I have been anxious for this release for some time. In many ways it is important to have a current Java Runtime on FreeBSD. I have considered migrating everything over to Linux but then I would miss out on all of the benefits of the FreeBSD Ports Collection. I also feel the FreeBSD release engineering team and the core developers do an excellent job of managing the project. By producing a native Java Runtime I do not have not have to entertain the prospect of using Linux... [and then paying SCO for the privilege;) ]
My approach has been to gradually assemble a reliable work environment with mature infrastructure over time but to build the current software with what is the best I can do at the time. For example, I am current creating Enterprise applications for a corporation and we are slowly migrating to Java and away from Perl and VB. And while nobody on the team has a great deal of experience with Java, several of us are learning rapidly and making decisions which will help us write more robust software in the near future. The first few applications ported over to Java were not the cleanest, but we learned from our mistakes and kept building.
And that should be your biggest lesson in IT or any field. Learn from your mistakes and develop solutions that help you do better in the future.
Another point I would make is to start with a good base of technology. I am finding that Java is a great base lately in large part to the support from the Apache Foundation and the associated Jakarta, Ant and XML projects. Coming from a Perl background I can see a big difference in the available Java packages that are extremely easy to integrate for a complete solution versus the Perl archive of modules which are sometimes incomplete or poorly tested.
My overriding rule for IT development is use what works, and actively avoid anything that is not proven.
I was talking to my sysadmin friend and he told me that no 64bit OS will work properly on the Internet because of a TCP/IP conflict. So you will need a Mac running Jaguar to act as a TCP bridge to translate the network communications. That is crazy!
Ok, I am just kidding. But someone will believe it.
Having the US exist as the only major power does not mean there will be peace. I think it would be best for these European countries to work toward their own mutual benefit without outside influence because they do exist in a very tight geographical location.
While the US is not perfectly secure, the country is surrounded by water and 2 friendly nations. I can only imagine how tense it could be to live in Turkey, Serbia or even Germany right now. The European Union may prove to be the new stabilizing force in the world now that the US and USSR are not fighting over the way things should be.
In a few years we may realize the biggest threat to war is a nation that fears nothing and is sees nothing wrong with destroying other nations as long as it serves their interests.
I work in IT and a while back there was some talk internally that IBM would be taking over Sun. One of their products, Eclipse, is a not so subtle sign that IBM aspired to take the lead with Java. I believe that going forward the only value Sun would have is Java since hardware has improved dramatically for x86/64bit and PowerPC architectures, and the fact that nearly all of the Sun products that I have had to use are always of poor quality.
By comparison, IBM has done a great job with producing great software and new frameworks. They have also contributed a great deal of software to the Apache/Jakarta and XML projects. They are already the leader in Java technology, Sun just owns the patents and copyrights behind it. IBM needs that to really allow Java to take off.
If you leave Sun as it is for too long, it will kill Java and.NET will easily take over. I know that IBM will be able to produce the kind of Java technologies we know should have been built years ago, but Sun never got passed suing Microsoft to realize innovation, market share and better products are what matters, not patents and law suits.
I would like to see Big Blue as the driving force behind Java.
I user MacOS X and when I moved to the SBC Yahoo DSL service and did not like having the Enternet software on my Windows 2000 PC to keep the DSL circuit alive. I have a private network and for a long time on the previous DSL service I simply used some Netgear hardware to support a private network. But I had to do a couple of things to make it work.
First, I went through the bubblegum looking installer that Yahoo sends to all users. That seems to do some additonal authorization changes that allow the DSL circuit to allow normal PPPoE connectivity. Then I uninstall the Enternet software, configure my Netgear box to connect using the same username and password and it works. Then I can connect all of my network computers through my Netgear hardware which happens to have a NAT router. One of the biggest reasons for doing this is that my Win2k box reboots and I do not want to disrupt the internet connection. I also have a wireless base station that I use to connect my iBook from my living room where I am now writing this message.
I wish SBC Yahoo did not require all of these silly steps. Perhaps with some feedback from their users they will change their ways.
Remember DARPA also funded research for things such as TCP/IP and something called the Internet. They wanted to create an ultra-reliable network in the event of a nuclear war. But like many military projects, the things they create are often very useful for the general public.
If Apple creates a Rendezvous implementation for Windows I fail to see how Apple's market share will grow. It will enable PC users to get the benefits of Rendezvous without owning a Mac. It will also allow existing Mac users connect with their PC using co-workers and friends. And since it is a completely open technology the PC users will not even need a Mac involved at all. So that begs the questions, how will this benefit Apple?
Apple does not make money by packaging software and making it available for everyone to use freely. Sure they get to innovate and make their customers happy, but it does not win them more customers. This article seems to imply that creating cool technology and implementing it on a PC will help Apple. There needs to be some proprietary software in place for this to be true.
Now if they created a Rendezvous implementation for corporate environments and a Software Development Kit to be used by companies like IBM. At work I use Lotus Notes which has a messenger client. I would like to automatically find co-workers without all of the initial setup that I had to do when I started using it. I would also like to be able to monitor the servers on the network and use the printers more easily. If Apple could sell software to do all of that, and perhaps sell XServe systems with it I bet that would benefit Apple.
I really hope Apple does break into the corporate workplace. It would really simplify much of extra work that I do so I can get back to my real work.
I am not sure it would be possible for him to change out of that blank turtlneck and bluejeans... but I can already see the slogans.
When you vote for Steve, you vote for Jobs.
Steve Jobs, the iPresident!
Crisis... in decent articles maybe
on
Decentralization
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This somehow related weblogs, web services and decentralization together. It does not make any sense. And saying Web Services has no business model or that is just a silly idea just lacks any amount of research to justify an article which bashes it.
In an economic slowdown would you expect innovation to also be stifled? That would be the best time to innovate since a truly good idea would be successful when others would die as they should. The whole dotcom era let every silly idea live for a while, with venture capital, and now the good ideas from the dotcom era are being sorted out to the top (XML, Java) and the 2nd generation will be the result.
From what I see it is a good thing. Head over to Apache.org and you will see lots of very useful projects which leverage lots of good ideas. This article is just crap.
This should be working. I have version SDDR-05 and would like it work so I do not have to use my PC.
SanDisk and Apple need to work on this together to get it resolved. How much work could it be to make a USB device mount so I can pull files off of it?
I did each of these steps and made my computer as responsive as it was when I first installed 10.2. I already had 384MB of RAM, but doing the pre-binding, fixing permissions with the disk utility and disabling Crash Reporter has made it fast again.
Now when I click between applications they come forward right away. I also found that when I click an icon in the dock to start it, the application now starts up much faster. I am a little shocked.
I will have to run these routines again if it gets slow. Hopefully 10.3 will take OS X a few steps further to eliminate all of the speed issues.
Re:Dell 1.8GHz laptop XP vs. 800MHz TIPB OSX 01.2
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 1
Apple does have a payment plan option. Put it on Apple credit!:)
It is slow, I have to say from my experiences
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 1
I bought an Snow iBook shortly after MacOS X 10.0 was released and installed it right away. It was sluggish then and has improved over time. I started with 128mb of RAM but upgraded to 384mb. That helps a lot because I like to run many programs.
What I typically run includes Mail (Apple), Internet Explorer, iChat, Yahoo Messenger and at different times I run Netbeans and jEdit. I have noticed that Java applications are slow, but that can be expected of Java and Swing. (try thinlet.com)
But I see that spinning rainbow circle way too often. I do get a lot of mail due to being on mailing lists for FreeBSD, Tomcat and others, but Mail just crawls as it tries to manage the folders. This is supposed to be a threaded application, but there is clearly a performance issue. IE seems to have similar issues.
One indicator that I use to see the slowness is moving from application to application. There is a noticable lag in pulling another application forward at times. Sure I am on an iBook with a slower processor and a slower system bus, but when I ran OS 9 it was just fine.
I would suggest that the shadowing and transparency is not necessary and I really wish I could turn them off from the Appearance preferences. They waste a lot of CPU time and slow me down. I do not need or want the eye candy. If you look closely at WinXP, you will notice they use a clever method to draw the buttons and windows which are not so cpu intensive. Doing away with shadowing and transparency will go a long way to speed things up.
Since 10.2 was released with the Quartz Extreme I have to say things are much faster, but Apple has lots more work to do.
I have said it before and I will say it again. I will not buy Apple hardware again until the OS is fast and the hardware is not behind the PC hardware. The phrase Megahertz does not matter is often used by Apple, but in an editorial I once read the author insisted that Gigahertz does. Being a full Gigahertz behind the Pentium and AMD processors makes the PC users laugh at the Mac users. Right now I can go out and buy a nice PC case, install a Pentium 4 and get a decent monitor for under $800 and install Linux or FreeBSD and do most of what I can now do with MacOS X.
Sure KDE, Gnome and the supporting applications may not be as refined in some key areas, but performance is key. They blow the doors off MacOS X. And so does my Windows 2000 workstation which sits right next to my iBook. (Pentium 4, 1.8Ghz)
I want more things added beyond the basics like support for the scroller on my mouse. I started to learn about the Thinlet framework for a lightweight GUI. It is meant to be used with midp applications, but like most stuff on java.sun.com, it is directed at Windows, Linux and Solaris. I would think by now they would provide a MacOS X download just like most Java application vendors now do.
I have installed the Linux version which is just a shell script which expands data to a directory that you specify, but it just does not work right. I would like a standard MacOS X installer which would set things up properly. If I had that, I would be on my way to developing midp applications. Instead I am going to have to wait till Sun or Apple puts something together.
Apple still does not seem to fully embrace Java anyway. If they did, they would be lobbying Sun or IBM to more quickly roll out these Java frameworks out for MacOS X so that we would not have to run a Windows box to run current Java technologies.
And while I am at it, why does Sun complain that Microsoft is a monopoly while making Java technologies so easily available for Windows and not MacOS X? Sure there is a matter of market share, but the monopoly will not change if Sun is not willing to take actual steps to make the change. Sure it supports Linux, but I still do not see the general public migrating to Linux. I see that happening more and more with MacOS X.
Swing applications run decently on OS X, so Sun should rush to make it the flagship platform.
Re:So how can I do WEP with a non-Apple access poi
on
WEP Keys in Mac OS X?
·
· Score: 1
Thanks. The simple stuff always seems to be glossed over with more advanced discussions. I will look forward to setting up my WEP connection. I am not really worried about security, but would like to use it if possible. For about 4 months now my home network was done without encryption because OS X 10.1 did not make it clear how to run WEP. It would also be helpful if Netgear would provide some OS X instructions. From the reviews which I have read, the other network hardware companies do a good job of providing information for users of Apple hardware.
Perhaps I can make my own screenshot and save it on a website somewhere.
So how can I do WEP with a non-Apple access point?
on
WEP Keys in Mac OS X?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In my case I have snow iBook and an airport card, which apparently just some toshiba hardware with an Apple label. The problem is that it prompts for a network name and password. I can configure my Netgear access point to do WEP, but how do I do that with my little iBook? Do I just copy/paste one of the segments or all of the segments into the password field?
A better question would be, why is Apple being such a pain about this? I should be able to connect my airport card to base stations with WEP, just as 802.11b specifies. It seems like an interface bug.
A list of instructions would be very helpful. Posting a screenshot of the login prompt would be even better.
Not supported? It is one of the white iBooks and I bought it this last year. It is 500Mhz and should be able to handle playing the game. And this is just meant to illustrate the difference in new Mac hardware vs new PC hardware. Another simple test would be to watch how much processor the iTunes application uses to play mp3 files while a Linux system uses far less processing resources to do the same thing.
The point was that it works better on a PC which is still much cheaper. Sure you can blame it on video memory, but I thought this Mac hardware is supposed to be superior. The video card I have in the PC is just an old Voodoo 3 card from over 2 years ago. So old PC hardware beats out new Mac hardware.
I prefer to use a Mac, but I do not like the situation where the hardware, combined with the poor OS X performance, makes it necessary to retreat back to a PC.
I do also not want to boot into OS9 which will just prove again that OS X is not ready for prime time.
I have a white iBook with a G3 500Mhz processor. I also had a Pentium II 350. I found that I could do things much better on my lower Mhz PC than my iBook, but I have to assume that is largely because Windows has evolved and been so well tuned over time when OS X is still just a hog. OS X 10.2 may help, but just so I can get things done I upgraded my PC, not buy another slow Mac.
Now I have a P4 1.7Ghz processor and it smokes my 500Mhz G3 easily. Even a 1Ghz processor would smoke the iBook because what seems to be inherent to increased processor speeds is increased bus speeds. This iBook has a 66Mb system bus while the P4 runs on a motherboard with 400Mb speeds. That is the biggest impact on the performance and while the Mhz for the processor is not the only factor for speed, it does help indicated what speed the system bus is going to be.
When I play Warcraft 3 it totally drags on my iBook. So I put it onto my upgraded PC and it works great. The internal bandwidth to move all of that data around inside the machine just has to be extremely high in order for it to play well.
So Apple needs to catch up and better do it quick. I will not be buying a new Mac unless the processor can match the speeds of a Pentium/AMD system. Use Altivec or a really fast system bus, or whatever trick is up the sleeve, but do it so I can actually use OS X. I love having a few great web browsers, a great mail client on the same machine as apache, mysql, java and perl so I have all my development in one place, but I need decent speeds.
Apple has a long road ahead. Make the processor, system bus and OS faster. And while they are doing that, they have to make it as cheap as a PC, but easier to use. I have tried WinXP and I no longer believe MacOS is the only easy to use system out there. That was 6 years ago. Now we have 2 good interfaces and Apple needs to shut up and get to work.
Well, I for one would prefer to run an enterprise system on top of a MacOS X Server with XServe than on top a Dell with Windows 2000. My day job has me on Windows all the time but on my own time I use an iBook with MacOS X and a FreeBSD server on a PC. From what I have seen with MacOS X security, I think Apple will get great marks.
And hopefully they will show they do not need some Palladium system to secure their OS. That is just silliness by Microsoft. They seem to be blaming the hardware for the OS being so insecure all this time.
With all these Linux companies, why can there not be a Linux PC or at least one that is not built around this new security hardware? Just because some of the industry heavyweights are behind it does not mean that all air will be pushed out of the room. Consider purchasing chips from Motorola and putting together motherboards based on the specs that IBM release a couple years back. BeOS use to run on it's own Be Box which was all custom hardware.
I for one would be happy to have a Linux PC made by VA, AlienWare or even Dell if they produce good hardware which works well with Linux.
Besides, who needs the hardware to do the security work? Sure you can use cipher/cryptography acceleration in hardware, but you do not have to be dependent on it. What Microsoft will find is they put all this work into a system which is still insecure because they still have a front door with holes through it. How long before a macro shares your private key with everyone on your Outlook Express mailing list. And when there is a hole that is found, do I now have to install a firmware update? That does not sound reasonable.
This sounds like a joke, but Microsoft is known for making these mistakes. They even released the Nimba virus on their Korean distribution of their development suite.
So instead of complaining that Microsoft, Intel and AMD are going to ruin the world for Linux, go out and build a business on better hardware which does not lock you into Microsoft. A modern BeBox similar to an Apple G4 system would be quite welcome as a Linux or FreeBSD system on my desk.
Redhat and the new Linux partnerships should put their resources together and actually produce something, instead of more spin on Linux. Make something significant.
I have a FreeBSD fileserver at home and I use ssh to log into it with keys automatically. No password is necessary. This is very secure.
I also have a remote FreeBSD server also set up with a public ssh key so that I can log in without typing a password. So if someone is really concerned about security, they can just use ssh to tunnel communcations (shell, cvs, scp).
But most systems, especially my iBook at home, does not need very long passwords because it does not run very many network services and does not hold critical information anyway, like a database of credit cards. And if I do run remote services (ssh, ftp) on the iBook, I can always use the ipfw firewall to deny traffic to these ports except from specific locations. In fact, I run the MySQL database server and block port 3306 for remote connections so it cannot be accessed remotely.
So for me the password issue is moot. If someone is really serious about security, they should know enough to take care of it without seeing the 8 character password as a security hole.
I have said it before and I will say it again, the big Linux companies do not seem to produce anything useful for the community. They package beta software into a distribution and sell it. They generally have not done much to raise the caliber of Open Source software like it seems Apple has started to do this year.
They were not satified with X Windows so they created Aqua, which works quite well. And they also implemented a nice admin system which allows a regular Joe to maintain what is a a Unix system under the sheets.
And now they are putting back a nice Javascript engine and releasing it as Open Source. I really hope all the IPO rich Linux companies would learn a lesson from this behavior. To improve Linux and to get it to take hold they need to polish several pieces and produce quality packages, not tons of RPMs of beta software.
And why does Redhat and all the other Linux companies not offer to produce useful drivers like this one? I have yet to see a substantial contribution by the Linux distributors. People suggest RPMs as a big contribution, but really? How come there is no Redhat web browser based on Mozilla with several advanced features? What type of research has Redhat funded for the sake of Linux?
I have seen Sun get closely involved with the usability and improvement of the Gnome systems but it seems every other Linux company just wants to bundle all the latest Beta distributions of some open source software and charge $100 for a box with 2 CDs and a useless book about configuring it.
It is news like this that makes me really wonder what all these IPO rich Linux companies did when they had all that money 3 years back. Not one of them made a bold move to make a drastic change to create something for the vision of what Linux should be. I think they simply lack any vision at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been anxious for this release for some time. In many ways it is important to have a current Java Runtime on FreeBSD. I have considered migrating everything over to Linux but then I would miss out on all of the benefits of the FreeBSD Ports Collection. I also feel the FreeBSD release engineering team and the core developers do an excellent job of managing the project. By producing a native Java Runtime I do not have not have to entertain the prospect of using Linux... [and then paying SCO for the privilege ;) ]
My approach has been to gradually assemble a reliable work environment with mature infrastructure over time but to build the current software with what is the best I can do at the time. For example, I am current creating Enterprise applications for a corporation and we are slowly migrating to Java and away from Perl and VB. And while nobody on the team has a great deal of experience with Java, several of us are learning rapidly and making decisions which will help us write more robust software in the near future. The first few applications ported over to Java were not the cleanest, but we learned from our mistakes and kept building.
And that should be your biggest lesson in IT or any field. Learn from your mistakes and develop solutions that help you do better in the future.
Another point I would make is to start with a good base of technology. I am finding that Java is a great base lately in large part to the support from the Apache Foundation and the associated Jakarta, Ant and XML projects. Coming from a Perl background I can see a big difference in the available Java packages that are extremely easy to integrate for a complete solution versus the Perl archive of modules which are sometimes incomplete or poorly tested.
My overriding rule for IT development is use what works, and actively avoid anything that is not proven.
I was talking to my sysadmin friend and he told me that no 64bit OS will work properly on the Internet because of a TCP/IP conflict. So you will need a Mac running Jaguar to act as a TCP bridge to translate the network communications. That is crazy!
Ok, I am just kidding. But someone will believe it.
Having the US exist as the only major power does not mean there will be peace. I think it would be best for these European countries to work toward their own mutual benefit without outside influence because they do exist in a very tight geographical location.
While the US is not perfectly secure, the country is surrounded by water and 2 friendly nations. I can only imagine how tense it could be to live in Turkey, Serbia or even Germany right now. The European Union may prove to be the new stabilizing force in the world now that the US and USSR are not fighting over the way things should be.
In a few years we may realize the biggest threat to war is a nation that fears nothing and is sees nothing wrong with destroying other nations as long as it serves their interests.
I work in IT and a while back there was some talk internally that IBM would be taking over Sun. One of their products, Eclipse, is a not so subtle sign that IBM aspired to take the lead with Java. I believe that going forward the only value Sun would have is Java since hardware has improved dramatically for x86/64bit and PowerPC architectures, and the fact that nearly all of the Sun products that I have had to use are always of poor quality.
.NET will easily take over. I know that IBM will be able to produce the kind of Java technologies we know should have been built years ago, but Sun never got passed suing Microsoft to realize innovation, market share and better products are what matters, not patents and law suits.
By comparison, IBM has done a great job with producing great software and new frameworks. They have also contributed a great deal of software to the Apache/Jakarta and XML projects. They are already the leader in Java technology, Sun just owns the patents and copyrights behind it. IBM needs that to really allow Java to take off.
If you leave Sun as it is for too long, it will kill Java and
I would like to see Big Blue as the driving force behind Java.
I user MacOS X and when I moved to the SBC Yahoo DSL service and did not like having the Enternet software on my Windows 2000 PC to keep the DSL circuit alive. I have a private network and for a long time on the previous DSL service I simply used some Netgear hardware to support a private network. But I had to do a couple of things to make it work.
First, I went through the bubblegum looking installer that Yahoo sends to all users. That seems to do some additonal authorization changes that allow the DSL circuit to allow normal PPPoE connectivity. Then I uninstall the Enternet software, configure my Netgear box to connect using the same username and password and it works. Then I can connect all of my network computers through my Netgear hardware which happens to have a NAT router. One of the biggest reasons for doing this is that my Win2k box reboots and I do not want to disrupt the internet connection. I also have a wireless base station that I use to connect my iBook from my living room where I am now writing this message.
I wish SBC Yahoo did not require all of these silly steps. Perhaps with some feedback from their users they will change their ways.
Remember DARPA also funded research for things such as TCP/IP and something called the Internet. They wanted to create an ultra-reliable network in the event of a nuclear war. But like many military projects, the things they create are often very useful for the general public.
So if we find Iraq running one of these methane power plants will we have proof they are developing a dirty bomb?
If Apple creates a Rendezvous implementation for Windows I fail to see how Apple's market share will grow. It will enable PC users to get the benefits of Rendezvous without owning a Mac. It will also allow existing Mac users connect with their PC using co-workers and friends. And since it is a completely open technology the PC users will not even need a Mac involved at all. So that begs the questions, how will this benefit Apple?
Apple does not make money by packaging software and making it available for everyone to use freely. Sure they get to innovate and make their customers happy, but it does not win them more customers. This article seems to imply that creating cool technology and implementing it on a PC will help Apple. There needs to be some proprietary software in place for this to be true.
Now if they created a Rendezvous implementation for corporate environments and a Software Development Kit to be used by companies like IBM. At work I use Lotus Notes which has a messenger client. I would like to automatically find co-workers without all of the initial setup that I had to do when I started using it. I would also like to be able to monitor the servers on the network and use the printers more easily. If Apple could sell software to do all of that, and perhaps sell XServe systems with it I bet that would benefit Apple.
I really hope Apple does break into the corporate workplace. It would really simplify much of extra work that I do so I can get back to my real work.
I am not sure it would be possible for him to change out of that blank turtlneck and bluejeans... but I can already see the slogans.
When you vote for Steve, you vote for Jobs.
Steve Jobs, the iPresident!
This somehow related weblogs, web services and decentralization together. It does not make any sense. And saying Web Services has no business model or that is just a silly idea just lacks any amount of research to justify an article which bashes it.
In an economic slowdown would you expect innovation to also be stifled? That would be the best time to innovate since a truly good idea would be successful when others would die as they should. The whole dotcom era let every silly idea live for a while, with venture capital, and now the good ideas from the dotcom era are being sorted out to the top (XML, Java) and the 2nd generation will be the result.
From what I see it is a good thing. Head over to Apache.org and you will see lots of very useful projects which leverage lots of good ideas. This article is just crap.
This should be working. I have version SDDR-05 and would like it work so I do not have to use my PC.
SanDisk and Apple need to work on this together to get it resolved. How much work could it be to make a USB device mount so I can pull files off of it?
I did each of these steps and made my computer as responsive as it was when I first installed 10.2. I already had 384MB of RAM, but doing the pre-binding, fixing permissions with the disk utility and disabling Crash Reporter has made it fast again.
Now when I click between applications they come forward right away. I also found that when I click an icon in the dock to start it, the application now starts up much faster. I am a little shocked.
I will have to run these routines again if it gets slow. Hopefully 10.3 will take OS X a few steps further to eliminate all of the speed issues.
Apple does have a payment plan option. Put it on Apple credit! :)
I bought an Snow iBook shortly after MacOS X 10.0 was released and installed it right away. It was sluggish then and has improved over time. I started with 128mb of RAM but upgraded to 384mb. That helps a lot because I like to run many programs.
What I typically run includes Mail (Apple), Internet Explorer, iChat, Yahoo Messenger and at different times I run Netbeans and jEdit. I have noticed that Java applications are slow, but that can be expected of Java and Swing. (try thinlet.com)
But I see that spinning rainbow circle way too often. I do get a lot of mail due to being on mailing lists for FreeBSD, Tomcat and others, but Mail just crawls as it tries to manage the folders. This is supposed to be a threaded application, but there is clearly a performance issue. IE seems to have similar issues.
One indicator that I use to see the slowness is moving from application to application. There is a noticable lag in pulling another application forward at times. Sure I am on an iBook with a slower processor and a slower system bus, but when I ran OS 9 it was just fine.
I would suggest that the shadowing and transparency is not necessary and I really wish I could turn them off from the Appearance preferences. They waste a lot of CPU time and slow me down. I do not need or want the eye candy. If you look closely at WinXP, you will notice they use a clever method to draw the buttons and windows which are not so cpu intensive. Doing away with shadowing and transparency will go a long way to speed things up.
Since 10.2 was released with the Quartz Extreme I have to say things are much faster, but Apple has lots more work to do.
I have said it before and I will say it again. I will not buy Apple hardware again until the OS is fast and the hardware is not behind the PC hardware. The phrase Megahertz does not matter is often used by Apple, but in an editorial I once read the author insisted that Gigahertz does. Being a full Gigahertz behind the Pentium and AMD processors makes the PC users laugh at the Mac users. Right now I can go out and buy a nice PC case, install a Pentium 4 and get a decent monitor for under $800 and install Linux or FreeBSD and do most of what I can now do with MacOS X.
Sure KDE, Gnome and the supporting applications may not be as refined in some key areas, but performance is key. They blow the doors off MacOS X. And so does my Windows 2000 workstation which sits right next to my iBook. (Pentium 4, 1.8Ghz)
I do not like it, but it is true.
I want more things added beyond the basics like support for the scroller on my mouse. I started to learn about the Thinlet framework for a lightweight GUI. It is meant to be used with midp applications, but like most stuff on java.sun.com, it is directed at Windows, Linux and Solaris. I would think by now they would provide a MacOS X download just like most Java application vendors now do.
I have installed the Linux version which is just a shell script which expands data to a directory that you specify, but it just does not work right. I would like a standard MacOS X installer which would set things up properly. If I had that, I would be on my way to developing midp applications. Instead I am going to have to wait till Sun or Apple puts something together.
Apple still does not seem to fully embrace Java anyway. If they did, they would be lobbying Sun or IBM to more quickly roll out these Java frameworks out for MacOS X so that we would not have to run a Windows box to run current Java technologies.
And while I am at it, why does Sun complain that Microsoft is a monopoly while making Java technologies so easily available for Windows and not MacOS X? Sure there is a matter of market share, but the monopoly will not change if Sun is not willing to take actual steps to make the change. Sure it supports Linux, but I still do not see the general public migrating to Linux. I see that happening more and more with MacOS X.
Swing applications run decently on OS X, so Sun should rush to make it the flagship platform.
Thanks. The simple stuff always seems to be glossed over with more advanced discussions. I will look forward to setting up my WEP connection. I am not really worried about security, but would like to use it if possible. For about 4 months now my home network was done without encryption because OS X 10.1 did not make it clear how to run WEP. It would also be helpful if Netgear would provide some OS X instructions. From the reviews which I have read, the other network hardware companies do a good job of providing information for users of Apple hardware.
Perhaps I can make my own screenshot and save it on a website somewhere.
In my case I have snow iBook and an airport card, which apparently just some toshiba hardware with an Apple label. The problem is that it prompts for a network name and password. I can configure my Netgear access point to do WEP, but how do I do that with my little iBook? Do I just copy/paste one of the segments or all of the segments into the password field?
A better question would be, why is Apple being such a pain about this? I should be able to connect my airport card to base stations with WEP, just as 802.11b specifies. It seems like an interface bug.
A list of instructions would be very helpful. Posting a screenshot of the login prompt would be even better.
Not supported? It is one of the white iBooks and I bought it this last year. It is 500Mhz and should be able to handle playing the game. And this is just meant to illustrate the difference in new Mac hardware vs new PC hardware. Another simple test would be to watch how much processor the iTunes application uses to play mp3 files while a Linux system uses far less processing resources to do the same thing.
The point was that it works better on a PC which is still much cheaper. Sure you can blame it on video memory, but I thought this Mac hardware is supposed to be superior. The video card I have in the PC is just an old Voodoo 3 card from over 2 years ago. So old PC hardware beats out new Mac hardware.
I prefer to use a Mac, but I do not like the situation where the hardware, combined with the poor OS X performance, makes it necessary to retreat back to a PC.
I do also not want to boot into OS9 which will just prove again that OS X is not ready for prime time.
I have a white iBook with a G3 500Mhz processor. I also had a Pentium II 350. I found that I could do things much better on my lower Mhz PC than my iBook, but I have to assume that is largely because Windows has evolved and been so well tuned over time when OS X is still just a hog. OS X 10.2 may help, but just so I can get things done I upgraded my PC, not buy another slow Mac.
Now I have a P4 1.7Ghz processor and it smokes my 500Mhz G3 easily. Even a 1Ghz processor would smoke the iBook because what seems to be inherent to increased processor speeds is increased bus speeds. This iBook has a 66Mb system bus while the P4 runs on a motherboard with 400Mb speeds. That is the biggest impact on the performance and while the Mhz for the processor is not the only factor for speed, it does help indicated what speed the system bus is going to be.
When I play Warcraft 3 it totally drags on my iBook. So I put it onto my upgraded PC and it works great. The internal bandwidth to move all of that data around inside the machine just has to be extremely high in order for it to play well.
So Apple needs to catch up and better do it quick. I will not be buying a new Mac unless the processor can match the speeds of a Pentium/AMD system. Use Altivec or a really fast system bus, or whatever trick is up the sleeve, but do it so I can actually use OS X. I love having a few great web browsers, a great mail client on the same machine as apache, mysql, java and perl so I have all my development in one place, but I need decent speeds.
Apple has a long road ahead. Make the processor, system bus and OS faster. And while they are doing that, they have to make it as cheap as a PC, but easier to use. I have tried WinXP and I no longer believe MacOS is the only easy to use system out there. That was 6 years ago. Now we have 2 good interfaces and Apple needs to shut up and get to work.
Hah!
Well, I for one would prefer to run an enterprise system on top of a MacOS X Server with XServe than on top a Dell with Windows 2000. My day job has me on Windows all the time but on my own time I use an iBook with MacOS X and a FreeBSD server on a PC. From what I have seen with MacOS X security, I think Apple will get great marks.
And hopefully they will show they do not need some Palladium system to secure their OS. That is just silliness by Microsoft. They seem to be blaming the hardware for the OS being so insecure all this time.
With all these Linux companies, why can there not be a Linux PC or at least one that is not built around this new security hardware? Just because some of the industry heavyweights are behind it does not mean that all air will be pushed out of the room. Consider purchasing chips from Motorola and putting together motherboards based on the specs that IBM release a couple years back. BeOS use to run on it's own Be Box which was all custom hardware.
I for one would be happy to have a Linux PC made by VA, AlienWare or even Dell if they produce good hardware which works well with Linux.
Besides, who needs the hardware to do the security work? Sure you can use cipher/cryptography acceleration in hardware, but you do not have to be dependent on it. What Microsoft will find is they put all this work into a system which is still insecure because they still have a front door with holes through it. How long before a macro shares your private key with everyone on your Outlook Express mailing list. And when there is a hole that is found, do I now have to install a firmware update? That does not sound reasonable.
This sounds like a joke, but Microsoft is known for making these mistakes. They even released the Nimba virus on their Korean distribution of their development suite.
So instead of complaining that Microsoft, Intel and AMD are going to ruin the world for Linux, go out and build a business on better hardware which does not lock you into Microsoft. A modern BeBox similar to an Apple G4 system would be quite welcome as a Linux or FreeBSD system on my desk.
Redhat and the new Linux partnerships should put their resources together and actually produce something, instead of more spin on Linux. Make something significant.
I have a FreeBSD fileserver at home and I use ssh to log into it with keys automatically. No password is necessary. This is very secure.
I also have a remote FreeBSD server also set up with a public ssh key so that I can log in without typing a password. So if someone is really concerned about security, they can just use ssh to tunnel communcations (shell, cvs, scp).
But most systems, especially my iBook at home, does not need very long passwords because it does not run very many network services and does not hold critical information anyway, like a database of credit cards. And if I do run remote services (ssh, ftp) on the iBook, I can always use the ipfw firewall to deny traffic to these ports except from specific locations. In fact, I run the MySQL database server and block port 3306 for remote connections so it cannot be accessed remotely.
So for me the password issue is moot. If someone is really serious about security, they should know enough to take care of it without seeing the 8 character password as a security hole.
I have said it before and I will say it again, the big Linux companies do not seem to produce anything useful for the community. They package beta software into a distribution and sell it. They generally have not done much to raise the caliber of Open Source software like it seems Apple has started to do this year.
They were not satified with X Windows so they created Aqua, which works quite well. And they also implemented a nice admin system which allows a regular Joe to maintain what is a a Unix system under the sheets.
And now they are putting back a nice Javascript engine and releasing it as Open Source. I really hope all the IPO rich Linux companies would learn a lesson from this behavior. To improve Linux and to get it to take hold they need to polish several pieces and produce quality packages, not tons of RPMs of beta software.
But will this happen?
And why does Redhat and all the other Linux companies not offer to produce useful drivers like this one? I have yet to see a substantial contribution by the Linux distributors. People suggest RPMs as a big contribution, but really? How come there is no Redhat web browser based on Mozilla with several advanced features? What type of research has Redhat funded for the sake of Linux?
I have seen Sun get closely involved with the usability and improvement of the Gnome systems but it seems every other Linux company just wants to bundle all the latest Beta distributions of some open source software and charge $100 for a box with 2 CDs and a useless book about configuring it.
It is news like this that makes me really wonder what all these IPO rich Linux companies did when they had all that money 3 years back. Not one of them made a bold move to make a drastic change to create something for the vision of what Linux should be. I think they simply lack any vision at all.