Being a Mac user c/d?

Dud: mac advocacy, prior to OS X

Uber Dud: derriding a command line before OS X was announced to be UNIX and championing the flexibility of it afterwards

I sold it last week.

< /patronizer>

Mac users: "Classic!"

PC users: "Dud!"

It must be said that Macintosh makes the only good-looking desktop computers available; how come PC users are willing to sacrifice the decor of their homes for a little brawn? Considering, I mean, that the only place a PC looks good is in an office.

John I think you just answered your own question!

Once my aesthetic love affair with the iBook waned, I came around to the creeping realization that it did half of what my old laptop did, with none of the vaunted stability or intuition.

The popular Mac chimera ('ease of use') applies only if you're comfortable sacrificing option after option after option...

(At which point, I guess, anything's easy to use.)

Because PC users often don't want to pay an additional $500 just for the design?

Seriously, though, there are a lot of PC boxes out there that look every bit as good (or better) than a lot of the Macs you see, but yeah, you have to pay more for them.

Being a professional computer technology reviewer, I'm not going to take sides here on the actual hardware and the users themselves. I think that both Mac and PC have their strengths and weaknesses and arguing one over the other is futile. At work, I have one of each.

What is total dud is Apple's switch campaign, which just smacks of desparation and in some cases could be construed as false advertising. (The insinuation in some of the ads is that Macs never crash, which anyone who's ever used one can tell you is utter crap. They crash just like PCs do; they just do it more stylishly.)

Being a MAC user is both C/D, just depends on what your actually using the thing for.

also, the PC bang for buck is a big deal, since you can double your computer's speed every couple years for under $500 (if you recycle some parts).

and it's far easier to get various utility software for PCs and all the big programs are released simultaneously (and if at all for Macs).

finally, the graphic design edge for Macs is now a non-issue.

yr games, and yr other games

I can't wait to get OS X.

Oh, and
finally, the graphic design edge for Macs is now a non-issue.

Spencer, you work in graphic design?

PC users get audiomulch.

the mouse action on the Mac is better, but that's it.

why exactly, do you think the Mac is better for design?

the interface lends itself to freehand stuff better than the keystroke/pulldown jungle of the PC, or so I'm told.

If the PC users' contention is that the appearance & ease-of-use of the machine is a minor point at best, then PC = rock and Mac = pop.

No matter what Spencer argues, all I had to do was look at PvP Online and Penny Arcade to understand that PCs are perfectly capable. So y'r right, the difference is scant at best.

My one remaining argument, which I can only really back up with anecdotal evidence, is that Mac HW fails at a much lower rate than PC HW - in that case, at least, you still get what you pay for. My Macs have always outlasted the PCs of dozens of friends and roommates, and especially when used in abusive work environments, like college dorms or an AF training barracks.

I can't wait to get my hands on OS X.

FWIW, in OS X if you drag a media/server icon the trashcan turns into an eject icon. Or you can just control-click on it and get a contextual menu for ejecting.

Anyway, I've rattling elsewhere here about Macs so I'll shut up.

BTW, why the hell are you using LimeWire for Gnutella? Get Acquisition!

Additionally: my iBook (running OSX) crashed with crushing frequency, exponentially more than any of the PCs (laptop, home or work) that run Windows 2000 or XP.

(ps - you can get two button mice for macs - but why bother?)
(pps - I can go on forever about why Macs are better than PCs for designers if you'd like me to bore you all to death - and I'm a PC owner as well so it's not mere evangelism)

Ha, you should see ILM :)

please do.

Between do Mac and PC... which do you prefer?
We all began with really cheap PCs and gradually we wanted to discover the Mac environment. For us, there aren't too many differences, you find good software on both. The software which we use for live work and in the studio is rather simple and we know them very well because we've been using them for a long time. We use some tricks too, like there's a program called Mousing (a basic emulation of the theremin which you play with the mouse) to make waves, variations etc, but our principal softwares remain Player Pro and Soundclub .

so, maybe the user friendliness is not really that acurate, but then again i am a re-tard. but in all honesty:

- in the past 4 years, my family has dealt with no fewer than 6 PC hard drives __crashing beyond repair___ while ne of my best friend still can use his mac from half a decade ago, and

- in the past 5 months alone, my hewett-pavkard laptop crashed 3 times ( ok, maybe u shouldn't spill coke into te keyboard - and then pur water into it to remedy the stickiness - but i sent it back to the factory then and when they sent it back "repaired" they fucked up the sound and it would still crash, and then i sent it in again and the DAY it came back, i plugged it in, and within 15 minutes it just died...that was during an ilx chat too, just recently in december). why should i send it back a third time?? 'coz the irony is, they're saying they didn't even get the check for the first time, so they're demanding another $287.07 when nothing got fixed.

oh and another reason Mac = C for some, 3 words, FINAL CUT PRO (version 4 is coming out in Jan, which i will burn from a friend, if anyone wants a copy let me know)

As a mac user since 1987 I have to say that they are amazing. 1 gripe was that the upgrade from 10.2.1 to 10.2.2 was a complete and total disaster, however this I do believe was partly due to a hard drive fault which I had ignored for about 6 months. Now I have a copy of disk warrior which saved the day. The mac HFS+ file system seems to be very resilient. My disk had effectively crashed but the computer soldiered on for 6 months before I fixed it.

Since I've had OS X my mac has not crashed once, not once. I had the odd badly written programme bomb but its never taken out the system.

I love being able to access all of the open source software written for unix through the auspices of XDarwin, Fink, OroboOSX, XFree86.

I like how the system looks and feels, especially compared to XP, Win95-2k had a plain simple functionality, XP is just vile.

I love that apple made Mail, iSync, iCal and Addressbook some of the best bits of free software and software that I use extensively.

I like having sendmail running on my laptop so I don't have to fiddle with outgoing mail settings every time I move my computer to a new network. I like the built in firewall.

I like the fact that I can connect to any kind of network or server simply and have people connect to my computer in myriad ways(Novell IPX networks aside, this is one big gripe that I can't get access to print queues in my university).

Oh and I love the way application icons jump up to get your attention.

OS X suits the way I work.

I use Macs at work and they totally suck but they are old and don't have OS X. I HATE all that clicking through levels of directories that you have to do with OS 9 and before.

Someone in the paper said OS X is just a con, cause if you want to do anything serious before long you have to start using UNIX commands. I had no idea what they were talking about.

Wait what?

i am actually using suzy's powerbook as we speak. i like this computer. i just wish it had a disc drive so that i could download this radiohead smut that mel has sent me TO THE PRIVACY OF MY OWN ROOM.

ed, are you offering to buy me a network card? i can afford to buy one myself if i don't pay you rent. which would you rather have, rent, or me not using your computer all the time?

shut up, nick, i have had three glasses of saki and two glasses of whine while you have been on the tea and cookies, so of course you have more energy. humph. ::flounces off to room until nick offers to make tea::

(x-post : It's almost 2 years old, Chris)

2 years seems like too soon for that. I'm actually curious about cleaning my iBook screen as well... I haven't read up on it enough.

I bet Elvis Telecom knows what to do...

Does he bless it first or something?

(where can I buy it, s1utsky?)

does the system bomb still happen? i haven't seen the blue screen of death since moving to win xp. i kind of miss it

I use this on my screen and keyboard every so often. Works great.

Also, if you've got a titanium PowerBook G4, the space between the keyboard and the screen is pretty small and the oil from your fingers left on the keyboard can mark up the screen when it's closed.

I do have a titanium g4 chris, but I use the little soft sheet divider thing that originally came with it - I just slip that between the screen and the keyboard when I close it. Good enough?

Also- one of the hinges to my screen got a knock and has come away, meaning that my screen is only firmly attached on one side. It works okay, but now I can't close it properly, and obviously this is not good. Will this be expensive to fix? Do I need a new screen?

Perfect. I use the same thing.

Will this be expensive to fix? Do I need a new screen?

Hurm. Depends somewhat on where the hinge is pulling away. Either way it's probably going to be expensive.

nordic, you probably only need a new screen bezel (the bit round the screen) and a hinge, but do it soon or you may end up needing a new screen.

My four-yr-old PC at home also runs much more smoothly. This Mac takes too many liberties, and I lose too much control, from the location of my files on down to the operation of my mouse (mouse operation on a single-button Mac is a bitch). It's a very strange machine, giving you great control in some areas (like from the command line) and no control at all in other areas. And then of course there's the "no downloading" clause. And finding software, free or otherwise, is an all-day job, especially considering that 10.2 is incompatible with any program written for 10.1 or 10.3. They're like three completely different operating systems, and there's no good reason why they should behave this way. It's just bitchy.

Everything about this computer is either bitchy, or insultingly dumbed-down. It's Fisher Price with a bad attitude. I hate hate hate this piece of crap. Did I mention it crashes all the time?

DON'T SWITCH!!!

That's not true. stuff written for 10.2 will work in 10.3 and most (but not all stuff) witten for 10.3 will work wih 10.2.8.

As for the all in one design, if you want a CRT, don't use an iMac.

Text rendering is pretty good in my opinion but it's definately worth fiddling with the anti-aliasing settings to get the bet results. It's worth calibrating your Screen using ColorSync every now and again for bets color fidelity, but that's the same with any screen. If you wnat a CRT Gamut, get a CRT.

I find it very hard to crash the OS. Apps can crash but don't blame the Mac for that, blame the Software vendor.

The one mouse button thing is rediculous, but go buy a two button mouse. it will work no-problems.

It's great. If you don't like it don't use it.

But I have 10.2.6, so I'm screwed, right? It all seems very arbitrary.

But what really pushes me over the edge is all the little stuff. Like the "save as" file menu not being clickable, so if you want to overwrite another file, you have to re-type the exact name of the file. What is that, a safety feature? Are they afraid I'm going to hurt myself? Is that also why it's so round and bubbly?

And, you know, other things.

this is right. this is the fault of your boss or IT department being cheap. No-one doing any kind of intenstive design work should be using an iMac.

Is it possible that I just got the crappiest Mac there is?

And even if that's so, I still don't see why I should pony up *thousands* of dollars for a Mac at home, when my experience with this low-end model is nothing but bad.

I'd still buy a powerbook if I had the money.

Also, my Pbook 1.33 is perfectly speedy! U R NUtz

No no wait, don't install that there! What are you doing?! That goes on the applications menu, not the desktop!

No it doesn't! It installs apps wherever you put the install file without even asking you.

I've been using this thing for a month now, trying to give it every benefit of the doubt. I don't doubt there are things that I still don't know how to do. But as a whole, I find it very difficult to use. Or at least, to use in the way I want to use it.

I will upgrade to 10.2.8 now. Thanks for that tip (even though I have run software update several times... we'll see if this time does the trick).

If anyone tells me that I have to buy anything else, I will scream. Why is the Mac solution to every problem to throw a hundred dollars at it? I can't even get a decent free FTP program. Is *anything* free on this machine?

there is transmit for ftp.

you are a doosh.

i can't stand this either.

no it doesn't.

If 10.2.6 -> 10.2.8 is not availible through software update try

http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosxupdatecombo_10_2_8.html

RBROWSER LITE IS FREE.

RBROWSER LITE IS FREE.

What is that?

(Look... I am frustrated, and I will never buy one of these damn things, but if you can tell me how to use it better, I will hug you.)

-- kyle (akmonda...) (webmail), September 27th, 2004 11:08 AM. (akmonday) (link)

Clearly I need some lessons in using this easy-to-use computer. And that's just wrong. I swear, I am not an idiot.

Clearly I need some lessons in using this easy-to-use computer. And that's just wrong. I swear, I am not an idiot.

I thought you were saying windows doesn't default to installing things in C:/.

The deal with macs is that installing the programs doesn't really matter. You can install it in any directory and move that directory around with no bad consquences. when you want to uninstall, you can just delte the directory. So that's why it installs stuff wherever you put the installer.

my big fear is my addiction to Outlook. why is there MS office for mac but no Outlook? i assume i can migrate all my contacts/calendar shit over to whatever the mac mail program is, right?

This I cannot argue with.

Is there a Mac OS X app for accessing Outlook Tasks from an Exchange server?

1. get quicksilver

2. drag to the right side of your dock (past the narrow line) your home house, your applications folder, your music folder, your pictures folder, etc for easy access

3. get nicotine.app (soulseek)

4. take any program off the dock you do not use often by dragging it off

5. repair your privileges often (usually after any OS update)

6. go through every part of system preferences to see how flexible everything is (although made very user friendly, MAC OS is VERY powerful in terms of customization)

7. try out the terminal

Aw shucks. Thanks.

RbrowserLite isn't bad. Thanks especially for that. I'm for any FTP client that doesn't bother me with "buy now" messages or, in the case of Transmit, automatically disconnect after ten minutes, upload or no upload.

And yes, I suppose I could FTP from the command line. But does anyone really prefer doing it that way? It's too hard to keep track in your head of what you're doing. It's not very practical.

Outlook Express is stupid. Outlook is not, and I like it - although this is probably because I'm so used to it (been using it regularly for years). I don't use notes or tasks on Outlook at home, and I do have a proper POP mail account so looks like no worries there.

(btw my Mac purchase decision is for home - I am still gonna be a PC guy at work).

fuck fuck fuck

(btw Office 2004 for mac rules)

My boss is not about to buy me squat. He doesn't even understand what I do, and he certainly isn't willing to pay extra for it.

I love my Jaguar Mac. I have better things to spend £100 on than an OS update. I might get Tiger when that's bedded in.

I haven't bothered with slsk, as Acqlite serves most of my needs, as long as it's been left running long enough to build up a decent network.

I think a lot of the PC/Mac debate is about emotional attachment to the physicality of your computer. I have none. And I get off a lot cheaper than you sods.

however, apple upgrades are cheaper than windows upgrades.

Plenty of Mac users quite happily still use OS 9, of course.

http://www.fejta.com/solarseek/

xpost: I'm still using InDesign 2 because of ID-CS's backwards incompatibility, but I don't think that problem exists with Photoshop.

1. Apple is a great innovator that pushes everyone else.
2. Apple is ripping me off with $129 upgrades
3. OSX = no control unless you are one somistophicated mofo, unlike Classic Mac which was easy to troubleshoot and dick around with w/o fear of screwing up everything.
4. OSX = 4 hour install, so if you DO fuck up, watch out!
5. Graphics : Apple is the industry standard. Sorry to burst anyone's bubble. Jumping back and forth from PC to Mac is probably more stress-inducing than necessary, so graphics professionals generally work on Macs... EXCEPT WEBGEEKS; web designers often use PCs.
7. Mac is making my life decisions hard at the moment. I can either spend $$$ for all new programs for Mac or get a nice, cheap PC and get PC versions. I wish I could predict the future. If the graphics industry would switch over, I would be happy to sell my G4 on ebay and never look back.

read: incompatible with other computers and impossible to scale or fix yourself. read: unnecessarily expensive. With the money it costs to buy a Powerbook, I could buy three cheap desktop PCs and link them up and maybe install Linux on one of them and be a PC-ing BADASS MACHINEHEAD FUCKING UN-FUCK-WITH-ABLE COMPUTER-HAVING-MOTHERFUCKER. FOR $2500, I AM THE TIM "TOOLTIME" TAYLOR OF COMPUTING. I HAVE MORE POWER THAN YOU, PUNY FEY MAC GRAPHICS PERSON!

Not that I would do that. But I could.

Actually it's the first-ever stable OS for PC. XP runs like a dream -- no, really!

the whole user/hierarchal structure is completely fucked, the whole MANAGE computer thing is retardedly organized, and we still have a convoluted REGISTRY system, don't we?

BACKPEDAL!! could have fooled me with what you were referring to right there.

That is very true. You get used to it. However: this iMac running OSX crashes all the time. ALL THE TIME. My PC running XP never, ever, ever crashes. Ever. I don't think it's crashed once in two and a half years. It's not what I would expect, given the popular wisdom about PC and Mac, but it's a fact.

if it really does take you four hours to do a clean install, that sucks for you, i guess.

it doesn't take that long for me, or many others who have been through the process.

OPERATOR ERROR/OPERATOR HYPERBOLE. PLEASE TRY AGAIN.

Industry standard by default, and not for any good reason. The output is identical. (nb-part of my work is web-geekery).

REDFEZ STOP USING INSTALL DISCS MADE OF SANDPAPER

Graphics professionals are not using Adobe CS applications just yet.

The real dilemma that can end up hurting macs in their user base is issues with compatibility between various versions of QuarkXPress. But at least where I am that hasn't been as painful as we thought. It is, however, no fun saving down from Quark 6 to Quark 4, as it involves Quark 5 and Classic. But there are printers and designers and agencies still using 4(hell, still using 3.32).

Macs are the industry standard for graphics because for YEARS they were ahead of the curb. They may not be so much any more but you're still dealing with thousands and thousands of designers who were laying out graphics on Macs when windows didn't even exist yet.

Two of the newspapers I work for use Quark 3, the other one Quark 4.

Actually [XP]'s the first-ever stable OS for PC.

It's the first vaguely-decent OS that Microsoft has sold for home machines, although the Home version (and to a lesser extent, the non-server Professional version) are crippled in stupid ways. Calling it the "first-ever stable PC OS" is completely wrong, though - Linux five or even ten years ago was more stable than XP is now.

Oh yeah, just a mere 500 pounds. Just a piddly 900 dollars for the crappiest Mac they make. No big deal at all.

It works fine for me, anyway.

I guess I am a kid or a layperson.

):

cheers.

jed, you MAY be able to use those powerbook discs. try it and it will tell you if they aren't letting you install it before anything gets fucked. if that doesn't work you need to get your hands on the retail discs...

my osx was on 3 disks, btw.

"user" being an appropriate term as, inspite of my recent dysappointment with them, i am probably about to fork over almost a months salary to those cockfaces.

But Indesign is surely on its way everywhere, as more young designers/production artist replace those of us weened on earlier versions of Quark. Fact is, Quark wasn't even going to make a version 6 for OSX, figuring they'd stay in business selling only windows software (dumbest idea EVER) untill Quark's boss's daughter or something, and her friend, who I believe posts here, told him he was crazy. Or something like that.

And I Googled this problem-- it isn't just me. It was very common with at least the first round of Apple Pro Mice (Quicksilver models all around in this case). The wire just frays by the tip and the mouse dies. Interestingly, the NEW mouse I bought from Tekserve died, too, so I think they haven't quite fixed the problem.

And, for the record, the 4 hour installs were completely wiping the harddrive. This is probably not considered a clean install. I think a clean install only updates a few files that could be damaged, not reformat everything.

But this is a pro-mac vote, anyway.

Haha, no. That would be me and my colleagues. I work in the design studio of a large regional paper, The Argus in Brighton, and we are all using 233 Mhz G3s (The orginal ones in beige boxes) - despite having the most heavily computer intensive work in the building. The problem is that we are careful with our machines as we know how to look after them, so whilst almost everyone else in the building has G4s to run Quark 3.3, we are stuck with the slowest machines in the world.

A lot of people are happily running os 9.2

Are they? I'm unhappily running 9.2 at work. Horrible, HORRIBLE Bloated OS. X is good though - but our company are too cheap to buy new Macs for us, let alone a whole new suite of software.

Some nitpicking::

macs are the industry standard for graphics because they can deal with colour much better than a pc.

Yeah, that's true. IF YOU'RE LIVING IN 1988.

Okay, the first-ever stable OS for a PC for laypeople.

Windows NT had protected memory years before XP - aka NT v.6 - (And Windows 2000 - AKA NT v.5 - was released in between.

and when it comes to sending files out to the printers, usually it's in the form of a hi-res pdf - so using indesign is a non-issue.

dan, i'm very curious to know where you work.

I don't know WHY we have this issue with Photoshop CS, but we do. Maybe it's a cross PC/Mac problem.

Anyway, far as I know, while PDF workflow is the way of the future, not everyone is on the same page as far as that is concerned, and knowing a thing or two about pre-press, I would never trust yr average graphic designer or small ad/design firm to be creating proper hi-res PDFs. All kinds of little details like trapping and what not. But hell, from my experiance working at printshops, people are still sending in files with lo-res jpgs, no fonts etc, so expecting everything to be clean prior to creating the pdf would be tough. But a good shop with good production people should have no problem, I suppose.

Personally, I find Mail fine, I like iCal, I think Safari kicks the ass of every other browser, and I LOVE LOVE LOVE iSync for having my calendar and bookmarks consistent at home and at work.

Having been a PC user all of my life, this is a big step and I want to make sure that I'm not making a mistake.

I use Win2K and XP at work, I think they're fine, much better than 98 was anyway. I just object to Internet Explorer (such an awful program) and all of the enforced spyware maintenance you have to do as a Windows user. You'll hear people say OS X never crashes. I crash my iMac all the time, but I run all sorts of unsanctioned open source stuff, even some X11 stuff like OpenOffice. My friends who just use the programs that come with OS X have never had problems. OS X is pretty, easy to understand and you will never have the viruses and spyware problems that plague Wintel. (Not because Macs are better, because so few people use macs that they aren't worth the virus writers time). It really is a nicer day to day computing experience.

If you are going to use it for work, make sure that you purchase Office for mac, or that your work has a citrix server or some equivalent technology. Otherwise you might have some compatability issues, and Chris is right, the more RAM the better.

If not having a second mouse buttons is going to irk you bring your mouse from the PC. I tend to use keyboard shortcuts more than contextual menus anyway, but that's because I've grown up with macs and the standard set of keyboard shortcuts they offer.

You only need Office 2004 if you need major office compatibility. I tend to rely on text edit for the minimal amount of writing that I do. Nothing really replaces Excel for doing my basic accounting stuff, but this is just because I have Excel, i haven't really looked for anything else. Doing basic Tax and budget calculations is a bit sledgehammer and nut.

I've not managed to crash the OS recently, but I have had programmes go down on me.

Bear in mind the powerbook g4s are long overdue for a refresh, you can see this as an opportunity to get a cheaper one of the existing models if you like, but I hear supply is pretty tight right now.

It will, it irked the living hell out of me. There is no earthly reason not to include a three button mouse, I definitely recommend buying one or using your old one. OS X recognizes it no problem.

when the guy came to install broadband yesterday he said "oo, mac, good, they're a doddle to set up". which was nice

but, on the flipside the scanner and photoimaging software i use hastn worked very well on the mac, the quality of the images is inferior to the very same program on the pc (off the same installation disk!). so, i'll need to sort that out

when the guy came to install broadband yesterday he said "oo, mac, good, they're a doddle to set up". which was nice

If not extremely disturbing, considering how ridiculously simple it is to set up an internet connection under both OS X and Windows XP.

Irregardless I love my Mac and OS X. The last couple of days I've been working on a tune on the tram to and from work on my lovely iBook. Very satisfying. The only thing I find frustrating about the whole Mac design philosophy is that there isn't enough emphasis on keyboard input. Under Windows I control almost everything using the keyboard, under OS X there are some things you just can't do (or are too counterintuitive to do regularly).

i just saw this. i will echo cutty in saying that guy is nuts.

how good is a mac in sharing an internet connection with a PC btw? at the moment my broadband goes through the windows XP computer which feeds through to a couple more win98/XP comps.. if i get a mac (or my flatmate does - he's thinking about it) will i be able to just plug it into the ethernet hub and expect it all to work?

how good is a mac in sharing an internet connection with a PC btw? at the moment my broadband goes through the windows XP computer which feeds through to a couple more win98/XP comps.. if i get a mac (or my flatmate does - he's thinking about it) will i be able to just plug it into the ethernet hub and expect it all to work?

yes

I am in full agreement with Andrew on the keyboard centricity of Windows. I love that fact, it often makes me wish I was doing certain things from work than at home.

The new office stuff, Pages/Keynote, is pretty damned awesome.

Has anybody tried out Garageband 2 by any chance

the 'edges' of the operating system have been so beautifully planed off on OSX - i'm not saying it doesn't have it's bugs, just far less shakey than anything Bill Gates regularly releases to market. anyone who doesn't favour macs in the potentially brutal arena of artistry hasn't been in a situation where they HAVE to spend large amounts of time in front of a screen. the mac is a comfy ride with smoooove gear changes and bagloads of acceleration.

and a final question: is adobe premier a viable alternative to final cut, if i stick with pc? i'm already v well-versed in FC.

Also, you know combo drives don't burn DVDs, right? So you'll still have to buy an external even if you choose the new iMac.

The newest version of Final Cut is pretty great. Does Premier do HD?

(And yes, I do a lot of video editing. There is no such thing as too much RAM.)

*note that Mr. Savonarola is not licensed to give out personal financial advice

Also, you know combo drives don't burn DVDs, right?

oops, i guess i should've read the fine (or at least finer) print and not just the shiny, fact-obscuring advertising copy ( - iMac G5 tucks away all the modern amenities in its two-inch thin(1) body, such as a slot-loading SuperDrive or Combo drive. Burn DVD slideshows of holiday photos or send friends a DVD movie of that special trip - ), huh? SUPERdrives do burn DVDs tho, right? so i'll need one of those then, huh?

...better expandability, (you can add an extra HD, more RAM, better or second graphics card, a video capture card etc.)

does this mean that ram expansion (the thing i'm most concerned abt) with a iMac is somewhat difficult?

Do NOT buy it from Apple, though, as they vastly overcharge for it

well, 'cos the rand/dollar exchange rate is so good at the moment (hurrah US expansionism), i'm thinking of getting whatever i get shipped from overseas. if i don't go through apple, anyone know of a reliable retailer that offers international shipping? (well, they might not even technically have to, if i get this importer guy i know to help me out)

Superdrive to burn DVD, yes.

iMac gets you a Maximum of 2Gb
PMG5 Single processor gives a Maximum of 4Gb
You also get 3 PCI slots and the upgradable AGP, otherwise a 1.8Ghz iMac and a 1.8Ghz iMac are pretty similar in spec. It comes down to the graphics card and expandability.

PCI slots are not that important. There are plenty of very good solutions for audio (MOTU, M-audio, Yamaha, Firestation) or SDI/COmponent/Y/C video (AJA).

You will not find a US retailer who will ship outside the US. For one Apple will cut off supply if they find out and for two all US retailers seem to think that anyone foreign is automatically a fraudster.

Now, I wanted to give Mac a chance (despite the lack of games - I figured that maybe I'd get more work done). Logged onto the Apple site and tried to price out something equivalent.

The absolute cheapest desktop G5 (single 1.8GHz processor) comes out to $2124 USD. That's with the 1GB of RAM and 6800GT video card, but doesn't include a 10000 RPM drive. Now this is Apple's slowest G5 configuration - the PC's above feature very fast processors (I know it's difficult to compare them side by side). The next step up to dual processors at 1.8Ghz jumps another $500.

I'm still considering the Mac, but the price difference is very difficult to justify. If I did video editing, I would certainly consider the Mac more, but the as it stands I'm obviously leaning heavily towards the PC. (Maybe I'll get a Mac mini in addition to it though).

Also the G5 is a much better processor design, it has better pipelining, more processing units and it generally thought, the best vector unit in the business (very important for graphics and video work).

Basically make sure you comparison is right.

Make sure the Athlon 64 is 939 chip, running at maximum bus speed etc. Should be but check.

You'll be happier with the mac.

You'll be happier with the PC.

XP is pretty good, it's just not the best. It runs well, it just doesn't have it's niceties. Colour management is so much better and CoreImage will give some really good photo and video editing advantages when it turns up. Plus less time managing the system, defending against malware.

what does a g5 1.8 translate to in pentium terms? i know there are a billion geeky charts and figures on the net but i'll believe the first vaguely credible answer someone gives me.

oh yeah, and it'd be really nice to have a fast pc to run music software.

post-xpost:

AARGH!!

btw i've been using a mac for flash and photoshop and fcp at university for 3 years now and, while i get more 'unexpectedly quit's than i'd like, yeah, they've been solidish. not quite impeccable tho, by any means. they're G4 emacs however, and i don't think they've been given any hefty ram injections.

with 1 gig ram and the default video card, i figure a g5 1.8'll come to about $1700.

i've had this warm glow feeling for the last 3 days knowing i'd be happier with a mac but now i'm leaning back towards 'undecided', and this is a battle that's been going on in my head for about a year.

the best benchmarking site and they are all rubbish. Short of actually performing the same task on two computers there's no real way of knowing.

They stepped them up today (after nearly a year) and I think I'm going to pull the trigger on getting one now rather than wait for the G5 I really don't do anything that requires 64 bit computing. I play with darwinports a bit and have run x11 and openoffice over OS X, but this (or something else that I've done) has led to some pretty severe stability problems on my beloved desk lamp iMac. It kernel panics fairly regularly now. I think on the Powerbook I'd be a good sheep and only play with the toys Steve Jobs includes, (except Firefox of course)

I love the 12 inch PB (at least in the Apple store), and its shockingly affordable considering how much you can jam into it. It's natively 1024x768 despite the somewhat small screen, I'm leaning towards it rather than paying the premium for the (admittedly sexier) 15 inch screen.

My question is, I have never seen anyone with the small powerbook, and I live in downtown NYC, I see many, many 15 and 17's in the coffee houses and what have you. Does anyone have experience with the 12 inch PowerBook as their main everyday computer? Postive or negative, I'd appreciate your thoughts.

Does this mean OSX on any machine you want? soon? Please?

The only doubts in my mind stem form the fact that neither Freescale nor IBM can come up with a decent notebook processor and the best notebook processor out there is Pentium M and apple does desperately need a notebook chip; Cell might be able to fulfil this function but not till next year.

Nonetheless getting OS X to run on x86 would not be that difficult, but don't expect it to run on generic hardware, that would be suicide for Apple.

http://www.adrants.com/2005/06/paris-hilton-says-think-different.php

My sister's new ibook shipped from apple today! I'll have it for a few days to configure for her so that she doesn't have to type in modem settings and setup pretty desktop photos with her toddler climbing all over her. I'm excited, I'm sick of taking adware & viruses off her old dell laptop.

(moving family members that you provide tech support to onto a mac platform== AWESOME)

My explanation is that Apple plans to use some Intel chips in some consumer device like the SAN offering.

Nothing to see, move along.

i shall be watching the keynot coverage with bated breath.

coo ur, an intel apple. that would be fucking weird. mind you: if you'd told me in 1997 that i'd be using a unix-based mac os, i'd have laughed like a drain ...

as you can tell, i'm an observer of these things rather than someone who actually understands them. but i can't help feeling that a G5 laptop is loooong overdue, and that perhaps drastic measures are called for.

Here are a few things we've discussed here:
Apple's PowerPC contracts with IBM and Motorola aren't public, and it's not clear what Apple could do with whatever PowerPC intellectual property it owns as an original partner in the IBM/Motorola/Apple PowerPC alliance (now defunct). Even if Apple has the rights to have Intel manufacture PowerPC CPUs, it seems entirely impractical from an economic viewpoint, given the mammoth costs of chip fabrication and the minimal market Apple enjoys.

Apple has led personal computer manufacturers in a market swing from desktop to portable systems, with the overall ratio now more than half laptops. In this situation, a problem getting high-performance, low-power processors from IBM - such as a special new version of the "G5" - could be critical. Intel, meanwhile, has made great progress on low-power processor technology, an effort that will continue to be funded by its near monopoly on the personal computer market. IBM and Freescale (the Motorola spin-off) have no equivalent source of sales to fund such massive investments in chips, assuming that Apple can't use the same Cell technology IBM is producing in great quantity for Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo game consoles.

As noted here earlier, Steve Jobs has already made this transition in the past. He successfully moved NeXTstep, the foundation of Mac OS X, from Motorola to Intel (and other) hardware, giving up on his own NeXT computer systems, which were a financial failure. The technical transition doesn't seem to have been terribly traumatic. It has been widely reported that Apple has maintained x86 versions of Mac OS X, and Mac OS X's open-source "Darwin" core has long been available in x86 code.

A wild card today is the magical, and so far untapped, potential of Transitive Corp.'s QuickTransit technology, which is supposed to provide transparent processor emulation with minimal performance penalty - a lot like Mac OS "Classic" running under Mac OS X....

While the x86 and PowerPC architectures are very different, the differences mostly impact low-level programming - programs that control hardware and programs that are timing- or performance-sensitive. This encompasses all critical operating system functions, including networking, printing, data storage, user interaction, etc. "High-level" or "application" programs that go through standard operating system "APIs" (programming interfaces) should have an easier porting path. We can see examples of this issue in the simple transition from "Panther" to "Tiger", which involves minimal hardware changes but a lot of low-level programming.

Today's Mac is far, far closer to a PC than past Macs, based on the same standards for memory, networking, data storage and peripherals (USB, PC Card, DVI) and using a lot of Unix code that also exists on x86 (e.g. Gimp printing, Apache, BSD libraries).

There's a big media angle to the story, which may or may not play out today. With Apple now in the music business (despite the direct conflict and lawsuit with the Beatles), and Steve Jobs in the movie business (with Pixar), going to x86 architecture may be a critical factor for participating in content-control systems that dominate the future.

rats' cocks.

OS X is very portable, it's libraries have developed on several architectures and maintaining a code base for multiple architectures wouldn't be too difficult. Vast sections of OS X are already cross platform. Quicktime runs in an x86 platform through a stripped down Carbon for x86 environment, Cocoa is derived from OpenSTEP which ran on x86, the mach kernel already runs on x86 as does OpenDarwin. Tiger shifting most of the graphics work to the GPU, using OpenGL, and of course the GPUs are the same on both platforms. There is actually very little work there to do to port. The vector extension differences between SSE3 and Altivec and hardware drivers remain the the last piece of the puzzle.

I reckon Apple want to position themselves to offer a choice of architectures to make sure they have the most powerful systems at any one time. IBM and Sun manage to support Intel, AMD and Power and Intel, AMD and Sparc respectively. OK this is server land and not userland but the challenges of supporting multiple architecture are probably outweighed by the benefits of being able to leverage the best and most appropriate technology at any one time.

Less than an hour to go.

Most exciting keynote in ages, potentially.

holy shit!!

fucking hell, where's my big bottle of hat sauce?

Will I now have to wait another year to buy a new laptop? Hopefully this will send second hand prices of G4s into the toilet so I can pick one up cheap as a stopgap.

Really shouldn be OK, other than a few fringe circumstances, since it's the compiler generating the different native code and not you... Unless you've (perhaps unusually in this day and age), written parts of it in assembler.

so that's what you get up to, is it? pressing F7 occasionally? pints are on you next time i see you, keith :) :) :)

Are you saying that modern CISC architectures basically turn their traditionally complex instructions into a series of simpler instructions that are then executed as the simple instructions? Other than backwards compatibility, I don't see the point in that.

Either way, I still can't see that this should change the philosophy of what's better and why RISC or CISC instruction sets might make sense; an argument that still seems valid to me, albeit unwinnable given that it basically depends on how you use them.

Simon, that was in 1996... Nowadays you just save the file and it compiles it... No link stage in Java or modern .NET languages.

So I guess that's what it's referring to. Still seems like a bit of a cheat though and doesn't "solve" any issues; just makes it possible to compile new programs against a RISC processor.

That'll explain why the old C++ compiler used to have a tick box for if you were using a Pentium Pro or not!

It's all to do with pipeline lengths I believe.

x-post

ah, now therein lies an enormous philosophical discussion. it's like the broom, innit?

"look at my broom! i've had it 20 years!"
"really?"
"yeh! and only 10 new handles and 10 new brushes."

the mac i use at home is a descendant of the one i used ten years ago, but really it's a completely and utterly different beast. even within tiger, the look-and-feel of certain apps - something that used to be the apple bible - is totally different. like i said earlier: if, in 1993, someone had shown me a sneak preview of OS X and said "this is what the mac will become", i'd have never believed them.

it'll still be a mac because apple says it's a mac; because we believe in the mac as a higher power. but to be honest the original macintosh concept died a long time ago.

Better get Longhorn out the door in a hurry.

Any bets as to how many hours it'll take before Apple releases an Intel development environment?

Here’s a personal sidelight: Last year I was chatting with a very senior IBM person that I’d just met, who smirked at my PowerBook and said “You know, we make more money on every one of those than Apple does.” Remember, he was real senior and we’d just met. Those kinds of stories are for sure going to get back to Apple and they’re going to be real irritating. Look at it this way: once Apple makes the first big step away from Power, if they don’t like Intel’s attitude or Intel’s performance or Intel’s pricing, they can walk across the street to AMD. Or for that matter back to IBM, who might have become a little more humble and hungry.

a week or so later they introduced a new model (was it called the 1200 or something? i can't remember now) with a colour screen and a fucking cd-rom for fuck-all more. the fuckers.

the 5300 occasionally gets called into use in the kitchen, for e-mailing/ILX-ing while i cook. it's survived a ceiling collapsing on top of it. it rocks. whaur's yer PCs noo, eh?

http://www.hungry.com.nyud.net:8090/~fn/tmp/Steve2.au

They wouldn't have done this if Intel hadn't started to abandon their own 64-bit chips and start making clones of the AMD 64-bit instruction set.

They wouldn't have done this if MS weren't a bit fucked-up at the minute; but MS's fucking-up is purely of their own doing, and nothing a tiny fringe competitor like Apple does can affect that.

For free software this doesn't really affect anything. The main problem with Unix software not running on OS X is API compatibility. Relatively few open-source projects use assembly language in any amount; those that do, have x86 versions available.

For overpriced software, this will only affect the minor items that don't already have equivalent-performance x86 versions available. Adobe, for example, should be able to weld the high-level language parts of Mac Photoshop to the assembly routines used in the Windows version. I'm assuming that there must be a large common code-base between the two already, because it's the only sensible way to code such a large app for multiple platforms.

If they don't already exist, about three separate open-source projects to clone each of the Cocoa and Carbon APIs will have sprung up before the week is out. The Cocoa ones will eventually get pretty far, much as Wine has for Windows. The Carbon ones will be rather less successful.

Apple's market share will drop, but not as much as some people will predict. That's because Apples are mostly marketed at people who will just go "ooh, shiny" and not look up to see a platform change bearing down on them.

If you develop in Carbon then this will be more painful, even more so if you don't use Xcode. So the answer to every one is to use NeXTStep (Cocoa) to devlop multi architecture apps. This is the last laugh for Jobs. Apple got taken over by NeXT not the other way round.

The big unanswered question is: 'Is this going to make device drivers easier to/from port from Win32/Linux'. The Universal binaries dev docs say Intel Macs will not be using Open Firmware, so presumably they will be using BIOS.

I'm starting to wonder if this is a masterstroke on Apple's part, or complete folly. "Fed up with viruses and spyware? Install MacOS X Leopard, and all your troubles will be gone!"

As a general rule, Linux device drivers don't use BIOS calls anyway, so that is irrelevant to that question.

i understand what OF is; can you explain in words of three syllables or less quite what moving to BIOS would entail? i vaguely remember BIOS settings etc from my PC-using days in the late 1980s. fuck.

it won't happen, but we can dream.

(actually, i can't think of a single instance when i'd want to boot into windows. but think of the selling point it'd be!)

verbose mode rocks!

Verbose mode can be useful, although you usually find that the useful parts disappear far too quickly to read, whilst the useless bits hang around for ages waiting for prompts like "Press Ctrl+F to enter the array building utility" to disappear.

Graphical BIOS screens of the logo-plus-progress bar type are completely useless for anything. Dell have a happy medium in their initial BIOS screen; most of them do give you some useful model and BIOS version info.

No opinion to offer on mactel, sorry.

Intel are heavily pushing this as the next-generation, and the clever bets are on Apple using this to boot the system.

http://www.intel.com/technology/efi/

no really..

What's next two button mice?

Short-term hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth in the developer community. Cheaper computers in the medium-term.

You mention Cocoa, NextStep, Carbon... What are these? APIs to the OS? (presumably just to GUIs though if so). Are they different versions of the same thing, or different things altogether? Who controls them? I assume by what you've said that Cocoa is the current one, presumably controlled by Apple and hence, will be ported to Intel and that'll obviously make porting apps relatively trivial...

NextStep was conceived as a cross platform ToolKit.

Kyle, the Intel stuff will run 99% of old apps. New versions of applications will run on both.

You mention Cocoa, NextStep, Carbon... What are these?

Cocoa is the native API inherited from NextStep (which was the basis for 10). Carbon was an API designed to work in Classic to ease the transition to OS X for Classic apps. IIRC they have a little more that GUI stuff....

Cheers.

It won't use BIOS, it will use EFI, and will probably look exactly like it would do on PPC.

It certainly looks that way! Thank **** for that!

Core Image was the last stage in abstracting the graphics architecture. Now every part of the graphic exists as an OpenGL texture which is composited on the graphics card and CoreImage now provides and abstracted way of achieving this.

As long as you stay within Cocoa then you don't use any hardware specific code. The hardware specific code is provided by Apple. this of course has it's disadvantages, but for most applications in the modern age it should be sufficient.

Most of the porting issues are going to come from legacy, pre- cocoa code bases, which are still supported but allow for much less hardware abstraction.

I'm thinking the OS?

Should I buy a second hand G4 laptop for OS X or a second hand thinkpad to run Ubuntu?

So the pre-cocoa things are analagous to pre NT Windows, in that you could address the screen directly and so on, whereas now with OpenGL or DirectX you don't, you call them.

That said (sorry, one question leads to another), is Core Image just a facade to OpenGL? OpenGL is already an API that abstracts from the hardware.

I didn't know that there were multiple OS APIs for Macs.

It's actually something I'm quite interested in, since it's one of the fundamental problems in computing: traditionally, greater choice is better for the consumer; however, having lots of APIs is poor for programmers (regardless of whether you mean within a single piece of hardware or multiple devices). This doesn't really work I guess for what you're saying here; it's clearly a bad thing on the Mac that there are multiple APIs to do the same thing, but in an ideal world, there would be a standardized API between Windows/X/Macs etc. (since WIMP GUIs are largely the same) and GUI portability would be simple.

apple have put a lot of energy into moving developer onto Cocoa, and there are lots of apps from small written in pure Cocoa, a lot of the bigger apps (MS Office for example).

Most Apple apps are pure Cocoa, although some aren't, I believe a lot of Quicktime and iTunes are still Carbon for example.

(As far as standardising API's go, a lot of Cocoa is available on Linux, through GnuStep, Windows support is there but not far advanced I think)

i'm not sure. as someone mentioned upthread: the majority of people in the market for a mac won't give two fucks about the processor it uses. indeed, if apple do the sensible thing and drop the prices of the G5, they'll shift thousands of them.

people like me - ie who know a wee bit about the insides of computers, but are basically slavish mac loyalists - would buy a turd in a box if it had an apple on the side, so they're not going to lose our custom.

most of the people who think, right, i'm not going to buy apple for a year are geeks hardcore users who've been tempted to X by the unix/not-windowsness of it all and don't want to be left behind in the rush to have teh h0t new tech. as a percentage of apple's user base, i'd wager this is tiny.

for a company with a history of lunatic marketing decisions, apple hasn't put a foot wrong for ages now. i don't claim to understand the ramifications fully, but i think this is a very clever move.

Intel chips are cheaper as I understand it, but in some sense it's a good point, since the chip won't make up the bulk of the cost, so whether it makes a significant dent or not I don't know. Everything in PCs are cheap, I suppose just because of volumes.

I don't know anything about Macs as I say, but an example would be that 32GB of memory for an IBM P/690 Unix box I know cost (last year) around £250,000; whereas, buying that much memory for a PC would cost you £1,600 from the shop across the road from me. There's just a huge variation in cost for bits and the only explanation I can see is supply/demand. If Macs use some fancy memory as opposed to some bog standard memory then you'll pay through the nose for it.

Ten years or so ago you could buy two types of Sparcstation, one that cost more but used normal bits, so upgrading memory was cheap, or a cheap Sparc that used Sun's memory, which cost an arm and a leg. Cheeky monkeys I say.

To contradict myself; that's not really true... The memory is faster and likely more resilient to failure, it's just not (in my opinion) 150 times as good!

iTunes maybe but QT 7 is a rewrite and totally changes everything.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/

Better to do it now than wait another year.

Do you actually feel upset about it... It's only a chip!

i'm not particularly upset, though. i stand by my poorly thought-out broom analogy (above).

i'm unsure about tiger: i have no need for it at all, and don't like all this talk of crash-happiness.

;-)

Also - latest news from people with dev kits - the new Macs run a standard Phoenix BIOS, and yes, you can run Windows on them…

Well, no, I don't see why you'd want to dual-boot, because I don't see why anyone would prefer OS X over Linux. It's no easier to use, there's little available in the way of interface customisation or choice, and all the "you will use our computer like THIS" stuff just gets in the way of getting on with what you want to do.

horses for courses, innit? and anyway: if the machines can boot into linux now, it's not exactly been much of a selling point. keith is right: the idea of a dual-boot mac/windows box would see a vast take-up of apple hardware. one of the main things that stops people "switching" now is still this fear that "oh, there isn't the same range of software". it's a pretty lame reason, but if windows-bootability acted like a security blanket, apple would be daft not to make a virtue of it.

http://giganticmag.com/images/ilx/uncle_sam_mac.jpg

Once in a while I figure I'll install Linux, really just to see how it's getting on. This time I got a lot further than I normally would. I managed to use it successfully for a few weeks. Thing is, I've got a wireless network. Naturally, this didn't work, so after a bit of reading (at this stage I reckon we've already lost 99% of the population) I discover that I need to use ndiswrapper to generate a proxy that talks to the windows wireless network card driver. I get a hold of this (using windows), have to compile it (another 99% of the remaining population lost) and ultimately I manage to get it working (by looking up articles on the internet, using Windows).

This is all fine until three weeks later when Linux decides to update itself (without asking me and ignoring my explicit instruction to leave ndiswrapper alone), installs a prior version of ndiswrapper, which isn't compatible with the proxy I've generated and once again I can't connect to the network.

At this point, it lost me. I suppose I could have fixed it but I've got better things to do with my time, especially when I can't actually achieve any more than I would working in Windows and taking no effort to do it. I'm sure it's the same in OS X (albeit, with the caveat that you've probably got to use the 'right' hardware). But I kind of figure that when all I'm trying to do is connect to the network and I've got fifteen years of Unix experience and I can't be bothered with the hassle, that almost everyone who uses OS X will probably have given up some way before I did.

Unless of course you have to do the same thing with OS X!

I don't think the points I make there are applicable to you guys, but you're not really typical Mac users are you?

By contrast, I bought a computer a couple of months back and installed Gentoo Linux on it. Unexpectedly, it came with wireless support on the motherboard. I wasn't too confident about my chances of getting it working, because I knew that ndiswrapper was out of the question;* but it turned out that, luckily, a driver for my card was available through the OS's package manager. Installing that, and also the 'wireless-tools' package, was one command; then I had to copy the network ID and encryption key to the network config file. It didn't work at first because the system couldn't work out how to get my wireless chipset to scan for available networks; after I tried the (suggested) alternative configuration to force it to only connect to a specific network, it works fine.

Since then, there have been updates for the packages involved; but none of the updates have broken everything.

* as it uses the Windows driver it only works on x86 machines;** I have an Athlon64.

** Pedantry: it will also work on Athlon64s which have been booted into a 32-bit OS, which is what happens if you run current release-versions of Windows on them. My kernel is 64-bit, though.

You had to:

- install a driver using the OS's package manager (you have to know what a 'package manager' is and where to find it
- Copy the security stuff to a config file (I assume requiring some knowledge of say vi or emacs or something, as well as knowing which config file)

Not too hard for someone who knows a bit about IT, but they are way beyond the capability of the average user.

I bought a laptop recently. It's got XP on it. When I turned it on, it basically went "What's your wireless network's security key". Granted this'll probably put off most people too, but it is really the minimum amount of techy stuff that's to be expected. Once I typed it in it was connected. I didn't need to find how to set it up, nor did I need to execute anything to set it up. It noticed there was a signal, assumed I'd want to use it, and asked the minimum number of questions possible in order to get it working.

This is what almost all of the population need in order to succeed in using a computer.

(there are efforts to make it all Just Work - Project Utopia, for example - but it's hard to predict how long it will take them to reach the mainstream distributions.)

Anyway, got to run. Meeting a pal down the town. Take care.

I think wireless is one of Linux's main failings at the moment; for some reason, they're having big difficulties in persuading the companies involved to give the specs out so native drivers can be written…

* a separate wireless card was even offered as an optional extra, which I turned down.

my biggest prob so far is that itunes sucks. is there a good mac equivalent to EAC??

the bastard - i spent saturday afternoon putting finishing touches to a new xscreensaver plugin. it's on the memory key in my pocket ready to send to him. then he goes and does this...

Oooh, what does it do?

um, old page here - http://home.clara.net/koogy/tuber/ have added wireframe and flat shaded options since. and colour cycling and rotation options and bendiness options and and and...)

(watching War Games yesterday made me remember i'd always planned to do a Nuke The USA screensaver - those scenes at the end are really simple but look great)

Because slashdot's readership is a shadow of itself 6 years ago.

(watching War Games yesterday made me remember i'd always planned to do a Nuke The USA screensaver - those scenes at the end are really simple but look great)

That would definitely be classic - given that there are n different Matrix-ripoffs about the place, why has noone done it?

Applecare? I keep telling my customers to buy it but they won't fucking listen.

really? how? and when? i'm buying one in the next month!

And if you don't get Applecare for your laptop you are foolish.

that seems strange that you can't exchange ram between computer

guess I don't know too much abt computers

so far the coolest thing about it is the "archive classic movies" widget for the dashboard. somehow i actually get more work done with old movies playing in the background (!).

when i'm downloading music using my browser now and the link loads up in the little quicktime window i used to be able to save the track, as you would, using "save as" or apple s onto my desktop before launching it into itunes but now when i go to save the file it either only saves the URL of the link or saves a tagged .mp3 icon which is usually 12kb in size and sometimes has a fraction of a second of music. can i change something in my settings to make sure it saves the complete .mp3 or uses the download window?

when i use a YSI link that has recently changed from a quckitime window to using the downloads window and launching the music directly into my itunes. why has this changed? (i prefer it this way and would rather it always did this on all sites).

thanks

If you want to get rid of the plugin so that music is downloaded, get rid of /Library/Internet Plug-ins/Quicktime.plugin -- but this means movies will also be downloaded.

-- Rock Hardy (crump...) (webmail), July 9th, 2005 10:58 PM. (Rock Hardy) (later) (link)

This has nothing to do with QT Pro. Also, there are s3r14l numb3rs out there for it. QT Pro should not exist, so I have no problems ripping them off to uncripple QT. I mean, fuck, I paid $1400 for my mac.

This is better than "save file as" and control-clicking on "save link to disk" because: a) It works on embedded files, b) you get to listen to the file first, c) you only have to download it once (if you click back and "save link", it'll download again)

It's common to any laptop that has a high-speed/capacity hard drive in it. Going full-bore on my PB, I notice that the CPU temperature hangs around 124degF and that seems to be pretty common.

the tucano looks nice - can you open the laptop while keeping it in the sleeve? does it have any corner protection? is it pretty thick neoprene?

(Incidentally, if you were trying to quit with Ctrl+Q: the Windows keystroke for "quit" has, for some unknown historical reason, always been Alt+F4)

I have the complete opposite experience, Laurel, getting used to osx - I had my windows desktop all neat and tiny and tidy and knew where everything was and what keyboard commands would make what happen and it asked me nothing unnecessary-- and now I'm starting again from scratch. (seriously, at first I was like 'help, if f5 doesn't refresh, what does? oh apple you rely on mouse too much, bah!')

Is it important to get shock-absorbing type of case for eg a powerbook, or just something that'll keep it from scuffing? I am quite v worried about transporting the lovely thing.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mac-OSX/message/1415

http://www.peteashton.com/04/11/16/region_free_your_dvd.html

you can change those; your parents probably chose the biggest ones. old people do that. :-)