flyermoney's Profile

Fellows, One major oversight [i](web-wide, nobody has grokked this)[/i] in what ZFS will really bring to Leopard users, is how it will tie in with Time Machine. Read the following, snagged from the Wikipedia entry on ZFS: [i]SNAPSHOTS The ZFS copy-on-write model has another powerful advantage: when ZFS writes new data, instead of releasing the blocks containing the old data, it can instead retain them, creating a snapshot version of the file system. [b]ZFS snapshots are created very quickly, since all the data comprising the snapshot is already stored; they are also space efficient, since any unchanged data is shared among the file system and its snapshots.[/b][/i] (empasis mine) Catch the drift? ZFS-formatted drives will provide excellent backup volumes for Time Machine, in the sense that instead of creating a backup of each and every file, which would rapidly become overwhelming in the case of large multimedia files, ZFS snapshots only retain incremental filesystem differences [i]at the block level[/i], greatly optimizing the space on the backup volume. ZFS support is a [i]huge[/i] technology/feature in Leopard, no doubt about it!

Mh... Chris, your comparaison to the "dying" French language is quite inappropriate. I speak English and French fluently, as I'm born English and live in Geneva, Switzerland since 1979. French is spoken in France, Switzerland, Luxemburg, Belgium and Québec. France extends well over its borders: Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon (in the Atlantic, right off the Canadian shores), French Polynesia, New Caledonia and Wallis et Futuna (Pacific isles), Guadeloupe and Martinique (Caribbean isles), Guyana (South America), Mayotte and La Réunion (African isles around Sri Lanka) and the Kerguelen isles are all French states (Départements) where French is spoken, as well as regional French-based dialects (Créole). Most of the the mentioned territories collectively have a huge literary output. French equally has a healthy following in Russian and some Asian cities. Frenchie's comment about government language normalisation refers to Novlangue, which is the french translation of Newspeak as described in Orwell's 1984.

To second jbelkin's and waa's comments, I'll utter that in addition to the uncertainty of when Intel PowerMacs (or whatever they'll be called) will realistically appear, the relatively small adoption rate of those after their introduction (a Mac user registration plate template is usually "OUTVMYDEDFNGRZ") and the irrevocable law of computer acquisition (namely don't ever, EVER, buy rev.A products,) I'm adamant that the dual-dual G5 is a viable choice and more-than-reasonable investment for those in need of serious number-crunching goodness. Universal Binaries are here (or soon here) to stay, because the majority of Mac users will own a PPC machine for years to come. Suicidal tendencies aside, there is no way in hell that software developers would issue Intel-only code until after 2010-2012 Rough guesstimate time-line: Intro of Intel-powered Apple dual & dual-dual workstations: -> in or after 2007 Intel porting of ALL mission-critical applications: -> in or after 2008 Hardware debugging (maturity, stability, customers stop waving class action suites) of MacTel power-horses: -> in or after 2008 Major in-field debugging (end-users cease to complain) of Universal Binary versions of major application suites: -> in or after 2009 Therefore: Half-life of the last PPC PowerMacs: -in or after 2010 Your perception may vary... I'd be more worried about purchasing a spanking-new PowerBook... Apple's laptop line is the prime target for Centrino-derived goodness, so I expect that it'll get the Intel treatment before desktops, with maybe, just maybe, the Mac mini and/or iMac in the same batch. Nevertheless, the sweetest Mac ever (price point/performance/features) is the latest 17" iMac G5; I expect Apple to sell them by the ton. I want one. Now. Studios, offices, institutions and individuals needing the ultimate performance for running work-flows in Mac OS X are VERY interested in the Quad. Now. No yelling in the desert about the day after tomorrow will prove otherwise. PPC is here for a while, at least as an unavoidable legacy. Mark my words.

My 3 cents: Chris: "Weren't mp3 players a niche before the iPod?" mp3 players were a small but expanding market before Apple threw the iPod into the arena. RAM based players were dominated by Ri�, Nike et al. and quite nifty these gadgets were, but 64MB was pretty much the expensive higher limit... The Asian market has seen a lot of MP3 CD players appear since long, and it was Archos who brought one of the first hard-disk based MP3 players to the world. About as portable as bricks and limited to slooow USB 1.1, but cheap and Wintel-compatible, the Archos players were serious competition for apple's snazzy, but Mac-only, 5Gig iPod rookie. iPod was Apple's answer to an existing and highly competitive market. The Tablet PC, however, is going nowhere. The market is reduced to the tattered shadow of a sliver of a very small portion. Recap: Apple has better things to do than compete in a market without competition, they've already pulled a Segway :/ with the Cube, which had the proverbial chance in hell, what with the "brainless" pricing for a "headless" iMac... Chris: "I think it's probably Microsoft being well... Microsoft." Before Mac OS X, iTunes had a plug-in driver architecture, allowing for players others than the iPod to connect and synchronise. Now, with iTunes, iPod and the iTMS, Apple has consolidated a pretty hermetic music outfit, litterally "the Microsoft of online music store" Steve said, effectively shutting out other digital players. All this is for the good of open standards and FairPlay DRM licences, I hope... (painstakingly trying to erase the mental image of MWSF'04 attendees gawking at the audience of PC drones in the 2004 redux of the 1984 ad, brrrr...) I'm getting an "H-P-O-D", because HP deserves a positive signal, as a confirmation that AAC is the logical stepping stone, because I happen to like Jellyfish Acqua Blue, because I'll have an easy, but somewhat sorry, excuse to serve people who point at Apple's MPEG-4/AAC while screaming bloody monopoly. bleep bleep bleeeeep....

Chris, (forgive the long post...) Remember these?: [url=http://www.flyermoney.com/aorta/legacy/ipad_01.html]http://www.flyermoney.com/aorta/legacy/ipad_01.html[/url] IMHO, just one piddly (but neat) natural-writing note-taking feature in the upcoming Office '04 is too little incentive for Apple to release an "iPad" any time soon, you'll fully agree on that. One interesting tidbit that I have yet to encounter though is if the MS MBU have used OS X's built-in Ink.framework or a bolted-on in-house solution... As duly noted elsewhere in the electrosphere, the Tablet PC has failed miserably as a mass phenomenon, but thrives in vertical niche markets for medical, on-site construction management or as a status symbol for corridor warriors and the odd gadget fetishists, of which I know a couple. The WinTel portable crowd is headed towards intel's great Centrino chipset(**), CES '04 was devoid of any Tablet PC or "intelliget display" announcements, as MS obviously wants to shift the media's attention to Entertainment PCs and away from the whole tablet fiasco, so tablets are a big "No go" in Apple's foreseeable future. (** Rest assured, I'm a Mac head, but 1.6GHz Centrinos beating the heck out of 2.4GHz Mobile Pentium IVs is too rich to ignore. I just have to praise intel in their optimisation effort, though Chipzilla's marketing muscle is stuck at selling GHz over efficiency... Now let's see who hops in the "GigaHertz Myth" bandwagon next... ;) Apple cannot afford to be a niche player in its own niche, their efforts are best used to penetrate existing mass and specialised markets. Using their current product line they have a nice set of inways to the enterprise, clustering, education, consumer and content creation markets, which is already work enough. I'd hate to see Apple spend any efforts trying to emulate MS's one and only recent "innovation", which amounts to little more than slapping together Win XP, a handwriting engine and some Wifi drivers, calling the package "Windows Tablet Edition" and urging manufacturers to conform to that particular "vision" of the future. Big deal. The Tablet PC is mighty late to the note-taking innovation party... Logitech has a very neat product, released some four years ago, that applies lateral thinking to electronic note-taking, in form of a special USB ball-point pen device. The concept unfolds thusly: you take good old-fashioned notes on a specially-printed paper pad with the pen, which records the notes by referring to the microscopic pattern printed on the paper, meaning that you're electronically recording your notes AND producing a hard copy at the same time! At the end of the session, plug the pen into a USB port and Logitech's software will dowload the notes, with eery precision and a lot less energy spent... and MS wants people to unload $2K+ on the sole argument of note taking? No wonder Redmond bleeds cash from all veins, surviving only on revenue generated from Windows and Office. Here's my take on InkWell: since 10.2, OS X has a hidden "InkWell" system control preference pane, appearing only when you connect a compatible graphic tablet; hidden to avoid frustration from tablet-less users, InkWell is more of a set of frameworks for third party developers wanting to set up custom-tailored services such as interactive kiosks. Along the same lines, Panther has a hidden collection of institutional badges and logos ranging from the US Navy to Public Education, used in various built-in personnel identification services such as SmartCards et al. That's where InkWell can, and will, weigh in to supply the frameworks for written signature identification, that kind of stuff, serious hum-ho DARPA hush-hush spooky stuff... Repeat: InkWell has more useful applications and higher ambitions than to cater to the needs of gizmo-fed immobility-challenged pinstripe-suit-clad pseudo-executive corridor-dwelling types. 'Nuff said. You will find some of my newer material here (more coming...): [url=http://www.flyermoney.com/aorta/]www.flyermoney.com/aorta/[/url] ) The Main Mac Design Speculator is, of course, Isamu Sanada at applele.com. On the 24th of january, you'll see why 2004 will be kinda like 2001... only, like, 3 years later... and stuff... hrm. Enjoy, Robert