Obviously this is a response to Apple's back-to-school promotion, which they have run for several years. Last year that program got you exactly the same amount in credit ($199) towards any iPod when you bought any Apple laptop.
One advantage of the Apple program is that you could trade up and get a higher priced iPod touch model and still get the $199 in credit. It looks like the Microsoft program only gets you the slightly gimped 4GB Xbox with no trade-up. A lot of students might be bummed when they realize they need a $100 hard drive accessory to play a lot of the games.
Not a bad deal, but I wonder how many Xboxes will be given to students who were going to buy a laptop anyway. I think the Apple motivation is obvious: to get students to switch to Apple. Not sure if the formula works the same with Microsoft.
At the bottom the article links to John Gruber's "Ronco Spray-on Usability" article, which also provides a lot of background on the challenges of good interface design.
In the original article, I think the most important point is number 8 - "Scratching their own itch." I can see how programmers interested in, for example, having a stable and scalable web server would work on Apache. I don't see the same passion coming from a human interface designer to fix, for example, the horrible user interface for joining wireless networks on desktop linux.
In my opinion the only way the user interface will get fixed is if Ubuntu or another distro pays for expert user interface folks to fix UI issues. I don't see the volunteer community being up to the task.
open source software might actually create competition for Apple's "official" developers
Riiiiiiight, just like the homebrew scene creates competition for Sony, Nintendo, and the Xbox 360. If someone want to goof around with doing homebrew iPhone apps, great! But, there is no way that jailbroken apps will be any sort of successful business model for the iPhone. No business will pay for it or install it, and too few consumers will be brave enough to jailbreak. 40% of iPhones are jailbroken? Ridiculous.
If devs really want to do open source phone applications why aren't they using Android or OpenMoko?:)
"Lovely laser printers that became ultimately useless."
Gotta call you on this one, we've still got several LaserWriters around the office still going strong, and I still see them around other offices. Those things were tanks!
Step 1: Log into.Mac at mac.com - notice big LOG OUT text button on the top right Step 2: Click to go to my iDisk - iDisk pops up in a new window Step 3: Finish using iDisk, close window Step 4: Click the big LOG OUT text button
dotMac also times out after 30 minutes and forces a re-authentication.
In other news, your computer is broadcasting an IP Address RIGHT NOW.
In summary from that link: - The "imei" field being sent to Apple isn't your actual IMEI in plain text. - The weather and the stock widget both contain different values for the imei field, so there must be some sort of encoding or salt added to the actual IMEI value for each one. - At this point there's no empirical data that the imei field data being sent has anything to do with your actual IMEI, but it does appear to be some sort of identifier. - Also, I tried a reboot and the data in the imei field is persistent, it stays the same after a reboot.
Someone told me that one of the *old* powerbooks has a replacable top panel in which there was some sort of official apple solar panel option. I did some googling but couldn't find any evidence of that.
My cubicle is standing height with a high-chair to sit in. I find I probably stand about half the time at work. Now that I'm used to it it seems much more productive to me, and it's nice to have the option to stand or sit.
At my (cupertino based) employer I think pretty much everyone gets the option to have a standing or sitting configuration in their cubicle/office.
Paul Thurrot used to be a lot worse, but he still drops the occasional Apple troll. Check out this story from today, for example. He mentions a nice article from the Apple support kbase on letterboxing and such, which clearly in the article is geared towards iMovie users, and then says "Coming next week from the iPod maker: Personal advice about dating."
Yeah Paul, Apple has no products with anything to do with video playback or video content creation, right?
To Paul's credit, he's come around a lot and rarely does stuff like this lately. When he does, though, it makes me scratch my head.
I suspect, but can't prove, that the "Evangilista" still exists (formally or infomally, sponsord by Apple or not). There's several Slashot users that one can count on only seeing when there's some bad Apple news to spin.
You're mixing up two different announcements in the article.
IBM announced a dual-core 970FX. That's what's currently used in the PowerMac line at dual 2.0 and dual 2.3 frequencies. It's definitely not low-power and still sports the large heatsinks used on the prior PowerMacs.
They also announced a single core low-power 970FX at 1.4GHz and 1.6GHz. That's slower than the current 1.67GHz G4 in the last Powerbook, and the Powerbook was already a slow machine. So, it looks to me like the move to a 1.6GHz low-power G5 just wouldn't have been enough performance to make the change worth it, while Intel had a dual core 1.83GHz Core Duo ready to go.
Also, the max power consumption is a bit misleading, since Core Duo can shut down parts of itself to save power. Discussed here. I'm not sure what the power consumption is though, or if the MacBooks even use that feature.
The Core Duo is a great laptop chip, have you seen the benchmarks and reviews lately? IBM had no real roadmap for a laptop version of the G5. Shortly after the switch was announced, IBM made some vague statement saying that they had a low power G5 design, and they could have made it if Apple wanted it. I seriously doubt that their chip would have come near the performance of the Core Duo, or that it would be ready today.
The CPU benchmark numbers tell the tale. The Core Duo is 4-5x faster than the 1.67GHz G4 in the PowerBook, but only 2x faster than the single-core 1.8GHz G5 in the old iMac. So you can assume that the Core Duo is at least twice as fast core-for-core as the G4, but about the same core-for-core as the G5.
The G5 was a decent chip, IBM just didn't have a mobile chip to sell Apple and was too distracted by Xbox 2 and PS3 to care.
I'm calling you out on the "from day one" statement. The AMD K5 was not exactly the pinnacle of performance, features, or price competitiveness. AMD is doing well now, no argument there. I'd like to see an article that compares total chip chipments worldwide, though, rather than say limited statements like "52% of all retail desktop sales, in the USA, in the 4th quarter".
In related news, my pants were the leading distribution method for iPod nanos, in the USA, in California, in my house, yesterday.
51. Clean your iPod with brasso based on a slashdot comment. Take pics and post about it on your weblog. Get an amazing amount of traffic. Watch the adsense dollars flow in.
I'm not saying I'm retiring soon or anything, but it was surprising to see the checks from google show up. Bonus!:)
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously this is a response to Apple's back-to-school promotion, which they have run for several years. Last year that program got you exactly the same amount in credit ($199) towards any iPod when you bought any Apple laptop.
One advantage of the Apple program is that you could trade up and get a higher priced iPod touch model and still get the $199 in credit. It looks like the Microsoft program only gets you the slightly gimped 4GB Xbox with no trade-up. A lot of students might be bummed when they realize they need a $100 hard drive accessory to play a lot of the games.
Not a bad deal, but I wonder how many Xboxes will be given to students who were going to buy a laptop anyway. I think the Apple motivation is obvious: to get students to switch to Apple. Not sure if the formula works the same with Microsoft.
Are there similar efforts, existing or proposed, in other countries?
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=internet+content+regulation
At the bottom the article links to John Gruber's "Ronco Spray-on Usability" article, which also provides a lot of background on the challenges of good interface design.
In the original article, I think the most important point is number 8 - "Scratching their own itch." I can see how programmers interested in, for example, having a stable and scalable web server would work on Apache. I don't see the same passion coming from a human interface designer to fix, for example, the horrible user interface for joining wireless networks on desktop linux.
In my opinion the only way the user interface will get fixed is if Ubuntu or another distro pays for expert user interface folks to fix UI issues. I don't see the volunteer community being up to the task.
open source software might actually create competition for Apple's "official" developers
:)
Riiiiiiight, just like the homebrew scene creates competition for Sony, Nintendo, and the Xbox 360. If someone want to goof around with doing homebrew iPhone apps, great! But, there is no way that jailbroken apps will be any sort of successful business model for the iPhone. No business will pay for it or install it, and too few consumers will be brave enough to jailbreak. 40% of iPhones are jailbroken? Ridiculous.
If devs really want to do open source phone applications why aren't they using Android or OpenMoko?
"Lovely laser printers that became ultimately useless."
Gotta call you on this one, we've still got several LaserWriters around the office still going strong, and I still see them around other offices. Those things were tanks!
This story is stupid.
.Mac at mac.com - notice big LOG OUT text button on the top right
Step 1: Log into
Step 2: Click to go to my iDisk - iDisk pops up in a new window
Step 3: Finish using iDisk, close window
Step 4: Click the big LOG OUT text button
dotMac also times out after 30 minutes and forces a re-authentication.
In other news, your computer is broadcasting an IP Address RIGHT NOW.
I'm off work this week, so I went ahead and did it.
http://todd.dailey.info/archives/2007/11/19/the-iphone-imei-echo-chamber/
In summary from that link:
- The "imei" field being sent to Apple isn't your actual IMEI in plain text.
- The weather and the stock widget both contain different values for the imei field, so there must be some sort of encoding or salt added to the actual IMEI value for each one.
- At this point there's no empirical data that the imei field data being sent has anything to do with your actual IMEI, but it does appear to be some sort of identifier.
- Also, I tried a reboot and the data in the imei field is persistent, it stays the same after a reboot.
Hello Mr. Literal, I was joking! ===> smiley ===
"Now you're just being peeved and ticked"
"You mean pedantic."
"Case in point."
Once again copying Apple: PowerBook: Solar Powered Solutions - and only 13 years after this support article was written. :)
Pics here.
Someone told me that one of the *old* powerbooks has a replacable top panel in which there was some sort of official apple solar panel option. I did some googling but couldn't find any evidence of that.
If you use OS X then the Apple Learning Interchange is a really good resource site. It has hundreds of teacher-contributed lesson plans.
Hey, I was running Linux on Parallels on the MacBook Pro in the Apple booth.
:)
So there.
No, the hinterlands of SC1 :(
My cubicle is standing height with a high-chair to sit in. I find I probably stand about half the time at work. Now that I'm used to it it seems much more productive to me, and it's nice to have the option to stand or sit.
At my (cupertino based) employer I think pretty much everyone gets the option to have a standing or sitting configuration in their cubicle/office.
Paul Thurrot used to be a lot worse, but he still drops the occasional Apple troll. Check out this story from today, for example. He mentions a nice article from the Apple support kbase on letterboxing and such, which clearly in the article is geared towards iMovie users, and then says "Coming next week from the iPod maker: Personal advice about dating."
Yeah Paul, Apple has no products with anything to do with video playback or video content creation, right?
To Paul's credit, he's come around a lot and rarely does stuff like this lately. When he does, though, it makes me scratch my head.
Hey, I post at other times too!
How is 32bit x86 at all important on a system with a 2GB memory capacity?
Will a 64-bit processor somehow be able to address the memory that you can't add more efficiently?
You're mixing up two different announcements in the article.
IBM announced a dual-core 970FX. That's what's currently used in the PowerMac line at dual 2.0 and dual 2.3 frequencies. It's definitely not low-power and still sports the large heatsinks used on the prior PowerMacs.
They also announced a single core low-power 970FX at 1.4GHz and 1.6GHz. That's slower than the current 1.67GHz G4 in the last Powerbook, and the Powerbook was already a slow machine. So, it looks to me like the move to a 1.6GHz low-power G5 just wouldn't have been enough performance to make the change worth it, while Intel had a dual core 1.83GHz Core Duo ready to go.
Also, the max power consumption is a bit misleading, since Core Duo can shut down parts of itself to save power. Discussed here. I'm not sure what the power consumption is though, or if the MacBooks even use that feature.
zing! :D
Um, yeah, how about that second source 8088 chip they made in 1982. What a screamer!!! And who remembers the glory days of the Am386 and Am486?!? :)
The Core Duo is a great laptop chip, have you seen the benchmarks and reviews lately? IBM had no real roadmap for a laptop version of the G5. Shortly after the switch was announced, IBM made some vague statement saying that they had a low power G5 design, and they could have made it if Apple wanted it. I seriously doubt that their chip would have come near the performance of the Core Duo, or that it would be ready today.
The CPU benchmark numbers tell the tale. The Core Duo is 4-5x faster than the 1.67GHz G4 in the PowerBook, but only 2x faster than the single-core 1.8GHz G5 in the old iMac. So you can assume that the Core Duo is at least twice as fast core-for-core as the G4, but about the same core-for-core as the G5.
The G5 was a decent chip, IBM just didn't have a mobile chip to sell Apple and was too distracted by Xbox 2 and PS3 to care.
I'm calling you out on the "from day one" statement. The AMD K5 was not exactly the pinnacle of performance, features, or price competitiveness. AMD is doing well now, no argument there. I'd like to see an article that compares total chip chipments worldwide, though, rather than say limited statements like "52% of all retail desktop sales, in the USA, in the 4th quarter".
In related news, my pants were the leading distribution method for iPod nanos, in the USA, in California, in my house, yesterday.
Pretty accessible. It's easy enough to put your iSight and iChat into "auto-answer" mode, which would be handy to catch dumb thieves. :)
Also, I personally use and like Evocam. It's great webcam software and scriptable, and can do the "auto capture every x minutes" thing.
There is a small green light that comes on whenever the camera is active.
Thank you for the information.
because..... I would have modded the post a troll?
:)
Too late!
51. Clean your iPod with brasso based on a slashdot comment. Take pics and post about it on your weblog. Get an amazing amount of traffic. Watch the adsense dollars flow in.
:)
I'm not saying I'm retiring soon or anything, but it was surprising to see the checks from google show up. Bonus!