Building a sub is a great project. As a single driver speaker, it requires no crossover, and therefore is relatively easy to design/build. Plus, with some careful planning, you can get amazing results.
I've built a couple Subs based around the Shiva Mk II driver this guy used, along with a 250W plate amplifier from partsexpress, and it is amazing. Easily produces useable bass down to 20 hz in a sealed enclosure (F3 of something like 17.3 hz in a 1.7 cu ft. box, if I remember correctly...). An adire sub kit easily rivals subs in the $1000-$1200 range.
Listening to one of these explains why audiophiles don't like those Sat/sub computer multimedia sets, and tend to call them a "bunch of crap". None of them produce any useable bass below 50-60 hz, and a lot of HT systems are designed such that the sub only STARTS playing from those frequencies down.
Having said that, I don't see why this is front page news on/.
There are game companies will replace a broken/lost disc for free (even pay shipping). Send them some artifact, like the original CD case with insert, and they'll mail you a new one. I know Blizzard does this, since my college roommate lost his Starcraft CD, but still had the case.
You're certainly on to something: One of my physics profs was a radioastronomer, and he needed a solution for storing gig's of pulsar data for extended periods of time, since radiotelescope time has to be reserved almost a year in advance, and you only get a week or so to take your readings.
Their solution: rigging 8 off the shelf VCR's in parallel to store their pulsar information. You can read more about it Here
From the PDF: Developed originally for VLBI applications, the S2 recorder is based on the use of commercial VHS tape transports (VCR's), modified for use in digital high density, high data rate applications. A single S2 recorder "tape-set" of eight SVHS tapes provides up to 500 GBytes of data storage, and an unattended operating time of up to 8.5 hours at the maximum data rate of 128 Mbits/s or 16 MBytes/s, corresponding typically to 16 MHz bandwidth in two circular polarizations at 2-bit quantization, which generates a data rate of up to 1 GByte/minute.
These are only $300/pop, that's around 1/10 the price per gig of a SCSI RAID. And $1/Gig is still doing pretty good. I paid $95 for an 80 gig just a month ago.
I worked at a school with about 400 iMacs, and 400 Dell Optiplex workstations. The iMacs were 266 RevB's, and the Dell's were Optiplex 600Mhz PIII's. Our school moved away from Dell because 1) Their failure rate was so high, and 2) in the event of failure, support from Dell was constantly frustrating (the insisted on getting the machines back for routine part replacements, unlike, ANY OTHER REASONABLE company, who'd let you do the install yourself. This was despite the fact that we had two Dell certified tech's who's main priority was maintaining the dell's). They actually moved to Gateway, but I'm gone now, and I can't imagine what their current situation is like.
Sure, we had some optical drive failures in the iMacs (they are laptop parts, and thus have high failure rates.. but just look what PC mfr's are doing with their home systems), but our NT guy was in the lab 3 days a week fixing floppies and other schenanigans, and reinstalling NT. So, my number's are bigger, haha. Seriously, people's experiences vary widely with hardware failure, and it's mostly just the specific batches of goods people get from the vendors. Macs have in the past 6 or so years used drives from IBM, Quantum, Western Digital, and Seagate. Their optical drives are from Sony, Panasonic (matsushita), and LiteOn. These are generally all first-run, very reliable companies. The same stuff a good PC shop uses. Yet, some people's legitimate experience with macs is "we bought x00 iMacs, and 11 of them had to go back because of drive failure," and theirs no reason that wouldn't happen to a batch of PC's from any vendor.
Good Ol' Halliday, Resnick, and Walker. It served as a great reference while I was a physics student for several years. they contain a good introduction to mechanics and E&M. Lots of diagrams, derrivations, and explainations.
For a good book on modern physics, try Tipler's Modern Physics. It's got a pretty good intro to particle physics, the wave equation, and other basic Quantum. All of it's fairly accessible with a strong background in multivariable calc.
How many PC's come with a 5-button optical mouse? I always have to buy a new mouse anyways..
What it really comes down to is choice and preference. At least Apple designed an OS that is fully operational using a single button interface -or- a 9-button Tri optical, force feedback, Microsoft H@x02 Explorer.
There are plenty of computer users out there who are virtually computer illiterate (my parents included), and it's taken them YEARS of hand holding to get them to use multibutton mice correctly. Strangely enough, both my parents are multiplatform*, but they both have shiny macs at their respective work places.
* They both use a PC for stock/investor related stuff. Mac support is horrific in that venue. Apple's own employee stock purchase plan is run by E-TRADE, which have no mac support *boggle*
They wanted to bash the Windows interface, but couldn't find any suitable examples of bad dialog design, so they hand crafted their own example and passed it off as the real thing.
Exactly, but not as dirty as you think. What they most likely did was design a simple control panel with a desired feature set using each OS's UI development packages. THey couldn't use real examples, first for legal reasons, and also because none of the control panels from windows exactly (or even closely) matches the equivalent OSX pane (and there is no "Power Options Properties" in OS X). Their point is that Window's control panels are fixed in size, and mac ones (under OSX) will dynamically fit any rectangular configuration, and perhaps that they prefer useful default settings to be layed out conveniently.
What was that? But you're supposed to use the linux tools that do the job better! You can't compare things that linux isn't good at/hasn't developed yet... this is/. for god's sake.
This whole "I used solution X on NT, or solution Y in linux, so if you're still doing it on a Mac, then you and your mother are illegitimate swine" attitude is so friggin' childish.
How about, "It's nice to see you've found a solution for your workflow blending both open and closed source software out there, but here's some other alternatives that might also get your work done... blah blah"
It's like 90% of/. poster's never got past 4th grade.... One of the largest problems with geeks is that they put all this effort into being "geekier than thou" but none into being helpful. Mod away, I'm emotionally stable.
But in a more related topic: How exactly is this front page news? I mean, this wouldn't be front page on a Mac News site. And, putting a functional web/dns server on a Powerbook IS silly, but for some reason, I see it all the time as well *boggle*.
There are a lot of legitimate complaints regarding the current state of mac gaming. This "parody" hits on absolutely NONE of them. This useless piece of drivel is completely devoid of wit.
Three years ago when I was in college, mac gaming was pathetic. We had to wait 6-12 months for a game to come out, and the support and gameplay was buggy and crappy as hell. Games like Mechwarrior 2, FutureCop, and the TombRaider series ran like total shit on comparably equipped macs compared to PC's (Note: this is when macs and PC's were of very comparable power, with a 500 Mhz PIII up against a 500 Mhz G3).
Nowadays, the wait is still there, but typically only 2 weeks-1.5 months, and even a concurrent release thrown in there every now and then. [and then some games just take forever, like MaxPayne, and Fallout2, which are recent mac releases *boggle*]
The main game publishers for Mac, Aspyr, Bold by Destineer, MacSoft, MacPlay, Feral Interactive, Graphsim, all release 2-3 games a month. And the major players, like Blizzard and Id have adopted their own inhouse porting teams. So the mac platform sees about 10 releases a month. That may be a small subset of PC releases, but it's the 10 BEST games the PC's seen in the last season or so. Even my hardcore gamer friend go through like half that many a month.
I've had a gaming PC (JUST for games) for the past 3 years that I keep fairly current, and it doesn't see much use anymore. I don't consider mac game releases to be in short order.
A lot of people perceive mac releases to be some fraction of their PC counterpart, but in the last 12 months, there's been exactly ZERO games that I've wanted to play and couldn't get a mac vs. or expect one in the near future.
Specific games over the past few months that I've been wasting my life with: Warcraft III, Wolfenstein, Sim's, Civ III, Aliens vs. Predator, Medal of Honor, Black and White, UT, Giants, Baldur's Gate II, Icewind Dale.
With the exception of Half-Life/Counterstrike, and the MMORPG scene (UO/Neverrest/Asheron's, although this is changing very soon), it's been hard to find a hit PC game that's NOT available on the mac.
My ability to use up disk space is, as usual, outstripping the industry's ability to make bigger disks
Sizes may not be keeping up, but cost/storage has NEVER been better. Three years ago, a 20 gig drive under $200 was a steal. These days, 160 gb is less than that. It's perfectly affordable for you to have your TB's of storage, if you're so inclined.
I'm not sure how everyone can be calling this a water purifier. I'm not saying I know what this thing is, or what it can and can't do, but a water purifier won't do any of what the article describes the machine doing. If I take de-ionized water and sprinkle it all over an anthrax laden envelope, it does nothing. Somehow, this salt water mixture is supposed to "scrub" all the baddies and microbes away, leaving the envelope safe for mucking. According to the article, this doesn't purify the water, it turns it into a purifying agent itself.
Water purifiers don't really do anything for large scale sterilization like this device claims to. And if it is just a water purifier, it'd do no more for 3rd world countries and military soldiers than iodine tablets.
Then you have the Apple "Pro" speakers, which are a joke compared to a comparably priced Logitech 560 setup
I'm not arguing the rest of your post, but Logitech Z-560 is @$150-200, Klipsch speakers are close to $300. Apple Pro Speakers are $50. Comparably priced my a$$
Just like the rest of the world, they use Microsoft Office for internal documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
Appleworks is not a professional level tool. It's marketed and designed towards home/school use. It can translate simple Office docs, but not Powerpoint. Additionally, the Presentation module in Appleworks lets you very quickly generate powerpoint-esque documents, but it's nowhere near as refined or powerful.
I managed to use Appleworks all throughout college (translating a few excel and word docs as necessary), maintaining my Macs with zero microsoft software, but as soon as I went to Apple, I *NEEDED* Office to work with all the docs I got.
Marketing-wize, Steve takes potshots at M$, but internally, they're a highly valued partner. M$, and more specifically, the MacBU is the second largest publisher of Mac software (a close second to Apple), they publish the defacto Productivity suite, and work very closely with Apple on a regular basis.
Apple helped start ARM
on
Newton Won't Die
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· Score: 2, Informative
Don't forget Apple fronted a good deal of the money for ARM to get started, and they still own millions of shares of ARM stock. They may not have influence in the company any more, but it'd wouldn't be crazy for them to hook up with ARM again, and it certainly wouldn't put them in a bad position. Intel fabs ARM, but they don't own the company. A PPC handheld may be possible some day, but a G4 PDA is totally out; way too hot.
This is not the full version. This is just the upgrade from iDVD 1.x to 2.x. It isn't legal to use without the original, and will search your HD for it before it installs.
They bundle it with all new macs regardless of if they have a superdrive (DVD-R) or not eating up more than a gig of customer HD space.
This is patently false. It is only bundled with macs with Superdrives, and will refuse to install or run unless the Superdrive firmware is found by the iDVD installer. You, my friend, are full of crack.
don't forget, that BMW, fast as it may be, has tires the size of a quarter, and only holds 6 oz. of gas at a time. P4's do run much cooler than Athlons, but I dont' know how refined that makes you.
All these "switched back" stories seem to mention a lack of virtual desktops, but none of them consider that Codetek makes a Virtual desktop solution for OSX. You can tab around desktops, move windows between virtual desktops from the mini desktops, it allows apps to be hardwired to a particular virtual desktop, so they always load into them, and you can have up to 100 of them in a grid style configuration. I don't know how this compares to linux virtual desktops (I've only used them briefly, and without any of the widgets it may have), but it worked for me, since I've always had a thing for virtual desktops.
Also, *nix users who "switch" to mac for a better *nix, or to *only* perform the functions they currently use their *nix box for, prolly aren't going to find any compelling reasons to stay. MacOSX isn't about replacing linux, or BSD, it's about bringing a consumer OS to the masses, with the mass sw compatibility, and quick and easy HW support/integration, along with the stability and robustness of a *nix.
I've got a friend who's used one of these for about a year with his bookPC. It plays DVD's and browses web (he's got it hooked up to a 27" monitor), and works very nicely, although it takes a bit of training to get real accuracy out of.
We're running 10.2 build 6C115 on a 500 Mhz PowerbookG4, and 333 iMac (Grape). The finder's operations are much faster. Opening folders, scrolling through folders with large amounts of files, searching through file system from within apps (like locating a file to open) is all at least twice as fast. The new search feature built into the finder is easily 10x faster than using sherlock for it in 10.1. Instances of the new beachball of death are fewer than ever. Other apps don't really see a speed difference, but for the finder itself, it's like comparing 10.0 to 10.1 again!! So much faster on the iMac, where 10.1 was pokey at everything. That plucky little guy is almost 4 years old, and it feels quick and responsive in OS X. God I love the jag.
"It's a fact of life that we're relying less and less on our hearing and sense of smell and respectively our communication channels switch to visual sense. A primordial hunter-gatherer would find our hearing pathetic. He'd find our sense of smell.. well, he wouldn't find THAT at all. You know why those smell-movies failed?"
NOOOO!!! Take it back!! Take it Back!! -- still waiting for "Smell-o-Vision"
It is true, tho, but I don't think it's exactly as you've described. In general, our environment has become much louder than it was hundreds, or thousands of years ago. Those rumpthumper cars, and rock concerts are close in dB's to a 747 taking off at 20 paces. Then there's cars, trains, those damned 747's, sporting events... Even just visiting the cinemas these days exposes one to 1.5 hours of 90-100 dB's of explosions and other LFE that kids dig today. If you were exposed to noises of this intensity at work, you'd be required to wear hearing protection, but these days its considered recreation. By the age of 18, we've all destroyed our sensitive hearing.
Smelling is similar with pollution and smoking (although i don't know if I could argue that people smoke more now than in the past...). I had a friend with freakishly sensitive smell, although she didn't realize it till she quit smoking, and she could smell people distinctly from 5-10 paces (i.e. discern them from that distance), and tell if someone had been in a room within the past hour or so... but all this is terribly OT.
Go test drive a Kia, or get the Blockbuster 10 rentals for $25, and free LOTR:FOTR. If you rent even one movie a week, the BB deal saves one money (since DVD rentals are $4 these days, sheesh..)
Then, if you wanna own bonus material out the whazzoo, buy the 4 disc collectors ed. and you've only "bought" it once.
You've got the wrong kind of "proprietary" in mind. Compaq used proprietary boards so that you couldn't upgrade with standard parts, were locked into their upgrade path. For a standard user, this did not offer any additional functionality.
Apple uses proprietary boards so they can offer features like autoswitching networking (just plug in an ordinary ethernet cable between two macs, and the two computers show up on each others local network), target disk mode (use a scsi or firewire cable between two macs, and one computer becomes a HDD on the second computer), instant dynamic network configuration (change your IP/ or configure multiple network devices with just a few clicks, no restarts), dynamically driving multiple monitors with multiple cards (I can plug in two graphics cards, and two monitors, then tell the mac which monitor to drive with which card, while its on.), and USB/Firewire plug and play ease that's still years ahead of windows (oh look, it's the windows hardware manager, again...). On the portables, multimonitor/external monitor support is so slick, it's enough to make a Wintel laptop user cry.
There are plenty of things you _can't_ do as a result of proprietary HW, such as move as quickly with the industry as new HW comes out (lets see how long it takes apple to get AGP 8x...*roll*), but the main differences in functionality between MacOS9 and Win9X/ME/XP is the hardware tweaks that you don't realize by using "open" HW. In the Wintel world, the peripherals people don't work with the OS people, who don't live on the same continent as the BIOS ppl, etc. etc.
Mac admins live for these tweaks, since it means hours less frustration and "pointless clicking" to set up an office of computers, or get them networking just so, using external devices, while adapting the systems to individual work flow and idiosyncrasies.
Slashdot Mirror
Building a sub is a great project. As a single driver speaker, it requires no crossover, and therefore is relatively easy to design/build. Plus, with some careful planning, you can get amazing results.
/.
I've built a couple Subs based around the Shiva Mk II driver this guy used, along with a 250W plate amplifier from partsexpress, and it is amazing. Easily produces useable bass down to 20 hz in a sealed enclosure (F3 of something like 17.3 hz in a 1.7 cu ft. box, if I remember correctly...). An adire sub kit easily rivals subs in the $1000-$1200 range.
Listening to one of these explains why audiophiles don't like those Sat/sub computer multimedia sets, and tend to call them a "bunch of crap". None of them produce any useable bass below 50-60 hz, and a lot of HT systems are designed such that the sub only STARTS playing from those frequencies down.
Having said that, I don't see why this is front page news on
There are game companies will replace a broken/lost disc for free (even pay shipping). Send them some artifact, like the original CD case with insert, and they'll mail you a new one. I know Blizzard does this, since my college roommate lost his Starcraft CD, but still had the case.
You're certainly on to something: One of my physics profs was a radioastronomer, and he needed a solution for storing gig's of pulsar data for extended periods of time, since radiotelescope time has to be reserved almost a year in advance, and you only get a week or so to take your readings.
Their solution: rigging 8 off the shelf VCR's in parallel to store their pulsar information. You can read more about it Here
From the PDF:
Developed originally for VLBI applications, the S2 recorder is based on the use of commercial VHS tape transports (VCR's), modified for use in digital high density, high data rate applications. A single S2 recorder "tape-set" of eight SVHS tapes provides up to 500 GBytes of data storage, and an unattended operating time of up to 8.5 hours at the maximum data rate of 128 Mbits/s or 16 MBytes/s, corresponding typically to 16 MHz bandwidth in two circular polarizations at 2-bit quantization, which generates a data rate of up to 1 GByte/minute.
--
These are only $300/pop, that's around 1/10 the price per gig of a SCSI RAID. And $1/Gig is still doing pretty good. I paid $95 for an 80 gig just a month ago.
I worked at a school with about 400 iMacs, and 400 Dell Optiplex workstations. The iMacs were 266 RevB's, and the Dell's were Optiplex 600Mhz PIII's. Our school moved away from Dell because 1) Their failure rate was so high, and 2) in the event of failure, support from Dell was constantly frustrating (the insisted on getting the machines back for routine part replacements, unlike, ANY OTHER REASONABLE company, who'd let you do the install yourself. This was despite the fact that we had two Dell certified tech's who's main priority was maintaining the dell's). They actually moved to Gateway, but I'm gone now, and I can't imagine what their current situation is like.
Sure, we had some optical drive failures in the iMacs (they are laptop parts, and thus have high failure rates.. but just look what PC mfr's are doing with their home systems), but our NT guy was in the lab 3 days a week fixing floppies and other schenanigans, and reinstalling NT. So, my number's are bigger, haha. Seriously, people's experiences vary widely with hardware failure, and it's mostly just the specific batches of goods people get from the vendors. Macs have in the past 6 or so years used drives from IBM, Quantum, Western Digital, and Seagate. Their optical drives are from Sony, Panasonic (matsushita), and LiteOn. These are generally all first-run, very reliable companies. The same stuff a good PC shop uses. Yet, some people's legitimate experience with macs is "we bought x00 iMacs, and 11 of them had to go back because of drive failure," and theirs no reason that wouldn't happen to a batch of PC's from any vendor.
--
Good Ol' Halliday, Resnick, and Walker. It served as a great reference while I was a physics student for several years. they contain a good introduction to mechanics and E&M. Lots of diagrams, derrivations, and explainations.
For a good book on modern physics, try Tipler's Modern Physics. It's got a pretty good intro to particle physics, the wave equation, and other basic Quantum. All of it's fairly accessible with a strong background in multivariable calc.
How many PC's come with a 5-button optical mouse? I always have to buy a new mouse anyways..
What it really comes down to is choice and preference. At least Apple designed an OS that is fully operational using a single button interface -or- a 9-button Tri optical, force feedback, Microsoft H@x02 Explorer.
There are plenty of computer users out there who are virtually computer illiterate (my parents included), and it's taken them YEARS of hand holding to get them to use multibutton mice correctly. Strangely enough, both my parents are multiplatform*, but they both have shiny macs at their respective work places.
* They both use a PC for stock/investor related stuff. Mac support is horrific in that venue. Apple's own employee stock purchase plan is run by E-TRADE, which have no mac support *boggle*
They wanted to bash the Windows interface, but couldn't find any suitable examples of bad dialog design, so they hand crafted their own example and passed it off as the real thing.
Exactly, but not as dirty as you think. What they most likely did was design a simple control panel with a desired feature set using each OS's UI development packages. THey couldn't use real examples, first for legal reasons, and also because none of the control panels from windows exactly (or even closely) matches the equivalent OSX pane (and there is no "Power Options Properties" in OS X). Their point is that Window's control panels are fixed in size, and mac ones (under OSX) will dynamically fit any rectangular configuration, and perhaps that they prefer useful default settings to be layed out conveniently.
the tools on linux aren't up to my standards
/. for god's sake.
/. poster's never got past 4th grade.... One of the largest problems with geeks is that they put all this effort into being "geekier than thou" but none into being helpful. Mod away, I'm emotionally stable.
What was that? But you're supposed to use the linux tools that do the job better! You can't compare things that linux isn't good at/hasn't developed yet... this is
This whole "I used solution X on NT, or solution Y in linux, so if you're still doing it on a Mac, then you and your mother are illegitimate swine" attitude is so friggin' childish.
How about, "It's nice to see you've found a solution for your workflow blending both open and closed source software out there, but here's some other alternatives that might also get your work done... blah blah"
It's like 90% of
But in a more related topic: How exactly is this front page news? I mean, this wouldn't be front page on a Mac News site. And, putting a functional web/dns server on a Powerbook IS silly, but for some reason, I see it all the time as well *boggle*.
There are a lot of legitimate complaints regarding the current state of mac gaming. This "parody" hits on absolutely NONE of them. This useless piece of drivel is completely devoid of wit.
Three years ago when I was in college, mac gaming was pathetic. We had to wait 6-12 months for a game to come out, and the support and gameplay was buggy and crappy as hell. Games like Mechwarrior 2, FutureCop, and the TombRaider series ran like total shit on comparably equipped macs compared to PC's (Note: this is when macs and PC's were of very comparable power, with a 500 Mhz PIII up against a 500 Mhz G3).
Nowadays, the wait is still there, but typically only 2 weeks-1.5 months, and even a concurrent release thrown in there every now and then. [and then some games just take forever, like MaxPayne, and Fallout2, which are recent mac releases *boggle*]
The main game publishers for Mac, Aspyr, Bold by Destineer, MacSoft, MacPlay, Feral Interactive, Graphsim, all release 2-3 games a month. And the major players, like Blizzard and Id have adopted their own inhouse porting teams. So the mac platform sees about 10 releases a month. That may be a small subset of PC releases, but it's the 10 BEST games the PC's seen in the last season or so. Even my hardcore gamer friend go through like half that many a month.
I've had a gaming PC (JUST for games) for the past 3 years that I keep fairly current, and it doesn't see much use anymore. I don't consider mac game releases to be in short order.
A lot of people perceive mac releases to be some fraction of their PC counterpart, but in the last 12 months, there's been exactly ZERO games that I've wanted to play and couldn't get a mac vs. or expect one in the near future.
Specific games over the past few months that I've been wasting my life with: Warcraft III, Wolfenstein, Sim's, Civ III, Aliens vs. Predator, Medal of Honor, Black and White, UT, Giants, Baldur's Gate II, Icewind Dale.
With the exception of Half-Life/Counterstrike, and the MMORPG scene (UO/Neverrest/Asheron's, although this is changing very soon), it's been hard to find a hit PC game that's NOT available on the mac.
My ability to use up disk space is, as usual, outstripping the industry's ability to make bigger disks
Sizes may not be keeping up, but cost/storage has NEVER been better. Three years ago, a 20 gig drive under $200 was a steal. These days, 160 gb is less than that. It's perfectly affordable for you to have your TB's of storage, if you're so inclined.
Don't forget about Toshiba and Samsung. They make tons of drives as well.
I'm not sure how everyone can be calling this a water purifier. I'm not saying I know what this thing is, or what it can and can't do, but a water purifier won't do any of what the article describes the machine doing. If I take de-ionized water and sprinkle it all over an anthrax laden envelope, it does nothing. Somehow, this salt water mixture is supposed to "scrub" all the baddies and microbes away, leaving the envelope safe for mucking. According to the article, this doesn't purify the water, it turns it into a purifying agent itself.
Water purifiers don't really do anything for large scale sterilization like this device claims to. And if it is just a water purifier, it'd do no more for 3rd world countries and military soldiers than iodine tablets.
Then you have the Apple "Pro" speakers, which are a joke compared to a comparably priced Logitech 560 setup
I'm not arguing the rest of your post, but Logitech Z-560 is @$150-200, Klipsch speakers are close to $300. Apple Pro Speakers are $50. Comparably priced my a$$
Just like the rest of the world, they use Microsoft Office for internal documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
Appleworks is not a professional level tool. It's marketed and designed towards home/school use. It can translate simple Office docs, but not Powerpoint. Additionally, the Presentation module in Appleworks lets you very quickly generate powerpoint-esque documents, but it's nowhere near as refined or powerful.
I managed to use Appleworks all throughout college (translating a few excel and word docs as necessary), maintaining my Macs with zero microsoft software, but as soon as I went to Apple, I *NEEDED* Office to work with all the docs I got.
Marketing-wize, Steve takes potshots at M$, but internally, they're a highly valued partner. M$, and more specifically, the MacBU is the second largest publisher of Mac software (a close second to Apple), they publish the defacto Productivity suite, and work very closely with Apple on a regular basis.
Don't forget Apple fronted a good deal of the money for ARM to get started, and they still own millions of shares of ARM stock. They may not have influence in the company any more, but it'd wouldn't be crazy for them to hook up with ARM again, and it certainly wouldn't put them in a bad position. Intel fabs ARM, but they don't own the company. A PPC handheld may be possible some day, but a G4 PDA is totally out; way too hot.
They will sell their software, iDVD, for $20 shipping and handeling to anyone!
s /A ppleStore.woa/81/wo/jKnwD1K9HTbp8ujtyc/1.3.0.3.34. 8.3.12.13.0
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObject
This is not the full version. This is just the upgrade from iDVD 1.x to 2.x. It isn't legal to use without the original, and will search your HD for it before it installs.
They bundle it with all new macs regardless of if they have a superdrive (DVD-R) or not eating up more than a gig of customer HD space.
This is patently false. It is only bundled with macs with Superdrives, and will refuse to install or run unless the Superdrive firmware is found by the iDVD installer. You, my friend, are full of crack.
Pentium 4 is a BMW, refined, smooth, and fast
don't forget, that BMW, fast as it may be, has tires the size of a quarter, and only holds 6 oz. of gas at a time. P4's do run much cooler than Athlons, but I dont' know how refined that makes you.
All these "switched back" stories seem to mention a lack of virtual desktops, but none of them consider that Codetek makes a Virtual desktop solution for OSX. You can tab around desktops, move windows between virtual desktops from the mini desktops, it allows apps to be hardwired to a particular virtual desktop, so they always load into them, and you can have up to 100 of them in a grid style configuration. I don't know how this compares to linux virtual desktops (I've only used them briefly, and without any of the widgets it may have), but it worked for me, since I've always had a thing for virtual desktops.
Also, *nix users who "switch" to mac for a better *nix, or to *only* perform the functions they currently use their *nix box for, prolly aren't going to find any compelling reasons to stay. MacOSX isn't about replacing linux, or BSD, it's about bringing a consumer OS to the masses, with the mass sw compatibility, and quick and easy HW support/integration, along with the stability and robustness of a *nix.
I've got a friend who's used one of these for about a year with his bookPC. It plays DVD's and browses web (he's got it hooked up to a 27" monitor), and works very nicely, although it takes a bit of training to get real accuracy out of.
We're running 10.2 build 6C115 on a 500 Mhz PowerbookG4, and 333 iMac (Grape). The finder's operations are much faster. Opening folders, scrolling through folders with large amounts of files, searching through file system from within apps (like locating a file to open) is all at least twice as fast. The new search feature built into the finder is easily 10x faster than using sherlock for it in 10.1. Instances of the new beachball of death are fewer than ever. Other apps don't really see a speed difference, but for the finder itself, it's like comparing 10.0 to 10.1 again!! So much faster on the iMac, where 10.1 was pokey at everything. That plucky little guy is almost 4 years old, and it feels quick and responsive in OS X. God I love the jag.
"It's a fact of life that we're relying less and less on our hearing and sense of smell and respectively our communication channels switch to visual sense. A primordial hunter-gatherer would find our hearing pathetic. He'd find our sense of smell.. well, he wouldn't find THAT at all. You know why those smell-movies failed?"
NOOOO!!! Take it back!! Take it Back!! -- still waiting for "Smell-o-Vision"
It is true, tho, but I don't think it's exactly as you've described. In general, our environment has become much louder than it was hundreds, or thousands of years ago. Those rumpthumper cars, and rock concerts are close in dB's to a 747 taking off at 20 paces. Then there's cars, trains, those damned 747's, sporting events... Even just visiting the cinemas these days exposes one to 1.5 hours of 90-100 dB's of explosions and other LFE that kids dig today. If you were exposed to noises of this intensity at work, you'd be required to wear hearing protection, but these days its considered recreation. By the age of 18, we've all destroyed our sensitive hearing.
Smelling is similar with pollution and smoking (although i don't know if I could argue that people smoke more now than in the past...). I had a friend with freakishly sensitive smell, although she didn't realize it till she quit smoking, and she could smell people distinctly from 5-10 paces (i.e. discern them from that distance), and tell if someone had been in a room within the past hour or so... but all this is terribly OT.
Go test drive a Kia, or get the Blockbuster 10 rentals for $25, and free LOTR:FOTR. If you rent even one movie a week, the BB deal saves one money (since DVD rentals are $4 these days, sheesh..)
Then, if you wanna own bonus material out the whazzoo, buy the 4 disc collectors ed. and you've only "bought" it once.
You've got the wrong kind of "proprietary" in mind. Compaq used proprietary boards so that you couldn't upgrade with standard parts, were locked into their upgrade path. For a standard user, this did not offer any additional functionality.
Apple uses proprietary boards so they can offer features like autoswitching networking (just plug in an ordinary ethernet cable between two macs, and the two computers show up on each others local network), target disk mode (use a scsi or firewire cable between two macs, and one computer becomes a HDD on the second computer), instant dynamic network configuration (change your IP/ or configure multiple network devices with just a few clicks, no restarts), dynamically driving multiple monitors with multiple cards (I can plug in two graphics cards, and two monitors, then tell the mac which monitor to drive with which card, while its on.), and USB/Firewire plug and play ease that's still years ahead of windows (oh look, it's the windows hardware manager, again...). On the portables, multimonitor/external monitor support is so slick, it's enough to make a Wintel laptop user cry.
There are plenty of things you _can't_ do as a result of proprietary HW, such as move as quickly with the industry as new HW comes out (lets see how long it takes apple to get AGP 8x...*roll*), but the main differences in functionality between MacOS9 and Win9X/ME/XP is the hardware tweaks that you don't realize by using "open" HW. In the Wintel world, the peripherals people don't work with the OS people, who don't live on the same continent as the BIOS ppl, etc. etc.
Mac admins live for these tweaks, since it means hours less frustration and "pointless clicking" to set up an office of computers, or get them networking just so, using external devices, while adapting the systems to individual work flow and idiosyncrasies.