Linux: I'm a super-sexy, super-genious and all the girls should sleep with me.
Heh. Well, I do have a t-shirt that reads "Chicks dig UNIX".
At my job, this is actually true. There are many damn cute geek girls in this town anyway, and most do appreciate (Linux|BSD|!Windows) ubergeeks.
Hey, it can be hard to meet people! I don't use my geek status or OS choice to define myself (entirely), but it has sure helped me find people to spend non-computing time with. That includes real sex, for those of you who haven't looked up from the porn on your monitors in a few weeks.
That last was a joke, so don't get your (Thinkgeek) panties all in a knot.
And as far as the hardware debate, yea, Macs are more expensive.
I'm getting tired of this old chestnut. More expensive than what, exactly?
Yes, the retail cost of a new Mac is more than your average clone, or built-it-yerself project, but this is not where Apple is positioned.
When I decided to get a Mac to replace a Windows box to run commercial applications, I decided to do an accurate price compare with other high-end vendors. That means I only looked at higher-end Compaqs (or whatever they are now), IBM (when they sold desktops), and anything from Sony. I did a build-your-own run on dell.com, making sure to choose all the "extra" items that came standard on a new G4.
Plainly put, I found that a Mac was less than $500 (Canadian) in most cases.
If I was building a super-deluxe gaming box, I would have built my own Intel/AMD box (again) and been done with it. This would not have been an economy solution either, based on the numbers I racked up pricing out an AMD godbox.
Look, a modest off-the-shelf or built-to-order Intel/AMD box running Windows is probably good enough for most people. If you want or need anything more, however, any top of the line brand-name box is going to be siginficantly pricier. Apple is not alone in this.
The bottom line is that, for what I wanted a home computer to be (semi-pro music production, web development, modest amount of gaming, software development) a Mac fit my life perfectly. I get a commercially supported OS, standardized equipment and a deep well of user experience I can draw on.
And I don't have to use Windows. I get enough of that at work.
If you want to criticize the Mac platform, a better place to start is the lack of cheap or free software. There isn't the same culture of freeware as in the BSD or Linux world, and the commercial apps tend toward higher prices. I attribute this to market-share.
This is changing, however. Anyone who uses OS X (and who doesn't) has access to Fink for opensource love.
If it's fanatical to choose a platform that allows you the benefits of a commercially-supported platform with the pleasures of a nice UNIX GUI, then go ahead and call me a fanatic. I don't know from anything earlier than OS X, so cannot comment. People tend to get attached to their first user experience. Heck, I have a soft spot in my heart for the TRS-80 Model I and Northstar minis.
From my experience though, if you fairly compare a recent G4 with a recent offering from Sony, add the DVD-RW/CD-RW and Gigabit ethernet (ok, this last is a bit spurious -- who can use 1000 mbit devices to the fullest right now?) you'll find the price difference almost meaningless. Add a $500 tax for running Windows (that's only a dollar a crash), and the price ends up the same.
Whenever the "digital vs. film" debate turns up, I can't help but think about the "film vs. video" debate that went on in the 70's and 80's.
Maybe this has been mentioned already, but it seems to me that eventually these things sort themselves out. Film isn't the same as video. Obviously, the contrary is also true. Even though we only thought of the new media in terms of a previous type of media doesn't mean we should necessarily place them in the same category and assign them a rank.
Clearly filmmakers are now able to use film and video to get different effects to convey very different ideas. The news is much different now that we can have a "man in the street" with a video camera to catch the action -- something basically unheard of (at the same scale) in the old film-only days. There are countless other examples, I'm sure.
I have faith that eventually digital "film" will become it's own unique thing. It will become just another colour in the photographer's palette. We haven't even seen what the digital image people can do with digital cameras yet; this stuff is just too young right now.
Just as some photogs will eschew digital for "pure" film, I'm sure there will be many who take digital beyond film, into something else.
The question of where all these bits will be in a century or so has not really been answered. Even though many filmstocks (as well as print and art paper) are not designed to last "forever", you can choose to put your important stuff on better stock.
Digital data has a lot of advantages, but I wonder how well today's images/words/sounds will be preserved for future generations.
Note that I'm not saying this data will disappear in 50 years or longer, but that the deliberate and accidental archiving of "analog" data is reasonably well-known. I don't think anyone really knows the full long-term effects of aging on digital archival media. Well, IBM did a big study of magtape in the 70's and determined that it would last far less than they initially expected.
I'm primarily talking about the "accidental" archiving of media. A family photograph is not necessarily considered important historical documentation but, decades later, that is exactly what some family snaps are. The same goes for early film and print. Archaeologists have seen cases where examples of a culture's art and technology are much harder to come by than another culture simply because the media they used (e.g., unfired clay, papyrus &etc.) didn't stand the "test of time". This may not exactly be the same, but it is part of the same problem. The accidental storage of digital pictures and journals are the future's historical documents. How well will these media fare?
None of the media we currently use (magnetic or optical) is perfect, and the various subtrates used to create them are known to degrade with age. The trick might be how well we can recover data off of such media. Extracting the data of a flaky CD is a lot different than the well-known ways to get information off of an LP or 1/4 inch tape.
Of course, I haven't even mentioned the fact that many digital formats exists only to make the distribution of the data convenient. All those lossy MP3's, MPEGs and JPEGs out there imply that we may be losing data right now. Then again, no media is perfect. Analog media are lossy as hell, but we've had a lot of time to improve upon them, and we are so used to the distortion by now that it isn't as obvious (to me, anyway). Some media problems have even turned into artistic technique, such as over- or under-exposing film. Maybe I'm an old-timer, but I can't see compression artefacts in JPEGs being a useful artistic technique! Same with AM distortion in MP3's (shudder).
On a positive note, there is a lot of room for clever engineers in the future to figure this stuff out.
I couldn't figure out this use of the word "bog" from the context either.
I know it as a synonym for "maximally", "ultimately" or "absolutely" as in "bog-stupid". I also know it's used as a noun as a synonym for what we North Americans call the "bathroom". (e.g., "Where are the girls? Oh, they're gassing in the bog" [talking in the toilet])
It's interesting how anecdotal (but informed) evidence like this always seems to run from absolute bad to absolute good.
Back in the Good Old Days, I worked for an engineering firm that had a Northstar mini with a CP/M console. The console talked to the Northstar and made paper tapes that would be fed into CNC machines to make big steel widgets. It took 8-inch floppies. Other support boxes took 5.25-inch floppies.
At one point we started to have constant data failures on the Verbatim floppies we were using. Disks would just die, or would not take a write the first time. We kept throwing them out, and went through cases of them. Eventually we threw out the rest of the boxes of verbatim and switched to Dysan and the problems just went away.
Of course, I never used Verbatim again. I won't even use their optical media.
I now assume that this was just one of those truly random, "Estimated Mean Time Between Failures" issues, and not everyone was experiencing such a high failure rate.
I mean, I've been using the same two Western Digital drives for years now. Right now, one of my years-old 2Gb drives is in my firewall/webserver where it gets daily constant abuse. We've also used them at work, and they don't seem to fail more than the other brands we have.
Macs aren't necessarily about the chips inside. The G4's go fast enough for the tasks the box was intended to run. Macs are about the OS, and making sure the things you plug into the box work without a hundred install-reboot-blue screen cycles. Macs are about a lot of things, least of which is the chipset it is based on.
Sure, you can never have a fast enough chip, and Apple can choose whatever chipset they want to run Mac OS. Will it make a difference in terms of what makes a Mac, a Mac?
I assure you that no changes were made to the program, apart from a minimal fix of the bug.
This sounds reasonable. The launch speeds I see may have just been one of those things 10.2 improved that I hadn't noticed yet. Nice to have instant terminals, though.
Since Jaguar, I've done nothing but shamelessly gloat about how cool OS X is.
I'm "getting out" pretty regularly I think, but my experience is that most people I meet have little in the way of basic comprehension. Many folks I meet would be hard pressed to match the comprehension of my Palm (Pilot).
Where do you go when you "get out"? Maybe people are smarter there.
Except that there are a good number of apps that run only in native mode, or run better than when in classic. It
I use OS X almost exclusively, but do boot into OS9 to play Alpha Centauri. AC doesn't like to run in Classic from OS X -- the screen rendering screws up, and the mouse pointer is erratic.
Sure it's just a game, but what other apps are like this? What about legacy software that will never by OS X or Classic ready?
Apple should make a proper boot loader that boots whatever OS you want. It's just stupid that a box can't boot to whatever valid OS it can find. Limiting user choice is not what the new Apple was all about, I thought.
We have clearly entered the realm of "opinion" here. I'm definitely "pro user" (I've developed software on OS X at work, and use a Mac to make original music at home), yet I find Aqua a great GUI to work with.
My opinion: WinXP is not ready for prime-time on a semi-pro music production system. Mac OS X is the right GUI that gets out of my way to let me do what I need to do. YMMV.
God, I hope not. IMHO, C++ is just overkill for most of the native development on OS X. Then again, I am not a C++ fan.
Anyway, if the issue is Cocoa, then Apple would have to provide C++ Cocoa APIs, instead of Objective-C. That is, the language linkage would have to change, but the core API would be the same, so C++ wouldn't give you a win in this case.
Anyway, you still can code in C++ on OS X -- it's still gcc. The APIs are not C++ friendly, though, so you are limited to basic stuff, or recreating chunks of the Application Framework in C++ yourself.
I don't know about how Steve Jobs thinks, but the Cocoa APIs are pretty solid Model-View-Controller stuff -- pretty venerable and proven object technology.
I hate to say it, but we may be seeing "Application Darwinism" at work here.
I've been on the lookout for a fast cheap text (only) editor to do HTML development with, on OS X. Many of the apps I've tried are just too clunky for me to consider paying anything for them. I eventually went back to VIM, even though it lacks some basic Mac functionality (i.e., it isn't a true document-based app). Since my LCD for a text editor is vi, this isn't so much of a hardship. I don't suggest everyone run out and use it on a daily basis. It work for me, but as they say: "Closed course. Professional driver".
I took a look at Pepper for a day or two, and I found it a very odd app. It seemed to operate contrary to some OS X usage expectations, and it rendered any typeface I chose terribly. The interface just felt all wrong to me. It crashed enough that I simply considered it "beta" and moved on.
I have similar complaints about the much beloved (but not by me) BBEdit.
I'm not saying that any of these editors are necessarily bad. If you like it, by all means, use it. However, I don't think all the comments about Pepper on Version Tracker are necessarily spurious. It seems that Pepper didn't quite cut it for other OS X users, as well.
Having less variety of apps available to OS X is sad, and some people will probably miss Pepper (even if they didn't pay for it), but I can't help but think that if it was a little more of a killer app, it would have survived.
Most cable and DSL connections (where a good number of Windows boxes are connected to the "internet") are just big LANs. The ISP has to specifically filter out the NetBIOS-over-IP traffic to keep the LAN from being your "Network Neighbourhood".
I know my provider does, but I heard of at least one DSL provider that does not. If you peak at the traffic on such a segment you see a lot of broadcast and specific "are you here" packets destined for Windows boxes. I have a mixed private network behind a firewall. From the anecdotal evidence out there, it appears a good number of folks simply plug their Windows or Mac (which speaks Samba) inot the DSL/Cable router and go.
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Heh. Well, I do have a t-shirt that reads "Chicks dig UNIX".
At my job, this is actually true. There are many damn cute geek girls in this town anyway, and most do appreciate (Linux|BSD|!Windows) ubergeeks.
Hey, it can be hard to meet people! I don't use my geek status or OS choice to define myself (entirely), but it has sure helped me find people to spend non-computing time with. That includes real sex, for those of you who haven't looked up from the porn on your monitors in a few weeks.
That last was a joke, so don't get your (Thinkgeek) panties all in a knot.
I'm getting tired of this old chestnut. More expensive than what, exactly?
Yes, the retail cost of a new Mac is more than your average clone, or built-it-yerself project, but this is not where Apple is positioned.
When I decided to get a Mac to replace a Windows box to run commercial applications, I decided to do an accurate price compare with other high-end vendors. That means I only looked at higher-end Compaqs (or whatever they are now), IBM (when they sold desktops), and anything from Sony. I did a build-your-own run on dell.com, making sure to choose all the "extra" items that came standard on a new G4.
Plainly put, I found that a Mac was less than $500 (Canadian) in most cases.
If I was building a super-deluxe gaming box, I would have built my own Intel/AMD box (again) and been done with it. This would not have been an economy solution either, based on the numbers I racked up pricing out an AMD godbox.
Look, a modest off-the-shelf or built-to-order Intel/AMD box running Windows is probably good enough for most people. If you want or need anything more, however, any top of the line brand-name box is going to be siginficantly pricier. Apple is not alone in this.
The bottom line is that, for what I wanted a home computer to be (semi-pro music production, web development, modest amount of gaming, software development) a Mac fit my life perfectly. I get a commercially supported OS, standardized equipment and a deep well of user experience I can draw on.
And I don't have to use Windows. I get enough of that at work.
If you want to criticize the Mac platform, a better place to start is the lack of cheap or free software. There isn't the same culture of freeware as in the BSD or Linux world, and the commercial apps tend toward higher prices. I attribute this to market-share.
This is changing, however. Anyone who uses OS X (and who doesn't) has access to Fink for opensource love.
If it's fanatical to choose a platform that allows you the benefits of a commercially-supported platform with the pleasures of a nice UNIX GUI, then go ahead and call me a fanatic. I don't know from anything earlier than OS X, so cannot comment. People tend to get attached to their first user experience. Heck, I have a soft spot in my heart for the TRS-80 Model I and Northstar minis.
From my experience though, if you fairly compare a recent G4 with a recent offering from Sony, add the DVD-RW/CD-RW and Gigabit ethernet (ok, this last is a bit spurious -- who can use 1000 mbit devices to the fullest right now?) you'll find the price difference almost meaningless. Add a $500 tax for running Windows (that's only a dollar a crash), and the price ends up the same.
Mmmmm. Bacon.
Whenever the "digital vs. film" debate turns up, I can't help but think about the "film vs. video" debate that went on in the 70's and 80's.
Maybe this has been mentioned already, but it seems to me that eventually these things sort themselves out. Film isn't the same as video. Obviously, the contrary is also true. Even though we only thought of the new media in terms of a previous type of media doesn't mean we should necessarily place them in the same category and assign them a rank.
Clearly filmmakers are now able to use film and video to get different effects to convey very different ideas. The news is much different now that we can have a "man in the street" with a video camera to catch the action -- something basically unheard of (at the same scale) in the old film-only days. There are countless other examples, I'm sure.
I have faith that eventually digital "film" will become it's own unique thing. It will become just another colour in the photographer's palette. We haven't even seen what the digital image people can do with digital cameras yet; this stuff is just too young right now.
Just as some photogs will eschew digital for "pure" film, I'm sure there will be many who take digital beyond film, into something else.
The question of where all these bits will be in a century or so has not really been answered. Even though many filmstocks (as well as print and art paper) are not designed to last "forever", you can choose to put your important stuff on better stock.
Digital data has a lot of advantages, but I wonder how well today's images/words/sounds will be preserved for future generations.
Note that I'm not saying this data will disappear in 50 years or longer, but that the deliberate and accidental archiving of "analog" data is reasonably well-known. I don't think anyone really knows the full long-term effects of aging on digital archival media. Well, IBM did a big study of magtape in the 70's and determined that it would last far less than they initially expected.
I'm primarily talking about the "accidental" archiving of media. A family photograph is not necessarily considered important historical documentation but, decades later, that is exactly what some family snaps are. The same goes for early film and print. Archaeologists have seen cases where examples of a culture's art and technology are much harder to come by than another culture simply because the media they used (e.g., unfired clay, papyrus &etc.) didn't stand the "test of time". This may not exactly be the same, but it is part of the same problem. The accidental storage of digital pictures and journals are the future's historical documents. How well will these media fare?
None of the media we currently use (magnetic or optical) is perfect, and the various subtrates used to create them are known to degrade with age. The trick might be how well we can recover data off of such media. Extracting the data of a flaky CD is a lot different than the well-known ways to get information off of an LP or 1/4 inch tape.
Of course, I haven't even mentioned the fact that many digital formats exists only to make the distribution of the data convenient. All those lossy MP3's, MPEGs and JPEGs out there imply that we may be losing data right now. Then again, no media is perfect. Analog media are lossy as hell, but we've had a lot of time to improve upon them, and we are so used to the distortion by now that it isn't as obvious (to me, anyway). Some media problems have even turned into artistic technique, such as over- or under-exposing film. Maybe I'm an old-timer, but I can't see compression artefacts in JPEGs being a useful artistic technique! Same with AM distortion in MP3's (shudder).
On a positive note, there is a lot of room for clever engineers in the future to figure this stuff out.
I couldn't figure out this use of the word "bog" from the context either.
I know it as a synonym for "maximally", "ultimately" or "absolutely" as in "bog-stupid". I also know it's used as a noun as a synonym for what we North Americans call the "bathroom". (e.g., "Where are the girls? Oh, they're gassing in the bog" [talking in the toilet])
Not sure of the meaning in this case, though.
It's interesting how anecdotal (but informed) evidence like this always seems to run from absolute bad to absolute good.
Back in the Good Old Days, I worked for an engineering firm that had a Northstar mini with a CP/M console. The console talked to the Northstar and made paper tapes that would be fed into CNC machines to make big steel widgets. It took 8-inch floppies. Other support boxes took 5.25-inch floppies.
At one point we started to have constant data failures on the Verbatim floppies we were using. Disks would just die, or would not take a write the first time. We kept throwing them out, and went through cases of them. Eventually we threw out the rest of the boxes of verbatim and switched to Dysan and the problems just went away.
Of course, I never used Verbatim again. I won't even use their optical media.
I now assume that this was just one of those truly random, "Estimated Mean Time Between Failures" issues, and not everyone was experiencing such a high failure rate.
I mean, I've been using the same two Western Digital drives for years now. Right now, one of my years-old 2Gb drives is in my firewall/webserver where it gets daily constant abuse. We've also used them at work, and they don't seem to fail more than the other brands we have.
Macs aren't necessarily about the chips inside. The G4's go fast enough for the tasks the box was intended to run. Macs are about the OS, and making sure the things you plug into the box work without a hundred install-reboot-blue screen cycles. Macs are about a lot of things, least of which is the chipset it is based on.
Sure, you can never have a fast enough chip, and Apple can choose whatever chipset they want to run Mac OS. Will it make a difference in terms of what makes a Mac, a Mac?
I just don't see how.
Mmmmm. Made me think of the episode when the Queen Bee and her scantily-clad "Honeybees" tied up both our heroes, after drugging them.
I Never really understood why I found that episode so titillating until I became an adult.
We need more thinly-veiled light BDSM fantasies in our children's shows.
No, the post said "dumass" which is not a word. Neither is "dumbass". It's spelled "dumb-ass".
Look it up.
The irony of having a reasonable post being violently criticized for a typo with a reply full of spelling mistakes seems to be lost on you.
Using AIDS in a put-down is so 1983, dude.
But it's the History Channel ferchrissakes. Let's just all agree to refer to the History Channel, the Discovery Channel and TLC as "science lite".
There may have been facts in there somewhere, but they are well obscured by the hyperbole and breathless presentation.
From the is-it-irony-or-is-it-obscure-humour dept.
I'm assuming you mean "dumb-ass".
I'm also assuming you mean "Berkeley, CA" and not "berkley, ca".
This sounds reasonable. The launch speeds I see may have just been one of those things 10.2 improved that I hadn't noticed yet. Nice to have instant terminals, though.
Since Jaguar, I've done nothing but shamelessly gloat about how cool OS X is.
I concur. It launches for me in a single bounce. Cool.
If you don't stop that, I'll go blind.
I'm "getting out" pretty regularly I think, but my experience is that most people I meet have little in the way of basic comprehension. Many folks I meet would be hard pressed to match the comprehension of my Palm (Pilot).
Where do you go when you "get out"? Maybe people are smarter there.
Too bad: According to the map my old places on D'Arcy and Kensington Ave. would have been Wi-Dri.
Fortunately, my new digs are working on going wireless, and legally.
Except that there are a good number of apps that run only in native mode, or run better than when in classic. It
I use OS X almost exclusively, but do boot into OS9 to play Alpha Centauri. AC doesn't like to run in Classic from OS X -- the screen rendering screws up, and the mouse pointer is erratic.
Sure it's just a game, but what other apps are like this? What about legacy software that will never by OS X or Classic ready?
Apple should make a proper boot loader that boots whatever OS you want. It's just stupid that a box can't boot to whatever valid OS it can find. Limiting user choice is not what the new Apple was all about, I thought.
Thanks for the tip. I'll check it out.
We have clearly entered the realm of "opinion" here. I'm definitely "pro user" (I've developed software on OS X at work, and use a Mac to make original music at home), yet I find Aqua a great GUI to work with.
My opinion: WinXP is not ready for prime-time on a semi-pro music production system. Mac OS X is the right GUI that gets out of my way to let me do what I need to do. YMMV.
Anyway, if the issue is Cocoa, then Apple would have to provide C++ Cocoa APIs, instead of Objective-C. That is, the language linkage would have to change, but the core API would be the same, so C++ wouldn't give you a win in this case.
Anyway, you still can code in C++ on OS X -- it's still gcc. The APIs are not C++ friendly, though, so you are limited to basic stuff, or recreating chunks of the Application Framework in C++ yourself.
I don't know about how Steve Jobs thinks, but the Cocoa APIs are pretty solid Model-View-Controller stuff -- pretty venerable and proven object technology.
I hate to say it, but we may be seeing "Application Darwinism" at work here.
I've been on the lookout for a fast cheap text (only) editor to do HTML development with, on OS X. Many of the apps I've tried are just too clunky for me to consider paying anything for them. I eventually went back to VIM, even though it lacks some basic Mac functionality (i.e., it isn't a true document-based app). Since my LCD for a text editor is vi, this isn't so much of a hardship. I don't suggest everyone run out and use it on a daily basis. It work for me, but as they say: "Closed course. Professional driver".
I took a look at Pepper for a day or two, and I found it a very odd app. It seemed to operate contrary to some OS X usage expectations, and it rendered any typeface I chose terribly. The interface just felt all wrong to me. It crashed enough that I simply considered it "beta" and moved on.
I have similar complaints about the much beloved (but not by me) BBEdit.
I'm not saying that any of these editors are necessarily bad. If you like it, by all means, use it. However, I don't think all the comments about Pepper on Version Tracker are necessarily spurious. It seems that Pepper didn't quite cut it for other OS X users, as well.
Having less variety of apps available to OS X is sad, and some people will probably miss Pepper (even if they didn't pay for it), but I can't help but think that if it was a little more of a killer app, it would have survived.
I know my provider does, but I heard of at least one DSL provider that does not. If you peak at the traffic on such a segment you see a lot of broadcast and specific "are you here" packets destined for Windows boxes. I have a mixed private network behind a firewall. From the anecdotal evidence out there, it appears a good number of folks simply plug their Windows or Mac (which speaks Samba) inot the DSL/Cable router and go.