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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.
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.
They give educational discounts on hardware, but not OSes. I got my PBG4 at Roosevelt Field and got the full edu discount.
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 ?
I haven't anything like that since people lined up to RETURN Windows ME!
As a note, you can have it install X11 automatically by pressing the "Customize" button while setting up the install. Its one of the options there.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Well, you can buy it online from the Apple Store using one of the demo machines in the phyical Apple Store at the edu price, then they'll give you a box to walk out with. My friend did this after the staff at the store suggested it to him.
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.
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!
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.
i think tim berners-lee'd have something to say about that.
While some of the effects I listed were exacerbated by the presence of the web and the net, I note that Fido didn't destroy everything even though it had a lot of the characteristics of today's Internet. (in fact we had an Internet gateway back then in Net 107 heh heh)
Microsoft, on the other hand, with preinstalled software and draconian licensing, as well as the desire to kill off all commercial competition in most markets, and making those who were in the tools business hang on with their fingernails to solvency (thinking Borland here), pretty much killed the shrinkwrap market for OS and applications. The net effect of this was to invalidate the whole reason for building your own box (for anyone but a hardcore geek) and even thinking much about office suites and the like - it's all Microsoft now. For that matter, the rise of OSS tracks this very action - if you can't compete commercially with them, the only resort is to compete for free. In some respects it's the transition from a business/hobbyist market to a utility. Computers are like the phone now, just less reliable. I don't think this is necessarily a good thing either, mind you.
Without the monopoly dominance, we might have had a chance of preserving the hobbyist nature of the net and computing in general. We were basically exploited to provide Microsoft with 60 billion in the bank, while running around willy-nilly fixing computers and patching for worms and cleaning up infections. Now it's 2003 and the hobby I used to love doesn't exist anymore. It sucks ass.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.