From the install CD: Press F1 at boot. Then type either 'expert' or 'server'. Both these options are already provided. Granted, at this time, server really means something more like 'just don't install the GUI components,' but that's because there's not yet been an actual server release of Ubuntu. That's coming next April with the release of 6.04 The Dapper Drake.
That's in the works. the 6.04 release is supposed to go through extra testing and be supported for something like 3-5 years. There was an announcement dubbing that upcoming release "The Dapper Drake" a couple of weeks back.:-)
It's something that Ubuntu has had planned from the beginning, if you read through the website, it's just that apparently this is when they feel the distro should be ready for such a release.
I tried to like Fedora. Really, I did. I've given each release since FC2 a chance, and it's yet to last more than a few days on any of my systems. I wish I could pin down exactly what it is I don't like about it, but really, it seems to come largely down to polish. Before FC I had been on Slackware and since then I've been on Ubuntu since the initial Warty release last October.
Fedora just plain lacked the amount of polish Ubuntu had and the simplicity Slackware had. I've run into hardware detection problems just about every time I've tried FC as well. In short, it failed to do anything that impressed me enough to pull me away from distributions I knew would just work. Throw in flashbacks in RPM nightmares I've lost hours fighting in the past, and it just wasn't compelling.
I've been running Ubuntu almost exclusively since its first release. I've installed others on my testing machines to check out what's out there - Xandros, Vector Linux, FC4, NLD/SuSE, etc, but my primary machines have all stayed running Ubuntu simply because I spend less time fighting with the OS with it.
Interestingly, MS also shipped a Korean product infected with a virus (Nimbda). Clearly this is a case of OSS being unable to innovate on their own, stealing valuable ideas from Microsoft.
It's a smaller binary and runs much quicker on older machines. I've been using it on my 667MHz TiBook lately because it's considerably quicker than FF on that machine. I still use FF on my 2GHz A64 Desktop though because speed isn't an issue and I do prefer FF's behavior in a couple of places.
I also rather like the e-mail client. Again, I'm still using Thunderbird on the desktop, but on the notebook, I far prefer Opera's mail client to OS X's Mail.app.
Then there are a few other niceities such as the built in note taking function, which while not a make or break feature, is nice to have. The bit torrent client is kind of neat to have, but a bit lacking in basic ability at this time. And version 8 wraps it all up in a really nice interface. The UI is honestly *the* thing that turned me off to Opera in the past, now it's one of the nice looking and behaving apps out there. The password manager in particular is far superior to FF's IMO.
Either way, for free, give it a try. It's certainly worth a look, especially given it's a 4MB download. I've been impressed in the month or so I've been using it, and it's always a good idea to keep your eyes open to new software anyway.:-)
OS X can join AD networks, XP Home can't. XP Home has also been crippled in a way that makes setting up user permissions an absolute nightmare at best, and I've seen a number of occassions where it simply started assigning permissions to files at random.
Given that, I'm sure most admins with a clue would far rather have to support i/PBooks on their network than notebooks running XP Home.
I think you need to reconsider your views of the origin of (at the least) OS X. Sure, it's based on UNIX, which Apple likes to use as a marketing point, but saying that Apple was merely 'going with the UNIX flow' is rather offbase.
Apple had originally intended to move to an internally developed next-generation OS in the mid-late nineties. You may have heard of it - its codename was Copland. It was one of the greatest software development disasters in recent memory. It repeatedly missed milestones, and Apple eventually decided the project was too ambitious and gave it the axe. At that point, Apple went shopping for a new OS. They looked at any number of candidates, but the two strongest suitors ended up being BeOS and NeXTStep.
Keep in mind, NeXTStep had been around since the mid-to-late 80's, so it was a fairly mature system by that point. It's certainly possible the UNIX underpinnings had some effect on Apple's final decision, but it seems far more likely the relative maturity of NeXT relative to Be and Steve Jobs had a greater effect than the underlying system.
Remember that Apple had stayed afloat at this point solely due to its loyal fanbase. I rather doubt UNIX fanboyism (even rarer then as this all hapened before Linux really started to gain wind in the mainstream) played much into Apple's decision.
The point of all this? Betting on NeXT was a life-or-death decision for Apple. Far from going with any flow, it was a radical shift in architechture that had to result in either success or the failure of the company. Apple's failed attempt at a modern OS with Copland had cost the company literally millions. They quite simply couldn't afford to ahve that happen a second time. Neither could they sit and do nothing as MacOS was already technically hobbled by the mid-90's.
Dismissing the evolution of NeXT into Rhapsody and eventually OS X as being a path of least resistance indicates a lack of familiarity with the actual gravity of the move at the time. It was a huge risk that paid off in the long run. The iPod may be another story - less risky, but still took a to that point niche market with mediocre at best sales and turning it into a phenomenally successful mainstream one indicates they did *SOMETHING* other than go with the flow. What that was is left as an excercise to the reader.
None of this is meant to defend to ROKR. Everything I've seen seems to indicate that Apple doesn't really care about it on any real level. But choosing the original iPod and OS X as examples of Apple being unwilling to take risks seems a bit ludicrous to me.
You, sir, do not understand usability. Usability is *not* having 10,000 options for the user to customize and play with. Usability, in the strictest sense, is having an interface such that a user can pick it up *without* having to dig through options.
Here's something else you're missing - the type of people Gnome is targeting *DO NOT CARE* about 95%+ of the settings that would require opening GConf to change. For these users, it's far better to have a tool layout such that finding basic options does not require digging through 4 layers of option dialogues.
I'm not saying Gnome is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, simply that the majority of people on Slashdot who complain about Gnome being 'ruined' just plain do not understand how difficult seemingly simple tasks are for the average user. I mean, really, I've been using Linux since around '99, and run KDE from time to time just to see how they're progressing, and it almost always ends up with me digging through the control panel searching for things that should be rather simple to change because KDE exposes too many options for the average user.
Sure, if you're a geek and enjoy playing with all your settings, more power to you. But for people who simply want to use their computer, the KDE Control Panel is a confusing mess. So I'd really take issue with the idea that KDE is improving at an "impressive rate." If they spent more time cleaning up the Control Panel and building in HAL tools instead of adding huge oversized tooltips and calling it a usability improvement, I might be able to agree.
The changes that have been made to Gnome (for the most part) were not mistakes. It was a deliberate decision to move toward an interface that's more usable to a computer neophyte. Argue that the KDE interface is 'familiar' all you want, but the idea behind usability is that you don't *need* to be familiar with it to figure out how to do what you want.
I don't disagree that PPC was very competitive at one time, and I'm disappointed to see its last semi-mainstream desktop supporter move away from it, but these aren't the Pentium II days anymore. Clock-for-clock the G5 is a little bit better than the P4, but slower than the P-M or K8, both of which draw relatively little power. The Pentium M suffers from relatively weak floating point performance (which would have an adverse effect on many multimedia operations), but has a fantastic integer unit which bests even the K8 clock-for-clock. The upswing is Yonah, the first core likely to be included in a Mac anyway, is supposed to bring marked FPU improvements to the P-M core.
Another big thing for PPC has been low-power chips. Even with no "portable" G5 it is still a much more sensible CPU than a Pentium4 from a power perspective and yesterday the G4 and G3 were even moreso as far as the power they draw.
Yes, the G5 draws less power than a Pentium 4, but the P4 is not Apple's future. The P6 core is. The fact is, the G5 just plain hasn't scaled well and the G4 is hampered by front side bus speeds that were fast 4 years ago. Yes, the chips are fast clock-for-clock, but when they fail to scale, that doesn't mean too much.
Five hours of battery life has been a standard on the Mac for many, many years.
You must not have used any of the Aluminum Powerbooks. You'll get 2.5 hours on a *good* day. iBooks have traditionally done a little better in this regard, but that's because they've also generally been packaged with slower CPUs. Most Pentium M notebooks these days get 4-6 hours of battery life while performing considerably faster than Apple's fastest Powerbook.
So it isn't like Altivec was the only magic that made PPC worthwhile.
I never said it was, merely that Altivec was highly overrated in the amount of difference it made to *most* users.
So as much as there is a win here for Intel it is not a win for yesterday's Pentium4 white box that uses 110 watts to reach 4 GHz and those of us who spent the last few years on PowerPC chips are not unhappy with the great systems we used to make graphics, video, and audio during that time.
On this we agree. The Netburst architechture has been in trouble since before Prescott's release in Jan 2004. It took AMD and the K8 essentially wiping the floor with Netburst for Intel to realize that low clock, high IPC designs like the Pentium M were the way forward.
I've posted here many times that I feel the Pentium M is the best chip to ever come out of Intel, but it's not without its weaknesses. Media perfomance on Mactels will largely depend on how much of an improvement to the FPU Yonah brings. I've heard many people hailing Yonah as Intel's savior, but I'm waiting to see it first. I would expect Intel based portables some time Q1 next year though.
However, what it does mean is that ICC will also plug into X-Code, meaning binaries for Mactel machines will be *fast*. While I don't care for many of Intel's products, their compilers are superb (so long as you're using an Intel chip).
One of the great farces of the PPC Macs, in my mind, was the weight Mac users put into Altivec. Yes, it's a solid vector process, but, as I understand it, GCC doesn't vectorize for Altivec -- meaning, quite simply, that Altivec optimizations had to be done by hand. On the other hand, ICC is generally lauded for its ability to vectorize code in a manner that lends to performance increases thanks to the SSE/2/3 vector units on Pentium chips.
There've already been a lot of reports that OS X on x86 is faster than on PPC, the availability of Intel compilers for the platform will only make that difference more dramatic.
Sure, there are a bunch that are rather bland, but I haven't found it *that* hard to find content I find interesting. The NPR podcasts are great - The Treatment in particular is fantastic if you're a movie buff. This Week in Tech is made of of the old TechTV crew, and is generally a fun listen. Tips from the Top Floor is a great photography show, focusing on a single hint each episode. Daily Sonic (which is probably my personal favorite) is a ~hour long podcast that features 5-15 minute segments on just about anything imaginable and refers to itself as an MP3zine. And so on.
Really, I don't deny that there's a lot of crap out there, as with any medium, but there are so many podcasts out there covering so many different topics that I think you're being a bit quick to dismiss the medium.
It all depends on the particular model of notebook. The only notebook I've ever owned that didn't suffer any real noticeable damage after being 5 years old or so was a Panasonic Toughbook, but you'll pay out the nose for that kind of overengineering.
I've owned sturdy notebooks from Toshiba and Dell both as well as a short jaunt with an IBM Thinkpad or two. While they all have issues with some models, I've found that they were all about equal as far as robustness goes. The (just over) 3 year old TiBook I'm using currently is honestly probably the worst of the bunch reliability wise. I love the machine, but it has some major mechanical problems I've not had with any of my PC notebooks.
In all honesty, in terms of longevity, I'm really happiest with my little Dell, and for one major reason - because Dell's business model consists of customizing the same basic platform, the same parts will be used across a number of models, making finding eBay replacement and upgrade parts relatively painless later on.
That's my take on it, anyway. Sorry to hear you had trouble with you Toshiba, but I've found them to be generally reliable books. The only thing I'd really stay away from are Compaqs and HPs. I can tell you from working in a support/service job that they have major mechanical problems, the most common being the powerjack breaking off the mobo.
Not sure on the math for actual throughput, but D-Link's Extreme G products are based on the Atheros chipset, which I've had great luck with on the client side. The routers tend to have rebooting issues. Netgear and Airlink's 108Mbs routers are based on the exact same logic board, and inherit many of the same problems. But again, just as an 802.11G card, Atheros is hard to beat, and for a long time they were the only a/b/g solution out there.
Actually, if it looks like anything by my eye, it's classic MacOS. This would make sense given that the Gnome devs are following many of the same interface guidelines as MacOS did prior to OS X.
Well, think of it like this. If your mouse wasn't wacky you could totally ignore primary selection.
Wrong. I have a perfectly working mouse and find primary selection constantly getting in my way because many apps misbehave to send everything to the same clipboard buffer. The most common place I have this problem is web browsing - highlight the address bar to clear it, only to find you've lost the URL you thought you had copied which is now replaced by the one you were trying to clear. Disabling the middle mouse button entirely doesn't work as some apps (again, namely web browsers) actually make use of it these days.
Your information is out of date. Northwood was already getting to be hotter than AMD, but when Prescott was released (almost 2 years ago now), it blew the doors off everything else in the x86 market in terms of power consumption and heat disipation. Disipation's well over 100W and operating temperatures in the 70-80C range. AMD64 chips, in comparison, generally put out in the range of 35-50W and operate between 30-50C. Personally, I've never seen my A64 3200+ get any higher than around 37C under full load with the stock fan.
In addition to this, AMD64 chips feature something called "Cool n Quiet." CnQ is basically a fancy name for intelligent dynamic clock scaling. Again, using my 3200+ as an example, when under full load, it runs at 2GHz @ 1.375V. However, when the computer's idling or under light loads (ie: most web browsing, word processing), the CPU drops down to 1GHz@1.0V. When the load's somewhere inbetween, the CPU scales up in 200MHz increments on the fly. It's actually kind of cool to watch happen in a clock speed/voltage monitor.
So the short answer - AMD's been ahead of Intel in this regard (on the desktop) for quite some time. Prescott took it from AMD being a bit cooler to there being no comparison whatsoever. Hope that helps.
you can turn them off quite easily, and if you pay really close attention you might notice that they are more than "just a bigger copy of the icon you are already hovering over". this has actually proved to be amazingly useful for users who aren't intimately familiar with all of KDE/Linux's icons and apps.
Excuse me, a bigger copy of the icon along with the actual text explaining what it is. Now what's useful there for the users? The giant reproduction of the icon or the text? And how is making it obnoxiously huge sensible?
Honestly, it's mostly indicative of a bigger problem with KDE's development - features are added, but nobody bothers to slow down and think about the *whys* of the implementation. As a result, you end up with good ideas like tooltips that are poorly implemented. Suggesting the solution to these problems is to "turn them off" suggests a fundamental lack of understanding of interface design.
Worse than that are the tooltips which are twice the size of the already large-by-default toolbar. Really, why do I need a tooltip that's 2 inches high on my screen, most of which is a bigger copy of the icon I'm already hovering over? Just seems like poor design to me.
Most DVD drives these days actually have "DVD Playback" mode that makes them essentially silent during read. Personally, I've got a year-plus old LiteOn drive that works wonderfully. I can't hear it at all while playing DVDs, compared to my CD-RW drive that makes a racket and a half in the same box.
If you check around, there's a video floating around online of Alan Kay's talk at the public unveiling of Croquet. He spends much of the talk discussing early computer interface research, specifically lamenting the fact that, in many ways, we've in fact *regressed* in computer interface design from the research that was showing up in computer labs 30 and 40 years ago. He also makes it clear that his work, while interesting, was only a very small part of a huge body of work that was going on at the time.
It's about two hours of footage, but *very* worth the watch if you have any interest in the history of computers whatsoever. I'll let somebody else get the karma for digging up a link.:-)
Actually, as others have pointed out, current speculation is that the extra pins are driving an on die PCIe controller, not particularly because of the memory switch.
Also, wasn't the DDR3 spec design by JEDEC to be pin compatible with DDR2? Meaning that AMD probably wouldn't need to change anything outside the CPU itself when DDR3 rolls around in a few years.
[1] Nope he doesn't go check with the "people in charge of Usability", because there aren't any. Which probably explains why Linux still has a mediocre GUI in terms of usability.
Which is why it's interesting that KDE is more popular among the hardcore geek crowd. When Gnome tries to make justifiable usability changes, they complain. Here's a hint - usability will be a mixed up hodgepodge unless you have someone whose job it is to prevent that from happening.
You must not have used any of the Powerbooks Apple's released in the past few years. One friend's 1GHz 15" AlBook is lucky to get 2.5 hours. Two others have 1.5GHz 15" AlBooks, and they're closer to the 2 hour side of 2.5 hours.
I'm personally using a 667MHz TiBook and getting something around 4.5 hours, but that's with a high capacity aftermarket battery that only became available for it in the last year or so.
On the other hand, the Toshiba Pentium M book I got for my father regularly gets 4-6 hours depending on usage. Someone else I know has a Dell with their higher capacity battery that can generally make it through playing two full DVDs with the screen on full brightness on battery.
Mac portables are great for many reasons, but I wouldn't count battery life as one of them until the Pentium M based PowerBooks come out.
Slashdot Mirror
From the install CD: Press F1 at boot. Then type either 'expert' or 'server'. Both these options are already provided. Granted, at this time, server really means something more like 'just don't install the GUI components,' but that's because there's not yet been an actual server release of Ubuntu. That's coming next April with the release of 6.04 The Dapper Drake.
That's in the works. the 6.04 release is supposed to go through extra testing and be supported for something like 3-5 years. There was an announcement dubbing that upcoming release "The Dapper Drake" a couple of weeks back. :-)
It's something that Ubuntu has had planned from the beginning, if you read through the website, it's just that apparently this is when they feel the distro should be ready for such a release.
I tried to like Fedora. Really, I did. I've given each release since FC2 a chance, and it's yet to last more than a few days on any of my systems. I wish I could pin down exactly what it is I don't like about it, but really, it seems to come largely down to polish. Before FC I had been on Slackware and since then I've been on Ubuntu since the initial Warty release last October.
Fedora just plain lacked the amount of polish Ubuntu had and the simplicity Slackware had. I've run into hardware detection problems just about every time I've tried FC as well. In short, it failed to do anything that impressed me enough to pull me away from distributions I knew would just work. Throw in flashbacks in RPM nightmares I've lost hours fighting in the past, and it just wasn't compelling.
I've been running Ubuntu almost exclusively since its first release. I've installed others on my testing machines to check out what's out there - Xandros, Vector Linux, FC4, NLD/SuSE, etc, but my primary machines have all stayed running Ubuntu simply because I spend less time fighting with the OS with it.
Interestingly, MS also shipped a Korean product infected with a virus (Nimbda). Clearly this is a case of OSS being unable to innovate on their own, stealing valuable ideas from Microsoft.
:-P
HOW YOU RIKE ME NOW HANS BRIX?
It's a smaller binary and runs much quicker on older machines. I've been using it on my 667MHz TiBook lately because it's considerably quicker than FF on that machine. I still use FF on my 2GHz A64 Desktop though because speed isn't an issue and I do prefer FF's behavior in a couple of places.
:-)
I also rather like the e-mail client. Again, I'm still using Thunderbird on the desktop, but on the notebook, I far prefer Opera's mail client to OS X's Mail.app.
Then there are a few other niceities such as the built in note taking function, which while not a make or break feature, is nice to have. The bit torrent client is kind of neat to have, but a bit lacking in basic ability at this time. And version 8 wraps it all up in a really nice interface. The UI is honestly *the* thing that turned me off to Opera in the past, now it's one of the nice looking and behaving apps out there. The password manager in particular is far superior to FF's IMO.
Either way, for free, give it a try. It's certainly worth a look, especially given it's a 4MB download. I've been impressed in the month or so I've been using it, and it's always a good idea to keep your eyes open to new software anyway.
OS X can join AD networks, XP Home can't. XP Home has also been crippled in a way that makes setting up user permissions an absolute nightmare at best, and I've seen a number of occassions where it simply started assigning permissions to files at random.
Given that, I'm sure most admins with a clue would far rather have to support i/PBooks on their network than notebooks running XP Home.
No, this is exactly what we warned Microsoft about! They've confused the poor consumer time and time again!
What you're referring to is actually the Windows Vista Steve Gibson Edition.
Relying on this permutation calculator since I've long forgotten how to do the math myself, so hopefully it's accurate.
Assuming alphanumeric characters only, pass length of five, gives you:
45239040 Permutations.
Password length of five, letter case added (n of 62):
776520240 Permutations.
Extending the password length two characters to seven (but ignoring case):
42072307200 Permutations.
Password length seven, with mixed case:
2478652606080 Permutations.
So adding length is certainly more effective, but adding case also increases the complexity a good bit, if you want to maintain a given length.
I think you need to reconsider your views of the origin of (at the least) OS X. Sure, it's based on UNIX, which Apple likes to use as a marketing point, but saying that Apple was merely 'going with the UNIX flow' is rather offbase.
Apple had originally intended to move to an internally developed next-generation OS in the mid-late nineties. You may have heard of it - its codename was Copland. It was one of the greatest software development disasters in recent memory. It repeatedly missed milestones, and Apple eventually decided the project was too ambitious and gave it the axe. At that point, Apple went shopping for a new OS. They looked at any number of candidates, but the two strongest suitors ended up being BeOS and NeXTStep.
Keep in mind, NeXTStep had been around since the mid-to-late 80's, so it was a fairly mature system by that point. It's certainly possible the UNIX underpinnings had some effect on Apple's final decision, but it seems far more likely the relative maturity of NeXT relative to Be and Steve Jobs had a greater effect than the underlying system.
Remember that Apple had stayed afloat at this point solely due to its loyal fanbase. I rather doubt UNIX fanboyism (even rarer then as this all hapened before Linux really started to gain wind in the mainstream) played much into Apple's decision.
The point of all this? Betting on NeXT was a life-or-death decision for Apple. Far from going with any flow, it was a radical shift in architechture that had to result in either success or the failure of the company. Apple's failed attempt at a modern OS with Copland had cost the company literally millions. They quite simply couldn't afford to ahve that happen a second time. Neither could they sit and do nothing as MacOS was already technically hobbled by the mid-90's.
Dismissing the evolution of NeXT into Rhapsody and eventually OS X as being a path of least resistance indicates a lack of familiarity with the actual gravity of the move at the time. It was a huge risk that paid off in the long run. The iPod may be another story - less risky, but still took a to that point niche market with mediocre at best sales and turning it into a phenomenally successful mainstream one indicates they did *SOMETHING* other than go with the flow. What that was is left as an excercise to the reader.
None of this is meant to defend to ROKR. Everything I've seen seems to indicate that Apple doesn't really care about it on any real level. But choosing the original iPod and OS X as examples of Apple being unwilling to take risks seems a bit ludicrous to me.
You, sir, do not understand usability. Usability is *not* having 10,000 options for the user to customize and play with. Usability, in the strictest sense, is having an interface such that a user can pick it up *without* having to dig through options.
Here's something else you're missing - the type of people Gnome is targeting *DO NOT CARE* about 95%+ of the settings that would require opening GConf to change. For these users, it's far better to have a tool layout such that finding basic options does not require digging through 4 layers of option dialogues.
I'm not saying Gnome is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, simply that the majority of people on Slashdot who complain about Gnome being 'ruined' just plain do not understand how difficult seemingly simple tasks are for the average user. I mean, really, I've been using Linux since around '99, and run KDE from time to time just to see how they're progressing, and it almost always ends up with me digging through the control panel searching for things that should be rather simple to change because KDE exposes too many options for the average user.
Sure, if you're a geek and enjoy playing with all your settings, more power to you. But for people who simply want to use their computer, the KDE Control Panel is a confusing mess. So I'd really take issue with the idea that KDE is improving at an "impressive rate." If they spent more time cleaning up the Control Panel and building in HAL tools instead of adding huge oversized tooltips and calling it a usability improvement, I might be able to agree.
The changes that have been made to Gnome (for the most part) were not mistakes. It was a deliberate decision to move toward an interface that's more usable to a computer neophyte. Argue that the KDE interface is 'familiar' all you want, but the idea behind usability is that you don't *need* to be familiar with it to figure out how to do what you want.
Yes, the G5 draws less power than a Pentium 4, but the P4 is not Apple's future. The P6 core is. The fact is, the G5 just plain hasn't scaled well and the G4 is hampered by front side bus speeds that were fast 4 years ago. Yes, the chips are fast clock-for-clock, but when they fail to scale, that doesn't mean too much.
You must not have used any of the Aluminum Powerbooks. You'll get 2.5 hours on a *good* day. iBooks have traditionally done a little better in this regard, but that's because they've also generally been packaged with slower CPUs. Most Pentium M notebooks these days get 4-6 hours of battery life while performing considerably faster than Apple's fastest Powerbook.
I never said it was, merely that Altivec was highly overrated in the amount of difference it made to *most* users.
On this we agree. The Netburst architechture has been in trouble since before Prescott's release in Jan 2004. It took AMD and the K8 essentially wiping the floor with Netburst for Intel to realize that low clock, high IPC designs like the Pentium M were the way forward.
I've posted here many times that I feel the Pentium M is the best chip to ever come out of Intel, but it's not without its weaknesses. Media perfomance on Mactels will largely depend on how much of an improvement to the FPU Yonah brings. I've heard many people hailing Yonah as Intel's savior, but I'm waiting to see it first. I would expect Intel based portables some time Q1 next year though.
However, what it does mean is that ICC will also plug into X-Code, meaning binaries for Mactel machines will be *fast*. While I don't care for many of Intel's products, their compilers are superb (so long as you're using an Intel chip).
One of the great farces of the PPC Macs, in my mind, was the weight Mac users put into Altivec. Yes, it's a solid vector process, but, as I understand it, GCC doesn't vectorize for Altivec -- meaning, quite simply, that Altivec optimizations had to be done by hand. On the other hand, ICC is generally lauded for its ability to vectorize code in a manner that lends to performance increases thanks to the SSE/2/3 vector units on Pentium chips.
There've already been a lot of reports that OS X on x86 is faster than on PPC, the availability of Intel compilers for the platform will only make that difference more dramatic.
Sure, there are a bunch that are rather bland, but I haven't found it *that* hard to find content I find interesting. The NPR podcasts are great - The Treatment in particular is fantastic if you're a movie buff. This Week in Tech is made of of the old TechTV crew, and is generally a fun listen. Tips from the Top Floor is a great photography show, focusing on a single hint each episode. Daily Sonic (which is probably my personal favorite) is a ~hour long podcast that features 5-15 minute segments on just about anything imaginable and refers to itself as an MP3zine. And so on.
Really, I don't deny that there's a lot of crap out there, as with any medium, but there are so many podcasts out there covering so many different topics that I think you're being a bit quick to dismiss the medium.
It all depends on the particular model of notebook. The only notebook I've ever owned that didn't suffer any real noticeable damage after being 5 years old or so was a Panasonic Toughbook, but you'll pay out the nose for that kind of overengineering.
I've owned sturdy notebooks from Toshiba and Dell both as well as a short jaunt with an IBM Thinkpad or two. While they all have issues with some models, I've found that they were all about equal as far as robustness goes. The (just over) 3 year old TiBook I'm using currently is honestly probably the worst of the bunch reliability wise. I love the machine, but it has some major mechanical problems I've not had with any of my PC notebooks.
In all honesty, in terms of longevity, I'm really happiest with my little Dell, and for one major reason - because Dell's business model consists of customizing the same basic platform, the same parts will be used across a number of models, making finding eBay replacement and upgrade parts relatively painless later on.
That's my take on it, anyway. Sorry to hear you had trouble with you Toshiba, but I've found them to be generally reliable books. The only thing I'd really stay away from are Compaqs and HPs. I can tell you from working in a support/service job that they have major mechanical problems, the most common being the powerjack breaking off the mobo.
Not sure on the math for actual throughput, but D-Link's Extreme G products are based on the Atheros chipset, which I've had great luck with on the client side. The routers tend to have rebooting issues. Netgear and Airlink's 108Mbs routers are based on the exact same logic board, and inherit many of the same problems. But again, just as an 802.11G card, Atheros is hard to beat, and for a long time they were the only a/b/g solution out there.
Actually, if it looks like anything by my eye, it's classic MacOS. This would make sense given that the Gnome devs are following many of the same interface guidelines as MacOS did prior to OS X.
Wrong. I have a perfectly working mouse and find primary selection constantly getting in my way because many apps misbehave to send everything to the same clipboard buffer. The most common place I have this problem is web browsing - highlight the address bar to clear it, only to find you've lost the URL you thought you had copied which is now replaced by the one you were trying to clear. Disabling the middle mouse button entirely doesn't work as some apps (again, namely web browsers) actually make use of it these days.
Your information is out of date. Northwood was already getting to be hotter than AMD, but when Prescott was released (almost 2 years ago now), it blew the doors off everything else in the x86 market in terms of power consumption and heat disipation. Disipation's well over 100W and operating temperatures in the 70-80C range. AMD64 chips, in comparison, generally put out in the range of 35-50W and operate between 30-50C. Personally, I've never seen my A64 3200+ get any higher than around 37C under full load with the stock fan.
In addition to this, AMD64 chips feature something called "Cool n Quiet." CnQ is basically a fancy name for intelligent dynamic clock scaling. Again, using my 3200+ as an example, when under full load, it runs at 2GHz @ 1.375V. However, when the computer's idling or under light loads (ie: most web browsing, word processing), the CPU drops down to 1GHz@1.0V. When the load's somewhere inbetween, the CPU scales up in 200MHz increments on the fly. It's actually kind of cool to watch happen in a clock speed/voltage monitor.
So the short answer - AMD's been ahead of Intel in this regard (on the desktop) for quite some time. Prescott took it from AMD being a bit cooler to there being no comparison whatsoever. Hope that helps.
Excuse me, a bigger copy of the icon along with the actual text explaining what it is. Now what's useful there for the users? The giant reproduction of the icon or the text? And how is making it obnoxiously huge sensible?
Honestly, it's mostly indicative of a bigger problem with KDE's development - features are added, but nobody bothers to slow down and think about the *whys* of the implementation. As a result, you end up with good ideas like tooltips that are poorly implemented. Suggesting the solution to these problems is to "turn them off" suggests a fundamental lack of understanding of interface design.
Worse than that are the tooltips which are twice the size of the already large-by-default toolbar. Really, why do I need a tooltip that's 2 inches high on my screen, most of which is a bigger copy of the icon I'm already hovering over? Just seems like poor design to me.
Most DVD drives these days actually have "DVD Playback" mode that makes them essentially silent during read. Personally, I've got a year-plus old LiteOn drive that works wonderfully. I can't hear it at all while playing DVDs, compared to my CD-RW drive that makes a racket and a half in the same box.
If you check around, there's a video floating around online of Alan Kay's talk at the public unveiling of Croquet. He spends much of the talk discussing early computer interface research, specifically lamenting the fact that, in many ways, we've in fact *regressed* in computer interface design from the research that was showing up in computer labs 30 and 40 years ago. He also makes it clear that his work, while interesting, was only a very small part of a huge body of work that was going on at the time.
:-)
It's about two hours of footage, but *very* worth the watch if you have any interest in the history of computers whatsoever. I'll let somebody else get the karma for digging up a link.
Actually, as others have pointed out, current speculation is that the extra pins are driving an on die PCIe controller, not particularly because of the memory switch.
Also, wasn't the DDR3 spec design by JEDEC to be pin compatible with DDR2? Meaning that AMD probably wouldn't need to change anything outside the CPU itself when DDR3 rolls around in a few years.
Which is why it's interesting that KDE is more popular among the hardcore geek crowd. When Gnome tries to make justifiable usability changes, they complain. Here's a hint - usability will be a mixed up hodgepodge unless you have someone whose job it is to prevent that from happening.
You must not have used any of the Powerbooks Apple's released in the past few years. One friend's 1GHz 15" AlBook is lucky to get 2.5 hours. Two others have 1.5GHz 15" AlBooks, and they're closer to the 2 hour side of 2.5 hours.
I'm personally using a 667MHz TiBook and getting something around 4.5 hours, but that's with a high capacity aftermarket battery that only became available for it in the last year or so.
On the other hand, the Toshiba Pentium M book I got for my father regularly gets 4-6 hours depending on usage. Someone else I know has a Dell with their higher capacity battery that can generally make it through playing two full DVDs with the screen on full brightness on battery.
Mac portables are great for many reasons, but I wouldn't count battery life as one of them until the Pentium M based PowerBooks come out.