I was able to reproduce the bug. Running 10.2.6 on a G4/733 Quicksilver. I simply held down the 'a' key for a little longer than five minutes. It takes a few seconds for screensaver to actually crash after you click on ok. Afterwards, there is no message that screensaver has crashed, and you have full access.
Awww man. I answered all the questions truthfully and I got 46. Not a good sign.
Sten
you sure about that?
on
Mac OS in a Lab
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Easy to bypass foolproof? No offense sir, but if you can't set up foolproof correctly, then you should not be admining that lab.
For those who have never used it, it's a cheesy-looking program, but it's a great solution for computers that run MacOS 9 and below. You can set it so you can't get info, move files, and there is a list of allowed/disallowed programs. Bypassing by holding down shift at startup won't work, etc.
There's a whole lot of other stuff it can do. All in all, when set up correctly, there is one way to bypass it, and one way to mess up a system, which I will not go into detail about. Our setup apparently works well, because I haven't seen any students bypass it.
Seriously, anyone who's used it knows that you just click on a bunch of check boxes and maybe disallow a few programs. Changing the default password is a good idea also. This is not a difficult thing to do.
I disagree. I have a Powermac G4/733 quicksilver with the stock ATI Radeon 7500 (32MB DDR) in it, and this machine flies. Right now I have around 17 visible windows open, ranging from around 800x600 to full screen. Quartz Debug (part of the developer tools) says that I have many more windows open, but they are invisible.
Performance is far superior to what it was in OSX 10.1.5 of course. The genie and scale effects are WAY faster. Scrolling has been improved by a lot, and the new eyecandy goes at a perfect speed. The only thing bad is resizing windows, and that is around a 4X improvement from OSX 10.1.5 . Most importantly, however, is that my load average has gone down a bit. While writing this my load average has been about at 0.60. Back in 10.1.5 It would have been about 1.35 to 1.6.
As always, your mileage may vary and speed is subjective, but I have found it zippy. You definately don't need the latest and greatest video card, but it can't hurt.
This is a horrible situation to be in. The guys in the northwest should already be commended for the amount of shit they'll have to go through on top of what they already have to deal with.
With that being said, the school needs to choose wisely what they are going to do now. Do they really want to a shitload of money that they don't have to a company that just fucked them over? As consumers, they vote with their dollars, so if they give them money then they are basically saying that what Microsoft is doing it ok. I couldn't see anyone agree with that, so they need to go with the alternatives.
They might as well go with Linux, since they don't have money to spend on anything else. I barely have any experience with any flavor of linux (i've used super old versions of redhat and gnome), but from the looks of it, even that old system configured correctly would work. Working for a school, I can tell you that the vast majority processor cycles spent are either with word processing or a web browser. Using Linux at home might be a stretch, but school demands are minimal, so I think Linux would be a viable alternative. It'll have to be, because without money, there are no other alternatives.
This is a great story to keep watching. I wish the guys in the northwest the best of luck. I suggest slashdot post a followup story after the 60 days to see how they're doing.
What this guy did, he used Virtual PC with Windows XP. He let the registration period run out on XP, so it said that he had to either register or shut down (I think, I don't own XP). So he clicked shutdown, and it caused a kernel panic.
Spending 8-16 hours on the computer per day, I can relate. I've had to take steps to decrease the wear and tear I've been putting on my hands and eyes. Here's what you can do:
eyes: My computer manual says to look away from the monitor at something 15 feet away a few times per hour and to take 5 minute breaks. This works. Also, eat a good amount of vitamins A, B2, and C. You'll eyes will love you for it. And before bed, just stare at the ceiling or wall for 10-15 minutes. This works really well for me. Looking at dark colors for a long period of time increases eyesight. Change the desktop to all black. You might want to also invest in an LCD screen. And keep the screen 18-24" away.
hands: Do whatever it takes to decrease the amount of keystrokes and clicks you do. Make your work more efficient. Make scripts, lots of them, and memorize those keyboard shortcuts! Mac users: set those F-keys to whatever you most frequently use. Most importantly, keep your hands on the keyboard, and don't use the mouse except when it's absolutely necessary, and don't use scroll wheels! Rest your palms when you type. And get a good amount of calcium.
You might want to invest in a good computer chair and a waterbed. Your back is just as important.
And you should buy quieter fans for your computer. Less noise means less stress, and all the problems that can cause. Or if you're really wanting to spend a lot of money, get one of those new flatpanel imacs. It's easy on the eyes (Apple flatpanels are some of the best around), you can place the monitor *exactly* where you want it, the keyboard's quiet, the fan is quiet, and it has an ultra efficient user interface.
Above all, do what's comfortable to you. And be sure to take notice of what's NOT comfortable, and take steps to make it comfortable, or to make it last not as long.
This might sound like a lot to do, but in the end you'll feel a lot better when you're working, and you'll save a lot of time so you can go home sooner and have fun. The key motto is to work smarter, not harder.
It's been six months since the last major MacOS X update, and as Steve has said, we should be done with the transition to MacOS X this upcoming March 24th. So where's the update that makes the rest of the transition possible? It's not good enough in its current form.
Newer ipods and bigger cinema displays are great, but MacOS X is vastly more important. Guess the transition period needs to be lengthened now.
Since OS X is one of the topics of slashback, it might be worth mentioning that a new update to MacOS X was released. 10.1.3. Here's what it offers:
1.CD Disc Recording Peripherals: Expanded support for QPS, EZQuest, LaCie, Yamaha, MCE Technologies and Sony devices 2.Image Capture and iPhoto: Improved support for several digital camera models from Canon, Kodak and Sony 3.DVD Playback on external VGA displays on PowerBook G4 4.PowerBook video mirroring will be on by default when connecting to a new display 5.Improvements for iTunes when the full screen visualizer is used 6.Login authentication support for LDAP and Active Directory services 7.OpenSSH version 3.0.2p1 8.WebDAV support for Digest authentication 9.Mail includes support for SSL encryption
Get it via Software Update. If you're a bit hesistant, might want to wait for what xlr8yourmac.com says. And MacsOnly does a variety of speed tests for every version released. I'm sure they'll put up new benchmarks shortly.
You'll see a huge leap in performance after they get aqua accelerated via the graphics hardware. Since the graphics hardware (which these days is insanely fast) will be handling it, the CPU will have more power to use for other things. How much more? I don't know, but judging from the looks of things (anti-aliased, alpha layered, bezier curved, quartz rendered, drop shadowed, etc), I'm sure it will be significant.
Window buffering isn't turned on by default, so a 800x600 window at millions of colors eats up 1.9 megs of ram. If you're the type of person who likes to have 70 windows open at a time, this adds up very fast. With window buffering, each window will use 8.5-10x less memory. So with those 70 windows, instead of using 133 megs of ram, they use 15 megs. That's a lot of ram that could be going elsewhere, and since you won't be using as much swap or any at all, you get a huge speed increase.
A big one which can't be dealt with on a technological perspective is our dependancy of the Classic compatibility environment. Some people like having it open at all times for maximum compatibility. Well, even if they don't, having to open that One Small Thing(tm) in Classic is a pain in the ass because it uses an astronomical amount of CPU power and Ram. So the sooner we lose this dependancy, the better.
And from the looks of it, getting MacOS X synced up to FreeBSD 4.5 might be good. I'm sure we all love "hundreds of fixes, updated many system components, made several substantial performance improvements, and addressed a wide variety of security issues." Enough said.
After it's all said and done, I'd at least hope that it would be on par with MacOS 9. A little slower, yes, but not drastically.
So when is all this coming? It would have to be on or around March 24th, 2002. That's when the transition to MacOS X is supposed to be complete. What better way to celebrate than a major upgrade? If we're still bitching about something as general as speed after the transition is all said and done, then either Apple failed with MacOS X, or they need to extend the transition period.
One of the things I've noticed of how OSes differ from the MacOS is their lack of keyboard shortcuts. In the menu bar under MacOS 9, there's 22 keyboard shortcuts and they're pretty obvious to use. command-o opens a file/folder, command-p prints, that type of thing. And every program takes advantage of them in some way. In Netscape, there's 38 keyboard shortcuts.
In the end, this is a huge efficiency gain because you don't have to spend the extra 3-5 seconds to go to the mouse, find what you want, and select what you want.
Multiply that 3-5 seconds by how many times you go from the keyboard to mouse in one day to access a menu. That's how much time you could be saving if their was a keyboard shortcut to it. It ends up becoming a huge number.
Last I looked, Windows didn't have too many keyboard shortcuts, or at the very least there was no obvious way of knowing what they were. Very unfortunate.
I just can't resist. There are some good stories involving the mice at my school. In one lab with the hockeypuck mice, students like to move them to different computers because they like the color better. Some students just switch a puck with an optical, and we've had students steal optical mice. Those things cost the school $40 each! And sometimes we find mice on the floor, or with the ball taken out. The real killer is when the ring that seals the mouse ball in the mouse is taken. It's easier to just buy a new mouse rather than get a replacement for the ring. We also have a lot of students who like to try to blind themselves with the optical mice.
For the grand finale of "crazy students and their mice", you have to know what the Apple hockeypucks look like. They're circular with little plastic plating on the sides that matches the color of the imac. So I walk into a lab that I don't go in too often, and the plastic plating was switched on at least 10 mice! Whoever did it preferred their mice to have purple and pink plating. After trying to dismantle the plating on an expendible puck I have, to no surprise, the plating is glued on. Whoever did it would have have to spent hours with a scalpal to cut/pry it off and a few more hours to glue it back together. It was done with quality in mind during the whole process. It felt just like a real Apple mouse.
After surfing the internet, I have come across the perfect reason to buy an imac. After you hear this, nerds everywhere will buy one. It will change the way you think about Apple computers. All you have to do is check out the second and third comics of last week's Rockwood. Read it? ok.
See. They're not more expensive because of propietary parts of pretty cases. They're more expensive because they get chicks. Geesh. You guys need to look deeper into the computer. Pretty cases and ghz only do so much, but female magnetism?! I'd glady pay twice as much as they're selling for.
After seeing this article, I decided to go to As The Apple Turns and check out reruns about Apple suing imac copycats. There appears to have been three suits. Future Power, japanese company Sotec, and emachines. Sotec actually made the computers for emachines and themselves. emachines's called it the eOne, and Sotec called it the e-One. The only difference between the two is that they were sold in different parts of the world. Future Power was the first to make an imac look-alike, and probably claimed record for the shortest courtcase in history. if I remember correctly, Future Power had such a hard time defending it that they said it was different because it had a disk drive and therefore should be allowed to be sold. Of course, the judge didn't buy it. The Apple press releases about the Future Power and emachines suits were almost exact duplicates.
There were still copycats after the fiasco was over. A year or to ago I was channel flipping and saw another imac look-alike on the Home Shopping Network. Looked exactly like an imac, but the price was attrocious. I forget what it was exactly, but it was around $1599 or $1799. They opened it up on stage and it was obvious why. It was a standard motherboard with a flatpanel display in it. I doubt that these took a serious bite out of potential imac sales.
I don't think Apple will sue OEone. It doesn't use translucent polycarbonate plastics and right now no one really cares about the old imacs. It wouldn't be Apple's best interest to sue someone over an old design. It would probably cost more to sue than the sales they would lose, and seeing a press release saying "Apple sues OEone for copying old imac design" would distract from the excitement the flatpanel imac is trying to generate.
Which brings up the question, who's going to try to copy the flatpanel imac, and what will it look like? The design is so "far out" and "out of this world" and other '80s phrases that it would be a challenge to get a copycat.
An expression used to describe the persuasive ability of managers like Steve Jobs (the term originated at Apple in the 1980s to describe his peculiar charisma). Those close to these managers become passionately committed to possibly insane projects, without regard to the practicality of their implementation or competitive forces in the marketpace.
If any of you guys are close to an Apple Store, then get out of the house and drive to one and see how slick the hardware and software is for yourself. If you're reading slashdot, then you're bored and have no excuse why you can't. The slashdot crowd can swear ten times over that MacOS X is the greatest thing out there, but you aren't going to get what they mean until you use it for yourself. If you're like me without an Apple Store nearby, a Circuit City will do, but the experience will suck a lot more.
I spent quite a bit of time using it at the local Circuit City here. It's no Apple Store, but it's decent enough for my needs. I just need a computer with MacOS X on it, and no one to pester me. It's PERFECTLY useable on Apple's low end machines. Just make sure you have a bunch of ram and you'll be fine. The interface didn't take too long to learn. The most confusing aspect of it was what the red, yellow, and green buttons at the top-left corner of every window are. If you can learn what those are, then you'll do fine with the rest of the OS. The thing that really struck me as handy was the one click to all the system prefs you could ever need. It's just right there on the dock. Click, and it comes up. Can't get much simpler than that.
The software Apple bundles in is pretty slick too. iTunes is great stuff. The visuals are awesome. But then again, how hard can it be to make an easy-to-use MP3 program? I haven't seen one yet that wasn't common sense to use. The MP3s included are pretty good too. iMovie is incredible stuff. There was a camcorder already attached to the iMac when I got there. I don't think those guys at circuit city would care enough to install drivers and such. Thank god it just works at the mere action of plugging it in. But anyway, I recorded just a bunch of customers walking and I went to edit it with iMovie. I have never used it before, and within 5 minutes I had created a movie that looked awesome. Well, as awesome as it could look. Customers walking isn't too entertaining.
I guess I'm a firm believer that technology should be simple to use. It is to be there to assist you, not to work against you. To that end, Apple's the best. Taking complex technology and making it easy enough for the average person to use. It's the reason why people bother purchasing macs. It's not like they're faster, or that they get the latest and greatest in software first, and it's certainly not price or that it's the latest trend. It's because they do what is advertised. They just work.
A couple other notes: judging from the front page of Apple's website, I think MacWorld is going to be big. Very big. You can catch the live webcast on Janurary 7th on Apple's website.
When you get down to it, there are two reasons why Office for macs exist and why Microsoft is bothering to upgrade and support it.
1. There's suitable demand for it.
2. It's profitable.
I'm no expert, but I don't think there's much demand for Office for *nix. And even if there was, it wouldn't be profitable like Office for mac due to way less market share.
There shouldn't be a OS X vs. Linux situation. They both compliment each other. And they both need each other. The open source community as a whole needs big corporations backing them up so some crazy senator doesn't make some bill that outlaws open source. OS X has definately proven that open source advocates aren't just hackers that want something for nothing.
But more specifically, it's no secret that Apple is the leading computer supplier for educational institutions. Soon, schools are going to transition from MacOS 9 to MacOS X. In the longterm, this has huge benefits for everyone. What better place to learn open source than at school? OS X is a pretty snazzy OS to learn it, too. It's got, of course, darwin, and a really slick GUI to fall back on. The kids, the ones who know they want to go into a tech, they'd probably stay after school just to learn the ins and outs of darwin. The skills learned from that are transferrable to Linux. And Linux is used in the real world. Yes, I know. Real world experience in SCHOOL. It's a first. But anyway, of course there are some major differences between the two. For example, I don't think installing MacOS X is anything like installing Linux. But nevertheless, OS X is a great starting point for kids, to expose them to the power of open source.
As for why Apple needs Linux, lets see what Linux has that Apple didn't have before OS X. The whole slew of technologies that *nix utilizes. Preemptive multitasking, protected memory, SMP. All of which are VERY important. A command line, which allows for unprecidented control of an Apple OS. A million and one Linux apps which are easily portable to darwin. And most importantly, the open source model that Linux shares with OS X. This will hopefully ensure that OS X doesn't fall behind in speed(slowness is in Aqua, not open source), stability, security, etc.
But where they both miserably fail is product recognition. Apple's trying to correct that with their retail stores, and hopefully they will succeed. Because a win for Apple is a win for open source. Well, only a win if the consumer knows that MacOS X's core is opensource, but that sort of goes with product recognition.
Slashdot Mirror
(disclaimer: I'm a mac user.)
Sten
Sten
Sten
Sten
Sten
For those who have never used it, it's a cheesy-looking program, but it's a great solution for computers that run MacOS 9 and below. You can set it so you can't get info, move files, and there is a list of allowed/disallowed programs. Bypassing by holding down shift at startup won't work, etc.
There's a whole lot of other stuff it can do. All in all, when set up correctly, there is one way to bypass it, and one way to mess up a system, which I will not go into detail about. Our setup apparently works well, because I haven't seen any students bypass it.
Seriously, anyone who's used it knows that you just click on a bunch of check boxes and maybe disallow a few programs. Changing the default password is a good idea also. This is not a difficult thing to do.
Sten
Performance is far superior to what it was in OSX 10.1.5 of course. The genie and scale effects are WAY faster. Scrolling has been improved by a lot, and the new eyecandy goes at a perfect speed. The only thing bad is resizing windows, and that is around a 4X improvement from OSX 10.1.5 . Most importantly, however, is that my load average has gone down a bit. While writing this my load average has been about at 0.60. Back in 10.1.5 It would have been about 1.35 to 1.6.
As always, your mileage may vary and speed is subjective, but I have found it zippy. You definately don't need the latest and greatest video card, but it can't hurt.
Sten
With that being said, the school needs to choose wisely what they are going to do now. Do they really want to a shitload of money that they don't have to a company that just fucked them over? As consumers, they vote with their dollars, so if they give them money then they are basically saying that what Microsoft is doing it ok. I couldn't see anyone agree with that, so they need to go with the alternatives.
They might as well go with Linux, since they don't have money to spend on anything else. I barely have any experience with any flavor of linux (i've used super old versions of redhat and gnome), but from the looks of it, even that old system configured correctly would work. Working for a school, I can tell you that the vast majority processor cycles spent are either with word processing or a web browser. Using Linux at home might be a stretch, but school demands are minimal, so I think Linux would be a viable alternative. It'll have to be, because without money, there are no other alternatives.
This is a great story to keep watching. I wish the guys in the northwest the best of luck. I suggest slashdot post a followup story after the 60 days to see how they're doing.
Did anyone else read that title as "Square and Disney Team up For Klingon Hearts," or am I just too much of a star trek fan?
Apparently macs can read and burn everything but the first track. Not exactly effective copy protection.
What this guy did, he used Virtual PC with Windows XP. He let the registration period run out on XP, so it said that he had to either register or shut down (I think, I don't own XP). So he clicked shutdown, and it caused a kernel panic.
Then I looked down a bit to where it says "Posted by", then I thought to myself, "Ahh. That explains it. It's a Katz article."
Sad thing is, I'm one of his biggest fans, and even I can't help but think that he's a bit silly at times.
eyes: My computer manual says to look away from the monitor at something 15 feet away a few times per hour and to take 5 minute breaks. This works. Also, eat a good amount of vitamins A, B2, and C. You'll eyes will love you for it. And before bed, just stare at the ceiling or wall for 10-15 minutes. This works really well for me. Looking at dark colors for a long period of time increases eyesight. Change the desktop to all black. You might want to also invest in an LCD screen. And keep the screen 18-24" away.
hands: Do whatever it takes to decrease the amount of keystrokes and clicks you do. Make your work more efficient. Make scripts, lots of them, and memorize those keyboard shortcuts! Mac users: set those F-keys to whatever you most frequently use. Most importantly, keep your hands on the keyboard, and don't use the mouse except when it's absolutely necessary, and don't use scroll wheels! Rest your palms when you type. And get a good amount of calcium.
You might want to invest in a good computer chair and a waterbed. Your back is just as important.
And you should buy quieter fans for your computer. Less noise means less stress, and all the problems that can cause. Or if you're really wanting to spend a lot of money, get one of those new flatpanel imacs. It's easy on the eyes (Apple flatpanels are some of the best around), you can place the monitor *exactly* where you want it, the keyboard's quiet, the fan is quiet, and it has an ultra efficient user interface.
Above all, do what's comfortable to you. And be sure to take notice of what's NOT comfortable, and take steps to make it comfortable, or to make it last not as long.
This might sound like a lot to do, but in the end you'll feel a lot better when you're working, and you'll save a lot of time so you can go home sooner and have fun. The key motto is to work smarter, not harder.
And if all else fails, get off of the computer.
Newer ipods and bigger cinema displays are great, but MacOS X is vastly more important. Guess the transition period needs to be lengthened now.
1.CD Disc Recording Peripherals: Expanded support for QPS, EZQuest, LaCie, Yamaha, MCE Technologies and Sony devices
2.Image Capture and iPhoto: Improved support for several digital camera models from Canon, Kodak and Sony
3.DVD Playback on external VGA displays on PowerBook G4
4.PowerBook video mirroring will be on by default when connecting to a new display
5.Improvements for iTunes when the full screen visualizer is used
6.Login authentication support for LDAP and Active Directory services
7.OpenSSH version 3.0.2p1
8.WebDAV support for Digest authentication
9.Mail includes support for SSL encryption
Get it via Software Update. If you're a bit hesistant, might want to wait for what xlr8yourmac.com says. And MacsOnly does a variety of speed tests for every version released. I'm sure they'll put up new benchmarks shortly.
You'll see a huge leap in performance after they get aqua accelerated via the graphics hardware. Since the graphics hardware (which these days is insanely fast) will be handling it, the CPU will have more power to use for other things. How much more? I don't know, but judging from the looks of things (anti-aliased, alpha layered, bezier curved, quartz rendered, drop shadowed, etc), I'm sure it will be significant.
Window buffering isn't turned on by default, so a 800x600 window at millions of colors eats up 1.9 megs of ram. If you're the type of person who likes to have 70 windows open at a time, this adds up very fast. With window buffering, each window will use 8.5-10x less memory. So with those 70 windows, instead of using 133 megs of ram, they use 15 megs. That's a lot of ram that could be going elsewhere, and since you won't be using as much swap or any at all, you get a huge speed increase.
A big one which can't be dealt with on a technological perspective is our dependancy of the Classic compatibility environment. Some people like having it open at all times for maximum compatibility. Well, even if they don't, having to open that One Small Thing(tm) in Classic is a pain in the ass because it uses an astronomical amount of CPU power and Ram. So the sooner we lose this dependancy, the better.
And from the looks of it, getting MacOS X synced up to FreeBSD 4.5 might be good. I'm sure we all love "hundreds of fixes, updated many system components, made several substantial performance improvements, and addressed a wide variety of security issues." Enough said.
After it's all said and done, I'd at least hope that it would be on par with MacOS 9. A little slower, yes, but not drastically.
So when is all this coming? It would have to be on or around March 24th, 2002. That's when the transition to MacOS X is supposed to be complete. What better way to celebrate than a major upgrade? If we're still bitching about something as general as speed after the transition is all said and done, then either Apple failed with MacOS X, or they need to extend the transition period.
In the end, this is a huge efficiency gain because you don't have to spend the extra 3-5 seconds to go to the mouse, find what you want, and select what you want.
Multiply that 3-5 seconds by how many times you go from the keyboard to mouse in one day to access a menu. That's how much time you could be saving if their was a keyboard shortcut to it. It ends up becoming a huge number.
Last I looked, Windows didn't have too many keyboard shortcuts, or at the very least there was no obvious way of knowing what they were. Very unfortunate.
For the grand finale of "crazy students and their mice", you have to know what the Apple hockeypucks look like. They're circular with little plastic plating on the sides that matches the color of the imac. So I walk into a lab that I don't go in too often, and the plastic plating was switched on at least 10 mice! Whoever did it preferred their mice to have purple and pink plating. After trying to dismantle the plating on an expendible puck I have, to no surprise, the plating is glued on. Whoever did it would have have to spent hours with a scalpal to cut/pry it off and a few more hours to glue it back together. It was done with quality in mind during the whole process. It felt just like a real Apple mouse.
See. They're not more expensive because of propietary parts of pretty cases. They're more expensive because they get chicks. Geesh. You guys need to look deeper into the computer. Pretty cases and ghz only do so much, but female magnetism?! I'd glady pay twice as much as they're selling for.
There were still copycats after the fiasco was over. A year or to ago I was channel flipping and saw another imac look-alike on the Home Shopping Network. Looked exactly like an imac, but the price was attrocious. I forget what it was exactly, but it was around $1599 or $1799. They opened it up on stage and it was obvious why. It was a standard motherboard with a flatpanel display in it. I doubt that these took a serious bite out of potential imac sales.
I don't think Apple will sue OEone. It doesn't use translucent polycarbonate plastics and right now no one really cares about the old imacs. It wouldn't be Apple's best interest to sue someone over an old design. It would probably cost more to sue than the sales they would lose, and seeing a press release saying "Apple sues OEone for copying old imac design" would distract from the excitement the flatpanel imac is trying to generate.
Which brings up the question, who's going to try to copy the flatpanel imac, and what will it look like? The design is so "far out" and "out of this world" and other '80s phrases that it would be a challenge to get a copycat.
from The New Hacker's Dictionary
reality-distortion field n.
An expression used to describe the persuasive ability of managers like Steve Jobs (the term originated at Apple in the 1980s to describe his peculiar charisma). Those close to these managers become passionately committed to possibly insane projects, without regard to the practicality of their implementation or competitive forces in the marketpace.
A 500mhz G4 (PPC 7400) can do 3084 MTOPS.
A 733mhz G4 (PPC 7450) can do 9406 MTOPS.
I spent quite a bit of time using it at the local Circuit City here. It's no Apple Store, but it's decent enough for my needs. I just need a computer with MacOS X on it, and no one to pester me. It's PERFECTLY useable on Apple's low end machines. Just make sure you have a bunch of ram and you'll be fine. The interface didn't take too long to learn. The most confusing aspect of it was what the red, yellow, and green buttons at the top-left corner of every window are. If you can learn what those are, then you'll do fine with the rest of the OS. The thing that really struck me as handy was the one click to all the system prefs you could ever need. It's just right there on the dock. Click, and it comes up. Can't get much simpler than that.
The software Apple bundles in is pretty slick too. iTunes is great stuff. The visuals are awesome. But then again, how hard can it be to make an easy-to-use MP3 program? I haven't seen one yet that wasn't common sense to use. The MP3s included are pretty good too. iMovie is incredible stuff. There was a camcorder already attached to the iMac when I got there. I don't think those guys at circuit city would care enough to install drivers and such. Thank god it just works at the mere action of plugging it in. But anyway, I recorded just a bunch of customers walking and I went to edit it with iMovie. I have never used it before, and within 5 minutes I had created a movie that looked awesome. Well, as awesome as it could look. Customers walking isn't too entertaining.
I guess I'm a firm believer that technology should be simple to use. It is to be there to assist you, not to work against you. To that end, Apple's the best. Taking complex technology and making it easy enough for the average person to use. It's the reason why people bother purchasing macs. It's not like they're faster, or that they get the latest and greatest in software first, and it's certainly not price or that it's the latest trend. It's because they do what is advertised. They just work.
A couple other notes: judging from the front page of Apple's website, I think MacWorld is going to be big. Very big. You can catch the live webcast on Janurary 7th on Apple's website.
1. There's suitable demand for it.
2. It's profitable.
I'm no expert, but I don't think there's much demand for Office for *nix. And even if there was, it wouldn't be profitable like Office for mac due to way less market share.
But more specifically, it's no secret that Apple is the leading computer supplier for educational institutions. Soon, schools are going to transition from MacOS 9 to MacOS X. In the longterm, this has huge benefits for everyone. What better place to learn open source than at school? OS X is a pretty snazzy OS to learn it, too. It's got, of course, darwin, and a really slick GUI to fall back on. The kids, the ones who know they want to go into a tech, they'd probably stay after school just to learn the ins and outs of darwin. The skills learned from that are transferrable to Linux. And Linux is used in the real world. Yes, I know. Real world experience in SCHOOL. It's a first. But anyway, of course there are some major differences between the two. For example, I don't think installing MacOS X is anything like installing Linux. But nevertheless, OS X is a great starting point for kids, to expose them to the power of open source.
As for why Apple needs Linux, lets see what Linux has that Apple didn't have before OS X. The whole slew of technologies that *nix utilizes. Preemptive multitasking, protected memory, SMP. All of which are VERY important. A command line, which allows for unprecidented control of an Apple OS. A million and one Linux apps which are easily portable to darwin. And most importantly, the open source model that Linux shares with OS X. This will hopefully ensure that OS X doesn't fall behind in speed(slowness is in Aqua, not open source), stability, security, etc.
But where they both miserably fail is product recognition. Apple's trying to correct that with their retail stores, and hopefully they will succeed. Because a win for Apple is a win for open source. Well, only a win if the consumer knows that MacOS X's core is opensource, but that sort of goes with product recognition.