New iPods

Bisley · Post by **Bisley** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 8:59 pm 0

Dammit ! Just realised my G4 powerbook only has OS X 10.3.9, gonna have to buy Tiger before i can use the Touch with it aren't I ?

Its a 1.33 Ghz with 256MB ram ..... is that going to struggle with Tiger or is it sufficient ?

Thanks

Acronym · Post by **Acronym** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 9:35 pm 0

My G4 12" came with Tiger and it's been fine - similar spec.

Bisley · Post by **Bisley** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 9:46 pm 0

Thanks - Ebay here i come i think......

tufty · Post by **tufty** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 8:55 am 0

Bisley wrote:Dammit ! Just realised my G4 powerbook only has OS X 10.3.9, gonna have to buy Tiger before i can use the Touch with it aren't I ?

Its a 1.33 Ghz with 256MB ram ..... is that going to struggle with Tiger or is it sufficient ?

Thanks

Processor-wise, it'll have no problems - my old 400Mhz G4 with 512MB is perfectly usable with Tiger. You might find 256MB a bit limiting, but probably no more than it currently is - OSX has got consistently faster with every release. Since 10.0, things have got consistently faster around the 512MB mark, but more is, as ever, better.

My G4 mini shows 112MB of wired memory (with an uptime of getting on for 3 months) so 256 should be feasible at least.

Simon

skip · Post by **skip** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 11:51 am 0

Bisley - don't go out and waste money on Tiger because Leopard will be out at the end of the month.

Hell, the only reason I'm typing on a Mac at the moment is because I got a super deal on a Mini a few months back. I was going to wait until Leopard shipped. Now I've got to buy it, but it will still end up cheaper than a new machine.

sty · Post by **sty** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 12:34 pm 0

Following the Slashdot article that Japanese airlines have banned DS and PSP for Wifi I suddenly had a thought...

can you disable the Wifi on am iTouch?

Be a bit of bollock if after having produced a device that's great for flights you suddenly can't use the fucker!

Yak · Post by **Yak** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 12:35 pm 0

Yeah, there's an on/off switch for wifi in Settings.

sty · Post by **sty** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 12:58 pm 0

Yak wrote:Yeah, there's an on/off switch for wifi in Settings.

Thank Steve for that

cheers for that piece of good news.

korruptor · Post by **korruptor** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 1:07 pm 0

I thought you could disable the wi-fi on the ds and psp though? Or did I just make that up?

sty · Post by **sty** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 1:21 pm 0

korruptor wrote:I thought you could disable the wi-fi on the ds and psp though? Or did I just make that up?

acording to the /. posters (so treat that with the care it needs) the PSP has a switch so easily done, and more woringly the DS depends on the game itself.

I actually worried when Niamh got all possesive about my DS on the flight to Brisbane last month and she decided that Pictochat was simply the best thing in the world, no she didn't post pictures of willies and balls, and there was nobody else she was talking to but I did worry.

My guess though is that your average trolly dolly is more concerned with earing their commision on sales of scratch cards and overpriced drinks than on checking out that your particular brand of mp3 player is wifi free, or that you have that switch on your PSP set to off.

So in a similar way to the fact that ALL laptops were banned from flights for a while until they had a small list of code numbers of batteries taht would explode, and the fact that they ban all electronics devices during take off and landing (or some airlines ban them when the seat belt sign is turned on) then I suspect we're going to see all kinds of shite.

Most interesting is the fact that when we flew JetStar and Virgin Pacific Blue recently (budget airlines between NZ and Oz, think Ryan Air and Virgin...) you can rent a movie player. We got one for Niamh and basically it's some form of fast boot PC that streams the movie from a cetral server on the plane wirelessly.

So there's an element of revenue protection in this IMHO

tufty · Post by **tufty** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 1:39 pm 0

sty wrote:We got one for Niamh and basically it's some form of fast boot PC that streams the movie from a cetral server on the plane wirelessly.

So there's an element of revenue protection in this IMHO

Vague memories of my time working for BA kick in here, this could be complete bollocks.

[edit]I am not saying sty is talking bollocks here, but that some or all of my following comment could be wrong, although I'm fairly sure it's not.[/edit]

There's possibly an element of revenue protection, but most of it is likely to come down to airworthiness regulations, which are "fairly" paranoiac (and, one might argue, rightly so).

You can't fit any sort of electronic gear on a plane until it's been certified (and certified for the *exact* type of plane it's fitted to, IIRC[1]) - this doesn't necessarily make the device any different from any non-certified device in real terms, but it does make it a helluva lot more expensive.

Once you're on board a plane with your electronic gizmo, it effectively becomes part of the airframe, and yes, if your iPod managed to take an aircraft system out by some fluke, the lawsuits would be massive. One could, of course, argue that aircraft systems should be shielded against potential consumer device interference, but that would require the testing of every possible combination of consumer devices (probably assuming a worst case scenario of every seat having x devices emitting at the same time) against every possible combination of airframe, avionics and flight operation.

Aircraft are a controlled environment.

Simon

[1] Which would tend to kibosh any thought of "but Apple could certify it" - although the model numbers might be more or less the same for the same airframes between airlines, a whole load of other stuff differs - for example, BA's 747 fleet use different engines to those supplied as "normal" by Boeing, and which have to go through a completely separate cert process.

sty · Post by **sty** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 2:15 pm 0

tufty wrote:
sty wrote:We got one for Niamh and basically it's some form of fast boot PC that streams the movie from a cetral server on the plane wirelessly.

So there's an element of revenue protection in this IMHO
Vague memories of my time working for BA kick in here, this could be complete bollocks.

my statement about the device being wireless is bollocks?

or the revenue protection being bollocks?

In the case of the former, ie. the movie playback device being wireless, then I'm about 99% certain it was wireless since our device ran out of battery 20 mins into the flight. They took the battery out and went and gota replacement. In the mean time I was able to be fairly sure that tehre wasn't space in the device for a 3.5" or a 2.5" HDD, but there could be a 1" disk.

However since when we chose our fist movie, before the battery ran out, there was a significant (>45secs) delay while it said "loading movie" and this was repeated when we swapped battery. I'd place very good money it was streaming and caching.

Given we had access to about 48 hours of video on demand, I would be suprised if

a) they had the local storage to do it, unless they used 1' drives

b) they would bother with the cherade of "loading content"

and also it just looked like a clunky wifi device

tufty · Post by **tufty** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 2:21 pm 0

sty wrote:
tufty wrote:
sty wrote:We got one for Niamh and basically it's some form of fast boot PC that streams the movie from a cetral server on the plane wirelessly.

So there's an element of revenue protection in this IMHO
Vague memories of my time working for BA kick in here, this could be complete bollocks.
my statement about the device being wireless is bollocks?

or the revenue protection being bollocks?

No, the rest of my comment.

I don't doubt that the device in question was wireless of one sort or another, and quite probably used a standard consumer-style chipset. However, it would have been type-approved for that particular installation, which a standard ipod/psp/ds/wifi adaptor hasn't. And that's without considering hacks to beef up transmit power etc.

Simon

kalmar · Post by **kalmar** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 2:28 pm 0

That sounds entirely plausible to me. With RF type approvals, you tend to have to re-do the entire thing if you make the smallest change to the PCB layout, the power regulation, or even bits of the unit that appear totally unrelated.

So, with something like an ipod (and it seems that there's already different batches of the iPod touch with varying perfomance), it'd be virtually impossible to approve it for such a use anyway, unless you threw all your multiple sourcing and cost reduction measures in the bin - not going to happen.

So, you get a weirdo one-off unit built just for the application and you don't change it once it's approved, for any reason.

Meatpuppet · Post by **Meatpuppet** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 2:48 pm 0

Back on topic...Posting from iPod touch!!!!! Splurg!!!