I live in New Zealand and I use it for checking out rivers and lakes for fishing and access to fishing. Although I have topo maps for most of NZ, as well as topo maps for my handheld GPS, Google Earth is still very useful for getting a better idea of terrain, bush cover etc. I use the measurement tools to work out roughly how far I'm going to need to walk. I also use it to check out tramping tracks and such. Not all of my main area of interest is covered by hi res imagery unfortunately.
When the Tour de France is on I use an overlay with the race route to get a further appreciation of the route and terrain etc.
I'm interested in landscapes so it's good to use to check out various parts of the world.
There's a lot of times when something comes up and someone says "Let's check it out on Google Earth".
I might just add I used NASA WorldWind for some time before GE came out. I changed primarily because there was a Mac version of GE and becase GE had much more high res imagery. Aside from those admittedly important points WorldWind was a better application though, although it's a number of years since used it now. GE has improved over time.
Replying to my own post, but out of the OSes I installed on my Mac Pro late last year Ubuntu was the most hassle because it didn't support the Intel ethernet card. I ended up having to recompile the drivers. Good thing I had other machines with a network connection otherwise I would have been a bit stuck.
I've been running Windows 7 RTM without problems on my Nehalem Mac Pro using Bootcamp for months. It was so painless I've forgotten the details but I think I started off with the Leopard Boot Camp and then updated it with the Boot Camp off the Snow Leopard GM. I did a clean install on a new partition. Windows 7 installed more easily than Vista Ultimate 64.
The movie "Never Say Never Again" clearly illustrated the shortcomings of iris scanning. That was back in the '80s. Pretty easy to fake the US President's iris and get the live warheads to replace the dummy ones. If USAF measures can be circumvented so easily then how can ordinary immigration officials deal with it?
I suppose there's an outside chance it could have all been fictional I guess. With all this reality TV it's so hard to tell what's real these days...
While I'm mainly a Mac guy, I own 7 of them ( one only used for nostalgic gaming ), I do also own a PC. I'm a software developer and I have the PC because I develop for both Mac and Windows. I started off doing Windows development with Win 98 running in Virtual PC on a Mac ( actually compiling on the Mac using Codewarrior's Intel compiler, just testing on Windows ), but inevitably the time came when I needed a real PC.
With the introduction of Intel Macs my need to get a Windows PC has dropped off. I was considering getting a new PC to run Vista but in the end decided to try it using Bootcamp ( Apple's Windows installation/dual boot solution ) on the Intel iMac I already and it's worked fine. I've just recently got an 8 core Mac Pro ( dual quad core Xeon ) and it now has OS X, Vista 64, Windows 7 64 and Ubuntu installed on it. They all seem to be peacefully coexisting. My Mac is also my PC - and my Linux box.
Dual booting isn't actually the greatest solution when you're doing cross platform work. It's much better to have separate machines so you can check in changes on one platform and test them immediately on the other platform. I may still end up getting a 64 bit PC but because I work on a renderer it will probably have to be a pretty grunty one. I may get another Mac Pro to run Windows on, because speccing up a Dell workstation ends up being roughly the same cost ( the Dell is more expensive but has a Quadro graphics card and comes with a monitor ). If I get the Mac Pro I can use it as a Mac rendering slave, plus I get a developer discount!
I have a Power Mac G4 533 which I got in 2001. It is still being used for commercial work every day and is running OS X 10.4. Not bad considering it started with OS 9. Any new Mac software which supports OS X 10.4 would run on it.
It's still going strong I recently got a PCI USB2 card for it to connect a new scanner, after our old SCSI scanner finally died, no problems. I think over its lifetime the only hardware issue has been a dead hard drive.
It will be retired in the next year or so, but mainly because trickle down in machines means it can be replaced by a newer machine.
Having used Macs for about 13 years now, the only time I've been "forced" to buy a new machine has been a couple of months ago with the advent of OS X 10.6 because it only supports Intel Macs. I'm a software developer and I need to support 64 bit OS X 10.6. My other Intel Mac is only 32 bit. I would have got a new machine eventually as my dual 2.7 GHz PowerMac G5 is starting to get a little creaky, but 10.6 forced my hand a bit and I had to get one when it didn't really suit financially.
The only other time I've got a new machine because of something Apple did was when they introduced Intel Macs. I "leased" an Intel iMac from Apple before Intel Macs were available for purchase IIRC and they ended up giving it to me. I'm a bit hazy but I think the lease was more or less a deposit which would be returned when Apple got the machine back. In the end we could keep them and although it was a large deposit it was still a fair bit cheaper than buying the same machine retail.
I have a new Mac Pro as well and it's certainly hefty, but it's still not as heavy as my older dual 2.7 GHz G5 PowerMac with liquid cooling.
On the Steve Jobs/CRT thing, I was using 21" CRTs until 2006 or so. It's never been obligatory to buy Apple displays, in fact my second monitor is a Dell LCD, previously connected using an adapter via VGA to the second connector on the graphics card, now using DVI. I have to say I was glad when my last big CRT died, because I was sick of hauling that thing up and down stairs whenever we moved.
I'd also wager the barbs help keep things like people and imported herbivores at bay as well, and until we go extinct maybe the trees will continue to poke when pecked, even if the poke is intended for extinct peckers.
The poke isn't bad enough to keep people at bay. I don't think I've ever brushed past a lancewood and noticed the barbs aside from the general and distinctive long thin serrated shape of the leaves. If I wanted to mess with the tree the barbs on the leaves wouldn't stop me. I can't really imagine it being too much of a problem even for an imported herbivore like a deer, pig, goat, sheep, cow or possum, something with good grinding teeth at least.
I agree that it does sound like a pretty good defense mechanism though. It's amazing how much the trees change as they get older. I only found out about that recently. We own some land with native bush where lancewoods grow and when I was walking around it asking what things where I got a surprise when I pointed to a largish tree and heard it was a lancewood. I knew the younger ones were lancewood, it's so distinctive.
Re:This is the future..
on
Robotic Penguins
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I live in New Zealand and have had blue penguins swimming around me a few times when I've been surfing. I've also seen the tracks they make through the bush on the way to and from their burrows, they can walk a surprisingly long way and climb pretty steep hills. I haven't seen them at night on the tracks but my mother has. I have seen them in their burrows though, on an island which is a scientific reserve. The burrows are man-made and have lids you can look off to peek inside:-).
I've seen a couple of other types of penguins in the wild too.
Apple didn't really break compatibility with the transition to OS X. They provided two means of compatibility between OS 9 and OS X. One was the Classic environment with was basically an OS 9 VM and the other was the Carbon API. Classic was for apps which weren't ported to Carbon.
Even with the transition to Intel machines Apple didn't completely break compatibility. They provided Rosetta to run PPC apps. I don't think any of the Intel machines support Classic so you can't run your non-Carbon apps anymore, but you could still run a Carbon PPC app on an Intel Mac and OS 9.
Really, the only break with OS 9 that has now come is with OS X 10.5 and its lack of support for 64 bit Carbon. The app I develop is currently based on Carbon. It needs 64 bit support so I'm going to be porting it to Cocoa in the near future. However if I didn't need 64 bit support I could still be using Carbon, although with the expectation that it isn't going to get any new APIs etc. I'm already mixing some Cocoa code in with Carbon code to provide functionality not available through Carbon.
Apple has been pretty good at providing compatibility. I have an app which is 10 years old now and which can still run on both OS 9 and an Intel Mac running OS X 10.5. Apple do obsolete stuff more quickly than Microsoft perhaps. My main work machine is still a dual G5 PowerMac, but OS X 10.6 won't run on it because it's dropping support for PPC. It's 4 year old machine, but still going strong and will continue in commercial use ( illustration rather than development ) when I have to replace it with an Intel one for OS X 10.6.
I hadn't heard of those before, I had to look them up. Interesting. Seems to be a fairly recent thing, looks rather Bolger-esque ( i.e. makes me shudder, but that's just me:-).
O Boatbuilder and yacht design student turned software developer
Hey !;-). Can't hurt to establish you know something about what you're talking about around these parts...
Sailboats tend to need keels if they plan on sailing in any direction other than directly downwind.
Assuming that there needs to be something extra for directional stability, there are also:
centreboards - which drop or hinge from inside the boat which can be retracted
lee boards - which hinge from the side of the boat, one on each side. The one on the downwind side is usually lowered, hence the name. The most common example I can think of for these that you might know ( from paintings and such ) is Dutch sailing barges.
bilge keels - short ( heightwise ) keels which run along the bottom of the boat away from the centreline ( along the bilges ), often oriented on a bit of outward angle vertically.
water ballast - internal tanks which hold water to balance the boat. This is usually more to help with resisting the heeling/tipping force of the sails, but can be also be used to aid directional stability through good balancing.
All of these methods generally do not add any significant permanent draught to the boat. Many of these already have a strong tradition in freight vessels, for example sailing barges which also needed to be able to move through canals, but of course not on the scope of today's freighters. Although it would cost ( or just be impractical ) to adapt these sorts of things to existing vessels, you can imagine a future when wind assisted freighters might have these designed in from the start. There would not really be too much need for extra dredging etc. The wind provides free energy ( barring the cost of the equipment needed to harness that free energy ) and engines can still be used to offset the problems sailing ships had with adverse conditions. I think we'd really have to be on the last two litres of oil before that sort of thing was seriously looked at though, there have been a number of wind assisted schemes over the years which haven't caught on ( not counting actual sailing ships of course ).
Regards,
Jo Meder
Boatbuilder and yacht design student turned software developer...
Apple has broken compatability a big way bunch of times - in the switch to Power, the switch to OS X, the switch to x86. Carbon Cocoa Pink Black Red. If I was a Mac developer, I'd be going NUTS. They're in a different siutation, a different market, and they can get away with it.
I'm a Mac developer, and I'm not going nuts. Apple are pretty good about backward compatibility. I first got a Mac just after the first wave of PowerPC machines were introduced. At that time a lot of software was still 68k and it worked fine. Some people do bitch about it, but I was lucky in that I never developed for 68k. I did have to deal with the Mixed Mode Manager and UPPs and such, but thankfully never near and far addressing etc. Overall, 68k software worked fine on my Macs, and I never noticed it being too slow, even with games. The 68k emulator was really good. I can only think of a couple of really old games which didn't want to run on my PPC machine ( Populous was one, I think ). I think they mainly wanted a 16 colour graphics mode or something though.
I have some silly graphics toys I wrote when I first started Mac programming. I wrote them on a 604/166 PPC machine, running OS 7.5.1. I've just started them up on my dual 2.5 GHz G5 running OS X 10.4.6 and they still work fine under Classic. They go really fast though:-). They won't run on my Core Duo iMac however, because Apple jettisoned Classic for Intel machines. I think that's fair enough.
Due to the fact I adopted modern APIs ( Appearance Manager, Navigation Services and such ) in my projects well ahead of the Carbon/OS X transition, getting a Carbon version of my work app going was pretty easy. The thing that took the most work was probably redoing the UI layouts to suit Aqua layout guidelines. Originally Apple wanted us to rewrite our apps completely for OS X, using Yellow Box ( Cocoa, as it became ), but thankfully the big software companies, and I would hope the myriad smaller ones, were heard and we got Carbon... for backwards compatibility, albeit with a very welcome rationalisation and modernisation of the APIs.
My current main app is not going to be updated for Intel machines. It is a performance intensive app so it doesn't run especially speedily under Rosetta, but it runs much better than I expected. The normal UI interaction speed is fine. It is a bit slower in general rendering, and a quite a lot slower when it's doing a lot of ray tracing, but it really isn't too bad. I would imagine that most PPC apps which aren't performance intensive would be perfectly usable, and reports seem to indicate they are. That's some very helpful backward compatibility there ( or is it forward compatibility ? ). Apple wouldn't have been able to get away with not providing some sort of solution like Rosetta, even though Rosetta itself was a bit of a surprise.
The next major version of my app is already Universal. Getting it going on an Intel Mac was a snap, the main problems I experienced in our code was some endian issues in pixel fiddling routines. We already have a lot of experience with endian issues, so that side of things was no big deal in general, all that was needed was the adjustment of a few flags. We are experiencing some issues with third party code ( open source code which is not very actively maintained for the Mac ), which is a drag, but I look forward to resolving them and contributing the fixes back to the community. Overall the Intel transition has been easy.
It's funny, but my main problems with backward compatibility have mainly come with recent versions of OS X. One example is the adoption of the new HIView system and compositing windows. It has been a barrier to backward compatibility because although it was introduced in 10.2, one of the important controls ( databrowser ) didn't support compositing windows until 10.3. I didn't want to have to juggle compositing and non-compositing windows just to accomodate the databrowser, and I definitely didn't want t
I don't see why CS is inherently a US discipline. It seems to me a lot of the US strength in CS/IT comes from historical reasons ( such as many of the advances which actually brought us computers in the first place of course ), and that it also happens to be where a lot of the money is. Consider how technology has spread around the world - there is no reason why other countries shouldn't feature more prominently in CS. History is just that - history. Things change and the US doesn't have a right to dominate CS/IT. When the US was building code breaking computers in the 1940s, was there even a similar sort of computer in India ( not counting it as part of the British Empire as it then was;-) ? Of course other countries are going to get stronger in CS and the US is going to lose out to them to some degree.
I work in the computer graphics field. From reading research papers, SIGGRAPH proceedings and the like I know that many, many people not from the US are doing a great deal of research. In fact it might even be the majority. Of course many of those people actually work in the US, and that is a large part of what has made the US strong in CS - so many foreigners are working in the US. The US is very lucky it has been able to attract those people away from their own countries to contribute toward the US dominance of the field to date. As someone not from the US myself I can't help feeling maybe the home countries might have been better off if those people hadn't gone to the US ( not that I'm judging those who've made that choice, by any means ).
Of course something else to consider is how many people actually studying and graduating in CS are what you could really computer scientists. I mean, a CS degree is just what you do to get a development job, it's a prerequisite for so many jobs. I don't have much formal CS training myself, but I've worked with people who have CS degrees and I think it would really be pushing things to say they were computer scientists;-). Decent developers yes, computer scientists no. My brother has an MSc in Marine Biology, he agrees that just having a BSc doesn't make him a scientist and he didn't really start to learn how to be a scientist until he started on his MSc.
Another thing is that the drop is compared to 2000, which is still bubblish times for CS/IT. I used to work in the boatbuilding industry in New Zealand. When I was training NZ won the America's Cup and that caused a massive amount of interest in the marine industries. The year after mine was filled with people who thought they would train to become boatbuilders because there would be so many jobs available in the near future. Many of them had just a vague interest in boats, and some didn't seem interested at all. A fair few didn't even finish the course. My point is, as others have said, whenever there is a "bubble" in some industry you always get a fair number of people looking to enter the industry who are after the job and not really in it because it's what they really want to do. BTW, in case you're wondering I'm no longer in the marine industry due to health problems, but my plan was to work as a boatbuilder ( something I'd already been doing as a hobby ) and gain wider practical experience before moving on to yacht design.
Personally, as a non-US member of the IT industry, who works with lots of other talented non-US members of the IT industry, I'm not sad to see countries other than the US progressing toward the forefront of things. I'd also like to emphasise I feel no ill will toward my colleagues in the US, because, you know, this is/. and it helps to be clear about these things:-).
I also apologise to actual computer scientists for using "CS" so loosely in the above...
Well, I'm a cross platform developer ( OS X and Windows ) and I'd far rather have the separate machines. Dual booting for development is a pain, I still have to do it sometimes for OS 9/OS X for one of our products. When we start Linux development I'm going to buy another machine just for Linux instead of dual booting either my PC or Intel iMac ( or one of my PPC macs for that matter, I guess ). For sure it costs a bit more but the convenience is well worth it in the long run. Being able to run things side by side is a big help. Even if you only have one monitor you can use VNC and/or RDC to interact with all your platforms at the same time. Of course I'm paid for my development work, but I can see your point for hobbyists etc.
Living here in New Zealand we can't use the iTunes Music Store. I still use it however, to check out albums before I buy CDs. It's the easiest way I know of previewing albums. I've bought quite a few CDs I hadn't been intending to because of the previews. I've also come across interesting stuff via the iMixes, you kind of start off with one and end up following a chain several links deep and end up checking out something completely different to what you started with. I like it. FWIW I don't buy much recent music either. The iTunes selection isn't complete, but it's very broad.
I have thousands of songs in my iTunes library all without DRM, ripped from my CDs. I got an iPod nano ( first portable music player I've owned since a walkman about 15 years ago ) last week and it's great. I've always been an iPod skeptic, however I got a good price for the nano. It's an excellent little thing, I'm very happy with it. Prior to getting the iPod I mostly used iTunes for streaming my music to other machines and other parts of the house.
How about "all mighty" for "almighty" then? Noone seems to have picked that up. I do not think I have seen any one write "all mighty" like that before, all though I am sure some one must have.
The other day I was buying a bunch of computer science/programming type books from Amazon. One thing I'm really interested in is something with a good description of Big-O ( Oh ) notation and how to assign it to an algorithm. I searched for "Big O" and of course I ended with a whole lot of results about having/giving orgasms, fellatio, cunnilingus etc. Not *quite* what I was looking for...
Please include all jokes relating to reading/. and sexual activity, or lack thereof for someone posting to/., in the box below.
BTW, does anyone know of a book with a really good treatment of Big-Oh, hopefully including good worked examples ?
I've tried Delicious Library, and didn't find it to be much use. It has nifty features and looks pretty for sure, but it might not be very useful at all if you don't live in the US. I live in New Zealand. When trying out DL I tried entering barcode numbers for CDs and DVDs but more often than not it couldn't find them in any online source it knew about. I guess that's because of the region of the world I live in, and the different publishers etc. we have. I now have a webcam so I will have to try it with some of my books, but I'm guessing there'll be similar problems there, unless I enter the ISBN manually. I also found the cover art was hit or miss, it isn't really important but it's one of the features of DL. As an example, I have quite a few Terry Pratchett books and I really like the covers they have here ( and in the UK I think ). For some reason the US editions have different covers, most of which aren't nearly as nice. I've sometimes thought about buying them from the US because they can be cheaper, but have always got them here just because I like the covers better. It might seem trivial, but DL puts so much emphasis on being a visual tool it makes a difference if you can't actually get covers which look like the books you have. There is a similar problem with CDs and DVDs, but it isn't so bad. That isn't a fault of DL really, it can only work with the information it has available.
Of course over at least a third of my books predate barcodes, so DL isn't much use there either. A lot of them don't have ISBN numbers either. At that point DL doesn't seem to have many advantages over other solutions, except for looking prettier. At least it will try to look up other details and cover art based on minimal information, so that can be handy.
DL is a nifty app but it's far from perfect. If you live in the US ( maybe parts of Europe, I don't know ) and mainly have collections which actually have barcodes, along with a reader/webcam then it may be great. If you live elsewhere and/or have a diverse library of differing ages and countries of origin, you are likely to better off with some other solution. I suspect for large collections the visual aspects of DL aren't going to be that handy. Once I'd entered about 10 DVDs it started to seem a bit gimmicky, especially when a bunch didn't have cover art, so I had a shelf of some DVDs with cover art ( a few of which actually had the correct cover ) and some which were just plain covers. Not really especially appealing to look at face on. I'm not sure the bookcase representation would be that useful for me either. With a catalogue I'm generally going to be looking for a specific book, so I'll just search for the name. I can't imagine browsing the bookshelves in DL, after all I already have the real bookshelves to browse. It's cool to show people though;-).
This is a general reply to those who've also replied and are getting down on your for not being able to remember what books you have, and are telling you perhaps you should read the ones you have then. Only on/., what a bunch ! I'm not sure how many books I have, maybe 900 or so, but I also have similar problems to you with remembering what books I have. I've been thinking of cataloguing my books on my laptop so I can take it to bookshops and check what I have.
Here's something to think about for all those people who think you should know what books you have just because you're read them - what happens if you've got a book out of the library and read it, but now want to remember if you own it or not before buying it ? This happened to me yesterday. I have about 20 Terry Pratchett books. I was looking at one of his older ones which I read several times when I was at school, over 13 years ago. I couldn't for the life of me remember if I had it already.
I have similar problems with Tintin and Asterix books. I've been reading those for over 20 years, mostly from libraries, and have picked up a few of my own. However now that I want to buy more of them for myself, I have a lot of trouble remembering which ones I already have. I know them all so well there's no point trying to look at one to see if I'd read it or not - I've already read every one, multiple times.
Another problem I have is with manga which have multiple books in a series, especially when I haven't been able to buy them all in order. Do I have "Lupin III" number 6 ? Hmm, I'm pretty sure I have 5 and 7 at least...
I collect books, so a lot of the time I'm also looking out for older or different editions, or ones in better condition than those I already have. Duplicates are also often useful to trade with others too, as long as you can remember which are worth having duplicates of.
I often read 2 or 3 fiction books in a week. I also have a lot of non-fiction, not all of which I have read cover to cover but which I have bought because there was something interesting in it. A lot of it is reference as well, bought specifically because it has stuff which I know I'm going to need and will want to be able to look up.
I'm getting to a similar point with movies too. I have about 600 on DVD and VHS. Most DVDs I buy on sale so I don't really have a shopping list and need to pick from what's on offer. I almost always buy movies I've already seen, so that doesn't help. I'm replacing some of my favourite movies I have on VHS ( many of which are taped off TV, so they aren't the greatest quality ) with DVDs when I get the chance, but I can't always remember when I've done that, especially when I happen to chance across something on sale. With DVDs I find it's also much hard to remember which DVDs in a series ( generally anime in my case ) you already have. It's much more difficult than with books, because often all you have to go on are episode names, which I personally don't pay much attention to when I'm watching. Sometimes you get a little synopsis, but it isn't always useful.
It ususally comes close to the top on any list of "Greatest Movies of All Time". It's well worth watching every few years; and it's even more remarkable when you think it was filmed in the middle of the war it portrays. The dialogue is full of quotable lines, several of which like this one have passed into common use.
When I said I was interested in movies, I actually have about 300 movies on DVD and about the same on VHS, from a wide range of genres, countries and eras. "Casablanca" isn't one of them though. I'm well aware of its place in the film pantheon, but it never really stood out for me for some reason. I've seen it about 3 times, the original twice and the colourised once. It's a good movie, but it isn't one of my favourites, and most of the quotes I know are just the usual ones everyone seems to. Most people who know my taste in movies are usually surpised to hear I don't particularly like it, and I'm not really sure myself.
Of Bogey movies from that era I prefer "The Maltese Falcon".
If the B/W doesn;t turn you on you you can always try Turner's colorised version. "I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue."
Casablanca might not be one of my favourite movies, but I do recgonise that the colourised version is a travesty which basically ruins the movie. Thanks for the suggestions anyway.
Thanks very much! I've been wanting to know that for a while, I was sure it couldn't have originated in "High Fidelity". I did actually try Google searching for it some time back, but didn't come across anything enlightening, a whole lot of blog entries IIRC. Of course it's now the second result... I feel kind of embarassed not knowing that, as I'm interested in movies, but then "Casablanca" isn't a favourite of mine.
I should have made this an "Ask Slashdot". It would have been certain to have been accepted, and would have saved my wondering all this time. I can imagine the answers - a bunch would have given me the answer as you kindly did, a bunch would have given me a Google link for "shocked, shocked" and mocked me, a bunch would have ranted at the editors for letting such a vapid question through and a small number would have stuck up for my right to ask such a question.
Anyway, thanks again, and to the others who also provided the answer.
I know it's the fashionable thing to do, but the whole article summary is a troll. I can't imagine all that many people are buying Intel Macs because there's a chance they might boot Windows, or rather any one who is going to be shocked-SHOCKED! if they can't. Not out in the real - not/. - world anyway. Some might be a bit miffed perhaps. I would hope that those who do want to dual boot Windows and OS X are savvy enough to wait to see if it's actually going to be possible before making a purchase. If not, well, sad for them but they have a pretty good OS and machine. I'm sure there'll be some sort of virtualisation environment available which will probably make for a more useful experience than dual booting anyway - much easier to share stuff between OSes when you can run both at the same time. Using Windows on my PC via RDC on one of my Macs is often more convenient than flipping between machines using my KVM.
Many of the people I'm aware of who are buying Intel Macs are people who have been hanging out for a pepped up PowerBook. There are a few who seem to be getting them because they're the "new Mac", more money than sense:-). I only know one or two first time Mac buyers who have been waiting for a spread of Intel Macs ( i.e. mini, iMac and MacBook ) to choose from. None of them seem to be particularly interested in running Windows on their new machines.
I have a 17" Intel iMac, which I got as a replacement machine from Apple for my DTK prototype Intel Mac. It's a great little machine. I have no intention at all of booting Windows on it - that's what my PC is for;-).
BTW, does anyone know where the "shocked-SHOCKED!" thing ( not necessarily with my capitalisation ) came from? I've seen quite a few people saying/writing it, and the only place in the popular media, if you will, that I've seen it is in the movie "High Fidelity" where Joan Cusack says it when having lunch with the Laura character. Is that where it came from? It's been buggin' me:-).
I have a PowerComputing PowerTower 166. Although it had an initial problem where the CPU fan hadn't been connected properly and the CPU suffered a meltdown quite soon after purchase, once that was sorted out it gave great service for a number of years. I think I got it in '96 or '97 and it was only retired about 18 months ago. Apart from the usual sorts of problems, such as the hard drive eventually dying and its Zip drive developing "The Click", all of which could have been an issue with any machine, it was really reliable. It had a hard life too, spread between development and print graphics work, often on about 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. At the time it was faster than the fastest Apple machine ( which was a 604/150 IIRC ) and also way, way cheaper. It was pretty horrible to work on the internals, lots of tortuous cable runs and knuckle cutting edges, but that was its only disadvantage versus a real Apple machine. I know a few people who had clones and they all seemed very happy with them. Of course the clones had to go eventually, but it was my first Mac and now I have 5 Apple machines.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in New Zealand and I use it for checking out rivers and lakes for fishing and access to fishing. Although I have topo maps for most of NZ, as well as topo maps for my handheld GPS, Google Earth is still very useful for getting a better idea of terrain, bush cover etc. I use the measurement tools to work out roughly how far I'm going to need to walk. I also use it to check out tramping tracks and such. Not all of my main area of interest is covered by hi res imagery unfortunately.
When the Tour de France is on I use an overlay with the race route to get a further appreciation of the route and terrain etc.
I'm interested in landscapes so it's good to use to check out various parts of the world.
There's a lot of times when something comes up and someone says "Let's check it out on Google Earth".
I might just add I used NASA WorldWind for some time before GE came out. I changed primarily because there was a Mac version of GE and becase GE had much more high res imagery. Aside from those admittedly important points WorldWind was a better application though, although it's a number of years since used it now. GE has improved over time.
Replying to my own post, but out of the OSes I installed on my Mac Pro late last year Ubuntu was the most hassle because it didn't support the Intel ethernet card. I ended up having to recompile the drivers. Good thing I had other machines with a network connection otherwise I would have been a bit stuck.
I've been running Windows 7 RTM without problems on my Nehalem Mac Pro using Bootcamp for months. It was so painless I've forgotten the details but I think I started off with the Leopard Boot Camp and then updated it with the Boot Camp off the Snow Leopard GM. I did a clean install on a new partition. Windows 7 installed more easily than Vista Ultimate 64.
The movie "Never Say Never Again" clearly illustrated the shortcomings of iris scanning. That was back in the '80s. Pretty easy to fake the US President's iris and get the live warheads to replace the dummy ones. If USAF measures can be circumvented so easily then how can ordinary immigration officials deal with it?
I suppose there's an outside chance it could have all been fictional I guess. With all this reality TV it's so hard to tell what's real these days...
While I'm mainly a Mac guy, I own 7 of them ( one only used for nostalgic gaming ), I do also own a PC. I'm a software developer and I have the PC because I develop for both Mac and Windows. I started off doing Windows development with Win 98 running in Virtual PC on a Mac ( actually compiling on the Mac using Codewarrior's Intel compiler, just testing on Windows ), but inevitably the time came when I needed a real PC.
With the introduction of Intel Macs my need to get a Windows PC has dropped off. I was considering getting a new PC to run Vista but in the end decided to try it using Bootcamp ( Apple's Windows installation/dual boot solution ) on the Intel iMac I already and it's worked fine. I've just recently got an 8 core Mac Pro ( dual quad core Xeon ) and it now has OS X, Vista 64, Windows 7 64 and Ubuntu installed on it. They all seem to be peacefully coexisting. My Mac is also my PC - and my Linux box.
Dual booting isn't actually the greatest solution when you're doing cross platform work. It's much better to have separate machines so you can check in changes on one platform and test them immediately on the other platform. I may still end up getting a 64 bit PC but because I work on a renderer it will probably have to be a pretty grunty one. I may get another Mac Pro to run Windows on, because speccing up a Dell workstation ends up being roughly the same cost ( the Dell is more expensive but has a Quadro graphics card and comes with a monitor ). If I get the Mac Pro I can use it as a Mac rendering slave, plus I get a developer discount!
I have a Power Mac G4 533 which I got in 2001. It is still being used for commercial work every day and is running OS X 10.4. Not bad considering it started with OS 9. Any new Mac software which supports OS X 10.4 would run on it.
It's still going strong I recently got a PCI USB2 card for it to connect a new scanner, after our old SCSI scanner finally died, no problems. I think over its lifetime the only hardware issue has been a dead hard drive.
It will be retired in the next year or so, but mainly because trickle down in machines means it can be replaced by a newer machine.
Having used Macs for about 13 years now, the only time I've been "forced" to buy a new machine has been a couple of months ago with the advent of OS X 10.6 because it only supports Intel Macs. I'm a software developer and I need to support 64 bit OS X 10.6. My other Intel Mac is only 32 bit. I would have got a new machine eventually as my dual 2.7 GHz PowerMac G5 is starting to get a little creaky, but 10.6 forced my hand a bit and I had to get one when it didn't really suit financially.
The only other time I've got a new machine because of something Apple did was when they introduced Intel Macs. I "leased" an Intel iMac from Apple before Intel Macs were available for purchase IIRC and they ended up giving it to me. I'm a bit hazy but I think the lease was more or less a deposit which would be returned when Apple got the machine back. In the end we could keep them and although it was a large deposit it was still a fair bit cheaper than buying the same machine retail.
I have a new Mac Pro as well and it's certainly hefty, but it's still not as heavy as my older dual 2.7 GHz G5 PowerMac with liquid cooling.
On the Steve Jobs/CRT thing, I was using 21" CRTs until 2006 or so. It's never been obligatory to buy Apple displays, in fact my second monitor is a Dell LCD, previously connected using an adapter via VGA to the second connector on the graphics card, now using DVI. I have to say I was glad when my last big CRT died, because I was sick of hauling that thing up and down stairs whenever we moved.
I'd also wager the barbs help keep things like people and imported herbivores at bay as well, and until we go extinct maybe the trees will continue to poke when pecked, even if the poke is intended for extinct peckers.
The poke isn't bad enough to keep people at bay. I don't think I've ever brushed past a lancewood and noticed the barbs aside from the general and distinctive long thin serrated shape of the leaves. If I wanted to mess with the tree the barbs on the leaves wouldn't stop me. I can't really imagine it being too much of a problem even for an imported herbivore like a deer, pig, goat, sheep, cow or possum, something with good grinding teeth at least.
I agree that it does sound like a pretty good defense mechanism though. It's amazing how much the trees change as they get older. I only found out about that recently. We own some land with native bush where lancewoods grow and when I was walking around it asking what things where I got a surprise when I pointed to a largish tree and heard it was a lancewood. I knew the younger ones were lancewood, it's so distinctive.
I live in New Zealand and have had blue penguins swimming around me a few times when I've been surfing. I've also seen the tracks they make through the bush on the way to and from their burrows, they can walk a surprisingly long way and climb pretty steep hills. I haven't seen them at night on the tracks but my mother has. I have seen them in their burrows though, on an island which is a scientific reserve. The burrows are man-made and have lids you can look off to peek inside :-).
I've seen a couple of other types of penguins in the wild too.
Apple didn't really break compatibility with the transition to OS X. They provided two means of compatibility between OS 9 and OS X. One was the Classic environment with was basically an OS 9 VM and the other was the Carbon API. Classic was for apps which weren't ported to Carbon.
Even with the transition to Intel machines Apple didn't completely break compatibility. They provided Rosetta to run PPC apps. I don't think any of the Intel machines support Classic so you can't run your non-Carbon apps anymore, but you could still run a Carbon PPC app on an Intel Mac and OS 9.
Really, the only break with OS 9 that has now come is with OS X 10.5 and its lack of support for 64 bit Carbon. The app I develop is currently based on Carbon. It needs 64 bit support so I'm going to be porting it to Cocoa in the near future. However if I didn't need 64 bit support I could still be using Carbon, although with the expectation that it isn't going to get any new APIs etc. I'm already mixing some Cocoa code in with Carbon code to provide functionality not available through Carbon.
Apple has been pretty good at providing compatibility. I have an app which is 10 years old now and which can still run on both OS 9 and an Intel Mac running OS X 10.5. Apple do obsolete stuff more quickly than Microsoft perhaps. My main work machine is still a dual G5 PowerMac, but OS X 10.6 won't run on it because it's dropping support for PPC. It's 4 year old machine, but still going strong and will continue in commercial use ( illustration rather than development ) when I have to replace it with an Intel one for OS X 10.6.
Regards,
Jo
I hadn't heard of those before, I had to look them up. Interesting. Seems to be a fairly recent thing, looks rather Bolger-esque ( i.e. makes me shudder, but that's just me :-).
O Boatbuilder and yacht design student turned software developer
Hey ! ;-). Can't hurt to establish you know something about what you're talking about around these parts...
Regards,
Jo Meder
Assuming that there needs to be something extra for directional stability, there are also :
- centreboards - which drop or hinge from inside the boat which can be retracted
- lee boards - which hinge from the side of the boat, one on each side. The one on the downwind side is usually lowered, hence the name. The most common example I can think of for these that you might know ( from paintings and such ) is Dutch sailing barges.
- bilge keels - short ( heightwise ) keels which run along the bottom of the boat away from the centreline ( along the bilges ), often oriented on a bit of outward angle vertically.
- water ballast - internal tanks which hold water to balance the boat. This is usually more to help with resisting the heeling/tipping force of the sails, but can be also be used to aid directional stability through good balancing.
All of these methods generally do not add any significant permanent draught to the boat. Many of these already have a strong tradition in freight vessels, for example sailing barges which also needed to be able to move through canals, but of course not on the scope of today's freighters. Although it would cost ( or just be impractical ) to adapt these sorts of things to existing vessels, you can imagine a future when wind assisted freighters might have these designed in from the start. There would not really be too much need for extra dredging etc. The wind provides free energy ( barring the cost of the equipment needed to harness that free energy ) and engines can still be used to offset the problems sailing ships had with adverse conditions. I think we'd really have to be on the last two litres of oil before that sort of thing was seriously looked at though, there have been a number of wind assisted schemes over the years which haven't caught on ( not counting actual sailing ships of course ).Regards,
Jo Meder
Boatbuilder and yacht design student turned software developer...
I'm a Mac developer, and I'm not going nuts. Apple are pretty good about backward compatibility. I first got a Mac just after the first wave of PowerPC machines were introduced. At that time a lot of software was still 68k and it worked fine. Some people do bitch about it, but I was lucky in that I never developed for 68k. I did have to deal with the Mixed Mode Manager and UPPs and such, but thankfully never near and far addressing etc. Overall, 68k software worked fine on my Macs, and I never noticed it being too slow, even with games. The 68k emulator was really good. I can only think of a couple of really old games which didn't want to run on my PPC machine ( Populous was one, I think ). I think they mainly wanted a 16 colour graphics mode or something though.
I have some silly graphics toys I wrote when I first started Mac programming. I wrote them on a 604/166 PPC machine, running OS 7.5.1. I've just started them up on my dual 2.5 GHz G5 running OS X 10.4.6 and they still work fine under Classic. They go really fast though :-). They won't run on my Core Duo iMac however, because Apple jettisoned Classic for Intel machines. I think that's fair enough.
Due to the fact I adopted modern APIs ( Appearance Manager, Navigation Services and such ) in my projects well ahead of the Carbon/OS X transition, getting a Carbon version of my work app going was pretty easy. The thing that took the most work was probably redoing the UI layouts to suit Aqua layout guidelines. Originally Apple wanted us to rewrite our apps completely for OS X, using Yellow Box ( Cocoa, as it became ), but thankfully the big software companies, and I would hope the myriad smaller ones, were heard and we got Carbon ... for backwards compatibility, albeit with a very welcome rationalisation and modernisation of the APIs.
My current main app is not going to be updated for Intel machines. It is a performance intensive app so it doesn't run especially speedily under Rosetta, but it runs much better than I expected. The normal UI interaction speed is fine. It is a bit slower in general rendering, and a quite a lot slower when it's doing a lot of ray tracing, but it really isn't too bad. I would imagine that most PPC apps which aren't performance intensive would be perfectly usable, and reports seem to indicate they are. That's some very helpful backward compatibility there ( or is it forward compatibility ? ). Apple wouldn't have been able to get away with not providing some sort of solution like Rosetta, even though Rosetta itself was a bit of a surprise.
The next major version of my app is already Universal. Getting it going on an Intel Mac was a snap, the main problems I experienced in our code was some endian issues in pixel fiddling routines. We already have a lot of experience with endian issues, so that side of things was no big deal in general, all that was needed was the adjustment of a few flags. We are experiencing some issues with third party code ( open source code which is not very actively maintained for the Mac ), which is a drag, but I look forward to resolving them and contributing the fixes back to the community. Overall the Intel transition has been easy.
It's funny, but my main problems with backward compatibility have mainly come with recent versions of OS X. One example is the adoption of the new HIView system and compositing windows. It has been a barrier to backward compatibility because although it was introduced in 10.2, one of the important controls ( databrowser ) didn't support compositing windows until 10.3. I didn't want to have to juggle compositing and non-compositing windows just to accomodate the databrowser, and I definitely didn't want t
HD-DVD, obviously.
I don't see why CS is inherently a US discipline. It seems to me a lot of the US strength in CS/IT comes from historical reasons ( such as many of the advances which actually brought us computers in the first place of course ), and that it also happens to be where a lot of the money is. Consider how technology has spread around the world - there is no reason why other countries shouldn't feature more prominently in CS. History is just that - history. Things change and the US doesn't have a right to dominate CS/IT. When the US was building code breaking computers in the 1940s, was there even a similar sort of computer in India ( not counting it as part of the British Empire as it then was ;-) ? Of course other countries are going to get stronger in CS and the US is going to lose out to them to some degree.
;-). Decent developers yes, computer scientists no. My brother has an MSc in Marine Biology, he agrees that just having a BSc doesn't make him a scientist and he didn't really start to learn how to be a scientist until he started on his MSc.
/. and it helps to be clear about these things :-).
I work in the computer graphics field. From reading research papers, SIGGRAPH proceedings and the like I know that many, many people not from the US are doing a great deal of research. In fact it might even be the majority. Of course many of those people actually work in the US, and that is a large part of what has made the US strong in CS - so many foreigners are working in the US. The US is very lucky it has been able to attract those people away from their own countries to contribute toward the US dominance of the field to date. As someone not from the US myself I can't help feeling maybe the home countries might have been better off if those people hadn't gone to the US ( not that I'm judging those who've made that choice, by any means ).
Of course something else to consider is how many people actually studying and graduating in CS are what you could really computer scientists. I mean, a CS degree is just what you do to get a development job, it's a prerequisite for so many jobs. I don't have much formal CS training myself, but I've worked with people who have CS degrees and I think it would really be pushing things to say they were computer scientists
Another thing is that the drop is compared to 2000, which is still bubblish times for CS/IT. I used to work in the boatbuilding industry in New Zealand. When I was training NZ won the America's Cup and that caused a massive amount of interest in the marine industries. The year after mine was filled with people who thought they would train to become boatbuilders because there would be so many jobs available in the near future. Many of them had just a vague interest in boats, and some didn't seem interested at all. A fair few didn't even finish the course. My point is, as others have said, whenever there is a "bubble" in some industry you always get a fair number of people looking to enter the industry who are after the job and not really in it because it's what they really want to do. BTW, in case you're wondering I'm no longer in the marine industry due to health problems, but my plan was to work as a boatbuilder ( something I'd already been doing as a hobby ) and gain wider practical experience before moving on to yacht design.
Personally, as a non-US member of the IT industry, who works with lots of other talented non-US members of the IT industry, I'm not sad to see countries other than the US progressing toward the forefront of things. I'd also like to emphasise I feel no ill will toward my colleagues in the US, because, you know, this is
I also apologise to actual computer scientists for using "CS" so loosely in the above...
Regards,
Jo Meder
Well, I'm a cross platform developer ( OS X and Windows ) and I'd far rather have the separate machines. Dual booting for development is a pain, I still have to do it sometimes for OS 9/OS X for one of our products. When we start Linux development I'm going to buy another machine just for Linux instead of dual booting either my PC or Intel iMac ( or one of my PPC macs for that matter, I guess ). For sure it costs a bit more but the convenience is well worth it in the long run. Being able to run things side by side is a big help. Even if you only have one monitor you can use VNC and/or RDC to interact with all your platforms at the same time. Of course I'm paid for my development work, but I can see your point for hobbyists etc.
Regards,
Jo Meder
Living here in New Zealand we can't use the iTunes Music Store. I still use it however, to check out albums before I buy CDs. It's the easiest way I know of previewing albums. I've bought quite a few CDs I hadn't been intending to because of the previews. I've also come across interesting stuff via the iMixes, you kind of start off with one and end up following a chain several links deep and end up checking out something completely different to what you started with. I like it. FWIW I don't buy much recent music either. The iTunes selection isn't complete, but it's very broad.
I have thousands of songs in my iTunes library all without DRM, ripped from my CDs. I got an iPod nano ( first portable music player I've owned since a walkman about 15 years ago ) last week and it's great. I've always been an iPod skeptic, however I got a good price for the nano. It's an excellent little thing, I'm very happy with it. Prior to getting the iPod I mostly used iTunes for streaming my music to other machines and other parts of the house.
Regards,
Jo Meder
How about "all mighty" for "almighty" then? Noone seems to have picked that up. I do not think I have seen any one write "all mighty" like that before, all though I am sure some one must have.
The other day I was buying a bunch of computer science/programming type books from Amazon. One thing I'm really interested in is something with a good description of Big-O ( Oh ) notation and how to assign it to an algorithm. I searched for "Big O" and of course I ended with a whole lot of results about having/giving orgasms, fellatio, cunnilingus etc. Not *quite* what I was looking for...
/. and sexual activity, or lack thereof for someone posting to /., in the box below.
Please include all jokes relating to reading
BTW, does anyone know of a book with a really good treatment of Big-Oh, hopefully including good worked examples ?
Regards,
Jo Meder
Hi,
;-).
I've tried Delicious Library, and didn't find it to be much use. It has nifty features and looks pretty for sure, but it might not be very useful at all if you don't live in the US. I live in New Zealand. When trying out DL I tried entering barcode numbers for CDs and DVDs but more often than not it couldn't find them in any online source it knew about. I guess that's because of the region of the world I live in, and the different publishers etc. we have. I now have a webcam so I will have to try it with some of my books, but I'm guessing there'll be similar problems there, unless I enter the ISBN manually. I also found the cover art was hit or miss, it isn't really important but it's one of the features of DL. As an example, I have quite a few Terry Pratchett books and I really like the covers they have here ( and in the UK I think ). For some reason the US editions have different covers, most of which aren't nearly as nice. I've sometimes thought about buying them from the US because they can be cheaper, but have always got them here just because I like the covers better. It might seem trivial, but DL puts so much emphasis on being a visual tool it makes a difference if you can't actually get covers which look like the books you have. There is a similar problem with CDs and DVDs, but it isn't so bad. That isn't a fault of DL really, it can only work with the information it has available.
Of course over at least a third of my books predate barcodes, so DL isn't much use there either. A lot of them don't have ISBN numbers either. At that point DL doesn't seem to have many advantages over other solutions, except for looking prettier. At least it will try to look up other details and cover art based on minimal information, so that can be handy.
DL is a nifty app but it's far from perfect. If you live in the US ( maybe parts of Europe, I don't know ) and mainly have collections which actually have barcodes, along with a reader/webcam then it may be great. If you live elsewhere and/or have a diverse library of differing ages and countries of origin, you are likely to better off with some other solution. I suspect for large collections the visual aspects of DL aren't going to be that handy. Once I'd entered about 10 DVDs it started to seem a bit gimmicky, especially when a bunch didn't have cover art, so I had a shelf of some DVDs with cover art ( a few of which actually had the correct cover ) and some which were just plain covers. Not really especially appealing to look at face on. I'm not sure the bookcase representation would be that useful for me either. With a catalogue I'm generally going to be looking for a specific book, so I'll just search for the name. I can't imagine browsing the bookshelves in DL, after all I already have the real bookshelves to browse. It's cool to show people though
Regards,
Jo Meder
Hi,
/., what a bunch ! I'm not sure how many books I have, maybe 900 or so, but I also have similar problems to you with remembering what books I have. I've been thinking of cataloguing my books on my laptop so I can take it to bookshops and check what I have.
This is a general reply to those who've also replied and are getting down on your for not being able to remember what books you have, and are telling you perhaps you should read the ones you have then. Only on
Here's something to think about for all those people who think you should know what books you have just because you're read them - what happens if you've got a book out of the library and read it, but now want to remember if you own it or not before buying it ? This happened to me yesterday. I have about 20 Terry Pratchett books. I was looking at one of his older ones which I read several times when I was at school, over 13 years ago. I couldn't for the life of me remember if I had it already.
I have similar problems with Tintin and Asterix books. I've been reading those for over 20 years, mostly from libraries, and have picked up a few of my own. However now that I want to buy more of them for myself, I have a lot of trouble remembering which ones I already have. I know them all so well there's no point trying to look at one to see if I'd read it or not - I've already read every one, multiple times.
Another problem I have is with manga which have multiple books in a series, especially when I haven't been able to buy them all in order. Do I have "Lupin III" number 6 ? Hmm, I'm pretty sure I have 5 and 7 at least...
I collect books, so a lot of the time I'm also looking out for older or different editions, or ones in better condition than those I already have. Duplicates are also often useful to trade with others too, as long as you can remember which are worth having duplicates of.
I often read 2 or 3 fiction books in a week. I also have a lot of non-fiction, not all of which I have read cover to cover but which I have bought because there was something interesting in it. A lot of it is reference as well, bought specifically because it has stuff which I know I'm going to need and will want to be able to look up.
I'm getting to a similar point with movies too. I have about 600 on DVD and VHS. Most DVDs I buy on sale so I don't really have a shopping list and need to pick from what's on offer. I almost always buy movies I've already seen, so that doesn't help. I'm replacing some of my favourite movies I have on VHS ( many of which are taped off TV, so they aren't the greatest quality ) with DVDs when I get the chance, but I can't always remember when I've done that, especially when I happen to chance across something on sale. With DVDs I find it's also much hard to remember which DVDs in a series ( generally anime in my case ) you already have. It's much more difficult than with books, because often all you have to go on are episode names, which I personally don't pay much attention to when I'm watching. Sometimes you get a little synopsis, but it isn't always useful.
Regards,
Jo Meder
It ususally comes close to the top on any list of "Greatest Movies of All Time". It's well worth watching every few years; and it's even more remarkable when you think it was filmed in the middle of the war it portrays. The dialogue is full of quotable lines, several of which like this one have passed into common use.
When I said I was interested in movies, I actually have about 300 movies on DVD and about the same on VHS, from a wide range of genres, countries and eras. "Casablanca" isn't one of them though. I'm well aware of its place in the film pantheon, but it never really stood out for me for some reason. I've seen it about 3 times, the original twice and the colourised once. It's a good movie, but it isn't one of my favourites, and most of the quotes I know are just the usual ones everyone seems to. Most people who know my taste in movies are usually surpised to hear I don't particularly like it, and I'm not really sure myself.
Of Bogey movies from that era I prefer "The Maltese Falcon".
If the B/W doesn;t turn you on you you can always try Turner's colorised version. "I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue."
Casablanca might not be one of my favourite movies, but I do recgonise that the colourised version is a travesty which basically ruins the movie. Thanks for the suggestions anyway.
Regards,
Jo Meder
Thanks very much! I've been wanting to know that for a while, I was sure it couldn't have originated in "High Fidelity". I did actually try Google searching for it some time back, but didn't come across anything enlightening, a whole lot of blog entries IIRC. Of course it's now the second result... I feel kind of embarassed not knowing that, as I'm interested in movies, but then "Casablanca" isn't a favourite of mine.
I should have made this an "Ask Slashdot". It would have been certain to have been accepted, and would have saved my wondering all this time. I can imagine the answers - a bunch would have given me the answer as you kindly did, a bunch would have given me a Google link for "shocked, shocked" and mocked me, a bunch would have ranted at the editors for letting such a vapid question through and a small number would have stuck up for my right to ask such a question.
Anyway, thanks again, and to the others who also provided the answer.
Regards,
Jo Meder
I know it's the fashionable thing to do, but the whole article summary is a troll. I can't imagine all that many people are buying Intel Macs because there's a chance they might boot Windows, or rather any one who is going to be shocked-SHOCKED! if they can't. Not out in the real - not /. - world anyway. Some might be a bit miffed perhaps. I would hope that those who do want to dual boot Windows and OS X are savvy enough to wait to see if it's actually going to be possible before making a purchase. If not, well, sad for them but they have a pretty good OS and machine. I'm sure there'll be some sort of virtualisation environment available which will probably make for a more useful experience than dual booting anyway - much easier to share stuff between OSes when you can run both at the same time. Using Windows on my PC via RDC on one of my Macs is often more convenient than flipping between machines using my KVM.
:-). I only know one or two first time Mac buyers who have been waiting for a spread of Intel Macs ( i.e. mini, iMac and MacBook ) to choose from. None of them seem to be particularly interested in running Windows on their new machines.
;-).
:-).
Many of the people I'm aware of who are buying Intel Macs are people who have been hanging out for a pepped up PowerBook. There are a few who seem to be getting them because they're the "new Mac", more money than sense
I have a 17" Intel iMac, which I got as a replacement machine from Apple for my DTK prototype Intel Mac. It's a great little machine. I have no intention at all of booting Windows on it - that's what my PC is for
BTW, does anyone know where the "shocked-SHOCKED!" thing ( not necessarily with my capitalisation ) came from? I've seen quite a few people saying/writing it, and the only place in the popular media, if you will, that I've seen it is in the movie "High Fidelity" where Joan Cusack says it when having lunch with the Laura character. Is that where it came from? It's been buggin' me
Regards,
Jo Meder
Hi,
I have a PowerComputing PowerTower 166. Although it had an initial problem where the CPU fan hadn't been connected properly and the CPU suffered a meltdown quite soon after purchase, once that was sorted out it gave great service for a number of years. I think I got it in '96 or '97 and it was only retired about 18 months ago. Apart from the usual sorts of problems, such as the hard drive eventually dying and its Zip drive developing "The Click", all of which could have been an issue with any machine, it was really reliable. It had a hard life too, spread between development and print graphics work, often on about 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. At the time it was faster than the fastest Apple machine ( which was a 604/150 IIRC ) and also way, way cheaper. It was pretty horrible to work on the internals, lots of tortuous cable runs and knuckle cutting edges, but that was its only disadvantage versus a real Apple machine. I know a few people who had clones and they all seemed very happy with them. Of course the clones had to go eventually, but it was my first Mac and now I have 5 Apple machines.
Regards,
Jo Meder