Recently in Macintosh Category

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

The blogospheric din is rising about Apple's supposed $800 laptop, which if it ever happens (and I have my doubts) will really hit hard on the Windows-based laptop market.

With Linux starting to eat away at the very low end of the laptop market on the ASUS EeePC and other netbooks, Apple dominating on the high-end (where it's share is considerable), the mushy middle is where most of the action is.

Having an $800 Macintosh laptop hits the bulk of the market and would steer plenty of people away from Windows and toward OS X. And like the iPod and iPhone's tendency to get their users to think about going all-Apple with an expensive desktop or laptop machine, a relatively inexpensive laptop is a hell of a game-changer.

Should this actually happen, Apple will have what looks like the right product at the right price — and at the exactly right time.

Let's see: Windows Vista not doing so well, and certainly not driving PC sales. Economy in the tank. The holiday season upon us.

If anything, it's a good time to buy some Apple stock.

Heather Clancy at the Green Tech Pastures blog from ZDNet writes about Faronics' power-management software, which now runs in Mac's OS X in addition to Windows:

The Power Save Mac 2.0 software includes intelligent shutdown functions; the ability to schedule when a system should be awake, asleep or in standby; the ability to customize what "inactivity" means for a particular system; enterprise control; and a reports feature that generates records of energy and cost savings. The report generator creates a "before" record of your computer, as well, which serves as a benchmark against which savings are calculated.

Faronics estimates that using the utility will save you $25 per year. How much does the package cost? $14.10 per year.

Power management has been one of my biggest headaches in Linux and the BSDs. For me, even getting the CPU fan under control in my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop usually requires a bit of work. For a short bit of time, the 2.6.18 Linux kernel did this automatically, but since then I've had to write simple scripts to get the fan to only turn on when CPU temperature warrants it.

And as far as CPU throttling goes, — slowing down and using less power when it's not needed, I haven't yet been able to implement that, even though it seemingly should work on a Celeron M processor.

The biggest power-management issue I have is with suspend/resume. I suspect that suspend/resume hasn't worked that well for that long on most PCs even in Windows, but these days I figure that hardware manufacturers of Windows-compatible PCs supply drivers to implement power management to at least some degree.

Power-management is great on our iBook G4. Using that laptop has made me expect good power-management from all of my other machines. And yes, I'd like to get it.

I'm even willing to work at the command line to make it happen, but the information I have, for the Gateway anyway, is sparse at best, and plain wrong at worst.

Matt Asay thinks (and has thought for some time) that the Macintosh is the best place to do open-source development. And he points out that he's not alone in this opinion. (And here's another post along the same lines.)

I happen to have a Mac — a 5-year-old iBook G4 running OS X 10.3.9 that I just recently gutted to replace a dying hard drive — and I've been thinking more and more about running Unix apps on it.

I've been reading an O'Reilly book on the subject, and here are two places that seem essential for bringing free, open-source apps to the Mac:

• The MacPorts Project
• The Fink Project

If anything, the relative uniformity of hardware in the Macintosh world, and the tight integration between OS X and the machines on which it runs, makes a lot of the Linux/BSD problems we have in terms of hardware compatibility go away.

What I can't get with, though, is the high cost of Mac hardware and software (and yes, you are paying for both when you buy an Apple machine).

Still, this does bear thinking about. And so I will.

Why this could work for my company: While there are a great many image-editing programs in the free, open-source software world, the work we do here, fortunately or not, depends on features that only Adobe Photoshop offers. Yes, I've been learning to use Photoshop because for some of the things I need to do, there's no alternative.

And then there's Flash. I don't like technologies for which the development tools are not free and open. But there's Adobe again, with Flash development nestled in its Creative Suite.

And then there's the print publishing system that our company only supports on Windows.

And I still want to run the free, open-source applications I've grown to depend on, including OpenOffice (which is coming to Mac natively in version 3 anyway), the lightweight image editors that I still can use (MtPaint!!) for some tasks, excellent text editors (Geany, the HTML-focused Bluefish) and even full desktop environments like GNOME and KDE.

If costs be damned, the Mac with Adobe CS, Windows and X11 with all the Unix apps I want just might be the ideal platform.

But I'm not throwing Linux over the side of the boat just yet. There's the part about Apple's hardware and software being closely guarded and ... closed source. Then there's the cost. More to start with, and more continually for operating-system upgrades and proprietary software upgrades as well.

In the corporate world, where money is supposed to flow like so much water, this Mac solution very well could work.

But in the real world, who can afford it?

For many, the solution remains free, open-source operating systems with greater stability, longer support, better hardware detection and configuration, full power management and better applications that can do all the things we need to get done.

And as Linux in general, and distributions like Ubuntu in specific, gain(s) traction, hardware makers just might start paying attention to drivers that make their equipment work seamlessly with Linux without making the user dive head-first into geekery. That would level the playing field considerably, but the issue of mixing proprietary software with FOSS still looms over the discussion. (And yes, I'm not mentioning WINE on purpose, though maybe I should.)

Let's get to it: I have one Web site that I work on infrequently that requires Internet Explorer, but since I barely have to do anything on it, I am free to use IE, or not.

And I waited at least a year to "upgrade" my IE6 to IE7 on the XP box at work. Yeah, it's an upgrade because now IE has tabbed browsing -- a feature Firefox has had for years, and which IE probably would've never added had FF not had it first.

I like IE6 because it was a fast program -- it opened fast and did the rest of its thing fast. And I could use it as an FTP client.

Now that I have IE7, sure there is tabbed browsing, and it looks a little better, but it's way slower than Firefox, and I pretty much only fire up IE for ONE Web site because it's at the top of my IE favorites and the bottom of my FF favorites.

IE loads more slowly, the favorites come up slower -- basically it gets beat by FF in performance by every measure. (I'm running a 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM.)

And I can run Firefox in Windows, Linux, BSD and Mac OS X ... and I do (though I'm partial to the Mozilla-derived Epiphany in the GNOME desktop, as well as the Seamonkey browser/e-mail client/HTML editor suite -- also based on Mozilla).

Truth be told, if it really bothered me, I'd try to roll the box back to IE6, if that indeed can be done. Since IE7 installs over your IE6, I think it might be a problem to "go back."

Note: While I can't get the same FTP functionality out of IE7, I have a Windows workaround: Open up My Computer from the Start menu, and type your FTP address in the search bar. The window functions pretty much like IE6 -- it's the same "Explorer"-like interface Windows uses to let you examine your own files, and it does FTP just like IE6. Thanks, Microsoft!

I used to think IE was the best browser for OS X, too -- that final version of IE5 for the Mac was a masterful, innovative application, and I'm sorry Microsoft abandoned it. Safari doesn't have enough critical mass to cut it -- many Web sites don't look so hot in it -- so Firefox is pretty much the browser of record for the Mac, too.

And Mozilla is making hand-over-fist money by getting a cut of the Google searches made through the browser. All it means is more money that Microsoft isn't making.

Hope you're happy, Microsoft!