Snow Leopard is available in the online Apple Store for $29 USD for a single-user license, $49 USD for a family pack (5 licenses) in the US. In Canada you can get Snow Leopard for $35 CAD for a single-user license and $59 CAD for a family pack (5 licenses).
All of these are available with free shipping or $13 CAD for expedited shipping (in Canada). Expedited shipping is imaginably the roughly the same in the US.
I have been a mostly faithful mac user since 2003 when I got my first Mac (an eMac). It shipped with 384 MB memory, an 800MHz G4 proc, a 40GB HDD, a CD-ROM drive that I had swapped for a combo—then eventually SuperDrive. That Mac saw Jaguar, Panther, and Tiger, and like all versions of Mac OS X are based on a the same core, Darwin—a Unix like core operating system based on FreeBSD, and it points out how well Apple gets OS X to scale to meet the hardware requirements. That Mac was relatively well-equipped with 384MB of memory (for the time), however now, at least is my experience with Leopard, 384MB is less memory than the kernel_task process uses, let alone today’s Adobe AIR based Twitter clients (at almost 500MB for Twhirl).
I think it’s interesting how Mac OS X is so robust that it natively runs on a processor as primitive as the G3 while still being able to run on a modern SSSE-enabled Intel Xenon. Given that Apple has a lot of deep, dark voodoo going on under the pleasant Aqua interface, it still gives credence to the abilities of Unix.
As a special note, today, Apple announced that Snow Leopard is available for pre-order and will ship (in-store and pre-orders) on August 28 (2009)-and this is the first version since Mac OS 7.1.2 to not support any PowerPC-based macs.
| 10.0 | 10.1 | 10.2 | 10.3 | 10.4 | 10.5 | 10.6 | |
| Min. Processor family | G3 | G3 | G3 | G3 | G3 | G4 Intel for some features |
Intel |
| Rec. Processor family | G4 | G4 | G4 / max G5 | G4 / max G5 | G4/G5 | G5/Intel | Intel 64-bit |
| Min. Clock speed | ? | ? | 233 MHz | 233 MHz | 333 MHz | G4-867 MHz | – |
| Rec. Clock speed | ? | ? | 233+ MHz | min 333 MHz | 333+ MHz | >867 MHz | – |
| Min. Memory | 64MB | 64MB* | 128MB | 128MB | 256MB | 512MB | 1GB |
| Rec. Memory | 128MB | 128MB | 256-512MB | 512 | 512MB-1GB | 1GB+ | 1GB+ |
| Min. Free HD | 800MB | 1.5GB | 2GB | 1.5GB | 2GB | 9GB | 5GB |
| Rec. Free HD | 1.5GB | N/A | N/A | N/A | 4 (developer tools) | N/A | N/A |
| Install media | 1xCD | 1xCD | 2xCD | 3xCD or DVD | 4xCD/DVD | DVD DL | DVD DL |
| Other | PB G3 “Kanga” not sorted | Free update to existing users. *unofficial minimum |
Original PB G3 not supported | “New World” ROM & USB | (ignoring Intel version) DVD drive built-in firewire |
All G3s and slower G4s dropped | All PPC dropped. OpenCL/H.264 hw de/encode requires min NVidia GeForece 8600 / ATI Radeon 4850 +) |
I know these posts for documenting my adventures in Linux (Kubuntu, to be exact) and it’s because I’m not encountering as many questions in operation as I did almost two weeks ago. Today I have something to add for those with iPhone/iPod Touch, specifically those who have applications such as Discover or other remote file access applications that are accessible via FTP or WebDAV. In Kubuntu I don’t have any FTP programs installed and therefore could only use a built-in tool… like cURL! cURL is an *amazing* open-source internet-download/upload-do-anything-you-need-to-do tool which is command line only (unless you use a GUI implementation, but that’s not as powerful).
The basic cURL syntax is curl and then the arguments. For example to download the TWiT Video using curl you would use curl http://bglive-a.bitgravity.com/twit/live/high -ooutput.flv (note that the -o or output tag doesn’t have a space between it and the output file name.) However for uploading the command I used was the -T, or upload. This is what I used curl -T ~/Desktop/SN-039.mp3 http://192.168.1.113:8888/sn39.mp3 this incorporates the source filename (and path) and the destination path (and destination file name, this is required).
This post is mostly for my future reference, if it’s useful then I’m happy, if you’re new to this whole idea of putting files on your iPhone/Pod Touch then I welcome you to this new world. If you’re curious why I would put an MP3 file on my iPod without going to through iTunes, consider the times that you don’t have time to update your iPod, specifically if it’s an MP3 file that you can’t get through the iTunes podcast store (I do not encourage music piracy, even if this could be used very effectively for it).
Remember, if you’re using Mac OS X then you have cURL already. (It’s shipped with OS X since version 10.2, if I recall, otherwise you will have to download it using the command apt-get install curl, but that’s for another day.)