I haven't yet figured out what the difference between the ~200 and ~400 MB delta updates is, although it seems like more PPC and white iMac users are getting the smaller update. The combo update, it turns out, is 536 MB.
The first dual reboot I remember was 10.4.3 on a PowerMac G5.
Both multiple reboots and extra-long initial boot times are very common after 10.x.x updates. Apple should do a better job of publicizing their existence. After every single one I see a bunch of posts like "OMG! My computer took three minutes to boot! This new OS is t3h sukc!"
(Not that I ever understood the obsession with boot time, either. But it's amazing how many people shut down the machine every single time they stop using it.)
I worked in a predatory lending clinic for the last few months (as part of my last semester of law school).
In many of our cases, the buyers didn't lie at all. Instead, the broker modified income and employment information on the application forms it sent to the lender, sometimes forging applications entirely
Lenders, for their part, turned a blind eye to obviously suspicious information (like a security guard making $80,000/year).
This worked for both lenders and brokers in the short term because the broker was only interested in getting more business written and the lender would quickly sell the obviously flawed mortgage to someone else.
Of course, all of this resulted in a lot of borrowers getting approved for products they couldn't afford. Why did they apply for such products? Because brokers often flatly misrepresented the terms of the products.
The incentive to get business done at any cost was a major cause of the outright fraud that underlies the current housing crisis. Borrowers are not totally blameless, but lenders and brokers were the really evil parties here.
The repairability of Apple machines seems to be very oddly hit or miss
Tru dat. It's like sometimes accessibility is a design criterion, and sometimes it isn't.
The towers were a monster pain until the 8600 and beige G3 came out. They've been a snap ever since, and the Mac Pro is the best one yet...
... unless you're trying to replace a part like a motherboard or PS. Then they're still a pain, although the G5 machines were much worse than the Mac Pro.
The laptops are laptops like anyone else's, although the easy-access hard disk on the MacBook is nice. Unless you're working on a 12" iBook or 12" Powerbook -- those two designs are a nightmare from start to finish.
And the iMacs... some of them great, some terrible, nothing in between.
The sharp dichotomy presented in the executive summary is just plain wrong. Sure, the two extremes exist, but I think most supporters of net neutrality regulation don't actually want the government to take over networks. The summary is as accurate as "All people in the U.S. are either knuckle-dragging Bushtards or communists."
The point of net neutrality is not to change who is running networks, it's to prevent network operators from effectively blocking or slowing down connections based on who or what the user is trying to connect to.
Those also tend to be some of the worst lighting conditions, too, depending on whether the bozo across the way leaves his window open.
Some of us don't want to spend our entire time traveling frantically buried in work. I'll continue looking at the view regardless of whether it may cause glare on your screen. Take a break.
For one, there are laptop screens that use other panel types. For example LG Display makes the LP201WE1 which is a full 8-bit laptop LCD panel.
That is a 20-inch luggable, not a laptop. I stand by what I said: there are no non-TN laptop (If there were a 1920x1200 17" IPS panel, or if they could convince a maker to create one, I feel absolutely sure Apple would use it in its top 17" MBP configuration. Many 17" MBP customers would pay extra for it, especially since the 17" MBP has a devoted following among pro photogs. But Apple has no way to cost-effectively source such a panel.
Also it is easy to get non-TN panels for desktop displays, you just have to be willing to pay more.
That is getting steadily less and less true. I don't know of any non-TN panels under 19" anymore. I don't know of any recent 19" or 20" non-TN panels. My feeling is that non-TN panels will slowly be harder and harder to find, and will soon be unavailable in sizes under 24". I think it's quite possible that, in two years, the only *IPS panels available will be $1500, 2560x1600 30" monsters.
Whether an individual subpixel can display 256 levels is quite irrelevant since dithering is capable of producing a higher colour depth at the expense of colour resolution. You still get full brightness resolution. And this is ok, because its not really possible to tell the difference.
Try the following exercise:
1. Find a new 20" iMac (or laptop, or other machine with a crap TN panel). Find a good IPS panel such as the one on a 24" iMac. Put them side by side.
2. Open your favorite image editor.
3. Create a diagonal gradient starting with black and ending with 50% pure blue or green
4. The hard part: tell me with a straight face that you can't see the dithering.
At typical viewing distances, subpixels are small enough to dither with reasonable effectiveness. Full pixels aren't, at least where the color transitions are subtle.
Fair enough, but there are a couple of other things to be aware of...
1. Apple used PVA or IPS panels in all previous 20" iMacs, so the aluminum generation represented a severe downgrade in panel quality.
2. Despite the overheated rhetoric in some posts above, many shops have used iMacs for all but the heaviest design work, as their top-flight panels actually calibrated quite well. That is no longer an option with the 20" model.
You won't see stripes, but noisy transitions, at least on the iMac. Most of the 6-bit displays (including the iMac one) dither when they are fed intermediate values.
For me, the difference is most dramatic on relatively dark gradients involving green or blue.
In any case, the worst problem with TN isn't the dithering/banding, it's the total lack of color consistency that derives from the very narrow viewing angle.
This isn't about the MacBook suit, this is about 20" iMac desktops.
I realize that. I was responding specifically to the inaccuracy in the parent post.
Incidentally a guy (Mac user) on our forums ran some tests on his Thinkpad and found that it does indeed have an IPS display. So although TN screens may be common on laptops they're not ubiquitous.
IBM made several ThinkPads with IPS panels 2-4 years ago, although none were produced in large numbers. The 14" and 15" IPS screens are no longer being made. The only one I know of still being sold is the X-series tablet, which has a 1440x900 12" IPS screen that I believe is also now out of production.
TN was just too big and cheap for IPS to survive. There was no money for the panel makers in producing a tiny quantity of $100 more expensive laptop screens for the few buyers with enough basic perceptivity to tell the difference.
There is no better laptop screen, because no one makes one. You can increase the resolution by paying extra, but you're still getting the same cheap TN crap that everyone uses and that Apple is getting sued for advertising as capable of displaying "millions of colors."
Crap TN panels are slowly but surely taking over the desktop space too. It's hard to find a non-TN panel under 23" these days, and even many 24" and all 27" panels use the sucky technology.
Unfortunately, Americans still largely drive tech trends, and we rarely care about anything but "big and cheap." (We say we do, but then we actually still buy "big and cheap.")
To translate a very good but somewhat too diplomatic reply...
Some passengers can lift a bag into the overheads and some can't.
Some passengers think that "one carry-on bag up to 20 pounds" means "three carry-on bags, 60 pounds each."
Some passengers are children. Some passengers are infants.
Some parents do very well controlling their children. Others allow theirs to run around the aisle while everyone is trying to board.
Some passengers are drunk.
And some passengers delay the flight by sitting in the bar blissfully ignoring all the increasingly irritated pages from the gate agents.
Some passengers are in groups trying to sit together. Some passengers are dumb as a box of rocks.
These are redundant, especially on the sort of short flights where turn times are critically important. You will live if you have to be separated from your wife/"friend"/kissing cousin/codependency object for one hour. If you won't, that's fine too, since natural selection needs to go to work on you.
Overhead space is limited, so the place where you stow your stuff may or may not be over your seat.
Thanks to the passengers with three 60-pound carry-on bags, the place where you stow your stuff may well be in the hold. The problem is that you, and the other 10 last passengers to get on, had to walk the entire length of the plane forward and backward in order to figure that out.
An airliner aisle is barely wide enough for two non-obese people to pass each other, without bags in tow.
Nevertheless, it's a very convenient place for people to fiddle around in their bags, socialize, ask where row 13 is without noticing that they are by row 7 and the next row is row 8, fluff pillows, and prepare carry-on fast food meals for consumption. Evidently, the aisle also promotes a strange affliction where people using it for all these convenient purposes are unable to perceive the 140 passengers impatiently waiting to get by.
And sometimes, disorganization sets in.
Especially on weekends and at major holidays, most fliers are rank n00bs.
Also, what difference would this truly make? Airports already maximize the number of takeoffs from multiple gates. The plane has no choice but to take off at time X, regardless of how annoying the boarding process is. Any successful implementation of speeding up this process means that everybody waits on the plane longer versus in the seating area at the gate.
Most airlines at most airports (i.e. all airports but jammed nightmares such as LGA, JFK in the evening, or ORD) are not capacity limited. If they can turn around planes quicker, that means more legs per day throughout the system, which translates directly into money. For example, Southwest has been continuously refining its boarding process for quite some time to try to shave minutes off turn time. They are at 25 to 30 minutes at most airports; they would dearly love to get that down to 20.
Even at capacity-limited airports, quicker turn times can get the plane out of the airport more quickly, saving time in the rest of the system. At delay-prone airports, quicker turns can help keep the system on schedule. One delayed major airport, such as EWR for Continental, can screw up an airline's entire network in a real hurry.
In 1998, Boeing introduced the 757-300, a super-stretch variant of the narrowbody 757 we know and love from transcontinental U.S. flights. The plane has the lowest cost per passenger-mile of any large jet in existence. Nevertheless, it didn't sell well. At least some of the operators who rejected it did so because, as a narrowbody with ~45 rows of seats, its turn times were just too long to fit smoothly into a short-haul operation. Instead, because of the turn times, those airlines are operating either smaller 757-200s (UA, AA) or widebodies such as the 767-300 (DL) or Airbus A300 (AA, LH). That's how critical turn times are to airline ops.
The Safari performance improvements are coming in Safari 3.1, not yet available to the public. To see them today, you have to be running current WebKit nightlies. The difference between the new WebKit builds and vanilla Safari 3.0.4 is pretty dramatic.
The usual Slashdot "assume dishonesty before checking out the facts" attitude...
Except that they only advertise 8Mbps sustained speed, which is what you get. They also advertise PowerBoost, which gets you ~25Mbps for a few seconds.
Comcast needs to be drawn and quartered over their forged packets, but they haven't done anything dishonest in advertising their speeds, at least not where I live. I do indeed get >20MBps for a few seconds and then 8MBps until the cows come home.
The MBA (and MBP) aren't silver-painted plastic (except for the touchpad), they're anodized aluminum. I'd rather have a natural metal finish than yet more black plastic, although ThinkPads are about as nice as non-Apple laptops get.
Largely agree with you on the glossy screens, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. Both machines were up-to-date.
I haven't yet figured out what the difference between the ~200 and ~400 MB delta updates is, although it seems like more PPC and white iMac users are getting the smaller update. The combo update, it turns out, is 536 MB.
Nope. I got the 420 MB version through Software Update on both of my MBPs (one 2.16GHz Core Duo, one 2.4GHz Penryn).
The first dual reboot I remember was 10.4.3 on a PowerMac G5.
Both multiple reboots and extra-long initial boot times are very common after 10.x.x updates. Apple should do a better job of publicizing their existence. After every single one I see a bunch of posts like "OMG! My computer took three minutes to boot! This new OS is t3h sukc!"
(Not that I ever understood the obsession with boot time, either. But it's amazing how many people shut down the machine every single time they stop using it.)
I worked in a predatory lending clinic for the last few months (as part of my last semester of law school).
In many of our cases, the buyers didn't lie at all. Instead, the broker modified income and employment information on the application forms it sent to the lender, sometimes forging applications entirely
Lenders, for their part, turned a blind eye to obviously suspicious information (like a security guard making $80,000/year).
This worked for both lenders and brokers in the short term because the broker was only interested in getting more business written and the lender would quickly sell the obviously flawed mortgage to someone else.
Of course, all of this resulted in a lot of borrowers getting approved for products they couldn't afford. Why did they apply for such products? Because brokers often flatly misrepresented the terms of the products.
The incentive to get business done at any cost was a major cause of the outright fraud that underlies the current housing crisis. Borrowers are not totally blameless, but lenders and brokers were the really evil parties here.
This is not a verdict, it's a default judgment. Verdicts come from juries.
You must be new here.
...are much smarter than the only other thing in the Palouse: Washington State Cougars.
Tru dat. It's like sometimes accessibility is a design criterion, and sometimes it isn't.
The towers were a monster pain until the 8600 and beige G3 came out. They've been a snap ever since, and the Mac Pro is the best one yet...
... unless you're trying to replace a part like a motherboard or PS. Then they're still a pain, although the G5 machines were much worse than the Mac Pro.
The laptops are laptops like anyone else's, although the easy-access hard disk on the MacBook is nice. Unless you're working on a 12" iBook or 12" Powerbook -- those two designs are a nightmare from start to finish.
And the iMacs... some of them great, some terrible, nothing in between.
The sharp dichotomy presented in the executive summary is just plain wrong. Sure, the two extremes exist, but I think most supporters of net neutrality regulation don't actually want the government to take over networks. The summary is as accurate as "All people in the U.S. are either knuckle-dragging Bushtards or communists."
The point of net neutrality is not to change who is running networks, it's to prevent network operators from effectively blocking or slowing down connections based on who or what the user is trying to connect to.
Um, those numbers were in thousands. Try 43.6 million homes with internet connections.
Some of us don't want to spend our entire time traveling frantically buried in work. I'll continue looking at the view regardless of whether it may cause glare on your screen. Take a break.
Ugh... showed up right in preview. Damn Slashcode.
The second sentence of my last post should read: "... non-TN laptop (17" or smaller) panels currently available."
That is a 20-inch luggable, not a laptop. I stand by what I said: there are no non-TN laptop (If there were a 1920x1200 17" IPS panel, or if they could convince a maker to create one, I feel absolutely sure Apple would use it in its top 17" MBP configuration. Many 17" MBP customers would pay extra for it, especially since the 17" MBP has a devoted following among pro photogs. But Apple has no way to cost-effectively source such a panel.
Also it is easy to get non-TN panels for desktop displays, you just have to be willing to pay more.That is getting steadily less and less true. I don't know of any non-TN panels under 19" anymore. I don't know of any recent 19" or 20" non-TN panels. My feeling is that non-TN panels will slowly be harder and harder to find, and will soon be unavailable in sizes under 24". I think it's quite possible that, in two years, the only *IPS panels available will be $1500, 2560x1600 30" monsters.
Try the following exercise:
1. Find a new 20" iMac (or laptop, or other machine with a crap TN panel). Find a good IPS panel such as the one on a 24" iMac. Put them side by side.
2. Open your favorite image editor.
3. Create a diagonal gradient starting with black and ending with 50% pure blue or green
4. The hard part: tell me with a straight face that you can't see the dithering.
At typical viewing distances, subpixels are small enough to dither with reasonable effectiveness. Full pixels aren't, at least where the color transitions are subtle.
Fair enough, but there are a couple of other things to be aware of...
1. Apple used PVA or IPS panels in all previous 20" iMacs, so the aluminum generation represented a severe downgrade in panel quality.
2. Despite the overheated rhetoric in some posts above, many shops have used iMacs for all but the heaviest design work, as their top-flight panels actually calibrated quite well. That is no longer an option with the 20" model.
You won't see stripes, but noisy transitions, at least on the iMac. Most of the 6-bit displays (including the iMac one) dither when they are fed intermediate values.
For me, the difference is most dramatic on relatively dark gradients involving green or blue.
In any case, the worst problem with TN isn't the dithering/banding, it's the total lack of color consistency that derives from the very narrow viewing angle.
I realize that. I was responding specifically to the inaccuracy in the parent post.
Incidentally a guy (Mac user) on our forums ran some tests on his Thinkpad and found that it does indeed have an IPS display. So although TN screens may be common on laptops they're not ubiquitous.IBM made several ThinkPads with IPS panels 2-4 years ago, although none were produced in large numbers. The 14" and 15" IPS screens are no longer being made. The only one I know of still being sold is the X-series tablet, which has a 1440x900 12" IPS screen that I believe is also now out of production.
TN was just too big and cheap for IPS to survive. There was no money for the panel makers in producing a tiny quantity of $100 more expensive laptop screens for the few buyers with enough basic perceptivity to tell the difference.
There is no better laptop screen, because no one makes one. You can increase the resolution by paying extra, but you're still getting the same cheap TN crap that everyone uses and that Apple is getting sued for advertising as capable of displaying "millions of colors."
Crap TN panels are slowly but surely taking over the desktop space too. It's hard to find a non-TN panel under 23" these days, and even many 24" and all 27" panels use the sucky technology.
Unfortunately, Americans still largely drive tech trends, and we rarely care about anything but "big and cheap." (We say we do, but then we actually still buy "big and cheap.")
It's misleading for the summary to say "Safari" gets 87/100 when the version of Safari that does that is not yet released.
Run current WebKit nightlies to get the high score now. The changes will be in the upcoming Safari 3.1 release.
To translate a very good but somewhat too diplomatic reply...
Some passengers can lift a bag into the overheads and some can't.Some passengers think that "one carry-on bag up to 20 pounds" means "three carry-on bags, 60 pounds each."
Some passengers are children. Some passengers are infants.Some parents do very well controlling their children. Others allow theirs to run around the aisle while everyone is trying to board.
Some passengers are drunk.And some passengers delay the flight by sitting in the bar blissfully ignoring all the increasingly irritated pages from the gate agents.
Some passengers are in groups trying to sit together. Some passengers are dumb as a box of rocks.These are redundant, especially on the sort of short flights where turn times are critically important. You will live if you have to be separated from your wife/"friend"/kissing cousin/codependency object for one hour. If you won't, that's fine too, since natural selection needs to go to work on you.
Overhead space is limited, so the place where you stow your stuff may or may not be over your seat.Thanks to the passengers with three 60-pound carry-on bags, the place where you stow your stuff may well be in the hold. The problem is that you, and the other 10 last passengers to get on, had to walk the entire length of the plane forward and backward in order to figure that out.
An airliner aisle is barely wide enough for two non-obese people to pass each other, without bags in tow.Nevertheless, it's a very convenient place for people to fiddle around in their bags, socialize, ask where row 13 is without noticing that they are by row 7 and the next row is row 8, fluff pillows, and prepare carry-on fast food meals for consumption. Evidently, the aisle also promotes a strange affliction where people using it for all these convenient purposes are unable to perceive the 140 passengers impatiently waiting to get by.
And sometimes, disorganization sets in.Especially on weekends and at major holidays, most fliers are rank n00bs.
Most airlines at most airports (i.e. all airports but jammed nightmares such as LGA, JFK in the evening, or ORD) are not capacity limited. If they can turn around planes quicker, that means more legs per day throughout the system, which translates directly into money. For example, Southwest has been continuously refining its boarding process for quite some time to try to shave minutes off turn time. They are at 25 to 30 minutes at most airports; they would dearly love to get that down to 20.
Even at capacity-limited airports, quicker turn times can get the plane out of the airport more quickly, saving time in the rest of the system. At delay-prone airports, quicker turns can help keep the system on schedule. One delayed major airport, such as EWR for Continental, can screw up an airline's entire network in a real hurry.
In 1998, Boeing introduced the 757-300, a super-stretch variant of the narrowbody 757 we know and love from transcontinental U.S. flights. The plane has the lowest cost per passenger-mile of any large jet in existence. Nevertheless, it didn't sell well. At least some of the operators who rejected it did so because, as a narrowbody with ~45 rows of seats, its turn times were just too long to fit smoothly into a short-haul operation. Instead, because of the turn times, those airlines are operating either smaller 757-200s (UA, AA) or widebodies such as the 767-300 (DL) or Airbus A300 (AA, LH). That's how critical turn times are to airline ops.
The Safari performance improvements are coming in Safari 3.1, not yet available to the public. To see them today, you have to be running current WebKit nightlies. The difference between the new WebKit builds and vanilla Safari 3.0.4 is pretty dramatic.
I had no idea Sam the Eagle had the computer skills to not just post, but login to, /. . Congratulations, birdbrain.
The usual Slashdot "assume dishonesty before checking out the facts" attitude...
Except that they only advertise 8Mbps sustained speed, which is what you get. They also advertise PowerBoost, which gets you ~25Mbps for a few seconds.
Comcast needs to be drawn and quartered over their forged packets, but they haven't done anything dishonest in advertising their speeds, at least not where I live. I do indeed get >20MBps for a few seconds and then 8MBps until the cows come home.
The MBA (and MBP) aren't silver-painted plastic (except for the touchpad), they're anodized aluminum. I'd rather have a natural metal finish than yet more black plastic, although ThinkPads are about as nice as non-Apple laptops get.
Largely agree with you on the glossy screens, though.