What you're missing is a LOT of these machines will be used for rendering. Rendering (say, Maya) LOVES GPUs. Because for render operations they can be 10x as fast or more.
I know people that render want that NVIDIA 8800 series card in there.
Also, Macs have Core Image, which is used extensively by applications like Aperture (pro photo organization and editing) and Motion (3D effects for video, e.g. the "fly-ins" you see in your evening news). Having an 8800 versus an ATI card would probably double performance there, or more.
Re:Might be bad news for home linux users...
on
WEP Broken Even Worse
·
· Score: 0, Troll
This is a Linux limitation, not a system limitation. OS X has supported WPA Personal for > 2 years, and WPA 2 Personal for at least 1.5 years on all systems.
Seems if you want a secure system you should stay away from a Linux laptop at home. But that's not really anything new. If you want a system that sleeps/wakes out of the box without tweaks a Mac would work nicely for that as well.
Yeah, it's a tough business. Because most of the phones suck, and because the carriers make the phone vendors their bitches.
Maybe the iPhone will be different enough to break this stranglehold. Maybe Apple's terms (other articles said that other carriers were given the opportunity and passed because of Apple's terms) will be enough to break this relationship.
But AT&T's COO whipped out the iPhone at CITA and said that they have received one MILLION "contact me's" for when the iPhone ships. Pick a 50% conversion rate there, add that to how many people will walk in, drooling, to the Apple Store (all Joy of Tech(tm) style), and you have a pretty good dent in that "10 million by the end of 2008" number that SJ touted at MacWorld.
The iPhone may be a success, and it may be a flop. What I am pretty certain about is that it won't be launched the way so many Nokia and Motorola phones are. For that I think we can all be thankful.
All this "smear campaign" stuff... talking about how Apple really hammered him on the clarification of whether it was a 3rd party driver. And George gets indignant that Apple asked this to be done.
Yes, you could see in the video that they used a 3rd party driver. However, was it really CLEAR that the exploit only existed for the 3rd party driver? Maynor and Ellch certainly did NOT dwell on this -- they in fact spent more time saying they enjoyed doing this because Mac users were "smug."
And, gullible as the press is, the press most certainly did NOT report "3rd party flaw exposes OS X security hole!" It was more along the lines of "OMGMACCRACKOVERWIRELESS!" It was days before it was clear, and even then it was necessary to specifically explain this to people. Sure, the video showed this, but the fact of the matter is that most people, including the press, did not UNDERSTAND this fact... and this was clearly obvious from the reaction to the matter in the first place.
And what I also don't get is... what are you really showing if you use a 3rd party wireless driver to hack a MacBook which has BUILT-IN wireless? Sure, you can do it, but is that a realistic scenario? I mean, I could compromise someone's system if I stole it and they didn't have disk encryption turned on as well... is that a hack?
You really need to define "broken." I have been using IMAP with the Apple Mail application for 5 years, with between 150 and 300 MB of mail on the server during this time (quota is 250 MB on the server). I have had no issues... and I have about 25 folders on the server.
So it's definitely not "broken," though perhaps there are some criteria that are leading you to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
You do get it with parts for the Xserve and Xserve RAID, with the service plan.
And, in case you didn't know, AppleCare DOES cover you for on-site service in areas where service providers can offer this. Third party providers can offer this (on-site for desktops, pick up and delivery for laptops) at no cost if you have AppleCare.
Ummm... well sure in theory 802.11a and g can do 54 Mbps, practically you're doing very well if you get 15 Mbps on them.
And most of the current "free" Wifi options, e.g. Google's offering in Mountain View, are capped at 1 Mbps (some of this is a kowtow to the local telephone companies). So edge cards can compete with the "free" offerings, at least to date. Also, coverage of the edge cards is substantially better if you are moving.
It's not really "free" already though. Apple has always said that Boot Camp was going to be supported in Leopard. They never said anything about Boot Camp being anything but a beta with Tiger.
So now, if you want it to be supported with Tiger (I mean, it already works today in beta form), then you can pay $30 and get a supported version. Or you can upgrade to Leopard, or you can continue using a beta version, which will tie you to the drivers present in the beta version.
So what's the harm? This is just a new option, that wasn't available before. There is some engineering effort and real cost to Boot Camp -- because it is a boot loader (similar to GRUB as others have noted), PLUS Windows drivers for all hardware components in the Mac machine itself. There's certainly work to maintain and test the tens of specific drivers -- for people who are slow to upgrade to Leopard but *want* officially supported drivers they now have the option to pay for them.
Given that education works on quarters or semesters, it's tough to really make all that much progress in a 10 or 15 week course, if it's all about collaboration. Plus, with college scheduling, it's awfully tough with the given time blocks.
I will say, I had a fairly "theoretical" based education -- BS in Physics and MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford. Now the EE program at Stanford was *very* hands-off... I spent a day or two calculating (on paper) what an optimal caching strategy was for L1, L2, and L3 caches... just math. And at the end of things... I don't know that I really understood computers all that well, despite getting a degree in EE with a computer hardware focus.
This compares to people I knew that got undergrad degrees in EE from MIT, who basically as a senior project were told to go build something much like an Apple II. Grab processors, logic, wire it all together, funge some microcode, get it to boot and write a program. Those folks with a BS could absoutely run circles around me when it came to practical experience. And I think it was a good education for them, because 5 years on I'm *sure* they could adapt it towards building something more complicated. Me... I could be a "consultant" and wave a nice high-powered degree in front of people, but build something myself? Er, no.
Anyway, the article is too light on specifics to really say *how* education should be changed. My opinion though is that college as it is (in the US at least) is pretty darned good -- it is markedly different to primary education in that pounding the books and doing the work isn't sufficient to do well -- to an extent you have to be able to "get it." At least, in math, science, and engineering for the most part you do. History may be a different kettle of fish.
I haven't used DirectControl personally -- though I know of some other folks who have said it works for them. The MacEnterprise folks did a webcast on it a while back, and they have their slides archived here:
I think, cost wise, that there is a "per seat" cost. I don't know the exact price, probably along the lines of a CAL, so $50-ish sounds a bit right. I'm sure it depends on the # of seats and the time of the year or quarter you're negotiating with a sales rep;-)
There are a number of solutions for pushing software to Mac clients. I don't know if Centrify does it -- I typically use Apple's Apple Remote Desktop to do it, but this is not cross-platform. There are a number of cross-platform solutions... NetOctopus, and 3 or 4 others whose names elude me right now as I'm in Sunday mode. If you really need details let me know and I'll eventually scare them up.
AD Integration has been there for a number of years. You use the Directory Access application in/Applications/Utilities, and there's an AD tab where you enter the relevant information. It provides authentication and full single sign-on. You can also change the password on your Mac and it propagates to AD. So what's the issue?
You can also manage the Macs via AD, if you want to lock them down. This requires a schema extension -- extensions that Apple has registered with the IANA. This historically has made some AD administrators nervous, especially back in the day when you couldn't reverse schema additions. These days, the scripts are fairly widely available -- install them on a test or staging server and see how it works.
So this provides very good management, the main limitation at this point is it's necessary to use Apple's Workgroup Manager application to do the management of the Macs, and point it to AD. Most Windows administrators are used to using GPOs for management and are reluctant to use another tool. If this is too much of a hurdle (you know, that whole "learning new things" thing which may be scary to people whose brain filled up getting their MSCE certification), then look for 3rd party tools like Centrify's Direct Control (http://www.centrify.com) which allow you managemetn of the Macs totally via GPOs.
Pretty much any way you WANT to manage Macs from AD, you can. Each option has a few caveats, and is not 100% like using AD to manage Windows machines, because they are different machines. But all solutions WORK, and in fact they WORK QUITE WELL.
As far as MVL, it does apply to copies that run in Parallels. So you're covered there -- the expense is the copy of Parallels... which is $79 list, and I'm just betting if you asked them for 500 copies that they'd negotiate a bit.
Regarding Entourage... you're right, it's not as good as Outlook. But for many folks, it's sufficient. As far as Excel... I've never personally had an interop issue between Windows and Mac versions of Excel or Word. Then again, I'll freely admit I don't get many documents that are loaded down with large numbers of VBA macros. Whenever I get a "enable Macros?" dialog I say no -- so that point is moot anyway. With the main use of VBA being to transmit viruses... it's a wonder they're really still prevalent on the Windows side. And I say this having written a few custom decision support systems based in Excel and Access, that used custom OLE controls no less, back in the day.
For all the academic arguments about what architecture is better (CISC versus RISC, pipelined versus superscalar, etc.) what's difficult to deny is that the Intel/AMD (and the x86 architecture in general) have continued to meet or exceed Moore's law. Despite Apple's insistence that PowerPC was a better and faster path forward, the facts are that Intel outran them. This doesn't necessarily mean it's a better architecture, but rather the engineering resources (perhaps due to AMD/Intel competition) managed to do more with what they had. Maybe x86 is performing at 95% of its potential, and PPC at 50%. Who knows. Who actually cares, except for an academic discussion.
SPARC may well be the same way -- the main issue there is that Sun doesn't have the resources to both build CPU architectures, computer architectures, and OS and application software, and be competitive in all markets.
There are other instances of something similar. Take the Porsche 911. A rear-engined setup (with the majority of the weight of the car *behind* the rear axle) is inherently inferior to a mid-engine design. The car should handle like crap. And early versions, for the most part, did (oversteer was a very real and common issue). Take 40 years of incremental advances in body and suspension design, and the 911 is one of the best handling cars there is. The design is not the best -- it never WILL be the best -- but it is a very, very competent performer. Few things are better.
And my experience (about 3 hours worth of tries) to get the latest version of Ubuntu (Edgy Eft?) to install on my Satellite failed miserably. I'm not an expert with Linux, but I *did* run a second Linux system for development and testing purposes back in the Red Hat 6/7/8 days. For the last 4 years I've been working with Macs -- which have been outstanding.
So I'd have to say... no. Unless the requirement is that everyone use Thinkpads or something, where perhaps it works better.
Compare Windows and Linux with KDE on a Laptop. Try things like authenticating to a network that uses WPA for encryption. Try things like getting reliable suspend/resume and other power options.
Now that you've revealed Linux for the turd that it is on a laptop... go back to Windows. Or better yet, buy a Mac, and get the only UNIX that runs well on a laptop.
Well, it's a trade off between data loss and shutdown.
For example, if you have a Word document open, with unsaved changes, and the system sends it a shutdown, Word throws up a modal dialog box "er, dude, I've been told to quit but you have unsaved changes... what should I do?"
If the system forces shutdown, you lose data. Is that good? It's a tough call... you could force Word to make a smart choice (save a copy as...) but that requires every single application to handle something like that.
OS X can be similar, and it annoys me. I send a shutdown and iChat says "you have existing chat sessions... can I quit?" and iChat cancels shutdown. I cuss every time -- but to some extent iChat is equally liable to the problem here as the OS is. Sending everything the equivalent of a 'kill -9' will bite you in the butt at some point.
The Intel-based Macs, though, really *are* faster in bootup. Sure, there are things being launched in the background (in parallel) via launchd, but that doesn't change the fact that the Intel-based Macs (and their EFI) boot substantially faster than the old PPC Macs did. You can get from power button to desktop in 25-45 seconds (depending on if some extra stuff goes on in the EFI stage... not sure if it's fsck or something else from an unclean reboot), and the system really *is* responsive within a few seconds.
PCs may get EFI support in 2012 or so... which means Windows and Linux may get that by the election after next:-P
I went to the site, and got 2 dialogs warning that Mozilla versions 1.3 aren't supported. WTF? Guess Safari isn't good enough... is IE good enough either?
This is incorrect -- the Zune does NOT add DRM to your un-DRMed songs for you. It doesn't modify songs that have been "squirted" in any way.
What it DOES do is prevent you from playing a song "squirted" (lol) to you more than 3 times. This is easy to do, it can just add a flag that indicates a file was received via "squirt" and then use that to prevent play more than 3 times, and prevent further transfer. This isn't really DRM -- nothing on the file is changed; it's just that the player treats it in a special manner.
Doesn't change my opinion that the Zune is showing its true colors in shart-like brown. And to spit in the face of all their "PlaysForSure" partners shows (not that it was a surprise) that Microsoft will backstab its "partners" whenever it's in its best interest.
Toshibas are hardly the fringe. Seriously, it's not that strange of a laptop, and it's neither "too old" nor "too new." It's about a year old. If I have to pick the hardware specifically to run the OS I want, the obvious choice would be a Mac.
Been there, done that. Of course, that's because you had an original XP install CD, that is 5 years old. Its existence predates any SATA drives.
If you had a newer (XP SP 2) install CD, it would have booted right up... no need for a separate floppy. I will agree it was a pain, but then again, if you tried to install Red Hat 5 (and by this, I mean Red Hat 5, circa 2001) on that same box, it wouldn't have detected the SATA drives either.
I will say though that the Linux experience on portables still stinks. I have a Toshiba Satellite that work gave me for some "testing." I have never actually booted it to Windows. When I first got it, I downloaded SuSe Enterprise 10 and tried to install. I got about 1/2 way through the install and it complained about a missing file (WTF? Nice ISO, guys... given it passed checksum). Tried again, no dice. So I left it for a couple months.
I saw a new version of Ubuntu came out this week, so yesterday I downloaded and burned a CD. Booted from it, selected "install," and the darned thing boots to desktop. I get a big dialog box about a non-responsive window manager. Dismiss it. Okay. So I double-click the "install" thing and it's hung. No mouse action, nothing. Reboot, wait the 30 minues it takes to boot to desktop off CD... same thing.
So I can't install. Is it always like this on a laptop? I'm hardly a non-savvy user... I did install Red Hat 5 and 6 on Desktop machines in the past, running Gnome and KDE. Must say though, I much prefer my Mac experiences which I've had the past 4 years -- it has *always* "just worked."
So did you read all the previous comments? All MacBooks can emulate a "right click" by simply holding 2 fingers on the track pad and clicking. Take one finger off the trackpad and click and it's left click.
It's faster than fishing for the right click button.
Well, yes, it is true they make the software to sell the hardware.
HOWEVER, I would still argue they are a software company. A Mac running Windows has almost nothing to differentiate it from a PC running Windows. The *entire* value of Apple products is the software, and the hardware/software integration (the ability to innovate). I would argue that Apple is a software company, though their business model makes money by hardware sales. A rather odd mix, but it works.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, yeah, hacked with a 3rd party driver. Never seen THAT one before.
What you're missing is a LOT of these machines will be used for rendering. Rendering (say, Maya) LOVES GPUs. Because for render operations they can be 10x as fast or more.
I know people that render want that NVIDIA 8800 series card in there.
Also, Macs have Core Image, which is used extensively by applications like Aperture (pro photo organization and editing) and Motion (3D effects for video, e.g. the "fly-ins" you see in your evening news). Having an 8800 versus an ATI card would probably double performance there, or more.
This is a Linux limitation, not a system limitation. OS X has supported WPA Personal for > 2 years, and WPA 2 Personal for at least 1.5 years on all systems.
Seems if you want a secure system you should stay away from a Linux laptop at home. But that's not really anything new. If you want a system that sleeps/wakes out of the box without tweaks a Mac would work nicely for that as well.
Yeah, it's a tough business. Because most of the phones suck, and because the carriers make the phone vendors their bitches.
Maybe the iPhone will be different enough to break this stranglehold. Maybe Apple's terms (other articles said that other carriers were given the opportunity and passed because of Apple's terms) will be enough to break this relationship.
But AT&T's COO whipped out the iPhone at CITA and said that they have received one MILLION "contact me's" for when the iPhone ships. Pick a 50% conversion rate there, add that to how many people will walk in, drooling, to the Apple Store (all Joy of Tech(tm) style), and you have a pretty good dent in that "10 million by the end of 2008" number that SJ touted at MacWorld.
The iPhone may be a success, and it may be a flop. What I am pretty certain about is that it won't be launched the way so many Nokia and Motorola phones are. For that I think we can all be thankful.
Is this documented somewhere or is this more stuff that George Ou is "hinting at?"
Would love to see some actual details on this, if it's true.
All this "smear campaign" stuff... talking about how Apple really hammered him on the clarification of whether it was a 3rd party driver. And George gets indignant that Apple asked this to be done.
Yes, you could see in the video that they used a 3rd party driver. However, was it really CLEAR that the exploit only existed for the 3rd party driver? Maynor and Ellch certainly did NOT dwell on this -- they in fact spent more time saying they enjoyed doing this because Mac users were "smug."
And, gullible as the press is, the press most certainly did NOT report "3rd party flaw exposes OS X security hole!" It was more along the lines of "OMGMACCRACKOVERWIRELESS!" It was days before it was clear, and even then it was necessary to specifically explain this to people. Sure, the video showed this, but the fact of the matter is that most people, including the press, did not UNDERSTAND this fact... and this was clearly obvious from the reaction to the matter in the first place.
And what I also don't get is... what are you really showing if you use a 3rd party wireless driver to hack a MacBook which has BUILT-IN wireless? Sure, you can do it, but is that a realistic scenario? I mean, I could compromise someone's system if I stole it and they didn't have disk encryption turned on as well... is that a hack?
You really need to define "broken." I have been using IMAP with the Apple Mail application for 5 years, with between 150 and 300 MB of mail on the server during this time (quota is 250 MB on the server). I have had no issues... and I have about 25 folders on the server.
So it's definitely not "broken," though perhaps there are some criteria that are leading you to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
You do get it with parts for the Xserve and Xserve RAID, with the service plan.
And, in case you didn't know, AppleCare DOES cover you for on-site service in areas where service providers can offer this. Third party providers can offer this (on-site for desktops, pick up and delivery for laptops) at no cost if you have AppleCare.
Ummm... well sure in theory 802.11a and g can do 54 Mbps, practically you're doing very well if you get 15 Mbps on them.
And most of the current "free" Wifi options, e.g. Google's offering in Mountain View, are capped at 1 Mbps (some of this is a kowtow to the local telephone companies). So edge cards can compete with the "free" offerings, at least to date. Also, coverage of the edge cards is substantially better if you are moving.
It's not really "free" already though. Apple has always said that Boot Camp was going to be supported in Leopard. They never said anything about Boot Camp being anything but a beta with Tiger.
So now, if you want it to be supported with Tiger (I mean, it already works today in beta form), then you can pay $30 and get a supported version. Or you can upgrade to Leopard, or you can continue using a beta version, which will tie you to the drivers present in the beta version.
So what's the harm? This is just a new option, that wasn't available before. There is some engineering effort and real cost to Boot Camp -- because it is a boot loader (similar to GRUB as others have noted), PLUS Windows drivers for all hardware components in the Mac machine itself. There's certainly work to maintain and test the tens of specific drivers -- for people who are slow to upgrade to Leopard but *want* officially supported drivers they now have the option to pay for them.
Given that education works on quarters or semesters, it's tough to really make all that much progress in a 10 or 15 week course, if it's all about collaboration. Plus, with college scheduling, it's awfully tough with the given time blocks.
I will say, I had a fairly "theoretical" based education -- BS in Physics and MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford. Now the EE program at Stanford was *very* hands-off... I spent a day or two calculating (on paper) what an optimal caching strategy was for L1, L2, and L3 caches... just math. And at the end of things... I don't know that I really understood computers all that well, despite getting a degree in EE with a computer hardware focus.
This compares to people I knew that got undergrad degrees in EE from MIT, who basically as a senior project were told to go build something much like an Apple II. Grab processors, logic, wire it all together, funge some microcode, get it to boot and write a program. Those folks with a BS could absoutely run circles around me when it came to practical experience. And I think it was a good education for them, because 5 years on I'm *sure* they could adapt it towards building something more complicated. Me... I could be a "consultant" and wave a nice high-powered degree in front of people, but build something myself? Er, no.
Anyway, the article is too light on specifics to really say *how* education should be changed. My opinion though is that college as it is (in the US at least) is pretty darned good -- it is markedly different to primary education in that pounding the books and doing the work isn't sufficient to do well -- to an extent you have to be able to "get it." At least, in math, science, and engineering for the most part you do. History may be a different kettle of fish.
I haven't used DirectControl personally -- though I know of some other folks who have said it works for them. The MacEnterprise folks did a webcast on it a while back, and they have their slides archived here:
e s.pdf
;-)
http://macenterprise.org/webcasts/2005-10-25_slid
Which gives a lot more detail on how it works.
I think, cost wise, that there is a "per seat" cost. I don't know the exact price, probably along the lines of a CAL, so $50-ish sounds a bit right. I'm sure it depends on the # of seats and the time of the year or quarter you're negotiating with a sales rep
There are a number of solutions for pushing software to Mac clients. I don't know if Centrify does it -- I typically use Apple's Apple Remote Desktop to do it, but this is not cross-platform. There are a number of cross-platform solutions... NetOctopus, and 3 or 4 others whose names elude me right now as I'm in Sunday mode. If you really need details let me know and I'll eventually scare them up.
AD Integration has been there for a number of years. You use the Directory Access application in /Applications/Utilities, and there's an AD tab where you enter the relevant information. It provides authentication and full single sign-on. You can also change the password on your Mac and it propagates to AD. So what's the issue?
You can also manage the Macs via AD, if you want to lock them down. This requires a schema extension -- extensions that Apple has registered with the IANA. This historically has made some AD administrators nervous, especially back in the day when you couldn't reverse schema additions. These days, the scripts are fairly widely available -- install them on a test or staging server and see how it works.
So this provides very good management, the main limitation at this point is it's necessary to use Apple's Workgroup Manager application to do the management of the Macs, and point it to AD. Most Windows administrators are used to using GPOs for management and are reluctant to use another tool. If this is too much of a hurdle (you know, that whole "learning new things" thing which may be scary to people whose brain filled up getting their MSCE certification), then look for 3rd party tools like Centrify's Direct Control (http://www.centrify.com) which allow you managemetn of the Macs totally via GPOs.
Pretty much any way you WANT to manage Macs from AD, you can. Each option has a few caveats, and is not 100% like using AD to manage Windows machines, because they are different machines. But all solutions WORK, and in fact they WORK QUITE WELL.
As far as MVL, it does apply to copies that run in Parallels. So you're covered there -- the expense is the copy of Parallels... which is $79 list, and I'm just betting if you asked them for 500 copies that they'd negotiate a bit.
Regarding Entourage... you're right, it's not as good as Outlook. But for many folks, it's sufficient. As far as Excel... I've never personally had an interop issue between Windows and Mac versions of Excel or Word. Then again, I'll freely admit I don't get many documents that are loaded down with large numbers of VBA macros. Whenever I get a "enable Macros?" dialog I say no -- so that point is moot anyway. With the main use of VBA being to transmit viruses... it's a wonder they're really still prevalent on the Windows side. And I say this having written a few custom decision support systems based in Excel and Access, that used custom OLE controls no less, back in the day.
For all the academic arguments about what architecture is better (CISC versus RISC, pipelined versus superscalar, etc.) what's difficult to deny is that the Intel/AMD (and the x86 architecture in general) have continued to meet or exceed Moore's law. Despite Apple's insistence that PowerPC was a better and faster path forward, the facts are that Intel outran them. This doesn't necessarily mean it's a better architecture, but rather the engineering resources (perhaps due to AMD/Intel competition) managed to do more with what they had. Maybe x86 is performing at 95% of its potential, and PPC at 50%. Who knows. Who actually cares, except for an academic discussion.
SPARC may well be the same way -- the main issue there is that Sun doesn't have the resources to both build CPU architectures, computer architectures, and OS and application software, and be competitive in all markets.
There are other instances of something similar. Take the Porsche 911. A rear-engined setup (with the majority of the weight of the car *behind* the rear axle) is inherently inferior to a mid-engine design. The car should handle like crap. And early versions, for the most part, did (oversteer was a very real and common issue). Take 40 years of incremental advances in body and suspension design, and the 911 is one of the best handling cars there is. The design is not the best -- it never WILL be the best -- but it is a very, very competent performer. Few things are better.
And my experience (about 3 hours worth of tries) to get the latest version of Ubuntu (Edgy Eft?) to install on my Satellite failed miserably. I'm not an expert with Linux, but I *did* run a second Linux system for development and testing purposes back in the Red Hat 6/7/8 days. For the last 4 years I've been working with Macs -- which have been outstanding.
So I'd have to say... no. Unless the requirement is that everyone use Thinkpads or something, where perhaps it works better.
Compare Windows and Linux with KDE on a Laptop. Try things like authenticating to a network that uses WPA for encryption. Try things like getting reliable suspend/resume and other power options.
Now that you've revealed Linux for the turd that it is on a laptop... go back to Windows. Or better yet, buy a Mac, and get the only UNIX that runs well on a laptop.
Well, it's a trade off between data loss and shutdown.
For example, if you have a Word document open, with unsaved changes, and the system sends it a shutdown, Word throws up a modal dialog box "er, dude, I've been told to quit but you have unsaved changes... what should I do?"
If the system forces shutdown, you lose data. Is that good? It's a tough call... you could force Word to make a smart choice (save a copy as...) but that requires every single application to handle something like that.
OS X can be similar, and it annoys me. I send a shutdown and iChat says "you have existing chat sessions... can I quit?" and iChat cancels shutdown. I cuss every time -- but to some extent iChat is equally liable to the problem here as the OS is. Sending everything the equivalent of a 'kill -9' will bite you in the butt at some point.
The Intel-based Macs, though, really *are* faster in bootup. Sure, there are things being launched in the background (in parallel) via launchd, but that doesn't change the fact that the Intel-based Macs (and their EFI) boot substantially faster than the old PPC Macs did. You can get from power button to desktop in 25-45 seconds (depending on if some extra stuff goes on in the EFI stage... not sure if it's fsck or something else from an unclean reboot), and the system really *is* responsive within a few seconds.
:-P
PCs may get EFI support in 2012 or so... which means Windows and Linux may get that by the election after next
I went to the site, and got 2 dialogs warning that Mozilla versions 1.3 aren't supported. WTF? Guess Safari isn't good enough... is IE good enough either?
Yeah, I recall that phrase from my time in Sydney.
This is incorrect -- the Zune does NOT add DRM to your un-DRMed songs for you. It doesn't modify songs that have been "squirted" in any way.
What it DOES do is prevent you from playing a song "squirted" (lol) to you more than 3 times. This is easy to do, it can just add a flag that indicates a file was received via "squirt" and then use that to prevent play more than 3 times, and prevent further transfer. This isn't really DRM -- nothing on the file is changed; it's just that the player treats it in a special manner.
Doesn't change my opinion that the Zune is showing its true colors in shart-like brown. And to spit in the face of all their "PlaysForSure" partners shows (not that it was a surprise) that Microsoft will backstab its "partners" whenever it's in its best interest.
rofl.
Toshibas are hardly the fringe. Seriously, it's not that strange of a laptop, and it's neither "too old" nor "too new." It's about a year old. If I have to pick the hardware specifically to run the OS I want, the obvious choice would be a Mac.
Been there, done that. Of course, that's because you had an original XP install CD, that is 5 years old. Its existence predates any SATA drives.
If you had a newer (XP SP 2) install CD, it would have booted right up... no need for a separate floppy. I will agree it was a pain, but then again, if you tried to install Red Hat 5 (and by this, I mean Red Hat 5, circa 2001) on that same box, it wouldn't have detected the SATA drives either.
I will say though that the Linux experience on portables still stinks. I have a Toshiba Satellite that work gave me for some "testing." I have never actually booted it to Windows. When I first got it, I downloaded SuSe Enterprise 10 and tried to install. I got about 1/2 way through the install and it complained about a missing file (WTF? Nice ISO, guys... given it passed checksum). Tried again, no dice. So I left it for a couple months.
I saw a new version of Ubuntu came out this week, so yesterday I downloaded and burned a CD. Booted from it, selected "install," and the darned thing boots to desktop. I get a big dialog box about a non-responsive window manager. Dismiss it. Okay. So I double-click the "install" thing and it's hung. No mouse action, nothing. Reboot, wait the 30 minues it takes to boot to desktop off CD... same thing.
So I can't install. Is it always like this on a laptop? I'm hardly a non-savvy user... I did install Red Hat 5 and 6 on Desktop machines in the past, running Gnome and KDE. Must say though, I much prefer my Mac experiences which I've had the past 4 years -- it has *always* "just worked."
So did you read all the previous comments? All MacBooks can emulate a "right click" by simply holding 2 fingers on the track pad and clicking. Take one finger off the trackpad and click and it's left click.
It's faster than fishing for the right click button.
Well, yes, it is true they make the software to sell the hardware.
HOWEVER, I would still argue they are a software company. A Mac running Windows has almost nothing to differentiate it from a PC running Windows. The *entire* value of Apple products is the software, and the hardware/software integration (the ability to innovate). I would argue that Apple is a software company, though their business model makes money by hardware sales. A rather odd mix, but it works.