Did you ever see any USB floppies that could read Mac formatted disks? All the ones that I ever saw could only read PC disks. I'm guessing that if they existed, they were probably a premium over the $20 version, which was already a premium over the internal drives that I was installing into PCs. Of course, it wasn't really a problem for getting data off of an iMac, as other Macs as well as PCs could read the 1.44MB disks - but if you wanted to read your old Mac disks, you had to use another Mac as a go-between or secure an old drive and bust out the soldering iron. But I guess it wasn't out of character for the original iMac, which was incompatible with just about everything else back in 1998.
I had a Gigabyte board with the Dual Bios feature that I got about 5 years back. With the dual bios, I had two bios chips, and could flash the "spare" bios chipp within Windows. Then when I rebooted the computer next, it would try to come up on the chip with the new bios. If it went well, it would then allow me to mirror the new bios chip to the other chip. If it failed to come up on the chip with the new bios, it would then go back to the other chip and boot with the old bios. Worked really well, and made it a lot harder to "brick" the motherboard with the addition of a part that probably only costs a few cents.
If you have a Windows 98 system kicking around, that should allow you to format the USB harddrive and make it bootable with DOS from the command prompt. Possibly with Windows ME too, but I'm not sure as ME's command prompt was pretty crippled.
Although I will agree that the Finder is terrible at accessing network filesystems (although not much worse than Windows Explorer - have neither Apple nor Microsoft heard of threading, or do they consider the file manager to be unnecessary?)
Actually, Microsoft has. Buried in the Folder Options - View tab in Explorer, you can check the "Launch Folder Windows in a Seperate Process" to do pretty much that. The reason why it's not defaulted to On I don't know, unless it's to save memory on older systems.
That's the Apple definintion, as Apple likes to conviently ignore alternatives like Linux when they bash the competition. I call a computer that is based on x86 processors, and is (mostly) compatible with the original IBM Personal Computer (aka IBM PC for short) a PC. Such a computer generally has a BIOS, and can natively boot up MSDOS if you wanted too, and its lineage can be traced back to the 1980's. While Apple computers now are x86 and can run Windows, they are different enough and break too much compatibility with legacy stuff to be a PC.
Even worse was the Windows 98 upgrade disk I have. It did allow me to put in a disk for the previous version of Windows if I was doing a clean install, however, it was just to taunt me as it would only accept Windows 95 CD-ROMs. It had no way to verify that I did indeed have a legal copy of Windows 95, which was on about 39 floppy disks. Later I discovered the secret "skip the media check and just install the damn OS" secret CD-Key and was happy ever since.
It seems that in many MMORPGs, being able to sell virtual goods for real money is a big incentive for people, and this is what motivates a lot of the cheating in terms of item dupes hacked items, botting, etc. By removing the ability for these people to sell their ill gotten virtual goods for real money, hopefully they'll move on and stop wrecking games for the real players.
There are plenty of rooted Linux boxes out there, and there have been reports of Macs as being part of bot nets. Granted, the problem is still 99% Windows, but is not all unique to Windows.
It's actaully a difficult task. Ultimately, you can't trust running any software on the potentially infected OS, as well as utilities like Task Manager because a good bot could mask itself from these progams. Right now many bots don't bother, or only hit a few of the most popular utilities, but this can't be counted on. One way to scan the computer is to use another OS to do the task (like a live CD), and run some tools from there.
Otherwise, you can watch the hardware itself. If the computer is idle, it shouldn't appear busy. The HDD should not be active, the network link lights should not be constantly blinking. If the computer has variable speed fans, they shouldn't be running full bore.
You can also try to judge the behavior of the computer too - is it as responsive as you would expect? IS the internet slow? This can be tough if you don't have a good feel for a baseline for how that computer is supposed to act.
The last way is probably the best - to be part of a botnet the computer must be sending and recieving data over the network. If you can place something between the computer and the internet like a firewall and watch all of its communications, the bot should make itself apparent. You can also use another computer to do a port scan, though not all bots open up ports so you can't count on this.
The implementations would suck because iTunes for windows is bloatware, and requires a fairly modern PC with all the trimmings running a full blown version of Windows. It would be much nicer if Apple would license their fairplay DRM, but they won't. I guess you could say that other companies could just take the guts of an iPod and put it in their own case, I suppose.
The ROKR is kind of an anomaly, but it does have the distinction of being the only non-Apple piece of hardware that can handle Fairplay. But it is crippled - it's a cell phone with music capabilities tacked on, and it can only hold a limited number of songs no matter how much memory it has. It's pretty clear that Apple did this so it wouldn't threaten their iPod/iTunes monopoly.
Fairplay only plays on MP3 players that are made by Apple. Redefining a Windows laptop running Quicktime as a MP3 player is quite a stretch, and most poeple who want an iPod don't want to haul around a bulky laptop with a 2 hour battery just to hear their songs.
Sure, Apple could claim that you can burn and re-rip the CD, but that's the equilivent of Microsoft claiming that you can just record the output from the headphone jack of the Zune. Sure it works, but to argue that going through a bunch of steps, wasting a CD, and a loss of quality is the same as just copying the files to the iPod is just plain stupid.
That's exactly why I don't think that Microsoft's anti-piracy tactics will get much more aggressive than they already are. If they do, they would be alienating some of their most loyal users.
That only works for the CDs that try to prevent you from ripping them by installing something via auto run when you put the CD in. The ones that violate the Red Book standards (invalid data tracks, bogus checksum data, whatever) are more sinister, and you might want to be careful about trying them on a Mac.
All that it would take is for the "private" email address to get out there once, and it would forever be spammed. Not to mention the dictionary spammers might find it too.
I would guess that most people would want to keep a phone they pay $600-$700 for a bit longer than they do with that free phone they get with a contract. In my opinion, a non-replacable battery is a huge turn off, but I guess it didn't hurt the iPod that much.
Never announce a product until you can actually ship it.
One of the reasons for this is that you hurt sales of your current product by announcing early, as people will hold off on buying what you are offering now if they see something that's way better right around the corner. However, since Apple doesn't have a phone on the market, all they are really hurting is their future competition (though I suppose the iPhone announcement probably is taking away a small handful of iPod sales here and there).
Why not reconnect them, but drop all packets to ports other than port 80 (and perhaps a couple of other fairly harmless ones like port 443)? If they aren't techinical enough to care about viruses or the fact that their computer is a zombie spewing out spam, they probably be happy once they can load up cnn.com again.
Most of these workstations are have to interact with specialized hardware. This hardware often requires expansion cards in the computer, or legacy ports like serial and parallel ports to be used (since the hardware revisions for stuff like this last a longer than in the computer world). Apple's hardware is simply not flexible enough to be up to the task. Also, this equipment tends to be in use a lot longer than the liketime of a typical computer. In the PC world you can buy Socket 478 (a current Intel socket) boards with ISA slots, allowing a failing 386, 486, or Pentium computer to be updated, so perfectly good older equipment can still be used. Yes, I have seen these boards in use. Apple is far too quick to drop legacy standards or to completely change their hardware (not to mention drop support for older versions of their OS) for their computers to be considered for this kind of application.
Also, OSX will soon be hobbled by the same DRM that currently inflicts Vista. So I don't see these kind of specialized workstations switching to Apple anytime soon.
The thing is, there are people who would like a phone with other high end features, but can't have or don't want a camera phone. Most, if not all of the no-camera phones are very basic phones that are pretty stripped down. It would be trying to find a motherboard for a computer without integrated Firewire. There are plenty of boards out there that lack it, but try to find one with high end features like SATA Raid, gigabit eithernet, and PCI Express, but no Firewire.
How so? The iPod currently has no sharing capablity at all, and even if you have your computer handy with iTunes, the only way to share a song by placing it on someone else's iPod involves several minutes of your time and wasting a CDR. The Zune certainly sucks, but I can't see how a even a very limited sharing capability is worse than none at all.
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Did you ever see any USB floppies that could read Mac formatted disks? All the ones that I ever saw could only read PC disks. I'm guessing that if they existed, they were probably a premium over the $20 version, which was already a premium over the internal drives that I was installing into PCs. Of course, it wasn't really a problem for getting data off of an iMac, as other Macs as well as PCs could read the 1.44MB disks - but if you wanted to read your old Mac disks, you had to use another Mac as a go-between or secure an old drive and bust out the soldering iron. But I guess it wasn't out of character for the original iMac, which was incompatible with just about everything else back in 1998.
I had a Gigabyte board with the Dual Bios feature that I got about 5 years back. With the dual bios, I had two bios chips, and could flash the "spare" bios chipp within Windows. Then when I rebooted the computer next, it would try to come up on the chip with the new bios. If it went well, it would then allow me to mirror the new bios chip to the other chip. If it failed to come up on the chip with the new bios, it would then go back to the other chip and boot with the old bios. Worked really well, and made it a lot harder to "brick" the motherboard with the addition of a part that probably only costs a few cents.
If you have a Windows 98 system kicking around, that should allow you to format the USB harddrive and make it bootable with DOS from the command prompt. Possibly with Windows ME too, but I'm not sure as ME's command prompt was pretty crippled.
Although I will agree that the Finder is terrible at accessing network filesystems (although not much worse than Windows Explorer - have neither Apple nor Microsoft heard of threading, or do they consider the file manager to be unnecessary?)
Actually, Microsoft has. Buried in the Folder Options - View tab in Explorer, you can check the "Launch Folder Windows in a Seperate Process" to do pretty much that. The reason why it's not defaulted to On I don't know, unless it's to save memory on older systems.
That's the Apple definintion, as Apple likes to conviently ignore alternatives like Linux when they bash the competition. I call a computer that is based on x86 processors, and is (mostly) compatible with the original IBM Personal Computer (aka IBM PC for short) a PC. Such a computer generally has a BIOS, and can natively boot up MSDOS if you wanted too, and its lineage can be traced back to the 1980's. While Apple computers now are x86 and can run Windows, they are different enough and break too much compatibility with legacy stuff to be a PC.
Even worse was the Windows 98 upgrade disk I have. It did allow me to put in a disk for the previous version of Windows if I was doing a clean install, however, it was just to taunt me as it would only accept Windows 95 CD-ROMs. It had no way to verify that I did indeed have a legal copy of Windows 95, which was on about 39 floppy disks. Later I discovered the secret "skip the media check and just install the damn OS" secret CD-Key and was happy ever since.
It seems that in many MMORPGs, being able to sell virtual goods for real money is a big incentive for people, and this is what motivates a lot of the cheating in terms of item dupes hacked items, botting, etc. By removing the ability for these people to sell their ill gotten virtual goods for real money, hopefully they'll move on and stop wrecking games for the real players.
There are plenty of rooted Linux boxes out there, and there have been reports of Macs as being part of bot nets. Granted, the problem is still 99% Windows, but is not all unique to Windows.
It's actaully a difficult task. Ultimately, you can't trust running any software on the potentially infected OS, as well as utilities like Task Manager because a good bot could mask itself from these progams. Right now many bots don't bother, or only hit a few of the most popular utilities, but this can't be counted on. One way to scan the computer is to use another OS to do the task (like a live CD), and run some tools from there.
Otherwise, you can watch the hardware itself. If the computer is idle, it shouldn't appear busy. The HDD should not be active, the network link lights should not be constantly blinking. If the computer has variable speed fans, they shouldn't be running full bore.
You can also try to judge the behavior of the computer too - is it as responsive as you would expect? IS the internet slow? This can be tough if you don't have a good feel for a baseline for how that computer is supposed to act.
The last way is probably the best - to be part of a botnet the computer must be sending and recieving data over the network. If you can place something between the computer and the internet like a firewall and watch all of its communications, the bot should make itself apparent. You can also use another computer to do a port scan, though not all bots open up ports so you can't count on this.
Easy. Just unplug any three of them from the network. Since you have to be on the internet to be part of a botnet, the remaining computer is your guy.
The implementations would suck because iTunes for windows is bloatware, and requires a fairly modern PC with all the trimmings running a full blown version of Windows. It would be much nicer if Apple would license their fairplay DRM, but they won't. I guess you could say that other companies could just take the guts of an iPod and put it in their own case, I suppose.
The ROKR is kind of an anomaly, but it does have the distinction of being the only non-Apple piece of hardware that can handle Fairplay. But it is crippled - it's a cell phone with music capabilities tacked on, and it can only hold a limited number of songs no matter how much memory it has. It's pretty clear that Apple did this so it wouldn't threaten their iPod/iTunes monopoly.
Fairplay only plays on MP3 players that are made by Apple. Redefining a Windows laptop running Quicktime as a MP3 player is quite a stretch, and most poeple who want an iPod don't want to haul around a bulky laptop with a 2 hour battery just to hear their songs.
Sure, Apple could claim that you can burn and re-rip the CD, but that's the equilivent of Microsoft claiming that you can just record the output from the headphone jack of the Zune. Sure it works, but to argue that going through a bunch of steps, wasting a CD, and a loss of quality is the same as just copying the files to the iPod is just plain stupid.
That's exactly why I don't think that Microsoft's anti-piracy tactics will get much more aggressive than they already are. If they do, they would be alienating some of their most loyal users.
That only works for the CDs that try to prevent you from ripping them by installing something via auto run when you put the CD in. The ones that violate the Red Book standards (invalid data tracks, bogus checksum data, whatever) are more sinister, and you might want to be careful about trying them on a Mac.
They also don't have Intel motherboards.
See for yourself. Gonzales says exactly what the article quotes him as saying.
All that it would take is for the "private" email address to get out there once, and it would forever be spammed. Not to mention the dictionary spammers might find it too.
Not to mention that the first couple of versions of OSX were basically playing catchup to Windows 2000 anyway.
It's more of an geeky exercise of seeing what's possible more than actually trying to build a computer to use, you know.
I would guess that most people would want to keep a phone they pay $600-$700 for a bit longer than they do with that free phone they get with a contract. In my opinion, a non-replacable battery is a huge turn off, but I guess it didn't hurt the iPod that much.
Never announce a product until you can actually ship it.
One of the reasons for this is that you hurt sales of your current product by announcing early, as people will hold off on buying what you are offering now if they see something that's way better right around the corner. However, since Apple doesn't have a phone on the market, all they are really hurting is their future competition (though I suppose the iPhone announcement probably is taking away a small handful of iPod sales here and there).
Why not reconnect them, but drop all packets to ports other than port 80 (and perhaps a couple of other fairly harmless ones like port 443)? If they aren't techinical enough to care about viruses or the fact that their computer is a zombie spewing out spam, they probably be happy once they can load up cnn.com again.
Most of these workstations are have to interact with specialized hardware. This hardware often requires expansion cards in the computer, or legacy ports like serial and parallel ports to be used (since the hardware revisions for stuff like this last a longer than in the computer world). Apple's hardware is simply not flexible enough to be up to the task. Also, this equipment tends to be in use a lot longer than the liketime of a typical computer. In the PC world you can buy Socket 478 (a current Intel socket) boards with ISA slots, allowing a failing 386, 486, or Pentium computer to be updated, so perfectly good older equipment can still be used. Yes, I have seen these boards in use. Apple is far too quick to drop legacy standards or to completely change their hardware (not to mention drop support for older versions of their OS) for their computers to be considered for this kind of application.
Also, OSX will soon be hobbled by the same DRM that currently inflicts Vista. So I don't see these kind of specialized workstations switching to Apple anytime soon.
The thing is, there are people who would like a phone with other high end features, but can't have or don't want a camera phone. Most, if not all of the no-camera phones are very basic phones that are pretty stripped down. It would be trying to find a motherboard for a computer without integrated Firewire. There are plenty of boards out there that lack it, but try to find one with high end features like SATA Raid, gigabit eithernet, and PCI Express, but no Firewire.
How so? The iPod currently has no sharing capablity at all, and even if you have your computer handy with iTunes, the only way to share a song by placing it on someone else's iPod involves several minutes of your time and wasting a CDR. The Zune certainly sucks, but I can't see how a even a very limited sharing capability is worse than none at all.