tiger review from windows guy

Paul Thurrott of WinSuperSite reviews Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. He concludes (emphases mine):

The marketing that accompanies Tiger’s release is no different: Described by Apple as “a super-modern operating system” and “the newest major release of the world’s most advanced operating system,” Tiger will, in Apple’s words, “change the way you use a computer.” That, of course, is completely untrue. Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” is, in fact, a minor upgrade to an already well-designed and rock-solid operating system. It will not change the way you use your computer at all, and instead uses the exact same mouse and windows interface we’ve had since the first Mac debuted in 1984. That isn’t a complaint about Tiger, per se: It’s a high-quality release. My issue here is with marketing, not with reality.

vienna teng wows ’em

Vienna Teng played the Ann Arbor Folk Festival. They liked her. A lot:

By the end of her quietly breathtaking 20-minute set that night, she was a star.

“We got up there and the response was just stunning, overwhelming, really,” said Teng, who brings her hushed, meditative, piano-based songcraft to The Ark for two shows on Friday (the first is sold out). “You could really feel the audience.

“I’d never experienced anything quite like it.”

Nor, apparently, had the sold-out Folk Festival audience, which roared its approval with an ovation that exceeded those offered even to the night’s headliners, The Blind Boys of Alabama and Indigo Girls.

“I’ve never seen anything like it and I’ve been going to the festival for more than 20 years,” said Eric Nunamaker of Ypsilanti…

open firmware’s default catch

i was upgrading a friend’s iMac G3* to Mac OS X 10.3.9 today. after we rebooted, he was stuck in open firmware. after i typed mac-boot at the prompt, it said default catch and refused to proceed any further.

the usual trick of
>set-defaults
>reset-all

did not help.

what did fix the problem was booting off the mac os x installer CD, selecting his hard drive in the startup disk application and restarting the machine.

* with a 20 GB hard drive, partitioned in to 8 and 12 GB partitions, as required.