Dual G4/867. I've not tried Camino on my old iMac G3/400, but 10.4.5/Safari works just great on there.
It's true that Safari did get a lot faster in more recent versions, but I think the biggest speed improvements did also appear in 1.3. For rough timings, the digg.com home page loads in about 2 sec for me in Safari, vs about 6 in Camino.
You should try the Schubert IT PDF plugin on 10.3. The built-in version in 10.4/2.0 is the same as in preview anyway, though I do use the Adobe one for slightly better compatibility. Either way, it's trivial to configure PDFs to load in an external helper.
I've not tried Camino for a while, so I thought I'd give this 1.0 release a spin. The uncluttered interface is nice, but speed-wise it's pretty poor. For example, the digg.com home page loads way, way slower than in Safari. It also doesn't match Safari in outright rendering quality (something which FF also fails on). I think I'll stick with FF for dev tweakery, and Safari for everyday use.
Well, I don't know about yours, but my iPod Mini DID come with a sticker on saying more or less exactly that.
Someone mentioned removing the EU volume cap; What you need is gopod.
I found that removing it doesn't just affect volume, but also makes it sound better at lower volumes. I suspect the cap is a current limiter, rather than a peak voltage, so it mostly affects bass. With the cap removed, I would definitely describe full volume as 'too loud', whereas with it it's not quite loud enough loud enough if you're on a train or a busy street.
The BBC says "The current version of IE for Macs is effectively three years old, making it an outdated browser compared to its Windows equivalent.".
Um, IE6 was last updated (other than security patches) in August 2001, making it 4.5 years old. Curious assumption that the Windows version was more recent - just shows that MS are far better at marketing than software.
I'm really not that keen on the MySQL online docs - they are nowhere near as good as the PHP docs (especially the user notes), and there's a lot that's undocumented (seems to be much I search for). For example, where can you find out about logging warnings? I'd hope that a definitive guide was quite a bit better than the online docs.
"Intuitive", though very commonly used in this context, is really the wrong word for user interfaces. It's not the interface that's intuitive, it's you - computers can't intuit anything as yet. The real word would be "intuitable", meaning that you, a creature capable of intuition, should find that figuring it out is not difficult. "Intuitive" would mean that it's capable of figuring out what YOU mean - I wish!
No-one seemed to have mentioned that the pass-phrase to decrypt everything in the world in the movie "Sneakers" was "Too Many Secrets". I guess it could have been too obvious.
Motorola releasing a phone that was actually easy or pleasant to use would be a pretty big departure anyway, even without iTunes. Motorola make some nice looking hardware (V3), but they can't seem to make it usable. In general phone OSs suck all round - even Nokia's high-end Symbian phones are really pretty bad - it's like Windows 3.0 all over again. Windows mobile is also hilariously clunky - it reminds me of all those big companies running using shiny new PCs with LCDs and Windows XP to display a text-only GUI for some ancient legacy app. Someone, somewhere is having a good giggle.
I have a Sony Ericsson K750i which is about as nice as phones get at present (its camera is truly excellent for a phone), but despite the fact that it comes with lots of storage and dedicated music controls, it's not actually possible to play your own music on it - it needs appropriate DRM, but there's no content available and they've removed their Windows-only DRM key maker app from their web site. Clever huh?!
My old and entirely fanless iMac DV SE runs Tiger perfectly adequately. The only noise is from the new Seagate Barracuda HD, which isn't the noisiest of drives. My G4 (see http://g4noise.com/ - even with 5HDs - is much quieter than my single-drive HP PC which is just unbearably loud.
Well, it seems the EU's lawmakers are not all corporate slaves - the dramatic rejection of the recent patents bill by 648:14 is a nice indicator that they do do some things right. I'd say there is hope for them doing copyright stuff at least vaguely right - after all, the current mess would not be hard to improve upon.
Perhaps, but the 2005 edition still says the same thing, so that's no excuse now. The book is missing any mention or concept of semantic markup, and almost every other paragraph is some kind of apology or excuse for IE's lameness. This is a book which fails to mention XHTML other than that it exists and then only reprimands it for case-sensitivity. Learning CSS without semantic markup is just a waste of time, negating most of the things that make CSS so cool, and therefore, I have to opine that this book is a complete waste of trees. Anyone reading it in the hope of learning CSS will be worse off than not reading it at all as it seems to set out to deliberately teach you every bad habit going.
IE is the albatross around the neck of the web, pulling everyone down to its level. Hard to believe that IE 6 has not had a single feature or bugfix upgrade (plenty of security patches though) for 4 years (Spot the monopoly?). IE is perfectly entitled to have proprietary features, it's just entirely unnecessary for MS to have implemented them in a non-standard way (i.e. outside of CSS extensions, gotta love that ActiveX) so that they break in other browsers. Someone should tell MS to grow up and not pee in the pool (the MS IE7 blogs comments are quite hilarious). As if it wasn't bad enough living with what MS did wrong deliberately, there's all the bugs too.
I've tried quite a few phones. The key stumbling block at the moment is that iSync's phone support is very out of date - a large number of currently model phones are not supported.
The Nokia 6600 in theory works very well, though in practice the OS/firmware on it is horribly buggy and unreliable (mine has now died completely) - hopefully this will be fixed in later models like the 6630, 6680, 6681 and N70 - none of which are yet supported by iSync. In general, I'm not impressed with Symbian at all, nor by Nokia's UIs for it. Having said that, Sendo's X2 looks pretty cool. My best experiences have been with Sony Ericssons, principally the T610 which has been utterly flawless - SE just seem to do bluetooth right (they did invent it!). SE's K700i has more OS X compatibility features than any other phone that's officially supported, so I'd say that it's probably the best current choice, however, the new K750i has some really compelling features (like the first camera worth having) and it's hackable to work with iSync (I'm awaiting delivery). Recently I've been subject to an exceedingly dumb Windows SPV C500 "SmartPhone" which is quite unbelievably bad. I don't even see how it could work well with Windows. Motorolas typically suffer from incredibly bad UIs, so I'd steer clear from them on that basis.
Here's a little tip for any Windows or Linux user who wants to know what the hell all this talk about OS X's wonderful APIs is all about. Get on a Mac with Tiger that has the developer tools installed and find a program called "Quartz Composer" (now there's a chance to try out spotlight). Play with it for a couple of hours. When you've realised the beauty of the way the whole thing works, ponder the fact that the entire OS is built this way.
While it is true that the G5 is a vastly superior CPU design to the P4, especially at the same clock speed, IBM really dropped the ball on cranking it up and they deserve to lose on this deal. One key thing to bear in mind that doesn't seem to have been mentioned: DEVELOPER machines will be running on P4s. that doesn't mean that Apple will ship P4 machines any more than MS will be shipping Apple G5s in Xbox 360 cases. Not least because P4 has woefully inadequate 64-bit support (something that Tiger has rightly made a big fuss over on the G5). However, the P4 is adequate for development purposes, and by the time that we see actual product, Intel may actually have got their 64-bit house in order. I don't quite buy the Pentium M thing - sure it gives better performance per watt, but it still doesn't get down to G4 levels of power consumption - it's still entirely normal for an iBook to be the last man standing when away from a power outlet. I don't care if it's 20x faster, if it eats the battery in half the time, it's a brick. Fortunately, we have a good year for Intel to sort themselves out - and Apple have rather a good history of getting the pick of the good stuff from their suppliers.
Pretty much all Macs have had target disk mode via SCSI since the PowerBook 100 in 1991. The closest I've got to doing this on Windows is using a live knoppix CD, though that's hardly the same thing.
FWIW, as easy as it is to use, I've found it's quite common to have a PC completely trashed by Windows update, particularly under Win2k. The symptom is that it deletes ALL DLLs in the system folder (first error you see is something fatal like 'ntoskrnl.dll not found'). I've had this happen on about 5 machines now, usually shortly after clean installs. There are also 2 Windows updates (853732 and 840987) that reproducibly trash Virtual PC for me. You'd have thought that MS would be able to make Windows work on the only PC they actually sell... YMMV of course.
There is still a need for this function. I let iTunes manage everything, but I use a shared folder so multiple users can access the same music library. If I add new tracks under one user, the others don't get to see them unless I import them manually. A rescan folder command would fix this. If you simply re-add all the tracks (so you don't have to figure out what you added since last time), it resets all your play counts and ratings. Not good.
it's an interesting mix of SQL and OO interfaces. Version 2.0 (in development) has full SQL 92 support, but you can also treat the DB as a bunch of objects from just about any environment you're likely to encounter. It's intending to support OO things like inheritance, while retaining SQL compatibility. It's also staggeringly fast - I do 5-term ORs on a 2Gb, 20 million record DB in 0.1 sec on a P3/600 with low RAM. http://www.paradigmasoft.com/ I'm just a contented user.
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Please don't post links to sys-con - they probably stole the content.
Dual G4/867. I've not tried Camino on my old iMac G3/400, but 10.4.5/Safari works just great on there. It's true that Safari did get a lot faster in more recent versions, but I think the biggest speed improvements did also appear in 1.3. For rough timings, the digg.com home page loads in about 2 sec for me in Safari, vs about 6 in Camino. You should try the Schubert IT PDF plugin on 10.3. The built-in version in 10.4/2.0 is the same as in preview anyway, though I do use the Adobe one for slightly better compatibility. Either way, it's trivial to configure PDFs to load in an external helper.
I've not tried Camino for a while, so I thought I'd give this 1.0 release a spin. The uncluttered interface is nice, but speed-wise it's pretty poor. For example, the digg.com home page loads way, way slower than in Safari. It also doesn't match Safari in outright rendering quality (something which FF also fails on). I think I'll stick with FF for dev tweakery, and Safari for everyday use.
Well, I don't know about yours, but my iPod Mini DID come with a sticker on saying more or less exactly that.
Someone mentioned removing the EU volume cap; What you need is gopod. I found that removing it doesn't just affect volume, but also makes it sound better at lower volumes. I suspect the cap is a current limiter, rather than a peak voltage, so it mostly affects bass. With the cap removed, I would definitely describe full volume as 'too loud', whereas with it it's not quite loud enough loud enough if you're on a train or a busy street.
The BBC says "The current version of IE for Macs is effectively three years old, making it an outdated browser compared to its Windows equivalent.".
Um, IE6 was last updated (other than security patches) in August 2001, making it 4.5 years old. Curious assumption that the Windows version was more recent - just shows that MS are far better at marketing than software.
I'm really not that keen on the MySQL online docs - they are nowhere near as good as the PHP docs (especially the user notes), and there's a lot that's undocumented (seems to be much I search for). For example, where can you find out about logging warnings? I'd hope that a definitive guide was quite a bit better than the online docs.
"Intuitive", though very commonly used in this context, is really the wrong word for user interfaces. It's not the interface that's intuitive, it's you - computers can't intuit anything as yet. The real word would be "intuitable", meaning that you, a creature capable of intuition, should find that figuring it out is not difficult. "Intuitive" would mean that it's capable of figuring out what YOU mean - I wish!
No-one seemed to have mentioned that the pass-phrase to decrypt everything in the world in the movie "Sneakers" was "Too Many Secrets". I guess it could have been too obvious.
Motorola releasing a phone that was actually easy or pleasant to use would be a pretty big departure anyway, even without iTunes. Motorola make some nice looking hardware (V3), but they can't seem to make it usable. In general phone OSs suck all round - even Nokia's high-end Symbian phones are really pretty bad - it's like Windows 3.0 all over again. Windows mobile is also hilariously clunky - it reminds me of all those big companies running using shiny new PCs with LCDs and Windows XP to display a text-only GUI for some ancient legacy app. Someone, somewhere is having a good giggle.
I have a Sony Ericsson K750i which is about as nice as phones get at present (its camera is truly excellent for a phone), but despite the fact that it comes with lots of storage and dedicated music controls, it's not actually possible to play your own music on it - it needs appropriate DRM, but there's no content available and they've removed their Windows-only DRM key maker app from their web site. Clever huh?!
My old and entirely fanless iMac DV SE runs Tiger perfectly adequately. The only noise is from the new Seagate Barracuda HD, which isn't the noisiest of drives. My G4 (see http://g4noise.com/ - even with 5HDs - is much quieter than my single-drive HP PC which is just unbearably loud.
Well, it seems the EU's lawmakers are not all corporate slaves - the dramatic rejection of the recent patents bill by 648:14 is a nice indicator that they do do some things right. I'd say there is hope for them doing copyright stuff at least vaguely right - after all, the current mess would not be hard to improve upon.
Perhaps, but the 2005 edition still says the same thing, so that's no excuse now. The book is missing any mention or concept of semantic markup, and almost every other paragraph is some kind of apology or excuse for IE's lameness. This is a book which fails to mention XHTML other than that it exists and then only reprimands it for case-sensitivity. Learning CSS without semantic markup is just a waste of time, negating most of the things that make CSS so cool, and therefore, I have to opine that this book is a complete waste of trees. Anyone reading it in the hope of learning CSS will be worse off than not reading it at all as it seems to set out to deliberately teach you every bad habit going.
IE is the albatross around the neck of the web, pulling everyone down to its level. Hard to believe that IE 6 has not had a single feature or bugfix upgrade (plenty of security patches though) for 4 years (Spot the monopoly?). IE is perfectly entitled to have proprietary features, it's just entirely unnecessary for MS to have implemented them in a non-standard way (i.e. outside of CSS extensions, gotta love that ActiveX) so that they break in other browsers. Someone should tell MS to grow up and not pee in the pool (the MS IE7 blogs comments are quite hilarious). As if it wasn't bad enough living with what MS did wrong deliberately, there's all the bugs too.
I've tried quite a few phones. The key stumbling block at the moment is that iSync's phone support is very out of date - a large number of currently model phones are not supported.
The Nokia 6600 in theory works very well, though in practice the OS/firmware on it is horribly buggy and unreliable (mine has now died completely) - hopefully this will be fixed in later models like the 6630, 6680, 6681 and N70 - none of which are yet supported by iSync. In general, I'm not impressed with Symbian at all, nor by Nokia's UIs for it. Having said that, Sendo's X2 looks pretty cool.
My best experiences have been with Sony Ericssons, principally the T610 which has been utterly flawless - SE just seem to do bluetooth right (they did invent it!).
SE's K700i has more OS X compatibility features than any other phone that's officially supported, so I'd say that it's probably the best current choice, however, the new K750i has some really compelling features (like the first camera worth having) and it's hackable to work with iSync (I'm awaiting delivery).
Recently I've been subject to an exceedingly dumb Windows SPV C500 "SmartPhone" which is quite unbelievably bad. I don't even see how it could work well with Windows.
Motorolas typically suffer from incredibly bad UIs, so I'd steer clear from them on that basis.
Here's a little tip for any Windows or Linux user who wants to know what the hell all this talk about OS X's wonderful APIs is all about. Get on a Mac with Tiger that has the developer tools installed and find a program called "Quartz Composer" (now there's a chance to try out spotlight). Play with it for a couple of hours. When you've realised the beauty of the way the whole thing works, ponder the fact that the entire OS is built this way.
While it is true that the G5 is a vastly superior CPU design to the P4, especially at the same clock speed, IBM really dropped the ball on cranking it up and they deserve to lose on this deal.
One key thing to bear in mind that doesn't seem to have been mentioned: DEVELOPER machines will be running on P4s. that doesn't mean that Apple will ship P4 machines any more than MS will be shipping Apple G5s in Xbox 360 cases. Not least because P4 has woefully inadequate 64-bit support (something that Tiger has rightly made a big fuss over on the G5). However, the P4 is adequate for development purposes, and by the time that we see actual product, Intel may actually have got their 64-bit house in order.
I don't quite buy the Pentium M thing - sure it gives better performance per watt, but it still doesn't get down to G4 levels of power consumption - it's still entirely normal for an iBook to be the last man standing when away from a power outlet. I don't care if it's 20x faster, if it eats the battery in half the time, it's a brick.
Fortunately, we have a good year for Intel to sort themselves out - and Apple have rather a good history of getting the pick of the good stuff from their suppliers.
Pretty much all Macs have had target disk mode via SCSI since the PowerBook 100 in 1991. The closest I've got to doing this on Windows is using a live knoppix CD, though that's hardly the same thing.
FWIW, as easy as it is to use, I've found it's quite common to have a PC completely trashed by Windows update, particularly under Win2k. The symptom is that it deletes ALL DLLs in the system folder (first error you see is something fatal like 'ntoskrnl.dll not found'). I've had this happen on about 5 machines now, usually shortly after clean installs. There are also 2 Windows updates (853732 and 840987) that reproducibly trash Virtual PC for me. You'd have thought that MS would be able to make Windows work on the only PC they actually sell... YMMV of course.
There is still a need for this function. I let iTunes manage everything, but I use a shared folder so multiple users can access the same music library. If I add new tracks under one user, the others don't get to see them unless I import them manually. A rescan folder command would fix this. If you simply re-add all the tracks (so you don't have to figure out what you added since last time), it resets all your play counts and ratings. Not good.
it's an interesting mix of SQL and OO interfaces. Version 2.0 (in development) has full SQL 92 support, but you can also treat the DB as a bunch of objects from just about any environment you're likely to encounter. It's intending to support OO things like inheritance, while retaining SQL compatibility.
It's also staggeringly fast - I do 5-term ORs on a 2Gb, 20 million record DB in 0.1 sec on a P3/600 with low RAM. http://www.paradigmasoft.com/ I'm just a contented user.