Ok, I AM an "artsy" type. I use Macs. But I also know about computers,and run various OS's on my Macs (LinuxPPC, NT 4 [under VirtualPC] and I used to run Be OS...)
I started on a PC, but I switched to using a Mac because: a) he business I work in (publishing and music) uses Macs, and b) after I started using them I saw that they really do this stuff better.
Plus they are very "artsy" computers, and with OS X I get to be artsy and geeky;-)
Try this for your reader's digest:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/01q4/macosx-10.1/ma cosx-10.1-12.html#conclusion
I have a better suggestion... try this.. try using OS X 10.1. You just read some article and you are an expert? He doesn't like OS X as much as OS 9. But that's him. I'm running OS X 10.1, and on my machine, which I'll admit is faster and has more RAM then his machine, it's just slightly slower *feeling* than OS 9... but that's only the GUI... the OS is faster and I have never had a GUI lockup or kernel panic, and I've been runing it since March...
Why can't a PCI sound card that plugs into a Mac plug into a PC and work with software on either computer?
The hardware is a Mac is no better than good PC hardware, so there's no reason a Mac should be needed.
Actually the problems with doing audio on PCs is mostly with the OS... Windows was never designed to do audio (or graphics, which is why MS stopped trying to push NT to pro publishing...) Macs were designed to do audio. Read the support section of any company that makes audio apps for both Windows and Mac OS and see all the issues listed trouble shooting PC problems, and very little on the Mac. There are driver issues... latency problems... etc.
Also Apple hardware is based on newer designs... there is still a lot of legacy crap in PCs. The main reason people have been using Macs in audio all these years is because they do audio better, not so much because they are easier to use. if good drivers and software can be written for Linux, then I see no reason it wouldn't work better than Windows... but the Mac had a big head start!
Linux is free, MacOS is cheap but you've got to purchase the Mac to run it on.
And what pro audio card are we going to use with Linux? I'm not talking SoundBlaster, I mean like one of the multi channel cards, like from DigiDesign, M-Audio, Echo, etc.
Are there Linux drivers? (I'm not trolling, I just don't know the answer...;-) There is more to pro audio hardware than the computer.
My Mac doesn't crash... and I rarely reboot... (Of course I have 896 MB and I'm mostly running OS X...)
But back to music... pro studios use Macs... period. Every Grammy winning album was recorded, mixed, edited, or mastered on a Mac.
I'm not sure how Linux would do, but Windows sucks for music. Just the latency issue alone makes it worthless.
Mac OS X has some real nice audio features built in... the guy that wrote OMS now works for Apple and wrote the MIDI subsystem. Now we just have to wait for the native apps! M-Audio just released an OS X driver for the Delta cards (and the great Audiophile 24/96) that has only 1 ms latency times!
With 1 GB of ram installed, it seems to me that compressing the windows is fairly pointless. I believe that the compression slows down more than reading the extra bytes. Probably a hack for those w/ less than 512 MB of ram.
Give it a try... I have 896 MB and it did make an improvement on my G4/466
Remember Gil saying at WWDC 1997 that all machines sold by Apple in 1997 would run the new Rhapsody OS? (mac OS X)
No, no, no! Rhapsody was to be System 8 (not to be confused with Mac OS 8... not the same thing at all)... and as several people have pointed out, OS X, is not Rhapsody.
The closest thing we have to Rhapsody would probably be OS 9 (since a lot of technology invented for Rhapsody made it's way into OS 8.x and above) and 9 does run on all PCI Macs.
Just as a side note, OS 8, was originally named System 7.7, at least from the beta I had of it. I guess they changed the name to OS 8 because they killed the Rhapsody project...
I thought that memory for older Macs like legacy PCI models were expensive because I looked at Crucial. OWC (where UUX can be downloaded) have very reasonable prices. Sure, it's not as inexpensive as PC-133 SDRAM; but it isn't as expensive as Crucial FPM DIMMs either. I believe 128MB costs around $40 dollars whereas it cost over $350 at Crucial.
I just bought a 512 MB PC-133 from OWC for $49!!:) Works fine in my G4
If Apple were a hardware company, they wouldn't have lost so badly when the clone makers gave Apple's customers what the customers wanted---inexpensive, powerful machines that ran MacOS, without logos, frogdesign, or ad campaigns. Instead, Apple was forced to reconsider what made them competitive, and yanked all the software licenses.
This is not exactly correct. As an owner of a PowerComputing Mac clone myself, I followed this whole affair closely.
Is wasn't just the Mac OS license, because the clone makers never had a license for Mac OS 8 anyway... only System 7.5.x, it was also a license for the Mac ROM and general motherboard designs. Apple had to certify the designs before the clone maker could get an OS license, and ROMs. Without the ROMs you couldn't run Mac OS on the box anyway.
This has changed of course, since they now use a ROM in RAM design, but since the clone makers could not legally sell a box with Mac OS installed that was the end of that. PowerComputing and a few others were going to include the retail package of Mac OS 8.0 (uninstalled at the time. My PowerCenter came with Be OS too!
Now Apple is too secretive about their hardware (remember Be on PPC?) for makers to make a Mac OS compatible box I think.
It is precisely because they are a hardware company that they lost so much to clone makers... instead of people spending money on Apple hardware, they were buying the less expensive clones. If Apple really made money on software, then they would have been fine selling all those Mac OS licenses.
Apple is a Computer company, back from the time when a computer maker had to make their own OS too.
Microsoft is a software company, and Dell (et al.) is a hardware company.
Apple provides a computer system much like SGI, Sun, or IBM.
Apple is a company that writes software, but they make most of their income from the hardware. This is why their software only operations used to be under the name of Claris.
It was written by Andrew Welch, from Ambrosia Software.
He states: "So what Apple did was they implemented a compression mechanism into the window server. When a window's contents haven't changed for a given period of time, the window server compresses them, so they take up less memory. Since it uses a compression method that doesn't require the buffer to be fully decompressed to do compositing (dragging a window around, updating the screen, etc.), you won't notice a slowdown with this compression turned on.
"In fact, because less memory is being used up by the window buffers, more RAM will be available for your applications, with will mean less virtual memory paging, and may in fact result in speeding up your machine. Additionally, since less data needs to be read (it is compressed, after all!), things like updating windows may be faster as well. "
I have to say I tried this, and it really does speed things up quite noticeably. I'm running OS X 10.1 on a 466 MHz G4 with 896 MB of RAM, so even though I rarely have page outs in VM, this tip worked, so it's not only VM related.
Isn't it true that if you have an iMac, *Book or tower Mac, you can just put a card in there, and you can set them up to be base stations?
Yes. Except if you are running OS X 10.1, because Apple felt there wasn't enough demand (read: they had too many other things to do and wanted to get 10.1 out the door...). But there are a bunch of articles on how to make it work on the mac web sites like macfixit.com.
But then Motorola came out with the 68000, which was like a 32-bit PDP-11, and IMHO that was the greatest instruction set of all time. I bet lots of you reading this even have one in your pocket or on your desk (PalmOS runs on a 68K).
Actually I have 9 old Macs sitting in my apartment... a 512K, two Plusses, a MacPortable, 2 Mac II fx's, 2 Mac II vx's, and a Quadra 610.
the sign of an accepted, mainstream OS is when most major software (Photoshop, MS Office, IE, etc) is available for said platform. Most of the most heavily used applications available for the Win32 platform are also available for the Mac
You have that backwards. Those are all programs that were written on the Mac then ported to Windows. Photoshop was a Mac program back before there was Windows! As was MS Word and IE was derived from NCSA Mosaic. Windows 1.0 was derived from code licensed from Apple just to run Excel (or was it called Visicalc or something...)
But I agree that makes Mac OS and Windows mainstream OS's
(Microsoft also has a history of good, iterative technologies; DDE led to OLE led to COM led to...OLE came from Apple's "Publish and Subscribe" used in a lot of Mac apps for years (like QuarkXPress)
(To be fair, the aforementioned 1000 MHz box running Beos 4.5 or QNX NTO is as fast as the Amiga.)
Yikes! I can't imagine Be OS on a system that fast. I have to say I used to be very fond of Be OS PR 2 running on my old PowerComputing, PowerCenter 132... this was the pre x86 Be OS days. it was a very fast OS and booted in about 5 seconds.
it's really mysterious as to why, for example, OS X would have Unix-like user directories, or a terminal divorced from the GUI.
Why is that? It IS Unix! You have to remember that this was exactly the way NeXTSTEP was, and of course that's basically what OS X is.
Of course, Apple has done little HCI work that is seriously innovative since System 7.
I take it you don't use Macs? OS 8 made HUGE improments to the GUI and introduced a bunch of great things like spring loaded folders, tabbed pop-up windows, and the control strip. it's been an evolution, not a revolution. OS X is the logical step (the NeXT step?) in the right direction.
For the new user, or the non techie user, we have a Unix based system that doesn't look like Unix. Something a lot of people have been asking for with Linux. For the power user you have all your Unix tools. You can even run X-Window apps.
A lot of people happen to think that the OS has no business demanding so much system resources. People don't run OSs, they run applications.
Actually there is nothing wrong with the speed of OS X 10.1 when running applications. The only place that the OS has speed problems is in the Finder, and it's not that bad with 10.1. I'm running on a 466 G4, below the bottom of the line now, and it runs fine. Most applications launch ina few blinks of an eye (or bounces in the Dock) and even though it's not as fast as OS 9.2.1 on the same machine, it will get faster with time.
I do have 896 MB of RAM, but it ran fine on 384 too!;-)
Oh and my vote is that Aqua is nicer than OS 9's GUI, and is a step up.
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I started on a PC, but I switched to using a Mac because: a) he business I work in (publishing and music) uses Macs, and b) after I started using them I saw that they really do this stuff better.
Plus they are very "artsy" computers, and with OS X I get to be artsy and geeky ;-)
I have a better suggestion... try this.. try using OS X 10.1. You just read some article and you are an expert? He doesn't like OS X as much as OS 9. But that's him. I'm running OS X 10.1, and on my machine, which I'll admit is faster and has more RAM then his machine, it's just slightly slower *feeling* than OS 9... but that's only the GUI... the OS is faster and I have never had a GUI lockup or kernel panic, and I've been runing it since March...
But the audio tracks and the sound track (and music score) were done on Apples ;-)
No one but hobbiest use Linux for audio
The hardware is a Mac is no better than good PC hardware, so there's no reason a Mac should be needed.
Actually the problems with doing audio on PCs is mostly with the OS... Windows was never designed to do audio (or graphics, which is why MS stopped trying to push NT to pro publishing...) Macs were designed to do audio. Read the support section of any company that makes audio apps for both Windows and Mac OS and see all the issues listed trouble shooting PC problems, and very little on the Mac. There are driver issues... latency problems... etc.
Also Apple hardware is based on newer designs ... there is still a lot of legacy crap in PCs. The main reason people have been using Macs in audio all these years is because they do audio better, not so much because they are easier to use. if good drivers and software can be written for Linux, then I see no reason it wouldn't work better than Windows... but the Mac had a big head start!
And what pro audio card are we going to use with Linux? I'm not talking SoundBlaster, I mean like one of the multi channel cards, like from DigiDesign, M-Audio, Echo, etc.
Are there Linux drivers? (I'm not trolling, I just don't know the answer... ;-) There is more to pro audio hardware than the computer.
But back to music ... pro studios use Macs ... period. Every Grammy winning album was recorded, mixed, edited, or mastered on a Mac.
I'm not sure how Linux would do, but Windows sucks for music. Just the latency issue alone makes it worthless.
Mac OS X has some real nice audio features built in ... the guy that wrote OMS now works for Apple and wrote the MIDI subsystem. Now we just have to wait for the native apps! M-Audio just released an OS X driver for the Delta cards (and the great Audiophile 24/96) that has only 1 ms latency times!
Audio in Mac OS X
Give it a try... I have 896 MB and it did make an improvement on my G4/466
No, no, no! Rhapsody was to be System 8 (not to be confused with Mac OS 8... not the same thing at all)... and as several people have pointed out, OS X, is not Rhapsody.
The closest thing we have to Rhapsody would probably be OS 9 (since a lot of technology invented for Rhapsody made it's way into OS 8.x and above) and 9 does run on all PCI Macs.
Just as a side note, OS 8, was originally named System 7.7, at least from the beta I had of it. I guess they changed the name to OS 8 because they killed the Rhapsody project...
I just bought a 512 MB PC-133 from OWC for $49!! :) Works fine in my G4
This is not exactly correct. As an owner of a PowerComputing Mac clone myself, I followed this whole affair closely.
Is wasn't just the Mac OS license, because the clone makers never had a license for Mac OS 8 anyway ... only System 7.5.x, it was also a license for the Mac ROM and general motherboard designs. Apple had to certify the designs before the clone maker could get an OS license, and ROMs. Without the ROMs you couldn't run Mac OS on the box anyway.
This has changed of course, since they now use a ROM in RAM design, but since the clone makers could not legally sell a box with Mac OS installed that was the end of that. PowerComputing and a few others were going to include the retail package of Mac OS 8.0 (uninstalled at the time. My PowerCenter came with Be OS too!
Now Apple is too secretive about their hardware (remember Be on PPC?) for makers to make a Mac OS compatible box I think.
It is precisely because they are a hardware company that they lost so much to clone makers ... instead of people spending money on Apple hardware, they were buying the less expensive clones. If Apple really made money on software, then they would have been fine selling all those Mac OS licenses.
Microsoft is a software company, and Dell (et al.) is a hardware company.
Apple provides a computer system much like SGI, Sun, or IBM.
Apple is a company that writes software, but they make most of their income from the hardware. This is why their software only operations used to be under the name of Claris.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20011 008024501793
It was written by Andrew Welch, from Ambrosia Software.
He states: "So what Apple did was they implemented a compression mechanism into the window server. When a window's contents haven't changed for a given period of time, the window server compresses them, so they take up less memory. Since it uses a compression method that doesn't require the buffer to be fully decompressed to do compositing (dragging a window around, updating the screen, etc.), you won't notice a slowdown with this compression turned on.
"In fact, because less memory is being used up by the window buffers, more RAM will be available for your applications, with will mean less virtual memory paging, and may in fact result in speeding up your machine. Additionally, since less data needs to be read (it is compressed, after all!), things like updating windows may be faster as well. "
I have to say I tried this, and it really does speed things up quite noticeably. I'm running OS X 10.1 on a 466 MHz G4 with 896 MB of RAM, so even though I rarely have page outs in VM, this tip worked, so it's not only VM related.
Yes. Except if you are running OS X 10.1, because Apple felt there wasn't enough demand (read: they had too many other things to do and wanted to get 10.1 out the door...). But there are a bunch of articles on how to make it work on the mac web sites like macfixit.com.
We do have AltiVec though...
Hey, wait a minute. Don't they use DragonBall processors in Palms?
Actually I have 9 old Macs sitting in my apartment... a 512K, two Plusses, a MacPortable, 2 Mac II fx's, 2 Mac II vx's, and a Quadra 610.
Lots of 68k's there!
I still have a Timex/Sinclair... was my first comuter ;-)
I heard in the last sequel it was supposed to be Aaliyah...
Did she ever get to film any of her parts?
You have that backwards. Those are all programs that were written on the Mac then ported to Windows. Photoshop was a Mac program back before there was Windows! As was MS Word and IE was derived from NCSA Mosaic. Windows 1.0 was derived from code licensed from Apple just to run Excel (or was it called Visicalc or something...)
But I agree that makes Mac OS and Windows mainstream OS's
(Microsoft also has a history of good, iterative technologies; DDE led to OLE led to COM led to ...
OLE came from Apple's "Publish and Subscribe" used in a lot of Mac apps for years (like QuarkXPress)
Yikes! I can't imagine Be OS on a system that fast. I have to say I used to be very fond of Be OS PR 2 running on my old PowerComputing, PowerCenter 132... this was the pre x86 Be OS days. it was a very fast OS and booted in about 5 seconds.
Why is that? It IS Unix! You have to remember that this was exactly the way NeXTSTEP was, and of course that's basically what OS X is.
Of course, Apple has done little HCI work that is seriously innovative since System 7.
I take it you don't use Macs? OS 8 made HUGE improments to the GUI and introduced a bunch of great things like spring loaded folders, tabbed pop-up windows, and the control strip. it's been an evolution, not a revolution. OS X is the logical step (the NeXT step?) in the right direction.
For the new user, or the non techie user, we have a Unix based system that doesn't look like Unix. Something a lot of people have been asking for with Linux. For the power user you have all your Unix tools. You can even run X-Window apps.
Actually there is nothing wrong with the speed of OS X 10.1 when running applications. The only place that the OS has speed problems is in the Finder, and it's not that bad with 10.1. I'm running on a 466 G4, below the bottom of the line now, and it runs fine. Most applications launch ina few blinks of an eye (or bounces in the Dock) and even though it's not as fast as OS 9.2.1 on the same machine, it will get faster with time.
I do have 896 MB of RAM, but it ran fine on 384 too! ;-)
Oh and my vote is that Aqua is nicer than OS 9's GUI, and is a step up.
Amen to that! Well actually they rewrote NeXTSTEP, but that's a good thing too!
(running OS X 10.1)