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Rave Reviews for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger
druid_getafix writes "The first mass market reviews of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger are trickling in with a big thumbs up for the release. Walt Mossberg of the WSJ says 'Tiger Leaps Out in Front' but complains about slowness of some applications - notably Mail. David Pogue of NYT says 'But with apologies to Mac-bashers everywhere, Spotlight changes everything. Tiger is the classiest version of Mac OS X ever and, by many measures, the most secure, stable and satisfying consumer operating system prowling the earth.' In related news Mossberg also covers the rising incidence of spam/virii in the Windows world and says '...consider dumping Windows altogether and switching to Apple's Macintosh...'. Previous reviews of Tiger were covered on /. earlier."
I did find it tremendously annoying that the multimedia part of the article requires you to have Real or WMP but not Quicktime.
I'm always amazed how people seem to be able to judge the quality of an operating system within just a couple of hours. I can't imagine that you can really tell if productivity and/or stability have improved within a couple of hours.
So how do they review the OS?
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Apple is obviously not interested in competing with all this crap'n'cheap PC storese and hardware floating around. Why can't people figure that out ?
Furthermore, I've actually spent less money on computer hardware since I bought my Power Mac, simply because I was suddenly so happy with it, and felt no need to constantly change stuff.
I threw my last Windows/PC years ago, running Linux/OpenBSD on my servers, and OS X on laptops/workstation. I dont miss this fuzz about crappy drivers, PSUs that goes black, noice, having to install a shitload of free/shareware just to be able to do something.
Simply put, I value my time, so I save money (and adrenaline) on my Mac's. If you dont mind all the crap that goes with cheap PC hardware, Apple is simply not for you, so dont "whine" about not being able to buy a cheap Mac.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Mac OS X includes speech commands, not speech-to-text. You can't dictate to your Mac using the built-in software. So don't compare it to anything you talked about here; it's a different kind of solution.
That said, speech commands work amazingly well. You can click a file in the Finder and say "Mail this to (name from your address book)," and it opens up a Mail window with that address, the file attached, ready for you to type or just click "Send."
That's cool. That's really cool. No question. But you know what really blows me away? About two weeks ago, without really thinking about it, I did it while brushing my teeth. Seriously. I was sitting at my computer at home early in the morning, still half asleep, with my toothbrush in my mouth. I mumbled "Send the latest blah-blah file to person-so-n-so," which I have set up to trigger a Spotlight search to find the most recent copy of a specific file and e-mail it to the named contact. (I have to do this often enough it was worth automating.) I said this with my toothbrush in my mouth, with a mouth full of Crest. And it understood me.
Honestly, it kinda freaked me out a little. It was a very "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" moment.
(Just for fun, I tried it again, and it didn't work. I guess I was able to mumble it just right the first time, totally by random chance. Got lucky. Still a pretty funny moment.)