>> Only Mac users are gullible enough to APPLAUD a company making expensive Gigabit ethernet stock when so very few have networks capable of using its full potential.
I bet an idiot like you would prefer a floppy drive to Gigabit Ethernet and have never heard that you can just connect 2 Macs with a cable to make a Gigabit network.
>> And what's up with this 802.11g networking? Do you know how fast your cable modem is?
What the fuck you are talking about? A high speed wireless LAN doesn't depend on a cable modem.
>> And you wouldn't need the extra room for your apps if damn Apple would put back in the multiple terminals every other Unixy product in the world has. Damn Crippled Unix.
Have you ever used OS X or any other Unix, and what the hell are you on about? There are many terminal apps on OS X, you can run many instances with each having multiple windows, and even tabbed terminals.
>> And unfortunately, they probably WILL go under soon.
Apple is one of the few computer maker that are still profitable, and they have a $4,400,000,000 cash pile, so why don't you keep your stupid oppinion to yourself and go to play with your noisy and ugly PC toy.
>> They're getting squeezed to death because they don't run Windows. They're not compatible with Windows. They don't run Windows software.
Obviously you have never heard Virtual PC, which allows a Mac to run Linux, DOS and Windows 95/98/NT//2000/ME/XP, all at the same time if you have enough RAM. In addition, the best of main stream software from MS, Adobe, Macromedia, Sybase, Oracle, Bortland and FileMaker are available on Mac and usually work better than the PC versions. Don't forget that there are many Mac only softeare
>> Why would they just idle faster? That wouldn't make any sense.
The P4 has built-in thermal control which would slow down the clock rate if the chip gets too hot. Ironically, the chip only gets hot when under heavy load but not when it's idling, hence the nice slogan - GHz power when you don't need it! What's more, Wintel laptops don't run at full speed at all on battery power due to Intel speedstep technology, so you see all that GHz stuff is really a marketing thing and looks good on paper.
How about Firewire 800, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth, Superdrive, 2 MB L3 cache, 2GB RAM, 4 internal disk drives, Gigabit Ethernet, Mac OS X, dozens of free programming tools, iLife, the style, the reliability, the lower TCO,...
Come on people, I thought/. readers are intelligent enough to look beyond the box.
How about Firewire 800, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth, Superdrive, 2 MB L3 cache, 2GB RAM, 4 internal disk drives, Gigabit Ethernet, Mac OS X, dozens of free programming tools, iLife, the style, the reliability, the lower TCO,...
Come on people, I thought/. readers are intelligent enough to look beyond the box.
How about Firewire 800, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth, Superdrive, 2 MB L3 cache, 2GB RAM, 4 internal disk drives, Gigabit Ethernet, Mac OS X, dozens of free programming tools, iLife, the style, the reliability, the lower TCO,...
Come on people, I thought/. readers are intelligent enough to look beyond the box.
>> Someone here said that CISC does more per clock cycle than RISC, but that because of the inherant simplicity, RISC could run at higher rates
You are talking shit through your ass. A CISC instruction doesn't do more per cycle, it may do more per instruction, but takes much more cycles, so the clock rate correlates very little with the real performance. In other words, CISC instructions may take anything from 1 to 40 instructions to finish, which makes them difficult to optimize, while most of the RISC instructions take 1 or 2 cycles, which is why the clock rate can't be arbitrarily increased like the P4.
The old Intel x86 instruction set is truly a piece of shit in terms of computer architecture, and actually not used very much by modern software. But for backward compatability and marketing reasons, Intel keeps patching it with new instructions and never bothers to remove the legacy, which is why the P4 gets so complicated and consume so much electricity.
>> But, all that being said, my 1GHz AMD, which may be running at any one time Photoshop, Outlook, Visual Studio, Kazaa, DC++, a web server, and a whole host of other crazy things in the background.. well, my system seems much faster than any Mac I've used.
What the hell are you talking about? Have you ever used a Mac and do you realize that Mac OS X is a real server grade OS with true Unix power and stability as well as Cocoa ellegence. My 700 MHz iBook can do more things than you mentioned simultaneously and runs weeks and months without Windows style crashes. What's more, a Mac can be put to sleep and wakes up instantly, so you never have to power down the system for months. In normal usage, my iBook definitely feels more usable than the 16" 2.6 GHz Sony Vaio I was playing the other day, and it's virtually silent with a single battery lasting smore than 4 hours, while my brother-in-law's Sony lasts 2 hours with 2 batteries.
>> the mantra was that CISC did more per cycle than RISC.
The opposite is true: most of the RISC instructions execute in a single cycle, while many CISC instructions take much more, which is why raw clock speed is only perhaps meaningful for RISC chips and means very little for CISC, but totally meaningless across platforms.
People keep forgetting that the G4 has a much higher raw clock speed than most of other very expensive high end RISC systems like Sun UltraSparc or SGI Mips or HP PA. How come other RISC vendors don't get blamed for their clock speed, while everyone screams at Apple everytime a faster system is introduced? Could this means that people just love to talk about Apple because it's cool and we all want a better Mac?
I first used with ClarisWorks nearly 10 years ago, and was totally amazed by the fact that such a seamless integration of 6 powerful tools (text, draw, paint, spreadsheet, database and communication) had only a tiny size of just over 3MB and MS Word alone was more than 20 MB.
How the world comes to prefer the MS bloatware called Office rather than a gem like ClarisWorks is just beyond me. Now Office X takes up 400 MB on my iBook, still not properly integrated like ClarisWorks, and runs as slow as hell even with a 3 pages documents! Apple, please take this guy back and I will wipe out the MS shit in a hear beat!
Has anyone read the reader comments from his site, it brings tears to my eyes. I am particularly moved by the story that Steve Woz always sited at the back of the classroom and learnt something new when someone was teaching the kids to use ClarisWorks.
I don't understand why so many people even mention MFC.
First of all, we are supposed to talk about cross-platform GUI tools here, how does MFC fit the bill? Secondly, even MS has given up MFC and moved on to the.NET frameworks (or whatever it's called). And finally, it's just a piece of shit.
>> The problem is that it's only available for Windows and Linux, and since the underlying code is native, it has to be separately developed and maintained.
Which version are you talking about? I am running Eclipse 2.0 right now, and it works fine.
I am developing a fairly complex Java application with Swing on a 700 MHz iBook running Mac OS X and Java 1.3.1. It looks almost like a pure Cocoa application, and certainly behave better and runs faster than most of the Carbon programs on OS X, particularly wrt multi-threading. Plus, antialiasing is available too.
Java is definitely ready for prime time. Most of the Java IDEs are writen in Java itself and feel more responsive than any of the MS Office apps. My favorite is Borland JBuilder which is also 100% pure Java, but very powerful and fast.
After programming in C/C++ for over 10 years, I am now a very happy Java programmer and will never look back.
By the way, Mac OS X is definitely the best platform for Java (and C/C++, Objective C/C++, etc). Virtually all of the Cocoa and QuickTime APIs have native Java binding. If you don't like Swing, there is always the wonderful Interface Builder that allows you to design the best GUI with almost no coding. And of course, OS X is bundled with dozens of programming tools for free!
Before any of your MS VB non-programmers even trying to suggest anything else, I have to confess that I did use VB a lot myself, mostly for small projects. But VB is really just a toy compared with Java or C++, it simply hasn't got the power to scale up. In any case, why are you foolish enough to pay a couple of thousands dollars for Visual Studio.NET just to program for Windows while there other free tools for writting software on all platforms?
There is no way that any Sony VAIO is better or cheaper than a similarly configured iBook or PowerBook, period.
My brother-in-law just bought a 12" iBook for $999 to repalce his 14" Sony bought less a year old, and he couldn't be more happier. He is a programmer and has been a PC user all his life and still owns 4 Wintel PCs, now he hardly use them for many reasons. His Sony is over 8 lbs and gets really hot after 30 minutes of use and lasts no more than 2 hrs with 2 fully charged batteries, while the iBook is 4.5 lbs and can carries on for 4 to 5 hrs with a single batteries. But the bigger deal for him is that Mac OS X gives him so many powerful programming tools (Project Builder, Interface Builder, GCC 3.1, Objective C/C++, Java, Perl, Ruby...) for free while MS Visual Studio.NET alone would cost him $2500 or more. Further more, he can now enjoy music and view photos and burn CDs and make movies and chat with friends and backup files and surfing the Web, while program in Java at the same time, with no extra cost. In contrast, the Sony with 512 MB RAM would become very slow just for programming Java. And of course, there are so many free or open sources Unix programs which are either unavailable or doesn't work properly on Windows, and OS X is just more solid and elegant than Windows XP.
I am a programmer myself, and do everything on my 700 MHz iBook which feels more responsive than a 1.8 GHz 16" Sony Vaio I once played with for a couple of hrs. To start with, when there are more than a few open windows and you drag a window around, all the little icons on the Sony desktop start flickering which is very disturbing to the eyes. The graphics and text just look sharper on the iBook than on the Sony. The iBook can sleep and wake up instantaneously, while the Sony takes much longer and doesn't always wake up.
Yeah, except that you can do it in 1 click rather than 5: just click Display on the menu bar and choose a different resolution. Or even better, just zoom in with {option command +} and zoom out with {option command -} to any depth you want, and how do you do that with your dirty Windows.
You obviously are as foolish as MS to think that more clicks give your more power!
I have also noticed this, and just submitted a bug to Apple. It's only Beta, you know.
But I am otherwise very impressed, particularly with the appearance, speed, bookmark, bug and text buttons, etc. You have got to give credit to Apple - everything they touch these days turns to gold.
>> Desktops and Servers, hands down I'd go with Intel architecture with Linux, the price/performance kicks Apple's ass in all kinds of ways.
This is simply not true at all.
Xserve http://www.apple.com/xserve/ is cheaper than a Dell and comes OS X Server with unlimited license. The flat panel iMac costs as little as $1199 which simply unmatched in style and quality by any Wintel box maker. Plus, you can still buy the G3 iMac or G4 eMac for $799 or $999.
"No offense to Apple, but their zealots are ignorant for the most part. These are the sort of people who are blindly loyal to Apple and do not have a clue what actually goes on under the hood, but yet profess to say it is better than MS, PC, etc etc."
You should be shamed of yourself to put out a sweeping statement like that, probably because you have little knowledge of the Mac community or you are just an arrangant and brainless idiot with just enough intelligence to follows the crowd.
Most Mac users that I know of are creative, smart and sensible people, and they choose Mac out of their own free will and for good reasons or due to constant frustration with endless reliability and security issues with the noisy and ugly Wintel PCs.
To me as a professional software developer with over 10 years experiences on virtually every flavors of expensive Unix workstations (Sun Solaris, HP/UX, IBM AIX, etc), Mac OS X simply blows them all away and is much much cheaper and more productive and sexy, and let's not bother to talk about Windows here.
You have also got realize that people have different priority and are not necessarily ignorant or less intelligent than you just because they don't want waste hours on messing with a crappy old PC.
OS X on 400MHz G3 iMac faster than XP on 800MHz PC
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 1
More surprisingly, the PC (256MB RAM) is used almost exclusively to run IE and Outlook and would crash about twice a week on everage, while the iMac (512MB RAM) is used for everything (programming, graphics, word processing, email, web browsing, gaming, music, DVD, NAT, software base station, etc) hardly ever crashes ever since OS X public beta 2 years ago. The PC is shut down every night due to unbearable noise level, while the iMac is typically loaded simultaneously with many applications and runs for weeks and weeks without rebooting or noticeable performance degradation. The iMac is nearly 4 years old, and I never spend any money to upgrade it other than adding some more memory and an Airport card, but it gets faster with every new version of OS X in the past 2 years. I like to know how many of your PC users are happy with a 4 years old PC running the latest MS bloat ware?
Firstly, I wouldn't use Visual Basic to build multi-platform enterprise software; and secondly, we are talking about live UI that actually works with the C++ code, not just UI prototyping. I guess you don't really know what I mean unless you try IB.
I have been programming C++ professionally for over 10 years on many Unix and Windows platforms (Sun Forte, MS Visual Studio, etc), and I can tell you that nothing comes close to ProjectBuilder, InterfaceBuilder, and dozens of other tools on OS X. The good news (for those who always think everything Apple must be expensive) is that they are absolutely free, so save that $2500 for Visual Studio.NET and buy yourself a decent G4 TiBook with a real OS and all those free tools.
With GCC 3.1, you can programming in mixed C / C++ and Objective C / C++ in the same file or project. ProjectBuilder provides the best IDE and CLI for building multiple projects with dependency and multi-targets and multi-phases, apart from editing source files, icons, graphics, sound, document, etc.
InterfaceBuilder is the only tool on earth that actually allows you to design and test professional UI with virtually no user code.
I've built quiet a few tools over the years, anything from little scripts to manage renders to water simulation plugins. Over time I'll place information about the tools here as well as make some available. Since getting a Mac my mind has been on overdrive, thinking about what new things I can put together - OS/X has such a nice development environment.
We have 3 here, an old iMac as a gateway and AirPort Base Station, an iBook and a Power Mac. The family license is a good deal. I would say that Mac people tend to be more honest and willing to pay for software they use.
Once you see the light of Mac and OS X, you just don't want to touch a PC. I got rid of my PC and Win XP a few months ago, and don't want to look back. We have everything we need on the Macs including MS Office, and they just work. All the machines are on 24/7 and keep running for weeks or months, they will go asleep when no used for a while and wake up in a fraction of a second. I have to shut down my PC every day - just too noisy, and it still crashes a few times a week.
Generally speaking, most PC users have a very crude and simplistic view when they talking about computers, all they care about is the list price, the clock speed or the size of hard drive. Mac users are more sophisticated in the sense that they consider the total cost of ownership, the build quality, the design, the style, the productivity as well as the performance.
A friend of mine has been a PC user for all these years up till 3 weeks ago when she bought an LCD iMac, and she just adored it, including little things like the bouncing icons, the genie effect, the smooth text, the shadow and transparency.
> The list price of $130 for OS X is perhaps a little high.
How the hell can anyone say OS X is expensive for $129, while Red Hat Linux 8.0 Professional sells for $135 and MS XP Professional for $187 on amazon.com. Out of box, OS X is not only far superior in style, but also provides much more tools than XP and Linux combined. The programming tools alone could worth over $1000, let alone AppleWorks, iMovie, iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD, iSync, iChat,Mail, Address Book,...
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>> Only Mac users are gullible enough to APPLAUD a company making expensive Gigabit ethernet stock when so very few have networks capable of using its full potential.
I bet an idiot like you would prefer a floppy drive to Gigabit Ethernet and have never heard that you can just connect 2 Macs with a cable to make a Gigabit network.
>> And what's up with this 802.11g networking? Do you know how fast your cable modem is?
What the fuck you are talking about? A high speed wireless LAN doesn't depend on a cable modem.
>> And you wouldn't need the extra room for your apps if damn Apple would put back in the multiple terminals every other Unixy product in the world has. Damn Crippled Unix.
Have you ever used OS X or any other Unix, and what the hell are you on about? There are many terminal apps on OS X, you can run many instances with each having multiple windows, and even tabbed terminals.
>> And unfortunately, they probably WILL go under soon.
Apple is one of the few computer maker that are still profitable, and they have a $4,400,000,000 cash pile, so why don't you keep your stupid oppinion to yourself and go to play with your noisy and ugly PC toy.
>> They're getting squeezed to death because they don't run Windows. They're not compatible with Windows. They don't run Windows software.
Obviously you have never heard Virtual PC, which allows a Mac to run Linux, DOS and Windows 95/98/NT//2000/ME/XP, all at the same time if you have enough RAM. In addition, the best of main stream software from MS, Adobe, Macromedia, Sybase, Oracle, Bortland and FileMaker are available on Mac and usually work better than the PC versions. Don't forget that there are many Mac only softeare
>> Why would they just idle faster? That wouldn't make any sense.
The P4 has built-in thermal control which would slow down the clock rate if the chip gets too hot. Ironically, the chip only gets hot when under heavy load but not when it's idling, hence the nice slogan - GHz power when you don't need it! What's more, Wintel laptops don't run at full speed at all on battery power due to Intel speedstep technology, so you see all that GHz stuff is really a marketing thing and looks good on paper.
How about Firewire 800, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth, Superdrive, 2 MB L3 cache, 2GB RAM, 4 internal disk drives, Gigabit Ethernet, Mac OS X, dozens of free programming tools, iLife, the style, the reliability, the lower TCO, ...
/. readers are intelligent enough to look beyond the box.
Come on people, I thought
How about Firewire 800, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth, Superdrive, 2 MB L3 cache, 2GB RAM, 4 internal disk drives, Gigabit Ethernet, Mac OS X, dozens of free programming tools, iLife, the style, the reliability, the lower TCO, ...
/. readers are intelligent enough to look beyond the box.
Come on people, I thought
How about Firewire 800, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth, Superdrive, 2 MB L3 cache, 2GB RAM, 4 internal disk drives, Gigabit Ethernet, Mac OS X, dozens of free programming tools, iLife, the style, the reliability, the lower TCO, ...
/. readers are intelligent enough to look beyond the box.
Come on people, I thought
>> Someone here said that CISC does more per clock cycle than RISC, but that because of the inherant simplicity, RISC could run at higher rates
You are talking shit through your ass. A CISC instruction doesn't do more per cycle, it may do more per instruction, but takes much more cycles, so the clock rate correlates very little with the real performance. In other words, CISC instructions may take anything from 1 to 40 instructions to finish, which makes them difficult to optimize, while most of the RISC instructions take 1 or 2 cycles, which is why the clock rate can't be arbitrarily increased like the P4.
The old Intel x86 instruction set is truly a piece of shit in terms of computer architecture, and actually not used very much by modern software. But for backward compatability and marketing reasons, Intel keeps patching it with new instructions and never bothers to remove the legacy, which is why the P4 gets so complicated and consume so much electricity.
>> But, all that being said, my 1GHz AMD, which may be running at any one time Photoshop, Outlook, Visual Studio, Kazaa, DC++, a web server, and a whole host of other crazy things in the background.. well, my system seems much faster than any Mac I've used.
What the hell are you talking about? Have you ever used a Mac and do you realize that Mac OS X is a real server grade OS with true Unix power and stability as well as Cocoa ellegence. My 700 MHz iBook can do more things than you mentioned simultaneously and runs weeks and months without Windows style crashes. What's more, a Mac can be put to sleep and wakes up instantly, so you never have to power down the system for months. In normal usage, my iBook definitely feels more usable than the 16" 2.6 GHz Sony Vaio I was playing the other day, and it's virtually silent with a single battery lasting smore than 4 hours, while my brother-in-law's Sony lasts 2 hours with 2 batteries.
>> the mantra was that CISC did more per cycle than RISC.
The opposite is true: most of the RISC instructions execute in a single cycle, while many CISC instructions take much more, which is why raw clock speed is only perhaps meaningful for RISC chips and means very little for CISC, but totally meaningless across platforms.
People keep forgetting that the G4 has a much higher raw clock speed than most of other very expensive high end RISC systems like Sun UltraSparc or SGI Mips or HP PA. How come other RISC vendors don't get blamed for their clock speed, while everyone screams at Apple everytime a faster system is introduced? Could this means that people just love to talk about Apple because it's cool and we all want a better Mac?
What a enjoyable read.
I first used with ClarisWorks nearly 10 years ago, and was totally amazed by the fact that such a seamless integration of 6 powerful tools (text, draw, paint, spreadsheet, database and communication) had only a tiny size of just over 3MB and MS Word alone was more than 20 MB.
How the world comes to prefer the MS bloatware called Office rather than a gem like ClarisWorks is just beyond me. Now Office X takes up 400 MB on my iBook, still not properly integrated like ClarisWorks, and runs as slow as hell even with a 3 pages documents! Apple, please take this guy back and I will wipe out the MS shit in a hear beat!
Has anyone read the reader comments from his site, it brings tears to my eyes. I am particularly moved by the story that Steve Woz always sited at the back of the classroom and learnt something new when someone was teaching the kids to use ClarisWorks.
>> please note that shared libraries aren't supported yet for Mac OS X version 10.2.
.dylib files in /usr/lib or packaged within Frameworks.
What the fuck are you talking about? Mac OS X always supports shared libraries, they are just
I don't understand why so many people even mention MFC.
.NET frameworks (or whatever it's called). And finally, it's just a piece of shit.
First of all, we are supposed to talk about cross-platform GUI tools here, how does MFC fit the bill? Secondly, even MS has given up MFC and moved on to the
>> The problem is that it's only available for Windows and Linux, and since the underlying code is native, it has to be separately developed and maintained. Which version are you talking about? I am running Eclipse 2.0 right now, and it works fine.
I am developing a fairly complex Java application with Swing on a 700 MHz iBook running Mac OS X and Java 1.3.1. It looks almost like a pure Cocoa application, and certainly behave better and runs faster than most of the Carbon programs on OS X, particularly wrt multi-threading. Plus, antialiasing is available too.
.NET just to program for Windows while there other free tools for writting software on all platforms?
Java is definitely ready for prime time. Most of the Java IDEs are writen in Java itself and feel more responsive than any of the MS Office apps. My favorite is Borland JBuilder which is also 100% pure Java, but very powerful and fast.
After programming in C/C++ for over 10 years, I am now a very happy Java programmer and will never look back.
By the way, Mac OS X is definitely the best platform for Java (and C/C++, Objective C/C++, etc). Virtually all of the Cocoa and QuickTime APIs have native Java binding. If you don't like Swing, there is always the wonderful Interface Builder that allows you to design the best GUI with almost no coding. And of course, OS X is bundled with dozens of programming tools for free!
Before any of your MS VB non-programmers even trying to suggest anything else, I have to confess that I did use VB a lot myself, mostly for small projects. But VB is really just a toy compared with Java or C++, it simply hasn't got the power to scale up. In any case, why are you foolish enough to pay a couple of thousands dollars for Visual Studio
There is no way that any Sony VAIO is better or cheaper than a similarly configured iBook or PowerBook, period.
...) for free while MS Visual Studio .NET alone would cost him $2500 or more. Further more, he can now enjoy music and view photos and burn CDs and make movies and chat with friends and backup files and surfing the Web, while program in Java at the same time, with no extra cost. In contrast, the Sony with 512 MB RAM would become very slow just for programming Java. And of course, there are so many free or open sources Unix programs which are either unavailable or doesn't work properly on Windows, and OS X is just more solid and elegant than Windows XP.
My brother-in-law just bought a 12" iBook for $999 to repalce his 14" Sony bought less a year old, and he couldn't be more happier. He is a programmer and has been a PC user all his life and still owns 4 Wintel PCs, now he hardly use them for many reasons. His Sony is over 8 lbs and gets really hot after 30 minutes of use and lasts no more than 2 hrs with 2 fully charged batteries, while the iBook is 4.5 lbs and can carries on for 4 to 5 hrs with a single batteries. But the bigger deal for him is that Mac OS X gives him so many powerful programming tools (Project Builder, Interface Builder, GCC 3.1, Objective C/C++, Java, Perl, Ruby
I am a programmer myself, and do everything on my 700 MHz iBook which feels more responsive than a 1.8 GHz 16" Sony Vaio I once played with for a couple of hrs. To start with, when there are more than a few open windows and you drag a window around, all the little icons on the Sony desktop start flickering which is very disturbing to the eyes. The graphics and text just look sharper on the iBook than on the Sony. The iBook can sleep and wake up instantaneously, while the Sony takes much longer and doesn't always wake up.
Yeah, except that you can do it in 1 click rather than 5: just click Display on the menu bar and choose a different resolution. Or even better, just zoom in with {option command +} and zoom out with {option command -} to any depth you want, and how do you do that with your dirty Windows.
You obviously are as foolish as MS to think that more clicks give your more power!
I have also noticed this, and just submitted a bug to Apple. It's only Beta, you know.
But I am otherwise very impressed, particularly with the appearance, speed, bookmark, bug and text buttons, etc. You have got to give credit to Apple - everything they touch these days turns to gold.
"Microsoft doesn't even care about Apple anymore as a competitor"
Oh, so did they do this http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2162. Maybe they just can't help copying Apple's idea.
>> Desktops and Servers, hands down I'd go with Intel architecture with Linux, the price/performance kicks Apple's ass in all kinds of ways.
This is simply not true at all.
Xserve http://www.apple.com/xserve/ is cheaper than a Dell and comes OS X Server with unlimited license. The flat panel iMac costs as little as $1199 which simply unmatched in style and quality by any Wintel box maker. Plus, you can still buy the G3 iMac or G4 eMac for $799 or $999.
"No offense to Apple, but their zealots are ignorant for the most part. These are the sort of people who are blindly loyal to Apple and do not have a clue what actually goes on under the hood, but yet profess to say it is better than MS, PC, etc etc."
You should be shamed of yourself to put out a sweeping statement like that, probably because you have little knowledge of the Mac community or you are just an arrangant and brainless idiot with just enough intelligence to follows the crowd.
Most Mac users that I know of are creative, smart and sensible people, and they choose Mac out of their own free will and for good reasons or due to constant frustration with endless reliability and security issues with the noisy and ugly Wintel PCs.
To me as a professional software developer with over 10 years experiences on virtually every flavors of expensive Unix workstations (Sun Solaris, HP/UX, IBM AIX, etc), Mac OS X simply blows them all away and is much much cheaper and more productive and sexy, and let's not bother to talk about Windows here.
You have also got realize that people have different priority and are not necessarily ignorant or less intelligent than you just because they don't want waste hours on messing with a crappy old PC.
More surprisingly, the PC (256MB RAM) is used almost exclusively to run IE and Outlook and would crash about twice a week on everage, while the iMac (512MB RAM) is used for everything (programming, graphics, word processing, email, web browsing, gaming, music, DVD, NAT, software base station, etc) hardly ever crashes ever since OS X public beta 2 years ago. The PC is shut down every night due to unbearable noise level, while the iMac is typically loaded simultaneously with many applications and runs for weeks and weeks without rebooting or noticeable performance degradation. The iMac is nearly 4 years old, and I never spend any money to upgrade it other than adding some more memory and an Airport card, but it gets faster with every new version of OS X in the past 2 years. I like to know how many of your PC users are happy with a 4 years old PC running the latest MS bloat ware?
Firstly, I wouldn't use Visual Basic to build multi-platform enterprise software; and secondly, we are talking about live UI that actually works with the C++ code, not just UI prototyping. I guess you don't really know what I mean unless you try IB.
And of course it also comes with latest Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, tcsh, bash, ...
I have been programming C++ professionally for over 10 years on many Unix and Windows platforms (Sun Forte, MS Visual Studio, etc), and I can tell you that nothing comes close to ProjectBuilder, InterfaceBuilder, and dozens of other tools on OS X. The good news (for those who always think everything Apple must be expensive) is that they are absolutely free, so save that $2500 for Visual Studio.NET and buy yourself a decent G4 TiBook with a real OS and all those free tools.
With GCC 3.1, you can programming in mixed C / C++ and Objective C / C++ in the same file or project. ProjectBuilder provides the best IDE and CLI for building multiple projects with dependency and multi-targets and multi-phases, apart from editing source files, icons, graphics, sound, document, etc.
InterfaceBuilder is the only tool on earth that actually allows you to design and test professional UI with virtually no user code.
The author of Liquid stated on his website:
I've built quiet a few tools over the years, anything from little scripts to manage renders to water simulation plugins. Over time I'll place information about the tools here as well as make some available. Since getting a Mac my mind has been on overdrive, thinking about what new things I can put together - OS/X has such a nice development environment.
We have 3 here, an old iMac as a gateway and AirPort Base Station, an iBook and a Power Mac. The family license is a good deal. I would say that Mac people tend to be more honest and willing to pay for software they use.
Once you see the light of Mac and OS X, you just don't want to touch a PC. I got rid of my PC and Win XP a few months ago, and don't want to look back. We have everything we need on the Macs including MS Office, and they just work. All the machines are on 24/7 and keep running for weeks or months, they will go asleep when no used for a while and wake up in a fraction of a second. I have to shut down my PC every day - just too noisy, and it still crashes a few times a week.
Generally speaking, most PC users have a very crude and simplistic view when they talking about computers, all they care about is the list price, the clock speed or the size of hard drive. Mac users are more sophisticated in the sense that they consider the total cost of ownership, the build quality, the design, the style, the productivity as well as the performance.
A friend of mine has been a PC user for all these years up till 3 weeks ago when she bought an LCD iMac, and she just adored it, including little things like the bouncing icons, the genie effect, the smooth text, the shadow and transparency.
> The list price of $130 for OS X is perhaps a little high.
...
How the hell can anyone say OS X is expensive for $129, while Red Hat Linux 8.0 Professional sells for $135 and MS XP Professional for $187 on amazon.com. Out of box, OS X is not only far superior in style, but also provides much more tools than XP and Linux combined. The programming tools alone could worth over $1000, let alone AppleWorks, iMovie, iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD, iSync, iChat,Mail, Address Book,