Co-founder tells his side of Apple story
Wed Sep 27, 2006 7:39am ET
By Eddie EvansNEW YORK (Reuters)

There was excited chatter as the revolutionaries met in a nondescript garage in Menlo Park, California, but in the beginning few of them really knew how they would change the world.And yet within a year of that first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club on March 5, 1975, a computer was in the hands of consumers for just a few hundred dollars and the personal computer revolution was under way.Steve Wozniak says that meeting inspired him to design and build the first Apple computer, but he almost didn’t show up. “I was shy and felt that I knew little about the newest developments in computers,” he recalls.

Shyness is a theme for Wozniak. He is “the other Steve” in the duo behind Apple Computer Inc., the self-effacing engineer to steve jobs’ brash marketing whiz.While Jobs, now presiding over the success of Apple’s iPod, is almost a household name, the other Steve has been content to stay out of the limelight, until now.In a book titled “iWoz” published this week, Wozniak seeks to tell the engineer’s side of the story and set a few things in the record straight.For him, the day that defined the personal computer was June 29, 1975, the first time he typed a character on a keyboard and saw it show up on the screen right in front of him.”Every computer before the ‘Apple I’ had that front panel of switches and lights. Every computer since has had a keyboard and a screen,” he writes.

Continued…

DHCP and Windows XP
Setting up TCP/IP

Begin by opening the Windows XP Control Panel. Click the Start button, then select Control Panel.
Click on the link labelled Network Connections to see a list of your network connections.
Double-click on the icon labelled Local Area Connection to configure your network connection. (Note: If you do not see this icon, your Network Interface Card may be improperly installed.) The following dialog box should appear:

Select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and click on Properties. The following dialog box should appear:

Select the Obtain an IP address automatically and Obtain DNS server address automatically options.
Click on Advanced. The following dialog box should appear:

Ensure that the Default gateways box is empty; otherwise, select each entry and click on the Remove button.
Select the DNS tab. The following dialog box should appear:

Remove the check mark beside the Register this connection’s addresses in DNS option.
Ensure that the DNS server addresses, in order of use and Append these DNS suffixes (in order) boxes are empty; otherwise, select each entry and click the Remove button.
Select the WINS tab.
Ensure that the WINS addresses, in order of use box is empty; otherwise, select each entry and click the Remove button.
Click OK to close the Advanced TCP/IP Settings dialog box.
Click OK again to close the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Settings dialog box.
Click Close to close the Local Area Connection Properties dialog box.
Windows may copy some files and then ask to restart your computer. Click Yes to do so.

OK - so Microsoft releases it’s ace-in-the-hole, the new iPod killer, handheld music device called the ZUNE. Now, I’ll pass on the fact that “Zoune”, in French, is slang for female genitalia. Right from the start we’ve got some bad marketing research…

The Motley Fool has a brief article about it that you can read HERE, called “Zune: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”

If you want to see some images of the Zune, just open this page.

Let me first say that I may not be the best judge of this technology: I was in row 10 of the Keynote where steve jobs first introduced the iPod, yet it took me a couple of years before surrendering to the idea that these would be a great commercial success – just about when I finally developed a serious addiction to the 5GB 1st gen and following devices…

But the Zune? Oh, heck – if this becomes a hit on the market I will lose any hope for mankind. Functionally, it isn’t bad at all, with some features that have been missing from every iPod such as FM radio. Though in all honesty I don’t see what us an FM radio would be, as if 10,000 and more songs and podcast would not be enough, except perhaps weather and news.

No – what really strikes me about the Zune it its look – bulky and cheap – and the color scheme that was adopted. I mean, seriously, what kind of color-blind focus groups did Microsoft run before deciding that vibrant black, white and BROWN were the new youth palette?

Brown? Brown reminds me of those beige boxes that were the only game in town until Apple changed the rules. Brown plastic gives me the same rich sense of luxury as a fake mahogany dashboard in a K-Car.

The black one at least look somewhat better. But can someone tell me why a black scroll wheel in mandatory across the board on all models?

Microsoft has a huge amount of wealth available for R & D. It’s not that the Zune is an awful product – I’ve seen worse – but to enter in such a competitive market as the portable music device with any hope of success, being competent is not enough – you MUST be better. Apple makes great products. Creative makes great products too, as a matter of fact – good ergonomic design that appeals to the eye.

I may be wrong here, once again, but my belief is that the Zune will be one of Microsoft’s most notorious mistake, and an abysmal failure an order of magnitude greater than Apple’s Cube, which at least had the merit of being a swell idea if overpriced. There are simply NO reason to spend money on mediocrity when good is available at the same price.

Weeks have passed since Apple’s announcement of the Mac Pro, and while we wanted to conclude our look at the Mac Pro much earlier, like many Mac Pro users we ran into some serious performance issues under Windows XP.

With the Mac Pro performance issues resolved and some more time with the system under our belts, we’re able to bring you the final part in our Mac Pro coverage. This time we’re focusing on upgrading the memory and CPUs in the Mac Pro, as well as looking at its performance as a PC running Windows XP.

As a high end Xeon based machine that can run both mac os X and Windows XP, the Mac Pro has the potential to be the power user’s dream. Today our task is to find out just how upgradable this machine is and how well it runs XP, if it can truly be your only system if you’re a Mac and PC user.

Read the whole article…

What about Quad Core?

Later this year Intel will be introducing pin compatible upgrades to its Core 2 and Xeon lines, except instead of two cores these processors will feature four.  Codenamed Kenstfield (Core 2) and Clovertown (Xeon), Intel’s new quad-core processors will dramatically increase the amount of processing power you can have in a single system.  Given that the Mac Pro features two LGA-771 sockets, you could theoretically drop two Clovertown processors in there and you’d have an 8-core Mac Pro.

Without a doubt Apple will release a quad-core version of the Mac Pro, either by the end of this year or early next year, but are users who buy the Mac Pro today missing out?  While we’re still a couple of months away from being able to test a retail Clovertown CPU in the Mac Pro, we wanted to see if the current engineering samples of the chip would work. 

Read the whole article…

Slashdot: The Apple News That Got Buried

Posted on Slashdot by kdawson
on Tuesday September 12, @11:30PM

“Apple’s Showtime event was all well and good, but the big news today was on Anandtech.com. They found that the two dual-core CPUs in the Mac Pro were not only removable, but that they were able to insert two quad-core Clovertown CPUs. OS X recognized all eight cores and it worked fine. Anandtech could not release performance numbers for the new monster, but did report they were unable to max out the CPUs.