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Apple Wants Your Input
Johnny Mnemonic writes "Apple is asking for feedback specifically from PC users about why you might be considering a Mac purchase, or if you recently purchased a Mac for the first time, why you made the switch. A good opportunity to sound off about your Apple peeves, but also a chance to let Apple know what you think they're doing right. The Mac OS X feedback page, originally from the Public Beta, is still up and accepting feedback, also."
The SMB browser support went in the new version of SMBFS in Darwin's CVS so it will be in Mac OS X 10.2.
If you want me as a customer, do whatever you can to promote open standards and Windows emulators.
Virtual PC may be what you're looking for.
It's very much like VMWare, except it's actually emulating a different architecture.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
1) Precompiled packages for MacOS X based on a nice package manager (PHP 4.1.2 is available):
http://fink.sourceforge.net
You can also use the instructions in this article to easily compile version 4.0.6 with the options that you want.
2) Civilization III is known to be slow (also on a PC). Have you installed the latest patch and disabled quartz text? You can also try to make an image of the CD (with disk copy) and use that, that should speed it up a bit as well. Optimizing your HD is also advisable. I've heard about a guy having smooth gameplay with the same machine that you have, so it's certainly possible.
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi
Expandabiltiy! If you want expandability, don't buy an iMac! You heard me, if you need a G4 Tower, then buy a fucking G4 Tower. Would you buy a Honda Civic Hatchback and then bitch about the leg room in the back seat? (OK, some people would, but they are stupid). In a G4 Tower, you get PCI, AGP, USB, FireWire, ATA, SCSI... What more do you fucking want people????
Sorry about all the ranting. I'll go take my meds now.
Reality has a liberal bias
When I was a first-year student at the University of Michigan I bought a Powerbook 5300. Before that I had been a PC user. I bought the mac for the following reasons:
1. The University was at the time primerily a "mac school". 80% of the machines on campus were macs, and there was a large user community, as well as appletalk networking in the dorms.
2. I liked the GUI. Everyone told me how macs were easier to use. I had never found it difficult to use PCs, but I was impressed by the look and feel of MacOS.
3. I wanted to learn about MacOS and about Mac hardware. Again, I'd heard good things, why not experience it for myself.
Soon after I bought the 5300, I knew something was amiss. After I'd had it out of the box for five minutes it crashed unexpectedly. Unfortunately it kept doing this every couple of hours, and I was starting to question whether my $2300 had been wisely spent. I called apple's SOS-APPL line and with the help of the technician discovered that someone had indeed installed RAM-Doubler on my 5300. Evidently, someone at the U of M computer kickoff office had decided to open up my mac before it was sold to me and install unsupported software on it. According to the support rep, all I needed to do was reinstall the system.
Several hours later, after I had done a clean install of 7.5.1, I went to bed. Soon after I awoke the next day I realized that the problem hadn't been solved.
It is now day 2 and I decide that I am going to attempt to return the 5300 to the computer kickoff office, as I have a hunch that it is defective. I had seen some Toshiba laptops that some of my hallmates had purchased, and they looked pretty nice. Not only that, but they'd been available with a color screen for less than the $2300 that I'd spent for grayscale!
Unfortunately, the computer kickoff people refused to take back the machine. I called Apple and Apple would not take it back either. This machine was 2 days old and clearly defective, as it crashed every couple of hours.
The next step was to send the machine to Apple via Airborn Express for service. The machine arrived back almost a week later with a clean bill of health. Apparently, it had not crashed in the 'lab' and tests had confirmed that nothing was wrong with it. The problem was, it crashed every time I used it.
I started to feel resigned to the fact that I would have to make the relationship work if I wanted to get anything positive out of my decision to purchase the 5300. For me, stability is one of the most important things that I look for in a hardware/os combination.
I configured WordPerfect's autosave to save every 30 seconds, and I avoided using the machine for important tasks (such as papers for my classes), opting to use the computing site instead.
Over the next two semesters I spent upwards of 80 hours on the phone with SOS-APPL. During this time I heard things such as:
- "You don't have 7.5.3? That is very likely the reason your machine has been crashing"
- "Apple never should have sold the 5300 with less than 16MB of RAM. Of course yours is crashing."
- "You don't have 7.5.5? That MUST be the reason your machine is crashing."
At some point there was finally an official recall of the 5300. I was fairly cynical by this point, because my machine had received a clean bill of health the last time I sent it in. Nonetheless, my machine went back to Apple via Airborn Express for another couple of days, this time coming back with a new logic board. The new logic board helped somewhat, although the machine still crashed way more than any other Apple that I've used. You may be thinking that I had installed nonstandard software or was loading unnecessary extensions. I was not. This was with a subset of the standard extensions and no funny stuff like After Dark or all the weird MS stuff.
By my sophomore year, I decided that the best thing to do was to cut my losses and sell the 5300 and put the money toward an inexpensive desktop PC (the original $2300 was supposed to cover my computing needs for all 4 years of college). I called some local shops that sold used macs and I was offered $300 for it. THE MACHINE HAD DEPRECIATED $2000 IN ONLY ONE YEAR!
Needless to say, I had a very bad experience with Apple and Macintosh. Seeing OSX and knowing that it's built on the mach microkernel gives me hope, but my dissatisfaction has more to do with the way Apple handled the situation rather than with the hardware/OS specifically. Yes, I've heard about that deal where I could get a few hundred bucks off on a new ibook as a 5300 owner. No thank you.
I realize that I was a sucker for buying the 5300, and I would never make the mistake of buying an Apple product again, though I would accept one for free. I have also considered buying an iPod, but since I don't own a Mac it might not really be the best idea at this point.
Amazing magic tricks
CPU upgrade from 132MHz 604e to 400MHz G3
scads of cheap, cheap RAM
USB PCI card
ATA PCI card and a 20GB IDE drive
PCI video card
The longevity of Macs has always amazed me. I'll probably get 7 or 8 years out of the G5 tower that will be my next new Mac purchase.
~Philly
To make Civ III playable turn off Aqua rendering in the preferences.
For PHP have you tried:
stepwise.
for the PHP install try this: http://www.entropy.ch/software/MacOSx/php/
Should be everything you need. It has some FAQs as well. If you used textedit to edit your php.config file, it is likely the culprit.
I hope you find this useful.
spent the weekend trying to compile PHP 4.1.2
Marc Liyanage has what you want, or you could try OpenOSX.