Try using a G4 Powerbook some time. Then match it with a comparable PC. There's lots of PC laptops cheaper than a 12" PowerBook ($1500), but they are mostly pretty crappy.
If you find a really nice laptop, with XP Pro, that comes close to the 'feel' you get using a G4, you are going to have paid around the same asking price as the mac.
Don't get me wrong, there are some great laptops out there, but even my Dell Precision M60 ($5000) has a real cheap feel about it, and the port placement is irritating as hell. It does however kick the ass of any P4 desktop, which is pretty good for a laptop.
What people really mean when they say this is that SQL*NET is a POS.
SQL Query Analyser on MS SQLServer is a decent app, but any quality (read $$) third party software such as SQL Query Navigator or TOAD will make using ORACLE a whole lot more pleasant.
I work on massive queries that pretty much push both SQL Server and Oracle to their limts, and both databases can take it, though it feels like Oracle ultimately has more capability. Certainly, when you are writing complex software such as corporate billing with 30 - 40 connections running simultaneously, both apps are pretty good.
Thanks to the person earlier who said Oracle is available for Mac OS X. I'm downloading now. I really need to try and boost up my familiarity with SQL*NET. Spit, cough!!
I first installed Ygdrassil/Walnut Creek branded version of Slackware 1.0 in about 1994 or 95 I think. It worked pretty good, and it was my way of hanging onto the UNIX knowledge I'd learned at University on SunOS. (This was before the Solaris name started being used)
I kept that for a while, ran Windows Me for a *long* time, then ran Red Hat 6.0 for a while, then switched to Gentoo.
My home Linux machines that run MythTV both still run Gentoo, but my laptops run Windows XP (Dell Precision M60 my work laptop), and my personal laptop is a PowerBook G4 12" that runs Mac OSX.
I may look at switching a machine to Gnome, from KDE, just to get all the SVG coolness, but as a daily machine, I do love Mac OSX.
It *is* hard to credit, but QVGA from iTunes is better than the alleged 'digital SD' garbage that the satellite providers *dish* up to unsuspecting consumers. Digital quality my ass. These guys are a testament to the dumbness of 'consoomers'.
That said, good quality SD TV, such as that I'm watching over comcast right now, is noticeable better than what can be downloaded from iTunes. Good SD TV, from an antennae, or cable *is* pretty good.
And real OTA HD TV blows almost anything away. I see about 1~2 MBytes sec when spooling to my HD. And the cpu on my mac is maxed out just displaying it.
Give iTunes some time to improve, but it is watchable and worth the money.
My shuffle is the first music player I've really used solidly. My pockets contain a wallet, a basic nokia phone, work id (smart card), 1 gig usb key, a 1 gig shuffle, white earphones. There's very limited space in a guy's pockets, and the shuffle wouldn't be in there if it didn't get used every single day.
Random selection of my fave music is my chosen way of listening to music.
It's not VisualBasic, but as long ago as 2001 or so, I was building little GUI apps on my Palm VX that quite happily got online and downloaded info from a server on my desktop at work. With Perl and WABA, you could stitch lots of cool web service type apps together.
WABA is Java, but with a simplified set of libraries, which make it easy to program for, but still pretty capable.
There are also some great gui PalmOS apps for laying out forms for simple data gathering etc.
Both my Dell D60 and my Powerbook G4 are 'instant on'. Simply open the lid and they boot. Both will near instantly connect to a known network. Neither of these computers gets rebooted more than about once a month. Both are rock stable, in fact the only glitch is Safari on the Mac needs to be restarted every few days or it's memory leaks threaten to overwhelm the machine.
Isn't that the main problem with radiation therapy? It's why you need a 'radiation planner' who essentially surveys a tumor, then plans a series of beams from different angles, that are calculated to deliver as much radiation as possible to a tumor, whilst minimising the effects on surrounding tissues.
See here for a link. Good radiation planning is a big selling point for hospitals.
Installing Windows is a total pain in the ass. Especially trying to get drivers installed. Don't get me started on the antics I had to get a wireless card running in an old Duron machine with XP Pro. Literally, it wouldn't work until you got the driver to blue screen. Then you had to reboot and 'race' to switch off the driver before it could bluescreen, and let windows start managing the card.
People use Windows because it COMES PRE-INSTALLED.
If people had to install a retail version of Windows, then install net card drivers, scanner drivers etc., GNU/Linux would have a much better chance on the desktop.
I already downloaded and watched the pilot of Night Stalker. The quality was *just* good enough to be decent on my 12" PowerBook at full screen, and really nice at double size.
I expect this will look great on the iPod. The download was about 5 or 6 minutes. That's a while, but bearable.
I think Apple have a winner with this, and ABC will make a large chunk of change at $1.99 x many downloads of the available material. Hopefully we will soon see other networks such as Fox and CBS jumping onto this, since they will not want to get left on the sidelines.
I bet this was a really near thing for Apple, since there would not be nearly as good a story if ABC had not been on board.
Ordering a black vPod was a no-brainer since I bet they will be in short supply come Christmas and will be at a premium on eBay.
Yeah, I remember watching DaveD's superfast image rotation routines. The PC (12MHz 8026 was the 'biz') didn't get *near* the 'ol Archie at that time. This is about 1989, when the initial work on a drawing package was started. This was a natural fit for our DTP package, Impression, which was going great guns, despite (in intial versions) the ease with which the parallel port dongle code could be hacked around.
I went back to Uni after working on Impression (and wrote my MSc thesis using it), and have watched Xara with interest over the years. Great to see that they are still doing cool things. I hope someone manages to port it onto OS X too.
I think you have a great idea. make a 6 inch PowerBook with 10 hours battery life and a decent screen for watching movies... Apple wouldn't be able to keep them on the shelves.
Give it a few years and we'll be there. I'll wait for Apple to do it though. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to bring myself to buy a non OS X machine ever again.
Countries like the Netherlands, Garmany and to a lesser extent the UK, aren't really raising standards by having relatively more difficult driving education and tests. They are trying to ration access to driving. However, with rationing, the price of all aspects is artificially raised.
In the US, driving is cheap, and the driving test, at least here in Texas is really quite easy to pass. Hence generally lower cost.
The real kicker is that the accident rate is not significantly reduced by controlling assholes. There may be some corollary in here about the % of jerks on the road more or less remaining constant.
Surfing the web and reading documentation, such as the ADC included in Mac OS X, I get about 4 1/2 hours or so out of my 12" PowerBook G4. Seriously, the battery life on this thing kicks ass.
Playing Halo sucks in power saving mode, so you have to crank the CPU up a bit, but that's the main limitation. I also have the screen set at low brightness.
Yeah, I'm not old, and I started at Uni in 1984. Pre-email. Man it sucked when started getting our assignments by email. We has to manually un-UUENCODE them and print them ourselves. Man how we bitched.
We never thought that electronic mail would catch on.
Google Broadband. Awesome, comes free with everything 90% of people need. This would most likely kill Dell and Microsoft in the home arena, and maybe for some small businesses as well.
I'd probably want to stick with my Powerbook, since I need a portable for traveling, but yeah, 99% of what I do at home, a thin client would be great. Hell, I spend a bunch of time using Citrix at work. My company saves a bunch of money by only having a few licenses for certain pieces of software, but giving access to everyone, albeit with only 12 people running at once, for example.
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Try using a G4 Powerbook some time. Then match it with a comparable PC. There's lots of PC laptops cheaper than a 12" PowerBook ($1500), but they are mostly pretty crappy.
If you find a really nice laptop, with XP Pro, that comes close to the 'feel' you get using a G4, you are going to have paid around the same asking price as the mac.
Don't get me wrong, there are some great laptops out there, but even my Dell Precision M60 ($5000) has a real cheap feel about it, and the port placement is irritating as hell. It does however kick the ass of any P4 desktop, which is pretty good for a laptop.
You get what you pay for. No way round it.
Yeah, and ffmpeg is pretty much the foundation of many or most multimedia on Linux. Take a look at the source-code sometime, it's pretty damn cool.
ffmpeg is the work of a guy called Fabrice Bellard, and probably many people who've tweaked, helped and tested.
What people really mean when they say this is that SQL*NET is a POS.
SQL Query Analyser on MS SQLServer is a decent app, but any quality (read $$) third party software such as SQL Query Navigator or TOAD will make using ORACLE a whole lot more pleasant.
I work on massive queries that pretty much push both SQL Server and Oracle to their limts, and both databases can take it, though it feels like Oracle ultimately has more capability. Certainly, when you are writing complex software such as corporate billing with 30 - 40 connections running simultaneously, both apps are pretty good.
Thanks to the person earlier who said Oracle is available for Mac OS X. I'm downloading now. I really need to try and boost up my familiarity with SQL*NET. Spit, cough!!
Actually, DishNetwork satellite probably comes in about 240x120. It completely sucks ass, what with jpeg artifacts, lousy color etc.
My ComCast SD cable completely kicks its ass. It's barely different from DVD on a SD TV.
Try watching all the detail in the grass blur out on satellite sometime.
ITMS video comes somewhere in the middle. Better than satellite but not as good as really good cable on a SD TV.
I first installed Ygdrassil/Walnut Creek branded version of Slackware 1.0 in about 1994 or 95 I think. It worked pretty good, and it was my way of hanging onto the UNIX knowledge I'd learned at University on SunOS. (This was before the Solaris name started being used)
I kept that for a while, ran Windows Me for a *long* time, then ran Red Hat 6.0 for a while, then switched to Gentoo.
My home Linux machines that run MythTV both still run Gentoo, but my laptops run Windows XP (Dell Precision M60 my work laptop), and my personal laptop is a PowerBook G4 12" that runs Mac OSX.
I may look at switching a machine to Gnome, from KDE, just to get all the SVG coolness, but as a daily machine, I do love Mac OSX.
It *is* hard to credit, but QVGA from iTunes is better than the alleged 'digital SD' garbage that the satellite providers *dish* up to unsuspecting consumers. Digital quality my ass. These guys are a testament to the dumbness of 'consoomers'.
That said, good quality SD TV, such as that I'm watching over comcast right now, is noticeable better than what can be downloaded from iTunes. Good SD TV, from an antennae, or cable *is* pretty good.
And real OTA HD TV blows almost anything away. I see about 1~2 MBytes sec when spooling to my HD. And the cpu on my mac is maxed out just displaying it.
Give iTunes some time to improve, but it is watchable and worth the money.
I think everyone needs to have a play in a V8 Expedition, or a leather-lined Lincoln Towncar.
I rent on business and both these ended up costing about $280 for five days, or about $55/day (30 GBP).
Mmmm, V8 waftiness.
My shuffle is the first music player I've really used solidly. My pockets contain a wallet, a basic nokia phone, work id (smart card), 1 gig usb key, a 1 gig shuffle, white earphones. There's very limited space in a guy's pockets, and the shuffle wouldn't be in there if it didn't get used every single day.
Random selection of my fave music is my chosen way of listening to music.
It's not VisualBasic, but as long ago as 2001 or so, I was building little GUI apps on my Palm VX that quite happily got online and downloaded info from a server on my desktop at work. With Perl and WABA, you could stitch lots of cool web service type apps together.
WABA is Java, but with a simplified set of libraries, which make it easy to program for, but still pretty capable.
There are also some great gui PalmOS apps for laying out forms for simple data gathering etc.
Dude, 1996 want their non-sleeping laptop back ...
Both my Dell D60 and my Powerbook G4 are 'instant on'. Simply open the lid and they boot. Both will near instantly connect to a known network. Neither of these computers gets rebooted more than about once a month. Both are rock stable, in fact the only glitch is Safari on the Mac needs to be restarted every few days or it's memory leaks threaten to overwhelm the machine.
Isn't that the main problem with radiation therapy? It's why you need a 'radiation planner' who essentially surveys a tumor, then plans a series of beams from different angles, that are calculated to deliver as much radiation as possible to a tumor, whilst minimising the effects on surrounding tissues.
See here for a link. Good radiation planning is a big selling point for hospitals.
Installing Windows is a total pain in the ass. Especially trying to get drivers installed. Don't get me started on the antics I had to get a wireless card running in an old Duron machine with XP Pro. Literally, it wouldn't work until you got the driver to blue screen. Then you had to reboot and 'race' to switch off the driver before it could bluescreen, and let windows start managing the card.
People use Windows because it COMES PRE-INSTALLED.
If people had to install a retail version of Windows, then install net card drivers, scanner drivers etc., GNU/Linux would have a much better chance on the desktop.
Double-click to get a separate quicktime window from iTunes, then right-click or ctrl-click on the title bar and click 'full screen'.
Hey presto, full screen video.
I already downloaded and watched the pilot of Night Stalker. The quality was *just* good enough to be decent on my 12" PowerBook at full screen, and really nice at double size.
I expect this will look great on the iPod. The download was about 5 or 6 minutes. That's a while, but bearable.
I think Apple have a winner with this, and ABC will make a large chunk of change at $1.99 x many downloads of the available material. Hopefully we will soon see other networks such as Fox and CBS jumping onto this, since they will not want to get left on the sidelines.
I bet this was a really near thing for Apple, since there would not be nearly as good a story if ABC had not been on board.
Ordering a black vPod was a no-brainer since I bet they will be in short supply come Christmas and will be at a premium on eBay.
Yeah, I remember watching DaveD's superfast image rotation routines. The PC (12MHz 8026 was the 'biz') didn't get *near* the 'ol Archie at that time. This is about 1989, when the initial work on a drawing package was started. This was a natural fit for our DTP package, Impression, which was going great guns, despite (in intial versions) the ease with which the parallel port dongle code could be hacked around.
I went back to Uni after working on Impression (and wrote my MSc thesis using it), and have watched Xara with interest over the years. Great to see that they are still doing cool things. I hope someone manages to port it onto OS X too.
I think you have a great idea. make a 6 inch PowerBook with 10 hours battery life and a decent screen for watching movies ... Apple wouldn't be able to keep them on the shelves.
Give it a few years and we'll be there. I'll wait for Apple to do it though. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to bring myself to buy a non OS X machine ever again.
They could license the Dell Ditty.
Bwahahahahah.
1. Antagonize Ballmer.
2. Screw chairs to floor.
3. Patent process of screwing chairs to floor.
4. ???
5. Profit!
Poor Steve Jobs. He must be in danger of herniating himself with laughter over this mess.
Countries like the Netherlands, Garmany and to a lesser extent the UK, aren't really raising standards by having relatively more difficult driving education and tests. They are trying to ration access to driving. However, with rationing, the price of all aspects is artificially raised.
In the US, driving is cheap, and the driving test, at least here in Texas is really quite easy to pass. Hence generally lower cost.
The real kicker is that the accident rate is not significantly reduced by controlling assholes. There may be some corollary in here about the % of jerks on the road more or less remaining constant.
Have you seen Keith Richards ? He needs a full days supply of gonads just to get out of bed in the morning.
1. Get hold of a copy of Excel.
2. Hit record macro to generate VB
3. Cut and paste recorded macro.
4. ???
5. Profit!
Surfing the web and reading documentation, such as the ADC included in Mac OS X, I get about 4 1/2 hours or so out of my 12" PowerBook G4. Seriously, the battery life on this thing kicks ass.
Playing Halo sucks in power saving mode, so you have to crank the CPU up a bit, but that's the main limitation. I also have the screen set at low brightness.
Yeah, I'm not old, and I started at Uni in 1984. Pre-email. Man it sucked when started getting our assignments by email. We has to manually un-UUENCODE them and print them ourselves. Man how we bitched.
We never thought that electronic mail would catch on.
Sweet, there's a pretty good angle.
Google Broadband. Awesome, comes free with everything 90% of people need. This would most likely kill Dell and Microsoft in the home arena, and maybe for some small businesses as well.
I'd probably want to stick with my Powerbook, since I need a portable for traveling, but yeah, 99% of what I do at home, a thin client would be great. Hell, I spend a bunch of time using Citrix at work. My company saves a bunch of money by only having a few licenses for certain pieces of software, but giving access to everyone, albeit with only 12 people running at once, for example.
They may be better off building super teeth, rather than super noses.