Does anyone else's iTunes for Windows lag horridly anytime you do anything CD related? Playing a CD lags, switching tracks while playing a CD lags, importing a CD lags, etc...
I've tried iTunes on a PII/350 running Win2K and a PIII/500 running WinXP. No lag on either.
What CPU, chipset, and audio/video cards are you using? Might be a weird hardware or driver issue.
Quicktime is a media wrapper with gobs of supported codecs and track types (it even supports a special text track for that MIDI karaoke fomat that never really took off). DVD Studio Pro, Final Cut Pro, and the OS X version of Shake are all very heavily QT-based. (As are iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, and even iPhoto).
The "Quicktime Player" is just a free front-end demo sort of thing that doesn't want to die. Seeing how Apple has published all the specs for the QT framework, I'm amazed someone hasn't written a nicer player frontend.
Most people only use QT for DV25/DVCPro25 and DV50/DVCPro50 video editing (and futher down the data path, MPEG2 for output). Be it at home from their MiniDV camera in iMovie and output to DVD via iDVD or a pro using Final Cut and DVD Studio.
Soooo many of.mov files I ran across on the net use the worst possible codecs (maybe for better compatibility?) usually cinepak, which hasn't changed since Quicktime 1.0 in 1991. But then, that's not any worse than the people that output to AVI using something like the crusty old Indeo 1 codec... equal ass quality.
I don't hate QT, it's part of what makes Macs and their applications a more sane world, but I do with QT had a few more codecs and wish there were some better frontends/players. (There were gobs of third-party/shareware/freeware QT player frontends back in the oldschool classic Mac OS days... but very few for OS X).
Obviously you've not actually been out in the real world much, where pretty much everyone and their dog surfs the web at some point or other each and every day, from work. Including receptionists, office workers, people in cubicles, etc etc etc etc etc. And yes, receptionists in doctors and dentists offices do indeed surf the web.
I have indeed seen this... it's one of the reasons why I have to wait so long for the staff at my public library to check my books out.
My point is they're not all using XP. And they're not all using Google either. My coworkers, the guy that runs the neighborhood computer store, and the staff of the local stereo shop all use recent computers and most use Google to search. Outside of the geek/semigeek community, older machines, older versions of Windows, and the MSN and Yahoo search engines rule the roost.
The idea that most people use Win2K or WinXP and do so on a 750 MHz+ computer is insane. It's more like Win98 and a PII/350, on a good day. Especially in offices. Things are a bit better at home, where junior bugs mom and dad for an upgraded machine to run the latest wiz-bang game.
That would be 38% according to Google, by the way. That study you're misquoting only surveyed a small sample of a specific market segment.
Ugh, how many times to people have to explain this... google browser stats are a very poor meter of OS distribution... for two reasons. First of all, the average work PC sits in your dentist's office or your architect's drafing room. It's not often used for web searching, that's generally done at home or in businesses/schools that do a lot of research. Secondly, google users tend to a more up to date with technology than the average computer user. They don't have msn.com set as their home page, no are they using the same computer they "invested in" six years ago.
I dunno... I have several busy mod_perl based websites running on an Ultra 1 (167 MHz UltraSPARC in 32-bit mode). Even under heavy loads of thousands of dynamic requests a minute and using the same machine as an NFS server for my small LAN, it keeps chugging away without slowing down. Granted I have spent some time tweaking and tuning, have 768 MB of RAM, and used Sun's compilers to build the Apache + mod_perl environment. But still... it's a really old box that seems to have plenty of pep.
If you're like most people, your electricity comes from a heavy duty powerplant. Your power is generated along with everyone elses and meets a set of standards. If you live in Berkeley, California, you'll get roughly the same 60 Hz, 115 - 122 volt power in your outlets as someone in Dover, Delaware. The only excitement is when the power is either cut off entirely or surges past specs and blows out your electrical gadgets and gizmos.
I suppose media could be done the same way... especially if you want a stream of generic music churning out 24/7 (think modern teen pop or barry manilow). If your idea of good entertainment is a world controlled by ClearChannel, then such a system may work out quite well for you.
For the rest of us... well, we like choice and are willing to put up with the costs and quirks of such a system.
I've read various Steve Jobs interviews and articles over the years and from what I gather, he tries to stay pretty current with computer and communication technology in general, not just the products his current companies churns out. He installed a T1 to his house around 1990 not only to link his personal computers to the NeXT network, but also to allow him to exlore the Internet with the sort of bandwidth the average user would have sometime in the future. A recent article mentioned he upgraded his connection towards the end of the 90s to something even more insane (I don't recall if it was a T3 or OC3) so he could experiment with video conferencing, file transfers, and other "next generation" Internet usage.
As far as Kazaa, I'm almost certain he's used it. Jobs is known to have a few PCs sitting around, some for Windows and some for NeXTSTEP/OpenStep.
It's also been said that Safari (Apple's Konq-based web browser for OS X) was originally a direct demand from Jobs when OmniWeb could no longer render the websites he was visiting.
There was an interview a couple years ago in which he talked about shopping around for some sort of crazy new hightech washing machine (a year or so before the Maytag Neptune came out).
Jobs may be an asshole, and he may not be a hardcore analog electrical engineer, but he seems to be quite the techie... a techie with style. NeXT and the Apple of 2003 display this quite well.
Now if only they would make a brushed aluminum version of the 17" widescreen lcd iMac...
Don't get me wrong, Monster Garage is a good show, but sometimes it's a little overhyped.
The only hype I see here is coming from the person that posted this to Slashdot.
Discovery Channel are not hyping this episode more than any other... it's getting the exact same "next week on monster garage" television advertisments.
I would agree that some of the monster garage challenges aren't too awe-inspiring... but I'd rather watch the lame shark cage pontoon episode again than watch Friends or SurvivalShowOfTheWeek.
if you are waiting for a 9.x update.... um.... yeah..... bye!
There is no way this splot can affect Mac OS 9 users. There is no command-line for Mac OS 9, nor is it even a true multi-user system. Remote access in Mac OS 9 is minimal and disabled in the first place. If you want an insanely secure server, get a box with Mac OS 9 and run WebStar, Rumpus, FileMakerServer, and/or QuickDNSPro.
Comparing Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X is like comparing DOS to NT.
Ever wonder why you have all that crap?... WHY?! Because you're a geek?
You damned right I am!
Hell, get the Apple I schematic tattooed as a swingin' back-piece!
Hmm, am I the only one that thinks of that as being kinda cool?
I'm a pure geek and I love my museum of old and cutting edge tech. It's even better when you share an apartment with fellow geeks. Every evening is fun tech time. Every night is monster home theater movie night. It's also a lot cheaper to maintain and add to the collection when 3 - 5 guys are adding to it.
Who in their right mind would want to trade all of this in for a minivan, IKEA furniture, and various baby/child peripherals?? Not me. At least not in the near future.
I can just see good ol Steve and Bill "coming to the rescue" with an NT based solution. The press would love it, "Microsoft replaces aging UNIX system".
Ugh.
Seriously, though, the failure of a SCADA system **SHOULD NOT** bring down the grid. This is just passing the buck.
I haven't used an Altix, but from the docs it seems sgi's patches provide a lot of the tools and goodies from IRIX. On a montster Origin, "top" gives 4 nicely formatted status lines above the process details. For specific details on each processor and other aspects of the machine, there's "osview". There's also a handy script called "hinv" that prints out a hardware inventory of the machine. "hinv -m" even prints out the part numbers and laser-burnt serial numbers for the various boards in a system. I believe the Altix software environment provides all three of these utlities. Each of which gives pages and pages and pages of nicely formatted, human-readable details with the right flags.
Dig around the Top500 list and you'll see that for this benchmark (LINPACK), Myrinet and Infiniband don't do much better than plain GigE. (Which is one reason why the Cray X1 systems aren't ranked higher).
In fact, there are some nearly-identical setups in which there is no difference between GigE and Myrinet.
LINPACK is a good benchmark for generating big numbers for clusters, but it's a pretty poor supercomputing bechmark in general. The faster your machine can multiply and add fp numbers, the better its LINPACK score. This isn't SPECfp_rate. (Notice I said SPEC rate, not SPEC base).
Everyone in the UNIX world knows that SPEC numbers have been BS since day one. Almost every smart vendor has tweaked their compilers and runtime environment in every which way to allow for the fastest possible SPEC marks. Don't believe me? Dig around the usenet and SPEC archives. Every time SPEC updates their CPU suite, the major UNIX vendors scramble to tweak their compilers. The lag time is usually about a month. The score differences make for some fun and entertaining reading.
At any rate, Apple is the first company to cheat at SPEC **AND** brag about it in an international ad campagin. Why someone else hasn't made a fuss yet is beyond me.
It's about time, Apple. Shape up or ship out.
Listening to Steve Job's BS is fun for a little while, but after a year he starts to sound like that annoying relative that is constantly trying to sell you the latest get rich scheme each month.
The next time you watch TV ads, take note of the wording of their claims. It's usually something very vague, or followed by small print / fast talking disclaimer. People have gotten used to this.
Apple, on the other hand, blatently lied, saying their new G5 was "the worlds fastest, most powerful personal computer". They didn't say it was faster at a certain task, nor did they even mention it requires a unique OS and unique software. To 90% of the population, a Personal Computer is an x86 box running MS Windows.
Apple has made huge lies in their ads for years. They were finally caught. All I can say is "ITS ABOUT TIME!".
The Dell Intern ads may be annoying as all hell, but at least they're honest.
I love OS X and I'm never, ever going back to OS 9. That said, I do have to say that OS 9 was not all that painful, especially for average users. 99% of Mac users never had to (nor ever needed to) tweak their memory allocation. Multitasking was fine, so long as you didn't mind the foreground application sucking up most of the CPU cycles. Again, fine for the average user. But... if you're like me or the typical slashdot geek, you'll want several applications grinding away hard on the CPU at the same time... and that, on OS 9, became painful.
The average user very rarely ran into extension and control panel conflicts. But, I'll tell you what, the 30 control panels and 120 extensions that made up OS 9 was complete childs play to maintain and tweak. Most had long, descriptive names and good icons. Extension Manager would even group extensions so you knew what required what to work. Put the control panel or extension file into the proper folder and it was installed. Remove it and it was uninstalled. Obscure conflicts were very quick and easy to find and fix in OS 9. Doing the same in OS X or Windows requires sorting through thousands of files! (Or, at the very least, some futile attempts at running uninstallers). At least OS X is well documented in the BSD sense... and most of the OS code is open source for the complete guru. (Remeber when 10.3 Panther came out and people were talking about the file system tweaks... such as the auto defrag? Several folks dug into the source to see just how it worked and reported the details to their websites/blogs. Try that with Windows!)
I'd like to see some organization go after some of Apple's other promotional material as well.
Apple's G5 Introduction Video is full of heavily edited quotes and comments from various industry leaders. I would personally like to see the raw comments, not Apple's spin.
Mac OS has always been evolutionary, yes, but 10.3 is a huge step from 10.2. Apple just uses that goofy naming scheme because they want to keep the roman numeral "X".
10.3 kernel is significantly different from 10.2. They even upped the Darwin kernel number from 6.x to 7.0 for this release. Large parts of the kernel and most of the userland has been synced up with FreeBSD 5.x. Perl has been upgraded to 5.8. Gimp-Print has been rolled in. Sendmail was replaced with Postfix. The whole OS is faster, especially the GUI. The GUI widgets have been tweaked, most of the pinstripes are gone or made more subtle. Quartz has been totally overhauled. PDF rendering (the whole GUI is displayPDF based) is more than 3x faster (try it, open a large PDF in Preview). Features like Expose are now possible. Fast user switching is now possible for other reasons. Lots of changes, both obvious and under the hood.
There's even a new developer suite included in the box!
It's not "OS 11" but it is still is a huge leap forward.
If you do more than one thing at a time (or if you browse the web), then Panther is faster than OS 9.
OS 9 is a great OS for running Photoshop by itself, but once you have more than a few applications running, the thing becomes an unstable mess.
Browsing the web with OS 9 is painful. PAAAAINNFUL. MSIE 5 for Mac is about as bad as it gets. There is no modern version of Mozilla for OS 9. And, even if you back up to Mozilla 1.3, it's still awful because OS 9's poor thread management makes the browser crawl.
Panther is smooth sailing on anything with a G3/350 and 256 MB RAM or better.
Macs have long shelf life blah blah blah, whatever. Save a couple old macs for some of the classic games (Harry the handsome executive!!!) but retire the rest.
For example, I used Pegasus while my wife was using Outlook. With my Mac, we'll both use the same mail prog, whatever it is. Does this cut down on variety? Does it cut down on experimentation? I think so.
There are gobs of email clients for OS X for every taste... for home users, corporate users, techincal users, unix users...
Unfortunately, even though we still use SGI for live broadcasts, it's just too late. All of our 3D work is done on PCs, and our IR, which we use for VizRT (a Real-time 3D package) is going to be replaced with a PC, soon.
Sounds about right. A lot of older VizRT setups (generally those using pre-HD video hardware) are being replaced with PCs as television stations move to higher resolution. Even SGI is moving towards commodity graphics hardware. Onyx4 uses an Origin 350 with 4, 9, or 16 ATI FireGL X1 GPUs tiled and composited per pipe. It's faster than IR4 for most things, but does not yet have all the features. It's only a matter of time before IR4 (or even an IR5) is replaced alltogether by a matrix of GPUs. Even the goofy scoreboard/replay animations on NFL broadcasts don't need anything more than a single FireGL/Radeon9800.
One of our local stations is going to "low" res 480p next month when it goes digital. Because they had no need for HD, they simply replaced their SGI O2's analog video i/o board with a CCIR-601 SDI digital video i/o board they got from some used sgi dealer for next to nothing. Others are still using their digital video boards in Indigo2 IMPACT series machines! I guess if it works, don't fix it! HD boards for Onyx and Octane aren't cheap... still above $8K used. It's almost cheaper to get a whole new PC for on-air graphics. Plus the station engineers love the warm fuzzy feeling of using an OS they have at home and on nearly every desk in the office. Some of the lesser engineers who have never quite figured out NFS or FTP love the ability to run Illustrator and Photoshop on the same machine as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using my older Mac all evening (I know, boring life). Right now it claims it's "2:01:22 AM 1/1/2004". Seems to be OK to me.
Does anyone else's iTunes for Windows lag horridly anytime you do anything CD related? Playing a CD lags, switching tracks while playing a CD lags, importing a CD lags, etc...
I've tried iTunes on a PII/350 running Win2K and a PIII/500 running WinXP. No lag on either.
What CPU, chipset, and audio/video cards are you using? Might be a weird hardware or driver issue.
Quicktime is a media wrapper with gobs of supported codecs and track types (it even supports a special text track for that MIDI karaoke fomat that never really took off). DVD Studio Pro, Final Cut Pro, and the OS X version of Shake are all very heavily QT-based. (As are iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, and even iPhoto).
.mov files I ran across on the net use the worst possible codecs (maybe for better compatibility?) usually cinepak, which hasn't changed since Quicktime 1.0 in 1991. But then, that's not any worse than the people that output to AVI using something like the crusty old Indeo 1 codec... equal ass quality.
The "Quicktime Player" is just a free front-end demo sort of thing that doesn't want to die. Seeing how Apple has published all the specs for the QT framework, I'm amazed someone hasn't written a nicer player frontend.
Most people only use QT for DV25/DVCPro25 and DV50/DVCPro50 video editing (and futher down the data path, MPEG2 for output). Be it at home from their MiniDV camera in iMovie and output to DVD via iDVD or a pro using Final Cut and DVD Studio.
Soooo many of
I don't hate QT, it's part of what makes Macs and their applications a more sane world, but I do with QT had a few more codecs and wish there were some better frontends/players. (There were gobs of third-party/shareware/freeware QT player frontends back in the oldschool classic Mac OS days... but very few for OS X).
That script works great!
I had previously been using various freeware Quicktime-compliant players to playback fullscreen. They work, but most have clunky GUIs.
Thanks!
Obviously you've not actually been out in the real world much, where pretty much everyone and their dog surfs the web at some point or other each and every day, from work. Including receptionists, office workers, people in cubicles, etc etc etc etc etc. And yes, receptionists in doctors and dentists offices do indeed surf the web.
I have indeed seen this... it's one of the reasons why I have to wait so long for the staff at my public library to check my books out.
My point is they're not all using XP. And they're not all using Google either. My coworkers, the guy that runs the neighborhood computer store, and the staff of the local stereo shop all use recent computers and most use Google to search. Outside of the geek/semigeek community, older machines, older versions of Windows, and the MSN and Yahoo search engines rule the roost.
The idea that most people use Win2K or WinXP and do so on a 750 MHz+ computer is insane. It's more like Win98 and a PII/350, on a good day. Especially in offices. Things are a bit better at home, where junior bugs mom and dad for an upgraded machine to run the latest wiz-bang game.
That would be 38% according to Google, by the way. That study you're misquoting only surveyed a small sample of a specific market segment.
Ugh, how many times to people have to explain this... google browser stats are a very poor meter of OS distribution... for two reasons. First of all, the average work PC sits in your dentist's office or your architect's drafing room. It's not often used for web searching, that's generally done at home or in businesses/schools that do a lot of research. Secondly, google users tend to a more up to date with technology than the average computer user. They don't have msn.com set as their home page, no are they using the same computer they "invested in" six years ago.
I dunno... I have several busy mod_perl based websites running on an Ultra 1 (167 MHz UltraSPARC in 32-bit mode). Even under heavy loads of thousands of dynamic requests a minute and using the same machine as an NFS server for my small LAN, it keeps chugging away without slowing down. Granted I have spent some time tweaking and tuning, have 768 MB of RAM, and used Sun's compilers to build the Apache + mod_perl environment. But still... it's a really old box that seems to have plenty of pep.
Interesting idea... but not too practical.
If you're like most people, your electricity comes from a heavy duty powerplant. Your power is generated along with everyone elses and meets a set of standards. If you live in Berkeley, California, you'll get roughly the same 60 Hz, 115 - 122 volt power in your outlets as someone in Dover, Delaware. The only excitement is when the power is either cut off entirely or surges past specs and blows out your electrical gadgets and gizmos.
I suppose media could be done the same way... especially if you want a stream of generic music churning out 24/7 (think modern teen pop or barry manilow). If your idea of good entertainment is a world controlled by ClearChannel, then such a system may work out quite well for you.
For the rest of us... well, we like choice and are willing to put up with the costs and quirks of such a system.
I've read various Steve Jobs interviews and articles over the years and from what I gather, he tries to stay pretty current with computer and communication technology in general, not just the products his current companies churns out. He installed a T1 to his house around 1990 not only to link his personal computers to the NeXT network, but also to allow him to exlore the Internet with the sort of bandwidth the average user would have sometime in the future. A recent article mentioned he upgraded his connection towards the end of the 90s to something even more insane (I don't recall if it was a T3 or OC3) so he could experiment with video conferencing, file transfers, and other "next generation" Internet usage.
As far as Kazaa, I'm almost certain he's used it. Jobs is known to have a few PCs sitting around, some for Windows and some for NeXTSTEP/OpenStep.
It's also been said that Safari (Apple's Konq-based web browser for OS X) was originally a direct demand from Jobs when OmniWeb could no longer render the websites he was visiting.
There was an interview a couple years ago in which he talked about shopping around for some sort of crazy new hightech washing machine (a year or so before the Maytag Neptune came out).
Jobs may be an asshole, and he may not be a hardcore analog electrical engineer, but he seems to be quite the techie... a techie with style. NeXT and the Apple of 2003 display this quite well.
Now if only they would make a brushed aluminum version of the 17" widescreen lcd iMac...
Don't get me wrong, Monster Garage is a good show, but sometimes it's a little overhyped.
The only hype I see here is coming from the person that posted this to Slashdot.
Discovery Channel are not hyping this episode more than any other... it's getting the exact same "next week on monster garage" television advertisments.
I would agree that some of the monster garage challenges aren't too awe-inspiring... but I'd rather watch the lame shark cage pontoon episode again than watch Friends or SurvivalShowOfTheWeek.
http://news.com.com/2100-1002-5109969.html
if you are waiting for a 9.x update.... um.... yeah..... bye!
There is no way this splot can affect Mac OS 9 users. There is no command-line for Mac OS 9, nor is it even a true multi-user system. Remote access in Mac OS 9 is minimal and disabled in the first place. If you want an insanely secure server, get a box with Mac OS 9 and run WebStar, Rumpus, FileMakerServer, and/or QuickDNSPro.
Comparing Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X is like comparing DOS to NT.
Ever wonder why you have all that crap? ...
WHY?! Because you're a geek?
You damned right I am!
Hell, get the Apple I schematic tattooed as a swingin' back-piece!
Hmm, am I the only one that thinks of that as being kinda cool?
I'm a pure geek and I love my museum of old and cutting edge tech. It's even better when you share an apartment with fellow geeks. Every evening is fun tech time. Every night is monster home theater movie night. It's also a lot cheaper to maintain and add to the collection when 3 - 5 guys are adding to it.
Who in their right mind would want to trade all of this in for a minivan, IKEA furniture, and various baby/child peripherals?? Not me. At least not in the near future.
I can just see good ol Steve and Bill "coming to the rescue" with an NT based solution. The press would love it, "Microsoft replaces aging UNIX system".
Ugh.
Seriously, though, the failure of a SCADA system **SHOULD NOT** bring down the grid. This is just passing the buck.
I haven't used an Altix, but from the docs it seems sgi's patches provide a lot of the tools and goodies from IRIX. On a montster Origin, "top" gives 4 nicely formatted status lines above the process details. For specific details on each processor and other aspects of the machine, there's "osview". There's also a handy script called "hinv" that prints out a hardware inventory of the machine. "hinv -m" even prints out the part numbers and laser-burnt serial numbers for the various boards in a system.
I believe the Altix software environment provides all three of these utlities. Each of which gives pages and pages and pages of nicely formatted, human-readable details with the right flags.
Dig around the Top500 list and you'll see that for this benchmark (LINPACK), Myrinet and Infiniband don't do much better than plain GigE. (Which is one reason why the Cray X1 systems aren't ranked higher).
In fact, there are some nearly-identical setups in which there is no difference between GigE and Myrinet.
LINPACK is a good benchmark for generating big numbers for clusters, but it's a pretty poor supercomputing bechmark in general. The faster your machine can multiply and add fp numbers, the better its LINPACK score. This isn't SPECfp_rate. (Notice I said SPEC rate, not SPEC base).
Everyone in the UNIX world knows that SPEC numbers have been BS since day one. Almost every smart vendor has tweaked their compilers and runtime environment in every which way to allow for the fastest possible SPEC marks. Don't believe me? Dig around the usenet and SPEC archives. Every time SPEC updates their CPU suite, the major UNIX vendors scramble to tweak their compilers. The lag time is usually about a month. The score differences make for some fun and entertaining reading.
At any rate, Apple is the first company to cheat at SPEC **AND** brag about it in an international ad campagin. Why someone else hasn't made a fuss yet is beyond me.
It's about time, Apple. Shape up or ship out.
Listening to Steve Job's BS is fun for a little while, but after a year he starts to sound like that annoying relative that is constantly trying to sell you the latest get rich scheme each month.
The next time you watch TV ads, take note of the wording of their claims. It's usually something very vague, or followed by small print / fast talking disclaimer. People have gotten used to this.
Apple, on the other hand, blatently lied, saying their new G5 was "the worlds fastest, most powerful personal computer". They didn't say it was faster at a certain task, nor did they even mention it requires a unique OS and unique software. To 90% of the population, a Personal Computer is an x86 box running MS Windows.
Apple has made huge lies in their ads for years. They were finally caught. All I can say is "ITS ABOUT TIME!".
The Dell Intern ads may be annoying as all hell, but at least they're honest.
I love OS X and I'm never, ever going back to OS 9. That said, I do have to say that OS 9 was not all that painful, especially for average users. 99% of Mac users never had to (nor ever needed to) tweak their memory allocation. Multitasking was fine, so long as you didn't mind the foreground application sucking up most of the CPU cycles. Again, fine for the average user. But... if you're like me or the typical slashdot geek, you'll want several applications grinding away hard on the CPU at the same time... and that, on OS 9, became painful.
The average user very rarely ran into extension and control panel conflicts. But, I'll tell you what, the 30 control panels and 120 extensions that made up OS 9 was complete childs play to maintain and tweak. Most had long, descriptive names and good icons. Extension Manager would even group extensions so you knew what required what to work. Put the control panel or extension file into the proper folder and it was installed. Remove it and it was uninstalled. Obscure conflicts were very quick and easy to find and fix in OS 9. Doing the same in OS X or Windows requires sorting through thousands of files! (Or, at the very least, some futile attempts at running uninstallers). At least OS X is well documented in the BSD sense... and most of the OS code is open source for the complete guru. (Remeber when 10.3 Panther came out and people were talking about the file system tweaks... such as the auto defrag? Several folks dug into the source to see just how it worked and reported the details to their websites/blogs. Try that with Windows!)
I'd like to see some organization go after some of Apple's other promotional material as well.
Apple's G5 Introduction Video is full of heavily edited quotes and comments from various industry leaders. I would personally like to see the raw comments, not Apple's spin.
Mac OS has always been evolutionary, yes, but 10.3 is a huge step from 10.2. Apple just uses that goofy naming scheme because they want to keep the roman numeral "X".
10.3 kernel is significantly different from 10.2. They even upped the Darwin kernel number from 6.x to 7.0 for this release. Large parts of the kernel and most of the userland has been synced up with FreeBSD 5.x. Perl has been upgraded to 5.8. Gimp-Print has been rolled in. Sendmail was replaced with Postfix. The whole OS is faster, especially the GUI. The GUI widgets have been tweaked, most of the pinstripes are gone or made more subtle. Quartz has been totally overhauled. PDF rendering (the whole GUI is displayPDF based) is more than 3x faster (try it, open a large PDF in Preview). Features like Expose are now possible. Fast user switching is now possible for other reasons. Lots of changes, both obvious and under the hood.
There's even a new developer suite included in the box!
It's not "OS 11" but it is still is a huge leap forward.
If you do more than one thing at a time (or if you browse the web), then Panther is faster than OS 9.
OS 9 is a great OS for running Photoshop by itself, but once you have more than a few applications running, the thing becomes an unstable mess.
Browsing the web with OS 9 is painful. PAAAAINNFUL. MSIE 5 for Mac is about as bad as it gets. There is no modern version of Mozilla for OS 9. And, even if you back up to Mozilla 1.3, it's still awful because OS 9's poor thread management makes the browser crawl.
Panther is smooth sailing on anything with a G3/350 and 256 MB RAM or better.
Macs have long shelf life blah blah blah, whatever. Save a couple old macs for some of the classic games (Harry the handsome executive!!!) but retire the rest.
You obviously haven't used Expose.
BTW, there were gobs of popular "tile all windows" add-ons for classic Mac OS in the past.
Expose is not simply a couple keys bound to "tile all windows" and "expose desktop".
There are gobs of email clients for OS X for every taste... for home users, corporate users, techincal users, unix users...
Unfortunately, even though we still use SGI for live broadcasts, it's just too late. All of our 3D work is done on PCs, and our IR, which we use for VizRT (a Real-time 3D package) is going to be replaced with a PC, soon.
Sounds about right. A lot of older VizRT setups (generally those using pre-HD video hardware) are being replaced with PCs as television stations move to higher resolution. Even SGI is moving towards commodity graphics hardware. Onyx4 uses an Origin 350 with 4, 9, or 16 ATI FireGL X1 GPUs tiled and composited per pipe. It's faster than IR4 for most things, but does not yet have all the features. It's only a matter of time before IR4 (or even an IR5) is replaced alltogether by a matrix of GPUs. Even the goofy scoreboard/replay animations on NFL broadcasts don't need anything more than a single FireGL/Radeon9800.
One of our local stations is going to "low" res 480p next month when it goes digital. Because they had no need for HD, they simply replaced their SGI O2's analog video i/o board with a CCIR-601 SDI digital video i/o board they got from some used sgi dealer for next to nothing. Others are still using their digital video boards in Indigo2 IMPACT series machines! I guess if it works, don't fix it! HD boards for Onyx and Octane aren't cheap... still above $8K used. It's almost cheaper to get a whole new PC for on-air graphics. Plus the station engineers love the warm fuzzy feeling of using an OS they have at home and on nearly every desk in the office. Some of the lesser engineers who have never quite figured out NFS or FTP love the ability to run Illustrator and Photoshop on the same machine as well.