Slashdot Mirror
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 think the whole voice recognition without having to configure it for your voice is pretty slick. I want a Mac.
unless there's a torrent..
Is Java 5 in the final version of Tiger?
If not when will Apple be releasing it?
Some people were waiting on Tiger's release to find out. Does AltiVec handle the CoreImage stuff alright?
I did find it tremendously annoying that the multimedia part of the article requires you to have Real or WMP but not Quicktime.
You wear wraparound sunglasses, even indoors. You wish your mother would let you ride a motorbike. You tell your friends you're pulling in $50,000 a year and $2,000 a month "playing the stock market" but in reality you're only bringing in half that and your dividends from MSFT havn't been good in years. Your non computing friends all turn to you for help; you only charge $30 an hour. Your collegues talk about you behind your back. Your workplace nickname is likely to be "The Asshole". Unlike the Linux fanboys, you actually try to pick up dates in bars but women laugh at you.
You think you're so cool you hurt. You have mirrors on every wall in your "loft apartment", which is really a grimy little apartment next to a guy who plays Guns 'n Roses at 3am. All of your furniture is from Ikea. You sometimes think that changing your name to "Steve" would be "pretty cool". When you go to bars you only drink Miller Lite. No body ever asks you for help with their computers because they know you don't know anything but OS X, even if you do tell them you "run Unix" now. Your friends openly laugh at you.
You regularly give $10 bills to homeless guys because you have too much money. Computers baffle you, but you enjoy looking at pictures of naked women. You don't know what Linux is, but you continually bugged the IT guy at work about your computer so he installed Linspire on your machine.
You shop at GAP. You probably used to use a Mac. When you saw the multiracial image used as a desktop picture and heard that this operating system came from the same country as Nelson Mandela, you knew it was for you. You meet with your friends in fair-trade coffee houses and talk about the eventual overthrow of evil corporations such as Microsoft and Starbucks. Like the Linspire user, you have very little real knowlege when it comes to computers but you would never use your computer to look at pictures of women degrading themselves.
You've been "into computers" for ohh, one or two years now and fancy yourself as "a bit of a hacker". Wouldn't know C from C++, or even Perl for that matter. Older Gentoy users may be building their homes from matchsticks. You've explained to all your friends that your matchstick house will have an "optimised floorplan". They've tried to tell you that your house violates every known building code and law in your area, but you've ignored them so far because you can't read those complicated regulatory documents.
Much like the Gentoy user but you'd also be into sadomasochistic sex if you could get it. You're not just building a house from matchsticks, you're planing to grow the trees to make the matchsticks. You've cleared some land but don't know what to do next because you havn't read the books you've got, so you've posted to alt.arborists.newbie asking for help. It's been three days so far and no one has replied. You remain hopeful.
welco... AHHH!! *mauled to death by a tiger for using a slashdot cliche*
Pity, I haven't got my copy yet. Can't wait... Spotlight will definetly change everything.. I wish we had this functionality on our windows network. Usually colleagues have a habit of making emssy files and storing things all over the shop, if we could search on meta data that would really help. From what I can tell so far, spotlight means you no longer care where things are, they simply exist and the context becomes the "path"... Truly innovating and definetly worth my money.
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
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
My god is it a great time to be a Mac user.
Apple Tech
NeXT Tech
Dual G5
iPod/iTunes/iTMS
OpenGL
unix Layer
and my copy of Tiger is riding around in a FedEx van at this very moment.
Everything I've ever wanted in a computer system is a few hours away from becoming reality.
7. VM/370; you're a genius with many years of experience. You've seen crummy junk like Windows, Unix and Mac and stick to the one proven to work system with a 38 year history of excellence.
I've had Tiger on my 17" powerbook for a few days now - it's actually installed on my iPod so I can dual boot.
One thing I have noticed so far is that Expose seems a lot less fluid than in Panther. Has anyone else noticed this, or am I going mad? The difference is noticable even with only a couple of windows on the desktop.
Other than that it seems nice. My Vodafone 3G card works, and most apps that I have tried. The only thing I can't get working yet is OpenVPN - as the TUN/TAP driver isn't ported yet.
Reality Distortion Field.
I, for one, welcome our new Feline overlords.
As a long time Slackware and FreeBSD user, I'm just waiting for a good check to come in so I can get a Mac. My problem is that I'm afraid I'll find it so cool and so much better that I will drop my beloved OS's and lose interest.
As far as Microsoft is concerned, well, they kissed my ass years ago when I dropped out around Windows 98. If there is ever a chance for Mac's to become more affordable I do not see a future for Microsoft. They can't sue us for NOT using their shit. Heh.
You are about to give someone a piece of your mind, something which you can ill afford...
Java 5 (Tiger) is not included in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). But Apple's got it under development and I'd suspect there'll be a Java update to Java 5 within a short period. Apple's been making test builds available to developers.
Apple, now raking in profits from its iPod, should seriously consider lowering their prices on their high-end machines to gain market share. Currently APPL is trading at $36.35 +0.40 (1.11%) a share and the stock has gone up consistenty since 2003 when it was around $10 a share. Now is the time for them to make some moves.
If Tiger indeed blows away XP, so they should try to advertise it more, get it out to as many people as possible in order to increase their popularity and inspire more people to use and develop Apple software. If everyone had a better alternative to Windows for say just a fraction more in price, people would start buying it. The iPod has already convinced people Apple is a good brand, all they need is a price incentive to switch to Apple PCs.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
...incidence of spam/virii in the Windows world...
The plural of virus is viruses.
Writing "virri" doesn't make you look clever, educated people will laugh at you.
David Pogue should disclose that he is a popular author of Apple books. I don't disagree with what he says, and I am an Apple fan, but if you have a major interest in Apple you should probably disclose it when writing neutral articles for the NYT.
I would love to make the switch, but I am not sure I could justify it. I know it is all subjective, but what is a good reason to switch away from WinXP? Looking for real reasons to switch, not trolls or flames.
For reference, I don't have problems with virii, my system never crashes, and all of my main programs (mainly design programs from Adobe and Macromedia) run very nicely. So what would I gain from switching?
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
A link to the NYT article that doesn't need registration.
When pointing to the NYT, can you please use the New York Times Link Generator! Links are the whole point of the web! While cutting-and-pasting the text is possible it's a bit of a kludge IMHO.
Uh, dude, you can't do that.
you can't take a quote, edit it to death to remove the point of the sentence, and then call it hype. "consumer" was the key freakin point in that sentence and you just said "haha no. I shall rewrite this to mean something else and then call them liars!"
Can you show me another consumer desktop OS that's as stable, secure, and satisfying? It ain't Linux, Linux isn't 'consumer' enough. No more than a Ford F-850 is a 'consumer' truck.
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
In all fairness, I've not used OSX before but back when the Classic and IIc reigned supreme the common complaint about the Mac was that it was too underpowered for the Operating System and the applications. Hell, my 7mhz Amiga felt zippier and responded quicker than the IIc.
Even in the Windows world, iTunes runs rather slow, has limited features (including the annoying "feature" of getting itself and my iPod completely out of sync with "consolidate" being the only, drastic, tool to resolve this) and takes up an inane amount of memory. Hardly a good impression of what to expect from Apple.
Sadly, these two things (including the fact that I'll be effectivily throwing away all the money I've currently invested in my PC) sour my desire to immediately switch to Apple.
However, when we all shift to BTX and I've got no choice but to replace every part of my computer then I have no doubt that I'll make the jump.
This won't be for a couple of years and i think there might be others who will wait until they find that the only way to move forward is replace so much of their PC that switching to Apple entirely isn't so much of a big deal.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
see http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/macos/index. html for Oracle's page.
Caution: Do not stare into laser with remaining eye.
From the NYT article:
The Safari browser now subscribes to R.S.S. news feeds,
And its "private browsing" mode conceals the tracks of online deeds.
There are archives now, and log files, when you send or get a fax;
You can make the pointer bigger on those Jumbotron-screened Macs.
You can start a full-screen slide show from some photos on demand;
And the voice that reads the screen aloud can lend the blind a hand.
There's a password-phrase suggestor meant to make yours more secure,
And the Grapher module draws equations simple and obscure.
Then the Automator program is a geeky software clerk -
You just choose the steps you want performed, and it does all the work.
There's a lot of miscellany, lots of spit-and-polish stuff,
But it works and doesn't slow you down - and these days, that's enough.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Another slashdot user predicted this something like a year and a half ago.
"What percentage of Windows PCs are 0wn3d by one or other parasite?
By multiple parasites? By spammers working with crackers working
with corrupt web site designers and pornographers? Enough, I think
to ensure that within a short time - say 6 to 12 months - we will
hit infection levels of 50% and more. The vast majority of home
PCs, happily connected to the Internet, will be hit, and a large
proportion of office PCs, insufficiently secured and protected,
will also succumb."
This was written in September 2003. And it's just starting to hit the general consciousness now?
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
The plural of virus is viruses.
Writing "virri" doesn't make you look clever, educated people will laugh at you.
Speak for yourself. Not all of us trot out our soapboxen for such little things.
Their new automator framework, which let applications send streams of objects to each other and have them propose interfaces to interact with.
(Well that's how it seems to work at least). It looks like the equivalent of unix pipes for desktop apps.
Something i've been waiting for for years.
...Apple won't release Quicktime 7 for Windows on the same day... They're just releasing the Mac version. Why? YOU'RE KILLING US APPLE! Release Quicktime 7 for Windows simultaneously!
Everyone is a buzz about Spotloght and it is no doubt going to be great, but I am also looking forward to improving productivity with Automator.
As with lots of scripting languages, sometimes it is just plain faster to brute force what you are doing than sit down, recall a language syntax and function set, write a script, give it a test, and then run it. What I see as cool about Automator is that it makes building a script so freaking easy and fast and since you can call scripts with scripts, you can build a nice function library of scripts to make the process even faster.
I am also digging on Dashboard. At first I didn't like the idea of a second desktop that is different than the first, and I will have to try before I agree that it makes sense to keep these on a different desktop, but I love the idea of the small applets (I used Konfabulator breifly) for small tasks like weather, itunes, stock tickers, and calculator. That they take minimal system memory means I will be more apt to keep them open and within easy reach without having to launch the applicaiton.
Lastly, I am totally excited about iChat AV supporting up to four people (including me) in a video chat. It just looks so cool to see three people sitting around the virtual room like that and this feature is making me finally break down and buy the iSight. It looks like the best autofocusing camera available for $150.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
IF anyone considers tomorrow a special day at all, it's probably because it's Friday, or because "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" movie opens, or because it's Uma Thurman's birthday.
It's also the birthday of former Japanese Emperor Hirohito, now known as "Midori no Hi" or "Green Day" (no relation to the band). It's an important national holiday as it kicks off "Golden Week," which consists of three other national holidays including Japan's national day and Boy's Day. So, if you were thinking of visiting an Onsen or going to Izu Peninsula this week, you should rethink your plan. Those kinds of places will be really crowded but downtown Tokyo should be nearly vacant. Except, of course, the crowd that should be gathering around the Apple Store in Ginza.
Just in case you were interested.
Want meta-data search (spotlight) on GNU/Linux? Try installing Beagle.
...and much more
From Beagle's webpage; "Beagle is a search tool that ransacks your personal information space to find whatever you're looking for. Beagle can search in many different domains:
documents
emails
web history
IM/IRC conversations
source code
images
music files
applications
Have a look at uber hacker Nat Friedman's videos of hot Beagle Action.
In short, beware teh Gnome.
I think you're missing the point. Instead of putting all of the files for project A in a folder called project A, you could tag the file with the term Project A (assuming that the term isnt already contained in the document). But say that the documents is for project A, and is some sort of invoice. With the traditional folder structure you would have to put it either in a Project A folder or an invoice folder. Folders limit you to one indentifier at a time (or at least a heirarchy of indentifiers) With spotlight you could instanly call up all invoices, all project A documents, all project A invoices, etc.
Did you just honestly use Enlightenment .17 in an argument? Isn't that like saying "Game X sure is great, but hell, Duke Nukem Forever will blow it away" ?
It runs Oracle.
Java 1.5 isn't available yet, but will be soon.
64-bit memory addressing is available for 64-bit backend processes. As the PowerPC can handle 32-bit and 64-bit at the same time, there's no performance cut at all.
I wasn't able to test the final GCC 4.0 yet.
I don't know what you mean by performance problems, outdated hardware and expensive prices.
I will dissolve my structured storage wholeheartedly. Smart folders will be my directory structure. Fear will keep the local files in line.
It will be a lot easier to just add the project information into the metadata than rely on a fixed directory structure. For example, if I want to view files related to projects A, B, and C then I can just search for all three. If I want them conviently grouped, I'll create a smart folder. When I don't care if they are grouped anymore, smart folder is gone.
Sure it's going to take some adjustment and I'm not going to lump everything together. Although...there's no reason why different filetypes need to be separated. Hmm, I think the degree of my file lumping will be determined by smart folder details.
If I could say, group all jpg files that have resolutions of (1024x768, 1280x1024, etc) that would be fantastic. If I can store metadata (like theme, mood, etc) in jpg files without using iPhoto (I don't like to mix my photographs with my desktop wallpaper) then it would be even better.
"I just do NOT need to have a widget telling me the weather, I've windows in my house, thanks. Neither I need a stock tracker, or a currency converter, and much less a calculator or a calendar or a fligh tracker or a world clock (Why on earth would 99.9% of the global population want to know what time is in other part of the world?) "
Um, some of us have lives that take us beyond those grimy windows? I LOVE the flight tracker, world clock and currency converter. To me these will be the three top most useful utilities. Having them in one environment instead of two browser windows and the calculator is not a trivial thing, however stupid that sounds.
Apart from that, I agree, there's a lot more to be enthusiastic about.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Just about all diehard Windows users I've shown OS X & Mac to are completely won over by it in a matter of minutes or hours. The user experience is rewarding, productive and ... fun! After seeing Tiger's "RSS Visualiser" screensaver - one of the most trivial features - one guy here decided on the spot to sell all his PCs.
For a software developer, OS X is particularly compelling.
you had me at #!
I have a dual 1 ghz power mac. I have a lot of ram 1.5 gig, and manipulate images in photoshop 7. Without core image acceleration its very good, especially with some of my larger images which can by 100 megs each. The only time the wait is anoying is when i'm using genuin fractals "degrain" filters which are slow (20-30 seconds) but work very well.
It even edits video ok. All without the core image.
My understanding of core image api is if the machine can't send the operations to the unsupported video card it just uses the main processor. minis have 1.2-1.4 ghz so they should work prety well for any image task thrown at it.
A g5 would improve things for anyone really into hardcore editing..
The FreeBSD personality makes up a small component of the entire OS; the kernel is Mach-based (although not quite a Microkernel), and most of the rest has nothing to do with FreeBSD (or any other OS, for that matter) whatsoever.
A bit of a write-up on the Mac OS X architecture: http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/
I am the only one who's totally pissed off that not only is there a MICROSOFT ad on this article (probably appearing on others, but this one especially) but it HONKS A HORN AT FULL VOLUME? What is wrong with SlashDot?
Coleman
PS It scared the crap out of me.
Hardly XP Home.
Apple has got this one right. There is NO "OS X Light." There's just one O/S to serve them all...
OS X comes with web server (Apache), SSH server (where's that in XP anything?), a SQL database, and many other things that you can't get without XP Professional or even Win2000/2003 Server.
Now, most of those "advanced" services are turned off by default, but they are there if you want to use them, and don't cost anything (other than the space they take up) if you don't ever configure them.
I think Microsoft's OS strategy sucks, because it generalizes: I need Win2003 Server Standard Edition--or is it Enterprise Edition?--to get some of the services I need, but need XP (Home,Professional) to get the desktop bubblegum that my kids want. I can't pick and choose--Microsoft does it for me and I don't get a say in their selections!
Of course, you can always get freeware/shareware or commercial add-ons, but that ups the price of the OS.
So... the proper comparison is OS X would be to purchase XP Professional with bits of Windows 2003 Server (total cost, mucho dinero!).
Who wants to bet that Microsoft will continue this silly strategy with Longhorn? I can see it now: Longhorn Home, Longhorn Professional, Longhorn Advanced Server, Longhorn Lite, Longhorn Media Edition, Longhorn Tablet Edition, Longhorn Pocket Edition... And what will developers target? (This requires Longhorn Home, with some bits of Longhorn Server, but is incompatible with the display driver in Longhorn Tablet...)
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
for the developer, I think CoreData, CoreImage, CoreVideo...
the thing there is that when developers take advantage of this, you will need to upgrade to use the neat new features in those new applications that take advantage of them.
CoreAudio, from panther, made creating audio plug-ins (for logic, live, etc.) relatively easy to build functions that work in a variety of applications as they are based on the architecture of the OS rather than the plug-in architecture of a particular application. (apologies for the sentence structure...)
I would love to see the ability to create image filters that could be used in a variety of manipulation programs, ( btw, is the CoreSet available to darwin?) and have it then be possible to generate a simple image manipulation framework that relied entirely on CoreImage/Video units.
having tried demos recently (of live and logic), it makes it easier to choose the application based on its core usability, rather than the presence of a particular reverb. the Audio Units work the same in both environments. Shake already does something similar, its composite trees are based on nodes, which are themselves based on command line modules, now move that thought out to the OS level, and make it available to every application.
...is it just me or does this seem like small tools and pipes...
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
This point has been run into the ground by now but I guess some people still don't get it. If you started with 10.0, you have to pay $130 to get to this point. No one is forced to upgrade. If you don't consider the enhancements being offered to be worth the cost, don't upgrade. Panther will work just as well tomorrow as it did yesterday.
I don't know, I think my Commodore 128 is pretty secure and satisfying, nobody's tried to hack me yet. I guess it crashes now and then ..
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
7. Slashdot smartass
You probably use SuSE or Mandrake, which increases your productivity some 300% over that of any given competing product, or rather would if you wouldn't waste your time copy'n'pasting (yes, X supports it at long last!) stupid second-hand cliches from some lame website into slashdot. You hang around and wait until you get "Score:5, Funny", then you go to the bathroom and jerk off.
As always, it depends on the work you do. For me, it's either Windows or Mac to get the hardware support for one of my machines (every other machine is a *nix) slide scanners and other 'strange' hardware I really need to use. OF COURSE I'd prefer the Mac over the Windows machine anyday! So then, if you take your hardware costs coupled WITH software costs the Mac breaks even to a dreadful Windows box when you account for ALL the requried software to be as productive. For example, a antivirus subscription, firewall, spyware removal, good defragger, good backup, and many others...
You betcha... when it runs on an AMD processor. I would love to, but since Apple refuses to look at other hardware than what they have on their machines it isn't going to happen.
You have to give credit to Apple for one thing though, by controlling the hardware that the software runs on, they can pretty much guarentee a good end-user expirience, less possible combinations of hardware to worry about, and makes it possible to include every piece of hardware that apple approves in the O/S. It makes the development cycle alot shorter when you only have one platform with specific hardware to worry about. Granted it's a different way of doing things then every other O/S and computer on the market, but it works for people who know that the product they by will never have driver problems, you just have to pay a little bit more for that quality assurance.
root@allevil:~#
Usng both a Windows2K (was using XP for a while as well) computer and a Mac day to day, I can list some little things that annoy me on Windows that are solved by the Mac:
Lots of windows? Taskbar has two modes, neither of whcih work very well - either fold your icons together and make it really a bother to get to, or have the taskbar go to multiple lines. Expose is just SO much better a way of dealing with finding multiple windows.
Macs don't ever hide menu items just because you've not used them for a while.
Ever had a Windows Window no respond to you because a modal dialgue has popped up somewhere and that window is now obscuring it? Well, I have and Macs do not have that problem due to a much more intelligent way of handlind modal popups (it's embedded in the window that spawned it).
Config files for every app that are really text and editible (or removable) by hand.
UNIX utilities as first-class members of the OS and not something that clings to life within the system. Yeah I'm looking at you Cygwin!
Usable simple text editing app (TextEdit). Both Wordpad and Notepad have unique issues that means you can't just automatically use one or the other (why do you think they are both still there). Heck in Tiger you can just use TextEdit for 99% of your word processing since it reads/writes Word files and supports things like tables.
Everything supports save as PDF through printing interface. No need to use Acrobat.
A home directory that reallly is in one place!!! You don't have to search the whole hard drive to REALLY back up all your app settings. They are all under ~/Library.
When people talk about being more productive on a Mac, these are the kinds of things they mean. It's all the little annoyances that are part of using Windows day to day... you don't notice them after a while but each one makes you just a tiny bit slower and interrupts your workflow. In my experience Macs have a better sustained throughput for humans. Sure if you're just sitting there typing a letter one may not be faster than the other, but it's when you have to stop typing and make transitions when your odds of being interrupted are lower on Mac.
And for less subtle reasons - Spotlight? Dashboard? Automator? These are pretty compelling reasons all on thier own, especially if you can write code at all. And if you can't then Automator should be even more compelling.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When are you people going to stop chanting the inaccurate 'popularity' mantra? Windows' insecurity and number of viruses/worms/adware/spyware/etc that target it are because of how tremendously susceptible it is to having such things created and implemented against it. Read the bulletings from SecurityFocus and CERT...you will find quickly that those insecurities in Windows are often caused by improper implementations of their own technologies. Making a claim that it is all about how many people use a specific operating system that makes an OS a target is unfounded. It is the insecurity of the system in the first place that taunts the virus writers...a large user base is just the bonus.
My problem with it is that it fragments the new mac users more than 10.3 did. Here is why.
They give the developer new tools/frameworks for easier better application development. These are great. HOWEVER, if you a developer choose to use those new features your software ONLY works on 10.4 (tiger) not on 10.3. core data for example
. Also it looks like apple won't make java 1.5 work on older versions of the mac OS, meaning they won't work on older versions the the OS either. This further fragmenting apples small market share, adding frustration to developers and software purchasers alike. You have to code with the older frameworks or compel your users to update. This is a not required but "strongly compelled upgrade"
I really like Spotlight, and I have to say that counter to your assessment that something needs to be built that will make things easier to organize that there are a lot of people that will never care and just dump documents somewhere.
However I do agree that for those that seek a cleaner path, a tool that made the creation of symlinks much easier for normal people would be cool. To some extent Smart Folders in spotlight and other systems fill this role in that a smart folder is sort of like getting a directory with links to all of the files from one subject. But I think you might end up with results not quite exactly what you want at times - like too many files or perhaps missing a few. So a tool that let you build a set of symlinks using spotlight as a base might be pretty interesting and has the possibility of eliminating the need for photo management apps for many people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
One of the more important things in Tiger is that it has an interface for the blind (VoiceOver) built into the OS.
Now at first you might think "so what" but consider this. To get a voiced interface in Windows that the blind can use you must buy one of two add on products WindowEyes or Jaws. The retail price for either of these products is $850.00 for Jaws and $760.00 wor WindowEyes (WindowEyes will breaks under WindowsXP SP2.)
So consider this, for less that the price of either one of these products, and I've used both and neither one is a good as Apple's built in solution, you could BUY a new MacMini and get the screen reader built in. That's right folk you could get a NEW COMPUTER and the screenreader for less than the cost of the screenreading software alone under windows.
I predict here and now that Microsoft will buy one of the two screen readers for windows and bundle it with Windows. The makers other screen reader will promptly go out of business.
Jobs quoted in TODAY's WSJ...
Market share is "a lot less important than it once was," Mr. Jobs says. "I'm not sure it matters."
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
...Apache, OpenSSHd and PostgreSQL all run just fine on XP Home. $0 each, simple to install and configure.
A Mac Mini RRPs for about AUD$799 here sans screen and with OS X bundled. I'll ring them tomorrow and find out if and how much for one without OS X. I can build a near-equivalent x86 whitebox (40GB HDD, 256MB RAM) for about AUD$450. If I could buy a naked PowerPC box of any physical size from Apple for about $550, I would be recommending them to customers like there was no tomorrow. Runs Linux but not x86 cracks, doesn't run Windows. Paradise.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It's built in at the filesystem level, and as a result files are indexed immediately when they are modified, rather than at the next search pass.
Spotlight also has a plugin architecture so that developers can add new file format parsers.
The reason that there is so little malware for the mac - is beacuse very few people are writing mainstream applications for the OS.
:)
Windows is still Industry Standard - and all you mac and linux zealots can do nothing to change it (well - not just yet anyway
At the moment, you can't go into PCworld, Game, Staples, etc and buy "Joe's Recipe Database" for *nix (linux or OSX). For the foreseeable future, the world is running Windows.
It is just one of those things. However, one day Micosoft will make a mistake, and they _will_ lose their domanace over the PC industry. I think it will happen when there is a completly new kind of hardware that is taken up.
My $0.02
TheLogster
The plethora of Mac's gee-whiz features (dashboard, rendezvous, expose, neato startup modes) that barely get used are becoming less and less valuable to me as the Apple hardware continues to lag behind.
I think that's an unfair statement unless you use a Mac day to day. Some of them look like eye candy but really are not. Rondevouz really is useful if you have two or more computers. I use Expose pretty heavily as it's a great productivity tool. And while I do not yet have dashboard I know how often I turn to the calculator or calendar to know I'll find it handy.
And while yes you can get a slower older no-name computer for less and put Linux on it so it's usable, it's still a lot of bother. I ran Linux for a long time as well, and still do at work (on one of two computers) where it's either that or Windows. But I really enjoy not having to spend time fiddling with a computer at home and just working on it, that's what Macs excel at.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Liger is going to pretty much be my favorite OS. its bred for its skills in stability and magic.
thats pretty much my best post ever. I spent like 3 hours typing it.
So... you didn't knew there was Doom 3 for Mac?
Watch out, they're cathing up...
Comparing process clock cycles between x86 chips and powerpc chips is a meaningless exercise. It's how much gets done during each cycle that's important. Much harder to casually measure, so use the machines you are interested in and see how you like their responsiveness in the tasks you like to do.
Go to the Apple store, play with a computer in your price range. Edit some photos, browse the web, launch some apps, mess around. And then do the same on a comparable system at (Best Buy, Fry's, etc) and see what you think.
Or go to CompUSA and hit both in one store.
Automator is *really* cool for a 1.0 app.
On my first demo of it, I created a desktop 'droplet' icon that allows account execs at my shop to drop a job order or update document on an icon, it creates a new email, summarizes the file in the body, attaches the file, sends it to the appropriate people with the correct job number in the subject line, and files it in the sent mail archive specific to which client the job number refers to.
I did this in three minutes flat on the first day I played with it.
There's a ton of reliance still on using shell script glue if you're doing super complex stuff, but once more actions (like applescript dictionaries) are available for common apps right in the automator window, people are going to start creating some amazing stuff.
Virtual memory does not mean "swapped out" memory. It simply means "allocated memory space". As long as you do not actually use this memory, it's free for other programs to use, will not cause any swapping and does not consume any RAM whatsoever.
use vmmap <pid> to get the memory map of an actual application. At the end, you'll get something like
All ReadOnly portions can be shared with other applications.Donate free food here
Your logical error is in assuming that you're indicative of Mac users (or even users of any platform).
Obviously you're not, as you spend 100% of your time in the shell.
I'll go out on a limb and say that the other 99.9% of us use the GUI. For me, Spotlight is going to be interesting, Automator will be potentially great, gcc4.0 will be amazing and the Core data services will change my world.
And I'm not representative either. I develop games as a hobby, so gcc4.0 makes my list of new toys but would make few other people's lists I suspect.
But end users will soon feel the effect of the Core data services, in image-processing apps, in rapid development of new apps (they should spring up around all over the place) and in a consistent expectation of the interface and how it works.
I don't see Dashboard as being of great value to me. But then I don't use Expose either. But I know a lot of people who do, and they'll probably get great value out of Dashboard. It's not just weather and time, after all, but any service people want.
Calm down a bit, realise that the majority of users don't work like you do, and respect their excitement in getting new toys to play with.
I have an 1ghz iBook G4 that I had done a clean install of Panther a month ago and installed Tiger directly over the top when I received it yesterday. It works beautifully. My roomate has a 1.2ghz Powerbook that's Panther installation dates back to the reciept of the machine over a year and half ago, and Tiger runs like shit on it. It broke everything. Connecting Firewire devices gives him Apple's Screen of Death (I didn't know it even existed . . . the screen goes black and white and says shit in a whole bunch of languages), Expose is broke, his widgets don't work, Spotlight is slow as hell, networking busted . . . wiping his drive and reinstalling clean fixed all of this. Just something to keep in mind.
A B A C A B B
From reading both stories it seems like a sleeper hit feature with the mass market might be the parental controls it offers. Since you can give your kid a seperate account you can also use that account to specify which web sites they can browse, forward all emails from them to you, limit who they can send emails to and have an email go to you first for aprpoval before it is transmitted if they are not on the list.
:-)
This feature was mentioned in both stores and I had not even noticed it before. But they sure seemed to be impressed by it, enough to mention it right alongside the major new features like spotlight or dashboard.
Personally I am a little creeeped out but the thought of parents exceting this much control over kids lives - I don't have kids but I'd like to imagine I would allow them more freedom than this. But parents are doing this kind of stuff anyway and I suppose on the plus side for kids parents will never notice when these features have been circumvented or they start talking in code. And any feature that drives kids to be more crafty has to be good as far as I'm concerned...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I keep seeing all of these posts where someone mentions they can get a PC with 'X' ram, 'X' HD, 'X' CPU for 'X' cheaper than a Mac... You can also go buy a $1000 Honda and add all sorts of ground effects, spoilers, lights, and other 'performance' mods and have a pretty quick little car that will beat a BMW 740il soundly... But it's still a Honda. And unless you're stupid, you'll wind up going down the road at the exact same speed as that Beemer. The only difference is that you added all of that stuff to your car, you know every rattle and squeak, tolerate the lousy ride because you can corner like no ones business, have bass that can make your neighbors evaporate, and you can fix any of it easily or upgrade it... Meanwhile the guy with the Beemer has a 10-year warrantee that covers tears in the upholstery and doesn't have to think about the car, he just drives it. He gets to spend his weekends out playing with his kids rather than tweaking a new intake manifold, can drive the car from Denver to L.A. without worrying about the radiator being two sizes too small for the type-R motor that has been shoehorned into the car, and his stock sound system is pretty nice because he doesn't need 3000 watts to overcome the #10 coffee can exhaust system. Of course the average /.'er drives a VW Thing that was hand built by everyone he/she knows, only runs on methanol that he/she makes in the back yard, has the steering wheel on the wrong side, and requires three keys to start. ;)
Microsoft are dropping features from Longhorn faster than an epileptic juggler on fire whose being attacked by ninjas. Who are also on fire. And they're all in a tall building during an earthquake. And the building's on fire as well.
Agreeed.. Definitely do a clean reinstall, or run Software Update before you go to Tiger if you plan on upgrading.
Yes you can change it - mine is option-space, as Launchbar is too handy as cmd-space. You can even assign it to a F-key.
Its pretty cool that Apple choose to include XGrid as part of Tiger -- software to distribute complex tasks among a number of networked machines. Before it was only XCode (now updated to v2) that did distributed compiles. But XGrid should lead to more applications designed to take advantage of networked Macs for CPU-intensive operations.
Beginning April 29th, upgrade discs will probably be stuffed into retail stock. I've never purchased a computer from the Apple Store Online, so I don't know if they do the same.
Preinstalled, probably a week or two from Friday.
PC prices have dropped, and dropped faster than Mac prices.
So has the quality, the security...
Somethings are worth paying good money for, somethings are cheap in more ways than one.
You can't take the sky from me...
The Automator icon's always kinda freaked me out since Apple released it to the features page. Maybe it's just me, but it looks like the roboto's going to flip out any moment and whack someone with that pipe. I can see him smacking it against his hand as he walks down the street looking for trouble.
Back to the other topic at hand, Automator is very cool. Sure, you could accomplish almost everything it does with AppleScript, but this is certainly a better general audience approach. Once developers start writing their own Automator actions, then we'll really see utility take off.
I have a G5 Powerbook at work...
Unless this guy works in the Apple skunkworks, this is highly impossible. Nice try, troll. The rest of his post is suspect as well... The OS X native version of Office sucks?!? Wonder why MS's Mac OS X development team keeps receiving accolades for it...
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
One thing I have noticed so far is that Expose seems a lot less fluid than in Panther. Has anyone else noticed this, or am I going mad? The difference is noticable even with only a couple of windows on the desktop.
Yes, I absolutely have noticed the slowness. I'm sitting here on my dual G5 2.0GHz with 1.5GB RAM and (what I thought was) a decent graphics card and its definitely a LOT less smooth than in Panther.
Another thing that I've noticed is a problem with font smoothing on my home machine, a Quicksilver G4 with a GeForce3 card. For some reason, most of my fonts look like total crap. I've tried every permutation of the font smoothing settings but nothing seems to help. Has anyone else seen this problem?
This has been stated by Mossberg and not contradicted in at least the first few Google results.
And the standard delete key on a Mac works like the backspace key, not the delete key, in Windows. Mac desktop keyboards have a second, Windows-type delete key, but Mac laptops lack one.
This is 50% true. If you hold Function and push backspace, you get the desired forward-delete. There are two problems with this: a) it isn't labeled directly on the keyboard and b) it is ugly to describe. But I assure you it becomes habit very quickly.
I've had Tiger for a week and should warn that while everything seems to work fine, a major problem for some videographers is that QuickTime is upgraded autyomaticaly to QT7, and those with QT6.5Pro are SOL. Your QT6.5Pro license DOESN'T carry over to QT7. You could open the 6.5 app if you archive it. But the hassle is with Safari's pluggin. And once you go through this, you can't reinstall QT6.5 using QT installer.
Actually, you're right. My "Macs for Dummies" book IS published by Wiley, and it WAS removed from all Apple stores this week. And yes, it's true, that I wrote a book on Mac OS X--and two of them on Windows XP (Home and Pro). --pogue
The question: Why doesn't Apple port their OS to Intel hardware?
/., or you'd pirate it-- either way, Apple would lose money on it.
Once again time for me to dust off and repost this:
----------
Look, you guys just can't get it through your heads that the reason why OS X works so well is because it runs on such a limited pool of hardware-- this allows the engineers coding OS X to make assumptions THAT CANNOT BE MADE in the x86 world, where a machine could be using one of thousands of motherboards, network cards, graphics cards, sound cards, etc. Windows developers have to code for the lowest common denominator. OS X developers code for specific hardware. Even the version of NeXTStep that ran on Intel hardware ran on a tiny subset of the available PC hardware. If your CD-ROM drive and motherboard weren't on the "supported hardware" list that came with NeXTStep, you were SOL.
That little fantasy you all have of buying "Mac OS X for x86", running it on some homebuilt shitbox you cobbled together from spare parts, and having it work as well as a G5 runs Panther today will NEVER come to pass. Microsoft has spent twenty years and untold millions trying to achieve that goal, and they still have quite a way to go.
Do you think Jobs could just snap his fingers one day and a few months later have a product on the shelves that would run perfectly on every PC capable of running XP today? It's impossible. And even if it were possible, you wouldn't buy it. Why? Because Apple uses their software to sell their hardware, so a copy of OS X for x86 would have to be priced to ease the pain of a lost hardware sale-- you'd either do without it and bitterly bitch about the price here on
~Philly
How are you measuring that? It's possible that we have a utility that's showing memory usage misleadingly.
Dashboard clients are little Web Views, which means they rely on Web Kit. Web Kit is a shared framework; it only gets loaded into memory once.
It's possible that whatever you were using to measure that reported the memory usage of Web Kit once per Dashboard client, which is not correct.
It will be a lot easier to just add the project information into the metadata than rely on a fixed directory structure.
Um. I really don't want you to buy Tiger and then be disappointed.
Spotlight isn't a general-purpose annotation system. In order for you to apply metadata to files, you have to have three things. First, a file format that supports metadata. (Metadata is actually stored inside files.) Two, an application that supports adding metadata. And finally, you have to have a Spotlight importer that extracts the metadata.
Example: Adobe has not yet shipped (for some bafflingly reason) their importers for their file formats. These importers will be able to read XMP metadata and store it in Spotlight. But right now, they're not available. So if you want to add Spotlight-savvy metadata to an InDesign file, you are completely out of luck. It can't be done, no way, no how.
Spotlight is great. I love Spotlight. Spotlight has changed the way I work. But if you go into it hoping that Spotlight is gonna do a whole bunch of things that it's just not equipped to do right now, you're going to be pissed. And I don't want you to be pissed.
Now, that said, you can group all JPEG files together based on width and height criteria. That works fine. And you can use Spotlight comments to store free-form, unstructured metadata. But don't hope that Spotlight is a general-purpose file annotation system. It's not. At least not in this release.
...it's illegal for you to run Apache, OpenSSHd, and PostgreSQL on your Windows machine. Or, at least, it's illegal for you to actually serve more than one person off of them. The license doesn't let you have multiple people connecting to your machine like that, if I recall correctly.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
While working in tech support for a game company there was obviously little respect for Macs.
There was one of the early iMacs which was used for testing...rarely.
Hearing coworkers cussing in their cubicles was never that big of a deal. It happened all of the time. One day, I got off of a call and I heard someone cussing and didn't recognize the voice. It took a few seconds for me to figure out that it sounded familiar. That's when I walked back to the iMac and saw that one of the techs had discovered that you could type cuss words into Simple Text and get the computer to read it out loud.
I told them about using speakable items and about the choices of voices they could use. It was amazing that those features alone suddenly made the Mac more useful to my coworkers.
****
Sometimes, when I don't feel like reading article online, I cut and paste artcles into a text editor and just have it read to me using Victoria's voice, Though for articles on politics, I just use the Deranged voice. Everything makes more sense then.
I love Linux. I've used it on the desktop at home for about 8 years. Linux can't compare with my Powerbook in terms of desktop user experience. My Mac 'just works.'
The hardware you're talking about has the same capacity hard disk and RAM. There's a 2.3GHz celeron compared to the 1.25 GHz G4. If you're talking about raw GHz, I guess you have Apple beat.
Video? I'm sure that the included video adapter is superior on the mini. Does your server have a modem? A DVD player, CD burner? Audio in or out? USB? Firewire?
But Linux has free software! Those free applications push Linux ahead, right?
Photo management? gPhoto has pretty good camera support - if you're using the right USB drivers. That gets the photos from the camera - now, what about organizing and editing photos? Slideshows with transitions, audio, etc? iPhoto kicks butt here.
Video editing? First find and configure the firewire card drivers for the chipset you have, then go get what? Cinelerra? Too hard for a linux geek to make work. VirtualDub, Kino? WAAAAY too limited in terms of features and ease of use.
DVD mastering? Don't get me started...
Music software? XMMS is pretty handy for playing music, but organizing, sorting? Grip for capturing the data...
OpenOffice and GAIM on linux are fine tools. NeoOffice and Adium are fine tools on my Mac, and they work almost identically on the Mac.
The point is that it's POSSIBLE to do these things on linux. On my Mac, it's EASY.
Write a letter, print it to a remote printer, rip a CD and copy it to a USB or firewire equipped MP3 player, take digital photos, create a slideshow with music, export it to a readily available format (doesn't have to be quicktime, but find something equally easy for the recipient to use.... Compare start-to-finish time on both platforms. My Mac clobbers linux in this.
Don't get me wrong here I'm a big Linux geek. My Mac makes desktop computing useful and usable.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Go into the Mail folder of /Users/[yourusername here]/Library/Mail/Mail Bundles and remove any third party add on you may have.
Then restart Mail. It will then work. I found that an HTTP Mail bundle I had installed some time ago caused the new Mail app to do this. Once I removed it all was fine.
Your experience is out of the oridinary. Here's how MacAddict reviewed Office v.X in 2002-- Here's Wired's review of Office for Mac OS X-- Since you're using a powerbook, which is what I also am using, I've got two suggestions that might improve your performance in Office-- Install 512mb of ram if you are trying to get by with 256mb. Also, if you've enabled filevault, disable it. I just don't believe your experience is the norm. Hopefully these suggestions will help.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Of course the average /.'er drives a VW Thing that was hand built by everyone he/she knows, only runs on methanol that he/she makes in the back yard, has the steering wheel on the wrong side, and requires three keys to start.
It was a used postal jeep, I had rebuilt nearly every part on it. Steering wheel on the wrong side, it started with a screwdriver though (not as secure as the linux analogy you make, so I had to hide an ignition cut out switch--security through obscurity, donchano) I finally got a real job, and bought a vw tdi. Now I burn biodiesel, instead of the methanol you mention.
More music, fewer hits
Wrong.
Apple has two OS product lines. Targeted differently and priced differently.
OS X - $129 (equivalent I guess, to XP Home)
OS X Server - $499 (equivalent to XP Pro).
So really, apple is doing exactly the same thing microsoft is doing.
What has hardware manufacturing got to do with entering the x86 arena? Even microsoft doesn't make PCs. They make operating systems.
Apple could sell OSX for x86, and benefit from the cutthroat pricing of x86 hardware, and the incredible choice of peripherals -- instead of the elitist pricing of mac hardware and the incredible lack of peripherals.
Apple is already competing with microsoft. Selling OSX for x86 would change nothing (except let OSX leverage hardware it doesnt currently have access to).