I've had an iPod shuffle (512 MB) on order from MacMall since January 12. I finally got a shipping notification yesterday (March 13). Maybe yours is not too far behind.
Let me throw my $.02 into the ring. I bought my 75 year-old mother her first computer five years ago -- a Strawberry iMac -- and I just about tore my hair out trying to teach her how to use a one-button mouse. I shudder to think what my ordeal would have been like with a two-button mouse.
To this day, she still can't manage a single-click without dragging the mouse, mainly because she's not physically capable of clicking that fast. By that token, I seriously doubt that her fingers are nimble enough to operate a two-button mouse. With one button, she gets by OK with only a minimal effort on my part -- and a lot of help from Timbuktu (she lives over 400 miles away).
Therefore, I approve of Apple's emphasis on one-button mice. As many have said, if you want an n-button mouse, quit being a cheapskate and go out and buy one.
If I end up buying one of these things, I'll take it one step further: Stream iTunes from my desktop machine in another part of the house and use my PowerBook as a remote. I'm already running OSXvnc on my desktop and Chicken of the VNC on my PB, so I have everything in place (except the Airport Express, of course). The advantage to this approach is that I don't have to keep my PowerBook awake if I just want to sit back and listen.
Definitely ask Comcast about TechTV. It wasn't listed in their marketing materials when I got digital cable, but I knew it was there because it showed up in the online program listings. Like another poster, I had to add a special digital package for $5/month, which gave me a few other channels I wanted also (and which were also absent from the marketing materials).
Have you checked to see if Linksys has a firmware update available that adds WPA support for your access point? My Netgear WGR614 didn't support WPA until a week or so ago, although the firmware that's available is still in beta. BTW, so far it works pretty well with my 12" PowerBook G4 and iBook SE/466.
Same here. Even though my household is in the 50% that has at least one musician (per Steve's keynote), the musician (my wife) works with computers all day and wants nothing to do with them when she gets home. As for me (I also work with computers all day, but they're Windoze and HP-UX machines so that doesn't count), GarageBand will probably be a neat toy that I'll play with for a couple of hours and then get bored with...unless I can get motivated to make another attempt at learning the recorder (the flute type, not the tape type).
This is a mild gripe, but I'd like to see a version of "ps" that follows the Linux conventions for arguments. I work with three *nix operating systems: OS X, Linux, and HP-UX. The arguments are mostly the same between Linux and HP-UX, e.g. "ps -ef" for a listing of all processes. I invariably try typing that same command in OS X, only to remember, after being told that the arguments are invalid, that the equivalent command is "ps -ax". Annoying!
Because of the phase-change technology involved in -RW writing, the disc must heat up more than with -R to transition from amorphous to crystalline (and probably also from crystalline to amorphous). With -R, the laser is just burning off a dye, sort of like what happens to colored fabrics when they're exposed to the sun for prolonged periods.
Safari won't supplant Camino as my browser of choice until it gets Keychain integration like Camino has (it auto-fills user names and passwords on Web forms, not just on login dialogs and specially-coded forms).
Now that Safari will presumably be getting tabs, the next feature that's needed is Keychain integration similar to that in Chimera. In fact, Keychain integration was #1 on my list (just ahead of tabs at #2) of new features I'd really like to see in Safari. Yeah, I know the Keychain will work for login dialogs and web sites that have been written to support it, but what makes Chimera really nice is that it'll use the Keychain for sites that don't explicitly support it.
I really like the tabs, but I think the most understated feature of Chimera is the Keychain integration for passwords. I have found only one site thus far for which Chimera didn't offer to save the password in the Keychain. The alternatives to this is to either remember every single password you have registered or to manually look up the passwords (in the Keychain app or elsewhere) and then type or cut-and-paste them into the web forms.
As soon as Safari gets these two features (tabs and Keychain integration), I will probably switch, but not until then.
There's one other factor that affects me personally. The phone lines in many of the newer housing developments use compression and multiplexing, presumably so the phone companies can get by with less overall bandwidth for servicing the area. As a result, end-user bandwidth is shot to hell. I could never get better than 28.8 kbps with a 56 kbps modem, which is what prompted me to go cable back in 1998.
and it works with any site you could care to name.
I beg to differ. There are a few e-commerce sites that *require* IE 6.0 and won't work at all on a Mac if your browser doesn't lie about itself to the site. In that regard, I have found that OmniWeb works best, as long as you set it up to masquerade as IE 6.0. (Opera also supports the same type of masquerading, but it generally doesn't otherwise work well with those types of sites.) However, I use Chimera 0.6 as my primary browser, as I find IE (and OmniWeb) to be much slower than Chimera on my iBook SE 466.
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I've had an iPod shuffle (512 MB) on order from MacMall since January 12. I finally got a shipping notification yesterday (March 13). Maybe yours is not too far behind.
Let me throw my $.02 into the ring. I bought my 75 year-old mother her first computer five years ago -- a Strawberry iMac -- and I just about tore my hair out trying to teach her how to use a one-button mouse. I shudder to think what my ordeal would have been like with a two-button mouse.
To this day, she still can't manage a single-click without dragging the mouse, mainly because she's not physically capable of clicking that fast. By that token, I seriously doubt that her fingers are nimble enough to operate a two-button mouse. With one button, she gets by OK with only a minimal effort on my part -- and a lot of help from Timbuktu (she lives over 400 miles away).
Therefore, I approve of Apple's emphasis on one-button mice. As many have said, if you want an n-button mouse, quit being a cheapskate and go out and buy one.
If I end up buying one of these things, I'll take it one step further: Stream iTunes from my desktop machine in another part of the house and use my PowerBook as a remote. I'm already running OSXvnc on my desktop and Chicken of the VNC on my PB, so I have everything in place (except the Airport Express, of course). The advantage to this approach is that I don't have to keep my PowerBook awake if I just want to sit back and listen.
Definitely ask Comcast about TechTV. It wasn't listed in their marketing materials when I got digital cable, but I knew it was there because it showed up in the online program listings. Like another poster, I had to add a special digital package for $5/month, which gave me a few other channels I wanted also (and which were also absent from the marketing materials).
Have you checked to see if Linksys has a firmware update available that adds WPA support for your access point? My Netgear WGR614 didn't support WPA until a week or so ago, although the firmware that's available is still in beta. BTW, so far it works pretty well with my 12" PowerBook G4 and iBook SE/466.
Same here. Even though my household is in the 50% that has at least one musician (per Steve's keynote), the musician (my wife) works with computers all day and wants nothing to do with them when she gets home. As for me (I also work with computers all day, but they're Windoze and HP-UX machines so that doesn't count), GarageBand will probably be a neat toy that I'll play with for a couple of hours and then get bored with...unless I can get motivated to make another attempt at learning the recorder (the flute type, not the tape type).
This is a mild gripe, but I'd like to see a version of "ps" that follows the Linux conventions for arguments. I work with three *nix operating systems: OS X, Linux, and HP-UX. The arguments are mostly the same between Linux and HP-UX, e.g. "ps -ef" for a listing of all processes. I invariably try typing that same command in OS X, only to remember, after being told that the arguments are invalid, that the equivalent command is "ps -ax". Annoying!
Because of the phase-change technology involved in -RW writing, the disc must heat up more than with -R to transition from amorphous to crystalline (and probably also from crystalline to amorphous). With -R, the laser is just burning off a dye, sort of like what happens to colored fabrics when they're exposed to the sun for prolonged periods.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the giant Jiffy Pop. Laslo: "I think we used too much."
Safari won't supplant Camino as my browser of choice until it gets Keychain integration like Camino has (it auto-fills user names and passwords on Web forms, not just on login dialogs and specially-coded forms).
Now that Safari will presumably be getting tabs, the next feature that's needed is Keychain integration similar to that in Chimera. In fact, Keychain integration was #1 on my list (just ahead of tabs at #2) of new features I'd really like to see in Safari. Yeah, I know the Keychain will work for login dialogs and web sites that have been written to support it, but what makes Chimera really nice is that it'll use the Keychain for sites that don't explicitly support it.
I really like the tabs, but I think the most understated feature of Chimera is the Keychain integration for passwords. I have found only one site thus far for which Chimera didn't offer to save the password in the Keychain. The alternatives to this is to either remember every single password you have registered or to manually look up the passwords (in the Keychain app or elsewhere) and then type or cut-and-paste them into the web forms. As soon as Safari gets these two features (tabs and Keychain integration), I will probably switch, but not until then.
There's one other factor that affects me personally. The phone lines in many of the newer housing developments use compression and multiplexing, presumably so the phone companies can get by with less overall bandwidth for servicing the area. As a result, end-user bandwidth is shot to hell. I could never get better than 28.8 kbps with a 56 kbps modem, which is what prompted me to go cable back in 1998.
I beg to differ. There are a few e-commerce sites that *require* IE 6.0 and won't work at all on a Mac if your browser doesn't lie about itself to the site. In that regard, I have found that OmniWeb works best, as long as you set it up to masquerade as IE 6.0. (Opera also supports the same type of masquerading, but it generally doesn't otherwise work well with those types of sites.) However, I use Chimera 0.6 as my primary browser, as I find IE (and OmniWeb) to be much slower than Chimera on my iBook SE 466.
If you use the current Amazon $5-off coupon, the net price comes down to $74. The promotion code is CHNKBKAMZNLT.