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Panther Released into the Wild
u2fan00 writes "Those fortunate enough to have an Apple Store near them were in for a treat last night -- crowds! Oh, and also Panther. Check out the local reactions, photos and stories from some stores across the nation."
Geeze. I saw the crowd last year at Lenox Mall in Atlanta for the Jaguar release, so I cleverly waited one entire day.
:-)
The Lenox Mall Apple store is a bit of a drive, so I went to the Micro Center not far from where I live. They're sort of a baby Fry's, but more expensive and nowhere near as good. This is, unfortunately, the South, and you take what you can get here. It beats Bosnia.
I walked into the Apple department, grabbed a copy of Panther, and asked if I needed to ring it up there or if I could keep shopping. The salesman put a sticker on it and told me to buy it up front, and then tossed a couple of freebies on the pile... a mousepad and a 64MB USB flash drive.
So I got a much shorter drive, no parking hassles, and a free USB drive in exchange for waiting a day. Calling this a no-brainer seems an understatement.
No impressions yet, I'm backing up before installing. Ok, one impression: the box is cool. Big silver X on a black background. Box upgrades are very important, you know.
... don't give educational discounts. You have to order online for that. So if you're a student, don't go trucking out to the store... you can't get it for $70 there.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
That looked like what happens to distro FTPs when a new release is out. Now they just need a physical equivalent to BitTorrent.
I believe it should be called either FleshTorrent or Orgy.
I'm quite sure spike lee owns intellectual property in the letter "X". Especially in that font and on a black background, jeez....
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Some people with in-house AirPort networks have run into difficulties after installing panther. If this is happening to you, Apple has already given a workaround here.
Also, Control-d now selects the dock and allows for keyboard navigation rather than getting sent to the app you want it to be sent to (such as terminal). I haven't figured out how to turn this off, but you can work around it by using the option key in addition to the control key (so Control-Option-d instead of just Control-d).
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Wow Apple fans sure are a rabid lot :-)
You'd have thought from the queues that the shops were giving away free drugs!
How do people get so addicted to a piece of computer software ?
Panther is cool; I like "Expose" pretty well.
For those unix types I have two issues so far:
1) the cocoa version of emacs I was using is broken by panther
2) the version of x11 I downloaded from apple is not automatically updated. You must update it manually from disc 3. Note that the old one is broken by panther.
I also needed to reinstall Microsoft Office X, but it is working fine now.
I haven't anything like that since people lined up to RETURN Windows ME!
Real men download their OSs.
No, real men upload their new OS for backup purposes.
Included in the box (what a cool black box it is, too!) is a development environment CD (compilers, APIs, SDKs, and the xcode IDE).
I'm happy to see Apple still giving the development tools away for free.
The Max OS X Panther 10.3 box includes 4 CDs... three for 10.3 and it's accessories (keep in mind these three CDs include localizations for 12 languages)... and a development environment CD containing compilers, various SDKs, and the feature-filled xCode IDE.
It's a bit alien to those not used to the NeXT way, but it only took my roommate about 15 minutes to find his way around. Both of us have already converted most of our projects to xCode.
Ehh... Carmack isn't developing Doom3 on MacOS. He has been pretty vocal about his love for Visual Studio 6. However, Doom3 does not make much use of DirectX (all of the gfx use OpenGL, for example) so he has made a few builds on Mac OS X and Linux over the past couple years.
In fact, the first demo of Doom3 (and the first demo of the GeForce 3 too) was on Mac OS X as part of one of Steve Jobs's keynote speeches.
Doom3 will be available for Mac OS X... but it's not being developed on it.
Gotta say I was drooling when they announced the G4 iBooks, lamenting my Applecare isn't up til May, but this has breathed new life into my iBook 500. I backed up to Peerless (hush - they were $50 EOL) and did an upgrade install - no problems so far. Given the backup, I may backup again now and do an erase install...
Everything is much faster. Mail.app has to reindex, Preview will now be my pdf viewer, and the calculator actually remembers which mode you quit it in. Sorry I paid for Koalacalc. The network panel is informative and rather than a clicking party.
Only drawback is without Quartz Extreme my Expose is doing about 3 fps, but it still does what's needed.
Only grip is that the new finder windows w/o toolbars have a very subtle facing - then you enable the new finder windows in full regalia, and they get the old brushed metal, which looks rough in comparison.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
There was a penguin, but the cat ate it. Sorry. :-)
--- Ban humanity.
It singlehandedly erased all my negative engrams upon first usage.
I commonly have ten applications and 25 windows open. Expose rocked my freakin' world. When I tied it to the right side button on my Intellimouse, my brain trancended to a spiritual level shared only by archangels and certain select saints. Once I came down from that, I had a full and satisfying orgasm with every subsequent use.
I AM NOT EXAGGERATING!
Well, OK, maybe a little.
Oh, and the new customizable finder bar in conjunction with the dock makes life good.
And for the first time I find labels cool. I never even used those back in the ghastly pre-OSX days.
--- Ban humanity.
would life crumple if one were to avoid the crowds and pick it up the next time you happen to be near the electronic store?
Life would crumple, because it wouldn't be as much fun.
These people aren't lining up and throwing parties because expose and fast user switching are going to change their lives. They're throwing parties because they want to throw parties, and the release is a good excuse to get all the mac users out there for some fun.
The guys who wait in line for an hour are not spending an hour of their lives to get OS X a day earlier, they're spending that hour hanging out with friends, making new friends (they all have something in common-being fans of the os-so it's a good way to meet people), and enjoying themselves.
The "cult of consumerism" is a real problem only insofar as consumers allow themselves to be exploited. Some may argue that Apple's policy of charging full price for annual upgrades is exploitative, but there are many who feel the pricing isn't unfair. Do the math, and it actually beats the cost per year of Microsoft's professional (ie, no product activiation) versions of windows. Apple is not a designer clothes brand selling the same materials from the same foreign country with a more famous label and a tripled price. Neither is Apple a monopoly gouging consumers without alternatives. The consumers in this picture are lining up like partiers outside a club. Look elsewhere if you want to find cattle.
For a hint as to where to look, try Keenan's recent paper, "Modern Dynamics in Consumerism: The Brand as a Proxy for Tribal Identity." It's an intriguing look at the effect of corporate branding on individuals' social lives. Certain social circles share a disturbing number of characteristics with cults, and the cult paradigm is a useful tool in analyzing how the most materialistic among us operate.
But getting back to the party at the Apple store, it worked really well for me, Panther wasnt the only cat I picked up. While we were hanging out waiting for the release, I ran into a girl who was touching up the digital version of her latest painting on her powerbook, and we ended up, um playing with our new kitties together after the party. You have no idea how hard it is to meet other lesbians who aren't raving, battle-axe-wielding, death-to-all-men feminists these days.
So, while the "cult of consumerism" is a real force in modern American society, the Panther release is a very poor example to use. It's just a case of people using a convenient excuse to have a little fun.
p.s. pickup games of medal of honor over airport with the rest of the line rock!
It's kind of sad that this is the only place where you get that same kind of ...release buzz...that you used to get back in the late 80's or early 90's almost regularly.
The industry just plain sucks nowadays. The shrinkwrap software market is dead. I walk into computer stores and find no one at shelves. No one is really buying anything. Computer shows are pretty much dead, even the swap meet kind. Building your own system is only for old geezers like me. The old local geek meetings like computer clubs pretty much barely exist. The onset of the net killed BBS's dead, eliminating that 'local' link.
This was ultimately the result of Microsoft's dominance. I curse everything I ever did to facilitate it. Sadly, with every day I got up during the 90's to go to work, I helped in many ways, along with thousands of others.
Stupid.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
After using 10.0 for a few months, my mind started melting away and Apple released 10.1. Yay.
After using 10.1 for almost a year, my sanity for a sane user experience started wearing thin. Finally Apple released 10.2, which was also much snappier. And it was something to rival OS 9 in a give-or-take competition for usability vs. stability, with Jaguar clearly winning.
But Panther just blows the doors off of.., um, not sure which doors I'm talking about. Let's put it this way in terms of performance. I used xbench to measure before and after the upgrade.
10.2.8 scores
CPU: 65.14
Thread Test: 35.3
Memory: 63.7
Quartz: 66
OpenGL: 60.5
UI (aqua controls): 57.87 (18.51 refresh/sec)
10.3.0 scores
CPU: 78.87
Thread Test: 60.95
Memory: 103.96
Quartz: 102.62
OpenGL: 78.6
UI (aqua controls): 141.58 (45.54 refresh/sec)
Totals:
10.2: 57.75
10.3: 85.19
Yes, HOLY CRAP this Mac is faster! My Q3A framerate jumped 15 fps (using the Q3 G4 beta). And the UI experience is much much smoother now, really the way OS X should be. Most notably, sheets and other window animation is VERY fast, and they now properly supplement the user experience, instead of just being eye candy. The Dock still sucks, but you can finally hide apps from the Dock contextual menu.
So, if you're sitting on the fence, jump off. If you thought Macs were slow, they just got a bit faster.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
Having installed Panther today, I'd say it's a nice improvement.
Upon installation, one interesting thing happened: the machine happened to kick into sleep mode, because I was away while it asked for disc 2. That's the first time I've ever seen an OS installer ever do that. Sure, they just boot to OS X from CD and then do an installation, but still pretty cool. Also, my machine didn't reboot after install, it was ready to use immediately, and no required reboot after doing Software Updates for iTunes and iSync. Expose is probably my favorite new feature, overall, though. The speed improvement is quite noticable on my upgraded G4 1.2Ghz (used to be a G4 400Mhz).