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Cringely: OS X on Intel
sti writes: "Cringely's column this week argues that Apple should port OS X to the Intel platform. He makes an interesting case for it. I would definitely favour this. I've always had this warm spot in my heart for Apple but rarely had the money to pay for their overpriced hardware."
This site talks about a project at Apple some ten years ago to port Mac OS to Intel hardware.
The article also talks about the work done by ARDI, the firm mentioned in the InfoWorld story.
Apple assembled a small team and got Mac OS runnning pretty quickly, but it seemed the firm didn't have the willpower to push it to market.
It probably would be different this time around with the forceful Steve Jobs at the helm.
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bzzzt. X runs just fine under OSX. Check out the XonX project .
. It is under darwin but that is a seperate distro and not is the bundled OSX that comes default with all macs
What? Darwin is the same, with or without OSX "on top".
The only Unix things I can run in OSX is stuff like sed, awk, etc.
Dude, what have you been smoking? You've never even *seen* OSX, have you?
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
Gates will never allow this to happen. If Jobs wanted to move OSX to an Intel platform, he would not be "granted" Microsoft Office to run on that platform. Moreover, its very likely that Gates would then pull Office from the OSX on Apple hardware. This would be suicide for Apple. You can beat your drums all you want and the govt. could threaten the MS monopoly and so on and so forth. In the meantime, Apple would be dead...
FMFrank W. Miller
Everyone is saying the same, obvious things about how Microsoft would pull their applications and that apple is a hardware company.
The truth is that OSX sucks. I know, I have it running on my Powerbook. The thing is that MacOS is poorly designed and it has only gotten worse. I really laugh when people say that it is easier, as I find it the most difficult and annoying operating sytem to use.
I will admit that the user interface in OS9 was quite nice, although far from perfect. Unfortunately, OS9 was also unresponsive.
The problem isn't raw speed, which in OSX can sometimes be a factor as well.. but the way that they multitask. OSX will give the active application full tasking priority, lets say it is Internet Explorer or Mozilla.. and it is fetching a page, while it is doing such.. it will put up the wait cursor. While the wait cursor is up, that application is using a lot of CPU and makes it more difficult if not impossible to switch to another application.
This has gotten worse in OSX as it has replaced the popular finder with the Dock. Unfortunately, even without anything running or using lots of CPU.. trying to use the dock to switch between running appliations can be somewhere between difficult and impossible.
Well, this shouldn't be a rant about usablity.. the point is that I don't think that OSX or any other version of MacOS is a very well designed Operating System. The best commercial OS, imho is Irix (although still far from perfect, still better then OSX)
Just did the same BTO at Dell.com... there seems to be a slight discrepancy here.
I believe that Riskable made the same mistake I did initially... which was selecting a 15" CRT, rather than a 15" LCD.
With the LCD, Dell's offering rounds out at $1289.00.
I could locate no option to add FireWire.
Now which is the bargain computer? Hmmm...
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus
Compare two cars: Ford Mustang vs. Jaguar XK Series (I'm not going into great detail on the specific options/prices)
Both have 4 wheels
Both have a stearing wheel
Both have bucket seats
Both have CD Stereo
Both can drive you around town
Price of the Mustang is dramatically less than the Jaguar - is the Jag overpriced? I would say not, the two cars are of completely different classes, and as such, cannot compare.
What you pay more for in a Mac is the complete engineering and design. Some say ease of use, as well, but that is too subjective to quantify. The simple fact is I can attach/detach my USB camera, photo printer, scanner, MP3 player, mouse, etc. to/from my Mac without any bazaar configuration issues to deal with. A Dell, or any other x86 box, will have quite a different behaviour to the this practice. If you're using Windows, prepare for a blue-screen or two. If your using Linux/*BSD hope you have the correct kernel/module compiled and your USB subsystem doesn't panic when connecting/disconnecting devices rapidly (I have had panics in both Linux & FreeBSD due to a USB based KVM switch to share a single USB keyboard & mouse if I switch ports too quickly). This is what you pay for - a system that works consistently, without putting the user through hell just to get work done.
I AM, therefore I THINK!
Try turning on backing compression and see if it helps you any. To do this, make a copy of /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver/plist , and after the first <dict> in the file, add the following:
:'(
:'(
<key>BackingCompression</key>
<dict>
<key>compressionScanTime</key>
<real>5.000000000000000e+00</real>
<key>minCompressableSize</key>
<integer>8193</integer>
<key>minCompressionRatio</key>
<real>1.100000023841858e+00</real>
</dict>
I don't know if this makes a difference, but I run 10.1.2 on an iBook 500 with 640M of memory, and the performance is very nice. (BTW, I didn't come up with this hack - it's from a MacOS mailing list, IIRC).
Also, if you are running Netscape, be aware that it busy loops and consumes a lot of CPU even if it's not displaying any animations. It will sit there and consume 50% of your CPU while you have it hidden.
Also, if you have Word for MacOS X, be aware that it also busy loops, and consumes a truly impressive amount of CPU.
If you don't know what this means, the deal is that in a non-pre-emptive O.S., most applications just sit there in the event loop waiting for something to happen, and they expect the system to take control away from them when they call getNextEvent (or whatever it is in MacOS 9) if there's another application with an event running. I suspect that Netscape and Office are both expecting this to happen when they call the carbon version of getNextEvent, but they're calling a non-blocking getNextEvent, so they just sit there going "is there an event?", hearing "no," and then doing the same thing again over and over again. I'm sure this would be really easy to fix, but although I reported the bug on Netscape, at least, the next version that came out was still broken in this way.
Neither do Linux and Windows application developers. That's what libraries and the OS and device drivers are for. I just wrote a Python program that plays music, that I'm running on Linux, and I sure as hell didn't take into account what kind of sound card I happen to have.
Mac developers don't worry much about Mac hardware either, but not because there's not a lot of variation of hardware. It is because MacOS is wonderfully device-independent. That is why I can run MacOS 7.5.5 on my Amiga, using a program called ShapeShifter which acts like a bunch of MacOS device drivers that wrap around my AmigaOS device drivers. I guarantee you that they guys at Ambrosia never anticipated the hardware that I play "Escape Velocity Override" on.
I'm sure that the limited range of Mac hardware, sure makes things easier for the guys at Apple who write drivers, but to app developers, it is insignificant.
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