Are you insane? Removing support for older versions?
Windows 2000 (released on Feb 17, 2000) is supported until 13 July 2010.
Windows XP (released in Aug 2001 is supported until April 8, 2014
They're not talking about that type of support.
Now please, list for me, the free software OS distributions that are provided with security fixes for 10-12 years after release?
***ALL OF THEM***.
The current Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc, are all the continued support from their very first releases. You can take any one of those OS's and upgrade, for free, to their most current edition.
What truth? That Windows includes DRM enabling underpinnings?
I can never understand why people seem so willing to given Windows' DRM a pass. I mean, the damned OS itself is locked with DRM. They even have a newspeak term for software that enforces it, "Windows Genuine Advantage".
It's an absurd and disgusting system (WGA/WPA, not Windows). I can understand the average home user not caring, since it's mostly taken care of by the preinstall, but knowledgeable slashdotters? You guys should hate that crap. Still use it if you want, but quit with this Orwellian, "it's good that they check on me to make sure I'm not stealing" nonsense.
And then they wonder why noone is taking the FSF seriously.
Um, what? Have you heard of the GPL? GNU?
Thankfully, they are not representative of the open source movement.
Correct. They are representative of the Free Software movement. You know, the movement that they started. The movement that laid the groundwork that allowed the open source movement to *exist* in the first place.
Exactly. Those which often cry "freedom" often forget that my freedom includes the freedom of choosing the choices they dislike. I have chosen Windows 7, and I'm damn happy I did so.
support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.
In that case, you can buy CS4.
Solutions:
1. Stay with 10.5 and CS3 2. Move to 10.6, use CS3 (which presumably works just fine, but if it doesn't, it's not Adobe's problem) 3. Move to 10.6 and CS4
It seems to me this is a non-issue, other than it's good to be aware of it so you can make the right choice for you. For most people (pros and amateurs alike), option 2 is probably the best.
If you're a Pro and you really want to use 10.6 and really want the peace of mind official support, then you can fork out for CS4.
On the other hand, moving from Photoshop (Illustrator, etc.) to some Open Source program is going to be, for most pros, worse than any of the three options listed.
I don't mean to say that the GIMP or Inkscape or whatever are bad, just that the switchover is going to be more jarring than any of those three options.
Macs do have viruses its just that for every (rougly) 20 mac viruses there are 70,000 Windows viruses. (my figures may be out of date though but it still would be quite small)
Your figures are off, there are zero Mac OS X viruses. There are a handful of trojans, though, but no worms and no viruses.
True, but thats no reason to not install linux which will at least have software available for it in future
Right. I didn't say "don't run Linux", I asked why.
10.3 and 10.4 os/x are being phased out due to support for objective-c 2.0 being non-existent, and many people wanting to make use of said runtime's garbage collection when doing os/x development.
His Mac can run 10.5 just fine.
He's making a fuss over SL not supporting PPC Macs, and the strong implication here is that he's not asking about Linux because he wants to run Linux (if you want to run Linux, you most likely don't need to ask about it, for example), but because he is upset about lack of support for his G4.
That's why I asked why. Is it because he is upset about not being able to run Snow Leopard? If so, there aren't a whole lot of things he's missing out were it available, since his computer can't take advantage of them anyway, and for the rest, Leopard works just fine. Had he replied that he's interested in Linux and wants to play with it or whatever, no biggie. But if it's about the dropping of PPC, I think he's sort of missing the big picture.
Since when did an Address Book/Calendaring application become required system components?
Required? That's obviously up to the user. As far as them being system components, I can't remember when it happened exactly, but some time around Jaguar or Panther the Address Book and Calendar moved from being more or less independent apps to being subsystems for which the apps are mainly a front end, with the actual data being available system-wide to any app that wants it.
These applications are nothing more than utilities to help you manage people you know and shit you need to remember to do. Nothing more.
See above. They are indeed "more" than just applications. They are components of the system.
What OS are you using that doesn't have any built-in calendaring or address book capabilities?
But with 10.6, the OS itself will support Exchange
Sure about that? I thought it was just in Mail.app (and friends). You're saying that Thunderbird under 10.6 could potentially be made to support Exchange?
No, Thunderbird won't support Exchange. When I said applications can support Exchange now, I mean they can license (or reverse-engineer) support for Exchange if they want it. There are probably others, but MS Entourage supports it right now, and will continue to support it in Snow Leopard.
Thunderbird can do the same thing, but most likely won't. As far as API support for Exchange that Thunderbird can take advantage of, it could most likely (having neither Snow Leopard, or an Exchange server to test this on, I'm going by how Leopard currently works, and the description of Snow Leopard's Exchange support) interact with the calendar and address book, but in order to do anything mail-wise, it will have to interact with Mail.app.
Yes, Snow Leopard doesn't support PPC. My post was about why the bulk of Snow Leopard's improvements be useless on a single-core, 32-bit, non-OpenCL capable computer anyway.
I find this very strange. I thought the whole point of buying an Apple was to reduce the time spent on mucking about with the PC?
Don't listen to him, he's well-intentioned, but looking at things from a point of view highly askew from most people. Snow Leopard will *not* run noticeably faster if you do a clean install. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the time spent doing the clean install would *completely* negate any speed savings, if there are any at all. Snow Leopard's upgrade install process is very good at not leaving any cruft around.
If you're a sort of natural tinkerer, go ahead and do it, what the hell, right? But if you're not, don't sweat it. Any proposed benefits are dubious at best. I don't mean to put down leamanc or anything, but his advice is extremely misleading to most people who aren't into tinkering around to squeeze out every little bit of performance they possibly can.
apple OS releases generally Improve performance on the same given hardware.
That hasn't been true since Spotlight was released. Ever since, each version of OSX added more and more crap that I can't turn off, like the 100% useless Dashboard.
You can disable Spotlight (it's in System Preferences, just add your hard drive to the Privacy list) and Dashboard doesn't run until you first open it. Remove it from the Dock and disable the function key for it and you'll never see it.
Additionally, you can completely turn off Spotlight if you want, but it takes either dropping to the command line or running one of the tinkering apps. Both methods work flawlessly, although there's really no need if your drive isn't indexed (and that's the only time it slows your system down, is when it's indexing).
I agree, but since their apps like iCal, Mail, notes...etc are all bundled with OSX this is considered a major feature when it really is nothing more than a application upgrade to include EWS.
Um, no. It's not using Exchange Web Service. It's interfacing with Exchange just like Outlook does.
And it's not just an "application upgrade", the support is at the very core of OS X. Contacts, email, calendar, any program can make use of these services. Address Book is just an interface to the system wide address book subsystem. iCal is the same. Mail is the only app that you have to use to interface with that particular service, but even there, any program can utilize it, just like on Windows, except that you don't have to buy Outlook to connect to an Exchange server.
Or, put differently, were MS to add Exchange support to Windows (which it doesn't have), it *would* be a big deal.
"a major one for some people will be Exchange support"
Maybe I look at things differently, but why should users have to upgrade their entire OS (from 10.5, which is an extremely modern OS already) to support something like Exchange?
Applications can support Exchange on OS X currently (i.e., MS Entourage). But with 10.6, the OS itself will support Exchange.
The irony here is that not even *Windows* supports Exchange directly.
45 seconds faster? Wow.. how many days does your PC require to boot? I got Kubuntu 9.04, 64-bit and it boots in 10 seconds.
Yeah, 9.04 (I'm highly suspicious of your 10 second claim. Are you running it on an SSD or something?). Older versions of Ubuntu had notoriously long startup times. Even 9.04 (Ubuntu, not Kubuntu, although I can't see why that would make any notable difference for startup) takes a while, but more on the order of 30-60 seconds instead of the minute or two from before.
I returned my iPod Touch 2nd Gen yesterday because of this
Returned? You mean brought in for warranty repair, right?
fingers crossed Apple don't drop it in a puddle and refuse to fix it
This is a silly thing to worry about. Apple doesn't drop returns into puddles to avoid honoring their warranties. Everyone knows they drop them into either Smart Water or San Pellegrino, depending on which service center your iPod is shipped to.
I have a G4 PowerMac which apparently won't run 10.6. Can Linux be run on this machine? Are there any stores/dealers/whatever that would do the install for me?
Yes, but why? Snow Leopard brings disk space benefits (good), full 64-bit support (useless to you), Grand Central which manages multi-core programming (useless to you) OpenCL (useless to you) and, um, QuickTime X.
So, you're missing out on saving 6GB and running QuickTime without any window borders. The vast bulk of Snow Leopard's advances are to make it scream on modern hardware. I don't think it's such a horrible thing to suggest upgrading your seven year old computer if you're interested in running the most current software on it.
But yes, you can run Linux on it. You'll save some more disk space, you won't get 64-bit support, multi-core anything, OpenCL, QuickTime X, or anything else that Snow Leopard or OS X in general gives you. But hey, at least you'll get to bitch about how you can't do those things with Snow Leopard either!
QUOTH YOU: - Money spent since 2002 on OS X 10.x - about $400. (Else my G4 Mac would stop functioning properly.)
Liar. You could go back and install the old Mac OS X on that computer any time you wanted, and it would have all the features and functionality it did when you purchased it. There's NOTHING about an OS update (or lack thereof) that is necessary to keep a computer functioning properly. As if the OS has an expiration date.
Hyperbole and bullshit.
No, he's being truthful. Why do you think Jobs wears that black turtleneck? What you're missing is the balaclava he keeps on hand so he can sneak up on Mac users and, as commodore64_love put it, suck money out of their wallets.
Ever wonder why Jobs doesn't have a license plate on his Benz? It keeps him untrackable. And the cat themes for OS X? Cats==stealth. They're the ninjas of the animal kingdom. Ninjas who sneak into Mac users houses and pick their wallets dry.
It might seem strange that Mac users would put up with that, but hey, it's better than running Windows.
Leopard messed up audio programs of all kinds until Apple finally got around to addressing the issues with the.3 update. The recent.8 update screwed up some people's wireless connectivity. It hasn't been that long since some early adopters lost entire volumes of data when they upgraded.
Snow Leopard is supposed to be fixes, tweaks, and improvements, so maybe this one is a better bet, but still, I can't see myself pre-ordering.
If you have Time Machine running, and your current Leopard install DVD, you have nothing to worry about. The problems you listed affected less than 0.1% of the Mac population. Even if something horrible happens and you lose your whole drive, you can just boot your old disc, choose to restore from Time Machine.
If you *don't* have Time Machine running, you really should. The cost of an external drive is minute compared to the benefit of never[*] having to worry about losing all your data.
[*] Technically, you *can* still lose all your data (fire, theft, extremely bad timing of both drives failing at once, etc., but Time Machine takes the potential for disaster out of the realm of reasonably worrisome down to "well, it *could* happen, but it's nothing to freak out over". And if you're still so paranoid, you can use two drives and store one offsite or whatever torment-that's-worse-than-the-risk-of-losing-everything-in-the-first-place you feel compelled to put yourself through.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you insane? Removing support for older versions?
Windows 2000 (released on Feb 17, 2000) is supported until 13 July 2010.
Windows XP (released in Aug 2001 is supported until April 8, 2014
They're not talking about that type of support.
Now please, list for me, the free software OS distributions that are provided with security fixes for 10-12 years after release?
***ALL OF THEM***.
The current Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc, are all the continued support from their very first releases. You can take any one of those OS's and upgrade, for free, to their most current edition.
What truth? That Windows includes DRM enabling underpinnings?
I can never understand why people seem so willing to given Windows' DRM a pass. I mean, the damned OS itself is locked with DRM. They even have a newspeak term for software that enforces it, "Windows Genuine Advantage".
It's an absurd and disgusting system (WGA/WPA, not Windows). I can understand the average home user not caring, since it's mostly taken care of by the preinstall, but knowledgeable slashdotters? You guys should hate that crap. Still use it if you want, but quit with this Orwellian, "it's good that they check on me to make sure I'm not stealing" nonsense.
And then they wonder why noone is taking the FSF seriously.
Um, what? Have you heard of the GPL? GNU?
Thankfully, they are not representative of the open source movement.
Correct. They are representative of the Free Software movement. You know, the movement that they started. The movement that laid the groundwork that allowed the open source movement to *exist* in the first place.
Exactly. Those which often cry "freedom" often forget that my freedom includes the freedom of choosing the choices they dislike. I have chosen Windows 7, and I'm damn happy I did so.
Oh, you rebel you!
support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.
What particular problems have you encountered that having support was able to dig you out of?
Having someone else to blame.
works, fine.
supported, no.
support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.
In that case, you can buy CS4.
Solutions:
1. Stay with 10.5 and CS3
2. Move to 10.6, use CS3 (which presumably works just fine, but if it doesn't, it's not Adobe's problem)
3. Move to 10.6 and CS4
It seems to me this is a non-issue, other than it's good to be aware of it so you can make the right choice for you. For most people (pros and amateurs alike), option 2 is probably the best.
If you're a Pro and you really want to use 10.6 and really want the peace of mind official support, then you can fork out for CS4.
On the other hand, moving from Photoshop (Illustrator, etc.) to some Open Source program is going to be, for most pros, worse than any of the three options listed.
I don't mean to say that the GIMP or Inkscape or whatever are bad, just that the switchover is going to be more jarring than any of those three options.
Macs do have viruses its just that for every (rougly) 20 mac viruses there are 70,000 Windows viruses. (my figures may be out of date though but it still would be quite small)
Your figures are off, there are zero Mac OS X viruses. There are a handful of trojans, though, but no worms and no viruses.
There's been multiple viruses using failures in the system to install themselves on the apple hardware without any user input.
Um, not this millennium.
My favorite is the iphone exploit where somebody could root your device & record everything barely by sending an IM :)
Not really. They could crash the iPhone. No one had a way to actually do anything more than that, though.
That's called a schematic or circuit diagram. It isn't "the source."
It's not the source *code*.
There are "open source" beers and colas. This is in that same vein. Making a big fuss over the word "source" is a bit silly.
True, but thats no reason to not install linux which will at least have software available for it in future
Right. I didn't say "don't run Linux", I asked why.
10.3 and 10.4 os/x are being phased out due to support for objective-c 2.0 being non-existent, and many people wanting to make use of said runtime's garbage collection when doing os/x development.
His Mac can run 10.5 just fine.
He's making a fuss over SL not supporting PPC Macs, and the strong implication here is that he's not asking about Linux because he wants to run Linux (if you want to run Linux, you most likely don't need to ask about it, for example), but because he is upset about lack of support for his G4.
That's why I asked why. Is it because he is upset about not being able to run Snow Leopard? If so, there aren't a whole lot of things he's missing out were it available, since his computer can't take advantage of them anyway, and for the rest, Leopard works just fine. Had he replied that he's interested in Linux and wants to play with it or whatever, no biggie. But if it's about the dropping of PPC, I think he's sort of missing the big picture.
Since when did an Address Book/Calendaring application become required system components?
Required? That's obviously up to the user. As far as them being system components, I can't remember when it happened exactly, but some time around Jaguar or Panther the Address Book and Calendar moved from being more or less independent apps to being subsystems for which the apps are mainly a front end, with the actual data being available system-wide to any app that wants it.
These applications are nothing more than utilities to help you manage people you know and shit you need to remember to do. Nothing more.
See above. They are indeed "more" than just applications. They are components of the system.
What OS are you using that doesn't have any built-in calendaring or address book capabilities?
But with 10.6, the OS itself will support Exchange
Sure about that? I thought it was just in Mail.app (and friends). You're saying that Thunderbird under 10.6 could potentially be made to support Exchange?
Yes, I'm sure about that: Snow Leopard - Exchange Support
No, Thunderbird won't support Exchange. When I said applications can support Exchange now, I mean they can license (or reverse-engineer) support for Exchange if they want it. There are probably others, but MS Entourage supports it right now, and will continue to support it in Snow Leopard.
Thunderbird can do the same thing, but most likely won't. As far as API support for Exchange that Thunderbird can take advantage of, it could most likely (having neither Snow Leopard, or an Exchange server to test this on, I'm going by how Leopard currently works, and the description of Snow Leopard's Exchange support) interact with the calendar and address book, but in order to do anything mail-wise, it will have to interact with Mail.app.
So, one component uses some code. How does that make the whole clock open source?
Here is the source. Just because you don't compile it doesn't mean it's not open source, it just means it's not open source *software*.
Why? Because 10.6 does not support PPC??
Why what?
Yes, Snow Leopard doesn't support PPC. My post was about why the bulk of Snow Leopard's improvements be useless on a single-core, 32-bit, non-OpenCL capable computer anyway.
I find this very strange. I thought the whole point of buying an Apple was to reduce the time spent on mucking about with the PC?
Don't listen to him, he's well-intentioned, but looking at things from a point of view highly askew from most people. Snow Leopard will *not* run noticeably faster if you do a clean install. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the time spent doing the clean install would *completely* negate any speed savings, if there are any at all. Snow Leopard's upgrade install process is very good at not leaving any cruft around.
If you're a sort of natural tinkerer, go ahead and do it, what the hell, right? But if you're not, don't sweat it. Any proposed benefits are dubious at best. I don't mean to put down leamanc or anything, but his advice is extremely misleading to most people who aren't into tinkering around to squeeze out every little bit of performance they possibly can.
That hasn't been true since Spotlight was released. Ever since, each version of OSX added more and more crap that I can't turn off, like the 100% useless Dashboard.
You can disable Spotlight (it's in System Preferences, just add your hard drive to the Privacy list) and Dashboard doesn't run until you first open it. Remove it from the Dock and disable the function key for it and you'll never see it.
Additionally, you can completely turn off Spotlight if you want, but it takes either dropping to the command line or running one of the tinkering apps. Both methods work flawlessly, although there's really no need if your drive isn't indexed (and that's the only time it slows your system down, is when it's indexing).
"There are many reasons to upgrade to Snow Leopard, for example a major one for some people will be Exchange support,"
pfft. Windows has had decent Exchange support since at least Vista SP1.
Unless I've missed something (which is entirely possible, but I did to a google search just to make sure), Windows doesn't natively support Exchange.
I agree, but since their apps like iCal, Mail, notes...etc are all bundled with OSX this is considered a major feature when it really is nothing more than a application upgrade to include EWS.
Um, no. It's not using Exchange Web Service. It's interfacing with Exchange just like Outlook does.
And it's not just an "application upgrade", the support is at the very core of OS X. Contacts, email, calendar, any program can make use of these services. Address Book is just an interface to the system wide address book subsystem. iCal is the same. Mail is the only app that you have to use to interface with that particular service, but even there, any program can utilize it, just like on Windows, except that you don't have to buy Outlook to connect to an Exchange server.
Or, put differently, were MS to add Exchange support to Windows (which it doesn't have), it *would* be a big deal.
"a major one for some people will be Exchange support"
Maybe I look at things differently, but why should users have to upgrade their entire OS (from 10.5, which is an extremely modern OS already) to support something like Exchange?
Applications can support Exchange on OS X currently (i.e., MS Entourage). But with 10.6, the OS itself will support Exchange.
The irony here is that not even *Windows* supports Exchange directly.
45 seconds faster? Wow.. how many days does your PC require to boot?
I got Kubuntu 9.04, 64-bit and it boots in 10 seconds.
Yeah, 9.04 (I'm highly suspicious of your 10 second claim. Are you running it on an SSD or something?). Older versions of Ubuntu had notoriously long startup times. Even 9.04 (Ubuntu, not Kubuntu, although I can't see why that would make any notable difference for startup) takes a while, but more on the order of 30-60 seconds instead of the minute or two from before.
A year on one end and a few months on the other doesn't really change his point.
I returned my iPod Touch 2nd Gen yesterday because of this
Returned? You mean brought in for warranty repair, right?
fingers crossed Apple don't drop it in a puddle and refuse to fix it
This is a silly thing to worry about. Apple doesn't drop returns into puddles to avoid honoring their warranties. Everyone knows they drop them into either Smart Water or San Pellegrino, depending on which service center your iPod is shipped to.
I have a G4 PowerMac which apparently won't run 10.6. Can Linux be run on this machine? Are there any stores/dealers/whatever that would do the install for me?
Yes, but why? Snow Leopard brings disk space benefits (good), full 64-bit support (useless to you), Grand Central which manages multi-core programming (useless to you) OpenCL (useless to you) and, um, QuickTime X.
So, you're missing out on saving 6GB and running QuickTime without any window borders. The vast bulk of Snow Leopard's advances are to make it scream on modern hardware. I don't think it's such a horrible thing to suggest upgrading your seven year old computer if you're interested in running the most current software on it.
But yes, you can run Linux on it. You'll save some more disk space, you won't get 64-bit support, multi-core anything, OpenCL, QuickTime X, or anything else that Snow Leopard or OS X in general gives you. But hey, at least you'll get to bitch about how you can't do those things with Snow Leopard either!
QUOTH YOU: - Money spent since 2002 on OS X 10.x - about $400. (Else my G4 Mac would stop functioning properly.)
Liar. You could go back and install the old Mac OS X on that computer any time you wanted, and it would have all the features and functionality it did when you purchased it. There's NOTHING about an OS update (or lack thereof) that is necessary to keep a computer functioning properly. As if the OS has an expiration date.
Hyperbole and bullshit.
No, he's being truthful. Why do you think Jobs wears that black turtleneck? What you're missing is the balaclava he keeps on hand so he can sneak up on Mac users and, as commodore64_love put it, suck money out of their wallets.
Ever wonder why Jobs doesn't have a license plate on his Benz? It keeps him untrackable. And the cat themes for OS X? Cats==stealth. They're the ninjas of the animal kingdom. Ninjas who sneak into Mac users houses and pick their wallets dry.
It might seem strange that Mac users would put up with that, but hey, it's better than running Windows.
Leopard messed up audio programs of all kinds until Apple finally got around to addressing the issues with the .3 update. The recent .8 update screwed up some people's wireless connectivity. It hasn't been that long since some early adopters lost entire volumes of data when they upgraded.
Snow Leopard is supposed to be fixes, tweaks, and improvements, so maybe this one is a better bet, but still, I can't see myself pre-ordering.
If you have Time Machine running, and your current Leopard install DVD, you have nothing to worry about. The problems you listed affected less than 0.1% of the Mac population. Even if something horrible happens and you lose your whole drive, you can just boot your old disc, choose to restore from Time Machine.
If you *don't* have Time Machine running, you really should. The cost of an external drive is minute compared to the benefit of never[*] having to worry about losing all your data.
[*] Technically, you *can* still lose all your data (fire, theft, extremely bad timing of both drives failing at once, etc., but Time Machine takes the potential for disaster out of the realm of reasonably worrisome down to "well, it *could* happen, but it's nothing to freak out over". And if you're still so paranoid, you can use two drives and store one offsite or whatever torment-that's-worse-than-the-risk-of-losing-everything-in-the-first-place you feel compelled to put yourself through.