I used to use Mozilla and this is a very good tip. However, it's easier for me to leave the site rather than change my browser (currently shared between Camino and Safari).
Slashdot's text ads work on me because they don't animate.
So many banner ads rely on a sequence of frames to get their messages across, like poor man's TV, but I have animated gifs turned off in my browser so I never see the whole story.
Quite often the first frame is often a plain box, so it obscures itself without me having to do too much server blocking.
I'm all for the support of sites that I read. Bandwidth, hosting and upkeep aren't free, especially on big sites. There's only so much I'll subject myself to to that end though. Slashdot's animated gif adverts weren't all that bad if I remember correctly, but it's not worth the trouble to turn animations on just when I come here.
I have clicked on Google's text ads before, when searching for prices on a laptop hard drive for my iBook.
Marketing is all about getting people to remember your product by any means necessary, then it will be in their mind when they need something in the future - or at least it used to be. The current method of being as obnoxious as possible has some degree of backfire.
I know I'll never buy windows from Safestyle UK, even though I can tell you all about their offers. Anyone who shouts constantly for 45 seconds trying to sell you windows on the radio will be recognised, but never get any business.
For a site like Newsfactor, this works well, but it has the potential for abuse - for example, the truly horrid "take over your status bar with a custom message when you hover over a link" thing, obscuring the url. I keep the status bar there for a very good reason - so I know where I'm going if I click.
I suppose it's like everything. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's abused.
This could be a bit of a problem. I for one would be very dubious about clicking on a link like that.
It could be genuine, or it could be a hijacked page - remember Microsoft's "smart links" feature that would take keywords in your pages and make them into hyperlinks to sites it thinks you should visit?
That's an unfair test from the outset! Apple's handling of the DV codec is far, far and away better than Windows is. I can capture full frame, broadcast quality DVCAM on my 600Mhz iBook, then transfer it to the Dual G4 Final Cut Pro machine when I get to work.
With my 40Gb drive (I upgraded the internal iBook HD myself) I can get quite a bit of footage on there.
Toughness and brittleness are two different properties of a material, at least in an engineering perspective.
It's possible to have a very tough material that is very brittle - like ice for example, or high carbon steel.
It's also possible to have a brittle matierial that isn't all that tough, like glass.
On the other hand, you can have tough steels that are not very brittle - like plain carbon steel. The trade off for losing that brittleness is a reduction in hardness in this case. Cobalt chrome is like this too - almost impossible to work, very tough, very hard, and not brittle.
There are lots of material properties to consider when selecting something for a job - toughness, brittleness, hardness, young's modulus (elasticity), density, cost etc.
Not exactly true, no, although that would be cool!
The iBook's plastic case is polycarbonate, which is the same material used to make bullet proof glass. You have to make it in a certain way (resins and laminate layers) for it to be bullet proof though.
The iBook case is a single layer, solid piece of polycarbonate, painted white on the inside. It is more brittle than ABS (the cheap plastic used in most plastic things like PC laptops, cellphones etc), but it is tougher. It's slightly less elastic too, and will tend to fracture if it is stressed too much (ABS will deform plastically first, then crack).
The reason they can use metal is the G4 isn't a space heater, unlike another anonymous cpu family that might have an 86 in the name, and possibly an x....
Hot laps with an Apple, but no burnt penii as far as I know.
I've been waiting for this since the rumours started, now I'll have to wait an indeterminate amount of time longer for the UK release.
I can buy pretty much anything online from the US with my UK credit card - I do it with RAM all the time (half as expensive as the UK in some cases), so what's the deal with US only.
Argh!
You're just jealous that we have free healthcare aren't you?
True, true. But it's not a "bottom of the range computer" as you said.
Apple starts in the middle and goes upwards. There is no bargain basement option.
All I'm saying is that when this comes up on Slashdot, people always compare the cheap PCs with the mid range Apples (or they compare the 17" powerbook with a medium range Dell etc), not being fair. Or they'll compare a PowerMac with an Athlon system that they've built themselves with scavanged parts from old machines.
I'm not saying Macs are not expensive, just that they're not much more than an equivalent PC (although this is a much weaker case with the PowerMac range - hopefully this will even out if/when the PPC970 comes out).
If you want a bargain machine, Apple isn't for you (unless you're willing to go second hand with an older model).
You forgot to mention the guy who posts about his 9600/300 in every Mac story, taking two hours to copy a 17 meg file, thus making all Apples worthless.
And the obligatory "I'd buy a Mac but they're soooo expensive! I looked at the iBook, but then saw a Dell for $650, ok so it only has a CD rom drive, a cheap plastic case, no wireless, no firewire, but it's still better than the iBook because it has a faster processor!"
But the point is, you don't ever need to use control+click to access features; they're always available via standard clicks through menus/lists etc (assuming the program is decent).
control+click provides a more advanced and convenient method in many cases, but it's for more advanced users. I novice user should be able to do everything with one button - and they can. If you want the extra button, buy a mouse with an extra button.
Maybe Apple should provide it as an option when buying a Mac, but they don't at the moment. Perhaps this new mouse they're patenting will be the optional mouse for their systems.
How hard is it really to hold down the control key with your left hand when you're clicking? It's not like you need to be doing anything else with that hand while you're using the mouse, and your left hand is already on the keyboard. Control is right there!
eh? If by "touchpads" you mean laptops with trackpads, you can attach a USB mouse to them with no problems - I have an Apple Pro mouse attached to my iBook.
When I'm on the move, I use the internal trackpad, and since it is close to the keyboard it is extremely easy to control+click to get right click funtion when necessary.
Most of the time I use command+shift+click with one hand to open links in tabs behind the current one. I very rarely use contol+click.
Go and look for someone selling an old Sawtooth or Mystic G4 box.
The Dual G4 450 Mystic in particular would be excellent - they have a pair of 450MHz or 500Mhz G4s and can support up to 2 gigs of Ram in OS X.
They can be had for cheap, and will run OS X more than adequately - it will fly along.
You can take most of your PC stuff and plug it in - hard drives, Ram (pc100/133 dimms), optical drives, graphics card (or just attach your monitor(s) to the Rage 128 that came with it in the agp slot if you don't need fancy graphics).
We're using a Dual 450 as a Final Cut Pro 3 workstation, producing broadcast videos, and there's nothing special about it - it's a stock dual 450, but with a large amount of firewire storage added.
If you want to game, then the Mac isn't really for you anyway, even if you want it.
There are some good games out for it, but nothing like you'll get on Windows.
If the only reason you have that copy of MS Crayola is to play games, stick with your PC - as you say, you can get it cheaper for more power.
If you want to do other things then a Mac becomes a good option. The Powermac is expensive right now, but the iMac, Powerbook and iBook ranges are very good value for money. They all lack the expansion of a Powermac system (although they all have at least 2 USB ports and a firewire port - iMac has 3x usb and 2x firewire).
If you're looking at a laptop at any point in the future, serioulsy consider either a 12" or 14" iBook. Go to an Apple store or another retailer and actually use it for a little while. Open and close it, pick it up, type on it, mouse around. You'll be impressed, trust me.
Same with using an iMac and a Powerbook.
The Powermac is too expensive for what it is right now, but the rest of the Apple lineup is well worth your time and money.
This was part of the plot of the Red Dwarf novels.
A spacecraft, called the Nova 5, was sent up into space to trigger certain stars to go supernova at precisely the right times so that when the light from each of them reached the earth, it would spell out "COKE ADDS LIFE!" across the night sky - an ad campaign that would supposedly "buy pepsi for good".
The crew were in stasis on their way to add the final dot on the excalmation mark when the ship's android decided to clean the computer - with hot soapy water. The ship, with no computer (the android, Kryten, cleaned the backup computer as well), crashed into a moon, to be found three million years later by Red Dwarf and its crew - with Kryten still tending to the needs of the three female crash survivors, feeding them, bathing them etc, although they've been skelotons for a fairly large proportion of those three million years.
Like those horrible bits of code that stop you right-clicking (or control+click in Camino) on web pages in some bizarre attempt to keep the source secret or something.
They'll use a 64 bit CPU at some point, and 10.3 will most certainly be 32 bit cpu compatible.
I don't think we'll see a PPC970-powered Mac when 10.3 is realeased, but I would imagine the middle of next year. Maybe there'll be a demo machine, but I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to use Mozilla and this is a very good tip. However, it's easier for me to leave the site rather than change my browser (currently shared between Camino and Safari).
The only sensational stories that are doomed are the ones hosted on BSD based servers.
Slashdot's text ads work on me because they don't animate.
So many banner ads rely on a sequence of frames to get their messages across, like poor man's TV, but I have animated gifs turned off in my browser so I never see the whole story.
Quite often the first frame is often a plain box, so it obscures itself without me having to do too much server blocking.
I'm all for the support of sites that I read. Bandwidth, hosting and upkeep aren't free, especially on big sites. There's only so much I'll subject myself to to that end though. Slashdot's animated gif adverts weren't all that bad if I remember correctly, but it's not worth the trouble to turn animations on just when I come here.
I have clicked on Google's text ads before, when searching for prices on a laptop hard drive for my iBook.
Marketing is all about getting people to remember your product by any means necessary, then it will be in their mind when they need something in the future - or at least it used to be. The current method of being as obnoxious as possible has some degree of backfire.
I know I'll never buy windows from Safestyle UK, even though I can tell you all about their offers. Anyone who shouts constantly for 45 seconds trying to sell you windows on the radio will be recognised, but never get any business.
For a site like Newsfactor, this works well, but it has the potential for abuse - for example, the truly horrid "take over your status bar with a custom message when you hover over a link" thing, obscuring the url. I keep the status bar there for a very good reason - so I know where I'm going if I click.
I suppose it's like everything. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's abused.
This could be a bit of a problem. I for one would be very dubious about clicking on a link like that.
It could be genuine, or it could be a hijacked page - remember Microsoft's "smart links" feature that would take keywords in your pages and make them into hyperlinks to sites it thinks you should visit?
It just seems a bit dodgy.
Hence the reason they're looking to hire someone to help them code it, so it won't be pants, even though it will run on XtremePants.
That's an unfair test from the outset! Apple's handling of the DV codec is far, far and away better than Windows is. I can capture full frame, broadcast quality DVCAM on my 600Mhz iBook, then transfer it to the Dual G4 Final Cut Pro machine when I get to work.
With my 40Gb drive (I upgraded the internal iBook HD myself) I can get quite a bit of footage on there.
Toughness and brittleness are two different properties of a material, at least in an engineering perspective.
It's possible to have a very tough material that is very brittle - like ice for example, or high carbon steel.
It's also possible to have a brittle matierial that isn't all that tough, like glass.
On the other hand, you can have tough steels that are not very brittle - like plain carbon steel. The trade off for losing that brittleness is a reduction in hardness in this case. Cobalt chrome is like this too - almost impossible to work, very tough, very hard, and not brittle.
There are lots of material properties to consider when selecting something for a job - toughness, brittleness, hardness, young's modulus (elasticity), density, cost etc.
Current iBook is 900Mhz G3. You can buy "decently fast" PC laptops with 1.2Ghz Celerons (although most are faster now).
I'd say that near-on 1Ghz was fast enough for a laptop, especially since you can get 4 or 5 hours of battery life out of it.
Not exactly true, no, although that would be cool!
The iBook's plastic case is polycarbonate, which is the same material used to make bullet proof glass. You have to make it in a certain way (resins and laminate layers) for it to be bullet proof though.
The iBook case is a single layer, solid piece of polycarbonate, painted white on the inside. It is more brittle than ABS (the cheap plastic used in most plastic things like PC laptops, cellphones etc), but it is tougher. It's slightly less elastic too, and will tend to fracture if it is stressed too much (ABS will deform plastically first, then crack).
The reason they can use metal is the G4 isn't a space heater, unlike another anonymous cpu family that might have an 86 in the name, and possibly an x....
Hot laps with an Apple, but no burnt penii as far as I know.
All your jokes are belong to us, along with any spalling mistakes.
Sincerely,
the slashdot management.
All I really need is a decently fast Unix-ish laptop with 802.11b.
How about one of these?
Mine's like a tank. I take it everywhere, use it heavily every day and it still looks and feels as good as the day I bought it.
Bonus feature, the Airport antenna is in the screen, and there are no other bits, doors, levers or switches poking out.
It also doesn't cook my lap, like my friend's 15" powerbook did while I was playing Medal of Honour. heh.
As Julia Roberts once said:
"I've got money to spend in here!"
I've been waiting for this since the rumours started, now I'll have to wait an indeterminate amount of time longer for the UK release.
I can buy pretty much anything online from the US with my UK credit card - I do it with RAM all the time (half as expensive as the UK in some cases), so what's the deal with US only.
Argh!
You're just jealous that we have free healthcare aren't you?
And what is this laptop you have?
Or are you just making it up?
The 12" iBook is a stunning size and weight for the stuff it has in it.
True, true. But it's not a "bottom of the range computer" as you said.
Apple starts in the middle and goes upwards. There is no bargain basement option.
All I'm saying is that when this comes up on Slashdot, people always compare the cheap PCs with the mid range Apples (or they compare the 17" powerbook with a medium range Dell etc), not being fair. Or they'll compare a PowerMac with an Athlon system that they've built themselves with scavanged parts from old machines.
I'm not saying Macs are not expensive, just that they're not much more than an equivalent PC (although this is a much weaker case with the PowerMac range - hopefully this will even out if/when the PPC970 comes out).
If you want a bargain machine, Apple isn't for you (unless you're willing to go second hand with an older model).
You forgot to mention the guy who posts about his 9600/300 in every Mac story, taking two hours to copy a 17 meg file, thus making all Apples worthless.
And the obligatory "I'd buy a Mac but they're soooo expensive! I looked at the iBook, but then saw a Dell for $650, ok so it only has a CD rom drive, a cheap plastic case, no wireless, no firewire, but it's still better than the iBook because it has a faster processor!"
But the point is, you don't ever need to use control+click to access features; they're always available via standard clicks through menus/lists etc (assuming the program is decent).
control+click provides a more advanced and convenient method in many cases, but it's for more advanced users. I novice user should be able to do everything with one button - and they can. If you want the extra button, buy a mouse with an extra button.
Maybe Apple should provide it as an option when buying a Mac, but they don't at the moment. Perhaps this new mouse they're patenting will be the optional mouse for their systems.
How hard is it really to hold down the control key with your left hand when you're clicking? It's not like you need to be doing anything else with that hand while you're using the mouse, and your left hand is already on the keyboard. Control is right there!
eh? If by "touchpads" you mean laptops with trackpads, you can attach a USB mouse to them with no problems - I have an Apple Pro mouse attached to my iBook.
When I'm on the move, I use the internal trackpad, and since it is close to the keyboard it is extremely easy to control+click to get right click funtion when necessary.
Most of the time I use command+shift+click with one hand to open links in tabs behind the current one. I very rarely use contol+click.
Go and look for someone selling an old Sawtooth or Mystic G4 box.
The Dual G4 450 Mystic in particular would be excellent - they have a pair of 450MHz or 500Mhz G4s and can support up to 2 gigs of Ram in OS X.
They can be had for cheap, and will run OS X more than adequately - it will fly along.
You can take most of your PC stuff and plug it in - hard drives, Ram (pc100/133 dimms), optical drives, graphics card (or just attach your monitor(s) to the Rage 128 that came with it in the agp slot if you don't need fancy graphics).
We're using a Dual 450 as a Final Cut Pro 3 workstation, producing broadcast videos, and there's nothing special about it - it's a stock dual 450, but with a large amount of firewire storage added.
Second hand, but very good stuff.
If you want to game, then the Mac isn't really for you anyway, even if you want it.
There are some good games out for it, but nothing like you'll get on Windows.
If the only reason you have that copy of MS Crayola is to play games, stick with your PC - as you say, you can get it cheaper for more power.
If you want to do other things then a Mac becomes a good option. The Powermac is expensive right now, but the iMac, Powerbook and iBook ranges are very good value for money. They all lack the expansion of a Powermac system (although they all have at least 2 USB ports and a firewire port - iMac has 3x usb and 2x firewire).
If you're looking at a laptop at any point in the future, serioulsy consider either a 12" or 14" iBook. Go to an Apple store or another retailer and actually use it for a little while. Open and close it, pick it up, type on it, mouse around. You'll be impressed, trust me.
Same with using an iMac and a Powerbook.
The Powermac is too expensive for what it is right now, but the rest of the Apple lineup is well worth your time and money.
This was part of the plot of the Red Dwarf novels.
A spacecraft, called the Nova 5, was sent up into space to trigger certain stars to go supernova at precisely the right times so that when the light from each of them reached the earth, it would spell out "COKE ADDS LIFE!" across the night sky - an ad campaign that would supposedly "buy pepsi for good".
The crew were in stasis on their way to add the final dot on the excalmation mark when the ship's android decided to clean the computer - with hot soapy water. The ship, with no computer (the android, Kryten, cleaned the backup computer as well), crashed into a moon, to be found three million years later by Red Dwarf and its crew - with Kryten still tending to the needs of the three female crash survivors, feeding them, bathing them etc, although they've been skelotons for a fairly large proportion of those three million years.
I use the last term there to refer to my ex-girlfriend, which is who I thought of when I read the article summary above.
The only thing I want to show her is the finger.
Like those horrible bits of code that stop you right-clicking (or control+click in Camino) on web pages in some bizarre attempt to keep the source secret or something.
They'll use a 64 bit CPU at some point, and 10.3 will most certainly be 32 bit cpu compatible.
I don't think we'll see a PPC970-powered Mac when 10.3 is realeased, but I would imagine the middle of next year. Maybe there'll be a demo machine, but I don't know.