>> This comes as a bit of a surprise, since Adobe was *always* the app vendor out in front when it came to multiproc support on the Mac, even when Mac multiprocessing architecture sucked balls (as on the Daystars).
Why don't you shut up before you actually read and understand that rather poorly crafted article before opening your mouth. Charlie White is clearly a PC troll and his so called DV benchmark is mostly about After Effects (importing Photoshop or Illustrator files). There are several points that render the benchmark meaningless: (1) AE is not designed for multi-processor system; (2) Adobe is being driven out of the DV market while Apple's own Final Cut Pro and Shake is taking Hollywood by storm and challenging Avid from top to bottom; (3) the price comparison is pure nonsense - a dual 1.25 GHz G4 costs as little $1999 (nearly $1000 cheaper than the $2964 Dell box) and still comes with more features such as Firewire 800.
>> Frankly, I don't give a damn so much about the Mac's CPU horsepower as I do about the disgusting, inefficient memory usage in OS X. OS X is without a doubt the most bloated piece of software I've ever run across. Apple might possibly make it worse by porting it to Java, but other than that, I can't imagine what else they might have done wrong. When you're blowing 128MB and swapping to display a desktop, somewhere there's a coder that needs to be shot.
What the fuck are you talking about? How on earth can Apple port OS X to Java? OS X is written in C / C++/Objective C, and Java is just another language that may be used to access the Cocoa API.
As a longtime c++ and Java programmer on both Unix and Windows, let me just tell you that OS X is simply the best designed OS in every possible way - stable, efficient, sexy and years ahead of Windoze or anything else on the market.
With Apple's Final Cut Pro and Shake taking Hollywood by storm and killing After Effects while challenging Avid from top to bottom, Adobe is simply a non-player in this market, which might be why they prefer PC - there is just no chance for their products on the Mac.
Given that Adobe still gets nearly 50% of their income from the Mac platform, this might be perceived as Adobe biting the hand that feeds them by many Mac users and a very bad move for them in the long run.
Without knowing any details about your system, I can't comment on your situation. But I have been a C++ / Java programmer on Unix (Solaris, HP / UX, etc) and Windows for over 10 years, and OS X is simply the best OS for me in every way - stable, fast, pretty, and preloaded with tons of free and best-of-breed programs and programming tools.
Now I do everything on an iBook (programming, graphics, DVD, music, Internet,etc) and typically keep dozens of programs running for weeks and rarely reboot or shut down the machine.
Finder might not be ferfect, but it doesn't crash the system and you can always relaunch it.
>> I like the design on the laptop, but OS X is just too slow for me and it don't have a snap feel to it.
My iMac (400 MHz) and 2 iBooks (500 & 700 MHz) are all quite snappy.
>> For example to open Safari on my ibook takes about 5 seconds. Word is about 10.
Safari lauches in 4 seconds or 3 bounces on my 400 MHz iMac. How fast do you want it? In any case, I really hate a Wintel idiot like you complaining about such trivil matters. Does it really make you more productive if Safari launches in 1 second rather than 5? There are far more important issues to be concerned about. How about the lack of constant danger of virus and worms on the Mac or the convenience of instant sleep and wake up or the virtually silent working environment and energy efficiency or the lickable GUI for the pleasure of your eyes or weeks and months uptime or the ease of software update or the one-click install and uninstall?
In the short space of 2 years since the initial release of OS X, Apple has rolled out 2 or 3 major release and many more minor updates, on top of new software and hardware products like Safari, Keynote, Rendezvous, Java 1.4.1, QuickTime 6 with MPEG4, Xserve, Xserve RAID, iPod, 802.11g, Firewire 800, 17" PowerBook, etc.
Each update adds new features or improves performance as well as fixs bugs, and only takes 2 mouse clicks to do. As a result, my 400 MHz iMac bought 4 years ago gets faster and more stable over time, and runs 24/7 for weeks and months with no rebooting or disk defragmenting.
And it looks most likely that Apple will be the first to release a mainstream 64-bit desktop OS.
What has our beloved Redmond beast done over the same period of time? Well, apart from weekly or daily security patches, the only thing springs to mind is XP SP1, which apparently can render some PC 10 times slower (according to http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=8485 at the inquirer). A friend of mine had to reinstall Win 2k on his office machine after his XP Pro was killed by the SP1, and another friend has just experienced a second dead Wintel PC within about 18 months.
And the much hyped next major Windows update Longhorn is at least 2 years away. So what is MS doing with all those well paid programmers and the money? Are they finally caught by their own badly flawed bloatware?
This is yet another example that the Linux community is totoally incapable of true GUI innovation, and the name alone gives it away. Why the hell is it called XPde if it looks and feels like Win 2000?
The Win XP GUI is really just a amateurish copy of Mac OS X, and even the name smells a rip off - XP vs X and Luna vs Aqua. Why don't they copy the real thing instead of a cheap imitation?
>> Microsoft (and Apple) make operating systems for people like you who don't understand computers, aren't interested in them and don't want to be.
You better shut your filthy mouth and should be shamed of yourself for making a sweeping statement like that. I don't who the hell you are, but many of the alpha geeks like Jordan Hubbard (FreeBSD lead programmer), James Duncan Davidson (the original author of Apache Tomcat and Ant), James Gosling (Inventor of Java) and the core Perl 6 team have all switched to Mac OS X. Even CmdrTaco himself and at least 4 other/. editors are all using Apple laptops as their main production tools!
It's really a rather sad fact of life that the Linux community is full of hot heads like you. Just because you prefer CLI doesn't automatically make you a superior computer user in any sense. I have been a Unix / C++ / Jave programmer for over a decade, and I am proud that I enjoy both good GUI and Unix terminal for different tasks. In my view, OS X has vastly more elegant GUI, better programming environment and more stability than Linux and Windows put together, and simply is the best there is for both geeks and novices alike.
You are losing the plot here, man. Come on, let's move on to something slightly more exciting than the damn cut & paste. There are so many things that either Windows can't do or OS X just do better such as: instant sleep and wake up, one-click application hiding without quiting, real-time resizing hundreds of photo thumbnails, one-click web publishing and printing of photo album, network location, built-in NAT / Firewall / FTP / Apache, software Airport basestation, system wise spelling check / speech recognition, screen zooming in and out, save as PDF, dozens of free and powerful programming tools,...
>> I'm a unix sysadmin by trade and spend most of my time in front of a Mac.
Oh, really? But you don't know how to how to keep OS X stable for more than a day - all my machines have an uptime of weeks or months. It sounds to me that you use Windows Explorer cutting & pasting files all day long.
>> Firstly, that's not the job of a file manager.
Maybe not in your usual black and white view, but there is nothing wrong in principle for a file manager to do a bit more than just browsing.
>> Secondly, it's not a function that requires the user to know the application is open, so there would be no reason whatsoever for the Finder icon to be present on the Dock if that was the only thing it was doing.
Yes, there are at least two: (1) it indicates everything is alive and well; (2) a new window can be opened quickly without restarting the application.
>> No, it's the underlying paradigm of a document-centric interface.
It's time to give up your stupid Windows dogma and listen to reasons.
>> The point is they shouldn't have to - or, more accurately, they shouldn't have to manually.
What's wrong with these stupid Wintel users? All they care about a computer is GHz that is mostly unused and idling, but they are constantly worried about using a few CPU cycles to make things more beautiful. When you spend hours in front of a computer, you do deserve the pleasure of eye-candy which is mostly designed to have a function value as well.
First of all, we are comparing OS X with Windoze, not third party software, so your Cygwin or expensive NFS solution just doesn't hold water. Besides, Cygwin is an half-baked Unix emulator, not a proper POSIX-complient Unix system, so there is no comparison with OS X in this regard.
Secondly, your cut & paste whinging is frankly just childish. We know Windows requires lots of maintenance, but for God's sake, how often do you move files around? I honestly can't remember when I spent more than a few minutes doing that. If that's all you do whole day long, use the terminal or write a script to do it. In any case, Column View combined with Finder Toolbar and Spring-loaded Folder is much more efficient than your "the classic directory tree + file list" (which is very similar to List View) for such trivial tasks, and yes you can sort by file Kind / Size / Date Created / Date Modified as well as by Name in Icon View.
>> The one click search bar in the Finder only searches on filenames. You also ignore the massive flaw in Finder that objects can only be ordered by name in the Icon and Column views (thus making them even more useless than they already are).
Well, you obviously don't know how to use Finder, and don't pretend that you do. One click from Finder can bring up a dialog for searching by name / date / type / size / visibility / extension as well as by content. You can drag folders to either the Toolbar or the Dock, and drop items into them from anywhere. Shit + Command + {C, H, I, A, F, G} takes you to {/, ~, http://idisk.mac.home/$user,/Applications, ~/Library/Favorites,/any/where/you/like}, and command + K connects to a remote server. How can you beat that?
>> Wow ! Just like Explorer has been doing for the last five years !
It doesn't mean that a GUI program can't have a background thread doing something quietly without a window! Don't forget that daemon is a Unix concept and OS X is Unix. What's your point again?
>> What possible "processing" could an interactive application be doing in the background isn't related to a open document (or analogical equivalent) ?
Why couldn't you MS trained monkeys see things from a slightly different angle? A file manager like Finder might have a background thread for content indexing or repairing the file system, even if there is no browsing windows.
>> As previously mentioned, the user shouldn't have to think about the application at all. The whole concept is simply unintuitive.
That's just your simplistic world view. People do think about applications, and frequently choose different tools for the same document.
>> The Mac in front of me has 512MB of RAM and an uptime of less than a day. Thus far OS X has create 3 "swapfiles" of 80MB apiece for paging reasons. All that is running is X11, MSN Messenger, Mail, Safari, Terminal, Word and Excel. That's a _lot_ of memory usage.
And my 400 MHz iMac with 512MB RAM runs 24/7 for weeks or months as a software AirPort base station for web browsing and for kidds playing games and my wife doing research (statistic analysis, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc). My 700 iBook is used for programming Unix / Java / C++ (X11, tcsh, bash, Ruby, Perl, JBuilder, Eclipse, NetBeans, Project Builder, Interface Builder, etc), web design and graphics (FireWorks, Flash, DreamWeaver), database (MySQL, PostgreSQL), web browsing (Safari, Camino, OmniWeb, IE), networking and web serving (FTP, Apache, SMB, AFP, Firewall, NetInfo, AirPort wireless, iDisk, iChat, iSync, Network Utility), Word, Excel, PowerPoint, QuickTime, iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, Mail, Address Book, OmniDictionary, World Book, and more. Typically, there are 70 to 80 processes running, and I generally don't quit applications, so they run continuously for days or weeks, and everything remains responsive virtually all the time.
Why don't you fuck off and go downloading some more useless free garbage? Some of us have work to do and are quite happy to pay for quality products that save valuable time.
>> IMHO OS X loses out here completely because it doesn't feature the classic directory tree + file list style of GUI file management which I find to be the easiest and most efficient to use (when partnered with good keyboard shortcuts).
What the fuck are you talking about? The OS X Finder does have "the classic directory tree + file list" called list view, and is miles ahead of Windows Explorer in at least 6 ways:
(1) Column View is the best feature for file browsing not available on any other OS.
(2) Spring-loaded folder makes it possible to drag and drop files to any depth without opening lots of windows.
(3) Finder toolbar is much more configurable than Windows Explorer.
(4) Music, graphics and movies can be played or viewed right in the Finder preview pane without starting applications.
(5) One-click search by content, size, type, date, extension, or visibility.
(6) Automation with AppleScript.
Oh, if that's not powerful enough, there is always the Unix terminal to play with: csh, tcsh, bash, Perl, Python, Ruby and lots other tools all preloaded. Windows is not even remotely close.
>> Connecting to remote machines in Windows is vastly superior. You can navigate directly to machines, the shares they have and manipulate things in those shares - even launch programs - all without having to map or mount the share.
Do you know anything about networking at all? Windows only understand Windows or SMB, while OS X can handle Windows as well as NFS, UFS, HFS+ and SMB. What do you mean by "without having to map or mount the share"? Surely you still have to login to a remote machine before accessing it. And OS X comes with Rendezvous ZeroConf so that devices (not just computers) can discover each other.
>> but there really shouldn't be anything in the UI to create a distinction between an application and a document.
Why not? An applications can run without any document window, it might be doing some house keeping at background.
Most of the times when the user closes a document window, he or she doesn't intend to stop the application. When people open and close lots of document windows, it's very annoying that they have to remember avoiding closing the last window and killing the application by accident.
Plus, due to the excellent virtual memory system in OS X, there is really no need at all to frequently close documents or quit applications - you can hide all the documents of the front application or all the other applications by a single key stroke, and the background apps consumes very little CPU or RAM.
>> You have to buy 4 additional macs to use "five licenses".
No, you are wrong, idiot. I have 3 Macs running OS X at home and the family pack @ $199 is still a good deal even if it's just for 2 machines.
>> OS X now seems quite expensive.
You are talking shit. At amazon.com, Mac OS X sells for $96.99, much cheaper than Red Hat 8 Pro for $116.99 and Win XP Pro for $199, and comes with more and better software than the other two put together.
Here is a company that has $billions to burn and spares no effort on hiring raw talents, but where is the results of all those smart people?
Let's face it, the beast is a bully and copycat, or just throw cash at anything that can't be acquired otherwise. As we all know, DOS was bought (from Bill's friend for $50,000), so was Visual Basic. Earlier versions of Windows are nothing more than half-baked copies of Mac OS, much like C# to Java. Tablet PC is really not that much better than Apple Newton introduced 10 years ago except for more powerful hardware, and the hand writing recognition software appears to be less usable than that of Newton. Every Mac has come with voice recognition since about 15 years ago, and where is the MS voice recognition technology that Bill has been talking about for so many years?
For OS X, the updating can be done by 2 mouse clicks with the Software Update tool. How long does it take on other system. I know it takes much longer to do Windows updating.
>> File navigation is a pain in the Finder. Windows Explorer, simply by providing a command line integrated with the GUI (alt-d) really puts the finder to shame.
I really don't know what the hell you are talking about. The OS X Finder is miles ahead of Windows Explorer in at least 6 ways:
(1) Column View is the best feature for file browsing not available on any other OS.
(2) Spring-loaded folder makes it possible to drag and drop files to any depth without opening lots of windows.
(3) Finder toolbar is much more configurable than Windows Explorer.
(4) Music, graphics and movies can be played or viewed right in the Finder preview pane without starting applications.
(5) One-click search by content, size, type, date, extension, or visibility.
(6) Automation with AppleScript.
Oh, if that's not powerful enough, there is always the Unix terminal to play with: csh, tcsh, bash, Perl, Python, Ruby and lots other tools all preloaded. Windows is not even remotely close.
>> Apple's refusal to allow multi-document interfaces keeps things easy for the newbie, but there are still times where I'd like to have child windows running within a parent. Same reason people enjoy VirtualPC or Mac-on-Linux,...
First of all, how could anyone be so confused to compare Virtual PC with MDI - they are just totally different animals.
MDI is the worst GUI that could only be invented by a clueless company like MS. It's clunky, restrictive and pointless. In OS X, the front application or all others can be hided with keyboard short cuts or mouse click, and individual windows of an application can be accessed through menu or Dock. Further more, there are sheets, drawers, tabed panes and toolbars, so can you remind me why anyone needs MDI.
And if you do programming, Mac OS X will be your dream platform - tons of free programming tools for GUI, Java, C/C++, Objective C/C++, Perl, Python, Ruby.
I consider Linux is just a dialect of Unix, much like BSD and Mac OS X. The enemy of Linux is Windows, not Unix. Dell is simply trying to grab more market share from other Unix vendors by dividing and conquering its competitors
This is no more than a cheap sensationalism to sell more Dell servers by dividing and conquering the Unix and Linux community, and would also strengthen MS in the high end server market which is still dominated by Unix.
By it's own admission, Dell profits from other people's R&D budget. This is one of the richest company in the computer industry with no technology other than cheap box making skills and makes zero contribution to the world. It's well on the way to become an MS-like monster playing every trick in the book to kill its rivals.
I for one can't bear the thought of a world full of ugly Dell boxes with dirty Windows. For the sake of our industry, we need the innovations of Apple, Sun, IBM and many others, so let's boycott Dell boxes - they are not even cheaper anymore.
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>> This comes as a bit of a surprise, since Adobe was *always* the app vendor out in front when it came to multiproc support on the Mac, even when Mac multiprocessing architecture sucked balls (as on the Daystars).
/Objective C, and Java is just another language that may be used to access the Cocoa API.
Why don't you shut up before you actually read and understand that rather poorly crafted article before opening your mouth. Charlie White is clearly a PC troll and his so called DV benchmark is mostly about After Effects (importing Photoshop or Illustrator files). There are several points that render the benchmark meaningless: (1) AE is not designed for multi-processor system; (2) Adobe is being driven out of the DV market while Apple's own Final Cut Pro and Shake is taking Hollywood by storm and challenging Avid from top to bottom; (3) the price comparison is pure nonsense - a dual 1.25 GHz G4 costs as little $1999 (nearly $1000 cheaper than the $2964 Dell box) and still comes with more features such as Firewire 800.
>> Frankly, I don't give a damn so much about the Mac's CPU horsepower as I do about the disgusting, inefficient memory usage in OS X. OS X is without a doubt the most bloated piece of software I've ever run across. Apple might possibly make it worse by porting it to Java, but other than that, I can't imagine what else they might have done wrong. When you're blowing 128MB and swapping to display a desktop, somewhere there's a coder that needs to be shot.
What the fuck are you talking about? How on earth can Apple port OS X to Java? OS X is written in C / C++
As a longtime c++ and Java programmer on both Unix and Windows, let me just tell you that OS X is simply the best designed OS in every possible way - stable, efficient, sexy and years ahead of Windoze or anything else on the market.
With Apple's Final Cut Pro and Shake taking Hollywood by storm and killing After Effects while challenging Avid from top to bottom, Adobe is simply a non-player in this market, which might be why they prefer PC - there is just no chance for their products on the Mac.
Given that Adobe still gets nearly 50% of their income from the Mac platform, this might be perceived as Adobe biting the hand that feeds them by many Mac users and a very bad move for them in the long run.
Without knowing any details about your system, I can't comment on your situation. But I have been a C++ / Java programmer on Unix (Solaris, HP / UX, etc) and Windows for over 10 years, and OS X is simply the best OS for me in every way - stable, fast, pretty, and preloaded with tons of free and best-of-breed programs and programming tools.
Now I do everything on an iBook (programming, graphics, DVD, music, Internet,etc) and typically keep dozens of programs running for weeks and rarely reboot or shut down the machine.
Finder might not be ferfect, but it doesn't crash the system and you can always relaunch it.
>> I like the design on the laptop, but OS X is just too slow for me and it don't have a snap feel to it.
My iMac (400 MHz) and 2 iBooks (500 & 700 MHz) are all quite snappy.
>> For example to open Safari on my ibook takes about 5 seconds. Word is about 10.
Safari lauches in 4 seconds or 3 bounces on my 400 MHz iMac. How fast do you want it? In any case, I really hate a Wintel idiot like you complaining about such trivil matters. Does it really make you more productive if Safari launches in 1 second rather than 5? There are far more important issues to be concerned about. How about the lack of constant danger of virus and worms on the Mac or the convenience of instant sleep and wake up or the virtually silent working environment and energy efficiency or the lickable GUI for the pleasure of your eyes or weeks and months uptime or the ease of software update or the one-click install and uninstall?
In the short space of 2 years since the initial release of OS X, Apple has rolled out 2 or 3 major release and many more minor updates, on top of new software and hardware products like Safari, Keynote, Rendezvous, Java 1.4.1, QuickTime 6 with MPEG4, Xserve, Xserve RAID, iPod, 802.11g, Firewire 800, 17" PowerBook, etc.
Each update adds new features or improves performance as well as fixs bugs, and only takes 2 mouse clicks to do. As a result, my 400 MHz iMac bought 4 years ago gets faster and more stable over time, and runs 24/7 for weeks and months with no rebooting or disk defragmenting.
And it looks most likely that Apple will be the first to release a mainstream 64-bit desktop OS.
What has our beloved Redmond beast done over the same period of time? Well, apart from weekly or daily security patches, the only thing springs to mind is XP SP1, which apparently can render some PC 10 times slower (according to http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=8485 at the inquirer). A friend of mine had to reinstall Win 2k on his office machine after his XP Pro was killed by the SP1, and another friend has just experienced a second dead Wintel PC within about 18 months.
And the much hyped next major Windows update Longhorn is at least 2 years away. So what is MS doing with all those well paid programmers and the money? Are they finally caught by their own badly flawed bloatware?
This is yet another example that the Linux community is totoally incapable of true GUI innovation, and the name alone gives it away. Why the hell is it called XPde if it looks and feels like Win 2000?
The Win XP GUI is really just a amateurish copy of Mac OS X, and even the name smells a rip off - XP vs X and Luna vs Aqua. Why don't they copy the real thing instead of a cheap imitation?
>> Microsoft (and Apple) make operating systems for people like you who don't understand computers, aren't interested in them and don't want to be.
/. editors are all using Apple laptops as their main production tools!
You better shut your filthy mouth and should be shamed of yourself for making a sweeping statement like that. I don't who the hell you are, but many of the alpha geeks like Jordan Hubbard (FreeBSD lead programmer), James Duncan Davidson (the original author of Apache Tomcat and Ant), James Gosling (Inventor of Java) and the core Perl 6 team have all switched to Mac OS X. Even CmdrTaco himself and at least 4 other
It's really a rather sad fact of life that the Linux community is full of hot heads like you. Just because you prefer CLI doesn't automatically make you a superior computer user in any sense. I have been a Unix / C++ / Jave programmer for over a decade, and I am proud that I enjoy both good GUI and Unix terminal for different tasks. In my view, OS X has vastly more elegant GUI, better programming environment and more stability than Linux and Windows put together, and simply is the best there is for both geeks and novices alike.
My iBook is 700 MHz / 16 MB VRAM / with 640 MB RAM, and Win 2000 is quite responsive and Win XP usable under VPC 6.0.1.
>> I use VPC to connect to my company's VPN. You can use OS X for VPN as well.
It's mainly for G3 Mac, and might improve G4 as well.
You are losing the plot here, man. Come on, let's move on to something slightly more exciting than the damn cut & paste. There are so many things that either Windows can't do or OS X just do better such as: instant sleep and wake up, one-click application hiding without quiting, real-time resizing hundreds of photo thumbnails, one-click web publishing and printing of photo album, network location, built-in NAT / Firewall / FTP / Apache, software Airport basestation, system wise spelling check / speech recognition, screen zooming in and out, save as PDF, dozens of free and powerful programming tools,...
>> I'm a unix sysadmin by trade and spend most of my time in front of a Mac.
Oh, really? But you don't know how to how to keep OS X stable for more than a day - all my machines have an uptime of weeks or months. It sounds to me that you use Windows Explorer cutting & pasting files all day long.
>> Firstly, that's not the job of a file manager.
Maybe not in your usual black and white view, but there is nothing wrong in principle for a file manager to do a bit more than just browsing.
>> Secondly, it's not a function that requires the user to know the application is open, so there would be no reason whatsoever for the Finder icon to be present on the Dock if that was the only thing it was doing.
Yes, there are at least two: (1) it indicates everything is alive and well; (2) a new window can be opened quickly without restarting the application.
>> No, it's the underlying paradigm of a document-centric interface.
It's time to give up your stupid Windows dogma and listen to reasons.
>> The point is they shouldn't have to - or, more accurately, they shouldn't have to manually.
Again, why not?
I don't see much slow down either.
What's wrong with these stupid Wintel users? All they care about a computer is GHz that is mostly unused and idling, but they are constantly worried about using a few CPU cycles to make things more beautiful. When you spend hours in front of a computer, you do deserve the pleasure of eye-candy which is mostly designed to have a function value as well.
First of all, we are comparing OS X with Windoze, not third party software, so your Cygwin or expensive NFS solution just doesn't hold water. Besides, Cygwin is an half-baked Unix emulator, not a proper POSIX-complient Unix system, so there is no comparison with OS X in this regard.
/Applications, ~/Library/Favorites, /any/where/you/like}, and command + K connects to a remote server. How can you beat that?
Secondly, your cut & paste whinging is frankly just childish. We know Windows requires lots of maintenance, but for God's sake, how often do you move files around? I honestly can't remember when I spent more than a few minutes doing that. If that's all you do whole day long, use the terminal or write a script to do it. In any case, Column View combined with Finder Toolbar and Spring-loaded Folder is much more efficient than your "the classic directory tree + file list" (which is very similar to List View) for such trivial tasks, and yes you can sort by file Kind / Size / Date Created / Date Modified as well as by Name in Icon View.
>> The one click search bar in the Finder only searches on filenames. You also ignore the massive flaw in Finder that objects can only be ordered by name in the Icon and Column views (thus making them even more useless than they already are).
Well, you obviously don't know how to use Finder, and don't pretend that you do. One click from Finder can bring up a dialog for searching by name / date / type / size / visibility / extension as well as by content. You can drag folders to either the Toolbar or the Dock, and drop items into them from anywhere. Shit + Command + {C, H, I, A, F, G} takes you to {/, ~, http://idisk.mac.home/$user,
>> Wow ! Just like Explorer has been doing for the last five years !
But how?
It doesn't mean that a GUI program can't have a background thread doing something quietly without a window! Don't forget that daemon is a Unix concept and OS X is Unix. What's your point again?
>> What possible "processing" could an interactive application be doing in the background isn't related to a open document (or analogical equivalent) ?
Why couldn't you MS trained monkeys see things from a slightly different angle? A file manager like Finder might have a background thread for content indexing or repairing the file system, even if there is no browsing windows.
>> As previously mentioned, the user shouldn't have to think about the application at all. The whole concept is simply unintuitive.
That's just your simplistic world view. People do think about applications, and frequently choose different tools for the same document.
>> The Mac in front of me has 512MB of RAM and an uptime of less than a day. Thus far OS X has create 3 "swapfiles" of 80MB apiece for paging reasons. All that is running is X11, MSN Messenger, Mail, Safari, Terminal, Word and Excel. That's a _lot_ of memory usage.
And my 400 MHz iMac with 512MB RAM runs 24/7 for weeks or months as a software AirPort base station for web browsing and for kidds playing games and my wife doing research (statistic analysis, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc). My 700 iBook is used for programming Unix / Java / C++ (X11, tcsh, bash, Ruby, Perl, JBuilder, Eclipse, NetBeans, Project Builder, Interface Builder, etc), web design and graphics (FireWorks, Flash, DreamWeaver), database (MySQL, PostgreSQL), web browsing (Safari, Camino, OmniWeb, IE), networking and web serving (FTP, Apache, SMB, AFP, Firewall, NetInfo, AirPort wireless, iDisk, iChat, iSync, Network Utility), Word, Excel, PowerPoint, QuickTime, iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, Mail, Address Book, OmniDictionary, World Book, and more. Typically, there are 70 to 80 processes running, and I generally don't quit applications, so they run continuously for days or weeks, and everything remains responsive virtually all the time.
Why don't you fuck off and go downloading some more useless free garbage? Some of us have work to do and are quite happy to pay for quality products that save valuable time.
>> IMHO OS X loses out here completely because it doesn't feature the classic directory tree + file list style of GUI file management which I find to be the easiest and most efficient to use (when partnered with good keyboard shortcuts).
What the fuck are you talking about? The OS X Finder does have "the classic directory tree + file list" called list view, and is miles ahead of Windows Explorer in at least 6 ways:
(1) Column View is the best feature for file browsing not available on any other OS.
(2) Spring-loaded folder makes it possible to drag and drop files to any depth without opening lots of windows.
(3) Finder toolbar is much more configurable than Windows Explorer.
(4) Music, graphics and movies can be played or viewed right in the Finder preview pane without starting applications.
(5) One-click search by content, size, type, date, extension, or visibility.
(6) Automation with AppleScript.
Oh, if that's not powerful enough, there is always the Unix terminal to play with: csh, tcsh, bash, Perl, Python, Ruby and lots other tools all preloaded. Windows is not even remotely close.
>> Connecting to remote machines in Windows is vastly superior. You can navigate directly to machines, the shares they have and manipulate things in those shares - even launch programs - all without having to map or mount the share.
Do you know anything about networking at all? Windows only understand Windows or SMB, while OS X can handle Windows as well as NFS, UFS, HFS+ and SMB. What do you mean by "without having to map or mount the share"? Surely you still have to login to a remote machine before accessing it. And OS X comes with Rendezvous ZeroConf so that devices (not just computers) can discover each other.
>> but there really shouldn't be anything in the UI to create a distinction between an application and a document.
Why not? An applications can run without any document window, it might be doing some house keeping at background.
Most of the times when the user closes a document window, he or she doesn't intend to stop the application. When people open and close lots of document windows, it's very annoying that they have to remember avoiding closing the last window and killing the application by accident.
Plus, due to the excellent virtual memory system in OS X, there is really no need at all to frequently close documents or quit applications - you can hide all the documents of the front application or all the other applications by a single key stroke, and the background apps consumes very little CPU or RAM.
>> You have to buy 4 additional macs to use "five licenses".
No, you are wrong, idiot. I have 3 Macs running OS X at home and the family pack @ $199 is still a good deal even if it's just for 2 machines.
>> OS X now seems quite expensive.
You are talking shit. At amazon.com, Mac OS X sells for $96.99, much cheaper than Red Hat 8 Pro for $116.99 and Win XP Pro for $199, and comes with more and better software than the other two put together.
Here is a company that has $billions to burn and spares no effort on hiring raw talents, but where is the results of all those smart people?
Let's face it, the beast is a bully and copycat, or just throw cash at anything that can't be acquired otherwise. As we all know, DOS was bought (from Bill's friend for $50,000), so was Visual Basic. Earlier versions of Windows are nothing more than half-baked copies of Mac OS, much like C# to Java. Tablet PC is really not that much better than Apple Newton introduced 10 years ago except for more powerful hardware, and the hand writing recognition software appears to be less usable than that of Newton. Every Mac has come with voice recognition since about 15 years ago, and where is the MS voice recognition technology that Bill has been talking about for so many years?
For OS X, the updating can be done by 2 mouse clicks with the Software Update tool. How long does it take on other system. I know it takes much longer to do Windows updating.
>> File navigation is a pain in the Finder. Windows Explorer, simply by providing a command line integrated with the GUI (alt-d) really puts the finder to shame.
...
I really don't know what the hell you are talking about. The OS X Finder is miles ahead of Windows Explorer in at least 6 ways:
(1) Column View is the best feature for file browsing not available on any other OS.
(2) Spring-loaded folder makes it possible to drag and drop files to any depth without opening lots of windows.
(3) Finder toolbar is much more configurable than Windows Explorer.
(4) Music, graphics and movies can be played or viewed right in the Finder preview pane without starting applications.
(5) One-click search by content, size, type, date, extension, or visibility.
(6) Automation with AppleScript.
Oh, if that's not powerful enough, there is always the Unix terminal to play with: csh, tcsh, bash, Perl, Python, Ruby and lots other tools all preloaded. Windows is not even remotely close.
>> Apple's refusal to allow multi-document interfaces keeps things easy for the newbie, but there are still times where I'd like to have child windows running within a parent. Same reason people enjoy VirtualPC or Mac-on-Linux,
First of all, how could anyone be so confused to compare Virtual PC with MDI - they are just totally different animals.
MDI is the worst GUI that could only be invented by a clueless company like MS. It's clunky, restrictive and pointless. In OS X, the front application or all others can be hided with keyboard short cuts or mouse click, and individual windows of an application can be accessed through menu or Dock. Further more, there are sheets, drawers, tabed panes and toolbars, so can you remind me why anyone needs MDI.
And if you do programming, Mac OS X will be your dream platform - tons of free programming tools for GUI, Java, C/C++, Objective C/C++, Perl, Python, Ruby.
I consider Linux is just a dialect of Unix, much like BSD and Mac OS X. The enemy of Linux is Windows, not Unix. Dell is simply trying to grab more market share from other Unix vendors by dividing and conquering its competitors
This is no more than a cheap sensationalism to sell more Dell servers by dividing and conquering the Unix and Linux community, and would also strengthen MS in the high end server market which is still dominated by Unix.
By it's own admission, Dell profits from other people's R&D budget. This is one of the richest company in the computer industry with no technology other than cheap box making skills and makes zero contribution to the world. It's well on the way to become an MS-like monster playing every trick in the book to kill its rivals.
I for one can't bear the thought of a world full of ugly Dell boxes with dirty Windows. For the sake of our industry, we need the innovations of Apple, Sun, IBM and many others, so let's boycott Dell boxes - they are not even cheaper anymore.