From http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html: "Mozilla needs performance, stability, and correctness"
Right on. I think they got stability and correctness done right, because every webpage I've been to renders correctly and I've never seen a single bug for quite a few versions of Mozilla. The performance, well, to be honest, is kind of on the low side. And the memory useage is really on the high side. In my opinion, more speed and less ram-hungry are the only things it really needs.
As long as there are still options, how can there be a MONOpoly????
Easily. Go into your local Best Buy. See any Linux and/or macs? Didn't think so. As a whole, you might have options, but in Best Buy, the only option is a Microsoft OS. No wonder there's a monopoly. Your average user isn't going to look around for options on the internet or elsewhere. They're going to walk in the store, look at what the store has, and walk out. And 100% of the time they walk out with a computer it's going to be a Microsoft OS because they don't sell anything else.
There's a whole lot of reasons Microsoft became a monopoly and how it's maintaining it. The retailers are just one of those reasons. I remember a few years ago when Best Buy offered an imac, but they only had one unit that users could play with, while they had 30 other Wintel computers laying around. That's shitty product representation, which is why Apple backed out of Best Buy. Circuit City suffers from the same problems too. They have three macs here, all lowend units, with about 25 or so computers running Windows XP. hmmm....I wonder which ones they're going to buy.
I find it sad that the whole reason Apple is opening their own retail stores is because they need to get the word out about Apple. People don't know about them or their products. When people can just not know about alternative operating systems and get along fine and dandy, you KNOW there's a monopoly in the midst.
Last I heard, it was the job of an operating system to get work done as quickly and as efficiently as possible. The moment that doesn't happen, it starts sucking.
Whoever those guys who work on the UI for MacOS X are either geniuses or they get paid A LOT of money, or both. Column view was a great idea. One window for everything you could want. It DEFINATELY beats minimizing the standard icon view because you don't have to shuffle through millions of windows to get to the one you want. You don't have to close those millions of windows either. Column view is a MUST for MacOS X, since a 800x600 window at million of colors eats up something like 1.6 megs of ram. Although window buffering can solve the problem of 70 windows eating up 112 megs of ram, it's not turned on by default and requires logging in as root and typing in a lot of stuff which won't mean anything to the average user. Not good.
Keeping the user's hands on the keyboard is a must for efficiency. It takes something like 1.32 seconds for a user to take their hand from the keyboard and put it on the mouse and to know where they want the mouse to go. That doesn't count the time it takes for the mouse to get there. If there is an equivilent keyboard command that's simple (such as command-W for closing a window on a mac), then you've just saved yourself 2-3 seconds. Multiple that by 1000, and you start to see the advantages. MacOS X really owned up to that advantage by allowing the menu and the dock to be accessible via keyboard, but I don't think you're saving yourself much time. Certainly not 2-3 seconds. Going to the menu via keyboard requires a lot of taps on the keyboard, while the mouse can go their directly. And they're big, so you won't have accuracy problems. Still, saving 1/10 of a second 1000 times over adds up.
They made some blunders also. Minimizing a window so it goes down to the dock takes FOREVER, especially on a slow computer. Although it looks neat, it's not too efficient. Those two seconds lost could be better spent getting work done and going home early. And if you're the kind who minimizes a lot of things, that deflates efficiency by having a huge dock which ends up being small because you have a lot of items. If you get too many, using the keyboard might be actually be slower than using the mouse which is already slow to begin, especially if you add in the extra time for accuracy. This is why you want to keep the dock as big as possible, and with as few of items as possible.
As far as position of the dock, keep it on the bottom. It works a whole lot better. Having the dock on the left or right is basically trying to read up to down instead of left to right. It's tough. Keeping in the middle creates a minimum of eyestrain also since your eyes are generally centered by default. Just lower them a bit, which is simple, and you can see it. Much simpler.
One of the most efficient ways to get what you want in a cluttered filesystem is to just type the name out. Well, at least this works on MacOS 9. Open a window, type the name of the file, and it automatically selects it or the closest spelling to it. VERY efficient. This means you can be as unorganized as you want, and you can still find things. Lets say I wanted to open a folder that's on my desktop right this minute. With the neat "type it, and it selects it" feature, I can just click on the desktop (always leave a tiny space where you can click on it so it switches apps), type in the name of the file or folder, and press command-O to open it. This takes under 2 seconds. While hiding the windows on all of my apps and opening it with the mouse takes 4-5 seconds. That doesn't include returning to the app I was on. That involes going to the menu bar and using mouse accuracy to click on small icons, which takes another couple seconds. Under the "type it and selects it" feature, you never hid the app in the first place, so you just have to maneuver the mouse over the app, and click. Half a second.
But anyway, regardless of what OS you use, you should analyze how you work and try to make it work as efficiently as possible. It might be a pain in the ass, but in the long run it saves HOURS worth of work. And you should evaluate other OSes not by who made them, but rather if it can get what you want done faster and more efficiently.
someone decides to put up a website to demonstrate this vulnerability. the site deletes everything on your harddrive. someone else decides to embed this into an HTML email. this email is sent to lots of people and deletes their harddrives.
Although in the short term that's bad, in the long run I could see something like this that breaks Microsoft's monopoly. Either that or an outlook virus that does the same thing. It's the only way normal consumers and buisnesses would look at alternative OSes.
In another location in case of a fire? I'd recommend that for the generic PC, but for one of Apple's G4s, you're fine even if there is a fire.
That's not an isolated case either. Another Powermac got toasted and lived to tell about it and the pictures to prove it (Babelfish translation, site is in spanish).
Although I am a mac freak, I would have NEVER thought that a Powermac would be able to withstand THAT kind of heat/damage. Even though the outside will look like a warzone has taken place, be assured that your data will be safe.
MacOS 9 crashes too much? Too hard to maintain? Either you have your expectations set way too high, or something's wrong with the system. MacOS 9 is rock hard stable. Very impressive for a system without protected memory. I often have uptimes of a week or more on this system before I end up restarting for whatever reason.
Ok. One system might not be able to convince a crowd that MacOS 9 is "rock hard stable." I defer to the job.
I work at my school as "Resident Macintosh Specialist". Actually, I was never told what my official job position is. I just work on the macs. As far as I know, there's just me and my boss who does things to them. No one else. This is in a school with 500 macs ranging from 8 year old LC 550s to new 500mhz indigo imacs running everything from system 7.6 to 9.2. The industry standard for tech support personnel to macintosh is 1:130, and there's only two of us. So we should be swamped with tech support problems, right? Wrong. We hardly ever do anything related to tech support. Usually the only thing that resembles tech support is that a teacher can't configure his or her e-mail client. Things like that.
Even last month I was barely swamped. Since I'm a student, policy is that I can only work a maximum of 3 hours after school. From November 10th to December 10th, I averaged 1.025 hours per work day. You'd think that if the OS "crashes too much" and is "difficult to maintain" that I'd be working more.
Although I am a crazed mac fanatic, in regards to stability I call it like I see it, and I'm not seeing unstable systems. The vast majority of the time I'm installing/upgrading existing hardware and software.
I won't lie to you. Occasionally we do have tech support problems, but usually they're isolated, easily fixed, and generally no big deal.
But as graphics artists, you guys aren't paid to know the OS and to do tech support. That's why if something is pissing you off, you should go and talk to a tech support person so they can fix it. Simple as that.
Apple's putting themselves in a position to reclaim market share that the Wintel world has taken from them.
The transition from MacOS 9 to MacOS X is almost done. As soon as March 24, 2001 comes around, every computer should boot to MacOS X by default. All Apple really needs to do is get aqua hardware accelerated and their apps ported to MacOS X. After that, Apple doesn't have much to do beyond bug fixing.
Whatever happens in January is a mixed bag. The G5s might come out, or they might speedbump the G4s. Either way, the holy grail of mac users everywhere will finally come to light. That's right....we'll FINALLY be at 1000mhz or even above! Can you believe it!?! But anyway, in my opinion it's essential that the G5s are released. Besides the fact that it should be a lot faster than the competiton, Apple needs to get G4s in their consumer lines.
If Apple was going to make a killer show, they'd show flat panel imacs with a 867, 933, and 1ghz G4s in them with G5s in the professional models at 1.2, 1.4, and 1.6ghz. And not only that, they should show the crowd a 1.6ghz G5 beating the snot out of the fastest Pentium 4 in....no guys, not Photoshop, but Quake 3! Macs have always sucked at providing gazillions of frames per second. It would be the first time a mac performed better than a PC at gaming. It would be a fair test and a lot more fun than Photoshop.
But anyway, don't trust Cnet! In fact, don't trust anybody but Apple! Last time the guessing was this extreme was at Macworld in July, which was the biggest letdown in Apple history. People were saying that 1ghz G4s with DDR-ram, MacOS X 10.1, flat panel imacs, the whole nine yards would be there, but it wasn't. Treat this as the same type of thing. If Apple hasn't announced it, it doesn't exist.
Maybe it's because we're using a technology to do stuff it wasn't designed for. ftp was designed for "attachments" and http was designed for HTML and images. E-mail was designed for only ASCII messages from one person to another. Nothing more.
I have a five year old mac clone made by PowerComputing (remember them, anyone?) with a bunch of upgrades. It runs MacOS 9 pretty well, but MacOS X is going to be the future, and I can't run it. I think it's really time for a new computer. And maybe an iPod. Those things look pretty snazzy.
But being 16, that's not going to happen. I got my first check Friday, and if all goes well I should be able to at least get the new computer by July. Yeah. Christmas in July.
But for now, I just want to be with my closest friends. I need a little bit of holiday cheer. When I'm with them I'd like my computer to do its part in finding the cure for cancer, but it's only avalible for Windows. Too bad it hasn't been ported to MacOS or Linux. I'd ditch SETI and use that in a heartbeat.
It's not really too much of a surprise he can do this without the computer blowing up. PPCs are designed to be cool (as in temperature, but also in neatness I guess) processors. Just put a huge heatsink on it, and you're set. My G3 upgrade that I overclocked by 40mhz (won't go any higher than 280mhz) maxes out at 43 degrees celcius. It's been awhile since I checked the specs out, but I believe it can handle a maximum is 90 degrees. That doesn't sound to relevant, but remember, the G4 the Cube uses is basically a G3 plus altivec. I'd be concerned about the other componets melting before being concerned about the processors even if it is in an extremely tight space.
I religiously watch Babylon 5, so I just HAVE to add my two cents.
The only characters even closely related to computer graphics is Kosh, the Shadows, and the First Ones. When Kosh is in his encounter suit there is a real live person in there (the actor, forget his name) moving the suit around and speaking. When Kosh is out of it, that's CGI. The Shadows are completely CGI and they only speak once and that's at the very end of the Shadow War. The only time you get a glimpse of what one of the First Ones looks like is when Ivoniva and Marcus go looking for them in a White Star in season two. And in season 4 or 5, the aliens that had just escaped Zaha'dum before it exploded (or it could have been actor with snazzy cgi). Everybody else was a flesh and blood actor. They just put the actors in suits/props/100lbs of makeup.
As for the anthropomorphicism of Babylon 5, most of them were anthropomorphic. The only ones I can think of that weren't are the Pauk-morau (sp?), the shadows, vorlons, that praying mantis guy early on in season 1, and the race of whoever Ambassador G'Kar wanted as a body guard in that episode where B5 is doing the religious ceremonies, and that race in season 4/5 explained above (real actor, spiffy computer effects?), and maybe also the race that enslaves the emperors of Centauri Prime, but nevertheless, only about half of the unanthropomorphic beings were computer generated.
I suggest you guys watch Babylon 5 if you want a super deep, long, and complicated plot with many twists and turns. Just this week, Babylon 5 seceded from the Earth Alliance. I admit it, I had major tears going when Captain John Sheridan was talking to his father for what might have been the last time for him. That's a little extreme, but I guarantee that ANYONE would shed tears for the last episode, but you have to watch every episode before that to understand why it's so sad.
On the same topic of hacked drivers, this guy is making MacOS X drivers for the voodoo 3 and maybe the voodoo 4 and 5. Although it's not as fast as those Nvidia cards they put into Powermac G4s these days, it would make for an excellent video card to drive a 2nd display.
Actually, why would a hardcore gamer be using a Powermac G4? They have one hell of a system bus bottleneck, and probably a CPU bottleneck also. The G5 should eliminate both of those bottlenecks. Rumors are saying that January is the release date for it.
If you order from a buisness, and the box and/or contents inside look obliterated, tell the buisness who made the product.
Awhile back some guy ordered a poster from Bungie. The box looked like shit. Utterly horrible. There wasn't even any packaging in the box, just the poster. So the guy took pictures and mailed them to Bungie.
Bungie put it up on bungie.net and said that the shipper "got in trouble". Whatever that means, but point being, shipping companies are more likely to listen to milti-million dollar companies than just one person.
Sure, those guys may have forgotten a couple of quotations, but I have found a more mysterious bug.
How the hell do they substantiate 1.1 -> 2.0? Bad version naming is also a bug! Lemme take a look at the new features. An equilizer, which should have been there in the first place, cross-fading, which is pretty neat, sound enhancing which is neat, syncing with an iPod which I don't care about, burning MP3 CDs which I don't care about, and I think exporting the playlist is new, which might be snazzy.
All the new features are great, but is there anything groundbreaking that substantiates the move from 1.1 -> 2.0? Not really. iTunes still has massive problems with speed. Scrolling is a pain in ass, especially if you have 1482 songs like myself. The visuals run piss ass slow, which really sucks since they're pretty neat.
Since iTunes has everything a person could ask for, the only thing left to give it is a healthy dose of Vitamin Speed.
All right guys...story time. Sit around the fire now and start flamin' those marshmellows.
Back in the day of 1996 or 1997, Apple bought NeXt. Then Apple kicked out their CEO and replaced him with Steve Jobs. He started using NeXt technologies and Apple's vast resources to make MacOS X.
In 1998 or so, we start hearing about it. No screenshots yet I believe, but Cocoa and Carbon were revealed. Adobe and Macromedia specifically praised carbon, since they wouldn't have to fully rewrite their apps. They'd only have to rewrite 10-30% of the code, which is 70-90% less rewriting than if Apple stuck with their original plan, Rhapsody.
Then on September 13th, 2000, Apple released MacOS X public beta. This costed $20, and a whole lot of people bought it. This is when Microsoft freaked out. Shortly after this, they announced Whistler. They said this upgrade was going to be as big and important as "Windows 3.1 to Windows 95". MacOS X, on the other hand, was being marketed as "The single most important thing since 1985".
Not too much happens between now and March 24th, 2000, but a couple of things do. Microsoft changed the name Whistler to Windows XP. Something like that, anyways. This brought many flames from mac users. MacOS X. Windows XP. Not much difference. Then Microsoft released pictures of Window's XP multiple users thing. Just one problem. They stole MacOS 9's Multiple User's rubber ducky icon. It was a direct rip from MacOS 9. This pissed off a lot of mac users.
Then on March 24th, 2000, just three days after my birthday I must add, Apple released MacOS X. This was not the fully featured OS we've come to know and love from Apple. It was awefully slow and lacked features, but it did show the public where Apple was heading with the OS. Apple made four small updates to it. CNet did a comparison of MacOS X and W2k and they preferred MacOS X.
In May, MacOS X is put on to every mac two months ahead of schedule, but it is not set as the default OS. This was probably done as a way to tell developers to hurry up.
On September 29th, 2001, Apple releases MacOS X 10.1 which is a lot faster and fully featured.
On October 23rd, 2001, Apple released the iPod, an arguably nice MP3 player. This serves two purposes. The primary is for Apple to expand its digital hub. The secondary purpose is to take a little bit of fire away from Windows XP. An interesting thing to note that the 5 gig firewire drive in the iPod costs $399, which is the same is what the iPod itself costs.
Windows XP, released on October 25th, 2001, emphasizes the same things that MacOS X does. music, movies, kids, the whole nine yards. What it does not emphasize is protected memory, which is very important since Microsoft OSes are usually not too stable. The price is a hell of a lot higher than MacOS X, and it includes a "feature" called product activation, which means you have to register with Microsoft to use it. Apple has no such equivilent.
So basically, Windows XP is Microsoft's direct response to MacOS X. Microsoft didn't want to fall too far behind in the competition, hence they made a product to compete with MacOS X. It will be interesting to see what the MacOS X vs. Windows XP articles say about the OSes as well as which one the reviewers preferred to use.
umm...this product is designed to compliment Apple's Digital Hub strategy, where your computer is the hub of your digital lifestyle. You can pay a few bucks more and get a product that you know will be easy, stable, and fast or you can go with a competitor which may be at a lower price, but you may not have any idea of if it sucks or not.
And also, Apple is selling MP3 players at their retail stores. The iPod is going to be right next to competing MP3 players. People will ask those employees "Why should I go with your higher priced solution when there other ones for a lower price?" Apple wouldn't be selling the iPod if it couldn't answer that question.
Personally, I want to see a review by someone who actually owns an iPod.
I actually saw an Xbox working here in Lincoln, NE in Software Etc. Overall, I was not impressed. Since there was nothing playable, I decided to watch a trailer for Bungie's Halo. I was surprised to find out how shitty it looked. But then I sucked my eyes out of the screen, and oh looky, That's a TV, not a computer monitor!
The moral is, computer games are not meant for the TV. Halo would look awesome on a computer monitor.
And anyway, I'd like to see what those guys at Nintendo are doing. Last I heard, the gamecube was easier and faster to program for as well as more optimized. No matter how fast the Xbox is on paper, that doesn't mean jack shit if those programmers can't make it optimized.
Beyond specs, Nintendo has several good games for it. Heh...just a cool thought, imagine Mario coming out saying "GIVE IT UP FOR-A MEEEEEEE!!!!" while ripping his shirt off exposing his winter coat of chest hair. ANYWAY, Nintendo has a reputation for good games and good consoles. I doubt that Microsoft can produce a superior product.
Re:Sense when as MS set computing standards?
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Microsoft's Future
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Apple actually invented firewire and won an emmy for it. Check it out.
On the hardware front, they were the first to use an easy to open case with easily accessible parts and pieces. I could be wrong on this one, but they were the first company to say that it was ok to open the case while the computer was still on. And yeah, it looks good. They were also the first to use trackpads, titanium, an extremely small form factor while keeping weight extremely low on their laptops. The ibook is very small but fully-featured. The imac itself was pure innovation, the proof is in the people who tried to copy it and failed. There was some imac look-alike on the Home Shopping Network, but it was $2000 and it looked worse. Apple includes a DVD-R with its midrange and highend towers. Apple was the first to embrace wireless. Apple's flatpanels are innovation with only one cable, and the best looking picture.
On the software front, MacOS X. The power of unix with the simplicity of the MacOS. That's major innovation right there. It's not perfect yet, but it should be sometime around March 24th, 2002. iTunes is great stuff, and so is iMovie supposedly. iDVD looks so simple that your average blowjoe computer user can use it without a problem. A couple independant studies showed that imovie and iDVD were easier than faster than the competiton. Another innovation that comes from not being a monopoly is burning CDs within the Finder.
As for iTools, I've never had it crash on me. My only complaints are that it's slow and that it's a bit hard to use if you're custom making your own webpage. All in all, I was fairly impressed with it.
"Apple doesn't innovate" doesn't hold water. Apple's always been on the bleeding edge of hardware and software innovation. If you want to see the newest and coolest things to hit the market, go with Apple.
I always have to go off on a tangent and be a conspiracy theorist. Have you guys noticed how Apple hasn't said anything negative toward Microsoft and Intel? Now back in the day of 1997, you might remember those commercials of a slug carrying a Pentium chip on its back, and the fireman cooling off one of those sleek guys in a cool costumes that were in Intel's commercials before the Blue Man Group. Those commercials kicked ass, I tell you! There's plenty of things Apple could have done since then, like this.
Sometime Apple is going to need to compete directly with Microsoft and Intel if they are to win more market share. Right now, they aren't ready. MacOS X 10.2 and the G5s need to come out, as well as some REALLY snazzy commercials. It's not too hard to see Microsoft pulling Office and Internet Explorer from the mac, so Apple would need alternatives for those. They need more retail stores also. As soon as all of the pieces are together, they should definately get the message out.
Internet tax is the lamest idea, wait. Nevermind about that, but it does rank up there with some of the lamest ideas ever conceived.
Lets refer to the very old equation of time = money. Also keep in mind the inequalities of time > money and time < money.
Now lets say we have two equivilent products from some manufacturer. Given that time = money, it's going to cost more money from Besy buy because you go there, buy it, return home with it and use it, so since there is less time involved, time < money you pay for it.
The same product far away may cost less money online than Best Buy, but it'll take a few days to get to you. Therefore, time > money.
In the end it all costs roughly the same. The reason why internet tax was thought up is because tons of people can wait for what they want, so retailers were losing money. And the government spent tons of money because of Sept. 11th, so of course they wouldn't mind some additional income.
If the balance between internet and retail store is broken, it would screw over everything.
If buying over the internet costed more money AND time than retail stores, it would screw over the world. If those people who normally order stuff at home went out to retail stores, traffic would be a mess, gas prices would go up since the demand would be greater, stores would be overcrowded, global warming will happen faster and we'll all die.
conversely, if internet became far more attractive than retail, elecricity, S&H, and possibly the product itself would cost a lot more.
This is all bad for the consumer. Very bad. to be short and to the point, the government just needs to fuck off. That's what it comes down to.
In fact, no taxation without representation! With the internet, putting up a poll is easy and it doesn't cost as much money as sending letters to every American citizen, and since it's easier and faster to go online, click a button and press "submit" than driving out to cast your vote, there will be more representation. Then if you go REALLY crazy, the House of Representatives would end up being disolved. After all, it was made so one person could represent a whole bunch of people. Seeing as how shitty of a job they do, especially when someone (RIAA, movie industry, Microsoft, etc.) gives money to them and how that the technology is availible that allow people to represent themselves, the house of representatives would serve little to no purpose. We hear all the time that we should take an active role in government, so why aren't the most advanced (ok, more advanced) technologies being applied so the people get as much representation as possible? Good question, and I'll tell you. As you slashdotters know, the government is owned by corporations. If the consumer had their way, companies wouldn't be making nearly as much profit as they are today, and prices would be low as hell for everything. Not good for greedy people.
Damn. I just thought all of that up inside of 10 minutes. Maybe I should run for president...
The case adding a lot? Hardly. The processor costs a lot, the mobo is probably fairly expensive, Apple gives you loads of free software like itunes, imovie, idvd, appleworks, and the not-free software like MacOS X and MacOS 9. That's before taking in the price considerations of what it takes to put in ram, video cards, hard drives, keyboard and mouse and all of that good stuff. All of the above involved some form of R&D, which tacks a lot on to the price. Then they have to stick a few hundred onto the price so they make profit.
The PC vendors don't have those kind of costs. They don't make software, mobos, do (as much) R&D, the processors are dirt cheap, and some of the other things that make Apple's computers expensive, which is why PC vendors can sell their hardware cheap.
And besides that, depending on what you're doing, a lowend G4 can kill a highend pentium and/or athlon. Not just photoshop, but some independent study showed that a lowend G4 can make DVDs in half the time that a top of the line PC can. Another one showed that imovie was faster and easier to use than the competition on the PC side. Then you take in the fact that independent studies show that the mac is easier to use, lasts longer, and has less problems than PCs.
The only place that the G4 gets its ass handed to itself is gaming. Performance should be on par with the competiton whenever Apple decides to use DDR ram.
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Right on. I think they got stability and correctness done right, because every webpage I've been to renders correctly and I've never seen a single bug for quite a few versions of Mozilla. The performance, well, to be honest, is kind of on the low side. And the memory useage is really on the high side. In my opinion, more speed and less ram-hungry are the only things it really needs.
Easily. Go into your local Best Buy. See any Linux and/or macs? Didn't think so. As a whole, you might have options, but in Best Buy, the only option is a Microsoft OS. No wonder there's a monopoly. Your average user isn't going to look around for options on the internet or elsewhere. They're going to walk in the store, look at what the store has, and walk out. And 100% of the time they walk out with a computer it's going to be a Microsoft OS because they don't sell anything else.
There's a whole lot of reasons Microsoft became a monopoly and how it's maintaining it. The retailers are just one of those reasons. I remember a few years ago when Best Buy offered an imac, but they only had one unit that users could play with, while they had 30 other Wintel computers laying around. That's shitty product representation, which is why Apple backed out of Best Buy. Circuit City suffers from the same problems too. They have three macs here, all lowend units, with about 25 or so computers running Windows XP. hmmm....I wonder which ones they're going to buy.
I find it sad that the whole reason Apple is opening their own retail stores is because they need to get the word out about Apple. People don't know about them or their products. When people can just not know about alternative operating systems and get along fine and dandy, you KNOW there's a monopoly in the midst.
Whoever those guys who work on the UI for MacOS X are either geniuses or they get paid A LOT of money, or both. Column view was a great idea. One window for everything you could want. It DEFINATELY beats minimizing the standard icon view because you don't have to shuffle through millions of windows to get to the one you want. You don't have to close those millions of windows either. Column view is a MUST for MacOS X, since a 800x600 window at million of colors eats up something like 1.6 megs of ram. Although window buffering can solve the problem of 70 windows eating up 112 megs of ram, it's not turned on by default and requires logging in as root and typing in a lot of stuff which won't mean anything to the average user. Not good.
Keeping the user's hands on the keyboard is a must for efficiency. It takes something like 1.32 seconds for a user to take their hand from the keyboard and put it on the mouse and to know where they want the mouse to go. That doesn't count the time it takes for the mouse to get there. If there is an equivilent keyboard command that's simple (such as command-W for closing a window on a mac), then you've just saved yourself 2-3 seconds. Multiple that by 1000, and you start to see the advantages. MacOS X really owned up to that advantage by allowing the menu and the dock to be accessible via keyboard, but I don't think you're saving yourself much time. Certainly not 2-3 seconds. Going to the menu via keyboard requires a lot of taps on the keyboard, while the mouse can go their directly. And they're big, so you won't have accuracy problems. Still, saving 1/10 of a second 1000 times over adds up.
They made some blunders also. Minimizing a window so it goes down to the dock takes FOREVER, especially on a slow computer. Although it looks neat, it's not too efficient. Those two seconds lost could be better spent getting work done and going home early. And if you're the kind who minimizes a lot of things, that deflates efficiency by having a huge dock which ends up being small because you have a lot of items. If you get too many, using the keyboard might be actually be slower than using the mouse which is already slow to begin, especially if you add in the extra time for accuracy. This is why you want to keep the dock as big as possible, and with as few of items as possible.
As far as position of the dock, keep it on the bottom. It works a whole lot better. Having the dock on the left or right is basically trying to read up to down instead of left to right. It's tough. Keeping in the middle creates a minimum of eyestrain also since your eyes are generally centered by default. Just lower them a bit, which is simple, and you can see it. Much simpler.
One of the most efficient ways to get what you want in a cluttered filesystem is to just type the name out. Well, at least this works on MacOS 9. Open a window, type the name of the file, and it automatically selects it or the closest spelling to it. VERY efficient. This means you can be as unorganized as you want, and you can still find things. Lets say I wanted to open a folder that's on my desktop right this minute. With the neat "type it, and it selects it" feature, I can just click on the desktop (always leave a tiny space where you can click on it so it switches apps), type in the name of the file or folder, and press command-O to open it. This takes under 2 seconds. While hiding the windows on all of my apps and opening it with the mouse takes 4-5 seconds. That doesn't include returning to the app I was on. That involes going to the menu bar and using mouse accuracy to click on small icons, which takes another couple seconds. Under the "type it and selects it" feature, you never hid the app in the first place, so you just have to maneuver the mouse over the app, and click. Half a second.
But anyway, regardless of what OS you use, you should analyze how you work and try to make it work as efficiently as possible. It might be a pain in the ass, but in the long run it saves HOURS worth of work. And you should evaluate other OSes not by who made them, but rather if it can get what you want done faster and more efficiently.
Although in the short term that's bad, in the long run I could see something like this that breaks Microsoft's monopoly. Either that or an outlook virus that does the same thing. It's the only way normal consumers and buisnesses would look at alternative OSes.
That's not an isolated case either. Another Powermac got toasted and lived to tell about it and the pictures to prove it (Babelfish translation, site is in spanish).
Although I am a mac freak, I would have NEVER thought that a Powermac would be able to withstand THAT kind of heat/damage. Even though the outside will look like a warzone has taken place, be assured that your data will be safe.
Ok. One system might not be able to convince a crowd that MacOS 9 is "rock hard stable." I defer to the job.
I work at my school as "Resident Macintosh Specialist". Actually, I was never told what my official job position is. I just work on the macs. As far as I know, there's just me and my boss who does things to them. No one else. This is in a school with 500 macs ranging from 8 year old LC 550s to new 500mhz indigo imacs running everything from system 7.6 to 9.2. The industry standard for tech support personnel to macintosh is 1:130, and there's only two of us. So we should be swamped with tech support problems, right? Wrong. We hardly ever do anything related to tech support. Usually the only thing that resembles tech support is that a teacher can't configure his or her e-mail client. Things like that.
Even last month I was barely swamped. Since I'm a student, policy is that I can only work a maximum of 3 hours after school. From November 10th to December 10th, I averaged 1.025 hours per work day. You'd think that if the OS "crashes too much" and is "difficult to maintain" that I'd be working more.
Although I am a crazed mac fanatic, in regards to stability I call it like I see it, and I'm not seeing unstable systems. The vast majority of the time I'm installing/upgrading existing hardware and software.
I won't lie to you. Occasionally we do have tech support problems, but usually they're isolated, easily fixed, and generally no big deal.
But as graphics artists, you guys aren't paid to know the OS and to do tech support. That's why if something is pissing you off, you should go and talk to a tech support person so they can fix it. Simple as that.
The transition from MacOS 9 to MacOS X is almost done. As soon as March 24, 2001 comes around, every computer should boot to MacOS X by default. All Apple really needs to do is get aqua hardware accelerated and their apps ported to MacOS X. After that, Apple doesn't have much to do beyond bug fixing.
Whatever happens in January is a mixed bag. The G5s might come out, or they might speedbump the G4s. Either way, the holy grail of mac users everywhere will finally come to light. That's right....we'll FINALLY be at 1000mhz or even above! Can you believe it!?! But anyway, in my opinion it's essential that the G5s are released. Besides the fact that it should be a lot faster than the competiton, Apple needs to get G4s in their consumer lines.
If Apple was going to make a killer show, they'd show flat panel imacs with a 867, 933, and 1ghz G4s in them with G5s in the professional models at 1.2, 1.4, and 1.6ghz. And not only that, they should show the crowd a 1.6ghz G5 beating the snot out of the fastest Pentium 4 in....no guys, not Photoshop, but Quake 3! Macs have always sucked at providing gazillions of frames per second. It would be the first time a mac performed better than a PC at gaming. It would be a fair test and a lot more fun than Photoshop.
But anyway, don't trust Cnet! In fact, don't trust anybody but Apple! Last time the guessing was this extreme was at Macworld in July, which was the biggest letdown in Apple history. People were saying that 1ghz G4s with DDR-ram, MacOS X 10.1, flat panel imacs, the whole nine yards would be there, but it wasn't. Treat this as the same type of thing. If Apple hasn't announced it, it doesn't exist.
Maybe it's because we're using a technology to do stuff it wasn't designed for. ftp was designed for "attachments" and http was designed for HTML and images. E-mail was designed for only ASCII messages from one person to another. Nothing more.
But being 16, that's not going to happen. I got my first check Friday, and if all goes well I should be able to at least get the new computer by July. Yeah. Christmas in July.
But for now, I just want to be with my closest friends. I need a little bit of holiday cheer. When I'm with them I'd like my computer to do its part in finding the cure for cancer, but it's only avalible for Windows. Too bad it hasn't been ported to MacOS or Linux. I'd ditch SETI and use that in a heartbeat.
Ok, enough of the boring stuff. Here are some links to keep you guys semi-entertained. The Cube goes into the Museum of Modern Art. For those without a NYTimes subscription, MacObserver summarizes the article.
Now for the fun stuff. Case mods! Check out the Kleenex Cube and the Blue Smoke Cube. Also, here's an All American Cube.
I religiously watch Babylon 5, so I just HAVE to add my two cents.
The only characters even closely related to computer graphics is Kosh, the Shadows, and the First Ones. When Kosh is in his encounter suit there is a real live person in there (the actor, forget his name) moving the suit around and speaking. When Kosh is out of it, that's CGI. The Shadows are completely CGI and they only speak once and that's at the very end of the Shadow War. The only time you get a glimpse of what one of the First Ones looks like is when Ivoniva and Marcus go looking for them in a White Star in season two. And in season 4 or 5, the aliens that had just escaped Zaha'dum before it exploded (or it could have been actor with snazzy cgi). Everybody else was a flesh and blood actor. They just put the actors in suits/props/100lbs of makeup.
As for the anthropomorphicism of Babylon 5, most of them were anthropomorphic. The only ones I can think of that weren't are the Pauk-morau (sp?), the shadows, vorlons, that praying mantis guy early on in season 1, and the race of whoever Ambassador G'Kar wanted as a body guard in that episode where B5 is doing the religious ceremonies, and that race in season 4/5 explained above (real actor, spiffy computer effects?), and maybe also the race that enslaves the emperors of Centauri Prime, but nevertheless, only about half of the unanthropomorphic beings were computer generated.
I suggest you guys watch Babylon 5 if you want a super deep, long, and complicated plot with many twists and turns. Just this week, Babylon 5 seceded from the Earth Alliance. I admit it, I had major tears going when Captain John Sheridan was talking to his father for what might have been the last time for him. That's a little extreme, but I guarantee that ANYONE would shed tears for the last episode, but you have to watch every episode before that to understand why it's so sad.
Do your research before you start making fun of someone. "knows" is a word and he used it correctly.
On the same topic of hacked drivers, this guy is making MacOS X drivers for the voodoo 3 and maybe the voodoo 4 and 5. Although it's not as fast as those Nvidia cards they put into Powermac G4s these days, it would make for an excellent video card to drive a 2nd display.
Actually, why would a hardcore gamer be using a Powermac G4? They have one hell of a system bus bottleneck, and probably a CPU bottleneck also. The G5 should eliminate both of those bottlenecks. Rumors are saying that January is the release date for it.
I'm afraid.
Galactic Gateway offers a very detailed synopsis of every episode of Babylon 5. Great for when you miss an episode.
This link says that a person's personality is fixed at age 25. Scroll down about halfway to find the direct quote.
DAMN! What the hell is milti-million? I guess it'll take the high IQ boys from MULTI-million dollar companies to find out.
If you order from a buisness, and the box and/or contents inside look obliterated, tell the buisness who made the product.
Awhile back some guy ordered a poster from Bungie. The box looked like shit. Utterly horrible. There wasn't even any packaging in the box, just the poster. So the guy took pictures and mailed them to Bungie.
Bungie put it up on bungie.net and said that the shipper "got in trouble". Whatever that means, but point being, shipping companies are more likely to listen to milti-million dollar companies than just one person.
Sure, those guys may have forgotten a couple of quotations, but I have found a more mysterious bug.
How the hell do they substantiate 1.1 -> 2.0? Bad version naming is also a bug! Lemme take a look at the new features. An equilizer, which should have been there in the first place, cross-fading, which is pretty neat, sound enhancing which is neat, syncing with an iPod which I don't care about, burning MP3 CDs which I don't care about, and I think exporting the playlist is new, which might be snazzy.
All the new features are great, but is there anything groundbreaking that substantiates the move from 1.1 -> 2.0? Not really. iTunes still has massive problems with speed. Scrolling is a pain in ass, especially if you have 1482 songs like myself. The visuals run piss ass slow, which really sucks since they're pretty neat.
Since iTunes has everything a person could ask for, the only thing left to give it is a healthy dose of Vitamin Speed.
All right guys...story time. Sit around the fire now and start flamin' those marshmellows.
Back in the day of 1996 or 1997, Apple bought NeXt. Then Apple kicked out their CEO and replaced him with Steve Jobs. He started using NeXt technologies and Apple's vast resources to make MacOS X.
In 1998 or so, we start hearing about it. No screenshots yet I believe, but Cocoa and Carbon were revealed. Adobe and Macromedia specifically praised carbon, since they wouldn't have to fully rewrite their apps. They'd only have to rewrite 10-30% of the code, which is 70-90% less rewriting than if Apple stuck with their original plan, Rhapsody.
Then on September 13th, 2000, Apple released MacOS X public beta. This costed $20, and a whole lot of people bought it. This is when Microsoft freaked out. Shortly after this, they announced Whistler. They said this upgrade was going to be as big and important as "Windows 3.1 to Windows 95". MacOS X, on the other hand, was being marketed as "The single most important thing since 1985".
Not too much happens between now and March 24th, 2000, but a couple of things do. Microsoft changed the name Whistler to Windows XP. Something like that, anyways. This brought many flames from mac users. MacOS X. Windows XP. Not much difference. Then Microsoft released pictures of Window's XP multiple users thing. Just one problem. They stole MacOS 9's Multiple User's rubber ducky icon. It was a direct rip from MacOS 9. This pissed off a lot of mac users.
Then on March 24th, 2000, just three days after my birthday I must add, Apple released MacOS X. This was not the fully featured OS we've come to know and love from Apple. It was awefully slow and lacked features, but it did show the public where Apple was heading with the OS. Apple made four small updates to it. CNet did a comparison of MacOS X and W2k and they preferred MacOS X.
In May, MacOS X is put on to every mac two months ahead of schedule, but it is not set as the default OS. This was probably done as a way to tell developers to hurry up.
On September 29th, 2001, Apple releases MacOS X 10.1 which is a lot faster and fully featured.
On October 23rd, 2001, Apple released the iPod, an arguably nice MP3 player. This serves two purposes. The primary is for Apple to expand its digital hub. The secondary purpose is to take a little bit of fire away from Windows XP. An interesting thing to note that the 5 gig firewire drive in the iPod costs $399, which is the same is what the iPod itself costs.
Windows XP, released on October 25th, 2001, emphasizes the same things that MacOS X does. music, movies, kids, the whole nine yards. What it does not emphasize is protected memory, which is very important since Microsoft OSes are usually not too stable. The price is a hell of a lot higher than MacOS X, and it includes a "feature" called product activation, which means you have to register with Microsoft to use it. Apple has no such equivilent.
So basically, Windows XP is Microsoft's direct response to MacOS X. Microsoft didn't want to fall too far behind in the competition, hence they made a product to compete with MacOS X. It will be interesting to see what the MacOS X vs. Windows XP articles say about the OSes as well as which one the reviewers preferred to use.
umm...this product is designed to compliment Apple's Digital Hub strategy, where your computer is the hub of your digital lifestyle. You can pay a few bucks more and get a product that you know will be easy, stable, and fast or you can go with a competitor which may be at a lower price, but you may not have any idea of if it sucks or not.
And also, Apple is selling MP3 players at their retail stores. The iPod is going to be right next to competing MP3 players. People will ask those employees "Why should I go with your higher priced solution when there other ones for a lower price?" Apple wouldn't be selling the iPod if it couldn't answer that question.
Personally, I want to see a review by someone who actually owns an iPod.
I actually saw an Xbox working here in Lincoln, NE in Software Etc. Overall, I was not impressed. Since there was nothing playable, I decided to watch a trailer for Bungie's Halo. I was surprised to find out how shitty it looked. But then I sucked my eyes out of the screen, and oh looky, That's a TV, not a computer monitor!
The moral is, computer games are not meant for the TV. Halo would look awesome on a computer monitor.
And anyway, I'd like to see what those guys at Nintendo are doing. Last I heard, the gamecube was easier and faster to program for as well as more optimized. No matter how fast the Xbox is on paper, that doesn't mean jack shit if those programmers can't make it optimized.
Beyond specs, Nintendo has several good games for it. Heh...just a cool thought, imagine Mario coming out saying "GIVE IT UP FOR-A MEEEEEEE!!!!" while ripping his shirt off exposing his winter coat of chest hair. ANYWAY, Nintendo has a reputation for good games and good consoles. I doubt that Microsoft can produce a superior product.
On the hardware front, they were the first to use an easy to open case with easily accessible parts and pieces. I could be wrong on this one, but they were the first company to say that it was ok to open the case while the computer was still on. And yeah, it looks good. They were also the first to use trackpads, titanium, an extremely small form factor while keeping weight extremely low on their laptops. The ibook is very small but fully-featured. The imac itself was pure innovation, the proof is in the people who tried to copy it and failed. There was some imac look-alike on the Home Shopping Network, but it was $2000 and it looked worse. Apple includes a DVD-R with its midrange and highend towers. Apple was the first to embrace wireless. Apple's flatpanels are innovation with only one cable, and the best looking picture.
On the software front, MacOS X. The power of unix with the simplicity of the MacOS. That's major innovation right there. It's not perfect yet, but it should be sometime around March 24th, 2002. iTunes is great stuff, and so is iMovie supposedly. iDVD looks so simple that your average blowjoe computer user can use it without a problem. A couple independant studies showed that imovie and iDVD were easier than faster than the competiton. Another innovation that comes from not being a monopoly is burning CDs within the Finder.
As for iTools, I've never had it crash on me. My only complaints are that it's slow and that it's a bit hard to use if you're custom making your own webpage. All in all, I was fairly impressed with it.
"Apple doesn't innovate" doesn't hold water. Apple's always been on the bleeding edge of hardware and software innovation. If you want to see the newest and coolest things to hit the market, go with Apple.
I always have to go off on a tangent and be a conspiracy theorist. Have you guys noticed how Apple hasn't said anything negative toward Microsoft and Intel? Now back in the day of 1997, you might remember those commercials of a slug carrying a Pentium chip on its back, and the fireman cooling off one of those sleek guys in a cool costumes that were in Intel's commercials before the Blue Man Group. Those commercials kicked ass, I tell you! There's plenty of things Apple could have done since then, like this.
Sometime Apple is going to need to compete directly with Microsoft and Intel if they are to win more market share. Right now, they aren't ready. MacOS X 10.2 and the G5s need to come out, as well as some REALLY snazzy commercials. It's not too hard to see Microsoft pulling Office and Internet Explorer from the mac, so Apple would need alternatives for those. They need more retail stores also. As soon as all of the pieces are together, they should definately get the message out.
Internet tax is the lamest idea, wait. Nevermind about that, but it does rank up there with some of the lamest ideas ever conceived.
Lets refer to the very old equation of time = money. Also keep in mind the inequalities of time > money and time < money.
Now lets say we have two equivilent products from some manufacturer. Given that time = money, it's going to cost more money from Besy buy because you go there, buy it, return home with it and use it, so since there is less time involved, time < money you pay for it.
The same product far away may cost less money online than Best Buy, but it'll take a few days to get to you. Therefore, time > money.
In the end it all costs roughly the same. The reason why internet tax was thought up is because tons of people can wait for what they want, so retailers were losing money. And the government spent tons of money because of Sept. 11th, so of course they wouldn't mind some additional income.
If the balance between internet and retail store is broken, it would screw over everything.
If buying over the internet costed more money AND time than retail stores, it would screw over the world. If those people who normally order stuff at home went out to retail stores, traffic would be a mess, gas prices would go up since the demand would be greater, stores would be overcrowded, global warming will happen faster and we'll all die.
conversely, if internet became far more attractive than retail, elecricity, S&H, and possibly the product itself would cost a lot more.
This is all bad for the consumer. Very bad. to be short and to the point, the government just needs to fuck off. That's what it comes down to.
In fact, no taxation without representation! With the internet, putting up a poll is easy and it doesn't cost as much money as sending letters to every American citizen, and since it's easier and faster to go online, click a button and press "submit" than driving out to cast your vote, there will be more representation. Then if you go REALLY crazy, the House of Representatives would end up being disolved. After all, it was made so one person could represent a whole bunch of people. Seeing as how shitty of a job they do, especially when someone (RIAA, movie industry, Microsoft, etc.) gives money to them and how that the technology is availible that allow people to represent themselves, the house of representatives would serve little to no purpose. We hear all the time that we should take an active role in government, so why aren't the most advanced (ok, more advanced) technologies being applied so the people get as much representation as possible? Good question, and I'll tell you. As you slashdotters know, the government is owned by corporations. If the consumer had their way, companies wouldn't be making nearly as much profit as they are today, and prices would be low as hell for everything. Not good for greedy people.
Damn. I just thought all of that up inside of 10 minutes. Maybe I should run for president...
The case adding a lot? Hardly. The processor costs a lot, the mobo is probably fairly expensive, Apple gives you loads of free software like itunes, imovie, idvd, appleworks, and the not-free software like MacOS X and MacOS 9. That's before taking in the price considerations of what it takes to put in ram, video cards, hard drives, keyboard and mouse and all of that good stuff. All of the above involved some form of R&D, which tacks a lot on to the price. Then they have to stick a few hundred onto the price so they make profit.
The PC vendors don't have those kind of costs. They don't make software, mobos, do (as much) R&D, the processors are dirt cheap, and some of the other things that make Apple's computers expensive, which is why PC vendors can sell their hardware cheap.
And besides that, depending on what you're doing, a lowend G4 can kill a highend pentium and/or athlon. Not just photoshop, but some independent study showed that a lowend G4 can make DVDs in half the time that a top of the line PC can. Another one showed that imovie was faster and easier to use than the competition on the PC side. Then you take in the fact that independent studies show that the mac is easier to use, lasts longer, and has less problems than PCs.
The only place that the G4 gets its ass handed to itself is gaming. Performance should be on par with the competiton whenever Apple decides to use DDR ram.