Apparently, according to a ZDNet article a while ago, TV programs or movies recorded from television using the expensive and all powerful Media PC can not be played on any devices other than the PC itself! If this is their idea of DRM, I would never ever touch the fucking PC with MS technology.
If you are a developer, OS X is a dream platform for you: open and rock solid Unix core; best GUI on earth; free and best-of-breed programming / UI tools to let you build almost functional apps with virtually zero user code; gcc 3.1 and gdb for C/C++, Objective C/C++; latest Java, Perl, Ruby, Apache, etc; a loyal and intelligent user base that are willing to support and pay for great products - unlike the GNU/Linux community where nothing gets appreciated unless it's free and time has no value.
Re:Thinking about switching... just need some advi
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Flirting With Mac OS X
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You bet. VPN client comes with Internet Connect in Jaguar, and it appears to work better than its Windows counterpart.
According to Tim O'Reilly, the Perl 6 core team have switched to OS X, and O'Reilly Network have been seriously considering to migrate its entire laptop, desktop and server line to OS X (if they haven't done so already). Apple are definitely doing something right lately
For all your programming geeks out there, do yourself a huge favor and give OS X a try. Let go of your ego and ideology just for a few days, and give Apple a chance and be prepared to be blown away.
I have been programming on Windows and Unix (Sun Solaris, HP/UX, etc) for over a decade, and I can tell you that nothing is remotely comparable to OS X.
OK, we all know that the best commercial products form MS, Adobe, Macromedia are all availabe on OS X; we also know that Apple also gives you the best-of-breed digital hub software (iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iCal, iSync, Mail, Preview, AppleWorks, Address Book, NetInfo, NetWork Utility, etc) for free which are not available on any other platform; and of course, if you are a Unix Weenie, you will love bash, tcsh, zsh, vi, pico, emacs, perl, python, ruby, apatch, mysql, postgresql, gcc, gmake, cvs, tcl/tk,...
But what's really the best about OS X is the free and powerful programming tools:
lrwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 64 Sep 1 17:17 Apple Help Indexing Tool.app ->/Developer/Documentation/Apple Help/Apple Help Indexing Tool.app drwxr-xr-x 7 root admin 238 May 20 10:52 AppleScript Studio drwxrwxr-x 8 root admin 272 Aug 30 22:14 Extras drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 FileMerge.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 IORegistryExplorer.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 IconComposer.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Sep 1 17:17 Interface Builder.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 JavaBrowser.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 MRJAppBuilder.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 MallocDebug.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 ObjectAlloc.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 OpenGL Info.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 OpenGL Profiler.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 OpenGL Shader Builder.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 PEFViewer.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 PackageMaker.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 Pixie.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 Project Builder.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 Property List Editor.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 Quartz Debug.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 Sampler.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 Thread Viewer.app drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 icns Browser.app
These are the best tools I have ever seen on any platform, better than anything on a $15k Sun workstation or MS Visual Studio.net which costs upto $2.5k.
Take Project Builder for instance, it comes with a very sophiscated IDE with a built-in class browser and wonderful text editor, and each projects can manages many targets with different build styles, source files in C/C++, Objective C/C++, Java, AppleScript, and resources like icons, images, sound, xml, html, plain text, etc.
Interface Builder together with AppKit and FoundationKit frameworks is the only GUI tool that I have ever seen or heard that makes it possible to write functional software with a sleek UI with virtually zero user code.
These are the reasons that OmniGroup can produce a browser with a team of 1.5 programmars which is better than MS IE that takes dozens of engineers. Yes, OS X is that good, and you are living in the dark age of computing if you haven't seen it.
According to the OS poll currently running on this site, 13% uses OS X and 34% Linux, which means even in Linux own backyard, OS X usage is already 38% of Linux usage which is very impressive given their respective age difference (18 months compared to over 10 years). And according to Apple and other sources, only 10% Mac users are currently using OS X (Apple expect it will double to 20% by the year end, following the recently released Jaguar), which means the total Mac users are 380% of the Linux users; the actual figure may well be higher if we assume that the percentage of/. readers among Linux users is higher than that of/. readers among OS X users, which agrees very well with the Google 4 Mac to 1 Linux stats.
Linux is supposed for geeks, not the average users. But even the geek community are adopting Mac OS X from left and right. Just look at how many Mac news on/. since the launch of OS X 18 months ago, and it appears that Apple has been discussed more frequently than any of the much bigger companies (IBM, MS, Oracle, Intel, HP/Compaq, Dell) and Mac coverage is not much less if not more than the total/. coverage of all those industry giants. I have also noticed so many Mac converts from Linux (and Windows) users here, but very very few cases the other way around. In fact, the whole Perl 6 core team and many top Java developers have also switched to OS X, and various models of Apple iBook have been simultaneously #1 and #2 best sellers on Amazon.com for many weeks, and frequently nearly half of the Amazon top 25 best sellers are Apple products, not to mention that OS X Jaguar has been Amazon #1 software best sellers for quite a while in both US and UK (and still UK #3 and US #6 at the moment). With xserve, Apple is finally in a position to invade the corporate market, and they sold 4000 machines before the product is on the market (in contrast, Intel only managed to sell 2700 Itanium servers in the first 12 months).
For developers, nothing is comparable to OS X, not by a long long shot. I have used MS Visual Studio, Sun Workshop / Forte, Metrowerks CodeWarrior and many other programming tools from HP, IBM, Symentac, Borland, etc, and I can tell you that nothing is better than Apple's Interface Builder and Project Builder in terms of power, flexibility and seamless integration, which allows you to use Java or GCC 3.1 for mixed C/C++ and Objective C/C++. You can build and debug with a command line interface or GUI, and have multi-targets and multi-styles in a single project and multi-phases in a target, attach scripts to a build-phase, and manage resources (icons, graphics, sounds, documents, help files, etc), Frameworks, as well as source and header files in the IDE. And before you cheap Linux people tell me that all those cool Apple tools are too expensive, let's just make it clear that they cost nothing at all, all don't tell me that you are not willing to pay $129 for an OS with the most elegant UI and a solid Mach/BSD Unix plus tons of best-of-bread software that will never be available on Linux or Windows. How much the poor Windows programmer have to pay MS for Visual Studio.NET? According MS (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy/pricin g.asp), it's $1079 for Professional, $1799 for Enterprise and $2499 for Enterprise Architect; and of course there are other MS tax such as the annual MSDN fee which could be $10k or more for a year.
You are completely off topic here. The original article compares the Xserve with much more expensive servers from Sun, IBM, or even branded Wintel box makers like HP and Dell. And in any case Apple is not in anyway interested in doing business or compete with with a DIY junky like you, so why don't you save your breath and get to your messy garage to build a few more boxes just for the sake of being cheap.
>> I had to reformat both my G4 and my powerbook to upgrade to Jaguar.
Why? You do have 3 other choices: upgrade, archive and install, and clean install, which all works fine and none of them requires you to reformat.
>> At a word length of 11, Apple's Altivec-optimized version of blast is NOT any faster than the stock version compiled with gcc running on a 2GHz pentium4 that costs less than half. Using intel compilers and a 2.5 GHz CPU, the x86 box will be at least 50% faster.
This is a very silly, irresponsible and sweeping statement. In case you haven't noticed, we are not talking about a cheap self-made Wintel box with half-baked software, we are talking about a sleek and branded 1U server that can accommodate due CPUs, 2 GB DDR RAM, 4 Drive bays (up to 480 GB), with due Gigbit Ethernet and plenty of Firewire / USB PCI / AGP ports and slots, plus the best-of-breed UI atop an open source Mach/BSD Unix core plus cross-platform support for native file sharing with Mac / Windows / Unix / Linux, as well as latest Apache web server and WebDAV server, POP and IMAP mail, ftp, QuickTime Streaming Server, DNS and DHCP, Perl, Python, Ruby, GCC 3.1, Java, not to mention dozens of Apple professional programming and system tools and an unlimited license.
If you are just a cheap bastard like you sound, why don't you get your ass out of this forum and go to waste your time on picking scraps.
The problem with an open source hothead like you is that your argument is driven by ideology and emotion rather than logic, and it's really annoying.
>> Apple can put backdoors in their GUI or iTunes or whatever as easily as the kernel. If the whole system isn't all open, you'll never know FOR SURE.
Is there evidence or reason for Apple to do this, or is this just total garbage from your otherwise empty head?
>> I'll stick to Free/OpenBSD/Gentoo/Whatever before I go to a kernel that's obsolete and badly designed but hanging on by pure ca$h infusions from Apple and the macaddicts who would buy a bag of crap if Apple put their logo on it.
Obsolete and badly designed, by what standard? Have you ever used OS X before you open your filthy mouth? I would say Apple's OS technology is at least 5 years ahead of Linux or anything else in the industry.
>> Hell, why would they choose a Mac over Win2000? I wouldn't, and I hate Microsoft.
Xserve with unlimited client license is priced similarly to a Dell with a MS server OS for 10 clients, not to mention OS X's far superior stability and security.
>> If Apple was bigger, it would be AS BAD or WORSE than M$.
How do you work that one out?
>> If you'd ever adminned an NT system or owned a Pinto, you'd understand. Apple's offering is not a very strong contender to get ME to buy.
You sound like an MSCE pretending to know something about open source.
Rendezvous is Apple's brand name for a technology that is hard to explain to the average computer user, and potentially even harder to market. I'm going to come at it from a few different angles. First, here is the (mildly) technical side of the story.
Technology
Rendezvous supports four important services.
1. IP interface auto-configuration. 2. Translation between host names and IP addresses. 3. Service discovery. 4. IP multicast address allocation.
The first two items sound like services you probably already have. Your network interfaces might automatically configure themselves by contacting a DHCP server. Translation between host names and IP addresses is done with the help of one or more DNS servers (possible also configured by your DHCP server). Service discovery sounds like something that's already handled by one of the many directory services that exist today (e.g. Active Directory on Windows.) The last item in the list sounds kind of esoteric. So who really needs these services?
The picture starts to become a bit clearer when the list of services is rewritten in terms of existing technologies in the same areas. How does this slightly revised list strike you?
1. Allocate addresses without a DHCP server. 2. Translate between names and IP addresses without a DNS server. 3. Find services, like printers, without a directory server. 4. Allocate IP Multicast addresses without a MADCAP server.
Suddenly we've gone from a list of seemingly uninteresting services to a set of capabilities that sound like magic! The last one still sounds a bit uninteresting, but it's actually a strong hint about how the whole system works.
Put simply, Rendezvous enables a local network of devices to configure themselves without the aid of any centralized servers. The key word here is "local", because Rendezvous only applies to a limited network domain. Rendezvous is not designed to scale to support the entire Internet. It is meant for small to medium sized networks.
All the magic happens through cooperation. Participating devices talk amongst themselves to sort out who has what address and what hostname, etc. This communication is done through the use of multicast IP addresses.
In order to bootstrap, all participating devices initially communicate using a "well-known" (i.e. pre-defined) multicast address. The first step is for each device to assign a unique IP address to all of its network interfaces. These so-called "self-assigned" addresses are taken from a special address block reserved for this purpose: 169.254/16.
(This address range may look familiar to those of you who have seen a machine fail to get an address from a DHCP server and then fall back by assigning itself (thus "self-assigned") an address in this range.)
Before continuing, it's important to note that these self-assigned addresses may be (and probably will be) assigned in addition to a device's "normal" Internet IP address. Remember that a single network interface can support multiple IP addresses.
Of course, the trick to self-assigned IP addresses is ensuring that no two hosts assign themselves the same one. To resolve these conflicts, Rendezvous-enabled hosts are able to "ask" simple questions (again, using well-known multicast IP addresses) such as "does anyone else have this address?" Address conflict resolution is actually done dynamically on an ongoing basis, rather than only once when a device is initially configured. This is possible because all Rendezvous services share the same dynamic configuration policy.
Take service number two, for example: translation between host names and IP addresses. Since IP addresses may change at any time due to the ongoing dynamic address conflict resolution, so too must hostname assignment and lookups be done dynamically on an ongoing basis. Again, well-known multicast IP addresses are used to ask questions such as "is anyone else using this hostname?" and "what IP address currently corresponds to the hostname 'foo'?"
Remember that there is no central server, so the answers to these types of questions come from the only authoritative source: the other hosts themselves. Each host is responsible for responding to questions about itself--questions that only it can answer with certainty.
Note that these Rendezvous hostnames only have meaning within the current network and exist in addition to any "normal" Internet hostnames that may be associated with the device.
Given this ad-hoc network of devices, the third item, "service discovery", is straightforward. Devices ask the network at large, "is anyone providing the service 'foo'?" Any device on the network that is providing the requested service will respond, saying "I am providing that service."
Finally we get to the last item in the list: IP multicast address allocation. This service is used to dynamically allocate application-specific multicast IP addresses. Rather than using "well known" multicast addresses (which every device is listening on) for all communications, devices can request the use of a private multicast address for a given network scope. As you'd expect by now, all participating devices cooperate to share the finite pool of multicast addresses pulled from the address block reserved for this purpose.
In truth, these services have all been provided by earlier technologies like AppleTalk, NetBIOS, and IPX. The first thing that makes Rendezvous different is that it is an open standard. Rendezvous is merely Apple's name for its implementation of the technologies proposed by the Zero Configuration Networking (Zeroconf) workgroup of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Apple does not "own" the technology any more than it owns IP networking or any other Internet standard.
The second thing that makes Rendezvous different is that it is built using existing IP networking technology. It communicates using standard IP networking. It uses standard DNS request packets for name resolution. Device and multicast addresses are allocated from address blocks explicitly reserved for this purpose. There is nothing proprietary or vendor-specific about it, and it is designed to work on existing IP networks without requiring any changes to them and without causing interference of any kind.
Network administrators reading all of this may have reservations as they envision network broadcast storms and other unfriendly behaviors that were exhibited by earlier proprietary protocols. The Zeroconf specification was written with this in mind, however, and there are restrictions on such behavior. It remains to be seen exactly how much less "chatty" the first implementations of Zeroconf really are, but the use of existing packet formats and addressing techniques will certainly give it a big head start on proprietary protocols that need to have each of their proprietary packets "wrapped" in standard IP packets before transmission.
History
A look at the history of Rendezvous is also instructive. As mentioned earlier, Rendezvous is Apple's brand name for its implementation of the Zeroconf standard. Zeroconf, in turn, traces its roots back to a discussion on a Macintosh network programmers' mailing list in 1997. The idea was to give IP networks the same ease of use enjoyed by AppleTalk networks.
Since 1997, Apple itself has made a transition from AppleTalk to IP networking, and in the process it has lost some of its historic ease of use. So it is not surprising that a standard designed to make IP networking more friendly was originated and eventually ended up in use at Apple.
With each foray into the world of standards, Apple is improving both its behavior and its success rate. The Bad Old Apple suffered from a severe case of Not Invented Here syndrome, insisting on inventing its own proprietary standards for just about everything. This often allowed Apple to leapfrong existing technologies, especially in the area most important to Apple: ease of use. AppleTalk is a great example of this. It provided a very friendly networking experience to the masses long before ease of use was even a consideration for most other networking standards.
The disadvantage of proprietary standards is that it's very difficult to get them adopted by the rest of the industry. No one wants to tie part of their business to a technology owned and controlled by a competitor. A standard that does not get adopted by the rest of the industry suffers in several ways. First, the entire cost of development must continue to be shouldered by a single company, rather than shared across the entire industry. Second, a smaller market means lower volumes, higher prices, and fewer choices. Finally, inevitably, industry-wide open standards eventually catch up with the proprietary technology, rendering it an island of interoperability.
AppleTalk suffered all of these fates. Apple's choice to move away from AppleTalk and towards IP networking was unavoidable, largely due to the explosion of the Internet. But this change met with some resistance because IP networking had not yet caught up to AppleTalk in terms of ease of use. Rendezvous finally closes the gap, providing the few remaining AppleTalk-like services that IP networking lacked.
More importantly, Apple has accomplished this not by defining a new, proprietary Apple-only extension to IP networking, but by working "within the system" to help define an open standard that is compatible with existing networks.
It's certainly a lot easier (and quicker) to unilaterally create a new proprietary standard. This interview with Stuart Cheshire, the chairman of the Zeroconf working group and an Apple employee, gives some insight into the difficulties of convincing the IETF that "ease of use" was even an important quality for IP networking to have. Here's what he had to say on the topic:
The IETF is generally populated by people who care very little for ease-of-use [...] Even today, it remains a something of a minority view in the IETF. Most IETF people work for router vendors, ISPs, backbone providers, telephone companies, etc., and their focus is wide-area networking. If you work for a company that makes routers, you've not going to be very excited about technology that lets computers communicate directly, without needing a router. If you work for a company that sells a DHCP server, you've not going to be very excited about technology that lets computers communicate without needing a DHCP server. If you work for a company that sells DNS servers, you've not going to be very excited about technology that lets computers communicate without needing a DNS server. I'm sure you get the point.
But ease of use is incredibly important to the end user, and will only become more important as more potentially networkable products are introduced. So, finally, let's look at Rendezvous from the perspective of the consumer.
It sounds to me that you are biased and not capable of making rational decisions based on facts.
First of all, Darwin is completely open source, you can compile the kernel on both Mac and PC, and Apple don't force anyone to use their GUI . Secondly, what has MS got to do with Apple? The last (and the only) OS X security issue was fixed by Apple within 3 days since the discovery.
There must be some truth in Apple's benchmark http://www.apple.com/xserve/performance.html
BLAST results: At the short word length of 9, the Xserve is 21 times faster than the IBM eServer x330 and 52 times faster than the Sun Fire V100. At the long word length of 40, Xserve is 5.8 times faster than the IBM eServer x330 and 13.4 times faster than the Sun Fire V100.
>> Appfolders don't let you check if something the program needs is installed, so all apps are huge and monolithic.
Quite the opposite, in fact. OS X has a very elegant mechanism called Frameworks for dynamic code sharing, and the Mach Microkernel itself is the best example of modular design, unlike the truly monolithic Linux.
>> I find this soooo irritiating with the Mac, I have to start all the apps from the Finder. Okay, now what if me and my brother want different list of apps? We both use lots of different apps, quite literally hundreds, and don't want them interfering with each other. The only way really is to create a subfolder and try and organise by "both use them", "I use them", "you use them".
Jump to conclusion again, that's really soooo irritiating (you, not the Mac). You can start apps from anywhere you like: Finder, Dock, Unix shell script or Terminal, AppleScript, Perl, etc, and you can start as many instances of the same app as you like.
I have been programming (mostly C/C++, but also Java and Perl) professionally for over 10 years on various Unix platforms (Sun, HP, IBM) and Windows, and I can tell you that nothing comes even close to Mac OS X. Just on top of my head, these are the reasons:
(1) It just works, as they say. I want to concentrate on my projects, not wasting days and weeks installing and debugging drivers.
(2) All the programming tools that I need come free (C/C++, Objective C/C++, ProjectBuilder, InterfaceBuilder, gcc 3.1, Perl, Java, Python, vi, emacs,...) and better than anything I have used on other platforms, while your poor MS developers have to pay over $500 for MS Visual Studio.net.
(3) Macs are beautiful, quiet, reliable, and cheap in the long run. My 400 Mhz G3 iMac bought 3 years ago still feel like a new computer and much faster than my 800 Mhz PC for almost everything I do, except for booting (which is no big deal because it's only needed once in a few weeks or even months). The "Macs are expensive" myth simply doesn't hold water anymore. Take a look at the new 17" iMac, for $1999, you get a virtually silent and unobtrusive beauty with a fast G4 processor, a lickable 1440 x 900 cinematic flat panel display , 80 GB drive, DVD burning superdrive, nVidia GeForce 4 MX GPU, not to mention the unmatched industrial design that is infinitely adjustable and only occupies a corner of your desk. Which of the Wintel box makers could offer anything remotely comparable for the price?
(4) All those Apple digital lifestyle apps (iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, AppleWorks, iChat, iCal,...) are free and best of class. My Canon digital camera comes with lots of software on 2 CDs, but it didn't even occur to me that I should install any of them, nor did I bother to read any instruction. All I have to do is to plug the FireWire cable to my iBook, and it just works, first time. Nearly 100 high res photos get imported in little over 10 minutes with just a single click. I then went on to organize them into different albums, watch the full screen slide show, and even published half of them on my.Mac home page with another click, and I never used a digital camera or iPhoto before.
(5) Most importantly, it never ever crashes on me once, and unlike Wintel PC, the performance of OS X doesn't degrade with weeks or even months continuous heavy usage. My PC with Windows XP typically crashes once in a few days with very little use (mostly IE and Outlook).
The combination of the rock solid BSD Unix and the most stylish Mac UI is truly a dream system for both geeks and novices alike. According Tim O'Reilly, all the core Perl 6 team and many top Java developers including the Java inventor Jim Gosling have all switched to Mac OS X.
>> For a desktop machine, its better you shut it down at night anyways to save electricity. I think Mac's arguement is too little too late.
But you can put a Mac asleep and wake it up in a blink of eyes, and it becomes totally silent and consumes virtually no electricity when asleep. It also has the option to wake up modem ring or network access.
By the way, my XP machine still crash once every few days - just rebooting itself with a black screen - no warning whatsoever, even if it only runs IE and a couple of Java applets and gets shut down everyday (too hot and noisy at night). In contrast, Mac OS X on my iBook and iMac have never ever crashed once for over a year now, and I do programming, graphics, almost all of web browsing and other computing on the Macs. Except for system updating, I never quit applications or shut down the system - just hide them or put the machine to sleep.
Have you tried to run XP for weeks or months? I bet it will slow down and crash more often.
In this age of GHz and GFLOPS machines, it's rather silly to worry about a few clock cycles that might be consumed by the GUI. Even for a server, the CPU power is rarely loaded 100%, so what's wrong with having a nice UI to make it a little easier to us?
I know that your Linux zealots have an obsession with showing off your skills by doing everything with commands, but you can't deny that there are plenty tools with nice GUI which do make some tasks quicker and easier to do, and OS X Serve is a good example. There are far more enjoyable and exciting things to do than spending hours typing in front of a noisy and ugly PC. If a few clicks can configure the damn box, why not? Are you more concerned with CPU wastage than your brain damage?
And a geek like you should know that a modern OS are capable of keeping idle processes in the background with very little CPU overhead. In other words, if you don't use the GUI, it would stay idle, so there is no need to kill it. With OS X, you can even hide the Finder or any other process with a GUI. So tell me again, what's your problem?
>> $2000 is still double the price of an Athlon-based PC that'll probably smoke a G4.
Are you telling me that you can buy any branded PC with 17" cinematic flat panel screen and DVD burning capability and 80 GB drive for $1000, let alone a stylish and virtually silent beauty that just occupies a corner of your desk and comes with all the applications you dream of for your digital lifestyle and programming tools.
By the way, Apple have over $4 billions cash, there are more and more people switching to a far superior platform, and MS are scared. They have more market share now, and have more to lose to both Mac and Linux.
Dell is just a cheap box maker. Do they have any other skills, or contribute anything to this industry? Two friends of mine bought Dell laptops in the last year or so, and both were sent back within a few weeks.
Oh, man, you are talking rubbish, and I hope you know that.
First of all, Longhorn won't be released until late 2004, which quite probably means sometime in 2005, knowing MS's track record. And you are comparing it to Apple technology to be released in a few weeks, a month ahead of schedule? What is it with you Windoze idiots?
With Mac OS X, you get great programming tools like InterfaceBuilder, ProjectBuilder and gcc 3 which allows you to design sleek UI with very little coding and writing programs in standard languages like Java, C / C++, and Objective C / C++, all for FREE. How much do you have to pay for using MS's me-too technology like C# which doesn't work on any other platform, and would you care to enlighten us why it's so leading edge?
>> $130 for bugfixes and a few extra features, plus $100 per year for a mac.com email account is just insane.
Not sure whether you are just plain stupid or ignorant. Have you ever used Mac OS X? Jaguar is not a bug fix, and has 150 new features. Apple is the only major computer left in this industry that are capable of innovating and taking risk, not a charity. Reasonable people are willing to pay a small price for Apple has done for us.
I have used virtually every other platform, there is nothing that even comes close to Mac OS X, and Linux is not even an option for most common people.
Wow, I bet Apple will sell tons of this. For $200 more than the 15" iMac ($100 more than the original price), you a GeForce4 + 80 GB drive + the gorgeous 1440x900 cinematic display instead of GeForce2 + 60 GB + 1024x768. Who would still buy the 15" models?
And of course, it's also a first class and virtually portable Unix workstation with the best GUI on top of a rock solid open source foundation plus FREE and great programming tools, who on earth will ever pay silly money to buy a Wintel PC, or a Sun, HP, IBM or SGI machines? Apple is officially the biggest volume Unix vendor with 2.5 million installed base within the first year of OS X release, and that number will be doubled by the end of this year. Should MS and Dell be concerned ? My answer is yes, especially when considering the new features in the upcoming Jaguar, and the ever quickening innovations that Apple is creating on both the software and the hardware fronts.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently, according to a ZDNet article a while ago, TV programs or movies recorded from television using the expensive and all powerful Media PC can not be played on any devices other than the PC itself! If this is their idea of DRM, I would never ever touch the fucking PC with MS technology.
If you are a developer, OS X is a dream platform for you: open and rock solid Unix core; best GUI on earth; free and best-of-breed programming / UI tools to let you build almost functional apps with virtually zero user code; gcc 3.1 and gdb for C/C++, Objective C/C++; latest Java, Perl, Ruby, Apache, etc; a loyal and intelligent user base that are willing to support and pay for great products - unlike the GNU/Linux community where nothing gets appreciated unless it's free and time has no value.
You bet. VPN client comes with Internet Connect in Jaguar, and it appears to work better than its Windows counterpart.
According to Tim O'Reilly, the Perl 6 core team have switched to OS X, and O'Reilly Network have been seriously considering to migrate its entire laptop, desktop and server line to OS X (if they haven't done so already). Apple are definitely doing something right lately
For all your programming geeks out there, do yourself a huge favor and give OS X a try. Let go of your ego and ideology just for a few days, and give Apple a chance and be prepared to be blown away.
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/Developer/Documentation/Apple Help/Apple Help Indexing Tool.app
.net which costs upto $2.5k.
I have been programming on Windows and Unix (Sun Solaris, HP/UX, etc) for over a decade, and I can tell you that nothing is remotely comparable to OS X.
OK, we all know that the best commercial products form MS, Adobe, Macromedia are all availabe on OS X; we also know that Apple also gives you the best-of-breed digital hub software (iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iCal, iSync, Mail, Preview, AppleWorks, Address Book, NetInfo, NetWork Utility, etc) for free which are not available on any other platform; and of course, if you are a Unix Weenie, you will love bash, tcsh, zsh, vi, pico, emacs, perl, python, ruby, apatch, mysql, postgresql, gcc, gmake, cvs, tcl/tk,
But what's really the best about OS X is the free and powerful programming tools:
lrwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 64 Sep 1 17:17 Apple Help Indexing Tool.app ->
drwxr-xr-x 7 root admin 238 May 20 10:52 AppleScript Studio
drwxrwxr-x 8 root admin 272 Aug 30 22:14 Extras
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 FileMerge.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 IORegistryExplorer.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 IconComposer.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Sep 1 17:17 Interface Builder.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 JavaBrowser.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 MRJAppBuilder.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 MallocDebug.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 ObjectAlloc.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 OpenGL Info.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 OpenGL Profiler.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 OpenGL Shader Builder.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 PEFViewer.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 PackageMaker.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 Pixie.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 Project Builder.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 Property List Editor.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 Quartz Debug.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 Sampler.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 Thread Viewer.app
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Aug 30 22:14 icns Browser.app
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These are the best tools I have ever seen on any platform, better than anything on a $15k Sun workstation or MS Visual Studio
Take Project Builder for instance, it comes with a very sophiscated IDE with a built-in class browser and wonderful text editor, and each projects can manages many targets with different build styles, source files in C/C++, Objective C/C++, Java, AppleScript, and resources like icons, images, sound, xml, html, plain text, etc.
Interface Builder together with AppKit and FoundationKit frameworks is the only GUI tool that I have ever seen or heard that makes it possible to write functional software with a sleek UI with virtually zero user code.
These are the reasons that OmniGroup can produce a browser with a team of 1.5 programmars which is better than MS IE that takes dozens of engineers. Yes, OS X is that good, and you are living in the dark age of computing if you haven't seen it.
According to the OS poll currently running on this site, 13% uses OS X and 34% Linux, which means even in Linux own backyard, OS X usage is already 38% of Linux usage which is very impressive given their respective age difference (18 months compared to over 10 years). And according to Apple and other sources, only 10% Mac users are currently using OS X (Apple expect it will double to 20% by the year end, following the recently released Jaguar), which means the total Mac users are 380% of the Linux users; the actual figure may well be higher if we assume that the percentage of /. readers among Linux users is higher than that of /. readers among OS X users, which agrees very well with the Google 4 Mac to 1 Linux stats.
Linux is supposed for geeks, not the average users. But even the geek community are adopting Mac OS X from left and right. Just look at how many Mac news on /. since the launch of OS X 18 months ago, and it appears that Apple has been discussed more frequently than any of the much bigger companies (IBM, MS, Oracle, Intel, HP/Compaq, Dell) and Mac coverage is not much less if not more than the total /. coverage of all those industry giants. I have also noticed so many Mac converts from Linux (and Windows) users here, but very very few cases the other way around. In fact, the whole Perl 6 core team and many top Java developers have also switched to OS X, and various models of Apple iBook have been simultaneously #1 and #2 best sellers on Amazon.com for many weeks, and frequently nearly half of the Amazon top 25 best sellers are Apple products, not to mention that OS X Jaguar has been Amazon #1 software best sellers for quite a while in both US and UK (and still UK #3 and US #6 at the moment). With xserve, Apple is finally in a position to invade the corporate market, and they sold 4000 machines before the product is on the market (in contrast, Intel only managed to sell 2700 Itanium servers in the first 12 months).
.NET? According MS (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy/pricin g.asp), it's $1079 for Professional, $1799 for Enterprise and $2499 for Enterprise Architect; and of course there are other MS tax such as the annual MSDN fee which could be $10k or more for a year.
For developers, nothing is comparable to OS X, not by a long long shot. I have used MS Visual Studio, Sun Workshop / Forte, Metrowerks CodeWarrior and many other programming tools from HP, IBM, Symentac, Borland, etc, and I can tell you that nothing is better than Apple's Interface Builder and Project Builder in terms of power, flexibility and seamless integration, which allows you to use Java or GCC 3.1 for mixed C/C++ and Objective C/C++. You can build and debug with a command line interface or GUI, and have multi-targets and multi-styles in a single project and multi-phases in a target, attach scripts to a build-phase, and manage resources (icons, graphics, sounds, documents, help files, etc), Frameworks, as well as source and header files in the IDE. And before you cheap Linux people tell me that all those cool Apple tools are too expensive, let's just make it clear that they cost nothing at all, all don't tell me that you are not willing to pay $129 for an OS with the most elegant UI and a solid Mach/BSD Unix plus tons of best-of-bread software that will never be available on Linux or Windows. How much the poor Windows programmer have to pay MS for Visual Studio
You are completely off topic here. The original article compares the Xserve with much more expensive servers from Sun, IBM, or even branded Wintel box makers like HP and Dell. And in any case Apple is not in anyway interested in doing business or compete with with a DIY junky like you, so why don't you save your breath and get to your messy garage to build a few more boxes just for the sake of being cheap.
>> I had to reformat both my G4 and my powerbook to upgrade to Jaguar. Why? You do have 3 other choices: upgrade, archive and install, and clean install, which all works fine and none of them requires you to reformat.
And by the way, did you make up the BLAST number or would you care to reveal your source?
>> At a word length of 11, Apple's Altivec-optimized version of blast is NOT any faster than the stock version compiled with gcc running on a 2GHz pentium4 that costs less than half. Using intel compilers and a 2.5 GHz CPU, the x86 box will be at least 50% faster.
This is a very silly, irresponsible and sweeping statement. In case you haven't noticed, we are not talking about a cheap self-made Wintel box with half-baked software, we are talking about a sleek and branded 1U server that can accommodate due CPUs, 2 GB DDR RAM, 4 Drive bays (up to 480 GB), with due Gigbit Ethernet and plenty of Firewire / USB PCI / AGP ports and slots, plus the best-of-breed UI atop an open source Mach/BSD Unix core plus cross-platform support for native file sharing with Mac / Windows / Unix / Linux, as well as latest Apache web server and WebDAV server, POP and IMAP mail, ftp, QuickTime Streaming Server, DNS and DHCP, Perl, Python, Ruby, GCC 3.1, Java, not to mention dozens of Apple professional programming and system tools and an unlimited license.
If you are just a cheap bastard like you sound, why don't you get your ass out of this forum and go to waste your time on picking scraps.
The problem with an open source hothead like you is that your argument is driven by ideology and emotion rather than logic, and it's really annoying.
>> Apple can put backdoors in their GUI or iTunes or whatever as easily as the kernel. If the whole system isn't all open, you'll never know FOR SURE.
Is there evidence or reason for Apple to do this, or is this just total garbage from your otherwise empty head?
>> I'll stick to Free/OpenBSD/Gentoo/Whatever before I go to a kernel that's obsolete and badly designed but hanging on by pure ca$h infusions from Apple and the macaddicts who would buy a bag of crap if Apple put their logo on it.
Obsolete and badly designed, by what standard? Have you ever used OS X before you open your filthy mouth? I would say Apple's OS technology is at least 5 years ahead of Linux or anything else in the industry.
>> Hell, why would they choose a Mac over Win2000? I wouldn't, and I hate Microsoft.
Xserve with unlimited client license is priced similarly to a Dell with a MS server OS for 10 clients, not to mention OS X's far superior stability and security.
>> If Apple was bigger, it would be AS BAD or WORSE than M$.
How do you work that one out?
>> If you'd ever adminned an NT system or owned a Pinto, you'd understand. Apple's offering is not a very strong contender to get ME to buy.
You sound like an MSCE pretending to know something about open source.
Nice review of Rendezvous:
Rendezvous is Apple's brand name for a technology that is hard to explain to the average computer user, and potentially even harder to market. I'm going to come at it from a few different angles. First, here is the (mildly) technical side of the story.
Technology
Rendezvous supports four important services.
1. IP interface auto-configuration.
2. Translation between host names and IP addresses.
3. Service discovery.
4. IP multicast address allocation.
The first two items sound like services you probably already have. Your network interfaces might automatically configure themselves by contacting a DHCP server. Translation between host names and IP addresses is done with the help of one or more DNS servers (possible also configured by your DHCP server). Service discovery sounds like something that's already handled by one of the many directory services that exist today (e.g. Active Directory on Windows.) The last item in the list sounds kind of esoteric. So who really needs these services?
The picture starts to become a bit clearer when the list of services is rewritten in terms of existing technologies in the same areas. How does this slightly revised list strike you?
1. Allocate addresses without a DHCP server.
2. Translate between names and IP addresses without a DNS server.
3. Find services, like printers, without a directory server.
4. Allocate IP Multicast addresses without a MADCAP server.
Suddenly we've gone from a list of seemingly uninteresting services to a set of capabilities that sound like magic! The last one still sounds a bit uninteresting, but it's actually a strong hint about how the whole system works.
Put simply, Rendezvous enables a local network of devices to configure themselves without the aid of any centralized servers. The key word here is "local", because Rendezvous only applies to a limited network domain. Rendezvous is not designed to scale to support the entire Internet. It is meant for small to medium sized networks.
All the magic happens through cooperation. Participating devices talk amongst themselves to sort out who has what address and what hostname, etc. This communication is done through the use of multicast IP addresses.
In order to bootstrap, all participating devices initially communicate using a "well-known" (i.e. pre-defined) multicast address. The first step is for each device to assign a unique IP address to all of its network interfaces. These so-called "self-assigned" addresses are taken from a special address block reserved for this purpose: 169.254/16.
(This address range may look familiar to those of you who have seen a machine fail to get an address from a DHCP server and then fall back by assigning itself (thus "self-assigned") an address in this range.)
Before continuing, it's important to note that these self-assigned addresses may be (and probably will be) assigned in addition to a device's "normal" Internet IP address. Remember that a single network interface can support multiple IP addresses.
Of course, the trick to self-assigned IP addresses is ensuring that no two hosts assign themselves the same one. To resolve these conflicts, Rendezvous-enabled hosts are able to "ask" simple questions (again, using well-known multicast IP addresses) such as "does anyone else have this address?" Address conflict resolution is actually done dynamically on an ongoing basis, rather than only once when a device is initially configured. This is possible because all Rendezvous services share the same dynamic configuration policy.
Take service number two, for example: translation between host names and IP addresses. Since IP addresses may change at any time due to the ongoing dynamic address conflict resolution, so too must hostname assignment and lookups be done dynamically on an ongoing basis. Again, well-known multicast IP addresses are used to ask questions such as "is anyone else using this hostname?" and "what IP address currently corresponds to the hostname 'foo'?"
Remember that there is no central server, so the answers to these types of questions come from the only authoritative source: the other hosts themselves. Each host is responsible for responding to questions about itself--questions that only it can answer with certainty.
Note that these Rendezvous hostnames only have meaning within the current network and exist in addition to any "normal" Internet hostnames that may be associated with the device.
Given this ad-hoc network of devices, the third item, "service discovery", is straightforward. Devices ask the network at large, "is anyone providing the service 'foo'?" Any device on the network that is providing the requested service will respond, saying "I am providing that service."
Finally we get to the last item in the list: IP multicast address allocation. This service is used to dynamically allocate application-specific multicast IP addresses. Rather than using "well known" multicast addresses (which every device is listening on) for all communications, devices can request the use of a private multicast address for a given network scope. As you'd expect by now, all participating devices cooperate to share the finite pool of multicast addresses pulled from the address block reserved for this purpose.
In truth, these services have all been provided by earlier technologies like AppleTalk, NetBIOS, and IPX. The first thing that makes Rendezvous different is that it is an open standard. Rendezvous is merely Apple's name for its implementation of the technologies proposed by the Zero Configuration Networking (Zeroconf) workgroup of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Apple does not "own" the technology any more than it owns IP networking or any other Internet standard.
The second thing that makes Rendezvous different is that it is built using existing IP networking technology. It communicates using standard IP networking. It uses standard DNS request packets for name resolution. Device and multicast addresses are allocated from address blocks explicitly reserved for this purpose. There is nothing proprietary or vendor-specific about it, and it is designed to work on existing IP networks without requiring any changes to them and without causing interference of any kind.
Network administrators reading all of this may have reservations as they envision network broadcast storms and other unfriendly behaviors that were exhibited by earlier proprietary protocols. The Zeroconf specification was written with this in mind, however, and there are restrictions on such behavior. It remains to be seen exactly how much less "chatty" the first implementations of Zeroconf really are, but the use of existing packet formats and addressing techniques will certainly give it a big head start on proprietary protocols that need to have each of their proprietary packets "wrapped" in standard IP packets before transmission.
History
A look at the history of Rendezvous is also instructive. As mentioned earlier, Rendezvous is Apple's brand name for its implementation of the Zeroconf standard. Zeroconf, in turn, traces its roots back to a discussion on a Macintosh network programmers' mailing list in 1997. The idea was to give IP networks the same ease of use enjoyed by AppleTalk networks.
Since 1997, Apple itself has made a transition from AppleTalk to IP networking, and in the process it has lost some of its historic ease of use. So it is not surprising that a standard designed to make IP networking more friendly was originated and eventually ended up in use at Apple.
With each foray into the world of standards, Apple is improving both its behavior and its success rate. The Bad Old Apple suffered from a severe case of Not Invented Here syndrome, insisting on inventing its own proprietary standards for just about everything. This often allowed Apple to leapfrong existing technologies, especially in the area most important to Apple: ease of use. AppleTalk is a great example of this. It provided a very friendly networking experience to the masses long before ease of use was even a consideration for most other networking standards.
The disadvantage of proprietary standards is that it's very difficult to get them adopted by the rest of the industry. No one wants to tie part of their business to a technology owned and controlled by a competitor. A standard that does not get adopted by the rest of the industry suffers in several ways. First, the entire cost of development must continue to be shouldered by a single company, rather than shared across the entire industry. Second, a smaller market means lower volumes, higher prices, and fewer choices. Finally, inevitably, industry-wide open standards eventually catch up with the proprietary technology, rendering it an island of interoperability.
AppleTalk suffered all of these fates. Apple's choice to move away from AppleTalk and towards IP networking was unavoidable, largely due to the explosion of the Internet. But this change met with some resistance because IP networking had not yet caught up to AppleTalk in terms of ease of use. Rendezvous finally closes the gap, providing the few remaining AppleTalk-like services that IP networking lacked.
More importantly, Apple has accomplished this not by defining a new, proprietary Apple-only extension to IP networking, but by working "within the system" to help define an open standard that is compatible with existing networks.
It's certainly a lot easier (and quicker) to unilaterally create a new proprietary standard. This interview with Stuart Cheshire, the chairman of the Zeroconf working group and an Apple employee, gives some insight into the difficulties of convincing the IETF that "ease of use" was even an important quality for IP networking to have. Here's what he had to say on the topic:
The IETF is generally populated by people who care very little for ease-of-use [...] Even today, it remains a something of a minority view in the IETF. Most IETF people work for router vendors, ISPs, backbone providers, telephone companies, etc., and their focus is wide-area networking. If you work for a company that makes routers, you've not going to be very excited about technology that lets computers communicate directly, without needing a router. If you work for a company that sells a DHCP server, you've not going to be very excited about technology that lets computers communicate without needing a DHCP server. If you work for a company that sells DNS servers, you've not going to be very excited about technology that lets computers communicate without needing a DNS server. I'm sure you get the point.
But ease of use is incredibly important to the end user, and will only become more important as more potentially networkable products are introduced. So, finally, let's look at Rendezvous from the perspective of the consumer.
It sounds to me that you are biased and not capable of making rational decisions based on facts.
First of all, Darwin is completely open source, you can compile the kernel on both Mac and PC, and Apple don't force anyone to use their GUI . Secondly, what has MS got to do with Apple? The last (and the only) OS X security issue was fixed by Apple within 3 days since the discovery.
There must be some truth in Apple's benchmark http://www.apple.com/xserve/performance.html BLAST results: At the short word length of 9, the Xserve is 21 times faster than the IBM eServer x330 and 52 times faster than the Sun Fire V100. At the long word length of 40, Xserve is 5.8 times faster than the IBM eServer x330 and 13.4 times faster than the Sun Fire V100.
>> Appfolders don't let you check if something the program needs is installed, so all apps are huge and monolithic.
Quite the opposite, in fact. OS X has a very elegant mechanism called Frameworks for dynamic code sharing, and the Mach Microkernel itself is the best example of modular design, unlike the truly monolithic Linux.
>> I find this soooo irritiating with the Mac, I have to start all the apps from the Finder. Okay, now what if me and my brother want different list of apps? We both use lots of different apps, quite literally hundreds, and don't want them interfering with each other. The only way really is to create a subfolder and try and organise by "both use them", "I use them", "you use them".
Jump to conclusion again, that's really soooo irritiating (you, not the Mac). You can start apps from anywhere you like: Finder, Dock, Unix shell script or Terminal, AppleScript, Perl, etc, and you can start as many instances of the same app as you like.
I have been programming (mostly C/C++, but also Java and Perl) professionally for over 10 years on various Unix platforms (Sun, HP, IBM) and Windows, and I can tell you that nothing comes even close to Mac OS X. Just on top of my head, these are the reasons:
...) and better than anything I have used on other platforms, while your poor MS developers have to pay over $500 for MS Visual Studio.net.
...) are free and best of class. My Canon digital camera comes with lots of software on 2 CDs, but it didn't even occur to me that I should install any of them, nor did I bother to read any instruction. All I have to do is to plug the FireWire cable to my iBook, and it just works, first time. Nearly 100 high res photos get imported in little over 10 minutes with just a single click. I then went on to organize them into different albums, watch the full screen slide show, and even published half of them on my .Mac home page with another click, and I never used a digital camera or iPhoto before.
(1) It just works, as they say. I want to concentrate on my projects, not wasting days and weeks installing and debugging drivers.
(2) All the programming tools that I need come free (C/C++, Objective C/C++, ProjectBuilder, InterfaceBuilder, gcc 3.1, Perl, Java, Python, vi, emacs,
(3) Macs are beautiful, quiet, reliable, and cheap in the long run. My 400 Mhz G3 iMac bought 3 years ago still feel like a new computer and much faster than my 800 Mhz PC for almost everything I do, except for booting (which is no big deal because it's only needed once in a few weeks or even months). The "Macs are expensive" myth simply doesn't hold water anymore. Take a look at the new 17" iMac, for $1999, you get a virtually silent and unobtrusive beauty with a fast G4 processor, a lickable 1440 x 900 cinematic flat panel display , 80 GB drive, DVD burning superdrive, nVidia GeForce 4 MX GPU, not to mention the unmatched industrial design that is infinitely adjustable and only occupies a corner of your desk. Which of the Wintel box makers could offer anything remotely comparable for the price?
(4) All those Apple digital lifestyle apps (iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, AppleWorks, iChat, iCal,
(5) Most importantly, it never ever crashes on me once, and unlike Wintel PC, the performance of OS X doesn't degrade with weeks or even months continuous heavy usage. My PC with Windows XP typically crashes once in a few days with very little use (mostly IE and Outlook).
The combination of the rock solid BSD Unix and the most stylish Mac UI is truly a dream system for both geeks and novices alike. According Tim O'Reilly, all the core Perl 6 team and many top Java developers including the Java inventor Jim Gosling have all switched to Mac OS X.
>> Except for the huge price tag.
What on earth are you talking about? You obviously haven't bothered to read the article, here are the figures for 1 CPU / 256 MB RAM / 60GB Disk:
Apple Xserve (unlimited clients) $2999;
Dell 1650 Red Hat $2953;
Dell 1650 Win 2000 (25 clients) $6079.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/5419 66/ref=gw_br_pc/002-0603305-5832826
>> For a desktop machine, its better you shut it down at night anyways to save electricity. I think Mac's arguement is too little too late.
But you can put a Mac asleep and wake it up in a blink of eyes, and it becomes totally silent and consumes virtually no electricity when asleep. It also has the option to wake up modem ring or network access.
By the way, my XP machine still crash once every few days - just rebooting itself with a black screen - no warning whatsoever, even if it only runs IE and a couple of Java applets and gets shut down everyday (too hot and noisy at night). In contrast, Mac OS X on my iBook and iMac have never ever crashed once for over a year now, and I do programming, graphics, almost all of web browsing and other computing on the Macs. Except for system updating, I never quit applications or shut down the system - just hide them or put the machine to sleep.
Have you tried to run XP for weeks or months? I bet it will slow down and crash more often.
In this age of GHz and GFLOPS machines, it's rather silly to worry about a few clock cycles that might be consumed by the GUI. Even for a server, the CPU power is rarely loaded 100%, so what's wrong with having a nice UI to make it a little easier to us?
I know that your Linux zealots have an obsession with showing off your skills by doing everything with commands, but you can't deny that there are plenty tools with nice GUI which do make some tasks quicker and easier to do, and OS X Serve is a good example. There are far more enjoyable and exciting things to do than spending hours typing in front of a noisy and ugly PC. If a few clicks can configure the damn box, why not? Are you more concerned with CPU wastage than your brain damage?
And a geek like you should know that a modern OS are capable of keeping idle processes in the background with very little CPU overhead. In other words, if you don't use the GUI, it would stay idle, so there is no need to kill it. With OS X, you can even hide the Finder or any other process with a GUI. So tell me again, what's your problem?
>> $2000 is still double the price of an Athlon-based PC that'll probably smoke a G4.
Are you telling me that you can buy any branded PC with 17" cinematic flat panel screen and DVD burning capability and 80 GB drive for $1000, let alone a stylish and virtually silent beauty that just occupies a corner of your desk and comes with all the applications you dream of for your digital lifestyle and programming tools.
By the way, Apple have over $4 billions cash, there are more and more people switching to a far superior platform, and MS are scared. They have more market share now, and have more to lose to both Mac and Linux.
Dell is just a cheap box maker. Do they have any other skills, or contribute anything to this industry? Two friends of mine bought Dell laptops in the last year or so, and both were sent back within a few weeks.
Oh, man, you are talking rubbish, and I hope you know that.
First of all, Longhorn won't be released until late 2004, which quite probably means sometime in 2005, knowing MS's track record. And you are comparing it to Apple technology to be released in a few weeks, a month ahead of schedule? What is it with you Windoze idiots?
With Mac OS X, you get great programming tools like InterfaceBuilder, ProjectBuilder and gcc 3 which allows you to design sleek UI with very little coding and writing programs in standard languages like Java, C / C++, and Objective C / C++, all for FREE. How much do you have to pay for using MS's me-too technology like C# which doesn't work on any other platform, and would you care to enlighten us why it's so leading edge?
Which version are you talking about? There was initially a problem with Modem connection, but it has been fixed quite awhile ago, at least for me.
In any case, get a broadband, it doesn't cost much more.
>> $130 for bugfixes and a few extra features, plus $100 per year for a mac.com email account is just insane.
Not sure whether you are just plain stupid or ignorant. Have you ever used Mac OS X? Jaguar is not a bug fix, and has 150 new features. Apple is the only major computer left in this industry that are capable of innovating and taking risk, not a charity. Reasonable people are willing to pay a small price for Apple has done for us.
I have used virtually every other platform, there is nothing that even comes close to Mac OS X, and Linux is not even an option for most common people.
By the way, Macs use standard PC hardware too.
Wow, I bet Apple will sell tons of this. For $200 more than the 15" iMac ($100 more than the original price), you a GeForce4 + 80 GB drive + the gorgeous 1440x900 cinematic display instead of GeForce2 + 60 GB + 1024x768. Who would still buy the 15" models?
And of course, it's also a first class and virtually portable Unix workstation with the best GUI on top of a rock solid open source foundation plus FREE and great programming tools, who on earth will ever pay silly money to buy a Wintel PC, or a Sun, HP, IBM or SGI machines? Apple is officially the biggest volume Unix vendor with 2.5 million installed base within the first year of OS X release, and that number will be doubled by the end of this year. Should MS and Dell be concerned ? My answer is yes, especially when considering the new features in the upcoming Jaguar, and the ever quickening innovations that Apple is creating on both the software and the hardware fronts.