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Psystar Open Computer Notes, Benchmarks and Video
Engadget has had a chance to play around with Psystar's Open Computer and has a few things to say about the controversial machine. "Okay, so we've been playing with the Psystar Open Computer for a few hours now, and we've formed some early impressions and put together a short video of it in action. We haven't really tried to stress the system yet, but based on our other experiences with OSx86 machines, we're expecting things to generally go smoothly. That said, there are some definite rough patches and issues, all mostly having to do with the fact that OS X isn't really built for this hardware."
Seems it's not a fraud box after all. Who'da thunk?
Say bad words about my book, in cold oatmeal, or I shall sue!
The price of the Psystar seems cheap compared to Apple branded products, although there appear to be several rough edges. A base system with the Leopard 10.5 OS, 2GB of RAM, a 250GB HDD and Core2Duo processor costs $555 plus shipping. It does not come with a monitor or keyboard. By comparison, for example, a Mac mini with 2GB of RAM, but a smaller HDD and slower CPU costs $949. Although, the aesthetics of the mini can't be denied. http://backpackcomputing.com/
"It's LOUD. Crazy loud. OS X doesn't seem to interface with the fan controller, so it runs at full tilt all the time. It doesn't really come across on the video, but it's loud enough so that it's hard to talk on the phone when the machine is running. There's no way we could deal with this thing on a daily basis."
:)
I watched the video, and he's completely wrong. The fan's so loud that at about 2 minutes into the video it drowns out a passing fire truck.
If you looking for a similar experience, hold a hair dryer (on low heat) about 3 inches from your ear.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
pystar, any relation I wonder to starmax ? (the last Mac clone)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I think the biggest issue with the Mini is that its outdated (its not meant to be powerful at all) but that its 600 bucks for something you could build for 300.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
In performance and price it's a 2-3 year old Mac, I guess. The fan problem though could probably be eliminated with a cheap PCI slot blower fan.
Fit that $300 in the same case as the mini. BTW I paid $300 for my mini, new.
and they stick a DVD / CDRW in there they should have DVDRW in all systems now days.
In fact, is there anything to suggest that Psystar isn't just making a quick buck from someone else's hacked Mac OS X installer?
Get me a factory and deals with suppliers and ill do it for $150
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
If something "just works", your not trying to do anything cool enough on it
e.g install MacOS on non apple hardware
convert a 5 y/o box into a PVR
mount your HDD through a loop over a coat-hanger.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Presumably a better version will follow. There's no reason it has to be a full tower case with noisy fans. And if they get some volume, they can revise the BIOS to work better with the MacOS.
It would be amusing to see Dell or HP in talks with Apple. They both need something better than Vista. It would actually make sense for Apple to sell off the desktop market to another vendor, and concentrate on portable devices. "Never trust a computer you can't lift", remember.
You don't happen to work in a macshop or something, do you?
Heaps of computers 'just work'. Maybe not Windows ones. And heaps of Macs just die suddenly. They are pretty, they are easy to use, but they still aren't worth the money.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
The Mini is still a good deal for an ultra-small system, take a look at the PC equilivents of the Mini and you'll see most of them are underpowered too. The problem is that most people would be willing to accept something the size of, say, a Shuttle if it meant a massive improvement in performance for the same price.
So you have to go into preferences and renew your dhcp lease every 15 minutes or you have no internet? Yeah, these'll sell well.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
This thing is such a turd that If I were apple I'd be overjoyed someone made it. A mac mmin actually costs less, delivered! You lose less than a factor of 2 on graphics speeds and smidge on disk writes on the mac mini.
...
In return the mac mini has wifi and blue tooth, temperature control, software updates, you can re-install the operating system, optical audio, ilife,
oh and it doesn't sound like a supersonic jet landing. The mini has lower power bills too.
it's difficult to think of the niche where anyone could possibly want a turn like this.
SO apple should be please that no one can make a cheaper computer, since it sort of puts it to all the whiners who complain about the "apple tax".
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
A mac mini delivered costs 599. Go over to mac mall and you get 2Gb memory, parallels, ilife, a printer, and free shipping for $599
Conversely, the a Pystar running mac OS costs
399$ + 155$ (OS) + $50 shipping. = $604
if you want firewire add $50 , the mini comes with it. (note you need pystar to install the firewire for you).
if you want wifi, blue tooth, optical audio, etc.. you'll have to buy them. Maybe they will even work with the OS too. who knows.
then of course the annual power bill is a lot less for the mac mini since not only is it lower power, the operating system power management actually functions.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Ok, so Apple takes BSD, slaps a bubbly GUI on top of it that becomes popular. Because of its popularity, bunch of hackers decide they'll run it differently anyway. The result? More BSD! And i'm sure apple loves that, don't they?
you can make your own, in a box of your choice. And costs cheaper....
How easy is it to build your own machine with specs closely matching Apple's and install OSX on it?
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
I figure Apple is not going to bother to sue Pystar. After all, when people see what a load of crap the computer is and how it does not integrate with Apple's wonderful software, people on the fence will realize what a really great *system* Apple has to offer in the Macintosh. People need to realize that Apple is a hardware company and a software company and a service company. The Macintosh is a combination of great hardware, software and support all working together. When you have a problem with Mac OS X or your Macintosh, you pick up the phone and call Apple. Or you walk into an Apple store and ask a genius. Can you do that with Pystar? Hardly.
It's the integration stupid.
Who modded a win3.1 troll up(insightful)?
What a moron.
The machine doesn't look that impressive. The thing that's really important is that they've forced the ball into Apple's court. At this point, Apple can respond to the violation of the EULA and see if a court says that the provision is legal or they can ignore it.
If they ignore it, others are likely to follow Psystar (after a long enough time to see that Apple doesn't go after them). Of course, in this case, there's still some threat, but I don't think it's outrageous to argue that if Apple ignores it for over a year that the provision looses some weight.
Personally, I hope they get sued. If they win their suit, it will be a new era for the Macintosh. If they loose their suit, they've lost, but at least we know.
Except that it doesn't. I use Linux mostly, but I work in a physics research lab that uses exclusively* macs. We still use several G4s with OS X 10.3.9. I can't install network printers on half of them, for no apparent reason. I can't mount them using firewire on newer macs. No error messages, it just stalls.
We got two new iMacs last month. One of them turns off randomly. Both of them crash randomly when we use our analysis software (a two-year old powerpc program). The OS is so slow it's nearly unresponsive (to me, the people that only use macs don't have a problem with it). On a related note, the iMac makes no hard drive noise, so I can never tell if it is just slow in responding, or if I didn't double click fast enough. File sharing is a pain to figure out. I can't easily change my icon theme without buying third party software. Don't get me started on the usability of the single menu bar. I can't find any easy way to uninstall Garage Band, et al, so that the automatic updater stops bothering me about them. I can't find a way to move windows between desktops ("spaces"), and all new windows seem to open on the same desktop that the program originally opened on, making multiple desktops virtually useless. I need third party software to have an automatically changing desktop wallpaper. Our IT guy told me that to take apart the iMac you have to buy suction cups from Apple to pull the glass off before you can unscrew the case. The "mighty mouse" can fake a right button, but you have to lift your index finger off the left side for it to work. My advisor was so used to this that he didn't even realize he was doing it. I can't drag windows around by alt-clicking on the window. I can't close a window that is minimized without showing it.
These are just the bad things that I can think of off the top of my head. There are a lot of great things that I haven't mentioned. Maybe coming from Windows I would be blown away, but in Linux all this stuff actually just works, plus all the stuff that does work on the mac. If macs work for you, great. Just realize that you're paying a 100% tax for a pretty box, and stop telling me that it just works.
Note that I'm not claiming in any way that macs can't do something. All that I am saying is that if I, a power user of several decades, couldn't figure out how to do it over the last year it didn't "just work." I welcome any solutions to problems that I mentioned, except solutions that include spending money.
* The computers that run our expensive research equipment are windows. It's cheaper for them to give you a computer with windows than it is to develop a cross-platform solution.
The complaints I have about apple:
1) Highway robbery for RAM/HDs from their website
2) Bank robbery for their hard drive prices for XServe
3) Spreadsheet performance (Excel 2008, OOo 2.4, Numbers '08)
4) Closed, shitty file formats for their iWork and iLife products
5) Pain in the ass to install free *nix software
Their computers are over priced, but are perfect for casual, non-technical yuppy types, or people who have to use Final Cut / Logic Pro.
Yes, a moron with a sense of humor.
It was a joke, laugh.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
I'm not doubting you might be having hardware problems, but several of your complaints are not actually problems.
Move windows between Spaces: Hit your spaces key, and drag the windows between spaces. Easy peasy.
Automatically change desktop wallpaper: right-click (or control-click) on desktop, select "Change Desktop Background". I have a folder of Digital Blasphemy pics, so I hit the + button at the bottom of the left hand side, and navigate to that folder. Then I check "Change Picture", select "Every Hour", and check Random Order.
I have a feeling that Spaces is "supposed to" separate things by application, not necessarily by window. Linux and Windows throw all windows into one huge Alt-Tab clusterfsck, where Apple says: Command-Tab is for switching applications, and Command-` is for switching windows within an application.
Menubar at the top of the screen? Ever hear of Fitt's Law? Rather than the fiddly wasted screen space of dozens of menu bars repeated in every window, I've just got one.
Uninstalling Garage Band? Just delete the folder. No uninstaller application needed.
Just because something is different doesn't mean it's broken
Dan Bongert <*> http://www.tiltingatwindmills.net
This is a Chao. A Chao says "Mu."
You work on various Psystars? I hope as tech support and not because you bought them (especially based on your own negative review of the system). Also, are you sure about that 17MB? If that takes more than 10 seconds on a G3, I'd be worried.
Sorry for the nitpicking. Anyway, while I'm impressed that Psystar is actually shipping, I can't imagine why anybody would actually want to purchase it. OSX seems to be only generally functional, you lose out on the benefit of automated software updates, and implementing many things requires hack after hack, thus throwing the benefit of "just works" out the window completely.
My question is, can you at least set the system up for multi-boot into Windows or Linux without any further headaches beyond the usual? If not, then I fail to see any benefit whatsoever in giving this company money; no support from Apple, no support from 3rd-party hardware vendors (try explaining to them what you're running their equipment on and see how long that lasts), and fidgety performance. No thanks.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
That's mostly true, but there's an exception to everything. You should see my MBP and my HP Photosmart 7350 not talk to each other :p
There are so many things wrong with this post it's mind-boggling. Not just like "hey I have a difference of opinion," but clear, factual errors. A few: * I can't easily change my icon theme without buying third party software. Go to any icon on the Mac. Cmd-I or ctrl-click and "Get Info." Click on the icon. Ctrl-C to copy it. You can now ctrl-P to paste that icon and use it for any other icon. You can usually do this with .jpgs as well (open an image in Preview. Select all, copy. Click on the icon you want to change in "Get Info" box. Paste) but .pngs are a bit hit-and-miss.
* I can't find an easy way to uninstall GarageBand
Drag app to trash. Done!
* I need third party software to have an automatically changing desktop wallpaper.
This one's a toughie. Open up the desktop & screensaver system preferences, and at the bottom of the list there's a checkbox that says "Change Picture:" followed by a drop-down list of times. Now, you have to mouse over the check box and CHECK it.
* I can't find a way to move windows between desktops ("spaces")
Provided you set it up properly, grab the window and move it to the edge nearest the window you want it to move to. It automagically moves it.
I know this isn't an exhaustive critique, and some of your points were valid. But Christ man, think before you post. It sounds like you don't want to learn, so you haven't bothered.
Well if you got new iMacs, they are Intel iMacs. PowerPCs programs would not necessarily work unless they were compiled for Universal.
I acutally have the opposite experience. I have Windows and Linux machines at home. It takes only a few clicks to turn on Windows Sharing and share files. Windows unfortunately makes me reboot if change the workgroup.
To uninstall any application drag it to the Trash.
Yes that is slightly annoying. However any USB mouse pretty much works on a Mac so you plug in a multibutton Logitech or MS mouse if you want.
For OS X, you can only drag windows by clicking on the titlebar.
I would say that it seems some of your issues are because you are a power user. You have expectations on how it should work because they worked that way in Windows and Linux. Unfortunately your experience with Linux and Windows does not translate. It's not that it doesn't just work. It doesn't just work the way you would like it to work.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Try Ctrl+Tab next time you're on a Windows box.
It's been a while since I last used Linux, but I bet it has an equivalent too.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
I know Fitt's law but this isn't exactly the best application of it. Fitt's law works best for corners, not edges. If you jam your mouse to the edge of the screen, it will still slide in one direction. To some degree the menu bar at the top does make the buttons "bigger" but not as big as the corners are.
Having a single menu bar at the top does have the benefit of saving space and ensuring that the bar is stationary, but there are some downsides. The bar will change depending on which window you are working with. So if you have two windows side by side, you have to first click the window you want, then you will have the right menu bar. Additionally if you have a really large screen but a small application like say a calculator, then when you want to access the menu for the application you have a travel a longer distance to reach the menu bar. There are trade offs to both designs and it isn't clear that one is better over the other. That's just UI design "art" if you will.
Now my personal opinion is any UI that makes heavy use of the menu bar needs to die (in fact all menu bars need to die). It's too easy to stuff things into the menus without thinking about usability beforehand. That's how we end up with stupid UIs.
Cool is in the eye of the beholder.
convert a 5 y/o box into a PVR
In my house is an Elgato EyeTV connected to a 2003 eMac via FireWire (which my 74 year old father set up two weeks after having a stent inserted in his carotid artery and with mount your HDD through a loop over a coat-hanger.
Um...no, that's just reckless, sub-Meccano grade stuff. Get back to me when you've securely shoehorned six HDDs into a computer that only has four drive bays, designed and built a bypass for the PSU that lets it run on a battery bank without an inverter or switch to mains automatically when available, mounted the whole thing in a rack and installed it in an outside broadcast van, which I did a few years ago with a G4 tower.
Blank until
Apparently [left caret]30% is an html tag, but not one that gets picked up in the preview. Brilliant.
...and so on.
That should have read:
In my house is an Elgato EyeTV connected to a 2003 eMac via FireWire (which my 74 year old father set up two weeks after having a stent inserted in his carotid artery and with less than 30% blood flow to his brain). So far from being cool, it's a task for a brain-damaged septuagenarian.
mount your HDD through a loop over a coat-hanger.
Blank until
I'm writing this on a Macbook - the first computer that I own that I didn't build from parts. When I decided to get a Mac, a friend warned me: "When you first get the Mac you'll spend a bunch of time fighting with it because it doesn't act like Windows. Once you get past that and start learning to use the Mac as a MAC, you'll find it much more pleasant to work with." He was right.
It sounds like the Grandparent has already decided that Macs suck and so can't even be bothered to figure out that half the things they want to do can be done already, making me wonder about the other problems and whether they are diagnosing them properly.
You can move windows between spaces by
1) hitting the spaces key, then dragging it to a window
2) by dragging a window to the side of the screen and watching it slide over
3) by grabbing a window and then hitting the button combo for the screen you want it to be on.
You can also set programs to auto open in certain spaces or to always appear in all spaces if you want that kind of thing.
I have a lot of opinions about Cyborgs and Architects
One of them turns off randomly.
Hardware problems likely.
Both of them crash randomly when we use our analysis software (a two-year old powerpc program).
I've only used rosetta briefly and it was stable for me, but running analysis software under hardware emulation? - not the best idea.
The OS is so slow it's nearly unresponsive (to me, the people that only use macs don't have a problem with it). On a related note, the iMac makes no hard drive noise, so I can never tell if it is just slow in responding, or if I didn't double click fast enough.
So your complaint is the iMac is too quiet? -- install the OS onto a loud external USB drive then go into System Preferences -> Startup Disk and let it boot from USB by default.
File sharing is a pain to figure out.
Click on System Preferences -> Sharing and tick File Sharing -- from there your public folder is shared onto the local network, to add anything else just right click -> Get Info -> Sharing.
Mac also supports NFS (not tried NFS server though), but you can mount NFS shars with mount_nfs -P host:share destination.
I can't easily change my icon theme without buying third party software.
Never tried but I'm sure you can find free icon collections and just overwrite the default icon files in the original location.
Don't get me started on the usability of the single menu bar.
KDE has this feature although it's a bit crippled and isn't system wide - but it's without a doubt one of my favourite things in OSX.
I can't find any easy way to uninstall Garage Band, et al, so that the automatic updater stops bothering me about them.
OSX doesn't have software installation (some packages come with installers but they just copy the application over to /Applications) - every application is a special self contained directory that you simply drag to trash when you are done with it - because OSX has spotlight, it creates any file associations as soon as you copy the application somewhere spotlight keeps a track of (think a pimped out inotify daemon on Linux).
I can't find a way to move windows between desktops ("spaces"),
Click on spaces in the dock and drag+drop the window wherever you want.
And all new windows seem to open on the same desktop that the program originally opened on, making multiple desktops virtually useless.
Go into system preferences -> spaces and assign whatever applications you want to whatever space you want.
I need third party software to have an automatically changing desktop wallpaper.
This is in system preferences -> desktop -- it's right there on the first page: "change picture: every": 5 seconds, 1 minute, 5/15/30/60 minutes, every day, when logging in and when waking from sleep.
Our IT guy told me that to take apart the iMac you have to buy suction cups from Apple to pull the glass off before you can unscrew the case.
I've never tried to take apart an iMac but a quick google search shows this: http://home.comcast.net/~woojo/DFFA53A0-F23D-4541-9015-481FD3B6532E/iMac_Disassembly.html - no suction cups needed.
:)
Macs are generally harder to disassemble and when I had to take apart my Macbook Pro for a hard drive upgrade, there were something in the range of 4 groups of different screw types to keep track of - but at least the screws don't just fall out like my on my Fujitsu laptop and then the warranty people claim you unscrewed them and forgot to screw them back in
I guess anything that has smooth edges and no little plastic doors will be harder to disassemble.
The "mighty mouse" can fake a right button, but you have to lift your index finger off the left side for it to work
Added to that: you are running a heavy physics PPC application on a new iMac (which is x86). No wonder your machine is slow, it's running through an emulator which makes it about 4 times slower on average and using 8 times more memory. For a physics app I would guess its even worse. Use a G5 machine for such applications or get/recompile an x86 version.
I would also recommend upgrading your OS version, 10.3.9 is like stone-age OS X.
All the other 'issues' don't really impress me. Changing your Icon Theme? Uninstalling an application? Changing the background image? Problems with the right button on the mighty mouse?
It just sounds like you don't know a lot about OS X yet and refuse to take a few minutes finding out how to solve these issues, and you are using outdated software compiled for a different CPU architecture. If these are the only issues you have with OS X, you don't actually have issues with OS X, you just have issues with the way it works, and with the applications you need to use on them.
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
The real copy protection, such as it is, is EFI and some obfuscation.
http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter7/tpmdrmmyth/
I've got one of the early overheating battery-warping Macbook Pros, with a keyboard that aggravates my RSI, and a built-in camera I can't do anything useful with because I can't turn it around (no, videoconferencing has abut as much appeal to me as reaming my sinuses out with a dremel tool). When I had a problem with my hard disk, I called Apple, and they said that I could ship them the computer and be without it for at least a week, or wait a week and go to a "genius bar" to get it replaced. No, they couldn't just ship me a replacement drive, because I couldn't replace it without violating my warranty.
I'll take a computer I can open up and replace the hard drive in any day. I'd have split the difference between the cheap Thinkpad I actually wanted and the Macbook Pro I had to get instead with Apple, if they'd sold a copy of OS X that would run on that Thinkpad. And they'd make better margins selling a copy of OS X for $519 and pocketing $500 of it instead of selling a laptop for $2000 and pocketing $500 of it.
IE the Cube, which was a awesome system, but again mispriced for its capabilities (being priced at a point where compared to the G4 Powermac 100-200 dollars more, it was junk)
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Yes, but it's also shinning more light Apple's infuriating decision not to offer a reasonable quad-core desktop that doesn't cost more than my car.
I'd be happy if they just had a dual-core or even single-core desktop that didn't suck.
That means: no built in monitor, a decent hard drive, a box you can open without a putty knife, and an nVidia GPU. Preferably with a socketed CPU and a swappable video card, but I'll even compromise there.
>> Uninstalling Garage Band? Just delete the folder. No uninstaller application needed.
Doing that will leave about two gigs of sound samples on your hard drive.
Garage Band puts its samples somewhere in the Library.
Maybe desktops are different from laptops but when I was looking into laptops, the Macs were generally of similar or better specs than the Vista laptops at the same price point.
When I was making the decision to go with the Macbook ($1200) or Macbook Pro ($2000) I was really tempted by one of the low end Thinkpads.
For $900, it had the exact same specs as the Macbook... in fact it had the same damn chipset, CPU, and GPU. For $200 more (still less than the Macbook) I could get it with a real nVidia GPU instead of the crap Intel it shipped with. For $1100 I'd have gotten a laptop that had every bit of hardware I actually wanted from my Macbook Pro, PLUS a far better keyboard, a two-button touchpad, a trackpoint controller, a hard drive on a sled, an optical drive that could be swapped out and upgraded, and for a little more an actual docking station. Things I can't get in my Macbook Pro at any price.
The only way you get Wintel hardware to cost as much as Mac hardware is if you discount every feature or option that the Mac is missing as worth $0, but make every feature or option that the Mac has a hard requirement.
Apple is waiting for the perfect time to introduce some sort of software update that'll break the mac clone, and they're probably thinking that after THAT... no one will ever do this again.
The solution is to run a script like this: If you prefer, start with MoreSCF and get a less hacky solution that's location-aware and all.
...iMac makes no hard drive noise... Too quiet? An interesting complaint! If bouncing dock icons, launch animations, hourglass indicators and so-on aren't sufficient for you, install something like iStat Menus (donationware) so that your menu bar will tell you what the machine's doing at any given time. Personally, I prefer the peace and quiet.
...file sharing... System Preferences -> Sharing -> tick 'File Sharing' and follow the on-screen instructions. A pain to figure out? I think not.
...uninstall Garage Band et al... Drag the application to the trash. Really - that's it. That's all you do. If you're worried about run-time preferences files etc. being left behind, install a freeware solution like AppTrap to ask you if you want to tidy those up too.
...move windows between desktops... Spaces is new to OS X and rough in places. 10.5.3 promises some improvements; we'll see. In the mean time, to move windows between spaces, you jump out to the Spaces view (e.g. press F8) and drag them from one space to another, or start a drag on the window title bar (click&hold) and activate a space-change keyboard shortcut (finger gymnastics ahoy). There isn't a way involving, say, some title bar menu or similar - and that's lame.
...third party software to have an automatically changing desktop wallpaper. System Preferences -> Desktop & Screen Saver / Desktop tab -> Tick the 'Change picture' checkbox and select the rate of change from the pulldown menu.
...drag windows around by alt-clicking... No, though there are all sorts of 3rd party extensions for this and the behaviour you describe is specific to the window manager you're used to under Linux; plenty others don't do it. You can at least press F8 and move the window within the Spaces overview.I've not found the need to drag windows from odd corners. My guess is that you're used to window managers which let windows obscure one another (raise on focus) but don't provide an easy way to get at the windows underneath, so you use alt+click on a protruding bit of window to get around that. MacOS has a solution I find much better, but that's strictly IMHO and it took me a while to start using it - get used to Expose on F9 and F10.
Overall I prefer a window manager with a simple 'send to back' icon and no forced raising, because I grew up with RISC OS and I'm used to using windows that way, but such beasts are few and far between.
All that I am saying is that if I, a power user of several decades, couldn't figure out how to do it over the last year it didn't "just work.@ I'd never used OS X in my life prior to acquiring a Macbook and it didn't take me more than 5 minutes to figure out where the wallpaper changer is, but I guess one man's obvious is another man's obscureUltimately, if you want an OS to work the same as Linux with your preferred window manager, then you may as well just run that. It's a lot cheaper.
That's why I'm still using my dual 1GHz MDD after all these years... four internal drive bays and a couple of external FW drives plugged into individual ports on a PCI FW card, and gigabit wired Ethernet too. It's a big reason why I never got a G5. (the other reason is that I've been keeping my laptops upgraded instead)
There was a bit of trouble in late 2006 when the boot drive wouldn't spin up other than at boot time, but that's it. And thanks to Apple's power supply replacement program, I even have a spare power supply (they decided it wasn't worth the shipping cost to have the noisier power supplies returned).
Oh yeah, and it can still run 9.2 if I get nostalgic.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I would say it "just" works. The number of people out there having issues with their Mac/iTunes/iPod set up is amazing.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
Wow, that's quite a deal. How did you get a Mini for $300 new?
You can get a firewire card for about 20 bucks give or take.
Sorry, but you're wrong. It's not art, it's science. The stopwatch doesn't lie.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
It's because they don't use human-readable files as the basis of everything. Say what you will about Linux's CLI usability, the GUIs are very simple and rarely cause problems as Windows and Mac ones do. In Linux the GUI merely makes a change to the config file - the same one you could edit directly if you wanted.
In Windows/Mac, the GUI isn't just a front end. If there's a bug in the GUI it's not going to make correct setting and there's nothing you can do.
Trying to get dual monitors working (playing DVDs) in Windows was this way. Theoretically easy, but there was a bug. Setting the right settings wasn't enough. First you had to set some, then apply, then the rest, then apply, then go into and come out of settings, then make the next change. Otherwise even with everything looking correct it just wouldn't do whatever it needed to do.
Linux was harder, as in it required actually editing files, but easier in that all the difficulty was right where it was expected. I didn't have to diagnose GUI bugs at the same time as trying to make the video work.
GUIs are easier, if they work, but not building a human-readable layer underneath means that it'll be far harder to do anything not explicitly planned for.
Easier for casual users does not translate into easier for advanced users.
If you listen to Apple that's not true.
Of course, they seem to have some bias...
The way I fiddle with icons is simply to use "sips -i" from the terminal on all images.
This creates an icon for each image which can always be copied and pasted from the info panels.
GarageBand leaves gigabytes worth of loops in the Library, though.
Some programs which DO need uninstallers don't have them.
Except that it doesn't. I use Linux mostly, but I work in a physics research lab that uses exclusively* macs. We still use several G4s with OS X 10.3.9. I can't install network printers on half of them, for no apparent reason. I can't mount them using firewire on newer macs. No error messages, it just stalls.
Ask around on forums, I'm sure it can be worked out. As someone who uses linux, surely you don't have a problem with doing research to fix something?
We got two new iMacs last month. One of them turns off randomly.
Warranty?
Both of them crash randomly when we use our analysis software (a two-year old powerpc program).
Just a thought, maybe that's because your analysis software is shit?
The OS is so slow it's nearly unresponsive (to me, the people that only use macs don't have a problem with it).
Slower than many linux distros is probably true, but "unresponsive"? You're either running crap software or don't have beefy enough hardware to run it.
On a related note, the iMac makes no hard drive noise, so I can never tell if it is just slow in responding, or if I didn't double click fast enough.
You're talking bullshit. When you double click something, there is an animation that you can't possibly miss. Unless you're talking about third party software, which must be pretty crap if it gives no feedback when you do something. And the default double click speed is very slow, so I find it hard to believe that you sometimes "don't double click fast enough" but you can change it in system prefs.
File sharing is a pain to figure out.
You have a list of servers that are auto-discovered, you click on one of them, the files come up. Alternatively you run the 'connect to server' menu item and type in the server's address. To become a filesharing host you tick a box named "personal file sharing" in the "sharing" section of system prefs, then drag files into your public folder. That's hard to figure out? wtf?
I can't easily change my icon theme without buying third party software.
The most popular software for doing this used to be an open source app (which still works perfectly), but virtually all icon/theme artists use proprietary file formats now... I agree, it sucks. :(
Don't get me started on the usability of the single menu bar.
OK, I won't. Personally I only use the menubar once or twice a day (i use the keyboard for everything on mac and windows, and none of the linux machines I use regularly have X installed), so I couldn't tell you which menubar system I prefer. I wish I could turn them off altogether.
I can't find any easy way to uninstall Garage Band, et al, so that the automatic updater stops bothering me about them.
Right click on garage band, select move to trash. Done, it's uninstalled.
I can't find a way to move windows between desktops ("spaces"), and all new windows seem to open on the same desktop that the program originally opened on, making multiple desktops virtually useless.
Drag a window to the edge of the screen, it will move to the next space. Or if you use hotkeys to change spaces, "grab" the window (start dragging it) and hit your hotkey, it will move to the space. Or if you use the expose-show-spaces-thing, open it up and drag a window to another space. In system prefs you can assign programs to specific spaces.
I need third party software to have an automatically changing desktop wallpaper.
Define "automatically changing". Depending on what you mean, this may be built in.
Our IT guy told me that to take apart the iMac you have to buy suction cups from Apple to pull the glass off before you can unscrew the case.
I'll admit I've only ever replaced ram, which takes seconds (most of the time spent waiting for it to shutdown/start up) and doesn't involve anything
Do you know anything about OS X? Virtually all configuration files are xml "property lists", except for the occasional binary property list (which are much more efficient for large files and can be converted to/from xml without a single command).
The gui is just as separated from the rest of the OS as it is on linux. All of the flashy gui features, like time machine, spotlight, etc are just primitive overlays on top of command line tools, and the command line tools will almost always let you do a ton more than the gui allows.
Lets talk about horsepower. On the day the 8-core 3.0Gz Xeon Mac Pro became available, Intel was only shipping those cpu chips to Apple and nowhere else. 8 cores was exactly what I wanted.
Ram that worked efficiently with the processors in this configuration had to have extra heat sinks and I wanted thoroughly tested ram that would not make errors when things got warm. Just because other sources of ram seem ok doesn't mean they meet the timing spec under all circumstances when viewed with logic analysers under load. Too many years of hearing, "Dos boots, the cpu board must be ok", left me feeling there were a lot of idiots in the world.
Four internal SATA II drives are a good fit, especially if you get a raid card and four of the new WD 10000RPM SATA II Raptor drives (to be available this month).
If I am going to use firewire, don't bother me with 400 ports, give me the good stuff. Two gigE ports is nice.
As of Leopard, Mac OS X is Real Unix and the X Window implementation is ok for my uses. The Leopard GUI is a lot nicer than OpenLook in my opinion.
Yes the Mac Pro is made of "server class components". That is what I always wanted and it is what I am happy to pay for.
When I was looking for the workstation of my dreams, I looked all over at the systems available at any price. I looked into what I could buy from Sun, HP, Dell, or build myself. I evaluated whether I would be happy owning a 10K plus dollar Sun Sparc machine with multiple processors. What I discovered is that if I wanted something better than the 8-core Mac Pro, I would have to buy a small mainframe and call it a workstation.
I intend to use this machine and it's peripherals for many years. As time moves on and specs change, I should be able to pick up a spare Mac Pro frame refurbished or used for less down the road. I feel that between Apple Care and having Apple repair my expensive workstation if it needs repair, I can trust that my investment will not be wasted. I expect the machine to last long enough to depreciate. Even with the Apple Tax, if it lasts long enough, the price per year will be within my flinch range. I have bought a dozen two thousand dollars machines in the last few years and they are not doing it for me. HP, Toshiba, Sony, Dell have all taken my money and let me down.
I Bought everything but the hard drives from Apple. I paid extra to assure that they would be 100% and there would not be any mysteries plaguing my system.
A year later, the new model is .2Gz faster and can have more ram added. This doesn't seem to bother me any. I haven't exceeded the need for 16GB of ram yet.for the application I am writing. If a client needs the max config, they can buy a newer Mac Pro.
I have used all the rest, and this time I wanted the best. Call me anything you like, and make fun of me for being ignorant and buying the system and it's ram from Apple. But at the end of the day, I have a kick-ass workstation that is the most reliable machine I have ever owned, and I don't regret a penny of the money that was spent putting it together.
I have a feeling that Spaces is "supposed to" separate things by application, not necessarily by window. Linux and Windows throw all windows into one huge Alt-Tab clusterfsck, where Apple says: Command-Tab is for switching applications, and Command-` is for switching windows within an application.
So it's the equivalent of Command-` on a Mac - switching between windows (or tabs) within an application.
It predates Vista, I believe it was introduced in 95.
Nice sig BTW.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
It must be nice having an unlimited toy budget, and if I had one I'd be happy dropping a few grand on a Mac Pro, but look at the Macs the rest of us have to put up with before telling us how cool your tower is.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
That's the magic of Apple and "usability." Everything's so "intuitive" that if it's not intuitive to you you're screwed. Everything a Mac can't do is called "something you don't really need to do." Every bug is a design feature. I was out with a bunch of friends, all young and techie iPod lovers, and every one of them, when we got to talking, "hated" their iPod, and all mostly for the same reason: there was such a huge learning curve because Apple's response to everything is "just use it, it'll just work." And after 25 years, we shouldn't keep believing them.
--Colin Jensen
colinandbethany.com
Which explorer are you referring to? IE7 will switch between tabs with Ctrl-Tab, earlier versions don't have tabs. Of course I've only used IE on Windows, and reluctantly at that.
;)
Ctrl-Tab only works with child windows contained within the main app window, rather than different instances of the same app. MDI rather than SDI.
The closest thing Windows has to switching between different instances of one app is Alt+Tab in XP and above, with "Group similar taskbar buttons" enabled (the default). That way all the windows of one app will be clustered and you can Alt-Tab or Alt-Shift-Tab between them without having to search through the other apps as well. As far as I'm aware, there's no way to switch between the multiple documents in different instances of one app with one shortcut. You'd have to Alt-Tab between the windows and Ctrl-Tab between the documents in each instance.
If this post doesn't make any sense then I rewrote it too many times.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Most, but I found it less so than Linux. Admittedly I've used OS X less than ten hours.
As for 'can be turned into XML', so could the Windows registry. The point that is that its native format isn't human readable. You can use these tools, but then you're trusting the tools like trusting the GUI.
Converting the registry to xml is not the same as plist/bplist. A binary property list is exactly the same file format as the xml property list, they are completely interchangeable. Binary property lists are only used when disk space is a concern, a 10MB binary property list is likely to be 80MB in XML.
They are exactly the same format, and you use the same tools to edit them (property list editor in the gui, the 'defaults' command from the cli, and the property list serialization api's from within a program).
But isn't the Windows registry just a tree structure? Couldn't it be reduced to XML in just as trivial a fashion?