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Ars Technica Posts Panther Review
Nexum writes "Today Ars released their latest Mac OS X review, this time for Max OS X 10.3 Panther. It's great to see another tour de force from the Ars guys. They have, as usual, an excellent insight into the new OS release, and they also cover that burning question 'is it worth $129?,' and Panther seems to come out rather well. Certainly worth a read."
Expose performs a vector transform on all your bitmap windows. It animates and scales them using nearest-neighbour interpolation (I'm sure Bicubic is coming in.. er, Ocelot?) and parks them in an arbitrary, non-overlapping arrangement on the screen. Do you get this?
Ok, it's "clean up all windows" with eye candy.
Again, why do you think this is innovative?
Looking on PCMall:
Windows XP Home Ed: $198
Upgrade: $98
Additional Licence: $189 (save $10!)
XP Pro: $299
XP Pro upgrade: $199
Mac OSX v.10.3 Panther: $108
So OSX 10.3 is only $10 more then a WinXP upgrade. Sounds like a good deal to me.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
I think I'll vomit.
/. could calm down a bit when it comes to reviews of Apple products, but no.
/Users/shared in their media directories instead. Which is 'great': at least in the old days, an intruder would have to crack their login to see their media files; today they can just go to /Users/shared and it's all there for free. Some security.
You'd think that
And if the review is negative, then it's biased and FUD; if it's positive, like this 'read the back of the box' Ars review, then it's bloody brilliant work.
Bollocks, I say. And all you ass-lickers out there are only making it worse: for by incessantly sucking up as you do, Apple are not getting the feedback nor feeling the pressure to do better.
Panther is a MESS. There is no way this excuse for an OS should ever have made it out the door, especially when Jobs personally oversees everything.
Take the UI as an example: this weak attempt to make the old pinstripe look obsolescent is a total failure. Not only is the new look not functional, it's downright ugly. Yet someone higher up in the organisation had to approve of it. And if Jobs is going to send Ive back to the drawing boards with the first design of the iMac, you know for sure he's not going to let an OS out the door that looks like this.
Virtual memory: all you morons here say Panther is so fast, and the 'read the back of the box' reviewers say the same thing, but no one has done any true benchmarks. Instead, Panther has proven to be a memory GLUTTON, easing you up to a gigabyte of swap in no time flat. Jaguar, that slow as molasses OS, by way of comparison used rarely more than one 80,000,000 byte swap file.
File Vault: the concept itself is flawed. You can't mount an entire drive representing every file the user has from a single encrypted blob at login. It's too touchy. Any computer scientist worth 1/10 his salt would react and back off from such a loony idea at the onset.
And what happens to all the media files? Users trying to make File Vault work put links to
And then there's security. Overwriting a file several times with itty-bitty bits does not constitute secure delete, and overwriting like this leaves the user wide open to a full forensic attack. Better to have no shredding at all than do it this way.
FireWire: this is unbelievable. So many people have already commented that it's a scandal that Apple could let this monstrosity out the door. And the reason they have this opinion is that it's a valid question. All of this should have been tested thoroughly before the release. It's not like Apple are drowning in hardware compatibility issues like Microsoft; they have a very finite set of hardware components to test. This time around, with the $129 Panther, they couldn't even do that.
Panther bites. And the best, most thorough, most honest review up to now came from CNET. But of course, as this review is negative (and how often do any of these zines dare print anything negative) then it's biased and FUD. Which is bullshit. It's spot on - but you ass-lickers have more invested in waving your Cupertino banners than seeing the truth.
You're customers of Apple like everyone else. Apple are not a football team. You don't root for them - you buy their products. And if their products don't meet quality tests, then they're bad and should be recalled. Stop worrying about Microsoft, and see Apple just as another vendor. If you do, odds are QA at Apple will improve.
OK, now mod this way down as a troll. Self-censorship is the meanest of human activities. Go for it!