Apple customers unhappy that the company dropped FireWire from its newest notebooks are venting their frustrations on the company's support forum in several hundred messages.
Within minutes of Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrapping up a launch event in California, users started several threads on the company's support forum blasting the omission of a FireWire port on the new MacBook laptop.
"Apple really screwed up with no FireWire port," said Russ Tolman, who inaugurated a thread that collected more than 200 messages and had been viewed over 5,000 times.
"No MacBook with [FireWire] - no new MacBook for me," added Simon Meyer in another message.
The two new MacBook configurations, which are priced at US$1,299 and US$1,599, include a pair of USB 2.0 ports, as did earlier models, but lack the FireWire 400 port their predecessors boasted.
FireWire is Apple's name for the IEEE 1394 interface and data transfer specification. Ironically, Apple has been one of the biggest boosters of the spec and was one of the primary drivers of the technology when it began development in the late 1980s.
Apple first added FireWire to its computers in early 1999, when Jobs - who had returned three years earlier to the company he co-founded - unveiled the technology at a MacWorld Conference and Expo. "Think of FireWire as USB, but rather than running at 12 megabits-per-second it's running at 400 megabits-per-second," said Jobs then. "And it's already an industry standard."
Many of the users who posted messages this week said that they were photographers, videographers or musicians who relied on FireWire to connect hardware ranging from cameras to drum kits. Others were disappointed that the new MacBooks could not be connected to their current FireWire external hard drives.
Several mentioned that FireWire's disappearance meant that the new MacBooks could not be connected to other Macs using Target Disk Mode (TDM), a procedure that's often used as a last resort to retrieve files from a dead system. TDM is also used by Apple's Migration Assistant, a utility that copies files and settings from one Mac to another.
Although the upper-end MacBook Pro - which Apple also revamped and relaunched Tuesday - includes a FireWire 800 port, users bemoaned the FireWire loss on the more affordable MacBook models.
"Dropping FireWire from the MacBook only serves to force people into buying the MacBook Pro," said a user identified as "miniconvert" yesterday.
"I don't need a backlit keyboard, 15" screen or any of the other small things the Pro model provides. I'm perfectly happy sacrificing a little bit in speed to save a lot of cash. I need FireWire so I can take videos of my kid off my SD camcorder and then upload to YouTube, put on a DVD or what ever I'd like to do."
Apple unveiled its new lineup of laptop Macs earlier this month. They are carved from blocks of aluminum for strength and lower costs, and equipped with powerful graphics chipsets.
The new MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air designs are intended to build on Apple's fast-growing sales in the notebook market. Executives say Apple has now over 17% of the US retail notebook market and has supplanted Dell as the market leader in the all-important education market, at 39%.
All the new notebooks use a manufacturing technique developed for the original MacBook Air: instead of starting with an aluminum frame and bolting in parts, Apple starts with a 2.5-pound block of aluminum, which is carved out and shaped to receive parts. The result is a very light but extremely strong and rigid body, a design that also uses far fewer parts than previous Apple notebooks.
The new MacBook now has an LED backlight display, a sleek multi-touch glass trackpad,and new graphics based on the Nvidia GeForce 9400M chip, which combines the chipset and graphics processing unit in a single die. Apple says the result is five times faster than conventional integrated graphics designs, delivering 54 gigaflops of performance.
There are two models of MacBook, one with a 13.3-inch display, 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, the Nvidia chip, and a 160GB hard drive, priced at about US$1,300. For US$300 more, you get the backlit display, a 2.4GHz Intel CPU, and 250GBs of disk.
The two new MacBook Pro models include two Nvidia graphics chipsets: the embedded 9400M, with about five hours of battery life, and the GeForce 9600M, with about 4 hours, as a separate part, for a total of 125 gigaflops of performance.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Stoners, Vegans and a Junky Elephant Conquer BitTorrent
And that was one of the kind reviews. It’s fair to say that “Free Jimmy” hasn’t been well received by the British press reviewers, even though it features voice-overs from the likes of Woody Harrelson and Simon Pegg. So, does this mean that the movie has to fade away into obscurity? Not at all.
‘Free Jimmy’ was released previously in Norwegian language and features four stoners, five vegans, three mobsters and four hunters competing to free a malnourished and circus-enslaved Russian junkie elephant. Which element the British press objected to most is debatable but what is clear, though, is that even if Fleet Street’s finest think the movie is dire, not everyone does. Time Out called it “undeniably touching, poignant” and Internet pirates seems to like the prospect of animated sex, drugs and violence too. Quite a bit in fact.
The producer of the movie, Lars Hellebust, told Dagbladet that the UK distributor, in contrast to his own feelings, was pretty upset that the movie was being heartily pirated on the Internet: “The distributor in England called and was despairing over the fact that thousands of people had downloaded it, but I just said ‘Great!’”
It seems that Lars appreciates that, even though the critics have been a bit sniffy, there are other avenues to be explored when trying to get exposure. Lars says that the more people discuss the movie, the greater its potential audience and in this case, file-sharing really can be a useful promotional tool. So just how much exposure is this movie getting on BitTorrent?
Although ‘Free Jimmy’ only came out officially in the UK on October 17th 2008, it has been available on the trackers in DVDRIP form for roughly 500 days (16 months) already, clocking up very nearly 500,000 downloads. Clearly the presence of stoners, four letter words or even vegans in a movie isn’t enough to put pirates off. Hell no. The most popular pirate version of the movie came from the one and only aXXo, and those releases are always hot, no matter what the critics say.
However, Lars is still optimistic that people will dig deep. “If they really like it they won’t be satisfied just owning a computer file, they will also buy the DVD,” he said with his fingers crossed, hoping that any of the early downloaders can remember the movie from more than 16 months ago.
An official DVD will be released in time for Christmas. Just don’t send one to the kids.
Spare a thought for ‘Anne‘, the last remaining circus elephant kept captive in the UK, and forced to work in grim conditions for the last 50 years.
The Ultimate Windows Desktop/Mac Notebook Alliance
When it comes to computers, you want it all: the portability of a laptop, the extensibility of a desktop, as well as the sleekness of Mac OS X and the wide selection of software for Windows. After virtualizing and dual-booting Windows on my MacBook Pro for well over a year, I'm done—done with slow virtual machines and "your hard drive is low on space" messages, done with having to switch gears to move from one OS to another. There's software and hardware I'm invested in that simply works better on a PC over a Mac (and vice versa) and I want it all at my fingertips every day. When you want to move between the two operating systems fluidly and get the full benefit of both a laptop and a desktop, a few techniques can marry your Mac notebook and PC desktop to live and work in harmony. Here's my current setup.
Share a Single Keyboard and Mouse Between Two Computers with Synergy
Share Your Speakers Between Computers
Set Up a Fast IP-Over-FireWire Network Connection
Decide Where Your Data Lives—Then Map Your Drives
Once you've figured out what data lives where, share your drives between computers so you can work with what you've got from either machine. Here's how to access your Mac's files on your PC, and your Windows files on your Mac.
What's Better on OS X versus Windows and Vice Versa
One can't make a holy-war-starting, controversial statement like "some software and hardware is better on the PC or Mac" without backing it up. The following is just my opinion, plus a few software licenses and gadgets I invested money in on either platform. Your reasons for wanting both Mac and Windows may differ from mine, but here's what I'm using on each.
On the Mac: NetNewsWire, Quicken (purchased a license), Quicksilver, Time Machine, GeekTool, and DevonThink (purchased a license) are all superior pieces of software to their Windows counterparts, as far as I'm concerned. My Fujitsu ScanSnap for Mac and the built-in iSight are also two peripherals I'll only use with the Mac.
On Windows: I greatly prefer Digsby, Picasa, Chrome, SnagIt (purchased a license), and EditPlus (purchased a license) to their counterparts on my Mac. Preferences aside, there are also scads of Windows-only software you see day in and day out on these pages, including Windows-only portable apps (like the Firefox 3.1 beta portable version) that makes having Windows access a must.
On both Mac and Windows: Obviously Synergy is required to share the keyboard and mouse between systems, so it's installed on each. I'm also using the same KeePass database (stored on the Mac, accessed on the PC), and todo.txt file from both systems.
With a notebook/tower setup like this, you can travel and have all your files with you, but still get the horsepower and extensibility you need at your desk. If your job requires that you use Windows (like mine), but you still want your Mac, this alliance is also a great option.
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