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Mac OS X Switcher Stories
spid writes "Tim O'Reilly posted an interesting article about people switching from other OSes (Mac OS, Windows, Linux) to Mac OS X. The resounding consensus is that most folks appreciate how, compared to these other OSes, Mac OS X 'just works.' O'Reilly also makes an interesting point that UNIX/Linux users, rather than Windows users, would be the best target niche for Apple's 'switch' campaign."
I'm a GNU/Linux user and have been since about 1995. I bought a Mac Powerbook laptop a few weeks ago, but ended up selling it after only a few days. Yes, it was sleeker, cooler, and generally nicer to look at than my current hodge-podge of hardware and software, but I decided that it wasn't for me. Yes, right now I have to tinker a little bit to keep things running, but I enjoy that. I realize that puts me in the minority of people in the "Real World," but I can understand how the Apple way isn't for everybody.
Don't get wrong, I think it's a great system, especially for people who aren't computer gurus, but it's not for me. The main thing was that OS X didn't offer me anything "new." There wasn't a compelling reason for me to learn a whole new set of shortcuts and keyboard commands in order to do what I'm already doing.
Switch to OSX from Linux? OSX is an incredible OS, but as long as I have to buy proprietary Apple hardware, and pay full price for minor upgrades, Apple can forget getting any of my money. Don't get me wrong.....technically, Apple got it right with OSX. But I still like the freedom of building my own machines as I need them. Apples are great for people that need convienience most of all, and have lots of cash to burn. The rest of us will continue to roll our own.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Yes, I see how Linux users may be the more likely candidate to pick up a Mac. Familiar *nix feel, sweet desktop and windows manager, kick ass hardware. What is there not to like?
On the other side, what's not to like? THE PRICE! Most Linux users have a Linux box that isn't the biggest and best machine, just a box with spare parts that you put together (cause, hell, it works GREAT on subpar hardware). Not many get stuff like GeForce4 cards, because the 3D gaming market hasn't really hit Linux hard. Now, to switch, you have to buy a fairly expensive machine. Personally, I'd rather spend the money on a PC, because I'm a gamer, and that's where my cash usually goes.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
O'Reilly also makes an interesting point that UNIX/Linux users, rather than Windows users, would be the best target niche for Apple's "switch" campaign.
As a Linux user, I agree, at least partly: Linux users are the most likely people to switch from Windows to Macintosh. I was never able to live with just Linux, I always used to have at least one Windows partition somewhere. Now I find that having a Macintosh around the house helps me sever my last ties with Microsoft. I'm still not giving up Linux, but Macintosh is a nice compliment to it.
Here I sit, writing on MacOSX IE 6, waiting Software Update to install new version of OpenSSL on the background. I use apt-get (fink), KDE and Emacs, develop software on this iBook and run it on *nix machines over network, be it command-line or X11, thru openssh.
I have not switched. This was, with it's 6 hour uptime, the best *nix-laptop I could afford.
I have not "switched", nor have I to "switch" back when someone puts out a better laptop. I just use whatever *nix is applicable to me. Yellow Dog, yeah, I would try, but I don't need to fix what is not broken.
Apple simply did not break BSD when they created Darwin.
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
Let me build my own box.
OSX works without having to know to hack configs and source, but if you want to, the ability to drop into its unix core is still there. It is both easy to use and powerful at the same time.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
I read an interesting article on Salon.com yesterday about a minister who had been suckered in the "Switch" campaign. The article can be found here.
Switching back and forth between different boxes all supporting your standard toolset is "freedom". Apple is in the game as long as they support it; soon as they start "locking" (see the excellent interview of Dre), they're out. Wish it were the same for every company.
Fix your laws, United Slaves of America!
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
Apple took a risk switching their entire OS core over and not having 'native combatibility' with older apps (yes I know it can run them but it has to load the whole classic mode which takes a long time). Apple went through a similar change when they went from motorola cpu's to the powerpc ones, and having the older code 'emulated' (although it ran just great anyway).
Apple seems to be much more willing than pc makers and microsoft to switch to new things and I think this is very good as it encourages others to follow. I am mostly a windows user and I must say that OS X is deffinately on par with winXP when it comes to usability and surpasses it when it comes to stability.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
DivX support on OSX is bad - if you use QuickTime. VideoLAN Client plays my DivX files perfectly on my 700MHz iBook. There is a small compatibility glitch if you have QuickTime 6 installed, but setting your display to Thousands of Colors instead of Millions of Colors fixes it. It's free, it's fast, and it lets you watch movies in full screen without the QuickTime tax.
Apple doesn't seem that interested in getting DivX to work well in QuickTime. Instead, they're pushing their own MPEG4 format. VLC is definitely the way to go.
Now there is a 'nix based OS that shows it can be done, the Linux distros should follow suit. It is no wonder that Linux "isn't on the desktop" given the current attitude of RTFM that pervades.
A lot of people are complaining about Apple's hardware, however, I have a slightly different view on it. I used to be a Mac person, and I am presently planning on going back, not because of the software (I prefer NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux, all of which support most modern Macs), but because of the hardware. Their laptops look nice, have reasonable battery life, and have more then enough power for what I do under Linux. As such, I'm currently planning on buying a loaded iBook as soon as possible, while the iBook doesn't look like that great of a deal if you look at it is a low end notebook, if you look at the 12.1" iBooks in comparison to PC "compact" laptops, the prices are really quite good. Sure the processors just are not keeping up with the x86 world these days, but my experiences with Apple in the past are such that I'm willing to bare that (plus their tech support ships you replacement parts quickly).
Windows and Linux users are used to having their desktops change dramatically throughout the years (for Linux users, sometimes weeks). Therefore, when plopped in front of a Mac OS X interface, the users tend to scout around and adapt pretty quickly.
Mac OS 9 users (Lord bless 'em) are the most stubborn, inflexible, fearful sort of user you can imagine when it comes to how their Macs work. That's a compliment to Apple--it shows the power of the original Mac OS interface over its many years of tenure. When you have a good thing, you are very stubborn to change.
But the loyalty to Mac OS 9 hurts Apple's move to OS X, of course. I anticipate having to take my client's OS 9 users through a Mac OS X orientation, watching them kick and scream in the process.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Actually, I'm convinced that Microsoft designed every version of Windows as a self-corrosive OS. That way you're always paying for upgrades and tech support. I bet if you let a fresh install of Win2k/XP sit on a machine running for 1 year with no user intervention and no hardware failures, it would still crash when you checked on it after that year...but that's just my opinion.
Apple is in the buisness of selling complete solutions starting with hardware. That's a good chunk of their money. Would all those that switched from a pc to a mac for a "better" os have done so if they could have run it on a pc? Doubt it.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Why not? Isn't that the primary goal, A stable OS, that is easy to use and configure. I don't have ANY problem with MS using a BSD/UNIX/LINUX kernel. I have a problem with MS and their method to create a proprietary PC platform.
IMHO - The majority of /. users disgust with MS is not the OS, but the desire to make the computing platform proprietary, and non standards compliant.
Don't flame me for supporting MS. I am not supporting them, just making a point.
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
Apple, does in fact, advertise to Linux users. Inside the cover of New Scientist, 29 June 2002 (AU edition) there is a double page advertisement entitled: "Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null."
A copy of this ad can be seen here.
They really are targeting OS X at the scientific Unix crowd, even Linux, as the ad says: "'After two-and-a-half years of Linux, I've finally found joy in a UNIX operating system. And I found it when I purchased a Macintosh - the first one I've ever owned.' - John Hummel Jr., The Gamers' Press"
While I can see them winning business off expensive Unix hardware, I wonder how effective they will be in targetting linux users.
www.fearthecow.net
Well not totally dead, but corporations would be far more ameniable to switching to OSX than they would Linux. It's not Microsoft, yet runs Office (so ensuring they can still use powerpoint, word, excel, outlook etc) and as many people have say "it just works". And once the corporations move, people get comfortable with working with something different and they eventually purchase it for home because that's what they've used and understand.
It isn't going to happen for various technical and business reasons, but it's something to think about anyway.
(cue lots of people either confirming the technical impossibility, telling me i'm dumb because i find OSX easier than KDE/GNOME, asking why I can't use OpenOffice instead of Word or just plain accusing me of trolling etc.etc)
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Basically, it boils down to "make it work".
I love Unix - I love the power and the stability. I still use Linux as a server system (though, I admit I wouldn't mind trying out an Apple server just to compare).
But the biggest reason why I switched just deals with making it work. Do I have to worry about whether my clock program, which has the features I want, works under Gnome or KDE or not? Will I be able to cut and paste between Emacs and Mozilla? How do I install the serial port adapter software - oh, wait, I'm using Red Hat, and the designer made it to work with Suse....
Again, it's not that Linux is bad at all, it just takes that much more work to tweak. Want to change resolution in Xwindows? Get out to a prompt and run Xconfigurator.
Then I use OS X, and I get the best of both worlds. I get the power of Unix (I spend more time in Terminal than anything else), but I still get a slick interface and programs that look great. I don't worry about whether the program I'm looking at needs Windows Manager or something else - it fits in. I can still run Gimp (because I'm too damn cheap for Photo Shop) under XDarwin.
I'd love for Linux to make huge desktop roads, but that will take a change of paradigm[sic]. Linux developers will have to give up some things - say "Let's stop the KDE vs Gnome arguments, and say *this* is the standard - let folks experiment with things if they want, but we will heretofore say *this* is the way to do things", then go out and make it. They'll have to have an Interface guideline, and try to hold to it. They'll have to get follow up programmer who don't just focus on cool technology - which we need, and I thank God they make it - but then they need someone to come along after them and say "All right, let's put a good interface on this puppy."
Is OS X better? Probably not - the stability is about the same, the speed is probably less than Linux, but the interface is great. Linux is faster, but isn't as pleasing to work with.
So that's why I switched. I keep up with the Linux stuff for my servers, but my day to day gaming/typing/communicating is done on OS X.
And just to self pimp (or for more on this subject): Penguin2Apple: How a Linux Lover turned to a Macintosh
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
In other words, switchers appear to be adopting Mac OS X at twice the rate of Mac OS 9 users. Linux users, and Windows users who also use Linux or another Unix, appear to be the most common switchers.
Does anybody else see something wrong with this statement? First, what percentage of his sample of alpha-geeks used Mac OS 9? We don't know. In general Mac has what, 5% of the market? So lets make things really simple and assume that the list he emailed consists of 1000 people. 50 of them use Macs. Of these 50, 5 have switched to OSX, a rate of 10%. Of the remaining 950, 10 people have switched to OSX, a rate of 1.05%. So what does "rate" mean to Tim?
More interesting is his claim that OSX is more appealing to those who already use some flavor of Unix as opposed to those who currently use Windows.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Just from the whining posts of "OS X is cool but Apple is a big, mean, evil proprietary hardware manufacturer", you can see that O'Reilly is completely wrong in suggesting Linux users are a perfect niche target. Apple should focus their ads 100% towards Windows users--people that expect to pay for what they use. There is no point going after the Linux folks. The attitude of "if its not free its evil" is not one you are going to change with white backgrounded commercials. Plus why would you focus on 1% of desktop users instead of 95%?
Unless Steve Jobs wants to lay prostrate in front of Linus and RMS and wail, "I am not worthy, I am not worthy!", there isn't an ad that is going to convert a hard core (masochistic) Linux desktop users.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Don't get me wrong - i use Linux for server applications because it's rock-solid.
Having said that, i don't know why this campaign of "It just works" isn't raising more eyebrows.
First of all - OS9 apps don't "just work" on OSX - there's a lot of cajoling to get older OS9 apps to run properly under X.
And, correct me if i'm wrong, Apple is still limited in the number of applications that are developed for the platform. Sure if you want to wait 6-8 months after the windows version of a game or app is realeased to have it ported to Mac, that's great - but i'm impatient.
As far as hardware is concerened - well at least NVidia cards work. But you certainly don't have as wide a variety of hardware available that's Mac-compliant - completely disregarding the hardware that the OS runs on!
OK. Make the campaign "It doesn't crash as much" or "You don't have to restart all that much anymore"...but say what you want - Windows 2000 and XP have taken Windows stability a long way since 95/98. Sure there are still some annoying points that i wish would go away (which is why i don't use Windows in a server environment) but on the whole i rarley encounter crashes anymore. And who leaves their machine on 24x7 anyway - i doubt all of those mac-usin' graphic designers do. They're all the artsy, crunchy, lets'-preserve-our-electricity types.
Bottom line is this - "It Just Works" is misleading at best.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
Well, I've been admiring the new iMac?, eMac?, the really cool looking single unit with the flat screen, for some time. I've also been lusting over the really nice looking Aqua interface. Anyway, the other day I had the opportunity to drive one of these machines for a day.
I started out with great excitement and anticipation. OS X presented me with various music and video applications which, I naturally couldn't resist trying. The picture was good and the sound from the little clear globe shaped speakers blew me away. Literally, they almost knocked me out of my chair, as the volume was set too high at first. I still marvel at the quality of the sound that comes out of these small speakers.
After a few minutes I tired of the quicktime sample movies and decided it was time to get to work. It suddenly became far more difficult for me to use this Mac. I found that there were a plethora of multimedia and surfing apps presented to me by the desktop but getting to the root of the file system and finding an xterm were much harder. It took me a fair bit of time to figure out how to get at these apps and several other productivity apps that I needed. It seemed as if Apple had intentionally hidden these apps, perhaps to keep it simple for less advanced users.
After about 30 minutes I also found that the *so cool* looking flat panel monitor was just too mall. The actual display area seems like about 14", I'm not sure what it really is. I am sure though that it is too small for extended use when you are trying to get work done.
All in all, I found my experience with this slick little Mac to be surprisingly cumbersome. I had expected the much touted, dead simple ease of use that Apple is famous for and I didn't feel that I experienced it. And, with the small screen I came to realize that I could never use this machine for an extended period of time.
Don't get me wrong, I still think that the Mac with OS X is fine. There's no doubt it's the coolest looking computer yet. I also know that with OS X it can probably do anything a Linux or Windows box can.
But, in the end I feel that I'm better off with Linux KDE and Mosfet's Liquid theme mimicing the Aqua interface. The simple fact is that this setup is just as capable, if not more so, than OS X and the difference in cost between a great Linux box and this cool Mac is mind boggling. Sorry dudes, no offense meant.
I work at a university, and I can see clearly who is switching.
Those who say they wont switch here are probably system administrators. Since I do sysadmin as part of my job, I can say that that part of me is a control freak, and loves the power of linux. That is also the reason why Linux has it hard on the desktop: only macosx, lycoris, lindows are even thinking of deprecating root in their OS'es.
The part of me which programs is split. Doing scientific programming today is easier on linux because of the number of high quality numerics/graphics libs available for X11. This will change. However, have you seen the simplicity of macosx? Every app is a directory. No gtk compatability problems(for those who remember). Copy the app anywhere. click, go. For command line people, change defaults using the default command, since all apps use plists. Open any file by saying open bla.pdf. It will use the default app. use open -with if you want a specific app.
The linking model is simple. The loading model is simple. applescript scripts most apps and is way easier to use than COM or bonobo. Still linux is a familiar model to lots of people. So I know people now, grad students and post-docs and engineers, whose desaktop is a macosx box and who program on linux..the professors dont program much so macosx works well for them. This student/scientist/engineer/programmer is the only remaining market.
But at the end of the day its the apps. Excel is available. And itunes and iphoto just rock.
There was a time when i liked struggling with linux to get all this working. At some point, one just wants to code. One dosent want to deal with dependencies, etc. You will say apt-get and I'll say hallelujah, its a great thing, but why cant i just install the freaking app where I want it too, and delete it by trashing it. rpm --erase??? Who would think of that?
The sad part is, most of what macosx has done could and still can be done on linux. Make a restricted distribution. Share earnings with app developers. Choose 10-15 best-of-breed apps, thats all. Thing of the next evolutionary step in these apps, rather than remaining behind the curve. root should only be a single user mode thing. Like gentoo, make init scripts dependent on whats running and whats not. Simplify the runlevels to single-user, and multi-user. Reduce hardware complexity by certifying systems based on linux friendly manufacturers. run daemons not as root. Get rid of the start, or hat, or whatever menu. Get rid of the XP like icons(see redhat8 beta). Give gtk a default look which dosent look like grey shit. Use a tasteful muted color scheme. Make sure pcmcia and usb and firewire just work on plug in. Use hotplug and devfs like mandrake do. Get rid of one million etc config files and use gconf and alchemist like redhat do. Simplify the gnome2.0 desktop. Check out the innovations in oe-one's desktop. Use autofs pervasively. Implement per process namespaces. Implement a simple event layer on top of bonobo, pipes, mimetypes, clipboard, etc to make scripting the desktop trivial. See plan9's plumbing. Unify zsh(bash) and nautilus to use same mime system. Allow apps to be manipulated as directories. When such directories are opened in either, allow hooks to be called which can start or install apps into a dependency database. Create a pasteboard server like in macosx. Implement gnustep over gtk2.0...
You get my point. There is so much thats already there but just missing a bit. It needs people with that extra bit of innovation, and that extra bit of compansation a app-royalty scheme would generate to push it across the edge. It needs that part of me that is a system administrator to let go. But it may be too late.
The Inscrutable Gargoyle
It isn't so much the platform, but rather the way they code it to avoid working with alternative platforms. Windows itself is fine, but locking other platforms out of specific Windows file formats is just wrong. That is reason enough to avoid supporting Windows.
D MCA bullshit. That is what pisses me off.
All of these folks on this article talk about going out and buying a Mac, then installing MS Office. It just feeds Microsoft even more. How about Open Office with an open, XML based file format. Not some cryptic-reverse-engineer-and-we'll-have-your-ass-
Closed software is OK (I love Opera), but it needs to be able to work with other alternatives. Standards are the issue here. Microsoft just doesn't support that idea.
Sounds like Astrid the Priestess needs to pray to God she gets some freaking brains. She's still using Floppies for God's sake! I can't even fit one MP3 on a floppy these days. She reports that she uses "Disk Utility" often -- something smells real fishy--is Gates religious?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
how many times does this idea need to be brought up, and then quickly shot down because it will never happen?
1. apple makes their money selling hardware. they will lose all that revenue if people can just use a walmart $400 pc.
2. apple is a systems company, using the fact that they develop both the hardware and the software as an advantage to them. how many times do you hear the words *it just works* when it comes to apple computers? that's a big selling point for the bulk of the population who don't like to tinker with hardware.
3. yet another architecture change? i think not. moving from 68K to ppc went well, it took some time but it was a success. os9 to os10 is going well, most apps are there and the open source/hobby coder population is booming. so to go from ppc to x86 after moving to a new OS, the big software companies are just going to say no. that's suicide.
4. ibm's new power4 desktop chip is further evidence that apple is going to stay ppc. this chip has 160 vector ops (altivec has 162), that's another big indicator.
i can't see apple going x86 in the future.
Pretty, clean, responsive(low end G4 with 256Mb), not nearly enough options to dig under the hood(especially during installation), give me an 'expert' mode, or give me death! :)
Hard to find some things, super easy to find others. I can't tell if my 'iDisk' is actually on a server at Apple, or a local cache of stuff on a server at Apple. A mount is not really a disk mount, like me Mr. 6 years of Unix would think of it as.
I like the Dock. I really like iTunes. I reallly like iPhoto.
I didn't like not having root access out of the box. It's no lie, Mozilla really does suck on OS X. :( /bin/tcsh has got to go. Configuring everything is a snap, and the XML based config files are cool. If I could find them.. The directory struct. is gonna take some getting used to, as is remembering that programs don't close when you click the 'X" on the top window bar, only that window does. SSH support(albeit an insecure version) out of the box is nice. The software updater package thingy is slick. I'm haven't totally figured out how to add new users, although its rumored to be under this 'Netinfo' thing, which is like a seperate control place for the Unix stuff.
So here I sit nearly 6 months later, still enjoying my Mac, but it splits time with my Linux box as well via a KVM switch. Some tasks are just better suited for certain tasks than other. The proof of that for me was coming back from South America and being able to plug my Sony Handycam right into my Mac via firewire and using iMovie to pull video clips right off the camera, editing them, and making a 'home movie' that turned out really nice.
The coolest part was I hit 'record' and it wrote my 'iMovie' back to a blank tape in the Handycam. Sometimes it is just nice to have things work like that without having to config anyting. Not that it's my primary machine(mandrake 8.2 still holds that role) or anything, and the iMovie software is just a small unique example of something I really like about my Mac, but as a Linux user for nearly 6 years, there's a lot I've come to appreciate about Mac's and OSX in particular and I think others in similar situations may feel the same way...
At first I was glad to come home to 98 for ease, XP for stabillity, and Beos for zippy speed. OS X 10.1.x had me hating the Mac. Many of the problems plaguing my Mac was due to bugs and features that I (still) can't believe they left out.
With 10.2, alot of the 'bugs' have been fixed, windows open a TON faster, the machine is far more responsive, and I have handwriting recognition too (which is just cool).
Arguably, It should have been that way at the start, rather than me beta-testing 10.1.x. I can't say I'll be auctioning off my p4 1.8 (which still smokes the mac) anytime soon, but Apple is definitely becoming more tempting.
If Apple gets faster hardware than my PC (blah, blah gigahertz/flops, whatever. IE opens in 2 seconds on my P4, and 8 on the mac 733) or if OpenBeos makes a strong case (which it will!) will make some of my decision to switch or not for me. The preceeding sentence was exceedingly poorly crafted. Thank you.
It seems like most of the comments here have been along the lines of "I won't switch to OSX because it doesn't run on x86 and therefore I can't build my own box". But it's clear that people who really want to build their own box is in the decided minority, and Apple would be crazy to go after this market in particular. And if you have an OS where users can build their own box, then you necessarily open yourself up to compatibility/driver/etc. issues.
And I think the reason Apple isn't targetting the Linux/Unix market is that there just isn't enough people using those machines to make money selling $2000 boxes...
I have been a Linux user sience 1994 and I like linux and I still do, Then I started working and I no longer have the time or the will of tinkering with a Linux box tring to get every peice of new hardware to work, and I never like PC archecture. So I switched to using Sun Hardware, and I was much more productive with it, Applications that I wanted to use generally ran better, and much more smoother. Then I switched to OS X. And I find that I am the most productive with it. GUI when GUI is best the terminal when CLI is best. The GUI is clean and out of the way, (unline CDE, GNOME, and KDE and Windows that tries to impress you with all the graphics) I found that using OS X is just more productive. And there is a larger selection of comerical software for OS X, (Open Sourse Software has a great software selection base but it still not there for everything I need). Just as the comerical says "it just works."
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If I had a OS X box the first thing I'd do is get a different mouse and keyboard. We have an OS X box here at work, and I have plugged my 3 button USB mouse into it, and it actually knows what to do when I right click on things.
Somehow, the idea that someone who's already been suckered into religion, was suckered into advertising, is not too surprising to me.
But the reason I don't consider it a waste is that the software does what *I* want it to do, not what some marketroid wants it to do. And I know it will continue to do what I want, instead of having my preferences thrown out the door next time someone decides that maybe, after all, I really do want spyware, upgrade nagging, submission to mailing lists, silent upgrades to important system components, their web browser as the default, their messaging software installed with an audio driver upgrade, email programs that execute code against my will, etc, ad nauseam. In the end, I get back that time I've invested from systems that don't crash, and things that don't magically go wrong when I install some unrelated piece of software.
So while I'll probably have OS X machines around, I'm also going to have FreeBSD and Linux machines installed somewhere, too. And I'll keep R-ing The F-ing M.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
She's still using Floppies for God's sake!
And why not? They're considerably cheaper than CDs, and they make a lot more sense if you only have a 30k file that you need to backup or take/send somewhere.
I can't even fit one MP3 on a floppy these days.
Did you even read the complete article? Did she ever mention wanting to store MP3s on floppy?
Remember, just because something isn't useful to you doesn't mean it isn't useful to someone else.
Dinivin
I'd used macs for years before I had to abandon them because none of my clients used them. I'm also a very long time Unix user (Since System III). So, OSX is a natural for me right? I have at TiBook with OSX and I would love it.
Except for the damned dock.
This is an incredibly misbegotten feature. First of all, let me state my UI bias: the user should be in charge, the UI elements should just sit there until called upon. I favor responsiveness over intrusiveness. The dock is cutesy, and keeps calling attention to itself with the stupid Genie effect (if I tell you to go away, just do it), and having icons bounce up and down. So right off the bat I was ill inclined towards the thing. In its default configuration it robs the user of valuable real estate. Yeah, you can do alpha blending, now go the hell away so I don't have to look through you to see the bottom of my documents.
The only thing that makes the dock tolerable is that you can use the System Preferences to make it tiny, hidden, and to turn off the idiotic genie effect.
The sad thing is that all the functions of the dock are done better by the apple and upper right hand menus of MacOS 7-9. These functions are clearer and separated in space. When applications needed to get the user's attention, they didn't have to jump up and down, they just flashed the upper right hand application menu (if I remember correctly).
The problem with the dock is that it is overloaded with functions. As I keep telling PDA developers I work with, overloaded UI elements are a very poor substitute for good design. The Dock really undermines the Mac experience. I find KDE much more responsive and less intrusive.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Haha, that's funny. The scary thing is it sounds just like my wife who insists on saving all her work to floppies and won't let me junk the drive.
:) ... I love being married.
Me: baby we have DSL if you need a file while you're at school you can transfer it, its faster than loading the 500K word doc off the floppy
her: but what if the harddrive breaks?
me: that floppy will go bad long before the harddrive breaks
her: I don't care, it could still happen and I want it with me!
Women
The Anti-Blog
since I have a three year old Bronze G3 Powerbook, and it's my understanding that it's too damn slow to run OSX, or OSX is too damn slow for it. Still true?
sulli
RTFJ.
Interestingly enough, she states that most of the problems she encountered were Microsoft applications throwing up on her. MS apps misbehaving on a competitor's OS? Quel Suprise!
[switch to black & white... interior Rick's Cafe Americain]
I'm shocked, SHOCKED that this is happening to her. (Your DR-DOS error message, sir) Oh, thank you, thank you very much.
[fade to present day]
banished to the lonely "Mac user" printer port at Kinko's
I dunno where she lives, but all the Kinko's I've visited recently (DC Metro area) have Air Ports up and running. Point and shoot printing!
losing all ability to communicate with my Euro-traveling boyfriend
Last time I looked, neither SMTP nor POP gave a rat's ass what OS was running.... this smells and looks like an eNORmous red herring. (but Salon, published by MSNBC, would NEVER do that, right?)
From all her whining, my suggestion to her would be to sell her iBook, and use the proceeds to purchase a good typewriter as her needs seem to be the ability to type up sermons and little else
Some of us want to do more with our computers. In fact, I bet you want to do more with your computer. In that event, MacOS X is a worthwhile consideration.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
I was Mac junkie for years, before finally being converted to GNU/Linux a couple of years ago. I think OS X is cool, but it has the worst GUI to ever come out of Cupertino. It's sluggish, many things don't have keyboard shortcuts that should, and in general Aqua is lacking in places where X Window Managers excel.
For example, why is there no support for virtual desktops? In a perfect world I'd have a monitor bigger than Rhode Island, but in reality I'm often using 15-inch Apple Studio Displays. I'd like to be able to have more than one window open without having a messy pile-up on my desktop.
In general, I find that I just can't work very fast in OS X, so until such work-flow issues get resolved, there's no chance of me using OS X as my primary desktop.
We enjoy learning the ins and outs of our machines, much like my brother the gearhead enjoys rebuilding his 52 Harley.
My mother, on the other hand does not want or need to know how to rebuild her engine, or her PC. She just wants to get her work done.
Clear, Dark Skies
...because other (former) Linux users are doing the job for them. Between Tim O'Reilly, plenty of folks here on / and various others, it would be difficult for geeks not to know that OS X is "Unix Inside (tm)".
Sing it again with me brothers and sisters: Apple is never ever going to port OS X to x86!
It just ain't gonna happen. Apple makes its money off of hardware sales.
Furthermore, do you want a great OS that runs on great hardware? Or do you want a great OS that runs on ad-hoc mismatched hardware.
Part of the reason that Windows sucks so hard and that Linux never seems to offer full support for hardware is because they have to support every little last variation and kludge that the hardware manufacturers can dream up. If Mac OS X were to go to x86, not only would Apple lose money, but they'd lose face -- OS X would start becoming more and more like Windows and Linux on the desktop...painful.
I haven't had any difficulty or undue expense in getting hardware for my Macs, so please...put away the FUD.
blog |
Had they licenced the OS, rather than the hardware, today /. would be bitching about the evil software monopoly Apple.
And Bill would be asking me, "Do you want fries with that?"
I'm another Linux user switching to OS X. Vice Chair of my LUG, Linux user for five years, and believe it or not it was other LUG members that talked me into taking the plunge.
I needed a notebook for two main purposes.
I ended up going way over budget and buying an 800MHz G4 "Titanium" Powerbook. It was a rocky start because OS X is missing some of the features I love most about Linux. But then I started diving into the applications and (here it comes) it Just Works.
Clients love it when I open my backpack, pull this thing out, and show them the progress of their video on this. Better still, it has all kinds of ports on it. I can hook it up to the SVideo jack on your television set, audio outs to your stereo, and show you your movie the way it will look once it it on a DVD. That feat would be much more difficult on a PeeCee portable running Linux (or even Windows) and would almost certainly require a PC Card adapter with a dongle. This is much cleaner as it only requires two cables plugged directly into the back of the TiBook.
My major gripes are pretty easy to name.
Overall, I am very happy with this purchase. I find myself using the Linux box less and less for desktop stuff, and the OS X box more and more for that purpose. It was a lot of money but I feel much better about it now because it is much better integrated than any PeeCee notebook I've seen.
Maybe it was his pitch about the intuitiveness and femininity of the Mac -- its smooth operating system, its sleek curves, its bouncy icons that enlarge when you touch them, the way the documents slide onto the screen, the glossy surface and undulating pastel screen savers...
I take "bouncy icons" as evidence of OSX.
This person sure does like to whine though. First she is unhappy when the Apple keys are gone in grade school. Then she complains that it never makes sense, but that the Ctrl key gave her a sense of "control"? Notice that she never exactly sings the praises of Windows. I wonder if this article is astro-turfing in action...
Lasers Controlled Games!
i agree, VLC (VideoLan Client) is great, and being at "Thousands" of colors rather than "Millions" is so inconsequential in OSX - as in OSX does such a good job with color handling - that I have been running with just "Thousands" for weeks without even realizing it until I checked the Displays menu in the menu bar a minute ago!
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
You're bent on Microsoft, and it shows badly. Apple doesn't prevent you from edit config files. They're all there, tucked quietly away from people that don't need to see them. But they are there, and you can edit them if you prefer.
On many levels, Apple has given us something that many others haven't - a choice. You can choose to use the interface, and most people will. For those who want more, use the console, install Xwindows, dig around in the config files.
And it's good that you keep different OSes. You should. If almost everyone used one OS, we'd have all sorts of headaches...
--
UNIX is Powerful, Linux is Free, BSD is Open, MacOS X is Usable.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Red Hat is better - the GNOME desktop is well laid out, bold and clean but it still suffers badly in comparison to OS X.
If you want to see how badly, just compare how hard it is to change your screen resolution, or share a folder, or change the system time, or burn a CD, or rip a CD into MP3 format, or get help on doing any of these things. All these things are pretty straightforward in OS X. You'd be hard pressed as a novice to figure them out in RH Linux.
OS X has faults (using Sherlock to find a file is a major pain in the ass) but it's clear from the changes in 10.2 that Apple are addressing them. The next question is why aren't Red Hat and the rest doing the same?
I am now buying CDs for around 20 cents a pop (and probably spending too much) so I really don't see the cost saving of a floppy that holds 1.5mb versus a CD that holds 700mb. And what program besides a text editor makes a 30k file?
Did you even read the complete article? Did she ever mention wanting to store MP3s on floppy?
That is a size example of how most file formats today are bigger than what a floppy can hold.
Remember, just because something isn't useful to you doesn't mean it isn't useful to someone else.
Yet Salon is promoting this woman as the "common man" in the article which doesn't sit well with your point. Most users have dropped the floppy.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
(User #241058 Info | http://killyridols.net/) Have you even tried the latest Mandrake.. or even RedHat? If you just want to read email, browse the web and play mp3s then you never have to edit config files.
You are describing the absolute minimum, what if you want to do more? How about running much more advanced software suites? Adding new hardware? Attaching a wide array of peripherals? I haven't used Mandrake so I don't know, but it seems that you are implying that to do more you probably will have to edit config files.
I'm doing all the things you mention plus I'm running a number of development tools, a few advanced graphics programs, dual monitors, a USB scanner, a wacom tablet, usb printer, attaching to a professional digital camera, connecting to an 802.11b network & occasionally attaching the laptop to a TV or video monitor, all without ever having to edit config files or even the command line to get it all working. (Oh yeah, and with color correction between input(scanners & camera) and output(monitors & printer or video monitor)). Perhaps that would be possible with Mandrake but your post seems to imply otherwise.
The only config files I have played with are for apache since I wanted to use a lot of advanced features. This is actually one of the things I like about OS X, everything just works, but if you want to do something different, advanced or just plain wierd the config files are still there for the advanced user.
- No multi-workspace/multi-desktop functionality in Aqua.
- Poor keyboard on iBook (flimsy, and I still haven't found a reliable way to swap Caps Lock and Control).
- Low bang for the buck. Yes, I'm well aware of the "MHz Myth". Unfortunately, it's only partly a myth. Given enough of a lead in clock speed, even the P4 (broken crap design that it is) can be pretty damn fast. The 700 MHz iBook is pretty damn slow compared to a comparably priced Athlon, PIII or P4 laptop. Add that to the slow memory speeds on all but the latest destop machines and, well it isn't pretty.
The speed thing I could probably deal with as a trade off for stability and reliability. The keyboard is a much bigger issue, as is the crippled UI. Fix those things, and I'd be inclined to start using OS-X. I'd still have my *nix, and access to a decent array of comercial software as well (more for my wife, who is a photographer, then for myself, mind you). I probably wouldn't really "switch", but rather add OS-X based Macs to my stable. Perhaps if they are as out of the box funtional as folks say, OS-X could even displace Linux as my primary environment.The idea of proprietary hardware is something like what Palladium might end up being, where only approved code can be run on a given platform. Last I checked, Linux ran perfectly well on Apple hardware. And if you open the things up, you see pretty much the same thing you'd see inside a PC, save for a PPC processor for an x86 one, and there's nothing in the G4 that you can't read about in a spec from Motorola (same situation as Intel's chips, for the most part).
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
I can't afford a Mercedes, and I accept that until I have the money to do so I will have to accept what ever alternatives there are. The world of computers is the same - its a reality you have to accept.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Agreed! This OS would sell millions of copies if it ran on x86 instead of PPC.
No, it'd sell a few more copies than it does now, and everyone else would pirate it. Its the same deal with windows.. if it doesn't come bundled with something, people steal it. Apple happens to make the hardware they bundle their OS with, so they don't have to break the law to ensure that people buy it.
What I don't like about it:
The dock. The dock was a cool thing ten years ago, but the start menu/taskbar style of user interface is, IMHO, far better. (Apparently the KDE and Gnome folks think so, too.) OS X's dock is just...bizarre. I've used it for seven months and I'm still wondering why it works the way it does. Yeah, you can resize it, you can hide it, you can change the magnification levels, and it has animated icons. That's all well and good, but all the dock is really good for is *lauching* programs. It pretty well sucks for controlling those programs after they're launched. Want to close a running app from the dock? You have to click and hold the dock icon to pop up a menu, then select the menu option to close the app. Maybe it'll close, maybe not, in which case you have to mouse all the way up to the top of the screen, pull down the Apple menu, and do the Force Quit thing. I'm sure there may be keyboard shortcuts for these things, but the whole point of a graphical user interface is so people don't have to memorize keyboard shortcuts. And we won't even discuss using the dock to keep track of any open windows an app may have...
The menu bar. I hate, loathe, and despise the way OS X always puts the menu bar at the top of the screen. You can have an app that runs in a 320x240 window in the bottom right corner of the screen, but if you want to access that program's menu bar, you have to mouse all the way up to the top of the screen. Change window focus without meaning to? The menu bar at the top changes, which means the menu bar you wanted to access when your mouse pointer finally arrives up there may not be the menu bar you needed to access. Keep the menu bars with the window, not as a separate entity.
File permission strangeness. I have seen cases in OS X where I, as the only administrator of a machine, did not have permission to do things I needed to do, such as, but certainly not limited to: deleting folders, taking ownership of folders, and changing permissions on folders. Example: I run Mozilla nightly builds on my OS X box. After upgrading to a newer build, I was not able to delete the folder containing the old build through the finder. So I popped open a terminal window, did a cd to the directory containing the Mozilla folder, and did an rm -rf Mozilla/. Permission denied. I tried to do an su. Wrong password. (My account has admin privs anyway; I shouldn't need to do an su at all.) WTF is the root password on these OS X boxes, anyway? I tried to do a chown -R. Permission denied. I tried to do a chmod -R ugo+rwx. Permission denied. I do an ls -alF on the Mozilla directory. Turns out the owner of this directory is some obscure number (undoubtedly the UID of the user that did the build on another machine far, far away). So I've got this directory I can't delete. I've worked with UNIX variants for 12 years; this shouldn't be happening.
You can't really customize the user interface. Just because it works for somebody at Apple doesn't mean it works for me. 'Nuff said.
Touchpads and the general lack of a second mouse button. Okay, this really is more of a hardware rant than an OS X issue, but come on. There's a reason almost all modern mice have at least two mouse buttons; that's because a second mouse button improves the usability of the interface. Apparently they don't believe that at Apple, and thus I have to do a lot of clicking-and-holding to open up context menus. And whoever came up with those damn touchpads will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
What I like:
It's based on BSD, and the iBook is very small and light.
IMHO, the cons outweigh the pros.
I found it kind of a pain to run X Windows apps on MacOS X, and it's nice to have the much wider set of open-source apps available on Linux, rather than the smaller set that's been ported to MacOS X. At this point, I only use my mac to run a couple of old MacOS 9 apps that I still need.
Find free books.
Odd, Internet Explorer 5.2 is the newest mac version...
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
That is a size example of how most file formats today are bigger than what a floppy can hold.
Hmmm... I know a lot of teachers who use their computer mostly for writing up lesson plans and tests in MS Word, and they can fit dozens of these files onto one floppy. That's all they need.
Shall we compare the number of users who use Word day to day with the number of users who create mp3s, avis, mpegs, or other formats that (generally) won't fit on a floppy. I think you'll find that Word users are much more plentiful, and for their needs, floppies work great.
Yet Salon is promoting this woman as the "common man" in the article which doesn't sit well with your point. Most users have dropped the floppy. Very few users that I know have dropped the floppy. The ones that have are generally the much more advanced computer users, not the average user.
Dinivin
I switched only because I needed a new video editing PC. After several years of building my own boxes with Windows NT and 2000 and 3rd party hardware, Adobe Premiere is still not easy to learn, nor is it very stable, nor is it very fast. And the 3rd party hardware makes me shudder with revulsion: buggy drivers and a lot of vendor denial.
The cost for the PC hardware I wanted was about 2700.00 USD. Then I looked at my other PCs: one is very stable, one does not work with any version of Windows but runs for 100 days with Linux, another one was sort of flaky until I installed OpenBSD (this is why it's good to have many OS choices; if it's a hardware problem, it should die under ANY OS, like my Thinkpad with a bad motherboard used to do).
When I looked at the Power Mac dual G4 1GHz, I saw the tradeoffs: slower bus, less MHz in the CPUs, and so on. But, I get 2 firewire ports digital video out and OSX all included. I also saw several movies in the past 2 years with a credit to FCP. The price was $200 over what I would pay for a tricked out PC.
I went to the Apple store where they showed me how to download and edit footage right in the store. I have never seen a PC store with a setup like this.
I was surprised at how fast the Mac replaced my Windows PC for everything I do: Office, e-mail, software development. The hardware is not the latest or sexiest, but it works better. The computer _feels_ faster, because I never have to stop working to appease some sudden need the OS has.
I think that the world of cheap commodity hardware and all-compatible software is still a dream; believe it or not, Intel, Motorola, Sparc, they're ALL using proprietary technology that locks you into a vendor's plans, whims, and mistakes. Get used to it. When buying the Apple, I chose a different route: pay a premium for "commodity" hardware with a lot of added value. Dell and Gateway have gotten so big that they cannot afford to lose any money; maybe being the biggest company is not always the best thing to do.
About me and technology: I work in a Windows NT/2000/Solaris 7-8-9 shop. By day I am a systems architect building Solaris, Windows, and OpenBSD systems for security and business automation. I program in python, perl, java, and C++.
My wife runs Mac OS X. She's a Project Manager for a International Medical Informatics project. She doesn't need the CLI but needs WebDAV, SMB, NFS and whatever else the project throws at her. Need to communicate with a hundred people all in different countries with different machines? You can't just send them Word files. I'm pretty amazed that a single platform can cope with both of our workloads.
My good friend runs FreeBSD. He swears by it. He writes little networked apps. He's recently got himself an iBook for development because he figures he can do 90% of the hard development work on any of his machines and then by just adding a pretty little GUI in InterfaceBuilder, he can sell the little apps to Mac people as well. He's not aMac guy but he tells me how much he's spent on hardware upgrades in the last two years and I'm amazed. Sure, PC hardware is cheaper, but is it necessary to upgrade everything every month???
I don't care what platform you use. Just leave me to use Mac OS X. You on Linux? Want to show me a cool app? Recompile and we're there.
What a terrible story! Regardless of what the actual situation is, and who is or is not switching, this guy spun an entire premise based on data that is worse than useless. After soaking up some anecdotal evidence about who is switching, he made just about every mistake possible in conducting a poll (preselected pool, lousy response rate, etc.), then draws conclusions based on a miniscule sample size! He got only 15 responses (quoting from the article):
"The 15 responses were as follows:
* Upgrading from OS 9 (5)
* Switching from another operating system (10)
Where things got interesting was the platform people were switching away from. Despite the implication of Apple's switch campaign, that users are coming from Windows, the majority of the defections were from Linux, or from a combination of Windows and Linux or another version of Unix:
* Switching from Windows only (1)
* Switching from Windows to OS X for personal use, but still using Windows at work (2)
* Switching from dual-boot Windows/Linux, or separate machines for the two operating systems (2)
* Switching from Linux (5)"
And so, from the response of 5, count 'em, *5* Linux-only users, he concludes that Linux is more of a target than Windows users. If only two more Windows users had responded to his "poll", the conclusions would have been quite different. What a worthless article. It remindes me of the old story about the behavioral scientist who, after studying rats, said, "33% of white rats consistently prefer Swiss cheese to Cheddar, 33% prefer Cheddar to Swiss, and 33% have unknown preference, because my third rat ran away without tasting either one."
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
thato nly changes the displayed resolution, not the actual desktop resolution. try switching tesolution and then moving your mouse beyond the bottom or the right side.
This is not intuitive. This is a mess. Sure, it may be useful for a select few, but really, it's confusing or annoying for anyone else.
Now i remember the first linux i succesfully installed was caldera and they actually did go a long way to promote usability. the version i used was very old, i think it was 2.x, however it had a gui for changing the resolution, and it actually did work. i think it had to restart the x server to do it though. a bit strange, but...
As a Linux user of 4 years now, I bought a new iMac a few months ago and have to say I have been nothing but impressed. I have a beautifully configured Linux box at work, but the thought of going home to the same thing after a 9 to 10 hour day didn't fill me with joy, plus I was concerned that I would be forever recompiling KDE betas when my wife wanted to check her email, which wouldn't lead to a happy family life. Yet I refuse to have a dull Microsoft box in the house.
The iMac has proved a superb compromise. Both my children are addicted to the various DK educational software the shop on Tottenham Court Road threw in. iPhoto is superb and the integration of Digital Cameras and Camcorders with the rest of the OS is seamless, my four year old can now take the camera and edit photos on the box without much help. And underneath it all is UNIX, it connects easily to my broadband connection, and all my IMAP, LDAP and SSH sessions to my corporate network work fine, making it the perfect machine to use for working from home (and it looks good too).
So I wouldn't described myself as someone who has switched from Windows or Linux, rather Apple achieved a sale where nothing would have been bought in it's place. I am confident I am not alone in this market segment, one of my friends with children the same age has bought an iMac for exactly the same reasons, and I know of others considering it.
i am not afraid of /etc, i just don't want to waste all my time there when i could be doing osmething more useful like responding to trolls on slashdot.
1.3gb is less than the 1.8gb workstation install of mandrake 8.2
I go from power-on, to login prompt in about 30 seconds using OS X 10.2.
Chimera Navigator (what name are they gonna use?) 0.4 starts up in about 5 seconds for me.
my machine is very modest. it's the lowest end machine that apple currently sells, the ibook 600 cdrom machine.
why not get the details correct if you are going to troll?
My wife, a graphic designer and longtime Mac user, also hates the UI. The finder doesn't feel right to her, and she forgets about the doc at the bottom. iMovie even hides the doc from you. She started using my Vaio laptop, and she's ready to dump her iMac.
Everyone says the Mac "just works", but the iMac DV she has is cursed with the "sleep of death". It hangs at boot about one in every ten times, and it never comes back from sleep states.I just found the fix for it (after assuming it was the hardware controller going out over the last two years), and it's going to involve digging in the extensions and clearing the PRAM. This is no fun, and there's no diagnostic output. I'm just going to have to try a bunch of different combinations that Apple recommends and hope that something works.
My four-year-old daughter cried the first time she saw the new OS and wanted to know what happened to her computer. She still doesn't entirely understand why her games don't work well in OSX, and why she has to reboot into System 9.
I've been a longtime Mac user, and I did a lot of ThinkC and 68000 assembler programming in college. I stopped using Apple machines as my primary desktop when they killed the clones, but I kept maintaining my wife's system. I went out and bought OSX for her when they ported iMovie, mainly for iMovie2. I can't say I'm happy with the interface. I'm a WindowMaker user, so I know where it's coming from, but I constantly forget about the doc and lose my way in the administration app. Aqua looks pretty, but that doesn't make up for the quirky UI. A lot of my Linux-using friends show interest in it, but I can't recommend it to them, especially when Apple charges twice the price of a decent PC for half the computing power.
My guess is that the guys O'Reilly dug up have more money than they know what to do with and really only use their machines to browse the web and fill their iPods. Most were late adopters (though he touts them as "alpha geeks"), which makes me suspicious of their commitment to the platform. My guess is that, a year or so from now the next bit Microsoft marketing campaign will convince them to switch back to the PC.
That's it. Whilst I can temporarily live without the video conferencing, I consider the lack of an accounts package on a home machine to be a truly serious ommission. I realise this doesn't affect the US, but in the UK it kills the thing dead as a home machine. Virtual PC won't do by the way - if I'm switching environments I'm switching environments and don't want to run half and half.
Please Intuit. Please. You have an OS X-native Quicken, and you ave a UK Quicken for Windows. Surely it can't be beyond the wit of mankind to combine these products and produce a native UK Quicken?
Cheers,
Ian
"it's called WinNT and it has a VMS"
Nooooooooo! Please stop perpetuating that myth. If NT had a VMS core, NT would actually be a scalable, secure, robust OS.
Yes, David Cutler, the head of NT/W2K development, was also one of the original VMS design team members, but the operating systems themselves have little in common (except for similarites between a few memory structures of interest only to device driver developers).
As for whether the NT kernel contains any purloined Prism/Mica code, that is an entirely different branch of speculation altogether....
*** Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams of Which Stuff is Made ***
The same with computers. Some people have real-life work to do and poking around inside the OS for hours to accomplish that takes a few seconds on XP or OS X is a supreme waste of time for them. They just want the bloody thing to work so they can get on with whatever they bought the machine to do in the first place.
Frankly I don't understand what your problem is with making Linux usable. If you want to RTFM, feel free to live your life in the console. But while Linux continues to inflict that piece of shit it calls a desktop on mere mortals they will simply turn to other operating systems be they made by Microsoft or Apple.
In fact, there's a crippled version that allows two desktops. I still think this is a basic feature that should be in the standard UI, but again, at least there is an option.
adobe premiere/after effects and discreet's editdv are available for windows, as well as professional tools like shake. i am a mac os x user myself, but there is good video editing stuff for windows too.
My conclusion was different. She wasn't suckered . . . being suckered implies being deceived. She wasn't deceived at all. Her negative experiences have to do with unreasonable and unrealistic expectations about the switching experience. She can't print, she can't talk to her boyfriend, she misses her floppy disks, she doesn't understand CD-RW, she misses her left-clicking Windows mouse, her favorite font is gone, she can't figure out what keys perform what task.
In other words, she expected her new Apple Macintosh iBook laptop to behave _exactly_ like her old Microsoft Windows desktop PC. And when it didn't, she blames someone else for "seducing" her. Suckered, or typical modern consumer? I think the conclusion is obvious.
It's not freeware (god forbid you have to pay for something), but I've been using it for a couple months and it's roughly a billion times better than the Space app.
Now all we need is focus-follows-mouse...
i could easily install all the necessary stuff.
easily for you, or easily for the average user?
If you can get em free for linux, 99% of the time you can get em free for OSX. And if worst comes to worst, you could always install Linux nex to OS X
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
It wouldn't even have been worth it if I hadn't got that Radeon PCI a few months before (the current 7000 series supposedly has a problem running on older Power Macs and OS X).
But the old thing won't take 10.2. I got it to install, but it crashed on startup. Good thing I installed it to a different drive and didn't trash my working 10.1.5 install. I'm getting me one of those new dual 1GHz boxes today. (I tried yesterday, but nobody had them in stock.)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
If Astrid is having problems with floppies, God forbid you put her in front on nano or vi! AppleWorks is more of her speed.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Yeh, but I bet macosx lets you change your screen resolution with out using a text editor and config files..
lol re: mac os x 86.
But think, how many people have pirated OSX. My good friend pirated it. Now how many people have pirated a full machine? As an apple customer, now adicted to the damned machine, my next machine will be another Mac. $1500 every 5 years or $100 every year. Yes, I lose out, but apple wins. So in the end I win.
And btw.. Juguar already has the better new proposed name. Mac OS/2 X.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
If your system was designed arround a single button mouse, you wouldn't need two buttons. Believe me, a mac is perfectly functional with just 1 button on the mouse. THe only thing you need 2 buttons for are games. And if you're really at a loss with less that 50 buttons on your mouse PLUG YOUR GOD DAMNED OLD MOUSE INTO THE MAC!!!!!! IF IT'S USB IT WILL WORK, PERIOD.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I can't think of a thing in OS X that I couldn't get to do exactly what I want to do. Unless of course you're talking about completely recompiling the entire system from the ground up, but how many people seriously do that anyways?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
you condemn a company because they released a (succesful) series of colorful cases?
I switched. I run a powerbook G4 as my primary machine, although I work with Sun hardware, Windows 2000 boxes and Linux boxes. My gaming machine is going to be x86 for the forseeable future.
:).
On the desktop, I don't have time to fiddle with things anymore. I like being able to snap in my digital camera and download it's contents in 5 seconds, without a kernel recompile. All of the apps and command line programs I got used to on linux have for the most part been ported - ah, the power of open source. OpenGL works flawlessly, and it comes with a nice set of developer tools and great developer support. Sockets even work right! It is bsd, after all
That said, I still use my linux box under the desk all the time as a server and for more industrial programming jobs. I will say the main reason for that is I haven't been able to justify getting a powermac yet - the new dual machines are very attractive, and if EDA tools became available they would make a more attractive platform for some things than Sun even.
As far as cost goes, the hardware isn't that bad relative to the time and productivity increase. The 10.2 upgrade, for what it offers, is a pittance, and most people in the target market have no problem justifying the expense. Propietary hardware is no big deal either. I use the computer to get work done! If (computer.doingJob()) { happy++; }
Say it with me : Computers are a tool. Tools make work easier. This is a new, novel viewpoint for myself, coinciding with using the mac for awhile. Beware! hehe.
There was a time in my life where I had time and inclination to fight with everything, but I don't have that luxury now. OS X arrived just in time.
My $0.02, you think powermacs are expensive, try it in fake money (www.apple.ca).
..don't panic
The perfect target audience for Macintosh is MS-Windows users, though it's not too bad for development. Most non-tech types are only interested in web, e-mail, word processing and maybe even a spreadsheet or two. The uptime and battery life are additional bonuses. Some people I know try to choose their notebooks based on battery life.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
What makes it even worse is the sort of unaproachable elitism that seems to be developing in the Linux world. All these people that finaly got it to do what they wanted, won't tell you a damn thing becasue they want you to suffer like they did. I can't tell you how many times when I was first begining to play with Red Hat (back arround 4 or 5) I would go into a forum asking someone how to do one thing or another or configure this or that option and I always got the same answer, Read the manuals, that's what they're there for. Believe me, if I had understood what the manual was saying to me (or sometimes if there even was a manual) I would have used that info. But I didn't see the answer I was looking for that's why I asked. I have never seen that sort of attitude in the mac community. Ask a mac user for help and they will tell you how they did it, where to get the best information on it, and if need be, walk you through it step by step. Now that's community.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
first it was the 90's but Jobs also did it at NeXT and it also almost killed NeXT.
Might be wrong, but doesn't that work only if XF86Config is already set up correctly? Apple has the advantage of knowing exactly what hardware is on the machine. Linux distributions have to guess right, and then it's over to the user.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Linux core usage is in Internet servers, compute servers, engineering and scientific applications, embedded systems, and systems research. OS X just isn't quite a replacement for those--not quite as functional, not quite as efficient, not quite as cost effective. And OS X's greatest assets--its style, its ease of use for inexperienced users, don't matter as much in those applications.
Where OS X may appeal to Linux users is as a second machine, to replace that Windows machine they use for MS Word. But the sensible main target for OS X advertising is still Windows users.
O'Reilly also notes that the poll is not accurate due to the nature of the sample group. Proposing Apple target *nix users instead of Windows users is ridiculous on the basis of this admittedly unreliable data (skewed towards *nix users).
Surely Apple are the people to ask about this, especially as they ask people to write in if they make the switch. And since there has been no significant shift in advertising, it would seem that those switching from Windows is greater than the proportion switching from *nix.
Seriously, I really do believe that the age of the user is about the only relatively "constant" factor when it comes to willingness to adapt/change with a new OS/software.
The idea that "Mac users are inflexible." is just as silly as saying "Linux users are inflexible." or "Windows users are inflexible." In any of these cases, some are and some aren't.
Having done nearly 10 years of PC support now - I can assure you that the older PC users, almost without exception, have been the ones most afraid of changes. They come from a world before the personal computer. The devices they used to get tasks done rarely changed much. (EG. They might have gone from a manual to an electric typewriter over the years, but they still worked almost the same way. The changes were very incremental and rather logical, such as the evolution of correction tape and finally correction fluid to fix typing errors.)
Then the computer came along, and threw them a BIG learning curve. Just when they struggled through that and mastered using their mouse, computer keyboard with function keys and all, and a few popular applications - people want to go and change the entire look and feel of everything! Younger folks grew up with the idea that computers are sort of "empty slates, waiting to get painted with whatever strikes the developer's fancy". Interface changes are treated like interior decorating... You do it once in a while just for the sake of freshening up the look of things. Believe me, the older users don't share that belief!
No, what's silly is that you didn't find Fire, which is a multi-protocol chat client that lets you (big drum roll) enter aliases for gobbledygook screen names on IRC. I have never been a big IRC fan, but according to Epicware, Fire supports IRC just fine, and has the aliasing feature you wanted.
Moral of the story really is to ask experienced Mac users before you assume something "can't" be done with the mac and do something drastic like sell it/throw it out the window. A good start is the forum at MacAddict.com. If that particular site doesn't turn you on, you can google for literally thousands of Macintosh discussion bulletin boards. Maybe your friend will sell the Mac back to you?
Who did what now?
What are your other issues, maybe we can help you solve those too (just don't ask for money
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
*ahem*
:)
They themselves state that RC5 is a poor overall CPU performance benchmark
"Many other CPUs do not have built-in hardware rotate instructions and must emulate the operation by (at the very least) two shifts and a logical OR. This handicap is why many non-32bit-Intel [1] and non-PowerPC computers run RC5 slower than one might expect based on real-world benchmarks. It is also the main reason why the RC5 client is a poor benchmark to use in determining the speed or performance of a particular CPU."
It also helps the G4 quite a bit that they have an Altivec crunching core for RC5, whilst there isn't an SSE cruncher for those of us living in x86 world
Well actually, I was referring to the Apple hardware itself - more than anything else.
Sure, they have USB now - so that opens up a few more expansion options than before. Still, you have to always use the "Apple approved" hardware, which is quite a limited selection compared to the options available for a PC.
For just one example, look at all the answering machine/voice mailbox type cards for a PC. Now, tell me how many of them you see for a Mac platform? How about TV/radio add-on boards? How about industrial control boards?
all it took is a couple weeks and a goddamn book on how to use it? Yeah that's great. That was coming from a self-described "mac guru" too.
To be fair, since he WAS a "mac guru" he probably wants to BECOME a "MacOS X guru" and is probably looking to gain more understanding and trying more advanced things than your average "switcher". Also note that I said he "WAS" a Mac Guru. Aside from the name MacOS X has almost *nothing* in common with the Macintosh operating system, this guy is in the same boat that a "windows Guru" would be in if he switched to FreeBSD but wanted to keep, or reaquire his "guru" status.
No, she's using OS X, but also running at least one Classic-mode application: "Are you sure it says 'error -7531'?" "Yes, I'm sure." "Macs don't do that." "Mine's doing it."
I emailed an offer of free tech support to her about an hour ago. Wonder if she'll reply.It's "Quelle surprise", because "surprise" is female: it is "une surprise" and not "un surprise".
Not to bash you, just the friendly advice of your local frenchie. I get bashed for my english all the time here on slashdot.
I didn't so much "switch" as fall into OS X's loving embrace.
;-) (It's not like they're much, I think the most I've for shareware far has been US$20).
... man, that program *rocks*. I'd "switch" to OS X from Linux just for that. The inbuilt PDF stuff is also very cool, and the fact that I can run Photoshop and the (surprisingly excellent) MS Office brings OS X a suite of much more stable apps than are available under Linux.
;-) I didn't think it would ever come to that, but I've taken the sweet delicious Apple bait, hook, line, and sinker.
Having seen the Titanium PowerBook G4s on display in the Apple shops, that drool-worthy stop outside the display window became a regular pausing point on my way home from Uni. The student discount price made it even more attractive, so after a while of saving up the sweet silvery sexiness that is a TiBook was mine.
A Linux user of 4 years, I used to boot into Windows to play games like Baldur's Gate II, knowing that I would be able to combine the excellence and stability that I'd come to take for granted with Linux with the ease of use and hardware integration that Windows offered, but with a much sexier look and feel, and no hideous Start bar, I was hooked instantly.
I tried for a while running rootless X in order to have my favourite Linux apps (XChat for one - available through the rather excellent 'fink'), but soon gave that up because even with the "Aqua-esque" themes, GTK and the WMs I was using just didn't quite make the aesthetic grade. I've since found an XChat-alike (Snak) and either ports of or apps that are similar to the ones I used to use under Linux. Sure, you have to pay for some of them, but I found that I didn't have a problem with this (I'm not really in the FS philosophy camp, preferring the BSD license anyway) and figured that if the programs I used regularly under Linux were shareware I'd probably pay for them too
There are, of course, plenty of excellent free (and Free, for those who care) apps available for OS X.
However, the best point of OS X is all the excellent bundled software that comes with it. iTunes is simply divine, iPhoto is
Don't get me started on the *hardware*. The networking is as simple as a very simple thing, wander between WLAN and traditional cables and OS X doesn't miss a beat. Not to mention that the Airport cards are seriously kickarse. Great range (due to the aerial being lined up the screen), and fantastic integration with the OS. Under Linux I'd be fiddling around with ifconfig and routing tables and such - not so under OS X.
Turn on Apache with a checkbox, ready to go. FTP? No problem, another checkbox. SSH? Certainly! Check that box too! I hear 10.2 has a seriously nice firewall configuration tool coming with it, I'm looking forward to *that*.
The display is something that has to be seen to be believed. Never have I seen such luscious crisp images on a laptop LCD. And the machine is *quiet*. Unless you're doing something graphics-intensive or spinning up the seriously kickarse combo drive (CDRW/CDROM/DVD), it's virtually silent. A fan kicks in when there's some excitement happening, but in my experience it's only when I've been playing games/watching DVDs or using the combo drive a lot.
And yes, you *can* use a 3-button mouse.
So where does that leave my trusty desktop Linux box? Acting as a local mail server and backup machine
Ever taken a UI course? Multiple choice question:
User Interface design emphasizes:
I used to support a 20-person Mac office in my spare time while running a minor publishing operation. When the Windows folks would move in, they invariably had learned quite detailed, rigid procedures for how to do every little thing, and it was really hard to encourage them away from their patterned behaviors. They'd learned to cope with things in one particular way, the first one they'd managed to make work, and every change was scary trauma to them. In one case a woman had screwed up every extension on her box -- renaming extensions based on the project -- but she knew to open everything from inside her apps, and she wouldn't, couldn't, change. Moving to the Mac OS made her files openable either way -- it wasn't reliant on extensions for file types -- but she never did figure that out. Just kept plodding right along.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I am usually in the "enjoy the challenge" category, but when I'm at work (I'm a developer), I want my desktop box to "just work" 'cause I have enough challenges in debugging the operating system I'm working on without having to debug the one running my development environment.
Linux "just works" if it "just likes" your hardware. Sure, you learn a lot by poking through the config files to figure out what tweak you need to make it run with your configuration. However, I'd wager that the majority of people out there don't have the slightest interest in learning that. Those people are Apple's target market.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
I just checked their page. The latest version fixes this bug, so you can run at Millions of Colors if you want to. I'm not sure what kind of impact this will have on speed (positive? negative? none?) but I at least appreciate the opportunity to run at whatever settings I want.
Apple, unlike MS, does not use a registration-key system or any other type of copy protection on their OS.
I think buying Jaguar in the store will atone for your current sin
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Actualy, in most cases, the labs full of iMacs (and yes, I'm even talking about the gumdrop colored ones) looked a hell of a lot better, and was a hell of a lot quieter than the PC labs
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
X11 is pretty tricky to set up OS X but I found an easy way to do it - install fink, follow the instructions on the fink website, when X11 starts, right click on it's icon in the dock and choose "Keep In Dock". From then on you just click the icon and launches as it's meant to.
I will type this slowly so you can get my point, "The Floppy is dead" and its continued promotion is a disservice to the public. It is not a cost effecient storage medium, takes up a ridculous amount of space for its storage ability and environmentally unsound. A 20 cent 700mb CD is far more efficient than a 5 cent 1.5mb Floppy. The only group that still believes in this tech are the floppy manufacturers and their marketing departments.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
great! i was rebutting the previous poster's 5-minute boot time theory
Alright, let me set a record straight here, because it seems like with the announcement of the Jaguar pricing, Apple has suddenly become a money grubbing leech. I have been with Apple since system 7 and every time a release has come out that has moved the first decimal place (ie 7 - 7.5, 7.5-8.0, 8.0-8.1) apple has always charged full price for the new system, the only exception being 9.1-9.2 So the full price charge from 10.1 to 10.2 is completely acceptable and consistant with theri business practices. Now let me tell you about getting it cheaper.
1) Are you a teacher or a student or in any way affiliated with a school (do you get a paycheck froma school?) If so, you get Jaguar for the educator price ($79?)
2) Are you an ADC member? Check with your discount benifits, you may be able to get a discount.
3) Can you stand to wait about 2 months? If so, wait till the price drops in the mail order places.
And when you consider that that price includes 2 OSes (they are still shipping OS 9 with it right?) and the developer kit, you get a nice deal for $120
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Fine. I take back all my statements. Astrid the Priestess is a freakin' rocket scientist because she makes the valid point that the floppy is a far more efficient and durable storage medium than the CD-RW. How foolish could I be?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Now there is a 'nix based OS that shows it can be done, the Linux distros should follow suit. It is no wonder that Linux "isn't on the desktop" given the current attitude of RTFM that pervades.
I would love if RTFM would reliable work on Linux.
However one distro uses a graphical UI to configure the machine.
The next distro builds a database and generates the config files during the boot process.
If any of the two above messes 'one' single thing up you have no clue how to fix it.
If you know how to configure
Even worth, RTFM is dead. Read tech-info, or how it is called. That means: you need EMACS. You need to know how EMACS navigates through tech-info documents, and well, some monky must have descided which keys to use for what.
The problem with Linux is: forget what you may have learned about *nix 10 years ago.
No file is where it should be, neither regarding to old standards of BSD or System V nor regarding to the newer standards used by IBM/HP/SUN.
Basicly a system only works if you install hundrets of packages you do not realy need. But one tool you have uses one of the obscure packages, so better put 400M linux on your HD where my first installation was 14 disks (floppy disks!) of slackware in 1992.
Puh
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
...
This has been true as far back as I can remember in Mac OS: back to 1986 or so. Apps may be dependent on system extensions, so moving them from one box to another might not fly, but you've always been able to move 'em around on the machine, and to delete them with a simple trashing.
The linking model is simple. The loading model is simple. applescript scripts most apps and is way easier to use than COM or bonobo.
Applescript has been easy and powerful for a long time. That's one reason publishing houses love the Mac OS; Applescripting stuff in Photoshop makes their lives easier in a hundred ways. Similar things could be said about the various linking approaches in Mac OS over the years -- they were thought out, solid designs.
The sad part is, most of what macosx has done could and still can be done on linux.
I agree totally -- but it's easy to undersell the experience and commitment of a company like Apple when it comes to User Interface. Apple's invested in getting it right. The contrast between Windows and Mac has always come down to that for me. You take pleasure from using a Mac box, and you don't from dealing with Windows. I'm not sure Linux is going to catch up any time soon. Partly the development model that goes with Linux is decentralized to the point where any coherent process for UI design is, if anything, deprecated. (Mac users like their interface, but it's only because they're "rigid," and so on.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Windows users shouldn't switch unless you want all the old problems of incompatibility.
Well, since O'Reilly is mostly talking about UNIX users switching the incompatability problems will be far fewer (if they exist at all) or the same windows -> UNIX problems they have already worked around.
Also, I read that article and she is obviously not an idiot since it is very well written and funny. But, most of the problems she is having seem either A) grossly exagerated (all of them), B) unlikely to be a problem for other people (unable to use email with her boyfriend?) or C) matters of personal preference - for instance prefers the word "control" & the control key rather than the curlie-cue on the "command" key. Apparently she is so confused by this she cannot figure out what the command key does (perhaps I was too generous and she IS an idiot, albeit an eloquent one.), and she prefers floppies to CD-RW's (she must have very modest memory needs & probably would have been happier with a MacPlus).
I was in Target the other day. While the wife was looking for lightbulbs or something I checked out the software. I couldn't help overhearing two teen-aged boys who were also looking at the software, while they weren't kicking and pushing each other. One boy said, "We're getting a new computer -- we're getting a Mac." Often when I've heard teenagers say things like that, they will spit it with venom, but this boy didn't. The other kid said, "Yeah? How come?" and the first boy replied, "Because our PC SUCKS!" I think that if the economy picks up just a bit, Apple could have a real hit on their hands -- I wonder if there isn't a substantial number of people who bought a PC, discovered that it SUCKED and have decided that, if they ever buy another computer there's no way in hell that they'll buy a PC again.
Ok, so the GNU philosphy is flamebait? Truth is flamebait? A dire warning on the consequences of OSX being successful is flamebait?
"I think he was truly surprised at how little I cared about how big a market the Mac had" - Linus on Jobs
http://homepage.mac.com/hackswitch
It looks like the production was cheesy, but funny (especially the clips at the end)
If they try to program for those 10,000 combinations of hardware, there WILL be compatibility glitches, and Apple will lose its reputation.
i agree completely. i, like most mac-faithfuls, are putting alot of hope into the ibm desktop power4 chip, and knowing ibm's rep, i'm not worried.
the fact that they have included a vector unit is a good sign. they have previously shunned the unit, so this might be a good indicator that their opinion has changed.
*crosses fingers*
No, it's recomended you use Apple aproved hardware, however it is not nessesary. Believe me, I have a USB card in my old 5400 that has no Apple drivers, I just use the deneric UDB drivers. I have a mouse that has no Apple aproved stickers, but with a nice little program called USB overdrive, it works fine. I have an HD made by western digital. NO MAC DRIVERs (since when were drivers nessesary for HDs? I don't know) Botted it up, the computer said the drive was unformated, formatted and it runs just fine. ANd this was ll on a 5400, the new ones are even more open.
As for the cards, it's not Apple's responsibility to write those drivers, just like it isn't M$s to write them. So if you want a card for your mac, write to the manufacturer and demand your drivers. Or write some yourself.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Part of the reason has to be because Be had piss-poor marketing, and Sun, at the consumer level, is even worse. Not that it would ever happen, but I'm sure that if they wanted to, Apple could do a much better job of selling OS X/86.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Well, that and the cost, but you said not to ask for money!
2. yes, it's called darwin. yes it's avail on x86. go get it. no, the windowing isn't available (it's called aqua and consists of some Very Neat Technologies).
3. i have rent to pay too. and i own a (couple of) macs.
4. "underacheivers"? as compared to all those operating systems that were so wildly successful after porting to x86 like beos, solaris x86 and (ironically) openstep.
porting to x86 means being forced to support byzantine hardware and having to convince consumers to not only install yr os but uninstall the one that came with their computer.
if you think there is any good reason for apple to port to intel then you really aren't thinking at all.
2 1337 4 u!
Why bother? I concede. The Floppy is the ultimate storage device. Death to the CD-RW, your efficiency is suspect!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
- drinking two cans of Coca Cola or Pepsi every day
- driving 20 miles per day
- going to the movies (not counting the $1 second-run places) once per week
People who complain about Mac cost, are short-sighted.But there is something to not like.
I admit that part of the reason I switched from Amiga to Linux, is that Linux worked ok. Not great, but Good Enough most of the time. But Linux has one other advantage: I feel safe from corporate madness here.
Linux will never have built-in DRM. Linux will never be killed or perverted by its creators for marketing reasons. Irving Gould will never criminally mismanage something I care about and depend on, Bill Gates will never sell me out to Hollywood, and Steve Jobs will never be able to make me eat something I don't want. With Free Software, the user gets the final say in what they run, and never has to depend on anyone else. Of course, you do a lot better if you do partake of others' efforts, but you get to pick who the others are, and you always have the last say and the ultimate veto. Freedom and personal responsibility: what a match!
I don't trust Apple. This goes beyond mere doubt: I am 100% certain that they will screw users if they ever feel they have to. Steve Jobs may be talking tough on music-related stuff right now, but I also know that MacOS' built-in DVD player is DVDCCA licensed, and doesn't have Firewire output. Think about how mind-bogglingly ridiculous that is, in light of the machine's capabilities. My Linux workstation can't play DVDs to Firewire either (yet), but this isn't on purpose, if you know what I mean.
That said, MacOSX looks like a nice system, and I particularly like Mac hardware (and no, I'm not talking about the Fisher-Price look). Mac+MacOs (not x86+Linux) is still my current recommendation for "casual" users. I wouldn't mind using it myself, as long as I never came to depend on it. I now understand when it's safe to trust, and when it isn't. MacOSX isn't safe, because it isn't Free.
Being Free still isn't a fanatical-value that outweighs all other considerations for me yet, but it's getting closer with every passing month. Every time Congress passes a tyrannic law and every time Microsoft makes their a sweet promise, it becomes a little easier to see what's really important in a personal computer.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
are not loaded & configured by default in Man 8.2
Go see what happens when you log onto a site with 3 different flash menues, you get 3 popups asking you log onto the netscape plugin page. Then you've got to click download, work out it went went into the bloody Uhix tree & then get the bloody plugin working.
I would absolutely love for you to build me a computer with dual processors each with 256k L2 cache and 1MB L3 cache 2 gigs of RAM (I know you said 4 time as much ram, but I can go online and pick up a 256 stick for about $60 so that's what I would do, not a giant expense). 120 GB of 7200 RPM HD space, a combo drive, a GeForce4MX card (I know it's the lowend card but I really don't need to run quake at 500 fps), gigabit ethernet, USB, Firewire, 4 PCI slots OPEN at minimum (NO ISA, a great *NIX OS with an easy to use intuitive interface, a software development package, a vector processor,Digital output (not just VGA), and audio audio line in and out for less than $1000. And thats just the minimum with the updates you described. I'm not tryin gto flame here, but seriously PCs for anythign decent are not that much better priced than macs.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
"Nobody really needs to do it" is not an answer to "why is this so hard to do."
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
I'm not a graphic designer, either, and I use Photoshop quite a bit. GIMP just isn't a very good program. Sorry. The UI is beyond annoying.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Yeah, but have you ever tried to play unreal tournament with one of those ignorant hockey puck macintosh mice? That was a dumbass design. It was a dumbass design with one button, and it would have been a dumbass design with three. Tiny round mice SUCK.
Yeah, I'm a recovering MCSE and the only reason I can see to move tools around is to drive revenue in the training division.
My other Win2k gripe relating to Active Directory is that, by design, you HAVE to use their goofy-ass DNS server. Further, said DNS server must be on the domain controller.
Why in the world does DNS have to be on the same box as the domain controller? I mean, if you're running a huge enterprise, having iron to do both functions simultaneously and also buy a redundant box that gets expensive. Tell me how much Dell stock Gates owns, anyway?
Who did what now?
The opinion of anyone who reminisces about the durability and speed of floppy disks is not worth very much.
Any fool who can't figure out how to email a file to herself instead of carrying around an unreliable floppy disk has no business writing about computers. The floppy is dead, long live the networked computer.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
OK... I'll take the hit for the Slate/Salon confusion, but who said anything about PPP? She was complaining about not being able to send/receive e-mail from her boyfriend. In addition, if you're using an online service that doesn't use standard PPP to connect, I'd suggest getting another one. To use your statement put forth in the subject line... AOL != The internet (MSN != the internet either)
I don't have a lot of spare time, but I put Linux on my PC when I built it. I have Windows 2000 too beacuse I occasionally have to do some Windows-compatible development work. I prefer using Linux though, because everything just seems to be in the right place, and the range of applications to choose from seems much nicer (Browsers: Mozilla, Konqueror, Dillo, Netscape, Galeon, Opera). Installing things is easier (RPM). Development work is easier with decent text editors. And what's more, as long as I don't do anything as silly as giving users write permission to anything outsite /home and /var/tmp, then my machine never messes up. The only installation of Linux I do is to upgrade. Oh yeah, and for those of us without much time to visit opticians, proper anti-aliasing the Linux offers (better than WinXP Cleartype) saves your eyes as well as your time :-)
Follow me
is run on any kind of hardware you care to name. If Apple would port OS X to x86 hardware, you'd see a hell of a lot more people switching.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I'd just like to voice my opinion that if you design a piece of hardware/software and you need to read the manual to get basic utility out of it, then you have failed as a designer. You should *NOT* have to read the manual to get an OS installed and usable. If you want to recompile the kernel or whatnot, I'd sure say that's advanced; but for basic usage, there is no reason you should have to.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
You know I don't read this as a negative story at all. I read this as a tongue-in-cheek diatribe about the advancement of technology. If you'll notice, she points out that she used to love the Mac, she cracks on Windows, etc. I get the feeling she was Mac OS 7 thru 9 user that's been dragged kicking and screaming to the realities of a new, more-stable OS.
blog |
....... Macs come bundled with Earthlink software, but as they are reknowned spam kings (Spaminator ads notwithstanding) I really couldn't recommend them.
BY promoting OS X I don't think they're saying you're better off with closed source, but they'r saying that you need some closed source. And they really are right. Money is still a motivational factor in this world. It's nice that OSS allows for everyone to have whatever they want, but just imagine if things like video codecs and certain ways of doing certain things became open source? 100s of versions, niether one compatible witht eh other. And they wouldn't be made compatible because that takes time and time is money and let's face it, untill food becomes downloadable, we're going to do more of what pays us than what we do in our spare time. Also factor in that as much as freedom is nice, it's also nice to know there is a closed source, something which there are real experts in who can and will help you (because it's their job). OSS is nessesary, but so is CSS, two forms of development, each one pushing the other.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Merci, mon ami ;)
Le Français n'est pas ma première langue, mais j'essaye.
In other words, she expected her new Apple Macintosh iBook laptop to behave _exactly_ like her old Microsoft Windows desktop PC. And when it didn't, she blames someone else for "seducing" her.
And you don't think there's any relevance in the fact that Apple's entire "Switch" campaign is based on the principle of "you can do everything you're used to doing on your PC"?
Of losing all ability to communicate with my Euro-traveling boyfriend and PC user ("Look: It's me or that Mac!").
Last I checked, there's MSN Messenger for Mac, several different email clients, and I can print to my HP printer just by plugging it in - didn't even need to install a driver. Did it ever occur to you that your boyfriend is a control freak (or he's trying to find an excuse to dump you)?
Of being exiled into the lonely desert of incompatible files, botched PowerPoint presentations, and gobbledy-gook attachments...
Blame the MacBU. They make PowerPoint for Mac, not Apple.
I'm nostalgic for my dear (not so floppy) floppies, poor things,
My USB floppy drive is recognized in moments. I doubt the PC would be any faster with a USB drive.
Suddenly, Disk Utility has become the most important feature on my desktop
Repeat after me - I can buy Mac-formatted floppies instead of using Disk Utility
Tempus Sans font and always forces me to use this darn Helvetica.
If it's so damned important for you to have Tempus Sans, then buy the font.
Switched in July 2001, and never going back.
sudo chown -R
sudo rm -rf Mozilla/
Buy a three button mouse. I did.
And apps usually close fine. I have to use force quit less often than I have to kill an app in Linux, or use task manager in windows.
how many times does this idea need to be brought up, and then quickly shot down because it will never happen?
As long as the people shooting it down are more ignorant than the people bringing it up, the point will continually be raised until it does happen.
1. apple makes their money selling hardware. they will lose all that revenue if people can just use a walmart $400 pc.
Cluehammer says even a moron knows it doesn't cost $129 to dup the OS X CDs. Yes, Apple is currently a systems company and not just a software company, but you need only look at the revenue that MS has generated to see that running on a Walmart special wouldn't necessarily bankrupt Apple.
3. yet another architecture change? i think not. moving from 68K to ppc went well, it took some time but it was a success. os9 to os10 is going well, most apps are there and the open source/hobby coder population is booming. so to go from ppc to x86 after moving to a new OS, the big software companies are just going to say no. that's suicide.
Here you show no sense of history. In the NeXT roots of OS X, getting a quad-fat binary was a simple matter of clicking some check boxes in ProjectBuilder. And if Apple had stuck with the Yellow Box like they promised, you'd even be seeing Cocoa apps that run under Windows XP. The APIs Apple makes available are, for the most part, at a high enough level that the developer need not worry about the underlying architecture.
i can't see apple going x86 in the future.
Mac OS X came from x86. If they're not going back, it's only because that shitty chip left a bad taste in their mouths. Given the history of Mac OS X, though, I can almost guarantee that they still have it running on a PC internally, in addition to checking out all the other hardware directions they could go in the future.
Wrong, Apple sales would plummet. Let me go through this one by one and tell you why:
1) Steve Jobs is making the biggest mistake he has yet. Apple sales would explode if Jobs ported OS X to the Intel platform.
Apple sells hardware, it has been said time and time again that they sell hardware and it is their main income. Infact, the only reason they sel the software stand alone is because it makes good business sense. Imagine how many customers they would loose if you had to buy a new machine for each new pice of software.
2)Granted, it may indeed threaten Mac hardware sales but, he could test the waters with less optimized Intel version. That way you could get a great OS on Intel but, if you wanted to see *really* fast, you should buy the Mac.
People don't think that deep. Here's how the though process would go. OS X on x86 = slow ---> Mac hardware numbers = slower than PC numbers ----> OS X on mac hardware = slowwer ----> buy X86 and windows. YOu see hoiw this is counterproductive? Not to mention if they didn't support everything at once, PC users would have a royal fit (just look at the mac users who bitched when beta wouldn't print to their 5 year old printer)
3) I'm certain that OS X on Intel would fly off the shelves faster than Apple could stamp out the CDs and Microsoft would crap all over themselves. Everybody wins.
No, it would sell fo ra bit and then be pirated.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
they key board should be mapabe or do what the above post said to do.
Bang for buck doesn't seem that different to me, but really the only way to compare bang for buck is to sit down and play with the two laptops side by side
The dock can not only be minimized but also set to auto hide when not in use. It can also be anchored to the left and right sides with a hack
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I was looking around for a laptop that met a somewhat pick list of criteria:
The capabilities issue is resolve simply by shopping for new hardware, not used hardware; besides, laptops don't seem to go down in price as much as desktops.
So, I looked around; I looked at Dell, Sony and IBM; all have laptops that meet my size and weight criteria, but they're expensive; or they have laptops that meet my modest performance criteria, but they're heavy bricks.
And after some research, I found that it's actually easier to get Linux going on an iBook with its relatively standardized hardware (except for the radeon mobility video card) that it is to get Linux going on the Sony Vaio of the month with different (linux incompatible) hardware every month or two.
I talked to a couple of people with different models of the sexy little Sony Vaio laptops; they all said they were great computers, but you couldn't get X, Y or Z to work under Linux because nothing else on the planet uses their variety of stuff and they seemed to have a problem with falling apart when dropped (more than other equipment).
So, I ended up buying a Mac because it was cheaper than the proprietary intel based laptops.
(Of course, I've got Debian on there but I've mostly been using MacOS/X which turns out to be quite painless to use; download their devel kit, add fink and it's kinda like Linux with a bit of commercial application support)
I help run a Linux Users Group. There certainly are a lot of people who put together a second computer to use Linux on, but in my experience the *serious* Linux users have their biggest and best machine running Linux. That's certainly the way I have it at work: the newest, best machine with all the hard drive space and CPU and RAM runs Linux and the infrequently uses Windows 2000 box is the older slower one that I mostly access with VNC.
However, amongst gamers you'd be right: gamers use Windows. they might dual-boot to Linux now and then or have a second little box thrown together from spare parts with Linux on it, but their primary OS is Windows because their primary task is games and the primary OS for games is Windows.
the BIOS code on such things as PCI cards, needs to be in PPC opcode format
:-)
Apple adapter card code is usually in Open Firmware format (FORTH), not PPC native. Whether FORTH is easier to read than PPC opcodes is a separate matter.
Hey - she's the one who made her religious occupation / life a major component of the article. It seems only natural people would continue mixing the religious part in with the technical.
That was my path. Sure I still have a Win98SE machine around for games but I completely dumped Linux and its no sound, stupid ugly X Server, Gnome on Monday, KDE on Tuesday, nothing the same twice junk.
Look I love the whole Linux thing. I dig the Peguin, the free (as in no payment,) and the community is _mostly_ (screw you RTFMers) helpful and glad to be of help. But it was a pain in the ass. Sometimes I just want to do some work and not fuck with a config file.
Bottom line OS X works, it has Apps, it runs on excellent hardware and dopey teens with DSLs switch to it all the time. (wink)
This
Amen to that!
Having just installed a shiny new copy of SuSE 8.0 on my PeeCee, I was quite pleased with everything until I tried to get X working.
Ok, so I'm used to this. X11 is a nasty system that feels very much like Microsoft Windows, they've both been getting layer-upon-layer of cruft since the 1980's (it's just that Bill sweeps it under the carpet, whereas the X community at least tries to polish it up). I was a little dismayed to find that attempting to configure X actually physically locked my hardware though.
So, I turn off 3D acceleration and try again. Same thing. In fact, I can't get X to come up at all! Yeah, I have really non-standard hardware to blame right? Well, I have a GeForce 3 video card and a 19" monitor that can handle 1600x1200 @ 70Hz... so why is this so tricky?
Answer... PeeCee hardware. I'm sure it's some legacy BIOS cruft that says "Hey, make sure that AGP 4x card can still be seen by any application that tries to poke at hardware address 0xC000, just in case!" Phagh!
Throw it all away... Yes, proprietary hardware is limiting... but at least they are allowed to innovate. They don't have to continue supporting CPU instructions that were last seen in a calculator (4044)!
As implied by the subject, I do like PPC hardware, but I'd chose to run Linux on it.
;-) and I can't create new ones to simplify things that I do frequently.
Those that have switched are quick to point out all of the same beautiful aspects of OS X, and before they do I'll say this: I've seen them. I've used it. I know. You don't have to sell me on OS X. I used it for long enough to know about all of the goodies, and I'll still take Linux and GNOME.
OS X, in trade for "just working", does not fit to the user, expecting the user to fit to the software instead.
Keybindings don't "just work"; I never found documentation listing the standard keys (though I'm sure someone will post a URL in reply to this comment
The Terminal doesn't "just work". Actually, the terminal emulator is probably the worst that I've ever used, on any platform.
UNIX source code often doesn't "just work" because OS X's kernel differs from UNIX in ways that are nothing short of bugs, which the developers don't seem keen to fix. (For example, when you try to create an IPv6 socket in 10.1, the kernel returns EPROTONOSUPPORT instead of EAFNOSUPPORT, which it should)
For the same reason I like Emacs, I like Linux and GNOME (especially sawfish): I can make a macro or shortcut of anything. I fit the software to me because I know best how I work. In the end, OS X feels like a pair of too-tight store bought jeans. Linux is more like a tailored pair of pants.
It's worth noting here that OS X isn't recommended for use on Macs that are upgraded to G3/G4, for those readers here who aren't up to date on Mac hardware.
You can pick up a nice Blue and White G3 for 400 bucks or so on eBay. They look awesome!
Tips and Tricks for Mozilla
Buy her an iPod. Have her keep a copy of the files on that. That's how several folks I know do things like SneakerNet files to work, or carry that extra copy of presentation if their laptop dies, or whatever. Bonus: it's also an MP3 player.
...which was to fuse Unix and the Mac.
;-)
I'd say we were 60% of the way there. We had decent GUIs (Gnome, KDE (which was really starting to rock when I left)), Netatalk for AppleTalk, Mac-on-Linux (hard to configure but quite good; perhaps a bit faster than the native Mac OS 9?) plus the usual assortment of OSS servers and applications.
When NeXT aquired Apple, I knew something big was going to happen. Years of speculating as to what would happen if Jobs came back to Apple was answered: first the iMac. Then OS X, which at first didn't look too hot.
When 10.1 came out, though, they got me back on the Apple wagon in full effect. Killing cloning was one step. If they hadn't made OS X, and that hadn't become as good as it is, I might not have ever come back.
But they did go to Unix. OS X gives me everything I love about Unix -- the stability, multitasking and multiprocessing from hell, and vi -- and melds it with the Mac in ways I never thought possible. The Mac's back, baby, and so much better than ever, ever before!
Now only if it were free...
But... here I am! I think differently about many, many things. Software's just one of them. (Politics being the other big one. Progressive, non-Democrat activists such as myself may seem to the world much like Linux users did to the rest of the world in 1997. But more on that later. And not here.)
anyway... No, OS X is not 100% open or free, but it's close enough that I'm pretty comfortable with it. (Sorry, RMS.)
And, Apple isn't behind TCPA. [shudder]
-- haaz.
lol, i'm talking about new motherboard, cpu and so forth. Apple mb/cpu's go a long way for their worth. Wssn't it just two years ago 900 mhz machines came out?
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
The resounding consensus is that most folks appreciate how, compared to these other OSes, Mac OS X 'just works.'
Resounding consensus, my ass. Macs don't "just work" any more than *anything* "just works".
Don't believe me? Believe this.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I don't know what you guys are talking about, the DivX codec from divx.com works extremely well on my PBG4 500MHz, and their translator is very fast, producing files that are about 1-2MB larger than PC files, but play with PC codecs as well for DivX. Really the only problem with playing normal DivX files is that quicktime can't handle variable bit rate MP3s because the data is spread out across AVI frames which is out of spec, thus apple isn't/doesn't support it.
the problem was, that the ad was hardware focused. Blue screens are an OS issue. They were comparing hardware to software, which made absolutely no sense to anybody who knows better.
It would be nice if they had the balls to say OS-X is better than WIndows, and not that it's better than a 'pc'.
That said, Steve is still probably a billionaire. But get your freaking facts straight.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Of course, any one person changes their screen resolution somewhat less frequently.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
my apologies, the last version of OS X that I've used (I'm waiting to get a Ti Book for the full experience was OS X.0 so it was not an option in that release
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Yes, you do need closed sourse combined with open source if just to provide an immage. It's the same reason the Linux cons have moved from a sci-fi con feel to a business con feel, because in order to be commercialy viable (which you have to do to win more than just a fan base, as Apple has painfuly learned) you need to present the immage of being professional. As great as OSS is, it doesn't quite have the feel of professionalism. Why do you think businesses using a *NIX system use the ones with closed licences (yes, if you read into it, UNIX is technicaly a closed system. Linux is the open version, there are of course exceptions). Think about it, before OS X, Linux and OSS as a viable commercial and home platform was almost dead in the water. SUre Red Hat had made some progress and some of the big distros were doing OK, but companies which had tried Linux configured systems had returned to windows. ANd I remember seeing a few articles proclaiming linux dead. Sure OSS still had it's geek cult following, but then again, so did Apple in 1996 and 97. Then along came OS X and revitalized the opensource industry. Now there was a big name comapny supporting OSS (by big name I refer to visable, like it or not, a lot of people know who Apple is, fewer know Red Hat) And what did it bring? It brought apps closer to OSS. Sure Photoshop for OS X isn't Photoshop for Linux, and Quicktime for OS X isn't Quicktime for linux, but it's a hell of a lot closer than it was before. My point is, when you have a commercial company with money behind it backing something like OSS (even if it's underlining is CSS) you make all the people that are nervous about trusting an openstandard a little bit more secure.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
And I have an ADB Wacom tablet - guess what? NO MAC DRIVERS.
And I have an ADB mouse - guess what? NO MAC DRIVERS.
This is hardware that used to work under Classic - but has been obsoleted by OS X.
I just bought an external firewire DVD drive, plugged it in, works great - except - GUESS WHAT?
iDVD and Apple's DVD player don't recognize it, because even though it's the same EXACT model number drive as is found as a built-in in their new models - Apple *disabled* the use of third-party drives for use with this software. That's even WORSE than requiring a special peice of hardware. That's saying: in order to use our software, you must not only buy OUR hardware, but you must buy a whole new system - and not just an ordinary system, you must buy one of our top of the line systems with the built in DVD burner.
I think that's proven that Apple is out to viciously suck as much money out of it's customers as it can now.
I've just about had enough, because I'm pretty much tapped out. I think I can just afford to assemble my own AMD-based Linux box, and I think I'm going to be much happier than having to swipe my credit card for Apple for every frickin little thing I want to do with my computer.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It's when you want to do those extra things, like OpenGL games, install obscure drivers not included in the kernel, get fonts de-uglified, etc. that you get stuck messing with text configs. Lord knows I've tried to stick to the "user friendly" way, but no matter how many GUI configs, there's always something omitted. Most operating systems solve this by simply not exposing such features, or at least labelling such things as "unsupported" or deny they even exist. Then they get to sell the same OS with just the new stuff turned on by default now that its stable. A lot of these difficulties can be solved by just making default configs more up to date with the features, but the linux world would probably disembowel itself before agreeing to just what the defaults should be.
Thanks for mentioning our app here!
Just to let you know, the product description URL for CodeTek VirtualDesktop is here with a direct download the the gzip compressed disk image here.
It's also listed on VersionTracker here. Plenty of good reviews there so you don't have to take my word for it.
One of the only things CodeTek VirtualDesktop is missing is different desktop backgrounds for each virtual desktop, which we're adding to the next release. We've got tons of other things we're adding, too, but I don't want to talk too much about new features until we're at least in beta for that version...
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
ITs worth bringing up Quicktime.
Quicktime is a file format, a libarary to work with the format, and a collection of codecs, most of whom are owned by other companies.
Apple has done all it can for quicktime-- its given it away to the world for free as an open standard as part of MP4. Granted they didn't adopt it wholesale, but all of apples engineering work for the Quicktime file format was given to MP4 and is available to everyone who wants to implement the standard. How can an open source advocate complain about that?
That Apple doesn't give away other people's codecs (That they HAVE TO PAY FOR) for other competing operating systems is not surprising. You expect apple to pay $5-$20 for every linux install that it gives codecs away for? And its not like its a simple port either-- the codecs on PowerPC are altivec optimized, so it would take significant work.
Yes, they PAY to have quicktime on Windows, and there's a strategic reason for that. But apple not choosing to subsidize your operating system is not in any shape "evil"
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Lycoris is supposed to be a really user-friendly Linux distro. It's actually aimed at the Windows XP crowd, that's how easy they want to make it. Has anybody here tried it, have any opinions to share?
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
ADB wouldn't matter anyway since that hasn't been in a mac since 1998. If you're using a mac that has ADB ports with OS X then your mac is at the very least 4 years old. It's time to seriously consider getting a new one anyway. Besides it isn't apple's responsibility to support Wacom tablets, that's Wacom's job. Somehow I doubt your DVD drive is the same model as used in the new computers unless it also writes CDs, but even assuming it does, iDVD and the DVD player are fairly new in terms of software. Give it a while and it will support more drives (just like iTunes). OTOH if they disabled the ability to work with other drives, then what is preventing you from re-enabling it? Or looking for a third party hack which I'm sure is out by now? Yo're trying to convince me you are going to build an AMD-Linux box, but you can't hack a simple DVD player and burner to recognize other drives. That's almost unbeleivable.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Sorry, but anyone that has never used Commodore's infamous 1541 disk drives doesn't *even* know what slow is. Quite possibly the slowest rotating disk media ever sold, they required hard sector diskettes (remember those? they used a series of locating holes around the hub to physically determine rotational positoining), and used a serial interface that was P A I N F U L L Y S L O W.
But they were cheap, so we were happy to have them, since they were one reason the Commodore machines were a fraction of the price of the Apples and such, even though they offered equal or better performance in other respects.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Apple sales would explode if Jobs ported OS X to the Intel platform.
Dead wrong. Steve knows something that his friend Scott Mc Nealy knows, too: Hardware is a far better business bet until someone figures out how to download a new workstation over the net.
It's really just about that simple. That and the fac that *nothing* can work easily or transparently in the hideous world of Intel PC hardware.
The reason Suns, Apples, and the like "just work" is that they don't have to worry about all the poorly designed hardware, firmware, and interfaces consire to guarantee compatibility problems. OS X on x86 would lose most of its strongest attributes - reliability, stability, ease, and predictability.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
OS X on Intel will not happen. At least, it won't if interviews with Jobs are any indication. I keep seeing this sentiment expressed, but those comments must be coming from people who haven't been using and following news about Apple for the last decade.
There was an interview with Jobs in MacAddict around the time he returned to Apple, where he was challenged on his decision to kill off Mac clones. Just paraphrasing from memory, his response was along the lines that Apple's real strength lies in the ability to control the hardware and the OS, despite the fact that everyone in the industry thinks otherwise. His phrase was the Apple is the last company around who makes the whole widget.
So, I think it's important to recognize that Apple has followed this line of thinking since Jobs returned. You can see it. OS X on Intel just won't happen, and if it ever did, it would be done in such a way that it would make very few PC users happy anyway. Apple would have to make the whole widget. So why would they bother?
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Correct. Unfortunately 90% of my DivX files (anime fansubs mostly) are encoded using VBR audio. VLC eliminates the need to run the DivX validator on each and every file.
It would be nice if they were encoded properly, or if QuickTime would support VBR audio, but VLC gives me that plus full-screen at no extra cost.
It's nice but it's also proprietary as far as the interface goes. Linux is wide open.
:P
I can't get used to the one button mouse. Bleah
Other than that... I got no problem with Mac OS X.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Use the "allow-update" directive. You can create ACLs which allow updates based upon IP address (not very secure) or by shared secret keys (more secure).
Good one :) Yeah, that's about when my friend loaded it onto the Mac he uses at work. The point was that even Mac has made usability errors... at least for the way I use a computer.
IMHO, you're nitpicking a bit. I do understand your point - but you're taking "proprietary" quite literally. On the other hand, in the world of computers, people typically use "proprietary" to designate the fact that the hardware is developed by a single vendor, using standards they invented themselves.
The Apple computers have always fit this definition, to one extent or another. (As I said, though, this is changing in some ways. You no longer see much happening with, say, the NuBus slot.) I still can't just buy an Apple Cinema display and slap it on my PC and expect it to work properly, though.
As for network protocols, simply publishing the details of how it works doesn't make it a defacto "standard". Appletalk might be completely and openly documented - but it will always be considered more "proprietary" than TCP/IP, just as Novell's IPX or Microsoft's Netbeui protocols are. Appletalk wasn't developed by a vendor-neutral committee - for one thing.
The funny thing with the boot-time debate is that Mac OS X users SIMPLY DON'T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT IT. If Mac OS X took one hour to boot it wouldn't bother me, because I only boot it about three times a year. In the last year, my PowerBook G4 had one kernel panic, and one or two system updates that required a restart (typically, security updates for UNIX tools and things like that, not high-level GUI stuff or plain apps). When you close the lid on the PowerBook, it goes to sleep instantly and quietly. When you open the lid up, it wakes up instantly and is ready to use. The batteries last 5 hours each (I carry two), fit in the palm of your hand, and can be hot-swapped, so I have also never run into the situation where I had to shut down just because of lack of power.
The real question is: when you sit down to work, how long does it take the computer to get ready for you? On Mac OS X, it's as long as it takes to open the laptop's lid, which means it's essentially no time at all.
> Now people are too lazy, I guess. [ to learn to edit config files ]
/etc and httpd.conf for ALL OF THEIR USERS. They are also worrying about hardware/software integration, stable kernels, and graphics modes and refresh rates and such, again so that the users don't have to. The user themselves is working with NON-COMPUTER tasks such as being doctors, lawyers, artists, musicians, students, etc. You are not any smarter than them because YOUR field or interest happens to be computer tech.
Now people have other things to do with their computers, like learn Pro Tools and do audio recording, or learn Photoshop and do graphics, or learn iMovie and do video (like iMovie takes any time to learn!). Apple has a very good stable of geeks who are worrying about things like
Now, on the other hand, if those config files and the substructure of the software are hidden from the users (like on Windows), then the user can't trust that their system is doing only what they want it to do. For this reason, Mac OS X's core is completely exposed to the advanced user or programmer or IT staff or security consultant or network architect, etc.
This stuff is part of the "best of both worlds" approach of Mac OS X. Come at it as a Mac user or a UNIX user and leave satisfied. Come at it as a Windows user and leave AMAZED.
Average user working with network drivers? You are about 10 years behind the curve, there. The average user wants to apply THEIR tools to THEIR work (e.g. Pro Tools to audio recording), not work in any way to make the computer work.
You just don't understand the high level that Apple is working at. When I bought my last Mac (a PowerBook G4), I took it out of the box, pressed the power button (the battery was already 2/3 charged), answered a few questions such as what I wanted to name the machine and my account, and then I was at my desktop. I clicked the AirPort (Wi-Fi, 802.11) menu at the top right of the display (with the other system menus) and entered my wireless network's name and password and I was on the Internet. I put a CD in and iTunes started and ripped it to MP3 and spit it back out. I plugged in a camcorder and iMovie started and I imported and edited some DV. I plugged an audio/S-Video cable between the PowerBook and my TV, chose "Detect Displays" from the Displays system menu on the PowerBook (top right of the display, again), and the TV became an additional 800x600 desktop. I opened the System Preferences and clicked Software Update and it reported that there were some new updates for the included software, so I checked the ones I wanted and clicked install and it did that for me in the background while I worked on something else, and when it was done, I didn't have to reboot or even logout. I inserted a software CD, dragged a single icon from the CD to my Applications folder, and then ran the application and used it. This was a multitrack audio application, too (Ableton Live).
This stuff is all EASY on the Mac. You can't ignore that and keep trying to sell people on building their own systems and scouring the Web for drivers and working hard to get to a point where they have the capabilities they can get all-inclusive on any new Mac.
> it booted the first time.
/Applications/Utilities/Terminal to access the command line. From there, you can approach it in the same way you would work with any BSD UNIX. You can change the default shell, do whatever you want. You can even change the transparency of the terminal window so you can see stuff that's behind it.
Yay! We are talking here about putting CD's into computers and ripping MP3's the first time, or plugging camcorders into computers and making movies the first time. Just booting is not "just working".
> BTW: does anyone know about the unix command line in OS X ? i have been considering
> buying a Mac, but i can't find any info on how easy it is to access the command line
> (eg: i don't want to reboot just to do some coding)
Use the included GUI app found at
Sometimes people say that there are two kinds of Mac users now: those with Terminal in their Dock and those without. Makes a great overall community. Artists make sure we get the best color-correction, musicians make sure we get the best audio, and coders make sure we get the best networking standards and interoperability. Steve Jobs makes sure that stuff works before they ship it.
Enjoy.
> When grandma is setting up her own Apache server we sysadmins are in a world of trouble.
Mac OS X's Web Sharing is Apache, and all you have to do to start it is click "Start". There are lots of grandmothers out there using it to share a small Web site. They learned how by using the previous version of Web Sharing in Mac OS that was not Apache. What happened was that Apple created an interface for Web Sharing that was for users, and then later (with Mac OS X) put in the best core technologies (Apache). The user doesn't need to know or care, unless they want some truly advanced feature, in which case they can still approach their own Apache by editing text files or by using a third-party GUI utility.
That article has been WIDELY discredited. It starts by assuming that the Internet bubble never happened, and that's only one of its problems. Steve Jobs wrote a letter to the editors of Fortune (which was published in the next issue) offering to sell those options to Fortune for 10% of what the article said they were worth and nobody bit.
A stock option is not a share of stock. It's an option to buy a share of stock for a set price at some time in the future. If your option price is less than the actual price at that time (the time when the options "vest") then you will get to buy some bargain stock. Otherwise, the options are WORTHLESS.
Darwin runs on both Mac PPC hardware and Intel hardware. Apple sells Mac OS X to run on DarwinPPC because there is a business model and demand there. Apple does not sell Mac OS X to run on DarwinIntel because there is no business model there. The first major problem is that there is a convicted monopolist selling Intel operating systems.
If you are an Intel user, it is YOUR platform that is sick, not Apple's. Don't blame Apple for not waving a magic wand and making everything OK for you and your shitty hardware.
> I still can't just buy an Apple Cinema display and slap it on my PC and expect it
... you're just used to DVI-1, but both are standard DVI cables.
... not good.
> to work properly, though.
Yes you can, but since your PC doesn't supply power to the attached display, you need to buy a power adapter for the Cinema Display. Apple sells them, and so do third parties. Once you plug the adapter onto the Cinema Display, it becomes a typical DVI display like any other. The ADC connector on the Cinema Display is a combination DVI, USB, VGA, and power, which makes it easy to split the cable out to plain DVI, USB, VGA, and power cables. The ADC connector is also known as a DVI-2 as far as I know
Funny that you'd talk digital display connectors. On the Mac, for flat panels we went VGA (1998), DVI-1(1999), then DVI-2 a.k.a. ADC (2000). On the PC, there were a few other kinds of flat panel connectors that haven't survived, and many flat panels still ship VGA, even now. Going from a digital graphics adapter to a digital display with an analog cable
For my part, I have a PowerMac G4 in a rack that travels sometimes, and when I set it up and plug the mouse into the keyboard with one cable, keyboard into the display with one cable, and display into the computer with one cable, I feel pretty happy about the ADC port.
Also, if you use a plain DVI display, you have to make sure to plug the AC power in BEFORE you attach the display to the computer, or else risk a static charge from the computer wrecking the display. ADC solves this, because you can't plug the display onto the graphics adapter without also plugging on power at the same time.
> Appletalk
Talking about AppleTalk within this discussion is disingenuous or at least ignorant. Mac OS 9 (1999) introduced AppleTalk over TCP/IP (Macs speaking AppleTalk over plain TCP/IP networks), and Mac OS X 10.2 (today) does all the tricks that AppleTalk used to do over plain TCP/IP (using Rendezvous a.k.a. ZeroConf, also a standard). In short, AppleTalk is memory. Why don't you complain about the Newton or something?
> You no longer see much happening with, say, the NuBus slot.
That could be because Apple has been using PCI since 1995. Nothing slows down a technology like being discontinued for 7 years. Sheesh.
Instead of talking on about things you don't know, please investigate the incredible list of IEEE and ISO standards that Apple supports. Their firmware (equivalent to PC BIOS) is an IEEE standard that's also used by Sun and others. The high-speed peripheral bus is an IEEE standard. They use PCI and AGP and USB and the same RAM and storage and even the same anti-theft collars. They've included an Ethernet port standard on every Mac for more than five years, and Gigabit Ethernet has been standard on pro Macs (Power Mac, PowerBook) for two years. They were the first company to introduce Wi-Fi (802.11), as well as the first company to build the antennae and hardware inside every system they sell. PowerBooks have typical PC Card slots. Optical drives are the same, TV outputs are S-Video, Bluetooth, yada, yada, yada.
Ok.... I'll take it slowly this time....
This woman wants to send e-mail to her boyfriend and maybe do a little web surfing. Unless she lives in a VERY small town, she has her pick of any of a number of ISP's. Thus, she doesn't have to deal with the likes of AOL or MSN. No non-standard PPP, no problem.
Thus, all your e-mail contacts would be unable to contact you
Here's a concept for you.... gather all the addresses in your address book and send each entry a small email saying
"Hi! I got a new ISP recently.
My email address has changed from me@old.isp.com to me@new.isp.com.
Please update your address book Thanx!"
As for the website passwords.... if your memory is not up to the task, I suggest writing down your passwords and storing them in a secure place..... or just put 'em on a post-it and stick it to your monitor like the rest of us do! [grin]
Configure vim to use the key you want. Viola! (Otherwise, wait around a few weeks. Dozens of geeks are working on a hack for this issue as we speak.) Still, let's face it, no laptop keyboard is exactly an ergonomic dream, but that's kind of the price you pay for being mobile. When using it at home, your best bet is to plug in a USB keyboard and configure it how you like.
2. Bang for the buck is pretty low relative to similarly priced x86 laptops.
Not in the laptop arena, it ain't! My iBook kicks the ass over every comparably priced PC I have ever seen. Don't let the Intel clock speed ratings fool you, they downchip the shit out of Pentiums when they put them in laptops, to avoid giving the user second degree burns and spending the battery in a half hour or so. The iBook G3 chip (made by IBM rather than Motorola, IIRC) is plenty fast compared to what's out there in the PC laptop world.
2. The dock is an atrocious monstrosity, though I understand that it can be shrunk, which would help a lot. It can be resized quite dramatically (I have friends who prefer teeny-tiny docks on they desktops). It can also be auto-hidden, like most docks and bars out there (Gnome, Windows, etc.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
My post wasn't comparing Linux and Mac OS. I was talking about PC software. I'd happily use OSX. The things I was talking about were far from unique. They were however, better implemented on Linux than on Windows software. I agree, the Mac versions of things, and the OS in general, tend to be cleaner and more refined. I like it that way.
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