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Return of the Mac
Ben Gutierrez writes "Paul Graham has posted a new essay on the Return of the Mac which begins with: 'All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs.' Tim O'Reilly said some similar things in Watching Alpha Geeks . From the article: "My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get."
That said... BSD is dy^H^Hthriving.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Since around 1993 I've been messing with Unix. SCO, Slackware (1.0-ish), RedHat (pre 4.0...on Sparc!), Caldera, Irix, SunOS, etc.... both in userland, on the desktop, on my own servers, and a professional sysadmin.
I've got a mac now. The first of my life, from someone who wasn't ever a mac guy (and was probably more 'anti-mac' than most.) My g/f has one too -- more than once I was like 'just open a terminal and do....'
The fact that she doesn't need to know what the terminal.app is? That's the best part..... I get what I need, she gets what she needs.
In other news, open source fanatics dislike Microsoft.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
...as this is the first time I read slashdot on my new Mac Mini.
I would switch if games didn't come out until a year after the PC version does.
"TK-421, why aren't you at your post?"
It's UNIX-based! What hacker doesn't want something that uses UNIX. Besides... Linux is sooooooo 90s.
In America, you spam computers In Soviet Russia, computers spam you!
get a g3 ibook. runs all but the greediest of os x apps just fine and i picked one up from a guy at work fro $100....they go for about 3-400 on ebay.
no i have not shot my gun in the air and gone 'Ahh!'
Last year's Usenix conference was full of Powerbooks. Most of the top dogs in the industry. That prompted me to buy a PowerMac. It's the best computing decision I've ever made.
What's your point? I don't like Dell laptops... IBM sold their laptop division to some no-name, can't be yet trusted for quality company over seas... what's that leave us? Yes, Powerbooks... they're great hardware... I'm not a Mac lover... but I have had to work on PPC hardware, and I do like the power it has over similiar x86 based laptops... and OSX is a nice unix environment with a pretty shell... now if the powerbooks still had OS9 on them, there would be no way I would buy one...
That's the seller, an OS that's stable and powerful, on hardware that's powerful... Less to do with it being Apple, more to do with being better than Dell and HP and the rest of the crap out there.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Self-righteous Apple fanboys in one corner.
Foaming-at-the-mouth Linux zealots in another.
This could get ugly, folks. I'm sure the *BSD crowd would chime in too, except that a judge recently orderd the feeding tube to be removed.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
at least at my university, it seems as if apple have changed their image. No longer for graphic designers - it's for people who wanna 'get stuff done' with their computers
Also, their laptops are pretty much class dominant, and compare favourably on price with the high-end thinkpads in the powerbook range.
Business Voyeur
I'm sure we'll see a sharp decline in the number of ingenious hacks out there as these developers spend their days holding shift and watching expose in slow motion.
Please this argument is old and false.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I'm at university, and I know a lot of computer scientists (particularly of the theoretical sort) and scientists of various other disciplines around here that love OS X. Just like using a functional language like Lisp versus using assembly, using OS X takes some of the responsibility for mundane, largely unnecessary tasks out of your hands and frees you to do the computing work that you need to do.
Sure someone well versed in systems or operating system design would be able to get more out of Linux if they took the time to optimize it, but most "hardcore hackers" I know around here sure don't have that sort of time.
In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
Oh wait...
Most /. advocacy seems to stem from the following:
Macs aren't Microsoft (unless you used Word or something on them)
You can install Linux on them (not that you can't even an electric toothbrush these days)
They were an underdog, which made those really cool Apple ][ computers back in the day (some of us have the emulators installed on our PC's and still fiddle with them.)
They had a sense of style, which the monolithic PC companies still can't seem to get (PC's, seen them lately? Was Dell/HP styling inspired by pinching a loaf?)
They were evolving, which always inspires some hope.
did I miss anything?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Are you sure about that? Think about messing around on the Internet. Ten years ago that was just getting popular in universities and now it's perfectly normal in the home.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
He said one, not half of one.
Here's the obligatory rebuttal. You're forgetting the software. You can put Linux on it for free, but you're not getting nearly the user experience you get with a Mac. Or you can pay for Windows and the software that runs on it. That will bring up the cost of that $450US system. Still, not the same user experience. With a Mac, it's the compete system your paying for, not just the hardware.
Cepstral: Quality TTS for OS X, Linux, Windows
> Last year's Usenix conference was full of Powerbooks.
This is an example of Principle of Similarity and Principle of Social Proof including "The Number of Sources" Effect.
> Most of the top dogs in the industry.
This is an example of influence using authority, including High Status
> That prompted me to buy a PowerMac.
Aha! The requested target action!
> It's the best computing decision I've ever made.
Principle of Consistency
p.s., I'm not mocking you. I just noticed a bunch of statements that match the midterm I have Thursday night. Thus, this post counts as "studying"
p.p.s., I love my PowerBook
p.p.p.s., Please note, reading the above post qualifies you to place out of a graduate level Consumer Behavior marketing class.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
The hardware is beautiful. It's well thought out, well laid out, lasts forever (battery wise and durability) and *gets girls to come over to your table look at it*. The alternative, at least for laptops, is IBM... at twice the price.
Now they even have a working scroll implimentation (which was a crippling omission, my NEC had a scroll stub for ~3 years before Apple thought of something).
And yes, your brand new very pretty computer will work well with Linux just fine, so there seems to be little downside at all*.
*Apart from lack of 3D card support, and for some reason Apple use crappy propriatery 802.11g cards with no Linux drivers. Mystifying.
Beep beep.
My kid brother can aforde a mac mini on lunch money...
Tell your kid brother that I and all my geeky friends would like our lunch money from the last six months back, uh... please?
I work at a development house that makes network security products. Three years ago there were a couple people with powerbooks running OS X. Today it is about half of the company. Last week a senior developer was talking to me about our latest hire. He's an experienced, professional coder. It had taken him a week to get the thinkpad we gave him up and running the Linux distro of his choice and configured to work with all our servers and testbeds. Thats 40-60 hours of work gone. How many powerbooks could we have bought him with a corresponding amount of cash. He was considering mandating powerbooks for all new hires unless they had a good reason to use something else.
OS X is making some huge inroads into the computer security field. It has certainly gained a huge amount of penetration here in just 3 years. Even some of the the managers have switched after looking over a developer's shoulder for a bit. You'd never guess Apple had a 5% market share from a walk around this office.
Google - 2 PhD students at Stanford
...
Linux - 1 grad student at Helsinki University
GNU - bunch O' long hairs at MIT
You were saying something about the author being on crack? Those are 3 examples off the top of my head that have not only influenced but re-defined the software industry. I'm sure there are probably at least a couple more out there
They call me the working man. I guess that's what I am.
I wish *Step was more popular. Learning Objective-C is a snap if you know C already. GNUStep makes an amazing range of functionality available to apps 'for free'. On OS X it's even better. For example, Tiger will give every app an undo function, automagicly. The included tools, and overall design of the OS, make developing on the platform a pleasure.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
I bet you also voted for whoever your favorite actor told you to.
Sheep. Baaaaaaa! B-a-a-a-a!
Sometimes taking unspoken advise from those whom you respect is a conscious choice, not mindless groupthink. There are developers out there who are better than I am, and when they speak, I listen. I also pay attention to what tools they use. This is neither blind nor foolish, when not taken to an extreme.
So, I was a die hard Windows user, been that way since 3.0 (3.11 and 2k were my favorite releases), but 18 months ago I switched to Linux (first SuSE and more recently FC3). And now I'm thinking of a PowerBook.
Leaving Windows wasn't a problem, but sticking with Linux is. Sure it's very fast on my machine, and I have all the familiar Unix tools from the GNU chain, but so much doesn't work right. Linux on the desktop is close to a joke. I've tried both GNOME and KDE and neither is bug free (cf. Win2K which was very, very stable), and there are so many hardware incompatibilities that it's a pain.
Ultimately, I want to support F/OSS, but I may have to switch because it's a productivity drain for me to discover that gnome-panel has crashed something and now Evolution can't open the File dialog. Ugh. Or figure out why gaim's icon disappears in the tray some of the time, or have gdesklets eat the CPU for no apparent reason, or...
John.
WWW -- PhD student at CERN
Mach -- Carnegie-Mellon
BSD -- UC Berkeley
Cisco -- Stanford
What amazes me most is how short of a time it took for OS X to get put together. Most everyone agrees that the first release was more of a public beta, but even X.0 was an amazingly mature product for something completely new that had been started mere years earlier. I heard a report that as many as 10,000 engineers had worked on OS X at some point in the course of its development years.
I'm sure it didn't hurt to have NextStep to build off of.
Hey, what are you using right now to read my post? A monitor? Wow, there's that problem solved.
What are you using to click on the Reply button. A mouse? Good! Two down, one to go.
Now, what are you using to make the letters appear on your monitor. A keyboard? Brilliant!
What were you complaining about again?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
The Linux PPC devs have a narrower set of hardware to support - you know pretty well what's in a iBook. The same cannot be said for x86 systems. I have a year old Dell D800 that still has a bit of trouble regarding ACPI events.
As well, iBooks aren't too terribly over priced, they are normally very well constructed - IOW it's a nice notebook. The icing on the cake is Mac on Linux - where you quite literally get to have your cake and eat it too.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Most large data centers have service contracts on their equipment. The vendor takes care of repairs under warranty onsite to minimize downtime and so that you don't have to have someone onsite who knows how to fix every piece of gear you own. Typically they commit to be onsite in a number of hours that gets smaller the more you pay. The bigger the data center the harder it is to have someone so trained.
I recently had an XServe motherboard fail and it was 28 hours before the new motherboard arrived via DHL and was installed. With the IBM gear, that's 4 hours max.
Sure, I could just have a second XServe on site but that costs 2x - the IBM service contract is approximately 10% of the machine's cost per year.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If you mean "they sent an email to a colleague (perhaps talking about tuning R.E.D. values)" then maybe. Yes- pointless websites existed 10 years ago (did you mean WWW as opposed to the internet?)- but so did printing out stereographic images from the internet (can you see the sailboat? Stare at it longer!). I haven't seen anyone doing that in ages. I also haven't seen too much quicktime VR (although some realestate web sites to have virtual tours like that).
So ten years ago, they were using what was intended to be a research tool to communicate with their friends and download pointless and silly bits of entertainment, and you don't think they were ahead of the game?
Maybe you can sell your wife the same way I did. She hated how our old windows box slowed to a crawl frequently due to malware, adware, etc. I'm sure I could have kept up on all the service patches and updates and adware programs and virus protectors, but screw it. My mac works. Always. With no complaints and no effort on my part.
By the way. Virus protectors are as bad as the viruses themselves. Does any body else complain about these pieces of crap?
Jack
Went from OS X server on a crotchety old blue G3 (upgraded to a g4/500 w/ a gig of ram) and a pile of firewire hard drives to debian on a cheapass x86 box with a 1tb SATA RAID. The box runs netatalk 2 and doesn't need to do anything else. Works perfectly.... and the PC and drives (with a stupid amount of ram, gigeth, etc) cost less than a base XServe.
I've been using macs daily since '98, and with the move to OS X, file sharing went from ACLs to unix permissions and suddenly there was no essential difference between using linux and using macos to the end user.... Since X came out and netatalk got useable, I've never had a compelling reason to use OS X on the server - but then, a server is (ime) a thing you set up once, lock up, and leave sitting in a rack until hardware dies. It probably helps that I'm a lot more comfortable with debian on the command line- it's easier to update and maintain a debian system without having to be at the box, in my experience.
But my job has no call for Serious Computers. So, YMMV.
Just FYI, the DVI -> VGA dongle is included with the Mac mini. No need to go out and buy one.
Linus doesn't like Mach, he says it is inheritly slower than "his" kernel. I think he is probably right, but not by an amount that really matters. Apple has been focusing on "micro-locking" critical sections in Mach for Tiger (and I assume even more for the next rev). This trend started as FreeBSD 5 tried to catch up with Linux 2.6, enough though the FreeBSD 5 kernel is unrelated to Mach. Why are they doing this? They are preparing for the day when there will be n cores, for n = 4, 6, 8... I remember an statement (was it Minsky?) that an n-way multiprocessor sysstem has performance of order n/log n. This does not have to be true in the future, and even if it is - we still win.
Also Apple has IOKit and "prebinding" which remove the need to keep multiple old copies of the *nix libraries for every binary you don't want to rebuild with every new release, and every device driver as well. Even Windows has this to some extent, this was an esssential feature for the non-hacker to use MacOS X, and damn nice convenience for hackers, too!
One reason Apple is more streamlined than Windows is that it refuses to keep backwards compatability.
...
... have you even used a Mac in this century? Or are you just busting on them because people are migrating from the platform you like and you don't: understand why, fear change, fear being a follower or that you just plain like what you're using and get a funny feeling when others find something they like better.
Not flaming you (although I think that's what you want). Most anti-Mac folks I run into these days haven't touched a Mac since the System 7 days and continue to carry that prejudice.
Stating that Apple refused to adopt backward compatibility is ignoring the fact that you can still run ancient software in Classic layer and will be able to for some time.
Can't use a floppy?
I haven't missed it, but I can go buy a USB external for peanuts.
No two-button mouse?
Never mind, I'm not going there
Seriously
Anyway, I guess I don't understand where you get "Apple thinks it's customers are idiots" out of any of this.
All I can say is fear not, there is enough room in this town for two OS's.
They can switch. I'll stick with *nix and free updates, and save myself $140 every other year in upgrade costs.
Too bad, those $140 (sic) upgrades are friggin' awesome.
Four weeks, Twenty papers, that's two dollars
Anonymous-Cowarding doubtless in admission that this is a troll.
I run OSX 10.3 on a 366mhz G3 iBook with 192mb of RAM, it's fine for wordprocessing, surfing, and multimedia use and isn't any slower than Windows XP on a Pentium-2 366.. which most people would agree is a workable pairing.
10.1 and 10.2 were slow on G3s. 10.3 is fine. As a Windows-refugee I'm still puzzled by an OS that gets faster on older hardware with every release...
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
You're mistaken. If you want a two or more button mouse, you can buy one or use just about any pc usb mouse. I'm using a three button mouse as I write this. All three work.
Secondly, even with the old mice, you just had to control click to get the same functionality.
It'd be nice if you had actually used a Mac in the last four years before you state categorically that you can't right click one.
- dj
But lets be honest, if I can get an AMD system with a 15inch LCD screen, Sempron 2200 proc, and half a gig of ram for about 450usd
Show us this marvelous machine that costs $450 and includes a complete operating system and equivalent software to match iLife and AppleWorks (or iWork for another $80), and an LCD monitor that won't make your eyes bleed, and 512MB of RAM that's worth having. Seriously, show us this machine. You were talking about something with no software, right?
how am I gonna convince my wife that I should buy a 600usd mac mini
That's easy, just sit her down in front of one for a few minutes.
, plus 250usd for the monitor, plus the keyboard and the silly one button mouse?
(1) Odds are you already have a perfectly good CRT monitor at home or you can get one for $120. If you want a decent LCD, you'll pay for it whether you get a Mac or a PC. Any monitor with a standard VGA or DVI connector will work with the Mac mini.
(2) Odds are you already have a keyboard. If not, USB keyboards go for about $25. You do not need to buy one from Apple. Any USB keyboard will work with the Mac mini.
(3) OS X has been around for what, five years now? And for five years now, OS X has had context menus and support for mouses with two or more buttons. Mine has 5 buttons including the scroll wheel/button. You do not need to buy a "silly one button mouse" from Apple. Any USB two-button scroll mouse will work with the Mac mini.
In the end, as so many of us have realized already, the cost is now very low, and very well justified.
I would be careful about purchasing g3 iBooks. I have owned two g3 iBooks and they both have had logic board issues that are not covered under Apple's logic board repair program. The overall quality of g3 iBook's are suspect in my book and you may just want to save a bit and just buy a g4 instead.
OS X runs great on the g3 iBooks provided you have 256 MB of RAM. 128 MB runs OS X but not much more. I could keep a browser of varying flavor open, iTunes, and one other app (Mathematica, et cetera) open before experiencing significant slow down. I really like iBooks but "caveat emptor" if you seek to buy an older model.
Oh the shock and horror. Apple is a "corporation" which has to protect its IP and trade secrets from being leaked to the competition.
# Tried to use the DMCA to remove content from source forge
See above.
# Use DRM to lock product(itunes) to device(ipod) and threaten to use the DMCA to protect the lock in
I have news for you, the labels want and demand DRM. But it can be easily circumvented legally with a thing called a CD-R disk.
# Reciever of numerous customer lawsuits from selling used products as new, and to lie about about the battery life on ipods
Those lawsuits are being pushed by disgruntled resellers, not consumers. Have those cases been proven?
Does the competition speak honestly about their battery life? No. Companies like Dell and Sony forget to mention that their "numbers" are based on testing using the lowest bandwidth settings with no user interaction.
YMMV but I've experienced battery life on my 2nd generation iPod which exceeds Apples claims for battery life but then again, I don't use the backlight and I'm not deaf. What this means is I usually listen on Shuffle mode and my volume is less than a fifth of full volume.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Heck, it's even attractive to those of us whose background in C is more of the "int" variety.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
However, my powerbook purchase brought the joy of computing back into my life. I frequently read the comments of those who decry the overpriced Mac when compared to constructing your own box (which I used to do - and I still believe that a Mac is equivalently priced with Dell/Gateway/IBM hardware, when all things are factored in properly) and while true on one level, it misses the mark on the total picture. That is depending on your interests and usage desires:
Life got a lot simpler when I replaced my wife's Win XP box with an iMac. No more weekly degunk sessions, antivirus, malware consternation and constant admonitions for her to be vigilant about keeping her machine clean were necessary. And she took to it like a charm -- things were unfamiliar (and still sometimes she stumbles on a Win -> Mac how-to-do question) but she is enthralled with it now and spends more time on email/web browsing than she ever did on the Win box. The iLife/iPod deal is just gravy and really we've experienced firsthand on how much more hassle-free life became after the Mac switch.
So, I'm not swayed by saving a couple hundred dollars. Just like I wouldn't buy a Kia or a Yugo, I'm not going to opt for a bargain basement PC over a quality machine like a Mac. No, it's not perfect and presents its own set of flaws, but at this juncture, it seems to be the product of greater quality for me.
AZspot
So you are just itching to buy yet another keyboard, mouse and monitor? With iMacs that force one to acquire the built-in monitor there were complaints about the forced bundling. Now that Apple has an option that doesn't require you to buy a new monitor we still hear nothing but whiny complaints.
For anyone who has owned a computer the cost of upgrading to Mac OS X is no more than $600. The excuse that it costs too much is gone. Find another one.
I'm a pre-sales SE for Apple Enterprise Sales (USA). If you fill out this form:
:)
http://programs.apple.com/contactme/xserve/
and mark that you are a business, I guarantee that someone from Apple direct sales will call you.
We've got a large, growing enterprise direct sales organization that's ready to work with big customers. I'm ex-Novell, and my co-workers are ex-Oracle, ex-NetApp, and generally ex-big enterprise companies. In fact, I can only think of one guy in our group who is "old" Apple. We send him all the OS9 questions.
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
I missed the first two installments of this slashdot story, i.e., The Fellowship of the GUI, and The Two Kernels. I can't find the links. Can anyone help me?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
We're a small business -- less than 100 employees in all, but we have to run a number of servers, some for customers but most for various different employee functions.
We found that the Macs were great for a couple of things: one, they have hot-swappable IDE (older models) and SATA (newer models) hard drives, which is great for backups... set up a mirrored array and then just pop one of the drives out and pop a blank one in, then carry the first one off-site. Or, in another case, when it's the dedicated backup server, we have four IDE drives in there, each one with a different backup from a different day of the week, and then we pop Saturday's one out once a month so we have a monthly offsite. Dell et al had the same thing with SCSI, which costs twice as much. (This was a couple years back, I'm sure Dell is getting to SATA by this time... right?)
Also, we have a server that we were concerned about going down for more than an hour or so, but it's not a big problem if it's down for an hour. We can't really afford redundant servers for EVERYTHING.
So we got the next best thing: we have it set up on an xServe, but all the software, incloding the OS, is on an external firewire hardware RAID box. The xServe started acting up one day (turned out to be a bad power outlet on the power manager, of all things) and I walked in, unplugged it, carried it into our test lab, plugged it into our iMac, and rebooted. Sha-zaam... the iMac is now the server. And it would have worked with any Mac made in the last, oh, five years or so. Well, any Mac with firewire or USB2 that had 256 megs of RAM or more. If necessary, I could have extracted one of the drives from the FW RAID and put it into any of the Macs that didn't have firewire, in an extra 10 minutes or so.
And that server, from soup to nuts, took less than a day to set up.
There really are some things you can do with the xServes that have significant advantages. Sometimes it's just doing things a little easier... sometimes it's doing things you never even thought of. Like a thoroughly portable server. (Heck, I could take that hard drive down to our colo site, attach it to our backup server down there, switch over the IP address, switch the IP address in our DNS, and we'd be up and running in under an hour, even if our HQ were without connectivity or power for days. Of course, I could do that with our main corporate file server, too, but that's just because we happen to have a machine down at the colo site that is the exact same model.)
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.