The Dock sucks. It really does. It's big, so it takes up a lot of room on the screen. Turning on magnification makes it a moving target. Turning on auto-hide makes it delightfully hard to access. Applications get "stuck" under the dock. Minimized windows become difficult to identify (as it turns out, pages of text all look the same when reduced to 80 pixels).
I disagree here. I like the Dock. You can change the size if you want to make it quite small, and you can even change its position to the side. Properly written applications should never have their windows go under the dock... but it does happen. It's pretty easy to tell one window icon from another, since when you mouse over them you get the name of the window. And most Mac users will use Exposé anyway.
Windows is "document based". When I have four websites open, I have four icons on the taskbar. When I have four Word documents open, there are four icons on the taskbar for them, too.
But that also clogs up the Task Bar. And don't forget that while you may think of Windows as document based, in reality it's not. Once you have an application open it takes over the whole screen with that app's parent window. Document windows are stuck inside that window.
On OS X I can have a Word document open next to an email document if I want, and be able to drag text between the two.
Also using Exposé lets you manage many open document windows.
For web surfing I don't need many windows open, because I use tabs in Safari. Therefore I see each website as a tab, and none of them are clogging up my Dock.
Mac OS is "application-centric". You could have 100 Word documents open and still have only one icon for "Word". OS X makes you think in terms of applications.
If I have 5 Word documents open, and I minimize them, there will be 5 word document icons in the Dock, with each easily identified when you mouse over them.
Right-clicking on Word's icon will give me a list of the open windows, and I can select them that way. Or I can use the Window menu.
Why on Earth would you want 100 icons in your Task Bar? They would be so small it would be impossible to tell them apart! That's not easier than the Dock at all.
Now assume Apples get replaced every 4 years and PCs get replaced every two. Now, who has the larger install base?
There you go! OK, for all the non Mac users out there... I work in publishing. Except for file serves, RIPs and two PCs in our office, it's all Macs. In publishing it's easily 90% Mac. Few of these computers are used to surf the Internet.
Now quite a few of these are pretty old... the G4/400 I'm typing this on is from 2001. We added a 1GHz CPU upgrade, and it runs fine. No reason yet to replace it. We have some dual CPU G4s from a couple of years ago. They work fine. We just got some G5s. We even have a PowerMac 7500/100 with a 266 MHz G3 upgrade that is used as a RIP/print server for one particular printer. This machine was bought in 1996.
At home I have a G4/466 from 2002, and my son uses my old PowerComputing clone from 1996. That machine is not connect to the 'Net.
So many of the installed base of Mac users are on older machines. And in businesses many Macs are not used for web surfing.
Also, look at the large numbers of Windows machines installed in offices. These are counted of course, but they aren't consumer machines, and as such the user had little say in the purchase. So while I'm lucky to use Macs and home and at work, some Mac users have to use PCs, and are thus counted as PC users if they surf the 'net.
Apple's numbers are:
"Apple shipped 1,046,000 Macintosh units during this quarter, representing a 26% increase in CPU units over the year-ago quarter."
p.s. The KHTML team will need to be conversant with OSX to the point that they can remove GUI calls to it and replace them with QT. If this is a current problem, then some books might be in order.
From what I've read, Apple uses a port of Qt, which they call "KWQ"
You can read about it here:
Safari and KHTML
Someone did, but they were at work at the time, and shouldn't have been reading SlashDot anyway! So it was previewed too quickly and not adequately enough.
Plus, it was a typo, and I never professed to be a good typist. But I did know the correct word to use, which was the issue in the original post. He spelled it the right way, but it was the wrong word. So I guess it was a grammar issue and not spelling.:)
Why would Microsoft write a driver for another manufacturer's product?
It wasn't the modem driver that was the problem. She had the disk that came with the 3Com modem.
The problem was she needed the PC Card Services for Windows (or what ever it was called) to get the PC card slot to work. This was a Microsoft driver for Win 3.11, that used to be on their web site, but they removed all Win 3.11 downloads. This was outlined in the modem's manual, which also listed the URL.
So she had to install the modem drivers every time she wanted to get online! Once she shut down she lost use of the modem.
Why is it that most Windows haters spell MS as M$?
I don't know... why not ask someone why spells it that way. I see Windows users spell it that way too. I bet it has something to do with their business ethic?
For fuck's sake dickwad, I'm not here to spell things properly.
No, but you're here to give your opinion on a subject in a public forum and you expect people to take you seriously, which would require people to accept (not knowing anything about you) that you have a clue about what you are talking about. How one spells is one indication of their education or intelligence, although admittedly a generalization... how someone presents themselves is important.
If you can't even communicate on an adult level why should anyone think you know what you're talking about? So sit up straight, tuck your shirt in and keep in mind the whole world might be reading what you write! I actually got a job as an advisor to a Mac book that way.
And yes, I have a powerbook, so I've used OS X; it would nice if you don't assume things.
Well you need to spend some more time with it, because you don't sound as if you know how to use it, based on a number of statements you made.
And the Dock is not a taskbar. They're completely different things. With the taskbar, without any need for extra buttons or clicks, I can immediately see every window I have open. With the Dock, all I see is a little arrow that says "dreamweaver" is open, with no idea how many windows within it. Or Safari, etc.
You are assuming that window management is a function of the Dock. That was a design of the Windows task bar, and I think a poor one at that, but not the Mac.
The problem with the Windows task bar is if you have many applications and windows open, it starts to become a crowded mess. The names are truncated, and it's not easy to tell what is what. It tries to be too many things.
Now with OS X the Dock shows you running applications, and if you happened to have minimized any windows, it shows those also. If you right click on an Applications icon you do see a list of the windows, which you can switch to from there.
Or you can just click on its icon and switch all its windows to the front, and select the one you want. Or just use Exposé.
You are trying to use OS X like Windows, and that's the wrong mindset. With Windows you need to see what windows are open, because they are contained within the parent application's main window. Macs obviously don't work that way, and you can generally see all your open windows at once.
Oh, and if you see the Alto you'll see many things that made it into the first Mac. Big deal. Companies get ideas from each other.
The people who were there would disagree with you. Jeff Raskin stated that he started the Mac project before Apple went to PARC. And he was there.
"Jobs had indeed made a visit in December, 1979 but the Mac project was proposed in the spring and was officially started in September, 1979. In other words, the project was well under way before the event that was supposed to have inspired it took place."
"To be sure, PARC's influence was broad, deep, and beneficial, but it was by no means the "single source" of "every important development." Stross's blanket claim ignores the influence of Sutherland's far earlier Sketchpad system, Englebart's prior conception of the mouse and windows, that the all-important invention of the microprocessor itself did not take place at PARC, and that the people who created the early personal computers (Apple I, SOL, Poly 88, Heath H8, IMSAI, Altair, PET, etc.) generally knew nothing of and took nothing from PARC. Many significant examples of influential software that did not derive from PARC's work, such as the systems written by Bill Gates, Gary Kildall, and Steve Wozniak also come to mind."
Jeff Raskin - Holes In The Histories
Using "Go to folder..." assumes you know what you're looking for. If you're new to Mac, how does that help?
If you were new to the Mac you wouldn't need to be looking for hidden directories.
And having to download programs that do things that should be default to the OS? I use cocktail to show hidden files in finder.
Why do you even need to see hidden directories? Except for special occasions, you don't. And why should that be the default? It's not turned on by default on Windows. They are hidden for a reason, to keep people who don't know enough out of harms way. And if you do know enough, then you know where to find them.
And so what if I configure Windows to hide the Mac files? They're still there. They still don't need to be there, and there's no way of disabling that.
They are supposed to be hidden files, and it's Windows that is not honoring the visibility flag. And they are needed by OS X. But I agree there should be an option to stop it from writing them. And Windows also writes invisible files. I see these all the time when I get disks in that came from PCs. How do you stop Windows from wiring them to disks? Same difference.
Win XP is slightly faster than all of them, if more memory hungry.
I actually find W2k pro to be faster than XP.
As far as OS X, 10.3.8 runs great on my 466 MHz G4 (digital audio) with 1 GB RAM. We even had it running well on a 400 MHz G4 (gigabit) with 512 MB at work. We upgraded that machine to a 1 GHz G4 recently though. But it runs fine on older Macs. My G4 has a Quartz Extreme capable video card, but the upgraded G4 doesn't, and except for no shadow on the mouse pointer and no spinning fast switcher cube, you can't really tell.
We will have to see how well Tiger does however. And none of these OS's was as fast as BeOS!:)
For example, when I was chatting with the other, fatter, balder and sweaty Steve...
Ha!
he pointed me to a page which states Windows 2000 will go out of support in 2010.
Hey but what are all the Windows 3.11 users to do?;)
And while that comment was in jest, my sister-in-law had a Windows 3.11 laptop she liked to use. She wanted to get it on the internet (don't laugh!), but the driver she needed for her modem card wasn't available anymore, since MS killed off all Win 3.11 downloads.
While I'd imagine Apple will stop selling older versions of Mac OS X (if they haven't already), or even updating it, they do have System 6 and 7.x available for free download!
, and you have to download applications to unhide hidden directories in Finder, or use the terminal which requires knowledge of UNIX commands.
You're doing a great job at making me laugh!:)
I can open a new Finder window, and type Command-Shift-G, or alternately go to the Go menu, and choose "Go to folder..." and then type, oh, let's say "var" and, hey, lookie there! A whole slew of hidden directories! If I want to browse, I can use something like RBrowserLite, which is a free FTP program, that also makes a nice file browser, a la, NeXT STEP.
But the thing that really cracks me up is how many years were Windows users saying "Macs suck because they don't have a command line"... Ha!
And with that BSD under the hood, we can run all those free X11 apps....
And you can configure Windows to not show the hidden Mac files if you like.
Sure, its way better, but its no way near as efficient and easy to use as a good old fashioned task bar.
The Dock is the taskbar in OS X, and does just about everything the Windows version does, plus more. If you right click on the Dock you will see far more options for most applications than you have with the taskbar. Exposé is not a replacement for the Dock. Exposé is a window management tool, and there's nothing on Windows that matches it. We can also switch applications using Command-Tab, which brings up the real app switcher in OS X. From there you can also hide/show and quit applications. So OS X has multiple ways to switch apps. Oh, and the word you want to use is "it's" not "its."
Also as far as "good old fashioned" task bars go, remember that OS X is a descendant to NeXT/OPEN STEP, and the Dock (or Tray) comes from there, and was out before Windows 95 reared its ugly head. If you take a look at NeXT STEP you will see many things that made their way into Windows 95... like the style of the windows themselves, and the recycle bin.
The next biggest thing is Spotlight, which Microsoft has already released for free for there OS.
Here's what I want to know... why is it that so often Window's users can't spell? It's "T H I E R" not "there." Spotlight isn't the next biggest thing. Spotlight is an update to the live search feature that has been in OS X for a while now. Spotlight is also a rip-off of LaunchBar which has been around for a while.
I've been using LaunchBar for the past couple of years.
And I said hackneyed to illustrate Apple/Steve Jobs refusal to admit mistakes of not incorporating a taskbar into their OS, just as they still insist on using one button mice.
OS X does have a task bar, it's called the Dock. I think it's a better task bar than the one in Windows, and I do use both Panther, W2K, and XP every day. Not only can you switch applications with the Dock, you can use it as a launcher and keep frequently used files, URLs, and folders there.
As far as mice... I have an 8 button Logitech MX-700 on my G4. You can buy any multi-button mouse you want. Right out of the box any two button scroll wheel mouse will work. Also for those people who prefer a one button mouse, and yes, they are out there, Apple includes the right click functionality by using the Control modifier key.
I see the reality distortion field is in full effect these days.
The Windows XP Home upgrade is $93.99, the XP Pro upgrade is $179.99.
Okay I obviously quoted the full price by mistake... however the upgrade is $198.49 at Amazon (which is where the other prices were quoted from).
Also I think it's obvious that it might be cheaper to upgrade with Windows for a couple of reasons. First there isn't that many upgrades! You showed yourself that after buying Win XP in 2001 how many upgrades have there been (not counting Service Packs)? MS spends a long time between upgrades.
Another reason is that a lot of people get a new PC and it has the latest version of Windows on it, so there's no need to upgrade. And this can be any PC made in the last 4 years or so. But this also means you are running an old OS. 4 years in computer years is like what?;)
However a lot of people are also buying Macs with OS X on them. And some of the people I know are still running whatever came on their Mac... Jaguar, Panther, whatever. I started out with an older G4 running OS 9.0, so I've bought every OS X upgrade since 10.0 (I didn't bother with the PB release... 10.0 was painful enough!). But then I also get them for a discount because my wife is a teacher.:)
And I agree that Apple should have an upgrade path, like they used to. At least they should honor the coupons they put in the damn box! Mac OS was $90 for the longest time... I guess as Steve's plan to get them back in the black he's become a bit greedy. They don't give away as much as they used to.
But this is in line with most software upgrades... I have to upgrade things like the Adobe Creative Suite and QuarkXPress, not to mention MS Office all the time... this stuff gets expensive!
Besides, compare the OS X updates, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, to Windows SP upgrades, which are free, and are equivalent in terms of functionality upgrades. But MS gives em out for free, Apple charges full price.
Ummmm, wrong. The SP upgrades are equivalent to the 10.x.x (10.3.2, 10.3.3, 10.3.4, 10.3.5, 10.3.6...etc.) updates from Apple... which are free.
You would have to compare 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 more to the "major" windows upgrades, like Win 95 to 98 to ME to XP... except MS releases much less upgrade with far more time in between. So because of this, Apple's upgrades seem like Service Packs to you, but they aren't. Apple's version of SPs are free.
I'm not sure what you mean by "because you can't run OS X on something that hasn't already been licensed for a previous version of MacOS." The OS X install disk has no restrictions as to where you install it, so long as you can run OS X on that machine. And of course you don't need a key code.
I have installed it on machines that never had OS X on them. There was a couple of upgrade CDs that required an older OS X install, but there were either free, or cost $19. The retail CDs are full installers, and you can install on an empty hard drive if you wish.
The minor upgrades in-between the major ones, i.e., 10.3.1, 10.3.2, etc., are of course free, but since they are updates, you need at least 10.3 to run the combo upgrade, and of course it doesn't upgrade a 10.2.x install.
Now if you are referring to OS 9, you don't need that on a mac to install OS X. You can install onto an empty hard drive. If you are saying they don't give you OS 9 ("shelling out to Apple for an earlier version of MacOS") that's not correct either. Even if it's not installed by default, OS 9 is on the OS X CD. It's in the additional software install folder.
If OSX appeared for x86, it would still be a proprietary system and I seriously doubt that it would perform well on the market.
You mean kind of the way Windows doesn't perform well in the market? Its also proprietary.
I like Linux, but until I can run things like ProTools, Cubase SX, QuarkXPress and Adobe Photoshop, et. al., it's useless for me and a lot of other people. That was one of the big problems with BeOS. I loved BeOS, but there wasn't that many programs!
MAC hasn't done any worthwhile innovation on the desktop since they ripped of Unix's X, (Which MS quickly ripped off for Win95)
First off, it's Apple, not MAC, second it's "Mac" not "MAC" and thirdly, Win95's GUI is a rip off of NeXTSTEP. Plus I'm quite sure the Apple LISA and Mac were around before X Window
Not only does God play dice, but...he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen. - Stephen Hawking
Just wanted to correct that quote, since it's such a good one.
In answer to Einstein's quote of 'God does not play dice', Hawking said:
"Einstein was very unhappy about this apparent randomness in nature. His views were summed up in his famous phrase, 'God does not play dice'.
Thus it seems Einstein was doubly wrong when he said, God does not play dice. Not only does God definitely play dice, but He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen."
My Quickcam likes OS X for about 10 minutes, then quits with an unexpected error.:p
Crappy software has nothing to do with the OS. Logitec writes crap for drivers.
I'm talking about a real digital camera, like a Sony or Cannon, that uses a memory card. On her PCs the card wont mount and the camera cant be accessed, on my Mac is does every time.
Another funny thing, our brand new W2k file server at work. We were told to do daily backups because "sooner or later it will crash and you will lose all your files"... so says the people who installed it! You call that stable? We never lost any files on the Macs in seven years.;)
Funny. To me it sounds like the slipping-in of a USB 2.0 plug, and the 5 seconds it takes for Photoshop to start up.
But, maybe that's because I'm using a REAL windows computer, and not one of those silly Windows-95 computers that were the last computers those Switchers used.;)
My friend who has TWO REAL windows computers, running W2KPro can't get her new digital camera to work on either computer, a laptop and a desktop, no matter what she does. It did work on a friends W98 laptop though.
Worked without a hitch on OS X. Didn't have to install drivers, just plugged it in.
Sara, just because your PCs work, doesn't mean no one has issues with thiers. You aren't an average PC user either. You are übergeekchick!:P
The only thing that's missing in Windows that I want (need) is file/folder labling (colors), which I'm actually programming for myself in my spare time. THAT would be worth dropping $30 for. It's one missing functionality--OS X is missing too many. I'd go broke.
I use Labels on OS 9 once in a blue moon, but I know a lot of people miss it.
Labels X $7. (but of course MS is making you pay extra to play MP3s...)
The rumor is Labels and Popup Windows are coming back in the near future.
No points given back to you for commenting on my cuteness. =] All that matters to me is that you recongize my devastating brilliance. (And overlook my spelling and grammatical errors.)
Can't blame a man for trying;)
And hey... Aren't we supposed to be having this argument in email? You're SUCH a guy- always arguing in public. =]
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree here. I like the Dock. You can change the size if you want to make it quite small, and you can even change its position to the side. Properly written applications should never have their windows go under the dock... but it does happen. It's pretty easy to tell one window icon from another, since when you mouse over them you get the name of the window. And most Mac users will use Exposé anyway.
Windows is "document based". When I have four websites open, I have four icons on the taskbar. When I have four Word documents open, there are four icons on the taskbar for them, too.
But that also clogs up the Task Bar. And don't forget that while you may think of Windows as document based, in reality it's not. Once you have an application open it takes over the whole screen with that app's parent window. Document windows are stuck inside that window.
On OS X I can have a Word document open next to an email document if I want, and be able to drag text between the two.
Also using Exposé lets you manage many open document windows.
For web surfing I don't need many windows open, because I use tabs in Safari. Therefore I see each website as a tab, and none of them are clogging up my Dock.
Mac OS is "application-centric". You could have 100 Word documents open and still have only one icon for "Word". OS X makes you think in terms of applications.
If I have 5 Word documents open, and I minimize them, there will be 5 word document icons in the Dock, with each easily identified when you mouse over them.
Right-clicking on Word's icon will give me a list of the open windows, and I can select them that way. Or I can use the Window menu.
Why on Earth would you want 100 icons in your Task Bar? They would be so small it would be impossible to tell them apart! That's not easier than the Dock at all.
There you go! OK, for all the non Mac users out there... I work in publishing. Except for file serves, RIPs and two PCs in our office, it's all Macs. In publishing it's easily 90% Mac. Few of these computers are used to surf the Internet.
Now quite a few of these are pretty old... the G4/400 I'm typing this on is from 2001. We added a 1GHz CPU upgrade, and it runs fine. No reason yet to replace it. We have some dual CPU G4s from a couple of years ago. They work fine. We just got some G5s. We even have a PowerMac 7500/100 with a 266 MHz G3 upgrade that is used as a RIP/print server for one particular printer. This machine was bought in 1996.
At home I have a G4/466 from 2002, and my son uses my old PowerComputing clone from 1996. That machine is not connect to the 'Net.
So many of the installed base of Mac users are on older machines. And in businesses many Macs are not used for web surfing.
Also, look at the large numbers of Windows machines installed in offices. These are counted of course, but they aren't consumer machines, and as such the user had little say in the purchase. So while I'm lucky to use Macs and home and at work, some Mac users have to use PCs, and are thus counted as PC users if they surf the 'net.
Apple's numbers are:
"Apple shipped 1,046,000 Macintosh units during this quarter, representing a 26% increase in CPU units over the year-ago quarter."
p.s. The KHTML team will need to be conversant with OSX to the point that they can remove GUI calls to it and replace them with QT. If this is a current problem, then some books might be in order.
From what I've read, Apple uses a port of Qt, which they call "KWQ"
You can read about it here:
Safari and KHTML
Someone did, but they were at work at the time, and shouldn't have been reading SlashDot anyway! So it was previewed too quickly and not adequately enough.
Plus, it was a typo, and I never professed to be a good typist. But I did know the correct word to use, which was the issue in the original post. He spelled it the right way, but it was the wrong word. So I guess it was a grammar issue and not spelling. :)
It wasn't the modem driver that was the problem. She had the disk that came with the 3Com modem.
The problem was she needed the PC Card Services for Windows (or what ever it was called) to get the PC card slot to work. This was a Microsoft driver for Win 3.11, that used to be on their web site, but they removed all Win 3.11 downloads. This was outlined in the modem's manual, which also listed the URL.
So she had to install the modem drivers every time she wanted to get online! Once she shut down she lost use of the modem.
Whoops... T Y P O ;)
I don't know... why not ask someone why spells it that way. I see Windows users spell it that way too. I bet it has something to do with their business ethic?
For fuck's sake dickwad, I'm not here to spell things properly.
No, but you're here to give your opinion on a subject in a public forum and you expect people to take you seriously, which would require people to accept (not knowing anything about you) that you have a clue about what you are talking about. How one spells is one indication of their education or intelligence, although admittedly a generalization... how someone presents themselves is important.
If you can't even communicate on an adult level why should anyone think you know what you're talking about? So sit up straight, tuck your shirt in and keep in mind the whole world might be reading what you write! I actually got a job as an advisor to a Mac book that way.
And yes, I have a powerbook, so I've used OS X; it would nice if you don't assume things.
Well you need to spend some more time with it, because you don't sound as if you know how to use it, based on a number of statements you made.
And the Dock is not a taskbar. They're completely different things. With the taskbar, without any need for extra buttons or clicks, I can immediately see every window I have open. With the Dock, all I see is a little arrow that says "dreamweaver" is open, with no idea how many windows within it. Or Safari, etc.
You are assuming that window management is a function of the Dock. That was a design of the Windows task bar, and I think a poor one at that, but not the Mac.
The problem with the Windows task bar is if you have many applications and windows open, it starts to become a crowded mess. The names are truncated, and it's not easy to tell what is what. It tries to be too many things.
Now with OS X the Dock shows you running applications, and if you happened to have minimized any windows, it shows those also. If you right click on an Applications icon you do see a list of the windows, which you can switch to from there.
Or you can just click on its icon and switch all its windows to the front, and select the one you want. Or just use Exposé.
You are trying to use OS X like Windows, and that's the wrong mindset. With Windows you need to see what windows are open, because they are contained within the parent application's main window. Macs obviously don't work that way, and you can generally see all your open windows at once.
Oh, and if you see the Alto you'll see many things that made it into the first Mac. Big deal. Companies get ideas from each other.
The people who were there would disagree with you. Jeff Raskin stated that he started the Mac project before Apple went to PARC. And he was there.
"Jobs had indeed made a visit in December, 1979 but the Mac project was proposed in the spring and was officially started in September, 1979. In other words, the project was well under way before the event that was supposed to have inspired it took place."
"To be sure, PARC's influence was broad, deep, and beneficial, but it was by no means the "single source" of "every important development." Stross's blanket claim ignores the influence of Sutherland's far earlier Sketchpad system, Englebart's prior conception of the mouse and windows, that the all-important invention of the microprocessor itself did not take place at PARC, and that the people who created the early personal computers (Apple I, SOL, Poly 88, Heath H8, IMSAI, Altair, PET, etc.) generally knew nothing of and took nothing from PARC. Many significant examples of influential software that did not derive from PARC's work, such as the systems written by Bill Gates, Gary Kildall, and Steve Wozniak also come to mind." Jeff Raskin - Holes In The Histories
If you were new to the Mac you wouldn't need to be looking for hidden directories.
And having to download programs that do things that should be default to the OS? I use cocktail to show hidden files in finder.
Why do you even need to see hidden directories? Except for special occasions, you don't. And why should that be the default? It's not turned on by default on Windows. They are hidden for a reason, to keep people who don't know enough out of harms way. And if you do know enough, then you know where to find them.
And so what if I configure Windows to hide the Mac files? They're still there. They still don't need to be there, and there's no way of disabling that.
They are supposed to be hidden files, and it's Windows that is not honoring the visibility flag. And they are needed by OS X. But I agree there should be an option to stop it from writing them. And Windows also writes invisible files. I see these all the time when I get disks in that came from PCs. How do you stop Windows from wiring them to disks? Same difference.
I actually find W2k pro to be faster than XP.
As far as OS X, 10.3.8 runs great on my 466 MHz G4 (digital audio) with 1 GB RAM. We even had it running well on a 400 MHz G4 (gigabit) with 512 MB at work. We upgraded that machine to a 1 GHz G4 recently though. But it runs fine on older Macs. My G4 has a Quartz Extreme capable video card, but the upgraded G4 doesn't, and except for no shadow on the mouse pointer and no spinning fast switcher cube, you can't really tell.
We will have to see how well Tiger does however. And none of these OS's was as fast as BeOS! :)
Ha!
he pointed me to a page which states Windows 2000 will go out of support in 2010.
Hey but what are all the Windows 3.11 users to do? ;)
And while that comment was in jest, my sister-in-law had a Windows 3.11 laptop she liked to use. She wanted to get it on the internet (don't laugh!), but the driver she needed for her modem card wasn't available anymore, since MS killed off all Win 3.11 downloads.
While I'd imagine Apple will stop selling older versions of Mac OS X (if they haven't already), or even updating it, they do have System 6 and 7.x available for free download!
You're doing a great job at making me laugh! :)
I can open a new Finder window, and type Command-Shift-G, or alternately go to the Go menu, and choose "Go to folder..." and then type, oh, let's say "var" and, hey, lookie there! A whole slew of hidden directories! If I want to browse, I can use something like RBrowserLite, which is a free FTP program, that also makes a nice file browser, a la, NeXT STEP. ... Ha!
But the thing that really cracks me up is how many years were Windows users saying "Macs suck because they don't have a command line"
And with that BSD under the hood, we can run all those free X11 apps....
And you can configure Windows to not show the hidden Mac files if you like.
The Dock is the taskbar in OS X, and does just about everything the Windows version does, plus more. If you right click on the Dock you will see far more options for most applications than you have with the taskbar. Exposé is not a replacement for the Dock. Exposé is a window management tool, and there's nothing on Windows that matches it. We can also switch applications using Command-Tab, which brings up the real app switcher in OS X. From there you can also hide/show and quit applications. So OS X has multiple ways to switch apps. Oh, and the word you want to use is "it's" not "its."
Also as far as "good old fashioned" task bars go, remember that OS X is a descendant to NeXT/OPEN STEP, and the Dock (or Tray) comes from there, and was out before Windows 95 reared its ugly head. If you take a look at NeXT STEP you will see many things that made their way into Windows 95... like the style of the windows themselves, and the recycle bin.
The next biggest thing is Spotlight, which Microsoft has already released for free for there OS.
Here's what I want to know... why is it that so often Window's users can't spell? It's "T H I E R" not "there." Spotlight isn't the next biggest thing. Spotlight is an update to the live search feature that has been in OS X for a while now. Spotlight is also a rip-off of LaunchBar which has been around for a while. I've been using LaunchBar for the past couple of years.
And I said hackneyed to illustrate Apple/Steve Jobs refusal to admit mistakes of not incorporating a taskbar into their OS, just as they still insist on using one button mice.
OS X does have a task bar, it's called the Dock. I think it's a better task bar than the one in Windows, and I do use both Panther, W2K, and XP every day. Not only can you switch applications with the Dock, you can use it as a launcher and keep frequently used files, URLs, and folders there.
As far as mice... I have an 8 button Logitech MX-700 on my G4. You can buy any multi-button mouse you want. Right out of the box any two button scroll wheel mouse will work. Also for those people who prefer a one button mouse, and yes, they are out there, Apple includes the right click functionality by using the Control modifier key.
You haven't actually used OS X, have you?
The Windows XP Home upgrade is $93.99, the XP Pro upgrade is $179.99.
Okay I obviously quoted the full price by mistake... however the upgrade is $198.49 at Amazon (which is where the other prices were quoted from).
Also I think it's obvious that it might be cheaper to upgrade with Windows for a couple of reasons. First there isn't that many upgrades! You showed yourself that after buying Win XP in 2001 how many upgrades have there been (not counting Service Packs)? MS spends a long time between upgrades.
Another reason is that a lot of people get a new PC and it has the latest version of Windows on it, so there's no need to upgrade. And this can be any PC made in the last 4 years or so. But this also means you are running an old OS. 4 years in computer years is like what? ;)
However a lot of people are also buying Macs with OS X on them. And some of the people I know are still running whatever came on their Mac... Jaguar, Panther, whatever. I started out with an older G4 running OS 9.0, so I've bought every OS X upgrade since 10.0 (I didn't bother with the PB release... 10.0 was painful enough!). But then I also get them for a discount because my wife is a teacher. :)
And I agree that Apple should have an upgrade path, like they used to. At least they should honor the coupons they put in the damn box! Mac OS was $90 for the longest time... I guess as Steve's plan to get them back in the black he's become a bit greedy. They don't give away as much as they used to.
But this is in line with most software upgrades... I have to upgrade things like the Adobe Creative Suite and QuarkXPress, not to mention MS Office all the time... this stuff gets expensive!
Ummmm, wrong. The SP upgrades are equivalent to the 10.x.x (10.3.2, 10.3.3, 10.3.4, 10.3.5, 10.3.6...etc.) updates from Apple... which are free.
You would have to compare 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 more to the "major" windows upgrades, like Win 95 to 98 to ME to XP... except MS releases much less upgrade with far more time in between. So because of this, Apple's upgrades seem like Service Packs to you, but they aren't. Apple's version of SPs are free.
I have installed it on machines that never had OS X on them. There was a couple of upgrade CDs that required an older OS X install, but there were either free, or cost $19. The retail CDs are full installers, and you can install on an empty hard drive if you wish.
The minor upgrades in-between the major ones, i.e., 10.3.1, 10.3.2, etc., are of course free, but since they are updates, you need at least 10.3 to run the combo upgrade, and of course it doesn't upgrade a 10.2.x install.
Now if you are referring to OS 9, you don't need that on a mac to install OS X. You can install onto an empty hard drive. If you are saying they don't give you OS 9 ("shelling out to Apple for an earlier version of MacOS") that's not correct either. Even if it's not installed by default, OS 9 is on the OS X CD. It's in the additional software install folder.
OS X would be more like XP Pro.. which is $269.99 for the upgrade.
Plus OS X is NOT an upgrade. You get the full installer for $114, so you don't need a previous version to install it.
Normally that's written Apple ][. It was the Apple /// that used the slanting slashes.
Pedantic... I know.
Yeah... sure is! Actually the idea was that the base of the Mac would take up the area of a sheet of paper. The writer got his x and y mixed up!
You mean kind of the way Windows doesn't perform well in the market? Its also proprietary.
I like Linux, but until I can run things like ProTools, Cubase SX, QuarkXPress and Adobe Photoshop, et. al., it's useless for me and a lot of other people. That was one of the big problems with BeOS. I loved BeOS, but there wasn't that many programs!
I actually get to use OS X at work. ;)
First off, it's Apple, not MAC, second it's "Mac" not "MAC" and thirdly, Win95's GUI is a rip off of NeXTSTEP. Plus I'm quite sure the Apple LISA and Mac were around before X Window
Exactly, and this is covered under "fair use" in the copyright laws. :)
Just wanted to correct that quote, since it's such a good one.
In answer to Einstein's quote of 'God does not play dice', Hawking said:
Public Lectures - Does God Play Dice?
Crappy software has nothing to do with the OS. Logitec writes crap for drivers.
I'm talking about a real digital camera, like a Sony or Cannon, that uses a memory card. On her PCs the card wont mount and the camera cant be accessed, on my Mac is does every time.
Another funny thing, our brand new W2k file server at work. We were told to do daily backups because "sooner or later it will crash and you will lose all your files" ... so says the people who installed it! You call that stable? We never lost any files on the Macs in seven years. ;)
My friend who has TWO REAL windows computers, running W2KPro can't get her new digital camera to work on either computer, a laptop and a desktop, no matter what she does. It did work on a friends W98 laptop though.
Worked without a hitch on OS X. Didn't have to install drivers, just plugged it in.
Sara, just because your PCs work, doesn't mean no one has issues with thiers. You aren't an average PC user either. You are übergeekchick! :P
They probably just hide them now! ;)
I use Labels on OS 9 once in a blue moon, but I know a lot of people miss it.
Labels X $7. (but of course MS is making you pay extra to play MP3s...)
The rumor is Labels and Popup Windows are coming back in the near future.
Can't blame a man for trying ;)
Damn, you never take me anywhere! :(