"moar features" is the philosophy behind most Linux distros, and that's not a bad thing. Having damn near every application written for your OS either on the disc or in the standard repositories is great. Apple is working under the guiding hand of a benevolent dictator who has a Philosophy and a Plan. That's not a bad thing either. Apple's basic strategy is to produce a consistent, unified user experience. Having random programs, however cool, sitting around detracts from the gestalt Apple is aiming for. See the iPhone software store for an example of Apple's controlling ways - a lot of people hate that sort of business. Maybe a widget that searches the various Mac repositories (I miss SunSite) for freeware and open source software and installs just like, say Synaptic, does would be popular.
But that's besides the point. Snow Leopard is about the OS. Kernel stuff like a whole new schedule to make multiple cores transparent to applications, shared library optimization, using the GPU as an extra processor for extra power. All the services needed by application developers. Putting a programmer on "go make something cool" takes a headcount away from the OpenCL team. 10.4 added a lot of APIs developers can use. 10.5 was interface and user experience focused. 10.6 looks to be kernel focused. The current architecture of OS X is more than adequate for general use computing, but has some serious flaws for some high performance tasks. There's horrific overhead in thread spawning for example. Lastly, some of these OS improvements really are end-user cool features. I mentioned the bioinformatics folks earlier. There are hundreds of thousands of OS X machines deployed in scientific roles and other compute-intensive industries. Easy access to every core is way cool to the Xgrid and budget supercomputer crowd. Don't forget that Apple used to sell a cluster-in-a-rack of Xservs specced out as a compute farm in a short, wheeled rack. It had a SKU and was semi-configured to drop into a datacenter and start running calculations.
Apple does not want to compete with its application developers. A consumer computer that can do "everything" out of the box ends up without a healthy ecosystem of commercial developers. Apple does put out some software that competes with existing stuff, look at what Final Cut did to Adobe Premier. This is usually a hardball business move (cf. Adobe Premier) or to prop up otherwise missing categories (office software, workgroup databases, pro audio). There's talk of that around iPhone developer applications, but I think Apple is early enough in the ramp-up stage of the iPhone software thing that they're just screwing some applications up. Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence. They'll get over it. Although anyone who has made an enemy at Apple may be in for a protracted application process.
Just in case, check and see if Entourage is doing IMAP. Probably not, but it's worth looking if you haven't yet. If you are stuck on Entourage, keep your database backed up. That bitch is worse than the fucking registry for all-in-one-basket stupidity. And I'm not just sayin'. ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data. Keep that backed up with a religious fervor. It's not so bad if you can keep everything on the server and just re-sync when it goes bad - not if, when. I had to support that abomination in a POP3 environment. POP3 ! In the 21st Century ! Years of mail add up to gigabytes with attachments. And Entourage just can't handle that, and WILL fail repeatedly.
Rsync it every time Entourage quits or something. Anything.
> Translation: "We've put off any serious work on OS X for eleven months"
Pshaw. Means they're just done screwing with the interface for a while. They have a stable and useful user experience in 10.5.3. It'll get a few tweaks along the line, 10.5.3 changed Spaces considerably. They're also talking about major architectural changes to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of the hardware. You may not care about optimizing for multiple cores or offloading processing to the GPU, but the bioinformatics people who run racks full of Xservs in a compute farm were dancing in the aisles at WWDC.
>most likely will help get Macs into corporate environments
Licensing full Exchange support sure as hell will. The return of VB support in MS Office a year or so after 10.6 comes out will also help enormously. The Active Directory support keeps getting better and better every release too. With, again, more stuff licensed from Microsoft Apple will be able to play in the enterprise.
It's easier to be funny when you have a clue.
I'll give you the bug fixes though. Adding a new hardware platform did disrupt 10.5 and increased their bug rate as Apple tries to manage a common codebase for two very different platforms. Arguably, 10.5.3 represents where Leopard should have been at release, and could have been but for the iPhone. They're late, but catching up.
10.5.3 is full ready for use if you haven't switched yet, Check the remaining issues before committing though, there are (always) some bugs left.
> I wonder if Apple has cracked it with Mobile Me?
If they have, it'll be worth $100 a month. Same bookmarks, same media, similar ability to get stuff done. Email, 20GB web space, multimedia integration AND transparent synchronization for less than $9.00 a month ? It isn't a shell account, but it has its value.
> How many of them offer a pro-rated discount on > your monthly rate for the time that the phone is > not on the network (phone turned off, bad > reception, etc.)?
Wait, what ? You want to get money back for turning off your phone ?
There's a lot of room for improvement in the iPhone camera. never mind the camera itself. I'd love to be able to control shutter speed and exposure. being able to save presets would be awesome.
The iPhone's big win is in showing off your pictures. That huge display makes photos look great. Flicking through photos is a great way to browse. it's also a fantastic viewfinder. A better camera only helps when you get the photos off the camera. It'd be nice though, I love always having a decent camera with me. Out of the pocket, unlock, hit Camera and start aiming.
> i never buy revision A apple hardware. let the fanatics bug test the hardware.
That's really good advice for any tech company, and especially Apple. They have letdowns from their component manufacturers, odd little design quirks, glaringly missing features (copy & paste on the iPhone, I'm looking in your direction) and other annoyances or errors that mar the design and utility of the product. Even with the copy & paste thing, my time with the iPhone has still been vastly superior to my Razr experience. The 2.0 upgrade and 3rd party apps will be like a whole new phone... experience. yeah, I said it. C'mon, drink the fucking kool aide already.
RIM is in serious trouble. Palm is putting out a major new OS release this year, and it had better be Really Good. A $199 iPhone is going to sell like absolute fucking hotcakes. Six million of the 1.0s, double or triple that in the 2.0s this year. The white 16GB model alone will outsell the hottest Blackberry. AT&T or not, everyone with an expiring contract is going to seriously think about it.
Corporate use will skyrocket. The Exchange integration gives you a good handheld email device that doesn't send your data through someone else's infrastructure. This is the sort of thing that makes security or regulatory compliance officers in large corporations all warm and fuzzy inside. Apple is a big SAP customer and SAP is jumping into iPhone development with both feet. That will make a lot of people in the executive suite a lot more comfortable with Apple all of a sudden. Even if their use isn't officially sanctioned, a lot of people will just open Outlook and copy the settings to their phone.
The first year was just the warm up. I'm absolutely terrified because I'm looking in the store at a 16G and at my dwindling free space on my current phone and seriously considering a new one. 3G would make it a business expense though.
Apple has used Framemaker for documentation since time immemorial. There are probably a couple of people with double-digit employee numbers who stashed some of the last machines that ran Framemaker 6.0 and have the pull to keep them up and running. It's not like anyone has produced anything better than that
Those people need to get a Pro version of Pages, Volumes maybe. It'd be a small market, but it'd kick in a few more doors for the sales team.
Exactly.
Well, it's a Unix, so you can secure it properly, so you should secure it. It's nice to see a vendor-approved guide to doing it that accounts for their own quirks (especially critical in the Unix realm). Scanning the NSA guide for Linux might help too, unless they did an OS X version.
And is anyone else waiting for a 4th edition of Essential Unix Systems Administration ?
That's pretty much what I was thinking. And I can't cite a source for "I heard faxes were legal copies" (which I meant in a business sense) nor can I find anything in the US Code about it. Oops.
But on the question of reliability and being able to trust faxes, USC 47 22 makes it unlawful to send a fax without having accurate identifying information on the top of the page. So a scammer can get in a lot of trouble legally. It isn't criminal, but it's unlawful and that makes them liable for your entire loss as well as collection costs and legal fees. Plus probably punitive damages, and the kind of lawyers who'd take a case like this to court would be all about punitive stuff.
Under US law, which I'm not citing first thing in the morning, a fax is a "legal facsimile" of the original. Under law, if you have a faxed copy of something you may as well have an original. Email doesn't have that legal status, so a scanned and emailed original won't cut it.
Well, opening the case on the white iMacs is just three captive screws. That gets you easy access to the power supply, drives, and RAM. Most of the rest is on the motherboard. the Minis and the laptops are more obnoxious to open, but the iMacs and towers are dead simple to get into.
if you're a Mac-using organization, you really need to work with Apple to get some people in IT access to order spare parts. That's available. Or you keep a couple spares around and send your hardware issues out to an authorized service provider. In the Bay Area there are two very good Mac repair shops that will pick up and drop off your repairs. Find one in your area. Their turnaround is going be pretty much however long Apple takes to get the parts to them. In the one case where one of our last G4 PowerBooks needed a part that wasn't available, after a few weeks they just sent us a MacBook Pro. This was acceptable to me.
The big catch in repairing Apple hardware is their just-in-time system for controlling parts inventory. Any glitch in the system means delays in repairs. Worse, repair providers can't keep a stock on hand. Every repair needs a case number and a serial number before parts can be ordered. It's annoying as hell sometimes.
Oh, and here's a PDF manual for one of the white plastic iMacs.
That's pretty much how the Burnout series was meant to be played. It's certainly found a permanent niche in my entertainment library: right next to the liquor cabinet.
That'd be nice. In the meantime, a Mac Pro can be had with only a single dual-core CPO as a BTO option. The machine is still overkill, but you can shave a few hundred dollars off the price. And it's a really nice case - tons of bays and slots, not sure about RAID on the drive controllers though.
Amusingly enough, Apple has only just, finally, squeezed a decent graphics card into an iMac. The 24" model now has the Nvidia 8800 GS as an option. I've been checking reviews on that card this morning, and it looks like a solid gaming card. Not as fast as the 8800 GT models, but still in the same class. Not a cheap machine, at about $2100 for one with the 8800 GS, but it's finally an option other than a Mac Pro.
At least in Ringworld the sex generally advances the plot (a bit) and isn't particularly detailed, nobody is a bloody-handed sadist or owns rape machines. And there's as much sex in Ringworld as there is in the rest of Niven's works put together, so you're done with it.
I think I'm a healthy child of America: either set the scene and turn out the lights, or the sex is all I'm interested in. And if you don't have a talent for writing erotica, don't bother setting the scene.
The horrifically violent sex turned me off of that series very, very early. The Gap series gets rough (Chung Kuo is far worse), but Donaldson isn't graphic about it. Or constant about it. Or selling his books with it. The Gap is readable, I do recommend it. Chung Kuo is violent pornography.
The next app I want to see for the iPhone is going to be one that fully controls all the possible camera settings, f-stop, exposure time, light levels, color balance, etc. I don't know how much control the camera in the current iPhones has, but at some point in its development I want full control over every fiddly little parameter on the camera. Presets for outdoors, presets for indoors, presets for taking great shots in a stadium environment... it'd be grand.
Same for about a dozen other features of the iPhone: other products claim to have them, but they are so painful to use that few people can stand them.
It's the little things in the implementation that give the iPhone it's edge in UI. Just about every cell phone has a timer, an alarm and a stopwatch. On my old Razr and Samsung a437 those functions are buried deep in the interface and require many key presses to set up an alarm (stopwatch features don't require a lot of key presses). On an iPhone you just open the clock app, switch to the right tab and spin the dials to set up an event. Those funky spinning dials also make setting the date & time for a calendar appointment MUCH easier than on any other phone. Easily selecting a specific time isn't a feature that makes it into presentations or advertising, but it makes using the thing on a daily basis easier. Say what you will about the iPhone interface as a whole, but the spinning dials are truly great widgets.
Oh, and perhaps my favourite ever - the Gap series by Stephen Donaldson - but other than saying I found them riveting, I'm not sure why. Though I'd definitely suggest that anyone into sci-fi checks these out if they haven't already (and don't be put off by the name/covers).
The Gap series is a pretty brutal set of books. The characters go through sheer hell, but it's a fascinating ride. And the last 150 pages of book 4 have the best space fight/chase sequence I've ever read.
Because anyone who worked for years in the tech industry and managed to confuse a kill file with an assassination list, in a lawsuit on the topic is a legend in his own mind^h^h^h^h time.
Slashdot Mirror
pleasebeyoutubepleasebeyoutubepleasebeyoutubepleasebeyoutubepleasebeyoutube
Damn.
Was anyone else hoping for a YouTube link to Rupert Murdoch frothing at the mouth and screaming "Facebook ! Facebook ! Facebook !" ?
"moar features" is the philosophy behind most Linux distros, and that's not a bad thing. Having damn near every application written for your OS either on the disc or in the standard repositories is great. Apple is working under the guiding hand of a benevolent dictator who has a Philosophy and a Plan. That's not a bad thing either. Apple's basic strategy is to produce a consistent, unified user experience. Having random programs, however cool, sitting around detracts from the gestalt Apple is aiming for. See the iPhone software store for an example of Apple's controlling ways - a lot of people hate that sort of business. Maybe a widget that searches the various Mac repositories (I miss SunSite) for freeware and open source software and installs just like, say Synaptic, does would be popular.
But that's besides the point. Snow Leopard is about the OS. Kernel stuff like a whole new schedule to make multiple cores transparent to applications, shared library optimization, using the GPU as an extra processor for extra power. All the services needed by application developers. Putting a programmer on "go make something cool" takes a headcount away from the OpenCL team. 10.4 added a lot of APIs developers can use. 10.5 was interface and user experience focused. 10.6 looks to be kernel focused. The current architecture of OS X is more than adequate for general use computing, but has some serious flaws for some high performance tasks. There's horrific overhead in thread spawning for example. Lastly, some of these OS improvements really are end-user cool features. I mentioned the bioinformatics folks earlier. There are hundreds of thousands of OS X machines deployed in scientific roles and other compute-intensive industries. Easy access to every core is way cool to the Xgrid and budget supercomputer crowd. Don't forget that Apple used to sell a cluster-in-a-rack of Xservs specced out as a compute farm in a short, wheeled rack. It had a SKU and was semi-configured to drop into a datacenter and start running calculations.
Apple does not want to compete with its application developers. A consumer computer that can do "everything" out of the box ends up without a healthy ecosystem of commercial developers. Apple does put out some software that competes with existing stuff, look at what Final Cut did to Adobe Premier. This is usually a hardball business move (cf. Adobe Premier) or to prop up otherwise missing categories (office software, workgroup databases, pro audio). There's talk of that around iPhone developer applications, but I think Apple is early enough in the ramp-up stage of the iPhone software thing that they're just screwing some applications up. Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence. They'll get over it. Although anyone who has made an enemy at Apple may be in for a protracted application process.
Just in case, check and see if Entourage is doing IMAP. Probably not, but it's worth looking if you haven't yet. If you are stuck on Entourage, keep your database backed up. That bitch is worse than the fucking registry for all-in-one-basket stupidity. And I'm not just sayin'. ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data. Keep that backed up with a religious fervor. It's not so bad if you can keep everything on the server and just re-sync when it goes bad - not if, when. I had to support that abomination in a POP3 environment. POP3 ! In the 21st Century ! Years of mail add up to gigabytes with attachments. And Entourage just can't handle that, and WILL fail repeatedly.
Rsync it every time Entourage quits or something. Anything.
> Translation: "We've put off any serious work on OS X for eleven months"
Pshaw. Means they're just done screwing with the interface for a while. They have a stable and useful user experience in 10.5.3. It'll get a few tweaks along the line, 10.5.3 changed Spaces considerably. They're also talking about major architectural changes to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of the hardware. You may not care about optimizing for multiple cores or offloading processing to the GPU, but the bioinformatics people who run racks full of Xservs in a compute farm were dancing in the aisles at WWDC.
>most likely will help get Macs into corporate environments
Licensing full Exchange support sure as hell will. The return of VB support in MS Office a year or so after 10.6 comes out will also help enormously. The Active Directory support keeps getting better and better every release too. With, again, more stuff licensed from Microsoft Apple will be able to play in the enterprise.
It's easier to be funny when you have a clue.
I'll give you the bug fixes though. Adding a new hardware platform did disrupt 10.5 and increased their bug rate as Apple tries to manage a common codebase for two very different platforms. Arguably, 10.5.3 represents where Leopard should have been at release, and could have been but for the iPhone. They're late, but catching up.
10.5.3 is full ready for use if you haven't switched yet, Check the remaining issues before committing though, there are (always) some bugs left.
> I wonder if Apple has cracked it with Mobile Me?
If they have, it'll be worth $100 a month. Same bookmarks, same media, similar ability to get stuff done. Email, 20GB web space, multimedia integration AND transparent synchronization for less than $9.00 a month ? It isn't a shell account, but it has its value.
> How many of them offer a pro-rated discount on
> your monthly rate for the time that the phone is
> not on the network (phone turned off, bad
> reception, etc.)?
Wait, what ? You want to get money back for turning off your phone ?
Fuck, I've been trolled. IHL.
There's a lot of room for improvement in the iPhone camera. never mind the camera itself. I'd love to be able to control shutter speed and exposure. being able to save presets would be awesome.
The iPhone's big win is in showing off your pictures. That huge display makes photos look great. Flicking through photos is a great way to browse. it's also a fantastic viewfinder. A better camera only helps when you get the photos off the camera. It'd be nice though, I love always having a decent camera with me. Out of the pocket, unlock, hit Camera and start aiming.
> i never buy revision A apple hardware. let the fanatics bug test the hardware.
That's really good advice for any tech company, and especially Apple. They have letdowns from their component manufacturers, odd little design quirks, glaringly missing features (copy & paste on the iPhone, I'm looking in your direction) and other annoyances or errors that mar the design and utility of the product. Even with the copy & paste thing, my time with the iPhone has still been vastly superior to my Razr experience. The 2.0 upgrade and 3rd party apps will be like a whole new phone... experience. yeah, I said it. C'mon, drink the fucking kool aide already.
RIM is in serious trouble. Palm is putting out a major new OS release this year, and it had better be Really Good. A $199 iPhone is going to sell like absolute fucking hotcakes. Six million of the 1.0s, double or triple that in the 2.0s this year. The white 16GB model alone will outsell the hottest Blackberry. AT&T or not, everyone with an expiring contract is going to seriously think about it.
Corporate use will skyrocket. The Exchange integration gives you a good handheld email device that doesn't send your data through someone else's infrastructure. This is the sort of thing that makes security or regulatory compliance officers in large corporations all warm and fuzzy inside. Apple is a big SAP customer and SAP is jumping into iPhone development with both feet. That will make a lot of people in the executive suite a lot more comfortable with Apple all of a sudden. Even if their use isn't officially sanctioned, a lot of people will just open Outlook and copy the settings to their phone.
The first year was just the warm up. I'm absolutely terrified because I'm looking in the store at a 16G and at my dwindling free space on my current phone and seriously considering a new one. 3G would make it a business expense though.
Apple has used Framemaker for documentation since time immemorial. There are probably a couple of people with double-digit employee numbers who stashed some of the last machines that ran Framemaker 6.0 and have the pull to keep them up and running. It's not like anyone has produced anything better than that Those people need to get a Pro version of Pages, Volumes maybe. It'd be a small market, but it'd kick in a few more doors for the sales team.
Now that's my kind of Easter Egg !
Exactly. Well, it's a Unix, so you can secure it properly, so you should secure it. It's nice to see a vendor-approved guide to doing it that accounts for their own quirks (especially critical in the Unix realm). Scanning the NSA guide for Linux might help too, unless they did an OS X version. And is anyone else waiting for a 4th edition of Essential Unix Systems Administration ?
That's pretty much what I was thinking. And I can't cite a source for "I heard faxes were legal copies" (which I meant in a business sense) nor can I find anything in the US Code about it. Oops.
But on the question of reliability and being able to trust faxes, USC 47 22 makes it unlawful to send a fax without having accurate identifying information on the top of the page. So a scammer can get in a lot of trouble legally. It isn't criminal, but it's unlawful and that makes them liable for your entire loss as well as collection costs and legal fees. Plus probably punitive damages, and the kind of lawyers who'd take a case like this to court would be all about punitive stuff.
Under US law, which I'm not citing first thing in the morning, a fax is a "legal facsimile" of the original. Under law, if you have a faxed copy of something you may as well have an original. Email doesn't have that legal status, so a scanned and emailed original won't cut it.
Well, opening the case on the white iMacs is just three captive screws. That gets you easy access to the power supply, drives, and RAM. Most of the rest is on the motherboard. the Minis and the laptops are more obnoxious to open, but the iMacs and towers are dead simple to get into.
if you're a Mac-using organization, you really need to work with Apple to get some people in IT access to order spare parts. That's available. Or you keep a couple spares around and send your hardware issues out to an authorized service provider. In the Bay Area there are two very good Mac repair shops that will pick up and drop off your repairs. Find one in your area. Their turnaround is going be pretty much however long Apple takes to get the parts to them. In the one case where one of our last G4 PowerBooks needed a part that wasn't available, after a few weeks they just sent us a MacBook Pro. This was acceptable to me.
The big catch in repairing Apple hardware is their just-in-time system for controlling parts inventory. Any glitch in the system means delays in repairs. Worse, repair providers can't keep a stock on hand. Every repair needs a case number and a serial number before parts can be ordered. It's annoying as hell sometimes.
Oh, and here's a PDF manual for one of the white plastic iMacs.
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/imacg5_17inch_Power_Supply.pdf
warning: pdf link
That's pretty much how the Burnout series was meant to be played. It's certainly found a permanent niche in my entertainment library: right next to the liquor cabinet.
That'd be nice. In the meantime, a Mac Pro can be had with only a single dual-core CPO as a BTO option. The machine is still overkill, but you can shave a few hundred dollars off the price. And it's a really nice case - tons of bays and slots, not sure about RAID on the drive controllers though.
Amusingly enough, Apple has only just, finally, squeezed a decent graphics card into an iMac. The 24" model now has the Nvidia 8800 GS as an option. I've been checking reviews on that card this morning, and it looks like a solid gaming card. Not as fast as the 8800 GT models, but still in the same class. Not a cheap machine, at about $2100 for one with the 8800 GS, but it's finally an option other than a Mac Pro.
Card review:
http://en.expreview.com/2008/01/21/review-palit-8800gs-384mb-768mb/
new iMacs:
http://www.apple.com/imac/
Naturally, like everyone else, I want roughly $1k tower with an upgradeable graphics card, but this is a nice step.
Just stay out of The Barrens. Barrens chat is bad, mmkay ?
At least in Ringworld the sex generally advances the plot (a bit) and isn't particularly detailed, nobody is a bloody-handed sadist or owns rape machines. And there's as much sex in Ringworld as there is in the rest of Niven's works put together, so you're done with it.
I think I'm a healthy child of America: either set the scene and turn out the lights, or the sex is all I'm interested in. And if you don't have a talent for writing erotica, don't bother setting the scene.
The horrifically violent sex turned me off of that series very, very early. The Gap series gets rough (Chung Kuo is far worse), but Donaldson isn't graphic about it. Or constant about it. Or selling his books with it. The Gap is readable, I do recommend it. Chung Kuo is violent pornography.
True enough, I just want the most possible out of the built-in camera.
The next app I want to see for the iPhone is going to be one that fully controls all the possible camera settings, f-stop, exposure time, light levels, color balance, etc. I don't know how much control the camera in the current iPhones has, but at some point in its development I want full control over every fiddly little parameter on the camera. Presets for outdoors, presets for indoors, presets for taking great shots in a stadium environment... it'd be grand.
Same for about a dozen other features of the iPhone: other products claim to have them, but they are so painful to use that few people can stand them.
It's the little things in the implementation that give the iPhone it's edge in UI. Just about every cell phone has a timer, an alarm and a stopwatch. On my old Razr and Samsung a437 those functions are buried deep in the interface and require many key presses to set up an alarm (stopwatch features don't require a lot of key presses). On an iPhone you just open the clock app, switch to the right tab and spin the dials to set up an event. Those funky spinning dials also make setting the date & time for a calendar appointment MUCH easier than on any other phone. Easily selecting a specific time isn't a feature that makes it into presentations or advertising, but it makes using the thing on a daily basis easier. Say what you will about the iPhone interface as a whole, but the spinning dials are truly great widgets.
Oh, and perhaps my favourite ever - the Gap series by Stephen Donaldson - but other than saying I found them riveting, I'm not sure why. Though I'd definitely suggest that anyone into sci-fi checks these out if they haven't already (and don't be put off by the name/covers).
The Gap series is a pretty brutal set of books. The characters go through sheer hell, but it's a fascinating ride. And the last 150 pages of book 4 have the best space fight/chase sequence I've ever read.
Because anyone who worked for years in the tech industry and managed to confuse a kill file with an assassination list, in a lawsuit on the topic is a legend in his own mind^h^h^h^h time.