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Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" Preview at WWDC
hype7 writes "Apple just announced that it will kick off WWDC 2004 with a preview of the next iteration of Apple's operating system, Mac OS X, in a Steve Jobs keynote. This version of Mac OS X, 10.4, has been code named 'Tiger.' As usual, Apple is being incredibly tight lipped about what's going to be added; there hasn't even been that much speculation of new features on the rumor sites. WWDC is scheduled to begin on the 28th of June."
I think Steve has a thing for large cats. Whatever happened to the rest of the animal kingdom?
Apple is on a roll! From Cnet:
g =n efd.top
http://news.com.com/2100-1045_3-5205185.html?ta
If Tiger goes on sale this year, it would mark the company's fifth version of Mac OS X in five years. In the same period, Microsoft has released one major version of Windows--XP--along with various updates. Longhorn, the next major release of Windows, is not expected until the middle of 2006, at the earliest.
All I can think of is better browsing of Windows/Samba networks. That's it. Panther does everything I need it to do and quietly and competently.
This guy is way out there
Mac OS point releases seem to have an even-odd curse just like Star Trek movies, only the other way around: the odd-numbered ones are much better. 10.0: unusable. 10.1: a huge improvement. 10.2: eh. 10.3: very nice. So maybe I'll wait for 10.5.
This trend goes back to at least the System 7 days, in my experience.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
To the best of my knowledge the cost has remained a constant $129 USD.
- Easier to use
- Faster internet
- Brighter colours
- Fruitier appearance
- More gay appeal
- Longer up-time
- Harder to crack
none of apples upgrades have cost 200 dollars
Um, neither have Microsoft's upgrades. And by my math, multiple $99 or $129 Apple upgrades are going to cost more than one $99 or $129 Microsoft upgrade
...and here's why: After this last semester of dealing with linux and windows in the house, cheap x86 hardware, school, and work, I HAVE HAD IT!
i will be buying Apples for both me and my girlfriend and an older dualproc Sun server to chain SCSI drives off of.
I HAVE HAD IT WITH SHIT NOT WORKING OUT OF THE BOX, FIRST TIME! i am not dealing with Windows nor linux for any of our serious design work anymore. i know this a massive linux crowd here, and honestly, i really love linux for my firewall and server stuff and my run Gentoo on the Sun (doubt it though...gentoo-sparc is nice, but Solaris 9/10 it ain't).
i don't have the time to fuck about with things anymore. i have to be able to plug it in, turn it on, and let people get to work. i say more power to Apple and they can have some of my cash too. You take the power of *nix (yes, i know what is under the Apple hood, i'm speaking general here) and put a slick, smooth, beautiful, easy-to-use GUI on top, have Adobe compile the must-have apps for it and i'll buy. Apple has done this. Now i will buy. And no, i don't have loads of cash laying around, i'm going to have to scrape to do this, but you know what? It's worth it.
The reason that people aren't pissed is because each new version of OSX is a lot better than the previous version. It just keeps getting better and better.
As long as the new versions are faster and offer new and innovative features I doubt that MacOS users will care too much.
They do for the Server editions; I'm not sure it makes so much sense for the clients but if they get enough people asking then I'm sure that they will. The fact is it's possible to get away with an earlier edition (I'm using OS X Server 1.2, Rhapsody DR2, 10.2 Jaguar and NeXTSTEP 3.3 :-) but that many - not all, but a significant minority - of Mac users will upgrade at the drop of a hat. One problem is that often the newer versions aren't binary or library compatible with the old versions, so if a developer upgrades to 10.4 and forgets to click the 'GCC 2.95' box in XCode then their software won't work on previous versions :-(.
It doesn't bug me at all. Nothing forces you to upgrade, after all. Imagine, you buy a computer with an OS, then a year later it's still the most current OS. Or imagine you buy a computer with an OS, then a year later a new version is released, but you don't upgrade. There is no difference between these two scenarios. They also break almost nothing, so if you do choose to upgrade it's a painless process, in the technical sense, if not the financial sense
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Bear in mind that nobody outside of Apple even knew about Expose until WWDC 2003. If Steve can pull another rabbit like that out of his hat, 10.4 might turn out to be worth it after all.
The big question I'm waiting to answer is whether this will be an incremental update or a major update. Panther added some nice new functionality Fast User Switching, Expose (which I don't use nearly as much as I thought I would the first time I saw it), and better networking support. It was a tough call but I believe it was worth the upgrade, fast user switching alone has made my life a lot easier.
What's left, quite a lot actually. The Finder for one thing could use a lot of enhancements. Forgoing the whole brush metal fiasco, I care little about, there is the whole underlying functionality. Why is it that the OS can't update the window's contents without being pushed to do it. This is something that is fundamentally critical to an operating system. Additionally browsing folders across a network with a large number of files in it is painfully slow, and I'm talking my 100MB network at home.
Lastly I would like to see a decent integrated development environment. XCode is a nice upgrade from previous tools but I'd still like to be able to work on the GUI and on code at the same time. CASE tools have come a long way, but Apple's tools still have a very antiquated feel about them.
Sir, there is a dragon outside with an armful of armor. He's inquiring if we offer free refills.
Apple is very kind. When I brought in my iBook for repair because of that nasty Logic Board problem, Apple serviced and delivered my computer free of charge for me. On top of that, they sent me a copy of Panther when the repairs were over. Apple must be selling their operating systems not based solely on a profit basis. I would assume that the reason Apple is charging the $130 for each "upgrade" of their operating systems (they are not upgrades but full versions only) is because they assume that the only people buying them are not upgrading, but buying from scratch. It would be interesting for Apple to set up a "n-year upgrade program" where you get every release of your particular OS for those n years. They are already doing that for their server operating systems.
What people do you know that buy a new car every year? Personally, I'm sick of this analogy. Software can be added to an existing computer - that's what computers do. To charge a large price for an upgrade that you really will need to get, is wholly wrong.
There are hundreds of software packages now that only run on 10.3 and higher. The same will be true for 10.4. There are certainly no "new roads" that my car can't drive on. And if there are, they certainly won't fully switch-over for at least 20 years (not 9 to 18 months like Apple expects).
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Standard Mac Reply(tm).
"But you get more with a new version of OS/x than you do a windows service pack."
And as a relatively new mac user coming from a windows/linux background, it's true. You get the same updates as you do via windows update for security fixes, etc etc. Most windows service packs however (with the exception of the upcoming xpsp2 that is) are essencially the previous bug fixes all rolled into one.
Contrasting this, the incremental updates for MacOS (10.2, 10.3) are more than hotfixes but less than a completely new os. Generally they contain new apps, improvements in existing apps (not just performance or bug fixes either) such as the new 'find as you type', expose, ichat, etc.
That said, I'd love to see the *real* next gen apple offerings, ie: OS 11, as the "new" OSs that have come out in the os 10 line have really been evolutionary, not revolutionary, as longhorn promises to be. Of course, redmond is making a lot of promises about longhorn, and it's a "I'll believe it when I see it" situation for me.
Do I *WANT* to pay for an upgrade every year? No.
Do I *HAVE* to pay for an upgrade every year? No.
However, who on earth can blame Apple for launching new releases on a regular basis and charging for them. If they don't have enough features to justify *YOU* paying for them (it is, after all, completely subjective), then don't get it. Wait until enough releases go by that you feel justified. On the flip side, Apple is trying to make money and apparently there are enough people willing to pay for these annual releases to encourage Apple to keep doing it.
I'm not sure how many they sell each year, but if they waited every 2-3 years, that's a TON of money being left on the table that a TON of consumers are apparently more than willing to part with.
Enjoy,
Andy
I imagine that the release date will be at least a year from WWDC. They have been setting the release dates about 18 months apart. This is the developers conference of course they are going to pull out the next OS and preview it. Oh and two paid updates in the past 5 years each of which has been a significant advancement is worth $250 dollars.
10.0 was available for free from CompUSA stores, possibly others too. 10.1 was a free upgrade. 10.3 is available for about $90 if you search on froogle.
Because Microsoft releases lousy OSs every two or three years, and Apple releases a great OS once a year, you dumb shit.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Clearly, you're not a Mac user. Every upgrade to OS X has made my four year old machine perform better. I can still use a 400MHz machine to do web design and graphics: You can't say that about a 1GHz PC running XP! I'd much rather have to shell out $120 each year for a speed bump than $600 for a new PC.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
So...It's been announced that Steve Jobs will announce what will eventually be in 10.4.
I don't know what's more disturbing, that this is a story or that my heart started beating faster as I read it.
Triv
I won't buy this one.
Um, ok, that's great. Good for you. Have a cookie.
Why are these articles filled with people saying, "I won't buy it"? Who gives a crap? Don't buy it!
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Or, compare this to Windows. I have a copy of Windows 2000 from early 2000, as in right around when they released it. Retailed for $300 (OEMed for about $180, if I remember right). And that's right about the time of OS 10.0 (a little before, actually). So for $300 for 2000, and another $200 for XP Pro (the actually comparable upgrade) in that span, I would really have gained very little.
2000's updates were mostly security issues, a few Direct X upgrades (not something I consider an added value, but definitely important for games), Windows Media 9 which I actively work to keep away from everything, and some Journal Reader add-ins.
Had I decided to upgrade to XP, I would've gained an eye-bleed inducing green and blue color scheme by default, system restore, and...? As far as I can tell, with the exception of some bluetooth products and a few system hack-type programs (stuff to change the UI and so forth), XP would've been 2000 pretty edition (hence the NT 5.1). So in these accumulated 4 years and some change, I'd have paid somewhere between $350 and $500, depending on how I valued support and whether I felt it necessary to upgrade to XP (I don't). I'm sure some harder-core windows historians could tell me a few of the other things introduced, so feel free.
On my macs, I got 10.0 included with an iMac, and 10.1 for free (the free upgrade offer), but we'll call it $150 there to be fair (assuming that I bought 10.1 retail). I paid $129 for 10.2 and $129 for 10.3, which puts me in essentially the same price category. I've seen substantial speed improvements, particularly on my older hardware (a 450mhz g3 iMac and a 500mhz iBook), which alone makes upgrading even more worthwhile (in stark contrast to XP's potnetial to run slower on a given system out of the box). I've seen quartz extreme, encrypted filesystems, easier integration of X11, fast user switching, and expose all introduced in that span, as well.
Honestly, to me, it's worth the cash. I'll need to see what Tiger brings to the forefront, although I suspect that theories about heavy G5 optimizations are probably true. If it turns out that people start noticing it running faster on their older hardware, which is entirely possible given the track record, I'll drop my $129 again.
Tiger will include Spoken Interface. The integration of aural tools into the OS (instead of tacking on screen readers) will be a major improvement over both the current Mac and Windows systems and a huge boon to users with a visual handicap or motor skill impairment.
Everyone bitches about shelling out money for an upgrade every year. If you don't like it, don't upgrade. The difference between MS and Apple updates is Apple updates actually have new features. MS's are bugfixes, that's why they are free. Older versions of Apple's OS are still supported. If you want the new features, you would have to pay for them, just like the upgrade from win2k to XP to 2003.
In any case, if you want to save yourself the money, just do what I do and buy a new machine everytime they come out with an OS upgrade. It's just like getting $130 off the price of the machine because it comes with the new OS, and then sell your old box on ebay. As long as you do it every year, you lose almost nothing.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Yeah, I'm replying to my own post. My previous one was trollish, and I thought I should clarify.
/.ers think it's cool, but when Microsoft does it, they complain" meme. The facts are that a) Microsoft is a convicted monopoly, and Apple isn't, and b) more importantly, Apple does it better than Microsoft. Microsoft embeds lousy software in a lousy OS, releases lousy service packs, and talks about "innovation" when all they create is bloat. Apple embeds good software in a good OS, releases upgrades that really do improve the software and OS even further, and continues to be the driving force in innovation for the whole PC industry.
/. who are smart enough to recognize that. People don't hate Microsoft because it's Microsoft. They hate it because its products and business practices suck.
I'm really sick of the "When Apple does it,
I'm not saying this is a permanent state of affairs. Companies can and do change. If you'd asked me twenty years ago, I'd have said that IBM would never be anything other than "Big Blue", a giant corporation sucking the life out of the industry by trading on name recognition to crush smaller companies that were doing all the real innovation. These days, IBM are the good guys. It may be that Microsoft will go through a similar change, and in twenty years they'll be an ally to small developers and desktop users, while Apple (or, more likely, some company we've barely even heard of in 2004) will be the giant evil force that's holding back the whole industry.
But right now: Microsoft is a bad corporation with bad products, Apple is a great corporation with great products, and there are a lot of people on
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
They ought to suck up the price of the upgrade and roll it into their .Mac subscriptions. Make it cheaper to get .Mac + the upgrade vs. just the upgrade alone.
Is this when we finally get to use that sheet of three paper coupons that came in the shipping box with all new Macs throught the 1990s? Remember, the ones that indicated the OS we'd bought and which said they'd be used for upgrades, but NEVER WERE?!
Windows XP Pro Upgrade cost $199. By my math, that's pretty damned close to $200 .
I am a recent convert and I am *utterly* pleased with 10.3. With that being said, there are a couple things I'd like to see improved/fixed:
1. Give me the option to have my quoted text in Mail.app appear at the top of my cursor when replying to an email. Few types of miscreant are worse than top-posters, and Apple doesn't need to be aiding and abetting.
2. Speed. I'll take OS X over Linux/X11 or XP any day of the week, but I'd love to see XP's responsiveness in the Tiger GUI. Again, I prefer the stability to the speed, but having both would be rich.
3. As mentioned, SMB interoperability can use some tweaking in the areas of both speed and ease of use.
4. This is sacrilegious, but the Finder still isn't there for me. I *hate* the spacing of the icons in icon view (they are like 3 feet apart), and the viewing of directories and files simply isn't as intuitive to me as it is in XP. Pathfinder does a much better job, in my opinion.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
Tabby", "Calico", and "American Shorthair" are not exactly going to make Bill Gates tremble in awe.
I don't know. If a monocle and a persian cat are good enough for a Bond Villain (or Bill Gates himself), they oughta be good enough for me.
Tweet, tweet.
Apple doesn't sell upgrades. That $129 gets you a full version of the OS. You can sell your old version on ebay if you want; you won't need it to install 10.4
What else Apple doesn't give you: Product Activation. They don't even require a serial number or product key. Just put the CD in the drive and go.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Even though they say it's a no-no in Usenet land... "Me Too!"
I'm piping up just so all the Linux heads can see that we're out there. Before you complain, know that I have no problem compiling the Kernel, I have a couple of Linux boxes running web sites in my home server closet and a very active postfix mail server servicing a bunch of different purposes and etc.
I'm no expert, but then again, I don't want to be. My 13 year old daughter has an iMac and an iPod and she loves them. I'm a convert. My next "main box" will be an iMac or a G5 or something, especially now that I'm getting into the digital video thing.
In any event, thank you Apple for saving me from Config File Hell. I'm sick of editing obscure, unique, hidden freaking config files, recompiling this and that and all the rest of the headaches associated with using Linux. I want the security and performance of *nix, with the ease of Windows. That means, OS X.
Apple's OS releases have always been evolutionary. For that matter, you could say the same of any OS really. OS 6 to 7 was the last "revolutionary" change for apple before OS9 to OS X, and that was a switch from 68k to PPC code. Everything else has always been evolutions of the previous OS. This isn't a bad thing, consistancy is something people like. A lot of people didn't like (and still don't) OS X because it doesn't look like the old OS and doesnt' behave like it in some places. A complete revolution every year or even every 2 years would be disasterous for Apple or any other software company.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
So here's a question: Why is it that while the OSes are named for large cats, the O'Reilly books on things Mac-related all feature dogs on the covers?
My point is that now that 10.4 is about to ship
Well.... no, it's not. It'll be at least 6 months, probably more.
Finder is the top listing. So, you couldn't find files before? No tool to help you seek what you are looking for? Yes, yes there was. What does this top listed improvement give me? Hint: Pretty Icon layout. How much was that worth?
Actually they did vastly improve the Finder in Panther - and none of the improvements had anything to do with the icons (except for the colored labels). Off the top of my head, there's a new, highly convenient sidebar, and Folder Actions allow you to attach an Applescript to a folder any time something happens to said folder, which is really cool (and useful).
The improvements to Mail aren't eye candy - the biggest one, organizing email by discussion, is really nice, similar to what Google's webmail gives you, only in a desktop app.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
I work as a system administrator for a small non-profit. I have enough work and dealing with configuration of yet another Linux box is not something that I would like to do on my free time. Do not get me wrong, I love what I do for living; however, I do not want to do my work at work and at home.
When I switched to Mac OS X I was fairly pleased with the fact that I could work from home on a system with a stable GUI that hasn't crashed on me in more than one and a half years. I can do all my work on a system that does not require a lot of maintenace; that increses my productivity. I am impressed by the quality of Xcode and how much you can do with it without installing a ton of new things. I can do OpengL programming, write user interfaces and do all sorts of things out of the box -- install Xcode and you're a done! Did I mention well-integrated Java support?
With that in mind, I am looking forward to the new version of the operating system that I love to use. However, I hope that Apple incudes more than new icons and new GUI features in 10.4. Here is my small wish list:
Update CVS to the most recent version.
Add better group and user management. For example, make sure that every user is a member of 'staff' and the admin user is a member of 'staff' and 'wheel.' It would be cool if UNIX inclined people could have a set of advanced options when it comes to user creation.
Fix passwd. I would like to use it in order to change my passwords; it is faster for me that way. I am sure that this command can be updated to change my KeyChain password.
Add more fonts.
Add tabbed sessions for Terminal. I know that there is iTerm, but it choked on me way too many times. I like Terminal better.
Add virtual desktops as a part of the window manager.
Provide a stable front end to firewall that supports both TCP and UDP rules. Currently, only TCP traffic can be managed.
Well, I guess that is it for 10.4.
If you're paying an annual fee for something on an 18-month update cycle, you're going to have years where you pay the full subscription price for an an idle year.
Or, the vendor is going to feel compelled to deliver something that approximates the value, and bend the development schedule out of shape to force a release, usually at the cost of quality. (Been there, done that, still have the t-shirt.)
So far, I think Apple has done a pretty good job of adding value to each release.
Apple spends loads of money paying an army of developers, designs, testers, managers, artists, support staff, etc. to develop these new releases. It costs money to run a business. Most businesses like to have income to offset the costs, and if they can, reap a profit which they can reinvest in their products. It's not like they're taking your $130 and buying golden toilet paper to wipe their asses with.
I paid $20 or 30 for the Public Beta, I got a kickass new OS to play with. I paid I don't remember how much for 10.0 and got a mediocre (but still better) version of the OS. I got the 10.1 upgrade for free at the Apple Store (score!) and finally had a truly usable version of Mac OS X. I paid $130 for 10.2 and got a kick-ass version of Mac OS X. I paid $130 for 10.3 and I've been totally wowed by it. 10.3 breathed new life into old hardware. Each time my money went towards making the next release even better.
Apple has every right to charge for their OS. Whether you agree with $130 being worth it is irrelevent. Just because you can get Free Software for free, does NOT mean ALL software should be free. Yes, it'd be nice if they had an upgrade version, but the last time they did that it was poorly devised and you could rip the CD, remove a single file from the image, and re-burn a full installer CD, which obviously cost them money.
If you want an upgrade version, make your voice heard. Go to http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback and let them know what you think.
Gabriel Ricard
Anyone got the shinny on whether there'll be drivers & compiler for the new shading language? I'd speculate that they'll do so to stay on the leading edge of open standards. Only 3dlabs has a compiler for windows & linux now, and apparently there is some buggy support for ati.
I want
improved Finder I think all Mac OS X users will agree with me better feature parity between Cocoa and Carbon every release improves this for older features, but every release also adds new features to one or the other w/o adding them to both better integration of Cocoa and Carbon Let me put an HIView in an NSWindow (no, the child window workaround is no good, because it doesn't work with keyboard navigation and it causes visual oddities such as disabling controls or taking away key window status.). And let me create custom menus in Cocoa. rpc.quotad I'm setting up an Xserve (w/ 3.5 TB Xserve RAID) running Mac OS X Server to serve files via NFS to some Solaris boxesThere's more, but I can't remember all of it right now.
-- Tim Buchheim
You know what? I'll snap this thing up right away. It's worth the cost, just as 10.2 and 10.3 were worth the cost. (Though I suspect I'll be buying a new Powerbook about the time 10.4 is released.)
I'm of the same school as a lot of posters here -- Redhat, Windows, and Mac OS X are part of my daily life. Redhat runs my webserver/small biz, Windows is the ball-and-chain of my day job, and Mac OS X does everything else.
My development work (PHP/MySQL, Ruby, Perl, etc., all of which are part of the OS X distribution), all done on OS X before deploying to the server. My design work? Fire up Photoshop on the iBook. My writing? I just installed PHPWiki a few days ago and have been using it to organize and build the notes for the sci-fi trilogy I've had rolling around in my head for years. Family? I just custom-rolled a photo book for my father-in-law that had restored copies of all his photos (gracias, Photoshop) and it arrived in hardcover (gracias, iPhoto). Road trip? Burning off CDs like mad from iTunes, including the ones I purchased from iTMS.
I'm a Mac OS X user for life. Period. I don't have to fuck around with all the annoying shit that amounts to day-to-day life on Windows/Linux.
Like an earlier poster, I used to bitch about the price of Macs. Then I got an OS X machine. The price is worthwhile -- it's no different than a car, a house, or any other consumer purchase -- you get what you pay for. And I'll happily shell out $129 for 10.4, or a few grand for a new Powerbook with 10.4. Because I have a computer that I use to work, not a computer that I have to spend hours or days trying to keep working.
blog |
Each year we seem to buy machines in May (just in time to miss the free upgrade for the OS), get OS on a developer machine, update our in-house applications, roll out across our small office.
Yeah, it costs money, but we've gotten functionality and improvements that have made our in-house applications faster and more reliable, so I'm happy.
Also, there is no obligation to buy the upgrades, we were going to skip Panther, but then Expose was so incredible, we upgraded all our developers. Instead of building on Panther to deploy on Jaguar, we just bought a bunch of Jaguar updates.
The Jaguar Server -> Panther Server was an INCREDIBLE change, and I look forward to Tiger Server for more polish.
So it's a GOOD thing. Customers get the option of getting new features/more productive, and Apple Shareholders get to increase earnings by selling more to the same (or slightly shrinking) market.
So rather then fighting for marketshare, Apple is selling more/customer.
So all around, it's a good thing.
have "Schrodinger" as version 10.8
"Will it be released or not?"
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
You found out wrong. Drivers don't have to be part of the kernel. They can also be loaded as modules. You don't have to recompile your kernel.
Nope. I spent about a month researching this, and had several people tell me that even though it shouldn't be this way, it was. It's a Toshiba laptop with a combo sound/video card. I tried 6 separate distros, including Mandrake, Gentoo, Slackware, and Red Hat. The video card worked fine, just not the sound part. This was a little over a year ago, but things probably haven't changed that much since then.
Your complaint is that there is no pre-built binary for your sound-card. This is not a fault of Linux. It is either the fault of the distribution for not including the driver (if the source is available) or the fault of the manufacturer for not supporting Linux.
Don't care WHOSE fault it is, just that the problem exists. Every single time I've tried Linux I've wound up having to dink with crap that I have absolutely no love for dinking with. I want something that works out of the box. Linux has NEVER footed the bill insofar as that consideration is concerned.
As a 1GHz user running XP, yes, I can.
I can vouch for him! VNC on his desktop is actually responsive. I have to disable all the adware on his box, and when I fire up the spam-server things will slow to a crawl - but it's not *that* bad.
Clearly, there are benifits to putting speed over security.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I had a look at a French guy's iBook a short while back, and noticed that they didn't bother to translate the App names (a side effect of the fact that a single copy of an OS X app can contain any number of localisations). In French the IM app is still called iChat, which translates as iCat.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You must like playing with fire. I still don't trust Panther in a large production environment, and that's been out for six months and has seen three fairly major service releases-- you want to buy a just-released 10.x.0 and roll it out in the space of a couple months?
One of my clients is about to move to OS X, and I'm moving them to a proven, well-tested-by-select-endusers build based on Jaguar (10.2.8) even though they're buying Panther licenses. One reason is because they live and die by Outlook, and Panther and Outlook 2001 in Classic are not best friends (and no, Entourage X is not a solution because the Exchange connectivity is shit and will be until they give it MAPI).
~Philly
When I upgrade Microsoft, I feel like I'm simply getting patches and ugly window dressing. When I upgrade Apple, I feel like I'm getting tons of new features and capabilities. Bottom line, Apple is providing significant value -- I'm willing to put hard money behind that kind of corporate behavior. The complaint I have toward Microsoft is that I don't get $200 worth of value, productivity, interest, or entertainment for the price tag. In fact, the XP "experience, the licensing, and lack of new features has turned me off from using Microsoft until I absolutely have to. Apple, who seems to trust their users not to pirate, gladly gets my repeat business. And will continue to do so.
Academia, Russia - what's the difference?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Let's not forget the Power Mac 7100 incident involving Carl Sagan. Interesting little story for those who've never heard it before.
IIRC, the first-gen Power Macs were internally codenamed "PDM" (6100), "Carl Sagan" (7100), and "Cold Fusion" (8100). Carl Sagan got wind of this via a MacWEEK article about the forthcoming machines, and promptly complained that Apple was using his name to promote their products without his consent-- a rather nebulous accusation since it was an internal codename never intended to be made public. Some say Sagan was also miffed about having his name included with two scientific frauds, Piltdown Man and cold fusion. I don't recall if lawyers came into play at this point, but they definitely did when Apple changed the 7100's codename to "BHA," widely rumored to stand for "Butt-Head Astronomer."
Sagan sued and lost, but the 7100's codename was again changed to "LAW," rumored to stand for "Lawyers Are Wimps."
"Microsoft embeds lousy software in a lousy OS, releases lousy service packs, and talks about "innovation" when all they create is bloat."
.NET .NET provides a free compiler for an excellent and modern development environment. C# has been described as "java done right". Moreover, Microsoft has worked with standards organizations, allowing projects like Mono to provide runtimes for other platforms.
I'm tired of the "Microsoft software must be gargabe".
Case in point: HDTV Community
Microsoft has released a free codec, encoder, and player which allows users to burn near-HD quality video onto a DVD. An episode of ER fits nicely onto a DVD with nearly the same quality as the original broadcast.
Case in point: Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office is head-and-shoulders above any other office suite. Give me this "openoffice is great" line and I'll show you ten people who hate OpenOffice. Microsoft Office is simly the easiest to use, most polished office suite available.
Case in point: DirectX
Microsoft is pushing the computer graphics industry forward with DirectX. Unlike with OpenGL, DirectX immediately standardizes new features. Developers don't have to choose between using proprietary extentions or not using the latest hardware features. Thanks to DirectX, there is a standardized, modern, high-quality interface to the GPU.
Case in point:
Case in point: Active Directory
Active Directory makes it far easier to centrally administer, configure, and upgrade PCs in a network environment.
Case in point: Windows Installer
Windows installer delivers both a command-line and GUI based framework for installing, repairing, and removing software. It is automatic and intelligent and can automatically install new components over the network as they are needed.
Microsoft's products don't suck. The fact is, people *don't* hate Microsoft. Ask ten people on the street.
If we really hated Microsoft, then why is everyone using Office and Windows? Oh, right, it's because of "file format lockin". Right. Because OpenOffice has no compatibility with MS Office.
People use Microsoft because it works. They can sit down, use their computer, and get on with their life.
Mac OS only runs on one brand of hardware. Linux has consistantly demonstrated that it is *not* ready for primetime on the desktop.
Windows is really the only viable desktop operating system for business. There is a reason why 95%+ of corporate desktops run Windows. Corporations know how to cut costs. Yet they still choose to use Windows. There is a reason for that.
People seem to repeatively rehash on the notion that spending $129 per .1 incremental OS update is expensive and not worthy of your hard earned funds.
The 10.x Model is very NeXTish in their 2.x, 3.x and 4.x phase of NeXTSTEP/Openstep before we ultimately merged with Apple.
Here is the rub. The Cost for Openstep User was $799, to go from NeXTSTEP 3.2 to 3.3 and to go from NeXTSTEP 3.3 to Openstep 4.0, so on and so forth.
The Developer CDs were $4999.
Educational User was $249. (I bought this package that was both User and Developer, before I went to work at NeXT)
Flashforward and we now get User/Developer for $129.
All I'm hearing is as the price goes down the Whining Increases exponentially.
DO YOU PEOPLE HAVE ANY BALLS?
HOW MANY OF YOU PISS MONEY DOWN THE DRAIN, DAILY?
Answer: ALL OF US
Apple Resources:We hear people discussing on how Apple has an Army of developers working on OS X.
Unless Steve suddenly changed years of development philosophy that Avie, John, Bertrand, Peter and others brought from NeXT to Apple such statements are PURE FANTASY.
Do most people know that only 12 Principle Architects/Core Developers worked on Openstep? Do most of you know that SQA @NeXT was a group of no more than 25 people (I know I worked in it)? Is it surprising that after the Hardware Days, NeXT kept only 300 employees yearly, world wide? See a pattern?
There are way more 3rd party developers banging away on the Beta code releases than their are in-house building the next release and there always will be.
Too many cooks spoil the soup.
With the emergence of Applications Engineering that houses all these new iLife apps and Professional apps even those teams will be lean and mean.
We all wore several hats at NeXT and at Apple when I worked there. Steve doesn't believe in bloat and when the IT Group alone, during the merger had over 500 employees with the single largest annual budget of over $40 million, not to mention over 180 in-house only applications built, can you take a guess which group got gutted first?
Within all this fat emerged a new Apple and one that will slowly get stronger, as time keeps showing.
P.S. As you can guess I'll spend the $129, and if I had an extra $1299 ($300 early bird registration) to WWDC--the best place for Business Networking within the Apple Dev Community, bar none. MacWorld is like a Rave where discussions of vinyl suited women on motorcycles (Iomega chicks) appears to be more important than Business discussions. If you are serious about being an Entrepreneur on the Mac platform, than get your ass to WWDC 2004.
I have no idea what it will be, but I'd be willing to bet that 10.4 "Tiger" includes a new major OS feature that takes advantage of Quartz Extreme.
For those that aren't familiar with it, Quartz Extreme, which was introduced in 10.2, uses OpenGL to "composite" your screen image. In other words, all application windows are bitmaps on your graphics card, and your graphics card puts them together to make the overlapping windows that you see.
In 10.2, the result was a 30% speed improvement for many operations, because the CPU no longer needed to spend as much time redrawing the screen. Eye candy like soft drop shadows on every window and on the mouse cursor, the Genie effect, and Dock magnification got a lot faster and smoother.
In 10.3, they added Expose and Fast User Switching (with a cool rotating animation) - neither of which would have been realistic without Quartz Extreme. Thanks to Quartz Extreme, my 733 MHz G4 had no problem Expose-ing 18 windows instantly, perfectly smoothly, including continuing to play a QuickTime movie while rearranging the windows! (Hint: hold down Shift while you press your Expose shortcut to watch it in slow motion!)
So anyway, in 10.4 I expect to see some major new OS feature that takes advantage of Quartz Extreme. Just think: they have the ability to instantly make any window partially transparent, rotate any window in 3-D, warp the whole desktop under the mouse, you name it - so I think there's a good chance they've come up with a clever new way to exploit this. Anyone could implement Expose on any OS - but without Quartz Extreme you couldn't possibly make it so fast and so smooth.
> Your OS might get patched to fix vulnerabilities but your applications won't; the new versions won't run on your version of the OS.
So basically what you're saying is, you don't mind paying each application vendor every time they release new versions, but it pisses you off to have to pay Apple to release new versions of the operating system? Is Apple's software somehow not worth the same as other software vendors?
I don't see how Microsoft is worlds better. There are a lot of programs now that don't run on Windows 9x (iTunes is one of them, lol). People don't bother to test their code on old OS versions because they suck. Really. In comparison to the current OS, using the last version always seems archaic and annoying. And it's the same for developers who learn new APIs and get used to them, and later can't be arsed to go rip out their cool new way of doing things and replace it with a kludge for the previous OS. It's not Apple's fault. The only things they could do would be (A) start giving the OS away for free (see "bad business idea") or (B) give the OS away for free and charge a subscription (which seems to bother most of us too) or (C) cease any development that changes APIs. OS updates would just change colors, fonts, and maybe the included applications. This sounds like a daft idea as well; there's no point in releasing an upgrade if you don't make real improvements and add new APIs as necessary.
The following is directed at everyone, not really the parent:
If you resent paying for a new version of an application or an OS, then don't ever update your apps or your OS. Apple will continue to release security updates for the old versions as long as it's sane,
Yes, if you're still running OS 8.6 and expect updates every couple weeks, you're out of your mind. Supporting every previous OS version would require constant expansion to support a few crackpots who are too cheap to ever upgrade. Tour guide: "This building is home to the System 7.5 team, who still release updates to that OS on a regular basis. Nearby is the 8.0 team, who constantly monitors 8.0 for bugs and security issues on that mid-90s OS..." But don't worry, by the time Apple quits releasing critical security updates for your OS version, I doubt anyone will be bothering to try to exploit it either, since only you and 14 other people are running it anyway, it's not a very big target. Go Google for "Atari 1200XL exploits" and let me know what you find.
As for your apps, don't upgrade them either. If you're so cheap that you can't afford $129 every two years (which is how long you can go without losing a serious amount of compatibility with new apps), then it shouldn't be too hard to not buy upgrades to other apps. If you're the type that doesn't mind being a version or two out of date, which you indicate when you refuse to upgrade your OS, you probably won't miss the app upgrades either!
Another hint, if you want your cake and to eat it as well: eBay. You can usually pick it up there for way less than retail.