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The Low End Mac Link Archive, October 2000
Low End Mac Reader Specials
Memory To Go Special: MacPro 8 Core 8GB kit $232 / 4GB kit $116 / 2GB kit $72. New Macbook 2GB DDR3-$65. HARD DRIVES available -- Free shipping / LIfetime warranty.
LA Computer Company: Specials on AppleCare, iMac's, Apple Batteries and Apple A/C Adapters. Also Great prices on Used Apple Computers. Call 1-800-941-7654 Click Here.
External news links are listed below by the date of publication
with the most recent articles listed at the top, older ones below
them. Other monthly archive indexes are linked on the right. Links
were correct when originally posted. However, we cannot guarantee
that these links are still active.
Low End:
PowerBook 100 series retrospective, Charles W. Moore, Road
Warrior, Mac Opinion, 10/31. Nine years of PowerBooks - this is
where they got their start.
Low End:
Shobaffum's Macintosh IIci Page, Al Brower. Includes helpful
notes such as, "neither the Sonnet '040 accelerator or the Micromac
'040 accelerator a can run in 24-bit mode."
Deal:
Star Wars Trilogy on VCD, CoolVCD. Not available on DVD. First
Video CDs mastered using THX process. Preorder for just US$26.88
plus shipping. Works with most CD-ROM and DVD drives.
Opinion: Where's
my perfect laptop?, David K. Every, iGeek, MacWeek, 10/27. "I
want a small, thin, and light machine. It can have a smaller
display, but give it a reasonable resolution (not 800 x 600)."
Analysis:
Not another "Windows is not so bad" article, Doc Hillman, But I
Digress, Mac Observer, 10/27. "Intuition is an important
consideration in these conversations, because intuition is at the
center of the platform debate."
Review: G4
Cube & Cinema Display, John Siracusa, Art Technica, 10/26.
Perhaps the longest Cube review yet, and worth every page. Reviewer
understands the Cube's market.
Advice: A
few more tips for new users, Nancy Gravley, Mac Observer,
10/25. Extensions Manager, the Apple Menu, and dealing with
lockups.
Web: Creative Mac, a
very nice, very different, very professional layout.
Web: OS X Talk launched,
another site based on Slashcode - but this one has a very clean,
less cluttered look.
Review: SANcube,
Misha Sakellaropoulos, Reviews.MacNN, 10/25. "Micronet's SANcube is
a FireWire storage area network (SAN)...."
Analysis: What
global language?, Barbara Wallraf, Atlantic Monthly, 11/00
[Slashdot]. English is #2 native
tongue, #1 second language around the world.
Humor: Some office
madness, The Usual Bucket. Dedicated to anyone who has to work
in an office.
Low End: The pickle's
Low-End Mac FAQ, the pickle, christened 10/25. The pickle's FAQ
answers the most common questions about 68K Macs.
Opinion: Test
drive musings of a (slightly wavering) OS X skeptic, Charles W.
Moore, Moore's Machine, Mac Junkie, 10/25. "While OS 9 is pretty
stable on my PowerBook, I am looking forward to protected memory
and preemptive multitasking with OS X. I just hope the new
interface doesn't slow down my work too much."
First look: Voodoo4
4500 PCI, Games.MacNN, 10/25. "The card basically matches the
performance of the Voodoo5 in 640 x 480 and 800 x 600...."
News: AT&T divides by
four, CNNfn, 10/25. AT&T Consumer, AT&T Business,
AT&T Wireless, and AT&T Broadband - business as usual or a
change for the better?
News: Cybercrime
treaty targets hackers, MSNBC, 10/24 [Slashdot]. "European Union nations, and
perhaps even the United States, are about to make nearly any form
of hacking &emdash; even security research &emdash; illegal
by treaty."
Hmm: Blue Man
Group uses Macs, Apple.
You know, the guys doing the ad for Intel's Pentium III processor -
they use Macs.
Rights:
Mandated mediocrity, Slashdot, 10/24. N2H2 Bess "filter"
software, used by about one-third of schools, bans political speech
including Second Amendment.
Advocacy: Get a
Compaq, put the old Mac to rest - revisited, Frank Ruffel,
Right On Mac!, 10/23. "Tony may have taken a cheap trip to the
darkside by buying a Compaq. But the ugly truth bit him in the
butt: A Compaq is no Mac. And his wife let him know."
Web: A
matter of (Wired news) style, Wired News, 10/23. Wired takes a
step against the flow, chooses to hyphenate email despite
historical trend of English to drop hyphens.
Opinion: Apple:
The message isn't even medium, Adam Gillitt, ZDNet, 10/23.
"People make choices based on the data available to them, and
Apple's current advertising and PR strategy leaves most consumers
without any concrete reasons to buy Macs."
Opinion:
Online government and the digital divide, Scott McCollum,
osOpinion, 10/23. "...the problem with computer use in our great
land is that it is overwhelmingly white and male."
AAPL: Morningstar.com: Eight
bucks for an Apple, Yahoo, 10/20 [MacNN]. "That's not a lot of money for
a business that - while declining at the moment - is highly
profitable and has one of the most well-known brand names in
technology."
Advocacy: The
dominance myth, Pete Ottman, osOpinion, 10/19. "...no one has
ever offered up one bit of evidence to support the assertion that
using any modern operating system but Windows will be a
hindrance."
Low End:
660av/840av Video Input Specifics, James Wang. "On a 660av or a
stock 840av, one 512KB bank is insufficient to store 640 by 480
pixels worth of 16-bit video."
Opinion: I
am not alone, because I have my Mac laptop, Nancy Gravley, Mac
Observer, 10/18. "...he replied that the Mac was the only computer
he had ever tried that didn't break down all the time."
OS 09. AutoPurge, Stimpsoft.
Freeware that fixes that pesky "Temporary Items" problem in Mac OS
9.0-9.0.4.
AAPL: Apple
profit: $170 million, MacWeek, 10/18. At 47¢ per diluted
share, this was far better than anyone expected.
AAPL: Apple
reports profit of $170 million, MacCentral, 10/18. Margin was
down, Cube and education sales were weak, but the future remains
bright.
Opinion:
Web design: Keep it simple (stupid), Eolake Stobblehouse, Fuzzy
Logic, Mac Observer, 10/18. "The long and the short of it is that
when that company finally got a Web site up and running at all, I
had already been living off my own Web sites for two years!"
Low End: Remodel
your Mac for under $1,000, Chris Oakes, Computer User,
11/15/94. Good article - and prices have dropped quite a bit over
the past six years.
History: NeXT:
When cool wasn't enough, Colin Barker, vnunet.com. "NeXT was a
high-profile disaster, a computer system that the world admired but
wouldn't buy."
Design: Sony
VAIO PictureBook, Sony [Go2Mac.com].
Apple should take a long hard look at this 9.8" x 6.0" x 1.1.4",
2.2 lb., up to 20 hour battery life portable. Now that's a
notebook computer!
Opinion:
Rebates, hinges, and asinine centralized PowerBook service,
Charles W. Moore, Road Warrior, Mac Opinion, 10/16. "...the job is
subject to Apple's Tier 1 repair flat fee of $310.00 plus the
technician's time, and you lose the use of your PowerBook for ten
days or so."
Tech: The fundamentals
of cache, Paul Mazzucco, SystemLogic [Slashdot]. More than you ever wanted to
know about L1, L2, and L3 cache - and pretty accessible.
Opinion: Why we
will benefit from Apple's financial troubles, Dave Schultz, Can
We Talk?, Applelust, 10/16. "The industrial design team at Apple
cannot be beat. Period. And if they are put in corner . . . look
out."
Consumer: Apple
planning PowerBook, Cube rebates, MacCentral, 10/11. Get $200
back on a PowerBook, $300 on a Cube - but only if purchased with an
Apple display. Starts Oct. 13.
Advice: How to use
GraphicConverter, MacInstruct. The poor man's Photoshop, almost
every Mac webmaster seems to find a place for
GraphicConverter.
News: Orange Micro gets
out of Pentium board business, MacWindows, 10/10. "The advent
of fast G4 processors has brought up the speed of emulators and
made coprocessor boards economically unfeasible."
Opinion: Amateur hardware
design & market strategy, M, osOpinion, 10/10. "Two obvious
gaps in Apple's product line are a new sub-notebook and a business
oriented, low-end desktop. The first everybody knows about, the
other seems to have gone largely unnoticed."
Web: Danger of banner
ads, Lowtax, Something Awful, 10/10 [Slashdot]. "When I first signed on, I
was simply told that I'd get $2.50 CPM - that is, $2.50 per 1,000
ads served."
Analysis: New
iBooks slower? Not so fast, Wired, 10/10 [MacSurfer]. "Acting on a hot tip,
Wired News ran the widely used MacBench test suite on Apple's
latest iBook...."
Opinion: AAPL
still cheap!, John H. Farr, Applelinks, 10/9. At $21.75 per
share, I need to find a broker!
News: AT&T mulls
Web charges, CNNfn, 10/9 [Slashdot]. AT&T wants to charge
online retailers every time an AT&T customer places an order -
or even visits the retailer's site. Time to ditch AT&T @Home
cable.
Privacy: Speech
without accountability, Scientific American [MyAppleMenu]. "New
software makes it nearly impossible to remove illegal material from
the Web--or to find out who put it there."
Opinion: Apple
needs more than its own store, Rodney O. Lain, iBrotha, 10/6.
"There are many of us who'd gladly work part-time or full-time for
an Apple-branded store."
Advice:
Running a Web server on the cheap, The Mac Mind, 10/6. A great
way to use an older Mac - we've even run small sites on Mac IIs and
Quadras.
OS X: The NeXT
Apple OS, MSNBC, 10/6. "Make no mistake about it: the complete
overhaul of the Macintosh operating system is a very big
deal."
Analysis: The Cube:
Looks aren't everything, BusinessWeek. "All of the Cube's
beauty doesn't change the fact that it is overpriced and
under-featured, with no clear target audience."
Opinion: Apple's
spark, Jack Shedd, osOpinion, 10/6. "When PC's became too
complex, it was the Apple Macintosh in 1984 that routed them into
simplicity."
Opinion: iBook: Portable
stereo, Dave Egger, MacMonkey. Convert you CD collection to
MP3s and carry 1000 songs on your iBook.
Opinion: The
insanity of Wall Street, David K. Every, iGeek, MacWeek, 10/5.
"When a company is undervalued, and has good technology, good
strategies and good people, in a growing industry, I think it is a
good investment."
Opinion: The
magic of Macintosh, Grayson Harding, 2 Cents, 10/5. "Using a
Macintosh is an intoxicating experience, that's why everyone
who trys one likes it."
Review: Radeon
AGP vs. Rage 128 Pro AGP, Accelerate Your Mac, 10/5. ATI's new
video card kicks on 3D games but doesn't seem to improve non-3D
performance.
Opinion:
Boxed in by the Cube, Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe, 10/5.
"...for the first time in a good long while, Apple has gotten it
wrong."
Opinion: A
proposal to fix the Cube, Charles W. Moore, Applelinks, 10/5.
"...I would even go farther and suggest that Apple use IBM's new
750cx G3e chips in the lower end Cubes...."
OS X: Adventures
in X, Marc Zeedar, Mac Opinion, 10/4. "With just a few minutes
of using the OS XBeta, it's obvious that it's not the Mac OS and it
won't feel like the Mac OS for quite some time."
Opinion: Thinking
outside the Cube: Mac OS X for X86, Jason Brooks, eWeek, 10/4.
"The world of X86 hardware leaves options for the rest of us, with
a veritable Star Wars cantina full of chip, component and
peripheral players from which to choose. "
Opinion:
Upgrade WallStreet or buy a new iBook?, Charles W. Moore, Road
Warrior, 10/3. Comparing the cost of upgrading a two-year-old
PowerBook G3 to the new iBooks.
Opinion: I come
not to bury the G4 Cube but to praise it, Jim, MacSpeedZone.
"...in the interest of balanced reporting and fairness I've got to
let you know that my Cube is nothing short of magnificent."
Opinion:
Heresy, Ceolaf, Applelust, 10/4. "I love Apple. I love its
computers. I love its operating system. But I became very unhappy
with Apple in September 2000."
AAPL: Apple
explained: In Steve we trust, Wes George, Apple Trader, Mac
Observer, 10/2. Best analysis yet of Apple, Apple earnings, and the
way Apple stock tanked on Friday.
Analysis:
Apple shares fall victim to "multiplier effect," David Wilson,
Bloomberg, 10/2. "Friday's 52 percent retreat in the
personal-computer maker's shares was far steeper than either the
earnings or sales comparison would indicate. "
Opinion:
HTML editor wars, David Schultz, Applelust, 10/2. "WYSIWYG HTML
editors, analogous to like the DTP packages that came before them,
are coming out which are robust, complex programs aimed at any
would-be web publisher."
Rights: 
Dark Side: