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Review of Mac OS X 10.3
alphakappa writes "The NY Times has a review of all the new Panther features which states that the 150 odd features added are so good that calling it a 0.1 upgrade is not fair. It finds the new Expose feature and other security features (like being able to encrypt/decrypt the entire home directory on the fly) extremely appealing. Gripes include the $130 price tag and the (somewhat) lack of backward compatibility."
M$'s service packs patch hundreds of holes. Panther offers 150 new *features*. I'd pay for features.
Plant a tree in a developing country.
As with any complex system, continuous updates will always leave tiny bits and pieces behind that eventually compromise the stability of the whole thing.
That said, there's a middle ground 'archive and install' option that preserves your users and network preferences while avoiding most if not all of the trouble that might come from updating. It's also faster as it doesn't need to check each and every file for updating and just writes everything while storing the old system folder in another place. Works mightily fine.
That $130 cost won't matter to those people whose systems the new version won't run on.
Seriously though - and I've lost track of the number of times I've said this - if you don't want the new features then you don't have to pay for them. And, if you don't pay for them, you're existing system doesn't become any less productive or user-friendly.
It really amazes me that people act as if their computing experience has somehow been crippled just because they don't have the very latest thing, even though their own machine hasn't regressed in anyway and is just as useful as it was the day before.
Watch how this story will generate countless posts that proclaim that Apple has somehow stabbed its users in the back by releasing a significant upgrade packed with both new and improved features and (shock, horror) daring to charge for it.
Newsflash people: software costs time and money to develop. So either pay up or shut up. Apple is a business, not a charity.
And to those of you who just fail to qualify for a free upgrade (if there is such a thing), please, get over it. Life is full of upsets, big and small. In the end, it's an upgrade you're missing out on, not a heart-bypass operation.
Anyone else think that upgrade envy is becoming way too common, on computing platforms and elsewhere in life?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Because the update scripts can't always plan for the havoc that a personal computer user has wreaked on the OS. They can't test to see what every little poorly coded application changed, and how it is affected by the update (and more importantly, how it affects the update).
This doesn't just go for Apple. Given the choice between a fresh install of an OS and a dist upgrade, I'll always take the fresh install (when it's really an option). Why not eliminate the variables? Regardless of the elegance of the OS, PC OS'es are usually made pretty ugly once an end user gets through with it.
-Turkey
Although it is quite popular with hackers, the "works for me" answer simply doesn't solve anybody's problems. The author of the article is referring to third-party applications (mentioning QuickKeys addon specifically), which stopped working. That most likely happened because it was using some undocumented API that got removed.
Microsoft, at least, has the decency to wait a few years between upgrades.
I know lame comments like these are essential to journalism and aren't meant to be taken seriously, but I'll bite --
What is indecent about releasing a major upgrade to your operating system after a year?
Should Apple sit on these changes for 2 more years?
If you don't want to buy the upgrade, don't. If you want to wait 2 more years, you'll likely get 10.5 with many more changes. You pay a premium to be a geek with the latest gadgets.
When the new iPod was released, I didn't expect Apple to give me a new one just because mine was only 6 months old. I sold mine on eBay and paid a substantial upgrade fee.
Cars are "upgraded" every year and most people don't drive the latest release because it's too expensive for them to upgrade. In fact, sometimes they only involve very minor cosmetic changes! And often they raise the price! Unbelievable!
Oh, but this is software and no physical manufacturing analogies apply.
Wanna know what's wrong with file-by-file encryption? Lots of stuff, but let's start at the beginning:
file names.
If I look at your laptop and see "Plan for World Domination.rtf," I know you're planning something, even if I can't read the file. Just the simple fact that the file's there--and that it was last modified on Tuesday--tells me something.
What else? Cache files. Windows doesn't encrypt cache and temporary files. Lots of important information can be pulled out of those, particularly if you use a company Intranet with confidential data on it.
The Apple solution, on the other hand, encrypts your entire home directory, caches and preferences and documents and everything, into a single sparse disk image file. If you don't have the password, you can't get anything.
Who's sucking it now?
Is that all Linux desktops are? Dumping grounds for poorly implemented features stolen from other operating systems?
I'd rather KDE invented its own innovation for a change. Slicker, so far, is the only project I've seen that could be considered in that realm.
"Sufferin' succotash."
This view can only be supported by having a very static view of how software is used. I was using OSX 10.1 when 10.2 was released. I suddenly began running into many commercial and open source products that required 10.2. For example, virtually everything on osxgnu.org now requires 10.2, and this is not because these projects are using 10.2 specific features; they're binary compatibility requirements. Fink is another example, and they already note on their page that 10.3 will require a new install from them. I also encountered this in a substantial number of commercial apps and drivers. Apple itself removed the 10.1 dev tools from their page by the time I went to get them.
For some people, myself included, software is a living, dynamic thing. I don't want 10.3 because of whatever assortment of new features it has; I want it because I'm afraid of being cut off from a bunch of things on which I depend. And if I get it, it's going to force some painful transition choices on me by breaking some 10.2-dependent stuff. In some ways the transitions between these 10.x versions is more jarring than that from 9.x to osx; at least when 9.x was left behind, dual boot and emulation support was provided.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
You're absolutely right about Linux package installation. The idea of building Mplayer from source makes be break out in a sweat and start looking for an afternoon I can clear.
.dll hell. .dll hell does not refer to the proliferation of libraries and dependencies. It refers to the lack of version awareness in Windows allowing an app to install a different version of a library over and existing version, thus breaking who knows what and making it difficult to even track down the problem, let alone cure it.
.dll hell.
For the most part installing a DVD player on Windows means popping in the CD and clicking on install.
However, doing so may mean invoking
Dependency Hell in Linux is, in fact, the cure for
Would you like Peche a la Frog, or Frog a la Peche?
Or I suppose you could have a pomme flavored frog.
The world is complex. There is no really good answer.
KFG
It's funny (strange) that Mr. Pogue makes such a big deal ("Now the big one:...") about the $130 upgrade price. I'm willing to bet that his copy of Panther didn't cost him even $0.01. He probably got a "review copy" or a "not for resale copy" or somesuch.
If you're the kind of guy who wants to get a lot of free stuff - books, gadgets, hardware, etc. - you can hardly do better than to become an author and reviewer. Write one or two books, and suddenly every other author in that field wants your name and a quote on the back of their book. I believe Dave Barry has written on this subject, and he's a lot funnier than I am, so I'll leave it to him.
Anyway, the upshot is that you should pretty much ignore anything that any hardware or software reviewer says about money, because they likely haven't spent any of theirs on hardware or software in quite a while.
"Software should be free," is not a double-standard. It's an ideal.
When you hear people griping about spending tons of money on MS products, it's because they are overpriced, bloated, insecure hacks from a corporate megalith that hates innovation because it means they might miss the Next Big Thing. Like the music industry, they don't want surprise hits; they want engineered hits.
Apple, on the other hand, has a corporate philosophy that respest, even *loves*, the computer. I believe this is Wozniak's biggest legacy: the love of the computer. So when Apple makes a product, it is often well worth the admission price.
You are confusing two orthogonal issues: the ideal of free software, and the judgements of the current state of corporate, commercial software. Just because some of us hold the Free Software ideal does not mean we don't hold valid opinions about the commercial software industry.
I hope this helps clarify the issue.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
If you checked his bibliography, you'll see that David Pogue has also written several books for Windows, such as The Missing Manual series for Windows XP and Windows Me.
Pogue might enjoy Macs, but he's hardly a Microsoft-bashing zealot.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
I love how everyone is jumping on Apple for having a numbering scheme that actually makes sense. Much like how the Linux Kernel is still on 2.x after 13 years of work, Apple recognizes that the first digit should only be for major changes in the basic functionality of the product, and since the BSD core of X is pretty solid, don't expect OS 11 any time soon. There are a lot of apps out there that never really should have left 1.x. Their . releases are like major windows upgrades (at least 95 to 98 scale) However, it would be nice if there were an upgrade priced package.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
The original point is valid: if most users are going to use easily-typed English words, that's the weak point of the system people are going to attack. [linebreak] In that sense, for the overwhelming majority of Mac users, it wouldn't matter if the cryptosystem used DES, or even pkzip-encryption; a determined attacker is going to break the system with the password.
Hmmm... This is a good point. However, I believe this is very easily corrected by Apple. Let's discuss this for a moment
The issue is "If users use one or more simple dictionairy words as a passphrase, their passphrases can be in recovered by a dictionairy brute-force attack."
First: A large percentage of those who actually need the protection offered by home-directory encryption already know about the dangers of dictionairy based passwords/passphrases (because of familiarity with security [remember, these are the ones that actually need it] ).
Second: Key generation from passphrases can be extremely secure, so long as dictionairy attacks (and the like) are not effective.
Third: This is the part Apple needs to do. When enabling encryption, Apple should bring up a new password generation/creation dialog that clearly explains to the user the dangers of dictionairy and short passwords. This dialog should do a check on any user-entered password and indicate dangers it sees. This is a simple thing, and if Apple hasn't already thought about this, there is a reasonable chance that they will (with some advice from it's userbase).
Conclusion: For a large class of users who actually needs this type of encryption, their need alone provides them with a level of security awareness that will help them choose passphrases that are immune to dictionairy attacks. The majority of the other class of users will never experience attacks, because no one would bother. For the small population of users who requires this type of security, but does not have the sophistication to know they need to be careful with passphrases, we need education and possibly a password wizard attached to encryption activation.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
It's not just the buttons. Looking at your screen shot, I mean this in the most constructive way possible:
Yes, I know the answers and I understand the limitations of the database, but this is exactly what people mean when they say Unix is cryptic. I'd like to see the left pane become a list of Applications, Libraries, and Servers, each grouped perhaps by categories like "audio", "games", "office", and so on. Provide a clickable link to the home page of each application, and perhaps the date of last update, or an indicator of its maturity.
This response was e-mailed to David Pogue in reply to his New York Times article":
> "..that far more software is available for Windows (true; "only"
> 6,500 programs are available for Mac OS X).."
I'm afraid I'm going to have to take exception to the above statement. While it's true that there are more native Windows applications, I think that this is a misleading metric.
The Macintosh is by far the most compatible platform. It runs Classic applications, Mac OS X applications, BSD applications, Linux applications, and X11 applications. As surely you know, the Mac will even run Windows applications via Virtual PC.
This being the case, it's a reasonable conclusion that "far more software is available for Windows" is a false statement. I thank you kindly for an otherwise excellent article.
--- Fox