> And a floppy drive being "useless" is debatable.
> As a tool for updating a BIOS
Updating the "BIOS" on a Mac involves downloading and running a firmware updater file. After a reboot, a graphical meter informs you of the progress of the firmware update and then reboots the computer. It's basically the same as the way an old Compaq that I had worked, except you don't have to put the file onto a floppy to make it work. How you think this is a knock against Apple, I don't know. If you want the update on a disk, write it to a CD-R, CD-RW, or DVD-R. It's as easy to make one of those on today's Macs as it was to make floppies in the past. The only difference is that when you eject the disc, you're asked if you really want to burn your data onto it. You say yes, and then the disc is burned and pops out. Easy.
> or as an easy R/W boot device it is unequalled.
You have got to be kidding. An easy R/W boot device on the Mac is an iPod or any other FireWire storage. You can get a FireWire hard drive enclosure for $80 and put any hard disk in it that you please and boot any Mac from it. It's been a while since you could boot a Mac system off a floppy, and the same is true for Windows. There was an article on MacSlash recently by a guy who works at three different locations on three different Macs, but keeps his system on an iPod so that it is the same no matter where he works and he can carry the iPod between jobs on his bike. That's what you're looking for if you like to put systems on floppies.
And, as if that weren't enough to kill floppies on the Mac platform, every Mac comes with a free iTools account, which gives you a free 20GB storage "disk" on Apple's servers. It appears as just another hard drive on the Mac, so you can copy stuff there and get it later from another machine.
Finally, a utility called DiskCopy, which is included with both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X makes "virtual disks". If you had Mac floppies at one time, then you have long since converted them to "virtual floppies". Basically, you have disk images that you can double-click and they mount, as if the original media were present.
> Why? because there is an equally unbalanced
> community that will support ANY move by Apple
Here you are talking absolute bullshit about why you think that the Mac platform should have floppy drives, and you are saying that Mac users are unbalanced? You don't know anything about it, yet you want millions of perfect strangers to embrace magnetic 1.4MB storage that they have no need for? Take a moment to get a clue, man. The 3.5" floppy debuted on the Mac in 1984. It was retired in 1998. It had a pretty good run. We're over it.
Consider for a moment how ubiquitous PC's are. Mac users are not sitting there using Macs because they don't know Windows exists. We have all pretty much used both. Still, we are passionate and vocal about the advantages of the Mac, and we're very proud of the technological artistry and leadership that comes out of Apple because it has saved us time and money and hassle in the past. If you haven't used both, then you ought to shut up... you're just making noise, not telling anybody anything useful. You don't know, but you think you know. But you don't. You actually do not know. Either find out or shut up.
> Like Gigabit ethernet (of which for now is usless
> as most of our hubs/switches are 10/100 and
> gigabit ones are still pricey)
A lot of Apple's customers work with big files, though, so just being able to connect a desktop and notebook machine with Gigabit Ethernet is a great feature.
I use a PowerMac and a PowerBook, and both have built-in Gigabit Ethernet. I hook them up with a standard Ethernet cable (don't even need a crossover cable), so that when I'm working on the PowerMac, the PowerBook's drive is mounted there and is just as fast as if the drive were attached to the internal ATA. This has totally removed the chore of moving large audio and video files between these machines. It's just a typical file copy like between two drives in the same machine.
Both machines get their Internet from AirPort (802.11) so I can use the Ethernet jacks like this without messing with the outside connection.
Another cool connectivity thing is that if you boot a Mac with the T key held down, it starts up as a FireWire hard drive, ready to plug into a FireWire computer. Sometimes I do that if I just want to hook the notebook up to the desktop quickly and grab a bunch of files, without working on the notebook as well.
One day we'll replace our hub and it will be Gigabit and we'll be ready for that with the machines.
These systems being included in every box really elevate the platform.
> Apple has a long tradition of breaking compatibility
> ever few years.
One of my favorite Mac OS X demonstrations was where they ran the original Mac's software on a Mac OS X Mac, including a beta version of MacPaint that was dated 1983. This is GUI software, remember? How many GUI apps are you running even from 1993?
When Apple switched CPU's, they built an emulator for the old CPU into the OS. When they switched kernels, they built a compatibility environment for the old software. Also, the Mac software is really worth having. Mac-first titles include Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, Word, Excel, Director, iMovie, Final Cut Pro, iDVD and lots more.
Excluding the G4 towers, all Macs have: 1) built-in display, 2) VGA out, 3) TV out. They can all mirror their main display on either a VGA monitor or a TV monitor... whatever you have available.
The G4 towers all have VGA and ADC (DVI) outs, but no TV out. You can add one on a PCI card, or use USB.
In the iMac's favor, it comes with a lot of really good, really usable software as well. There is a really decent productivity suite that's like a simplified MS Office and reads and writes those formats. You get FireWire ports, but you also get an OS that mounts all the FireWire storage easily, and the best consumer video editing software as well, so you can plug in any DV camcorder and make a movie. Games, UNIX-compatibility, great stability, and iTunes is spectacularly easy and enjoyable music management. Third-party software installation is drag-and-drop; third-party hardware installation is plug-and-play.
What I'm saying is that you have to go further than just RAM, CPU, HD, graphics RAM to put a PC together that can capably replace an iMac. You've got to add some software and hardware and do a lot of configuring. iMac also has very decent speakers in it, a beautiful optical mouse, a great keyboard, and wireless antennaes built-in so it can be a base station for your notebook or any other 802.11 computer if you add a $99 AirPort card. And no fan. It's very quiet. Also, the design and appeal of the iMac has to count for $100 or so. You add RAM by opening the RAM door with a quarter and popping in a chip of "iMac RAM" (many vendors sell RAM this way, guaranteed and tested for iMac). That shit really, really counts for many users. It enables them to admin their own system to a certain degree and not have to call a geek to get anything done.
The problem with them continuing to offer a CRT version is that the CRT they use isn't going to be manufactured anymore. They will be anxious to lose the CRT version ASAP. They have to support the CRT one for three years, meaning they have to have spare CRT's for that long, and techs who know how to work with them, etc.
Also, the flat-panel iMac will save them shipping, storage, and retail space and cost. Instead of a big square carton, they can use a suitcase-style box like iBook and PowerBook and their flat-panel displays use.
I think with the first iMac they had to really work to get down to the original $1299 price point, knowing they'd make it up in volume. Hopefully, they will be aggressive with the flat-panel version, and make a big splash with a great Mac OS X machine for $899 or $999 with all the usual trimmings, and an iMac/iPod bundle costs about the same as the original iMac. People with 1998 and 1999 iMacs would have to seriously check that out.
Another angle is that they could debut some new convergence feature with iMac II. Make it a home server as well as desktop, whatever.
Some people don't want to take the computer with them anywhere. In that case, it makes sense for them to have bigger, faster, cheaper "desktop" components in their computer rather than low-power, miniature components and a battery.
Some good examples: the iBook's 20GB 4200rpm hard drive vs iMac's 60GB 7200rpm hard drive; iBook's notebook keyboard/trackpad vs iMac's full-size desktop keyboard and optical mouse; iBook's 8MB graphics RAM vs iMac's 32MB. It all adds up to where iMac makes more sense if you don't want to take it all with you.
Apple has a chance to do some really special stuff with a flat iMac that's not possible for other PC manufacturers. With the CRT gone, the 6-7 watt G3 and G4 chips are going to enable Apple to do some cool miniaturization or design things that PC's with 50-70 watt P4's are not going to be able to do as they move to flat panels.
As for being a low-end machine, it is the low-end of Apple's line, but it's also sort of the flagship, "people's" computer. The simplicity and ease of use of it are admired and respected by a lot of people. Many iMac users don't think of themselves as low-end users... I'm sure there are a lot of iMac users who got iMacs because they liked them best, not to save money on a tower machine. They didn't want a tower, plus display, plus speakers, etc.
I've been using nothing but Macs for a few years now, but I have VirtualPC to run old DOS and Windows software, or the occassional little freeware or shareware utility that's Windows-only and halfway interesting. Also to test Web sites in a Windows environment. Windows is entirely more usable on a PowerBook Titanium than on any Windows notebook. It runs quickly, and you get five hours of battery life, and when Windows crashes, you don't have to reboot, just restart VirtualPC. You can keep multiple Windows disk images, too, so if you have an app that runs best with DOS, use it with DOS, or runs best with Windows 98, then use it with that disk image. You can even run them simultaneously, and they start up instantly because they save their state to disk. And, with Mac OS X running it, you can run your Windows apps next to Mac OS X apps, Classic Mac apps, Java2, and X-Windows/UNIX apps. Very, very flexible, powerful solution. VirtualPC also enables you to control Windows itself with AppleScript. You can make an AppleScript that takes a document and works on it in five or six apps before giving it back to you, and some of those apps could be Windows apps.
> Comparing the iMac to a PC doesn't seem to
> do the PC justice just because of the PC's basic
> modular, expandable nature, which you are paying
> for; If the PC were as unexpandable as the iMac,
> it would be cheaper.
I think people also buy iMacs for their expandability, but what they appreciate about the expandability is that it already has great "add-on" software and hardware in it from the start, and adding more software and hardware is easy (drag-and-drop software installs, plug-and-play hardware installs, easy-access expansion doors in the cases). I mean, all of the ports are right there on the side, attractively presented to the user. People who never looked at the back of their PC are looking at the FireWire port on their Mac and going "that's where you plug-in a camcorder or hard drive" because when they do that, it just works. It's already been set up for that before they get the machine.
For example, a non-technical friend of mine gave up trying to add software and hardware to his PC because he didn't enjoy all the work involved, and he was generally always suffering from one problem or another with Windows, anyway, and "didn't want to make it worse". He got an iMac and added a printer and scanner himself, no problem. He adds software all the time. So he actually told me that the iMac's "great expandability" was one of the things he liked about it over the PC, second only to the fact that it crashed less than his PC. Also, I got one "help desk" call from him in the past two years with his iMac, versus one a week when he had his PC.
So to say an iMac is "not expandable" is really looking at it from a PCI board / geek hacker perspective. For many people, it's the most expandable system they've ever used. That's part of why they're still selling more than a million iMacs a year, even in this economy, even with CRT displays in them, even with all the empty MHz you get on the PC side. It really serves the needs of the users who buy them.
Gibson's name is mud or less than mud in electronic music. They have a long history of buying small, innovative electronic music companies and running them into the ground and then shutting them down, like they did with Opcode recently. Opcode made OMS, which had become the standard MIDI routing app for Mac OS, but Gibson refused to open source it or even sell it to Apple when they asked. Instead, Apple had to hire the lead coder behind OMS and he built Mac OS X's MIDI subsystem from scratch, delaying that part of the OS until Mac OS X 10.1. It will be a long, long, long, long time before Gibson introduces an interconnection standard that people will build their instruments or studios around. Opcode also made Vision, one of the leading sequencers, used by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails just to name one, and those users are all writing songs in an entirely new environment now. Vision is in a box at Gibson and that's that. No open source, no selling to a new development team, nothing. Music is very tactile and muscle-memory based... it's hard for a musician to switch songwriting or production environments. Those cats feel pretty burned by Gibson't strange behavior.
Also, guitar players are the least-digital and least-wired kind of musician. A guitar player typically knows more about vacuum tubes and resistors than he does about digital audio. Even if guitarists loved this technology, they are going to need help to identify what an Ethernet cable looks like.
AND, any digital guitar connection system would have to be WIRELESS to get people to move to it. Wireless adapters are small enough now that you don't even need a belt-pack anymore, some of them are just plugs that go into the guitar's output jack. You're not going to get a guitarist to give up his wireless for a fragile ethernet cable. This is a cute trick, is all... a me-too from a company that is well behind the curve in the industry.
> The problem is then MIDI's serial throughput
> limitation, not it's latency.
The problem the poster is describing is "MIDI lag". Once you have multiple pairs of MIDI cables going, you don't get information back at precisely the right time from each device. MIDI is a 1980 technology... think about it. It's not enough to make a new connection standard that just does audio and leaves MIDI alone. We want one cable going between each device, making one bus for every device to use whether it wants to move MIDI information or audio information.
There are various technologies in use to get around MIDI lag, but mLan is the one that looks like it's going to be the one everybody uses in the future. For a start, it was introduced to the industry quite a while ago and developers are knowledgable about it. Second, it uses common, cheap, hot-plug FireWire cables with greater throughput than 10/100 and FireWire ports are on every Mac from the past few years and also many PC's. Third, it carries both MIDI-style performance information and digital audio data, meaning fewer cables. Fourth, it is already in Mac OS X 10.1 right now. Fifth, Yamaha is a very respected electronic music manufacturer, and Gibson has a very, very bad name in electronic music.
Mac OS X 10.1 has a lot of accessibility features, which are all installed by default. The user just has to configure them to taste in System Preferences. It's not entirely free, but the core OS is free and open source, and UNIX compatibility is built-in. You can still install and use all the same software as on any UNIX system, while also having access to Mac software that has a long history of accessibility features. I have a good friend who doesn't have the use of his hands and uses a Mac OS X Mac every day all day.
The Universal Access System Preference offers enhancements to keyboard and mouse input. Sticky Keys makes modifier keys stick so that a person can type with one finger or with a mouthstick. It has great on-screen feedback, with translucent icons that float over a corner of the desktop showing what modifiers are currently active without blocking your work. Mouse Keys makes the numeric keypad into a mouse substitute. Mac OS has long had standard key shortcuts that work everywhere (Command+F is always Find if Find is available, Command+G is Find Again, Command+Q always quits an app, etc) so a person who is using the keyboard can count on those things working in every application. Macs also have keys on the keyboard for volume up/down, mute audio, brightness up/down, and the eject key for removable media is also on the keyboard, which helps a lot of users. You can also eject disks from the GUI by dragging and dropping or using a menu or key command.
In the Keyboard System Preference, you can enable Full Keyboard Access, which enables you to navigate the entire Aqua GUI with the keyboard. Key shortcuts highlight the menus or Dock so you can move through them from the keyboard, and you can move through dialog boxes and similar things of course. This is an option that many people use outside of whether they have a special need... if you work with this for a short while, you can get very fast in Mac OS X without taking your hands off the keyboard.
Speech recognition is and text-to-speech are also built into Mac OS X. It's trivial to open applications and run scripts using your voice. It's easy to have text read back to you in a variety of voices, from almost any application. If the built-in speech recognition isn't enough, then IBM's ViaVoice is available, and enables you to navigate the GUI and dictate into almost any application.
In Finder, you can set icons to be displayed at 128x128, which is large enough that even on a 1600x1024 display, a person with vision difficulties can still have honking great icons. Icon labels are large and bold as well. You can also navigate and perform all kinds of file management tasks using only the keyboard. There is an Undo feature in Finder so that if you make a mistake while you're learning these features, you can easily go back a step, even if you Trashed a file. Those kinds of safeguards benefit every user, of course.
Another aspect to consider is that the Mac UI itself is considered to be much simpler to learn (a bonus when you also have to learn the accessibility features on top of what everyone else has to do), and these kinds of accessibility features have been around since System 6 on the Mac... applications know about them and developers have adapted their software to work with them. Text-to-speech has been around even longer, and it's common for Mac applications to read stuff to people.
The downside is that there is currently a transition going on between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, so for now and for about six more months, most users have an extra layer of complexity as they work with a mix of native and Classic apps. I don't know how that affects accessibility, but it makes sense that the slight differences between how native and Classic apps react to certain things are going to have to be managed a bit by the user. Window controls are slightly different on new and old -style windows, for example. This is temporary, though. There's a new native "marquee" app coming out about every week. The most recent were Microsoft Office, IBM ViaVoice, and Adobe Illustrator. Also, most Mac freeware and shareware is already native, and there are UNIX and Java2 apps up the ying yang.
AppleScript is another technology that can really help out a person with special needs. You can encapsulate an entire workflow in AppleScript, essentially turning a user task into a script task. So you can make a script such that you drop a file on it, and the file is opened in five or six applications and modified in certain ways and passed onto the next application and then finally uploaded and made live on the Web. This benefits all users, but if I were using a mouthstick, I'd probably have twice the AppleScript collection that I have now, because extra keystrokes are even more precious. Also, it's trivial to add languages so that you can script the Aqua GUI with JavaScript if you want. The component for that is free.
There are plenty of digital cameras that have QuickTime inside, so the QT media devices are already here. QuickTime is alive and well with media developers. The MPEG-4 file format is QuickTime's file format. If the client that the end user uses is going to be Windows Media because that's what's been included with Windows, well, so what? Microsoft wants to build a rip-off client so they can embrace and extend. So what? Doesn't change the fact that if you are editing or working with rich media, QuickTime will save you time and money and increase the quality of your work. If you are viewing rich media on your computer, you owe a debt of thanks to QuickTime just like text editing owes ASCII.
And the Amiga guys... PLEASE! The Amiga was amazing in its day, but it was an analog (TV) thing, not a digital video or multimedia thing. There was no interactivity in the client. Chroma key effects are not what we're talking about here.
I am running Unix systems on my machines and I am really fed up to hit the famous: This web page require a quick time plug-in, go to download it !
THERE IS NO QUICKTIME PLUG-IN FOR UNIX
How good can be a format that is not OPEN ????
Developper have to buy the right to code a reader for this format !
This is outrageous ! But, after all, Apple and Microsoft have the same goal... world domination. Microsoft had just done some steps further than Apple. That's all.
I am fed up with this Apache !
I am running Windows systems on my machines and I am really fed up to hit the famous: This IIS server needs to be patched in order to not kill routers and tie up Internet traffic with malicious worms like Code Red and Nimda! Go run Apache if you want a real Web server!
THERE IS NO APACHE WEB SERVER FOR WINDOWS!
How good can be a Web server be that is not running on Windows ????
Developper have to buy a non-Windows computer to run this Web server !
This is outrageous ! But, after all, Microsoft and Linux/UNIX have the same goal... world domination. Microsoft had just done some steps further than Linux. That's all.
No, no, no... you guys are talking about this like it's a QuickTime vs Real vs MS Media Player war, like the only issue is the media player clients, or streaming video. The video has to exist on the computer in the first place before you can convert it to Real or MS formats and stream it. What you're taking for granted is that this stuff even exists on computers at all. That's what the 10 year anniversary of QuickTime is about. It's the UNIX of multimedia. Saying that QuickTime is no good because more people watch streaming video in Real or MS than in QuickTime Player is like saying whether ASCII or XML is good or not depends on which text editor you use. The reason there are multiple text editors in the first place is because we have these text formats that are easily interoperable, so much so that we take them for granted. That's what QuickTime did for video and multimedia.
The video you're watching in RealPlayer was at one point a QuickTime file... the authors are using QuickTime, the editors are using QuickTime. In other words, there's a workflow that starts in a camera and ends in your RealPlayer or MS Media Player and QuickTime was in the middle somewhere. In a sense, RealPlayer and MS Media Player are QuickTime players, but you convert the QuickTime to Real or MS formats. The fact that all this stuff has a long, long history and is well-integrated into the entire Mac platform is why Apple's iMovie and iDVD are years ahead of everyone else in consumer DV editing and DVD creation (really, the only true consumer entries, not even requiring any hardware or software installation beyond plugging in an iMac). Working with these different rich media types is just much older news on the Mac. The maturity benefits the user like the maturity of Apache over IIS benefits the server user. Apache and QuickTime are so much better than IIS and Windows Media that serving Web pages or working with rich media is taken for granted and many people don't actually ask themselves whether Microsoft's tools just aren't cutting it in the real world, to the level that other tools are.
QuickTime is also much more than just streaming video or Sorenson streams. It handles all kinds of media, and a QuickTime movie is actually a wrapper for multiple media tracks. So you can easily add a MIDI soundtrack (just by cutting and pasting) to a video presentation, playing the lightweight music file through the built-in software synth that supports DownLoadable Sounds (DLS). Then you can layer on a Flash movie for an interface, and a spoken narrative in MP3. You can add transitions that are built-into QuickTime itself. All of these tracks exist within the single wrapper file.
Really, you can't overstate how important QuickTime has been and is now to any kind of computer multimedia.
Microsoft's earlier Video for Windows effort was even found in court to contain stolen QuickTime code. The didn't just copy the architecture, they also used Apple code. It's not surprising, but it's just symbolic of how much more of a leader Apple has been on this front.
The G4/450's that are in this Cube only use 7-11 watts each. Compare to 50-70 watt Athlons and Pentiums, and you can get an idea of why this works without a fan. Standard Cubes run cool, so there was some room there. He plainly states that he is monitoring the CPU temperature with a utility app and it's cool enough. It may not work in Florida if you don't have air conditioning, but that's why he checked with the CPU temperature utility.
The G4 towers have a fan, but they are there at least partially because the box has room for three more hard drives, one more removable drive, and four PCI cards in addition to the stock stuff, so you have to leave a big margin for error. The fan switches off when the machine sleeps, though, and the boxes don't run hot. Also, the power supply is inside a G4 tower, but it is outside on the Cube.
iPod is the only FireWire MP3 player. Also, the only one with a high-speed interface of any kind. Make sure you try an iPod out before you purchase a device. Lots of people have said that a couple of minutes with iPod spoils you for other players.
You still pay in Canada, though. The other part of the law that says you can make a copy of a friend's stuff is a tax on blank media and recording devices that you use to do it. A Canadian musician who buys equipment and CD-R's to store his own music is paying money to the record companies just as if he were storing somebody else's songs.
> But who in his/her right mind would run
> the "up"grade to SDMIze their Rio? I just
> don't see it.
Oh, you naive Mac/iPod -using bastard! We are spoiled all the time by Apple, and we take it so for granted. On Windows, there is something called a "stealth upgrade". It goes like this:
"Download firmware 2.3.1. New features include improved audio quality, enhanced ID3 support, and better support for Windows XP."
You go "GREAT!" and you download and flash your MP3 player to get the "improved" audio quality, "enhanced" ID3 support, and you also get some new SDMI trojan horse that constitutes "better support for Windows XP".
Aside from that, though, this generation of MP3 players is like a bunch of test cases (iPod excepted). The SDMI stuff can sit idle and really become a nuisance to the average user in the next generation of players "because MP3 players have 'always' had SDMI". Your RIO is not going to last the next 5 or 10 years. They'll get you eventually. It always becomes a drag. It's hard to make water less wet.
> Why would you ever want to copy music back
> from your player to your desktop unless you
> were stealing it from someone else's computer?
Sometimes I write a song, make a few different mixes of it, put them on my MP3 player, go down to the beach and listen to them, stop by my guitarist's house and play it for him, and then I have to go home and email him a copy because the MP3 files that I made won't copy off a NomadII. All other kinds of files will, though.
A workaround is to remove the ".mp3" suffix on the files and then you can do what you please. A better workaround is that I'm going to get an iPod.
> I don't see this sdmi thing being a problem
> in real world applications...
YOU don't see it being a problem, but there are 6 billion people in the world, and lots of unforeseen possibilities and future technologies. I have a portable DAT player that I NEVER use now because of SCMI. DAT tapes are fragile as hell, so only having one digital master is ridiculous. Everything that goes on DAT first ends up eventually getting recorded (using analog outs) to a computer. What a chore.
iTunes does 320Kbps, so iPod probably does as well. You can also use uncompressed AIFF or WAVE audio if you want super high quality and don't mind storing a lot fewer songs. The 5GB drive in iPod stores 1000 songs at 160Kbps, but will probably only store about 125 in uncompressed AIFF.
> So what's stopping him from downloading
> it again at home? Nothing.
What if your friend has a couple of gigabytes of totally free MP3's that he put together using his fast DSL or cable modem? Should he give you a list of URL's so you can download them yourself on your 56k line, or should you just plug in your iPod and get them all in a few minutes?
If you trash iTunes music database file and then start iTunes, it will rebuild the file by reading all the ID3 tags from the files in the music folder. Maybe the same is true of iPod if its database file is deleted? Perhaps XPod will just copy new files over and then delete iPod's catalogue? Similarly, if you delete the "desktop database" on a Mac, it is rebuilt automatically.
Also, there are various commands you can give an iPod by pressing and holding some of its buttons. Maybe rebuilding its music database is one of those commands?
The people who are making the XPod software also make a solution for reading HFS+ disks on Windows, so they are building on their current product line, not just putting out vapor for publicity. I'm sure they'll put a decent product together, by Windows standards.
"An mp3-cd player should be able to spin the disc up when you select a song, buffer the whole song in RAM, spin the disc down, and save power while playing it."
iPod does this, except it's a hard drive that it spins down, and it stores 20 minutes of music in RAM at a time. That's the way it ought to be done. This also gets them their 10-12 hours of continuous battery life on one charge.
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> And a floppy drive being "useless" is debatable.
... you're just making noise, not telling anybody anything useful. You don't know, but you think you know. But you don't. You actually do not know. Either find out or shut up.
> As a tool for updating a BIOS
Updating the "BIOS" on a Mac involves downloading and running a firmware updater file. After a reboot, a graphical meter informs you of the progress of the firmware update and then reboots the computer. It's basically the same as the way an old Compaq that I had worked, except you don't have to put the file onto a floppy to make it work. How you think this is a knock against Apple, I don't know. If you want the update on a disk, write it to a CD-R, CD-RW, or DVD-R. It's as easy to make one of those on today's Macs as it was to make floppies in the past. The only difference is that when you eject the disc, you're asked if you really want to burn your data onto it. You say yes, and then the disc is burned and pops out. Easy.
> or as an easy R/W boot device it is unequalled.
You have got to be kidding. An easy R/W boot device on the Mac is an iPod or any other FireWire storage. You can get a FireWire hard drive enclosure for $80 and put any hard disk in it that you please and boot any Mac from it. It's been a while since you could boot a Mac system off a floppy, and the same is true for Windows. There was an article on MacSlash recently by a guy who works at three different locations on three different Macs, but keeps his system on an iPod so that it is the same no matter where he works and he can carry the iPod between jobs on his bike. That's what you're looking for if you like to put systems on floppies.
And, as if that weren't enough to kill floppies on the Mac platform, every Mac comes with a free iTools account, which gives you a free 20GB storage "disk" on Apple's servers. It appears as just another hard drive on the Mac, so you can copy stuff there and get it later from another machine.
Finally, a utility called DiskCopy, which is included with both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X makes "virtual disks". If you had Mac floppies at one time, then you have long since converted them to "virtual floppies". Basically, you have disk images that you can double-click and they mount, as if the original media were present.
> Why? because there is an equally unbalanced
> community that will support ANY move by Apple
Here you are talking absolute bullshit about why you think that the Mac platform should have floppy drives, and you are saying that Mac users are unbalanced? You don't know anything about it, yet you want millions of perfect strangers to embrace magnetic 1.4MB storage that they have no need for? Take a moment to get a clue, man. The 3.5" floppy debuted on the Mac in 1984. It was retired in 1998. It had a pretty good run. We're over it.
Consider for a moment how ubiquitous PC's are. Mac users are not sitting there using Macs because they don't know Windows exists. We have all pretty much used both. Still, we are passionate and vocal about the advantages of the Mac, and we're very proud of the technological artistry and leadership that comes out of Apple because it has saved us time and money and hassle in the past. If you haven't used both, then you ought to shut up
> Like Gigabit ethernet (of which for now is usless
> as most of our hubs/switches are 10/100 and
> gigabit ones are still pricey)
A lot of Apple's customers work with big files, though, so just being able to connect a desktop and notebook machine with Gigabit Ethernet is a great feature.
I use a PowerMac and a PowerBook, and both have built-in Gigabit Ethernet. I hook them up with a standard Ethernet cable (don't even need a crossover cable), so that when I'm working on the PowerMac, the PowerBook's drive is mounted there and is just as fast as if the drive were attached to the internal ATA. This has totally removed the chore of moving large audio and video files between these machines. It's just a typical file copy like between two drives in the same machine.
Both machines get their Internet from AirPort (802.11) so I can use the Ethernet jacks like this without messing with the outside connection.
Another cool connectivity thing is that if you boot a Mac with the T key held down, it starts up as a FireWire hard drive, ready to plug into a FireWire computer. Sometimes I do that if I just want to hook the notebook up to the desktop quickly and grab a bunch of files, without working on the notebook as well.
One day we'll replace our hub and it will be Gigabit and we'll be ready for that with the machines.
These systems being included in every box really elevate the platform.
> Apple has a long tradition of breaking compatibility
> ever few years.
One of my favorite Mac OS X demonstrations was where they ran the original Mac's software on a Mac OS X Mac, including a beta version of MacPaint that was dated 1983. This is GUI software, remember? How many GUI apps are you running even from 1993?
When Apple switched CPU's, they built an emulator for the old CPU into the OS. When they switched kernels, they built a compatibility environment for the old software. Also, the Mac software is really worth having. Mac-first titles include Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, Word, Excel, Director, iMovie, Final Cut Pro, iDVD and lots more.
Excluding the G4 towers, all Macs have: 1) built-in display, 2) VGA out, 3) TV out. They can all mirror their main display on either a VGA monitor or a TV monitor ... whatever you have available.
The G4 towers all have VGA and ADC (DVI) outs, but no TV out. You can add one on a PCI card, or use USB.
In the iMac's favor, it comes with a lot of really good, really usable software as well. There is a really decent productivity suite that's like a simplified MS Office and reads and writes those formats. You get FireWire ports, but you also get an OS that mounts all the FireWire storage easily, and the best consumer video editing software as well, so you can plug in any DV camcorder and make a movie. Games, UNIX-compatibility, great stability, and iTunes is spectacularly easy and enjoyable music management. Third-party software installation is drag-and-drop; third-party hardware installation is plug-and-play.
What I'm saying is that you have to go further than just RAM, CPU, HD, graphics RAM to put a PC together that can capably replace an iMac. You've got to add some software and hardware and do a lot of configuring. iMac also has very decent speakers in it, a beautiful optical mouse, a great keyboard, and wireless antennaes built-in so it can be a base station for your notebook or any other 802.11 computer if you add a $99 AirPort card. And no fan. It's very quiet. Also, the design and appeal of the iMac has to count for $100 or so. You add RAM by opening the RAM door with a quarter and popping in a chip of "iMac RAM" (many vendors sell RAM this way, guaranteed and tested for iMac). That shit really, really counts for many users. It enables them to admin their own system to a certain degree and not have to call a geek to get anything done.
The problem with them continuing to offer a CRT version is that the CRT they use isn't going to be manufactured anymore. They will be anxious to lose the CRT version ASAP. They have to support the CRT one for three years, meaning they have to have spare CRT's for that long, and techs who know how to work with them, etc.
Also, the flat-panel iMac will save them shipping, storage, and retail space and cost. Instead of a big square carton, they can use a suitcase-style box like iBook and PowerBook and their flat-panel displays use.
I think with the first iMac they had to really work to get down to the original $1299 price point, knowing they'd make it up in volume. Hopefully, they will be aggressive with the flat-panel version, and make a big splash with a great Mac OS X machine for $899 or $999 with all the usual trimmings, and an iMac/iPod bundle costs about the same as the original iMac. People with 1998 and 1999 iMacs would have to seriously check that out.
Another angle is that they could debut some new convergence feature with iMac II. Make it a home server as well as desktop, whatever.
Some people don't want to take the computer with them anywhere. In that case, it makes sense for them to have bigger, faster, cheaper "desktop" components in their computer rather than low-power, miniature components and a battery.
... I'm sure there are a lot of iMac users who got iMacs because they liked them best, not to save money on a tower machine. They didn't want a tower, plus display, plus speakers, etc.
Some good examples: the iBook's 20GB 4200rpm hard drive vs iMac's 60GB 7200rpm hard drive; iBook's notebook keyboard/trackpad vs iMac's full-size desktop keyboard and optical mouse; iBook's 8MB graphics RAM vs iMac's 32MB. It all adds up to where iMac makes more sense if you don't want to take it all with you.
Apple has a chance to do some really special stuff with a flat iMac that's not possible for other PC manufacturers. With the CRT gone, the 6-7 watt G3 and G4 chips are going to enable Apple to do some cool miniaturization or design things that PC's with 50-70 watt P4's are not going to be able to do as they move to flat panels.
As for being a low-end machine, it is the low-end of Apple's line, but it's also sort of the flagship, "people's" computer. The simplicity and ease of use of it are admired and respected by a lot of people. Many iMac users don't think of themselves as low-end users
I've been using nothing but Macs for a few years now, but I have VirtualPC to run old DOS and Windows software, or the occassional little freeware or shareware utility that's Windows-only and halfway interesting. Also to test Web sites in a Windows environment. Windows is entirely more usable on a PowerBook Titanium than on any Windows notebook. It runs quickly, and you get five hours of battery life, and when Windows crashes, you don't have to reboot, just restart VirtualPC. You can keep multiple Windows disk images, too, so if you have an app that runs best with DOS, use it with DOS, or runs best with Windows 98, then use it with that disk image. You can even run them simultaneously, and they start up instantly because they save their state to disk. And, with Mac OS X running it, you can run your Windows apps next to Mac OS X apps, Classic Mac apps, Java2, and X-Windows/UNIX apps. Very, very flexible, powerful solution. VirtualPC also enables you to control Windows itself with AppleScript. You can make an AppleScript that takes a document and works on it in five or six apps before giving it back to you, and some of those apps could be Windows apps.
> Comparing the iMac to a PC doesn't seem to
> do the PC justice just because of the PC's basic
> modular, expandable nature, which you are paying
> for; If the PC were as unexpandable as the iMac,
> it would be cheaper.
I think people also buy iMacs for their expandability, but what they appreciate about the expandability is that it already has great "add-on" software and hardware in it from the start, and adding more software and hardware is easy (drag-and-drop software installs, plug-and-play hardware installs, easy-access expansion doors in the cases). I mean, all of the ports are right there on the side, attractively presented to the user. People who never looked at the back of their PC are looking at the FireWire port on their Mac and going "that's where you plug-in a camcorder or hard drive" because when they do that, it just works. It's already been set up for that before they get the machine.
For example, a non-technical friend of mine gave up trying to add software and hardware to his PC because he didn't enjoy all the work involved, and he was generally always suffering from one problem or another with Windows, anyway, and "didn't want to make it worse". He got an iMac and added a printer and scanner himself, no problem. He adds software all the time. So he actually told me that the iMac's "great expandability" was one of the things he liked about it over the PC, second only to the fact that it crashed less than his PC. Also, I got one "help desk" call from him in the past two years with his iMac, versus one a week when he had his PC.
So to say an iMac is "not expandable" is really looking at it from a PCI board / geek hacker perspective. For many people, it's the most expandable system they've ever used. That's part of why they're still selling more than a million iMacs a year, even in this economy, even with CRT displays in them, even with all the empty MHz you get on the PC side. It really serves the needs of the users who buy them.
Gibson's name is mud or less than mud in electronic music. They have a long history of buying small, innovative electronic music companies and running them into the ground and then shutting them down, like they did with Opcode recently. Opcode made OMS, which had become the standard MIDI routing app for Mac OS, but Gibson refused to open source it or even sell it to Apple when they asked. Instead, Apple had to hire the lead coder behind OMS and he built Mac OS X's MIDI subsystem from scratch, delaying that part of the OS until Mac OS X 10.1. It will be a long, long, long, long time before Gibson introduces an interconnection standard that people will build their instruments or studios around. Opcode also made Vision, one of the leading sequencers, used by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails just to name one, and those users are all writing songs in an entirely new environment now. Vision is in a box at Gibson and that's that. No open source, no selling to a new development team, nothing. Music is very tactile and muscle-memory based ... it's hard for a musician to switch songwriting or production environments. Those cats feel pretty burned by Gibson't strange behavior.
... a me-too from a company that is well behind the curve in the industry.
Also, guitar players are the least-digital and least-wired kind of musician. A guitar player typically knows more about vacuum tubes and resistors than he does about digital audio. Even if guitarists loved this technology, they are going to need help to identify what an Ethernet cable looks like.
AND, any digital guitar connection system would have to be WIRELESS to get people to move to it. Wireless adapters are small enough now that you don't even need a belt-pack anymore, some of them are just plugs that go into the guitar's output jack. You're not going to get a guitarist to give up his wireless for a fragile ethernet cable. This is a cute trick, is all
> The problem is then MIDI's serial throughput
... think about it. It's not enough to make a new connection standard that just does audio and leaves MIDI alone. We want one cable going between each device, making one bus for every device to use whether it wants to move MIDI information or audio information.
> limitation, not it's latency.
The problem the poster is describing is "MIDI lag". Once you have multiple pairs of MIDI cables going, you don't get information back at precisely the right time from each device. MIDI is a 1980 technology
There are various technologies in use to get around MIDI lag, but mLan is the one that looks like it's going to be the one everybody uses in the future. For a start, it was introduced to the industry quite a while ago and developers are knowledgable about it. Second, it uses common, cheap, hot-plug FireWire cables with greater throughput than 10/100 and FireWire ports are on every Mac from the past few years and also many PC's. Third, it carries both MIDI-style performance information and digital audio data, meaning fewer cables. Fourth, it is already in Mac OS X 10.1 right now. Fifth, Yamaha is a very respected electronic music manufacturer, and Gibson has a very, very bad name in electronic music.
Mac OS X 10.1 has a lot of accessibility features, which are all installed by default. The user just has to configure them to taste in System Preferences. It's not entirely free, but the core OS is free and open source, and UNIX compatibility is built-in. You can still install and use all the same software as on any UNIX system, while also having access to Mac software that has a long history of accessibility features. I have a good friend who doesn't have the use of his hands and uses a Mac OS X Mac every day all day.
... if you work with this for a short while, you can get very fast in Mac OS X without taking your hands off the keyboard.
... applications know about them and developers have adapted their software to work with them. Text-to-speech has been around even longer, and it's common for Mac applications to read stuff to people.
The Universal Access System Preference offers enhancements to keyboard and mouse input. Sticky Keys makes modifier keys stick so that a person can type with one finger or with a mouthstick. It has great on-screen feedback, with translucent icons that float over a corner of the desktop showing what modifiers are currently active without blocking your work. Mouse Keys makes the numeric keypad into a mouse substitute. Mac OS has long had standard key shortcuts that work everywhere (Command+F is always Find if Find is available, Command+G is Find Again, Command+Q always quits an app, etc) so a person who is using the keyboard can count on those things working in every application. Macs also have keys on the keyboard for volume up/down, mute audio, brightness up/down, and the eject key for removable media is also on the keyboard, which helps a lot of users. You can also eject disks from the GUI by dragging and dropping or using a menu or key command.
In the Keyboard System Preference, you can enable Full Keyboard Access, which enables you to navigate the entire Aqua GUI with the keyboard. Key shortcuts highlight the menus or Dock so you can move through them from the keyboard, and you can move through dialog boxes and similar things of course. This is an option that many people use outside of whether they have a special need
Speech recognition is and text-to-speech are also built into Mac OS X. It's trivial to open applications and run scripts using your voice. It's easy to have text read back to you in a variety of voices, from almost any application. If the built-in speech recognition isn't enough, then IBM's ViaVoice is available, and enables you to navigate the GUI and dictate into almost any application.
In Finder, you can set icons to be displayed at 128x128, which is large enough that even on a 1600x1024 display, a person with vision difficulties can still have honking great icons. Icon labels are large and bold as well. You can also navigate and perform all kinds of file management tasks using only the keyboard. There is an Undo feature in Finder so that if you make a mistake while you're learning these features, you can easily go back a step, even if you Trashed a file. Those kinds of safeguards benefit every user, of course.
Another aspect to consider is that the Mac UI itself is considered to be much simpler to learn (a bonus when you also have to learn the accessibility features on top of what everyone else has to do), and these kinds of accessibility features have been around since System 6 on the Mac
The downside is that there is currently a transition going on between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, so for now and for about six more months, most users have an extra layer of complexity as they work with a mix of native and Classic apps. I don't know how that affects accessibility, but it makes sense that the slight differences between how native and Classic apps react to certain things are going to have to be managed a bit by the user. Window controls are slightly different on new and old -style windows, for example. This is temporary, though. There's a new native "marquee" app coming out about every week. The most recent were Microsoft Office, IBM ViaVoice, and Adobe Illustrator. Also, most Mac freeware and shareware is already native, and there are UNIX and Java2 apps up the ying yang.
AppleScript is another technology that can really help out a person with special needs. You can encapsulate an entire workflow in AppleScript, essentially turning a user task into a script task. So you can make a script such that you drop a file on it, and the file is opened in five or six applications and modified in certain ways and passed onto the next application and then finally uploaded and made live on the Web. This benefits all users, but if I were using a mouthstick, I'd probably have twice the AppleScript collection that I have now, because extra keystrokes are even more precious. Also, it's trivial to add languages so that you can script the Aqua GUI with JavaScript if you want. The component for that is free.
There are plenty of digital cameras that have QuickTime inside, so the QT media devices are already here. QuickTime is alive and well with media developers. The MPEG-4 file format is QuickTime's file format. If the client that the end user uses is going to be Windows Media because that's what's been included with Windows, well, so what? Microsoft wants to build a rip-off client so they can embrace and extend. So what? Doesn't change the fact that if you are editing or working with rich media, QuickTime will save you time and money and increase the quality of your work. If you are viewing rich media on your computer, you owe a debt of thanks to QuickTime just like text editing owes ASCII.
... PLEASE! The Amiga was amazing in its day, but it was an analog (TV) thing, not a digital video or multimedia thing. There was no interactivity in the client. Chroma key effects are not what we're talking about here.
And the Amiga guys
I am fed up with this Quicktime !
I am running Unix systems on my machines and I am really fed up to hit the famous: This web page require a quick time plug-in, go to download it !
THERE IS NO QUICKTIME PLUG-IN FOR UNIX
How good can be a format that is not OPEN ????
Developper have to buy the right to code a reader for this format !
This is outrageous ! But, after all, Apple and Microsoft have the same goal... world domination. Microsoft had just done some steps further than Apple. That's all.
I am fed up with this Apache !
I am running Windows systems on my machines and I am really fed up to hit the famous: This IIS server needs to be patched in order to not kill routers and tie up Internet traffic with malicious worms like Code Red and Nimda! Go run Apache if you want a real Web server!
THERE IS NO APACHE WEB SERVER FOR WINDOWS!
How good can be a Web server be that is not running on Windows ????
Developper have to buy a non-Windows computer to run this Web server !
This is outrageous ! But, after all, Microsoft and Linux/UNIX have the same goal... world domination. Microsoft had just done some steps further than Linux. That's all.
No, no, no ... you guys are talking about this like it's a QuickTime vs Real vs MS Media Player war, like the only issue is the media player clients, or streaming video. The video has to exist on the computer in the first place before you can convert it to Real or MS formats and stream it. What you're taking for granted is that this stuff even exists on computers at all. That's what the 10 year anniversary of QuickTime is about. It's the UNIX of multimedia. Saying that QuickTime is no good because more people watch streaming video in Real or MS than in QuickTime Player is like saying whether ASCII or XML is good or not depends on which text editor you use. The reason there are multiple text editors in the first place is because we have these text formats that are easily interoperable, so much so that we take them for granted. That's what QuickTime did for video and multimedia.
... the authors are using QuickTime, the editors are using QuickTime. In other words, there's a workflow that starts in a camera and ends in your RealPlayer or MS Media Player and QuickTime was in the middle somewhere. In a sense, RealPlayer and MS Media Player are QuickTime players, but you convert the QuickTime to Real or MS formats. The fact that all this stuff has a long, long history and is well-integrated into the entire Mac platform is why Apple's iMovie and iDVD are years ahead of everyone else in consumer DV editing and DVD creation (really, the only true consumer entries, not even requiring any hardware or software installation beyond plugging in an iMac). Working with these different rich media types is just much older news on the Mac. The maturity benefits the user like the maturity of Apache over IIS benefits the server user. Apache and QuickTime are so much better than IIS and Windows Media that serving Web pages or working with rich media is taken for granted and many people don't actually ask themselves whether Microsoft's tools just aren't cutting it in the real world, to the level that other tools are.
The video you're watching in RealPlayer was at one point a QuickTime file
QuickTime is also much more than just streaming video or Sorenson streams. It handles all kinds of media, and a QuickTime movie is actually a wrapper for multiple media tracks. So you can easily add a MIDI soundtrack (just by cutting and pasting) to a video presentation, playing the lightweight music file through the built-in software synth that supports DownLoadable Sounds (DLS). Then you can layer on a Flash movie for an interface, and a spoken narrative in MP3. You can add transitions that are built-into QuickTime itself. All of these tracks exist within the single wrapper file.
Really, you can't overstate how important QuickTime has been and is now to any kind of computer multimedia.
Microsoft's earlier Video for Windows effort was even found in court to contain stolen QuickTime code. The didn't just copy the architecture, they also used Apple code. It's not surprising, but it's just symbolic of how much more of a leader Apple has been on this front.
If you could burn as many calories by sitting on a couch powering a TV as you would by going jogging ... now that would be something.
The G4/450's that are in this Cube only use 7-11 watts each. Compare to 50-70 watt Athlons and Pentiums, and you can get an idea of why this works without a fan. Standard Cubes run cool, so there was some room there. He plainly states that he is monitoring the CPU temperature with a utility app and it's cool enough. It may not work in Florida if you don't have air conditioning, but that's why he checked with the CPU temperature utility.
The G4 towers have a fan, but they are there at least partially because the box has room for three more hard drives, one more removable drive, and four PCI cards in addition to the stock stuff, so you have to leave a big margin for error. The fan switches off when the machine sleeps, though, and the boxes don't run hot. Also, the power supply is inside a G4 tower, but it is outside on the Cube.
iPod is the only FireWire MP3 player. Also, the only one with a high-speed interface of any kind. Make sure you try an iPod out before you purchase a device. Lots of people have said that a couple of minutes with iPod spoils you for other players.
You still pay in Canada, though. The other part of the law that says you can make a copy of a friend's stuff is a tax on blank media and recording devices that you use to do it. A Canadian musician who buys equipment and CD-R's to store his own music is paying money to the record companies just as if he were storing somebody else's songs.
> But who in his/her right mind would run
> the "up"grade to SDMIze their Rio? I just
> don't see it.
Oh, you naive Mac/iPod -using bastard! We are spoiled all the time by Apple, and we take it so for granted. On Windows, there is something called a "stealth upgrade". It goes like this:
"Download firmware 2.3.1. New features include improved audio quality, enhanced ID3 support, and better support for Windows XP."
You go "GREAT!" and you download and flash your MP3 player to get the "improved" audio quality, "enhanced" ID3 support, and you also get some new SDMI trojan horse that constitutes "better support for Windows XP".
Aside from that, though, this generation of MP3 players is like a bunch of test cases (iPod excepted). The SDMI stuff can sit idle and really become a nuisance to the average user in the next generation of players "because MP3 players have 'always' had SDMI". Your RIO is not going to last the next 5 or 10 years. They'll get you eventually. It always becomes a drag. It's hard to make water less wet.
> Why would you ever want to copy music back
> from your player to your desktop unless you
> were stealing it from someone else's computer?
Sometimes I write a song, make a few different mixes of it, put them on my MP3 player, go down to the beach and listen to them, stop by my guitarist's house and play it for him, and then I have to go home and email him a copy because the MP3 files that I made won't copy off a NomadII. All other kinds of files will, though.
A workaround is to remove the ".mp3" suffix on the files and then you can do what you please. A better workaround is that I'm going to get an iPod.
> I don't see this sdmi thing being a problem
> in real world applications...
YOU don't see it being a problem, but there are 6 billion people in the world, and lots of unforeseen possibilities and future technologies. I have a portable DAT player that I NEVER use now because of SCMI. DAT tapes are fragile as hell, so only having one digital master is ridiculous. Everything that goes on DAT first ends up eventually getting recorded (using analog outs) to a computer. What a chore.
iTunes does 320Kbps, so iPod probably does as well. You can also use uncompressed AIFF or WAVE audio if you want super high quality and don't mind storing a lot fewer songs. The 5GB drive in iPod stores 1000 songs at 160Kbps, but will probably only store about 125 in uncompressed AIFF.
> So what's stopping him from downloading
> it again at home? Nothing.
What if your friend has a couple of gigabytes of totally free MP3's that he put together using his fast DSL or cable modem? Should he give you a list of URL's so you can download them yourself on your 56k line, or should you just plug in your iPod and get them all in a few minutes?
If you trash iTunes music database file and then start iTunes, it will rebuild the file by reading all the ID3 tags from the files in the music folder. Maybe the same is true of iPod if its database file is deleted? Perhaps XPod will just copy new files over and then delete iPod's catalogue? Similarly, if you delete the "desktop database" on a Mac, it is rebuilt automatically.
Also, there are various commands you can give an iPod by pressing and holding some of its buttons. Maybe rebuilding its music database is one of those commands?
The people who are making the XPod software also make a solution for reading HFS+ disks on Windows, so they are building on their current product line, not just putting out vapor for publicity. I'm sure they'll put a decent product together, by Windows standards.
"An mp3-cd player should be able to spin the disc up when you select a song, buffer the whole song in RAM, spin the disc down, and save power while playing it."
iPod does this, except it's a hard drive that it spins down, and it stores 20 minutes of music in RAM at a time. That's the way it ought to be done. This also gets them their 10-12 hours of continuous battery life on one charge.