Apple would sink like a stone if if released it's Godlike OS on PC hardware.
As well as having to redo all the apps desgined for PPC, they'd lose sales hand over fist on their hardware because people would buy crap machines.
The stability would drop too, since the careful selection of components in off-the-shelf Mac computers would be lost.
One of the reasons the Windows experience is so bad is the "sell the CPU" method - Dell will sell you a box with a "super fast, super excellent 3Ghz P4!!" for $700. To keep the price that low, of course, the rest of the components are rubbish. Built in graphics and sound, cheap case, budget monitor etc. Windows is much better when you go for a balanced approach - get a 1.5Ghz chip instead and use the money you save to flesh out the other components a bit, but a 1.5Ghz system won't sell as well as a 3Ghz system, no matter how good the overall quality is.
OS X looks pretty, there's no denying it. It does have lots of "eye candy" effects and pretty icons.
However, you can turn all this off, including the toolbars in the Finder windows.
You can turn off dock magnification and resizing. You can turn off the animation effect for minimising windows. You can turn off dock bouncing for opening apps.
The only eye candy you can't disable is the way the plus, minus and x symbols appear in the red, yellow and green circles in the window corners when you hover over them (or the very useful way that the close box fills with a dot if the window has unsaved information in it).
You also can't disable the way the preference panes and file open/save dialog boxes change size dynamically when you expand them.
It's quite a clean interface overall, and quite customisable. The fact that it looks nice doesn't mean it's wasted - I'm sure Apple could make it look like blocky, grey rectangular box, plain windows style, but I doubt they'd gain any added performance from this look (assming all the animation is turned off).
Sniping at Apple's closed source higher level bits and pieces of OS X is just sour grapes because you don't know how to react to a company that uses closed source in conjunction with open source in such an effective way.
The "expensive" argument has been done to death, but in my opinion (and it is just that, a subjective opinion) most Apple Macs are good value for money - the exception is the PowerMac tower range, but hopefully that will be fixed when the PPC970 ships). All of Apple's other offerings are excellent value - they're not in the business of selling cheap computers. They start at the mid range and go up from there.
At the end of the day Apple is a business and needs to make money. It does this by selling computers and its operating system. Sure, they could open source the entire thing and charge for support or something like that, a la Red Hat, but they have chosen not to do it that way so they can keep a tighter control over how the GUI looks and feels, and it's their choice.
The core is open source, bsd 4.4, and you can download it from Apple and play with it as much as you want.
Single sourced hardware is something of a ropey point - sure the case, power supply, motherboard and CPU are single source, but everything else is standard. I put a 2.5" laptop hard drive in my iBook a couple of months ago. I bought it from a PC vendor and had OS X installed on it in no time.
Similarly, my iBook's RAM was purchased from the same PC supplier and is interchangable with PC laptops. So is my dvd/cd-rw combo drive, and my printer, and my 3.5" HDD, and my scanner, and my monitor, my digital camera, my memory card reader, my network gear, my cable modem. The list goes on. So I can't stick an Athlon in there, but who cares? The logic board/CPU combo rarely goes wrong in an Apple box anyway, and if it does I'll just get another from Apple.
You folks complain mightily when MS spreads FUD about Linux/OSS etc, but have no problem spreading it yourself when it suits you.
Can the telly and radio, shifting all the broadcasting to the internet where you'll need a daily patch to Windows XP in order to watch shows in Windows Media format.
Of course, a webcam will be mandatory so the computer can count how many people are in the room with you and charge you for the appropriate number of licences.
A security guard lost his job in the UK a couple of days ago because he went to help a patient in the hospital he worked at.
The patient was trying to kill himself by jumping of some scaffold, and the guard helped to keep him (relatively) safe with a paramedic also there. They eventually persuaded him to come down, or he was removed by medical staff, I forget which.
The hospital praised the guard for helping out and saving the patient's life. The company he worked for (security was contracted out to a private firm) fired him for "endangering himself and the patient".
That's true, but the problem would be voltage drop, or similar problems with long cable runs.
IIRC, the maximum run for 100baseT ethernet is 100 metres with cat 5 between switches/machines/etc.
The Cisco system must introduce some sort of line amplifier to send data that far, so you'd have to have a pair of them, one on each end. The signals and cable setup itself would be identical to standard ethernet, just with a lot more power.
Other readers of/. will also be eagarly anticipating this since it will finally enable scientists to build a memory big enough that can fit inside a head-shaped space to create their future wives.
eek! You're right! I installed OS X 30 days ago and now it's telling me I have to phone Apple, long distance, to "activate" it or somethingwith my Social Security Number, my passport details, my dna, the rights to my first born child and two side orders of onion rings.
I need to write my term paper and I'm like, bummer, they're engaged.
OS X is not a Unix like cigarettes don't cause cancer.
Sure the top layers are proprietary, but the Darwin level is all open source. Hell, you can download it from Apple's site and install it yourself. Or install OS X itself and compile all those useful tools designed for BSD-style unix OSes.
They keep the top levels closed for a reason - to make money, and to ensure that the overall feel of the system stays the same.
I use GPG Mail with Mail.app and it's great, combined with GnuPG for OS X.
I also use Tiny Fugue in the terminal to connect to a journal community chat server. You need Apple's free Developer Tools to build it though, but it works perfectly.
I also use NcFTP for all my ftp needs. It used to be included with 10.1.x, but Apple stopped shipping it with 10.2.x, instead favouring the basic BSD ftp, which they improved in Jaguar. I prefer NcFTP though, and had no problems building it from source with the Developer Tools.
The huge bonus I've found with OS X's terminal is the way it integrates with the "consumer" side of the OS making command line work more conveinent. For example, if I'm not in the mood to drill down into a directory to upload a file in NcFTP I can just drag it onto the terminal after typing "put [space]". I can also command+click links in TF to open them in my browser. These tricks work in the shell too, often handy for perfoming operations on files deeper in directories that I don't want to navigate to by typing them out. (Yes, yes, I'm lazy).
We use a Dual 450 Powermac in a professional video production environment.
This is 4 or 5 year old tech and it performs flawlessly! Render times in Final Cut Pro are perfectly satisfactory, although we don't use After Effects so I can't comment on that.
We encode in mpeg2 using Cleaner 5, then make DVDs with DVD Studio Pro and it doesn't take a long enough time that we start cursing its slowness.
Remember, this is a Dual 450, not the current Dual 1/1.2/1.42Ghz machines available at the moment.
I would strongly suggest you go to an Apple store and try out Final Cut Pro before making your final decision. If you phone ahead they will install it for you ahead of time and have it ready for you to try.
If you can wait for the PPC970, Final Cut Pro will be even better still.
More like "a crack team of international mercenaries in the emply of the mpaa/riaa/ashcroft who will break your door down then keep you in solitary confinement in Cuba for daring to even think about going against the United Corporations of America(tm)."
The XP login window has copied from OS X - the window changes size dynamically when you click on the user login icons to make the password box show, exactly like OS X does.
You can change the size of the Dock, turn off (or change the amount of) magnification. You can make the desktop icons, and any icons in folders and so on almost any size you want.
Just because by default the icons and Dock are quite big doesn't mean you should just ditch it.
You can go from 128x128 down to 16x16 I think, and a huge range of sizes in between.
Also, the icons resize dynamically, even on my humble 600Mhz iBook so you can find a happy medium without having to change, click apply, change, click apply (or in the case of windows, change, click apply, reboot twice etc etc).
This is the one problem that I can see with Apple's optical mouse - it is a giant rocking button with two small portions at the side that don't move.
These are there so that if you click and drag and run out of space you can pick the mouse up and move it back to the middle of the mousemat and continue dragging without releasing the button. It takes a bit of getting used to, but you soon get the hang of it. If you were doing a lof of clicking and dragging and had bad technique it would soon hurt though.
The fact that your whole hand clicks the mouse rather than just your index finger has really helped me though. In my PC days I used to get regular arm pain using a normal mouse, even when I tried to be as gentle as possible and adopt a good posture.
They also had Ensign Lynsey Ballard - who arrived in one episode as an alien, having already died some time in the past, and they revive the love interest between her and Harry, but we've never heard of her before.
The alien species takes the dead of other races and engineers them into new children of their species.
I think you've hit a proverbial nail on the proverbial head with a proverbial hammer, proverbially speaking..
The Babylon 5 universe works so well partly because they don't rely on the tech to get them out of tough spots, they do it the hard way, often with a lot of death, pain and destruction.
The only real major deaths in Trek, that I can remember offhand anyway, are Tasha Yar (killed in a stupid episode) and Jadzia Dax.
B5 had much greater depth in their characters too - Garibaldi's drinking problem, Ivonova's past and her hate of the Psy Corps, the whole Sinclair/Valen thing.
The major thing though, is that Earth's tech is not the best out there. The earth ships are clunky, unweildy and massively outgunned compared to the sleek Mimbari ships and to a certain extent, the Centauri (and of course the Vorlons and Shadows).
They have no shields, tractor beams or transporters to get them out of scrapes. The Vorlons, with their extreme power, tend not to get involved in things unless it's to dish out cryptic advice, Rotating sections for gravity, conventional chemical engines for thrust.
Not always being the biggest fish in the pond really can help the story along.
Babylon 5 did a lot in this area without being too extravagant. They managed to produce some much more interesting aliens than the Trek universe though.
You had your regular "bumpy heads": Mimbari, Brakiri, Centauri (just a lot of hairspray and an 80s handbook there).
You also had your more adventurous aliens that were still easy to do: the Narns must have been one of the most difficult to do with latex and foam. That insect species with the breathing mask and humanoid body comes to mind. Obviously the Vorlons here - although you really only ever see the big floating encounter suit. Actual Vorlons were CG, or were appearing in human form so were played by real actors. The pak'ma'ra were also pretty interesting to look at.
So the Borg are going to go to the Babylon 5 universe, assimilate the Centauri and adapt the big hair to pull borg chicks.
Once they woo them they can use those 6 tentacle/penis things the Centauri have to great effect - I'm sure they could easily add vibrator technology with some cleverly placed borg tech.
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..to let go of its hardware platform.
Apple would sink like a stone if if released it's Godlike OS on PC hardware.
As well as having to redo all the apps desgined for PPC, they'd lose sales hand over fist on their hardware because people would buy crap machines.
The stability would drop too, since the careful selection of components in off-the-shelf Mac computers would be lost.
One of the reasons the Windows experience is so bad is the "sell the CPU" method - Dell will sell you a box with a "super fast, super excellent 3Ghz P4!!" for $700. To keep the price that low, of course, the rest of the components are rubbish. Built in graphics and sound, cheap case, budget monitor etc. Windows is much better when you go for a balanced approach - get a 1.5Ghz chip instead and use the money you save to flesh out the other components a bit, but a 1.5Ghz system won't sell as well as a 3Ghz system, no matter how good the overall quality is.
What exactly do you mean by wasted windo chrome?
OS X looks pretty, there's no denying it. It does have lots of "eye candy" effects and pretty icons.
However, you can turn all this off, including the toolbars in the Finder windows.
You can turn off dock magnification and resizing. You can turn off the animation effect for minimising windows. You can turn off dock bouncing for opening apps.
The only eye candy you can't disable is the way the plus, minus and x symbols appear in the red, yellow and green circles in the window corners when you hover over them (or the very useful way that the close box fills with a dot if the window has unsaved information in it).
You also can't disable the way the preference panes and file open/save dialog boxes change size dynamically when you expand them.
It's quite a clean interface overall, and quite customisable. The fact that it looks nice doesn't mean it's wasted - I'm sure Apple could make it look like blocky, grey rectangular box, plain windows style, but I doubt they'd gain any added performance from this look (assming all the animation is turned off).
I would argue that it is (what they're best at).
Sniping at Apple's closed source higher level bits and pieces of OS X is just sour grapes because you don't know how to react to a company that uses closed source in conjunction with open source in such an effective way.
The "expensive" argument has been done to death, but in my opinion (and it is just that, a subjective opinion) most Apple Macs are good value for money - the exception is the PowerMac tower range, but hopefully that will be fixed when the PPC970 ships). All of Apple's other offerings are excellent value - they're not in the business of selling cheap computers. They start at the mid range and go up from there.
At the end of the day Apple is a business and needs to make money. It does this by selling computers and its operating system. Sure, they could open source the entire thing and charge for support or something like that, a la Red Hat, but they have chosen not to do it that way so they can keep a tighter control over how the GUI looks and feels, and it's their choice.
The core is open source, bsd 4.4, and you can download it from Apple and play with it as much as you want.
Single sourced hardware is something of a ropey point - sure the case, power supply, motherboard and CPU are single source, but everything else is standard. I put a 2.5" laptop hard drive in my iBook a couple of months ago. I bought it from a PC vendor and had OS X installed on it in no time.
Similarly, my iBook's RAM was purchased from the same PC supplier and is interchangable with PC laptops. So is my dvd/cd-rw combo drive, and my printer, and my 3.5" HDD, and my scanner, and my monitor, my digital camera, my memory card reader, my network gear, my cable modem. The list goes on. So I can't stick an Athlon in there, but who cares? The logic board/CPU combo rarely goes wrong in an Apple box anyway, and if it does I'll just get another from Apple.
You folks complain mightily when MS spreads FUD about Linux/OSS etc, but have no problem spreading it yourself when it suits you.
Well, if she can't install and use OS X, what hope is there for the rest of us!
Can the telly and radio, shifting all the broadcasting to the internet where you'll need a daily patch to Windows XP in order to watch shows in Windows Media format.
Of course, a webcam will be mandatory so the computer can count how many people are in the room with you and charge you for the appropriate number of licences.
A security guard lost his job in the UK a couple of days ago because he went to help a patient in the hospital he worked at.
The patient was trying to kill himself by jumping of some scaffold, and the guard helped to keep him (relatively) safe with a paramedic also there. They eventually persuaded him to come down, or he was removed by medical staff, I forget which.
The hospital praised the guard for helping out and saving the patient's life. The company he worked for (security was contracted out to a private firm) fired him for "endangering himself and the patient".
That's true, but the problem would be voltage drop, or similar problems with long cable runs.
IIRC, the maximum run for 100baseT ethernet is 100 metres with cat 5 between switches/machines/etc.
The Cisco system must introduce some sort of line amplifier to send data that far, so you'd have to have a pair of them, one on each end. The signals and cable setup itself would be identical to standard ethernet, just with a lot more power.
heh, no problem.
It's all in jest, though.
If you can't laugh at yourself [you being anyone] then life isn't going to be much fun.
Just playing the stereotype joke.
Other readers of /. will also be eagarly anticipating this since it will finally enable scientists to build a memory big enough that can fit inside a head-shaped space to create their future wives.
eek! You're right! I installed OS X 30 days ago and now it's telling me I have to phone Apple, long distance, to "activate" it or somethingwith my Social Security Number, my passport details, my dna, the rights to my first born child and two side orders of onion rings.
I need to write my term paper and I'm like, bummer, they're engaged.
OS X is not a Unix like cigarettes don't cause cancer.
Sure the top layers are proprietary, but the Darwin level is all open source. Hell, you can download it from Apple's site and install it yourself.
Or install OS X itself and compile all those useful tools designed for BSD-style unix OSes.
They keep the top levels closed for a reason - to make money, and to ensure that the overall feel of the system stays the same.
I use GPG Mail with Mail.app and it's great, combined with GnuPG for OS X.
I also use Tiny Fugue in the terminal to connect to a journal community chat server. You need Apple's free Developer Tools to build it though, but it works perfectly.
I also use NcFTP for all my ftp needs. It used to be included with 10.1.x, but Apple stopped shipping it with 10.2.x, instead favouring the basic BSD ftp, which they improved in Jaguar. I prefer NcFTP though, and had no problems building it from source with the Developer Tools.
The huge bonus I've found with OS X's terminal is the way it integrates with the "consumer" side of the OS making command line work more conveinent. For example, if I'm not in the mood to drill down into a directory to upload a file in NcFTP I can just drag it onto the terminal after typing "put [space]". I can also command+click links in TF to open them in my browser. These tricks work in the shell too, often handy for perfoming operations on files deeper in directories that I don't want to navigate to by typing them out. (Yes, yes, I'm lazy).
We use a Dual 450 Powermac in a professional video production environment.
This is 4 or 5 year old tech and it performs flawlessly! Render times in Final Cut Pro are perfectly satisfactory, although we don't use After Effects so I can't comment on that.
We encode in mpeg2 using Cleaner 5, then make DVDs with DVD Studio Pro and it doesn't take a long enough time that we start cursing its slowness.
Remember, this is a Dual 450, not the current Dual 1/1.2/1.42Ghz machines available at the moment.
I would strongly suggest you go to an Apple store and try out Final Cut Pro before making your final decision. If you phone ahead they will install it for you ahead of time and have it ready for you to try.
If you can wait for the PPC970, Final Cut Pro will be even better still.
At least we post with our real names.
I think that's just sour grapes from you because you've realised you're on the wrong side. heh.
bollocks united. Who needs the preview button eh? That should read "You can't run windows on it unless..."
/. without the rampant typos.
Although, this just wouldn't be
The best way to opt out is to go here to buy all your future hardware.
No OS related restrictions, no serial numbers, no phoning up for activation, no being treated like a criminal.
Ok, so you can run windows on it unless you install an emulator, but i think that's something of an advantage.
More like "a crack team of international mercenaries in the emply of the mpaa/riaa/ashcroft who will break your door down then keep you in solitary confinement in Cuba for daring to even think about going against the United Corporations of America(tm)."
Who needs Cease and Desist letters?
The XP login window has copied from OS X - the window changes size dynamically when you click on the user login icons to make the password box show, exactly like OS X does.
You can change the size of the Dock, turn off (or change the amount of) magnification. You can make the desktop icons, and any icons in folders and so on almost any size you want.
Just because by default the icons and Dock are quite big doesn't mean you should just ditch it.
You can go from 128x128 down to 16x16 I think, and a huge range of sizes in between.
Also, the icons resize dynamically, even on my humble 600Mhz iBook so you can find a happy medium without having to change, click apply, change, click apply (or in the case of windows, change, click apply, reboot twice etc etc).
This is the one problem that I can see with Apple's optical mouse - it is a giant rocking button with two small portions at the side that don't move.
These are there so that if you click and drag and run out of space you can pick the mouse up and move it back to the middle of the mousemat and continue dragging without releasing the button. It takes a bit of getting used to, but you soon get the hang of it. If you were doing a lof of clicking and dragging and had bad technique it would soon hurt though.
The fact that your whole hand clicks the mouse rather than just your index finger has really helped me though. In my PC days I used to get regular arm pain using a normal mouse, even when I tried to be as gentle as possible and adopt a good posture.
I remember Tuvix.
They also had Ensign Lynsey Ballard - who arrived in one episode as an alien, having already died some time in the past, and they revive the love interest between her and Harry, but we've never heard of her before.
The alien species takes the dead of other races and engineers them into new children of their species.
I think you've hit a proverbial nail on the proverbial head with a proverbial hammer, proverbially speaking..
The Babylon 5 universe works so well partly because they don't rely on the tech to get them out of tough spots, they do it the hard way, often with a lot of death, pain and destruction.
The only real major deaths in Trek, that I can remember offhand anyway, are Tasha Yar (killed in a stupid episode) and Jadzia Dax.
B5 had much greater depth in their characters too - Garibaldi's drinking problem, Ivonova's past and her hate of the Psy Corps, the whole Sinclair/Valen thing.
The major thing though, is that Earth's tech is not the best out there. The earth ships are clunky, unweildy and massively outgunned compared to the sleek Mimbari ships and to a certain extent, the Centauri (and of course the Vorlons and Shadows).
They have no shields, tractor beams or transporters to get them out of scrapes. The Vorlons, with their extreme power, tend not to get involved in things unless it's to dish out cryptic advice, Rotating sections for gravity, conventional chemical engines for thrust.
Not always being the biggest fish in the pond really can help the story along.
Babylon 5 did a lot in this area without being too extravagant. They managed to produce some much more interesting aliens than the Trek universe though.
You had your regular "bumpy heads": Mimbari, Brakiri, Centauri (just a lot of hairspray and an 80s handbook there).
You also had your more adventurous aliens that were still easy to do: the Narns must have been one of the most difficult to do with latex and foam. That insect species with the breathing mask and humanoid body comes to mind. Obviously the Vorlons here - although you really only ever see the big floating encounter suit. Actual Vorlons were CG, or were appearing in human form so were played by real actors.
The pak'ma'ra were also pretty interesting to look at.
New hairdos eh?
So the Borg are going to go to the Babylon 5 universe, assimilate the Centauri and adapt the big hair to pull borg chicks.
Once they woo them they can use those 6 tentacle/penis things the Centauri have to great effect - I'm sure they could easily add vibrator technology with some cleverly placed borg tech.
err, never mind...