Follow-up To Critique of BeOS & Mac OS X

UnknownSoldier writes: "Scot Hacker has posted a great follow-up to his Tales of a BeOS Refugee entitled Reactions to Tales of a BeOS Refugee. (Hopefully everyone involved in implementing 'Linux on the Desktop' will eventually incorporate the best ideas of Be and Mac OS X for smoother usability in Linux.)"

Comments

Re:I would pay for that name...

[cscx]

Hmm... I guess some guy named "Dixon Cox" got offended by all the 'Scot Hacker' comments and modded them all down as Offtopic.

Get a sense of humor, dude.

Progress is in making choices too

[Anonymous Coward]

...and less is more.

Consistency is vital. A `deep' user interface notion is needed, instead of the concept of the user interface as shallow cosmetics.

You cannot get consistency without coordination; consistency, and a deeply uniform structure in all things noticable, limits choice too.

Less is more. Predictable behaviour over in-depth per-widget configuration is required.

You'll never get there by borrowing here and adding there. A larger vision is called for, rather than ad-hock additions of code, no matter how l337 the c0d3 h@x0rZ be.

Re:Progress is in making choices too

[stew77]

ACK.

One of the major points why I don't like KDE is that they don't make any choices but make everything a user decision. Having the menu bar in the window or on the screen top does not result in having the best but the worst of both worlds.

I'd like to remind all the people working on a user interfaces of this quote from the KDE UI pages:Avoid rampant customisation. .. If a user can, by a few judicious choices, really improve the interface, we probably have done a poor job.

Re:Progress is in making choices too

[darkPHi3er]

"And don't start on whether most OSS projects value advice on interfaces. That's the major hurdle to overcome"

while i don't know if that's THE major hurdle, but it is a BIG ONE.

however, the next generation of UI design, as is mentioned in the the parent will have to be deep, as opposed to wide (which is what we have now)

but your target user makes all the difference in the design approach...

right now most LINUX GUI/Desktop installs assume that the user is a geek, somewhere between a newbie and Linus...

as designers, we could ALL do a lot more, even with the current desktops and installs, if we would assume that some users want the choice of a "i'm a complete idiot, make all my decisions for me" , similar to the way that Mandrake and RedHat attempt to do with the base install...and then load up our designs with context-senstive "help for dummies", but well thought out contextual help, that we test against new, non-geek users for value and effectiveness

so, maybe if we stopped assuming in the design phase that everybody wants to be just like us and play around with all the bells and whistles and just bite the bullet and make some complete sets of install choices, it might make it easier for the completely non-geek to use our products????

Re:Progress is in making choices too

[stew77]

ACK again.

Usually I hate themes, they just add more confusion to mostly alreday inconsistent interfaces. But I admit, one of the first things I installed on OS X was Sosumi. OS X however, being the OS I use the most at this time (I still stand to my .sig, it's just that my BeOS box is a couple thousand miles away) seems to be tuned on "showability" instead of usability. I hope Apple listens to its users just the way they did with Dock enlargement (it was standard on 10.0.x but is turned off in 10.1.x) and applies the "form follows function" rule to the OS X UI.

Re:Progress is in making choices too

[stew77]

You are assuming that an interface that is good for the geek is bad for the newbie, and vice versa. This is not neccesarily true. While I am far from calling it the perfect interface, my opinion is that e.g. the BeOS UI is perfect for both sides. Users who don't want to touch any of the OS interiours at all seem to be comfortable with it, while geeks never get the feeling of being interrupted by assistants or other annoying so-called "userfriendly" toys.

The key is keeping things as simple and consitent as possible. Take the common bash with the usual unix tools: It is mostly a very consistent approach, help is available for almost any item with '--help' and you can RTFM with 'man command'. Now imagine how happy your mother (as an expample of the ultimate non-geek computer user) would be if her keyboard had a "help"-key (I know Amiga computers have one that's unused most of the time) that raised a help window that looked more or less the same, no matter what application she were running at that time.

The basic rules of good UI design serve both the geek and the novice. Everyone profits from simpicity, consictency, visibility and predictability.

Re:Progress is in making choices too

[jasonv118]

Wow, I liked that. The only thing I like about BeOS GUI is that it's not in your face... but the face that every CLI app has help automatically and every GUI app doesn't... that's interesting.

Re:Here's an idea

[Shadowlion]

It's not entirely logical, because going to MacOS X requires at least two things: one, it requires you to purchase new hardware, and two, it requires you to use closed-source software (namely, Quartz et. al.).

MacOS X cannot be used on existing hardware, and the hardware required for MacOS X to be used is undeniably more expensive. (You can make arguments that it is BETTER hardware, but nonetheless it is more expensive.)

Further, while MacOS X is based on the Darwin core, which in turn is FreeBSD-derived, much of the operating system is still proprietary, closed-source software. While that may not bother some, others would be greatly opposed to using it.

Re:Here's an idea

[J.D. Hogg]

"Wouldn't the logical solution be "go straight to MacOSX" as it seems perfected already and skip the Linux headache in between?"

Next time Apple releases a new super-duper OS that requires you to buy a new Mac and renew your entire collection of software you bought with your hard-earned cash, I and my headache-making Linux box running on my PII-266 shall taunt you a second time.

Nothing New

[dozing]

I know I'm not saying anything new here so please don't mod me down for being unoriginal, but I am dying for a x86 desktop alternative.

As somone who has been selling custom built computers for at least 5 years and tinkering with Linux and other free operating systems. I become increasingly disgusted when i have to buy a copy of windows forcing my customers to pay an extra $100 for the computer. If only there were an alternative desktop operating system which I felt my customers would be happy with.

Re:Nothing New

[Squareball]

No, I believe what he is saying is that he wants an alternative because there is no viable competition for MS on the x86. Just think how much Coke could charge if there wasn't Pepsi. Or how much McDonalds could charge if there wasn't burger king. If there were an OS that was as good if not better than Windows then there would be a price war. In a price war, the winners are the consumers. So newOS could say "Hey we're only $75 compared to $150 for Windows" and then MS can say "We're cuttin our prices to $70!" and so on. Competition = Good for the consumers.

Re:Nothing New

[Ayende Rahien]

That is what Lotus tried to do, Excel didn't bother to react, and you know where they are today, don't you?

Re:Nothing New

[Digitalia]

Your argument is flawed because you attempt to associate a cheaply produced consumable to an something put out by an "artisan." In the field of software, competition doesn't reduce prices so much as it improves quality. Note Adobe v. Macromedia. Each produces high quality products and competes directly with the other, but the prices are still very high.

Re:Nothing New

[reemul]

Yah, and how many companies are making money or even breaking even doing this? Zero. How long are they likely to be around to pay Linux programmers? Bet you'll be more likely to use a stopwatch than a calendar for that calculation. Services can't pay for programmers, as another almost identical company without them can charge the same or less as the company with coders. Basic economics. Don't any of you zealots want to actually be able to get paid to work with Linux? Where do you expect the money to come from? I like free software too, but I also like to be able to pay my rent.

-reemul

Re:Nothing New

[ZxCv]

Each produces high quality products and competes directly with the other, but the prices are still very high.

The prices are high compared maybe to those consumables the first poster mentioned. But when considered against the usefulness of those tools, the prices really aren't that high. And beyond that, can you imagine how much more expensive they might be if there was only one (and thus no competition) ?

Re:Nothing New

[Reality Master 101]

However, that rule doesn't apply if you put out a shitty product squash competition and name it windows.

Wrong. Windows is not a "shitty" product in the areas that matter, as IBM found out. IBM used to bundle OS/2 and Win 3.1 (yes, 3.1). You had to go out of your way to delete OS/2 and install 3.1. Yet almost EVERYONE did it.

The areas that Windows ruled are:

1) Backward compatibility with DOS apps,
2) Software availability (MS courted developers like anything),
3) Hardware availability

And your ignorance of why Windows is successful is exactly why Linux never will be a competitor to Windows on the desktop.

Re:Nothing New

[Ayende Rahien]

1 & 3 were important factors, but it's 2 that makes a platform into a success.
Having killer applications is something that any platform needs, and MS realized this in a very early stage of the game.
Ms tradionally has been very friendly to developers, both as a tool provider (quite frankly, their developing tools are second to none. For crying out loud, VC++6 is 4 years old, and the only thing better out there is VS.NET.)

Compare that to IBM, frex, which made you pay for OS/2 documentation & help.
It might help understanding why it was Windows and not OS/2 that got the killer applications.

Re:Nothing New

[Digitalia]

And yet, without Windows, you would not be able to use those tools. It is the very platform upon which all of those expensive articles of software run. Office is also very functional, though in a different field. In fact, most specialized applications are very expensive. That was the point I intended to make. The expense comes not from the lack of competition but from the niche-nature of the market. I remember back in the older days of Adobe, and prices really haven't dropped all that much when one factors in the general decrease in cost related to the increasing breadth of the tech market.

Re:Nothing New

[Hes Nikke]

quite frankly, their [MS's] developing tools are second to none. For crying out loud, VC++6 is 4 years old, and the only thing better out there is VS.NET

this is where the MacOS X Developer Tools come in, they may or may not be better then MS's tools (i've only used VB 4 & 5, they sucked) but they are free all you have to do is own a copy of Mac OS X and you have an incredible, and versitle development inviroment, just by inserting the included CD (retail OS X only) or a quick 150 MB download!

they work for CLI and GUI apps, they work with Java, C, C++, Obj. C, and a new one: Apple Script (think of original Basic, just for controling other apps)

i don't think i've worked in an easer development enviroment. if i knew Obj. C, (still learning C++) i could probably build a cocoa app quicker then a Visual Basic app with the same funcionality! :)

Re:Nothing New

[snarfer]

Right. Explain to the masses about how to downoad it, compile it, partition their drive, etc... Right.

The OS has to come on the computer for people to use it. That way there are no driver issues and no installation issues, etc...

This is why it makes such a difference that computer manufacturers are not allowed to put another OS along with Windows on their computers. (That's what put BeOS out of business.)

If Linux or BeOS came on some computers preinstalled and configured, with a few apps, then people would occasionally boot into that partition - especially to run apps that work better in those OSes than they do in Windows. Like music apps on BeOS. And markets would develop.

This is the reason Microsoft paid off so many politicians to stop the anti-trust ruling.

Re:Nothing New

[castlan]

You point out the areas that Windows "ruled", but it seems that you are leaving something out, because AFAIK, OS/2 also has
1) backwards compatibility with DOS apps,
1.5) backwards compat. with Win 3.1 apps,
which leads to 2) software availabity,
3) AFAIK, OS/2 could utilize DOS drivers.

OS/2 was just not a priority for Big Blue, almost an unwanted burden judging from their actions. That more than anything, is not only why OS/2 didn't do well, but why Microsft even exists in the capacity they do today. As talented programmers, MS was still in far too hostile an environment without the unperceptive support of IBM to shoulder their expenses.

As for Today, Linux is hardly in the time where dinosaurs roam... commodity PCs are very cushy for Free Software, and Linux has all of the areas you mention covered in spades.

Of course "Linux" will not compete with Windows, a kernel is not an operating system. GNU is available, and has fulfilled its purpose as being a freely available and functional system for hackers. None of the reasons you mention prevent GNU/Linux from replacing windows.

Until somebody with enough resources and determination makes consistency and ease of use the priority, not an afterthought, then GNU OS will retain it's high level of entry. OEMs also have to be convinced of GNU's marketabilty, which is where the Open Source Initiative is finally making its presence known.

That requires an unacceptable compromise:

[uradu]

buying into a hardware platform that is less flexible than the current x86 standard, is single-sourced, and thus considerably more expensive. If OS X ever makes it to the x86, it will be hard to resist.

-

Re:That requires an unacceptable compromise:

[enrayged]

all Apple would have to do is port Aqua over to *BSD repackage it and sell it as OS X for the PC.

Re:That requires an unacceptable compromise:

[nitehorse]

The flipside of that is that with such a small peripheral/hardware pool, Thing Just Work (TM) on Macs. It's a beautiful thing, my friend.

For example: The X86 platform might be more flexible as to the sheer amount of things that you _can_ do with it, but for most families, it's not flexible enough because it's too technically daunting for them to do the things that they _want_ to do with it.

Macs make it easy. Want to plug in a CD burner? Don't worry, you don't have to open up your case! Just plug in the firewire cord and the power, and off you go. New hard drive? Digital video camera? USB camera? Don't worry about drivers. OS X is nice stuff, and it's a crying shame that non-Mac owners will never get to make it their /home.

-clee

Re:That requires an unacceptable compromise:

[cscx]

I'm sure they want to do that, since Apple has a monopoly on Apple hardware. If you want OS X, you need to buy Apple hardware. Pretty good business strategy in my opinion! Plus Apple hardware is uber-kool anyway...

Re:That requires an unacceptable compromise:

[IronChef]

The flipside of that is that with such a small peripheral/hardware pool, Thing Just Work (TM) on Macs. It's a beautiful thing, my friend.

Huzzah. I wish more people would understand that. The lack of hardware options is, in the Mac context, a good thing... actually, a VITAL thing.

I have 4 "beige boxes" at home and I have a great time fiddling around with cheap add-in cards and other components. It's great. I wouldn't change the flexibility of the X86 world for anything. $30 TV-in card? Sign me up! $50 CPU? I'm there! My $200 BSD box is one of the best computing investments I have ever made... once I learned, the hard way, how cheap is TOO cheap when you are shopping for parts!

At the same time, I would not trade the Apple-led, carefully engineered, exactingly sculpted Mac *experience* for anything. I have a 400MHz Mac next to my overclocked Wintel Frankenputer, and the Mac is where all the real work gets done. Photoshop. HTML. Graphic design. DTP.

The "Frankenputer" of the Wintel world and the "walled garden" of Apple are 2 different philosophies which are largely incompatible. Macs "just work" only because there are no crappy Trident video cards to support... no $10 Fry's IDE cards... no weirdass sound cards... etc.

Not that you can't expand Macs. Of course you can. But I am the first to admit that you have fewer and more expensive choices most of the time. But if that is the price of keeping things "just working," I'll gladly pay it. When I want to have fun wrestling with a computer problem, or building a $200 BSD box, I have several other machines that fill that need.

Macs are a different kind of product. And having variety in the market is good, even if you don't personally want to purchase such a product. Would the world really be better off if Apple was gone and it was down to MS, Linux, Intel and AMD? Of course not. Is your computer room better off without Apple? Maybe. But that's a personal decision, and people who wish ill on Apple are short-sighted.

Re:That requires an unacceptable compromise:

[Phroggy]

and it's a crying shame that non-Mac owners will never get to make it their /home.

you mean their /Users? ;-)

Re:That requires an unacceptable compromise:

[Phroggy]

all Apple would have to do is port Aqua over to *BSD repackage it and sell it as OS X for the PC.

Not quite...

They'd have to port it to Darwin/x86, not Free/Net/OpenBSD.

They'd have to port the Cocoa APIs (mostly already done, just need some cleaning up), and the Carbon APIs, in addition to Aqua/Quartz.

Then, every application would have to be recompiled for x86 (certainly possible to get the major ones to do it, and OSX supports cross-platform FAT binaries quite nicely from what I understand. Major apps would certainly do this; less popular or less actively developed software simply wouldn't happen (many apps will never be ported from Classic to Carbon; many more will never be ported from PPC to x86).

If you think you could just use existing *nix apps with the Aqua GUI on top of FreeBSD, not only are you dead wrong (Aqua doesn't use X Windows so no existing apps would work), but you're also forgetting what has always made the Mac platform great: Mac applications.

Re:That requires an unacceptable compromise:

[Jherico]

The "Frankenputer" of the Wintel world and the "walled garden" of Apple are 2 different philosophies which are largely incompatible.

And the walled garden approach doesn't encourage innovation, doesn't drive down prices till the masses all have connectivity and processing power.

It harkens back to the idea that all computers should be buried in the basements of large corporate offices attended by a small priesthood of skilled engineers.

Making computers idealogically pure is a fine goal and all, but it should be a goal that is in the service of making computers ubiquitous, not making them artistically nifty. And the walled garden approach goes against the the goal of ubiquity in the end.

Brad

Re:That requires an unacceptable compromise:

[IronChef]

Your goal may be ubiquity. For others it is simply utility.

Re:That requires an unacceptable compromise:

[inkswamp]

The flipside of that is that with such a small peripheral/hardware pool, Thing Just Work (TM) on Macs. It's a beautiful thing, my friend.

Don't waste your time. Some people simply don't want to accept that it really does just work. In fact, it's even more fantastic than that. About eight months ago, I bought a (supposedly) Windows-only USB card. I found the company had posted beta Mac drivers on their site. This "Windows-only" card has worked in my Mac beautifully, flawlessly. In fact, I had to chuckle at the instructions because the Windows install required two reboots. I only rebooted my Mac once. :^)

Similar story with my video card. Neither the USB nor the video card took more than 5 minutes to install, and they weren't even officially supported on Mac hardware. Both have performed perfectly.

Some of us know. The rest think they know. Don't waste your breath trying to convince people.

--Rick

Re:That requires an unacceptable compromise:

[jedidiah]

That doesn't even work with Win2K.

What makes you think you're going to get a bunch of x86 users to buy that bullsh*t.

You have a fundemental misunderstanding of how USB works (and probably firewire too). There are plenty of driver support issues there to complicate you "AltOS experience".

It being a Macintosh won't save you.

Now, turning a 2002 desktop computer into the equivalent of an Atari 400 is another philosophical flamefest.

Re:That requires an unacceptable compromise:

[jedidiah]

...except the Apple road has not garaunteed this at all. The like of USB simply aren't that simple. All USB does ultimately is eliminate the burden of doing a rather simple manual task. It doesn't ensure that all devices are supported for all operating systems.

Meanwhile, you can get PC's loaded to the gills with more frills than you could find on a Macintosh. Plug in that first USB device and the PC and the Mac are on even terms.

Except if the PC is running an M$ OS, the external device is more likely to have a driver.

Re:That requires an unacceptable compromise:

[uradu]

> Macs make it easy. Want to plug in a CD burner? Don't worry, you don't have to open up your case!
> Just plug in the firewire cord and the power, and off you go. New hard drive? Digital video
> camera? USB camera? Don't worry about drivers. OS X is nice stuff

USB and 1394 devices are all devices that are pretty much just a easy to get going on Win2K. So far you've extolled the virtues of USB and 1394, not the Mac. Come USB2, and the Mac user WILL have to crack open that stylish case and WILL have to install new drivers. Sure you don't need drivers for many devices--if they get serviced by class drivers, or Apple packed drivers in the box. But for many other devices, don't tell me the Mac just magically "knows" how to talk to them. And also don't tell me that there are absolutely NO crappy USB devices that can foul up even a Mac installation.

Anyway, what I'm objecting to is the hardware platform, not the OS. In the past I've had nothing but contempt for the Mac OS (I was there and sure didn't like it, from a programmer perspective), but OS X seems to be a very different beast indeed. I'm just not willing to expose myself to Apple's temperamental hardware antics.

-

Re:That requires an unacceptable compromise:

[Jherico]

Your goal may be ubiquity. For others it is simply utility.

But utility is drivin by ubiquity. A walled garden is a far more supportive environment for a small minority to push their view of usability on the users of the fruits of that garden.

This I think is demonstrated by some of the debates in the followup article, particularly the ones on creator types and keyboard usability. Mac priest (developers) and their acolytes (owners) have a way of doing things they consider proper and that many migrating over from other systems with greater usability find frustrating.

Yes, I'll give you that your garden has produced a technical marvel of seamless compatibility that the PC world can't match with all of its messy interfaces and backwards compatibility, but this same garden has actually held back the Mac UI from adopting some of the simple usability that wider adoption of the Windows platform has forced Windows to adopt.

Break your mouse on your windows machine and you can still navigate the web, launch programs, write software, write documents and so on. Break your mouse on your mac and you're hosed.

Brad

Re:That requires an unacceptable compromise:

[Davoid]

That would be nice if it were true for OS-X. Sadly, even though OS-X is limited to a relatively small pool of hardware (as compared to the Wintel world) it is even limited to a subset of Apple hardware. Thing Just Work(TM) IF AND ONLY IF the Thing is from a limited subset of hardware... otherwise it is more like Thing Just Won't(TM).

OS-X is in the place Linux was about 4-5 years ago where it was a crapshoot if Linux would work with your existing hardware. The difference is that as Linux grew popular we got the modules and drivers we needed for just about everything. With OS-X we have to hope that Apple will bless us with new drivers for existing and future hardware.

-DU-...etc...

New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff yet

[wormyguy1]

The funny thing I've noticed is that a lot of the BeOS and Linux types are migrating straight for OSX for exactly the reasons brought up in the article. It's UNIX, it's got a great interface, etc, etc, etc. On the other end of the coin, people who have been with the Mac for decades (me included) have yet to migrate over. I have my excuses - no photoshop, and it runs nice and slow on my 3-year old Blue G3. OSX works fine on my Powerbook, which actually came with it installed, but I downgraded as I didn't feel I had enough disk space to warrant running a 1 GB OS. That's another thing... Macs don't age nearly as fast as PCs do... hell, I'm still using a 3-year old 350 MHz box for professional web design, Photoshop and video editing, and it works just fine. Rendering takes a few more seconds, but it's not noticable. As soon as I went over to OSX, it just got really choppy.

While I think it's great that OSX is getting so much new blood into the Mac, power users at that, I simply don't find that OSX has enough to offer me yet. I won't go so far as to say I hate it, as some of my other iPod-toting hardcore-Mac friends have said, it just has a little more way to go.

Re:Here's an idea

[crayz]

Well it took them 17 years to do it the first time, so don't hold your breath.

Re:Here's an idea

[rebug]

Gentlemen, light your flamethrowers.

I don't care if my software is open. Open source hase wonderful advantages, but it's more important to me that software is good. OS X is the best operating system I've ever seen. I don't care if it's closed, I don't care if they had to drive a steamroller through a kitten factory to make it. It's that good.

It's amazing how people will put up with crap software just because it's open source, and denounce great software just because it's closed. Last time I checked, the purpose of open source was to create great software, not to stick to ideals.

Re:Here's an idea

[jockm]

MacOS X cannot be used on existing hardware

I run OS X on my G3 Powerbook. This was pre-iBook. In fact, OS X runs on most G3 macs (and with the right Darwin kernal, it runs on most PCI PPC macs)

Re:Here's an idea

[crayz]

MacOS X cannot be used on existing hardware

That statement makes no logical sense. What can Mac OS X be used on? Hardware that will be released 10 years from now? I wonder how Apple got those screenshots.

Re:Here's an idea

[Shadowlion]

I meant x86-based hardware. Sorry for not being specific enough.

My assumption was that the original poster that I replied to was targeting x86 Linux users in his comment.

Re:Here's an idea

[Shadowlion]

As I said in a different post, I interpreted the original poster's comments as targeted towards x86 Linux users.

For me, the most astonishing revelation ...

[Tsar]

...was that OS X can handle filesizes up to eight exabytes—sorry, I forgot—that's eight exbibytes . More than a gigabyte for every man, woman & child on earth.

Okay, I'm satisfied. Now let's see some ATA10000 drives with that capacity, and I'll finally be able to reload all my MP3's.

Re:For me, the most astonishing revelation ...

[foobar104]

OS X can handle filesizes up to eight exabytes

That's cool and all, if true, but XFS has been able to handle 9 million TB files and 18 million TB filesystems for years and years.

(Can't really handle the term "exabyte" ever since that tape drive company comandeered it. Besides, a million terabytes sounds bigger than one exabyte.)

Re:For me, the most astonishing revelation ...

[Ayende Rahien]

Well NTFS can handle up to 16 exabytes...

Re:For me, the most astonishing revelation ...

[pnatural]

More than a gigabyte for every man, woman & child on earth

that would almost cover my quake3arena installation.

Re:For me, the most astonishing revelation ...

[Dr Caleb]

and I'll finally be able to reload all my MP3's.

Given the theory "An infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters"; with the random noise it has before formatting, the drive should already have your entire MP3 collection on it.:-\

Re:For me, the most astonishing revelation ...

[crawling_chaos]

Given the theory "An infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters"; with the random noise it has before formatting, the drive should already have your entire MP3 collection on it.:-\

But finding a given song would be a real bitch...

It's not like they do this every year

[denjin]

As another poster said, it's been a -long- time since Apple came out w/an OS that made you buy a new Mac.

For most current Mac users, it is only OS X that made them do this, and it even runs on a lot of Macs from at least the G3 line onward (I use it on a B&W as well as my new G4).

Seems like a lot of old Mac users complain about OS X, but I certainly like the fact that I've never had the OS crash yet ;)

Christina

Re:Here's an idea

[Junks Jerzey]

It's not entirely logical, because going to MacOS X requires at least two things: one, it requires you to purchase new hardware, and two, it requires you to use closed-source software (namely, Quartz et. al.).

If OSX truly makes you more productive in your business--and I mean "you" personally and not some generic group--then it's worth the price. Too often poor open source advocates (i.e. students) think that it is worth enduring massive hardship just to avoid spending $1000.

Sure it works on existing hardware!!

[itwerx]

I've got it running on an old 7300 with an XLR8 G4 module and 168M and it runs just fine.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[Anonymous Coward]

As an old time NEXTSTEP and SunOS/Solaris administrator, I was really skeptical about installing OS X on my friend's beige G3 266 Minitower. But, after slapping 512MB or RAM in there, and formatting the stock 9GB IDE drive in UFS, I was amazed at how _well_ OS X (10.1) runs!

This is the equivalent of a Celeron 300 running Windows 2000 pro in 1600x1200 with all the visual effects on. I am surprised that it runs very nicely.

Of course, I am still running openStep 4.2 on a Motorola 68040 25MHz, and it is fine as well. I have OpenStep 4.2 for Sparc on a 60MHz SuperSparc, and it iis quite usefull as well.

it takes my Athlon 1.2GHz to run Win2K reasonably.

Apple and NeXT just made good tight platforms with very solid HW SW integration. Same with Sun and HP on the UNIX side. Bemoan closed platforms all you want, who here does their daily work and surfing on 13 year old HW? I do. How about on 9 year old HW? I do.

Why? Because I use enterprise grade pro-caliber equipment with OSes made by talented people who gave a damn about the concept and execution of Quality. Quality endures. I have a 18 year old Volvo GLT Turbo that has much more character and fun factor than my 2 year old Jeep Wrangler. Why? Quality.

Blah blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

The great usability myth... By the way, I can't seem to connect to birdhouse dot org as his pipe seems to be saturated.

Well anyways, back to the usability myth. I propose that it is just that, a myth. People think something is easy to use because they feel familiar with it, or they "know" how to use it, that's how something ranks high on the "usability" scale. The Mac mantra has always been how easy it is to use... well.. the couple of times I tried to use a Mac it seemed confusing to me and certainly not "easy" Why???? You may be asking??? Because, all I've ever used have been Windows machines and Unix machines. Those are easy to me. But that's mostly beside the point, which is, if usability was so important than why didn't the public migrate to the Mac? Answer, besides the obvious monopoly thingy, is because usability, for the most part, doesn't matter. Period. People learn how to use a machine to do what they need to get done and it becomes easy to do when you know how to use it.

So, you can make Linux the most "user friendly" desktop OS on the planet and it won't matter at all. If you want Linux to matter then you need to come up with a reason for people to use it, a killer app or a killer tool or something along those lines.

Now before you pundits get your panties all knotted up into a bunch, I'm not saying you shouldn't try to design an interface that is consistant and easy to learn, yes, that's important, but it's not the driving force for the public when it comes to using one operating environment over another.

Thank You.

Re:Blah blah blah

[spagbol]

Spot On! It is only a tool. For me Linux kicks butt because it makes my life easier, I get home from work on time and I do not need to reinvent the wheel every year or two. But all I do is administer a corporate database. Good GUI, nice but not necessary.

Re:Blah blah blah

[Phroggy]

You can't sit down in front of an unfamiliar system and judge its usability. You have to actually USE it for a month or so, getting real work done on a daily basis. Most people I know who have done that with Macs love Macs now, because the platform is simply better, once you get to know it well enough.

And by the way, it's the platform that's better, not just the OS. Mac applications work in a consistent way, there are standards for how they should behave, there are user interface guidelines to ensure that everything feels right, and users shun poorly-designed apps (such as Microsoft Word 6.0, which was a direct port from the Windows version and felt completely backwards and strange to Mac users). This is where Apple has the real edge - Mac apps have been following these guidelines for YEARS. Most other platforms don't even HAVE guidelines, and those that do only started thinking about them recently.

An example of application consistency: what's a keyboard shortcut to paste something you've copied? Now, list three applications on the same platform that don't do it the same way.

Re:Blah blah blah

[Tachys]

Nice little speech too bad the article proves you wrong.

In the article he say he tried using Linux on the Desktop for four months before trying Mac OS X.

So he was alot more familiar with Linux then with Mac OS X. But still considers Mac OS X a better desktop.

Re:Blah blah blah

[alexburke]

An example of application consistency: what's a keyboard shortcut to paste something you've copied? Now, list three applications on the same platform that don't do it the same way.

Ctrl+V or Shift+Ins -- both work just fine damn near everywhere. The only app I can think of that has strange pasting is QuickBooks, and maybe other Intuit software. That's it, though.

Re:Blah blah blah

[cpt kangarooski]

Not quite.

Most users are right handed, most right handed users keep their mouse to the right of their keyboard, but COMMAND V can be easily typed with their left hand, regardless of whether their right hand is mousing or not, whereas, SHIFT INSERT cannot, on a typical keyboard.

The quartet of Z X C and V were never chosen for mnemonic reasons; it's their position on the keyboard relative to a metakey, and the behavior patterns of the user that are important.

Re:Blah blah blah

[Jherico]

Most people I know who have done that with Macs love Macs now, because the platform is simply better, once you get to know it well enough.

I dissent. Yes, I agree with you that you have to use a system a little while before you can become familiar with its usage metaphors, and get rid of the desire to fall back patterns previously learned on another system, but the Mac simply does have deficincies compared to the Windows platform.

Its context menu support is spotty at best, and its keyboard shortcut support is abysmal. I've been doing a lot of cross-development between OS X, OS 9, Win32 and Linux lately and the Mac has the absolute worst support of consistent context menus of all of them.

Brad

Re:Blah blah blah

[inkswamp]

but the Mac simply does have deficincies compared to the Windows platform.

Bollocks! This depends entirely on what you're using the machine for. For my line of work, a Windows machine increases work time by about 1 1/2 and I'm not alone in that observation either. Believe me, contextual menus and keyboard shortcuts are almost totally irrelevant. It's bigger than that, and useability is not a myth. Yeah, keyboard shortcuts are great, as long as you can remember what shortcuts do what in each program! Windows shortcuts would be useful if there was any attempt to standardize any of them. And contextual menus have become the developer's crutch on the Windows platform--often I spend ludicrous amounts of time searching for the right place to right-click to find the menu item or option I'm looking for. That's bad interface design and the way Windows works encourages that.

I've steadily been winning over my co-workers (staunch Windows users) by showing them what a Mac can really do and how it can cut our work time down considerably. What you view as "deficiencies" is simply your perception from your biases, none of which you're evidently prepared to challenge.

--Rick

Re:Blah blah blah

[Jherico]

Believe me, contextual menus and keyboard shortcuts are almost totally irrelevant.

I knew someone was going to say this.

They're NOT irrelevant if I want to use them. I don't care if you don't like using keyboard shortcuts. You don't have to. But If I want to use them and they're not there, if there's not way for me to navigate and perform actions without touching the mouse on the Mac and I can on Windows, then that is a deficiency.

I don't know what your line of work is, but I'm a software developer and keyboard shortcuts are my bread and butter for a smooth working environment. I spend most of my time editing text and not even touching the mouse. Keyboard shortcuts make my life easier and improve my efficiency, as they would for many users who spend most of their time on the keyboard and not the mouse.

Brad

Re:Blah blah blah

[Phroggy]

Personally, I'm quite pleased with the support for keyboard shortcuts in Mac OS. They save me time. Yes, there are things I have to use the mouse for - but usually not anything I do frequently, and that's where keyboard shortcuts really speed things up.

If editing text is what you do a lot of, try BBEdit - not only does it make good use of keyboard shortcuts, but if you don't like them, the shortcuts are configurable. Best text editor I've ever seen.

Where does the Mac lack keyboard shortcuts?

Re:Blah blah blah

[Phroggy]

Ctrl+V or Shift+Ins -- both work just fine damn near everywhere. The only app I can think of that has strange pasting is QuickBooks, and maybe other Intuit software. That's it, though.

Telnet in Win95/98/ME doesn't have a shortcut for paste; you have to use Alt-E, P to select it from the Edit menu. QVTTerm uses Alt-V. PuTTY uses right-click. The Command Prompt window in Windows 2000 uses right-click; I think previous MS-DOS Prompt windows required you to select Paste from the Edit submenu of the Application menu (Alt-space, E, P).

Most Windows apps support Ctrl-V, but not all - do you know which ones do and which ones don't? Most Windows apps support Shift-Insert, but not all - do you know which ones? Many support both, a few support neither.

In X, middle-click usually pastes, but some apps are trying to work around the retarded select-to-copy, middle-click-to-paste method, so these apps support Ctrl-V while a middle-click does something else.

Now, find a Mac application in which the shortcut for Paste is not Command-V.

Re:Blah blah blah

[alexburke]

Telnet in Win95/98/ME doesn't have a shortcut for paste; you have to use Alt-E, P to select it from the Edit menu.

Telnet in Win95/98/ME is the most evil, hacked, bastardized thing I've ever seen. It doesn't count.

QVTTerm uses Alt-V.

Never used it, so I don't know my ass from my elbow when it comes to QVTTerm.

PuTTY uses right-click.

PuTTY is a TTY program at heart, which is why metakeys and so on are passed straight through to the other end. Hence the right-click. (Otherwise you couldn't use Ctrl+V to do anything on the remote end.) Hence the name.

The Command Prompt window in Windows 2000 uses right-click; I think previous MS-DOS Prompt windows required you to select Paste from the Edit submenu of the Application menu (Alt-space, E, P).

See my remark about 9x/ME Telnet.

Most Windows apps support Ctrl-V, but not all - do you know which ones do and which ones don't?

It's a foregone conclusion that pretty much all normal apps (not terminal emulation apps, as all your examples have been) support it.

Most Windows apps support Shift-Insert, but not all - do you know which ones? Many support both, a few support neither.

See above.

In X, middle-click usually pastes, but some apps are trying to work around the retarded select-to-copy, middle-click-to-paste method, so these apps support Ctrl-V while a middle-click does something else.

See my remark about 9x/ME Telnet.

Now, find a Mac application in which the shortcut for Paste is not Command-V.

IIRC, The debug window spawned by pressing the programmer's button doesn't support it. ;)

Seriously, though, MacOS has always been really focused on uniformity. It can be a good thing, but it's what keeps most geeks who know what they're doing from taking MacOS seriously. It's simply too limiting for someone who wants to dive right into the OS and customize it to a tee. It simply can't be done beyond a very shallow level.

Re:Blah blah blah

[Phroggy]

IIRC, The debug window spawned by pressing the programmer's button doesn't support it. ;)

MacsBug is not an application, it's a system debugger, and it doesn't support copy & paste as far as I know. Older versions didn't support mouse movement.

Re:Blah blah blah

[Numen]

Developer here also, and for me keyboard shortcuts are vital... I use the mouse as little as possible.

Re:Here's an idea

[cscx]

SAT Test Question:

Closed Source:Filet Mignon::

a) Open Source:Ramen Noodles
b) Log:Bathtub
c) Monitor:Computer
d) USB:FireWire
e) JonKatz:Homosexual

[OT]Re:I would pay for that name...

[cscx]

That's cause I'm not trying to be a troll! I just tell it like it is!

Re:[OT]Re:I would pay for that name...

[newbob]

...but your anti-semeitc rantings are another story.

You may be sick about hearing about the Holocaust--but I'm sick about hearing about the CRUCIFIXION.

Re:[OT]Re:I would pay for that name...

[cscx]

If you're referring to the link in my .sig, I didn't write that. I found it very moving and worthy of linkage, however. :)

Runs fine on my G3 350.

[Genady]

Well, looks like the site is already slashdotted, so I haven't read the article yet, but let me shed some light on a few things.

I'm a UNIX person. I've run Linux, Solaris X86, IRIX (yes I had an Indy) at home. I like UNIX. It's what I do for a living, I'm a SysAdmin.

I LOVE OS X. 10.0.4 blew dogs. It's what came with the new iBook I bought this year. 10.1 is prime time, if not ready for the masses. I recently started a new job and was given my choice between a 500 MHz Intel machine running Linux or a G3 at 350MHz running OS X. No brainer dude. Aqua is hands down the best window manager I've ever seen (I never saw a NeXT machine.) Rendering everything in PDF is just mind blowing, and the ease of application development in Cocoa is equally dope.

Here's the thing though. If you're a hardware hacker it's not for you. Plain and simple, neither was the Indy, or the NeXT, or an Ultra Sparc. There are things you just can't do with workstation class machines that you can with desktops.

However, if you're like me and could give a rip about the hardware and tweeking the hell out of it, well Mac OS X is SWEET! It reminds me of the early days of Linux when I'd download something and actually HAVE TO COMPILE IT! Hehehehe, yes i compiled bash, and the fileutils, and even vim on OS X, no problem at all. And since I can't fiddle with the WindowManager I'm not going insane trying to get the current version of Enlightenment (heh a one word oxymoron there) and all it's assinine libraries to compile. I was always partial to WindowMaker anyway, and here's the upgrade!

Re:Runs fine on my G3 350.

[cscx]

Since you've never used it, you don't know how customizable it is. You can also revert to the 'classic' interface if you want.

Re:Runs fine on my G3 350.

[Xerithane]

Not to start a flame war, but we just purchased a new laptop with XP for my girlfriend and so far XP is USDA Grade A Pure Pile O' Shit.

It's features? Like what? Popping up applications it thinks you need? Like Media player which is worse than that damned paper clip but insists on popping up all the time. Or it's network configuration which breaks any connection it did have (What? No DHCP, oh well.. let me kill your settings and turn it back on!)

As far as speed goes, it's definitely not a speed improvement over 2K (I dual boot 2KPro on my laptop for games) on comparable hardware (my CPU is slower, yet I can do 99% of things noticably faster on 2K than on her XP box.) and as for stability goes, we've already had 3 crashes in which it sends the core file so M$ can figure out why their kernel keeps dumping.

I also hear I'm not alone in that experience. So, glad it worked for you. For me, I stick to my Linux desktop - which is very simple for me to setup. And I'm not blinded by the ugliness that is XP.

Re:Runs fine on my G3 350.

[Pengo]

You should try winXP. Since you have finally graduated from the "my life is my computer" stage. You would most probably appreciate its stability and features. Really, I used to dualboot linux and NT/2k for 4 years. I got XP Pro(for free) and didn't think I would like or even need it. But after using it for a month now, I can say it has NEVER crashed and is now my only desktop OS.


Yup, I agree 100%. I have been fighting my machines for a long time now, dual booting, trying to get different things to work.. unstable this or that after installing this program or that program.. bleah.

I finally went out and bought windows xp home and put it over my win2k/linux partitions and love it. I have an older machine (p130) I use as my home network server and my wife happily uses her g4 w/osx which gives me another full time unix server to play with when necessary.

After discovering Cygwin I have been able to do most of my work related tasks without having to even ssh into my server. I can write scripts and manage my source code (java programmer, yippee) w/CVS and not wack out my code w/CR+LF wack and play all the games I want. None of the new games seem to have a problem and I have normal hardware (tnt graphics card + cheezy integrated sound) that seem to work fine too.

I am ripping dvd's as I type this and divx'ing them. I guess I am just tired of fighting w/my linux desktop. after the thrill of figuring it all out.. I discovered I really just want to play games , surf around and read email... JBuilder runs in anything and now with cygwin it lets me do most of my dev in xp. works for me.

Before you flame me, linux is about choice... to use it or not to use it.

Re:Runs fine on my G3 350.

[Xerithane]

Since you've never used it, you don't know how customizable it is. You can also revert to the 'classic' interface if you want.
You sure can, a nice little slider:

Ugly |-----------o| Abomination to all that is Good and Right.

Re:Runs fine on my G3 350.

[mjpaci]

I like XP. I hate XP's interface and have made my XP box look like a 2000 box. That said, I do like MacOS X's interface better. Why? I don't know. It's a gut reaction. I don't need to justify this to anyone, period. I use my Mac and I get everything done that I need to. The only reason that I am not 100% Mac at the office is that 1) There is no Notes client, yet; 2) Symantec System Center doesn't exist for the Mac; and 3) I support both Macs and PCs so I need both at my desk in order to trouble shoot, test, etc.

--Mike

Re:Runs fine on my G3 350.

[nomadic]

I know a lot of people here don't want to hear this, but XP is not a bad OS. As for your comparisons to 2k, I'm not sure exactly why you're making them; XP is meant to upgrade 98 users, not 2k ones. I'm not sure why you'd upgrade from 2k in the first place.

I also hear I'm not alone in that experience. So, glad it worked for you. For me, I stick to my Linux desktop - which is very simple for me to setup. And I'm not blinded by the ugliness that is XP.

I would have stuck with linux too; if it could actually play games.

Re:Runs fine on my G3 350.

[Xerithane]

I know a lot of people here don't want to hear this, but XP is not a bad OS. As for your comparisons to 2k, I'm not sure exactly why you're making them; XP is meant to upgrade 98 users, not 2k ones. I'm not sure why you'd upgrade from 2k in the first place.
Please read my original post. I did not upgrade from 2K. They are on two different laptops. I have a 2K Pro, she has an XP.

She's been having a world of problems with it, and has since started bugging me about getting a dual boot of Linux on there. Linux can play games, just not all games. But, that's the whole reason why I dual boot 2K on my laptop - starcraft and Counter Strike, and because I'm having difficulties w/ the 2.4.17 kernel and the USB Mass Storage so I'm using it at the moment to update my archos mp3 player.. but I will always go back to linux or BSD. As for XP.. my assessment of it will stand that it is absolute shit. After spending about 4 days trying to get a netgear MA401 802.11 card to work in it to no avail and then popping the same card into my laptop and having it work w/o any configuration changes from my linksys card, I gave up.

Re:Runs fine on my G3 350.

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically you're too lazy to learn the difference between its and it's, and your and you're, and to use them appropriately--I won't mention correct use of commas and the like. Kudos though for actually knowing how to use too, as opposed to to.

To answer you, no, i played with it in a shop, as i said, and didn't take the time to discover that it could be made to look like win2k. Win2k is nothing to write home about either, though. I was hoping that xp would be a step forward, UI-wise, since there has been tons of great research in what works in UIs since even win2k came out. It's a very active area of research, and i was disappointed to see that out of the box it comes with the childish looking UI that it does.

Saying that you have a choice between the childish UI and one that belongs in 1995 doesn't sound like much of a choice to me. I guess I was just hoping for something different from M$, since I do use windows begrudgingly, and was disappointed to see that the microdrones are still pawning off the same old shit. Whatever.

Re:Runs fine on my G3 350.

[ljaguar]

Hear, hear. XP is a piece of shit. Win2k beat xp senseless in all aspects.

Re:Runs fine on my G3 350.

[rabidcow]

I got XP Pro(for free) and didn't think I would like or even need it. But after using it for a month now, I can say it has NEVER crashed and is now my only desktop OS.

If the OS still functions perfectly after a year of patches and hardware upgrades, then I will be impressed. 2k has been pretty stable for me, except for problems that slowly seeped in after about 4 months which I've been to busy to try to locate or fix.

That's the unfortunate part about the system getting more stable, it takes longer to know just how stable it is...

Re:Runs fine on my G3 350.

[nomadic]

Windows 98. You would not believe how many corporate networks still use it. Hell, a lot of places still use 3.11.

Re:Runs fine on my G3 350.

[f00zbll]

I'll second, third and forth that sentiment. I just purchased a new vaio with XP and even though it has some nice features, they are poorly thought out. The networking in XP has improved significantly and microsoft finally realized people use their computers on multiple networks. The new network features are nice, except for remote assistance which in it's current state is just screaming "hack me." Having the mouse over become selection is plain old annoying. Single click no longer works like before and by default expands any folder. There are alot of annoying things about XP, but I'd rather not void the stupid warranty on the laptop until I know the hardware is good(the usual 3 months).

XP isn't a total piece of crap, but it sure isn't an improvement over win2K. Most of the so called improvements are useless.

Re:Runs fine on my G3 350.

[sheldon]

"I guess I am just tired of fighting w/my linux desktop."

Now after a few years you'll give up on cygwin, and then start using better tools and pretty soon you'll be living in a Unix free environment. :)

Re:Runs fine on my G3 350.

[Pete]

Linux can play games, just not all games. But, that's the whole reason why I dual boot 2K on my laptop - starcraft and Counter Strike,

It's interesting that you mention particularly Starcraft and CounterStrike (Half-Life mod), as both of these are known to work well under Linux with Wine. See the StarCraft under Wine HOWTO and the HOWTO on the Linux Half-Life page. I can verify that Half-Life and the Counterstrike mod work fine on my Linux machine. Not that this information is anything particularly new, but if you haven't tried using Wine before, it might be worth giving it a go now.

Hope that helps, :)

Pete.

Re:Runs fine on my G3 350.

[Billly Gates]

"I am ripping dvd's as I type this and divx'ing them..

OMG! CALL THE POLICE AND THE MPAA! WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TO RIP YOUR OWN DVD'S THAT YOU OWN?

THese communists and terrorists are everywhere and the problem is just begenning. Before you know it they will actually except to have the right to do whatever they want on there own computers. We need to ban XP entirely. IT is clearly a circumvention device according to the DMCA.

Re:Runs fine on my G3 350.

[jnana]

You are wrong. Windows XP Home Edition upgrades Win9x (incl. ME), while Windows XP Professional upgrades WinNT/2K.

Re:Runs fine on my G3 350.

[nomadic]

They both upgrade both, technically. The Professional version is simply the home version with a few extras, and I think it was mainly intended to encourage people to buy one for home and one for the office. If you already have 2k deployed in a corporate environment, I see little reason for changing, especially since there will be a 2k server upgrade this year. The kernel might be basically the same, but they're still different lines of software.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[sporty]

Well, its a matter of your hardware becoming obsolete. Yes it runs classic really well. OSX requires a bit.. more. Fortunately and unfortunately. Newer hardware supports OSX wonderfuly. Not sure if its anyone's fault really. Just the desires of having a "really cool" OS.

As for the software thing, give it time. Just like how linux and the bsd's went from a.out -> elf, it takes time.

OSX isn't unfortunately suited to the population of mac owners who can only run classic and need them. Luckily, photoshop isn't my biggest need.. yet. And office is finally out, so I'm happy.

Just think of it as X11R6 with a really neet window mangler ;)

Re:Here's an idea

[SiMac]

People who want to run open source software, people who want to develop open source software, or people who want a nice UI and a UNIX backend are the kind of people who should use OS X.

Some people, such as RMS, don't believe in any closed source software. They can stay with Linux, and deal with the fact that another OS runs all the apps of theirs and more (well, not yet, but people are working as hard as they can).

Re:Maybe BeOS ideas but which MacOS X ones?

[Osty]

BeOS has had a Finder database integration from the start (MS is just catching up with something similar)

I assume you're referring to the pseudo-database format of the befs? Very nifty idea, but it's more fakery than most people realize. Using a full-blown rdbms was too performance intensive, so while initially the befs did have an actual relational database, it eventually became lighter code that had a sql-like syntactical interface. Still very nice, I agree, and it'd be nice to see something similar in Linux.

one of the fastest OpenGL implementation on Desktop PC

For limited types of hardware, sure. When I last tried BeOS 4.5 (yes, I never tried 5), I was lucky that my nVidia TNT2 Ultra card was supported in 2D, and forget about 3D. Maybe Be's OpenGL implementation was one of the fastest software rendering implementations, but that can't hold a candle to proper hardware acceleration, and nVidia is currently the king in that area.

The OS was also ported and SUPPORTED on both PPC and Intel x86.

But not the G* PPC processors, sadly. Which meant that the PPC version was essentially dead, and Be was spending all their efforts on the x86 port.

I agree with your assessment of OS X, and I also agree that there are some nice ideas to be had from Be, but I just want to point out that Be was not the pinnacle of GUI or OS design (yeah, sure, it was good, but it had its share of problems, and quite a few of them). It'd be nice to see all the fancy features of Be on an OS with better hardware support, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Re:Here's an idea

[cscx]

You know, I've bought tons of closed source software, and every day I go to my mailbox and I can't seem to find my bill from Microsoft, asking for my monthly fee for that copy of Windows 3.1 I bought in 1992. Hmmm.... you know, I only recall paying ONCE for all the software programs I bought. Well, off to the mailbox again, I'll see if my Visual Studio Rent has come in.

Re:Maybe BeOS ideas but which MacOS X ones?

[JLester]

What type of machine were you running it on? I just received a new Powerbook G4 (550/512MB) and it runs great on it. Very stable and fast. It has taken me a few days to find out where everything is, but I really like it once I got used to it. I'm a PC user, but Apple really tempted me with their notebook design and the promise of a great GUI on top of *nix. I think they delivered in spades. I've already compiled Apache/PHP4/MySQL on it and have a backup of my main site running so that I can test different things. It's a great combo. Add Airport (which I did) and I can work on development anywhere in and around my house.

To test their claims, I've plugged my digital camera and digital video camera in it and was pleasantly surprised that no drivers were needed and the correct apps popped up automatically. iTunes is a great MP3 ripper and manager as well. My wife and I played with iMovie this weekend and found it to be a great entry level movie editor. It even connects to my Samba server and WinXP desktop with no add-ons. Very cool, everything just works!

Jason

Re:Here's an idea

[Jeremi]

Last time I checked, the purpose of open source was to create great software, not to stick to ideals.

Speaking as a recovering BeOS user/developer, I can say that BeOS is/was great software. But because it was closed source, it is now orphan-ware, getting more obsolete every day. When I to upgrade to a new machine, I most likely won't be able to run it at all anymore, since the new hardware won't be supported. If BeOS had been open source, it would still be a viable OS today, since the Be developer community would have taken over development when Be keeled over. (indeed, they are still trying to do just this, but Palm couldn't care less)

The moral of the story is this: for certain "platform" types of software that require a lot of time/money/software investment from the user (such as operating systems, APIs, languages, etc), one of the most important "features" that must be considered is whether or not the software product will continue to be supportable and developed. You can either make that guarantee by being too rich to ever go out of business (if you're Microsoft), or by making the code open source (if you're anybody else).

Or to put it more succinctly, it's gonna be a bummer for all the OS/X users if/when Apple goes out of business, and drags OS/X down with it. Users of open source operating systems have no such worries.

Re:Maybe BeOS ideas but which MacOS X ones?

[Anonymous Coward]

>> one of the fastest OpenGL implementation on Desktop PC For limited types of hardware, sure. When I last tried BeOS 4.5 (yes, I never tried 5), I was lucky that my nVidia TNT2 Ultra card was supported in 2D, and forget about 3D. Maybe Be's OpenGL implementation was one of the fastest software rendering implementations, but that can't hold a candle to proper hardware acceleration, and nVidia is currently the king in that area.

The blame for the lack of nVidia support in BeOS lies squarely on nVidia. As a member of the BeOS community I begged and pleaded with nVidia to either a) release their register info to Be, Inc., or b) just create the BeOS driver themselves if they want to keep the register info close to the vest. I kept all the emails short and polite, too.

All of that to play... Quake2. Or watch the Teapot rotate at insane speed.

Seriously though, hardware rendered OpenGL support for the nVidia line may have helped the wider appeal of "the little OS that couldn't-quite."

Re:Maybe BeOS ideas but which MacOS X ones?

[Otter]

What type of machine were you running it on? I just received a new Powerbook G4 (550/512MB) and it runs great on it. Very stable and fast.

And which version did she have? I've finally gotten around to installing 10.1 on a B&W 350 and it is a night-and-day difference from 10.0.x. It's gone from unusably sluggish to just perceptibly slower than OS 9, even with the eye candy turned on.

To test their claims, I've plugged my digital camera and digital video camera in it and was pleasantly surprised that no drivers were needed and the correct apps popped up automatically...Very cool, everything just works!

Brother, welcome to MacWorld. You're going to like it here. ;-)

Criticizing OS X

[mushkalion]

I've been following criticism of OS X on slashdot for a while. It seems that people here mainly reject OS X because either it's closed source or the hardware's too expensive.

Well, criticizing OS X because it is closed source is ridiculous. Choose a product based on quality, not ideology. Linux will never gain many mainstream users because of ethics- people will choose the best product offered to them. Granted, compatibility, available software, and conformity may play into this more than some would want, (perhaps explaining why my parents use MS) but it is still a matter of quality.

The cost of the hardware is a valid issue. However, the computers are well built, especially the laptops. If you're obsessed with customizing beige boxes, then stick to a different operating system. But, regardless, stick to criticizing features, not attitudes.

Re:Criticizing OS X

[jslag]

Well, criticizing OS X because it is closed source is ridiculous.

That's your opinion. My opinion is that telling people they shouldn't make decisions based on their personal beliefs is moronic.

Re:Criticizing OS X

[Reality Master 101]

My opinion is that telling people they shouldn't make decisions based on their personal beliefs is moronic.

He didn't say you shouldn't make decisions based on your personal beliefs, he said your personal beliefs themselves (i.e., choosing open source regardless of quality) are ridiculous. Which may disagree with, but it's a perfectly valid point to make.

Re:Criticizing OS X

[uchian]

I am only here challenging one part of your argument - closed source.

There is one very big problem with closed source which open source neatly avoids, and that is the problem of what happens when the original company either stops supporting it, or vanishes off the face of the earth.

Let's take a couple of examples - os/2 and Beos. Without knowing much about either operating system, but from reading the laments of others, if they had been open sourced when the original companies had lost interest, then they would still be alive and in development today.

You may say, and it is a valid argument, that if these operating systems had become a success then they would have been in wider use, and thus wouldn't have been forgotten. Granted, this is true. Now consider the following cases.

Windows 95 and Mac OS 9.

Two operating systems, once widely used. (In the case of Mac OS 9, still widely used). But in Windows 95's case already, and in Max OS 9 it's simply a matter of time, no more security updates will be made. No new minor modifications. People who want to carry on using them, who have no wish to upgrade their hardware simply because the newer versions require higher specced systems, have to live with the bugs on their computer, with no hope of them being fixed.

Now let's take an open source "success", and you may read this however you like - Nautilus. The company that made it, Eazel, no longer exists. Imagine if Nautilus was closed source - what would that mean? Well it's obvious - it wouldn't be developed anymore. It would have vanished into the mists of time. Some people might see this as a good thing. But the truth is, that because it was open source, it still exists, and is still being developed. What it turns into, who knows - perhaps it will be the best software ever, perhaps it will just become more and more bloated. At least it has the chance to find out

This is the nice property of open source - software doesn't die unless everyone loses interest in it, which doesn't happen unless the alternatives are so incredible that they deserve to be forgotten... The fact that it doesn't cost anything is just a bonus.

The bad property of open source is that it places software over the developer, and that we have yet to find an effective way of making sure that the developer does not get left out. but some developers have found effective ways - think Trolltech, for instance. When more companies have successful business models which integrate Open Source software into their philosophy, I think that they will become a very powerful competitor to the closed source models of software development.

Re:Criticizing OS X

[Arandir]

This is the nice property of open source - software doesn't die unless everyone loses interest in it

The corollary being that as long as people have interest in it, it will remain? Funny, the same thing happens with closed source software as well.

Windows 95 isn't dead because people still have interest in it. Only it's name changed. Now it's Win98SE and WinME. What? You meant that Microsoft no longer supports Win95? Well duh! And neither does Redhat support their 4.2 version.

Re:Criticizing OS X

[Woko]

Choose a product based on quality, not ideology

I'll choose a product on whatever terms I like. Quality, price, whether it was made by slave labour, whether it contains real animal fur, etc.

Saying everyone should base a purchasing decision purely on quality is the rediculous statement.

Re:Criticizing OS X

[Skald]

But, regardless, stick to criticizing features, not attitudes.

Rather ironic, don't you think? The bulk of your post concerns itself with criticizing an attitude.

For my own part, I don't hold with your views. Running free software is important to me, and to others; to some people, that sort of criticism is interesting. By all means, choose according to your values. Even criticize other people's attitudes; as long as things remain civil, that's what public debate is about.

But stick to criticizing attitudes, not criticizing people for criticizing attitudes.

Re:Criticizing OS X

[broody]

Choose a product based on quality, not ideology.

It seems muddled Ad Hominem attacks on free software and open source are considered insightful. Your complaints are no different then any other of kind of zealot. Your just demanding the universal evaluation criteria be 'quality' instead of 'freedom'.

But, regardless, stick to criticizing features, not attitudes.

Hmm...

It seems you should follow your own advice. The 'hardware's too expensive' is a valid concern for those who value frugality. Avoiding 'closed source' products is legitimate concern for those who the killer feature is to be able to audit source code for security purposes or customize the products they purchase. For some people 'ethics' (or freedom) trumps the utillity of consumer goods they choose to own. Some just want the right tool for the job and don't care if it has a laundry list of features.

That's the fun part of this wacky life-game. We all play by our own rules.

Re:Criticizing OS X

[Arandir]

If you're a developer, then of course you can go back and fix it. But if you're not, forget about it.

Re:Here's an idea

[TheAJofOZ]

Or to put it more succinctly, it's gonna be a bummer for all the OS/X users if/when Apple goes out of business, and drags OS/X down with it.

Because we all know that Apple is going out of business and all..... Have been for the past 20 years. Sigh, back to being a MS drone because then my OS will *never* become obsolete...

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[jchristopher]

That's another thing... Macs don't age nearly as fast as PCs do...

I'm sorry but that is the biggest MYTH.

One half of Apple's current lineup of computers, the iMac and the iBook (2 computers that I bet make up the bulk of their sales) have NO expansion slots. No PCI slots on the iMac, and no PCMCIA slots on the laptops.

This is nothing more than a stupid, short-sighted attempt by Apple to make the computer not last as long. In essence, your choices become: 1: buy the much more expensive TiBook or G4 tower, or 2: buy the cheap one and it's obsolete, FAST.

Apple has end-of-lifed the video cards used in the first generation iMac - users of those computers are never going to get accelerated video drivers in OS X. If those were cheapo PCs with slots, you could at least throw a nicer video card in there and solve the problem.

And don't bother posting that it doesn't matter that there aren't any expansion slots because "everything comes built in". Tell that to first generation iBook or iMac owners who like to use the iPod - "sorry, FireWire only". Those computers are less than two years old, and already becoming obsolete.

Would you like to have USB 2.0? I will, and I can add it to my 3 year old Dell notebook via a card and it will work fine. The Apple iBook you buy TODAY can't be expanded with a single new tech. beyond what it ships with. Now which comp. is aging faster, the Apple, or the Dell? Even crummy $700 PCs and $1100 laptops have PCI/PCMCIA.

PCI and PCMCIA slots let you add all sorts of stuff to your computer, in effect, "future-proofing" it by allowing you to expand rather than buy a new computer. A computer without expansion options hardly qualifies as "a computer that ages slower than PCs."

P.S. I don't want to hear about how you can add all sorts of nifty expansion option via FireWire. I don't want 5 boxes hanging off my computer.

Re:Here's an idea

[call -151]

Apple being closed source works well with Apple's software running only on their hardware- because there are only so many possible configurations (dozens, not thousands) it is possible for a single company to manage.

For Wintel hardware, supporting the thousands of possible hardware components is probably more than any non-Microsoft company could manage. It consumes a lot of resources and doesn't really impress anyone (whoopee- there's a driver...) Instead, people complain when there aren't drivers. I don't know how much of Be's energy went into supporting so many configs, but even if it was done in the most efficient way possible, it would still complicate things dramatically- both in terms of the install process and the support process.

unix core != interoperability

[S. Allen]

OS X is unfinished to say the least. I was pretty excited when I got a new iMac with OS X to play around with. But when I got around to integrating it into my Linux-base environment, it really fell apart.

NFS support is severely lacking. You can't even count on a command-line mount of an nfs volume. If I try to mount with "mount server:/local /mnt/local", the "/mnt/local" directory disappears. The mount doesn't and you can't unmount without rebooting. There is a shareware program that makes it possible to use NFS, but c'mon folks. This is a violation of some basic trust. NFS should just work.

SMB is nearly as bad. At least you can reliable mount samba volumes. However, it's highly unstable. Changing files on the server will cause OS X to behave unpredictably. Updating an app binary, for example, will cause subsequent execution of that app to fail with bus errors.

NIS? Good luck. Not supported. There is an FAQ for enabling it. But my success with this has been limited at best.

Until they get the basics sorted out, it'll just sit on the kitchen counter as a nice little internet and recipe browser for my wife.

Re:unix core != interoperability

[jankol]

NFS support is severely lacking. You can't even count on a command-line mount of an nfs volume. If I try to mount with "mount server:/local /mnt/local", the "/mnt/local" directory disappears. The mount doesn't and you can't unmount without rebooting. There is a shareware program that makes it possible to use NFS, but c'mon folks. This is a violation of some basic trust. NFS should just work.

The "preferred" way of mounting NFS in Mac OS X is through the Finder - connect to nfs://server/share and you're good to go.

Another way, which is the one I use, is to insert mounts in NetInfo - this makes them show up at boot, though, so this is only for permanent mounts.

Last time I tried, command-line mounting worked fine. That was in Mac OS X Public Beta, however, so things may have changed since then.

NIS? Good luck. Not supported. There is an FAQ for enabling it. But my success with this has been limited at best.

For a Mac-only environment, I'd recommend NetInfo. Not that I know too much about either NIS or NetInfo, though.

One of Mac OS X's greatest problems, as I see it, is that UNIX people measure it with UNIX standards, and Mac people measure it with Mac standards. It is both, and at the same time neither.

Mac OS X is more Mac OS than UNIX, but it is definitely also more UNIX than Mac OS. For some strange reason, certain users from both camps tend to be ticked off by this. Me, I like my Mac, and I like using Mac OS X. Of course I have my own gripes with it, but not nearly enough to stop me from loving it.

Re:unix core != interoperability

[Auckerman]

"NFS support is severely lacking. You can't even count on a command-line mount of an nfs volume. If I try to mount with "mount server:/local /mnt/local", the "/mnt/local" directory disappears. The mount doesn't and you can't unmount without rebooting. There is a shareware program that makes it possible to use NFS, but c'mon folks. This is a violation of some basic trust. NFS should just work. "

And it does. The Mac OS X machine I am sitting at RIGHT NOW has two NFS exports and 3 NFS imports. It does "just work". I guess your problem is that NFS doesn't use the set up procedure that are used to. This is because OS X using NetInfo for all set ups. Try using NFSManager for easy setup with no learning curve, or "NetInfo Manager", which is infinitely more powerful. Ingorance is okay and can be cured, but I suspect you are nothing more than a troll, since you outright dismissed using "shareware tools" and wanted it to work your way.

Re:unix core != interoperability

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, years back I used to dump netInfo (`nidump passwd / > /tmp/passwd.dump` for example) to files which were coincidentally identical to NIS source files. Then you could rcp/scp the file to your NIS master and do a 'ypmake' to push it up into NIS.

I ran a NeXT Cube as my NetInfo master, so I could use NetInfoManager.app as my primary interface. Via the above method, the NeXT fed a Sun SparcStation 10 which was the NIS master. The hosts map dynamically updated internal DNS, adn could be used as an LMHOSTS file on the PeeCees (win 3.1 with Crynwr TCP/IP, when Microsoft was too stupid to believe TCP was valuable).

Thus, NetInfo could easily provide a centralized repository, accessible anywhere on a global NEXTSTEP network with the correct passwrods, yet provide authoritative network information for 4 UNIX flavors and several PC varietals. I think there was some OS/2 in there as well.

So, when M$ asks where to go today, some of us know that Steve, Avie, Keith Ohlfs and the NEXTSTEP community took us there a long long time ago. And most of the crunchy goodness of NEXTSTEP can still be used in OS X by the cognoscenti.

For you SAs out there, to drag adn drop an entire subnet of hosts and have them readdress themselves, remember mounts, shares, and shared printers and all appropriate domain users was a beautiful thing. Can't do that in NT, can't do that with NIS, can't even get NIS+ to work most of the time.

Re:unix core != interoperability

[S. Allen]

I'm glad you found it acceptable to use third party tools to navigate the quagmire that is NetInfo. I did not. It shouldn't be so friggin complicated (setting up a single NFS import in NetInfo by hand takes 5 minutes) and if it is, then Apple should be the ones providing the tools. The out of box experience with NFS is appalling.

However, NFS is only part of the story. There's a lot more to integrating a system than NFS mounts. NIS and SMB are also only pieces of the story. The point remains valid; and that is that OS X doesn't make any of it easy.

Apple set the bar for ease of use a decade ago but seems to have walked away from it since. Any Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, or other un*x distribution is easier to use for network interoperability. If you can't see that then you're blinded by your loyalty to Apple.

Re:unix core != interoperability

[RickHunter]

Ah. So despite claiming that, under the GUI, OSX is a traditional, powerful Unix system, Apple has really disabled all the truely powerful Unix tools? He doesn't want it to work his way, he wants it to work the standard POSIX way. Which, according to Apple's marketing, it should. Its not the setup procedure he's used to, its one that every single Unix machine uses to mount NFS volumes.

Looks like OSX is just a lot of hype, just like WinXP. Guess the consumer software industry will never change.

Re:unix core != interoperability

[moof1138]

As far as NFS goes, there are free utilities (mentioned above) to make this easy to set up. Granted Apple should have included some tool to do a similar thing, but the tool does exist. If you have moral issues with using it, then dig in to the NetInfo man pages, and have fun. Do note that there is a netinfo (3) and a netinfo (8) page. When I need to mount shares I now use the Finder's 'connect to' and enter the url in this form "nfs://host.domain.net/path/to/share/" It mounts just like an SMB of AFP share, making it more Mac-like. I know a lot of people who use NFS mouting and automounting who never have seen any problems, so I think you just need to bear with learning how it works on Mac OS X.

As far as NIS goes, there are tutorials on setting this up (the best being How to integrate Mac OS X in an NIS environment. I have set up NIS on a 10.0.4 system with no hassles (and it survived the 10.1 update fine), so I think you just need to look into it a little more. It is not hard. We still have a Mac OS X system bound to our Sun for testing setups, and it was straightforward to set up. Setting up Mac OS X as an NIS master is a hairy (though possible), if that was what you wanted to do, I would recommend that you just use something else.
Mac OS X's UNIXness has at its core OpenSTEP, which is whhere the way of setting up both NIS and NFS comes from. OpenSTEP used to have a cool NetworkManger.app that made setting up NIS a lot better, though sadly it is gone now. It is a UNIX even if it is a bit weird compared to the rest. To make it behave more normally, you can change lookupd's lookup order to read the FFAgent first, so that all those files in /etc/ will be read instead of NetInfo.

Finally as far as SMB goes, this does not seem to me to be much related to a UNIX thing, since it is a Windows protocol. As far as mounting SMB shares, it is the same as AFP or NFS - use the GUI. I don't use SMB much, but I never saw problems. I expect that if it is broken updates will be coming.

As far as ease of use goes, mounting NFS or SMB share sis really easy, and the rest is not what the typical Mac user would ever deal with. Apple has limited resources, and puts its focus on making core groups happy. I feel it is safe to say that NIS integration is not going to be high on the list.

I do agree that currently on the *NIX side others are more mature, Mac OS X's core hasn't changed a lot since OpenStep 4.2 in a lot of ways, and it certainly needs work. With Jordan Hubbard on board working to get the *NIX side in sync with FreeBSD I think it should mature nicely, and you can always contribute to Darwin if you get a bee in your bonnet, it's open.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a deep breath! You are about to dump core, or something.

You seem to have confused expansion capability with aging, but they just ain't the same.

**As far as being widely useful for getting work done** Macs last longer than PCs. That is what I believe the other poster is talking about.

As far as Mac OS X and its interface, its nice that people used to generally weak interfaces think it is so great, but us long time Mac users are suffering a severe downgrade with Mac OS X and it Just Isn't Worth It for most of us.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[Geekboy(Wizard)]

iMacs are aimed at Joe-I-just-wanna-browse-the-damn-web. They don't even know what a PCI card is, let alone know how to install one.

I just bought a Powerbook G4, and that has a type I/II PCMCIA slot. But since the Powerbook has a 56-k modem, and a 10/100/1000-baseT ethernet slot already built in, what would you put in it?

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[scrod]

I'm sorry but that is the biggest MYTH.
Gee, I guess that must be why those iMacs and iBooks have decreased little in price despite the fact that newer models have been continually introduced since then.
Sorry, but that's the truth. It's your choice whether or not you want to accept it. Sure you can whine and complain about the lack of expansion, but you'll still be wrong.

Re:Here's an idea

[cpeterso]

Apple has been successfully going out of business for about 15 years.

Re:Here's an idea

[TheAJofOZ]

Because we all know that Apple is going out of business and all..... Have been for the past 20 years.

and in reply:
Apple has been successfully going out of business for about 15 years.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry..... God I hope that reply wasn't serious.

Re:Here's an idea

[Don Negro]

The BeOS guys were always predicting Apple's demise.

It ain't gonna happen.

They survived 1996, which was an absolutely hellish year. If they can survive that (lost 1 billion in a quarter) they can survive anything. Apple makes money, their business is self-sustaining. If they sell the same number of macs every year from 2002 til doomsday, they can go on designing new machines and updating the OS. Hell, the place is run by NeXT guys, who were profitable before the buyout even though they had no real userbase.

In addition, they have a huge pile of cash in the bank. Apple will be around for years to come. They have a unique value to add to personal computers and won't ever have a problem finding someone to buy their product.

Now, if Steve leaves and another Michael Spindler takes the helm, all bets are off, but assuming current management practices, Apple will be just fine.

Re:Here's an idea

[Chris Johnson]

Well... nobody who drives a steamroller through a kitten factory gets MY business! :o

Apart from that, hear hear. Know what I care about? I care that my software is open. Photoshop is not 'my' software, I just bought some and use it. I do not have the power to make people like that share their work, even if doing so would help me and help society in general. I just have power over what I do, particularly over what I code up myself.

I'm mac based, so quite a lot of software I use and enjoy is freeware. Of this, very little is truly open source- the most significant OSS to me that I use is Mastering Tools, which was written BY me. That's not so wrong.

Re:Maybe BeOS ideas but which MacOS X ones?

[JFTaylor]

Having been a long-time x86 person (well, after I retired my amiga), I was intrigued about OSX from the "hype" I read on websites and thought it best to check it out. Before recently, Mac hardware has been the yuppie computer dream for the most part, considering how much Apple charged for the things. But now, they are affordable, and they are more accesible than they ever have been in the past.

I get the distinct impression you are a long time mac user who really wants his/her old Mac to stay "just the way it is" forever. I have met many of them since I bought my macintosh, and I can't say that I blame them. I was reluctant to move to a new machine (much less a new OS too), but I am glad I did. Sure OSX is a hog sometimes, but I never expected ultra zippy performance with my GUI (if I did, I'd run Win3.1 on my Athlon 1ghz). The interface is by no means sluggish on my machine, even when it had only 256mb of ram (something that is fast becoming the bottom rung of the ladder even in the Microsoft camp.)

The UI is customizable, as customizable as Win9x/2000 were without third party add-ons. I don't see this as a setback.

I don't understand why you criticize apple's design process as if you were a developer on the OSX system, but if you insist, so be it. I don't find ObjectiveC all that difficult to handle (C++ has ALWAYS been overrated as a panacea for things it was never intended to be, but that's another thread.)

There is support for ATI Rage cards and G3's, but ATI Rage cards don't have hardware acceleration support any longer. You act as if there is a black screen on everyone's ATI equipped macintosh or something.

Tell me, how many Voodoo drivers have you seen for Windows lately? I'm sure there's limited support for them in XP (never checked), but Voodoo cards aren't that old. ATI should get with apple and try and support their cards. I have had orphaned video cards and sound cards on the Intel side of things, and I know it sucks. Apple should be scolded for not trying harder to support these cards, but I am guessing it is a result of their age.

I am not saying apple's perfect, but OSX is very good. Better than a bitter person like yourself gives it credit for. Wait for the next MacExpo announcement and pick yourself up a G4 Quicksilver for half price. That's how I got my G4. I haven't regretted it yet.

Most Mac users aren't regretting OSX. It's helping Apple immensely. And anything that can take a bite out of the Wintel juggernaut should be applauded.

BTW, I run OSX on a 19" no-name monitor....looks fine, fits perfectly. For $200 you can trade in your 12" screen too. *GRIN*

Re:I really would like to play with OS X...

[WildBeast]

Look, they already tried and they failed. It may seem like nothing to you, but designing an OS to be compatible with thousands and thousands of different PC hardware is kinda hard.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[Jeffrey Baker]

I'm constantly swapping PCMCIA cards in and out of my Powerbook G4, so I know it is useful. First, I have to use a Cisco aironet card for 802.11b because the airport implementation in the Powerbook G4 sucks shit. Range is horrible with the built-in antenna to I use the Aironet.

Second, I have to use a SCSI controller because the Powerbook has no SCSI port, and I have a lot of SCSI peripherals (that I mainly bought because Macs used to come with SCSI ports...grr). My scanners are the essential things here but also removable storage. And no, I can't just haul off and replace all that stuff with 1394 gear.

Third, you have to use the PCMCIA card if you want a modem that works with Linux. I guess you could use a USB modem, but let me know when you get that to work with Linux and for someone who goes on the road a lot it is too painful to carry another box.

Re:Maybe BeOS ideas but which MacOS X ones?

[chairmanKAGA]

As you probally know you can program Cocoa in Objective C++, which doesn;t mean you have access to any C++ Cocoa librarys but you can use your old, crummy C++ syntax with it if your afraid to learn objective C. I had the same fear at first but then I decided to invest 3 hours into learning Objective C and ta-da, I'm now *also* and objective C programmer.
What are you going to say 30 years from? "Where is my C++!! it's all I will ever learn!"
Face it, C++ is crap compared to Objective C and I can see no reason a competent C++ programmer can not learn Objective C and *real* object oriented programming.
C++ isn't the end all of coding. In fact, it's a very poor language.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[Phroggy]

Right there with ya on 9.2.2; I like the UI better, and it supports my printer. I dual-booted for awhile, but when I realized many of my apps were still running in Classic and the native apps didn't run better, I switched back.

I would use OSX anyway, if I didn't also have a Linux box that I can ssh to.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[tswinzig]

That's another thing... Macs don't age nearly as fast as PCs do... hell, I'm still using a 3-year old 350 MHz box for professional web design

This is a nice way of saying, "I can't upgrade my 3-year old Mac because Apple's hardware is too expensive." Right?

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that's laughable, try posting something that's anti-linux in slashdot and watch the rabid dogs come after you!

Your "open source" essay on AOL...

[newbob]

...is one of the best things I've read in a long time.

I've long maintained that I had nothing against Linux (or MacOS for that matter). What I do have a problem with is Linux and Mac users.

Re:Here's an idea

[Silver222]

Stallman wouldn't be caught dead using Linux. You see, he uses GNU/Linux. When he isn't using the HURD, which was going to be revolutionary about 10 years ago but is more of an ongoing joke now.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[sporty]

That's the biggest problem with OSX sadly enough. The memory foot print is kinda.. huge. But then again, risc programs have the unfortunate problem of being a little bigger. So the whole PC 128 megs of ram doesn't compare well with a PPC with 128 megs of ram. Hell, with 256 it runs like a dream. With 128, it was running quite well none the less. I just couldn't open mozilla and use finder very well :)

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[fiftyfly]

I think we've kinda missed something here. If your needs never change then neither does the usefullness of your hardware - PC or MAC or, heck, Amiga. If it works, it works.

If, on the other hand I now have a need for newer software, different hardware etc, then the question of life span becomes more important.
In this case, though - the statement "Macs last longer than PCs" is clearly BS for the reaons stated in this parent's parent.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[wormyguy1]

Actually, it's a way of saying that I've spent tons of money upgrading my G3/350 (New hard drive, new video card, 512 MB of RAM), and there is no reason to warrant buying a new machine right now, except to run OSX. Yes, Apple's hardware is very expensive, but not only do I like my Mac better, but if I wanted to upgrade a Windows box to the point where it had what the Mac came with standard, I'd be spending ALMOST as much money. Make that money difference the cost of running a (by my opinion) superior OS, and it's the same amount of money. Except for OSX, my 3-year old machine isn't old enough to warrant buying a new machine. I can run Photoshop REALLY well, I can play Quake at 50 FPS, and I can even run Final Cut at an acceptable level.

Re:Maybe BeOS ideas but which MacOS X ones?

[jonknee]

I will bet that he's never used X. He probably doesn't even own a Mac. He's just one of the typical Windows-Using-Mac-Bashing-Even-Though-They've-Neve r-Used-One-Before people. I suspect this because: A. It runs great on my G4 400... if he had any dual cpu system it'd have to be twice as fast as this one. B. He's insane if he thinks X needs a 22" screen. My 17" is pumping it out great. The cinema monitors are great, he may have saw one at the Apple store and thought it was needed because of the 128x128 icons they used on it. C. Ram's cheap but you still dont NEED 512. I was running it with 192 just fine until i saw how cheap it was. If you can afford Dual CPU's howabout 50 bones for RAM? What do you think? btw I am compiling MySQL and PHP tonight... FUN!

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[Foamy]

No, I think that is a way of saying my 3 year old B&W G3-350 gets all my work done just fine. Period.

I too have a B&W G3-350 and I can attest to the fact that it runs everything I use it for (web, email, web design, PHP, mysql, etc) just fine. I bought it 3 years ago for 1500.00 and am 100% satisfied with my purchase. If I hadn't gotten a G4 TiBook from my work, then I would still be using the G3-350 as my daily driver... now it is a server and testing box for my websites.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[atlasheavy]

Ok. As irritating as it is, I am going to have to do a point by point rebuttal here. Sorry in advance.

Point One half of Apple's current lineup of computers, the iMac and the iBook (2 computers that I bet make up the bulk of their sales) have NO expansion slots. No PCI slots on the iMac, and no PCMCIA slots on the laptops.

Rebuttal And this is bad why? The vast majority of people in the world out there DO NOT upgrade their computers. EVER. I worked at a computer repair firm for two years, and I would guess that not more than a quarter of PC users actually get new cards installed into their computers. This, contrary to what most people on slashdot feel, is not a limitation for the vast majority of users. Here, think of it like this. Most PC users, when they're adding new stuff to their computers, will get things that can be plugged into serial, parallel, and usb ports. Not PCI. Not AGP. Not (god forbid) ISA.

Point This is nothing more than a stupid, short-sighted attempt by Apple to make the computer not last as long. In essence, your choices become: 1: buy the much more expensive TiBook or G4 tower, or 2: buy the cheap one and it's obsolete, FAST.

RebuttalAnd this is different from those microtower Dells, Compaq iPaqs, etc, in what way exactly? Furthermore, with laptops, what the hell is the point of a PC card slot on a laptop that has video out, firewire, usb, 10/100 ethernet, AirPort (802.11b), and a 56k modem built-in? I actually just bought a TiBook 3-4 days ago (it's still on its way), and I don't have any notion of what I'll actually use the PC card slot on it for. I've been using an indigo iBook for the last 14 months, and I am currently replacing it only because I am starting to find the screen size limiting (it's a pain to use Project Builder and Interface Builder in 800x600 pixels).

Point Apple has end-of-lifed the video cards used in the first generation iMac - users of those computers are never going to get accelerated video drivers in OS X. If those were cheapo PCs with slots, you could at least throw a nicer video card in there and solve the problem.

Rebuttal Ok. OS X is big. It's a dog on anything less than a 366 MHz G3 with at least 128MB RAM. The original iMac (the bondi blue variety) has a 233MHz G3 processor, and came with 32 mb RAM. The average person is NOT going to run OS X on that thing. They'd be absolutely nuts to do it. Apple knows this. That's a big reason why they will not bother writing accelerated video card drivers for the bondi iMac. No one would use them (or at least they shouldn't). If these people really want to run OS X, they should sell their Bondi iMac off for $350 or $400, or whatever they go for, and pick up the $799 iMac.

PointAnd don't bother posting that it doesn't matter that there aren't any expansion slots because "everything comes built in". Tell that to first generation iBook or iMac owners who like to use the iPod - "sorry, FireWire only". Those computers are less than two years old, and already becoming obsolete.

Rebuttal Ha. Yeah right. I hate to break it to you, but if you can't afford to pick up a new computer every two or three years (the iMac will be 4 next August, and the iBook came out ~one year after the iMac) there is no way in hell you could afford an iPod. The iPod is a toy for those with too much money. Don't get me wrong on this, I'd love to have one, but there's no way in hell I can afford one until I'm out of college (I bought the TiBook because it'll serve a definite purpose. besides, I bought an AVC Soul Player a year ago). These people aren't going to go out and spend $400 on the iPod unless they could afford a new computer anyway. Besides, it doesn't matter, since everything comes built-in anyways, right? ;-)

Point Would you like to have USB 2.0? I will, and I can add it to my 3 year old Dell notebook via a card and it will work fine. The Apple iBook you buy TODAY can't be expanded with a single new tech. beyond what it ships with. Now which comp. is aging faster, the Apple, or the Dell? Even crummy $700 PCs and $1100 laptops have PCI/PCMCIA.

Rebuttal Yet people continue buying iBooks, with their 400 Mbit firewire ports that have devices available for the port today. What idiots! Can you even buy a USB 2.0 card yet? By the way, take a look at your P.S. statement. Hell, I'll quote it here. P.S. I don't want to hear about how you can add all sorts of nifty expansion option via FireWire. I don't want 5 boxes hanging off my computer. But wait, you still want 5 USB 2.0 devices hanging off your computer? I'm confused. It must be because I'm one of those gullible anti-windows mac users (I'm typing this on my self-built coppermine-core system running XP pro right now.).

Point PCI and PCMCIA slots let you add all sorts of stuff to your computer, in effect, "future-proofing" it by allowing you to expand rather than buy a new computer. A computer without expansion options hardly qualifies as "a computer that ages slower than PCs."

Point I just did a search on Micro Warehouse for pc card, and as you can see, basically everything listed is a wireless ethernet card, an ethernet card, a modem, or a usb controller. I HAVE ALL OF THOSE THINGS BUILT INTO MY IBOOK. Jeez. About the only thing I would find useful to buy for a pc card slot would be one of those pc card hard drives (that ibm makes). Even then, I'd rather just burn a cd with the built-in burner. More people have cd-rom drives than pc card slots. Furthermore, let's take a look at the cards I have in my PC right now. 1. An ATI Xpert 2000 (AGP 4x). 2. An SB Live (PCI). 3. A Linksys 10/100BaseT Ethernet card (PCI). 4. A firewire card. There is really nothing else that I am planning on ever adding to this computer. Sure, there are a lot of people out there who need second monitors, but none of them would buy an iMac anyways. They wouldn't be served well by a 15" monitor. The iMac is a consumer machine. The iBook (supposedly) is too (although most business types would probably be fine having one). The Power Mac G4 is a professional machine. Same thing goes for the Powerbook G4. You don't hear people complaining that their Dell Dimension 2100's won't let them install a burner inside the case. If you did, you'd probably ridicule them for not buying a higher-end machine.

You know what, I will go on using my Apple laptop, my Intel/Microsoft desktop, and the god-awful Sun Blade 100 I get stuck using at school, and you can go on using whatever you want to. We'll just call it even.

minor quibbles

[jd142]

Two comments from the articles stuck out at me.

The first was copying and pasting in Linux. It has gotten *much* better in Mandrake 8.1 Gaming, where I'm at right now. I use KDE, so as a test I opened up Nautilus, copied the text from the address bar and pasted it into both vim and emacs, which would seem to be a pretty good test. With KDE, don't know about gnome, you even sort of get 2 clipboards. If you select text, you can paste it with the wheel or middle button. At the same time you can ctrl+c some other piece of text and ctrl+v it in, effectively giving you 2 clipboards.

The other was using special characters with umlauts in Windows. I believe it is true that Windows itself doesn't support the simple ctrl+U, U to get an umlauted U, but I would swear you could do that in Word and maybe even Wordperfect; I'm not in windows right now, so I can't check to see if my memory is correct, I could easily be wrong. Not the same thing as having the os handle it so that the keystrokes work in things like a command prompt window or in notepad, but still close enough for most people.

Other than that, a lot of the comments seemed to be along the lines of "this matches/doesn't match the way I prefer to work." Unfortunately there is no optimal way for all people to work efficiently. We can talk about mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, etc., but a lot of it comes down to personal preference and whatever the user is accustomed to.

Re:minor quibbles

[HerrNewton]

re the high-bit character handling: yea it's fine for *most* people most of the time, but the first time someone tries to use crtl+u to get in umluat in, say, Quark for Windows (which is evil anyway...), they notice the discontinuity.

Re:minor quibbles

[Anonymous Coward]

Copying and pasting in linux is a mess. First, in order to paste in VI you have to be in insert mode, and if you are copying code, make sure that you have :set noai... else you are gunna be fscked.

Second, Try cutting and pasting between the following applications: gnome, kde, an X app, java, a console, and any other apps you have lying around. Oh? What? It doesn't work consistently? No way!

OK, now try this: get out the gimp. Copy a selection. Paste into a KDE, java, or CLI application. What? It doesn't work? No way!

Yep, that's right folks, cutting/pasting DOES NOT WORK correctly in linux. I haven't tried in a while, but it MAY work in KDE/Gnome (not at my work machine to tell you), but until every application is Gnome/KDE-ized, and every application works well between KDE/Gnome, then it is complely useless.

This is not a flame, this is not meant as a downer to linux. i love linux and I love OSX, but don't piss on my leg and tell me its raining: linux still has a LONG LONG LONG way before it will be even 1/2 as good on teh desktop as OSX/Mac (and despite its configurability it is not as good as Windows even!).

Re:minor quibbles

[jd142]

Well, I did try to copy and paste between Nautilus (a Gnome app), and GVIM (which is pretty close to vi and also a gnome app), Konqueror (which is definitely a KDE app), konsole, plain generic vi (The insert mode is a feature of the app, not of the os and it works this way if you run vi for windows as well.) within a konsole, xterm, and xedit and it all worked. That was from within KDE using the KDE default copy and paste method: select with left button to copy and click with middle button to paste. That is as consistent as it gets. Select then middle button. Worked everytime in every app. Go an app you'd like me to test?

Yes, I was referring specifically to text copying and pasting, I should have made that clearer. But what I said still goes: text copy and paste works across many different kinds of apps under KDE. Don't know or claim to know about Gnome. But the apps don't need to be "KDE-ized" for the select/middle button to work.

You are correct, the clipboard doesn't handle other data formats correctly at all. They need to work on that. You also can't select a file in Konqueror (as a file manager) and then paste it into a different directory in Nautilus. This doesn't seem like something a lot of people would want to do though. But I will give you the graphics objection.

Re:minor quibbles

[Ayende Rahien]

What about something other than plain text? I doubt that plain text copying has changed in the last couple of years, or that it was hard to get it right the first time.
But on Windows, you can copy *structured* text, tables, etc, with no difficulity at all.
That is much more impressive than merely a text copying.

Re:minor quibbles

[jd142]

you can copy *structured* text, tables, etc, with no difficulity at all

Try copying a table from Microsoft Word into WordPerfect. Both support tables, right? It's a pita.

The data gets put on the clipboard, but there's still no guarentee that the app will be able to correctly handle the data. I haven't done a lot of tests, but generally if you are talking about intra-app (within an app) c/p it works fine in both win and lin. It is only when you are looking at inter-app c/p that you run into problems, sometimes on both platforms.

Re:minor quibbles

[ZigMonty]

The first was copying and pasting in Linux. It has gotten *much* better in Mandrake 8.1 Gaming, where I'm at right now. I use KDE, so as a test I opened up Nautilus, copied the text from the address bar and pasted it into both vim and emacs, which would seem to be a pretty good test.

Congratulations, your preferred OS has the ability to copy and paste! Trying not to sound like a troll but other OS's seem to have no problem with it either and haven't had a problem with it since the mid-80s.

I know these UI problems aren't a fundamental problem with Linux and look forward to its continued improvement.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[ZxCv]

It's a dog on anything less than a 366 MHz G3 with at least 128MB RAM

I was first running OS X on a 266MHz G3 with 192MB RAM. Since then, in different steps, I upgraded the CPU to a 300MHz G3 (mainly because it has 2x the cache that the 266 does) and the RAM to 768MB. The heftier CPU helped a little bit, but the real noticeable difference came with the big RAM upgrade. With OS X, you need 128MB just to get the OS up and running and useable. Consider running any applications and that memory requirement goes up fast. When I upgraded the RAM, I no longer had to deal with the slow UI responsiveness that I had with the smaller amount of RAM. So I'd definitely say that OS X will run just fine any pretty much any speed G3-- as long as there is oodles of RAM for it to consume.

Mouse mapping.

[saintlupus]

I'm posting this from Mac OS X using OmniWeb. I've been using my brief Christmas vacation to get my home machine running just the way I like... this is the first time I've seriously tried to avoid using Classic or booting into Mac OS 9.2. There's just one thing I can't get working.

I have a three button mouse on my iMac, and I can't find a way to map the buttons to anything other than the default! The left button is "click" and the right button is "ctrl-click," which is fine. But on OS 9 I map the middle button to "option-click," and I can't find a way to do that in X. Does anyone have any ideas?

--saint
(before you ask, option-click switches to the application whose window was clicked on while automatically hiding the application that you just used. It's a great time saver, and I want it to work quite a bit. Not enough real estate on a 15 inch iMac monitor, you know?)

Re:Mouse mapping.

[banky]

This is, apparently, a bug of sorts. Hardware support is something that people are constantly bitching about. Near as I can tell, this sort of thing will come "soon", where "soon" is defined as "at some point in the future, before the heat-death of the universe". Who knows?

I have an entire list of rants about the mouse and keyboard in OSX. The keyboard is lame, it doesn't really perform well, and the mouse is useless; its like no one at Apple ever thought, the initial users of OSX are going to be the faithful who already have a ton of hardware they like. No one ever uses the goddamn hockey-puck for more than an hour, for example.

The other problem is: who exactly should fix the extra buttons? On OS9, IIRC, my MS Optimouse was configured by the MS driver, using what I assume was an extension API provided by MS. Given the serious changes in OSX, does it mean Apple has to write the new drivers, or is it once again MS's job? and if the latter is true, has Apple even published the specs/APIs sufficiently to allow them to do so?

Re:Mouse mapping.

[90XDoubleSide]

Which brand of mouse do you have? The only manufacturer that has currently written drivers for Mac OS X is Kensington, unfortunately they just make good trackballs and average mice. If you have any other brand of mouse, Mac OS X will fall back to the generic USB mouse driver which supports left and right buttons and a scroll wheel, but not any third, fourth, fifth, etc. buttons. Also note that the right button is not control-click, it is right click; all OS X applications support two button mice (you can see this in the keymappings in Q3A, for example).

The solution, of course, is to have you and all your friends e-mail the manufacturer until they get off their lazy arse and write some drivers. You could also go over to the Mac OS X feedback page and suggest that they add support for configuring additional buttons, but it really is the responsibility of the manufacturer to write a driver for their product if the default one doesn't support all it's features (after all, the OS 9 mouse driver only supports one button).

BTW, I use the Logitech Cordless Optical Mouse, which is a simple cordless with two buttons and a scroll wheel that therefore doesn't require a special driver. It's also cheaper than the 3-button version and fits my hand better.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[krmt]

Once upon a time I would have agreed with you on the idea that Macs have longer lives. Back in the day, I remember my friends having to get new PC's very frequently in order to run the latest stuff. My Mac Plus and IIvx, on the other hand, served me for five years with only minor expansions (hard drive and RAM) each.

Now that processors are so fast though, and RAM is so ubiquitous, most people don't need much faster machines. Bandwidth tends to be the key limiting factor in what people can do, especially now that CD burners are so cheap. My Pentium II is going on in to its fourth year right now, and it hardly feels aged when I don't browse the game isles :-) Aside from adding some more drive space and a burner, there's very little I've done to it.

I think PC's, in general, have reached a point where they all have longer lives. Most people are still very productive with Win95, and until recently they could run everything they wanted on it. I think once upon a time Macs used to have the longer life, which made them a much more worthwhile purchase, but now that PC's have surpassed what people need they've switched to features, like firewire. I think the above poster is right to mention expansion. The capability to add a firewire card to an original iMac would add some extra life to the machine.

Usability a myth? No, just misunderstood

[Catiline]

Well anyways, back to the usability myth. I propose that it is just that, a myth.
Look here, let's get something straight. When the marketing people talk usability, what they're talking about is the learning curve. And there are several ways to turn a learning curve into usability 'statistics'.

One is the very bottom of the curve: with the most idiotic of users. How easily is it to sit down at a strange system and understand it? No one will argue that new users understand a GUI metaphor far better than the command line-- it takes a brand new user training in understanding the CLI metaphor. For most intents and purposes, then, a UI can't be considered 'usable' until it's graphical.

The next two criteria seem to be at odds with themselves most of the time. The first is how error-friendly the system is: for example, can the system tolerate an error in case? For the Linux CLI (Bash most likely) the answer is no (And yes I know there's an option in Bash to change that but it's not enabled by default- which is what matters to a new user)- compare to DOS, which doesn't care at all. In this particular instance, DOS is more usable. But to turn the tables, Linux/Bash has command line completion, which helps prevent typing errors. However, you can't have your UI out-guess the user-- never let it push the user in the wrong direction.
Complimenting error tolerance is how much power is available- how many options the user can select from at once. This is again a balancing act: give the user too few options and you give them no power, and yet if you give them too many at once they will not be able to determine the ones they want to choose. Nesting options helps, but may add to user confusion (that is, it only helps if done in a logical manner And I don't consider the way Windows does its' menus logical. Why is the dialog for changing file associations nested under the View menu? (This is from memory, I'm in Linux)).

There are other things to consider, I will pass them over for the sake of brevity and to mention the way I would measure usability- being a programmer and not a marketroid. My measure is height of the first learning plateau. On any learning curve, there are plateaus- level-- or nearly so-- periods with little to no learning. Having a low first plateau on your curve means that the user will feel comfortable with some very limited parts of the system, yet have far more to learn to be able to manage it all at once. The "best" (most usable) system would employ a UI metaphor that enabled the first plateau to be as high as possible. This is more true with GUIs than a CLI (compare launching a new program-- from a brand new users' point of view) as well as more true of Windows than Linux (compare program installation- with Linux I still hunt dependencies often).

People think something is easy to use because they feel familiar with it
Without a doubt, the portion of usability that most lay persons bandy about is indeed familiarity, but that isn't too limiting a factor. Sit an aveerage Windows user down at a Mac and let them browse the web- you won't get that many questions. (Probably just "Why does this mouse only have one button?") Sit them down at the Mac and give them a reference book- they'll be able to use it quickly. (I assume, knowing the converse is true, that they will read the book.) The problem with the transition is that in each system the baseline skills are the same-- beginning users have no problem transitioning-- but the power users would flounder. Keyboard shortcuts differ. Mouse command keys differ. The control panel on each system works differently. And so on.

What I'm saying here is simple. Usability is not a myth. Having differed with your introdcution, I agree entirely with your conclusion.
...it's[usability] not the driving force for the public when it comes to using one operating environment over another.
Nope. It's marketing. Joe Sixpack drinks the beer his favorite sports star does, wears the same brand name clothes his favorite TV/film star does, and uses the Operating System he is told to on his favorite TV channel. Once Linux registers on his radar at all, then it has a hope of really making it onto the desktop (getting a "respectable" percentage like Mac- as a Linux advocate I'd settle for 10% in a heartbeat! At least the Mac registers on the major software developer's radar). From there, who knows? And I won't prognosticate about that day at all- because I can't even tell if it will come in a year or in a hundred years. I just hope that the revolution comes before computers get outlawed.

Re:Maybe BeOS ideas but which MacOS X ones?

[ZxCv]

Well until the G3, they never used the G* names in marketing their chips. Using this logic, its pretty clear that the poster meant G3 and above aren't supported.

Please, no...

[krmt]

Just think of it as X11R6 with a really neet window mangler ;)

Oh no! Didn't we just have this discussion?

once again, where are the good ideas?

[roffe]

I'd like to reiterate what I wrote earlier in a similar thread which some moron scored down to -1.

I think people have had enough of user interfaces that are based on the twenty-some years old ideas that Windows, MacOS, Gnome and KDE are based on.

Where are the attempts at trying to create somehting exciting and radical?

It's hard enough to convince a Windows-user that MacOS makes you more productive - the interfaces are so similar that it's possible to approach both MacOS and BeOs with a Windows-infused mind and miss out all the good stuff. It's possible to build a user interface that is both obviously different and obviously better - even with Linux, but it seems to me that the Linux community lacks the competence. I would like to be proven wrong.

Re:once again, where are the good ideas?

[SPrintF]

One of the first rules of a good UI is: don't surprise the user. Believe it or not, a lot of people don't want "exciting" or "radical" changes in their UI, because it would be confusing and create training issues.

Don't forget that the purpose of a UI is to help get stuff done. Adding eye candy or exciting widgets doesn't necessarily help that.

Although, like you, I feel the current "desktop" metaphor is limited, I haven't heard any useful suggestions of what could replace it. Perhaps the real limitation is not in software, but in hardware. What could replace the current monitor/keyboard/mouse configuration?

Re:once again, where are the good ideas?

[Jeremi]

It's hard enough to convince a Windows-user that MacOS makes you more productive - the interfaces are so similar that it's possible to approach both MacOS and BeOs with a Windows-infused mind and miss out all the good stuff.

Correct--and that is a good thing. Time spent learning a new interface is not productive time. Most productivity gains can be had these days by making the standard (and well-known/understood) UI metaphors smarter, so that more things "just work" and don't require futzing around or technical knowledge to use... not by reinventing everything just for the sake of doing so.

It's possible to build a user interface that is both obviously different and obviously better

Is it possible? Are you sure? Can you point to any examples? Ones that people actually like to use, as opposed to 'interesting proofs of concept'? It's easy to wave one's hands and say "things ought to be better", and it's possible to write a user interface that is radically different from the standard one we have now (people occasionally do this), but I have yet to see an alternative user interface that is "enough better" to justify requiring everyone to re-learn how to use a computer. Hell, we can't even get people to use Dvorak instead of Qwerty, let alone getting them to give up an interaction paradigm that took many of them years to learn...

Re:once again, where are the good ideas?

[statusbar]

But the original GUI that came out was "Exciting" and "Radical". So if people followed the rules you specified then we wouldn't even have any GUI.

I would love to see a new "Exciting Radical" change in user interfaces instead of just rehashes and tweaks of existing ones. That could possibly be the "Killer App" for linux, if everyone just stopped trying to copy existing technologies.

--jeff

Re:once again, where are the good ideas?

[roffe]

Time spent learning a new interface is not productive time.

It is if the new interface actually makes you faster. I address this issue in another slashdot article: Much more is known about user interface design now than ~ twenty years ago when the MacOS first arrived.

Can you point to any examples?

Again, no, and that's a pity. But please read my previous article - I think the questions you pose are answered there.

Re:once again, where are the good ideas?

[roffe]

Are you talking about rules that I specify here? Which rules are those?

Re:once again, where are the good ideas?

[statusbar]

One of the first rules of a good UI is: don't surprise the user. Believe it or not, a lot of people don't want "exciting" or "radical" changes in their UI, because it would be confusing and create training issues.

Re:once again, where are the good ideas?

[roffe]

Oh. I thought I made it obvious that that's not what I mean by exciting and radical. By radical, I mean something that is rooted in more recent ideas than the popular paradigms, not radical for radical's sake. By exciting, I mean something that feels good in actual use, not something that's got a lot of colors and sounds.

With a risk of repeating myself, a good user interface is familiar, but that does not have to mean familiar compared to other user interfaces, which seems to be a very common misconception. Rather, it means familiar in the sense that it is rooted in the experiences and the world of the user.

But pretty please, with cream and sugar and a cherry on top, go back to my original article, I think it adresses the issues you are touching and it lists some very interesting reading matters.

Re:once again, where are the good ideas?

[statusbar]

I was referring to the message that I replied to (here). My 'Original GUI' note referred to XEROX, not linux.

Your article was very good.

--jeff

Mac OS X and metadata

[Tachys]

I wonder if apple is planning on making the default file system in Mac OS X to be UFS. This could help reduce costs on FS development. This does not mean the death of metadata. TrustedBSD is working on giving UFS extended attributes and ACLs. So maybe Apple could use those for metadata

Re:Mac OS X and metadata

[90XDoubleSide]

The current problem with UFS is that most classic apps only understand HFS/HFS+ partitions; i.e. many will not even run if they are on a UFS partition, or they will not be able to save or read files. This is the primary reason why almost no one is formatting their OS X disk in UFS yet, mostly just people running servers. UFS offers some substantial performance gains, however, so as soon as Photoshop 7 is out, many may make the switch.

Apple might therefore switch the formatting on new Macs in 6 months to a year. It is always tough to decide between performance/features and backwards compatibility, after all, it is nice still being able to run most apps written for System 0.0 in OS X :)

Re:I really would like to play with OS X...

[WildBeast]

well, Apple failed time and time again.
what development cost? their whole OS is based on someone else's code.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[DavidRavenMoon]

That's another thing... Macs don't age nearly as fast as PCs do...

I'm sorry but that is the biggest MYTH.

One half of Apple's current lineup of computers, the iMac and the iBook (2 computers that I bet make up the bulk of their sales) have NO expansion slots. No PCI slots on the iMac, and no PCMCIA slots on the laptops.

My last Mac was a 1997 PowerComputing - PowerCenter 132, which was a Mac clone. It came with 16 MB, 1 GB, and a 132 MHz 604 PPC. Since then I upgraded it to a 500 MHz G3, 192 MB and a 9 GB SCSI drive. And except for a USB card, I never installed any PCI cards in it.

I'd say that's a pretty good lifespan for a computer, and i think most average users don't add any cards to their computers anyway...

I do have two PCI cards in my G4, a SCSI card and a M-Audio Delta sound card ... but most people wouldn't need those. I wanted a Cube, but had to get the G4 tower. If a user knows they will need PCI, then they wont buy an iMac.

My brother has a 266 MHz iMac, and has no need for expansion, since the iMacs have USB already, he has his Zip drive, Epson printer, Umax scanner, floppy drive, etc. all hooked up.

Also it's ATI who writes the drivers for the video cards, not Apple, so they are the ones that are not going to support the older hardware for OS X.

True, and worse is:

[Dog and Pony]

The fact that Apple drops support for anything replaced by something new faster than you can say "obsolete". Thus trying to force people to switch to the new stuff, and pay moeny for it. One of the many ways they try to make you pay again and again.

One of many examples I have is when we moved a working environment recently to a new set of boxes, and thus needed licenses for them. We were running in WebObjects, one of Apples products (and a damn sucky one at that, can't scale at all and is just bloated, but we haven't had the time to replace it yet). Our version was 4.5.1, which was replaced a couple of months ago by WO5. Only way they will sell us any license at all is if we buy MAC OS X, In which WO5 is bundled. So right now we are running on borrowed licenses, effectively making us pirates. We are not running on OS X, thank heavens, we run Solaris, and we don't want to waste the time porting to WO5 although a relatively small procedure (or so they say). We would, however, want to pay money the honest way. We'll see.

This same story, with variations seems to be true all the way, with both hardware and software from that company. Not to mention that they are double the cost for the same, or less punch. I'd stay very, very clear of that company if I were you.

Was it just recently that microsoft finally dropped their support for windows 95? After how many years? Now that is taking care of the customers. And the Linux world will of course never ever have such problems. :)

"Linux just has no feng shui."

[Animats]

That's the most concise statement of the problem I've ever seen.

Re:"Linux just has no feng shui."

[Spazntwich]

Of course, it also might just be a lame attempt at karma whoring!

Re:"Linux just has no feng shui."

[ShmakDown]

yup, sums it up exactly

Re:"Linux just has no feng shui."

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, this may be a karma whore (don't bother to register, post as AC, and you don't have these problems ;)), but it *is* a surprisingly concise explanation.

See, turns out Feng Shui isn't *just* about empowering your office. It's a damn big set of rules for consistency.

I was watching a documentary a while back, about the reconstruction of a classic bridge in China. There was some argument, as the site zoned for the bridge violated Feng Shui- it was north of a public lavatory, rather than south, or something like that. A trivial complaint, and construction continued, but the important thing is that, in Imperial China, you knew which way to run if you had to go!

OSes benefit from that level of consistency; UIs benefit if the consistent solution is the optimal solution.

Re:Here's an idea

[dhartshorn]

Your taunts are pretty faint, from where I sit.

Mac OS X runs fine on older Macs, including my (former) 9600/350, which dates from 1996 and is not even the oldest model (9500/8500/7500 circa 1995) that runs OS X. The price for these is right, too. $300 should do you just fine, especially if you're replacing that tired PII.

Anyone telling you that you have to pitch your software collection is full of crap, too. Some classic apps even appear to run faster on OS X/Classic than on Mac OS 9.

My cash is as precious to me as yours is to you, and I'll bet your PII replaced another machine. Even if you stay well behind the bleeding edge, upgrades cost money, take time, and are generally worth doing. Why should someone else's upgrade be a cause for taunts from you?

Now that is plain lying.

[Dog and Pony]

it takes my Athlon 1.2GHz to run Win2K reasonably.

I've run w2k on boxes from an old 200 MHz and up with no serious problems. Granted, on the 200 MHz, it was slow when opening lots of applications at the same time, but only stepping up to 400 cured that more or less completely.

Now I run w2k on two boxes, one 500 MHz, and one 1 GHz, and I don't really see the difference. Unless I start up photoshop and a few other heavy apps of course - but really, how does the old Mac behave then?

One thing worth noting is that it will behave a lot better if you give it at least 256 MB to work with, instead of just 128 which strangely enough seems to be some kind of standard out there when buying computers (or getting them from your employer hehe). But it seems you need that to run Mac stuff too, or more, if I read the above correctly.

From what I have seen you need pretty late (and very, very expensive) boxes to be able to run OS X at all, not to mention smoothly, but I have heard that it has been a little better lately. I won't really judge that, only your grossly incorrect statement about windows. That is trolling.

Re:FreeBSD desktop

[jasonv118]

To the user, FreeBSD looks like Linux with much less hardware compatibility. Oh, yeah, and stuff doesn't work when you install it. But I still like FreeBSD, and ABSOLUTELY agree about the incompatible versions of Linux. I just don't think FreeBSD is ready for the desktop.

So?

[Dog and Pony]

I have similar experience with a 400 MHz Intel box running w2k. Although I didn't need to upgrade it with all that new stuff, apart from some memory. So I don't see what the big thing would be? That is, of course, from promoting your personal preference. :)

The basic difference

[jasonv118]

Linux is where it needs to be. Hardware support and a robust kernel. KDE is where it needs to be. Spiffy, nice toolkit (thought Trolltech always makes me unsure...), usable, getting better all the time. It even anti-aliases all the fonts on my brother's computer! (Doesn't work on mine). GNOME is where it needs to be. I would add anti-aliased fonts (like in KDE) and beautify the toolkit (a la Aqua), but nonetheless a great environment. Mandrake is where it needs to be. Easy to install, does everything for you, takes you by the hand when you want to do anything. The huge problem is the enormous difference between XFree86 and Quartz!!! XFree is a sluggish system, that doesn't support all the cool stuff that Quartz does, like its vector graphics, PDF thingie and alpha transparency. You guys want Linux on the desktop? Then EVERY DEVELOPER, go and work on Xfree for the next 3 months. GUT IT. Make it as good as quarts, and you've got a Windows killer. I'd do it, but I know next to nothing about graphics :( Just my 2 cents.

Re:The basic difference

[jedidiah]

This is a nice idea in theory.

However, if there aren't WinDOS users defecting in droves to get to use Quartz then there there really is no point in expending an excess of energy cloning it.

2003 will be the same as 1983: All that matters is the apps. People don't care about spiffy features, cool multimedia hardware, or a easy user interface. All they want to run is their app (or game) du jour.

If the Amiga or the Mac couldn't win the market in the era of DOS, a spiffier Mac is unlikely to make a significant dent now.

Sadly enough, the world just doesn't work that way. The competence of Apple's advertising agency is simply more relevant than the quality of their system software.

Re:Here's an idea

[alexburke]

I don't care if they had to drive a steamroller through a kitten factory to make it.

Where the hell did you get that line? It's priceless! :)

Consider it stolen. ;)

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[rabidcow]

OSX requires a bit.. more. Fortunately and unfortunately.

How is an OS that uses more processor power fortunate for the end user? The extra features are definitely a benefit, but I don't see how extra requirements are.

Go to an Apple Store...

[Stenpas]

If any of you guys are close to an Apple Store, then get out of the house and drive to one and see how slick the hardware and software is for yourself. If you're reading slashdot, then you're bored and have no excuse why you can't. The slashdot crowd can swear ten times over that MacOS X is the greatest thing out there, but you aren't going to get what they mean until you use it for yourself. If you're like me without an Apple Store nearby, a Circuit City will do, but the experience will suck a lot more.

I spent quite a bit of time using it at the local Circuit City here. It's no Apple Store, but it's decent enough for my needs. I just need a computer with MacOS X on it, and no one to pester me. It's PERFECTLY useable on Apple's low end machines. Just make sure you have a bunch of ram and you'll be fine. The interface didn't take too long to learn. The most confusing aspect of it was what the red, yellow, and green buttons at the top-left corner of every window are. If you can learn what those are, then you'll do fine with the rest of the OS. The thing that really struck me as handy was the one click to all the system prefs you could ever need. It's just right there on the dock. Click, and it comes up. Can't get much simpler than that.

The software Apple bundles in is pretty slick too. iTunes is great stuff. The visuals are awesome. But then again, how hard can it be to make an easy-to-use MP3 program? I haven't seen one yet that wasn't common sense to use. The MP3s included are pretty good too. iMovie is incredible stuff. There was a camcorder already attached to the iMac when I got there. I don't think those guys at circuit city would care enough to install drivers and such. Thank god it just works at the mere action of plugging it in. But anyway, I recorded just a bunch of customers walking and I went to edit it with iMovie. I have never used it before, and within 5 minutes I had created a movie that looked awesome. Well, as awesome as it could look. Customers walking isn't too entertaining.

I guess I'm a firm believer that technology should be simple to use. It is to be there to assist you, not to work against you. To that end, Apple's the best. Taking complex technology and making it easy enough for the average person to use. It's the reason why people bother purchasing macs. It's not like they're faster, or that they get the latest and greatest in software first, and it's certainly not price or that it's the latest trend. It's because they do what is advertised. They just work.

A couple other notes: judging from the front page of Apple's website, I think MacWorld is going to be big. Very big. You can catch the live webcast on Janurary 7th on Apple's website.

Re:I really would like to play with OS X...

[WildBeast]

couldn't care less, Apple's OS doesn't meet my needs.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[Auckerman]

"This is a nice way of saying, "I can't upgrade my 3-year old Mac because Apple's hardware is too expensive." Right?"

ZIF upgrades, PCI upgrades, daughter card upgrades can be bought for ALL PowerPC's Apple has ever made, and MOST (90%) can be upgraded to a G4 without buying a new machine, and the remaining can be upgraded to G3's.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[sporty]

Its quite fortunate for Apple. Imagine all the old computers that must be phased out. Remember the whole era between OS 6 - 8? If I remember correctly, a lot of computers became.. obsolete. Wasn't that the time the PPC came into play? I am quite sure it wasn't Appple's intention to write an OS that requires 128 megs of RAM minimum, but think of all the profit it brings to this smaller computer company.
Unfortunately because it forces others to upgrade. Hell, I had to upgrade my G4 to 256 megs ram and now to get office for OS X.

Esscentially, they created a need, which forces users to spend a little more. I was a little suspect of this type of behavior and waited a little longer until OSX was actually out to get my mac. So Apple earned $1650 or so out of my pocket.

A fair trade for a really good machine, with a good OS from a company that's not doing as well as.. others.

Re:Here's an idea

[melatonin]

Or to put it more succinctly, it's gonna be a bummer for all the OS/X users if/when Apple goes out of business, and drags OS/X down with it. Users of open source operating systems have no such worries.

Isn't it better to enjoy what you've got then to live in fear of what might happen?

If you love Linux, great. I don't. I love my OS X box. Apple going out of business? You really want me to worry about that? I haven't worried about losing the Mac in the last 10 years. Apple always had enough cash in the bank, and in the case if it does tank, someone will pick it up. The Macintosh is one platform that will not just fade away. If the tools I use can no longer fulfill my needs, I'll move on to different tools. I'm not going to worry about the company making them going bankrupt.

Duh.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[jedidiah]

Actually, there are a few winmodem chipsets that are supported by Linux these days. Like with any AltOS (including Win2k), you merely have to acknowledge the fact that doesn't have the characteristic of "it runs everything" that Microsoft's flavor of the month does.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[jedidiah]

Technology changes over time. Nifty new things get introduced. If Apple manages to forget something, or merely succumbs to progress, then you have to trash and entire system when a single expansion slot might save you from this.

Now one might argue against the complexity of opening up a desktop system. However, there is simply no excuse for this kind of narrow minded shortsightedness on a laptop.

Ironically enough, this mentality locks the end user out of using traditionally Mac-only type of hardware (consumer SCSI devices).

There's nothing to do!!

[jasonv118]

If you're an operating system development guy who is working on a Windows killer, don't move to OS X... there's nothing left to be done.

Re:Here's an idea

[jedidiah]

Have fun replacing all of your payware.

Although, this is something that you're probably used to anyways.

This talk of "quality" is gibberish. You need what you need, not some self-proclaimed guru's notion of what you need.

Yes, this means that for a great many people a mangey desktop crafted by volunteers is more relevant than your beloved Apple.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[rabidcow]

Its quite fortunate for Apple.

Of course it's good for the hardware vender, they get to sell more stuff, and it's good for the software developers because they don't have to work as hard to support the older hardware.

So is that your point? Fortunately for Apple it requires a better computer, but unfortunately for the users they won't get as much work out of older systems with it? That's fine, but why should we concern ourselves with what's good for Apple?

Re:I really would like to play with OS X...

[jedidiah]

...actually, it's painfully easy.

The hard part is getting the world of hardware vendors to work on your behalf.

They would be expending their resources to make your product more valuable with little prospect of reward.

In this situation, there is some value to an OS that is "owned by everyone". The exchange of labor doesn't seem quite so lopsided.

Re:FreeBSD desktop

[jedidiah]

Back in the days before Redhat 2.0 I was willing to shell out the ~$400 for Solaris or NextStep x86. Microsoft OSen were really crappy in those days and I was anxious for an alternative. I was willing to "fork over" for it despite my relative lack of money then.

Yet it was Linux that won me over first. All that it achieved was supporting my common hardware (IDE disks, SB cdrom, SB soundcard). Solaris and Nextstep were SCSI only.

Linux also had some wider name recognition from it's Amiga and ST ports. I had heard of Linux even before buying my first PC.

Why we should be concerned.

[sporty]

My point was it was fortunate and unfortunate. :) But why should we be concerned? To answer your question (briefly)....

What to care about
Apple is no Microsoft. There is no perpetual motion of upgrades and contracts for Apple like MS has.

How Apple is making us care about them
Mind you, there are, but think of the home users. MS has such a strong hold. Apple is simply pulling a Microsoft, except they are doing it in my opinion, a nicer way. Apps in OSX and Classic will work the same, mostly without the Classic emulation. And even then, there is good support for complete backward compatibility with it.

Why care at all
We find such ways to combat MS, perhaps we should also find support for Apple, IMHO. A similar thing to care about is that the DJIA is back to 10k. The same reason applies to the WTC attack. Do you care that DeCSS has been found a freedom of speech? Perhaps, perhaps not. The entire mp3 revolution?

Maybe the concern isn't for you. Like microsoft. Point being, if you don't care for MS, Apple's existance, whether or not you like Mac's does affect you. After all, Apple hold's 5%. Linux, .5%, BSD some other amount. If you care less, kudos to you. :)

Did you go as far as to educate if you are concerned.

it's business, not technology

[markj02]

The debates over whether Linux, OSX, Windows, or BeOS are technically better are roughly like the debates over whether Ford or General Motors make better cars. There may be some differences in technology, style, and quality, and there may be some preferences, but they are basically the same mode of transportation. There is no technology in any of them that is fundamentally ahead of the technology of any of the others, marketing departments notwithstanding. Most of the differences are a matter of taste, not some deep insight that one group had and another one lacked (in particular, all the features Hacker likes in BeOS had been considered by other OS designers--and rejected).

The real distinguishing factors are not the technology, they are the business positions. Windows comes from a wealthy, ruthless monopolist that knows how to generate a steady revenue stream by controlling APIs and formats. OSX comes from an upscale vendor with a valuable brand name and stylish design. Linux comes from a large group of volunteer developers and has a DYI flavor.

And BeOS? Well, BeOS came from a small company that failed to sell to its one major potential client and somewhat predictably went out of business. That's the reason why most developers wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole, no matter what its technical merits may have been.

Re:it's business, not technology

[Jayzz]

So if it's all marketing, would you buy any car without considering anything because they are all same? I don't think so. As you said, "There may be some differences in technology, style, and quality, and there may be some preferences". These are what make people choose one over others. So what is wrong with concerning these things? You said in particular, all the features Hacker likes in BeOS had been considered by other OS designers--and rejected What were the reasons for them to reject those feature? The fact some guys considered and rejected some ideas does not mean the ideas are generally bad. You should consider the context of the decision. Windows dev guys have known their API sucks, that's one of the reasons why they try to push .net. But they still chose to keep the API so far, that's because they put priority on compatibility over better development environment. That's why they made Windows 95. Unless you give me some reasonable explanation why those features are undesirable, just saying "some guys already knew and didn't use them" is not so convincing to me.

Re:it's business, not technology

[MHV]

The real distinguishing factors are not the technology, they are the business positions.

Prithee sir, I guess you are missing Scott's point here. BeOS's architecture has (had?) strong departures from Windows's or OSX's. Think about the virtual database at the core of BFS, and the benefits it gives for searches: indexing files each time a file is written, working with attributes instead of extensions or commentaries. Same for pervasive multithreading and servers (Hurd, anyone?) I'm not techie enough to argue on what's better what's worse, but for some points, BeOS vs other OSes is just simply apples and oranges; it's not only a matter of marketing strategies. Anyone would like to argue that Hurd and Linux are roughly identical technologies with different brand names? I would rather not...

Re:it's business, not technology

[markj02]

Prithee sir, I guess you are missing Scott's point here. BeOS's architecture has (had?) strong departures from Windows's or OSX's.

And my point is that Scot is confused if he uses Windows, OSX, UNIX, and Linux to represent the entirety of past thought on OS design. If BeOS has a feature that isn't in those systems, it doesn't mean that the feature is new, it usually means that the other systems left it out for one reason or another.

Think about the virtual database at the core of BFS

Well, that's a particularly silly example of a departure since NT has had the same facilities for a number of years. And they have been in many operating systems prior to NT. The fact that they are not widely used suggests that they are less useful than they appear on the surface.

Re:it's business, not technology

[markj02]

I'm not saying all operating systems are the same. I'm merely saying that the differences between those specific operating systems (BeOS, OSX, Windows, Linux, UNIX) largely comes do marketing, quality, and business issues. In terms of functionality, limitations, and technology, they are pretty similar to one another as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Here's an idea

[Ayende Rahien]

> and OpenGL hardware support

They got that right, at least.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[jchristopher]

Furthermore, with laptops, what the hell is the point of a PC card slot on a laptop that has video out, firewire, usb, 10/100 ethernet, AirPort (802.11b), and a 56k modem built-in? I actually just bought a TiBook 3-4 days ago (it's still on its way), and I don't have any notion of what I'll actually use the PC card slot on it for.

Suggest you re-read parent post. The whole point of the PC card slot is for FUTURE technologies. Yes, the iBook has built in ethernet, modem, and Firewire. But what happens when you want some NEW technology? Out of luck.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[jchristopher]

If a user knows they will need PCI, then they wont buy an iMac.

This is the core of the argument - I say "I'd use OS X, but Mac hardware is too expensive". You say - "Mac hardware isn't expensive - the iMac is just $799!"

But when I complain about the iMac's shortcomings, mac lovers say "well, if you need expandability, you need the G4 tower, not the iMac". Funny how that works - the G4 tower is $1700, which damn well is expensive.

The FACT is that the cheapest expandable computer Apple sells is $1700. Even if you accept that the G4 is twice as fast per Mhz, that's still double the cost of x86 hardware. NICE x86 hardware, not junk.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[benb]

> I don't have any notion of what I'll actually use the PC card slot on it for.

Exactly. That's the point.

Re:I really would like to play with OS X...

[foobar104]

Apple has never tried on x86.

That isn't true. For a long time Apple funded their "Star Trek" project, which was a ground-up port of Mac OS to the IA-32 architecture. (Going where no man has gone before... get it?)

Both "Star Trek" and "TNG," the follow-up project, were cancelled.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[d0n quix0te]

$1700 is expensive? El cheapo like you are not our target base. Now if you had a real job and earned real money then you would be able to afford this.

Begging your parents to spend more money on you aint gonna help ;-)

To me, usability is...

[SuperKendall]

not just the UI - it's Making Things Work.

I've used a lot of UNIX machines, a few variants of linux and many PC boxes between work and home. I now have a TIBook and I have to say OS X is my favorite OS thus far because more things Just Work than on any other platform... it comes with great UI tools for many networking tasks if you don't want to waste a lot of time to learn the command line (though if you already know it, it's right there for you). Multiple monitors work as nature intended them too with no fiddling. I tried video creation under PC's and found the xperience exasperating.

I get a combo USB/Firewire CD burner. Under Windows (98, admittedly I've only used NT/98 so far and not used XP so I'm not sure how different things would be) I have to install Special Software. Of course, after burning a few CD's I find that the default is to burn them under a windows format so the can't be read on a mac, and the hidden preference setting to switch to ISO has dire warnings about filename truncation.

I plug the same drive into my Mac and just burn a CD - a handy dialog box comes up to ask if I would like that HFS+ or ISO? No extra software needed.

Windows update feels klunky to me compared to the mac update, though I couldn't say exactly why. Perhaps it's that I've yet to have the mac update fail or render my mac update unusable, as Windows update has done to me in the past.

The only reason you wouldn't want to get a Mac as far as I can see is that your selection of games might suffer somewhat - but in that case just get an XBox or PS2 or Gamecube. That's what I did to stop the rediculous upgrade cycle of PC's. And there are lot of games that come out for the mac so you might not have to suffer that horribly after all (especially true for RTS games which I don't think consoles do as well, or at least the same). As for office software, the Mac version of office has been said to be better than Office XP if you swing that way!

I can boil down all my experiences to this - on my home PC, both under Windows and Linux, I was fiddling a lot more than I wanted to with system settings. With OS X I'm getting more done and fighting the system less, and that to me is usability. I still prefer Linux for servers but for a development box I really like OS X.

Re:Here's an idea

[spd_rcr]

why can't apple just completely screw microsoft & offer OS X for the x86 platform .. i'd toss aside my library of software in a second to use the OS, but it may be some time before i'm rich enough to use their hardware. a 3 year old g3 tower still costs far more than a brand new pc. apple may have the os down to a lovely art, but there's no way in hell i'm going to go back to the 15" monitor of an imac to run it.

have you seen the cost of firewire addons ?

[spd_rcr]

sure it's great to just plug-in all these wonderful external drives, but the cost of them ... oh 'n' let's not forget desk space.
sure it's pretty, works great, but i could buy & maintain a decent older car for the cost of an "entry" level g4 ... that'd save me a helluva lot more time then the pretty interface =P

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[herwin]

I felt that way until Mac OS X 10.1 came out and the vendors really began supporting it. At that point, almost all my productivity applications (MS Office, Virtual PC, Metrowerks Codewarrior, GraphicConverter, NOW, etc.) had finally been ported over and I didn't need Classic for much. Now I run days at a time between restarts, and if you're were used to Windoze or Mac OS 9.2, that's really an improvement. VPC gives me my Windoze software, and OSX gives a me terminal window with UNIX. OSX is really up to snuff.

The "case preserving" point is interesting

[renoX]

It really points out the difference between the Unix philosophy and the Apple philosophy.

(As an aside, I'm quite happy that email addresses are case-insensitive :-))

My only grip with this is : where do you stop?
Everybody will recognize that "John Doe", "John_Doe", "John-Doe" or "JohnDoe" is the same person, should the filesystem be insensitive to underscore, white-space, etc ?

If we have "John Doe" and "Jon Doe", is-it the same person?
Same with "Jhon Doe" and "John Doe" ...

Re:The "case preserving" point is interesting

[ZigMonty]

You stop where apple stopped, with case. "Test" and "test" are the same but "One_two" isn't the same as "One two". Apple isn't the only one to go down this path and at least they made it case preserving. "Test" stays as "Test" and will never be printed as "test".

What to expect at MacWorld

[jeti]

I think I can make some good guesses at what
we're going to see at the MacWorld. Apple is
pretty much cornered in the PC market and I
think they'll try to sell more hq gadgets
like the iPod. Of course there'll be perfect
integration with the Macs.

I'm pretty sure some of those products will be
presented:
Digital camera
Handheld
LCD Monitor with TV functionality

Less likely:
Beamer
Camcorder
Cell phone with organizer functionality

In the future, Apple's main competitior will be
Sony and not MS.

Give MacOSX a chance

[ZigMonty]

As far as Mac OS X and its interface, its nice that people used to generally weak interfaces think it is so great, but us long time Mac users are suffering a severe downgrade with Mac OS X and it Just Isn't Worth It for most of us.

I have a Mac Plus sitting on the desk next to me that we bought a LONG time ago. Is that "long time" enough for you? I have used MacOSX exclusively since the Public Beta. I dread having to boot into OS9 because of its weak interface. I fully respect your decision not to upgrade (yes *upgrade*). I am however sick of non-converters claiming things like "OSX is good for beginners but us power users need more". If you don't want to use it fine, but do realise that you are being left behind. I'd wager that a lot more people are currently happy with OSX than people who have *tried* it and given it a decent chance but still prefer OS9. It is not the next version of the MacOS, it is the first version of MacOSX. If you keep that in mind and stop trying to turn it into OS9 (like I did after about the first month), you'll have a much better experience with it.

If you've done this (with 10.1, *big* difference) and still aren't happy with it, I'll accept that. I believe that MacOSX cured a lot of the long lived problems with the classic MacOS. Yes, it introduced a few annoyances of its own but with each (free) upgrade that apple puts out their numbers are diminishing quickly. Apple is listening to user feedback. If you have a gripe with OSX, besides "Please kill the Dock", tell them about it.

Re:Here's an idea

[ZigMonty]

Simple, they do this they lose MS Office. Linux may have survived without Office but Microsoft's withdrawal would kill MacOSX. Unless we can find a competitor that is *very* compatible with Office, it isn't going to happen.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[discogravy]

I can't tell you how disappointed I was when I found out I couldn't put a GeForce2 in my apple //c ...

(Although I do think you have a valid point.)

I really think that Apple's hardware monopoly has completely screwed them -- MS would be in the same boat, but since they (up 'til recently,) have been lenient w/r/t pirating (from DOS up 'til recently,) and since the cost of their software (to the consumer) is 100$~ to 300~, versus Apple's much higher prices. I'd love to have an Apple machine of my own, but since there's nothing I can run on Apple that I can't run on Wintel/Lintel machines for 1/3 of the price, there's no point in throwing my money away.

Re:I really would like to play with OS X...

[foobar104]

How far did the projects get, and what were the reasons for their being cancelled?

"Star Trek" got far enough along to have a working prototype; I don't know about TNG. As to why, exactly, they were cancelled, I'm not sure. I'm certain it had something to do with putting the engineers where they could do the most profitable work.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[iphayd]

That's another thing... Macs don't age nearly as fast as PCs do...

I'm sorry but that is the biggest MYTH.

-- No, actually it is true.

One half of Apple's current lineup of computers, the iMac and the iBook (2 computers that I bet make up the bulk of their sales) have NO expansion slots. No PCI slots on the iMac, and no PCMCIA slots on the laptops.

-- ...and I would guess that ~90% of mac expansion slots are unused. I have clients using 7100s as a major portion of their computer use because they work. Granted, they have more powerful computers on the desk of those that actually _use_ their computers, but many users just check their e-mail and weather, and a 7100 does fine. BTW, NONE of their expansion slots are used.

-- My father teaches in the homes. He's taken old versions of Word, thrown them on _really_ old macs (read: pre powerPC) He then puts them in the students' home (of injured and kicked-out students). The school system doesn't care, as the computers are worthless, yet to these students, they are a valuable part of their education.

This is nothing more than a stupid, short-sighted attempt by Apple to make the computer not last as long. In essence, your choices become: 1: buy the much more expensive TiBook or G4 tower, or 2: buy the cheap one and it's obsolete, FAST.

-- I agree with your statement, but not in the way that you intended. The expandability of a computer has nothing to do with the obsoleteness. The problem is that Apple is refusing support of computers that were promised to be fully supported in Mac OS X. I realize these machines are not suitable for 3d games, but when the OS _needs_ acceleration, they should at least put basic acceleration in it.

Apple has end-of-lifed the video cards used in the first generation iMac - users of those computers are never going to get accelerated video drivers in OS X. If those were cheapo PCs with slots, you could at least throw a nicer video card in there and solve the problem.

-- ... and since your processor is too slow, you can get another processor. But then you motherboard's socket isn't right, so you need a new motherboard. You then decide that your case looks old, so you get a new case. And you're sick of running out of space on your HD, so you get a 40 Gig. Now you've spent two weeks getting drivers to co-operate, and end up with an "upgraded" computer (and still have the parts to build your old computer exactly the same.) In this time, I've bought myself a new mac, and billed several hours, which you spent fidgeting.

And don't bother posting that it doesn't matter that there aren't any expansion slots because "everything comes built in". Tell that to first generation iBook or iMac owners who like to use the iPod - "sorry, FireWire only". Those computers are less than two years old, and already becoming obsolete.

-- What world are you in? I think that the iPod probably prices itself out of the market of anyone that is still using a 2 year old laptop (the only 2 year old machines without firewire.) I wouldn't take someone with a bondi iMac as a candidate for an iPod.

Would you like to have USB 2.0?

-- No, not really. Firewire does the job better, as it was designed for speed, not hacked for it.

I will, and I can add it to my 3 year old Dell notebook via a card and it will work fine. The Apple iBook you buy TODAY can't be expanded with a single new tech. beyond what it ships with. Now which comp. is aging faster, the Apple, or the Dell? Even crummy $700 PCs and $1100 laptops have PCI/PCMCIA.

-- I've used mac laptops for over 5 years now, and guess how many PCMCIA cards I've used. _NONE_. That's right, I've never used one. I know others that have due to lack of ethernet/modem, but I've always configured mine with both, as I know that I will need that connectivity somewhere.

PCI and PCMCIA slots let you add all sorts of stuff to your computer, in effect, "future-proofing" it by allowing you to expand rather than buy a new computer. A computer without expansion options hardly qualifies as "a computer that ages slower than PCs."

-- When Mac users talk about the length of usability of a Mac, we are talking from experience. I _know_ of 8-12 year old Macs currently in use on desktops of users. I _know_ of LC2s that _just_ got replaced with iMacs. Apple makes machines that are useful without expandability.

P.S. I don't want to hear about how you can add all sorts of nifty expansion option via FireWire. I don't want 5 boxes hanging off my computer.

-- Okay, put them in a drawer, and take them out only when you need them. Also note that I haven't used single expansion in my previous explanations (except for as a solution for those that thought they don't need connectivity in a laptop).

Re:Here's an idea

[Spencerian]

If Apple sold Mac OS X without their hardware running it, it wouldn't be a Mac--and it would show, greatly.

Think of the little inane things that piss you off on any x86 hardware running ANY operating systems it supports. Many of these little things don't EVER occur on an integrated system like SGI IRIX or Macintosh, leaving you to worry about the big stuff--making things or doing something that appeals to you.

You don't buy a Mac for the cost anymore than you buy a BMW or Jag or Porsche for its price tag. Most people expect quality (and receive it) when they put in the extra dollars for a Mac. A PC is built by the lowest bidder, friends. That's OK if you can make it work--but most Joes just want to sit down and play, and the Mac has consistently done that more than any PC I've serviced for my customers.

At the same time, I tell them that I'll build them a great PC if I know they need any computer. Mac zealotism is sooo 1990 and we don't need to play that stupid game anymore.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[chrsbrwn]

Ironically enough, this mentality locks the end user out of using traditionally Mac-only type of hardware (consumer SCSI devices).

And if it is important to the user to use their SCSI device, they can buy this OrangeMicro Firewire to SCSI converter which has drivers built into Mac OS X (completely plug and play), and works with most scanners, CD Burners, Zip drives, etc...

And every possible peripheral device that I want to use with my iBook (running OS X 10.1.2), I have been able to. My scanner and printer are USB, as is my Rio 500... my SCSI zip drive and CD burner connect through the orange converter (the CD burner is even supported in iTunes that way!). When I buy a digital camera, there are USB SmartMedia and CompactFlash readers... I am using my Airport card to connect to an SMC wireless access point...

USB 2.0 has no interest for me, because all of it's intended benefits and devices are already available to me through a combination of existing USB and FireWire devices

The only possible thing I might want to add is a faster wireless connection... and that card is easily replacable.

And if we get farther in the future than that, then I will want to buy a new laptop anyway, for the increased processor spead and storage.

So what was your point again?

Yes in the sense of no

[epepke]

Is is business, but it isn't quite as you put it. It's more like this:

• Wintel is Ford and General Motors rolled into one. The Wintel machines in translucent cases are Saturn.
• Apple is Chrysler/Plymouth.
• Be OS is Tucker.
• Linux is the Caterham Seven, though Red Hat may be approaching Lotus.

Re:Here's an idea

[Lewisham]

If BeOS had been open source, it would still be a viable OS today.

The keyword you use is "viable." Would it really be viable in ten years? I don't have a Mac, so I'm not here to spout Mac lovers slogans, but the whole point of an OS is to get things done. Word processing, gaming, whatever. If Be was open-source, you'd end up with a BorgOS instead. Small parts bolted on as and when needed: "We will adapt." And, as the article in this topic refers to, an OS like that (Linux being an OS like that) simply won't hang together. Be would not be the same. Ten years down the road, it'll be a crashing, feeezing heap. It would get screwed around with so much that you'd probably end up wishing it would have just died, thanks for the memories.
Clinging to the past is a curious geek trait, when technology is all about moving forward. If the Apple cash cow dries up, then Mac users would have to let MacOS go. Change isn't a Bad Thing. Just go out and get the OS that gets the things you need to do done, and leave the past behind.

Re:Here's an idea

[Jeremi]

Ten years down the road, [OpenSourced BeOS would] be a crashing, feeezing heap.

What on earth are you basing that on? Would you call Linux or BSD a "crashing, freezing heap"? One of the more important potential benefits of opening the source is to improve reliability, not the other way around.

The key point to keep in mind is that while any idiot can go and change the source on his own machine, only the best code gets accepted back into the "official distributions". (assuming the official project maintainers are even a little bit competent, of course)

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[Shanep]

Why? Quality.

I have an old Nikon F2AS 35mm camera. Almost as old as me. I wish things were still built like it, because it is still my main camera today due to very high build quality. It also makes a great weapon.

I hope I can buy a CCD back for it before film is dead.

Printing to PDF.

[Shanep]

I have'nt finished reading "Tales of...", I'm about half way. So far it seems annoyingly biased. He has obviously not attempted to learn Linux enough to complain about it the way he has.

He boasts that OSX can print to PDF from any app. So can Linux. Damn near everything printed in Linux, prints as postscript. Which is easily converted to PDF with the ghostscript ps2pdf script.

I save web sites and save much of what I work on as PDF with it. In fact, I also print from Windows machines to a file stored on my samba server for conversion to PDF when I want it.

Re:Printing to PDF.

[TheAwfulTruth]

And installing distiller on Windows allows you to print from any app to PDF as well...

Re:Printing to PDF.

[Shanep]

Yeah, but that would cost money. Something I think should either come with the OS or be a free install. Printing to postscript is expected, and nowdays, printing to PDF should be too.

The free Unixes have it for free and OSX has it (and the cost of) built into the OS. With the excellent intergration of PDF in OSX, it is worth the cost of the OS.

Windows with Distiller, I could'nt care less about at this stage.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[Steve Cowan]

This unforeseen NEW technology you speak of will hopefully connect to your computer via USB/FireWire - in which case the problem is solved.

Yup, you're right, if it doesn't, you're out of luck.

But -- did you buy your computer thinking that you'd be doing something else with it in two years? Or did you buy it because you had specific tasks in mind?

I can't imagine what I might ever want to do with my iBook that I can't right now. If some new device appears and I can't plug it in to my computer, I will still believe that my iBook was a good purchase, because it is the most elegant solution for the jobs I want to do.

But this comes down to bandwagon-jumping. Windows users seem to want to buy hardware for the sake of the hardware itself, whereas Mac users tend to buy computers based on specific needs. The Windows guy may well be able to install the latest-and-greatest (usually also the most unstable) technology, while the slow-and-steady Mac user will win the race.

Re:I really would like to play with OS X...

[phoenix_orb]

If I am not mistaken(which I may be :), one of the tenants of the $150 million dollar "investment" Microsoft put into Apple several years ago was to not port there software to Intel/AMD chips. Now I believe that apple now has someone who is in charge of porting Darwin (the kernal) over to Intel chips, but they say that is for testing purposes to test the validity of the code.

http://www.opensource.apple.com/news/qa20010927. ht ml#x86

Re:I really would like to play with OS X...

[foobar104]

If I am not mistaken(which I may be :), one of the tenants of the $150 million dollar "investment" Microsoft put into Apple several years ago was to not port there software to Intel/AMD chips.

Who knows? Come next week, we may both be surprised.

"Requires you to buy a new Mac"

[sfgoth]

[sarcasm]
Yeah, it really really sucks to be an Apple user who is required to buy new hardware every few years because Apple has released new software that's so amazingly cool that the computer police will arrest you if you don't upgrade.
[/sarcasm]

Last time I checked, Macintoshes did not suddenly keel over dead just because Apple released new software. No one is forced at gunpoint to upgrade.

No one ever needs to buy all new hardware to run Linux, because Linux has never come out with anything substantially new from what was done 30 years ago.

People would be a lot happier with their computers if they just bought them to get something done today, instead of thinking they're buying some magic box that will solve all the world's problems tomorrow.

-pmb

Re:Maybe BeOS ideas but which MacOS X ones?

[castlan]

I didn't have extensive experience with the Old BeFS, or in depth knowledge while I did, so I can't speak with much certainty about it. But with the psedu-database implemented in the New BeFS, disk performance is much better than Mac Filesystems, and tends to be _slightly_ better than Windows Filesystems (in my experience). I suspect that more than a performance issue, is more of the complexity inherent in maintaining standard (POSIX) filesystem semantics with this database, with limited engineers to work on it. I understand that actually using a filesystem with directories was an early on compromise for the sanity of the understaffed team. Te original, idealistic plan was to do away with standard filesystem semantics altogether, and make use of the database of attributed for those purposed instead. BeOS really did try to avoid legacy cruft (read: backwards compatibilty) for JLG's vison of where modern computing should be.

As for OpenGL, you have a very good point. Even the best software rendering won't compete with proper hardware acceleration. Not having a Voodoo 3, I couldn't comment on that either, but it would have been nice to see.

They did support G3 processors, which was of very little use considering Apple under Jobs changed the motherboard and withheld the necessary engineering info from Be. The last (9500/9600? MP?) revision of Apple 604 motherboards didn't work properly either, but a support motherboard with a G3 upgrade card would work.

Perhaps it wasn't the pinnacle of GUI design, but I've never used a Lisp machine. I've used various revisions of Windows, MacOS, IRIX 5.x-6.5, AIX(CDE), KDE, GNOME and a bit of NeXTSTEP and Solaris(CDE), and Besides a bit of eye-candy with drop-menus (Start button) in never revisions of Windows, I'd be hard pressed to pick a hands-down better GUI than BeOS. The BeOS could even fake the Window-managers of Win9x, MacOS classic, and Amiga Workbench, but all of them reduced functionality available to the standard Be window manager. One of the most standout features, apart from the sheer responsiveness under load, was the abilty to trivially browse many folders deep in seconds using the right mouse button. I've seen similar functionality in the Now Utilities add-on to MacOS 7.x, which broke with MacOS 8. Could you please point out some GUI problems?

As For OS design, the only problems I am aware of were direct consequences of the "clean from scratch" design, basically meaning all hardware drivers had to be written from scratch. This would have been fine on the original hobbitt based machine and on the ppc BeBox as long as standard Network and Display devices were supported. This situation even improved on the closed Mac Platform, until they were shut out from Jobsian revisions - but it was bound to fall apart on the unregulated IA32 architecture.

While the hardware driver issue was critical, I can hardly blame it on OS design. One of my more wizardly kernel hacking friends informed me about some low-level trouble resulting from the exensive use of C++... but on the whole, the Os was a very well designed, flexible and highly performant Microkernel design. Using Mime types internally was inspired, the SGI derived filesystem was delicious (when finally paired with a chkdsk-type utility) and the copious metadata added enourmously to expressive capability accessibe to the system. The pervasively threaded Gui was unequaled, and if you ever did manage to lock up the interface, you could always telnet in Unix style and kill any offending process, and restart it again from the command line.

With hindsight, I can see how maybe the highly modular microkernel could have been leveraged to provide a hardware interface with a windows or Linux driver compatibilty layer - it might have immensely increased immediate usability if feasible. But can you point out some of the significant share of problems to me? Just about every one I have seen (other than marketshare, obviously) has been fixed.

Or maybe I'm still in my BeOs dream world. Wake me up... the loss of Be Inc. doesn't affect the CD still in my possesion, can you raise some of these issues for me? I've raised my own share, but they all have solutions, especially if you have the right hardware. Other than some long-term promise I see in bits of GNOME, I don't see anything else coming close to the strong points in Be.

-castlan

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[ChristTrekker]

No, it's true. At least, it has been until the last year or so.

I used my 1993-era Centris for 5 years. I bought a G3 in 1998 not because the 650 was too slow for the work I was doing, but because it was getting difficult to find the new apps written in 68k code. If Apple hadn't switched to the PPC, I would have gotten another year, or possibly two, out of the Centris. I use the heck out of my computer, and do some casual development. Seeing 10-12 year old Macs doing file or print serving is not unusual. Seeing 6-8 year old Macs doing basic word processing and email is not unusual. But I never see anybody using a PC more than 5 years old. By the time it's 4 y.o. the user is complaining. And even given the larger number of PCs over Macs, I've heard of far more PC components burning out than Mac components. I've got 5 compact Macs (Classics, SE's) in my garage and they all boot and work fine.

Fact: Macs last longer, and are usable longer, then PCs.

Also, expandability does not equal age-ability. The only thing I added to the Centris in five years was RAM. The only thing I've added to the G3 in 3½ years is RAM.

Within the past year, this has changed a little, I think. Processors have reached the point where they're fast enough to do everything required. Apps are not complex enough to use all that speed yet. But I still think you'll see older Macs in service, whereas older PCs will be in the recycle bin.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[ChristTrekker]

Your dad sounds a little like me. Wouldn't happen to know if MS provides disk images of Word 5.1 to registered users, would you? I'm trying to get some of my old 68k machines back in service, but the third installer disk is shot and I don't have a backup.

Re:Here's an idea

[Lewisham]

*Hands up to project management* Fair point. I'd forgotton about that :)

Wheather open-source itself improves reliability is up for debate, though. I think the limited scope of open-source development is the factor that gives the software it's reliability. There is nothing that can be done about it. Without corporate muscle, or millions of competant programmers, you can't expect an OS to do everything. Windows main failing is that it has to try and do everything, and that's what causes it's unreliability at the core. Linux doesn't, and isn't expected to, work on everything. Linux is developed steadily and properly. That's why it's more reliable. That's not because it's open-source, but an indication of good coding. Closed-source software could take the same careful pace if companies wished it. Unfortuantely, working 80% of the time on 80% of products seems to be the target.

Re:Here's an idea

[festers]

Is it so amazing that people won't use products created by child labor in Honduras? Having beliefs and *acting* on them is a quality that not enough people demonstrate these days.

Re:Maybe BeOS ideas but which MacOS X ones?

[Osty]

They did support G3 processors, which was of very little use considering Apple under Jobs changed the motherboard and withheld the necessary engineering info from Be. The last (9500/9600? MP?) revision of Apple 604 motherboards didn't work properly either, but a support motherboard with a G3 upgrade card would work.

You know, I knew this, but I wasn't thinking when I posted. My intended statement was that Apple cut them out of later-generation macs, and they obviously did so at the motherboard level (since they don't control the PPC CPU design). But I didn't say that, so I was wrong.

Could you please point out some GUI problems?

It's been so long since I used BeOS that I likely can't make a convincing argument. I do remember being less than impressed with Be's anti-aliased text (they seemed just a little too blurry for my tastes), but that's hardly a major gripe (well, except that you couldn't turn off anti-aliasing, as I remember). The mouse felt sluggish, even at higher sensitivity and acceleration levels, but that's more personal preference than anything and I'm likely too used to Windows (mouse response in MacOS feels sluggish to me, as well). I seem to recall a distinct lack of keyboard access to gui elements, hindering accessibility, but maybe because I'm not handicapped I didn't go searching out the necessary settings or tools.

But can you point out some of the significant share of problems to me? Just about every one I have seen (other than marketshare, obviously) has been fixed.

Well, you already pointed out the distinct lack of drivers. That's not really an OS design flaw, but it's still a bad thing. A number of drivers were flakey, as well (again, not the OS team's fault, just as flakey drivers in Windows are not the fault of the Windows kernel team, but just as Windows gets the blame, so does Be). Printing support was very poor all around, and the network stack had its own share of problems (I hear both of these were fixed, to some extent, but not when I was using 4.5). Otherwise, microkernel designs have never been as good when applied practically as they're made out to be in theory. The HURD is still bungling along, NT moved from its microkernel origins for performance reasons, and Be's pretty much dead. Mach is still kicking, but it's not the most performant of beasts. I'm sure there are other microkernel-based systems out there, but they're likely in small niche markets like embedded systems (which is a large market, yes, but can be subdivided into many niche markets that make up the whole).

I wasn't trying to be overly critical. I just wanted to point out that nothing is perfect, and neither is BeOS. It had a good number of interesting ideas and innovations that I'm sure we'll see reinvented in the coming years, and it's sad to see Be go away, but them's the breaks.

You, sir, are dead wrong.

[nitehorse]

Bullshit.

If I had a fundamental misunderstanding of how _simple_ things like USB and FireWire worked, I seriously doubt that I'd be running Slackware on my X86 boxen. I can tell you that (without a doubt) if it's on the Apple supported hardware list, for something simple like (say) a CD-Burner via FireWire and OS X, all that you have to do is plug it in.

And it really does Just Work. Suddenly, iTunes stops reporting that there is no CD-Burner attached. As soon as you insert a blank CD, it asks you what you intend to do with it - should it prepare it for life as an ISO9660 CD or a real audio CD, to be used in your car and home stereo systems?

Without even a reboot.

I'm quite used to Slackware, and I wouldn't give it up for anything. But it's really REALLY nice to be able to sit down and plug things in, and watch them work properly. Which is exactly what my iBook is for.

Not only that, but it runs UNIX. (And since I prefer tcsh anyway, it's fine with me that it doesn't include bash. :)

The line "That doesn't even work with Win2K" should tell you something - OS X is a far different beast, and I'm quite glad of it. That doesn't work with Win2K because Win2K, while quite possibly the best Windows available, still sucks as far as operating systems go. (And yes, I know what I'm talking about here, too. I've had to use Win2K on my workstation before, and I'll probably have to again. Shit, I run it on my desktop at home for when I want to play CS and Unreal.)

-clee

Well, you're at least partially right. :)

[nitehorse]

Yes, the virtues of IEEE1394 and USB are very potent. But don't forget that there are two parts to every piece of hardware - the hardware itself, and the software to talk to it. Apple might have chosen the less-technically-elegant approach (let's include every driver we can with the OS) but it's much more impressive to the end-user. For example, I've got an iBook with iTunes. (From iApple, apparently. And who says the 'k' prefix on everything from the KDE project is annoying? :)

Someone at work brought in a FireWire CD burner (a Sony, a sweet 16x8x32x model - probably cost a pretty penny) and all I had to do to get it to work with the OS was plug it in. No clicking 'next' on the driver install, no prompts. iTunes suddenly stopped reporting "CD burner or software not found..." and ejected the disc tray, stating "Please insert a blank disc to continue..."

That's the kind of experience that people want from a computer. And so far, nothing - Windows XP, 2000, ME, 98, Linux, or anything else on the x86 platform - has been able to deliver it. Apple, quite simply, has.

-clee

Re:Maybe BeOS ideas but which MacOS X ones?

[castlan]

Don't worry, you were not being overly critical. Your perspective is likely more coorect than mine, as I was posting from a perspective near zealotry - namely, that the BeOS is very near to the pinnacle of OS and/or GUI design, as opposed to the statement in your earlier post.

The advantage to having a microkernel architecture paid off as BeOS's new and untested (compared to most preexisting systems) network stack could be flaky, but you could easily change it on the fly without affecting the rest of the system. The highly imperfect network stack would occaisionaly choke for a few reasons, but even if it got killed, it was trivial to restart it and continue using the system with little interupption. This may not be as good as having the time-tested BSD stack, but it is scalable enough that it is concievable that the BeOS network could improve.

Unfortunately, the attempt at fixing the weak (compared to many Unixes at least... weak is definitely relative here) by Be was to integrate it into the kernel. Sone the unreleased BONE system would have sacrificed any advantage derived from a microkernel architecture. That alludes to the biggest problem with BeOS : While it was designed by talented engineers without limitations, they were not equipped to handle the market realities of implementing their system. It is possible that an embracing an Open Source strategy more fully could have helped them, but it is also possible that they would have been consumed much earlier if they had tried tht approach.

They tried to be the pinnacle of OS design, by flaunting legacy compromised. For example, most early PCs didn't have enough Video RAM to support a windowing environment, so for many years they were command line only. After average PCs had suitable graphics hardware, Windows took over where DOS once ruled. BeOS didn't even bother with a command line environment... if you need a command line, then you can open a terminal window. They never even considered supporting technology that was considered old when they started. Similarly, Win3.1 True Type fonts were already well established, so they didn't even bother with Bitmapped fonts. Perhaps Anti-aliasing wasn't up to par yet, if you feel that the fonts weren't sufficient for you. But perhaps you have become accustomed to having the bitterness in your drink, as evidenced by your preference for the (IMO) cruder Windows mouse driver over the slicker Mac mouse movement. Ideally, both systems should be able to adjust the mouse input to your tastes, so if the BeOS could not, then that was also a shortcoming. The biggest flaw in the GUI, as in all non-Windows GUIs, is a deficiency in the keyboard bindings in the interface. It is likely a positive side effect of their non-GUI legacy, which might make up for many of the negative side effects. To date I have not used a GUI that is as effective from the keyboard as is Windows (win32 and 16 bit GUIS).

But despite all of these flaws in the over all OS, in my experience BeOS was the pinnacle of WIMP GUIs. That is, using windowing environments with a mouse pointer. It took many of the great Macisms, added in some Win-flavoing, and innovatively improved upon both in a still unmatched level. The few mistakes thay did make in that arena (choosing to fix the Win mistakes while unnecessarily altering the Mac defaults - as in the ctrl/alt tab fiasco) still don't make the BeOS GUI less usuable than the GUIs of current systems (MacOS 9, MacOS X, WinXP, Win2K+98, GNOME, KDE... an I missing any?)

Even though Be had to go away, I am glad to see a BeOS community sprout up under the Open Source Aegis, and doubly glad that Be expired before BONEing up the BeOS... without being a microkernel, it has that much less to live for. So FreeBeOS with the distinct networking services will likely see the light of day, and I can't wait. Even more importantly, other than a few crumbs with GNOME, I have yet too see a proper reinvention of BeOs's Mime-types as file identifiers. Linux as of 2.4 with the VFS does seem to have metadata capability suficient for BeOS style usage, but it remains to be seen in that lumbering beast will even notice _that_ particular flea on it's back. Again, Win2K on NTFS, besides having the keybindings, handles metadata well. As of today, with MacOS X stil having too high a point of entry, Win2K is unfortunately my preferred system, until GNOME on Linux takes better advantage of what it has, or FreeBeOS comes onto its own. Win2K is actually a fairly good system, which delivers enough of it's promises to be genuinely useful. But even if Windows doesn't go away (as you say, like Be), it still breaks.

...Not as badly as XP still does though. Never use MS products without (AT LEAST) one service pack/patch/point release.

Re:But... [feeding the troll]

[cduffy]

The Linux hype may die down, and Linux itself may even die off -- but there will always be some open source Unix workalike (there are many more in the pipe with significantly superior design to Linux -- see VSTA for an example).

Even if Win2K takes over the market for new servers -- something which I'm not about to stipulate as likely -- legacy systems are still big business; I know businesses willing to pay big bucks to get off of their old AIX systems onto something running real hardware, and places looking for an OS they can embed royalty-free into their settop boxes and handhelds.

The projects don't rely on external funding, but rather on development hours done by those who use them. Thus, a project cannot die because "the funding" is shut off; it only dies when it is no longer useful to anyone with the time to maintain it or the money to hire someone who can. When you show me a non-Unixlike OS which can replace Linux in every niche it fills (/including/ its zero-royalty licensing terms), I'll then be ready to be concerned about becoming a "refugee". 'Till then, I'll let Linux continue paying the rent and putting food on the table, which it does quite nicely.

Re:Here's an idea

[cduffy]

Linux has corporate muscle. No, really -- you just don't see it.

While Linus decides what really goes in, a great many of the coders writing patches do it for pay. My employer, MontaVista Software, employs quite a few kernel hackers (particularly linux-ppc folks). While the specific things they work on are dictated by our customer's and clients' needs, it all (or the best of it, rather) goes back in the tree. We have customers. Big ones. Lots of them. Can't say more -- I'm NDA'd -- but trust me, there's profit to be made working on Linux.

Filesystem development is being corporately sponsored -- see Red Hat, Namesys and SGI for examples. MontaVista has been sponsoring work on making the kernel fully preemptible for some time, and we do a great deal of internal QAing (and fixes, the latter being submitted upstream to the "real" kernels) on otherwise rare platforms. There are a great many "big names" putting programmers into this thing, because it's cheaper to hire folks to improve Linux to do what you need than to write your own OS from the ground up (which a great many places building embedded systems used to do), and far, far easier than trying to get your closed-source OS vendor to make the changes you need for you.

The open source model is unique in that it has a wide variety of different agents each with their own private agenda. Rather than one entity trying to build the "perfect OS", each individual group focuses on the thing that's important to them. When the users and the developers are one and the same, it really does improve quality -- I've written apps for myself and apps for other people, and I know which ones work better.

As for the "limited scope" thing... what limited scope? What does Windows try to do that open source software does not?

In many respects, Linux has a much wider scope than Windows. Consider: the same Linux kernel and userspace works not only on x86 systems but also MIPS, PowerPC, PA-RISC, SuperHitachi, StrongARM, Alpha, the S/390, Sparc and elsewhere. While Windows has separate revisions for embedded space and high-end servers, the same Linux kernel is expected to work everywhere -- and does so.

Re:New blood is good, but OSX isn't up to snuff ye

[jchristopher]

A Wintel notebook has (usually two) PCMCIA slots, which can add just about ANY kind of device to your computer. The iBook has no PCMCIA slots, so you're stuck.