Most people listen to Britney Spears. Try something complex at those bitrates (such as Dire Straits or Yokko Kanno) and you'll butcher the music. I encode at 320 kbps AAC:-/ It's not necessary for all music, but I'd rather take up the extra HD space than to cringe at the one point in the song that stresses treble and bass at the same time.
I still think that Faramir's character was butchered by PJ
Yes, I didn't like that either, but I can't deny it when PJ says in the DVD that "let's all sit down and have tea, and then off you go!" or something like that. The extra scene in the DVD about Faramir's "chance to show his quality" was desprately needed in the theatrical release, and I think it was foolish to not include it.
Arwen's subplot was unnecessary
A matter of opinion; I think it was perfectly necessary, if for the very least that a king like Aragorn needs a queen like Arwen.
conflict between Sam and Frodo was stupid
I didn't 'enjoy' it I guess, but no sense in being chummy all the time. The conflict arose from Frodo being taken by the ring, which was more intense than in the book (where Frodo sits around with it for 30 years or so without being drawn to it). The only thing that bugged me was inside Mount Doom; at one point I was just thinking, Sam, push him over already:P
Aragorn was not kingly
I thought he was. He was always assertive, wise when it counts, and passionate for those he needed to protect. And yet, they made him 'unexperienced' compared to Theoden when needed, which broadened his wisdom further. I especially liked how he said to the hobbits, "you bow to no-one." Nicely humble. The book mentions, at one point, that Aragorn stands very kingly. Does that make him more 'kingly' in the book?
dialog in TTT and ROTK was lame and contrived
At least they weren't singing all the time like the books:P Seriously, would you have been happier if they all spoke in Shakespearian tongue? As directory/writer, you have more to express than dialog; you have an environment that you want the viewer to absorb too. Simple dialog is effective in movies, but not in books.
the quality of special effects was not consistant (just think, why all agriculture in the movie was concentrated in Shire?
Because the shire was the purest place in Middle Earth, and served as a foil to the environment outside. The only place not ravaged by war. The plains of Rohan looked desert-like to me, despite the fact that they were green. I felt that was appropriate.
Many people and critics enjoyed them, but they sucked
A lot of people liked all the Matrix movies too, but Leno doesn't talk about those people. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but one's a fool to not recognize the difference between opinion and facts.
Movies that I think suck: After Earth, Batman Forever, Terminator 3 (although I didn't see it). Some people think Unbreakable sucked. I saw it before I saw the Sixth Sense, and as such I thought both were great. It also helps that I'm a fan of some American comics, and Unbreakable resonated very well. But to some, it sucked.
Note to moderators: it's not off-topic to talk about how much the movie did or didn't suck; it's the fricken LOTR topic. OK, it's a matter of opinion, but be nice:P
Well, to actually implement a semi-global keylogger in OS X is trivial. You simply put an appropriate.bundle in ~/Library/InputManagers . No root required. Every subsequent program opened will (attempt) to link and run this code. Since.bundles can be versioned, you can even make a platform-specific version.
Not quite. Anything that needs trusted input can bypass that, such as password (sudo) dialogs. You can go to Terminal and select Secure Keyboard Entry from the File menu, thus protecting any passwords you use for SSH.
Mac OS X has been a huge leap backwards in useability compared to the Classic Mas OS
I'm not sure if I can agree or disagree with that. On one hand, all the changes to OS X make it a wonderful OS to use. On the other hand, I was over-seas for a month and had only my untrusty PowerBook 1400 running OS 9. And after a while, it felt nice.
A lot of the changes to OS X are because the Mac OS is now a multitasking, multi-user OS. Changes to the file system (forced structure) and window management reflect that. There are a lot of small things (which I'll iterate below) that most people don't realize about OS X because they haven't been using it as long. However, throwing good OS 9 ideas out the window was not smart.
The most glaring example is the new Finder. It's a total piece of shit, and completely buggy. I'm not sure if they could have lifted the old Finder and just ported it; one fundamental rule of programming (Carmack's Code Entropy thing) is that when a fundamental assumption has changed, start over from scratch rather than patch. So they rewrote the Finder. Good. But they got idiots to code it (using PowerPlant, no less) and idiots to design the user experience for it. All the small things that made the old Finder so great, things that have evolved through years of tweaking, have been thrown out the window (such as using the Command key to scroll the contents of a window, or initiating spring loaded folders when you're not dragging something). For those who like the new Finder in OS X, try this sometime. Set the file type of the old OS 9 Finder binary to APPL. Here's an example using Terminal and Developer Tools,
$ cd $OS9_SYSTEM_FOLDER $ path=($path/Developer/Tools) $ cpmac Finder Finder-appl $ setfile -t 'APPL' Finder-appl $ open./Finder-appl
Try navigating around using the old Finder. Do some operations with it (moving files and copying and stuff). It's a joy to use! (You can't see Desktop icons, so use Command-Shift-UpArrow to activate the Desktop, selecting the startup drive. Use Command-O to open it or type the name of something else on the desktop that you want). Whenever I have 'serious' Finder work to do, I end up using the old one.
Anyway, the new Finder is OS X's biggest wart (or snot-ball). There's good stuff in OS X too. Clearing the right corner of the menu bar for system stuff is great - much better than the annoying control strip (either keep all your windows out of the way of it, or keep it closed all the time. Both workflows sucked). I like the new Apple menu. It has a strict purpose and is hard to mess up (I've seen some pretty horid Apple menus). The downside to the new Apple menu is what they replaced it with - the Dock. The new Application menus (showing the title of the Application and containing the Quit, Preferences and Services menu items) is a welcome addition.
The thing that's made OS X totally livable for me, as Tog recommends, is DragThing. DT's grown up a lot since it's OS 8 days, and although it can be tedious and often confusing how to configure it to your needs, once you do you get all the existing benefits of OS X, a replacement for whatever you used the Apple menu for, and you never need to use the Dock again (who the hell minimizes windows in OS X anyway? the Dock is a useless place to put them).
Smith entering Bane is less obvious, but I figure if they can download training programs or connect to a virtual reality, programs can also hijack a brain through those same ports.
Remember when they were hacking Morpheous' brain in the first Matrix? Computers hacking human brains has already been established. I never had a problem with this part of the story:-/
Number one it's much more difficult because of limited resources. I don't know of many who've actually accomplished useable voice recognition on a pocket platform.
Apple's had their voice recognition technology since 1994 - that's before they had PowerMacs. Back then they used a DSP, but on the first PowerMacs (66 MHz to 80 I thnk; I've used it on my 7200/90, a 90 MHz machine), it ran great on a 90 MHz machine. This is no big deal, and easy as pie on a 400 MHz machine. Which I'm sure has more RAM than my 7200 had. And a more modern operating system.
OS X has some excellent voice recognition. I can give commands like , "switch to Finder. trash selection. switch to mail. get new mail. delete this message. switch to safari. Go to slashdot. move page down," etc. Some of that is done by assigning recognized phrases to menu commands (go to slashdot == bookmark command key), some of that runs apple scripts, some of that is provided by applications that offer speech recognition services. It's great.
But it has one fatal flaw. I can't use it when I'm listening to iTunes.
I'd rather be listening to music than talking to my computer, no matter how convenient it is. In an office I use headphones, but then I just sound stupid talking to my computer:P Perhaps if I got a noise canceling mic that stayed very close to my mouth by way of a headset, but frankly that's not worth the investment. So it's a nice toy, and definitely something that's nice to have for free, bundled with the OS and available to those who can use it, but if I think about all the much noisier environments that I use my PDA in, I myself would not pay $40 for it.
Yes I do, but the performance increases are not because of Quartz extreme. Look at the numbers for thread and CPU performances. The sheet and window animations aren't because of Quartz extreme, it's mainly because Apple made the animation time faster (although even with QE under 10.2, they were jittery to watch. Under 10.3, they're perfectly smooth).
I feel it's safe to say that Panther is the best CPU upgrade you can get for your Mac. Everything is MUCH faster. For example, if you have a window with a tab view, clicking across multiple tabs is instantaneous, whereas before there would be even a slight delay. That's not because of Quartz Extreme, it's because of all the other numbers in the xbench scores.
Finally. I bought a G4/733 (the first 733s... the ones that have 1MB L3 cache) a few years ago, and it arrived right when 10.0 came out. And naturally I used 10.0 on it never getting used to how fast OS 9 was on it. Coming from a 400 MHz G3, I never got to really feel how fast this Mac was.
After using 10.0 for a few months, my mind started melting away and Apple released 10.1. Yay.
After using 10.1 for almost a year, my sanity for a sane user experience started wearing thin. Finally Apple released 10.2, which was also much snappier. And it was something to rival OS 9 in a give-or-take competition for usability vs. stability, with Jaguar clearly winning.
But Panther just blows the doors off of.., um, not sure which doors I'm talking about. Let's put it this way in terms of performance. I used xbench to measure before and after the upgrade.
Yes, HOLY CRAP this Mac is faster! My Q3A framerate jumped 15 fps (using the Q3 G4 beta). And the UI experience is much much smoother now, really the way OS X should be. Most notably, sheets and other window animation is VERY fast, and they now properly supplement the user experience, instead of just being eye candy. The Dock still sucks, but you can finally hide apps from the Dock contextual menu.
So, if you're sitting on the fence, jump off. If you thought Macs were slow, they just got a bit faster.
The problem with smartphones is that, well, they suck. They're always some sort of compromise. On one end of the spectrum you deal with a tiny screen with and crappy organizer features attached to a normal phone. On the other end you have an excellent PDA with a crappy phone (such as the Tungsten W). Even the Treo 270 doesn't really cut it as a great phone, when you compare it to the talk time that you get with a real phone. And a lot of people feel silly using the flip cover (I really don't care about that; I feel silly talking on a phone in public).
However, when everything supports Bluetooth, it becomes a non-issue. Leave your phone on and in your pocket ready to receive calls. Want to check your email? Whip out your Tungsten T, fire up VersaMail and check your favorite IMAP account. Or use Web Pro to check any web site. Your Palm will connect to your Bluetooth phone using your personal area network and establish an Internet connection. It rocks. When you want to make a phone call, you don't have to use a PDA to do it! That's the best part! You have all the features of your favorite phone (so long as your fav. phone supports Bluetooth) with no compromises. You can even use Graffiti to send SMS messages. Much better than a smart phone.
Better still, your calendar, contact, and other pda stuff syncs with your desktop machines (using Bluetooth if you want, so you don't have to buy an extra cradle for the office). This stuff is available now, it's not a pie-in-the-sky dream. Some people may object to carrying more than one item, but meh, I've given in and just bought a bag to carry crap in. Hell, I had a bag when I was in university to carry books and frankly that kicked ass. Now I can carry my Minidisc player, flash card reader, Tungsten, phone, and digicam when I need to.
And I don't need to buy one crappy device that combines an MP3 player (I currently use Minidiscs), flash memory (I currently use a portable SmartMedia/Compact Flash reader/writer as a "USB Key"), PDA, phone, and digital camera that compromises all of those items (the digital cameras in these smart phones/pdas make me want to cry). The article talks about smart phones that play music. Great. Probably 128 MB MP3 players. I would never use that.
Smart phones aren't the way of the future; wireless personal area networks are. And ways to take them with you. And hopefully not get them stolen.
My first computer was a//e. It served our family daily from 1984 to 1992. And it taught me computer programming, starting my career...
But there's something remarkably adept about this computer that makes it so functional. We originally used AppleWorks on it, which was a typical Works suite. Then we used MultiScribe, which was a MacWrite clone (fonts that printed beautifully to an Apple ImageWriter). Then we bought PublishIt! 2 for the thing that gave us desktop publishing. And then we were pushing it; PublishIt! 2 was slow.
But I had to hook up my//e the other day to check some serial hardware, and while I was at it I took a trip down memory lane. Things that I thought were slow 10 years ago were pretty damn fast by today's standards! A 1 MHz//e, fast! To launch MultiScribe, you had to startup the//e with the floppy in the drive, wait for it to ask you to flip the floppy over (insert disk 2), and then hit return for it to continue. I used to think that took forever. It turns out that's faster than OS X booting up on my G4, and I think faster than Illustrator 10 or Photoshop starting up. And honestly, nobody uses the features that Microsoft Word has over the features that MultiScribe has.
For those who aren't familiar, the//e's spec'd as (mine's an original, but the later ones shipped as) 128 K of RAM at 1 MHz. You can expand the RAM quite a bit, add a hard drive, add networking, add a Postscript Laserwriter, and honestly expand anything you can think of (that's what the 'e' stands for), but they're generally expected to be used as I said, and perhaps with a mouse. BTW, the//e had 15 character file names with Macintosh-style type and creator meta-data (no 3-character extensions like DOS to determine file types); it was quite a shock when my Dad bought a powerful 8 MHz 286 for his business and it was so... archaic:)
We can do a whole lot more work with a whole lot less CPU power; the//e is a testimony to that. Compare the original Palms to the Windows CE devices. The first Palms were great! They were instant sellers because they served a useful purpose; not because they had a bazillion features. OS X is nice and all, but most of the CPU time and RAM isn't spent doing much. I'm looking at getting more RAM (I have 768, I'm thinking of popping in a 512MB dimm) just because I do hit the max every so often. Software developers have grown accustomed to growing hardware requirements, and it's really a shame.
When my older brother did CS in University, his computer lab consisted of 16 MHz Sun workstations and he did quite a bit of assembly programming over a few courses. He had to write controller software for a robot arm in assembly. When I did computer science at a different University (I started in 96), we had 300 MHz UltraSparcs, did most of our stuff in C, and I had one course in assembly where we didn't actually execute the code on hardware. The new students to CS do everything in Java; compare that (garbage collection) to programming a robot arm in assembly. (FYI, I'm all for garbage collection as a programming practice, but they don't teach you calculus in university because it's useful. They teach it to you because it makes your brain hurt).
While it's absolutely fantastic that Apple went from the Copland/Gershwin route to Mach/BSD, they did lose a bit in the process; one of the features of Copland's NuKernel was that it ran within 1 MB of RAM. Holy crap. That's what happens when you write stuff from scratch and start over. Multics is generally considered a failure but it did actually ship. Most people don't know what it was, and just think "it was too complex to even exist." Here's a quick rundown of its features,
Convenient remote terminal use
A wide range of system configurations, changeable without system or user program reorganization
I'd say not. The G4 is a dead end chip. If I have my facts straight (based on what I've read on the web, it's not like I work for Motorola/Apple), the G4 tops out at 1.2 GHz. Anything Apple ships higher than that is overclocked. Apple desperately needed the G5. The PowerBooks have just hit 1.2 GHz, just after the back to school rush. What odd timing indeed. I have friends in educational channel sales, and they are pissed. People who paid for PowerBooks back in July just got theirs Monday, right before the new revisions!
Apple doesn't have a scheme to go any faster with the G4. Motorola won't deliver. There was an article saying that Moto was going to go to 2 GHz in what, 2005? It was something too little, too late. That's clearly not useful to Apple. Apple needs to get G5s into PowerBooks as soon as possible, as that's going to be the next speed bump, unless if they can overclock the current G4s, keep them cool, and not eat power.
For the record, autolist and automenu seem to already be enabled on my os x install
Yeah, that might be a zsh 4.0 thing; I think with older versions you had to turn it on yourself.
Guess I gotta study bash too if that will be the os x default
Sadly, zsh used to be the default in the Public Beta. In fact, the 'sh' was actually zsh until 10.2, which is when they decided to include bash and use that for sh instead (which is a very odd choice given how they don't want to rely on the GPL; perhaps it's just to make Linux users happy).
Every time I install OS X or create a new user, I have to bust out NetInfo Manager and change the/users/::user::/shell from tcsh to zsh so I don't drive myself nuts:) Once you get used to zsh you can't go back to csh.
"Waiting for your shell to load" is a non-issue. Here's a tip.
Go to Preferences in the Terminal menu
Select "Execute this command..." instead of using the default login shell,"
Where the 'command' should read/bin/tcsh (preferably/bin/zsh). The problem is that Terminal uses the 'login' command which takes several seconds to go through the login process, which is slow. If you use this to exec the shell directly when opening a new Terminal window, it's zippy.
--
I can't speak for bash, but given that you put the following in your.zshrc,
setopt autolist
setopt automenu
zsh will automatically become much nicer than tcsh. When you hit tab, you'll get an 'auto listing' of completions below the prompt,
If you partially type something, you'll get menus for only those items (so D::tab:: would only show Desktop and Documents). If you hit tab again, you'll get an 'auto menu'. So D::tab:tab:: would result in this at the command line,
% ls Desktop/
And D::tab:tab:tab (just adding one more to select the next one) would go to next item named D, the next item on the menu.
% ls Documents/
There's also the 'setopt autocd' option, which means that if you type the name of a directory on the command line without giving it to a command, it will just cd to that directory.
Seriously check out the user-friendly manual at zsh.org. Zsh is one of those gems that comes with OS X that most people don't use:P
And one last thing; there are two main kinds of shells I'd say, the sh-kind and the csh-kind. tcsh is obviously of the csh-kind. The point of csh was to give C-like syntax to shell programming, but in effect sh constructs are much, much better suited towards shell scripting. csh and friends were best left to being good 'interactive' shells. bash (the Linux implementation of 'sh') and zsh ended up becoming every bit as good and then far better at being interactive shells than csh/tcsh, so in the end IMO there aren't any advantages to using tcsh over bash/zsh.
Now choosing bash v zsh... I use zsh, and I'm happy. I'll leave it at that:P
Actually I posted a comment about resurrecting a Beige G3 in the "OS X returns" article over here.
They key points are,
Get a bigger hard drive (the 4GB-6GB standard on these are too small). If your G3 has Rage II on board video, your built-in IDE controller supports only one IDE drive, so you can't just attach a slave. I've done it, but it's not reliable.
Get a USB card. These are cheap.
Get a ZIF upgrade from a place like OWC. 500MHz for $160 with a 1MB backside cache gives you a fantastic performance boost; I've installed a 400 MHz myself.
Get at least one 256 MB DIMM. These are cheap. 400 MB is good to shoot for, but it depends on what you do (We've got an iMac DV with 128 MB, and with its light workload I totally forget that).
I recommend getting at least an ATI Rage 128, as the Rage II/Rage Pro that came with the G3 doesn't like to display millions of colours at high resolutions, and OS X does like to display millions of colours at high resolutions.
Install no less than OS X 10.2.3 (a fresh retail box of Jaguar would be at least this).
You can put in a G4 ZIF upgrade, but I can't vouch for stability or compatibility of those.
When I tried to upgrade it to 10.2, the installer trashed my 10.1 install instead of updating it
This has nothing to do with your machine being old.
The 10.2.0 installer disk is the easiest way to trash any Mac, new or old. Check out Apple's support forums, there were people buying brand new Macs which came with 10.2 who reformatted their drives so they could re-partition it, and they couldn't install 10.2!! They were left with useless Macs with no operating system (except for OS 9, if they wanted that).
My own examples,
Digital Audio G4. 10.0 installs fine. 10.0.3 does not install (can't remember details). 10.1 installs fine. 10.1.3 does not (kernel panics through install, after first reboot, all kinds of crap). 10.2.0 installs fine, no problems at all.
QuickSilver G4 - purchased a bit before 10.2 was released. 10.2 gets an error after trying to install. Hard drive is still intact with original 10.1 installation. Impossible to upgrade machine to 10.2.0 (this is a newer G4 than the Digital Audio).
iMac DV - Upgrading 10.1 to 10.2 works (older than G4 and QuickSilver). Not sure about other 10.x install discs.
Beige G3 Minitower. 10.1 - When booting into the installer CD, and the Mac is in "OS X boot mode" and looking for an OS, it cannot find the boot device. ?. 10.2.0 - didn't dare.
Wallstreet 233: 10.1 upgrade to 10.2.0: worked the first time, but every app crashed after launching; seemed as if it were a permissions issue. Tried a clean install of 10.2. Installer kept kept kernel panicing during install at various points. Had to revert to 10.1.
Apple never really responded to the outcries on their forums, people thought their logic boards were f'd up or something and many just decided to buy new Macs (and again, people with new Macs were having the problem!).
Eventually Apple released the 10.2.3 installer disk - I got one as part of the Developer Program. This thing is a God Send (or rather, a really good bug fix). It runs perfectly on every Mac with no complaints, especially the Beige G3!
The Beige G3 was originally a 233, it's been upgraded to a 400MHz/1MB backside cache from OWC (you can get that for about $150, makes your Mac very usable. Get a USB card too).
The Beige G3 running 10.2.6 is far more stable than when it's running 9.2.2 or 8.5.1 (I have all three on the same box). It's faster, easier to work with, and a heck of a lot more modern. Honestly, I've been toying with some old hardware and old versions of the Mac OS for the last couple of weeks (8.1, 8.5, 8.6, 9.0, 9.2..), and playing with what's supported on what (8.5 supports the GeoPort, 8.6 does not, 8.5 does not support USB hard drives, 8.6 does, 9.2 does not support my DVD drive, 8.5 does.. etc). In OS X, everything works perfectly (except the GeoPort, of course). And reliabily. You get used to all the little patches and extensions and your perfectly selected Extensions Manager Set to get your Mac booting perfectly, with 10.2 things just work. I don't need no friggin' driver for my DVD drive in OS X. OS X didn't freeze because my HD has a corrupt hard disk driver -- it mounted it anyway! This is all on the G3! With 10.1/10.0, using Mac OS X was iffy. But with 10.2.3+ Mac OS X is FAR better than using OS 9!! I've used a B&W G3/400 daily 'once upon a time' with 10.1 a bit over a year ago. This G3 running 10.2 is far smoother.
"Funky" and old world hardware still isn't supported - the AV personality card I've got on the G3 that gives me video/audio in/out doesn't work (just the basics work, audio), but hey, when I reboot into OS 9.2.2 the Finder crashes because it doesn't like my Toshiba DVD drive's driver (OS X uses it automatically).
Assuming there's no regressions with Panther, OS X runs fine on these old Macs. It's running great on that PowerBook too, we've got a PowerLogix G4 upgrade for that thing as well, but the develop
The paper was written to compare the G4 and the G5's AltiVec performance, so MFLOPS/MHz is a very useful metric. Many were concerned about poor AltiVec performance in the G5.
GCC sucks for PPC as well. The GCC folks don't favour any processors; at best they're hampered by patent issues.
Apple tested the CPUs based on the compiler they will use. And it's a fair test, as I said. Too many compilers make special cases for SPECs.
And how many of these computer illiterates are buying state-of-the-art G5 desktop machines?
Much, much more than you think.
When I was working at a failing.com, I remember my manager saying "once we turn this around I'm going to get the most gorgeous PowerBook I can get" (he hated his Dell). Someone else, who shall remain nameless, bought a G4 Tower with a 17" studio display because he saw how gorgeous my 17" was (the 17" iMac wasn't out yet, and you need a tower to run the 17" ASDs). This person uses the (very expensive) G4 to check email at work (he says it's good for impressing clients). This person freaked out when I replaced Chimera with Safari, because it looked too different. He didn't know how to use it!
Chances are your boss has a more expensive box than you do. It's probably a portable, but it's probably... nice.
People with money can afford the prettier, nicer things in life, but that doesn't mean that they know why they're any good. How many old people do you see driving high-end Mercedes sports cars? A LOT! They're the only ones who can afford them! How many women do you see driving 'cute' yet powerful sports cars (such as low-end Mercedes or Z3s)? A LOT! No other kind of car can be as 'cute' as a small sports car. How many women do you see driving SUVs? A LOT! How many of them bought them because they were four wheel drive? Certainly the woman in the SUV behind me during the nightly traffic jam "drive" home didn't. Why is Porsche making an SUV? it's going to sell a hell of a lot better than their two-seater sports cars! And again, if you're in the market for a 'luxurious,' enviable computer, which brands are you going to turn to?
This is a reason why geeks can't understand WTF Apple is doing sometimes. Apple's target demographic is much larger (they have to satisfy the Mathematica geeks and the SUV drivers). And you ALWAYS make more money targetting a demographic that has money than targeting markets that don't; which is a large reason why Apple didn't suffer anywhere near as much as the PC makers did during this downturn.
And, back on topic, OS X is far more sophisticated than most Linux developers realize. Apple succeeded bringing Unix to the desktop; they didn't do it by making users learn how Unix works. I remember a TidBits article ranting about poor Unix user experience, talking about things like invisible dot-files in your home directory for app preferences (he was worried about how Unix-y Mac OS X was going to be). Forcing your users to think they way you do is the wrong approach.
Which is why Apple ships Macs with one button mice. If you want a good mouse you can buy the best damn mouse you want- with or without a scroll wheel, as many buttons as you want, etc. Myself, I use a graphics tablet! For me, mice suck in comparison, so why should Apple try an appease my 'sophisticated' tastes? Instead, I plug in my fav. tablet and the OS gives me hand writing recognition and fractional pixel resolution (that is, the OS gives apps the fraction of a pixel I'm on; event coords are not integers, but floats). If I use a mouse with a scroll wheel, it supports the scroll wheel too. If I use a mouse with a second button (or the second button on my tablet's stylus), the OS supports that. The mouse Apple provides is the lowest common denominator that everyone can use, and it's a pretty damn good mouse, being optical and all. For the times when I need a mouse it's great. It's free. I had to teach that person who bought the 17" how to double-click (many years ago); he kept moving the pointer all over the place while doing it. All right, he's my Dad.
Let the user do what they want to do, and support whatever they want to do. Don't make them fit into your definition of 'correct.' Kind of like sites who say "you must use IE 6" or "you must have JavaScript enabled" or "you must register to read content at the NY Times." Your reaction: screw you buddy; I'll spend my time elsewhere.
It's obvious that gcc was chosen to make x86 CPUs look bad
No, Mac OS X is compiled with GCC. All of it. Apple used to use MrC for System 7+, but abandoned it (even though it was far superior performance-wise) in favour of GCC for OS X. Their aim is to improve GCC now; already Apple's pre-compiled header stuff is making its way in (as it was better than what the GCC group had/planned/ for GCC).
Just wanna clear some stuff up. I liked Be a lot; a friend of mine had a BeBox and it kicked (and I was waiting for them to port it to a PowerPC that I actually had... they managed to port it to everything that I did not have...)
1) The kernel was extremely low latency, and the scheduler was superbly designed for user responsiveness. This was at a time when the low-latency and preempt kernels simply didn't exist, and we were putting up with the 100ms+ second latencies of kernel 2.2. While Linux today has caught up with and surpassed the latency targets, it (even in 2.5) still hasn't managed to reach the same quality in the scheduler.
Wasn't the kernel built on Mach? Actually, I'm very sure it was. I remember that being used to give it credibility.
2) The GUI was very fast and responsive.
My fav feature of the GUI was the ability to turn off both processors on a BeBox:) That of course would freeze the machine.
5) Long before OS X came around, BeOS had the power of Unix with the simplicity of a Mac. The shell was extremely well integrated with the GUI, and you could even script GUI events from the command line.
Not exactly, since Mac OS X is really just OpenStep v6. OpenStep/Mach and NeXT are much older than the BeOS, and they provide that functionality. Actually, the scripting-the-GUI part only came with OS X (thanks to AppleScript providing a scripting language to Cocoa), but one of the reasons why Apple chose NeXT over Be was their ability to hide Unix's complexity. And IIRC Be OS isn't multi-user. It's not exactly Unix either, or at least it wasn't 'back in the day' when I used it; it was more of a POSIX compatibility layer (OS wasn't built on or dependant on Unix, but the OS provided POSIX compatibility). I remember it being a pain to port stuff because the file system structure was different... wow those are old memories.
6) The API was awesome. It was simple, well designed, and well documented. This was back when GTK+' s documentation consisted of source code.
If you take a look at the API and compare it to OpenStep (now Cocoa), it's largely a rip-off. Perfectly understandable too, since most popular OO frameworks are based on something already (the two most common roots seem to be OpenStep (which itself is Smalltalk-ish), and Apple's MacApp). And in the case of the BeOS, it's probably the only good framework written in C++:)
Microsoft Employee: Look, Apple just added X feature to OS X!
Bill Gates: Well rats. Since they beat us to the punch, we should just voluntarially not add the feature for the next five to ten years as if they had a patent on it or something.
Microsoft Employee: Good idea sir!
Jeebus, that's funny. Good point and well made that I agree with. But it's still news.
The problem is, what has Microsoft done while Apple was building OS X? Up until Win95, Microsoft's goal was to create Win95 (BG: "Make it like a Mac!" or something to that effect). And after? What's the diff between Win95, 98, 98SE, Me?
Sure, tech advances to keep up with the times. IE's been integrated, the one feature no-one asked for or wanted. Active Desktop, which was similarly useless. And that whole, forgot what it was called, "push content" thing that was part of 98, that big bar of crap from the Internet that they added. That was all a reflex reaction to the Internet; so we can ignore that, I think.
What did Apple do? Alright, after releasing Sys 7, Apple had problems, because they had this awesome 'Pink' project (Sys 7 was the result of the 'Blue' project, they were in development at the same time) that was document-centric (task-centric as opposed to app-centric computing) and fully OO a la NeXT. They decided to team up with IBM to do it who had some good tech like SOM. That turned into Taligent. Apple eventually saw how that union was going, and put a roadmap out for Copland/Gershwin (also with task-centric computing). Uh, then Win95 came out, Apple couldn't build their machines fast enough to sell them and they started bleeding money....
So no fundamental changes to the Mac OS since System 7 to OS X, mostly due to bad management decisions. Now Apple's adding features that benefit user experience. Microsoft? Oh shit, Apple's doing stuff again, we gotta start catching up! BE LIKE MAC!
That's why it's news; it's illustrating Microsoft's true nature, the company that claims it's an innovator and wants to be protected as such. If it was such an innovator, why haven't they implemented their own useful ideas in all this time? Why don't they have confidence in their vision (all that hand-holding auto-shit in XP), and stand out as a leader? Don't they have a vision for computing?
Based on what I've read, another problem that Apple had getting Copland out the door was that nobody (good) wanted to work on it.
Really OT now, but of course no-one good wanted to work on it. Management imposed 100% impossible-to-implement product requirements. There used to be a page at Macintouch describing a working Copland build at some Macworld or something (rule #1 of the Internet: nothing lasts forever. I'm not sure why they took the page down when they revamped the site; perhaps the credibility of the article was questionable). The Finder was implemented. The technology worked, Nukernal was eventually completed, but anyone with a brain knew that you couldn't make a non-reentrant API re-entrant (ah that's not quite correct or the core problem, but you get the gist). And yeah, there were a lot of other cool projects at Apple that got axed too:)
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Most people encode at 128 or 192
Most people listen to Britney Spears. Try something complex at those bitrates (such as Dire Straits or Yokko Kanno) and you'll butcher the music. I encode at 320 kbps AAC :-/ It's not necessary for all music, but I'd rather take up the extra HD space than to cringe at the one point in the song that stresses treble and bass at the same time.
I still think that Faramir's character was butchered by PJ
Yes, I didn't like that either, but I can't deny it when PJ says in the DVD that "let's all sit down and have tea, and then off you go!" or something like that. The extra scene in the DVD about Faramir's "chance to show his quality" was desprately needed in the theatrical release, and I think it was foolish to not include it.
Arwen's subplot was unnecessary
A matter of opinion; I think it was perfectly necessary, if for the very least that a king like Aragorn needs a queen like Arwen.
conflict between Sam and Frodo was stupid
I didn't 'enjoy' it I guess, but no sense in being chummy all the time. The conflict arose from Frodo being taken by the ring, which was more intense than in the book (where Frodo sits around with it for 30 years or so without being drawn to it). The only thing that bugged me was inside Mount Doom; at one point I was just thinking, Sam, push him over already :P
Aragorn was not kingly
I thought he was. He was always assertive, wise when it counts, and passionate for those he needed to protect. And yet, they made him 'unexperienced' compared to Theoden when needed, which broadened his wisdom further. I especially liked how he said to the hobbits, "you bow to no-one." Nicely humble. The book mentions, at one point, that Aragorn stands very kingly. Does that make him more 'kingly' in the book?
dialog in TTT and ROTK was lame and contrived
At least they weren't singing all the time like the books :P Seriously, would you have been happier if they all spoke in Shakespearian tongue? As directory/writer, you have more to express than dialog; you have an environment that you want the viewer to absorb too. Simple dialog is effective in movies, but not in books.
the quality of special effects was not consistant (just think, why all agriculture in the movie was concentrated in Shire?
Because the shire was the purest place in Middle Earth, and served as a foil to the environment outside. The only place not ravaged by war. The plains of Rohan looked desert-like to me, despite the fact that they were green. I felt that was appropriate.
Many people and critics enjoyed them, but they sucked
A lot of people liked all the Matrix movies too, but Leno doesn't talk about those people. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but one's a fool to not recognize the difference between opinion and facts.
Movies that I think suck: After Earth, Batman Forever, Terminator 3 (although I didn't see it). Some people think Unbreakable sucked. I saw it before I saw the Sixth Sense, and as such I thought both were great. It also helps that I'm a fan of some American comics, and Unbreakable resonated very well. But to some, it sucked.
Note to moderators: it's not off-topic to talk about how much the movie did or didn't suck; it's the fricken LOTR topic. OK, it's a matter of opinion, but be nice :P
Not quite. Anything that needs trusted input can bypass that, such as password (sudo) dialogs. You can go to Terminal and select Secure Keyboard Entry from the File menu, thus protecting any passwords you use for SSH.
I'm not sure if I can agree or disagree with that. On one hand, all the changes to OS X make it a wonderful OS to use. On the other hand, I was over-seas for a month and had only my untrusty PowerBook 1400 running OS 9. And after a while, it felt nice.
A lot of the changes to OS X are because the Mac OS is now a multitasking, multi-user OS. Changes to the file system (forced structure) and window management reflect that. There are a lot of small things (which I'll iterate below) that most people don't realize about OS X because they haven't been using it as long. However, throwing good OS 9 ideas out the window was not smart.
The most glaring example is the new Finder. It's a total piece of shit, and completely buggy. I'm not sure if they could have lifted the old Finder and just ported it; one fundamental rule of programming (Carmack's Code Entropy thing) is that when a fundamental assumption has changed, start over from scratch rather than patch. So they rewrote the Finder. Good. But they got idiots to code it (using PowerPlant, no less) and idiots to design the user experience for it. All the small things that made the old Finder so great, things that have evolved through years of tweaking, have been thrown out the window (such as using the Command key to scroll the contents of a window, or initiating spring loaded folders when you're not dragging something). For those who like the new Finder in OS X, try this sometime. Set the file type of the old OS 9 Finder binary to APPL. Here's an example using Terminal and Developer Tools,
Try navigating around using the old Finder. Do some operations with it (moving files and copying and stuff). It's a joy to use! (You can't see Desktop icons, so use Command-Shift-UpArrow to activate the Desktop, selecting the startup drive. Use Command-O to open it or type the name of something else on the desktop that you want). Whenever I have 'serious' Finder work to do, I end up using the old one.
Anyway, the new Finder is OS X's biggest wart (or snot-ball). There's good stuff in OS X too. Clearing the right corner of the menu bar for system stuff is great - much better than the annoying control strip (either keep all your windows out of the way of it, or keep it closed all the time. Both workflows sucked). I like the new Apple menu. It has a strict purpose and is hard to mess up (I've seen some pretty horid Apple menus). The downside to the new Apple menu is what they replaced it with - the Dock. The new Application menus (showing the title of the Application and containing the Quit, Preferences and Services menu items) is a welcome addition.
The thing that's made OS X totally livable for me, as Tog recommends, is DragThing. DT's grown up a lot since it's OS 8 days, and although it can be tedious and often confusing how to configure it to your needs, once you do you get all the existing benefits of OS X, a replacement for whatever you used the Apple menu for, and you never need to use the Dock again (who the hell minimizes windows in OS X anyway? the Dock is a useless place to put them).
Anyway, that's my OS X rant for today.
Remember when they were hacking Morpheous' brain in the first Matrix? Computers hacking human brains has already been established. I never had a problem with this part of the story :-/
Apple's had their voice recognition technology since 1994 - that's before they had PowerMacs. Back then they used a DSP, but on the first PowerMacs (66 MHz to 80 I thnk; I've used it on my 7200/90, a 90 MHz machine), it ran great on a 90 MHz machine. This is no big deal, and easy as pie on a 400 MHz machine. Which I'm sure has more RAM than my 7200 had. And a more modern operating system.
But it has one fatal flaw. I can't use it when I'm listening to iTunes.
I'd rather be listening to music than talking to my computer, no matter how convenient it is. In an office I use headphones, but then I just sound stupid talking to my computer :P Perhaps if I got a noise canceling mic that stayed very close to my mouth by way of a headset, but frankly that's not worth the investment. So it's a nice toy, and definitely something that's nice to have for free, bundled with the OS and available to those who can use it, but if I think about all the much noisier environments that I use my PDA in, I myself would not pay $40 for it.
I feel it's safe to say that Panther is the best CPU upgrade you can get for your Mac. Everything is MUCH faster. For example, if you have a window with a tab view, clicking across multiple tabs is instantaneous, whereas before there would be even a slight delay. That's not because of Quartz Extreme, it's because of all the other numbers in the xbench scores.
After using 10.0 for a few months, my mind started melting away and Apple released 10.1. Yay.
After using 10.1 for almost a year, my sanity for a sane user experience started wearing thin. Finally Apple released 10.2, which was also much snappier. And it was something to rival OS 9 in a give-or-take competition for usability vs. stability, with Jaguar clearly winning.
But Panther just blows the doors off of.., um, not sure which doors I'm talking about. Let's put it this way in terms of performance. I used xbench to measure before and after the upgrade.
10.2.8 scores
CPU: 65.14
Thread Test: 35.3
Memory: 63.7
Quartz: 66
OpenGL: 60.5
UI (aqua controls): 57.87 (18.51 refresh/sec)
10.3.0 scores
CPU: 78.87
Thread Test: 60.95
Memory: 103.96
Quartz: 102.62
OpenGL: 78.6
UI (aqua controls): 141.58 (45.54 refresh/sec)
Totals:
10.2: 57.75
10.3: 85.19
Yes, HOLY CRAP this Mac is faster! My Q3A framerate jumped 15 fps (using the Q3 G4 beta). And the UI experience is much much smoother now, really the way OS X should be. Most notably, sheets and other window animation is VERY fast, and they now properly supplement the user experience, instead of just being eye candy. The Dock still sucks, but you can finally hide apps from the Dock contextual menu.
So, if you're sitting on the fence, jump off. If you thought Macs were slow, they just got a bit faster.
However, when everything supports Bluetooth, it becomes a non-issue. Leave your phone on and in your pocket ready to receive calls. Want to check your email? Whip out your Tungsten T, fire up VersaMail and check your favorite IMAP account. Or use Web Pro to check any web site. Your Palm will connect to your Bluetooth phone using your personal area network and establish an Internet connection. It rocks. When you want to make a phone call, you don't have to use a PDA to do it! That's the best part! You have all the features of your favorite phone (so long as your fav. phone supports Bluetooth) with no compromises. You can even use Graffiti to send SMS messages. Much better than a smart phone.
Better still, your calendar, contact, and other pda stuff syncs with your desktop machines (using Bluetooth if you want, so you don't have to buy an extra cradle for the office). This stuff is available now, it's not a pie-in-the-sky dream. Some people may object to carrying more than one item, but meh, I've given in and just bought a bag to carry crap in. Hell, I had a bag when I was in university to carry books and frankly that kicked ass. Now I can carry my Minidisc player, flash card reader, Tungsten, phone, and digicam when I need to.
And I don't need to buy one crappy device that combines an MP3 player (I currently use Minidiscs), flash memory (I currently use a portable SmartMedia/Compact Flash reader/writer as a "USB Key"), PDA, phone, and digital camera that compromises all of those items (the digital cameras in these smart phones/pdas make me want to cry). The article talks about smart phones that play music. Great. Probably 128 MB MP3 players. I would never use that.
Smart phones aren't the way of the future; wireless personal area networks are. And ways to take them with you. And hopefully not get them stolen.
But there's something remarkably adept about this computer that makes it so functional. We originally used AppleWorks on it, which was a typical Works suite. Then we used MultiScribe, which was a MacWrite clone (fonts that printed beautifully to an Apple ImageWriter). Then we bought PublishIt! 2 for the thing that gave us desktop publishing. And then we were pushing it; PublishIt! 2 was slow.
But I had to hook up my //e the other day to check some serial hardware, and while I was at it I took a trip down memory lane. Things that I thought were slow 10 years ago were pretty damn fast by today's standards! A 1 MHz //e, fast! To launch MultiScribe, you had to startup the //e with the floppy in the drive, wait for it to ask you to flip the floppy over (insert disk 2), and then hit return for it to continue. I used to think that took forever. It turns out that's faster than OS X booting up on my G4, and I think faster than Illustrator 10 or Photoshop starting up. And honestly, nobody uses the features that Microsoft Word has over the features that MultiScribe has.
For those who aren't familiar, the //e's spec'd as (mine's an original, but the later ones shipped as) 128 K of RAM at 1 MHz. You can expand the RAM quite a bit, add a hard drive, add networking, add a Postscript Laserwriter, and honestly expand anything you can think of (that's what the 'e' stands for), but they're generally expected to be used as I said, and perhaps with a mouse. BTW, the //e had 15 character file names with Macintosh-style type and creator meta-data (no 3-character extensions like DOS to determine file types); it was quite a shock when my Dad bought a powerful 8 MHz 286 for his business and it was so... archaic :)
We can do a whole lot more work with a whole lot less CPU power; the //e is a testimony to that. Compare the original Palms to the Windows CE devices. The first Palms were great! They were instant sellers because they served a useful purpose; not because they had a bazillion features. OS X is nice and all, but most of the CPU time and RAM isn't spent doing much. I'm looking at getting more RAM (I have 768, I'm thinking of popping in a 512MB dimm) just because I do hit the max every so often. Software developers have grown accustomed to growing hardware requirements, and it's really a shame.
When my older brother did CS in University, his computer lab consisted of 16 MHz Sun workstations and he did quite a bit of assembly programming over a few courses. He had to write controller software for a robot arm in assembly. When I did computer science at a different University (I started in 96), we had 300 MHz UltraSparcs, did most of our stuff in C, and I had one course in assembly where we didn't actually execute the code on hardware. The new students to CS do everything in Java; compare that (garbage collection) to programming a robot arm in assembly. (FYI, I'm all for garbage collection as a programming practice, but they don't teach you calculus in university because it's useful. They teach it to you because it makes your brain hurt).
While it's absolutely fantastic that Apple went from the Copland/Gershwin route to Mach/BSD, they did lose a bit in the process; one of the features of Copland's NuKernel was that it ran within 1 MB of RAM. Holy crap. That's what happens when you write stuff from scratch and start over. Multics is generally considered a failure but it did actually ship. Most people don't know what it was, and just think "it was too complex to even exist." Here's a quick rundown of its features,
Apple doesn't have a scheme to go any faster with the G4. Motorola won't deliver. There was an article saying that Moto was going to go to 2 GHz in what, 2005? It was something too little, too late. That's clearly not useful to Apple. Apple needs to get G5s into PowerBooks as soon as possible, as that's going to be the next speed bump, unless if they can overclock the current G4s, keep them cool, and not eat power.
Yeah, that might be a zsh 4.0 thing; I think with older versions you had to turn it on yourself.
Guess I gotta study bash too if that will be the os x default
Sadly, zsh used to be the default in the Public Beta. In fact, the 'sh' was actually zsh until 10.2, which is when they decided to include bash and use that for sh instead (which is a very odd choice given how they don't want to rely on the GPL; perhaps it's just to make Linux users happy).
Every time I install OS X or create a new user, I have to bust out NetInfo Manager and change the /users/::user::/shell from tcsh to zsh so I don't drive myself nuts :) Once you get used to zsh you can't go back to csh.
Where the 'command' should read /bin/tcsh (preferably /bin/zsh). The problem is that Terminal uses the 'login' command which takes several seconds to go through the login process, which is slow. If you use this to exec the shell directly when opening a new Terminal window, it's zippy.
--
I can't speak for bash, but given that you put the following in your .zshrc,
setopt autolist setopt automenu
zsh will automatically become much nicer than tcsh. When you hit tab, you'll get an 'auto listing' of completions below the prompt,
If you partially type something, you'll get menus for only those items (so D::tab:: would only show Desktop and Documents). If you hit tab again, you'll get an 'auto menu'. So D::tab:tab:: would result in this at the command line, % ls Desktop/
And D::tab:tab:tab (just adding one more to select the next one) would go to next item named D, the next item on the menu. % ls Documents/
There's also the 'setopt autocd' option, which means that if you type the name of a directory on the command line without giving it to a command, it will just cd to that directory.
Seriously check out the user-friendly manual at zsh.org. Zsh is one of those gems that comes with OS X that most people don't use :P
And one last thing; there are two main kinds of shells I'd say, the sh-kind and the csh-kind. tcsh is obviously of the csh-kind. The point of csh was to give C-like syntax to shell programming, but in effect sh constructs are much, much better suited towards shell scripting. csh and friends were best left to being good 'interactive' shells. bash (the Linux implementation of 'sh') and zsh ended up becoming every bit as good and then far better at being interactive shells than csh/tcsh, so in the end IMO there aren't any advantages to using tcsh over bash/zsh.
Now choosing bash v zsh... I use zsh, and I'm happy. I'll leave it at that :P
They key points are,
You can put in a G4 ZIF upgrade, but I can't vouch for stability or compatibility of those.
This has nothing to do with your machine being old.
The 10.2.0 installer disk is the easiest way to trash any Mac, new or old. Check out Apple's support forums, there were people buying brand new Macs which came with 10.2 who reformatted their drives so they could re-partition it, and they couldn't install 10.2!! They were left with useless Macs with no operating system (except for OS 9, if they wanted that).
My own examples,
Apple never really responded to the outcries on their forums, people thought their logic boards were f'd up or something and many just decided to buy new Macs (and again, people with new Macs were having the problem!).
Eventually Apple released the 10.2.3 installer disk - I got one as part of the Developer Program. This thing is a God Send (or rather, a really good bug fix). It runs perfectly on every Mac with no complaints, especially the Beige G3!
The Beige G3 was originally a 233, it's been upgraded to a 400MHz/1MB backside cache from OWC (you can get that for about $150, makes your Mac very usable. Get a USB card too).
The Beige G3 running 10.2.6 is far more stable than when it's running 9.2.2 or 8.5.1 (I have all three on the same box). It's faster, easier to work with, and a heck of a lot more modern. Honestly, I've been toying with some old hardware and old versions of the Mac OS for the last couple of weeks (8.1, 8.5, 8.6, 9.0, 9.2..), and playing with what's supported on what (8.5 supports the GeoPort, 8.6 does not, 8.5 does not support USB hard drives, 8.6 does, 9.2 does not support my DVD drive, 8.5 does.. etc). In OS X, everything works perfectly (except the GeoPort, of course). And reliabily. You get used to all the little patches and extensions and your perfectly selected Extensions Manager Set to get your Mac booting perfectly, with 10.2 things just work. I don't need no friggin' driver for my DVD drive in OS X. OS X didn't freeze because my HD has a corrupt hard disk driver -- it mounted it anyway! This is all on the G3! With 10.1/10.0, using Mac OS X was iffy. But with 10.2.3+ Mac OS X is FAR better than using OS 9!! I've used a B&W G3/400 daily 'once upon a time' with 10.1 a bit over a year ago. This G3 running 10.2 is far smoother.
"Funky" and old world hardware still isn't supported - the AV personality card I've got on the G3 that gives me video/audio in/out doesn't work (just the basics work, audio), but hey, when I reboot into OS 9.2.2 the Finder crashes because it doesn't like my Toshiba DVD drive's driver (OS X uses it automatically).
Assuming there's no regressions with Panther, OS X runs fine on these old Macs. It's running great on that PowerBook too, we've got a PowerLogix G4 upgrade for that thing as well, but the develop
FreeBSD ports are simple tcsh scripts
Isn't that an oxymoron?
::ducks::
The Pentium comparison was just a fun side show.
GCC sucks for PPC as well. The GCC folks don't favour any processors; at best they're hampered by patent issues. Apple tested the CPUs based on the compiler they will use. And it's a fair test, as I said. Too many compilers make special cases for SPECs.
Come ON. It's a power user's machine. Sell the bloody iMac with a one button mouse, but have a bit of respect for your other (non-imbecile) customers.
How many soon-to-be G5 owners have $1000 graphics tablets? A LOT!
Much, much more than you think.
When I was working at a failing .com, I remember my manager saying "once we turn this around I'm going to get the most gorgeous PowerBook I can get" (he hated his Dell). Someone else, who shall remain nameless, bought a G4 Tower with a 17" studio display because he saw how gorgeous my 17" was (the 17" iMac wasn't out yet, and you need a tower to run the 17" ASDs). This person uses the (very expensive) G4 to check email at work (he says it's good for impressing clients). This person freaked out when I replaced Chimera with Safari, because it looked too different. He didn't know how to use it!
Chances are your boss has a more expensive box than you do. It's probably a portable, but it's probably... nice.
People with money can afford the prettier, nicer things in life, but that doesn't mean that they know why they're any good. How many old people do you see driving high-end Mercedes sports cars? A LOT! They're the only ones who can afford them! How many women do you see driving 'cute' yet powerful sports cars (such as low-end Mercedes or Z3s)? A LOT! No other kind of car can be as 'cute' as a small sports car. How many women do you see driving SUVs? A LOT! How many of them bought them because they were four wheel drive? Certainly the woman in the SUV behind me during the nightly traffic jam "drive" home didn't. Why is Porsche making an SUV? it's going to sell a hell of a lot better than their two-seater sports cars! And again, if you're in the market for a 'luxurious,' enviable computer, which brands are you going to turn to?
This is a reason why geeks can't understand WTF Apple is doing sometimes. Apple's target demographic is much larger (they have to satisfy the Mathematica geeks and the SUV drivers). And you ALWAYS make more money targetting a demographic that has money than targeting markets that don't; which is a large reason why Apple didn't suffer anywhere near as much as the PC makers did during this downturn.
And, back on topic, OS X is far more sophisticated than most Linux developers realize. Apple succeeded bringing Unix to the desktop; they didn't do it by making users learn how Unix works. I remember a TidBits article ranting about poor Unix user experience, talking about things like invisible dot-files in your home directory for app preferences (he was worried about how Unix-y Mac OS X was going to be). Forcing your users to think they way you do is the wrong approach.
Which is why Apple ships Macs with one button mice. If you want a good mouse you can buy the best damn mouse you want- with or without a scroll wheel, as many buttons as you want, etc. Myself, I use a graphics tablet! For me, mice suck in comparison, so why should Apple try an appease my 'sophisticated' tastes? Instead, I plug in my fav. tablet and the OS gives me hand writing recognition and fractional pixel resolution (that is, the OS gives apps the fraction of a pixel I'm on; event coords are not integers, but floats). If I use a mouse with a scroll wheel, it supports the scroll wheel too. If I use a mouse with a second button (or the second button on my tablet's stylus), the OS supports that. The mouse Apple provides is the lowest common denominator that everyone can use, and it's a pretty damn good mouse, being optical and all. For the times when I need a mouse it's great. It's free. I had to teach that person who bought the 17" how to double-click (many years ago); he kept moving the pointer all over the place while doing it. All right, he's my Dad.
Let the user do what they want to do, and support whatever they want to do. Don't make them fit into your definition of 'correct.' Kind of like sites who say "you must use IE 6" or "you must have JavaScript enabled" or "you must register to read content at the NY Times." Your reaction: screw you buddy; I'll spend my time elsewhere.
No, Mac OS X is compiled with GCC. All of it. Apple used to use MrC for System 7+, but abandoned it (even though it was far superior performance-wise) in favour of GCC for OS X. Their aim is to improve GCC now; already Apple's pre-compiled header stuff is making its way in (as it was better than what the GCC group had /planned/ for GCC).
1) The kernel was extremely low latency, and the scheduler was superbly designed for user responsiveness. This was at a time when the low-latency and preempt kernels simply didn't exist, and we were putting up with the 100ms+ second latencies of kernel 2.2. While Linux today has caught up with and surpassed the latency targets, it (even in 2.5) still hasn't managed to reach the same quality in the scheduler.
Wasn't the kernel built on Mach? Actually, I'm very sure it was. I remember that being used to give it credibility.
2) The GUI was very fast and responsive.
My fav feature of the GUI was the ability to turn off both processors on a BeBox :) That of course would freeze the machine.
5) Long before OS X came around, BeOS had the power of Unix with the simplicity of a Mac. The shell was extremely well integrated with the GUI, and you could even script GUI events from the command line.
Not exactly, since Mac OS X is really just OpenStep v6. OpenStep/Mach and NeXT are much older than the BeOS, and they provide that functionality. Actually, the scripting-the-GUI part only came with OS X (thanks to AppleScript providing a scripting language to Cocoa), but one of the reasons why Apple chose NeXT over Be was their ability to hide Unix's complexity. And IIRC Be OS isn't multi-user. It's not exactly Unix either, or at least it wasn't 'back in the day' when I used it; it was more of a POSIX compatibility layer (OS wasn't built on or dependant on Unix, but the OS provided POSIX compatibility). I remember it being a pain to port stuff because the file system structure was different... wow those are old memories.
6) The API was awesome. It was simple, well designed, and well documented. This was back when GTK+' s documentation consisted of source code.
If you take a look at the API and compare it to OpenStep (now Cocoa), it's largely a rip-off. Perfectly understandable too, since most popular OO frameworks are based on something already (the two most common roots seem to be OpenStep (which itself is Smalltalk-ish), and Apple's MacApp). And in the case of the BeOS, it's probably the only good framework written in C++ :)
Bill Gates: Well rats. Since they beat us to the punch, we should just voluntarially not add the feature for the next five to ten years as if they had a patent on it or something.
Microsoft Employee: Good idea sir!
Jeebus, that's funny. Good point and well made that I agree with. But it's still news.
The problem is, what has Microsoft done while Apple was building OS X? Up until Win95, Microsoft's goal was to create Win95 (BG: "Make it like a Mac!" or something to that effect). And after? What's the diff between Win95, 98, 98SE, Me?
Sure, tech advances to keep up with the times. IE's been integrated, the one feature no-one asked for or wanted. Active Desktop, which was similarly useless. And that whole, forgot what it was called, "push content" thing that was part of 98, that big bar of crap from the Internet that they added. That was all a reflex reaction to the Internet; so we can ignore that, I think.
What did Apple do? Alright, after releasing Sys 7, Apple had problems, because they had this awesome 'Pink' project (Sys 7 was the result of the 'Blue' project, they were in development at the same time) that was document-centric (task-centric as opposed to app-centric computing) and fully OO a la NeXT. They decided to team up with IBM to do it who had some good tech like SOM. That turned into Taligent. Apple eventually saw how that union was going, and put a roadmap out for Copland/Gershwin (also with task-centric computing). Uh, then Win95 came out, Apple couldn't build their machines fast enough to sell them and they started bleeding money....
So no fundamental changes to the Mac OS since System 7 to OS X, mostly due to bad management decisions. Now Apple's adding features that benefit user experience. Microsoft? Oh shit, Apple's doing stuff again, we gotta start catching up! BE LIKE MAC!
That's why it's news; it's illustrating Microsoft's true nature, the company that claims it's an innovator and wants to be protected as such. If it was such an innovator, why haven't they implemented their own useful ideas in all this time? Why don't they have confidence in their vision (all that hand-holding auto-shit in XP), and stand out as a leader? Don't they have a vision for computing?
Really OT now, but of course no-one good wanted to work on it. Management imposed 100% impossible-to-implement product requirements. There used to be a page at Macintouch describing a working Copland build at some Macworld or something (rule #1 of the Internet: nothing lasts forever. I'm not sure why they took the page down when they revamped the site; perhaps the credibility of the article was questionable). The Finder was implemented. The technology worked, Nukernal was eventually completed, but anyone with a brain knew that you couldn't make a non-reentrant API re-entrant (ah that's not quite correct or the core problem, but you get the gist). And yeah, there were a lot of other cool projects at Apple that got axed too :)