"First, those provisions are irrelevant since Apple is far from being a monopoly itself (and the case is far from over anyway)."
I didn't say that. I said they should lead by example.
And I'm saying that makes no sense. It doesn't make sense for Apple to follow provisions the states are trying to impose on Microsoft because Apple is not in the same position as MS. It doesn't make business sense for them to do so, and they can't abuse their non-existent monopoly by not doing so. Plus, as far as I was aware, they're not even directly involved in the MS case, so it's not like they're pushing to impose these things on MS without following them themselves (correct me if I'm wrong). Anyway, this is a different subject for another discussion...
"Apple has always been a company that wasn't afraid to drop old technology in order to get users to adopt newer, clearly superior technology. "
In other words, they force users to upgrade just like the evil Microsoft.
Neither Apple nor Microsoft is forcing anyone to upgrade (well, some might theorize that the registration in WinXP is laying the groundwork for MS to be able to do this, but that's all conspiracy theory at this point). My older Mac still runs OS 8.6 just like the day I installed it. Furthermore, as I said Apple is still supporting, and selling (with every new system) OS 9 for some time to come - they just aren't developing for it anymore and are encouraging third party developers to move on as well. Nothing is forcing them to do so. Even big bad MS only recently dropped Win95 support with the latest DirectX or somesuch - over 6 years after the product was released, an eternity in the computer world.
Of course Apple is going to encourage people to upgrade. It makes more money for them and provides more value for their customers. They aren't flipping a magical switch that causes OS 9 to cease functioning. You want a product that has improved features over what you're running today? Guess what, you have to upgrade. If you're happy with what you have, don't.
Anyway, I feel like we're arguing two different things, so I'm done here. Have a nice day.;-)
First, those provisions are irrelevant since Apple is far from being a monopoly itself (and the case is far from over anyway). Second, continuing to support OS 9 for developers would be bad in a couple of ways: it would use resources that Apple could otherwise devote to making OS X even better, and third-party developers would see this as a lack of direction from Apple. Should they write for OS 9? OS X? Both? Developers have had to put up with this somewhat for awhile now, but they knew that Apple would eventually drop OS 9, so they've had ample time to prepare.
Apple has always been a company that wasn't afraid to drop old technology in order to get users to adopt newer, clearly superior technology. They really understand that many users (especially those like your grandma who love the simplicity of a Mac) are unwilling to change unless absolutely forced to do so. Ultimately, all but a very few of those users, when migrated over to the superior new technology, will wonder how they ever managed to do anything with the old systems.
I don't think OS 9 is going away any time soon - it'll still be preinstalled on new Macs for some time, and it will likely live on in Classic for some time after Apple stops making it directly bootable on new machines. And there's nothing stopping anyone from running it exclusively on an existing machine.
Apple says "graphics professionals will appreciate the ability to input text via stylus instead of switching to the keyboard." It also says this will require an input tablet. I kind of assumed it would allow OCR of scanned images too, but maybe not. Too bad.
And to add to that, what extra support does it need from Apple? Xdarwin works great, and the people who are likely to need X11 apps on OS X will almost certainly know where to look for it.
I hate it when some systems add this to the default.cshrc/bashrc/whateverc. IMO, relying on such an alias is asking for trouble. What happens if you're on another machine that doesn't have that aliased? What if the alias didn't take effect (something bad in your.cshrc caused it to stop parsing before that)? I've seen people use this alias to get into the habit of typing 'rm *' and just saying N to the files they wanted to keep. Bad idea.
The intentions are good, but I think if you're playing with fire (doing things as root), you should be forced to be absolutely careful and type everything out just as you really meant it.
I don't speak for the previous poster, but I believe this is what he was getting at: You probably know someone who has a Mac. There is nothing stopping you from going over to your friend's house, signing up for an iTools account, and then using it to your heart's content from a PC. Your friend can invite all his friends to do the same, all at no extra charge. Sure, someone has to buy a Mac to get it done, but Apple does not charge any more per account. That was the only point. Whether you consider that "free" is another matter altogether.
Funny story. I was a Star Wars fan up until I saw Phantom Menace. I also had no girlfriend in all those years. The night I saw TPM, I went with this girl who was really cool. Well, the movie sucked and caused me to renounce all that is George Lucas, but I hooked up with the girl. We're getting married next month. And we won't be seeing AOTC (at least not in theaters - it may be worth putting on the Netflix queue, but we'll see).
It's not like they don't buy enough TV airtime anyway!
Personally, I think they don't. AMD, too. During the few primetime shows I sometimes watch, there will inevitably be at least 2 or 3 Intel ads. Often an MS ad too. I think I saw the new iMac ad once since it was announced 4 months ago. Can't recall ever seeing an ad for AMD on tv. Is it any wonder that MS/Intel continues to "win" the platform war?
As a fan of both Apple and AMD, I can't understand why they don't spend a few bucks and put more ads on tv. I don't know much about marketing, but it seems to me that this would nearly translate to an instant boost in sales for both. A lot of people I know have no clue who or what AMD is, and if they do, they assume it must be inferior because it isn't the Intel brand name they get shoved down their throats. Most of those same people haven't even seen or heard of the new iMac, let alone know anything about what Apple is up to these days and what they offer in terms of the whole digital hub thing. Many of them may not even realize Apple is still alive and kicking!
Yep, I do suck! Quite badly. Poke around my webpage listed above and you'll find some mp3s to prove it. Do a google search on the site if you can't manage to find them.
Irony? Nope. I just enjoy the heck out of it. I have no false pretense that I'm so great and therefore deserve an expensive guitar. No regrets on any of the purchases - they've brought me more than enough enjoyment to justify the expense. The only regret is the timing. It would have been a much smaller dent in my finances to purchase now than 5 years ago.
Thanks for the troll, though, I have now more fully experienced slashdot!;-)
Maybe so. But you'd be surprised at just how insufficiently educated most people are about personal finance.
Exactly. While the above is certainly not a good excuse, it's probably by far the most common reason people get into trouble financially. I'm definitely in that group.
The one thing I really wish I'd done differently was to learn more about personal finance, and more importantly, the consequences of poor financial management. I can't blame my parents - they always bugged me to save, don't spend so much, be smart, etc. I didn't listen when I was growing up, and because I had no real responsibility then, I saw no negative consequences. I spent my allowance like there was no tomorrow and enjoyed my youth.
I got out of college 6 years ago and landed a good job making nearly $40k. All of a sudden I had a hefty, steady income with lots to spare after splitting living expenses with a couple of roommates. I bought an expensive vehicle, a few nice guitars and music studio equipment, computer toys, went out to eat a lot, etc. My mentality at the time was basically that I was young, it was early in my life, and I'd have plenty of time to save later on. Plus, in 5 or 6 years I'd be making a lot more money and would have no trouble paying everything off. I never thought about saving for retirement, to buy a house, having a cushion for hard times, etc.
I suppose I've been lucky. I haven't gotten laid off or anything, so I've got it pretty good compared to many. But 6 years later my salary is almost exactly double what I started with, and I'm just now climbing out of credit card debt. I live in a small one bedroom apartment with two other people, drive the same vehicle and have no cushion. About 8 months ago I moved in here to save money and aggressively pay off my debt. I've managed to knock off about $12k, with another $4k to go. I'd be done by now if I didn't have a wedding in another month, but it'll be a couple months after that before I'm down to $0. Then we start saving for a cushion and a down payment on a house. We'll probably buy our first house in mid to late '03 depending on how things go.
About a year ago, I realized that if I had been just a little smarter with my money, I could already own that house. Not only that, but I could probably still own all the toys and gadgets I've bought, I just would have had to wait until I could afford them instead of buying them when I couldn't. A $3000 guitar is a much bigger deal when you make $40k than it is when you make $80k.
Back to the point... I really wish my high school or college had had a good course on personal finance. If I had really learned that being irresponsible early would have me paying for it years later, maybe I would have acted differently. Instead I just "winged it," as you say, and assumed everything would work out automatically. I figured I was ok as long as I always made at least the minimum payments on all my debts.
Stupid, but after reading this thread I'm glad to see I'm not alone.;-)
Sounds good! Hopefully the hotkeys are fairly configurable. Personally, I like Alt-1, Alt-2, etc, which is what I use with WindowMaker. Space.dock has been sitting in my dock for about 2 months and hasn't gotten any use simply because it requires mousing over there and using a context menu. Right now, it's easier to Cmd-Tab or just click on the app I want in the dock.
Alright, you've convinced me to investigate the hardware angle more than I already have.;-) I put it off due to the relative rarity of the problems, which makes it difficult to diagnose. It was easier to chalk up to a relatively new operating system...
This is straying slightly off-topic, so moderate accordingly if you wish... But does anyone know of any good utilities to really stress test the memory under OS X? I suppose I could grab something large like gnome from fink and see if I get any compile errors. But it would be nicer to have a utility specifically for this purpose. I'll go check versiontracker now...
Again, I have to wonder if you have a hardware problem. We have an iBook that came with a bad memory chip, and it
exhibited lots of wierd behavior that disappeared when we replaced the chip and re-installed the OS. Other than that, on a
half-dozen machines, we never see much weirdness (aside from the printing subsystem, which is horrible).
This is certainly a possibility. I've avoided trying to swap out memory chips or something because it's still relatively infrequent. In my experience, a hardware problem generally makes the whole machine very unstable - as in you're lucky to get through a few hours or a day without at least a few application crashes if not an OS crash. I'm not seeing that - just the occasional infrequent oddity or crash. I've had Linux crash on me more often than that on perfectly good hardware.;-) Besides, I'd hate to pull my 512meg memory chip and go back to 128 just to see if that's it. It'd probably take a few weeks to be sure with this infrequency, and that's painful!
Yeah. Especially since every other OS has one and only one installer! I'm so glad Linux has standardized on one installer for everything;P
Heh, fair enough. I just wish Apple had picked one (that allows non-admin users to easily assume temporary privileges for the install) and pushed it harder with developers.
4) a. Most things ARE hidden from most users, so unless you are running as root (which is NOT the default setup) you cant just fsck your computer up. The only time you should need to enter an admin password for installing stuff or changing locked configurations. (it asks for YOUR passwd if youre an admin, not roots passwd!)
I agree absolutely! I run as a regular user (not an admin, and certainly not root) just fine most of the time. The problem is those few applications that expect I'll be running as an admin (Quicken is a notorious offender I can think of off the top of my head - though a little poking around and chmod on the command line fixed that).
b. Installers are lame anyway... any good OSX app should be able to fit in one icon (.app wrapper) or folder in/Applications. Programs that do otherwise are usually just trying to be fancy;P
c. Why should you need to frequently run apps are root? Bad idea if you ask me;)
Agreed again! The problem with the drag-and-drop application bundles is that I don't have permission, under my normal account, to drag them to/Applications. (I can put them in my own ~/Applications folder but I usually want them available to all users) I guess what I'd really like is for Finder to automatically pop up and ask for an admin user/password when I try to drag something to a folder I don't have permission to modify. That would save the hassle of logging out, logging in as admin, dragging the application to install, logging out, logging back in as myself. I don't install things every day, but it's a pain when I have to do this. Again, I think the assumption is that most users will give their normal accounts admin privileges, so it's not an issue at all for them.
I'd love to say that I agree 100% with the ad's tagline, but I can't. Not yet, anyway. I love OS X and definitely rate it as the best overall OS I've ever used, but on the UNIX side, it still needs work.
First, there's stability. It's very good, orders of magnitude better than classic Mac OS, but still well behind most other UNIXes. In my group at work, we have a mix of about 25 IRIX and Solaris boxes. Of those, we get maybe one or two crashes a year due to memory parity errors. I have yet to crash my FreeBSD box at home after a year and a half. The Mac, since I got it 2 months ago, has crashed or locked up at least 4 times. Stock hardware, stock OS X install with the latest updates. Twice a month is great if you're used to Windows, but for UNIX, it stinks.
Flakiness/weirdness. Occasionally I'll type a command at the tcsh prompt and it will coredump for no reason. "ls" gets a bus error or something. Then it works fine after that. This certainly isn't every day, and it always seems to work the next time, but it's not indicative of a truly mature OS.
Administration. I realize that OS X has a lot of NeXTStep heritage, and therefore uses NetInfo instead of the more traditional UNIX administration mechanisms. Fine. But Apple, being the king of ease-of-use, needs to improve the administration abilities in OS X. Easy gui panels for everything - not just a few settings like IP address, users, etc. Do it like IRIX but even better. (I may have read somewhere that OS X Server has a lot of this stuff - maybe Apple wants people to buy that to get all the admin stuff. Fair enough)
The whole assumption that everyday users will run with admin privileges. As a seasoned UNIX veteran, I cringe at the very thought of running with any more than standard user privileges. Most things in OS X work just fine as a regular user, but some still assume you have admin privileges. Moreover, many third party applications have taken this attitude from Apple and practically refuse to work if run by a non-admin user. Quicken was a real ordeal to get working so both my wife and I could run it and update the same data file from our respective accounts.
Also, I wish there weren't so many different installers used by various apps. The standard one you get with Apple's development environment is nice in that it allows normal users to temporarily acquire admin privileges by entering a user/password. They all should do this, but I find myself logging out completely and logging back in as admin just to install some software.
Along these lines, it would also be nice to have an easier way to start gui apps as an admin - sort of a graphical sudo. Of course I can do something like sudo open/path/to/Finder.app or whatever but it's a pain.
Virtual memory. I don't know a lot of details about this, but from what I've read, there is a lot of room for improvement here. As I understand, OS X allocates swap space in 80 meg chunks as needed, in files on the filesystem (again, heritage from NeXTStep). I'm no expert, but it seems like a dedicated swap partition might be faster. Maybe not, though.
Performance. 10.1.x runs pretty well, but it still seems like there is room for improvement, even at the BSD level (of course Aqua can use more performance, but that's not exactly the UNIX layer anymore). Command-line utilities on my G4/733 still seem slower than the same ones on my Duron/750. I know Apple's advertising about the MHz myth is a bit misleading with highly optimized Photoshop filters, but still - isn't there some more optimization that can be done? GCC is nice and all, but my understanding is it's not that great at optimizing for PowerPC. Perhaps real performance gain could be had simply by improving compiler output.
Well, those are my completely non-expert opinions. Take them with a huge grain of salt. Hopefully Apple will improve on them in 10.2, along with some of the other issues I've noticed. Even so, I love this OS and I'm very excited to see how much better it can get!
Exactly what I was thinking. At 3 hours, the movie felt much faster than the book. A 5 hour cut seems about right to slow down the pace a bit and really provide a better feel for the months of passage between when the hobbits left the Shire and the breaking of the fellowship. Now, if they don't have enough good content filmed to make 5 hours without useless filler, then fine. 4 hours is great.
Perhaps they felt that 4 hours was about the limit to keep the interest of enough non-die-hard fans that the extended release would still be profitable. Or maybe they just don't have enough time in the schedule to add that much back in and still get the next 2 movies out on time... Could there be another super long special edition when all three movies are complete? Doubtful, but who knows...
Yep, same here. Lately Ebert's movie reviews have been the ones that I put the most stock in - not just the thumbs up or thumbs down on the TV show, but his written reviews on the Sun Times site. Even if I disagree with him in the overall good/bad assessment of a movie, I can generally tell if I will by reading what he has to say. Sometimes he'll like something particular about a movie that I know I wouldn't anyway, but I understand why he likes it. Much better than the typical "Fantastic! Thrill ride of a lifetime!! Don't miss this movie!!!"
I read his other articles on the linked site yesterday and kept telling myself, "Man, he's pretty smart. He really does get it!" We need more people like Roger Ebert in the media.
Maybe I can still find one that I can disable the region codes on...
Head down to your local Wal-Mart and pick up an Apex AD-1500. Check out this page first, though - they all used to be CDR upgradeable but apparently some aren't now. I bought my sister one for Christmas and using the instructions on that page (it was CDR upgradeable), the "upgrade" was a snap, including a custom background image I made.
Even if you get one that isn't CDR upgradeable, you can get a region free firmware chip for about $20 from apexmodchip.com.
Exactly! Really, I'm getting tired of people responding to these one-button-mouse trolls by telling them to buy a USB mouse. It just plays right into their hands. Every big Apple story we see the following exchange about 10 times:
Mac basher: Apples have only one button mice, they suck!
Mac zealot: Go buy a two button USB mouse, you cheap bastard!
Mac basher: But I want two buttons on my laptop trackpad, nyah, nyah!
People, if you're moving from PC to Mac, a lot of things will be different. Ctrl-click instead of push-the-other-mouse-button is one of them. Laptop space is cramped as it is, so it's no more difficult to ctrl-click than it is to contort your hand and click the other button on a wintel laptop. It's just a matter of learning a different method. If this is considered a showstopper, you won't get past the many other differences either.
I'm not a fan of computers, I'm a fan of what I can do with them. That's why I never bought a mac, and don't think I ever will.
Hmm. I'm not a fan of computers, I'm a fan of what I can do with them. That's why I bought a Mac, and think I will again when this one gets old.
This is certainly not a flame, but I found your comment interesting because that's exactly what a lot of Mac users say about why they like the Mac. Myself included. It's not about having the absolutely fastest, most tricked out hardware. It's about what you do with it. Sure, G4 Macs are slightly slower than high end Athlons or P4s, but that doesn't matter to Mac users. The Macintosh lets them do what they want to do, with little fuss about the computer itself.
Personally, I recently got my Mac for iMovie, iDVD, Digital Performer (excellent 3rd party music software), and the Unix goodness that is OS X. I'm having more fun, getting more done with my hobbies (music and digital video) than would be possible with any other system. Of course it's not for everyone, but it is definitely for me.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say that. I said they should lead by example.
And I'm saying that makes no sense. It doesn't make sense for Apple to follow provisions the states are trying to impose on Microsoft because Apple is not in the same position as MS. It doesn't make business sense for them to do so, and they can't abuse their non-existent monopoly by not doing so. Plus, as far as I was aware, they're not even directly involved in the MS case, so it's not like they're pushing to impose these things on MS without following them themselves (correct me if I'm wrong). Anyway, this is a different subject for another discussion...
"Apple has always been a company that wasn't afraid to drop old technology in order to get users to adopt newer, clearly superior technology. "
In other words, they force users to upgrade just like the evil Microsoft.
Neither Apple nor Microsoft is forcing anyone to upgrade (well, some might theorize that the registration in WinXP is laying the groundwork for MS to be able to do this, but that's all conspiracy theory at this point). My older Mac still runs OS 8.6 just like the day I installed it. Furthermore, as I said Apple is still supporting, and selling (with every new system) OS 9 for some time to come - they just aren't developing for it anymore and are encouraging third party developers to move on as well. Nothing is forcing them to do so. Even big bad MS only recently dropped Win95 support with the latest DirectX or somesuch - over 6 years after the product was released, an eternity in the computer world.
Of course Apple is going to encourage people to upgrade. It makes more money for them and provides more value for their customers. They aren't flipping a magical switch that causes OS 9 to cease functioning. You want a product that has improved features over what you're running today? Guess what, you have to upgrade. If you're happy with what you have, don't.
Anyway, I feel like we're arguing two different things, so I'm done here. Have a nice day. ;-)
Apple has always been a company that wasn't afraid to drop old technology in order to get users to adopt newer, clearly superior technology. They really understand that many users (especially those like your grandma who love the simplicity of a Mac) are unwilling to change unless absolutely forced to do so. Ultimately, all but a very few of those users, when migrated over to the superior new technology, will wonder how they ever managed to do anything with the old systems.
I don't think OS 9 is going away any time soon - it'll still be preinstalled on new Macs for some time, and it will likely live on in Classic for some time after Apple stops making it directly bootable on new machines. And there's nothing stopping anyone from running it exclusively on an existing machine.
Apple says "graphics professionals will appreciate the ability to input text via stylus instead of switching to the keyboard." It also says this will require an input tablet. I kind of assumed it would allow OCR of scanned images too, but maybe not. Too bad.
And to add to that, what extra support does it need from Apple? Xdarwin works great, and the people who are likely to need X11 apps on OS X will almost certainly know where to look for it.
I hate it when some systems add this to the default .cshrc/bashrc/whateverc. IMO, relying on such an alias is asking for trouble. What happens if you're on another machine that doesn't have that aliased? What if the alias didn't take effect (something bad in your .cshrc caused it to stop parsing before that)? I've seen people use this alias to get into the habit of typing 'rm *' and just saying N to the files they wanted to keep. Bad idea.
The intentions are good, but I think if you're playing with fire (doing things as root), you should be forced to be absolutely careful and type everything out just as you really meant it.
I don't speak for the previous poster, but I believe this is what he was getting at: You probably know someone who has a Mac. There is nothing stopping you from going over to your friend's house, signing up for an iTools account, and then using it to your heart's content from a PC. Your friend can invite all his friends to do the same, all at no extra charge. Sure, someone has to buy a Mac to get it done, but Apple does not charge any more per account. That was the only point. Whether you consider that "free" is another matter altogether.
This is completely offtopic, moderate as such. I always liked got a light?
So I guess your statement is true! ;-)
Personally, I think they don't. AMD, too. During the few primetime shows I sometimes watch, there will inevitably be at least 2 or 3 Intel ads. Often an MS ad too. I think I saw the new iMac ad once since it was announced 4 months ago. Can't recall ever seeing an ad for AMD on tv. Is it any wonder that MS/Intel continues to "win" the platform war?
As a fan of both Apple and AMD, I can't understand why they don't spend a few bucks and put more ads on tv. I don't know much about marketing, but it seems to me that this would nearly translate to an instant boost in sales for both. A lot of people I know have no clue who or what AMD is, and if they do, they assume it must be inferior because it isn't the Intel brand name they get shoved down their throats. Most of those same people haven't even seen or heard of the new iMac, let alone know anything about what Apple is up to these days and what they offer in terms of the whole digital hub thing. Many of them may not even realize Apple is still alive and kicking!
Strange.
Irony? Nope. I just enjoy the heck out of it. I have no false pretense that I'm so great and therefore deserve an expensive guitar. No regrets on any of the purchases - they've brought me more than enough enjoyment to justify the expense. The only regret is the timing. It would have been a much smaller dent in my finances to purchase now than 5 years ago.
Thanks for the troll, though, I have now more fully experienced slashdot! ;-)
Exactly. While the above is certainly not a good excuse, it's probably by far the most common reason people get into trouble financially. I'm definitely in that group.
The one thing I really wish I'd done differently was to learn more about personal finance, and more importantly, the consequences of poor financial management. I can't blame my parents - they always bugged me to save, don't spend so much, be smart, etc. I didn't listen when I was growing up, and because I had no real responsibility then, I saw no negative consequences. I spent my allowance like there was no tomorrow and enjoyed my youth.
I got out of college 6 years ago and landed a good job making nearly $40k. All of a sudden I had a hefty, steady income with lots to spare after splitting living expenses with a couple of roommates. I bought an expensive vehicle, a few nice guitars and music studio equipment, computer toys, went out to eat a lot, etc. My mentality at the time was basically that I was young, it was early in my life, and I'd have plenty of time to save later on. Plus, in 5 or 6 years I'd be making a lot more money and would have no trouble paying everything off. I never thought about saving for retirement, to buy a house, having a cushion for hard times, etc.
I suppose I've been lucky. I haven't gotten laid off or anything, so I've got it pretty good compared to many. But 6 years later my salary is almost exactly double what I started with, and I'm just now climbing out of credit card debt. I live in a small one bedroom apartment with two other people, drive the same vehicle and have no cushion. About 8 months ago I moved in here to save money and aggressively pay off my debt. I've managed to knock off about $12k, with another $4k to go. I'd be done by now if I didn't have a wedding in another month, but it'll be a couple months after that before I'm down to $0. Then we start saving for a cushion and a down payment on a house. We'll probably buy our first house in mid to late '03 depending on how things go.
About a year ago, I realized that if I had been just a little smarter with my money, I could already own that house. Not only that, but I could probably still own all the toys and gadgets I've bought, I just would have had to wait until I could afford them instead of buying them when I couldn't. A $3000 guitar is a much bigger deal when you make $40k than it is when you make $80k.
Back to the point... I really wish my high school or college had had a good course on personal finance. If I had really learned that being irresponsible early would have me paying for it years later, maybe I would have acted differently. Instead I just "winged it," as you say, and assumed everything would work out automatically. I figured I was ok as long as I always made at least the minimum payments on all my debts.
Stupid, but after reading this thread I'm glad to see I'm not alone. ;-)
Actually, that's 4.4BSD, which is most certainly not the same as FreeBSD 4.4. Apple says the FreeBSD part of Darwin is derived from FreeBSD 3.2.
Japan: What you say !!
Sounds good! Hopefully the hotkeys are fairly configurable. Personally, I like Alt-1, Alt-2, etc, which is what I use with WindowMaker. Space.dock has been sitting in my dock for about 2 months and hasn't gotten any use simply because it requires mousing over there and using a context menu. Right now, it's easier to Cmd-Tab or just click on the app I want in the dock.
This is straying slightly off-topic, so moderate accordingly if you wish... But does anyone know of any good utilities to really stress test the memory under OS X? I suppose I could grab something large like gnome from fink and see if I get any compile errors. But it would be nicer to have a utility specifically for this purpose. I'll go check versiontracker now...
Excellent! This looks like exactly what I was looking for. Thanks (to you and PghFox, who must have been about 10 seconds later, heh...).
This is certainly a possibility. I've avoided trying to swap out memory chips or something because it's still relatively infrequent. In my experience, a hardware problem generally makes the whole machine very unstable - as in you're lucky to get through a few hours or a day without at least a few application crashes if not an OS crash. I'm not seeing that - just the occasional infrequent oddity or crash. I've had Linux crash on me more often than that on perfectly good hardware. ;-) Besides, I'd hate to pull my 512meg memory chip and go back to 128 just to see if that's it. It'd probably take a few weeks to be sure with this infrequency, and that's painful!
Yeah. Especially since every other OS has one and only one installer! I'm so glad Linux has standardized on one installer for everything ;P
Heh, fair enough. I just wish Apple had picked one (that allows non-admin users to easily assume temporary privileges for the install) and pushed it harder with developers.
I agree absolutely! I run as a regular user (not an admin, and certainly not root) just fine most of the time. The problem is those few applications that expect I'll be running as an admin (Quicken is a notorious offender I can think of off the top of my head - though a little poking around and chmod on the command line fixed that).
b. Installers are lame anyway... any good OSX app should be able to fit in one icon (.app wrapper) or folder in /Applications. Programs that do otherwise are usually just trying to be fancy ;P ;)
c. Why should you need to frequently run apps are root? Bad idea if you ask me
Agreed again! The problem with the drag-and-drop application bundles is that I don't have permission, under my normal account, to drag them to /Applications. (I can put them in my own ~/Applications folder but I usually want them available to all users) I guess what I'd really like is for Finder to automatically pop up and ask for an admin user/password when I try to drag something to a folder I don't have permission to modify. That would save the hassle of logging out, logging in as admin, dragging the application to install, logging out, logging back in as myself. I don't install things every day, but it's a pain when I have to do this. Again, I think the assumption is that most users will give their normal accounts admin privileges, so it's not an issue at all for them.
Also, I wish there weren't so many different installers used by various apps. The standard one you get with Apple's development environment is nice in that it allows normal users to temporarily acquire admin privileges by entering a user/password. They all should do this, but I find myself logging out completely and logging back in as admin just to install some software.
Along these lines, it would also be nice to have an easier way to start gui apps as an admin - sort of a graphical sudo. Of course I can do something like sudo open /path/to/Finder.app or whatever but it's a pain.
Well, those are my completely non-expert opinions. Take them with a huge grain of salt. Hopefully Apple will improve on them in 10.2, along with some of the other issues I've noticed. Even so, I love this OS and I'm very excited to see how much better it can get!
See the headline and think Apple was replacing the next version of Mac OS with CD burning software?
Perhaps they felt that 4 hours was about the limit to keep the interest of enough non-die-hard fans that the extended release would still be profitable. Or maybe they just don't have enough time in the schedule to add that much back in and still get the next 2 movies out on time... Could there be another super long special edition when all three movies are complete? Doubtful, but who knows...
I read his other articles on the linked site yesterday and kept telling myself, "Man, he's pretty smart. He really does get it!" We need more people like Roger Ebert in the media.
Head down to your local Wal-Mart and pick up an Apex AD-1500. Check out this page first, though - they all used to be CDR upgradeable but apparently some aren't now. I bought my sister one for Christmas and using the instructions on that page (it was CDR upgradeable), the "upgrade" was a snap, including a custom background image I made.
Even if you get one that isn't CDR upgradeable, you can get a region free firmware chip for about $20 from apexmodchip.com.
People, if you're moving from PC to Mac, a lot of things will be different. Ctrl-click instead of push-the-other-mouse-button is one of them. Laptop space is cramped as it is, so it's no more difficult to ctrl-click than it is to contort your hand and click the other button on a wintel laptop. It's just a matter of learning a different method. If this is considered a showstopper, you won't get past the many other differences either.
Hmm. I'm not a fan of computers, I'm a fan of what I can do with them. That's why I bought a Mac, and think I will again when this one gets old.
This is certainly not a flame, but I found your comment interesting because that's exactly what a lot of Mac users say about why they like the Mac. Myself included. It's not about having the absolutely fastest, most tricked out hardware. It's about what you do with it. Sure, G4 Macs are slightly slower than high end Athlons or P4s, but that doesn't matter to Mac users. The Macintosh lets them do what they want to do, with little fuss about the computer itself.
Personally, I recently got my Mac for iMovie, iDVD, Digital Performer (excellent 3rd party music software), and the Unix goodness that is OS X. I'm having more fun, getting more done with my hobbies (music and digital video) than would be possible with any other system. Of course it's not for everyone, but it is definitely for me.