That's just FUD. Linux generally installs more easily on Macs because the hardware set is much more limited. There are a couple advantages to a closed architecture, and that's one of 'em.
Apple does make real computers too you know. I'm using a Power Mac G3 right now. Looks great, fast, and it's the easiest case to open and work in I've ever seen. Go here.
Apple is not calling Mac OS 9 Mac OS 9 in an attempt to take advantage of Microware's marketing. eMachines is making the eOne look like the iMac to take advantage of Apple's marketing. eMachines actually admitted this.
As for calling Mac OS 9 Mac OS X, that's a bad idea. Mac OS X isn't even really Mac OS anymore. It's Apple's big new next generation OS that has more in common with *BSD than Mac OS.
It would be a marketing mess to have to change it's name. Apple could call Mac OS 9 Mac OS 8.99999 or something though:-)
The original Macintosh was an all-in-one, in 1984, as was the Lisa, which Apple shipped in '83. Many of Apple's consumer and education systems throughout the years have been all-in-ones.
Given that the API of choice for developing software for Mac OS X is NeXT's API...
Apple is changing around some stuff, (dropping DPS for Quartz, for example) but it will all be _very_ interesting. Apple didn't just buy NeXT for kicks you know. And lots of the Mac OS X team is composed of the very same team that brought you NeXTStep.
I'm a Mac user (not zealot), and I don't agree with much of that. There was a period of a few years when Apple totally sucked, and had I been shopping for a new computer during that time, it wouldn't have been from Apple. But the company has really turned around. Product quality is much better than it was during that period, prices are down (although still rather high), Apple's Open Source efforts are impressive for a company that's as closed as Apple usually is (although if they can find a way to open the platform without going under I hope they do it).
Mac OS's underpinnings suck, but if Apple delivers with Mac OS X it'll really be the best OS out there. A Unix with an interface done by the folks who brought you Mac OS and NeXTStep. It gets me really frustrated they won't offer it for x86, because this is something that could really screw MS (I suspect MS had something to do with Apple's decision to drop the planned x86 version).
Sure Apple isn't perfect (far from it), but I don't understand the hate people have for Apple. The Mac is a choice, and isn't choice good? Nobody is making you use one. Chances are you aren't forced to use a Mac at work like you are with a Wintel machine.
As for the support issue, well, no unlimited free tech support sucks, but there are a few of points here:
1) You get a card good for a year of tech support when you buy a computer (I think it's a year).
2) It's a Mac. If you've used one for more than a couple of years you don't need tech support. There isn't much that can go wrong that you can't fix unless it's hardware. And it doesn't usually require reinstalling the OS (and when you do reinstall the OS none of your apps break like in Windows).
3) You know when you call tech support and hear them typing away? They're looking for things in their support database of course. Apple has it's entire internal support database online at http://til.apple.com. This means that you can likely figure out anything tech support people can, and faster since you're sitting at the computer.
4) Tech support people get paid quite a bit.
Mostly, it's much worse for new users than folks like us.
I don't use the Mac because I like Apple (does anyone?), I use the Mac because I find that with my needs, I'm more productive with it than with anything else. If that ever changes, I'll drop Apple overnight.
As for the iMac issue, it should be noted that Apple isn't suing just any company that makes colored computer cases. Apple is only going after the ones that make rounded, all-in-one, blue and white, translucent computers targeted at new users. If you don't think Apple should have some rights to this idea, tell me how many rounded, all-in-one, blue and white, translucent computers targeted at new users you saw before the iMac.
Re:No X -- we need a media-savvy, compositing GUI
on
Is X The Future?
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· Score: 1
Quartz looks like it will be truly amazing. Only problem is it almost certainly won't support remote display. Not a big deal for most users, but it would be nice to have. Other than that it looks like it'll be years ahead of anything else out there.
The only info I can find online about it is this which is mostly just marketing hype, but from demos Apple gave at WWDC in January it looks like it'll be amazing.
Linux/Unix in general could really use a replacement for X. I believe the OSS community can put together something better than Quartz if people will just admit that X is broken first.
Re:HERE COME DA BLOAT! HERE COME DA BLOAT!
on
The Future of GNOME
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· Score: 1
Which is the entire point of the OLE-like stuff in question! It lets you use a separate spreadsheet, word processor, graphics program, etc, and still combine different things in one document rather than forcing you to use one giant app that does everything to make documents containing different types of data.
It's not quite on the level of using piping to tie together tiny apps, but such tricks are hard to pull with GUIs.
If you look at it from a real user interface standpoint rather than a personal preference standpoint Mac OS does much better than Windows, and just about everything else out there. That doesn't mean you or anyone else has to like it of course, it just means it follows more of the rules for good UI.
Are there any really UI-oriented people working on GNOME? It seems to be it could benefit greatly from this. Trying to match the Windows interface is not a good goal for the OSS community, because frankly Windows isn't very good at UI.
Since you don't have to worry about the bottom line, the OSS community is an ideal environment to test out new ideas and do things that haven't been done before, and it would be especially great to see that happening in the UI department as Linux tries to get a hold in the desktop market. To the typical user UI is much more important than buzzword compliance. If Linux can be made easier to use than Windows, Microsoft will truly have something to fear on the desktop.
That's REALLY stretching it. What are you going to do? Post a hacked/pirated version of Mac OS X that runs on a different kernel with different hardware support? That just ain't gonna fly.
No. Just post a kernal that boots on these machines and maybe instructions on how to get Mac OS X Server installed on them. This would likely require doing something like installing it on an Apple machine and copying files over, but unless Apple specifically doesn't something to prevent it I don't see why it wouldn't work.
Plus, what's the point? One of the key features of Apple's offerings is hardware compatibility simplicity. By intruducing mutant hardware, you've erased that advantage.
We're not talking about a commercial-like solution here. We're talking about something for hackers. Besides, it might not be such a mess with kernel source available. You should be able to get it to support the hardware just as well as Linux does.
333? The iMac is not the only computer Apple makes. Apple's "pro" machines are up to 450MHz (yes, with 100MHz system buses). A 450 MHz G3 is about on par with a PIII/550. My G3/400 runs Quake3Test quite well. And Apple's "pro" laptops are up to 400MHz (same version of the chip as the desktop machines), *and* get 5 hours of battery life off a single battery.
Apple's "twice as fast" claims are a joke, but most companies do that kind of thing. MS calls NT "the most powerful network operating system in the world", for example.
And even if the current Mac OS won't run (and it might not: there is still a ROM, it's flashable and contains very little/no OS code, but it does contain some custom stuff I bet), Mac OS 10 Server's (and Mac OS X Workstation when it ships) entire core is open sourced under the APSL, so I'd imagine it wouldn't be all that hard to get it running and install the higher levels of the OS on it.
Of course Apple might always do something to prevent the higher levels of the OS from working on non-Apple hardware, but Steve Jobs *did* say that Apple might bring back cloning if it could find a way to do it without killing it's profits.
It's simply impossible to disprove Creationism because it goes along with the idea that God is omniscient. Carbon dating proves that the universe is much more than several thousand years old, as does the fact that we can see the light from objects billions of light years out, but all this evidence can be dismissed by someone who believes in an omniscient God. I've heard the argument that the reason we can see light from more than a few thousand light years away is that God created the light in transit. There is simply no way to disprove such things, so you must apply Occam's(sp?) Razor. It's much simpler to conclude that we can use carbon dating to show that things are millions of years old and we can see light from billions of light years away because the Universe is actually that old, rather than that is was created by some omniscient being with the objective of tricking us into believing it is that old.
I am dreaming the entire Universe. None of it is real. Prove to me that isn't true. There's no way you can. It's the same thing, but IMO far more likely than Creationism.
Besides which, Creationism explains nothing at all. If God created the Universe and life, where did God come from?
No. The POWER chips (it stands for something, though I forget what at the moment) are NOT PowerPC chips. The POWER chips are big 64 bit chips for heavy iron. The PowerPC chip is a 32 bit chip based on the POWER architecture and scaled down for use in personal computers. The POWER3 could run 32 bit PPC binaries I believe, so I'd expect the POWER4 can do it as well.
An iMac. MS is probably running their test server of some big Xeon iron. I just think it would be funny to show that Apple's little jelly bean computer running Linux makes a better server than a $7000 Xeon box running W2K;-)
An iBook would be even better, but I don't think anyone outside of Apple has one yet.
It's totally gone now. They removed in the last 10 minutes actually. I was just about to check how many people where on the list when it happened too. Damn.
Hey, LinuxPPC guys, how about doing an "attempted cracks" counter?
Some companies actually used USB to *replace* old interfaces (it's real intent; to simplify things rather than just make them more complex with Yet Another Interface). Actually, I shouldn't say "some". Apple is the only company I know of that's done this. Consequently Linux isn't of much use to me on my G3 tower. It supports the internal modems available for this thing, but I too have always liked external modems, so I opted for one of those instead.
Does the PPC version of Linux support USB modems? That's the only reason I'm not running it on my G3 yet. Oh well. I'll have ADSL in a couple of months anyway (if I can believe Bell Atlantic).
I've been without Linux since my old Mac clone broke!
According to someone at MacWorld, an Apple rep says the easy-to-grip plastics being used in the iBook look best in those colors. Other colors may be introduced later. (Note: this is info from Usenet, I'm sure everyone knows what that means.)
Also, maybe it's just me, but I find that tangerine works with the iBook. I don't like the tangerine iMacs, but I like the tangerine iBook more than the blueberry, and blueberry is my favorite iMac color.
Because Apple is using Darwin as the core of it's next-generation (or is that NeXT-generation?;-)) "real" OS (i.e. commercial OS that'll be preinstalled on Macs), so the average Mac user can benefit from the contributions of the OSS community, while the OSS community benefits from Apple's work.
And also, I ran Mk (back when it was the only Linux implementation on the Mac), and it sucked . Sure Darwin doesn't run on NuBus machines or even some non-G3 PCI machines (it does run on most non-G3 PCI machines however, and so does Mac OS 10 Server*, in spite of Apple's claims), but it's Open Source, so if anybody cares enough that can change.
*Stop the insanity Apple! Use numbers instead of Roman numerals before you confuse even more people!
The "RealityMonsterTM multisubsystem" in the high-end SGI Onxy2 systems renders "up to 210 million polygons per second and [has a] 7.2 gigapixels per second fill rate", although the high-end Onyx2 might not fit in your door. Go here, and bring LOTS of cash
Slashdot Mirror
(which makes it much easier to install Linux)
That's just FUD. Linux generally installs more easily on Macs because the hardware set is much more limited. There are a couple advantages to a closed architecture, and that's one of 'em.
Apple does make real computers too you know. I'm using a Power Mac G3 right now. Looks great, fast, and it's the easiest case to open and work in I've ever seen. Go here.
Runs Linux too. (Actually, so does the iMac)
Apple is not calling Mac OS 9 Mac OS 9 in an attempt to take advantage of Microware's marketing. eMachines is making the eOne look like the iMac to take advantage of Apple's marketing. eMachines actually admitted this.
:-)
As for calling Mac OS 9 Mac OS X, that's a bad idea. Mac OS X isn't even really Mac OS anymore. It's Apple's big new next generation OS that has more in common with *BSD than Mac OS.
It would be a marketing mess to have to change it's name. Apple could call Mac OS 9 Mac OS 8.99999 or something though
The original Macintosh was an all-in-one, in 1984, as was the Lisa, which Apple shipped in '83. Many of Apple's consumer and education systems throughout the years have been all-in-ones.
Given that the API of choice for developing software for Mac OS X is NeXT's API...
Apple is changing around some stuff, (dropping DPS for Quartz, for example) but it will all be _very_ interesting. Apple didn't just buy NeXT for kicks you know. And lots of the Mac OS X team is composed of the very same team that brought you NeXTStep.
I'm a Mac user (not zealot), and I don't agree with much of that. There was a period of a few years when Apple totally sucked, and had I been shopping for a new computer during that time, it wouldn't have been from Apple. But the company has really turned around. Product quality is much better than it was during that period, prices are down (although still rather high), Apple's Open Source efforts are impressive for a company that's as closed as Apple usually is (although if they can find a way to open the platform without going under I hope they do it).
Mac OS's underpinnings suck, but if Apple delivers with Mac OS X it'll really be the best OS out there. A Unix with an interface done by the folks who brought you Mac OS and NeXTStep. It gets me really frustrated they won't offer it for x86, because this is something that could really screw MS (I suspect MS had something to do with Apple's decision to drop the planned x86 version).
Sure Apple isn't perfect (far from it), but I don't understand the hate people have for Apple. The Mac is a choice, and isn't choice good? Nobody is making you use one. Chances are you aren't forced to use a Mac at work like you are with a Wintel machine.
As for the support issue, well, no unlimited free tech support sucks, but there are a few of points here:
1) You get a card good for a year of tech support when you buy a computer (I think it's a year).
2) It's a Mac. If you've used one for more than a couple of years you don't need tech support. There isn't much that can go wrong that you can't fix unless it's hardware. And it doesn't usually require reinstalling the OS (and when you do reinstall the OS none of your apps break like in Windows).
3) You know when you call tech support and hear them typing away? They're looking for things in their support database of course. Apple has it's entire internal support database online at http://til.apple.com. This means that you can likely figure out anything tech support people can, and faster since you're sitting at the computer.
4) Tech support people get paid quite a bit.
Mostly, it's much worse for new users than folks like us.
I don't use the Mac because I like Apple (does anyone?), I use the Mac because I find that with my needs, I'm more productive with it than with anything else. If that ever changes, I'll drop Apple overnight.
As for the iMac issue, it should be noted that Apple isn't suing just any company that makes colored computer cases. Apple is only going after the ones that make rounded, all-in-one, blue and white, translucent computers targeted at new users. If you don't think Apple should have some rights to this idea, tell me how many rounded, all-in-one, blue and white, translucent computers targeted at new users you saw before the iMac.
Quartz looks like it will be truly amazing. Only problem is it almost certainly won't support remote display. Not a big deal for most users, but it would be nice to have. Other than that it looks like it'll be years ahead of anything else out there.
The only info I can find online about it is this which is mostly just marketing hype, but from demos Apple gave at WWDC in January it looks like it'll be amazing.
Linux/Unix in general could really use a replacement for X. I believe the OSS community can put together something better than Quartz if people will just admit that X is broken first.
Which is the entire point of the OLE-like stuff in question! It lets you use a separate spreadsheet, word processor, graphics program, etc, and still combine different things in one document rather than forcing you to use one giant app that does everything to make documents containing different types of data.
It's not quite on the level of using piping to tie together tiny apps, but such tricks are hard to pull with GUIs.
If you look at it from a real user interface standpoint rather than a personal preference standpoint Mac OS does much better than Windows, and just about everything else out there. That doesn't mean you or anyone else has to like it of course, it just means it follows more of the rules for good UI.
Are there any really UI-oriented people working on GNOME? It seems to be it could benefit greatly from this. Trying to match the Windows interface is not a good goal for the OSS community, because frankly Windows isn't very good at UI.
Since you don't have to worry about the bottom line, the OSS community is an ideal environment to test out new ideas and do things that haven't been done before, and it would be especially great to see that happening in the UI department as Linux tries to get a hold in the desktop market. To the typical user UI is much more important than buzzword compliance. If Linux can be made easier to use than Windows, Microsoft will truly have something to fear on the desktop.
Fully powered flight is not allowed but is seems ground effect is.
That's REALLY stretching it. What are you going to do? Post a hacked/pirated version of Mac OS X that runs on a different kernel with different hardware support? That just ain't gonna fly.
No. Just post a kernal that boots on these machines and maybe instructions on how to get Mac OS X Server installed on them. This would likely require doing something like installing it on an Apple machine and copying files over, but unless Apple specifically doesn't something to prevent it I don't see why it wouldn't work.
Plus, what's the point? One of the key features of Apple's offerings is hardware compatibility simplicity. By intruducing mutant hardware, you've erased that advantage.
We're not talking about a commercial-like solution here. We're talking about something for hackers. Besides, it might not be such a mess with kernel source available. You should be able to get it to support the hardware just as well as Linux does.
333? The iMac is not the only computer Apple makes. Apple's "pro" machines are up to 450MHz (yes, with 100MHz system buses). A 450 MHz G3 is about on par with a PIII/550. My G3/400 runs Quake3Test quite well. And Apple's "pro" laptops are up to 400MHz (same version of the chip as the desktop machines), *and* get 5 hours of battery life off a single battery.
Apple's "twice as fast" claims are a joke, but most companies do that kind of thing. MS calls NT "the most powerful network operating system in the world", for example.
AGP is due this fall (rumored to be 4x).
And even if the current Mac OS won't run (and it might not: there is still a ROM, it's flashable and contains very little/no OS code, but it does contain some custom stuff I bet), Mac OS 10 Server's (and Mac OS X Workstation when it ships) entire core is open sourced under the APSL, so I'd imagine it wouldn't be all that hard to get it running and install the higher levels of the OS on it.
Of course Apple might always do something to prevent the higher levels of the OS from working on non-Apple hardware, but Steve Jobs *did* say that Apple might bring back cloning if it could find a way to do it without killing it's profits.
It's simply impossible to disprove Creationism because it goes along with the idea that God is omniscient. Carbon dating proves that the universe is much more than several thousand years old, as does the fact that we can see the light from objects billions of light years out, but all this evidence can be dismissed by someone who believes in an omniscient God. I've heard the argument that the reason we can see light from more than a few thousand light years away is that God created the light in transit. There is simply no way to disprove such things, so you must apply Occam's(sp?) Razor. It's much simpler to conclude that we can use carbon dating to show that things are millions of years old and we can see light from billions of light years away because the Universe is actually that old, rather than that is was created by some omniscient being with the objective of tricking us into believing it is that old.
I am dreaming the entire Universe. None of it is real. Prove to me that isn't true. There's no way you can. It's the same thing, but IMO far more likely than Creationism.
Besides which, Creationism explains nothing at all. If God created the Universe and life, where did God come from?
Like maybe we are a lost colony from another planet? that one makes way more sense than evolution.
Actually, it doesn't solve anything. It just changes the question from "how did life develop on Earth?" to "how did life develop on Planet X?".
That doesn't help much.
No. The POWER chips (it stands for something, though I forget what at the moment) are NOT PowerPC chips. The POWER chips are big 64 bit chips for heavy iron. The PowerPC chip is a 32 bit chip based on the POWER architecture and scaled down for use in personal computers. The POWER3 could run 32 bit PPC binaries I believe, so I'd expect the POWER4 can do it as well.
The status page and the server are back up now. Here's the rundown for today:
---
Status
Current Status: UP
8/4/99 Events
6:58pm - IIS stopped sending pages. Restarted service.
6:00pm - Morning crash dump due to known bug
4:40pm - Machine back up, network down due to recabling
9:42am - Crash dump - still investigating causes
---
An iMac. MS is probably running their test server of some big Xeon iron. I just think it would be funny to show that Apple's little jelly bean computer running Linux makes a better server than a $7000 Xeon box running W2K ;-)
An iBook would be even better, but I don't think anyone outside of Apple has one yet.
It's totally gone now. They removed in the last 10 minutes actually. I was just about to check how many people where on the list when it happened too. Damn.
Hey, LinuxPPC guys, how about doing an "attempted cracks" counter?
Some companies actually used USB to *replace* old interfaces (it's real intent; to simplify things rather than just make them more complex with Yet Another Interface). Actually, I shouldn't say "some". Apple is the only company I know of that's done this. Consequently Linux isn't of much use to me on my G3 tower. It supports the internal modems available for this thing, but I too have always liked external modems, so I opted for one of those instead.
Does the PPC version of Linux support USB modems? That's the only reason I'm not running it on my G3 yet. Oh well. I'll have ADSL in a couple of months anyway (if I can believe Bell Atlantic).
I've been without Linux since my old Mac clone broke!
According to someone at MacWorld, an Apple rep says the easy-to-grip plastics being used in the iBook look best in those colors. Other colors may be introduced later. (Note: this is info from Usenet, I'm sure everyone knows what that means.)
Also, maybe it's just me, but I find that tangerine works with the iBook. I don't like the tangerine iMacs, but I like the tangerine iBook more than the blueberry, and blueberry is my favorite iMac color.
Because Apple is using Darwin as the core of it's next-generation (or is that NeXT-generation? ;-)) "real" OS (i.e. commercial OS that'll be preinstalled on Macs), so the average Mac user can benefit from the contributions of the OSS community, while the OSS community benefits from Apple's work.
And also, I ran Mk (back when it was the only Linux implementation on the Mac), and it sucked . Sure Darwin doesn't run on NuBus machines or even some non-G3 PCI machines (it does run on most non-G3 PCI machines however, and so does Mac OS 10 Server*, in spite of Apple's claims), but it's Open Source, so if anybody cares enough that can change.
*Stop the insanity Apple! Use numbers instead of Roman numerals before you confuse even more people!
The "RealityMonsterTM multisubsystem" in the high-end SGI Onxy2 systems renders "up to 210 million polygons per second and [has a] 7.2 gigapixels per second fill rate", although the high-end Onyx2 might not fit in your door. Go here, and bring LOTS of cash
It's also good for M$ because that stock they bought is now worth 3-4 times as much.
Maybe that'll almost make up for the undisclosed sum M$ paid Apple to settle the patent disputes Apple was privately threatening to sue them over.