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Windows Journalist Takes On Tiger
BRSQUIRRL writes "Paul Thurrott has posted a review of Mac OS X 'Tiger' on his SuperSite for Windows. He gives it a score of 4 out of 5. Interesting to get a Microsoft Windows journalist's take on Tiger, especially one as hardcore as Thurrott. In the article, he actually confesses that he has 'been a Mac fan [his] entire life.' Interesting, considering some of his criticism of Apple's work in the past."
As a Windows user and fan, I have to take exception to the "XP service packs are more substantial than the OS X upgrade".
This is far from the truth. In my experience, Windows XP is just a facelift of Windows 2000. Sure, the default colors are different and the buttons look different, but it's all the same stuff - just a minor upgrade to colors and a bunch of bug/feature fixes.
XP service packs are just that - they fix stuff that is totally broken or flawed, or worse, they layer in new software that I don't want or that break my older apps.
So although I agree with him that Windows XP is a good and solid OS, touting the transition from Windows 2000 to XPsp2 as multiple "major upgrades" looks just like fantasy. I consider them all to be in the "minor bug/feature/UI fix" category.
You have to remember that at it's heart Apple is a hardware company. Yes they make a great OS, but the purpose of that OS is to drive hardware sales. Making the x86 platform a more user friendly environment would actually hurt apple sales.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Meh. I don't think this is the greatest analogy.
The best way to summarize my attitude about Apple (as an owner of almost 8 Macs now, starting with the LC) is "love the product, hate the company". Namely, service and support- which are the worst in the industry, and always have been. They're advanced machines, a great operating system. The company itself though, clearly does not subscribe to the "don't be evil" philosophy Google's PR department has been expousing.
My PB 1400 kept crashing while sleeping. I sent it in for repair to TEXAS, the only place you can get it repaired. Each time it came back, the HD was wiped, and on the second trip, they broke the 3rd party ethernet card's jack. On my third attempt to get it serviced, the Apple "customer relations" agent who was supposed to hear out my side of the story...started screaming at me.
My Powerbook Lombard had a screen clutch fail. Like many other Lombards, this causes the video screen cable to get chewed up. Before this, a thick white line suddenly appeared down one side. Apple wouldn't fix any of it.
My Powerbook 17" makes crackling and squealing noises with CPU activity. The hinges loosened up during the warranty period, and when I went into the apple store, the guy said "oh, well, ours in the store does it too." How does a retail demo unit's condition become acceptable...wait a sec, how does "ours fails the same way" suddenly not make it "normal" and not covered by warranty? Then I found out the little power plug on the A/C adapter, called a "duckbill", isn't covered by Apple. "We don't cover that part." "My warranty covers everything. It doesn't say, 'does not cover the power adapter'." "We DO NOT cover THAT PART. They break a lot." "On a three grand laptop you're going to tell me a $10 part isn't covered because it wasn't designed properly and breaks?" Then there was getting the little rubber feet replaced(those are covered, yay!)- I spent 20 minutes waiting for the guy to finish doing PAPERWORK to replace $2 in parts, and I had to initial and sign 5 different "invoices" and statements that I had -actually- received the service in question.
I had a friend who couldn't return her powerbook after 12 days because, despite clear proof on the Apple Store homepage, the customer service reps claimed shipping time was included in the 14 day evaluation period. Slimy. Needlessly so. Guess what? She hates Apple with a passion now, and tells everyone who will listen about how they're a bunch of crooks and liars. She's right.
Please help metamoderate.
Windows through to WinXPSP2 _still_ does not have TRUE pre-emptive multitasking.
Witness the trials of "program not responding."...
Hit 'X'. Nothing.
Hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete...wait LONG time for task manager to get a time slice and run.
(under TRUE pre-emption everything else would get blocked on Ctrl-Alt-Delete, but it doesn't)
Select rogue Task, click "End Task". Nothing.
Do it again. Nothing.
Do it again. Nothing. (repeat ad nauseum)
Wait a while, program gives in and dies.
(under TRUE pre-emption the scheduler would terminate it; under windows it gets politely "asked" to die...)
Alternatively; stop ever using the task pane in task manager and terminate processes (except the task manager doesn't tell you what tasks each process belongs to - great task _management_ there...), which works somewhat better (usually only 2 instructions before the process complies.
Essentially Windows is a different computing paradigm to any other; in most OS environments the user is seen as giving "commands". Windows treats everything you tell it to do as a "request", and feels at libery to refuse that request on a whim.
Take unmounting USB drives; Windows will refuse if it thinks the drive is in use - OSX will just unmount the drive when told to, I assume linux is suitably obedient too...
I don't consider Rhapsody and "Yellow Box" missteps. What we have now in OS X, Cocoa, that's what it comes from. The problem wasn't anything to do with Rhapsody, it was with Adobe. Adobe refused to port their apps to what became Cocoa, forcing Apple to make this huge unweildy sidestep through Carbon that kept the abysmal OS 9 alive for years longer than it deserved, and where we ended up now is EXACTLY where we'd be if Apple had been able to convince Adobe and a few other key developers to stick with the program... except years later *and* most of the key apps that Apple bent over for ended up getting dropped anyway.
Spotlight is a HUGE step forward. It's killer functionality, and needs OS support to work right, but just a touch. OS X provides that support... without creating a new "search-based" file system.
Because you don't (despite what Be and Microsoft say) need a new file system to manage metadata, you just need a mechanism for applications to talk about it... WHEREVER it's stored. That's why Find on palm OS already exists, and has existed since 1996, despite Palm OS having a file system that's hardly worthy of the name. And that's why Spotlight works and Microsoft's dithering on WinFS.
And if I hadn't bought a Mac Mini I would have skipped Panther altogether because Panther *is* a relatively minor release. Tiger, with Spotlight, is a different kind of cat altogether.
[quote]
My Powerbook 17" makes crackling and squealing noises with CPU activity.
[quote]
This is the cpu going into/out of rapid sleep cycles in order to conserve power and stay cool. Annoying as heck sometimes.
You can solve it by installing the CHUD tools from the developer area on the Apple site.
CHUD installs a new preference pane called "CPU" under system preferences. Open that up, and UNcheck the button marked "nap". Instance silence! Of course, your fan will come on more often --and stay on longer-- but that's sometimes worth it. Personally, I hop back and forth.
I agree about the feet, though. I've gone through three sets, and managed to get them replaced for free each time by being all-nice-like to the geniuses at the NYC SOHO store and Tekserve. YMMV, of course.
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
No, it's not. I'm not sure where this rumor got started. Maybe somebody misunderstood it during the demo.
Automator is the modern equivalent of the venerable UNIX command line. You know what makes the command line cool? Pipelines and loops. You can route the output from one command-line tool to the input of another and create pipelines, and you can loop those pipelines over input. You can type, for example,(The sips command is the Mac's command-line image processing utility. Other platforms have their equivalents.)
What Automator does it it lets you create the equivalent of UNIX command lines without having to learn a command-line language and without being locked into just what the command-line gives you. In place of UNIX tools like "find" and "sips," you use Automator actions. Instead of building command lines, you build workflows.
For instance, to implement the same basic operation as an Automator workflow, I'd start by dragging the "Get Selected Finder Items" action to the workflow pane, then follow it with a "Scale Images" action, then a "Change Type of Images" action.
Then I can save my workflow as a Finder plug-in, which means it's available from the Action menu in any Finder window. I can select any file (or group of files), choose the workflow from the Automator sub-menu of the Action menu, and off we go.
That's a ridiculously simple example, sure, but in a work environment it can be amazingly useful. For example, say your job is to post news stories and accompanying photographs on the Web. Each photograph has to be scaled and converted from CMYK to RGB, applying the correct ColorSync profile in the process and embedding IPTC copyright metadata. You could do that today with a program like Photoshop using scripting, or you can do it with Automator in much less time and with a much higher degree of desktop integration. Just click an image and run the "Make ready for Web" workflow. Easy.
Automator actions can be either compiled AppleScripts or Objective-C code fragments (strongly recommended). Into any workflow you can insert a "Run AppleScript" action if you absolutely have to call AppleScript; you can even insert a "Run Shell Script" action if you absolutely have to call a shell script. But the actions themselves are little tiny code fragments written in Objective-C that implement runWithInput:fromAction:error.
Think of a UNIX command-line tool that accepts standard input and sends standard output and standard error and you'll have the idea. An Automator action is basically a command-line tool without the nasty command-line interface.
Will most people use Automator? Frankly, probably not. But most people don't create command-line pipelines and scripts either, even the ones who know how. But for those who want to, Automator is there.
Frankly, I never thought I would like it. It just didn't interest me. But then one day I had to do a tedious repetitive task, and ever since I've been a big-time Automator junkie.