Mac OS X is DEFINITELY slower than any other operating system I've ever used. I've used a few flavors of Linux, Windows 95, 98, Me, and XP, and Mac OS 7.1 through 9.2.2.
BUT! Here's why:
- unaccelerated video. The poor widdle CPU has to do EVERY bit of graphics on the screen. For the past, oh, decade and a half, the graphics card would do the QuickDraw commands. Now, the CPU has to do it all, and this means slower graphics *and* slower everything else
- PDF graphics. This one hurts. Suddenly everything on the screen is a PDF. That's fine and powerful and all, but PDF is historically slow. And it'll be a few years until video cards get to render the PDF natively. No, Quartz Extreme doesn't count, it only means the vid card does compositing, but not rendering.
- There's some flap about the kernel being designed for 68k and it can't be fixed without requiring a recompile of everything. Personally, I'll take a 10-12% performance gain even if the price is updating *all* of my apps. This will probably happen by 10.5, once the shock of Carbonizing everything has faded into memory.
- Immaturity. The OS is still very very young. It doesn't have the years and years of optimization work that's gone into every other operating system. Furthermore, Apple is too busy getting it out the door to make it fast. Hopefully they can take a break from adding features, and make 10.3 a blazing fast 10.2
- G3 processors just suck. AltiVec is now a must-have. Trust me. I have a 700 G3 iMac (CRT). My father has an 800 G4 TiBook. It kicks my iMac's ass. WAY more than can be accounted for by 100mhz in bus speed, or a better gfx card, or vagaries of busses. It BLOWS my g3 AWAY.
I'm going to ask for a G4 for Christmas - no, demand! My iMac is a year and a half old and already it feels crappy. I'd rather be ahead of the curve than behind it. And at least I get Quartz Extreme and such to soothe the pain until Apple really fixes OS X.
% nslookup pengaol.org
Server: ns2.charterpipeline.net
Address: 24.205.1.62
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: pengaol.org
Address: 0.0.0.0
Hmm. Did they give in, or is their name server just dying?
We had a T1 from PacBell, on the central coast of California. DSLReports.com tests worked fine, read 1400s usually. Note that that is data bandwidth and so doesn't count tcp headers, etc. DSLReports claims that their tests are usually accurate to 5mbps or so.
If you're getting 300-900 from reputable sites... you have middling cable speeds. You should be reading at 1200 at the very LEAST (1544 is of course T1's rated speed)
Win98 is regarded as one of the crappiest OSes in existence with the possible exception of WinME. Why it's running CRITICAL REAL-TIME SYSTEMS in a motor vehicle is utterly beyond me. A CONSUMER-LEVEL OS should NEVER be used for critical functions. I haven't seen M$'s EULA, but most of them have a clause about how this operating system is not to be used for critical applications where failures could result in death or destruction - I'd say if Win98 crashed while trying to keep your car on the road, and you died because of it, that counts as death caused by Win98. Volvo is at fault for choosing a consumer-level OS for critical systems, and either Microsoft is hubristic for thinking their OS can run critical systems, or Volvo is breaking the EULA for using it. (And yes I know EULA means *end-user* license agreement, but I'm certain there are similar terms for companies in Volvo's situation)
...now I think they should just roll over and die. I mean, for god's sake, WINDOWS? A CONSUMER version more so? This isn't the user interface, dammit! Use something DESIGNED for critical operations, at the very least NT... Volvo just lost a very loyal customer. I'm sure I'm not unique by a long shot.
Remind me why Microsoft's system ISN'T vulnerable to this?? If anything, it's more vulnerable, because a) people know about it and b) it's statistically certain there are exploitable holes in the update code.
I'll tackle this in order. I've heard iMovie is several times easier than a lot of other programs --- and it was one of the first consumer-targeted video editing apps. iPhoto, really isn't that special. =) I'll skip iDVD because it needs more explanation. iTunes really is basically another mp3 player, but its killer feature is, of course, the iPod and its tight integration.
iDVD is an app that lets you create DVDs. You make the menu, add video clips (from iMovie if you wish, or pretty much any format QuickTime can read), still pictures, audio, etc, and then burn the DVD (with the SuperDrive CD-RW/DVD-R drive on the top model iMac and top two G4 towers). Then you can use the DVD in any consumer DVD player. It's pretty damn killer.
I am an atheist. I am in high school. For the past, oh six years or so, I simply haven't said the words "under God" during the pledge. I say everything else, usually in unison, but when we get to the phrase in question, I close my mouth and stay silent for two words. I start right back up at "indivisible", and carry on to a strong finish. By now it's habit and I barely notice it. No one (at least not at my school!) is forcing you to say every word and listening for it. In fact, you're not even required to say the pledge - just stand up and put your hand over your heart and face the flag, that's enough. I figure, though, not all schools are as relatively liberal as mine.
More data in the same space means tighter track spacing, among other things. Tighter track spacing means more tracks overall on the disk. Now, let's imagine seek times stay the same - 9ms or so on decent drives. Well, in that 9ms we can find any byte on the disk, but unfortunately, that's a smaller fraction of the overall data. You have to seek over greater "distances" (explained in a moment) to deliver more data. Note that "distance" is not physical length the head must move, but rather the head must reach more bytes which may or may not be conveniently contiguous. This means that the greater the density, if the head technology stays the same, the throughput will stay the same. Now, today the very best way to beat this problem is to set up a RAID of one flavor or another. But only a very small percentage of computer users use RAIDs. Some kind of "ninety-percent" solution needs to be made for people who have one built-in HD that comes with their computer. Else, throughputs will stay the same while capacity increases greatly - not the best situation.
The rules for this sort of thing are in the employment agreement which usually has some NDA-style clauses. Basically, the corporation would try to treat this as valuable company documents, despite the fact that the documents are written on your memory. If the contract says nothing about it, then yippee, you're allowed to remember how you solved the problem a year ago. Otherwise, you abide by the contract. Contracts suck.
... in which EVERY program requires an installer to scatter bits of it across far-flung parts of your HD, tweak a million registry keys, and optionally install one or more spyware/adware packages.
Now, on Mac OS X on the other hand, it's a simple matter to copy a program - well-behaved programs keep all their data inside the app bundle itself, meaning you have to copy exactly one file to your iPod.
And remember, Windows folks - you may have an iPod, but you still don't have iMovie or iDVD! (iPhoto is really a bastard child of all the quickie photo-album makers of the world, with a few whizzy features tossed in)
Hrm... it seems to me that if my iris code is publicly available, it won't be that difficult to make an iris scanner *think* it's seen my iris. Just a bit of creative recabling, a couple of breakout boxes, and a dumb terminal, and you should be able to make the security system think the scanner just sent in your iris code. This wouldn't be too hard, unless the system has good security.
Riiiight.... who wants to bet Microsoft will be in this business before long? No takers? Well there goes our security.
The only way to stop this would be something I saw mentioned QUITE a while back, with digital signatures - pen-based that is. Supposedly, if the system ever saw the exact same signature data, it'd immediately ignore it. It's not possible for a human to PRECISELY duplicate their signature, at least not in a way that looks the same to the scanner; the only possibility then would be that the signature data had been stolen and re-used.
As far as the privacy concerns, it's too late. We lost. Get over it. Your address is already long since out there, and personally I think it's more trouble to have my phone number out there than my fingerprint. It's not too easy to make telemarketing calls by knowing your iris pattern now is it?
When MS says Windows is not modular, they are using a legal, not technical, argument. This is based on past cases where, for example, Ford was banned from buidling pick-up trucks with covers (ie snugtop) because it was an optional module.
Well then, by thunder Microsoft should be banned from producing an OS with a browser included, because it's an optional module!
Microsoft should be banned from including a Microsoft-branded browser, and if they want to keep IE they'll have to spin it off to a child company. This would be legal under that precedent (though the interaction would have to be watched) - it's the same as Ford including another company's cover with their trucks, which is perfectly legal. The court case only bans Ford from including a Ford-made cover.
Instead they could take Apple's standpoint on the issue: HTML rendering services and APIs are provided, some kind of simplistic HTTP is provided, but a browser (i.e., complete application using those tools) is not part of the OS. Until recently, Internet Explorer and Netscape were both included with the OS (though IE was the default, grr...). This changed with OS X because until very recently there was no OS X-native version of Netscape. With the next version of OS X, due out in late summer, Apple probably will once again include both.
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Mac OS X is DEFINITELY slower than any other operating system I've ever used. I've used a few flavors of Linux, Windows 95, 98, Me, and XP, and Mac OS 7.1 through 9.2.2. BUT! Here's why: - unaccelerated video. The poor widdle CPU has to do EVERY bit of graphics on the screen. For the past, oh, decade and a half, the graphics card would do the QuickDraw commands. Now, the CPU has to do it all, and this means slower graphics *and* slower everything else - PDF graphics. This one hurts. Suddenly everything on the screen is a PDF. That's fine and powerful and all, but PDF is historically slow. And it'll be a few years until video cards get to render the PDF natively. No, Quartz Extreme doesn't count, it only means the vid card does compositing, but not rendering. - There's some flap about the kernel being designed for 68k and it can't be fixed without requiring a recompile of everything. Personally, I'll take a 10-12% performance gain even if the price is updating *all* of my apps. This will probably happen by 10.5, once the shock of Carbonizing everything has faded into memory. - Immaturity. The OS is still very very young. It doesn't have the years and years of optimization work that's gone into every other operating system. Furthermore, Apple is too busy getting it out the door to make it fast. Hopefully they can take a break from adding features, and make 10.3 a blazing fast 10.2 - G3 processors just suck. AltiVec is now a must-have. Trust me. I have a 700 G3 iMac (CRT). My father has an 800 G4 TiBook. It kicks my iMac's ass. WAY more than can be accounted for by 100mhz in bus speed, or a better gfx card, or vagaries of busses. It BLOWS my g3 AWAY. I'm going to ask for a G4 for Christmas - no, demand! My iMac is a year and a half old and already it feels crappy. I'd rather be ahead of the curve than behind it. And at least I get Quartz Extreme and such to soothe the pain until Apple really fixes OS X.
% nslookup pengaol.org Server: ns2.charterpipeline.net Address: 24.205.1.62 Non-authoritative answer: Name: pengaol.org Address: 0.0.0.0 Hmm. Did they give in, or is their name server just dying?
We had a T1 from PacBell, on the central coast of California. DSLReports.com tests worked fine, read 1400s usually. Note that that is data bandwidth and so doesn't count tcp headers, etc. DSLReports claims that their tests are usually accurate to 5mbps or so. If you're getting 300-900 from reputable sites... you have middling cable speeds. You should be reading at 1200 at the very LEAST (1544 is of course T1's rated speed)
Win98 is regarded as one of the crappiest OSes in existence with the possible exception of WinME. Why it's running CRITICAL REAL-TIME SYSTEMS in a motor vehicle is utterly beyond me. A CONSUMER-LEVEL OS should NEVER be used for critical functions. I haven't seen M$'s EULA, but most of them have a clause about how this operating system is not to be used for critical applications where failures could result in death or destruction - I'd say if Win98 crashed while trying to keep your car on the road, and you died because of it, that counts as death caused by Win98. Volvo is at fault for choosing a consumer-level OS for critical systems, and either Microsoft is hubristic for thinking their OS can run critical systems, or Volvo is breaking the EULA for using it. (And yes I know EULA means *end-user* license agreement, but I'm certain there are similar terms for companies in Volvo's situation)
...now I think they should just roll over and die. I mean, for god's sake, WINDOWS? A CONSUMER version more so? This isn't the user interface, dammit! Use something DESIGNED for critical operations, at the very least NT... Volvo just lost a very loyal customer. I'm sure I'm not unique by a long shot.
Remind me why Microsoft's system ISN'T vulnerable to this?? If anything, it's more vulnerable, because a) people know about it and b) it's statistically certain there are exploitable holes in the update code.
I'll tackle this in order. I've heard iMovie is several times easier than a lot of other programs --- and it was one of the first consumer-targeted video editing apps. iPhoto, really isn't that special. =) I'll skip iDVD because it needs more explanation. iTunes really is basically another mp3 player, but its killer feature is, of course, the iPod and its tight integration. iDVD is an app that lets you create DVDs. You make the menu, add video clips (from iMovie if you wish, or pretty much any format QuickTime can read), still pictures, audio, etc, and then burn the DVD (with the SuperDrive CD-RW/DVD-R drive on the top model iMac and top two G4 towers). Then you can use the DVD in any consumer DVD player. It's pretty damn killer.
I am an atheist. I am in high school. For the past, oh six years or so, I simply haven't said the words "under God" during the pledge. I say everything else, usually in unison, but when we get to the phrase in question, I close my mouth and stay silent for two words. I start right back up at "indivisible", and carry on to a strong finish. By now it's habit and I barely notice it. No one (at least not at my school!) is forcing you to say every word and listening for it. In fact, you're not even required to say the pledge - just stand up and put your hand over your heart and face the flag, that's enough. I figure, though, not all schools are as relatively liberal as mine.
More data in the same space means tighter track spacing, among other things. Tighter track spacing means more tracks overall on the disk. Now, let's imagine seek times stay the same - 9ms or so on decent drives. Well, in that 9ms we can find any byte on the disk, but unfortunately, that's a smaller fraction of the overall data. You have to seek over greater "distances" (explained in a moment) to deliver more data. Note that "distance" is not physical length the head must move, but rather the head must reach more bytes which may or may not be conveniently contiguous. This means that the greater the density, if the head technology stays the same, the throughput will stay the same. Now, today the very best way to beat this problem is to set up a RAID of one flavor or another. But only a very small percentage of computer users use RAIDs. Some kind of "ninety-percent" solution needs to be made for people who have one built-in HD that comes with their computer. Else, throughputs will stay the same while capacity increases greatly - not the best situation.
The rules for this sort of thing are in the employment agreement which usually has some NDA-style clauses. Basically, the corporation would try to treat this as valuable company documents, despite the fact that the documents are written on your memory. If the contract says nothing about it, then yippee, you're allowed to remember how you solved the problem a year ago. Otherwise, you abide by the contract. Contracts suck.
... in which EVERY program requires an installer to scatter bits of it across far-flung parts of your HD, tweak a million registry keys, and optionally install one or more spyware/adware packages.
Now, on Mac OS X on the other hand, it's a simple matter to copy a program - well-behaved programs keep all their data inside the app bundle itself, meaning you have to copy exactly one file to your iPod.
And remember, Windows folks - you may have an iPod, but you still don't have iMovie or iDVD! (iPhoto is really a bastard child of all the quickie photo-album makers of the world, with a few whizzy features tossed in)
Hrm... it seems to me that if my iris code is publicly available, it won't be that difficult to make an iris scanner *think* it's seen my iris. Just a bit of creative recabling, a couple of breakout boxes, and a dumb terminal, and you should be able to make the security system think the scanner just sent in your iris code. This wouldn't be too hard, unless the system has good security.
Riiiight.... who wants to bet Microsoft will be in this business before long? No takers? Well there goes our security.
The only way to stop this would be something I saw mentioned QUITE a while back, with digital signatures - pen-based that is. Supposedly, if the system ever saw the exact same signature data, it'd immediately ignore it. It's not possible for a human to PRECISELY duplicate their signature, at least not in a way that looks the same to the scanner; the only possibility then would be that the signature data had been stolen and re-used.
As far as the privacy concerns, it's too late. We lost. Get over it. Your address is already long since out there, and personally I think it's more trouble to have my phone number out there than my fingerprint. It's not too easy to make telemarketing calls by knowing your iris pattern now is it?
When MS says Windows is not modular, they are using a legal, not technical, argument. This is based on past cases where, for example, Ford was banned from buidling pick-up trucks with covers (ie snugtop) because it was an optional module.
Well then, by thunder Microsoft should be banned from producing an OS with a browser included, because it's an optional module!
Microsoft should be banned from including a Microsoft-branded browser, and if they want to keep IE they'll have to spin it off to a child company. This would be legal under that precedent (though the interaction would have to be watched) - it's the same as Ford including another company's cover with their trucks, which is perfectly legal. The court case only bans Ford from including a Ford-made cover.
Instead they could take Apple's standpoint on the issue: HTML rendering services and APIs are provided, some kind of simplistic HTTP is provided, but a browser (i.e., complete application using those tools) is not part of the OS. Until recently, Internet Explorer and Netscape were both included with the OS (though IE was the default, grr...). This changed with OS X because until very recently there was no OS X-native version of Netscape. With the next version of OS X, due out in late summer, Apple probably will once again include both.
n/t