OS X 10.0 shipped with a 2D/3D accelerated driver for the RagePro in this machine. Apple dropped all 2D/3D hardware acceleration in 10.1, making the machine essentially unusable under OS X.
Are you sure they dropped support in 10.1 that was present in 10? Sounds pretty odd. I was under the impression that Mac OS 9 had drivers, but Mac OS X never did. MacCentral seems to back that up:
More recently, however, G3 users migrating from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X have discovered that they've lost features like DVD playback, support for hardware graphics acceleration using OpenGL and hardware-accelerated QuickTime movie playback.
[...]
Older Power Macs, iBooks, iMacs and PowerBooks sport slower ATI graphics accelerators, and to date, Apple has not provided OS X drivers or application software that offer the same capabilities as drivers and applications under 9.
what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to download 300 Megs of MP3s from Limewire to my computer. 40 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes.
The machine you're using has almost nothing in common with the current hardware and software architecture. The machine you have came out before the first iMac, and is slower than it (even though first iMac ran at 233Mhz). But realistically, the problem you're having has little or nothing to do with the CPU speed.
Most importantly, you are not running Mac OS X on your 8600 there. You're running an OS (Mac OS 8/9) with an outdated design and a non-ideal networking layer. There's no preemptive threading either, thus the Netscape problem. If you are somehow running Mac OS X, you're running it on a machine it wasn't designed/optimized for. Now, on top of that, LimeWire is a Java app, right? Well, Java sucks on any Mac OS before X. Mac OS 7/8/9 were never designed to do things like that. Compare that to NT which I believe has a reasonably good network layer and good Java support. Even on the chip with a slower clock, the NT machine will simply do LimeWire transfers faster than Mac OS 8/9.
So basically, you're using a machine that came out before Apple got its shit back together (before Steve Jobs came back). Reserve judgement until you try some sort of G4 running Mac OS X. The combination of the two represents a completely different computer than what you're using, and results in a radically different experience.
No one on slashdot is raving about Mac OS 9 on an 8600. Heck, not even that many Mac users do.
I don't have time to read through 860 comments to see if this is redundant, but there seems to be a rather obvious omission in the article. It seems as if the author doesn't realize that many Linux desktop installations are dual boot with Windows. Many Linux desktops users switch back to Windows for various things.
With a Mac, you're almost certainly running Mac OS X (or OS 9) exclusively. Sure there's Virtual PC and Linux for PowerPC, but these situations are in the vast minority. In most cases, a Mac is dedicated to running some version of Mac OS. That's why you have to write Mac software to reach Mac hardware owners. You don't have to write Linux software to reach people that have Linux hardware.
So the suggestion the Linux desktop marketshare will somehow surpass Mac OS X on the desktop doesn't hold much weight for me. Perhaps what will surprass Mac OS X eventually are the segement of Windows machines that also have Linux installed. I don't see how any of this would make professional developers reconsider selling Mac OS X software (as the article suggests). How many Linux users even buy software?
Although with Apple now selling at 64-bit dual processor workstation (with 8GB ram capacity and half a terrabyte of storage capacity) with a beautiful Unix OS for $3000 -- well I'm not so sure anybody can reasonably predict where this will go.
- Scott
Re:Another 3dfx, etc, etc.
on
iBox Episode 2
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Obviously, letting anyone build the hardware and just licensing the operating system could never be very profitable... what a stupid idea:)
It's only really worked once, and many others have tried. I don't see that as a very strong business case.
- Scott
I'd love to know
on
iBox Episode 2
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Steve Jobs shoots Apple in the foot once again. MBA classes all across America probably use Apple's poor business decisions as examples of how to offend customers and how *not* to grow business
Please enlighten us as to how allowing a third party to distribute a cheap knockoff of a design that Apple spent years creating will bolster Apple's image of quality and help them increase revenue.
- Scott
That's MicroCenter's price, not Apple's
on
iBox Episode 2
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The only flat panel iMac I see listed at store.apple.com that has a 60GB hard drive runs $1299. So that particular incident is all Micro Center. But all of this is really beside the point.
When you buy an Apple machine you're not buying the box, you're buying the overall product. Apple thinks of the computer as a whole, not processor, firmware, software. If you don't care about any of this and just want a cheap generic DIY box, then why are you interested in Macs at all? Just for the transparent windows?
Much of Mac OS X's value comes as result of Apple's approach to product design. The ease of use, peripheral connectivity that "just works", seamless integration and low maintenace don't come for free -- they come as a result of looking the computer as a whole product, not various disperate pieces slammed into a box ala Dell. You can't have both.
- Scott
What in the world are you talking about?
on
iBox Episode 2
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Do you think Sony would allow a repair center to resell PS2 components to a third party, who would in turn sell something called a "Play Stashun?" Is anyone jumping down Sony's throat for not allowing cloning of PlayStations?
Perhaps we can consider that not every platform benefits from being cloned.
I'd rather have hype that I can choose to disbelieve than deal with a company that's going to drop a product on the market for the same price as my day old obsolete gear. Apple does this so they don't cannibalize their own sales.
I think you're missing some critical parts of the equation here. First off, hardware is a different deal than software. You'll notice Apple is already talking about Panther, but not getting into specifics because it wants to actually to ship the product before Microsoft starts ripping it off.
Microsoft, on the other hand, rules by fear and deception. If it talks something up early, it can prevent consumers from buying better products that are already on the market from competitors. This gives it time to work on its promises. Apple's not the monopoly so it doesn't have this option. It only stands to lose by announcing too early.
What happened to those people that bought the $3500 monitor only to see it drop to $2000 the next day?
Where's the logic here? You have to pick a day to change the price. Somebody is always going to buy the day before the price drops -- whether it's three months before the next model comes out or three days before.
The last time I spent $800 all at once on my PC was when I bought a 486 motherboard with processor and 16 megs of RAM. [...] you'd be used to a $1000+ ream job at every upgrade. 'The Rest Of Us' (tm) aren't that kind of suckers.
To me, a sucker is someone who gets something other than what they are led to believe they are buying. This seems to be a common occurence among people buying wintel PCs. They expect a computer that takes care of itself, but end up having to babysit Windows as well as making sure Windows plays well with the actual machine.
Most people don't have the time, interest or skill to build their own computers and resolve the software/driver issues that come as a result. Most people buy a computer prebuilt.
The value of a wholeistic computer design is not widely grasped in the computer industry, but I believe it's the issue that's most important to consumers. They just don't realize when they buy a cheap machine they are likely buying a frustrating experience. The most effective way to combat that frustration is to a buy a computer that has been designed as a whole product.
OS X 10.0 is now obsolete. Windows 2000 is still very much useable, supported, and widely-used
This isn't a realistic comparison. Windows has been going through evolutionary upgrades for years. Mac OS X 10.0 was a brand new platform. 10.0 didn't even do DVD playback.
I do know that AppleWorks and FileMaker Pro were third-party software
AppleWorks and FileMarker both come from Claris, which I think was always a subsidiary of Apple. Claris was essentially Apple's application arm for a while.
Call me cynical, but perhaps they think those over 29 don't have the knowledge, will or resources to defend the ownership of their creations? Just a thought.
Why not publicly release nightly betas, so users can post feedback on development as with BugZilla?
Quality expectations are different for Apple than from many other developers. I suspect this is at least part of the reason. Not to mention all the journalists that would descend upon such a thing to pick apart every release.
Users don't expect the nightlies to be perfect
Normal users don't, Mac users do. They take it personally if there's a bug in a piece of software -- like Apple is after them specifically.
I find it really amusing that "everyone" here thinks MS is so evil, when in reality, they are one of the best companies to work for - and perhaps are even doing some things right - as much as it hurts the people here to think.
True. As long as you do what Microsoft asks, they don't have a problem with you.
Mitchell talks about how Camino (aka Chimera) is a true community browser project, but what he leaves out is that Apple is exposing Safari's engine (essentially KHTML) to developers with an Objective-C interface.
What this means is that we are likely to see at least one Camino-style community roject that is based on the Safari/KHTML engine.
As he says, this is good for everyone. But it's not as if Gecko is the only way to go if you want an engine for a fully open source browser. WebCore combined with Cocoa is quite a powerful little toolbox.
David Hyatt is a major contributor to all of the concerned browser projects (Safari, Gecko, Chimera/Camino, Phoenix). It's not too surprising, therefore, that they look similar.
This is repeated every single time Apple behaves like a corporation (since that's what it is) instead of a lovable gang of fashionable geeks. Yet Microsoft is evil when they do things like these, but Apple is just... well, being Apple.
Right.... we're all in peril because Apple patents a trash can. Oh no. What will we do.
Maybe if you look more carefully at the content and frequency of the offenses, particularly when taking their contributions into account, you can see why Apple isn't regarded the same as Microsoft. Apple isn't perfect. But how you can even attempt to compare the two in terms of malicious intent blows my mind.
Slashdot Mirror
OS X 10.0 shipped with a 2D/3D accelerated driver for the RagePro in this machine. Apple dropped all 2D/3D hardware acceleration in 10.1, making the machine essentially unusable under OS X.
Are you sure they dropped support in 10.1 that was present in 10? Sounds pretty odd. I was under the impression that Mac OS 9 had drivers, but Mac OS X never did. MacCentral seems to back that up:
More recently, however, G3 users migrating from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X have discovered that they've lost features like DVD playback, support for hardware graphics acceleration using OpenGL and hardware-accelerated QuickTime movie playback.
[...]
Older Power Macs, iBooks, iMacs and PowerBooks sport slower ATI graphics accelerators, and to date, Apple has not provided OS X drivers or application software that offer the same capabilities as drivers and applications under 9.
- Scott
Your doctor can prescribe it, but you have to be diagnosed with ADHD (aka ADD) first, which your doctor may or may not be able to do.
If you feel you have dramatically more focus with some sort of stimulant in your system (coffee, red bull, tea, etc), then ritalin could help a lot.
- Scott
what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to download 300 Megs of MP3s from Limewire to my computer. 40 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes.
The machine you're using has almost nothing in common with the current hardware and software architecture. The machine you have came out before the first iMac, and is slower than it (even though first iMac ran at 233Mhz). But realistically, the problem you're having has little or nothing to do with the CPU speed.
Most importantly, you are not running Mac OS X on your 8600 there. You're running an OS (Mac OS 8/9) with an outdated design and a non-ideal networking layer. There's no preemptive threading either, thus the Netscape problem. If you are somehow running Mac OS X, you're running it on a machine it wasn't designed/optimized for. Now, on top of that, LimeWire is a Java app, right? Well, Java sucks on any Mac OS before X. Mac OS 7/8/9 were never designed to do things like that. Compare that to NT which I believe has a reasonably good network layer and good Java support. Even on the chip with a slower clock, the NT machine will simply do LimeWire transfers faster than Mac OS 8/9.
So basically, you're using a machine that came out before Apple got its shit back together (before Steve Jobs came back). Reserve judgement until you try some sort of G4 running Mac OS X. The combination of the two represents a completely different computer than what you're using, and results in a radically different experience.
No one on slashdot is raving about Mac OS 9 on an 8600. Heck, not even that many Mac users do.
- Scott
I don't have time to read through 860 comments to see if this is redundant, but there seems to be a rather obvious omission in the article. It seems as if the author doesn't realize that many Linux desktop installations are dual boot with Windows. Many Linux desktops users switch back to Windows for various things.
With a Mac, you're almost certainly running Mac OS X (or OS 9) exclusively. Sure there's Virtual PC and Linux for PowerPC, but these situations are in the vast minority. In most cases, a Mac is dedicated to running some version of Mac OS. That's why you have to write Mac software to reach Mac hardware owners. You don't have to write Linux software to reach people that have Linux hardware.
So the suggestion the Linux desktop marketshare will somehow surpass Mac OS X on the desktop doesn't hold much weight for me. Perhaps what will surprass Mac OS X eventually are the segement of Windows machines that also have Linux installed. I don't see how any of this would make professional developers reconsider selling Mac OS X software (as the article suggests). How many Linux users even buy software?
Although with Apple now selling at 64-bit dual processor workstation (with 8GB ram capacity and half a terrabyte of storage capacity) with a beautiful Unix OS for $3000 -- well I'm not so sure anybody can reasonably predict where this will go.
- Scott
Obviously, letting anyone build the hardware and just licensing the operating system could never be very profitable... what a stupid idea :)
It's only really worked once, and many others have tried. I don't see that as a very strong business case.
- Scott
Steve Jobs shoots Apple in the foot once again. MBA classes all across America probably use Apple's poor business decisions as examples of how to offend customers and how *not* to grow business
Please enlighten us as to how allowing a third party to distribute a cheap knockoff of a design that Apple spent years creating will bolster Apple's image of quality and help them increase revenue.
- Scott
The only flat panel iMac I see listed at store.apple.com that has a 60GB hard drive runs $1299. So that particular incident is all Micro Center. But all of this is really beside the point.
When you buy an Apple machine you're not buying the box, you're buying the overall product. Apple thinks of the computer as a whole, not processor, firmware, software. If you don't care about any of this and just want a cheap generic DIY box, then why are you interested in Macs at all? Just for the transparent windows?
Much of Mac OS X's value comes as result of Apple's approach to product design. The ease of use, peripheral connectivity that "just works", seamless integration and low maintenace don't come for free -- they come as a result of looking the computer as a whole product, not various disperate pieces slammed into a box ala Dell. You can't have both.
- Scott
Do you think Sony would allow a repair center to resell PS2 components to a third party, who would in turn sell something called a "Play Stashun?" Is anyone jumping down Sony's throat for not allowing cloning of PlayStations?
Perhaps we can consider that not every platform benefits from being cloned.
- Scott
I'd rather have hype that I can choose to disbelieve than deal with a company that's going to drop a product on the market for the same price as my day old obsolete gear. Apple does this so they don't cannibalize their own sales.
I think you're missing some critical parts of the equation here. First off, hardware is a different deal than software. You'll notice Apple is already talking about Panther, but not getting into specifics because it wants to actually to ship the product before Microsoft starts ripping it off.
Microsoft, on the other hand, rules by fear and deception. If it talks something up early, it can prevent consumers from buying better products that are already on the market from competitors. This gives it time to work on its promises. Apple's not the monopoly so it doesn't have this option. It only stands to lose by announcing too early.
What happened to those people that bought the $3500 monitor only to see it drop to $2000 the next day?
Where's the logic here? You have to pick a day to change the price. Somebody is always going to buy the day before the price drops -- whether it's three months before the next model comes out or three days before.
- Scott
Damn english language.
- Scott
The last time I spent $800 all at once on my PC was when I bought a 486 motherboard with processor and 16 megs of RAM. [...] you'd be used to a $1000+ ream job at every upgrade. 'The Rest Of Us' (tm) aren't that kind of suckers.
To me, a sucker is someone who gets something other than what they are led to believe they are buying. This seems to be a common occurence among people buying wintel PCs. They expect a computer that takes care of itself, but end up having to babysit Windows as well as making sure Windows plays well with the actual machine.
Most people don't have the time, interest or skill to build their own computers and resolve the software/driver issues that come as a result. Most people buy a computer prebuilt.
The value of a wholeistic computer design is not widely grasped in the computer industry, but I believe it's the issue that's most important to consumers. They just don't realize when they buy a cheap machine they are likely buying a frustrating experience. The most effective way to combat that frustration is to a buy a computer that has been designed as a whole product.
- Scott
The fact that Apple shoulders the burden of pioneering new ideas certainly makes it easier for others to charge less.
- Scott
OS X 10.0 is now obsolete. Windows 2000 is still very much useable, supported, and widely-used
This isn't a realistic comparison. Windows has been going through evolutionary upgrades for years. Mac OS X 10.0 was a brand new platform. 10.0 didn't even do DVD playback.
- Scott
Microsoft has a big stake in the company
You might want to double-check that.
- Scott
I do know that AppleWorks and FileMaker Pro were third-party software
:)
AppleWorks and FileMarker both come from Claris, which I think was always a subsidiary of Apple. Claris was essentially Apple's application arm for a while.
Windows Movie Maker
You mean Microsoft's cheap iMovie ripoff?
- Scott
Yes, should have been "under 29".
- Scott
Call me cynical, but perhaps they think those over 29 don't have the knowledge, will or resources to defend the ownership of their creations? Just a thought.
- Scott
Puma was 10.1.
- Scott
Why not publicly release nightly betas, so users can post feedback on development as with BugZilla?
Quality expectations are different for Apple than from many other developers. I suspect this is at least part of the reason. Not to mention all the journalists that would descend upon such a thing to pick apart every release.
Users don't expect the nightlies to be perfect
Normal users don't, Mac users do. They take it personally if there's a bug in a piece of software -- like Apple is after them specifically.
- Scott
because M$ ripped it just as much as mac did..
The company is Apple, not "mac". And Apple had an aggreement with Xerox that explicitly allowed it to incorporate PARC concepts into mass-market OS.
Microsoft had no such agreement with Apple.
- Scott
How many times are you planning on posting this? Does it look less contrived each time or something?
- Scott
I find it really amusing that "everyone" here thinks MS is so evil, when in reality, they are one of the best companies to work for - and perhaps are even doing some things right - as much as it hurts the people here to think.
True. As long as you do what Microsoft asks, they don't have a problem with you.
Easy.
- Scott
Mitchell talks about how Camino (aka Chimera) is a true community browser project, but what he leaves out is that Apple is exposing Safari's engine (essentially KHTML) to developers with an Objective-C interface.
What this means is that we are likely to see at least one Camino-style community roject that is based on the Safari/KHTML engine.
As he says, this is good for everyone. But it's not as if Gecko is the only way to go if you want an engine for a fully open source browser. WebCore combined with Cocoa is quite a powerful little toolbox.
- Scott
David Hyatt is a major contributor to all of the concerned browser projects (Safari, Gecko, Chimera/Camino, Phoenix). It's not too surprising, therefore, that they look similar.
- Scott
This is repeated every single time Apple behaves like a corporation (since that's what it is) instead of a lovable gang of fashionable geeks. Yet Microsoft is evil when they do things like these, but Apple is just... well, being Apple.
Right.... we're all in peril because Apple patents a trash can. Oh no. What will we do.
Maybe if you look more carefully at the content and frequency of the offenses, particularly when taking their contributions into account, you can see why Apple isn't regarded the same as Microsoft. Apple isn't perfect. But how you can even attempt to compare the two in terms of malicious intent blows my mind.
- Scott