First of all, payments should be made directly to representatives, hence the open nature of the system. The site merely organizes the donations and lets people come together and discuss the issue at hand and the most effective method of lobbying that issue. There could be sample letters to representatives, or just ideas for letters, and people could then print it out and send it off along with a check. This is a grassroots lobbying campaign for general geek interests. The site should not handle any of the payments, and instead get people interested in making the contributions themselves, along with constructive letters supporting our interests. The site would take a life of its own, and many different political groups might find it an excellent resource for building support for their causes. There could be some educated discussion of the issues at hand, and people would be encouraged to voice their concerns to their local representatives. This would not be too hard to impliment, and could have a significant impact on our political system if enough people participate.
Yeah, you could arrest every single college student, and a good portion of the rest of the population, and turn your country into a police state; or you could simply produce a new distribution model that would work with the system and encourage people to pay for their content. It is still a pain in the ass to obtain content reliably and in good quality, or at any decent speed. If I could pay a small fee (1-25 depending on the content, or a monthly subscription to a service) to be able to download the content into a format that can be converted into any other format (like a QuickTime codec), so that I could use the content how I see fit on any device that might play that sort of content. I don't want to stream content and I don't want to download an encrypted file. I want total control of what I'm going to purchase, along with value added material, such as info, pictures and lyrics if it's a song as an attached PDF file, and it must be delivered quickly and reliably. Music should be delivered in MP3 or OGG Vorbis format, as they are freely re-encoded, and video should be MPEG4 ISO. This is something that's really amiss on the internet today, and something that I'm sure a huge amount of people would love to pay for. Interoperability with various hardware players is key, and I have to be able to re-encode the content to any format I want. Any streaming services must be free and funded by advertising. If I can't download the media ad-free, I'm not going to pay for it. This is the way it's going to have to be if they want to work with the internet and draw people away from piracy. The fact is, that right now, it is more convenient to get your content online from bootleg sources than to purchase the content legally. If they change this and make the content available on demand over the internet in standard formats, it would be well-worth paying for, and the demand is huge for these services. If 350,000 films are being downloaded now every day, with all the trouble people go through and bad quality they put up with, imagine how many would be willing to pay a reasonable fee to be able to download that content from a legitimate source reliably, quickly and in guaranteed quality. The fact that so many people are pirating movies should only encourage the MPAA and RIAA to see the oportunity they're missing, and to change their distribution system. This is going to put a lot of the physical media distribution industry out of business, but it is for the best, for the creators, providers, consumers and the environment. We are bound to move to an electronic distribution system, so they might as well get started, before the pirates get more organized, and figure out better ways to capture and distribute content on their own. All we want to do is watch movies and listen to music . . .
Why hasn't this been started in the technical community? There could be a slash site with info on representatives with the potential to support or harm our interests as geeks, and organize some contribution/lobbying for certain causes. I'm sure the support would be there, and this might end up having a significant impact on US politics. Imagine a site with the traffic of/. geared towards lobbying representatives for causes we care about. The site would have to be sectioned geographically. If well-implimented, this could change the way democracy works, with people actively supporting causes they care about, and a government resposive directly to the people. PAC groups, or Political Action Commities already can serve a similar function, but the organization is lacking to get individuals involved in their political system, and business interests are often at the heart of such groups. A sort of open-sourced lobbying would be a good way to bring the influence on the political system back into the hands of the people it is meant to represent. Work should start on this immediately, although I personally lack the technical ability, or time to impliment such a system. Time to ask the community for some help.
It provides an alternative to other Mac sites with a discussion-based theme. Macslash and the other / sites are cool, but it's a pain to have accounts at all those sites, whereas here, we can just use our/. accounts and post with the convenience of the/. cookie in your Browser's cookies. It makes it convenient for all these Mac users to join the discussion and comment on different stories. Due to this, I'm sure we will get rich discussions here, not available on other Mac sites, due to the volume of/. users. If the main stories keep getting posted to the main/. page, and if they get some additional Mac heads to post interesting Mac-related articles to this section exclusively, this could be a good alternative to other Mac news sites. I'm all for it, as long as they don't stop posting important Apple stories to the main page.
Congratulations, you are the proud owner of one of Apple's worst line of computers ever produced. The 6400 and slightly upgraded 6500 performa series were the worst-designed Macs ever produced, crippled by Apple so that it wouldn't encroach on the higher-end models. The hardware was almost completely non-upgradeable, with slow and small hard drives (limited to 4GB, I believe), 1 non-standard PCI slot, crappy, non-upgradeable video (that often failed or turned different colors) and many other problems. The PowerComputing clone (although I think clones came out a little later than the 6400 glory days) would definitely have been a better deal, although they are not too reliable, and most of the ones I've seen have broken down since then, whereas the 6400s are still (unfortunately) chugging along, causing pain to any user trying to use modern apps on them. A headless linux fileserver has got to be the best possible use of this terrible lemon of a computer.
The.mp4 file format is the new ISO format for MPEG 4 files, and it is based on the QuickTime.mov (open) format. The MPEG 4 ISO specification also includes a video codec and an audio codec based on wavelet compression. These codecs, along with the MPEG 4 file format make up the MPEG 4 ISO.
Actually, no, you can get an adapter to connect an ADC monitor (which includes DVI, power and USB in a single connector) to a DVI-compatible video card, plus a USB connector and power source.
Actually, OS X's task manager takes full advantage of the dual procs to distribute processes and threads (for threaded apps) evenly, and they benchmark about twice as well as single proc. machines. The other thing is that a 1 GHz G4 != 1GHz Athlon or P4, and even a 1GHz Xeon, with the G4 besting them all. The altivec unit on the G4 is not really comparable to the SSE and 3DNow of Intel and AMD, with altivec finding applications in many more computations, and many software programs take advantage of this. The tasks that really take a long time, such as encoding/decoding, encrypting/decrypting, compressing/decompressing and 2D/3D rendering if you're a graphics pro are all greatly accelerated by the G4's altivec unit. A dual GHz G4 will be much faster at many tasks than the 2000+ Athlon, which is clocked at what, 1600 MHz? You really do need to go with the dual Athlon 1600+ or 1800+ for comparable processing power. When you add a comparable video card, a good mobo, 10/100/1000 BT ethernet, IEEE 1394 ports, you start approaching the $3k price tag and considering spending the little extra for the better OS and user experience.
Actually, the proc. speed does not have to be a whole multiple of the cache clock, as demonstrated by the recently discontinued 733 and 867 models (133 MHz memory bus clock) and the current 1 GHz model. They can do fractions of multiplier speeds, and can go all the way to 12X, I believe, with the Motorola MaxBus controller. So this is not a 'quantum upgrade' outside of marketing speak, but rather another incrimental upgrade of 66 - 200 MHz depending on the model.
It looks like we're going to have to boycott Universal Music. Don't buy any more of their products or any products you know are affiliated with them. This is the only way to let the message out that we want control over the music we buy. I, for one, will be boycotting Universal, and getting as many people as possible to do the same. Please do likewise.
"First of all, the menu bar at the top of the screen. While I understand the appeal, it breaks any hope of using sloppy focus - you can be in a situation where you simply can't get to the menu bar of an app without crossing over another application's window, which would give it the focus and change the menubar. "
How does crossing an app's window give it the focus? You would have to click on its window to bring focus to it. The menu bar is focused to the app last used or clicked on, either in the dock, or on one of its windows. I don't see what is confusing or unintuitive about this, and if you need access to an app's menu bar, click on one of its windows, finder or dock icons, and focus will be brought to it. The menu bar on the top provides great intuitive access to often-used commands, where you know that if you bring the cursor to the top of the screen and click, you will be selecting a menu. This makes menu using more efficient in general, so you don't need to maximize an app's window to fill the screen in order to use it, but can work with many windows from different apps at the same time, and drag-n-drop items between them.
I didn't mean for this to get so long, but to summarize, the menu bar design of the MacOS allows for a better experience working with many apps. If you need to give a command to an app, you bring focus to it by clicking on one of its windows, or its dock icon, and then you give the command, either by keyboard combo or with the menu bar. This is what you have to do with other window managers, but in this implimentation, you always know where to find the menu bar.
I just wanted to voice my support for MacOS X when it comes to multihoming. It automatically detects the fastest connection available from the different ones set up in the Network System Pref. This is great when an Airport (802.11b) network becomes available, or one of your providers goes down at any time. It will even trigger a dialup connection if the broadband goes down, or switch broadband providers if you're lucky enough to have several. This truly works very well, and for laptop owners, it's a crucial capability.
You're thinking of the word "Ghey", meaning lame, as opposed to the word "Gay", meaning homosexual or happy, depending on your era. "Ghey" is a perfectly acceptable word, not to be confused with "Gay", so this is not using homosexuality as a negative label. I am pushing for the broad acceptance of the word "Ghey" in the English (well American anyway) language, so as to avoid critique from Gay rights groups and individuals. So the next time someone says "you shouldn't say 'Gay' like that", you can say, "oh no, I'm saying 'Ghey' as in 'lame', not 'Gay', silly goose!".
Your X environment is a Mac application that you can switch to by clicking on its window or on its dock or double clicking on its finder icon. Once the X environment is frontmost, you can switch frontmost apps the way you usually do with whatever window manager.
A good (and silent) solution for this would be to use this material to transfer the heat from a hot component to some circulating water in a condenser type setup. There could be an external container of recycled water that could be replaced when it gets too hot. This could even be automatic, with an electric valve and thermometer. This material could efficiently move the heat from the component to the water, which has a very high heat capacity, so the external container wouldn't have to be flushed very often. This might be a viable cooling method as processors and other components run at rapidly increasing temperatures.
They didn't make you dl the 15 MB updater. You could have used the Apple Software Update Preference and just downloaded the several hundred kb updater from 10.0.2 to 10.0.3...
"2) all my images seem to have kept their Picture View 1.1 bindings, and I don't know an easy way of changing the bindings for the several 100 images."
This is really easy, just select all the files you want to bind, hit apple-I or choose "show info" in the File menu, and then choose Applications from the popup tab. Choose the application you want to open them with, and that's it; they're all bound to that app.
peace,
WiseWeasel
For root, it is very simple, any UNIX user could figure it out... just type the following in the terminal:
sudo passwd root
it'll prompt you for your "admin" password, then for a root password, and to confirm the root pass, and that's it . . . you've enabled root. Apple was right to hide this from normal Apple users, they would have caused all sorts of hell on their systems. Enabling root is so easy, that anyone who knows what to do with a root account will know how to activate it.
About the RAM, 128 MB is definitely NOT enough. I have 320 and I'm golden, but I'm sure you could get by with 256. With the price of RAM, this is not a problem.
MacOSX IS UNIX, it has a full implimentation of FreeBSD, and it's pretty much (but not officially) POSIX compliant.
Airport is supported, I believe, so it's your fault that it's not working. I'm sure this will also be made easier as OS X progresses. There's always ethernet cable to hold you through...
I'd say this OS is less half-baked than OS 9. I mean, some apps crash, and they do it a lot, but even then you just relaunch them or use an alternative...no more freezes, no more system bombs, life is definitely better. Most apps in OSX are perfectly stable. Some of the bigger ones (IE, OmniWeb, AppleWorks) seem to be a bit rough, but even then, they only hurt themselves. I'm sure the apps' bugs will be fixed in the future, and we'll have a very nice user experience.
My only quarrel with the interface is that it doesn't remember icon placement, making it impossible to have links in strategic locations and be able to count on their being there. When they add this feature, OSX will be very useable.
I'm now using OSX as my primary OS, and only boot OS 9 to burn CDs and play Q3. Everything I need works well as a native OS X app or in classic mode.
Nope, the latest version works just fine. I've been connected all day with the new version of Fire (0.23b) and haven't been booted yet...Yay for Fire.app and MacOS X...
It's still usable on a Mac, but hasn't been updated in more than 5 years or so...There is an alternative named SuperCard, that I believe is cross-platform.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, payments should be made directly to representatives, hence the open nature of the system. The site merely organizes the donations and lets people come together and discuss the issue at hand and the most effective method of lobbying that issue. There could be sample letters to representatives, or just ideas for letters, and people could then print it out and send it off along with a check. This is a grassroots lobbying campaign for general geek interests. The site should not handle any of the payments, and instead get people interested in making the contributions themselves, along with constructive letters supporting our interests. The site would take a life of its own, and many different political groups might find it an excellent resource for building support for their causes. There could be some educated discussion of the issues at hand, and people would be encouraged to voice their concerns to their local representatives. This would not be too hard to impliment, and could have a significant impact on our political system if enough people participate.
guess I should've warned some people, my bad . . .
Yeah, you could arrest every single college student, and a good portion of the rest of the population, and turn your country into a police state; or you could simply produce a new distribution model that would work with the system and encourage people to pay for their content. It is still a pain in the ass to obtain content reliably and in good quality, or at any decent speed. If I could pay a small fee (1-25 depending on the content, or a monthly subscription to a service) to be able to download the content into a format that can be converted into any other format (like a QuickTime codec), so that I could use the content how I see fit on any device that might play that sort of content. I don't want to stream content and I don't want to download an encrypted file. I want total control of what I'm going to purchase, along with value added material, such as info, pictures and lyrics if it's a song as an attached PDF file, and it must be delivered quickly and reliably. Music should be delivered in MP3 or OGG Vorbis format, as they are freely re-encoded, and video should be MPEG4 ISO. This is something that's really amiss on the internet today, and something that I'm sure a huge amount of people would love to pay for. Interoperability with various hardware players is key, and I have to be able to re-encode the content to any format I want. Any streaming services must be free and funded by advertising. If I can't download the media ad-free, I'm not going to pay for it. This is the way it's going to have to be if they want to work with the internet and draw people away from piracy. The fact is, that right now, it is more convenient to get your content online from bootleg sources than to purchase the content legally. If they change this and make the content available on demand over the internet in standard formats, it would be well-worth paying for, and the demand is huge for these services. If 350,000 films are being downloaded now every day, with all the trouble people go through and bad quality they put up with, imagine how many would be willing to pay a reasonable fee to be able to download that content from a legitimate source reliably, quickly and in guaranteed quality. The fact that so many people are pirating movies should only encourage the MPAA and RIAA to see the oportunity they're missing, and to change their distribution system. This is going to put a lot of the physical media distribution industry out of business, but it is for the best, for the creators, providers, consumers and the environment. We are bound to move to an electronic distribution system, so they might as well get started, before the pirates get more organized, and figure out better ways to capture and distribute content on their own. All we want to do is watch movies and listen to music . . .
Why hasn't this been started in the technical community? There could be a slash site with info on representatives with the potential to support or harm our interests as geeks, and organize some contribution/lobbying for certain causes. I'm sure the support would be there, and this might end up having a significant impact on US politics. Imagine a site with the traffic of /. geared towards lobbying representatives for causes we care about. The site would have to be sectioned geographically. If well-implimented, this could change the way democracy works, with people actively supporting causes they care about, and a government resposive directly to the people. PAC groups, or Political Action Commities already can serve a similar function, but the organization is lacking to get individuals involved in their political system, and business interests are often at the heart of such groups. A sort of open-sourced lobbying would be a good way to bring the influence on the political system back into the hands of the people it is meant to represent. Work should start on this immediately, although I personally lack the technical ability, or time to impliment such a system. Time to ask the community for some help.
It provides an alternative to other Mac sites with a discussion-based theme. Macslash and the other / sites are cool, but it's a pain to have accounts at all those sites, whereas here, we can just use our /. accounts and post with the convenience of the /. cookie in your Browser's cookies. It makes it convenient for all these Mac users to join the discussion and comment on different stories. Due to this, I'm sure we will get rich discussions here, not available on other Mac sites, due to the volume of /. users. If the main stories keep getting posted to the main /. page, and if they get some additional Mac heads to post interesting Mac-related articles to this section exclusively, this could be a good alternative to other Mac news sites. I'm all for it, as long as they don't stop posting important Apple stories to the main page.
Congratulations, you are the proud owner of one of Apple's worst line of computers ever produced. The 6400 and slightly upgraded 6500 performa series were the worst-designed Macs ever produced, crippled by Apple so that it wouldn't encroach on the higher-end models. The hardware was almost completely non-upgradeable, with slow and small hard drives (limited to 4GB, I believe), 1 non-standard PCI slot, crappy, non-upgradeable video (that often failed or turned different colors) and many other problems. The PowerComputing clone (although I think clones came out a little later than the 6400 glory days) would definitely have been a better deal, although they are not too reliable, and most of the ones I've seen have broken down since then, whereas the 6400s are still (unfortunately) chugging along, causing pain to any user trying to use modern apps on them. A headless linux fileserver has got to be the best possible use of this terrible lemon of a computer.
The .mp4 file format is the new ISO format for MPEG 4 files, and it is based on the QuickTime .mov (open) format. The MPEG 4 ISO specification also includes a video codec and an audio codec based on wavelet compression. These codecs, along with the MPEG 4 file format make up the MPEG 4 ISO.
Actually, no, you can get an adapter to connect an ADC monitor (which includes DVI, power and USB in a single connector) to a DVI-compatible video card, plus a USB connector and power source.
Actually, OS X's task manager takes full advantage of the dual procs to distribute processes and threads (for threaded apps) evenly, and they benchmark about twice as well as single proc. machines. The other thing is that a 1 GHz G4 != 1GHz Athlon or P4, and even a 1GHz Xeon, with the G4 besting them all. The altivec unit on the G4 is not really comparable to the SSE and 3DNow of Intel and AMD, with altivec finding applications in many more computations, and many software programs take advantage of this. The tasks that really take a long time, such as encoding/decoding, encrypting/decrypting, compressing/decompressing and 2D/3D rendering if you're a graphics pro are all greatly accelerated by the G4's altivec unit. A dual GHz G4 will be much faster at many tasks than the 2000+ Athlon, which is clocked at what, 1600 MHz? You really do need to go with the dual Athlon 1600+ or 1800+ for comparable processing power. When you add a comparable video card, a good mobo, 10/100/1000 BT ethernet, IEEE 1394 ports, you start approaching the $3k price tag and considering spending the little extra for the better OS and user experience.
Actually, the proc. speed does not have to be a whole multiple of the cache clock, as demonstrated by the recently discontinued 733 and 867 models (133 MHz memory bus clock) and the current 1 GHz model. They can do fractions of multiplier speeds, and can go all the way to 12X, I believe, with the Motorola MaxBus controller. So this is not a 'quantum upgrade' outside of marketing speak, but rather another incrimental upgrade of 66 - 200 MHz depending on the model.
It looks like we're going to have to boycott Universal Music. Don't buy any more of their products or any products you know are affiliated with them. This is the only way to let the message out that we want control over the music we buy. I, for one, will be boycotting Universal, and getting as many people as possible to do the same. Please do likewise.
"First of all, the menu bar at the top of the screen. While I understand the appeal, it breaks any hope of using sloppy focus - you can be in a situation where you simply can't get to the menu bar of an app without crossing over another application's window, which would give it the focus and change the menubar. "
How does crossing an app's window give it the focus? You would have to click on its window to bring focus to it. The menu bar is focused to the app last used or clicked on, either in the dock, or on one of its windows. I don't see what is confusing or unintuitive about this, and if you need access to an app's menu bar, click on one of its windows, finder or dock icons, and focus will be brought to it. The menu bar on the top provides great intuitive access to often-used commands, where you know that if you bring the cursor to the top of the screen and click, you will be selecting a menu. This makes menu using more efficient in general, so you don't need to maximize an app's window to fill the screen in order to use it, but can work with many windows from different apps at the same time, and drag-n-drop items between them.
I didn't mean for this to get so long, but to summarize, the menu bar design of the MacOS allows for a better experience working with many apps. If you need to give a command to an app, you bring focus to it by clicking on one of its windows, or its dock icon, and then you give the command, either by keyboard combo or with the menu bar. This is what you have to do with other window managers, but in this implimentation, you always know where to find the menu bar.
I just wanted to voice my support for MacOS X when it comes to multihoming. It automatically detects the fastest connection available from the different ones set up in the Network System Pref. This is great when an Airport (802.11b) network becomes available, or one of your providers goes down at any time. It will even trigger a dialup connection if the broadband goes down, or switch broadband providers if you're lucky enough to have several. This truly works very well, and for laptop owners, it's a crucial capability.
You're thinking of the word "Ghey", meaning lame, as opposed to the word "Gay", meaning homosexual or happy, depending on your era. "Ghey" is a perfectly acceptable word, not to be confused with "Gay", so this is not using homosexuality as a negative label. I am pushing for the broad acceptance of the word "Ghey" in the English (well American anyway) language, so as to avoid critique from Gay rights groups and individuals. So the next time someone says "you shouldn't say 'Gay' like that", you can say, "oh no, I'm saying 'Ghey' as in 'lame', not 'Gay', silly goose!".
...
http://planetmirror.com/pub/starwars/ep2_mystery_m 480.mov
Your X environment is a Mac application that you can switch to by clicking on its window or on its dock or double clicking on its finder icon. Once the X environment is frontmost, you can switch frontmost apps the way you usually do with whatever window manager.
A good (and silent) solution for this would be to use this material to transfer the heat from a hot component to some circulating water in a condenser type setup. There could be an external container of recycled water that could be replaced when it gets too hot. This could even be automatic, with an electric valve and thermometer. This material could efficiently move the heat from the component to the water, which has a very high heat capacity, so the external container wouldn't have to be flushed very often. This might be a viable cooling method as processors and other components run at rapidly increasing temperatures.
They didn't make you dl the 15 MB updater. You could have used the Apple Software Update Preference and just downloaded the several hundred kb updater from 10.0.2 to 10.0.3...
"2) all my images seem to have kept their Picture View 1.1 bindings, and I don't know an easy way of changing the bindings for the several 100 images."
This is really easy, just select all the files you want to bind, hit apple-I or choose "show info" in the File menu, and then choose Applications from the popup tab. Choose the application you want to open them with, and that's it; they're all bound to that app.
peace,
WiseWeasel
For root, it is very simple, any UNIX user could figure it out... just type the following in the terminal:
sudo passwd root
it'll prompt you for your "admin" password, then for a root password, and to confirm the root pass, and that's it . . . you've enabled root. Apple was right to hide this from normal Apple users, they would have caused all sorts of hell on their systems. Enabling root is so easy, that anyone who knows what to do with a root account will know how to activate it.
About the RAM, 128 MB is definitely NOT enough. I have 320 and I'm golden, but I'm sure you could get by with 256. With the price of RAM, this is not a problem.
MacOSX IS UNIX, it has a full implimentation of FreeBSD, and it's pretty much (but not officially) POSIX compliant.
Airport is supported, I believe, so it's your fault that it's not working. I'm sure this will also be made easier as OS X progresses. There's always ethernet cable to hold you through...
I'd say this OS is less half-baked than OS 9. I mean, some apps crash, and they do it a lot, but even then you just relaunch them or use an alternative...no more freezes, no more system bombs, life is definitely better. Most apps in OSX are perfectly stable. Some of the bigger ones (IE, OmniWeb, AppleWorks) seem to be a bit rough, but even then, they only hurt themselves. I'm sure the apps' bugs will be fixed in the future, and we'll have a very nice user experience.
My only quarrel with the interface is that it doesn't remember icon placement, making it impossible to have links in strategic locations and be able to count on their being there. When they add this feature, OSX will be very useable.
I'm now using OSX as my primary OS, and only boot OS 9 to burn CDs and play Q3. Everything I need works well as a native OS X app or in classic mode.
peace,
WiseWeasel
Try the new version of Fire.app (0.23b), it works great for me. I've been connected all day with no problems...Yay for Fire.app and MacOS X!
Nope, the latest version works just fine. I've been connected all day with the new version of Fire (0.23b) and haven't been booted yet...Yay for Fire.app and MacOS X...
Tim? is that you??? Thought you could get away with it...you cheeky monkey!
It's still usable on a Mac, but hasn't been updated in more than 5 years or so...There is an alternative named SuperCard, that I believe is cross-platform.