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re MS-Office
I'm not sure I agree that the program is "nice" and that there's no reason to compete with it. I find MS-Word slowly consumes more and more clock cycles, even sitting idly, until the CPU is saturated with busywork. I find the asking retail price of hundreds of dollars for the MS-Office suite to be absurd, particularly in light of the MS expectation you re-purchase it every two years or so. I also find it crashes during routine operation. Further, I find its alleged "updater" fails to find and update it on launch, regardless where I try installing the suite.
I am excited that OpenOffice is gaining government users abroad. A large user base with an incentive to demand features ... and pockets to fund development of the free Office suite ... will lead to a great product we can all use and enjoy, without worrying about an app opening ports secretly and attempting surreptitious communication with other machines. Given the security record of MS, that behavior is absurd and not merely unacceptable. Only a fool would install MS' spyware-"enhanced" versions on unfirewalled machines.
Insane. I say, let the competition flourish. The only thing a user wants is access to legacy data, and interoperation with the files of strangers. If that can be achieved, the label is irrelevant.
Just my 2¢.
--Tex.
everyone got one?
Hate to break it to you, but the iPod is also expensive, and not everyone got one. Sure, it's not $4k, but then, it's not the TV the whole household will watch at once, either. MiniPod is similar, but smaller and cheaper, and will appeal to (a) people who want to but iPod on the cheap and (b) people who feel even the iPod is too big and bulky for their preferred activity. The interesting thing is that the cheaper competitors are either smaller in capacity or much bigger, so far as I can tell; I think Apple's MiniPod will do better than detractors allege when they say it's not much less expensive than the smallest iPod so why would one buy. I think size is critical in this device for many people. My own experience with an AIWA tape player in the 1980s convinces me ... it turned out I really could NOT run with the thing, though it *looked* small.
As prices drop and capacity grows, and coolness rises and the idea gnaws on them, and they get free songs in their Pepsis or at McDonalds and think they might like to hear it while working out or working, people will begin to come to the iPod/MiniPod that wanted one last holiday season but didn't
Here's to the MiniPod
--Tex.
God ordered me to kill!
... and other examples.
I agree that religion doesn't suggest a higher standard of behavior. Interestingly, I find that several of the most highly principled people I know are committed atheists: they are certain there is no god to forgive them, and have to get it right the first time. Religion can propel people to lives of great contribution, but can also be perverted to justify (or be invoked to forgive) a wide variety of behaviors society does not broadly condone: polygamy, torture, killing of strangers and bystanders of selected symbols perceived to oppose the religion ... all kinds of behavior.
We unfortunately are unable, in my estimation, to look to membership in particular religions, or religion generally, as a substitute for examination of the quality of those we meet. We must actually learn about each person and each motive, and it is a painstaking process. We also make mistakes, but perhaps fewer than if we paint the population with the broad brushes we would adopt if we stated that "All X possess characteristic Y" and the like. (or even "Most X will generally possess characteristic Y, and we will assume that each X has Y unless we learn differently" ... which leads us to the same place, especially if we are too busy to look very hard at the people we encounter)
Laters.
--Tex.
64-but laptop
I like the 64-bit and hypertransport, but who in Wintel space is writing 64-bit apps? The OS vendor hasn't got it ready and the next OS version is now suspected to come in '06? And when I read it had 4 USB ports, I looked at the 7.5lb weight ... is this machine a hot seller?
It's interesting, though. Apple won't be the first 64-bit laptop
--Tex.
I really need to let Apple know about the smaller and lighter issue on the G5. I hope I can find a place to send Apple the comments.
Apple's got an email address for investor relations, and they actually read it. On occasion I've actually gotten a human's individualized reply. Feel free to comment ... many pleas I have entered there have, for whatever reason, been given life in Apple products and strategies. Obviously not all. But at least they read it.
On the other hand, I think arguing weight and space on a tower configuration is going to fall on deaf ears. I don't like lifting towers either, but nobody looking at Dells will be bringing a scale, either. Weight is a really frequent question in portables, but I think despite your concern that it is considered to be a minor issue at best in a full-sized tower.
--Tex.
Pizmo resale
I doubt I would get much, and it's a big hassle ... Pizmos aren't going for much: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2780533234&category=51042
And I would rather not get a current G4, given my suspicions about what's just over the horizon.
We'll see
--Tex.
Waiting for G5 Powerbook, too.
My Pizmo remains perfectly serviceable, and I have no reason to replace the now 4-year old computer. But I will want to manipulate digital video and edit sound and do lots of things I didn't need in the spring of 2000, and didn't get drive space for even on upgrade to 30GB.
The fact that two (2) G5s are working nicely in a 1U rack speaks well of power; the larger-than-90nm process could not. I also read that Apple is working with liquid cooling technology companies for quietly cooled portable high performance notebooks ... sure, I expect to wait for the summer. But by fall 2004, I expect to be placing an order.
Could be wrong of course, and might buy a desktop instead if I get demands the Pizmo won't handle.
--Tex.
VNC ? RDC
Microsoft Windows Terminal Services allows Windows messages to be transmitted to a special proprietary client ... VNC is closer to X-Windows in having to transmit all the screen data across the network to the client, and in my experience VNC hasn't been particularly fast. Of course, the machine I was controlling via VNC wasn't very fast, so it's not particularly useful info.
My experience controlling Win boxes with the M$ tool has been that it is serviceable, but don't try to scroll with a document while trying to highlight, as it's all out of sync by the time the messages about the mouse and its location and the screen position all get sorted out.
VNC doesn't support drag and drop between the remote and local machines, like some systems.
Ideally, Apple would revive a version of what used to exist on all the NeXT boxes. NeXT offered remote post script windowing, with each application informing the client running the interface the status of the window using postscript descriptions rather than transmitting information about every pixel on the screen. It was lightweight on the network. Apple scrapped this when it re-wrote the windowing system for MacOS X to reflect the fact it could not affordably license PostScript from Adobe. To underscore what USED to be available: an app could be run on any machine, with any machine (with the app on it, or a remote machine) receiving the UI for the app. Remote PDF should permit this just fine in principle, but Apple when Apple re-wrote its windowing system, it was not thinking about its machines as members of a network but as stand-alone machines.
I'd sure like to see port forwarding features of OpenSSH harnessed to tunnel remote PDF. Old-timer NeXT developers have complained about the disappearance of the remote windowing capabilities of the old OS, and I can see their point. Apple could sell a lot of big iron to schools and other institutions, in my opinion, if it could tell them that their local machines were upgrade-proof (needed only to have the power to run the UI of their apps) so long as power for increasingly complicated apps could be added transparently as back-room servers. With the advent of Rendezvous, this is even more a realistic possibility: apps needing processor power could "discover" ready additional machines and tap their free clock cycles, while ancient clients kept humming away year after year. Sure, you have a hard time selling client boxes to people whose machines remain serviceable, but you gain long-term interest in your servers, you excite IT people about your customer-friendly solution, and you offer a very convenient user experience that can be set up at home without sweat. Rather than reinvent the wheel with remote connections, Apple should just use the battle-proven tool it already ships, the OpenSSH tool which runs whenever "allow remote login" is clicked. But Apple should offer better than a command line interface, providing a remote GUI environment to forward across OpenSSH's connection.
--Tex.
new iApp question
Is my impression correct that the improved iPhoto and other apps are purchase-only, or with new macs, and not for download?
Thanks,
-Tex.
concern over buying iBooks?
Given what you can get in the G4 iBooks, I'd think the fear would be cannibalization of Powerbook sales, not pathetic iBook sales. Since schools are the largest-volume individual buyers of iBooks I know of, and they are being courted by other vendors on price and performance, the G4 iBooks should help Apple with its momentum back into educational space in the below-university level.
MY concern is that until there'sa G5 Powerbook, it might be hard to sell Powerbooks to people who will be satisfied with a14" screen, except for the people who actually want to burn DVDs.
As much as analysts get things wrong on this company, it's interesting to see they correctly pegged a sales number. As far as fear Apple will lose music player sales share, it seems most people still don't have a player and sales are accelerating. A PC buddy recently came to me for help synching his iPod ... it seems he had just recently bought a 30GB iPod and couldn't get MusicMatch to synch his music on a work-supplied machine with a slew of security programs designed to prevent users from unauthorized uses and allowing software to engage in unauthorized behaviors. Unknown whether the problem is the security software or just the fact the software is out of date. He hadn't succeeded in getting DSL to run at his home, despite paying for it.
As long as PCs give this behavior, the market for Macs shouldn't be thought to be too near death It was an XP box, btw.
Hope your holidays were great!
--Tex.
Drive not mounting . . .
. . . possibly because it has no filesystem yet?
Try formatting the drive with a filesystem; it will show up in the disk utility in the utilities folder in the applications folder.
Enjoy the drive, and tell us how the G5 treats you
--Tex.
Sun out-Steving Steve?
Actually, looking at the desktop portrayed, I thought I saw a lot of features that were rumored to have been in Panther, like minimized windows and the like. The transparency is certainly not innovative relative to Apple, I use transparency all the time to see what's beneath Terminal windows
I think allowing apps to offer services that can be inherited by other apps' windows, like sticky tabs that stick to the backside of a window, are interesting. The concern I have is that storing all those stickies could be hard for pages with changing content, or remote pages. Sure, a database can handle it. The details are up the the apps. It's interesting that I don't recall a way to allow MS-Word on Panther to use the system's spell-checker instead of its own, or to offer its spellchecker to other apps systemwide. Probably related to the fact MS-Office/X was written before Carbon apps were Services-aware.
Oh, well. nice to see the market up
--Tex.
Strong suit? demand?
If MSFT's strong suit isn't security it's not merely because the market has not historically refused to buy insecure products when they were recognized as such, but because unlike some other alternative solutions, MSFT's solutions are not engineered by people with a very sophisticated grasp of security. MSFT has falsely claimed its code had been so thoroughly audited of buffer-overflows that the buffer overflow was over as an MS-Windows attack type. MSFT apparently can't recognize its vulnerabilities even when deliberately looking for them.
MSFT continues to be able to sell its products for a few major reasons:
(1) File-format lock. People want into the data they handled last week, and MSFT does not only not document the file formats it uses, but ensures the target keeps moving to prevent reverse-engineering. Now, we also see MSFT will use patents to prevent reverse-engineering: MSFT is offering to LICENSE to flash RAM vendors the use of the FAT file system (yes, the one that was obsoleted in 1996 because it didn't handle names longer than 8 chars and a 3-char extension). Not FAT32, not NTFS ... FAT. Crazy. You want into a document created with MS-Word without hozing its formatting and content? You can't license THAT, you have to buy MS-Word, complete with open ports and security holes.
(2) Ignorance. People don't generally have a very good understanding of security, so they look for the buzz-words on teh box and can't tell what they're missing. Password authentication? 256-bit encryption? I'm safe! Heh, but what they don't know, and MSFT either lies about or is ignorant of, is how the whole enchilada works together and how it falls apart in the middle. Security nuts prefer Unix
(3) FUD. People accept because they hear that a computing monoculture creates efficiencies, and that M$ is the vendor to sell it to them, despite the clear fact that buying IIS servers and standardizing people on Outlook is suicide for security of both networks and all the individual machines on which they sit. You use network attached storage? Muhuhahaha! As for the security of the underlying OS, M$ simply trots out a mouth every so often to say, "We used to be slower and insecure but we're better now. And we're cheaper than Linux." The evidence is that for a firewall, you need a machine that is good at firewalls and not an M$ product. And that for a high-performance mailserver, Postfix is miles ahead of Exchange, which requires a whole roomful of Compaq/IBM machines to handle what one Linux box from IBM will do. Webserving? Heh. When was the last time your server was attacked by an Apache installation? What server do you want running inside your network? ROFL.
(4) Anticompetitive tactics. Since HP and IBM are major Windows licensees, and IBM proved to the world when it allowed OS/2 to be smothered that one can't fight M$ effectively while required to bargain for Windows license terms, it's pretty clear that HP and IBM will have increasing difficulty peddling Linux and the like to their own customers, as M$ will require absurd things like bundled licenses with every machine sold, or else a highway-robbery licensing rate on the licenses actually shipped. Funding litigation against Linux vendors and users is also classic FUD: SCO hasn't in all this time ever said what property it thinks was misappropriated or by which individuals in what commits to whose Linux tree ... and nobody seems to take SCO's hijack attempt seriously any more ... but M$ has given SCO millions to run with it. The winner: SCO's law firm. SCO is too distracted to do any real work while this is underway, and its shareholders will be screwed. The cap to the anticompetitive tactics appears to be Palladium, a system which will allow software vendors to ram down consumers' throats the most onerous possible licensing terms, and because of (1)-(3) above, many will not have an opportunity to resist. Then when they discover all their files -- THEIR files, with THEIR data -- are encrypted and depend on licensing fees being regularly paid just to read them ... and the files can't be opened on a non-palladium computer because they lack the digital credentials needed to get through the DRM on all the files ... and cracking it is a DMCA violation ... heh ... then they're really screwed.
So I am happy I decided I could not afford to use M$ solutions in my business or personal life; I've avoided some outrageous licensing fees, some terrifying security blunders, and have kept my server up and my laptop churning away productively for several years.
Heh, too bad for Apple my machine still runs fine ... but then, my experience with it has sold several more and I don't think they'll ever go back. I am keen to see what is done for the small business segment with existing open-source tools. This could be a good battleground for Apple and other alternative OS vendors, as the market shudders at M$' pricing and legal tactics. I mean, when did a group from Linux or FreeBSD ever require a school district to account for all their installed copies and licenses? I don't think others can afford to use M$' product much more than I can, it's just taking them longer to see it.
--Tex.
semi-OT re The Dark Side
While incompatibility between platforms was something one used to just nod at and move on, the existence of widely available, often zero-fee development environments which have been engineered to run on multiple platforms prevents me from tolerating apps that don't run on my box. The Mozilla project has a toolkit for writing apps that run anyplace Mozilla itself will run, using Mozilla's back-end to drive the UI. Java runs anyplace, unless you've bought and used a crippled java development tool that was designed to prevent cross-platform use. Web sites that refuse to offer me their content because they test my browser's ID string instead of its functionality are especially idiotic: I tell the browser to lie about who it is and where it is running and the content works just fine. Do the site's managers have any idea how many people are running Konqueror or Mozilla or OmniWeb where they had, for whatever bizzare reason, hoped to create an enclave of M$-only browsers?
So I have no tolerance for newly-written software that won't run on my box. I especially have no tolerance for BAD software that won't run on my box. A trip through law offices in Houston has shocked me with the pitiful quality of the performance, much less the user experience, on some really expensive software (I think of most commercial software as "really expensive" ... hundreds of dollars per seat is "really expensive" when there are free alternatives that work better) designed to run the law offices and their records. Whole teams of people are sucked into making this stuff ... ahem ... "work". And it's STANDARD to be this bad, apparently. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Security? Here's what I wrote when people on a listserv started arguing over whether Apple was lying when it said its operating system came with integrated antivirus technology, and whether Apple could have as accurately said its products came with anti-tiger technology (you haven't been mauled by a tiger at your Apple have you?):
No, I don't think MacOS X can be fairly said to include anti-tiger technology.
The reason Outlook and Exchange are big virus propagators, and not the high-volume mailservers (like QMail, Postfix, etc.), is directly related to the fact that their creator has no real concern about or interest in genuine security. Thus, bolt-on "security" in the form of antivirus software is needed to even begin describing such systems as "secure". (Remember the remote control exploit, useable on any default XP installation on a network, available for XP a few weeks after MS declared XP the most secure product it had ever shipped?) Let's face it: if so many Outlook installations did not execute scripts attached to unauthenticated incoming communications, there would BE no super-scale virus propagation, only the propagation of Trojans by people duped into executing them by hand. I have yet to hear of Pine, Eudora, Mail.app, or any other client causing unintended transmission of self-propagating email to entire address-books full of victims. Mind you, I get junk attachments all the time, returned to me because a virus used my email in a forged return address when attempting to infect a third party -- and my machines have NEVER infected others as a result of receiving such an attachment. No client I have run has the faults that enable self-propagation, the defining feature of a virus.
Denying unauthenticated incoming transmissions the power to execute themselves, or to propagate themselves, is a design decision which is a security feature. Sure, KMail *could* enable javascript to run KMail itself, and turn KMail into an instrument of virus propagation, but KMail does not. KMail is in this respect possessed of integrated anti-virus architecture. This is a trait not shared with the creators of Outlook, Exchange, IIS, MS-Word, etc. These apps, running on the operating systems created by the same manufacturer, usually run with privilege which exceeds that of the user at the keyboard, and thus enables further mischief. Parts of IIS as I understand it run effectively in kernel mode; DLLs used by MS-Word on its native platform execute commands with privilege which exceeds the logged-in user's; and since MS-Word now opens ports to try to trade messages with other MS-Word installations, while remaining fully scriptable, thus opening a whole vista of attacks which allow elevated privileges to be enjoyed by strangers who lack privilege even to log into the machine.
One day in the Texas capitol, I tested an XP exploit which relied on the predictable, but insecure, misbehavior of XP's software update tool. It is possible for a user on machines which have not been updated since that time to recursively delete all files from any point in the filesystem, merely by clicking a specially malformed hyperlink. (Yes, even C:/ ... though this was not my test. The app which did this was analagous to a SUID app in that it had super privileges though it was executable by any user.) Given that Outlook will happily send this malformed link to everyone in your address book, it seems permitting Outlook to be installed in an error anywhere you do not intend to reinstall every machine's OS and applications. The fact that Outlook will send the link to everyone in your address book is a nuisance, but the fact that the link will hose an entire system is unacceptable. The fun part is that since MS-Explorer is also scriptable, you don't even need the user to click the link ... just run Outlook.
Rather than expect "bolt-on" security like anti-virus software to catch attacks, I prefer to see systems designed to avoid exposing vulnerable services with any privilege which would cause real irritation. The Secure Shell Daemon is a good example of an application which permits lots of power without permitting lots of subversion. Especially now that it is designed with separation of privilege, the architecture exposes great functionality without exposing the boxes running it to great embarrassment. It is this sort of thinking that we need to see in security, not a ballooning market of bolt-on software to drive up the cost of running boxes while neglecting real security. Apache does not run as root on any system I have used, it runs as a fictitious user with no privilege to overwrite users' home directories, etc. This is a security feature. Ignoring this because it isn't a third-party add-on is simply not fair. Especially as my server logs have recorded attempted attacks from MS' own servers running IIS (from the hotmail.com domain), I regard minimum-necessary-privilege design and genuine privilege enforcement without in-kernel code run by the webserver to be a very high quality form of anti-virus. The IIS servers which attacked me included machines in Korea, and I could not even tell their operators that the machines were infected. Meanwhile, self-propagating messages were being transmitted throughout IIS-land in the form of Nimda and Code Red ... fearful sysadmins took servers offline as a preventative measure, accomplishing what virus-writers themselves need not in rendering their services unavailable ... and my Apache on MacOS X on an old beige G3 kept serving away, logging all the attacks against it and dutifully serving underwater hockey information to the world.
So, actually having apps run in user space to take advantage of user privilege limits, the existence of privilege limits even in "admin" accounts, the forbiddance of auto-execution of any-attachment-received-from-anywhere, and other features do constitute real anti-virus technology, and in my view are better described as "built-in" security than the inclusion of some bolt-on extra like an antivirus scanner package. Sure, feel free to use an antivirus screen on your server to catch cascades of obviously hostile executables, and protect vulnerable users and their scarce disk space. But don't call that "security" when the answer is to architect systems to forbid the most obvious and the most heinous attacks in the first instance.
Understanding what goes into virus propagation on other systems is the first step to figuring out what constitutes an antivirus strategy. I'm happy with my antivirus strategy, and it doesn't cost me more than my OS license and my local network environment.
Cheers,
--Tex.
re stability
I hear, about once every two years, some testimonial praising Redmond's software offerings. I am sure someone must have an experience that does not fail expectations, and these folks are surely in that group. I have no idea what these people *do* with their machines, mind you. Whenever I've tried to push machines and test their more interesting capabilities, I've found rough edges and warts and so on -- mac or PC.
Stability, though, I've not seen in MSFT operating systems' apps or operating systems under the kind of use I give them. Yes, I've used XP and apps supposedly updated for it. After the first few updates to 10.0, MacOS X has performed well for me though, as befits its Unix heritage. I see stability even while doing really oddball things, and when using fairly harshly (eg, sleeping and then waking it with mounted volumes missing). I don't do this sort of thing purposely, but I do it.
Sure, you may get a painless existence on your Dell, but that's not the experience of anyone I know using a Dell. It doesn't take an evangelist to say a hog truck reeks. It just reeks. Park them in your neighborhood if you want, but keep them far from me.
Not a Mac evangelist here, only bought a Mac when Apple migrated to Unix. Plenty aware of the differences between Gatesware and software you find operating where stability and security matters. Your suggestions about anti-virus and firewalls are interesting ... MacOS X has a fairly full-featured firewall and router in it when you install, and its mailhandling programs do not enable self-propagation, so virii are irrelevant: you need lusers to execute trojans by hand, and on my network they don't exist. The gulf between this and the rampant insecurty which permeates M$' products is ... substantial. If you'd like it spelled out I can paste here what I posted a while back on a list when "integrated antivirus technology" claims were being debated.
Insecurity has me actively looking to rid myself even of M$ Word. It really is that bad.
--Tex.
only semi OT: Why Dell, again?
Did I miss the part where it is explained why a Dell is needed? I've not found myself needing to use the tools of the devil for some time, and I'm slightly surprised to hear they are being resorted to here.
What's the need for the big, noisy, ugly box that won't last? (at least, that was MY experience with Dells)
Proprietary software needed?
Thx,
--Tex.
Ginza Store:
Was this before it opened, or ...?
Anyway, it's quite a crowd. I was fascinated. I think a store this size may be justified after all in that location
--Tex.
thx, cotton
--Tex.
thx re waterhouse; PaperProfit: where are links to educate me on calendar spreads?
Thanks!
--Tex.
re streamer on MacOS X
OK, what do you do to enable Waterhouse's streamer? I have a Waterhouse account, but have only used Waterhouse for browser-based real-time quotes on an as-requested, per-click basis. How do you do it?
Thx,
--Tex.
PS, who wants to point me to a source on calendar spreads? Info, desctiption, strategies, etc. Also: how you'd enter them at Waterhouse ...?
failure of representative systems to represent
It's the fact your label is supposed to contract to promote your work, and gets you screwed through deals with/through RIAA, that interests me. We have lots of representative systems in the "free world" and they are pretty manifestly broken -- corporate boards, legislatures, etc. being only the most obvious. I'm interested in the mechanics of how artists get screwed by their labels. Can you post a like to walk the newbie through it, or email me with some anecdotes?
sea_dragons at mac dot com, if you're interested.
Thanks,
--Tex.
not a joke! no royalties??
Assuming the recording contract with the label was intended to get the recording artist paid, it's hard to imagine the label making money out of the RIAA's deals without inevitably trickling a few dimes back to the artists. If you say the money trail doesn't lead back to you, I believe it, but it's certainly an interesting example of people freely contracting to be represented by others and getting shafted for it.
This is the case, then?
Thanks,
--Tex.
no royalties from iTunes?
OK, if RIAA is getting most of the money from iTunes sales, how is it you are getting shorted? Are your tunes in their catalog, or are you in iTunes through a different/indie arrangement?
I'm eager to hear how RIAA may not be actually representing artists' interests ....
--Tex.
trampling iTunes' market share 100:1?
To the extent Kazaa, Gnutella, and the like have more users than iTunes, and you're trying to evaluate iTunes as a business in this environment, consider that development of those platforms has been a money-loser, it exists on donated bandwidth, and it involves illegal duplication of copyrighted material. Counting only lawful downloads and systems with some mechanism of directing revenue to developers for use, I think iTunes' market position is a bit better than is suggested by the 100:1 ratio with Kazaa et al.
Besides, if Roxio's stock is in the pits after its service's debut under the newly-bought "Napster" name, and Apple freely admits it is willing to lose a little money on the service to sell hardware and is in the #1 slot, Apple is in a position to scare people out of the market. Only the likes of MSFT, which has money to burn, would enter the market ... and they would enter only to make war on the basis of file formats. Expect to see a pile of development on codecs designed to be a hair smaller and a hair more faithful to originals, so M$ can claim its file format is superior. And expect M$ to enter a cataleptic fit figuring out whether to milk hardware mfg for licenses, or to subsidize the hardware mfg to drive use of its format and marginalize the early market entrant's influence. Actually, M$ has put a lot of R&D into its compression already ....
It'll be an interesting battle ... I wonder if apple's patent on the circular mouse wheel will hold up when people actually challenge it. It's the defining feature on the iPod. Surely someone has made one for a different device though ...?
Later
--Tex.
re digital audio on G5
I was thinking that people interested in using the G5 as an instrument, or using it to mix music, or as a digital jukebox would prefer the digital audio out to the soundcards what used to prevail on Macs. I recall being disappointed that the high-end cards I was interested in on the PC side weren't available on the Mac side. I would think that a better encoding than MP3, and high bitrates, would be assumed in the audiophile who bothered to compress
Sure, if you're getting your music from Kazaa/Gnutella rather than your collection, the improvement in output would be irrelevant because the sound you start with is garbage, and GIGO.
Anyone got a Mac with digital audio out connected to an amp? I'd like your report
--Tex.
digital audio
It's not being promoted for reasons which probably rank next to lots of other features which are not promoted: who knows?
Most high-end amps apparently now ship with digital audio in/out, which means the Mac can be used as a jukebox for the audiophile, something not available due to the quality of sound cards in macs. Now that no conversion to analog occurs, it's losslessly sent in digital to the amp which is trusted to have the listener's intended quality.
Nice, eh?
Also, probably has value for people who mix sound or need to communicate with audio equipment, but I'm not sure: lots of pro audio hardware seems to be using firewire of late.
I am really attracted to the digital audio, and am looking at desktops despite being a portable-only person for years now.
Happy turkey day
--Tex.
Hyundai, labor ...
My mistake, it was a different Korean auto mfg that went belly-up, not Hyundai .... however:
"Tex, Hyundai can offer roadside assistance and inexpensive vehicles because they use cheap labor."
But, the roadside assistance is offered in the US, right? Surely, by persons near the car in the US and paid at a rate influenced by the market near the location of the car, right?
I drive an ancient, smoking Diesel and ran out of fuel years ago in Mississippi ... it seems, driving through the night in a place/year where lots of stations closed at 11PM was a poor move on my part. The car's former owner had put a sticker inside the glovebox, giving the manufacturer's 800 number for roadside assistance, and when my fiancée and I bummed a ride to a phone, we called the number and got a free wrecker with a free gallon of Diesel. (Where are we, ma'am? Hm, in the vicinity of the greater metropolitan area of Social Springs, Mississippi . . . .) Lifetime roadside service, and it followed the car though transfer Got me to the next station for a fill-up
The woman on the phone and the wrecker were both Americans, though the manufacturer was not...
The thing I wonder at in our competitiveness is the amount of taxation we build into our products. While it's nice that foreigners pay lots of US income taxes whose cost is built into the price of the products, would we keep more jobs and have better domestic living if our predominant tax scheme didn't drive up the cost of export goods? The attractiveness of making a sales tax (coupled with a monthly refund of tax which would be paid on the standard deduction, so that the poor don't get overtaxed, else the system would be horribly regressive) rather than an income tax is that the tax affects the price of goods bought here, not the cost to make the goods, assuming we don't tax manufacturers on their materials .... In Texas, we run mostly on a sales tax (no income tax here), and lots of raw foods are untaxed entirely. If you cook your own food, your taxes are mostly collected when you buy and (re)register your car, and when you own property (or rent it from a taxpaying property owner). Eat out a lot? Pay lots of tax. Taxing consumption seems a way to tax the wealthy more while not taxing people any more than they "deserve" -- and taxing all illegal and income the moment it gets spent. Any thoughts on whether we're better off taxing incomes or taxing consumption on a national level?
Thanks,
--Tex.
battling dictionaries: rofl
Webster's does include a definition of irony which includes the word sarcasm, suggesting that confusing the two words has become so commonplace as to have migrated the definitions one finds "in the wild" and thus also now in the dictionary (you can also find hippopotamuses as the plural of hippopotamus, but this doesn't make it much more correct). Apparently, misuse has confused the line between irony and sarcasm quite badly. The use I am familiar with for irony is "a state of affairs or events which is the opposite of what was or what was to be expected", which is another Webster's definition. The Webster's definition of ironic merely states "marked by irony" and leaves you to look up irony.
My favorite dictionary cross reference was in a sailing book. Near the beginning, the word Breeze was defined with the instruction: "see Zephyr". Zephyr, in turn, was defined with the instruction "see Breeze". Flipping back and forth a few times, you quickly goto the idea ...
--Tex.
Vocabulary:
Uh, you have it wrong.
Sarcasm is a statement intended to suggest its opposite, and may be intended for humorous purpose -- it certainly need not be intended to be mean. Ever see Faulty Towers? Brits are masters of sarcastic humor.
Irony is not the same as "saying the opposite of what you mean" .... A racecar driver ticketed for failure to drive the minuimum speed on a freeway might be ironic, for example.
I invested in an unabriged Webster's which is hard to lift, and I've never regretted it. I recommend it highly.
--Tex.
How long does Hyundai roadside assistance last?
And ... is Hyundai not bankrupt yet?
--Tex.
national healthcare
The most substantial impediment to national health care is federal interference with state regulation of employee benefir plans, the tool through which most coverage of working-age people and their dependents get their coverage. If you think for a second, you will realize we actually DO have universal insurance in the US, for drivers. States experimented with systems to spread the cost of motor vehicle collisions, and at this point in time EVERY state has independently adopted coverage requirements that result in every driver being insured unless the driver actively worked to evade the coverage. The minimum required coverage is cheap, though of course additional optional coverage can be expensive based on individual risks. Because the *basic* required insured risks are broadly spread, those risks are not difficult to cover.
Oregon's universal coverage experiment was prevented by federal courts' interpretation of federal employee benefit law, and Hawaii's has been frozen by the same law in the state in which it existed in 1974 ... despite the fact that Hawaii has learned quite a bit in the last 30 years wnd would LIKE to improve its coverage system. By eliminating any experimentation for 30 years, the federal government has delayed universal coverage by 30 years.
Don't pray for a federal solution that will freeze us in the dark ages for another 30 yeasrs, just demand the elimination of the fedreal barriers to interstate experimentation which yielded nationally uniform law on the sale of goods (you don't have trouble buying on the internet under state law, do you?).
--Tex.
Security increases in importance to corporate purchasers...
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/031107/microsoft_security_1.html
Heh, heh.
--Tex.
Remote Desktop Connection
On a Pizmo, RDC runs fine. Since you're connecting no deobt to a stronghold of windozzzz...(snore .... Zzzz....) you will likely use a VPN rather than ssh connection to reach the network from which you will use a machine's "Terminal Services" (the M$-speak for remote access to the machine) ... so the real trick is getting the VPN settings right.
After that, it was fine.
--Tex.
VaporPC: a cynical view
When Microsoft was buying the IP of Connectix, purveyors of VirtualPC, it would have been advantageous to derail regulators with a vaporware competitive alternative for running Win32 applications on an Apple platform. Any thoughts whether the vaporware was invited by Microsoft, either to improve its purchase position with Connectix or to improve its posture with antitrust regulators? Oh, wait, antitrust regulators have been de-fanged for a while now, eh? (just back from Canada, eh?)
--Tex.
"freeloading" states
Actually, if my recollection of history serves me properly, some southern states proposed exactly that a few years back and it went badly
--Tex.
re Audiochat with AIM users
The AIM client which supports audio says of iChat that the client is unable to do audio conferencing. The two are apparently using different systems, or the "recognition" is by parsing the name of the client rather than by testign functionality. Unless Jobs was lying through his teeth at WWDC (I'm not taking bets either way), anyone implementing the same mechanism as iCaht should be able to interoperate. The question is: if they don't, will Apple adopt what becomes widely in use, for interoperability? Also: is there some technical barrier to others' adoption of Apple's solution? Codec to license? Processor requirements? AIM could be targeting ancient CPUs ... I have no idea what it sounds like, because I found nobody to talk to using the version supporting voice.
Currently, the only people TO chat with seem to be on iChat, except by special arrangement. H.323 is a security nightmare and implementing it in home offices, homes, etc. is a disaster waiting to happen. Oh, unless you want to buy and install an H.323 proxy! Which is no doubt why MS loves it, it pushes needless complexity and additional license sales. Promoting H.323 would be nice, but there's no reason in this century to implement a protocol which has the same security problems as the original FTP. Here's to doing it over one port, over which original signal negotiation occurs.
Best regards,
--Tex.
Fingerprint mouse:
This is an interesting product for kiosks, but for home use it's a dud, IMHO. Oh, and they can't really use the fingerprint as ID confirmation until you've registered ... and quite a few of us aren't into creating database entries for ourselves. I'd not be much of a customer for it anyway, as I often have, heh, heh, no readable fingerprint.
I think smartcards are a better bet, but since nobody's got smartcard readers (well, YOU haven't got one, do you? me neither!) they're not really "here" yet. The smartchip in my Amex cracks me up. Support online security, will it? Hah.
Take care,
--Tex.
OT Zanny re biking
Actually, I scanned the text too quickly to miss the total number of stages in the Tour de France. The way the link was written made it appear the fellow being hilighted had won his fourth tour, not his fourth stage in THIS tour. Since I figured out it wasn't over, I also figured out Lance could still pull it out, since his strength in this race is the end, which seems to kill everyone else.
The real issue I was getting at was: what on Earth is the USPS doing spending piles of money onadvertising when they've got bulk mail, first-class letters, bills, postcards, and lots of other markets completely sewn up. The only competition is in certain sizes of boxes and in certain priority deliveries. And the USPS could compete on price with more effectiveness than with an ad campaign.
Next thing, the USPS will have an IPO! Silly.
Just get my bills there on time and stop spending my postage sending Lance to France! Let FedEx do it!
Take care,
--Tex.
OT re Tour de France
Pity it looks like Armstrong didn't pull it off again, but I keep asking myself: Why would the United States Postal Service need to spend my money sponsoring a race team? It's not like I have alternatives for sending most of my mail, unless I want to overnight it!
--Tex.