X On OSX Now Free

ffejbean noted that OSXTalk (hey, they run Slashcode!) has an article up noting that XFree86 and MacOS X are getting more and more friendly every day. Now you don't have to purchase a lame commercial binary, you can just install it yourself. If only those iCubes didn't cost twice what they should, this may just be a great platform yet. (BTW, I'm getting confused here, should I post this as Apple, X, or BSD? Ah well, close enough :)

Comments

A big win for portability

[IGnatius T Foobar]

It'll be nice to have X apps running on MacOS. Still, I think the ultimate thing to have would be a version of Xlib for MacOS that simply translates X11 calls to their Mac native equivalents. That way you don't have to have an X server running on the Mac to display X apps.

It'd be nice to have that on Windows too, actually.
--

Re:A big win for portability

[Cire]

(I'm not a coder) But... Why can't someone port Xlib over to macos X? It's got all of the unix goodies, like gcc and emacs built in. How hard would it be?

Eric

Re:A big win for portability

[mreece]

Cire wrote: (I'm not a coder) But... Why can't someone port Xlib over to macos X? It's got all of the unix goodies, like gcc and emacs built in. How hard would it be?

I think that is essentially what has already been done. Xlib requires an X server, though. That was the original poster's point: X would run much faster on MacOS X if, rather than working the way X normally does and going through a server, it just called MacOS APIs directly. This would lose the advantage of X's network features, but a lot of people don't use those anyway.

Re:A big win for portability

[redhog]

Or why not just write a server that translates the commands it recieves from its X-clients into native calls? That way, you wouldn't miss any of the networking features, but still have real MAC-windowses and so on.

And probably someone else have allready written this somewhere below 0...

Re:A big win for portability

[plsuh]

OK, I have moderator privs right now, but this thread is just too tempting to not jump into!

1) Given the architecture of X Windows, you must have a an X server running on your machine. Even local X Windows apps run by connecting to a local X server. Just compiling an Xlib will not give you much in the way of speed gains -- loopback calls under the OS X's network architecture are very cheap (heck, this is true for most OS's).

The relatively expensive part of the X Windows architecture (in terms of speed and resources) is the context switch that is necessary in this whole set-up: server process picks up mouse click and sends to client, client processes mouse click and sends display commands back to server, server processes display commands and puts them back onto the screen. Any mouse click requires at least two context switches (server to client, client to server), which are expensive under some OS's (MS WinNT/2K, Classic Mac OS). However, under the Mac OS X kernel, and indeed on most Unices, context switches are fast and cheap, so this is not much of a performance hit. (This is why Apache on Unix runs multiple processes, but is a single multi-threaded process on WinNT/2K.)

Pushing the server-side functions into the client-side Xlib would only really save the cost of the loopback overhead plus the context switches, both of which are cheap in Mac OS X (and other Unices). Only on a Windows- or Classic MacOS-based system does it make sense to try and cut out the context switches.

2) The X Windows server does in fact translate X calls into native Mac OS X calls. The implementation referenced above does it through the VNC application, which is extremely slow due to the massive number of layers involved -- one or two context switches are not so bad, but it looks to me that they're going through four or five. If you look at the Mac OS X graphics architecture, there is a lightweight graphics server underneath it all called Core Graphics Services, which is responsible for all drawing on the screen. Aqua, QuickTime, OpenGL, and QuickDraw all hook into this layer to do their actual drawing to the screen. It is possible (I don't claim it's easy, but it shouldn't be that hard) to write an X server that hooks in directly above the Core Graphics Services layer to translate X Windows calls to native, low-level CGS calls. This would make X Windows just as fast as the native libraries (aside from bottlenecks that might be inherent to X Windows) and allow for interleaved X and native windows on the screen. This is the Right Way To Do It (tm). :-)

Disclaimer: I am an Apple employee, but these views are my own and not based on anything that is Apple Confidential. I work with WebObjects as part of Apple iServices, which is a bit away from the core Mac OS X dev teams.


--Paul

Re:A big win for portability

[Foogle]

It would be basically impossible to implement a system wherein all X apps acted as actuall Mac apps. The reason is that X, at its lowest level, does not know anything about high level controls like buttons and scrollbars. These widgets are all implemented at a higher level by toolkits like Motif, Qt, and GTK. And they don't work the same way.

However, it would be possible to write a port of GTK, Motif, or Qt (or any other toolkit, I'd imagine) that would translate the high level controls into their MacOS equivalents. This is very similar to what TrollTech does for it's Qt toolkit under Windows. However, TrollTech has no plans to make a port that runs under anything but Windows and X11. Maybe if you've got some free time on your hands... :-)

Re:A big win for portability

[The_Messenger]

Still, I think the ultimate thing to have would be a version of Xlib for MacOS that simply translates X11 calls to their Mac native equivalents.

What, Babelfish doesn't do that yet?

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

Re:A big win for portability

[plastik55]

Ok, I know that Gnome and KDE have Mac-lookalike widget themes, so that takes care of widgets (sorta...)

Now as for the Window server, it shouldn't be that hard to write a window server that actually uses MacOS windows. That seems to be the only big piece that's missing.

Re:A big win for portability

[geobaker]

"As a side bonus, if you survive the 50+ mb download, you can log in to OS X's console and run the X server directly from there, if you so choose."

Note the above method which was mentioned later in the article, which I would think would be faster than the main method, since the Xvnc/VNC/viewer "...winds up being slow because everything is rendered several times: once in Xvnc's virtual framebuffer, which gets translated into VNC, sent to the VNC Viewer application, and then finally displayed on the screen.").

thoughts?

Re:A big win for portability

[The_Messenger]

Aw, you're just jealous. Don't worry, you'll reach puberty one day and the world will make much more sense; I can imagine how confused and alone you feel right now. And maybe, just maybe, you'll lose your virginity to Chewbacca. So buck up, kiddo!

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

Re:A big win for portability

[o_kenway]

Why didn't Apple build X-Windows into Mac OS X in the first place? This seems a little silly since the whole system is based on BSD.

Re:A big win for portability

[Bryan Ischo]

"Any mouse click requires at least two context switches (server to client, client to server) ..."

This is NOT true. X buffers requests and responses so multiple X messages (including user input messages) may be handled by the server or client at a time. Therefore, rather than a context switch per mouse click, you have a context switch per N mouse clicks and other X events.

Context switch overhead is a factor, for sure, but it's not as bad as you make it out to be.

I personally find X performance to be more than adequate for 100% of what I do. I guess if I were doing realtime 3d rendering (including 3d games) I would have something to complain about.

But of course the advantages of X far outweigh its disadvantages, as everyone ought to know by now ...

Re:A big win for portability

[Bryan Ischo]

And another thing - the reason that VNC is slow is because it is basically pumping over all of the bits necessary to refresh any window which changes. X is a MUCH smarter protocol that sends over "meta" information about what to draw and how to draw it, instead of sending over every pixel as VNC does multiple times per second.

In my mind, X is a "problem solved". There are improvements to be made to X, for sure, but it is the Right Way to do windowing systems. The only reason it is not used in Windows and OSX is because the companies that make these products have an agenda, and that agenda includes locking software into properietary APIs rather than using standardized open protocols like X.

Good news

[madumas]

With some work, we will see the number of Linux applications increase. If this option becomes popular, many mac users should be interested by Linux app.

Re:Good news

[madumas]

Sorry, but nobody made this point before. And I pressed submit by accident while swithing windows before i was able to develop my point. then I Read new post and saw somebody else saying what I was about to say and I don't want to make redundant post. Sorry I'm a newbie. Yes, I know I should post this as AC.

Icon for DAX? :)

[jd]

(As in bsD/Apple/X)

I suggest you stick to a photo from the first 6 series of DS9.

Apple or BSDaemon, good question...

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

Well, since the product started with the very apple gui (blecch!) and one mouse button on the hardware, the apple icon looked perfectly appropriate... Now that some actual useful stuff is there, like X support, etc, and since an x86 edition is doing something and is available, it might be almost ready to graduate into the realm of being classified in the BSD arena. Unfortunately I haven't enough experience on it (the last time I played with it was in a VERY early test on a school district computer, where no compilation tools were installed and what looked like Apple's 'finder' was the shell) to be more decisive. Besides, I thought all diehard Apple/UNIX fans ran AUX anyway...

Re:Apple or BSDaemon, good question...

[Syberghost]

More Unix-like behavior in OSX is always a good thing for the same reason why many Linux afficionados still run Solaris on their Sun boxen;

Support.

When something goes out, the last thing you want to do when getting it fixed is have to waste time proving to the vendor that it's not the unsupported OS you added that's causing the problem.

-

Re:Apple or BSDaemon, good question...

[um... Lucas]

We probably would, if not for the fact that you can't run AU/X on anything later than a quadra... Which topped out at 40 MHz 040's.... for all the supposed benefits of unix, you sure can get a lot more work done on a 400 MHz machine that crashes once a day on a bad day, than on a machine a 10th the speed which doesn't crash at all.

And will everyone quit raggin on the one mouse button aleady? It's such a tired argument.

Re:Apple or BSDaemon, good question...

[SuiteSisterMary]

Actually, I run solaris on sun hardware because it's a better enterprise level OS than Linux currently is. When Linux surpasses Solaris in that respect, I'll switch. Want some examples? The ability to set system resources, like shared memory, semaphores, etc etc with a textfile and a reboot, and not a kernal recompile. Or the ability to fsck a disk, in production. Stuff like that.

Re:Apple or BSDaemon, good question...

[Syberghost]

Actually, I run solaris on sun hardware because it's a better enterprise level OS than Linux currently is.

I wasn't talking about Enterprise 6500s, I was
talking about Ultra 2s. :-)

-

Re:Apple or BSDaemon, good question...

[SuiteSisterMary]

Ultra 2 is better than Ultra 5...gee, lets take a Pentium clone, weld an UltraSPARC II on there, and call it a computer. What's that? Want to read a file off disk? CPU up to 100 percent.

Re:Apple or BSDaemon, good question...

[andrewski]

One of my buddies who works in a computer lab with a bunch of macs was playing around with OSX server (commercial release, not beta) and locked it by browsing the web. I laughed pretty hard about that one.

Job's buisness strategy

[Spazntwich]

I think Jobs has the right idea here. Nobody cares as much about apple hardware if it's not even slightly compatible with any widely accepted software, besides of course what Microsoft decides to throw at it. Opening up the world of linux to Apple hardware means it can now be used by the power users/graphic artists, AND the geeks. If they drop the price on their hardware, I'd drop my intel box for an apple running X any day.
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Re:Job's buisness strategy

[n3rd]

Nobody cares as much about apple hardware if it's not even slightly compatible with any widely accepted software, besides of course what Microsoft decides to throw at it.

Isn't this true of almost all non x86 platforms? I can't name 3 platforms that the same piece of "widely accepted software" run on simply because most "widly accepted software" runs on x86 Windows. You can see this is even more true when you start to hear about all of the applications that Microsoft didn't port to Windows NT for the Alpha processor.

Re:Job's buisness strategy

[Skyshadow]

I think Jobs' real strategy is to turn the Mac into the equivalent of a designer label in clothing. The iMacs were a start, but the cubes are the *perfect* example of this. They look funky-cool. They have a well-recognized label. They cost a lot. Sound framiliar?

Jobs has had the insight to see the potential of the computer as a sort of renewed status symbol, and the new Mac cubes are chasing that with a vengence. Everyone has a computer, but not everyone has a really swanky one. Ask yourself: Does the average mid-20's to mid-30's hipster who just surfs and emails and buys designer clothes and furniture want a beige lump or a sleek, cool-looking Mac? I'd be willing to bet that you'll start seeing cK and Ralph Lauren computers with sleek looks within the next couple of years -- Apple is just at the start of this trend.

In this age where more and more of what you use a computer for is on the net anyhow, lack of software apps matter less and less. Style, on the other hand (and forgive me), never goes out of style.

----

Re:Job's buisness strategy

[_xeno_]

Lack of apps for Alpha NT actually has nothing to do with MS just not porting them. It has much more to do with the target audience - and the target market isn't using Alphas for desktop tasks. Simply put, there is no market for Office on WinNT Alpha. In fact, the only market for WinNT/Alpha machines is as servers (mainly due to cost). As it turned out, there really wasn't a market for WinNT on Alpha either - in fact Win on Alpha support has been completely dropped. Not by Microsoft, but by Compaq.

Conspiracy theorists might decide that WinNT for Alpha was dropped because Compaq wanted to force the people buying Alphas to use Tru64. However, this really isn't the case, because apparently the market for WinNT Alpha machines was less than 10% the market for Tru64 Alpha machines. WinNT on Alpha simply isn't commerically viable.

However the Mac is an entirely different beast. The biggest difference is simply the target market - while Alpha machines are sold as high-end servers, Mac machines are sold as desktop boxes. That means that there is a market for applications on MacOS that there simply isn't for WinNT on Alpha.

Since there is a definite market for desktop applications on MacOS that WinNT for Alpha lacked, then it stands to reason that if people aren't porting applications to it there issome other reason... Unfortunately for Apple, this isn't entirely true - there is a much larger market for Wintel applications than any other type. That's why there are almost always Win32/x86 versions even when there aren't for other platforms.

A rather good example is the fact that Java for Win32(x86) is usually more advanced than Java for UNIX. (Keep in mind that Java for Linux is almost identical as Java for Solaris and Java for (Free)BSD. The differences are mostly in the JIT, along with thread support and other things that the OSes disagree on.) Sun may own Solaris, but Java developers are mostly interested in the applications running under Windows. As a result, Java for Windows gets the most attention and is usually released sooner than Java for any other platform - including Solaris.

It's really a market thing. If Apple can create a market for MacOS apps, then companies will port. The market only has to be commerically viable - the cost of supporting the market cannot be prohibitive. From the few Mac developers I've talked with, this hasn't always been the case.

In the case of WinNT for Alpha, though, it was too costly a market to support. There simply wasn't any demand. Outside the world of open source, the market determines what succeeds and what fails - not technology. Not stability. And, again, it's the market that will cause OSX to either succeed or fail.

Re:Job's buisness strategy

[Bongo]

I think Jobs' real strategy is to turn the Mac into the equivalent of a designer label in clothing.

Here (in the UK) I see most ads (90%?) that need to include a computer as part of the set, are using iMacs and iBooks. That's a heck of a lot of 'free' advertising. And TV programmes too. Take 'Watchdog' for example (they pursue consumer complaints by hounding down the companies involved -- you don't want your company featured on this programme) -- they read email from viewers while in the studio on air, on a prominently placed iMac)

Another example, I was checking out the latest models at one of the few department stores that carry macs, when a middle aged woman dragged her husband over to show him the machine. She said "Now that (hands gesturing with delight) is what I'd like to see at home..."

Something is working in their campaign -- although I'd hate computers to go the way of the car....

Re:Job's buisness strategy

[Mumble01]

In this age where more and more of what you use a computer for is on the net anyhow, lack of software apps matter less and less. Style, on the other hand (and forgive me), never goes out of style.

Yes, but have you noticed how quickly fashion changes? The iMacs were wildly different from everything else when they first appeared, but now they just seem ordinary. Ho hum *yawn*. I doubt any computer company could change product appearances fast enough to maintain the "cool" factor Apple captured for a time with the introduction of the iMac.

Conserve bandwidth... delete your sig.

Re:Job's buisness strategy

[Doc Wheeley]

WOW! Designer Ralph Lauren Computers... just think--you could buy paint, wallpaper, and clothing, not to mention glasses to match your computer.

Re:Job's buisness strategy

[Ixohoxi]

Like many things the rich buy, it also *performs* like a high-class machine. Ever hear someone complain about their 200k luxury car? PowerPC is a good technology; the Velocity Engine is much better than MMX. And the OS is more stable than Windows. So the cost is worth it to those who are willing to spend the cash.

Re:Job's buisness strategy

[Woody77]

There are a lot of uses for Alphas running NT. They're called workstations. Office is bloatware that still doesn't need an Alpha to run. However, I have seen Industrial Automation software packages that make dual Xenon (or whatever they are called, Xeon?) boxes cry.

When you're receiving 10,000 numbers a second from a control system, logging some of them to disk, running alarming algorithms on others, and presenting others on the screen graphically, you can get enough going on that you need more horsepower than a desktop computer, but you don't want the kind of hardware you get when you buy a SERVER. Just a box that can crunch a LOT of data, and deal with a decent amount of I/O, at the same time.

Logging/Trending is a HUGE pain, when the user of the workstation decides to view 300MB worth of data... That tends to slow things down for a bit.

Re:Job's buisness strategy

[gig]

> Nobody cares as much about apple hardware if it's
> not even slightly compatible with any widely
> accepted software, besides of course what
> Microsoft decides to throw at it.

Most "widely used" software on Windows are ports of Mac and Unix software. Word, Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, Director, Pro Tools, QuickTime ... these are all Macintosh apps that showed up on Windows around their 3.0 or 4.0 versions. In spite of the fact that Adobe, the second biggest software company in the world, ported their whole product line to Windows, they still make the majority of their money from Mac users.

Internet Explorer on the Mac is probably the only widely used Windows-first app, but the Mac version uses a completely different codebase, UI, and has a standards-compliant rendering engine. Only the name is the same.

Re:Job's buisness strategy

[gig]

> It's really a market thing. If Apple can create a
> market for MacOS apps, then companies will port.

I'm a Mac user. Can somebody tell me: what are the apps from Windows that I am missing out on? Might as well leave out anything that already runs on Unix, since I'm running Mac OS X.

Some of the major apps I'm running now: Pro Tools, Cubase, Peak, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Director, Flash, FreeHand, Word (under duress), Internet Explorer, Acrobat, BBEdit, QuickTime Pro, VideoShop, ViaVoice, iMovie, RealPlayer, Shockwave, and about 50 smaller apps that do things like play MP3's or batch convert media files or whatever. I mean, what am I missing here?

So far the only occasion I've had to actually have to use Virtual PC for something productive (as opposed to just for geek fun) was Ray Kurzweil's Poet Assistant, which is a small app that runs full speed in Virtual PC. I was sort of interested in Sonic Foundry's ACID for a while, but Bitheadz now has a Mac app called Phrazer that's the same thing.

This is a legitimate question. I don't feel like I'm missing anything, but I'd like to know what these apps are. Never mind about games ... I'll get a console if I want those, although I have the Mac OS X version of Quake III.

Re:Job's buisness strategy

[Golias]

Yes, but have you noticed how quickly fashion changes?

Almost as quickly as systems become obsolete.

DO you still attract chicks with OSX

[Hairy_Potter]

I know that Macs (like me) are a chick magnet, and if a chick says she's into computers and a computer geek, the odds are she's really into a Mac (right Rob), and wouldn't know a command line from a hole in the ground, so I keep a Mac around for the chicks who drop by.

Anyhow, once these Macs are running OSX, are the chicks still gonna be interested in them? I'm trying to keep my bachelor pad up to date and keep the chick tractor beam still functioning.

Thanks,

What about the rest of it?

[eln]

So now that the X part of OSX is free, when are
they going to free the O and S?
Quit discriminating against the other letters of
the alphabet!

Re:What about the rest of it?

[Jonathan]

Well, the O and S are intellectual property of Microsoft, so Apple can't release those (they are only using them under license). Granted, there are some people who claim that those letters were used before Microsoft came into existence, but they are the same crazies who deny that Microsoft invented the graphical user interface and the web browser.

But...

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

... when you do find that gal who is a command line junkie who uses Debian Linux or BSD, and simply blows you out of the water with her skills, and she's been BBSing since, like the 300 baud days, you're hers...

X wrapper as a 'plugin' for OSX?

[otis wildflower]

How about, instead of building a fully-fledged monolithic X system, extending the Mac interface to wrapper X functionality? What I'd really rather have is to run in my Mac interface and pop open X apps (using OSX widgets) as appropriate instead of having to throw out the OSX interface (which, let's be honest, is why you buy the damn thing in the first place).

I wonder how well the basic widgets map..

Your Working Boy,

Re:X wrapper as a 'plugin' for OSX?

[FigWig]

X doesn't natively have widgets - thus QT and GTK. There could be a wrapper for those libraries, but X just provides basic graphics services. The other stuff you see is dependent on the window manager, which again is built on top of X.

Re:X wrapper as a 'plugin' for OSX?

[am 2k]

You're too late. Tenon has already done this:
http://www.tenon.com/prod uct s/xtools/pre-release_beta/
Simultaneous execution of X- and Aqua-based applications is provided. Support for both copy and paste functions is provided between X and native applications.
Tenon plans to add full support of OpenGL, as well as more convenient way to close X applications and start remote X clients. Although no widget libraries have been ported, these too are planned.

Re:X wrapper as a 'plugin' for OSX?

[MacOSNeedsDeath]

A Mac OS X port of GTK (on top of Cocoa) is what you really want. Run the GIMP with OS X widgets. Oo, ick.

Re:X wrapper as a 'plugin' for OSX?

[Foogle]

While that's a noble goal, it would probably be much easier to just port the GTK libraries to OSX (using this X server) and use a OSX-like theme.

Re:X wrapper as a 'plugin' for OSX?

[otis wildflower]

X doesn't natively have widgets - thus QT and GTK.

Yeah, but there's lots of client/server plumbing and X primitives that something like standard xterm would use.. GTK/QT would allow you to in theory compile those apps for use as native Mac apps, which would also be cool, but it wouldn't let you login to a remote server via SSH + X forwarding and spawn back a proctool or gkrellm..

Considering I can do almost anything useful from home with my Mac using Nutscrape + Nifty/SSH, adding X would just be icing on the cake ;)

Your Working Boy,

Re:X wrapper as a 'plugin' for OSX?

[otis wildflower]

Looks very cool, though I'm wondering if any Mac and/or BSD geeks are at work on an OSS version..

Your Working Boy,

X on Macs

[zpengo]

Both Linux and the Microsoft OSes have long been considered PC-based, which is part of the reason that Macs have had a hard time taking off. OS X has the potential to bring back Macintosh in a big way because suddenly both Mac and PC can work together with a common operating system. (LinuxPPC and other flavors for Mac are great hacks, but I think that they failed to take advantage of the architecture as OS X does). Once again, Linux has brought together mortal enemies, and has promoted a spirit of peace, love, and understanding. (Or something like that).

Re:X on Macs

[mreece]

zpengo wrote: Linux has brought together mortal enemies, and has promoted a spirit of peace, love, and understanding. (Or something like that).

Not quite. MacOS X isn't Linux; it's a BSD system. Still, I think you're right, the increased portability of software to the Mac hardware will be nice.

X on MS Windows

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

There's an application suite called "Exceed" that is an X Server for windows, and it can serve apps so that Windows is the native window manager, putting an entry on the taskbar and everything. It requires Exceed to be running as an app, but I'm sure that if enough people wanted it they might be willing to write another version to be a service...

It's made by Hummingbird Software and is expensive, but my school (Arizona State University) provides a license for students to use it for student use.

Re:conspiracy!

[strider( corinth )]

Whether or not you think that it's a last ditch strategy or a fancy plot, it's a good one. MacOS X promises to be a stable UNIX OS combined with an integrated (and if Apple pulls through like they have in the past, usable and functional) GUI. Jobs has a better product to sell, and one that will benefit the community.

Jobs also opened up the source (after a fashion) to the OS, allowing developers to port it to the x86 architecture (and perhaps others in the future). That isn't trying "to get macs more accepted". That's a sound strategy for deploying a new OS.

Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[namespan]

If only those iCubes didn't cost twice what they should, this may just be a great platform yet.

What should they cost?

I hear this complaint quite a bit. It seems that one of the enshrined bits of common wisdom (or myth?) when it comes to PC buying is that Mac HW costs more for the performance you get.

Mac fans counter that it's the same or better, and give the following reasons:

1) even though PPC clock speeds are slower, programs run faster because the processor can do more per clock cycle. I've been told to expect twice the performance from a G3 than a similarly clocked PIII.

2) productivity gain by less futzing about with hardware, due to standardization...

Comments? Maybe even hard numbers? Balanced reasoning (ha!)?

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[birder]

The ones spouting that myth were Apple themselves.
arstechnica.com explains it best:

"Apple also made it a point to reiterate their old bit about how, under certain circumstances with certain applications that certain Apple users often use, the G4 can sometimes be twice as fast as a PIII at the same MHz rating.

Give it up Apple, because not only are such statements both
a) purposefully misleading and
b) so vague as to not really mean much of anything, and not even the die-hards are buying it anymore.

Yeah, the MHz rating isn't all that matters, but it does really matter. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to sell you a Mac."

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[KFury]

Most people's complaint with the cube isn't it's price/performace ration when compared to Intel boxen, but when compared to other Macs. You're paying a premium for a Cube, and what you get is a slower machine than a Mac G4 dual-processor tower, and no expandability. For this you're paying more.

This is why the Cube is the first CPU in Apple's history that hasn't bet initial sales forecasts (this gleaned from their recent earnings conference call).

I love the Cube, but I'm waiting until they come out with the low-cost version in Jan or Feb. They can't cut anything but the price, and I'm pretty sure the 'low price' cube wil be the current cube, and they'll introduce something faster for the premium price. This is what they've been doing with Powerbooks and iMacs for the last three years.

Kevin Fox

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[kyz]

G4s only really get fantastic performance when they can parallelize with their matrix operations. Coincidentally, Photoshop spends most of its time applying filters, which are... matrix operations! Now you know who bankrolls Apple - print media companies.

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[Doktor Memory]

even though PPC clock speeds are slower, programs run faster because the processor can do more per clock cycle.

That is true. (It's also true of sparc, alpha, MIPS and pretty much any non-x86 architecture.)

I've been told to expect twice the performance from a G3 than a similarly clocked PIII.

That is unadorned horseshit. But don't take my word for it: go to www.spec.org and check out the numbers yourself. 20-30% is more the average gain, and that's cold comfort when you can buy 1.2GHz Athlon chips for less than $500 a pop.

The "twice as fast as Wintel" claim is based on a small number of Adobe Photoshop operation benchmarks; usually filters that have been painstakingly optimized for the G4's "Altivec" vector processing unit. This isn't necessarily "cheating", since Photoshop is still one of the primary reasons to buy a mac, but if you are not a graphics professional, you are simply never ever going to see that kind of speed benefit using a Mac.

In "regular use" applications, the scenario at the moment is even worse than you might guess based on the SPEC numbers: MacOS 9 is such a turgid, inefficient piece of crap, and the device drivers for 3rd-party Mac hardware so shoddily implemented, that MacOS applications will often run significantly slower than their Windows counterparts on similar hardware: just ask anybody if they're getting the same kind of Quake III framerates out of a G4/500 with a Radeon card as they would from a PIII/800 with the same graphics card.

You just don't buy Macs for world-beating performance (Photoshop being the exception). You buy them for nice industrial design, an OS that for all of its architectural ugliness still offers a more compelling user experience than Windows, and more often than not just to maintain an existing investment in MacOS software.

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[um... Lucas]

No matter how you look at it, the G4 cube is vastly overpriced... And that's coming from a Mac fan. You're paying a huge premium over a regular G4, for a machine with no expansion slots, no internal drive bays, etc...

Yes, i think that regular G3's and G4's so far have provided a very competitive bang for the buck, but the G4 cube isn't aiming for that niche... it's aimed squarely at those who think that something should look cool and don't mind spending twice as much as they should for it.

The G4 Cube really should be positioned between the iMac's and G4's in Apple's lineup, not between the cheapest G4 and the Dual Processor G4's.

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[HiyaPower]

Hmm... A Seti workset on my Mac G4 at 450 Mhz takes 6 hrs, done on my 333 Pentium 2 its 16 hrs if it is done under Windoze and 12 if it is done under BeOS (same hardware thus 33% penalty for Microsquish OS over BeOS). My 700 Mhz Athlon does one in about 8 hours (direct scale from the P2) in Windoze. My dual 450 P2 does one in 12 hrs. Somehow, it seems that clock for clock, I am getting more out of the Power PC. Further, stability is not an issue even though I am running a frankenmachengezelshaftcomputingmachin machine (a 7500 with a boatload of ram, ide disks off a 3rd party card, drop in processor, etc.) Somehow the "rice pudding" model that M$ uses to make their OS is more the problem in stability than the hardware.

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[spreer]

you heard about the $300 rebate?

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[DrCode]

I remember thinking this years ago, when the Mac was still a strong contender, and CD drives were first becoming available. I'd see ads in the papers, with the CD drive for the PC costing $100, and the one for the Mac $200. And this seemed to be the case for most any piece of hardware.

As for performance: I played around with an iMac at the local science museum a few weeks ago, and the general response speed reminded me of my old 486 that occasionally gets uses as an X-server.

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[swb]

1) Twice the performance? Maybe equal. I have a 350Mhz G3 and a Compaq PII400 running Win2k side by side on my desk and generally speaking the Mac feels slower than the PC, albeit not by much. I don't run Photoshop, but do pound the snot out of the I/O capabilities of both machines and the Mac's I/O is doggy under OS9.

2) Neither machine has been in need of much futzing. I've added a SCSI card to both machines without any problems, either OS or hardware. One thing that drives me nuts about the Mac lineup is the *lack* of standardization. The G3/G4 line notwithstanding, Macs have been all over the map in terms of hardware. PCs vary, but the behavior and components are largely swappable between a Dell and a Compaq and whatever. I think the PC lends itself to user-driven futzing because it can so easily be futzted with. Many Macs have lacked any expandability or changeability so you didn't futz because you couldn't.

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[ichimunki]

For all of it's bluntness this is one of the most effective summaries that I've seen of this entire discussion about the differences in chip speeds and when it is and isn't important or significant. It certainly underscores some of the very real reasons why Apple machines might be a rational purchase, while simultaneously pointing out some of the smoke that Apple has been screening with regards to hardware performance.

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[A coward on a mouse]

You have exceeded your licensed usage of the word "futz" and words derived therefrom. Please refrain from using these terms until you have arranged for more licenses.

Sincerely,
Licensing department, FutzCo

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[Junks Jerzey]

>I've been told to expect twice the performance from a G3 than a similarly clocked PIII.

That is unadorned horseshit. But don't take my word for it: go to www.spec.org and check out the numbers yourself. 20-30% is more the average gain, and that's cold comfort when you can buy 1.2GHz Athlon chips for less than $500 a pop.

It was horseshit when Apple tried to say that the G3 was twice as fast as a Pentium II back in 1998. I repeat: it was bunk. But, it has turned out that a 500 MHz G4 (not G3) is remarkably fast for it's clock speed. Here's a PC-oriented benchmark site, quoted on Slashdot a few weeks back, showing that a 500 MHz G4 is only 15% slower than a 1 GHz Athlon. That's impressive, especially when you look at the huge difference in power consumption.

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[lizrd]

Back in the days of old Macs had better parts than PCs. The 2x price difference you'd see in CD drives etc. between the two different platforms was mostly due to the fact that Macs were a SCSI only outfit. This price difference is still true today, a 48 spin IDE CD-ROM drive will set you back between $40 and $50 while a 40 spin SCSI CD-ROM will set you back a little over $100. These drives are probably pretty comparable in data rate given the inherent speed advantage of SCSI. At least that's the feeling I get looking at egghead.

This has changed somewhat in the last 3-4 years. Macs are now shipped with IDE hard drives and CD drives. Any external devices are connected with cross platform USB cables rather than SCSI and ADB which were unique to Apple in the consumer market. In addition the PC industry has switched from 70 pin SIMMs to 168 pin DIMMs so memory for Macs is now the same parts as PCs. As a result of these changes it's now a lot easier to buy parts for a Mac and a lot cheaper too.

Apple has chosen to adopt more industry standard parts as an alternative to using only the best parts. This has lead to cheaper Macs at the expense of some of their really great quality that used to be worth paying extra for.
________________
They're - They are
Their - Belonging to them

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

In the original CD days (when 2x drives were COOL) all Macs had SCSI, most PCs have/had IDE/ATA. If The drives were different busses, then you can't compare them. If they were both SCSI, they're interchangeable and no such thing as a Mac or PC drive.

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[Tralfamadorian]

From their page:

$1,799.00

450MHz PowerPC G4
1MB L2 cache
64MB SDRAM memory
20GB Ultra ATA drive
DVD-ROM w/DVD-Video
RAGE 128 Pro graphics
10/100BASE-T Ethernet
56K internal modem

Without a display. A 17 inch monitor from their store costs 500 dollars. If you buy a computer and monitor, then you get a 300 dollar rebate which makes the price of the monitor good, but that still leaves you paying 1,800 for the computer.

Plus, the cube is 200 dollars more than the tower G4 wich has a floppy drive, and gigabit ethernet, but is 50 mhz slower, but has the ability to add more drives.


He who knows not, and knows he knows not is a wise man

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[Bongo]

But, it has turned out that a 500 MHz G4 (not G3) is remarkably fast for it's clock speed

I read a posting in the form.Z (3d modelling app) user forum, where someone reported a rendering on their dual-pentium processor enabled form.Z was finishing in a similar time to their similarly clocked but single processor G4.

Maybe it's the software, but even so, if your main breadwinning app runs twice as fast, that's all the reason you need to buy a G4.

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[macx666]

The Tower G4 does not have a floppy drive. It can have a zip thougth. No Mac since Yosemite and the origional iMacs has had floppy drives standard.

-Mr. Macx

Moof!
******

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[moz711]

> A Seti workset on my Mac G4 at 450 Mhz takes 6 > hrs, done on my 333 Pentium 2 its 16 hrs if it is > done under Windoze and 12 if it is done under > BeOS (same hardware thus 33% penalty for > Microsquish OS over BeOS). My 700 Mhz Athlon > does one in about 8 hours (direct scale > from the P2) in Windoze. I read someplace theat the seti client does a lot of fast fourier (spell?) analysis. Thats one of the types of calculations that can be sped up by Alvitech.

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[Weirdling]

A 7500 is a bloody ancient machine. I own an 8500 that will be G3-400 ugraded soon. I think one of the things that PC people miss is the longevity of Macs: time to obsolescence is incredibly long. I was running a 7100/G3 215 until a few months ago when its *really* old memory hardware caught up with it.

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[Woody77]

And Athlons and PIIIs have that wonderfull, deep pipeline that gets trashed on every interrupt or cache miss... And cache misses are 10%, so you spend a lot of time rebuilding that deep pipe-line.

A deep pipeline scales the Mhz ladder better, but it takes more Mhz to do the same amount of work... And so long as you are spending all of your time in the same loop, acessing sequential data, without any interrupts, then you're fine.

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[SethJohnson]

As for the HD expansion you were hoping for, get an external firewire case and punch in whatever HD you choose. Set that brick on the floor or up to 64 feet away and you'll be fine. I am pretty certain the ram is PC100 SDRAM and you can put like 2 gigs of ram in the cube.

Seth

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[Throw Away Account]

We'll start by granting that a G4 per megahertz is overall twice as fast as a Pentium III. That's debatable, but only on the side of being slower, so we're favoring Apple here.

In that case, in this corner we've got the Cube, with a 450 MHz G4 (900 MHz P3 equivalent), 64 MB RAM, 20 GB hard drive, and DVD-ROM, and FireWire for $1,799.97, at CompUSA.

And in this corner, we have a HP Pavilion 8775C with a 933 MHz P3 (466 MHz G4 equivalent), 128 MB RAM, 60 GB hard drive, 8X/4X/32X CD-RW, floppy drive, and DVD-ROM for $1,649.97

Both have USB and ethernet, neither comes with a monitor; the Cube $300 rebate requires purchase of at least a 17" $499.97 monitor, for a net $199.97. The equivalent 17" HP monitor runs $299.97.

So the HP has a faster processor by a smidge (or more, if you dispute the grant of the doubling), twice the RAM, three times the hard drive capacity, and an additional CR-RW drive and floppy drive, and costs $50 less; but the Cube has FireWire, an optical mouse, and what is claimed to be a better display.

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[Master Bait]

A 17 inch monitor from their store costs 500 dollars. If you buy a computer and monitor, then you get a 300 dollar rebate which makes the price of the monitor good, but that still leaves you paying 1,800 for the computer.

Wow! $500 for a 17" monitor... There's a stockholder born every minute!

blessings,

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[kirkb]

I've been told to expect twice the performance from a G3 than a similarly clocked PIII.

Of course you've been told to beleive this, that's how these cult things work. Pope Steve told me to beleive it, so I will do so blindly. Please check out www.spec.org, or any of the impartial sites out there (Ars Technica?).

BTW, doesn't *everyone* know by now that MHz are meaningless? You should think about "what's the speed difference between $1500 worth of mac vs. $1500 worth of PC?"

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[gig]

Have you seen the $500 CRT? It comes ColorSync calibrated and has a fully flat 16" viewable display area. It has a completely clear casing that's really beautiful. When you plug it into a Mac, all of the display's controls are accessible from within Mac OS, and the display's power switch works for the whole computer. It's also got a couple of USB ports and gets its USB, power and analog video through one cable. An entirely different device than the house 17" CRT you pay $250 for from other vendors. I haven't used a CRT for about a year, but I was still blown away by this display when I saw it.

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[rve]

Erm, that very page you link here, seem to indicate a performance inbetween the AMD duron 600 and 700, both at roughly half the price.

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[f5426]

> I've been told to expect twice the performance from a G3 than a similarly clocked PIII.

This is not true in my experience. I got 16% lower performance from a G3 350 compared to a PIII 500. A G4 400 had exactly the same performance than the G3 (well, it was 0.56% faster).

It all depends on what you do, how you do it, if you are processor/fp/memopry bound, etc, etc.

Anyway G3/G4 are really cool machines. But the Steve Jobs hype is just false (unless you happen to use only altivec-enhanced applications)

> productivity gain by less futzing about with hardware, due to standardization

This is *the* benefit of apple hardware. I lost counteless hours with PCs. PCs are cheap, but only if your time is cheap. If it is not, Apple machines are great alternatives.

Cheers,

--fred

Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs

[dobes]

I think the real problem with these price/performance discussions is that they assume two things:

1. Performance is measurable
2. Price is based on it in any way whatsoever

I think it would be better to take a look at the Economics 101 of the situation: Price vs. Utility

How much more *utility* (i.e. pleasure of use, productivity at work, programs to use) will you get out of a G4 cube than from a PC? And more importantly, how much more utility does the average consumer think he will get out of the G4 cube than a cheaper computer?

A week and a half ago, I said "Yes! I want a G4 cube now!" because I'd seen Mac OS X. I love project builder, their visual effects are cool, and their system seems stable as hell. Then I went to the Apple Store and discovered a few problems:

1. The price was $1000 more for the mac hardware compared to top of the line PC hardware.
2. I had very limited choices in terms of what I could get with the core of it; I couldn't get the 64MB ATI Radeon card that I could get in the much cheaper PC system, no egronomic keyboard, no 5-button wheelmouse.

Suddenly I was left horribly disappointed. To me, the difference in utility between Mac OS X and OS's that run on the PC would appear to be a $1000 permium.

Many Mac users argue that the Mac hardware is worth it because its faster. Realisticly speaking, however, the speed of the hardware is no longer a major contributing factor in the *utility* of the computer. Therefore, I dont believe that an increase in hardware performance is what I am really paying for with the G4 cube.

And of course, there is the style thing, which is worth maybe $100 but not $1000.

Others seem to have a different measure of utility. For example, mac zealots are largely concerned with whether it is a mac, or not. This "camp" difference is probably well worth $1000 price difference. For some people, the increase in usability is worth $1000. If you like playing video games, getting mac will cost you not only an extra $1000, but also all the utility you get out of playing any video games that are only for PC!

Re:conspiracy!

[pressman]

Let's see here..... hmmmmm... the CEO of Apple making strategic business maneuvers to increase the acceptance, marketshare and sales of one or more of his company's products.

Yup. Sounds like a conspiracy to me. Yup. Yup.

FUD!

[John_Profit]

There's no such thing as an iCube.

-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)

Re:FUD!

[Master Bait]

There's no such thing as an iCube.

I think you've hit the nail on the head! Apple needed an iCube a lot more than they needed the the Steve Cube.

Apple's own market needs an iMac with an external monitor, which is exactly what the Cube is (minus the glamor price).

blessings,

Re:conspiracy!

[Erisynne]

Conspiracy? You mean like using a cute, cuddly, fuzzy mascot to market evil opensource to children?

Ha ha ha.

It's not a conspiracy, it's good business.

X? Come along...

[arnald]

Surprised there haven't been any comments pointing out that X is woefully out of date. Nostalgia aside, it's really fairly embarassing that we'll still all be using X Window in 2001 - I would have thought a tech-savvy audience like Slashdot would have been the first to point this out.

So, is it really so exciting that Apple now support X? I suppose in one sense it's great to have all those legacy applications, but it would be nice to see the state of the art pushed forward somewhat - I would certainly have expected this of Apple, one of the more forward-thinking old-school computer companies.

Then again, I must admit there are no serious contenders to X currently visible on the radar. I've looked at WHY (fairly promising but early days) and Berlin (extremely interesting, but a little too bogged-down in providing support for glitzy rotations and the like too early on in the development), but I don't see X being replaced in the forseeable future, sadly.

Perhaps this is because X Window was developed by academic experts who were basically employed to do this, whereas it's putative replacements are being developed by enthusiastic amateurs (and this isn't intended as a knock to those developers, but merely a reflection of the truth - I am an enthusiastic amateur myself!).

Specifically, one thing X certainly needs is FAST and CONSISTENT (across the whole desktop) sub-pixel anti-alisasing. Acorn users have had this since 1990, so why has it taken so long for the rest of the world to catch up?

XServers on Mac in past

[peter303]

I remember some in the late 1980s,
but don't know if they are still around.
The Xserver is pretty portable. You have supply
about 30-50 kernal graphics routines in their
driver.

Re:conspiracy!

[Mojojojo Monkey Inc.]

I could say the same thing about cigarette companies using the cute joe camel cartoon character to sell cigarettes... and no one would argue with me on that point.

Did you watch the Mac Expo Europe?

[MO!]

A single 500MHz G4 was compared side-by-side with a single 1GHz Pentium III, running the same Photoshop script. the results were 124 seconds for the P3, and 108 seconds for the G4. So basically, the G4 was faster than a P3 running at twice the clock speed.

This may not be true for *every* application, or Photoshop job for that matter, but it does support the claim that some applications, under some uses, perform at better than twice that of a similarly clocked P3.

Re:Did you watch the Mac Expo Europe?

[SuiteSisterMary]

the results were 124 seconds for the P3, and 108 seconds for the G4

If Apple is claiming that 124 is twice as much as 108, then I don't think I'll be buying their stock any time soon. Besides, application level benchmarks are only worth something to people who are going to run one application. Otherwise, use stuff like SPEC.

Re:Did you watch the Mac Expo Europe?

[el_nino]

Read the original post next time - the G4 was more than twice as fast per clock cycle than the PIII. 500MHz G4, 1GHz PIII, you do the math.

However, it doesn't really say much since Apple naturally picked the tasks the G4 does best compared to the PIII.
--
Niklas Nordebo | nino at sonox.com | +46-708-405095

Re:Did you watch the Mac Expo Europe?

[SuiteSisterMary]

In other words, a theoretical 500 MHz p3 would take 248 seconds to complete the task which took only 108 seconds on the G4.

500mhz G4 did it in 108 seconds. If it's twice as fast per clock cycle, it should have done it in 62 seconds, which is half the time the P3 took. Regardless of the numbers, the benchmark itself is still worthless.

Re:Did you watch the Mac Expo Europe?

[pjl5602]

500mhz G4 did it in 108 seconds. If it's twice as fast per clock cycle, it should have done it in 62 seconds, which is half the time the P3 took.

You're not reading carefully...&nbsp It's a 500Mhz G4 vs. 1Ghz P3.&nbsp The G4 did it in less time with half the clock speed.&nbsp End of story.

As for the worth of the benchmark, it's *quite* relevant if you use Photoshop extensively.

Re:Did you watch the Mac Expo Europe?

[SuiteSisterMary]

As I said originally, application benchmarks are only worth using if you're only running that particular benchmark. :-) Although I do point out that for general benchmarking, wanting to use a specific application generally means assembler-optimized. What would happen, for example, if the Photoshop filter was optimized for MMX2/KNI/SMID/whatever the hell it is the P3 has?

Re:Did you watch the Mac Expo Europe?

[Golias]

What would happen, for example, if the Photoshop filter was optimized for MMX2/KNI/SMID/whatever the hell it is the P3 has?

It is. Adobe Photoshop for Windows is tricked out for the Pentium CPU in all it's sub-processing glory. It takes full advantage of on-board caching and MMX instructions. It really is a great product (if you can afford it and are doing things that GIMP can't handle).

The reason for application benchmarking is that it is one of the few ways you can do a meaningful cross-platform comparison. Will the 500Mhz G4 beat the 1G PIII on all applications? No. Will it score well enough that it is fair to say "up to twice as fast", based on the fact that in many applications it can be? You betcha.

But don't take my word for it... if raw speed matters to you, do some side-by-sides in applications you rely on. I can tell you that running Photoshop on one of those new dual-CPU Macs is wicked fast... like nothing you will see any Windows system do for at least another year or two.

I use both platforms a lot, and I use the various Unices as well... but I would never kid myself into thinking my Windows box could replace my Mac when it comes to media creation.

Re:Did you watch the Mac Expo Europe?

[gig]

It's not just a Photoshop benchmark, it's a Photoshop FILTER benchmark. They are:

cross-platform
used in multiple applications (not just Photoshop ... for example, Director and FreeHand both support Photoshop filters)
very processor intensive
(most of all) the user sits and stares at a progress bar while they happen.

If you're encoding or compiling, you might start it and go away, maybe even overnight, but if you're applying Photoshop filters, you are going to watch a minute go by here, and two minutes there. The shootout that they do at the Expos is quite convincing in that case.

PC Magazine also recreated those benchmarks. They put a dual 1GHz PC (note the "dual") against a dual 500MHz Mac, and the Mac won 6 of their 8 Photoshop filter tests, and tied a 7th. They also did a bunch of comparisons of 3D rendering and stuff, and the PC only barely beat the Mac in many cases. This is a dual 1GHz PC, and the Mac held its own very, very well, even in non-Altivec stuff. These Macs are fast machines.

Re:conspiracy!

[Maschine]

Mojo... the enemy isn't Apple.. the enemy is Microsoft and a Unix market that is divided is much easier to damage. By the way, what the fuck dio you know about Apple products and engineering?

OSX Beta report card

[franksbiyatch]

I'm curious. How does the OSX Beta compare with other graphically-rich Unix flavors (specifically Irix)? I want the opinion of Unix users (not necessarily LinuxPPC folks like myself).

Since my machine is not uber enough to run it, I need to take your word for it.

I just hope Apple doesn't sue me for asking.

Re:OSX Beta report card

[SirFlakey]

Ok since you specifically mention IRIX let me pipe in =) .. I have a PowerBook G3/400 running on 192Mb of ram with OSX and it peforms ok->well. I also have an SGI O2 (200 Mhz R5000 with 128MB ram and IRIX 6.5.7). I am sure that in terms of raw speed teh G3 beats the MIPS all over the place - perhaps even in Screen response time. But in true multitasking operation (I cannot describe this in a technical manner other then to say - how the system feels with java and other things open) the O2 wipes the floor with OSX.

In fact even though it's like "UNIX for Mac Users" I find Irix immensly more responsive to use then some of the other OS's I run regulary (on Desktop Systems). OSX however has "Potential" a lot of the "drag" in the system comes from the AQUA/QUARTZ layers (upon layers) that are stacked above darwin (log in to >console , run top and be amazed how snappy things get). That said - this a Public Beta of the 1st release of a new MacOS - so perhaps we should hope for the best =) (in summary - not as fast as LinuxPPC on the same hardware - not as technically behind as MacOS "plain")
--

Re: What's fuzting?

[AFCArchvile]

Is it a mix of fussing and putzing?

Read the article!

[rrwood]

If you read the linked article, you'll realize that this is not really a port of XFree86 to MacOS X. This is a port of VNC, which is extremely cool, to MacOS X. For those of you who are unfamiliar with VNC, it is similar to Timbuktu or PCAnywhere in that it lets you access and control a GUI desktop on a remote machine pretty much as if you were sitting in front of the remote machine. VNC does this by implementing an X server to host the X apps on the remote machine, and then shooting the pixel data to the viewing "client" machine. Obviously key presses and mouse gestures are sent from the viewer client to the remote/host machine, too. The best part (or worst, depending on your point of view wrt security, etc.) is that the VNC session stays put even if you quit the client, so your desktop session is maintained as you move around in meatspace.

Click here to visit the VNC homepage

So, to run X apps on MacOS X using this hack requires you to run the X app on top of the VNC server, and then use the VNC viewer/client app to interact with the X app.

Sounds like it'll be pretty sluggish, to me. Still, it is kinda clever, and it does let you run an X app if you really need it now.

"Ask Slashdot" NLE and video capture comparisons?

[FreeUser]

Anyone know of any hard benchmarks for video processing/capture/editing.

I've pretty much given up on the PC (be it Windows, BeOS, or Linux) for video capture and editing and will probably get a powerbook for that application simply to avoid the headaches PC video capture/editing always entails (unless Linux video editing has matured by then, which is a very distinct possibility), but I would be curious if anyone has any pointers to hard benchmarks or in-depth, relatively unbiased comparisons of the two platforms vis-a-vis video and NLE.

should I post this as Apple, X, or BSD?

[ahg]

I favor the Apple category for MacOSX related posts.

About a month ago there was a MacOSX article with the BSD demon - the discussion was so Mac centric that it didn't really seem to relate to the common underlying BSD base.

Here's the distinction I would make:

If it's about Darwin, Apple's CLI open source edition of the OS that compiles on various platforms it should be categorized as BSD.

If it is specifically about MacOSX which is tied to proprietary Apple hardware or an application running within that environment - then it is a Apple article.

As for the 'X' option, while I can see it as a contender for this article... I guess because this news is particular to one "minority" platform and less relevent to the larger X user community I would still go with Apple categorization.

Re:should I post this as Apple, X, or BSD?

[sirinek]

As long as you are talking about Apple categorization, I notice from time to time, Taco likes to take articles about the PowerPC (not necessarily in relation to MacOS) and label them as "Apple" instead of "Motorola" which he might want to create an icon for. :)

siri

Re:X? Come along...

[karzan]

Sheesh.

I'm tired of hearing about this stuff. X is excellent technology, and the reason it's been around since 1984 and is still working wonderfully (well X11 has been around since 89) is that it's EXTREMELY WELL DESIGNED. Despite peoples' griping about the X toolkit and protocol, the whole system is vastly well designed, and built to last. It lasts not because of the abundance of "legacy" applications (at one time there was a migration from X10 to X11--and that was very quick--and think of the migration from win3.1 to win95, etc), but because it's excellent, excellent technology.

A word about antialiasing. Most uses of X are in businesses, governments, and science. When you're controlling satellites, nuclear reactors, nuclear warheads, global databases, etc, does antialiasing do you ANY good whatsoever?

And as people have pointed out numerous times, today's screen resolutions are so huge that antialiasing is outdated--it was designed to compensate for huge jaggies that no longer exist.

Slashdot, meet Mac users

[update()]

Almost completely off-topic, but I had to laugh when I saw this on EvangeList today. You think Slashdot readers and the Mac community might have significantly different priorities?

Subject: [CTA] :CueCat Reader for Mac
From: "Dan Fisher"
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 08:13:39 +1100

Hey Guys,

There's a really neat little product being pushed (FOR FREE) by RadioShack called the :CueCat Reader. There is a Mac version of the software in development, and they're gauging the response on their website with a form for Mac users to sign up if they're interested. Let's show them we want this! Go read up on it at the site, it's basically a barcode scanner that launches websites of the products or books, CDs, DVDs, whatever you scan into it.

http://www.crq.com/mac.html

Dan

Personally, I agree with Joel On Software -- I can't imagine why I would want one of these, regardless of whose software it runs.

Earth to Cmdr Taco....

[maggard]

The article is about cobbling together VNC to talk to X under MacOS X. This is *not* the same as firing up X on one's Mac monitor and getting a plays-well-with-other X window (which is what the "lame commercial binary" does.)

Will there be a retraction this time or will it slide?

Re:Earth to Cmdr Taco....

[latneM]

The second link in the post describes how to get XFree86 to run on MacOSX. Specifically, look here. Even the page you refer to points to that article, and even says (direct quote) "As a side bonus, if you survive the 50+ mb download, you can log in to OS X's console and run the X server directly from there, if you so choose".

How about reading the article before complaining about it?

Re:Earth to Cmdr Taco....

[maggard]

OK - I'll reword it:

While one will get X working under MacOS X it doesn't work under Quartz.

Running X on MacOS X isn't terribly impressive - it's been doable on MacOS X's progenitor Darwin for quite some time.

What folks want is an X that can run under MacOS X's Quartz/Aqua environment. Then one could simultanuosly run Classic, Carbon, Cocoa, Java & X applications at the same time. To date this is only doable using the "lame commercial binary".

Re:X? Come along...

[arnald]

I suspect you may be trolling here, but I'll play along anyway...

I don't doubt that X is well designed. Unix is well designed, and that's been around for years too. However, if something has been around essential unchanged for over ten years then it CANNOT be said that it represents the state of the art in its field. This is certainly true of X.

There's nothing particularly wrong with it, except that we can now do better!

As for your comments regarding anti-aliasing, I must strongly disagree here. Businesses, governments and science ALL benefit from anti-aliasing, simply because (in the most simple terms) it makes the writing on the computer screen easier to read! In fact these are three areas where operators would expect to read a lot of material from screen (eg. papers, reports, figures, etc etc.) and therefore where anti-aliasing would be of most benefit.

This isn't intended to be a facetious question, but have you ever actually used a system with proper sub-pixel anti-aliasing throughout? Come back to anything else and your eyes will complain...

As for the resolution issue, jaggies will ALWAYS occur no matter what the resolution, as at the end of the day you cannot perfectly approximate a curve by a series of rectangular dots on a CRT. Moreover, anti-aliasing makes small fonts MUCH easier to read, even at high resolutions, and prevents the "greeking" that so besets X's standard fonts (on my machine at least).

Also, remember that some of us are forced to used resolutions such as 800x640, for either personal or financial reasons.

(Note: just thought I'd say this early before some AC tries to be clever... anti-aliasing /= alpha transparancy. The latter *can* (but need not) be used to achieve the former - that's all.)

Antialiasing necessary?

[dstone]

one thing X certainly needs is FAST and CONSISTENT (across the whole desktop) sub-pixel anti-alisasing. Acorn users have had this since 1990

What was the screen res of an Acorn in 1990? As your screen res increases, antialiasing becomes less and less important. But you're right, all else equal, it would be nice to have antialiasing as an option.

After using and loving sharp, flicker-free, non-antialiased text on a 15" 1400x1050 notebook, I would say that the world doesn't need antialiasing as much as low dot pitch and high refresh rates (or just discrete pixel displays). Yes, that's hardware technology, beyond the scope of an OS, but all OSs will benefit from those developments. And your retinas will love you. No more antialiased, blurry flicker. Visual joy.

Re:Antialiasing necessary?

[arnald]

Acorns could probably do 1024x768 in 1990, but that's missing the point. Anti-aliasing is beneficial even at high-resolutions, for small and large text alike.

Better still, let it be controllable - you can turn it off, I can leave it on. We're both happy. :-)

It's a side issue, but I wholeheartedly agree with you about the need for high refresh rates - one of the reasons I prefer to use 800x600 rather than anything higher, as with my fairly rubbish vid. card and monitor I can still get fast refreshes at this size but not at greater resolutions (yes, I'm skint).

Re:Insightful

[A coward on a mouse]

Funny, I thought Slashdot followed the Law of the Schoolyard:

1. Don't tattle.
2. Always make fun of those different from you.
3. Never say anything unless you're absolutely sure everyone else thinks the same thing.

I guess you learn something new every day.

X Kicks Ass!

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

a point by point retort:

"Surprised there haven't been any comments pointing out that X is woefully out of date. Nostalgia aside, it's really fairly embarassing that we'll still all be using X Window in 2001 - I would have thought a tech-savvy audience like Slashdot would have been the first to point this out."

X Windows has been with us a long time, and I'll be the first to admit that in its original incantation, it isn't the greatest GUI. All of the GUIs that are specifically written for a specific platform usually outperform it, and for someone who only will use one platform and for one specific function, that's fine. X has its power as a DISTRIBUTED GUI though, in that one can run applications on MANY different computers, regardless of the OS on the computer (providing it has X and TCP/IP support) and use them ALL on one workstation with one X Server. In fact, one doesn't even need a computer to run X, just an X Terminal. They are often cheaper and better equipment than most full blown computers. I have on my desk an HP Envizex term that I use to connect to my BSD box in the rack, and it's great! For someone who wants to be connected to a network and have software available regardless of the platform, X is the easiest way to go, for ALL modern Unices support it, and OS/2 does as well (for whatever reason).

"So, is it really so exciting that Apple now support X? I suppose in one sense it's great to have all those legacy applications, but it would be nice to see the state of the art pushed forward somewhat - I would certainly have expected this of Apple, one of the more forward-thinking old-school computer companies."

It's exciting because it gives lots of professionals more options than they have with Microsoft products, like the ability to run very common software on a central server (software like web browsers, email clients, and other stuff that just doesn't _need_ to be installed on every computer and needs to be updated from time to time) to ease maintenance and overhead. I personally would MUCH rather upgrade just ONE installation of Netscape or an office suite instead of like, 200...

"Then again, I must admit there are no serious contenders to X currently visible on the radar. I've looked at WHY (fairly promising but early days) and Berlin (extremely interesting, but a little too bogged-down in providing support for glitzy rotations and the like too early on in the development), but I don't see X being replaced in the forseeable future, sadly."

Well, one thing that will always allow X to compete is that the X Consortium has the option of adding features as they see them necessary. Remember, many of the existing X installations (like my aformentioned term) aren't running X11R6.4 revisions, I think my term has a X11R5 or R4 server. So far, all that I have tried has worked on it, but maintaining compatiblity is very tricky. If they want 15 year old equipment to stay working, they have to test and test and test...

"Perhaps this is because X Window was developed by academic experts who were basically employed to do this, whereas it's putative replacements are being developed by enthusiastic amateurs (and this isn't intended as a knock to those developers, but merely a reflection of the truth - I am an enthusiastic amateur myself!)."

Remember, a lot of early UNIX stuff was all at schools, with students and teachers doing the work, and not necessarily for money. I'd say that the only difference is that they didn't have existing paradigms for this sort of development, so they created them. Besides, most of the RFCs are fairly easy to read if one has the technical background for them, and one could fairly easily figure out what they did. Also, the sources are available from groups like the XFree86 project and the X Consortium, so one who is skilled enough can work with it (I'm not that good, but oh well, I can type "make" with the best of them)

"Specifically, one thing X certainly needs is FAST and CONSISTENT (across the whole desktop) sub-pixel anti-alisasing. Acorn users have had this since 1990, so why has it taken so long for the rest of the world to catch up?"

Well, I'll admit speed is an issue, but most of the terminals have classically been on 10BaseT or slower network connections, so it really didn't matter for a long, long time. SuSE has developed a lot of X servers that are accelerated, and these are really nice servers. As more vendors decide to support their equipment natively, thist should become less and less of a problem.

I like X, it does almost everything I need it to do. The only thing lacking that I'd like to see is better support for some of the more enhanced routines, but as it stands it does do a fairly good job.

Re:If only...

[arnald]

Agree with most of this, except the fan. Fans are EVIL and must be banished by better design. It's like power amplifiers - most designs require fans, but companies that put their minds to it can come up with very high powered amps that cool by convection, and actually run colder than an equivalent fan-cooled device.

This must be done with computers. It's particularly important if (like me) you use a computer in your recording studio - this is one area where Macs are particularly popular, so evidently Apple are listening to the market here.

(NB this is why I still use a silent Atari 1024STE for my sequencing...)

However, I haven't used a Cube yet, so for all I know it might melt within half an hour. :-)

Job's business strategy - Focus on Customer

[lwagner]

Apple has always gone after the supposed upper-class niche of computer users. It didn't work with NeXT - it didn't work with the original Macs. It still isn't working. If you've read the latest stockholder reports, the iMacs are sagging badly as are the Cubes. *HOWEVER*, I don't see any reason why they would drop prices. Jobs understands that, pretty much no matter how outrageous Apple behaves, they will never fail their die-hard users. It's part of knowing who your customer is. What Apple has that PC box-pushers don't is a dedicated customer base of people who will buy their funky machines and tolerate their broken software. As for Jobs "turning around" Apple: as a stockholder, I don't think that he was successful - this was more of a media play than anything else. OTOH, he did something that no one else had been able to do before Jobs (since Sculley): he plugged back into the Apple customer and made a real attempt to satisfy what Apple customers want. IMHO, he was very successful at pumping new life and bringing new vision into the still-ailing business model of Apple.

Re:Job's business strategy - Focus on Customer

[Smitty825]

he plugged back into the Apple customer and made a real attempt to satisfy what Apple customers want

(disclaimer--I'm a long time Macintosh Owner & supporter (since '88)...as well as a Linux user (circa 1997))

What has Steve Jobs done to satisfy what the Apple Customer wants? I have a few examples

• He killed the clones. Granted they were killing Apple's business, but Apple wasn't producing machines as fast or as sleek as the clone companies. It took almost 2 years for Apple to catch up to Power Computing's PowerTowerG3/275 (or something like that), and it took Apple almost 6 months to release a motherboard that ran at 66MHz (Motorola was close to shipping one right before the no clone policy.)
• He doesn't ship any 6 PCI slot machines. Many of the people in Apple's Core markets need as many PCI slots as possible. SCSI (another sore subject), Video Caputre Cards, Video Cards (for multiple monitors), etc, are put to use well inside a Mac system.
• Their B&W G3 "Trojan Horse" firmware upgrade. They issued a required upgrade for their Blue & White G3 Macs that disabled the machine if you upgraded to a G4 processor before Apple wanted you to. They later fixed this situation, but most Mac users weren't happy.
• A few weeks after the B&W incident, Apple tried to ship G4 machines @ 400, 450 & 500 MHz. They couldn't get enough 500MHz chips, so they dropped the speeds down 50MHz, and then raised the prices of some people's orders (ie, if I ordered the 450MHz machine before Apple changed speed ratings, I would be shipped the 450MHz machine at the old 500MHz price...)
• Recently, Apple charged their customers $30 to debug their beta OS! Granted it is nice, but it is far from feature complete, and there are lots of thorny issues that Apple needs to straighten out (ie, do you display folders that begin with a "." -- it's a system file/directory in Unix, but it worked fine in OS 9...and a few CD-ROM's I own have folders begining with a ".")
• Mike at Xlr8YourMac had a petition to allow third party video cards to be installed at the Apple store. Almost 10,000 people signed it, but Apple seems to have ignored the wishes of thier customers. (FYI, ATI is the current supplier (both Radeon & Rage128 Pro), but 3dfx has Mac support, as does ProFormance, and supposedly the GeForce2MX is capable of supporting the Mac (no drivers, though) )

I'm not saying I hate the Apple, but I (and many other Mac users), has become very frustrated to the way Apple treats their die-hard group of users. There are tons more examples I (and other Mac users) can give you. I really hope that this changes in the future.

Re:Job's business strategy - Focus on Customer

[fgodfrey]

I've seen the comment that Apple charged customers for a beta a lot. At least on the high end, the people who want early access to software end up paying more since they end up with more support. I still think you shouldn't charge for beta's, but it is hardly unusual.

Re:Job's business strategy - Focus on Customer

[gig]

> He doesn't ship any 6 PCI slot machines.

If you need more than 3, you need more than 6. People who do, use an expansion chassis. The kind of user you're talking about buys their Mac right from Digidesign or Avid, as a small part of an overall $10,000+ system. The expansion chassis is a minor expense. This "issue" with Apple is as much a real issue as the one-button mouse, which 70% of Mac users like better than two.

I've always had at least one slot free on my Blue & White Power Mac. I mean, when you have FireWire and USB, PCI is much less important.

Re:Job's business strategy - Focus on Customer

[kylearin]

Keep in mind that Microsoft charged companies twice that much to beta Win2K. This is something many people forget when mentioning that Apple is charging for beta software...

Altivec optimizations in core graphics.

[yerricde]

The "twice as fast as Wintel" claim is based on a small number of Adobe Photoshop operation benchmarks; usually filters that have been painstakingly optimized for the G4's "Altivec" vector processing unit. This isn't necessarily "cheating", since Photoshop is still one of the primary reasons to buy a mac, but if you are not a graphics professional, you are simply never ever going to see that kind of speed benefit using a Mac.

How do you know the native core graphics drivers aren't also written in assembly language for Altivec? Painstaking optimization of graphics is part of what made the first QuickDraw so fast and Macs so attractive in the first place.

Re:Altivec optimizations in core graphics.

[Doktor Memory]

How do you know the native core graphics drivers aren't also written in assembly language for Altivec?

Because (a) QuickDraw has been around a lot longer than the G4 units, (b) Apple still needs to support non-G4 macs, (c) graphics-intensive programs other than Photoshop tend not to exhibit the same gains (Quake III comes to mind instantly), and (d) I follow Apple's OS announcements pretty closely and haven't seen them announce any such thing for MacOS 9. Nor have ATI or 3dfx made any mention of re-tuning their device drivers for Altivec that I'm aware of. (Proof to the contrary will be happily accepted, on both counts.)

Let me re-emphasize that first point: QuickDraw is really, really old. Re-writing the thing to be optimized for altivec when they've known for over a year now that they're going to be throwing it away in favor of Quartz would be a nonsensical waste of effort on Apple's part.

The good news is that they are apparently optimizing quite a bit of the "Quartz" (aka "DisplayPDF") rendering engine for Altivec in OS X -- most reviews of the public beta have commented on how much snappier screen operations are on the G4 than even on higher-clock G3 machines.

Or try xmanager

[MeowMeow Jones]

at www.xmanager.com. It's only $69 (compared to Exceed that's cheap) and it works pretty well. As far as I can tell the demo version doesn't expire.

It's also the only Windows X server that actaully provides an easy connect dialog so you don't have to manually telnet in and set your DISPLAY. Granted, it's not that dificult to do, but it gets annoying.

Re:Or try xmanager

[IGnatius T Foobar]

My favorite X server for MS Windows is Reflection X. It allows you to do expect/send dialogs with a telnet server so that you don't have to diddle with a console window prior to starting X.

I like the idea of running an X Server as a service in Windows, though. Even though it's essentially the same thing, it would definitely feel more natural.
--

Re:Or try xmanager

[fReNeTiK]

Thank You!

I've been looking for a good inexpensive X server in Windows for a while now and none satisfied me.

I just downloaded the demo of this one and so far it looks very promising. Very cool.

Oh, and... Meow?

Category Order of Operations

[Cardinal]

Well, IMHO, categorizing should go something like

1. Hardware (Apple, Intel, etc)
2. OS (MacOS, Linux, Amiga, etc)
3. Software (X, Gnome, KDE, etc)

Re:Category Order of Operations

[ahg]

Well, IMHO, categorizing should go something like

1. Hardware (Apple, Intel, etc) 2. OS (MacOS, Linux, Amiga, etc)

Yes... but this separation clearly isn't as cut-n-dry as you make it seem. Apple and MacOS share the same catagory/icon and that is the logical choice since they are very much tied to each other.

3. Software (X, Gnome, KDE, etc)

You are right within the context of "classic" linux/*BSD discussions. However, sometimes you have software that is so tightly linked to a platform that the "hardware" category/icon for that platform may be more appropriate.

Example:

Categorize as 'X'
XYZ Systems announces new super fast X-server for MacOSX that plays Quake at 120fps!

Categorize as MacOSX (in this case)
MacOSX users can finally run X apps in Aqua with a kludge a'la VNC...

The difference between the two is more subtle then you would allow for consideration in your categorization. One is of interest to anyone who relys heavily on X for day to day fun/work and the other is relatively specific to a narrower group of users.

Whichever... I guess we'll have to leave the decision to the great and wise CmdrTaco :)

It's *free*, not the best :)

[Erisynne]

There are other implementations of true X Window support for MacOS X, however they are not free. In fact, I believe they are quite costly -- upwards of $200 or so. This obviously won't be the case for much longer, but the notability of this article was that there is finally a free (if somewhat kludgy) solution taht will get the job done FROM within the OS X GUI. Other free solutions require console access.

Re:It's *free*, not the best :)

[Wesley Felter]

Yeah, using VNC just so you can run X apps is a kludge; why not just use WeirdX?

Xtools

[mandelbaum]

here, this is an X server for OS X, without the VNC overhead:

http://www.tenon.com/products/xtools/

-aaron

Can we get an FTP mirror?

[WillAdams]

I've been trying to d/l this for a while, but no joy, 'cause it's re-directed http, and I can't resume that through the proxy here at work.

William

--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams

Ummmm... What's the point???

[edelbrp]

I've run both MacOS X and Yellow Dog Linux on my iBook, and YDL seems to win out. Especially if you'd rather opt for the X-Windows environment over MacOS-X's (I don't blame you..).

I mean, why keep any of it, if you are replacing the GUI with X-windows?? Why not just install YDL and be done with it! It certainly makes compiling/porting of other OSS easier.

--Phil

One Downside: Mutual Exclusivity

[Christopher B. Brown]

According to the Darwin site,

This really is a document about XFree86 on Darwin, but there's just a tiny trick to get things working on MacOS X. You should follow all the directions above, but to be able to get X working on MacOS X, you need to quit the MacOS GUI. To do this, log in as console, and it should drop you to a text prompt. From there you can start XFree86 the same as from Darwin.

I'd call this a bit more than a "tiny trick;" it is more than a small matter that you need to quit the MacOS GUI.

That means that you can't, at least not with XFree86-for-Darwin, run MacOS apps concurrently with X-based applications.

It certainly represents a cool hack, but, in that it requires choosing not to use "MacOS," this rather diminishes the merits of having MacOS-X. If you haven't the GUI, how much better can "text mode" MacOS-X be than Linux or *BSD?

Re:One Downside: Mutual Exclusivity

[edelbrp]

Exactly my point! Once you quit the MacOS GUI, you'll find that the (stock) 'Unix' system is stripped down to (dare I say!) 'DOS-like' functionality. You can mv, cp, and other basic things, but most of the power and functionality of BSD systems I'm used to, simply wasn't there!

Soooo, what's the point? You've got a pretty (arguably), slow, buggy, clunky GUI w/ MacOS-X. If you don't want to use it, then you've thrown away a majority of what MacOS-X is! Is there an advantage to keeping the rest, even if you add X-windows? It doesn't sound like there is.

--Phil

Re:One Downside: Mutual Exclusivity

[bgue]

I'd call this a bit more than a "tiny trick;" it is more than a small matter that you need to quit the MacOS GUI.
That means that you can't, at least not with XFree86-for-Darwin, run MacOS apps concurrently with X-based applications.

Hey, you can't run MacOS apps on Darwin anyway, XFree or not. It's the BSD core of OSX, without the MacOS compatability or GUI.

In any case, on a full version of OSX, the article says you *can* run MacOS apps concurrently with X apps, since the X ones show up in a VNC window (see the previous VNC threads)...

Try reading more than the first line of the article before complaining.

Brian

Get WeirdX

[Wesley Felter]

If you want to use X and Quartz apps at the same time, get WeirdX. It's not fast, but it works.

Re: What's fuzting?

[ceswiedler]

futzing is a term commonly used in Larry Niven novels, as a euphemism for "fucking." tanj dammit also comes to mind: "there ain't no justice!"

Please post as BSD

[ststrat]

In fact, any stories not directly related to Aqua or Mach on OS X should be posted as BSD.
Credit where credit is due. You listening Apple?

Re:X? Come along...

[Wesley Felter]

Hey, you forgot to include the obligatory link to The X-Windows Disaster. :-)

There already is

[Anne Marie]

Behold: the Y Window System. Check out the overview. It shows promise, but then, we've been saying that about Berlin for years now.

One button

[Microsift]

Apple doesn't sell a one-button mouse anymore.

Re:One button

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

Yeah, it's now a no button mouse!

Stupidest thing I ever saw...

Re:I pulled the plug on my Cue Cat

[iso]

offtopic, but how do you get a CueCat anyhow? is this just an american thing? i was at a RadioShack here in Toronto (Canada) and they didn't know anything about the CueCat (.. ;;?:Cue:;Cat:?:: .. whatever).

i'd like to get my hands on one just to play around.

- j

At least three reasons

[bcrowell]

Well, if all you want is Unix and X Windows, I can't imagine why you'd have bought Mac hardware in the first place. Assuming you like the MacOS interface and/or have previous Mac software that you need to keep running, there are several reasons to use MacOS X and not Linux:

(1) You don't have to have separate partitions for MacOS and Unix.

(2) The Linux flavor I tried (LinuxPPC) didn't work on my G4 when I tried to get it running. (But let me add that the LinuxPPC guy I talked to about it was really nice, and offered to send me a free update when G4 support was better.)

(3) Commercial software companies have a tendency to start demanding more recent OS versions after a while, so unless you never intend to buy Mac software again, you'll eventually need to upgrade.

Radeon, was Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes"...

[ostiguy]

Yo,

How about us poor Win2k users? The Radeon drivers are about 50% slower than the 98 ones. ATI isn't getting my money until they get their act together

ostiguy

Of course, the reason nVidia isn't an option is because of their closed source binary drivers for Xfree86. I am just another MCSE who runs OpenBSD for a router/firewall.

Comment normalization

[TheInternet]

Fact: Apple recommends 192 Megs of memory as a realistic minimum

Where did you get this so-called "fact?" 128MB works great. And remember, this is still pre-release unoptimized code. The goal is to get it down to 64MB by 1.0.

Windows 95 box that I use for web surfing. It has 32 Megs of memory. It runs on a Cyrix 5x86-120 (sort of a 486-DX-120). It flies.

Windows 95 is hardly comparable to OSX. A lot of the aforementioned requirements for OSX go into supporting the Classic environment which is an entirely different OS. If you think Win95 is better overall than OSX, then feel free to continue using it.

But this is a moot point since OSX on Intel isn't good business sense right now.

- Scott

------
Scott Stevenson

Re:Xtools price

[TheInternet]

here, this is an X server for OS X, without the VNC overhead

Xtools looks nice nice, but it will also set you back about $200.

- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson

Re:conspiracy!

[pressman]

Oh give me a break! The graphics market is never going to go away and graphic artists are never going to give up their Macs. With Aqua under OS X, the mac graphics market is going to flourish like never before. On screen font rendering. "Save As PDF" from any application! No more cheesy, low rez, bitmapped screen captures. Then there's the core BSD layer with all the fancy buzzwords like Prememptive Multitasking, Protected memory etc. etc. Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand, Indesign, XPress and the rest are going to fly. Keep your ill-informed doomsaying to yourself. The Mac may never overtake the AMD x86 market, but as long as Apple is posting healthy quarterly profits and maintain their overwhelming performance benefit in graphics they will be around for a long time.

Re:OSX on Intel

[MacDaffy]

This is out-and-out wrong. If you opt not to run the Classic MacOS alongside it, MacOS X runs with 64 MB of memory.

Re:If only...

[TheInternet]

If only the G4 cubes didn't have hairline cracks in their clear plastic casings

Whatever they are, it's not too suprising that they showed up. Nobody has tried to make a computer like this with these materials before. It's hard to blame engineering for shortcomings in an experimental product. It's easy to blame PR for the way they dealt with it.

If only the G4 cube had a fan so it wouldn't overheat like a toaster.

Ummmm, I actually haven't heard of any of the cubes overheating. PowerPCs take much less power and generate much less heat than most other chips.

If only it had capacity for a true RAID cage

I think this may be outside of Apple's target market.

If only the G4 cube had an SVGA connector

Agreed.

If only it had room for more than 2 DIMMs.

Hmmm, size sacrifices have to be made somewhere to shrink the case. Otherwise, why not get a tower?

- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson

Well, I don't know about that

[TheInternet]

It doesn't. OSX is not, and will not be, a Unix flavor. It is a proprietary user environment running on top of the Mach kernel.

That'a bit misleading, as it acts very much like a Unix flavor in a number of ways. Certainly much more than NT ever will. The fact that it is based on Darwin says a lot, and Darwin is nothing if it is not Unix. I'm not qualified to compare OSX to Irix, though. There are a number of articles on the web as to how good of a Unix MOSX is. Such a topic is beyond the scope of a single post.

- Scott


------
Scott Stevenson

Rootless X display already available for Mac OS X

[andrew]

Tenon has a beta of Xtools available for download.

According to their press release it is a:

full implementation of the X Windows system running on Mac OS X. Based on X11R6.4, Xtools inherits the clean, fast, stable, and portable codebase from Xfree86. Integration with the Aqua environment is enabled by building the X server on top of Cocoa and QuickDraw, providing a rootless X windows display while still retaining the ability to use native applications.

Of course, it costs real money, but it seems to be a smoother solution than VNC.

-Andrew

Re:OSX on Intel

[toddhisattva]

It would have to be a very limited set of "Intel" hardware. I can't even get Linux to run on my ASUS mobo w/K6-2, and I've tried SIX of them. LinuxPPC went on my Mac 7600 with no problems.

Folks, the reasons PeeCees are so much cheaper is that they are so much crappier! "PC" stands for "Peice of Crap" after all.

Troll, flame, or mere observation: your pick. -Toddhisattva

Some gaps

[TheInternet]

The Mac is dying.

You do realize how ridiculous that sounds considering that 1) this has been said since 1986 2) Mac marketshare has been increasing recently?

It can't compete with Durons/Athlons/Thunderbirds, PIII, PIV, SMP

Actually, that's the funny part. Despite popular slashdot belief, G4s do quite a admirable job of competing with processors at twice their clock speed. You'll note that IBM, Sun, etc. do not freak out that they sell high-end machines with low-megahertz processors in them. The real problem is that Motorola has not shipped faster chips in about a year. As for SMP, the G4 was designed with SMP in mind, as was OSX. You can get a dual G4 for $2500.

The reason Mac lost is that they didn't realize the power of the commodity marketplace.

Or maybe consider the option that Apple isn't really about that type of product. Do we really need another generic box maker?

AMD is now doing SMP

PowerPC has been doing SMP since the 604 days. This isn't that impressive.

Motorola will be out of the PPC business withing 2 years

Hopefully.

Why do you think they are stuck at 500 Mhz?

Because their fabrication process sucks. IBM had to come in and save the day.

Right. No interest in going furuther.

They just unveiled the G4 Plus at 1GHz. No idea when this will end up in an Apple machine, though.

Motorola pulls out and Mac will croak.

Strong words for somebody who has never run a multi-billion dollar computer company before (I'm assuming :).

- Scott


------
Scott Stevenson

About the Cube

[piecewise]

Just so people know, I bought a new Cube with 17" monitor and cost me $1799. Well worth it. It's not only absolutely beautiful, but it's incredibly fast.

As a big supporter of Linux, I suppose I'm not AS into aestetics... but when I see a little power icon on the top of the Cube, but not button, I go to press it and suddenly it's glowing (i can't tell from where!) -- well, I'm very impressed. I'm finding these "Stupid Apple design details" really make it wonderful. People say, we don't need Tangerine iBooks! I want something dull!
Well you know what? My work can be pretty dull, and when I go and look at this beautiful machine that's ALSO very fast and very ahead of its time (OSX), I'm pretty damn inspired to produce some beautiful code.
It's not for everyone, but it's definately for me, and a few million other people.

I'm running Mac OS X Public Beta on the Cube and I really love it. Yes there are some quirks, but it's just so amazing and a lot can happen between now and January.

Re:About the Cube

[Dahan]

Just so people know, I bought a new Cube with 17" monitor and cost me $1799. Well worth it. It's not only absolutely beautiful, but it's incredibly fast.

What's a good place to buy Macs nowadays? The last time I bought a Mac was in '92 :) The Apple Store sells a Cube without any monitor for $1799; where did you get Cube and monitor for that price? I'm actually interested in getting a dual G4, not a cube :)

Re:About the Cube

[piecewise]

A cube without a monitor is $1799 - a monitor is $499 (starting)
There's a $300 rebate, so it about evens out.

My business also houses Dual G4s with Mac OS X.. It's wonderful

CompUSA devotes a big section of its store specifically just to Apple.
Circuit City is in the works of doing the same, only they'll devote
about a quarter of their store just to Apple.

Rumor says Apple is opening their own retail stores.

I've NEVER had trouble with CompUSA or The Apple Store. They're both
extremely supportive. People blast Apple for its Support staff, but
honestly I've never had a problem.

Chris.

Misleading blurb...

[Hacksworth]

When I read that Mac OS X was free, I thought you meant that you didn't have to order the public beta for $30 and that Apple had it up on its ftp servers. Oh well, not that it isn't all over hotline and carracho.

I would disagree

[TotallyUseless]

Im no unix expert, but I do have experience with them. I have been using MacOSX for several weeks now, and it is a lot like a regular unix system, if thats what you want it to be. If you want to live in shell windows, using the command line, it is perfectly possible to get along that way. All of the standard unix utilities you would expect are there. Most of the source code for terminal apps that you try will work with little or no modification. If you wanna use it for a proxy for your network, or for your web server, it is all there, waiting for you. If you want to use the gui, it is waiting there for you too. I use pico for a lot of text editing, but sometimes I use textEdit (the cocoa app). I think many diehard unix users will be happy if they give it a chance. It is what you make of it

Re:If only...

[Wesley Felter]

If only the G4 cube had an SVGA connector...

Then what's this "15-pin mini D-Sub VGA connector" on the spec sheet?

Free clue: It has both the weird ADC connector and a standard SVGA connector.

Re:That's NOT a 15-pin midi d-sub.

[AFCArchvile]

I'm sure about it, the connector is larger. It's DVI, a standard used only in digital flat panels. A converter isn't too expensive, but neither is it common.

Re:OSX on Intel

[toddhisattva]

I have run the Classic environment in OS X beta in just 64M.

I love how ignorant PeeCee folks are -- 256M, really, just how stupid do you have to be to make up stuff like that?

I'm typing from my Linux-unable PeeCee, which has a K6-2 at 333MHz, and it compiles code some 40% slower than my Mac with G3 at 300MHz.

Let's just fire CmdrTaco for starting this price/performance crap for no good reason.

-Toddhisattva

Re:Do the math: about 2.3 times as much.

[meebs]

funny how clueless idiots like this guy get angry at people who just want things to work. Boy! I want to live in your world where fashion designers, interior decorators, and here's what really made me laugh out loud.... GRAPHIC ARTISTS... are wiped from the planet, because they don't compare dick sizes all day long on a message board. lol... skate on bro.

Re:If only...

[Coretti]

However, I haven't used a Cube yet, so for all I know it might melt within half an hour. :-)

After having my Cube on roughly 24/7 for the past 2 months, I can safely say that this does not happen. :)

Re:NetBSD runs on nearly every Mac

[Dahan]

Most of the custom ASICs on early Macs have been reverse-engineered and ports of NetBSD exist for nearly every Mac (with a few exceptions; AV Macs especially).

Eh? I don't know about the AV PowerMacs (haven't gotten around to buying a PowerMac yet, but those dual G4s are tempting :), but NetBSD works just fine on the 68K AV Macs (660av and 840av); I even wrote a driver for the onboard ethernet chip and its funky DMA controller

Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000
The NetBSD Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
The Regents of the University of California.All rights reserved.

NetBSD 1.5_BETA (GEDD) #602: Sun Oct 22 01:41:46 CDT 2000
khym@dahan.metonymy.com:/usr/src.local/sys/arch/ma c68k/compile/GED D
Apple Macintosh Centris 660AV(68040)
cpu: delay factor 800
total memory = 36864 KB
avail memory = 31040 KB

Re:NetBSD runs on nearly every Mac

[Dahan]

Actually, all of the AV PowerMacs were Nubus 601 machines, weren't they? NetBSD currently doesn't run on any Nubus PowerMac. The reason doesn't have anything to do with the AV stuff--I think it's the lack of OpenFirmware that's the problem.

Re:Well, for those of us who don't use MacOS/OS X

[Dahan]

Considering that there is no working version of FreeBSD for the Mac, I guess the question is irrelavent.

Well, he said NetBSD or FreeBSD. NetBSD works on just about all PowerMacs less than 5 years old, and almost every 68K Mac with a 68020+PMMU or higher.

Tenon

[ToastyKen]

True, but it'd be great if people would start working on an open source version..

Re:That's NOT a 15-pin midi d-sub.

[Wesley Felter]

I'm pretty sure that the DVI signals go through the ADC port and that the D-sub connector really is standard VGA, but who cares? I don't want a Cube and I don't care if other people want to go around bashing it.

Re:If only...

[gig]

If only the G4 cubes didn't have hairline cracks in their clear plastic casings (I don't care whether they're cracks or just flashings from molding, those blemishes don't belong!).

Yawn. They apparently fell a little short of crafting an absolutely seamless and perfect Cube out of transparent plastic. "If I had known that my Cube wasn't going to be geometrically perfect, I would have got a Compaq". Right.

If only the G4 cube had a fan so it wouldn't overheat like a toaster.

What are you talking about? Whose Cube overheated?

If only it had capacity for a true RAID cage (not yet another über-clocked serial interface stretched to the limits).

If you want a Cube with big storage, either 1) hook up two FireWire drives and turn them into a RAID with SoftRAID, or 2) hook up an actual hardware FireWire RAID, or 3) pay $200 extra for your Cube and get Gigabit Ethernet and hook up to an Ethernet storage device. Are you really stretching your FireWire bus to its limits? What are you doing that causes that? Lucky for you, the 800mbs version is almost ready.

If only the G4 cube had an SVGA connector so you could connect a decent 21-inch monitor to it instead of Apple's ultra-lucid offerings.

The Cube has an SVGA connector, as well as a standard DVI+ connector, which Apple calls an "Apple Display Connector", same as they call 1394 "FireWire".

* If only it had room for more than 2 DIMMs.

You're breaking my heart. The Cube is 8 inches square and can take a GB of RAM. Boo-hoo.

If only you could put in a less expensive IDE CD-recorder.

You can get a USB model for $200 or less, or a FireWire one for a bit more, and use either on multiple machines. Que makes some really nice looking ones.

If only it didn't look like a giant spider once you finished connecting all the external devices.

That's a weird complaint to make about a machine whose standard cabling goes:

mouse --- keyboard --- display --- Cube --- wall power

all in one long line, and has antennaes built-in for wireless networking. The last time I checked, there weren't any other manufacturers doing anything at all about how cables look on their machines. Apple is the only company I've ever seen who actually shows their products in their advertising with cables attached and showing, such as the iMac ad that shows how to set up an iMac. HP is not going to show you what kind of cables are involved in their machines until after you buy.

What to think about Macintosh speed

[xhypertensionx]

I love it when "I hate everything except Windows Magazine" decides to rate a Mac. Oftentimes these people are so ignorant of how to use one, I'm surprised that they could even figure out how to run the applications they want to benchmark.

The way I see it is this: using a Mac is a lot like using a jetski. If you're slightly serious about either, you're going to know that a little effort is necessary to make them run to their full potential. MacAddict magazine knows this, and just like any decent Mac user, they were able to do the five minutes of software tweaking necessary to make a 500 mhz G4 match a 1 Ghz Athalon.

Sure, the benchmarks that they ran were done in Photoshop, but what about the benchmarks done by others? Can we really trust them? "This Pentium III running M$ windows was considerably faster (1.2 seconds) at running MS applications than the G4 was."

Please...

Instead of using MS applications, you refer to Quake 3. Is it anything like Unreal Tournament, which is a friggen Macplay PORT??

I am not blind to the fact that some PC applications work better than their Mac counter-parts, but I tend to believe that the root of the problem lies in company's Mac development teams.. is Microsoft REALLY going to make its office software work better on a Mac than a PC running their OS?

I suppose when OS X final is released, with its BSD core, that it won't be the "turgid, inefficient piece of crap" that you see in the current OS now. I think that Macs might perform better in other "credible" benchmarks in the future because the new OS may eliminate the need for some of the software tweaking that was needed to be done before to achieve maximum efficiency.

Very much depends on the software of course

[renoX]

Yes, maybe it was the software: if the software isn't using multiple process, you won't see any improvement going from one to two CPU.

SMP is nice but you really have to know what you're doing!

Re:Very much depends on the software of course

[Bongo]

if the software isn't using multiple process, you won't see any improvement going from one to two CPU

Yes, I gather the software was SMP enabled.... what I meant (I wasn't very clear) was that maybe it was just not very well implemented... or maybe like you say... it really wasn't using the second chip at all, and the P4 is just average in fp performance.

Re:That's NOT a 15-pin midi d-sub.

[gig]

There is a VGA port and an ADC port on the video cards that ship in Cube and tower Macs. If you buy the retail (boxed) version of the same two ATI cards you can get from Apple, they have a VGA and a plain DVI on them. I have yet to see a display card with a digital output that didn't also have a VGA on it. At least not in the last couple of years.

The ADC is actually one of the standard DVI connectors. It is the same as the plain DVI connector, except that it has a few more pins on the end that carry VGA, USB and power. It is better than the plain DVI plug (since all digital flat panel displays also need USB and power as well as DVI), but it is not cheaper. Hence, it is not used by manufacturers of commodity PC's.

I know it's natural to go "oh no, not another connector", but the reason that adapters to split ADC into plain DVI / USB / VGA / power are cheap because all those things are within the ADC. The signals are the same. You're not converting anything, just re-cabling. It's only an issue of three cables between two devices, or one cable between two devices, not a competing technology.

Think about it, though: the ADC carries everything any display could possibly need in one cable, whether the display is analog (VGA) or digital (DVI). That's why all of Apple's displays (2 digital LCD's and one analog CRT) all use the ADC connector. If every computer had one of these connectors, hooking up a display to a computer would be as simple as plugging in the cable from the display into the computer and that's it, without having to know or worry about whether it's an analog or digital display. We ought to applaud Apple for going down this road. Why switch from the VGA connector to the plain DVI connector (as an industry) and not get a little more than just the plain analog to digital switch? The ADC also carries VGA, so you have a way to adapt an existing VGA monitor design to an ADC connector easily. The signal is still there. The ADC is a good "universal" display connector, wheras the rest of the industry is going with having both VGA and plain DVI on everything from now until probably forever, along with instructions not to hook up a display to both at once, and the requirement that you have a vague knowledge of which display is analog and which is digital. Billions of people hooking up billions of displays over the coming years will also have to run a separate power and USB cable. Why would you voluntarily have three cables going between two devices? So you can knock $20 off the price of the computer. Not worth it. If you use Compaq or Dell or whatever brand of machine, you ought to be on them to get with this program. Think about it next time you're hooking up three cables between two devices.

*Sight*, let's not be religious here!

[renoX]

A CPU alone won't do you any good, usually mainboards for any other general purpose CPU than a x86 are usually much more expensive!

Why? Simply because of the huge number of PC and the economy of scale..

PPC DO NOT offer better performance/price!
Check the SpecInt/SpecFP benchmarks, they are the most reliable tests, do not blindly beleive Intel or Apple...
Better perfomance/power consumed, yes but it is not really an interesting benchmark for desktop computer, for laptop on the other hand it is much more interesting.

Consoles are very very different from general purpose computers so you cannot use Nintendo as an example.

Apple won't use 80x86 CPU but it is much more a problem of hardware control and a problem of software control than only a performance problem..

Freeing the Developer from OS Vendor Shackles

[goingware]

Operating systems vendors invest a great deal of energy in getting applications developers to code products to the native API of the OS.

The result is that it is very difficult for the developer to bring the product out on a competing platform, and it discourages users from moving to a different OS when they feel the vendor isn't serving their needs (because they can't get the solutions to their problems).

If the developer doesn't want to deal with the OS vendor anymore, he's really got a problem - either suffer under the vendor's thumb, or make a great deal of personal sacrifice to move to a different operating system.

I was sick of Apple so I wrote I'm worried about my future. That's why I'm a Be developer.

And in fact I shipped (and still do support) on of the first commercial applications for the BeOS, Spellswell from Working Software.

Nothing Be ever did made any sense, and while there are individuals at the company that I regard highly, on the whole I felt the company to be uniquely unresponsive and incompetent.

And just when they were showing some promise of shipping enough BeOS installations that I had some hope of making more than the measly couple hundred bucks I'd earned in royalties in the three years I'd been working on Spellswell, they announced a "change in focus" and said they weren't going to support the desktop anymore, except for the extent necessary to use it as a development platform for their new Strategy Du Jour, Internet Appliances.

After I posted on BeDevTalk that Some of Us Work for a Living, the moderator told me he was fed up with a developer who was trying to discuss business issues of concern to Be's third-party developers on Be's third-party developer mailing list. That was my last message to bedevtalk - he unsubscribed me.

I've been working on a really challenging C++ application for a few months, and after reading C++ Answers with Bjarne Stoustrup I got excited about really digging into the basics of programming - but from the perspective of a developer with 13 years of work experience and a lot of shipping products.

I bought a few books, mostly on C++ and also hit some websites and newsgroups, and I became a much better programmer as a result. And I really felt that I did better to spend my time on core architectural and language issues rather than dealing with OS-specific nits or tool issues. And so I wrote Study Fundamentals, Not APIs, Tools or OSes.

So this brings me back to being used by operating systems vendors to serve their material needs at my expense and the cost of much personal pain. If you become a better programmer by learning the basics better, to can fluidly go from OS to OS without much of a learning curve.

But there's the problem that you have to use some API to code your application to, and while Java claims to be "platform-independent" it is really a proprietary platform in itself - just try making use of platform-specific code in a Java application, yes you can do it with the Java Native Interface but it is difficult and an assault on the Java developer's senses to write a dll in C or C++ to load into the runtime.

So what you really need is a cross-platform application framework that you can write in with a language such as C++, that comes preconfigured with easy-to-use preprocessor symbols so you can drop into OS-specific code at your whim, and will compile from a single sourcebase to native machine code for multiple operating systems.

Funny that, since December '99 I've been writing a multithreaded special-purpose graphics editor that is also an HTTP client with just such a cross-platform application framework. I can develop on Mac or Windows as the need suits me and switch back and forth at a moments notice (especially now that I've got filesharing between my machines). My client only asked for Mac and Windows versions but I could port to BeOS or Linux in a few days. The framework is called ZooLib.

It was written by my friend Andrew Green of The Electric Magic Company, originally to insulate himself from Apple's API nonsense. (Do you remember when all progress on developer tools at Apple and Symantec stopped while they went off into the sunset to develop Bedrock, itself a cross-platform application framework and an immense investment of time and money - and then abandoned it? If it hadn't been for then-tiny Metrowerks Apple would have gone out of business after shipping the first PowerPC Macs, because there would have been no native PPC compilers.)

He felt that if he could code to his own layer and Apple changed their API, he'd just have to reimplement the OS-specific layer and he'd be working again. But then a little more work and he'd be cross-platform...

If you click that link today you'll just get a placeholder page. But just wait a few days...

(For practical reasons the source itself, mailing lists and so on will be provided at http://zoolib.sourceforge.net/ once it's released.)

While ZooLib is to be newly released to the public it is not new code. It has been in use in commercial products for about five years - and in development in my own since last December. Part of why Andy gave me the code and I've been working with it is to give him meaningful architectural feedback and detailed bug reports so he can prepare it for public release.

I've been urging Andy to release the source as-is for a couple of years but his standards are incredibly high for a programmer. Andy's code doesn't just work, it is correct.

Andy spares no effort or time to fix the smallest problems (this is especially important in multithreaded code - think about reference counted smart pointers that are operated on by different threads, as you can do with Zoolib), and part of why he's been delaying the release is to improve the overall architecture.

For more details, including relevant quotes from Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's Findings of Fact and Final Judgement discussing why Microsoft felt it was more important than anything to suppress cross-platform API's, such as Netscape plug-ins, Java, Intel Native Signal Processing, Lotus Notes, Apple Quicktime (runs on Windows too!) and RealNetworks' multimedia technology, please read my early draft of:

The Cross-Platform Manifesto

Thank you for your attention.

Regards,

So have they fixed that problem yet....

[mgblst]

OK, so this may be construed by some people as a flame but....

..yesterday, my friend wanted to copy a file from one disk to another, and since we were using a uni computer, i assumed that the harddrive would be locked. So i thought, considering myself relatively smart, that i could load up the doc in word, eject the disk, put in the new disk, and save it onto the new disk. So i load it up, eject the disk, put in the new disk, and try to save it, but then it prompts me to insert the old disk. So i do so, but it seems to want me to swap diskc ad infinitem.

What the hell is this about. Why does it even need the old disk back in the first place. This was very frustrating.

Surely they would have fixed this in MacOSX????

Apple: radical change, little user downside.

[drowsy]

Apple does what other companies just talk about: making sweeping changes while reinforcing customer loyalty.

Maybe this is commonplace, but I remember going from 68K to PPC with very little inconvience. Apple pulled off an incredible feat: changing the architecture while allowing folks to keep operating in a business-as-usual fashion.

Now we are changing again, and I find Classic to be a more than adequate solution. Apple makes very bold moves and manages to keep most of its user base happy and able to leverage past investments in the platform. (Well, except I got burned on the Geoport, but you can't win them all.)

That's amazing.

Geez, SGI couldn't pull this kind of thing off with Cray or Intel.

BTW: I've never been a big fan of X-windows GUI. To this day I can't tell which radio buttons/checkboxes are selected and which ones aren't. I use it when I must, like with the GIMP.
Otherwise, it's CLI or MacGUI for me. I'm still getting used to Aqua, but it's better than X for GUI.

Just because it's old ...

[Bryan Ischo]

Doesn't mean it's not CORRECT.

X is simply a protocol for describing how clients and servers may communicate so that clients can draw window contents onto servers' screens. Period. It is a well-defined problem space, and X, as a solution, is pretty much IT. There have not been fundamental changes to X in 10 years because it is a correct, complete, efficient solution to the problem. Period.

Yes, there are areas in which X can be improved, such as font support, but this is NO reason to chuck X. You try designing a network-transparent windowing system and see how far you get before all of the problems that X solves with respect to race conditions, efficiency, performance, correctness, etc, bite you in the butt and you give up and go with X.

Xlib is a problem. It represents the minimal set of C API calls necessary to expose the full functionality of the X protocol to a client program. But it does not provide any kind of higher-level windowing system functionality such as buttons and scrollbars. Thus, many people have implemented these things in many different ways, most of them poor, and the result is that the typical X program looks and runs like crap.

This is NOT the fault of X. It is the fault of the people who released X without releasing any kind of standardized, effective toolkit that won over a broad base of usage. It is the fault of the people who have and will continue to ruin Unix by refusing to engage in any kind of standardization whatsoever.

The fragmentation of Unix systems and Unix desktops is a problem, but it IS NOT THE FAULT OF X!

So stop blaming X already!

X is state of the art because the "art" (network transparent windowing) has not changed, and will not change, in the same way that algebra is state of the art because the fundamental facts of mathematics do not change.

BTW, there are resolutions for which jaggies do not occur, despite your assertion to the contrary - any resolution where the pixel is too small to be seen by the naked eye, will not have jaggies and will not require antialiasing. I predict that 95% of all computers will meet this criterion within 10 years.

In the meantime, YES, we need support for antialising in X. There are standardized mechanisms for extending X to support things like this. The problem once again is that there is no common toolkit API that all X programs are using such that simply adding an antialiasing extension to the X server will magically fix X programs.

Once again, not X's fault - it's the fault of toolkits and the general X developer community which failed to produce a single viable toolkit (and GTK makes me barf, by the way).