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More Switching Stories
serendigital writes "Unix guru Simon Cozens wrote about his "conversion" story in the UK Unix User Group Newsletter. He touts: OroborosX and XDarwin. This gives you a rootless X server and Aqua-like window manager. He also seems to like the libraries: the NeXT approach of separating libraries off into their own subdirectories and separating out library versions makes for a much tidier filesystem arrangement than simply bundling everything in /usr/lib. One of the more controversial "differences" in OSX." And on the other side of the switch, there's Wil Wheaton does Mandrake.
Mandrake has been very good to me. I have helped many people i know move from windows to linux and Mandrake is about twice as easy as anything else i have found. With the latest version 9.0 its even better and i would advise checking it out. As much as people like to flame Mandrake for not being a "hardcore" distro i say i dont care. It is distro's like Mandrake that bring in new people and it was what i used to switch over.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
I got Mandrake 8.1 and inserted the cd. The Installation mode fucked up, I had to install in 640x480x16@56, Which really sux0red. CD 5 Didn't work, so i had to download off the net, It was ransacked with unacceptable bugs. I had to download thousands of patches and had to read a $hit load of doucmentation to get linux to behave, I even had to switch to windows to fix problems
So i switched to suse 8, no bugs, fast clean and modern. No bugs, its fast and its YAST installer works properly. I would not go back to Mandrake.
SUSE
Suse / Switch.
Im Anonymous Coward, and im a Troll At slashdot.
Most users don't care whether you're running FreeBSD or Linux underneath. What they see is the shell and the GUI.
Isn't that stretching it a tad?
I like many of the features but I've only got x86 hardware or an alpha. When does apple get wise and port to other hardware and kick M$ where it hurts...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I've never liked Apples and Macs, which is suprising since the first programming I did was on an Apply IIc at school. Oh, how the children gathered 'round. Yes, I was actually popular in that class because I was a geek. Most the activity periods of the year were spent with me coding and the rest of the class watching in amazement at my 'Im' game and other programs. And all with just a single 5.25 to last the year.
Anyway, then I move to Macs in art class, and use a mouse. A horrid thing of a mouse with one button. I'm sorry, but I can never get used to that. I can't even stand 2 and I'm about to opt for a 12 button. Yeah, you heard me right.
I admit, OS X is a nice idea. But the problem is that the hardcores like their flexability. its nice to have choices. Those that Mac OS X does no so easily offer. Port the latest Linux with UML support to OS X, and then maybe I'll give it a try. Hmm.. damn thats a good idea. Just run the X server on OS X and there you go. Well? Hop to it Maciphyles!
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
And, incidentally, no, I don't find it a problem having only one mouse button.
;)
:)
Well, now we know he's been paid off.
Seriously, the more I hear about OSX, the more interested I get in trying it out. Who knows - my next PC might be a Mac
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
You don't have permission to access to this document on this server.
Apache Server at wilwheaton.net
Wrong button Ensign Crusher! :)
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Too bad google just cuts off the results as close to 100k as it can get. It find results in batches and tries to get as close to 100k within the limits of the batches of results it gets.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Putting libraries in their own subdirectories make look tidier, but it means you're going to have a huge LD_LIBRARY_PATH, unless every application has the path to its particular library compiled in. I hate to think about the lookup times on that.
Presumably they have symlinks to /usr/lib to avoid this? If so, the whole idea of putting them in separate directories is redundant.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
And, incidentally, no, I don't find it a problem having only one mouse button
There you have it folks, you don't need 2 buttons to get stuff done.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Legacy CPUs? Is that what Macs use? What's the fastest G4 speed - 800 MHz? The x86 architecture is in the double-gigahertz range now. I don't think that's what you call "legacy."
Also, OS X about as close to UNIX as Cygwin running on top of Win98 is. They still have a bunch of NeXT stuff under the hood (Darwin) and do most things the NeXT way (display postscript, etc). The only thing that makes it "unix" is the fact that it runs some unix commands. But you can make DOS run unix commands, so that's not really a good argument.
I would be very skeptical of using something like Darwin/OS X on an industrial-class machine. It's worse than Win2K in terms of overhead (can you even boot without a GUI?), and runs a weird microkernel.
Yes, it makes a good desktop. If you hate computers and love the Apple way of doing things, this is the OS for you. If you switch from Linux to OS X, you probably shouldn't have been using Linux in the first place.
Stuff like this makes me wonder what some of the names of 24th century operating systems.
Microsoft apparently gets more powerful over the years, and decides to name it and all the companies it acquires "The Federation." Galaxy Class Starships run Windows 2.35k Service Pack 4.
(FYI: Klingons run Linux 3.5.7 kernel. Not much work has been done on it since the 22nd century, where the kernel dev team finally went bonkers and decided to started growing ridges on their heads. The penguin has been replaced by a Targ, and every year there is a festival which commemorates the burning of plush penguins).
This is the true reason Wesley left. He got tired of all the Computer Lockouts and Copyright protection. So he travels back in time to try and push Mandrake, changing the course of history into something that looks more like Firefly.
Oh God, all this acid is making my head hurt. I'll stop now.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I need details! My biggest problem with OSX is that running a SSH session with epic/Third Eye looks awful in the Terminal! I've searched the web for answers, to no avail. Help!
Damn man, she is HOT. Doobie chix are the best!
Of course, and then you start using mouse button + control, mouse button + command, mouse button + .
hum... the G4s are now at dual 1.25ghz
osx IS unix, its not jsut a few unix applications, its all unix applications
of course you can boot without the gui, its just a few processes, just dont have them start up! and that weird microkernal is mach, its been around for a while and presents an intersting way of doing things, but still presents the same interface to YOU as the end user, you can use standard POSIX calls just like on any unix, and they are native.
why do i have to hate computers to love apple? im typing this on a tibook, and it is the best engineered laptop i have ever used. apples hardware may not be the fastest, but in usablity and reliablity it kicks ass.
What happens with left handed people? To hell with them, right? Damn, they have only one button (which I do no like), but at least all Apple mouses were suited for left and right handed people without distinction. Also, new mouse has no button, the click is in the front support.
Stop spreading FUD already :)
Um, I'm no Mac fanatic or anything, but a quick look at http://www.apple.com/ lists dual 1.25 GHz G4s for sale. Not to mention, of course, that hertz isn't the best way of measuring CPU power; I'm sure you know that Athlon CPUs at the same GHz rating as Intel CPUs tend to be significantly faster, right? Well, G4s have more power per clock cycle than Athlons do.
Also, could you back up your statement that it's worse than Win2k in terms of overhead? You may be able to boot into a command line-only environment in Win2k, but it's virtually useless, and gives you about as much functionality as DOS 2.0.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Apple's hardware is expensive.
;) While it is true that I could run Linux on my shiny new powerbook, I can also continue to do so on my shiny Thinkpad, which is just as solidly built.
It is understandable that they have to be a bit higher priced to support development costs, as their market is smaller, however the fact that I can buy a very capable product, often for half the cost of its mac counterpart is always the first problem I run across when considering the switch.
OSX is not free.
As much as Apple likes to tout their new position as open source loving folk, the fact remains that they will be charging for this OS. While I do not disagree with this business model, it feels as though Apple has taken a lot more than they have given back.
OSX is amusing.
Unfortunately, I think that after a few months with it I would long for a nice X server with WindowMaker. (more NeXT than OSX anyway
Steve Jobs scares me.
He does.
-- Grok
of a Sparc
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Whoopdeedo. Unless you can run them at faster speeds than 1.25 GHz, it doesn't matter. G4s trail the pack.
-Kevin
So is that another reason why you should switch to Apple?
Since Apple's "Switch" campaign has been underway, there have been three different market analyses to claim that Apple's market share is even lower than it had been before. Giga Information Group says that Apple sunk to a new low of a mere 2.6 percent market share, while RedSheriff and OneState.com put it even lower, at 2.2 and 1.43 percent, respectively.
Apple, those Switch commercials are quaint, especially with the quirky music and all, but it's your own users that you're portraying as idiots. Your rejection by the marketplace reflects this. Better come up with a new ad campaign before those numbers drop to zero...
If you switch from Linux to OS X, you probably shouldn't have been using Linux in the first place.
Go out with the head cheerleader if you want!
I knew you only took me to the lake 'cause I'm the only female chess team member and I put out!
So go on! - Go out with that bitch! See if I care...
- geeks do make passes at girls who wear glasses but always will dream of the peaches and cream.
You can boot into Darwin- the command line interface of Apple's Operating System upon which the Aqua GUI sits. And oh, Darwin is Opensource.
-Fawad TK
Wil linked this screenshot of GNOME, as an example of what the desktop in Mandrake looks like.
;-)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I can see Alan Cox's fuzzy head over on the 'Projects' icon.. and prolific Linux hero or not, I can't see Mandrake coming with an Alan Cox icon.
mogorific carpentry experiments
open -a "Microsoft Word"
'nuff said.open -a "Adobe Photoshop 7.0"
Not that I don't support the development of open, Free alternatives, but when you want to use two of the most common and powerful commercial programs out there, tapping those commands into the Terminal does come in handy..
four nine eighteen twenty-7 thirty-nine forty-7 fiftyeight sixty-nine seventy-9 eighty-8 one-hundred-and-nine one-twenty
Everyone who isn't a trained actor looks like an idiot when a camera is trained on them. That's the point. Real, goofy, quirky, neurotic, normal people, not paid actors.
Actually, the kernel is XNU. It's a hybrid mix of Mach with some BSD stuff that would normally be in userspace kicked down into kernel space to get rid of the Mach message passing overhead. XNU isnt a Microkernel or a Monolithic kernel. It's somewhere in between. Also, the drivers are done with something called IOKit, which is a nice safe abstration
A pure Mach microkernel (GNU Hurd) is really slow and that server paradigm just isnt practical right now. Maybe later.
Darwin has the XNU kernel with a lot of the BSD stuff sitting around. The only thing that's not cool with Darwin is the netinfo databse. It's NeXTish, but could stand to be replaced.
With two processors and an OS that natively supports multiple processors? Some how I doubt it.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
WTF? Are you stupid or something? Fastest G4 speed is currently dual 1.25 Ghz. OS X is UNIX my friend, take a quick run down to Apple's web site and actualy do some research before you spout bull shit.
ANd why is it that so many "geeks" thing the "hard to use" == better?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
First, loved your TV show :-)
re: terminal, ssh, etc.:
Did you set up termcap correctly? Email me privately if you need some help with this.
-Mark
And just what have you been doing with all those GHz lately? Besides impressing your neighbours, what you going to do with all that speed? Play UT2003 AND Quake 3 at the same time? Right now there's nothing worth getting a 2.8GHz over a dual 1.25Ghz machine
A OSX-friendly article at www.apple.com deserves the same attention we could give to a "Linux is better than Windows" article at www.redhat.com.
/usr/lib is literally full and slow to parse; this actually affects many programs. IMO, something should be done to put walls between system libraries, user libraries, test (beta) libraries. By putting symlinks (and only symlinks) in /usr[/local]/lib to the needed ones would make them visible to the OS, plus having a more clean filesystem. Wanna test a library? Just redirect the link and you're done.
In one word: none.
Something should be said on the whole library thing, though.
Under Linux we face two major library problems:
1 - Concentration.
(of course take care the library resides on a mounted device when it's needed, etc. I assume here that all precautions were taken)
2 - Dependencies. Too many times one compiles a source just downloaded from the net it asks for the latest (too often even a beta!) version of one or more libraries. I simply refuse to believe that so many developers do it on purpose. Do we need a smarter versioning system or smarter compilers?
1. The G4 is up to 1.25 Ghz and only comes in dual configurations.
2. Darwin is not the same kernel as was used in NeXT. NeXT was the 2.5 mach microkernel and BSDLite 3.2. Mac OS X is mach 3.1, FreeBSD 4.4, plus a few things from NetBSD.
3. Mac OS X does not use display postscript. It uses Quartz, which is derived from the pdf compositing engine and OpenGL.
4. The Darwin subsystem is a full Unix-like system, complete with X Windows, etc. Its as much Unix as Linux is. It even runs on x86 hardware.
5. You can boot without a GUI and manage a Mac OS X machine headless.
6. In what ways is the mach microkernel "weird"?
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Wil. Not because he switched to linux, but because his story included a pointer to pr0n. Get your head in the game, Apple, you're losing serious points here!
--Jim
If Simon Cozens is a Unix guru I will eat my shorts.
Apple needs to move to two butons. The idea that one button is "easier" is stupid. (Ok, I know yu didn't say it was. I'm just on my soapbox.) Have you ever seen little kid working a playstation control? If a five year old can do it so can my mother.
As for moving to a USB mouse, I have an iBook. Connecting it to a mouse doesn't work for me because I normally use it from my couch. If Steve can swallow his pride and take money from msft then he can admit he was wrong about the one button mouse.
Vanguard
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
That was hilarious!
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
The two packages mentioned in the article, fink and OroborosX, turn OSX into the slickest X client on the planet, IMO. It's a huge step forward for operating systems, and a worthy inspiration for OpenSource. The posts above doubting it's UNIXness or comparing it to CygWin are wrong. This _is_ UNIX. Bash, python, ruby, development tools, all just under a slick UI.
That said, it's not perfect. Apples design ethos can get in the way (one button mouse!!,five fingers!!) Package management is confusing. Things are in weird places. That slick UI is the only look you get, etc. But I still think that any UNIX geex who give it a try will be hooked.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
This free PDF book (from http://www.funwithfink.com) is very helpful for anyone (especially beginners) interested in running UNIX apps on Mac OS X with Fink:d f, or
p df
http://idisk.mac.com/pluzano/Public/FunWithFink.p
http://idisk.mac.com/plavigna/Public/FunWithFink.
For games, MS Word, and some other stuff, I run Windows.
For app development, I use Linux.
I use both for e-mail and browsing.
Both are good to me, very steady (no crash in either O/S).
No problem. Why switching, where you can have both ?
Weird, we don't quite get the same numbers.
Karma: Could be worse (could be raining)
Weird microkernel? Mach? It's older than NT.
NeXT stuff under the hood? You mean the assorted UNIX libraries that provide the GUI and such? How's that different from KDE or CDE?
DPS hasn't been used since 1999 or so. The only thing that makes it UNIX is that it runs some UNIX commands? How is anything else more UNIX? Linux is less UNIX than Mac OS X if you want to be a pedantic jerk, really.
Hate computers? I love computers. Switch from Linux? I did. I want to have apps. I want to have a UI that doesn't make me depressed just thinking about it. I don't want to have to deal with the PC hardware every day. I switched and I couldn't be happier.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
-Kevin
I thought Microsoft has a vested interest in Apple ... could somebody please tell me I'm wrong or right?
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
And there doesn't need to be.
So it looks like a big mess, here it is:
:). If your a normal user and want to use it as a desktop os, then it's pretty decent. I use Windows, Linux, and OS X server (client also but rarely)... all for different tasks.
:). I'd replace Linux with windows already if it were not for the better interface + number of desktop apps of windows that i already use.
I've extensively used OS X 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2, servers and clients. If your truly serious about business you'll realize that optimizing and customising these systems are a big pain. With non standard everything... Also it's not actually BSD, but based on it somewhat.
If your gonna use a mac YDL is better imo
Windows: I've used it for a long time and it happens to be a excellent desktop O/S. It on ibm's Open PC Architecture (and has been since the 80s) so there's a lot of cheap and powerful hardware. Downside is that it is harder to use because of the shear amount of stuff for it.
Linux (RH 7.1 with a lot of RPM upgrades): I use this as a hobby/side business for a server of mine. Runs very well, Duron 1 ghz, 1 gig of ram. Hardware/software cost is a real issue here and nothing can compare. My hobby includes a site that get's over 600,000 pageviews daily
OS X Server: I run several of these for and educational institution (happens to be a rich school district). They've always been using macs and there was no way around it. I mainly run two webservers an apache (with PHP, MySQL) and a webstar (with Lasso, Filemaker). When configuring apache and bind, I had to use the terminal for everthing as Apples interface didn't include much to control apache and nothing for bind.
Hmmm... Pie...
Searched the web for h.
Results 1 - 10 of about 137,000,000. Search took 0.09 seconds.
Are you sure about that?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
AND FUCK THE SLOW HARDWARE.
"I BEGAN SAVING FOR A TITANIUM LAPTOP"
AHHAHAHAHAA THAT SAYS IT ALL ZEALOTS!
The 286-based IBM AT already had the right components for preemptive multitasking and memmory protection. It's not IBM's fault that MS software did not take advantage of what the hardware could offer. At the time (http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1984/ind
I think the two most innovative things to come out of Apple in a long, long time are Quartz and Firewire. But we can get Firewire on the PC now, so the only thing that is missing would be Quartz.
Why would an avid PC user care about what CPU Apple will use next? Because that dictates whether or not I can potentially move over to Mac OS X.
Bruising by Apple Roland Miller III - and other cases against apple
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 judgement. 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 Apple*s 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. .
dah dah dah.
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.
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.
This is a good start (the buying public is sending a message to Apple, how do the intend
to GROW thier market share????????)
http://www.barefeats.com/pmddr.html - new macs slower DDR
SPEC-CPU-2000 (INT/FP)AthlonXP1800MHz 738/624 -- Pentium4 2533 MHz : 893 / 878 -- Power4 1300 MHz : 804 / 1202 -- Itanium2 1000 MHz : 807 / 1356 -- G4 1000MHz 306 / 187 (read and weep http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/ )
SPEC-CPU-2000 (INT/FP)
AthlonXP1800MHz 738/624
Pentium4 2533 MHz : 893 / 878
Power4 1300 MHz : 804 / 1202
Itanium2 1000 MHz : 807 / 1356
G4 1000MHz 306 / 187 (read and weep http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/ )
AthlonXP 1533Mhz
FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE
OpenSSL 0.9.6a speed 5 Apr 2001
137.7
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 512 bits 0.0009s 0.0001s 1109.2 14497.3
rsa 1024 bits 0.0040s 0.0002s 252.8 5308.0
rsa 2048 bits 0.0220s 0.0006s 45.6 1635.9
rsa 4096 bits 0.1419s 0.0021s 7.0 468.6
dsa 512 bits 0.0007s 0.0009s 1377.3 1161.0
dsa 1024 bits 0.0019s 0.0023s 530.2 437.7
dsa 2048 bits 0.0060s 0.0073s 165.9 137.7
P3 550MHZ x 2
FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT #3
OpenSSL 0.9.6g 9 Aug 2002
39.5
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 512 bits 0.0027s 0.0002s 375.7 4308.0
rsa 1024 bits 0.0131s 0.0007s 76.4 1499.7
rsa 2048 bits 0.0760s 0.0022s 13.2 451.7
rsa 4096 bits 0.5066s 0.0076s 2.0 130.8
dsa 512 bits 0.0023s 0.0028s 433.2 360.6
dsa 1024 bits 0.0064s 0.0078s 155.3 127.8
dsa 2048 bits 0.0212s 0.0253s 47.2 39.5
1GHz Motorola PPC OpenSSL 0.9.6
33.0
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 512 bits 0.0024s 0.0002s 422.7 4565.7
rsa 1024 bits 0.0131s 0.0007s 76.2 1433.4
rsa 2048 bits 0.0850s 0.0025s 11.8 396.5
rsa 4096 bits 0.5872s 0.0092s 1.7 108.9
dsa 512 bits 0.0022s 0.0026s 464.3 387.9
dsa 1024 bits 0.0070s 0.0085s 142.8 117.0
dsa 2048 bits 0.0245s 0.0303s 40.7 33.0
G4 867 / 896MB / 10.1.2
24.2
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 512 bits 0.0029s 0.0003s 346.3 3521.8
rsa 1024 bits 0.0172s 0.0009s 58.3 1062.2
rsa 2048 bits 0.1149s 0.0034s 8.7 293.4
rsa 4096 bits 0.8009s 0.0128s 1.2 78.3
dsa 512 bits 0.0027s 0.0034s 366.6 295.3
dsa 1024 bits 0.0094s 0.0114s 106.8 87.4
dsa 2048 bits 0.0334s 0.0413s 29.9 24.2
Mystery ClawHammer/.
signs/sec verifies/sec
rsa 512bits 965.9 12211.9
rsa1024 bits 205.0 3980.0
rsa 2048 bits 33.0 1093.3
rsa 4096 bits 4.7 288.5
I laugh at you, as i sit on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT on an SMP box that will whip your fucking gay shit machine's ass. With a Cherry on top, I get to use win2k for crap-software.
I just installed 6C115 OS 10.2 final on a G4 with 1GB of ram. SNORE. Youd think Apple would pick up on the fact they have a slow implementation of Unix on slow and inferior hardware.
Look to IBM Power4 or Intel for salvation, Motorola sucks. Intel has a larger payroll that Motorola makes on the PPC, and it shows, losers.
You make me sick you MAC zealot maggot. I see through you. Your snarky little "hahahaha," your non chalant elitist proto-communist attitude. You make me sick. You want to legislate mediocrity because you are a communist and dont belive the biggest, fastest or most qualified should win. Feiss isn't aout MAC, It is such a stupid fag-ridden ad campaign, I as a Unix and PC user (as well as SPARC and HPPA) have noticed this CRAP. As far as feiss being cute, I would let her suck me off and I would crap on her for a nice Schei*e video. As far as SPEC marks go, truth hurts, doesnt 'it zealot? You like making Jobs richer? Keep at it losers. The day my company fired an x-apple (& x-NEXT) employee was the day things go better around the office - he was a techno nerd jerk, he wanted technology for technology's sake, not because it was useful. He failed to do his job, and we fired him. I hope you contract terminal cancer you snarky little faceless mac zealot fuck!
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
Funny, a BSD platform hanging in the balance because it fails an an MSFT VAR. Its not BSDs
fault, trust me, its Apple.
Will Microsoft dump Mac support?
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4485
Two firms slag off each other
By INQUIRER staff: Wednesday 17 July 2002, 12:22
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.
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
a PC with horrible Mot-PPC).
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.
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 thats 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 appeling than ANY ANY of the other BSDs, they
all destroy Darwin in useablility, 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 unuseable. Also, if Apple like
fit and finish on Unix, why dont they make the more complicated things useable througha
GUI (like Brickhouse did for IPF). Noo, the only people Apple caters to is those who die
thier hair purple and sucks on pacifier and laugh at baby rattles while they are e-tarded
from thier last bout with Xtasy after the cool rave for mac zealots.
1 - Nope, not a troll opinion. People trying to name trolls are often themselves trolling
by crying wolf.
2 - Pirate, no. I deleted the software. They are liars because they say on their product
literature that the product can do things it simply cannot. Do you buy a car without a
test drive. NO. Do lots of states have cool-off periods. Yes. Are you are one of those
inferior software developers that cant let people try before they buy because you cant
deliver on your promise? Or you just and advocate for that because you benefit somehow?
3 - OS X would be easier to eat (its cheap at $130.) if I could use it on a cheap Intel
box. Then I could leave it there, tinker with it, do more to make what I like about other
Unices available to OS X. I borrowed a Mac G3 (350/1MB cache, 1GB memory, 15GB HDD/2MB
buffer) and * Linux ran better (Debian, Yellowdog and Mandrake * I did try them all) , *
GNU-Darwin was near-useless compared to the Linuxes * let alone that pile of garbage apple
calls Darwin 1.4.1, and * Mac OS X was horribly slow and clunky. I also find that
Administration in OS X is counterintuitive.
Now to address your pathetic complexes. Your quoting is interesting. You were upset about
my thread(s) and were looking to pick apart any of my comments. Grasping at straws. First
tactic you used was name calling / labeling. Cheap shot. Then you tried to confuse good
consumer strategy (protecting my wallet from thieving/lying software developers who often
sell your privacy to marketing companies, and fail to deliver proper support for software
and force version upgrades that should be called service packs) with piracy, and thus
you were attempting to assassinate my character. I would never, and have never, created
revenue for myself, any of the businesses I have worked for with unlicensed or pirated
software. I am an advocate for paying for what you use to generate revenue for yourself. I
utterly resent your insinuations. Now you try and hit your own self justified home run by
saying "Nah, wah, why would you want OS X if you don*t like it wash." I don*t
mind the software, I think it is a meritorious endeavor to have a polished UI on Unix. I
don*t see the point in cornering it to a pass* , deprecated, slow SPECmarkless overpriced
platform. I would appreciate it far more if it would be ported to x86, but alas, Microsoft
would pull the Office X plug because it would compete (rather well I might add) with
Windows XP. Therefore, Apple is a Microsoft VAR, their existence is to stay afloat and
give their shareholders money, not innovate anything useful in the community.
Sorry I wasn*t fooled by them like you were. I resent you, you are alike Mao, Stalin,
Hitler. The experts agree, censorship works. If I am a fool, let me foolishness speak for
itself * as writing on this wall* * but you are far more sinister than fool, you want to
dictate, excise, remove. You want the world to be as you see it, and cannot accept a
subjective opinion because you are probably sexless and very pathetic. I resent you.
I RESENT ALL OF YOU APPLE MAC LUNATIC ZEALOTS!
In the words of the band Three Dead Trools in a Baggie: "Every OS wastes my time from the desktop to the lap. Everything since apple dos is all just a bunch of crap. From Microsoft to Macintosh to Linux. Every computer crashes 'cause every OS sucks."
.
Each system has its strengths and weaknesses, and no one system is good at everything. You should make a decision about what operating system to use based on your needs. Maybe a hybrid approach is best
I use a Mac to develop on, and Linux fileserver that shares file with the other macs(via appletalk) in the office, and with the windows machines.
Why is it with all these people who when asked why they won't use a Mac, they tout the oh so old "I can't stand the one button mouse" line. Hello?!?!? McFly? Add a multi button one! It's funny how all these uber geeks will proudly show you the greatest modification the've made to their Intel systems, but when confroned with the problem of changing the mouse on a Mac system, the concept is beyond them.
Maybe it's because the troll made the numbers up and you wasted 10 minutes of your life getting the right ones. YHBT. YHL. HAND. Idiot.
If you want more accurate numbers of who has what percentage of the market, then you should check out this article. Jack Campbell spent about 30 hours and about a week's worth of research to gather his numbers. Definitely worth a look. Even includes Linux, AS400, and mainframe OS and application numbers. At the end of the article he also includes the hardware numbers per manufacturer over the last 20 years for those people wanting to know those numbers. I will not tell you the results, you should read the article for yourself.
Ok... normally I use SuSE Linux with Gnome for everything. But we do schools and schools do MACs so here I am with OS-X on my (messy) desk. Right next to me is my LCD monitor which can show me my Linux GUI or my Windows GUI. I can compare all of them with little effort.
What do I like about OS-X?
1. I like the size and convenience of the iBook. It has Unix on it and that makes it useful for me to carry to clients' sites and check out their network. Normally I carry a Linux laptop for this but the P-120 laptop (my wife's old machine) is too slow for a useful GUI.
2. I like the GUI. Heck, I was laying in bed the other night playing games on this thing and it was damn fun. (Well, fun for me, my wife was annoyed at the bleeps and whistles... sheesh.)
3, I like that it's Unix... BSD rocks (although I generally prefer Linux).
What do I not like???
1. Yeah, the mouse. One button. I like to surf using new windows for links and then close 'em down to go back for more links. A single-button mouse doesn't do this and it's a pain in the butt to carry a mouse with me.
2. One desktop. Damn! How can I work with only one desktop? On my Linux box I have 4 desktops; one for email/calendar (Ximian Evolution), one for web browsers, and two for misc apps I pull up (Open Office, GAIM, etc.). How anyone can do useful work without having multiple desktops (accessible with alt-F keys) is beyond me. Is there a way to do this on the MAC. I dunno yet.
3. The keyboard on this iBook bounces... some letters in words appear twice in a row. This annoys me. Although, to be frank, it might be just my untrained fingers on a new keyboard.
Generally, however, I like the iBook and I like OS-X. I would recommend this product to any client as long as the apps they need are available. But I'm not switching yet.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Who in their right mind would buy it ? If Apple levels the field they CAN ONLY GAIN. I figure you guys are right though corporate politics being what they are...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
That is the gayest thing you could ever think, say or write.
Apple laptops are effectively unusable for unix users.
I am a long-time Unix user. That means I need to have the Ctrl key to the left of the A key. This is a genuine need , not merely a want; it is based upon ergonomics. The Ctrl key is heavily used in unix, and it must be easily accessable. It cannot be off in the lower left corner of the keyboard where it is difficult to get at, and where it distorts the position of your left hand such that you can't easily type other keys while holding the Ctrl key down.
Apple desktop keyboards are now all USB. They are all OK. The CapsLock key can be re-mapped into a Ctrl key.
Unfortunately, even in this modern age, all Apple laptops have built-in ADB keyboards. The ADB keyboard is broken-by-design. It is, in general, not possible to remap the CapsLock key into a Ctrl key.
There are some exceptions, but they are horrible kludges. They are horrible kludges because the original design of the ADB keyboard was a horrible kludge. The correct solution would be for Apple to re-design their laptop motherboards to use built-in USB keyboards. This hasn't happened yet. If you run Linux, use Debian's solution. For Mac OS X users, uControl works. There are no solutions (that I know of) for either NetBSD or OpenBSD. Please note once again that the "solutions" above are in fact kludges, because of the original bad design of the ADB keyboard.
Apple is (currently) ignoring Unix users! This is not merely speculation on my part. In an on-going email exchange I am having with an Apple employee (whom I won't name) in their marketing department, the Apple marketing person directly stated to me that Apple was catering to their historic Mac customers, and is purposely ignoring the Unix market. He also claimed that Apple would soon start paying more attention to the Unix market. I won't hold my breath. Apple has been ignoring Unix users for more than 12 years. I expect that trend to continue. (Also note that my Apple contact indicated that Macs would never ship with a 3-button mouse, even though Apple intended to port almost all X-window software and deliver it either on a CD/DVD or installed directly on each Mac's hard drive. How Unix friendly is a 1-button mouse with X programs that often require 3 buttons?)
Apple has now lost two opportunities to sell me hardware. I really wanted an Apple laptop for their superior battery life, and for the PowerPC with Altivec CPU. (The Altivec is vastly superior to the x86 line for DSP.) Because I can't live with the broken-by-design built-in ADB keyboard in all Apple laptops, Sony and IBM sold me laptops instead. If Apple fixes this problem, they will sell me a PowerBook next year; if they don't, I'll still be running OpenBSD on x86 hardware, and wishing I could use a Mac.
I had Suse and Mandrake and Redhat all installed on the same machine at various times. Suse was, by far, the slowest/worst of them all. So, I guess everyone should listen to me now instead because I've just given unrefutable evidence, just like the poster, I'm replying to, right? :)
Seriously, Suse used to really suck bad on the hardware here - yeah, maybe it was bad hardware, but Mandrake/Redhat (hell even Caldera) all worked better than the Suse we had. Perhaps newer ones are better, but I couldn't even get Suse fans to admit (when they saw it) that it was bad, even though it was demonstrably bad.
creation science book
"Of course, there are a few warts. It took me a long time to make the Terminal's ANSI capabilities behave."
He said that he got it fixed. I would love to fix mine. It drives me crazy. Anyone know how?
The above is not worth reading.
Hahahaha ... ya switched to WHAT for reliability? SusE-the-bi*ch ?? I've seen salmon more reliably spawn a process ... than that twitchy piece a' low-beta sauerKraut. Printer still doesn't work, does it? Hahahahahahaha ... but go right ahead sez Unkil Bill$.
Since it sounds like Wesley Crusher, I mean Wil Wheaton, likes Mandrake, how about some Wesley Crusher, I mean Wil Wheaton games and utilities for Mandrake? He could provide his voice to whoever decided to code the stuff.
Here are some fictional examples I'd like to see:
1. Star Trek Dodgeball
2. TURN YOUR TEARS INTO BEERS : How to shed crocodile tears over plastic toys bearing your likeness, and tell stories about your used goods for extra cash on eBay.
3. MILK THE FORMER FAME : How to make an effective whine blog : the fans will buy into your propoganda based upon your former celebrity status.
4. King Wesley Desktop : Others may mock the next generation character, but with the KWD (King Wesley Desktop), every time you use your system you will be greeted with Wesley Crusher dressed in robes and crowned, holding a autographed Next Generation lunchbox. Wait, there's more! 15% of every purchase goes towards the: Why Is Spot Under The Bed? foundation. Help truly discover the reason Data and Geordie were peeking at each other underneath a bed all alone. The cat was surely a hologram, but sssssh! Results will be kept private.
5. The Next Generation Interactive! Reality Show. Watch as Wesley Crusher gets tossed out from his companions' group like Brainy from the Smurfs. Just like in the smurfs, it happens every episode!
We are the latest division of Apple's marketing department.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Dude, that's the wrong paper, the one you should have posted details probing your anus using your own head. I'm sure many windows supporting trolls would benifit from reading it.
I think after viewing that rant, we can see who the lunatic zealot is!
And brain dead as well!
Switch?
I think the whole "Switch" thing is a brilliant ploy! Microsoft knows that Linux is not an OS that it can stop using its old methods. Linux is hitting Microsoft hard in the Server market. Now, with technologies like Mozilla and OpenOffice.org, Microsoft sees the possibility of seeing the same thing happen on the desktop. How do they stop it?
Enter Microsoft's token desktop competitor, Apple! Apple has been useful to Microsoft in the past to show the world that they aren't a monopoly, they have competition. In fact, when Apple was in danger of dying completely, Microsoft pumps $150 million into Apple to save it. Also, they continue to port applications to the Mac, even though on the surface, why would you want to port software to your "competitors" platform? Simple, the Mac has always had less that 15% of the desktop market, and, since its closed hardware, that isn't going to change.
So how does this relate to Linux? Perhaps Microsoft saw a useful purpose in the technologies of Apple and NeXT. Help Apple build a new Mac OS that is based on UNIX with a GUI that would attract the best and brightest of the Open Source/Linux community away from improved the Linux desktop! So far, it seems to be working, as the "switch" articles keep coming. Sure, Microsoft loses a small number of Windows users as well to this platform, but, Microsoft knows it can easily take out Apple using its tried and true methods.
Only that he didn't provide a single reference to where the numbers are from... it's essentially only a guess by a macintosh zealot.
Don't you think that Steve Jobs would have picked it up if their real market share was larger than 2.5-5%?
Both Linux (and Windows NT since version 3.1, although I don't use it) support SMP perfectly, and you can get a dual Athlon for far less than $1700.
Besides, if you are compiling code instead of using Altivec-accelerated programs, the Athlon will perform much better EVEN PER CLOCK, not to mention that they have announced > 2GHz machines. (Apple isn't shipping the 1.25 GHz boxes yet either...). And if you are including Altivec in the equation you should compare with the corresponding SSE accelerated stuff for the Athlon. The photoshop 'benchmark' is a wonderful example where Apple have picked a collection of tests that are altivec but not SSE-accelerated. They don't include any SSE-only-accelerated routines, nor any routines where both architectures do well. Guess why all independent tests show the Athlon as a winner...
Finally, you seem to compare the price of a dual Athlon with the low-end 867 MHz Mac, but the performance with the top-of-the-line 1.25 GHz...
No, the fastest G4 speed is currently 1 GHz. Apple have *announced* the 1.25 GHz boxes, and you can order one and pay it now - but it won't be shipped for a couple of months.
That $150 million in stock has since been sold.
Thank god.
Like many of the die hards in my office, I thought OS X was an improvment over Mac OS, but I stuck by my linux installation as my primary work station for quite some time. A couple of weeks ago- with the release of 10.2, I decided I would switch over on an experimental basis. With OroborOSX and XDarwin, as well as the Mac OS X developer tools, I'm pretty much sold at this point.
I now have a workstation that runs most (if not all) of the Unix ish apps I need to do my work, as well as the propritary applications I used to have to switch to windows for.
Sure, I still have three boxes on my desk (Linux WS, Mac g4 desktop, and cheesy little windows laptop) but I'm increasing using ONLY the OS X system. I'm pretty much sold - as are most of the other's on the engineering/it team I work with.
'course at home - I still run linux - but I don't need MS Office as much there. I'm still sold on Linux as a platform, all but a very few server installations I'm working with at this point are linux, and I'm not about to get rid of it all together - but the next machine I'll buy will be a tiBook (though if you're listening apple, we need a damed two button mouse)
\Drew National Data Director, John Edwards for President
>Jack Campbell spent about 30 hours and about a
>week's worth of research to gather his numbers.
He doesn't detail how he arrived at his numbers, which to me ruins any credibility in them.
>Even includes Linux, AS400, and mainframe OS and
>application numbers.
And ignores Netware, OpenVMS, MPE/IX, OS/2, DOS, System/36, and numerous others.
It would be easy to say these are all legacy platforms, but it doesn't change the fact that there is a signifigant installed base of each. The last numbers published by IDC (in 1998) reported an installed base of 10 *million*. Even System/36 still has a signifigant userbase, despite being superceded by OS/400 in the early 1990's.
>At the end of the article he also includes the
>hardware numbers per manufacturer over the last
>20 years for those people wanting to know those
>numbers. I will not tell you the results, you
>should read the article for yourself.
How about some more hardware numbers... The total number of Macintoshes ever produced is 54 million, of which only 17 million are capable of running MacOS X.
On the other hand, the PC industry is pumping out somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 million units A QUARTER. That's 120 million units a year. And that is only the Intel compatible machines.
Somehow the figure of 275 million installed machines is starting to sound a little low, isn't it?
And, to put that into further perspective, Apple is selling about 800k units per quarter. Respectable? Yes. Enough to put them in the top five manufacturers? Yes. But it is still only 3% of the total market.
Please note that I am not expressing an opinion about the value of the Macintosh platform, nor its long term viability. I just dislike people who present unsubstantiated statistics as facts, and that's what Mr. Campbell apears to be.
Matt
On a TiBook myself, and I mostly agree with you. This thing is nice, but far from perfect. Roughly following your points, first those you list as positive:
Now the ones you listed as bad:
One more thing you didn't mention but needs to be said... Free Software! Yes, the OS isn't Free, which is sad, but it's quite a bit closer than the Windows box I still had to keep on before, and it's a hell of a lot easier to port *nix applications to. Which is good for the user, and good for Free Software too, more ports and more eyeballs.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Apple is (currently) ignoring Unix users! This is not merely speculation on my part.
No, it is either clearly false (see below) or non-falsifiable blather. Apple has engaged in substantial marketing specifically directed toward the Unix Market, for example by running Apple print ads directed to the Unix Market, complete with "/dev/null" unix jargon.
Reasonable people may differ with our anonymous coward about whether discounting his 1990 suggestion constitutes ignoring the entire Unix market, or whether he simply has an overblown view of the representattive constituency of his own design choices as compared to those of others.
I have worked Unix, Mac, Windows and other OS and development environments for decades, and don't find myself using the control key all that much more in any one as opposed to another, so I don't see this as a peculiarly Unix-centric issue. Even so, despite doing a massive amount of Unix and terminal work day by day on my prime ax, an Apple Powerbook, and having a zillion desktop and other machines around from which to pick, I just don't experience his pains. (I suppose I find the virtue of my wireless flexibility to walk around my world more significant to me than the slight trick of learning my fingers around a keyboard.)
How much is apple paying you guys?
I mean, story after story about positive reactions to an advertising campaign.
WTF?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Since when is a Gui "entertaining"? I mean, I realize that little animations and stuff for scrolling around on the dock (or whatever) might be fun for the first five minutes, I would certainly hope that apple users are brainwashed enough to pay $130 for that...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
There are several versions of the Apple Unix-centric print ads available on-line.
One good reason would be because with the new Macs you can do all of that, with the possible exception of games depending on which ones you play, on one machine, without rebooting. Which is nice, particularly if that one machine is a TiBook you can take with you wherever you go.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
After watching a stream of Apple's switch adds today during a football game broadcast, I've come to a conclusion about the majority of Apple's adds: they compare older versions of Windows to Apple's latest OS X. Former Windows users complain about not being able to plug digital cameras into their computers and having them work, or not having the capability to edit digital videos on their computers. These may be true, but not if they were to come from using Windows XP on a new PC. Microsoft could have adds that say: "Switch to windows cause apple's OS is unstable and doesn't even have the benefits of a command line or advanced features" Obviously this would be in refernce to the older versions of Mac OS. Most of the arguments presented in the switch commercials wouldn't stand up against a new PC running windows XP.
SIGFAULT
But under the surface, OS X also has some pretty big issues. It is quite schizophrenic about APIs: the BSD, Carbon, and Cocoa APIs really aren't all that well integrated. There are half a dozen different kinds of executables, with entirely different behaviors. Many applications see a Mac file system, others see a UNIX file system. OSA scripting doesn't work for the majority of applications. And Carbon applications ignore Cocoa preferences. Some devices are accessible through BSD-like APIs, others are only available through Carbon, some have Cocoa wrappers.
And the crown jewel of OS X, the GUI, is also a bit iffy under the covers. Quartz is an enormous resource hog and rather sluggish. The Cocoa API requires lots of manual storage management and manual layout management. Objective-C is getting rather long in the tooth and will not take the world by storm anymore (it was a nice idea in 1985, now we have better systems). In terms of usability, OS X is better than Windows, but it is still far from "intuitive" (all current GUIs, including Apple's, commit some grave sins), as you will quickly find out if you try to explain how to use it over the phone to non-computer users.
I like my Macs (and am typing from a Mac right now). But they are not replacements for UNIX workstations or Linux machines--they are replacements for Windows desktop machines. And Apple has their work cut out for them. Let's hope they'll clean up some of the mess under the covers. I think the more open source software they can use, the better for them. In the medium term, they might even be well advised to drop Quartz and Objective-C and adopt technologies more widely used in the open source world--I think Apple won't be able to keep up with Gnome, KDE, Ximian, and other efforts like that.
The biggest advantage of Mac OS X are probably still the hardware/software integration, brand, distribution channels, and surrounding infrastructure. Those, rather than amazing technical differences, are what make the Mac a good choice for many non-technical users.
But you're not? Let me see if I can pull some samples out of your post (and just this post never mind your rant)
and all of that just from a short post. So now tell me who's a fucking elitist bastard? People might actualy listen to you if you came accross as an intelligent, reasonable and thoughtful individual instead of a Bill Gates loving 13 year old with nothing better to do than look at porn all day.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
mandrake is fine, if you want to use the command line you can, if you want to compile from source you can. If want to setup a server without a gui you can. If you what too be able to use .deb packages you can,just use APT-RPM.
If you want to see something lame just look at yourself.
Why not just use a two button mouse. Obviously, people don't have problems with it. Obvioulsly hitting 'control-click' or 'click+hold+for+one+second' is more difficult/annoying then just using another finger. It's like they're trying to prove a point.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
never had problems like you seem to have had. what hardware do you have?
I have installed 8.1 on p3, p2, k6-2, athlon, celeron. all with only prob being on tnt2 graphics card which i had to type depmod -a as su to fix.
I disagree with suse's business practices so i won't use there distro.
Only distro's i consider are mandrake, debian, and gentoo.
have also installed 8.1 on a cyrix pr333 and a p1
Wether or not they are 'supposed' to look like idiots dosn't change the fact that they do, and that people don't want to be 'like' an idiot wether they are or not.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I'm afraid you're incorrect. Check out http://forums.appleinsider.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb. cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=2&t=001514
"My 1.25 is on a truck coming out of Sacramento. Estimated delivery is on Sept. 21."
"I recieved an e-mail confirming mine was shipped yesterday."
I see the irony: The major lack in OS X is actually X.
1) Look up irony before you use it next time. It's pronounced "OS Ten" not "OS Ecks", so the irony is pretty much lost there.
2) The lack of X is why I like using the newest MacOS.
I ran linux on a desktop at home for two years. I went back to windows because the experience was so horrible. I then switched over to the Macintosh line because I was tired of constantly upgrading my machine. I converted the PC to a BSD box that runs only on the command line. Life is good.
Lowmag.net
I am on a tiBook (800)...
Things I like:
1. Unix unix unix. I am a programmer/admin for a bunch of unix boxes and 99% of my web applications etc. I am able to develop w/out any problems right on my laptop.
2. Good Java support. Finally.
3. Fast. I have heard complaints from other people, but my tiBook seems to run fine. It feels like it runs 2x faster than my G4 tower (466) and doesn't feel like a workstation when it's doc'd to my monitor and usb keyboard/mouse.
4. Da chit just works. I honestly don't have to monkey around with anything. I don't install hacks and wacks to make my windows different shapped or themed. I install the updates, trival as windows update really. I have IDEA and JEdit installed and they work great. The new iChat is pretty cool, different than GAIM which I have been pretty used to until now. But, I don't feel like I have to really monkey with anything to get things working.
5. Feeling of integration. I find myself using a lot of the same things, so not a huge deal. Mozilla & my two java apps (IDEA and JEdit) seem to sorta throw me once in a while, but for the most part
Dislikes.
1. Expensive. If I wasn't a moderatly well paid professional , it would of been impossible to afford it. ($3200 is a lot of money to me at least).
2. My model gets pretty hot. Almost freaks me out to where I am going to go buy a little caddy for the laptop and a small fan to keep it cool. I worry about it ruining the screen with the lid closed while using it as a desk-side workstation. My java apps tend to run a bit hot.
3. No Infrared.
4. Sometimes mediocre 802.11b reception, probably due to the titanium case.
5. Slows noticably if disk-io is sky-high. Though, my brother who has an iBook said that putting disk-intensive apps on a fire-wire drive run fantastic. Probably the small form-factor of a laptop hard disk. I remember having the same issue with my Sony Viao.
Overall I would say that is the best laptop I have ever purchased and I don't regret buying it. I figure even if Apple tanks 4 years from now, I will get my 2 year life cycle out of the unit with another 2 years on top of that for my wife or kids to use.
It's the first laptop I have ever owned that I find myself using as my primary workstation for development.
Cheers
Suck on my dong plz k thx.
In classic, it was possible to use ResEdit to remap your keyboard however you want. I suggest you check www.macosxapps.com someone may have a solution for you.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
you can change just about EVERYTHING in ut2k3, it is so incredibly geared toward the mod community that i am personally amazed. i was doubtful of anyone embracing modders as much as q3 and halflife had, but apparently the ut2k3 boys are.
why any mod wouldn't just start with tenebrae though is lost on me. anyone deving for urban terror should switch now!
oh yeah, and this:
And, incidentally, no, I don't find it a problem having only one mouse button.
is just plain crap, and a good optical usb mous with 2 buttons and a scroll wheel are ~$30 so that's ONE rebate i would want from mac before *i* switch.
Oh yeah, and i want pj64 to work like it does in XP, too...
rhy
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Do NOT install MetamorphX or other theme-switching utilities with 10.2 I installed the BeOS MetamorphX theme on OSX, and it caused the OS to become unbootable! It would get to the login screen where I'd choose between users, then it would get snagged.
h tm l
Fortunately, there was this nice option in Install CD to install over the current OSX, but keep the users files and preferences. Nice, but still a pain in the ass.
The desire for alternate themes shows the deficiencies in OSX's current theme. OSX's Aqua effects make it look like a two-dollar whroe. I personally preferred the OLD OS 9 appearance much more; I also like the std. BeOS appearance and the NeXT appearance much better. A GUI is supposed to help me get things done quicker, not impress me or get in my way.
Apple has dropped the ball in a number of UI areas in OSX, though overall its an improvement.
1. No labels on dock icons unless you move mouse over them. Dock icons should be labelled with labels to the left/right if the dock is on the right/left side of the screen; if its ont he bottom, the labels should be tilted.
2. No separation of the grouping of running applications from favorites on the dock. All running applications should be in the same place on the dock, not mixed in with your favorites.
3. Lack of serious configurability. This has always been a problem with Mac. Jobs, get your head out of your ass. Everyone is different; different people will want it set up different ways. I find these Aqua-effects and transition effects, as well as animations, to be completely useless. I want instantaneous responses. Here in the real world, people want to get work done, not be distracted and annoyed by genie or scaling effects.
4. Ability to view folder as pop-up has been lost. That was a good feature w/c Apple got rid of.
5. Old Mac menu dismantled. The old mac menu with an application pull-down menu where you could list *all* of your applications and with a menu where you could list *all* of your control panel items is gone. Replaced by a new and inferior Apple menu. Jobs, the dock is great, but its more suitable as a complement for the desktop, not a complete replacement for the Apple menu.
6. Loss of old applications switcher menu.
7. Loss of ability to label different folders/files different colors. Another good feature thrown out the window for god-knows-why.
8. In the dock, if you place a folder there, you can only navigate 5 sublevels deep. You should be able to navigate the entire hard drive through a folder menu bought up from the dock.
9. Option clicking on a folder should allow you to navigate from that folder via a menu.
10. When is Apple going to realize that tabbed windowing is superior to other styles of maximization? Tabbed windows, as are used in Mozilla, effectively allow all windows to be maximized, but still allow you to see the other apps running.
12. Window management. Arranging windows in ANY OS by Apple is a bitch. You have to manually drag the windows to be a certain size. Hey, Apple, ever heard of tile horizontally/vertically or cascade? Give us predefined ways to arrange windows.
13. When is Apple going to give us the ability to make the universal menu at the top of hte screen hide-away? And when are they going to give us a universal tool-bar to go along with the universal menu? Why does every instance of Finder need its own tool-bar?
I have more suggestions for Apple and anyone else making a GUI here
http://home.rochester.rr.com/tweak/WM-features.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
OS X gives you both, without requiring you to have 2 computers or to reboot into a different OS if you have 1 computer with dual-boot.
Shame on Google.
Its actually really easy:
/usr/bin/smbspool /usr/libexec/cups/backend/smb
1) ln -s
2) reboot
3) setup the printer normally
It's becoming tempting to get a Mac, but I still wouldn't want to have one as my only computer.
Apple laptops are effectively unusable for unix users.
Demonstrably false. I am a UNIX user and programmer from fairly far back. I use an Apple iBook exclusively when I'm away from home, and at home I use a Power Mac G4 with essentially the same keyboard layout. You, sir, are just being lazy.
Apple is (currently) ignoring Unix users!
This is also demonstrably false.
Because I can't live with the broken-by-design built-in ADB keyboard in all Apple laptops, Sony and IBM sold me laptops instead.
In other words, "Because I am too lazy or too stubborn to accept the fact that the control key on a Mac keyboard is in a different place than I'm accustomed to, Sony and IBM sold me laptops instead."
Apple's certainly not going to go out of their way to cater to customers who do nothing but whine about trivialities.
I used to like guys, but the more I used them... they just didn't work like I did. Since I've switched I am much happier.
Because I'm afraid that 'feature-laden' is often mistaken for 'hard-to-use'.
:P
If I want an operating system for idiots, I'll run MS Windows, thanks. At least they'll give me an option to set up things somewhat like the way I'd want them.
single mouse buttons suck, might be ok for general desktop use, but for specialized apps like games or cad, you need more than 1 damn stupid arse button.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Woohoo, gimme two servings!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You make no sense. You say that you cannot remap the control key on a powerbook, and then refer to software that does exactly that. You then berate Apple for catering to their traditional customers. What company in their right mind would not cater to their traditional customer base? Let me just say that you come off as a tad paranoid about Apple ignoring UNIX folk, and oddly obsessed on the placement of a modifier key (especially one you know you can change the mapping of via software). Apple has a few markets they are working on entering, especially Hi Ed, and Scientific that are UNIX strongholds, and from what I can tell they are working on strengthening them. Not including a three button mouse, and leaving the keyboard unchanged from it's layout of the past fifteen years does not mean that Apple is ignoring all customers who are UNIX sorts.
BTW - on a PowerBook is is a lot easier to work with a single button and use mod keys for the other two keys. I have now done it for years and find that I actually prefer the single button approach to my two-button ThinkPad. It works better with my thumb placement. My fingers of my left hand are always over the modifier keys on the PowerBook anyway, since that's where my hand rests - it works perfectly.
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
I believe that is what "IBM" called it. It may have not been completely true then. But it does make sense now and it is IBM's fault we have these damn machines no matter how you look at it.
:).
Compaq couldn't have reversed engineered IBM's BIOS unless IBM created it in the first place
Hmmm... Pie...
You can get virtual PC; which is designed to allow you to run XP apps. Anyway there really isn't a comparison. Apple is thrilled when people buy Macs to run Yellow Dog or some other OS (those guys are authorized dealers). Microsoft doesn't make money on hardware.
FWIW, we do prepublishing, and we're trying to make the jump from Word to Quark.
Word is so badly programmed that it has cost us tons of money due to document corruption. When this problem came out in '98/99, there was officially support with our purchased product. However Word support went to the extent of saying "what you are seeing on the screen is not what is happening, Word functions properly, and no don't send us the files for autopsy."
Quark at least is stable, as of Ver. 4.05 (which we use). When there *is* document corruption, you can either (a) select all, copy, open a clean document, paste, save as (b) delete all pages. Ask the program to regenerate pages. That's it. Corruption is not permanent there.
We do this on Mac, but Word has similar problems on the PC, and according to reports I read later versions than ours also have those problems. So we're jumping ship.
What with no support, a real cost 10x that of professional programs, and all, I would not be sorry to see Mac lose Office support. Very quickly, our authors would also make the jump, and there would be no question as to whether it was a better choice.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
The issue is not that the control key on a Mac keyboard is in a different place than I'm used to. The issue is that with all other keyboards, I can re-map it to my heart's content. With an Apple laptop keyboard (because of the kludgy bad design) it is not possible to re-map the CapsLock key.
I need to re-map the key to the left of the A into a Ctrl key. Apple laptops prevent this. (Apple desktop keyboards don't. They are all USB.) Until such time as Apple starts building in USB keyboards into their laptops, they have failed to solve the ergonomic problem which prevents me from being their customer.
I hope Apple re-designs their laptop motherboards soon. I really do.
I don't want any hand-holding. However, I do need insanely great hardware, especially insanely great input devices. The rest of the hardware is insanely great. The OS is insanely great. The laptop keyboards, however, need some work.
The keyboard is the most important input device. A poor keyboard severely limits not only my user experience, but my productivity. I won't settle for anything less than total re-mappability of every key, especially the CapsLock key. That's why I don't have a PowerMac yet.
Maybe next year ...
I think you were just trolling but since you didn't post AC I'll reply.
Also, OS X about as close to UNIX as Cygwin running on top of Win98 is.
I'm compiling things like Gnome on OSX virtually nothing complicated compiles on Cygwin.
They still have a bunch of NeXT stuff under the hood (Darwin)
First off Next was a Unix. Darwin is primarily Mach/BSD there is nothing particularly Nextish at the Darwin level the real Next influence is at the Cocoa level.
and do most things the NeXT way (display postscript, etc).
And how does this not make it a Unix. One of Unixes core ideas is that the Gui isn't the OS.
The only thing that makes it "unix" is the fact that it runs some unix commands. But you can make DOS run unix commands, so that's not really a good argument.
In what sense is BSD a Unix that OSX isn't?
I would be very skeptical of using something like Darwin/OS X on an industrial-class machine.
Meaning what? Apple doesn't really sell Enterprise level apps; and frankly I'm skeptical of Unix in general for hard core reliability and security VMS, Z-OS, I-OS... are where I would go for that sort of stuff.
It's worse than Win2K in terms of overhead (can you even boot without a GUI?),
Yes you hit command-S in startup and boot to single user mode (init 1). What happens in this mode is defined by your rc.d scripts.
and runs a weird microkernel.
Mach is weird?
Yes, it makes a good desktop. If you hate computers and love the Apple way of doing things, this is the OS for you. If you switch from Linux to OS X, you probably shouldn't have been using Linux in the first place.
And why is that?
That's really, really impressive. Almost every sentence in your post was wrong! The only one that you got right was, "Yes, it makes a good desktop." You obviously put a lot of effort into this post, and I respect that. I laugh at it, but at the same time I respect it.
If I can keep a 24 processor Sun busy for an hour, I can probably figure out how to keep a PC busy, eh?
Dude,
while (1) {
fork();
}
doesn't count.
1. The G4 is up to 1.25 Ghz and only comes in dual configurations.
Mostly true, but technically false. The Apple Store for educators will still sell you a 900 MHz single-processor Quicksilver system, if you're a teacher or a student. If I recall, the price is about $1,200, but that's totally from memory, so don't bitch at me if I got it wrong.
Actually, no, the gayest thing he could have thought, said, or written would have been, "That is the gayest thing you could ever think, say or write."
You make no sense. You say that you cannot remap the control key on a powerbook, and then refer to software that does exactly that.
I'm trying to be complete and fair. There is software that somewhat solves the problem, but not for all OSes. In addition, the available software fixes are kludges, because the ADB keyboard design was a horrible kludge. (It is not elegant to fix a horrible hardware kludge with a horrible software kludge. The proper solution is for Apple to abandon ADB keyboards, and go with properly designed USB keyboards.)
Also, you have to pay extra for uControl for Mac OS X.
Most importantly, as far as I know, there is no solution for either NetBSD or OpenBSD. I run primarily OpenBSD.
You then berate Apple for catering to their traditional customers. ... Apple has a few markets they are working on entering, especially Hi Ed, and Scientific that are UNIX strongholds, and from what I can tell they are working on strengthening them.
I'm a scientific unix user, and have spent more than a decade in academia. I'm in the market you claim that Apple is targeting. (I agree that Apple should target this market; it is a natural for them. They should also be targeting all engineers doing DSP.)
I have raised this keyboard issue with Apple technical people, including Jordan Hubbard. I have also raised the issue with Apple marketing people. In discussions with Apple marketing people, I was directly told that "Apple was purposely ignoring the Unix market." Those were the exact words of the Apple representative. They haven't fixed their kludgy ADB keyboard problem yet. Their marketing person seems to be right.
Not including a three button mouse, and leaving the keyboard unchanged from it's layout of the past fifteen years does not mean that Apple is ignoring all customers who are UNIX sorts.
Both of these actions impose costs. For me, those costs are too high to bear.
Not including a 3-button mouse means that I either have to re-map a couple of keyboard keys as mouse keys (and lose their keyboard functionality), or carry around another piece of equipment with my laptop. Carrying around another piece of equipment with my laptop is just not acceptable.
Retaining the historical keyboard layout is not what I'm complaining about. That's not even a problem. The issue is that the CapsLock key is not re-mappable (in some of the OSes that I use), because it is still an ADB keyboard. Not being able to re-map the CapsLock key is an unacceptably high cost, for me. I certainly wish I could get a unix-friendly layout right out of the box, but as long as I can re-map the keyboard I can use it.
I suggest you check www.MacOsXApps.com. Someone may have a solution for you.
The solution must work for all OSes, including NetBSD and OpenBSD.
What do you think?
Hi werdna,
You wrote:
Reasonable people may differ with our anonymous coward about whether discounting his 1990 suggestion constitutes ignoring the entire Unix market, or whether he simply has an overblown view of the representattive constituency of his own design choices as compared to those of others.
You make a good point. My personal design choices don't represent the entire Unix market. I grant that.
Many Unix users are young, and learned with Linux or FreeBSD on IBM compatible hardware. For some of them, the IBM AT keyboard layout is OK.
Many other unix users were using Unix (or CP/M or VMS) systems long before the IBM AT, and grew accustomed to a keyboard layout having Ctrl to the left of the A key. Many of these people share my desire for a solution to the "ADB keyboard problem".
Executive Summary:
I am the anonymous coward who posted "Apple Laptop Keyboards Unsuitable for Unix Users". I am not the author of the UseNET post asking how to re-map the CapsLock key on an Apple Macintosh back in 1990. My point is that Apple's design choices back in the mid-80's are having very negative effects now. (They were having negative effects back in 1990 as well, as the UseNET post indicates.)
Additional evidence that other long-time Unix users share my need for a Ctrl key to the left of the A key is the fact that soon after IBM re-designed the keyboard layout for their IBM AT in 1984, unix man pages started to include sections on how to re-map the CapsLock key. For modern examples, see xmodmap(1), pckbd(4), wsconsctl(8), and XF86Config(5).
All Apple laptops still have ADB keyboards, and have a design flaw that prevents re-mapping the CapsLock key with software. If Apple really wants to expand into the Unix market, they should correct this problem.
Not all Unix people absolutely need a Ctrl key to the left of the A like I do, but a significant number do. Those people can't effectively use Apple laptops.
Historical Background:
Back in 1984, when the IBM AT first came out, IBM correctly recognized that the killer-app was word processing. IBM chose to have a keyboard layout that closely matched the IBM Selectric typewriter. They placed CapsLock to the left of the A key.
I think IBM's choice was a mistake. The Ctrl key was very heavily used in unix, CP/M, and even in DOS in those days. By placing the Ctrl key in an ergonomically very hard to reach place they discouraged its use. I don't think that this was the intention of the IBM people who made this decision; it was a consequence they didn't foresee. There are many other ways to achieve the functionality of CapsLock, but no other ergonomically good ways to achieve the meta- functionality of the Ctrl key. So, IBM foisted a bad keyboard layout upon us.
Apple followed IBM down the route to keyboard layout perdition, but they made the problem much worse! Apple not only copied IBM's (bad in my opinion) layout, but they also designed the ADB keyboard such that it was not possible to re-map the layout in software. You can re-map every key on every IBM compatible keyboard, and every key except CapsLock on the ADB keyboards. You ought to be able to re-map the CapsLock key as well! Preventing this was Apple's horribly bad mistake.
The original Apple ADB keyboards were not like this. They had a layout like all IBM XT keyboards, with the Ctrl key to the left of the A. The first ADB keyboards didn't even have a CapsLock key. However, when Apple added a CapsLock key, they also botched the design of the keyboard. They made the CapsLock key operate as if it was an actual hardware-locking typewriter key.
Proper Keyboard Design:
- When a key is pressed, the keyboard sends a keyPress
event.
- When a key is released, the keyboard sends a keyRelease
event.
- Each key is assigned a different keycode.
Nothing more, nothing less.ADB Keyboard Mis-design:
- When the key to the left of the 'A' (CapsLock) is
pressed, the ADB keyboard sends both a keyPress event
and a keyRelease event.
- When the CapsLock key is then released, the ADB keyboard
sends NO events.
- When the CapsLock key is next pressed, the ADB keyboard
sends NO events.
- When the CapsLock key is then released, the ADB keyboard
sends both a keyPress event and a keyRelease
event.
- The above cycle repeats over and over.
This is WRONG ! Apple's ADB keyboards are broken by design.Now, you and I may differ on the best layout. However, designing a keyboard that prevents re-mapping cannot be defended!
The Unix users who don't care about keyboard layout can use Apple's laptops as they currently exist. I know some of them.
For those Unix users (and there are many) who depend upon the Ctrl key being to the left of the A key, current Apple laptop hardware is unusable. For these folks, it doesn't matter if they are using vi or emacs; the keyboard layout must satisfy ergonomic requirements. It must be possible to re-map the CapsLock key. These users currently go elsewhere for their (laptop) computer hardware. Apple loses sales to these people.
The KDE equivalent of the open command is kfmclient. Unfortunately, it takes URLs as arguments, not filenames or urls with no protocol prefix. Here's a little script called 'k' that wraps kfmclient with a more friendly interface.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Where do you get the idea that uControl costs money? You linked directly to the versiontracker page which explicitly says:
"This is Free Software licensed under the GPL."
Shame that the wilWheaton does Mandrake was mixed with the Switcher story as it seems to have again brought out the worst in people.
I use Mac OS X and I'm happy with it. I have access to Linux and *BSD and Windows on new hardware but I just prefer running OSX on my 2 year old Powerbook. I don't CARE what you run and that's a GOOD thing. What is nice is that I'm on UNIX. If you're running Mandrake or SuSe or Debian then you're on UNIX too. It's a cliche but we've all got bigger fish to fry.
As for the commercial == Bad? Pardon? I suppose software engineers live on handouts? Pay someone to do it right. Make it open source so people can tell you what's wrong with it.
Actually, you can remap caps lock to control using ucontrol in OS X. There's a linux patch to do the equivalent as noted in the post you linked to. It was based on the stuff from ucontrol (called icontrol back then).
I used that patch in Linux and ucontrol in OS X for almost a year without too many big problems. Occasionally you'd have to hit caps lock (ctrl) when coming back from sleep. Nothing too big.
Now are you going to stop your whining?
Ditto. Linux has two big problems to fix before it becomes a viable consumer desktop competitor to Windows and OX X The first is X: Byzantine, fragile, clunky, old, and (usually) ugly. Worst of all are the fonts.
The second problem is Linux's Unix and Gnu underpinnings. You need to hide the Unix plumbing and the Gnu software's...well, Gnu-i-ness.
With OS X, Apple has fixed the second problem while eliminating the first.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Wow. You can parrot 3 lines of C. You're so leet, slashbot.
For all your programming geeks out there, do yourself a huge favor and give OS X a try. Let go of your ego and ideology just for a few days, and give Apple a chance and be prepared to be blown away.
...
/Developer/Documentation/Apple Help/Apple Help Indexing Tool.app
.net which costs upto $2.5k.
I have been programming on Windows and Unix (Sun Solaris, HP/UX, etc) for over a decade, and I can tell you that nothing is remotely comparable to OS X.
OK, we all know that the best commercial products form MS, Adobe, Macromedia are all availabe on OS X; we also know that Apple also gives you the best-of-breed digital hub software (iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iCal, iSync, Mail, Preview, AppleWorks, Address Book, NetInfo, NetWork Utility, etc) for free which are not available on any other platform; and of course, if you are a Unix Weenie, you will love bash, tcsh, zsh, vi, pico, emacs, perl, python, ruby, apatch, mysql, postgresql, gcc, gmake, cvs, tcl/tk,
But what's really the best about OS X is the free and powerful programming tools:
lrwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 64 Sep 1 17:17 Apple Help Indexing Tool.app ->
drwxr-xr-x 7 root admin 238 May 20 10:52 AppleScript Studio
drwxrwxr-x 8 root admin 272 Aug 30 22:14 Extras
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 FileMerge.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 IORegistryExplorer.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 IconComposer.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Sep 1 17:17 Interface Builder.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 JavaBrowser.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 MRJAppBuilder.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 MallocDebug.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 ObjectAlloc.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 OpenGL Info.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 OpenGL Profiler.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 OpenGL Shader Builder.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 PEFViewer.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 PackageMaker.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 Pixie.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 Project Builder.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 Property List Editor.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 Quartz Debug.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 Sampler.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 Thread Viewer.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 icns Browser.app
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 14260 Sep 18 22:28 BuildStrings
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 28552 Sep 18 22:30 CpMac
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 111292 Sep 18 22:30 DeRez
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 14020 Sep 18 22:30 GetFileInfo
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 77720 Sep 18 22:30 MergePef
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 28516 Sep 18 22:30 MvMac
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 19256 Sep 18 22:30 ResMerger
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 116468 Sep 18 22:30 Rez
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 14248 Sep 18 22:29 RezWack
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 18452 Sep 18 22:30 SetFile
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 18928 Sep 18 22:30 SplitForks
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 18468 Sep 18 22:28 UnRezWack
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 172004 Sep 18 22:30 WSMakeStubs
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 15052 Jul 14 21:31 agvtool
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 1160 Jul 14 21:31 cvs-unwrap
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 967 Jul 14 21:31 cvs-wrap
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 3012 Jul 14 21:31 cvswrappers
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 9764 Sep 18 22:29 lnresolve
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 22736 Sep 18 22:31 pbhelpindexer
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 18336 Sep 18 22:30 pbprojectdump
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 23932 Sep 18 22:28 pbxcp
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 47732 Sep 18 22:28 pbxhmapdump
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 112700 Sep 18 22:29 sdp
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 11132 Jul 14 10:19 uninstall-devtools.pl
These are the best tools I have ever seen on any platform, better than anything on a $15k Sun workstation or MS Visual Studio
Take Project Builder for instance, it comes with a very sophiscated IDE with a built-in class browser and wonderful text editor, and each projects can manages many targets with different build styles, source files in C/C++, Objective C/C++, Java, AppleScript, and resources like icons, images, sound, xml, html, plain text, etc.
Interface Builder together with AppKit and FoundationKit frameworks is the only GUI tool that I have ever seen or heard that makes it possible to write functional software with a sleek UI with virtually zero user code.
These are the reasons that OmniGroup can produce a browser with a team of 1.5 programmars which is better than MS IE that takes dozens of engineers. Yes, OS X is that good, and you are living in the dark age of computing if you haven't seen it.
>> the problem is that the hardcores like their flexability (sic)
Apple doesn't care about selling to "the hardcores"". No one does; there's no money in it.
The Mac is a consumer and business platform. Judging it by "hardcore" standards is missing the point.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Being right or wrong in your argument is *HIGHLY* debateable. A lot of your "facts" were out dated. And no, even if you are right, it is not ok to be a rude asshole. Period.
You don't get respect of people by being a jack ass, and likewise, you wouldn't listen to someone being a jackass. People who treat other with respect and dignity and refrain from posting with such offensive intent are the people that actualy get listened to on slashdot. Why else would you post anonomously? Because you're afraid of loosing respect by using your real name. You know that by posting AC, people can't tag you specificaly as a freak and just have your posts automaticaly moderated down to below their threshhold.
Also you should never ever make assumptions. I am not typing this nor my previous message from an apple since my iBook had a bad run in with a pudle of water and a power cord. I know plenty about PCs and Macs and it is my opinion that the mac is a better computer overall. That doesn't mean I don't use a PC.
As for your busy work, I could care less. You have no idea what work on a computer is. I know this because there is no way any self respecting adult with computer knowledge would post like you do.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Speak for yourself. I'm a unix user, have been since 1987. I use macs, too. My control key on my Dell keyboard is in the lower left corner, and I touchtype on a Dvorak layout. That said, my primary beef with the laptops I have played with is the touchpad mouse. I can't stand them. If I buy an apple laptop, I'm getting a nice usb mouse to make it usable for me.
"Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens." - Schiller
Are you saying that Mac users are in some way more ignorant than users of other systems of the fact that programmers are needed, or that Mac users are more ignorant of programming than other other computer users, or ....?
Are you saying that users need to know about programming to run their systems? Do I need to know how my car engine works to drive?
On the face of it, your comment appears to make little sense.
In the words of the band Three Dead Trools in a Baggie
Actually, Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie are a comedy troupe, not a band.
The Trolls started out as Joe Bird, Wes Borg (the guy who wrote the song you quoted), Neil Gahan, and Cathleen Rootsaert. Neil left in 1993 to do TV, and Cathleen left in 1994 when she got married.
Wes and Joe formed a band called Hookahman in 1995 with several friends (including Cathleen's husband, Jeff Page) They released two CD's, but broke up to persue other interests.
After that, Donovan Workun and Paul Mather of Atomic Improv (another comedy foursome that had two members leave) joined the two remaing Trolls (Wes and Joe), and are sometimes billed as the Atomic Trolls.
I'm curious why PC users get so hung up about slight UI differences between Macs and PCs. Whether it's the perennial "I can't live with a one-button mouse" rant, or the guy here who says "I need to have the Ctrl key to the left of the A key. This is a genuine need , not merely a want," it's like you people are announcing that you have no powers of adaptation whatsoever. Just because you're familiar with the Windows/Linux way of doing things doesn't mean it's the best UI design.
(Incidentally, Apple tested a two-button mouse when designing the Lisa. The test users found it confusing, and their productivity increased dramatically with an interface designed for a one-button mouse.)
I don't know if you've tried it before, but the touchpads on macs are of a higher quality than the ones on PCs. I don't know if it's the material of the manufatuer but the mac touch pads are better than the PC ones.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
What do you want to set up the way you want under OS X that you can't? Have you taken a trip to www.macosxapps.com to see if there is a fix there?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I often read about it but rarely hear anybody talk about it, so the pronunciation doesn't make any change to me. And the few times I have had heard people talk about it, they did not pronounce it OS 10.
The lack of X is why I like using the newest MacOS.
I couldn't disagree more. I find X one of the major strengths of Linux and Unix systems. I don't spend a day without running remote applications with their display on my local computer. And I do so between three different architectures.
An implementation of X doesn't have to take all the bad parts from existing implementations. A major reason I would very much have liked to see Mac OS X with X was that I believed Apple would be able to combine the best parts of X with the best parts of their own design. I don't opponent against Aqua, I just think it should have been implemented on top of X. I would still have found it a good choice even if they had chosen to ship Mac OS X with Aqua as the only windowmanager. To the end user, the interface should have looked exactly the same. But a few additional features would exist:
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
....Bill Gates got a makeover and renamed himself (all together now):
KKHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAN!
I have shown your post to a considerable base (roughly 20 people) of whom I consider knowledgeable in computers. All these people also think I'm a moron for sticking to a mac. Yet in each case, each one of these people described you and your post as fanatical and unrealistic. Many also said that the very fact that you can't go two sentences without swearing and can't seem to pull together the language or intelligence of someone with a highschool diploma destroys all your credability. Also note that your credability goes out the window as soon as you question the ability of a person who uses a mac to do work. I'm also positive that if we were to thow your posts into a slashdot poll, most people would say the same. Aguments are one thing, I can handle being proved wrong (and I have the karma to prove it), being a jerk and an asshole are not excuseable which I assume is why you post AC. My guess is your account is so poorly moderated you post at -1 everytime.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
what about a solution like tightvnc (or one of its cousins) for remote stuff then? it does most (not all mind you) of what x does w/o all the crud that x brings w/ it, and it is very platform independent and w/ ssh you can make it very secure.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
what about a solution like tightvnc
VNC can be good for some purposes, but it is not a replacement for X. It is actually kind of like X just backwards. (With X it is the programs with windows to display that are the clients connecting to the server. With VNC it is the "screen" wanting to display an image that is the client connecting to the computer with an image.)
One of the drawbacks of VNC is the fact that you don't get access to the single windows of remote applications, your only choice is the entire screen including windowmanager and a set of windows. Another problem is the performance that in my experience is not nearly as good as X.
Xvnc and vncclients for X proves that the two can work together and can do so quite well. But they don't do the same thing.
Finally on the tightvnc webpage I don't see a server for Mac OS X. Is it even possible to implement a VNC server within the Mac OS X design? I don't know, so somebody please enlighten me on this. If the answer is no I simply take that as just another proof that the X design simply is better.
Now don't point me to the Java version, because that is only a client. You can make a VNC client for most graphical systems just like you can implement some kind of X server for most graphical systems. What is interesting is to implement a VNC server that will work together with all graphical programs for Mac OS X, or to have all graphical programs use the X protocol. This is the two options that will allow programs running on Mac OS X to be used remote.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
>Until you realize the percentage of Macs running
>is the same statistic as the percentage of P.C.'s
>in a landfill.
Until you present me with some solid facts backing that up, I'll just as soon believe you pulled that figure out of your ass rather than realizing anything.
Let's assume your correct. So, given Apple's claim that there are 20 million Mac currently in use worldwide. A little quick arithmatic shows us that comes out to 37% of all Macs ever produced running. For simplicity sake, for the PC side, we'll limit it to the 576 million produced since 1998. By your claim, only 37% of those are in a landfill, so that must mean 363 million are still running.
Oh dear, that's probably the answer you wanted to hear. Just for fun, lets plug in the figures that Jack Campbell would have us believe, i.e. that there are 32 million Macs currently in use. Now our figure rises to 59% of the total still being servicable. Ahhh, here we go. That comes out to the figure you're looking for - 236 million PCs in use.
Mind you, we're taking the word of someone who did a WHOLE 30 hours of research over a corporation that had no reason to understate its userbase by 12 million users. And we threw out all PCs manufactured before 1998. And we took your estimate of how many PCs are in landfills at face value, which is a little silly given the time frame we're using, and the fact that amortization of computer hardware happens over three years.
You know, I didn't realize just how much work you zealots did to make up statistics that suit you. I have a new found respect. Really.
Matt
Before he became a hermit, Zarathud was a young Priest, and
took great delight in making fools of his opponents in front of
his followers.
One day Zarathud took his students to a pleasant pasture and
there he confronted The Sacred Chao while She was contentedly grazing.
"Tell me, you dumb beast," demanded the Priest in his
commanding voice, "why don't you do something worthwhile? What is your
Purpose in Life, anyway?"
Munching the tasty grass, The Sacred Chao replied "MU". (The
Chinese ideogram for NO-THING.)
Upon hearing this, absolutely nobody was enlightened.
Primarily because nobody understood Chinese.
-- Camden Benares, "Zen Without Zen Masters"
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