How many times do people have to explain that it's being updated? Right after the keynote ended, the whole hardware and store section of the site disappeared, and is gradually reappearing now with all new content.
Apple is a huge investor in Akamai, and all the media on apple.com comes through their network, but it has to get out to the network before those caches do anything for you.
Also, it's common practice to put old expire dates in certain pages so that they're never cached. That way, the user always gets the newest version of the pages.
A friend of mine has a G4/400 and he does SETI@Home units in 5 hours and change. I think the G4 likes that kind of computation.
Photoshop is a pretty good test, because you do all kinds of computation, and the user looks at a progress bar constantly, every time they use a filter. In most other apps, you only get a progress bar while saving, encoding, or printing, usually after you're done working. Speeding up Photoshop really speeds up a person's day, and a huge percentage of PowerMac G4's run Photoshop all day or a significant part of the day. It's a real world test for Macs, and Apple's customers are interested in it.
Bluetooth is designed to enable devices to communicate when they are within a few feet of each other, right? But it's not even out and doing that yet, is it? What you're describing is more like 802.11, which is designed to create wireless computer networks. It's an international standard, has been out for more than a year, and there are millions of devices using it in many countries. It's 11mbs, so it's plenty fast, and it's very cheap.
Apple used just 18 AirPort base stations to provide wireless internet to over 400 simultaneous users throughout a whole convention center at their Worldwide Developer Conference. There are a few airports in Texas (actual airports, with planes, not AirPorts) that have 802.11 throughout, so you just take out your wireless notebook and you're connected. Schools are doing this, too. As it grows in popularity, I'd expect to see restaurants and coffee shops and hotels get on board. It makes sense any place where people take out their notebook computers.
I have Apple's AirPort at home, hooked to DSL. Amazing stuff. The Internet is just sort of THERE. When I got an iBook, with a tough exterior, 5-6 hours of battery life and 802.11, the whole notebook computer form factor actually made sense. It's suddenly completely self-contained, and you just throw it in a bag to take it with you. Lounging on the couch or in the backyard while surfing the Web is pretty cool. Taking out your notebook at someone else's office and just logging on to their wireless network is great as well.
We probably haven't heard the last of this, though. Steve Jobs is a huge fan of remote display and hasn't used a local machine for over 10 years. The developer releases are deliberately stripped of certain features so that Apple can still pull out a few surprises. Remote display may be one of them.
Re:Err, can't you just cut the first x bytes out?
on
Embedding Ads In MP3s?
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· Score: 1
You can also select a portion of an MP3 file and Cut it out using QuickTime Pro 4. Save the modified file and it works fine.
I sent a PowerBook 190 that had developed a split seam on the casing back to Apple five years after it was purchased and they replaced the whole outer housing and made it look like a brand new machine for absolutely no charge. Not even shipping.
They are continually in the top three in polls for service and support, along with Dell and IBM.
> The Mac is still standing largely because of > the business savvy of it's management
You don't realize how funny it is for you to accuse Apple of getting by on their business-savvy. Anyone who is at all familiar with Apple knows that this is not so. They do well when they ship good products, and not so well when they ship poor ones. Lately, they've been shipping good products, and OS X probably means that will continue for quite a while longer.
Sonic Foundry is the exception that proves the rule. They're the only ones making Mac musicians think about getting Virtual PC. Perhaps we'll see them do ports once OS X is up and running for audio.
> The products are good in a lot of ways, but > they're not that good (be honest!).
They're THAT good. They really are. I asked the same questions you did until I got a Mac and figured it out. Apple does a pretty poor job of explaining what makes their machines good. They mostly go "isn't it cool?" and that's about it.
Many of the standard computer complaints just aren't there on the Mac. Many people who simply aren't geek enough to use other systems are very, very thankful that the Mac exists so that they can do some computing. Lots and lots of little features add up to a much more pleasant experience.
You pay Apple for the "FireWire" name, which they actively promote. Or you can call it IEEE 1394 if you want to. Or pay Sony and call it i.Link. The important thing is that it's a standard, not controlled by one company. Unlike USB 2.0.
Oh, no. They released the iMac and then they released an updated version later (revision b). The bastards! The point is, a person can just go to the store and get an iMac and always get the newest one. Easy.
> School kids ok, but artists and musicians? Come > on, until artists understand and demand better > functionality for art on computers then they will > have to suffice with whatever is shoved down > their throats.
As a professional artist and musician who uses a Mac (but has used Windows extensively as well... even done IT work for both Mac and Windows) I can tell you that you are so far from right on this one that you are in another galaxy. What's "shoved down their throats" is Windows, usually in big companies with a small creative department, where they gleefully converted all of their computers to Windows PC's to get some marginal benefit from Microsoft, without a thought about whether that was the best thing for all of their workers. I hear time and again about places like this that are now on their next round of IT purchases and are getting Macs for the creative people again. Some of these places have lost valuable workers in the meantime who got tired of hammering in nails with a Windows screwdriver all day.
I would be surprised if you could find a music CD in your collection where a non-Mac computer was used in the production. Among musicians and artists who get to choose which computer to use, amateurs and hobbyists use Windows because they already had the PC and they want to also play games or whatever, professionals use Macs because they are overwhelmingly the right tool for the job. Macs have a laundry list of technologies that support artists and musicians, and these technologies simply don't exist anywhere else. I can guarantee you that Microsoft has not been building the ultimate creative environment over these past few years. Apple has been doing exactly that.
Maybe you're focusing solely on the plumbing... the old protected memory/preemptive multitasking sucks on Macs debate. Well, Windows 98 sucks at that, too, and there aren't enough apps on Windows NT/2000 for musicians. The one major app you can run on NT (SP5 only) is a high-end version of Pro Tools, but they only support one (1) PC model, the $4000 IBM IntelliStation Pro, and they're missing features from the Mac version that runs on a Mac that's half that price. So, for the majority of audio work, your choice is Windows 98 or Mac OS 9, meaning you don't give a shit about PM/PM. It's irrelevant. Besides, Mac software is moving from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X over the next year, and gaining full PM/PM, while most Windows music software is moving from Windows 98 to Windows ME and gaining jack. And, Apple makes up for your one crash a week with a bunch of other stuff. Windows 98 doesn't give you anything for the three crashes a day that moving huge files around in a music app nets you.
> Who do you respect more; the college kid who > buys pre-made paints, canvases, and brushes, > or the starving artist type who makes their own > material, medium, and tools?
I respect the person who creates the best art, who captures their personal vision in their work most succinctly. It's cheaper to buy your tools than make them, unless you are living in the woods. Starving artists work part-time at art supply places for a few hours and make enough money to buy a canvas and paints, rather than spend a week making their own from scratch. What's important is that there be a wide variety of tools that are available for you to choose from, so that the combination you create is uniquely yours. Once again, on the Mac, there is a wider range of choices available in creative software. Things like MetaSynth and Pluggo just don't exist on Windows, and they are cheap, fantastically creative tools.
I'm not using the same exact system for my music that the next guy is just because I didn't compile anything. I built my own personal "tool", not by coding and compiling, but by choosing a variety of professional software applications and plug-ins and building a combination that's greater than the sum of its parts. I got a Mac, put in the Pro Tools Digi-001 PCI card, plugged in the USB MIDI interface, plugged keyboard and drumpad MIDI controllers into the MIDI interface, plugged in a FireWire RAID as an audio drive (two big Maxtor IDE drives in two cheap FireWire enclosures), installed OMS, Pro Tools, Cubase VST/24, MetaSynth, Xx, Peak, QuickTime Pro, and a whole whack of VST and DirectConnect software synthesizers and effects. It took only a few hours to do, and at the time I put my system together, only two of the above were available for Windows, and both had lesser features than the Mac versions. One was a full version number behind. Since then, the Digi-001 is also available for Windows 98 (not NT or 2000) but the software also lacks features that the Mac version has, and is crippled by music and audio features that are lacking in Windows.
(I take the FireWire RAID with gigabytes of audio data to a bigger studio to mix my work, and just hot-plug it right into their Mac and open up and start working in seconds. Another advantage.)
Maybe you could code and compile (from scratch) a 24 track, 24-bit professional-level project studio that includes software recreations of popular synthesizers and effects units for the few thousand dollars that mine cost, but I don't think so. Maybe in your perfect world, I finish music college and then re-enroll as a computer science major so that I can make my own software so that I can record a demo, but I don't think that's ideal, personally. I spend about an hour a week administering this machine, including installing updates and defragging disks. It's so easy a guitar player could probably do it. That's part of the appeal of a Mac as well.
Really, you have to have some faith that you don't know it all. The range of tasks that people use computers for is very large, and Windows and Linux can't answer every need. They are not the right tools for every job. Musicians are not using Macs because they are too stupid to know better, and they are not hobbled by the lack of certain features like PM/PM or a command line that you think are a requirement. Not only are we surviving just fine, thank-you very much, but artists-that-use-Macs are the happiest computer users in the world, tied for first with coders-who-use-Linux.
"old" PowerMacs - built-in SCSI (5MB/s), ADB, Mac-serial, Apple video
"new" PowerMacs - built-in FireWire, USB, VGA (plus DVI and AirPort slot on G4) - add SCSI (10MB/s) $50 - add Mac-serial $50 - ADB built-in on G3, add to G4 for $50
If you have old peripherals, get an adapter for them and extend their life indefinitely. Most of the people I know who moved from an old Mac to a new one needed to get only one of either a ADB, Mac-serial, or SCSI adapter for their new machine in order to use a current peripheral. Since then, most of them have replaced that peripheral (a SCSI scanner or external SCSI hard drive, usually) with a faster and cheaper USB or FireWire version that hot-plugs and uses a much smaller and cheaper cable with much longer cable lengths. They whined a little initially, too, but across the board, they're happy now that they essentially got FireWire and USB for the $50 extra they paid to get an adapter for an old port their new machine lacked.
These days, you can get an IDE-to-FireWire adapter for $80-$120 and turn any monster IDE hard drive into a hot-pluggable external FireWire drive, and feel free to add 20 of those to your stock Mac if you want to. You can choose any VGA display without using an adapter. You can select from hundreds of USB peripherals, instead of 10 or 20 ADB peripherals. You can plug any DV camcorder into any stock Mac (except the iBook) and you even get free DV editing software from Apple, too. All of this for the small one-time price ($50-$150) you paid to add support for any or all of the old ports that you personally required during the transitional few years.
That's a pretty smooth transition, and one the PC world is very, very jealous of. All the major PC vendors have "legacy-free" PC's now, but they're a minority of machines. Most PC's still include serial ports that aren't really fast enough for a 56k modem, even though they've had USB for five years. You have to install a $100 PCI card in most PC's just to get video out of a camcorder.
How many years from now do you think it would be okay for Apple to drop ports that move data at less than 1mbs? Those ports look foolish on a machine that comes with two hot-plug FireWire busses, two hot-plug USB busses, and AirPort and Ethernet.
Connectix have already officially said that Virtual PC 3.x won't ever run on Mac OS X... that's what Virtual PC 4.0 is for. Virtual PC uses every undocumented and sneaky, tricky thing it can to improve performance, so it needs to be updated for Mac OS X.
Another interesting item is that around the time of Virtual PC 2.0, Connectix said they hoped that by 4.0 they would "un-box" the emulator, sort of like what happened to the "Blue Box" in Mac OS X, so that Windows apps would appear for all intents and purposes to be Mac apps. Who knows whether they still plan to do this...
Virtual PC really is amazing. Incredibly fast and a lot of fun to use. Very satisfying in a geek way. I wrote a computer book recently where we had Windows screenshots in odd-numbered chapters and Mac screenshots in even-numbered chapters, and I did all the screenshots on the same Mac, thanks to Virtual PC.
If you're not a Mac user, but you have a chance to play with a Mac with Virtual PC for a day sometime, take it. Lots of fun. You can run DOS, Windows 3.1/95/98, Windows NT/2000, Linux, OS/2, and switch between them anytime. Each lives on its own virtual hard drive, which are just disk images. With Windows or Linux, you just drag files from within the Virtual PC window (from the Windows desktop, for example) and drop them on the Mac desktop.
Why wouldn't the GoMac people port it? The Dock in OS X is just another running application. You can kill it and fit in a replacement pretty easily, from what I've seen.
It's likely that GoMac could actually be better under OS X, since you have minimizing windows and app-independent windows (bringing a window to the front doesn't bring all of the other windows that the app owns to the front). In other words, as a Dock replacement, GoMac integrates better with Aqua than it does with Platinum under Mac OS 9.
> Being forced to buy new hardware because of new > software isn't a 'good thing'. That sounds like > Microsoft 'if it's too slow/unstable for your computer, > you need a new computer' Windows.
ADB was not killed before its time.
Most Macs use both FireWire and USB ports for peripherals now. FireWire is 40 times faster than USB, but USB is over 10 times faster than ADB. FireWire is about to go to 800mbs, which would mean your FireWire port is getting on for a thousand times faster than your ADB port. Do those two ports belong on the same computer?
USB and FireWire are both hot-pluggable, whereas ADB is not. Both or neither of your low and high speed serial busses need to be hot-pluggable, not one is and one isn't.
Aside from that, moving to USB created a cross-platform peripheral market where there was none before. Even Microsoft's mouses run on Macs now.
And finally, "legacy-free" PC's from IBM, Dell, and Compaq pretty much validates the idea.
> However, there is about a snowballs' chance in > hell that Microsoft is porting Office to the Cocoa > API's, the native MacOS X API.
Carbon is just as native as Cocoa, but, actually, Office 2001 for Mac OS X will be Cocoa. An MS engineer talked about this publically a month or two ago. Originally, they were going to release a Carbon version for Mac OS 8-X in late 2000, but then revised their plans and decided to do a Classic version for Mac OS 8-9 this fall, and then release a Cocoa version for Mac OS X in mid-2001.
It makes sense when you realize that only the Office UI is truly Mac-specific... one of Cocoa's strengths is the rapid development drag-and-drop UI stuff. If you're building a UI wrapper for Windows code, starting fresh in Cocoa is not going to take a whole lot more time than Carbonizing.
This also will probably result in some Mac users buying Office 2001 (Classic) this fall and then buying it again (Cocoa) six or eight months later. A very Microsoftian bonus.
As far as running Office 2001 (Cocoa) on another Unix, perhaps a PowerPC BSD with a complete GNUstep (I don't know what the status of that is) could run it. It wouldn't look the same (no Aqua) but perhaps it could be made to work.
Apple may release Cocoa API's for other Unix variants at some point, as well. They've been trying to make XML configuration files and application packages a standard, so who knows?
A final sentence bashing Apple in some sort of ill-informed way is included for free with every occurance of the Apple icon on Slashdot stories. That's just the way it is. Lots of current Linux users are former MS-drones and they can't shake all the past propaganda.
Every few months, there's a big Apple event, such as Macworld or WWDC and Apple spends a week talking about Mac OS X and/or new hardware. Both of these are unique and interesting and can make for five days straight of Apple-related stories. If you're not interested in them, block Apple-related stories in your user profile.
> Look at the widgets in Win3.1 > Close is a minus sign. Pretty obvious to > any 6-y.o.
Actually, the close box on Win3.1 is a "spacebar" on parent windows, and a "dash" on child windows. It's a key shortcut: Alt+Spacebar shows the parent window's window menu, and Alt+dash shows the child window's menu.
> Look at the widgets in Win95/98
If you've seen NeXTSTEP, you know why Apple can't have the Windows 95 widgets BACK for use in OS X. The Windows 95 team borrowed heavily from NeXT.
I think the idea is that Terminal.app is available if you're logged in as root, but unavailable otherwise. Of course, the user could change this if they want to.
I read the Tog Aqua article when it first came out a few months ago, but I can remember that he didn't like the View button in the new Finder, since it looked the same as the other buttons, but wasn't navigational. This was fixed in DP4. He also complained that the icons in the Dock didn't use masks (just sat in the middle of their own square). This was also fixed in DP4. He also wanted the Dock to be split, just like it is in DP4.
Also, the QuickTime 5 Player that's in Mac OS X DP4 is quite different than QuickTime 4, and fixes many things that were pointed out by Tog. The Favorites drawer that he really hated is gone completely. The "transport" controls are completely redone as well.
Slashdot Mirror
How many times do people have to explain that it's being updated? Right after the keynote ended, the whole hardware and store section of the site disappeared, and is gradually reappearing now with all new content.
Apple is a huge investor in Akamai, and all the media on apple.com comes through their network, but it has to get out to the network before those caches do anything for you.
Also, it's common practice to put old expire dates in certain pages so that they're never cached. That way, the user always gets the newest version of the pages.
A friend of mine has a G4/400 and he does SETI@Home units in 5 hours and change. I think the G4 likes that kind of computation.
Photoshop is a pretty good test, because you do all kinds of computation, and the user looks at a progress bar constantly, every time they use a filter. In most other apps, you only get a progress bar while saving, encoding, or printing, usually after you're done working. Speeding up Photoshop really speeds up a person's day, and a huge percentage of PowerMac G4's run Photoshop all day or a significant part of the day. It's a real world test for Macs, and Apple's customers are interested in it.
Bluetooth is designed to enable devices to communicate when they are within a few feet of each other, right? But it's not even out and doing that yet, is it? What you're describing is more like 802.11, which is designed to create wireless computer networks. It's an international standard, has been out for more than a year, and there are millions of devices using it in many countries. It's 11mbs, so it's plenty fast, and it's very cheap.
Apple used just 18 AirPort base stations to provide wireless internet to over 400 simultaneous users throughout a whole convention center at their Worldwide Developer Conference. There are a few airports in Texas (actual airports, with planes, not AirPorts) that have 802.11 throughout, so you just take out your wireless notebook and you're connected. Schools are doing this, too. As it grows in popularity, I'd expect to see restaurants and coffee shops and hotels get on board. It makes sense any place where people take out their notebook computers.
I have Apple's AirPort at home, hooked to DSL. Amazing stuff. The Internet is just sort of THERE. When I got an iBook, with a tough exterior, 5-6 hours of battery life and 802.11, the whole notebook computer form factor actually made sense. It's suddenly completely self-contained, and you just throw it in a bag to take it with you. Lounging on the couch or in the backyard while surfing the Web is pretty cool. Taking out your notebook at someone else's office and just logging on to their wireless network is great as well.
We probably haven't heard the last of this, though. Steve Jobs is a huge fan of remote display and hasn't used a local machine for over 10 years. The developer releases are deliberately stripped of certain features so that Apple can still pull out a few surprises. Remote display may be one of them.
You can also select a portion of an MP3 file and Cut it out using QuickTime Pro 4. Save the modified file and it works fine.
I sent a PowerBook 190 that had developed a split seam on the casing back to Apple five years after it was purchased and they replaced the whole outer housing and made it look like a brand new machine for absolutely no charge. Not even shipping.
They are continually in the top three in polls for service and support, along with Dell and IBM.
I guess that's lousy support, though.
www.apple.com/imovie
> The Mac is still standing largely because of
> the business savvy of it's management
You don't realize how funny it is for you to accuse Apple of getting by on their business-savvy. Anyone who is at all familiar with Apple knows that this is not so. They do well when they ship good products, and not so well when they ship poor ones. Lately, they've been shipping good products, and OS X probably means that will continue for quite a while longer.
Sonic Foundry is the exception that proves the rule. They're the only ones making Mac musicians think about getting Virtual PC. Perhaps we'll see them do ports once OS X is up and running for audio.
> The products are good in a lot of ways, but
> they're not that good (be honest!).
They're THAT good. They really are. I asked the same questions you did until I got a Mac and figured it out. Apple does a pretty poor job of explaining what makes their machines good. They mostly go "isn't it cool?" and that's about it.
Many of the standard computer complaints just aren't there on the Mac. Many people who simply aren't geek enough to use other systems are very, very thankful that the Mac exists so that they can do some computing. Lots and lots of little features add up to a much more pleasant experience.
You pay Apple for the "FireWire" name, which they actively promote. Or you can call it IEEE 1394 if you want to. Or pay Sony and call it i.Link. The important thing is that it's a standard, not controlled by one company. Unlike USB 2.0.
Oh, no. They released the iMac and then they released an updated version later (revision b). The bastards! The point is, a person can just go to the store and get an iMac and always get the newest one. Easy.
> School kids ok, but artists and musicians? Come
... even done IT work for both Mac and Windows) I can tell you that you are so far from right on this one that you are in another galaxy. What's "shoved down their throats" is Windows, usually in big companies with a small creative department, where they gleefully converted all of their computers to Windows PC's to get some marginal benefit from Microsoft, without a thought about whether that was the best thing for all of their workers. I hear time and again about places like this that are now on their next round of IT purchases and are getting Macs for the creative people again. Some of these places have lost valuable workers in the meantime who got tired of hammering in nails with a Windows screwdriver all day.
... the old protected memory/preemptive multitasking sucks on Macs debate. Well, Windows 98 sucks at that, too, and there aren't enough apps on Windows NT/2000 for musicians. The one major app you can run on NT (SP5 only) is a high-end version of Pro Tools, but they only support one (1) PC model, the $4000 IBM IntelliStation Pro, and they're missing features from the Mac version that runs on a Mac that's half that price. So, for the majority of audio work, your choice is Windows 98 or Mac OS 9, meaning you don't give a shit about PM/PM. It's irrelevant. Besides, Mac software is moving from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X over the next year, and gaining full PM/PM, while most Windows music software is moving from Windows 98 to Windows ME and gaining jack. And, Apple makes up for your one crash a week with a bunch of other stuff. Windows 98 doesn't give you anything for the three crashes a day that moving huge files around in a music app nets you.
> on, until artists understand and demand better
> functionality for art on computers then they will
> have to suffice with whatever is shoved down
> their throats.
As a professional artist and musician who uses a Mac (but has used Windows extensively as well
I would be surprised if you could find a music CD in your collection where a non-Mac computer was used in the production. Among musicians and artists who get to choose which computer to use, amateurs and hobbyists use Windows because they already had the PC and they want to also play games or whatever, professionals use Macs because they are overwhelmingly the right tool for the job. Macs have a laundry list of technologies that support artists and musicians, and these technologies simply don't exist anywhere else. I can guarantee you that Microsoft has not been building the ultimate creative environment over these past few years. Apple has been doing exactly that.
Maybe you're focusing solely on the plumbing
> Who do you respect more; the college kid who
> buys pre-made paints, canvases, and brushes,
> or the starving artist type who makes their own
> material, medium, and tools?
I respect the person who creates the best art, who captures their personal vision in their work most succinctly. It's cheaper to buy your tools than make them, unless you are living in the woods. Starving artists work part-time at art supply places for a few hours and make enough money to buy a canvas and paints, rather than spend a week making their own from scratch. What's important is that there be a wide variety of tools that are available for you to choose from, so that the combination you create is uniquely yours. Once again, on the Mac, there is a wider range of choices available in creative software. Things like MetaSynth and Pluggo just don't exist on Windows, and they are cheap, fantastically creative tools.
I'm not using the same exact system for my music that the next guy is just because I didn't compile anything. I built my own personal "tool", not by coding and compiling, but by choosing a variety of professional software applications and plug-ins and building a combination that's greater than the sum of its parts. I got a Mac, put in the Pro Tools Digi-001 PCI card, plugged in the USB MIDI interface, plugged keyboard and drumpad MIDI controllers into the MIDI interface, plugged in a FireWire RAID as an audio drive (two big Maxtor IDE drives in two cheap FireWire enclosures), installed OMS, Pro Tools, Cubase VST/24, MetaSynth, Xx, Peak, QuickTime Pro, and a whole whack of VST and DirectConnect software synthesizers and effects. It took only a few hours to do, and at the time I put my system together, only two of the above were available for Windows, and both had lesser features than the Mac versions. One was a full version number behind. Since then, the Digi-001 is also available for Windows 98 (not NT or 2000) but the software also lacks features that the Mac version has, and is crippled by music and audio features that are lacking in Windows.
(I take the FireWire RAID with gigabytes of audio data to a bigger studio to mix my work, and just hot-plug it right into their Mac and open up and start working in seconds. Another advantage.)
Maybe you could code and compile (from scratch) a 24 track, 24-bit professional-level project studio that includes software recreations of popular synthesizers and effects units for the few thousand dollars that mine cost, but I don't think so. Maybe in your perfect world, I finish music college and then re-enroll as a computer science major so that I can make my own software so that I can record a demo, but I don't think that's ideal, personally. I spend about an hour a week administering this machine, including installing updates and defragging disks. It's so easy a guitar player could probably do it. That's part of the appeal of a Mac as well.
Really, you have to have some faith that you don't know it all. The range of tasks that people use computers for is very large, and Windows and Linux can't answer every need. They are not the right tools for every job. Musicians are not using Macs because they are too stupid to know better, and they are not hobbled by the lack of certain features like PM/PM or a command line that you think are a requirement. Not only are we surviving just fine, thank-you very much, but artists-that-use-Macs are the happiest computer users in the world, tied for first with coders-who-use-Linux.
"old" PowerMacs
- built-in SCSI (5MB/s), ADB, Mac-serial, Apple video
"new" PowerMacs
- built-in FireWire, USB, VGA (plus DVI and AirPort slot on G4)
- add SCSI (10MB/s) $50
- add Mac-serial $50
- ADB built-in on G3, add to G4 for $50
If you have old peripherals, get an adapter for them and extend their life indefinitely. Most of the people I know who moved from an old Mac to a new one needed to get only one of either a ADB, Mac-serial, or SCSI adapter for their new machine in order to use a current peripheral. Since then, most of them have replaced that peripheral (a SCSI scanner or external SCSI hard drive, usually) with a faster and cheaper USB or FireWire version that hot-plugs and uses a much smaller and cheaper cable with much longer cable lengths. They whined a little initially, too, but across the board, they're happy now that they essentially got FireWire and USB for the $50 extra they paid to get an adapter for an old port their new machine lacked.
These days, you can get an IDE-to-FireWire adapter for $80-$120 and turn any monster IDE hard drive into a hot-pluggable external FireWire drive, and feel free to add 20 of those to your stock Mac if you want to. You can choose any VGA display without using an adapter. You can select from hundreds of USB peripherals, instead of 10 or 20 ADB peripherals. You can plug any DV camcorder into any stock Mac (except the iBook) and you even get free DV editing software from Apple, too. All of this for the small one-time price ($50-$150) you paid to add support for any or all of the old ports that you personally required during the transitional few years.
That's a pretty smooth transition, and one the PC world is very, very jealous of. All the major PC vendors have "legacy-free" PC's now, but they're a minority of machines. Most PC's still include serial ports that aren't really fast enough for a 56k modem, even though they've had USB for five years. You have to install a $100 PCI card in most PC's just to get video out of a camcorder.
How many years from now do you think it would be okay for Apple to drop ports that move data at less than 1mbs? Those ports look foolish on a machine that comes with two hot-plug FireWire busses, two hot-plug USB busses, and AirPort and Ethernet.
Connectix have already officially said that Virtual PC 3.x won't ever run on Mac OS X ... that's what Virtual PC 4.0 is for. Virtual PC uses every undocumented and sneaky, tricky thing it can to improve performance, so it needs to be updated for Mac OS X.
...
Another interesting item is that around the time of Virtual PC 2.0, Connectix said they hoped that by 4.0 they would "un-box" the emulator, sort of like what happened to the "Blue Box" in Mac OS X, so that Windows apps would appear for all intents and purposes to be Mac apps. Who knows whether they still plan to do this
Virtual PC really is amazing. Incredibly fast and a lot of fun to use. Very satisfying in a geek way. I wrote a computer book recently where we had Windows screenshots in odd-numbered chapters and Mac screenshots in even-numbered chapters, and I did all the screenshots on the same Mac, thanks to Virtual PC.
If you're not a Mac user, but you have a chance to play with a Mac with Virtual PC for a day sometime, take it. Lots of fun. You can run DOS, Windows 3.1/95/98, Windows NT/2000, Linux, OS/2, and switch between them anytime. Each lives on its own virtual hard drive, which are just disk images. With Windows or Linux, you just drag files from within the Virtual PC window (from the Windows desktop, for example) and drop them on the Mac desktop.
Why wouldn't the GoMac people port it? The Dock in OS X is just another running application. You can kill it and fit in a replacement pretty easily, from what I've seen.
It's likely that GoMac could actually be better under OS X, since you have minimizing windows and app-independent windows (bringing a window to the front doesn't bring all of the other windows that the app owns to the front). In other words, as a Dock replacement, GoMac integrates better with Aqua than it does with Platinum under Mac OS 9.
> Being forced to buy new hardware because of new
> software isn't a 'good thing'. That sounds like
> Microsoft 'if it's too slow/unstable for your computer,
> you need a new computer' Windows.
ADB was not killed before its time.
Most Macs use both FireWire and USB ports for peripherals now. FireWire is 40 times faster than USB, but USB is over 10 times faster than ADB. FireWire is about to go to 800mbs, which would mean your FireWire port is getting on for a thousand times faster than your ADB port. Do those two ports belong on the same computer?
USB and FireWire are both hot-pluggable, whereas ADB is not. Both or neither of your low and high speed serial busses need to be hot-pluggable, not one is and one isn't.
Aside from that, moving to USB created a cross-platform peripheral market where there was none before. Even Microsoft's mouses run on Macs now.
And finally, "legacy-free" PC's from IBM, Dell, and Compaq pretty much validates the idea.
> However, there is about a snowballs' chance in
... one of Cocoa's strengths is the rapid development drag-and-drop UI stuff. If you're building a UI wrapper for Windows code, starting fresh in Cocoa is not going to take a whole lot more time than Carbonizing.
> hell that Microsoft is porting Office to the Cocoa
> API's, the native MacOS X API.
Carbon is just as native as Cocoa, but, actually, Office 2001 for Mac OS X will be Cocoa. An MS engineer talked about this publically a month or two ago. Originally, they were going to release a Carbon version for Mac OS 8-X in late 2000, but then revised their plans and decided to do a Classic version for Mac OS 8-9 this fall, and then release a Cocoa version for Mac OS X in mid-2001.
It makes sense when you realize that only the Office UI is truly Mac-specific
This also will probably result in some Mac users buying Office 2001 (Classic) this fall and then buying it again (Cocoa) six or eight months later. A very Microsoftian bonus.
As far as running Office 2001 (Cocoa) on another Unix, perhaps a PowerPC BSD with a complete GNUstep (I don't know what the status of that is) could run it. It wouldn't look the same (no Aqua) but perhaps it could be made to work.
Apple may release Cocoa API's for other Unix variants at some point, as well. They've been trying to make XML configuration files and application packages a standard, so who knows?
> single user
You're misinformed.
A final sentence bashing Apple in some sort of ill-informed way is included for free with every occurance of the Apple icon on Slashdot stories. That's just the way it is. Lots of current Linux users are former MS-drones and they can't shake all the past propaganda.
If you read the article before reading the posts about that article, you'll be better informed.
The Ars article that this Slashdot story is about is part 4 in a series. Reading 1 through 4 pretty much makes you a Mac OS X expert.
Every few months, there's a big Apple event, such as Macworld or WWDC and Apple spends a week talking about Mac OS X and/or new hardware. Both of these are unique and interesting and can make for five days straight of Apple-related stories. If you're not interested in them, block Apple-related stories in your user profile.
> And the speed things -- WinNT/2K does :-)
... there's no hardware graphics acceleration in Mac OS X, yet.
> full window drag really fast, even with
> movies playing. At least on my box
FYI
> Look at the widgets in Win3.1
> Close is a minus sign. Pretty obvious to
> any 6-y.o.
Actually, the close box on Win3.1 is a "spacebar" on parent windows, and a "dash" on child windows. It's a key shortcut: Alt+Spacebar shows the parent window's window menu, and Alt+dash shows the child window's menu.
> Look at the widgets in Win95/98
If you've seen NeXTSTEP, you know why Apple can't have the Windows 95 widgets BACK for use in OS X. The Windows 95 team borrowed heavily from NeXT.
I think the idea is that Terminal.app is available if you're logged in as root, but unavailable otherwise. Of course, the user could change this if they want to.
I read the Tog Aqua article when it first came out a few months ago, but I can remember that he didn't like the View button in the new Finder, since it looked the same as the other buttons, but wasn't navigational. This was fixed in DP4. He also complained that the icons in the Dock didn't use masks (just sat in the middle of their own square). This was also fixed in DP4. He also wanted the Dock to be split, just like it is in DP4.
Also, the QuickTime 5 Player that's in Mac OS X DP4 is quite different than QuickTime 4, and fixes many things that were pointed out by Tog. The Favorites drawer that he really hated is gone completely. The "transport" controls are completely redone as well.