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Linux Promises, Apple Delivers
Anonymous Mac OS X Coward writes "This is a pretty strong article talking about Apple's delivery of *nix to the common man, something Linux has been touting for a while.
It has good points, like apple actually tries to make the OS user friendly while linux sees this as a side project." Valid points. I need to get a copy of OSX. I'm really curious if it truly can be the common persons *nix. Sure looks like it could be, but I still don't know.
Why is it so important to get unix onto everyones desktop? As long as linux is available why should I care if anyone but me is using it?
It will support ALL Macs shipped in the last 4 years which is about 50% of the installed user base. It only supports 7 machine types because there are only 7 machine types in the last 4 years. Mac hardware has most of the same features as an x86 box (PC cards, PCI slots, USB, Firewire) especially if you remove legacy ports (like Intel and M$ want to do).
80% of the world lives on $1 or less a day? Wow. Sucks to be them.
Now, if only I could figure out how to live on $80,000 a year, I'd be set.
Maybe they should all have studied a little more in school. "You're labourers! You should be labouring! That's what you get for not having an education!" - Jerry Hathaway, Real Genius
> What part of "Mac-OS-X ready" did you understand
... mystery components, missing drivers, hard-to-install OS, etc. Apple's support is one of the reasons that you can find so many 5-10 year old Macs still in use.
...
> mister know-it-all? That 800 dollar imac aint gonna
> run MacOSX worth a shit, and apple knows it. that's
> why it aint mac-os-X ready.
I'm sorry, but you are completely wrong on this. I'm running a late beta of Mac OS X on an old iBook right now, and it runs great. This machine has a 300MHz G3 processor, 512K L2 cache, a 66MHz bus, 192MB RAM, 4MB video RAM, and a 4200rpm notebook hard drive. Windows flow around very quickly, it responds to user input instantly, and is all-in-all, a pleasure to use. The fact that it never, ever crashes and the interface is simple and logical makes this a great machine for a newbie.
Now, if this old iBook is running Mac OS X very well, it stands to reason that it will run like a dream on the $800 iMac, which has a faster CPU, twice the L2 cache, a 100MHz bus, twice the video RAM and a better video chipset, and a much faster desktop hard drive.
A postscript to the "third world computing" argument would be to note that this iBook I'm using now will probably be passed down to two or three or even more users before it stops being useful. If the hard drive ever gets wiped or crashes, any user will be able to get a Mac OS X CD and install the OS from scratch and be on the Internet within a half hour. That kind of "built-in" technical support is also worth something. There are a lot of ways a generic PC can become useless as it's passed on to other users
Please give Mac OS X a look for yourself
"...while linux sees this as a side project...". There is no such thing as a side project in Linux. There is always someone somewhere who thinks whatever project they are on is the most wonderful and important thing in the world. I am sure the Gnome and KDE team don't concider a user-friendly GUI to be a side project.
I find Linux amazingly easy-to-use (And UNIX in general, except for things like CDE, but that is another story). I can get done what I need to get done. I can find out what I need to find out about everything. I know exactly what the programs running on my computer do, how they are run, and how they interact, so I can fix problems when they come up rather than just shrug. I love my command line, and shell scripting, and script languages, and can do amazingly complex tasks fairly easily with them.
My window manager is configured to be fairly fast, so that I can use my keyboard to get around easily and accomplish other tasks easily. Selecting copies to the clipboard, middle-click pastes. All these things make me powerful on my computer.
This all took me a while to learn, however.
MacOS (and also Windows) fall under ``easy-to-learn''. They do not have as many of the flexible, powerful tools available to them. They really don't care about that, they want people to be able to do easy tasks without having to sit down and understand things. Things are hidden from the user as much as possible; many times it is impossible to do tasks that are trivial under a UNIX machine.
``easy-to-learn'' systems are important in a world where people don't want to have to figure out how things work in order to play solitaire or download email viruses^W^W porn^H^H^H^H games and emails from friends. To this end, I think that Linux is fairly easy-to-learn from a user perspective, though adminisration is still rough. But even administration has become much more ``easy-to-learn.'' And userland is getting better almost weekly.
On the contrary, MacOS (until maybe OSX, I will believe it when I see it) and Windows have not become, for me, any more easy-to-use. They are easier to learn, but still not as easy-to-use.
Please don't stick me in front of a computer that isn't easy-to-use. I just can't take it. I need to be productive in front of a computer, if you take the productivity away from me it is terribly frustrating.
Rant over.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
You are missing the point. A unix is difficult to use (bear with me) but very powerful and flexible. It is the best option for a hacker, one who works with the computer itself, and has to have as much access and as much control as possible to do his job (programming, adminning, etc.)
For the rest of the world, the opposite is better. An OS that is very easy to use but somewhat limited in what it can do by itself. To them, a computer is a tool for doing something else. They don't care about all the options they have for the computer itself, they just want it to do what it has to do to get out of their way and let them get stuff done.
If someone made the equivalent of a game console that ran only Photoshop, they would own the content creation world.
5) I've got a G4 under my desk right this very moment, running Debian/PPC. Although I may play with MacOSX out of morbid curiosity about what they did to my old love, NeXTstep, I know that I'll maintain Debian as my primary system for the sole reason that I'm never again going to put myself in the position where I have to wait for my vendor.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
sure, but do realize at all what they did? come on, porting an os is one thing. But maintaining binary compatibility with legacy apps is wholly something else. They didn't have it run in a virtual machine which trivializes the problem (relatively). Much like i386 binaries on Alpha for windows or linux (developed by Digital, very well I might add), MacOS allowed 68k apps to run alongside their PPC companions, and even the OS itself had mixed arch components.
I'm sure this is the reason (besides their being married to intel) MS will never port windows to anything non-intel. NT is actually one of the most widely ported OS's, although only 4 arch variants were ever sold. The core has been ported to tons of different architectures internally, if only for the exercise. But that experience allowed MS to port CE (the same core as NT) to lots of non-intel/alpha/mips/ppc apps.
I'm not saying that MacOS (pre-X) is a well designed OS by today's standards. But it beat the shit out of anything else that ran on a 512x384 screen with 1meg of ram in 1984. It's just a pity they didn't scrap that OS sooner.
Linux will continue to be available to those who want to use and extend it. Linux won't just go away, just because some users switch to OS X because they want user-friendly. If that's what they really want, well, OK, that's their choice. (Just keep in mind you have to buy the whole package - Apple's hardware, which is a good bit more expensive than PC hardware, in general, to get OS X.)
One thing I find interesting is that some people seem to think that people who write Open Source/Free Software programs should write for others, not for themselves. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why an individual writes a piece of code. They don't do it to make some amorphous entity, known only as The Buying Public(TM), happy - they write to scratch a personal itch. Whether it's something they need to get a job done, or something they just want to do, they're not doing it with Joe Windows Luser in mind. You expect them, just out of the goodness of their heart, to put time into something that they have no interest in using, and (quite likely) have no interest in trying to build a business around?
This is the problem with the typical user. They just don't understand, and can't believe that the entire world isn't groveling on hand and foot to serve their needs. Bah.
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Let those companies spend their dollars to write what they want, and make their distro what they want it to be. They can make a profit if they choose to do so, but damn it, no one owes anyone a revenue stream "just because". I'll stick with Debian, thanks.
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
The clone makers were outselling AND underpricing Apple. They were making the same or better machines and selling them for less and the users loved it. An illustrator I worked with still has a Power Computing G3 and he says it runs quite a bit more reliably than the Apple G3 he has sitting right next to it AND was cheaper.
Power Computing never made a G3 machine. The highest they went was PPC 604e. I've owned two Power Computing machines. Both still working today. However, I have some rather annoying problems with a couple of Power Computing Power Center Pro 210s (210 MHz 604e) at work (running 9.0.4 and 9.1). They just seem to lock up every once in a while. I have this theory that the motherboard and/or components are just different enough from Apple's design that the were based on (7200) that things go strange every once in a while. In contrast, my Apple Blue & White G3 at home running 9.1 is pretty damn stable. It doesn't quite have the uptime my VA Research (remember back in the day when they were VA Research?) RedHat linux box does, but its close. Not to mention that I admin a Mac OS X Server (the pre-Mac OS X one that used to be called Rhapsody) box and I can see that a bunch of our Mac clients have been connected for 28-34 days, which tells me they have been running at least that long with no restarts. Not bad.
Don't get me wrong, I welcome Mac OS X. It looks like Apple is doing some rather neat things nowadays, but to level the complaint that Linux is hard to setup is not valid when Linux supports way more hardware (for better or worse) than Apple ever will.
Bah!
I can't speak for other 3rd world countries, but I did live in Guatemala for quite some time. Every middle class person is perfectly capable of buying a computer. Many poor people are a lot more capable of buying computers than you imagine. They'll pay the equivalent of $400 in their money for a good TV. And then they sign up for cable. Or they have $300 stereo systems. I don't think more than about 8% of the people I met didn't have a nice stereo system in their house. Compare that number to the 60% who live in "extreme poverty" and the other 28% who live in "poverty"
Third world countries are bad, but not *that* bad.
The two things that really holds people back from buying computers right along with everything else in Guatemala are: 1) non-technical jobs that therefore provide no computer experience and also no "conceivable" need for computers in your home, and 2) internet access is still pay-by-the-hour in addition to the minute costs of the phone calls (local calls cost about $0.03/min).
That at least has been my humble experience in a third world country.
Inconceivable!
re-read post. I address the middle class and the poor separately. And their living conditions. The poor are a huge number, but as poor as they are, in the central-american culture (I understand this to be true at least for all central america, I don't know anything about south) everybody and their dog has a stereo. A danged nice one. The only people who don't have them are those who live in aldeas or the deeply rural areas, and even among them, as the government invests more money in running electricity out to these areas, they are making efforts to acquire stereos. But all the same, as far as computers, its not so much a can't as an issue of too much sacrifice for something they don't see any use for. But they still can't live without their stereos. Not that I'm complaining.
Inconceivable!
uh, no. Never. Not even for a single quarter.
IBM dominated, for a brief period, "PC compatibles". But at the time the pc had not been cloned, apple still had *staggering* market share, radio shack was significant (but dwindling), and *plenty* of 8 bit machines and prorprietary machines. Aple held on to at least 10% even into the mid 90's.
however, the point that things change quickly is true--the os, wp, and spreadsheet monopolies are "contestable" monolies, and ms got them by contesting them from the predecessors--os from cpm, wp from wordperfect who in turn took it from wordstar, and excel from lotus.
I don't know what the dominant wp and spreadsheet will be 10 years from now, but history says it won't be word and excel (though they mihgt be somethign else from ms).
hawk
Is this the same repackaged OpenStep that doesn't even have CDRW support yet and who's USB device support list looks smaller than that of any freenix?
Linux has 2 major desktop projects, with one of them garnering serious commercial Unix vendor support. Linux also has ex-apple GUI developers on board as well as it's own implementation of OpenStep in the works.
Meanwhile: Calera, Suse, Mandrake and Redhat are all pushing the system administration side.
All Apple has done different is offer NARROWER hardware support, fewer end user choices and removed legacy Unix tools.
Meanwhile, Linux doesn't get to have the legacy of only supporting ONE vendor's hardware. Apple's achievements don't mean much in comparison to Linux until an Apple OS is as widely deployed.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Sun thrives because it provides something else that just can't be had with generica. The gap between Sun and it's generic competitors is far larger than the gap between Apple and it's more generic competitors.
Apple's market is also considerably more cost concious and less interested in TCO.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Actually, Linux is already quite big in India and the government is officially supporting it in China. Meanwhile, KDE is supporting Icelandic, Arabic and the lesser Norwegian dialect.
This is the sort of pissing contest an Apple cheerleader simply can't win. Linux can be whatever an particular culture wants it to be.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Don't know much about cars either, eh?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...that was $1000 machine in those days.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I dunno about your local Best Buy. However, mine doesn't sell machines preloaded with MacOS either.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Hogwash. Computers aren't "meant" to be absurdly priced. It's only the PC/Mac era that has people convinced that a fully functional computer (including the OS) has to be over $300.
That extra $150 can be the difference between affording something or not. All you twits sound like you were born choking on a silver spoon.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
So you have a machine with a HALF GIG of physical memory. That's a really representative sample of older machines.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Do you even bother to check out this stuff before you post?
You're comparing what is likely a single chip IO solution to physical hardware. Just the chasis alone on a CDRW is likely going to cost more than a cheap SCSI solution.
Cheap CDRW ~ $100, Cheap SCSI3 PCI ~ $30.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There is no good reason to buy a Dell or Compaq.
It is not a requirement, and they certainly aren't any "better" than the sort of alternatives that Apple users would attempt to discount for no good reason.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What's so frelling hard about "modprobe bttv"?
OTOH, even that's not necessary for Mandrake 7.2. Video and 3D support are "one click", as is CDRW support, DVD driver support, network support, and even USB support.
Find some newer lies.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Ok, then tell me the procedure for replacing your videocard with a Matrox G400.
For Mandrake 7.2, it's: turn on the power, let mandrake know whether or not you want 3D support & then set your default video resolution.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Get a grip. Windows 'rules' today because MS-DOS did yesterday. It did this for 10 years after the release of the "so easy your mom could understand it" Macintosh. MS-DOS is MORE arcane than Linux. Yet it had no problem burying Macintosh.
Get a grip.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Parroting historical revisionism != truth.
MS-DOS whipped the ass of MacOS.
MS-DOS is MORE user hostile than Linux evere was.
The success of Microsoft only shows that Linux can achieve similar things (survive as an arcane OS long enough to finally become 'easy to use').
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Actually, judging from the compatibility lists being bandied about it does seem that LinuxPPC does INFACT support more hardware than MacOS 10 does.
Also, Linux INFACT has been made "that easy to install and configure". This would be especially true if you limited the 'test' to 7 preselected models from the like of Penguin Computing or VA Research.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I installed Redhat 5.0 on a box with a SB AWE and it supported it "out of the box" just fine actually.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Then kindly provide some details. The examples from CompUSA certainly aren't inspiring.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If you insist on having NO understanding of your tools, you will simply use them poorly. There's not getting around that. Us "power GUI users" get a lot more out of our machines than the "drooling moron" crowd. Pretty pictures are no excuse to be an idiot.
Also, one typically can only avoid "getting under the hood" by severely restricting what one does with a machine.
Otherwise, you will eventually want to go somewhere that hasn't been pre-paved for you by some developer somewhere.
Software Engineer != psychic.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
How much Mac software is in Fry's or even CompUSA?
How much of those X thousand titles would you even bother to use for birdcage liner, nevermind use?
Any, "we've got X thousand apps" arguments that any AltOS user can come up with can be trounced by the same argument applied to WinDOS.
...dunno about Bughat these days, but Xconfurator was quite simple to use in the days of version 5 and 6 for dibbling with GUI hardware settings.
Chances are, you just never bothered to use it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The only catch with this is that the "PC hardware" that Apple uses isn't much better. For the most part, Apple's these days are just PC's with a PPC slot instead of an Athlon socket.
OTOH, just about any crappy PC can be saved with a little overhaul. That, and real benchmarks make the current CPU's that Apple ships seem rather pathetic.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
One click installers?
You mean like WordPerfect 6, Applixware or Jagged Alliance 2?
It's always funny to see the clueless claim that Linux really needs to get something it's had available for 5 years.
What you 'really' want is the author of gqmpeg or ripperX to suddenly start writing installshield scripts.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You forget the automatic prompt for the root password...
...otherwise all true.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No, it just makes you cheerleaders look a little less absurd. The shiny happy OS finally has something underneath the pretty pictures now.
OTOH, someone can always rename the DrakConf icon to something suitably obvious. Things of that sort are remarkably easier than making a robust core OS. Otherwise, Apple might have accomplished this feat in a reasonable timeframe.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What happens when you want to plug in a new model, or something NOT from Apple?
What? Can't find that new driver disk?
What? That spiffy new printer isn't even supported?
Even MacOS classic doesn't insulate you from this. Neither did NeXT really.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
BTW, Bughat/Mandrake can also do the "plug it in and autodtect" bit with printers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
A shiny happy tool is NOT going to save the end user when it comes to formating a new drive. You will either have to give the user the power to shoot themselves in the foot or castrate them.
Managing multiple disks intellegently simply isn't that simple. At some point, you will need to be aware of what's going on behind the curtain.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...except they want that toaster to really be an oven. They want to do many things with this oven without running the risk of learning something OR burning their food. They want the simplicity of a budget gourmet frozen entry without having it taste like cardboard.
They claim to want one thing while really wanting the opposite.
PC's are the LAST thing you should subject the person that wants to understand nothing. Macs are only slightly better in this regard.
A Mac (in any form) is still a car that you have to drive yourself. Yet people still insist on not wanting to drive.
They really should have taken a bus to begin with.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Saying that Apple 'delivered' MacOS 10 is like saying Microsoft invented the GUI.
It's a total sham.
The shiny happy part was built by NeXT, NOT APPLE.
The robust part underneath was built by the Unix community, NOT APPLE.
Apple is still marginalized, restricted to a few shrinking retail ghettos. Whining about 10 of the 100 heads of the Linux dragon being cut off wont change that.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You can market Unix to grandmas.
This sort of thing is called a Tivo.
It is simple, reliable and does what it's supposed to. It doesn't burden the user with "driving" and doesn't con them into thinking that a general purpose computer is a toaster.
Apple still does that, as does Microsoft.
The Mac is still a PC and quite likely more PC than most people even need.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You mean like YAST2 or DrakConf?
Yet again, a well meaning cluebie is telling us that Linux 'needs' something it already has.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"power" means that the end user is going to have to make a decision. They are going to have to apply their grey matter into choosing something. Force the user to do this enough times and they will call this "difficult". Give them too many choices and they will call this "difficult".
Well rendered menus and icons won't change this.
My idea of a better Tivo would probably confuse the average Mac user, or at best ensure that the bulk of available features went unused. This would be true if the interface remained essentially the same.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Yes, Microsoft "owns" Apple.
All Bill has to do is to threaten not to release the next version of msoffice or ie for the macintosh.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I'm extremely dubious that Apple's OS-X will be much easier to use than Linux. It's been mentioned both here and on ArsTechnica that OSX has a long way to go in the human interface department. Especially the Dock. While I think the panel in gnome shares some of these failings, I think it's better and at least has room for customization.
Many of the authors of the original Mac interface have been critical of OSX's new interface; some of them have even been working on a shell for Linux, that while it gobbles processor cycles, seems interesting to me.
The one thing Apple will probably do better is in having better hot-plugging of USB and firewire stuff... but I've heard they're postponing full support for that in initial releases. As far as the interface itself, they're just not even paying attention.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
I think you will be disappointed in the performance of OS X on an iMac.
OS X relies a lot on AltiVec, which is only found in G4s, which is *not* available in any system for $900.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
We will not wait. We will dual-boot to classic for those functions until the patch is ready. It's not THAT big of a deal.
For all the other stuff, no crashing is a big change compared to what we Mac OS users are used to.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
128MB SDRAM - 1 DIMM
iMac 600MHz
40GB Ultra ATA drive
CD-RW Drive
10/100BASE-T Ethernet
56K internal modem
Two USB ports
Two FireWire ports
VGA video mirroring
Harman Kardon speakers
Apple Pro Keyboard
Apple Pro Mouse
Here's one of my BIG complaints about Apple. Can I get the same iMac 600MHz, let's see, I don't need the 56k internal modem, I have DSL, I don't need VGA video mirroring, don't need the fancy speakers, dont need their crappy 1 button mouse, I'd like to have a 4 button model Kensington instead. Don't need the CD-RW, I'd like to use the external SCSI one I already have. hm. let's see, that's roughly what, like $500? minus the cost of the 4 button, $450. So can I get this model for $1050? fuck no. I have to buy all this useless garbage I don't need. I couldn't even leverage the SCSI CD-RW anyway, because of the extreme irony of a Mac without external SCSI connectors.
PC's for all their faults, give you this kind of flexibility. Yes, you have that flexibility with the more expensive G4 models, but then, you're adding another $1000 to the price tag, so what's the point?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yes, but Apple wants MS to keep writing IE and Office for Mac, so you can bet, DOJ or no, that OpenStep for Windows NT will never see the light of day.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Funny you mention that driver upgrade, because the latest thing going through the Mac tech community is this problem upgrading the NVidia driver on Macs, there's sort of a catch 22 that requires you to write an Apple Script to get the firmware update to work, so you can install the driver (or something like that).
In other words; on a Mac, you must learn to become a programmer to do something as basic as update a driver. (in this case). I find the irony sweet to the taste.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What's really great is, a lot of great BSD stuff has been ported. . .
bash, Gimp, XFree86, Samba, Apache.
As far as critical apps goes, I'd say OS X is close on Linux's tail, and it currently runs pretty much all Classic Mac software already, and most critical desktop stuff, mail, web, office, has already been carbonized. There's not a lot left (other than Photoshop, which, ironically, was supposedly one of the first apps that was carbonized. What's up with THAT, I wonder?)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I'm not trying to FUD or Troll,
I was greatly underwhelmed by the performance of OS X on my 300MHz G3 Beige. And I've seen it on a Dual 533 G4. Barely useable in the classic Mac GUI interaction way. (command line was snappy though).
I know a lot of that was unoptomized slowness of the PB that will be cleared up in the release, but there's a LOT of fancy schmancy eye candy in Aqua, that works very well on a G4, but slows things way down on a G3. Trust me, you won't be happy with this thing on an iMac.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Retail prices is what I'm paying. Moreso with Apple's obnoxious markups. (have you priced their RAM upgrades lately?)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Well, I havent' tried the final, and I will next week, and I may actually eat some crow on this point, considering what others are saying. I just wonder if people's perceptions are colored by exuberance at having a new OS. I mean, nobody complained about PB performance until 2 weeks after it was released. The first two weeks people were just drooling at it or bitching about the dock (goddamn dock!).
On the other hand, if I believed MacOSRumors, I'd be running a Dual 1 GHz G5 monitorless iMac with a holographic display, and it would run Windows apps in RedBox.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
you have to buy a Mac from APple, you don't have to buy a PC from Dell or Compaq. There's zillions of vendors from which you can get zillions of configurations, pick and choose components, and avoid being nickel-and-dimed to death.
No, I don't bolt together my systems. I buy Macs, I prefer that - and I like many aspects of their product, but I sure wish some other aspects were a bit more flexible and open. I'm sure a lot of Mac people feel the same (but see it as a trade off vs. all the cons of buying a PC).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
GNUSTEP?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
That's nice, but let's get the stats right. Everything up to System 6.x (1987) ran on everything which had been released at that time.
System 7.0 (1991) was the first System to require 2 megs of RAM (this effectively eliminates only the mac 128 and 512, unless you do significant upgrading to the 512). This lasted through 7.5.5, although 2 megs was probably not nearly enough for a real install of 7.5.x.
System 7.6 (1996) was the first System to eliminate 68000s (most old Macs), 68020s (MacII), and 68030s which were not 32-bit clean (SE/30, etc.). I believe the RAM requirement went up to 8 megs of physical memory here, too.
MacOS 8.0 (1997) eliminated all non-PPC or 68040 Macs. This meant the oldest Mac MacOS 8 could run on was a Quadra 700, which came out in October 1991. So this is about a 6 year spread of Macs at the most at this point. I believe it also upped RAM requirements to 16 megs.
MacOS 8.5 (1998) was a big one, the first to require a PowerMac of any kind. The FIRST PowerMac was March of 1994, but lets not forget that Apple was still making 68040 Macs until April 1995. RAM requirement is now 32 megs, I think. So Apple is now down to a 3.5-4.5 year spread for what hardware their most current software will run on. Fortunately, until 3/24/2001 (unless you count MacOS X Server or the public beta), the requirements have not gone up at all. 9.1 still runs on 7 year old Macs.
MacOS X (2001) requires a G3/G4. The *first* G3 was November, 1997. So basically, if you're machine is over 3.5 years old, you're out. This is not impressive. I find it unbelievable that Apple can ship a product which does not run on any hardware which was shipping a the time when they shipped the second beta (Rhapsody b2 in 1997) of the product. I guess I don't care that much, though, since I already ordered my copy. :P
Still, I think Apple's doing better than Microsoft did with Windows 95, which shipped in August 1995 and didn't [really] run on a 386.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
True, and they also need decent educational systems. And at least at the college level, computers are a must. There's no question that the cheapest solution that satisfies all the requirements is a free Unix on an old PC. And many schools in the thirld world have figured that out.
--
The proof is in the iBook. It's running the OS-X public beta fine, with the Classic envoirnment and Outlook Express chugging away in the background.
The proof is in the pudding, or in this case the blue and white "purse" thing I own.
-- The unsig...
Check out this page for the full range of Macs that will run OS X.
It goes back as far as the original "Bondi Blue" iMac and the first G3 desktops. My fruity 333Mhz iMac will just need a RAM upgrade, which it sorely needed anyhow.
Whenever an any story gets posted related to OSX, fists full of (mostly Linux-only Non-Mac) users post mutations of rumors that they've heard at one point or another. Please allow me to clarify:
/bin) are from BSD. Its basically Nextstep with an iMac'd face. Please remember that Apple *bought* Nextstep, so this is no surprise.
OSX uses the Mach microkernel. It does not use a BSD kernel, although its user land utilities (eg:
It fully supports SMP (for its IMO very nice new MP boxes), pre emptive multitasking, and protected memory. OS9 and below did not support these, and is the main reason why it was very much crash prone.
Its display engine is called Quartz. It is based on PDF. It is not based on postscript. Early versions of it were based on postscript, and it was called DPS (D for display). Its engine is not called Aqua, Aqua is just an interface theme, repeat: a theme. It also offers a theme called graphite, which is mostly grey instead of blue and other colors to make it easier on the eyes of graphics developers.
The final retail build of it is 4K78.
Do not expect it to be availible for x86 processors until either Apple goes belly up and decides to open it for some reason, or if Apple starts using x86 processors in its machines. Darwin, the open source kernel of OSX, is availlible for x86, but that by no means includes most of the reasons people want OSX.
Apple is a hardware company, they really aren't making any money directly off of the OS, but they hope the allure hardware sales with OSX. Apple hardware is much more expensive than x86 hardware, but you get what you pay for. Part of the reason why the entire OSX experience will be nice, is that there will not be a swarm of nothing but third party hardware to deal with; you are assured your hardware will work as good as it possibly can.
I hope this clarifies things with the whole slashdot camp.
I worked for DG who became resellers. We had a great launch, I ran around evangelising it's features and telling everyone it was the way of the future. Then NeXT sold its plant to Canon and then fizz...I guess the future has caught up now :-)
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
BUT You can run Quicken on MacOS. Now if they'd only update Quickbooks!
Linx could easily restrict itself to a "closed hardware set". Pick one. It's bullshit to say that mac has it easy and that Linux has it so hard. No one forced linux to try to fit on every i-toaster and digital watch. If it's too hard to distro for so much hard ware... don't.
Please. When's the last time you installed a Linux distribution? 1995?
Instead of requiring you to screw around with a bunch of text files and hope you got your settings right, Mac OS X simply works.
Munging text files is the only way to make sure they work. Microsoft used the same arguments for the Winblows 95 registry. No more config files to edit. The all-encompassing registry 'will do it' (tm). Windows 'simply works' (tm).
And just like all Macs before it, no one will write any software for OS X.
--
"In the land of the brave and the free, we defend our freedom with the GNU GPL."
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
Facts? FACTS?!?
Get out! Get out! Get out! If someone makes baseless statements about a company they obviously know nothing about, you should never contradict them with the truth. That's just bad manners.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- Jeff
However, if you insulted the how-to's, which are what I used to learn linux/unix. I was in fine arts and am now running the technical side of a company, I did it through document repositories and the help of others online. So if you can cross the hurdles of time, economy, getting online, and the ability to go forth with the challenge, then you can find the answers. It will just be hard. 8)
Unix was built for servers and is now being morphed into an end user machine because of the model it posesses. I don't know where Linux's future is, but its in my workplace, and in my home, but so is windows and mac.. They are all just tools.
-M-
"Life is all about strategy, mathematics and psychological perceptiveness."
all your replies are belong to us
Russell Ahrens
I'm not arguing that there are differences, but you specifically were talking about the look and feel. What look and feel? The command line? X? GNOME?
If you tell me that you can tell a difference in their VM schemes, I'll damn you for a liar :)
"Beware by whom you are called sane."
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Perhaps I don't understand ... Is there a look-and-feel difference between BSD and Linux? If you mean command line options, I wouldn't consider that a look or a feel. If you mean X, then I'm curious -- how can you tell whether you're running BSD or Linux while running X?
Umm... OS X's kernel is based on NeXT's kernel, which is based on Mach. The userland stuff is based on BSD. Dunno how GNUists care one way or the other about kernel design (unless you're talking Hurd, which is neither BSD nor Mach)
Perhaps you're just trolling -- in which case, phfffllllbbblllt!
"Beware by whom you are called sane."
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
No point, if they can't read the computer in their own language. Apple (and Microsoft, incidentally) are the leaders in I18N support for their OSes. I believe Solaris is also in the top. Linux has some decent support, but nowhere near the level of Apple and MS.
Would you use an OS if it gave you prompts in Swahilli? Even if it was free (and Free)?
"Beware by whom you are called sane."
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Did you read my post? You're agreeing with me -- thanks for the supporting anecdote.
"Beware by whom you are called sane."
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
I didn't make myself clear, I suppose. Either that, or you're intentionally misreading me to score one-upsmanship points. Either way, I'll clarify with smaller words.
Porting OS X to x86 hardware gains Apple nothing, except availability on cheap hardware. This minor advantage is not something Apple is willing to spend millions (perhaps billions) on achieving. As an occassional Apple user (digital video and Photoshop, mainly), I'd prefer Apple to spend that money on advancing their PPC technology.
(Okay, eMachines use ATI processors. s/eMachines/random generic computer/ if it makes you feel better.)
"Beware by whom you are called sane."
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Geez, is this still hanging around? Look, Windows users aren't using Windows because it's got an x86 architecture. This is a myth promulgated over and over again by well-meaning people who think Apple needs their advice.
If you ask your standard Windows user what processor he has, you'll get either a misguided or flat-out wrong answer ("It's a Pentium!" Okay, Sparky, what version of Pentium? II, III, IV? Wait, it's not a Pentium, it's an Athlon!) All they know for sure is that they run Windows.
The reason why the MacOS is so nice and tight is because they control the hardware and the software. Throw in a different architecture (especially one with a funny endian-ness), and now you've exponentially increased your support costs, with little benefit.
x86 hardware has price going for it, and that's all. And you only get that price advantage when you're buying cheap shit. You want a decent video card? It costs. What comes in your $500 eMachines is usually a piece of crap. What's in the $800 iMac isn't top of the line, but at least it's made by ATI and not Wang Chungs House o' Video Procs.
Repeat after me -- Windows users use Windows because they think its the best. If they sit down at at Mac, they'll think it's screwed up.
(I'm talking generalities here -- there are exceptions, but only exceptions. The general rule is still true.)
"Beware by whom you are called sane."
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Will Mac OS X become popular if it's being run on x86 hardware? I posit to you that it wouldn't make a difference. As proof, I offer BeOS as an example.
BeOS is created, amid quite a bit of hype. It runs on proprietary Be hardware. They sell a handful of 'em, so they port to Apple hardware (in, I believe, an attempt to get bought by Apple. I'm willing to bet that if you looked at Gassee's exit strategy on his business plan, that's what you'll find) They still can't sell many copies, though they sell more than before. They port to x86 hardware, and they sell a few more copies. But, regardless of quality and power and availability on x86 hardware, Be can't make many in-roads. Now Be has re-invented itself again as an "Internet Appliance" OS, trying another tact. Not only was Be unable to uproot Microsoft, they couldn't even survive as a co-existing OS.
OS X on x86 would sell a few copies, but not enough to make it worthwhile, because OS X is not Windows.
Techno-elitist? I don't have a computer newer than 5 years old. Some elitist. Don't assume you know me, Sparky.
I'll use smaller words, since the point whizzed a good 3 or 4 feet over your head.
In porting Mac OS X to x86 hardware, Apple gains cheap hardware, and that's all. There is no particularly important technical reason for Apple to do so. Why spend a minimum of 2 years and millions (perhaps billions) of dollars to gain a handful of users?
Apple hardware, regardless of what you think, is not that expensive. It's more expensive than Turbo Bob's House o' Chips box, but on par with a Dell or IBM, which, after all, is Apple's peer group.
Neither will your mother say "Because I blindly follow other people, baa baa baaaa", but that doesn't make it less true.
If they use Windows for Word, they think Windows is the best OS to run Word on, though I find the Mac version superior myself. If they use it for Quake, it's because they think it's best for Quake (which happens to be true). If it's because it came with the computer, if they didn't think Windows was best, they'd install Linux, right?
Microsoft has spent billions of dollars convincing people that Windows is the best. They spend untold millions more in t-shirts and pens at trade shows to make IT managers think favorably of them. They spend even more in staff to put the thumbscrews to computer manufacturers to make sure they ship boxes with Windows on 'em (barring that, MS at least gets the money).
I don't blame people for equating computers with Windows, but neither do I delude myself into thinking that people care one way or the other.
"Beware by whom you are called sane."
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
OS X runs supported on every Apple machine released since 1997. This means any machine Apple shipped with a G3 or G4 processor (or 2) will run OS X out of the box. It can be made to run on older machines, although unsupported of course. This is a good move because they don't weigh themselves down by going to far into the past but use the freedom of newer machines to innovate.
Guess you missed the display PostScript that the original NeXT machines used. Better luck next time.
Just junk food for thought...
Here's the most insightful comment I've read on Spashdot in weeks, if not months. Bravo!
Sorry if this a inflamitory, just venting.
... (that's called an elipse by the way)
Do you actually read your posts for logical phallacy or not? First you start of with an AlvinMaker/GrassBasketa mistake. You can build stable systems, but Apple (or any manufaturer) can out build you. Why don't you try and establish that you can build a MORE stable system. A much more worthy goal. Second, having total control of parts can't == run any OS you want. (emulation aside) once you chose the processor/mobo, you are limited in the OSes. Choose x86, you are limited to x86 OSes.
Third, the listing of OSes per MotherBoard is flawed since you must show that you can't buy Apple PPC motherboards (you can $$$) and then run the intended OS of choice (MacOS) or Linux (LinuxPPC, MKLinux) or NT (NT3.5) or BSD (MacOS X, NetBSD) or
Fourth you switch hats, from holding a Ph.D. in MIS to holding a Ph.D. in Business and Economics, wave a magic wand, and declare that a complete shift in Apples business paradigm would not effect profits one wit. (Har,har)
As you are not a victim of vendor lock, I assume you do not take prescription drugs, frequent amazon.com, drive an automobile, fly on a plane, work in most branches of the military, or eat preprocessed foods. Well Dorthy, click your heals together three times, because micromonoplies are neither a bad witch, or a good witch, in fact thier not a witch at all.
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
The software bundled on the CD includes minor stuff, like Apple and Netscape's contributions to the OpenLDAP (I think, definitely LDAP-ish) source tree (.c and .h included) and WhatRoute (now a Mac can ping out of the box). I'd like to see WhatRoute end up installed since it's a really nice tracert et al utility. I hope Apple hired the author.
The CD burning is sweet. The Finder recognizes a blank cd and prompts for format (HFS+/ISO 9660, AUdioCD, ISO 9660). The cd then mounts normally as a volume with 660MB free. Drag files in, then pick Burn CD... from the menu and it burns the disk. I haven't tried to multisession it yet. I did burn an ISO 9660 (listed as an MP3 format) and put some media files on it for my boss (PC user). I had forgotten to add extensions to the files, but File Exchange (a control panel) added the extensions based on the Mac file type. Sweet.
Nobody else has anything like it. It gets OS X on Monday.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
ON the other hand, the windowmanager protion of Windows and Explorer both suck. www.iarchitect.com has an extensive critique of Explorer, the Common File Dialog, and the Find function in their Interface Hall of Shame Yes, Apple's Quicktime player is in there too, but for good reason (and I've hacked mine to be more 'normal').
These are the most commonly used portions of Windows itself. And the Mac OS has them beat all hollow.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Access no, but the rest of Office will run natively on OS X (4th Q release). It'll be Unix, and it will run MS Office. That can't help but sell a few boxes. Access, sadly probably won't ever be ported to the Mac. On the other hand, Real Basic can do databases, Filemaker listens to Applescript, and the free RDBMS are being ported. Access no, pretty much everything else - yes.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
I don't know about Hindi or Arabic, but Chinese has been available for quite some time. Go to Red Flag Linux were the official Linux of the People's Republic of China is available for Download. And yes, it has a Chinese install and KDE. GNOME is coming. The box stands on my desk righht before me, so don't bother to deny its existance ;o)
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
At my work we're having to rewrite large portions of out (windows) code because of its lack of remote administration. If it were unix, it wouldn't be an issue. SSH in and go.
Yes, you can set up ssh on Windows, but the OS still isn't set up as nicely to be able to manage your system from the console.
Also, scripting the command-line is DEAD SIMPLE!
I often run the following command:
cdrecord -v -dev=0,0,0 -speed=10 -blank=fast && cdrecord -v -dev=0,0,0 -speed=10 -eject yourISOhere.iso
I walk away, I come back 15 minutes later and I've just done something that can't be easily duplicated by most existing GUI cdr software.
GUIs are great. I used a GUI burning tool under Linux almost exclusively until I read the man page. The great thing with Unix is that most of the GUI tools are written on top of console-based tools, and it uses flat files almost exclusively. This gives me ease of use when I want it, but power and flexibility when I need it.
Both have their place.
This poster is neither an OS X fan or Linux supporter. he is just in the line of "who rules, who suxx". And it is interesting to see /. going on it. Does this means that we finally get some peace from the Linux Hyper "Cry-Lowd" command?
.NET initiative. Maybe that thing is real cool, real effective and real good. OS/2 is also one of the best OSes ever made you know?
I wonder when Linux Torvalds, Alan Cox or anyone on the top Linux development promised to make it "easy-for-the-masses". If anyone cared at least to read interviews, then he knows that Linus position is crystal clear - develop the server side. However he doesn't mess with anyone who wants to make it "user-friendly". Well there are several distros trying to do it and its THEIR right to do it, and let's hope they get successful on this. But it's the distros, stupid...
Now it is amazing to see that someone comes up with the eternaly promised OS X and suddenly we, the Linux community, are not only "failing" in some nebulous promess. No. We are failing because an OS that till now didn't make the highway looks much better than Linux. I can't say it's worse or better. Because I have never seen it, and also because this OS is much more overhyped than any
Besides we take this articleand what we see?
"When the Linux hype hit its height about a year ago, there were predictions that it was going to take market share from every operating system out there, including from the Mac but especially from Windows."
Ok that's cool, that's real great... Well I know that we are after MS. And we do are after MS. And we are going to hunt Redmonds birdies as far as we can. But that's an historical problem made of tons of people who were dropped out of the MS boat and found refuge on Linux world.
There were also risks that we could take some Sun or BSD piece of the market but really that was not in our plans to take over the world... However "including the Mac"??? Who knows Mac users, perfectly understands that these are the ones in the end of the line. A Mac user will more probably to turn to Windows and barely will ever risk to enter our world. Because, apart of the good looking desktops "a-la Mac", everything else is a Mac user worst nightmare.
Then you've obviously not spent much time working with NeXTSTEP. As I'm sure many other people here will point out (or have already), NeXT was very user friendly, and yet very powerful.
[My mother] neither wants nor needs most of the benefits that it provides
She doesn't need true multitasking? She doesn't need a computer that crashes the instant a single program goes Tango Uniform? She doesn't need a system that makes it simple to send a fax, from any application, by simply clicking a single button on the Print Panel?
Truthfully, we can all benefit from the power of a UNIX system. Just think of all the problems in DOS--er, Windows. Can your mother benefit from losing those problems, while gaining ease-of-use? That's what it's all about.
My biggest problem, with both the Linux community and (especially) the Windows consumer community at large, is that it doesn't need to be like this. Computers can be powerful and easy at the same time. I know, I was there. Truly computer-illiterate secretaries who'd been using IBM Selectrics for 30 years were comfortable, and very productive, with NeXTSTEP. As were three-star generals and other high-level bueraucrats. Any OS that can provide a usable system to those two kinds of users deserves a gold medal.
The point is: It can be better. NeXT knew that. I wish that the Linux community would truly recognize that, as well. And as long as Steve doesn't screw the company into the ground like did at Apple before, and NeXT after, we could be looking at a true renaissance in personal computing.
I hate it when these sensationalist bastards over-hype something they don't even understand, then rip it down when it doesn't live up to the hype. Just read this lousy little piece-of-crap editoral linked here. Just who decided that Linux was going to take over the desktop, and hyped that claim? Oh, that's right-- the self-serving journalists and clueless industry pundits. And now that Linux has failed to take over the desktop, they get to gloat about it. WTF?!
Look, you bastards, just because some hackers work on GNOME or KDE, doesn't mean all of us even want to turn Linux into a desktop OS. Some of us appreciate it for its virtues, like complete control by the administrator (yes, administrator), stability, and transparency, and also appreciate other operating systems for their easy-for-clueless-Joe-User qualities. We're not all behind the 'castrated-Linux' desktop idea you so firmly latched onto last year, alright?!
Gah! I can't stand smug bastard pundits like this Reynolds guy, especially when they're only smugly ripping down a strawman.
I COMPLETELY AGREE. OpenStep got unfairly shafted long ago and it was tragic.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Check out:
http://www.apple.com/imac/
Clear as day it says MacOS X Ready!!!
-Hunter
RateVegas.com - Vegas Reviews
So I, as a programmer, don't have to use Windows or MacOS. I can only have a job programming on UNIX/Linux if there are people using it. Perfectly valid reason to promote UNIX as far as I'm concerned.
To use the Windows term, the BSD layer is a "subsystem" in MacOS X. Since most users will never directly touch this susystem, nor run applications on it, it shouldn't really count.
It would be sorta like Microsoft saying that Windows 2000 was the best selling version of OS/2 ever, due to the fact that there's an OS/2 API layer hidden in there.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
This is beyond my expertise, but my understanding was that if your app runs on Cocoa or Carbon, you probably wouldn't be be directly using any Unix APIs at all (unlike your KDE/Gnome app which still makes Unix system calls).
How much Cocoa/Carbon actually depends on BSD versus straight Mach, I don't know.
Of course, it all boils down to kernel calls, but even in that respect, OS X's kernel isn't exactly the classic Unix model.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The biggest traditional feature of MacOS has been the fact that it was tied very close to the hardware. (In fact for years, Apple didn't offically even admit that "The Macintosh" had an OS.)
Unfortunately, the designers took this to heart and didn't build enough abstraction layers into the operating system. Thus whenever they want to add support for new hardware, even just a new motherboard design, it by necessity meant a new code path. And guess what, the older path will eventually get dropped or forgotten.
Apple has been well aware of this problem since the era of clones and CHRP. However, the proposed fix was the Copland OS which never shipped. So hardware independance was just another goat sacraficed at the alter of Apple's R+D fuckups.
OS X should solve this problem of hardware abstraction and could potentially provide a lot more backcompatiblity in the future, if Apple wants it too. Note how it supposedly (unofficially) supports machines like the 8500, which I think were only officially supported during the Rhapsody beta period some years ago.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Well, the legacy of Apple is being user friendly. Look at applesoft Basic. You could teach it to children and they could actually write viable programs. Then the Macintosh. One mouse button. Icons. A (somewhat) intuitive file structure. All this when PCs were still command line as a standard. Can they make *Nix user friendly? Perhaps. Will OSX be friendly out of the box? Probably not, at least not for a standard end user. I think they can do it, but it will still take a little while, maybe in two or three years they will have it truly userfriendly.
You say you want a revolution....
h4x0r, m4n, h4x0r... g3t w1th th3 pr0gr4m, d00d
Am I an Apple user? Nope, but I will be. I've got a new iMac sitting on my desk and my copy of OS X is on the way.
And if you want a computing environment that's as tough to learn how to use as it is to learn how to fly, hey, your kink is ok, but it's not necessary.
Incorrect. OS X can take advantage of AltiVec for some things, but doesn't need it. Ditto for a few (very few, so far) applications.
Uh, nothing personal, but why should I trust you over the folks -- and I don't mean just Apple, who might be tempted to exaggerate -- who've said that OS X works just fine on a G3?
By the way, thanks Neil.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
"I mean, a 450 MHz processor dedicated to one thing at a time? "
;)"
Hold your hashes. MacOS has supported multitasking since the very beginning, for appropriate values of "multitasking".
First of all, any OS that allows the processor to handle interrupts, e.g., for I/O, is dedicating the CPU to multiple tasks as much as any single-processor OS does. The CPU does indeed work on one task at a time, going off periodically to work on something else, without the user's bidding.
Second, desk accessories let the user launch a small application without leaving the main app since the earliest days of MacOS. It's not the same thing as general multitasking, but it did allow the USER to multitask somewhat, which is what really matters.
App switchers came out around the time Macs got big enough to hold more than one in memory, roughly 1986.
MultiFinder, a true multitasking shell, came out with MacOS 6, around 1988 or so. Every MacOS since the late 1980s has had multitasking built-in. I know Unix weenies like to bitch and moan about preemption, but the truth of the matter is, cooperative multitasking is just as real a form of multitasking as preemptive, and is in many ways a superior one, especially for a single-user desktop machine.
Case in point: Have you ever had your foreground app in X-windows bog down because some other task went nuts? I have. Oh, goodness gracious, have I ever. Took so much CPU, the stupid computer couldn't even read my kill signal. Maybe there's something to be said after all for a system that encourages tasks to voluntarily take a breather occasionally.
And, of course, MacOS has supported multiple threads, and even multiple CPUs, for the past several years.
I usually run anywhere from 5 to 15 interactive applications simultaneously on my Mac, for days at a time without quitting them or shutting down. Just like on Unix. And when a task does get out of hand, I can almost always kill it from the shell. Just like on Unix. As a USER, I say there's nothing wrong with the multitasking on classic MacOS.
So let's just agree to drop the "Macs don't multitask" line.
"It needed to be gutted."
That is definitely true. The lack of memory protection was a major shortcoming. It's a whole lot easier to accidentally dereference a garbage pointer than to design an app without WaitNextEvent.
"However, like many GNU purists, I think their decision to go with BSD over Mach is pretty short-sighted."
You think Apple should have waited for the HURD to be released? I should live to be so old as to see that day. I think their decision to spruce up a mature, stable, 10-year-old Unix implementation was pretty smart.
"And, like many Linux purists, I would prefer the more fun, more chaotic environment of a less-mature, more malleable OS."
Ah-ha, now we get to the bottom of it. You're not having fun unless you're having a kernel panic. You need to run Windows.
I think you'll find that MacOS and OS X are a whole lot more malleable than you give them credit for. I've been tweaking and skinning MacOS since about 1989, and I have no intention of stopping now. (Will MacFish run on X?)
"Besides, I prefer the look and feel of Linux on a Mac versus BSD
Heretic! Heretic!
;-)
;-)
In point of fact, numerous Power Macintosh models are based on ATX form factor motherboards. You can even get one without buying a whole Mac.
But what makes you think you wouldn't want to add all of the above items to an already complete Mac? PC users don't have a monopoly on upgrading or expanding; why shouldn't Mac users have a shot at the least expensive commodity parts, too?
CarbonLib is supported for MacOS 8.1 and higher. You can get it from VersionTracker.
Either way, Apple has a much better history of supporting old machines.
I don't know if I necessarily buy that. You can compile and run Linux on some REALLY OLD hardware, and ls and vi run like a champ. :-) But your point is well taken. For example, while I was at VersionTracker, I just happened to notice that one of my favorite Mac shareware games from days of yore has been updated for OS X! Yes, Klondike lives! You download one game,and it runs on essentially every Macintosh model made in the last 15 years; every MacOS made in the last 12 years; and it still looks and plays great! How many 17-year-old PC games have aged that gracefully?
http://www.openppc.org/vendors.html
MacOS (and also Windows) fall under ``easy-to-learn''. They do not have as many of the flexible, powerful tools available to them. They really don't care about that, they want people to be able to do easy tasks without having to sit down and understand things. Things are hidden from the user as much as possible; many times it is impossible to do tasks that are trivial under a UNIX machine.
Your have much to learn. If you think MacOS or Windows lack powerful tools, then you haven't used them enough. So you like grep? You can do regex searches on MacOS and Windows. Like writing shell scripts? You will not find a better shell scripting language than AppleScript. Perl floats your boat? Perl works excellently on MacOS (not just X, 7 thru 9) and Windows. Want to repartition your hard drive? Trivial. All of the great, powerful tools and commands you love about Unix have MacOS and Windows equivalents. You just have to learn how to use them -- just like Unix.
Don't assume, just because you don't know about something, that it does not exist.
Furthermore, a GUI allows you to trivially perform complex operations that would be very difficult on a command line. It cuts both ways. Think how easy a GUI makes it to select and open, copy, or delete a large number of files with no easily identifiable pattern in their names.
If it were available for PC's.
Greetings Joergen
I just find it so darned cute to see an OS with 4% of the desktop market get into a pissing contest with an OS with 1% of the desktop market over which one serves "the common man" the best.
Cheers,
I saw a mjor speed bump on an Imac DV SE I was using when I installed OS X Public Beta on it. It has a G3 400. The OS is much snappier than the 9.1 it had before. Too bad I didn't have any OS X apps to play with more, just what it came with. I would definately suggest every Mac user upgrade ASAP if your system is compatible.
Q.
What is up with the Lear Jet designers??? Can't they make the damn things easier for the average person to fly?
I suspect that NASA considers the multi-million dollar upgrade of User Interface to the space shuttles to be worth their while.
Could the pilots fly them before? Of course.
Is it safer, easier, faster and more reliable to fly with the new integrated graphic displays (as opposed to ten thousand switches and blinking lights)? You bet your ass.
Funny how NASA, the armed forces (along with the FAA and every airline and manufacturer) have realized that having a few context-sensitive graphical multipage displays makes it less likely for operator error to occur than the old "make everything a switch and blinking light" method of design.
The difference is, when people mess up at the control of a plane, people die. Unfortunately, the same isn't true of most computer systems, so there's been little incentive to fix glaring usability errors that every single user runs across. If every time you missplelled something at a command prompt someone died, I have a feeling lots of Unix folks would reconsider the usefulness of well-designed user interfaces...
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
The ability to pipeline commands is something that currently can only be had at the command line; I have seen a couple of discussions on /. about possibly extending this concept to a GUI, but as of now, it hasn't been done.
/etc/fstab. All of which offer little guidance and great ease to screw up your system.
Applescript works well. Probably even moreso in OSX.
Adding a new hard drive? Forget about it
You did read what you wrote, right? It involved fdisk, mkfs, and adding a mount point to
Windows and mac -- attatch hard drive (equally hard/easy on any system these days), when GUI comes up, click on new drive and select "format" from the OS context menu. Yes, you could accidentally format the wrong drive, but thats about the only pitfall. Of course it would be much easier to format the wrong drive with your method, seeing as how most people wouldn't know the difference between hda3 and hdg4 if their life depended on it.
Please note that this operation should require no knowledge of emacs, editing configuration files, mount points, cylinders, heads, or sectors, or logical block addressing, nor the internal OS loader designations for devices or number of partitions and order of drives.
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
A shiny happy tool is NOT going to save the end user when it comes to formating a new drive. You will either have to give the user the power to shoot themselves in the foot or castrate them.
Um, this means what? Of course, yes, every OS has to have the capability to format the drive. That's exactly what i said, you have to do that for any system, as well as physically installing it.
The difference is, that on *nix, you're presented with no USEFUL information on which drive is your new one unless you understand how disk partitions are allocated and tracked on that paticular system.
on Mac and Windows, the system will boot, say "hey, there's a new drive", and ask "do you want to format your new drive?" or when you go to save data on the drive it will say "hey, this is a new drive that isn't formatted, would you like to format it now so that you can save data on it?".
I assume you do all your taxes by reading all of the actual tax statues, rather than the wussy little step-by-step brochure that comes with the forms. After all, "anyone" should be able to read, fully understand, and remember with perfect recall all of the million different rules.
How can you expect to function in society if you don't know the difference between a 503(c) corporation and a 503(b)? You must just be too stupid or lazy to not know, so we're sure not going to make it easier by summarizing the differences that apply to 95%+ of the tax filers.
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
3rd worlders by and large use equipment that we donate. since proprietary os'en are tricky to redistribute in this manner, linux is most commonly installed on thier newly accquired boxes.
But what counts as the "orginonal" PowerBook G3? I've got a pre-USB PowerBook with a G3 (commonly refered to as a "Wall Street" model). Anybody have any idea if OS X is going to work on my laptop or shall I just continue with LinuxPPC alone?
As for the probably 20% of the planet's population who actually have stable phone, water, and power, they could probably get by with OS X on an $800 iMac. For 3 grand, they could buy a dual processor G4 with a flat-panel screen.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
If you can get reliable market share numbers for some "major Linux Distros", I'd gladly take this as a bet.
By the end of the year, Apple will likely have shipped more *NIX than any company except Sun.
Besides, what counts is boxes IN USE. People who get RedHat to dink around but don't use it shouldn't count.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
What part of "Mac-OS-X ready" did you understand mister know-it-all? That 800 dollar imac aint gonna run MacOSX worth a shit, and apple knows it. that's why it aint mac-os-X ready.
Funny, isn't it, that Apple is labeling all iMacs released as "Mac OS X ready." I guess you know more than Apple does.
Your turn, troll-boy.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
If you want to consider used, how much does a 1997-era iMac cost today?
And speaking of third world, I take it that your mythical third-world resident with the spare time to dink around with Linux speaks English. Of course, Apple will be releasing the Hindi version of Mac OS X this summer. Arabic should be out soon, too. Japanese is shipping on March 24th, and Chinese is probably not too far behind. (Yes, I know Japan isn't third-world. But the Kanjii input methods are not going to be dissimilar to the Pinyin input methods. In short, the support for Chinese is probably there.) When's the Hindi (or Arabic or Chinese) version of Linux coming out? Granted, only about 40 or 50 percent of the world's population speaks those languages, so maybe they aren't "third-world" enough for you. Or are you only considering the multi-lingual poor people around the world?
Thought so.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
I didn't see any code, any specs, any anything, other than some vague wishes. Apple will have a Unix release in Hindi between June and September, 2001 (my guess is July, at MacWorld Expo NY). When will indlinux.org have their release ready?
Mac OS X will run on an iMac 233, which costs around $250-$300 on eBay. Granted this is still very expensive for poor people, but the cost of the hardware is going to be a problem, whether it's Linux or not. If you're going to have a Graphical UI, you're going to pay for more powerful hardware.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
And how are multi-lingual applications handled? Take a look at the OS X system for i18n, and you'll probably be impressed.
This is the sort of pissing contest an Apple cheerleader simply can't win. Linux can be whatever an particular culture wants it to be.
If that particular culture has the skills to do the hacking, sure. But the cost in time is far greater than if it came from someone else, already localized.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
What part of $800 didn't you understand? You can go right now to any of a dozen places on the web, and they will ship you an $800 iMac. It will run OS X just fine if you don't want to run Mac OS 9 apps. If you do want to run OS 9 apps, spend an additional $20 and buy 64 MB of RAM. This summer, when Apple plans to pre-install OS X, I'm sure that all iMacs, even the $800 ones, will ship with 128MB of RAM.
Heck, go hog-wild and spend $80 and buy 256MB of RAM. Then you can run Virtual PC for OS X when it ships this summer. That'll add an additional $99 onto the price.
And, troll-boy, please price out a comparable PC to that $800 iMac. Just try to tell me there will be more than $50 difference in the price. If you're able to buy a computer, you can afford $50 to get something better.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
this post isn't moderated down far enough...
talk about being asinine. by 'common man,' it isn't intended to mean every single human being on the planet! grow up!
Just raise the taxes on crack.
You know, that's great, but so what?
:) People who want to have a touchy feely hold your hand GUI and don't mind paying for it should go buy MacOS X or Windows ME. They'll be happier, and I'll be happier because I won't have to worry about them or have any dumb animated widgets getting in my way. I most certainly won't be upset that someone chose Microsoft or Apple over linux. If that's their choice then so be it.
Begin selfish bastard rant mode:
Linux is the best operating system for the people who write it. Don't bitch and moan about it not being friendly or some such nonesense. If you don't understand how it works, or you don't want to, then you have one of three options:
- Make it do what you want by writing some code.
- Pay someone to make it do what you wantfor you.
- Go run windows and shut the hell up.
Seriously, I'm not trying to be a dick or anything. The interface to linux is perfect... for the *nix geeks that use it. It's also great for knowledgable system administrators that understand how the system works. Who cares about everyone else? Not me. I'm me, not them. I wish people would stop promising that linux is going to be this great general purpose desktop OS, because the people claiming this aren't the ones writing the software, and most of the people writing the software won't like an interface "for the rest of them."
It's not the end of the world if linux doesn't "take over the world." There is no reason that there cannot be multiple successful operating systems out there. If linux only does well in the server space then that's fine. I'll even be able to keep my job in that case
End rant; Brace for karma loss.
"Did you see the new G4 cube? It's a thing of beauty!"
"Yeah, well, so's Cindy Margolis, but you can't run Quicken on her."
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--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Recently, we've been reading lots of articles and opinions on what path and "business plan" we should take, or Linux will never make it and "we'll lose". There were articles linked from Slashdot, and a friend of mine also commented recently that we "need to simplify Linux or else nobody will use it".
So, I'd rather just answer him cynically "yes, Linux is losing, and soon gonna be erradicated, and we're so damn scared of losing the market", while the reality speaks for itself.
The desktop developers don't ignore the UI. KDE and GNOME do attempt running UI research and usability tests just like the big guys, but they're always doing it for the hack value, not cause we owe something to someone and want to win hordes of users.
The idea is to hack and have fun, not to market our "Linux" thing. We don't owe it to anymore.
Then how am I able to run OSXPB (slower than the final version out in two days) on my 233MHz beige G3 with 128MB RAM?
I drank what? -- Socrates
Um... no, that's not true. PPC and 68k are very, very, very different. M68k pretty much exemplifies the CISC concept, and the PPC was designed as a true RISC chip (though of course, it's now got more instructions than x86, thanks to AltiVec). They don't share much of anything. So, it really was a huge accomplishment to do the transition so smoothly. Do some research before you speak.
Supreme Lord High Commander of the Interstellar Task Force for the Eradication of Stupidity
And from all of that, the only correct response is number four. After all, it's what Free Software is all about. Or Open Source, whichever (RMS won't lynch me, he can't find me!). So, instead of complaining about Apple, why doesn't everyone run out and start hacking on GNUstep? Heck, Apple has even open sourced CoreFoundation, which is the C framework their new version of Cocoa (OpenStep) is based on.
Of course, I'm going to go work on my Mac OS X machine, but competition is good :)
Supreme Lord High Commander of the Interstellar Task Force for the Eradication of Stupidity
Do you even KNOW what a PPC processor is? It is no great leap to go from 68k to PPC.. their cores are very similar, as are the compilers.
Not only that, but porting a WELL DESIGNED OS is not a terribly difficult task. Just because Microsoft is incapable of doing it doesn't make Apple that wonderful.
I can't be bothered to go through the effort of learning to properly fly a jet aircraft. Why don't they make airplanes easier to fly? I would love for my mentally challenged cousin (he has an I.Q. of 47) to feel the exhilaration of flying, but IT'S JUST TOO HARD!
What is up with the Lear Jet designers??? Can't they make the damn things easier for the average person to fly?
But this is just the point; what you say isn't true. Remember, I just bought a Thinkpad (you snipped that out of your reply), so I *know* how much a decent quality notebook with a large screen costs. For almost exactly the same amount of money as I spent on an IBM Thinkpad A21m, I could have bought a Powerbook G4. Now, OS 9 isn't exactly my cup of tea, but that's okay: I could download Linux for it today, or shell out for Mac OS X. Problem solved. As far as speed goes, I am dead certain I could buy notebooks that are actually faster, but not for very much less, at least if we hold the design of the thing constant. Which is why I pointed out the importance of seeing one of these in person. Until you do, you would probably shrug over it just like me. Now, I have no doubt that some PC maker could duplicate the Powerbook G4 essentially feature for feature, but nobody has done this...yet.
Babar
I think the problem here is that you personally do not want any iMac at any price. The point of the iMac is that it's an ultra-quiet luggable one-piece solution with cheap wireless networking, USB-only peripherals, and a firewire hookup for your digital camera. If you want to plug in all kinds of other stuff and swap components until you get exactly what you want, you want one of the G4 models.
Similarly, if you want a relatively inexpensive one-piece (no dongles) and indestructible notebook, you might want an iBook. Otherwise, you don't.
But if you don't want an iBook, you probably *do* want a Powerbook G4. I honestly haven't yet met anybody who didn't. In all seriousness, I think this is the one Mac that has many Windows people caught with their mouths wide open. I'll confess that I didn't get the point of this machine until I saw one up close and personal, and then cursed the fact that I'd went and bought a (very, very nice) ThinkPad. :-(
The big problem with Apple wasn't the current iMac configuration per se, but the fact that they didn't offer an iMac with a built-in CD-RW at any price a year ago, when they could have and should have done so.
Babar
As long as they include a manual.
I'm sick of online help. Give me a book!
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InstantCool
OK. So, I buy a program like Office for $400 and then I get to spend another $30-40 for a manual that should've been included with the software?
Yeah, I love that.
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InstantCool
I will be purchasing a new fancy powermac and OS-X later this year. Why? Simple.
1) I hate windows
2) I like Unix, for things unix is good at. It appeases the geek in me.
3) I like macs; they appease the 'I don't wanna fuck around with my computer when I want to run photoshop' guy in me.
4) Apple makes funky hardware.
Plus.. the lower-level components are open-source (please let's not argue about terms; fact is, I can mess with it)
I'm not claming it's the best unix in the world, but I've been told by some friends who I adminned unix with a while back that it's quite solid. I like the desktop. one thing unix is lacking is a user-friendly desktop for those who want it. kde is neat. gnome is neat... both have good points, but neither really fits the bill.
What apple has done looks to bee a good fusion of the most flexible back-end on earth (unix) and the most consistant desktop on earth (MacOS). Great.
We could debate the fine points of windows, all the unices & linux distros, and MacOS... but this is the reality. Unless apple blows it, or unless it's a big letdown out of the gates... this could be really cool.
Damn! 128k is steep! My Altair just isn't going to cut it I guess. Bummer. ;)
BTW Have you checked into RAM prices lately? Under $40 US for 128MB PC133, about $60 for name-brand stuff. 128MB is by no means out of reach these days.
SONET
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. --Benjamin Franklin
yes, I just had the deja vu feeling of getting a soundcard working in linux. In Beos and MS Windows it just works. It's a soundblaster 64, what's the fucking problem?
/dev audio devices in such a way that ordinary users (i.e. non root) can also enjoy sound. The only thing is, it took me two full days to get to the last part due to a gross lack of feedback as to what was actually going wrong. That is user unfriendly. That is linux. Some distributions handle this sort of thing much better these days but the bottom line is that most Linux distributions require you to do this type of fiddling to get the most trivial tasks done. Want the wheel on your mouse to work? Oh just change this and that obscure line in an even more obscure text file. Oh you want readable fonts in konqueror (ironically even the KDE website is unreadable without any tweaking)? Here's the enormously tedious procedure to get truetype fonts working.
:). But to ordinary users who just expect their mp3 player to play their mp3 when they click play this is annoying.
It turns out I have to fiddle a bit with the module settings, run red-hats sndconfig utility and since I'm on Debian, manually chmod the
Now don't get me wrong, I actually enjoy this kind of fiddling and was able to resolve all of the above issues (the reason I'm running Debian
Now you can say what you want about apple but the fact remains that while the UNIX community was talking about making UNIX user friendly, Apple got it done. I'm almost sorry I don't own a mac so I can't play with MacOS X.
Jilles
Not everyone can write (or has enough hours in the day) to write everything that they need to have on a particular OS. That's the one reason I switched from dos/win3.11 for linux was the application support and support for legacy hardware and minimal sys requirements.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
This issue is brought up every time there is an Apple related story on Slashdot.
Most x86 hardware sucks. It is cheap (in both senses) and not standardized. Bolting together a box from lowest bidder OEM parts is not computer engineering. There is a ton of legacy crap that has to be supported by the operating system. Much of it is buggy. For anyone selling and supporting an operating system, this is a bottomless pit of development and support costs.
I own and use both Macs and x86 PCs. Much of the attraction of the Mac is due to the fact that real engineering went into the design and integration of the hardware and software. This wouldn't be possible if Mac OS X was ported to some random Intel box.
They point here is that we nerds treat the interface as an after-thought. We need to grasp this fundamental truth: The Interface *is* the Computer!
Windows' success shows how even a lame-assed imitation of a good interface will work. We need to do better -- better than KDE has done, better than Gnome is so far, and god knows, better than Windows. There are too many details! Too much technical knowledge required! We can do so much better.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
When I installed OS X Public Beta on my older Mac, I suddenly found myself using my Linux box a lot less. The things I love Linux for, being able to setup reliable servers, the command line, Unix programs, standard development tools (after I installed them separately), and eager users with lots of info and ideas - were all there. At the same time Mac OS X has something that Linux lacks, a beautiful, smooth, consistant user interface. Mac OS X is really a pleasure to use. For me, it's the best of both worlds.
Of course, Mac OS X is not free.
How does OSX compare to BSD? Are all of the .conf files REALLY there, or is there some kind of kludged mapping? What server tasks are you using it for? (My neighbor is a Mac consultant, but he's never home, or I'd ask him:)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
If a bunch of wankers from across the globe can make an OS that supports so much stuff (two bunches, if you include Linux as well as BSD) certainly Apple can do something similar.
CoS has nothing to do with John Travolta. It's the Cult of Steve.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
You actually can buy an iMac for $900. You still don't get a LOT for your money, but that's actually not bad.
Still... Compare the $1200 machine. I think my points are still valid.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Therein lies one of the problems with the article: if Apple is catering to recording studios and graphics houses, how is this possibly a 'machine for the rest of us'?
My Mac Classic. That was a machine for the rest of us. Turn it on and go.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
No, the above comment was not flamebait. But it was an exaggeration.
For about $1200, you can get a wicked fast x86 machine, nice big (huge?) hard drive, 17" monitor, enough RAM, and even a decent 3d-video card.
Can you even buy an iMac for that much? Assuming you can, you have to live with: slower proc (yes, G4 faster at equivalent proc speeds, but at the $1200 price I mentioned, you should be able to get a 900 mHz x86. The iMac has what, a 450 or so? The extra cycles on the x86 are making up for the inherent problems in the processor). You also get: no expandability, a dinky screen, smaller drive(s). etc.
The reason I dropped the Mac after about twelve years of allegiance was the impossibility of buying high speed hardware. I just don't make enough money.
So, moderators, look at the comment, and see hyperbole. Not a troll.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Just an FYI for some folks that may be unfamiliar with what's going on beneath the GUI for Mac OS X. As a ADC member, I've done a bit of looking into the nuts & bolts of OS X and its actually pretty interesting.
Here's a good URL to check for more info: Darwin FAQ. For those of you too lazy to read the entire thing, it mentions here that Darwin is based on NextStep and uses NetBSD applications and FreeBSD libraries.
How does Darwin relate to OS X? Well, the way that I've come to look at it is simple: Darwin is the *NIX and OS X (the proprietary part) is the GUI that users will learn to love.
In the FAQ, you'll also see mention of how much of the Darwin source is entirely processor/platform independent and that they actually have Darwin running on a particular configuration of an x86 machine. All that is needed to bring Darwin to x86 fully is more developers.
The FAQ also mentions that any updates to the Mac OS X source (the none-proprietary parts) are automatically reflected in the Darwin tree and that updates to the Darwin tree are eventually folded into the releases of OS X. That's powerful - think about it.
All in all, I think OS X is an excellent step for Apple and for the *NIX/Open Source community in general.
I can't stand how Apple keeps on insisting that they have to do everything in house and everything proprietary... instead of using cheap, standard parts
they keep on using proprietary things like
ATA
PCI and AGP
USB
IEEE 1394
PC-100 and 133 RAM
15 pin VGA ports
1/8" audio Jacks
1000/100/10bT or 100/10bT Ethernet on every machine
PCMCIA, S-Video, and VGA outputs on thier laptops
Jeezz.. if they ever got a clue, *maybe* I could upgrade a Mac with a good gaming video card, cheap RAM, cheap IDE hard drives, use my regular PC monitor, use a cheap USB scanner, speakers and networking gear.. much less there's no way to install Windows or Linux on their computers
fuckin Apple.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
they DO compile, and depending on the programme need little or no tweaking.
The weird thing is that it's SUPPOSED to be FreeBSD... but it isn't.
It's mostly FreeBSD, but there are aspects of Net and Open BSDs in it...
Or that's what I read somewhere.. in a DaemonNews article I think
-Donald
~Donald / Just RTFM
name ONE THING that a Mac CAN'T do that you CAN with a PC. Nameing a specific programme is not fair. Let's see it.
-Donald
~Donald / Just RTFM
... and it's fine. It's even running on an old IDE drive that I put in (not UDMA66).. no problems at all.
the build I am using is pre-release and has debugging code in the widgets and UI and I have heard from people that have already recieved the gold master that it's quite quicker.
such claims are sorta silly... oh well, at least nobody can accuse you of being a karma-whore
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Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?
Yes and No,
You are not accounting for the quality of hardware vs your garage trick.
You are also not accounting for the fact that with that hardware you can run Mac OS9.1, OSX, Linux (PPC) , Windows*, OSX Server, etc.
Frankly I would spend the $800 on the iMac and then convert the machine you where using previous to a linux server which you can then get the best of both worlds.
I have done that myself (just bought a G4 last week after playing with OSX on my wifes iBook for about a month...). I have my dual processor PIII 800 (Running Debian) sitting next to my G4 running OSX.
I can always reboot into windows 2000 on my pc if I -HAVE- to play a latest and greatest game.
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Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?
goto http://www.darwinfo.org
lots of ports of UNIX based packages, not BSD applications. (not many successful LINUX only applications... with exception of the kernel.)
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Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?
I just installed OSX, it's got BSD plastered all over the installation process.
they have given back to the community as well. You can download the Darwin/BSD kernel and run it on PC hardware.
They give credit where credit is due. They use the BSD story is part of their pitch on why it's so damn stable.
Geez...
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Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?
Simple enough...
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Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?
I have.. I have been working with it for a while now.
I could give a rats ass about accomplishments or who supports what type of backwards compatible code... I need to write java apps. I need to use XWin apps. I need to read Excel spreadsheets and edit Word documents. I enjoy using a constistant and clever interface. I enjoy having commercially supported drivers. I enjoy STILL BEING ABLE TO CO EXISTS WITH MY LINUX MACHINE AS A SERVER. I ENJOY BEING ABLE TO RUN X-WINDOWS APPS AS I NEED THEM FROM MY LINUX SERVER.
I don't give up anything. I get the best of both worlds. I can hack on my G4, play with my DV cam and listen to MP3's while hacking Java code on JBuilder and all with a mac interface.
If you have little experience in setting up a heterogenious environment there are plenty of howto's out there that will help. Because OSX comes with native NFS and has plenty of Samba and other unix native applications ported already, you shouldn't have to hard of time a dealing with your phobia of a well supported consumer directed linux.
By christmas time this year I promise that there will be more games, business applications, etc. that will allow me to function and co-habitate with Windows BORG users yet retain my Unix-independance without compromising colaboration and cohabitation.
I have sent documents converted to Office format from StarOffice to work collegues and was embarrased by their reactions.
Like lesbians, don't know em till you try em.
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Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?
just, uh, FYI: they are working on it. not Lear, but there are several companies working on personal aircraft (google that for links). the concept is that computers prevent you from ramming things/other jets/the ground , and you get a joystick. nifty, eh?
nik
New VCR's also have a clock embedded in them that keeps the time for a day or two if the power goes out. The user should never have to set the time on any VCR, it should set itself from embedded time codes in the video signals. That's what user interface engineering is all about.
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
Yes it multiboots. I have MacOS X and Debian Linux on my Powerbook G3 and have no problem dual booting. Mac partitioning allows a couple hundred partitions, rather than the paltry maximum of four primaries I get on my PC. If you only want to dual boot between MacOS X and MacOS 9.1, you can put them both on the same partition, with MacOS 9 in a directory.
/usr/libexec) and you're in business. This is because darwin is relatively new and wasn't listed in these files until recently.
As for compiling your standard unix tools, I've used the copy of gcc that comes with every copy of MacOS X to compile Bash, the GNU filesystem tools (ls, etc.) since OS X ships with the BSD versions, and I prefer the GNU tools, Python, PostgreSQL, a new version of tcpwrappers, OpenSSH and a bunch of other stuff.
With older stuff, in general the only thing you need to do to get things to compile is pick up a new copy of config.guess and config.sub from the GNU FTP site (or replace them with the ones included with OS X in
I don't think there's much to worry about...
In short, marketing UNIX to my mother would be a mistake. She neither wants nor needs most of the benefits that it provides. She has a hard enough time using Windows.
Funny, my mother would not agree with you. I switched her from windows to Linux/KDE. She had no real problems with the interface after a week or so, and is busily doing all sorts of things on the computer. She enjoys the fact that her computer doesn't crash anymore, that her net connection stays up longer (she had problems with connection idling killers on the ISP side). She likes that all the software and HW she needs works correctly.
Color Printer - check
Digital Camera - check
sound - check
internet - check
Instant messaging - check
web browsing - check
email - check
So she really is very happy.
OS X PB runs pretty well on my far less than $3500 Powerbook running at 333mhz with 128MB RAM. You can run it on a low end iMac too (you would have to spring $50 extra to bring the RAM up from 64MB). Nevertheless, for $1000 you have a decent system running a UNIX varient. With a whole lot of software present and future to choose from.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
They did. I'm running Carbon apps on 8.6.
-- Colin
How true!
Alas the current, uh, wave in the Unix/Linux people is more like "do everything with perl and emacs". Forget about pipes and redirections, say hello to the language with 42 different ways of writing if(x) y; (BTW, is there anyone besides Larry Wall who knows all of these?) and a HUGE libc-duplicated-for-perl.
-- Colin
Did you write the OS that runs in the box under your desk?
Eh?
-- Colin
This is silly question. If you can't afford the OS you almost certainly can't afford the box that it goes on.
Beware the wood elf!!!
First of all, the Mac's not really all the closed. I mean, IDE, SCSI, PCI -- it's not like the days of the Mac 512 where you needed an extra long torx driver, pony clamp and special processor clip on to anything which wasn't provided as an external port.
Macs are indeed much easier to manage than Linux x86 boxes, but it isn't just the number of possibile hardware combinations. There was the avoidance of legacy x86 hardware problems, for one thing, but more importanly simple configuration was deliberately given a higher priority than the lowest possible price.
Historically, Macs have had a rich supply of external connectors like SCSI and ADB, and now fire wire. It isn't just the availability of an external port, its the relatively high level nature of the interface. Generally devices for the mac are more expensive but have more smarts built in so there's less tweaking. Adding an USB serial port or parallel port is simply going to be easier than installing and configuring an ISA card.
If you compared apples (lowercase a) to apples, it would be possible to get Linux to install things like hard disks just as easily. For example connecting a firewire hard disk. Even better consider Linux PCMCIA support -- which is here now. You just plug just about anything in and it works. This I think is related again to the nature of the device's interface, which allows cards to be handled in an abstract way by the operating system.
On the other hand with Linux you can modify its behavior so that it recognizes that a webgear aviator card is the same thing as a raytheon Ray Link card.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
At Apple they probably started writing that marketing paper a couple of years ago because actually the easiest/fastest/troubleless way to install an OS on a PC is with Mandrake 7.2. (not on a mac but mac are not for the common man, it's for the common rich man)
I've always wondered about these attempts to deliver linux to the common man. What i've always found appealing about the unix design is that it doesn't dumb things down in an attempt to be more 'user friendly'. The command line is a beautiful thing, but it doesn't mean my mother should be exposed to it. Personally, i've always seen true user friendliness as a sacrifice to power. I would rather have a high learning curve but more power than an OS that's easy to use, but offers me less power.
In short, marketing UNIX to my mother would be a mistake. She neither wants nor needs most of the benefits that it provides. She has a hard enough time using Windows. I see no problem in having different operating systems aimed at different audiences, rather than having one OS that tries to do everything. Why exactly does linux *want* world domination? The entire UNIX philosophy is that it's better to have things be the best at what they do, rather than trying to do everything.
ObHolyWarFodder: I suspect that emacs users may disagree with this. =P
hot foreign sheep.
I'm sorry to tell you, but linux can not be made that easy to install and configure, because there is so much more to configure on a pc. The closest you could hope to get is an installer to install and setup the system to run in vga16 color graphics mode unaccelerated, which I'll tell you right now won't impress ANYONE. There are too many options to setup in X for instance for it to just work.
Want an example? take mice.
Is my mouse ps2? Is it serial? Is it a busmouse? What protocol does it use? MS? Logitech? Huh? Everyone of the "user friendly" linux installers I've checked out have required me to know what type of mouse I have. This is trivial but annoying.
Granted I know these things, and I have no doubts you know these things, but the average person doesn't. Of course choosing a video card is a completely different issues...as are sound cards.
Recent Macs have 2 or 3 video card types. Most people who have a mac will have one of them. Average PC user a) won't know what type of video card they have, and b) won't by default have anything anyways (meaning there is no default video card that goes into all PC's).
You can say that linux wasn't made for people like that and you're correct - however that's also my point.
He didn't say it was a success, jackass, he said it rocked.
As is true with most unixen, the makefiles need a little tweaking. But it has all the [open?]bsd stuff.
You'll need to up the memory for OSX, but do you think this is 'common man price' enough? (from their store page)
Imac
$899.00
400MHz
PowerPC G3
512K L2 cache
(at 160MHz)
64MB SDRAM
10GB Ultra ATA drive
CD-ROM
RAGE 128 Pro w/ 8MB
10/100BASE-T Ethernet
56K internal modem
15-inch display
Two USB ports
Two FireWire ports
You make a fantastic point, and yet you miss the point you made!
Old VCRs are "very hard" to use. Recent VCRs have 'VCR+'? which lets you enter a number that corresponds to the show you want to watch and programs it for you. Modern VCRs set the clock for you automagically using a signal on the PBS? station. New VCRs let you select the show you want on a menu and record it for you AND record shows that it thinks you may want to see (tivo).
They're all "just VCRs" in the same way the 'OS' is "just an OS". But which would you rather use?
Apple is shooting for the new VCR model - hyper friendly.
Linux is, at best, a shotgun because it is aiming in different directions depending on the distro/person/time of day. I happen to like Mandrake...
Dunno about OS X, but it looks like it works now with 9 (see http://www.architosh.com/e-store/hardware/workstat ions.html, http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/video.html). With an iMac you can't, but with a regular mac I hope they get around to writing the driver for OSX soon. Or maybe they have? Or maybe you will? I believe they are open sourcing driver dev.
Do you want 3D support? What a stupid question...
Mac FUD? Who'd have thunk...
802.11
They have one of the best solutions around for it.
Please. Yeah, that's the most expensive box you can buy from Apple right now. Note that you can buy a DUAL CPU box for $2500 (533Mhz G4's). Yeah, you can build an intel box for less, but it's nice to see a Unix vendor :-) ship a VERY nice dual CPU box for that amount. Note also that you can buy a bitchin' cool laptop for $2600.
OK, enough commercial. Sorry.
Seriously, there's lots of point to it; it's not always obvious from America, where most people react to the mere idea of other languages with a face like someone farted.
Comparing, for example, getting web broswers and a simple text editor to work for Chinese, Mac is the easiest, Unix has decent support for some editors and whatnot, but probably the most people are doing it on PC on pirated software.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
" It would be my best guess that Apple still had to write device drivers for MOST existing hardware. I haven't been keeping up on all the details lately, but it seems very reasonable to assume. "
Apple has tight control of the hardware so they don't have to support umpteen video cards just a handful.
"but since my first day I've gained a LOT of respect for their NT and 2000 OSes. I still prefer a Macintosh for home use, Windows NT/2000 for work, and *nix for geeking out. "
In that case you can chuck all of them out the window. MacOSX gives you the ease of use of a mac, with the power of Unix. You can geek out all you want and your mom can cruise the net. There is no real need for w2K anymore (unless of course you are vendor locked in. If that's the case you have my sympathies).
War is necrophilia.
Apple has me sold. With one of the most impressive laptops, and a pretty Unix-based OS, how could I say no?
The Vaio's are nice, but this new combo of hardware/software rocks. And in the end, if OS X becomes crummy, I can -still- run Linux on the hardware. I always hated the x86 platform with all its baggage.
Sign me up.
First off, WTF, are you smoked out of your gourd or something? What on God's great earth would prompt you to say something as absurd as 'linux should provide support for only a few types of hardware' - that's the reversal of progress. A large driver database is something that linux has been progressing in over time - it's not a bad thing.
Screw those people who think linux isn't 'user friendly' - it's not targeted at them. People who can't use a specific device should not use it. Period. Linux is not for everybody. A blind person is not allowed to drive because they're not physically able to. The same goes for those of the populace of lesser intelligence who aren't willing to wade through the difficulties of a more advanced operating system - tough crap, either deal or get out.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I've inquired on the Loki web site as to why they list EB as a retailer but none of the stores actually carry the products, and never gotten a response.
siri
and believe it or not, it's faster than running 9.1 directly.
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
First of all you seem to not understand the message of the article... It sayes that Mac OS X is Unix for the MASSES... As in NOT sys admins.
But apart from that you are not really in touch with reality. Since when did it become the job of an OS to provide CDRW support and USB drivers for 3rd party stuff?
Mac OS X has one of the best driver structures I have seen. Basically ALL kinds of drivers have been unified under one API (known as IOKit). And for most standard type devices very little code is needed to make one specific for that device. I will give you it's poorly documented. But OTOH the implementation and a lot of Apples drivers is Open Source under Darwin. So a dedicated developer would be able to figure it out. But since the OS have pretty much just become a stable target from a developers viewpoint (since Apple have improved on the core OS design almost all the way to the final candidates).
Anyway you slice it. Apple have again proved that they show the way for the rest of the computer industry. By combining open source with a final product that 'normal' users can acturlly use I think they have hit something that will shake M$ in it's roots if it ever get's on the Intel PC marked. Although that product is not likely to be Mac OS X itself.
Correct - except that was Rhapsody. But drivers lacked. So only a very small number of machines would run it.
Acturlly to this day Mac OS X compiles on Intel hardware (something Apple does to make sure they can once again move to another processor family if need be). But from there to acturlly run... Well a whole lot of Intel platform drivers would have to be made.
Why shouldn't someone want to run Redhat right out of the box?
:), I was happy to discover that it lived up to its claim. I plugged it in, it got its address from the DHCP server on my FreeBSD box and I was up and running in no time.
;). If OSX is just as easy, I'll probably upgrade them and administer their machines remotely. It might even make all of those "I can't figure out how to hook up my digital camera" calls a lots less painful.
When Apple put out the iMac it came with a 3 step setup manual and a claim of "online in 30 minutes". When I bought one (as a kitchen appliance
I was so happy with it that I bought one for my sister and an iBook for my parents. I even got them an Airport (so I could hook into it when I visit
I don't understand why you, apparently, think Linux should be reserved for the "technically elite". If a person is using the computer for WWW, email and games, why should they care what daemons are running? For that matter, why should they care what OS they are running?
Remember: every one of those "idiots" running RH out of the box means one less idiot running Windows out of the box. (And one more person wanting Linux drivers for their digital camera, or kickass video card, etc).
blog
What's your point?
blog
"Steve has forgotten that (Control != Profit)."
But you've forgotten that Mind_Control == Profit. If it weren't for Jobs' reality distortion field, I'm sure Apple would have gone under a while ago. Not to say that's a good or bad thing...but Apple is basically just a small superset of Jobs (and NeXT).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
"Windows users aren't using Windows because it's got an x86 architecture."
No, they're using it because it's the most popular. And what better way to get your operating system into the hands of the populace, than by porting it to *popular* hardware?
"The reason why the MacOS is so nice and tight is because they control the hardware and the software."
You forgot "...and expensive". Sure Mr. Techo-Elitist, perhaps you can afford to pay a premium to get "blessed" hardware from Apple. But most users don't *care* if their hardware was designed elegantly or not. They look at value. They don't want to have to pay a premium for a whole new machine every year just because brilliant Apple engineers thought, in their professional engineering opinion that it would be more elegant to obsolete a piece of hardware or software. <soup-nazi>NO UPGRADE FOR YOU!</soup-nazi>
"x86 hardware has price going for it, and that's all."
And in this case, by all, you must mean *everything*. Why isn't everybody driving Mercedes and BMWs, instead of Ford Tauruses and Chevy Caveliers? They're better designed right?
"Windows users use Windows because they think its the best"
Windows users use Windows because they don't know any better, don't care, or are too lazy to change something they've already grown accustomed to. If I ask my mother why she uses Windows I will guarantee you the words "Because it's best" will not come out of her mouth (more like "Because it runs Word". Or "Because it runs game XYZ". Or "Because it came with the computer").
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Acting like unix and BEING unix are two different things. Unix runs java fine last time I checked.. It was written on unix and runs fine on linux/solaris (SUN Microsystems, the people that wrote JAVA) if doesn't run good on solaris then it's not gonna run properly anywhere else/openbsd. Speed? JVM from mac thats supposed to be "faster"? Heh, I'll see it when it materializes. Also a quick note, every feature that I liked about *nix will not exist on OS/X. Otherwise they'd support 64bit tasking. I'm not offended by your zealotry, i'm offended that you seem to be informed only about the mac side of things and blind yourself to other things. However, that is what Apple wants. BTW; I can't wait to get a copy of OS/X
I am from the third world, and I am surprised at some of the comments people make about the third world.
The lower you bring down the price of computing, the better. A lot of people are still running 386, 486 and P1 machines, even in businesses.
The reason is because it is just too expensive to upgrade... In the west, you junk a 10 yr old car... in the 3rd world, a lot of people rely on 20+ year old vehicles as their main mode of transportation. Only when there is no hope for it is it 'retired'. Even then it is cannibalised in order to patch up another one!
Necessity does maketh an environmentally friendly man!
The buy-trash-buy-trash-buy cycle is not as short as it is in the west.
I for one am a believer that linux companies should target the third world both as a market , and a source of relatively cheap hardworking talent.
I am working on a project to have companies donate PCs to schools, and colleges in southern Africa. (contact me if you want to help).
Cheap PCs + free software will equal opportunities for many youngsters whose alternative is crime/sweatshops/agriculture.
Live today. Tomorrow will cost a lot more!
Apple's first UNIX, A/UX, could have been everything that NeXTSTEP was, but that was in the days when Apple had a very strong set of blinders on.
A/UX was a Sys V implementation, and it ran NeWS (aka display postscript) back in 1987.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I know the point you're trying to make, Macs aren't THAT expensive when compared to PCs, but the price to performance ratio is still way off. No to mention the fact that Mac hardware ties you to Apple, whereas with a PC I can alway buy expanstions or upgrades from anyone. The value stills seems to be in the PC world.
Which part of USB, PC-100 Memory, IDE or SCSI, PCI, etc "tie you to Apple"?
Expansions and upgrades are very easy to get for New World mac hardware, from multiple vendors. I just don't get this gripe.
And of course no one cares about anyone who doesn't read slashdot.
I think Apple would say "go tell BMW that they're pricing themselves out of the market. If you're dissatisfierd, get a Kia." Apple wants to be the sports cars of computers, the BMW, the mercedes.
If you can't stand Apple, I can't stop you from getting an x86. You're paying in this case for goot stability, good drivers, good integration end-to-end software/hardware.
Apple isn't out to make the cheapest computers, they're trying to make the best damn computers on the market. Its like you're saying poorer people can't buy a mercedes.
Actually it's pretty good at 64MB RAM and 300MHz. Only when Classic starts up, it eats the extra availible RAM, and makes the windows stutter.
Lemme guess, you used the Public Beta. That was slow. I used the final, it's much, much faster, now that the debugging code was removed, and the code was optimized. Accorind to macosrumors.com, they got "400% faster" Whether its really that much, its a heck of a lot more snappier.
GNOME can be made to run on anything: Linux, BSD, commercial UNIX, even Windows.
GTK runs on Windows, Gnome does not.
But it's gonna be GNOME.
GNOME and KDE are both far from consistently innovative. Maybe one day one of the two projects will churn out something that is different, something that hasn't been done before or something that combines a lot of old ideas into a fresh one. An idea that lets the user work faster, an idea that makes the developer sit in their chair and ponder why they hadn't thought of that before. Not that the two projects aren't of high quality; they just aren't particularly innovative. Neither is Microsoft. GNOME and KDE mostly seem to be decent copies of a mediocre copy. Note how KDE/GNOME implementation isn't even as advanced as NextStep was ten years ago. For some reason, the innovative companies always seem to be in financial trouble. Something about creative manic depression in the foundation of the company, instability reverberating throughout the company's Benjamins. They die frequently, or, like Apple, are merely predicted to die frequently.
The former Mac developers at Eazel are working to make a GNOME environment every bit as slick and polished as an Apple environment.
Eazel is dead.
Both of the main desktop environment projects depress me because of their ignorance of fundamental rules of UI design; e.g. Fitz's Law. Not that they aren't alone, it seems most commercial software ignores it as well.
One reason I appreciate projects like GnuStep is that they chose to copy something that was actually really cool.
I'd rather not be entirely pessimistic, though. For example, I think KDE's kio system is advanced--such as Konqueror's ability to view a POP3 mailbox with minimum additional hassle, just through the use of an existing kio method for POP3. Gnome has other noteworthy features. They aren't totally stagnant--while I feel they are somewhat stagnant on pure UI stuff, as far as architecture both projects conduct some interesting experiments and demonstrate advances.
Commercial software, when done by bright and dedicated people and managed by people with a clue, tends to produce software that explores new ideas more commonly than OSS does. If nothing else, OSS provides a more robust implementation of said creativity.
Wrong. Mac OS X Server (released two years ago) was basically NeXTStep 5.0 (not that that's bad), but Apple has made huge improvements for Mac OS X. There's a new vector imaging model (Quartz), the Carbon API to let existing Mac apps run natively in X with minimal changes, a full JDK 1.3 environment, a rewritten Finder, kickass development tools (included free), and the spiffy Aqua effects that you may laugh it, but that will sell Macs. And I'm probably leaving out a bunch of stuff.
Last, it may be useful to remind everyone out there that Apple has achieved this so-colled user-friendliness by hiding as much as it could the Unix tools: their flexibility and their powers are buried as deep as can be.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Because:
a) If you made a clone Macintosh, Apple would immediately modify their next OS release/service pack so it couldn't run on the clone machine.
b) The market for Macs isn't exactly huge right now. Its not like the entry-level iMac is hugely expensive, either. Good luck breaking into a tiny market with one dominant manufacturer who isn't afraid of tying you up in frivolous lawsuits to deny you entry.
c) Apple will refuse to license their OS to you. You'd have to ship the machines running Darwin, LinuxPPC or no OS at all. Not the best recipe for a good 'out-of-the-box experience'.
All of these reasons relate to the fact that Apple have a monopoly on the Macintosh platform - understandably, they did invent the thing. They have had it threatened before, and won't be giving it up any time soon.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
How many residents of third world countries can afford a $500 computer and the $1200 in replacement parts that will be required in the first year? Or have a good internet connection to get Linux help? Or can afford the Microsoft Tax?
If things can be made so much better and more useful on a closed hardware system, as you claim, that seems to be a pretty strong argument in favour of closed hardware systems.
LinuxPPC supports the exact same machines as MacOS X, and I haven't heard it's anywhere near MacOS X in these aspects.
Of course Linux can be made that easy to install and configure. The point of the article is that it hasn't. That's the promise vs deliver thing.
Personally, i've always seen true user friendliness as a sacrifice to power. I would rather have a high learning curve but more power than an OS that's easy to use, but offers me less power.
If done right, user friendly design increases the power of a system. You can spend less effort remembering, learning and figuring out how to do things, and more on actually doing them.
And there is no need at all to take away features to get there. You just have to do them right.
I can't really blame you for your observation though. Most of what's done in the name of user friendliness is pathetically misguided.
Er, you're running Debian, known to be a distribution aimed at enthusiasts; yet you're complaining that it took some fiddling to get the sound card working.
>>>>>>>
It should be configured automatically in *every* distro enthusiast or not. I see no reason to make a distinction here. You autoconfig it, and provide the ability for the user to modify the settings. That way the regular user (or the enthusiast who doesn't give a flying fuck about his sound card's IRQs) can just use it, and the user who wants to micromange can change the settings. It doesn't decrease the power of the system, just makes it more polished. Hacked together (I'm not saying Debian is) and unpolished!=powerful. Polished and well put together!=not-powerful. An enthusiast likes using his computer and fiddling with it. However, I know few enthusiasts who want to fiddle just to get trival things like sound to work. *Real* enthusiasts want to get in and tweek code, make their system better, do something useful. *Real* enthusiasts don't like complexity for complexity's sake.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
BeOS runs on Intel too, and it has hte simplest installation known to man. Sure it doesn't support as much HW as Linux, but its installation complexity isn't proporitonal to its hardware support. Linux just does a lot of things wrong from the install/configuration standpoint. First, there is no standard method of adding hardware and drivers. Kudzu-like programs mitigate some of this, but they constrain the user into using a very specific software set. Second, the OS doesn't automatically autoconfigure anything. I'm not saying the user shouldn't be able to do it, I'm saying the user shouldn't HAVE to do it. Third, it manages resources all funny. Every other OS I've ever used can assign IRQs and DMAs and memory ranges without problems, but with Linux, I have to know these details to configure my sound card. Unlike OS-X, there are not standard methods of doing configuration files on Linux. Each one is different. It doesn't take much to create a standard method for something like this. All you need to do is provide a standard method accessible from the system API. Most developers will just use the built-in services, and not bother to hack their own config format. This way, all files that can use the standard format (XML) do use the standard format. Forth, documentation is lacking. I love the UNIX concept of man pages, why doesn't Linux do this anymore? In Linux documentation is split between man pages, info pages, README's, and web-sites. I think Linux should live up to its UNIX heritage and unify its documentation. Man is probably too limited, but the numerous schemes based on XML seem promising. (BTW, include it standard in every distro. Why did man pages become so universal? Because the OS had out-of-box support for them!) I could go on, but I have a feeling I'm repeating myself...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I believe most Macs ship with the ROM on the harddrive. Besides, who cars about ROM size?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Doh! That's almost the definition of proprietory! You have to buy hardware from them and only them. I, for one, hate the fact taht you have to buy Macs premade. If I haven't built it myself, I don't want it under my desk.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Not yet, but give me six months to finish it ;)
Seriously though I meant the box. I built every computer in my house, and I find that the big name guys just don't pack in the proper parts.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
That's bullshit. I spent more time "engineering" my computer than any Dell (or Apple) lacky spent throwing a system together.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Even Linux From Source. The Linux kernel should have a unified way of handling and configuring hardware, and there should be a standard userspace tool to configure and manage hardware. (Kinda like how kernel-level networking is configured through the userspace program ifconfig.)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
So... You designed your own motherboards and chipsets, wrote your ROM bios code, spec-ed out your capicitors and diodes, pressed your own sheetmetal cases, injection molded your own case-skins, wrote your own firewire spec, then implemented the CMOS for it, and then wrote the drivers for it, designed and built the wireless antennas for your PC, and drafted your own bus specs and implementations?
;), Klipsch 4.1 speakers, 80GB RAID array (4 drives!) and a Sound Blaster Live! card. A Mac user, on the other hand, would have to shell out $3500 for a 733MHz G4 (benchmarks put a $500 Mhz G4 at about the speed of an Athlon 750. I doubt a 733 will clear an Athlon 1.1, much less a 1.3) with a third the RAM, 60GB-non RAID drive, Apple "Pro" speakers, and a no-name sound chip. By the time you bring this anemic thing up to PC standard, the price balloons to well over $5000. PPC seems to be a good platform. Motorola and IBM are getting their act together and releasing 1GHz G4s, which should beat with the fastest x86 chips. The platform has always been easy to use, and with the upcoming DDR-SDRAM chipsets, will be on a speed-parity with the x86 platform. Despite it all, Apple is killing it by keeping it closed.
>>>>>>>>>>>
Who cares? In the PC industry, the people who do these jobs do it as well (or better) than Apple does it. The only reason that the PC's aren't as high-quality as Macs is because of the limitations in the architecture, not bad build quality.
You can create a PC as well as any 'lacky' who throws parts together. You may chose better or worse parts than
any lacky, but when you buy Apple, you buy all of the above, and if you don't want to pay for that, then you
can't get a PPC system.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A) I don't WANT a PPC system.
B) Apple is stupid for doing all this itself. It hems the customer into using whatever Apple feels they should use, and drives up cost. Build quality isn't drastically improved (I'm 99% sure that an Open PPC system would be just as high quality as the closed Apple system. Besides, the old Apple clones were just as good as real Apples) and the industry hates you for it. Companys hate Intel for sucking it all in and doing their own chipsets, motherboards, CPUs, and graphics cards, and (if Apple becomes big enough to matter) people will hate Apple for the same reasons.
Now I don't contest that a PC you build is stable or reliable; it cannot be denied that a multi-million dollar corp can build crap PCs too.
>>>>>>>>>>>
The PC I built I just as high quality as any Apple machine. With plug & play (and BeOS) adding hardware is just as easy as with an Apple machine. Its cheaper, more powerful, and more well-supported (in terms of replacement hardware). And I'm not too sure of how much Apple cares about product quality. This is the same company that for years shipped systems with graphics cards two generations out of date, system busses two bins too slow, OSs two bits short of stable, and sound hardware that couldn't compete with my kazoo. With $3500 (or less!), I could easily build a 1.33Ghz Athlon PC with 1GB RAM, A GeForce3 (or ATI's upcoming, BeOS supported, Radeon II
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Who cares? The people who buy the PCs care that they get something well designed. This applies as equally to
;)
Macs as to PCs, to cars. It means more to some than to others, but quality is what people pay for!
>>>>>>>>
I didn't mean who cares about quality, I meant who cares that Apple does it all themselves? People do care about quality, but doing everything in one company does not necessarily bring that quality.
And thus the real question; are you actually acknowledging that Macs are higher quality than PCs?
>>>>>>>>
Depends on what you're talking about. If you're talking build quality and hardware quality, then no, PCs are just as high quality (or more so, depending on the vendor) as Macs. If you're talking about the quality of the architecture, then yes, Macs are more high quality because they don't have to deal with the vargacies of the PC architecture. This doesn't effect stability or reliability, but effects the platform's ease of use.
Still, if the PC has problems because of limitations in the architecture, that's still a problem. Why is it that
Compaq or Dell have not 'engineered' their own solution to overcome these limitations? Macs use the same
AGP and PCI busses, memory busses, USB, Firewire, ATA drive specs, video connectors, etc, so it's possible.
Why is it none of the PC manufacturers have done it yet?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You have no idea what you're talking about do you? Sure they use the same hardware, but Macs don't have to deal with software and hardware that assumes there are 16 IRQs with IRQ2 as a cascade. Apple doesn't have to deal with software that expects a sound blaster to be at a particular port address with a particular IRQ and with software that assumes IRQ 5 is the ATA interface. Mac designers don't have to bother with the ISA bus or with a limited number of DMA channels. Mac designers don't have to treat the first meg of memory with great reverence and maek sure that DMA-able memory is under 16MBs so the ISA cards can do DMA. PC hardware manufacturers *can't* fix these issues, there is just too much software that depends on these issues.
Why the heck is Apple stupid? HP uses it's own motherboard (not a stock one from Tyan, MSI, or Intel), though it probably relies on chipsets from Intel or something.
>>>>>>>>>>
Hah! I don't know about HP, but I know that Dell's "engineered" motherboards are simply modified Intel ones. And Compaq used to make their own motherboards, but everybody hated them so they switched to stock ones. As for chipsets, only one company makes its own chipsets, and that is Micron, who uses their own chipsets in their workstations and servers.
By doing this Apple can provide it's own feature set at
the advantage of everyone else.
>>>>>>>>>
Yea, but they also tie users to their motherboards. As I said, everybody hated Compaq's LPX motherboards because their riser cards and cases were proprietory. Everyone also hates Dell's motherboards and power supplies because the power connectors are specific to Dell's motherboards.
Apple was one of the earliest adopters of USB, because it could build it into the system instead of waiting for Intel or Tyan to design the motherboards with USB support.
>>>>>>>>
But does Apple let other companys make Apple compatible chipsets? AMD made their own chipset as well to add features for the K7 platform, but allowed other companys to take over the K7 chipset market as the platform matured. I don't see Apple allowing VIA to make Apple chipsets.
It's called innovation, and it's called leading the pack. They can either wait for someone else to do it, and bundle it, or they can do it themselves!
>>>>>>>>>>>
That's fine. But even after other companies support it, they continue to lock them out. That's called monopolizing the platform!
You're 99% sure? I'm pretty sure than in an Open PPC system, you'd get identical results as today's open PC
system.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
The 99% sure is because, like IBM and their OpenPPC system, somebody might fuck up.
Crap devices with crap drivers and crap systems.
>>>>>>>
It's called a Mac. Crap graphics cards, crap OS, crap hardware.
Don't tell me they don't exist!
>>>>>>>>>
I'm not saying they don't exit because they do. At least with PC's, however, you have the option of not buying crap hardware! Besides, there is crap hardware and crap drivers on every platform, even Apple's. The only advantage the Apple platform has is that it doesn't inherit the limitations of the IBM PC. An OpenPPC platform would inherit these limitations either, and would be better than an Apple system because it was open.
Apple may be the cream of the crop in such a market
>>>>>>
In the crap hardware market? Seriously though, until recently, Apple was the king of crap hardware. Rage II+ graphics chips, Crystal sound chips, too little RAM, 50MHz system busses, the list goes on. Even now that Apple has good hardware (GeForce3's, DDR-SDRAM, etc) its only because manufacturers from the PC industry decided to include Apple in their plans. And they still can't get a decent set of bundled speakers!
but tell me how Apple gets an advantage in an Open system? Apple gets no advantage,
>>>>>>>>>>
That's a good thing for the consumer.
and the users gets one advantage: The ability to choose their own motherboard (that's it! Everything else in a Mac is already standard!)
>>>>>>>>>
No, they get the ability to build their own system. With that comes the ability not know to choose your motherboard, but choose alternate chipsets, mix-and-match parts, and have access to cheaper hardware. Right now, if I buy an Apple, I would have to throw away the entire sound system and replace it with a Live! and a set of Klipschs. I'd have to lose the on board ATA card and install at ATA RAID array. Why bother? With the PC, I can go to a manufacturer that offers these standard (or build my own) and not pay for parts that I don't want.
And do you seriously think there would be a company that build a better motherboard than Apple? If they do,
they should *already* be building better motherboards than Apple today!
>>>>>>>>>>
Yes. Where'd you get the idea that Apple builds the best motherboards in the world? They don't, and because of the closed nature of the Apple platform, nobody is allowed toc compete with them.
Okay, so now we get to the meat of your argument. That the platform is being killed by a non open standard.
>>>>>>>
Actually, I think Apple is bouncing back. I just think a lot more people would use it if they got to have control over their system. I know I would (once the quad 1Ghz G4 mobo's come out, of course
Well, 2 things.
Apple *is* the standard.
>>>>>>>>>>
What? Clarify what you mean.
Anyone (Dell, Compaq, etc) can release their own PPC systems if they wanted, but they would need an OS.
Apple, as a business, need not 'give' their OS to a competitor. Think about it.
>>>>>>>>>>>
They could not build a PPC system that would run MacOS. Besides, Apple could sue them. Do you think Dell could clone the Playstation hardware without Sony sueing their asses off? Hell no! I think you need to read up on the definition of "closed platform." Besides, Apple forcing people to buy hardware by withholding their OS is worse than MS's tactics!
Apple sells what it sells, and people buy it. It suits their needs, despite the comparison you bring up. It's stable enough, full featured enough, fast enough, powerful enough.
>>>>>>>>>>>
Ohhh. It's enough. If enough were enough, then mediocrity would be celebrated, not spat upon.
If they weren't, people wouldn't buy Apple. They would buy Compaq, or Dell, or like yourself, build their own
system.
>>>>>>>>>>
People (statistically) DON'T buy Apples.
The platform you speak of is easy to use *because* of everything you point out. That Apple does it's own
hardware and software and drivers
>>>>>>>
You contradict yourself. If Apple does everything themselves (they don't, NVIDIA writes the drivers, Crystal writes the drivers, Adaptec writes the drivers, etc) how can most of the hardware on an Apple be standard? Apple uses mostly PC hardware, but makes their own motherboards and chipsets, and doesn't allow anyone to clone them. The only thing that makes Mac's easier to use (besides the OS, which isn't relevant in this discussion) is the fact that Apple isn't stradled with a two decade old architecture. That's IT. If Dell and Compaq etc all were allowed to make their own versions of the Mac, the Mac would be no less easy to use.
because they have their own OS
>>>>>>>
There OS is easy to use. I'll give you that.
You can't get that *anywhere* else because no one else does it. Microsoft will soon, when they release their XBox, and then you'll have *all* the same arguments against them as you do against Apple!
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well, both the XBox and the Mac have crappy OSs, so their is one comparison. Still, you're making what we in the psychology world call a "fundmental attribution error." You're attributing the Mac's ease of use to the fact that Apple builds it, not to the quality of the architecture. If the PC didn't have all these IRQs and DMAs and all, then you could still buy chipsets from all over the place, graphics cards from all over the place, etc, and still have a system that's as easy to use as a Mac. (If you buy good hardware, but again, crappy hardware is universal.)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
>enough to have a 1996-era Mac
The only people I know who still use five YEAR old computers, Macintosh or otherwise, are people like myself who can't bear to throw away an obsolete, but otherwise functional box.
They put Linux on them, and stick them in a closet to route mail, IP masq, or serve files.
Hardly the pursuit of your "Average" user, who'll bitch, moan and complain to tech support if word on windoze 2k doesn't load and open a file in under twenty seconds, if they can't load some flash or shockwave webpage 'cause their computer's too slow, or if their quake framerate drops below 60fps.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
I want to play my favorite games on my platform of Choice, be it whether Windows, Linux, or BeOS.
Without games, an desktop OS will never reach mass popularity.
I agree with the article. Linux does take a long time to setup -- I don't have 3 days to read man pages and HOWTO's just to setup a desktop (For firewalls and servers, I *will* take the time for that.) I use Win2K at home, because it is "good enough" for development, quick to setup, and gaming.
Under windows it is painless to upgrade your driver to a newer version. i.e. nVidia 6.31 to 6.50, etc.
Does anyone have a link to that article where it showed that Window's strengths were Linux's weaknesses, and Linux's strengths were Window's weaknesses.
As Linux becomes more user-friendly, consistent, and easier to use, that is good thing for everyone.
Hi, how ya doin'?
Just lookin' at your reply to the previous comment. It really looked like the quote to which you responded was about old Mac OSes, not OS X. Just a little FYI.
Have a great day and don't forget to try to understand the words you read. It really helps.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
That's right, I said that as far as anyone but a hardcore geek can tell windows is without cost!
Unless you build your own computer from parts it comes with an operating system. The common man doesn't build his own computer from parts. Hell, there's a lot of geeky sorts that don't do that. Granted, there are a few places where you can get a bare system, but they don't cost $150 less than the same system with Windows already installed.
The simple fact is that Linux will not be accessable to the common man until you can go to Best Buy and get the $500 reasonably modern computer with Linux preinstalled. This is what Apple is now doing. In a few months you will be able to go to a store and for less than $1000 take home a complete, modern computer with Unix preinstalled. There is so such Linux based product, so Linux is not avaliable to the common man.
Maybe this means that there's money to be made in that area. Perhaps people would buy the $1k Linux box if someone were selling and supporting it. If you think that this could be profitable, let me know. I'll take investments and give it a try.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
For starters. Don't buy from Apple. They have very questionable business practices. Think different indeed. Don't give them any more $. I don't want to be sued.
That said. MacOSX is NOT Free Software. It does not matter. We still have a lot of work to do. It is also not Open Source. In this regard the most important thing is the community.
Why is KDE doing better than GNOME? Community. They have done a good job of not being corrupted as GNOME did with their Eazel/Helix cooperation.
First, classic mode works pretty damn well..
Second, When was the last time a copy of Red Hat, Suse, Debian, shipped with a DVD-R app? If you want to burn a DVD-R you'll have to wait a couple months, big flippin' deal.. This is not an OS level concern. It's an application level concern.. Who do you work for? Microsoft?.. There's a difference between applications, and the OS. I thought atleast this crowd would understand that..
Okay, that might be easy. Now what is your mom more likely to pick when she wants to set up a printer? 'DrakConf' or 'Print Center'.
Hmmm... Let me think.
Assuming they get that far, then yes, it should be easy. As for drives, same thing; "Run Configuration Tool" from the menu or a program called "Drive Setup" with a big button marked "Initialize".
I just installed OS X last night (thanks, Staples), and what Grandma, or Little Susie see first thing is the pretty-familiar Internet Exploder button (when you mouse over it, it says what it is) and a big postage stamp that screams "Mail". There's your two main tasks right there.
OS X takes (roughly speaking here, don't bother reading too much into it) your bad-ass OS and brings it out of the Mountain Dew can-infested dorm room and into the living room or the sewing room.
Too bad you'll have to fork over $3500 for a 750Mhz CPU system to use it.
Someone you trust is one of us.
barnyfoo, give up. I am writing this on a 333 Mhz iMac with 92Mb RAM. On this machine, which is a couple of generations slower than the 400Mhz iMac that is now the bottom of the line (66Mz system bus vs 100Mhz, better video chip, etc...). I am running MacOS X Public Beta very comfortably and will be doing so with the Final version in two days. There is no reason to claim that the low-end iMac is not "MacOS X-ready". As others have already pointed out, if you don't have legacy apps then it is completely ready. If you do need more ram, then it is not expensive, and a 3 minute install (including reading the directions).
And its inexpensive, and available, and supported. I can buy replacements/upgrades easily. Stunningly easily, compared to Macintosh.
And fast. I can buy brand new, blazingly fast X86 and Athlon systems for a fraction of a Mac's cost. And by and large, even with legacy problems (something the Macintosh has as well), those systems will run absolute rings around the Mac.
Want to go to real high quality, UNIX and the like boxes? Fine, the price goes up even higher, then.
Much of the attraction of the Mac is due to the fact that real engineering went into the design and integration of the hardware and software.
Heh. That might be believable if I hadn't been an Amiga owner and Mac user in the late 80s/early 90s, when it was painfully obvious what kludges Mac hardware and software was becoming.
Bolting together a box from lowest bidder OEM parts is not computer engineering.
No, its not. But buying high quality parts, to build a system to my specifications isn't either - but that's what I expect to be able to do.
The high-end x86/Athlon stuff makes the stuff available for the Mac, especially with OSX look embarrasing.
And I've been rather impressed with the ease that BeOS is able to handle the x86/Athlon architectures. Yes, its got a restricted hardware list. So does Windows 2000/NT.
A restricted list, only supporting some hundreds/thousands of SCSI/RAID/Video/Sound things isn't anywhere near as difficult to deal with as only running on 5 machines, all of which are price/performance ratio skewed far beyond the attraction of OSX.
Addison
How many residents of third world countries can afford a $1500 computer?
Simple math tells me: alot more than could afford a $3,000 apple computer. And Im guessing, based on a bell curve distribution, about 5000% more people.
Troll boy?
/very/ able computer. Jesus, you can get a used pentium1 computer for around $100, without a monitor -- and you can get a cheap used vga monitor for around $50. I doubt you considered these minor exceptions, in your sancimonous defense of Apple.
I was simply pointing out that Apple consistently prices itself out of the market.
If Steve Jobs had any math experience his Blessed Apple would be the monopoly OS and not Windows.
Ok, Maybe a MacOS-X ready Mac wont cost 3,000. Maybe more like 2,200 to 2,500.
But your one-sided, supposed "counter troll", failed to mention that a x86 computer costs alot, no ALOT, less than $1500. More than 50% less. And this is for a
So my mathematical (not rigorous - heh) argument about price and availability to 3rd world people is only heightened. $2000 versus $200 ? man..
Thanks for your enlightening comments.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe $800 will buy a horrible MacOS-X experience. Whatever. Read my next comment down to see how I feel about your disingenous leadings astray of the original intent of my post.
maybe you dont care. Maybe you just want to defend apple. I dont consider that noble but it's certainly your perogative...
I guess I'm not l33t enough for you... *runs away crying*
Your cynicism is dripping from your brow. Want to have sex? I love secksy men like you. So manly and powerful. I bet you impress all the ladies! Just kidding. Alright I think we can call a truce. Ego battles are so tiring. . . I do think the MacOSX sucks though. And Darwin is just a nifty toy. Me? My money is on HURD. You just wait, that baby's gonna take off in a year or two! Go RMS! I love you baby.
What part of "Mac-OS-X ready" did you understand mister know-it-all? That 800 dollar imac aint gonna run MacOSX worth a shit, and apple knows it. that's why it aint mac-os-X ready.
As I've pointed out in other threads. MacOS X has to be the most top-heavy "Unix" ever. Display-PDF? No wonder you need a 600Mhz G4 with Super Velocity Engine. Aqua? barf.
Really. I haven't used a mac since the g3 came out, but I recall one thing that used to impress my PC friends was I had a Zip disk which had a "universal" system which I could plug into any mac EVER MADE at the time and boot to. It had all my disk utilities, file recovery tools, etc.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
I'm booting Mac OS X Release Candidate, Mac OS 9.1 and Suse Linux as we speak, so yes, multi-booting is possible (at least using two disks).
I've used all previous versions of Mac OS X from OpenStep through Rhapsody, the DPs and PB, and I got the Release Canditate the other day.
Yes, installation, configuration and the interface in general is infinitely more usable than for any other *NIX out there. Fair enough, it's not as tweakable as Gnome for example, but it just works!
On the other hand, it's still fairly far away from Mac OS 9, despite the flashy surface. The days of happily creating folders all over the place is gone. I guess Mac support people will get their hands full as soon as "normal" users get their paws on it :) I'm just about to switch over to using it as my primary OS (from Win2K), despite the rough edges. Who else?
And yes, I just willingly gave up the opportunity of 1st post...
I'm sorry, maybe I missed something, but i don't recall either Linux or Tux (or Linus, Alan, or GNU/Richard for that matter) making any such promise. AFAIK, any such warrants or predictions of Linux being Unix for the masses was made by the media, and by specific distro vendors. This "promise" resulted in much hype during IPOs, and sold numerous newspapers and magazines. Mission accomplished.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
the OS only has to do 4 things remember, file, memory, device and process management. I don't remember anything about having to provide or manage a friendly GUI. That is the job of the distribution.
.... you get my point.
Redhat already makes a version tailored for Oracle, so how about a simple redhat distro - provide the basics just like MS and Apple do - include a filemanager/gui of redhat's choice (probably nautilus/gnome), one email program, one good text editor, one office suite, an media player (mp3, mpeg, etc), a DVD player, half a dozen solitaire games etc.
also include a single config app which (while needing root access) will let you config everything in a 'wizard-like' fashion
Provide a manual explaining how to use these apps and you are home and hosed.
While your at it, why not Redhat for Secretaries, Redhat for Gamers, Redhat for Web Designers, Redhat for my mother who only sends 2 emails a month (okay that was silly), Redhat for Journalists, Redhat for
Basically they would all be the same but would have a few different apps in each.
--
Steve Jobs: We're better than you are.
Bill Gates: That doesn't matter.
'Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson...'
But I still seem to have some problems getting NFS to work on OSX. Maybe its just me, but if you end up breaking the traditional UNIX functionality when you are bring UNIX to the common man (similar to what RedHat does) then maybe you shouldn't stop calling it UNIX.
Linux at least gives me the choice to have EVERYTHING I want for free for any OS. OSX... well, go buy a mac and spend a few thousand dollars and we'll talk about it.
.technomancer
.technomancer
OS X looks great, but spare me this guy's crap
.technomancer
.technomancer
Maybe instead of criticizing Mac OSX, the linux community should learn from it. Apple is a company that really understands the needs and desires of desktop users (apart from their desire to have cheap machines with lots of compatible peripherals). OSX is graphical unix designed from the ground up. Given, with more than a little help from next. Study what mac users appreciate about the UI. Look at how mac programmers, the best application GUI programmers on the planet, design their apps. See the consistency from one app to the next. Take a look at how the Application Bundle system gives users an easy and clean way to install stuff without blowing other stuff away. Apple does things well that Microsoft does very poorly. If you want to beat Microsoft, learn from Apple.
> Personally, i've always seen true user
> friendliness as a sacrifice to power.
This isn't necessarily the case, something which, Apple has shown to some degree. A good example of this is Lotus 1-2-3 vs. Microsoft Excel.
Back when Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS was out and Excel for Windows came out, a lot of users felt that Excel wasn't as powerful and, because of the GUI, was slower to use then Excel. In fact, 1) would anyone claim that, say, the last version of Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS is more powerful than a Excel 00? It certainly is easier for the uninitiated to use and has more features. And 2) in studies of watching people use the products, they continually found that people were faster under the GUI even though they perceived they were faster under the old 1-2-3 command mode structure, partly because they were doing more work, they assumed they were achieving more effect.
I wouldn't claim that a GUI is necessarily more powerful than a command line interface - it may just be that it's easier to create a 1/2 decent GUI than an 1/2 decent CLI. Some things are more intuitive to do in a GUI, others are more intuitive to do in a CLI.
But I definitely disagree with the idea that just because something is easy to use means it's less powerful. Most things can be made easier to use w/o losing power by simply providing the user with the ability to get help or by giving more notification of what they're doing.
--
"Brown University? We have one of those in Providence!" -- Outside Providence
Except that the BSD base apple used deliveres a BETTER linux product than linux does.
Duke of URL shows FreeBSD runs Linux version of quake faster than linux does.
FreeBSD's FTP install/Package/ports adminning methodology is now a 'feature' of many linux distros.
And the testimonials of yahoo! and others show how well FreeBSD works.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Er... given the slogan of Slashdot to present "News for Nerds", I'd think they would at least provide *some* sort of basis for differentiating their "news" stories from their "opinion" stories. This wasn't an "article", it was an editorial opinion, with no factual statements per se, and frankly no new information either. Why is this story on the front page? From the fact that the word "opinion" is in the URL itself, you'd think somebody would recognize and acknowledge this...
Wait, this just in: Powersauce is full of apple-y goodness! Nobody else concentrates the power of apples in bar form! Back to you Dave...
Either copy the installation files over the network to the local hard drive and run it from there, or configure a RIS server for a completly hands-free installation.
Now, explain to me please how I install redhat 6.2 on my laptop over the network, since there are no Linux drivers for my lovely new D-Link DFE-680TXD Ethernet card.
P.S. This is not a Pro MS troll, I'm just enjoying the arguement!
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
I'm not sure one could describe an Apple user as "common man". Last I checked, those Macs weren't cheap ;-) If only Apple would finally make an x86 version of its OS, then Linux would really have some competition in the user-friendly *nix arena.
- Also Sprach Doktor Merkwurdigliebe
My main reason for sticking with x86: game performance and cost issues. As soon as Apple starts unbundling components (processors, motherboards, etc), and increases peripheral support, so I don't have to throw out as much of my existing hardware investment to switch platforms, (not to mention lowering the price/performance ratio to compete with PCs) you might see me in PPCland.
But until then, my buying habits (doing small and frequent upgrades), my desire of affordable performance [aside: why does apple alternately keep launching and killing their dual processor lines?], my indifference to end-to-end user friendlyness (although, not reliability!)
The promise of Linux is a Unix like operating system on commodity hardware, AFAIK.
Like xBSDs. OS ECKS is fine for a unix running on proprietary hardware. Sure I could probably build my own Mac. Just Compaq, DELL or Emachine cant.
Why? Because the hardware is cheaper? Not. Because the hardware is better? Definitely not, unless you mean better at toasting bread.
Windows users use Windows because it's all they know. It has a majority of the mindshare, so they stick with it regardless of any other factors. Users don't care about chip architecture!
As several other posters pointed out, I can't believe ill-informed opinions like yours are still circulating. Here's what it would really take to lure users away from the Evil Empire:
For the first point, I'd say check the numbers. For the second, I'd say that standard file formats are becoming more common, and Virtual PC is there as a backup.
Flamebait != Disagree
Constitutionally Correct
I agree. The PPC architecture is nice, I'd love to have one, but there are so many disadvantages to a single source market.
If Apple opened up their specs so that all those dinkum ROC chaps could start producing compatible parts, and somebody like Dell or IBM could start assembling licensed clones for a small cut... then Apple could get the costs down and the sales back up. It would cut their profit margin, but what's the point in big margins when your volume is dying?
The alternative, for Apple, would be porting OSX (NOT just Darwin) to x86. But opening the hardware would be a lot better, imhop. I'd rather have cheap compatible ppc components than Apple on x86... *shudder* ever use Solaris/x86?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The unspoken assumption in your post is that having more commercial applications available is a huge benefit that should be chased. Why?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
There was no need for a command line; but NeXT's mistake was in letting us old Unix farts and punks try to market the system. Ultimately, the system became schizophrenic, and never found a target audience.
Apple has gone the other way; taken a platform known for its user-friendliness and insinuated NEXTSTEP onto it. That schizophrenia is still there, but it will be embraced by the Mac platform audience, and then find its Unix power niche, in an inversion from NeXT's 1980's tactics.
Disclaimer: I was a NeXT marketer in '89. Pity me.
Oh wait....
It doesn't exist yet. And it doesn't run on my computer. And its incompatible with unix.
Now, darwin is pretty cool, and cocoa will be too, but lets not get confused here.
Is it possible that if you'd installed Mandrake, SuSE, or RedHat, that it would have been done automatically? I know that SuSE tends to set things up (like X) with minimal user intervention.
But I may have convinced him to buy a copy of Linux, and give it a try:-)
Most aircraft cockpits are of the black-cockpit design. Lights only turn on when there's a problem. This attracts attention to the lingt, and the problem.
A great example of UI simplification.
bart
MacOS X is good for Linux because it will encourage developers to port to a unix operating system or use java. An openGL-based game written for the mac would have little to no re-writing for Linux. Ditto with general applications.
Posting anything negative about linux on a HEAVILY pro-linux , anti-everything-else website is a very brave move. Again, read the posts from readers to follow up this story and you get the same "Linux is really great because we say so and we refuse to look at your reasoning or proof otherwise". It's sad really. OS X does have it's problems, but it brought *nix to the desktop before either KDE or GNOME could. I'm still struggling to see the benefits of using *nix over windows on a desktop anyhow. I'm still trying to picture my secretary on a linux machine, asking me for help. /. users hate Windows or think Microsoft is out to get them!
____________________
Remember, not all
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
The cheapest iMac is $800. It will run OS X, if you want to upgrade the ram to 128 megs, itll run you about $900. Just because the computer YOU would buy from apple costs $3000, doesnt mean they all do. i would assume people from third world countries would tend to buy the cheaper model.
Journalism always makes me laugh - the more you know about a particular subject, the more you laugh. Over and over again, we see articles in the press that assume linux is some cohesive movement with a single vision or a single set of goals. But really, the only single thing that all members of the linux community absolutely share in common is the linux kernel. Just about everything else can vary. So when you translate statements by David Reynolds (and admitted mac addict, no less ;) ), you get utter nonsense.
Linux has no goals. People who use and develop linux have a wide range of goals, from embedded devices, to desktops, to dedicated gaming systems, to hobby shop experimentation, to back room power. Linux has no threats. People who want to use it, will; people who don't, won't. Linux and other OSes don't have goals or aspirations, or even gratitude for misguided people who waste their time on earth fighting for mindshare on their behalf.
Put that in your crack pipe and smoke it, David Reynolds.
XML causes global warming.
I'm sorry, but his stupidity was always there.
The very first thing he did, at NeXT, was spend an absurd amount of money for a logo. The first NeXT computer was a cube, 12"x12"x12" -- why? No technical reason; Jobs insisted it had to be a cube and it had to be that size. The first cube shipped with no floppy drive and no hard disk; instead it had an MO drive, media cost $50 each. In those days people actually used floppy drives to send things to each other; Jobs figured they didn't need to, or else he figured they wouldn't mind using $50 MO disks to ship a $10 shareware program, or else (my choice) Jobs just wasn't thinking. And while you could run from the MO it made things slow. The worst sin: Jobs found out at Apple that if you try to sell a computer called the Lisa for $10,000 that it doesn't work; at NeXT he tried to sell the cube for $10,000 and it didn't work.
The first NeXT box that actually got some traction was the "pizza box". It had a hard disk, it had a floppy disk, and if I recall correctly it was much less than $10,000.
In other words, the NeXT computers as conceived by Jobs were flops, and the worst features were the ones Jobs insisted upon. (Not unlike the Mac situation: the original Mac, as conceived by Jobs, was a totally closed box completely controlled by Apple; the Mac didn't become really successful until the Mac II shipped, with expandability, color, hard drives, etc.)
I don't think Steve Jobs is a genius. I give him some credit, because Apple seems to be doing okay at the moment and he seems to have had a lot to do with that. But looking at his history, he has done much more that was stupid than brilliant.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I don't think KDE is going to dry up and blow away, either. I think both GNOME and KDE will be around forever; this isn't an anti-KDE troll.
GNOME can be made to run on anything: Linux, BSD, commercial UNIX, even Windows. It has lower system requirements than OS X; you can install GNOME and all the KDE libraries and run any GNOME or KDE application, and it will still run in less than 128MB of RAM. The former Mac developers at Eazel are working to make a GNOME environment every bit as slick and polished as an Apple environment. The only thing we need are more apps, and we are getting them.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
True, but NeXT really wanted to sell to business people in general. Lack of floppies was one barrier that kept businesses from buying NeXT, and it was just dumb.
Do you really think NeXT sat down and said: "Our business plan is to sell only to people who have live Ethernet connections to the Internet"? At the time, that would have been dramatically dumb.
Some original cube models did ship with a SCSI hard disk in addition to the MO drive.
True, but that was extra cost. Tech-savvy people buying NeXT computers would spring for the hard drive.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
My point was that there never would be any $10 shareware programs if the only way you could distribute them was on $50 MO disks. The Internet was not then what it is today, and companies like Public Brand software who distributed shareware, did the distributing on floppies.
Note that Sun boxes were selling like hotcakes at the time.
Let's see, about the time the NeXT started selling, Sun would have been shipping the SPARCstation 1, which was several times faster than the 68000-family workstations it competed against while not being very expensive. Sounds like a recipe for success to me.
Guess what? NO FLOPPY!
Are you sure? The SPARCstation 1 had a floppy; see this web page. The floppy was on the side, where it wasn't obvious, but it was there.
But never mind all that. NeXT may have shipped the first cube with no floppy drive, but they added one later and from then on, as long as they made computers, the computers had a floppy disk drive.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Reynolds writes:
Regular people were going to be able to install their favorite Linux variant and have a powerful, customizable, infinitely tweakable operating system at their command, complete with a stable of software that could be freely downloaded and compiled.
Er, isn't that what Linux already is? OSX - while a pretty good OS on many points - is only about half of that. It certainly doesn't come with 'a stable of software that [can] be freely download and compiled. For one thing, Mac apps still ain't free. Neither is their source available. And the OS - for all of it's options - clearly isn't 'infinitely tweakble' given that some of perfectly intelligent UI criticisms I read about weren't built into the final product.
Wood Shavings!
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
The best thing I read was an attack on OS X making older machines obsolete. Their arguement? You can install Windows 95 on a machine going all the way back to around '92. Well, people attacking Apple neglect to remember that that is Microsoft's 5.5 year OLD operating system. Windows 2000 officially requires a Pentium processor, and that's only because it was supposed to ship in '97-'98. Realistically, you only run it on a P6 generation machine, or a few K6 generation machines if you are masochistic like I am.
Carbon will be the dominant environment for developing Macintosh applications for 3-5 years. That will run on OS 9.1 and OS X. In fact, I don't know if they've backported Carbon to OS 8.x, but I'd expect them to. The 8.1 supports back to the 68040 chip?
Either way, Apple has a much better history of supporting old machines. Yes, Linux does, but only because the modular Linux approach makes that easy. You can run the newer kernel on old machines, as the kernel is a small part of the system. Try to run modern programs on it.
Alex
Your aruguments are nothing more than anecdotal evidence. I could give you plenty of examples of difficult/easy W2k installations and plenty of difficult/easy Redhat installs. When you come to the point of realizing that some hardware works better than others within the various operating systems, you will have reached a point of maturity. Until then, you are just adding to the noise level of Slashdot.
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Very well put.
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Have you ever seen a Windows user on a Mac? I'm going to tell you a little story from my college days. I worked for my school's lab for a little bit. One night I was overseeing the Mac lab that we had. Aparantly the power in the building that had all the PC labs went out and so all students who didn't have a computer came to the Mac lab to try to finish the papers they had been working on. Well lets just say things weren't pretty. I believe the comments I heard the most, and remember this was a Christian university (I know Christian's are all hypocrits, etc. etc.), "I hate this fucking thing!", "How does it fucking work?", "This fucking piece of shit sucks!" That is what happens when you get Windows users on a Mac. They don't know it and they hate it. You might be able to say that a new user might be able to use it easier but most of those ingrained in the Windows way will not like the Mac.
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
Mine runs OS X PB just fine. I realize it's still the beta, but it runs much more smoothly, in my opinion, than OS 9 did.
And yes, this IS on a 64MB machine.
Please check your facts.
Angry IT woman in big clompy boots. And talking lint!.
That isn't a troll. His point is valid IMHO.
sorry I thought you were replying to the post above yours. you were right the moderators need to mod down the post about affording a $1500 computer.
Your argument makes no sense when comparing Linux to apples (pun intended). Have you priced a mac today?
Ok I get your point but then how many people who don't own or aren't into computers read slashdot?
For instance, remember when they switched over to the PowerPC from the Motorola 68XXX series of chips? I do. I had a mac with a 68XXX in it, and then a PowerPC computer. For a while I had the two running concurrently. Both could run the software even though they were different chips.
System stability. Having used a Mac since the Finder 4 days (dual floppies rule!), I've always been impressed with the stability of the system software. Crashes of a system have never proven fatal for me, and I have crashed many a mac. I wish I could say the same for the PCs I've had (windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT, 2000).
I think Apple's new OS X looks great. And Apple knows it can't ingore the existing apps for the older system, and is providing support for those apps (as long as the apps didn't break any "no nos"). My experience so far with running OS X prereleases is very very favoriable. You can access Unix command, but most of it is hidden by default. The hardcore Unix guy can easily tweak everything to their heart's content. The average user will notice a few changes but will benefit from Multitasking (FINALLY!), memory protection, etc. Hopefully NO MORE frozen macs.
The only complaint with OS X is that my Midi programs don't run...:-(
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It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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Now, would you like to back up your statement that the only going for the x86 platform is price? It seems like a rather broad statement to me, but even if you're only talking about the quality of the hardware itself, well, do explain.
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
How many residents of third-world contries can afford $150.00 for their OS?
When I was a kid, I only knew ProDOS and later MacOS. Hard-won experience with way too many other OSes has taught me to re-evaluate their merits along 2 simple lines:
1) Is it flexible? Can you without installing ANY OTHER VENDOR SOFTWARE implement a variety of creative solutions to your problems or your business, even automating your solution to run unattended? This is not unreasonable - even an Apple II had a nearly complete development system in ROM, and one easy enough that people with no programming background could teach themselves from scratch, and maybe build something they could sell.
2) Does it play nice with the other kids in the playground, especially the foreign ones? If it's on a LAN, again only with the core OS and any OS updates/packs, can it provided services to other computers and use the services of others, no matter how esoteric, proprietary, or bizarre?
2) is starting to eclipse 1) in importance, but of course with 1) you can build 2) yourself.
Along these lines, Linux and BSD win hands down. VMS is pretty close. You can write a multi-user database solution with web & telnet access, if you didn't have to BUY a TCP/IP stack for VMS... Ah, but there's always DecNET (ha ha). NT? Once you get the Option Pack on there and a reasonable service pack, you have Perl, ASP, OBDC, and even a small assembler to work with. Whether NT sucks or not, you can get a lot done with just it and the tools it comes with.
MacOS totally fails on these two points. For one, the only "tool" it comes with is AppleScript, limited TCP/IP services, and some dumb multimedia widgets. It's a kiosk OS, plain and simple. If what you want to do can't be done by being a mouse-jockey, waiting to click that next modal "OK", then forget it, MacOS is not for you.
The question for me with MacOS X is not whether it's a good UNIX. It's whether Apple is going to turn in into another OS like Windows, MacOS or NT that thethers you that KVM trinity to get work done. I sit so much in front of computers, the last thing I need is another screen to stare at, no matter how pretty. That's my question. If you were stranded on an alien planet with a solar array and a lan of G4s, and ONLY A MACOS X CD for software, is it flexible enough to build a complete solution to inventory supplies and water the plants while you're out and away? Is it self-hosting? In a corporation, could you feasably use it to do away with all Windows, Solaris and OS/2 systems, providing everything those did to your MacOS clients (or other OS clients) and yet still talk to the Pike, OS/390, MVS, or other mainframe? You certainly can with BSD or Linux. Does Apple have enough guts to make a viable competitor and alternative to Solaris and Windows 2000? Part of me hopes they don't chicken out.
Democracy. Whiskey. Sexy. Pick any two.
I already own a Mac. It's not very old. I'm talking the life-span of a small rat here. It CAN NOT run MacOS X. If I could, I would buy it, but there's no need. I'd have to buy an accelerator probably with a proprietary extension to get it to even boot up. No chance. And I don't intend to shell out $800 to replace what I already own to have an OS that only does what I already do. I can already burn CDs. I can get a Firewire card and burn DVDs later, though movies on CD-R work just fine. Think with your brain, for crying out loud. It's not "just $800" if it means you have to toss the computer you already bought and own! Unless you use your home computer for work that makes money besides just a wage, then sure, that $800 will pay itself off. But that doesn't typify most of the people Apple targets.
Democracy. Whiskey. Sexy. Pick any two.
To be honest part of the reason I think Apple chose BSD over Mach is licensing issues, and GNU purists such as yourself.
The BSD license is far better for what Apple wanted than the GNU one, they wanted a stable *nix OS which they could tailor to build their own proprietry desktop over the top off. If they tried this with something under the GPL they'd have people peering in-depth to see if they could find a way to make Apple OpenSource the Darwin parts of the OS. The GPL would have it's day in court, Apple would lose face amongst the OpenSource people it's relying upon for it's move into *nix.
By chosing to use the BSD license they don't get rabid Stallmanites screaming about them having the 'Proprietry-Software-for-Profit' mentality. Before anyone says Apple are a hardware company and don't their make money on software I'd ask you to consider how many users would prefer an i386 Darwin to a Mac Darwin, and how many sales of candy-coloured-clown computers it'd cost Apple.
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The way I look at OpenSource I see a lot of very talented programmers and developers, if you're waiting for a way to serve up the content-of-the-day then OpenSource will provide, if you're after a solution. What I don't see in OpenSource though is a lot of talented UI designers..
In my opinion the best user interfaces for OpenSource interfaces are those that don't shy away from borrowing heavily from the proprietry user interfaces that Microsoft, Apple, et al, have been spending their millions of dollars on R&D for. This is not a bad thing, it lets people see what we're aiming to beat, and also let's us see ideas that've taken a lot of time to develop and adopt them.
Now though we have a new thing, here's a company that has good UI designers doing something that the Linux distributors (To name one example) have spent a lot of time trying to do... namely putting a nice userinterface over *nix.
I'm wondering how long it is before we see Linuxconf's style moving closer to that of Darwin. We can now see 'How It Can Work', and know we can do as well as them if we really try.
What I think would be a good idea is if people could somehow 'recruit' those without a grasp of technology to act as testers for us. Maybe they can point'n'click in MacOS or Win9x, but they'd gibber if confronted with the most basic fstab or crontab. We need to know what these people think, and what they want. These are the market that Linux seems determined to win away from Windows, and if it's going to get them it's going to have to bend over backwards to do it. GNOME , KDE and Enlightenment are all nice frontends for the system, but it's when they can do all the stuff (Adding hardward, Kernel configuration, and building programs from tarballs spring to mind) in a simple and easy-to-use way (No, I do *not* consider what we have to be easy to use) we may be able to make the true '*nix for the common man'.
I really can't see the OpenSource GUIs lagging behind Apple too much in the usability stakes for too long, not now they can see 'How to do it'. What'll be more of a challenge is doing it without infringing upon Apple's precious intellectual property.
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Yeah, OS X will be. But it helps that Apple controls the entire process, and hardware, and has a lot of money to spend on it. If every software house on the planet knew they could just target RedHat (for example), and everyone was using Gnome/Enlightenment, and knew everyone had certain hardware, then yeah, Linux would be a helluva lot easier for end users, also.
The price you pay for Freedom is often confusion. I'm willing to deal with it.
After having used OS X PB (none of the nice new developer builds. sigh.) extensively on my year-old iMac (400MHz G3, 512MB RAM), I can't trust you. It's been plenty fast for me, even in Classic. Although I would doubtless consider certain things suboptimal, as expected in a beta, barely useable would have to be FUD, troll or exaggeration. The *other* possibility, I suppose, would be misconfiguration. With the beta, if you didn't instlall it on a freshly formatted partition, performance suffered very visibly. Also, if you are hacking around, following tips posted in forums, etc. and not familiar with NeXT and BSD, it certainly is possible to hose your setup... I guess this is true of any OS though.
ymmv-
pétard
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The issue here was processor speed, not paging. He was complaining that on slower processors that don't support AltiVec, it's too slow. FWIW, it worked fine when the box only had 128 as well... the extra RAM did (of course) have performance implications, but not on the eye candy the poster was complaining about.
pétard
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For example:
"In short: non-network-related command line apps work great," he added. "UNIX/Linux GUI apps are buggy if you can get them to work at all. (Mac OS X's GUI does not like giving up control). The reason for network related apps being buggy is that Mac OS X does not use the standard UNIX networking structure (inetd or Network Daemon). Instead, Mac OS X has replaced these services with NetInfo (from NeXT), which UNIX apps don't understand."
Interestingly, many of the standard UNIX tools are there (inetd and friends), but they serve no purpose other than sucking up CPU cycles, Aas said. Interacting with them doesn't override NetInfo, so they're effectively useless, he added.
Well, the source of authority, lthis Josh Aas guy, is not very authoritative on the subject, judging his remarks. This whole article is dubious at best.
He says UNIX/Linux GUI apps don't run well because "Mac OS X's GUI does not like giving up control" Although earlier stating that OS X didnt have support for X11R6 libs.
And what command line app uses Inet superserver anyway? And what do they mean by saying the provided Inetd is useless as it cant override NetInfo? Is NetInfo is so inane as to bind to every non-ephemeral port? And if so, does that mean I can't write normal socket programs for MacOSX, but rather use some API that utilizes NetInfo? I mean, in the second article, the guy said he had to use some patches for compiling Apache.
I think this guy should practice better journalism and that MacWorld should definently practice better editorialism.
-- They hate you if you're clever, and they despise a fool -- John Lennon
No you couldn't, troll.
By the way, the 80286 was not the first x86 processor. Nor can the PowerPC G3 or G4, in ANY way, be considered a 68k. They're not even in the same ballpark. 68k is a CISC architecture. PowerPC is RISC. Go look up what those acronyms mean and come back and tell me why you don't know what you're talking about.
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There's a fundamental break there. There is no continuous lineage.
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One of my coworkers, running the OS/X public beta on an older PowerBook, was able to trivally get Kerberos IV and arla (an open-source AFS client, which requires a kernel module to work) running on his machine. The thing is pretty much pure BSD, under the GUI.
If someone has a lot of spare time they should start a project of writing scripts that can translate all the linux files to xml. This way it would be a lot easier for the good people at kde and gnome to make a nice GUI menusystem.
But WTF is wrong with the interfaces of KDE or Gnome, they aren't at all hard to use. They both have that Start bar thing and both have the application bar, what's the difference. Konquer is just like Internet Explorer, and KOffice is very similar to Word, what's the problem? Hell you can even load up a theme to make KDE look just like windows. That's not the only one, though there a bunch.
I would imagine that anybody could install Mandrake 7.1 or EasyLinux, with those tutorials that would be a snap for anybody.
Open Source, Open Standards, Open Minds
I love how "Linux promised to bring *nix to the common user's desktop." What the hell does that mean? Why do people keep treating linux like it's a corporation? If you were going to define this mythical Linux, I guess the most obvious answer would be that it is the community of developers and other contributors. And when has this community as a whole promised anything? A large part of it doesn't even care about desktop environments. Apple is a coordinated company that can force developers to work on what they want done. I don't even know why I'm writing this, everyone here knows it. I'm going back to ign to read about the gameboy advance...
My other
Someone hasn't done there homework.
OS X is mulitasking, unlike OS 9 or lesser.
Finalty, no more manually allocating memory to each program all the time. There's nothing user friendly about that, thats for sure.
In reality, there arn't that many windows zealots/advocates. It's just the OS everyone loves to hate.
I would much rather prefere Mac OS to WinXX, but I'm still deciding what I want to get becasue I know I can get much better hardware if I get a PC, that if i get a Mac. The only real advantage of a Mac is the prossecor, but I could only afford a 550Mhz Mac. For the same price I could get a 1000Mhz. Maybe if mac where up to 850Mhz, then mac would have a processor advantage. But I wouln't be able to afford it anyway.
I've added the prices up, And I can tell you that I can get a better deal with PC than with a Mac. And that's not using cheap hardware either.
I agree that the delays have been bad. But you have to give them credit. Apple is committed to their customers. For the most part, their customers do not notice the difference between a BSD based operating system and one lacking preemptive multitasking and protected memory. They use one application at a time, even if several are loaded (e.g. user preempting like Windows 3.x), they very rarely use their Mac as a server, and they want to be able to use the applications they've been using for years, and most of all, they want it to be easy. For Apple to accommodate that, they had to perfect the Classic layer to work in OS X. Apple has worked hard to make sure the user experiences little or no transition pain, and ensure that everything works. All too often features take importance over quality. Apple deserves some credit for not prematurely releasing the product. Product delays create bad publicity, but defective or poorly aimed products create worse publicity.
Who's the troll? I wasn't trolling. Did you even read my post? I said that there is a type of multitasking that has always worked well enough. Well enough for Mac users. I never said it doesn't do multitasking at all. I said it doesn't do PRE-EMPTIVE multitasking. Click on the scroll bar of a browser or text box on your Mac while playing an MP3, and hold it down. The MP3 player cannot pre-emptively regain control of the CPU. Try bruning a CD and switching applications (even with an all SCSI system). Load a page with a large number of tables and embedded tables in Netscape 4.x, and watch as it takes complete control of the CPU while it renders. True, it sucks that Netscape 4.x is slow at rendering, but the OS should at least give one or two CPU cycles to you to let you switch to another application during this period. But most Mac users don't really notice these issues.
The article mentions hard drives and printers
He asks how to add a hard drive. Well, with an iMac you can't, so don't bother asking. Actually you can if you don't want any CDROM type device and shave a cable. Easy for the common man? The iBook hard drive is even harder.
And I CAN repartition my Linux ext2 drive without reformatting. (Windows still has problems with things having to be on C:, D:, or whereever the drive was enumerated when you installed the item). How do I repartition my iMac or iBook?
What about my SCSI tape drive? out of luck there. The FW/SCSI converters aren't stable (don't exist for OSX) and I can't add interfaces to most of the latest apple hardware.
Well, what about printouts? Most of the web pages I try printing (with 3 different browsers) still occasionally overlap images obscuring text. OSX gives me 1" margins and I haven't found anywhere to tell it I'm not going to create a matte portrait, but I would like to read with normal sized text and kill fewer trees.
Many printers don't have Mac drivers, and OSX hasn't included ghostscript, which linux does.
The problem with OSX is the same as with most of the "easy to use" interfaces. When they are good, they are very good, but when they are bad they are horrid. As long as I stay "in the box", and use newer mac approved hardware (oh, Linux runs on old 68k Macs and all the old powermacs - does OSX?), everything works beautifully. When I try to think different, it becomes impossible.
Linux has a steep learning curve, but once you've surmounted it, it is much like breaking the sound barrier. Things tend to go smoothly. The worst or hardest problems (if not proprietary hardware that you can't get info or help) are not that much more difficult than the simple things. Everything is so modular you can find the point of failure and fix it, or add the missing piece.
The final problem is the semantic confusion. OSX is Darwin (their mutant BSDerivative), plus Quartz plus apps plus other things. GNU/Linux is similarly the Linux kernel, lots of GNU tools, lots of other contributed things, and various apps. The integrated package OSX is more friendly than the integrated GNU/Linux is currently. But GNU/Linux is still growing.
If Apple really wanted to, they could have built OSX on Linux (and would have more filesystems - sometimes adding a disk means adding an existing disk with data).
For what its worth, I think Linux/PPC and Darwin, and by extension OSX will converge if not merge in 2-3 years. Add elf binary support and a few other shims to Darwin and you can run LinuxPPC binaries. Add a compatability layer to LinuxPPC and OSX would think its Darwin.
The biggest thing keeping them apart are the incompatible licenses. The second thing is the mutations to the gcc toolchain and the different IO, VFS, and such interfaces. They may or may not be better, but I can't easily redo a Linux driver or filesystem into Darwin even without worrying about GPL v.s. APSL. But I think these things will eventually happen.
Let's remember that MacOS X is repackaged NeXT, which was doing "everything just works without being a UNIX guru, but with UNIX under the hood" years ago. I'm actually surprised that the UNIX vendors didn't take this approach a long time ago--eg, power on, and within seconds you're in CDE, hardware autoconfiguration, etc. Makes you wonder.
If you want people working on the same platform as yourself, to enable easier cross-compatabilty--or you simply want your platform to be recognized as a standard, then your interface needs to be user-friendly before it will win acceptance.
If the goal of the linux community is simpoly to build thousands of individualized and specialized systems, then great. forget the user interface. However, for your technoligical improvements to have any effect on tech outside that world, the user friendlyness has got to be upped...
tcd004
Stockphotos
What seems so damn funny to me is that before when I was asking oh-so-many people why they wish to support Linux rather than OpenBSD (or any BSD) the one single answer I got was 'GPL license' so that the big bad micro$oft et al. can't steal the code... Now people are so pumped about OSX while not only is the base a BSD, but the license is more restrictive than any touted on Slashdot so far... Hell, even QNX is free for personal use! Meanwhile Apple is going after the themes... Something that even Microsoft hasn't tried yet
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Perhaps stupid is a bit over the top, but the fact is that the common man can't set the clock on his VCR.
The reason is, that the common man doesn't read the manual. If you read the manual nothing is all that hard to use. The same thing apply to *nix, you just have to read a little more.
When the common man can use his VCR, he can use *nix
I didn't say it was your fault. I said I was going to blame it on you.
Apple is clearly targeting this release to the geeky crowd. They want to make it clear that OS X really is Unix; hence, the inclusion of developer tools in the box (remember that you had to download them in the public beta; you couldn't compile anything in the default install).
On a related note, the only Apple ad for OS X I've seen is on Slashdot. They may be low keying the 10.0 release for consumers, but they definitely want to get as many people who can program as possible familiar with OS X as soon as possible. In July, ads for OS X 10.1 will be on every prime time TV show and every web site you can find, but they're nowhere to be found right now (except on Slashdot).
> If I want to configure my printer to work with RedHat 7, I:
> Su to root.
> Start up printtool
> Click the Add button
> Choose the printer make/model
> Check the "Fix Stair-stepping text" button
> Click OK.
> Choose the "Lpd | Restart lpd" menu option
And that's (way) too hard for the average user. I had an original NeXT. Here's what you did to add a printer:
1) Plug printer into printer port
and that's it. To add a hard drive, it was harder:
1) Plug hard drive into SCSI port
2) Turn hard drive on
3) Wait for OS to format hard drive
Admittedly they got away with the printer install because the hardware was a closed platform. Nevertheless, that's the ease of use the average user needs. And it's what Linux needs to do. No "fix stair-stepping". No "su root". Nothing. Nada. Plug it in, turn it on, and it works.
Although not directly related. If Linux was easy to use and had a good user interface that everyone could understand, then more people would use Linux. If more people use Linux then more companies will make applications for Linux. I know many Linux users think "Well it works for me, I don't care about anyone else." Well unless everyone else starts using linux, companies are not going to see enough consumers using Linux that will buy their products.
More Linux users == bigger market share for Linux == more Linux users to buy Linux applications == more applications for Linux.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
You guys just crack me up. The reason Apple can't put X on x86s is that Microsoft OWNS Apple. No way in the world will they let Windows compete with X on a level playing field. If they did, well we all know what the results would be. Everyone would be running X and I mean everyone.
Apple is a capitalistic company, they have to make money. Their primary goal is to make money.
Linux is a hobby with most people working on it. Their primary goal is to make the best, most stable thing they can.
Apple has to appeal to the lowest common denominator, Linux types appeal to the tech inclined anyway.
This is like... like.... comparing apples to penguins.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
To put it in perspective.would you buy a PC if it cost you 150% of annual income? Say $120,000?
Oh, and then there's the business about you gotta have electricty to run the thing.
I recommend spending some serious time in places where they eat corn meal and sour milk three times a day to cure these myopic views.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
"Linux promises, Apple delivers"
Pretty provocative title, huh? Especially when it's groundless:
The writer says: "When the Linux hype hit its height about a year ago, there were predictions that it was going to take market share from every operating sysqem out there, including from the Mac but especially from Windows. [...] Well, things didn't work out quite that way."
There has been one year, and only one between the promise and the verdict of this talented and objective journalist. Considering that it took ALMOST TEN YEARS (yes!) to Apple to deliver an operating system based on modern fundations after its promise of doing so, I find this comment a little bit odd, don't you?
Besides, who delivered this stable operating system of Apple's? Unix. Apple failed completely. Remember Copland? Nukernel? Remember the fancy rechnos of the pre-Amelio and Amelio era? Boy, this man really has a short memory And even this friendly Unix is not really Apple's work, it's just NeXtStep's child.
Last, it may be useful to remind everyone out there that Apple has achieved this so-colled user-friendliness by hiding as much as it could the Unix tools: their flexibility and their powers are buried as deep as can be. Sorry, but Linux environments are up to something more ambitious.
See you in 3 years, Mr triumphant.
Yes, CmdrTaco, this is unfair. It is 19h50 in europe. Just when european have to leave work, you post such a trollish article ? This is unfair for us, europeean trolls. (Btw, Cmdr, is it because you learn that Mac
OS X supports 2 buttons that you are okay to try it ?)
Lastly, Mac OS X is not sweet because it brings unix to the masses, but because it bring a real object oriented system to the desktop.
NeXT promised, Apple delivers.
I started to develop for NeXTstep in 1991. The moto was "NeXT have ten years of advance". I didn't expected it to be that true.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
1/ OpenSTEP capitalisation was OpenStep (the spec) or OPENSTEP (the OS)
2/ OPENSTEP relied heavily on DPS. DPS was licensed from Adobe. The story says that Adobe refused to extend license.
3/ The silver bullet was not OPENSTEP, but the YellowBox (aka OPENSTEP/Enterprise, aka OpenStep for Windows NT, a way to run OpenStep applications under NT)
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
--Linux would be easy for everyone if:
1 -- Windows didn't assume everyone was a Super User all these years, confusing Mom and Pop AOL emailer into believing they had any right to load anything on their HD's
2 -- Mac didn't cater to the "I'm and artist not a computer user," one mouse button is plenty crowd
3 -- Games were developed for *nix
---
This
Why is it OK to bash Linux over its GUIs and whine about easy of use, but it's selfish to complain about GUI bloat and Linux losing its roots? Isn't that a double standard? You can call us selfish, but there are a lot of us who have the same view.
Linux is going downhill IMHO because practically all development effort has been redirected to building bloated desktop environments to attract new users. Linux has lost its community spirit. Simplicity is being replaced by bloat. Traditional UNIX paradigms for user interaction and software development are being replaced by MS and Mac paradigms.
Everybody is trying to exorcise the "UNIX-ness" out of Linux so that it appeals to a different class of user. Well, what about those of us who LIKE the UNIX experience? I'm pretty tired of listening to a lot of Linux newcomers bitch because
WOW! What a steaming pile!
I use Linux. I love it. I can hardly STAND using Windows - for the simple reason that if something goes wrong, it REALLY GOES WRONG and you have to start all over again. (reboot, reload, etc)
But, just because I know what insmod does, and have no problem playing with ipchains (For work, I code in PHP/SQL) doesn't mean that having a color display causes me great pain.
KDE 2.1 is AWESOME!
Having read about OSX on Macinslosh, I'd seriously consider a migration.
The idea of putting a top-rate GUI on top of a *nix chassis just gives me shits and giggles!
Then, I'd want to compare it to KDE 2.1, which ROCKS BIG TIME!
My $0.02...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Mandrake Linux is easy to use. You have to use the command line about as much as you do in Windows. The lack of apps is the problem, and is a much harder one to solve.
Linux hackers have not been doing GUIs since 1984 either. If they had the source code to all these wonderful ideas, perhaps they could do what Apple has done, but they have had to reinvent the wheel, and as far as KDE goes I think they're doing a great job.
OS X on x86 would have the same problems as Linux - not all the drivers, the apps or the games would be available - e.g. pigs would divebomb Redmond en-masse before Microsoft ported Office to a competitor that had any chance of taking market share away from Windows. Running a PPC binary on x86 wouldn't cut it in terms of speed.
On Mandrake 7.2, fire up DrakConf and then select Printer configuration. Add a printer queue and then select your printer model.
For the harddrive, click on Hardware Configuration, select your disk drive and click Run Configuration Tool. Partition your drive and format the partitions. God that's tough. Windows requires the use of fdisk to partition stuff, unless you want to fork out for Partition Magic.
It is still cryptic for your average Joe and Sally
So is Windows, and I will continue believing this fact until I go six months without someone asking me to get their system to do something that the ever-so intuitive OS makes confusing. Mandrake 7.2 is just as 'intuitive', except it also allows me to login remotely and sort stuff out for people, doesn't crash in lots of different obscure ways and has a log file to make debugging easier. I don't know about MacOS because I can't afford a Mac and neither can most of the people I know.
My mum refuses to have anything to do with computers, and I don't blame her in many ways :)
When the Mandrake desktop opens up you have an icon saying 'Browse the web', an icon saying 'Connect to the Internet' and a button saying Mail. So by your logic, Mandrake is just as easy to use as OS X.
The thing about installing devices is that you generally have to have an idea of what you're doing. That's why, when my dad bought a new graphics card and hard drive it was me who installed them for him, because he was nervous about doing something he hadn't done before and preferred to let me do it. Neither OS X, Windows or Linux is going to change this, and I don't doubt that there are many, many people like my dad. I also think that my dad will have no trouble with Mandrake 8 when it comes out, apart from playing games obviously, since all his hardware is supported and he's sick to death of Windows. The upside of that being that if he does have any problems unrelated to internet access, then I can connect to his machine and fix it without him having to wait until the next time I'm there.
I agree with you about DrakConf, in that it should have a more 'generic' name, but then a tinkerer with computers will click on this icon anyway, just to see what it does.
There are differences between Linux and BSD.
It's like comparing a pair of black Levi's to a pair of black Lee's.
They are basically the same, but the cut, the feel, and the way they wear are different.
Ruling The World, One Moron At A Time(tm)
"As Kosher As A Bacon-Cheeseburger"(tmp)
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Apple has done a very good job in their GUI's.
;)
No one can deny that.
However, their OS's needed work.
I mean, a 450 MHz processor dedicated to one thing at a time?
It needed to be gutted.
However, like many GNU purists, I think their decision to go with BSD over Mach is pretty short-sighted.
And, like many Linux purists, I would prefer the more fun, more chaotic environment of a less-mature, more malleable OS.
Besides, I prefer the look and feel of Linux on a Mac versus BSD
Ruling The World, One Moron At A Time(tm)
"As Kosher As A Bacon-Cheeseburger"(tmp)
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Explain to me please, how I install Win2K on my laptop that does not have a CDROM drive.
I don't have a CDROM drive in my laptop becuase I don't want to carry it around, I don't want it eating battery life and I don't want to pay for it either.
To install Linux I made a floppy boot disk that recognised the PCMCIA ethernet card, and pulled redhat 6.2 over the network.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Apple's official Mac OS X site has been revamped and now sports at least ten new QuickTimes that show off the new OS. Also, two news features (Your new Desktop and Inside Mac OS X) present looks at Aqua and Darwin.
1)"Apple will become the highest-volume vendor of Unix in the world, and it'll bring all that *Nixy power to folks who don't know a thing about command line terminals".
This is very wrong - one of the most powerful things about *nix is the ability to chain together multiple commands in a pipeline to perform some desired task. This is why most *nix commands are very simple and only accomplish a very limited task. The ability to pipeline commands is something that currently can only be had at the command line; I have seen a couple of discussions on
The article talks about *nixy power at the fingertips of OSX users, but if they don't take the time to learn the command line interface, where is the power in that?
2)"it's nowhere near ready for prime time as a consumer operating system. Ever try to print from Linux or add a new hard drive? Forget it."
I have used a number of different flavors of Linux, and I really don't have a favorite. However, the flavor I've had the most experience with is RedHat. As far as the two tasks here are concerned, the article is mistaken about their complexity. If I want to configure my printer to work with RedHat 7, I:
And that's it! It's not very hard to do - yes, there are other ways to do it, and if you're a hardcore *nix user, you can always go into
Adding a new hard drive? Forget about it - fdisk to create your partitions (disk druid for the people out there that don't like fdisk's arcane commands) and mkfs to format it. Then you mount it - add the mount point to
3) "Mac OS X simply works."
And why is that? Because Apple has a stranglehold on the hardware market for their machines. Sure, it'll work. But you'll pay through the nose to get the box. On the other hand, Linux is free, and Intel hardware is much cheaper than Apple hardware.
On a final note, consider the source of the article: macaddict.com. Need I say more about the bias of the article?
-VoR
The thing is tho, Linux will probably never be widely accepted as long as there isnt a standardized gui that is a breeze to use. Im sure many people will say 'that's fine', but for people that would like linux to take the mainstream by storm, this is a real problem.
Until linux starts getting used by non hacker/coder types, it isnt going to be able to 'hit the big time.' Many of the coders may not truly care if linux really hits the bigtime, but there are quite a few linux companies out there banking on it. And those companies are the ones that major corporations will judge the viability of linux from.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Quoted from the article... "When Mac OS X ships on Saturday, it's going to deliver on that promise--Apple will become the highest-volume vendor of Unix in the world.
After a year or two, at the rate they have been shipping machines, they will have a nice installed *nix userbase.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
"That is what happens when you get Windows users on a Mac. They don't know it and they hate it." hmmm, funny... you can turn that right around and it will be even more true... put your average Mac user on a Windows machine and watch the steam come out their ears because Windows is inscrutable and intrusive as hell... and, personally, i use both and am here to tell you the Windows OS'es are clumsy in comparison to either MacOS classic or MacOS X
Last time I checked, no version of Windows shipped with a DVD decoder and player. Gosh, I have an awfully tough time watching DVDs on my Linux box too. But you just want to bust on Apple, so I guess it's OK.
"The point is, if you have the default hardware (that which is on the compatibility lists), and install Windows 2000, every bit of hardware works correctly out of box. You set up the machine and everything just works. I didn't need to run any configuration utilities whatsoever."
If I were to install W2K right now, it wouldn't have my sound card dirver, my printer driver, my ethernet card driver, or my modem driver. I would have to install all of these by hand. Windows has always been this way, they never seem to feel the need to include every driver (I don't mind, actually). So Windows is not so glorious either.
The fact is, RedHat is a server/workstation distro and KDE is not the default desktop for RedHat, Gnome is.
This does not excuse the problem, but it is not as catastrophic and one-sided as you make it seem.
Neither the Mac nor Linux hold much more than 5% of the destop. What is there to win between them?
Linux and Mac users represent about the most orthogonal set computer users there is. How can you compare the two?
OSX is not going to turn the tide from Microsoft to Apple. The common man is not going to buy a Mac instead of PC because the Mac runs on a UNIX core. And mac applications aren't going to be much less buggy than they already are; they just won't crash the whole computer as much.
And as for Linux not taking over the world, Christ, where are my flying cars?
You don't have to lower *nix to the common man's level. You have to raise common man to *nix level. If common man doesn't care to learn *nix, *nix doesn't care about him.
I am seeing a very ugly kind of elitism here on Slashdot. For a while I've been seeing a cadre of Linux crusaders screaming that Linux will take over the world as the OS for the masses as soon as it's made to be more accessable. Fastforward to now. Linux is indeed alot more easier then even just a year ago. But it's easier for a tech geek or CompSci major. It is still cryptic for your average Joe and Sally.
Then we have those tech snobs look down on the collective masses for not knowing which daemons to run or which services to configure yourself. After all only a loser would run something straight out of a box as is. Hey snob, 90% of the users out there run their OS's like this. So OS X comes along. "Bloody hearesy!" cries some of those Linux Inquisitors. Don't use OS X then if you have a problem with it. There are almost 20 other flavors of Linux or FreeBSD to choose from.
The true geek/hacker will reserve judgement until they see OS X first hand. I for one am looking forward to it. I have LinuxPPC at home running along side Mac OS 9. I think anything that staves off the M$ evil from my home is worth lookin into.
-- What's this '-r *' file doing here? -- Oh well, a simple 'rm' should do the trick.
That has to be the most selfish thought I've heard in a long time...
Market forces, man, market forces.
z
Just one more step down this line of reasoning, and you will start sounding like the BeOS crowd. "We had to drop development for the PPC since we couldn't get the specs..."
Seems like the LinuxPPC crowd never complained about "missing specs", etc....they just went ahead and did it. If they haven't got as polished a product as Apple, maybe the real reason is the amount of $$$ thrown at the project?
I must have missed that staff meeting.
Seriously, this article makes the same incorrect assumptions that MS does: that linux is somehow vying for consumer dollars and market share. If there was only one person in the world running linux and they happily tweaked and coded away, then it would be mission accomplished for linux! MS and others just don't understand this.
- Toby
Here, let me hand you a hanky for your poor bleeding heart.
How's that for charity?
- Toby
Apple on the other hand, is a company trying to sell a product. They know darn well that if their product isn't very easy to use, their existing customer base will leave and they will have a hard time attracting new customers. Apple is scratching their own itch. And it appears they are doing a pretty decent job of it too, though only time will tell for sure.
I'm fairly convinced that user friendly GUI's will only become a priority to parts of the linux community with corporate involvement. Companies care about selling products and they will sell more if their products are easy to use. If IBM is going to sell a lot of machines with linux on it, it is in their interest to make linux as attractive as possible to the widest range of customers possible. Ditto for anyone else. Hackers generally don't and won't care.
My starting point is that OSX is cool. It is after all a good UNIX-clone, which is about as much UNIX inside as a system can become. It is attractive in its own right, and it also provides rock-solid foundations for the GUI (unlike Windows or the old MacOS).
However, OSX is hardly open-source software. Its kernel and system libraries are not developed by the general public. Therefore, it is quite similar to, say, Solaris or IRIX, which are also proprietary UNIX clones, albeit with some open-source userspace software (gcc, emacs etc.).
OSX lacks one central Linux feature - transparency. OSX will never be as thoroughly hacked, and it will not attract the sights of such a distinguished group of programmers as Linux. It is a step backwards from the openness that we learnt to like in Linux.
Another main advantage of Linux is the fact that it can dynamically absorb the new developments in various areas. These include new device standards (USB), or new user-level conceptions (browser integration in the OS). It is much harder to do so in a closed OS, like OSX. So perhaps OSX will be a king for its day; however Linux will still be actively developed when OSX media are dust.
I think that Apple's secret goal IS to get OS X running on x 86 and then blow Borg out of the water. Think about it. They've put a decent interface onto *nix, which is something that the Linux community has yet to do. They're including the development environment. They're releasing before there's a lot of software, so current Mac users get used to the new OS while being able to use their old software. What happens next? More software gets released. They iron out the bugs on the PPC platform, port the code to x86 (etc...), release it to the world cheap ($100 or so--not too much more than a documented Linux distro) and Kill the Borg. Having Mac hardware will make the experience even better, because you won't have to hack everything to make it work right, but you'll be able to run on x86 if you want to get going cheap. I think that this makes perfect sense given Apple's involvement in and adherence to new standards for their hardware platforms, such as Firewire and USB, as well as their groundbreaking efforts in audio and video. Imagine if, in 2 or 3 years, you can buy a sub-$1000 computer that can edit video, burn it to DVD, and be a fully-functioning, commercial grade web server? Sure you can do that with Linux now, but you'll spend $1000 and have to spend a man-year getting it set up and running right.
i have no legs.
Apple didn't bring unix to the common man. All the real work was done in creating the BSD system that they put some nice GUI stuff on top of. So if anything BSD brought unix to (Apple's version of) the common man before linux, with Apple as a mojor contributor.
This is really bound to happen because Apple's definition of bringing to the common man is basically 'incarnated as a home-user targeted commercial OS'. Of course BSD will make this goal first since it's liscence is more commercial friendly. The BSD and GPL liscences have different goals and Apple's definition of the common man simply fits BSD goals better.
This really annoys me since it's basically Apple claiming credit for all the work that has been done on BSD unix over the past N years.
check your iDisk (from apple's iTools, when you register)
They dropped a fair amount of free or beta software into a folder for you to play with, and on saturday, they'll be giving you more free applications to work with.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
I use GNU/Linux because it gives me freedom, something proprietary OS-es like OSX does not give.
Thus in my eyes, Apple has NOT delivered - GNU/Linux has
Well, until the Linux folks can convince Adobe that it would be profitable to develop Photoshop and Illustrator, I'll stick with my newfound *nix based MacOS on a PPC chip thankyouverymuch.
And no rants about the GIMP, please, it's about as powerful as Photoshop 2!
---------------------------
Pooty tweet
OSX is UNIX
really...
Maybe I'm ignorant, uneduacated, whatever... It's my understanding that UNIX is UNIX, Linux is Linux and OSX is MacOS 10, AKA the operating system that comes after MacOS 9. I mean for crying out loud, did they base it on BSD just so they could say "Neener neener! we have UNIX too!!!" and do a little butt dance in the face of Linux users?
Ok, that was the cynical part of my comment. I know there were some very good reasons for using BSD for the base of the new MacOS. I'm glad they used it personally, it's a good move in the right direction. However, I still think Mac zealots are a little weird about the way they're now waving this we-use-unix-too-now banner all over the place.
The average Mac user won't give a rat's ass anyway.
Silly slashdot, sigs are for kids!
...that many of you with elitist (not everyone deservse Linux) or selfish (hey, *I* run it that's all that matters) perspectives are missing. If Linux can get the volume up and stay open it will benefit the Linux community far more than if it stays an arcane, elitist mostly-server platform. And if Linux market share increases so will the spread of Open Source philosophy and veondor independence. M$ is as powerful as it is today because of deployment volume, period. M$ is opening up just enough with SOAP and other initiatives that if Linux doesn't start building midnshare, it risks being marginalized: democracy could lose to autocracy.
I don't think we'll successfully make the computer an appliance until we have something that's still 20-30 years off. Powerful Artificial Intelligence with Natural Language processing (probably tied to voice recognition but that's not essential).
Why do I think that? Because there's never been a machine like the computer before. Let me discuss two types of machine that computers are most often compared to - appliances and tools.
Appliances are machines which do one thing well - TVs, Phones, Stereos, Cars - whatever. They have one main function to perform. So when you learn to use a TV - you learn a few key concepts - ON/OFF, channels, Volume - and you can work it. If you master all the functions your TV has to offer - you still basically do only one thing with it - watch TV programs. It's easy to use because it only does one thing.
Tools are different in that they can be used to do many things. However often they still only do one thing - it's just that that one thing can be applied to many situations. A screw-driver can be used to fix or remove screws from a variety of objects. What's interesting is that although there's more applications for a tool than an appliance - the key to unlock that potential lies in the skill, knowledge and experience of the user - not in the tool itself.
Of course there are tools that can perform more than one function - the Swiss Army Knife. But that's really a group of tools stuck together. The point is it still has a limited number of things it can do.
Now a computer is programmable - which is to say if you can describe a way to do it the computer can do it. There's an infinite number of things it can do (which is not the same as saying it can do everything). But now the key to all this power is the programming. Programming is something of a specialised skill - like being a car mechanic or TV repair person. If you're a programmer and you have the software tools - you can acheive an unlimited number of things with your computer. If you're not a programmer - you're limited to those things for which someone has already written a program, or for which you can persuade, pay a programmer to write a program for.
You can make an OS which makes a computer easy to learn - which makes it more like an appliance - but you limit what someone can do with it. Or you can make an OS that makes it easy for you to write programs - but then it's no longer easy to use.
The logical solution is to make software (I wouldn't call it an OS but you could) which means you communicate to the computer in natural language and it writes the programs to do what you want it to do.
"Good morning Computer can you record the movie on TV tonight, do my tax returns and while you're doing that I'd like to play a first person shooter based game based on that SciFi novel I read last week."
Have a look at Microsoft GraphEdit. It's a very simple interface to a series of 'filters' - programs which convert one kind of input into another type of output. You choose a filter and it's displayed as a box on screen. It has one little tabs for it's inputs and outputs. To pipe commands you connect one filter's output with another's input with a line. Some filters have more than one output or input - e.g. split an AVI into audio and video streams.
Once you've joined all the dots you press a 'play' type button and it goes off and runs the commands you've defined. It's pretty cool.
Of course it hasn't got scripting in the sense of a programming language. Nor has it got the ability to take an output from any program - it's got to be written to conform the the filter standard - and I don't know how open it is. But it is the closest thing I've seen in a GUI to a CLI pipe.
In all the hype I've seen surrounding X, there's been very little mainstream talk about its Unix-based architecture. Oh sure if you dig a little or click on the right link, you'll find that type of information. But Steve Jobs isn't using it as a key-selling point. This article stipulates that X is the next great thing because it's Unix but it's also a Mac. Wow, nifty. Sounds like typical Mac zealotry to me. Look, I don't think the majority of Apple's X target audience are going to buy it because it has Unix at its heart. They're going to buy it because it's pretty and it does pretty things and makes pretty noises and has pretty colors. The same things can be done, with a little determination (and luck) on X Windows. I don't think the majority of Linux converts leave the safe confines (key word) of their GUI based systems to have a command line they have to learn to bend to their will. I think they do it because quite frankly, other people's ideas of how our computers should look and perform generally suck. So the point that X is the Unix OS/GUI for the common man is a bunch of shit. He's just excited about it because he's a lazy schmuck.
...you might be surprised how many people really don't have an immediate need for those drivers. And the ones who do will just wait for the first round of updates, the same as any sensible WinXX upgrader will do.
- Part 1
- Part 2
- Part 3
Also:I, for one, found the HOWTOs invaluable, and, yes, I'm self-taught (started about 5 or so years ago). I now have an admin job using (mostly) Linux. They may not always be straightforward, but in working through them you gain a lot more knowledge and excitement about that pile of chips under your desk than you ever would with your bog-standard pre-installed WinBox.
OK, I'm opening up to the troll crowd here, who will inevitably say "But you were'nt *producing* anything while reading HOWTOS, were you?", but hell, I feel the gain. Now, lets apply that to education programmes, such as those in Mexico, and the huge tide of acceptance of Linux in other countries such as Brazil and China (go to the former - every magazine stand will contain about 200 Linux CDs!). The educators suddenly realise that with a little initiative they can whack RH or MDK on some PCs that would die under Win*, get kids using them for the basics (WP, email, etc) and then have all the tools pre-installed to progress to much more advanced tasks, from web design and serving through to full on programming. What better way to increase the national skillset at minimum cost? I think it's great, and despite Gates's mighty charitable donations, nothing can compare to being able to truly 'own'* your own knowledge and software, while sharing it with others.
*By this, I mean not having your working platform and development subject to someone's arbitrary licensing whims, eg, if you write a proggy with our SDK, you can't do x.
-- Sig Sig Sputnik
As a former mac user and nowadays a *nix geek (linux/solaris), I think there is one important aspect that is being neglected.
...
Compatibility.
Macintosh has always wanted to go their own way and they are finally joining the UNIX community. I am really looking forward to go back to a macintosh having Xfree86 as my default xserver and a terminal (bought an old G4 a few days ago). I can mount everything from my linux server using NFS. Once all the GNUtools are ported to MacOSX, it will be an excellent OS.
Even though the average mac user probably cares nothing about UNIX, I am very happy that the applications that I develop for *nix will also run under mac. (anything is better than windows...) Using Linux from a windows interface is a real pain in the ass apart from the fact that windows is horrible.
By the way... It is intresting to see that there is almost 700 comments already
I couldn't agree with you more. I just got myself a G4 and have been running the release candidate for a few days
On the other hand, there are still a lot of things missing such as all the nice GNU tools. The terminal still lacks the nice UNIX feel of linux distributions. (should be available in a few weeks I suppose).
Apple has realized that they'll never beat Microsoft marketshare-wise. What you buy when you buy Apple hardware is an experience that is guaranteed to work. Everytime. Out of the box. People pay for that. *That* is why Apple has a small list of supported platforms.
If Apple had to support x86 hardware, they would be in the EXACT same situation the Linux distros are in. It's the whole "jack of all trades, master of none" expression. Apple *could* run on x86, but the experience would not be guaranteed to work. Everytime. Apple IS the best user-oriented *nix we'll ever see BECAUSE it doesn't have the marketshare of the x86 hardware based Linux distros. Apple would not be able to provide the same experience over that great range of hardware. It would be impossible for them to do. If Apple can't provide the experience, then Apple software/hardware doesn't sell. And if Apple's software/hardware doesn't sell, that's the end of the story.
Apple being in control of its hardware is no different than Linus being in control of his kernel. Somebody has to guarantee that it will work (hardware/kernel) the same time, all the time. Apple accomplishes this through restricting the hardware, Linus accomplishes this by controlling what goes in the kernel. But "Linux" is more than just the kernel. And that's correct. That's why there are so many Linux distros. Not one distro can support every usage on every piece of hardware the same way, each time, every time. They specialize. And in doing so, they restrict the hardware, although subtly and not as profoundly as Apple. And that's the difference between user experiences.
If my parents want a user experience that will work the same, every time, without any fiddling, they'll buy Apple hardware. If they want to buy cheaper hardware, they'll buy x86 equipment and hope they can install some version of Linux. But which one? Not one is guaranteed to work on their hardware. That's what they get when they buy Apple. A guarantee. This software WILL work on these computers.
Apple's business practice is not punitive in the least. They could not provide the greatest experience if they didn't control the hardware. And if they can't provide the greatest experience, then they can't survive.
And I will believe it compiles and RUNS BSD apps with the same ease as everything else when I see it for myself.
Just as a disclaimer - I'm bashing the article, not OS X, which I think has great potential if they see it through.
Unix is 'in'. Remember Apple's first attempt at Unix, A/UX? Even if you are a machead, probably not. Because Unix wasn't 'in'. Let's not kid ourselves, there's not much difference between OSX or Linux or BSD or Solaris. It's all marketing. Anyone can learn to use Unix, unless maybe someone says "This is really hard". Anyway, this article is on a website called 'Mac Addict'.
--
Find a PowerPC ATX motherboard that will run MacOS...
All those parts you just mentioned are useless without it.
--
This dosen't make any sense! I can but a Alpha ATX motherboard and run Digital Unix or Linux or NT or BSD or... I can buy a UltraSPARC motherboard ATX and run Solaris or Linux or...
Get the picture. But, oddly, I can't do that with Apple. And this isn't about money because Apple can make just as much money as they do now. (Har, har). Seriously, it's about control. I will not be a victum of vendor lock!
--
Point for the first paragraph. Excellent point, even. This is what people pay for, when they buy Apple, software and hardware.
The second point is true too. Apple need not control every point in the product to make a profit. The whole concept of maximum advantage and relative advantage means the most profit and growth occurs when Apple sells and produces what it is best at, and other corps sell and produce what they are best at, and a synergistic whole is produced; Apple-> OSes and Hardware, UI and user experience, and then let other people create the rest that Apple doesn't decide to be strong in. Adobe is a good example. So is HP.
Point the third I can't give you.
"If only it would run on x86 hardware, Windows users would flock away from the evil empire"
Thats about as true as saying
"If only users would buy Mac hardware, Windows users would flock away from the evil empire"
In terms of practicality, guess what? Apple would make *their* own hardware, even if it were x86. They'd spend as much resources creating their x86 hardware as they do their PPC hardware, leaving a situation where people still can't run OS X on vanilla x86 boxen without at least some compatibility card or a set of 'emulation' drivers to fool the system into thinking it's Apple Boxen. Apple boot rom, USB hardware, Firewire hardware, busses and chipsets, etc.
Well, don't buy Apple; but I'd prefer and recommend them over Dell, Compaq, Gateway, or Micron. IBM, Toshiba, and Fujitsu I like ^^
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
So that means all the Linux crowd should really be leapfrogging Windows and copying the original host; Apple!
Why the heck have KDE, GNOME, etc, all been aping Windows, when Microsoft has itself been aping Mac? If we really want powerful Linux UI development, shouldn't we be copying the most developed and intuitive UI in existence? Apple's?
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GPL Deconstructed
Airplanes are easier to fly!
I dunno if you are old enough to know, but it used to be that computers, fly by wire, and autopilot were all pipe dreams. Where moving the controls pushed and pulled at pneumatic and hydrolic lines that moved ailerons and flaps according to your movements.
I daresay your Lear Jet is only difficult because computing and processing hasn't made the last step yet, where the interface to the sky isn't the plane, but the computer model in which you 'point and click' and let the plane handle the rest. I believe they are working on that.
That aside, that's a crap argument for computers. Are you saying that your retard cousin *shouldn't* be able to use a PC? There are whole loads of people who are PC challenged, and making them easier isn't a good thing?
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GPL Deconstructed
Are easy.
Buy an iBook, PowerBook, PowerMac, Cube, or iMac!
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GPL Deconstructed
Well, yeah. It's also called 'engineered'
Macs are an engineered solution... like cars, or ovens, or bunches of other things in our lives.
It's what you get when you buy a Mac.
Your only other choice... is to go work for Apple, I guess!
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GPL Deconstructed
This is a repost of mine...
"Well it works for me, I don't care about anyone else."
That has to be the most selfish thought I've heard in a long time...
To turn it around;
"Nothing else anyone does matters, so anything they do won't affect or improve my status."
This is obviously false. Someone writes a better USB driver, and all of a sudden your camera stops crashing your PC. Someone tweaks the networking code, and your Quake framerates increase by 3%. I dunno if I'm eloquent enough to get my point across, but being selfishly isolated is a bad thing. Sigh, I wish I could articulate better.
So why is it important to get Unix onto everyones desktop? The same reason it's on yours. If it's useful to you, if it's powerful, if it's flexible, if it's reliable, or affordable or whatever. If it's worth something to you, it's worth it for everyone else!
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GPL Deconstructed
Hey, that's why I use Linux for my web and file server, Mac for my notebook, and Windows for my game machine!
To each their own strength!
I totally don't disagree with you on this!
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GPL Deconstructed
Here's what I wonder...
Why do you need Apple's okay to make Mac clones?
Did Compaq petition IBM to make IBM-PC clones?
Do some cleanroom reverse engineering, create a nice, clean desktop system, and you have a Mac clone. It's anyone's guess whether you compete against Apple or help Apple grow the market, but there's your solution!
His need to control the hardware was smart. He doesn't need to bless hardware for clones to exist. All a clone maker needs to do is make sure that it runs the current OS 100%, and provide future functionality to support future OSes.
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GPL Deconstructed
So... You designed your own motherboards and chipsets, wrote your ROM bios code, spec-ed out your capicitors and diodes, pressed your own sheetmetal cases, injection molded your own case-skins, wrote your own firewire spec, then implemented the CMOS for it, and then wrote the drivers for it, designed and built the wireless antennas for your PC, and drafted your own bus specs and implementations?
You can create a PC as well as any 'lacky' who throws parts together. You may chose better or worse parts than any lacky, but when you buy Apple, you buy all of the above, and if you don't want to pay for that, then you can't get a PPC system.
Now I don't contest that a PC you build is stable or reliable; it cannot be denied that a multi-million dollar corp can build crap PCs too.
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GPL Deconstructed
Who cares? In the PC industry, the people who do these jobs (hint, they're called computer engineers) do it as well (or better) than Apple does it. The only reason that the PC's aren't as high-quality as Macs is because of the limitations in the architecture, not bad build quality.
Who cares? The people who buy the PCs care that they get something well designed. This applies as equally to Macs as to PCs, to cars. It means more to some than to others, but quality is what people pay for!
And thus the real question; are you actually acknowledging that Macs are higher quality than PCs?
Still, if the PC has problems because of limitations in the architecture, that's still a problem. Why is it that Compaq or Dell have not 'engineered' their own solution to overcome these limitations? Macs use the same AGP and PCI busses, memory busses, USB, Firewire, ATA drive specs, video connectors, etc, so it's possible. Why is it none of the PC manufacturers have done it yet?
<em>A) I don't WANT a PPC system.</em>
Then why are you even talking about Macs in the first place?
<em> Apple is stupid for doing all this itself. It hems the customer into using whatever Apple feels they should use, and drives up cost. Build quality isn't drastically improved (I'm 99% sure that an Open PPC system would be just as high quality as the closed Apple system. Besides, the old Apple clones were just as good as real Apples) and the industry hates you for it. Companys hate Intel for sucking it all in and doing their own chipsets, motherboards, CPUs, and graphics cards, and (if Apple becomes big enough to matter) people will hate Apple for the same reasons.<em>
Why the heck is Apple stupid? HP uses it's own motherboard (not a stock one from Tyan, MSI, or Intel), though it probably relies on chipsets from Intel or something. By doing this Apple can provide it's own feature set at the advantage of everyone else. Apple was one of the earliest adopters of USB, because it could build it into the system instead of waiting for Intel or Tyan to design the motherboards with USB support. The same with Firewire. Or wireless networking. Or gigabit ethernet. It's called innovation, and it's called leading the pack. They can either wait for someone else to do it, and bundle it, or they can do it themselves!
You're 99% sure? I'm pretty sure than in an Open PPC system, you'd get identical results as today's open PC system. Crap devices with crap drivers and crap systems. Don't tell me they don't exist! Apple may be the cream of the crop in such a market, but tell me how Apple gets an advantage in an Open system? Apple gets no advantage, and the users gets one advantage: The ability to choose their own motherboard (that's it! Everything else in a Mac is already standard!)
And do you seriously think there would be a company that build a better motherboard than Apple? If they do, they should *already* be building better motherboards than Apple today!
<em>The PC I built I just as high quality as any Apple machine</em>
I already gave you that point.
I cannot argue cheaper. I cannot argue more powerful. Both of those qualities are due to the economics of volume in the PC market. Even support is a question of volume. There are less choices for the Apple machines. But there are still video cards, SCSI cards, hard disks, etc, for Macs.
Okay, so now we get to the meat of your argument. That the platform is being killed by a non open standard.
Well, 2 things.
Apple *is* the standard.
Anyone (Dell, Compaq, etc) can release their own PPC systems if they wanted, but they would need an OS. Apple, as a business, need not 'give' their OS to a competitor. Think about it.
Apple sells what it sells, and people buy it. It suits their needs, despite the comparison you bring up. It's stable enough, full featured enough, fast enough, powerful enough.
If they weren't, people wouldn't buy Apple. They would buy Compaq, or Dell, or like yourself, build their own system.
The platform you speak of is easy to use *because* of everything you point out. That Apple does it's own hardware and software and drivers, because they have their own OS, because they roll their own systems. You can't get that *anywhere* else because no one else does it. Microsoft will soon, when they release their XBox, and then you'll have *all* the same arguments against them as you do against Apple!
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GPL Deconstructed
"Well it works for me, I don't care about anyone else."
That has to be the most selfish thought I've heard in a long time...
To turn it around;
"Nothing else anyone does matters, so anything they do won't affect or improve my status."
This is obviously false. Someone writes a better USB driver, and all of a sudden your camera stops crashing your PC. Someone tweaks the networking code, and your Quake framerates increase by 3%. I dunno if I'm eloquent enough to get my point across, but being selfishly isolated is a bad thing. Sigh, I wish I could articulate better.
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GPL Deconstructed
Jobs is going to pop a gasket but nobody told the people at Staples to keep X off of the shelf until Saturday. I walked in and there it was, a pile of 'em. So far, it's really nice. Much more refined and much faster than the Public Beta. Makes all Linux distros look as dowdy as M$ products. Mac people are going to freak though...it's -not- a Mac anymore. The nicest surprise was the inclusion of a CD with the complete developer tools. Off I go to play, too much fun.
For long time cdrecord (shipped with any distro I able to think of) is able to burn DVD-Rs.
There's no need to use Aqua and the Mac OS system configuration tools if you don't want to.
Blue skies... Barthie burgers... girls.
And for those who want at the real power of Unix, simply fire up Terminal.app, and start typing away.
The terminal is hardly the 'real power of Unix'. The real power of (especially) linux is the ability to configure/modify/recompile/disable/enable any component you need with relative ease. I've played around with OS X PB, and IMO it is an improvement over the current MacOSes, but the system configuration is a bit of a mess... at least from a Linux user perspective. Perhaps BSD users might have a happier time?
Anyway, my G4s (see URL above) will be running YellowDog Linux for a while. We might integrate MacOS X for some uses, but it will be a while before it replaces Linux.
Because, like Microsoft, Apple cares about getting their software and other accessories into as many hands as possible.
wait, this is different from linux "world domination" how?
everybody wants to get their software into as many hands as possible. its called success
the animal doesnt even have opposable thumbs, focker!
yes, but i will go further: the appliance is the computer. you should be able to just plug it in and it works (remember apples imac ad? despite our mockery, theyve sold millions of those). the interface is just one aspect of ease-of-use
apart from a good, consistent interface, linux needs a one click installer, integration between services, and one-click-type consumer apps (think word, not emacs)
the interface is actually the part of ease-of-use that linux is closest to. while hackers want a continuously changing system, youd think someone like redhat could have come up with an integrated consumer distro by now
the animal doesnt even have opposable thumbs, focker!
get your facts straight. the imac is supported and costs $899. not to mention darwin has been ported to x86
the animal doesnt even have opposable thumbs, focker!
Don't get me wrong, I'm starting to like Linux, it's just not for the 'common' man, at least yet.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
People certainly can be self-taught, as I mostly am, but it's a whole lot easier (here come the flames) to use and a million times easier to maintain a Win box (or even a Mac) than a Linux box. It is getting easier, with the more automated update utilities that are coming of age, but it's still so much more complicated.
Many 3rd World residents are actually very time-crunched as well, working hard, long hours for not a lot. I do hope Linux will be able to help them, but it's far from being ready now. If it's for someone who's used Unix for a while, it's pretty manageable, but for newbies, it's a twisted mess. Trust me, I know. ;) Again, I'm not saying Linux is bad, but it's pretty unmaintainable for the unexperienced.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Actually things in the Third World are that bad. While it is true that in most of the large cities of the underdeveloped world, there is a sizeable and visible middle class capable of purchasing the items you mentioned, this class actually represents a very small size of the total population. Most of the population of China, India, Africa and vast swathes of Latin America is rural and literacy (computer or otherwise) is scant. A member of the local middle class would often have problems communicating in the national language with the less well-off of these people due to their rudimentary communication skills. It is another world entirely. I have lived in and/or worked in all of these places and have visited some of these "basket-case" areas. The locals tend to be concerned with staying alive and feeding themselves. Most wouldn't sell a computer to feed their family simply because they wouldn't recognize its value.
I still think it'd be cool if the "Red Box" was still around (the Red Box is to Windows software what the Blue Box is to "Classic" Mac software).
In order to run Classic, you must have a "Classic" OS installed (that would be the OS 9.1 that comes with OSX). Then, when you run Classic, it boots OS 9 "inside" OSX. There really is no "emulation" since OS9 and OSX are both "native" to Mac hardware.
So Apple isn't "throwing in a copy of OS 9.1" because emulation is bad, it's including it because it is a necessary part of Classic.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
See that is the difference between hard-core computer-philes and end users. The former regards the computer as this cool, powerful device like a fast car or a powerful jet. The end user just sees another appliance taking up desk space.
My 'tard cousin just wants to press buttons on a flashy box without it breaking, man.
"I like to wear big boy pants."
If my previous message was flamebait, who am I supposed to be baiting? Certainly not Mac users.
Is one of these new Macs with OS X a viable bridge between the Linux I want to learn more about and the MS Orifice software that is admittedly a Redmond product but which, warts and all, drives the bulk of modern business? Can I light off this new Mac and do all of the kewel thingz a /. reader would want to do, but still toss off a few lines of Visual BaSick when I need to get my MS Access on? These are the questions driving my next hardware purchase. A small, yet noticable, legion of folks will drop Mr. Softy like a bad habit, given solid file compatibility.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Boy, I must have pissed of some Appleites. I got modded up to 5 and then back down to 2 when I was at lunch.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Because, like Microsoft, Apple cares about getting their software and other accessories into as many hands as possible. To this end, they've spent decades worth of man-hours on usability, testing, usability testing, and even more testing. Since their GUI and applications are written to be sold to people who need them rather to 'scratch an itch', the applications are often, but not always, powerful *and* intuitive.
Apple as a company, however, has fallen into the trap of thinking that it has to control every single aspect of its business to remain sucessfull. Steve has forgotten that (Control != Profit). This means that despite the fact that MacOS X is probably the best user-oriented *nix we'll ever see, it will never gain the kind of marketshare that the major Linux Distros currently occupy.
If only it would run on x86 hardware, Windows users would flock away from the evil empire.
After using a Mac professionally for quite a while, and lusting after all the cool hardware and software, I cannot in good concience, buy Apple products or reccomend them for purchase because of Apple's punitive busines practices.
It's truly sad, because Linux hackers don't get the importance of a usuable, intuitive interace and M$ and its legion of MSDN coders will never get the point of a powerful user-controlled subsytem.
*sigh*.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
OS X will work because the people writing applications, administers of their servers, and all the people using the applications (read: word to photoshop) will be able to use a single operating system with ease. The power of OS X is to integrate power with class. Windows will never do this.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
that's sick...sick sick sick sick sick...poor little bunny rabbit :(
terradot, growing awareness
Hmpf..i know in the Phillipines you can get a $150 OS for 2 bucks :)
when i was there 2 years ago the amount of software being sold in major stores would blow your mind away.
UT, Q3A, etc etc for 2 bucks. All "full version cd's"
Same thing with the OSes...
I think the benefit of Mac OS X (Unix for the rest of us) is lost on the /. crowd - or appears to be.
Aqua is purely elegant. Java 2 support is impressive. PDF implementation is unreal.
Look at an OS before you judge:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/theater/index.html
And yes Virginia you can gnutar -zxf file.gnutar.gz
http://www.omnigroup.com/community/freeware/quake3 /
And I'm sorry enlightenment (you're really nice) but compared to aqua - you lose.
Apple makes hardware, but they also attempt to define a user expirience - i have never seen such elegance in OS design & GUI implementation. I have never seen a more user friendly window manager for Unix.
If apple isn't heading in the right direction - by opening their kernel and several of their applications. Then I don't know who is. I think Apple should be applauded by thier efforts & welcomed to the *nix community.
I'm not asking you to let go of your Mandrake / Slack Ware / Redhat / or whatever distro you cling to. I merely ask for educated opinions.
I have provided mine, but I drank the Apple Kool - Aid, & I liked it! :)
Move 'zig'!
I hope this was a joke- it should be:
"stupid spelling nazis",
not "nazi's".
Also, the first poster spelled "losers" correctly, but he should have put "thinks", not "think's".
If someone sends me a CV for a programming job and includes at least one instance of an apostrophe in a simple plural, I won't hire them. Why the hell should I? If they can't learn to punctuate their native language, why should I trust their regexps? Maybe it's because when you program, the compiler or interpreter instantly gives you feedback if your syntax or grammar is off.
So that's what I'm doing here- giving feedback.
Graspee
So last time you checked there was obviously no Windows ME.
Yes, Windows ME is a piece of shit, but it does have a DVD player application, and Media Player 7 (which playes MPEG-2).
Graspee
"I had to write assembly for the 68000 and the 286 at the same time, so I had the opportunity to compare them. And I regret that the winning architecture was the Intel one."
Well I've written assembly for both too, and I disagree. Don't you *use* registers? Isn't it nice having more of them?
Graspee
Sorry, I missed your point, of course the 68000 is nicer- but when you said:
"I had to write assembly for the 68000 and the 286 at the same time, so I had the opportunity to compare them. And I regret that the winning architecture was the Intel one."
I took it to mean that you prefered the intel assembly, but just regretted to say it because of the anti-Intel feeling on slashdot.
So, sorry about that....
Graspee
URL?
When he returned to Apple his stupidity returned.
1) he killed Mac clones
2) he killed the x86 version of OpenSTEP
His need to "control the hardware" undercuts Apple's software efforts.
The Mac OS or NeXT/OpenSTEP could've stomped Windows if Jobs had the brains to license the hardware widely.
Jobs should stand on the platform next to Xerox for creating some of the most exciting stuff in the comuter industry, then blowing the possibility of owning the industry with their stupidity.
They both make Bill Gates look the the genius he isn't!
You must not get out much, the average person has far less intiligence than most dogs. If I had a dog I would be insulted by your post.
I have been using the PB since Sept. There is a lot to like about it. There is one thing that they still got wrong. There are things that you cannot do without a mouse. AFAIK only os2 got that one right.
let me address your initial question first: redhat should not be run out of the box because it comes with a bunch of deamons running; many of these daemons are very insecure and can be exploited (check securityfocus to see what i mean). now, it may be that the rh7+ installer changes this; however, rh7+ is worse, it has a broken gcc that linus torvalds himself condemned. secondly; yes i think the iMac and windows are great.. for people who want easy, no-brainer solutions. personally, i prefer to have a little control over my box, instead of having everything automated to the automater's specifications. but others may just want to get their box online in 30 minutes.. and thats fine too, let them use mac, and ill keep my *nix. i dont want linux to be dumbed down to the level of the average user thereby removing my ability to control my box as i want it.
Ratio of replies to old sig content : replies to actual post content > 0.5. Sig changed.
I hate to say this, but you're way off. Easy of use and understanding of the GUI has nothing to do with who uses it. Windows is neither either to use nor easy to understand. Ask any computer illiterate person and he'll tell you so. Windows' interface is more known and people are more exposed to it. That is the sole reason people think it is easier to use. If Windows is on your machine when you buy it, that's what people will use. You want people to start using Linux more? Get it the same mind space and exposure that Windows has. That's all that is required. At this point, Linux UI's are no more difficult than Windows'. They're just different. You are correct that the more people use Linux, the more companies will write for it though.
Khyron
You lost. Get the fuck out.
Actually, I'm a BeOS advocate so it goes like this:
1) Realize that there is hardly any hardware support.
2) Find out that there is almost no software.
3) Sigh heavily because you really liked that OS.
4) Move on.
As a linux advocate, you have several options: 1) "Oh yeah! Well...er...it can't do [enter a feature here]!" 2) "Yeah, but their [type of computer] costs $[several thousand dollars]!" 3) "Yeah, so? I never cared that Linux made it to the desktop. As long as it's free and available to the masses, it's fine with me." 4) "Let's learn from what Apple has done and make Linux even better! Discuss." 5) "Linux is for 3l33t h4ck3rz!" (excuse me if I did that wrong, for I am not elite nor a hacker)
The big issue with Apple being proprietary is in that you can't get some hardware from them, mainly system configurations and mainboards. You are stuck with whatever Apple chooses to sell at the time, which is usually few systems. Need a server with 4 processors? Sorry, no luck. How about 12 PCI cards? Again, no dice. Or maybe you don't want to shell out cash for some of the things like gig eithernet, or a video card (because you have one already). Sorry, have to take them. I know that this is not an issue to many home consumers but to many bussinesses and professionals it is. Often it is silly and they don't really need the features they ask for, but the thing that counts is that they THINK they do. The Apple justification for not providing more than a 3-slot G4 for so long was that most customers who though they needed 6 slots really didn't. Well that's fine, but if they THINK they need it, they do. If they want a 6-slot computer, sell it to them. Doesn't matter if they really ever use more than a single slot, if they have made having 6 a priority, you'd better be able to deliver. This really is where Apple catches a lot of their flack. If I call up Dell and order a system, they'll put in it whatever I lok, no matter how weird the order is. With Apple, you have several set configuration that you must take, and you're out of luck otherwise. So let's say I work for a large educational instution (which I do) and we decide we need new computers for about 50 staff. We settle on a spec that includes 19" monitors, 3 peice (2+sub) speakers. Well, Apple won't provide either of those, so I have to go to a second vendor and order all those on a seperate PO. Then there is the hassel of cataloguing and support and so on.
Another issue is Apple "assuming" that all consumers want/need certian features when indeed many/most don't. Like gigabit eithernet. That is probably the silliest thing I've seen included in a desktop computer yet. What percentage of people honestly have gigabit to their desk? I mean at the University of Arizona (where I work) we're only using gigabit eithernet for our BACKBONE. All our central switches and routers are interconnected with gig fibre. Currently even the bussiest of those connections only hase 100-200mb/sec of traffic, and this is the backbone for a campus with 15,000 computers. With 100mb eithernet, you can transfer 650 megabytes (a whole CD) in 52 seconds. Also, a 4 port copper gigabit switch currently runs about $500. So, what use does the end user have for gigabit and how many can even afford to impliment it? Gig eithernet is not useful today for desktops, it is useful for backbones for large netowrks like campuses, ISPs and so on. For Apple to implement it in a desktop is silly. The real problem with that implementation is the price. Copper gig cards cost about $200 as opposed to 10/100 adapters that run around $40. Well, that's a non-trivial cost increase, espically when you are talking something that is of no use to most people.
Which brings me to the next reason some people have a problem with Macs: price. Sorry, but they do cost more for what you get, and it shows. Have a look at the Apple store right now. IT will cost you $200 to upgrade their base G4 from 128MB to 256MB. That's $1.56/MB. Now, currently on the open market 256MB of high quality Micron PC133 SDRAM with lifetime warentee costs $72, or $0.28/MB. Now of course open market RAM is always cheaper than what you get form manufacturers so let's look at Compaq. It costs $120 to go from 128MB to 256MB, so $0.94/MB. That means you're paying about a 66% price premium for RAM from Apple over Compaq. Now, I realise Apple uses standard SDRAM and you could, and should buy it aftermarket, however this is merely to illustrate Apple's expensive prices. This is a big turn off to many people, espically bussinesses. If a Mac ends up costing $300 more than a comparable Dell, that's bad enough, but if you multiply that by 100 computers that's a major expense. Supposing you try to take the "buy it minimal and upgrade" approach you are then stuck with the same problem of ordering from multiple vendors, in addition to having yout IT staff waste their time installing a whole series of upgrades.
Finally I'd just like to point out that if you really believe that Windows in an emulator like Virtual PC is anywhere near as fast and as powerful as the real thing, you really need to use an actual PC. VPC is only useful if you do most of your work on a Mac, but have one or two small programs that are PC only that you need to access once and awhile. If you're doing serious work in it, you really ought to get the real thing.
As a mac user I've enjoyed reading slashdot for a while now, even though it seems to be a heavily linux oriented site. Slashdot (and posters to threads) provides me with lots of info on a variety of stuff I'm interested in, even a mac article once in a while. It was this site that convinced my to install Darwin (the BSD that os x uses) and linuxppc on my mac system. Sometimes though it seems like the primarily linux x86 users don't *get* it...
Don't be offended because thats not my intent. The post I'm replying to and the posts that reply to it repeatedly talk about "macintosh and windows" as if they were the same os. I'm not sure how windows is even related to what were discussing. yes they are both os's with a higher user to devoper ratio than *nix os's. I'm not just emphasizing the difference between windows and macintosh because I'm one of those windows hating mac evangelists (although I am), I'm saying this becuase anyone who has used both os's and gotten to know them would never use the phase "windows and macintosh."
Mac is not "difficult to use." Yes I know shells are cool but do you know that there are alternatives? Do you realize that it is possible to use a gui input/output as much if not more than with pure text? A gui, properly configured, can use graphics to display a huge amount of data and use the keyboard to input data. Mac os (even mac os 9) is properly configured out of the box. If you know any powerusers watch them operate a mac and see how many times they reach for that mouse. Ever wondered why standard mac mouses only have one butten? Now you know.
There is scripting in mac os, its tied directly into the gui, or into the speach software (no not speach to text or any silliness like that, and ya the speach software works great... now).
OK, that I'm done arguing for os 9, lets talk about os x (now I'll admit that I am glad we are getting all that unix shell coolness). First off, *any* feature that you liked about *nix will exist on os x. you can even run your fav xwindows window manager (which will run your fav xwindow apps) and apples aqua windows *simultaineously*, check it out on sourceforge xonx project. No that involves no form of emulation, it works because under that ultra cool aqua gui is a full distro of apple's special blend of *nix called darwin (comming soon to x86, get your bleeding edge alpha today). Plus stuff you may never see working well on linux. Can you say java? Apples saying that os x has the best java support ever, of course you may be disinclined to believe praise a company says about its own products, but from what I understand java apps will be indistinguishable (from the users perspective) from other apps written in c/c++/objective-c/whatever.
Anyway I would encourage people to find out about os x/os x server (no, it still uses apache not a proprietary webserver. Yes you can also use apache on plain os x). The frontpage of the os x section of apple.com is mostly movies of the ui and other such fluff but if you dig deeper into their site and get to some of their docs (I recommend Inside Mac OS X, they also have the *only* good book on objective c for download in pdf format), you can even sign up for the apple developer connection and recieve a few free issues of mactech and you don't even have to own a mac, of most interest to linux users is www.darwinfo.org which will show you just how *nixy os x is.
If someone was offended by my mac zealotry, become a mac user for a few years and see how you start acting.
Well if nothing else, at least we are starting to see some more Unix clones for desktop machines. This is probably due in no small part to the existence of Linux for PCs.
I always lusted after Unix. Eventually Linux made it available to me. .doc files.
Apple's OSX is going to create a new awareness of
Unix among the masses. Pretty soon *nix compatibility or *nix type
of kernel is going to become as important as having Word
to read
I don't view OSX as a competitor to Linux or BSD but as
a compatriot.
We should encourage people to buy these machines. Eventually it will
be MS who is on the outside of compatibility.
I have already been advising people who don't list gaming as a priority to consider Apples. Remember the advantages of a heterogenous system.
that guy who listed the steps about installing a new hard drive on a linux machine was nuts. he was all "all you do is run fdisk, and then lp1 and blah blah blah"... trying to say it's so simple why make big deal out of apple's simplicity. well he is on crack. i am a programmer for god's sake and i have tried to become a linux user three times now... it's HARD. you can feel smugly superior because i feel that way, or you can realize your precious platform is going to remain a tiny niche that OS X is going to kill. i am a mac user and i have a huge interest in the *nix world. i write perl scripts and i would like to learn how to operate unix from the command line, and compile stuff, and use open source software. with Mac OS X I can finally get my foot in the door.
and for the other guy who said he doesn't understand what dave reynolds was saying about using the full power of unix on os x. reynolds isn't necessarily talking about using command line, he means great multitasking, memory protection, speed, symmetric multiprocessing, and under the hood stuff - PLUS the ability to get at the command line.
just my two cents.
john
Now there is an operating system with enough installed base to justify coding all those mainstream apps we always wanted into some variant of Unix. This means porting those same apps to other *nixes will be easier, more software should seep into *BSD and Linux within a year. Now only if more games were ported....
Yeah, apple delivers... their site delivers a bus error to my solaris/netscape browser.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Of course they brought cool innovation to unix, like the fact that you don't seem to be able to change the mount points since they;re saved in the drives header. or the fact that they took a nice, easy, *established* way of setting up certain things like passwd, groups,hosts, etc and turned it into a real command line nightmare with niutil (or you can use NetInfo's gui app, but I'm generally telnet'd or ssh'd into a server configuring it remotely. there's also the nice little touches they made like using /Local/Users for home directories instead of /home ... which was WAY worse,...
I just worked on an os x server box for a few hours last night ... basically taking far too much time to figure out how to get around what apple change.
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
Huraah!!
My mom thanks you.
How many of you can rebuild a carburetor? Or do a tune up?
You just want to turn the key and drive
How many know which foods spoil at which temperatures? Or which preservatives/additives have which effects? Or how the sushi is transported and how it's prepared?
You just take the bag-o-frozen pizza, stick it in the microwave, and press START
Does this make you stupid? Worthy of ridicule as the unthinking masses? No.
Then why the double standard when it comes to computers?
Why is the desire to press a button OK for an elevator or a microwave but wrong for a text-editor?
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
more pressure on hardware manufacturers to open up their specs.
more companies using *nix in more departments(not just as servers) means more jobs for *nix sysadmins, custom software providers, and contractors.
a greater push towards open standards/source code so that writing programs will be easier, more efficient, and more fun.
we wont have a future where people are charged to use their word-processors as a "service," or giant registry databases keeping track of every single piece of software we use and for how long. Atleast it gives privacy a fighting chance..
the (good) code you write will live on in other projects.
higher visibility of *nix means more popularity and a better chance of getting dates:)
Mom will have an OS that is stable, fast, easy to use, and free.
(come on, help mom out -- she'll thank you)
We're *almost* there. Almost. Let's not let snobbery get in the way. Mom would be so happy..
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
You are right. We should remember we are talking about the company that blew up the chance to make a serious hardware platform to compete with the PC one. And it blew it by the simple expedient of making it closed as a nutshell. Every time I think we could be using now the descent of the M68000, instead of the descent of the */^%##* 80286, I get cold sweat. Have they lernt something since then? I have seen nothing to date, to uphold that notion.
So they have a nice wrap-around on a BSD. Good for them. They will make propietary expansions, and soon nothing developed for that platform will work on any other. If that's not already the case. Notwhithstanding the fact, already mentioned, that it will work only on a hardware platform. I could make a friendly Linux distribution if the hardware set were fixed and small.
Just more corporate hype.
--
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Yet the first demo's I saw of OSX were on Intel hardware about 2 years or so ago....
Also, the "Classic" emulation apparently doesn't work well, because Apple is throwing in a copy of OS 9.1 as well. Because of these problems it isn't even shipping on new Macs until summer.
Now if only Microsoft could build their NT interface over BSD !!
I was rather suprised when Soia showed me her laptop.
You sort of don't expect a girl from Madagascar to have a computer.
There was an explanation of course. It seems every one of my co-students from third-world countries has an aunt, uncle or cousin who is a Norwegian citizen, and Soia is no exception. Turns out this aunt of hers had an old laptop that she didn't use, so she gave her to write her schoolwork on.
There I have for my predjuices I suppose. Not all third-world citizens are extremely poor. And they can be damn resourceful even if they are.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Use Linux (most likely to be SuSE or some homebrewed version) and get KDE 2.x
gcc: brain.c: No such file or directory
Hahahaha! What the hell is this guy talking about? I hate these types of statements, where people hit nothing but air in their agony, restlessness to dump crap on users which in their eyes are too "dumb" to use Linux.
If you like userunfriendlyness that is fine, but why should everyone be confronted with difficult to configure ondocumented programs Linux is so blessed with! I applaud Apple for their userfriendlyness!
It is sad that there are so many people like you around, people that hold Linux back from entering the desktop market and really making a difference in the world.
You say Linux is an "Open Source" OS. That is true, but it's a sad thing a part of it's userbase is so "closed".
I have only one thing to say to you:"wake up, and start living in the real world!"
"Linux is only free....if your time is worthless"
is that while opensource linux is available for a wide variety of hardware apple's OS X, while good, is not available for the PC world.
This could have been their opportunity to move into the microsoft arena - possibly even with an implementation of WINE (or something similar) for the x86 implementation. This would have been absolutely great for lots of people who like windows applications but do not like windows.
Apple sucks at hardware - they are proprietary - what else do you expect? they did a good job with os x but who cares? if you only have a couple computers to run it on - what, do i have to buy a crappy mac to run it?
naa.. i'll just install red hat.
bla bla bla..
I think that the author of this article did everyone a disservice by choosing such an antagonistic title. I'm a huge supporter of Linux but I went out and got a Macintosh anyway. The reason is that where I work I am _required_ to use Microsoft Outlook (primarily for its scheduling purposes) and to read (and write) Microsoft Office documents. Furthermore, since I help develop a web site, I am _required_ to verify that our website works with Internet Explorer. We deploy our application on a Solaris box. I have tried using VMWare to overcome these problems with varying degrees of success. But in the end, I found using an X server under Windows 2000 faster than running VMWare under Linux. Mac OS X allows me to run the Microsoft software I am _required_ to run without having to run a Microsoft OS. Furthermore, I will eventually be able to run most if not all of my Linux applications on OS X as well. Mac OS X opens up a whole new platform where GNU and X Windows software will run efficiently. I really don't see this as an "Us versus Them" type of situation. Both OSes are UNIX. Apple does some proprietary stuff with their Quartz and Aqua interface. However, it's at least loosely based on a standard (PDF) and I think they do some real innovation there. Hopefully the good ideas in Quartz/Aqua will get integrated into X Windows in some fashion. But at least Apple is supporting LDAP instead of some BS like ActiveDirectory, OpenGL instead of Direct3D, NFS/HTTP/WebDAV instead of AppleTalk, UNIX instead of yet another proprietary OS, and so on. The new Apple hardware and OS is a lot more open than closed. Certainly a lot more open than it used to be.
I heartily endorse Quebec's comment on the Mandrake 7.2 distribution.
t news/latest
;-)
This reviewer does appear to have based his evaluation of Linux installation on the *previous* generation of distros. Otherwise, he's not familiar with Mandrake's biz model.
Let me state from the outset, I am *not* a Mandrake employee, nor have I taken any renumeration for my support of their Linux distro. I'm just a very, *very* happy user.
I should also state at the outset that, "I love the Mac!"
However...
I expect much of my software & OS frustration with the Mac to finally go away, now that they've shifted to a Unix core.
Having said that, the smart & deft folks at Mandrake have done exactly what the Open Source model encourages - carved out a market niche to meet several demonstrable, user needs.
These are - as of the 7.2 distro:
1) Automatic hardware identification: HardDrak is the sort of GUI-oriented, auto identification, hardware config utility Linux has been in need of for a long time. Admittedly, the 'open' hardware spec that comes with the x86 architecture makes this task *much* harder than with a closed spec like the Mac. Still, Mandrake has done a bangup job carving out a very specific need and providing an attractive solution for it. The graphical part *is* important - even for us command-line chauvenist weenies. The human-brain has a distinctly visual bias. It does help to put a pretty face on this complex task. HardDrak will remain a work in progress - as new hardware is constantly coming on line - but I expect it will evolve for the better, as most of Mandrake's tools consistently have done.
2) Simple as pie, graphically-oriented, *smart* installer. By smart, I mean it is able to harvest the value of hardare auto-identification from point 1 above. There are more steps than with the typical MacOS installation, but not by much. Plus, the user doesn't need to bring an intimate knowledge of their hardware into play, as was the case with the previous generation of Linux distros.
3) Very simple printer setup! We have 2 Macs and 3 PCs on our home LAN. We also have an Epson inkjet & Brother laserwriter on the LAN via an Axis network print server. It took me less than 1 minute per printer to configure my Mandrake 7.2 Linux to print to these printers. I still can't quite get the Macs to do it, after *many* hours of trying to hunt down & configure the necessary network printer drivers. The Epson happened to have the required AppleTalk printer driver. The Brother printer must still be accessed by only 1 of the Macs via the 3rd party, USB PowerPrint driver. There are ways of printing to the Brother laswerwrite from a Mac via EtherTalk, but they either cost a lot of extra $$$ and/or require the Mac OS print stream to be first converted to PostScript. The output of these PS conversions not only requires a lot of extra CPU cycles to create, but also needs more printer memory & tends to be lower quality, unless you spend a lot of time configuring the PS driver.
4) With their i586 compile, they meet the need of many Linux users to tweak every last computation optimation out of the newer CPU cores. Maybe we'll even get i686 & Althon specific complies soon, too!
5) Mandrake also seems to have done a good job offering kernel & app development management services via it's 'Cooker' project. Not only does this provide a service to the user community, it also helps the folks at Mandrake roll-out new Linux software to the user community. This is made most dramatic by their announcement today of the MandrakeFreq 'frequent release' service:
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/community/mandrakesof
Mandrake is awesome!
All other distros are merely great.
uhh... well, I am using OSX (not the PB) on a fruit iMac (333MHz 128Mb ram).
And is faster and more stable (also, noticeable faster than the PB) and there is not really any slowdown in classic mode over running 9.1.
BTW, the Beige G3 was never a solid performer to begin with, new chip on old hardware.
So, you are right, I am not happy, I am ecstatic!
Unfortunate title for the Article.
You can argue whether or not it's the goal of linux to bring UNIX to the common user. Some in the linux community would certainly like that, others could care less.
Apple certainly didn't create OS X because they wanted to bring UNIX to the masses. Their own OS development was stumbling so they bought NeXT which was crumbling.
In fact, many old-guard Mac users are suspicious of the fact that there's UNIX somewhere in OS X, and eeeeek! - a command line!
But, both Mac and Linux folk should see this as a good thing. It exposes the pluses of *nix to a larger audience and gives Mac users access to a large body of open source work.
And, if you don't like MS, well now the *nix community suddenly just got larger, and so did the number of Mac developers. Redmond can't be pleased.
This is the most unbiased opinion and one of the most valid I've seen.
Bashing Apple might make people feel better, but companies exist to make money and 99% of the people out there get confused when they have 2 mouse buttons. I'm sure that many of you have done tech support for Company XYZ and see where I'm coming from.
It annoys me that people get a hair up their butt about the hardware it supports. Since when has it been impossible to upgrade to a different HD, video card, etc.? It would be my best guess that Apple still had to write device drivers for MOST existing hardware. I haven't been keeping up on all the details lately, but it seems very reasonable to assume.
Some of you need to get a life. It seems that a lot of people that bash other OSes either don't know enough to see the advantages of that OS or they feel special when they use *nix. Do you need to prove how smart you are or what? That's certainly why I used to bash MS back in the day.
FYI, I am an avid Macintosh/RedHat/FreeBSD user that does outsourced NT networking support for MS. As an active Mac evangelist you can imagine my previous opinion of MS, but since my first day I've gained a LOT of respect for their NT and 2000 OSes. I still prefer a Macintosh for home use, Windows NT/2000 for work, and *nix for geeking out.
Sosume
-Lucas
What is all this stuff about a linux experience, a OSX experience. It sounds good but what does it mean. Linux and OSX are both just OS's
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule. -Randal, Clerks