I even ran Doom on the Digita OS of my Pentax digital camera! Quite cool to be able to flip it into Doom mode and knock off a few aliens in between shots....
I fear the white box is too small to impress the bumpkins
1. The answer is obvious. Buy an empty PC tower case, fit a Mac Mini into it, and sell it for about the same as the average Windows box to the "bumpkins".
2. ????
3. Profit!!
Any time you get a dialog on the screen, the computer disappears off the internet. Any dialog: system error, a prompt, a confirmation, a warning that you're low on disk space--whatever. Any dialog, and it all stops, because of the single-threading.
This doesn't sound right. A dialog box doesn't block the thread, it carries on running the event loop. Depending on how its implemented it might run this loop locally as a modal loop, or simply deactivate the rest of the app's GUI and work off the main event loop. Either way, running the event loop means that the cooperative multitasking gets a chance to context switch. However, even a OS 9 machine CAN run other processes as pre-emptive interrupt tasks, and it's likely that the IP stack is one of them. While a Mac OS 9 webserver sounds like a perverse idea, it is actually not as unfeasible as it might sound. And it's also very unlikely that GUI "interruptions" such as dialogs would kill off server type processes unless they were very badly written.
But it's not a replacement for my PC because there are several pieces of software I want to run on pc
Have you considered emulation? If those apps can run without needing 100% of the CPU, it might work for you. It does for many. However it may appear in relative terms, a 1.25 GHz G4 is not a slow chip. If people could get useful work done on their 400MHz Pentiums just a few years ago, emulating same on the G4 should be feasible, and is, if you're not playing games.
And finally I find the mac user interface to be really painful to use compared with windows. There are a couple of major design flaws that make it much slower to use than my PC for general use
I find the exact opposite, so it's my view that these "major design flaws" are in fact just differences that you just need to get used to. I'd be interested to know what you think they are though, since there's really very little about the Mac interface I'd consider a design flaw, rather than just the result of a design decision, and more often than not one that appears very logical and thought-through overall. Almost everything is done the way it is for a reason (brushed metal notwithstanding), and usually once the reason is explained, most people seem to agree it's the right thing. On the other hand on Windows many things appear to be done for no other reason that it was too hard to do right. I don't mean this as flamebait, but as someone who has built many user interfaces in his career - sometimes doing things the right way takes extra time and effort, and it's easy to see that if corners have to be cut, this is one place where it can be done without harming the raw functionality (but at the expense of usability). From that perspective many design decisions in the interface on Windows appear to me to be cut corners.
OK, point taken. 'Nuff said, I think. At least your tone appears to have mellowed - keep drinking. By the way, it's not 2am here, I'm in Australia, and it's the middle of the afternoon. Back to the code....
Well, whatever you say. I'm also a Mac user/programmer and a lot of what people say both FOR and against Macs piss me off too.
I can appreciate humour, if it's funny. This wasn't. It's lame and dull. Sarcasm and irony are not "sophisticated literary devices", but the lowest form of wit, according to the cliche.
Look, I get it. It's a pisstake. But I'm British and I get irony. I also known that there are many folk out there that won't, and many Windows weenies who'll take it at face value. I'm not taking it even semi-seriously, but many out there are quite likely to.
Now if you don't mind, I'll get back to writing Mac (only) software which I interrupted to respond to your idiotic response. You call yourself a hardcore evangelist - I'm writing cool software for the Mac, so I'm doing my bit for "the cause" (WTF??) - what are YOU doing, apart from carping?
Read my post history and you'll realise you got off likely.
And just who the fuck are you again? If you take everyone to task for responding to anti-Mac trolls it's YOU who's going to look pretty stupid, as well as having a never-ending supply of willing baiters.
I'm a hardcore computer nerd, but this Apple news isn't the slightest bit interesting to me.
So, you saw the story on the front page, and thought "Oh, that's not the SLIGHTEST bit interesting to me. I think I'll open it." Or perhaps you suffer from an obsessive-compulsive disorder that forces you to read every single article on Slashdot regardless. Sorry to hear that mate, it must be torture.
As well as any other overclocking of any other computer
Well, it's getting a bit long in the tooth now but I overclocked my 2001 12" iBook from 500MHz to 600MHz and boosted its memory bus from 66MHz to 100MHz. The difference was staggering - it meant the ability to run OS X well instead of very badly. And it's now been nearly three years and I haven't had the slightest problem with reliablility. So in this case at least, your statement is obviously a bit too sweepingly general to be true.
As others have pointed out, basically it's no problem. A few weeks ago a PC laptop using friend visited and we needed to swap some files to my iBook. We both had wireless cards, but his was "broken", and hadn't worked for some time according to him. Luckily my wife knows Windows (I don't) and had it fixed in short order. Getting an ad-hoc wireless connection between the machines was then the work of about 2 minutes, mainly spent grappling with the arcane network settings on the XP machine, which turned out to be configured oddly - In the end it was much easier to simply change the Mac's settings to go with the PC's existing setup. From then on it was child's play to drag and drop files between the machines. My friend was impressed that it seemed so easy as he normally struggles with connecting his laptop anywhere (given its settings, probably no surprise), though to be fair he was an ex-Mac user forced to switch to a PC by his employer.
Hrrm, I guess hilarity is in the eye of the beholder. I do see the funny side, but it is also full of errors and smacks of some seriously sour grapes.
From TFA: if you believe Apple's marketing department, the new Mini is "smaller than most packs of gum" and weighs "less than four quarters". Well, we received our test unit from Apple yesterday, and let me say right off the bat that those claims are a wee bit of an exaggeration.
Easy mistake to make, but seems he's mixed the mini up with the iPod shuffle. Or maybe that was a "joke". Hee haw.
While the hardware is about roughly equivalent to a Windows PC circa 1995
Errr... yeah right. I seem to recall that a Windows PC circa 1995 was in fact running software 'roughly equivalent' to a Mac circa 1984.
less than half the Mini's price, with the added benefit of being able to run Windows XP. Decisions, decisions.
Decisions indeed. Hmm, let me see, a modern rock-solid genuine unix-based OS with a great usable GUI that actually works instead of a buggy, security-problem ridden crock of shite. Tough one!
The Mini boots up into a stripped-down operating system which Apple calls OS X, similar to the stripped-down WindowsCE OS found on many handhelds
LOL!!
When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware--none of which are available for the Mac platform--it doesn't make sense for me to "switch" to a Mac at this time.
Yeah, well obviously the guy is joking. Hoo hoo. The only problem is that there is already so much ignorance around about Macs in the PC universe that anyone who doesn't know the truth or sees the very dry wit at work here is likely to take this at face value. So it might be meant to be funny, but in fact it's just FUD.
Well, you could be right. I try to avoid using Windows as much as possible. However, recently I was forced to restart an XP machine to get it to recognise a new font. I assumed from this this was standard OP - it may just have been something wrong on that machine.
And yet, every time I use the Mac at work, it's an exercise in frustration. Part of it is the unfamiliarity with the way to do things on a Mac (bass-ackwards, it seems, is the rule of the day), but part of it is sheer torture (font handling, for instance).
Well I find the exact same frustration on Windows, so I guess it just depends what you're used to. At least Apple does have some underlying priciples that once "got", explain the design and operation of almost everything (some exceptions as with anything). I personally find far fewer unifying principles on Windows - everything seems to need learning separately.
As for Font handling, having done a lot on both platforms lately, I can tell you that Windows approach is years behind the Mac. Even a Mac from ~1987. Windows has to be restarted to recognise a newly installed font - ridiculous! (And we all know how long a bloody Windows box takes to boot, unlike OS X which boots in about 15 seconds). Mac has never required a restart, only a relaunch of an application to see a new font. Under OS X even that isn't required, new fonts appear instantly.
I don't know why you're modded as "funny" because I just started this project myself. I'm putting a Mac mini into a Classic II case - widening the floppy slot to accept a CD can be done without impacting the look of the machine, and it will be a neat conversion for a nice little desktop machine.
The LCD screen is proving harder to source and it seems that the most readily available type is for in-car DVD players which run to 7 or 8" but are stuck at 640 x 480 resolution. I'm also not sure whether these can be adapted to be driven from the Mac's video port. If you or anyone else hears about a 9" or 10" LCD running at 800 x 600 or better and has a VGA or digital input please let me know!
Yahoo Messenger for OS X supports voice fine
on
Mac mini Dissection
·
· Score: 1
The Mac OS X version of Yahoo Messenger supports voice chat fine, I use it well, not all the time, but now and again. It supports video too. So go for it...
Everyone seems to be saying (as was my first reaction when I read the story) that this will lead to everything sounding the same, being bland, etc - as if that wasn't already the case. However, I believe there is cause for optimism - because when something good comes along that really doesn't fit the "hit box" it will stand out so much above the background mush of the rest that it will be worth taking notice of. When I was growing up mainstream music seemed to be a lot more diverse, and you had to pay close attention to really keep up with what was going on. It was hard work (but usually rewarding) to sort the good from the bad. Now all you need to do is keep the radio on but turned down low so you don't actually have to listen to it, but loud enough so that when something interesting does get played, your brain suddenly wakes up and notices it. Thus it becomes much easier than it used to be to pick out interesting stuff. Thanks, lazy pigopolist music industry-type guys!
If you think I'm joking, consider this. The UK has just now "celebrated" the 1000th number one record in the charts. The track in question is Elvis Presley's tune One Night from about 2000 B.C. Last week's number one (the 999th) was Elvis Presley's Jailhouse Rock. Hrrrmm... could there be a marketing campaign around promoting Elvis records? Perhaps to help flll up the special "limited edition" (only 500,000 issues!) box sets of Elvis's Greatest Hits that were flogged off the other week, a bargain of an empty carboard box for only 10.99GBP. Marketing genius really, get the punters to stump up for an empty box, then get them to fork out 3 quid a week for fifty weeks to fill it! (Elvis fans - just say no!)
Every number one nowadays comes IN at number one, because of hyping and marketing techniques. But the 1000th number 1 needed only 29,000 sales to make it there. Of the last 530-odd number ones, all but 2 entered at number one. This makes the chart meaningless. Back in my day:) entering at number one was virtually unheard of - Slade's Merry Christmas Everybody did it in 1973, the next one to do so was about 5 years later! And back then you needed to sell hundreds of thousands if not millions of records to make No. 1. So basically the music industry has ruined what used to be a useful indicator of popular taste (within limits) into something that isn't even a useful indicator of how successful their marketing is, except in pure binary terms (number 1 = did OK-ish, not number 1 = flop). Basically the chart has been quantised down into fewer and fewer bits. I say it's time it was officially abandoned altogether, though those of us with any musical sensibility personally abandoned it some time in the early 1980s.
Many comments seem to think that Spotlight is "just another desktop search". Ho-hum. Of course it is that, but I think what will be killer is its integration into the system. The Steve Jobs demos are cool, but they are not very focused on what I think is the real wow - Smart Folders in the Finder. I truly believe these will revolutionise the way people manage files. If you've used iTunes for any length of time you'll find the smart playlists absolutely invaluable. Having that at the Finder level will be incredible. It'll make the "recent documents" and "recent applications" menu look pretty lame. I think after a while no-one will be able to understand how the hell we managed with only fixed folders all these years.
Concorde was indeed pretty noisy taking off, being the only commercial jet ever fitted with afterburners - but on landing it was no worse than most planes. Indeed its higher landing speed meant that the noise footprint on the approach path moved along more quickly, so it was less of a nuisance. In the 1970s jets were overall a lot more noisy than they are now - the 707s and DC-8s and whatnot were not that much less noisy, but by the time that the modern turbofan was ubiquitous, Concorde stood out as much noisier by comparison.
It certainly seemed to many of us Brits at the time that the banning of Concorde in the US was more political than technical - but that may have just been the way it seemed raher than the actuality. Same thing today with steel tarrifs, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I even ran Doom on the Digita OS of my Pentax digital camera! Quite cool to be able to flip it into Doom mode and knock off a few aliens in between shots....
I fear the white box is too small to impress the bumpkins
1. The answer is obvious. Buy an empty PC tower case, fit a Mac Mini into it, and sell it for about the same as the average Windows box to the "bumpkins". 2. ???? 3. Profit!!
Any time you get a dialog on the screen, the computer disappears off the internet. Any dialog: system error, a prompt, a confirmation, a warning that you're low on disk space--whatever. Any dialog, and it all stops, because of the single-threading.
This doesn't sound right. A dialog box doesn't block the thread, it carries on running the event loop. Depending on how its implemented it might run this loop locally as a modal loop, or simply deactivate the rest of the app's GUI and work off the main event loop. Either way, running the event loop means that the cooperative multitasking gets a chance to context switch. However, even a OS 9 machine CAN run other processes as pre-emptive interrupt tasks, and it's likely that the IP stack is one of them. While a Mac OS 9 webserver sounds like a perverse idea, it is actually not as unfeasible as it might sound. And it's also very unlikely that GUI "interruptions" such as dialogs would kill off server type processes unless they were very badly written.
But it's not a replacement for my PC because there are several pieces of software I want to run on pc
Have you considered emulation? If those apps can run without needing 100% of the CPU, it might work for you. It does for many. However it may appear in relative terms, a 1.25 GHz G4 is not a slow chip. If people could get useful work done on their 400MHz Pentiums just a few years ago, emulating same on the G4 should be feasible, and is, if you're not playing games.
And finally I find the mac user interface to be really painful to use compared with windows. There are a couple of major design flaws that make it much slower to use than my PC for general use
I find the exact opposite, so it's my view that these "major design flaws" are in fact just differences that you just need to get used to. I'd be interested to know what you think they are though, since there's really very little about the Mac interface I'd consider a design flaw, rather than just the result of a design decision, and more often than not one that appears very logical and thought-through overall. Almost everything is done the way it is for a reason (brushed metal notwithstanding), and usually once the reason is explained, most people seem to agree it's the right thing. On the other hand on Windows many things appear to be done for no other reason that it was too hard to do right. I don't mean this as flamebait, but as someone who has built many user interfaces in his career - sometimes doing things the right way takes extra time and effort, and it's easy to see that if corners have to be cut, this is one place where it can be done without harming the raw functionality (but at the expense of usability). From that perspective many design decisions in the interface on Windows appear to me to be cut corners.
7. Never release software until you've rewritten it at least three times. (i.e. version 3.0 is the minimum one that's any good).
Time and again this one seems to prove itself true!
OK, point taken. 'Nuff said, I think. At least your tone appears to have mellowed - keep drinking. By the way, it's not 2am here, I'm in Australia, and it's the middle of the afternoon. Back to the code....
Well, whatever you say. I'm also a Mac user/programmer and a lot of what people say both FOR and against Macs piss me off too.
I can appreciate humour, if it's funny. This wasn't. It's lame and dull. Sarcasm and irony are not "sophisticated literary devices", but the lowest form of wit, according to the cliche.
Look, I get it. It's a pisstake. But I'm British and I get irony. I also known that there are many folk out there that won't, and many Windows weenies who'll take it at face value. I'm not taking it even semi-seriously, but many out there are quite likely to.
Now if you don't mind, I'll get back to writing Mac (only) software which I interrupted to respond to your idiotic response. You call yourself a hardcore evangelist - I'm writing cool software for the Mac, so I'm doing my bit for "the cause" (WTF??) - what are YOU doing, apart from carping?
Read my post history and you'll realise you got off likely.
And just who the fuck are you again? If you take everyone to task for responding to anti-Mac trolls it's YOU who's going to look pretty stupid, as well as having a never-ending supply of willing baiters.
I'm a hardcore computer nerd, but this Apple news isn't the slightest bit interesting to me.
So, you saw the story on the front page, and thought "Oh, that's not the SLIGHTEST bit interesting to me. I think I'll open it." Or perhaps you suffer from an obsessive-compulsive disorder that forces you to read every single article on Slashdot regardless. Sorry to hear that mate, it must be torture.
As well as any other overclocking of any other computer
Well, it's getting a bit long in the tooth now but I overclocked my 2001 12" iBook from 500MHz to 600MHz and boosted its memory bus from 66MHz to 100MHz. The difference was staggering - it meant the ability to run OS X well instead of very badly. And it's now been nearly three years and I haven't had the slightest problem with reliablility. So in this case at least, your statement is obviously a bit too sweepingly general to be true.
As others have pointed out, basically it's no problem. A few weeks ago a PC laptop using friend visited and we needed to swap some files to my iBook. We both had wireless cards, but his was "broken", and hadn't worked for some time according to him. Luckily my wife knows Windows (I don't) and had it fixed in short order. Getting an ad-hoc wireless connection between the machines was then the work of about 2 minutes, mainly spent grappling with the arcane network settings on the XP machine, which turned out to be configured oddly - In the end it was much easier to simply change the Mac's settings to go with the PC's existing setup. From then on it was child's play to drag and drop files between the machines. My friend was impressed that it seemed so easy as he normally struggles with connecting his laptop anywhere (given its settings, probably no surprise), though to be fair he was an ex-Mac user forced to switch to a PC by his employer.
Hrrm, I guess hilarity is in the eye of the beholder. I do see the funny side, but it is also full of errors and smacks of some seriously sour grapes.
From TFA: if you believe Apple's marketing department, the new Mini is "smaller than most packs of gum" and weighs "less than four quarters". Well, we received our test unit from Apple yesterday, and let me say right off the bat that those claims are a wee bit of an exaggeration.
Easy mistake to make, but seems he's mixed the mini up with the iPod shuffle. Or maybe that was a "joke". Hee haw.
While the hardware is about roughly equivalent to a Windows PC circa 1995
Errr... yeah right. I seem to recall that a Windows PC circa 1995 was in fact running software 'roughly equivalent' to a Mac circa 1984.
less than half the Mini's price, with the added benefit of being able to run Windows XP. Decisions, decisions.
Decisions indeed. Hmm, let me see, a modern rock-solid genuine unix-based OS with a great usable GUI that actually works instead of a buggy, security-problem ridden crock of shite. Tough one!
The Mini boots up into a stripped-down operating system which Apple calls OS X, similar to the stripped-down WindowsCE OS found on many handhelds
LOL!!
When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware--none of which are available for the Mac platform--it doesn't make sense for me to "switch" to a Mac at this time.
Yeah, well obviously the guy is joking. Hoo hoo. The only problem is that there is already so much ignorance around about Macs in the PC universe that anyone who doesn't know the truth or sees the very dry wit at work here is likely to take this at face value. So it might be meant to be funny, but in fact it's just FUD.
sight -> site
sentance -> sentence
puposeful -> purposeful
spitiual->spiritual
Well, you could be right. I try to avoid using Windows as much as possible. However, recently I was forced to restart an XP machine to get it to recognise a new font. I assumed from this this was standard OP - it may just have been something wrong on that machine.
And yet, every time I use the Mac at work, it's an exercise in frustration. Part of it is the unfamiliarity with the way to do things on a Mac (bass-ackwards, it seems, is the rule of the day), but part of it is sheer torture (font handling, for instance).
Well I find the exact same frustration on Windows, so I guess it just depends what you're used to. At least Apple does have some underlying priciples that once "got", explain the design and operation of almost everything (some exceptions as with anything). I personally find far fewer unifying principles on Windows - everything seems to need learning separately.
As for Font handling, having done a lot on both platforms lately, I can tell you that Windows approach is years behind the Mac. Even a Mac from ~1987. Windows has to be restarted to recognise a newly installed font - ridiculous! (And we all know how long a bloody Windows box takes to boot, unlike OS X which boots in about 15 seconds). Mac has never required a restart, only a relaunch of an application to see a new font. Under OS X even that isn't required, new fonts appear instantly.
You're right, that one is OK. Thanks for not calling me a Nazi. Have a nice day! :)
Can I just point out that you have misused "its" in every instance in your admittedly amusing post. I hope you find this helpful.
...maybe its immune system is simply trying to shake off the virulent infection called mankind?
I don't know why you're modded as "funny" because I just started this project myself. I'm putting a Mac mini into a Classic II case - widening the floppy slot to accept a CD can be done without impacting the look of the machine, and it will be a neat conversion for a nice little desktop machine.
The LCD screen is proving harder to source and it seems that the most readily available type is for in-car DVD players which run to 7 or 8" but are stuck at 640 x 480 resolution. I'm also not sure whether these can be adapted to be driven from the Mac's video port. If you or anyone else hears about a 9" or 10" LCD running at 800 x 600 or better and has a VGA or digital input please let me know!
windows wasn't an OS back then :)
and still isn't!
The Mac OS X version of Yahoo Messenger supports voice chat fine, I use it well, not all the time, but now and again. It supports video too. So go for it...
Nuff said.
Everyone seems to be saying (as was my first reaction when I read the story) that this will lead to everything sounding the same, being bland, etc - as if that wasn't already the case. However, I believe there is cause for optimism - because when something good comes along that really doesn't fit the "hit box" it will stand out so much above the background mush of the rest that it will be worth taking notice of. When I was growing up mainstream music seemed to be a lot more diverse, and you had to pay close attention to really keep up with what was going on. It was hard work (but usually rewarding) to sort the good from the bad. Now all you need to do is keep the radio on but turned down low so you don't actually have to listen to it, but loud enough so that when something interesting does get played, your brain suddenly wakes up and notices it. Thus it becomes much easier than it used to be to pick out interesting stuff. Thanks, lazy pigopolist music industry-type guys!
:) entering at number one was virtually unheard of - Slade's Merry Christmas Everybody did it in 1973, the next one to do so was about 5 years later! And back then you needed to sell hundreds of thousands if not millions of records to make No. 1. So basically the music industry has ruined what used to be a useful indicator of popular taste (within limits) into something that isn't even a useful indicator of how successful their marketing is, except in pure binary terms (number 1 = did OK-ish, not number 1 = flop). Basically the chart has been quantised down into fewer and fewer bits. I say it's time it was officially abandoned altogether, though those of us with any musical sensibility personally abandoned it some time in the early 1980s.
If you think I'm joking, consider this. The UK has just now "celebrated" the 1000th number one record in the charts. The track in question is Elvis Presley's tune One Night from about 2000 B.C. Last week's number one (the 999th) was Elvis Presley's Jailhouse Rock. Hrrrmm... could there be a marketing campaign around promoting Elvis records? Perhaps to help flll up the special "limited edition" (only 500,000 issues!) box sets of Elvis's Greatest Hits that were flogged off the other week, a bargain of an empty carboard box for only 10.99GBP. Marketing genius really, get the punters to stump up for an empty box, then get them to fork out 3 quid a week for fifty weeks to fill it! (Elvis fans - just say no!)
Every number one nowadays comes IN at number one, because of hyping and marketing techniques. But the 1000th number 1 needed only 29,000 sales to make it there. Of the last 530-odd number ones, all but 2 entered at number one. This makes the chart meaningless. Back in my day
Many comments seem to think that Spotlight is "just another desktop search". Ho-hum. Of course it is that, but I think what will be killer is its integration into the system. The Steve Jobs demos are cool, but they are not very focused on what I think is the real wow - Smart Folders in the Finder. I truly believe these will revolutionise the way people manage files. If you've used iTunes for any length of time you'll find the smart playlists absolutely invaluable. Having that at the Finder level will be incredible. It'll make the "recent documents" and "recent applications" menu look pretty lame. I think after a while no-one will be able to understand how the hell we managed with only fixed folders all these years.
Concorde was indeed pretty noisy taking off, being the only commercial jet ever fitted with afterburners - but on landing it was no worse than most planes. Indeed its higher landing speed meant that the noise footprint on the approach path moved along more quickly, so it was less of a nuisance. In the 1970s jets were overall a lot more noisy than they are now - the 707s and DC-8s and whatnot were not that much less noisy, but by the time that the modern turbofan was ubiquitous, Concorde stood out as much noisier by comparison. It certainly seemed to many of us Brits at the time that the banning of Concorde in the US was more political than technical - but that may have just been the way it seemed raher than the actuality. Same thing today with steel tarrifs, etc.
I think Apple's products are third rate
So show us one you think is first rate, then we'll have a clue what planet you think you're from.