Flirting With Mac OS X

An anonymous reader wrote to us with an article on Byte from Moshe Bar about flirting with using OS X. Taco and I are both strongly considering beginning to use OS X as a primary laptops - anyone else looking at doing this? And anyone from Apple that can get me a good price on super TiBooks? *grin*

Comments

Laptop is apple's strength

[Duds]

I'm certinally considering a Mac laptop. I don't really get on with the design desktopwise, but as a laptop something like the powerbooks look really nice.

Plus what I want in a notebook is low power consumption, good screen, easy access to the smaller number of things I need to DO with my laptop.

Plus of course new toy syndrome :)

I actually think Apple should be stressing this market a lot more than they are.

Re:Laptop is apple's strength

[mAIsE]

I am a UNIX guy, that has switched.

I have X11 from the same code base as linux, check out XonX.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/xonx

If you are familur with the debian tools, you should check out fink, I use it everyday. 1400+ packages and growing.

http://fink.sourceforge.net/index.php

The biggest difference between OSX and Linux and the real deal winner for me, No dual booting anymore I have it all in one OS. I can run commercial applications(M$ office, Lotus Notes etc..) and Fonts look really nice (better than Windows and X11R6) inside of aqua as well as having several beutiful fonts provided by Apple, this is something Microsoft has never really cared about.

I think it is the perfect combination and I am becoming on of those Mac freaks i used to not understand.

Did i mention no installation conflicts with hardware!!! I love Debian but this is the hardest part of installing Debian (how do you get that sound blaster working with OSS again......)

Just my $0.02 but I say go for it.

Re:Laptop is apple's strength

[bluethundr]

"The touch pad is by far the worst input device on the market today."

Totally subjective, dude. I hear this complaint a lot from people I know. But I have been using Apple trackpads since the mid-90s and to this particular carbon-based life form the trackpad feels so natural to use it feels like its part of my hand.

I'll just tell you what I tell all trackpad naysayers. If you hop on a skateboard, and fall off of it and break y'r arse what do you feel is to blame? The poorly designed piece of wood with wheels attached that slides around unpredictably when you try to stand on it? Or the fact that you haven't become familiar with how to stand on one and make it roll around?

Re:Laptop is apple's strength

[ealar dlanvuli]

I think it is the perfect combination and I am becoming on of those Mac freaks i used to not understand.

heh, I had the exact same experience. When I first got my iBook it was more for the features it provided than because I really wanted a apple computer (one has to understand, I only have one windows machine in my entire house, and thats for guests that can't figure out what a textured X on the titlebar means, so jumping from one non-windows operating system to another wasn't a risk at all).

After a month, I found it hard to use any of my other computers. All of a suddent I realized I took every opportunity to promote Mac's (this is coming from a sys admin who kept his linux passion in the closet), because it's just so much easier, and at the same time so much more powerfull if you want it to be

I finally found a computer I can really recomend for my great parents, not just say "well I'm sure it will work well enough for your needs". And the really funny part, it's the exact same computer I'd recomend for a hardcore computer nerd.

The only audience I don't think really should get a mac atm is PC gamers, but then the statment "I realized my windows machine was just a console" could be accurate for most people that actually have a need for windows. For them I suggest trying out a xbox. Everyone else should be considering Mac for thier next purchase, even if they decide against it, they need to seriously give it some thought before they get something else.

Re:Laptop is apple's strength

[Maserati]

My company's default font is FuturaBook. I use that at 14 point (19" Studio Display) as my Application, browser (Mozilla) and email (Entourage has very nice mail composition features). And it is absolutely gorgeous.

I had to use TinkerTool to set the Application font and set double scroll arrows at both ends (essential, I paid for DoubleScroll exactly 10 minutes after the demo version expired and suffered while the check cleared) Apple is continuing to include features in their window managers that aren't exposed by the system preferences GUI. But they have always been addressable by 3rd party apps. When OS 8.1 came out, Prestissimo was written to configure Appearance Mananger by Applescript, I still have it on my public share at work. In OS X you can use 'defaults' on the command line, edit plist files in text (check out PlistEditor on the DevTools CD), or use TinkerTool to expose hidden features of the OS. Kind of like unlocking secrets in a video game...

I'm a Mac guy and I have the Purple Book 3rd ed on my desk.

Re:Laptop is apple's strength

[Shanep]

Ok, it might feel really great touching that great, plastic surface, but I dont think that your "hand" will hold a rocket-launcher or a rail gin very well.

I have an old clamshell iBook, on which I write this. I realise your post touches on the poor accuracy and speed of pads within games, but I think you also unknowingly touch on something else...

When I'm finished with my typically long sessions with my iBook, my hand hurts and I don't feel like holding anything shortly after that.

I wonder how most people use trackpads? I'm right handed, I touch my pointing finger with my thumb as if holding a pen, the other fingers are folded in fist like while my pointing finger touches the pad with movement assistance from my thumb (which I find gives less jerky movement). If I ever need small accurate movements, I find rolling my finger around on one spot works very well.

Is this typical? I think my pain is from the fact that my hand is quite tense during usage in this position. I'd use my logitech optical wheel mouse, but I'm having too much fun using it with WindowMaker under OpenBSD. Which will hopefully soon also be on my iBook.

Re:Laptop is apple's strength

[Megs]

I wonder how most people use trackpads? I'm right handed, I touch my pointing finger with my thumb as if holding a pen, the other fingers are folded in fist like while my pointing finger touches the pad with movement assistance from my thumb (which I find gives less jerky movement). If I ever need small accurate movements, I find rolling my finger around on one spot works very well.

Ouch. My hand hurts just thinking about doing that, much less when I tried it.

I'm also right-handed, and I have an iceBook. I use my right index finger, with my palm resting on the laptop most of the time (especially when I'm trying to do something precise). My thumb hovers over the button. My other three fingers are curled up in the air above the laptop, naturally, with my pinky being farthest up, rather like an affected person drinking tea.

I'm personally in the "this is as natural as typing or breathing" category with it comes to my touchpad. YMMV.

Meghan

Re:Laptop is apple's strength

[Fillup]

There has been some some discussion about whether " Apple should be stressing this market a lot more than they are," among my group of friends. (I'm a longtime Mac user who had "left the fold" until OS X allowed me to be proud and happy again).

I kinda think they don't need to. They only have so many marketing dollars, and with discussions like this, who needs to pay for this marketing to the UNIX crowd? ;-)

I guess what I am saying is that people who dig UNIX are going to hear about it, check it out, find out more about it, etc., all on their own, especially now with all the buzz and momentum.

Re:Laptop is apple's strength

[kalidasa]

Fonts look really nice (better than Windows and X11R6) inside of aqua as well as having several beutiful fonts provided by Apple, this is something Microsoft has never really cared about.

Usually I'd be happy to join in on the Microsoft bashing, but this really isn't fair. Microsoft has been putting a lot of effort into adding high-quality internationalized fonts into Windows, as Apple is doing with OS X (I'm impressed with a lot of the work both companies have been doing). There are plenty of things you can bash MS for without bashing them for something they're actually doing a good job at.

The times...

[los furtive]

...they are a changing.

Re:The times...

[Snibor Eoj]

I believe the preferred term is "switching".

I did enjoy this part of the article:

[Anonymous Coward]

As an example, look at this very standard series of commands, used to install Perl 5.8 on my system:

[macosx:~] cd /usr/local/
[macosx:~] sudo mkdir src
[macosx:~] curl -O ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/CPAN/src/perl-5.8.0.tar.gz
[macosx:~] tar zxvf perl-5.8.0.tar.gz
[macosx:~] cd perl-5.8.0
[macosx:~] make distclean
[macosx:~] make
[macosx:~] make test
[macosx:~] sudo make install

You couldn't tell this was Mac OS X if I hadn't told you, right?

Hell no! I mean, just because the name of the damn OS is in the prompt; I would NEVER tell it was Mac OS X!

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[lburdet]

prompts can be changed...
back in the days where a funny prompt on the professor's overhead was funny, his was somehow changed to "{student X}deserves an A+$" on his telnet(i think) acct.
good thing the prof laughed :-)

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[Khopesh]

[macosx:~] cd /usr/local/
[macosx:~] sudo mkdir src

so why is the prompt not [macosx:/usr/local/] now?

and iirc you can change the osx prompt the same way you change any other posix shell prompt: change $PS1.
in bash (osx uses bash, right?):
export PS1='\[\033[0;32m\][\[\033[0;36m\]\u@\h \[\033[33m\]\w\[\033[0;32m\]]\$\[\033[0;37m\] '
(one line) for colors or
export PS1='[\u@\h \w]\$ '
(RedHat-style prompts)

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[sh4de]

OS X uses tcsh by default, but bash is available as of version 10.2. Prior to that, fans of bash just downloaded the source and compiled it.

Furthermore, 10.2 stripped the default tcsh shell to its factory set-up. All the nifty aliases that were in 10.1 are now available in /usr/share/tcsh/examples.

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[demaria]

"so why is the prompt not [macosx:/usr/local/] now?"

It works on mine, although I'm using tcsh. What I think happened is the author just retyped the commands into his story instead of doing a direct cut-and-paste.

[coruscant:~] demaria% cd /usr
[coruscant:/usr] demaria%

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[jaavaaguru]

so why is the prompt not [macosx:/usr/local/] now?

So if you cd'd to this directory...
/export/home/sandyd/cvs/mozilla/xpcom/tools/regist ry/macbuild/CVS
...you'd like that to appear in your prompt?

Yeah, some of us don't like the wd to appear in our prompt, thank you :-)

I'll just be minimalist and be happy with my hostname% prompt.

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[Psiren]

Yeah, some of us don't like the wd to appear in our prompt, thank you :-)

Saves checking the wd you're in before issuing some destructive command. It's always there in front of you. Another thing I do is make my root prompts bold red. This way they stand out like hell from the rest of the text, just to let me know I have my root hat on. =)

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[dschuetz]

So if you cd'd to this directory... /export/home/sandyd/cvs/mozilla/xpcom/tools/regist ry/macbuild/CVS ...you'd like that to appear in your prompt?

I had my prompt set to a wacky little awk script that parsed out the last three components of a path, so I'd have something like:

[root@anywhere ...registry/macbuild/CVS] #

as my prompt. Worked pretty well. Damned if I know where the code is anymore, though, I've never customized my Linux environments as much as I did the NeXT I used 5-10 years ago.

Also, in NS 3.3+, a special escape code could change the titlebar of the Terminal.app window. So I eventually dropped the path in the prompt and stuck it up in the titlebar instead. Was very nice.

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[jaavaaguru]

I had my prompt set to a wacky little awk script that parsed out the last three components of a path, so I'd have something like:
[root@anywhere ...registry/macbuild/CVS] #

I like that very much. I'll be on the lookout for some code to do the same thing... or maybe just learn awk or sed ;-)

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[kin_korn_karn]

I use a two-line prompt. wd on first line, prompt on second line.

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[chegosaurus]

> I WANT OSX on the intel platform !!!

Yeah, and I want Episode III to be great. But it's not going to happen is it?

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[Noer]

You still can; I have the following in my .cshrc:
sched +0:00 alias postcmd 'echo -n "^[]0;\!#^G"'

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[Hallow]

Multiline prompts are the way to go, eg:
"\n[\w]\n\u@\h> "

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[RevAaron]

And I want the Newton OS on any platform that isn't dead! But guess what! Neither of us will get what we want!

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[Aqua OS X]

"Mac OS X", that's just what this guy picked as a user name.

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[zaphod110676]

In College I was a teaching assistant and worked in a computer lab. When students would leave the lab without logging out we would go in and change their prompt to say something like, "If I forget to log out of my Unix account bad things could happen to it -- The Lab Staff"

It was always amusing to see people who didn't know how to change it back and too embarrassed to ask with the altered prompt months later. =)

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[DavidRavenMoon]

That's not really what the prompt looks like, he must have edited it.

It really shows part of your netword address, like this:

Last login: Thu Sep 26 09:32:09 on console
Welcome to Darwin!
[pcp02174408pcs:~] david%

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[Knife_Edge]

Actually, IIRC, 10.2 uses bash as the default shell now. Even if I am wrong, it is now trivial to enable it since it is included in /bin as of 10.2

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[benedict]

You folks are confused. /bin/sh is bash as
of 10.2 (previously it was zsh). The shell
that's assigned to users by default is tcsh.

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[jmegq]

Of course, tcsh will do that for you automatically (as will zsh). In tcsh it's %cn , where n is the number of components of the path.

% set prompt="[%n@%m %c3] %% "
[me@here ~/devel/tcsh] %

I cringe when I see awk/shell/perl scripts fired off for each and every prompt... I mean, yes, computers are fast, but... yeech. ;)

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[dschuetz]

Cool, I may have to change my default shell to tcsh, then.

I cringe when I see awk/shell/perl scripts fired off for each and every prompt... I mean, yes, computers are fast, but... yeech. ;)

I never noticed much of a slowdown when I was doing this. And that was on NeXT Turbo hardware (33 MHz 68040 chip). So today's systems oughta handle it with no problem.

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[Macka]

> I WANT OSX on the intel platform !!!

And I want that as much as a hole in the head. What makes the Apple experience so good, is the tight integration between software and hardware you simply don't get on any other platform.

Save up your cash and get one .. you won't regret it!!!

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[MoneyT]

I thought there was an option in the terminal preferences under OSX to have the wd displayed in the titlebar.

Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:

[dbrutus]

FWIW, the article writer didn't seem to know that fink existed at the time of writing (he states there is no apt-get which fink uses).

Mac Laptops

[Naikrovek]

I thought about this for a while, but the keyboards that come on Mac laptops leave A LOT to be desired. shallow keys, half-height arrow keys, etc.

And don't get me started on Trackpads v. Trackpoints. If Apple had Trackpoints (the little nipple between G, B, and H on your keyboard) I think i could overlook the keyboard.

And one button mice... We all know that is not enough.

Sure, I can get an external keyboard & mouse, and I would if i were *given* a powerbook, but to me, that's just like having a Mac desktop, because it would never leave my desk. But, if were to *buy* a Mac, it would have to be a desktop, where I can replace the peripherals with something I like.

The point: they should try to make a few more people happy. I would have switched long ago if they had a full size laptop keyboard (every key full size) and a three button trackpoint pointer. I want a Mac in a Thinkpad case.

my two cents on the "Switch" campaign.

Re:Mac Laptops

[MoNickels]

The point: they should try to make a few more people happy. I would have switched long ago if they had a full size laptop keyboard (every key full size) and a three button trackpoint pointer.

You mean they should make *you* happy.

It's a different computer: use it differently. As a long time trackpad user, you'd have to squeeze my testicles in a vise to get me to use a laptop with the orange knob right in the middle of the keyboard. I've tried it, repeatedly, and it sucks. It's an infuriatingly useless device. I onced worked in an office where Thinkpads with such idiotic cursor-manipulating devices were standard. Everyone there was a Windows user, not converted Mac users, and a majority of users had mice. They couldn't stand the stupid thing.

Same goes for the two- and three-button trackpoint pointers. Again, I've used them, and repeatedly. It almost requires two hands to use! In fact, that's how most people do it: with two hands. What a logistical and tactical waste of effort. But a one-button trackpad, it's a one-handed device. And you can keep your other hand on the keyboard to control-click, which is natural since that hand is often using other modifier keys, as well.

Part of the reason Windows and Unix users have problems with the Mac's one button (and whine incessantly about it, to such a degree that you want to put *their* testicles in a vise), is because they tend to be unused to the click-and-hold action. On a modern Mac, this will get you the exact same action as the right-click menu. What in God's name you need a third button for, besides having another part to break, beats the hell out of me.

Re:Mac Laptops

[override11]

Dont like nipples...

Cmon man, everybody likes nipples...
:-)

Re:Mac Laptops

[Surak]

What in God's name you need a third button for, besides having another part to break, beats the hell out of me.


In a word: Emacs. Emacs on X makes extensive use of the middle mouse button. Also, X-style copy and paste. Especially in an Xterm.

Re:Mac Laptops

[Alan Partridge]

well, it shouldn't be. If you're expecting a beautiful keyboard on a laptop that's about half an inch thick then you're a loon, if you're upset that Apple's don't have multiple mouse buttons and are too dense to push the Option, Control and Command keys in their stead (hang on a minute, that means you've got - effectively - FOUR mouse click types!) then you're just being deliberately perverse. The modifier key system is GOOD, and gives NOTHING away to the multiple mouse button approach IMHO.

Re:Mac Laptops

[Negatyfus]

I've also grown used to the mouse wheel...

Re:Mac Laptops

[jeremyp]

Why use X (as in windows) with OS X (as in "ten")? Newsflash: it already has a superior graphical environment (IMHO). Having said that, I do run XDarwin on my Mac because my favourite text editor is X only. I get around the three button problem in two ways:

1 - use an external mouse with enough buttons.

2 - set up XDarwin to emulate the middle button.

Re:Mac Laptops

[mccalli]

As a long time trackpad user, you'd have to squeeze my testicles in a vise to get me to use a laptop with the orange knob right in the middle of the keyboard. I've tried it, repeatedly, and it sucks. It's an infuriatingly useless device.

Whereas I hate trackpads and never use the damned things if possible.

I like Dell's approach on the Inspiron I have - put both on the machine, let the user decide.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Mac Laptops

[Surak]

is X only. I get around the three button problem in two ways:

1 - use an external mouse with enough buttons.

2 - set up XDarwin to emulate the middle button.


So then you admit that you need that middle mouse button, emulated or not? :-P

The point wasn't whether OS X's gui was superior to X's. (I agree, OS X's gui is nice, although I'll say that KDE with Mosfet's Liquid Widgets is pretty darned cool also) The question asked was WTF needs a middle mouse button. The answer is obvious: if you use X, you need a middle mouse button. If you don't, you don't. :)

Re:Mac Laptops

[blixel]

You mean they should make *you* happy.

Why not have multiple options available and let the user decide which one they want? It's called choice. Everyone wins.

Re:Mac Laptops

[digitect]

if you're upset that Apple's don't have multiple mouse buttons and are too dense to push the Option, Control and Command keys in their stead (hang on a minute, that means you've got - effectively - FOUR mouse click types!) then you're just being deliberately perverse. The modifier key system is GOOD, and gives NOTHING away to the multiple mouse button approach IMHO.

Serious CAD software requires multiple mouse buttons. In AutoCAD 2000 and later, the right mouse hand can control selection, zoom, pan, context menus, and command enter if you are fortunate enough to have three buttons and a scroll wheel. Meanwhile, the left hand is very busy hopping all over the keyboard entering the hundreds of possible commands. With some experience, the CAD user can almost draw without looking down at the keyboard. Except...

We used to use Logitech mice at our firm, but the mouse software was buggy with AutoCAD, requiring the user to hold down the Ctrl key with the left hand while using the right hand mouse scroll button just to zoom around the drawing. This defeated the whole purpose of having zoom on the scroll button: single hand zoom and pan control! My left hand effectively became multi-modal again which requires considerable more thinking (read: slower) effort during production.

A single button mouse might make sense for dinky little point and click word processing but all serious CAD and graphics software (and probably other serious industry-based software) provide much more power at the mouse hand. Apple continues to hold on to this paradigm because it likes both the design implications and the tradition. But it is one of the major reasons Micros~1 ate it for lunch ten years ago: lack of options.

Re:Mac Laptops

[rseuhs]

Part of the reason Windows and Unix users have problems with the Mac's one button (and whine incessantly about it, to such a degree that you want to put *their* testicles in a vise), is because they tend to be unused to the click-and-hold action. On a modern Mac, this will get you the exact same action as the right-click menu. What in God's name you need a third button for, besides having another part to break, beats the hell out of me.

You may not believe it, but I feel bored in the second I have to wait for that menu to pop up.

And I need the 3rd button to put windows in the background, jump on scrollbars, open links in new tabs and paste selections of course.

Did I mention that I'd like a mouse-wheel, too?

Macs are expensive, but the price is still acceptable compared feature-wise to top PC-brands. But on Macs you are forced to buy a lot of crap which you don't need and/or will have to replace (Firewire, 1GBit LAN, 1-button mouse) which makes them really expensive compared to a PC that contains only what you are going to use.

Re:Mac Laptops

[rseuhs]

If it were superior it would support Unix-style copy-paste (which is much faster than MacOS-style).

Re:Mac Laptops

[mjpaci]

If you're spending that much money on AutoCad, you might as well spend ~$80 on a REALLY NICE multibutton mouse, no?

Re:Mac Laptops

[SlamMan]

Well, since I just used the firewire port and the gigabit port yesterday at work, I wouldn't quite consider them useless.

Re:Mac Laptops

[jedrek]

It's not only CAD. I use the left-hand-on-keyboard right-hand-on-mouse position in almost all the soft I use: Maya, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash. The only time I take my hands off is to type in something. Each of these programs has almost every function accessible from the keyboard - usually via a hotkey, sometimes I have to alt-letter to get a menu option, but I still get it done.

Two things made me realize how dependent I was on my keystroke/mouse configuration. (1) I was showing two friends how to do some stuff in Photoshop and they kept saying 'how'd you do that', and I kept explaning that I hit a key-combo. (2) The beta of Flash 6 came out, but it had no keyboard shortcuts. It was totaly unusable to me. Still haven't gotten into FlashMX because of it...

Re:Mac Laptops

[rseuhs]

OK, my statement was an exaggeration. However it is true that most people don't need Firewire and certainly don't need 1GBit LAN.

Of course Apple can and should offer machines with Firewire and Gigabit LAN, but they should also offer machines without it! (But with PCI slots)

Re:Mac Laptops

[jaavaaguru]

Me too, but my Sun Blade doesn't seem to like my USB Intellimouse, despite it's default mouse and keyboard being USB.

Re:Mac Laptops

[CProgrammer98]

The modifier key system is GOOD, and gives NOTHING away to the multiple mouse button approach IMHO
Apart from the fact that a right click on the mac becomes a two handed operation instead of one handed. That's important to a lot of people.

Re:Mac Laptops

[MaxVlast]

You're clearly unfamiliar with Steve Jobs and Apple. =)

Seriously, though, they went through that period (want a Performa 6115? Or a 6116? One has a PDS adapter, one has more RAM.) There were a ton of Macs in the retail channel, everything was getting clogged up, and the user had no idea which machine to buy. The company almost went out of business as a result.

Re:Mac Laptops

[Surak]

I find unix style copy-paste often frustrating. It works inconsistantly and about 50% of the time I want to cut/copy, select something and and paste over it. That's awkward with the middle button paste.

With the applications I use it for (Emacs, Xterms, Mozilla, and KDE applications mostly), it works consistently 100% of the time.

And the parent poster is right: it's faster, it's more efficient and it's more convenient.

Re:Mac Laptops

[CoolVibe]

The right click becomes a slightly lengtier left click and hold operation, which can be done one handed.

Alternatively, you don't even NEED a mouse to operate OS X, since everything can be accessed through key combinations.

Re:Mac Laptops

[b1t r0t]

It is significantly cheaper to put ports like that on the motherboard than to make people buy PCI cards, not to mention the cost of trying to support whatever crap card the user digs up at his local CompuBuy store. I'll bet Firewire adds less than $5 to the cost of goods, and gigabit Ethernet (vs 10/100) adds less than $10 to cost of goods. And don't forget the economies of scale of purchasing and manufacturing so many units.

Have you bitched at Microsoft for putting a 10/100 Ethernet port on the X-Box when most people will probably never use it?

And FWIW, on the one Mac I have with built-in gigabit Ethernet, I am using it. I can saturate a switched 100MBit connection with it, though I've never tested to see how much more it can push.

Re:Mac Laptops

[CProgrammer98]

lol, no not necessarily.

some examples off the top of my head...

1) games that use right click and can be entirely operated by the mouse

2) websurfing - with my 5 button mouse, I never have to touch the keyboard when surfing unless I want to write a message, such as now) and right click is useful for lots of things when surfing (e.g save image as, browser back for lame sites that open in menuless windows, add to bookmark etc) It's just so useful to have the right click without having to use the other hand - which may be holding a soda, or the phone, or whatever...

Re:Mac Laptops

[rseuhs]

It is significantly cheaper to put ports like that on the motherboard than to make people buy PCI cards, not to mention the cost of trying to support whatever crap card the user digs up at his local CompuBuy store. I'll bet Firewire adds less than $5 to the cost of goods, and gigabit Ethernet (vs 10/100) adds less than $10 to cost of goods. And don't forget the economies of scale of purchasing and manufacturing so many units.

Well, maybe. But then I don't see Apple passing the savings to the user.

Hell, Apple could be cheaper than most PCs. A PPC is (contrary to the common belief) much cheaper than any x86 CPU. But they prefer to be a high-margin low-marketshare business, it seems.

Have you bitched at Microsoft for putting a 10/100 Ethernet port on the X-Box when most people will probably never use it?

Actually, yes I have. I have even called it "the Mac of consoles" because of the unnecessary harddrive (an bundled memorycard would have accomplished the same at a much lower cost). XBox is a comatose patient that needs 1 billion per year just to stay alive. And it will die anyway when PS3 is released... But that's offtopic, I think.

Re:Mac Laptops

[rseuhs]

Most home-users don't even have a LAN and use their LAN-connector for their cable-modem which doesn't even come near 10MBit.

Most businesses have just migrated to 100MBit.

I think it's very safe to say that most current Macs won't need 1GBit LAN even if you assume a livespan of 6 years.

Re:Mac Laptops

[Frymaster]

So then you admit that you need that middle mouse button, emulated or not?

only because the author created that need by writing crappy software. in fact all the extra buttons on mice (ie more than one) are there because of crappy software. witness:

in the old (and current) mac os there is only one menu bar visible at a time. whichever app has focus, has its menu across the top of the screen. this is how apple presented the gui to the world back in '84.

later, some guys from harvard decided it would be much better to attach menus to the title bars of windows. due to this "improvement" it was possible to have dozens of menus visible on screen simultaneously. computer using moms around the world were confused - they select the text, go to get "copy" from the menu and... which menu?

the solution was the advent of the "contextual menu" (the right click menu) and the required hardware to support it. lesson from history: poor software design created hardware to compensate.

if you want 3 or 5 buttons (hell, a second keyboard on wheels) that's yr choice... but remember that those are extra buttons for added features. they should not be required for basic operation. any software that demands extra buttons suffers from feature creep.

Re:Mac Laptops

[Hallow]

unix-style cut and paste would be a nice option. I've been forced into a "standardized" ssh client for win32 at work... man I miss putty.

The MacOSX gui may be pretty, and fairly functional, however it's missing 1 *great* thing X11 has in it's favor - network transparency. It comes builtin, native, with X11. You have to use VNC or a commercial remote desktop soultion to come anywhere close (and those only do the whole desktop, not just individual applications!)

Re:Mac Laptops

[MaxVlast]

Yep, they'd just go out of business and it wouldn't be a problem! Remember the clone fiasco.

Re:Mac Laptops

[rseuhs]

I'm not saying that we will never have Gigabit LANs. I just say it's stupid and unnecessary to put it in *ALL* computers *RIGHT NOW*. (No, I will not call a device without PCI slots and integrated monitor a real computer)

Sure Apple can offer it. No argument.

But they shouldn't force it onto their customers.

The step from 10MBit to 100MBit was fast, but the step from 100 to 1GBit will take longer because many harddisks can't saturate this bandwidth. As long as harddisks don't improve drastically in speed or RAID becomes standard, I don't see GBit as neccessity.

Re:Mac Laptops

[DavidRavenMoon]

On PCs, you do also have Alt, Control, and Shift, and even Meta and Hyper if you use some *nix and map the Windows and Menu keys. Now, combine those with the 6 buttons on my mouse (Left, Right, Middle, Scroll Up/Down, Thumb), that's up to, let's see, ...

Macs also have Control, Option (alt), Shift, and the Command key (which is like the Control key on a PC).

You can use any of those as modifiers while mousing. For example, Option-drag copies a file, while Cmd-Option-drag makes an alias (short cut). You can use any USB multibutton pointing device you like.

I use an MS Itellimouse Optical mouse, and USB Overdrive mouse software (which is what the MS Itellipoint is based on). The software allows me to program button functions that can change depending on what application I'm using, so the mouse wheel is a middle button in Maya, and opens a link in a new tab in Mozilla, for instance.

Even without the software, OS X supports right clicks and the scroll wheel.

Also on the desktop Macs you have three extra F keys, which come in handy in programs like Quark, but are missing in the Windows version.

Re:Mac Laptops

[spitzak]

WIthout making any claims about what is better or worse, your history is somewhat backwards.

"Contextual menus" were certainly first, the Xerox Parc and the Lisp Machine used these. Often these were the *only* thing you could do with the mouse. They also had the incredible stupid UI design that once you popped-up a menu you had to choose some item, leading the user to have to pick the least-destructive action when they accidentally popped it up.

Less certainly, but I think per-window menus were next. Take a look at older XViews or early X interfaces. At that time only *some* programs had menus, so it made perfect sense to put them on the windows, rather than reserve a piece of expensive screen space for a menu that was not always used. Also point-to-type was commonly used and it is impossible to use that with a shared menubar.

I never saw shared menu area until the Lisa appeared. The original Mac, though later than the Lisa, did not count because it was single-tasking (the whole screen switched when you changed apps, so it's hard to claim the menu bar is special). The "switcher" versions of Mac where you could still see other windows is probably the first version seen by many people.

Re:Mac Laptops

[StarFace]

Pandering the absolute lowest common denominator has never been the goal with *NIX applications in the past, and there has been no reason to pander, either. Since having more than one button only adds power to the user's ability to interface with the software, and the targeted users of the software were all capable of logically discerning which widgets correspond to what -- there is absolutely no reason that they should write software that only uses one button.

The Macintosh platform is an entirely different beast, with an entirely different target group. Even the professionals that use the Mac are, in my six years of experience in the graphics field, less technically inclined on average (there are always exceptions, of course.) They are artists, not computer science gurus, hence the general fondness for the Mac platform amongst them.

Taking an application that was intended to be run on an operating system that is designed for advanced users, and running it on an operating system that is designed for less advanced users -- and calling said software crap because it relies upon conventions that advanced users are used to, is just silly.

Re:Mac Laptops

[StarFace]

True, but it isn't exactly an efficient method of navigation yet. They should have just bitten the bullet, copied MS, and used Alt-Letter hot points to jump around forms and menus. It's a two key solution to what often times amounts to many subsequent presses of tab keys and modifier keys (often with inconsistent results) in X. I think keyboard access on X, at the moment, is mostly intended for handicapped accessibility.

Re:Mac Laptops

[Elwood P Dowd]

Huh. So you do CAD work on a laptop trackpad with two buttons? I thought those things were unusable for web browsing, let alone CAD design.

You do realize that no laptop manufacturers include a five button mouse as a standard option, right? We were talking about laptops, right?

Mice, on Apple machines, like mice on all machines, are typically an option. When you buy a dell, you can get it with a crappy mouse, or with a good mouse. When you order an Apple, you also have to choose a mouse. It's on a different page of the order form, which may be confusing. It might *seem* like Apple is only selling single button mice.

But you're a computer expert. Apple was concerned with making this less confusing for computer novices. Their mouse input concept is perfect. Admit it.

Re:Mac Laptops

[ealar dlanvuli]

I will agree this is valid, but you have to understand some history.

When GUI apples were first released, your keyboard was a very major investment, and they wanted you to buy a mouse also. It was decided that keyboard modifiers of a single mouse button were more than enough, and at this point there was no pressure what so ever to use more than one. Things like CAD programs would have been completly keyboard operated most likley, and your mouse was mailny to navigate the interface.

Since then the need for at least 3 buttons has been conditioned onto us, because other OS's tend to avoid keyboard+mouse combos whenever possible (for ergonomic reaons I'd assume), but it's not a "need" for most users when they can use intelligent modifier keys.

Apple is very resistant to major changes to thier UI, this is one of the things that makes them good as I understand it. On this issue it hasn't been impressed upon them that most users do things that require a 17 button mouse with 5 scroll wheels and 75 lasers tracking movment in 3d space. In fact most users are quite fine with a single mouse button, the only time this really effects anyone is while on a laptop though, as everyone who cares would have a 165 button mouse plugged in to a desktop anyway.

Apple dosen't see a reason to change the layout of thier laptop, as for most NORMAL tasks, a single button is easily as efficent as a 3 button trackpad, and in many ways is actually better.

Re:Mac Laptops

[rseuhs]

Xbox is a superior console, and the only reason for playstation to do better is because of marketing/brand recognition, momentum.

XBox is only a (slightly) superior console because it has 2 years of technology advantage. XBox is the clearly inferior platform compared to PS2.

Face it: x86 is not suited for a console. Of course you CAN do it, but as some engineer once said: "We can make this building fly, but you won't like the bill". Putting a x86 into a console is stupid. All that backwards-compatibility is not needed and it will cost way too much to produce.

When PS3 is released, MSFT has 3 choices:

• Release a more expensive and less performant XBox2 at the same time plus spend 1 billion/year just to keep it alive.
• Wait 2 years until x86-tech is good and cheap enough and then release a more performant - but still more expensive XBox2. (Just like PS2 vs. XBox1) They'll also need about 1 billion/year just to keep it alive.
• Let XBox die and pretend it never happened.

If you ask me, I'd say choice 3 is the most probable thing Microsoft will do.

Re:Mac Laptops

[Frymaster]

you'll note that i said that " this is how apple presented the gui to the world back in '84." i realize that the parc effort was significantly different... i also realize that it didn't make very far out of the lab.

i'm pretty sure the lisa was out and about before menu-capable x. the single-tasking argument doesn't detract from the shared menu. yes, it was the result of architectural challenges in the os itself, but the single menu is still valid. it led to a menu system that worked. no one saw the need to drastically change that at apple. a good thing!

Re:Mac Laptops

[rseuhs]

Funny, you were shunning another computer because you were too worked up to spend even less on a modem.

Re:Mac Laptops

[Maserati]

That's in the Keyboard Preferences as of 10.2. User configurable activation of different methods for accessing the menus and other things from the keyboard. Go take a look.

Re:Mac Laptops

[gig]

> As long as harddisks don't improve drastically in
> speed or RAID becomes standard, I don't see GBit as
> neccessity.

RAID is standard on the Mac. You open Disk Utility and set it up with a few GUI switches.

I routinely move huge amounts of data between my PowerBook and PowerMac. They both came with gigabit Ethernet standard, and theh ports also do their own sensing so you don't need a crossover cable. Apple was ahead of the curve going to 10/100 just like they are ahead of the curve going to 10/100/1000 because their customers work with lots of data for desktop users. DV movie clips, huge print jobs, multitrack audio. Macs keep their value and get used for many years longer than you would expect, and it's stuff like this that does that. Gigabit Ethernet has been standard on pro Macs for 18 months or so and those machines are going to be great servers later on, with their FireWire and 802.11 antennaes and Gigabit Ethernet and lots of empty PCI slots.

My PowerBook usually has two FireWire drives hooked up to it while I'm working, and my PowerMac has 4-6 drives hooked up at all times, so the big pipe between the machines means no waiting for data no matter where it is.

Re:Mac Laptops

[SlamMan]

For the record, its a software based RAID, not hardware. Anyway,I completly agree on the use of firewire on thhe Macs. Itsa godsend. All you points, plus one I find can save me hours: target disk mode. Being able to boot one of your machines jsut like its a hard drive and get an absolutly sick transfer speed is great. Even wroks with imacs without GBit.

Re:Mac Laptops

[SlamMan]

I think the biggest hinderance in getting Gbit to work right now has nothing to do with the machines, its the switch sofware. Have you priced GBit switches??
Also, for the record, thier low end machines only have 10/100. I think.

Re:Mac Laptops

[StarFace]

Yes, yes. That is what I was referring to. It enables you to access different areas of the interface with a key combination. The problem doesn't really lie there, it lies in the navigation of the specific areas. For instance, menu navigation requires first the access combination, then many multiple arrow key presses to get to what you need. It is far, far faster to just access the menu with the mouse unless you are going for upper right hand corner, relatively top menu items. With Windows (as well as GTK+ and QT for the most part, as well) you can access any menu with a hot key, and then once you are in the menu you can press a single hot key to access each of the items within that menu drop down. This, at the most requires three key presses, and that is including the Alt button modifier.

The Apple method also has another flaw in that it uses the arrow keys, which are situated on the right side of the keyboard. This either means sweeping your left hand all the way across the keyboard after hitting the menu access key -- or removing your right hand from the mouse. Already at that point, a speedy user could have selected the menu action with the mouse, and we haven't even started arrow key navigation.

All of this might sound a bit picky, as if I'm too lazy to take an extra second, but if you work on time sensative projects all day long, every little second helps, and split second menu access is vital.

The second issue is dock access. When comparing it to the Windows methods, one has to consider that the dock is more powerful than the task bar, so you cannot strictly compare it to Alt + Tab application switching, since you can also launch applications/documents from the dock. So Apple gets a point there, but once again, it opts for a vastly more clumsy method, relying upon a left hand access method and then a right hand arrow key navigation with arrows to select applications. Since you switch applications more often the launch them (at least I do) Apple loses two points for making this method too clumsy. It is still easier to switch applications with the mouse.

So, there is the "Select Window or Next Behind It" option. This behaves in a strange manner that doesn't really accomplish good task switching, so I never use it. Half of the time it seems to pick random windows. I'm sure there is a system, but I'd rather have something come up that shows me what it wants to select *before* it selects, not as it is selecting.

Re:Mac Laptops

[MoneyT]

On a laptop, a single button using modifier keys is a god send compared to multibutton. It's quick and responsive, and you don't have to worry about misclicking (some laptops just have the 2 buttons too close and too similar to tell without checking first). Not only that, but since you're on a laptop, your hands are always right by the keyboard, hitting the modifiers becomes second nature.

Re:Mac Laptops

[MoneyT]

Option-click == save target as

Re:Mac Laptops

[MoneyT]

1) Unplug your current 3 button mouse from your PC, or take one of the extras you probably have lying arround.

2) Plug it into the mac.

3) Go on with your life.

Re:Mac Laptops

[MoneyT]

Except since all the vendors would be selling at razor thin profit margins, no one would take the risk of developing something new. As a good example, look at PCI and USB in the PC world. PCI has been arround for a long long time, but up until a few years ago, almost every PC MB that you bought had an ISA slot or two, no one was willing to kill the old system in favor of a new system.

The same thing happened with USB. Intel developed it and sat on it. A few computers had one here and there, but no one included it default, and it certainly wasn't used (still isn't used) as a primary port for keyboards and mice.

Having the high profit margins that they do, and being the only manufacturer of macs, Apple has the power to push products like USB, Firewire and PCI (though they didn't push PCI) into the market. Sometimes they do things way ahead of their time (LCD displays on the 20th aniversary mac, the cube, Newton) but a lot of good products come out of their risk taking.

Re:Mac Laptops

[overunderunderdone]

My left hand effectively became multi-modal again which requires considerable more thinking (read: slower) effort during production.

It only required more thinking because you weren't used to it. I've always been a mac guy so I have the same problem when I'm using a two-button or three-button mouse. I'm just not used to it so it requires thinking (read: slower). It took a while to get used to using a second button, I like it more for the scrollwhell than the second button which I only find adds much in limited situations (see below for what I mean)

A single button mouse might make sense for dinky little point and click word processing but all serious CAD and graphics software (and probably other serious industry-based software) provide much more power at the mouse hand.

My personal experience with a two-button mouse (that came with my wacom tablet) is the exact opposite. I find the two button mouse with a scroll wheel useful for the simple point & click stuff where you only need one modifier (the right click) and the scroll wheel is really useful. BUT when using a more complex app I find the measly addition of another button insufficient compared to a single mouse button plus the four modifier keys (and in some programs the spacebar). A total of 5 (or 6) "mouse" buttons that are used in combination to effect a potentially much larger number of varying kinds of mouse clicks. For instance in Photoshop using a brush here is the "lack of options" I suffer with:

1. I click to paint
   
2. control-click for contextual menus
   
3. shift+control click to bring up a DIFFERENT contextual menu
   (Aside from the scroll wheel my two-button mouse is out of tricks. Clicking with both buttons could add another one but Photoshop doesn't appear to use this potential)
   
4. control+option click to bring up YET ANOTHER contextual menu
   
5. option-click to sample a color
   
6. shift+option to bring up the multiple sample tool
   
7. command-click to move a layer
   
8. option+command-click to duplicate & move a layer
   
9. shift-click to constrain myself to 90% angles, or point-to-point straight lines
   
10. spacebar-click & drag to freely move my view of the image (more useful than the scroll whell which only moves up & down)
    
11. Command+spacebar click to zoom in
    Option+spacebar click to zoom out
    
12. control+spacebar for YET ONE MORE contextual menu.

I THINK that's about it. All this without having six buttons on my wacom's stylus ;) There are a few of these I only rarely use, but a surprisingly large number of these different "mouse" clicks are firmly in my "muscle memory". Without sitting at the keyboard I couldn't tell you which keys I hit to modify the mouse click in a particular way. I just do it without thinking it's not slow at all and if I suffer from a lack of options... well there were a few modifier-key combinations as yet unused.

Re:Mac Laptops

[dbrutus]

Both my and my wife's parents use computers. All four are talented, retired white collar professionals. Mine have a mac and limp around getting things done, my wife's have a pc and limp around getting things done. These are both very common use cases for PCs. My wife's parents continually make the mistake of clicking the wrong mouse button and after the 10th time of telling them which one to use, I just gave up and when I hear "it didn't work" I just say try the other mouse button.

Creating an experience where the system is set up for the novice out of the box is a good move. If you like your multi-button mouse, plug any USB mouse into your mac. It'll work just fine.

I've been using a Mac since 1987. My current mouse is a Kensington Mouse-in-a-box which has four buttons and a clickable scroll wheel (essentially a fifth button). They all work just fine on my Mac and if you're running CAD, I'd suggest getting something similar.

Let's be honest, CAD users generally aren't happy with those $5 mice that ship with most PCs anyway so what's the big deal? Put the 1 button wonders up on e-bay and move on.

Re:Mac Laptops

[jaavaaguru]

I thought it "just worked" in Mozilla - at least it just works on any Mozilla I've seen recently on Windows or Linux. Maybe I'm missing something.

Re:Mac Laptops

[Surak]

Virtually all X-based web browsers support middle-clicking in the window to bring up the URL on the clipboard.

Go for it.

[matthew.thompson]

10 months ago I used Linux and Windows at home exclusively but wanted a laptop for taking stuff to work and writing on the train.

None of the Windows laptops cut it with battery life or displays so I looked at the iBook. I plumped for the 600Mhz DVD Rom drive beast. It's since been with me to Singapore - great for watching DVDs, work most days, bed for writing, downstairs infront of the TV for emailing, the kitchen for recipes. (I got the airport card as well - nothing to break off so I don't feel scared using wireless networking while actually moving!)

I use nothing but OS X on the beast (Up the RAM to at least 384Mb) and it's great. Proper terminal window to connect to my personal servers, MS RDP client for configuring Works' Windows 2000 boxes. Internal modem for connecting to other networks, Bluetooth for connecting whilst on the train. Best of all IT JUST WORKS.

I've definately reached the point where I no longer want to have all my machines as play toys - the iBook is a workhorse and just keeps on slogging. It'd without a doubt the best PC I've bought so far.

My Name's Matthew Thompson and I'm a system administrator and freelance journalist.

Re:Go for it.

[jbolden]

Its really pretty easy to understand why the /. crowd would like OSX. If you need business apps and Unix apps what are your alternatives:

dual boot -- a pain in the neck and you end up spending almost all your time in either Linux or Windows

Windows + Cygwin -- too weak on the Unix side, things rarely compile correctly

Linux + Wine -- very weak on the windows side too many things don't run correctly

The Unix side of OSX is getting very close to being as good as FreeBSD; and the Business side is very close to being as good as Windows XP (better in terms of interface worse in terms of inexpensive app availablility). Then you toss in Classic and you pick up a few of the Mac 9 apps.

What is so hard to understand why this combo would be appealing to the /. crowd?

Re:Go for it.

[jeremyp]

Yep, it needs a lot of RAM. My Ti powerbook came with 256Mb RAM and OS X ate all of it. I upgraded to 512Mb and it's been great since then. With the price of memory, I don't think it's a big deal.

Re:Go for it.

[Large Green Mallard]

Yes, you do need 384MB of RAM. Yes, it's a lot of RAM. But it runs really nicely with that much RAM. RAM isn't that expensive. Apps and OS don't need to run all in 32MB of RAM anymore. More than that is available.

I have three OSX machines. 1 x G4 Desktop (Gigabit Ethernet) with 1024MB of RAM, 1 x G4 Powerbook (800mhz) with 1024MB of RAM and 1 x iBook with 384MB of RAM. And one linux box with 192MB of RAM.

The linux box really liked the memory leak in kppp which made it eat up 380MB of RAM. Was swapping a little..

Re:Go for it.

[Lao-Tzu]

As for games, well, Transgaming's WineX is currently exceeding many people's expectations with regard to DirectX gaming on Linux. Heck, they had Warcraft 3 working within a couple weeks after it launched. Where's Warcraft 3 for OSX?

In the box, when you purchase W3.

Re:Go for it.

[GMontag451]

Where's Warcraft 3 for OSX? Thought so.

Warcraft 3 works perfectly fine on OS X. Every single copy sold is a copy that works on OS X.

Re:Go for it.

[squaretorus]

None of the Windows laptops cut it with battery life or displays so I looked at the iBook. I plumped for the 600Mhz DVD Rom drive beast.

What sort of battery life do you get? And how has it changed over the life of the machine? My Dell started out giving me about 4 useful hours - now its down to about 2 hrs 45min if Im lucky!

Get me a sustainable 5 or 6 hours and I'll buy one today!

Re:Go for it.

[jbolden]

In short, I think you're wrong to dismiss Wine out of hand.

I may be out of date on this issue. I've followed wine's progress mainly from various posts such as your's and frankly your's is the strongest claim I've seen. I'd agree with you that running office is a fairly good test of being there or almost there. I've been following Lindows for example and they had banked heavily on having Wine up to the point you are claiming they are at; but have pulled back and now are going for just an easy to use desktop. Why?

Anyway, the last windows emulation I've personally done was the OS/2 2.0, 2.1, 3.0 and I'd agree that OS/2 2.1 really was a "better dos then dos and a better windows then windows" of course they basically used the windows binaries. Maybe wine is worth another look.

Re:Go for it.

[fault0]

> Windows + Cygwin -- too weak on the Unix side, things rarely compile correctly

Or people can just use binaries. Recent things like apache2 are even made to run on windows _well_.

> Linux + Wine -- very weak on the windows side too many things don't run correctly

You'd be suprised how far wine has gone even in the last year.

Re:Go for it.

[Malor]

I bought a dual-G4, and it's fairly nice, but don't buy the hype. I really suspect there's some 'astroturf marketing' going on, and I think maybe the /. crowd is buying it.

I mean, the system looks FANTASTIC, but the just-works thing is crap. My printer doesn't work with OS/X.. it's the one thing I really wanted to work, and it doesn't. Not even the Gimp-Print people have a driver for it yet.

And Unix stuff is a royal pain in the ASS to get running well.

I posted a long critique on the O'Reilly website, home of the major cheerleading -- I attached it to his second article. (Link here).

It *looks* wonderful. And the notebooks may be absolutely fantastic: I have not worked with one. (Linux is apparently pretty weak on notebooks). But as a desktop... if you're really a Unix guy, you're probably going to be happier with Mandrake. If you're a Mac person, then OS/X is a no-brainer, IMO.... but Unix geeks should be wary. There's simply not as much 'there' there as Apple, and what I believe are its astroturfers, want you to believe.

They should change their logo to: "Everything just works, as long as it's not Unix stuff". (or particular printers)

Re:Go for it.

[MoneyT]

The old iBook (clamshell) got roughly 3 1/2 hours of MP3 playing + wordprocessing + websurfing. 4+ hours of sitting as an MP3 jukebox (car trip from Albany NY to Longisland) and would generaly get 3 1/2 to 4 hours of just about any other program. From what I hear from current owners, the new laptops are just as good and sometimes better. And all of my numbers are after 2 years of use

Re:Go for it.

[pi radians]

At work I have an unsupported printer, and Xerox said that they will never support OS X for that particular model. All I did was copy the PPD for the printer and saved it on the harddrive (I saved it in a folder I called Printer Descriptions in the Library dir.) Then I started up Print Center at just manually selected the PPD. I now have a fully working printer for my G4.

This of course only works if you printer is networked. But for USB printers it is the printer companies that are responsible. Write to them to complain.

Sorry, I don't see the appeal

[mocm]

I have had a tiBook for 1.5 years now and I have tried using OSX from time to time. I can't say that I find it very appealing, but I am probably to used to Linux (I use KDE, Gnome and simpler WMs on several computers). I just couldn't get OSX to feel right. Every configuration (other than those meant to be done by "normal" users) is a pain (well NIS, NFS and automount is).E.g. I could not convice the network setup that my domain has no .xxx at the end and WiFi didn't work at first, either.
Even with the rootless X11 it's not much better and switching to X11 only doesn't make sense. In my view the only advantage over Linux is the DVD player, which is not Linux fault.
As nice as OSX may be for Mac users and newbies as a long time Linux user I have to say it is just to proprietary and constricting for me to use.

Re:Sorry, I don't see the appeal

[Arkham]

I used Linux (RH 6.2, RH 7.1) for over 2 years, and I think it's a great OS. But it's not an OS that regular users can use like OSX 10.1.5 and 10.2. It's harder to be productive in Linux than OSX. I've said it before, but the fact remains that OSX is significantly easier to set up and use on a daily basis than Linux.

Want some reasons that regular people like OSX better? All the control panels are in one place and follow a consistent design. You can get Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Flash MX, and AOL for it.

Want some reasons that many geeks like us like OSX better? Excellent free development IDE (ProjectBuilder & InterfaceBuilder) that makes native apps with an audience of 5 million paying customers. Great commercial tools like BBEdit, Oracle, Sybase, SQLGrinder, and JBuilder Enterprise, that make developing for production systems as easy as developing on Linux.

The DVD issue is really a money issue. With Linux, there's no one willing to pay the money to legally play DVDs. When I worked at ZapMedia, we had a software-only DVD player working under Linux. We had to pay for it, but it can be done. With MacOSX, a small portion of the purchase price covers the R&D and licensing required to have this feature.

I have a 600MHz iBook/DVD that I carry to work every day. The office is all-Windows, but thanks to OSX's built-in SMB browser and CUPS printing support, I can do everything that the Windows machines can do. I might be able to make that happen with Linux using a compiler and a lot of free time, but my experience with Linux in the past is that it's not nearly as simple or obvious.

Make the change!!!

[RealTC]

Well, several months ago I switched over from using Linux/Windows to OSX under an iBook. If it wasnt for OSX then there would've been no way the change would have happened. The best thing about OSX is that:-

1) You have a BSD backend...command line baby!!!!
2) Its very stable....very very stable!
3) its not windows......important part!
4) Has a totally cool desktop.
5) The iBook doesnt heat up as much as the Intel/AMD laptops and is efficient with battery power.

Sure, you have just one mouse button, but mostly I use an external wheel mouse or trackball anyway with 2 buttons.

And no, this isnt an ad for Apple, but after getting tired of XP crashing it was a good persuasion(typo?) to move to OSX.

Why all this moaning about Linux GUIs?

[g4dget]

I don't get it--why do people keep moaning about Linux GUIs? I use an OS X machine daily. It has a pretty interface. It also has a few really slick applications and accessories, foremost, perhaps, its 802.11b support.

And it's not like that OS X has figured out how to eliminate user confusion, as you will find out when you try to talk computer novices through installations or system configuration over the phone. Yes, even OS X has lots of GUI tarpits: the printer system, AirPort configuration, and network configuration are pretty bad.

But when it comes down to it, I just don't see much difference between Gnome, KDE, OS X, and Windows. All of them let you move files around in roughly the same way, all of them associate files with applications, all of them have lots of dialog boxes with buttons and little rectangles to type into, etc. And all of them run roughly comparable sets of applications. What more do you want?

Re:Why all this moaning about Linux GUIs?

[Dephex Twin]

Yes, even OS X has lots of GUI tarpits: the printer system, AirPort configuration, and network configuration are pretty bad.

Huh? Maybe you haven't used OS X 10.2.

To set up Airport I selected "Airport Active" from the menu bar.

To set up the computer to the network I plugged it in. Automatic setup. (If I needed to configure manually it is just System Prefs->Network.)

To set it up for the printer, I... well, I didn't do ANYTHING. That's right. I did nothing. From the first time I clicked print, there is a dropdown menu with the names of all the printers on the network, some I didn't even realize were hooked up.

Honestly, not only are these things not hard on OS X, but I couldn't imagine them being easier!

Re:Why all this moaning about Linux GUIs?

[g4dget]

To set up Airport I selected "Airport Active" from the menu bar.

That makes your machine a client of an AirPort network. I'm talking about setting up and configuring the AirPort device itself.

To set up the computer to the network I plugged it in. Automatic setup.

Yes, Apple has DHCP and (now) Rendezvous. Obviously, if you can use them, it's easy to get your machine on a network.

It gets hard when you need to set up things like PPPoE, dial-up, and direct Ethernet connections. Getting a fully functional setup with AirPort and DSL requires going through dozens of dialog boxes. Think that's some obscure setup? Think again: I had to talk several DSL users in my family through this over the phone. It's not pretty. Let's hope Rendezvous will improve the situation.

To set it up for the printer, I... well, I didn't do ANYTHING. That's right. I did nothing. From the first time I clicked print, there is a dropdown menu with the names of all the printers on the network, some I didn't even realize were hooked up.

Again, you live in an environment where someone has bothered setting up the network for you to make your life easy.

If you install the printer yourself, you may have to download drivers, install them, answer a bunch of odd questions, and go through some odd sequence ("don't plug in the printer before...", "now press the something-or-other"). Once the printer is plugged in, if there is a printer fault, like if it's turned off or out of paper, all printing stops and doesn't restart automatically. Restarting the printer is a minefield of dialog boxes and unobvious choices for a non-technical user.

This is in 10.1; I have no idea whether Apple has fixed this in 10.2, but that's besides the point. My point is that Apple, too, ships software that is hard to use.

Honestly, not only are these things not hard on OS X, but I couldn't imagine them being easier!

Well, you obviously haven't talked novice computer users through such configurations over the phone. You'd be surprised how many ways people can find in screwing up and how unobvious and unintuitive the OS X user interface is through the eyes of a novice.

To be honest, the only times things go smoothly are when I can tell people "type the following into a Terminal exactly as I say". Thank God that OS X has a good command line. The problem is that I don't have any idea of how to, say, configure the AirPort base station using command line tools, if it's even possible.

Re:Why all this moaning about Linux GUIs?

[g4dget]

It's all in the network preference pane. I did ... I have ... etc.

Well, how nice for you. But to a normal user, the whole concept of a "network preference pane" is an anathema.

I'm not saying it is utter perfection, but I feel like these are areas where OS X/Jaguar particularly shines.

OS X does a few very simple things well, and Apple is trying hard to fix things where they can--they really are. But when it comes down to it, unless someone is a nerd like you or me, they will have to turn for help in order to get anything but the simplest networking and peripherals working, just like they do with any other OS. OS X doesn't walk on water, although at least it manages to tread it.

The improvements that OS X offers over, say, Windows do make it worthwhile in my opinion, which is why I keep recommending it to people. But, in the end, I think OS X is a dead end of GUI development, just like Windows, Gnome, and KDE--the whole paradigm just doesn't work well.

Re:Why all this moaning about Linux GUIs?

[daviddennis]

One reason, which I will agree is a little bizarre, is how ugly Linux fonts look. I know I can theoretically, with enormous difficulty, get them to look at least slightly better than they do, but that would take time I simply do not have.

Out of the box, MacOS fonts make ordinary text look like a printed, typeset document instead of something barely readable.

The other advantage is mainstream applications; I have never really warmed to the GIMP; I prefer Photoshop. I can get it and it looks and works great on MacOS X. Likewise with some super-complex applications like Final Cut Pro and After Effects, which are highly unlikely to get Linux equivalents. For completeness, I'll add Office, even though I rarely use it.

When you spend half your life in front of a computer, it becomes surprisingly important to make it look great. And if you don't like the Windows hegemony but want to be able to use mainstream applications, the Mac is your only choice.

Long may it live!

D

Not a microkernel

[selkirk]

Well, you see, Mac OS X is a UNIX. Under the surface it runs a 4.4 BSD kernel derived from FreeBSD 3.2. That, in turn, runs on top of a Mach 3.0 message-passing microkernel. Microkernels were all the rage in OS research about 10-15 years ago, but are now generally considered to be underperforming for most purposes.

This is misleading. The Mach kernel in OS X is not a pure microkernel.
Kernel Programming Mach Overview

I Sometimes Wish I had Bought an OS X Laptop

[RAMMS EIN]

Last January (that is Jan 2002, if memory serves) I bought a HP Pavilion laptop (yes, the one with the USB IRQ issues). I sometimes wish I had bought an Apple laptop/notebook instead. They have GREAT battery life, a beautiful OS (with hack appeal) and guaranteed to be free of incompatibilities, because Apple is in full control of both the hardware and the OS.
OTOH, I am fairly happy with the laptop I have. It runs Linux just fine, and after applying the usepirq patch every piece of hardware works (except the winmodem, I never bothered to try and get that to work because I don't need it). It is fast and has an excellent display. The only thing that drives me up the wall is the heat it generates. I have a stack of CDs under it to give it enough fresh air - putting it on my desk results in overheating and forced shutdown. I've heard that PowerPC CPUs run cool, so I think that they would really be a better choice. And it saves one from paying M$ tax.

Re:I Sometimes Wish I had Bought an OS X Laptop

[darkov]

I've heard that PowerPC CPUs run cool, so I think that they would really be a better choice.

I dunno, I have one of the earlier TiBooks and they can run pretty hot - enough to not want it on your lap. I don't know if the later ones are cooler. One thing it has never done is forced a shutdown. The worst thing that happens is that the fan turns on, and boy is it noisy.

Re:I Sometimes Wish I had Bought an OS X Laptop

[idiotnot]

ObAOL: Me too! Well, sorta. I bought at Compaq Presario 710 (1ghz Duron/DVD/256M/20GB) instead of the 600 iBook I could have gotten a screaming deal on. I regret it. This is especially true after I bought an old PowerMac G3 just to run OSX on. The notebook sorta runs Linux okay now, but I couldn't say that for the first two months I owned it. I still haven't been able to get the power management to work right under Linux, and get about 45 minutes of battery life if I'm lucky. At least the sound now works with the 2.4.19 kernel.

The G3, on the other hand, has been basically flawless. Jaguar refused to install, but that was due to a bad DIMM. Since I got 10.2 to install, I think I've rebooted it twice. it just chugs along. No, it's not real fast. But then, neither is the Duron running KDE.

And the iBook wouldn't be burning my thighs as we speak....

apt-get, rpm? Portage!

[richie2000]

The part in the article about OS X lacking a package management system got me thinking. Since portage (flirting with Gentoo and it's babealicious) is more or less ports-based, supports recompiles (almost demands them, actually) and is all around probably pretty portable, why not get it running on OS X? From where I'm standing, it would help Apple users with system management and it would help Gentoo users with faster/better ports and ebuilds.

Just an idea. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Re:apt-get, rpm? Portage!

[iomud]

Fink. It's basically apt for os x, bringing most if not all the tools you commonly use on Linux to os x. I can literally use apt-get, which made my transition to os x that much easier as I previously used debian at home.

apt-get replacement

[fungai]

from the article: "Something you will miss when coming from a Linux distribution are tools like apt-get or rpm to easily get and install packages and resolve dependencies. "

well, i most certainly, definitley don't miss rpm, but apt-get for the mac is called fink

Princing, pricing, pricing

[Ubi_NL]

I'd switch to OSX today if it ran on my hardware.
But, looking at laptop prices, the Macs aren't that much more expensive than Dell. However, looking at the specs you do get a lot less MHz for the same money. But are those figures really comparable (like...erm..comparing Apples to Oranges..whahaherm)??. Seriously; can anyone comment on the price/performance for Apple laptops vs (Dell,Compaq,Sony}?

Re:Princing, pricing, pricing

[doghouse41]

You can have a Multi-GHz CPU, a laptop that runs cool, serveral hours of battery life, pick any two options...

Seriously, CPU speeds have reached the point where I don't see the value in paying to stay on the bleeding edge of CPU speed.

I've been using a 600MHz laptop with win2K the last couple of years for development, mail, wordprocessing etc, and I don't feel in any need to upgrade. I'd much rather just wait till the machine dies of it's own accord over the next year or two, rather than go out and buy a 2.5Ghz laptop that will be no faster, have no more battery life and be equally obselete in 6 months.

By the time I get to that stage, I'm guessing that the marketeers driving M$ product development these days will have the Windows ship locked up so tightly with Palladium and DCMA compliance that a Mac with OSX will be the only option. (And the 2Ghz Ti powerbook available by then will still be 3 times faster than what I have now!)

Re:Princing, pricing, pricing

[MrAndrews]

My first-gen TiBook (which I admittedly got second-hand from a liquidating dotcom) cost, when it came out, a good $2000 less than my Dell Inspiron 8000. The TiBook is theoretically under-powered, but it easily holds its own against the top-of-the-line Dell. And what's more, the TiBook can stand up to a 3-year old's bashing and smashing, while my Dell gave me exactly 7 months of service (discounting the blue screen of death the first time I turned it on) before falling apart (hardware and software) so badly I have to run it closed plugged into a CRT all the time to avoid the godawful screen. A very expensive desktop.

Macs may not be as fast as PCs (anymore...and for how long?) but they make FAR better hardware. The reason I don't own a 2-button mouse is because Apple has yet to make one. 3rd-party hardware always feels so creaky and crumbly to me... just like the hinges on the Dell. You don't appreciate a Mac till you grab an iBook by the top of the screen and carry it into another room, just swaying, not even considering how stupid it is to do that.

Now for desktops, building your own might be a better idea, but for latops, no one beats Apple. There are no other small-form-factor power laptops around.

(the Dell's fan is whirring today which is why I'm so sour on PCs right now)

Re:Princing, pricing, pricing

[Compulawyer]

I have a Dell lattitude C600 with 512 Mb RAM and an 850 MHz PIII mobile processor. It runs a highly tweaked Win 98 version. I also have a TiBook with an 800 MHz G4 and 512 Mb RAM running OS X 10.2 (Jaguar). Let me say that the TiBook is MUCH more responsive.

I tell people that you don't care about speed benchmarks. The only thing you REALLY care about when using the computer is response time. I define that as the time it takes for the computer to execute the command you just gave it (i.e., file saves, close window, open application, etc.). There are too many other variables that figure into designing a computer too pay attention to, even for engineers.

When I compare the amount of time I spend waiting for my Dell to do something versus my TiBook, I feel it is worth the price difference in saved time (BTW, I am a lawyer and make my living charging for time - less time waiting = more productive lawyer = happier clients). You can always make more money - you can never make more time. I am grateful for the time the TiBook has saved me.

Re:Princing, pricing, pricing

[jeremyp]

Apples run PowerPC processors in them. Dells run Intel Pentium style ones. You cannot get a performance comparison by comparing raw clock speed. My Apple laptop has a 500MHz chip in it that Apple *claimed* was equivalent to a 900MHz Pentium (top of the line for laptops at the time I bought my Apple). Don't know if that is true but subjectively it felt very fast until I put OS X on it. The problems with OS X were fixed by adding more RAM.

Re:Princing, pricing, pricing

[angel'o'sphere]

But, looking at laptop prices, the Macs aren't that much more expensive than Dell. However, looking at the specs you do get a lot less MHz for the same money.

You can not compare two different architectures by MHz. Dell is a Pentium where as a Mac is a PowerPC.

You try to compare a truck with a formular one car. Both have > 500 horse powers. But what does 500 650 mean for a truck and a formular one car?

Nothing.

I know that in RL a Mac often feels slower than a PC.

However there are a lot of cases where a MAC *IS* faster than a PC. Despite that a Mac only has 800MHz and a PC meanwhile up to 3GHz.

angel'o'sphere

Re:Princing, pricing, pricing

[fault0]

> Seriously, CPU speeds have reached the point where I don't see the value in paying to stay on the bleeding edge of CPU speed.

It still matters in games (eg, ut2k3)

Re:Princing, pricing, pricing

[garoush]

I have a Dell lattitude C600 with 512 Mb RAM and an 850 MHz PIII mobile processor. It runs a highly tweaked Win 98 version. I also have a TiBook with an 800 MHz G4 and 512 Mb RAM running OS X 10.2 (Jaguar). Let me say that the TiBook is MUCH more responsive.

Why of course. But have you tried Windows 2000/XP on your said Dell? You will see a BIG difference.

It's not fair to compare OSX or Linux to Win95/98/ME.

Re:Princing, pricing, pricing

[iso]

While Apple's "Megahertz Myth" material may be a little overboard at times, when it comes to laptops, it's pretty close. Remember that your "Pentium IV" laptop is actually using a "Pentium IV-M" processor. That a mobile Pentium, which has been butchered to make it less power-hungry. This affect performance. Another very important consideration is that when unplugged, most Pentium laptops run at as little as 1/2 or even 1/3rd the rated clockspeed! This, again, is to save power. This can be turned off, but it severely sacrifices battery life.

By comparison, the G4 in a Titanium is the same G4 that's in the desktops, and it runs at full clockspeed all the time, unless you set it to do otherwise. The fact is, a G4 Titanium will cleanly whip the fastest Mobile Pentium chips out there. Laptops are the one market where Apple is not lagging behind.

- j

Re:Princing, pricing, pricing

[MoneyT]

I'm currently using XP on a desktop, and it's been my experience that it responds slower than Win 98 did. I can't immagine how it performs on a laptop.

Love to - my eternal request...

[mccalli]

Every time this comes up, I post my request. I've posted to Apple, to Intuit, on the enwsgroups...

Please Intuit - please make a UK-version of Quicken for OS X. Please. Please...

There's a Mac OS X version of Quicken. There's a Windows version Quicken for the UK. Surely it can't be too hard to transfer the config from one across to the other? Can it?

Without Quicken, I have to stay put. I know I could emulate, but that's not really switching away is it? A shame, because I would snap up a Mac or two otherwise (one iMac, one portable).

Cheers,
Ian

Second impressions...

[g4dget]

I think as Moshe continues to use it, he will either turn into a dedicated Mac zealot, or he will discover that OS X isn't quite the smooth integration of slick GUI and UNIX that he imagines.

For example, he may think he was editing /etc/hosts, but reality is somewhat different. He may copy files with "cp" and discover that some important bits didn't make it. Cocoa looks really nice and descriptive (and I really like Objective-C's named arguments and object model), but it also has its dark sides, for example in the areas of resource management, error handling, and type safety. He'll also discover that there are two different kinds of path names that don't quite mesh and three different sets of APIs, no single one of which gives him complete access to the machine. Carbon and Cocoa applications take different key bindings and handle text differently. A "ps" and some graphics benchmarks will show him that Aqua really has a very hefty footprint and isn't all that speedy. He'll also discover that the Apple file systems (HFS+, UFS) are not all that great compared to what he can get on Linux (ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, ...).

Don't get me wrong: I think it's great that Apple is using a UNIX base, and I think they have done a great job with migrating from OS 9 to OS X. There are some really great programs on that platform. And I think there are quite a number of things Linux would do very well to copy from OS X. But the suggestion that OS X is the heavenly integration of UNIX and GUI that the world has strikes me as not realistic.

Re:Second impressions...

[crawling_chaos]

You know, with a bit of search and replace, almost all of your arguments would have applied to Linux when it was at the same stage of development (say four or five years ago.) In fact, I heard some of my Unix using colleagues use those arguments for sticking with HP/UX, Tru64, and even SCO. Give Apple a little bit of time.

Re:Second impressions...

[blakestah]

For example, he may think he was editing /etc/hosts, but reality is somewhat different. He may copy files with "cp" and discover that some important bits didn't make it. Cocoa looks really nice and descriptive (and I really like Objective-C's named arguments and object model), but it also has its dark sides, for example in the areas of resource management, error handling, and type safety. He'll also discover that there are two different kinds of path names that don't quite mesh and three different sets of APIs, no single one of which gives him complete access to the machine. Carbon and Cocoa applications take different key bindings and handle text differently. A "ps" and some graphics benchmarks will show him that Aqua really has a very hefty footprint and isn't all that speedy. He'll also discover that the Apple file systems (HFS+, UFS) are not all that great compared to what he can get on Linux (ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, ...).

Those are all great points, but utterly irrelevant. I wouldn't argue that linux doesn't have better filesystems, memory management (in 2.4), lower overhead apps, etc.

But to the laptop user, those are not so relevant. He cares about his Airport Wireless card working well out of the box. He digs a DVD playing seamlessly. He is probably happy about the lack of time he has to spend futzing with those things under OS X compared to linux.

OS X does well the most important things to a laptop user (he didn't even mention Office X or all the Adobe art apps). And that is why Moshe Bar is happy. And that is why people are switching in droves to OS X laptops.

Low battery consumption, nice screens, and nice keyboards do not hurt either.

Re:Second impressions...

[g4dget]

The resource fork. See here for an article that explains it: http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/07/02/t erminal_5.html

Re:Second impressions...

[g4dget]

But to the laptop user, those are not so relevant.

Well, as I was saying: OS X is quite a nice system, otherwise I wouldn't be using it myself. But it just isn't a replacement for Linux or UNIX systems: sometimes OS X is better, and sometimes Linux or UNIX is better, even on laptops, depending on what it is being used for.

Re:Second impressions...

[DunbarTheInept]

your .sig:

80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent

life.

That's funny coming from someone who apparently thinks a 63 character line would wrap on a 80 column screen.

Re:Second impressions...

[g4dget]

UNIX filesystems don't support file attributes which weren't invented 30 years ago and they follow the stupid methodology that everything-is-a-file-found-at-a-static-path.

The UNIX designers, in fact, realized 30 years ago that attributed file systems were a lousy idea and rejected the idea; in UNIX, if you want a bunch of things together, you stick them into a directory. Apple is now coming around to that idea, which is why applications now are usually small directory trees of components in OS X. Congratulations.

Only Microsoft hasn't figured it out yet (they are usually a little late), which is why they are gung-ho on building a Rube Goldberg attributed file system that will make Macintosh look like a toy. Microsoft will get over it, too, in a decade or two.

Most of the problems you talk about are due to UNIX being a piece of crap.

Well, if that were the case, then Apple made the wrong choice. Are you going to switch to Windows? Windows has an attributed file system throughout, and many of the other features you love so much on paper.

Re:Second impressions...

[Dirtside]

Well, four or five years ago, Linux had the advantages of costing no money, running on numerous architectures, and being completely free. I'm not saying it's better, but it's not as if MacOS X is in the same scrappy-upcoming-OS situation that Linux was, so it can be a little misleading to compare them this way.

Re:Second impressions...

[crawling_chaos]

Scrappy has nothing to do with it. It's just at a different point in its development curve, analogous to where Linux was a few years ago. Apple could still drop the ball, but if they keep putting effort into it, it could turn out pretty well.

Also, they could could start to borrow. They could grab something like XFS and port it to Darwin. I'm sure that they and SGI could come to an understanding about the licensing.

Re:apt-get, rpm? Portage! - Fink!

[shiva600]

You should check out fink.

Excerpt form the start page:
"The Fink project wants to bring the full world of Unix Open Source software to Darwin and Mac OS X. We modify Unix software so that it compiles and runs on Mac OS X ("port" it) and make it available for download as a coherent distribution. Fink uses Debian tools like dpkg and apt-get to provide powerful binary package management. You can choose whether you want to download precompiled binary packages or build everything from source."

I guess that`s pretty much what you are thinking about.

Fink, Fink, Fink, Fink: A Package Manager

[MoNickels]

How many times does this have to be pointed out for OS X newbies? There is an open-source, community-driven package manager for the Unix underpinnings of OS X: It's called Fink. It's a port of the Debian tools, including apt. It currently has 1452 packages at various levels of stability, including many of the major applications required for development. It works very, very well, from a command line or via happy little Aqua app called Fink Commander. If you do use Fink, use the CVS tree: the maintainers are very conservative about adding apps to the stable tree, so most of the interesting action is in unstable.

Re:Fink, Fink, Fink, Fink: A Package Manager

[weave]

Fink is a bit raw still when using OX X 10.2. You have to use the unstable tree and even then there are some problems. It'll be spiffed up soon enough.

Nothing beats having a rootless X server running on your Mac! :)

I also enjoy running microsoft's rdesktop on my Mac to administer my windows servers. There is just some weird satisfaction thing there...

Re:Fink, Fink, Fink, Fink: A Package Manager

[addaon]

Can you recommend a good window manager for Jaguar? I used OroborusX under 10.1, and absolutely loved it. It doesn't expect a root window, and doesn't get weird when there isn't one. The aqua-style windows are gorgeous... if nothing else, they blend in. And interleaving just works. Unfortunately, I can't get OroborusX to work at all under 10.2. It installs fine, but at startup, I get a slew of odd messages that basically say "This version of X11 is newer than me, help!" Is there any other window manager that blends into Aqua this well?

Re:Fink, Fink, Fink, Fink: A Package Manager

[MoNickels]

Sounds like you're having one of two problems. Try these links for help:

Installing Fink from scratch for 10.2
Step-by-step instruction for upgrading under 10.2
Jaguar Xterm update

Re:Fink, Fink, Fink, Fink: A Package Manager

[jweatherley]

I installed OroborusX on 10.2.1 and it runs without a hitch so it is possible. What X11 are you using? Have you got the latest OroborusX?

Re:Fink, Fink, Fink, Fink: A Package Manager

[jweatherley]

I didn't do anything fancy when I installed OroborusX. I'm using XDarwin from www.xdarwin.org. I don't know what fink installs so that might be your problem.

Sooo many...

[alvieboy]

[macosx:~] cd /usr/local/
[macosx:~] sudo mkdir src
[macosx:~] curl -O ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/CPAN/src/perl-5.8.0.tar.gz
[macosx:~] tar zxvf perl-5.8.0.tar.gz
[macosx:~] cd perl-5.8.0
[macosx:~] make distclean
[macosx:~] make
[macosx:~] make test
[macosx:~] sudo make install


# apt-get install perl

Easier, hmm?

Alvie

Re:Sooo many...

[reallocate]

Sticking a frozen dinner in the microwave is easier than cooking dinner yourself, too. I can cook, so my food tastes better.

It's difficult to understand the emphasis on packaging systems. It seems, sadly, to be the most important factor differentiating one Linux distribution from another. Aren't they just necessary bandages to patch over the lack of adherence to standard libraries and file systems?

I've used RPM's, apt-get, Slack's tgz's, Gentoo's portage and FreeBSD's ports. They all are great if you work only within the packaging system. Start installing outside the packaging system and, sooner or later, something will break.
Happened to me every time. You can try to prevent this by tracking and recording where all the files go, plus their versioning info. But, if you're going to do that, why bother with a packaging system?

Re:Sooo many...

[herwin]

fink install perl ...

Re:Sooo many...

[Dephex Twin]

Sticking a frozen dinner in the microwave is easier than cooking dinner yourself, too. I can cook, so my food tastes better.

I would say it's more like going to a restaurant compared to cooking dinner for yourself.

Some people like the joy of tinkering with recipes and making their own food. Other people just want to eat something delicious and be waited on, and get on with more important things in life.

Re:Sooo many...

[DreamerFi]

And after installing fink it's just:

fink install perl

Yep, you're right, that is indeed easier...

-John

Bravo.

[castlan]

+2, witty troll. +1 humorous for those that caught the reference. -2 for those who, lacking the background to recognize the style of the post, didn't even take note of the unblushing praise that is rare without some form of payment.

You forgot to play the silly background music and to flash the Apple logo afterwards.

Re:Bravo.

[matthew.thompson]

Actually I can give you loads of little niggles that I have with the box and the OS but they're no more in number than I have with Windows and much less than with Linux.

I'm just recounting my use of the machine and how easy I find things with it.

The end tag line was added as a humorous afterthought.

try it.

[jpellino]

all you'll get from us is a pile of yes and no votes, plus personal preferences which will want to make you tear your hair out - trackpoints, close boxes, true microkernels, silver vs black paint, raw mhz -

try it on a desktop which you can prolly shake loose faster than a spare tibook

try smalldog or similar for NOS or openbox or refurb tibooks if you must

make sure it's jaguar and try it.

Re:Linux desktop, Windows for games, and an ibook

[ciryon]

Your situation kinda look like mine did a while ago. I had a Linux/Windows dual boot where I used Windows for some games that Transgaming couldn't handle. I then bought an iBook and Airport wireless networking. OS X stole my heart completely. I could do anything I could do on my Linux desktop, plus I had games and commercial programs like Photoshop available.

I have now traded the PC to a PowerMac and only use Linux at work and for a "multimedia-server" to stream movies and music to my computers.

Ciryon

Re: Dell Laptops are Better

[standards]

Really? I just bought a Dell Latitude x200 last night... for my brother-in-law who isn't interested in "switching".

I did some shopping around first - and I just simply couldn't find a laptop as nice as the Mac titanium laptop... light, thin, big screen, built-in DVD. The Latitude was the closest I could find for the money.

But unlike the Mac, the Latitude has no built-in-DVD and a much smaller display. The performance of the Dell by no mean screams over the Mac (The Dell is a 800mhz P3... not even a P4).

And the price of the Dell with the DVD/CD-RW and the other basics isn't any better than the Mac price. Really.

For a laptop, I like thin & light... I don't want to lug around a big thing on business trips. Unless the market changes radically in the next month, my next laptop purchase will be a Mac. For the first time.

Time-based interfaces

[hobbit]

And you can keep your other hand on the keyboard to control-click, which is natural since that hand is often using other modifier keys, as well.

The reason your other hand is using other modifier keys so often is that you don't have enough mouse buttons.

Part of the reason Windows and Unix users have problems with the Mac's one button (and whine incessantly about it, to such a degree that you want to put *their* testicles in a vise), is because they tend to be unused to the click-and-hold action.

No, it's because we think it's shite, which it is. What in God's name you need to hang around for, when you could have a perfectly good right mouse button, is beyond me.

Having said that, I don't think that it's all bad for Macs to have one button. It certainly encourages developers to consider alternatives to large context-sensitive menus, such as intelligent use of drag-and-drop (which to my mind is a better paradigm).

Re:Time-based interfaces

[MoNickels]

The reason your other hand is using other modifier keys so often is that you don't have enough mouse buttons.

So you have a mouse button for shift, caps lock, control, alt and command? Interesting.

Re:Time-based interfaces

[TotallyUseless]

when you drag a file around on a mac, if you accidentally let go on the desktop, or on any directory on the same disk the file is on, it will simply move it. no need to wait for the copy. It is pretty much instant. Also, a quick 'command-z' (undo) will zap the file right back to where it was, also instantly.

Re:Time-based interfaces

[DavidRavenMoon]

I call bullshit. You are saying Windows installs never work, ever?

This wasn't my post but I'll comment anyway. My experience with using both Macs and Windows has shown that Windows installs fail more than Mac installs. I just installed Quark5 and Photoshop 6 on a PC and had to do Photoshop twice, and then when trying to update Quark, it wouldn't run, so I had to do the install over again.

Except for some recent Adobe upgrades in OS X, this just doesn't happen on Macs.

Gee, I wonder how all those Windows users are typing up emails and writing documents in Word if their installations all failed and nothing ever works?

A lot of PC users us whatever was installed when they bought the computer. And it works fine. It's when they start installing more stuff that they run into problems. You have to realize a lot of PC users can't fix things when they go awry. Macs have always been easier to trouble shoot, but OS X is changing that for many.

Windows has yet to have drag and drop installs.

Of course people that are running Linux or some other Unix are more savvy than your typical Windows user.

Re:Time-based interfaces

[StarFace]

Eh, apply logic. The keys you listed all correspond to keyboard actions. The first two modify the behavior of the keyboard, the second two enable the keyboard to access meta-functions beyond text input (in most cases.) Having a key on the keyboard that does little but give you a pseudo-second-mouse-button is an entirely different type of key, and it screws around with the mental division between mouse and keyboard. It is certainly not intuitive (though Mac users have grown used to it, just as Windows users have grown used to pressing the Start button to shut down.)

Now some applications do use other keyboard modifiers to adjust mouse behavior, typically graphics applications do this. A common one is the spacebar. Usually there is only a handful of these, and usually I bind these functions directly to the mouse buttons (since I have seven of them.) It makes for a cleaner operation, and leaves my left hand free to do other keyboard operations while I pan around with the mouse.

The other "alternative" right click with the Mac is the click-hold, which is clearly designed for novice users. Professionals who are payed for their time typically don't want to sit around waiting for something that could be instantaneously accessed with an additional mouse button. I don't know any pro Mac users who actually prefer a one mouse button. Generally the first thing they do is plug a real mouse into the keyboard and use the Apple supplied mouse as a decoration element. I've got nothing against a one mouse button GUI philosophy, especially for folks who'd rather just use their computer casually. This aside, I don't think anybody could rightfully defend the single mouse button as being something adequate for advanced usage. Even the Apple developers have implied this left and right by allowing "power" users to access more advanced features of the GUI with all manner of ridiculous keyboard combinations that are hard to remember, and rarely menmonic. I think they should just get over their Pride and sell three+wheel button mice as a pro add-on and have these advanced parts of the OS accessible by default using consistent mouse bindings.

Re:Time-based interfaces

[MoneyT]

You can't undo a copy to another disk via a key command. However if you accidentaly move a file, you can undo it with command Z in OS X or in classic it was command-Y (put away). AFAIK command y also works under OS X

Re:The grin hides the truth

[scrutty]

>How much Intel can 500 quid buy?

500 quid would buy you a pretty sucky intel laptop.

Not looking back

[weefle]

I have three boxes under my desk at work. One running Windows XP, one running Debian, and one running Jaguar. The Windows box has been awakened from sleep maybe three times since Jaguar came out, and all three times it was to run NessusWX or some Novell client application that won't run on Mac OS X. I have used the Debian box for netselect a few times (can't seem to find a Mac OS X port for that one yet), and that's about it.

But the Mac... Mail.app filters my junk mail very efficiently. Chimera does tabbed browsing almost as well as Galeon. iCal is young but already extremely cool, letting me keep track of my schedule and tasks. Terminal.app's ANSI colors suck, but it's a good emulator otherwise. Oh, and Fink and XDarwin let me sudo apt-get install gimp and almost anything else I could do on my Linux box.

Oh, yeah, and I can run Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

I've switched, and I can't see going back.

Re: Mac mouse buttons

[Raetsel]

I recently had the misfortune to have to use a friend's Mac (running MacOS 8.something) in their office. I think it was worse because it was the hockey-puck mouse, and the ball was probably a bit dirty... but God! I missed that second button. It was... infuriating... even knowing the 'click-hold-wait' for the alternate mouse button function.

Know what? That trick doesn't work in every program! (Aargh.)

So I put up with it for about half an hour. Then I bitched about how it was taking me so damn long to do a few simple tasks, and that a two-button mouse would make life a LOT easier. My friend laughed, and then pointed out the "right" Mac mouse button -- It's <CTRL>-click! (Or was it the 'option' button? It's one of those on the lower left of the keyboard.)

Things went a lot faster after that.

Now, about those trackpoint devices... the first few versions couldn't detect force, or they didn't detect it very well. So the harder you pushed didn't make the mouse move any faster, and people hated 'em for it. Trackpoint versions 3 and 4 (that's hardware versions, not software!) are much better at detecting varying levels of force, and the mouse responds accordingly. Also, you really need to tune the software to your taste (light vs. heavy touch, mouse acceleration becomes very important, etc.) If properly adjusted -- and that's a big "if" -- I'm relatively happy with a trackpoint.

(Just ignore that USB optical mouse in my laptop bag, please...)

I "switched" my laptop to an iBook...

[kikensei]

2 months ago. Still using home brew desktops, but since I can't build a laptop, I figured an OS X, and very sweet looking iBook would work well. There was always PPC Linux and Virtual PC if OS X didn't work out. Well its worked out. I can take care of all my remote administration via command line. The FINK project has ported a lot of good GPL apps to PPC OS X, and incorporates apt-get into the iBook's reportoire. The iBook 700Mhx (my purchase) is not a speed demon. It runs well though, and can play Warcraft3 acceptably. The Airport card range and battery life is awesome. Two features the Ti Books trail far behind in. Since wireless is a big factr I decided to save about 500 bucks and stick with the iBook. Don't regret it. I'm not switching my desktop off of x86 Linux anytime in the foreseeable future but an Apple laptop is a great machine to tote around.

Karma to burn...

[Jerky McNaughty]

A few of my co-workers are getting these machines, but I would prefer to stick with Linux, partly because I don't want to learn the quirks of yet another operating system.

But another big part is (*gasp*)... freedom. I don't get the source to everything in OS X. I can't easily modify anything, recompile, and reap the benefits of my change. I'm not a free software bigot that feels free software is the best thing in every situation (I do, after all, work on proprietary software every day).

Plus, what do I use each day? fvwm. xterm. Emacs. Mozilla. gcc. Perl. Ruby. That's really it. OS X really doesn't give me anything over what I currently use, the hardware is closed, the OS is closed, and it's expensive.

I also don't care about pretty. Come look at my desktop if you don't believe me. My Emacs doesn't even have scrollbars or the cute little toolbar. I got rid of that stuff ages ago in the name of screen real estate.

OS X doesn't make sense for me, but I can understand why it makes sense for others since it probably runs the apps they want to run.

But for me, I'll stick with Linux. But when they bring that little fishtank screen saver up on their OS X machine, I'll agree that it looks pretty damn sweet!

Re:Karma to burn...

[Jonny Ringo]

I'm sorry I don't believe you have use emacs for OS X. Its not the x-windows version of emacs. Its the regulaur one with no scroll bars or pull down menus. Yes the terminal has a scroll bar (god that would be awful if it didn't).

Re:Karma to burn...

[Elwood P Dowd]

Yeah, I'm kindof shocked that I'm not seeing many highly modded comments about free software...

I thought a significant minority of Linux users really cared about freedom. I know *I* did. And I still do. But I still run MacOS X on an iBook....

Re:Karma to burn...

[daviddennis]

There actually is a MacOS X native version of emacs, but it's not quite there - it doesn't quite have the right look and feel. I forget the reasons, but I stopped using it and returned to the terminal.

What I really want is xemacs, with variable width fonts and a better user interface, but so far there doesn't seem to be any Aqua version. And the X version simply reminds me of how horrid X fonts are whenever I see it :-(.

D

$500 intel equivalent laptop?

[stego]

please show me the $500 intel-based laptop that compares to a ToBook...

Re:$500 intel equivalent laptop?

[nagora]

please show me the $500 intel-based laptop that compares to a ToBook...

I was making a more general point about Apple hardware than just laptops but, in fact, the price difference is even worse in the laptop market than the desktop. Some of that is made up for in quality but not enough.

TWW

Re:$500 intel equivalent laptop?

[stego]

but, in fact, the price difference is even worse in the laptop market than the desktop

I'd have to disagree with that. Price comparisons that I've seen that take into account stuff like the included ethernet and wireless-ready nature of Mac laptops tend to call the price difference negligable.

Every x86 laptop owner that I know has spent some time dealing with some random hardware issue like a modem needing drivers or just not working. I just watched my boss spend 2 days trying to get the modem/network card working on his Sony. That wasted time right there eats up any cost differences that might exist between x86 hardware and Mac hardware

Re:$500 intel equivalent laptop?

[nagora]

It's actually the opposite.

Yes, sorry.

TWW

I switched.

[Tinfoil]

Granted, I was not a hardcore *nix user to begin with, but I did use FreeBSD as a primary OS before the switch, with windows being used for games. I happened upon a frustrated OSX user who wanted to trade his TiBook DVI for a windows machine. Naturaly I traded. It's been a great experience, especially with Jaguar. As much as I hate to say it, they are right.... it just works.

Re:Not on an ibook!

[efatapo]

Ok, well I own a G3 iBook and am perfectly happy with its speed. I hate to point out the obvious, but...

Have you tried installing more RAM?

Have you tried X.2 (Jaguar)? It's much quicker/more responsive

Just a couple of things that really made my iBook go a lot faster. The included 64mb of RAM is not enough, I threw in 256 more and it flies. Also, I have never had a problem with my CD ROM not recognizing a CD, ever. Maybe you just got a bad apple. I love mine and it works great!!!!

This could be the end of an era

[guttentag]

1. Slashdot editors switch to Mac laptops
2. They discover OmniWeb, which underlines misspelled words in textarea boxes as you type
3. Slashdot readers suddenly begin complaining that the editors have "forgotten" how to spell "properly."

Seriously, I would wait on buying a TiBook if I were you. Apple crippled the processors in every model after the first generation. An 800-mhz TiBook with 32 megs of video ram may outperform a 500-mhz TiBook (8 megs vram, which makes a difference OS X) on most tasks, but the 500-mhz TiBook from January 2001 still encodes MP3s faster than the latest models. There's something fundamentally wrong with that. I would wait until Apple can produce a laptop that soundly outperforms its Jan 2001 model.

Re:This could be the end of an era

[Anonymous Coward]

The first generation of TiBooks use the PPC 7410, which is a first-generation G4. More recent TiBooks are equipped with processors from the 7455 series, which are significantly different from the 7410.

Firstly, the L2 in the 7400/7410 series is not mounted inside the chip. Thus, 7400/7410 based Macs have a larger L2 cache (the 7410 allows for up to 2 MB) than the 7455, but it can't access the L2 as quickly. The 7455 has 256 kB of on-chip L2 and support for up to 2 MB of L3 cache. However, the 7410 can't prefetch data to the L2 since it only serves as an evacuation space for the L1. The 7455, on the other hand, may use the L2 and L3 caches to prefetch data.

Secondly, the 7455 has more functional units than the 7410. The first generation of TiBooks have two integer units (32 bit), one 64-bit FPU and dual 128-bit SIMD units (AltiVec units). The newer 7455-equipped TiBooks have twice the amount of integer units and SIMD units, but the number of FPU:s still is the same.

Re:This could be the end of an era

[robertchin]

You forgot to mention the fact that the 7455, while having a one cycle longer fp unit, has its three fp cores separated so data can be fetched to all three at the same time. And that the altivec units are also separated into four distinct types allowing several different types of instructions to be loaded and processed in parallel.

Re:This could be the end of an era

[MoneyT]

I'd wait on buying the TiBook anyways, they're due for a revamp soon, no point in buying now and then bitching in a few months when the $3,000 laptop you bought just became $1,500

Power conservation on these ain't so great

[signal7]

I have an iBook with OSX.1 on it. The power management features of the OS are very poorly implemented in comparison to the way they were in OS9.2. Previously, you had different options depending on if you had the laptop on battery or AC power. In OSX.1, you only get one profile for both.

Add to that the fact that sleep/wakeup operations while it's plugged into a live network sometimes put the machine in a coma, and it truly sucks. I eventually removed the magnet that causes it to sleep when the lid was closed just becuase it would be more stable.

I'm seriously hoping they fixed these issues in Jaguar.

Re:Power conservation on these ain't so great

[Junta]

I know that at least in 10.2, I've been able to have separate Battery/AC power configurations.

Re:Ugh, where to begin...

[firewort]

Regarding wireless cards:

The Apple Airport Card has an antenna which runs within the inside of the laptop. In the iBook, the antenna runs up the sides of the screen frame. In the Powerbook, it runs along both sides of the palmrest. In the Thinkpad, there is no internal antenna- the card simply juts out the side.

Antennae make a difference, and Apple engineering did pretty nicely when they incorporated the antennna in the whole product line, desktops included. It's hard to fault this good technical design advantage.

Regarding DVD Playback:
For a long time now, on Windows and on Mac, people have defeated region limitations, either by flashing the DVD drive with new firmware, or by using other software. It's pretty common. Of course, commerical skipping is still an annoyance.

powerbook

[stego]

Given the chance, get the G4 machine. And I've seen very noticable differences between otherwise similar Macs that have different bus speeds...

Re:After 17yrs of Windwoes and 3 yrs of Linux.

[perlyking]

How have you had 17 years of windows? Or at least thats what I assume you are trying to make a new amusing name for.

Or did you leave a stray "1" in there by accident :-)

More on topic: Demonstration Macs at PC World (pc superstore) have put me off OS X because they were sluggish, grey areas lurked where the OS hadnt quite managed to redraw the screen after a window had been moved, sluggish response etc.. I suppose they could have been badly configured but I thought the whole point of macs is that they "just work".
On the less serious side though they do look good.

Re:Not on an ibook!

[firewort]

Do NOT run OS X on an ibook. ibook G3 CPUs are not fast enough to run OS X at a usable speed when doing anything that shows off a lot of 2D stuff (A few days ago I wrote a simple C++ program that finds prime numbers and displays them in real-time, and the terminal updates were using almost as many CPU cycles as the number generator was.). Java is also very slow on the G3 ibooks. Other ibook issues include:

- DVD/CD-Rom flakiness on OS X (The DVD/CD drive doesn't always recognize a CD after the disc has been in a while. - Power management problems. OS X does not always wake up after the ibook has been closed/ opened. - CPU heat. The G3 CPUs in ibooks put out enough heat to be very uncomfortable when in one's lap.

What you're saying is, don't run OS X on a G3 processor. I say you're incorrect.

I have a G3/333 with 512mb RAM running 10.2, and it's not bad. It isn't a speed demon, but it's fast enough.

The G3 puts out less heat than the G4. It isn't uncomfortably warm, it's just fine- and the cooling fan as only come on once in the 12 months I've had the thing.

Sleep issues- must be something about your/the iBook. Every other machine I have around (powerbook 333, powerbook g4, powerbook pismo) wakes without problems.

Are you running OS X 10.2.1? I highly recommend that you do.

I switched 6 months ago

[deadsquid]

I purchased a Ti back in April to replace my Vaio and ThinkPad X21. I was tired of switching between Linux and Windoze on a regular basis, and wanted something that would allow me all the toys I wanted, the office apps work demanded of me, and a development platform that could go where I went. I also wanted integrated wireless - I _hate_ the antennas that stick out.

I've had a mixed bag of an experience. I'm very used to right clicking items for properties/context-sensitive menus, and the "click-and-hold" drives me insane. That few tenths of a second is just enough to interrupt the flow of using the trackpad, and I use a two button mouse whenever possible.

The click-and-hold also makes the dock less than useful for navigating around the apps if you have multiple windows/instances open and are looking for the familiar "taskbar" approach. I also find the jumping icons instead of a simple flash to grab my attention annoying. I have a couple other beefs about the interface, but nothing I can't deal with. Navigation between apps is icky, and that was my point.

I use the powerbook (funny how we don't call it a laptop) in a variety of places and have a serious beef with the "Location" feature for networking. When I switch to a known area, and switch the location, it seems if chance plays heavily into whether the net connections are used. It's very unreliable, but I seem to have found the majiic sequence necessary to get it to work most times.

That all said, I'm pretty happy with the rest. The apps that make up OSX, such as the DVD player, iPhoto, and iTunes are well thought out, and I wish they were available for other platforms. Third party software has helped with things like PocketPC support, and apps I'm used to with other OS's.

I use Office X (thank you Microsoft, for not allowing me to upgrade cross-platform and fucking me for some more $, thank god for tax writeoffs) so I can use Entourage, Word, Excel, and PPoint as office apps, and I prefer the OSX versions to their windoze counterparts. This lets me fit into the environments of most of the companies I work with. StarOffice/OpenOffice is ok, but I prefer to use the Office Suite when I can.

Finally, I have mysql, apache, and a bunch of mods installed so I can do app development/screwing around without the need for another box or rebooting/using an emulator when I want to use. It's also really nice to have a console/term window on an environment designed for use by regular folk.

The hardware itself is mostly great - beautiful screen, three types of networking, firewire, usb, and the combo drive, and battery life kicks ass. The gripes I have are its size and weight (it's a little too big for my tastes, I was spoiled with the X21), the trackpad could have been designed a little better and including scrolling capabilities would have been nice, and a hd light would have been welcome as I sit and wait for stuff to launch, wondering if it's doing anything.

All in all, I'm happy with the switch to the Ti as my laptop. I don't think I'd use it to replace my desktop, as I still can't play CS and a bunch of other games on it, but for a all-in-one travelling companion it's very hard to beat. I'm happy I made the switch.

Re:I switched 6 months ago

[Doctor O]

I'm very used to right clicking items for properties/context-sensitive menus, and the "click-and-hold" drives me insane

You mention this several times - if you had RTFM, you had found out you can as well Ctrl-Click. There's no need to hold the mouse button unless you want to drag&drop something.

Re:I switched 6 months ago

[extra88]

Regarding your "location" problems in networking, try this instead. Use a single location, Duplicate the relevant interfaces (Ethernet or Airport) and configure the duplicates for each network. I think you'll find OS X uses whatever network connnection works.

Example: you have an Airport base station at home connected to a cable modem on one side and a 5 port switch on the other. When you're at the desk you use the wire and DHCP is provided by the base station. When you're on the couch you use the Airport. In your office cubicle you have to use one static IP but if you do a presentation in the conference room upstairs you have to use a different static IP and a different gateway. A local coffee shop is attempting a pay-for-wireless system but you've discovered you can just pick an unused IP in their subnet so you use Airport with a static IP there.

So, in this case you'd have the following Network Port Configurations:

Built-in Ethernet (home) DHCP
Built-in Ethernet Copy (cubicle) static IP
Built-in Ethernet Copy 1 (conference room) static IP
Airport (home) DHCP
Airport Copy (stealing from coffee shop) static IP

You may have to still switch airport networks but that can be done from the menu bar.

Re:I switched 6 months ago

[smack.addict]

As long as you do not have any weird need to configure your network in any specific locations, forget about the Location feature. Everywhere I go has DHCP enabled. As a result, I go home and plug in or walk around, it just knows its IP and whether to use ethernet or airport. I take the TiBook to work, same thing. No reboot, no changing location, no selecting wireless networks from the menu bar, NOTHING. I have not had to touch network configuration in the 18 months since I switched from Win2k to OS X.

Re:I switched 6 months ago

[Jonny Ringo]

Its true that the games don't come out like they do on windows, but there are a lot of good games that are out and will keep you busy. I made a few lists at amazon.

First list is OS X native games:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listm ania/lis t-browse/-/2HHH2QUBDN95E/002-1264678-5508828

Second list our games that need a patch to be OS X native, the link to the url to get the patch are included:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/l is t-browse/-/1D11EDOKXVLD1/002-1264678-5508828

There are also a lot of free games you can find on Apple's site, some even opensourced. Have fun!

Re:I switched 6 months ago

[Kevinv]

I've got 3 locations:

Auto-wired
Auto-wireless
No Network

All use DHCP, I just use location manager to shut off unused nic cards to give me more battery life.

Re:Serious question

[Toraz Chryx]

the GUI layer (Aqua/Quartz) isn't available in sourcecode form, and it's compiled for PowerPC processors.. hence it won't run on x86 based machines, laptop or otherwise.

Re:Not on an ibook!

[addaon]

As a side note, I question the 'heat' comment. I've had many laptops in my day, and none have gotten hotter than a Sony Picturebook... using OS X 10.1, the iBook (600MHz) got hardly warm at all. However, on upgrading to 10.2, I noticed my laptop getting much, much warmer. Still not nearly as hot as that sony... but warm. It turns out that it's the graphics chip (ATI, 16MB) which is generating the heat; disabling Quartz Extreme cools the machine right down. Clearly, this needs a bit more optimization, in terms of engineering... just like to point out that it's not the poor struggling CPU that's getting hot.

Re:Serious question

[TheLostOne]

why can't I put OSX on my IBM clone ... What am I missing?

The source.

Someone correct me if i'm wrong (ha.. as if i had to add that on /. ;) but Mac OSX is not open source... only parts of it are.

Sure you could get the kernel ported over.. but what then?

And in case anybody is expecting them to port those remaining closed bits anytime soon don't hold your breathe... being on apple certified hardware is what makes macos macos.

Re:Pointing Devices (was Re:Mac Laptops)

[ianscot]

I think originally it was a maintenance thing that made Apple switch; by far the most common part swap on old PowerBooks was the trackball's setting in the case, just going by my personal experience supporting a bunch of them. Physical trackballs got filthy, it made them much less pleasant to use, and when you destroyed the wheels inside you had to give up your machine for a bit.

Now that we have optical trackballs -- like the one right here -- it'd make more sense. C'mon, this is a no-brainer.

if you do decide to buy, wait a few more weeks

[frostycellnex]

Rumors coming out of several Mac rumor mills suggest that Apple is going to release a new version of the Titanium PowerBook in early-mid October. It will sport updated CPUs (of course) a beefier video card and (what I've personally been waiting for) a "portable Superdrive" (DVD-R and CD-RW). Not exactly sure yet what "portable" means in this context, but I'm hoping the slimmed down the form factor far enough on the Superdrive to be able to fit it into one of those amazingly thin machines. Hope you switch! frostycellnex

I do it...

[jyoull]

I've used a Powerbook as my primary laptop for about 7 years now, and behind it (since Linux 1.2 or somesuch) has always been some group of *nix servers. I presently have a G4, new in Nov. 2001. I have always used my laptops and servers together for - writing and running net-connected server apps, and running my life (Quicken, e-mail, etc) and prefer a Powerbook for running-my-life stuff, by a big measure.

OS/X is very nice for someone wanting to do this. I prefer the behaviours of the Mac interface and applications and always have. So this is the best of both for me, since I often have a terminal window open while working on a GUI app (e.g. 5 mins ago before I took this break, coding in CodeWarrior, running the app from a terminal window and editing something w/ pico)...

The nice big screen is, well, nice and big. Sometimes too big. I have a courier bag for biking around with it, and a soft, snug case designed just to hold it - recommended if you're going to take it anywhere. Even if it's under your arm it seems to want to smack into things otherwise.

However sometimes the nice big screen is too damn big. If I were doing this again, I'd think about getting the smaller iBook. I do some video editing but it's not an everyday thing for me. ... iBook at half the price but not half the speed, and I'd still have a nice machine for *just about everything* plus money left over for drugs.

It's easy to take from place to place - joining new wireless or wired nets, or switching to a projection display always works very quickly and doesn't screw things up.

Have had a smattering of kernel panics, but not much to get too excited about. Greatest issue seems to be that while that apps are stable and work well, they are not yet mature, but I like them.

I like the feel of the keyboard. I like the trackpad. I've purchased a tiny external USB mouse that I often use as well.

some issues:

case cosmetics: The outer edge of the case (the last 1/4" all around then keyboard, and around the screen as well) is not titanium. It's some cheapass painted crap. The paint wears off and then it looks like your $2,500 Powerbook has a skin condition.

Brittle power supply connector: The AC adapter socket built into this seems designed to snap of. It's very tight and very brittle. Once I heard the motherboard creak a few times, I learned to be plus ultra careful plugging it in.

Do not use if you have a pacemaker: The case is electrically live when plugged into the wall. Go measure one, or if you are sensitive to 60Hz, just run your finger across the titanium surface of one that's plugged in. Wrote to Apple. Wrote to the US gov't agency that oversees consumer safety. No replies.

Excellent marshmallow toaster: WHen it was new, it was quiet. When it was less new (6 mos) it started to be very warm when running. Now it runs extremely hot - the fan comes on a lot. I bought these nice ventilation stands for laptops, and they help a lot (and swivel -too cool), but the whole heat up thing is screwed up.
heat

ln -s versus alias, what the hell? A minor point, or is it. If I `ln -s` to create a link, the Finder is perfectly fine with it. If I create an alias via the Finder, it puts the info in the resource fork rather than doing the Right Thing in the file system. What the hell is that all about?

And my battery died From the start, the promised 5 hours never materialized. Ever. More like 2 hours 45 minutes of runtime on a full charge. Then one day (after about 9 monhts) the battery decided that a full charge would mean 45 minutes of runtime, and that's how it stands now.

I am sending it in for warranty work next week. They can't promise it will come back with my data on it, so I have had to purchase an external hard drive to back it up to ($300) which sucks (yes, i was backing it up regularly to one of my Linux boxes via Retrospect, but I wanted a LIVE backup as well - this is my life and livelihood we're talking about!). It will be gone for a week. Not sure what I'm to do for a week while they have it. I hope that goes okay.

And I am going to have to purchase an Applecare warranty (another $300) for two more years of warranty coverage, considering the record of this thing.

In summary: Buy an iBook if you just want a nice portable computer that integrates nicely with *nix and other systems. Save the extra money for women, booze and Ticketmaster service charges.

Re:I do it...

[gig]

Aliases aren't file system links, they're links to the file by a special number each file gets (I think it's called a node number). The user can rename the target file and the alias will still point to the target. This aspect of HFS+ is also what lets you rename MP3 files (for example) and iTunes will still know that a song is the same song. It's like the computer is using its own naming convention (long unique numbers) which frees up file names for the user to do as they please. You can rename and move apps and documents on the Mac and stuff keeps on working.

Re:Serious question

[NumberSyx]

then why can't I put OSX on my IBM clone

Well, you can and you can't. OS X is coded and compiled for PPC processors not x86, so going out and buying a copy and installing it on your x86 PC is out. You can however get the underlying OS Darwin, it is free for the download, there is even a port to x86. The problem here is, first Darwin does not come with the pretty OS X GUI, it is command prompt only, you must get the Darwin port of X Windows for a GUI and second, the x86 port of Darwin supports a very narrow band of hardware. If you are considering this, goto the Darwin site and read the hardware compatibility list and build your system accordingly, otherwise you will be very disappointed.

Oh, you're going to switch all right

[Silas]

You're going to switch to OS X now, or you're going to switch to OS X later. The only question you have to answer is "what section of the train do I want to be on?" The engine's already rolled past...do you want to be comfortable in the middle coach cars, or running behind the caboose trying to catch up?

Seriously: I'm a switcher...a power-user/sysadmin who used Windozes and frumped around with RedHat/FreeBSD desktops for a long time, got up the nerve to try OS X, and I'm not looking back. I tell people who laugh (as they drool over my TiBook) and/or don't understand that in 5 years, they'll be using OS X too. Their laugh is a little more strained at that point, because I think they sense that I may be right. Maybe they *want* me to be right.

The plunge is totally worth it. If I had the cash, I'd offer you a money-back guarantee. OS X is the future of desktop computing.

Some other obvious options

[Baki]

1. windows client with X-window server, linux server

2. vmware, run either windows + linux in vmware or linux + windows in vmware (depending on the operating system where you need native I/O and graphics speed the most).

I use both option 1 and 2. A windows desktop for games etc., and fullscreen X-window access to my linux server (running X-windows fullscreen you get a 100% illusion that you're working directly on a linux/unix system). The server also runs vmware with a win2000, for some long-running windows programs such as P2P leeching or mpeg2 rendering. I prefer to do that on the server, since running games tends to cause frequent reboots/crashes on my windows client.

Re:Some other obvious options

[jbolden]

1. windows client with X-window server, linux server

This with Solaris instead of Linux was a setup I used at work for a very long time. I liked it so much had it at home (though this time with Linux). Problem it is a 2 machine setup which isn't too bad for desktops but is unworkable for laptops.

So yes I guess I should have included this option but added the 2 machine problem.

Re:Some other obvious options

[Baki]

I use VNC to display vmware (running win2k) on, so I can disconnect and reconnect at a later time (while rebooting my client PC :).

However, for real interactive GUI work VNC is absolutely no match to a decent X11 implementation.
VNC is nice to remotely control and disconnect/reconnect to sessions, but for GUI over LAN access, X11 is the only sensible option.

Apple is Non-Free

[SubtleNuance]

Id consider OSX if it wasnt Proprietary, Non-Free software. Sure the kit has its merits, but I cant see getting fooled again...

Re:After 17yrs of Windwoes and 3 yrs of Linux.

[hearingaid]

Early beta tester, perhaps?

The original 286-friendly version of Windoze I think was released around '85. That is, Windows 1.0. Nobody used it before 3.0, I know, but it was out before.

Worked for me... somewhat

[srhuston]

Being a Unix sysadmin, I wanted a laptop that ran Unix. And since I got to hand-hold all the users in my department when they had problems installing Linux on their laptops, I didn't want to do that with my own machine. Stupid little things, like you need to find and download a binary X server, built-in wireless doesn't quite work right... things that can be fixed, but perhaps require little work-arounds that make you end up keeping some sort of Windows on the box just in case you need feature X, Y or Z.

Enter the TiBook, top-of-the-line model that the department got for me (hey, if they want me to support it, I've got to have some way to learn it :> ) On the day it arrived, I powered it on to hear the Mac "Bong", followed by nothing. DOA unit, wouldn't turn on the display, external display didn't work either, nothing. So for the first week of owning it, it was in the shop getting its motherboard replaced. Now, the sticker inside the battery compartment which shows the serial number and MAC address, has the wrong MAC address (on-board NIC was replaced along with the mobo). Stupid little thing, yes, but it makes it look to me like it's got things wrong with it.

So a weekend goes by, and now it's got a purple line from the top of the screen to the bottom, right over F9. Call Apple again, they pick it up on Tuesday, I get it back on Thursday (damn nice if you ask me), purple line is gone but now there's a handful of stuck pixels throughout the screen. Apple says it's "within tolerance", but of the 4 other TiBooks in the department none of them have *any* problems with their screens.

While I love the OS, and adding packages with Fink is simple and handy (I now have a fully functional network analyzer, 10/100/1000 & wireless, running Ethereal, MacStumbler, etc. And unlike a Fluke, it runs Solitaire and Nethack too :> ), I am concerned with two things:

1) It was in Apple's posession more than it was in mine for the first two weeks of "ownership", for service.

2) Why did I just pay a hair over $4000 for what looks like a refurbished laptop, not a brand new one?

Re:Worked for me... somewhat

[herwin]

It sounds refurbished... Was the hard drive new?

Re:Worked for me... somewhat

[herwin]

OK, I see the issue. I have a PB G4/500 that I use as a brain supplement, a PB G3/400 that my wife and I use to play DVDs (region-free 8), and a dual G4/1000 desktop that I use for research (neuroscience and security). VPC gives me access to Windows, and fink to the Linux world. No complaints. I suspect your box was a return that was refurbished and sent out again.

Re:Serious question

[MaxVlast]

All of the open source parts are still open source. (Even though they're all in the BSD license and don't have to be. Compare BSD and GPL some day.) The closed source parts are written by Apple and kept in a safe deep below Apple headquarters (figuratively.)

As to the latter part, that's not a practical thing to do.

Re:Pointing Devices (was Re:Mac Laptops)

[MaxVlast]

A major reason is that trackballs are a lot thicker than trackpads. If you look inside a trackball-bearing notebook, usually there is nothing below the device for lack of space. With laptops so thin nowadays, old-fashioned trackballs just aren't practical. Heck, the ball on a PowerBook 160 is roughly as thick as the entire TiBook.

I, too, miss trackballs, but we're stuck with pads (and I hate points.)

Re:Not on an ibook!

[Snuffub]

then i would suggest you take your ibook and get it looked at right away, maybe one of your ram chips got unseated through some freak accident so youre only using it with 64MB or something. my experience with a 400MHz imac (G3 processor) was completely different. with 10.1 and 10.2 (which i used for only a week before upgrading to my new tower) performance was very respectable. playing dvds was hit or miss but asside from that i could do pretty much any consumer type work on it without problem, i never tried to say.. recompile mozilla, or use photoshop for anything over small images but. but for evertyhing else, no problem.

OS X on an iBook

[eparkin]

I've been using my 700mhz iBook for roughly 3.5 months now and I have to say, I'm never going back to Linux as a day-to-day machine. I will however keep my FreeBSD server(s) for now.
I'm lead software architect for a financial firm developing fairly large applications (as well as a couple of necessary kludges in this business). I needed a machine (preferably a laptop) which would give me the freedom to move about while taking my development environment with me.
My first foray into real computers started in 1986 when I bought my first Amiga 1000. I progressed through multiple Amigas (I ended up running a 12 Line BBS (Somerton Telecomm) from 1987-1996) and became quite used to certain ways of doing things. Mostly the command line interface and it's unix slant towards directory paths and commands. We used to bust on Macs because they didn't offer anything for the power users.
I moved to WinTel PC's in the latter half of 1996. I was at first enthralled with some of the really "neat" stuff I was able to do, but that lasted about 3 months. The current version of Slackware Linux at the time was installed, and I had a dual boot machine. Win 95 & Slackware. I did my perl development in Slackware, along with website development. Eventually bought my wife her own machine and that too was a dual boot.
Flash forward to roughly 2 years ago. The wife was getting fed up with Win2000 Professional. She went 100% Mandrake Linux. (She's a professional illustrator). Loaded with a SCSI Scanner, The GIMP, etc. she was good to go. I was running FreeBSD in various versions (I still do).
Started seeing and hearing more about these OS X laptops, the iBooks and the TiBooks. Did a bunch of research, decided to go with it and bought a 700mhz iBook w/Airport Card and 640MB of ram/30GB hard drive. I've enjoyed its ability so much that I went and bought an identical one for my wife. She loves it as well. Still have to install Gimp on hers (I have it on mine), but again, she is not only using her Linux box for Scanning because i don't have Gimp installed yet for her to touch up her comic strip (www.doemainofourown.com). That'll happen soon.
End result. Jaguar is killer, and it runs super quick on the 700mhz iBooks. 10.1.5 was decent, and I've heard the older versions of OS X were abysmal so I can understand where some people are coming from. Try it, you'll love it.
My iBook: 700mhz, 640MB ram, 30G HD, Java, Python, Perl 5.8, PHP4, MySQL, Mozilla 1.1, Chimera, GCC 3.1, NetBeans 3.3.2. Ati Radeon 16mb onboard. OpenGL 1.2.. Runs like a dream. Oh, and a firewire webcam.. who needs a video camera when you have one of those.. (iBot).

As a side note: I only found that the majority of people who bitch about OS X and Apple, and about it not being free, are the people who can't afford them. This is their problem, not Apples.

Re:OS X on an iBook

[ealar dlanvuli]

You forgot to add "My name is eparkin, and I'm a computer geek" at the end

all posts praising "switch" must do so, it is the law!!

you have been warned

That's horseshit

[greygent]

An 800 dusts a 500mhz TiBook badly, including MP3 encoding. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet that's in an ugly little table...

opinion of a sysadmin with a TiBook

[Raleel]

It's awesome. I love it. I have a nearly 2 year old hand me down 500Mhz from my boss. I put linux on it first. Linux is fast as hell on it. No question. But then I had problems like playing dvds, getting a kernel that worked the way I wanted it. Yellowdog didn't even get my X right (this was just a few weeks ago when I tried again).

I'm a happy as a clam os x user. It's nice to have everything just work instead of fighting with it all the damn time. I like dicking with systems, don't get me wrong, but sometimes I just want to rip a cd or watch a dvd.

I say go for it. I _love_ my TiBook...the form factor is awesome. Yes, they keyboard kinda blows,, but you get used to it after a while. The one button mouse thing I got over. I do like that it seems that they put everything where I expected it. When I wanted an ñ, I hit option n n...really, i didn't know it before, I just tried hitting option n and got a ~, but selected and up high...I figured if I hit an n again, it would just work. It did. Last night I was zoning out to mp3s watching the visual display full screen. I wanted to move forward a track in my play list. I hit the right arrow instinctually, and it did the right thing.

OSX is ready

[esme]

I've used a bunch of different OSes over the years, starting with DOS 5x/6x, Win 3.1 and MacOS 7x in the early to mid nineties. I used Win 9x for a while, but also started using Linux. I started using Linux fulltime around three years ago, but added MacOS 9 when I wanted to do some video editing -- we got an iMac. When the OSX Public Beta came out, I put that on the iMac and never went back. My wife and I both got new portables about six months ago (iBook for her, work sprang for a TiBook for me), and I've been using that fulltime since. I still have a linux box for a webserver and NAT, but almost never login on the console.

OSX 10.0 and 10.1 had some major problems. But as more apps have been ported from OS9 to OSX, and with 10.2 giving a much needed performance boost, I think OSX is definitely ready. It's a really good user experience, though not as polished as OS9, yet. When I occasionally login to my linux box (RH7.2 w/GNOME), I find it very jolting -- the UI isn't as consistent, the apps seem to take longer to load (maybe the stupid bouncing icons in the Dock are good for something...), etc. With Fink, a reasonably modern JDK, XDarwin, etc., you can run almost anything that's available for linux on OSX.

My only major complaint is that there isn't a decent backup system. All the command-line tools lose your resource fork and HFS+ attributes (which makes the system and apps useless). None of the GUI tools are any good. I've been using Retrospect for a while, but it's very flaky and the interface is horrible. Still, it's the best I've found.

-Esme

Re:Serious question

[Jezza]

Well for a start the Cocoa libraries aren't open source, nor are the Carbon ones, and you can forget classic!

So no that stuff CAN'T run on OS X on Intel. Aqua isn't going to work either (though I don't see that matters given the above).

However what IS open source can be (has been) ported onto Intel. That's called "Darwin" (a stupid name to be sure). It works and is complete, this gives you a full Unix (of the BSD style) with compilers and lots of toys. There is stuff you'd probably not expect there too - how about a free mpeg4 steaming server? (I know!)

To this you can add X-Windows, and a WindowManager of your choice (personally I like WindowMaker). Now if you want a OS X experience take a look at GNUstep - an open source implementation of the OpenStep API and tool set (Cocoa is based on this). I don't know if anyone has done this yet (but it seems like an obvious thing to do - so I'd not be suprised).

If you're really into this idea - take a look at Apple's Darwin pages, and www.dawinfo.org and www.gnustep.org.

Hope this helps :-)

The costs aren't necessarily that bad

[JonathanF]

You'd be surprised. The 12.1" iBook is a pretty good bargain for a small laptop. I'll use Canadian prices for comparison, since that's what I have to deal with myself.

Most Windows-based slim laptops are actually quite expensive. The closest I've really found to the iBook is Sony's Superslim Pro, which is a full $300 more than the iBook 700 - and it's debatable whether the Sony is faster. CPU arguments aside, the iBook has dedicated video (a Mobility Radeon); the Sony has a chipset with shared video memory, and I can tell you from personal experience that nothing kills video performance like needing to use system memory.

What's more amusing is that the Toshiba Portegé 2000 is actually a popular laptop, but it's $900 more than the same iBook 700... and it's not only slower, it doesn't even come with a docking station. You're paying for chic alone, and really the iBook does a better job of that.

I won't deny that Apple is expensive, but they can make a convincing case in the portable world. I'm looking to replace my clunky Toshiba with an iBook, but heck - if I weren't in university, I'd probably be considering a Powerbook!

Re:The costs aren't necessarily that bad

[call -151]

The comparison gets even more favorable when you factor in the durability issue. My Sony VAIO Superslim-whatever was a nice machine and it was nice not carring the cdrom/floppy stuff around since I only used it when at home, but boy was that thing fragile. Sony's business model is that when something breaks, you send it back to Fremont and it always took several weeks. Even the screws on the base (which kept falling out) were not available to Sony distributors to fix. I cannot be without my laptop for several weeks at a time- and I had to send it back to be fixed four times in just over two years. The thing was ridiculously fragile, had awful battery life, and external video was a hassle.

My iBook seems to have been built for 10-year olds, has great battery life, and has been ridiculously sturdy. The one time it needed attention was when I dropped the screw into the innards upgrading the RAM (oops), and my local Apple place dismantled the whole thing and put it back together while I sat in their lobby using a loaner in under an hour. The 12" screen is great (why would anyone with non-ancient eyes want the 14" model- it's the same screen res, just bigger, heavier (ok, slightly better battery life) and costs way more? I wonder how many people buy it just because it costs more...) and of course Airport is wonderful. It's light, has a sharp display, and good battery life and seriously, I can't think of anything I would want more these days. My killer apps are ssh, vi, gcc and perl so I'm totally happy...

Switched, then Switched Back

[rjamestaylor]

I *did* switch to using a TiBook G4550 w/ 768MB RAM as my primary laptop. This worked well until my web development went from general public-access sites to b2b sites that had standardized on Win/IE[56]. The result--I switched back to Win2k on my Toshiba 2805. Supporting a Windows world via MacOSX is not pleasant.

There were other reasons why I wasn't ultimately satisified with OSX (pre Jaguar...I never did see Jaguar), so see my journal on the subject for more info.

Re:Not on an ibook! - maybe yours

[victim]

I wonder how you meausured CPU use. top is tempting, but should never be used for that. It is far too easily skewed by processes that respond to timed interrupts or that yield the processor voluntarily. You should make a benchmark mode where your program does not do the updates for some period and compare its progress to the version with updates.

Wait a ding dong minute! You said terminal updates and simple C++ program. You are printing on standard output to a terminal aren't you?!? Well DUH! So you compute a couple thousand instructions, find a prime and then scroll the terminal window which involves copying a half million pixels. No Quartz Extreme for you, the CPU is doing the scroll.

If this is the case I officially proclaim your test silly on the grounds that...

• You can not possible read those numbers as they blast past
  
• You are using a very general purpose tool, terminal, for a specific high performance operation.
  
• What you really mean to show is how many primes/second are being found. A blasting terminal can convey that, but not with any accuracy and at a great CPU cost. Better to draw a scrolling graph at a fraction of the CPU cost and screen space, plus providing clear temporal trends and specific quantitative data. I'd also have a 'biggest one found yet' number that updates every second.

For more normal tasks...

I run OS X on a 300MHz G3 iBook and a 500MHz G3 iBook. Both do a fine job of document prep, email, and web surfing. The 500 does a fine job in Project Builder, the 300 is a little RAM light for that.

I was testing my opengl network visualization program on the 500MHz G3. 20fps (it is throttled at that, no sense going faster, its not like my T1 lines are going to gib me if I'm a reaction time later :-), full screen, 15% cpu utilization. Seems like plenty of power for me. (Ok, if you put a translucent window on top of the opengl view it goes to 1fps, 100% cpu, but that is probably because this unit can't run the Quartz Extreme.)

Switching, switching, switching

[Dixie_Flatline]

I had OSX on my G3 300 Powerbook. I sold it to someone in California. Then I sold one of my mountain bikes. It looks like I'm selling my PC as well. Why?

So I can buy me a sweet Dual-G4. Sure, I'll only be able to buy the bottom model, but dual 867s is more than enough for me to do my daily grind on. OSX on the Powerbook sold me. I loved it so much, but I'll admit that it was occasionally a bit laggy. It was excellent for being a remote terminal when I had headless machines around me. I only half switched before, because of the cost. I've decided now that I'm sick of fighting with my machines. The cost of my time is now more than worth the money I'm going to spend. I'm sick of trying to get things like Gnome 2.x to compile (took me a week because of some Xft problems) and then discovering that Gnome 2.x is possibly the worst user interface that I've ever had to beat my head against. I know where I stand with OSX. I start up the computer, it works. I do my work on it, that's all. Add Space.app into the mix, and I've got multiple desktops, and the world is a glorious place. :)

So Hi. I'm Jan Sacharuk, and I'm a games programmer.

Re:Switching, switching, switching

[Dixie_Flatline]

Hmmm. Very interesting. You're right about Space.app, but the big thing there is that it's free. :)

Still, if VirtualDesktop works as advertised, I'll pay $20 for it. :)

Re:Ugh, where to begin...

[firewort]

You're obviously reading much more into my earlier reply than I actually wrote.

Moshe Bar isn't a Mac user- he's a linux user. Accusing him of being as stupid as a Mac user is inaccurate and ill-deserved. He chose his words poorly, and you, like many others, understood that he ties wireless performance to the OS.

For a Mac, that's almost the case, since it's pretty rare that you would use anything other than the Apple Airport card for wireless (although for those of us with older powerbooks, or other needs, it is possible to use proxim, cisco, and lucent cards. Users of those cards are not in the majority.)

Moshe Bar's primary language isn't English. You'll forgive this apparent error. I'm pretty certain that he was simply citing the experience and obsvering that the kid with the iBook got signal where he didn't- and that he knows as well as anyone that OS isn't a factor.

As for Fair Use, and Apple, I never claimed that Apple protects fair use. You assigned that to me.

I only suggested that there are ways in which you can do what you want, and Apple won't prevent you from doing them. They don't assist you, but they stay out of your way, which is worth remembering.

Apple protects itself from liability. Shipping a DVD Player application without region management and anti-commercial-skipping would be, as a business decision, suicidal- like asking the MPAA to joust, when you're armed with a dead flower instead of a metal spear.

Haven't they got enough problems, having shipped the iPod, which the RIAA would readily like to outlaw?

Re:Serious question

[robbieduncan]

Darwin != OSX

Darwin is the core of the OS. It consists of (iirc) the Mach kernel and the BSD layer, but not the higher OSX layers (Quartz, Open GL, Carbon, Cocoa, QuickTime and so on). So any command line app should run, but iPhoto which relies on Quartz, Cocoa and some other stuff will not.

Not now, guys!? Please consider NOT switching.

[puppetluva]

Here's why you should NOT switch to a MacOSx machine.

1. You are locked into the hardware. What if Apple does something you don't like in the future? What are you going to run, TurboLinux? Forget it. The only distro that treats all platforms the same is classic debian. If you think that getting packages/support on other platforms besides x86 is just as easy, think again.
   
2. Microsoft controls Mac adoption. Think I'm kidding? I was a HUGE mac fan and Mac administrator years ago. Macs started to get popular, so what does M$ do? They fail to release an update to Mac Office FOR EIGHT YEARS. Apple almost goes down the toilet. This will happen again if it is in M$'s best interest. I think that the only reason M$ supports Apple is that Apple can steal the Unix crowd's user-base. M$ is secretly happy about the "switch" ads because they sound so much like Linux advocacy and can confuse the Linux/BSD crowd into going with proprietary software. THEY WILL SWITCH LINUX USERS BEFORE M$ USERS. In most cases, M$ users have no choice, and hence no mobility towards MacOSX in most cases.
   
3. Open Office.org's health is good for everyone. Switching to the Mac enables people to use M$ Office blissfully without contributing bugfixes, comments etc. to OpenOffice --which we all own the rights to use. It just got good enough to replace M$ Office. Don't jump ship now - we are taking over - it just takes time. (You've seen the fruits of our the community's labor, so you know I'm not just blowing smoke).
   
4. The IPod doesn't support Ogg. No players will support Ogg unless people ask for it. IPod means MP3 or WMA formats ( I think ). If you are switching for the IPod, ask Apple to support linux first - or use gnupod. IPod is like a vote for proprietary codecs. We have just gotten free codecs for audio and video (The Ogg Family). . . we should support them.
   
5. You waited for: good, free GUI desktops, mozilla, OpenOffice, XMMS, etc. etc. etc. NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN CREATED IF WE HAD ALL BEEN MAC USERS ALL THIS TIME.
   
6. Believe it or not, Slashdot and linux are wedded. If there was no Linux talk here, a major percentage of the audience would be elsewhere. If Cmdr Taco and others are no longer going to "live the life", this forum will lose its credibility. I'm not here for the articles on space travel and I suspect MANY others aren't either.
   

I don't work for Sun, I don't work for RedHat or any other distro. My choice of helping out with linux works for everybody though. Please stay in the game.

Review of iBook, by a 'Switcher'

[CompVisGuy]

Hi

I bought an iBook about two months ago, and below is a review of the machine. I jusst bashed out the review, so my apologies for the poor structure etc.

I am a PhD student, and I wanted a laptop for the following reasons:

1. To write papers and my thesis on, using LaTeX.
2. To watch movies on if I'm travelling to/from meetings and conferences.
3. To surf the web and send/receive email.
4. To edit code. I didn't want to actually run my code on the laptop, becasuse my experiments often take several days to complete on a high-end PC.
5. To 'log in' to my work machine to check if code is running, channge settings, get a file etc. My work machine runs Windows (sigh), so the laptop has to talk to that remotely.
6. To use on the uni's network, and use my 'home' account (in this case a Windows account).
7. To drive projectors, for presentations at conferences.

I'll focus my review on the above, but first I'll talk about the reasons I picked an Apple.

Laptops are expensive. But in my line of work (OK, I'm a student, stop that sniggering at the back...), I need a computer that I can use when I'm running an experiment on my main machine. It helps to be able to write code/papers on a laptop, so I can sit in front of the TV, or at my girlfriend's place, or in a coffee house.

I originally wanted a Dell, so I could install Linux, but there are problems with this:
1. Linux isn't supported by Dell.
2. Drivers for laptops often come out ages after a new laptop has rolled off production (if at all), and their quality varies. So there's no guarantee that Linux will work and be stable on a laptop. I accept that desktops are another matter -- I have RH7.3 on my home Dell desktop running fine.
3. Dell's aren't cheap.
4. I don't really want to have to pay for a MS OS that comes pre-installed if I'll never use it.

A friend told me about a TiBook that his work colleague has and how wonderful it was. I started checking out the apple.com website, and became quite interested in OS X. Then I saw a colleague's iBook. That convinced me. I could do everything i wanted on the iBook. I bought one.

Firstly, the price of the iBook was cheaper than a similarly-specced machine. It's a 700MHz G3 (which I reckon gives similar performance to a 1GHz Celeron) with 256MB of RAM and a 16MB 3D graphics card. The screen is a 12" 1024x768 TFT LCD. I opted for the CD-ROM version, rather than the DVD-CD/RW combo option because of price (I already have a CD/RW on myn desktop, and I'll discuss the DVD/movie watching later). Apple give an educational discount, which means that the machine cost me just under £1200 (UK Pounds) and that included a 3 year warranty (also discounted). At the time, I could have bought an entry-level Dell laptop, without the 3 year warranty, with a similar spec (but perhaps a DVD drive, and definitely a larger screen (well, in terms of inches, the number of pixels would be the same)).

The first iBook arrived dead. It didn't work. The Apple helpline people were friendly and efficient, and ordered me a replacement, which arrived just over a week later. Although this was a bummer, the Apple helpline people sounded amazed that this happened, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that my experience was unusual.

When the second one arrived, I was amazed. The design is flawless. There isn't a laptop (or desktop) in the PC world that is as well designed as the iBook. The screen, although seemingly small, is wonderful. It allows the laptop to be small, but you still get the full 1024x768 pixels at 24bit colour -- because the pixels are smaller than those on a 14" screen at the same 1024x768, text and graphics look much nicer -- I have to look very closely to see the pixels. The screen has a well-designed hinge that has the effect of taking the screen away from you when you open the computer -- not like PC laptops that just have a simple hinge. The ports are nicely arranged. The speakers are adequate. The machine has no fan to cool the processor (Apple select chips properly, instead of doing an intel and designing chips that they can write a big number next to and rely on people's stupidity to buy the 1GHz PC because it will be "faster" than the 700MHz Apple [I used to be a chip designer, so I know what the right thing to do is]).

The battery life is amazing (I keep using that word). I can work for 4 hours on a single charge, listening to music (though not spinning the CD). Sometimes for 5 hours.

When you close the lid, the machine sleeps. When you open it it wakes up, often before the lid is fully open. Because of this (and the excellent reliability of the OS), I have shut down/rebooted less than 10 times since getting the machine. uptime tells me that the machine has been up for 6 days (I have never had the whole OS crash on me). Show me a PC laptop that has been up for 6 days! When the iBook sleeps, a white light snoozes from inside the machine, gently pulsating -- this shows evidence of good design: PC laptops use horrid LEDs chopped into their sides without any thought. This excellent level of design is carried throughout the iBook.

But the real test is whether I can do all those things I wanted to.

1. To write papers and my thesis on, using LaTeX.

Yes. There is a free LaTeX distribution called TeXShop which is excellent.

2. To watch movies on if I'm travelling to/from meetings and conferences.

Obviously the DVD-equipped models allow movie-watching, but what about my CD only iBook? Well, there is a free movie player called VLC that will play MPEG files, DVDs and VCDs. I can easily rip a DVD to VCD, and then play that.

[Note: I am only ripping DVDs that I own a copy of -- I do not advocate breaking copyright laws. Those in the US may be limited by the DMCA (write to your representatives, people!).]

3. To surf the web and send/receive email.

Yep. The bundled IE5 is a bit crap, but Opera just released their beta of Opera6 for Mac OSX. I am currently using Mozilla for both web (with their mouse gestures plugin!) and mail. It's fine.

4. To edit code. I didn't want to actually run my code on the laptop, becasuse my experiments often take several days to complete on a high-end PC.

A little trickier. I have yet to find a really good text editor under OS X that I like. I use jEdit on the PC (an excellent Java-based text editor), but even though this is available for OS X (and even gets the OS X widgets), it is a little slow. I guess this is a JVM efficiency thing.

I have used Fink to download XEmacs and NEdit for X windows (OS X ships with an X server, and OroborosX is a Window manager that gives your X windows the look and feel of OS X), but I don't really like these. NEdit isn't as powerful as jEdit, and XEmacs is just weird, as a former PC user, but maybe I'll keep trying.

On the code front, OS X ships with Project Builder, an excellent IDE for application development on the Mac, which IMHO is better than MS Visual Studio. Since moving onto the Mac I've gotten back into C/C++ development. It should be easy to write UNIX apps that can then be compiled on Linux and other Unices.

Because OS X is UNIX, there are loads of apps and libraries out there just waiting to go.

5. To 'log in' to my work machine to check if code is running, channge settings, get a file etc. My work machine runs Windows (sigh), so the laptop has to talk to that remotely.

I used to use the Remote Desktop feature of MS's Netmeeting. Now I use VNC and the OS X VNCThing client to access my Windows desktop.

6. To use on the uni's network, and use my 'home' account (in this case a Windows account).

Yep. Easy. I can't print over the uni's network yet, but then I haven't really tried very hard. I understand printing in OS X 10.2 Jaguar is better. I could probably easily print from the command line, but this is a bit 1970's for me.

7. To drive projectors, for presentations at conferences.

Yep. Easy. Plug and go.

There's only the text editor that's the sticking point, but maybe someone will reply to this post with a suggestion.

Other nice things about OS X:
* Aqua. Lovely. It looks wonderful -- the anti-aliasing is much better than in WinXP. Although KDE and GNOME are fine projects, Aqua is much better IMHO.
* Being able to use one spell-checker in every OS X app.
* Built-in speech synthesis -- I can get the iBook to read me stuff on the web as I work on something else.
* Speech recognition -- I can tell the Chess game where I want to move my pieces!
* More than the one button mouse. I sometimes use an optical MS Wheelmouse, and it works fine without needing to install drivers. Left-mouse, right-mouse, and the wheel all work fine (even in many X-windows apps).
* "It just works". It's one of apple's mottos, and they're right. It does just work.

In conclusion, the iBook is the best computer I ever used (and I've used most major computers from the days of 8-bit processors and most major OSs). If Apple keep up their good work, I will never go back to a PC again.

Re:Review of iBook, by a 'Switcher'

[Etcetera]

A little trickier. I have yet to find a really good text editor under OS X that I like.

Try BB Edit (Lite = free, Pro = commercial). It's generally considered to be the BEST text editor for the Mac. I wish something like it was available for the PC.

I used to use the Remote Desktop feature of MS's Netmeeting. Now I use VNC and the OS X VNCThing client to access my Windows desktop.

Not sure if that's the same as MS's Terminal Server Client, but if so, MS just released a freeware version of that for the Mac as well.

Re:Review of iBook, by a 'Switcher'

[Etcetera]

you might want to try ultraedit. not free, but supposedly well worth the price.

A friend of mine suggested that, but I found it too "clunky" to use (and kind of slow). For now, I've settled on TextPad as a decent enough replacement. I can dream though.... =)

It Just Works.

[tyler9680]

I bought a TiBook 667 (512 Mb RAM, DVD/CD-RW, etc etc) in late August (so I could get Jaguar with it) and I haven't been happier. Before then I was a Windows XP user, where I used Linux for development. OS X really has the feel and power of Linux, but also has a wonderful UI. I think that is what hooked me on the Mac. I had looked at both Apples and PCs before buying. It was the fact that I could get all the nice parts of the Linux environment and the excellent user interface, but not have to worry about Windows crashing every two seconds. I installed the fink package manager and with that I've gotten most of all my favorite Linux applications. I plugged in my digital camera and it just worked. I plugged in my printer and it just worked. I added an external mouse (because trackpads are annoying after a while) and it just worked. I think you can see where I'm going with this.

Having said all that, its not without its drawbacks. Jaguar is not perfect, sometimes applications flip out and close for no reason, albeit this is rare. The software support is close to but not quite up to par with what I can get on Windows (insert flame here). That being said, I can't think of many more gripes I have for it.

Bottom line:
If you want a good powerful development/multimedia portable solution this is it, however I wouldn't just replace your desktop all the way. I still use my desktop quite a bit, its just nice to have the option of the portability.

I'm switching, too

[Charles Dodgeson]

OK, mod this redundent. I've got little to add to what others have said, but if a hand count matters here, I'll add my voice too.

I recently inherited a G4 and have installed Jaguar (10.2, now 10.2.1) on it. So, I'll make just a few points.

• I don't have to worry about rebuilding my kernel everytime I add some device that I didn't anticipate the last time I rebuilt my kernel.
• The UI is a bit tough to get used to (I know I could put in a more familiar WM, but I want to give this a change), but it is very very nice in many respects. But it ain't X, and I've got lots of old habits.
• fink is a must (as others have already pointed out). People are busy porting and packaging the stuff that I know and use to OS X. Fink is how to manage it.
• Administration can be a problem if you don't know what controls what. For example, some files in /etc really should only be edited by using the System Preferences GUI, while others can be modified by vi. Learning which is which takes some poking around. But this is true of any distro which provides high level tools for adminstration.
• Basically everything works. I don't have to fiddle with things to make the system usable.

My Linux system still remains my primary system for many things, put that is shifting function by function. (The single biggest limit is that I don't have proper air conditioning in the room where most of my boxes sit and I don't like leaving the G4 running all the time, until the weather cools down here.)

My Switching experience

[danielacroft]

Was a windows user (had tried linux (RH|Mandrake) on a number of occasions but it didn't stick) for about 8 years or so I guess.
Switched in May 2002 to a 667 DVI G4 PowerBook w 512MB RAM and 60GB HDD. I added an airport afterwards. Bought Jagwire.

Good Stuff:
*nix goodness - I'm studying comp sci externally (work full time) and I need a *nix machine for that, I also need a box that I can do the usual PC stuff with (word docs, spreadsheets, etc), the PB is that. :)
No, really, it just works. The other thing it does is just not work! It basically ignores stuff that it doesn't understand. For example I installed a 3COM nic PC Card in the card slot. It tells you that it's there but there are no drivers for it so you can't do anything with it. I would love to get a *nix driver for an extra NIC if there aren't osx drivers but I'm using multi-homing for now. Point is that it doesn't crash or complain.
MS software - Like it or loath it, MS software is a requirement for some people, I am one of them (yes that's right I don't want to worry about compatibility with open office or apple works).
Stress level - gone way down when using my PB as opposed to my PC at home or work. (I've sold my PC)

Bad Stuff:
One button - personal preference of course but the one button just annoys the hell out of me.
No Drivers - now that is annoying, I want to add an IR port (BT just works thank goodness) but I can't find anywhere that has drivers for any IR on OSX.
Waiting - waiting for new versions of stuff that has been out for a while is just annoying.
UI - some of the GUI is a bit evil (those damn window buttons are too small for my liking). Button combinations for different stuff (shift + opt + cmd + ...) is often hidden and sometimes not standard (Preferences in apps: cmd + y or cmd + ; or nothing)
Mhz - 667 G4 != 2.0Ghz P4m, no marketing (lies perhaps) please, it's just plain wrong. It might be like a 1Ghz PIII if I'm lucky, perhaps a little more but that's it.

Summary:
Overall the performance is excellent. I only have the 667 but it really does run fast enough at the moment. Of course of if you put me infront of a quad 3Ghz+ Hammer I'm sure I'd notice, but I don't care. Battery life rocks, Try playing a whole DVD and then still having 30% battery life (I had 52% left once but I'm ignoring the outlyers). The TiBook is an excellent machine, if you can spare the $$$(^3) of course.

Re:After 17yrs of Windwoes and 3 yrs of Linux.

[ECXStar]

LOL, you ever hear of Windows 286 and 1.0? Yeah, I was networking that crap back in the Netware 1.x days.

I flirted, I adored, I switched

[al3x]

I'm happily typing this on a new white iBook 700MHz, rather decked out with a 40GB harddrive and 384MB of RAM. It may not have the raw horsepower of my roommate's Dell Inspiron 8200, but it also weighs a third of that behemoth, has more than twice the battery life, and most day-to-day operations feel faster, and the whole experience is more pleasurable. What do I mean by "pleasurable?" Example: as a longtime Linux user, I prayed for decent antialiasing system-wide (well, except for the terminal). OS X's PostScript-driven graphics layer makes everything look gorgeous, sharp and readable. It's like looking at a printed page, maybe better. And I can keep my terminal and anything under x-font size unantialiased if I so desire. That's pleasurable. It makes the machine I interact with hours a day enjoyable to use. Things just work, by and large. If I want to tinker, I can, but after years of spending hours and hours to get, well, ANYTHING working (somewhat self-inflicted: I used Gentoo, which I still love on the server side along with OpenBSD), it's amazing to just plug in devices and have them work the way they should. I forget who said it, but "Linux is only free if your time is worthless." With college, I don't have the time to tinker endlessly to get a printer working when I've got a paper due. There are tons of open source apps that have either been ported or are being natively developed for OS X. This is a slow transition for the Mac community, however, and you'll still find lots of shareware and commercial programs out there, particularly in the utilities/customization arena. But as someone who's learned to accept that commercial development works for some products and open source for others, I think the OS X community has the right idea in accepting and supporting both. I could go on for hours about how nice it is to have an OS that's actually integrated with its hardware, all the little aesthetic details and polish that Apple throws in, but most readers have heard it all before. I can safely say that as someone who's lived and breathed Linux (with forays into *BSD) for the last six years, I feel utterly satisfied with my switch, and I can reccomend it to anyone looking for a great desktop (or laptop) platform.

Re:I flirted, I adored, I switched

[knife_in_winter]

The quote you are thinking of is here: http://www.jwz.org/doc/linux.html:


But as we all know, Linux is only free if your time has no value, and I find that my time is better spent doing things other than the endless moving-target-upgrade dance.


For what it is worth, that is *exactly* why I switched from Linux to OS X for my primary desktop.

Besides, Apple hardware really is drop dead sexy. :)

MacOS X Security

[herwin]

The security boffins at Qinetiq in the UK like Mac OS X a _lot_--it's locked down out of the box! Unlike certain unnamed vendors, Apple takes security seriously and is extremely responsive in releasing security updates.

Flirting with Mac OS X?

[Steve Cowan]

Aww I was really hoping this article would be about how I can use my iBook to pick up girls in bars... I've tried this a few times and had no success...

"Hey baby, Steve Jobs says once you see this interface you'll want to lick it!"

"Your ~ or mine?"

"Let's make an iMovie!"

Best OS I've seen in a decade

[krray]

I'm in my mid 30's, have/had MSCE (DOA now :), RHCE, and CNE certificates, multiple degrees in computer science, and just been buried in the computer business for 15+ years. Today I'm the MIS/IT MGR where I work (and partly own :). Anyway...

I remember drooling over the NeXT. Way outside my price range though, but enjoyed working on them with my job at the time at North-Western in IL.

Here at work we grew up on the network originally with DOS, then WFW3.11, 98se, and finally 2K. I skipped 95/98 due to HORRIBLE networking issues. At one point I took a Win98se box home to FORCE myself to completely learn the OS. What a joke! At least my Linux box was moved to the basement and not just re-formatted. The Windows box literally lasted almost 6 months and went flying out the Window one day with too much of the garbage.

I sat there dumb founded. What do I do NOW? I love Linux, but the pissing match between KDE/Gnome, their complex setup/usage and so forth have kept them off my corporate desktops. Did I want to go back to Linux as my main GUI? I did then.

This was six months before OS X beta when I started reading about it. I bought a Cube for myself three months later and used OS 9 for three months. OS 9 was OK, and boy did I have it decked out and functional very quickly.

OS X initially was just OK. Coming from a Unix background it was obviously the right choice. As of 10.2 it's game over (for us :). I'm using source code I wrote ten years ago and compiling it on OS X no problem. Take _any_ package out there (ssh, ftp, apache, whatever) and compile/use it -- or just look around ... it's probably already installed. For example the "df/du" commands that ship with OS X stink, go grab the fileutils package, compile, and install.

It just works. And works. And works.

I personally now have a PowerMac (gave the Cube to my brother for home use), parents on the iMac, and a Powerbook for roaming (mostly the wife). Corporately I use a Mac daily (bouncing between all the OS' w/ VirtualPC -- 98se, 2K, XP, Linux, etc) as well as many Powerbooks in the field.

Interanally we're switching to Mac 100% as the existing equipment is depreciated (4 years) which is a concept Microsoft just does not "get". I thought it was simple accounting... I wish I had an extra 100K laying around so I could by a Mac for everybody _tdoay_.

I will say that my Mac users _never_ call me for help. I endlessly hear from Windows users though... Applications crashing (reboot needed), BSOD _still_ in 2K (though much more rare), configurations mysteriously getting munched, etc.

I have seen the Mac crash. Wow, the last time it happened (the 2nd time, 1st I saw was on BETA) the wife thought world war three had started by my reaction, "WHAT!? NO WAY! THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING!. I DON'T BELIEVE IT. IS THIS THE END?" -- as she came running upstairs to find out WHAT.

BUY A TWO BUTTON MOUSE

[neo]

You'd think you didn't have $12 left after buying that damn computer...

I'm using a two button mouse on my Mac right now and it works just fine, out of the box. Hell, it's set up to a KVM switch.

I didn't have to install any software, it just worked.

Re:BUY A TWO BUTTON MOUSE

[tshak]

I don't have room for an external mouse on a bus or plane. I need a fully functional pointing device BUILT IN to a laptop. I have no problem buying a Mac desktop then buying a nice 3 button w/scroll wheel mouse afterwords. But with a laptop, it must be built in. It's a bigger issue then Mac fanatics would like it to be. Apple needs to drop their ego and upgrade their one click pointing devices at least on the Ti's. Maybe it makes sense to keep things simpler on the iBook, but simpler!=efficient and the Ti's being a workstation need to be efficient.

Only games

[SuperKendall]

If you like Office, then you might want to take a look at Office X - I like at least a few of the programs much better than the Windows counterparts I use at work, and I know there are a lot of other people that feel the same. Personally I pray for the day we all use something other than word to send documents ot each other, but I know it's a little ways off yet.

At this point the Windows box is essentially a console (though a damn fine console). I came to the conclusion about a year ago I didn't want a fussy expensive console, and bought a PS2 and a Powerbook. The PS2 has enough great games I don't get bored, and just enough of the great PC games get ported to the mac to satisfy me (like UT or WCIII).

Instant on

[SuperKendall]

The instant-on feature of the Powerbook makes it worth something like eight times the money, considering you can get an easy days use out of one battery by only opening the laptop when taking notes. Great for conferences...

I've seen too many people wandering around the office with laptops open because they don't want to wait through the wakeup cycle... if it even wakes!! And of course they are trailing cords because they have to have the thing plugged in most of the time to last a day.

Then you have the great network switching ability, moving between various wireless and wired networks can be done without thought.

Oh, and obligatory reference about the hardware being better quality as others have noted.

Try it on an ibook!

[macsox]

I have been running X on my ibook since I got it about 18 months ago. even 10.2 runs fine on it.

here are some of the things i've never had a problem with:

-DVD/CD-Rom

-Power management

-CPU heat

enjoy!

Freedom

[SuperKendall]

You can get the source for the basic OS, just not Auqa or Quartz. If you want to alter the Mach or BSD layer, go ahead.

What do I use every day? Mostly Emacs and Mozilla and Java tools. OS X does give me something using those, in that I don't spend as much time configuring or fiddling with the system and therefore get to do more things with Mozilla, Emacs, etc.

I am a great believer in the GPL, and frankly I think OS X is the best possible combination of the Open and Closed worlds right now. When you want things to work they do, and if you want to use Open alternatives they are there and you can work on them. You could run only X programs and ignore Quartz if you liked.

I don't care about pretty but I do care about efficiency, and OS X is the most efficient system I've found. That's why I use OS X.

Re:Freedom

[Elwood P Dowd]

Eh. Kindof. Yes, you can use almost all open source software while in MacOS X. However.

Getting the source is not even close to good enough. Right now, you cannot install Darwin underneath MacOS X. 'Till that's possible, you cannot make a change to the source, recompile, and see the effects. For a serious programmer (which I'm not) I'd imagine that could be pretty frustrating.

Apple has managed a perfect balance, where they get all the benefits of open source, and none of the potential financial pitfalls. It'll be very hard for other folks to make/sell something like MacOS.

It might be the single best example of the difference between free/open source software. Yes, open source has made Apple's OS a great platform. Changing it for your own purposes is difficult.

Re:Asthetics

[fault0]

> The fact remains: MacOS X is everything linux dreams of being.

Except that it doesn't run on my x86 boxen. Not many people going to buy macs just for OSX.

Re:Ugh, where to begin...

[JabberWokky]

I'll tell you why: like most Mac users, he's too stupid to understand how technology works. He thinks Linux has something to do with the bad reception he gets!

Interesting, considering he's the creator of one of the more powerful clustering solutions for Linux, maintains a prominant fork of the kernel, and has been writing a regular series of deeply technical stories about Linux for Byte magazine for many years.

Yup - the man obviously knows nothing about Linux. You're right - stoopid Mac lusers. He-yuck.

--
Evan (no reference)

my reviews

[asv108]

I received the current top of the line powerbook to do some testing for work. I wrote a little review about it. Its pretty darn fast but for the price of my conifguration, I could buy a 3.5 pound Fujitsu P-2000 and build a top of the line Athlon system with 21in CRT.

So if you really want to go for OSX on a laptop you will probably want to go with an ibook unless you don't find spending the extra money painful. Personally, I will be sticking with my p-2000. It has a full size keyboard, DVD, CD-Burner, Built in Wireless, Firewire and 2 USB all integrated in to a 3.5 pound package.

I Just switched from Linux

[brainchill]

I have been using linux exclusively for about the last 3 years I have had to keep (like a thorn in my side) a windows machine in my home to run Photoshop. Because, and we're being honest here, there is nothing in the linux world that will do everything that photoshop will do as well as photoshop does it. This month I made the Apple switch. I bought a TiPbook. I never even wanted to look back. I can run vi, pine, apache and Photoshop all on the same machine withought windows. And the interface just makes you smile. It's like they locked a bunch of graphics designers in a room with a pile of heroin and told them to go wild.

Re:Not now, guys!? Please consider NOT switching.

[victim]

And from the other viewport...

1. You are locked into the hardware. - whatever I buy for hardware I will be locked in to for 3 years. (My buying cycle time.) I don't need anything other than what I have now to be happy for three years.
   
2. Microsoft controls Mac adoption. - microsoft controls my ability to pay my american express bill online. Thats it. AppleWorks does everything I need in an office suite. Freehand takes care of my compositing. I will kiss whoever integrates top notch vector layers with gimp.
   
3. Open Office.org's health is good for everyone. Sounds good to me, but switching to the mac doesn't mean you shell out $300 for Office. That's just silly.
   
4. The IPod doesn't support Ogg True, nor does any other mp3 player. Oops, that was a silly contradiction, you know what I meant. The rumor I hear and believe is that iTunes 4 goes to a plugin architecture for sound formats and ogg support is in. I hopefully assume that means ogg in the ipod at the same time. Sometime next year. I can wait to re-rip my aluminized polycarbonate music ownership tokens until then.
   
5. You waited for: good, free GUI desktops... And I'm still waiting. Its getting better, but I no longer have the time to work on making the tools, I need something that works. (My linux machine that runs the 8ball robot ate 10 hours of my time last night and still isn't right. USB driver problems. Using the USB camera because kernel updates broke the bttv card support. Maybe I'll go back to the bttv and see how that goes. It doesn't take but a couple of those to pay the software bill to get a machine that just works.)
   
6. Believe it or not, Slashdot and linux are wedded communities change and evolve. People's interests change.
   

I also don't work for Sun, I don't work for RedHat either, but do work for Debian. My choice of helping out with linux works for everybody though.

Re:After 17yrs of Windwoes and 3 yrs of Linux.

[JabberWokky]

Nobody used it before 3.0

I used 2.x on a few systems - it wasn't really so much an OS or even a shell as much as a add-on library that things like Harvard Graphics or some other paint program required. Kinda like how the original AOL required... Gem, was it? Some other windowing software of that era. Not Desqview... I was a Desqview user, but whatever it was looked really nice. Windows stunk, although it did support 16 color CGA (aka Tandy CGA) nicely.

--
Evan (no references)

TiBook handout registration thread

[victim]

Sorry if this is redundant, but I couldn't find the thread where the rest of us register to get cheap TiBooks from Apple.

Maybe Apple could have a special refurb sale for switching slashdotters? (Don't get your hopes up, refurbed TiBooks go for about $200 off retail. Damn those computers that keep their value.)

So sign up in a reply to this so Apple knows how many machines to set aside for the Switch-a-Nerd program.

Re:Pointing Devices (was Re:Mac Laptops)

[MaxVlast]

I actually agree. I use a Kensington TurboMouse 4.0 as my primary pointer-control device.

Re:After 17yrs of Windwoes and 3 yrs of Linux.

[perlyking]

I stand corrected, noob that I am :-)

To repay my debt to slashdot society here is a page that you might find interesting on the subject.

Join us Taco!

[Aqua OS X]

Come on Taco, do it...join us :)

I did

[krokodil]

After 10 years of using Unix as my primary and only OS on BSD386, Xenix 286, SCO Unix, HPUX (with VUE), Solaris (with OpenWindows and later CDE), Linux (KDE and then GNOME) I switched to MacOS X. With XDarwin and OroborOSX switch is painless and really not big deal.

I committed to the switch yesterday.

[crankyspice]

Read all about it on my blog. A quick look at my resume will tell you I'm a Linux fan from way back, but I like what Apple has done... A UNIX for all intents and purposes, with lots of mainstream applications (Office should I choose to sell my soul even further, Photoshop and Premiere, the Macromedia Flash authoring tool, Warcraft III). All without using WineX (none of my PCs are fast enough to run WineX, though they're fast enough for everything else I do), or jumping through hoops. I used to love fiddling with Linux distros; now I'm working full time, consulting as a PHP/Perl programmer, and in law school, so I just don't have time. Hence, MacOS X...

And who's gonna pay for that ???

[Abreu]

We need a company that is as creative as Apple to make a desktop for Linux. Or Apple should try making a desktop for Linux in addition to there present products.

And who's gonna pay for that developement? Do you think people are going to pay 150-200usd for a linux desktop?

Much nicer than an IBM ThinkBrick

[pvera]

At my previous job I used three different IBM ThinkPads. These are great, even if they are expensive as hell and very very heavy. But they worked fine.

At my new job (I am employee #9 on a 11-person company) everybody has macs except me. Since I am the web developer and the code is in asp I inherited two Windows 2000 boxes. I had been dying to switch to mac since January, and this was the last excuse I needed to make the jump.

I got a killer deal for an iBook 600 with 256MB RAM (already upped to 384), airport and MS Office v:X retail. The whole bundle cost me less than a retail iBook 700 with 128MB of ram and no airport.

I am very happy with OS 10.2 and I have been able to do all my ASP work with just BBEdit Pro and the MS Remote Desktop client. I can manage my freeBSD and Linux servers thru the terminal without any theatrics. My friends that used to make fun of me for even considering the mac are now changing their minds when they see how easy it has been for me to make the switch. Plus the iBook is so light I don't feel it on my backpack.

I am of course counting down the days for when I can afford to get a Titanium Powerbook :-)

Re:Not on an ibook!

[TellarHK]

Well, with 10.1.5 I would have probably agreed with you. I bought the iBook based on my desire to try OS X, and really had started to feel a significant amount of buyer's remorse. The video card in my model doesn't support Quartz Extreme, it only has 64M of RAM base (upgraded to 192 with a luckily compatible cheap stick of 128M) and it's the G3 500 Mhz model with none of the extras.

Prior to acquiring Jaguar, I was seriously considering selling the iBook. It just wasn't -fun- or even pleasant to use under a lot of circumstances. It was sluggish, and I knew it was a model at the end of a generation of hardware. Now that I have Jaguar installed, it has a whole new lease on life. The video responsiveness is much improved, in just about all circumstances. It's still no GeForce, but for an ATI Rage, it's clunking along decently.

Re:Many Slashdotters NOT Linuxheads. OSX just bett

[puppetluva]

An argument can be made that OSX is the perfect combination of Open Source and commercial interests. OS X finally does "Just Work" with a nifty geek-friendly back-end while many of its technologies are open.


I'm not interested in open-source. I'm interested in free. That's my problem with Apple. If apple shows you the source-code, but doesn't let you improve or change it, then it isn't free. Linux got where it is because it is free.


So what you're reading in this thread IS truly terrible for Linux development. OSX has beaten Linux at its own game. If we have true competition rather than Linux or open source zealotry, OS X will win, IMO.


I don't understand this comment. My understanding was that Linux' game was to provide a great free(dom) operating system. OSX hasn't done that and won't ever do that. I don't begrudge OSX users. . . and I don't think that we should just be "zealots" in the Linux camp -- but OSX simply won't "win" a game it never played.

Just being Unix is not enough to "win". . . there was plenty of Unix before OSX. Besides, I would prefer that we all "win", rather than have MacOSX "win".


Finally - just because open source development matured (birthed?) with Linux doesn't mean that it will die if Linux dies. In other words - it doesn't follow that future open source development will be dependent on Linux.


I certainly hope you are right. . . but a blow to Linux will CERTAINLY be a blow to the open-source and free-software movements. Free software has been around a lot longer than GNU/Linux, but its development _exploded_ when Linux became usable and the whole system could be free. Trying to create open-software on closed systems is just not as easy and will be subject to obstacles like vendor-interference and proprietary interests.

PS - I'm not sure I really like most of the open-source histories. . . I know that there are books like "Open Sources" and works like "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", but they are more rhetoric than responsible histories.

Firewire Target Mode

[DJ FirBee]

Built in Firewire
Built in Firewire that works all of the time unlike Sony Vaio.

Firewire Target Mode
Connect your laptop via firewire to your desktop and back up absolutely everyfile on your laptop to your desktop. This rocks!

Dual Monitor Capability
Run your browser/Telnet in on your laptop display and your development stuff on your squanking huge monitor. All built in to the Powerbooks.

Ethernet with auto-crossover detection
You don't need a crossover cable to connect computer to computer. The circuitry does the 1,2 to 3,6 crossover stuff for you.

Runs really quiet.

Big honking screen at more than 1152 X 768
nice screen baby!

USB stuff works on Macs!

Real FTP Server that configures quick and works.

Light laptop with built in Airport support.
light enough to run to the crapper with

OSX
Really cool multimedia Apps. Bash shell, GCC, blah blah blah. Same laptop. OS9 apps in cool classic compatibility (like vmware) mode.

All conspire to make a Powerbook the laptop on choice for this geek.

This is my second post ever on slashdot. The first wasnt formatted. I have run linux since 1.12. I was an engineer for Cisco, so I have at least some geek karma.

I lurve my Mac enough to get a user account on /. to rant about it. This beats running Linux on even the coolest of thinkpads.

Your gonna love it guys. The hardware alone is worth it.

Re:Serious question

[DavidRavenMoon]

If Mac OSX is based on the free version of Berkeley BSD or some such, and I can put Free BSD or Net BSD or whatever it is on my Intel based IBM clone homebuilt, then why can't I put OSX on my IBM clone, even if I go out and actually purchase a nice box with pretty graphics at the local CompUSA?

You can't install OS X, but you can install Darwin, which is the Open Source core underlying Mac OS X, sans Aqua.

http://developer.apple.com/darwin/

And you can get the x86 version here:

http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/

focus follows mouse?

[binaryfeed]

I might have considered switching to OSX full-time (I have an iLamp^H^H^H^HMac) if I could figure out how to have the focus follow the mouse pointer, as well as a few other "goodies" that I like about KDE. Here they are, in no particular order. I would like all of these without running a rooted X-Server:

1. focus follows mouse
2. multiple desktops
3. key bindings to avoid the necessity for using the mouse, i.e. -- "warp"ing to different apps / desktops, etc.

That being said, here are the things I dislike about KDE:

1. Kclipboard sucks ... I wish I could only have the X clipboard active in non-KDE apps (the only one I use is Emacs) and everywhere else I'd just like the sensible Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X, Ctrl-V
2. more difficult to do multimedia stuff (iPhoto, iTunes, iDVD, iMovie are all amazing pieces of software)
3. need CodeWeavers to run MS Office

Anyone managed to get either of these desktop environments into the state that I want? I'd love to hear about it.

Re:focus follows mouse?

[ellem]

1. focus follows mouse
2. multiple desktops
3. key bindings to avoid the necessity for using the mouse, i.e. -- "warp"ing to different apps / desktops, etc.

1 -- yeah me too
2 -- CodeTek Virtual Desktop. Yeah it's 20USD but worth every penny.
3 -- See above

Whatever

[bogie]

You'll excuse the rest of us who are tired of hearing about an OS where the all of the important parts are proprietary and requires and expense hardware platform to boot. Then of course there is Apple itself which treats its users like crap and makes MS(shudder) look benevolent. I tired of this Apple is a good guy crap.

So whatever mod me as troll, but know in the end OS X being nix based does nothing for the opensource desktop because there is nothing opensource about the parts of the Apple desktop that count. What happens if X company does the same thing to linux? Say they do the same thing and throw a proprietary desktop that solves all of linux's problems. Will it be a win when all of the linux desktop vendors go out of business because some commercial company co-opted linux? Thanks but no thanks. I'll "Struggle" a little while longer with my Truly Free desktop.

Re:Serious question

[DavidRavenMoon]

Probably the BSD version was changed to be suitable for Motorola processors, that's why you can't use mac os x with an Intel or similar.

From the Darwin FAQ

Darwin and BSD

Q. Why is Darwin based on BSD UNIX?

A. There are several reasons for this. The first one is historical. Mac OS X draws a lot of its code base from a system called OPENSTEP, created by NeXT Software, which Apple bought in 1997. OPENSTEP and its predecessor, NEXTSTEP, were based on 4.3 BSD. BSD has always had a rich academic developer community behind it, and while much of the original BSD UNIX was not free, its source code was available to anyone who obtained a license for it. The wide development community that arose to support BSD contributed to many of the ideas that drive today's open source community. That community also facilitated a great deal of research, including work to put BSD on Mach at Carnegie Mellon University-code that eventually found its way to NeXT and now to Apple.

Second, BSD is widely respected as clean, robust, and maintainable code. There remains a strong developer community that knows the code base very well and continues the work started at UC Berkeley. In addition, the BSD license is very open, which has made it easy for us to leverage its compelling core technology to enhance the Mac OS.

Best of all, as a result of making this choice, Apple is now an active participant in the BSD community. This allows us to make sure that the capabilities important to Mac users are added to BSD. Being part of the BSD community also gives us access to excellent peer review and keeps us on a path to adopt and contribute to open standards, the benefits of which are well known to our developers. The BSD community has been extremely supportive of Apple since we first approached NetBSD, FreeBSD, and others about doing a better job of sharing code. That happened even before we announced Darwin. Now we're pleased to have become an even more active participant in the community.

Q. Where does Darwin fit into the BSD family?

A. The purpose of Darwin is to provide the core system software for Mac OS X. It is not designed to be an alternative to other excellent BSD options such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Darwin is simply BSD tweaked in ways we think will help Apple deliver the next great version of the Mac OS. We should note, however, that apart from a few architectural differences (such as our use of the Mach kernel), we try to keep Darwin as compatible as possible with FreeBSD (our BSD reference platform).

Q. Does Darwin offer any benefits to someone who's already using another version of BSD?

A. Yes, it does. Darwin drives Mac OS X, which we consider a compelling new operating system not only for existing Macintosh customers, but also for the BSD community and other UNIX users. Darwin is a great example of BSD running on the PowerPC platform. It offers a well-defined code base from a major computer manufacturer, as well as a really cool graphical user interface (Mac OS X).

Q. How does Apple intend to work with other BSD groups?

A. Our goals with all of the upstream source projects-BSD, Apache, Kerberos, GNU, and so on-are to minimize the differences between our code and theirs and to update our code regularly. We already synchronize our code periodically with NetBSD for most of our user commands, and we will soon be doing the same with FreeBSD for our libraries.

Q. Why did Apple decide to share all of its modifications with the BSD community?

A. Although the BSD licenses don't require companies to post their sources, divergent code bases are very hard to maintain. We believe that the open source model is the most effective form of development for certain types of software. By pooling our expertise with the open source development community, we expect to improve the quality, performance, and feature set of our software. In addition, we realize that many developers enjoy working with open source software, and we want to give them the opportunity to use that kind of environment while they're creating solutions for Apple customers.

Although many people think that the rather simple BSD license does little to protect the openness of the code, it has contributed significantly to Apple's ability to adapt the code for the benefit of Mac users. Its emphasis on sharing code has also heightened our own commitment to the open development process.

bad test methods

[jcsehak]

The article doing the comparison only does the comparison ripping mp3s from a CD. This introduces foreign variables, the most important being CD drive performance (the combo drive may be slower than the DVD one). The author would have done better doing a standard "Photoshop: see how long it takes to gaussian blur a 300mb file" benchmark. His results are therefore pretty much useless.

Re:Not now, guys!? Please consider NOT switching.

[Vhalkyrie]

OpenOffice is working on a OS X port. It's currently a developer version using XFree86.

OpenOffice Mac

Chimera is an open OS X mozilla web browser in development.

Chimera

These are just a couple of quick examples, but the ability is there to continue OSS work on a very capable platform - it's already begun. I was amazed I was able to compile and install my favorite tools and utilities, right out of the box.

My switch story ...

[valmont]

from a win2k dell laptop to an early model TiBook 400mhz/384MB RAM/aiport/10GIG hd ... is in my journal. Another journal entry also outlines some of what i've found to be the nicest features of OS X on my TiBook.

Keep in mind i wrote all that quite a few months ago. Now with Jaguar, things are even smoother, faster, just works even better.

In more recent developments ...

Where i work, a fairly big corporation, engineers are switching in strides to OS X laptops, usually TiBooks . Even the hard-core "Mac dissers" just can't get over how cool those machines are. I am one of the early adopters here with my ol' 400mhz and only 10GIG hard drive, they're all using later models with faster CPU and brigher screen.

It is simply starting to make less and less sense for professional developers and engineers to be running windows versus OS X, unless you are developing windows software. OS X is just too powerful.

My gf just bought a 700mhz iBook. She loves it. She gets around computers fine but had *never* used a mac before. She adapted just fine: M$ Office for OS X, browsing, emailing. I got her one of those USB microdrives so she brings Office files home from her work desktop PC. She's already playing with iTunes and iPhoto.

Re:Not True

[asparagus]

...clicking on your link...

There's a pref in iTunes that copies all mp3's you try to play to your local hard drive. Just turn it off and add the mp3's to your library. iTunes will play them fine off the server.

-asparagus

Re:Not on an ibook!

[addaon]

There are third party apps for it. But I don't really recommend it. Disabling QE only increased battery life by about ten minutes (that's wall time... 10.2's battery management is seriously borked), and noticably decreased performance. Unless the heat itself is really bothering you (and it's well within spec for the system, it's just a question of your thigh being warm), I'd suggest leaving QE on. It /is/ slightly ironic that the graphics chip is using possibly more power than the CPU... but in the iBook, the biggest power consumer by far is the screen, followed by the hard drive. Might as well use the hardware you paid for, and QE /is/ nice.

As usual, it depends why you want the laptop

[NickDoulas]

I think your perspective will depend on what you're expecting to do with the laptop. I just switched from a Win98 Dell laptop to an iBook. The way I see it, mac laptops "just work", they have sleek hardware design, and they have familiar unix underneath. If you're expecting a mac laptop to essentially be just like your linux machine because it's unix underneath, you might be disappointed. I still use my linux desktop a lot, and I prefer to keep that as my machine to tinker with. I was looking to do video import/edit using a DV camcorder. This seems possible on linux, but I wasn't too anxious to figure out the details. With the iBook, I just plugged in the camera, and was I was editing video within seconds. There were no apps or drivers to deal with. I was even spared the annoying "found driver for new hardware" dialog. I also didn't previously appreciate how smoothly the iBook sleeps and wakes up. I've used a few flavors of windows on a few different laptops, and putting a laptop to sleep, docking it, etc, was never consistently smooth. The iBook is really this simple - close the laptop, it sleeps. Open it back up, it wakes --- within a second or so. It's just great - I essentially never need to reboot, never need to hit the power button, etc.

Re:Not True

[BitGeek]

Remember that x86 processors cut their clock rate to get good battery performance. The x86 design requires a lot of power. So while the G4 is running at full speed, the x86 isn't and that's why you're getting better battery performance-- at the expense of cpu performance.

Re:Serious question

[DavidRavenMoon]

But would anybody BUY those systems without the software? Heck, hardly anybody buys those systems even with the software! ;-)

People buy Macs for the OS, not so much the hardware.

But it is nice hardware.

As far as how many people buy Macs -- most of the media content creation industries, such as publishing and pro audio recording studios, run almost entirely on Macs. Big in TV editing too.

Re:Not True

[asv108]

Not on my laptop, its a Trasnmeta TM5800 with longrun disabled so there is not reduction of clockrate.

I almost switched

[matt-fu]

I was eyeing Apple's laptops for several months. My previous laptop had been a (piss poor) Dell Inspiron 3800, and I swore that the next time out I was going with a decent machine. I use my laptop as a primary workstation and am not a gamer, so CPU wasn't a huge issue. The low end iBooks have more than enough. I had additional reason to get a Mac because I'm a musician and do audio recording as a side hobby, so I wanted my machine to be able to handle at least 18 channels simultaneously (which is what my MOTU 828 will handle). Since the audio industry generally develops for Apple first and PC second, I thought I'd get in on some of the love that my Mac-only friends have been seeing for years.

Either the TiBook or the iBook would have been nice. The only thing holding me back was the video specs. 1280x854 on a $3k machine is a joke, one that I didn't quite get. The bigger joke still is the iBook, which won't go above 1024x768 even on the external port, nor will it support dualheading. Yes, that's fine for OS X and watching DVDs, but come on. We're not in y2k anymore. I don't care how many parlor tricks the hardware/software can do, trading functionality for coolness is just dumb. So I decided to wait until Apple upped the specs, at which point I would happily become a switcher.

While waiting (and waiting and waiting), I started looking at PC laptop specs, you know, to psyche myself out about the cool Apple I was eventually going to be using. That's when I discovered that some used Thinkpads were going for under $1k and had more video resolution than the best TiBook (referring to the A20p specifically). So I waited some more, and when Apple didn't bother to upgrade their laptops for the Paris Apple Expo, I hit up ebay and scored an A21p that I totally love. $1k for the laptop, $100 for the firewire card, $50 for the Orinoco Silver card, and I've got a rig with better video (1600x1200 on the LCD, fear) and swappable drive bay. 6 hour battery life? Not an issue, but if it were I could drop $50 on a Thinkpad battery on ebay and be good to go. And now it's being said that maybe in January the laptops will be upgraded? I think I made the right choice.

Sorry Apple, I really wanted to do it. I just couldn't justify paying the extra money and sacrificing the screen resolution for what amounts to coolness points and not having to dual boot. Maybe next time.

The one button + mods == three buttons fallacy

[jmorris42]

I hear the same bleats from the Mac Faithful every time us UNIX folk say we won't convert without a three button pointer. And it's BS because you have obviously never ran GIMP (fill in the blank with your fav). Programs like GIMP use all three buttons alone AND in combination with the 'bucky bits.'

Three buttons are vital to productive use of non-trivial GUI apps on a *NIX workstation, iBooks, having but one button, therefore are NOT suitable for serious UNIX work, QED.

And it IS possible to have a real keyboard and pointer in a small system. My Thinkpad 570E is damn near as thin as a TiBook and still managed to get a much better keyboard in. (And my Thinkpad is smaller in the other two dimensions and lighter than a TiBook, no neayh! Do wish it had the five plus hours of runtime though.)

And don't even get me started about the raggedy ass userland Apple ships. It is painfully obvious that the BSD portions of OSX is just as much a neglected stepchild as the old POSIX subsystem in NT. And no, downloading fink or the GNU toolchain is no more a solution than adding Cygwin is an excuse for NT's defects.

Try moving an OSX filesystem from one location to another. cp won't do it, tar can't handle the deeply nested filesystem and cpio, while having the same problems as tar, silently fails instead of throwing a warning. Useless!

And the idiocy extends into the GUI portion as well. They ship a utility called "Disk Copy" that does everything EXCEPT copy a disk. This is intuitive?

Give em another couple of years and maybe they will start to learn how to build a UNIX based OS. Perhaps by 2005 they can make it to where Sun was in 1990 or RedHat was with their first offering.

Re:The one button + mods == three buttons fallacy

[Van Halen]

Programs like GIMP use all three buttons alone AND in combination with the 'bucky bits.'

Right. And Gimp was never designed for Mac. Really, not much design went into its user interface at all: it's pretty horrid by any professional gui developer's standards. I hear they're seriously revamping it for the next big version - hope so. That said, I love Gimp and use it nearly every day - with my multibutton scroll wheel mouse under OS X. Works great.

Three buttons are vital to productive use of non-trivial GUI apps on a *NIX workstation, iBooks, having but one button, therefore are NOT suitable for serious UNIX work, QED.

If you can't get along with modifier keys (and Xdarwin allows you to setup 3-button emulation so you do get all 3 buttons), then fine. Don't get an iBook. Or get an external mouse and use that.

Macs were never designed to use software with crappy user interfaces - anything that requires multiple buttons plus multiple modifier keys simultaneously is not a good interface. Necessary for the extreme power user, perhaps (see CAD, et al). But still arguably not good. And I'd argue that the vast majority of Unix software (especially open source) has bad interfaces because the programmers lacked any knowledge on what consitutes a good user interface. They're geeks coding for geeks, so they don't worry about this stuff. Apple does - it's their core market. They can't be everything to everyone (and they don't even want to!) so they concentrate on this. They're happy being the BMW of computer makers, as long as they keep making a profit overall.

It is painfully obvious that the BSD portions of OSX is just as much a neglected stepchild as the old POSIX subsystem in NT.

Examples? One I can think of off the top of my head is that "w" is still not fully functional: it doesn't actually display what the users are running. And utmp isn't updated when somebody logs out. Sloppy, perhaps, but critical? Not for me. Apple has finite resources and I'm sure this is pretty damn low on the priority list. (darn, I'm sounding like an Apple apologist fanboy, better cut it out)

Try moving an OSX filesystem from one location to another.

man ditto

But again, I agree with you in part. I think the standard unix utilities do need to be modified to handle Mac-specific quirks. Like handling carriage returns transparently as newlines in vi and less. Or cp, tar, et al handling resource forks (ditto does, but only with a command-line option).

Re:The one button + mods == three buttons fallacy

[jmorris42]

> Right. And Gimp was never designed for Mac.

Exactly my point; thank you! GIMP is a UNIX program adn needs a real UNIX environment, including the hardware portion of the user experience.

How had would it be for Apple to put in a three button pointer and rig the OS to treat them all as one big button by default? Since it isn't a real 'clicky' button (at least on the TiBook I played with) the normal users wouldn't even have to know it was three, just one big button with some artfully placed grooves. They don't really care, we are supposed to adopt the "Mac Way" like some sort of cult. Screw that.

> > Try moving an OSX filesystem from one
> > location to another.

> man ditto

Did. Now go read www.macosxlabs.org where they report that using the switch to copy resources causes unexplainable failures.

It is obvious you are a Mac user who has read up a bit on this "unix thing" that they dropped on you with OSX but you probably don't depend on those subsystems yet. I'm a UNIX user exploring OSX starting from their promise it was "UNIX with a pretty face." It ain't.

And even the graphical part is buggy as hell if you push it hard. I have been rebooting fast and furious after finding new ways to wedge it, almost like Win3.1.

Basically, I like the idea, but judge the current implementation (10.1.x) as beta quality. No, my site won't be buying licenses for 10.2 on the forlorn hope that chasing the upgrade fairy will fix things this quick.

Re:The one button + mods == three buttons fallacy

[overunderunderdone]

Programs like GIMP use all three buttons alone AND in combination with the 'bucky bits.'

How do you fit all those buttons on your stylus? or alternatively: You use a MOUSE?!? for image manipulation? LOL... and you are arguing that one-button is "crippling". You are losing better than half of the functionality of any image manipulation program by using a mouse and you are complaining about one-button + 5 modifier keys being "crippling". Get yourself a pressure senstive tablet, when you use a mouse to edit images after that you will know the meaning of "crippling"

I'm not as familiar with GIMP but on Photoshop there are 12 different ways to modify a mouse click (when using the brush tool, it varies from tool to tool) I only use 8 or so to the point where they are firmly entrenched in my "muscle memory" With those 12 there are still a few modifier key combos that are unused. I'm willing to believe that you need & actually use 3 mouse buttons + 5 modifier keys in combination but I doubt that most people do.

Three buttons are vital to productive use of non-trivial GUI apps on a *NIX workstation

I'll concede that most mac people aren't talking about UNIX apps that expect a three-button mouse when they say one-button is enough. I'm sure GIMP (& others) do suffer from the transition. I will however defend the usuablity of a one-button mouse (plus the modifier keys) when the system and the software is originally designed with that in mind. I very much doubt that you are any more productive with GIMP designed for a three button mouse than I am with Photoshop designed for a one-button mouse (leaving aside the varying capabilities of the two programs) I can assure you quite confidently that with a stylus I am quite a bit more productive. If GIMP *really* is written to be almost unusable without three mouse-buttons I wonder how effective it can be when using a pressure sensitive tablet. Even if you can find a three-button model it would be awkward to use those buttons.

And the idiocy extends into the GUI portion as well. They ship a utility called "Disk Copy" that does everything EXCEPT copy a disk. This is intuitive?

Hmmm... perhaps I have a newer version of Disk Copy, never had a problem copying disks with it.

Re:Serious question

[Steve Franklin]

I know. I fell in love with the new cinema monitor. So much so that I went and ordered a flat panel from the same manufacturer. Couldn't quite figure out how to turn it on--they failed to include the part about waving a dead chicken over it in the manual--so I had to send it back. Looked great, though. ;-)

And the transparent speakers are really cool too. Of course, I finally figured out that I could run my audio into my stereo and JBL Control Monitors and blow any silly "computer speakers" away. I'm beginning to think that computers exist in a whole different inertial frame from normal reality.

And yes, I realize that most high end audio/video/publishing stuff is done with Apples, though I think that's changing. I used to be a photoengraver and from what I've heard, they've all gone to Macs for the front end processes. But as an individual user who's not doing multimedia professionally and just likes to do some digital photography and editing now and then and maybe play with some graphics in Corel Draw, I just don't have the bucks for a fancy Apple system. Not that I couldn't afford it. I just dropped close to $3000 building my own system. I just don't see the bang for the buck with Apple. I think you're paying for the flash more than the substance.

My name is Fran�ois J. Perreault ...

[An anonymous Frank]

and I'm a network analyst. When Apple asked for comments from PC users, I sent in my two cents. Never got a reply yet spent all summer looking at models, specs, features and prices. I am now the very proud owner of an iBook 14.x" G3 700 with the base 256MB RAM. I will boost the memory anyhow but I have yet to run out. Mind you I have not installed anything big yet, just War3. As a user experience, everyday I notice or discover something else and I think: "How neat that they thought of that". I almost purchased an extra power supply for nothing, thanks to the design of the one that comes with it, I don't need to buy another one when on the road. It really 'just works'. Very intuitive. I had done some dev work on System 7.0.x a long time ago, but I'm not lost even though I've used and supported all versions of Windows (station and server), many versions of Novell Netware, Solaris (Sparc and Intel), Slackware, Mandrake, Redhat, OS/2, GeoWorks, AIX, HP-UX (a little) and I must forget some. I did buy a Wacom Pen/Mouse pad for home, abd I admit to using the iBook mostly at home for now. But I've had to use a trackpad in the past and I don't mind them, but enough about that religious debate. I switched to Mac for the "Unix with a real desktop" experience and even though I haven't really dug into the Unix side, I'm impressed. Any time I want to know something about my system and might not assume that there's a gui app for it (and there usually is) I lauch Terminal and I'm right at home. The next step is to go get some of the apps I've become accustomed to and expect to use frequently. For example, due to financial constraints, I prefer to use Gimp rather than Photoshop. I've heard of MacGimp but it's slightly outdated and I didn't find anything about an upgrade path, so I'll be doing it the old way, which is an investment I don't mind to make since it'll pay off later when I want to install other X-Window dependant software or tools. Perhaps rpm-for-OSX would be a nice thing, haven't checked if that's in progress.

Re:MacOS = good, Apple = bad

[JohnG]

My iBook doesn't look like a toilet bowl, it looks like... a laptop. Where have you been shopping for laptops, home depot?

Exactly, that's why I have an Inspiron

[BoomerSooner]

It's like a thinkpad, only cheaper, custom configured, and a hell of a lot easier to install linux on.

That being said I have to agree with the thread stating they need more than one mouse button. If they had a point-stick I would have purchased an Apple instead of a Dell. And it is that simple as to why I chose one over the other.

My company runs Linux & Solaris on the server side and Windows/OS 9/OS X/Linux/whatever works/... on the desktop. As long as you can sftp/ssh to a server then you can choose whatever tool you want. I love OS X I just want more buttons without having to go out and buy a new mouse for my laptop/desktop.

Note to Apple: G5 + 2 Button Mouse with Scroll Wheel acting as 3rd button (see Microsoft IntelliMouse, it's the only thing they've done worth a damn in my opinion, oh yeah natural keyboard too, i freaking hate standard keyboards).

Re:Serious question

[DavidRavenMoon]

And the transparent speakers are really cool too. Of course, I finally figured out that I could run my audio into my stereo and JBL Control Monitors and blow any silly "computer speakers" away. I'm beginning to think that computers exist in a whole different inertial frame from normal reality.

I don't care for the sound of the Apple (Harmon/Kardon) speakers. I bought a set of Monsoon MM-702's. But I use my G4 as my home recording studio, so I needed better speakers.

And yes, I realize that most high end audio/video/publishing stuff is done with Apples, though I think that's changing.

Not in the NYC area. I work in the publishing field. It's still mostly Macs.

But as an individual user who's not doing multimedia professionally and just likes to do some digital photography and editing now and then and maybe play with some graphics in Corel Draw, I just don't have the bucks for a fancy Apple system.

But that's the area where Macs shine. With the whole iPhoto-iMovie thing. My PC using friend love the way they can bring their camera over and plug it into my Mac and ImageCapture opens and lets us download the photos. Two of them cant get Windows to see the camera, so I copy the images onto a CD for them.

Not that I couldn't afford it. I just dropped close to $3000 building my own system. I just don't see the bang for the buck with Apple. I think you're paying for the flash more than the substance.

Gee I dunno. I got a pretty good bang for a lot less than you spent, about $1700. And OS X.

Re:Yes but those are pretty minor nuiscnces

[g4dget]

For example, I can already tell that someday when I figure out how to use netInfo without making mistakes I will love it a lot more than the /etc/hosts /etc/fstab mess that we call linux.

You seem determined to dislike Linux. If you don't like the textual configuration files, you never have to touch them: just use GUI tools. That part is really no different from OS X, since it, too, has the text files and a GUI. The difference is that in OS X, things are even more complicated because there is also the Netinfo database.

On linux, which I dearly love, the number of ways to fuck up is almost endless. The sticky points on apple are partly a matter of getting used to them, not true problems.

Yup: problems are problems until you learn how to deal with them. Same for every system, even Linux and Windows.

The parent post was a very good summary of the real nuiscances I have found in OSX. But...and I dont know how to emphasize this enough... Those are ALL of the REAL nuiscances. ALL of them!

Well, no. Like any big system, there are plenty more, buried in APIs, system management, and other places.

ext3 is mainly useful when your computer does not gracefully survive crashes. I have noticed my mac is much more robust and thus has less need. but like RAID 5 its in the works and will be out.

That is just BS. "Gracefully surviving crashes" is a function of the file system and pretty much nothing else. "ext3" is the means by which a Linux system survives crashes gracefully and recovers very quickly afterwards, and it does (it mostly comes into play when a Linux laptop runs out of power). OS X manages to fix its file system most of the time, but it seems to take a long time to boot after a crash. And while OS X is almost as stable as Linux, it certainly isn't better in that regard.

And, come on, RAID 5 isn't an answer for desktop or laptops. Those come with one disk, and they should boot fast and reliably.

Altogether, you just keep making excluses. "Well, OS X does this, but it really doesn't matter...", "Well, OS X can't do this, but you are really a fool for wanting it to...", etc. Just face the facts: no operating is perfect. Linux requires a lot of fiddling in one area, and OS X requires a lot of fiddling in other areas.

Re:Not now, guys!? Please consider NOT switching.

[00_NOP]

Linux's fundamental strength is that it is free (in both senses). If people want to use OSX, go ahead, but it won't hurt the fundamental case for Linux or stop the Linux juggernaut.

Linux is less than 1% of the desktop but that is going to change for one simple reason - it's dirt cheap.

Re:unix style copy/paste is evil!

[rseuhs]

First, you would copy it after the section and THEN delete the section.

For replacing, both methods are roughly equal, IMO. But Unix-style has the advantage that you paste all with the mouse and don't need to mess with the keyboard. Sometimes it's a matter of preference.

But that's why KDE supports *BOTH* MacOS-style *AND* Unix-style, anyway.

Nifty, eh?

Re:Sooo many...Apple packaging.

[reallocate]

They don't have a packaging system, as such. Apple software updates and most mainstream commercial Mac software is delivered as something called a "disk image". That's simply a batch of compressed files. Click on the icon and it opens to display the files that are inside. Typically, the application -- often a collection of files, not just a single executable -- is represented by a single icon, which you drag to the appropriate folder (almost always the "Applications" folder). That action triggers all the necesary file copying, etc.

If you choose, you can do all this via command line in OSX. Personally, I don't see the gain from that. (Apple has also tweaked the permissions on many standard Unix files and directories, to prevent disaster befalling an unwary user. In fact, by default, the root account isn't active. If you want to become root and muck about with permissions, you're free to do so, of course.)

Updates, deletions, and preservation of personal configuration files seems left up to the individual program. I'm a relative Mac newbie, so others may be a better source hee.

Apple maintains a software update facility to disberse new code and bug fixes. You can run it manully or automatically per a schedule. Works like a charm for me.

Fink is an apt-get look-alike for open source ported to OSX that gets good reviews. I've tried it just enough to know it works rather well.

Remember that a typical Mac user is unlikely to install and uninstall software at the same rate as an ethusiastic Linux user. I suspect most Mac users have no idea about "packaging systems". That's because they really don't need one.

I switched back

[theolein]

I work in a completely backward mixed Novell, Linux and NT4 server, NT4, Win2k and XP clients. We run a Microsoft Navision financial package. I really wanted to get a TiPowerbook to do my admin stuff (as my old G3 Powerbook was getting really long in the tooth for day to day stuff)but it just didn't integrate well enough with the environment and, here in Switzerland in any case, cost almost $1000 more than a Dell Inspiron 8200.

I got the Dell with XPpro and Debian. It is a good machine and really fast. Even XP isn't as bad as I thought it would be. However WinNT is a desaster and I spend most of my day running around fixing NT problems. We don't want to upgrade to XP all around because our hardware is generally old and some of our stuff doesn't run on XP.

If I had my way we'ld all use Macs. MacOSX isn't perfect and has a lot of quirks (ObjC,C compatibility, Old Java version, lack of a fast browser, lack of application alternatives) but next year I'm getting an iBook.

Re:Serious question

[Steve Franklin]

"But that's the area where Macs shine. With the whole iPhoto-iMovie thing. My PC using friend love the way they can bring their camera over and plug it into my Mac and ImageCapture opens and lets us download the photos. Two of them cant get Windows to see the camera, so I copy the images onto a CD for them."

My CD1000 puts the image directly onto a CD-R. I really couldn't see playing around with memory sticks or other high dollar plug-in memory. The CDs hold ~130 shots, which runs about a half cent apiece. And no having to carry a laptop around to free up memory in the camera. I made darn sure I had a handle on getting the images into the computer BEFORE I bought the camera. Apple is just taking advantage of the fact that most people don't plan ahead that well.

I'm not knocking Apple. They do what they do well. It's just not my cup of tea.

User review

[K'tohg]

My account of a Linux geek turned Mac

I loved Linux, BSD, Sun, etc. anything with a propper Bash shell. I would hiss at others as they entered the room with there new Windows ME based hardware. I would scower at others with their up-side-down Apple logos and their shinny happy faces. *shudder*

With Mac OS X all of that has changed. Now I'm one of those shiny happy faces. So why did I switch. Simple: "Based on Unix." Yup That's why. When I saw that a nice and functinoal interface that didn't get in the way ontop of a Unix environment I was almost sold.

Hardware

The hardware is very superior. First thing I noticed is compatability. Not once has my machine fretted about hardware. It has been very polite by either supporting my hardware 100% or nicely letting me know that it doesn't know how to talk to the device.

My TiBook came with two USB ports, A Firewire port, A 1000 Kb/s RJ-45 Jack, A monitor port, S-Video port (with Composite Addapter), 56 Kb/s V.90 Modem and a PCMCIA slot. Eveyone I talk to is amased by the slot loading DVD drive.

The keyboard is nice. It's slim and black with white letters. That in my book is cool. However the keys are weak and shallow. And the Control key is in the upmost worst spot it could be. So thanks to the ease of use of USB I use my "Happy Hacker Keyboard" Plus a Logiteck Optical mouse (3 button w/ wheel).

As for power my machine really kicks but. I got the lower end model at 550 MHz G4 and it's fast. Most of the time I have multiple apps running. Photoshop, Word, iTunes, Mozilla, Terminal (w/ multiple ssh and updatedb at 0000 midnight) and my machine doesn't break a sweat (It's got a fan too)

By far my favorite feature is "sleep mode" all I do is close the lid and the machine suspends itself and a spiffy glowing pulsing LED turns on lighting up the room like a night light. It's that simple. I even had the battery drop out and when I quickly returned it in a panic I found everything was still ok. It is roubust and durable. And it's mad from titanium.

The only two draw backs I saw is the pain on the edges chip off needing a paint job at somepoint. And the price. Apple hardware although superiour is more expensive.

Interface

So far OS X is the best desktop for a Unix environment I have ever seen. It out trumps GNOME and KDE and tottaly obliverates Windows. I may loose some geek factor in favor of ease of use but to be honest Terminal is for those geek things. It it intuitive enough for a kid yet powerfull enough for a serious gamer. Allot is already customizable by default. The look and feel can be customized by a third party app. A few of the Enightenmant features I miss. Mainly the middle mouse button paste. The virtual destop is missing too. And most missed is the sloppy focus. But aside for that the interface is easy and doesn't get in my way Like so many others.

In my eyes OS X compares as if it were just another windows manager on a really well made BSD Distribution. If it ever came to Intel it would rule the world but the hardware is why you should by a Mac. In fact you should get it because it will remove some of the extra thought you use to use the machine and put it to better use. Really the interface does a descent job of freeing you from thinking about it as much. But I'll save more propaganda for more qualified reviewers than myself.

pros

• Easy to use
• fast
• dependable
• perfect multitasking
• compatability w/ windows networks, Unix, And good hardware compatability.
• Looks uber slick
• This is the Docker pants amung computers

cons

• It's a little pricey
• Doesn't have as much commercial software (But you Unix geeks should be used to that)
• $120 for an upgrade from 10.1.5 to 10.2
• It places fear and resentment to those companies who have been sleeping around with Microsoft

Please forgive the poor quality of this review it's my first time. Questions/comments can be addressed in emails or slashdot reply posts.

I am proud to say my Mac is 100% OS X. I have deleted my Virtual PC's so no more windows and Classic (OS 9) has been remove. Fink [sf.net] saved my sanity.

Re:It all depends who your friends are

[StarFace]

I am going out on a limb here, but I would bet that the percentage of engineers using Macs is a lot less than the publishing and multimedia market, let alone the home user market. I am speaking of general, popular usage. There are places where extremely technical people use Macs, because they recognize that the best too for the job is not a religion. I'm not really addressing that group of people, which incidentally, I fall under, and given your list of years under different operating systems, it sounds like that is your motto too. Amongst the latter category, lots of expert Mac users that have added on to the system, both in hardware and software terms. They use multi-button mice, extensions that allow keyboard shortcuts, virtual workspaces, and other such niceties. But again, this really isn't addressing the user space I'm talking about, nor is it addressing the user space that Apple targets.

Preference of choice is a big thing with computer experts. They usually do not want their systems to create a barrier, and when they do, they like systems that allow them to circumvent that barrier. This is why the workstation *NIX systems have grown to be so popular among those who'd rather not put up with system limitations.

While the Macintosh OS, in my humble opinion, is superior to the Windows OS in interface and underlying design, it still has a barrier that I run in to, and this is where we come to preference. You are comfortable within the set of rules Apple lays out, and that is perfectly fine, I and plenty of others are not comfortable. I'd rather be able to switch the stock OS X window manager out with something that has a smaller footprint, for instance, and something that allows me to have transparent control over the system. Blackbox is my favorite window manager. I've grown used to the power that it provides, along with its clean simplicity. I cannot really do this swap with OS X though. Sure, I could set it to boot to X11 and just use the Darwin kernel and BSD system, but then I would have all manner of configuration nightmares since OS X doesn't use the standard /etc files. At that point, I might as well just install FreeBSD or Linux on Apple hardware (which is something that I do. I own an iBook, and it dual boots between Debian and OS X on a regular basis.) I find that when I want to get some serious work done, the Debian system caters to that, and when I want to grab photos from my camera, email them to a few friends, or watch a DVD, it is generally easier to do that with OS X. The right tool for the job.

Incidentally, with that said, I am completely enjoying learning the OS X Cocoa toolkit, and Objective-C. I'm finding that I am more inclined to create custom applications for myself in OS X than Linux.

I'm digressing. The point of the matter is that configuration and optimization should be laid bare for the experts, if they so choose to use it. The fact that you can only change a minimal set of features with OS X's window manager is an example of catering to inexpert users. That's fine and dandy, but it's a frustrating environment for me to work in. That doesn't mean that I am any more expert or inexpert than you, it just goes to show that people are different, and if the OS cannot anticipate and allow people to be different, it has barriers. You just happened to get lucky in that your preferences lie within the barriers.

Thinkpad vs Dell

[sjbe]

It's like a thinkpad, only cheaper, custom configured, and a hell of a lot easier to install linux on.

Cheaper both in cost and in quality. I happen to be typing on a Thinkpad T30 with Ultranav (both the trackpoint and pad). Most of the folks I work with have Dell laptops of one form or another, usually Inspiron 8200s, so I get to work on them regularly. The Thinkpads have a notably higher build quality. Less plasticy feel, superior layout, and of course nobody does keyboards better than IBM. IBM's ultrabay is slick, and there are just a bunch of little touches, like the keyboard light, that make it very nice to use. Don't get me wrong, the Dell machines are fine and great on cost/performance. But they just aren't as nice to use.

Oh, and you can get a Thinkpad custom configured too. Slightly different options and Dell's process is a tad slicker & more flexible but functionally both companies can do the custom configuration thing. And thinkpads ain't so bad to install linux on. Most laptops are a bit of a pain but it's not horrible anymore. (usually anyway)

Re:It all depends who your friends are

[PythonOrRuby]

Besides offering a better interface for novices, you might want to look at how else a consistent interface across the platform benefits users.

It provides an environment where I can go from one OS X machine to another, and instantly be at home, even if someone else is currently using it. It makes it easier to break out of an "assigned computer for each user" way of thinking and start thinking about a more network-centric environment where there are a bunch of machines and a bunch of users, and a server, and anyone can do any of their work at any workstation.

Until the thin client concept really matures, and network transparent windowing systems get fast enough to deal with something like Quartz, this is how Apple has to tackle such a situation.

Besides, Apple has the strongest branding in the industry(what other software or hardware vendor can be almost universally identified by just a non-alphanumerc image?), so it's in their best interest to make their machines recognizable.

//machine_name/current/directory in the title bar

[steveha]

I used to have my shells set up to display the machine name and directory in the title bar of the xterm. It was sweet; you could have a really long directory path and it would all fit up there. (A proportional font helps it fit nicely.) Then the actual shell prompt was history number and a # (if root) or a $ (if not root).

I was using tcsh in those days, and it has a feature called "cwdcmd" where you could set up a command to be executed when changing directories. But you don't need that; you can just alias the cd command itself under bash or whatever.

steveha

Re:It all depends who your friends are

[StarFace]

Once again, to this purpose I completely agree! It's great that there is a company out there that actually does what it says (for the most part) and manages to keep "the users" relatively happy with their products year after year. Consistency across machines is just one nice feature for this purpose.

I just don't subscribe to this model in the specialist market. People who spend 12-16 hours a day on a computer, and are intimate with its inner workings shouldn't have to be fenced in with people who spend 12 hours a month, simply for the convenience of machine consistency. This is why I am staunchly opposed to the thin client model as a global solution.

It's a silly analogy, but you wouldn't expect a biochemist to use the same exact pocket calculator that mother used to balance the check books. A few here and there might be satisfied with that arrangment but they are the exceptions. Sure, having One pocket calculator button layout would make for a more consistent and convenient world where you wouldn't have to hunt for the 'off' switch on an HP 48G, but it wouldn't address the specific needs of expert users either. The same goes for computers. Some people live and breathe these things, others use them like a toaster, or a television set, or a book.

I completely agree with the notion that the Mac OS, both 8-9 and X era is a wonderful philosophy for entry level to mid-level users, and in some cases, even some higher level usage. But the moment it turns into a religion and people start saying that experts should be happy with one button and a relativey unconfigurable interface is when I start quirking my eyebrow.

Oh, and by the way, in response to your user name: Ruby. :)

Re:BSD Kernel on Mach

[sjgman9]

XNU is the kernel. Its a mix of BSD and Mach. BSD stuff is kicked into kernel space to get rid of the message passing overhead. Also, the Mach Kernel has been around in NeXT for quite some time

Re:Not now, guys!? Please consider NOT switching.

[victim]

The quicktime ogg library is not yet correct. Apple would never release that.

There seems to be some issue about returning a variable amount of data with each call, but given that variable bit rate mp3s work it seems to me that with an appropriate buffer for reblocking output data oggs should work as well. They may have gotten beyond that, since I last looked closely, but I see on their bug tracker they still have issues.

Still, if the API works out it would make sense for them to use quicktime and save some duplication.

Re:Ugh, where to begin...

[firewort]

Yes, Diamond Multimedia really made the first stand a few years ago when they fought to be able to sell mp3 players.

Apple has only been the recent target due to their "Rip. Mix. Burn." campaign.

Reliable yet not utterly boring

[seawall]

IBooks are just enough different to be a little fun yet still manage to be useful and reliable.

That combination doesn't happen every day.

I work on Linux and Windows machines mostly. I like Linux a lot. There are things I like in Windows. Solaris is in there too and pleasant enough (and before that: BSD on Vaxen, Primos, CP/M and even CDC and IBM card walloping).

The thing is: After dealing with Linux, Solaris and Windows all day, they just aren't that amusing.

The iBook I'm using is reasonably fast with Jaguar, small, light, reliable, has a decent screen, a keyboard/touchpad I can live with (and I usually dislike touchpads). It can run most of what I need and most of what I want and it has just enough difference to be fun.

I find I had missed fun.

That "It Just Works" means I can carry around a machine I find fun. Neat.

Eventually it may stop being fun but for now, I like it a lot.

Me too ... and I'm loving it.

[Macka]

You're not the only one. I used to use a Linux desktop at home, and a Windows laptop when out visiting customers. I've combined both workloads onto the same 800Mhz Powerbook Moshse uses. I couldn't be happier. It's proving to be a real benefit in so many ways.

Just this weekend I was talking to my brother and he was bitching about a problem he was having trying to get some footage off his Sony video camera. He's got a firewire card for his PC, but 5 mins into the import it would lock up and his PC (WinXP) would crash.

So I called round, plugged it into my firewire port and fired up iMovie. It saw the camera right away and I was able to import the clips. Next step, connect my network port into his hub and connect to a fileshare on his PC (a 30 second job .. no reboot required) and I'm ready to start converting the clips to quicktime movies (Expert mode: Sorensen Codec @ 720x576 resolution) and drop them on his PC.

Actually, that's something else where Mac OS X really shines .. the ease with which you can jump around networks makes working with a PowerBook a real joy. Even when I dial into customer networks, OSX quietly turns off my local ethernet network for the duration, and then restores it again afterwards. No intervention needed from me. It's real sweet.

I'm hooked. I'm so much more productive on OSX than I ever was with Windows or Linux. Best desktop I've ever used.

PS: The longest part of the day was generating the quicktime movies. The Sorensen Codec seems to be the only one that can generate good quality movies at that resolution .. but it's massively cpu bound and takes an age to render.

Network configuration bad .. huh ??

[Macka]

You're nuts .. network configuration on OSX is one of the easiest I've ever seen or used. I constantly travel around between home office, hotels and customer sites; and setting up on a new network is fast, quick, and painless. It takes seconds, and (like any other Unix) there is no requirement to logout or reboot.

Re:Serious question

[gig]

Basically, there are three levels of Mac OS now:

Darwin - Core OS

This is the software layer between the hardware and the rest of the software on the computer. Darwin runs on Macs and on some Intel systems. It's not some loose pieces of Mac OS X that fell under a particular license; it's the core OS, the really technical part of the operating system that you interact with from the command line. This would have been the whole operating system before graphical interfaces, but now it's the geeky filling inside the candy coating of Mac OS X. Transparency is really valued in this core part of the Mac OS, and ease-of-use often takes a back seat to maintaining traditions and functionalities that have been proven to work. So, in Darwin, there are folders with names like /etc and /bin, there are traditional UNIX tools, there's the file system, the Hardware Abstraction Layer and all this stuff is open so that it can be scoured for bugs, and so that this vital software layer that is the spine of the computer can't be held hostage by a single party, or be made deliberately incompatible with other technologies, or run tasks without the user's knowledge. Darwin is also progressive and modern, with XML configuration files, a simplified directory structure, and ZeroConf networking that makes small, industry-standard IP networks configure themselves.

Mac OS X - Professional and Consumer Desktop

Darwin for PowerPC plus closed-source software from Apple and other vendors, including a great graphical user interface. The emphasis in this version of Mac OS is ease-of-use, simplicity, and good looks. Huge features of the machine may only be exposed to the GUI in one little easy-to-use widget, enabling the user to understand and harness a lot of technology quickly and easily. Huge simplifications benefit the non-technical or new user: an application and all of its files go in a single folder that is presented to the user as a single icon that they can run, move, rename, or peek inside with the use of a contextual menu. There are hundreds of features, but they're presented to the user in such a simplified and friendly way that you can take it all in very quickly. I just read the instructions today for making Mozilla your default browser, and on Mac OS X it is "Go Apple Menu > System Preferences > Internet > Web > Default Browser, press Choose and select the Mozilla icon in your Applications folder." Figure out what it is on your platform and compare. Note that the user is not picking the browser off a list, whether stock or generated ... they are picking the single icon called 'Mozilla' that is in their Applications folder. Whole layers of complexity are just not there to trouble you or to decay as the software installation matures. The Mozilla icon is actually a folder with all of the files and images and whatnot that Mozilla requires, and all you have to do to 'install' it is to place it in the Applications folder, provided your user account has the right to do so. Most apps just come as a single icon on a CD or a Disk Copy image (Macs mount disc images as if they were really on media ... basically, you open a disk image and it is made into a RAM disk and mounted).

Mac OS X Server - Media, Web, Workgroup Servers

Mac OS X optimized for server use instead of desktop use. It's particularly suited to serving QuickTime, MPEG-4, and other streaming media. Apache is the Web server, and all the UNIX stuff you'd want is there or can easily be added. The GUI layer has a number of easy-to-use configuration and administration tools. Licensing compared to Windows is very cheap thanks to use of open source software, and there is also no client access license.

Re:Asthetics

[fault0]

I'm sorry, but thousands of people isn't many. OSX hasn't taken a significant portion of the desktop market from Microsoft nor a significant portion of the server market from Linux and FreeBSD.

I do personally like MacOS. Hell, I love it. I think it would have had a great potential if it ran on PC's. Unlike Moshe Bar, I don't want to squander $3000 to get the equivalent of my $1600 home built box.

Sure, there are a few people switching from WinXP and Linux, but there is an equal number of classic MacOS holdouts. Hell, I even have a few friends who have been bugging me to switch to Macs for the last umpteen years who refuse to use MacOSX on a regular basis until it's as comfortable for them as classic MacOS is *shrug*.

Re:Nothing beats... PINE!?!?!

[Nugget]

pine: people ignorant of newer emailers.

Re:Asthetics

[fault0]

The vast majority of new Mac users are people who've previously owned Macs as their major computer. Apple has good brand loyalty rates.

Re:Asthetics

[gig]

Up in the GUI, you add functionality to apps with scripts and plug-ins. AppleScript is in full swing right now, and the History panels in Adobe and Macromedia and other apps make scripting available to everyone. This has always been the command line of the Mac, and you can use AppleScript to create an application that essentially runs other applications as if it were a user, performing routine or repetitive tasks. When you see it in action, it's quite brilliant, with documents opening up in an application and changing, importing other data, saving, then the document opening in another application and being treated. It's great.

Not true!

[John Harrison]

In the Thinkpad, there is no internal antenna- the card simply juts out the side.

Depends on the Thinkpad. You can buy Thinkpads with built in 802.11b. No card jutting out. Of course not all Thinkpads have this, but it is certainly an option.

Re:Serious question

[dbrutus]

Supposedly, IBM is going to be unveiling that consumer grade successor chip in October. It's also likely to have Altivec or clone as well.

Re:Ugh, where to begin...

[MoneyT]

I"m pretty sure that the reason the mac doesn't default play multiple region DVDs is due to legal issues. Even if it's not nessesarily a written law, Apple's lawers have always been on the look out for potential problems. For example, the sound sosumi (sp?) in the mac OS is the sound of a xylophone. However, when they were adding the sound to the system, Apple's lawers wanted the name changed to avoid any possible cultural insults, hence the new name, sosumi (for the people that haven't figured it out yet, it's read so-sue-me)

Re:I wish i could afford one

[jbolden]

How can you compare notebook prices to desktop prices. And you can't build a top of the line desktop for $1000 much less $500; you can get a motherboard in a case and some ram for that much.

Re:Nothing beats... PINE!?!?!

[jbuilder]

I really resent being mod'ed down as flamebait on that posting. That was NOT flamebait. PINE is so outdated is almost funny! You like the keystrokes in PINE! No problem! So do I, I just remapped MUTT and I was good to go!

Don't agree fine... But to say I'm flaming? Puhleze... Some moderators are SO touchy.

Re:Er, no.

[00_NOP]

Did Linux suddenly become free yesterday? The reasons Linux has and will continue to have such a low share of the desktop are that a) the office/productivity software available for it is derivative and poor (when it exists at all), and b) it is more time-consuming to configure and maintain than MacOS or Windows.

Typically, you are assuming the market is confined to North America/Europe. Well, it ain't.

Disk Copy doesn't copy disks on a Mac

[jmorris42]

Ya, I saw "Burn CD" also. Try copying something off to a FireWire drive sometime. Can't be done. If it was only designed to copy CDs it should have been CD Burner or CD Copy.

And Mac folk rag us about "cp" being cryptic? There is an icon labeled in plain english "Disk Copy" that won't actually copy a disk. Bah!

(And there isn't really a need to dredge up the old drag to trash to eject golden oldie is there? At least on OSX the trashcan icon does switch to an eject symbol.)

Re:Nothing beats... PINE!?!?!

[Nugget]

strange, since I've always considered speed and economy of interface to be one of pine's weakest points. It's about the least efficient and most cumbersome interface I've used.

I still say that pine is the Outlook Express of unix mail readers:

They both focus on ease of learning at the expense of ease of use.

They're both preferred by relatively inexperienced users and win mainly due to "first exposure" intertia

The users of both appear to believe that theirs is the only similar email client. ("I like pine because I can ")

Pine embraces the Windows philosophy of monolithic applications by bundline an editor and a newsreader into the mail reader. Very un-unix.

Try mutt, you'll never look back.

Mod Up

[theolein]

Right on! And you can advertise on my site as well for a small trade...