Don't believe me about Mac OS X's very much un-UNIX-like true heart? Try to add a static network mount.
There is no standard way to add a static network mount on UNIX. Editing fstab? that's a BSDism. It's a COMMON BSDism, but there's UNIX boxes that don't even have an fstab.
All these sorts of issues make it crucial to test on Mac OS X...
Err... you would consider it reasonable to not test on any popular system, exotic and mundane alike? What do you normally test on? Red Hat and Suse? Do you include Debian and maybe even Solaris?
Here, try Tru64, AIX, HPUX, and Unixware as well.
If your idea of UNIX is so narrow that not having to change ONE configuration file before using/etc/fstab is a problem, I'm not sure you're ready to think about trying to write really portable code. Just go "it works on RHEL 3 and Solaris 10, so it's portable!" and give us all a laugh.
The reason that Apple can't let go of the hardware side of the business and focus on selling OS X is simple.. they can't generate even a fraction of the revenue they currently generate otherwise.
Let's say they sold Mac OS X retail for the same general amount as Microsoft sells XP for, $200-$300 new (Home vs Pro), $100-$200 upgrade. Their OS X price is in the right range for an upgrade, and since it's only selling to people who had already bought Mac OS with their Macs it effectively *is* an upgrade.
So let's say they sell "Mac OS X for Macs Only" for $130, "Mac OS X86 for clones" for $260, and "Mac OS X86 Upgrade for clones" for $130. Let's say Apple's margin is the oft-reported 40% across the board. It probably isn't that consistent, but that's good enough for the back of my envelope.
Mac mini: $500. Apple's margin: 40%. Gross profit: $200 on $300 worth of materials.
Mac OS X86 retail for $260. Apple's margin: 95%. Gross profit: $247 on $13 worth of materials.
iMac: $1300. Apple's margin: 40%. Gross profit: $520 on $780 worth of materials.
So, they make about half as much per iMac sale, or about 25% more per mini sale. But they've only got $13 per box at risk, and it wouldn't take much increase in market share for them to be making MORE money even if they didn't sell any Macs. At any rate, they CERTAINLY don't need to make $10 for every $1 in revenue to stay profitable here... and you're ignoring the fact that they do have applications as well.
It's a completely different environment today. Back then the clones ONLY ran Mac OS. This caused two problems:
1. Apple was limited in what they could charge since the clone maker had to make all their money back from clone sales... they couldn't share the hardware development cost between Macs and PCs.
2. The primary competition for the clones was Apple themselves.
Today Apple could almost certainly get away with charging something comparable to Windows retail prices for licences... which is $70-$170 more than they sell OS X for Macs for... by treating the OS X for Macs as an "upgrade". That would be enough to offset the loss of revenue from the "Mac Tax" and then some. And today the primary competition for the clones would be Windows sales on the same hardware.
It depends on the terms Apple licensed Mac OS on. I don't know what they were, but if they weren't high enough to make up for the price difference the problem was that they weren't high enough.
They probably couldn't make them that high back then because they licensees had to make computers that ONLY ran Mac OS. This time around they could make generic computers and sell OS X as an option... so if Apple charged them an amount in the same range as their margin on the equivalent Mac they would experience less pushback.
Let's say they licensed OS X86 for... $300 retail box, $150 upgrade, and $100 + 10% of retail on bundles (up to $300). That would mean your $350 entry-level Dell would cost $495 with Mac OS X. Your $1300 Thinkpad would go up to $1530.
If the licensing fee DID make the cost of the machines guess which one people would buy?
Mac mini for $500, or a comparable PC I can add PCI and AGP cards to for $700?
iBook for $1300, or a Thinkpad with a keyboard that doesn't suck and two mouse buttons for $1500?
I'd take the Thinkpad.
Apple can keep their boutique boxes, I want their boutique OS.
My quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that iApple would have to sell Mac OS X for at least $100 more to make up for the revenue loss on a Mac mini or iBook, more on the iMac, Powerbook, or Powermac.
On the other hand, Microsoft sells XP Professional for $300 new, $200 upgrade. If Apple sold "OS X86" for $300, and kept the current price for OS X as an "upgrade" (because that's effectively what it is, unless you're one of the vanishingly few people upgrading from OS 9), they *would* come close to breaking even.
The problem with DRM, for me, is that it's impossible to have both strong software-based DRM and an open operating system *. The whole point to DRM is to give someone a copy of an encrypted message, AND the key to decrypt it, and to enforce a policy on when and how they can decrypt it.
The only way to make this happen is to:
1. Deny them access to the key except through your software, and 2. Deny them access to the output of your software except through controlled hardware.
The only ways to implement 1 are to obfuscate the mechanism by which the key is extracted from their software (which has proven to be unworkable), or to put the key in a physically secure repository in their computer AND deny them access to any parts of the operating system that mediate the communication between your software and the repository (which is incompatible with an open operating system).
The only way to implement 2 is to deny them access to any parts of the operating system that mediate the communication between your software and the controlled hardware. This is incompatible with an open operating system.
* By this I mean an operating system for which source code is available and this source code can be used to modify the behaviour of the OS, or one for which source code is unavailable but full documentation of all internal APIs is available in a form compatible with modifying the behaviour of the OS.
By building in some TPM scheme, they have a demonstratable attempt to protect their technology. This provides a method for legal actions for any offical vendor that attempts to reverse engineer the Tamper Resistant code.
Good news:
I don't really care about whether it's a stupid patent or not, since it's a stupid patent on something that has negative value... if they do patent this and discourage other people from doing the same stupid thing, that's actually a win
Bad news:
If they sell an OS that's got a boobytrap in it such that I can't fix a problem because I can't tamper with the OS, then that destroys a huge part of the value of Mac OS X for me. It means I can't use it for any work that actually matters to me, and Mac OS will join Windows in the category of "X-Terminal that runs a few local apps", and Windows does THAT cheaper and on much cheaper hardware.
Don't-care news:
If this is just a legal tactic and the actual scheme can be reliably bypassed for legitimate purposes, or at worst if they sell an OS that won't enable iTunes to play iTMS music or movies if I tamper with it, then that's a minor annoyance... biggest impact would be I don't buy anything more from the iTMS.
Mac mini: $500 Entry-level clone, roughly comparable: $300
Mac OS X retail: $130
XP Home retail: $200 XP Home upgrade: $100 XP Professional retail: $300 XP Professional upgrade: $200
What this means is that the retail Mac OS X price is a little more than Microsoft's upgrade price for XP Home, but the cost of buying it bundled is like buying XP Home or upgrading XP Pro... so if they sold an unbundled vetrsion that was priced like XP Pro, would they break even?
Apple shouldn't lock its OS at all. Why not? Of course, its entitled to protect its investment by product activation or DRM or whatever. Everyone else does.
If Apple implements a mechanism for locking OS X that is sufficiently effective that I can't override it if I need to, I won't buy it, or use it, or recommend it, as anything more than the same kind of "smart terminal" that I used Windows as... because one of the advantages of OS X over Windows is that it doesn't contain that kind of boobytrap in its core.
And if I need a separate computer anyway, running an OS that doesn't have a deliberately fragile kernel, that will be where all my important work goes on, why should I keep paying the Mac Tax on Apple hardware... however small that may become?
And I haven't even minded the money spent on buying new versions of OS X since I bought my Mac... where I'm still running the original Windows 2000 install on my Windows box. Apple doesn't have to force me to at "license-key-point" to pay for those upgrades because Apple provides something of value to me.
So obviously cell phones pose a valid threat to the venerable iPod.
Cellphone + iPod: Well, the iPod gives you at least 10 hours of music before you recharge and when it gets low you can still use your phone. The cellphone that can just about go a long weekend on standby between charges. Used to be longer, but they started adding more functions and making them smaller... but they seem to be hitting a wall, at least they've stopped getting worse. Maybe people are pushing back on the battery problem at last.
Cellphone playing MP3s: Hell, I gave up using my PDA to play MP3s because I was tired of not being able to get at my calendar because I was conserving my battery... and my PDA didn't have to run a radio transceiver full time. I can't see how this could ever have seemed like a good idea to anyone who really needed to use their phone as a phone.
the fact that you are a BSD guy is relevant to your judgement
I'm not "a BSD guy", I happened to be at Berkeley when BSD was gelling and did some work on it... then I didn't touch a BSD system for over ten years until 386BSD came around: I've probably still got more hours on System III/V and Xenix than on BSD, and my AT&T UNIX PC runs System V. I actually *liked* Microsoft Xenix and OpenNET. Regulus was a System V clone. Lanetix was based on a kernel modelled after VMS.
But, whatever, you have a real narrow view of UNIX and I reckon that all that's going to happen if we continue this discussion is you're gonna nail that view down like a stake and not budge from the spot. Ciao.
Ah, I see, your statements are not surprising given that your experience is mainly with bastardizations of UNIX and with BSD;
Oh, god. You're actually trying to tell me that broad experience with a wide variety of operating systems and implementations of UNIX is a bad thing?
Hey, why don't you go have a look at what DMR wrote about what USG did to streams in System V before you go ranting about "bastardised UNIX". If you want a UNIX system that fits the "creator's vision", you need to get rid of System V streams, System V shared memory and IPC, and TLI. You can keep sockets, but only if you move the endpoints into the filesystem. Oh, and you better do something painful and terminal to glibc.
For that matter, go have a look at what DMR's actually been doing for the past decade or two... if your UNIX doesn't come with an Aleph compiler, the 8.5 Window System, and have native Unicode support at every level you really shouldn't be rattling on about what "the UNIX creators" thought.
BSD is still reasonably considered UNIX, but it's not canonical
And Linux is? Oh god, the irony.
Me, I consider Linux an implementation of UNIX. Have since it wasn't much more than a rumor. What side of that debate were you on in 1993?
I do miss the superb keyboard navigation on Windows, though I wish it was as configurable as the keyboard navigation on OSX. On the other hand I wish OSX had a real input manager that let you control all these magic key bindings from one place with one user interface... because there's too many programs (including Apple's own) that excessively restrict how you can bind these hotkeys.
"alt doesn't select menu 'feature'"
System Preferences -> Keyboard and Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Keyboard Navigation -> Focus on Menu -> "^F2"
It feels like a Carbon app.
I would be staggered to find that it wasn't. It would have required a complete rewrite from scratch to make it Cocoa.
I started using, developing for, and managing, UNIX with Research V6, 2.8BSD, and 4.1BSD, and have been involved in it ever since on every major workstation and server,
Big deal.
I was at Berkeley when 2.8 and 4.1 were in development, and contributed code to some of those tapes. I've been involved in UNIX on platforms most people have never heard of, I still have a PDP-11, an AT&T UNIX PC, a NeXTstation, and a Mac SE/30 running Apple's first UNIX. I've used Minix, Lanetix, Regulus, and implemented UNIX tools on top of RSX-11 and VMS. I was one of the early 386BSD patchkit developers, and was one of the early defenders of the argument that "Linux *is* UNIX" back when that was controversial. Blah blah blah...
and I can tell you from nearly 30 years experience with UNIX: OS X is not UNIX, not even close.... and I can tell you with 30 years experience with UNIX, Darwin is pretty damn mainstream UNIX.
Normally I'd spend the next quarter of an hour explaining exactly why you're wrong about this, and go on to explain how X11 isn't actually a UNIX window system, and how Darwin has more in common with traditional UNIX than Linux does, and so on.
But I'm tired of going over the same territory with kids who have absolutely no clue of what UNIX is or where it came from, so I'll just say that if you can really make a statement like that with a straight face you're utterly unqualified to express an opinion on the subject of what is or isn't UNIX.
I don't really like Word for Mac 2004, but, frankly, what else is there?
If I had a choice between writing a document in Word and writing it in a 1970's line editor with ad-hoc markup using dot commands and macros, I'd fire up EDT/SOS/TECO/ED in a minute.
Gawd Word is horrible. It knows about no text object larger than a paragraph, and no layout object larger than a table. Everything else, including chapters, sections, lists, and captions, are built out of gluing "this paragraph" and "next paragraph" styles together. Even RUNOFF did better than that.
Compared to Windows, where half the system is built around a mechanism designed specifically to let remote sites run unsandboxed code on your system without your request and often without your even being aware of it?
The sad thing is that IE and Active X sets such a low standard for security that 10 year old sloppy programming still puts OS X light-years ahead of Windows.
4. Macs are inherently more secure (which is likely, but not proven because of 1-3).
Macs don't have ActiveX.
ActiveX and the way ActiveX and Internet Explorer are entwined with the desktop and applications like incestuous siamese twins everywhere Microsoft could possibly wedge them together.
Take those out of Windows and the majority of the easily exploitable security holes vanish. I proved that by convincing our local management back in 1997 to ban IE, Outlook, any other application that used the Microsoft HTML control on untrusted data... and we were the only part of our company that didn't get hit by any of the big Windows viruses and worms that flooded the rest of the sites. But every new version of Windows makes it harder and harder to track down and block every last Active Infected application...
Macs don't have anything like that exposure. Oh, theres some design flaws in Safari and the way it uses LaunchServices, but (a) you can turn that off by telling Safari not to open "safe" files after downloading, and (b) it's like the difference between "you forgot to wash your hands before dinner" and "running barefoot theough a 'Hot Ward' snogging Ebola patients".
Dell PC with Windows XP Home and 256M RAM - $350 Upgrade to XP Professional - $120 Norton Antivirus - $40 (Dell recommends Norton Security Center for $80) Upgrade to 512M RAM - $40 Windows XP Professional Install CD - $10 (!) CDRW+DVD - $50
Total - $610
Mac Mini with Mac OS X Tiger and 512M RAM - $500 Microsoft Optical Mouse - $15 (I like the Microsoft optical mouse, OK) USB keyboard - $5
Total - $520
The Dell has a faster CPU, the Mac has a better GPU, but I can add a better one to the Dell for another $40. And I could probably build a white box comparable to the Mac mini for close to $300 and run Free UNIX on it, and I probably would, but everyone talks about how popular Dell is so I started with them...
The Mac Tax is as small as it's ever been, at least at the low end.
Macintosh is not a replacement for a Linux machine
In what sense? Linux and Darwin are both first class implementations of UNIX, and by and large there's little to choose between them on the command line. You've got bash/tcsh/vim/emacs/gcc/apache/postgresql/whatever on both, and Darwinports or Fink instead of RPM or dpkg. For the desktop, OS X and Quartz/Aqua/Cocoa is a much more complete environment than Gnome or KDE and X11/Gtk/Qt/...
And, as other people have noted, Apple hardly mentions Linux.
That's what I said. But I was able to get a used G3 with a G4 upgrade card and 768M for under $200. It's not super-fast, but it did everything I needed to occasionally boot Windows for and let me shut off my space-heater PC for good. Later on I upgraded to a Mac mini and just keep the original G3 as a backup.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't believe me about Mac OS X's very much un-UNIX-like true heart? Try to add a static network mount.
...
/etc/fstab is a problem, I'm not sure you're ready to think about trying to write really portable code. Just go "it works on RHEL 3 and Solaris 10, so it's portable!" and give us all a laugh.
There is no standard way to add a static network mount on UNIX. Editing fstab? that's a BSDism. It's a COMMON BSDism, but there's UNIX boxes that don't even have an fstab.
All these sorts of issues make it crucial to test on Mac OS X
Err... you would consider it reasonable to not test on any popular system, exotic and mundane alike? What do you normally test on? Red Hat and Suse? Do you include Debian and maybe even Solaris?
Here, try Tru64, AIX, HPUX, and Unixware as well.
If your idea of UNIX is so narrow that not having to change ONE configuration file before using
The reason that Apple can't let go of the hardware side of the business and focus on selling OS X is simple.. they can't generate even a fraction of the revenue they currently generate otherwise.
Let's say they sold Mac OS X retail for the same general amount as Microsoft sells XP for, $200-$300 new (Home vs Pro), $100-$200 upgrade. Their OS X price is in the right range for an upgrade, and since it's only selling to people who had already bought Mac OS with their Macs it effectively *is* an upgrade.
So let's say they sell "Mac OS X for Macs Only" for $130, "Mac OS X86 for clones" for $260, and "Mac OS X86 Upgrade for clones" for $130. Let's say Apple's margin is the oft-reported 40% across the board. It probably isn't that consistent, but that's good enough for the back of my envelope.
Mac mini: $500. Apple's margin: 40%. Gross profit: $200 on $300 worth of materials.
Mac OS X86 retail for $260. Apple's margin: 95%. Gross profit: $247 on $13 worth of materials.
iMac: $1300. Apple's margin: 40%. Gross profit: $520 on $780 worth of materials.
So, they make about half as much per iMac sale, or about 25% more per mini sale. But they've only got $13 per box at risk, and it wouldn't take much increase in market share for them to be making MORE money even if they didn't sell any Macs. At any rate, they CERTAINLY don't need to make $10 for every $1 in revenue to stay profitable here... and you're ignoring the fact that they do have applications as well.
It's a completely different environment today. Back then the clones ONLY ran Mac OS. This caused two problems:
1. Apple was limited in what they could charge since the clone maker had to make all their money back from clone sales... they couldn't share the hardware development cost between Macs and PCs.
2. The primary competition for the clones was Apple themselves.
Today Apple could almost certainly get away with charging something comparable to Windows retail prices for licences... which is $70-$170 more than they sell OS X for Macs for... by treating the OS X for Macs as an "upgrade". That would be enough to offset the loss of revenue from the "Mac Tax" and then some. And today the primary competition for the clones would be Windows sales on the same hardware.
It depends on the terms Apple licensed Mac OS on. I don't know what they were, but if they weren't high enough to make up for the price difference the problem was that they weren't high enough.
They probably couldn't make them that high back then because they licensees had to make computers that ONLY ran Mac OS. This time around they could make generic computers and sell OS X as an option... so if Apple charged them an amount in the same range as their margin on the equivalent Mac they would experience less pushback.
Let's say they licensed OS X86 for... $300 retail box, $150 upgrade, and $100 + 10% of retail on bundles (up to $300). That would mean your $350 entry-level Dell would cost $495 with Mac OS X. Your $1300 Thinkpad would go up to $1530.
If the licensing fee DID make the cost of the machines guess which one people would buy?
Mac mini for $500, or a comparable PC I can add PCI and AGP cards to for $700?
iBook for $1300, or a Thinkpad with a keyboard that doesn't suck and two mouse buttons for $1500?
I'd take the Thinkpad.
Apple can keep their boutique boxes, I want their boutique OS.
My quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that iApple would have to sell Mac OS X for at least $100 more to make up for the revenue loss on a Mac mini or iBook, more on the iMac, Powerbook, or Powermac.
On the other hand, Microsoft sells XP Professional for $300 new, $200 upgrade. If Apple sold "OS X86" for $300, and kept the current price for OS X as an "upgrade" (because that's effectively what it is, unless you're one of the vanishingly few people upgrading from OS 9), they *would* come close to breaking even.
John Smedley: I was going to send you a Word doc, then remembered this was going to /. Including the text here.
/. in weeks.
Funniest thing I've read in
The problem with DRM, for me, is that it's impossible to have both strong software-based DRM and an open operating system *. The whole point to DRM is to give someone a copy of an encrypted message, AND the key to decrypt it, and to enforce a policy on when and how they can decrypt it.
The only way to make this happen is to:
1. Deny them access to the key except through your software, and
2. Deny them access to the output of your software except through controlled hardware.
The only ways to implement 1 are to obfuscate the mechanism by which the key is extracted from their software (which has proven to be unworkable), or to put the key in a physically secure repository in their computer AND deny them access to any parts of the operating system that mediate the communication between your software and the repository (which is incompatible with an open operating system).
The only way to implement 2 is to deny them access to any parts of the operating system that mediate the communication between your software and the controlled hardware. This is incompatible with an open operating system.
* By this I mean an operating system for which source code is available and this source code can be used to modify the behaviour of the OS, or one for which source code is unavailable but full documentation of all internal APIs is available in a form compatible with modifying the behaviour of the OS.
With the recent "Mighty Mouse" part of this need has been address.
You mean there's more than one person who uses this mouse and considers it in any sense useful?
I don't think you understood what it implies for BSD not to be listed on this patent application.
By building in some TPM scheme, they have a demonstratable attempt to protect their technology. This provides a method for legal actions for any offical vendor that attempts to reverse engineer the Tamper Resistant code.
Good news:
I don't really care about whether it's a stupid patent or not, since it's a stupid patent on something that has negative value... if they do patent this and discourage other people from doing the same stupid thing, that's actually a win
Bad news:
If they sell an OS that's got a boobytrap in it such that I can't fix a problem because I can't tamper with the OS, then that destroys a huge part of the value of Mac OS X for me. It means I can't use it for any work that actually matters to me, and Mac OS will join Windows in the category of "X-Terminal that runs a few local apps", and Windows does THAT cheaper and on much cheaper hardware.
Don't-care news:
If this is just a legal tactic and the actual scheme can be reliably bypassed for legitimate purposes, or at worst if they sell an OS that won't enable iTunes to play iTMS music or movies if I tamper with it, then that's a minor annoyance... biggest impact would be I don't buy anything more from the iTMS.
Mac mini: $500
Entry-level clone, roughly comparable: $300
Mac OS X retail: $130
XP Home retail: $200
XP Home upgrade: $100
XP Professional retail: $300
XP Professional upgrade: $200
What this means is that the retail Mac OS X price is a little more than Microsoft's upgrade price for XP Home, but the cost of buying it bundled is like buying XP Home or upgrading XP Pro... so if they sold an unbundled vetrsion that was priced like XP Pro, would they break even?
Apple shouldn't lock its OS at all. Why not? Of course, its entitled to protect its investment by product activation or DRM or whatever. Everyone else does.
... where I'm still running the original Windows 2000 install on my Windows box. Apple doesn't have to force me to at "license-key-point" to pay for those upgrades because Apple provides something of value to me.
If Apple implements a mechanism for locking OS X that is sufficiently effective that I can't override it if I need to, I won't buy it, or use it, or recommend it, as anything more than the same kind of "smart terminal" that I used Windows as... because one of the advantages of OS X over Windows is that it doesn't contain that kind of boobytrap in its core.
And if I need a separate computer anyway, running an OS that doesn't have a deliberately fragile kernel, that will be where all my important work goes on, why should I keep paying the Mac Tax on Apple hardware... however small that may become?
And I haven't even minded the money spent on buying new versions of OS X since I bought my Mac
PS: Thanks for the link to the web page. I know Simon and I'll enjoy getting on his case about it.
So obviously cell phones pose a valid threat to the venerable iPod.
Cellphone + iPod: Well, the iPod gives you at least 10 hours of music before you recharge and when it gets low you can still use your phone. The cellphone that can just about go a long weekend on standby between charges. Used to be longer, but they started adding more functions and making them smaller... but they seem to be hitting a wall, at least they've stopped getting worse. Maybe people are pushing back on the battery problem at last.
Cellphone playing MP3s: Hell, I gave up using my PDA to play MP3s because I was tired of not being able to get at my calendar because I was conserving my battery... and my PDA didn't have to run a radio transceiver full time. I can't see how this could ever have seemed like a good idea to anyone who really needed to use their phone as a phone.
the fact that you are a BSD guy is relevant to your judgement
I'm not "a BSD guy", I happened to be at Berkeley when BSD was gelling and did some work on it... then I didn't touch a BSD system for over ten years until 386BSD came around: I've probably still got more hours on System III/V and Xenix than on BSD, and my AT&T UNIX PC runs System V. I actually *liked* Microsoft Xenix and OpenNET. Regulus was a System V clone. Lanetix was based on a kernel modelled after VMS.
But, whatever, you have a real narrow view of UNIX and I reckon that all that's going to happen if we continue this discussion is you're gonna nail that view down like a stake and not budge from the spot. Ciao.
Ah, I see, your statements are not surprising given that your experience is mainly with bastardizations of UNIX and with BSD;
Oh, god. You're actually trying to tell me that broad experience with a wide variety of operating systems and implementations of UNIX is a bad thing?
Hey, why don't you go have a look at what DMR wrote about what USG did to streams in System V before you go ranting about "bastardised UNIX". If you want a UNIX system that fits the "creator's vision", you need to get rid of System V streams, System V shared memory and IPC, and TLI. You can keep sockets, but only if you move the endpoints into the filesystem. Oh, and you better do something painful and terminal to glibc.
For that matter, go have a look at what DMR's actually been doing for the past decade or two... if your UNIX doesn't come with an Aleph compiler, the 8.5 Window System, and have native Unicode support at every level you really shouldn't be rattling on about what "the UNIX creators" thought.
BSD is still reasonably considered UNIX, but it's not canonical
And Linux is? Oh god, the irony.
Me, I consider Linux an implementation of UNIX. Have since it wasn't much more than a rumor. What side of that debate were you on in 1993?
Lack of shortcut keys.
I do miss the superb keyboard navigation on Windows, though I wish it was as configurable as the keyboard navigation on OSX. On the other hand I wish OSX had a real input manager that let you control all these magic key bindings from one place with one user interface... because there's too many programs (including Apple's own) that excessively restrict how you can bind these hotkeys.
"alt doesn't select menu 'feature'"
System Preferences -> Keyboard and Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Keyboard Navigation -> Focus on Menu -> "^F2"
It feels like a Carbon app.
I would be staggered to find that it wasn't. It would have required a complete rewrite from scratch to make it Cocoa.
I started using, developing for, and managing, UNIX with Research V6, 2.8BSD, and 4.1BSD, and have been involved in it ever since on every major workstation and server,
... and I can tell you with 30 years experience with UNIX, Darwin is pretty damn mainstream UNIX.
Big deal.
I was at Berkeley when 2.8 and 4.1 were in development, and contributed code to some of those tapes. I've been involved in UNIX on platforms most people have never heard of, I still have a PDP-11, an AT&T UNIX PC, a NeXTstation, and a Mac SE/30 running Apple's first UNIX. I've used Minix, Lanetix, Regulus, and implemented UNIX tools on top of RSX-11 and VMS. I was one of the early 386BSD patchkit developers, and was one of the early defenders of the argument that "Linux *is* UNIX" back when that was controversial. Blah blah blah...
and I can tell you from nearly 30 years experience with UNIX: OS X is not UNIX, not even close.
Darwin is not an implementation of UNIX
Normally I'd spend the next quarter of an hour explaining exactly why you're wrong about this, and go on to explain how X11 isn't actually a UNIX window system, and how Darwin has more in common with traditional UNIX than Linux does, and so on.
But I'm tired of going over the same territory with kids who have absolutely no clue of what UNIX is or where it came from, so I'll just say that if you can really make a statement like that with a straight face you're utterly unqualified to express an opinion on the subject of what is or isn't UNIX.
I don't really like Word for Mac 2004, but, frankly, what else is there?
If I had a choice between writing a document in Word and writing it in a 1970's line editor with ad-hoc markup using dot commands and macros, I'd fire up EDT/SOS/TECO/ED in a minute.
Gawd Word is horrible. It knows about no text object larger than a paragraph, and no layout object larger than a table. Everything else, including chapters, sections, lists, and captions, are built out of gluing "this paragraph" and "next paragraph" styles together. Even RUNOFF did better than that.
Secure? Not by my reckoning.
Compared to Windows, where half the system is built around a mechanism designed specifically to let remote sites run unsandboxed code on your system without your request and often without your even being aware of it?
The sad thing is that IE and Active X sets such a low standard for security that 10 year old sloppy programming still puts OS X light-years ahead of Windows.
4. Macs are inherently more secure (which is likely, but not proven because of 1-3).
Macs don't have ActiveX.
ActiveX and the way ActiveX and Internet Explorer are entwined with the desktop and applications like incestuous siamese twins everywhere Microsoft could possibly wedge them together.
Take those out of Windows and the majority of the easily exploitable security holes vanish. I proved that by convincing our local management back in 1997 to ban IE, Outlook, any other application that used the Microsoft HTML control on untrusted data... and we were the only part of our company that didn't get hit by any of the big Windows viruses and worms that flooded the rest of the sites. But every new version of Windows makes it harder and harder to track down and block every last Active Infected application...
Macs don't have anything like that exposure. Oh, theres some design flaws in Safari and the way it uses LaunchServices, but (a) you can turn that off by telling Safari not to open "safe" files after downloading, and (b) it's like the difference between "you forgot to wash your hands before dinner" and "running barefoot theough a 'Hot Ward' snogging Ebola patients".
Dell PC with Windows XP Home and 256M RAM - $350
Upgrade to XP Professional - $120
Norton Antivirus - $40 (Dell recommends Norton Security Center for $80)
Upgrade to 512M RAM - $40
Windows XP Professional Install CD - $10 (!)
CDRW+DVD - $50
Total - $610
Mac Mini with Mac OS X Tiger and 512M RAM - $500
Microsoft Optical Mouse - $15 (I like the Microsoft optical mouse, OK)
USB keyboard - $5
Total - $520
The Dell has a faster CPU, the Mac has a better GPU, but I can add a better one to the Dell for another $40. And I could probably build a white box comparable to the Mac mini for close to $300 and run Free UNIX on it, and I probably would, but everyone talks about how popular Dell is so I started with them...
The Mac Tax is as small as it's ever been, at least at the low end.
Macintosh is not a replacement for a Linux machine
r on both, and Darwinports or Fink instead of RPM or dpkg. For the desktop, OS X and Quartz/Aqua/Cocoa is a much more complete environment than Gnome or KDE and X11/Gtk/Qt/...
In what sense? Linux and Darwin are both first class implementations of UNIX, and by and large there's little to choose between them on the command line. You've got bash/tcsh/vim/emacs/gcc/apache/postgresql/whateve
And, as other people have noted, Apple hardly mentions Linux.
...if it weren't for the cost.
That's what I said. But I was able to get a used G3 with a G4 upgrade card and 768M for under $200. It's not super-fast, but it did everything I needed to occasionally boot Windows for and let me shut off my space-heater PC for good. Later on I upgraded to a Mac mini and just keep the original G3 as a backup.