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ArsTechnica Posts Mac OS X 10.2 Review
hype7 writes "ArsTechnica have posted their review on Mac OS X 10.2. John Siracusa has been writing the reviews of Mac OS X since way back with the developer previews, and in my experience they've been the most thorough, thoughtful and unbiased reviews of Mac OS X on the web. Well worth a read." He does do a fine job; so if you needed one last fix of looks at Jaguar, here you go.
Zero bugs that I noticed.
Zero issues that impacted productivity.
Zero problems running my old apps under classic
and Zero things to get done?
That was classic intercourse!
Or unless you care about doing things at the speed at which PCs did them in 1999-2000. Macs are so god aawful slow and overpriced, I cant believe anyone who can forulate a sentece would advocate for them
a tures/cw_macvspc2.htm
.Mac Today Posted by pudge on Wednesday July 17, @04:31AM Steve Mason writes "Apple has put up a .Mac FAQ up here proving that .Mac will indeed be introduced at Mac World New York. .Mac will cost $100 a year as previous rumors had reported." Yes, this means that if you don't pay Apple, your mac.com URL and email address will stop working. Some have suggested that the "switch" in Apple's new ad campaign stands for the unfortunate part of a "bait and switch." Someone should mirror that URL, it might be taken down any second now.
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. ht ml
.DOC reader installed.
.DOC is still a problem, I have noticed that documents shared even
/etc) and old binaries included without gcc in the default install. Its only young in that
.mac accounts.
= 60 839
.
I have a treatment to follow which addresses your deuded zealot lies.
Zealot. You are a lying Zealot. I have a G3 no one wanted. I got OS 10.2 running. It sucks ass, and G3 are slower than pig-shit. The OS is not Unix power user friendly. Its packaging system is HORRIBLE. You don't know what you are talking about - AT ALL.
http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/
Go here to see it G4-1000, spec INT of 306 (SPEC-CPU2000), P3-1000 spec INT of 309. Hhahaha.
Dual G4 1000 Macs are getting DESTROYED by a SINGLE P4 in benchmarks. Zealots, deny this one. http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/07_jul/fe
"Apple CEO Steve Jobs said this week that his company would consider moving to Intel chips, but that he would wait until at least 2003 because the transition to Mac OS X was more important. But with the speed of Power PC hardware increasingly falling behind Intel's chips--The Pentium 4 will hit 3 GHz this year--Apple would be wise to do a bit of research. I recommend AMD's upcoming 64-bit Opteron, which will give Apple a technological leg up on Windows and, perhaps, offer them Windows compatibility through the Opteron's full compatibility with 32-bit x86 code. Come on, Apple: Do the right thing." Read the blurb on WinInformant. Read more for a short commentary.
"The dual Athlon is still the fastest PC we've tested, but the single Intel P4 2.53 GHz machine runs a close second, and even beats the dual Athlon on some of the tests. And, as expected, the Mac dual 1GHz G4 could not even come close to keeping up with these two PCs. Even though the P4 machine has only a single processor, it was easy for it to leave the dual-processor Mac far behind." Read the benchmarks at DigitalVideoEditing.
A quick comparison, when using the better compilers for the x86 CPUs:
Integer Results:
Athlon 1666 (2000+) : 697
P4 2200 : 790
G4 1000 : 306
PIII 667 : 310
Floating Point Results:
Athlon 1666 : 596
P4 2200 : 779
G4 1000: 187
PIII 667 : 222
For the people who argue that Altivec was not enabled. This is true, but it is also unfair.
The compiler they used, gcc 2.95.2, doesn't know how to use MMX or SSE either, and barely knows how to use the PPro floating-point instructions FCOMI and FCMOVcc.
Fuck those Mongoloid retards. Never in my life have I seen a royal fuckup as them not being able to whip MSFT ass with OS X. But they had to fuck-face try to be a hardware vendor in a world of cheap chink knockoffs (where the hardware is commoditized to the point where there is little quality variance) where even Compaq died and shriveled up. Fucking idiots.
"Will Microsoft dump Mac support? Two firms slag off each other By INQUIRER staff: Wednesday 17 July 2002, 12:22 " http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4485
"Apple profits halve in Q2 Jobs predicts flatness ahead By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 16 July 2002, 22:05 " http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4467
" "bait and switch." Apple: Apple to Unveil
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/
Zealots. He used the word "magic" and excused unethical business practice, ignore their plunging profits and growing customer dissatisfaction, their complete loss of the educations market only to have their stake in things being upheld by horn-rimmed-glass wearing elitist "artists" and "musicians" who have to make it look like if you create art or music on anything but a Mac its amateurish and unprofessional because they don't know what the fuck they are doing and are being shown up by talented/poor people with PCs.
I have *never* met a Mac user that has taught me one things about computing. Ever.
Steve Jobs is egotistical, and he chose to not take on XP head to head with OS X. Now OS X is relegated to a niche processor, once Adobe and MSFT pull the plug (notice Adobe took considerable time to get OS X versions of their stuff out the door with CALL-HOME on all their apps for the Mac) there wont be much to speak of in terms of software. If OS X was for x86, there would be sex appeal, the would make more money and the x86 would finally get an Open Firmware and a vendor with a deep respect for building the right things (an the wrong video chipsets) on the motherboards.
The Apple ][ was it for them. After that, the TRASH-80 seems like a holy crusade.
I have a G3 here beside me, and I can't upgrade the CPU officially, they wont give a 4.X firmware for it, so much for OPEN-firmware, its slow as fucking SHIT with this horribly slow clock and HALF SPEED cache, and there is no SCSI. It's a PC with a slow CPU.
I never had any intention of running MacOSX server on it. Instead I wanted to run NetBSD.
The Xserve uses Motorola 7455 processor with 2MB of L3 cache and PC2100 RAM. Unfortunately, even though this is a "server" class machine, Apple skimped and did not allow you to use ECC memory. For a datacenter machine, this seems remarkably short sighted.
While the machine is quick, it still lags behind the high-end P4 and Athlon's when it comes to doing NetBSD builds. It is slightly slower the same speed as 1.4GHz Athlon.
If you need a lot of powerpc computing in a small form factor, the Xserve is a nice box but x86 still has it beat when it comes to price/performance.
One last thing, the Xserve is exceptionally loud. Granted it is a 1U box but it is louder than other 1U I've ever heard.
After having a (single CPU) Xserve to play for the past week, I thought I'd try to interject some of my experience with it.
I have to say that the Xserve is not the first dual processor RISC 1U machine. The Alpha powered CS20 precedes by well over a year (which can have two 833MHz 21264 (EV67) cpus).
Note: The Dell 1650 and 2650 are both cheaper, the 2650 has SMT, and ECC (and nice linux
ecc support as well, it logs ECC errors in syslog). They also include onboard RAID(option
via 7899 asic) and a U160 AIC-7899 by default. And you can buy retail CPUs and retail
memory for Dells often at half the price without voiding the warranty.
Apple charges $500 per 120GB EIDE drive. HAHAHAHA.
Apple is right about one thing, that Alpha has existed for some time, but have you ever
tried actually buying an Alpha? Its hard, I know an engineer who works for
DEC->/Compaq->/HP, and I was dying to buy one, and he couldnt find anyone to call me
about getting one.
Apple's New 1U servers: Sorry. Doesn't fit well in a market where the Dell 1550/1650 and
2550 and 2650 exist. Sorry. THEY DON'T PUBLISH SPEC numbers. Apple is a dying breed, I
just recently tried to revive my interest in them only to be disappointed. The Motorola
PPC architecture is embarrassingly slow, and they always are quick to point out the
near-useless Altivec and some obscure filter in Photoshop, but its not true. I have a Mac,
several PCs and a SPARC at *home*, so trust me people, this box is a bore. And OS X and
Open ClosedROM make putting regular memory, disks and CPU upgrades NEAR-IMPOSSIBLE, they
try to block it so you have to buy the same part from them 3x the cost. And the Dell 530
Dual P4-Xeon with SMT buries the fastest Mac by almost a factor of two.
OS X is no great shakes as of yet because even though most of the porting off of Classic
has been done, there are annoying remnants of classic everywhere, including a gamut of
Apple utilities. These are notoriously the worst Administrator-unfriendly boxes in the
industry, and I have used a few boxen in my time. OS X's Darwin kernel will be sorely
eclipsed by Linux 2.6, and 2.4.X is already superior in all the ways I can tell (This isnt
to say BSD it bad, but I dont think this OS demands a PREMIUM). I tried YellowDog, Madrake
and Debian on PPC as well, and they ran (even with aggressive G3 optimizations) rather
poorly - but interestingly far faster than native OS X.
This is a dying gasp of air from a dead Unix vendor, who has had to turn themselves into a
Microsoft VAR (most popular Mac Application: Microsoft Office X).
If you have an insatiable fetish for PPC, DON'T. Wait for Hammer. Remind yourself about
SMT, and 2.8GHz clock speeds before you go pay for obsolete/deprecated silicon. And the
term RISC? Pathetic.
I happily resell our product on a 1650 and 2650. We "configured" a Mac box
because we were genuinely curious. We laughed at the final price and moved on.
This isn't a troll, or a flame - its reality. What this box does can be done with a 1650,
with redundant power supplies, with SCSI and hardware raid build ON BOARD, dual gigabit
NICs onboard, dual 1400 MHZ/512cache Tualatin (with SPEC numbers to gauge the performance
by) (2650 gets high clock Xeons), two 64bit/66Mhz slots, onboard video, console
redirection, USB, etc. And for half the price. And you can use retail Intel CPUs,(cheap),
retail hard drives (if you don't want to buy the Dell ones at a modest premium), and
retail Crucial.com memory (the same memory Dell uses for Half the price). All in all, you
get a box, for half the price, with twice the features and performance. And this is coming
from a person who doesn't even LIKE Dell. (I feel I can always build better more reliable
systems than most of the PC vendors.)
BBBBBBZT. Apple, you lost, you lost, you will always be niche because OS X isn't where it
needs to be - on an X86.
TO give a better link for you, since you will have trouble finding this on your own, I'll put you right where you need to be to see Motorola PPC chips are, well, so horrible they wont publish industry standard Specmarks.
http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/cpu2000
Sorry. Apple. Steve Jobs keeps them in business but his ego is trash. I know people who work there, personally . You pay for his ego.
Ok. Publish your findings. No, I didnt think so. So its as conjective as my assertations,
which are based on my whim in addition to evideince (or lacktherof), and the reading of
the CPU Report, EE Times, etc. I'm into this industry, and unless you are a zealot, you
would know PPC is IBM now. Motorola is in the dirt.
Bzzt. I like NeXT. Ahead of its time, over priced. Darwin is useless, I have 1.4.1, its
crap. OS X is nice looking, but it is *very* easy to "piss" the system off, its
package manager is so bad compared to RPM I wont even start, and it is, as as what I
consider a *nix to be, wholly inadequate and incomplete. Next.
About being content free, thats a snarky, trollish accusation. Now why dont you use Purify
on yourself and remove all the said cruft and actually say something in Apple's defense
besides naming Mach 3.0+ (like if it was 5.0+ would it make a shit bit of difference.) I
hate zealotry.
And about computing pleasure. This isnt fafenugen or a driving experience, dude, its about
stuff WORKING, well, for the lowest cost with the cheapest parts. There is no sex appeal
in server administration.
Funny, everytime I have gone to a Mac shop they have, for as long as I can ever remember,
always, ALWAYS had NT based servers. Unilaterally.
And I saw a few Mac shops in my time in New York.
You know what, not that I like NT, but they worked more reliably (generally Compaq
servers) than the Macs did. (Mostly these days non parity memory and no SCSI anymore, its
Funny. When I run a linux or *nix or NT based server I dont have a
Ever. Maybe a PDF reader if I can't figure something out using google, a few nesgroups and
other better-than-manuals-and-man-page sources.
For those wondering why
between Office X, XP and 2002 are very inconsistent. Its MSFT playing the upgrade me to
fix problems game. For complicated layout and manuals, use Framaker or a LaTeX backended
application or something realistic.
As far as OS X being "young", I think its probably the oldest feeling Unix there
is. Old kernel, old Unix specification (I happen to like what I find in a SYS V style
Apple does not know very well how to serve people who use unix.
I gave OS X a fair shot on a G3 with 1GB of memory. Its good. I wated to use it instead of
Microsoft crap for home use, but I wouldnt switch from Win2k after that. They also block
CPU upgrade cards, which are expensive. They try to block 3rd party memory. The included
keyboard and mouse always sucks. And they try not to partition non-apple drives with Drive
Setup, which is the WORST partitioning utility, and Apple's partition maps are screwed up
and stupid, and trying to run OS X without classic is diffcult because so many fools still
have ported thier stuff to OS X.
I'll stick to PCs for home computing, and think about other vendors for servers.
IS MICROSOFT CONTEMPLATING ditching support for Apple Macs?
That's the thrust of an article that appeared on Wininfo a day or two back, but if
Microsoft is getting out of the Mac market, it's not quite yet.
And all is not well in other respects, reports Mac Rumors, which has posted what it says
is an Apple FAQ saying people will have to pay for
Microsoft has already prepared a press release to time with the Macworld Expo saying that
it has announced a Microsoft Office V.x "triple header", this being an
announcement which offers better mobility with Palm handheld for Entourage X, a way to buy
Office v.X cheaper, and some Windows compatibility with the RDC client.
The Wininfo article, however, quotes Kevin Browne, who runs the Mac Business Unit at
Microsoft as saying Apple hasn't made much of an effort to promote Mac OSX, even though
there are opportunities.
He is quoted as saying that "if things don't dramatically turn round", it might
be Goodnight Mr Chips for Steve Jobs firm.
But the same article says that Apple blames Microsoft for sales problems with Office
v.X.
Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates have traditionally had a somewhat strained relationship.
Is this the beginning of the beginning of the end between the two companies?
Wininfo.
Mac Rumors is providing a blow-by-blow account of what's happening at MacExpo on the site
link above - it seems Apple may well announce support for Nforce 2, too.
On the Nvidia site, here, you'll see that Digital Vibrance Control is "currently
unavailable on Mac systems", which is more than just a hint, we guess.
*JOBS KICKS off MacWorld Expo at the Javitz Center at 09:00 Eastern time. There will be a
live Webcast using Quicktime, natch, here.
This is a good start (the buying public is sending a message to Apple, how do the intend
to GROW thier market share????????)
Apple profits halve in Q2
Jobs preducts flatness ahead
By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 16 July 2002, 22:05
APPLE MADE A NET profit of $32 million for its third quarter, almost half the profit it
made in the same period last year, and turnover fell three per cent to $1.43 billion
compared to the quarter in 2001.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4467
http://docs.info.apple.com/article2.html?artnum
TITLE Firmware Update: Firmware Updates 4.1.7 and Later May Disable Out-of-Spec Third-Party RAM Article ID: Created: Modified: 60839 4/12/01 9/28/01
Read up. Apple is trying to make it harder and harder to use "out of spec" hahahaha memory. Luckily www.crucial.com always works. But imagine, a firmware update that DISABLES YOUR MEMORY.
Apple tried to block G3 owners from upgrading to G4. Nice guys.
PowerForce G4 ZIF
The PowerForce G4 ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) is the only G4 CPU upgrade you will want to upgrade your "Beige" Power Mac G3, "G3 All-in-One" educational model, Blue and White G3's and the Yikes Motherboard Graphite G4's. The PowerForce G4 ZIF is one of the highest performance CPU products when used with "AltiVec enhanced" software. Utilizing the second generation PowerPC 7410 processor ("G4") the PowerForce G4 includes a full 1 megabyte of backside cache running at up to 220MHz.
G4 ZIF Upgrade vs. 800MHz G4 Apple: PowerForce ZIF G4 550/220/1MB Apple G4 733 Price $289 $1599
The Bottom Line: If you already have quite a bit invested in your Power Mac G3, it just makes sense to upgrade the processor rather than opting for the new G4 systems from Apple. Apple has finally eliminated all of the legacy ports with the removal of the ADB port on the new G4 systems, not to mention the removal of the serial ports, and SCSI on the Blue and White G3 systems. So the choice is clear. PowerLogix saves you hundreds of dollars over the cost of buying a new system!
PowerLogix was the first to release a solution for the G4 ROM block for Blue and White G3s.
Bruising by Apple
Roland Miller III
One notable fact concerning Apple's customer base is that it has always tested very highly in the category of brand loyalty. "Once a Mac user, always a Mac user." Apple has depended on this customer loyalty to get it through some rough times. It could always count on a portion of the market to continue to buy Apple products and continue to upgrade with Apple products. Despite (or perhaps due to) this loyalty, Apple has subjected its customers to some decidedly anti-customer abuses.
The latest example of Apple bruising its customers is a doozy. Due to shortages of the higher speed G4 processors, Apple speed reduced its entire line by 50 MHz and kept the prices the same. On top of that, Apple unilaterally cancelled all outstanding G4 orders with instructions that customers should reorder their systems. This has the net effect of increasing everyone's cost for the same system.
Needless to say, this action produced a massive and immediate customer backlash. Based on what I have seen on the net, this uproar lasted a few hours before Apple backed down and started to rejoin reality. After about a day of total confusion and rampant rumors followed by a week of small clarifications, Apple made right and reinstated all G4 orders except the high end 500 MHz model. Those customers were offered the choice of purchasing the "new" 450 MHz model at the original 450 MHz price, which is what should have been done in the first place.
While it is possible for me to see some corporate logic behind the original decision, never the less, this bright idea should not have left the meeting room where it was hatched. It doesn't take an MBA (obviously) to predict the firestorm that was touched off when this decision was implemented. The only positive thing I can see in this fiasco was the speed at which corrective steps were implemented. The corporation responded to its customer's will and proved somewhat nimble in the process.
Another recent example of Apple bruising was with AppleShare IP 6.2. Apple decided to charge several hundred dollars for this upgrade (the previous being 6.1.) The only problem was that aside from a few new features, it was mainly seen as a bug-fix and compatibility upgrade for MacOS 8.6 (which itself was a free upgrade to 8.5.1.) You couldn't run ASIP 6.1 on 8.6 and you couldn't run the upgrade on 8.5. Again, the reaction was very predictable: customer outrage. Apple listened to its customers and eventually made 6.2 a free update to 6.1.
You may have also have heard about Apple purposefully preventing G3 owners from installing G4 CPU upgrades with a firmware upgrade that officially solved another problem. People were again outraged when the rumor was confirmed by all of the CPU upgrade companies. The outrage keyed on false advertising and speculation that Apple released a Trojan horse.
There were unofficial rumors from anonymous Apple employees that this firmware block will be removed with Mac OS 9. However, there has been no official word from Apple concerning this issue. In the meantime, all the CPU upgrade companies have announced that they have gotten around the block and that their respective upgrade will work fine when they ship.
While Apple has responded favorably to two of these examples, all of these misfires do take a toll. Many people simply will not tolerate this sort of behavior from a major corporation. A company simply cannot afford to make too many of these types of decisions and still remain in business.
Ultimately what can be learned from these examples?
The perception of the "bottom-line" doesn't always coincide with the needs of the consumer resulting in corporate mistakes of judgment. Some of them can be bad enough to make the pages of the Laramie Daily Boomerang. I can't speculate on whether these bad decisions were based on stupidity or on over estimating the loyalty of AppleÕs customers or both. Apple has taken concrete steps in most of these cases to defuse the situation. As long as Apple continues to admit that it is wrong and make things right immediately, I will still tolerate being one of its customers.
Until next time. .
It wasn't meant to be a troll. And thank you for your honesty.
I gave OS X a fair shake. I have many machines at home and with Gnucleus I was able to get
just about every Mac app compiled native for OS X in existence. (Thank god I wont be
keeping any of them or buying any of them - try before you buy, people)
I have to say that the total lack of incumbent middleware is horrible with OS X. Its
barely an OS out of the box. I hate having to boot from a CD to manage anything, and its
multiboot handling is inferior. The Norton set of tools is pathetically weak for the
money. Office X is admittedly excellent. But that's it. IE was mentioned not too long ago
as rendering incorrectly and having a huge security flaw that is fixed in 5.2.1, but the
response from MSFT took much longer than they do for x86.
If OS X was ported to x86 (looks like it has) I would buy it. Period. Forget buying a PPC
ripp off machine though.
I noticed on the OS X cd there is i386 directories littering the place and Darwin
(hahahah) works on like one computer with an intel chip deep in the belly of Apple, but
they are not trying to make Darwin/X86 more appealing than ANY ANY of the other BSDs, they
all destroy Darwin in usability, even when you get Darwin from
http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/.
I came, I saw, I mastered it, I left. Its BORING.
And as far as IPFW. IPF for OpenBSD is out. and there are no decent APP-firewalls for OS X
(Firewalk sucks), Brickhouse is a joke of a GUI.
I am thinking Kerio Winroute/Personal Firewall as a base comparison. The fact nothing
analogous exists in Mac OS X land make this platform more unusable. Also, if Apple like
fit and finish on Unix, why dont they make the more complicated things useable through
GUI (like Brickhouse did for IPF). Noo, the only people Apple caters to is those who die
their hair purple and sucks on pacifier and laugh at baby rattles while they are e-tarded
from their last bout with Xtasy after the cool rave for mac zealots.
: We can forget about this because its a pipe dream and it wont ever happen and it wont ever happen because its a pipe dream.
I think its clear its a pipe dream, we can forget about it because its a pipedreamery factory pumping out pipes and dreams.
: PIPE DREAM
: openfirmware is worst
its like you get a command line
: anything apple is worse
: its poop
: of something worse than unuseable
: you can run like 10 OSes on a pc
: well even suns have openfirmware
: its not like clear why its good
: crapple is like 3 oses, tops
: alpha SRM is good
: linBIOS (pipe Dream) would be good
: repairing remote filesystems over the network isnt gay
: like a real SRM would let you do
: but not going to happen in PC LAND
: its a pipe dream
: and openfirmware, while technically correct, is CRAP
: FUCKING CRAP
: zzzz
: it is
: its all crap
: like IOS is better for a boot loader
: but crapple is the crap of the crap
: cream of the crap
: creamy pussy
: nasty dirty
: creaming crud
I am a homosexual. I bought an Apple computer because of its well earned reputation for being "the" gay computer. Since I have become an Apple owner, I have been exposed to a whole new world of gay friends. It is really a pleasure to meet and compute with other homos such as myself. I plan on using my new Apple computer as a way to entice and recruit young schoolboys into the homosexual lifestyle; it would be so helpful if you could produce more software which would appeal to young boys. Thanks in advance.
with much gayness,
Father Randy "Pudge" O'Day, S.J.