Hopefully very few. With the current state of affairs, anti-virus software for the Mac is a case of the cure being much worse than the disease. Even these recently discovered worms and the Safari vulnerability are relatively benign and can be protected against with a little common sense. In fact, most users hopefully are already safe from the Safari vulnerability since the "Open Safe Files" option was already the source of another vulnerability a while back.
By the time these vulnerabilities make it into the virus definitions, they are old hat. Plus, at least one *cough* Norton *cough* anti-virus for the Mac actually introduces a considerable number of new security vulnerabilities to the OS.
Sure, running anti-virus software on our machines will catch all those old Windows exploits but I'm not compromising my system to protect somebody else who didn't bother taking steps to protect their own machine... sorry.
If/When we start to see a critical mass of malicious viruses, trojans, or other malware targeted at the Mac that aren't stopped by common sense practices, then I'll look into Anti-Virus software... no sooner. Yeah, perhaps there's some risk in doing that, but far less risk than with running anti-virus software right now.
I don't know where you get your figure of 80M chips per year, but sites like this one list Macintosh sales for 2004 at approximately 3.5M units. Even if all were dual processors (they're not), you are overstating processors by more than an order of magnitude.
80M sounds awfully high to me also. A modern motherboard has many chips on it, some of which might also come from Intel, but even at the most generous, I'm having trouble seeing 80M.
Your number of 3.5M units appears to be about a million low, though. 4.5 Million is what they shipped in 2005. Granted, that figure is a lot closer to your 3.5M than the OP's 80M, but you're still shorting Apple by roughly 25% on units shipped and even if only 10% of Macs were dual processor/core, and 5% were quad processor, you're still bumping up against 5 million chips, and considering that many previously single-chip machines are going to now be dual-core, 2006 could very well be even higher. AMD might be able to handle that amount, but it'd be a risk, and supply chain is one area where Apple is going to play it very conservatively because of all the problems they've had historically.
I realize that I'm just speaking for the people I know but those people are Apple's target audience.
Those people are one of Apple's target audiences. In my experience, I see no difference in the percentage of people on either platform who are really "with it". I see a lot more Windows people who style themselves as 733t Hax0rz, but knowing how to hobble together a VB app doesn't really qualify you for that status in my book, but other than that, I see little difference in the makeup of the two platforms' user bases. There are stupid Mac users, sure, and there are stuipd Windows users; it's just that stupidity isn't quite as dangerous on the Mac as things stand now.
Most of the really computer savvy people can work comfortably on either platform. Oh, they may have (almost certainly) definite preferences, but can get work done using either when push comes to shove, and probably Linux or *BSD as well.
"More perfect" is improper English. OS X is not perfect. It is more secure than most other OS's, especially as a default install.
I hate to knock you, since I agree with you, but.... Despite the fact that perfect is a superlative and, in a technical sense, there can't be different levels of perfectness, I do not think it is accurate to say "more perfect" is improper English. At worst, it would qualify as an idiomatic expression dating back at least to the late eighteenth century when the preamble to the U.S. Constitution was written ("to form a more perfect union"), and probably earlier. The fact is, many superlatives are used in the vernacular to mean something less than their literal meaning. How often do people say, for example, that they "need" something that could hardly qualify as a necessity? Haven't you ever heard someone say "there's nothing worse than" followed by something rather trivial?
You've got great points; don't get your arguments dismissed by being a Word Nazi(TM). Idiomatic expressions are an accepted part of the language and is probably the least problem we have on Slashdot when it comes to understanding posts.
I have spyware detection programs, snort, firewall, litte snitch (network traffic filter), virus scanner make regular back ups.... etc. It's foolish to even step on to a computer... any and assume that you are safe. My personal opinion is those who keep blindly procaiming that Mac OS X is a security haven should be held accountable for their words.
Backing up and firewalls are a great idea. Little snitch isn't bad, either.
The rest of your regime is foolish. Virus and anti-spyware software on the Mac is a case of the problem being worse than the cure. Several of the anti-virus software packages for the Mac actually make your machine less secure. You're not just wasting your time and processor cycles, you are actually making yourself more vulnerable.
Use a firewall, backup regularly, and don't open executables from untrusted sources. That's my whole regime. Perhaps Mac users are a little smug, but hey... this article is six years old and we're STILL considerably safer than our Windows counterparts. Perhaps we deserve to be a little smug.
No amount of software can replace common sense, and common sense never let a virus onto somebody's computer (unlike certain anti-virus software).
I think the argument that there are more Win* vulnerabilities than there are *nix vulnerabilities because Win* runs on 99% of desktops is valid. It only makes sense. Why would a malicious author write something that effects 1% versus 99%?
One of the problems with common logic is that it's often wrong. first tof all, Windows does not represent 99% of the computers, it's more like 90%-93% depending on whom you believe, though those statistics are generally calculated based on new computer sales, which is skewed because older Intel machines are often given a second life as Linux/*BSD boxes, people who use Macs tend to keep them (on average) longer, and because of the way Windows is licensed, many machines that run Linux/*BSD are also licensed to run Windows and are likely incorrectly counted as Windows machines in these statistics. In terms of "installed base", Windows could actually be considerably lower than the numbers show, and there's no real way to know with any certainty
Now, why would someone exploit vulnerabilities in a minority platform? A number of reasons. First of all, even if it's only 7% of computers, that's a lot of computers in terms of raw numbers - a number in the millions. There are many purposes that those computers could be put to, such as acting as click-fraud zombies, being used for DDOS attacks, etc. Not every exploit is designed to bring down the net.
Another reason is simple geek cred. It's become rather commonly known that Unix is harder to write effective exploits for because of its architecture. The first person who writes a really invasive, problematic OS X virus, for example, is going to be considered pretty bad-ass among the misfits who make up that particular sub-culture.
Even if you pro-rate the number of exploits by the installed base of users and don't even take into account the severity and impact of those exploits (which you obviously should), Windows security still sucks in comparison to pretty much anything else. There are many platform differences that get debated and for which there are valid reasons for differing opinions, but anyone who claims Windows security is anything other than disastrous is an apologist of the worst sort.
Short answer: It's a Mac rumor. Many anti-Mac people are ignorant of what the Mac actually is and how it actually works. That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone by now.:-/
Contextual menus in OS 9 and OS 8 (and maybe OS 7?? I don't remember) had to be specifically coded by the application developer, which meant that they were not consistently available or consistent in their use when they were available. You couldn't just take any old USB mouse and plug it in and get the full functionality of the right button and the multi-button ADB mice needed special drivers and software to support the additional buttons.
So, yeah, multi-button mice were available and could be used prior to OS X, but OS X was the first time where multi-button mice were supported consistently throughout the operating system and were supported by default in applications (for the basics like cut, copy, paste, etc) without the developer doing additional work.
OS X was more than a "lovely addition" to the Mac universe; it's pretty much a new universe that eclipsed the old one.:p Thankfully. OS 7-9, though functional from an end-user perspective, were pretty much a disaster under the hood. Cooperative multitasking? Hard-coded memory partitioning? No protected memory spaces? A crash in the foremost application often forced a system reboot? Horrid thread support and no command line? Oy. I don't miss it at all.
Except that NeXT's mouse was two-button, not three, though you could emulate three (e.g., if using X-windows) by pressing both simultaneously.
Ahh... my bad. I never actually used NeXT hardware; my first exposure was in the OPENSTEP days after NeXT stopped making hardware. I just knew there were key constants for three mouse buttons, so assumed there had actually been three physical buttons.:( My apologies.
Not to nitpick or start a flame war, but isn't that like how microsoft word doesn't require a keyboard( office ships with voice recognition)?
In OS X applications, you can very easily use the control key to simulate right-clicking or usually use a menu item or toolbar item to accomplish the same thing you can with the right-click. It's a tad bit less convenient, and I don't like to do it (hence my Logitech mouse), but that's really nothing like trying to use a word processor without a keyboard - I wouldn't say they are comparable situations at all.
But I agree that Apple's obstinance on the multi-button mouse issue was annoying.
Shake, an Apple application, requires a 3 button mouse.
Okay, you got me here. There are some programs that require a multi-button mouse. Most high-end 3D programs need one. Shake I'll take your word on since I've never used it. Outside of certain high-end niche markets, the vast, vast majority of (if not all) consumer-oriented Mac software does not require a multi-button mouse. Even most of the 3D software can be used without it, it's just horribly inconvenient to do so.
Re:How about giving putting a DVD-R in the iBook
on
The Odds at Macworld
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· Score: 1
Meh, I still think these computers are overpriced.
Dude, cry me a river because Apple's product strategy doesn't fit with the way you want the world to be. Of course they're trying to push you to buy more expensive systems; that's what companies do.
It's not completely without reason, however: the 12-inch iBook isn't targeted at the type of person who would be authoring DVDs, and it's really not the right machine for that task. If you want to be miserable, go ahead and buy the wrong machine for what you want to do and then upgrade the drive. Really.
The iBook is Apple's low-end laptop. Deal with it.
Oooh... what a witty troll. Congratulations on such an insightful post. Because, you know, nobody loses any time or productivity due to Windows virii, or the extensive mish-mash of security patches you have to apply, or having the registry get borked, or having their machine become a spam-producing zombie, not to mention that nobody ever has to do clean installs of Windows to clean out all that crap, and nobody's at risk because Windows executables run with equivalent of root privileges. I'm sure nobody's ever lost productivity because their network was taken over by SQLSlammer or other similar worm. And that anti-virus software you have to have on your Windows box, I'm sure, doesn't suck any processor cycles or make your system any less stable. You know, now that I've read your post, I think I'd better get rid of my Mac and start using Windows for the bulk of my work, because I'm obviously less productive than I should be. My god, why didn't I see it before?? Thank you so much!
Hell, I go longer without rebooting my Mac than I go without having to reinstall Windows on my Dell. And, oh yeah, my Mac doesn't have solitaire or minesweeper on it, either, so if it weren't for Slashdot, I'd be extremely productive on my Mac.:p
Aluminum polish? Heh. Right. I'll do that right after I vacuum my keyboard and send my underwear out for dry-cleaning.
Sad thing is, all Mac software assumes one button so those extra buttons will be doing pretty much nothing the next few... decades or so...
*Buzz* Thanks for playing.
OS X has supported multiple buttons and scroll wheels natively since its very first release, as the OS's event architecture was originally designed to accommodate Next's three-button mouse. Apple continued to develop the multi-button support under OS X despite shipping a single-button mouse. Most OS X applications (Cocoa, Carbon, and even Java) have always automatically taken advantage of the OS-level support for scroll wheels and right-clicking for basic tasks (e.g. copy, cut, paste) without doing anything, plus OS X developers routinely add additional contextual menus and other types of support for modern mice. I don't know a single OS X developer who routinely uses a single button mouse, and I've met a good number of them. On top of that, I believe that the Mighty Mouse's buttons are fully customizable in the System Preferences (not sure on that - I still use an old Logitech mouse on my Mac)
OS X applications never require a multi-button mouse, but they almost universally support them.
So instead of using decent lowcost hardware and running freebsd, they went with the gui clone?
Ugh. No. It's a friggin' RAID array. It's not a computer. There's no OS X or BSD or Linux or Windows... it's a complex, but glorified hard drive (well, maybe that's an oversimplification, but I'm trying to put it in terms you can understand).
And even if it were, OS X is not a "clone" of FreeBSD; it's a derivative.
A FANBOY wouldn't have said ANYTHING negative. You did. And, thankyou
Oh, I've been accused of being a fanboy and much worse on these forums, but no hoo-hoo. I like Apple -- what can I say? But I don't want to sleep with Steve or anything...
I actually have had a bad experience with Apple (back in the Gil Emelio days). It did get resolved eventually, after a lot of pain and many long waits on hold and losing my temper enough that I finally got a manager on the phone. But the question here was specifically about PowerBooks, and the only real problem I ever had with a PowerBook, Apple took care of promptly.
I'll spare you all the sob story of the bad experience unless someone asks about Apple's CRTs (which is unlikely, since they don't sell them any more) =)
Oh, please, no Apple fanboy Troll posts. I want real feedback.
Well, I'll admit to being a bit of a fanboy, but not a drooling one, and certainly will try not to troll. I'll give my experiences, and you can judge for yourself. Anecdotal experience is not all that reliable, but mine is almost completely positive when it comes to the PowerBooks.
Let's see... first PowerBook was a PowerBook 100 - the greyscale one. Got it second-hand when it was about two years old and used it for about three more years. I had to have the backlight fixed on it once, but Apple sent a box for it, I sent it in, and four days later it was back. It wasn't under warranty, so I had to pay, but I remember it being reasonable. I do not believe Apple does this anymore, but this was before the Apple Store and I had no local Apple Dealer. Other than that, it was reliable the rest of the time, and I gave it away to my in-laws who continued to use it for a few more years.
After that, I went a few years with just desktop machines. My next PowerBook was a TiBook (15" titanium PowerBook G4). This was a 400mhz model. I had no problems with it, except after three years the battery life started to degrade and by the end of the fourth year the battery was pretty much dead. I still have this computer and it works, but it doesn't get used much, and it needs a new battery. I never had any significant problems with it, and the only service it ever had was when I opened it up to add extra RAM to it. The keyboard on this model was a little "soft", though - the newer PowerBooks have a much better keyboard.
Current PowerBook is a first generation 17" aluminum PowerBook G4. I've had it for about three years I think, and it's still going strong. It's not the fastest Mac on the planet, by any means, but I'm rarely inconvenienced by that yet and have no compelling urge to get a new one (though I wouldn't mind if funds were unlimited:) ). I hit this machine harder than most people do, and it's still very usable. I added additional RAM to this one as well (1 gig), but have never had to take it in to be serviced. I did dump a bottle of soda on it a few months back, which I thought was going to be the end of it, but astonishingly enough, the only thing that happened was that the keys on the left side of the keyboard got sticky, which I was able to resolve with some isopropyl alcohol and Q-tips. The keys can be a tad difficult to get back on if you take them all the way off for cleaning, but most of the cleaing I was able to do without taking them completely off. I was pretty darn impressed with the engineering of this laptop after that event.
I see... so, tell me: when did you give up your mouse and switch to command-line chorded data entry? On your monochrome display no less?
Are you comments always so penetrating and insightful? Do you honestly think that only people who are willing to give up a technology should be able to comment on weaknesses, inefficiencies, or bugs in that technology?
I did not say that the widget was not useful, nor even that I do not use them, I merely commented that they take up more memory and more processor cycles to do their job than they reasonably should. I could re-write the weather widget as a native application and it would use a few hundred kilobytes of memory, max. The "dashboard" concept should add some overhead, but not this much - remember that that 12 megs is in addition to the added overhead in the Dock for hosting and maintaining the widget pane - all the memory for that, and the rendering engine and all the other good stuff is elsewhere. That 12 megs is just for executing a small script and a maintaining small bit of rendered HTML. It's inefficient; it can and should be improved.
Hell, XP is only decent "out of the box" if you didn't get that box from a major manufacturer. Dell, HP & Gateway throw so much extra bullshit on there it takes 30 minutes to clean everything up before it is usable.
You know how to clean up Windows XP from Dell in only 30 minutes? Damn, you're good. The fastest I've yet been able to do it is how long a clean install of XP takes.
I can't believe I'm posting hits, because I'm usually playing the drooling Mac fan-boy part in this here Slashdot play we're all in, but...
Do you realize how inefficient even a 12 meg memory footprint for something that pulls down like 20 bytes of weather data from a URL and then displays that data along with an image to indicate whether it's sunny, raining, or snowing? Widgets are a great idea, but they ARE memory hogs and take far more processor cycles than they should to do their job. They are not the best example of software engineering to ever come out of Cupertino by any stretch of the imagination.
Considering that *most* computer sales are laptops
This is wrong. Most computer sales are desktops.
Check your facts. Notebooks started outselling desktops this year. Haven't seen any follow-up since to tell if the trend has continued, steadied, or reversed, but as of June, 2005, notebooks were outselling desktops.
Depends on what you mean by "matters." I'd guess that most software developers would consider anybody who wants to pay for a license as somebody who "matters", and for most commercial software there's a lot more potential licensees using Windows. For most software companies, money matters more than elegance of design so yes, Virginia, Windows matters, whether you like it or not.
Sure... and long before Java, there was NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP which allowed you to write once and deploy pretty much anywhere except on a Mac (ironic, since OpenSTEP turned into Cocoa which is the "preferred" application development tool on the Mac). Different approach than Java, but it supported as many platforms as Java does now and didn't have the overhead of a virtual machine. Of course, OpenSTEP for Windows was always a bit wonky, but it was a cool idea and the technology behind it is what's allowing the upcoming transition to Intel processors for Apple.
I have no choice *but* to do this ctrl-drag thing.
You do have a choice. You can also bind the invocation target without control dragging on the bindings inspector, or you can create your interface items in code and specify its target using a selector.
If my controls aren't doing the action I expect them to, how do I fix it?
The the control is not doing what you expect, and your expecations are in line with the HIG, then the problem is in your code, not the underlying interface code, so not having access to it shouldn't matter. If you need to change that behavior, you simply subclass the control or cell object whose behavior you want to change. That's the beauty of OO when implemented well.
It's very buggy and unstable. Searches take *forever*, and one they're started, you can stop them (yeah, there's a stop button , but the UI freezes up during big searches)
With the exception of some pre-release developer seeded copies of Xcode, I have had no stability problems with Xcode. Early versions of Xcode 1.0, were problematic, but I haven't had problems or heard from people having problems in quite some time. Searches can be canceled, and if you're on Tiger (10.4), they're very fast since they use Spotlight's indices to speed up the results (much, much faster than in VS).
Because Xcode doesn't have any tabbed interface, you have a tendency to have lots of files open making it difficult to find the one you're looking for (and you have no effect way of toggling between two files you're actively using, because apple-tilde rotates the files in a circle)
Tabbed interfaces in an IDE sucks IMHO. Unless you work on small projects with only a few source files, a tab interface quickly becomes unmangeable. It's actually one of my biggest pet peeves with both Eclipse and VS, since I do tend to work on very large projects and often have a dozen files or more open at once. I find the open file combo box and the Groups & Files pane in Xcode to be a much faster way to work on complex projects. I have to admit I've spent some time over the years adjusting the custom key bindings to fit the way I work, though, but that's to be expected. No IDE is going to please everyone out of the box. I've done the same thing with Eclipse, though I do tend to use VS pretty much out-of-the-box.
The debugger doesn't always stop on the correct line.
Are you developing in Objective-C? I've never head of anyone having this problem unless they changed their code after launching the debug executable. Maybe you've got a corrupted installation or something. The problems you're describing could be an indication of more serious problems.
The debugger pops up its own window, leading you to get multiple views of the same window
Preference thing. I like it better this way. I don't want the debugger changing which file is open in my editor. I often continue working on code while other apps or libraries are compiling, and would rather go to it when I'm ready to look at the problem.
Recently, I've hit this problem where I miss an end brace and Xcode spends the next 15 minutes generating 500,000 errors - and there's no way to stop it, short of killing the app, because the UI has totally freezed up
This is not the default behavior of Xcode that you're describing here.
Oh, did I mention that it's unstable?
Yes, more times than necessary, to be honest. And I'm thinking there's a problem with your installation or something, because I work with Xcode constantly and work with many people who work with Xcode and I can tell you that what you're describing is not typical. I've left close-brackets off countless times, and it stops after an error or three.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully very few. With the current state of affairs, anti-virus software for the Mac is a case of the cure being much worse than the disease. Even these recently discovered worms and the Safari vulnerability are relatively benign and can be protected against with a little common sense. In fact, most users hopefully are already safe from the Safari vulnerability since the "Open Safe Files" option was already the source of another vulnerability a while back.
By the time these vulnerabilities make it into the virus definitions, they are old hat. Plus, at least one *cough* Norton *cough* anti-virus for the Mac actually introduces a considerable number of new security vulnerabilities to the OS.
Sure, running anti-virus software on our machines will catch all those old Windows exploits but I'm not compromising my system to protect somebody else who didn't bother taking steps to protect their own machine... sorry.
If/When we start to see a critical mass of malicious viruses, trojans, or other malware targeted at the Mac that aren't stopped by common sense practices, then I'll look into Anti-Virus software... no sooner. Yeah, perhaps there's some risk in doing that, but far less risk than with running anti-virus software right now.
Your number of 3.5M units appears to be about a million low, though. 4.5 Million is what they shipped in 2005. Granted, that figure is a lot closer to your 3.5M than the OP's 80M, but you're still shorting Apple by roughly 25% on units shipped and even if only 10% of Macs were dual processor/core, and 5% were quad processor, you're still bumping up against 5 million chips, and considering that many previously single-chip machines are going to now be dual-core, 2006 could very well be even higher. AMD might be able to handle that amount, but it'd be a risk, and supply chain is one area where Apple is going to play it very conservatively because of all the problems they've had historically.
Most of the really computer savvy people can work comfortably on either platform. Oh, they may have (almost certainly) definite preferences, but can get work done using either when push comes to shove, and probably Linux or *BSD as well.
You've got great points; don't get your arguments dismissed by being a Word Nazi(TM). Idiomatic expressions are an accepted part of the language and is probably the least problem we have on Slashdot when it comes to understanding posts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moof
Unfortunately, the original Apple Technote describing the cowdog (31) is now offline.
The rest of your regime is foolish. Virus and anti-spyware software on the Mac is a case of the problem being worse than the cure. Several of the anti-virus software packages for the Mac actually make your machine less secure. You're not just wasting your time and processor cycles, you are actually making yourself more vulnerable.
Use a firewall, backup regularly, and don't open executables from untrusted sources. That's my whole regime. Perhaps Mac users are a little smug, but hey... this article is six years old and we're STILL considerably safer than our Windows counterparts. Perhaps we deserve to be a little smug.
No amount of software can replace common sense, and common sense never let a virus onto somebody's computer (unlike certain anti-virus software).
Now, why would someone exploit vulnerabilities in a minority platform? A number of reasons. First of all, even if it's only 7% of computers, that's a lot of computers in terms of raw numbers - a number in the millions. There are many purposes that those computers could be put to, such as acting as click-fraud zombies, being used for DDOS attacks, etc. Not every exploit is designed to bring down the net.
Another reason is simple geek cred. It's become rather commonly known that Unix is harder to write effective exploits for because of its architecture. The first person who writes a really invasive, problematic OS X virus, for example, is going to be considered pretty bad-ass among the misfits who make up that particular sub-culture.
Even if you pro-rate the number of exploits by the installed base of users and don't even take into account the severity and impact of those exploits (which you obviously should), Windows security still sucks in comparison to pretty much anything else. There are many platform differences that get debated and for which there are valid reasons for differing opinions, but anyone who claims Windows security is anything other than disastrous is an apologist of the worst sort.
Contextual menus in OS 9 and OS 8 (and maybe OS 7?? I don't remember) had to be specifically coded by the application developer, which meant that they were not consistently available or consistent in their use when they were available. You couldn't just take any old USB mouse and plug it in and get the full functionality of the right button and the multi-button ADB mice needed special drivers and software to support the additional buttons.
So, yeah, multi-button mice were available and could be used prior to OS X, but OS X was the first time where multi-button mice were supported consistently throughout the operating system and were supported by default in applications (for the basics like cut, copy, paste, etc) without the developer doing additional work.
OS X was more than a "lovely addition" to the Mac universe; it's pretty much a new universe that eclipsed the old one.
But I agree that Apple's obstinance on the multi-button mouse issue was annoying.
It's not completely without reason, however: the 12-inch iBook isn't targeted at the type of person who would be authoring DVDs, and it's really not the right machine for that task. If you want to be miserable, go ahead and buy the wrong machine for what you want to do and then upgrade the drive. Really.
The iBook is Apple's low-end laptop. Deal with it.
Oooh... what a witty troll. Congratulations on such an insightful post. Because, you know, nobody loses any time or productivity due to Windows virii, or the extensive mish-mash of security patches you have to apply, or having the registry get borked, or having their machine become a spam-producing zombie, not to mention that nobody ever has to do clean installs of Windows to clean out all that crap, and nobody's at risk because Windows executables run with equivalent of root privileges. I'm sure nobody's ever lost productivity because their network was taken over by SQLSlammer or other similar worm. And that anti-virus software you have to have on your Windows box, I'm sure, doesn't suck any processor cycles or make your system any less stable. You know, now that I've read your post, I think I'd better get rid of my Mac and start using Windows for the bulk of my work, because I'm obviously less productive than I should be. My god, why didn't I see it before?? Thank you so much!
:p
Hell, I go longer without rebooting my Mac than I go without having to reinstall Windows on my Dell. And, oh yeah, my Mac doesn't have solitaire or minesweeper on it, either, so if it weren't for Slashdot, I'd be extremely productive on my Mac.
Aluminum polish? Heh. Right. I'll do that right after I vacuum my keyboard and send my underwear out for dry-cleaning.
OS X has supported multiple buttons and scroll wheels natively since its very first release, as the OS's event architecture was originally designed to accommodate Next's three-button mouse. Apple continued to develop the multi-button support under OS X despite shipping a single-button mouse. Most OS X applications (Cocoa, Carbon, and even Java) have always automatically taken advantage of the OS-level support for scroll wheels and right-clicking for basic tasks (e.g. copy, cut, paste) without doing anything, plus OS X developers routinely add additional contextual menus and other types of support for modern mice. I don't know a single OS X developer who routinely uses a single button mouse, and I've met a good number of them. On top of that, I believe that the Mighty Mouse's buttons are fully customizable in the System Preferences (not sure on that - I still use an old Logitech mouse on my Mac)
OS X applications never require a multi-button mouse, but they almost universally support them.
And even if it were, OS X is not a "clone" of FreeBSD; it's a derivative.
I actually have had a bad experience with Apple (back in the Gil Emelio days). It did get resolved eventually, after a lot of pain and many long waits on hold and losing my temper enough that I finally got a manager on the phone. But the question here was specifically about PowerBooks, and the only real problem I ever had with a PowerBook, Apple took care of promptly.
I'll spare you all the sob story of the bad experience unless someone asks about Apple's CRTs (which is unlikely, since they don't sell them any more) =)
After that, I went a few years with just desktop machines. My next PowerBook was a TiBook (15" titanium PowerBook G4). This was a 400mhz model. I had no problems with it, except after three years the battery life started to degrade and by the end of the fourth year the battery was pretty much dead. I still have this computer and it works, but it doesn't get used much, and it needs a new battery. I never had any significant problems with it, and the only service it ever had was when I opened it up to add extra RAM to it. The keyboard on this model was a little "soft", though - the newer PowerBooks have a much better keyboard.
Current PowerBook is a first generation 17" aluminum PowerBook G4. I've had it for about three years I think, and it's still going strong. It's not the fastest Mac on the planet, by any means, but I'm rarely inconvenienced by that yet and have no compelling urge to get a new one (though I wouldn't mind if funds were unlimited
I did not say that the widget was not useful, nor even that I do not use them, I merely commented that they take up more memory and more processor cycles to do their job than they reasonably should. I could re-write the weather widget as a native application and it would use a few hundred kilobytes of memory, max. The "dashboard" concept should add some overhead, but not this much - remember that that 12 megs is in addition to the added overhead in the Dock for hosting and maintaining the widget pane - all the memory for that, and the rendering engine and all the other good stuff is elsewhere. That 12 megs is just for executing a small script and a maintaining small bit of rendered HTML. It's inefficient; it can and should be improved.
You know how to clean up Windows XP from Dell in only 30 minutes? Damn, you're good. The fastest I've yet been able to do it is how long a clean install of XP takes.
I can't believe I'm posting hits, because I'm usually playing the drooling Mac fan-boy part in this here Slashdot play we're all in, but...
Do you realize how inefficient even a 12 meg memory footprint for something that pulls down like 20 bytes of weather data from a URL and then displays that data along with an image to indicate whether it's sunny, raining, or snowing? Widgets are a great idea, but they ARE memory hogs and take far more processor cycles than they should to do their job. They are not the best example of software engineering to ever come out of Cupertino by any stretch of the imagination.
http://news.com.com/PC+milestone--notebooks+outse
Depends on what you mean by "matters." I'd guess that most software developers would consider anybody who wants to pay for a license as somebody who "matters", and for most commercial software there's a lot more potential licensees using Windows. For most software companies, money matters more than elegance of design so yes, Virginia, Windows matters, whether you like it or not.
Sure... and long before Java, there was NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP which allowed you to write once and deploy pretty much anywhere except on a Mac (ironic, since OpenSTEP turned into Cocoa which is the "preferred" application development tool on the Mac). Different approach than Java, but it supported as many platforms as Java does now and didn't have the overhead of a virtual machine. Of course, OpenSTEP for Windows was always a bit wonky, but it was a cool idea and the technology behind it is what's allowing the upcoming transition to Intel processors for Apple.
Sure... if you define "anywhere" to mean "anywhere but windows"
You do have a choice. You can also bind the invocation target without control dragging on the bindings inspector, or you can create your interface items in code and specify its target using a selector.
The the control is not doing what you expect, and your expecations are in line with the HIG, then the problem is in your code, not the underlying interface code, so not having access to it shouldn't matter. If you need to change that behavior, you simply subclass the control or cell object whose behavior you want to change. That's the beauty of OO when implemented well.
With the exception of some pre-release developer seeded copies of Xcode, I have had no stability problems with Xcode. Early versions of Xcode 1.0, were problematic, but I haven't had problems or heard from people having problems in quite some time. Searches can be canceled, and if you're on Tiger (10.4), they're very fast since they use Spotlight's indices to speed up the results (much, much faster than in VS).
Tabbed interfaces in an IDE sucks IMHO. Unless you work on small projects with only a few source files, a tab interface quickly becomes unmangeable. It's actually one of my biggest pet peeves with both Eclipse and VS, since I do tend to work on very large projects and often have a dozen files or more open at once. I find the open file combo box and the Groups & Files pane in Xcode to be a much faster way to work on complex projects. I have to admit I've spent some time over the years adjusting the custom key bindings to fit the way I work, though, but that's to be expected. No IDE is going to please everyone out of the box. I've done the same thing with Eclipse, though I do tend to use VS pretty much out-of-the-box.
Are you developing in Objective-C? I've never head of anyone having this problem unless they changed their code after launching the debug executable. Maybe you've got a corrupted installation or something. The problems you're describing could be an indication of more serious problems.
Preference thing. I like it better this way. I don't want the debugger changing which file is open in my editor. I often continue working on code while other apps or libraries are compiling, and would rather go to it when I'm ready to look at the problem.
This is not the default behavior of Xcode that you're describing here.
Yes, more times than necessary, to be honest. And I'm thinking there's a problem with your installation or something, because I work with Xcode constantly and work with many people who work with Xcode and I can tell you that what you're describing is not typical. I've left close-brackets off countless times, and it stops after an error or three.