Oh, but continue reading the article you linked to (another link here because there's a stray / in yours):
Terrace's work was a major blow to talking-ape proponents. But their case started looking stronger in 1990, when researcher Emily Sue Savage-Rumbaugh of Georgia State University presented evidence of language development in a bonobo chimp named Kanzi. One of the more telling complaints made about gorillas like Koko who communicated via sign language was that they often babbled, producing long, apparently meaningless strings of signs. Their handlers would then pluck a few lucky hits from the noise and declare that communication had occurred. Savage-Rumbaugh got around this problem by teaching Kanzi to point to printed symbols on a keyboard, a less ambiguous approach. She claimed that the ape demonstrated a rough grasp of grammar using this system. What's more, when presented with 653 sentences making requests using novel word combinations, Kanzi responded correctly 72 percent of the time--supposedly comparable to what a human child can do at two and a half years old. (Emphasis mine)
That reminds me of a program I saw around four years ago on TV. There was an ape, (I think it was a gorilla so it wasn't Kanzi, but I think it wasn't Koko either--sorry for the fuzziness of my memory), who had been trained to communicate using a board with buttons with weird, randomly selected, symbols on them. When the ape pressed a button, a word or extremely short phrase would be produced by a computer connected to the board. The ape learned to combine those words into sentences. She (I think it was a female) developed a very crude grammar of her own, but of course she didn't produce deep philosophical thoughts (neither can an average three-year-old human, anyway).
Maybe the most interesting part was that they could switch the buttons around, and the ape would still produce phrases. And the most amazing thing: they switched the words corresponding to each button, and after some time the ape learned the new symbols, showing that she was actually aware that the important part of their language was not the symbols but the sounds.
I have a music collection that is larger than the iPod's HD - at least larger than the discs of those I can afford. How does iTunes handle this? Judging from other posts here this is not so easy anymore.
Do what people with more normal (say, 8GB) music collections do to feed their iPod minis: define playlists that contain what you want to have in your iPod.
With smart playlists this is easy: Define any number of playlists (smart and/or dumb) that select all your possible candidates. It doesn't matter if some of the songs appear in more than one of the playlists, it doesn't matter if they won't all fit in the iPod.
Now, create a smart playlist that selects songs that are in "any" of the playlists of candidates that you created above. And here is the trick: Limit it to just under the capacity of your iPod (or whatever space you want to allocate in it to music; take the space for the DB into account, but that's not too much), selecting the songs "randomly". Tell iTunes to synchronize your iPod only with that smart playlist.
You can reshuffle the playlist every time you synchronize the iPod so that you always take, say, 15GB out of the 40 GB of your collection, but choosing only from your 25 GB of favorite songs. The other 5 GB can be used as handy FW/USB 2 storage. Enjoy.
If my favorite badn is X, and iTMS doesn't carry them, the whole "it's easy" argument is sort of moot.
He, he... for a moment I thought that you were saying that X was your favorite band, and I was going to point out that iTMS does actually carry them.:-)
Anyway, I have seen that there is far more "exclusive" material in iTMS that you can't find in any of the WMA stores than the other way around. On the other hand, that has only been for the things that I like, so I guess YMMV.
In fact, I have had far more trouble among the iTMSs for different countries: due to distribution contracts, you will find lots of material in some European stores that you can't find in the U.S. one, and vice-versa. Even the different European stores hold different collections.
For my own part, I have the ultimate "pull-out" stereo. It fits in the back pocket of my jeans, and I can keep listening to it as I walk across the parking lot.
Come on, that's a stupid answer. If you had said "shirt pocket", "jacket pocket", "holder attached to belt", or even "front pocket of my jeans" I would agree with you, but carrying an iPod in your back pants pocket is so uncomfortable it's simply stupid. And just try to sit down with the iPod there!
I actually agree wholeheartedly with almost everything you said, except one thing: You are not limited to iTunes and iPod. On the portable player's arena, you are right (unless you use something like hymn of fairtunes to strip the DRM). But you can actually use several other jukebox programs to play the DRMed AACs, as long as they use QuickTime to decode the file.
Anyway, I agree buying the CD (or the LP) gets you things that you won't get from iTunes. I haven't and won't buy albums from an online store for those reasons. But I do buy individual songs because that way I can spend $12 and get exactly the 12 songs that I want in my "album", instead of buying four real albums to get the same 12 songs plus dozens of others that I really don't care about.
That feature works also with 3rd generation (last year's) iPods, not only with the "new" (4rth gen/click wheel) ones. I'm not sure about previous ones, though.
Re:Did Copland failing actually help Apple succeed
on
NeXTSTEP To Mac OS X
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· Score: 1
Watch what happens when you click yer Safari Bookmarks menu the first time after launch,(i use firefox) or ask the Finder to do 2 things at once... heheh, yeah,
For the love of God, I have no idea of what you're talking about. The Finder handles multiple tasks perfectly well, I just tested it. Regarding the Safari bookmarks "problem", I guess you mean that it takes a long time to open, but that hasn't been my experience.
Three years ago I was the main administrator of an NT 4.0 server that ran a critical database for the company I used to work for. It only crashed once, badly, and it was due to a hardware failure. But one of the policies was NEVER to run more than one critical app (a database, webserver, mail server) on an NT or 2000 server, and the servers were basically never touched in fear of them crashing. That was extremely stressing, frankly speaking. Given my (admittedly limited) experience with MacOS X and other Unix-like systems, I would never again run something critical on an NT-based box. And if forced to, I would probably go for a Win 2003 server, NOT for NT.
That is true, however Fink does do one thing by default that I find deplorable: it puts/sw/bin at the FRONT of your path instead of at the end, thus replacing (not physically, but effectively) basic system binaries like cp, rm, ls, df. No third-party library should put EVER itself in front of/bin unless the user specifically asks for it.
Wait a minute: first, Fink doesn't have replacement packages for cp, rm , ls, nor df. None of them get replaced even "effectively".
Now, suppose that they post an improved version of, say, ls. If you choose to install their version, then of course you want it to "effectively" replace the system's version. I mean, you should know what you are installing and why (unless you are rather clueless, in which case you probably don't want to mess with Fink/OpenDarwin/etc).
Allegedly, it would be better if they appended/sw/bin at the end of the path and added some mechanism to allow you to have a subset of binaries before the system ones, so that they can be replaced. And allow the user to decide in which group to put each package. As you can see, this can easily turn into a mess, so I'm glad they implemented it as they did.
Yes, judging from the web page, the pictures appear to be in DICOM format. If so, I highly recommend OsiriX, an extremely cool, free, open source (GPL), DICOM viewer and PACS workstation/server that happens to be Mac only.
There are other programs that will open DICOM files, like the NIH's ImageJ. There are other cool, free medical image viewers for Mac and other systems (MRIcro comes to mind). And there are professional tools that spank OsiriX's ass, but cost over $70,000. But I have seen nothing for a reasonable price that is as good and as easy to use as OsiriX. Make sure you give it a look!
You make very good points and I agree that it's absurd to ignore the other machines, some of which advantage System X in more than raw power.
But going directly to your question: Why the concentration on a Single Power970 machine ?
A possible explanation: It is the first machine of the list that is made up of individual servers that some people would actually have in their small company. And its previous encarnation was made of workstations identical to the ones that several people have on their desks. You can't help but get some emotional attachment to the VT cluster.
I know it sounds silly to you and that it's not a technical justification. But certainly the other machines look more impersonal and distant to the average user (specially the Mac users). I can understand that, and I don't even have a G5.
... but some people (myself included) turned them on by moving them from the Calculator.app/Contents/Resources folder to the Calculator.app/Contents/PlugIns folder.
It was easier to select "Get info" for the Calculator icon, and set all the checkboxes in the Plug-ins section.
I'm sorry to learn that the special views got broken. Some of them are rather useful.
If two thirds people of the continent in which the former Federal Republic of Germany was located called their continent Germany I would certainly find a different name for the West Germans.
(Although in this case not even Germans call their country Germany, but that's off-topic.)
Wow, those entries in Wikipedia have really improved, kudos to the authors.
I would add that "Columbus discovered America" but neither Columbus nor Amerigo (Americo) Vespucci were ever in North America. If some place in "The Americas" should keep the name to itself it's certainly not the USA.
You mean FARC and ELN, not M19. M19 was a guerilla group that was reinstated to civil life in the very late 80's. Now they are a rather important political party.
Also, another important part of the drug production is in hands of the so-named "paramilitar" groups (or "autodefensas"). They claim to have been formed to fight against the guerrillas due to the incapacity of the state to do so, but in practice many of those groups were actually protecting the original drug lords. A big chunk of them is dialoguing with the current government to leave the war (and the drug-related businesses), but as you said the business will certainly be inherited by other groups.
I think that the grandparent post implied that he used his Mac as much as he could (including gaming where possible), but preferred the console for games that existed for it.
I'm not really into computer games at all, but I did notice that you mentioned five games: NeverWinter Nights exists for Mac. Age Of Mythology also. NeverWinter Nights 2 and Dragon Age don't even exist for PCs yet, but since they are from the same house as NWN it's feasible that they will get to the Mac (eventually). EVE... I don't know what that is.
My point is that he can run most of what you call "REAL" games on his Mac, and the rest on his console, so both his and your gaming needs seem to be covered.
Just my 2 cents. I don't know why I'm even reading this thread, as I stopped playing computer games early in college.
Yes! I agree with you 100% and I apologize for my mistake. I used the wrong word because the grandparent post talked about "BSD devils", but I should have corrected that detail.
Now all those daemons are going to torment me with their tridents for eternity, specially Hexley (who is actually a platypus, but whatever).
Should $1800 really be the cost of entry for a dual-head capable laptop in 2004?
Apart from the hacks for the iBooks that everyone and their mother mentioned, allow me to nitpick by saying that the 12" Powerbook starts at $1600, not $1800.
You can import music in a variety of formats (such as MP3 or AAC) and at whatever quality level you'd prefer. http://www.apple.com/ipod/
I read that as requiring some type of format conversion
You read incorrectly. What they mean is import to the iTunes library. The import procedure involves registering the songs in the iTunes database and either copying the MP3 file to the iTunes Music Folder or referencing the original file (depending on whether you want iTunes to keep a neatly organized structure for your files or you would rather use your own weird structure). No format conversion is made.
I'm confused why a 256MB USB storage device can read MP3 files and other files just by copying them over, but a $250+ device requires special software to "import" the same files?
The iPod has it's own database with the metadata of the files, just as iTunes does. Part of the information for these databases is retrieved from the ID3 tags of the files that have them (for music from CDs you rip with iTunes you can get that info automatically from CDDB), and part is not there (like your rating, the time the song was last played, the play count).
I guess having a centralized storage for this information allows an easier implementation of a consistent user experience (something you can get on the cheaper devices only if you are very disciplined in your bookkeeping, something most users aren't). So the "special software" is not really a big deal, and that's why it was successfully reverse engineered in Linux clients. On the other hand, the user experience given by this "special software" (iTunes) in combination with the iPod is so good that once you use it you won't want to go back to the hassle of the cheaper devices.
And OGG support is not impossible. It's only that Apple isn't interested in developing the decoder (why would they be? to satisfy a few hundred geeks who won't touch MP3s or AACs?) and third parties have been unsuccessful at developing an efficient one (maybe due to lack of know-how).
I guess I agree about the FM tuner. And I can't argue with your lack of money, as I bought mine only because I got a $200 rebate.
Hummm.... Where did you get the weird idea that the iPod doesn't play MP3 files natively? Of course it does! In fact, when the first gen iPods came out, Apple didn't even support AAC.
Regarding the Linux support, there are hacks that allow you to use and iPod on Linux. Of course they are quite a nuisance (specially compared to Apple's software on MacOS and Windows), but it will work.
It seems to me that you don't buy an iPod because you don't care enough to research your options.
China and India are in the "developing" world, not the 3rd world, get it straight.
No, no. "Third world" and "developing world" are the same thing. Apparently it was politically incorrect to refer to a country as "third-world" or as "underdeveloped", so they invented the "developing" designation..
In fact, the "second world" refers to the nations within the former USSR's sphere of influence. It does not refer to "nations that are more developed than third world neations and less than first world ones". (Of course all these definitions are flaky anyway).
I really don't give a shit about your message. I haven't really paid much attention, but it seems that you are a pathetic loser that doesn't have much to do. You are a really sad example of a human being.
But I'm very grateful, because I have learned a lot thanks to your post. You see, I don't really have a lot of free time, but at least I try to use it constructively. Today, I'm learning about HTML formatting of Slashdot posts, following yours as an example.
In particular, today I:
Learned how to write text in italics with bullets.
I already knew how to do similar things, but this gives a much cleaner output.
But that's not all!
I also learned that you can mix monospaced fonts with regular text.
Before, if I wanted to include a nicely formatted table, I would resort to posting the whole thing in "code" style.
And a final lesson:
This lines are all indented.
I'm using DD instead of BLOCKQUOTE (that's what I normally use, and that's what's used in the monospaced lines).
Apparently DD doesn't automatically insert the vertically space that I hated in BLOCKQUOTE.
Now, laugh all you want at my ignorance of HTML, but we all have to learn each thing some day. Kudos to you if you mastered it years ago.
Well, not stating those two letters certainly threw me off...;) But now I see your point.
On the other hand, as a very poor international student who decided to make a huge investment in a PowerBook after using mainly PCs for more than five years (and some Unix Workstations but no Macs at all), I must say that yes, he should specify that he needs an OS that runs on his current computer.
By the way, the PB was the best buying decision I have made in my life.
Slashdot Mirror
That reminds me of a program I saw around four years ago on TV. There was an ape, (I think it was a gorilla so it wasn't Kanzi, but I think it wasn't Koko either--sorry for the fuzziness of my memory), who had been trained to communicate using a board with buttons with weird, randomly selected, symbols on them. When the ape pressed a button, a word or extremely short phrase would be produced by a computer connected to the board. The ape learned to combine those words into sentences. She (I think it was a female) developed a very crude grammar of her own, but of course she didn't produce deep philosophical thoughts (neither can an average three-year-old human, anyway).
Maybe the most interesting part was that they could switch the buttons around, and the ape would still produce phrases. And the most amazing thing: they switched the words corresponding to each button, and after some time the ape learned the new symbols, showing that she was actually aware that the important part of their language was not the symbols but the sounds.
That program really shocked me. I tried to google for links to this ape, but instead got these to Kanzi and another chimp called Lana:
http://www.gsu.edu/~wwwlrc/biographies/kanzi.html
http://www.gsu.edu/~wwwlrc/biographies/lana.html
http://www.gsu.edu/~wwwlrc/biographies/apebiograp
Lana kind of fits my description, but she's a chimpanzee and slightly old (DOB: 10/7/1970), I think the ape I saw was a teenager. (My memory stinks anyway, don't rely on my word.)
Do what people with more normal (say, 8GB) music collections do to feed their iPod minis: define playlists that contain what you want to have in your iPod.
With smart playlists this is easy: Define any number of playlists (smart and/or dumb) that select all your possible candidates. It doesn't matter if some of the songs appear in more than one of the playlists, it doesn't matter if they won't all fit in the iPod.
Now, create a smart playlist that selects songs that are in "any" of the playlists of candidates that you created above. And here is the trick: Limit it to just under the capacity of your iPod (or whatever space you want to allocate in it to music; take the space for the DB into account, but that's not too much), selecting the songs "randomly". Tell iTunes to synchronize your iPod only with that smart playlist.
You can reshuffle the playlist every time you synchronize the iPod so that you always take, say, 15GB out of the 40 GB of your collection, but choosing only from your 25 GB of favorite songs. The other 5 GB can be used as handy FW/USB 2 storage. Enjoy.
He, he... for a moment I thought that you were saying that X was your favorite band, and I was going to point out that iTMS does actually carry them.
Anyway, I have seen that there is far more "exclusive" material in iTMS that you can't find in any of the WMA stores than the other way around. On the other hand, that has only been for the things that I like, so I guess YMMV.
In fact, I have had far more trouble among the iTMSs for different countries: due to distribution contracts, you will find lots of material in some European stores that you can't find in the U.S. one, and vice-versa. Even the different European stores hold different collections.
Come on, that's a stupid answer. If you had said "shirt pocket", "jacket pocket", "holder attached to belt", or even "front pocket of my jeans" I would agree with you, but carrying an iPod in your back pants pocket is so uncomfortable it's simply stupid. And just try to sit down with the iPod there!
I actually agree wholeheartedly with almost everything you said, except one thing: You are not limited to iTunes and iPod. On the portable player's arena, you are right (unless you use something like hymn of fairtunes to strip the DRM). But you can actually use several other jukebox programs to play the DRMed AACs, as long as they use QuickTime to decode the file.
Anyway, I agree buying the CD (or the LP) gets you things that you won't get from iTunes. I haven't and won't buy albums from an online store for those reasons. But I do buy individual songs because that way I can spend $12 and get exactly the 12 songs that I want in my "album", instead of buying four real albums to get the same 12 songs plus dozens of others that I really don't care about.
That feature works also with 3rd generation (last year's) iPods, not only with the "new" (4rth gen/click wheel) ones. I'm not sure about previous ones, though.
For the love of God, I have no idea of what you're talking about. The Finder handles multiple tasks perfectly well, I just tested it. Regarding the Safari bookmarks "problem", I guess you mean that it takes a long time to open, but that hasn't been my experience.
Three years ago I was the main administrator of an NT 4.0 server that ran a critical database for the company I used to work for. It only crashed once, badly, and it was due to a hardware failure. But one of the policies was NEVER to run more than one critical app (a database, webserver, mail server) on an NT or 2000 server, and the servers were basically never touched in fear of them crashing. That was extremely stressing, frankly speaking. Given my (admittedly limited) experience with MacOS X and other Unix-like systems, I would never again run something critical on an NT-based box. And if forced to, I would probably go for a Win 2003 server, NOT for NT.
Wait a minute: first, Fink doesn't have replacement packages for cp, rm , ls, nor df. None of them get replaced even "effectively".
Now, suppose that they post an improved version of, say, ls. If you choose to install their version, then of course you want it to "effectively" replace the system's version. I mean, you should know what you are installing and why (unless you are rather clueless, in which case you probably don't want to mess with Fink/OpenDarwin/etc).
Allegedly, it would be better if they appended
I realized that's what they mean when I was RTFA.
;)
I confess that for a moment I thought they had come up with recordings of over 33 hours of boring meetings of top executives...
Hey, I'm not a native speaker, cut me some slack...
Yes, judging from the web page, the pictures appear to be in DICOM format. If so, I highly recommend OsiriX, an extremely cool, free, open source (GPL), DICOM viewer and PACS workstation/server that happens to be Mac only.
There are other programs that will open DICOM files, like the NIH's ImageJ. There are other cool, free medical image viewers for Mac and other systems (MRIcro comes to mind). And there are professional tools that spank OsiriX's ass, but cost over $70,000. But I have seen nothing for a reasonable price that is as good and as easy to use as OsiriX. Make sure you give it a look!
You make very good points and I agree that it's absurd to ignore the other machines, some of which advantage System X in more than raw power.
But going directly to your question: Why the concentration on a Single Power970 machine ?
A possible explanation: It is the first machine of the list that is made up of individual servers that some people would actually have in their small company. And its previous encarnation was made of workstations identical to the ones that several people have on their desks. You can't help but get some emotional attachment to the VT cluster.
I know it sounds silly to you and that it's not a technical justification. But certainly the other machines look more impersonal and distant to the average user (specially the Mac users). I can understand that, and I don't even have a G5.
... but some people (myself included) turned them on by moving them from the Calculator.app/Contents/Resources folder to the Calculator.app/Contents/PlugIns folder.
It was easier to select "Get info" for the Calculator icon, and set all the checkboxes in the Plug-ins section.
I'm sorry to learn that the special views got broken. Some of them are rather useful.
Are you kidding? I would LOVE to be his psychiatrist!! Think of all those years of expensive therapy!
If two thirds people of the continent in which the former Federal Republic of Germany was located called their continent Germany I would certainly find a different name for the West Germans.
(Although in this case not even Germans call their country Germany, but that's off-topic.)
Wow, those entries in Wikipedia have really improved, kudos to the authors.
I would add that "Columbus discovered America" but neither Columbus nor Amerigo (Americo) Vespucci were ever in North America. If some place in "The Americas" should keep the name to itself it's certainly not the USA.
You mean FARC and ELN, not M19. M19 was a guerilla group that was reinstated to civil life in the very late 80's. Now they are a rather important political party.
Also, another important part of the drug production is in hands of the so-named "paramilitar" groups (or "autodefensas"). They claim to have been formed to fight against the guerrillas due to the incapacity of the state to do so, but in practice many of those groups were actually protecting the original drug lords. A big chunk of them is dialoguing with the current government to leave the war (and the drug-related businesses), but as you said the business will certainly be inherited by other groups.
Oh, and the country is Colombia, not Columbia.
I think that the grandparent post implied that he used his Mac as much as he could (including gaming where possible), but preferred the console for games that existed for it.
I'm not really into computer games at all, but I did notice that you mentioned five games: NeverWinter Nights exists for Mac. Age Of Mythology also. NeverWinter Nights 2 and Dragon Age don't even exist for PCs yet, but since they are from the same house as NWN it's feasible that they will get to the Mac (eventually). EVE... I don't know what that is.
My point is that he can run most of what you call "REAL" games on his Mac, and the rest on his console, so both his and your gaming needs seem to be covered.
Just my 2 cents. I don't know why I'm even reading this thread, as I stopped playing computer games early in college.
Yes! I agree with you 100% and I apologize for my mistake. I used the wrong word because the grandparent post talked about "BSD devils", but I should have corrected that detail.
Now all those daemons are going to torment me with their tridents for eternity, specially Hexley (who is actually a platypus, but whatever).
Yes, but if you RTFA you'll find that the old logo had four devils:
http://www.netbsd.org/images/NetBSD-old.jpg
Should $1800 really be the cost of entry for a dual-head capable laptop in 2004?
Apart from the hacks for the iBooks that everyone and their mother mentioned, allow me to nitpick by saying that the 12" Powerbook starts at $1600, not $1800.
You read incorrectly. What they mean is import to the iTunes library. The import procedure involves registering the songs in the iTunes database and either copying the MP3 file to the iTunes Music Folder or referencing the original file (depending on whether you want iTunes to keep a neatly organized structure for your files or you would rather use your own weird structure). No format conversion is made.
The iPod has it's own database with the metadata of the files, just as iTunes does. Part of the information for these databases is retrieved from the ID3 tags of the files that have them (for music from CDs you rip with iTunes you can get that info automatically from CDDB), and part is not there (like your rating, the time the song was last played, the play count).
I guess having a centralized storage for this information allows an easier implementation of a consistent user experience (something you can get on the cheaper devices only if you are very disciplined in your bookkeeping, something most users aren't). So the "special software" is not really a big deal, and that's why it was successfully reverse engineered in Linux clients. On the other hand, the user experience given by this "special software" (iTunes) in combination with the iPod is so good that once you use it you won't want to go back to the hassle of the cheaper devices.
And OGG support is not impossible. It's only that Apple isn't interested in developing the decoder (why would they be? to satisfy a few hundred geeks who won't touch MP3s or AACs?) and third parties have been unsuccessful at developing an efficient one (maybe due to lack of know-how).
I guess I agree about the FM tuner. And I can't argue with your lack of money, as I bought mine only because I got a $200 rebate.
Hummm.... Where did you get the weird idea that the iPod doesn't play MP3 files natively? Of course it does! In fact, when the first gen iPods came out, Apple didn't even support AAC.
Regarding the Linux support, there are hacks that allow you to use and iPod on Linux. Of course they are quite a nuisance (specially compared to Apple's software on MacOS and Windows), but it will work.
It seems to me that you don't buy an iPod because you don't care enough to research your options.
No, no. "Third world" and "developing world" are the same thing. Apparently it was politically incorrect to refer to a country as "third-world" or as "underdeveloped", so they invented the "developing" designation..
In fact, the "second world" refers to the nations within the former USSR's sphere of influence. It does not refer to "nations that are more developed than third world neations and less than first world ones". (Of course all these definitions are flaky anyway).
But I'm very grateful, because I have learned a lot thanks to your post. You see, I don't really have a lot of free time, but at least I try to use it constructively. Today, I'm learning about HTML formatting of Slashdot posts, following yours as an example.
In particular, today I:
- Learned how to write text in italics with bullets.
- I already knew how to do similar things, but this gives a much cleaner output.
But that's not all! And a final lesson: This lines are all indented. I'm using DD instead of BLOCKQUOTE (that's what I normally use, and that's what's used in the monospaced lines). Apparently DD doesn't automatically insert the vertically space that I hated in BLOCKQUOTE.Now, laugh all you want at my ignorance of HTML, but we all have to learn each thing some day. Kudos to you if you mastered it years ago.
Well, not stating those two letters certainly threw me off... ;)
But now I see your point.
On the other hand, as a very poor international student who decided to make a huge investment in a PowerBook after using mainly PCs for more than five years (and some Unix Workstations but no Macs at all), I must say that yes, he should specify that he needs an OS that runs on his current computer.
By the way, the PB was the best buying decision I have made in my life.