I used to use SGIs and when I first booted a new SGI system it woould run the "Out of Box Experience" which would give me the lowdown on the new features with a multimedia presentation. The Mac which is supposed to be the king of multimedia doesn't include anything like this beyond the flying multilingual "Welcome" intro.
You will get the lowdown by selecting "help", where you can select "New to MacOS X?" section, and you are greeted by this menu:
Welcome to Mac OS X!
If you're new to computers, click "For new computer users" at the left. You'll learn how to find your way around Mac OS X and how to get started using all the great features of the Mac.
If you switched from a Windows PC, click "For Windows switchers" for a look at the Mac desktop and advice about making your transition to the Mac quick and easy.
If you've been working in Mac OS 9, click "For Mac OS 9 users" to learn how to do all your usual tasks, and how to take advantage of the power and ease of use of Mac OS X.
However, the most important thing about the Pogue manuals is that they are not just lowdown. They offer much more than "if you are new to computers, click here".
Re:"Might have to 'swap' diskettes..."
on
Macintosh's 1984 Debut
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's strange that Steve Jobs, generally a fan of new technology, had such a blind spot about internal hard drives.
Jobs hated hard drives because they were loud and power hungry. A Macintosh with internal hard drive would require a cooling fan, and that was agains Jobs will. He was always a fan of silent computing (and still is - the hard drive in my iBook is incredibly silent, and the machine is almost entirely mute, until the fan kicks in, but that's not very often). Oddly enough, many people in early 80's considered hard drives to be a dead end and obsolete technology. The mass storage of the future was supposed to be bubble memory. Kind of like the gallium arsenide story, methinks - but I still remember predictions in computer press that no hard drive can go past the 100 megabyte barrier and no silicon-based CPU can break the 100 megahertz.
Microsoft has dominated the desktop for over a decade. Unless something drastic and unexpected happens, it will take a minimum of five years from now for it to lose dominance. Having said that, I do think that 2004 is a watershed year for Linux and for Microsoft. Years from now, we will look back and identify 2004 as the year where the tides bagan to change.
Maybe... but I have this strange feeling I heard that back in 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999 and 1998.
There seems to be a lot of different interpretations of Linus' views of the future of Linux floating around. There was a recent post on/. entitled "Linus says 2004 is the year of the Linux Desktop" or something like that. That seems to be a bit of a conflict with this article. Can someone clarify his view for me?
I'll try. The confusion is actually inherent in the contemporary meaning of the word "desktop". Sometimes this means "just any computer for a non-techie", sometimes "a machine for a home user". Even in this interview Linus has said "it's doing pretty well, especially in companies that can support it already. Linux is ready as a desktop in a corporate environment on machines that are supposed to be nothing more than, say, a locked-in word processing station - but that requires a corporate support. Linux is not ready as a desktop for someone who just bought himself a new PC and want to use it for the same word processing at home, with no corporate support available. Please note that this is not my view, I'm just giving you my understanding on what Linus has said (damn, this sounds like a part of "Monty Python's Life Of Brian").
The entire rail industry in the 19th century was essentially privately funded.
Not true. Actually, the rise of the rail industry in the gilded age (1866-1901) is an excellent example of the weird mixture of private monopoly and state intervention, unfortunately typical for American capitalism. If there is a large project - such as "we need railroads to connect our cities" or "we need broadcaster to provide us television" or "we need weapons to combat communism", it is indeed given to private hands. But since it is so important, private enterprises receive substantial state aid (such as advances in government bonds) and become strong enough to influence politics by financing the politicians back. That's how the famous military-industrial complex works (and just because you heard this name in some Oliver Stone movie, it does not mean it doesn't exist).
For example, Tom Scott, a typical railorad tycoon, had a deal with the Republican presidential candidate Rutherford Hayes - "I will help you win the 1876 election, you will subsidize my Texas and Pacific lines when you'll get the office". Scott has helped, Hayes has won, railroad was subsidized. Government also kindly provided troops to break the railroad strikes of 1877.
Excellent point. Now, what about looking for a trashed out (i.e. cheap or free) laptop of simular make and parting it out?
Batteries are among the first parts to wear out - 3 years for a battery is MUCH. I have a '2000 clamshell iBook. Everything works perfectly fine, but the battery is virtually dead (~20 minutes max).
Not just in the office, but the home user market still has a huge installed base for Win98. To completely drop Win98 would further anger a large number of customers. I am no fan of Microsoft, but I would have to say that keeping support alive for another couple of years if a wise choice if they don't want to further upset their customers.
On the other hand, people who bought your product once in last century and do not plan to buy another in next two years... are not exactly the kind of customer base you proudly display on shareholders meeting. Looks like Microsoft has reached a dead-end. They don't know how to persuade their user base to upgrade - but they cannot make them do it by enforcing it. From the Microsoft's point of view, people running Win 98 are almost as evil as people running Linux - one way or another, they don't buy Win XP.
OK, I see it's a troll, but... I'll bite anyway. The whole history of Western Civilization in a nutshell looks like that. Once there were the pre-hellenic mediterranean cultures, like the Phoenicians. The Greeks conquered and destroyed them all. Then came the Romans, who conquered and destroyed the Greeks (not to mention the Celts). Then came the German and Slavonic barbarians, and they conquered and destroyed the Romans (and then repeatedly conquered and destroyed each other, like the Goth who perished for the Vandals etc). So if you live, say, in London, there are ashes of dozens of destroyed cultures under your feet, under the pavement of the very Oxford Street. The Celts, the Celtic-Romans, the Roman-Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Anglo-Danes, the Normans etc.
Now, for a long time Americans were fed with the not-exactly-true fairy tale about the Mayflower settlers, who arrived to a no-man's-land. It was not a no-man's-land at all. It had its native inhabitants and they were, indeed, conquered. But the British Islands were not a no-man's-land neither, when the William the Conqueor arrived, and he is still regarded as hero.
There's nothing racist in Apache, just as there's nothing racist when modern Britons use greek, latin, saxon or celtic words. Or when modern Italians use the name La Fenice (="country of Phoenicians") for an opera.
That's the point! I have very good memories from a vacation trip to the mountains with my son. We ended up one-on-one multiplayer shootout of "Age Of Empires" played on a peer2peer network made of our two Airport-equipped iBooks. I took my cell phone so in the evening, when he went to sleep, I could even do some slashdotting from the wilderness.
....claiming G5's are slow...how do these drones explain the fact Big Mac is #3 fastest super computer in the world?
I'm definitely not in the Wintel camp, but this is actually very easy to explain: one thing is the computing power of a given CPU and another is the scalability of a cluster stacked of many CPUs. MacOS X scales very well, but nobody ever denied that, not even the most zealous Wintel zealots.
In Apple's MacWorld presentation (and this film) they show how the VT supercomputer is #3 and they talk about the details, but barely touch on #2 and #1. I'm curious what operating systems primarily drive those two, but none of the searches on Google I'm doing are turning up the info that I'm seeking. Anyone have any links or resources to share that can clarify it?
The whole point of the ban on export of supercomputers was that they could be used to simulate nuclear explosions
Not exactly, it was also their usage in brute-force decryption. The former point was indeed emphasized in the days of the old Cray supercomputer, but the latter was stressed as the most important factor in mid 1990's, when the aging cold war COCOM was replaced by the Wassenaar Agreement.
Definitely a weekend project (or many, many weekends). If it works, just think of all the happy legacy owners!
Wait a minute. Your LC 520 is at least 10 times slower than a beige G3 (probably much more, but that would depend on a specific benchmark). I don't know how many of them you have "stacked in your garage", but it looks like this cluster won't even get near the performance of the slowest second-hand G4. So your "many weekends" of hard labor would bring you what - something you can get for $400 on ebay?
The real question is whether said females will shell out $250 for such fashionable hardware.
Or rather - males trying to win favors among those females. It's a well-known fact that nobody likes 18-year old girls like men in midlife crisis; so maybe the mini-iPod is not so bad priced after all?
But seriously - they shot themselves in the foot, no doubt about it.
There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people with similar stories to mine.
Obviously there are! But since there are - in general - millions or tens of millions of iBook and powerbook users, hundreds or even thousands would not accumulate even to 0.1% of the user base. I am sorry for your bad luck - but it's just bad luck. If 99.9% machines work flawlessly - this means that there will be thousands or dozens of thousands unhappy users, very active on the Internet (writing petitions, participating in Usenet newsgroups, slashdotting etc.). I am really sorry that it happens - but it would be really naive to think that any company can achieve 100.0% of customer satisfaction. 99% would be quite much (and just one percent would be HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS in this case).
And even saying something like 'hey nice day out, btw. did you know the hyperfine transition for H is 1.4GHz' would be mostly meaningless since Hz depends upon the definition of seconds which is a measure of time we just dreamed up anyway
In practice, it would be rather something like "Hello, by the way - bzzzzz", where "bzzzz" would be, say, microwave transmission with some Important Frequency Of The Universe modulated to some Another Important Frequency Of The Universe, to show the guys that we know both of them - and therefore we are cool. But look:
And to an advanced civilization all you're really going to be saying is "hey did you know the sky's blue?", not a very exciting conversation...
Even now, you make human-centric assumptions of the early Star Trek magnitude. In order to understand "what is blue", they gotta have eyes seeing roughly the same wavelenghts as ours; and they gotta have eyes at all. Try to imagine a civilization made by something like bats, intelligent mammals for which sound and ultrasound is as importand as sight is to us. It would be impossible to translate to their language a sentence like "hey did you know the sky's blue" - they would obviously have no word for the "blue", and quite likely they would have no word for the "sky" as we know it. You could obviously translate it to something like "hey, do you know that the atmosphere absorbs this and this part of the electromagnetic spectrum", but you don't need aliens to talk about it.
Well, since Apple has sold quite a few millions of iBooks, all those signatures don't amount even to 0.1%...
Re:Aliens don't visit the projects...
on
Lonely Planets
·
· Score: 1
my favorite explanation for the lack of ET contact is that Earth is the ghetto of the universe. if you were an upper-middle-class space-faring advanced lifeform, would you really want to take a cruise to such a violent and polluted place?
On a vacation? Of course I would! Once where I was on Sicily, hotel concierge gave me an explicit map of the parts of the city that are to be avoided by tourists. Of course, it was the first place I visited (it was actually fascinating, the bad parts were ruined in XVII century by earthquake and volcano eruption, never rebuild since then; today they are inhibited by illegal aliens from Africa and Eastern Europe).
Re:Statistically
on
Lonely Planets
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
From a metaphore coined by Arkady & Boris Strugatski (masters of Russian sf from the Breznhev era) - snails and squirrels encounter each other on a daily basis but even if they could talk to each other, they would have exactly nothing to say. Their everyday experience is so different, their languages would be untranslatable to each other. And we are talking about species inhabiting the same world, even the same forest. What about species as different as snails and squirrels - but living on different planets, to make things even worse?
Even if we'll ever meet "them", we can talk to each other about the things we already know: the hydrogen resonance frequency, the Pythagorean triangle, the Big Bang echo radiation etc. Exciting as it might be, it wold be actually meaningless, just a kind of galactic small talk ("hi, how are you, what a beautiful day, and by the way - hydrogen frequency is 1.4 GHz"). But anything past that would lead us into the "snails and squirrels" lack of translation.
And even that is an optimistic assumption - snails and squirrels at least don't fight for the same niche. So I am actually happy that probably there will be no "contact" as long as I live. At its best, it could be as meaningless as some small talk; at its worst, it would be a war for obliteration.
Re:27% of google users use windows 98
on
Windows 98 Phased Out
·
· Score: 4, Informative
That does not mean anything - many niche OS users keep their niche browsers identyfying as "Microsoft Explorer for Windows" just to fool javascript websites that display the stupid "If you don't have MSIE, you can't access us, goodbye" messages. Even my Safari identifies itself as MSIE 6.0, otherwise my damned bank wouldn't let me check my own bloody account.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to use SGIs and when I first booted a new SGI system it woould run the "Out of Box Experience" which would give me the lowdown on the new features with a multimedia presentation. The Mac which is supposed to be the king of multimedia doesn't include anything like this beyond the flying multilingual "Welcome" intro.
You will get the lowdown by selecting "help", where you can select "New to MacOS X?" section, and you are greeted by this menu:
Welcome to Mac OS X!
If you're new to computers, click "For new computer users" at the left. You'll learn how to find your way around Mac OS X and how to get started using all the great features of the Mac.
If you switched from a Windows PC, click "For Windows switchers" for a look at the Mac desktop and advice about making your transition to the Mac quick and easy.
If you've been working in Mac OS 9, click "For Mac OS 9 users" to learn how to do all your usual tasks, and how to take advantage of the power and ease of use of Mac OS X.
However, the most important thing about the Pogue manuals is that they are not just lowdown. They offer much more than "if you are new to computers, click here".
It's strange that Steve Jobs, generally a fan of new technology, had such a blind spot about internal hard drives.
Jobs hated hard drives because they were loud and power hungry. A Macintosh with internal hard drive would require a cooling fan, and that was agains Jobs will. He was always a fan of silent computing (and still is - the hard drive in my iBook is incredibly silent, and the machine is almost entirely mute, until the fan kicks in, but that's not very often). Oddly enough, many people in early 80's considered hard drives to be a dead end and obsolete technology. The mass storage of the future was supposed to be bubble memory. Kind of like the gallium arsenide story, methinks - but I still remember predictions in computer press that no hard drive can go past the 100 megabyte barrier and no silicon-based CPU can break the 100 megahertz.
Microsoft has dominated the desktop for over a decade. Unless something drastic and unexpected happens, it will take a minimum of five years from now for it to lose dominance. Having said that, I do think that 2004 is a watershed year for Linux and for Microsoft. Years from now, we will look back and identify 2004 as the year where the tides bagan to change.
Maybe... but I have this strange feeling I heard that back in 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999 and 1998.
There seems to be a lot of different interpretations of Linus' views of the future of Linux floating around. There was a recent post on /. entitled "Linus says 2004 is the year of the Linux Desktop" or something like that. That seems to be a bit of a conflict with this article. Can someone clarify his view for me?
I'll try. The confusion is actually inherent in the contemporary meaning of the word "desktop". Sometimes this means "just any computer for a non-techie", sometimes "a machine for a home user". Even in this interview Linus has said "it's doing pretty well, especially in companies that can support it already. Linux is ready as a desktop in a corporate environment on machines that are supposed to be nothing more than, say, a locked-in word processing station - but that requires a corporate support. Linux is not ready as a desktop for someone who just bought himself a new PC and want to use it for the same word processing at home, with no corporate support available. Please note that this is not my view, I'm just giving you my understanding on what Linus has said (damn, this sounds like a part of "Monty Python's Life Of Brian").
OK, that's why there are places that will buy your old hardware.
Wow, you begin to grasp the Macintosh way of upgrading, sir!
The entire rail industry in the 19th century was essentially privately funded.
Not true. Actually, the rise of the rail industry in the gilded age (1866-1901) is an excellent example of the weird mixture of private monopoly and state intervention, unfortunately typical for American capitalism. If there is a large project - such as "we need railroads to connect our cities" or "we need broadcaster to provide us television" or "we need weapons to combat communism", it is indeed given to private hands. But since it is so important, private enterprises receive substantial state aid (such as advances in government bonds) and become strong enough to influence politics by financing the politicians back. That's how the famous military-industrial complex works (and just because you heard this name in some Oliver Stone movie, it does not mean it doesn't exist).
For example, Tom Scott, a typical railorad tycoon, had a deal with the Republican presidential candidate Rutherford Hayes - "I will help you win the 1876 election, you will subsidize my Texas and Pacific lines when you'll get the office". Scott has helped, Hayes has won, railroad was subsidized. Government also kindly provided troops to break the railroad strikes of 1877.
Excellent point. Now, what about looking for a trashed out (i.e. cheap or free) laptop of simular make and parting it out?
Batteries are among the first parts to wear out - 3 years for a battery is MUCH. I have a '2000 clamshell iBook. Everything works perfectly fine, but the battery is virtually dead (~20 minutes max).
Not just in the office, but the home user market still has a huge installed base for Win98. To completely drop Win98 would further anger a large number of customers. I am no fan of Microsoft, but I would have to say that keeping support alive for another couple of years if a wise choice if they don't want to further upset their customers.
On the other hand, people who bought your product once in last century and do not plan to buy another in next two years... are not exactly the kind of customer base you proudly display on shareholders meeting. Looks like Microsoft has reached a dead-end. They don't know how to persuade their user base to upgrade - but they cannot make them do it by enforcing it. From the Microsoft's point of view, people running Win 98 are almost as evil as people running Linux - one way or another, they don't buy Win XP.
OK, I see it's a troll, but... I'll bite anyway. The whole history of Western Civilization in a nutshell looks like that. Once there were the pre-hellenic mediterranean cultures, like the Phoenicians. The Greeks conquered and destroyed them all. Then came the Romans, who conquered and destroyed the Greeks (not to mention the Celts). Then came the German and Slavonic barbarians, and they conquered and destroyed the Romans (and then repeatedly conquered and destroyed each other, like the Goth who perished for the Vandals etc). So if you live, say, in London, there are ashes of dozens of destroyed cultures under your feet, under the pavement of the very Oxford Street. The Celts, the Celtic-Romans, the Roman-Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Anglo-Danes, the Normans etc.
Now, for a long time Americans were fed with the not-exactly-true fairy tale about the Mayflower settlers, who arrived to a no-man's-land. It was not a no-man's-land at all. It had its native inhabitants and they were, indeed, conquered. But the British Islands were not a no-man's-land neither, when the William the Conqueor arrived, and he is still regarded as hero.
There's nothing racist in Apache, just as there's nothing racist when modern Britons use greek, latin, saxon or celtic words. Or when modern Italians use the name La Fenice (="country of Phoenicians") for an opera.
Sorry for feeding trolls.
...can it be compiled for MacOS X or Linux/PPC - or is it somehow dependent on physical x86?
That's the point! I have very good memories from a vacation trip to the mountains with my son. We ended up one-on-one multiplayer shootout of "Age Of Empires" played on a peer2peer network made of our two Airport-equipped iBooks. I took my cell phone so in the evening, when he went to sleep, I could even do some slashdotting from the wilderness.
"Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?"
Choose software engineering, then. There is no known defence against the "It's not a bug, it's a feature" counter attack.
....claiming G5's are slow ...how do these drones explain the fact Big Mac is #3 fastest super computer in the world?
I'm definitely not in the Wintel camp, but this is actually very easy to explain: one thing is the computing power of a given CPU and another is the scalability of a cluster stacked of many CPUs. MacOS X scales very well, but nobody ever denied that, not even the most zealous Wintel zealots.
In Apple's MacWorld presentation (and this film) they show how the VT supercomputer is #3 and they talk about the details, but barely touch on #2 and #1. I'm curious what operating systems primarily drive those two, but none of the searches on Google I'm doing are turning up the info that I'm seeking. Anyone have any links or resources to share that can clarify it?
Tried this?
I wonder if the VT folks had to buy an OSX license for each node of their "cluster."
What's really interesting is - can anyone ever buy any Macintosh unit WITHOUT an OS X license?
The whole point of the ban on export of supercomputers was that they could be used to simulate nuclear explosions
Not exactly, it was also their usage in brute-force decryption. The former point was indeed emphasized in the days of the old Cray supercomputer, but the latter was stressed as the most important factor in mid 1990's, when the aging cold war COCOM was replaced by the Wassenaar Agreement.
(the same thing happpened with Japan and the PS2 I think, or it might have been a urban legend in that case)
No, it was not; although Japan wasn't exactly the culprit.
Definitely a weekend project (or many, many weekends). If it works, just think of all the happy legacy owners!
Wait a minute. Your LC 520 is at least 10 times slower than a beige G3 (probably much more, but that would depend on a specific benchmark). I don't know how many of them you have "stacked in your garage", but it looks like this cluster won't even get near the performance of the slowest second-hand G4. So your "many weekends" of hard labor would bring you what - something you can get for $400 on ebay?
The real question is whether said females will shell out $250 for such fashionable hardware.
Or rather - males trying to win favors among those females. It's a well-known fact that nobody likes 18-year old girls like men in midlife crisis; so maybe the mini-iPod is not so bad priced after all?
But seriously - they shot themselves in the foot, no doubt about it.
There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people with similar stories to mine.
Obviously there are! But since there are - in general - millions or tens of millions of iBook and powerbook users, hundreds or even thousands would not accumulate even to 0.1% of the user base. I am sorry for your bad luck - but it's just bad luck. If 99.9% machines work flawlessly - this means that there will be thousands or dozens of thousands unhappy users, very active on the Internet (writing petitions, participating in Usenet newsgroups, slashdotting etc.). I am really sorry that it happens - but it would be really naive to think that any company can achieve 100.0% of customer satisfaction. 99% would be quite much (and just one percent would be HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS in this case).
And even saying something like 'hey nice day out, btw. did you know the hyperfine transition for H is 1.4GHz' would be mostly meaningless since Hz depends upon the definition of seconds which is a measure of time we just dreamed up anyway
In practice, it would be rather something like "Hello, by the way - bzzzzz", where "bzzzz" would be, say, microwave transmission with some Important Frequency Of The Universe modulated to some Another Important Frequency Of The Universe, to show the guys that we know both of them - and therefore we are cool. But look:
And to an advanced civilization all you're really going to be saying is "hey did you know the sky's blue?", not a very exciting conversation...
Even now, you make human-centric assumptions of the early Star Trek magnitude. In order to understand "what is blue", they gotta have eyes seeing roughly the same wavelenghts as ours; and they gotta have eyes at all. Try to imagine a civilization made by something like bats, intelligent mammals for which sound and ultrasound is as importand as sight is to us. It would be impossible to translate to their language a sentence like "hey did you know the sky's blue" - they would obviously have no word for the "blue", and quite likely they would have no word for the "sky" as we know it. You could obviously translate it to something like "hey, do you know that the atmosphere absorbs this and this part of the electromagnetic spectrum", but you don't need aliens to talk about it.
Well, since Apple has sold quite a few millions of iBooks, all those signatures don't amount even to 0.1%...
my favorite explanation for the lack of ET contact is that Earth is the ghetto of the universe. if you were an upper-middle-class space-faring advanced lifeform, would you really want to take a cruise to such a violent and polluted place?
On a vacation? Of course I would! Once where I was on Sicily, hotel concierge gave me an explicit map of the parts of the city that are to be avoided by tourists. Of course, it was the first place I visited (it was actually fascinating, the bad parts were ruined in XVII century by earthquake and volcano eruption, never rebuild since then; today they are inhibited by illegal aliens from Africa and Eastern Europe).
From a metaphore coined by Arkady & Boris Strugatski (masters of Russian sf from the Breznhev era) - snails and squirrels encounter each other on a daily basis but even if they could talk to each other, they would have exactly nothing to say. Their everyday experience is so different, their languages would be untranslatable to each other. And we are talking about species inhabiting the same world, even the same forest. What about species as different as snails and squirrels - but living on different planets, to make things even worse?
Even if we'll ever meet "them", we can talk to each other about the things we already know: the hydrogen resonance frequency, the Pythagorean triangle, the Big Bang echo radiation etc. Exciting as it might be, it wold be actually meaningless, just a kind of galactic small talk ("hi, how are you, what a beautiful day, and by the way - hydrogen frequency is 1.4 GHz"). But anything past that would lead us into the "snails and squirrels" lack of translation.
And even that is an optimistic assumption - snails and squirrels at least don't fight for the same niche. So I am actually happy that probably there will be no "contact" as long as I live. At its best, it could be as meaningless as some small talk; at its worst, it would be a war for obliteration.
That does not mean anything - many niche OS users keep their niche browsers identyfying as "Microsoft Explorer for Windows" just to fool javascript websites that display the stupid "If you don't have MSIE, you can't access us, goodbye" messages. Even my Safari identifies itself as MSIE 6.0, otherwise my damned bank wouldn't let me check my own bloody account.