Re: Ease Of Use and Hardware Support (WAS: Linux Laptops)


Subject: Re: Ease Of Use and Hardware Support (WAS: Linux Laptops)
From: Timothy A. Seufert (tas@mindspring.com)
Date: Thu Mar 07 2002 - 14:59:03 MST


At 12:53 AM -0600 3/7/02, Robert Brandtjen wrote:
>It runs doesnt it ? ergo it's supported -
>just ask all of those beige G3 owners running OSX 10.1.3 now that quick time
>is largely broken for them - or how about all of those people with orphaned
>SCSI cards and peripherals - or the ones who bought NVdia cards and ATI cards
>directly from the vendor and now will not work on OSX because they don't have
>Apple's precise rom on them (read BS marketing scam by Apple)-
>
>yep - next in line for non-OSX TRUE compatibility will be the early
>blue&white models -
>
>If you search the OSXadmin list you'll see I predicted it 18 months ago -
>then the next target was the Beige G3.

Robert, you ought to know better than to spread silly paranoid FUD like this.

I just read through the Macintouch reader reports on 10.1.3 to see if
your comments were substantiated. Usually if any problem comes up
you will see it in the Macintouch reports, especially if it is
something that affects a particular class of user and Apple seems to
be unresponsive.

The only QuickTime bug appears to have nothing to do with the beige
G3. MPEG movies don't play back in the QT Movie Player if the Get
Info window is open. I can reproduce this on my G4.

The reports from people using beige G3s didn't seem exceptionally
negative or positive overall, though I will quote one guy (David
Arnold) as a general counterpoint to your FUD:

   "In reply to Derek's request for positive experiences with OS X 10.1.3,
    beige G3 and a Yamaha SCSI SDR I offer the following:

    At home I have a beige G3 RevB tower with 512 MB Ram, 400MHz G3, 40 GB
    IDE Hard Drive (Mac OS 9.2.2), 8 GB internal SCSI hard drive (OS 10.1.3
    and Classic Mac OS 9.2.2), SCSI Zip 100 drive, ATI Radeon, XSense
    10/100 Ethernet adapter, and a Firewire/USB card, two Sony 19in
    monitors and an external Yamaha 2100 CDRW SCSI, EPSON 850N and EPSON
    C80 printers, Microsoft Intellimouse and a Palm 505. I can burn
    successfully at 10x (the SCSI bus gets saturated above this speed)
    using Toast. Basically EVERYTHING works. It can be slow at times, but
    I've had zero issues getting toast or any of the peripherals to work."

P.S. You can't buy NVidia cards from the vendor, because NVidia
doesn't sell cards to end users. There are no companies making
Macintosh NVidia cards except for whoever is building Apple's OEM
cards (might be NVidia itself, but it could be anybody), so the only
source for a card that's SUPPOSED to work on a Mac is Apple.

Some people have had mixed success reflashing PC NVidia cards with
Mac ROMs. The success is mixed because the PC cards do in fact have
hardware differences from the Mac cards, so both the flash contents
and the drivers Apple bundles with the OS may make incorrect
assumptions about what's on the card.

P.P.S. I'd like to know where there is a proven case that Apple
disabled ATI retail cards deliberately. There seem to be multihead
bugs with OS X in general, leading to problems with one of the common
uses of a retail ATI card, but I have never heard of an ATI card that
ATI supports on OS X absolutely failing to work, excepting hardware
incompatability. (Some recent cards are incompatible with the PCI
controllers on older Macs.)

-- 
Tim Seufert



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