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BSD User's Review Of OS X
Lally Singh writes: "Getting bored with the latest distribution? Or getting tired of searching for drivers for your 8 bit soundblaster (in)compatible? Then listen to one BSD user's opinion of Mac OS X. And stop complaining about the hardware. Give a Powermac or one of the portables a chance before knocking on it."
I just sold my DUAL G4 533 because it was the worst OS I have ever used in reguards to:
Apple sort of screwed people by releasing OSX too early. I don't blame you for being angry with them, and I wouldn't disagree with the problems that you've experienced.
However, even before OSX hit the stores, all of the Mac sites were abuzz with OSX's deficiencies. Anyone with a web browser could have seen that OSX wasn't ready for prime time.
I decided to sit on the sidelines and wait until the reports improved. Sure enough, 10.1 looks like the "real thing", and I'll re-evaluate the situation in September.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
I don't feel too sorry for people who shelled out 3500$ for a 733 PowerMac because they should have been a little more informed before they confirmed their order. Hey I have a great idea lets lay down 3 grand for a new Mac right before a big show like Mac World where you're practically assured speed and configuration changes. It isn't by any means cruel to customers, it's always been buyer beware and always should be. Geez dude, the whole goal of marketing is to sell shit to people they may or may not want or need.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
It is true you can buy wintel machines for cheaper, but you must look at the whole picture. What are you really getting for that $300 or so extra dollars? 1.Of course the always easy and great looking OS 2.iMovie 3.iDVD 4.iTunes 5.AppleWorks 6.Rumors of a release of iPhoto. 7.The OS ships with many different languages alreasy in there, so you can switch with the push of a button. So for that extra $300 the average user also gets all of the software he/she would need to do pretty much everything. BTW have you seen how much M$ wants for office these days?
This is the main reason I hesitate to get into OS X. Having a real GUI *and* a real command line in the same system sounds very very cool (Cygwin just isn't as good as the real thing), but I want intel level pricing. As long as Apple sticks with its niche strategy they're just not competitive.
-- Sigs are for losers
I have seen the prices. And I went, "ouch!" for a while, too, until someone pointed something out to me that makes the price seem just fine to me - longeivity.
/why/ we still have so many old macs -- they don't need to be upgraded yet!
Ya see, I work for the computer center at a college. We provide the students and faculty with both PC's and Macs to use. About two years ago, all the PC's were upgraded to Pentium 3 500's and now we have quite a few 700's, too. At the same time, the school is still using quite a few poewermac 7100's in addition to all the various and sundry iThis and iThat. I was bitching about the age of the mac hardware one day when someone pointed out to me the reason
Yup, kids. While all the PC's of the same age had either become hopelessly obsolete for their tasks or had simply broken down beyond the point of it being worth it to fix them, the Powermacs were still chugging along, getting a memory or hard drive upgrade here or there.
To me, this makes owning a Mac cheaper - yeah, it costs more in the short run, but since I don't need to do any major upgrades as often, I'm happy paying the (slightly, when you consider price/performance in the equation) higher initial cost, because I'm convinced I'm really not throwing away my money because I know the machine won't poop out on me the way my 486 and my Pentium did.
Sleep with one of her skinny friends.... Then she'll realise she has to lose weight and love you even more for it...
LOL, yes ... I was compling a ton of apps today, I guess it kinda screaw me up :)
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Then again, I'm talking about spending your money, not mine, and it's always easier to spend other people's money than your own. (I present any government as Exhibit A, m'lud.) In truth, you might want to go to your local Apple retailer and play around with them. Just watch out for CompUSSR; sometimes they don't even have working models of the Mac available.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
A new iMac did come, it just wasn't the revolution people were hoping for.
It was pretty clear that there would be no new iBook for a while, since it was just introduced and has been selling well.
I finally got my new Titanium G4, and I must say it's an awesome machine!
D
Comparing just the processor does a disservice to the engioneering that apple puts into it's products.
You are 100% correct.
If you read carefully, the scope of my response is directly pointed to the replied discussion regarding the CPU's "mhz" rating, and how Apple may calculate thier numbers differently, and has a better CPU architecture. This was not a "system comparison" discussion, in which, as you state, the scope would have been way to narrow.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
I don't think that they are available anymore. Last time I checked the only way to get the Developer Tools was by purchasing OS X. Once the public beta ended, so did free access to the Developer tools.
Well, that would be cool. Care to clue me in on how you did that? (Just say RTFM if I could have read it in the fine manual...)
What I cannot create, I do not understand
Have any other /.'ers played around with both the TiBook and the iBook? Does the iBook have enough power to satisfy a developer's needs, especially with Java programming (swing, running an IDE or application server with 256MB of course)? Or for this kind of programming is the TiBook required?
What are your thoughts?
I was thinking of buying an Apple as my 2nd home system, but I've been holding off for awhile. I seem to recall reading an interesting post from a fellow Slashdotter who had some rather sobering facts about BSD's possible decline (if somebody would be kind enough to dredge it up and post it, I would appreciate it). Those numbers have me wondering if I shouldn't stick with a proven Intel solution and stick to Linux -- contrary to the BSD numbers, Linux appears to be as healthy as ever.
You're going to believe everything you read on slashdot? Geez, why not give up your intelligence and believe politicians, journalists, and M$ spokespeople while you're at it?
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Our friend's browser count for Mac OS X is a little low. He includes:
Internet Explorer, OmniWeb, and Mozilla.
He neglects: Opera and iCab and Lynx. I'm posting this from iCab, which
I love (though it can't seem to handle hotmail and crashes on a few things, it's overall snappier than IE. I can almost quit and restart it
in the time it takes IE to come up with a new window after switching
back from another app). I don't know how any Unix geek could possibly
leave lynx out of the pantheon of browsers.
As for Mozilla: uch. I can't even get beyond the splash screen on my
machine. I almost think it doesn't count.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
If you have 3rd party ram in it, definately check with whoever makes it that it'll work before installing that. The new firmware (after it's installed) checks for "bad ram" and if it sees any, your system won't recognize it.
Heh..this just came to mind. It might be something as simple as a 3rd party control panel/extension doesn't like your computer.
Either way, Apple prides itself on rock hard stable systems. It can be fixed!
and would you mind posting the shell script meta-converter that prefixes all paths with those cool c: and d: drive references?
A bit more seriously, OS X does have a number of non-standard (unix standard that is) locations for things. But so far I found it much less difficult to get used to than cygwin.
Hope you like it, DannyiMac, because it's soldered on, and there's no way to add another.
Keep in mind all I discuss is a rumor. I do not know the truth of it, the guy I head it from said he recalls it from back in the early 90s. But maybe this is an explanation as to why a G4 500 MHz OS-X and a P3 1GHz RedHat 6.2 both wallclock the same result for the same program.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
They tell you what is coming down the pipe, to a point. I have a good friend who let's me know about some key developments at Apple that will be showing up shortly; the other side is, they announce their stuff "just in time" (with some misses, of course). I've watched Dell, etc., promise 3GHz machines in just 2 months (yes, exaggerating.) But you get the point.
And no, no one ever buys a G3 500MHz the day before it is obsolete, Apple always puts price cuts, promotions, special deals, etc., into the works a month AT A MINIMUM, and usually 2 months, before that model is discontinued. This is why Apple's sales always fall off before every major event.
I agree with you on the warranty program.
To close, read Mac OS Rumors (mosr.com) and As The Apple Turns (appleturns.com), and you can get a 90% clue as to what is coming up in the next "big event". Over the past 2 years, they have had about a 90% success rate. This will give you a basic, if not official, idea of upcoming events for Apple.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
IMO, the proprietary OS will go the way way of the dinosaur when you don't have to download custom drivers and use unofficial client software for services like AIM and ICQ, and so on. Don't get me wrong, Linux and BSD are nice, but I don't think that closed and commercial software will be going anywhere soon.
Yes, simulscan works fine. But only up to 1024x768. In addition, as stated above, dual display is also intentionally crippled. This is a damn shame.
I'm pretty sure I found one with a 12.1" screen for comparison purposes.
Dell's site doesn't list Inspiron 4000s with anything other than 14.1" screens, the only choice being different resolutions. I can't rule out there being an earlier model also called 4000, but neoseeker's review links refer to slower processors but no smaller screens.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Spot on. In fact, in Apple's case, even more so. Even though your shiny G4 might come with an ATI video card, it has an APPLE driver - updates for which are released by APPLE as part of system software, responsibily taken by APPLE, testing for conformance and compatibility done by APPLE. It works SO much better this way.
If anyone's interested, a couple months ago I did some price shopping on the Web, and tried to match specs among various laptops. Results are here.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I wondered that myself. What the hell version of OSX did he install?
On the other hand, there are occasional reasons for recompiling Apache. You can't get suEXEC working with a pre-compiled binary, and for a server with multiple users running CGI scripts, that's critical.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
The satisfaction of working with well designed and well supported hardware is worth the higher price, in my opinion. And now that Mac OS = UNIX, too, is just getting me more excited, since the older Mac OSs were arguably no better than MS Windows for overall stability.
Many people cite price/performance as justification of PCs over Macs and UNIX workstations, which is somewhat valid for people who do lots of computation and/or need the ego-trip of keeping up with the latest hardware. But, looking at the flat line of my CPU meter, I don't think this argument is very strong. Having everything just work is much more important.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
know an iMac dead, cause they suck... screen too small, 3D card way outdated, not enough RAM, overpriced for the high-end models, not flatscreen... pure bollocks !
You can install unknown utility to get OS X going on any 603 powermac. search www.versiontracker.com for it.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Depends on what you're doing, doesn't it? A couple of years back, my university (Trinity) was revamping its media lab. Because one of the VPs has his head up Dell's ass, we got all Dells instead of the Macs that the Comm Department was clamoring for.
With everything maxed out on the Dells (and believe me, the price-performance difference flattens out at the high end), 21-inch monitors, and $5000 Miro editing boards, the Dell machines came out to about $12000 each (including software like Photoshop, Premiere, etc).
G4s with all the software and a media converter to handle DV-to-analog transfers ($500) would have cost $8000.
The worst thing is, the Dells haven't worked well at all. They shipped with a mobo that was incompatible with Photoshop 6 (great for a web design class) and people fill them up with games.
The Miro hardware is extremely persnickety and locks up when certain filters are applied. Luckily we have an old Mac-based Media100 stashed in the back.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Apple's concept for this new interface is what they're calling the "cumulative user manipulation." The C.U.M. interface right now is travelling all over the net, in short little batches like spreading seed. It's swallowed by remote nodes, called "sister objects" in the C.U.M. heirarchy.
Like I've said, I've been CUMing for almost two years now and have no desire to stop. OSX rocks, and I think it will re-establish Apple's desktop dominance.
CUM swallowed by sisters? Spreading seed? Since I'd never heard of this being in MacOSX, I'm going 'to make an "ass" out of "u" and "me"' and chalk this up as a joke that went over the heads of too many sex-deprived geeks...
Does this mean knocking on the iMacs without first giving them a chance is perfectly acceptible? ;-)
--
Yes.
photosMy Photostream
I bought a new iBook, and I must admit, I was a bit wary about OS X. Having now used it for about two months, I can say that I am nothing but happy with this thing.
Getting over the New GUI Hump was easy enough. Now I find myself delving more into *nix stuff. Why? Because I have the incentive to learn it. Prior to this, I had shell acounts, and could handle basic functionality, but I never really had any interest in digging deeper into the minutae of a command-line OS. That's changed. And I think that's changed because I have a consistent, reliable GUI front-end to fall back on should I get tired of stumbling around in the CLI.
blog |
Good Stuff:
After the linux revolution has pretty much run out of gas for the consumer desktop (although the linux PDA wave should revive it from that direction), Apple is stepping up and doing something very brave: betting the farm on a Un*x-like OS, trusting that they will perfect the desktop.
At the risk of sounding like a broken (vinyl!) record, after watching the smooth transition from 68K to PPC, I believe that this will be a success in the long-term.
If you have been a Mac and Unix user, OSX on a laptop is a godsend. If you aren't, maybe you won't be drawn to it.
Bad Stuff:
Who is the @zz4013 who decided that cmd-N does not stand for New Folder anymore? That little fact kills me. Why not use the extra key press for the new finder window, and make it that much easier to move forward? I can't believe that made it out of the usage lab!
I could be wrong here, but my main beef with OSX so far is that I do not see a mandatory CLI interface for basic operations in OSX binaries.
Ex: Who is going to run Filemaker on an OSX server if you can't ssh in and restart it with the right environment?
Other than getting my mind around the netinfo world, all the controls are very well placed, you can just will your Mac to be a web server and/or ftp server. And ssh is right there! I'm sick of sneaking PuTTY onto every PC I hog time on.
Now for the off-topic hardware sucks/rules stuff going on...
In the last few days, someone made the excellent point that outsiders view Apple laptops as closer to fair price because no one is doing a DIY laptop like we do x86 towers.
Otherwise you get what you pay for. Apple has made some lemons, but they do outrageous things like allow you to trade them in for a great price on the latest hardware. I'm not sure who else does that.
Oh well.
Hey jchristopher, who do you work for here? You've so far posted *30* anti-Apple rants to THIS article, as well as a bunch to another article titled "Mac Rants". I mean, if Apples aren't your thing, that's fine. But you sound insane dude.
Get help. It's just a computer.
And you constantly bring up the benefits of Dells over Macs, and ONLY Dells, so my Astroturfometer is going crazy...
Not that I have EITHER a Dell OR a Mac, but I know my girlfriends father's Mac is solid as hell, while the Draftsman at work has been swearing at his Dell since he got it two weeks ago - of course, it's mostly WinME that sucks, not the Dell, but still, one computer causes pain and suffering, while the other is seemingly excellent. We've also had 3 out of 15 new Dell Latitude Laptops go back within 3 months for bad motherboards. So if I didn't have an IBM Thinkpad (which is the greatest, and runs GNU/Linux and the BSDs like a dream), I'd dump Windows and the Intel Architectures entirely and get the Mac - just based on user experiences. Oh, yeah, and that Pentium 3 ID number thing, that sucks too, even though theres an ID# disabler patch out.
Try telling that to the people who bought new Macs in early 1997 once Apple (who were worried about people putting off buying computers in order to get useful ones) made a public commitment that OSX (aka "Rhapsody") would run on them. Oddly enough, OSX doesn't run on them--Apple just wanted to screw those people into buying two overpriced dongles instead of one. There was talk of a class action; I sure hope they win.
The x86 thing is a bad idea and won't happen; Apple isn't stupid. Of all the people who would love to run OSX on an x86 box, how many of them would actually be willing to PAY for it? Nobody I know. I think the only people I know who use Windows legally do so because it came pre-installed on their PC.
On top of that, an x86 port would suck; there are no drivers for ANYTHING. Have you seen the requirements for Darwin/x86? Will that run on your hardware? If not, then OSX won't run on it either. This will change with time, but that time hasn't come yet.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Here are instructions to get the FreeBSD ports tree installed on Mac OS X (& GNU-Darwin). I've had pretty good luck with it :)
He pads out his pages with bogus keywords to help the spiders. Here's a quote:
<font class=hidden> <!-- a few words for the spiders --> Greasy Daemon, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, BSDi, Unix, Internet, Networking, NFS, Netatalk, SMB, Samba, Security, Guide, News, Benchmark, SSH, OpenSSH, Cryptography, TTY,
(and so it goes on ...)
dude - patents hurt innovation? hmmm, I'd think that the abscence of patents can decrease innovations, especially those coming from capitalists. /. ) but it's a grimy fact of economic life. keep the faith, patents can expire!
it's a balancing act. if my invention is set free -- as in information needs to be free -- I know my landlord is not going to let me live for free. abuse of patents is another story but recouping your investment and keeping a business running by maintaining some proprietary information may be unpalatable to some (many here a
the future is here, it is just not evenly distributed - w. gibson
He had OS 9.1 on the iBook and used the install CD, he talks about how easy the install went.
OS X is nowhere near as bad as the VMS crap
I hear PC user hardware horror stories all the time. Fried hard drive. Dead RAM. Motherboard toasted before its time had come. I've heard at least seven individual hardware failure stories from my co-workers in the last year alone. I rarely hear these kinds of dead hardware stories from Mac users. Why do you suppose that would be?
More than likely because of cheesy power supplies. Have you seen what PC manufactureres try to pass off as a power supply?
> Uh, how many have you got? - I count ONE
... Digidesign apparently sells it, but nobody uses it. There are top ten hits that were made on tape, and there were top ten hits that were made without tape. If they were made without tape, then they were made with Digidesign Pro Tools on a Mac. End of story.
... DVD, receivers, etc. Where is the 5.1 audio being created? On Macs. Sorry, buddy. Hell, Mac OS X supports 5.1 within CoreAudio. You could sit down and write your own 5.1-capable application in a week, because the guts are all there just like text rendering is there for word processors. Then you can use the same hardware that pros use to author the 5.1 to listen to it, if you want.
> consumer level sound card available for mac -
> SoundBlaster. That's IT. There aren't any!
Every Mac made since about 1991 has had on-board sound equivalent to an add-on SoundBlaster card. In addition, every Mac made since about 1993 has had a wavetable software synth in it, so Mac users were spared the cheezy FM synth MIDI files that SoundBlaster users enjoyed through 1997.
There is only one consumer PCI audio solution for the Mac, but there are numerous USB audio solutions for $20-$40. I have a Griffin iMic that you can hide in your hand. To use it, you plug it into the Mac keyboard and either talk into it or plug a line-in into it. There are also semi-pro USB audio solutions for $200-$500 or so. What makes them better for the consumer is that instead of plugging a PCI card into the inside of the computer and then installing drivers and then plugging an analog mic into the PCI card, all the Mac user has to do is plug in the USB microphone and that's it. Mac OS already has support for USB audio built-in. No drivers to install.
For professionals, the main PCI audio solution is Digidesign's Pro Tools, which you can run on any PowerMac, or on one particular IBM workstation and that's it. The IBM version is sort of legendary
There are also pro PCI cards from Yamaha, eMagic, Event, and dozens of others. There are also professional FireWire solutions from Mark of the Unicorn now, and more coming. Yamaha's mLAN is the front-runner to replace MIDI, and it runs over FireWire and support for it is built into Mac OS X. The MIDI ports that are found on all digital musical instruments will gradually be replaced by FireWire over the next few years. FireWire is already on digital camcorders, VCR's and things like TiVo. It's where we're moving because most of the time, people prefer to hot-plug a single cable between two devices and having them just work over popping the box and handling bare cards and installing drivers.
> Hope you like it, DannyiMac, because it's soldered
> on, and there's no way to add another.
Thank-you, jchristopher, for another ignorant Mac-bashing troll (seek help, man). PCI solutions require a PowerMac, but you can use the USB or FireWire solutions with any Mac, including iMacs, iBooks, and PowerBooks. As I mentioned above, there are cheap USB ones, semi-pro USB ones, and pro-level FireWire ones. It is very common in the music industry to see PowerBooks being used as portable music studios. The iMac has the same expandability. Microsoft doesn't want you to know that, but hey. Get a Mac and a FireWire hard disk and plug them together and they just work, no installing anything (even if the disk is running FAT32). FireWire audio is the same and it's hot, especially with the PowerBook G4 running audio software so well.
> the G4 tower, the only Mac with any real
> expansion options, STARTS at $1699. That is
> too much to pay for a low end, expandable
> computer.
It's not a low-end computer. Apple doesn't make any low-end computers. The G4 tower you're picking on for $1699 has FireWire, GIGABIT ethernet, wireless antennaes that enable it to be a base station for Wi-Fi, an optical mouse, a graphics adapter with DVI and VGA, 1.5GB RAM capacity, and 4 EMPTY PCI slots (see how many you have empty over at Dell once you've added FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet, and wireless networking to a box). It also has iMovie, iTunes, iDVD and Mac OS X. Out of the box, it is already a semi-pro video editing solution.
Have some humility, man. You're obviously not a music and audio person. Macs are the dominant computer platform in music and audio, graphics, and video. They simply can do things in those fields that can't be done with any other machine, and they've been doing those things for YEARS and YEARS. People have been running recording studio's with Macs since the 1980's. I know a guy who still uses a 1989 Mac for writing music.
I hope you aren't a Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails fan. Those guys don't just use Macs, they get out and prostelytize as well. Throw your CD's away if you can't stand the idea of people using anything but Dells.
> What if I want to add optical 5.1 sound out so I
> can play my DVDs on my stereo system?
That's an esoteric request considering that you can get 5.1 decoding built into just about any kind of home entertainment component you want
You are so far out of your league on this, it's just not even funny. Well, maybe it's funny.
Dell is able to react quickly to market movements because they have a very small inventory. When a component becomes cheaper, as soon as they get rid of their inventory, they can profitably reduce their prices. My guess is that Apple's inventory, relative to their total sales, is larger.
And you would be wrong. Apple has, over the last three years or so, had a much lower inventory than even Dell (measured in days, Apple is something like 1.5 days worth of parts on hand, while Dell keeps about 3-5 days).
i just dont see it that way. I program in c when i can, and in perl for work. As far as hobby programming goes, it has all been geared twoards games, which was about the hardest kind of programming to do on pre OSX macs. Granted, these types of things have gotten easier over the years, but when I started, there were no 'Game Sprockets' and you had to do your own sound/blitter/networking/etc. OSX is changing this dramatically. I was nervous about programming for OSX. I was scared a lot of the skills I had learned would be useless... and you know what? Many of them were... But the thing is, with the way such things work now, it just took me a few days to get up to date with where I had been. BTW, this is using cocoa, the new framework... not carbon, which is meant to migrate apps from os9. If you think programming for OSX is hard, then you flat out havent given it a good try, and that is all there is to it. If you know what you are doing, you can develop a cocoa app in about 1/3 the time of other apps. For an example, purely off the top of my head... take the game Alice. The port to Mac OSX was at first playable within a few *days* and ready for release a few short weeks after that. If you have programmed for Mac OS in the past, you should know this would more than likely not be possible in that timeframe. OSX is a developers dream, just as NextStep was considered a dev's dream. I dont think of OSX as bloated, I tend to think of it as beefy. No matter what your tastes, there should be a good hunk of meat there able to satisfy you
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
"Out of those two systems, I know which one I'd like to own" Yep, me too! Can you imagine actually BUYING a Dell! What a thing to have on YOUR OWN desk. Whoa!
Not sure what you're smoking. Sure, Mac OS is a nightmare - that's why they scrapped it. Are you under the delusion that OSX is a new version of Mac OS? If so, I suggest you go buy yourself a clue.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
>If you think Apples are expensive in the USA..
>boy, you should see the rest of the world.
Isn't that also true of Compaq's, Dell's, IBM's, etc?
Probably. But where Apple's desktop machines always suffer is by comparison to the price of built-from-parts PC's. Yeah, I know, not exactly fair, but it happens. Anyway, in Australia, the difference is greatly magnified. We're talking easily triple the price of a kick-ass frankenstein PC for a kick-ass Mac, sadly.
That's why the only Mac I'd ever buy would be a laptop. They look so much nicer when they're only competing with name-brand PC's, not cloneboxes. :-)
My only gripe with osx is that most apps that i try to build from source don't build. I think this is important to ppl who move from other nix's as you want to bring over all your favorite tools and get everything under one roof. granted if you know enough c or can figure out the whole build process the problems may not be that bad but that is not an option all the time. i put yellow dog linux on my laptop to try get around the problem but the same problem still exists because of the powerpc processor not being tested for everything. The holy grail for osx in my books is having a full bsd ports tree working, no more hunting around for guides that end up breaking other parts of the system.
For instance, a car cannot "Break it's foot off in someone's ass", and a foot (generally) cannot pollute.
It's been a while since I read about the AltiVec engine, but I believe that is what is the major problem in upping the MHz on the G4. From what I remember it does not scale well.
Also, wasn't the AltiVec engine supposed to be used to produce realtime rendering? Perhaps I am mistaken, as it is a fixed-point accelerator.
Anyway... maybe your were asking if he drove a car "to get there," or "to get there in style". If that's the case, your question has more merit, and the other person that responded to this post has their head in their rectum.
The titanium powerbook gets the award as the sexiest portable available today. Titanium. My god... how sexy. I like big women. I like my tower laden with all my heat-generating paraphenalia... an athlon... a geforce2 (I got a good deal on auction!)... ahhh yeah.
I still miss my Apple IIe. Why the hell was that such an amazing computer? Why do I still go back and play "The Crowther and Woods Adventure" and listen to the Text-to-Speech capability of the Mockinboard? Why the hell does that stuff still work? Ultima 4 rocked. I'm rambling.
I drive a truck so I can:
closed minded is as closed minded does
With FreeBSD I have to edit /etc/rc.conf or tinker with ifconfig. Even then I need to make sure my default gateway is set just right. Making such changes can be problematic for a novice. As a part of a popular desktop, it must be easier.
Okay, he did mention the most of the right files and all. Still, he managed to install FreeBSD without ever looking at "sysinstall"? Okay, maybe sysinstall doesn't have all the transparent glossiness there, but by gosh, all the basic network settings can be done right there. A user need not ever know that rc.conf exists!
With this router I can also run DHCP to auto-configure network systems on my private network. Within moments I had connectivity to the internet.
Again, DHCP is an option right in sysinstall. You do not have to go hunting through a 3 foot high stack of how-to's and man pages. This is right within the installer, which you can call back at any time.
With BSD systems you may not even have driver support and therefore have no sound at all.
I've successfuly got going 4 different sound cards with FreeBSD. One of which was built on to the motherboard, two were PCI, and the last was ISA. Each one needed the very same tweak to the kernel. Okay, kernel tweaking may not be for the newbie, but it did work each time.
I won't even get into the troubles this guy had with getting the compiler to work. Again, the real FreeBSD would have been WAY easier.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Hmm. I don't know, then. Maybe it's because Dell can choose from more vendors, because they don't have to worry about drivers as much. If it's not that, I'm stumped.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Hey didn't you know you can get a $300 dollar
compaq with a $1.8 GHZ P4?
Oh you might have to sign up for AOL for a few
months...er...years, but you don't need to know
ALL the details right now.
> M$ Office will work on Mac OS X when the
> "Classic" environment is running. It will be
> OS X native sometime this year.
It's shipping in October and has already been announced and demonstrated. Even the price has been announced.
If you upgraded to Mac OS X the very first day it came out, and then got Office 10 for Mac OS X the very first day it comes out, you will have run Office in the Classic Environment for a total of six months. Considering that Office 2001 runs better in the Classic Environment than it does native on Mac OS 9, that's pretty good. It's the only Classic app on the machine I'm using right now, so it has the Classic Environment to itself and it couldn't be happier.
One cool thing that many non-Mac users don't know is that Microsoft's Mac Business Unit is separate from the Windows division. Their Mac apps are head and shoulders above their Windows apps. Internet Explorer on Mac OS X is ONE FILE that you can move wherever you want to, or trash in a blink. It has the most standards-compliant rendering of any browser, according to the Web Standards Project. No VBScript and ActiveX. Office has Mac-style panels that speed up formatting and other tasks. Word and Excel started on the Mac, of course. Office 10 for Mac OS X is kind of a big deal historically or sentimentally, because we actually had all 10 releases on the Mac (on Windows the first three were 2, 6, 7).
For about the last 8-10 months Apple has had a "50% RAM upgrade" promotion. Its still much more expensive ($200 rather than $400 for the upgrade you specified) than buying the RAM yourself, but not nearly as bad as you are making it out to be...
When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, "To know one's self." And what was easy, "To advise another."
Ethernet is available on the motherboard (built in). FireWire is $50 and Dell will be glad to install it for you.
1. Plug computer in.
2. Turn computer on.
3. There is no step 3.
Those steps would be the same with the Dell. Think you can figure out how to plug in a monitor?
There are several tiers of the Apple Developer Program, including a free "online" membership that provides direct download access to the latest tools from Apple. For more information, visit the official developer site; to register for access, go here.
There are obviously a number of ways in which Apple could have made the process simpler, but the bottom line is that its OS X dev tools are available to the public.
The Darwin dev tools mentioned in the article certainly enable BSD-style development. Apple's full tool set, on the other hand, provides the BSD dev tools as well as APIs, tools, and documentation for the all of OS X. The Darwin tools will be sufficient to port BSD apps (though these days most developers are also adding tools like fink for apt-get like packaging), but to access the full potential of the OS (including the Quartz imaging layer, QuickTime playback, and the Aqua GUI) requires use of Apple's APIs.
One can also use a variety of 3rd-party tools such as the commercial Metrowerks package, but for a BSD developer, the Apple kit is probably the best.
Had the same screen problem with mine. I orignally thought it was scratches, but the helpful folks at Apple tech support said it was grease from my fingers on the edges of the keys. A decent LCD screen cleaner got them all of without a problem.
My biggest problem is with the rubber feet that fall off. Without the feet, air doesn't pass under it as well, and it can get quite hot. Apple sent me two sets of replacement ones for free, just for the asking, though.
The first run of batteries were missing a rubber gasket, which lead to the falling out problem. Got a free swap-out on that.
Other than those three problems, it's been a great machine. And it's amazing how non-embittering it is to have minor problems like these when the company admits to the issues, apologizes, and overnights a fix.
My video compression blog
Thanks for the non-response, by the way. I can't believe you got modded up to "2, informative" for a statement which is FALSE.
Guess what? That's what iMac's are for. Drop it on a desk and go. OTOH, when did USB start not accepting 3rd party devices? Or if the iMac is more current, Firewire?
I assume the additional memory is installed when that G4 comes to you? Ever heard of payig for installing the stuff? Every deviation from standar levels means there's got to be at least one, ideally two more work phases: Installing the stuff and (hopefully) Testing the extra stuff works. Of course, the price of work fluctuates badly, you can get a riend to put a memory stick in for peanuts, but Brand Shop to do anything with your name-brand computer is going to make you bleed money through your nose. Of course, Brand Name shop might know what they were doing and not just wonder why the stick doesn't fit well... Or wow at the bright sparks. But work costs, pal, and it can cost a lot if you want convenience.
they are not doing too badly, they are making a profit and keeping staff while companies like Dell are shedding 1000s. anyway i thought monopolies were bad ;)
Funny... Microsoft makes a VMS-based OS and Apple does their "me too" with BSD. They must enjoy perpetually being three steps behind,
Because there have been a few changes from version 1.3.14 which ships with OS X and the latest version 1.3.20 available from your friends at apache.org
I just have to point out that the G3 uses less power than the Pentium, so watt hours (WH) is not a good measure of battery life.
I didn't have a better metric. I had to use the information they would give me, which varied between manufacturer.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
PowerPC, PowerMac same thing. PowerPC = PPC is more used to mark out the difference betwene the PPC processor and the older 68k processors, which has slightly differebt binaries. So PowerPC is the type of the processor (601, 603, 604, G3, G4 etc.) and PowerMac is the whole package.
The 733 for $1699 has a different processor with less cache than the $3400 on that preceeded it. Plus the more expensive on has the DVD-R-CD-RW Superdrive that retails for about $900. It is not like it is the same machine in any respect that went from $3400 to $1699 in an hour, it is not even the same processor. -entro
- clever sig here
And i thought it was all a metaphor for the MAC getting bulkier rather than better with time !!!
Probably the same reason BMW never compares their cars to Yugos.
The major kinks will be worked out by September, which is when I plan to switch to it as my primary desktop OS. It would be nice in they'd release incremental patches and bugfixes in the mean time, but the time spent on packaging up each bugfix release would detract from development, so I support their current strategy.
As Jobs said last month and MWNY, while most tech companies are laying people off, Apple's engineers are working overtime right now, putting in long hard hours. I salute them for it, and I look forward to the fruits of their labor.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Also, Apple is pretty surruptious about its upgrade paths, as the original iMac barely had any documentation on upgrades past memory, including the hard drive, which clearly Apple did to enforce future whole-system sales. When I called Apple they actually said "it's physically impossible to upgrade the hard drive", which I knew was BS.
I like some of the prinicipals behind Apple machines, but not all, because at times they act like just another big name brand in the industry. Their legal confrontations haven't helped. And when you do argue against them, you get the diehards screaming you down (or, in this case, modding you down). I never actually determined which was worse: Linux zealotness or Mac zealotness. :)
512k? My old 386 could beat that...
I am that guy...
At the time Apple did not have the Developer Tools available for download. I actually waited for a few weeks and finally resorted to Darwin, which is the same tools anyway, minus the Project Builder apps.
But after 10.0.4 came out they also made many of the tools available to ADC members. Regardless, the tools I got from Darwin already worked.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
What if I want to add optical 5.1 sound out so I can play my DVDs on my stereo system? Oops, I guess you can't. What if I want to add stereo RCA in? You can't. What about hot games that take advantage of special fx in new sound cards? You can't. Etc.
Many people can't [install an OS]. It comes pre-installed, which is the only reason a lot of people can get started without help.
I agree. That's why it's unreasonable to expect Linux to be easy for the average person to install. If corporations with billions to spend on R&D and usability studies can't come up with such a design, then it's unreasonable to knock free software for failing to do it.
I should have made that clearer in my response to osgeek. I was trying to make the distinction by breaking "install" and "use" up into two sentences, but I should have made it clearer that I realize the two are different, and that not every computer user can install an OS.
Still, I think that most of the time what stops people from installing an OS simple inexperience. They've never had to do it before, so they don't know how. I think most people could figure out how to install a modern consumer/desktop OS from the simple documentation that comes with them. There really aren't any hard questions in a modern, graphical OS install.
But, again, since most people have never had to do it, they of course will fear doing an OS install. Given the chance, though, most people would do fine these days.
It took me over half an hour to figure out how to change the background too. You have to bring the Finder to the forefront, and then you click on Preferences under the Finder menu. Not very intuitive, in my book. Why wasn't it under display properties or Appearance in the control panel?
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
so x86 hardware is "overpriced, proprietary hardware"? WTF?!? nice cognitive disconnect...
[|]
OS X 10.1 (or is that X.1?) is out in "September."
My video compression blog
I think almost all of us would agree that the new iBook is an industry leader in value. My complaints go mostly toward the G4 tower and iMac. If Apple can assemble and sell the iBook for $1299, with a portable form factor, with an LCD, they damn well could sell a tower with 4 slots for $999, but they refuse to. They are losing out on a LOT of sales.
At $999 I (and I bet a lot of other readers too) would buy one in a heartbeat, but at $1700, forget it.
The iBook is the best Apple machine out there at the moment. I think Apple are keeping the current iMac prices artificially high so that they can introduce the new LCD based iMac at the same price points and give users of older iMacs a compelling reason to upgrade. The TiBook is a great looking machine but is lacking a killer feature along the line of a DVD-R drive or something like that - a feature to make it a really compelling buy. Processor speed could also do with a bump to bring it closer to the Pro Desktop line. The G4 towers at the moment are very nicely designed, but they represent bad value against the Athlon. I suspect Moto is screwing Apple over the price of the G4. It'll be interesting to see if Apple take up the option to bring the PowerPC desktop processor line back to the in-house design team when the deal is available next year. Then they could ask AMD, IBM or Taiwan Semiconductor to manufacture it more efficiently, cheaply and at a higher clock speed.
> If you think Apples are expensive in the USA..
> boy, you should see the rest of the world.
Isn't that also true of Compaq's, Dell's, IBM's, etc? You pay more because there are often huge import taxes that have to be paid to get a machine into the person's country. In some places, computers are taxed to pay for environmentally-conscious disposal of the components later. In other words, it costs to bring a CRT into the country because it's a mess that will need cleaning up later.
If Apple and Adobe are in collusion to produce exactly one fast MacOS app, that's life, but anyone claiming PPC CPUs are faster than IA32 CPUs while omitting "but only if you spend your life running Photoshop" is being awfully dishonest.
Their new laptops are incremental improvements on an old idea. Final Cut Pro was cited as an industry "standard" (though I doubt any industry consortium or standards body specifies it), so I really doubt Apple invented it this year. Nor did they invent video encoding, though I don't know enough about a DVD filesystem to know whether anything there was tricky. OSX is NEXTSTEP for Dummies--making (someone else's) portable software environment viable might have been innovative, but they killed NEXTSTEP/Intel to protect their monopoly margins.
PC owners have learned not to pay high markups for innovative (translation: proprietary, incompatible, and rapidly obsolescent) integrated hardware; you'll find plenty from IA32 software vendors.
I love you man ...
:wq
Interesting.. I'm typing this on an iBook with a 21" VGA monitor running at 1280x1024 right now..
I don't want to start a FreeBSD vs Linux battle. I get enough of that from some of the people I know. But I have to admit that after using several Linux distros and using FreeBSD, the choice (for me) was quite clear. That's not to say I didn't like some of the Linux distros I tried. Not at all. I really liked Storm and I fully intend to install either Debian or Slackware on an IBM I have sitting in the corner. But when it came time to choose a system of the many I tried to run my web-server off of, I had to settle on FreeBSD.
At first I was a little wery about going with something slightly less mainstream than Linux, but good Linux binary compatibility (not to mention the Ports Collection) was a plus that won me over to FreeBSD.
With FreeBSD the first few days were really rough because there were several major annoyances I had, and none of my Linux friends had any useful insight. But I quickly solved most of my problems on my own. I feel I have learned much more this way. Plus, when I needed quick answers, web-searches almost always provided immediate and exact answers because there is only one FreeBSD and many other users have experienced the exact same problems.
It's something of a shame that Storm went the way of the wind, but after I made my choice to run FreeBSD it hasn't mattered too much. As for my soon-to-be Linux system, that just shows that I'm not knocking Linux at all (how could I?) it's just that I made the choice based on my needs and what I like. I personally don't feel I was moving forward fast enough with any of the Linux distros, but I felt comfortable with FreeBSD very quickly.
As a rabid Mac evangelist, I am saddened to agree with this statement. Not only is the iBook's ATI 128 card capable of higher resolutions, it is also capable of dual screen support (have the LCD and the video out showing separate windows).
Apple intentionally left those features out of their iBook drivers to push sales to the TiBook, which is a freaking awesome beast that does not need stupid protectionism. Just give it a 100M speed bump, an optional Radeon or Geforce, and a mild price cut. Hamstringing the iBook is not the right answer.
Damn it, I was hoping for a 'Funny' ... Man, ./ sucks these days.
I was hinting how the site fell apart in a few minutes ...
until (succeed) try { again(); }
> The program has been eternally stuck in the era
... that's just not true. For the past few years, both Apple and Microsoft have had desktop operating systems that you expect to reboot three times a week, and server operating systems that you expect to reboot three times a year. And I am being generous to Microsoft there ... I don't think anybody ever got three reboots a year out of NT 4. Both companies are now transitioning all of their users to a similar base as their server OS. All the promises that Microsoft made with Windows 95 about DOS being gone are about to finally start to come true this November with XP. With Apple, the transition started in March 2001 with Mac OS X and will go until March 2002. With Microsoft, the transition will start in November 2001, and go on forever. The reason that Windows XP Home Edition runs everything as root is so that it can run ALL of the Windows software and hardware ... the Pro edition won't. Maybe in the NEXT Windows revision.
> of unprotected memory- since the 80's
First, you're talking about the previous version of the Mac OS. The current one has a Unix kernel. Most Windows users still use Windows 98 (Windows Magazine recommends against using Windows Me at all). Microsoft says Windows 95/98/Me have protected memory and preemptive multitasking, but apps routinely bring the system down, and you can't format a floppy in the background and keep working. It's all bullshit. Most Windows users are still running DOS, even today. There are all kinds of software and hardware products that won't work with Windows 2000.
> Apple will finally be upgrading to the quality of
> windows 95 with OS X. Wow what an
> accomplishment! *golf clap*
No, man
Not quite (though is IS true if you think about it): BeOS has come with dev tools for quite awhile (unless you download the free version, but even then you can download the IDE/compiler for it).
And that's my $0.32 (adjusted for inflation).
No Cygwin; zsh for win32 deals with drive letters and path delimeters itself. The userland utilities are 90% native ports with only a couple that had to be linked against cygwin.dll. If you look around enough on the Net, you will find pretty much everything...
Admittedly, NT is not BSD, or OSX; you still have to think DOS (as for example, for drive letters), but overall it's very doable.
Don't get me wrong: I am excited about OSX, I used to be a NeXTStep zealot back in the day; however, win32 is viable as a development platform for Unix developers.
Very cool :-) Thanks for the link!
And that's my $0.32 (adjusted for inflation).
I would buy one at that price - the 9600 i have is going on 4 years old and still shits on my PII 866 with 512k of ram for photoshop work - the OS is not as bad as you may believe and is worth a look
I wasn't aware that you could buy P2s that ran at 866mhz - is that an overclocked 233? You might also find the PC will work somewhat better if equipped with more than the 1/2 meg of RAM you currently have installed. What is it running? DOS?
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
That's what he said. Re-read before you jump on him.
I own an Inspiron 4000 and the machine is absolutely incredible. It runs Linux and Windows XP perfectly.
Are you buying the Dimension line or the Optiplex line from Dell? The Dimension line changes rapidly, and is geared towards home users. If you're looking for long-term availability of the exact same model, you need to buy the Optiplex computers. As a bonus, the cases are much easier to work on, too...
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
MacOS has always been a nightmare and a half to program for. The program has been eternally stuck in the era of unprotected memory- since the 80's it has been shamefully easy to write code that will walk all over other programs memory and over the kernel and drivers of the OS itself as well. Pile this on top of the non-existing threading model (enabling all sorts of funny system hangs from processes that dont play nice) makes it a pain in the ass to develop for MacOS. All of the complaints that were leveled against DOS in the days of DOS4GW (remember that?) are STILL true of MacOS. Apple will finally be upgrading to the quality of windows 95 with OS X. Wow what an accomplishment! *golf clap*
No one will argue that codewarrrior is a crappy development environment. It is great and I have had much pleasure using it. The real problem is the bloated, stinking pile of an operating system that it rests upon. Apple basically got comfortable with the idea of being second best and only innovated enough to keep its loyal fans comfortable. Which is why they are now like 4th best and sinking fast.
OS 10? I didnt know they stacked shit that high.
Capitalism suck. Go Socialist now! Demand Direct Democracy!
So what happens if you're married with 2 kids?! Mike
I guess you missed the price cuts in the last couple of months. A 867MHz PowerPC G4 with the superdrive DVD burner is $2,499.00 and the 17" flat panel screen is $999.
Cretin, he said he was in Australia. Check out the Australian Apple store: 867Mhz G4 with Superdrive is $5,495.00. 17" flat panel screen is $2,299.00. If you want to convert those into US dollars, that's roughly $US2830 for the G4, $US1185 for the screen. And that's with the Assie dollar in its current wretched state - the comparison used to be even more heinous for Apple.
If you think Apples are expensive in the USA.. boy, you should see the rest of the world.
Ouch.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
If your $999 config is like the one I put together at the Dell web site (who do you have to do to get to the Dell online store, anyway? sheesh.) then it lacks an Ethernet card and FireWire.
Sure, an Ethernet card can be had for a few bucks, and FireWire cards aren't much more, but the point is, I have to buy them separately and add them. That takes an investment of time and money that I don't think I should have to spend.
I look at buying a home computer (as opposed to my loaded-out workstation at the office, which is an entirely different kettle of fish) the same way I look at buying a car, or a TV. I plunk down my money, and it's done. I don't want to spend the rest of my weekend adding stuff, or configuring it, or installing drivers, or whatever. I don't consider that to be fun.
I've bought two iMacs now, and each time it was the same experience.
1. Plug computer in.
2. Turn computer on.
3. There is no step 3.
You can run OSX on your 9600. Get thee hence to Ryan Rempel's OS X for Legacy Macs and download his Unsupported UtilityX. It will allow you to install OSX on a vast range of machines that Apple's installer doesn't want to run on, your 9600 included.
Granted, OSX will tax a 604 beyond its resources, and if you haven't already you'll soon want to drop ~ $350US on a fast G3 / slower G4 processor upgrade. Throw in a Firewire&USB PCI card for another ~$100US and you've got yerself a fairly modern mac to play with.
Your mileage may vary. As I said in my first post, it's up to the individual user. Of the problems you mention, I've only experienced the key marks on LCD issue, and it seems to have gone away after a few months of use.
heheh... Good point. However, I should point out that she's a computer science / chemistry girlfriend who hates chick flicks, builds her own 'puters, and codes some bad-ass C++ and Java. ;)
Umm Microsoft Office can run on Mac OS X...
- Danny
I'd be interested in trying it if they ported OSX to x86 and if it coexisted nicely with a Win98/linux setup. If there was a lot of things that could be run on it, that is.
If he'd actually *bought* OS X off the shelf at his local software store instead of having it supplied with his iBook, it would have included the dev tools with an equally easy installation process. OS X plus devtools comes in at about $100 which is expensive for a Linux distro, but compares well with Win2K + Visual C++.
Also, it's probably more acceptable to have a complex install procedure for products aimed at somebody who will be developing software than for an average home user.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
You got a good deal... although that may be because you're located in the US. Here in Canada, Dell is selling the 8100 for quite a bit of $$$. As I mentioned, at the time I purchased my G4 Titanium, there was only a $50 difference between a Dell 8100 and the G4... not the $450 difference you claim. But then again, if you're in the US, you'll probably be able to save that $450.
I don't understand for the life of me why this guy kept bitching about not being able to compile things...seems like this guy had more trouble than I've ever heard of to get to these things.
And then there was Apache...why oh why did he feel the need to recompile Apache, when OSX comes with a Native Version of the damned thing that is far easier to use and confiugre than our standard *nix Apache.
*Sigh*
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
That's my biggest complaint about OS X. The appearence is just not customisable enough and the options to customise it are not where you'd expect them (system prefs IMHO)
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
That notwithstanding, I think you may have missed an important point in the latest product announcement.
The price drop you mentioned on the 733 system (from a $3500 top-of-the-line box to $1700 entry-level system) is certainly significant, but the configurations are not comparable. The most important difference is the elimination the DVD-R SuperDrive from the new model (which alone probably accounts for over half the discount).
In the broader sense, though, I think it is worth noting that for better or worse Apple's development is a notch more episodic than the more gradual, incremental improvements of the Wintel manufacturers. PCs tend to creep up in MHz and down in price fairly steadily, with small bumps at minor inflection points (e.g., adding 1394), but the products themselves exist on a continuum of price, performance, and capability.
Apple, on the other hand, seeks to redefine entire product categories on a regular basis. One can question its success at that, but the process is inarguably different. In addition to doing the traditional megahertz boosting and other linear product improvements required of any computer manufacturer, Apple invests tremendous effort in the development of new technology and product paradigms. Again, Apple's success at that may be mixed, but the process is inherently discontinuous -- revolution is never milestoned. Unlike Wintel clone companies, Apple is in the business of innovation. You can debate the wisdom of the business model or the appeal of the products, but the development model is fundamentally different.
What secrets can Dell have from Gateway? The similarity of the products is half their appeal, and modest price differentials are the primary point of competition. Apple, on the other hand, strives to offer significant amounts of unique (or uniquely appealing) capability to its users. As a niche player, Apple must make its products distinctive. Even if Apple could release its product schedule a year in advance, it would not be in the best interests of the company or its long-term users to do so. Why make it any easier for Michael Dell or Bill Gates to knockoff its innovations and steal the market, if only with preemptive FUD?
Exactly. I keep trying to explain this here -- in fact, I've been trying to explain it to people for about ten years. Back in the early 1990's, people said Macs were sooo expensive and slow compared to PCs. I moved from a Mac to a Windows shop, and at the time, I noticed that everyone on PCs was spending literally hours a day doing nothing but tweaking their configurations to keep them running. Every time there was any software install, that person would lose at least a day of work; add a peripheral, and the impact was a week. It wasn't even controversial -- the PC architect took those as the stated costs of using Windows, and I'm just quoting his rules.
By contrast, in the Mac shops I was used to, the Macs just worked, and the Mac users could just do their work. Installing software and peripherals had costs measured in minutes instead of days. "Now how much would you pay?" What do you think the productivity cost per user is in that environment? Linux today seems to be barely above that early-90's Windows 3.x TCO level.
Despite the fact that the GNU project has been around for every bit as long as the Mac (since 1984), they still don't have an OS that my mom could install and use. Why is that?
We keep getting told that free software improves so rapidly, but somehow its user experience still hasn't reached the level of a commercial operating system from seventeen years ago, and its compiler hasn't reached the performance (compilation or runtime) of commercial compilers ten years ago. I think it's time to face up to the fact that projects people do in their spare time as tinkerers may never catch up to those that are funded, staffed and managed based on the potential for financial reward.
(This leaves open the question of free software that is funded in hopes it will provide commercial benefit, but looking at Mozilla as an exemplar would not result in a positive conclusion.)
Tim
yrs,
Ephemeriis
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
to paraphrase from the article, and quote a bit "There is a known issue where an iBook does not wake up after it goes to sleep, so the workaround is to simply to turn off the sleep feature. Eventually there should be a fix.". i can just see the headlines now! "apple's secret plans to murder helpless ibooks in their sleep! authorities baffled, criminal on the loose! WILL HE BE CAUGHT?" =D
I think, therefore, I'm smarter than our president.
Man, I expected more from a Slashdot nerd..
Here's the thing. The reason you think fat is gross is b/c the media, and your peers, have basically told you that is how you should feel..
Go against the grain! See her for what she is - a natural woman! Back in the day, plump women were in, and it was sexy.. Don't be a sheep! Learn to like it.
Oh, and she probably already knows she's fat. Do you think she doesn't know?
Here's what you gotta do:
Go without any type of relations with her (or your hand) for at least a week.
Go to www.google.com and search for natural women
Enjoy!
Shiny colored case (to match the titlebar on his windows)
Point and click interface to everything(one button only)
Internet Explorer (Skinned, of course -- Neoplanet?)
3 slow paced games (Myst III?)
And here's the clincher:
A GUI for his server
I know I'll sound like a troll but I would NEVER spend money on another sound card. I don't know how to express how much I don't care that my iMac can't take a third party sound card. The built-in one sounds great and I can't understand why someone would bother to get one unless they are a professional who deals with audio things.
Dell is able to react quickly to market movements because they have a very small inventory. When a component becomes cheaper, as soon as they get rid of their inventory, they can profitably reduce their prices. My guess is that Apple's inventory, relative to their total sales, is larger.
Dell is sort of famous for their small-inventory strategy.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Foot cannot pollute
You shit, piss and breathe out I presume? All forms of transport pollute in some way. It's just that some pollution is easier to deal with.
Anyway I have a Titanium Powerbook. It was worth the money just to see my coworkers looking jealously and salivating uncontrollably.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
> Getting bored with the latest distribution?
/. nowadays.)
What?! Since when did your OS become a style choice? It's not something you should change just because you "get bored" with it! It's a tool that you select based on your needs. (That's not to say anything of the other "tools" which seem to frequently post stories to
-Chris
Comparing just the processor does a disservice to the engioneering that apple puts into it's products.
Oversimplified analogy:
Which would you rather have. Lego or the combination of building blocks, tinker toys, connectix, and structures.
Macs are like lego... they just fit together. PC's are like the combination of all the other toy building systems.
They are attractive for different reasons. I know lots of people who would rather try to put together a robot from 5 different toy sets, but I prefer the design work that Lego (and Mac) have to offer. I don't want to spend hours trying to get two different toys to work together.
On the outset, Lego costs more. That's because they stress quality and design. You can easily go out and buy building blocks from another company and they will cost much less, but they wont work as well. If money was all that mattered, I'd buy the cheapest toy and play.
But I want to play and have fun... so I buy Lego.
neo
The iBook has a 12.1" screen, the Inspiron 4000 a 14.1". At the very least, screen size should be part of your comparison. Including weight would also be good, the iBook does pretty well there. (If you're going to maintain this, adding max memory would also be smart.)
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Absolutely true, I paid 1299 for the original iMac, and after $200 for a 64M ram upgrade and 20 gig HD, its still working just fine, I can run all the latest stuff and have never had a problem. So far my invenstment comes out to about 500 a year, but I figure I can go at least another 2 years or so, so ultimately ill be investing about 300 a year, not too bad, IMHO
Despite the fact that the GNU project has been around for every bit as long as the Mac (since 1984), they still don't have an OS that my mom could install and use.
Have you tried SuSE Linux 7.2, or Mandrake 8.0? Both install very nicely. SuSE will auto-detect your hardware for you, setting up X and so on. If you can install a Microsoft OS, you can install SuSE Linux 7.2. And if you can use a Microsoft OS, then you can use SuSE Linux 7.2 as well.
Check it out, if you get the chance.
"But both YellowDog and LinuxPPC allow you to easily remap keys to mouse buttons."
Actually, I've been having a lot of trouble with that (LinuxPPC 2000, 604e, ADB, Gnome). Can you post a link to a solution that actually works? That would be mucho appreciated.
Last time I looked the iBooks my university bought still ran simulscan resolutions just fine. Perhaps you aren't using the software correctly? Or, possibly, you're using OS X, which may not support simulscan just yet...
Photoshop has morphed itself into the sole arbiter of workstation performance.
I don't think you realize exactly how many of those who purchase G4s run Photoshop almost exclusively. What should they benchmark? Kernel compile times?
In the absence of actual innovation...
Interesting you say that. From my perspective, Apple and Sony seem to be the only personal computer makers on the planet left actually creating new products. iDVD? iMovie? Final Cut? Ti PowerBook? New iBook? Um... Mac OS X?
What type of innovation have other PC makers offered this year?
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
It's a 136Mb download, so if you're not on broadband then picking up a retail copy of Mac OS X is the easiest way to get them on CD - the tools CD isn't shipped with new systems, but it's in the box if you buy it at retail.
-dair
If you can install a Microsoft OS...
Many people can't. It comes pre-installed, which is the only reason a lot of people can get started without help.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I had some trouble with fizilla so I made an alias for the classic version of 0.9.3, put it in the shared folder, and partied on. It works fine. The skypilot theme works well too.
Links is also a good browser, and if you have the time and expertise, you can run Amaya from XWindows.
photosMy Photostream
You can turn off the screensaver login if you wish.
photosMy Photostream
I heartily disagree. Being a longtime Mac user (13 years) I know how much progress the Mac has made. It has come from a niche product to the Mercedes-Benz of computers (the iMac is like the $25,000 benz ;) When you buy a Mac, you buy more than a computer, you buy the the whole image of the Mac. While this sounds dumb, realize that the image of most PCs is beige and duct tape. Apple sells a sleek, cool looking product, something you wouldn't be ashamed to leave on top of your desk. Plus the new OS is damn spiffy too. :)
(before you try and LART me, realize I've also been using Linux for 6 years and Windows for 4)
bah... the On board sound is pretty good to me...
- Danny
Actually, many of the latest distributions of Linux make it far easier to deal with than Windows or even Mac. As for productivity / interfaces, have you tried KDE? I've yet to find someone previously experienced with Windows that had any trouble with it. As long as your hardware is not total crap, Linux is not far from being a "insert CD, click install, come back in 15 minutes, start working" kinda OS. What do I mean by crap hardware? The kind of stuff that no self-respecting kernel hacker would buy, let alone write drivers for. (Like Winmodems, no-name Ethernet cards, old cheap SB-compatible sound cards, scanners with proprietary interfaces made by some company that died 5 years ago, etc.) Sure, you may need to buy or contract or develop some custom software for your needs, but Linux itself is becoming quite mature. Mozilla, btw, is moving along nicely. Keep in mind that it has a ton of debug code still. 1.0 should be quite respectable.
I think it's time to face up to the fact that projects people do in their spare time as tinkerers may never catch up to those that are funded, staffed and managed based on the potential for financial reward. You need to read Eric Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar. http://tuxedo.org/~esr/ Enjoy.
You disagree with what, exactly? The post you replied to is talking about how annoying it is that Apple keeps their product plans such a secret.
When you say you disagree, you're saying that you prefer it that way? I don't get it - how can that possibly be good for the consumer?
Actually this is a really good point in a way - Apples own worst enemy has always been and remains apple, their arrogance and short sighted ness to licensing the OS (Bill Gates actually suggested they do it !!!!!!!!!!) and allowing cloners to open source the architecture have meant they have been behind in the market again and again and contributed to their financial problems.
:)
They do only post against intel - but up till now thats been their major competition - and as they sell an all in one solution they are really competing against the big vendors like Compaq (who they could have bought cheap at the start) Dell (Who wanted to make mac's under license at one time) and IBM - these companies dont or are only now starting to issue AMD chipped machines, so this policy may change soon.
(Apple dont just post results for photoshop anymore BTW)
Umm the second one i sort of dont agree with but - Apple worked with IBM to design the PPC processor and this is an optimised chipset for them - it works on hardware that Apple themselves designed and the Nvidia Cards are not a set in stone alernative (the G3 and 4 use a AGP bus for graphics so apple could change) - People should never ever make the mistake of thinking Apple are a software only company - they designed many of their components from the ground up and until the Gil Amelio days still owned considerable manuf and assembly plants for motherboards, pc add in boards, cases etc. (and i think still own manuf plants for most of this) this of course is one of the reasons they cost more - market lifecycles and sales vs development costs are higher BUT you get control of quality and this counts - Most Macs are bullet proof (with some exceptions in the past)
But Apple is becoming a stable company - and dont forget this is the company that was unstable when it launched the Apple II, the Apple III, the Mac, The powerbook and the G3 - it could be argued that they are as stable if not more so than ever.
And finally (and i not going looking for trolls here) I dont understand the point on low level content - what other sort of content would the general user want to make (note i qualified this in my first post) SGI make great products for a development market in animation etc, yes they are getting cheaper second hand BUT they are not user friendly, many many third party products (Digital Cams, Organisers, printers etc) either dont work properly or require fiddling around - and thus the home user would never ever buy one - and i mean mom and dad and the small business NOT the hackers and enthusiasts. (advertising companies use macs BTW for the reasons that its the easiest platform, cheapest for their use, graphic artists are trained on it, its user friendly and finally easy to maintain) And home users dont want to make animated films or crunch massive 3d models (and neither do most ad agencies - they outsource that sort of thing (i worked in Advertising for 3 years as Network Admin and IT manager so i can speak on that one)which is what SGI machines excel at.
Apple shines because the average user doesnt need to know about makefiles, RPM's and all the other stuff to use it daily - they can choose OS9 or OSx depending on needs.
Oh and in final closing - Uptime means absolutely nothing to these users (and i should point out to me) Most people buy a machine for a reason and use it for that - the fact that it wont stay up for 500 days is neither relevant or important IMHO (and im not flaming just expressing an opinion here) I have NT servers (yuck but they are my job) that stay up for 6 months without issues - they might stay up longer, but i take them down every 60 days anyway for maintenance - like sucking dust out of filters etc (they are rackmounts) and as long as they are up during work hours the rest of the time they can whistle - note - if they were web servers i would want them up constantly (which is why we use Linux for those) but these machines dont need to be up all the time - only most of the time.
The average business and home user turns of the desktop at night / when they are done with it and they are the people Apple needs for market share and hence more software/lower price ( this point also holds for open source in IMO as well - the 'war' will be fought on Joe Bloggs desktop at home, not the server at work - the desktop market is the one Linux and open source needs to beat MS or anyone else and this means user friendly and idiot proof)
After all its not the size but how you use it
But a damn good post - thanks for reminding me how arrogant Apple can be
PS if you would like to know more about Apple and what the company has designed and the miracle that they still exist try these books
APPLE - by Jim Carlton
INFINITE LOOP - Michael S Malone
THE MACINTOSH WAY - Guy Kawasaki
FIRE IN THE VALLEY - Frieberger and Swaine (actually this is one anyone interested in computers should read - a history of silicon valley from the early days till now (new edition just out)
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
Apple.com charges $400 to go from 128 to 384 megs.
What's wrong with this picture? Both chips probably come from crucial/micron, too, so the only logical conclusion is that Apple is fucking you. This especially hurts consumers like schools, who prefer to get it all in one box, rather than adding 3rd party memory to a system.
Be sure your software is all up to date. MacOS 9.1 is as stable as a rock. MacOS 8.6 was pretty damn stable also. If there's one thing that Microsoft should have copied from Apple, it's the Software Update control panel. Works like a charm. Make sure all your 3rd parties are all up to date also.
It was meant to say PIII and 512mb - i was tired after working 18hours and missed it in the preview - apologies (good to see people picked up the error)
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
100% BS, buddy. Maybe under Linux you are, but not OS 9 or X. On the iBook 2 that just came out?
Sorry, but no. If you are, a LOT of iBook users would like to know how you did it.
Something tells me that Dell, Gateway, etc. don't send your extra RAM in a static bag along with your system... guess what, they ALL install the memory for you. So why does Apple charge double for the same service?
...lay credence to the Trolls' constant cut-and-pasting that *BSD is dead. Go ahead, show them how the last one left is looking at OS-X as a possible alternative. I'm sure it won't encourage them or anything...
I bet he has his own two feet for transportation. You must admit, the price per mile for feet transportation is pretty impressive. $40 for some Vans (but if course) that take youy maybe about 600 miles? (A few years of intensive walking, running, sneaker-netting, etc. The Usual) - about 7 cents per mile? Not bad. Cars usually get about 20 cents to 40 cents per mile, concidering wear and tear, fluid changes, etc.
What me have a pinto? HAHAH I got these used bowling shoes for $5, 8 years ago!
I was just wondering: the guy stresses the importance of having an easy install (no messing around with XFree or audio) and then proceeds to tell how he managed to get the development tools installed by a small amount of scripting trickery.
I'm a bit baffled. So it's important to have a nice install but it's not important that you have to loop-mount a couple of things to install devtools? (Yes, I know they're now available in a bit easier way.)
What's that .SIG of yours? Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain? Methinks you were talking about yourself, fuX0r.
Don't like those update reminders? Here is how to fix that.
Open the time/date window. Change the date to some time in the future. close the window then open QuickTime. click the Later button. Now quit QuickTime. Reset the date, and boogie on.
For $29.95 you can upgrade to the Pro version, it is a good deal. I never regretted doing it.
photosMy Photostream
This is changed in Mac OS 10.1. Take a look at Apple's 10.1 page, and search for the string "preferable preferences".
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
I don't know. I mean, G4s are nice, but in no way shape or form can they compare well to the best that IBM compatible machines have to offer. I mean, what could be more IBM compatible than an IBM? With that in mind, check out this. This bad boy running gimp or many other graphics apps will kick a G4 every which way, and it will do so with out breaking a sweat. And the G4s Velocity Engine is helpless to prevent the onslaught. So, screw those Apple toys, and get yourself a real IBM compatible machine.
(BTW, this is a joke, unless you actually have a spare $50k for that IBM, in which case go for it).
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
I don't think there's anyone in the Apple world who didn't know the new PowerMacs were coming at the expo; this is pretty much common knowledge, and most of us will plan our buying accordingly unless we really, really need a machine.
(I'm typing this on my new TiBook because I really, really needed a notebook over the next few weeks, even though I know that new TiBooks will almost certainly come in September. But I also have a friend who wants to buy this one when I replace it, so I've covered myself already. He won't buy anything unless it's A Deal, so he's easy prey for that kind of tactic).
D
Inordinate prices could also be a sign that people that buy RAM from Apple are largely idiots.
So Apple is not quite there yet on price, but they are getting closer with the portables.
Apple's scheme seems to be to make the low-end machines affordable, but then really boost the price for the high-end. So they make most of the profit from people where price isn't an object. Thus you see the low-end G4 tower for $1699, but it goes up significantly from there. The iBook is price-competitive, but if you have to have a screen larger than 12.1", it's going to cost you a lot. And so on.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
My facts ARE straight, chief. Go to the Apple store and configure a G4. They come with 128 megs of RAM. Now look at the drop down for "384 megs of RAM" - it's a $400 increase. That's right, an additional 256 megs costs $400. Anyone can verify this by visiting the website.
I was originally looking at getting a high end Mac, but then I ran across this baby and saved myself a good $1500!
disclaimer: That's not my machine but if it was I wouldn't want anyone else claiming it - so props to the real owner
apparently, you don't get out much.
http://guide.apple.com/ushardware.lasso
hmm.
Think of it this way: people who buy RAM at those outrageous prices are subsidized Apple's hardware for the benefit of people like you and me, who are perfectly capable of buying such hardware from third parties.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Damn it, I was hoping for a 'Funny' ... Man, ./ sucks these days.
./?? this is /. ./configure or something?
are you thinking of
------
Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
Well, I'm glad you own a small business. Now how about me, who is just a consumer? What is the equivalent price? And no, I'm not going to go check myself because you just priced 2 different computers through 2 different schemes, and I don't know how you priced your small business computer. Come back with a consumer price please.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I bought MacOSX as soon it was available, I gave up on it, because I had to switch to MacOS9 to play DVDs.
You can swtich back next month.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Just a correction: the G4 has been shipping in quantities above 500 Mhz for quite some time. The slowest G4 you can get in a desktop is actually 733 Mhz, and the fastest is 867 Mhz (for one chip -- there is also a dual 800 Mhz). I haven't used a PC desktop faster than dual 233 (what we're stuck with at work), but the 800 Mhz laptop I used felt distinctly slower in all respected to my PowerBook G3 500 Mhz. I have no basis to judge the latest and greatest x86 desktop systems. (I made my purchase based on software more than hardware).
Russell Ahrens
You'd think Linux and FreeBSD sucked or something.
I don't think that anyone's saying they suck. It's just that a lot of people have been waiting for someone to put together the power of UNIX beneath an easy-to-use GUI, coupled with application support that still only seems to exist in the commercial OS arena. Apple appears to be the first company to pull it off. Linux and *BSD still have their places, but I - for one - want to "have it all". If I have to pay a slight cash premium to get it, so be it.
Also, consider this: I get paid $100/hour for consulting. What does it cost me to muck around with my X configuration for a few hours to get it to work with my video card? (Not to mention my sound card configuration and the extra screwing around that you always have to do when installing any peripheral under Linux) A few hours of not having to screw with that stuff, and the Apple hardware suddenly isn't a premium investment after all. In my business, I really have to consider the Total Cost of Ownership.
Sorry, but proprietary is going the way of the dinosaur.
Says you. Personally, I love open standards and open software - but they haven't been the answer to everything. Despite the fact that the GNU project has been around for every bit as long as the Mac (since 1984), they still don't have an OS that my mom could install and use. Why is that? Will they ever put together a total user experience like Microsoft, Apple, and to some exten Be have? I hope they will, but who knows? Maybe the whole Free/free software model will never provide a viable alternative to the commercial software world.
I have computer needs now, though, and I'm not going to let software religion get in the way of meeting those needs.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
malamac@trammel:~> which python
c:/Python/python
malamac@trammel:~> find c:/Program\ Files/ -name Apache.exe -print
c:/Program Files/Apache Group/Apache/Apache.exe
malamac@trammel:~> net start mysql
The MySql service is starting.
The MySql service was started successfully.
malamac@trammel:~> echo $SHELL
d:\root\bin\zsh.exe
malamac@trammel:~> uname
Windows_NT
No, although they certainly are improving. You might want to read the GNOME Usability Study Report.
As long as your hardware is not total crap, Linux is not far from being a "insert CD, click install, come back in 15 minutes, start working" kinda OS. What do I mean by crap hardware? The kind of stuff that no self-respecting kernel hacker would buy, let alone write drivers for. (Like Winmodems, no-name Ethernet cards, old cheap SB-compatible sound cards, scanners with proprietary interfaces made by some company that died 5 years ago, etc.)
This is an internal myth of the Linux community. There is nothing wrong with reducing the cost of modem hardware by offloading some of its functions onto the main processor. In fact there's a major user benefit, which is lower cost. The reason people say Winmodems are crap is so they don't have to deal with the issue that Linux software support and availability isn't as good as on Windows. The tiny Linux market share doesn't lend itself to broad software or hardware support.
We have the same problem on the Mac side of the fence. It's a really unfair thing in a lot of ways, but it also is a concrete problem with using a minority platform, and the way to deal with it is not by saying that all the missing hardware and software is crap. (Although that was a good enough answer back when the war was between Mac and DOS!)
Mozilla, btw, is moving along nicely.
An ever-increasing number of bugs is not my idea of moving along nicely. I wouldn't ship commercial software that had Mozilla's defect curve. I'd link directly to the chart, but the bug chart feature is broken again today.
I think it's time to face up to the fact that projects people do in their spare time as tinkerers may never catch up to those that are funded, staffed and managed based on the potential for financial reward.
You need to read Eric Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar. http://tuxedo.org/~esr/ Enjoy.
I read it years ago. It bears no resemblance to reality and has even largely fallen out of favor in the open source community.
Tim
I see the problem with the "Powerbook G4" decal transferring from the screen to the case. I also have the rubber foot problem.
The biggest issues I have are the fact that it is too easy to touch the mousepad while you're typing which leads to the caret moving to a random spot (I have the trackpad click feature switched on) and the case flexes if you pick it up in one hand. This isn't a problem unless there is a CD in the drive in which case you can hear it fouling the case.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Uh, how many have you got? - I count ONE consumer level sound card available for mac - SoundBlaster. That's IT. There aren't any!
You can use the VGA adapter that comes with the new iBook to plug it into whatever monitor you like.
-- remove NOSPAM for actual email address -- Things are not as square as they may seem
Might as well build 'em yourself then. I'm a total believer in building boxen myself. You can spec the parts yourself and get a machine you completely expect. Also helps when something breaks...just go to the Friendly Neighborhood Screwdriver Shop or the next computer fair and grab what you need, cheap.
Now, Apple hardware...that's a completely different story. Built to last, built to very exacting specs. I have old Macs that I'm still using which first saw the light of day in the late 1980s/early 1990s. And my G3 Blue-and-white, aka Yosemite, aka The Fisher-Price computer (the latter nickname was bestowed by my hubby) still looks and feels like it came from the future, even though I've had it since 1999.
If you want a PC, go generic. If you want a PC laptop, go IBM Thinkpad. If you want a computer which will have an awesome lifespan and will remain useful for literally decades, go Macintosh.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Mac = Mercedes
I own both, so I know what I'm talking about.
My friend has a Dell and a Citroen XP, both top of the line in their markets. I have a Mercedes 320E and a PowerBook G4/500, both only mid-range in their markets.
But sitting in my Merc, aaaaaah, that's a feeling. And driving it? You bet it feels good.
Sure it does not have all the gadgets his XP has, sure it does not come with height-adjustable suspensions, etc, but it lasts forever. And you know what service you get when you bring it to the Merc dealer for a checkup. Yeah, baby.
Same goes for my Mac. Who cares about PC users? They are the Pontiac users of the computer market. Or the Fiat users, if you are on this side of the Atlantic.
The problem is, here in good old Europe we have to pay too much for our Macs.
Over there in the 'new continent' you have to pay too much for a Mercedes. Period.
PS: not to mention that your coffee really sucks compared to ours
Most slashdotters don't formalize their relationships with their computers this much, but some are truely touched.
Seriously, it depends. If you can recognize your wife and kids without 'accidentally' refering to them as the compiler and the daemons (or forks), you loose geek points. If your wife and kids can't recognize you by looking at the front of your head, then guru bonus.
-- Len
Uhh... he said he bought an iBook--not Mac OS X. I recently bought an iBook and he's right... Apple only provides the Mac OS X CD. The only thing I find fishy is that he either got the iBook before Apple preinstalled it on the iBooks or either he didn't know to change the the settings in the Startup Disk control panel to boot into Mac OS X and he just reinstalled it. Also, I do see how he got confused on where to get the Developer tools... I had the same problem until I remembered the way I had to get the tools for Mac OS X Public Beta: you have to be an ADC member (membership is free) before you can download the tools. Over all, it was an okay article.
- Danny
Really 10.1 isn't the real thing either. Apple has always been very open that they had a 12 month transitional period before they considered it ready for prime time (IE. you buy a machine and it boots into OS X instead of Mac OS 9.x) From a usability and speed standpoint that is subjective. OS X is actually very fast, but with the system not being optimized, like with the finder, things felt slow, but the actual processes that were being running like Apache or whatever are actually VERY fast. Interface wise it is slow, but if anyone has worked with Linux with GNOME or such on sketchy video hardware then you will know what I am talking about. I have been using OS X pretty exclusively since 10.0. I am so used to it now switching back to 9.1 is like traveling back in time it seems to archaic.
Sure, for massive processing for minimum dollars, the Athlon may be a better choice, assuming you're problem is not easily parallelizable. A place like Google with 3000 servers makes this kind of calculation.
But if we're talking about a desktop computer, the cost of the CPU is negligable compared to the man-hour cost spent on the machine, so if a $200 price premium saves you an hour a day, it shouldn't even be in the equation. This may not be true in your case, but for many people it is.
I'd like to get a laptop myself and I'm seriously considering spending double the money to get a TiBook with the 15.2" screen. Because I program and need reference and code simultaneously, not taking the context hit switch each time I need to change focus will, over the life of the machine, make the $1200 seem inconsequential.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I HATE frickin MacOS up to and including 9. We have macs and imacs in our lab, while I have my own laptop running linux. Mine never crashes and runs umpteen scientific apps that I need while the macs crash regularly.
Now then, MacOS X...THAT interests me. I could even see myself getting a G4 with MacOS X on it (and then loading Yellow Dog as well) but not until I can go to a software store or software outlet on the net and buy the games I like to run under MacOS X.
All things being equal, I would have no problems going to MacOS X but they are not, in the end, equal, until vendors start selling/producing the same cool games for the Mac as they do in droves for the PC. That day may well be coming, and I hope it is, but until then, that is the little weight that still casts the scale in favor of a PC.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
remember this is the entry level - the top end starts at $7699 less monitor (but with the apple superdrive DVD burner) and a monitor starts at $1399
I guess you missed the price cuts in the last couple of months. A 867MHz PowerPC G4 with the superdrive DVD burneris $2,499.00 and the 17" flat panel screen is $999.
Granted you can get a more powerful PC for $3,498, but not with a DVD burner and a screen like that.
-Erik
I'm pretty sure I found one with a 12.1" screen for comparison purposes.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
"Plump" doesn't mean frickin' lardass. You don't fuck the personality, you fuck the body and if the body isn't a turn-on...you go for a body that IS a turn-on.
"Natural woman" sounds like codespeak for "let your ass grow HUGe, eat all the bon-bons you want, be a FAT-ass lazy, disgusting cottage-cheese bag - it's natural. Except it is extremely rare to find a fat-ass aborigine type. Most tribal or primative (in this case, closer to nature and thus more "natural" than ANY western girl) peoples are nice and svelt, muscular, well-toned. Fat is detrimental, unnecessary, and UGLY. Muscle is beautiful.
"Natural woman" = Fat-ass lazy pig.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
A big +1 to this. We run Photoshop on Athlon-based machines because for the price of an average Mac we can add on dual monitors, and get stability from Win2K (no crashes on either machine in a few months of usage). It also brings a wider variety of backend stuff we can run (CF, ASP, PHP, IIS, Apache, etc).
The Mac users in our office find their computers crashing every hour or so. All those Mac-restarting-chimes are like a symphony of mediocrity.
There is a truism from the movie "Liar, liar" spoken humerously by Jim Carrey. His reply to a statement his son makes about a teacher telling him that "beauty is on the inside" is to say "That is just something ugly people say". It was a joke but is is also largely true. It also applies to lardasses.
We're not talking slightly overweight here, we're talking 30-40 lbs of wobbly, unhealthy, unattractive, quivering fat. We're talking people who eat too much and exercise too little. We are talking about candy-eating lazy slobs.
Get a frickin' bike and RIDE it. Get off your fat ass and walk, join a gym, do aerobics, hike regularly. Get off the damn couch, put the potato chips away and get your heartrate up lardo. It's that simple. My sister did it (she WAS a lardo), her husband did it (he was a bigger lardo). They no longer have back problems, his diabetes is better, their hearts and circulatory systems are happy, and they look good as opposed to like typical, disgusting, lazy American fat-asses.
Mozilla runs faster and better than ie on my dual 450 G4. Just wish it had a download manager for resumable downloads.
Which is the only thing I use ie for.
you should also count netscape 6.1
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Have you used OS X? Do you have any idea of its features
I have installed OSX on a G3 box. Most confusing damn thing I've ever done. Spent an hour or more futzing with it until I finally broke down and called Apple tech support. Turned out that I needed to boot up OS9 from CD to create an exactly 8gig partition. This tid bit wasn't mentioned in any of the docs that came with it. Then even the tech support guy didn't know if I needed to make that 8gig partition 8000Meg or 8192Meg to account for proper kilobyte size.
Well, I ended up just making it 8000Meg and it finally installed. Eye candy everywhere. Looked a LOT like KDE meets Win2k to me, with the added doo dad of having a task bar that warps. Yawn.
The user I was setting this up for does graphics work, oddly enough, and has a requirement for a plain gray background. After literally going through every single control panel on this OS several times I was totally unable to locate how in the heck you get rid of the blue swirlly background. Oh yeah, easy as pie.
I'm sure there's a way to get the background to change, but should it require this much effort? Heck, the real FreeBSD isn't anywhere near this difficult to get a GUI up and running. That, and it at least knows how to partition a hard drive all by itself. I know a lot of Apple die hards are screaming troll, but from my personal experience OS9, KDE, Gnome, Win9x, Win2k are all a LOT easier to figure out for a new user than what I saw in OSX.
About the only concept in use that I did like was the use of drop shadows instead of off color window borders. The shadows are a bit too large, but the concept is cool. Outside of that, I guess I'll have a look at 10.1 when it comes out to see if it's worth the time to muck with.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
"I think it's fairly clear that Apple purchases and resells higher quality parts than other box makers. You can point out that one vendor has some given type of RAM or a hard drive for one price while Apple sells it for a few bucks more, but that's ignoring the likely case that Apple is getting better quality hardware, somehow. I wouldn't presume to know the details, but reality seems to line up with that assumption." Not true, of course. Apple uses fairly solid brands, but my G4 came with an IBM harddrive and Crucial memory. So I added a second IBM HD and 1GB of Crucial RAM. Works beautifully, no compatibility issues if you stick with the gear Apple specify. Saving a few bucks is never worth when it all starts going pear shaped.
"...and selling 256 MB sticks of memory for $400" yeah? and how much does IBM charge for BTO memory - just as much as Apple. It's just a laziness tax. If you can't be bothered to install it yourself, you deserve to pay 5x as much as it costs. You also absolve yourself from warranty issues with a "but I've never opened the case" plea. What price peace of mind?
> And my G3 Blue-and-white, aka Yosemite,
> aka The Fisher-Price computer (the latter
> nickname was bestowed by my hubby)
> still looks and feels like it came from the future,
> even though I've had it since 1999.
Just recently I had someone ooh and ahh at a Yosemite that I have, and their exact words were "it looks like it's from the future". She was talking about the look of the machine, but it is still quite current otherwise as well. Even though it's two years old, it has a 15" flat panel display, built-in Ethernet, built-in FireWire, built-in USB, no legacy ports, 16MB graphics card, can take 1.5GB of RAM, and runs Mac OS X quite happily. I got a new PowerMac recently, but I kept the Yosemite as well. I don't recall ever keeping a two year old PC around voluntarily. The Yosemite is compact and capable and really beautiful. It has over a hundred gigabytes of storage in it (4 internal hard drive bays) and over a hundred gigabytes more attached to it by FireWire (80GB FireWire Maxtors are $200 now) and is working now as a server. With 1.5GB of RAM and 60 or so spaces left on the FireWire bus, it still has room to grow. You can pop out the CPU and put a new one in, too, in about three minutes, because the mobo is on the drop-down door. It's paid for itself many times over, too.
For about the past 18 months, Apple's been shipping PowerMacs with gigabit Ethernet and wireless antennaes built-in (so they can act as base stations for wireless LAN's). Those are the kinds of features that make a machine long-lived, along with high RAM capacity, FireWire, etc.
Apple and Dell are both fucking you, it's just that Dell is fucking you hard and Apple is fucking you silly.
No shit, Sherlock?
> If Apple and Adobe are in collusion to produce exactly
... very, very fast). The high-end PowerMac does it in a realtime (another first). Then you have to design and implement an interface for the DVD. When you start a DVD, you're really in a menu system that access video. Once all that is done, then you have to burn the DVD itself. Not only does Apple provide really great professional-level tools for all of this that are thousands of dollars cheaper than the competition, they also have a HOME version of it all, called iDVD. It's outrageous. For years people have been talking about the brick wall that home video enthusiasts were seeing with digital and the DVD, because suddenly you needed to edit, encode, make menus, and burn discs and each of those things were independently thought to be out of reach of the consumer before Apple put it all together and solved all of the problems at once. The $2499 PowerMac comes with all of this INCLUDED. One year ago, you would have needed well over $10,000 and a year's training. It's outstanding stuff. DVD players are in 1 in 5 homes or something ... as the SuperDrive gets more inexpensive and makes its way into the iMac and DVD players proliferate, this will be an even bigger story for Apple.
... MP3 encoding is just one example.
> one fast MacOS app, that's life,
Ha ha ha ha. Mac users wish that we got such treatment from Adobe. They are seen as spending too much time on their consumer-level apps for Windows, while Mac-based pros pay the bills and get much less attention. Photoshop is not more highly optimized for the Mac. It is running full speed on Windows, too.
Apple also does encoding shootouts with Media Cleaner Pro. People are editing broadcast-quality video on PowerBooks with Final Cut Pro. Music systems are running more tracks and plug-ins than Intel systems. The things I do each day on a PowerMac simply can't be done on Intel. The same software is there but it doesn't perform.
> but anyone claiming PPC CPUs are faster than IA32
> CPUs while omitting "but only if you spend your
> life running Photoshop" is being awfully dishonest.
People who continue to insist that Photoshop is some kind of strange island of an app are the ones being dishonest. Today's software spends a lot of its time working with images. Most people are running Graphical User Interfaces, right? Video-editing is like graphics editing but with lots more images. Every graphics app runs Photoshop plug-ins. As I mentioned, the comparisons are not just done in Photoshop, but also in other apps. Altivec is not just one little add-on to the G4. The chip in my PowerMac has 11 Altivec units. Apple very definitely sat down some time in the past and decided to optimize their systems for modern desktop computing: graphics, video, audio. It shows in their systems. But the G4 also kicks ass on distributed.net, along with sub-1GHz Alphas and other processors that don't have too many pipelines like the P4.
> Final Cut Pro was cited as an industry "standard"
> (though I doubt any industry consortium or
> standards body specifies it
No, just more people use it. You have to know about video to know how good Final Cut Pro is. It is replacing $30,000 workstations for some people; for others, it's letting them work on a notebook for the first time. You have already watched hours of TV that was done exclusively in Final Cut Pro on Macs. CNN is all over it. Everybody is all over it. Imagine Linux and Apache rolled into one, but for video-editing people instead of server admins.
> Nor did they invent video encoding, though I don't
> know enough about a DVD filesystem to know
> whether anything there was tricky
First, you have to encode the video into MPEG-2. Apple's low-end PowerMac does this in very high quality, in software, at 2x (a first
Ad agencies do all their work digitally, but up till about six months ago, when they wanted to show a clip to a client, they put it on analog video tape. Now they put it on DVD using Apple's tools, and it's cheap! Very, very cheap.
Not to mention that video comes out of the camera over FireWire (Apple invention) and is easily handled in Mac OS through QuickTime (Apple invention), and is easy for consumers to edit with iMovie (also Apple's).
> PC owners have learned not to pay high markups
> for innovative
They have learned how to pay high costs for IT support. They have learned that you can get Outlook viruses through email and blame them on Unix hackers instead of Microsoft.
> (translation: proprietary, incompatible, and rapidly
> obsolescent) integrated hardware; you'll find plenty
> from IA32 software vendors.
Apple uses the same hardware. A PowerMac has PCI, ATA, DRAM, etc. What's different is that the old BIOS of the x86 is OpenFirmware on the Mac (includes a nice graphical boot loader); the P4 is replaced with a G4 that's better for media tasks, and instead of Windows, we use Mac OS X, which is better for media tasks. What is so hard to understand about the fact that the resulting system is better for media tasks? Most consumers these days are using their computers for media tasks
> making (someone else's) portable software
> environment viable might have been innovative
It's hard to call NeXT "someone else" when speaking of Apple. The NeXT project started at Apple, and left with Steve Jobs and a bunch of other people. Then it came back to Apple, along with Steve Jobs and a bunch of other people. NeXT systems used the same serial ports and connections as Macs, and the same CPU's. In a sense, you could say that Mac OS forked when Steve Jobs left, and it's being reunited right now after a few years of Mac OS / Mac OS X existing next to each other as entirely different products.
> , but they killed NEXTSTEP/Intel to protect their
> monopoly margins.
They killed Cocoa for Windows to protect Microsoft's monopoly margins and ensure that Microsoft wasn't going to stop making Office for Mac (even though Microsoft makes hundreds of millions of dollars in profit off that product every year). Microsoft also wanted Apple to kill QuickTime, a technology that's used by content creators in audio, video, etc. Even if this hadn't come out at the MS trial, I don't think anybody really believed that Microsoft would tolerate Apple deploying their new API onto both Windows and Mac. No way.
Would you ask a musician to set up your Linux server? No. So don't act like you know more about Macs than the next guy. You look at the components that are typically in an x86 and compare them to Apple and find Apple lacking, but you're not looking at all the other stuff. Innovative and productive software that's enabling people to do things they never could, FireWire, gigabit Ethernet, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, wireless antennas, etc.
=)
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
You sure can, but you will only be able to go up to 1024x768.
But a business, unlike the average consumer can use that purchase as a tax deduction. It's not as bad as you are making it out to be
USB and FireWire are not the answer for every expansion question.
P.S. Let me know when the USB version of the GeForce3 comes out, I'll be eagerly awaiting it.
There are others, however quite expensive ones. But that is of course since standard mac users don't need anything better than the top quality consumer level soundcard that is already built in. Saved you a PCI slot. Its not a conincidence most soundengineers and pro audio musicians choose Macintosh (and a expensive soundcard) as their audio system.
If you want a powerful machine, buy one.
That's exactly the point. I say Apple is overpriced, you say look at the iBook. I say the iBook is crippled and not powerful, you say buy a TiBook. The TiBook STARTS at $2600, which damn well is overpriced. You say "Apple isn't overpriced, we have the iBook!" See my point?
The TiBook is a great machine. There is no need for Apple to cripple the lowend to make it look good. If they do, maybe the TiBook is priced too high?
You are arguing that iMacs are not expandable. What you SHOULD be arguing is that iMacs are not expandable in a way that makes you feel all warm and cozy inside.
Who are you trying to fool? If it weren't the expansion, you'd have some other perfectly reasonable explanation for why you think Macs suck. OK, fine, here's your cookie, please don't ever buy a Macintosh. No skin off my nose.
Let me know when the GF3 a) has software that takes advantage of it and b) costs less than in iMac. I'll be eagerly awaiting THAT.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
The iBook's LCD only supports 1024x768, but the card in it supports much higher... which you see if you hook it up to another monitor.
Do you own one? Sorry, but anyone here can go to Apple's support boards, Macintouch.com, MacNN, whatever, and confirm that:
The new iBook does NOT support dual displays (only mirroring)
You CANNOT drive an external display at any resolution greater than 1024 x 768.
Both of these apply to both MacOS 9 and X. If you've somehow hacked it to make it work, back it up with a URL or something. Believe me, there are lots of people pissed because it doesn't work, and we're all eagerly awaiting your reply telling us how to do it.
P.S., I suspect you will not reply, because you'll do the research and find that you're wrong. There's a guy further up in this thread, that claimed the same thing, then never came back to back it up. (I really do wish you weren't wrong - these issues are the only thing stopping me from buying this machine).
Strangely enough, I got my copy of the Developer Tools CD by clicking on a banner ad, right here on Slashdot, back in the spring.
Are you an idiot? The whole point is for them to be cheap. If you want something high end, buy a damn G4, don't bitch about the iMac.
It's an iBook - what do you want? If you want a powerful machine, buy one. Apple isn't marketing the iBook as the laptop-to-end-all-laptops, so get over it.
You're so off base here, I just had to respond.
> It so happens that apple only posts tests on
> Intels, and only tests on photoshop
First, they do demonstrations with Photoshop and with Media Cleaner Pro. In Photoshop, they run scripts that are essentially recordings of every action a user took during a whole project. They use the movie poster from whatever new movie just got added to QuickTime's movie trailer site. It's like a complete graphics-editing showdown. Those tasks are the same transformations you'd be applying to images if you were editing in Painter, or Fireworks, or any other app that edits graphics. The same filters are used in all of the graphics apps. If you edit images or video, you are impressed by the results of these tests. That's why people are running their business on Macs in those fields. Final Cut Pro is the most popular pro-level video editing software, and it runs only on the Mac.
Media Cleaner Pro is demonstrated taking video from tape to the Web. Macs can encode streaming video and MPEG at ridiculously fast speeds (realtime in software on the high-end PowerMac, with super high quality, 2x on the low end PowerMac). Encoding and encryption are some common tasks that benefit from the same strenths that are shown in the Media Cleaner Pro tests.
> which is
> optimized for macos.
Just the other day here on Slashdot we heard from an Adobe guy who said one person did the Mac optimizations for the last rev of Photoshop, while the Wintel optimizations were done by two teams of coders, one from Adobe and one from Intel. Apple puts Photoshop 6 against Photoshop 6 with the same RAM, hard disk, graphics card, etc. Then they put Media Cleaner Pro 5 against Media Cleaner Pro 5 on similar hardware. The only thing different is that you swap the G4 for the P4, and Mac OS for Windows. The Mac spanks Wintel in these tests.
> I said attitude... Maybe a G4 really is the best
> thing scince the microchip, but even if it is, it's
> not Apple's doing.
Apple, IBM, and Motorola are the PPC partners. It's not the tight-knit club it once was or maybe was supposed to be, but Apple contributes quite a bit to PowerPC development. Certainly, more than any other personal computer maker, who don't even make their own motherboards most of the time.
> Truth is, Apple isn't a stable company right now,
One unprofitable quarter in the last three years. Over 4 billion dollars in cash in the bank. They sold more notebook computers last quarter than any other quarter in Apple's history.
> they're way to dependent, on IBM (for PPC
> processors),
They get PPC processors from both IBM and Motorola.
> and on NVidia (for releasing video cards first).
Not sure what that means. nVidia stuff is the same hardware on either platform. Only the drivers are different. There is as much difference between Windows 98 and Windows 2000 with nVidia cards as with the Mac.
> Perhaps apple is the best for content creation,
> on the low level, but SGI's are running lower
> costs now (used machines), and these things
> run for 3 months uptime overclocked!
There are plenty of people with both a Mac and an SGI on their desks, because they don't overlap in capabilities, except for Mac OS X with Maya. You can't run Photoshop on SGI, you can't run Dreamweaver, Office, etc.
I'm surprised you recommend SGI when you mention that you think that Apple is unstable business-wise. A lot of people think that Mac OS X running Maya actually delivers on the promises that SGI made with their NT machines. You combine all the content creation stuff onto one box, and you're still on Unix, running Apache, Perl, etc.
You're right - mhz rating has NOTHING to do with it.
Wow, lots of folks drinking deeply into the Apple marketing kool-aid. You're right to a point, frequency of the clock alone will not always win out. Thing is, for most computing tasks it really does make all the difference. Try running a long batch routine into a database, or crunch a large set of integer numbers. MHz beats optimization every time.
Where optimization plays a factor is in specific tasks. The Motorola processor handles Photoshop tasks quite well, but is far weaker than a PIII when it comes to gaming. You could run through a stack of various apps on both machines and you'd most likely find that each chip is tuned in for performance on some, and not others. Across the board for generic applications, it's still damn hard to beat raw clock speed.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
The G4 500 Mhz performs roughly the same as PIII 1 Ghz. I heard a rumor recently that may explain this MHz myth on why Apple's chips haven't hit the GHz barrier yet: Intel and their x86 competitors (AMD, etc) count both the rising edge and falling edge of the clock cycle, while Motorola (makers of the Apple CPUs) count only the rising edge.
As far as the G4 outperforming the athlon, that remains something to be skeptical about. I don't believe Apple at all (if you believe a manufacturer when they tell you their product outperforms the competition then you're a doofus)
But the reasopn they can't get it above 500 mhz is very simple. It's the same reason why P4's have such high clock frequencies. Pipeline depth.
The G4 has a shallow pipeline. Few stages means that less penalty is incurred when a branch was mispredicted, but it also means that you need to leave more time for each pipeline stage to complete. As far as whether this is a good choice or not, that I can't answer. Intel clearly got it wrong with their ultra-deep pipeline, because it underperforms the athlon. But maybe the G4 has too little pipeline stages.
> a mix of BSD and NeXT
NeXT's kernel was already BSD/Mach.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Imagine a Beowolf CLuster of THESE!!!
> The Dimension line changes rapidly, and is geared
> towards home users.
It comes and goes in three months because it's already the old stuff. The parts in those home systems are leftovers from last year's pro systems. If you could track the technology up the product line, you'd find that hardware configuration is as old as any Mac model ever gets.
> If you're looking for long-term
> availability of the exact same model, you need
> to buy the Optiplex computers
As soon as somebody has some real work to do, they pay a little more and get better stuff.
There is the reason why Apple's products don't go up and down in price like a flea market. Apple doesn't have a low-end commodity box. Time and time again people say Apple's products are expensive, but those are people who can't find a low-end box at apple.com to compare to something they found at a screwdriver shop, or essentially got on clearance at Gateway. With Apple, you get a complete solution at every price point they offer, with all the stuff built-in so you don't have to add it yourself later and mess with drivers and such. The Mac OS X system requirements was a single Web page with pictures of all the computers that can run Mac OS X! If your computer is pictured there, you can install OS X and it will work. You can't sell that to people for clearance prices.
Also, IT departments may like to track the ins and outs of what graphics adapter is at the perfect price/performance point this week, but IT departments generally just know and promote Microsoft. Often, Macs are purchased and supported by people who actually use them, even within large companies. That you can go to apple.com and easily find any updates for "iMac (Summer 2000)" because all iMacs sold that summer were the same is an important feature. Swap stuff in and out during that product's life and you have to make the user compare serial numbers to decide what graphics driver they need or whatever. It's just too much of a drag for people who also have real work to do.
And stop complaining about the hardware. Give a Powermac or one of the portables a chance before knocking on it.
;-)
Does this mean knocking on the iMacs without first giving them a chance is perfectly acceptible?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I'm glad to see that OSX is shaping up to what it promised. I saw it in beta and on its first official release on my buddy's dual-G4, and did nothing but drool. It's pretty. And it's pretty quick too. I'm glad to hear that someone who has better access to it and knows what to look for in the OS gave his thumbs up. Apple needs this boost, and it never hurts for BSD to chalk up another feather in its cap.
Have you used OS X? Do you have any idea of its features (how Aqua renders itself, for one)? Before you make statements like yours, please back them up by being informed.
A new record?
This guy did not use the developer tools that came with OS X. They are downloadable from the apple site. I don't think that I can believe what this guy says if he can't even get the right set of tools.
for your earlier troll, Hemos? I wish I could moderate the editors--then my frontpage would be more (+2 Insightful) and less (-1 Troll).
--
$tar -xvf
my girlfriend and i have been dating for almost two years. over the last year, she has packed on about 20-30 extra pounds! what should i do? how can i tell her that it's gross without hurting her feelings?
I'm having fun with OS X on my new 866 G4 tower (plus dual-booting LinuxPPC ;-) . It's fairly quick on my machine, but I'm looking forward to the 10.1 speed jump.
:-p
OS X doesn't get everything right, but I think its probably the closest any Unix variant will come to the general consumer's desktop. OS X is a usable Unix distro, but has the niceties that most home users expect, and really require. Yes, translucent buttons on top of a port scanner are a requirement. Sure, its nice to grep for things, but my next-door soccer mom neighboor isn't going to. But I can use SSH to administer my website. This duality makes OS X the most usable OS - almost. Not enough native apps yet.
Later,
Goss
After a series of problems with 4 Sony Vaio notebooks (two PCG-748s, a Picturebook, and a PCG-F630), my girlfriend and I decided to look for alternative mobile computing solutions. Both of us being Unix/Linux users, we were drawn to the Apple Powerbooks/iBooks (the new model, not the clamshell).
The notebooks feel solid. They have excellent battery life (I got 4.5 hours on a charge at the Ottawa Linux Symposium, while surfing wirelessly the whole time). The G3 and G4 processors feel fast. You don't have to have a 1 GHz Intel beast in your notebook - performance isn't measured solely by MHz, and especially not across different chip architectures!
Sure, I had some minor complaints - only one mouse button for instance. But both YellowDog and LinuxPPC allow you to easily remap keys to mouse buttons. Guess what? That Apple key, and the "enter" key, on either side of the spacebar, just above the mouse pad on a G4 Titanium make excellent mouse buttons! Not to mention full USB support for external keyboards/mice when "docked". Built in antennas for wireless networking reduce the cost of a wireless network card... here in Canada, an 802.11b wireless card typically runs around $220 Cdn, whereas the Apple Airport (OEMed Lucent 802.11b card) runs about $140. And the G4 Titanium's screen is simply the most georgeous thing out there IMHO.
Price-wise Apple hardware isn't all that bad these days. Sure, the G4 Titanium is expensive when compared to a Dell Latitude. But the G4 Ti is the top of the line Apple - it has more in common with the Dell 8100 series... and when you compare those two, the difference is $50-$100 Cdn.
Ultimately, it's up to the individual user to decide which notebook best suits them. But at least give an Apple notebook a chance before dismissing it. They are really quite nice (and quite popular with the Linux coder crowd at the Ottawa Linux Symposium - there were many, many, many Powerbook G4s, and a few iBooks).
I'll stop complaining about their hardware as soon as they stop charging $350 to UPGRADE from a GeForce2mx to a GeForce3 and selling 256 MB sticks of memory for $400.
I have no problem with Apple charging a premium for their nice cases, friendly OS, and good quality motherboards. I DO have a problem with them using "clone-PC" quality commodity parts and charging for them as if they engineered them in their own R&D department.
I have been using MacOS X since the first ports, and before that OpenStep. I still have a slab running at home. Still a nice system after all these years. I got hooked to objective-c the first day I tried it. The language and the OS where well integrated. The beautiful interface and high-quality of the whole system was a nice achievement. Not like MacOS X unfortunately. Nothing seems to make sense in the gut of the architecture. You have a mixture of C for kernel and foundation, add a little bit of embedded C++ for the IOKit and addtional drivers, drop some C++ with a CodeWarrior PowerPlant on top in what is known as the Finder (a cross between Destop manager and MacOS 9 Finder), then of course, objective C framework renamed Cocoa to go with the trend and add Java in case you get bored to the mix. You end up with this hideous monster of bloatware, hard to program system, slow as hell for loading all the libraries. In short : a kludge. So you know what I did: I installed linux on my PowerMac instead and then things got useable and snappy again. Linux could have even run without the 512MB of RAM I had to put in there ot run OS X. Oh! and finally, I can play DVDs with ut region code, and burn any type of CDs too BTW. And I won't get IE to crash all the time, and Quicktime reminding me to buy the upgrade everytime I watch a movie. Things are so much better now.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
OS-X seems fairly cool from the little I've seen of it. I was especially happy to see that a full Java 2 implementation is available on it.
Apple did a good job with this.
One thing to check out is the Gnu/Darwin project here : http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/
ebw
Based on what? The MHz? The G4 500 Mhz performs roughly the same as PIII 1 Ghz. I heard a rumor recently that may explain this MHz myth on why Apple's chips haven't hit the GHz barrier yet: Intel and their x86 competitors (AMD, etc) count both the rising edge and falling edge of the clock cycle, while Motorola (makers of the Apple CPUs) count only the rising edge.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
"Insightful?"
Anybody who complains that Apple hardware prices are high hasn't been pawing attention for a couple of years.
Compare the price/performance of an iMac with similarly powered x86 systems. Compare the price of an iBook with similarly powered portables.
They're very competitive these days.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
I saw OSX for the first time the other night at my brother's house. It seemed quite fast (on a relatively old iMac). It is also most certainly a UNIX. The command prompt is right there with all the commands I know and love (like 'man' ;^)). My brother also had an early MONO running on it. Very cool. The developers tools (which come on a seperate CD) look quite interesting. Nice GUI builder ala visual basic with object c behind (I think). Overall....I'm jealous!
It's only as fast as a PIII 1 Ghz on certain tests, especially Graphics ones... and ones designed so they can beat Intel processors, but Apple never compares there hardware in ads to AMD... wonder why?
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
My first experience with OS X was when the network
guy at school brought in a copy for us(Comm Center Aides) and him. It's very pretty,but you can't get a shell up fast enough for my liking,and classic stuff takes FOREVER to load. There's also some really obvious bugs, like the screensaver one (moving mouse brings up a login box,but if you don't login and close the box,there's a rectangular patch frozen to what the screensaver was when you brought the box up). Seriously, how hard is that to notice. OS X will be awesome once some kinks get worked out. It's a prettyfied BSD.
Not everyone had access to an OC-2048, and most servers where 800 mhz, so we would have to wait 4 hours before we could reach a site due to the slashdot effect. You kids are spoiled, your connection are so quick, it gets there before you needed it ... damn wipper snappers.
Don't ask ... :)
until (succeed) try { again(); }
I think Hemos took some of the earlier comments to heart...
"the best safety of the frontier...will be secured by total annihilation of the few remaining indians" L Frank Baum 1890
If you studied search engine theory, you would note that many modern search engines (such as Google) ignore meta tags because people put useless things in them.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
(1, Informative)?? Would the admins please try out mirrors before giving out "Informative" points to obvious Trolls like this.
this seems to be bad link...mod it down to -1
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Sorry, can't afford it. Really. Has anyone seen the prices of Macs lately? I swear, I think at least $100 goes toward the candy coating.
Maybe so, but the tests i'm talking about are ones a co-worker of mine had done using the same C program compiled on a Linux box and an OS-X box, both compiled using gcc. The program itself is proprietary, but I can say it involved a rather complex math algorithm. The timing element was a wallclock. Result was approximately the same amount of processing time.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
**PORN WARNING**
I don't know how they did it, but this is a big picture of a couple of guys getting it on. It also crashed Netscape by opening lots of windows. If you go here, turn off Javascript first.
**PORN WARNING**
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
it's NOT a cached copy of the article, it's pr0n.
I know all about the differences between a 500Mhz RISC chip with a massive cache versus a 1Ghz CISC chip with a tiny cache, you pretentious fuck. Just because Apple can win a few benchmarks doesn't beat mean that their chips are anywhere near as fast as Intel/AMD chips all around, especially in gaming performance, one of the most important arenas for PC performance. The G4 CPU is a great processor, it just isn't nearly great enough to justify what Apple charges for it.
You're trolling, but just to clarify in case anyone already doesn't know, every current Apple computer takes "PC standard" memory, (SO-DIMMS in the laptops, regular SDRAM for the desktops) and has for quite a while.
There is enough shit wrong with Apple that's true, we don't need to make up more :) Thanks.
Hertz is Hertz.
It means times per second. It refers to a full clock cycle, up down and back around, including rising and falling edges.
Worst rumor ever. And I only use a mac at home.
Not only did you cleverly manage to work a porno link into the thread, you managed to get modded up for it, too. Congratulations!
She's* been posting this trash for months. If there was a URL, would you really want to follow it?
*Used female pronoun instead of assuming subject is male. Perhaps we should be randomly picking male or female pronouns when there is no information available, instead of using a male one or one for your own gender.
Geekizoid: The Small Shiny Things Network ©
Gobble a dick!
I'm sorry? Now, before you mod me as a troll, hear me out. Of course Mac OS X doesn't have driver problems, but it's because the hardware selection in Macland is very poor. Why should they have driver problems? There are so few peripherals out there for Macintosh computers. What good is it having "working drivers" if there is so little hardware available in the first place?
Apple hardware is too slow
Based on what? The MHz? The G4 500 Mhz performs roughly the same as PIII 1 Ghz. I heard a rumor recently that may explain this MHz myth on why Apple's chips haven't hit the GHz barrier yet: Intel and their x86 competitors (AMD, etc) count both the rising edge and falling edge of the clock cycle, while Motorola (makers of the Apple CPUs) count only the rising edge.
Actually, although the G4 is clearly a superior chip then a PIII, or even an Athlon Thunderbird, the price performance ratio is what is in question.
You're right - mhz rating has NOTHING to do with it. It's completely irrelevant if processor A at nmhz outperforms processor B at nmhz. What does matter, is if processor A at $n outperforms processor B at the same price. Anyone can go out and build a super optimized chip that runs at 500mhz and outperforms another chip at 2ghz, but what's the point if it costs 10times as much?
To quantify my point with a relevant example, here's a rough comparison:
If I spend $77 for an Athlon 1.0Ghz, I don't care if a $349 G4 500mhz get's similar scores on benchmarks.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Okay, I've just started reading and already I've hit:
I guess the author & I have a different idea of "fundamental". My idea of a fundamental is being able to dd to a raw device. I'll grant that compilers and network utilities can be fundamental depending on the application, but web & db servers? Besides, it's not like you couldn't get all four of those under MacOS. I think OS X is much more impressive under the hood as opposed to just the benefits of adding a CLI.
There, I've said my peace - flame away.
-"Zow"
You sound like a computer geek...go buy your GeForce3 and extra memory third party. It's easy enough to add this stuff to any Mac made in the last 10 years.
You're displaying a common misunderstanding about marketing -- things are generally priced based on what people will pay for them, not based on what they cost. Don't like it? Tough. That's capitalism.
Apple is charging you a premium for the convenience of buying it from them. They're not the only company that charges for the convenience: ever bought popcorn at the movies? Do you pay a 1000% markup on Coke at a fast food place? Did you know that most liquor companies bottle the exact same stuff in a generic bottle and sell it for half the price as a "house brand"? My company charges about $10k for a bottom of the line PC if you insist that we sell you one to go with our multi-million dollar telephone switch. And customers pay it, because it's simpler that way.
Same thing.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Please mod down.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
What does your comment have to do with OS X from a BSD users perspective?
I work for a specialty consulting firm in Dallas - our specialty is that we deal almost exclusively with Macs. We have a networking division, a developer/programming division, and a help desk branch that we contract out to large companies. I work in the development side, mostly in interface development for custom databases we write.
Aplle send us their code early and often - I was running a version of OSX almost two years ago - when it was still very much a hybrid of the prior release. The forked resource allocation was in place, but relatively simple stuff (like IP routing) were added gradually in small pieces.
I've discovered that OSX - from both a user perspective and an "under the hood" view - is quite simply the best OS they've come up with. They're WAY ahead of alot of what Microsoft is trying to do with, say, Active Directory. The whole concept of a central distributed database is taken to a whole new level with OSX, by taking the concept of "user" and applying it to the underlying OS.
Think of it in these simple terms
And how big is that network? Potentially as big as the Internet, again, determined your habits as the OS wathces you. If you only work in your soho, your manipulated profile will probably only stay in the building. If you travel all over the county and browse the internet alot, your user profile could be sitting on a computer in San Jose even though you live in Pittsburgh. But if you travel to Los Angeles, you'll get the San Jose copy when there.
Apple's concept for this new interface is what they're calling the "cumulative user manipulation." The C.U.M. interface right now is travelling all over the net, in short little batches like spreading seed. It's swallowed by remote nodes, called "sister objects" in the C.U.M. heirarchy.
Like I've said, I've been CUMing for almost two years now and have no desire to stop. OSX rocks, and I think it will re-establish Apple's desktop dominance.
I was thinking of buying an Apple as my 2nd home system, but I've been holding off for awhile. I seem to recall reading an interesting post from a fellow Slashdotter who had some rather sobering facts about BSD's possible decline (if somebody would be kind enough to dredge it up and post it, I would appreciate it). Those numbers have me wondering if I shouldn't stick with a proven Intel solution and stick to Linux -- contrary to the BSD numbers, Linux appears to be as healthy as ever.
It means times per second. It refers to a full clock cycle, up down and back around, including rising and falling edges.
I believe the guy was referring to fetches on the rising and falling edge of the bus clock. AMD does this, maybe others do too?
Get real.
What matters most is what YOU use the computer for. If its as a gaming machine, fine buy Intel. If you need to work with Photoshop all day buy a Mac, the price difference per MHz is irrelevant if you make your money doing this type of work. Need to compile stuff fast? How about a AMD or Alpha. Need to run Oracle with very high reliability, use SPARC/Solaris. Need to process as million records a second for a billing application, use an IBM Mainframe. Want to edit home movies, buy a Mac.
Get it right, its USEABILITY that matters not MHz.
Find the best machine for a task and then worry about MHz.
My personal opinion is that the best machine for a geek to play with linux, games, fool around with hardware etc has to be an x86 box because of the all round flexibility for a great price. In a business though? I don't care if costs $1K or $100K more if its more useable for the given task then the extra cost is almost irrelevant.
My G4 Titanium 400 is just as fast at Word, IE, Excel, Outlook, FTP, etc as the 1000 and 1133 P3s in the office.
It's a hell of a lot more stable than WinNT 4 or Win2000 too. And it's only 100 bucks more than the 733MHz IBM A21s that we bought at the same time.
The price/performance ratio is in line with X86.
Before telling me to grow up, you should click the damn link and find out for yourself you fool. Of course it looks like a legitimate link, that's what I thought when I clicked it at first. Oh and please ignore the other posts that complain about this so-called 'mirror', they must all be trolls. If you're the retard who posted this, then you can go screw yourself instead of calling legitimate readers trolls.
Your UID is proof that inflammatory cretin trolls existed before RISC was invented;.
Geekizoid: The Small Shiny Things Network ©
Gobble a dick!
I wish I could moderate the editors
You can. You're just not looking at the right weblog. Go to Kuro5hin and moderate all the stories you want.
Nice troll, butt....
It's too damn old. I have been seeing this for a long time (and I didn't find it convincing ever).
You crapped out on the linkage. The first 2 paragraphs pretty strong, but the rest has no links! Why not a link to the different strains of OpenBSD that you mention, as well as Walnut Creek. For one final trollish jab, you could make the word dead in those bold phrases point to a disgusting dead guy at rotten.com.
Don't bother now. No one will care. Write a new troll.
Geekizoid: The Small Shiny Things Network ©
Gobble a dick!
Jesus, you're really an asshole, aren't you? Fuck you.
You shouldn't have picked the iMac :)
I'll bite -"Fastest" iMac, $1499. 700 mhz G3, 256 MB, 60 GB drive, cheesy ATI graphics card, ethernet, CDRW, FireWire.
Now let's stroll over to Dell.com. They sell a computer called the 8100, for $1459. Pentium IV 1.5ghz, 256 MB RAM, 60 GB drive, vastly superior GeForce2mx video, ethernet, CDRW, Firewire. 17" monitor, bigger than iMac. I won't even start on it's ZERO PCI slots or lack of upgradability on the video and sound.
Out of those two systems, I know which one I'd like to own.
Note: I have not even addressed Athlon systems, which have an even better price/performance ratio.
Don't even get me started on the higher priced G4, their pricing is a horrible joke.
Just a side-note: one of the most reliable and robust processors available right now for large applications (talking about mission-critical, server farm grade) is the Power architecture. This is an architecture made by IBM. A very robust RISC architecture. It's the processor in an IBM RS/6000 and other RS series servers. It just so happens to be the same architecture that Apple uses, just a version of it (PowerPC). The fact is that these processors ARE superior in their respective arenas.
Also, the other fact that Apple has to deal with (which in turn jacks up price) is the ability to produce the processors to meet demand. When the G4 debuted, Apple and Motorolla could not meet the demand. My buddy waited a few months extra for his dual G4. The inability to mass produce, something that Intel and AMD have the luxury of, will certainly jack up costs due to the obvious extra work required to produce the same output. This is probably, IMHO, one of the biggest contributors to Apple's price difference. But, (even being an Intel employee), I am thouroghly impressed with the G4's performace. I can't wait to see how the Intel Itanium aligns itself with the G4.
LC3, not G3. Wipe the come stain off your box and look again.
Geekizoid: The Small Shiny Things Network ©
Gobble a dick!
I write this from a W2k machine, listening to mp3s on my freebsd samba server, using my iBook as a gateway to my wireless DSL connection (via airport), so I am most certainly not an apple zealot. I just like computers
"If you need to work with Photoshop all day buy a Mac, the price difference per MHz is irrelevant if you make your money doing this type of work. "
Not anymore.
More and more professionals run Photoshop on Intel simply because for the price of high-end Mac they can get outrageously equipped PC.
Really? Then why is this computer one thousand dollars less?
Sorry, the G4 Ti IS an awesome computer, but it is not what I would call "cost competitive". At $2600 it is definitely a botique computer.
Last year I bought a Dell Inspiron 3800 for $1200, and I dare say it is 95% of the computer the G4 Ti is for less than half the price. I could have bought another for the kitchen and still come out ahead!
Yeah right...
Sure $400 G4 can be as fast as 1 GZ Athlon....
The problem is that very Athlon costs less than $100.
That is NOT even close to being competitive.
What kind of car do you have?
Sorry, but the G3 tower does indeed take PC100 standard memory.
The reason it's over priced is simple. Companies know that in a niche market the people that are going to buy it will buy it regardless of the price. If you raise the price another 200$ mac fanatics who want to feel like they "think different" are still gonna buy it. This is a basic business thing. I donno the term for it. But basically people that are in the niche will are gonna buy it anyways, so these few that buy it might as well get charged alot for it, cuase they're gonna pay for it anyways.
Getting bored with the latest distribution? Uhh.. No. But the latest Debian Testing is absolutely excellent I might add.
Or getting tired of searching for drivers for your 8 bit soundblaster (in)compatible? Umm.. They exist, but why would I use an 8-bit SoundBlaster?
You'd think Linux and FreeBSD sucked or something. Why should one have any interest whatsoever in a proprietary operating system running on overpriced hardware? Sorry, but proprietary is going the way of the dinosaur. Survival of the fittest. Adapt or die.
Try not to any article that might possibly make the front page of /. into 6 different pages, its rather difficult to read when the hits begin...
G4 Cube takes standard PC100/PC133 RAM
some iMacs takes SO-DIMMS
G3/G4 Towers takes standard PC100/PC133 RAM too
-- Note: These Comments are Generated by ME! Not You! ME!
how recently have you priced apple hardware? their price/performance ratio is actually quite competative, and has been for about two years now. sorry, buddy.
to clear up some confusion, the fact the the number before the "Mhz" on the chip description tends to be lower with Macs isn't relavant. once you move accross chip architectures, those numbers are next to meaningless. do you really think your 100Mhz 486 and my 100 Mhz MIPS chip perform comprably? sorry, not even close. the PowerPC chip design is much cleaner, faster, and more efficient than the x86 design, especially the P-III grade design. hz for hz, a PPC chip'll beat an x86 chip any time.
to be fair, even if you take a more "enlightened" view of the performance, apple's price/performance ratio isn't quite as good as many x86 desktop models (although it's close, and better than many of the big-name boxes). but there's much more to buying a computer than that. Apple hardware is actually engineered, in ways that most other PCs certainly don't seem to be. the hardware is well-designed and well-built. on desktop systems, i've not seen anything in the x86 market that comes close, and that's probably because of some fundamental facts of that market. the x86 world does a bit better with laptops, but Apple's still got them beat there, too. add to that the usability issues, battery life, screen size and clarity, and general slickness, and Apple comes out well worth the extra ~$100 (if that) they're behind in a strict price/performance comparison.
the current iBook line starts at $1300, list. nothing in the x86 laptop world comes close for under $1500. the iMac starts at $1000, roughly comparable to many of the $900-1100 low-end boxes being offered by the big x86 producers.
and, of cource, there's the OS to consider, which is kinda what this is about. in my book, a box shipping with OS X is a huge win over a box shipping with more M$ crap. and i'm talking for people like my mom, for whom linux (or any other non-OS X unix) isn't even a remote posability.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Imagine this scenario:
Mom: I want to have a computer to use the internet, and have Office so I can work at home once in a while.
Son: No problem, I'll get you a nice Athlon and install Linux and StarOffice
Mom: But I need the *real* Office, because the export filters sometimes mess my documents
Son: OK then, I'll install VMWare! You know, Linux is really stable compared to Windows...
Mom: I wasn't talking about 'Doze... I read ./ too, you know ;-) I want OSX. You know it runs Apache and MySQL too? You can even compile bash if you want.
Son: Sorry Mom, but give me *one* good reason why OSX is better and I'll shut up (Buwha ha ha!)
Mom: It has the real QuickTime with the *Sorenson* codec, and you've spent 2 years trying to make it work under Linux.
Son: DOH!
I was thinking about this the other day - in my work i deal with NT4 and Win2k servers and destops but in previous incarnations have worked with supporting UNIX, Novell and Macs and find myself scratching my head over the 'macs suck' line. On my desk here i have a notebook (DELL) a PC (Dell) and a terminal (WYSE Winterm) and they all do different jobs, and thats the thing with macs.
I used to think mac's sucked until i worked on them and supported them - they dont - the G4 is a mind blowing machine for what its intended for - trust me it can and does piss on any wintel or IBM compatible equipment in the fields of Graphics manipulation, Desktop Publishing, video editing and related functions(and dont start talking to me about SGI or such like - i dont call a pro machine priced at $15k US a general use machine and this therefore wipes out AAVID etc - i mean for general business and home use). The mac is exstensively used for web design and graphic work, in advertising it remains king and dont look now but they are still making major sales in the home user market.
Why ?
Think about it - they are user friendly - very much so in fact - need to reinstall the os, then just copy the files onto the hard drive and reboot (this i believe does not hold for OSx - i have a 9600 power mac at home with my pc's but it wont run the latest release), installing most software is also that easy, and configuration of internet and ISDN is so simple it will make most windows people cry (and dont get me started on linux config)
The mac is becoming every day a more attractive platform - the only thing against it is price - in aussie the G3 starts at $3895including a CD-RW drive which does not include a monitor - sure you can bung a standard VGA on it but if you do then you are missing out - the newer LCd monitors apple have are mindblowing.
If the price for these machines comes down to around $2000 with a monitor (or a top end of $3000) then they would become a serious market player (remember this is the entry level - the top end starts at $7699 less monitor (but with the apple superdrive DVD burner) and a monitor starts at $1399
I would buy one at that price - the 9600 i have is going on 4 years old and still shits on my PII 866 with 512k of ram for photoshop work - the OS is not as bad as you may believe and is worth a look
The only issue is that there is limited free software (and warez for all the l33t haxors)on the mac, thats due to the higher cost of developing for what really has been seen as a pro platform, but this is changing all the time as more and more people move into macs in the home market, thus driving things forward. Come on GPL people - money where the mouth is an start developing for the MAC OS under this license. (i think it can be done)
So the next time you dismiss an apple as a toy or dying go out and play with one for a while - you might be surprised and be carefull you may fall in love ! After all this is a company that has been declared dead more times than i can count and they are getting stronger by the day again.
PC User - MAC Lover - Microsoft by neccesity - Open Source by choice - free speach for all - thats my story whats yours ?
PS for all the mac and tech lovers out there you can contact Steve Wozniak (inventor of the Apple i and one of the true hardware pioneers of the PC industry) at www.woz.org or email him on laura@woz.org - a chance to talk to a legend if thats your cup of tea
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
Professionals typically use name-brand computers. The price of a graphics workstation from Apple, Dell, IBM, Compaq, etc. is all the same. You pay a few thousand dollars and up for whatever machine makes you comfortable and productive. Adobe still makes more money on their Mac products than their Windows and Unix products combined, though.
... in fact most graphics applications use Photoshop plug-ins themselves, so the tests apply directly. The shootouts that Apple does with Media Cleaner Pro carry over to MP3 encoding and encryption. Lots of people are buying computers to do those kinds of tasks. Macs are optimized for those tasks throughout the whole system, and getting moreso fast with a major new system update every six months.
... they're all bark, no bite.
Macs are clearly faster for Photoshop (tested by multiple parties, including such Mac-unfriendly sites as PC Magazine and TechTV), but what a lot of people don't realize is that the Photoshop and Media Cleaner Pro shootouts that Apple does are run by scripts that are really the condensed workday of a user. It's not just a few specific tests in Photoshop, it's hundreds of tasks. Every step the user took as they created the movie poster, or transferred the video from tape to the Web. Common graphics tasks like resizing an image are the same in Photoshop or Final Cut Pro or Internet Explorer or Word or wherever
The whole industry is using the same process for their CPU's. There's no magic happening with the P4 except for marketing magic. I know you think you know better, but you're just looking ignorant here. There's a reason why people aren't rushing out to buy P4-based systems
I bought a powerbook to use as a multimedia machine, I use it for light browsing, sometimes to read my mails, watch movies(DVDs) and play music.
I bought MacOSX as soon it was available, I gave up on it, because I had to switch to MacOS9 to play DVDs. So Ill stick to a dual boot of Linux(for work) and MacOS9(for play) setup for a while.
--
If Microsoft is the solution, I want my problems back
But what the hell do I know.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
So often we forget that while WE can search the Internet and find awesome deals here on a video card and awesome deals there on memory, big vendors don't work that way.
:)
Major vendors offer support, they install the options for you and they warrant it against defects. If it is bad when you get it, sure we'll take care of it. You are paying for a service as much as a part. Try going to Multiwave, PCboost, Access Micro and ordering a processor only to discover it is defective. YOU pay the return shipping and wait a couple of weeks to get your replacement part that you paid extra to have shipped in just 3 days (Do I sound resentful? Is it obvious I speak from immediate experience?).
Have you looked around? Untill very revcently most places sold the GeForce3 for about $400 and then you have to install it and make it work. No small feat if you run Win2K and want better than 60Hz refresh.
Go to Dell and look at their 1.8GHz Dimension starting at $869. I chose customize, made no changes and it was suddenly $1687. IBM advertises some of their systems as starting at $999 but I cannot figure out how to purchase one at that price.
Sure, you and I can build a PC for less but that is not who Apple, Dell, IBM, Gateway, whoever is marketing to. You want an Apple with a GeForce3 and more RAM but do not want to pay their prices? Do what you do with a PC, buy the Mac and then go buy your own GeForce3 from off_the_back_of_a_truck.com and your RAM from Crucial and suddenly the prices make more sense.
Just a thought, hope this helps
"There's a reason why people aren't rushing out to buy P4-based systems ... they're all bark, no bite"
...
Well, they are not rushing out to buy Apple system either
The point is that Apple used to have almost absolute monopoly in this field.
Not anymore, and things are NOT getting better for them.
I pawed Attention last night, then she slapped me.
This article is talking about Mac OS X, not the price of Macs. And the BSD guy who wrote the article actually finished with a plea for people just to actually TRY a Mac before they pass judgement, and there are still cats here saying "Macs cost too much". No wonder Apple is opening their own stores. $1299 for a fully-featured, beautifully designed and built 5-pound, 1.3 inch thick notebook computer with 5-hour battery life, CD-ROM, FireWire, the best movie-editing software there is, complete MP3 software, built-in wireless antennas, video mirroring, TV-out, 10x7 display, with a state-of-the-art Unix-based OS with Java2, and there's still a guy out there who can complain that Macs are too expensive. It is quite amazing. What does Apple have to do, come to your house and show it to you in order to get a fair shake?
The G4 PowerBook is one-inch thick and has a 15.1 inch wide-aspect display. It has 5-hour battery life and can take 1GB of RAM. You have to see one to appreciate that it is a brick of metal that you can then open up to see a huge, perfect LCD display. Running Mac OS X, it's the state-of-the-art in computing. You can get one for $2500 and they include a free FireWire CD-burner and printer for that price, too. It looks like a boutique computer, but it is not. Apple's price points are the same ones that everybody else uses, they just don't sell stuff with a bunch of things stripped out.
There are guys here on Slashdot that still drool over old Sun notebooks. Apple's stuff today is a thousand times more advanced than those old notebooks, and they are still Unix workstations if that's what you want.
256 mb for 400 when was the last time you even looked at mac Ram? Get your facts straight before you post.
Dell's $999 offering is a Pentium IV 1.3 ghz, 256 MB RAM. Is that what you would call "low-end"? Sorry, but if you want to make Apple look competitive, the iMac is not the way.
"...my girlfriend and I decided to look for alternative mobile computing solutions."
Don't say that you have a girlfriend on slashdot. You lose a lot of credibility around here.
Perhaps it's their attitude we're steered away from, or maybe it's because we like Athlons. The truth is, the G4 is a old platform, but so is a PIII (you said PII, but nevermind). It so happens that apple only posts tests on Intels, and only tests on photoshop - which is optimized for macos.
I said attitude... Maybe a G4 really is the best thing scince the microchip, but even if it is, it's not Apple's doing. They need to emphisize that. It's a very similar attitude that microsoft takes... 'you do the works, we'll steal it, and get all the credit.' Truth is, Apple isn't a stable company right now, they're way to dependent, on IBM (for PPC processors), and on NVidia (for releasing video cards first).
Perhaps apple is the best for content creation, on the low level, but SGI's are running lower costs now (used machines), and these things run for 3 months uptime overclocked! In fact, on the "max uptime" list on netcraft (which doesn't truely reflect acutal computer uptime, just site uptime) Irix trails Freebsd only. Maybe it's not a coincidence that AOL uses IRIX on their servers.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the new iBook's (which is otherwise a nice, competitively priced computer) crippled video out. On a laptop with a 12 inch screen, it would be REAL nice to run the video out to show 1280 x 1024 on your 17 inch CRT, right? Or maybe drive a high resolution projector for a PowerPoint presentation?
It would be nice, except that you can't, because Apple intentionally crippled the video out so that it will only do 1024x768, even though the video chipset is capable of 1600x1200.
This is deplorable! Why are they intentionally reducing functionality?
Dell makes their top end look good by giving faster and faster chips and more storage, not by crippling the low end.
It has been suggested to me that they don't want to take sales away from the TiBook. Well, if the TiBook looks overpriced compared to the iBook, maybe they should revisit the pricing, huh?
http://www.datamem.com has 512 MB PC133 memory for the Mac (desktop) for $71.00. Don't knock Apple for add-ons when all you have to do is flip down the side of the computer and stick in more RAM. Also the datamem memory works fine with the new firmware.
6EQUJ5, what I am giving you at the present is advice. It could be said that i am a Grammar Nazi Advisor.
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
What's this about BSD fussing about Mac OS X? Who cares if OS X runs soundblaster live or this hardware or that hardware? I don't like APPLE persiod and I'm soley a x86 user. I don't give squat how fast APPLE claims their machines are, my x86 machines are blazing fast enough for me. So, what's this about Mac OS X? Is FreeBSD doing away with x86 or what? If FreeBSD is going forward with Mac OS X and backward with x86 architecture, the hell with FreeBSD, I'll look for different OS that has better support for x86. I'm not about to change my machines for an OS. In my world, hardware comes first. OS follows. So, cut the crap about just making noise with Mac OS X for it's only applicable to APPLE users. Stop saying shit and get on with better hardware support for x86. I almost laughed at this papers headline saying, "tired of soundblaster not working.... blah blah blah... look for Mac OS X" Bull shit, Mac OS X doesn't run on x86 machines and Mac OS X is just as expensive and just as full of bullshit propaganda for APPLE like Windows is for Microsoft.
Chances are you'll never read this, but I'll post it anyway. As far as the extras, I'll concur with you on iMovie and AppleWorks. Software with similar capabilities to the rest is incorporated into Windows2000 or would come with the components I listed (MS Media Player, EZ CD creator with the burner... the DVD player's a moot point since neither system ships with one). So for $300 I get Appleworks and iMovie, a slower processor, and the ability to switch languages easily. That is not a great deal in my book.
RC