It's useful in that objects can use it to climb up and out of the Earth's atmosphere and into orbit, thus saving in the exorbitant costs, financial and environmental, in using rockets. From orbit after escaping Earth's gravity, it's a much easier prospect to jet off to the moon. Although there's use in just sticking things in orbit, as well.
It's inner-ear monitors, AKA ear-canal-phones, AKA earplug headphones that completely isolate the music from external noise - with the major benefit being that you don't have to turn up the volume as high to drown out that extraneous noise. I never have to turn up my Ultimate Ears IEMs much further than 50% before I feel its deafening.
Both can cause hearing loss - as can regular supra aural and circumaural headphones - if the volume is too loud. The lesson is the same - lots of decibels = hearing loss, and it's stupid not to know this. I think it would be an ugly precedent if this guy won this suit.
Can you deal without blue? Because that's the problem color right now... Red OLEDs reach 500,000 hours at decent brightness (not suitable for monitor brightness, but probably good enough for a keyboard). And I seriously doubt the average-sized key could provide enough information to warrant the need for more than monochrome (although, my laptop keyboard uses two colors to distinguish between a key's normal function and its "Fn" function).
Personally, I'm too much a touch typer to care about looking at my keys; the most I would want are backlit keys like on Apple Powerbooks so I could glance down to orient my fingers properly. I get information overload as it is on my main monitor... Having three, ten, or one-hundred-whatever other little screens spouting information would literally be a nightmare for me!:)
You can still install software to decode video. It's similar to how video cards have a chip for MPEG-2 decoding, but users can install software MPEG-4 codecs to decode (and encode for that matter) XviD, H.264, and the like. It's dependent on the CPU power - which is worth wondering about on the Nano.
Unless the RAM's gotten cheaper of late, don't buy Apple's RAM for the Mac Mini, either. I got a stick of Rosewill 512MB from Newegg.com for a good $20 or so less than Apple's (and I got to keep the 256MB that it came with), and it's been running perfectly fine since last February when I bought it.
Before I got the Etymotics I linked above, I used a pair of Sony EX-71SL's (I love this store...and it's right down the street from my work!). The isolation was maybe only slightly looser than the ER-6's aforelinked - but the Sony's are more comfortable. A subjective thing for sure - but it's a subjective thing that is the main reason for the $70 price difference: sound quality. They block almost exactly as well as the ER-6's, but the ER-6's are (to my ears) far more neutral and accurate in sound.
If you want to go really cheap, I found the Koss "The Plug" canalphones to be decent. But not very comfortable. And sound quality was a high priority of mine, so they quickly fell to the wayside next to the Sonys and Etymotics.
Firefox 1.5 as previously noted by default associates WMF files with Windows Media Player, which is functionally wrong but fortunately prevents WMFs from just opening straight out (you'd have to save it locally, and then open it manually from Explorer).
I just tried renaming a WMF file I had created as a JPG and loading it in Firefox 1.5, and nothing was rendered; it just showed the file's location on my local hard drive.
I then created a small HTML file with an img tag that tries to load the renamed WMF file. I get a broken graphic pic.
Finally, renaming the file back to WMF, and readjusting the img tag to load the WMF resulted similarly in a broken graphic.
So from these minor tests, I'd say FF 1.5 is pretty safe. Unless there's a method of loading a WMF that I'm ignoring.
I sort of go along that vein, using a distant cousin of the ear bud: in-ear monitors. These actually seal up the ear canal relatively completely, isolating the music from outside noise far better than ear buds (think ear plugs and headphones combined). And I never feel the need to turn my music's volume further than halfway.
So I don't suffer from over-loudness, but of course one consequence of this is that I am pretty much deaf to anything outside the headphones, so I can't hear people talking to me like you can. But IEMs or other similar noise-isolating/cancelling headphones are nigh necessity on the NYC subway, as far as I'm concerned. There's probably far more people suffering hearing loss on the subway here than anywhere else, as they crank to 11 to kill off the scream of the trains.
Still early in development, and I don't know how excited big phone companies would be to use OSS
(especially if using an Microsoft OS), but Mozilla has Minimo coming down the pipe. The existing preview builds already work in many Windows Mobile devices.
The proof of concept doesn't crash Firefox 1.5 on either my Ubuntu Linux laptop nor my Windows XP SP2 desktop. After running it, though, it immediately screws up the window title that appears in the taskbar; in Ubuntu, it's stuck on AAAAAAAA... no matter what page I'm viewing. And in Windows, the title is simply blank. But the browsers continue to run seemingly unaffected otherwise.
However, after closing, opening up again is extremely slow. A couple of times in Ubuntu it apparently took so long to load that a window popped up saying the program stopped responding and suggested I force quit it. In Windows, despite taking a long time, it always managed to open successfully. And once the browser opened, in either OS, it ran perfectly fine.
So based on the proof of concept, at least on my machines, it's a big annoyance at worst. Annoying enough to get me to delete my history.dat's, at least.
You mean something like this? I've used it a couple of times on my PocketPC and it was useful.
NYC MTA also has Trips123.com, which although ugly works well enough. And it has the added advantage of keeping up to snuff on transit disruptions and changes (which are a dozen a day lately, it seems like).
SilverSpurG: It was in New York - a suburb just north of the Bronx. I don't know how far it got, though... I think it was just proposed.
And I agree with both you and BrokenHalo... Either users need far more education, hardware manufacturers need to ship with more secure settings at default, or the local gov needs to force it into attention.
Wifi definitely exploded into a mainstream that isn't prepared to deploy it responsibly. For instance, a coffee shop near where I live in Brooklyn touts their free wifi, but has left the admin login into their Linksys at default. I could have had custom firmware on there doing all kinds of assorted badness. And the place is constantly crowded with folks and their laptops.
People don't know to care about security, and the manufacturers aren't really helping.
Ars Technica theorizes that Real's ultimate goal is mobile penetration. And honestly, I see no other route for them. One of the other reasons I like Rhapsody is that I can play it back wherever I have the client installed, which is awfully convenient - but with the upside that I'm not centralizing the music on a relatively easy to lose portable. And sadly enough, I have lost enough portables in the past that this is a big benefit to me.
I think a portable device eschewing all those relatively big and costly hard and flash drives in favor of, say, higher quality audio equipment and a wifi antenna for feeding into Rhapsody would be the ultimate.
Although in the meantime, I'd greatly appreciate Linux support! Is this web-based, platform-neutral addition rolled out already? I checked out Real's site, and saw that they seemed to have the components for it in place, but I was automatically shot down for my "browser and operating system combination," which is currently Firefox 1.5 and Ubuntu Linux. Ah well... I'll always have my usual strategy, which is dubbing the music streams analog to Vorbis files.
Agreed on just about all your points. My style of listening has me exploring a lot of unknowns, and reaching those previously obscure corners is really easy with Rhapsody.
Actually, it was through Audiogalaxy that I learnt of Rhapsody. I also used to use that website exclusively for my music, and when it stopped running as it did, it converted to Rhapsody. So now I use "Audiogalaxy Rhapsody" (which I think by all intents and purposes is the same as any other Rhapsody).
1920x1080 res at 60% quality at only slightly more than real time on the dual G5? I dig that. Gonna' have to check that out...I'm on the g/f's G5 now. =D
Although a friend of mine who works for broadcaster-codec developer Main Concept told me that they've recently developed a 1920x1080 codec for Pentium 4 machines that encodes two passes at real time. Two-pass encodes are usually VBR, as opposed to a CBR encode that is usually used for percentage-based quality, and would generally take twice as long to perform. To do two passes with h.264 at real time for 1920x1080 is impressive indeed, since I did 2-pass encodes using x264 for DVD resolution (~720x480) at a bit under half real time (1-pass encodes, of course, were more or less at real-time - depending mostly on which deblocking options I picked) on my Athlon 64 machine. Although that was months ago when most AVCs were fairly early on in their lifetimes.
By the way, I'm impressed that you manage to deal with 60gb with OS X also installed for your PVR. I'm doing standard res TV, and the 80gb in my MythTV box is awful slim! I made heavy use of it for today's (American) football games. Although, there are 7200 RPM drives all the way up to 100gb (I'm using a 60gb Hitachi in my laptop, myself). I guess you switched it out a while ago before they got to that size?
They're really expensive in 2.5", though, and I'd rather just spend the dough on 3.5"ers for my file server.
Maybe not, but the 512MB I was using in it is equal to that of what I'm now using in my MythTV box. And I also was using a 1.42GHz Mini that I ordered the day they came out.
The hard drive limitation is worth noting, as well. We're you doing real-time compression? The biggest 2.5" hard drive is actually 120GB - bigger than I had thought, but still restrictive for any big TV watchers for whom live TV is a thing of the past and all shows are only worth watching on demand. And of course no Mac Mini has that big of a hard drive installed. You can (as I did) hook into a file server - and if you want you can even set your file server to automatically compress the video for archiving. Probably a bit more technical than most consumers care to get.
Or you can simply hook in external drives, or even replace the internal drive yourself. But now we're getting rather expensive for a cheap-end Mac. And face it... I'm a do-it-myselfer, and a cheap one at that, so I went the MythTV route.
Today's Minis are nice machines for sure considering the tiny case that they're in. They just aren't very practical or affordable for someone like me. I am excited about the move from G4 to Intel, though.
The fact that my girlfriend got a dual 2GHz G5 (it's in our bedroom) as a bonus from her work made it easier for me to say goodbye, too. So we may be joining you in the G5-based PVR bandwagon soon. =D
I wouldn't even dream of using one of today's Minis as an HDTV PVR. I got so frustrated with mine that I sold it.
Not to mention that unless the Mini does real-time compression it'd probably run out of disk space real fast with its 2.5" drives that currently max out at 100GB - at least, for anybody who records a lot (at 8GB/hr. for uncompressed - that is MPEG-2 - 1080i, that's at most 12 hours of recording time before something needs to be compressed, and MPEG-4 compression on today's Mac Minis is, IMHO, HORRENDOUS - it took mine 16 hours to compress MPEG-2 to H.264 MPEG-4 for a 2 hour movie - and that was at DVD res, not 1080i).
But who knows... Maybe Intel will make this bottom-rung Mac more powerful than some of the top PowerMacs out now. And I'm speculating like the rest anyway, so I hope you had your salt shakers with you while you read this comment.;)
I second the Google Talk compliments. But it's Windows-only, of course. Maybe Gaim's main dev, Sean Egan, will borrow from some of the experience he had working at Google on Google Talk, and incorporate some of that into the direction Gaim takes. I for one am certainly looking forward to Gaim 2.0.
I'll have to go back to OS X for a while on my g/f's G5... Been a good many months since I've used it, but I don't recall too significant a difference between Adium and Gaim for general chatting in terms of ease of use. But, being a graphic designer, I believe that Adium's visuals are a big part of its pleasurable experience.
True enough... I've been using Adium in Tiger for about as long as I've used Gaim in Ubuntu Linux, and the interface comparisons are practically nonexistent - Adium is a diamond next to Gaim's rough visual edges. But most of the Adium interface benefits from the accelerated Aqua GUI, IMO. Adium has really nice little transitions, and chat window stylings, but when you get right down to it, the two functionally are nearly identical. If Linux and Windows had the same level of hardware accelerated GUI as Adium, then Gaim would probably level out, visually.
Although with the right skin in Gnome, I've been amply satisfied with the look of Gaim in Linux compared to Adium in OS X. And in terms of what the subject of this particular post is, what makes a good client is convenient functionality - to which aesthetic plays only a fractional, though important, part. And chatting it up with my AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, and Google Talk buddies all at once is as intuitively easy in Adium as it is in Gaim - both excellent clients, for eye candy and usability addicts alike.
Still, I've been in Linux lately a lot more than OS X, and I've grown especially fond of certain Gaim functions like automatic chat logging (easily searchable through an intuitive backend) and Gaim Encryption. I'm not sure how Adium compares on those fronts; though I'd assume they're similar on all aspects outside of pure visual.
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It's useful in that objects can use it to climb up and out of the Earth's atmosphere and into orbit, thus saving in the exorbitant costs, financial and environmental, in using rockets. From orbit after escaping Earth's gravity, it's a much easier prospect to jet off to the moon. Although there's use in just sticking things in orbit, as well.
You're wrong, earbuds DO allow quite a bit of noise in. In fact, a recent study claimed the exact opposite to what you said - that earbuds are LESS efficient at closing outside noise than padded supra-aural/circumaural headphones, and therefore kids are turning them up higher than regular headphones to compensate.
It's inner-ear monitors, AKA ear-canal-phones, AKA earplug headphones that completely isolate the music from external noise - with the major benefit being that you don't have to turn up the volume as high to drown out that extraneous noise. I never have to turn up my Ultimate Ears IEMs much further than 50% before I feel its deafening.
Both can cause hearing loss - as can regular supra aural and circumaural headphones - if the volume is too loud. The lesson is the same - lots of decibels = hearing loss, and it's stupid not to know this. I think it would be an ugly precedent if this guy won this suit.
Can you deal without blue? Because that's the problem color right now... Red OLEDs reach 500,000 hours at decent brightness (not suitable for monitor brightness, but probably good enough for a keyboard). And I seriously doubt the average-sized key could provide enough information to warrant the need for more than monochrome (although, my laptop keyboard uses two colors to distinguish between a key's normal function and its "Fn" function).
Personally, I'm too much a touch typer to care about looking at my keys; the most I would want are backlit keys like on Apple Powerbooks so I could glance down to orient my fingers properly. I get information overload as it is on my main monitor... Having three, ten, or one-hundred-whatever other little screens spouting information would literally be a nightmare for me! :)
I would, too...but not because I'm a music junkie. Just because I like to save my ripped music as 32-bit PCM wave files. ;)
Can you consider the multidirectional rolling action of the ball collectively as a button as well? Then it's 5.
You can still install software to decode video. It's similar to how video cards have a chip for MPEG-2 decoding, but users can install software MPEG-4 codecs to decode (and encode for that matter) XviD, H.264, and the like. It's dependent on the CPU power - which is worth wondering about on the Nano.
Unless the RAM's gotten cheaper of late, don't buy Apple's RAM for the Mac Mini, either. I got a stick of Rosewill 512MB from Newegg.com for a good $20 or so less than Apple's (and I got to keep the 256MB that it came with), and it's been running perfectly fine since last February when I bought it.
Before I got the Etymotics I linked above, I used a pair of Sony EX-71SL's (I love this store...and it's right down the street from my work!). The isolation was maybe only slightly looser than the ER-6's aforelinked - but the Sony's are more comfortable. A subjective thing for sure - but it's a subjective thing that is the main reason for the $70 price difference: sound quality. They block almost exactly as well as the ER-6's, but the ER-6's are (to my ears) far more neutral and accurate in sound.
If you want to go really cheap, I found the Koss "The Plug" canalphones to be decent. But not very comfortable. And sound quality was a high priority of mine, so they quickly fell to the wayside next to the Sonys and Etymotics.
Firefox 1.5 as previously noted by default associates WMF files with Windows Media Player, which is functionally wrong but fortunately prevents WMFs from just opening straight out (you'd have to save it locally, and then open it manually from Explorer).
I just tried renaming a WMF file I had created as a JPG and loading it in Firefox 1.5, and nothing was rendered; it just showed the file's location on my local hard drive.
I then created a small HTML file with an img tag that tries to load the renamed WMF file. I get a broken graphic pic.
Finally, renaming the file back to WMF, and readjusting the img tag to load the WMF resulted similarly in a broken graphic.
So from these minor tests, I'd say FF 1.5 is pretty safe. Unless there's a method of loading a WMF that I'm ignoring.
I sort of go along that vein, using a distant cousin of the ear bud: in-ear monitors. These actually seal up the ear canal relatively completely, isolating the music from outside noise far better than ear buds (think ear plugs and headphones combined). And I never feel the need to turn my music's volume further than halfway.
So I don't suffer from over-loudness, but of course one consequence of this is that I am pretty much deaf to anything outside the headphones, so I can't hear people talking to me like you can. But IEMs or other similar noise-isolating/cancelling headphones are nigh necessity on the NYC subway, as far as I'm concerned. There's probably far more people suffering hearing loss on the subway here than anywhere else, as they crank to 11 to kill off the scream of the trains.
Still early in development, and I don't know how excited big phone companies would be to use OSS (especially if using an Microsoft OS), but Mozilla has Minimo coming down the pipe. The existing preview builds already work in many Windows Mobile devices.
Sadly, my PDA isn't one of them.
I use too many extensions to switch completely.
But the Opera 9 preview has some damn impressive SVG implementation.
Anyway, the more open source standards forward browsers, the better, right? So I'd also hope they'd open source it.
The proof of concept doesn't crash Firefox 1.5 on either my Ubuntu Linux laptop nor my Windows XP SP2 desktop. After running it, though, it immediately screws up the window title that appears in the taskbar; in Ubuntu, it's stuck on AAAAAAAA... no matter what page I'm viewing. And in Windows, the title is simply blank. But the browsers continue to run seemingly unaffected otherwise.
However, after closing, opening up again is extremely slow. A couple of times in Ubuntu it apparently took so long to load that a window popped up saying the program stopped responding and suggested I force quit it. In Windows, despite taking a long time, it always managed to open successfully. And once the browser opened, in either OS, it ran perfectly fine.
So based on the proof of concept, at least on my machines, it's a big annoyance at worst. Annoying enough to get me to delete my history.dat's, at least.
You mean something like this? I've used it a couple of times on my PocketPC and it was useful.
NYC MTA also has Trips123.com, which although ugly works well enough. And it has the added advantage of keeping up to snuff on transit disruptions and changes (which are a dozen a day lately, it seems like).
SilverSpurG: It was in New York - a suburb just north of the Bronx. I don't know how far it got, though... I think it was just proposed.
And I agree with both you and BrokenHalo... Either users need far more education, hardware manufacturers need to ship with more secure settings at default, or the local gov needs to force it into attention.
Wifi definitely exploded into a mainstream that isn't prepared to deploy it responsibly. For instance, a coffee shop near where I live in Brooklyn touts their free wifi, but has left the admin login into their Linksys at default. I could have had custom firmware on there doing all kinds of assorted badness. And the place is constantly crowded with folks and their laptops.
People don't know to care about security, and the manufacturers aren't really helping.
Ars Technica theorizes that Real's ultimate goal is mobile penetration. And honestly, I see no other route for them. One of the other reasons I like Rhapsody is that I can play it back wherever I have the client installed, which is awfully convenient - but with the upside that I'm not centralizing the music on a relatively easy to lose portable. And sadly enough, I have lost enough portables in the past that this is a big benefit to me.
I think a portable device eschewing all those relatively big and costly hard and flash drives in favor of, say, higher quality audio equipment and a wifi antenna for feeding into Rhapsody would be the ultimate.
Although in the meantime, I'd greatly appreciate Linux support! Is this web-based, platform-neutral addition rolled out already? I checked out Real's site, and saw that they seemed to have the components for it in place, but I was automatically shot down for my "browser and operating system combination," which is currently Firefox 1.5 and Ubuntu Linux. Ah well... I'll always have my usual strategy, which is dubbing the music streams analog to Vorbis files.
Agreed on just about all your points. My style of listening has me exploring a lot of unknowns, and reaching those previously obscure corners is really easy with Rhapsody. Actually, it was through Audiogalaxy that I learnt of Rhapsody. I also used to use that website exclusively for my music, and when it stopped running as it did, it converted to Rhapsody. So now I use "Audiogalaxy Rhapsody" (which I think by all intents and purposes is the same as any other Rhapsody).
1920x1080 res at 60% quality at only slightly more than real time on the dual G5? I dig that. Gonna' have to check that out...I'm on the g/f's G5 now. =D
Although a friend of mine who works for broadcaster-codec developer Main Concept told me that they've recently developed a 1920x1080 codec for Pentium 4 machines that encodes two passes at real time. Two-pass encodes are usually VBR, as opposed to a CBR encode that is usually used for percentage-based quality, and would generally take twice as long to perform. To do two passes with h.264 at real time for 1920x1080 is impressive indeed, since I did 2-pass encodes using x264 for DVD resolution (~720x480) at a bit under half real time (1-pass encodes, of course, were more or less at real-time - depending mostly on which deblocking options I picked) on my Athlon 64 machine. Although that was months ago when most AVCs were fairly early on in their lifetimes.
By the way, I'm impressed that you manage to deal with 60gb with OS X also installed for your PVR. I'm doing standard res TV, and the 80gb in my MythTV box is awful slim! I made heavy use of it for today's (American) football games. Although, there are 7200 RPM drives all the way up to 100gb (I'm using a 60gb Hitachi in my laptop, myself). I guess you switched it out a while ago before they got to that size?
They're really expensive in 2.5", though, and I'd rather just spend the dough on 3.5"ers for my file server.
Maybe not, but the 512MB I was using in it is equal to that of what I'm now using in my MythTV box. And I also was using a 1.42GHz Mini that I ordered the day they came out.
The hard drive limitation is worth noting, as well. We're you doing real-time compression? The biggest 2.5" hard drive is actually 120GB - bigger than I had thought, but still restrictive for any big TV watchers for whom live TV is a thing of the past and all shows are only worth watching on demand. And of course no Mac Mini has that big of a hard drive installed. You can (as I did) hook into a file server - and if you want you can even set your file server to automatically compress the video for archiving. Probably a bit more technical than most consumers care to get.
Or you can simply hook in external drives, or even replace the internal drive yourself. But now we're getting rather expensive for a cheap-end Mac. And face it... I'm a do-it-myselfer, and a cheap one at that, so I went the MythTV route.
Today's Minis are nice machines for sure considering the tiny case that they're in. They just aren't very practical or affordable for someone like me. I am excited about the move from G4 to Intel, though.
The fact that my girlfriend got a dual 2GHz G5 (it's in our bedroom) as a bonus from her work made it easier for me to say goodbye, too. So we may be joining you in the G5-based PVR bandwagon soon. =D
Hopefully Intel will give the Mini a real good boost, then - or some magic has to be done with the tuner, because the current solution for an Apple-based PVR timeshifting 1080i HDTV requires no less than a dual G5 (click requirements on right side).
I wouldn't even dream of using one of today's Minis as an HDTV PVR. I got so frustrated with mine that I sold it.
Not to mention that unless the Mini does real-time compression it'd probably run out of disk space real fast with its 2.5" drives that currently max out at 100GB - at least, for anybody who records a lot (at 8GB/hr. for uncompressed - that is MPEG-2 - 1080i, that's at most 12 hours of recording time before something needs to be compressed, and MPEG-4 compression on today's Mac Minis is, IMHO, HORRENDOUS - it took mine 16 hours to compress MPEG-2 to H.264 MPEG-4 for a 2 hour movie - and that was at DVD res, not 1080i).
But who knows... Maybe Intel will make this bottom-rung Mac more powerful than some of the top PowerMacs out now. And I'm speculating like the rest anyway, so I hope you had your salt shakers with you while you read this comment. ;)
OK, I officially mediawiki too much. Please allow me to rephrase:
Then I swapped it for an 2915ABG, which is natively supported in Linux just fine.
Depends on what wifi card you're talking about. My Acer Aspire used to have a Broadcom chip controlling the wifi, for which my only solution was Ndiswrapper (which incidentally worked pretty well, so long as routers weren't encrypted using anything other than WEP). Then I swapped it for an [http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8 2E16833106219&ATT=Network+Wireless+Ada&CMP=OTC-yah 00TT Intel 2915ABG], which is [http://support.intel.com/support/notebook/sb/CS-0 06408.htm natively supported in Linux just fine].
I second the Google Talk compliments. But it's Windows-only, of course. Maybe Gaim's main dev, Sean Egan, will borrow from some of the experience he had working at Google on Google Talk, and incorporate some of that into the direction Gaim takes. I for one am certainly looking forward to Gaim 2.0.
I'll have to go back to OS X for a while on my g/f's G5... Been a good many months since I've used it, but I don't recall too significant a difference between Adium and Gaim for general chatting in terms of ease of use. But, being a graphic designer, I believe that Adium's visuals are a big part of its pleasurable experience.
True enough... I've been using Adium in Tiger for about as long as I've used Gaim in Ubuntu Linux, and the interface comparisons are practically nonexistent - Adium is a diamond next to Gaim's rough visual edges. But most of the Adium interface benefits from the accelerated Aqua GUI, IMO. Adium has really nice little transitions, and chat window stylings, but when you get right down to it, the two functionally are nearly identical. If Linux and Windows had the same level of hardware accelerated GUI as Adium, then Gaim would probably level out, visually.
Although with the right skin in Gnome, I've been amply satisfied with the look of Gaim in Linux compared to Adium in OS X. And in terms of what the subject of this particular post is, what makes a good client is convenient functionality - to which aesthetic plays only a fractional, though important, part. And chatting it up with my AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, and Google Talk buddies all at once is as intuitively easy in Adium as it is in Gaim - both excellent clients, for eye candy and usability addicts alike.
Still, I've been in Linux lately a lot more than OS X, and I've grown especially fond of certain Gaim functions like automatic chat logging (easily searchable through an intuitive backend) and Gaim Encryption. I'm not sure how Adium compares on those fronts; though I'd assume they're similar on all aspects outside of pure visual.