Actually, the word out there is that it works fine on some multi-processor systems, and is unable to install on otheres (but apparently works well once installed....). The probelem appears to be a spcific errata with a portion of the G4 chips, if you get one of those chips, you have problems in a specific case... and the installer meets that criteria... And it is in the cache coherincy system that this happens (the part keeping the chips' view of memory the same). A hiccup, but.. this is Beta....
Apple refers to this model as the "Firewire" PowerBook. Pismo was a (rumored) development name, and Apple rarely uses those names, or even acnologes them outside of the NDA'd Development community for that product.
Usually Apple names their products after what they include that their previous product didn't have. Names such as: FireWire, Bronze (the color of the keyboard), Slot-Loading, Graphite (the 366 iBook), AGP (the former generation of G4's), Gigabit (the current generation of G4's including the MP boxes).
The linup right now is:
Gigabit (PowerMacintosh, AKA G4, also called Summer-2000)
Firewire (PowerBook)
Cube (new product line)
Summer-2000 (iMac's, telling as there are no nuw features other than new colors, simply a speed-bump and marketing re-tool)
Graphite (366 iBook, the other two are the same as origianally introduced with more memory)
These are the names you would search for in the TIL's, or you would simply look at the main info pages. (PS, the FireWire's rock! that is from personal experience)
Actually, both Microsoft and Apple (and presumably Logitech) liscence the technology from HP. There were a series of articles a few months ago about this. Microsoft didn't even bother to re-design the mouse's shape. They even used the same colors initially.
On the button issues, Apple's new mouse has a single button (that is essentially the whole mouse) reflecting their long-standing research that this is the easiest for computer luddites ("the rest of us"). Personally I like my multi button mouse, but the single button by default does make my job supporting computer end users a lot easier. Trying to get someone to click on the right mouse button for Win support can be really difficult! When you put people under stress, like their computer has "crashed", they often lose the ability to think properly, or remember simple things like their left from right.
If you are a more advanced user, then you can get more mouse buttons, as many as you can use, but it is nice for beginners not to have thta hurdle to contend with from the get-go.
No, OS 9 will run on all PCI-based Macintoshes, that includes all but a few of the PPC macintoshes. MacOS X will be the first to require a G3 or better (although it works unsupportly on older computers). I have used DP4 on an old 8500, it worked, but was too slow for real use.
While running on batterys the Powerbooks are faster (even before adjusting for differnces in the amount of work/Mhz). The PIII's have to "PowerStep" in order to run, while the PowerBook can continue on without using their PowerSaving features untill power becomes an issue. I do want to see faster processors in the PowerBook line (700 would be nice), but I would wait untill the G4e (or is that G4+) gets the power consumption down on the chip so that I can keep the battery lief I am using. Remember, portablility ad batery life are more important than processor horesepower in laptops.
The only problem with your argument is that the reasons people have to buy the upper model Macintoshes are the exact places where the G4 is 2x+ as fast, namely photoshop and codec work. This is where the better pipleines, cashe, and the Altivec/VelocityEngine unit comes into play. So for those who are going to be doing accurate comparisons in real world experience, the Macs are faster.
Now in heavy database work you might get differnt reselys, but this is an area dominated by the big chips, and both the PPC and Intel chips are going to be trounced by the Alphas, MIPS, etc...
Now if you are a dedicated gamer, then yes Intel is a better/faster platform. But this is not what most professionals are looking for.
A couple of notes, you talk a lot about FSB as if it were an advantage for the Intel camp, but the PPC arcitecutre has been using an on-card cashe that does most of thiswork since the G3, running at wither 1/2 or in synch with the procesor. So if you were going to look for an equivelint number, you would have to say that PPC trounces Intel here, and the cache sizes are generally bigger as well. And the whole memory bandwidth issue is way more complicated then PC100 vs. PC133, you also have to look at burst latency, cache hit/miss, and what sort of process you are looking at... not nearly as simple as you make it out to be.
Apple is not silly enough to use G4's on apple.com. They use Sun hardware, because that is Sun's domain. Apple has never tried to be in the true enterprise market ($10,000+ a box), nor should they.
This rumor started when an IBM engineer said that they could produce this if Motorolla would let them. he did not say that they had done so, but simply was riping on Motorolla engineers for not solving the problems quickly enough.
To repeat, the IBM engineer was saying that they could solve the problmes that have been holding Motorolla back quickly, not that they had actually done the work. It was a rip that was taken out of context and became a rumor.
Don't know about the "Roseta Stone" Project, but Roseta was the codename for the version of Handwriting Recognition that was featured in the Newton 2.0 OS (the version that accompanied the Newton 2100). That handwritting recognition was/is truely exelent. I have just about caved in and bought a used 2K for that reason on more than one ocassion.
If "Roseta Stone" is the codename of a handwriting recognizing tablet from Palm, then it could either be a singn that they are working with Apple on this, or that they just took their inspiration for a name from the same source; THE "roseta stone" is an ancient egyption stone enscribed with the same mesage in three aincent languages that was the key piece of arceological evidence that has allowed us to begin to crack those languages. It has also become a literart refernce to informaiton that allows translations of archaric languge posible. Some might argue that my handwriting would fall into this category.
You need to read about the system a littel before you post. Carnivore is a computer system (sounds like a laptop), that is patched into and ISP and sifts through the traffic looking for the traffic from/to a specific person when a federal judge signs a warrent for it. Then it is removed from the ISP. It does not look for MP3's or anything so banal. Wiretaps (wich this is a form of), are used in anti-terrorism, and long term investigations. This is just an example of the FBI trying to keep up with criminals (or do you perfer a criminal state?).
Oh, and just because you arn't a "major pirate" does not mean that it is ok.. just that it is not worth going after you..
Ok, just have to go through this one point by point:
If you actually look back at what the CEO's of the cloners all said later (not at the moment), everyone was loosing money. That is: Apple, PowerComputeing, UMAX, etc... And the cloners had not really don anything to do research, they were killing Apple, just like the cloners (read Compaq) killed IBM's PC industry (IBM has not earned money on this in over a decade). This is a specious argument.
QuickTime is first an Apple technology on MacOS, thus the control pannel is taken from there. And Apple has a ton of codecs, but there are a few they don't have. Some they are working on (MPEG 2 for instance is comming soon), and some are propritary and not for sale (some of intel's and Microsoft's for instance). In the last, Apple cannot be faulted.
"Don't support QT on anything but Windows"... ummm, Macintosh. If what you really meant was "Don't support Linux" then you are correct, but there is no ecomomic reason for them to do so at this time. Give them a reason, and they will come, untill then, quit whining.
Mouse and keyboard... I am working on the "old" versions right now, and am quite happy, that does not mean that I don't want the new ones that you forgot to read about before complainig...
And FUD = "Fear Uncertainty and Doubt". How is Apple spreading any of this? I watched the keynote, and Steve Jobs was very clear about the dual G4's being the fastest PERSONAL computers out there for using Photoshop, and then demonstrated this admirably. There was no mention of being fastest in any other tasks (no denials there either), and there was no mention of anything in the Workstation market (Alphas and US's are not Personal computers).
There has never been any mention at any keynote about MacOS 9 being "technologcally superior". Apple has always put forward the User Interface as being the big issue, and User issues as being the advantages. They have been pushing MacOS X on this count, but lets set that aside for another conversation.
On the compatablilty and and flxibility issues, it all depends on what you mean, As a knowledgeble mac user there are few data files that I cannot use. To me that is compatability. And there are few personal computing tasks that I can't accomplish on my computer, that is flexibility.
"I'll be watching Apple try to stay as much in ultra-proprietary-land as they can". Where have you been? What about 64 bit PCI (standard, backward compatible to the regular 32 bit you find in most PC's), Gigabit Ethernet (backward compatable to 10/100), AGP, PC100 RAM (granted they use th 3-2-2 or better only), USB periferals, etc do you find propritary. And with MacOS X comming and adding a BSD UNIX layer, where do you find this "ultra-proprietary-land" you seem to be living in?
And on the MTU issue, why do you care how big a network packet you send? How does this help 99.9% of users? I think you were just looking for some big sounding acronym to toss arround. And that third party software you talk about simply adjusts a setting in OpenTransport, which is part of the OS, thus the tweeker prorgam is freeware....
No, you get Darwin, Apple's semi-OpenSource OS. There are a numer of differnces between this and the trditional BSD code-trees: Mach kernal based, radially different driver model, NetInfo, etc... It can be seen as another fork in the BSD tree, but there are some major differences.
Re:John Carmack already did this
on
MacOSX and X11
·
· Score: 1
The port was for MacOS X Server, not MacOS X (there is a huge difference). The two differnent OS's use entirely different grapics models as thier primary display mode (although they share some other modes). The X11 port that Carmac did for MacOS X Server does not work under MacOS X, and would require a lot of work to get there.
You mean like Maya, who will probably be demo-ing again tommorow at Macworld on MacOS X, just like they did at WWDC? Ie.. someone has already thought of that, and has already announced a product (shipping close to the same time as MacOS X, this comming January).
Simple, so that System admins could have a X-Windows-Server to use on their desktop computer. So a Solaris admin could sit at his Mac in his office, and connect to the E-10K in the basement and run the Solaris admin utilities (which are not going to be ported to MacOS X) from there. In other words the same reason why X-11 was orrigianly invented (not Solaris specific).
The porting of the client side is a littel harder to jusify, as most progams would benifit more from being ported to the native Quartz interface, but if you are allready doing most of the work in the server.... And I suppose that it would make (other than swing) UNIX development possible on MacOS X, but this does not seem a big issue to me.
What exactly is informal about OPEC? I agree that the US, Canadian, and former Soviet companies are only infomally in leauge, but it seems to me that the only thing blocking anti-trust procedings are that most of these companies are not controlled by a single govenment.
Well, that is a matter of opinion. Europe's gas prices are high because they are more inflated by taxes than in the US, the proceedes of which in turn are used to help pay for roads and the train systems. In the US we do the same thing, just not nearly as much. In both cases the gas taxes do not nearly pay for road construction, and it has to come out of general revenue. Last I hear is that in order to completely pay for the road system the US would have to raise the price of gasoline to about $9 a gallon (currently at $1.5-2 a gallon).
There are several PCI TV cards, including a number from ATI (unforunately the 128's are not among them), and a really good solution from now-defunkt IXMicro. Or you cna go with a USB TV tuner, there are several on the market (I have never used one, so can't speak to quality). I would really like to see a iMac DVSE with TV in, even if it doesn't have a tuner (that is what a VCR is for... among other things).
My recomendation would be to find one of the old IXMicro TurboTV cards.. I relly like mine, and the picture is better than on my ATI RagePro TV viewer (I don't have the external pod verison, so I can't speak there either).
Umm... he has a PowerBook.. and a FireWire one at that.. he already has "DualHead"... all he has to do is connect an external monitor and tell it to be a second display, I use that on my desktop so that I can hav more space avalible (this is not video mirroring, they are seperate dispays)... now if someone would just come out with a portatble lcd display with its own batteries....
Ok, as RadioHead ha already pointed out, MacWorld New York is a scant 10 days away, and all signs point to a "refresh" of at least the iMac and the ProDesktop (G4) "quadrents" (Apple marketing speak). Possibly also a speedbump in the powerbooks. There is a good chance that at least some of these new products will be "avaible immediately". I will leave you to the rumor sites to get more rumors.
But there is no chance that NVidia products will be in the new boxes for at least four months (that is assuming the they have been secretly working with Apple behind the scenes already). NVidea just this week announced that their new MX cards (the only ones that would make sense) are hardware compatible with Macs (has to do with the color space... Microsoft made the wrong decision all those years ago, and went proprietary), they still do not have final drivers.
What I hope that will be announced at the keynote on this subjects is that the Apple store will start offering third party graphics cards (read: not ATI) as Build-To-Order options on the G4. This might be only as additional cards, or might (fingers crossed) be as replacements to the primary card. A simmilar option on the iMac is unlikely, as it would require that Apple move the graphics chip off the motherboard and onto its own PSB. This costs money, and how many of you already complain about $950 for a nice computer including monitor?
They are few between, but can cause fun situations. I was at Apple's WWDC this year, and there was an attractive young woman there in very tight outfits everyday, I think she was from the Czech Republic (the styles were right for that). So she got a lot of looks from the overwhelmingly-male crowds (although I am told this years ratio was much better than last's).
Well, despite what some people were thinking this lady had a brain, turns out she is one of the best OpenGL game programer's in Europe, and was attending the conference in order to 'rip a new one' for some of the Apple OpenGL Engineers. She apparetly asked one difficult question after another about obscure bugs in the implimentation, both on MacOS 9, and the OpenGL implimentation for MacOS X DP3 that had been out only a coupple of weeks then. I am not saying that either implimentation was bad, she just was at the outer edge of both implimentations, and there to make sure that her games would work on MacOS. It was fun to watch!
And on another note, it is fun to discuss shell scripting with a girlfriend. One of mine was the one to teach me, I was a freshman in college, and she was a upperclassmen CS/EE double-major who knew/knows her stuff. Never was a foreplay thing... but to each their own...
I can't speak for the tech comunity there, but Bavaria in gerneral, and München in particular are wonderfull places to live. The people are very friendly, all you have to do is to try and speak their langauge (German, or more properly, Bayrish!), and they will fall over themselves helping you out. In one month living there my German went fron almost non-existant to respectabe, with a Bavarian accent even!
I do agree that if you go out into the country-side the accent can get a little difficult at first, but after time it is just natural, and quite cute comming out of some of the German girls (although I still like Switzer Deutsch and Hungarian better from pretty girls...).
Oddly enough, I am persuing a job in Europe right now, being a bi-lingual geek does have some nice points....
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the word out there is that it works fine on some multi-processor systems, and is unable to install on otheres (but apparently works well once installed....). The probelem appears to be a spcific errata with a portion of the G4 chips, if you get one of those chips, you have problems in a specific case... and the installer meets that criteria... And it is in the cache coherincy system that this happens (the part keeping the chips' view of memory the same). A hiccup, but.. this is Beta....
Apple refers to this model as the "Firewire" PowerBook. Pismo was a (rumored) development name, and Apple rarely uses those names, or even acnologes them outside of the NDA'd Development community for that product. Usually Apple names their products after what they include that their previous product didn't have. Names such as: FireWire, Bronze (the color of the keyboard), Slot-Loading, Graphite (the 366 iBook), AGP (the former generation of G4's), Gigabit (the current generation of G4's including the MP boxes). The linup right now is: Gigabit (PowerMacintosh, AKA G4, also called Summer-2000) Firewire (PowerBook) Cube (new product line) Summer-2000 (iMac's, telling as there are no nuw features other than new colors, simply a speed-bump and marketing re-tool) Graphite (366 iBook, the other two are the same as origianally introduced with more memory) These are the names you would search for in the TIL's, or you would simply look at the main info pages. (PS, the FireWire's rock! that is from personal experience)
Actually, both Microsoft and Apple (and presumably Logitech) liscence the technology from HP. There were a series of articles a few months ago about this. Microsoft didn't even bother to re-design the mouse's shape. They even used the same colors initially.
On the button issues, Apple's new mouse has a single button (that is essentially the whole mouse) reflecting their long-standing research that this is the easiest for computer luddites ("the rest of us"). Personally I like my multi button mouse, but the single button by default does make my job supporting computer end users a lot easier. Trying to get someone to click on the right mouse button for Win support can be really difficult! When you put people under stress, like their computer has "crashed", they often lose the ability to think properly, or remember simple things like their left from right.
If you are a more advanced user, then you can get more mouse buttons, as many as you can use, but it is nice for beginners not to have thta hurdle to contend with from the get-go.
No, OS 9 will run on all PCI-based Macintoshes, that includes all but a few of the PPC macintoshes. MacOS X will be the first to require a G3 or better (although it works unsupportly on older computers). I have used DP4 on an old 8500, it worked, but was too slow for real use.
And OS 9 runs great on my 604e computer at home.
While running on batterys the Powerbooks are faster (even before adjusting for differnces in the amount of work/Mhz). The PIII's have to "PowerStep" in order to run, while the PowerBook can continue on without using their PowerSaving features untill power becomes an issue. I do want to see faster processors in the PowerBook line (700 would be nice), but I would wait untill the G4e (or is that G4+) gets the power consumption down on the chip so that I can keep the battery lief I am using. Remember, portablility ad batery life are more important than processor horesepower in laptops.
Apple System Profiler reports that the slot-loading CD-ROM drive on this iMac is from Matshita, product ID is CD-ROM CR-1750 revision 0A0C.
The only problem with your argument is that the reasons people have to buy the upper model Macintoshes are the exact places where the G4 is 2x+ as fast, namely photoshop and codec work. This is where the better pipleines, cashe, and the Altivec/VelocityEngine unit comes into play. So for those who are going to be doing accurate comparisons in real world experience, the Macs are faster.
Now in heavy database work you might get differnt reselys, but this is an area dominated by the big chips, and both the PPC and Intel chips are going to be trounced by the Alphas, MIPS, etc...
Now if you are a dedicated gamer, then yes Intel is a better/faster platform. But this is not what most professionals are looking for.
A couple of notes, you talk a lot about FSB as if it were an advantage for the Intel camp, but the PPC arcitecutre has been using an on-card cashe that does most of thiswork since the G3, running at wither 1/2 or in synch with the procesor. So if you were going to look for an equivelint number, you would have to say that PPC trounces Intel here, and the cache sizes are generally bigger as well. And the whole memory bandwidth issue is way more complicated then PC100 vs. PC133, you also have to look at burst latency, cache hit/miss, and what sort of process you are looking at... not nearly as simple as you make it out to be.
Yes, all the function keys are map-able through a control panel.
Apple is not silly enough to use G4's on apple.com. They use Sun hardware, because that is Sun's domain. Apple has never tried to be in the true enterprise market ($10,000+ a box), nor should they.
This rumor started when an IBM engineer said that they could produce this if Motorolla would let them. he did not say that they had done so, but simply was riping on Motorolla engineers for not solving the problems quickly enough.
To repeat, the IBM engineer was saying that they could solve the problmes that have been holding Motorolla back quickly, not that they had actually done the work. It was a rip that was taken out of context and became a rumor.
Don't know about the "Roseta Stone" Project, but Roseta was the codename for the version of Handwriting Recognition that was featured in the Newton 2.0 OS (the version that accompanied the Newton 2100). That handwritting recognition was/is truely exelent. I have just about caved in and bought a used 2K for that reason on more than one ocassion.
If "Roseta Stone" is the codename of a handwriting recognizing tablet from Palm, then it could either be a singn that they are working with Apple on this, or that they just took their inspiration for a name from the same source; THE "roseta stone" is an ancient egyption stone enscribed with the same mesage in three aincent languages that was the key piece of arceological evidence that has allowed us to begin to crack those languages. It has also become a literart refernce to informaiton that allows translations of archaric languge posible. Some might argue that my handwriting would fall into this category.
You need to read about the system a littel before you post. Carnivore is a computer system (sounds like a laptop), that is patched into and ISP and sifts through the traffic looking for the traffic from/to a specific person when a federal judge signs a warrent for it. Then it is removed from the ISP. It does not look for MP3's or anything so banal. Wiretaps (wich this is a form of), are used in anti-terrorism, and long term investigations. This is just an example of the FBI trying to keep up with criminals (or do you perfer a criminal state?).
Oh, and just because you arn't a "major pirate" does not mean that it is ok.. just that it is not worth going after you..
Confirmed, it was on the Satelite feed.
Ok, just have to go through this one point by point:
... ummm, Macintosh. If what you really meant was "Don't support Linux" then you are correct, but there is no ecomomic reason for them to do so at this time. Give them a reason, and they will come, untill then, quit whining.
If you actually look back at what the CEO's of the cloners all said later (not at the moment), everyone was loosing money. That is: Apple, PowerComputeing, UMAX, etc... And the cloners had not really don anything to do research, they were killing Apple, just like the cloners (read Compaq) killed IBM's PC industry (IBM has not earned money on this in over a decade). This is a specious argument.
QuickTime is first an Apple technology on MacOS, thus the control pannel is taken from there. And Apple has a ton of codecs, but there are a few they don't have. Some they are working on (MPEG 2 for instance is comming soon), and some are propritary and not for sale (some of intel's and Microsoft's for instance). In the last, Apple cannot be faulted.
"Don't support QT on anything but Windows"
Mouse and keyboard... I am working on the "old" versions right now, and am quite happy, that does not mean that I don't want the new ones that you forgot to read about before complainig...
And FUD = "Fear Uncertainty and Doubt". How is Apple spreading any of this? I watched the keynote, and Steve Jobs was very clear about the dual G4's being the fastest PERSONAL computers out there for using Photoshop, and then demonstrated this admirably. There was no mention of being fastest in any other tasks (no denials there either), and there was no mention of anything in the Workstation market (Alphas and US's are not Personal computers).
There has never been any mention at any keynote about MacOS 9 being "technologcally superior". Apple has always put forward the User Interface as being the big issue, and User issues as being the advantages. They have been pushing MacOS X on this count, but lets set that aside for another conversation.
On the compatablilty and and flxibility issues, it all depends on what you mean, As a knowledgeble mac user there are few data files that I cannot use. To me that is compatability. And there are few personal computing tasks that I can't accomplish on my computer, that is flexibility.
"I'll be watching Apple try to stay as much in ultra-proprietary-land as they can". Where have you been? What about 64 bit PCI (standard, backward compatible to the regular 32 bit you find in most PC's), Gigabit Ethernet (backward compatable to 10/100), AGP, PC100 RAM (granted they use th 3-2-2 or better only), USB periferals, etc do you find propritary. And with MacOS X comming and adding a BSD UNIX layer, where do you find this "ultra-proprietary-land" you seem to be living in?
And on the MTU issue, why do you care how big a network packet you send? How does this help 99.9% of users? I think you were just looking for some big sounding acronym to toss arround. And that third party software you talk about simply adjusts a setting in OpenTransport, which is part of the OS, thus the tweeker prorgam is freeware....
No, you get Darwin, Apple's semi-OpenSource OS. There are a numer of differnces between this and the trditional BSD code-trees: Mach kernal based, radially different driver model, NetInfo, etc... It can be seen as another fork in the BSD tree, but there are some major differences.
The port was for MacOS X Server, not MacOS X (there is a huge difference). The two differnent OS's use entirely different grapics models as thier primary display mode (although they share some other modes). The X11 port that Carmac did for MacOS X Server does not work under MacOS X, and would require a lot of work to get there.
You mean like Maya, who will probably be demo-ing again tommorow at Macworld on MacOS X, just like they did at WWDC? Ie.. someone has already thought of that, and has already announced a product (shipping close to the same time as MacOS X, this comming January).
Simple, so that System admins could have a X-Windows-Server to use on their desktop computer. So a Solaris admin could sit at his Mac in his office, and connect to the E-10K in the basement and run the Solaris admin utilities (which are not going to be ported to MacOS X) from there. In other words the same reason why X-11 was orrigianly invented (not Solaris specific).
The porting of the client side is a littel harder to jusify, as most progams would benifit more from being ported to the native Quartz interface, but if you are allready doing most of the work in the server.... And I suppose that it would make (other than swing) UNIX development possible on MacOS X, but this does not seem a big issue to me.
What exactly is informal about OPEC? I agree that the US, Canadian, and former Soviet companies are only infomally in leauge, but it seems to me that the only thing blocking anti-trust procedings are that most of these companies are not controlled by a single govenment.
Well, that is a matter of opinion. Europe's gas prices are high because they are more inflated by taxes than in the US, the proceedes of which in turn are used to help pay for roads and the train systems. In the US we do the same thing, just not nearly as much. In both cases the gas taxes do not nearly pay for road construction, and it has to come out of general revenue. Last I hear is that in order to completely pay for the road system the US would have to raise the price of gasoline to about $9 a gallon (currently at $1.5-2 a gallon).
There are several PCI TV cards, including a number from ATI (unforunately the 128's are not among them), and a really good solution from now-defunkt IXMicro. Or you cna go with a USB TV tuner, there are several on the market (I have never used one, so can't speak to quality). I would really like to see a iMac DVSE with TV in, even if it doesn't have a tuner (that is what a VCR is for... among other things).
My recomendation would be to find one of the old IXMicro TurboTV cards.. I relly like mine, and the picture is better than on my ATI RagePro TV viewer (I don't have the external pod verison, so I can't speak there either).
Umm... he has a PowerBook.. and a FireWire one at that.. he already has "DualHead"... all he has to do is connect an external monitor and tell it to be a second display, I use that on my desktop so that I can hav more space avalible (this is not video mirroring, they are seperate dispays)... now if someone would just come out with a portatble lcd display with its own batteries....
Ok, as RadioHead ha already pointed out, MacWorld New York is a scant 10 days away, and all signs point to a "refresh" of at least the iMac and the ProDesktop (G4) "quadrents" (Apple marketing speak). Possibly also a speedbump in the powerbooks. There is a good chance that at least some of these new products will be "avaible immediately". I will leave you to the rumor sites to get more rumors.
But there is no chance that NVidia products will be in the new boxes for at least four months (that is assuming the they have been secretly working with Apple behind the scenes already). NVidea just this week announced that their new MX cards (the only ones that would make sense) are hardware compatible with Macs (has to do with the color space... Microsoft made the wrong decision all those years ago, and went proprietary), they still do not have final drivers.
What I hope that will be announced at the keynote on this subjects is that the Apple store will start offering third party graphics cards (read: not ATI) as Build-To-Order options on the G4. This might be only as additional cards, or might (fingers crossed) be as replacements to the primary card. A simmilar option on the iMac is unlikely, as it would require that Apple move the graphics chip off the motherboard and onto its own PSB. This costs money, and how many of you already complain about $950 for a nice computer including monitor?
They are few between, but can cause fun situations. I was at Apple's WWDC this year, and there was an attractive young woman there in very tight outfits everyday, I think she was from the Czech Republic (the styles were right for that). So she got a lot of looks from the overwhelmingly-male crowds (although I am told this years ratio was much better than last's).
Well, despite what some people were thinking this lady had a brain, turns out she is one of the best OpenGL game programer's in Europe, and was attending the conference in order to 'rip a new one' for some of the Apple OpenGL Engineers. She apparetly asked one difficult question after another about obscure bugs in the implimentation, both on MacOS 9, and the OpenGL implimentation for MacOS X DP3 that had been out only a coupple of weeks then. I am not saying that either implimentation was bad, she just was at the outer edge of both implimentations, and there to make sure that her games would work on MacOS. It was fun to watch!
And on another note, it is fun to discuss shell scripting with a girlfriend. One of mine was the one to teach me, I was a freshman in college, and she was a upperclassmen CS/EE double-major who knew/knows her stuff. Never was a foreplay thing... but to each their own...
I can't speak for the tech comunity there, but Bavaria in gerneral, and München in particular are wonderfull places to live. The people are very friendly, all you have to do is to try and speak their langauge (German, or more properly, Bayrish!), and they will fall over themselves helping you out. In one month living there my German went fron almost non-existant to respectabe, with a Bavarian accent even!
I do agree that if you go out into the country-side the accent can get a little difficult at first, but after time it is just natural, and quite cute comming out of some of the German girls (although I still like Switzer Deutsch and Hungarian better from pretty girls...).
Oddly enough, I am persuing a job in Europe right now, being a bi-lingual geek does have some nice points....