Hey guys if I buy now will Snow Leopard come free or will I pay moola for it?

2. Is it true new macbooks are comming out soon?

3. iphone as a pda replacement anyone have comments about this?

4. Some dude made an APP called podcaster just to have it rejected,
isn't mac becomming more and ore like MS slowly?

1 Yes, you will pay.

2 Probably.

3 The iPhone is a computer. A pda is 20th century technology.

4 The jury's out on that.

i.From fiddling around/reading/talking to Apple Genius this was my impression of AFP, 1.a router is needed to co-ordinate sharing traffic. IE: the home router assigns the computer with an AFP address IE afp://10.x.x.x and that is the number that I connect through the home network from mac to mac. So when it is said that you can be in the desert with two macs, and share is the poster wrong or is the Apple Genius wrong?

ii. If I am at work with a macbook and I want to access my home iMAC,
which protocol is used? If the answer FTP, is is built into Leopard like AFP?

iii. Since the protocol is AFP://10.x.x.x. can I use Safari/Firefox to gain
AFP access on the home network?

If there is no router then the two machines will connect directly, then you flip on File Sharing on one Mac and that is the Mac that becomes the "router" or more like the server.

If the two machines can't find each other automatically then I determine the machine's IP address and type that into the second machine to connect, and that always works.

I did this in a car once, transferring files between two Macs with no network or router around. Just a cable between two Mac laptops in the back seat. (Hm, that's starting to sound dirty.)

I assume the desert scenario involves no cables correct

It is indeed possible to share files between two Macs with no cables (assuming the Macs have Airport cards as is the case for all recent Macs) and no router.

Suppose we call the two Macs AAA and BBB.
On AAA, use the Airport menu and click on the menu item "Create Network...". Press OK in the dialog that comes up (you can change the name that is listed if you want - just make it something you can recognize).

On BBB, use the Airport menu and you should see a menu item that is named the same as the name that was in that dialog in AAA. Click on that name in the Airport menu. Wait a minute or so, and your two Macs should now be connected via Airport.

Then turn on "File Sharing" in the Sharing preferences of the Mac that has the files you want to access.

After setting that up, you should be able to go into "Network" in the SideBar of Finder on the other Mac and you should see (maybe after a short delay) the other Mac appear there. Click on it and use Finder as usual.

As Hayne said, no problem, you just make one of the Macs an ad-hoc network. Again, it becomes a server (wireless) and the other machine connects. And I'm pretty sure this is all similar on Windows. I've connected Macs and PCs directly too.

I should have said that the reason I used a cable is because we were short on time, we had big files, and I knew that the standard Gigabit Ethernet ports would be way, WAY faster than any wireless connection, and it was one less thing to set up (only the server instead of both server + wireless). And I happened to have an Ethernet cable in my bag. But sure, wireless works just fine.

Thanks hayne and stryaoframe. Before you told me the specific steps, I went into Best Buy and started to fiddle with the "sharing" folder and getting nowhere with it and getting frustrated.

Now about the adhoc connections:

1. I am assuming it assigns the numbers itself no fiddling involved like in XP yes?

2. Do you use a regular Ethernet cable from mac to mac, or a crossover cable?

3. In windows XP we have been advised to set our wireless cards infrastructure points only, is adhoc security a problem in macs or at least you can shut it off yes?

BTW yes I realize that I must at some point purchase a book on how to use macs properly, before this turns into a 10 page post.

But I must say that I am a windows power user, meaning when computers get broken I am the one people usually come to , I feel
like i am back to zero again... like when i was 13 and I read a book on "pc's" and wondered what the difference between ram memory, and
hard drive memory is, it is a weird feeling knowing nothing...but again when i plugged in my microsoft USB mouse into a Vista computer and
it did not recognize the mouse.... that is when I had my epiphany and saw the writing on the wall.

Actually, I think you should just buy a Mac.
Then you can just try some of these things instead of asking about them. It's much easier to do some of these things than explain how to do them.
And you can then ask specific questions just about the things that you can't figure out.

But regarding file sharing via Ethernet:
Yes, each Mac will assign itself an IP address.
A regular Ethernet cable will work - all recent Macs have auto-sensing so can deal with either a cross-over or regular Ethernet cable.

IP addresses are self-assigned if there is no router. Bonjour networking should allow configuration-free auto-discovery but I sometimes assign manual IP addresses.

Doesn't matter. Mac Ethernet cards have been auto-sensing for many years. It will auto-detect whether your cable is regular or crossover and auto-adapt the signal to make a connection.

This is not an issue of Mac or PC but of wireless networking in general. Ad hoc access points are much more likely to be rogues or honeypots, doesn't matter what type of computer (or these days, what wi-fi phone) you are connecting with. That said, the Airport menu in Mac OS X lists ad-hoc (called "computer-to-computer") networks separately at the bottom of the networks list so that you can see they are different from the fixed stations at the top of the list. There might be a way to suppress them from showing up at all, but I don't know how.

But overall you would say that mac networking file sharing is a lot easier than win xp ,right? (That is the core reason I want to switch ease of networking-> home home /work home etc. ).

Or does the silence mena that mac newroking and windows networking are about the same in difficulty?

I've always found Windows networking to be counter intuitive compared to the Mac.

Yeah , as I go more and more to Best Buy and Apple store to fiddle with imac's and learn a little more, I am finding out that this tends to be true.

Anyhow, I am either holding out for the new iMacs in mid October, which I hope will have a DVD-+R standard on all models and maybe even Blue Ray support.

Chill

The iMac has already had a standard dual-layer DVD -/+R burner for about 3 years now. Only certain models were available without that, generally only for education sales. Blue Ray is likely coming this month.

Cool, I really hope that apple does include blueray/dvd-+r on all models even the basic ones.

Anyhow, I went to Future Shop today, and asked a dude to share mac files,
he had some difficulty insisting that he has some manual backup program on
the floor demonstrator called deep freeze, but I was able to get a jist on
hoe macs share files if there are two macs beside one another.
i.Create a network etc. ii.turn on the sharing folder iii.add the desktop and
all appropriate folders to be shared (and maybe turn on apple talk).
Now comes the hard part, accesing my home mac from my work mac;

1.how does one go about doing that aceesing home mac from work?

2. what is a good networking book about macs to read?

3. Since the guy at the store had trouble making MAC's share,
and kept telling me that this should be way more easier at home,
my determination and enthusiasm towards switching and dropping
1300 CDN, has waivered quite a lot. The people on the forum have
been like yeah its easy, but in practice it seemed hard, and now I am
a bit confused. Is it seriously easy? (I know I am beating a dead horse
but loosing that much moola and then finding out that it was not
what I thought it to be is worth asking the question again).


Cheers.

I suspect that when BluRay does come it will be on the high end machines first. Is there a BluRay/DVD(DL)+-RW/CDRW drive out there? If not (and I suspect not in any economic form) BluRay will show up as a second drive on the Pro line. It won't reach the lower lines and laptops until there's a cheap combo drive.

Sounds like the Future Shop guy just didn't know how to do it. Even if Deep Freeze and the permissions or network setup didn't allow sharing, he still should have been able to show the Sharing pane and walk through some of the steps.

It really is easy. Turn on sharing, pick folders and drives to share, connect to shared volumes. Any difficulty should be a one time setup on the host Mac and from my recollection, it's dead easy.

Accessing from work might be more difficult only if you are behind a router at home which would "hide" the Mac. There are ways to get around this though, and mostly have to do with the router configuration not the Mac.

I haven't picked up a Mac book in quite a while, but the MacWorld article I posted before is really good.

I've been using Windows since 3.0, and MacOS since 7.5.
The networking concepts are identical, I can't say that either one is easier than the other these days. The difference is merely in some terminology and different control panels. If you have a basic grasp of TCP/IP, it's all the same. Apple's file sharing protocol runs over IP just like Windows Netbios does. All the same rules still apply. Before you read a book specific to Mac networking, I'd suggest getting more familiar with TCP/IP in general.
I think one reason the store clerk told you to get a router was because that would simplify at least one thing: both computers would automatically be assigned valid IP's and subnet masks without having to do any configuration. I would agree with that.

Now, to copy files between them you do have two choices. Make a share on the Mac and copy to it from Windows, or share your drive in Windows and copy from it on the Mac. If you're not familiar with setting up shares on the Mac, option B might be better for you.

Next, accessing home computers from work... I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that neither is easier for that. What exactly do you want to access? Remote control of the PC? Or just access file shares? Neither one is a particularly safe thing to open up to the internet, on either platform, unless you setup a router with VPN capabilities. (which would be my first suggestion) Then understand that most corporate networks use proxies or firewalls to block many ports that are used for this. For instance I can't access file shares or VPN into my home computer from work due to the proxy they've setup. Verify what's allowed from that site before deciding what and how to access home computers.

:D Identical? I've never heard of a Mac user with this problem:
As for accessing computers from outside your local network, it's the router(s) that is/are the issue there, not the computer. Other than having a private ip address, your computer doesn't know the difference between a LAN and the internet. It will share with anything that can connect to it as long as it's set up to share.