every single Mac is overpriced by at least 20-30% compared to similar pile of MSRP PC hardware.
I figured about 40% myself.
That's about what OS X is worth, it seems.
And I guess it is. I'd pay that much extra for a Thinkpad running OS X, or for a retail copy of OS X I could legally run on that Thinkpad. I'd love to see Apple make the jump to a real software company instead of pretending to be a hardware company that buries the software cost in hardware markups.
But as a pseudo-hardware company they're never going to compete with Dell on price. They have to pay for the OS development one way or another, and I don't think people are going to be as sanguine as myself about paying $500 retail for OS X.
That depends entirely on what they do with it, doesn't it?
If all they do with the TPM chip is make sure you don't run OSX on non-Apple hardware, which is what seems to be the case, you're better off then with Windows XP's DRM support.
Macs have had (and still do) a few issues. Graphics cards is a major one. I hope the switch to Intel helps this more, because my 1 year old laptop has a sorry graphics card compared to what was available on PCs at the time (Radeon 9700 or 9800).
Alas, the low end Macs have the same sorry graphics card that a lot of low-end laptops sport... the Intel GMA950. It's got decent 2d support, but if you want to do 3d, a Radeon 9200 beats it.
I agree. Though with a bit of a spin... I don't think that the low end intel Macs are really that much of a performance boost for most applications, for most people, because of the double whammy of Rosetta and the GMA950 GPU.
I think the first generation low end intel Macs are going to end up filed on Low End Mac as "Road Apples", alongside the first generation of PPC Powermacs and the Rev A G3s.
When they put something like an ATI X200 in there, or intel gets its act together on the GMA series and gives it decent 3d support, and when Adobe pulls its finger out on Photoshop... yes. But until then a lot of people are going to stick with the last generation G4s and G5s. I certainly have no plans on upgrading from my first generation G4 mini until there's a real upgrade available...
I've worked with good programs written in C, and bad programs written in C or C++. The Mozilla code base is not one of the good ones. I went into it once to try and chase down a proxy problem, and I ended up giving up... I couldn't figure out the call tree from entering a URL through to the proxies being applied to the actual connection.
Maybe it's better now, I don't know, I don't really care. Because on top of that the whole design of Firefox has gone down the same path as Internet Explorer (though, hopefully, not so far), with the same components responsible for evaluating trusted and untrusted objects. I originally believed that they had followed the same design as KHTML and created a sandboxed rendering engine that had additional components (I/O slaves) embedded when it knew it was dealing with trusted objects. Instead there have been many bugs that could only have occurred if an untrusted object was being checked for trustedness at run time. I suppose they had to do that to implement the XPI installer so you could install components directly from web sites.
Which is, of course, a bad idea to begin with.
I would love to be proven wrong, and I wish there was a good KHTML-based browser for Windows, or at least a good Gecko-based browser that didn't use XUL or anything like it.
You sure that the smaller buildings were simply not more robust and able to survive the centuries?
The "shorter medieval man" myth turned out to be founded on the fact that it's easier to take in clothes than add material to them, so smaller outfits were more likely to be preserved. It's not a huge effect, but given enough time even a small effect adds up.
And ironically Microsoft's most reliable text input technique on the Pocket PC is a clone of Palm's original Graffiti... which was developed for the Newton.:)
I didn't want to get a Macbook, I wanted to get a GOOD laptop and run OS X on it, but Apple's still trying to be a hardware company and I'm not prepared to go the "pirate domain" route.
Laptops have always been something that Apple has done well.
When was this? Toshiba and IBM have always made better and more reliable laptops, and Sony makes "cooler" and "sleeker" ones. Apple's best laptop of the '90s was done in conjunction with IBM, for that matter.
* Lousy keyboards. The last decent keyboard Apple made for desktops OR laptops was the Apple Pro II keyboard on the Beige G3s. The keyboard on my Macbook Pro makes my wrists and arms hurt after less than half an hour of use. I had a better keyboard in the Stowaway folding keyboard I got for my handheld than the one on my 'book.
* One-button mice/trackpads. The "Mighty Mouse" tells us that Apple has accepted that one-button mice are a mistake, but they're not willing to go so far as to produce a real multi-button mouse or trackpad.
* Style over substance. I'd rather have a half-inch thicker and half-inch narrower laptop that DIDN'T overheat and had room for a real keyboard with bevelled keys and a decent throw. And the style ain't all that great... the Thinkpad's Lamborghini brutality isn't the same kind of style as Apple's Porsche sleekness, but it's not necessarily bad... just different.
It's the software that's selling the laptops. If the laptops were as well designed as the software that runs on them they'd have no competition.
Were you aware that you could simply collapse the sidebar and never have to look at it again?
Did you read the rest of my message, where I wrote "Give me the Jaguar finder, and stick small, inconspicuous, uncluttered Mozilla/Safari style tabs under the toolbar, and I'll be happy."
But in any case, that still doesn't get rid of the abomination of Metal that even iTunes has abandoned.
Finder in Panther and Tiger is already too cluttered. The Metal Finder with he huge space-wasting tabs on the left side is an abomination, and I actually bought PathFinder to try and get away from it... but Pathfinders's even more cluttered.
Give me the Jaguar finder, and stick small, inconspicuous, uncluttered Mozilla/Safari style tabs under the toolbar, and I'll be happy. The "shortcut" capability of the Finder tabs is already taken care of by the ability to drag files into the toolbar, so that's really all that's missing.
I have the same reaction to the "preview tabs" in Safari in another entry. Blah. Put the preview in a tooltip-style popup when you hover over the tab, if you like, or even do a "dock magnify" effect on them... but don't waste my screen space on stuff I'm not actually working with.
Your other two bullet points are really all variants of this:
Over time, more APIs will have to go Open Source as they become commodities that people aren't going to pay for.
People don't pay for APIs, they don't even pay for operating systems, they pay for having their problems solved. Apple provides a way to run commercial software that doesn't involve the toxic swamp of Windows, and that's why people are still buying Macs.
And the same thing with open source. You can't *push* something into the open source community. Software succeeds as open source if it provides something that people need and are willing to pay for in time spent hacking on it. Darwin as a collection of open source projects that build on the source code Apple's releasing and do things with it that people actually need was a success. Darwin as an open source OS based on the core of OS X had no market. Why? Because nobody needs another free UNIX variant that provides no new and interesting capabilities. Darwin without the rest of OS X is just FreeBSD writ slower.
Open Source code from Apple is not the improvement playground of Linux, but a utilitarian structure that is only changed when necessary, and only by Apple.
The same is true of Red Hat, really, and yet they're the most popular Linux version in the real world.
What, is it only if you're taking on Microsoft that you guys give a damn about a project?
No, it's only if I've got a reason to use a project that I give a damn about the project.
As a platform for understanding and working with OS X, developing tools to work with OS X, darwin's got a point.
As an operating system, it's a sluggish poor relative to FreeBSD, and it doesn't do anything I can imagine wanting to do that FreeBSD doesn't do better.
The only valuable thing they were doing was providing a place for "the insignificant little projects" you're complaining about. The core itself is pretty much worthless beyond that.
So why was nobody interested in Open Darwin? Because it's Apple's product.
Hardly.
I'm not interested in Open darwin because it's got no point.
Darwin is a lower performance kernel than FreeBSD, supports fewer drivers than FreeBSD, and can't do much of anything that FreeBSD can't do better other than provide a modicum of compatibility with OS X for server applications... and OS X is a poor server platform.
People don't run operating systems for the sake of running operating systems, they run them for the sake of doing something with them. What can yo do with Open Darwin you can't do better elsewhere?
If red Hat was willing to give up the input from the open source community to the extent that Apple has, they pretty much *could* fork off and go it alone. There have been forks in GPLed projects in the past, and there will be in the future.
It's not the GPL that binds Linux together, it's the open source community. It's not the GPL that makes Open Source work, it's Open Source that makes the GPL work.
It's like Microsoft opensourcing the NT kernel and keeping Win32, DirectX, COM,.NET*, etc closed.
That would be tremendously useful. The NT kernel is a really interesting system that has all kinds of potential that Microsoft's thrown away for fear they'll distract attention from their "crown jewels"... the Win32 subsystem. An open source NT kernel would allow for a real open UNIX-compatible subsystem, rather than having to choose between staying in the awful Win32 environment or depend on Microsoft's goodwill with Interix. It would allow for GOOD ports of filesystems like UFS or XFS to NT, and better interoperability with open systems. It would also let people do to Microsoft what OSx86 did to Apple, and wiping out all their DRM and license validation in one fell swoop... which is the real reason it won't happen.
I don't find GPL software stays in the commons any better than BSD software. I have just as much trouble finding old GPL software as old BSD software.
What keeps open source software in the commons is active development by the commons. Lose that, and the software rots... falls behind current APIs... and eventually vanishes.
The only difference with BSD software is that with BSD software there can be proprietary forks. If the open source model works (and it does, for an awful lot of stuff) the proprietary fork has to play catch-up. Where the open-source model doesn't work, the version in the commons is going to tend to be a poor cousin to the commercial version anyway... and end up falling out of active development.
Like happened here, and would have happened eventually no matter what Apple did, because the real problem was the lack of interest from the open source community for a slower and less capable cousin of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Red Hat, Suse, Debian, Gentoo, Solaris, or Lites...
I'd say that their web browser is a strategically more important component to Apple and its userbase than some unix userland utils.
Mach is a LONG way from a complete operating system, and there's most of a BSD kernel there in kernel space alongside Mach: the "BSD single server" for operating system services.
If they made the kernel GPL, they'd have to make many of their kernel modules - and most of the really critical ones - GPL as well, which would have brought Quartz and everything built on top of it into the GPL. That was just NOT going to happen.
By default it is a simple one-button mouse anyone can use with no training and which encourages app designers to behave properly.
This is such bullshit.
Single button mice encourage app designers to hide functionality behind CMD-ALT-SHIFT-CONTROL-DOUBLE-CLICK. Apple's "one button" mouse really had 5.5 buttons, with 4 of them on the keyboard, one called "double click" and no consistency between how applications use them, whereas Xerox's original 3 button mouse really did have three buttons and they were consistent - select, execute, and menu.
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every single Mac is overpriced by at least 20-30% compared to similar pile of MSRP PC hardware.
I figured about 40% myself.
That's about what OS X is worth, it seems.
And I guess it is. I'd pay that much extra for a Thinkpad running OS X, or for a retail copy of OS X I could legally run on that Thinkpad. I'd love to see Apple make the jump to a real software company instead of pretending to be a hardware company that buries the software cost in hardware markups.
But as a pseudo-hardware company they're never going to compete with Dell on price. They have to pay for the OS development one way or another, and I don't think people are going to be as sanguine as myself about paying $500 retail for OS X.
Until my family buys a Mac for me, I can't help them with their Mac problems.
Good thing they won't need your help with their Mac problems.
People will switch from the Windows PC, realize that they have to pay for constant upgrades and all the latest n' greatest doodads.
I've spent more money on Windows PC than Macs every year since I switched, including the year I switched, and the year I bought a Mac for my daughter.
Are you parroting some Microsoft astroturfer, or did you just make that up?
That depends entirely on what they do with it, doesn't it?
If all they do with the TPM chip is make sure you don't run OSX on non-Apple hardware, which is what seems to be the case, you're better off then with Windows XP's DRM support.
Macs have had (and still do) a few issues. Graphics cards is a major one. I hope the switch to Intel helps this more, because my 1 year old laptop has a sorry graphics card compared to what was available on PCs at the time (Radeon 9700 or 9800).
Alas, the low end Macs have the same sorry graphics card that a lot of low-end laptops sport... the Intel GMA950. It's got decent 2d support, but if you want to do 3d, a Radeon 9200 beats it.
I agree. Though with a bit of a spin... I don't think that the low end intel Macs are really that much of a performance boost for most applications, for most people, because of the double whammy of Rosetta and the GMA950 GPU.
I think the first generation low end intel Macs are going to end up filed on Low End Mac as "Road Apples", alongside the first generation of PPC Powermacs and the Rev A G3s.
When they put something like an ATI X200 in there, or intel gets its act together on the GMA series and gives it decent 3d support, and when Adobe pulls its finger out on Photoshop... yes. But until then a lot of people are going to stick with the last generation G4s and G5s. I certainly have no plans on upgrading from my first generation G4 mini until there's a real upgrade available...
Looking at the code... I probably didn't let it run long enough. It likely takes a while to allocate an array that big in Javascript on a Mac Mini. :)
I tried the test page and it popped up a dialog indicating that someone was trying to start a shell on a high port, and the browser hung.
:)
Is Camino vulnerable to an exploit or just a DOS?
Where is Camino 1.0.3?
I've worked with good programs written in C, and bad programs written in C or C++. The Mozilla code base is not one of the good ones. I went into it once to try and chase down a proxy problem, and I ended up giving up... I couldn't figure out the call tree from entering a URL through to the proxies being applied to the actual connection.
Maybe it's better now, I don't know, I don't really care. Because on top of that the whole design of Firefox has gone down the same path as Internet Explorer (though, hopefully, not so far), with the same components responsible for evaluating trusted and untrusted objects. I originally believed that they had followed the same design as KHTML and created a sandboxed rendering engine that had additional components (I/O slaves) embedded when it knew it was dealing with trusted objects. Instead there have been many bugs that could only have occurred if an untrusted object was being checked for trustedness at run time. I suppose they had to do that to implement the XPI installer so you could install components directly from web sites.
Which is, of course, a bad idea to begin with.
I would love to be proven wrong, and I wish there was a good KHTML-based browser for Windows, or at least a good Gecko-based browser that didn't use XUL or anything like it.
You sure that the smaller buildings were simply not more robust and able to survive the centuries?
The "shorter medieval man" myth turned out to be founded on the fact that it's easier to take in clothes than add material to them, so smaller outfits were more likely to be preserved. It's not a huge effect, but given enough time even a small effect adds up.
"Tablespoons" turned out to be a hoax.
:)
And ironically Microsoft's most reliable text input technique on the Pocket PC is a clone of Palm's original Graffiti... which was developed for the Newton.
I didn't want to get a Macbook, I wanted to get a GOOD laptop and run OS X on it, but Apple's still trying to be a hardware company and I'm not prepared to go the "pirate domain" route.
Laptops have always been something that Apple has done well.
When was this? Toshiba and IBM have always made better and more reliable laptops, and Sony makes "cooler" and "sleeker" ones. Apple's best laptop of the '90s was done in conjunction with IBM, for that matter.
* Lousy keyboards. The last decent keyboard Apple made for desktops OR laptops was the Apple Pro II keyboard on the Beige G3s. The keyboard on my Macbook Pro makes my wrists and arms hurt after less than half an hour of use. I had a better keyboard in the Stowaway folding keyboard I got for my handheld than the one on my 'book.
* One-button mice/trackpads. The "Mighty Mouse" tells us that Apple has accepted that one-button mice are a mistake, but they're not willing to go so far as to produce a real multi-button mouse or trackpad.
* Style over substance. I'd rather have a half-inch thicker and half-inch narrower laptop that DIDN'T overheat and had room for a real keyboard with bevelled keys and a decent throw. And the style ain't all that great... the Thinkpad's Lamborghini brutality isn't the same kind of style as Apple's Porsche sleekness, but it's not necessarily bad... just different.
It's the software that's selling the laptops. If the laptops were as well designed as the software that runs on them they'd have no competition.
Were you aware that you could simply collapse the sidebar and never have to look at it again?
Did you read the rest of my message, where I wrote "Give me the Jaguar finder, and stick small, inconspicuous, uncluttered Mozilla/Safari style tabs under the toolbar, and I'll be happy."
But in any case, that still doesn't get rid of the abomination of Metal that even iTunes has abandoned.
... couldn't fit on a web page, except maybe using VRML.
http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/3dworld.html
Finder in Panther and Tiger is already too cluttered. The Metal Finder with he huge space-wasting tabs on the left side is an abomination, and I actually bought PathFinder to try and get away from it... but Pathfinders's even more cluttered.
Give me the Jaguar finder, and stick small, inconspicuous, uncluttered Mozilla/Safari style tabs under the toolbar, and I'll be happy. The "shortcut" capability of the Finder tabs is already taken care of by the ability to drag files into the toolbar, so that's really all that's missing.
I have the same reaction to the "preview tabs" in Safari in another entry. Blah. Put the preview in a tooltip-style popup when you hover over the tab, if you like, or even do a "dock magnify" effect on them... but don't waste my screen space on stuff I'm not actually working with.
Your other two bullet points are really all variants of this:
Over time, more APIs will have to go Open Source as they become commodities that people aren't going to pay for.
People don't pay for APIs, they don't even pay for operating systems, they pay for having their problems solved. Apple provides a way to run commercial software that doesn't involve the toxic swamp of Windows, and that's why people are still buying Macs.
And the same thing with open source. You can't *push* something into the open source community. Software succeeds as open source if it provides something that people need and are willing to pay for in time spent hacking on it. Darwin as a collection of open source projects that build on the source code Apple's releasing and do things with it that people actually need was a success. Darwin as an open source OS based on the core of OS X had no market. Why? Because nobody needs another free UNIX variant that provides no new and interesting capabilities. Darwin without the rest of OS X is just FreeBSD writ slower.
Open Source code from Apple is not the improvement playground of Linux, but a utilitarian structure that is only changed when necessary, and only by Apple.
The same is true of Red Hat, really, and yet they're the most popular Linux version in the real world.
What, is it only if you're taking on Microsoft that you guys give a damn about a project?
No, it's only if I've got a reason to use a project that I give a damn about the project.
As a platform for understanding and working with OS X, developing tools to work with OS X, darwin's got a point.
As an operating system, it's a sluggish poor relative to FreeBSD, and it doesn't do anything I can imagine wanting to do that FreeBSD doesn't do better.
The only valuable thing they were doing was providing a place for "the insignificant little projects" you're complaining about. The core itself is pretty much worthless beyond that.
So why was nobody interested in Open Darwin? Because it's Apple's product.
Hardly.
I'm not interested in Open darwin because it's got no point.
Darwin is a lower performance kernel than FreeBSD, supports fewer drivers than FreeBSD, and can't do much of anything that FreeBSD can't do better other than provide a modicum of compatibility with OS X for server applications... and OS X is a poor server platform.
People don't run operating systems for the sake of running operating systems, they run them for the sake of doing something with them. What can yo do with Open Darwin you can't do better elsewhere?
If red Hat was willing to give up the input from the open source community to the extent that Apple has, they pretty much *could* fork off and go it alone. There have been forks in GPLed projects in the past, and there will be in the future.
It's not the GPL that binds Linux together, it's the open source community. It's not the GPL that makes Open Source work, it's Open Source that makes the GPL work.
Yes, it's nice that Apple "just works".
It's nicer that Apple actually has commercial applications available.
It's like Microsoft opensourcing the NT kernel and keeping Win32, DirectX, COM, .NET*, etc closed.
That would be tremendously useful. The NT kernel is a really interesting system that has all kinds of potential that Microsoft's thrown away for fear they'll distract attention from their "crown jewels"... the Win32 subsystem. An open source NT kernel would allow for a real open UNIX-compatible subsystem, rather than having to choose between staying in the awful Win32 environment or depend on Microsoft's goodwill with Interix. It would allow for GOOD ports of filesystems like UFS or XFS to NT, and better interoperability with open systems. It would also let people do to Microsoft what OSx86 did to Apple, and wiping out all their DRM and license validation in one fell swoop... which is the real reason it won't happen.
I don't find GPL software stays in the commons any better than BSD software. I have just as much trouble finding old GPL software as old BSD software.
What keeps open source software in the commons is active development by the commons. Lose that, and the software rots... falls behind current APIs... and eventually vanishes.
The only difference with BSD software is that with BSD software there can be proprietary forks. If the open source model works (and it does, for an awful lot of stuff) the proprietary fork has to play catch-up. Where the open-source model doesn't work, the version in the commons is going to tend to be a poor cousin to the commercial version anyway... and end up falling out of active development.
Like happened here, and would have happened eventually no matter what Apple did, because the real problem was the lack of interest from the open source community for a slower and less capable cousin of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Red Hat, Suse, Debian, Gentoo, Solaris, or Lites...
I'd say that their web browser is a strategically more important component to Apple and its userbase than some unix userland utils.
Mach is a LONG way from a complete operating system, and there's most of a BSD kernel there in kernel space alongside Mach: the "BSD single server" for operating system services.
If they made the kernel GPL, they'd have to make many of their kernel modules - and most of the really critical ones - GPL as well, which would have brought Quartz and everything built on top of it into the GPL. That was just NOT going to happen.
the radioactive spider venom "just works".
Only in comic books, Objective C works in real life.
By default it is a simple one-button mouse anyone can use with no training and which encourages app designers to behave properly.
This is such bullshit.
Single button mice encourage app designers to hide functionality behind CMD-ALT-SHIFT-CONTROL-DOUBLE-CLICK. Apple's "one button" mouse really had 5.5 buttons, with 4 of them on the keyboard, one called "double click" and no consistency between how applications use them, whereas Xerox's original 3 button mouse really did have three buttons and they were consistent - select, execute, and menu.