Tell that to my Win2k machine at work that needs to be restarted 3-5 times (along with the same amount of logging out and back in) a day so that our network and database-driven apps can authenticate properly, or even just to get Outlook working correctly. Even then, our net services are always giving us grief. Granted, a substantial part of the responsibility lies on the server end of our network apps (Win2k servers running MS services along w/ Oracle database), but the client end is responsible for at least 1-2 of those daily restarts. Our tech dept. is so overworked as it is, we can't be asking them to rebuild our machines (aka reinstalling Windows) weekly or monthly to get them running the way they're supposed to. Add to that the worms and viruses, and we spend a huge of time not being able to get our work done, costing the company a whole lot more than to replace our setup with a quality one, based on stable open-sourced technology. Forget OSX (though that would be heaven), just gimme a linux box or something that isn't possessed by the Macroshaft crapiness voodoo. The problem, of course is proprietary Windows-only software we use for our lab data input (I'm a microbiologist at a rather large pharmaceutical company). WINE might be able to help there, but good luck getting the software's developer supporting that... So basically, we're screwed, and our company is losing very significant amounts of money due to lost productivity and general lack of reliability. So, in summary, Win NT based OSs are no panacea, and I've found them to be a huge kludge to get working right and fix when something goes wrong. Nothing ever works like it's supposed to all the time, and unreliability has become the norm. So we are doomed to rebooting and logging out and back in, and just postponing work until some app decides to work like it's supposed to.
Those are songs they offered for download (aka sharing). There is no info on any songs they were downloading, or whether they kept track of that. It seems they're going after people sharing songs with others, trying to turn everyone into leechers, thereby collapsing the system as no one uploads, except in other countries maybe.
Awright! Now I can get a Dual 2GHz G5 w/ stock options and an upgrade to a 9800 Pro graphics card for $2969, about $100 less than when I priced it out yesterday. Oh happy day. It's like they said here, you're a student, have a free 9800 Pro, you'll be needing it for all your studying . . . how generous. My order is soooooo placed.
He's wrong because the -R media is cheaper for the very reason that it's sold in higher volumes with greater competition, driving the price down. The low price is an indication of the format's success, not its demise.
... which is where the 2 GHz G5's 1 GHz frontside bus and point-to-point ASIC get a chance to shine. Architecturally, the G5 should be a good performer, even once your code outgrows the paltry 512K L2 cache, something that cannot be said for Apple's current crop of computers, with their 133 - 166 MHz busses.
It's called WebCore, based on kHTML. It is not a low level library accessed by several applications, but a open-sourced library that can be integrated into any app, and has recently been incorporated into iTunes, for the iTunes Music Store. Since each app runs its own copy of the library in their own memory space, it's less efficient, and more redundant, so one WebCore based app crashing will not affect others. This is contrary to the Windows IE HTML rendering DLL, which is used simultaneously by several apps, including Outlook and others, as I understand it. Given the choice, I'll pick the higher memory use and lower interdependency any day.
It seems that IE 5.x on MacOS X is not affected by this. Not that it's such a big deal, I imagine any affected Windows versions of IE can be relaunched and people will just avoid going to places with such code. I fail to see the significance. Oh well, glad to see their Mac port is more stable in this regard.
It's Apple's MPEG 2 encoder that requires a G4 to get decent encoding rates on the Mac. Yes you can use Media Pipe with mpeg2enc, but it will take a longer time on a G3, as that is also optimized somewhat for the G4's Altivec SIMD unit. If you're going to be doing any video work, the G4 will prove itself to be a great benefit.
Because that can easily be circumvented. If they upgrade their hardware and don't provide OS 9 support for the new hardware, it will be easier to say they're cutting costs by not developing for OS 9, and people will be less upset that the new Macs suddenly only boot OS X.
The FireWire 2 specs out at 800 Mbps over copper cables like the current ones, and 3.2 Gbps over fiber optic cable. This is more than enough to compete with Serial-ATA for internal drives.
Yep, he is probably pretty steamed. This is definitely good support for an entire lineup refresh, which was already sort of announced when SJ said all new hardware in Jan, 2003 would only boot in MacOS X.
Apple has already announced that starting in Jan, 2003, all Apple hardware will only boot in OS X. To me, this means a large-scale accross-the-board upgrade for the entire Mac line. This new news only confirms that possibility. On a side note, I give the Mac hacking community three days (after people actually start to receive these things) to find a way to boot into OS 9 anyways.
Actually, they are person to person. They are client/server combos which happen to be separated into two apps which focus on wither managing files on your cmoputer, or accessing those on others. Other P2P software such as Gnutella, WinMX, Kazaa and others are just combined client/server apps, but they work the same way, except that you can search for files on all servers on the network, as their is no authentication control. These are all 'P2P', but just work in different ways, all person to person; from the person running the server to you being a client on that server, or vice-versa. P2P usually refers to the clients and servers being end-users on the internet, vs. commercial servers hosted on guaranteed bandwidth.
Check out this hint that shows how to add an image handling preference pane to Chimera's prefs. It works great, and adds that most essential feature you mentioned.
Just grab the OS X native binaries from versiontracker.com . ..
Re:Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge
on
Review: EyeTV
·
· Score: 1
You can actually find the Dazzle DV Bridge for about the same price by now, so there's no competition, Eye TV loses. That is unless the TV tuner is key for you, but you can still rig up some programmed recording using AppleScript, cron and Final Cut Pro and just use it with whatever tuner works for your TV service.
Yeah, I switched my secondary iTools account to fastmail, and it works great. The only problem with the free account is there is no outgoiung mail server, so you have to use your ISP's. I can live with this, so i switched over. Fastmail also gives you a wide selection of domain names to chose from, and has a webmail function, so you can check your mail on the road as well. Yay for fastmail.fm!
It creates a swap drive when I set the swap partition to its own drive, separate from the startup disk. Same filesystem, different volume. This undeniably speeds up VM-intensive tasks, as the drive will be dedicated to VM read/writes, while the application that's running the task and data used in the task is being read/written from its own drive. This is possible using the method I have described. Even if the fragmentation is irrelevant, the fact that VM gets its dedicated drive gives VM-intensive tasks a significant boost in performance. Since the linux install probably had the VM swap partition as simply a partition of the same drive the apps and data reside on, this is all pointless if fragmentation is a non-issue, and we can assume that this is not a source of error in comparing linux to osx as in the article.
Yes, and this gives OS X quite a performance penalty. It is easy to add swap partition support to OS X by editing your/etc/rc file manually or by using the simple Swap Cop utility and then using the program Swap Relocator to get post-10.2 MacOS X to use those prefs set in/etc/rc. The Darwin team at Apple is supposedly working on this, and there will be a simple way to assign VM swap partitions in one of the next releases.
Here is the mail I sent them from the web-form email contacting option in their Help section. Feel free to use it as a template for your comments to them:
I was going to sign up for a PayPal account, but have just been informed that AbiWord has had their donation PayPal account robbed, highlighting the lack of security and customer protection within your service. The coercion to give bank account information upon payment receipt is unacceptable, and your use of debit functions rather than credit on cards that support both shows great disregard for your customers' protection offered by VISA and other credit services. Until you rethink your service with the thought of protecting your customers' transactions, and working for them to make PayPal as convenient, customer-friendly and secure as possible, I will keep using my credit card and checks through snailmail for all online transactions.
It's Windows Media Player format, with a really crappy selection of music . . . the other guy's right, nothing to see here . . . as long as they try to distribute in closed formats, they will fail time and time again. The only choice for them is to embrace the internet and release all their music in MP3 format for pay. I know I will never pay for a WMA track.
Actually, QT w/ the Sorenson codec is most efficient on most networks, due to the VBR encoding, and QuickTime has 'Skip Protection' since v. 5.0 (broadcaster v. 3.0). Sorenson media looks great at bitrates of 100 kbit all the way to the 1 Mbit level, but beyond that, you should be using MPEG. Real player looks incredibly blocky at low bitrates, and still pixelated at high bitrates. QuickTime also makes sense for small, underground video distribution, since it's free, and will very soon have MPEG4 ISO encoding support for a minimal fee ($30 for the pro version), along with decoding for free.
QuickTime might not be able to adjust the bitrate as network conditions change, but the stream starts out more efficient, with VBR encoding, and the skip protection buffering is usually sufficient to make up for changes. If the bandwidth available is too low to play the stream, then you have to launch a lower bitrate stream, or wait until bandwidth is available, but you won't get downshifted to a lower bitrate. This ensures a certain level of quality that many distributors count on to ensure that viewers get a satisfactory experience, and not some blocky mess with painfully bad sound. QuickTime is very much a viable option for many different streaming content distributions, and whould be considered in any streaming endeavor.
No current consumer DVD burners (general format) can write double-layered discs. We're pretty much screwed on this until the next generation of DVD burners. Hopefully, this will be happening in the not-too-distant future. . .
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Tell that to my Win2k machine at work that needs to be restarted 3-5 times (along with the same amount of logging out and back in) a day so that our network and database-driven apps can authenticate properly, or even just to get Outlook working correctly. Even then, our net services are always giving us grief. Granted, a substantial part of the responsibility lies on the server end of our network apps (Win2k servers running MS services along w/ Oracle database), but the client end is responsible for at least 1-2 of those daily restarts. Our tech dept. is so overworked as it is, we can't be asking them to rebuild our machines (aka reinstalling Windows) weekly or monthly to get them running the way they're supposed to. Add to that the worms and viruses, and we spend a huge of time not being able to get our work done, costing the company a whole lot more than to replace our setup with a quality one, based on stable open-sourced technology. Forget OSX (though that would be heaven), just gimme a linux box or something that isn't possessed by the Macroshaft crapiness voodoo. The problem, of course is proprietary Windows-only software we use for our lab data input (I'm a microbiologist at a rather large pharmaceutical company). WINE might be able to help there, but good luck getting the software's developer supporting that... So basically, we're screwed, and our company is losing very significant amounts of money due to lost productivity and general lack of reliability. So, in summary, Win NT based OSs are no panacea, and I've found them to be a huge kludge to get working right and fix when something goes wrong. Nothing ever works like it's supposed to all the time, and unreliability has become the norm. So we are doomed to rebooting and logging out and back in, and just postponing work until some app decides to work like it's supposed to.
Here ya go: M$'s WMV 9 codec for WMP 6.4 & 7.0 Gotta give the credit to Google for locating the site...
Those are songs they offered for download (aka sharing). There is no info on any songs they were downloading, or whether they kept track of that. It seems they're going after people sharing songs with others, trying to turn everyone into leechers, thereby collapsing the system as no one uploads, except in other countries maybe.
Awright! Now I can get a Dual 2GHz G5 w/ stock options and an upgrade to a 9800 Pro graphics card for $2969, about $100 less than when I priced it out yesterday. Oh happy day. It's like they said here, you're a student, have a free 9800 Pro, you'll be needing it for all your studying . . . how generous. My order is soooooo placed.
He's wrong because the -R media is cheaper for the very reason that it's sold in higher volumes with greater competition, driving the price down. The low price is an indication of the format's success, not its demise.
... which is where the 2 GHz G5's 1 GHz frontside bus and point-to-point ASIC get a chance to shine. Architecturally, the G5 should be a good performer, even once your code outgrows the paltry 512K L2 cache, something that cannot be said for Apple's current crop of computers, with their 133 - 166 MHz busses.
It's called WebCore, based on kHTML. It is not a low level library accessed by several applications, but a open-sourced library that can be integrated into any app, and has recently been incorporated into iTunes, for the iTunes Music Store. Since each app runs its own copy of the library in their own memory space, it's less efficient, and more redundant, so one WebCore based app crashing will not affect others. This is contrary to the Windows IE HTML rendering DLL, which is used simultaneously by several apps, including Outlook and others, as I understand it. Given the choice, I'll pick the higher memory use and lower interdependency any day.
It seems that IE 5.x on MacOS X is not affected by this. Not that it's such a big deal, I imagine any affected Windows versions of IE can be relaunched and people will just avoid going to places with such code. I fail to see the significance. Oh well, glad to see their Mac port is more stable in this regard.
It's Apple's MPEG 2 encoder that requires a G4 to get decent encoding rates on the Mac. Yes you can use Media Pipe with mpeg2enc, but it will take a longer time on a G3, as that is also optimized somewhat for the G4's Altivec SIMD unit. If you're going to be doing any video work, the G4 will prove itself to be a great benefit.
Because that can easily be circumvented. If they upgrade their hardware and don't provide OS 9 support for the new hardware, it will be easier to say they're cutting costs by not developing for OS 9, and people will be less upset that the new Macs suddenly only boot OS X.
The FireWire 2 specs out at 800 Mbps over copper cables like the current ones, and 3.2 Gbps over fiber optic cable. This is more than enough to compete with Serial-ATA for internal drives.
Yep, he is probably pretty steamed. This is definitely good support for an entire lineup refresh, which was already sort of announced when SJ said all new hardware in Jan, 2003 would only boot in MacOS X.
Apple has already announced that starting in Jan, 2003, all Apple hardware will only boot in OS X. To me, this means a large-scale accross-the-board upgrade for the entire Mac line. This new news only confirms that possibility. On a side note, I give the Mac hacking community three days (after people actually start to receive these things) to find a way to boot into OS 9 anyways.
Actually, they are person to person. They are client/server combos which happen to be separated into two apps which focus on wither managing files on your cmoputer, or accessing those on others. Other P2P software such as Gnutella, WinMX, Kazaa and others are just combined client/server apps, but they work the same way, except that you can search for files on all servers on the network, as their is no authentication control. These are all 'P2P', but just work in different ways, all person to person; from the person running the server to you being a client on that server, or vice-versa. P2P usually refers to the clients and servers being end-users on the internet, vs. commercial servers hosted on guaranteed bandwidth.
Check out this hint that shows how to add an image handling preference pane to Chimera's prefs. It works great, and adds that most essential feature you mentioned.
Just grab the OS X native binaries from versiontracker.com . . .
You can actually find the Dazzle DV Bridge for about the same price by now, so there's no competition, Eye TV loses. That is unless the TV tuner is key for you, but you can still rig up some programmed recording using AppleScript, cron and Final Cut Pro and just use it with whatever tuner works for your TV service.
Yeah, I switched my secondary iTools account to fastmail, and it works great. The only problem with the free account is there is no outgoiung mail server, so you have to use your ISP's. I can live with this, so i switched over. Fastmail also gives you a wide selection of domain names to chose from, and has a webmail function, so you can check your mail on the road as well. Yay for fastmail.fm!
It creates a swap drive when I set the swap partition to its own drive, separate from the startup disk. Same filesystem, different volume. This undeniably speeds up VM-intensive tasks, as the drive will be dedicated to VM read/writes, while the application that's running the task and data used in the task is being read/written from its own drive. This is possible using the method I have described. Even if the fragmentation is irrelevant, the fact that VM gets its dedicated drive gives VM-intensive tasks a significant boost in performance. Since the linux install probably had the VM swap partition as simply a partition of the same drive the apps and data reside on, this is all pointless if fragmentation is a non-issue, and we can assume that this is not a source of error in comparing linux to osx as in the article.
Yes, and this gives OS X quite a performance penalty. It is easy to add swap partition support to OS X by editing your /etc/rc file manually or by using the simple Swap Cop utility and then using the program Swap Relocator to get post-10.2 MacOS X to use those prefs set in /etc/rc. The Darwin team at Apple is supposedly working on this, and there will be a simple way to assign VM swap partitions in one of the next releases.
Here is the mail I sent them from the web-form email contacting option in their Help section. Feel free to use it as a template for your comments to them:
I was going to sign up for a PayPal account, but have just been informed that AbiWord has had their donation PayPal account robbed, highlighting the lack of security and customer protection within your service. The coercion to give bank account information upon payment receipt is unacceptable, and your use of debit functions rather than credit on cards that support both shows great disregard for your customers' protection offered by VISA and other credit services. Until you rethink your service with the thought of protecting your customers' transactions, and working for them to make PayPal as convenient, customer-friendly and
secure as possible, I will keep using my credit card and checks through snailmail for all online transactions.
It's Windows Media Player format, with a really crappy selection of music . . . the other guy's right, nothing to see here . . . as long as they try to distribute in closed formats, they will fail time and time again. The only choice for them is to embrace the internet and release all their music in MP3 format for pay. I know I will never pay for a WMA track.
Actually, QT w/ the Sorenson codec is most efficient on most networks, due to the VBR encoding, and QuickTime has 'Skip Protection' since v. 5.0 (broadcaster v. 3.0). Sorenson media looks great at bitrates of 100 kbit all the way to the 1 Mbit level, but beyond that, you should be using MPEG. Real player looks incredibly blocky at low bitrates, and still pixelated at high bitrates. QuickTime also makes sense for small, underground video distribution, since it's free, and will very soon have MPEG4 ISO encoding support for a minimal fee ($30 for the pro version), along with decoding for free.
QuickTime might not be able to adjust the bitrate as network conditions change, but the stream starts out more efficient, with VBR encoding, and the skip protection buffering is usually sufficient to make up for changes. If the bandwidth available is too low to play the stream, then you have to launch a lower bitrate stream, or wait until bandwidth is available, but you won't get downshifted to a lower bitrate. This ensures a certain level of quality that many distributors count on to ensure that viewers get a satisfactory experience, and not some blocky mess with painfully bad sound. QuickTime is very much a viable option for many different streaming content distributions, and whould be considered in any streaming endeavor.
No current consumer DVD burners (general format) can write double-layered discs. We're pretty much screwed on this until the next generation of DVD burners. Hopefully, this will be happening in the not-too-distant future. . .
Actually, here is some cheap 2x DVD-R media, at $2.85 a pop. 1x DVD-R media can be had for as little as $2.29 a pop at meritline.com.