There are a few things I see from the specs which I haven't seen mentioned yet that I thought I'd bring to everyones attention:
Optical audio input and output as part of the mini-jacks. Very nice.
The systems now max out at 2GB of installed RAM,
The various mini-DVI connectors are now sold seperately. When I bought my 12" PowerBook, it came with the VGA and DVI connectors in the box. Sure, if I were to upgrade I could keep my existing connectors (and the S-Video/composite connector which I previously purchased seperately), but this is something for we 12" PowerBook users which has now been removed from the box,
The ethernet has been upgraded to Gigabit ethernet,
They have removed the modem (something I personally won't miss), and have made it an add-on component.
Those are the bits that jump out at me which I haven't seen discussed much -- everyone seems focussed on the display, lack of a decent video card, the fact that FireWire 400 is indeed present, with one or two people mentioning the fact that Bluetooth has been updated to 2.0+EDR. Oh, and not to forget the built-in iSight camera.
As a 12" PowerBook owner, I'm tossed up about all of this. There is a lot of great new stuff to these new machines which I would love to have. The use of integrated Intel graphics, however, is disappointing (I wouldn't mind if these machines were just replacing the iBooks, but they're also replacing my beloved PowerBook!:P). And I don't like losing the cool aluminium alloy look either (although the black is rather striking). I also always rather liked the fact that the 12" lacked any wasted space to either side of the keyboard, but now with the wide screen display there is a small gap between the edge of the outermost keys and the edge of the case. As such, I'm a tiny bit ambivilent about these new machines -- I see a lot to like about them, but feel like I'm losing some things at the same time. I hope Apple realizes that there are some of us out here who need professional features and high portability at the same time, and eventually adds a 13.3" MacBook Pro to the new Intel family.
The dial plans in the US and Canada are identical, hence "Else you won't be able to dial it when you go to another country where the dialing sequences are different". Your dial plan was developed by Bell, whose center of gravity was solidly placed in the USA.
Fair enough, although the centre of gravity remark is debatable (as the first long distance call was in fact made between Brantford and Paris, Ontario, Canada, by Mr. Bell himself). Regardless, the US and Canada has long had a very highly integrated telephone system.
You do have to realize, however, that I'm in a region of the globe where I can travel a thousand kilometres in any direction and reach only two countries: Canada and the US. I can fly a direct span and remain in Canada in a distance that would cross a dozen countries in most other areas of the world. So getting outside of North America is a fairly infrequent endevour here.
And assuming I am outside of North America, these days I'd be much more likely to call home from my Vonage Softphone, which has a North American area code attached to it and allows me 500 minutes of calling to any POTS line in North America per month. Perhaps not quite as convenient as a cell phone in some regards, but then again I'm not the type of person who has their ear welded to their telephone anyhow -- for myself, making a phone call is an infrequent event anyhow.
When you consider that this Skype service is targeted specifically towards people in the US and Canada, however, it would seem reasonable that people within these two countries who want to try the service out are going to assume the dial plan in use within those two countries, and aren't going to need to follow dialing rules used outside this area (which they may not know about in the first place).
As for "shibboleth", I was happy to find that the Oxford American Dictionary built into Mac OS X does indeed have an entry for it. Good show!
Here in europe, we DO dial the + when dialing from cell phones.
Fair enough, but Skype's free SkypeOut service is only being offered in the US and Canada, where we don't dial a plus sign. Indeed, traditionally it isn't even used in writing North American telephone numbers.
My original point being that it is non-obvious to the people this service is targeted at, and may explain why some people are claiming to have problems using the free service. If they are trying to dial the number as they normally would (depending on their service, that could be via a 7-digit, 10-digit, or 11-digit number), it simply won't work.
For years the plus notation has been the correct way to write phone numbers. When you store a number on your cell phone, you use a plus sign, right? Else you won't be able to dial it when you go to another country where the dialing sequences are different. Come to think of it, maybe this is a 21st century shibboleth that distinguishes US-centric folks from the others.
I have never added a + to any phone numbers in my cell phone, and yet it has always worked, and
I am Canadian, and live in Canada. I am not an American, and am not US-centric.
Perhaps the shibboleth (and thanks for the new word for my vocabulary, by the way) lies between those who assume that everything that isn't European must be American, and those who know there are other countries in this world that belong to neither?
Your first explaination was better, although I would then question why Skype would permit user IDs that could be confused with telephone numbers in the first place.
Yes -- I discovered it when I went to Skype's SkypeOut information page, although admittedly at first I overlooked it. Let's face it -- many people are used to seeing the + sign in phone numbers when they are written to denote the country code part, but you never actually dial the plus sign, just the digits. So when I first saw it, my first inclination was to dial the number as 1-xxx-xxx-xxxx, without the plus.
As well, I would imagine for many people like myself who have experience with Skype, but not with SkypeOut, when you hear about such a new service and want to try it out, you're going to input the phone number and press the dial button. I'd be interested to hear what technical reasons Skype has for forcing the use of the plus sign at the beginning of the phone numbers -- it does seem superfluous.
I was able to test the free SkypeOut by calling my home phone from my PowerBook, but not without some difficulty. At first it wouldn't dial the number at all -- apparently you need to use a bit of a special incantation to get it to dial.
On my first attempt, I tried to do a ten digit dial (xxx-xxx-xxxx), but it wouldn't let me dial out. So I next tried adding a 1 in front of the number (1-xxx-xxx-xxxx), but again, no-go.
The trick? You must put a plus sign ('+') in front of the 1 (that is, dial "+1-xxx-xxx-xxxx"). Then it works just fine. But otherwise, it doesn't work at all -- the call button will be completely disabled.
I wonder however if this won't be ripe for abuse. All Skype calls show up as being from 000-012-3456, and I just know there are some asshats out there who are going to start using this for obscene phone calls, or other negative abuses of the system.
Anyhow, if you can't get your version of Skype to work, try it with the + symbol in front of the 1. On the latest Mac version at least, this is the only way it will work correctly.
I took my usual paranoid route. For the first four questions, I didn't select either site (which, as it asks which site you trust, seems to me to implicitly state that I don't trust either site). For the last four sites, I specified that all of them potentially had spyware.
My result? Well, acccording to this "survey" I only scored 3 out of 8, as my not trusting sites which didn't have spyware (as they could find) counted against me, and I distrusted one site which the survey claims has no spyware. So apparantly, because I don't trust ANY of the 8 sites referenced in the survey, I'm "At Risk", and my "...answers would have infected your PC with adware and spyware many times over.".
Uh huh. Not trusting any of the 8 sites is putting me at risk? Spyware and adware many times over? Let's ignore for a moment that I'm running Mac OS X, and that I wouldn't visit any of those sites in the first place, and don't download screensavers, wallpapers, or smilies, but apparantly according to SiteAdvisor my distrust of all their sites puts me at risk.
And that right there is enough to tell you the quality of this so called "survey".
Pardon? If by the "special bookmark menu" you mean the Bonjour "plugin" for IE, then you would only discover such services if they were web servers running somewhere in your bonjourhood.
Which is all wel and good if you're intimately familiar with your "bonjourhood". However, take a look again at my example of the airport. It is entirely possible (and, in fact, probable) that the airport is going to have more than one webserver. The airport authority might have one for general airport information, arrivals, and departures. The individual airlines which service that airport may each have their own which permit online check-in (something I actually use frequently), and booking flights. Car rental companies that function within the airport may have their own server to advertise and provide sign-up for their own services, as may the shops. Customs may also have their own server (fairly likely due to government privacy and security laws in most jurisdictions).
All of these individual servers and services can be advertised via Bonjour. You walk into an airport you've never set foot inside, open up your laptop, and presto -- bookmarks to all of these services are immediately available to you (and technically no , I wasn't talking about the IE plug-in, I was thinking of the bookmark menu in Safari, but hey, 2**4 of one and 4**2 of the other I suppose).
And even if they were all running on the same server, you can still advertise them seperately. Each Bonjour service entry permits one or more text records, and HTTP records in specific (_http._tcp) have a "path" TXT record entry which denotes the path into the web server for the specific entry. So you can also have multiple entries per server. And you (as an end-user) don't need to know the URLs to any of these servers beforehand -- your web browser can build them for you based on what it finds within the local subnet (or beyond).
I can already share my iTunes library across my network without installing additional software (additional to iTunes) on my Windows boxes.
That's because iTunes on Windows has Bonjour built right into its executable. This additional code for Windows from Apple is to activate Bonjour functionality into applications it doesn't directly control itself. So you're already using Bonjour for a very useful purpose.
Bonjour is immensely useful. A little imagination shows a plethora of uses. I use it within the lab and my home for all sorts of service advertisement. It shows itself as vastly more useful when you use it with an OS which supports it at a low level, like Mac OS X or Linux. With it, small networks don't need to run their own DNS at all. Devices and services can be found automatically, and what services are advertised are up to each and every individual machine, and don't require the authorization or activation by some central authority.
Apple can essentially write its own implementation of WINE, but somehow won't suffer from all the problems that WINE has. If you think that strategy works well, look at what happened when OS/2 tried it.
Except that's not what happened with OS/2. Indeed, what happened is exactly what you propose for OS X, and is why OS/2 was doomed to fail in the long run.
OS/2 didn't emulate the Windows APIs to run Windows applications (it did later have an emulated Windows API in the form of Open32, but that required a recompile). OS/2 provided a DOS Virtual Machine which was capable of running Windows 3.1 directly. While OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 initially came with IBM recompiled versions of Microsoft Windows 3.1, later versions (OS/2 2.1 for Windows and OS/2 WARP v3 RedSpine) allowed you to simply use your existing Windows 3.1 installation to run Windows applications under OS/2. OS/2 did provide its own Video driver and WinSock subsystem to allow Windows applications to run on the same desktop as OS/2 applications (and to access the OS/2 networking subsystem), but the underlying code was the same Windows 3.1 you ran on MS-DOS.
Which is why running Windows applications on OS/2 worked so well. So well, in fact, that many software developers saw absolutely no reason at all to port their applications to OS/2 -- OS/2 users could run the Windows 3.1 version, so why bother with a native OS/2 version of the software?
OS/2 did the "run Windows in a virtual machine" well over a decade ago, and we all know the result. Perhaps part of their problem was that the Windows support shipped with every copy of OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 (until the eventual release of OS/2 for Windows), and that by that time if you were an OS/2 user, you were expected to have Windows installed. Perhaps more general VM support without an included copy of Windows would be enough to keep OS X development alive, but to be honest I already went through the pain of fighting with ISV's to get OS/2 versions of software packages to little avail -- I have no desire to go through that again with OS X (which is the platform I switched to on the client side after I finally gave up on OS/2).
This whole case still has me puzzled. Apple apparently was working on a product to provide a firewire break-out box for use with their GarageBand product. Someone inside Apple (or outside and on an NDA) leaked it to an Apple rumours website, which published it. Apple then fired off a lawsuit against John Doe, and decided to drag the website(s) in question to court to get them to reveal the identity of the source of the leak.
All well and good, except one thing: where is the product? Whatever happened to this GarageBand break-out box? It has never materialized, and it's what -- a year-and-a-half later? You can't tell me that Apple suddenly decided to cancel this product just because news of it got leaked to the web. So far as I'm aware, it isn't like any of their competitors have such a product on the market, or that the leak has caused them any actual harm.
It makes me wonder -- did this product ever really exist to begin with, or was this some sort of fake product "trap" to try to find the source of product leaks to rumour websites?
Or is this product still in development, to be released at some later date?
Something about all of this just doesn't strike me as right (besides the whole freedom of the press, and confidentiality of sources issues). It isn't as if this is the first Apple product to be leaked to the press. Perhaps this one was leaked well before Apple was ready to announce something? Does Apple think it knows who is leaking this information, but wants sufficient proof to fire them? Does "Asteroid" even exist (and it sounds like a useful product to me -- with GarageBand '06's new Podcast creation features, even I'm starting to think of interesting ways I can put something like this to use)?
There is something more to this that Apple doesn't want us to know. I just can't quite pinpoint what is going on...
How is this any different than the Wireless Zero configuration that comes with Windows XP? It seems that they all offer the same thing except the Windows Wireless Zero is already on the machine.
It is completely different. Wireless Zero Configuration on Windows is a serviced used to connect your machine to 802.11 wireless networks, and (apparantly) to 802.1X network authorization systems.
Bonjour is a completely different animal, that is more of a combination of a decentralized DNS, and a way for machines to say "hey, heere are the services I offer that you can use" to any other machines on the network. Each machine running a full Bonjour/ZeroConf installation will advertise its name on the network, and the network services it provides. A system might, for example, advertise that it offers SSH, HTTP, FTP, AFP, Samba, and printing services. A client machine running Bonjour/ZeroConf that connects to this network will automatically know about these other services on the network, and can thus offer them as connection options to the user as is approperiate.
For example, say you take your laptop to the airport. You open it up, and get a wireless connection through Windows as usual. You fire up your web browser, and in a special bookmark menu you automatically see the links for arrivals, departures, and general airport information.
Or you walk into an office you are visiting, and need to print off a document. You open up the document, select Print, and find in the print dialog that your system has already found all available printers on your subnet.
You hit the cafe, and decide to fire up your favorite music application to listen to some tunes. Other people are there doing the same thing, and your system finds their playlists, and lets you browser through them and play them on your own laptop.
These are the sorts of things that Bonjour/ZeroConf permit. It's like a distributed DNS, where each machine only needs to know about itself, and the resolution database gets built dynamically. But it goes one step further to describe not just the hosts, but the public services those hosts offer.
I run Bonjour a lot on my networks. I do have a few Macs, but most of the systems I'm running it on are Linux systems. A client that connects to my personal network (something which is of course restricted by both WPA2 and a MAC filter list) will learn about all of the services they have public access to, including a few print gateways, digital audio streaming services, network sharing services, multimedia sharing services, chat services, and a variety of others. Suitably enabled client applications will know about these systems automatically, and can then build the relevent on screen menus or selection dialogs or whatnot to permit connecting to these services. And for a significantly large network size, it is significantly easier for an administrator to configure one printer to use Bonjour/ZeroConf than it is to have to tell potentially hundreds of clients where the printer is on the network.
About the patent, all I can say is that while I'm viewing this on a Philips monitor, this will be my last purchase of any Philips product. Ever. Just because they patented that.
Let's see what they do with this before passing any judgement. It is my hope that they might just use this patent in a purely defensive manner, to ensure that this sort of feature ever gets implemented by anyone (at least for the life of the patent).
Yeah, I know -- probably a bit naive, but a guy has to hope...
My PC is currently down, so I'm not sure if this particular trick/feature works with any other platform or software, but I thought I'd mention it, since you seem to be having such frustration with this particular problem.
Thanks, and no need to appologize for the zeal -- you're preaching to the converted here. I use this feature on my PowerBook all the time.
My nieces don't live with me however, and their father (my brother) hasn't been able to afford the cross-country trip to come and visit. So when I play a movie for them, it's at their home, and not mine.
And while I do take my PowerBook with me, leaving it next to the TV for a few hours while they watch movies isn't what I bought it for , and while they're generally very good girls, they do get curious, and I'm not leaving them with my PowerBook unattended:).
The joys of VLC media player and a video-out socket.
I have both myself, so I know how good it is. Mac the Ripper does a great job of stripping out any unwanted UOPs (User Operation Prohibitions), and then I can convert them to H.264, or re-burn them to DVD (or do both:) ).
However, my DVD collection hasn't required this -- the majority of the movies I own don't have obnoxious ads you can't skip. I've done this for one or two discs the girls own that have started to exhibit some wear and tear, but as mentioned elsewhere that as a long-term project has been put off due to the geographical distance currently between us (I moved about 5000km away last fall).
If you rip and copy the DVD, you should be able to strip out the no-skip flags or better yet, just watch the movie, minus the hassle of menus, as soon as you stick the DVD in.
I've actually done this before, however in the case of my nieces, they now live nearly 5000km from where I live (although I am flying out on Friday for a visit).
Of course, this also depends on the capacity of your DVD+R's, though Nero can re-encode the files in a lower quality (i found that even at 60% the quality wasn't noticeable different).
Not a concern -- I have a dual layer DVD+/-RW drive in my PowerMac.
[T]echnically the DMCA forbids bypassing the CSS protection, but seeing as how you own the DVDs and it's a personal backup...they can't really go after you unless you email them asking them to.
The DCMA can say whatever it wants -- it holds no sway over what I can and cannot do here in Canada:).
what pisses me off even more is when they aren't even advertising products, they're just forcing me to watch their "copying DVDs is piracy and is the same as mugguing someone so don't do it" bullshit.
My nieces, who are 4 years old, have a number of childrens DVDs they like to watch (Disney movies and such). These sorts of discs are the absolute WORST for forced advertisements. One of the discs they like to watch (and I forget which one it is) has a 10 MINUTE advertisement for "Madagascar" which can't be skipped.
And do you know what the galling part about this is? They own a copy of Madagascar!. And yet, every time they want to watch this other movie, I have to stand there with my thumb on the fast forward button to get through the advertisement for a movie they already own (you can't skip the track, but at least fast forward works to get through it quicker).
Thank goodness my nieces are generally very well behaved and patient people, and don't seem to mind (or question) the fact that I have to fast forward through these things for them. But still, if you think the DVDs you watch are bad, try pretty much any kids movie. Grrr.
Wouldn't it be more apt to say "RockboxOffersGaplessPlayback"?;)
FWIW, iTunes permits this at the ripping stage. You need to tell it to "Join CD Tracks" (under "Advanced") prior to ripping. Perhaps not as good a solution, but at least one can listen to the music as intended this way (personally, I really need to get ahold of a new Abbey Road CD so I can re-rip side 2 for gapless playback for the tracks on it which are joined together).
In fact, I think the fact that people find what they need in the first couple pages is actually a testament to how good search engines are nowadays.
I think the interesting part is what happens if the average person doesn't find what they need within the first few pages of results.
Personally, if what I need isn't within the first 5 pages, I'll try refining my search. The problem is that if your search turns up 300 000 results, sorted by relevence, the tail end is typically going to be packed with a lot of useless junk. And while the data you are looking for could very well be on page 6, the probability by this point is significantly higher that it is going to be buried on page 200. And who has time to wade through that many pages of results?
I find it is significantly more effective to simply refine your query, to either enhance the relevence of what you're looking for, or to remove extraneous results. I'll give you a recent example of the latter: yesterday, I decided to switch my '97 Chevy Lumina sedan from regular crude to pure synthetic motor oil (it just recently ticked over 150k km). So I decided to research some of the different synthetic oils available in my area of the world. One of the searches I did was "Castrol Syntec review". And as early as the second page of the search on Google I started seeing reviews of the video game "Need for Speed". It provided me with a better experience reading multiple reviews of the motor oil by simply refining my search to remove all references for "Need for Speed".
I suppose by this survey, that means I don't look past page 2. However, I personally don't mind mading through a lot more pages of relevent results -- it's just the fact that it is faster to narrow down your search when you start to find a lot of irrelevent results than it is to waste your time with a search that has a lot of similar results which are useless to you makes doing another, more refined search an overall better proposition.
And that's what we have computers for -- to zero in on the data we want, and weed out the stuff we don't want. Currently, however, computers are not mind readers, so even Google needs some help refining your searches to get you the results you want.
Really? Your iSync and my iSync must be two different things, because mine fails to preserve catagories when transferring appointments and tasks to and from my Palm. Or are you using that "jSyncManager" thing in your sig?
The two are probably the same -- it's probably just a matter of difference in how we are using the tools. For my part, I do the vast majority of my data entry in iCal and the OS X Address Book. It is rather rare that I do any entry into the Palm (or the cell phone for that matter).
The jSyncManager could help with this, but I haven't had an opportunity to write a plug-in for it to mate it up with iSync. Here within the "jSyncManager Labs" I've written a Cocoa-Java version of the jSyncManager that runs extraordinarily well, but I need to find the time to implement two things to make it usable for the average Mac user:
As it is written in Java, I need an external library to allow access to USB. The core jSyncManager already supports the Javax-USB API, but this API is not yet available on the Mac (a source of continued frustration). Right now you can only connect through TCP/IP or serial connections on the Mac (and possibly via Bluetooth -- I don't have a Bluetooth-enabled Palm (I own a Tungsten C, which has WiFi instead) to run testing on, and
I need to write some conduits to attach the jSyncManager protocol stack and synchronization engine to iSync to permit the data exchange.
Perhaps one day I'll get around to finishing this effort, but for now other things have priority.
You won't get a lot of argument from me, although with flash memory prices coming down as capacities increase, I don't see why devices can't have a certain amount of local storage for those times when they aren't near their paired storage module.
The wireless technologies would have to improve in speed, mind you. Bluetooth v1.x can be slow, and Bluetooth plus a hard drive could be a serious power drain.
But these issues are solvable, and I agree -- being able to have devices which can talk to one another easily is a good idea. While some people would like some sort of convergence where one device does everything, as other have pointed out, this generally results in a device that is so-so at everything, but isn't really that good at anything. I'm for some convergence (it doesn't bother me one bit that my cell phone, PDA, and iPod all have my calendar and Address Book on them, for example -- Apple's iSync fortunately makes this brutally simple), but feel that expandability with wireless technologies is the key way to go.
To be honest, I don't even use my cell phone as a telephone anymore (in the sense of using it as a handset). You won't catch me with a candy bar pressed up against the side of my head -- if I need to have a voice conversation, I'll put on my Bluetooth headset (a Sony HBH 660). It provides a much better conversation experience. My cell phone is just a little box I cary on my belt that provides a Bluetooth-to-GSM gateway (which I also use for Internet access through my PowerBook).
Put a color screen in it, run OS X on a flash drive along with global band cell phone connectivity, 802.11 and Bluetooth and if you can sell it for $700-800 or so, you have the ideal PDA.
I am a firm believer that a pure PDA device should leave out the cell phone connectivity. Once you add that in, the only way you're going to be able to get one is through the cell companies, which will try to hobble the device.
Besides which, it's an added expense and power draw for the mobile device.
The key to good portability for such a device is REALLY GOOD Bluetooth support, so that you can easily have it connect as required to a real cell phone, and so that you can upgrade your phone or change your service provider to your hearts content without the device having to worry about it. And this way you can use a single cell device for ALL of your portable computing devices, without having the need for each one to have its own cellular subsystem.
There isn't a lot of grant money for people who propose that the world is flat, or that gravity doesn't exist either. But I'm hardly going to lose any sleep over the fact (unless, of course, I fall off the edge of the Earth and float away -- that might cause me to lose some sleep for a little while).
Slashdot Mirror
There are a few things I see from the specs which I haven't seen mentioned yet that I thought I'd bring to everyones attention:
Those are the bits that jump out at me which I haven't seen discussed much -- everyone seems focussed on the display, lack of a decent video card, the fact that FireWire 400 is indeed present, with one or two people mentioning the fact that Bluetooth has been updated to 2.0+EDR. Oh, and not to forget the built-in iSight camera.
As a 12" PowerBook owner, I'm tossed up about all of this. There is a lot of great new stuff to these new machines which I would love to have. The use of integrated Intel graphics, however, is disappointing (I wouldn't mind if these machines were just replacing the iBooks, but they're also replacing my beloved PowerBook! :P). And I don't like losing the cool aluminium alloy look either (although the black is rather striking). I also always rather liked the fact that the 12" lacked any wasted space to either side of the keyboard, but now with the wide screen display there is a small gap between the edge of the outermost keys and the edge of the case. As such, I'm a tiny bit ambivilent about these new machines -- I see a lot to like about them, but feel like I'm losing some things at the same time. I hope Apple realizes that there are some of us out here who need professional features and high portability at the same time, and eventually adds a 13.3" MacBook Pro to the new Intel family.
Yaz
I'm not arguing that the country code shound't be required. That just makes sense. It's the plus symbol that is extraneous.
Why? I've survived for several decades without doing this. Why has it suddenly become a requirement?
Yaz.
Fair enough, although the centre of gravity remark is debatable (as the first long distance call was in fact made between Brantford and Paris, Ontario, Canada, by Mr. Bell himself). Regardless, the US and Canada has long had a very highly integrated telephone system.
You do have to realize, however, that I'm in a region of the globe where I can travel a thousand kilometres in any direction and reach only two countries: Canada and the US. I can fly a direct span and remain in Canada in a distance that would cross a dozen countries in most other areas of the world. So getting outside of North America is a fairly infrequent endevour here.
And assuming I am outside of North America, these days I'd be much more likely to call home from my Vonage Softphone, which has a North American area code attached to it and allows me 500 minutes of calling to any POTS line in North America per month. Perhaps not quite as convenient as a cell phone in some regards, but then again I'm not the type of person who has their ear welded to their telephone anyhow -- for myself, making a phone call is an infrequent event anyhow.
When you consider that this Skype service is targeted specifically towards people in the US and Canada, however, it would seem reasonable that people within these two countries who want to try the service out are going to assume the dial plan in use within those two countries, and aren't going to need to follow dialing rules used outside this area (which they may not know about in the first place).
As for "shibboleth", I was happy to find that the Oxford American Dictionary built into Mac OS X does indeed have an entry for it. Good show!
Yaz.
Fair enough, but Skype's free SkypeOut service is only being offered in the US and Canada, where we don't dial a plus sign. Indeed, traditionally it isn't even used in writing North American telephone numbers.
My original point being that it is non-obvious to the people this service is targeted at, and may explain why some people are claiming to have problems using the free service. If they are trying to dial the number as they normally would (depending on their service, that could be via a 7-digit, 10-digit, or 11-digit number), it simply won't work.
Yaz
Perhaps the shibboleth (and thanks for the new word for my vocabulary, by the way) lies between those who assume that everything that isn't European must be American, and those who know there are other countries in this world that belong to neither?
Your first explaination was better, although I would then question why Skype would permit user IDs that could be confused with telephone numbers in the first place.
Yaz.
Yes -- I discovered it when I went to Skype's SkypeOut information page, although admittedly at first I overlooked it. Let's face it -- many people are used to seeing the + sign in phone numbers when they are written to denote the country code part, but you never actually dial the plus sign, just the digits. So when I first saw it, my first inclination was to dial the number as 1-xxx-xxx-xxxx, without the plus.
As well, I would imagine for many people like myself who have experience with Skype, but not with SkypeOut, when you hear about such a new service and want to try it out, you're going to input the phone number and press the dial button. I'd be interested to hear what technical reasons Skype has for forcing the use of the plus sign at the beginning of the phone numbers -- it does seem superfluous.
Yaz.
I was able to test the free SkypeOut by calling my home phone from my PowerBook, but not without some difficulty. At first it wouldn't dial the number at all -- apparently you need to use a bit of a special incantation to get it to dial.
On my first attempt, I tried to do a ten digit dial (xxx-xxx-xxxx), but it wouldn't let me dial out. So I next tried adding a 1 in front of the number (1-xxx-xxx-xxxx), but again, no-go.
The trick? You must put a plus sign ('+') in front of the 1 (that is, dial "+1-xxx-xxx-xxxx"). Then it works just fine. But otherwise, it doesn't work at all -- the call button will be completely disabled.
I wonder however if this won't be ripe for abuse. All Skype calls show up as being from 000-012-3456, and I just know there are some asshats out there who are going to start using this for obscene phone calls, or other negative abuses of the system.
Anyhow, if you can't get your version of Skype to work, try it with the + symbol in front of the 1. On the latest Mac version at least, this is the only way it will work correctly.
Yaz.
I took my usual paranoid route. For the first four questions, I didn't select either site (which, as it asks which site you trust, seems to me to implicitly state that I don't trust either site). For the last four sites, I specified that all of them potentially had spyware.
My result? Well, acccording to this "survey" I only scored 3 out of 8, as my not trusting sites which didn't have spyware (as they could find) counted against me, and I distrusted one site which the survey claims has no spyware. So apparantly, because I don't trust ANY of the 8 sites referenced in the survey, I'm "At Risk", and my "...answers would have infected your PC with adware and spyware many times over.".
Uh huh. Not trusting any of the 8 sites is putting me at risk? Spyware and adware many times over? Let's ignore for a moment that I'm running Mac OS X, and that I wouldn't visit any of those sites in the first place, and don't download screensavers, wallpapers, or smilies, but apparantly according to SiteAdvisor my distrust of all their sites puts me at risk.
And that right there is enough to tell you the quality of this so called "survey".
Yaz.
Which is all wel and good if you're intimately familiar with your "bonjourhood". However, take a look again at my example of the airport. It is entirely possible (and, in fact, probable) that the airport is going to have more than one webserver. The airport authority might have one for general airport information, arrivals, and departures. The individual airlines which service that airport may each have their own which permit online check-in (something I actually use frequently), and booking flights. Car rental companies that function within the airport may have their own server to advertise and provide sign-up for their own services, as may the shops. Customs may also have their own server (fairly likely due to government privacy and security laws in most jurisdictions).
All of these individual servers and services can be advertised via Bonjour. You walk into an airport you've never set foot inside, open up your laptop, and presto -- bookmarks to all of these services are immediately available to you (and technically no , I wasn't talking about the IE plug-in, I was thinking of the bookmark menu in Safari, but hey, 2**4 of one and 4**2 of the other I suppose).
And even if they were all running on the same server, you can still advertise them seperately. Each Bonjour service entry permits one or more text records, and HTTP records in specific (_http._tcp) have a "path" TXT record entry which denotes the path into the web server for the specific entry. So you can also have multiple entries per server. And you (as an end-user) don't need to know the URLs to any of these servers beforehand -- your web browser can build them for you based on what it finds within the local subnet (or beyond).
That's because iTunes on Windows has Bonjour built right into its executable. This additional code for Windows from Apple is to activate Bonjour functionality into applications it doesn't directly control itself. So you're already using Bonjour for a very useful purpose.
Bonjour is immensely useful. A little imagination shows a plethora of uses. I use it within the lab and my home for all sorts of service advertisement. It shows itself as vastly more useful when you use it with an OS which supports it at a low level, like Mac OS X or Linux. With it, small networks don't need to run their own DNS at all. Devices and services can be found automatically, and what services are advertised are up to each and every individual machine, and don't require the authorization or activation by some central authority.
Yaz.
Except that's not what happened with OS/2. Indeed, what happened is exactly what you propose for OS X, and is why OS/2 was doomed to fail in the long run.
OS/2 didn't emulate the Windows APIs to run Windows applications (it did later have an emulated Windows API in the form of Open32, but that required a recompile). OS/2 provided a DOS Virtual Machine which was capable of running Windows 3.1 directly. While OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 initially came with IBM recompiled versions of Microsoft Windows 3.1, later versions (OS/2 2.1 for Windows and OS/2 WARP v3 RedSpine) allowed you to simply use your existing Windows 3.1 installation to run Windows applications under OS/2. OS/2 did provide its own Video driver and WinSock subsystem to allow Windows applications to run on the same desktop as OS/2 applications (and to access the OS/2 networking subsystem), but the underlying code was the same Windows 3.1 you ran on MS-DOS.
Which is why running Windows applications on OS/2 worked so well. So well, in fact, that many software developers saw absolutely no reason at all to port their applications to OS/2 -- OS/2 users could run the Windows 3.1 version, so why bother with a native OS/2 version of the software?
OS/2 did the "run Windows in a virtual machine" well over a decade ago, and we all know the result. Perhaps part of their problem was that the Windows support shipped with every copy of OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 (until the eventual release of OS/2 for Windows), and that by that time if you were an OS/2 user, you were expected to have Windows installed. Perhaps more general VM support without an included copy of Windows would be enough to keep OS X development alive, but to be honest I already went through the pain of fighting with ISV's to get OS/2 versions of software packages to little avail -- I have no desire to go through that again with OS X (which is the platform I switched to on the client side after I finally gave up on OS/2).
Yaz.
This whole case still has me puzzled. Apple apparently was working on a product to provide a firewire break-out box for use with their GarageBand product. Someone inside Apple (or outside and on an NDA) leaked it to an Apple rumours website, which published it. Apple then fired off a lawsuit against John Doe, and decided to drag the website(s) in question to court to get them to reveal the identity of the source of the leak.
All well and good, except one thing: where is the product? Whatever happened to this GarageBand break-out box? It has never materialized, and it's what -- a year-and-a-half later? You can't tell me that Apple suddenly decided to cancel this product just because news of it got leaked to the web. So far as I'm aware, it isn't like any of their competitors have such a product on the market, or that the leak has caused them any actual harm.
It makes me wonder -- did this product ever really exist to begin with, or was this some sort of fake product "trap" to try to find the source of product leaks to rumour websites?
Or is this product still in development, to be released at some later date?
Something about all of this just doesn't strike me as right (besides the whole freedom of the press, and confidentiality of sources issues). It isn't as if this is the first Apple product to be leaked to the press. Perhaps this one was leaked well before Apple was ready to announce something? Does Apple think it knows who is leaking this information, but wants sufficient proof to fire them? Does "Asteroid" even exist (and it sounds like a useful product to me -- with GarageBand '06's new Podcast creation features, even I'm starting to think of interesting ways I can put something like this to use)?
There is something more to this that Apple doesn't want us to know. I just can't quite pinpoint what is going on...
Yaz.
It is completely different. Wireless Zero Configuration on Windows is a serviced used to connect your machine to 802.11 wireless networks, and (apparantly) to 802.1X network authorization systems.
Bonjour is a completely different animal, that is more of a combination of a decentralized DNS, and a way for machines to say "hey, heere are the services I offer that you can use" to any other machines on the network. Each machine running a full Bonjour/ZeroConf installation will advertise its name on the network, and the network services it provides. A system might, for example, advertise that it offers SSH, HTTP, FTP, AFP, Samba, and printing services. A client machine running Bonjour/ZeroConf that connects to this network will automatically know about these other services on the network, and can thus offer them as connection options to the user as is approperiate.
For example, say you take your laptop to the airport. You open it up, and get a wireless connection through Windows as usual. You fire up your web browser, and in a special bookmark menu you automatically see the links for arrivals, departures, and general airport information.
Or you walk into an office you are visiting, and need to print off a document. You open up the document, select Print, and find in the print dialog that your system has already found all available printers on your subnet.
You hit the cafe, and decide to fire up your favorite music application to listen to some tunes. Other people are there doing the same thing, and your system finds their playlists, and lets you browser through them and play them on your own laptop.
These are the sorts of things that Bonjour/ZeroConf permit. It's like a distributed DNS, where each machine only needs to know about itself, and the resolution database gets built dynamically. But it goes one step further to describe not just the hosts, but the public services those hosts offer.
I run Bonjour a lot on my networks. I do have a few Macs, but most of the systems I'm running it on are Linux systems. A client that connects to my personal network (something which is of course restricted by both WPA2 and a MAC filter list) will learn about all of the services they have public access to, including a few print gateways, digital audio streaming services, network sharing services, multimedia sharing services, chat services, and a variety of others. Suitably enabled client applications will know about these systems automatically, and can then build the relevent on screen menus or selection dialogs or whatnot to permit connecting to these services. And for a significantly large network size, it is significantly easier for an administrator to configure one printer to use Bonjour/ZeroConf than it is to have to tell potentially hundreds of clients where the printer is on the network.
Yaz.
Let's see what they do with this before passing any judgement. It is my hope that they might just use this patent in a purely defensive manner, to ensure that this sort of feature ever gets implemented by anyone (at least for the life of the patent).
Yeah, I know -- probably a bit naive, but a guy has to hope...
Yaz.
That would be the one. Thanks!
Yaz.
I was born here. I guess the cost would be whatever you would value a broken condom at, in early 1970s dollars :).
Yaz.
Thanks, and no need to appologize for the zeal -- you're preaching to the converted here. I use this feature on my PowerBook all the time.
My nieces don't live with me however, and their father (my brother) hasn't been able to afford the cross-country trip to come and visit. So when I play a movie for them, it's at their home, and not mine.
And while I do take my PowerBook with me, leaving it next to the TV for a few hours while they watch movies isn't what I bought it for , and while they're generally very good girls, they do get curious, and I'm not leaving them with my PowerBook unattended :).
Yaz.
I have both myself, so I know how good it is. Mac the Ripper does a great job of stripping out any unwanted UOPs (User Operation Prohibitions), and then I can convert them to H.264, or re-burn them to DVD (or do both :) ).
However, my DVD collection hasn't required this -- the majority of the movies I own don't have obnoxious ads you can't skip. I've done this for one or two discs the girls own that have started to exhibit some wear and tear, but as mentioned elsewhere that as a long-term project has been put off due to the geographical distance currently between us (I moved about 5000km away last fall).
Yaz.
I've actually done this before, however in the case of my nieces, they now live nearly 5000km from where I live (although I am flying out on Friday for a visit).
Not a concern -- I have a dual layer DVD+/-RW drive in my PowerMac.
The DCMA can say whatever it wants -- it holds no sway over what I can and cannot do here in Canada :).
Yaz.
My nieces, who are 4 years old, have a number of childrens DVDs they like to watch (Disney movies and such). These sorts of discs are the absolute WORST for forced advertisements. One of the discs they like to watch (and I forget which one it is) has a 10 MINUTE advertisement for "Madagascar" which can't be skipped.
And do you know what the galling part about this is? They own a copy of Madagascar!. And yet, every time they want to watch this other movie, I have to stand there with my thumb on the fast forward button to get through the advertisement for a movie they already own (you can't skip the track, but at least fast forward works to get through it quicker).
Thank goodness my nieces are generally very well behaved and patient people, and don't seem to mind (or question) the fact that I have to fast forward through these things for them. But still, if you think the DVDs you watch are bad, try pretty much any kids movie. Grrr.
Yaz.
Wouldn't it be more apt to say "RockboxOffersGaplessPlayback"? ;)
FWIW, iTunes permits this at the ripping stage. You need to tell it to "Join CD Tracks" (under "Advanced") prior to ripping. Perhaps not as good a solution, but at least one can listen to the music as intended this way (personally, I really need to get ahold of a new Abbey Road CD so I can re-rip side 2 for gapless playback for the tracks on it which are joined together).
Yaz.
I think the interesting part is what happens if the average person doesn't find what they need within the first few pages of results.
Personally, if what I need isn't within the first 5 pages, I'll try refining my search. The problem is that if your search turns up 300 000 results, sorted by relevence, the tail end is typically going to be packed with a lot of useless junk. And while the data you are looking for could very well be on page 6, the probability by this point is significantly higher that it is going to be buried on page 200. And who has time to wade through that many pages of results?
I find it is significantly more effective to simply refine your query, to either enhance the relevence of what you're looking for, or to remove extraneous results. I'll give you a recent example of the latter: yesterday, I decided to switch my '97 Chevy Lumina sedan from regular crude to pure synthetic motor oil (it just recently ticked over 150k km). So I decided to research some of the different synthetic oils available in my area of the world. One of the searches I did was "Castrol Syntec review". And as early as the second page of the search on Google I started seeing reviews of the video game "Need for Speed". It provided me with a better experience reading multiple reviews of the motor oil by simply refining my search to remove all references for "Need for Speed".
I suppose by this survey, that means I don't look past page 2. However, I personally don't mind mading through a lot more pages of relevent results -- it's just the fact that it is faster to narrow down your search when you start to find a lot of irrelevent results than it is to waste your time with a search that has a lot of similar results which are useless to you makes doing another, more refined search an overall better proposition.
And that's what we have computers for -- to zero in on the data we want, and weed out the stuff we don't want. Currently, however, computers are not mind readers, so even Google needs some help refining your searches to get you the results you want.
Yaz.
The two are probably the same -- it's probably just a matter of difference in how we are using the tools. For my part, I do the vast majority of my data entry in iCal and the OS X Address Book. It is rather rare that I do any entry into the Palm (or the cell phone for that matter).
The jSyncManager could help with this, but I haven't had an opportunity to write a plug-in for it to mate it up with iSync. Here within the "jSyncManager Labs" I've written a Cocoa-Java version of the jSyncManager that runs extraordinarily well, but I need to find the time to implement two things to make it usable for the average Mac user:
Perhaps one day I'll get around to finishing this effort, but for now other things have priority.
Yaz.
You won't get a lot of argument from me, although with flash memory prices coming down as capacities increase, I don't see why devices can't have a certain amount of local storage for those times when they aren't near their paired storage module.
The wireless technologies would have to improve in speed, mind you. Bluetooth v1.x can be slow, and Bluetooth plus a hard drive could be a serious power drain.
But these issues are solvable, and I agree -- being able to have devices which can talk to one another easily is a good idea. While some people would like some sort of convergence where one device does everything, as other have pointed out, this generally results in a device that is so-so at everything, but isn't really that good at anything. I'm for some convergence (it doesn't bother me one bit that my cell phone, PDA, and iPod all have my calendar and Address Book on them, for example -- Apple's iSync fortunately makes this brutally simple), but feel that expandability with wireless technologies is the key way to go.
To be honest, I don't even use my cell phone as a telephone anymore (in the sense of using it as a handset). You won't catch me with a candy bar pressed up against the side of my head -- if I need to have a voice conversation, I'll put on my Bluetooth headset (a Sony HBH 660). It provides a much better conversation experience. My cell phone is just a little box I cary on my belt that provides a Bluetooth-to-GSM gateway (which I also use for Internet access through my PowerBook).
Yaz.
I am a firm believer that a pure PDA device should leave out the cell phone connectivity. Once you add that in, the only way you're going to be able to get one is through the cell companies, which will try to hobble the device.
Besides which, it's an added expense and power draw for the mobile device.
The key to good portability for such a device is REALLY GOOD Bluetooth support, so that you can easily have it connect as required to a real cell phone, and so that you can upgrade your phone or change your service provider to your hearts content without the device having to worry about it. And this way you can use a single cell device for ALL of your portable computing devices, without having the need for each one to have its own cellular subsystem.
Yaz.
There isn't a lot of grant money for people who propose that the world is flat, or that gravity doesn't exist either. But I'm hardly going to lose any sleep over the fact (unless, of course, I fall off the edge of the Earth and float away -- that might cause me to lose some sleep for a little while).
Yaz.