22MB isn't large, I gave examples of software that is large. I would define the breaking point as the point where most dial-up users wouldn't bother. Perhaps 200MB? 250 MB? It's unclear, but definitely anything shipping on a DVD is out. I recently had someone ask me if iTunes sold CD's -- because she was on dial-up and didn't want to try to download anything. I imagine there is a certain market that isn't currently served by broadband (she is in one of those areas, only 35 miles or so from one of the largest major metropolitan areas in the US).
I'm not talking about bit rot on hard disks, I'm talking about problems with consumer-recorded CD's and DVD's. I burn a copy of all retail CD/DVD software disks and then take the retail disks offsite. I don't care about the movies I buy so I don't bother with them.
This isn't a gaming rig. Moving the storage to SSD will provide more benefit than increasing CPU speed for the target market. Target market wants silence, low weight, high portability, low heat, and the ability to run some relatively CPU-light software. This product is absolutely perfect for that market... think of it as a pad device on Star Trek.
...you'll have to wait for iOS apps to be ported to Mac OS X first, or wait for a version of Mac OS X that supports those APIs.
Maybe I missed the point where they said that existing iOS apps won't run on OS X -- I was following the Gizmodo blog. That would water down some of the benefits I could see with a write-once-use-everywhere app. I was excited to think that was possible.
Why not? What about an App Store-like interface [apple.com] would prevent existing apps from being sold there?
Size is one thing, I don't see you downloading the WoW installation DVD from there for instance, and many games nowadays are quite large. Something along the lines of MS Office is also too large for the same reason. The download model works best with small files and low cost items.
Second is if I'm paying lots of money for a fat app I want a physical disk and a physical manual. Lately the manuals are all PDF's which I hate but I still want the physical disk. On the occasions I've bought something downloadable (because I needed it right away) I burned it to disk but with all the news of bit rot on consumer-level CD's and DVD's I'm concerned that my disks won't be usable several years into the future. And yes I've already had disks become unreadable, and I've had individual files on other disks suffer corruption (very large PDF files which load but individual pictures are missing and Acrobat complains). Who knows how many other files have already been lost? I thought I was doing a good thing by burning them to disk. I thought it was maybe just my media, or just my burner, or just my bad luck, and that it was an isolated case.
Handle the money Remember there are 3% or more fees just for accepting credit cards. There are chargeback fees. Credit declines have to be handled etc.
Handle the distribution Do technical support for downloads, provide more bandwidth than you can imagine, etc.
Possibly Give You Free Advertising If your app sells well it will be on their "top x" charts which is free advertising. You probably can't afford to advertise to that many people otherwise unless you're a really really huge development house. This lets a little company with a popular application make it even more popular with search and top x results.
Provide Basic Search You have a captive audience of how many millions of people searching for an app.
Provide Your Buyers Immediate Gratification Is there any other place like this? That allows them to click and enter a password and it's bought and delivered immediately? No, your website can't do this, it's at least several additional steps and potential incompatibilities. And they don't have to trust you implicitly since all authorization is done via Apple... those people you never heard of before do not get your credit card details.
Give Your Buyer a Belief That the App Will Be Compatible With Your System When you buy something on the App Store, it's not going to complain that your video card isn't supported or you don't have enough RAM. That's not to say every app is wonderful, but you've got better luck here than most other places.
The people complaining have never dealt with many of these issues or they would consider 30% a steal.
I'm interested in seeing some of the apps on the Mac -- there are quite a few that do one very useful job very well. So I welcome the chance to use these under OS X.
And no, I'm not one of the trolls that somehow believes that traditional apps will be restricted under OS X. I don't even see how you could think that traditional apps could be delivered via an App Store-like interface, or that traditional software on the Mac will be uprooted for the App Store. There will always be apps too fat for an iDevice, which require a non-touch interface etc, and I don't see those going away ever.
Mod parent up. We have approx a dozen Linux servers which I manage myself and 20-something Windows servers that take a team of 3 + me to manage. Our most critical stuff runs under Linux and those servers have by far the highest volume of transactions / connections.
Interesting, I didn't notice the change in terminal files since they just ran (except for not closing when exiting). So earlier today I exported (after adding the "run" command) a much smaller XML file. I opened it and could see the ugly binary segment used for the "font" key.
I tried adding the ExecutionString key, no results, it didn't launch the script. I never did figure out why or what to change it to so it would work.
What worked -- I wouldn't have thought of it without this thread -- was modifying this key value in my existing.term file, which was previously set to 2 (I noticed it was 1 in the.terminal file):
In Linux you have the ability to set the swappiness of the machine, basically what is the balance between in-use RAM and memory swapped to physical disk. Here's an article that might explain it better than I could: http://wiki.xdroop.com/space/Linux/swappiness
In OSX, my day starts with almost all page ins, many hundreds of thousands, which is great, and very few page outs. For instance right now I've got 300K page ins and 0 page outs. But at some point, depending on usage, the page outs jump to hundreds of thousands. They go from being statistically insignificant to a large percentage of swaps, almost as if a scale were tipped. I show mostly inactive memory when this happens (although sometimes the free memory is very high, in the hundreds of MB or low GB's) so my best guess is that the system is too eagerly swapping items to disk, then having to fetch them again.
I'm not sure what issues you'd have if you statically linked the libraries in the executables (something I've had to use to get newer versions of rar to run on old versions of RHEL). Assuming of course you have dependencies resolved. Can you explain a bit further please?
Fink never worked correctly for me, I got a bunch of errors with other tools (which it broke) and after reading about it, the consensus was it works sometimes, for some people, in some situations. It's older and less up-to-date than MacPorts/DarwinPorts.
I melted a system doing a MacPorts/DarwinPorts selfupdate. I had used it to install BubbleTrouble2 or some such silly game for my kids and I wanted to get the newest version of MacPorts and the game itself. When I noticed it locked up and the fans at 100% I did a hard poweroff. The system would no longer boot and I had to use the OS X install CD to recover, then I had an extra "Previous System" folder I couldn't merge or get rid of.
So no, neither of these are working for me. They do not coexist without problems, installing duplicate packages for instance causes all kinds of workarounds.
So far as you're talking about the state of package management on Linux, most people consider the available tools such as apt-get and yum superior to all other platforms. You were using some free, unsupported OS and something went awry. I'm talking about commercial, supported software such as OS X. The last RHEL patch that broke something was.. I have no idea. I've been using Red Hat since 5.2 and RHEL since RHEL 3. I've never had a patch break something.
As to your comments on databases, I don't know where to begin. You're seriously arguing for file-based storage over DB storage for this use? And you <chuckle> want to "edit [the text file] manually, say over an SSH session"? Come on, please tell me you're upset and not thinking clearly.
It gives their products additional value, the same reason Microsoft doesn't battle cygwin.
Both Windows and OS X are "locked-down, proprietary environments" if you want to look at it that way (vs open-source OS's such as Linux).
If you used a Mac, you'd wonder why someone would want to use something else. I can run pretty much anything I want on my work machine, and I chose OS X after trying Linux and Windows. For what I do, it's just so much better than the other stuff available. So from my viewpoint, why would you want to transition to another OS?
I spent a few minutes at the Homebrew site, but I can't tell which packages have config files available and didn't find any documentation. I would rather not install it just to find out that the packages I want to use aren't there.
I would much prefer a solution which uses standard RPM / DEB files, or has a large enough community that I can assume most packages have installers already created and tested. Then there's the whole package-management side of it, where you want to upgrade or remove one thing without breaking the others. I didn't see any explanation of this with Homebrew, but maybe I missed something.
I think we read the same articles. LSQuarantine didn't solve the issue for me. I was trying to save to a small NAS and it kept giving me a strange error. What I did was add a line to another script (credit to "Unquarantine" by Henrik Nyh http://henrik.nyh.se/2007/10/lift-the-leopard-download-quarantine ):
Other script did this (excerpt):
do shell script "xattr -d com.apple.quarantine " & (addedItems as text)
I added this:
do shell script "xattr -d com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms " & (addedItems as text)
I was NOT getting the problems from all downloads, specifically I was having trouble with the Apple SDK files which have another attribute on them.
For the terminal issue, I have a.term file for the servers I use regularly. It's an XML file, which among other things contains a line of the server to connect to:
That script just calls rdesktop with the hostname, username, and resolution settings.
I prefer rdesktop since that's what I've always used. It seems to be substantially faster and more reliable than the Microsoft Mac Remote Desktop software. It's small and light, it works.
As of right now, with 4GB RAM, Parallels 5 with an XP Pro VM, 2 rdesktop sessions, FireFox, Thunderbird, and an assortment of widgets and added utilities, I'm showing ~1.2GB wired / ~1.9GB active / ~0.7GB inactive / ~0.2GB free, with 354K page ins and only 45 page outs. If I leave it running for a couple of days the page outs shoots skyward as a percentage of total paging. If I launch PhotoShop in the VM, paging soars. If I allocate more than 1GB to the VM, paging soars. If I launch a bunch of stuff in the VM concurrently, paging soars. It's not like I'm memory-starved.
There is more margin on software upgrades than hardware, strictly speaking, although they would of course like to sell both. Brand loyalty is Apple's #1 asset, and like the automobile aftermarket, keeping that loyalty through upgrades and accessories keeps people coming back.
Look at it this way, the device isn't just a tool, you learn to depend on it, like a carpenter's favorite tape measure. Yes there are fancier, shinier tape measures, but the carpenter remembers something that grants the existing tape measure extra value. Similarly, I don't want to go to another laptop unless it's an obvious win because I found one that works for me.
As far as adding gewgaws goes, there's always somebody who thinks adding some extra flash will be great. I want to underscore that Snow Leopard actually runs faster than Tiger on the same laptop*** and I don't want an "upgrade" that has less functionality or is noticeably slower. ***I removed the internal optical drive and installed a second, faster, larger hard drive in the bay. Then my optical drive was moved to an external case and it all works fine. It boots from the new drive automatically and both are accessible at any time.
What would make me upgrade the hardware? Maybe a cooler-running version? This one gets pretty hot. I'm pleased with it otherwise, it has the ports I need and is pleasantly quick. It's not too heavy and the battery life is sufficient for my needs, although I don't use it on battery much anymore. It gets maybe 2.5 hours on a charge if I'm using WiFi or an AirCard.
If they implement a decent package management tool, they're probably going to want to prevent the user from unknowingly doing something stupid and wrecking the system. Right now it's all too easy to use Fink or MacPorts or DarwinPorts and install one little thing that causes it not to boot.
So to that end I think there may be a need to "approve" apps as compatible. You don't want someone replacing CUPS for instance with a newer version, because then some system printing apps / code no longer works correctly. I'm not sure the best way to accomplish this.
To give a parallel, you can use rpm -e <packagename> in RHEL/Fedora and it will NOT always tell you what all will break... but yum erase <packagename> will work as expected, even listing the 32-bit and 64-bit versions separately.
I use Spaces daily / throughout the day, but I haven't run into this problem. Maybe because I invoke it using keyboard + mouse (Apple key + 3-finger click)? If it helps you, I'm using BetterTouchTool 0.626 to accomplish this.
I recently (within the past few months) upgraded from Tiger to Snow Leopard and it went very well... I knew the next release would be out sometime before mid-2011 but I just couldn't wait any longer. The biggest issue for upgrading was not having updates for software running on Tiger anymore.
Things I hope they change:
Make it easier to install binaries used on other *nix systems. Because the pain of using Fink or DarwinPorts is too much. Both install absolutely ridiculous sized frameworks and trying to compile something when you don't have a binary is a mixture of voodoo and tears, roughly where Linux was 15 years ago. Recently I wanted to install a2ps to use some documentation scripts I created which run on Fedora / RHEL. I gave up, it was too much bother.
Make it easier to setup passthru printers (required to print large documents successfully from Parallels). Yes I know CUPS, I maintain all printers company-wide for our RHEL servers. So it was only a little bit of an inconvenience to setup... but the thought of trying to explain how to do that to someone else isn't a happy thought. The raw printers don't even show up in the GUI, the only way you see them is in Terminal or the CUPS web interface.
Let me set my Terminal preferences for new windows, then actually use those preferences. Every day at work, I start up at least 2 rdesktop sessions using a separate script for each. Every day it adds another terminal preference to the list. Periodically I go back and delete these extra prefs. Just use my existing prefs like Tiger did, already!
This new "downloaded from the internet" warning causes some people problems, so provide a way to turn it off. Previous versions of AFP do not like files with more than 2 or 3 extended attributes (or whatever they're called) and trying to copy or move these files to a network AFP share fails. I setup my downloads folder as a watched folder, and created a folder action script to remove 2 or 3 of the most common extended attributes. Another thing I don't want to try to explain to someone.
Change the swapping settings to be less aggressive by default. I upgraded to 4GB to get around most of the swapping but I've found the easiest way to keep the system stable and happy is to just shut it down regularly.
Please don't add a lot of extra eye candy or things to slow us down. I'm using a 2007 MacBook Pro and while it's plenty fast for what I need, I don't want to have to upgrade either.
Above all, the system works very well so don't screw it up. This is really important.
Yes, your response was informative and I know you're trying to help.
But seriously, if this person has no idea what a Cell processor is, I'm pretty sure the concept of CPU optimization will be lost on them. You could say it was a new type of chip made by elves to regrow tissue and they would probably believe it. Just how out of touch would someone have to be to miss the Cell, and not bother to Google it before posting?
This is trusted computing. People wanted it, the industry pushed it hard, and now it's here. It's the same story you get with various other implementations of TPC.
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22MB isn't large, I gave examples of software that is large. I would define the breaking point as the point where most dial-up users wouldn't bother. Perhaps 200MB? 250 MB? It's unclear, but definitely anything shipping on a DVD is out. I recently had someone ask me if iTunes sold CD's -- because she was on dial-up and didn't want to try to download anything. I imagine there is a certain market that isn't currently served by broadband (she is in one of those areas, only 35 miles or so from one of the largest major metropolitan areas in the US).
I'm not talking about bit rot on hard disks, I'm talking about problems with consumer-recorded CD's and DVD's. I burn a copy of all retail CD/DVD software disks and then take the retail disks offsite. I don't care about the movies I buy so I don't bother with them.
There are always a few like that, but I have to agree overall much less hand-holding is required on Macs.
+1 Informative. I missed the flash vs SSD as well. Thanks.
This isn't a gaming rig. Moving the storage to SSD will provide more benefit than increasing CPU speed for the target market. Target market wants silence, low weight, high portability, low heat, and the ability to run some relatively CPU-light software. This product is absolutely perfect for that market... think of it as a pad device on Star Trek.
Excellent points, thanks I totally agree.
...you'll have to wait for iOS apps to be ported to Mac OS X first, or wait for a version of Mac OS X that supports those APIs.
Maybe I missed the point where they said that existing iOS apps won't run on OS X -- I was following the Gizmodo blog. That would water down some of the benefits I could see with a write-once-use-everywhere app. I was excited to think that was possible.
Why not? What about an App Store-like interface [apple.com] would prevent existing apps from being sold there?
Size is one thing, I don't see you downloading the WoW installation DVD from there for instance, and many games nowadays are quite large. Something along the lines of MS Office is also too large for the same reason. The download model works best with small files and low cost items.
Second is if I'm paying lots of money for a fat app I want a physical disk and a physical manual. Lately the manuals are all PDF's which I hate but I still want the physical disk. On the occasions I've bought something downloadable (because I needed it right away) I burned it to disk but with all the news of bit rot on consumer-level CD's and DVD's I'm concerned that my disks won't be usable several years into the future. And yes I've already had disks become unreadable, and I've had individual files on other disks suffer corruption (very large PDF files which load but individual pictures are missing and Acrobat complains). Who knows how many other files have already been lost? I thought I was doing a good thing by burning them to disk. I thought it was maybe just my media, or just my burner, or just my bad luck, and that it was an isolated case.
The people complaining have never dealt with many of these issues or they would consider 30% a steal.
+1 insightful. If you don't like the product, don't buy it. You may be surprised however at the number of people who will.
I'm interested in seeing some of the apps on the Mac -- there are quite a few that do one very useful job very well. So I welcome the chance to use these under OS X.
And no, I'm not one of the trolls that somehow believes that traditional apps will be restricted under OS X. I don't even see how you could think that traditional apps could be delivered via an App Store-like interface, or that traditional software on the Mac will be uprooted for the App Store. There will always be apps too fat for an iDevice, which require a non-touch interface etc, and I don't see those going away ever.
And you were doing so well, being very informative, until you decided to throw in the political rant...
Mod parent up. We have approx a dozen Linux servers which I manage myself and 20-something Windows servers that take a team of 3 + me to manage. Our most critical stuff runs under Linux and those servers have by far the highest volume of transactions / connections.
I tried adding the ExecutionString key, no results, it didn't launch the script. I never did figure out why or what to change it to so it would work.
What worked -- I wouldn't have thought of it without this thread -- was modifying this key value in my existing
Thanks for the idea!
Ah, I understand much better now. It seems the issues I ran into when trying to compile software on OS X are trivial compared to these. Many thanks.
In Linux you have the ability to set the swappiness of the machine, basically what is the balance between in-use RAM and memory swapped to physical disk. Here's an article that might explain it better than I could: http://wiki.xdroop.com/space/Linux/swappiness In OSX, my day starts with almost all page ins, many hundreds of thousands, which is great, and very few page outs. For instance right now I've got 300K page ins and 0 page outs. But at some point, depending on usage, the page outs jump to hundreds of thousands. They go from being statistically insignificant to a large percentage of swaps, almost as if a scale were tipped. I show mostly inactive memory when this happens (although sometimes the free memory is very high, in the hundreds of MB or low GB's) so my best guess is that the system is too eagerly swapping items to disk, then having to fetch them again.
I'm not sure what issues you'd have if you statically linked the libraries in the executables (something I've had to use to get newer versions of rar to run on old versions of RHEL). Assuming of course you have dependencies resolved. Can you explain a bit further please?
Fink never worked correctly for me, I got a bunch of errors with other tools (which it broke) and after reading about it, the consensus was it works sometimes, for some people, in some situations. It's older and less up-to-date than MacPorts/DarwinPorts.
I melted a system doing a MacPorts/DarwinPorts selfupdate. I had used it to install BubbleTrouble2 or some such silly game for my kids and I wanted to get the newest version of MacPorts and the game itself. When I noticed it locked up and the fans at 100% I did a hard poweroff. The system would no longer boot and I had to use the OS X install CD to recover, then I had an extra "Previous System" folder I couldn't merge or get rid of.
So no, neither of these are working for me. They do not coexist without problems, installing duplicate packages for instance causes all kinds of workarounds.
So far as you're talking about the state of package management on Linux, most people consider the available tools such as apt-get and yum superior to all other platforms. You were using some free, unsupported OS and something went awry. I'm talking about commercial, supported software such as OS X. The last RHEL patch that broke something was.. I have no idea. I've been using Red Hat since 5.2 and RHEL since RHEL 3. I've never had a patch break something.
As to your comments on databases, I don't know where to begin. You're seriously arguing for file-based storage over DB storage for this use? And you <chuckle> want to "edit [the text file] manually, say over an SSH session"? Come on, please tell me you're upset and not thinking clearly.
Thanks this was very helpful. I may give it a spin.
It gives their products additional value, the same reason Microsoft doesn't battle cygwin.
Both Windows and OS X are "locked-down, proprietary environments" if you want to look at it that way (vs open-source OS's such as Linux).
If you used a Mac, you'd wonder why someone would want to use something else. I can run pretty much anything I want on my work machine, and I chose OS X after trying Linux and Windows. For what I do, it's just so much better than the other stuff available. So from my viewpoint, why would you want to transition to another OS?
Thanks for the info.
I spent a few minutes at the Homebrew site, but I can't tell which packages have config files available and didn't find any documentation. I would rather not install it just to find out that the packages I want to use aren't there.
I would much prefer a solution which uses standard RPM / DEB files, or has a large enough community that I can assume most packages have installers already created and tested. Then there's the whole package-management side of it, where you want to upgrade or remove one thing without breaking the others. I didn't see any explanation of this with Homebrew, but maybe I missed something.
I was NOT getting the problems from all downloads, specifically I was having trouble with the Apple SDK files which have another attribute on them.
.term file for the servers I use regularly. It's an XML file, which among other things contains a line of the server to connect to:
For the terminal issue, I have a
That script just calls rdesktop with the hostname, username, and resolution settings.
I prefer rdesktop since that's what I've always used. It seems to be substantially faster and more reliable than the Microsoft Mac Remote Desktop software. It's small and light, it works.
As of right now, with 4GB RAM, Parallels 5 with an XP Pro VM, 2 rdesktop sessions, FireFox, Thunderbird, and an assortment of widgets and added utilities, I'm showing ~1.2GB wired / ~1.9GB active / ~0.7GB inactive / ~0.2GB free, with 354K page ins and only 45 page outs. If I leave it running for a couple of days the page outs shoots skyward as a percentage of total paging. If I launch PhotoShop in the VM, paging soars. If I allocate more than 1GB to the VM, paging soars. If I launch a bunch of stuff in the VM concurrently, paging soars. It's not like I'm memory-starved.
There is more margin on software upgrades than hardware, strictly speaking, although they would of course like to sell both. Brand loyalty is Apple's #1 asset, and like the automobile aftermarket, keeping that loyalty through upgrades and accessories keeps people coming back.
Look at it this way, the device isn't just a tool, you learn to depend on it, like a carpenter's favorite tape measure. Yes there are fancier, shinier tape measures, but the carpenter remembers something that grants the existing tape measure extra value. Similarly, I don't want to go to another laptop unless it's an obvious win because I found one that works for me.
As far as adding gewgaws goes, there's always somebody who thinks adding some extra flash will be great. I want to underscore that Snow Leopard actually runs faster than Tiger on the same laptop*** and I don't want an "upgrade" that has less functionality or is noticeably slower.
***I removed the internal optical drive and installed a second, faster, larger hard drive in the bay. Then my optical drive was moved to an external case and it all works fine. It boots from the new drive automatically and both are accessible at any time.
What would make me upgrade the hardware? Maybe a cooler-running version? This one gets pretty hot. I'm pleased with it otherwise, it has the ports I need and is pleasantly quick. It's not too heavy and the battery life is sufficient for my needs, although I don't use it on battery much anymore. It gets maybe 2.5 hours on a charge if I'm using WiFi or an AirCard.
If they implement a decent package management tool, they're probably going to want to prevent the user from unknowingly doing something stupid and wrecking the system. Right now it's all too easy to use Fink or MacPorts or DarwinPorts and install one little thing that causes it not to boot.
So to that end I think there may be a need to "approve" apps as compatible. You don't want someone replacing CUPS for instance with a newer version, because then some system printing apps / code no longer works correctly. I'm not sure the best way to accomplish this.
To give a parallel, you can use rpm -e <packagename> in RHEL/Fedora and it will NOT always tell you what all will break... but yum erase <packagename> will work as expected, even listing the 32-bit and 64-bit versions separately.
I use Spaces daily / throughout the day, but I haven't run into this problem. Maybe because I invoke it using keyboard + mouse (Apple key + 3-finger click)? If it helps you, I'm using BetterTouchTool 0.626 to accomplish this.
Things I hope they change:
Yes, your response was informative and I know you're trying to help.
But seriously, if this person has no idea what a Cell processor is, I'm pretty sure the concept of CPU optimization will be lost on them. You could say it was a new type of chip made by elves to regrow tissue and they would probably believe it. Just how out of touch would someone have to be to miss the Cell, and not bother to Google it before posting?
This is trusted computing. People wanted it, the industry pushed it hard, and now it's here. It's the same story you get with various other implementations of TPC.