A number of people on the MacAddict forums have actually run X on systems with 64MB RAM, and claim to be satisfied with the result. Now, perhaps Apple is just doing a good job managing expectations, but so far, so good.
If you take the author's pronouncements entirely seriously, you'd come to the conclusion that no computer company should ever release a radically new OS.
I, too, found it very strange that he talked about running NT on a system with 16MB RAM. I remember running NT 4.0 on a 32MB system and I had to upgrade RAM to 48MB for it to be barely decent. In fact the realistic hardware requirements for each new Microsoft OS strain the capabilities of most hardware out there. The Windows 2000 requirements were quite comparable to those for OS X, and Windows 2000 compared to Windows NT 4 is a much less radical change than OS X compared to OS 9.
I'm typing this on OS/X right now, and I'm definitely looking forward to switching to it as my primary OS, as soon as they can get video editing software working. (That's what I'm spending most of my time on the machine for).
By the way, here's a maddening OS/X problem I'm having - when I type fast, it seems to be eating about every 5th to 10th character. Grrr. Anyone know what's going on?
I actually would consider this a problem. How many people are getting broadband connections who are entirely clueless about security? Those people probably can't afford a pricey firewall just for their Mac - what should they be doing?
The classic Slashdot user's problem is the tricky question of, "What should my artistically-inclined girlfriend who doesn't want to learn computers use?"
Or, for that matter, what should I use when I want to take off my programmer's hat and use Photoshop or Final Cut [video editing package] or even a word processor?
True, Gimp and StarOffice and friends are here and making some inroads, but even there the ugly fonts and bad printing are a royal pain.
What MacOS X really does is make it possible for us to be able to sincerely and wholeheartedly recommend a solution that actually works for our friends without making us wince.
I think it's fantastic, personally. I have a dual G4/450 right here just waiting for the new beta (which I've ordered).
Depends on what kind of point you want to make with the statistics:-).
But seriously, I'd keep it in the Apple column, simply because Apple developed it and people are going to be using it because it's the Apple OS, not because it's Unix.
If I want to get a good but not outrageous system, Macs generally cost about $2,500 and PCs around $ 1,200.
However, if I want to keep myself reasonably modern, I have to buy a PC about every year, while I only have to buy a Mac every other year. Also, a year-old PC is worth basically $ 0, while a two year old Mac is worth about $ 500.
Add this all together:
PC
$ 1,200 Year 1
$ 1,200 Year 2
----------
$ 2,400
Minus circa $200 as value of year-old system
$ 2,200
Mac
$ 2,500 Year 1
$ -0- Year 2
-----------
$ 2,500 Total spent
Minus $ 500 salvage value old machine
Net expenditure $ 2,000.
So with the lesser amount of built-in obsolescence the Mac has, it's actually slightly cheaper for me to run than a PC that's kept up to date.
Of course I could upgrade my PC, but I'm not sure how much sense that makes. After all, to take advantage of the latest technology has to offer, you really need entirely new components: Motherboards, CPUs, disk drives, memory and video cards are all getting better and better. And I really doubt you could replace all those components for less than what a completely new system would cost.
(2) People who try to make it pretty, like those nice folks who created Enlightenment, wind up producing something bloated and inefficient due to the basic design of X.
(3) Font support is mind-bendingly bad; there are hardly any fonts available that don't hurt the eyes just to look at them.
Now, it's true these problems are being worked on, but I have yet to see a solution that works well enough for me to find it appealing.
In striking contrast, MacOS X was designed from the ground up, as a major requirement, to be beautiful. And this is a job that, quite frankly, we can trust Steve Jobs to do. He may be a maniac about those poor rumors sites, and he may be a bastard to work with, but he sure does know how to design pretty stuff.
We look at our computers so much... surely they should be beautiful? MacOS X is, and that's a good reason to give it a shot.
(I have a dual G4/450 I bought about a week ago, and it's a fantastic machine even running the ancient MacOS 9).
but IE on MacOS 9 is a very impressive program. It just keeps on running. Netscape on the same machine crashed within a few minutes of my trying it out.
I'm looking forward to using Omniweb, though. They claim to have full JavaScript support and all kinds of goodies, which I'm certainly anticipating with glee.
I'm writing this on my spiffy new dual processor G4/450, and I can say that there's an enormous aesthetic appeal to the machine that transcends tiresome questions like killer apps.
Certainly the new killer app for the system is digital video, what with both iMovie and Final Cut being made only for the platform. That and my high hopes for MacOS X are the main reasons I bought this system.
Using iMovie, I made a 47 second quickie horror film, complete with sounds, music and cheesy special effects, and it turned out well enough to impress a potential business partner interested in making a real, he-man style moneymaking project with me. Now, Final Cut is much better, and I'm looking forward to using it, but I think that's a good testimony to the merits of the platform and system.
There are two interesting problem areas for X that I haven't noticed anywhere, but are interesting:
* MacOS Classic users are going to miss features such as the Apple menu. Within hours of buying my spiffy new system, I was able to easily customize it to work the way I wanted. The new system is totally different in this regard, and I've heard a lot of grousing about the Dock being unable to replace the old features. I think they have a point, and this is allegedly one of the major reasons this is a beta and not a final release.
* I'm surprised Adobe and others haven't come out with carbon versions of their software yet. It was said to require but minor modifications, and they even showed a Carbonized Photoshop earlier this year. So why is there no Carbonized Photoshop yet if they already know how to do it? This concerns me a bit.
If the value of argv[1] is longer than 999 characters (999 + the trailing null at the end of all C strings), the string will overflow and cause the program to crash with a segementation violation error.
If you put data representing machine language instructions at the end of the string, you will get a stack overflow, and the next characters will start overwriting the stack. This can result in having the code executed by the computer, which can do nasty things like emailing the contents of your/etc/passwd file someplace, or copying a setuid shell somewhere for future use.
The solution is use snprintf:
snprintf(string, 1000, "%s", argv[1]);
That will copy no more than 1000 characters into the new string (counting the null).
I recently spent $ 191 at amazon.com and they gave me the lower price on the Men in Black DVD.
However, they messed up my $191 order - they sent it late and one of the items they sent was the wrong one. I don't really want to complain since it's not worth the trouble of shipping it back, but I doubt I'll buy from them again.
Because, based on the other messages on this thread, it would be worth absolutely nothing to them. It's a specialized machine designed to solve specialized problems.
If it costs $ 35,000 to de-install the system, a church or charity couldn't afford to take it in any event.
If the OS license is locked to the box (as I understand it is), how could an AS/400 exist without a license?
I'm really curious, since I'd love to own an AS/400 just for the sheer heck of it -- but I'm sure the price of getting a license would be prohibitive on, say, one of the older $200-500 machines.
I ordered $ 194 worth of books at amazon last Thursday, and I have to admit, I'm not impressed anymore - and I've been a loyal customer for years.
To start, despite all the books I ordered being "Usually ships in 24 hours", my order was not shipped until Saturday - two days after the order. I remember when orders were almost invariably shipped a few hours after being placed.
It added somewhat to my irritation that, although the order was placed on the 24th and shipped on the 31st, it claimed delivery would be between the 31st and the 5th. Since shipment via UPS ground almost invariably takes three days, this was an absurdly pessimistic range. My order actually arrived, to my relief, on the 30th - just when I thought it would.
Finally, out of the ten-odd items I ordered, instead of sending me William Goldman's sequel to Adventures in the screen trade, they sent me a well-written but surely unrelated SAP: The Inside Story. I'm not inclined to send it back, since that's more trouble than it's worth, but I'm not inclined to appreciate what they did, either. Any suggestions as to what to do about this would be appreciated.
Now, I wouldn't be that upset about this if it weren't for the fact that poor service from Amazon now appears to be a common complaint. See this review:
After seeing their current service, I have to agree entirely. It's sad to see this kind of decline in a one-time king of customer service, despite their recent privacy problems. But there it is.
Many thanks for the detailed response - I'm going to be getting a dual G4/500 system, so the easy boot sounds like it will work just fine. All I need to do is buy another IDE drive and slot it in.
Whenever a Steve Jobs keynote comes up, the Mac faithful start feeling breathless anticipation because most of the times he speaks, he has a spectacular, world-beating announcement to make.
And with his July announcement of the multi-processor G4s and the Cube, the collective WOW! pasted a smile on the face of every Mac enthusiast.
Now, it would be only natural to think that there wasn't really any time for anything of significance, with less than a month between this one and the last. After all, I only saw my first Cube last night(*).
But the public has great expectations for Steve, because, after all, Steve is the Godlike figure who saved Apple from irrelevence, disaster, and tiresomeness. Steve the Great can do anything, they say!
So everyone expects something exciting when he speaks, however much Apple tries to diminish expectations.
Hope that helps explain the curious phenomenon.
D
(*) The CUBE: Yes, it's as stunning a looker as you've heard -- but the store ruined the effect by paring it with an off-brand Beige monitor. For shame, guys! No more Beige! [laugh] ----
That's something I'm curious about - Apple got rid of X and replaced it with Display PostScript, right?
I can't live without my xemacs, and yet with it, MacOX X would be my dream OS - enough applications to use in the real world, but stable enough for me to use for Unix/Linux web site development.
Many thanks for any thoughts? Incidentally, the reason I'm saying xemacs instead of regular emacs is that I like the proportional font support built into XE.
I checked into playing with an AS/400 a few months back, but was stymied by the near-vertical learning curve. Seems like you need to understand the whole complex system to write a 'hello world' program.
I'd like to try again someday, though, because I admire the quality and stability of the system.
Copyright actually lasts some number of years (I think 75) past the life of its creator. I'm not sure how long it is for corporations - I think it's a fixed span then.
I think car companies are required to sell spare parts for a specific amount of time after they stop production, and I think that period is quite long. However, a car is very different from hardware or software. Would you still drive a 10 year old car if the new ones cost 1/10th what old ones did, and the new ones were 20 times as fast and efficient? There wouldn't be many old cars actively used if this was the case.
The conventional wisdom is a juicy story: Microsoft founder Gates buys DOS from Seattle Computer founder Tim Patterson (those names might be off a little, feel free to make a correction) for $ 55,000, MS goes on to make billions, and Patterson's company goes bust.
But if my memory serves, Patterson was hired afterwards by Microsoft. If he got the stock options normally offered at that time, he'd be pretty rich right now, thus giving his story a happy ending.
I wonder what the status of the Lighthouse Suite might be once MacOX X makes NeXT software viable again. It might suddenly turn from worthless to a viable product.
What does the NeXT community think of MacOS X? Is it going to make NeXT programming once again a valuable skill?
Slashdot Mirror
A number of people on the MacAddict forums have actually run X on systems with 64MB RAM, and claim to be satisfied with the result. Now, perhaps Apple is just doing a good job managing expectations, but so far, so good.
If you take the author's pronouncements entirely seriously, you'd come to the conclusion that no computer company should ever release a radically new OS.
I, too, found it very strange that he talked about running NT on a system with 16MB RAM. I remember running NT 4.0 on a 32MB system and I had to upgrade RAM to 48MB for it to be barely decent. In fact the realistic hardware requirements for each new Microsoft OS strain the capabilities of most hardware out there. The Windows 2000 requirements were quite comparable to those for OS X, and Windows 2000 compared to Windows NT 4 is a much less radical change than OS X compared to OS 9.
I'm typing this on OS/X right now, and I'm definitely looking forward to switching to it as my primary OS, as soon as they can get video editing software working. (That's what I'm spending most of my time on the machine for).
By the way, here's a maddening OS/X problem I'm having - when I type fast, it seems to be eating about every 5th to 10th character. Grrr. Anyone know what's going on?
D
----
I actually would consider this a problem. How many people are getting broadband connections who are entirely clueless about security? Those people probably can't afford a pricey firewall just for their Mac - what should they be doing?
D
----
The classic Slashdot user's problem is the tricky question of, "What should my artistically-inclined girlfriend who doesn't want to learn computers use?"
Or, for that matter, what should I use when I want to take off my programmer's hat and use Photoshop or Final Cut [video editing package] or even a word processor?
True, Gimp and StarOffice and friends are here and making some inroads, but even there the ugly fonts and bad printing are a royal pain.
What MacOS X really does is make it possible for us to be able to sincerely and wholeheartedly recommend a solution that actually works for our friends without making us wince.
I think it's fantastic, personally. I have a dual G4/450 right here just waiting for the new beta (which I've ordered).
D
----
Depends on what kind of point you want to make with the statistics :-).
But seriously, I'd keep it in the Apple column, simply because Apple developed it and people are going to be using it because it's the Apple OS, not because it's Unix.
D
----
If I want to get a good but not outrageous system, Macs generally cost about $2,500 and PCs around $ 1,200.
However, if I want to keep myself reasonably modern, I have to buy a PC about every year, while I only have to buy a Mac every other year. Also, a year-old PC is worth basically $ 0, while a two year old Mac is worth about $ 500.
Add this all together:
PC
$ 1,200 Year 1
$ 1,200 Year 2
----------
$ 2,400
Minus circa $200 as value of year-old system
$ 2,200
Mac
$ 2,500 Year 1
$ -0- Year 2
-----------
$ 2,500 Total spent
Minus $ 500 salvage value old machine
Net expenditure $ 2,000.
So with the lesser amount of built-in obsolescence the Mac has, it's actually slightly cheaper for me to run than a PC that's kept up to date.
Of course I could upgrade my PC, but I'm not sure how much sense that makes. After all, to take advantage of the latest technology has to offer, you really need entirely new components: Motherboards, CPUs, disk drives, memory and video cards are all getting better and better. And I really doubt you could replace all those components for less than what a completely new system would cost.
D
----
Well, there are actually quite a few:
... surely they should be beautiful? MacOS X is, and that's a good reason to give it a shot.
(1) It's hideously ugly in most incarnations.
(2) People who try to make it pretty, like those nice folks who created Enlightenment, wind up producing something bloated and inefficient due to the basic design of X.
(3) Font support is mind-bendingly bad; there are hardly any fonts available that don't hurt the eyes just to look at them.
Now, it's true these problems are being worked on, but I have yet to see a solution that works well enough for me to find it appealing.
In striking contrast, MacOS X was designed from the ground up, as a major requirement, to be beautiful. And this is a job that, quite frankly, we can trust Steve Jobs to do. He may be a maniac about those poor rumors sites, and he may be a bastard to work with, but he sure does know how to design pretty stuff.
We look at our computers so much
(I have a dual G4/450 I bought about a week ago, and it's a fantastic machine even running the ancient MacOS 9).
D
----
I have an IBM ThinkPad 770Z with the 1280x1024 screen, and it looks fabulous. I think the screen is 13.7".
D
----
but IE on MacOS 9 is a very impressive program. It just keeps on running. Netscape on the same machine crashed within a few minutes of my trying it out.
I'm looking forward to using Omniweb, though. They claim to have full JavaScript support and all kinds of goodies, which I'm certainly anticipating with glee.
D
----
I'm writing this on my spiffy new dual processor G4/450, and I can say that there's an enormous aesthetic appeal to the machine that transcends tiresome questions like killer apps.
Certainly the new killer app for the system is digital video, what with both iMovie and Final Cut being made only for the platform. That and my high hopes for MacOS X are the main reasons I bought this system.
Using iMovie, I made a 47 second quickie horror film, complete with sounds, music and cheesy special effects, and it turned out well enough to impress a potential business partner interested in making a real, he-man style moneymaking project with me. Now, Final Cut is much better, and I'm looking forward to using it, but I think that's a good testimony to the merits of the platform and system.
There are two interesting problem areas for X that I haven't noticed anywhere, but are interesting:
* MacOS Classic users are going to miss features such as the Apple menu. Within hours of buying my spiffy new system, I was able to easily customize it to work the way I wanted. The new system is totally different in this regard, and I've heard a lot of grousing about the Dock being unable to replace the old features. I think they have a point, and this is allegedly one of the major reasons this is a beta and not a final release.
* I'm surprised Adobe and others haven't come out with carbon versions of their software yet. It was said to require but minor modifications, and they even showed a Carbonized Photoshop earlier this year. So why is there no Carbonized Photoshop yet if they already know how to do it? This concerns me a bit.
Thoughts?
D
----
No. The problem is like this:
/etc/passwd file someplace, or copying a setuid shell somewhere for future use.
char string[1000];
sprintf(string, "%s", argv[1]);
If the value of argv[1] is longer than 999 characters (999 + the trailing null at the end of all C strings), the string will overflow and cause the program to crash with a segementation violation error.
If you put data representing machine language instructions at the end of the string, you will get a stack overflow, and the next characters will start overwriting the stack. This can result in having the code executed by the computer, which can do nasty things like emailing the contents of your
The solution is use snprintf:
snprintf(string, 1000, "%s", argv[1]);
That will copy no more than 1000 characters into the new string (counting the null).
D
----
I recently spent $ 191 at amazon.com and they gave me the lower price on the Men in Black DVD.
However, they messed up my $191 order - they sent it late and one of the items they sent was the wrong one. I don't really want to complain since it's not worth the trouble of shipping it back, but I doubt I'll buy from them again.
D
----
You're right; I had our company do the exact same thing.
I guess I can run Apache/SSL on our backup server now; this is excellent news, even though we all knew it was coming.
What happens to the RSA firm? Do they more or less go out of business now that they have nothing to sell?
D
----
Because, based on the other messages on this thread, it would be worth absolutely nothing to them. It's a specialized machine designed to solve specialized problems.
If it costs $ 35,000 to de-install the system, a church or charity couldn't afford to take it in any event.
D
----
If the OS license is locked to the box (as I understand it is), how could an AS/400 exist without a license?
I'm really curious, since I'd love to own an AS/400 just for the sheer heck of it -- but I'm sure the price of getting a license would be prohibitive on, say, one of the older $200-500 machines.
D
----
I ordered $ 194 worth of books at amazon last Thursday, and I have to admit, I'm not impressed anymore - and I've been a loyal customer for years.
3 F-39902617-prod5
To start, despite all the books I ordered being "Usually ships in 24 hours", my order was not shipped until Saturday - two days after the order. I remember when orders were almost invariably shipped a few hours after being placed.
It added somewhat to my irritation that, although the order was placed on the 24th and shipped on the 31st, it claimed delivery would be between the 31st and the 5th. Since shipment via UPS ground almost invariably takes three days, this was an absurdly pessimistic range. My order actually arrived, to my relief, on the 30th - just when I thought it would.
Finally, out of the ten-odd items I ordered, instead of sending me William Goldman's sequel to Adventures in the screen trade, they sent me a well-written but surely unrelated SAP: The Inside Story. I'm not inclined to send it back, since that's more trouble than it's worth, but I'm not inclined to appreciate what they did, either. Any suggestions as to what to do about this would be appreciated.
Now, I wouldn't be that upset about this if it weren't for the fact that poor service from Amazon now appears to be a common complaint. See this review:
http://www.epinions.com/book-review-217D-2788EE
After seeing their current service, I have to agree entirely. It's sad to see this kind of decline in a one-time king of customer service, despite their recent privacy problems. But there it is.
D
----
Many thanks for the detailed response - I'm going to be getting a dual G4/500 system, so the easy boot sounds like it will work just fine. All I need to do is buy another IDE drive and slot it in.
D
----
How do you define high-end hardware - what machines are you running it on?
D
----
Whenever a Steve Jobs keynote comes up, the Mac faithful start feeling breathless anticipation because most of the times he speaks, he has a spectacular, world-beating announcement to make.
And with his July announcement of the multi-processor G4s and the Cube, the collective WOW! pasted a smile on the face of every Mac enthusiast.
Now, it would be only natural to think that there wasn't really any time for anything of significance, with less than a month between this one and the last. After all, I only saw my first Cube last night(*).
But the public has great expectations for Steve, because, after all, Steve is the Godlike figure who saved Apple from irrelevence, disaster, and tiresomeness. Steve the Great can do anything, they say!
So everyone expects something exciting when he speaks, however much Apple tries to diminish expectations.
Hope that helps explain the curious phenomenon.
D
(*) The CUBE: Yes, it's as stunning a looker as you've heard -- but the store ruined the effect by paring it with an off-brand Beige monitor. For shame, guys! No more Beige! [laugh]
----
Will the beta come with a boot manager like Lilo, and if not, how do you select which OS to use if you have two?
Is there going to be some kind of partition manager, or do I need to buy a separate hard drive for OS X?
I'm going to be buying one of the dual/500 Macs and would just love to try the beta on it.
D
----
That's something I'm curious about - Apple got rid of X and replaced it with Display PostScript, right?
I can't live without my xemacs, and yet with it, MacOX X would be my dream OS - enough applications to use in the real world, but stable enough for me to use for Unix/Linux web site development.
Many thanks for any thoughts? Incidentally, the reason I'm saying xemacs instead of regular emacs is that I like the proportional font support built into XE.
D
----
I checked into playing with an AS/400 a few months back, but was stymied by the near-vertical learning curve. Seems like you need to understand the whole complex system to write a 'hello world' program.
I'd like to try again someday, though, because I admire the quality and stability of the system.
D
----
this link, sadly, is one of those tiresome trolls that appears every once in a while.
... but not quite.
I was almost tricked
D
----
Copyright actually lasts some number of years (I think 75) past the life of its creator. I'm not sure how long it is for corporations - I think it's a fixed span then.
I think car companies are required to sell spare parts for a specific amount of time after they stop production, and I think that period is quite long. However, a car is very different from hardware or software. Would you still drive a 10 year old car if the new ones cost 1/10th what old ones did, and the new ones were 20 times as fast and efficient? There wouldn't be many old cars actively used if this was the case.
D
----
The conventional wisdom is a juicy story: Microsoft founder Gates buys DOS from Seattle Computer founder Tim Patterson (those names might be off a little, feel free to make a correction) for $ 55,000, MS goes on to make billions, and Patterson's company goes bust.
But if my memory serves, Patterson was hired afterwards by Microsoft. If he got the stock options normally offered at that time, he'd be pretty rich right now, thus giving his story a happy ending.
Anyone know if that's true?
D
----
I wonder what the status of the Lighthouse Suite might be once MacOX X makes NeXT software viable again. It might suddenly turn from worthless to a viable product.
What does the NeXT community think of MacOS X? Is it going to make NeXT programming once again a valuable skill?
D
----