We have several SGI Origin machines in our department and
would like to replace them with an Xserve cluster as well and
G5 PowerMac for individual researchers as a development platform. We use FastShip, Maxsurf, Rhino, Tribon
CAD systems and therefore unix CAD applications, like CATIA, IDEAS, Unigraphics, ProEngineer are not critical for us in the Naval Architecture & Marine Engineering (for the layman think of aerospace engineering in the water).What we are missing are the following commercial
engineering software:
Nastran
Hypermesh
Abaqus
Fluent
Fluent doesn't want to support Apple OS X, yet they
will support FujitsuPrimepower? I wonder how many seats
they sell to Fujitsu customers and how many more seats they could sell
if they woke up and ported to OS X with X11.
You can add those annoying AOL CDs to the landfill as well.
AOL should distribute their CDs with little rubber cushions on printed side, so people can actually use it for coasters at home.
Your only choice maybe to go with Apple, because
of your need to run Maya and Adobe AfterEffects. Linux does Maya, but not AfterEffects. I would look into trying to get a Xserve Renderfarm to work with Xgrid. This is something that someone in Apple would be able help you if you ask the right person, because it can showcase several pieces of their technology working together with Adobe applications. Seems like all the components from Apple are there, just have to have their sales engineer be able to validate that it will work with Xgrid or any other render queue software of your choice.
On the flip side Linux enjoys having engineering programs like Fluent and Nastran, which OSX doesn't have support for yet.
If the programs you need only ran on Irix, Linux or Windows then that is hardware platform you would need to acquire.
My only experience installing Linux till now is with Red Hat 8.0 using the default Bluecurve theme. It runs on an old IBM Aptiva with
128MB RAM and Pentium III running at 500MHz. I was a little disappointed at the performance of redrawing windows and launching applications. The machine generally isn't used on the console and is left alone to run as our webserver. Which it's done a great job of so far.
I was expecting Redhat 8.0 to be more snappy with this hardware. Perhaps if I was to swich to fvwm or something with
less overhead it would help. Coming from a Windows 2000 (now XP) and OSX side which we use plenty of in our department, I was expecting a BeOS like responsiveness to the OS. Seems to me by using Bluecurve, Red Hat has bogged itself down with trying to look more pretty, which helps sell more Linux for the desktops in the long run. Any recommendations aside from slapping on more RAM to speed things up? Are there an optimizations I can make on the software side to make Red Hat 8.0 more responsive?
As a systems administrator for my department, the year 2003 and early 2004 was the least productive with worms and viruses galore. My own work PC is now switched off most of the time and so is my home PC (since May '03). I administrate all the Windows PCs, Macs and Unix/Linux boxes from a single G4 Powerbook. Life is sweet and I'll never go back to a Wintel box, unless OS X flounders in the future and Longhorn becomes the utopian computing environment 'Valhalla'. Which is unlikely.
Now on my non-Windows rocking G4 TiBook computer:
No more DLL hell
No more registry labyrinth
Strong security
Less administration
A GUI with elegance and easy of use
Power of Open Source tools and BSD
Things work out of the box
Great industrial design and sense of style.
Finally, ONE computer to control PCs, Macs and Unix/Linux
computers, contained in a sleek portable laptop.
A system administrator's dream. It was tough to get the laptop during budget cut's, yet everyone who's seen me use it will agree it was worth every penny. I get a LOT of work done on OS X
Not yet, but people are ripping out the 4GB Microdrive from
the iPod minis for their digital cameras. One of the biggest bottleneck for digital photography is the write speed. The XD standard is an attempt to address this issue. This
new fast memory is a step in the right direction. I'd like to
see 25MB RAW images generated by a camera shooting 4fps writing without delay onto memory. Thats when I'll sell my Nikon 90s and fully convert to digital.
From our
Research Systems Unix Group . Won't fix your current problem, but may help in the future along with using standard
security features, firewall...etc
radmind - A suite of Unix command-line tools and a server designed to remotely administer the file systems of multiple Unix machines. For Mac OS X, there's also a graphical interface.
At its core, radmind operates as a tripwire. It is able to detect changes to any managed filesystem object, e.g. files, directories, links, etc. However, radmind goes further than just integrity checking: once a change is detected, radmind can optionally reverse the change.
Each managed machine may have its own loadset composed of multiple, layered overloads. This allows, for example, the operating system to be described separately from applications.
Loadsets are stored on a remote server. By updating a loadset on the server, changes can be pushed to managed machines.
radmind is available under a BSD-style license.
Go Blue!
Hibernate works doesn't work well, if not at all in Windows.
Instant-on is a great feature and is one of the big selling points for laptops using OSX. If you want to believe in the theoretically hibernation mode (which I have yet to see work without messing up running applications), then be my guest and spend your $$$$'s on it. As for me I've been logged in to my Powerbook 15" for over 21 days at a time and allowing it to sleep without a single reboot. Your mileage may vary
...I install HPC Windows. We run a few SGIs, our biggest being the SGI Origin 3000. We'll probably shift to either a Linux Beowulf
cluster or Apple G5 Xserve cluster in the future, since the type of problems we need to solve don't typically need a single image machine using ccNUMA. I doubt Microsoft will be coming up with anything that will be able to run as a large single image for some time now and by then the competition would have moved forward even more. This is Windows HPC Vaporware so competitors will waste time and divide their resources trying to be Windows HPC compatible on their hardware. They did it with Windows NT in the beginning when they supported MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha.... The best strategy would be to ignore Windows HPC, but I know there is a gullible hardware manufacturer born everyday that will buy into Microsoft's sales pitch.
1) To have the maximum potential you need to be running as admin user,
not standard user. I encourage everyone to be standard user when
they run their computer. I also have a "-i" file in my home directory
which forces a "rm" command to ask before deleting. This is an old unix
trick to prevent one from deleting their whole directory by accident. Another method is to have "alias rm rm -i" in your.cshrc or.tchrc environment configuration.
2) A malicious website would have to be catered specifically for Mac users
and have them navigate to this website by clicking on the link. Most
serious threats on the Windows side comes from you having your computer
simply being plugged into the network. i.e. worms. I would classify this
more under the realm of a Trojan Horse, which requires some trust on the
users part.
3) One can kill the unix terminal with in seconds of it launching. The script
doesn't and can't surreptitiously launch in the background. You can actually
see the script and terminal run in front of you.
Microsoft has been on the offensive lately. Trying to
avoid people from migrating away from their security hole
ridden operating system to Linux, Mac OSX and the BSDs.
I hope companies don't sit still and stop innovating their own products fearing Microsoft will wipe them out. e.g. Macromedia adoption of Central has slowed down because many people are waiting for Indigo and Avalon.
My SGI 320 died one day with a puff of bluish smoke
that reeked and subsequently had no more power.
I called SGI's PC tech support, which I have to add is not their regular tech support for their Irix and Linux line of machines. Their IA-32 PCs manufacturing and their PC tech support was handled by another company.
The PC tech support "guru" insisted that it was a f@*#ing
software problem. Smoke comes out of my computer and
this imbecile comes up with the lamest excuse on Earth.
Software !?!?!?!?!?! I was so pissed, I was fuming and
talked to his immediate supervisor and bitched her out.
I then threatened the regional sales manager not
to buy any more machines, which is an effective threat when
you end up buying Onyx 2000 and Origin 3000 from them.
In all fairness the workstation and server SGI tech support is really good. Its the best I've seen compared to Apple, Dell, HP....you name it. You do pay a pretty price for their tech support, but when SGI entered the PC market they had to subcontract the
manufacturing and support out to other American companies. Which resulted in a significant problem with the quality of their tech support (which I may add was all done in the U.S.) My experience with tech support from Bangalore has been pretty
good so far. Which goes to show its not which country you subcontract or outsource to, but to whom.
Which is why my primary work machine is now a Powerbook G4 running OSX and the two other machines in my office,
an SGI O2 and a dual CPU Pentium III SGI 320 is now switched
off most of the time. I'm a systems admin in my department and I've wasted way too much time on these Windows worms and viruses over the past year and Microsoft is plain negligent
for not upgrading IE 6.x with a pop-up blocker over the past two years!!!. Can't believe
how many people have managed to get spyware and adware on
their Windows computers. For people who can't afford the Apple hardware I would
recommend either Linux/FreeBSD and OpenOffice, Mozilla/Firefox.
Personally, I feel its worth paying the extra dollars for Apple hardware. The difference in quality is similar to the differences
between a Ford Escort (Dell) and a Toyota Avalon (Apple). Don't think I'd go as far to call an Apple a BMW of computers:) Although, Apple's software solutions are tightly integrated throughout the OS.
These nice features aren't quantified by straight forward comparisons of hardware and software alone. e.g. When I post a comment on/. I can right mouse click on the comment field
to check for spelling. Just one of the nice features of OSX with its fairly pervasive spell checker.
First I'd like to see a greater selection of graphics
hardware on the G5 machines. The Radeon 9800
are good, but a Quadro FX 4000 or 3000 would
make selection better. I don't think Apple should
try to get 3DLabs Wildcat boards on the G5s.
Applications like Gelato running on OSX would
give the platform a boost as well.
For the kind of work I do, a Nvidia Quadro FX 3000G would
be best for driving large displays.
"SGI makes supercomputers, other heavy-duty servers, and workstations, which are beefed-up PCs used for demanding tasks such as 3D modeling and scientific simulations."on
CNET.
Beefed up PCs? Interesting, they obviously can't tell the difference in construction, design, quality, graphics fidelity, OS of a "PC" versus an SGI box. I'd love to see a PC link 1024 CPUs as a single image system without ccNUMA. CNET needs to hire better reporters.
Ethyl alcohol is a clear, colorless liquid with a characteristic, agreeable odor. In dilute aqueous solution, it has a somewhat sweet flavor, but in more concentrated solutions it has a burning taste.
I have the last design iteration of the 15" TiBook and
its the best damn laptop out there. It has replaced
my SGI O2 Irix workstation and my dual PIII SGI 320
Windows 2000 PC as well. With all the major applications
running natively on OSX (MS Office, Palm Desktop, Macromedia,
Dreamweaver..., Adobe PS...) with X11 and RDC for OSX
those other machines are turned off most of the time.
Only thing I wish I had in my version was the backlit keyboard.
Well, guess I have to get that with my next Powerbook purchase.
Whether the charges of RFID in money is true or not.
This feature would be useful for high-tech criminals who
could conjure up their own scanners,
then would like to target victims carrying the most money.
I can imagine a well organized mafia using it in casinos, race tracks and other events where people carry lots of money.
The group that would find it useful would be customs agents
who want to make sure you declare curreny over $10,000 in
and out of the country.
We just started using Brightmail on our mail servers.
It gets a large quantity of the SPAM, whatever it doesn't
mark as SPAM using the header. I send a report to their
service. Which apparently updates the Brightmail data
every 10 minutes on our mail servers. Whatever Brightmail
doesn't catch Mail.app has done a good job of catching
and so far looks like 99% of my SPAM has been caught,
but I don't have enough stats over a long enough period
of time to show that this 99% will continue.
On our main campus there will be a pilot program to
use DSPAM. Although I've heard it requires more user training,
Brightmail doesn't need any or very little feedback to block
80% of the SPAM.
Interesting. Although, not all Mac users are what you describe above. There where a decent amount users who used
Unix and classic Mac OS before OSX came out. For those users
who where strictly from the OS9 and previous versions this book would be useful.
In my experience I've seen two types of large Mac user communities
(1) Mac users who want a simple OS, that is easy to use.
They are not computer savvy and just want to use their machine to get the job done
(2) Unix / Mac users who hated Microsoft Windows for being
neither powerful/stable nor simple/elegant to use.
Many of the people in the category (2) probably gravitated towards OSX quickly when it came out. People in category (1) waited for all their essential applications to be ported, before being forced to upgrade.
-Diganta
Larry Slotnick (larry.slotnick@palmsource.com)
Chief Products Officer
PalmSource
To Mr. Slotnick,
I've been a Handspring Treo 180 user for a while now and regularly use
iSync and the Hotsync tools to back up my Treo and synchronize my
Addressbook and Calendar with the Mac OSX built in apps. I couldn't
be happier with the whole configuration and interoperability of the
two devices. Personally I think its the best damn thing since
slice bread and I pity the masses who still have a separate devices
with addresses, numbers and calendars in their mobile phone, PDA,
home computer, work computer with out a single button solution
to synchronize all that data.
My next purchase of the next generation Treo device will be
dependent on the fact it will be able to interchange data as
easily as it has my Treo 180 has in the past with my Apple
Powerbook running OSX. By only supporting Windows in the
future , Palmsource effectively is giving the Microsoft monopoly a
distinct advantage, while Palmource loses its advantage of being the
only PDA vendor for the OSX platform. I feel that Palmsource is only
helping Microsoft establish itself as the only dominate player in
the consumer computing arena.
Sincerely,
-Diganta
One can speculate this to be a case of Bad blood or a case of industry karma. I guess the ex-Be OS executives could be getting back at Apple for shutting out Be OS development beyond the 604 processors on the Mac. I'm a huge Be OS admirer and still refer back to
Scot Hacker's columns on Byte magazine
to understand the way a truly modern OS should run and be responsive under heavy workloads. I think its ironic that Be OS who's
microkernel originated to run on the AT&T Hobbit processor (Newton PDA prototypes) will now end up going back into a PDA. Funny how that works right?
I guess the ex-Be OS executives could be getting back at
Apple for shutting out Be OS development beyond the 604
processors on the Mac. I'm a huge Be OS admirer and still
refer back to
Scot Hacker's columns on Byte magazine to understand the way a truly modern OS should run and be responsive under heavy workloads. I think its ironic that Be OS who's
microkernel
originated to run on the AT&T Hobbit processor (Newton PDA prototypes) will now end up going back into a PDA. Funny how that works right?
I'm also very disappointed with PalmSource decision to stop
development for the Mac OSX platform. I've been a Handspring Treo 180 user for a while now and regularly use iSync and the Hotsync tools to back up my Treo and synchronize my Addressbook and Calendar with the Mac OSX built in apps. I couldn't be happier with the whole configuration and interoperability of the two devices. Personally I think its the best damn thing since slice bread and I pity the masses who still have a separate devices with addresses, numbers and calendars in their mobile phone, PDA, home computer, work computer with out a single button solution to synchronize all that data.
I would highly recommend another book to go along with this.
Geometry of Design:
Studies in Proportion and Composition by Kimberly Elam.
Each image of an object or graphic design is covered with a tracing paper layer with geometric lines, to highlight the correlation to the Golden ratio.
I wish I didn't have to use 8x11.5 and 11x17 standard here.
I would ideally prefer we'd use the European A1, A2, A3, A4 standard for paper sizes. Cut an A1 paper down the middle
across the width and you get A2. You can keep going all
the way down to the A8 size.
Now they need to implement that for monitors. A 1920 by
1200 monitor could display two pages at once. Great for
desktop publishing. Or tiled displays breaking up tasks
with multiple GPUs with a ratio you can keep splitting
down and scale easily....next universal adoption of the metric system, if only that would happen in my life time !!!
I don't think I'm going to stop using the regular phone
lines. In fact I'm going to insist that we still have it.
What makes me nervous is when our network guys talk
about IP telephony and the great advantages of IP based
communications. I don't deny the features that they
tout are attractive. i.e. Ability to take your phone anywhere
on campus, integration of email, voicemail...etc.
But my biggest concern would be realiability. My traditional analog office phone didn't stop working when My.Doom or Slammer worms/viruses are choking our IP based networks. When there was a blackout throughout the eastern seaboard region last fall, my analog phone was still working.
As for the news that iChatAV will now talk to PCs, I did forward it to our chairman this morning. We've been interested in distance learning using iChatAV a few months back and one of the biggest concerns was that it ONLY worked on the Mac OS platform. Now that concern has been addressed and we plan to continue to explore this new tool as a cost effective way to promote distance learning/tele-teaching.
There are other professional multi-cast video products we will be evaluating as well and here are the recommendations from our university Apple rep. (note: iChatAV is for point-to-point communtications)
-Diganta
The products I am aware of are Marratech Pro[1], Pixion[2] the other solution I am aware of is a one to many with feedback - caststream[3]. You should take a look at caststream & marratech if you haven't already. Especially join a professional presentation to see capabilities.
At Apple I have been attending a number of conferences that are utilizing Marratech. This works incredibly well over the public internet and yet allows for 128bit encryption end to end for all video/audio/chat. I have been using it and am very impressed. Additionally I use and love CastStream for presentations (one to many). Joe Bishop is a good contact for information on Marratech - bishop@mac.com - he worked for Apple and now is at Marratech
Slashdot Mirror
Nastran
Hypermesh
Abaqus
Fluent
Fluent doesn't want to support Apple OS X, yet they will support FujitsuPrimepower? I wonder how many seats they sell to Fujitsu customers and how many more seats they could sell if they woke up and ported to OS X with X11.
HPItaniumHP-UX 11i v1.6 (11.22)
HPPA 8x00HP-UX 11.0
HPPA-RISCHP-UX 11i (11.11)
HPAlphaTru64Unix 5.0A, 5.1
HPAlphaTru64Unix 5.1A
IBMPower3AIX 4.3.3
IBMPower3AIX 5.1
IBMPower4AIX 5.1
SGIR10000 R12000 R14000IRIX 6.5
SGIAltix-ItaniumLinux Red Hat: 7.2
SUNUltraSolaris 8
SUNUltraSolaris 9
FujitsuPrimepowerSolaris 8
LinuxItaniumRed Hat: 2.1AS
LinuxPentium/XeonRed Hat: 7.1, 7.2, 7.3
LinuxPentium/XeonRed Hat: 8.0
LinuxPentium/XeonSuSE: 7.2
LinuxPentium/XeonSuSE: 7.3, 8.0
LinuxAthlonRed Hat:7.3
LinuxAthlonRed Hat: 8.0
LinuxAthlonSuSE: 7.2, 7.3, 8.0
LinuxOpteronSuSE: SLES8
WindowsPentium/Xeon2000, XP
WindowsPentium/XeonNT 4.0
WindowsAthlon2000, XP
Microsoft says Web site violates copyright
Time based hardware button for application launch i.e. Double click
You can add those annoying AOL CDs to the landfill as well. AOL should distribute their CDs with little rubber cushions on printed side, so people can actually use it for coasters at home.
On the flip side Linux enjoys having engineering programs like Fluent and Nastran, which OSX doesn't have support for yet. If the programs you need only ran on Irix, Linux or Windows then that is hardware platform you would need to acquire.
I was expecting Redhat 8.0 to be more snappy with this hardware. Perhaps if I was to swich to fvwm or something with less overhead it would help. Coming from a Windows 2000 (now XP) and OSX side which we use plenty of in our department, I was expecting a BeOS like responsiveness to the OS. Seems to me by using Bluecurve, Red Hat has bogged itself down with trying to look more pretty, which helps sell more Linux for the desktops in the long run. Any recommendations aside from slapping on more RAM to speed things up? Are there an optimizations I can make on the software side to make Red Hat 8.0 more responsive?
Now on my non-Windows rocking G4 TiBook computer:
No more DLL hell
No more registry labyrinth
Strong security
Less administration
A GUI with elegance and easy of use
Power of Open Source tools and BSD
Things work out of the box
Great industrial design and sense of style.
Finally, ONE computer to control PCs, Macs and Unix/Linux computers, contained in a sleek portable laptop.
A system administrator's dream. It was tough to get the laptop during budget cut's, yet everyone who's seen me use it will agree it was worth every penny. I get a LOT of work done on OS X
Not yet, but people are ripping out the 4GB Microdrive from the iPod minis for their digital cameras. One of the biggest bottleneck for digital photography is the write speed. The XD standard is an attempt to address this issue. This new fast memory is a step in the right direction. I'd like to see 25MB RAW images generated by a camera shooting 4fps writing without delay onto memory. Thats when I'll sell my Nikon 90s and fully convert to digital.
radmind - A suite of Unix command-line tools and a server designed to remotely administer the file systems of multiple Unix machines. For Mac OS X, there's also a graphical interface.
At its core, radmind operates as a tripwire. It is able to detect changes to any managed filesystem object, e.g. files, directories, links, etc. However, radmind goes further than just integrity checking: once a change is detected, radmind can optionally reverse the change.
Each managed machine may have its own loadset composed of multiple, layered overloads. This allows, for example, the operating system to be described separately from applications.
Loadsets are stored on a remote server. By updating a loadset on the server, changes can be pushed to managed machines. radmind is available under a BSD-style license.
Go Blue!
Hibernate works doesn't work well, if not at all in Windows. Instant-on is a great feature and is one of the big selling points for laptops using OSX. If you want to believe in the theoretically hibernation mode (which I have yet to see work without messing up running applications), then be my guest and spend your $$$$'s on it. As for me I've been logged in to my Powerbook 15" for over 21 days at a time and allowing it to sleep without a single reboot. Your mileage may vary
...I install HPC Windows. We run a few SGIs, our biggest being the SGI Origin 3000. We'll probably shift to either a Linux Beowulf cluster or Apple G5 Xserve cluster in the future, since the type of problems we need to solve don't typically need a single image machine using ccNUMA. I doubt Microsoft will be coming up with anything that will be able to run as a large single image for some time now and by then the competition would have moved forward even more. This is Windows HPC Vaporware so competitors will waste time and divide their resources trying to be Windows HPC compatible on their hardware. They did it with Windows NT in the beginning when they supported MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha.... The best strategy would be to ignore Windows HPC, but I know there is a gullible hardware manufacturer born everyday that will buy into Microsoft's sales pitch.
http://bronosky.com/pub/AppleScript.htm Only runs "du" command.
1) To have the maximum potential you need to be running as admin user, not standard user. I encourage everyone to be standard user when they run their computer. I also have a "-i" file in my home directory which forces a "rm" command to ask before deleting. This is an old unix trick to prevent one from deleting their whole directory by accident. Another method is to have "alias rm rm -i" in your .cshrc or .tchrc environment configuration.
2) A malicious website would have to be catered specifically for Mac users and have them navigate to this website by clicking on the link. Most serious threats on the Windows side comes from you having your computer simply being plugged into the network. i.e. worms. I would classify this more under the realm of a Trojan Horse, which requires some trust on the users part.
3) One can kill the unix terminal with in seconds of it launching. The script doesn't and can't surreptitiously launch in the background. You can actually see the script and terminal run in front of you.
Microsoft has been on the offensive lately. Trying to avoid people from migrating away from their security hole ridden operating system to Linux, Mac OSX and the BSDs. I hope companies don't sit still and stop innovating their own products fearing Microsoft will wipe them out. e.g. Macromedia adoption of Central has slowed down because many people are waiting for Indigo and Avalon.
The PC tech support "guru" insisted that it was a f@*#ing software problem. Smoke comes out of my computer and this imbecile comes up with the lamest excuse on Earth. Software !?!?!?!?!?! I was so pissed, I was fuming and talked to his immediate supervisor and bitched her out. I then threatened the regional sales manager not to buy any more machines, which is an effective threat when you end up buying Onyx 2000 and Origin 3000 from them.
In all fairness the workstation and server SGI tech support is really good. Its the best I've seen compared to Apple, Dell, HP ....you name it. You do pay a pretty price for their tech support, but when SGI entered the PC market they had to subcontract the
manufacturing and support out to other American companies. Which resulted in a significant problem with the quality of their tech support (which I may add was all done in the U.S.) My experience with tech support from Bangalore has been pretty
good so far. Which goes to show its not which country you subcontract or outsource to, but to whom.
Which is why my primary work machine is now a Powerbook G4 running OSX and the two other machines in my office, an SGI O2 and a dual CPU Pentium III SGI 320 is now switched off most of the time. I'm a systems admin in my department and I've wasted way too much time on these Windows worms and viruses over the past year and Microsoft is plain negligent for not upgrading IE 6.x with a pop-up blocker over the past two years!!!. Can't believe how many people have managed to get spyware and adware on their Windows computers. For people who can't afford the Apple hardware I would recommend either Linux/FreeBSD and OpenOffice, Mozilla/Firefox.
Personally, I feel its worth paying the extra dollars for Apple hardware. The difference in quality is similar to the differences between a Ford Escort (Dell) and a Toyota Avalon (Apple). Don't think I'd go as far to call an Apple a BMW of computers :) Although, Apple's software solutions are tightly integrated throughout the OS.
These nice features aren't quantified by straight forward comparisons of hardware and software alone. e.g. When I post a comment on /. I can right mouse click on the comment field
to check for spelling. Just one of the nice features of OSX with its fairly pervasive spell checker.
For the kind of work I do, a Nvidia Quadro FX 3000G would be best for driving large displays.
Beefed up PCs? Interesting, they obviously can't tell the difference in construction, design, quality, graphics fidelity, OS of a "PC" versus an SGI box. I'd love to see a PC link 1024 CPUs as a single image system without ccNUMA. CNET needs to hire better reporters.
Ethyl alcohol is a clear, colorless liquid with a characteristic, agreeable odor. In dilute aqueous solution, it has a somewhat sweet flavor, but in more concentrated solutions it has a burning taste.
I have the last design iteration of the 15" TiBook and its the best damn laptop out there. It has replaced my SGI O2 Irix workstation and my dual PIII SGI 320 Windows 2000 PC as well. With all the major applications running natively on OSX (MS Office, Palm Desktop, Macromedia, Dreamweaver ..., Adobe PS...) with X11 and RDC for OSX
those other machines are turned off most of the time.
Only thing I wish I had in my version was the backlit keyboard. Well, guess I have to get that with my next Powerbook purchase.
This feature would be useful for high-tech criminals who could conjure up their own scanners, then would like to target victims carrying the most money. I can imagine a well organized mafia using it in casinos, race tracks and other events where people carry lots of money.
The group that would find it useful would be customs agents who want to make sure you declare curreny over $10,000 in and out of the country.
On our main campus there will be a pilot program to use DSPAM. Although I've heard it requires more user training, Brightmail doesn't need any or very little feedback to block 80% of the SPAM.
In my experience I've seen two types of large Mac user communities
(1) Mac users who want a simple OS, that is easy to use. They are not computer savvy and just want to use their machine to get the job done
(2) Unix / Mac users who hated Microsoft Windows for being neither powerful/stable nor simple/elegant to use.
Many of the people in the category (2) probably gravitated towards OSX quickly when it came out. People in category (1) waited for all their essential applications to be ported, before being forced to upgrade.
-Diganta
Chief Products Officer
PalmSource
To Mr. Slotnick,
I've been a Handspring Treo 180 user for a while now and regularly use iSync and the Hotsync tools to back up my Treo and synchronize my Addressbook and Calendar with the Mac OSX built in apps. I couldn't be happier with the whole configuration and interoperability of the two devices. Personally I think its the best damn thing since slice bread and I pity the masses who still have a separate devices with addresses, numbers and calendars in their mobile phone, PDA, home computer, work computer with out a single button solution to synchronize all that data.
My next purchase of the next generation Treo device will be dependent on the fact it will be able to interchange data as easily as it has my Treo 180 has in the past with my Apple Powerbook running OSX. By only supporting Windows in the future , Palmsource effectively is giving the Microsoft monopoly a distinct advantage, while Palmource loses its advantage of being the only PDA vendor for the OSX platform. I feel that Palmsource is only helping Microsoft establish itself as the only dominate player in the consumer computing arena.
Sincerely,
-Diganta
One can speculate this to be a case of Bad blood or a case of industry karma. I guess the ex-Be OS executives could be getting back at Apple for shutting out Be OS development beyond the 604 processors on the Mac. I'm a huge Be OS admirer and still refer back to Scot Hacker's columns on Byte magazine to understand the way a truly modern OS should run and be responsive under heavy workloads. I think its ironic that Be OS who's microkernel originated to run on the AT&T Hobbit processor (Newton PDA prototypes) will now end up going back into a PDA. Funny how that works right?
I'm also very disappointed with PalmSource decision to stop development for the Mac OSX platform. I've been a Handspring Treo 180 user for a while now and regularly use iSync and the Hotsync tools to back up my Treo and synchronize my Addressbook and Calendar with the Mac OSX built in apps. I couldn't be happier with the whole configuration and interoperability of the two devices. Personally I think its the best damn thing since slice bread and I pity the masses who still have a separate devices with addresses, numbers and calendars in their mobile phone, PDA, home computer, work computer with out a single button solution to synchronize all that data.
I wish I didn't have to use 8x11.5 and 11x17 standard here. I would ideally prefer we'd use the European A1, A2, A3, A4 standard for paper sizes. Cut an A1 paper down the middle across the width and you get A2. You can keep going all the way down to the A8 size.
Now they need to implement that for monitors. A 1920 by 1200 monitor could display two pages at once. Great for desktop publishing. Or tiled displays breaking up tasks with multiple GPUs with a ratio you can keep splitting down and scale easily....next universal adoption of the metric system, if only that would happen in my life time !!!
What makes me nervous is when our network guys talk about IP telephony and the great advantages of IP based communications. I don't deny the features that they tout are attractive. i.e. Ability to take your phone anywhere on campus, integration of email, voicemail ...etc.
But my biggest concern would be realiability. My traditional analog office phone didn't stop working when My.Doom or Slammer worms/viruses are choking our IP based networks. When there was a blackout throughout the eastern seaboard region last fall, my analog phone was still working.
As for the news that iChatAV will now talk to PCs, I did forward it to our chairman this morning. We've been interested in distance learning using iChatAV a few months back and one of the biggest concerns was that it ONLY worked on the Mac OS platform. Now that concern has been addressed and we plan to continue to explore this new tool as a cost effective way to promote distance learning/tele-teaching.
There are other professional multi-cast video products we will be evaluating as well and here are the recommendations from our university Apple rep. (note: iChatAV is for point-to-point communtications)
-Diganta
The products I am aware of are Marratech Pro[1], Pixion[2] the other solution I am aware of is a one to many with feedback - caststream[3]. You should take a look at caststream & marratech if you haven't already. Especially join a professional presentation to see capabilities.
At Apple I have been attending a number of conferences that are utilizing Marratech. This works incredibly well over the public internet and yet allows for 128bit encryption end to end for all video/audio/chat. I have been using it and am very impressed. Additionally I use and love CastStream for presentations (one to many). Joe Bishop is a good contact for information on Marratech - bishop@mac.com - he worked for Apple and now is at Marratech
-John"
[1] http://www.marratech.com/
[2] http://www.pixion.com/
[2] http://www.caststream.com/