I'd suggest checking out m0n0wall (http://m0n0.ch/wall). It's a compact firewall distro, with a version that runs on generic PCs. It's got pretty light hardware requirements, runs great on old hardware, and had a pretty good web UI for administration (better than many SOHO/consumer devices from Best Buy, IMHO).
You can find a ton of older hardware on eBay and surplus stores in rackmount form factors (Nokia IP330, Watchguard Firebox, etc) that are basically just Pentium or Pentium II class processors with 2 or 3 NICs that can be reappropriated to run m0n0wall pretty easily and make for great router/firewall/NAT boxes.
The only downside (IMHO) is that it's currently based on an older version of FreeBSD, so it doesn't support some of the newer NICs that are coming built into motherboards these days. But, if you're using it with an older board with a handful of Intel or 3COM PCI 10/100 cards, then it's no big deal.
It also doesn't have great wireless support...basically just Atheros cards for 802.11g, along with a number of old 802.11b devices. Forget about 802.11n (for now), so you'd still need a separate AP if you want to go wireless. Then again, I've found that where most consumer gear sucks is in the routing and that if you turn it into a dumb AP and let another device do the routing and NAT, then you'll be much better off.
Silly commenters always have such a skewed sense of reading comprehension. The trips were:
Tampa - Houston - London Paris (CDG) - Newark - Tampa
The "missing segment" is how the traveler got to Paris from London without flying, not from Newark to Tampa The answer, of course, is a train (ever hear of the Chunnel?)
All I can say is..."good riddance". I've been on a self-imposed boycott of CompUSA for about 2 and a half years now, after the dickhead of a manager at the CompUSA in Spokane, WA, wouldn't sell me the AppleCare package for my iPod and fed me so many lines of BS that I just wanted to jump over the counter and punch the guy after I was done talking to him.
I kinda needed the AppleCare quickly at the time, though, since my iPod's hard drive was flaking out. It was still under the 1-year factory warranty (but nearing the end of it), but I didn't want to pay $40 or whatever the service fee is after 6 mos to do the exchange by mail with Apple, and thought the AppleCare package would be a good deal, since it'd essentially just cost me an extra 20 bucks for another year of warranty service. I thought it'd be quick and easy to get AppleCare in a retail store (and CompUSA was the only one in my area that carried Apple stuff), rather than waiting a few days for Apple to ship it to me. I was wrong.
The manager at the CompUSA I went to kept insisting that I had to have purchased the iPod at CompUSA within the past 90 days, or Apple would deny the AppleCare registration. I tried to explain to him that's not how AppleCare works (the only thing in the box is a registration code, and Apple doesn't care where or when the iPod was purchased, other than that it was still under the 1-year factory warranty) -- having worked at an Apple reseller (my university bookstore) for several years, I knew this. Still wouldn't sell it to me. He tried to tell me that CompUSA was somehow different in this regard and that Apple would "know". Tried to convince him that I would take the risk of it not registering...still no go. Then he tried to tell me it was just store policy not to sell AppleCare if the iPod had not been purchased within 90 days from that store. Tried to get him to tell me where the hell this "policy" was actually written down...it should come as no surprise that he didn't even bother to try to look it up. Even tried, at one point, to tell me that if I had purchased the iPod more than 90 days ago, regardless of where I bought it, then the only place I could buy the AppleCare enrollment kit was directly from Apple.
At this point, I was somewhat set on proving a point and getting AppleCare immediately, so I went to my campus computer lab nearby, logged onto CompUSA.com, and ordered the AppleCare package online for in-store pickup. Half an hour later, I was back in the store at the customer service desk, trying to pick up my online order from the (relatively clueless) salesperson there. I almost got away with it, until somewhere near the end of the checkout, either the salesguy flagged down the manager (or the manager happened to wander by--it was so long ago I can't quite remember), noticed it was me and what I was trying to do again, and shot me down. Apparently "the website was wrong" and shouldn't have let me order AppleCare.
Since then, I haven't set foot in a CompUSA and moved even more of my computer parts purchases to places like NewEgg. Of course, now that I moved to Seattle, I have a Fry's nearby, and it's actually _fun_ to just wander around that store.
I kept telling myself after that incident that I would write to CompUSA's corporate offices and complain about that manager, but I never got around to it. Oh, well. The kicker is that the following Monday, I went to my University Bookstore, walked up to my old manager and asked they had any AppleCare enrollment kits for iPod. They happened to have one or two in stock, so about 10 minutes later, after sharing a laugh about the idiocy of the CompUSA manager, I was back at my desk across campus and my iPod was now covered under AppleCare.
Now that the directions are out, it looks like it requires doing a little slipstreaming to the Windows XP CD (and apparently one that has SP2 in it already).
For those of us who work in IT, like me, and have already created a slipstreamed XP CD with the latest security updates (and storage drivers--thank god for that! no more F6 during an install), I want to know how to add the XP on Mac fixes to that already-prepared CD. Oh, and I want to know how to do that without having to go and actually figure it out myself (mostly because I don't yet have an Intel Mac of my own to play with). WINNT.SIF I can handle, but I'd rather leave TXTSETUP.SIF to someone more knowledgeable (hopefully that will work with the iastor drivers that are already inserted into my CD).
From a quick glance at the patch provided, it looks like it provides the iaStor drivers for the Windows installer to be able to access the hard drive (since the Intel Macs appear to use an Intel 945 chipset with ICH7 storage, this makes sense, since you can't exactly hit "F6" during boot to load the drivers from a floppy. It also looks like it adds a custom framebuffer driver, since the X1600 is apparently one of the few things that doesn't have working drivers yet (everything else seems to be supported by the generic Intel Chipset drivers, the generic Marvell Yukon Gig-E drivers, the generic Broadcom WiFi card drivers, etc). I guess the X1600 issue isn't an issue on the Mac Minis, since those have Intel 950 integrated graphics.
In any case, this is the greatest news I have heard in a long time. I really want to get a MacBook Pro to replace my aging Power Mac G4/500 DP and my crappy eMachines laptop, and I want to dual-boot Windows XP just so I can play games at LAN parties without having to drag my desktop system around (and run a few bits of Windows-only software). For day to day use, nothing beats Mac OS X.
The uControl webpage refers to fKeys [kodachi.com] as an alternative for Tiger, but it doesn't seem to have the Option and Command key reversal feature, so I don't know how to get that functionality for Tiger
The key-swapping feature is built-in to Mac OS X Tiger. Take a look at your Keyboard section in System Preferences. (The only problem with this is that it swaps it for all keyboards, which is annoying if, say, you have a laptop with a built-in keyboard and want to use a generic PC keyboard).
That said, the Microsoft and Logitech drivers for their respective keyboards also include this functionality (and then some) and also allows you to customize what all those extra buttons do, which is nice if you have one of their keyboards, but not so useful if you want to, say, use an IBM Model M keyboard via a USB-PS/2 adapter (which works great), so you'll need to use Tiger's built-in swapping functionality.
This sort of thing is precisely why my university has a dedicated Cyber-Security lab in our shiny new Computer Science Building that's its own network that's completely isolated from the Internet and the rest of campus.
Too bad we don't have faculty around here clever enough to create an assignment like this one.
I think that's a miscalculation. People know what "no support" means. It wouldn't hurt Apple at all, and would probably help, with the free publicity from the "gotta build my own box" set.
No, that's pretty mcuh dead on.
We here on Slashdot know what "no support" means. And we're fine throwing OS X onto a spare partition in a box that already multiboots between XP, 2K, Gentoo, and NetBSD. And we like to brag about the challenges we had to go through to get it all to work ("I spent the afternoon recompiling my Xserver to use "march=pentium4" instead of "mcpu=pentium4" in my make.conf blah blah blah").
But we here on Slashdot are not normal people (and a great many of our kin don't seem to understand that). What is easy and cool for us is difficult and scary for everyone else. We can deal with looking at system requirements and buying compatible hardware to use with our unsupport copy of OS X, but my parent's can't, and neither can the folks who walk into Best Buy and ask if 802.11b is compatible with 802.11g (and neither can the salesman there who answers that they don't work together).
Joe Sixpack will hear from his friend that he can use OS X on a non-Apple PC. Even if the friend is very specifc about the details, most of those details are going to go in one of Joe's ears and out the other (much like I have no clue what most of the medical terminology means on House, M.D. or Grey's Anatomy). But they're still going to have "non-apple PC" and "OS X" stuck in their head, and then they'll try it and it won't work properly, and then they'll be one of the vocal minority of people who have problems, and post on every message board they can find that "Apple sux", etc., etc., and generally do a bad thing to Apple's image.
Bottom line, what's great about the Mac is that it's more than just an OS, it's an entire platform that is guaranteed (well, almost guaranteed) to JUST WORK. And at this point in time, Apple is not going to do ANYTHING to jeopardize that, no matter how many people on Slashdot wish they would.
I hope this post made some sense...running on very little sleep right now. I think I had some larger point to make, but it seems to have escaped me.
He had to buy an external for his notebook.
He's 800 miles away in college and he doesn't call home before making decisions.
He's not a technician or computer expert. He acted on information the local Apple dealer provided him with.
Well, some of us are quite capable of buying that $129 hard drive and making it work in a Mac, whereas some of us still have 12:00 blinking on our VCRs and would rather just spend the extra $100 on what they dealer says is guaranteed to work straight out of the box. Mac users, by and large, fall into the latter category (though that's not always the case).
I saw pretty much this exact same thing about six months ago. It was made by Vivato (a couple of Vivato people, being a local company, had come to one of my CS seminar classes). And it had been around for a couple of years by that time.
Not sure if they have an 802.11g version out yet. The one I saw (and touched!) was an 802.11b version with some nifty directional (phased?) antenna array stuff, using multiple Agere PHYs and an embedded PPC CPU running Linux to control the whole thing.
OS X is mostly FreeBSD which means they do not own the code. The GUI, they own, but so what. The kernel is still UNIX!
No, not really. The kernel is Apple's own creation (Xnu, I think they call it, but I'm not positive on that). As I recall, it's a Mach-derived kernel. The user-space is all FreeBSD-based, but the core microkernel is not.
And Apple owns more than just the GUI. They own the APIs, too. You know, CoreFoundation, Cocoa, Carbon, all those fancy things that allow Mac developers to quickly and easily make all those wonderful programs.
Mac OS X is far, far more than simply FreeBSD with a proprietary window server...
Barnes and Noble won't even stock Just A Geek I've never seen it in a single store.
Just for the record, I bought my copy of JAG at a Barnes and Noble (University Village, Seattle, WA, as I recall). They did, however, have it in the Star Trek section and not the Biography/Autobiography section in which I spent 15 minutes looking before asking for help.
My Motorola V400 and V551 (Cingular) support this.
Using Bluetooth on my V551, I can even upload ringtones and wallpaper directly from Windows XP and Mac OS X, without having to use the USB cable and Motorola Mobile Phone Tools software like I did with my V400. It doesn't get much simpler than that.
Just be sure to use a low bit rate and mono sound for best results (the speaker isn't exactly hi-fi, so 48 Kbps/mono sound works great without taking up a lot of space for me, leaving more room for more ringtones).
1. Their Mobile is based on P3 (just a lot of cache added). I won't say that my Centrino 1.7 is bad, but I will get rid of him as soon as HP puts out Turion models. All I say is that why P4 when it seems that P3 is better?
The Pentium M (no, the M does not stand for "mobile") is indeed based off the Pentium 3 heritage (but it's not a Pentium 3), while the Pentium 4 is a different beast. Someone with more detailed knowledge of Intel's processor lines can explain it better than I can, but the Pentium M takes a different approach to getting better performance than the Pentium 4 (whose approach basically amounts to HyperThreading, deeper pipelines, and insance clock speeds to counteract lackluster per-cycle performance).
Intel went with the P4, then created the Pentium M, found they had something worked much better than the P4, and appears to be focusing their development efforts on adding dual cores and x86-64 extensions to the Pentium M. All the better, I guess. My P4 3 Ghz puts off a huge amount of heat, and it's annoying now that the temperature around here is approaching 90 F and I don't have A/C.
Mr. Pink: How about if I'm Mr. Purple? That sounds good to me, I'll be Mr. Purple.
Joe: You're not Mr. Purple. Some guy on some other job is Mr. Purple. You're Mr. Pink!
Mr. White: Who cares what your name is?
Mr. Pink: Yeah that's easy for you to say, you're Mr. White, you have a cool sounding name. All right look if it's no big deal to be Mr. Pink, do you wanna trade?
Correct me if I'm wrong (it's been a while since I last took a physics course, and I don't remember much of the thermodynamics stuff).
If he fed the outlet from the fan's tubing back into the cold water reservoir, that would completely defeat the purpose of this system. Where does the heat go?
The heat in the room would move from the air in the room into the water in the tubing behind the fan. That heat, which used to be in the air, is now fed back into the water reservoir in the room, where the heat radiates back into the air. Net effect: none (actually, probably worse off after the heat generated by the motor in the fan). It'd probably cool the room down quickly as an equilibrium between the water and the air is achieved, but then start to heat back up.
That said, I might try this guy's setup at my place. My room gets quite warm from all the electronics in it, and while the house I'm in does have an air conditioner, it's not very well suited for cooling down just my room (the rest of the house is usually fine). I'm afraid, though, that I'd knock over the garbage can and drown a server, or drop my laptop in the can. Might just have to get an $80 window unit for my room.
Sorry, but I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with the bulk of your post. It's attitudes like this that make me hate using Windows and Linux for day-to-day work (I use my Mac and Mac OS X for my day-to-day work, but work with Windows and Linux systems as required/appropriate for work, school, and other projects).
Joel Spolsky has a book out called User Interface Design for Programmers. In it, he makes a point of telling a story about a company that set out to design kitchen utensils for arthritic people (I want to say Oxo, but that could be completely wrong, and I don't have the book in front of me to check). The target market was people who couldn't grip a handle as tightly as you or I might be able to, so the utensils were designed with rubbery handles that were easy to hold onto and wouldn't slip, and that were large enough to grip comfortably. As it turns out, these utensils were a huge hit not only with the target market, but also with everyday users: they found the utensils easy to use as well, and the company took off.
The point of this story is twofold: first, you never know who your target market really is until the product is out in the world. You may find that your intended target just isn't interested in your product, or that some group you overlooked while doing market research finds your product by accident, gives it a chance, and loves it.
Secondly, and MUCH more importantly, is the notion that by designing something that is easy for a certain group of people to use, you end up making it easier for everyone to use. Everyone wins.
I consider myself a pretty advanced user (undergrad degree in Computer Science, graduate degree in Comp. Sci. in progress, etc., etc). I use Linux on my PCs and on servers because of the flexibility it provides me. That doesn't, however, that I don't like to have that flexibility hidden from me behind a complex or non-intuitive interface. Consider, for a moment, a program that has a couple dozen options that are binary (yes/no), so that they can be all be chosen by simple checkboxes in a GUI. At first glance, you might think that I would like to have all those options in a single "Options" dialog box. After all, there all the options would then be presented in a single window and I could, in theory, find what I wanted to change quickly and easily. But how do I have to find that option I'm looking for? I have to start going through the options one by one until I find it. And if what I want is at the end of the list, I just wasted a lot of time and got a little annoyed (multiply that annoyance by every time I need to go through this).
But what if I arrange the options by, say, function. All the file-related options in one group, all the text-related options in another, all the shortcut-related options in another. Take that a step further, and move each group to its own preference window or tab. Give each section a simple, descriptive name. Boom. You've just reduced the clutter, streamlined the interface, and made your users much happier. Instead of trying to search for "enable syntax highlighting" amongst dozens of checkboxes, I just need to select the text-related tab, scan 6-8 options, and click the checkbox. See, that wasn't so hard, now was it?
It's people who dismiss with the wave of a hand the benefits of good user interface design that really irk me. A good user interface is not something that just happens to materialize out of thin air. Nor is it something that is really best developed by the same people who actually write the code, either. And sadly, it's the general attitudes of "if you don't like it, fix the code yourself" or "it works well for me, it should work well for everyone" that dooms so many applications. And don't even get me started on user interface conventions (I'll just say that they exist for a reason.
I know Google SMS has the ability to retrieve movie showtimes for the current day in your area, though I haven't yet found a way to get future movie times (say, what opens tomorrow) through Google SMS (read: I've been too lazy to go read the help and find out).
I'm rather surprised that it sounds like Google SMS got something before the mainstream Google web did.
The short answer is that you don't actually have to multicast all twelve billion (slight exageration) channels simultaneously all the way to the set top boxes, just whatever 12 channels the people on the LAN are using (looking at this from the POV of a residential cable system based on Gig-E fiber to the home). If this is done inteligently, you can multicast only those channels being viewed and use IGMP snooping to figure out what to start multicasting from the cable head end. Depending on the exact network configuration (PON, active, etc), the multicast pruning might be done in the network, in the CPE, etc.
As for bandwidth, yes, it does matter what codec you use, but MPEG-2 for standard resolution TV is 4-6 MB/sec (IIRC). HDTV is another matter entirely, as it's huge (especially when uncompressed).
Not to mention that that aggregate bandwidth of 11 Mbps or 54 Mbps is the bandwidth provided at the raw physical layer. Even when you get to layer 2, you lose a lot of that bandwidth due to all ACKs at the MAC layer, the various timers (inter-frame delays). Then add on top of that the retransmission of lots frames due to interference and you're down to less than 10 Mbps of bandwidth. I've seen data from Vivato that indicates that you get even less than that (around 5 Mbps) in real-world conditions on a 802.11g network. That's about 10% usable bandwidth. Shared. That's not nearly enough. That's enough for maybe one TV channel and nothing else. And don't get me started on the latency...
Landing the shuttle may be hard, but it's still done automatically by the onboard computers. The only part of the process that has any human intervention at all is the deployment of the landing gear (which is done mostly to give the astronauts a feeling of usefulness during landing). I'd much rather trust a well-tested computer system guiding the shuttle on a pre-programmed trajectory than have a human pilot sneeze while traveling Mach 2 and jerk the stick sideways and destroy the orbiter.
I don't remember where I read this, though. I heard it long ago and came across a mention of it just the other day. I thought it was in the WikiPedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shuttle, but it's not mentioned there.
I dunno, I'd suspect the walls are the hard part. I think of it like this: if you're building, say, a moon base, you send up a robot to build the raw structure and seal it all in. Then your astronauts can go up there and find a pre-built habitat waiting for them. All they need to do is add a little bit of wiring and plumbing and artificial atmosphere, but that'll be easy since they're already protected from the lack of atmosphere and whatnot. Or something like that.
Supposedly it only takes an average of 4 minutes for a WikiPedia vandalism to get corrected, pretty much regardless of the popularity of the article. I find that pretty impressive.
How often do you think that 100 meg (bit, probably) connection is going to be maxed out? Likely never.
Hahahaha. Verizon isn't planning on just serving up high-speed Internet with their Fiber-to-the-whatever rollouts.
They're also planning on things like television and video-on-demand. At 4-6 Mbps (IIRC) per channel, you'll use up that network capacity very quickly. (I won't go into the details of how you multicast that much data to the set-top boxes.)
I saw a presentation recently on passive optical networks, which IIRC is what Verizon is using for their rollout (or it might be another RBOC, I can't quite remember at the moment, and my notes from the presentatio aren't handy). For a gigabit PON, you've got one gigabit per second available, total, for all subscribers connected to that passive network (anywhere from 2 to 64, depending on the number of optical splitters installed). In addition, you have very limited upstream bandwidth.
I'd much rather see Verizon and the other RBOCs deliver Gig-E straight to my home using active optical networks--Fiber to the home, not fiber to the premises or fiber to the curb. Something like what Provo, UT, is doing with their iProvo project http://www.iprovo.net/. I saw a presentation from World Wide Packets (the equipment vendor) on that a couple weeks ago, and it's very impressive. Almost makes me want to move to Provo.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd suggest checking out m0n0wall (http://m0n0.ch/wall). It's a compact firewall distro, with a version that runs on generic PCs. It's got pretty light hardware requirements, runs great on old hardware, and had a pretty good web UI for administration (better than many SOHO/consumer devices from Best Buy, IMHO).
You can find a ton of older hardware on eBay and surplus stores in rackmount form factors (Nokia IP330, Watchguard Firebox, etc) that are basically just Pentium or Pentium II class processors with 2 or 3 NICs that can be reappropriated to run m0n0wall pretty easily and make for great router/firewall/NAT boxes.
The only downside (IMHO) is that it's currently based on an older version of FreeBSD, so it doesn't support some of the newer NICs that are coming built into motherboards these days. But, if you're using it with an older board with a handful of Intel or 3COM PCI 10/100 cards, then it's no big deal.
It also doesn't have great wireless support...basically just Atheros cards for 802.11g, along with a number of old 802.11b devices. Forget about 802.11n (for now), so you'd still need a separate AP if you want to go wireless. Then again, I've found that where most consumer gear sucks is in the routing and that if you turn it into a dumb AP and let another device do the routing and NAT, then you'll be much better off.
Silly commenters always have such a skewed sense of reading comprehension. The trips were:
Tampa - Houston - London
Paris (CDG) - Newark - Tampa
The "missing segment" is how the traveler got to Paris from London without flying, not from Newark to Tampa The answer, of course, is a train (ever hear of the Chunnel?)
All I can say is..."good riddance". I've been on a self-imposed boycott of CompUSA for about 2 and a half years now, after the dickhead of a manager at the CompUSA in Spokane, WA, wouldn't sell me the AppleCare package for my iPod and fed me so many lines of BS that I just wanted to jump over the counter and punch the guy after I was done talking to him.
I kinda needed the AppleCare quickly at the time, though, since my iPod's hard drive was flaking out. It was still under the 1-year factory warranty (but nearing the end of it), but I didn't want to pay $40 or whatever the service fee is after 6 mos to do the exchange by mail with Apple, and thought the AppleCare package would be a good deal, since it'd essentially just cost me an extra 20 bucks for another year of warranty service. I thought it'd be quick and easy to get AppleCare in a retail store (and CompUSA was the only one in my area that carried Apple stuff), rather than waiting a few days for Apple to ship it to me. I was wrong.
The manager at the CompUSA I went to kept insisting that I had to have purchased the iPod at CompUSA within the past 90 days, or Apple would deny the AppleCare registration. I tried to explain to him that's not how AppleCare works (the only thing in the box is a registration code, and Apple doesn't care where or when the iPod was purchased, other than that it was still under the 1-year factory warranty) -- having worked at an Apple reseller (my university bookstore) for several years, I knew this. Still wouldn't sell it to me. He tried to tell me that CompUSA was somehow different in this regard and that Apple would "know". Tried to convince him that I would take the risk of it not registering...still no go. Then he tried to tell me it was just store policy not to sell AppleCare if the iPod had not been purchased within 90 days from that store. Tried to get him to tell me where the hell this "policy" was actually written down...it should come as no surprise that he didn't even bother to try to look it up. Even tried, at one point, to tell me that if I had purchased the iPod more than 90 days ago, regardless of where I bought it, then the only place I could buy the AppleCare enrollment kit was directly from Apple.
At this point, I was somewhat set on proving a point and getting AppleCare immediately, so I went to my campus computer lab nearby, logged onto CompUSA.com, and ordered the AppleCare package online for in-store pickup. Half an hour later, I was back in the store at the customer service desk, trying to pick up my online order from the (relatively clueless) salesperson there. I almost got away with it, until somewhere near the end of the checkout, either the salesguy flagged down the manager (or the manager happened to wander by--it was so long ago I can't quite remember), noticed it was me and what I was trying to do again, and shot me down. Apparently "the website was wrong" and shouldn't have let me order AppleCare.
Since then, I haven't set foot in a CompUSA and moved even more of my computer parts purchases to places like NewEgg. Of course, now that I moved to Seattle, I have a Fry's nearby, and it's actually _fun_ to just wander around that store.
I kept telling myself after that incident that I would write to CompUSA's corporate offices and complain about that manager, but I never got around to it. Oh, well. The kicker is that the following Monday, I went to my University Bookstore, walked up to my old manager and asked they had any AppleCare enrollment kits for iPod. They happened to have one or two in stock, so about 10 minutes later, after sharing a laugh about the idiocy of the CompUSA manager, I was back at my desk across campus and my iPod was now covered under AppleCare.
Ah, the venting...it feels good.
*end rant*
Anyone hear anything about mining Moon Saphires? We need them as a prize for the person who solves the global warming problem.
Now that the directions are out, it looks like it requires doing a little slipstreaming to the Windows XP CD (and apparently one that has SP2 in it already).
For those of us who work in IT, like me, and have already created a slipstreamed XP CD with the latest security updates (and storage drivers--thank god for that! no more F6 during an install), I want to know how to add the XP on Mac fixes to that already-prepared CD. Oh, and I want to know how to do that without having to go and actually figure it out myself (mostly because I don't yet have an Intel Mac of my own to play with). WINNT.SIF I can handle, but I'd rather leave TXTSETUP.SIF to someone more knowledgeable (hopefully that will work with the iastor drivers that are already inserted into my CD).
From a quick glance at the patch provided, it looks like it provides the iaStor drivers for the Windows installer to be able to access the hard drive (since the Intel Macs appear to use an Intel 945 chipset with ICH7 storage, this makes sense, since you can't exactly hit "F6" during boot to load the drivers from a floppy. It also looks like it adds a custom framebuffer driver, since the X1600 is apparently one of the few things that doesn't have working drivers yet (everything else seems to be supported by the generic Intel Chipset drivers, the generic Marvell Yukon Gig-E drivers, the generic Broadcom WiFi card drivers, etc). I guess the X1600 issue isn't an issue on the Mac Minis, since those have Intel 950 integrated graphics.
In any case, this is the greatest news I have heard in a long time. I really want to get a MacBook Pro to replace my aging Power Mac G4/500 DP and my crappy eMachines laptop, and I want to dual-boot Windows XP just so I can play games at LAN parties without having to drag my desktop system around (and run a few bits of Windows-only software). For day to day use, nothing beats Mac OS X.
The uControl webpage refers to fKeys [kodachi.com] as an alternative for Tiger, but it doesn't seem to have the Option and Command key reversal feature, so I don't know how to get that functionality for Tiger
The key-swapping feature is built-in to Mac OS X Tiger. Take a look at your Keyboard section in System Preferences. (The only problem with this is that it swaps it for all keyboards, which is annoying if, say, you have a laptop with a built-in keyboard and want to use a generic PC keyboard).
That said, the Microsoft and Logitech drivers for their respective keyboards also include this functionality (and then some) and also allows you to customize what all those extra buttons do, which is nice if you have one of their keyboards, but not so useful if you want to, say, use an IBM Model M keyboard via a USB-PS/2 adapter (which works great), so you'll need to use Tiger's built-in swapping functionality.
This sort of thing is precisely why my university has a dedicated Cyber-Security lab in our shiny new Computer Science Building that's its own network that's completely isolated from the Internet and the rest of campus.
Too bad we don't have faculty around here clever enough to create an assignment like this one.
I think that's a miscalculation. People know what "no support" means. It wouldn't hurt Apple at all, and would probably help, with the free publicity from the "gotta build my own box" set.
No, that's pretty mcuh dead on.
We here on Slashdot know what "no support" means. And we're fine throwing OS X onto a spare partition in a box that already multiboots between XP, 2K, Gentoo, and NetBSD. And we like to brag about the challenges we had to go through to get it all to work ("I spent the afternoon recompiling my Xserver to use "march=pentium4" instead of "mcpu=pentium4" in my make.conf blah blah blah").
But we here on Slashdot are not normal people (and a great many of our kin don't seem to understand that). What is easy and cool for us is difficult and scary for everyone else. We can deal with looking at system requirements and buying compatible hardware to use with our unsupport copy of OS X, but my parent's can't, and neither can the folks who walk into Best Buy and ask if 802.11b is compatible with 802.11g (and neither can the salesman there who answers that they don't work together).
Joe Sixpack will hear from his friend that he can use OS X on a non-Apple PC. Even if the friend is very specifc about the details, most of those details are going to go in one of Joe's ears and out the other (much like I have no clue what most of the medical terminology means on House, M.D. or Grey's Anatomy). But they're still going to have "non-apple PC" and "OS X" stuck in their head, and then they'll try it and it won't work properly, and then they'll be one of the vocal minority of people who have problems, and post on every message board they can find that "Apple sux", etc., etc., and generally do a bad thing to Apple's image.
Bottom line, what's great about the Mac is that it's more than just an OS, it's an entire platform that is guaranteed (well, almost guaranteed) to JUST WORK. And at this point in time, Apple is not going to do ANYTHING to jeopardize that, no matter how many people on Slashdot wish they would.
I hope this post made some sense...running on very little sleep right now. I think I had some larger point to make, but it seems to have escaped me.
He had to buy an external for his notebook. He's 800 miles away in college and he doesn't call home before making decisions. He's not a technician or computer expert. He acted on information the local Apple dealer provided him with.
Well, some of us are quite capable of buying that $129 hard drive and making it work in a Mac, whereas some of us still have 12:00 blinking on our VCRs and would rather just spend the extra $100 on what they dealer says is guaranteed to work straight out of the box. Mac users, by and large, fall into the latter category (though that's not always the case).
I saw pretty much this exact same thing about six months ago. It was made by Vivato (a couple of Vivato people, being a local company, had come to one of my CS seminar classes). And it had been around for a couple of years by that time.
Not sure if they have an 802.11g version out yet. The one I saw (and touched!) was an 802.11b version with some nifty directional (phased?) antenna array stuff, using multiple Agere PHYs and an embedded PPC CPU running Linux to control the whole thing.
Several of the ones I saw (probably the VP 1200 or its predacessor http://www.vivato.net/prodtech_overview.html) are being used to power the WiFi network in downtown Spokane, WA.
OS X is mostly FreeBSD which means they do not own the code. The GUI, they own, but so what. The kernel is still UNIX!
No, not really. The kernel is Apple's own creation (Xnu, I think they call it, but I'm not positive on that). As I recall, it's a Mach-derived kernel. The user-space is all FreeBSD-based, but the core microkernel is not.
And Apple owns more than just the GUI. They own the APIs, too. You know, CoreFoundation, Cocoa, Carbon, all those fancy things that allow Mac developers to quickly and easily make all those wonderful programs.
Mac OS X is far, far more than simply FreeBSD with a proprietary window server...
Barnes and Noble won't even stock Just A Geek I've never seen it in a single store.
Just for the record, I bought my copy of JAG at a Barnes and Noble (University Village, Seattle, WA, as I recall). They did, however, have it in the Star Trek section and not the Biography/Autobiography section in which I spent 15 minutes looking before asking for help.
My Motorola V400 and V551 (Cingular) support this.
Using Bluetooth on my V551, I can even upload ringtones and wallpaper directly from Windows XP and Mac OS X, without having to use the USB cable and Motorola Mobile Phone Tools software like I did with my V400. It doesn't get much simpler than that.
Just be sure to use a low bit rate and mono sound for best results (the speaker isn't exactly hi-fi, so 48 Kbps/mono sound works great without taking up a lot of space for me, leaving more room for more ringtones).
1. Their Mobile is based on P3 (just a lot of cache added). I won't say that my Centrino 1.7 is bad, but I will get rid of him as soon as HP puts out Turion models. All I say is that why P4 when it seems that P3 is better?
The Pentium M (no, the M does not stand for "mobile") is indeed based off the Pentium 3 heritage (but it's not a Pentium 3), while the Pentium 4 is a different beast. Someone with more detailed knowledge of Intel's processor lines can explain it better than I can, but the Pentium M takes a different approach to getting better performance than the Pentium 4 (whose approach basically amounts to HyperThreading, deeper pipelines, and insance clock speeds to counteract lackluster per-cycle performance).
Intel went with the P4, then created the Pentium M, found they had something worked much better than the P4, and appears to be focusing their development efforts on adding dual cores and x86-64 extensions to the Pentium M. All the better, I guess. My P4 3 Ghz puts off a huge amount of heat, and it's annoying now that the temperature around here is approaching 90 F and I don't have A/C.
Mr. Pink: How about if I'm Mr. Purple? That sounds good to me, I'll be Mr. Purple.
Joe: You're not Mr. Purple. Some guy on some other job is Mr. Purple. You're Mr. Pink!
Mr. White: Who cares what your name is?
Mr. Pink: Yeah that's easy for you to say, you're Mr. White, you have a cool sounding name. All right look if it's no big deal to be Mr. Pink, do you wanna trade?
Correct me if I'm wrong (it's been a while since I last took a physics course, and I don't remember much of the thermodynamics stuff).
If he fed the outlet from the fan's tubing back into the cold water reservoir, that would completely defeat the purpose of this system. Where does the heat go?
The heat in the room would move from the air in the room into the water in the tubing behind the fan. That heat, which used to be in the air, is now fed back into the water reservoir in the room, where the heat radiates back into the air. Net effect: none (actually, probably worse off after the heat generated by the motor in the fan). It'd probably cool the room down quickly as an equilibrium between the water and the air is achieved, but then start to heat back up.
That said, I might try this guy's setup at my place. My room gets quite warm from all the electronics in it, and while the house I'm in does have an air conditioner, it's not very well suited for cooling down just my room (the rest of the house is usually fine). I'm afraid, though, that I'd knock over the garbage can and drown a server, or drop my laptop in the can. Might just have to get an $80 window unit for my room.
Dave
Sorry, but I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with the bulk of your post. It's attitudes like this that make me hate using Windows and Linux for day-to-day work (I use my Mac and Mac OS X for my day-to-day work, but work with Windows and Linux systems as required/appropriate for work, school, and other projects).
/end rant
Joel Spolsky has a book out called User Interface Design for Programmers. In it, he makes a point of telling a story about a company that set out to design kitchen utensils for arthritic people (I want to say Oxo, but that could be completely wrong, and I don't have the book in front of me to check). The target market was people who couldn't grip a handle as tightly as you or I might be able to, so the utensils were designed with rubbery handles that were easy to hold onto and wouldn't slip, and that were large enough to grip comfortably. As it turns out, these utensils were a huge hit not only with the target market, but also with everyday users: they found the utensils easy to use as well, and the company took off.
The point of this story is twofold: first, you never know who your target market really is until the product is out in the world. You may find that your intended target just isn't interested in your product, or that some group you overlooked while doing market research finds your product by accident, gives it a chance, and loves it.
Secondly, and MUCH more importantly, is the notion that by designing something that is easy for a certain group of people to use, you end up making it easier for everyone to use. Everyone wins.
I consider myself a pretty advanced user (undergrad degree in Computer Science, graduate degree in Comp. Sci. in progress, etc., etc). I use Linux on my PCs and on servers because of the flexibility it provides me. That doesn't, however, that I don't like to have that flexibility hidden from me behind a complex or non-intuitive interface. Consider, for a moment, a program that has a couple dozen options that are binary (yes/no), so that they can be all be chosen by simple checkboxes in a GUI. At first glance, you might think that I would like to have all those options in a single "Options" dialog box. After all, there all the options would then be presented in a single window and I could, in theory, find what I wanted to change quickly and easily. But how do I have to find that option I'm looking for? I have to start going through the options one by one until I find it. And if what I want is at the end of the list, I just wasted a lot of time and got a little annoyed (multiply that annoyance by every time I need to go through this). But what if I arrange the options by, say, function. All the file-related options in one group, all the text-related options in another, all the shortcut-related options in another. Take that a step further, and move each group to its own preference window or tab. Give each section a simple, descriptive name. Boom. You've just reduced the clutter, streamlined the interface, and made your users much happier. Instead of trying to search for "enable syntax highlighting" amongst dozens of checkboxes, I just need to select the text-related tab, scan 6-8 options, and click the checkbox. See, that wasn't so hard, now was it?
It's people who dismiss with the wave of a hand the benefits of good user interface design that really irk me. A good user interface is not something that just happens to materialize out of thin air. Nor is it something that is really best developed by the same people who actually write the code, either. And sadly, it's the general attitudes of "if you don't like it, fix the code yourself" or "it works well for me, it should work well for everyone" that dooms so many applications. And don't even get me started on user interface conventions (I'll just say that they exist for a reason.
I know Google SMS has the ability to retrieve movie showtimes for the current day in your area, though I haven't yet found a way to get future movie times (say, what opens tomorrow) through Google SMS (read: I've been too lazy to go read the help and find out).
I'm rather surprised that it sounds like Google SMS got something before the mainstream Google web did.
Still, very cool. I *heart* Google.
Yes, if the multicasting is done correctly.
The short answer is that you don't actually have to multicast all twelve billion (slight exageration) channels simultaneously all the way to the set top boxes, just whatever 12 channels the people on the LAN are using (looking at this from the POV of a residential cable system based on Gig-E fiber to the home). If this is done inteligently, you can multicast only those channels being viewed and use IGMP snooping to figure out what to start multicasting from the cable head end. Depending on the exact network configuration (PON, active, etc), the multicast pruning might be done in the network, in the CPE, etc.
As for bandwidth, yes, it does matter what codec you use, but MPEG-2 for standard resolution TV is 4-6 MB/sec (IIRC). HDTV is another matter entirely, as it's huge (especially when uncompressed).
I'd write more, but it's time for lunch.
Not to mention that that aggregate bandwidth of 11 Mbps or 54 Mbps is the bandwidth provided at the raw physical layer. Even when you get to layer 2, you lose a lot of that bandwidth due to all ACKs at the MAC layer, the various timers (inter-frame delays). Then add on top of that the retransmission of lots frames due to interference and you're down to less than 10 Mbps of bandwidth. I've seen data from Vivato that indicates that you get even less than that (around 5 Mbps) in real-world conditions on a 802.11g network. That's about 10% usable bandwidth. Shared. That's not nearly enough. That's enough for maybe one TV channel and nothing else. And don't get me started on the latency...
Landing the shuttle may be hard, but it's still done automatically by the onboard computers. The only part of the process that has any human intervention at all is the deployment of the landing gear (which is done mostly to give the astronauts a feeling of usefulness during landing). I'd much rather trust a well-tested computer system guiding the shuttle on a pre-programmed trajectory than have a human pilot sneeze while traveling Mach 2 and jerk the stick sideways and destroy the orbiter.
I don't remember where I read this, though. I heard it long ago and came across a mention of it just the other day. I thought it was in the WikiPedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shuttle, but it's not mentioned there.
The walls are the easy part.
I dunno, I'd suspect the walls are the hard part. I think of it like this: if you're building, say, a moon base, you send up a robot to build the raw structure and seal it all in. Then your astronauts can go up there and find a pre-built habitat waiting for them. All they need to do is add a little bit of wiring and plumbing and artificial atmosphere, but that'll be easy since they're already protected from the lack of atmosphere and whatnot. Or something like that.
So, when will KDE 3.4 make it into the x86-stable tree?
Supposedly it only takes an average of 4 minutes for a WikiPedia vandalism to get corrected, pretty much regardless of the popularity of the article. I find that pretty impressive.
How often do you think that 100 meg (bit, probably) connection is going to be maxed out? Likely never.
Hahahaha. Verizon isn't planning on just serving up high-speed Internet with their Fiber-to-the-whatever rollouts.
They're also planning on things like television and video-on-demand. At 4-6 Mbps (IIRC) per channel, you'll use up that network capacity very quickly. (I won't go into the details of how you multicast that much data to the set-top boxes.)
I saw a presentation recently on passive optical networks, which IIRC is what Verizon is using for their rollout (or it might be another RBOC, I can't quite remember at the moment, and my notes from the presentatio aren't handy). For a gigabit PON, you've got one gigabit per second available, total, for all subscribers connected to that passive network (anywhere from 2 to 64, depending on the number of optical splitters installed). In addition, you have very limited upstream bandwidth.
I'd much rather see Verizon and the other RBOCs deliver Gig-E straight to my home using active optical networks--Fiber to the home, not fiber to the premises or fiber to the curb. Something like what Provo, UT, is doing with their iProvo project http://www.iprovo.net/. I saw a presentation from World Wide Packets (the equipment vendor) on that a couple weeks ago, and it's very impressive. Almost makes me want to move to Provo.