Due to industry pressures. Period. The fact that you could make modules for OD and string modules together to make an application meant, essentially, that you could drop a type module and a paint module together... and a spell checking module... and BLAMMO! Be running what Adobe didn't get around to doing with Photoshop until v.7 back in the days of OS 8.
Adobe and several other major software houses took notice of this, realized what it could do, and essentially told Apple "Drop this shit like a ton of bricks or we drop support for your platform. Now." (this may also answer your question as to why it was never opened- though asking why older software wasn't open sourced is kind of like asking why I can't get m '57 Chevy with factory air and CD player...)
Same thing with the memory management system that had been planned for MacOS 9.3. Publishers pissing an moaning about "OOOOH WE'LL HAVE TO REWRITE OUR APPS AND YOUR A NICHE MARKET SO IT MIGHT BE BETTER TO JUST DROP IT" has kept Apple hogtied in more ways than one for some time.
Fortunately, OS X and Final Cut Pro are serious coups in this department- Adobe dropped Premiere (which sucks rocks regardless) in response to having to compete against Apple. The fact it was Apple must have pissed them off something fierce- if Macromedia had continued FCP development instead of selling it to Apple, I'm sure things would be a bit different.... and I'm sure FCP would suck.:P
Anyway. That's the long form. The short form: Get a clue. Talk to a few developers who've actually been to the Apple campus and have been doing work on the platform since the 80's. Get their views.
That said, OD was whacked after Jobs came back, and the OSS buzzword was barely a blip on anyone's radar back in the days of MacOS 8.
Why do you think I still own a Pismo? Fucking thing is built like a tank. I've replaced the power supply (human errors on my part, whoo), but this thing has sustained some serious hits and is still ticking. Compare to the tiBooks. I've seen a total of five or so in the field, only one of which wasn't cracked or fractured or broken in some fashion.
Haven't heard of any issues with the albooks, conversely. And everyone I know of with an iBook loves the little bugger.
I dislike the tibook- I'm certain you'd have a much more positive experience with other Apple hardware.
Awww.:( Well, if it's any consolation, I've only been Aware of Linux since 1998, and didn't start attempting to use it until 2000. Now it's a daily thing for me, and a critical part of my network operations.:)
Back in the day, whenever I'd bitch about how window managers lacked basic functionality, how the default IP tools didn't do multiple hot-switchable configurations, about the lack of decent documentation in the distro, about some aspect of the application that didn't work, shouldn't work that way, or had TOO MANY OPTIONS.... the response was ALWAYS "dude. The source is THERE. FIX IT YOUR OWN DAMNED SELF." With "That's a FEATURE, not a BUG." being a close second. To which I'd usually reply "I'm an ARTIST, not a CODER," resulting in a flamewar about the quality of the Gimp, but that's a different story.
Things like this will get fixed when the people maintaining the packages start doing the gruntwork that gets those little bits enterprise grade- in other words, doing the hard, annoying, pain in the ass shit that you pretty much have to get paid to do, because nobody wants to do it in their free time. Big bonus points to open source software companies for making a BIG effort to do exactly that.:D
It was just sitting on the bookshelf in the occult section. Paperback. Not horribly rare- in fact, both it and various books on the Golden Dawn are easier to find than, say, Book Four or a nice hardbound copy of Liber Al Vel Legis.:|
Dude. Barnes and Noble puts it all in the same section anyway- it's clear to them there's no distinction between Fantasy or Sci-Fi. It's a preference- you want your dragons with scales or hyperdrive motivators?
That said, science fiction has an alarming tendency to ooze semen out of its pants whenever technology comes up. Frankly, it's fucking dull. Fantasy, conversly, rarely gets ubertechnical- at least what I've read- and consequently, is better for it, as the author's hitting pagecount on plot and not technical description.
That said, the fact that Trek and Star Wars have gotten so damned BAD that you can HEAR the suck coming out of the TV says something- the sci-fi franchises that I grew up with in the 80s have peaked and are in a state of active decline- and we finally have the technology to go about making realistic looking fantasy movies. Hence the success of LOTR.
Why Lucas is spending tens of millions fucking up Star Wars is beyond me- I'd love it if he'd drop a few million on cleaning up the end of Willow, plzkthks.
Anyway.
Sci-fi in decline? Bull. Shit. You could make the case for everything being in decline. Fantasy has the public limelight in entertainment because sci-fi has resoundly DROPPED THE FUCKING BALL. Sci-fi has failed to give people what they want.
With the single exception of Transmetropolitan, which is easily one of the best comic books I've read. Ever. Blows away any sci-fi novel I've read in the last ten years, easily.
I'd just learned how to read well enough to comprehend and retain- this was around second or third grade or so- and my dad gave me "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" to read. It was my first big book without pictures in it, and it blew my mind something fierce.:D
That one book did more to get me into reading than anything else before or since.
Optimal launch time for a mars mission would be the speed of the rocket divided by the distance between us and mars. Take that number and make it that number of days AGO.
You wouldn't want to launch for mars NOW, it'll be moving AWAY by the time you get to it. You want to launch for mars three months AGO so you're there NOW. When it's closest.
All these cats gotta do is leave their findings in a position where they can be easily "stolen". Some 1337 haxx0r with that information in his hands can do whatever the hell he wants with it, especially if he's outside the US- HE wasn't smacked with a cease and desist, after all...
The worst thing about this situation is that it's now an effective known that the system can be compromised. That fact alone is sufficient motivation for many who would have something to gain from an effective hack- especially since the company is so hellbent on keeping it quiet!
Facts like this should be released on foreign servers outside of US controlled DNS, made publicly available and actively linked to. Why in the flaming hell would I ever want to be in a position to have to use this system when it's been proven insecure and the manufacturer refuses to fix the problems? I'd feel safer running IIS without a firewall- at least the fucking bug fixes are actually released to the public periodically.
Go DMCA.
Seriously. Drop a big flaw like this anonymously on usenet- thoroughly documented and reproduceable- and it'll get fixed by the end of semester.
.... rolling out the 970 on the desktop end is the perfect time to drop OS 9 as any kind of a feasable boot option. New data bus means new motherboards, so hey.... better to move forward, you know?:-)
Any time before that, you'll wind up with some section of the userbase pissed about not being able to boot into 9, for whatever reason, when the previous revision of the same hardware DID. A big change in hardware is a great way to soften the blow of OS 9 no longer booting- something some people may miss, believe it or not.:-P
You're beating a dead horse. The 970 is on deck and will likely come in the same time Apple kicks OS 9 out the door. I'll save the rest of the schpeal, as you obviously haven't been paying attention and hence won't want to hear it from me. Sufficed to say, if not getting a faster processor ASAP is going to kill Apple, then grab a sharpie and marker "RIP" on that iMac of yours, because by the numbers game, Apple has been DEAD for YEARS.
I'll bite it and indulge the poster with a clarification.
BeOS does not run on the G3 or G4 processors.
In fact, the company made rather a large deal whining about how Apple wouldn't give them the specs. Which is why r5 wasn't released for PPC. BeOS r4 will run on supported 604s and (I think) 603s.
No shit. I get to babysit the staff graphics guy in addition to running video and multimedia in my division. He's using a G4/500 with a gig of ram. Since we already had licenses for the apps, I threw everything onto a spare machine with a similar configuration and took it for a test run.
On the same hardware, Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10 are glacial pieces of SHIT in OS 9 OR OS X. The prior revisions (6 and 9 running under 9) are lightning fast by comparison. I blame this squarely on Adobe- more "Features", more bloat, both apps suck a lot more RAM just to run and do a lot less with the same amount of memory as older versions.
When you have 512 ram, your OS takes 256 running idle, your application takes 128 just to open, and you're working on a couple of 200 meg files with multiple levels of undoes.... you're going to thrash the SHIT out of laptop swap space. Same mhz, same OS revision, same application on a 7200rpm desktop drive will be faster.... even faster if you're using 10krpm SCSI for swap, but not many of us have that luxury.:-) Laptops are NOT speed demons for big honking graphics files- swap disk and speed of the hard drive is the biggest limiting factor. NOT the OS. Application design is the second biggest factor, as I blame Adobe bloatware for forcing me into swap faster and faster with each applicaiton revision.
We have licenses for Photoshop 5 and up and Illustrator 7 and up floating around, as well as MacOS 8.6 on up. My coworker uses Photoshop 6 and Illustrator 9 because they work best for him in OS 9, and I'm running After Effects and DVD Studio Pro on OS X, much smoother than they ever ran on OS 9.
Adobe's optimizations for OS X are shitty, to put it mildly- After Effects is the only app I don't really have problems with- its rendering engine went from zippy to a tranquilized slug between 4 and 5, and 5.5 was the OS X revision, running along at the same speed (and still lacking even simple clip editing functions, but that's another story).
And for what it's worth, Illustrator has been a dog since version 7- a friend of mine refuses to go above 6 for print design, and my coworker uses 9 for features that aren't there in lower versions.
Simple. I'm downloading ten DIVX files right now. TEN. AT ONCE. Thank you.
The number of files you can download at any given time is a *preference*. I made a lot of hotheaded mistakes with Safari when I was first using it- this was one of them.
The real bias here, as usual, is editorial. A fearsome amount of people are ignorant of the inherent advantages of the MacOS- speed isn't one of them these days, but that's not a problem in my line of work.
I do professional video editing, compositing, and dvd mastering for a living. I use MacOS- having recently switched over from 9.1 to 10.2 on a G4/733. Painlessly, I might add. Video handles a hell of a lot smoother under X than it does under 9, hands down- I wouldn't go back. And I sure as hell wouldn't go to windows, for three main reasons- two of which directly pertain to this article.
The first big thing is maintenance: if my mac blows up, I can fix it. I've been running video production here for three years and have never once had to reinstall an OS or worry about a virus.
The second big thing is Useability, which relates to the third item indirectly. I could give a RATS ASS about how the P4 can spank the pants off of a G4- to me, that speed is completely negated by the atrocious Windows interface (which only seems to be getting worse). This argument does, essentially, boil down to Mac and Windows - Premiere, After Effects and Photoshop have not been ported to Linux.
Also as part of useability is applications- Media 100 DOES make PC boards, but Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro- the latter of which I depend on to do my job- are not available for the PC. And won't be. I'm sure there are DVD authoring packages for Windows, but the odds of them being useable- let alone on a par with DVDSP- are slim.
The third big thing is Quicktime. You can't fuck with it. It's system level, backwards compatible (to an extent), amazingly powerful once you plug in the license key, and exists outside of the applications- you can run any version of After Effects with any version of Quicktime. It also exists outside of the OS, though it's a big component of it. I suppose the equivalent might be the hooks and calls that developers for Windows can use to invoke various bits of IE.
Quicktime on the PC is generally considered to suck, and I can certainly see why- I love Quicktime, and the way it handles on the PC is one less reason to bother with the platform. Windows Media codecs are a pain in the ass to deal with, and very rarely cross platform. I could write a book about the issues with both platforms and the state of video software in general, but sufficed to say, there are more issues with doing video Right on Windows than there are doing video Right on Macintosh. Hell- if you have a DVCam, you can use any shipping Macintosh as a video editing station right out of the box.:)
Sure, you can technically do video work on a PC. I'd rather use a platform that's designed with such things in mind than one that added the functionality in order to appeal to marketshare.
...that doesn't fix the horrid piles of ass that are Photoshop 7 and Dreamweaver MX.:(
I've been to the unsanity site, and it looks like cool stuff- but unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that I can just keep my powerbook in OS 9.... and keep finder labels and window shading without having to pay for them.:(
I'm also using X for design work...
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
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· Score: 2
...and I wound up running Photoshop 5 inside of Classic.
I've stuck with 5 since 5.5 came out- every release after changes more things that I liked into things I can't use to do my job- so I wasn't enthused about 7. I gave it a spin anyway.... and went right back to 5 in Classic after 7 stole focus too many times.
5 is a bit spastic running under Jaguar, but it does two things 7 can't- window shade and stay in the background.
The only problem I have with the operating system UI is the lack of window shading.
I have NO END of issues with the present state of OS X third party applications- particularly the Adobe suite, which has decided to completely ignore the full Aqua common command structure, and the windowing behaviour in Macromedia apps.
Final conclusion: OS X is great. OS X apps suck something fierce (unless we're talking video, in which case it's an AMAZING improvement....).
This is why I use X at work and 9 on my powerbook, which I don't do any video editing on anyway.
However, you're spot on with your point that while Apple doesn't invent a lot of this stuff (Firewire, yes. But the rest? Well, poke around...)- but they ARE the first to actually weild it and get people into it. If it hadn't been for the iMac, USB would still be a niche technology.
Apple has the power to totally push the technology- through virtue of being able to move faster than the rest of the market, due to their smaller size and much more satisfied consumer base. (I have eleven Macs at home....).
It's horrid to see what could easily be the swiss army knife of multi-platform software development be used in something that's buzzword compliant.
So much for thinking outside the box, eh? Hell, I'd LOVE a rack of these on a PCI board to accellerate photoshop, After Effects, etceteras.... the company that made the board would could have it be ppc on the mac and x86 on the PC.
I could *use* Transmeta chips.... but I have no use for a tablet PC or a PC laptop.:(
Plaintalk and the Newton. End of story. I could give my iMac voice commands in 1998, and the software had existed for several OS revisions prior to that. Shipped default install, no less.
The Newton... is another subject entirely. Light years ahead of its time, with handwriting recognition that still spanks the Palm resoundly- I much prefer writing in my own hand instead of learning Grafitti, thank you.
Do some research, you'll get body-checked less often.:)
The posts in the thread already mention that the Carusoe is a niche chip- from what I've seen, it's gone horrifically under-utilized: a chip that could hypothetically be a power pc, mips, sparc, etceteras is nothing other than a super-low power x86?
A tablet PC might be fine for some people- If the input is pressure sensitive, it would be great for the graphics field- but these really don't seem to be much more than big PDAs or totally integrated, one-piece laptops.
What, exactly, is a tablet good for that a PDA or laptop *isn't* ? I need quick access to photoshop and apache practically everywhere I go (freelance web designer with a powerbook)- a PDA is useless for me, and the tablets I've seen don't run my OS of choice or seem to do anything I might need.
Someone clue me- what market are tablets actually *aimed* at? A laptop is perfect for my needs, and a PDA works great for many people I know.
If people don't need a thing, or can't find a use for it, then the only people that are going to buy the device are gadget hounds- which, in all honesty, don't seem like enough of a market segment to keep a niche industry like this afloat.
And that's Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark Xpress, Pagemaker, Freehand, etceteras. The world does not revolve around office.
Also the fact that the Acrobat Reader is available for just about EVERY operating environment. OSses that have never run Microsoft code.
PDF is where it is because it's a standard- and most importantly, it's supported by Illustrator and Photoshop- the de-facto vector and pixel manipulation standards.
I'll admit, I use Word- but I moved over to.rtf a long, long time ago. The worst that can happen here is that PDF gets whacked in the windows corporate arena- where most of the users know as much about their options as a slug knows about quantum mechanics.
One more reason I'm glad I have no use for windows- in the circles I move, it's becoming progressively marginalized. I'm in a fortunate position of being able to enforce standards compliance at work- and in our case, "standard" happens to be "supported by the widest array of platforms". (coincidentally how I piss my supervisor off- he can't get the concept of video codecs through his skull and keeps rendering roughs in intel codecs.:P)
I don't see an XDoc reader happening for Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, Irix, Linux, MacOSX, Be, and OS/2.
HL was the last game I remember being an FPS with a decent storyline. Sure, nobody really went into great detail about the plot when they were discussing it on the smoke deck- they always talked about the weapons, character interaction, facial movements, enemy and ally AI... Halflife had a LOT of really nifty things that kicked ass for single player- things that just didn't apply to the multiplayer aspect.
I fiddled with UT and Q3 when they came available, but HalfLife spanked the pants off of them both- if anything of that caliber single-player ever comes around, I'll probably check it out. Until then, I'm sticking with RPGs. I like FPS, but I fucking HATE multiplayer.... it's great to see iD focusing on the one thing that makes a game great- the single-player experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Due to industry pressures. Period. The fact that you could make modules for OD and string modules together to make an application meant, essentially, that you could drop a type module and a paint module together... and a spell checking module... and BLAMMO! Be running what Adobe didn't get around to doing with Photoshop until v.7 back in the days of OS 8.
:P
Adobe and several other major software houses took notice of this, realized what it could do, and essentially told Apple "Drop this shit like a ton of bricks or we drop support for your platform. Now." (this may also answer your question as to why it was never opened- though asking why older software wasn't open sourced is kind of like asking why I can't get m '57 Chevy with factory air and CD player...)
Same thing with the memory management system that had been planned for MacOS 9.3. Publishers pissing an moaning about "OOOOH WE'LL HAVE TO REWRITE OUR APPS AND YOUR A NICHE MARKET SO IT MIGHT BE BETTER TO JUST DROP IT" has kept Apple hogtied in more ways than one for some time.
Fortunately, OS X and Final Cut Pro are serious coups in this department- Adobe dropped Premiere (which sucks rocks regardless) in response to having to compete against Apple. The fact it was Apple must have pissed them off something fierce- if Macromedia had continued FCP development instead of selling it to Apple, I'm sure things would be a bit different.... and I'm sure FCP would suck.
Anyway. That's the long form. The short form: Get a clue. Talk to a few developers who've actually been to the Apple campus and have been doing work on the platform since the 80's. Get their views.
That said, OD was whacked after Jobs came back, and the OSS buzzword was barely a blip on anyone's radar back in the days of MacOS 8.
Why do you think I still own a Pismo? Fucking thing is built like a tank. I've replaced the power supply (human errors on my part, whoo), but this thing has sustained some serious hits and is still ticking. Compare to the tiBooks. I've seen a total of five or so in the field, only one of which wasn't cracked or fractured or broken in some fashion.
Haven't heard of any issues with the albooks, conversely. And everyone I know of with an iBook loves the little bugger.
I dislike the tibook- I'm certain you'd have a much more positive experience with other Apple hardware.
Awww. :( :)
Well, if it's any consolation, I've only been Aware of Linux since 1998, and didn't start attempting to use it until 2000. Now it's a daily thing for me, and a critical part of my network operations.
Back in the day, whenever I'd bitch about how window managers lacked basic functionality, how the default IP tools didn't do multiple hot-switchable configurations, about the lack of decent documentation in the distro, about some aspect of the application that didn't work, shouldn't work that way, or had TOO MANY OPTIONS.... the response was ALWAYS "dude. The source is THERE. FIX IT YOUR OWN DAMNED SELF." With "That's a FEATURE, not a BUG." being a close second. To which I'd usually reply "I'm an ARTIST, not a CODER," resulting in a flamewar about the quality of the Gimp, but that's a different story.
:D
Things like this will get fixed when the people maintaining the packages start doing the gruntwork that gets those little bits enterprise grade- in other words, doing the hard, annoying, pain in the ass shit that you pretty much have to get paid to do, because nobody wants to do it in their free time. Big bonus points to open source software companies for making a BIG effort to do exactly that.
It was just sitting on the bookshelf in the occult section. Paperback. Not horribly rare- in fact, both it and various books on the Golden Dawn are easier to find than, say, Book Four or a nice hardbound copy of Liber Al Vel Legis. :|
Dude. Barnes and Noble puts it all in the same section anyway- it's clear to them there's no distinction between Fantasy or Sci-Fi. It's a preference- you want your dragons with scales or hyperdrive motivators?
That said, science fiction has an alarming tendency to ooze semen out of its pants whenever technology comes up. Frankly, it's fucking dull. Fantasy, conversly, rarely gets ubertechnical- at least what I've read- and consequently, is better for it, as the author's hitting pagecount on plot and not technical description.
That said, the fact that Trek and Star Wars have gotten so damned BAD that you can HEAR the suck coming out of the TV says something- the sci-fi franchises that I grew up with in the 80s have peaked and are in a state of active decline- and we finally have the technology to go about making realistic looking fantasy movies. Hence the success of LOTR.
Why Lucas is spending tens of millions fucking up Star Wars is beyond me- I'd love it if he'd drop a few million on cleaning up the end of Willow, plzkthks.
Anyway.
Sci-fi in decline? Bull. Shit. You could make the case for everything being in decline. Fantasy has the public limelight in entertainment because sci-fi has resoundly DROPPED THE FUCKING BALL. Sci-fi has failed to give people what they want.
With the single exception of Transmetropolitan, which is easily one of the best comic books I've read. Ever. Blows away any sci-fi novel I've read in the last ten years, easily.
Nice to see this one pop up in the discussion.
:D
I'd just learned how to read well enough to comprehend and retain- this was around second or third grade or so- and my dad gave me "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" to read. It was my first big book without pictures in it, and it blew my mind something fierce.
That one book did more to get me into reading than anything else before or since.
Optimal launch time for a mars mission would be the speed of the rocket divided by the distance between us and mars. Take that number and make it that number of days AGO.
You wouldn't want to launch for mars NOW, it'll be moving AWAY by the time you get to it. You want to launch for mars three months AGO so you're there NOW. When it's closest.
Less fuel on the way out, or something.
7,033 bytes, to be exact. I'm sure the icon for the OS X calculator is at least twice that size- ever mind the UI buttons. o.O
All these cats gotta do is leave their findings in a position where they can be easily "stolen". Some 1337 haxx0r with that information in his hands can do whatever the hell he wants with it, especially if he's outside the US- HE wasn't smacked with a cease and desist, after all...
The worst thing about this situation is that it's now an effective known that the system can be compromised. That fact alone is sufficient motivation for many who would have something to gain from an effective hack- especially since the company is so hellbent on keeping it quiet!
Facts like this should be released on foreign servers outside of US controlled DNS, made publicly available and actively linked to. Why in the flaming hell would I ever want to be in a position to have to use this system when it's been proven insecure and the manufacturer refuses to fix the problems? I'd feel safer running IIS without a firewall- at least the fucking bug fixes are actually released to the public periodically.
Go DMCA.
Seriously. Drop a big flaw like this anonymously on usenet- thoroughly documented and reproduceable- and it'll get fixed by the end of semester.
.... rolling out the 970 on the desktop end is the perfect time to drop OS 9 as any kind of a feasable boot option. New data bus means new motherboards, so hey.... better to move forward, you know? :-)
:-P
Any time before that, you'll wind up with some section of the userbase pissed about not being able to boot into 9, for whatever reason, when the previous revision of the same hardware DID. A big change in hardware is a great way to soften the blow of OS 9 no longer booting- something some people may miss, believe it or not.
You're beating a dead horse. The 970 is on deck and will likely come in the same time Apple kicks OS 9 out the door. I'll save the rest of the schpeal, as you obviously haven't been paying attention and hence won't want to hear it from me. Sufficed to say, if not getting a faster processor ASAP is going to kill Apple, then grab a sharpie and marker "RIP" on that iMac of yours, because by the numbers game, Apple has been DEAD for YEARS.
I'll bite it and indulge the poster with a clarification.
BeOS does not run on the G3 or G4 processors.
In fact, the company made rather a large deal whining about how Apple wouldn't give them the specs. Which is why r5 wasn't released for PPC. BeOS r4 will run on supported 604s and (I think) 603s.
So you could technically do:
7300 -> Be r4 -> Sheepshaver -> MacOS -> VPC -> NT4.
Of course, by the same token, you could run OS X Server on a G3, run 8.5 in the bluebox, and then VPC on top of that.
In my experience, while Be was nice, it was about as stable as lint under a blowtorch. OS X Server, conversely, was a tank.
No shit. I get to babysit the staff graphics guy in addition to running video and multimedia in my division. He's using a G4/500 with a gig of ram. Since we already had licenses for the apps, I threw everything onto a spare machine with a similar configuration and took it for a test run.
:-) Laptops are NOT speed demons for big honking graphics files- swap disk and speed of the hard drive is the biggest limiting factor. NOT the OS. Application design is the second biggest factor, as I blame Adobe bloatware for forcing me into swap faster and faster with each applicaiton revision.
On the same hardware, Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10 are glacial pieces of SHIT in OS 9 OR OS X. The prior revisions (6 and 9 running under 9) are lightning fast by comparison. I blame this squarely on Adobe- more "Features", more bloat, both apps suck a lot more RAM just to run and do a lot less with the same amount of memory as older versions.
When you have 512 ram, your OS takes 256 running idle, your application takes 128 just to open, and you're working on a couple of 200 meg files with multiple levels of undoes.... you're going to thrash the SHIT out of laptop swap space. Same mhz, same OS revision, same application on a 7200rpm desktop drive will be faster.... even faster if you're using 10krpm SCSI for swap, but not many of us have that luxury.
We have licenses for Photoshop 5 and up and Illustrator 7 and up floating around, as well as MacOS 8.6 on up. My coworker uses Photoshop 6 and Illustrator 9 because they work best for him in OS 9, and I'm running After Effects and DVD Studio Pro on OS X, much smoother than they ever ran on OS 9.
Adobe's optimizations for OS X are shitty, to put it mildly- After Effects is the only app I don't really have problems with- its rendering engine went from zippy to a tranquilized slug between 4 and 5, and 5.5 was the OS X revision, running along at the same speed (and still lacking even simple clip editing functions, but that's another story).
And for what it's worth, Illustrator has been a dog since version 7- a friend of mine refuses to go above 6 for print design, and my coworker uses 9 for features that aren't there in lower versions.
Yay commercial software.
Well, not the one you detail, anyway.
How's that?
Simple. I'm downloading ten DIVX files right now. TEN. AT ONCE. Thank you.
The number of files you can download at any given time is a *preference*. I made a lot of hotheaded mistakes with Safari when I was first using it- this was one of them.
The real bias here, as usual, is editorial. A fearsome amount of people are ignorant of the inherent advantages of the MacOS- speed isn't one of them these days, but that's not a problem in my line of work.
:)
I do professional video editing, compositing, and dvd mastering for a living. I use MacOS- having recently switched over from 9.1 to 10.2 on a G4/733. Painlessly, I might add. Video handles a hell of a lot smoother under X than it does under 9, hands down- I wouldn't go back. And I sure as hell wouldn't go to windows, for three main reasons- two of which directly pertain to this article.
The first big thing is maintenance: if my mac blows up, I can fix it. I've been running video production here for three years and have never once had to reinstall an OS or worry about a virus.
The second big thing is Useability, which relates to the third item indirectly. I could give a RATS ASS about how the P4 can spank the pants off of a G4- to me, that speed is completely negated by the atrocious Windows interface (which only seems to be getting worse). This argument does, essentially, boil down to Mac and Windows - Premiere, After Effects and Photoshop have not been ported to Linux.
Also as part of useability is applications- Media 100 DOES make PC boards, but Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro- the latter of which I depend on to do my job- are not available for the PC. And won't be. I'm sure there are DVD authoring packages for Windows, but the odds of them being useable- let alone on a par with DVDSP- are slim.
The third big thing is Quicktime. You can't fuck with it. It's system level, backwards compatible (to an extent), amazingly powerful once you plug in the license key, and exists outside of the applications- you can run any version of After Effects with any version of Quicktime. It also exists outside of the OS, though it's a big component of it. I suppose the equivalent might be the hooks and calls that developers for Windows can use to invoke various bits of IE.
Quicktime on the PC is generally considered to suck, and I can certainly see why- I love Quicktime, and the way it handles on the PC is one less reason to bother with the platform. Windows Media codecs are a pain in the ass to deal with, and very rarely cross platform. I could write a book about the issues with both platforms and the state of video software in general, but sufficed to say, there are more issues with doing video Right on Windows than there are doing video Right on Macintosh. Hell- if you have a DVCam, you can use any shipping Macintosh as a video editing station right out of the box.
Sure, you can technically do video work on a PC. I'd rather use a platform that's designed with such things in mind than one that added the functionality in order to appeal to marketshare.
I have a 9" greenscale //c monitor. Attached to a Powermac 8500 as the primary display. :) It's cute.
//c has, for sure. :D
The collectors I know (including myself, to a lesser extent) are interested in gear with the Apple logo on it- something that
If it didn't have an RCA plug, and if my 8500 didn't have RCA plugs, well... I probably still would have bought it. Because it's cute.
...that doesn't fix the horrid piles of ass that are Photoshop 7 and Dreamweaver MX. :(
:(
I've been to the unsanity site, and it looks like cool stuff- but unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that I can just keep my powerbook in OS 9.... and keep finder labels and window shading without having to pay for them.
...and I wound up running Photoshop 5 inside of Classic.
I've stuck with 5 since 5.5 came out- every release after changes more things that I liked into things I can't use to do my job- so I wasn't enthused about 7. I gave it a spin anyway.... and went right back to 5 in Classic after 7 stole focus too many times.
5 is a bit spastic running under Jaguar, but it does two things 7 can't- window shade and stay in the background.
The only problem I have with the operating system UI is the lack of window shading.
I have NO END of issues with the present state of OS X third party applications- particularly the Adobe suite, which has decided to completely ignore the full Aqua common command structure, and the windowing behaviour in Macromedia apps.
Final conclusion: OS X is great. OS X apps suck something fierce (unless we're talking video, in which case it's an AMAZING improvement....).
This is why I use X at work and 9 on my powerbook, which I don't do any video editing on anyway.
....USB is an intel spec. :)
However, you're spot on with your point that while Apple doesn't invent a lot of this stuff (Firewire, yes. But the rest? Well, poke around...)- but they ARE the first to actually weild it and get people into it. If it hadn't been for the iMac, USB would still be a niche technology.
Apple has the power to totally push the technology- through virtue of being able to move faster than the rest of the market, due to their smaller size and much more satisfied consumer base. (I have eleven Macs at home....).
It's horrid to see what could easily be the swiss army knife of multi-platform software development be used in something that's buzzword compliant.
:(
So much for thinking outside the box, eh? Hell, I'd LOVE a rack of these on a PCI board to accellerate photoshop, After Effects, etceteras.... the company that made the board would could have it be ppc on the mac and x86 on the PC.
I could *use* Transmeta chips.... but I have no use for a tablet PC or a PC laptop.
Plaintalk and the Newton. End of story.
:)
I could give my iMac voice commands in 1998, and the software had existed for several OS revisions prior to that. Shipped default install, no less.
The Newton... is another subject entirely. Light years ahead of its time, with handwriting recognition that still spanks the Palm resoundly- I much prefer writing in my own hand instead of learning Grafitti, thank you.
Do some research, you'll get body-checked less often.
....maybe it's not in the cards?
The posts in the thread already mention that the Carusoe is a niche chip- from what I've seen, it's gone horrifically under-utilized: a chip that could hypothetically be a power pc, mips, sparc, etceteras is nothing other than a super-low power x86?
A tablet PC might be fine for some people- If the input is pressure sensitive, it would be great for the graphics field- but these really don't seem to be much more than big PDAs or totally integrated, one-piece laptops.
What, exactly, is a tablet good for that a PDA or laptop *isn't* ? I need quick access to photoshop and apache practically everywhere I go (freelance web designer with a powerbook)- a PDA is useless for me, and the tablets I've seen don't run my OS of choice or seem to do anything I might need.
Someone clue me- what market are tablets actually *aimed* at? A laptop is perfect for my needs, and a PDA works great for many people I know.
If people don't need a thing, or can't find a use for it, then the only people that are going to buy the device are gadget hounds- which, in all honesty, don't seem like enough of a market segment to keep a niche industry like this afloat.
And that's Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark Xpress, Pagemaker, Freehand, etceteras. The world does not revolve around office.
.rtf a long, long time ago. The worst that can happen here is that PDF gets whacked in the windows corporate arena- where most of the users know as much about their options as a slug knows about quantum mechanics.
:P)
Also the fact that the Acrobat Reader is available for just about EVERY operating environment. OSses that have never run Microsoft code.
PDF is where it is because it's a standard- and most importantly, it's supported by Illustrator and Photoshop- the de-facto vector and pixel manipulation standards.
I'll admit, I use Word- but I moved over to
One more reason I'm glad I have no use for windows- in the circles I move, it's becoming progressively marginalized. I'm in a fortunate position of being able to enforce standards compliance at work- and in our case, "standard" happens to be "supported by the widest array of platforms". (coincidentally how I piss my supervisor off- he can't get the concept of video codecs through his skull and keeps rendering roughs in intel codecs.
I don't see an XDoc reader happening for Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, Irix, Linux, MacOSX, Be, and OS/2.
Hence, I don't see a use for it.
HL was the last game I remember being an FPS with a decent storyline. Sure, nobody really went into great detail about the plot when they were discussing it on the smoke deck- they always talked about the weapons, character interaction, facial movements, enemy and ally AI... Halflife had a LOT of really nifty things that kicked ass for single player- things that just didn't apply to the multiplayer aspect.
I fiddled with UT and Q3 when they came available, but HalfLife spanked the pants off of them both- if anything of that caliber single-player ever comes around, I'll probably check it out. Until then, I'm sticking with RPGs. I like FPS, but I fucking HATE multiplayer.... it's great to see iD focusing on the one thing that makes a game great- the single-player experience.