bodies are simply coalitions of vendors anyway. Kind of like the NFL is a not for profit association of for profit businesss.
The Apple computers have always fit this definition, to one extent or another. (As I said, though, this is changing in some ways. You no longer see much happening with, say, the NuBus slot.) I still can't just buy an Apple Cinema display and slap it on my PC and expect it to work properly, though.
Even if we accept your definition Apple is no more "proprietary" than any other PC vendor. They use in-house bridge chips, but IEEE firmware. PC vendors use proprietary (literally) firmware.
BTW, Apple did not develop NuBus. It was designed at MIT and Texas Instruments. They published the standard in 1979, almost a decade before Apple used it. The reason you don't see it anymore is because it isn't as good as PCI.
As for network protocols, simply publishing the details of how it works doesn't make it a defacto "standard". Appletalk might be completely and openly documented - but it will always be considered more "proprietary" than TCP/IP,
Because TCP/IP was developed at Berkely? Being less common does not make something proprietary. Go hang out in the Netatalk mailing lists. You'll find Apple employees exchanging information and even contributing bugfixes. If AppleTalk and AFP are proprietary, maybe Apple should tell their developers to stop working on competing implementations.
just as Novell's IPX or Microsoft's Netbeui protocols are. Appletalk wasn't developed by a vendor-neutral committee - for one thing.
Neither was the IEEE1394. It was developed at Apple. Is that proprietary too? Actually, it is more proprietary than AppleTalk or just about anything else in the Mac. Apple holds several governing patents and charges licensing fees, through a non-profit coalition of vendors I might add.
Well actually, I was referring to the Apple hardware itself - more than anything else.
Sure, they have USB now - so that opens up a few more expansion options than before. Still, you have to always use the "Apple approved" hardware, which is quite a limited selection compared to the options available for a PC.
I don't think you understand the definition of proprietary. Apple has no hardware for which it holds exclusive rights or which it uses produces, or markets under exclusive legal right of the inventor or maker. Apple has the least proprietary hardware I have ever seen. Not even proprietary firmware and ROMS. I don't know of a single proprietary component. Even ADC, although not used by anyone else, is not proprietary. It is simply the combination of two existing published standards into a single connecter.
Your statement that you have to buy Apple approved hardware is completely specious.
For just one example, look at all the answering machine/voice mailbox type cards for a PC. Now, tell me how many of them you see for a Mac platform? How about TV/radio add-on boards? How about industrial control boards?
Umh...drivers? Are you saying Apple hardware is proprietary because their OS team doesn't write drivers for every arcane third party PCI card on the market? I don't get the logical connection.
This kind of abuse of the word "proprietary" is really out of control. I recently heard an engineer refer to AppleTalk as a proprietary protocol. LOL! not only is it a well documented published standard, but Apple lets their engineers bug-fix free Netatalk ( a free implementation of the suite).
Now that the latest offerings in the Mac world are upon all of us (iMac, Titanium Powerbook, OSX, etc.) - I thought it was time to take one more look. Nope, pretty new "candy coating" but same old proprietary, over-hyped core.
You are precisely right and should be modded up as insightful. This is a pet peeve of mine.
Furthermore, the Macintosh is actually less proprietary than your average PC. They use IEEE 1275 Open Firmware. What x86 machine has that? If you don't like their firmware code you can get a Forth book and write your own. Also, Apple moved the ROMs off the motherboard and put them in RAM years ago. It makes running MacOS in a virtual machine a breeze.
So yea, Apple could (in theory) save about $50 a system (their cost) by moving everything over to Intel. But they would also end up increasing the odds that somebody could reverse-engineer their ROMs (as Compaq once did to IBM), and suddenly all those "Pricewatch Special" shitbox PC's and PC Mo-Bo kits (and I say that as a big fan of "Pricewatch Special" shitbox kits) will be able to run OS X after a simple chip-mod, and Apple would die a horrible death shortly thereafter, making version 10.5 (or whatever) the last Mac OS ever.
Actually, Apple no longer uses proprietary ROMs or firmware. Not physical ones anyway. The what used to be iin ROM is now loaded into memory at boot. Makes it very easy to run recent versions of the OS under Mac On Linux (MOL). In fact I think it means you can run OS 9.x on an RS6000 under MOL.
The firmware is IEEE 1275 Open Firmware, just like a Sun.
And since I can anticipate the off-topic discussion, as an educated southerner, I feel I should say that, yes while the South was fighting to preserve slavery, (it was, after all, the basis of their economy) the North was *not* fighting to abolish it(*). And if you read the constitution literally, the south had the right to secession. Having said that, it would have really sucked if the nation had been split in two, and I'm certainly glad President Lincoln was able to later use the war as an excuse to abolish slavery.
(*) in fact, two full regiments of union soldiers disbanded in protest after the emancipation proclimation, refusing to fight a war for slaves.
I'd like to see documentation on that. I've never heard it and it makes no sense, since the Army had been officially freeing slaves for two years by that time (since August 1861). Our articles of war forbade returning slaves to owners. Slavery had been abolished in DC and all territories. Lincoln (conservative on the subject) had promised aid/compensation to all loyal slave states which undertook emancipation voluntarily. In July 1862, Lincoln told them that if they did not undertake voluntary emancipation it would "be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion--by the mere incidents of the war." If a soldier didn't know he was fighting a war against slavery by 1863, he was a moron.
Furthermore, exactly what do think the 200,000 black US soldiers, fully 10% of our armed forces, were fighting for?
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Same goes for Canada. They ban all sorts of stuff, at least from importation. R. Crumb's When the *'s Take over America series springs to mind.
The cheapest Wintel Desktop they list is a Compaq EVO D510 2GHz P4 256/40GB CD at 1,149.00. The Compaq has more RAM and a three year warranty but inferior display/graphics combo and no firewire.
They also offer amazing specials on Apple products. When the second generation TiBook came out I got a first generation one for $1,700. I also got an iPod for $230 back when they retailed for $399.
"Instead of patching the original directory, it quickly builds a new replacement directory using data recovered from the original directory thereby recovering files and folders that you thought were lost and that no other program could recover."
Sounds like it would have fixed your machine. It fixed an OS X boot disk of mine which NDD 7 had completely chewed. A few files ended up recovered to a "Recovered Files" directory, but at least I still had them. The damn thing booted right up.
I have heard mention of Apple licensing technologies from XEROX, but I have never seen documentation. I don't think it happened because, According to Cyberlaw, when Apple sued MS the"Ninth Circuit recognized that "protection extends only to those components of a work that are original to the author, although original selection and arrangement of otherwise uncopyrightable components may be protectable." They "upheld the denial of protection to certain GUI items because of Apple's admitted heavy borrowing from iconic treatments in the Xerox Star and an IBM Pictureworld research report. The Ninth Circuit also found that even if certain folder and page icon designs were original to Apple, they "added so little to the mix of protectable material that the outcome could not reasonably be affected."
That said, I don't see how Apple "stole" anything from PARC. The two systems are pretty different.
Jef raskin been pushing GUIs at Apple for at least a couple of years at that point, and was already a couple of months into the Macintosh project. He had taken his Mac proposal straight to Mike Markula because the Steves had never been excited about his GUI work. In the late sixties at Carnegie Mellon (and long before Star/Alto), raskin did his PhD. thesis on object oriented graphic interface. He even called the system he described in his thesis "Quickdraw."
Steve Jobs got the idea for a new operating system from Jeff raskin and his Macintosh team who were busy developing one. Then he went to PARC to get a different perspective.
The Xerox trip was important to the evolution of the Mac in that it probably influenced some of Jobs decisions. In particular, the choice of a mouse as the pointer device, which raskin opposed. Raskin himself was pretty familiar with PARC's work. He had spent a fair amount of time there before coming to Apple and was friends with several PARC people. IIRC, there was a substantial gap between the PARC visit and Jobs' Mac coup, time he spent working on Lisa.
For the most part, the PARC story is just a Jobs authored mythology designed to paint himself as the spiritual father of the Mac. As with many such breakthroughs, the Mac was an appropriate implementation of technologies and design concepts which had been developing simultaneously in several places.
My guess is the licensing story is an embelishment of the truth that Apple had XEROX's corporate level permission to tour PARC sans NDA.
You are absolutely correct. However, the Nobel Foundation corruptly obscures this fact and treats the "Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel" just like a real Nobel Prize on its web site. The award is totally politicized, disproportionately awarded to the U of Chicago school, and frequently goes to fringe cranks like Ronald Coase.
The great economist Gunnar Myrdal, who sat on the board of the Bank of Sweden, argued for the prize's abolition. In 1974 Myrdal shared the award with Freidrich Hayek. Basically, Myrdal felt that if ideologue hacks like Freidman and Hayek won the prize it was meaningless.
The Jaguar Samba implemention is fine for non-routed networks. However, browsing only works on local subnets. If you try to add a WINS server to cross subnets you can only browse the WINS server itself. For some reason, this is not big news, even though Apple heavily touted SMB browsing as a Jaguar feature. They seem to be dragging their feet on a fix, although they document it dep inside this technote.
This quote from a seaman aboard the HMS Macedonian regarding her 1812 battle with the USS United States pretty well sums it up,
Our men were all in good spirits; though they did not scruple to express the wish that the coming foe was a Frenchman rather than a Yankee. We had been told, by the Americans on board, that frigates in the American service carried more and heavier metal than ours. This, together with our consciousness of superiority over the French at sea, led us to a preference for a French antagonist. Well, I believe the 68-pounders were mounted on the forecastle, so the bow was pretty much off limits. Unless you could get close enough so they couldn't be depressed enough to hit you. I'm not confident that was possible. Not sure about the stern. Crossing your opponents stern was probably always a good tactic if you could pull it off. At Trafalgar, Victory destroyed Vilaneuve's flagship Bucentaure by getting her 68-pounders aft of her. To be honest get a little queesy thinking about it. I mean, modern combat is scary enough. Fighting inside an inflamable, splintering coffin with five foot ceilings, filled with noxious black powder smoke is almost unimaginably terrifying.
I like sailing as much as the next guy. But being decapitated by a yard long burning splinter kinda sucks.
OTOH, I now get your point about the USB ethernet adapters and A/AUI.
Ol' Ironsides was tough, but she wasn't invulnerable. Victory would have handily dispatched her in single combat.
Apple hasn't made a desktop without an RJ-45 Ethernet port for seven years. Likewise, what do the relative volumes of a 1994 6100 and some circa 1998 PII have to do with this guy's point? I think it is pretty obvious he was talking about reasonably recent hardware.
I apologize. My comment wasn't really aimed at you. I was merely venting my frustration at the oppressive slashdot establishment. Your post added to the discourse. I didn't know there was an updated xterm binary package much less a GIMP one. I'll need to check up on such things more often.
I think it was really the HIPAA thing that was bugging me. Slashdot should tell me it loves me more often.
Isn't this what I said in my original post? I even included a link (albeit OS X GNU, not sourceforge) to the binary installer. I am starting to feel unheard.
When the new Windows SP EULAs came out I posted a response about how it would be a HIPPA violation for me to accept it. Nobody replied and I received no moderation. Last week, my point shows up as a headline here and all of the sudden everybody has an insight. Slashdot is just a boys club isn't it?
I agree it would be nice if Apple bundled XFree86. However, installing it is not hard. Fink aside, you can get an OS X binary package from the OS X Gnu guys.
I wouldn't exactly say AppleTalk is memory either. OS X still supports it, and until Rendezvous printers start appearing, it is still pretty damn useful.
Your statement that you have to buy Apple approved hardware is completely specious. Umh...drivers? Are you saying Apple hardware is proprietary because their OS team doesn't write drivers for every arcane third party PCI card on the market? I don't get the logical connection.
This kind of abuse of the word "proprietary" is really out of control. I recently heard an engineer refer to AppleTalk as a proprietary protocol. LOL! not only is it a well documented published standard, but Apple lets their engineers bug-fix free Netatalk ( a free implementation of the suite).
Darwin is proprietary? Or are you talking about Open Firmware?
You are precisely right and should be modded up as insightful. This is a pet peeve of mine.
Furthermore, the Macintosh is actually less proprietary than your average PC. They use IEEE 1275 Open Firmware. What x86 machine has that? If you don't like their firmware code you can get a Forth book and write your own. Also, Apple moved the ROMs off the motherboard and put them in RAM years ago. It makes running MacOS in a virtual machine a breeze.
On Mac, you get the choice of NetBSD, Linux, and OS X. Again, I don't think I missed any.
OpenBSD also runs on Macs - either PPC or m68k.
So does MacOS 9.x.
The firmware is IEEE 1275 Open Firmware, just like a Sun.
Furthermore, exactly what do think the 200,000 black US soldiers, fully 10% of our armed forces, were fighting for?