Macking 97

The Apple Rollout
No one ever accused Steve Jobs of understatement. (That was Wozniak's job.) In fact, just about the only time you see "Steve Jobs" and "understatement" in the same sentence is in this paragraph right here.
Two days after Jobs' exciting announcement at WWDC, a dedicated Macker wrote an article on his website detailing how Apple exaggerated the results, crippled the competition and otherwise cooked the books in order to claim that the new G5 is the fastest PC on the market. Shortly after that, the article generated a full-blown flame-fest on the Mac sites with people picking apart both arguments.
The new Mac is a great leap forward; there are a lot of good things going for the G5, but it isn't the fastest kid on the block. Or maybe it is. What really counts is the future: by this time next year Apple expects to have twin 3-GHz chips in place.
Why does Jobs need to rely on bombast and overstatement? He's mellowed over the years, but not yet learned that overstatement is easily debunked, and the worst thing that can happen from understatement is your opposition arguing your case for you.
The rollout of all the new software and the new G5 was a good show. Too bad you all weren't down at the MacForce office watching it on satellite TV. They had free coffee and good baked goods as well and yet the place wasn't filled. Get on their mailing list already. How? Hit their web site.
Whether you love or hate the look of the new Macs, you don't need to actually buy them just yet. Although they will ship in August, the OS will not be ready for them. Jaguar does not take advantage of 64-bit processing, and according to a WWDC attendee, neither does Panther (10.3). Apparently we will have to wait until January for 10.3.1 when important pieces of the OS will be optimized for it. This will then allow the system to address eight GBytes of internal RAM, bypassing the upper limit of 4 GB for a 32-bit processor.
Another reason to wait is the huge cost of that memory. The new high-speed RAM that will be required will add $3750 for eight gigs to the price (at the Apple store)! That's more than the cost of the high-end computer! That will drop very quickly; already Ramjet is selling 4 GB for $1149 and the computer is still a month away. The horrible cost is for the 1-Gb memory modules; you can save a bundle if you buy the 512-Mb modules and top it out at 4. Very few of you will be able to make sufficient use of the remaining 4 GB anyway (you know who you are) and will probably have ordered your unit already.
The wait for 10.3.1 may not even be necessary. The architecture of the chip and the proprietary G5 Controller that Apple designed will let this processor work on twice as many instructions at once without having to optimize the system or recompile the applications so you will be able to take advantage of almost all of the new power right away.
No announcement regarding the rumored upgrade to the 15" PowerBook happened either. Guess he had to save something for the CreativePro conference in NY this month.

Panther
Most interesting was the preview of Panther, version 10.3 of OSX. Now it is major changes to the Finder and the Window Manager. Called Exposé, this feature lets you invoke a hot key that reduces all open windows to miniature versions on the desktop. Click on the one you want and it jumps to the forefront. This is a LOT more convenient than the Minimize to Dock feature and one that I expect to be using constantly. You can also assign hot corners for this and a key to instantly hide/show all windows for quick access to files on the desktop.
FileVault is 128-bit encryption applied to your home folder that decrypts on the fly. You use it normally, but when you log out, no one can read your files without your password, whether they start from a CD or log in as Root. (Root users can delete your entire directory so watch out; but at least they can't read your data.)
What else looks cool? Faxing is now built in to the Print dialog box. Like FaxSTF, you must keep your directory of fax listings in the Address Book application, but FaxSTF itself is probably gone. Not since Global Village's fax software has faxing been so well integrated. Designers who must manipulate a lot of fonts and have been frustrated by OSX's terrible handling of fonts will be given a new application called FontBook which will improve things greatly. About time!
Admitting Windows got there first, Panther introduces Fast User Switching: a drop-down menu lets the Mac switch users without quitting all applications and logging out. Switching happens instantaneously; it was downright magical to watch. This will encourage more people to learn how to use the Multiple Users features of OSX.
There were lots more details and all of them may be found by exploring Apple's site, and Macintouch, The Mac Observer, MacNewsNetwork and other sites dedicated to all things Mackish.

After Dark is Back
Longtime Mackers will remember this screen saver, which was a must-have for its flying toasters, fish tank and other screen saver modules. Somewhat open source, others could develop compatible modules for it, leading to hundreds of variations.
A combination of free screen savers and the new Energy Star monitors that simply went to sleep killed demand for AfterDark, so it went out of business in the late '90s.
Now one of the old distributors, Infinisys of Japan, has resurrected the name and produced new modules that work with the OSX screen saver engine. Back is the familiar Flying Toasters, this time with Earth and the moon as background, a fish tank (which is nice but not as good as SereneScreen's Marine Aquarium, available online for $10) and a fireworks show and seven others. AfterDark is also $10 from Infinisys.

For Matrix Fans
Another cool screen saver is called Red Pill (to avoid using the word "matrix" in the name and prevent lawsuits) which does a great job of generating the falling streams of data used in The Matrix. Read all about it or just download it from VersionTracker.

Satellite Internet
Most of the satellite ISPs do not support Macs. Sometimes you have no choice and gotta get a Windoze box for that purpose, but you certainly shouldn't have to spend much money or take up a lot of space for what is basically an internet server for your Mac.
At a recent Pacific Solutions internet radio show*, I was shown the Eden Mini-ITX board, cheap at $135.00. A case from Dreamstar ITX will hold it quite nicely. Add the smallest possible hard drive and a small, cheap monitor and a router/firewall to pass the signal on to your Mac you will have something will get you Internet connection at 10 times modem speed or better. Go see some really cool custom case designs people have made. It's slow, 533 to 800 MHz, but for this purpose, it doesn't matter.
*You can listen to the show live Saturday mornings 10am - 11am Pacific time live here or from the link on the Pacific Solutions site, below. Other times during the week you can listen to the repeating stream from Shoutcast, accessible here.
What, me, the uber-Macker recommending a Windows box? Hey, since it's only a Mac peripheral, why not. Besides, it could also, or instead, be configured with Linux to make a nice MP3 player that will fit into your stereo system. (Or you could just get a $795 eMac for that purpose and run iTunes.)
I can't help you set something like that up for your network, but Pacific Solutions sure can. See their ad elsewhere. They are probably the most Mac-friendly PC shop in town.

Memory Checking
Larrie Easterly writes, I have been reading your articles in ComputerBits for a number of years and have enjoyed them very much. I recently came across a problem that I thought you might enjoy.
It seems that OSX 10.2.6 does not do as complete a memory check as OS 9.2. Here is the background. My PowerBook Lombard, with the 400 MHz processor, has been getting slower and slower even though I have 512 Meg of memory. It has also not been starting up without pushing the reset button on the back. A few days ago I booted in OS 9.2 from the CD drive and surprise surprise up popped a memory error box during the launch sequence. The error basically said that the cache memory was bad and to contact an Apple repair tech.
I thought it was a random error so I tried it several more times booting from both the CD and an external drive and got the same error each time. When I booted into OSX no error, just a slow machine. It seems odd to me that OSX would not see the error but OS 9.2 does. When I boot into Classic from OSX there is no error either. Taking a quick look at the OSX start up log does not appear to show any memory checking going on at all.
When I talked to the local repair tech they said to bring it in to have it fixed, about $470 for the processor board plus labor. The lady was nice enough to tell me that having a noticeably slower machine and the start up problems are definitely signs of bad cache ram in the chip. She also said it can cause lots of other anomalies too. So it was off to EBay for a new processor board for $149.00 plus shipping. It should be here Friday. If that does not fix it the it is time to trade this baby in for a new one and upgrade my daughters 333 MHz Lombard with the new 400 MHz board.
I passed his question on to the local consultants' group and Rory Bowman responded,
"I've gone through two processors on my Pismo, so I'm not surprised. I don't think that a memory check normally bothers to check processor cache, just "standard" RAM. If anything, I've found that OS X is more finicky about RAM. Perhaps the way that OS X handles memory makes the cache less of an issue? With multi-threading, I would guess that OS X could interpret the bad cache as damage and just route around it (like the Internet mythically does with censorship)."
I sent that back to Larrie, who replied:
Thanks for the update. My new processor, which I bought on eBay form GlobalDeals, arrived Friday and I just put it in. There is a definite speed increase with a working cache in the processor. The system booted to login 34 seconds faster than with the bad cache and then about the same time to usability after login.

Justify Macs in Enterprises
Macintouch has put together a user report on this oft-debated issue. It contains specific examples of why and how companies save thousands of dollars and increase productivity when using Macs instead of Windows, including alternatives to Microsoft servers.
Keep this link handy should you be called on to back up your preference to an information-free boss who is listening to a Mac-hostile IT guy.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp@moonmac.com.