Most Sony equipment I've ever bought has been top notch. Especially their video gear.
With that said...
My first DVD player for the entertainment center was a Sony. It worked fine, but it was very fussy about what disks it would play. Quite a few disks from Netflix wouldn't play in it and it wasn't because they were scratched. I had problems playing brand new disks.
So I bought a Panasonic unit that was a generation newer. It plays every DVD I've ever tossed at it. It doesn't play VCD or SVCD, which would be really nice, but I don't have problems playing any movies anymore.
Despite that experience, I bought a DRU-530A internal 8x Sony burner about 6 months ago and stuffed it into a FW/USB case. It works great. Firmware updates work fine despite the failed to write buffer error at the very end. Once you reboot it's fine and running the new firmware.
The only problem I've had with the 530 is burning at 8x. My Panasonic player in the living room has a tendency to glitch frequently playing 8x burns. Burn the same media at 4x and it's a happy camper. I'm not too surprised that a player that old has issues with 8x burns. Kinda sucks, though, but I'll probably buy a new player for the rack that supports more formats and, being more modern, shouldn't have problems with 8x burns.
So, despite one bad experience (and it wasn't THAT bad), I'm still a Sony fan. Having done professional video before, there's a reason I've always been a Sony man, their video gear is hard to beat, although Panasonic does really well in that market as well.
It does DVD+R and DVD+RW, both single and double layer. It's pretty well known that the + format is less compatible with players than the - format.
So the disks it burns probably have a 50/50 chance of even being playable in my 3rd generation (5 years old) Panasonic DVD Player.
Sure, they'll play on my Mac or PC, but sitting in a computer chair to watch 90-120 minutes of video is far less preferable than kicking it in my easy chair and stuffing a disk into the player in the entertainment center.
The boot chime (or the hong as I like to call it) is stored in the ROM, which is Apple proprietary and not a part of any PC motherboard.
So, to answer your question, no, it won't.
Although, you could grab the boot chime from the net or sample one yourself and configure it to play the sound, but it wouldn't play at the right point in time, at the start of the boot, rather... as it was finishing booting up and Finder was visible, etc...
until "The Great Hard Drive Crash of 1999". Which was followed by "The Great Failure of Retrospect To Restore My Data."
I'd done several backup/restore tests to ensure everything worked fine, and it did. But when the sh*t hit the fan and I REALLY needed it to come through for me, it failed to do the job it was designed to do. I've never used it since, nor will I ever consider trying it again.
For you Star Trek fans: Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice...
I don't even bother with traditional backups anymore. I just periodically copy important data to another system or burn it off to disk.
The Newton got a bad rep in it's early days due to being released too soon. The handwriting recognition just didn't work well enough.
Unfortunately, people never gave it a second chance. The 2000 and 2100, the final models of the Newton had excellent handwriting recognition and a faster processor that was pretty darned fast for the applications the Newton ran.
I'm glad to see holdouts trying to keep the heart beating. With the technology available today, a screamingly fast Newton could be housed in something no larger than your typical Palm. And that mid-90s software is BETTER than today's PalmOS.
I've been a customer of Bungie's since 1994. I've beta tested several of their releases and you can even find my name in the credits for the Marathon authoring tools Forge and Anvil.
Bungie left Mac/Windows development and sold to MS for one reason: money. Not only did MS offer them wheelbarrows full of ca$h, but the console market is larger than the computer game market. So short and long term revenue were ensured to increase. Then came Halo to seal that bargain.
Personally I prefer PC/Mac gaming to consoles. Especially for FPS games like Halo. I'm sorry, but aiming with a tiny joystick vs a mouse just doesn't cut it. But if you will notice, Halo PC was done by Gearbox, not Bungie. And the Mac version was a port of their port.
I'd love to see Halo2 for the PC and Mac, but only if it's a solid, refined release that isn't a hastily done port rushed out to milk a franchise.
Halo PC COULD have been a defining FPS game for computer gaming, instead, it was an also ran that was so buggy, you couldn't play it for 2 days online before you started to notice the severe networking problems, issues with weapon balancing and the horrible implementation of vehicles (indestructible, warping, etc).
I certainly won't be playing it on my XBox unless I can use a mouse and keyboard and should it ever be released for the PC or Mac, I'll have to resist the urge to go buy it (I'm weak and full of hope that is often unfounded) until 2 or 3 months have gone by and level headed non-fanboi reviews by end users (not those always rosy 'professional' reviews) hit the net.
(there's absolutely NO mfg cost and distribution costs are pretty low, this is completely affordable for the fat gluttonous record execs)
60 second stream... fairly low quality is ok, as long as it isn't HORRIBLE quality.
I couldn't care less about a radio station.
Pay per song/album. No subscription BS for me. Individual pricing makes atrist payment much simpler.
File formats: DRM is going to have to be there to make it have a chance of happening, so that limits the file format options...
AAC
If universal DRM were applied to other formats, I'd be interested in:
MP3, FLAC, perhaps OGG if I felt really stupid
Selectable bit rates of 128/192/256/384
Accurate and complete info tags for everything as well as album art for the formats that support that (AAC).
Discount for hard copy purchase. Half the cost of your downloaded files applied to purchase of physical CD. Don't make me pay twice for the same songs, just charge me for mfg/distro costs. Half credit doesn't come close since the industry rapes us on CDs, but it's a compromise I think people can live with.
and finally...
The largest selection known to mankind!
I want to be scoring a Hat Trick in Hell while body slamming Lucifer on a goal run before I can't find a song or album I want.
That's ridiculous, you can't have one rule for the decade and the other rule for the millenia. No consistency. Decades are part of a century which is part of a millenia. They're all related!
It starts on 00 or 01, take your pick.
Nerds that think school = reality believe it begins at 00, realists too blind to see the logic of the nerds think it begins at 01.
As far as I'm concerned, a significant change in the digits = new start point, ie:
1999 to 2000 =
end of decade
end of millenia
end of year
Some would say that it's a year short of a millenia as mankind surely didn't start at year 0 when Christ died. I can see that point of view, but I don't have to agree with it. This is why:
a) go back in time and prove it didn't start at 0. It's not like 2000 year old historical records are accurate. They don't even agree on Christ's actual birthdate!
b) Assuming it WAS 0, we write off a year from the get go to make calculation easier? Does this mean the universe will implode? I think not. Einstein taught us that time was relative.
Feel free to state your opinion, which you may have freely, even if it is wrong.
Green hasn't taken over. Both Blue and Green Screens are commonly used today.
The technique is called Chroma Key in that the color of the screen (the chroma) is a mask for compositing. Which color screen you use depends on what colors are present in the live material. If you have people in blue jeans, a Green Screen is clearly the best option since it won't conflict with it. The same goes for shots with blue skies or green grass. If a shot involved both green grass and blue sky, I'm not sure what they'd use, perhaps a split blue/green?
In all actuality, it doesn't matter WHAT color you use as the chroma key as long as it's not present in the material you don't want masked out. You could use Purple if you wanted. Blue and Green have evolved over time as consistentlyl viable choices.
It's lean, mean and quick. It's got a nice feature set, but I do find myself wanting:
- A more exposed menu to temporarily disable popup blocking.
- An option to open new tabs in the background rather than switching to them.
My favorite aspect of Firefox is that it doesn't try to do everything. It's just a browser, like... well.. IE. Only it's better. It doesn't have that Craptive X stuff.
Web designers have gotten sloppy in the last few years, coding only for IE, causing problems for those that don't use IE. The trend is changing and I welcome our new extra workload for lazy web designer overlords!
A standard doesn't mean squat unless there's a driving reason to support and comply with it. That's not to say that LSB couldn't become that, but that IS the hurdle it must overcome in order to fulfill its true function.
The reason you have to pay to get certified is simple: "Uh... yeah! We ran the tests and they all passed! Cert us!"
I don't know if LSB is doing the cert testing themselves or using a RedHat approach (which is decent, but academically flawed). If they aren't, results aren't truly verifiable and they're just overcharging people for some small amount of administration work. If they are, more power to them. That means they're serious about this and it could be the One True Standard for all.
The problem exists in QuickMenuPro, a javascript suite that many big sites use. The company that makes it has already posted a patch which, I'm sure, the affected sites will take months to deploy.
With this latest information in mind, it is probably safe to go ahead and install the security patch on a G4... at least as long as you can wait for any of the affected sites to post the patch. If you can't, hold off until they do.
This paranoia over USB flash drives and iPods just shows how uninformed, uneducated and like lemmings general IT personnel are.
How is an iPod or a USB flash drive any different than a floppy disk? Or a ZIP disk? or CD-RW?
In the past, most CPUs have had some form of writable removable media drive such as a floppy, zip disk, ls120, etc. USB is the new form of that. So why the panic?
Job security? After all, network security is the new black. Or is it paranoia over USB flash drives and iPods that are the new black?
All locking out these devices does it make it inconvenient for people to do their job. No more storing that Powerpoint presentation on a USB drive and plugging it into the meeting room projector, you'll have to bring the whole computer.
And if someone REALLY wanted to steal corporate data, they'd remove the hard drive, take it home, copy it, and bring it back.
Most of the problems I've encountered are with Safari. The following sites all have similar problems and are entirely unusable with Safari after applying the patch:
Component: Safari
CVE-ID: CAN-2004-0361
Available for: Mac OS X 10.2.8, Mac OS X Server 10.2.8
Impact: A JavaScript array of negative size can cause Safari to access out of bounds memory resulting in an application crash.
Description: Storing objects into a JavaScript array allocated with negative size can overwrite memory. Safari now stops processing JavaScript programs if an array allocation fails.
This security enhancement was previously made available in Safari 1.0.3, and is being applied inside the Mac OS X 10.2.8 operating system as an extra layer of protection for customers who have not installed that version of Safari. This is a specific fix for Mac OS X 10.2.8 and the issue does not exist in Mac OS X 10.3 or later systems. ----
This particular fix is specific to 10.2.8 and NOT 10.3 or later, yet appears it may install with the 10.3.x update. This could well be the cause of the problems. This is further supported by the fact that all of the known sites that fail to render properly use JavaScript 1.2 extensively.
Word is the Safari team is aware of the problem and working on it.
There have been two waves of tablet PCs in the industry: The original with Go, etc back in the early to mid 90s and the recent wave that fell flat on it's face.
This history makes it a rather risky move for anyone to enter that market. I just don't see Apple making this move. I see them sticking with their excellent laptops.
Now I do see them considering more integration between computers and the iPod. Apple may well license iPod technology to other vendors than Motorola (for their upcoming iTunes compatible phone). Before too long 4gb of memory in a cell phone is going to be commonplace and that's what the iPod mini has now. I think Apple's deal with Motorola shows that Apple knows they won't be able to sell the hardware forever, so they've taken steps to move the technology beyond that.
I think an iPodPhone is a great idea. One less gadget to forget to grab on my way out the door in the morning. I don't see Apple making the phone, though, so count out your dreams of an iPhone. An iPod-white SonyEricsson T630 with 8gb of memory sounds great to me, though! Talk about a big selection of MP3 ringtones!
FireFox is just mozilla without the mail and news stuff. Lots of non-slashdotters know about it.
It's a nice, fast, very standards compliant browser. Any web site that it doesn't work with it not conforming to standards spec. It's probably been coded by some web hacker on a 21" monitor with 1600x1200 resolution using IE6 and only tested in that configuration.
I know MS is the marketshare king and all but the web was designed to be platform agnostic. Using CCS elements and html tags that ONLY IE supports is just plain dumb.
Did you know that the web was invented on a NeXT box in Switzerland? Not on a PC in Redmond. And this was years before NeXt bought Apple. Or Apple bought NeXT depending on your point of view.
In any case, the solution to the problem is to ditch IE until it plays nice with others. Until it doesn't have gaping holes. If users switch in droves off of IE, websites will have to be written in a compatible manner. And this will be good for everyone.
Not for the same amount. For the same amount plus $900 and taxes.
And a year is a pretty long time in tech market.
You never buy too soon. Buy when you have the need and the money. There is ALWAYS something better in the pipeline. If you wait, you will ALWAYS be waiting.
FreeBSD is a pretty good OS as far as unix variants goes. It's reliability is well known, the linux compatibility is nice and if you don't touch it at all after you install the OS, everything works pretty well. The problem is that Linux gets all the press, Windows owns the market and OS X has FreeBSD underneath and a GUI that kicks it's butt to hell and back (and any X based interface for that matter).
I've always been a BSD fan when it comes to my Unix flavors and I just started working for a company that bases it's products off FreeBSD. So I have a FreeBSD workstation set up in my cube, like pretty much everyone else. I decided to install Mozilla on my pretty much stock as a rock 4.9 system. Dependencies made me upgrade a few things and next thing I know, Nautilus crashes on launch. I fuss with it, start reinstalling new versions of every library known to man that's remotely related and after a week, I gave up and installed 4.10. Had it working great until I added KDE into the mix, now, once again, Nautilus crashes on launch, but for another reason. Some lib got upgraded and broke all the linkage.
My current plan is to install distros only, no packages and then just do ports manually using make install. It was still compiling crap when I left work today, but I've written off experimenting with KDE and I'm just going to stick with Gnome as I prefer it anyways.
As long as you don't try to upgrade anything, FreeBSD is rock solid, powerful and pretty straightforward for a unix system. But you'll be damned to hell if you want to install Apache 2.0 or upgrade something. You don't see this issues with Windows or OS X. And while I've run into rpm hell on Linux (I do source only now), I don't recall having such problems on a Linux box. Then again, I'd never use Linux as a workstation unless I HAD to...
Kind of sad that FreeBSD is slowly dying, I think it's better than Linux. But it's probably too late to shift the winds of change, so we'll be stuck wtih the oddities of Linux forevermore, at least for that Unix like alternative to windows on Intel platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
Most Sony equipment I've ever bought has been top notch. Especially their video gear.
With that said...
My first DVD player for the entertainment center was a Sony. It worked fine, but it was very fussy about what disks it would play. Quite a few disks from Netflix wouldn't play in it and it wasn't because they were scratched. I had problems playing brand new disks.
So I bought a Panasonic unit that was a generation newer. It plays every DVD I've ever tossed at it. It doesn't play VCD or SVCD, which would be really nice, but I don't have problems playing any movies anymore.
Despite that experience, I bought a DRU-530A internal 8x Sony burner about 6 months ago and stuffed it into a FW/USB case. It works great. Firmware updates work fine despite the failed to write buffer error at the very end. Once you reboot it's fine and running the new firmware.
The only problem I've had with the 530 is burning at 8x. My Panasonic player in the living room has a tendency to glitch frequently playing 8x burns. Burn the same media at 4x and it's a happy camper. I'm not too surprised that a player that old has issues with 8x burns. Kinda sucks, though, but I'll probably buy a new player for the rack that supports more formats and, being more modern, shouldn't have problems with 8x burns.
So, despite one bad experience (and it wasn't THAT bad), I'm still a Sony fan. Having done professional video before, there's a reason I've always been a Sony man, their video gear is hard to beat, although Panasonic does really well in that market as well.
It does DVD+R and DVD+RW, both single and double layer. It's pretty well known that the + format is less compatible with players than the - format.
So the disks it burns probably have a 50/50 chance of even being playable in my 3rd generation (5 years old) Panasonic DVD Player.
Sure, they'll play on my Mac or PC, but sitting in a computer chair to watch 90-120 minutes of video is far less preferable than kicking it in my easy chair and stuffing a disk into the player in the entertainment center.
If they make a -R version I might consider one.
The boot chime (or the hong as I like to call it) is stored in the ROM, which is Apple proprietary and not a part of any PC motherboard.
... as it was finishing booting up and Finder was visible, etc...
So, to answer your question, no, it won't.
Although, you could grab the boot chime from the net or sample one yourself and configure it to play the sound, but it wouldn't play at the right point in time, at the start of the boot, rather
Apple just released an entirely new version of the iPods like 2 months ago.
I don't see this new iPod, if it is REAL, appearing on shelves for 6 months.
until "The Great Hard Drive Crash of 1999". Which was followed by "The Great Failure of Retrospect To Restore My Data."
I'd done several backup/restore tests to ensure everything worked fine, and it did. But when the sh*t hit the fan and I REALLY needed it to come through for me, it failed to do the job it was designed to do. I've never used it since, nor will I ever consider trying it again.
For you Star Trek fans: Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice...
I don't even bother with traditional backups anymore. I just periodically copy important data to another system or burn it off to disk.
The Newton got a bad rep in it's early days due to being released too soon. The handwriting recognition just didn't work well enough.
Unfortunately, people never gave it a second chance. The 2000 and 2100, the final models of the Newton had excellent handwriting recognition and a faster processor that was pretty darned fast for the applications the Newton ran.
I'm glad to see holdouts trying to keep the heart beating. With the technology available today, a screamingly fast Newton could be housed in something no larger than your typical Palm. And that mid-90s software is BETTER than today's PalmOS.
Oh, and Graffiti SUCKS!
"Ballmer thinks Apple will control digital media market"
Right in the article description it says:
"critical mass will have to come from the PC."
Well, I got news for ya monkeyboy, the iPod owns the PC platform in case you haven't been paying attention (and it would seem he has not been).
The iPod has 50% of the marketshare and it's only showing signs of growth.
Looks like you missed the boat, monkeyboy!
I've been a customer of Bungie's since 1994. I've beta tested several of their releases and you can even find my name in the credits for the Marathon authoring tools Forge and Anvil.
Bungie left Mac/Windows development and sold to MS for one reason: money. Not only did MS offer them wheelbarrows full of ca$h, but the console market is larger than the computer game market. So short and long term revenue were ensured to increase. Then came Halo to seal that bargain.
Personally I prefer PC/Mac gaming to consoles. Especially for FPS games like Halo. I'm sorry, but aiming with a tiny joystick vs a mouse just doesn't cut it. But if you will notice, Halo PC was done by Gearbox, not Bungie. And the Mac version was a port of their port.
I'd love to see Halo2 for the PC and Mac, but only if it's a solid, refined release that isn't a hastily done port rushed out to milk a franchise.
Halo PC COULD have been a defining FPS game for computer gaming, instead, it was an also ran that was so buggy, you couldn't play it for 2 days online before you started to notice the severe networking problems, issues with weapon balancing and the horrible implementation of vehicles (indestructible, warping, etc).
I certainly won't be playing it on my XBox unless I can use a mouse and keyboard and should it ever be released for the PC or Mac, I'll have to resist the urge to go buy it (I'm weak and full of hope that is often unfounded) until 2 or 3 months have gone by and level headed non-fanboi reviews by end users (not those always rosy 'professional' reviews) hit the net.
My dream list:
... fairly low quality is ok, as long as it isn't HORRIBLE quality.
$0.49 song pricing
$5.99 album pricing
(there's absolutely NO mfg cost and distribution costs are pretty low, this is completely affordable for the fat gluttonous record execs)
60 second stream
I couldn't care less about a radio station.
Pay per song/album. No subscription BS for me. Individual pricing makes atrist payment much simpler.
File formats: DRM is going to have to be there to make it have a chance of happening, so that limits the file format options...
AAC
If universal DRM were applied to other formats, I'd be interested in:
MP3, FLAC, perhaps OGG if I felt really stupid
Selectable bit rates of 128/192/256/384
Accurate and complete info tags for everything as well as album art for the formats that support that (AAC).
Discount for hard copy purchase. Half the cost of your downloaded files applied to purchase of physical CD. Don't make me pay twice for the same songs, just charge me for mfg/distro costs. Half credit doesn't come close since the industry rapes us on CDs, but it's a compromise I think people can live with.
and finally...
The largest selection known to mankind!
I want to be scoring a Hat Trick in Hell while body slamming Lucifer on a goal run before I can't find a song or album I want.
That's ridiculous, you can't have one rule for the decade and the other rule for the millenia. No consistency. Decades are part of a century which is part of a millenia. They're all related!
It starts on 00 or 01, take your pick.
Nerds that think school = reality believe it begins at 00, realists too blind to see the logic of the nerds think it begins at 01.
As far as I'm concerned, a significant change in the digits = new start point, ie:
1999 to 2000 =
end of decade
end of millenia
end of year
Some would say that it's a year short of a millenia as mankind surely didn't start at year 0 when Christ died. I can see that point of view, but I don't have to agree with it. This is why:
a) go back in time and prove it didn't start at 0. It's not like 2000 year old historical records are accurate. They don't even agree on Christ's actual birthdate!
b) Assuming it WAS 0, we write off a year from the get go to make calculation easier? Does this mean the universe will implode? I think not. Einstein taught us that time was relative.
Feel free to state your opinion, which you may have freely, even if it is wrong.
According to reports, Jesus bled when he was crucified.
No, he's not saying that. It was a stylistic comparison not a qualitative one.
version 0.9.3
Just upgraded to 1.0PR and noticed a few desirable additions, but it still lacks some key features. Coming along nicely, though.
Green hasn't taken over. Both Blue and Green Screens are commonly used today.
The technique is called Chroma Key in that the color of the screen (the chroma) is a mask for compositing. Which color screen you use depends on what colors are present in the live material. If you have people in blue jeans, a Green Screen is clearly the best option since it won't conflict with it. The same goes for shots with blue skies or green grass. If a shot involved both green grass and blue sky, I'm not sure what they'd use, perhaps a split blue/green?
In all actuality, it doesn't matter WHAT color you use as the chroma key as long as it's not present in the material you don't want masked out. You could use Purple if you wanted. Blue and Green have evolved over time as consistentlyl viable choices.
It's lean, mean and quick. It's got a nice feature set, but I do find myself wanting:
- A more exposed menu to temporarily disable popup blocking.
- An option to open new tabs in the background rather than switching to them.
My favorite aspect of Firefox is that it doesn't try to do everything. It's just a browser, like... well.. IE. Only it's better. It doesn't have that Craptive X stuff.
Web designers have gotten sloppy in the last few years, coding only for IE, causing problems for those that don't use IE. The trend is changing and I welcome our new extra workload for lazy web designer overlords!
Standards, there are so many to choose from...
... yeah! We ran the tests and they all passed! Cert us!"
A standard doesn't mean squat unless there's a driving reason to support and comply with it. That's not to say that LSB couldn't become that, but that IS the hurdle it must overcome in order to fulfill its true function.
The reason you have to pay to get certified is simple:
"Uh
I don't know if LSB is doing the cert testing themselves or using a RedHat approach (which is decent, but academically flawed). If they aren't, results aren't truly verifiable and they're just overcharging people for some small amount of administration work. If they are, more power to them. That means they're serious about this and it could be the One True Standard for all.
The linked picture title who's that next to her...
That picture is of Jessica Alba on the left and Jennifer Garner (of Alias and Daredevil) on the right.
UPDATE:
The problem exists in QuickMenuPro, a javascript suite that many big sites use. The company that makes it has already posted a patch which, I'm sure, the affected sites will take months to deploy.
With this latest information in mind, it is probably safe to go ahead and install the security patch on a G4... at least as long as you can wait for any of the affected sites to post the patch. If you can't, hold off until they do.
This paranoia over USB flash drives and iPods just shows how uninformed, uneducated and like lemmings general IT personnel are.
How is an iPod or a USB flash drive any different than a floppy disk? Or a ZIP disk? or CD-RW?
In the past, most CPUs have had some form of writable removable media drive such as a floppy, zip disk, ls120, etc. USB is the new form of that. So why the panic?
Job security? After all, network security is the new black. Or is it paranoia over USB flash drives and iPods that are the new black?
All locking out these devices does it make it inconvenient for people to do their job. No more storing that Powerpoint presentation on a USB drive and plugging it into the meeting room projector, you'll have to bring the whole computer.
And if someone REALLY wanted to steal corporate data, they'd remove the hard drive, take it home, copy it, and bring it back.
Most of the problems I've encountered are with Safari. The following sites all have similar problems and are entirely unusable with Safari after applying the patch:
7 98 :
http://www.fedex.com/
http://www.compusa.com/
http://www.bestbuy.com/
I'm sure there are many others. G5 systems do not appear to be affected. G4s are.
As noted on http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61
Component: Safari
CVE-ID: CAN-2004-0361
Available for: Mac OS X 10.2.8, Mac OS X Server 10.2.8
Impact: A JavaScript array of negative size can cause Safari to access out of bounds memory resulting in an application crash.
Description: Storing objects into a JavaScript array allocated with negative size can overwrite memory. Safari now stops processing JavaScript programs if an array allocation fails.
This security enhancement was previously made available in Safari 1.0.3, and is being applied inside the Mac OS X 10.2.8 operating system as an extra layer of protection for customers who have not installed that version of Safari. This is a specific fix for Mac OS X 10.2.8 and the issue does not exist in Mac OS X 10.3 or later systems.
----
This particular fix is specific to 10.2.8 and NOT 10.3 or later, yet appears it may install with the 10.3.x update. This could well be the cause of the problems. This is further supported by the fact that all of the known sites that fail to render properly use JavaScript 1.2 extensively.
Word is the Safari team is aware of the problem and working on it.
Could this mean that Linux will die this year?
Yup, right along with Apple. They've been slated to fold ever year for the last 20 years.
Welcome to the club, Linux! And Happy Birthday!
There have been two waves of tablet PCs in the industry: The original with Go, etc back in the early to mid 90s and the recent wave that fell flat on it's face.
This history makes it a rather risky move for anyone to enter that market. I just don't see Apple making this move. I see them sticking with their excellent laptops.
Now I do see them considering more integration between computers and the iPod. Apple may well license iPod technology to other vendors than Motorola (for their upcoming iTunes compatible phone). Before too long 4gb of memory in a cell phone is going to be commonplace and that's what the iPod mini has now. I think Apple's deal with Motorola shows that Apple knows they won't be able to sell the hardware forever, so they've taken steps to move the technology beyond that.
I think an iPodPhone is a great idea. One less gadget to forget to grab on my way out the door in the morning. I don't see Apple making the phone, though, so count out your dreams of an iPhone. An iPod-white SonyEricsson T630 with 8gb of memory sounds great to me, though! Talk about a big selection of MP3 ringtones!
FireFox is just mozilla without the mail and news stuff. Lots of non-slashdotters know about it.
It's a nice, fast, very standards compliant browser. Any web site that it doesn't work with it not conforming to standards spec. It's probably been coded by some web hacker on a 21" monitor with 1600x1200 resolution using IE6 and only tested in that configuration.
I know MS is the marketshare king and all but the web was designed to be platform agnostic. Using CCS elements and html tags that ONLY IE supports is just plain dumb.
Did you know that the web was invented on a NeXT box in Switzerland? Not on a PC in Redmond. And this was years before NeXt bought Apple. Or Apple bought NeXT depending on your point of view.
In any case, the solution to the problem is to ditch IE until it plays nice with others. Until it doesn't have gaping holes. If users switch in droves off of IE, websites will have to be written in a compatible manner. And this will be good for everyone.
Not for the same amount. For the same amount plus $900 and taxes.
And a year is a pretty long time in tech market.
You never buy too soon. Buy when you have the need and the money. There is ALWAYS something better in the pipeline. If you wait, you will ALWAYS be waiting.
FreeBSD is a pretty good OS as far as unix variants goes. It's reliability is well known, the linux compatibility is nice and if you don't touch it at all after you install the OS, everything works pretty well. The problem is that Linux gets all the press, Windows owns the market and OS X has FreeBSD underneath and a GUI that kicks it's butt to hell and back (and any X based interface for that matter).
I've always been a BSD fan when it comes to my Unix flavors and I just started working for a company that bases it's products off FreeBSD. So I have a FreeBSD workstation set up in my cube, like pretty much everyone else. I decided to install Mozilla on my pretty much stock as a rock 4.9 system. Dependencies made me upgrade a few things and next thing I know, Nautilus crashes on launch. I fuss with it, start reinstalling new versions of every library known to man that's remotely related and after a week, I gave up and installed 4.10. Had it working great until I added KDE into the mix, now, once again, Nautilus crashes on launch, but for another reason. Some lib got upgraded and broke all the linkage.
My current plan is to install distros only, no packages and then just do ports manually using make install. It was still compiling crap when I left work today, but I've written off experimenting with KDE and I'm just going to stick with Gnome as I prefer it anyways.
As long as you don't try to upgrade anything, FreeBSD is rock solid, powerful and pretty straightforward for a unix system. But you'll be damned to hell if you want to install Apache 2.0 or upgrade something. You don't see this issues with Windows or OS X. And while I've run into rpm hell on Linux (I do source only now), I don't recall having such problems on a Linux box. Then again, I'd never use Linux as a workstation unless I HAD to...
Kind of sad that FreeBSD is slowly dying, I think it's better than Linux. But it's probably too late to shift the winds of change, so we'll be stuck wtih the oddities of Linux forevermore, at least for that Unix like alternative to windows on Intel platforms.