You can have it as either 130 x 64 (only buttons/volume), or 310 x 64 (with the display for (1) title (2) album/artist (3) elapsed and (total or remaining) times and a scroll bar in between). You can make it wider than 310 (widening the display area, making the scroll bar more precise), but not taller or shorter than 64 pixels.
On the other hand, you can locate it where it's less obstructive for you, and since it (optionally) floats over other windows you can have it "sharing" unused vertical space of your active title bar.
Well, since it's a free thing you can download it again and check it up for yourself. Just make sure to tell it NOT to look for your current music library (or at least NOT to copy the files to the iTunes Music folder when adding them to the library). I don't want you to hate me!:o)
In the version that I have (6.0.1 for Mac) the Mini Player is 2 pixels taller but 30 pixels "thinner". The little display now has three lines (title, album/artist, and a usable scroll bar with elapsed and total/remaining times in the ends). As you can see, it has buttons for previous and next tracks, pause/play and volume. (There is no stop button in iTunes).
You can make the window smaller (to, as I said, 130 x 64), but then you lose the right part (the display) and are left with the buttons and the volume slider.
Anyway, I see that iTunes just isn't your cup of tea and I, of course, respect that.
The first thing I noticed was that the only way iTunes didn't take up too much screen was when it wasn't on the screen.
I don't know about the Windows version, but on MacOS X, the green (+) button toggles between the normal (expanded view) and a small view called the "Mini Player". This Mini Player is less than 65 pixels tall, and as little as 130 pixels wide (you can change the width). In the preferences you can set it to float over all other windows. Enjoy!
Mac users typically love their proprietary software more than pc-equivalents, often, even if unreasonably.
Dude, Adium is released under GPL, and in no way proprietary. I'm sorry if I sound offensive, but I'm under the impression that you are attempting to compare two programs without knowing almost anything about one of them. And that's not very reasonable in my opinion.
At least the other guy claims that he used Trillian extensively...
Apparently your bigotry doesn't allow you to educate yourself before writing stupid trash. Otherwise, you would know that the DRM in Apple's AAC files (or most any other DRM scheme, for that matter) will NOT prevent you from BACKING UP your files.
Yes, dear Troll, you can still burn the files on CDs/DVDs or copy them to as many computers as you want. If one of the computers registered to PLAY the music dies, you can still register another one (and Apple will allow you to unregister the corpse).
Dude, you obviously haven't been to Latin America. It's true that there is a lot of poverty. That is, while almost 13% of the U.S. population lives under the poverty line, over 60% and even 70% of the Latin American population does (depending on the country).
On the other hand there are the fortunate ones that have access to an education and a decent job. People who have a college degree from a decent local university (and yes, there are many very good ones for the undergraduate levels), and who get a good job may earn, say, one fifth or less than what they would be earning for the same work in the U.S. But due to the extremely lower cost of life, their quality of life is amazingly good.
My point is: Even though you are a troll and an A.C. you read Slashdot, so chances are that you are a technical person, maybe an engineer or a college student. If after graduating you managed to get a job in, say, Mexico, Argentina, Chile or Colombia, equivalent to what you would get here (USA) (admittedly a huge "if" because many industries aren't very mature), chances are that your quality of life would be much higher there than here.
What I mean by "quality of life" is things like:
Much better health care, because you can actually afford the best that is offered. Most of the population there can't reach even the basic levels of the US, but you would not be in that group by a long shot.
Much, much better food and extremely cheap access to a surprisingly high number of wonderful restaurants offering food from all over the world. Although a few of the best restaurants in the world are in the USA -and in the UK, for that matter-, the fact remains that the gastronomy landscape in both countries is nothing short of pathetic; though you may be ignorant to that fact if you haven't travelled abroad.
Much better housing quality (it's appalling that many of the middle class houses in the US are made of wood, no wonder home fires are so prevalent here) with better architectural studies (so not everything seems constructed with a cookie cutter).
The average professional in Latin America can very easily afford a maid, and thus the houses tend to remain much cleaner and the quality of the everyday food is so much higher. Also, this frees a lot of time for the professional (but sucks for the maid).
Since crime rate is fairly-to-very high in large cities and labor is so cheap, practically all the apartment buildings and house complexes have private security guards 24/7. This means that ironically you have less probability of being victimized in your home there than in the US.
People are much friendlier and warmer. Foreigners are usually treated as kings as long as they don't treat people with contempt (something USAinas sometimes do).
Admittedly, there are some drawbacks. For example, whatever you save will be small potatoes and won't allow you to travel to other countries on vacation (something that anyway most USAians don't do anyway, but that's a whole different problem). But there are people fortunate enough to be hired by a foreign company and are paid salaries not much lower than the typical ones in the company's home country. This happens for example in the finance sector and in the oil industry, and is frequent in the case of foreigners who are sent to work "on commission" to Latin America. Those people live like kings, save most of what they earn (again, the cost of life is minimum) and are in now way at a disadvantage.
My message is: don't believe that, because the majority of people in third world countries live in terrible conditions, that's the case for the whole population. Chances are that people with equivalent background to yours are living better than you do.
The menus are too far away and require too much mouse movement to be effective.
Hmmm.... you need to increase the acceleration of your mouse. Whenever I've used a Mac with a mouse, I have only needed to jerk the mouse quite less than three inches to go from one corner of the screen to the other on 30" monitors at 2560x1600 (and much less in smaller monitors). Right now I can't make that test because I only have a Powerbook and a Windows PC with a PS/2 mouse in front of me. But, for what it's worth:
On the Powerbook, I can go from one corner to the other (1280x854) with only one swipe through the trackpad. The speed is set one tick faster than the middle setting. There are four more ticks to the right, and if I set it at the maximum, I can cover the diagonal by swiping over half the trackpad. But that's way too fast for me. (Note that there is no acceleration control for the trackpad).
On the Windows PC (an old Dell P4), at 1600x1200, I can travel the diagonal by jerking the mouse once around two inches. I have never touched the mouse settings so far: the speed is in the middle tick, the acceleration is in... surprise: low.
Let me set it to High (there are None, Low, Medium, and High settings). Ok, now I can cover the 1600x1200 diagonal with a 1 inch jerk (again, way to fast for me).
I never change the mouse settings for computers that aren't mine, but my experiences have been consistent with the above data, both with Macs and PCs. My guess is that you simply move the mouse too slowly. There is no shame on that, simply adjust the settings so that they better suit you.
For example this one. Granted, the stores that sell MP3s *legally* sell mainly indie music.
On the other hand this may bring a wave of indie bands getting a fairer share by bypassing the big labels. If they succeed, mainstream bands may discover that tying themselves to the big labels may not be as good as they thought, and perhaps they'll figure out how to nullify their contracts.
Hibernation, however... that takes almost as long as a boot up on Windows, and I'm not even sure how to activate it for OSX.
Unlike what the other reply says, most Apple notebooks can be configured to hibernate. You can find the instructions here. Now, you will notice that this is a rather low-level hack (although the option is readily available on the latest generation PowerBooks). But then, of course, as the other reply says, there is little motivation for Mac users to prefer hibernation over sleep.
(One of the few situations where you may want to put the laptop to hibernate is when you won't use it for a couple of days in which it will remain unplugged, and yet you don't want to lose your current session. That's infrequent, but it does happen occasionally.)
...the fact remains that large and important parts of Fink and DarwinPorts are broken and don't even install.
The jump from Jaguar to Tiger (or should I say, from Darwin 7 to Darwin 8) broke several packages. In most cases, that meant that those packages needed to be recompiled. In other cases, some patching was needed. Don't be so shocked by this, since it has happened before in the Linux world when changing versions of the kernel. I even recall something about needing to recompile most everything with a new version of gcc, but the details are fuzzy in my memory (since I don't work with Linux now).
By now, most of the "important" parts already made the transition, both in Fink and in DarwinPorts. Some minor things haven't, but in general those are things that very few people are actually demanding. For example, most KDE related packages are not yet in Fink, although most Gnome packages are. But let's face it, most Fink users aren't really interested in KDE or Gnome.
If you know of some *really* important packages that still don't work please report them to their maintainers. If they are minor things that few people need and no one else is repairing them it you may need to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself. That's the spirit of OSS, isn't it?
Both also require lots of compilation,...
No, you can install the binaries if you don't want to go through the hassle of compiling. Just as you can install packages in Linux packaging systems.
...something that is a ridiculous proposition on a $100 laptop (it's a ridiculous proposition even on a Powerbook).
I agree with you, but the main argument waved by the supporters of using Linux for the $100 laptop is precisely that with Linux the kids will have the opportunity of hacking everything in the system. If they hack it, they will need to compile, and in the said laptops that will require a lot of patience. If they don't want to hack anything nor recompile, they can install the packages directly. But that's no different from installing Fink/DarwinPorts packages or other applications in MacOS X.
The immaturity and incompleteness of Fink and DarwinPorts alone would be more than reason enough not to pick OS X.
From the point of view of a hacker-to-be third world poor kid that sounds like a world of opportunity. That is, again, if you assume that some of the kids will be hacking away in their laptops, which some Linux supporters believe, but you don't.
So, if you want a consisten, fairly easy to use GUI on top of OS X, you are limited to Cocoa applications.
And Carbon. They may not be as cool or consistent as Cocoa applications, but many are great anyway
But if you are limited to Cocoa applications, then the range of applications you can choose for OS X is small, and it gets even smaller if you limit yourself to free Cocoa applications (which you would have to for a $100 laptop).
Even ignoring Carbon, you are severely underestimating the amount of Cocoa freeware and shareware available. (Shareware counts here because I can assure you that almost all shareware developers will be very happy to know that their software is benefiting poor kids even if they don't get a dime for that).
Just make a list of all the useful software that these kids will use on Linux. I bet you will find free/shareware replacements for almost all of it in the MacOS X world that are good enough for them, if not better.
On Mac OS X there's no keyboard navigation between input boxes or buttons.
Not true. Go to System Preferences, Keyboard & Mouse, and click on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. The last option reads: "Full keyboard access: In windows and dialogs, press Tab to move the keyboard focus between:" The options are "Text boxes and lists only" and "All controls". The latter, of course, is the option you want. By the way, you can switch this on the fly with Ctr-F7.
And yes, this works beautifully in iTunes, although, admittedly, not within the iTMS.
The x86 Macs that Apple will release next year will all be Intels. Since the official version of x86 MacOS X will be tightly tied to the hardware, it may be extremely hard, if not impossible, to hack it to run on AMD computers.
Having said that, the OS X 10.4.1 prototype that was leaked a couple of months ago *does* run on AMD, as shown in the ZDnet article featured recently on Slashdot (look at the last figure in the page). It's not clear, though, if Rosetta applications currently run on AMD.
So, to answer your question: yes, for Apple it will be extremely easy to port OS X to AMD after they have finished the transition to Intel. You can bet that this has passed through their minds, and that Jobs knew this when he made the offer.
It would be way cool if I could use my laptop as a keyboard/moniter for the mini, though, as I'm not keen on buying new ones to clutter up my desk.
Unless you know how to do that with a Windows PC (that is, use laptop as kb/monitor of the other PC), I don't think you will succeed. You could use VNC, but I think that the VNC servers for MacOS X had a problem where the mouse pointer would not show up properly in the client. I don't know if this has been corrected, though.
On the other hand, take into account that an external monitor and nice USB kb and mouse will most certainly work with your current laptop, so the "clutter" may be more justifiable than you think.
I'm also a switch-backer and mark my words: once your Mac and suffer through the 1 to 2 weeks readaptation period, you will hate yourself for not switching back sooner.
Then, I actually tried to create a tri-fold brochure with it. I could type a sentence, then wait 10 seconds for the first keystroke to appear, and another 30 seconds for the entire sentence to be inserted into the text. This occurs when editing Apple's own tri-fold brochure template.
This is very interesting. I was going to mod you down, but you are already at -1. Then I thought to myself: "I actually use and LOVE Keynote, but I don't really use Pages, so modding this comment without first hand experience would be unfair."
So I fired up Pages, opened the Three Panel Brochure template (I guess that's what you meant), and noticed that if I replaced the template text, the program would be dog slow. Not as slow as you say: after typing a very, very long sentence, the last character would appear around six seconds after I typed it, which is anyway too annoying.
So I was going to mod you up. But then I saw all the comments saying that they don't experience such a long lag... WTF? So I closed the document and started a new one using the Club Newsletter template, which looks fairly complex. To make things fair, I inserted five different pages all with several columns, pictures, side texts (or however they are called). By the way, everything looks very cool, and far more complex than the Three Panel Brochure. I started editing all over the place, with *absolutely* no delay.
So the problem is actually with the specific template! Apparently it's much more complex than it seems, or the author screwed up, or it uses a particular "feature" that kills Pages. In any case, you can make documents that look much more complex using other templates (although I only tested those two).
Someone please mod parent as "Underrated". I personally thought that describing my findings would contribute more to the discussion.
Oh, by the way: Pages - Just say yes only if you have already tested the template you want to use.
Keynote, that's a totally different story. Keynote rocks!
4. Or, the ability to tell the OS to only encrypt certain files/directories, rather than have the loop-AES hack of FileVault -- I don't care if my ~/doc tree is encrypted, I do care that my ~/work tree is.
How's this for a workaround?:
Create an encrypted disk image with Disk Utility. The size, whether it's a sparse image or not, putting the password in the keychain, etc, that all depends on your needs.
Create a work folder in the encrypted disk image.
Make an alias of the folder, copy the alias to ~/, rename the copy to work.
That way, you can work with what appears to be a ~/work directory, but in reality it will be encrypted. If you store the password in the keychain, you're set. If not, the first time you need to access that directory after logging in you just need to double click on the alias and enter the password. An added benefit is that you can unmount the disk image whenever your paranoid mind tells you that your laptop is in risk of getting compromised.
I can say that there are a LOT of things wrong with this article. This is pre-school journalism at its best. Hear me out...
Yes, I agree with you on this. The author of the article is one of the developers (he's also a radiologist), and he just wrote a little piece showing the work they have done. I wonder why CNN picked it up, I guess it was because he talks about using iPods. Pure hype.
Second, this is a MAJOR patient confidentiality issue, and I believe is considered legal under HIPAA, but if a physician, clinician, etc lost the iPod, they could go to JAIL. I'm not kidding.
Of course. But they may also go to jail if they lose a DICOM CD. Transporting DICOM files on iPods is just convenient in some cases. In general if you are going to go around with your iPod (that is, if you want to use it as an iPod also), you should either load only anonymized series (yes, that makes sense if you are a researcher as opposed to a clinician). Or at least you should put the files in an encrypted disk image, something trivial to do on MacOS X.
Also, they also allude to actually viewing images on the photo iPods. I cannot imagine any image that could even be useful to a non-Radiology (referring phsyician, surgeon, etc) on those screens. About the lowest quality image that is useful even for referrals or comparisons is a 2MP monitor that displays at least 1280 resolution. Anything less than that is pretty much medically worthless, and for Radiologists, you typically need a 3MP display for proper detail, not to mention special graphics hardware.
Actually what happened was that the developers realized that writing the code that would convert DICOMs to JPEGs and export them to the iPod was extremely trivial. So they said "why not? It may even be useful for quick presentations if you connect the iPod to a TV". Note that iPod photo software does NOT read DICOM and the JPEGs don't have any identifiable information, so that covers part of your concerns.
I'm not quite sure if this CNN article is a cry for publicity from the developers of OsiriX, or Apple.
Certainly not from Apple. The developers, on the other hand, are doing very well, thank you. They have received several awards from the radiology community both in the US and in Europe. The users, both radiologists and others, are ecstatic, because in features/easy of use OsiriX beats all other free viewers, and most other programs that sell for under $3000. And for some needs it's actually an acceptable substitute for the high end stuff (especially if you add a VolumePro card to your Mac). The software is evolving at a staggering pace, and the responsiveness of the developers is great.
In a setup like yours it makes a lot of sense to spend $70,000 on a Vitrea workstation, or even on several. But imagine how much the productivity would increase if instead of buying four Vitreas they only got three and spend the rest of the money on several Macs for the most humble uses (i.e. almost everything, specially for non-radiologists). Well, that's what some places are starting to realize. And for researchers with tight budgets OsiriX is a dream come true.
As for the journalistic integrity, c'mon... I mean, the reporter spelled DICOM (format for medical image storage and transfer), "Diacom". They even spell out what it stands for after that, I don't see any A's in there!
Obviously the article fell in the hands of a clueless editor (or of Word's autocorrect bug^H^H^H feature). The author is a radiologist that helps develop a DICOM viewer. You can bet he can spell DICOM. Also, note that the article only talks about Osirix, instead of OsiriX. These guys are like Apple with their iProducts: they are proud of their X and don't want anyone to use an x instead. So it's not surprising the Diacom thing got past them too.
In conclusion, the great sin here is that the article focuses on a silly toy-feature, instead of the really important stuff. On the other hand, if it wasn't for the iPod hype, the article probably wouldn't have made it to CNN (or to Slashdot, for that matter).
OSIRIS has been around for a while -- I don't see why it's news.
Osiris has been around for a while. OsiriX hasn't. The OsiriX developers made important contributions to Osiris back then, but the difference between both products is huge.
Oh, now I see that I misunderstood coyote4til7's post. I though that he said that Pope John XXIII (the recent one) had been charged with piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest, which is of course false.
Slashdot Mirror
No, not in my version.
:o)
You can have it as either 130 x 64 (only buttons/volume), or 310 x 64 (with the display for (1) title (2) album/artist (3) elapsed and (total or remaining) times and a scroll bar in between). You can make it wider than 310 (widening the display area, making the scroll bar more precise), but not taller or shorter than 64 pixels.
On the other hand, you can locate it where it's less obstructive for you, and since it (optionally) floats over other windows you can have it "sharing" unused vertical space of your active title bar.
Well, since it's a free thing you can download it again and check it up for yourself. Just make sure to tell it NOT to look for your current music library (or at least NOT to copy the files to the iTunes Music folder when adding them to the library). I don't want you to hate me!
Here you go. That's for iTunes 4.7.x in Windows.
In the version that I have (6.0.1 for Mac) the Mini Player is 2 pixels taller but 30 pixels "thinner". The little display now has three lines (title, album/artist, and a usable scroll bar with elapsed and total/remaining times in the ends). As you can see, it has buttons for previous and next tracks, pause/play and volume. (There is no stop button in iTunes).
You can make the window smaller (to, as I said, 130 x 64), but then you lose the right part (the display) and are left with the buttons and the volume slider.
Anyway, I see that iTunes just isn't your cup of tea and I, of course, respect that.
I don't know about the Windows version, but on MacOS X, the green (+) button toggles between the normal (expanded view) and a small view called the "Mini Player". This Mini Player is less than 65 pixels tall, and as little as 130 pixels wide (you can change the width). In the preferences you can set it to float over all other windows. Enjoy!
Dude, wasn't it easier to ask the poster in the Apple forum if he was the same guy?
Well, he is the same guy.
Plagiarism sucks, but so does accusing others without merit.
Hmmm... OK. Just wanted to note that the dual G5 PowerMac starts at $2000, not at $2500. Just in case someone would be mislead by your comment.
Dude, Adium is released under GPL, and in no way proprietary. I'm sorry if I sound offensive, but I'm under the impression that you are attempting to compare two programs without knowing almost anything about one of them. And that's not very reasonable in my opinion.
At least the other guy claims that he used Trillian extensively...
Why not just take your iPod??
Because the video iPods are only able to play videos that are smaller than a limited resolution (which depends on the codec used).
Dear Anonymous Troll,
Apparently your bigotry doesn't allow you to educate yourself before writing stupid trash. Otherwise, you would know that the DRM in Apple's AAC files (or most any other DRM scheme, for that matter) will NOT prevent you from BACKING UP your files.
Yes, dear Troll, you can still burn the files on CDs/DVDs or copy them to as many computers as you want. If one of the computers registered to PLAY the music dies, you can still register another one (and Apple will allow you to unregister the corpse).
On the other hand there are the fortunate ones that have access to an education and a decent job. People who have a college degree from a decent local university (and yes, there are many very good ones for the undergraduate levels), and who get a good job may earn, say, one fifth or less than what they would be earning for the same work in the U.S. But due to the extremely lower cost of life, their quality of life is amazingly good.
My point is: Even though you are a troll and an A.C. you read Slashdot, so chances are that you are a technical person, maybe an engineer or a college student. If after graduating you managed to get a job in, say, Mexico, Argentina, Chile or Colombia, equivalent to what you would get here (USA) (admittedly a huge "if" because many industries aren't very mature), chances are that your quality of life would be much higher there than here.
What I mean by "quality of life" is things like:
Admittedly, there are some drawbacks. For example, whatever you save will be small potatoes and won't allow you to travel to other countries on vacation (something that anyway most USAians don't do anyway, but that's a whole different problem). But there are people fortunate enough to be hired by a foreign company and are paid salaries not much lower than the typical ones in the company's home country. This happens for example in the finance sector and in the oil industry, and is frequent in the case of foreigners who are sent to work "on commission" to Latin America. Those people live like kings, save most of what they earn (again, the cost of life is minimum) and are in now way at a disadvantage.
My message is: don't believe that, because the majority of people in third world countries live in terrible conditions, that's the case for the whole population. Chances are that people with equivalent background to yours are living better than you do.
Hmmm.... you need to increase the acceleration of your mouse. Whenever I've used a Mac with a mouse, I have only needed to jerk the mouse quite less than three inches to go from one corner of the screen to the other on 30" monitors at 2560x1600 (and much less in smaller monitors). Right now I can't make that test because I only have a Powerbook and a Windows PC with a PS/2 mouse in front of me. But, for what it's worth:
On the Powerbook, I can go from one corner to the other (1280x854) with only one swipe through the trackpad. The speed is set one tick faster than the middle setting. There are four more ticks to the right, and if I set it at the maximum, I can cover the diagonal by swiping over half the trackpad. But that's way too fast for me. (Note that there is no acceleration control for the trackpad).
On the Windows PC (an old Dell P4), at 1600x1200, I can travel the diagonal by jerking the mouse once around two inches. I have never touched the mouse settings so far: the speed is in the middle tick, the acceleration is in... surprise: low.
Let me set it to High (there are None, Low, Medium, and High settings). Ok, now I can cover the 1600x1200 diagonal with a 1 inch jerk (again, way to fast for me).
I never change the mouse settings for computers that aren't mine, but my experiences have been consistent with the above data, both with Macs and PCs. My guess is that you simply move the mouse too slowly. There is no shame on that, simply adjust the settings so that they better suit you.
For example this one. Granted, the stores that sell MP3s *legally* sell mainly indie music.
On the other hand this may bring a wave of indie bands getting a fairer share by bypassing the big labels. If they succeed, mainstream bands may discover that tying themselves to the big labels may not be as good as they thought, and perhaps they'll figure out how to nullify their contracts.
Unlike what the other reply says, most Apple notebooks can be configured to hibernate. You can find the instructions here. Now, you will notice that this is a rather low-level hack (although the option is readily available on the latest generation PowerBooks). But then, of course, as the other reply says, there is little motivation for Mac users to prefer hibernation over sleep.
(One of the few situations where you may want to put the laptop to hibernate is when you won't use it for a couple of days in which it will remain unplugged, and yet you don't want to lose your current session. That's infrequent, but it does happen occasionally.)
The jump from Jaguar to Tiger (or should I say, from Darwin 7 to Darwin 8) broke several packages. In most cases, that meant that those packages needed to be recompiled. In other cases, some patching was needed. Don't be so shocked by this, since it has happened before in the Linux world when changing versions of the kernel. I even recall something about needing to recompile most everything with a new version of gcc, but the details are fuzzy in my memory (since I don't work with Linux now).
By now, most of the "important" parts already made the transition, both in Fink and in DarwinPorts. Some minor things haven't, but in general those are things that very few people are actually demanding. For example, most KDE related packages are not yet in Fink, although most Gnome packages are. But let's face it, most Fink users aren't really interested in KDE or Gnome.
If you know of some *really* important packages that still don't work please report them to their maintainers. If they are minor things that few people need and no one else is repairing them it you may need to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself. That's the spirit of OSS, isn't it?
No, you can install the binaries if you don't want to go through the hassle of compiling. Just as you can install packages in Linux packaging systems.
I agree with you, but the main argument waved by the supporters of using Linux for the $100 laptop is precisely that with Linux the kids will have the opportunity of hacking everything in the system. If they hack it, they will need to compile, and in the said laptops that will require a lot of patience. If they don't want to hack anything nor recompile, they can install the packages directly. But that's no different from installing Fink/DarwinPorts packages or other applications in MacOS X.
From the point of view of a hacker-to-be third world poor kid that sounds like a world of opportunity. That is, again, if you assume that some of the kids will be hacking away in their laptops, which some Linux supporters believe, but you don't.
And Carbon. They may not be as cool or consistent as Cocoa applications, but many are great anyway
Even ignoring Carbon, you are severely underestimating the amount of Cocoa freeware and shareware available. (Shareware counts here because I can assure you that almost all shareware developers will be very happy to know that their software is benefiting poor kids even if they don't get a dime for that).
Just make a list of all the useful software that these kids will use on Linux. I bet you will find free/shareware replacements for almost all of it in the MacOS X world that are good enough for them, if not better.
Not true. Go to System Preferences, Keyboard & Mouse, and click on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. The last option reads: "Full keyboard access: In windows and dialogs, press Tab to move the keyboard focus between:" The options are "Text boxes and lists only" and "All controls". The latter, of course, is the option you want. By the way, you can switch this on the fly with Ctr-F7.
And yes, this works beautifully in iTunes, although, admittedly, not within the iTMS.
The x86 Macs that Apple will release next year will all be Intels. Since the official version of x86 MacOS X will be tightly tied to the hardware, it may be extremely hard, if not impossible, to hack it to run on AMD computers.
Having said that, the OS X 10.4.1 prototype that was leaked a couple of months ago *does* run on AMD, as shown in the ZDnet article featured recently on Slashdot (look at the last figure in the page). It's not clear, though, if Rosetta applications currently run on AMD.
So, to answer your question: yes, for Apple it will be extremely easy to port OS X to AMD after they have finished the transition to Intel. You can bet that this has passed through their minds, and that Jobs knew this when he made the offer.
Unless you know how to do that with a Windows PC (that is, use laptop as kb/monitor of the other PC), I don't think you will succeed. You could use VNC, but I think that the VNC servers for MacOS X had a problem where the mouse pointer would not show up properly in the client. I don't know if this has been corrected, though.
On the other hand, take into account that an external monitor and nice USB kb and mouse will most certainly work with your current laptop, so the "clutter" may be more justifiable than you think.
I'm also a switch-backer and mark my words: once your Mac and suffer through the 1 to 2 weeks readaptation period, you will hate yourself for not switching back sooner.
Dude, where have you been? Your iBook most certainly qualifies for the Expanded iBook Logic Board Repair Extension Program!
See: http://www.apple.com/support/ibook/faq/
That's not a virus, it's a worm. Or a snake... I don't know, something long and thin without legs. A penis maybe?
Meh... too bad I already posted in this story, so I can't mod this up.
Seriously, this is great advice.
See their website. It's way too useful. And cross-platform to boot.
Yes, I know that. But it much cooler to pronounce it "Mac... Oooh! Ssssseeexxx!".
This is very interesting. I was going to mod you down, but you are already at -1. Then I thought to myself: "I actually use and LOVE Keynote, but I don't really use Pages, so modding this comment without first hand experience would be unfair."
So I fired up Pages, opened the Three Panel Brochure template (I guess that's what you meant), and noticed that if I replaced the template text, the program would be dog slow. Not as slow as you say: after typing a very, very long sentence, the last character would appear around six seconds after I typed it, which is anyway too annoying.
So I was going to mod you up. But then I saw all the comments saying that they don't experience such a long lag... WTF? So I closed the document and started a new one using the Club Newsletter template, which looks fairly complex. To make things fair, I inserted five different pages all with several columns, pictures, side texts (or however they are called). By the way, everything looks very cool, and far more complex than the Three Panel Brochure. I started editing all over the place, with *absolutely* no delay.
So the problem is actually with the specific template! Apparently it's much more complex than it seems, or the author screwed up, or it uses a particular "feature" that kills Pages. In any case, you can make documents that look much more complex using other templates (although I only tested those two).
Someone please mod parent as "Underrated". I personally thought that describing my findings would contribute more to the discussion.
Oh, by the way: Pages - Just say yes only if you have already tested the template you want to use.
Keynote, that's a totally different story. Keynote rocks!
How's this for a workaround?:
That way, you can work with what appears to be a ~/work directory, but in reality it will be encrypted. If you store the password in the keychain, you're set. If not, the first time you need to access that directory after logging in you just need to double click on the alias and enter the password. An added benefit is that you can unmount the disk image whenever your paranoid mind tells you that your laptop is in risk of getting compromised.
Yes, I agree with you on this. The author of the article is one of the developers (he's also a radiologist), and he just wrote a little piece showing the work they have done. I wonder why CNN picked it up, I guess it was because he talks about using iPods. Pure hype.
Of course. But they may also go to jail if they lose a DICOM CD. Transporting DICOM files on iPods is just convenient in some cases. In general if you are going to go around with your iPod (that is, if you want to use it as an iPod also), you should either load only anonymized series (yes, that makes sense if you are a researcher as opposed to a clinician). Or at least you should put the files in an encrypted disk image, something trivial to do on MacOS X.
Actually what happened was that the developers realized that writing the code that would convert DICOMs to JPEGs and export them to the iPod was extremely trivial. So they said "why not? It may even be useful for quick presentations if you connect the iPod to a TV". Note that iPod photo software does NOT read DICOM and the JPEGs don't have any identifiable information, so that covers part of your concerns.
Certainly not from Apple. The developers, on the other hand, are doing very well, thank you. They have received several awards from the radiology community both in the US and in Europe. The users, both radiologists and others, are ecstatic, because in features/easy of use OsiriX beats all other free viewers, and most other programs that sell for under $3000. And for some needs it's actually an acceptable substitute for the high end stuff (especially if you add a VolumePro card to your Mac). The software is evolving at a staggering pace, and the responsiveness of the developers is great.
In a setup like yours it makes a lot of sense to spend $70,000 on a Vitrea workstation, or even on several. But imagine how much the productivity would increase if instead of buying four Vitreas they only got three and spend the rest of the money on several Macs for the most humble uses (i.e. almost everything, specially for non-radiologists). Well, that's what some places are starting to realize. And for researchers with tight budgets OsiriX is a dream come true.
Obviously the article fell in the hands of a clueless editor (or of Word's autocorrect bug^H^H^H feature). The author is a radiologist that helps develop a DICOM viewer. You can bet he can spell DICOM. Also, note that the article only talks about Osirix, instead of OsiriX. These guys are like Apple with their iProducts: they are proud of their X and don't want anyone to use an x instead. So it's not surprising the Diacom thing got past them too.
In conclusion, the great sin here is that the article focuses on a silly toy-feature, instead of the really important stuff. On the other hand, if it wasn't for the iPod hype, the article probably wouldn't have made it to CNN (or to Slashdot, for that matter).
Osiris has been around for a while. OsiriX hasn't. The OsiriX developers made important contributions to Osiris back then, but the difference between both products is huge.
Oh, now I see that I misunderstood coyote4til7's post. I though that he said that Pope John XXIII (the recent one) had been charged with piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest, which is of course false.
My apologies!