Slashdot Mirror
Mac OS X 10.1.5 Update Available
krugdm writes "The Mac OS X 10.1.5 update which was hinted at in the MS Office update changelog is now available through Software Update. From the updater: 'Update 10.1.5 delivers enhancements which improve the reliability of Mac OS X applications, delivers improved networking, security, support for PC Card serial communication devices, and expanded peripheral device support.'"
It now supports 2D hardware acceleration and Quicktime support for the Rage Pro. Finally, the rev/A iMacs and iBooks can use OS X faster. Works quite well, windows on it seem snappier.
The source of this questioning is probably the Darwin 1.4.1 ISO image for x86 that's available....
Sure, Darwin has been available for IA-32 for a long time. But Darwin isn't OS X. The question remains, why would anybody think Apple would port their flagship operating system-- meaning OS X, not Darwin-- to a different architecture? Isn't that kind of like asking when Tivo is going to port their software to Replay TV's hardware?
Maybe because it already happened before but was killed because Apple did not want to sell Mac OS for x86?
Sure, the Star Trek project. That project failed for the obvious reasons:
1. Apple didn't think it likely that PC vendors would choose to bundle a Mac OS for Intel with their systems, and Apple didn't like the odds of trying to sell an after-market OS to customers that already had one for their computers.
2. Apple didn't want to start a political battle with Motorola by appearing to endorse Intel's CPUs over the PowerPC.
3. Apple was-- and is-- a hardware company, not a software company. Porting the OS to another platform would do nothing but reduce Apple's hardware revenues, which would very quickly be self-defeating.
Same reasons Apple wouldn't want to port OS X to any other architecture. So the question stands: why would anybody assume that Apple would want to port their OS to a non-Apple hardware platform?
3. Apple was-- and is-- a hardware company, not a software company.
/3
This statement is posted quite often, but I have to (somewhat) disagree. Apple is not just a hardware company. Apple is a COMPUTER company. They make the whole shebang, the hardware, the OS, and a lot of the best software for the platform. Very few other companies can say that. (Sun, IBM, HP, perhaps... with various Unices in ONLY the server market)
I am glad that Apple doesn't port to x86. As a long time windows/linux user, I can say that I was surprised at how much I love my Mac systems. OS X, how I love thee.
All powerbook users that use DoubleCommand to turn the useless second enter key into another beware ! 10.1.5 crashes at boot time due to DoubleCommand.
Delete the folder in your Library/Startup Items folder !!
blaah !
My tsch prompt in the terminal has changed. I'm pretty sure it's b/c of this update.
t er:~] elliotj%
When I launch my terminal.app this the prompt:
[elliot\032johnson\226\149\146s\032compu
but if I "pwd", it reports that I'm at:
/Users/elliotj
Wierd. Any ideas?
i say my rosary to OmniWeb. It (almost) makes my iBook have orgasms. Definatly my first choice for a while.
i'll be damned if i'm going to pay for it, though.
I don't mean to make fun, but I'll be damned if this isn't the perfect Slashdot comment. "Loved your software. Use it every day. I'll never pay you for it, ever."
Sheesh. Some of us make our living writing and selling software, you know. You could be just a little more tactful.
Look closely at a Mac LCD display - if it was using pixel subsampling, you'd see little coloured bits around the edge. You don't.
Sigh. That's not what subpixel sampling means. When you antialias, you render the image at a higher resolution than you can actually display. For example, you might double the effective resolution, and each pixel on the screen would be represented by four pixels in memory. Each of these rendered-but-not-displayed pixels is called a subpixel.
That trick with using only the red, green, or blue parts of an LCD pixel to display edges of type ("ClearType," I think it's called) is a pretty lame attempt at increasing apparent visual resolution. In an informal survey of about 15 people around my office, nobody liked the little colored flecks around the letters. One person said it made him feel like his eyes were going in and out of focus.
So, first, you and I are talking about two different things. And second, ClearType is not superior.
At the risk of perpetuating advertising for Unsanity... today I received this email from Unsanity (I use several of their "haxies"):
.
Dear friends,
When we saw MacOS X 10.1.5 out this morning, we got all excited about the ability of Carbon applications to use the native Quartz text rendering for ultra-smooth, antialiased text display. In order to take advantage of this feature, however, every Carbon application needs to be updated
"That's not fair" - we thought, so we sat down and wrote a small freeware haxie, called Silk (smooth as silk, get the feeling?). Silk enables the Quartz text rendering and smoothing introduced in Mac OS X 10.1.5 for all Carbon applications. This means antialiased text in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and many others. And if it doesn't look right in some application, you can add it to the Exclude list to get it to the way it looked before.
So, grab it now:
http://download.unsanity.com/silk-10.sit
More information and some pretty screenshots:
http://www.haxies.com/silk/
Thank you for your support and participation!
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
I'd like to know how, exactly, this is flamebait.
Aside from a few vocal, attention-starved whiners who have nothing better to do than move files around and scroll Finder windows back and forth all day, most of the people who have made an honest attempt at using it, have found OS/X's performance to be acceptable for getting Real Work done. It's not perfect, of course - nothing is. But the amount of whining that some people do over trivial issues is pathetic and annoying - thus, flamebait.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
There are about 3 ways to do anti-aliasing:
The very expensive way is to examine the actual paths you are rendering, how they intersect the pixels, and calculating the actual coverage of the pixels directly with math. This is probably what the original poster meant by "floating point". This is easy for infinitely long straight lines but very difficult for any other shape to do correctly.
A less expensive way is subpixel sampling, which is to use the normal black & white algorithim to render the letter about 4 times larger and then use 16 pixels (or sometimes weighted overlapping areas for better quality) to calculate the resulting gray from how many pixels are filled in. This can be done by hardware today and I believe is what is used by Quartz, the older Mac AntiAliasing, the new Windows AntiAliasing, and by Xrender for AntiAliasing. Note that some algorithims do the summation at the same time they calculate the subpixels, so there never is any "high resolution bitmap" in memory, but this does not change the basic algorithim.
The third way is to render at normal size and guess by looking at adjacent pixels. This is what Windows "Font Smoothing" did, I believe. A variation on it (producing shapes rather than grayscales) was used by early Macintoshes to render bitmaps onto higher-resolution printers. The primary advantage of this scheme is that it is fast, but otherwise it sucks.
ClearType is subpixel sampling with some multliple of 3 horizontally (not necessaryilly 1x3 as many people think, doing a higher resolution would result in better antialaiasing). These samples are then weighted-summed down to an image with 3 "subpixels" horizontally and one vertically. This is followed by a step I call "error diffusion" which is the clever part, to change the image by adding or subtracting some subpixels so the total amount or red, green, and blue are equal.
Okay, everybody, got it? "subpixel sampling" was used before Bill Gates first saw a computer, incidentally. It is NOT a MicroSoft invention, so stop making fools of yourselves.
...is that it's still not running on my Quadras.
(back to recompiling darwin on 68k for me... 3 months & seventeen days and gcc's STILL going...)
a grrl & her server