A visit to the forums at onmac.net (the home of the fully working XP on Mac contest won by narf and blanka for their fully working dual-boot solution) shows a lot of angst over not yet having fully working graphics acceleration, due to a lack of ATI x1600 drivers.
Such angst might also exist for a Virtual PC solution if, as in the past with this software, graphics are not fully accelerated. This is mainly for games of course, but in the Wiki on that site which shows tested software, many people have expressed desires to run high-end 3D and scientific OpenGL applications.
So for these, booting as a PC is the better option. Besides, it takes my MacBook Pro less than 30 secs to reboot from Mac OS X to XP and vice versa.
Another area is hardware drivers which are not fully compatible with the Virtual PC environment. In the past I've been using a specialized piece of mapping software with a GPS hardware device (via RS232 serial converted to USB). Although I could tortuously configure Virtual PC to work with it, it was always forgetting settings, or directing the adapter to the wrong port, etc. Now with dual-booting, it just works each and every time I plug it it.
I agree having a virtualization option would be great, but it is not always the best way of running another OS on the same hardware.
Re:192939495969798999 Thats some anonymous name
on
Apple's Fruitful Future
·
· Score: 3, Funny
And that's only his nickname, his full name is written in binary.
It doesn't have to be an April 1 joke, since any visitor to onmac.net can announce to themselves that dual-booting XP and OS X on a Intel-based Mac is quite straightforward, thanks to the work of narf and blanka.
Although, it probably is a (feeble) joke, because Apple didn't do anything to encourage dual-booting (other than switch to Intel chips) and Mr Jobs is unlikely to celebrate his rival's OS appearing on his precious hardware, even if it does bring a few extra sales.
OS X on generic PC is perfectly doable. Maxxuss is your friend.
But I disagree about the hardware being undistinguishable: the design aesthetic (smooth seductive materials and shapes), practical functionality (wake from sleep in 2 secs and on the network), the little why-didn't-anyone-do-this-before features (eg, MagSafe on their recent laptop) make them the undisputed leaders of the domestic computer industry, design wise if not marketshare wise.
After all, there's got to be some reason why scores of new owners put up proud web pages filled with photos of them opening the damn box!
Users who have bought the new Core Duo systems over the past week have indeed tried putting in an XP disc and booting it, and a Vista beta build 5270, etc. These don't work, so it's not that easy.
The people who are likely to know what is going on, and capable of experimenting with workarounds, either don't have their machines yet (the true geek's droolworthy machine doesn't ship until Feb) or haven't published their findings because they want to be the first to announce a complete working Windows-on-a-Mac solution.
In short, a standard Windows install disc DOES NOT work, and whether a series of patches to get one working is possible is something only time and a lot of hacking will tell.
Precisely. And with the easiest installation of MySQL or PostgreSQL possible (double-click a.pkg and it's there), a uber fast SQL compliant RDBMS is not far away, along with some slick GUI tools for filling it.
Python and Ruby are already in there out of the box, as is the Apache webserver for debugging your PHP scripts before they go to the server.
Still, if you're a proprietary Microsoft shop and IIS, ASP and.NET are your bread and butter, a dual-booting Intel based Mac could be the bees knees of development platforms.
I think there's some confusion over the definition of "streaming" and what the technology in dispute actually is.
The QuickTime Plugin had "progressive download" type streaming from day 1, which meant movies embedded in web pages could begin to play almost straight away, even though most of the content was still to be transferred. If the buffer stayed ahead of the playhead, a good experience resulted.
This in my view was more useful than normal style streaming, where given my haphazard connections over the years, made long pauses, freezes and drop-outs a regular part of the experience, whether on Real, WMP, or QuickTime.
However, although I've RTFA, I'm unclear what type the "used in iTunes and iPod" phrase means. I thought iTunes just embedded QuickTime and used progressive caching, which means Apple was there first, patent or not. I'm just thinking out loud. I equate true streaming with DRM - it restricts my use of the content.
> I wonder if using the CD instead of an album would screw up the timing.
Unlikely unless the vinyl was snagging or the record player motor was worn, but something that definitely would affect the timing is watching in Europe or Australia where they have the PAL video system.
PAL runs at 25 fps (vs. NTSC which runs at 29.97 fps). This means that for easier compatibility, most DVDs are re-timed to run at 25 fps instead of the cinematic 24 fps. The result is a 4% speedup.
Usually unnoticeable, but for something like this, it would throw off the timing.
Personally, I don't see any logic in taking a stable, fast, robust, stylish piece of hardware and ruining it with bloated, insecure, unstable software like Windows.
No real argument from me, except to say that if you can take the B/I/U software like Windows and run it its own little window, VMWare like, while the rest of the system is chugging along with OS X goodness, you're 3 steps closer to nirvana.
Windows isn't going away, but being able to keep it available and in its own sandbox could be a useful transition mechanism.
The Aussie store currently doesn't have the Just For You feature, but if you go to the home page and switch to the US store using the popup menu at the bottom, it appears.
(You have to switch back if you want to buy a song later.)
And here I thought that US$1.00 was more like AU$1.33.
Yes, it is, but you've got to add tax (GST = 10%) too which brings it to about $1.45.
I think $1.50 per song would have been a nicer price point, but I suppose they are hedging in case the Aussie dollar tanks again if/when the economy takes a hit from rising inflation - it's harder to go up once the price is set.
There's also the overhead of running a high bandwidth store in a backward country (whose "leading" technology company, Telstra can't even manage a shareholder meeting webcast without screwing up).
Still, I bought 20 songs this morning. Though I'm pissed I can't buy Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell as a single song only. Grumble...
Anyway, my thoughts on such news is that MS now acknowledges that Linux is a genuine market player that they need to play nice with, much more so than they do with Apple for example.
Hmm.
<sarcasm> So I guess that's why they brought out MS Office for Linux instead of MS Office for Mac. </sarcasm>
Did know that a low-end Mac sold with a boxed copy of Office often makes more money for Microsoft than it does Apple? (Gross margins on software are 80%+ compared to gross margins of 20% on hardware.) Yeah, Microsoft must really hate Apple.
Apple is no threat to Microsoft. If Mac doubled it's marketshare, Microsoft's revenue from it would increase.
Linux, if it can get its desktop act together, is.
It's a bit different there. It is still the identical RSS 2.0 spec. They are just using a namespace to supply information that isn't otherwise available, such as duration, a subtitle and an "explicit" warning, which are handy (but optional) things to have.
Conventional RSS tags in Podcasts without these namespace tags work fine, just don't give the extra useful information.
The namespace allows delineation of info voluntarily added for the user's benefit. It hasn't altered the RSS 2.0 spec at all.
I think a lot of people are interested in OSx86 because it's a solid, well-designed OS that lets people leverage their *nix skills in an attractively presented GUI.
In fairness, signs point to the reason having more to do with Apple throwing it's weight around like it was still 1997.
You mean like expecting a steady supply of chips so that they could sell competitively performing machines without angering customers with long delays?
I don't know if you're a Mac user but if you are you probably didn't have to wait THREE MONTHS to be shipped a PowerMac G5 like I did last year. Apple couldn't get the chips. IBM couldn't get the yield up to sufficient quantities.
IBM had also told Apple they could supply a 3GHz part within a year of the initial launch in 2003. It's now 2005 and they still cannot.
Yes, they announced dual core within weeks of Jobs' bombshell (everyone knew they were coming anyway). But no, they are not shipping. When they finally do, there's every indication someone like me who might want to buy one would experience deja vu with the extreme shipping delays.
And for the actual reason that prompted the (arguably difficult) Intel transition to start:
IBM failed to produce a low-power, low-heat variant that wasn't severely reduced in performance. Intel have excellently performing low-power chips. Enough said.
If that situation is "Apple throwing it's weight" around, like many others, I think you've been doing too much armchair speculation and not enough real world observation.
Do you have to buy a new motherboard to get the chipset with Intel based ethernet / sound / video?
I've looked at building such a box and a motherboard that supports everything is quite cheap. Add a low-end P4, a cheap case, a PSU and you're in business with a custom-made Mac!
However, you do know that even with it running and all hardware supported, it's still a pre-release developer edition of the OS. That is, intended for developers like Adobe to port their apps across, not as a stable daily use OS.
The final x86 release may use quite different protection, that may not even run on the same chipsets. The reason this one has been so easily hacked, is that the developer machines use standard Intel chipsets so that their limited run (probably less than a few hundred have been sold) is cheap to manufacture.
So yes, with just a few hundred bucks of components, you're saving about half the cost of a Mac Mini. However, it may be stuck running a partially functional developer release, so just be warned.
What do you mean? The croc is probably the closest thing to a dinosaur still alive today. (Birds, though descended from dinosaurs, have grown feathers and stuff.) That's less evolution, isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
My MacBook Pro is a bright shiny box, you insensitive clod!
It really depends what you want to do.
A visit to the forums at onmac.net (the home of the fully working XP on Mac contest won by narf and blanka for their fully working dual-boot solution) shows a lot of angst over not yet having fully working graphics acceleration, due to a lack of ATI x1600 drivers.
Such angst might also exist for a Virtual PC solution if, as in the past with this software, graphics are not fully accelerated. This is mainly for games of course, but in the Wiki on that site which shows tested software, many people have expressed desires to run high-end 3D and scientific OpenGL applications.
So for these, booting as a PC is the better option. Besides, it takes my MacBook Pro less than 30 secs to reboot from Mac OS X to XP and vice versa.
Another area is hardware drivers which are not fully compatible with the Virtual PC environment. In the past I've been using a specialized piece of mapping software with a GPS hardware device (via RS232 serial converted to USB). Although I could tortuously configure Virtual PC to work with it, it was always forgetting settings, or directing the adapter to the wrong port, etc. Now with dual-booting, it just works each and every time I plug it it.
I agree having a virtualization option would be great, but it is not always the best way of running another OS on the same hardware.
And that's only his nickname, his full name is written in binary.
It doesn't have to be an April 1 joke, since any visitor to onmac.net can announce to themselves that dual-booting XP and OS X on a Intel-based Mac is quite straightforward, thanks to the work of narf and blanka.
Although, it probably is a (feeble) joke, because Apple didn't do anything to encourage dual-booting (other than switch to Intel chips) and Mr Jobs is unlikely to celebrate his rival's OS appearing on his precious hardware, even if it does bring a few extra sales.
OS X on generic PC is perfectly doable. Maxxuss is your friend.
But I disagree about the hardware being undistinguishable: the design aesthetic (smooth seductive materials and shapes), practical functionality (wake from sleep in 2 secs and on the network), the little why-didn't-anyone-do-this-before features (eg, MagSafe on their recent laptop) make them the undisputed leaders of the domestic computer industry, design wise if not marketshare wise.
After all, there's got to be some reason why scores of new owners put up proud web pages filled with photos of them opening the damn box!
Maybe he's right: Apple is only practicing, it's Microsoft who is the expert.
I, for one, welcome our new Red Dwarf watching, icy veined Sagittarian overlords.
Users who have bought the new Core Duo systems over the past week have indeed tried putting in an XP disc and booting it, and a Vista beta build 5270, etc. These don't work, so it's not that easy.
The people who are likely to know what is going on, and capable of experimenting with workarounds, either don't have their machines yet (the true geek's droolworthy machine doesn't ship until Feb) or haven't published their findings because they want to be the first to announce a complete working Windows-on-a-Mac solution.
In short, a standard Windows install disc DOES NOT work, and whether a series of patches to get one working is possible is something only time and a lot of hacking will tell.
Precisely. And with the easiest installation of MySQL or PostgreSQL possible (double-click a .pkg and it's there), a uber fast SQL compliant RDBMS is not far away, along with some slick GUI tools for filling it.
.NET are your bread and butter, a dual-booting Intel based Mac could be the bees knees of development platforms.
Python and Ruby are already in there out of the box, as is the Apache webserver for debugging your PHP scripts before they go to the server.
Still, if you're a proprietary Microsoft shop and IIS, ASP and
I think there's some confusion over the definition of "streaming" and what the technology in dispute actually is.
The QuickTime Plugin had "progressive download" type streaming from day 1, which meant movies embedded in web pages could begin to play almost straight away, even though most of the content was still to be transferred. If the buffer stayed ahead of the playhead, a good experience resulted.
This in my view was more useful than normal style streaming, where given my haphazard connections over the years, made long pauses, freezes and drop-outs a regular part of the experience, whether on Real, WMP, or QuickTime.
However, although I've RTFA, I'm unclear what type the "used in iTunes and iPod" phrase means. I thought iTunes just embedded QuickTime and used progressive caching, which means Apple was there first, patent or not. I'm just thinking out loud. I equate true streaming with DRM - it restricts my use of the content.
> I wonder if using the CD instead of an album would screw up the timing.
Unlikely unless the vinyl was snagging or the record player motor was worn, but something that definitely would affect the timing is watching in Europe or Australia where they have the PAL video system.
PAL runs at 25 fps (vs. NTSC which runs at 29.97 fps). This means that for easier compatibility, most DVDs are re-timed to run at 25 fps instead of the cinematic 24 fps. The result is a 4% speedup.
Usually unnoticeable, but for something like this, it would throw off the timing.
No real argument from me, except to say that if you can take the B/I/U software like Windows and run it its own little window, VMWare like, while the rest of the system is chugging along with OS X goodness, you're 3 steps closer to nirvana.
Windows isn't going away, but being able to keep it available and in its own sandbox could be a useful transition mechanism.
The Aussie store currently doesn't have the Just For You feature, but if you go to the home page and switch to the US store using the popup menu at the bottom, it appears.
(You have to switch back if you want to buy a song later.)
Yes, it is, but you've got to add tax (GST = 10%) too which brings it to about $1.45.
I think $1.50 per song would have been a nicer price point, but I suppose they are hedging in case the Aussie dollar tanks again if/when the economy takes a hit from rising inflation - it's harder to go up once the price is set.
There's also the overhead of running a high bandwidth store in a backward country (whose "leading" technology company, Telstra can't even manage a shareholder meeting webcast without screwing up).
Still, I bought 20 songs this morning. Though I'm pissed I can't buy Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell as a single song only. Grumble...
At least Cmdr. Taco didn't pick it up... Then it would have been:
"Less songs than MSN Music. No Sony. Lame."
> Coming out of MS CEO's office: "I'm going to f**king kill LINUX!!!!"
King Canute commanding the waves to go back.
Hmm.
<sarcasm>
So I guess that's why they brought out MS Office for Linux instead of MS Office for Mac.
</sarcasm>
Did know that a low-end Mac sold with a boxed copy of Office often makes more money for Microsoft than it does Apple? (Gross margins on software are 80%+ compared to gross margins of 20% on hardware.) Yeah, Microsoft must really hate Apple.
Apple is no threat to Microsoft. If Mac doubled it's marketshare, Microsoft's revenue from it would increase.
Linux, if it can get its desktop act together, is.
It's a bit different there. It is still the identical RSS 2.0 spec. They are just using a namespace to supply information that isn't otherwise available, such as duration, a subtitle and an "explicit" warning, which are handy (but optional) things to have.
Conventional RSS tags in Podcasts without these namespace tags work fine, just don't give the extra useful information.
The namespace allows delineation of info voluntarily added for the user's benefit. It hasn't altered the RSS 2.0 spec at all.
iLawyer had a bug in the early versions...
It failed to submit a patent for the company's second most important product (iPod) until a year after its release.
This bug was corrected in iLawyer 1.0.1, but that version introduced a new bug that sued a blog site on every launch.
Reports suggest the bug has still not been fixed in iLawyer 1.0.2.
Start a poll and find out...
I think a lot of people are interested in OSx86 because it's a solid, well-designed OS that lets people leverage their *nix skills in an attractively presented GUI.
And... because they can!
You mean like expecting a steady supply of chips so that they could sell competitively performing machines without angering customers with long delays?
I don't know if you're a Mac user but if you are you probably didn't have to wait THREE MONTHS to be shipped a PowerMac G5 like I did last year. Apple couldn't get the chips. IBM couldn't get the yield up to sufficient quantities.
IBM had also told Apple they could supply a 3GHz part within a year of the initial launch in 2003. It's now 2005 and they still cannot.
Yes, they announced dual core within weeks of Jobs' bombshell (everyone knew they were coming anyway). But no, they are not shipping. When they finally do, there's every indication someone like me who might want to buy one would experience deja vu with the extreme shipping delays.
And for the actual reason that prompted the (arguably difficult) Intel transition to start:
IBM failed to produce a low-power, low-heat variant that wasn't severely reduced in performance. Intel have excellently performing low-power chips. Enough said.
If that situation is "Apple throwing it's weight" around, like many others, I think you've been doing too much armchair speculation and not enough real world observation.
Why a few weeks though?
Do you have to buy a new motherboard to get the chipset with Intel based ethernet / sound / video?
I've looked at building such a box and a motherboard that supports everything is quite cheap. Add a low-end P4, a cheap case, a PSU and you're in business with a custom-made Mac!
However, you do know that even with it running and all hardware supported, it's still a pre-release developer edition of the OS. That is, intended for developers like Adobe to port their apps across, not as a stable daily use OS.
The final x86 release may use quite different protection, that may not even run on the same chipsets. The reason this one has been so easily hacked, is that the developer machines use standard Intel chipsets so that their limited run (probably less than a few hundred have been sold) is cheap to manufacture.
So yes, with just a few hundred bucks of components, you're saving about half the cost of a Mac Mini. However, it may be stuck running a partially functional developer release, so just be warned.
No, it means you have to start buying condoms made from crocodile skin.
Which once the word gets around pretty much guarantees you'll still be reading Slashdot into the wee small hours.
(Seriously though, wasn't the first condom made from a sheep's bladder or something?)
Yes, Australia has discovered electricity. But it goes slower in Queensland, and is positively glacial in Canberra.
Which, coincidentally, is the speed of Telstra Broadband.
What do you mean? The croc is probably the closest thing to a dinosaur still alive today. (Birds, though descended from dinosaurs, have grown feathers and stuff.) That's less evolution, isn't it?