>> There simply are no deployments of the type talked about in the article, with hundreds of domain servers needing to be migrated.
I am not so sure about that. In a recent survey of hardware site, apple.com is the #1 site with about 3.5 mln unique visitors, while hp.com is a distant second with 2.7 mln. Apple Store is probably the best online store with annual sale in billions of dollars, Apple also host the most popular QuickTime movie trailers, and iTunes Music Store sell over a mln songs a week.
In fact, I haven't found another Web site with the combination of e-commerce, movie trailer and music download anywhere near the sophistication of apple.com. And guess what, apple.com is powered by Mac OS X Server.
You can run it by just entering "./jazilla.bat" from ether a Terminal window or a xterm window under X11, and it loads up quite fast and looks not bad either.
It does load quite fast with or with out X11, and in both case, the text rendering is as smooth as Safari.
However, the GUI needs a lot of work - it doesn't even have a backward or forward button! Most sites (apple.com, hp.com, cnn.com, yahoo.com) don't load at all. Only ibm.com and news.com display some sort of contents.
An idiot like you really deserves the ugly and bug-ridden dirty Windows, because you don't have the basic intelligence to look for better alternatives. You are wasting my time by making stupid generalization without any factual basis.
As a long time C++ and Java programmer on Windows and Unix, I now do all programming as well as Web design, graphics and everything else on an iBook and never been happier. I do use Win 2K and XP regularly to test my work, but Mac OS X makes Windows feel like shit. Most of the best applications have Mac versions which are usually better than Windows counterpart, including Adobe PhotoShop / InDesign / Illustrator, Macromedia Flash / FireWorks / DreamWeaver / FreeHand / Director, MS Office, Maya, etc.
There are many excellent Mac applications that are not available for Windows, such as Final Cut Pro, Shake, DVD Studio Pro, Shake, iLife, iTune Music Store. There are more good Web browsers on the Mac, and Safari in its beta form is already miles ahead of MS IE. Apple hardware also comes with more and better quality free software than Wintel boxes.
Mac OS X is just a dream platform for geeks with the best programming environment (Cocoa, Carbon, Java, Unix) and dozens of professional programming tools for Java / C/C++ / Objective C/C++ / Perl / Python / Ruby / Apache / PHP and many other open and standard. While MS Visual Studio.NET costs more than $3000, all Apple tools are free and better.
Now, are you going to tell me why "eMacs and iBooks do not cut it in business"?
Actually, Apple is quite competitive. An eMac costs as little as $799, an iBook $999, and both have more than enough power and features for almost any business. Further more, Apple hardware typically lasts longer, requires much less maintenance, and comes with more and better software than Wintel machines, so in the long run Macs are cheaper.
Since its initial release just 2 years ago, Mac OS X has had 2 major revisions and numerous minor updates with significant performance gain and countless new features. In contrast, Win XP remains virtually unchanged apart from a single service pack and a large number of security patches.
MS is just full of puffs and bluffs. They have been talking about.NET, Longhorn, speech recognition for so many years, but failed deliver any meaningful result. Now we know that Longhorn is at least 2 years away, and WinFS is just a Windows Service on top of NTSF rather than a revolutionary file system. The only things really worth mentioning in Longhorn appears to be the Aero GUI and Window rendering through GPU, basicly a second rate imitation of Aqua and Quartz Extreme.
MS is just a slow dinosaur that has to die sooner or later due to its total incapacity to innovate. Apple is 60 times smaller than MS, and yet makes more and better software than the Redmond beast, in addition to cool hardware innovations like Xserve, Xserve RAID, iPod, iMac, PowerBook, and so on.
Although Win XP has some nice features, but it just doesn't feel nearly refined as Mac OS X. Judging from the recent leaks, Longhorn can't even match Jaguar, let alone Panther. And no one can imagine how much better OS X would be by 2005.
The most hyped Longhorn feature is Windows Future Storage - a revolutionary file system with built-in database facility (based on MS SQL Server) like the beloved BFS. But after years of typical MS brouhaha, now we are told that it's nothing more than a Windows service.
Apple innovates and delivers, while MS copies and hypes. Longhorn has nothing new or better than what has been available on Mac OS X since a year or two ago, and 2005 is just too far away. For me, the future OS is Mac OS X 10.3 to be announced next month.
Apple and IBM are probably the only companies left in the computer industry that are capable of innovations.
MS the copy cat and convicted monoplist just wants dominate the world with its inferior and bug-ridden bloatware, Dell the box maker is a shameless parasite profiting from other peoples R&D dollars, Carly's HP is more interested in jumping to bed with Intel and MS than inventing anything, and Sun is just too busy bad mouthing Billy boy to do anything useful.
Only IBM and Apple can save our dying industry, and we need Mac OS X on PPC 970 now.
As a long time UNIX and Windows programmer, I am much more productive on Mac OS X and can't bear the thought of having to go back to Windows or Solaris. Mac OS X is a dream platform for geeks and novice alike. There are tons of free and powerful programming tools which would cost thousands of dollars on Windows, and Cocoa (together with Interface Builder and Project Builder) is the only programming environment on earth that makes it possible to program great GUI with virtually no code.
I am surprised that the article didn't even mention OS X.
Apple and the Open Source community should work together to take advantage of their UNIX similarity and fight the common enemy. MS doesn't play well with anyone - it just want dominate the world with its inferior and bug-ridden dirty Windows by flooding the consumers with incompatible technology (just look at Windows Media Player or the MS implementation of Java, JavaScript, XML, C++).
The combination of fast and dirt-cheap Linux servers with sleek and rock solid Mac OS X desktops can really damage the Redmond beast. Linux obviously has made impressive progress in the server space, but those millions of MS trained monkeys can always attack Linux on the usability front, which is why Mac OS X can be a valuable ally - even MS knows that Apple is years ahead with elegant GUI and industrial design.
A lot of alpha geeks have switched to Mac OS X, including Jim Gosling (the Java inventor) and most of his Java team, the entire Perl 6 core team, James Duncan Davidson (the original author of Apache Ant and Apache Tomcat), Tim O'Reailly, Tim Bray (ActiveWin.com founder and co-inventor of XML), at least 4/. editors, and many more.
Not only Mac software generally better (iLife, iSync, iChat, QuickTime, iTunes Music Store, Keynote, Safari, AppleWorks, FileMaker Pro, and so on), Apple also has a bigger software portfolio than MS (incredible but true, considering Apple is primarily a hardware company and 60 times smaller than MS).
For instance, MS has no high-end tools to compete with Apple WebObjects (Java application server), Final Cut Pro (nonlinear video editing), Shake (movie composition), DVD Studio Pro (DVD authoring), Logic (digital audio), QuickTime Streaming Server. Linux could get a huge boost if many of these tools get ported over.
>> In Windows, I right click and select (gasp) EJECT. That's a hell of a lot more understandable than dragging it to the trash.
If you are smart enough to read or ask someone for help, you would know that right click (or trl click for a single button mouse) and EJECT also work on Mac OS X, in addition to pressing F12 or draging the CD to trash. So next time, do your home work before you complain about something new to you.
>> Windows is better than OSX by a long shot!
You must be either stupid or just kidding yourself. The problem with your poor MS victims is that you have wasted you life to fight with and learn the oddities of Windoze so that you have no ability to learn anything new. I bet you would argue that the most intuitive way to shut down Windows is to go through the Start Menu!
How many hours did spend on the Mac? You can't form an objective opinion about anything if you are biased. Millions of Mac users also use PC daily, but they prefer Mac based on real experiences, unlike you.
As a Windows and Unix programmer for over a decade, I can tell you that nothing comes close to Mac OS X - certainly not any version of Windows. From what I read, even Windows Lonhorn (to appear in 2005) can't touch OS X 10.2, and Apple will be at least 3 years ahead of MS when OS X 10.3 is realeased in a few months time.
With the most elegant GUI and a rock solid Mach / BSD UNIX foundation plus the best and free programming environment (Cocoa, Carbon, Java, Objective C / C++, etc), Apple is moving much faster than MS can with its insecure, unstable and over bloated Windows codebase, which is why OS X has been regularly updated with performance and new features while MS has been busy with weekly security patches and unable to upgrade Windows XP till 2005.
>> But I switched to Linux on Intel five or six years ago and haven't looked back since. As a programmer, I love the tools. As a user, I love the independance. And as a man who appreciates freedom, I savour the chaos, the energy, and the source code.
With OS X, the Mac world is so much better and more exciting than it was 2 or 3 years ago, so you experience gained 5 or 6 years ago is simply irrelevant.
As an long time UNIX and Windows programmer, I can tell you that OS X is truly a dream platform - better than Solaris, Windows and the old Mac OS in every way. I am now much more productive on my $999 iBook than on a $15K Sun Ultra Sparc machine.
Many UNIX and Linux geeks have switched to Mac OS X, including people like James Gosling, Bud Tribble, James Duncan Davidson, Tim O'Reilly, and most of the Perl 6 core team. At least 4 or 5 Slashdot editors are now Mac users.
Longhorn 3D Desktop = Mac OS X Quartz Extreme--
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It looks to me that MS resort to its old trick of copying Apple again. Can anyone see anything new here?
It's just too bad for those Windows victims that they have to wait 2 or more years for something that has been available on Mac OS X since last summer.
The screen shots clearly shows that MS has a long way to go before reaching the level of refinement of Mac OS X. For instance, the scaled icons look like a POS
>> Interestingly enough, even though Filemaker Inc is an Apple company, Filemaker isn't Apple exclusive. It runs on Windows, on Linux, even on Palm OS.
The UNIX core of Mac OS X (Darwin Open Source) is officially available for both PowerPC and x86. WebObjects, Darwin Streaming Server and Shake are all cross-platform products that run on Mac OS, Windows, and Linux / Unix. QuickTime Player works on Windows too.
In contrast, most of the MS software systems support nothing but Windows, which is yet another indication that MS is years behind Apple.
>> Microsoft has heard back from Corporate America saying "please don't make us update so often".
It would be a reasonable argument, had MS taken the time to make better quality software. But unfortunately that's not the case. Apart from hypes about.NET and Lonhorn, what the world get from MS is mostly a constant stream of security paches that often break your system or introduce new bugs.
>> Why should Microsoft bother? XP is still flying off the shelves, virtual and non-virtual.
You basicly agree that MS does not produce much interesting stuff because of its monoply, which surely isn't healthy for our industry.
>> You are inflating Apple's accomplishments.
I don't think so. In fact, there are many other Apple technologies like speech and hand writing recognition missing from my list.
>> How many of those products you named did Apple buy and stick their name onto?
The same argument can be used against MS or indeed any other company. Many of the most popular MS products originally came from third parties: Visual Basic, IE, PowerPoint, HotMail, and of course DOS itself (bought for $50k).
Apple has much less money ($4.5 bln) than MS (over $40 bln), but more wisdom to spot innovative ideas and turn them into great products.
>> Similarly, you are sidelining many of Microsoft's accomplishments, eliding Office XP, Internet Explorer 6, Windows Movie Maker, Windows Media Player 9, DirectX 9, ThreeDegrees, and more.
For virtually every MS software product, there is normally a Apple equivalent that usually works better, but the opposite is not true. MS doesn't have any high-end products to match Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Shake, Logic, WebObjects.
Unlike MS, Apple also contributes to the Open Source community with Darwin, Darwin Streaming Server, Rendezvous, KHTML, GCC, and so on.
Office XP is probably the strongest MS brand, but other than its bigger market share, it doesn't really have that much advantages over AppleWorks. Further more, Keynote is clearly better than PowerPoint, and Apple is probably working on a brand new Office killer.
While Movie Maker is no match to iMovie or Final Cut Express, the beta release of Safari is already faster and has more features than any version of IE. Oh, have we just heard recently that IE crashes instantly on a simple HTML page with a single line of tags (<html><form><input type></form></html>)?
QuickTime Player was released by Apple years before Windows Media Player, and is also cross-platform and standard-based, unlike the latter.
DirectX 9 is a mess. Maybe it's good for game programming, but tell me how does it fit with.NET and Longhorn.
>> Microsoft really does churn out a lot of software--they can afford to, as Windows and Office are cash cow juggernauts.
A lot of software? Where is the evidence? People know MS has tons of money to burn, and automatically assume the company must produce lots of stuff. Well, let me tell you that the emperor has no cloth.
>> but I sincerely doubt Apple has a "bigger" software lineup.
It always piss me off that most of the Wintel users like you just don't have the basic intelligence to see anything beyond the market share.
How many times do we have to go through the BMW and Ford analogy to prove that market share is not a measure of quality or innovation?
My point is a very simple one: while MS is 60 times bigger than Apple with propably 100 times more software engineers, but its software portofolio is simply dwarfed by Apple, which is doubly embarrassing because Apple is essentially a hardware company.
There would be a case for MS if its software products have a better quality, but the opposite is true - Apple software is generally much refined.
Take Safari for instance, it's currently a beta release but already vastly superior to MS IE in virtually every single aspect (speed, tabs, standard comformance, Java and Java Script support, CSS, etc). Another good example is Keynote, which blows MS PowerPoint out of water with the first release, according to most reviews.
I am expecting some reasonably sensible argements, but that's obviously too much to ask from a Wintel crowd who care about nothing other than market share.
>> Or maybe it's because Microsoft has done more to support their current OSes' lifecycles?
You mean security patches that are known to break people's system and come so frequently that most users inluding system administrators don't know how to deal with them.
While Software Update for OS X is a 2 click process, can anyone of you poor Windows victimes tell me how many MS loops that you have to jump through for a typical Windows Update? I guess you haven't got a clue, because it varies from case to case.
>> OS X 10.0 is now obsolete. Windows 2000 is still very much useable, supported, and widely-used.
And Mac OS 8 or 9 is vey usable either alone or within Mac OS X. People still use Win 2K because Win XP doesn't offer real benefit other than cosmic changes that are nothing more than a inferior imitation of Mac OS X Aqua.
>> Finally I must mention that I have seen more Microsoft hardware this year than Mac hardware or software.
More MS hardware than Apple? You must be kidding or don't the definition of hardware.
>> They launched a comsumer network hardware recently and MS continues to improve their bundled apps and online services.
How could a simple consumer network router remotely match the constant Apple hardware innovations like Xserve, Xserve RAID, iPod, 17" PowerBook, FireWire, Rendezvous, and many others? And don't forget that Apple was the first computer maker that introduced AirPort 802.11b wireless network 5 years ago and gigabit Ethernet soon after, and they have done it again recently with AirPort Extreme (based on 802.11g, 5 times faster than 802.11b and backward compatible).
Don't you dare compare the MS bundled apps like Movie Maker or NotePad to what come free with iLife and tons of other free Apple software, they are in a different league.
Why is MS so much slower than Apple?
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In the short period of 2 years since the initial release of Mac OS X, Apple has produced 2 major and numerous minor upgrades with significant performance improvement and lots of new features, in addition to shipping an impressive array of innovative hardwares (iPod, Xserve, Xserve RAID, LCD iMac, 17" PowerBook with slot-loading DVD burner, FireWire 800, BlueTooth, 54 mbps 802.11g AirPort Extreme, Gigabit Ethernet) and highly sophisticated software tools such as iLife, iSync, iCal, Keynote, Safari, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Shake, Logic, WebObjects, FileMaker Pro, AppleWorks, Rendezvous, QuickTime 6, iTunes Music Store, and so on.
But what has the biggest software company done in the same time frame? Surprisingly, very few. Other than the countless security patches plus a Win XP Service Pack and Windows 2003 Server, the only things that come from Redmond are hypes.
Longhorn is officially a 2005 product with very few features to brag about, and may well be delayed to 2006 or later if the track record of MS is anything to go by.
It's just incredible that a small hardware company like Apple has somehow developed a bigger and better software portofolio than the most powerful company in the world , and frankly embarrassing when considering that MS is 60 times bigger than Apple.
>> It is moderately difficult to get more than one instance running.
That's because you don't know how to do it. All you have to do is to launch an application through the Terminal. For instance, you can start up as many Safari instances as you wish by typing "/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari " from a terminal window.
>> I made some experiments and this bug is not that serious, if you use IE correctly.
Are you stupid or what? How can you blame users for not using it correctly when it can be crashed by such a simple HTML code? It's serious because IE is so widely used and the bug also impacts other MS programs like Outlook and FrontPage.
>> IE has a feature, Mozilla/Firebird and Opera sadly don't have: IE can run in multiple processes. If you open a new window by clicking IExplore.exe instead of pressing Ctrl-N, the new window runs in a seperate process.
You must be one of those MS trained idiots who know nothing but Windows. On a real OS like Mac OS X, Linux or any type of UNIX systems, all applications can be launched multiple times from a terminal and run in different processes.
>> If you visit that crash page, only the one IE process crashes while the other processes stay unaffected (at least on NT based systems).
You are probably too thick to realize how absurd your logic is, but it's as silly as suggesting that people should buy a hundred Windows PCs so that it's alright if one of them keeps crashing.
>> The only issue I have with Macs is their cost, but I think I can cope by having a pretty damn cool, commercially supported, end-user Unix system.
Cost is not an issue at all. For $999, you can get a G3 iBook or G4 eMac, probably cheaper than a similarly equiped brand Wintel PC. All new Macs also come with tons of best-of-class software including iTunes plus dozens of professional grade programming tools, which are not even available for Windows or Linux even if you don't mind paying for them.
Don't let anyone tell you that these machines are slow. I use a 700 MHz iBook and 400 MHz iMac for programming, graphics, music, DVD, QuickTime, Safari, MS Office, games and am very happy with the performance. The only thing that feels slow is Windows XP under Virtual PC.
>> I think that OS X looks amazing, and is in all respects the perfect OS, but I refuse to pay £2000 for less power than I have now on a machine that cost half that.
You are talking nonsense! Please take a quick look at the Apple UK store http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore/ and report back to me.
For £680, you can get a G3 iBook or a G4 eMac that are more than capable of running OS X and almost anything I can imagine and comes with tons of free best-of-class software and programming tools.
My 4 years old iMac is only 400 MHz and runs faster than my 800 MHz PC for literally anything I do. The best thing about the Mac OS X, it doesn't crash like Windows 2000 or XP, nor does it get slower and slower over time so that you have to reformat the hard disk or mess with the Registry every now and then. And of course, there is virtually no virus or weekly or daily MS security patches.
If you play Quake all day long, maybe you should keep your ugly hot and noisy dual Athlon. But for real work, you need a real OS, and there is nothing better than OS X. I do programming and graphics on a cheap 700 MHz iBook which is almost perfect (fast, stable, quiet, beautiful, 4+ hours battery life, instant sleep and wake up) - except that it's not a 17" PowerBook.
And finally, the 17" PowerBook - 1" thin and the only portable (or desktop in the Wintel world) that comes with slot-loading DVD burner, built-in 802.11g AirPort Extreme, BlueTooth, FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB, Gigabit Ethernet, and fiber optical sensor that would automatically illuminate the keyboard when light goes out.
Speech recognition - I used and was impressed by the Chinese version on my 75 MHz PPC 601 Mac over 10 years ago, long before Bill Gates and MS Research started to hype the technology; the translucent iMac - the all-in-one wonder that has inspired not only the computer industry but also a generation of industrial designers for mobile phones, printers, furnitures and perhaps even Windows XP; G4 Cube - the 8" Gigaflops computer that has probably garnered more design awards than any other computer; iPod - the best MP3 player.
Apple might have modified or removed a few UNIX oddities here and there, but OS X is as POSIX complient as any other UNIX or Linux on the market. But obviously you should stick to Linux if that's what your audiences want to learn.
From Solaris 8 man page:
init is a general process spawner. Its primary role is to create processes from information stored in the file /etc/inittab.
Clearly it's not intended for shutting down the system, although it does have the side effect of killing other processes on the way. But this is quite a different issue than the silliest UI blunder by the most powerful and "innovative" software company in human history where the only way to shut down Windows is to click the Start button.
By the way, UNIX is not well hidden from OS X, and {sudo shutdown} works fine, so does {sudo reboot} or {sudo kill -9 -1}.
Slashdot Mirror
>> There simply are no deployments of the type talked about in the article, with hundreds of domain servers needing to be migrated.
I am not so sure about that. In a recent survey of hardware site, apple.com is the #1 site with about 3.5 mln unique visitors, while hp.com is a distant second with 2.7 mln. Apple Store is probably the best online store with annual sale in billions of dollars, Apple also host the most popular QuickTime movie trailers, and iTunes Music Store sell over a mln songs a week.
In fact, I haven't found another Web site with the combination of e-commerce, movie trailer and music download anywhere near the sophistication of apple.com. And guess what, apple.com is powered by Mac OS X Server.
You probably have to install X11 first.
You can run it by just entering "./jazilla.bat" from ether a Terminal window or a xterm window under X11, and it loads up quite fast and looks not bad either.
Well, sort of.
It does load quite fast with or with out X11, and in both case, the text rendering is as smooth as Safari.
However, the GUI needs a lot of work - it doesn't even have a backward or forward button! Most sites (apple.com, hp.com, cnn.com, yahoo.com) don't load at all. Only ibm.com and news.com display some sort of contents.
In short, a long long way to go.
An idiot like you really deserves the ugly and bug-ridden dirty Windows, because you don't have the basic intelligence to look for better alternatives. You are wasting my time by making stupid generalization without any factual basis.
.NET costs more than $3000, all Apple tools are free and better.
As a long time C++ and Java programmer on Windows and Unix, I now do all programming as well as Web design, graphics and everything else on an iBook and never been happier. I do use Win 2K and XP regularly to test my work, but Mac OS X makes Windows feel like shit. Most of the best applications have Mac versions which are usually better than Windows counterpart, including Adobe PhotoShop / InDesign / Illustrator, Macromedia Flash / FireWorks / DreamWeaver / FreeHand / Director, MS Office, Maya, etc.
There are many excellent Mac applications that are not available for Windows, such as Final Cut Pro, Shake, DVD Studio Pro, Shake, iLife, iTune Music Store. There are more good Web browsers on the Mac, and Safari in its beta form is already miles ahead of MS IE. Apple hardware also comes with more and better quality free software than Wintel boxes.
Mac OS X is just a dream platform for geeks with the best programming environment (Cocoa, Carbon, Java, Unix) and dozens of professional programming tools for Java / C/C++ / Objective C/C++ / Perl / Python / Ruby / Apache / PHP and many other open and standard. While MS Visual Studio
Now, are you going to tell me why "eMacs and iBooks do not cut it in business"?
Actually, Apple is quite competitive. An eMac costs as little as $799, an iBook $999, and both have more than enough power and features for almost any business. Further more, Apple hardware typically lasts longer, requires much less maintenance, and comes with more and better software than Wintel machines, so in the long run Macs are cheaper.
Since its initial release just 2 years ago, Mac OS X has had 2 major revisions and numerous minor updates with significant performance gain and countless new features. In contrast, Win XP remains virtually unchanged apart from a single service pack and a large number of security patches.
.NET, Longhorn, speech recognition for so many years, but failed deliver any meaningful result. Now we know that Longhorn is at least 2 years away, and WinFS is just a Windows Service on top of NTSF rather than a revolutionary file system. The only things really worth mentioning in Longhorn appears to be the Aero GUI and Window rendering through GPU, basicly a second rate imitation of Aqua and Quartz Extreme.
MS is just full of puffs and bluffs. They have been talking about
MS is just a slow dinosaur that has to die sooner or later due to its total incapacity to innovate. Apple is 60 times smaller than MS, and yet makes more and better software than the Redmond beast, in addition to cool hardware innovations like Xserve, Xserve RAID, iPod, iMac, PowerBook, and so on.
Although Win XP has some nice features, but it just doesn't feel nearly refined as Mac OS X. Judging from the recent leaks, Longhorn can't even match Jaguar, let alone Panther. And no one can imagine how much better OS X would be by 2005.
The most hyped Longhorn feature is Windows Future Storage - a revolutionary file system with built-in database facility (based on MS SQL Server) like the beloved BFS. But after years of typical MS brouhaha, now we are told that it's nothing more than a Windows service.
Apple innovates and delivers, while MS copies and hypes. Longhorn has nothing new or better than what has been available on Mac OS X since a year or two ago, and 2005 is just too far away. For me, the future OS is Mac OS X 10.3 to be announced next month.
This is truly fantastic news.
Apple and IBM are probably the only companies left in the computer industry that are capable of innovations.
MS the copy cat and convicted monoplist just wants dominate the world with its inferior and bug-ridden bloatware, Dell the box maker is a shameless parasite profiting from other peoples R&D dollars, Carly's HP is more interested in jumping to bed with Intel and MS than inventing anything, and Sun is just too busy bad mouthing Billy boy to do anything useful.
Only IBM and Apple can save our dying industry, and we need Mac OS X on PPC 970 now.
As a long time UNIX and Windows programmer, I am much more productive on Mac OS X and can't bear the thought of having to go back to Windows or Solaris. Mac OS X is a dream platform for geeks and novice alike. There are tons of free and powerful programming tools which would cost thousands of dollars on Windows, and Cocoa (together with Interface Builder and Project Builder) is the only programming environment on earth that makes it possible to program great GUI with virtually no code.
I am surprised that the article didn't even mention OS X.
/. editors, and many more.
Apple and the Open Source community should work together to take advantage of their UNIX similarity and fight the common enemy. MS doesn't play well with anyone - it just want dominate the world with its inferior and bug-ridden dirty Windows by flooding the consumers with incompatible technology (just look at Windows Media Player or the MS implementation of Java, JavaScript, XML, C++).
The combination of fast and dirt-cheap Linux servers with sleek and rock solid Mac OS X desktops can really damage the Redmond beast. Linux obviously has made impressive progress in the server space, but those millions of MS trained monkeys can always attack Linux on the usability front, which is why Mac OS X can be a valuable ally - even MS knows that Apple is years ahead with elegant GUI and industrial design.
A lot of alpha geeks have switched to Mac OS X, including Jim Gosling (the Java inventor) and most of his Java team, the entire Perl 6 core team, James Duncan Davidson (the original author of Apache Ant and Apache Tomcat), Tim O'Reailly, Tim Bray (ActiveWin.com founder and co-inventor of XML), at least 4
Not only Mac software generally better (iLife, iSync, iChat, QuickTime, iTunes Music Store, Keynote, Safari, AppleWorks, FileMaker Pro, and so on), Apple also has a bigger software portfolio than MS (incredible but true, considering Apple is primarily a hardware company and 60 times smaller than MS).
For instance, MS has no high-end tools to compete with Apple WebObjects (Java application server), Final Cut Pro (nonlinear video editing), Shake (movie composition), DVD Studio Pro (DVD authoring), Logic (digital audio), QuickTime Streaming Server. Linux could get a huge boost if many of these tools get ported over.
>> In Windows, I right click and select (gasp) EJECT. That's a hell of a lot more understandable than dragging it to the trash.
If you are smart enough to read or ask someone for help, you would know that right click (or trl click for a single button mouse) and EJECT also work on Mac OS X, in addition to pressing F12 or draging the CD to trash. So next time, do your home work before you complain about something new to you.
>> Windows is better than OSX by a long shot!
You must be either stupid or just kidding yourself. The problem with your poor MS victims is that you have wasted you life to fight with and learn the oddities of Windoze so that you have no ability to learn anything new. I bet you would argue that the most intuitive way to shut down Windows is to go through the Start Menu!
How many hours did spend on the Mac? You can't form an objective opinion about anything if you are biased. Millions of Mac users also use PC daily, but they prefer Mac based on real experiences, unlike you.
As a Windows and Unix programmer for over a decade, I can tell you that nothing comes close to Mac OS X - certainly not any version of Windows. From what I read, even Windows Lonhorn (to appear in 2005) can't touch OS X 10.2, and Apple will be at least 3 years ahead of MS when OS X 10.3 is realeased in a few months time.
With the most elegant GUI and a rock solid Mach / BSD UNIX foundation plus the best and free programming environment (Cocoa, Carbon, Java, Objective C / C++, etc), Apple is moving much faster than MS can with its insecure, unstable and over bloated Windows codebase, which is why OS X has been regularly updated with performance and new features while MS has been busy with weekly security patches and unable to upgrade Windows XP till 2005.
>> But I switched to Linux on Intel five or six years ago and haven't looked back since. As a programmer, I love the tools. As a user, I love the independance. And as a man who appreciates freedom, I savour the chaos, the energy, and the source code.
With OS X, the Mac world is so much better and more exciting than it was 2 or 3 years ago, so you experience gained 5 or 6 years ago is simply irrelevant.
As an long time UNIX and Windows programmer, I can tell you that OS X is truly a dream platform - better than Solaris, Windows and the old Mac OS in every way. I am now much more productive on my $999 iBook than on a $15K Sun Ultra Sparc machine.
Many UNIX and Linux geeks have switched to Mac OS X, including people like James Gosling, Bud Tribble, James Duncan Davidson, Tim O'Reilly, and most of the Perl 6 core team. At least 4 or 5 Slashdot editors are now Mac users.
It looks to me that MS resort to its old trick of copying Apple again. Can anyone see anything new here? It's just too bad for those Windows victims that they have to wait 2 or more years for something that has been available on Mac OS X since last summer. The screen shots clearly shows that MS has a long way to go before reaching the level of refinement of Mac OS X. For instance, the scaled icons look like a POS
>> Interestingly enough, even though Filemaker Inc is an Apple company, Filemaker isn't Apple exclusive. It runs on Windows, on Linux, even on Palm OS.
The UNIX core of Mac OS X (Darwin Open Source) is officially available for both PowerPC and x86. WebObjects, Darwin Streaming Server and Shake are all cross-platform products that run on Mac OS, Windows, and Linux / Unix. QuickTime Player works on Windows too.
In contrast, most of the MS software systems support nothing but Windows, which is yet another indication that MS is years behind Apple.
>> Microsoft has heard back from Corporate America saying "please don't make us update so often".
.NET and Lonhorn, what the world get from MS is mostly a constant stream of security paches that often break your system or introduce new bugs.
.NET and Longhorn.
It would be a reasonable argument, had MS taken the time to make better quality software. But unfortunately that's not the case. Apart from hypes about
>> Why should Microsoft bother? XP is still flying off the shelves, virtual and non-virtual.
You basicly agree that MS does not produce much interesting stuff because of its monoply, which surely isn't healthy for our industry.
>> You are inflating Apple's accomplishments.
I don't think so. In fact, there are many other Apple technologies like speech and hand writing recognition missing from my list.
>> How many of those products you named did Apple buy and stick their name onto?
The same argument can be used against MS or indeed any other company. Many of the most popular MS products originally came from third parties: Visual Basic, IE, PowerPoint, HotMail, and of course DOS itself (bought for $50k).
Apple has much less money ($4.5 bln) than MS (over $40 bln), but more wisdom to spot innovative ideas and turn them into great products.
>> Similarly, you are sidelining many of Microsoft's accomplishments, eliding Office XP, Internet Explorer 6, Windows Movie Maker, Windows Media Player 9, DirectX 9, ThreeDegrees, and more.
For virtually every MS software product, there is normally a Apple equivalent that usually works better, but the opposite is not true. MS doesn't have any high-end products to match Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Shake, Logic, WebObjects.
Unlike MS, Apple also contributes to the Open Source community with Darwin, Darwin Streaming Server, Rendezvous, KHTML, GCC, and so on.
Office XP is probably the strongest MS brand, but other than its bigger market share, it doesn't really have that much advantages over AppleWorks. Further more, Keynote is clearly better than PowerPoint, and Apple is probably working on a brand new Office killer.
While Movie Maker is no match to iMovie or Final Cut Express, the beta release of Safari is already faster and has more features than any version of IE. Oh, have we just heard recently that IE crashes instantly on a simple HTML page with a single line of tags (<html><form><input type></form></html>)?
QuickTime Player was released by Apple years before Windows Media Player, and is also cross-platform and standard-based, unlike the latter.
DirectX 9 is a mess. Maybe it's good for game programming, but tell me how does it fit with
>> Microsoft really does churn out a lot of software--they can afford to, as Windows and Office are cash cow juggernauts.
A lot of software? Where is the evidence? People know MS has tons of money to burn, and automatically assume the company must produce lots of stuff. Well, let me tell you that the emperor has no cloth.
>> but I sincerely doubt Apple has a "bigger" software lineup.
This is something beyond believe, but true.
It always piss me off that most of the Wintel users like you just don't have the basic intelligence to see anything beyond the market share.
How many times do we have to go through the BMW and Ford analogy to prove that market share is not a measure of quality or innovation?
My point is a very simple one: while MS is 60 times bigger than Apple with propably 100 times more software engineers, but its software portofolio is simply dwarfed by Apple, which is doubly embarrassing because Apple is essentially a hardware company.
There would be a case for MS if its software products have a better quality, but the opposite is true - Apple software is generally much refined.
Take Safari for instance, it's currently a beta release but already vastly superior to MS IE in virtually every single aspect (speed, tabs, standard comformance, Java and Java Script support, CSS, etc). Another good example is Keynote, which blows MS PowerPoint out of water with the first release, according to most reviews.
I am expecting some reasonably sensible argements, but that's obviously too much to ask from a Wintel crowd who care about nothing other than market share.
>> Or maybe it's because Microsoft has done more to support their current OSes' lifecycles?
You mean security patches that are known to break people's system and come so frequently that most users inluding system administrators don't know how to deal with them.
While Software Update for OS X is a 2 click process, can anyone of you poor Windows victimes tell me how many MS loops that you have to jump through for a typical Windows Update? I guess you haven't got a clue, because it varies from case to case.
>> OS X 10.0 is now obsolete. Windows 2000 is still very much useable, supported, and widely-used.
And Mac OS 8 or 9 is vey usable either alone or within Mac OS X. People still use Win 2K because Win XP doesn't offer real benefit other than cosmic changes that are nothing more than a inferior imitation of Mac OS X Aqua.
>> Finally I must mention that I have seen more Microsoft hardware this year than Mac hardware or software.
More MS hardware than Apple? You must be kidding or don't the definition of hardware.
>> They launched a comsumer network hardware recently and MS continues to improve their bundled apps and online services.
How could a simple consumer network router remotely match the constant Apple hardware innovations like Xserve, Xserve RAID, iPod, 17" PowerBook, FireWire, Rendezvous, and many others? And don't forget that Apple was the first computer maker that introduced AirPort 802.11b wireless network 5 years ago and gigabit Ethernet soon after, and they have done it again recently with AirPort Extreme (based on 802.11g, 5 times faster than 802.11b and backward compatible).
Don't you dare compare the MS bundled apps like Movie Maker or NotePad to what come free with iLife and tons of other free Apple software, they are in a different league.
In the short period of 2 years since the initial release of Mac OS X, Apple has produced 2 major and numerous minor upgrades with significant performance improvement and lots of new features, in addition to shipping an impressive array of innovative hardwares (iPod, Xserve, Xserve RAID, LCD iMac, 17" PowerBook with slot-loading DVD burner, FireWire 800, BlueTooth, 54 mbps 802.11g AirPort Extreme, Gigabit Ethernet) and highly sophisticated software tools such as iLife, iSync, iCal, Keynote, Safari, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Shake, Logic, WebObjects, FileMaker Pro, AppleWorks, Rendezvous, QuickTime 6, iTunes Music Store, and so on.
But what has the biggest software company done in the same time frame? Surprisingly, very few. Other than the countless security patches plus a Win XP Service Pack and Windows 2003 Server, the only things that come from Redmond are hypes.
Longhorn is officially a 2005 product with very few features to brag about, and may well be delayed to 2006 or later if the track record of MS is anything to go by.
It's just incredible that a small hardware company like Apple has somehow developed a bigger and better software portofolio than the most powerful company in the world , and frankly embarrassing when considering that MS is 60 times bigger than Apple.
>> It is moderately difficult to get more than one instance running.
That's because you don't know how to do it. All you have to do is to launch an application through the Terminal. For instance, you can start up as many Safari instances as you wish by typing "/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari " from a terminal window.
>> I made some experiments and this bug is not that serious, if you use IE correctly.
Are you stupid or what? How can you blame users for not using it correctly when it can be crashed by such a simple HTML code? It's serious because IE is so widely used and the bug also impacts other MS programs like Outlook and FrontPage.
>> IE has a feature, Mozilla/Firebird and Opera sadly don't have: IE can run in multiple processes. If you open a new window by clicking IExplore.exe instead of pressing Ctrl-N, the new window runs in a seperate process.
You must be one of those MS trained idiots who know nothing but Windows. On a real OS like Mac OS X, Linux or any type of UNIX systems, all applications can be launched multiple times from a terminal and run in different processes.
>> If you visit that crash page, only the one IE process crashes while the other processes stay unaffected (at least on NT based systems).
You are probably too thick to realize how absurd your logic is, but it's as silly as suggesting that people should buy a hundred Windows PCs so that it's alright if one of them keeps crashing.
>> The only issue I have with Macs is their cost, but I think I can cope by having a pretty damn cool, commercially supported, end-user Unix system.
Cost is not an issue at all. For $999, you can get a G3 iBook or G4 eMac, probably cheaper than a similarly equiped brand Wintel PC. All new Macs also come with tons of best-of-class software including iTunes plus dozens of professional grade programming tools, which are not even available for Windows or Linux even if you don't mind paying for them.
Don't let anyone tell you that these machines are slow. I use a 700 MHz iBook and 400 MHz iMac for programming, graphics, music, DVD, QuickTime, Safari, MS Office, games and am very happy with the performance. The only thing that feels slow is Windows XP under Virtual PC.
>> I think that OS X looks amazing, and is in all respects the perfect OS, but I refuse to pay £2000 for less power than I have now on a machine that cost half that.
You are talking nonsense! Please take a quick look at the Apple UK store http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore/ and report back to me.
For £680, you can get a G3 iBook or a G4 eMac that are more than capable of running OS X and almost anything I can imagine and comes with tons of free best-of-class software and programming tools.
My 4 years old iMac is only 400 MHz and runs faster than my 800 MHz PC for literally anything I do. The best thing about the Mac OS X, it doesn't crash like Windows 2000 or XP, nor does it get slower and slower over time so that you have to reformat the hard disk or mess with the Registry every now and then. And of course, there is virtually no virus or weekly or daily MS security patches.
If you play Quake all day long, maybe you should keep your ugly hot and noisy dual Athlon. But for real work, you need a real OS, and there is nothing better than OS X. I do programming and graphics on a cheap 700 MHz iBook which is almost perfect (fast, stable, quiet, beautiful, 4+ hours battery life, instant sleep and wake up) - except that it's not a 17" PowerBook.
And finally, the 17" PowerBook - 1" thin and the only portable (or desktop in the Wintel world) that comes with slot-loading DVD burner, built-in 802.11g AirPort Extreme, BlueTooth, FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB, Gigabit Ethernet, and fiber optical sensor that would automatically illuminate the keyboard when light goes out.
And let's not forget:
Speech recognition - I used and was impressed by the Chinese version on my 75 MHz PPC 601 Mac over 10 years ago, long before Bill Gates and MS Research started to hype the technology; the translucent iMac - the all-in-one wonder that has inspired not only the computer industry but also a generation of industrial designers for mobile phones, printers, furnitures and perhaps even Windows XP; G4 Cube - the 8" Gigaflops computer that has probably garnered more design awards than any other computer; iPod - the best MP3 player.
Apple might have modified or removed a few UNIX oddities here and there, but OS X is as POSIX complient as any other UNIX or Linux on the market. But obviously you should stick to Linux if that's what your audiences want to learn.
/etc/inittab.
From Solaris 8 man page:
init is a general process spawner. Its primary role is to
create processes from information stored in the file
Clearly it's not intended for shutting down the system, although it does have the side effect of killing other processes on the way. But this is quite a different issue than the silliest UI blunder by the most powerful and "innovative" software company in human history where the only way to shut down Windows is to click the Start button.
By the way, UNIX is not well hidden from OS X, and {sudo shutdown} works fine, so does {sudo reboot} or {sudo kill -9 -1}.