As a "switcher" (away from Linux) I was annoyed to see that one of the first things I saw on my TiBook after starting OS X was the Quicktime nag screen. Needless to say, shortly after that I found a Mac OS serials site and cracked it straight away.
To this day I still think that is one of the most obnoxious things I've ever seen from an OS vendor, and I will NEVER EVER pay for Quicktime after that experience, even if I become a multi-multi-squillionaire.
Who cares? As long as it works it doesn't matter one bit, especially since most of iTunes uses custom widgets, it's not like that brushed metal interface is going to integrate with standard QT or GTK themes.
Insert Apple Zealot(tm) post about how Apple uses Open Source stuff and how the kernel is open. Umm, but don't mention how all the important stuff that makes a Mac a Mac is closed and locked away by Apple, because that would ruin the Mac Zealot(tm) argument (and put Mac on a level playing field with MS).
Holy crap! When did MS release the entire source code to their OS?
Woohoo! I'm going to fork the NT kernel.
Or is the "level playing field" you talk about one where MS doesn't have to give away anything, or provide Windows on any other platforms, while Apple has to give away their entire OS for nothing and make sure it works on every hardware platform?
Then insert counter point that Apple _needs_ to keep somethings proprietary in order to compete. Then ingnore the fact how Apple loves Open source code they can take and use to save millions in development costs and then take ages to return changes to the community (cough, safari, cough).
Oh, I see... the playing field's not even that level, in addition to giving away all of their source code for free, they also have to release it according to your schedule?
Only if you can do it without presuming he's an idiot operating on low oxygen, acting on advice he got from Dr. Nick's online doctorb service. (the B is for Bargain)
* Drive him to the hospital?
Only if the hospital is going to cure him.
* Send money to pay for his treatment?
Money never hurt, even if it only ends up paying for gold plated handles on his casket it would help.
* Develop a miracle drug to cure him?
Too late, people already did that in the first half of last century. Alternatively you could get in touch with some Georgian doctors who are skilled in phage medicine and arrange a flight to Russia.
Don't worry, you can fix it by moving the dock to the side of the screen, then it bounces side to side in an amusing gravity-defying fashion instead of up and down like someone with ADHD who's been tied to a chair.
What I dislike about biometrics is the consequences of someone compromising the system. At the moment if someone steals my passcode or a key card I can be issued another one.
No one is proposing a method of reissuing retinas or fingerprints. If biometrics are used large scale and someone manages to make a fake eyeball or finger that can fool the sensors for a particular application, that information will be permanently useless as a method of identification, leaving the victim to suffer life-long consequences.
Has it ever occurred to you that there are plenty of Mac users who hate those café mac-touting wankers just as much as you?
Just as there are white people who hate Nazis and black people who don't support Robert Mugabe, not everyone you see using a PowerBook is a member of some cult of mac zealotry. Some of us use Macs because Linux and BSD can't seem to get their act together when it comes to supporting portable computers properly. It was certainly that way when I decided to migrate from my old APM-based PC laptop to something more modern a few years ago. Something to do with ACPI or APIC or both. I didn't care, all I knew was that to get a new laptop that would suspend and resume properly I couldn't use Linux on it. Hence I have a PowerBook.
"Now, I can hear some of you saying "well, uh...but we have a commandline! And it's *nix!" Well, yes sonny, you DO have a commandline. But I'd rather have my Linux commandline anyday, unencumbered by OS X's ridiculously overblown, unintuitive, overwrought GUI."
And instead encumbered by a poorly performing designed-by-committee X server, and both the KDE and GNOME libraries and associated multimedia and network servers just to be able to use any application made for god knows what Unix operating system, having no commercial software available, no stable driver ABI, and having to compile things from scratch or put up with horrendously complicated dependancy trees because no-one ever compiles anything statically, ever.
See? I can have an unreasonable, inflammatory and borderline-false rant about your favorite OS too.
Plus after using PC's for so many years you come to release everything keeps repeating itself (better 3d cards, more RAM, faster CPU's, etc) however in the Mac world things do get quicker like PC's however they veer off into the 64-bit RISC world which most PC fans only dream of.
I love my PowerBook G4, it's the only computer I've ever owned that I feel like cuddling, but you have to face the fact that the best that the PC world has to offer is at least as good as what Apple/IBM are offering in terms of hardware.
The only reason that the Mac doesn't get crushed in the never-ending upgrade machine every 3 years like PCs do is because no-one in their right mind buys a Mac to play games on, in fact until Quartz Extreme came along it was difficult to buy a Mac with a decent graphics card, even in supposedly high end workstations.
As for the 64-bit RISC thing, AMD's Athlon 64 and Opteron chips are a 64-bit RISC core pretending to be a 64-bit CISC core, and they use the same Hypertransport high-speed bus technology as the G5, in case you were wondering that was developed by AMD for use by x86-64 motherboard manufacturers.
I dig Mac in a big way and anybody who disagrees, go and try using a Mac for a bit if you can. You will find you enjoy computing again.
Unless you want to play the latest games.:)
Not everybody uses their computer for the same thing you do. Someone who just wants to play the latest-greatest first person shooters would be better off with a PC.
Are you blind? Maybe you didn't read my post? I said that it uses QE to SPEED IT UP, and if QE wasn't there, it would DECREASE PERFORMANCE.
Actually, that's not what you said. You said:
"Mac OS X uses Quartz Extreme to render all the windows in 3d with shadows and fancy coloring. No graphics card = horrid windowing performance."
Implying that without Quartz Extreme windowing performance would be unbearable, that shadows wouldn't work, and that the colours would somehow be affected. All bullshit.
This is an emulator we're talking about, even if it doesn't support Quartz Extreme it can still achieve high performance.
Mac on Linux doesn't support Quartz Extreme yet performs admirably. Though PearPC's graphics speed is not very impressive, it's hardly the limiting factor there either.
I'd contend that the lack of/support for QE has approximately nothing whatsoever to do with performance in an emulator (as anyone whose used a PPC emulator/VM can attest), and that your previous post appeared to say that without QE support the emulator would not be able to render shadows or draw colours correctly. This, as you are obviously aware, is blatantly false.
Which is why I called you a troll.
Had you made the assertions you made in this post, I would have supported some of what you say, but I think without some kind of native graphics card translator, QE would be worthless anyway, and in fact would almost certainly be slower.
As you may already be aware, native graphics card support is not just a matter of 1:1 mapping between the PC and Mac graphics card, because of fundamental architectural differences between x86 and PPC. There would need to be some interception and modification of QE's graphics instructions into the correct form for the PC graphics chipset, which could easily negate any speed benefit.
In short, you're correct about it being slower, but the Chicken Little-esque, sky-is-falling way you went about stating it in your previous post made it sound like the emulator would be useless simply because it didn't support QE, which is far from truthful.
Nah, you're thinking of something else. There have been numerous aborted attempts at creating a next generation Mac OS under a variety of strange code names like Pink, Taligent and Copland.
Rhapsody was the name of the OS [strategy] developed under the leadership of Gil Amelio, it was heavily based on OpenStep (moreso than OS X), hence it's cross platform capabilities. Apple also had a version of the Rhapsody frameworks that ran in NT, which they inherited from NeXT. At that stage, the name for Cocoa was YellowBox, and the Classic environment was called BlueBox IIRC. There was no equivalent to the Carbon frameworks in those early days, which was the subject of much debate.
Steve Jobs became Interim CEO after Amelio's departure in 1997 and killed the cross platform versions of Rhapsody along with the Mac 'clone' industry. About a year later Apple announced the name change from Rhapsody to Mac OS X. They released Mac OS X Server in 1999, followed a year later by the almost unrecognisable OS X Public Beta.
Check out these screenshots, which (in order from top to bottom) show the gradual progression from NeXTstep's multi-column Browser to Mac OS X 10.3's Finder*.
The machines were both brand new, and in unopened boxes. I have transported both laptops in a padded and armoured backpack, I also used a leather screen protector on the TiBook when transporting or storing it. I have never dropped either of them, I have only scratched the underside on either machine (there are no scratches on the albook, even though I have had it for nearly 6 months). I have never had problems with the hard drives or CD ROM drives in either machine, which (being moving parts) you would expect to be the first things to give up the ghost if the machines were being abused.
The laptops have both been very well used, but also well treated. I've never had these kind of problems with the other laptops I've used, and I've owned a few, about 6 in the last 10 years from various different manufacturers. If anything I treat these machines better than any others I've owned because I paid more for the TiBook than I've ever paid for any piece of computer equipment in my life.
I'm not knocking Apple, because I know plenty of other people have owned both types of laptop without having an endless string of problems like I have, I just feel I have to tell people about my situation when they say how great the quality of Apple hardware is. To be fair, they replaced the machine after only threatening legal action, so I didn't actually have to go to court. Although I got a free upgrade, I would've been much happier if the TiBook could survived a year in the life of any other laptop instead of spending week after week in the shop being repaired. Now that I have another machine that's repeatedly failing, I'm starting to wonder about the legendary quality of Apple hardware, and I think others should know.
"I also know the design is nothing to be sneezed at, since it has excellent airflow and the case is made of aluminum - not cheap plastic like all Macs I've ever seen."
I think you'd be hard pressed to find any case more obviously made of aluminium or more thouroughly engineered for adequate airflow than the one on a PowerMac G5.
I think they've been around more than long enough for you to have sneaked a peek at one on the apple website.
I think they sell them at the Apple online store, they're just a standard USB mouse that costs lots of money and is probably a lot less than half-as-useful on any other OS.
Keep smoking that krak man, the track record of the Macs I have owned, my 667Mhz GigE PowerBook had no less than 9 serious hardware failures in two years, and the replacement Apple gave me after threatening legal action (1GHz AlBook) has been into the shop for latch problems 5 times now and still isn't working right.
It may just be that all laptops are shit these days, but I've owned a lot of PC laptops and never had anywhere near the number of problems as I have with the two Macs I've owned.
Then again, it doesn't seem like I've had the typical run of luck with PowerBooks, and I can't exactly say my sample size of 2 is very scientific. But it's a free (as in speech) internet, and I'm allowed to whine...
"I think I'll be even more comfortable once I get a replacement mouse that had 2 buttons and a clickable wheel..."
You will be more comfortable, although the machines don't ship with two button mice, the OS supports them seamlessly.
In the meantime, you can turn your trackpad into a 3 button trackpad with a scrollwheel by getting sidetrack here.
"I really miss the Linux/Unix way of clicking with left button to drag to highlight...and just click middle button (wheel) to paste. I understand with will work on OSX too with a new mouse."
Sadly no, the Linux method of copy/paste won't work except in X11 applications, but OS X supports text drag and drop which can still be done entirely without moving your hand from the mouse, and is independant of the clipboard.
"Overall..I do like it. I think I'll really like it more when I can figure how to get the Gentoo for OSX portage kit put on...and start to run more native X applications on it."
It wasn't until I started using OS X as just another Unix with a fancy GUI that I really started to feel comfortable.
As a person coming from the linux world, you might want to install the GNU fileutils, which is the same ls/rm/mv/cp/ln/chmod/chown etc that Linux uses, then just alias to the GNU versions instead of the FreeBSD tools it comes with.
Slashdot Mirror
As a "switcher" (away from Linux) I was annoyed to see that one of the first things I saw on my TiBook after starting OS X was the Quicktime nag screen. Needless to say, shortly after that I found a Mac OS serials site and cracked it straight away.
To this day I still think that is one of the most obnoxious things I've ever seen from an OS vendor, and I will NEVER EVER pay for Quicktime after that experience, even if I become a multi-multi-squillionaire.
Who cares? As long as it works it doesn't matter one bit, especially since most of iTunes uses custom widgets, it's not like that brushed metal interface is going to integrate with standard QT or GTK themes.
Insert Apple Zealot(tm) post about how Apple uses Open Source stuff and how the kernel is open. Umm, but don't mention how all the important stuff that makes a Mac a Mac is closed and locked away by Apple, because that would ruin the Mac Zealot(tm) argument (and put Mac on a level playing field with MS).
Holy crap! When did MS release the entire source code to their OS?
Woohoo! I'm going to fork the NT kernel.
Or is the "level playing field" you talk about one where MS doesn't have to give away anything, or provide Windows on any other platforms, while Apple has to give away their entire OS for nothing and make sure it works on every hardware platform?
Then insert counter point that Apple _needs_ to keep somethings proprietary in order to compete. Then ingnore the fact how Apple loves Open source code they can take and use to save millions in development costs and then take ages to return changes to the community (cough, safari, cough).
Oh, I see... the playing field's not even that level, in addition to giving away all of their source code for free, they also have to release it according to your schedule?
And you call Apple users zealots...
Sweet! where do I sign up? Do I get a gun or a knife?
If there's one thing I hate more than having to wait in line, it's having to wait in line with a bloody screeching baby.
How am I supposed to help?
:)
* Provide medical advice?
Only if you can do it without presuming he's an idiot operating on low oxygen, acting on advice he got from Dr. Nick's online doctorb service. (the B is for Bargain)
* Drive him to the hospital?
Only if the hospital is going to cure him.
* Send money to pay for his treatment?
Money never hurt, even if it only ends up paying for gold plated handles on his casket it would help.
* Develop a miracle drug to cure him?
Too late, people already did that in the first half of last century. Alternatively you could get in touch with some Georgian doctors who are skilled in phage medicine and arrange a flight to Russia.
* Contribute time or money to Slackware Linux?
Of course!
Yes that's true. If I wasn't such a humourless pedant, I might have noticed. :|
Don't worry, you can fix it by moving the dock to the side of the screen, then it bounces side to side in an amusing gravity-defying fashion instead of up and down like someone with ADHD who's been tied to a chair.
"It is better to remain quiet and be thought a fool, then to speak up and remove all doubt."
Surely you meant "than to speak up"?
What I dislike about biometrics is the consequences of someone compromising the system. At the moment if someone steals my passcode or a key card I can be issued another one.
No one is proposing a method of reissuing retinas or fingerprints. If biometrics are used large scale and someone manages to make a fake eyeball or finger that can fool the sensors for a particular application, that information will be permanently useless as a method of identification, leaving the victim to suffer life-long consequences.
Oh yeah of course, and KFC are slipping arsenic and cyanide into the recipe which is why they're keeping it secret as well.
Has it ever occurred to you that there are plenty of Mac users who hate those café mac-touting wankers just as much as you?
Just as there are white people who hate Nazis and black people who don't support Robert Mugabe, not everyone you see using a PowerBook is a member of some cult of mac zealotry. Some of us use Macs because Linux and BSD can't seem to get their act together when it comes to supporting portable computers properly. It was certainly that way when I decided to migrate from my old APM-based PC laptop to something more modern a few years ago. Something to do with ACPI or APIC or both. I didn't care, all I knew was that to get a new laptop that would suspend and resume properly I couldn't use Linux on it. Hence I have a PowerBook.
"Now, I can hear some of you saying "well, uh...but we have a commandline! And it's *nix!" Well, yes sonny, you DO have a commandline. But I'd rather have my Linux commandline anyday, unencumbered by OS X's ridiculously overblown, unintuitive, overwrought GUI."
And instead encumbered by a poorly performing designed-by-committee X server, and both the KDE and GNOME libraries and associated multimedia and network servers just to be able to use any application made for god knows what Unix operating system, having no commercial software available, no stable driver ABI, and having to compile things from scratch or put up with horrendously complicated dependancy trees because no-one ever compiles anything statically, ever.
See? I can have an unreasonable, inflammatory and borderline-false rant about your favorite OS too.
Plus after using PC's for so many years you come to release everything keeps repeating itself (better 3d cards, more RAM, faster CPU's, etc) however in the Mac world things do get quicker like PC's however they veer off into the 64-bit RISC world which most PC fans only dream of.
:)
I love my PowerBook G4, it's the only computer I've ever owned that I feel like cuddling, but you have to face the fact that the best that the PC world has to offer is at least as good as what Apple/IBM are offering in terms of hardware.
The only reason that the Mac doesn't get crushed in the never-ending upgrade machine every 3 years like PCs do is because no-one in their right mind buys a Mac to play games on, in fact until Quartz Extreme came along it was difficult to buy a Mac with a decent graphics card, even in supposedly high end workstations.
As for the 64-bit RISC thing, AMD's Athlon 64 and Opteron chips are a 64-bit RISC core pretending to be a 64-bit CISC core, and they use the same Hypertransport high-speed bus technology as the G5, in case you were wondering that was developed by AMD for use by x86-64 motherboard manufacturers.
I dig Mac in a big way and anybody who disagrees, go and try using a Mac for a bit if you can. You will find you enjoy computing again.
Unless you want to play the latest games.
Not everybody uses their computer for the same thing you do. Someone who just wants to play the latest-greatest first person shooters would be better off with a PC.
That's a blatant lie, without MACs ethernet simply wouldn't work.
I bet your computer is using a MAC right now!
Are you blind? Maybe you didn't read my post? I said that it uses QE to SPEED IT UP, and if QE wasn't there, it would DECREASE PERFORMANCE.
Actually, that's not what you said. You said:
"Mac OS X uses Quartz Extreme to render all the windows in 3d with shadows and fancy coloring. No graphics card = horrid windowing performance."
Implying that without Quartz Extreme windowing performance would be unbearable, that shadows wouldn't work, and that the colours would somehow be affected. All bullshit.
This is an emulator we're talking about, even if it doesn't support Quartz Extreme it can still achieve high performance.
Mac on Linux doesn't support Quartz Extreme yet performs admirably. Though PearPC's graphics speed is not very impressive, it's hardly the limiting factor there either.
I'd contend that the lack of/support for QE has approximately nothing whatsoever to do with performance in an emulator (as anyone whose used a PPC emulator/VM can attest), and that your previous post appeared to say that without QE support the emulator would not be able to render shadows or draw colours correctly. This, as you are obviously aware, is blatantly false.
Which is why I called you a troll.
Had you made the assertions you made in this post, I would have supported some of what you say, but I think without some kind of native graphics card translator, QE would be worthless anyway, and in fact would almost certainly be slower.
As you may already be aware, native graphics card support is not just a matter of 1:1 mapping between the PC and Mac graphics card, because of fundamental architectural differences between x86 and PPC. There would need to be some interception and modification of QE's graphics instructions into the correct form for the PC graphics chipset, which could easily negate any speed benefit.
In short, you're correct about it being slower, but the Chicken Little-esque, sky-is-falling way you went about stating it in your previous post made it sound like the emulator would be useless simply because it didn't support QE, which is far from truthful.
I sit corrected. :)
*some applications may implement their own support for X11 style copy/paste.
Who the hell modded this bollocks insightful, window transparency, shadows, and various other pretty effects all existed prior to quartz extreme.
Everything still works without quartz extreme, as many of the machines still officially supported by OS X are not QE capable.
Please someone with a brain mod this down to -1 Troll where it should be.
Nah, you're thinking of something else. There have been numerous aborted attempts at creating a next generation Mac OS under a variety of strange code names like Pink, Taligent and Copland.
Rhapsody was the name of the OS [strategy] developed under the leadership of Gil Amelio, it was heavily based on OpenStep (moreso than OS X), hence it's cross platform capabilities. Apple also had a version of the Rhapsody frameworks that ran in NT, which they inherited from NeXT. At that stage, the name for Cocoa was YellowBox, and the Classic environment was called BlueBox IIRC. There was no equivalent to the Carbon frameworks in those early days, which was the subject of much debate.
Steve Jobs became Interim CEO after Amelio's departure in 1997 and killed the cross platform versions of Rhapsody along with the Mac 'clone' industry. About a year later Apple announced the name change from Rhapsody to Mac OS X. They released Mac OS X Server in 1999, followed a year later by the almost unrecognisable OS X Public Beta.
Check out these screenshots, which (in order from top to bottom) show the gradual progression from NeXTstep's multi-column Browser to Mac OS X 10.3's Finder*.
NeXTstep
Rhapsody
Mac OS X server 1.x
Panther
*yes, I skipped the aqua Finder.
The machines were both brand new, and in unopened boxes. I have transported both laptops in a padded and armoured backpack, I also used a leather screen protector on the TiBook when transporting or storing it. I have never dropped either of them, I have only scratched the underside on either machine (there are no scratches on the albook, even though I have had it for nearly 6 months). I have never had problems with the hard drives or CD ROM drives in either machine, which (being moving parts) you would expect to be the first things to give up the ghost if the machines were being abused.
The laptops have both been very well used, but also well treated. I've never had these kind of problems with the other laptops I've used, and I've owned a few, about 6 in the last 10 years from various different manufacturers. If anything I treat these machines better than any others I've owned because I paid more for the TiBook than I've ever paid for any piece of computer equipment in my life.
I'm not knocking Apple, because I know plenty of other people have owned both types of laptop without having an endless string of problems like I have, I just feel I have to tell people about my situation when they say how great the quality of Apple hardware is. To be fair, they replaced the machine after only threatening legal action, so I didn't actually have to go to court. Although I got a free upgrade, I would've been much happier if the TiBook could survived a year in the life of any other laptop instead of spending week after week in the shop being repaired. Now that I have another machine that's repeatedly failing, I'm starting to wonder about the legendary quality of Apple hardware, and I think others should know.
"I also know the design is nothing to be sneezed at, since it has excellent airflow and the case is made of aluminum - not cheap plastic like all Macs I've ever seen."
I think you'd be hard pressed to find any case more obviously made of aluminium or more thouroughly engineered for adequate airflow than the one on a PowerMac G5.
I think they've been around more than long enough for you to have sneaked a peek at one on the apple website.
Hahahah. If only I had mod points.
I think they sell them at the Apple online store, they're just a standard USB mouse that costs lots of money and is probably a lot less than half-as-useful on any other OS.
Keep smoking that krak man, the track record of the Macs I have owned, my 667Mhz GigE PowerBook had no less than 9 serious hardware failures in two years, and the replacement Apple gave me after threatening legal action (1GHz AlBook) has been into the shop for latch problems 5 times now and still isn't working right.
It may just be that all laptops are shit these days, but I've owned a lot of PC laptops and never had anywhere near the number of problems as I have with the two Macs I've owned.
Then again, it doesn't seem like I've had the typical run of luck with PowerBooks, and I can't exactly say my sample size of 2 is very scientific. But it's a free (as in speech) internet, and I'm allowed to whine...
"I think I'll be even more comfortable once I get a replacement mouse that had 2 buttons and a clickable wheel..."
You will be more comfortable, although the machines don't ship with two button mice, the OS supports them seamlessly.
In the meantime, you can turn your trackpad into a 3 button trackpad with a scrollwheel by getting sidetrack here.
"I really miss the Linux/Unix way of clicking with left button to drag to highlight...and just click middle button (wheel) to paste. I understand with will work on OSX too with a new mouse."
Sadly no, the Linux method of copy/paste won't work except in X11 applications, but OS X supports text drag and drop which can still be done entirely without moving your hand from the mouse, and is independant of the clipboard.
"Overall..I do like it. I think I'll really like it more when I can figure how to get the Gentoo for OSX portage kit put on...and start to run more native X applications on it."
It wasn't until I started using OS X as just another Unix with a fancy GUI that I really started to feel comfortable.
As a person coming from the linux world, you might want to install the GNU fileutils, which is the same ls/rm/mv/cp/ln/chmod/chown etc that Linux uses, then just alias to the GNU versions instead of the FreeBSD tools it comes with.
Very true :)
I think that incompetence supported a decision that had already been made, however.
Iraq posed no threat to any of their neighbours after the disarmament and sanctions following the first Gulf War.
They had no weapons of mass destruction
and there is no prooof that Hussein supported
terrorists
Remind me again what that war was about if not oil and lining the pockets of companies associated with those in power...
I agree! :)