> of course, bill was RIGHT from a biz standpoint..
Not long term.
Mac OS switched completely from the 68k CPU to the PowerPC because they built something better, and then built a bridge between the old and the new by providing excellent 68k emulation. Apple is doing it again, moving from the Classic API to the Cocoa API with the Carbon API as the bridge.
Microsoft never looked ahead and never provided any leadership. Windows 2000 has all kinds of kludges for backwards compatibility, but eventually you hit a wall and you have to implement something like their System File Protection(tm) just to get a semblance of security and stability. So Windows 2000 only runs about 75% of NT apps and 50% of Win32 apps. Is anybody looking forward to this thing going gold?
> for booting > off a floppy to bypass security measures. > The last two can be major problems for > sysadmins.
The last PC BIOS setup that I had a look at had specific options for disabling a floppy boot or disabling the whole drive, as a security/anti-virus measure. In that case, why not make it an external USB device that you can buy if you want to, or not? Disbling a Mac floppy drive means unplugging the USB cable and putting the drive in the closet. If you need it, it's there for you to use the same drive on any number of Macs.
I don't know how the x86 platform will ever drop a technology. I read that Intel has been trying to ditch the LPT and COM ports but Windows gives you problems on a machine that doesn't have them. Maybe a forward-looking Linux reference spec could drop the old stuff, but in that case, you'd have to ask if you would even keep the x86 processor when Linux runs on so many architectures.
> I am tired of reading here that there > are still PC models on the market that > can't boot from a CD.
Often this is because many users don't know how to make their machine boot from the CD. If it's not enabled by default then they have to edit BIOS settings. Easy for some, but impossible or very stressful for most. Also, what CD do you boot up? I've never seen a bootable Windows CD.
On a Mac, you put the Mac OS CD that came with your machine in the CD-ROM drive and either select it as your boot disk in the Startup Disk Control Panel, or reboot and hold down "C". When it boots, you're running Mac OS off the CD.
If GM says that their pickup truck has the best gas mileage in its class, that doesn't also mean its the cheapest in its class.
In this case, the devil on your shoulder is supposed to go "the Mac is $200 more" and the Angel goes "but it has better graphics and a faster CPU". Whichever one wins is up to you.
I think that's the idea with these new iMacs... they showed them off running Quake III and editing digital video, not just surfing the Web. The original 233MHz iMac is still plenty good for that and will be for some time to come (especially with cable or DSL hooked up to its Ethernet port).
I don't think they try to make any secret out of the fact that Jobs is also CEO (and owns) Pixar. He has one share of Apple stock and I don't think he receives any salary for being "interim" CEO of Apple. Can you imagine anyone at Apple resenting the fact that the DVD they use to demo the DVD iMac is a Pixar title even if they weren't giving them away with the iMac? The markets are similar. When they demo QuickTime streaming they use a Pixar movie trailer or whatever as well.
Apple has introduced the next generation of Power Macintosh G3 computers -- now with built-in FireWire technology. FireWire is a high-speed serial input/output (I/O) technology for connecting peripherals to a computer. Originally developed by Apple, FireWire is now an official industry standard (IEEE 1394).
Re:gotta love the benchmarks! - horrid ATI drivers
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New iMac Rolled Out
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· Score: 1
Yes, the drivers that shipped with my Yosemite G3 were a piece of shit. After installing the first driver update, my machine was rock solid stable, but before that it crashed a few times a week.
Re:$1299 Model also has DVD and Firewire.
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New iMac Rolled Out
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· Score: 1
> what the heck are you talking about? > I just bought a 128meg chip for 96 bucks > off ebay. Or is there special MAC dram?
It's the same RAM, but you could buy a 128MB PC100 DIMM brand new for $90 a few months ago (I bought two). New, that part goes for about $160 minimum right now.
I thought Sony had one? Or it might have been a digital camcorder that also had a still mode where it captured a single non-interlaced frame at a time.
I think it was AppleInsider that reported that Mac OS 9 went GM just in time for them to put it on the new iMacs, even though many had already been produced and had 8.6 on them. Whether this is true or not, I don't know. You get 9 for the cost of the media and shipping and handling ($19.99) if you get one with 8.6 now.
The 8.6 that was going to be on them was sort of an 8.6+ with some parts of 9 that the thing requires because of the new motherboards, so I think they were anxious to get 9 on there.
You can get a Zip drive, an Imation Superdisk or a DVD-RAM built into any PowerMac.
You can get Firewire CD-RW, DVD-RAM, ORB, DAT and a couple of other types of tape drive, as well as full-sized and portable-sized hard drives. They'll work on any PowerMac and on the new iMac DV, or on a PowerBook with a PC Card.
You can get Zip drives, Superdisk, CD-RW or hard drives in USB that will work on any current or recent Mac.
All of the above external drives hotplug and most don't even require any driver software on top of what's already in the OS. Plus, all Macs have built-in 10/100 Ethernet and 56k modems.
I have an 18 GB Firewire hard drive that I routinely pack full of digital audio and video and take to another location and hotplug right into another Mac and resume working. The thing weighs a kg or so and cost a few hundred dollars. THAT's removable storage. (And you can boot from it.)
Macs can also mount floppy disk images as if they were floppy drives, so old stuff is easily transferred to a hard drive with a borrowed USB floppy or on an older Mac with a floppy drive.
Slashdot's obligatory "no floppy" post. Somebody always has to pop up with that anytime Apple is mentioned.
I guess you could also make a Beowolf cluster of new iMacs that would be fast enough to get you the first post so you could complain about the moderation and remind everyone how much Linux roolz.
To go from $1299 to $1499 you add 64MB more RAM, 3 GB more HD and the graphite color, but all of the iMacs except the base model come with DVD and Firewire.
One cheap box with everything you need to make and edit home movies except the digital camcorder, and it's easy to use? There's been demand for that for a long time. Too bad Microsoft has been too busy making NT pretty to provide any leadership in that kind of thing.
> I would rather have IE5 with 2,500 bugs > than Navigator with none.
Please elaborate. What is IE 5 a solution for?
There is very little IE 5 only content available on the Web, or even IE 4 only content. Almost all content is designed to the lowest common denominator between Navigator 3, 4 and IE 3-5. The performance hit a Windows installation takes for installing IE 4 or 5 is routinely shown to be between 10 and 20% in speed and stability. The confusion it adds to the Windows interface (browser and window toolbar very similar but not the same) seems to me personally to be an undesireable feature (but then, I work on a Mac all the time these days).
This is an honest question. I may be personally biased against IE 5 because I'm a Web developer and it's made my job much tougher, but I'd like to know what users are gaining from it that someone would trade a bug-free Navigator for a 2500 bug IE.
Puh-leeze... did you think that up yourself or did Sally Jessy Raphael provide you with that?
Besides, if you're an American, you already own a gun. You bought it with your tax dollars, and the police or the army is killing brown people with it right now. Thanks for not being smart enough to learn how to work it yourself and use it only for self-defense. You've made the world a better place. Really.
> The media constantly monitors/. as a > reflection of the state of open source. > And when two of the most well known > personalities indulge in a high > quality scuffle of name calling of > the kind I haven't seen since 4th grade, > it creates a BAD image of the community > as a whole.
Yes. Over the next few years, as the OSS community works to defeat the beast from Redmond, members of the community should be:
1) mindful of public opinion 2) sensitive to the needs of shareholders 3) kind to animals 4) clean-shaven 5) well dressed in suit and tie
Business leaders need to know there will be a reliable (open) source of corporate drones once Microsoft stops supplying their bloated, buggy, unstable variety.
Vive le revolution! Plus ca change, plus c'est le meme chose!
> We need to start at the "What's best for > society" and go from there.
What's best for you will either be decided by you or (if you don't want to do it) by someone else. "Society" is a figment of your imagination. Groups of individuals can only be said to truly decide something if they all act individually... if they each make the decision for themselves. What you're really saying is "instead of doing our own thing, we should try and guess what we should do to benefit our neighbors". Well, then stop writing that app for Linux, because more people use Windows. They have decided what's best for society, and it is Windows. Get to work and stop complaining.
>> starting on the "what's best for me" >> level and moving upward
I agree, except that I would ask "upward to what?" President Clinton? Bob Barr? (If you're American.) I would submit that we start at "what's best for me" and just stay there. If we're all equal, how can there be more than one level? Besides, if you got some good to spread around, the only people who will appreciate it are people who see themselves as your equal anyway.
It's been my experience that, politically, most geeks are anti-authoritarian, even if that just means having no use for politics and authority.
The two biggest political parties in America are both very authoritarian, but neither is really traditionally left or right, so for Americans, libertarian/authoritarian is a more descriptive measure of political ideas than left/right or liberal/conservative.
When the DEA/ATF/FBI/etc storm a house they take the guns first, the computers second, and everything else third. Sometimes you get everything else back, but they always keep the guns and computers. There's something for geeks to think about.
Slashdot Mirror
> of course, bill was RIGHT from a biz standpoint..
Not long term.
Mac OS switched completely from the 68k CPU to the PowerPC because they built something better, and then built a bridge between the old and the new by providing excellent 68k emulation. Apple is doing it again, moving from the Classic API to the Cocoa API with the Carbon API as the bridge.
Microsoft never looked ahead and never provided any leadership. Windows 2000 has all kinds of kludges for backwards compatibility, but eventually you hit a wall and you have to implement something like their System File Protection(tm) just to get a semblance of security and stability. So Windows 2000 only runs about 75% of NT apps and 50% of Win32 apps. Is anybody looking forward to this thing going gold?
> So it looks like we have yet another example
> of Apple copying something that Microsoft did
> before them.
Damn. I missed the other ones. Please detail them here for me.
> for booting
> off a floppy to bypass security measures.
> The last two can be major problems for
> sysadmins.
The last PC BIOS setup that I had a look at had specific options for disabling a floppy boot or disabling the whole drive, as a security/anti-virus measure. In that case, why not make it an external USB device that you can buy if you want to, or not? Disbling a Mac floppy drive means unplugging the USB cable and putting the drive in the closet. If you need it, it's there for you to use the same drive on any number of Macs.
I don't know how the x86 platform will ever drop a technology. I read that Intel has been trying to ditch the LPT and COM ports but Windows gives you problems on a machine that doesn't have them. Maybe a forward-looking Linux reference spec could drop the old stuff, but in that case, you'd have to ask if you would even keep the x86 processor when Linux runs on so many architectures.
> I am tired of reading here that there
> are still PC models on the market that
> can't boot from a CD.
Often this is because many users don't know how to make their machine boot from the CD. If it's not enabled by default then they have to edit BIOS settings. Easy for some, but impossible or very stressful for most. Also, what CD do you boot up? I've never seen a bootable Windows CD.
On a Mac, you put the Mac OS CD that came with your machine in the CD-ROM drive and either select it as your boot disk in the Startup Disk Control Panel, or reboot and hold down "C". When it boots, you're running Mac OS off the CD.
If GM says that their pickup truck has the best gas mileage in its class, that doesn't also mean its the cheapest in its class.
In this case, the devil on your shoulder is supposed to go "the Mac is $200 more" and the Angel goes "but it has better graphics and a faster CPU". Whichever one wins is up to you.
I think that's the idea with these new iMacs ... they showed them off running Quake III and editing digital video, not just surfing the Web. The original 233MHz iMac is still plenty good for that and will be for some time to come (especially with cable or DSL hooked up to its Ethernet port).
I don't think they try to make any secret out of the fact that Jobs is also CEO (and owns) Pixar. He has one share of Apple stock and I don't think he receives any salary for being "interim" CEO of Apple. Can you imagine anyone at Apple resenting the fact that the DVD they use to demo the DVD iMac is a Pixar title even if they weren't giving them away with the iMac? The markets are similar. When they demo QuickTime streaming they use a Pixar movie trailer or whatever as well.
What is FireWire?
Apple has introduced the next generation of Power Macintosh G3 computers -- now with built-in FireWire technology. FireWire is a high-speed serial input/output (I/O) technology for connecting peripherals to a computer. Originally developed by Apple, FireWire is now an official industry standard (IEEE 1394).
Firewire Fact Sheet (pdf)
Firewire Home Page
Yes, the drivers that shipped with my Yosemite G3 were a piece of shit. After installing the first driver update, my machine was rock solid stable, but before that it crashed a few times a week.
> what the heck are you talking about?
> I just bought a 128meg chip for 96 bucks
> off ebay. Or is there special MAC dram?
It's the same RAM, but you could buy a 128MB PC100 DIMM brand new for $90 a few months ago (I bought two). New, that part goes for about $160 minimum right now.
I thought Sony had one? Or it might have been a digital camcorder that also had a still mode where it captured a single non-interlaced frame at a time.
Failure? It's been out two weeks and they've sold 250,000 of them. How is that a failure?
You're just trolling.
I think it was AppleInsider that reported that Mac OS 9 went GM just in time for them to put it on the new iMacs, even though many had already been produced and had 8.6 on them. Whether this is true or not, I don't know. You get 9 for the cost of the media and shipping and handling ($19.99) if you get one with 8.6 now.
The 8.6 that was going to be on them was sort of an 8.6+ with some parts of 9 that the thing requires because of the new motherboards, so I think they were anxious to get 9 on there.
You can get a Zip drive, an Imation Superdisk or a DVD-RAM built into any PowerMac.
You can get Firewire CD-RW, DVD-RAM, ORB, DAT and a couple of other types of tape drive, as well as full-sized and portable-sized hard drives. They'll work on any PowerMac and on the new iMac DV, or on a PowerBook with a PC Card.
You can get Zip drives, Superdisk, CD-RW or hard drives in USB that will work on any current or recent Mac.
All of the above external drives hotplug and most don't even require any driver software on top of what's already in the OS. Plus, all Macs have built-in 10/100 Ethernet and 56k modems.
I have an 18 GB Firewire hard drive that I routinely pack full of digital audio and video and take to another location and hotplug right into another Mac and resume working. The thing weighs a kg or so and cost a few hundred dollars. THAT's removable storage. (And you can boot from it.)
Macs can also mount floppy disk images as if they were floppy drives, so old stuff is easily transferred to a hard drive with a borrowed USB floppy or on an older Mac with a floppy drive.
What other alternatives do you need?
Slashdot's obligatory "no floppy" post. Somebody always has to pop up with that anytime Apple is mentioned.
I guess you could also make a Beowolf cluster of new iMacs that would be fast enough to get you the first post so you could complain about the moderation and remind everyone how much Linux roolz.
To go from $1299 to $1499 you add 64MB more RAM, 3 GB more HD and the graphite color, but all of the iMacs except the base model come with DVD and Firewire.
One cheap box with everything you need to make and edit home movies except the digital camcorder, and it's easy to use? There's been demand for that for a long time. Too bad Microsoft has been too busy making NT pretty to provide any leadership in that kind of thing.
> I would rather have IE5 with 2,500 bugs
> than Navigator with none.
Please elaborate. What is IE 5 a solution for?
There is very little IE 5 only content available on the Web, or even IE 4 only content. Almost all content is designed to the lowest common denominator between Navigator 3, 4 and IE 3-5. The performance hit a Windows installation takes for installing IE 4 or 5 is routinely shown to be between 10 and 20% in speed and stability. The confusion it adds to the Windows interface (browser and window toolbar very similar but not the same) seems to me personally to be an undesireable feature (but then, I work on a Mac all the time these days).
This is an honest question. I may be personally biased against IE 5 because I'm a Web developer and it's made my job much tougher, but I'd like to know what users are gaining from it that someone would trade a bug-free Navigator for a 2500 bug IE.
>>you can guess which OS
... the world is just full of Mac users who hate their Macs.
>Must be MacOS
Yeah
Puh-leeze ... did you think that up yourself or did Sally Jessy Raphael provide you with that?
Besides, if you're an American, you already own a gun. You bought it with your tax dollars, and the police or the army is killing brown people with it right now. Thanks for not being smart enough to learn how to work it yourself and use it only for self-defense. You've made the world a better place. Really.
> The media constantly monitors /. as a
> reflection of the state of open source.
> And when two of the most well known
> personalities indulge in a high
> quality scuffle of name calling of
> the kind I haven't seen since 4th grade,
> it creates a BAD image of the community
> as a whole.
Yes. Over the next few years, as the OSS community works to defeat the beast from Redmond, members of the community should be:
1) mindful of public opinion
2) sensitive to the needs of shareholders
3) kind to animals
4) clean-shaven
5) well dressed in suit and tie
Business leaders need to know there will be a reliable (open) source of corporate drones once Microsoft stops supplying their bloated, buggy, unstable variety.
Vive le revolution! Plus ca change, plus c'est le meme chose!
The sarcasm detector(tm) has to be removed to make space for the (open source) zealot module.
> We need to start at the "What's best for
... if they each make the decision for themselves. What you're really saying is "instead of doing our own thing, we should try and guess what we should do to benefit our neighbors". Well, then stop writing that app for Linux, because more people use Windows. They have decided what's best for society, and it is Windows. Get to work and stop complaining.
> society" and go from there.
What's best for you will either be decided by you or (if you don't want to do it) by someone else. "Society" is a figment of your imagination. Groups of individuals can only be said to truly decide something if they all act individually
>> starting on the "what's best for me"
>> level and moving upward
I agree, except that I would ask "upward to what?" President Clinton? Bob Barr? (If you're American.) I would submit that we start at "what's best for me" and just stay there. If we're all equal, how can there be more than one level? Besides, if you got some good to spread around, the only people who will appreciate it are people who see themselves as your equal anyway.
It's been my experience that, politically, most geeks are anti-authoritarian, even if that just means having no use for politics and authority.
The two biggest political parties in America are both very authoritarian, but neither is really traditionally left or right, so for Americans, libertarian/authoritarian is a more descriptive measure of political ideas than left/right or liberal/conservative.
When the DEA/ATF/FBI/etc storm a house they take the guns first, the computers second, and everything else third. Sometimes you get everything else back, but they always keep the guns and computers. There's something for geeks to think about.
Sue one little guy who's easy to beat and scare everybody else.