Tiger's Loping Along
Tiger is OSX 10.4 and it brings ever more features. The good news is it won't be released until mid-2005. So if you have been thinking of moving to OSX, or upgrading from 10.1 or 10.2 to Panther, go ahead. You will get at least a year before you need to think about Tiger. But read about it on Apple's web site and keep a cup handy to catch the drool.
Screen, She So Beeeg
Remember when I tossed off a reference to an Apple 30" monitor a few months ago? Thought it would never happen, I bet. Well heeeere it is, so big it dwarfs the G5 that is required to use it. How big? Over FOUR MILLION pixels. That's 77% larger than the 23" model! How big is that? The screen measures 2560 pixels wide by 1600 deep. Remember the original 21" Cinema Display that cost $4 grand? That was 1600 pixels WIDE. The 30" is that DEEP.
There has never been a display like this. You can show an entire HDTV image at full size on this screen and have over 600 more pixels of width to put your editing tools. The Apple 23" model, optimized for HDTV, is 1920 x 1200 pixels. To lighten the overall weight, Apple has abandoned the clear-plastic tripod design and now builds the display into a brushed aluminum frame to match the G5. It stands on a single foot and the viewing angle is adjustable from -5 to 25 degrees. The frame also has two USB 2.0 ports and two FireWire 400 ports. If you desire you can remove the stand and attach the display to a VESA-compliant mounting surface. Apple has also abandoned the ADC port to return to the industry-standard DVI so you can even use this display with a PC.
Cost? $3299, plus $599 for the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL graphics card that drives it. Total $3900, $100 less than the original Cinema Display. Faster, cheaper, larger and better. Oh, and if you should be so motivated, the graphics card has ports to support two of these monster displays.
I'll say that again. Paired Dual DVI ports support TWO of these 30" displays. That's 8,200,000 pixels, side by side. At the optimum 100 DPI setting, an image will stretch almost 60" across your desk. Five feet of screen image. A digital camera image at 4.1 megapixels will fill one screen at 100% size.
I wish I were still a graphics professional, and worked for a company that can afford to buy this. The display will be available in August.
Oh, by further comparison, anyone remember the PowerMac 9500? This was the best in the industry when it came out in the late '90s and it cost, without a monitor, $9000. Add the desired 21" CRT available at the time, and the optional graphics card, and you more than equaled the cost of the new package of a twin-processor 2.5 GHz G5, with half a terabyte of disk space, a gig of RAM and two 30" displays.
You won't be plugging this monster into your PowerBook! Oh, but you will be able to plug either the 20" or 23" display into any of the current PB line, even the 12" model. I may just be crazy enough to upgrade my own PB to one with a DVI port and get one of these 20 inch models. If so, my current package that I have written about before will go up for sale.
Great Column, Frank
Our staff curmudgeon wrote a great rant against spammers last month. He made a couple of good suggestions, and one bad (limiting the amount of email one can send to a group, which would block me from sending to my client list) and called for more direct vigilante action against known spammers.
Hooray. I've made periodic suggestions in this column that someone just go kill known spammers, most deleted by the editor, and I am glad to see I'm not the only one.
A scheme developed in the late '90s by Portland anarchist Jim Bell called "Assassination Politics" landed him in jail for the crime of publishing such an idea, one of the few modern writers to suffer this fate. People who know him agree that he is something of a twit, not schooled in the ways of subtlety, and that he crossed the line somewhere. He was charged with violating the law that prohibits "any threat to injure the person of another" with 5 years in the Federal can. (For more on the Jim Bell story, go here.)
Politicians get downright testy when someone advocates a cash scheme for encouraging a hit man to kill them; I guess I sympathize. However, spammers are a different case because they are not Federal agents, and as everyone knows, under the law Federal agents are a superior, protected class of people. The rest of us American citizen-subjects get less attention. Maybe Jim's visionary dream could be put to a great and wonderful good to control the population of spammers some day. I know I'd contribute a few quid.
Bypassing Parental Lockout
What do you do if you're a kid who wants to access the Web, but your parents set you up with a limited user account and you can't launch, or even see, Safari? Macintouch noted a gaping hole in security that lets you launch your browser by simply opening up the Chess game and then choosing About Chess from the application menu.
Chess uses Safari to display its information, which bypasses the fact that there is no icon for Safari in your restricted Applications folder. No Chess? Simply open every About box and Help file you can access. One of them will launch Safari and from there on you are free to access that stuff that your church, parents or parole officer does not want you to see.
Trivia: Did you know that Scientologists are prohibited from owning Macs? Unless they have changed their policy recently, if you were a Scientologist you were "encouraged" to own a Windows box equipped with their special version of Explorer that would block access to any web sites critical of Scientology. Nothing unusual about that; many religions, including the one the US is at war with, prohibit members from challenging orthodoxy or even asking embarrassing questions. So click away, all you apostates and heretics, click away.
Giant Updates
I gave a few hints in last month's column about how to get Apple's software updates when you lack a broadband Internet connection. One I omitted I kick myself for: get it from PMUG! One of the services the Mac users' group offers is to supply a freshly burned CD with all of Apple's updates on them, for just the cost of production and time ($5). This is yet another membership benefit of PMUG. For more information, visit them at their site.
Apple Remote Desktop Client
You have probably seen this in Software Update, or if you choose Customize when installing OSX. The purpose of the software is to allow remote administration of your computer on a network. It's useless without Apple Remote Desktop, $299 for 10 managed systems and $499 for unlimited.
It's used for installing updates and software packages on multiple clients at the same time, all from the administrator's Mac. It can also provide help-desk assistance through observing and controlling the desktops of any remote Mac or Virtual Network Computing-enabled computer like Timbuktu does, including Windows and Linux systems.
If you are not on a network or are not using a service that subscribes you to Remote Desktop, you can choose not to install or update the software and save yourself some hard disk space.
Get That AirPort Card Quick
Apple has quietly dropped distribution and sales of the original AirPort card, the one that works in original G3 iBooks and iMacs. If you had been thinking about getting one, better call around to all of the local retailers and if no luck, try PowerMax.com and SmallDog.com. Although Apple will be keeping them available for warranty replacement purposes, but once the stores are out of stock you will be stuck with Ebay.
PowerBook users can use a non-Apple wireless card such as the Aero Card by MacSense, or the Aria Extreme by Sonnet. Lack of a PC card slot will keep you from that choice.
Letter
"I just read your column in the July Computerbits where you comment about MS Office and you list Apple's Keynote as an alternative.
"There is another good alternative and that is OpenOffice1.1.2 for Mac. OpenOffice is based on Sun's StarOffice suite for Windows and Linux and Solaris. It is a complete office suite that runs on Apple's X11. It is improved from the earlier version 1.0.3. It now has an easy-to-install .dmg file. That is what I use (given that I work at Sun that is to be expected). It is free and does all that most need for presentations and spreadsheets and documents.
"There is a complete Mac OS X version of OpenOffice written in Java called NeoOffice. While I think that is a little slow and buggy it is getting better all the time and does not require X11.
"Another option is Thinkfree but I have not used it."
Tom Atwood
I have tried ThinkFree Office and was singularly unimpressed due to all its weaknesses. You're right; I need to try OpenOffice.
No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.
email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)