Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Happy Holidays From The Random Tech Guy
I hope your holiday season is and has been bright and cheerful. In hope you did get stuck with ME II or and other Micro$oft fodder, and you got good study working tech gifts, like iPods, Macs, a nice Linux replacement for Vi$ta etc. Here's to a wonderful 2008, bringing the troops home, getting out of Iraq and not into Iran, national health care, a democrat in the White House, and more in congress, and more failures to the Republicants!
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Why I'll Miss Open Firmware
There are many reasons to mourn the loss of the PowerPC Mac (though my MacBook is fast and solid), one of the main ones is Open Firmware.
What could be better than a fully programmable interface for booting the machine, etc. Open firmware can be used to trick a machine into booting a Leopard CD by telling the Mac it is a different speed than it really is. It can blast that pesky PRAM better than the command keys, and even help eject a stuck CD. It was also used at one point to boot some Mac Linux distros.
One Of my favorite tips was using open firmware to boot the machine from a USB 2 device (something Apple does not support, though they did USB for some strange reason).
Most of all Open Firmware was a good trouble shooting tool.
Thankfully Apple decided not to go the 1980's route and decided to use Intel's EFI rather than the overly antiquated BIOS no one seems to want to give up on. The 80's is long over and it is time to stop booting your machine in an 8088 emulation mode. Even Micro$oft has refused to support EFI in Vi$ta save for their 64-Bit versions (M$ of course took way too long to get into the 64-Bit Market, but that is for another article). In the words of William Shatner (on SNL), "Get a life!" lose the BIOS guys. It has been at least 25 years, get over it the technology is dead. Then again PC's and M$ alike always did like beating dead horses.
What could be better than a fully programmable interface for booting the machine, etc. Open firmware can be used to trick a machine into booting a Leopard CD by telling the Mac it is a different speed than it really is. It can blast that pesky PRAM better than the command keys, and even help eject a stuck CD. It was also used at one point to boot some Mac Linux distros.
One Of my favorite tips was using open firmware to boot the machine from a USB 2 device (something Apple does not support, though they did USB for some strange reason).
Most of all Open Firmware was a good trouble shooting tool.
Thankfully Apple decided not to go the 1980's route and decided to use Intel's EFI rather than the overly antiquated BIOS no one seems to want to give up on. The 80's is long over and it is time to stop booting your machine in an 8088 emulation mode. Even Micro$oft has refused to support EFI in Vi$ta save for their 64-Bit versions (M$ of course took way too long to get into the 64-Bit Market, but that is for another article). In the words of William Shatner (on SNL), "Get a life!" lose the BIOS guys. It has been at least 25 years, get over it the technology is dead. Then again PC's and M$ alike always did like beating dead horses.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
The Only Props I'd Give Microsoft
Why did these guys in Redmond have to go and screw up a perfectly good thing? Xerox's brain child of the GUI, brought to fruition and perfection by Apple had to be effected by the greed, arrogance, and brutishness of a few "business" men. While I'd like to rant about how I do like a free market society when it is actually free (instead of monopolized) that is not what this article is about.
This may be my one and only shout out to Micro$oft. And it is for their one and only useful, stable, and not-so-privacy-invading OS, Windows 2000.
Yes Win2k, as some of us called it, was the culmination of bringing the here-to-fore stable Windows NT 4.0 kernal to a more user friendly (and plug and pray enabled) public. (And ok it did have a Win2k bug, so ironic). If M$ had just stopped with Win2k (AKA Windows NT 5.0) and just improved it with service packs and such, they might still have a good product. Instead that had to ruin it with NT 5.1 an incremental upgrade we all know as Windoze XP. And I'd rather not get into the travesty of NT 6.0 (Vi$ta). Which just might be the most unstable NT incarnation yet. Other than the massive amount of memory and hard drive space it uses, what does it really do that I need that XP didn't? Or OS X and Linux already did? And what about the RAM is seems to "steal" for video? Have you noticed if you have a 128 MB video card in the system it still tells you it is using more like 256? And fie on those who use it, and double fie on those who like it (and also remember up until recently the fastest Vista laptop was a Mac). At least for a few of us we can still use Windows 2000 (when we need to use Windoze). And even get a free patch for the daylight savings time changes, that Microshaft themselves refused to make free.
This may be my one and only shout out to Micro$oft. And it is for their one and only useful, stable, and not-so-privacy-invading OS, Windows 2000.
Yes Win2k, as some of us called it, was the culmination of bringing the here-to-fore stable Windows NT 4.0 kernal to a more user friendly (and plug and pray enabled) public. (And ok it did have a Win2k bug, so ironic). If M$ had just stopped with Win2k (AKA Windows NT 5.0) and just improved it with service packs and such, they might still have a good product. Instead that had to ruin it with NT 5.1 an incremental upgrade we all know as Windoze XP. And I'd rather not get into the travesty of NT 6.0 (Vi$ta). Which just might be the most unstable NT incarnation yet. Other than the massive amount of memory and hard drive space it uses, what does it really do that I need that XP didn't? Or OS X and Linux already did? And what about the RAM is seems to "steal" for video? Have you noticed if you have a 128 MB video card in the system it still tells you it is using more like 256? And fie on those who use it, and double fie on those who like it (and also remember up until recently the fastest Vista laptop was a Mac). At least for a few of us we can still use Windows 2000 (when we need to use Windoze). And even get a free patch for the daylight savings time changes, that Microshaft themselves refused to make free.
Sound Apple Theory
Well we can all see that thanks to Vista (henceforth know as Vi$ta or ME II) and Apple's awesome new OS X 10.5 (or Leopard) that Apple is having a banner year. Selling more Macs than ever (http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/03/01/mac_sales_growth_up_over_100_percent_in_january_says_firm.html for one example). PC sales are "sluggish"(ex. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EKF/is_31_46/ai_65023319) leaving many to believe that there is (finally) a paradigm shift in the market place, as people wake up to the fact the M$ is not the only answer and there are much better things in the world out there. While some are scrapping their Vi$ta installs for XP (some people of dubious intelligence call this a "downgrade") and more are ditching Windoze altogether for beautiful and refined new Linux OSes like Ubuntu 7.10. That is a subject for another article, however.
Users seem worried that Apple's nest OS iteration (10.6) will no longer run on PowerPC processors and only on the new Intel machines. I think they may be worrying for naught. First, Apple has invested a lot of time and money into Rosetta calling it, "The most mazing software you'll never see." Rosetta lets many (if not most) PowerPC native applications run on an Intel Mac without the user having to do anything. The technology is robust and powerful, but then again Apple knows processor transition. In March of 1994 Apple transitioned from the old Motorola 68k line of processors to its first PowerPC's. This meant, of course, that the 68k programs had to run on the new PowerPC's. As I recall there was no fancy name for the emulation mode and it worked quite well until "fat-binaries" (those that contained both 68k and PowerPC code) for programs were released (like the new "Universal" packages). Lastly there is living proof known as OS 8.1. OS 8.1 was the last OS to run on the 68k line and ran only on the top end 68040 ('040, Quadra, etc) processors. It also ran on many of the new PowerPC's right up until the G3's.
I suspect much like OS 8.1, 10.6 will run on G5 processors (with G4's already limited in support to 867 MHz I wouldn't look forward to anymore G4 support), and with G5's being sold right up until mid 2006, that means those who bought AppleCare will have support until 2009, so I suspect Apple won't leave G5's in the dust in 10.6. Remember it won't be ME II and they are not Micro$oft.
Users seem worried that Apple's nest OS iteration (10.6) will no longer run on PowerPC processors and only on the new Intel machines. I think they may be worrying for naught. First, Apple has invested a lot of time and money into Rosetta calling it, "The most mazing software you'll never see." Rosetta lets many (if not most) PowerPC native applications run on an Intel Mac without the user having to do anything. The technology is robust and powerful, but then again Apple knows processor transition. In March of 1994 Apple transitioned from the old Motorola 68k line of processors to its first PowerPC's. This meant, of course, that the 68k programs had to run on the new PowerPC's. As I recall there was no fancy name for the emulation mode and it worked quite well until "fat-binaries" (those that contained both 68k and PowerPC code) for programs were released (like the new "Universal" packages). Lastly there is living proof known as OS 8.1. OS 8.1 was the last OS to run on the 68k line and ran only on the top end 68040 ('040, Quadra, etc) processors. It also ran on many of the new PowerPC's right up until the G3's.
I suspect much like OS 8.1, 10.6 will run on G5 processors (with G4's already limited in support to 867 MHz I wouldn't look forward to anymore G4 support), and with G5's being sold right up until mid 2006, that means those who bought AppleCare will have support until 2009, so I suspect Apple won't leave G5's in the dust in 10.6. Remember it won't be ME II and they are not Micro$oft.
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