5300s - never played with one that wasn't horribly broken in some way but they're Old so that's okay.
Pismo (G3 Firewire) - built like TANKS. TANKS I SAY. Slap a Lombard power brick on them to replace the POS yo-yo (I went through four yoyos in four years) and you're ready for the bomb to drop- the brick is the only part I've ever needed to replace.
iBooks - They seem to break easily (logic boards, etc) but I swear I'm the only person I know who both owns an iBook and doesn't treat it like a doorstop.:P Mine's got the wonky backlight but otherwise the only issue is disk speed.
TiBooks - early powerbook g4s. I've never seen one without either case cracks, cracked optical drives, or extensive screen damage. I've been close to a half dozen or so and they've all been damaged in some fashion - frequently a cracked optical bezel and screen damage of some sort. Doesn't help that the screens don't seem very good even when they're not cracked or broken.
Modern Powerbooks - they look nice but everyone I know who owns one still misses their Pismo series powerbooks (if they had one). Go figure.
Yeah right. Wake me up when wireless is faster than gigabit ethernet.:P 802.whatever is great for web, streaming video and other reasonably lightweight tasks, but just try pushing a a few hundred gigs over a wireless link and see what happens.
Serious amounts of finger-tapping, that's what.
Conversely (upside!), in my experience, wireless isn't replacing land lines, it's creating new networks where land lines would be inconvenient, inadvisable or flat-out stupid Coffee houses, bars, etceteras - I can pop open my laptop in my WAP-free house and at the right time of night pick from three different WLANS. Do you really think the local bar and the houses on either side of me would be willing to run cable? No. So Zee Wahrluz is creating networks, not replacing them. My laptop can talk to the bar WLAN while staying tethered to the home LAN - it can pr0n off of the bar and still ing the media box and the workstation without the bar ever being aware of either of my G4s.
Liv Tyler and ELVES AT HELMS DEEP just totally make my nuts SCREAM in agony. Nevermind the original Tolkein incongruity of Teh Undead Army - I can almost stomach that, but man. Liv and the overdone, nuked-to-DEATH sequence of over-endings put me off. Probably because I had to pee.:P
I've seen some of the commentary on a couple of the movies - a friend of mine STILL tents his fucking khakis at the mention of anything even related to LOTR - and from what I've seen, I completely agree with what you've stated - the lower quality bits are totally the ones that WETA and crew have added to "improve" the original.
Conversely - and I say this as a creator - it's hard to not want to put your stamp on a thing. Especially when, in their case, the original creator isn't around to dissaprove of the alterations!
generally speaking. I firmly believe that the average home PC user sees the PC as a form of entertainment, just like a VCR or DVD player.
This would be why several friends of mine own PCs and put up with Windows - they're not running CAD software, they're not using the machine for office work, they're not running "creative" apps. They're using the thing as a Nintendo and MacOS/Linux just Do Not Have The Games.
10.3 : Finder kept and displayed Classic MacOS icons. Old photoshop files? 32x32 preview icons, scaled up. Looked like ass but they were there.
10.4 (WITH SPOTLIGHT!!!1oneoneomfg) : Finder not only ignores Classic MacOS icons for images, it now builds new previes for these images regardless of rather or not they have a classic macos preview icon or not. If the document is a few megs, no problem. If it's more than ten, you get some grind - you get a LOT of grind if it's fifty or more megs, while finder/spotlight shits its pants trying to get an idea of what it's looking at. Not only does this preview-building take for-frigging-ever, Finder DOES NOT CACHE THE RESULT. So every time you roll over that image in column view, grind, grind, grind, GRIND, GRIND...
The end result is that column view is now vastly less useful in 10.4. Go Apple.
Yeah, you might care fuckall, but some of us own macs specifically for how the graphics apps handle... and I really do not have the time or patience to reprocess seven years (100+ gigs) of Photoshop documents just to see what I'm fucking LOOKING AT in a modern OS when I had no problems to speak of last year.:P
It's an issue. We're gaining features and losing functionality. Verily, I am irritated.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks that the OS X Finder sucks.
The problem isn't that it's worse than Platinum (the matured Classic MacOS Finder).
The problem is that it sucks less than win32's bastardass Motif Ate MacOS interface, and just about every damned freenix "desktop" is in turn a knockoff of that (or OS/2). So BY COMPARISON to the HORRIBLE ASSRAPE of a desktop that everyone who's "switched" has experienced previously, hey... Finder 10.X is great.
And unfortunately, Jobs has made it crystal clear that this is NeXT with a MacOS compatability layer (that's getting ejected with the switch back to Intel*), and that he cares fuckall for MacOS users.:-|
* NeXT went (iirc) 68k -> x86 -| Apple purchase |-> PPC as OS X Server 1.X and then OS X, losing binary compatibility en route.
... IE for the Mac has a much nicer download manager, and the ui is a hell of a lot snappier than Firefox for OS X. General UI responsiveness is one area Mozilla Project stuff still sucks at on the mac.:P
I'm one of those people who has a low tolerance for hype. A very low tolerance - and as much as I loved the TV series, I got sick to death of teaser trailer after teaser trailer and all the yakkity-shmakkity-blah-blah-blah about pre-screening after pre-screening. Months and months of "ZOMFG TEH MOVIES GONNA PWN!!!!" from everyone and their monkey and I stopped wanting to hear about it, started getting sick of it, and wanted nothing to do with it by the time it was actually released, as I was relieved everyone had finally shut the fuck up about it. For me, it was overhyped by April - I wanted the goods and didn't take kindly to being strung along. I don't go to strip joints for the same reason.
But seriously, how many people saw Firefly at a pre-screening and then actually watched it during the release run? What do those figures look like compared against ticket sales?
Seriously, man. ESPECIALLY in this day and age, it takes BALLS to be absolutely a hundred percent no holds barred no bullshit 100% DEDICATED to the exact letter of What You Belive Is True. It might be "socially awkward" or "a career impairment" but this is, I firmly believe, the one possible instance in which a Dungeons & Dragons Paladin grade Lawful-lawful Good-good Dedication To Cause is actually - in some capacity - having a positive impact on the lives of many.
That his intensity of focus could also make him an object of ridicule is a natural side effect of said dedication. i doubt I'd be able to talk to the guy about software or legal issues for more than a handful of syllables before the punching instinct kicked in, but where would modern software be if it weren't for GNU and the GPL?
The immediate cheap response would be "yeah but Bosch is good, see." - Toriyama has maybe two dozen or so physical archetypes that he's endlessly recycled with minor variations, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread - there's almost no difference between Chrono and Goku and the DQ hero. He's got some fairly obvious, fairly basic themes and hasn't evolved much over the past decade. Great for eleven year olds but it fails to hold water as an adult.... which is about the time those of us with an interest in art start studying the Good Stuff, as it were.:)
Dragon Ball Z designer Akira Toriyama helmed the look of this title, and the result is a naturalistic landscape and highly distinctive characters.
If memory serves, Toriyama's done the design on all of the DQ titles... which was vastly more palatable back in the 8-bit days, when you couldn't tell how atrocious his "distinctive" character design was. He's also responsible for the aesthetic of Chrono Trigger - a game that plays great but in my opinion looks absolutely horrible: his grotesque "anatomy" and facial design seriously hampered my enjoyment of the title.
The lesson here is that a "distinctive" look and feel can alienate gamers as well as attract them - I won't play or watch anything modern that Toriyama's involved with simply because I just can't stand to look at it.
The difference between the Rated R and the original Rated X cut of Robocop ? ED209 unloads about a dozen more rounds into the suit during his "malfunction" - that scene and a couple of other violent bits are a second or three longer.
It's not the violence itself, it's the duraction- at least in Robocop's case.
Gotta go with a truncated reply (strike while the iron is hot, etc) - I agree with most of your points, but to nickle and dime the bits I've personal experience with:
1. I ran my entire music library -larger than it is now, actually - off of a 9600 with a g3/300 upgrade and a Sonnet ATA/66 card in the bottom 3 PCI slots (a separate arbiter and it won't play mp3s if it's in any of the top 3 slots). Access to the entire library is an issue if you want to serve it over NFS or SMB but if it's local.... been there.:)
2. DVD playback in OS 9 and earlier is. A. JOKE. A jerky, crashy, HORRID mess on my old Pismo powerbook... smooth as butter in OS X. Even the Public Beta. I'm down.
3.classic MacOS will do Broadband with some ease. Tweak-tweak and it'll do SSH tunnels as well. I'll admit that Broadband and MacOS is usually - often - a Power User thing as opposed to It Just Works, but hey... from the standpoint of straight-up functionality, I find it hard to list anything X does better than 9... unless you're talking, say... rebooting five or twelve times a day.:P*
4. Notepad - oi. Man, don't make me smack you.:P I was a Simpletext whore and now TextEdit. TextEdit is AWESOME if all you need is basic read/write/edit where "read" includes RTF and.doc. I like it. Combine with Quicksilver and it's how all of my IRC experience gets blogged - copy from terminal, apple-space, t - e - x - and a couple of find/replaces that reformat everything. Zing.
* I LOVE OS 9 so long as I'm running one thing at a time. X let's me do more than that, but that sort of useage is only comfortable with GOBS AND GOBS AND GOBS (read : four gigs in my case) of ram. Man. A loose upside of OS 9 is that it screams bloody murder if you try to run apps that won't fit into the space left available by other running apps. Boil it all down and I really, REALLY like the fact that in 9, I can give Photoshop a gig of ram and NOTHING CAN TAKE IT. EVER. In OS X, ANYTHING can take away from that gig - force Photoshop into swap - just because it needs to, say....... cache a fucking web page. While this is great and makes total sense from a CS perspective, it's balls from the standpoint that any app in the background can hog the "rights" or "priority" of the app I'm actually using. Gross, yo. Gross.
6 has that bar at the top of the screen. I hateseses it, I do. I've gotten used to my palettes being OVER THERE (on the righthand monitor), OUT. Of. My. WAY. I mean yeah, you can tear the thing off, but you can't dock it with the other palettes. It just sits there sucking up real estate. $%W#$%@#q5q349i759823!!!!!!!AUGH.
Also, the type tool. I'm stuck at 5.5 because - get this - I actually need it the way it is. This "type on the canvas just like in Illustrator!!!!" thing is pretty useless for my needs.:P
For one thing, it makes backups a pain in the ass. The MacOS System Folder and Applications fit on a CD (which would then be bootable, fancy that).
For another, it's not nearly as big of an issue with my Work workstation (2x400g SATA drives), but on my iBook (1x40g hdd), a hugeass ultrabloated install leaves me a lot less space for user data. Nevermind the fact that fatter applications take more time to read into memory, which results in wicked-slow app launches off of a 2.5" hdd.
Yeah, it's an issue. The major difference is in boot time- X is up and struggling to load apps while 9 is still spamming extensions across the bottom of the screen. My issue in this case is that while zero-to-dock time is faster than Windows or MacOS, OS X still takes a few moments of disk-thrashing, proc-chocking sluggishness before it'll even let you use auto-launched apps.
I agree that switching was a pain - especially if you tried to do two things at once. My favorite example of OS 9 goofiness was running SSH and an FTP client at the same time - start an FTP transfer, then switch to SSH... and watch the FTP transfer slow to a crawl.
Good times!
Conversely, if you're running ONE application 90% of the time - I live in Photoshop - the idea that the OS or any other application can force my running, focused app into swap just because it feels like it is incredibly frustrating, and one of the things that irks me about OS X.
Woz is from an era in which software was fast, light, and did exactly what it said on the box and nothing more.
WHEN CAN WE GO BACK. I am sick to fucking DEATH of multi-gig bloatware installs that try to impress 428 features I don't need and will never frigging USE on me. In fact, I still use old software for production use - Photoshop 5.5 - because the newer versions have nothing to offer me but a speed reduction and a slower interface.
... I still use Classic MacOS apps for productivity - Photoshop 5.5, Illustrator 9, Office 98. They do what I need, and just as importantly, after Classic is loaded (and before Adobe gave the ghost of a shit about optimizing for OS X, cold start - classic launch + app launch), the apps launch a hell of a lot faster than their modern, "featureful" counterparts, and they're a hell of a lot more responsive, too.
Is it Adobe sucking? I don't think so. ALL OS X apps are like this. Except video, which is the single biggest improvement in OS X.
For day to day use, OS X is still loads slower than 9.2.2... and I remember some people bitching about how much slower 9.2.2 was compared to 7.6.1.
The features I want, use, and need were all on the market six or seven years ago. Unfortunately, SPEED was ONE OF THEM.:(
So yeah, it ain't just UNIX that's Succumbed To Bloat - OS X is by far the worst offender. Full install of everything I needed on my old powerbook (OS 9.2.2 and all the apps I used) was ~800 megs and could be stripped down to 250-300 if I Had To. A fully loaded and Useable OS X install - which includes that Classic environment, as it's the only way to actually get anything done half hte time - is somewhere around 20-30 gigs. 40 if Final Cut Pro goes on the box.
Working at a big corporation is being forced to use poor quality crap tools because some snake-oil salesman is buddy-buddy with a senior VP 10,000 miles away.
EDMC - the company that runs the Art Institutes - uses nothing but HP workstations. Kayaks when I was there - IT has had NO END OF PROBLEMS with HP kit, and have repeatedly submitted POs to Corporate requesting better, more reliable hardware that Does What They Need for much less cost, but EDMC Uses HP, Period. They're immune to logic in this respect.
Why? I used to know exactly, but to cut the hemming and hawing down - either one of the EDMC Corporate Suits has a friend or relative at HP, or an HP employee is on the EDMC board.
Slashdot Mirror
They all begin with the letter "F". :P
5300s - never played with one that wasn't horribly broken in some way but they're Old so that's okay.
:P Mine's got the wonky backlight but otherwise the only issue is disk speed.
Pismo (G3 Firewire) - built like TANKS. TANKS I SAY. Slap a Lombard power brick on them to replace the POS yo-yo (I went through four yoyos in four years) and you're ready for the bomb to drop- the brick is the only part I've ever needed to replace.
iBooks - They seem to break easily (logic boards, etc) but I swear I'm the only person I know who both owns an iBook and doesn't treat it like a doorstop.
TiBooks - early powerbook g4s. I've never seen one without either case cracks, cracked optical drives, or extensive screen damage. I've been close to a half dozen or so and they've all been damaged in some fashion - frequently a cracked optical bezel and screen damage of some sort. Doesn't help that the screens don't seem very good even when they're not cracked or broken.
Modern Powerbooks - they look nice but everyone I know who owns one still misses their Pismo series powerbooks (if they had one). Go figure.
Yeah right. Wake me up when wireless is faster than gigabit ethernet. :P 802.whatever is great for web, streaming video and other reasonably lightweight tasks, but just try pushing a a few hundred gigs over a wireless link and see what happens.
Serious amounts of finger-tapping, that's what.
Conversely (upside!), in my experience, wireless isn't replacing land lines, it's creating new networks where land lines would be inconvenient, inadvisable or flat-out stupid Coffee houses, bars, etceteras - I can pop open my laptop in my WAP-free house and at the right time of night pick from three different WLANS. Do you really think the local bar and the houses on either side of me would be willing to run cable? No. So Zee Wahrluz is creating networks, not replacing them. My laptop can talk to the bar WLAN while staying tethered to the home LAN - it can pr0n off of the bar and still ing the media box and the workstation without the bar ever being aware of either of my G4s.
Woot, yay, doom, etc.
Wouldn't surprise me. :|
:P
Liv Tyler and ELVES AT HELMS DEEP just totally make my nuts SCREAM in agony. Nevermind the original Tolkein incongruity of Teh Undead Army - I can almost stomach that, but man. Liv and the overdone, nuked-to-DEATH sequence of over-endings put me off. Probably because I had to pee.
I've seen some of the commentary on a couple of the movies - a friend of mine STILL tents his fucking khakis at the mention of anything even related to LOTR - and from what I've seen, I completely agree with what you've stated - the lower quality bits are totally the ones that WETA and crew have added to "improve" the original.
Conversely - and I say this as a creator - it's hard to not want to put your stamp on a thing. Especially when, in their case, the original creator isn't around to dissaprove of the alterations!
Kong's a remake. The LOTR trilogy were books first. He may have a talent for visualizing but these are NOT his stories.
This would be why several friends of mine own PCs and put up with Windows - they're not running CAD software, they're not using the machine for office work, they're not running "creative" apps. They're using the thing as a Nintendo and MacOS/Linux just Do Not Have The Games.
Webspace + WGET or FTP/SFTP app. Problem solved.
If you're tossing applications around in forwards you've either got a bad sysadmin or severe lameness/cheapness issues.
(self-extracting zips excepted)
How's this:
:P
10.3 : Finder kept and displayed Classic MacOS icons. Old photoshop files? 32x32 preview icons, scaled up. Looked like ass but they were there.
10.4 (WITH SPOTLIGHT!!!1oneoneomfg) : Finder not only ignores Classic MacOS icons for images, it now builds new previes for these images regardless of rather or not they have a classic macos preview icon or not. If the document is a few megs, no problem. If it's more than ten, you get some grind - you get a LOT of grind if it's fifty or more megs, while finder/spotlight shits its pants trying to get an idea of what it's looking at. Not only does this preview-building take for-frigging-ever, Finder DOES NOT CACHE THE RESULT . So every time you roll over that image in column view, grind, grind, grind, GRIND, GRIND...
The end result is that column view is now vastly less useful in 10.4. Go Apple.
Yeah, you might care fuckall, but some of us own macs specifically for how the graphics apps handle... and I really do not have the time or patience to reprocess seven years (100+ gigs) of Photoshop documents just to see what I'm fucking LOOKING AT in a modern OS when I had no problems to speak of last year.
It's an issue. We're gaining features and losing functionality. Verily, I am irritated.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks that the OS X Finder sucks.
:-|
The problem isn't that it's worse than Platinum (the matured Classic MacOS Finder).
The problem is that it sucks less than win32's bastardass Motif Ate MacOS interface, and just about every damned freenix "desktop" is in turn a knockoff of that (or OS/2). So BY COMPARISON to the HORRIBLE ASSRAPE of a desktop that everyone who's "switched" has experienced previously, hey... Finder 10.X is great.
And unfortunately, Jobs has made it crystal clear that this is NeXT with a MacOS compatability layer (that's getting ejected with the switch back to Intel*), and that he cares fuckall for MacOS users.
* NeXT went (iirc) 68k -> x86 -| Apple purchase |-> PPC as OS X Server 1.X and then OS X, losing binary compatibility en route.
... IE for the Mac has a much nicer download manager, and the ui is a hell of a lot snappier than Firefox for OS X. General UI responsiveness is one area Mozilla Project stuff still sucks at on the mac. :P
I'm one of those people who has a low tolerance for hype. A very low tolerance - and as much as I loved the TV series, I got sick to death of teaser trailer after teaser trailer and all the yakkity-shmakkity-blah-blah-blah about pre-screening after pre-screening. Months and months of "ZOMFG TEH MOVIES GONNA PWN!!!!" from everyone and their monkey and I stopped wanting to hear about it, started getting sick of it, and wanted nothing to do with it by the time it was actually released, as I was relieved everyone had finally shut the fuck up about it. For me, it was overhyped by April - I wanted the goods and didn't take kindly to being strung along. I don't go to strip joints for the same reason.
But seriously, how many people saw Firefly at a pre-screening and then actually watched it during the release run? What do those figures look like compared against ticket sales?
Seriously, man. ESPECIALLY in this day and age, it takes BALLS to be absolutely a hundred percent no holds barred no bullshit 100% DEDICATED to the exact letter of What You Belive Is True. It might be "socially awkward" or "a career impairment" but this is, I firmly believe, the one possible instance in which a Dungeons & Dragons Paladin grade Lawful-lawful Good-good Dedication To Cause is actually - in some capacity - having a positive impact on the lives of many.
That his intensity of focus could also make him an object of ridicule is a natural side effect of said dedication. i doubt I'd be able to talk to the guy about software or legal issues for more than a handful of syllables before the punching instinct kicked in, but where would modern software be if it weren't for GNU and the GPL?
The immediate cheap response would be "yeah but Bosch is good, see." - Toriyama has maybe two dozen or so physical archetypes that he's endlessly recycled with minor variations, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread - there's almost no difference between Chrono and Goku and the DQ hero. He's got some fairly obvious, fairly basic themes and hasn't evolved much over the past decade. Great for eleven year olds but it fails to hold water as an adult.... which is about the time those of us with an interest in art start studying the Good Stuff, as it were. :)
If memory serves, Toriyama's done the design on all of the DQ titles... which was vastly more palatable back in the 8-bit days, when you couldn't tell how atrocious his "distinctive" character design was. He's also responsible for the aesthetic of Chrono Trigger - a game that plays great but in my opinion looks absolutely horrible: his grotesque "anatomy" and facial design seriously hampered my enjoyment of the title.
The lesson here is that a "distinctive" look and feel can alienate gamers as well as attract them - I won't play or watch anything modern that Toriyama's involved with simply because I just can't stand to look at it.
And we thought the human "bone" was sensitive...
"Graphic" is certainly analogue.
The difference between the Rated R and the original Rated X cut of Robocop ? ED209 unloads about a dozen more rounds into the suit during his "malfunction" - that scene and a couple of other violent bits are a second or three longer.
It's not the violence itself, it's the duraction- at least in Robocop's case.
More importantly, does it run linux?
Gotta go with a truncated reply (strike while the iron is hot, etc) - I agree with most of your points, but to nickle and dime the bits I've personal experience with:
:)
:P*
:P I was a Simpletext whore and now TextEdit. TextEdit is AWESOME if all you need is basic read/write/edit where "read" includes RTF and .doc. I like it. Combine with Quicksilver and it's how all of my IRC experience gets blogged - copy from terminal, apple-space, t - e - x - and a couple of find/replaces that reformat everything. Zing.
1. I ran my entire music library -larger than it is now, actually - off of a 9600 with a g3/300 upgrade and a Sonnet ATA/66 card in the bottom 3 PCI slots (a separate arbiter and it won't play mp3s if it's in any of the top 3 slots). Access to the entire library is an issue if you want to serve it over NFS or SMB but if it's local.... been there.
2. DVD playback in OS 9 and earlier is. A. JOKE. A jerky, crashy, HORRID mess on my old Pismo powerbook... smooth as butter in OS X. Even the Public Beta. I'm down.
3.classic MacOS will do Broadband with some ease. Tweak-tweak and it'll do SSH tunnels as well. I'll admit that Broadband and MacOS is usually - often - a Power User thing as opposed to It Just Works, but hey... from the standpoint of straight-up functionality, I find it hard to list anything X does better than 9... unless you're talking, say... rebooting five or twelve times a day.
4. Notepad - oi. Man, don't make me smack you.
* I LOVE OS 9 so long as I'm running one thing at a time. X let's me do more than that, but that sort of useage is only comfortable with GOBS AND GOBS AND GOBS (read : four gigs in my case) of ram. Man. A loose upside of OS 9 is that it screams bloody murder if you try to run apps that won't fit into the space left available by other running apps. Boil it all down and I really, REALLY like the fact that in 9, I can give Photoshop a gig of ram and NOTHING CAN TAKE IT. EVER. In OS X, ANYTHING can take away from that gig - force Photoshop into swap - just because it needs to, say....... cache a fucking web page. While this is great and makes total sense from a CS perspective, it's balls from the standpoint that any app in the background can hog the "rights" or "priority" of the app I'm actually using. Gross, yo. Gross.
6 has that bar at the top of the screen. I hateseses it, I do. I've gotten used to my palettes being OVER THERE (on the righthand monitor), OUT. Of. My. WAY. I mean yeah, you can tear the thing off, but you can't dock it with the other palettes. It just sits there sucking up real estate. $%W#$%@#q5q349i759823!!!!!!!AUGH.
:P
Also, the type tool. I'm stuck at 5.5 because - get this - I actually need it the way it is. This "type on the canvas just like in Illustrator!!!!" thing is pretty useless for my needs.
For one thing, it makes backups a pain in the ass. The MacOS System Folder and Applications fit on a CD (which would then be bootable, fancy that).
For another, it's not nearly as big of an issue with my Work workstation (2x400g SATA drives), but on my iBook (1x40g hdd), a hugeass ultrabloated install leaves me a lot less space for user data. Nevermind the fact that fatter applications take more time to read into memory, which results in wicked-slow app launches off of a 2.5" hdd.
Yeah, it's an issue. The major difference is in boot time- X is up and struggling to load apps while 9 is still spamming extensions across the bottom of the screen. My issue in this case is that while zero-to-dock time is faster than Windows or MacOS, OS X still takes a few moments of disk-thrashing, proc-chocking sluggishness before it'll even let you use auto-launched apps.
I agree that switching was a pain - especially if you tried to do two things at once. My favorite example of OS 9 goofiness was running SSH and an FTP client at the same time - start an FTP transfer, then switch to SSH... and watch the FTP transfer slow to a crawl.
Good times!
Conversely, if you're running ONE application 90% of the time - I live in Photoshop - the idea that the OS or any other application can force my running, focused app into swap just because it feels like it is incredibly frustrating, and one of the things that irks me about OS X.
Woz is from an era in which software was fast, light, and did exactly what it said on the box and nothing more.
WHEN CAN WE GO BACK. I am sick to fucking DEATH of multi-gig bloatware installs that try to impress 428 features I don't need and will never frigging USE on me. In fact, I still use old software for production use - Photoshop 5.5 - because the newer versions have nothing to offer me but a speed reduction and a slower interface.
Monkeys!
... I still use Classic MacOS apps for productivity - Photoshop 5.5, Illustrator 9, Office 98. They do what I need, and just as importantly, after Classic is loaded (and before Adobe gave the ghost of a shit about optimizing for OS X, cold start - classic launch + app launch), the apps launch a hell of a lot faster than their modern, "featureful" counterparts, and they're a hell of a lot more responsive, too.
:(
Is it Adobe sucking? I don't think so. ALL OS X apps are like this. Except video, which is the single biggest improvement in OS X.
For day to day use, OS X is still loads slower than 9.2.2... and I remember some people bitching about how much slower 9.2.2 was compared to 7.6.1.
The features I want, use, and need were all on the market six or seven years ago. Unfortunately, SPEED was ONE OF THEM.
So yeah, it ain't just UNIX that's Succumbed To Bloat - OS X is by far the worst offender. Full install of everything I needed on my old powerbook (OS 9.2.2 and all the apps I used) was ~800 megs and could be stripped down to 250-300 if I Had To. A fully loaded and Useable OS X install - which includes that Classic environment, as it's the only way to actually get anything done half hte time - is somewhere around 20-30 gigs. 40 if Final Cut Pro goes on the box.
bloat--
EDMC - the company that runs the Art Institutes - uses nothing but HP workstations. Kayaks when I was there - IT has had NO END OF PROBLEMS with HP kit, and have repeatedly submitted POs to Corporate requesting better, more reliable hardware that Does What They Need for much less cost, but EDMC Uses HP, Period. They're immune to logic in this respect.
Why? I used to know exactly, but to cut the hemming and hawing down - either one of the EDMC Corporate Suits has a friend or relative at HP, or an HP employee is on the EDMC board.
Hey man, you're the one commenting on the Death Star of blogs, slashdot. ;-)