one thing to bear in mind (at least what i discovered after the missing manual and unix geeks books on mac os x) is that despite people getting modded for saying that os x books are mostly fluff, there is not much to say about them.
i knew very little about actually running the console if it was not an ms-dos prompt prior to the release of os x and have found that learning how to use it is a battle fought with man pages, documentation from other linux documentation and distributions help, but not for you to learn in a book. it is 2003 and os x has been since 2001, one would not expect good documentation yet. if i read another book on how to configure iChat i think i may have to "Switch" again.
that is so weird!!! fox news is the same way for me. i will be watching and stories that i have absolutely no interest in will show up again and again, all with promising headlines. it is so decieving. as a mac user i notice that slashdot spends an awful lot of time talking about things that aren't mac related, especially games. everyone knows games don't work on the mac.
Or maybe it's just they're not doing all that well since M$ took over the Network arena.
that is an angle that i have not been reading on so much. it is obvious that the linux community has a vested interest in SCO losing, but the motivations of other commercial vendors had not come up. one is left to wonder whether NOVELL's decision was retalitory or just took time to work out. it did not seem like a fruitless lawsuit at first, but now it seems like SCO should just give it up as a UNIX vendor and try to find a better hold on other intellectual property. perhaps the mouse pad would be a good idea, then you could threaten everyone to start using their legs for mousing, pay the licensing fee or be sued. someone give the parent of this comment another point for pointing out such a good angle.
one could lose some of the more deliberate clients that come in precompiled applications, but i seriously do not see methods such as hosts files and firewalls being scrutinized, so we will all be in the clear with the more fundamental methods of avoiding adservers and spyware.
i also would say that taking another site's ad space is different than opting not to use the adspace at all. that would be like saying it is illegal to cover your eyes when you see a billboard since it is illegal to advertise your own company on a billboard someone else has paid for. the two are incongruent in motivations.
no court can rule that i cannot manipulate my network input to suit the needs that i see fit, just as they cannot rule that gov't or commercial companies from doing the same thing for the sake of helping secure their networks. i doubt they will pimp us on this one and if they do...well it may be a good idea to grab all the binaries, source and instructions you can find before it happens.
i am still going to hold off until microsoft comes out with a collar-based PDA with GPS capabilities. if they were cheap (or simply mandatory) i think everyone would grow to love them.
XP collar edition does not sound that far away, i am going to embrace the "freedom to innovate" and hope i don't catch anything.
i have used abiword on x11 as my primary word processor for some time. it is better than openoffice.org in that it takes less than half a week to load and seems to cover everything i need.
funny i have tried over a thousand of the 7000 os x apps and never heard of it. i guess no one will lose sleep over that one.
the only one with a li-polymer battery. a better buffer for HDD players and a cool design.
everyone wants to be like the iPod and i wonder where they will be in a year. with the iPod you know you are going to get updates and not be left out to dry on it. the others will not sell like the iPod and don't have the pull that apple does to improve them. MP3 encoding on unit is cool, but how useful will that be? i have not recorded a FM radio stream since 1988.
i see more models and different brands as being a bad plan if you want to update them. they are all mostly upgradeable, but how many are going to get many updates, and how many are going to be overshadowed and ignored by a new model to compete with the new iPod a year down the road.
you end up stuck a $500 walkman that an antique with a battery life that makes it hardly a portable anymore and a salty taste in your mouth. i would stick to the iPod, as they are sexy, reliable and supported by a company that is pretty good for not leaving their hardware owners out to dry prematurely.
everyone is complaining about dupes. what about this comment? about the gazillionth time i have seen it, verbatim to boot. i got a troll for disagreeing with this guy last time, and no one will call his dupes. Anonymous Coward seems to get enough publicity around here, but you don't see people calling him out like everyone else.
well i think you are dupes. i am starting to wonder if i am not a dupe. i am glad that everyone posted the same dupe comment too. i though it was "DERP!!!" not dupe. i am glad their is two of everything here, "one to take a dump and one to wipe my butt with" ~chris farley.
i got a troll last time i commented to this one. i guess i am working on two. DUPE!!!!!
if you think that is bad, try to configure a dell server that competes with the XServe, you end up thinking those are pretty reasonable too, amazingly enough. the 4u dell with all the bells and whistles twibbed to match the ultimate XServe ends up scarily almost twice as much.
the powermacs got an update to increase their speed performance to allow for the new higher speed media, and they may follow suit with that with the powerbooks as well.
i would also say that you should not expect much of an optical drive in a laptop. i imagine that it would be pretty system intensive to burn a dvd at 2x on a powerbook and would get mighty hot anyway.
apple really does not cripple their hardware so much as not allow for poor support of it. no dvd support at all until 10.1, so why expect them to have support that they feel is satisfactory on a relatively new concept? apple does a great deal of tech support and i think that they are best to not release anything unstable to save their already busy support people when it can all be avoided by quality products.
kind of like taking the engine out of a volkswagen, you have to take the whole thing apart to work on it.
i stand corrected on the mhz, i have a 9100 and i assumed that it shipping with a 120mhz that the 8600 would ship with lower. i disassembled an 8500 last month and was basing my knowledge on this. i knew i should have hit apple-history before i had to put my foot in my mouth.
10.2 was 80$ with student discount 10.0-10.1 upgrade 20$, 10.3 will be 80$ to students...or anyone who says they are a student and knows the name of a university.
the 8600 is less than 100mhz, so that may have something to do with it, i have a powermac 9100 that has 12 dimm slots and takes up to 1.5gb memory. it smokes on os9.2.2 that is not a 300mhz machine, either. maybe 300watts, but that is upgradable to 400:) seriously though, the 8600 is a dinosaur and 64 megs of ram is inadequate for anything above os 8.6, unless you are a wizard with extension, and that is probably not the case.
that 8600 can be ugraded to a viable machine. my 9100 can get a processor upgrade into g4 territory for a couple hundred (a bit expensive for my wallet), take 1.5gb ram, has 6 pci slots and plenty of room for 5.25 and 3.5 drives. the 8600 on the other hand takes Apple SIMMs and is not something worth salvaging as a mac machine. put linux on it and have some fun. the 8500 i play with with debian runs way better than my old ibm, which stacks up even in megahertz, disk space (ide on x86, scsi on ppc) and ram (32mb). they are identical for all intents and purposes, but powerpc architechture will always do better.
open Directory Access.app and enable BSD Configuration files, get a good hosts file and pico/etc/hosts usually does fine for most of my content blocking needs. if i knew how to use vi i could probably cut a good four and half seconds off that.
i think opera is great and they could potentially justify someone paying for it, but i think the cost has gotten out of hand. you now are buying operamail premium with every copy you buy, and that is just lamo! operamail through a web browser is a nightmare, makes me want to use hotmail. they dropped pop3 to non-premium members and imap entirely. they used to just have badass ad-driven mail with every feature you could come to enjoy, and now it is just garbage.
i would buy opera for 20$ if i still ran intel architechture, but powerpc opera is no good at all, and forty dollars is unacceptable for a browser. omniweb for mac blows opera's doors off and looks nominally better doing so.
safari does all of that with a minor amount ingenuity, as can omniweb or ie for mac for that matter. why would you want email and news mixed in with a web browser? everytime i use a web browser to do email and news i find out just how much i love using a seperate client.
the gestures were awesome when they came out, but linux and mac both now have system-wide gestures, making all browsers able to do the same thing (all cocoa browsers in the case of the mac www.bitart.com). so why pay 40$? you get an operamail pop account. they dropped imap support on operamail and gave up the free pop3 access following suit with yahoo (which irked me having switched all my contact to opera) and changed the mail so it does not function on any of my browsers. operamail sucks, so why would anyone want it if they already have email (wouldn't most people who want a power browser already be hip to the whole Electronic-mail thing by now?). it did not use to cost forty dollars and i will not pay it considering that is half of the cost of my operating system (more for most of you that are not mac users yet) after student discount. so opera may be better than other browsers on linux or windows, but i scarcely think it can hold a candle to anything on os x that is not iCab. omniweb, safari, mozilla and even the dredded mac ie are better for mac than opera. try them all out, opera will lose on the mac every time.
they are usually pretty slow about getting mac support, and they were somewhat piss-ed about apple not using their engine. why would they? why pay opera money when they have perfectly good programmers that can do the work? i think apple was right in not using opera, especially considering that opera has always run poorly on os x, and i am a hardcore opera fan. beos, linux or windows are great places to run opera, but macs are not the place for it, whether it be their fault or not. also opera for mac has no gestures, whereas any of the cocoa browsers can with cocoa gestures (www.bitart.com). so opera can keep their mac browser, it will never have a place on my machine unless it supplies the women and the beer.
i know, slashdot only gets like 30 hits a day, and ten are from me. i am sure that you guys are not busy at all. was that a book review we were talking about? why did it not end up in the apple section? wait, nevermind.
i always thought that os x's preemptive multitasking, buffered memory and journaled filesystem were pretty gay myself. the SMP thing sounds a little willy-nilly to me too, two processors working together, doing everything in unison...pretty gay you are right.
Slashdot Mirror
one thing to bear in mind (at least what i discovered after the missing manual and unix geeks books on mac os x) is that despite people getting modded for saying that os x books are mostly fluff, there is not much to say about them.
i knew very little about actually running the console if it was not an ms-dos prompt prior to the release of os x and have found that learning how to use it is a battle fought with man pages, documentation from other linux documentation and distributions help, but not for you to learn in a book. it is 2003 and os x has been since 2001, one would not expect good documentation yet. if i read another book on how to configure iChat i think i may have to "Switch" again.
that is so weird!!! fox news is the same way for me. i will be watching and stories that i have absolutely no interest in will show up again and again, all with promising headlines. it is so decieving.
as a mac user i notice that slashdot spends an awful lot of time talking about things that aren't mac related, especially games. everyone knows games don't work on the mac.
that is an angle that i have not been reading on so much. it is obvious that the linux community has a vested interest in SCO losing, but the motivations of other commercial vendors had not come up. one is left to wonder whether NOVELL's decision was retalitory or just took time to work out.
it did not seem like a fruitless lawsuit at first, but now it seems like SCO should just give it up as a UNIX vendor and try to find a better hold on other intellectual property. perhaps the mouse pad would be a good idea, then you could threaten everyone to start using their legs for mousing, pay the licensing fee or be sued.
someone give the parent of this comment another point for pointing out such a good angle.
one could lose some of the more deliberate clients that come in precompiled applications, but i seriously do not see methods such as hosts files and firewalls being scrutinized, so we will all be in the clear with the more fundamental methods of avoiding adservers and spyware.
i also would say that taking another site's ad space is different than opting not to use the adspace at all. that would be like saying it is illegal to cover your eyes when you see a billboard since it is illegal to advertise your own company on a billboard someone else has paid for. the two are incongruent in motivations.
no court can rule that i cannot manipulate my network input to suit the needs that i see fit, just as they cannot rule that gov't or commercial companies from doing the same thing for the sake of helping secure their networks. i doubt they will pimp us on this one and if they do...well it may be a good idea to grab all the binaries, source and instructions you can find before it happens.
it is always good to see that the u.s. can tell the world what is right for them, we have always had good luck with foreign affairs in the past.
if we are doing this it has to be right, right?
PETA would never put there name on something to harm the animals, especially the fuzzy ones.
i am still going to hold off until microsoft comes out with a collar-based PDA with GPS capabilities. if they were cheap (or simply mandatory) i think everyone would grow to love them.
XP collar edition does not sound that far away, i am going to embrace the "freedom to innovate" and hope i don't catch anything.
i remember seeing in the license agreement for windows you can sue them for up to $5. what more could one ask for?
AMD's upcoming Athlon 64, however, will bring 64-bit computing to the desktop. so we can give a full 64-bits to one backdoor network or the next.
i have used abiword on x11 as my primary word processor for some time. it is better than openoffice.org in that it takes less than half a week to load and seems to cover everything i need.
funny i have tried over a thousand of the 7000 os x apps and never heard of it. i guess no one will lose sleep over that one.
the ipod
the only one with a li-polymer battery. a better buffer for HDD players and a cool design.
everyone wants to be like the iPod and i wonder where they will be in a year. with the iPod you know you are going to get updates and not be left out to dry on it. the others will not sell like the iPod and don't have the pull that apple does to improve them. MP3 encoding on unit is cool, but how useful will that be? i have not recorded a FM radio stream since 1988.
i see more models and different brands as being a bad plan if you want to update them. they are all mostly upgradeable, but how many are going to get many updates, and how many are going to be overshadowed and ignored by a new model to compete with the new iPod a year down the road.
you end up stuck a $500 walkman that an antique with a battery life that makes it hardly a portable anymore and a salty taste in your mouth. i would stick to the iPod, as they are sexy, reliable and supported by a company that is pretty good for not leaving their hardware owners out to dry prematurely.
everyone is complaining about dupes. what about this comment? about the gazillionth time i have seen it, verbatim to boot. i got a troll for disagreeing with this guy last time, and no one will call his dupes. Anonymous Coward seems to get enough publicity around here, but you don't see people calling him out like everyone else. well i think you are dupes. i am starting to wonder if i am not a dupe. i am glad that everyone posted the same dupe comment too. i though it was "DERP!!!" not dupe. i am glad their is two of everything here, "one to take a dump and one to wipe my butt with" ~chris farley. i got a troll last time i commented to this one. i guess i am working on two. DUPE!!!!!
if you think that is bad, try to configure a dell server that competes with the XServe, you end up thinking those are pretty reasonable too, amazingly enough. the 4u dell with all the bells and whistles twibbed to match the ultimate XServe ends up scarily almost twice as much.
the powermacs got an update to increase their speed performance to allow for the new higher speed media, and they may follow suit with that with the powerbooks as well.
i would also say that you should not expect much of an optical drive in a laptop. i imagine that it would be pretty system intensive to burn a dvd at 2x on a powerbook and would get mighty hot anyway.
apple really does not cripple their hardware so much as not allow for poor support of it. no dvd support at all until 10.1, so why expect them to have support that they feel is satisfactory on a relatively new concept? apple does a great deal of tech support and i think that they are best to not release anything unstable to save their already busy support people when it can all be avoided by quality products.
kind of like taking the engine out of a volkswagen, you have to take the whole thing apart to work on it.
i stand corrected on the mhz, i have a 9100 and i assumed that it shipping with a 120mhz that the 8600 would ship with lower. i disassembled an 8500 last month and was basing my knowledge on this. i knew i should have hit apple-history before i had to put my foot in my mouth.
10.2 was 80$ with student discount 10.0-10.1 upgrade 20$, 10.3 will be 80$ to students...or anyone who says they are a student and knows the name of a university.
the 8600 is less than 100mhz, so that may have something to do with it, i have a powermac 9100 that has 12 dimm slots and takes up to 1.5gb memory. it smokes on os9.2.2 :) seriously though, the 8600 is a dinosaur and 64 megs of ram is inadequate for anything above os 8.6, unless you are a wizard with extension, and that is probably not the case.
that 8600 can be ugraded to a viable machine. my 9100 can get a processor upgrade into g4 territory for a couple hundred (a bit expensive for my wallet), take 1.5gb ram, has 6 pci slots and plenty of room for 5.25 and 3.5 drives. the 8600 on the other hand takes Apple SIMMs and is not something worth salvaging as a mac machine. put linux on it and have some fun. the 8500 i play with with debian runs way better than my old ibm, which stacks up even in megahertz, disk space (ide on x86, scsi on ppc) and ram (32mb). they are identical for all intents and purposes, but powerpc architechture will always do better.
that is not a 300mhz machine, either. maybe 300watts, but that is upgradable to 400
open Directory Access.app and enable BSD Configuration files, get a good hosts file and pico /etc/hosts usually does fine for most of my content blocking needs. if i knew how to use vi i could probably cut a good four and half seconds off that.
i think opera is great and they could potentially justify someone paying for it, but i think the cost has gotten out of hand. you now are buying operamail premium with every copy you buy, and that is just lamo! operamail through a web browser is a nightmare, makes me want to use hotmail. they dropped pop3 to non-premium members and imap entirely. they used to just have badass ad-driven mail with every feature you could come to enjoy, and now it is just garbage.
i would buy opera for 20$ if i still ran intel architechture, but powerpc opera is no good at all, and forty dollars is unacceptable for a browser. omniweb for mac blows opera's doors off and looks nominally better doing so.
safari does all of that with a minor amount ingenuity, as can omniweb or ie for mac for that matter.
why would you want email and news mixed in with a web browser? everytime i use a web browser to do email and news i find out just how much i love using a seperate client.
the gestures were awesome when they came out, but linux and mac both now have system-wide gestures, making all browsers able to do the same thing (all cocoa browsers in the case of the mac www.bitart.com).
so why pay 40$? you get an operamail pop account. they dropped imap support on operamail and gave up the free pop3 access following suit with yahoo (which irked me having switched all my contact to opera) and changed the mail so it does not function on any of my browsers. operamail sucks, so why would anyone want it if they already have email (wouldn't most people who want a power browser already be hip to the whole Electronic-mail thing by now?). it did not use to cost forty dollars and i will not pay it considering that is half of the cost of my operating system (more for most of you that are not mac users yet) after student discount.
so opera may be better than other browsers on linux or windows, but i scarcely think it can hold a candle to anything on os x that is not iCab. omniweb, safari, mozilla and even the dredded mac ie are better for mac than opera. try them all out, opera will lose on the mac every time.
they are usually pretty slow about getting mac support, and they were somewhat piss-ed about apple not using their engine. why would they? why pay opera money when they have perfectly good programmers that can do the work? i think apple was right in not using opera, especially considering that opera has always run poorly on os x, and i am a hardcore opera fan. beos, linux or windows are great places to run opera, but macs are not the place for it, whether it be their fault or not.
also opera for mac has no gestures, whereas any of the cocoa browsers can with cocoa gestures (www.bitart.com). so opera can keep their mac browser, it will never have a place on my machine unless it supplies the women and the beer.
i know, slashdot only gets like 30 hits a day, and ten are from me. i am sure that you guys are not busy at all. was that a book review we were talking about? why did it not end up in the apple section? wait, nevermind.
i always thought that os x's preemptive multitasking, buffered memory and journaled filesystem were pretty gay myself. the SMP thing sounds a little willy-nilly to me too, two processors working together, doing everything in unison...pretty gay you are right.
i don't know, i bought a g3 to run os x and have yet to have a complaint. i am sure os x would run faster on a g4.
i know os x is no lindows, but it is still working on getting decent enough that it can someday compete.