₦airaland Forum

vistamizer gives a better vista look. and since your xp is no doubt pirated, why not go ahead and install a pirated vista copy? god knows they are everywhere.

kantaris
gomplayer
mediamonkey
itunes & quicktime
parallels desktop
system commander 9
winsecret 2008
pcwizard 2008
tuneup utilities 2008
adobe pdf reader/foxit pdf
openoffice.org
MS office 2007
video convert master
paint.NET
pictomio
picasa 2

and, if you are completely hopeless, Encarta 2008.

tobaaro sounds too much like tobacco, and im sure the nicotine and tar made him crazy to post car stuff in computer thread.

make sure you have vista drivers for your hardware, plunk in your xp cd, boot from it and go from there.

@texazzpete

heres the chromium makeover. and a game i dont wanna lose in no hurry, but seems i have no choice.

they wiil be unlocked, no question about it. the only thing is guessing when. me, i believe in less than a month, probably nothing more than two weeks. Apple just made a few tweaks to how the system does its security checks at bootstage, but nothing that uses software cannot be hacked. its only a matter of time.

judging by the recent postings in devteam's blog, they are almost there. the iphone 1g now is more expensive even on ebay because it is unlockable to use 2.0, meanwhile the 3G is sold in more countries so the justification for unlocking is not as pertinent as it was with the 1g iphone.

theres something about this "G" that confuses a lot of folks: 2g, 1g, 3g, 8g, 16g etc. the "g" is used differently in different scenarios. fo9r the benefit of those who get sligtly murked up here it is:

1g means iphone first Generation

2g means two things: (1) iphone 1st generation on EDGE which is 2nd Generation cellular (its actually to 2.75G, even though certain bodies such as ITU define it as 3G. general consensus is EDGE is 2G). here the G means the cellular generation, and (2) 2nd Generation Iphone which is the latest 3G iphone. here the G means the iphone generation.

3g means the new 2nd Generation iphone that runs on 3G networks. here 3G refers to the network link type; ie 2nd Gen 3G.

8g and 16g are abbreviations for 8gigs and 16gigs.

otherwise its easy for a newbie to get confused in most forums.

yah, true, you can buy now in anticipation of a rainy day (even though geohot is stumped and devteam are posting only vids and inane codes running in shell while zibri is lounging by a stream ), but these things have a habit of coming down drastically in price. remember how the iphone 1g was slashed barely two months after it came out and early adopters and stockpilers raged until jobs gave them free $100 store credit.

i bought my first iphone close to $900 in dubai. a few days later the above slash happened.

best to wait. but then, each to his own.

hey! just remembered i still have TurboSim. maybe it'll work on 3G. if only that yeye boi can get his paws on one. ps: my sis wont let me have another go at her 2.0, wants her apps back (shes kindy deeply pious too, but i suspect iWoman has soemthing to do with it *wink wink*)

sis, dont get mad if you reading this!!

shes lurking in nairaland, her name is-

maybe later!!

my netlink has crawled to 19kbps. this is ludicrous.

you can't buy iphone 3g without contract, at least not in Apple Store and AT&T. also online purchase is not available. you can only buy and cancel the contract and pay contract cancellation fees after the first month (and after the first month bill of around $75 to $80), early cancellation fee is around $175 plus probable tax. and thats all after paying activation fee of $35. since the $199 for the 8gig 3G is taxable, adding up everything gives close to $575 or more, depending on tax rates. then theres the small matter of chargeable credit checking by the carrier.

since the subsidized iphone is $199 (correct, the 16gig is $299) it stands to reason the cancellation fees are meant to discourage those who buy to unlock. if you cancel outright, you have to return the phone. if you hold on longer for a month, you have to pay monthly bill which adds up to the total cost. and the monthly service charge is also taxable.

also, cancelling after 30 days will prevent you from using AT&T for 6 months. and if you do obtain a non-contract iphone on full retail (almost $600) you cannot use it on any other carrier since apple locked the durn thing. it then makes no commercial sense whatever to pay a huge amount of fees for what essentially you can't sell or use. FOR NOW.


besides, they are out of stuck now, my kin is out there looking for one like crazy.

peek here

http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque/iPhone/ for more info on pix below

@logica

no offense there, man. its cool.

@texazzpete

im redownloading 2.0 firmware, my external HD crashed, and the weather here is messing up my bandwidth. its moving at 40kbps. turkey!

to set permissions with pc suite just right click the app folder, but then you are on 2.0.

my 1.1.4 16 gigs im planning to upgrqade 2day crashed lastnight, i just rebooted after springboard froze (was playing yeti3d using accelerometer control) when i hit home. after the Apple logo it went ionto Shell, showing time limits on Apple marvel commands. i thought of using terminal to forcekick it into booting but the mac wont see the phone. it took me all night to get DFU and had to restore to 1.1.4. ON WINDOWS! now im using pc suite to return my apps.

heard of neverball? its a free clone of the crossplatform neverball ported to iphone/touch. its a lot like monkeyball. currently its on 1.1.4. but in process of being put up for free in appstore. google it.

i don't know dude, my fave  (religious) apps are not on apstore (quran, ipray, imoon, ieathalal etc) ecept iquran, thats why im hedging. i also want simport. im  dying for installer 4.

here is a screenie of the shell my phone ended in. its blurry, took it with the other iphone and you know that 2mp is nonsense in dim light.
its saying that OIIpodUSB cannot be started, needs configuration. and retry limit=15

but its fixed now. took me all night.

i no say na me you dey follow, no wahala i go try find ya time, ehn? i don dey fancy elf self.

granted it may not work for all apps, but then plists in /system are generated after certain settings are effected or you set prefs. that requires you launching the app first. a virgin app will almost always launch.

apps that keep components in databases are the trickier ones, eg ebook readers, games etc or apps that keep components in strings, not plists (which is just xml). but once you know where to look its a simple matter knwing the path and recreating one.

for example, i copied the quran app and placed it in the other iphone. then i copied the db from /private/var/root/Library/Quran and recreated the quran folder at the end of the path to contain the database. i worked, as did every single app i downloaded. they used to crash without setting 755 but now they run.

guess what, almost every app already contains its plist files along with the pngs and stuff in the.app folder.

and sice installer didnt install them why should they show up? there were not cached. to remove them i simply use pc suite to delete the folder. infact, this metod does away with installer's repo info which eat space.

and really, putting trick in double quotes is demeaning. people still use secure shell to do what i did, and setting permission is something i never knew i could do with pc suite. since it eliminates the need for SSH it IS a trick irrespective of your condescending snorts.

dammiit garmine, will you STOP following me around? or are your own morals loose? i can help with that.

hic

most women's morals are loose plenty enough without liquor. hey, don't ask me, just look outside the window from 9pm.

hic

@gamine

haha, im immensely bored and its overcast here in kaduna hence i trawl nairaland looking for noteworthy discourses to pipe my own opinion.

@shaz

census has historically always been a political instrument much given to controversy, malcontent, and suspicion

i daresay that so long in naija we continue working at cross-purposess with split interests, we can never hold a credible census.

a credible elction, perhaps (some day) but never a census especially if we interpret it as a tool to share that yeye national cake.

hey, im a muslim but then thats saying someting. let us separate church and the evil ways of man. if god says this-and-that is condemnable and you go ahead out of choice and do it, then you stand to be condemend and you should accept it in good faith, UNLESS-

1. you deny God exists, and hence his denunciations of evil are mumbo jumbo in your sole opinion

2. you know he exists but finding a suitable pretense for rationalizing   the dastardly deed involves you looking for obscure verses in the scripture and claim as bases of divine justification, and your piety can take a back seat

3. the pleasure you derive from this ominous sin far outweighs the pain of your conscience accepting its universal denunciation.

4. you are plain nuts.


hey, theres a reason God, nature whatever created us in opposite pairs: opposites attract. physiologically, emotionally, and biologically. anything to the contrary is abnormal. be you christian or muslim.

homosexuality is biologically, psychologically, socially abnormal and we don't need no holy book to tell us that. ive nevr seen homosexual animals mating so tat stands to reason there is a certain disease endemic only to the human species.

we need to exorcise this demonic disease called homosexuality from our midst lest we fall the way of sodom.

and to hell with choice and liberty, we don't allow murderers thieves and rapists in our ranks because they are entitled to choice of being what they are. why should homos be any different? the law is god's not man's.

google for and get Recover My Files. warning: its commercialware, not free.

*but not if thepiratebay has anything to say*

get my meaning?

depends on whetehre you want a straight-through or crossover cable type. whatever the case, read this.:

http://surisdigitalworld..com/2008/07/how-to-make-network-cable.html

anyway back to topic.

i find it most annoying when vista keeps popping up balloons telling to check my security settings, i need an antiral program or that the antirus needs updating, windows defender has blocked startup items etc.

well, i don't know of any tool to remove this so i use the registry.

to turn off all balloon tips, go to registry (start, type regedit) and navigate:

HKcurrent use/software/microsoft/windows/current version/ explorer/advanced

in the right pane in Advanced, right click an empty space, select NEW, create a DWORD value of 32bits (or 64bits if you are on vista 64), name it exactly thus: EnableBalloonTips. the defaulkt value is (0), live it at that. if however the Key exists simply double click, set value as decimal zero (0).
reboot and voila! taskbar balloon popups burst!

like i mentioned before, vista does not allow custom themes, and that fancy transparency disapperas when you maximise a window (assuming Aero is running). well to kill two stones with one bird  i use a nifty tool called VistGlazz. it patches the necessary resources and enhances transparency. now you can install custom themes.

vista was done in such a rush that icons and animations from as far as windows 2000 are still found in Vista. to get rid of them i use a tool called Vize.

i don't like the default vista logon screen. the aurora theme hurts my eyes so i use stardock's Logon Studio Vista (its free) and download logons from www.wincustomize.org (or is it .com) to spiff things up.

iconpackager replaces system wide icons.

you want to install vista on a system without a dvd drive. waddaya do? well you could always copy the installer package to external disk, but that only works on a system that boots into xp or whatever. assuming you want to install vista on a non-booiting system without a dvd drive.

in that case use vlite. it allows you to strip vista of all but the bare essentials. in the end, you could have vista ultimate fit on a cd rom. bott from the cd and install.

hope this helps you hapless windoze users out there

well said!

the Deathstar may well explode.

when jaguar debuted in 2002 or was it 2003 it provided a lot of the stuff MS was busy dreaming up for longhorn (none of which appeared in vista  ). they had to strip everything beacause they went in over their heads and had to ship something in four years. so we got saddled with Vista.

consider this: a lot of people make a lot of noise about how Apple has only like 5% of the whole PC marklet but they don't factor in that Aple isnt directly competing wit MS; Apple is actually fighting its battle with hardware manufacturers (Dell, HP, Sony, Acer,Asus, Emachines/Gateway, Ibm/Lenovo, Generics-without-a-name etc) because the real money, as contained in the post above bibbrovar's, is in hardware sales. Apple makes its own hardware and OS; MS only makes OS, while the OEMs make only the hardware which invariably get stuffed with MS Windows. therefore,  for Apple, it is a two-front war. in such a situation, product integration is a leverage and that simle fact escapes Gates, Ballmer et all otherwise they would go beyond churning out mice, joysticks and keyboards and actually make a proper, streamlined and integrated Windows machine and set a trend for the OEMs.

wouldnt this choice give MS the leverage the become finally innovative?

i remeber watching the videocast of Macworld 2007 keynote (you can see it on my desktop in the Linux screenshot above) when the iphone was introduced and jobs quoted industry figure Alan Kay as saying:

"peole who are really serious about software should make their own hardware". this forms the basic principle of Apple, and this is why the Mac, powerbook, Ipod, iphone, appleTV, Cinema Display, Time Capsule etc all exist.

not that everyone interested in writing an OS should cobble their own machine to go with it (imagine Linus Torvalds coding Linux AND building a DEC Alpha lookalike  ). but it behoves those industry leaders who set the trend (or are expected to) to provide the general direction of innovation. right now the PC is in Limbo: all we get are more expansion slots, faster wifi, bigger hard disks etc in place of genuine innnovation. and then the windows software that goes into that oh-so-generic box takes computing back twenty years!

now is when MS is supposed to do someting new.

besides, in contrast to tose windows OEMs Machines, Apples approach is a segmented one that targets core niches. all tiers of productivity have some sort of mac to cater for them: Mac Pro for video, graphics aand picture pfosessionals (some mac pros can take up to 16 gigs of ram and have up to dual quad cores, thats eight cores in one machine); macminis and macbooks for general computing for the average joes, and macbook pro for the mobile professional and macbook air for the upwardly mobile, frequent and wirelessly connected traveller.

now tats a product mix that makes commercial sense.

meanwhile HP is churning out look-alike Pavillions wit very similar spec sheets and bland focus. of course such junk sell higher volumes generate little profits. its Hp's volume sales against Apple's higher markup for premioum, well-thought out systems.

whether Hp sells a two hundred thousand naira box or a stripped down clunker for eighty thousand naira both with vista preinstalled makes no difference to Microsofts profits: OEM licenses do not charge margins for higerh specced machines.

now let us come back to that 5% Apple market share PC makers/sellers make so much noise about.

"While Apple is cited by Gartner and IDC as selling around 5% of all the computers in the US, it isn't obvious that Apple's 5% share is the cream of the market; it’s actually worth more than the same or larger percentage shares held by rivals.

There were 9.8 million Macs sold in the last two years, up from 6.2 million in the previous two year period. Those numbers don't compare with the stunning volume of PCs shipped by HP and Dell--which each sold 38 million PCs in 2006 alone--but Apple's profits do.

In the forth quarter of last year, HP and Dell combined sold 10 times as many PCs as Apple in the US, earned 5.5 times as much revenue as Apple, but together only ended up with 2.2 times as much net income as Apple.

In other words, Apple earned nearly half as much net income with its 5% share the market as HP and Dell together, with their combined 55% share of the US PC market: $1 billion for Apple vs $2.2 billion for HP and Dell together!"

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/9EF16A95-278E-40ED-9E00-FBEBD75207FB.html

note that the year in question is 2007


so what exactly is the point of all this seemingly neverending barrage on MS? simple, microsoft has lost focus  and is desparately trieng everyting (even blatant plagiarism) to catch up. from the zune which is still under 3% of the digital music player market as against the dominant ipod to the speed of openOffice.org in catching up and even beating Office 2207 featurewise to losing ground with the porrly manufactured Xbox360 (which is still losing money) to the total lack of innovation in windows mobile 6 (which now iphone OS X has completely trashed) to the ticking timer on Exchange (MobileME, from Apple, BES from RIM) all the way to the flagship product, Windows. microsoft is losing ground.

meanwhile, Linux is gracing ever more servers, desktoips, organizations and governments (most of the internet runs off Apache servers running Linux).

Linux is already on a par with Vista feature for feature and is even getting better, while OS X is leaving the competition in the dust. it is time the world woke up.

PS: unless where indicated, the opinions above are mine, but also informed by the findings of more professional critics, as such feel free to disagree and point out mistakes.

altough some of the statements in the LENGHTY post above are some people's opinions, i share moste of them, if not all. its not to illustrate that vista is comlete crap, just that its shortcomings are too many and unforgivable seeing the promises and features that MS made and removed from the roadmap. at one point even sidebar was removed (i think it was in Longhorn beta 2, cant really remember).

it works too much like XP and is hardly innovative enough to justify six years and countless millions. that is the butt of my argument.

i will not deny that it is a pleasurable eyecandy when properly themed, and sometimes is a joy to use, but it still is not up there on the scale of what i expected. while Apple was making networking and Upnp a breeze with Apple Bonjour, MS Vista was complicating things especially wit the hassle of bridging if you have 2 network gateways/nodes on one box. bonjour-capable devices find each other and their services on any network as easy as blinking using zeroconf principles, but sadly zeroconf on windows requires a bit of IP fidling sometimes. its annoying looking for one connected device on your own network when you expect it to appear automatically soon as it connects

i have given up my windows AMD machine to Linux, and on the MAcbook i dualbooted vista with Leopard via Apple Boot Camp. every now and then i use windows to manage some phone apps not readily found on Mac or Linux, and i find that itunes on windows works a lot better than itunes on Mac.

yay, tezz. thanks. meanwhile my sis doesnt like 2.0, says she lost her prada in school and now wants her iphone back. will have to upgrade mine.

heres a neat trick i discovered while tinkering. its for those on 1.1.4:

besides using wifi on installer the only other way to upload apps on iphone is to SSH into /Applications, upload the app and set permissions to 755, right?

well, no more. ive been having problems with SSH, so i decided to use ispazio pc suite to upload a zipped file of cracked apps i got (pool, pocket money, showtime, video recorder etc) from piratebay. well, i created a new folder for each app, uploaded the contents of the downloaded app folder, and set the created folder permission to the following:

owner: read, write, execute

group: read, execute

everyone: read, execute

it gives you a purview of 755, restart your phone and bingo!

if you upload without setting permission to 755, the app will open, then close back to springboard without launching

whats the implication of this? you can save your /Applications folder and upload back after a restore, all you need is just to install ibrickr fix.

you can also swap apps by backing up the folder and uploading, or download from the net and install without fiddling with installer, SSH, or wifi/

scantee:
@ex-infat
IE is more better in terms of security
it always blocks some site without certificate of authentification

Mozila fire slows system

all the webstandars that IE support are the very reason it has weak security: dHTML, Active X etc. Firefox is secure against tose loopholes. simply having a browser block one or two phishing sites hardly qualifies as superior security.

IE 7 is more secure than IE 6 but firefox has better security.

@scantee

every OS works much like any OS these days: you click icons, copy and paste stuff, create and modify folders, play games/movies/music and you browse.

but thats the general, broad aspect. every OS too has certain peculiarities that can qualify as either a Pro or a Con:

windows dominates by virtue of being everywhere so chances are nine out of ten people use it. it therefore has a bigger program library. but it is poor on security, terrible on networking, easy to hack, and expensive.

linux is free (a few are paid for), is better secured, great at networking (although a bit fiddly to configure), does everything windows does, and has tons of free programs. however you need to have an internet connection to download said programs.

OS X is even rarer to find. this is because the machines that run it are terribly expensive (though you can buy a Macbook with core 2 duo, 2 gigs ram, superdrive, airport, over 250 gigs HD, Apple remote, and Multitouch trackpad for around $1,024 dollars at the Macmall). however the benefit of a Mac machine is you can dual-boot Vista and run Xp or Linux on Parallels or VMware virtual machine so you have the best of all worlds. OS X is very easy to use, hardly crashes, has superior sound and graphics, superfast, and very high tech. however apps are not readily available but a preinstalled copy on a new machine comes with almost everything you need preinstalled: iLife, iWork, Front Row media center, boot camp etc.

i use all three OS's, but my personal preference is OS X followed by Linux.

windows Vista is OK, but its just toio buggy sometimes and crashes a lot or drops my wireless connection for no reason

Gamine:

yeah, search me too, sister. dunno why i put that up.

@bigbrovar

hi dude, thanks for refreshing my memory. i do remember now that in fact Linux stands for LINUs' MiniX.

OS X works a lot like linux so you already have a feel for the thing. even micrososft seems to concede vista has failed and Dell and others in defiance of Microsoft are still offering Xp, theres an ongoing petition with millions of signatories demanding MS not to kill Xp, and yet some people still dont get it. steve ballmer snorted at the idea of a service pack for vista cos in his own words vista did not need service packs as it was a continually updating OS.

guess what? sp1 for vista is old news now. ive installed it, and i removed it.

this may interest you

http://vista.blorge.com/2008/04/21/microsoft-may-allow-businesses-to-skip-vista-go-direct-to-windows-7/

if you are too lazy here is the text

" Microsoft has done everything but admit Vista was a failure, it has skipped around the term with Steve Ballmer saying that it is “a work in progress.” Well, it may be but after trying to fit in every feature possible, DRM bloat (which may or may not be the cause of system sluggishness); the company is now once again trying to please everyone that is dissatisfied with Vista and will do everything possible to make Windows 7 everything that Vista wasn’t.

The company has already hinted that Windows 7 would make an appearance in the late 2009 or early 2010 time frame but could it be earlier than that? TechReblic thinks it may.

“Microsoft will use smoke and mirrors to conjure up an early release of Windows 7, the next edition of the world’s most widely-used operating system. Then they will quietly and unofficially allow IT departments to migrate straight from Windows XP to Windows 7.”

The author also suggests that some features of Vista should be stripped out or minimized starting with User Account Controls; leave the virtualization feature but tear everything else out. Other suggestions include,
Simplify the interface back to something closer to Windows XP
Reduce backward compatibility in order to streamline the code base
Work much harder with vendors to ensure driver and software compatibility with new hardware and applications
Reduce the cost of Windows in retail boxes
Release Windows 7 by the end of 2009 and market it as the simplest and easiest Windows ever

History is once again repeating itself. Windows ME tried to be everything and failed; it was quickly swept under the rug by the completely redesigned Windows XP that magically appeared just one year later. Windows Vista tried to be everything which failed and is going to be quickly done away with by Windows 7 which Jason Hiner calls, “Windows Vista Service Pack 2."

here is another

http://vista.blorge.com/2008/04/17/microsoft-ceo-steve-ballmer-vista-is-a-work-in-progress/

and the text

" With all the problems regarding Vista, Microsoft is trying to think its way out of the worst marketing debacle since Windows ME and it may well have found it. Speaking at a conference in Seattle, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called Windows Vista "a work in progress."

Vista had its first service pack released but one of its updates caused on infinite reboot cycle on some systems which was later fixed. A later update to non-SP1 Vista and Vista SP1 system caused USB device driver problems. Clearly, there are still issues with the operating system.

According to PCWorld, Ballmer said,

"It’s a very important piece of work. We did a lot of things right and have a lot of things we need to learn from. You never want to let five years go between releases."

Unless you need a new computer there is no compelling reason to upgrade you current PC to Vista nor is there one to buy a new computer with Vista especially if the one you have is a relatively new XP system.

Now, if you do need a new computer, it will probably come with Vista unless you consider a Mac or a Linux based computer. And if you do wind up with Vista, chances are you will not have compatibility issues with anything that came with or is installed in or on the system. Anything you add to it, well, that’s taking your life into your own hands."

the pc world link is http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/144773/ballmer_vista_is_a_work_in_progress.html


do not misconstrue the above as anything more than the author's opinion (which incidentally, i share). its a plain fact vista is underpowered and shattered many illusions of six years of expectation. while linux was evolving, Mac was radically growing and even solaris was gracing the desktop, MS worked away uplifting XP with few innovations. you wont understand until you read what was offered but was sadly removed from vista.

since im spamming, here is another informed opinion

The problems with Vista laid bare
Part One What we got and why

By Liam Proven: Wednesday, 21 March 2007, 8:43 AM


"The only problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste. They have absolutely no taste." - Steve Jobs to Robert X Cringely in Revenge of the Nerds

REGARDLESS OF WHAT Bill Gates might have claimed in interviews, a lot of the goodies in Vista have - I'll be diplomatic - drawn inspiration from rival products, primarily Apple's Mac OS X. The trouble is that Microsoft has prioritised the wrong bits, taken the wrong inspiration. And the sad irony is that if it had made different choices, we'd have got a simpler, faster, safer Vista a lot sooner.

So what sources and where has MS got its ideas from? And where should it have done so instead? You don't have to look far.

System-wide instant search and a query-driven, location-independent view of the filesystem are very useful things to have. Microsoft spent years working on "Windows Future Storage", a complex system that would store all your data in a SQL database.

Instead, Apple came up with Spotlight. A minor tweak to the filesystem code means that every file saved to disk is indexed as it's saved, making it simple to offer near-instant file searching. Once you've got that, it's relatively trivial to offer folders showing all image files or all files containing "Dear Mrs Jones" or all files of over 38.45Kb generated by used "alice" between 2:30 on 13 April 2004 and 5:15 on 26 September 2005. No need for a big heavy relational database or SQL or anything else.

And guess what happened? Microsoft quietly dropped WinFS and Vista gained a very Spotlight-like index-driven search system instead. On Linux, GNOME's Beagle search is much the same. If you use an older version of Windows, you can get much the same functionality from Google Desktop Search, MSN Search Toolbar or others; they don't have the benefits of integrating with the shell, or of being able to put indexing hooks right into the filesystem, but the end result is similar.

The idea for Vista's pseudo-3D GUI surely came from OS X - as it did with open source versions such as Compiz and Beryl. The live previews of taskbar buttons strongly resemble the live icons in OS X's Dock. The visual inspiration for the 3D window flipper was probably Sun's 3D Java desktop Looking Glass, but the competitive pressure was surely from OS X's Expose.

A bit of background
Bear with me for a second. To understand what Vista does and why, you have to know the history - and the history comes from a different company.

The whole concept of using a 3D graphics card to accelerate the windowing system comes from the Mac's Quartz Extreme. Apple's OS X is based upon NeXTStep, NeXT Computer's pioneering Unix-based OS from the 1980s. The NeXTStep GUI didn't have hardware acceleration, because it was drawn by Display PostScript, which was too complex for the simple 2D graphics cards of the time to provide any useful help. OS X's graphics system, Quartz, uses Adobe's royalty-free PDF imaging language instead - which is derived from PostScript anyway. In OS X 10.0 and 10.1, Quartz was unaccelerated.

Modern 3D cards, though, are powerful processors in their own right - as is demonstrated by the fact that they're getting used for real computation now, such as the GPU version of Folding@Home. The innovation in Quartz Extreme, which appeared with OS X 10.2, is that Apple's engineers found a way to use a 3D card to speed up their GUI. In QE, each actual window is handled as a 3D object by the GPU - which means that the GPU does the grunt work of compositing (calculating which window appears on top of which other ones, which bits are hidden and so on), moving windows around, scaling them and so on.

What that means is that suddenly all these special effects are computationally "cheap" - in other words, they don't take much CPU power. It's not doing the work, the graphics card is. This being so, not only can the developers use them more widely. So, you get pretty but largely gratuitous effects like transparency, drop shadows and zooming translucent "ghost" icons when files are double-clicked - but it also enables useful new features, like Exposé. In case you're a deprived Windows user, I'll explain: Exposé is a feature of the OS X windowing system where hitting a hotkey shrinks all the windows onscreen - either showing all a single application's windows side-by-side, or all applications side-by-side, or even zooming them all offscreen so that you can get at the desktop for a moment without minimising or otherwise disturbing the arrangement of your windows.

There are several important points to realise here.

Firstly, all the shrinking, scaling and other "chrome" is done in hardware, so it puts no extra load on the CPU.

Secondly, all the chrome is part of OS X's Quartz graphics API - these sorts of features are an inherent part of using a sophisticated language like Postscript or its descendant PDF to implement the display. This means that the developer doesn't have to make great extra efforts: they can just specify a window as 80% transparent or tell Quartz to rotate it 74° clockwise and shrink it 18% and it just happens. Such facilities are built into the OS, so it does the grunt work of implementation, not the application developer.

On a machine with a poor graphics card, the effects are rendered in software, slowly - so even users of old Macs don't miss out on the fun. But on a modern machine with a powerful card, it all happens in hardware, automatically, and the programmer need neither know nor care. That's the third benefit - implementing things this way doesn't exclude users with older, slower hardware. It levels the playing field for developers and users alike.

The Microsoft way
Compare this with Microsoft's effort in Vista. All the chrome happens through extensions layered on top of the basic 2D Windows GDI (Graphical Device Interface). If the user has one of the Basic editions of Windows Vista, they don't get the 3D effects at all - those editions don't include the feature. If they have one of the more expensive editions but a low-spec graphics card, they don't get the snazzy effects either, because they only work on certain CPUs.

Which means that the developers have to take these things into account. And, of course, all this stuff is new in Vista. Microsoft has realised the implications of this and is releasing an update for XP to bring some of the new APIs to older versions - but if you're on Windows 2000 still, forget it. Naturally, along with the down-market Vista customers, XP users don't get the new 3D effects, either.

So if a developer incorporates this 3D stuff into their app, it won't display on all versions of Vista and won't work at all on older versions of Windows. Which means more work for the programmers, ensuring that things degrade gracefully.

To be fair, these problems aren't unique to Vista. Now that this 3D whizzery has been done, naturally, everyone's doing it. In the open source world, there are two parallel efforts - AIGLX and Compiz. The technical details of how they work are irrelevant; suffice to say that they both use the 3D card to render and display the desktop, using two different underlying approaches. That's one of the joys of Free software - with no accounts department to have to justify things to, multiple different approaches can be tried. The one that works better or has some compelling advantage will succeed.

The snag is that the same problems that face Microsoft, trying to bolt 3D onto a twenty-year-old 2D-based imaging model, also face the Linux world. On the Free side of the fence, though, users replace and update their software far more often. New releases of Ubuntu Linux come along twice a year, the same as its GNOME desktop - very roughly ten times as fast as the Windows rate of about twice a decade. And of course it usually costs little or no money to update to a new version of Linux, whereas every successive release of Windows gets more expensive than before.

So why are we getting all this 3D glitz, anyway?
Regardless of where they come from, these sorts of features are rapidly becoming not only accepted but expected in modern desktop OSs. So we can't really blame Microsoft for doing what everyone else is doing. It gives the "wow" factor, the instant appeal of the shiny, which is the main driver of the Vista marketing campaign. Although of course the real thing propelling Vista uptake isn't adverts or upgrades, it's that soon all new PCs will come with Vista on. If it could afford to be patient, Microsoft could save its massive promotional effort - in a year or two, Vista will all but replace XP anyway.

The main reason it's going to all the trouble is twofold. For one thing, Microsoft makes a lot more money on an upgrade copy of Windows or Office than from OEM bundled one, so it is in the company's interest that people buy Vista. More significantly, though, it needs them to want Vista. Microsoft, along with the whole PC industry, is predicated on growth: they really need all their customers to dump XP and buy new software - and hardware - as soon as possible.

Actually, in recent years, the rate of improvement in PC performance has dropped off. The boom years were the 1990s, when every eighteen months, PCs got roughly twice as fast. But this is not what the famed "Moore's Law" predicts. What Intel cofounder Gordon Moore actually said was that the number of transistors it was possible to put on a chip for a given cost would double every year and a half. For a while, more transistors meant more speed - but it doesn't any more. Processor designs have got to the stage of complexity where it's difficult to make them much faster while keeping the costs down. The rate of improvement in raw speed is slowing: now, they're spreading sideways instead of upwards: more cores, more memory, GPUs that can perform more complex and more elaborate 3D rendering in hardware, and of course, bigger disks and faster communications links.

Acting against this, though, is another driver: more transistors take more power, even as they continue to get smaller and smaller. Computers with more CPU cores and more capable GPUs require more electricity to run and they generate more heat - so the machines are getting bigger and hotter and noisier, and designers need to go to greater lengths to counter these trends.

Which makes the computers harder to sell. They don't actually work much faster than older computers, they just handle lots more data and can present it to the user with more snazzy visual and sound effects. Even for gamers, one of the hardcore performance-driven markets, the main benefits are being able to fill larger and higher-resolution displays with crisp high-definition graphics while keeping the refresh rates up.

In summary, we're not getting fancy 3D effects and other new features because we need them or asked for them, we're getting them because they're what modern PCs can do, and the vendors - Apple included - need to find ways to make these new features attractive and desirable because they need to keep selling more computers.

The only difference between Apple's method and everyone else's is due to history. Back in the mid to late 1980s, when Steve Jobs was kicked out of Apple and started NeXT, he hired a selection of the best and brightest computer systems designers around, and starting with a clean sheet, they set out to build the best educational computer that money could buy - based around educational standards like Unix and commercial ones like Postscript, but intended for a market that wasn't as price-sensitive as the home and business ones, which would pay for and expected powerful machines with big screens and integral networking. The NeXT team made some very smart choices back then and Apple inherited those benefits when it bought NeXT - and thus got Jobs back on board - more than a decade later. All Apple's own efforts at designing the future - Pink, Copland, Taligent, OpenDoc, CyberDog and so forth - came to nothing and ended up in the bin.

The vision and the foresight came from NeXT, which took the best of what was out there at the time (BSD Unix, Motorola's 68030 and 68040 processors and some Digital Signal Processors), added the most promising future-looking technologies (Mach, Display Postscript, optical storage), and aimed high, for functionality not price: integrated standards-based networking, big high-resolution displays, laser printers for output and so on. NeXT also made sure that they were best-of-breed in areas like development tools, cross-platform networking and support for upcoming standards like Internet email and multimedia.

Much of this didn't deliver - there's little sign of the CPUs, DSPs or optical drives in modern Mac OS X machines. Overall, though, the bets paid off handsomely, and nearly two decades later, everyone else is still playing catch-up.

In the second and concluding part of this article, I'll look at the areas that Microsoft didn't prioritise when it was developing Vista - and which it arguably should have.

http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2007/03/21/the-problems-with-vista-laid-bare

for speed, safari for windows is better

for compatibilit with webstandards, go with IE

for security and ease of use, try firefox

for easy navigation and a little speed Opera

for bling bling, space-time

for nonsense and lagging, Omnibrowser

texazzpete:
Neoteny
You will like this. Are you pondering what i'm pondering?

http://allforces.com/2008/07/22/share-apps-between-iphones/

http://www.tuaw.com/2008/07/25/multiple-iphone-household-share-your-apps

hey Tezz. for some reason my phone keeps switching off, the battery drains like a mother. think 2.0 has anything to do with it? now my poor sim has taken abode in a cursed HTC Wizard A200 (win mo 5) i can't remeber ever buying. im just beginning to see the limitations of windows mobile o! so slow.

ha! shebi i told you that app store will fall to piracy! sometimes hype is its own enemy.

abeg send me wetin we talk about make i grab SMB.


check out this dude

https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-154458.0.html

then to salivate, CHECK THIS OUT!!

http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/07/25/installer.4.for.iphone/

actually google is faster if you know what you are looking for

well, if you knew your Unix history you'd probably know that one implementation of Unix was the BSD (Berkley Software Distribution, hope i spelt Berkley right) and that the Mach Kernel OS X uses is actually a microkernel meant to replace that of BSD. (as a programmer im sure you know what a kernel is). so yes, OS X is Unix-like since its kernel is derived from an imlementation of Unix. i do not know the core kernel of Linux since Linux Torvalds rewrote it but i'll check my books. however i do know Linus began wit a Unix kernel.

nextstep introduced Object Oriented Programming (again as a java programmer i assume you are aware of tis too since java is OOB) and implemented it into Mac OS then called Rhapsody. nextstep (or Openstep) was of course bought by apple from the ousted steve jobs.

so actually its nextstep that gave Os X all its mojo.

as for BIOS, i assume you know how BIOS works-you switch on your system, BIOS boots from a rom chip on the motherboard, checks all the hardware settings as well as the hardware to see if everything is as it should be, if everything passses this check, the BIOS hangs over control to windows or whatever and the system boots.

well, apple doesnt use BIOS. first, every intel apple machine (they swithched from PowerPC architecture to Intel in 2006) has a rom chip called a Trusted Platform module (as an offshoot perhaps of bill gates' Palladium/ Trusted Computing Initiative) which works in conjunction with the EFI and checks to confirm the hardware is indeed intel and Mac. if it is, the system boiots. if not the system refuses to boot. if you try to install OS X on a non-apple machine (ie on an intel windows machine) with a bios, the EFI will detect the absence of the TPM and will know its a non-authorized macine and will refuse to install.

EFI is the Apple equivalent of BIOS but is much more advanced. BIOS is outdated technology and yet Vista still uses it.

tried logging to yahoo messenger but i cant, using the web version (hate Ajax!). just add me up, neoteny7@yahoo.com.

yup, 512 mb is heaven in linux and its not too fussy about your graphics card so long as its at least 64mb of vram and able to do shader model 2.0 and OpenGL. vista will gawk at that if you throw Aero at it, " direct x 10, Shader Model 3.0, Wddm, 128mb vram, D3D etc etc" and then it runs its benchmarking tool and tells you your card qualifies for only 2.1 of graphics performance when that same card can run Need for Speed Carbon at 1280*800. haba!

the more ram you throw at vista, the more it eats. try this: amp ip to 3gigs ram and watch the CPU gadget at sidebar; it always hovers between 40%-60% no matter what even with no program running. the secret? fire up taskmanager and see the strings of endless processes running all at once! DWM alone has 2, SVCHOST has like 5 etc.

kai! no wonder apple did away with running processes in Iphone 2.0 apps that need a constant link and relied on push notification instead. not that any OS can do without them, but windows has far too many obscure processes and threads running concurrently and they are always asking for more ram.

I use Ubuntu too, but i have isos for Vixta, Linspire, Freespire, gOS, Kubuntu, RH, Pclinux OS 2007 and 2008. some i run on virtual machines at work though i coulndt get vixta to work. im looking for Linux Xp 2008.

if you want a copy of Mac OS X you either have to buy a Mac or download a HUGE torrent of a modded leopard or Tiger image to Install in your windwos machine. look for iatkos Vesrion 2, Kalyway, brazilmac. you know Mac does not use BIOS, soemting called EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) and a trusted module rom chip to prevent you from installing Mac Os on intel machines. tose images i mentioned above contained soemting called PC-EFI which emulates Mac's bootrom and bypasses TPM checks to enable you install on any dual core or Amd machine with at least 1gig ram.

i think i still have iatkos 1.0 DVD so i will rummage throug my stuff and try to send you.

meanwhile Leopard is the latest iteration of the MAc OS X (note: X is 10, not 'eks') , being 10.5. Apple name their OS after big cats, so we had tiger, Panther, Cheetah/Puma. next up is Snow Leopard. some say Tiger (10.4) is more stable sha. but for bling bling effects and ease of use nothing beats Leopard.