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Mac OS X Beta Reviewed On ArsTechnica
scout.finch writes: "John Siracusa has just written a review of the new Mac OS X Public Beta over on Ars Technica. His thorough and unflinching reviews of previous developer releases have been the most accurate source of information on Mac OS X thus far, and this installation is no exception."
Except NT, unfortunately...
Donate free food to the hungry at The Hunger site.
Would also note that even if Quartz runs like a dog, file copying is far better than 8 or 9. On my boxes, it seems maybe twice as quick.
+++OK ATH
Yeah. I post this from a Mac OS X Server too. It is correct (I hated it at first, because of the frankenstein merge of Mac and NeXT, but well, I am used to it now. Not as clean as the NeXT, but nowehere as crappy as the mac)
OS X gives a different feeling, but seems very solid too.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Wow, they must have really improved it. I only tried it once, and that was a couple of months ago. It screwed things up so badly I had to scratch-install everything all over again. Since then, I've been reluctant to give it another try. Maybe I should try again with the Beta release.
Free Hans!
Malcolm X took the surname "X" to replace his slave name, and pronounced it like the letter (or, if you will, variable) X. Apple created Mac OS 9, and decided to refer to the subsequent version (the tenth version) as Mac OS X to save space and confuse thousands of readers like yourself.
Because the X refers to a version number, pronounce it as "ten." Don't confuse it with a horribly obfuscated windowing system or a variable you might use in algebra class. Don't you dare.
For more information, click here.
> This is why WebObjects is moving away from ObjectiveC.
In fact not exactly. But I'll only tell the true story on my death bed. Let's pretend this is right.
> To these people Apple has stepped back from supporting ObjC where they need it
The problem started before Apple bought NeXT. NeXTstep, then OPENSTEP was (and still is) used by very big non-disclosed corporation, that basically used NeXT as their outsourced R&D staff. Those guys have millions and millions of line of code, involving Distributed Objects and a lot of EOF.
Then, half accidentally, NeXT stumbled on WebObjects, and decided that it would be the next big thing. (This kind of shitf was classic in the NeXT community, as we already had the 'education market' as the orignal big thing, abandonned to 'the desktop publishing market' (or was it the opposite?), killed for 'interpersonal computing', itself replaced by 'mission-critical custom apps', while the hardware line got a chaotic course [m68k->i386->hppa->sparc], then the OS disapeared replaced by the yellow box, while the whole libraries were rewritten for OpenStep, fundamentally breaking *every* application and existing source code)
At this point of time (about 96), we had lost our Hardware platform, and our Operating System.
NeXT started to tell all developers that the future was java, but promised that Objective-C would stay. And the reason Objective-C would stay was:
"We cannot kill objective-c because WebObjects is based on it"
Then apple bought NeXT, and started reviving a defunct operating system.
Then the re-write of WebObjects on Java appeared, along the java version of EOF.
It looked like we were loosing our language too. Apple was not communicating on ObjC, most new cocoa documentation was about java, because MacOS developpers don't want to hear about objc. Internally, Apple decided to get rid of ObjC too.
So, it is rather refreshing to find that they changed their mind (probably because they had no choice, IMHO)
> in fact most of the apps that were ported to Java for early DP's were moved back to ObjC for DP4 and beyond...
Yep. This worth every press release of the earth.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
I just had a question.
I found this post on deja.com:
Subject: BG2-NPC petrified?
Date: 10/03/2000
Author: chuck schroeder
Now that my NPC is petrified, is there a way to remove the spell? Thanks!
Chuck
What does NPc stand for? What's a Natalie portman c. Should it be Natalie Portman bw c?
Take this personaility test.
can you do rpcinfo -p localhost; showmount -e localhost
.. don't know if that works on BSD, but it should tell you what process has what open.
And I have no idea what those other ports are, try doing netstat -anp
How we know is more important than what we know.
Uh, no it doesn't. If I didn't know the specs on the B&W G3, I'd have to go look it up if I wanted to compare to my system.
I ran some demos of MacOS X on a dual G4 machine at the Seybold conference in SF about a month ago, and I was able to play a bunch of looped Quicktime movies in the background while juggling about 5 different apps in the foreground. It was very smooth. The CPU meter showed a fairly balanced load between the two processors the whole time. Pretty slick!
Free Hans!
PFM (Posted From a Mac)
off-topic but try looking here http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/www.linuxberg.com/x1 1html/mul_video.html for xanim
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
not at all, I was actually trying to figure out how to make a decent PPC linux machine w/o using apple's ROM, it takes some doing cuz they sell the ppc motherboards at extremely rediculous prices so I gave up on that venture. They were selling them at like $2000 -$3000 a peice just for the boards!!!!
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
No, no, no ... how old are you? The original affront was that the Apple II came ALREADY ASSEMBLED instead of in a kit. Just about the time that died down and everybody admitted that maybe already assembled computers were actually a good thing, THEN they introduced the Graphical User Interface and the sealed box with no slots. Only took a year after that to get X Windows, and a couple more to get the first version of MS Windows, but the sealed box with no slots has only become a "well ... duh" in the past couple of years.
Personally, I love it. I love the graphite, I love the protected memory space (uptime measured in weeks on a mac, who'da thunk it?) and I love the dock.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
Of course not, thinking "different" is dangerous and should be avoided at all costs.
If LinuxPPC/YDL got sound support and better video support
I'm posting this from a UMAX s900 (PowerMac 9500 clone) running LinuxPPC. I'm listening to some mp3s, too. Obviously, there's some kind of sound support. I didn't change any of it from the default install, either (well, OK, I've recompiled Apache and PHP and MySQL to work together, but I haven't done anything with sound).
Now, video support is sortof a problem. When running Gnome, many of my icons look like they've accidentally been run through an inversion/pixelation/noise filter. And I keep being told my X server does not support DPMS. But by and large, things are OK.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
pfft. I'd run it headless and use it to compile things and play music.
:(
;) and need more test/build/play machines.
If I had $1800 to toss away on a box that I could never really upgrade.
I'm hoping that they continue a cube series and lower the prices... I'm enjoying my iMac (it compiles glibc surprisingly quickly
I've seen Windows 2000 run perfectly on a Pentium 60 with 32 megs of RAM. It ran kinda like 98 on a 486, but it ran.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
q-dOS, ms-dOS, OS/9, OS/9000, cmOS
ok that's stretching it...
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
S I T E
great comedy company.
This is just patently untrue. The quick launch bar is available in all version of Windows since 98. Even if it isn't initialy visible you are only a right click on the taskbar away from it.
Anything that hasn't the Stallman seal of approval (GPL) is by default crap on /.
Bjarne
I'd agree with your statements if your target audience is an existing linux user who wants to run linux.
But if you're a current Mac user, your arguments miss the point. The cons you list can be grouped into three categories:
- completely subjective, and biased towards unix
- complaining about features which are obviously not perfectly functional, given the 'beta' designation
- pointing out UI issues which are relatively trivial to change, not software design flaws
really. so if I want a desktop operating system with a modern design, with a rich oo programming api with access to advanced display technologies, what are my choices:
- *nix and gnustep
- *nix and berlin
- macosx
linux and gnustep might be at an analagous point in development, check out their status page. berlin is still in heavy development. but the big difference is apple has salaried employees working on this. and the cocoa api is much more powerful than openstep/gnustep because of its access to quartz, which is like dpsng + opengl + quicktime. gnustep is a clone, and will always be catching up to cocoa.
and if you really want, install Apple's dev tools, XFree86, and be done with it, you've got a gnome-ready workstation (when it gets ported, Darwin is just another BSD). Have you seen ProjectBuilder? I've never before seen such a nice IDE that uses open-source tools (gcc, gdb, jam). And for you hard core unix guys, openssh included.
And, to top it off, you get all the OS9 applications that Mac users are used to. You get a java runtime environment whos swing interface is consistent with the MacOS interface. You get a professionally designed and polished GUI.
I would argue that ALL MacOSX needs for release is polishing. A linux system that looks like MacOSX can do nothing that MacOSX will not be able to do.
cheers,
-o
If another company had done it, which hardware would they have used?
The 80x86 family of course because of the better performance / price ratio.
No, I'm NOT talking about meaningless MHz race (the PhotoShop benchmark from Apple is not much better, so a filter carrefully hand-optimised in assembly language beats a less optimised one for another computer, duh!) but about the SpecInt/SpecFP which are still benchmarks (thus not perfect).
So the CPU is lacking, the videocard is usually much worse than its equivalent in the PC world and you pay more! The OS may be nice but No thanks!
hahahaha
Thats just to damn funny
No, you're quite wrong. It is a feature in 2000,98, and me, but not in ie5. He's talking about people who use NT4, and that's me, and christ it pisses me off not having active desktop in ie, but now I know I can uninstall, install 4, then install 5, that's what I'll have to do. You don't know how much that little thing improves your satisfaction with your work pc untill it's gone.
Gfunk
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
you guys could have held off posting this till i was done with the darn thing... i think it's interesting to note how many /. people are interested in what happens with this other os... and how many times people beg for it to run on their wintel hardware :)
did anyone else notice that he's forgotten about the advantages of the microkernel? the whole point of darwin is that a buggy device driver _wont't_ bring down the kernel.
Sitting Walrus Blog
Worst of the Unix and MacOS worlds put together.
.pdf.
:'( Menus draw incredibly slowly, ditto for switching applications.
I would tend to disagree. In fact, I think it's just the opposite.
The Unix side is stripped of most functionality. Unix people will be disappointed.
This baffles me. I'm a "unix person" (have been using Unix for about 6 years -- SunOS, Solaris, Linux), and I'm actually quite amazed with how well the Mac and Unix worlds mesh under Mac OS X.
Especially since there is no X server support and no development or daemon support (of the stock install).
For marketing/positioning reasons, it really doesn't make sense for Apple to include compilers and and X server with Mac OS X. They're not trying to be just another *nix distro.
The Mac side seems even more buggy and much slower.
No idea what this means. Classic is remarkably solid for me.
New MacOS look and feel is cumbersome, wastes too much screen space (definitely on a laptop, anyway). Not very customizable.
I'd admit there are some rough edges, but I honestly thinks it's quite a revolution (in a good way). If you're on an iBook, yes you're going to have problems since you're maxed out at 800x600. As far as "not very customizable," nothing could be further from the truth. Most UI elements seem to be made up of PDF files stored throughout the system. Do a search for
Old hat Mac users will have to relearn much of the interface
This was inevitable, and necessary, IMHO. I'm pretty darn tired of 1984-centric UI.
Very buggy. I couldn't copy files (except using 'cp' in a term) from a server to a local directory w/o weird errors happening. Friends reported system crashes/freezes (under Unix!?).
Something isn't normal. I'm running on a Blue G3/400. The install and setup went seamless, and in the two weeks I've been using MOSX for my day-to-day work, I have yet to see anything resembling a system crash. Classic dies from time to time, but that's not entirely suprising at this stage.
On the other hand, I've heard of people seeing kernel panics in the beta. Since the differences between my experience and others is so great, I suspect that certain hardware configurations are far more stable at this point than others (rather than just being general kernel problems). Especially since I've heard of people completely ignoring the stated minimum requirements, and then acting suprised when things don't work right.
Incredibly slow. Playing MP3's and browsing the web takes my 128MB iBook to it's limits.
I think this has a lot to do with the fact that things are still in progress. Note, for example, that there does not appear to be any support for 2D acceleration yet. This will slow things down substantially.
With 128MB of memory I found things quite usable (6-10 Classic/Carbon/Cocoa apps of varying sizes open), but not optimal. I added in another 128MB (256MB total) and the thing absolutely flies now. The OS boots faster, classic launches much faster faster, apps launch quicker, and the disk is rarely touched. I believe Apple is aiming to bring the minimum down to 64MB by the 1.0 release.
Also, you'd be suprised at how much faster the public beta is than DP4. I'm sure there are more optimizations to be done.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
We've got some UltraSPARCs here in our lab clocked at 143MHz. Running SETI@home clients on Solaris 2.5.1, this is what you get:
--
The Desktop seems (to me) a poor rip of the NeXT Workspace Manager. It is real crappy, have many bugs, and is nowhere as usable as the program he tries to clone. It is interesting to see that it is (almost) the only important Carbon app shipped with the system.
As a side note, the purported reason that the "new Finder" (whatever qualfies as that) is written in Carbon, is that Apple is "eating its own dog food" (Jobs' words). At the 1998 Apple developers conference, Apple said it would develop at least one major Cabon app, and one major Cocoa app to prove that both were plausible, and to make sure they deal with any problems that crop up. The former is the new Finder, the latter is the Mail app included with the system.
Or at least this is how it was in May 1998.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I mean, really, guys. What would the response be if Microsoft came out with their own version of Linux, complete with Office, but if in order to run it, you had to buy a mysterious 'firmware' card from Microsoft to plug into your machine?? Why does Apple get away with selling some of the worlds most closed hardware in these parts?
Because it's part of the reason things works so well on the platform. The same reason game console popularity has exploded in the past few years. Many people just want stuff to work.
Microsoft's markets and Apple's markets may have some overlap, but they have much different philosophies. Apple is meticulous about architecting the entire computing experience. Example: iMovie. The only reason this came together so quickly and has been such a hit was because they could change the 1) hardware 2) OS 3) application on a whim.
If you like, feel free to continue buying an OS from one company, and all your other hardware from other companies. That's fine. But allow me to have the choice to buy an entire computer, and have that manufacturer be held accountable for the entire experience, not just the OS, or just the CPU or just the hard drive. I don't have time for that BS.
Besides, if you want to run OSX without all the extra stuff, download Darwin and hack it into whatever you want.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I haven't had any problems, but you cannot (and I believe this holds whether or not you install OS X on the same partition or a separate one) launch the Classic 'app' in order to access your OS 9 programs. When you try to, Classic will say you do not have OS 9 installed. And on my machine, when booted to OS X, and I go to the 8.6 partition and try to launch an app it says (paraphrased) "This is not OS 9, you must install OS 9 to run Classic and Classic applications". That's fine with me at the moment. Besides, I feel better about having separate partitions for OS X and OS 8.6, in case of crashes....
Yes, crashes. I will be a bastard and do a second posting, but I crashed the system (yes the SYSTEM, not an app) within 3 hours of installing. However I can't recreate it, so it must have been some confluence of events/beta bug. I can crash Apple System Profiler at will - within 5 seconds of opening it. See my other posting for more info....
common, you don't want it to be too easy.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Actually you could download the specs on the PPC procs, but it wouldn't do any good seeing that Apple has a rom on their boards that the OS searches for upon installation. If it's not present, it doesn't install. That's the only reason I'm not building my own MacOS box.
nah just use a dish towel with a flat-head screwdriver...then try re-molding it.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
I haven't tried to install it on the same partion as OS 8, but I've installed it on the same machine as 8.6, and everthing is fine and dandy - classic works just fine.
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
At least that was my understanding when I was at IBM working and was able to get the specs in actual paper form. The boards aren't difficult to build, but I don't have the rom to be able to make it "Apple" friendly.
Not to mention you can get the specs from motorola/IBM on the PPC architechture to make your own motherboard...it's hidden in the site somewhere but I was indeed looking at them at one point...
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
> The Apple menu is one of the WORST elements in
> MacOS. It is NOT obvious it's a menu
Well, it's on the menubar, which also has an Application menu that can be toggled between name and icon. There are also plenty of apps with iconic menus: StuffIt, Navigator, ViaVoice, Spell Catcher, and Mac OS X's Desktop, which has an iconic Application menu, and an iconic Keyboard menu (that shows the flag of the language you're using, if you turn it on).
The fact that an icon or name on the menubar has always been a menu is the major source of the complaints about the Apple icon in Mac OS X. It's an icon that sits right next to the Keyboard menu in some cases, but you click it and it's not a menu.
Since you've got to learn the Application menu in Mac OS 9, learning the Apple menu is not such a stretch.
Actually, the word out there is that it works fine on some multi-processor systems, and is unable to install on otheres (but apparently works well once installed....). The probelem appears to be a spcific errata with a portion of the G4 chips, if you get one of those chips, you have problems in a specific case... and the installer meets that criteria... And it is in the cache coherincy system that this happens (the part keeping the chips' view of memory the same). A hiccup, but.. this is Beta....
When you consider that Apple has a niche market, you will understand the place that the cube has.
It is not a computer for geeks. Its for preppy, snobby people who crave style so much that think "Oh, that cubed-computer will look smashing next to my Ming-vase!!!"
If you don't want it, don't gripe about it, just buy something more geek-ish.. like a dual 500mhz G4 tower.. heheheheh
I dont know if this is exactly what YOU need but this was just released. PPPoE - 2.3 Port of the daemon needed for PPP connections via ADSL "The port of Roaring Penguin's PPPoE daemon for Mac OS X Public Beta. Enables Internet connections via ADSL when the ISP uses the PPP protocol over Ethernet." http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=897 3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
Are we doomed to see this comment on every story about mac osx from now on? Please everyone who has had this thought... read this now and remember me later...... Apple is a hardware company. They make $ on boxes. thats it. end of story. please... no more 'osx on intel?' comments.... or i will puke. honest. and no, it wont be insanely great puke
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
98MB? It doesn't add up!
iBooks have 32MB or 64MB. And there isn't a 34MB chip, is there?
Have you tried using the proper Torx screwdriver to fix it?
--
Make mine methylphenidate.
> [1] i dont want to call it X. X is a windowing system.
And a letter of the alphabet, and a roman numeral 10. So what?
and being a normally major Linux user, I had to say I was impressed, the main thing they need to do is port it to Intel machines and the like...keeping it on Macintoshes only shows windows-like characteristics.
öööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööö
How Jaded Are You?
You would be correct, Tao - others, please READ my post. Thank you.
The load average is how many processes are, on average, on the queue for CPU time -- not the result of some clever algorithm for measuring CPU usage. So if you're running one CPU-intensive process (plus a few quiet daemons or shells here and there), your load average will be about one. If you have two processes that never sleep() or block or otherwise surrender their timeslices, and nothing else going on, it will be two. And so forth. So all those load averages mean is that there are a couple of processes that are always doing something, even if it's not much of something.
This isn't a gripe, just an observation. I happen to use the Aqua theme myself, and the blue is getting old... :)
Wait a sec...when you say "he" do you mean "it"?
--
Make mine methylphenidate.
Be careful if you decide to install MacOS X on a Mac with LinuxPPC on it - I did NOT tell it to touch my partitions, but it did, causing the partitions to become inaccessible. I didn't try to find out what was wrong, just put Linux back and put X in the bottom of the drawer.
If you have another hard drive at all, that would be the safest place to try out MacOS X. I might install it again on a rainy day.
Applications (.app) are really folders. Drag and drop them in a shell to look inside them.
Cd to the Content/MacOS directory. There is the real application exectuable.
Then, if you have the developer tools (from darwin, for instance), you can look at executable content with 'nm'.
If you have things like:
0000f078 t -[MyClass _myMethod:]
then it is a Cocoa application.
You'll find that most of them are really cocoa applications.
The Desktop seems (to me) a poor rip of the NeXT Workspace Manager. It is real crappy, have many bugs, and is nowhere as usable as the program he tries to clone.
It is interesting to see that it is (almost) the only important Carbon app shipped with the system.
Long life to ObjC.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Nothing about BSD here. Shouldn't they at least mention BSD in this copyright? (I know that it's not required anymore by the BSD license, but just out of respect, shouldn't they mention BSD?
nah they havent been /.ed, they were already almost unreachable around 1pm eastern. I don't know wether that is due to increased traffic caused by the Mac OS X beta review (which was posted early in the morning or last night) or some other reason. Maybe some mac zealots are DDOSing ars coz they say that Mac OS X beta is buggy? :-)
Now I've seen it all!
Appended to the end of comments I post? 120 chars?!
the Ars servers have been very hard to reach all through the day, it started long before the /. even
Your right to free speach?? what the hell are you talking about?? Yes I agree that some of the things apple has threatened lawsuits over are a bit trivial, but it's all over things they own the patent on!! Imagine that, a for-profit company trying to protect itself...hmmm how novel.
I do agree that the whole thing with themes.org and a few other lawsuits sucked, but with the roles reversed I think I might do the same thing.
this is capitalism you know, not some commy country,
i am curious though, exactly how did apple impinge on free speech and why didn't you take it to court?
--fogive me i accidentally made a comment.....oops
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
There is no doubt that taste plays a role in this kind of thing, but that makes it especially strange for Apple to go against the very well-documented tastes of its current users. They had to work hard to change some of these UI details that really did not have to change, and for what gain?
I'm so very sick of hearing this. Enough. 1984 is done. Let's move on.
I know some people feel that the Mac OS 9 is "their" OS (mostly due to nostalgia), but unfortunately, this doesn't translate into broader acceptance of Mac OS X. You should have seen the look of the faces of my family members when I showed them Mac OS X. They instantly wanted it. All the nostalgia-induced love of the same UI is useless if Apple isn't growing marketshare.
I can still remember how some people solidly believed how GUIs (in general) were a bad idea because they were too different. I can remember how people thought that the iMac wouldn't sell because it was too different. Maybe Mac OS X will fail because it's too different, but thank goodness we have people at Apple stretching the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable. That's the goal of computing, isn't it?
There really is an awful lot to like about Mac OS X, which is why I suspect the flaws and weird parts seem the more striking: this really could have been almost perfect.
What do you mean "could have been?" It's still in beta. Do you realize how much has changed since DP4? If these issues are important to you, and you'd like to consider using the final version of Mac OS X, go over to the Mac OS X feedback form.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
"In the past also Apple had been through severe beatings, but nothing like this. Wired has an article where they have mentioned that OS X might be the only straw it has. Remains to be seen.. "
The recent stock slump has certainly been dramatic, but Apple has been in much more serious trouble. Its stock has been in the toilet on a number of previous occasions, coupled with massive losses and serious financial mismanagement that left the company on the brink of collapse. What we have today is a sales slump and a stock market panic. Apple is still going to turn a profit this quarter, unlike many companies still in favour on the stock market, it has billions in cash and practically no debt.
It's true that this may turn out to be a serious chapter in Apple's history, but if you've read that history you'll know that this is a company that's seen it all.
Cool.... Mail via LDAP, that's a cool new feature. I'm surprised it comes free with the OS. I'm not aware of anyone else doing it. Are there any mail servers for it? Oh wait, you meant IMAP didn't you...
Acutally, there is LDAP support sprinkled throughout as well. Sherlock has supported LDAP searches for some time, and the Address Book app in Mac OS X can be pointed at LDAP servers as well. I imagine the Mail app can use LDAP too.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Heh.
Free Hans!
do me a favor, go to the apple store, and just try to buy osx server for intel. for that matter, see if you can find a link to buy server at all. yes, developer versions of server ran on intel, but that was dropped. yes, darwin runs on intel, but that is more due to industrious hackers than Apple. but that is a moot point, because darwin is NOT OSX. also, OSX server is a different beast than client. Just because one ran on intel at one point does not mean that the other will
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Jesus. you guys discussing this shit just encourages this guy.
I can't believe his masturbatory prose! get to the details already you...you...you... geek!
The criticisms of the dock and the new Finder are well-founded and the research behind the criticisms is documented.
Please point me at this documentation. So far all the complaints I've seen have been anecdotal, and along the lines of people whining about things being "too different."
Of course, I absolutely could not stand the Control Strip and rarely used the Apple Menu (except for "Recent Documents"). They may have made sense individually, but in 2000, they didn't really seem to mesh well with each other or the overall UI design anymore. The control strip was original designed only for PowerBook users. It always seemed out of place to me. Do you develop a control strip module or a control panel, for example? It was time to start from a clean slate, IMHO.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
hehe.. be my guest. though out of local patriotism I might just take the joke a step further and start calling it `Kristiansand'. IMHO, Oslo is a very noisy city.
I've come to... anesthetize you!
I'm not actually worried about "apple" friendly but it would be cool to have a PPC board. Do you remember where those links were? I cannot find them anymore...
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
It would hardly surprise me, though there's probably some other reasoning too.
While I love the MacOS UI, and a lot of the stuff that runs on it, I agree that the OS is falling apart, that it's amazing that Apple is still around with some of the boners they've pulled, and that Steve is one of the world's biggest assholes.
Contrast this with the Woz, who I have nothing but respect for.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Of course, when the Dock in OS X starts to fill the bottom of the screen, navigating around got a little tricky. For me (today) that point was when I was jumping between 5 apps and 8 windows so I could crib data while installing tomcat
Say what you will, but this is one area where it's hard to criticize the dock. In Windows, you'll get 5-8 different tabs in the task bar that have the exact same IE icon and just a bit of text associated with them.
Mac OS X, however, brilliantly generates a thumbnail of each window you send to the dock, and you get the full title of the window when you mouse over it. If you want to quicker access to various open terminal, consider changing the default window title or the background color of them (perhaps different color for each host or active app), then saving these settings as a separate file. This should greatly speed up navigation.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
> You can keep your pitiful imitations, thank you.
Stop trolling. Even an idiot knows that the Apple menu predates the Windows Start menu by about 10 years.
... OpenbSd
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Sarcasm, people. Seriously. Recognize. Laugh.
/me backs off of the angry, bitter mac users.
I just think it's pretty humorous that while other companies refer to their systems with model numbers and product line names like 'Vectra' and 'Proliant', Apple uses blue and white.
I KNOW there's no grape G3, I KNOW how they specify machine details. The fact that Apple has degenerated into describing their systems with pretty colors amuses me. I know it's definitely a different, possibly very efficient way of designating systems specs. Maybe it's perfectly Apple. Just seems very first grade.
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"how can the same street intersect with itself? i must be at the nexus of the universe!" - cosmo kramer
Oh, yes. I beleive they tried to kill Cocoa, but the it wouldn't die. I hope that *now* they will push cocoa as much as they can. It is rather easy:
There is some debate as to whether Apple tried to kill off Objective-C, but I don't think killing off Cocoa was ever in the cards.
This looks like a open source MacOS X clone on the horizon... maybe in 3 or 4 years.
It depends on what you're hoping to get out of Mac OS X. The most common reasons seem to be:
1) Love Mac hardware and general Apple system design concepts, want a good OS to go with it
2) Love Unix, want a well-designed GUI to go with it
3) Want anything that is not Windows and can still run most mainstream apps (read: Office)
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
awww.. don't make fun of the TRS-80! I learned how to program in BASIC on that thing :) .. and as it had no external storage, I learned touchtyping by typing in 400-lines programs every day.. ahh.. nostalgia.
I've come to... anesthetize you!
I tried both Yellow Dog Linux and now receintly MacOS X Client on my iBook. Here's what I thought of MacOS X Client (compared to YDL):
:'( Menus draw incredibly slowly, ditto for switching applications.
:'( I hope the full release is much more improved than this 'beta'. MacOS X client needs more than just some polishing to make it practical and useful.
Pros:
- Supports sound (yeah!)
- Supports 32-bit color (yeah!)
- System config is easily at hand in the GUI (NIC settings, screen settings, etc.)
- Very simple. Install and go.
Cons:
- Worst of the Unix and MacOS worlds put together. The Unix side is stripped of most functionality. Unix people will be disappointed. Especially since there is no X server support and no development or daemon support (of the stock install). The Mac side seems even more buggy and much slower.
- New MacOS look and feel is cumbersome, wastes too much screen space (definitely on a laptop, anyway). Not very customizable. Old hat Mac users will have to relearn much of the interface, and Unix users will wish it wasn't so much in the way.
- Very buggy. I couldn't copy files (except using 'cp' in a term) from a server to a local directory w/o weird errors happening. Friends reported system crashes/freezes (under Unix!?).
- Incredibly slow. Playing MP3's and browsing the web takes my 128MB iBook to it's limits.
If LinuxPPC/YDL got sound support and better video support (I think both are in the works, or perhaps even done now?). Then it's a no brainer that YDL is faster, more stable, probably more secure, more functional, and cheaper than MacOS X Client. Stick a MacOS-X theme on YDL and you've got something cheaper and better than MacOS X Client.
Really, a sad day for me (being a long term Mac supporter) to see MacOS get this bad.
--Phil (with a big frowny face)
I've been running Mac OS X Public Beta for the last couple of weeks, too (running it right now, posting from IE 5 for Mac OS X). No need to reboot, no system freezes. Very useable performance on this G3 300 iBook with 192MB RAM and 4MB of video RAM, but not snappy like Mac OS 9. Amazing multitasking, font support, graphics, audio, MIDI. IE, QuickTime, Shockwave, Flash, and POP/LDAP mail are already here. There is so much good tech that it's amazing. App bundles make so much sense.
... you're asking all these people to learn a new method for things they've been happily doing for years without complaint, except that they want more stability, which OS X has in droves.
... previewing files is amazing in columns, but why take a good thing and make it bad by trying to make it do too much? Give me a columns browser, and the ability to open up list and icon view folder windows like on Mac OS 9 and newbies will use the former, and power users will use both.
BUT, the UI is a train wreck. Not the way it looks, which is beautiful, but only skin deep. I'm talking about the way it functions and how useful it is for a variety of tasks. It's unbelievably bad. Give me a Mac GUI, or give me a NeXT GUI, but not this monster. You can't open a folder anymore (gone between DP4 and Public Beta) so you're always stuck in these huge browser windows. Sometimes I just want to open a folder and have it show up where I left it so I can get on with my work. Never mind if I'm using a big display, a little palette window is a little palette window, and list-view Finder windows are drag and drop palettes for me. I always have one or two next to a document window with clipart or script snippets in them. No way to do this in Mac OS X. Amazing stuff. Company after company has copied the Mac Finder since it came out, and Apple ports the source code of the real thing and makes a mess of it. What's bothersome is not that there is stuff missing (it's a beta) but that there is crappy replacement stuff that's far along. If you're going to change it between 9 and 10, you have to have a better reason than "a bunch of us used to work at NeXT". It's got to be demonstrably better
The columns browser is great in the Open and Save dialogs, and it's great when I want to open up a big window and browse around
Seeing only 21 characters of a filename is a bug I can't wait to see gone, either. Suddenly we have 255 character names, but we can only see 21 characters, except through heroic means (opening an Inspector or a Terminal window, or clicking on the name to get ready to change it). Mac OS 9 allowed 32 characters and displayed 32 as well, and that's better UI. On Mac OS 9, you grab a file and it "feels real", but in Mac OS X, you never forget that you're looking at an abstraction in a browser, just like Windows.
On my 30" screen watching a 120x120 Quicktime movie pixels were most defintately noticable - you idiot.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
The public beta DOES NOT SUPPORT OS8. Period. Go to the apple support site it is there. Sorry
a man, a plan, a canal, panama
I ran NT 4.0 on a Pentium 75 with 8MB of ram once.. Talk about slow.
:)
I dont' even think it would install on a machine like that. I installed it with 64MB of ram, and then removed some of the chips
Without really looking into it in any detail, I would suspect that a) their algorithm for calculating load sucks rocks and b) people might be connecting to the stream every now and then. (It's a dev box at the moment - no real load yet)
I've been running Mac OS X for months now, but I wait for John Siracusa's articles almost as expectantly as I wait for new releases of the OS. Seems like a lot of others also feel the same way. His articles are still the best introduction for the technical user to Mac OS X.
...
Also, you have to give some credit to Ars Technica. On many sites, this would have been a 20-part series, cut to pieces and released a bit at a time, so you get a sip everyday but never drink.
Thanks, John
Yes, but root can't be accessed from the outside world. Sure, there may be root exploits, but this sounds safer than the current method. As he says in the article, if they have physical access, all bets are off anyway.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
I think it's any thing (Win95 included) that has IE4+ installed.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Seriously, you need 64MB of RAM just to run the OS without hanging. Windows ME still only needs 32MB to run by itself; and you can chop off a few megs from that by using Win98lite.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I've been running it for about 10 days now. It's basically BSD (Mach 3.0) with a Mac shell. It runs Mac OS 9 as an application and the major showstopper is that PPP can't be used (yet) with the older stuff. I leave a terminal window up at all times and switch between the two Mac OS shells and BSD on an as-needed basis. It makes the Windows NT 4.0 machine on the other desk look like a toy. (Of course, I've been a UNIX sysadmin.) Recommended.
I beleive it is already gone. In fact os x beta requires 128 megs!!!! Apples site lists this as something they are werking on (trying to get requirements down)
;-)
btw nice jurassic park quote
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
do any of these exist?
youll need that if you want any of that stuff on "mak oh es ten"(1)
[1] i dont want to call it X. X is a windowing system.
He then said he didn't think Easel would ever work because they were "just slapping a UI on top of a Unix system". The guy sitting next to me almost split a kidney laughing.
If you think Mac OS X is just a pretty UI slapped on top of Mach, methinks you need to do some more reading and/or beta testing.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I understand that this is a troll, but Apache is the standard web server on Mac OS X. That is, the formerly liteweight Personal Web Sharing which is in Mac OS 8/9 is powered by Apache in OS X, out of the box. As far as I can tell, the standard "OS X Workstation" can be used as a pretty good server, out of the box. It has Apache, ftpd, sshd, telnetd, tcsh, perl and other nice goodies, out of the box. If you want to add developer software (visual java/objective c tools, as well as egcs, etc), you can download a free addition from the Apple Developer site.
Of course, you can also get compilers from Apple's public source Darwin project.
I have been using Mac OS X PB as my primary OS for about a week and a half, and the only problem I have had is with the slow window resizing. I have compiled standard BSD applications without problem, so any free or BSD software that I want -- as long as it isn't locked into using X Windows -- can be added without trouble. Even features which are currently not supported (dual monitors, for example) have worked flawlessly.
Again, I understand that you are a troll, but I just thought it should be said.
Russell
all this petty bitching about the Mac GUI is testimony to the open source way. If you don't like xyz feature, hack the code and remove xyz feature.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Apple Goes Out Of Business: Users Say This Is "Good News"
I get sound too on my 9500 under LinuxPPC... but that's not what he is saying... it's on the iBook that sound has troubles (I'm pretty sure that BenH's recent kernels have fixed that though...)
The thing is, there have been two Macintosh models called "Power Macintosh G3."
The first one was the last machine they released before going on their translucency craze. I'm using one right now. The official color os Platinum, but everyone calls it "Beige."
The second model was the first of the colored desktop lines and was blue and white (sometimes shortened to "Blue G3." This had a substantially different design from the older models, including a totally new motherboard architecture, lack of floppy, ADB, and SCSI (though ADB was added in the second revision of the Blues), and several other things.
This is very important, because of the motherboard architectures. Every Mac from the iMac on up has used essentially the same motherboard design, called UMA-1 (Unified Motherboard Architecture, Revision 1). There have been various "personalities" plugged into them, depending on the model; this is how a PowerMac G4 can have the same motherboard as an iBook, a PowerBook G3, an iMac, and a Cube, with them all still being substantially different.
This is a big deal, because the Beige G3 is the only supported Mac model that does not use this architecture (for those interested, the first revision of the motherboard was codenamed Gossamer, the second and third were Silk). As such, it has some rather unique issues, such as built-in SCSI and a floppy drive, that must be dealt with. The only one that's made any difference to me (Beige G3 owner) is that my G4 processor upgrade doesn't work yet, so I've reverted to the original chip for the time being (the upgrade maker, Sonnet, is working on a fix).
So for the most part, the color of a person's Mac doesn't matter. But in one special case, namely the G3 desktop systems, it does.
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I used MkLinux for several years. I was impressed with the stability. On a 7100/80, speed was not an issue. Changing Kernels was a no brainer. Talk about a painless upgrade.
How long has it been since you used an OS with Mach?
photosMy Photostream
%rpcinfo -p localhost program vers proto port 100000 2 tcp 111 portmapper 100000 2 udp 111 portmapper 200100001 1 udp 756 netinfobind 200100001 1 tcp 759 netinfobind %showmount -e localhost RPC: Program not registered: Can't do Exports rpc Is this what you're looking for?
Try again:
%rpcinfo -p localhost
program vers proto port
100000 2 tcp 111 portmapper
100000 2 udp 111 portmapper
200100001 1 udp 756 netinfobind
200100001 1 tcp 759 netinfobind
%showmount -e localhost
RPC: Program not registered: Can't do Exports rpc
Is this what you're looking for?
Starting nmap V. 2.54BETA5 ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ )
Interesting ports on (x.x.x.x):
(The 1522 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
Port State Service
67/tcp filtered bootps
111/tcp open sunrpc
137/tcp filtered netbios-ns
138/tcp filtered netbios-dgm
139/tcp filtered netbios-ssn
445/tcp filtered microsoft-ds
513/tcp open login
514/tcp open shell
760/tcp open krbupdate
763/tcp open cycleserv
Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 4 seconds
Active Internet connections (including servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address (state)
tcp 0 0 *.22 *.* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *.80 *.* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *.427 *.* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *.548 *.* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *.759 *.* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *.762 *.* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *.sunrpc *.* LISTEN
I turned on sshd (installed by default!) and apache myself. I also cut out all the lines without a LISTEN.
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
Uh. Yeah. Sure. Here, quit your whining, spend $35, and get slave support via the Rev. B ROM module. They've had Rev. C and Rev. B ROMs for sale for over a year now, though they've finally sold out of Cs.
t af
http://eshop.macsales.com/specials/XLR8YourMac.
Listen, I've met your kind before. Even if they changed model names every time they came out with new revisions you'd still bitch. You'd bitch because you didn't know your model was going to be discontinued. BFD. Welcome to the real world. Models get replaced with faster ones all the time.
If you bought a Dell, and two months later they discontinued your line and came out with new systems with with new features for the same price, would you do the same thing? No? Because this doesn't happen on the other side of the fence, right?
Wrong.
Dell speed-bumps systems just as often, if not more often, than Apple does. Many times those speed bumps, just like Apple, include new features. Even if you don't find out about those features until you bump into the limitations of your older model.
Life sucks and then you die. Either deal with it or commit suicide, but don't sit around and harp endlessly about how life sucks, okay?
Moof!
OS X shows the most promise of any system out there. Ya, you can have *nix, but can your grandma use it? Or you can have Mac OS 9 (I taught it to my little brother who was seven and he had no problem with it) but it lacks features wanted by us slashdotters (like SMP or protected memory). It's two diffrent worlds almost, and OS X comes the closest to each that I have seen.
The OS X beta is very incomplete. There are many unoptimized areas, just try resizing a window and you'll see what I mean (or QT 4 in os x, or minimizing a window on a 233 G3, or running it on 96 MB of RAM, ect...). Hopefully the final release will run at warp 1 X 10^999999.
At the moment, the beta seems to be too intuative. This doesn't make sense at first, but how intuative was the apple menu? A small picture of an apple with great power and effecincy? Try explaining that to your grandma. The OS X GUI hasn't taken that extra step of complexety that appeals to the pro users, but can remain hidden to novice users. This would be like hiding the dock like I have on my iMac. I get the extra screen space back and the dock works fine, but it just isn't as intuative anymore.
Other options I think would improve OS X that would appeal to pro users would be to have a control strip in the unused upper right in the menu bar. To have an option for the file names permenently under the icons in the dock (no cursor rollover needed). The clickable area in the dock should extend to the base of the screen and not just the icon (easy to hit). Anchor the dock on the left of the base so commenly used apps would always be in the same place on the screen. And yes, I have sent them about 40 suggestions so far, including these
My $2 X 10^ -2
> Carbon itself is a good thing, and was necessary,
> but it distracts ISV's from what they SHOULD be
> doing, and that's porting apps to Cocoa.
Carbon and Cocoa will have equivalent functionality eventually, even Services. Whether a developer chooses one over the other is a personal thing. There are 10,000 Mac applications that are almost-Carbon, and comparitively few NeXT apps that are almost-Cocoa. Unsurprisingly, more Mac users are interested in the apps they already use, and they want them immediately, not after a year of exhaustive porting.
Telling a user that OmniWeb is superior to IE because the former is Cocoa and the latter is Carbon is doing them a grave disservice. A good app is a good app. A lot of the Cocoa stuff that's currently out is very un-Mac-like and won't necessarily be an instant hit with many Mac users.
Quicktime movies are still based around a pixel grid. There's no more detail than the pixel level and when you double the size of the video, you double the size of the pixels, and although MacOSX uses a fuzzy scaling scheme with antialiasing in an attempt to try and counteract pixelation when zoomed it's still pixely - and any idiot, like me, can notice that.
To say "stretch as big as you want with _NO_ pixelation??" is just not true and something an idiot would say.
Oh yes, and you're welcome, peasant.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
better than naming it after a year that you barely manage to ship in..... also, when it hits 2001, they os wont look out of date, just because of its name, as has happened with 95, 98, and will happen with 2000
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
I think the ISVs are not necessarily UNIX programmers, so asking them to port to Obj-C or Java is a stretch right off the bat. It's a good way to get them out of Classic, at which point we whiny Mac users will start bugging them to go to Cocoa ;-).
Seriously, the learning curve is bad enough going to Carbon, and Cocoa is much too much. And Carbon apps run pretty well. So in a year there should be few un-Carbonized apps.
well on the 21" display which in turn was broudcast onto a screen projector that I used at the mac business expo in seattle 2 weeks ago they weren't --you idiot
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Any proper response to this post would contain phrases like 'get a life' and such, so I won't give you a proper response, because flaming sucks
i have my doubts. heh
/me fully expects to get moderated down
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Well, this is it. MacOS is going the way of the Dodo, and that means...yes, the last of the "big" OSes (except for that one I won't mention) is a UNIX.
I have high hopes for these "UNIX under the hood" operating systems. I always thought Be had things right, and it looks like OS X is basically duplicating that scheme.
Mac OS X and NeXT machines seem to use a different algorithm to caluculate load averages, I've always been suprised when looking at the output of uptime or top on them...
I've also been using it for almost two weeks. No reboots either.
There are lots of UI quibbles, which we all know that either Apple will fix, or third parties will. I'm not concerned about the loss of spring loaded folders or windowshades (actually, the Cocoa-ified Stickies HAS windowshades!).
I think the BIGGEST weakness of this OS will be Carbon. Carbon itself is a good thing, and was necessary, but it distracts ISV's from what they SHOULD be doing, and that's porting apps to Cocoa, and if they need to address the Solaris and NT market, use the portability stuff inherent in Cocoa (OPENSTEP). Instead, ISV's seem to be confused, running scared, and when we have apps that aren't Carbon OR Cocoa, we have to run the Classic environment, which is a huge waste of time. Classic boot times are slow, the necessity of running classic is a geek concept; normal users won't understand it. It's a memory hog, and many apps don't run at all, while many more run so damn slow it's not even funny. There are still several that run just fine. But the end result is so inconsistant as to be utterly baffling. I think Apple may have taken the only course they could, and how they did it was elegant as possible, but damn, I sure wonder how things would have worked out if Apple had evangelized Cocoa a LOT more strongly pushed the cross-platform features, and ease of programming, and not done the work on Carbon, and not made Classic so easy to fall back on. Personally, if I have any Classic apps I have to run, I'm going to dual-boot to get there, for a LONG while. Make a stronger case for Cocoa, and maybe more ISV's would have taken it seriously, instead of shunning it for either Carbon, or completely ignoring OS X altogether.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
their hardware's not closed, i'm running 3 (or 4, depending on how you count them) os's on my macs at home. it's just better. no, really, i mean that. apart from CPU speed, which isn't exactly their fault, the only thing that the pc world does better than apple is fsb, and that's arguable, as you can pass more on a 100mhz 128 bit wide bus than you can on a 133mhz 64 bit bus. as soon as os x ships, i expect that everyone will shut up about the speed issue, as 2 500mhz procs on a big ass wide bus are arguably better than 1 ghz proc being strangled to death by a crappy os. but, that's just my opinion.
Sitting Walrus Blog
Apple users (myself included) are waiting for faster g4s/g3s. Thus lower sales, thus stock getting beaten.
The next gen g4 (g4+ ) is a faster g4 and hopefully will move apple beyond the 500 mhz where its been sitting for a while now.
I don't think the dual processer machine is filling in well enough, because many apple users remember apples dual 200 machine that worked really fast with the one supported application (photoshop...)
Does anyone know how well OS X beta handles 2 processors?
oh goody, it will look so good up next to my Bill gates ice cream cake, my chocolate intel bunny, and my steve ellison dart board!!!
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Hi!
If you don't want that coaster with the blue X on it, I'll take it off your hands... contact me at victor *at* ripal.co.il
(I do hate it when things alter my partitions without permission. it's *SO* unsettling!)
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
oh yeah, and one REALLY cool little detail about OS X.
If you type in the wrong password in the GUI login, the dialog box responds by shaking back and forth, you can almost hear it say "nope". It is the most brilliant example of computer-human interface I have ever seen.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yeah... run WinME on a P200 with 32 megs of RAM... Try Win2000 on a Celeron 300 with 32 megs of RAM... At least Apple's being HONEST about what it's system requires, as opposed to some other company that gives you the most lowball figures in the world, just to sell a license for something that may not actually run on the hardware you own..
I guess we can be thankful that microsoft officially retired the 386 and 486 by now...
beOS OS/2 WindOwS macOS ecOS freedOS Which OS are you talking about?
I first commented on this at MacSlash where the article's been up since this morning, but maybe there will be more answers here. How painless will it be to install OS X over OS 8? The story only mentions installing over OS 9.
Constitutionally Correct
Let's call it "Arse Technica." I can see it now...
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Why'd you even bother with a Quadra? You could have gotten yourself a Pentium class machine for the same price no doubt. Especially if your aim is to run a BSD. Not bashing Apple here, but it just seems confusing that anyone would buy their hardware and adamantly refuse to use their software... Their software is the only real reason to buy the hardware.
You mean, like BeOS, OS/390, OS/400, RTOS, AmigaOS...
...closed up shop? If Apple started a new OS company, how long do you think it would be before the company realized that it could market their product to PC computer users as well? And then what would have happened? I don't think that the prejudice is stopping people like myself from praising OSX, it's that OSX won't run on my hardware.
Well, that's fine, Apple makes money of their hardware. But that's why OSX is a yawn for most people. Of course most people will benefit eventually as Windows & *nix distros copy the nice parts, but most of us won't really know about the nice parts until we get them running on our own machines.
Apple may have the Mozilla team beat.
Mozilla: Let's take a web page written in a meta-presentation language and translate it into a meta-data language and feed that to a renderer running in a browser itself rendered using a meta-data language and expect that the user will sacrifice 50meg of RAM and a good deal of CPU cycles for all this *kewl* technology.
Apple: Let's take an excellent microkernel and OS and heap on loads of fancy graphics that will impress the user for a grand total of about 30 seconds causing every application to operate slower than if they were running on a Commodore-64. Gosh, everyone knows it worked for NeXT!
This is what happens when geeks run a project...sad but true.
Jason.
Also been there... If it's not available, right click an empty spot on the task-bar, choose Toolbars then check Quick Launch. Available in 98, 98SE, Millennium, and Win 2000.
Despite that, I have not seen too many trolly articles here. The complaints I've seen have been reasonable, just as Ars Technica was a relatively reasonable review. People thinking about this OS should know about those faults. I've also seen some insiteful review of the Ars Technica article as well.
If anything Apple is getting a free ride here. People abuse MS all the time for things that Apple is doing. This is a "buggy" OS that takes up 800MB that hides important concepts from it's users. Some 200MB of that install are trailers for movies! Why should the install not tell you what a root account is? It's a simple but very important concept that's easy to relate. Granted, all of these things are better than what MS offers (920 MB install with very poor security and a checkbox to hide the entire contents of a hard drive, hides other things anyway, and costs much much more). Developments in free software are more interesting than this.
There is a little much coverage of this. Apple stuff has only tangential interest to most people who read this site. It's commodity hardware, and greater success will give us more toys to play with. Their use of BSD is interesting, and we hope that more gets ported back out as free. There seems to be more coverage of this than say Sun.
But really it would be much more impressive if some small company would develop something like this without all of the Apple restrictions. Imagine a small company putting togeter a nice Motorola computer ala IBM, so that duplication would be encouraged and profitable. Imagine also that they used all free ware, so that anyone could develop software for it. Further imagine that they had enough marketing muscle to get the thing noticed and it could be mass produced and cheap. If Apple would form a company to do this, and if they alowed this company to run it's existing codebase, we would indeed be impressed with Apple. As it is, shrug.
Poster does not hate Apple.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This isn't a troll. This is a real wish!
It's actually a fine way of differentiating machines. For the most part, with some noticeable exceptions, most PC manufacturers stick with a relatively common form factor across their entire line and use model numbers to differentiate their base systems. Apple simply uses color, processor, processor speed, and maybe a revision number/letter for specifics. B&W G3-350. Bronze PowerbookG3 whatever. Why is the color so important? It's a dinstinctive, easily recognized differentiation between models. One can't easily confuse a PowerMacG3 from 1997 with a PowerMacG3 from 1998, can they? One is beige, the other blue and white. And one can't mistake a G4 for a G3 simply because of the case styling.
Color is everything!
(And sorry on the original reply--I thought you were flat-out flamebating.)
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
I checked out the Cube at an Apple dealer, and the ugly beige monitor they were running it on felt almost like an affront to the machine.
...
Strangely, I felt that almost as strongly when I brought home my shiny new G4/450 Multi-Processor a week or so later, and plugged it into my beige Sony 19".
I wonder how many $3,999 cinema displays they've sold to style-hungry people with more cash and flash than sense? Not to say I might not be one of them if I had a spare $ 3,999 floating around dying for a home
D
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> There is some debate as to whether Apple tried to kill off Objective-C, but I don't think killing off Cocoa was ever in the cards.
Oh. Explain me what cocoa is without Objective-C. A java-only framework bridged to an inernally developped ObjC core that only runs on Mac OS X ?
Mmmm. Without ObjC, cocoa is cold dead.
> It depends on what you're hoping to get out of Mac OS X. The most common reasons seem to be:
Mine is:
* An operating system where Cocoa application runs with the same level of integration than on OPENSTEP.
So I probably meant '2)'
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
hmmm, sure? That's pretty cool. Magnum Opera, then. Most folks won't get it. They'll think it's the next version of a vaporware browser ;)
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
we have people who read the first 5 letters of the article (A-p-p-l-e) and respond with...
"Why does this crap OS get so much coverage?"
We also have people who look at the first 5 letters and see a name that they have depended on for twenty years. There's no sense in changing your name just because you want to appeal to nerds, especially when dozens of Fortune 500 companies and school systems already trust you.
Sure, FreeBSD/Mach sounds cool to us nerds, but do you honestly think that it will do well with school systems? Do you think that Pepsi would have sold as well had it been called Carbonated Water?
--
The World is Yours.
Let's back up some: The original Macintosh had one small bug that didn't become evident for a while - the name. It was simply 'Macintosh.'
When the newer version came out, the problem persisted. There was no way to tell a Mac with 128kB of RAM from one with 512kB. (they quickly became informally known as the 128K and the 512K, which was also called by it's code name, Fat Mac)
The third Mac, which had 512kB RAM but a new 800kB floppy drive (the original was 400kB... ah, memories) still didn't have a unique name, and ended up being known as the 512KE (E for Expanded, I guess... I have one at my parent's house ;)
Finally the Mac Plus came out, and sanity was restored. Every Mac since had a particular model name... Mac II, IIx, IIcx, SE, SE/30, IIvx (had one of those too... I'm a sucker) Quadra 700, 6100/66, 9500/132, etc.
But it's worth noting that Steve left Apple at around the time of the 512K - 512KE.
Now, a couple years ago the G3's came out. If they had continued with the ~8 year tradition of assigning each model a confusing number, the desktop would have been the 7700 and the minitower the 8700.
But Steve, who had returned, decided that they would simply be named 'Power Macintosh G3/xxx' where xxx was the speed of the CPU.
Okay, obviously a break from the numbering system (which did have a vague amount of logic behind it... I can follow up later on that if you want) but you could say G3 and people knew what you meant.
Unfortunately, the iMac (which also suffers from this problem) had come out and we all knew that the beige look that the first G3's had was not long for this world.
And indeed, the next models to come out of Cupertino in Jan '99 looked different. They had Blue and White cases. Here's a picture. Note, btw, that they ONLY came in Blue and White. By that time IIRC the iMacs came in colors. (more on that in a moment)
Apple, and everyone else, in order to distinguish them, came to call them 'Power Mac G3 (Blue and White)'s. So when he says that that's what he tested it on, that's important. I would have a good guess if he said G3/400, since the ones now known as Beige G3's weren't sold that fast, but the color tells me which MODEL.
The G4's have the same problem; G4 can mean the original G4 Yikes, with a PCI video card, or the slightly newer G4 Sawtooth with an AGP video card, or the Dual-Processor G4. Guess what people call these things in order to distinguish them?
iMacs are the
- iMac Revision A, the original 233MHz Bondi iMac
- iMac Revision B, almost exactly the same
- iMac Revision C, better known as 'Fruity iMacs' because they came in five colors.
- iMac Revision D, a somewhat faster version (ie Fruity/333 instead of Fruity/266)
- iMac Revision E, better known as 'Slot Loading iMacs' because of the new CD/DVD mechanism, or the 'Kihei iMacs' after the codename, or the 'Transparent iMacs' because of the redesigned case. This introduced the Graphite iMac DV/SE, and split the current iMac models up by how powerful they were (a low-end Blueberry, midrange in five colors, high end in Graphite)
- iMac Revision F, currently known as 'Summer 2000 iMacs', which come in different colors, and are currently shipping.
This makes it really frickin' hard to talk about iMacs and actually convey some sense of what you're talking about.The PowerBooks (which I don't really follow closely) are about as bad - they're presently being officially named after the color of the keyboards or something. And so everyone ignores that and uses the codenames instead.
Backing up, because Steve has boneheadedly decided that we shouldn't have a standard method of being able to tell these things apart (there aren't even name badges on the desktops - just a pictoral Apple logo) we have to describe the appearance, etc.
And as already noted, there never was a purple G3 desktop, though a lot of people did want one actually... Blue and purple have been the most popular colors.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
If those 22" Cinema Display LCDs would work on a PC (without messing around - I know they _sort of_ work with some cards) I'd have one in a NY minute. Well, Fedex overnight anyway. It is the best 22" monitor available, and for the desktop maybe the best monitor period. And that's even compared it to the Sony GDM-F500 that I'm using to write this post.
Not even the 17" SGI comes close. Hell, even the Apple 15" flat screens are the best monitors available in that size range. I saw one at Fry's two nights ago and wanted it even though it's a lot smaller than what I have now. How much revenue are Apple losing out on because they didn't stick to the industry standard there?
No, I believe that I am Moderator.
--
The World is Yours.
yeah NextStep and OS9 both do that too, its cute
I'm under the understanding that it's NOT BSD. It's Mach. Mach just happens to run a BSD personality when needed. That said, they don't need to display anything else... Mach is the kernel used in darwin and OS X.
The only fault the Apple menu has is that it's not obviously a menu to the novice Mac user. (And once you grasp the idea that the bar across the top of the screen is full of menus, it's not too big a leap to think that everything is a menu, not just the text things.)
If users are used to putting aliases on the desktop, they probably came from the Windoze world where there wasn't anywhere as convenient as the Apple menu for putting aliases. (Don't even mention the Start menu. It's been around for 5 years. The Apple menu's been around for 15.) I hate a cluttered desktop. I use it only for work in progress currently - as soon as I'm done with it it's filed away again. If it was chock full of this, that, and the other thing, like application and document shortcuts I often see Windows users have, I'd go crazy.
And how is System Folder:Apple Menu Items less intuitive than Windows\Start Menu? Man, I haven't done a MacOS install in a while, but isn't "Apple Menu Items" one of the items in the Apple menu? That's just as easy to find as the Windows equivalent.
Constitutionally Correct
I mostly agree with that. And those users can continue to just ignore it (it's one tiny icon, after all.)
But there's no reason that a UI element that duplicates the functional merits of the Apple menu (as outlined in the article) also needs to duplicate its faults: the obscure icon, the non-obvious customization, etc.
That was covered in many of the earlier articles in the series.
Sure it's a touch process
I believe you mean "sure its' a touch process," or if you're talking about the negative plural participle, it's "sure i'ts a touched processing," in which case you would need to replace "but sheesh" with "holy crap."
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
You really only need 128MB if you're using the Classic environment. Running two OSs at the same time takes up memory.
OSX does *not* require 128MB, i got 98MB on my iBook and it runs adequately, Classic is slow to startup but other than that its fine. 128MB is a lot better though. its beta code so i guess it'll be cleaned up
Step 1: Get the development tools. This will let you compile programs for the BSD layer. The basic idea here is to download the Darwin disk image and copy the development tools from Darwin to Mac OS X Beta. MacAddict has the details including a shell script that will move all the right stuff for you.
Step 2: Download the latest bash source code (bash/bash-2.04.tar.gz) from a GNU mirror site.
Step 3: Untar and compile it. The only real trick is the command line options for the configure script. I got it to work with the slightly incorrect:
Step 4: Install it. Mac OS X Beta doesn't have a /usr/local directory when you install it. I created one by hand but I'm pretty sure that the make install would create the directory structure fine.
Step 5: Configure it. Go into Terminal's prefs and change the default shell from tcsh to bash. Set up bash config files cribbing the settings from tcsh's config files. Move things around. Have fun.
Compiling UNIX-type stuff for Mac OS X isn't that bad. I have done it with ncftp 3, readline, tintin++, and bash so far. Usually it's just a tweak here and there and it works fine. Have fun playing with it.
Regarding DLL hell, you should check out the Frameworks stuff. Shared Libraries done the Right Way. Framework directories contain dynamically loadable code, and localized UI, and headers, and localized documentation, and anything else. ...and they are versioned. Two different versions of the same Framework will hapilly coexist. It's killer!
Burris
My favorite quote, on the info about the test systems:
"G3/400: A revision 1 Blue and White G3 with a 400MHz G3, 256MB RAM, a 12GB HD, and a matching Blue and White 17" Apple Studio Display CRT."
I'm so relieved that John provided the vital information on what colors the systems were. I know the results would have been astoundingly different if he used the grape one.
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"how can the same street intersect with itself? i must be at the nexus of the universe!" - cosmo kramer
Yeah, last time i looked (it's been a while...) 8.6 with the ATM, Quicktime, and Notes extensions used 20 megs on it's own. Not to mention running the apps that graphics people run...
I'm just applauding apple for actually giving a realistic number, rather than undershooting the requirements in order to make it appeal to a broader audience...
doesn't gnome do that, too? (it did on debian ppc)
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Apple will sue them again? bastards.
--
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
... 'nother poster said it was 'opera' -- hmm. Never heard it that way, I've heard it as opus of course (I was trying to be funny). Worth looking up in the unabridged oxford ... off to the library
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
that was exactly my point. I won't pay the premium. But if I did, I would sure as hell go all out and buy the studio display, and it would look real nice. But I don't care if it looks real nice, so I am running a dell, that is beige and square. Oh well.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I take it then that you havent seen HP's recent ads "Simple to the point of duh"
The sealed slotless box actually makes a lot of sense. Look at how many people & corporations simply discard their box after 2 years (or less!). why upgrade when you can buy new (and keep in mind your hourly rate as you explain to a 63 year old woman that she has to open the computer to install the ram and not just stick it in the cd slot) And of course look at how many people don't need an expandable computer.
Welcome to the world of the disposable computer.
Just a brief bitchy note (I assume at this point serious readers have long since passed this story by):
If they want to pronounce it OS ten, why not call it OS TEN? As I understand it, Latin as a spoken language has been dead for something > 30 years. At this point, it's either OS X(Eks) or OS Ten (ten).
At the very least, just leave it up to me. If you draw a big X on the box, I may choose to call it X.
Bash is the default shell, and it comes with vi - but not a terribly huge selection of other goodies. Apache is there, as well.
It's proven to be very stable, as the machine has been up for AGES:
bash-2.02$ uptime
5:45PM up 78 days, 4:16, 3 users, load averages: 2.55, 3.54, 3.63
I certainly won't pine over being un-linux-ified.
Now, if only I could get sshd to run....
--boinger
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
You don't have to wonder--just go back to the old articles and read about how people like Adobe et al said "No way" when Apple tried this. Carbon was put in because the big ISV's told Apple they weren't willing to accept the expense/risk/trouble of changing their entire code base.
At least that's how I remember it...
mike
--
Liberty uber alles.
"Also note that 160MB of Beta's ~800MB install is taken up by QuickTime trailers for various questionable movies (Charlie's Angles, The Emperor's New Groove, etc.) Even minus that 160MB, I suspect many curmudgeons will still holler about the "bloated" install size. To them, I have this to say: 1GB of hard disk space costs about $5 at today's prices (20GB IDE drives are less than $100). By contrast, back when Mac OS ("System", please) could fit on one floppy disk, a floppy disk's worth of HD space cost about $10 (I bought a 32MB HD for $450 back when the Mac System fit on an 800K floppy.) Feel better now?"
No, I do not feel better. The issue isn't the financial cost of a bloated piece of software, it's the quality cost of a bloated piece of software. While I'm always generally pleased with the quality of coverage by Ars, this is 1 point I strongly disagree with.
Regards
Once again, Ars Technica delivers the stuff that keeps it my favorite Tech site. A plain, relatively unbiased review that covers a lot of criticism that Apple should listen to. Kudos to John Siracusa for writing such an in-depth look at the up-and-coming Mac OS X.
I'm particularly impressed by the way that he has done the same thing for the past several DP installments. How I hope the Apple engineers look it over and see what's been missing from a user's point of view.
Keep up the good work, Ars!
cool, can you do the netstat -ap as well and tell me what processes have those wierd ports open?
How we know is more important than what we know.
As we all know Apple stocks took a beating, a severe one at that, couple of days back when it crashed more than 20 points because of its shortcoming in earnings for the 4th quarter. Analysts are hoping that Mac OS X would help Apple to earn its reputation of a survivor again
:)
In the past also Apple had been through severe beatings, but nothing like this. Wired has an article where they have mentioned that OS X might be the only straw it has. Remains to be seen..
Apple however priced the Cube for a price too high for anyone to afford, which made it inaccessible for both novice users and power users. At 1799 a piece it was too high for anyone with a sane mind to afford it, but for its elegance. And that was too silly a reason to fork out 1800 in cash, and it was reported that feature wise it really didnt make a difference from the G4 macs.
Hope apple would get its act together. It would be worth watching. As for me, I am just gonna go ahead and buy a couple of stocks
Rapid Nirvana
Actually, you can open windows in the new Finder. In one of the Preference panels (General, iirc) there's the choice for Open New Window or Open in Place (holding down Option always reverse your pref).
Not that there aren't glaring deficiencies. List and Icon windows aren't *nearly* as aestheticaly pleasing as under OS 9. ANd managing lots of windows and open documents is a train wreck.
Of course, the beta doesn't expire until May, so there's lots of time for work. And there's already an Apple Menu replacement available.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
> if they need to address the Solaris and NT market, use the portability stuff inherent in Cocoa (OPENSTEP)
Unfortunately, you cannot do any YB stuff on windows since the end of last month. Fini. Termine. Nada. The license does not enalbe deplyment of AppKit applications on NT. Period.
> I sure wonder how things would have worked out if Apple had evangelized Cocoa a LOT more strongly pushed the cross-platform features, and ease of programming, and not done the work on Carbon, and not made Classic so easy to fall back on
Oh, yes. I beleive they tried to kill Cocoa, but the it wouldn't die. I hope that *now* they will push cocoa as much as they can. It is rather easy:
* Evangelize
* Do a lot of examples/documentation
* Get correct support for obj from metrowerks
* Do the new APIs on Cocoa first. (Ie: "if you want to get more out of this, you'll have to learn a bit of cocoa")
* Resurect the NT version
And the opensource community could do something nice too by contributing to GNUstep. Think about it:
* Darwin already boot on x86
* XFree86 already runs on darwin
* GNUstep already sort-of run on X
Mmmm. This looks like a open source MacOS X clone on the horizon... maybe in 3 or 4 years.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
uhm pretty sure it was...unless apple wrote another os that said "os x" just for the conference that could do that, just to trick us all...i'm sorry to hear that you have your head up your ass, I hope you feel better soon.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
:)
Actually, funny story. I was at a "History of Mac OS X" infosession here a few weeks ago, and the Apple guy was giving his shpiel. At the bottom of one slide, he said: "Compare this to other operating systems: Windows, Unix, ... Easel [sic]?"
He then said he didn't think Easel would ever work because they were "just slapping a UI on top of a Unix system".
The guy sitting next to me almost split a kidney laughing.
I'm not qualified to argue on this specific point -- I'm a profoundly non-Mac person. (I speak of personality types as well as OS religions!) But I found Siracusa's discussion of the ideas behind the Apple Menu, and other such GUI elements, to be most fascinating. I think anybody with who pretends to be serious about GUI design is obligated to think carefully about these ideas, even if they don't agree with their specific application.
It is possible the piece puts a little too much emphasis on "rigorous" analysis, and too little on the intuitive side of GUI design. (I say "possible" because I was about 2/3 done with Ars got Slashdotted to a standstill.) On the other hand, Siracusa seem to be saying recent changes are motivated neither rigor nor intuition, but just a blind response to user complaints by people who really don't know what they're doing. If I were a Mac person, I'd be quite depressed.
__________
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
The current uname -a output in Mac OS X is:
:)
Darwin Lucas 1.2 Darwin Kernel Version 1.2: Wed Aug 30 23:32:53 PDT 2000; root:xnu/xnu-103.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
There's no reference to Rhapsody anymore. It's pure Darwin. Now, if you telnet in, you get:
[lucas:~] marcus% telnet 127.0.0.1
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to 127.0.0.1.
Escape character is '^]'.
Darwin/BSD (Lucas) (ttyp2)
login:
... and so on. So, it's all good.
I was just told at the recent mac business expo here in seattle that it requires 128, maybe the vm counts i dunno....
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
btw, ms also say win nt 4 will run on a 486 sx, but have you tried it?
it's not pretty
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
rofl, some people just don't get the term BETA! I will most definatelly wait untill it actually becomes full fledged beta2 ;-)
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Mark my words. There are going to be Mac cracks by the thousand. "You will be an administrator of this machine" and look at the perms on the directories, and the root password = the first password you entered on install, can we say lame? My god, I wish someone would do a netstat -a and tell us what ports are open.
How we know is more important than what we know.
you apparently have never seen os x in action, granted the version i saw was the beta they are talking about now running on a dual g4 500 with 256 megs of ram...but things like anti-aliased movies??? stretch as big as you want with _NO_ pixelation??
I didn't get as much time as I would have like to play around with the command line but things like cron are there, my only beef is the lack of compilers, but you get get things like gcc from the darwin project and apple is sending out a 2nd cd to developers.....
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
OT: The plural of opus is opera. Not a flame - as nerdy as it sounds, I happen to be rather fond of this pluralization.
--Tom
MAN SHOOTS ROVER!
It does run, it's not pretty, but it works, and it's probably acceptable for a departmental FTP server or the like.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Microsoft may be a bad company, but give me them over Apple anyday
Yes, we owe our cheap hardware to Microsoft. Because Microsoft and IBM opted for the PC like they did and let cheap clone-builders create cheap PC's we can get a cheap Linux box by buying sub-(current)standard (=cheap) hardware.
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"Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a sick mind." (Terry Pratchett)
I was showing a friend the password field that comes up (if you click on the little lock in the lower left corner of the window) when you try to change the startup disk (partition). I had entered it wrong once already then didn't enter any password and just hit enter. It gave me the "incorrect name or password" dialog. I left that one up, and clicked on the desktop in the background, then wend to the Dock and clicked on Sherlock.
The screen blinked, then error codes came up OVER the top of the desktop. I.e.-I had the GUI in the background and a DOS-type (white text on black background) listing over the top of it down the left side of the screen. This is what it said:
Unresolved kernel trap: 0x300 Data access DSISR=0x40000000 DAR=0x5854000 PC=0x00045414
Generating stack backtrace prior to panic:
backtrace: 0x00045414 .... (blah, blah, blah) and it ended with:
Waiting for remote debugger connection.
Options Type
continue c
reboot r
I choose 'c', and it panicked (sp?) again:
Continuing....
panic (cpu 0): 0x300 data access .... blah blah blah.... and this time I chose 'r' and it rebooted (to the OS X gui login) and was fine from then on. I could not replicate it later on.
I installed OS X on another Mac, a Snow iMac DV SE with only the standard configuration (128 MB RAM, etc.). Here I installed it 'over' OS 9.0.4.
I was watching the console for info on the error I found and was replicating (Apple System Profiler crashing at certain mouseclicks - console log says "We shold not be seeing a mouse moved event in TrackMouseLocation. We lost a mouseup somewhere."), when a Finder window I had open deep in the background closed. I went to the Dock to click on the desktop icon (to get a new finder window) and showed the desktop as active, but wouldn't give me a Finder window. I ended up having to force a reboot (I couldn't get to the Desktop to select Log Out or Shutdown). When it rebooted and I logged in, the same thing happened right off. I couldn't get to the desktop. I had left the OS X CD in the drive, and with the slot loading iMacs, you can't force eject the CD. I ended up rebooting to the OS X CD, then reinstalling OS X to get a desktop and eject the CD. Then I rebooted from the OS 9 CD and reinstalled OS 9 while creating 2 drive partitions. This gives me a 'backup' boot drive if I get that serious a loop going again.
Yep, I wrote my first BASIC program on a TRS-80, too. Remeber those giant floppy disks that were 10 1/2 inches? Man, those things gave a whole new meaning to the word "floppy". Maybe I'm remembering wrong, and it was only 8 1/2 inches, but whatever it was, they sure were big.
Free Hans!
Start up the CPU monitor and you'll get two displays, one for each CPU. Start moving things around, running different applications -- you'll find the ones where the designers really understood multi-threading. In the Mac world threads used to be slow and nasty. Not any more, they are the real thing, that Mach lives and breathes.
Find an MP machine and try one out. You'll have reason to smile.
Post no cute signatures.
>"Why does this crap OS get so much coverage?"
This OS is very promising and I wish prejudice wouldn't come into play. If you check this thing out, I think you'd see why it gets so much coverage. Those who most hate Apple should be the most happy. They're actually changing.
The one that stands out the most, is that he wants a equalivent replacement for the Apple Menu. Why? The Apple menu is one of the WORST elements in MacOS. It is NOT obvious it's a menu, it is NOT obvious how to add things to it and quite frankly a clear majority of users (both Mac and Windows) I know just put alias' on their desktops. The entire GUI is point and click. It took me about 30 minutes to figure out it's quirks.
He also left out one of the most relevent piece of ease of use info about Mac OS X. Drag and Drop installation of Applications. No Applications can install into the system folder. How novel. Uncompress the file (if necissary) and drag it to the Applications folder. This is a BIG deduction in tech support costs since the OS is locked and root is hidden, no Extension conficts, no DLL hell.
Burn Hollywood Burn
uhm it appears that ars technica has been /.ed!!!!
proxy server in the hall, whose got the fastest mirror of all?
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
bash-2.02$ uname -aP PC Copyright (c) 1988-1995,1997-1999 Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Power Macintosh
Rhapsody stream1 5.6 Kernel Release 5.6: Tue Nov 23 15:07:38 PST 1999; root(rcbuilder):Objects/kernel-187.obj~2/RELEASE_
Also, note the banner upon login:
Connected to w.x.y.z.
Escape character is '^]'.
4.4 BSD (stream1) (ttyp2)
login:
BSD! :)
Is this really a troll? Offtopic, maybe.
--
Make mine methylphenidate.
I am willing to wait for a good solid OS. I can't wait for the Nix'ers to start rolling out the hacks. I won't be totally happy until I can run Gnome-Helix and GIMP, on OSX.
photosMy Photostream
This looks real good for ObjC. You now what ? NeXTstep really did have 10 years of advance. He's only getting mainstream now... :-)
I'd *love* to see ObjC gain a mainstream-ish following. It's everything C++ and Java should have been.
This would also bode well for the GnuSTEP project and GCC's ObjC front end. GnuSTEP is already integrating some of Apple's OSX changes to the OpenSTEP API, and is already the closest thing out there to OSX (that isn't owned by Apple).
iSKUNK!
MKLinux as an alternative to Mac OS X? Maybe for text editing or for playing with Unix, but if you have other work to do, you need a bit more.
oh yer, the first user you create, they are in the "admin" group, all binaries on the machine are owned by root:admin and are group writable. There's been a lot of people writing unix viruses recently, they've been laughed at for one reason, binaries are not writable by ordinary users. Trust Apple.
How we know is more important than what we know.
only decent browser from Microsoft?? Try OmniWeb before you spout off again, you might be pleasantly surprised.
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
Ars always seems to be slashdotted when I try to read one of Siracusa's magnum opi (opuses?). C'mon VA, donate them some big servers (and bandwidth!). But based on what I've read soo far... I think my next home PC's gonna be a Mac running OS X! My family gets the gui chrome, I get /usr ... marriage saved! ;)
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
Tsk, tsk... You should have run fdisk/pdisk from the Mac side before wiping your disk. You would have saved yourself a lot of trouble.
/dev/hdb11 instead of /dev/hdb9. Lo and behold, it booted. Updated fstab and there everything was, back to normal.
DP4 did something very similar to me. The installer rewrites the partition table, adding two (very small) partitions to the beginning of the table, and then does some kind of voodoo magic to keep the remaining filesystems from being corrupted. All I had to do was update my bootloader configuration (yaboot.conf, or similar) to look for my kernel 2 partitions down the line. i.e. pointing to
However, there is absolutely no warning that it would do this. Apple really should have included a warning for those running alternative operating systems. But then, that isn't really a concern of theirs, I guess.
Free yourself. Everything else will follow.
you can check it out over on the macnn forums and http://osx.macnn.com
Blocklevel: Practical Information Architecture