Well, I just verified that our Dell Dimensions (Pentium 4 machines) don't have a USB boot option. So that means that 95%, if not 100%
Wow -- I'm quite amused discovering this actually, learned something new:). I rarely deal with Dell computers, Most computers in the companies (I can say for sure in this region -- not sure about the rest of the country) come from HP/Compaq, IBM, Lenovo and Acer (Acer doesn't provide corporate support like the other companies do though).
So that means that 95%, if not 100% (I haven't checked the few oddballs and laptops), of the PCs here cannot boot from USB.
Dell needs a bigger presence than just being popular in the USA and in the UK (I don't live in either countries right now -- I also haven't even seen a Dell or Sony system for a few months now just to give you a picture -- Did see them all the time in the UK though).
So I'm not really sure what your experience is or why it should be so different than mine.
Well, even if one vendor isn't as a popular... No -- it doesn't make sense to me.
Is USB booting only common in the last year or two?
Hmm, had three-four year old PCs are doing it, so I doubt so.
This is certainly far more rare than PCs that cannot boot USB.
Could be a number of things causing it though -- dirty laser, the actual media not of a reasonable quality etc - I just never bothered investigating why this happens occasionally (a lot faster to use alternatives).
No, I mean booting using the harddrive/OS on another computer. Not netbooting or serving out a disk image via USB.
This is somewhat of a grey line in my opinion, one can achieve the same results if one set it up that way.
Unless you specifically tweak the machine, differeing HAL setups will cause bluescreen last I checked.
Never experienced that issue (did have issues though with bad drivers on some hardware).
Actually, I'd probably use VMware Player on a portable drive. Simple and elegant. Kinda like booting Macs off various media.;-)
Good idea, although I don't it would work too well on locked down workstations (non-administrator access).
WoW is actually quite low bandwidth, on par with web browsing. Doesn't often hit 3k per sec. WoW would be playable on a 28.8 modem if your latency is low enough.
I've seen it clog up networks badly for a few days when there are new updates.
Good luck getting it to boot reliably. I tried making a Linux on USB system and found that, even though it would technically support the hardware, many PCs just didn't have the option to boot it.
Not my experience.
The only way to get a reliable PC boot media is to use CD/DVD but then writing persistent data and maintenance become a pain.
Also not my experience, often I come across CD/DVD-roms that just mess up reading some CDs, while the same CDs work fine in others (nothing todo with burn speeds), I've also had this issue on Mac hardware.
"Most people"? I have never once, in my 12 years of PC tech experience, seen someone use such a setup on with a PC.
Should I phrase it, "Most people who do this sort of thing" instead?
If it is so simple to setup, why does every Windows tech I hve ever known use a DOS boot disk/CD to run virus scanners, Ghost, and the like?
Strange, most windows techs I know would use BartPE for any recovery work on a unbootable system at remote locations while at business locations they would use network booting into recovery tools. But I am not sure what you're trying to say. How is inserting some DOS cd to run outdated virus scanners about running your own little desktop off a portable device?
For "most people," a portable, bootable "Windows" system means a DOS floppy image with an NTFS driver or the XP install media...
For most people, a portable "Windows" system is a laptop.
Maybe in theory you can get Windows to to boot on a significant subset of PCs off of USB, but only in the Mac world is it common practice.
It isn't a theory when I've already done it.
Also, did you know that you can boot one Mac off of another Mac acting as as an external Firewire drive?
Yes
You can't do anything even remotely like this on a PC without physically moving drives around.
I've booted standard x86 systems off Ethernet and USB using another PC -- I do admit it isn't as easy to setup though.
And even then, there is a good chance that Windows will simply refuse to boot on anything but the machine it was installed on.
Strange, the worst I've seen is that Windows asks you to reactivate it, but you can still use the computer despite that message.
WTF are you talking about? What does you rusting Amiga have to do with anything?
I don't get what you mean about 'rusting', what I do know is that Amiga is still developing, and it's still on the PPC platform, the Mac line of PPC products are ending. If you're going to use the word "PPC", I'm going to assume the architecture, and computers on that architecture, just as much as if you say "Intel", I'm going to assume computers that use the Intel processor, and x86 being the architecture and so on.
And why would I want to boot Intel OS X on a PC when I have a workplace and home full of Macs?
I miss-understood you it seems.
Yes, but it is mostly a utility, not a general pupose computing device.
By the way, ever heard of Blackdog? So far I think it's the 'neatest' way to take a mobile desktop with you -- although I haven't bought one yet, so I can't say this is a opinion drawn from experience.
You can boot Windows off a iPod or any other USB device too. To be able todo this simply, one usually gets WinPE and the few of it's many plugins that lets it boot off USB devices.
OS X isn't like Windows where the OS is tied to a particular hardware configuration.
Actually windows isn't... Infact there are options in Windows that let you setup multiple hardware profiles, so when you boot you can be asked which specific profile you want to use... Or you can just use one profile like most people do and have all the hardware supported under that.
You can even make a universal system that will boot either an PPC or Intel machine (I've done it).
Well, there is no supported proprietary Windows OS solution for PPC anymore. Plus PPC systems seem to be dying. I some how doubt your iPod would boot my PPC Amiga though (can run Linux and AmigaOS fine though). The other thing is, don't you have to crack MacOSX for it to boot on most Intel machines -- and even then, it doesn't generally support the hardware that well from what I've heard.
You could easily write scripts to synhronize your desktop with your iPod. I believe Carbon Copy Cloner will do it.
I could use the briefcase synchronisation of windows, or offline files, or even a trick with roaming profiles.
By the way, have you found any noticeable speed differences when running the OS off the iPod?
It should be noted that IE's share is still as high as it is because it's the default. A large number of PC users aren't even aware that there are alternatives to IE out there, or even what the advantages/disadvantages of different browsers would be, so of course the slice of the pie for IE will be the largest.
I found a large number of PC users don't care.
Not trying to flame you, but it is something I've found common with people who use the default software that comes on their computer, they really don't care one way or another.
Terminal.app supports ANSI color just fine. The checkbox to enable/disable this is under "Window Settings", under the "Color" menu item.
That isn't full VT100 ANSI Terminal Color support.
The Finder's Samba support is sub-par. You're dead on there.
Guess you never browsed a Samba fileshare that had files with the SAME filename in multiple cases, like "readme" and "README".
A lot of users have no problem with the one theme idea -- for comparison look at how many Windows users use themes provided with Windows (either Luna or Classic). Those that are computer-savvy enough to know about theming, etc, will probably use one of the many methods to change their theme on Mac OS X.
To be honest, I don't really care much for theming nor effects and all that jazz, I want it all turned off usually. My problem with Windows and MacOSX theming however -- they actually require intercepting calls to UI functions and changing them if you want any theming at all. I prefer KDE/QT's, where there theming support is built in, so there is no need to add such annoying overheads to get a real minimalistic theme.
didn't really get your point about the "desktop applications" and categories. Do you mean the icons in the Dock? The choice of software bundled with the OS? You don't seem to rant about anything specific.
Actually, I was quite annoyed at how few applications were available for the Mac, particularly in some categories like astronomy (Tracking visible satellites using Keplerian Elements), games (I had more accessible to me under Linux). A lot of opensource software that worked fine under Linux/BSDs/Windows had real issues (GIMP being one of them). Then to futher the problem of lack of applications, the Java runtime that comes with MacOSX had real problems handling most Java UIs
I haven't rebooted my Mac in over two weeks. I've installed tons of stuff, including the Developer Tools since then.
I found myself rebooting the Mac a bit too often, when installing things like codecs for QuickTime so I could use those codecs with iMovie (which I discover that I needed to buy the encoding codecs to get it to export to those formats -- but that's another story).
As for the XML files... well... they'e not easy for the average user to edit, but they certainly are documented.
Ease of editing XML files didn't really bother me as much as having to edit them to modify some UI aspect (when I could do the equilivant in kcontrol on KDE or System Settings) and then having to reboot the system to see the changes really infuriated me.
The "open source applications are unstable" claim is kinda silly. I've used tons of applications, open source and not, on Mac OS X, and I don't notice any difference in stability. I have used several open source apps which have significant stability problems, but I've also used stable open source apps. Same goes for commercial software.
My Mac experience hasn't been so rosey, I've been plagued by random crashing of software that was supposed to be 'polished' and 'superior' according to many others.
SWT has its quirks on Mac OS X -- it's true. Apple does ship a JRE that's better integrated with the UI. As a result, some things are different. Then again, they are on Windows. And Linux. And Solaris. And BSD.... etc. etc. etc. Java's not 100% cross-platform, at least not when it comes to SWT. If SWT worked perfectly the same on everything but OS X, I'd be pissed at Apple. It doesn't, and I'm fine with the Aquafied look of SWT apps.
The problem you describe with SWT, is exactly what I am having problems with. Even Microsoft Java, Kaffe etc. Aren't having these problems I'm getting on MacOSX using very basic SWT (sample project).
In my opinion Apple could of done much better and Linux desktops aren't unusable as people keep claiming -- I do think they need work, but I think Windows (My opinion does not include Vista -- since I refuse to judge on beta/RC versions the OS) and MacOSX need a lot more work.
Don't get me wrong, Linux has its place. As a server. I will use nothing but it for a server, but for a workstation it still has a long way to go.
Yeah! They need to get rid of easy to click "Shows hidden files" option from Konqueror and make it a secret terminal command -- speaking of Terminal, we should remove ANSI colour support and make people pay for commercial alternatives to get it in the default terminal application.
Hm, then there's that pesky simple replace folder option, that needs to be removed. Not to mention we need to make the file manager crash when accessing Samba shares that files with the same name, just in different cases. We also need to reduce all the desktop applications to just one per category (except for games, we can have six there), we can't have choice, it's too confusing for the user.
It's especially confusing with theming, let's just stick to one ugly theme, with all those lovely pointless flashy effects and require people make horrible hacks of applications to get around it if they really want to.
Ah, we also need to make Linux reboot more, for things like codecs, interface configuration modifications. Hide certain configurations undocumented in secret XML files.
Oh! and we should make open-source desktop applications even more unstable. Why, without this, Linux desktop will never be ready!
Break Java support so things like SWT don't work quite right unless you make OS-specific (MacOSX) specific class files compiled against the JDK classes that came with OS (with functions extended specifically for the platform -- Didn't Microsoft get sued over this?), we don't want too many cross-platform binary applications after all.
There are too many variables for designing Linux based games for PC's. Do you design for FC, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Slackware (yes please:), Mandriva,... you get the idea.
Just use LSB?
No commercial developer that exists today wants to deal with that headache.
I don't think so? Here is my list of companies that develop games for Linux (it's in mozilla-bookmark format, so you can import them to bookmarks if you like).
Second, hardware support. If you develop for Wii, you know all the *hardware* features that you can and cannot support. The poor support of 3D accelerators for Linux is well known.
Isn't that why we use standards like SDL or OpenGL, which also determine what the system can and can't do (in some cases even providing alternative methods for doing things)?
So again, in a market that wants to squeeze every ounce of processing power into the prettiest graphics, no one is going to deal with the hit or miss chance that someones hardware will even work with the game.
Many games on the PS2, x-box don't take full advantage of the hardware from what I've seen. Also since people are running Oblivion, UT2k4, WoW on old Pentium 4s with 512MB ram. What games exactly are we talking about?
With Skype, you're locked into the proprietary Skype client using their proprietary protocol and don't have the freedom of chosing the *best* client for your requirements.
Well, perhaps you can help me. My requirements are zero configuration beyond which sound card to use and login credentials.
This means I don't want to mess with port forwards, tunnelling on restricted networks where the only outgoing port permitted is 80 through a transparent proxy [doesn't allow proxy connections over HTTP], not even HTTPS being available [unless you use that HTTPS proxy on the network -- which doesn't allow proxy connections over HTTPS] or even figuring out how to get my connections encrypted. Something this easy which family, friends and I could run on Linux and Windows (a MacOSX version is not needed).
Because I haven't found an mp3 player with a good interface from a reliable company.
So, suddenly your requirements aren't just playing mp3s, it's additionally a 'good interface'.
Of course what people define as a good interface is different. My requirements for a portable music player, are just something I can hit 'play, stop, pause, rewind, fast forward, skip to next song, skip to last song' as buttons. The end, nothing I need beyond that. I imagine yours are probably beyond that though?
I also use iTunes for my music - after trying and uninstalling just abouit everything out there.
I found iTunes quite annoying, as it didn't support a lot of music formats (MOD, IT, NSF ?), no lyric support, no automatic downloading and displaying of album information. There even seemed to be lack of the ability to synchronise to different devices (like iRiver, minidisc, simple usb-mp3 players -- I let aqaitences sync my mod music library if they wish).
Any how, this is why I use Amarok (which supports all of the above and more). The only disadvantage with Amarok is that you can't play Apple DRM on it -- But then again, that doesn't concern me, since I will do everything in my power not to buy DRM media.
I'm not seeing how that Wired blog supports your statement. It makes no statements whatsoever comparing the Windows to OSX version in terms of ease of use by design.
No, but it did actually say there are more problems with the windows version. Which by the way, in turn can also be interpreted as more problematic. More problematic = software becomes less easy.
I'm sure you understand my logical reasoning here.
All it notes is that iTunes 7 has issues, and iTunes 6.0.5 is the most popular download on Apple's site right now.
Apple's iTunes website has iTunes 7 for download on the front page now. Which still has problems (I know, because I'm being asked constantly now by people to support their DRM non-sense -- Whereas before, I was never, ever bothered about iTunes).
Also, the timeframe the downloads are counted in is not listed. iTunes 6.0.5 was available for how many months before iTunes 7?
True, and I agree with you there.
Everybody on the planet is not going to upgrade in the first 24 hrs (I haven't). Unless you want to buy video content or want gapless music playback, there is little reason to download this upgrade.
My experience (after having checked every documented possibility on Apple's site),
"Yes, but you can't play your DRM music obviously on iTunes 7 for some reason, so if you want to play them, you will need to downgrade to six." "But I like iTunes7."
I don't know how you can claim it's just as easy on windows -- When on iTunes 7 for Windows, things just don't work.
Steve Jobs: Do not try and break the Zune. That's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth. Mac User: What truth? Steve Jobs: There is no Zune. User: There is no Zune? Steve Jobs: Then you'll see that it is not the Zune that trends, it is only yourself.
Mom and dad pay for the Internet. How many kids are going to afford a 300 dollar MySpace device? How many parents are going to buy their kids one when they probably already have a iPod?
... Now that you put it that way, a Zune sounds better than myspace.
And? So what if Apple only has 5% of the opertaing system market, the iPod is compatable with Windows too, and using it is just as easy as using it with a Mac!
So what we really have is Microsoft's Zune is compatable with 90% of desktop computers and the iPod is compatable with 95% of desktop computers (not counting the Linux users who use third party software to use iPods).
That's assuming Microsoft will require special software to copy music to the device, like the iPod. Then again, they might do something most other companies have done, and just let you copy it directly to the device drive (appearing as a standard USB drive -- which would make it compatible with most OSes) with no fuss.
(Un?)fortunately the iPod doesn't let you just copy your music or such to the iPod so you can play it. You have to run some special software todo it for you.
The highest resolution you can get is super hires interlaced, which is 1280x512i on PAL machines, If you enable all 8 bitplanes or turn on HAM the graphics chips will eat all the chipmem bandwidth alive efectively killing the CPUs access to it.
Try using the VGAOnly monitor driver while using one of the many custom monitor files off aminet. Then enable overscan to achieve 1024x768.
Harrison selected a slideshow option that arranged his photos as if they were set down on a flat white surface. As he cycled through them, dates were displayed in a handwritten font. Harrison stated that this was an example of one of many slideshow functions that will let people display their photographs in unique ways. The ornate interactivity comes courtesy of the PS3's RSX processor, which allows photos to be moved around like 3D objects.
I could do this on my Amiga 1200 at 1024x768 without a RSX processor. This is supposed to impress me?
Slashdot Mirror
Good idea, although I don't it would work too well on locked down workstations (non-administrator access).
By the way, ever heard of Blackdog? So far I think it's the 'neatest' way to take a mobile desktop with you -- although I haven't bought one yet, so I can't say this is a opinion drawn from experience.
By the way, have you found any noticeable speed differences when running the OS off the iPod?
Not trying to flame you, but it is something I've found common with people who use the default software that comes on their computer, they really don't care one way or another.
In my opinion Apple could of done much better and Linux desktops aren't unusable as people keep claiming -- I do think they need work, but I think Windows (My opinion does not include Vista -- since I refuse to judge on beta/RC versions the OS) and MacOSX need a lot more work.
Hm, then there's that pesky simple replace folder option, that needs to be removed. Not to mention we need to make the file manager crash when accessing Samba shares that files with the same name, just in different cases. We also need to reduce all the desktop applications to just one per category (except for games, we can have six there), we can't have choice, it's too confusing for the user.
It's especially confusing with theming, let's just stick to one ugly theme, with all those lovely pointless flashy effects and require people make horrible hacks of applications to get around it if they really want to.
Ah, we also need to make Linux reboot more, for things like codecs, interface configuration modifications. Hide certain configurations undocumented in secret XML files.
Oh! and we should make open-source desktop applications even more unstable. Why, without this, Linux desktop will never be ready!
Break Java support so things like SWT don't work quite right unless you make OS-specific (MacOSX) specific class files compiled against the JDK classes that came with OS (with functions extended specifically for the platform -- Didn't Microsoft get sued over this?), we don't want too many cross-platform binary applications after all.
I don't think so? Here is my list of companies that develop games for Linux (it's in mozilla-bookmark format, so you can import them to bookmarks if you like).
Isn't that why we use standards like SDL or OpenGL, which also determine what the system can and can't do (in some cases even providing alternative methods for doing things)?
Many games on the PS2, x-box don't take full advantage of the hardware from what I've seen. Also since people are running Oblivion, UT2k4, WoW on old Pentium 4s with 512MB ram. What games exactly are we talking about?
It's either because there is no real alternative to them or because they don't run in Wine (as well as they should).
This means I don't want to mess with port forwards, tunnelling on restricted networks where the only outgoing port permitted is 80 through a transparent proxy [doesn't allow proxy connections over HTTP], not even HTTPS being available [unless you use that HTTPS proxy on the network -- which doesn't allow proxy connections over HTTPS] or even figuring out how to get my connections encrypted. Something this easy which family, friends and I could run on Linux and Windows (a MacOSX version is not needed).
I look forward to your reply.
Of course what people define as a good interface is different. My requirements for a portable music player, are just something I can hit 'play, stop, pause, rewind, fast forward, skip to next song, skip to last song' as buttons. The end, nothing I need beyond that. I imagine yours are probably beyond that though?
I found iTunes quite annoying, as it didn't support a lot of music formats (MOD, IT, NSF ?), no lyric support, no automatic downloading and displaying of album information. There even seemed to be lack of the ability to synchronise to different devices (like iRiver, minidisc, simple usb-mp3 players -- I let aqaitences sync my mod music library if they wish).
Any how, this is why I use Amarok (which supports all of the above and more). The only disadvantage with Amarok is that you can't play Apple DRM on it -- But then again, that doesn't concern me, since I will do everything in my power not to buy DRM media.
I'm sure you understand my logical reasoning here.
Apple's iTunes website has iTunes 7 for download on the front page now. Which still has problems (I know, because I'm being asked constantly now by people to support their DRM non-sense -- Whereas before, I was never, ever bothered about iTunes).
True, and I agree with you there.
My experience (after having checked every documented possibility on Apple's site),
"Yes, but you can't play your DRM music obviously on iTunes 7 for some reason, so if you want to play them, you will need to downgrade to six."
"But I like iTunes7."
I don't know how you can claim it's just as easy on windows -- When on iTunes 7 for Windows, things just don't work.
Mac User: What truth?
Steve Jobs: There is no Zune.
User: There is no Zune?
Steve Jobs: Then you'll see that it is not the Zune that trends, it is only yourself.
From the Apple wikipedia article:
Uh... Step out of the reality distortion field.
(Un?)fortunately the iPod doesn't let you just copy your music or such to the iPod so you can play it. You have to run some special software todo it for you.
There are plenty of devices suited to JUST playing mp3s.
Not to mention that tinyurl.com doesn't even resolve for me. Just another point of failure, I don't like it.
Argh, I should of read your post before following that link.