And therein lies the difference - I referred not to the idea that no one might have a use for such features, but that typical users who might benefit from it don't need it. A typical desktop sits in one place, with the same net connection for months at a time. A typical laptop moves between home and work, sometimes getting used on the train/bus/whatever, requiring really only two profiles (AC/wired and battery/netless) and no need to rapidly switch between them
The location manager is not valuable to me not only because it increases speed, it is more an ease of use issue. It may not be of much use on a desktop system, but on a laptop it allows me to have an OFF profile where the wireless and wired networking hardware is powered off completely to save battery, then turn the settings to home (wireless, no DHCP)/work (wired, no DCHP)/Automatic (wired & wireless DHCP) at the click of a button. I have used Unix and Windows on laptops, and found the networking situation to be far more annoying when moving between disparate networking environments.
I use 4 different locations, and I don't regard my setup as being particularly unusual, I've contacted two of my friends to ask them what they have in their location manager. One of my friends, a writer, uses 4 locations on her iBook, (dialup/work/DHCP/off), and another friend who is an admin at a university who uses 3, (wired/wireless/off). It certainly seems to me to be the rule rather than the exception that mobile users have a stack of locations. Is it any coincidence that most of the people I know with laptops have [retro/up/side]graded to Macs?:)
For a desktop system, the location manager can allow you to make a temporary persona to connect to a game lan, or to the network in the office. It allows you to retain your original networking settings and change back to them instantly, so while it's not amazingly useful, it can come in handy.
Location manager is not neccessary by any means, but it is certainly an improvement that I'd miss if I switched back to any other OS, and is a valuable addition that possibly can't be appreciated unless you have an opportunity to make use of it. For instance, there's not much (if anything) that you can't do without a GUI, but most people I know would prefer to at least have the option to use a GUI.
All of the things you mention sound vaguely useful, for someone clueless about the actual workings of their machine.
Hmm, so if I were 'clueful', rather than moving to the top of my screen, I'd much rather click on the terminal and type in a line to set my new network address, a line to delete the default route, a line to add a new default route, and then edit the/etc/resolv.conf line and change the nameservers, and then go to the preference pane for internet settings and change my cache settings every single time I move my laptop between the office and home.
Not every network in the world has DHCP on it, the location manager bundles all of this stuff up in a nice, easily accessible script. Thank you for accusing me of being clueless you gormless twat.
under OS-X, 90% of the "useful" progs run setuid root anyway, so again, you basically have every user a superuser. Why switch between equally useless (or open to abuse, depending on your perspective) accounts?
I also take issue with the idea that most useful programs run with root priviliges, this statement makes me wonder if you've ever laid eyes upon an OS X machine in your life, but more disturbingly, it makes me wonder what you actually meant by your statement.
Is there some new found study linking the percentage of programs running as root with security?
I certainly haven't found anything that allows me to do things I shouldn't be able to do, and programs that require root priviliges usually seem only to want the priviliges to accomplish the task they require before dropping back to normal user. The fact that OS X has a system wide consistent interface for doing this inside a GUI makes it MORE secure than most other Unix systems, which just choke when this happens, thus requiring you to run the program with root priviliges, making your system insecure if you have to leave it unattended for any length of time.
In case you were wondering, my OS X machine shows 70% of it's tasks running with non-root privilige, while my OpenBSD machine shows only 43% of it's tasks running with non-root privilige, therefore I conclude that Mac OS X is more secure than OpenBSD. Logic supplied by pla.
For the purposes of this post, I'll assume that we are including unix work alikes like Linux under the umbrella of Unix
I don't think you understand much about this subject. Mac OS X is a multi user system from the ground up, as much as any other Unix system, the only thing that is NOT multi user about it at the moment is the GUI.
If you go into/etc/inittab on any other Unix and comment out all of the lines that start virtual terminals except one, that doesn't stop it from being a Unix system, nor does it stop it being multiuser.
You are confused about what makes a system into a Unix system. The architecture of Mac OS X is a lot like every other Unix system (but for a few technical changes to abstract the OS from the hardware, and make it easier to write low level OS plugins, and binary device drivers) until you reach the GUI level.
If I take Linux or BSD or Solaris or HP/UX or AIX or Tru64 and put a GUI on it that is not the X Window System, it doesn't stop being a Unix machine.
It seems like you think Apple took Mac OS 9, stuck a Unix layer like Cygwin on top and are trying to call it a Unix system, This is not the case. If anything, compatibility with Mac OS 9 is the thing that is tacked on and "not supposed to be there".
If you want to read all about Mac OS X's history, so that you can fully understand it, and not seem like an idiotic troll when posting on the subject try reading something like these two O'Reilly articles on the history of Mac OS X.
Anyway, rest assured that Apple didn't take their old OS and tack on new features to make it Unix, they took Unix, and tacked on new features to make it compatible with Mac OS.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a better solution actually be to use larger intake apertures and slower moving fans with larger blades to actually correct the noise problem at it's source rather than getting a (cheap?) badly designed case and lining it with noise absorbing material?
I know that the bigger, slower moving fan solution works on CPU coolers, so why not with the whole case. As long as the intake and exahaust holes in the case don't create too much turbulence this idea should work.
Of course your computer would probably end up looking like swiss cheese, but considering that most people are more than happy to put up with a beige block, I'm sure a beige block with 20 billion holes drilled in it would go down just as well.
Then fucking ignore them dickhead, how is it in any way affecting you or anyone you know that Apple are saying that their machines have the fastest CPU in some ill defined category?
Has anyone you know cancelled their order for a dual Opteron or dual Xeon machine and ordered a G5 instead?
Even if this did happen, how would it affect you or anyone else here?
Apple claiming their machines are the fastest doesn't suddenly mean you have to buy one, nor does it make any other machines slower. The only people that this could possibly adversely affect are intel and AMD, who I'm sure will happily sue Apple if they think that they have caused any loss of profit by spreading false information.
What about AMD's questionable and blatant lies calling their 1.7Ghz CPU a 2000+ XP
Or intel releasing a processor that MHz for MHz was slower than the last generation.
All of these companies lie when they're trying to market to desktop users. For one thing they figure we're too stupid to check the numbers for ourselves, and for another they think we'll be swayed by having bigger numbers flashed in front of us.
Apple count on spec, AMD on their PR ratings, and intel on GHz.
It's not much different than an auto company giving you the horsepower, torque, weight, drag coefficient, top speed and quarter mile statistics about their vehicles. It doesn't tell you whether the car is going to get you to work any quicker on Monday morning.
"This geekness went way to far, I really think this must stop, and they should be put in jail."
For wanting to run Linux on the Xbox? or for offering to refrain from releasing code that will allow anything to run on the Xbox, signed or not. In return for a signed OS loader?
These guys may be acting unethically, but they can not yet be proven to have broken any laws. If and when they release an exploit that allows unsigned content on the Xbox, they may have violated the DMCA, but that only applies if they are in the US.
Most other countries rightly allow consumers the freedom to modify things that they paid for in any way they see fit, providing it does not endanger the safety of other people.
Firstly, I'll clarify my point from the first message.
I have formed the opinion over the years that no company can compete in x86 space while Microsoft has the power it currently has over PC manufacturers. I believe that that's the reason why BeOS, OS/2, PC Geos and DR-DOS died (by the way, I've used all of the former).
"Dell's equipment may not be as slick as Apple's, but it works really well, and they've been selling the hell out of them for years. And like it or not, MS has made good progress with its OSs. I'm no MS fan, but XP is "good enough" for the buying public, just like PCs are good enough."
By crap hardware, I don't mean Dell. I mean $5 network cards from a chain store, $30 taiwanese motherboards etc. I don't give a shit about the aesthetics of the computer I use as long as it has a querty keyboard and the X and Y axis of the mouse isn't inverted, to be honest.
"Your argument about other doomed OSs has no relevance. BeOS died from lack of apps, not because it was based on Intel platform."
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the x86 platform, in fact I like Dell servers running a Unixy OS, I'm saying that no company can compete on the x86 platform because Microsoft can force them out of the business instantly by using strongarm tactics against the PC manufacturers. I base this opinion on the fact that they have done it every other time a commercial OS competitor has come along trying to swipe the crown jewels from them.
"You sound like yet-another-rabid-Machead. If Apple didn't want to support every peripheral in the world, they could produce an approved hardware list. Microsoft did that for NT, and other OS vendors do that for Linux. And anyway, nowdays it's largely up to the hardware vendors to write the drivers for the OS. All Apple would have to do is review/approve/certify them."
If it was left up to the hardware vendors to supply drivers for linux, you'd have a choice of Framebuffer, nVidia or ATI video cards, 3com network cards, no mice as far as I know, no sound cards, no USB devices etc etc etc. There never was a scanner driver made for BeOS as far as I know...
Hardware manufacturers might support Apple, but their primary focus would always be on windows. It most likely wouldn't improve driver support, but it would increase the number of people who put crap hardware in their computers, and then expect it to work in OS X because it works in Windows.
As it is, Apple get Apple specialised hardware manufacturers because the platform is sufficiently different electronically to prompt the companies into action. I'm convinced that companies that produce PC hardware don't support Linux because they've already done a driver for x86 and don't see why they should do it again.
"Regarding reliability, despite my dislike for MS, I have to say my office development machine (running XP Pro on a Dell P4 workstation) runs flawlessly. I never reboot it, at least not often enough to even remember. It's up for at least 30+ days at a time. Of course, my RedHat 9.0 running on the Dell P4 workstation beside it stays up even longer, but it doesn't see as much day to day use."
That's nice. I have three machines here running windows, used by the rest of the household, two laptops, and one machine slapped together out of parts bought from a nearby computer supplier. The two laptops have hardly any problems, but I did have all manner of problems with expansion cards in the white box.
This is what I'm talking about. The laptops have wireless cards in them, apart from the fuss of getting them set up with WEP (had to resort to 56bit in the end to get it running) they work pretty flawlessly.
I'm arguing this point to you. When you buy a computer from Dell or Gateway or Compaq/HP, you get something that someone has taken a reasonable amount of time to test and make sure the parts all work together well. When you buy a box and slap it together yourself, you don't know whether the problems come from the hardware/drivers or the
Except that if Apple did move to AMD/Intel, they'd have to dump all the classic and carbon apps, and become a new OS with no support. The same awesome strategy that saw BeOS achieve such mammoth success.
What an awesome way to bring in a bunch of new users- chuck away all the old ones. OS X could join the glorious ranks of MS/intel competitors like DR-DOS, PC Geos, OS/2 and BeOS!
Plus they'd be inundated with whingeing users wanting to know why their windows only scanner doesn't work with OS X when they're using a PC,
Plus! with the tremendous advantage of having to support every piece of shit network card and graphics chipset under the sun, they'd be able to take advantage of the same legendary performance and stability offered by Wintel PCs today.
Your genius is wasted on Slashdot, go and apply for a job as a CEO at a multi-millon dollar company today!
I love the Mac, but I certainly wouldn't say that Apple have been "pulling away for some time now" unless I was talking about what I think Apple's PR people have been doing while trying to play down the G3 & G4's speed deficiencies.:D
It especially doesn't make sense the way they go after schools - they target kids when they're young, which is smart, but I expect they lose a lot of them when they get out of grade school because of ownership costs, which is less smart.
Don't you remember how everything was cooler when you were young. Everything was bigger, shinier and brighter.:)
Apple's bean counters are counting on people to reminisce fondly about their younger days, and how nice it was playing educational games on a Mac, when their copy of MS Word crashes for the fourth time this week and takes out the whole OS and the 40 page document they just created because the hard drive lost an interrupt while swapping.
Meanwhile Microsoft churn out another upgrade that is even less stable and secure than the last version. Their bean counters are counting on users not noticing that most of the advanced features in their OS are place-holders put there for purely illusory purposes like spoilers on Honda Civics.
Computer marketing makes me feel so ill I want to throw away my PowerBook and use FreeBSD on a Taiwanese motherboard from a company I've never heard of. It pays not to think about it too hard.
Classic Mac apologism at work. All the Mac users I know (well, all one of them ignoring slashdot) are treating this like christmas come early, but for the longest time the party line seemed to be "who needs speed when you have MacOS X" or whatever. Of course before that it was "ho hum, another day, another supercomputer" - will Mac users please decide whether they care about speed or not? The story changes every few years!
I can't speak for anyone else, I put the OS before cost and speed issues. I accepted that there would be downsides to owning a Mac (Apple as a vendor, less speed, more price) and as a bonus at the time, I couldn't buy a laptop with a combo drive and a 15" screen from anyone else. But the real reason I bought a Mac was because I've always wanted a NeXT machine since I drooled over their OS and hardware back in 1988. I dropped my OS of choice (Linux) in favour of OS X, even though I could have copied my apps and data over to another x86 laptop more easily.
Also, have you considered that the reason that people are getting excited over the PPC970/G5 is because if this was a PC-Land announcement, AMD or Intel would announce that their 64bit CPU is ready for production, then sometime later Microsoft would announce their 64bit OS, then sometime after that, motherboards and full systems would begin appearing.
Apple, being a sole supplier are able to save their hype and release it all at once. They haven't officially announced a G5 machine yet, so on the 23rd, Apple fanatics get a new OS, a new CPU, a faster bus, USB 2.0, firewire 800, SATA, and Airport Extreme in desktops all on the same day. Worth getting excited about if you're in the market for an OS X machine, and a pretty major announcement by anyone's standards.
Think of the OS as one of the structural components in an engineering project, you wouldn't choose failure prone materials even if they were cheaper because that's a false economy at best, and a possible risk to peoples lives at worst.
The computers in a nuclear power plant may well only send signals to say "vent radioactive gas", but if the operating system locks up because of a stray interrupt, or the CPU locks up because someone said F00F, the consequences could be catastrophic.
The Software is crucial, the OS is crucial and the hardware is crucial for any computer system to keep operating as it should. I think that's a fair generalization.
Ever heard the saying that a chain is only as important as it's weakest link?
"Not that I think turning down free equiptment is a good thing. You can always use them as standalones for the art dept, or some for some other function, but Schools are charged with preparing students for employment, essentially. And when these kids get employed, they will most likely be using PCs, regardless of OS."
I'd argue that modern Macs at least as relevant as a Windows based desktop PC to any kind of vocation that works with enterprize level computing hardware.
Even x86 based server hardware bares little resemblance to desktop machines, so if that hardware is being used to run a Unix, Linux or BSD flavour then the experience using Microsoft Office on a desktop PC is going to be of little to no value at all.
Mac OS X is based on BSD, people experienced with modern Macs are more likely to feel at home with a Unix based OS than someone who's never used a Unix machine their life.
"I question the wisdom of turning down a free computer, but realistically, the student putting MacOS on the "Proficiency" section of his resume is only adding a feather in his cap. A dirty, weather beaten feather. The part that will score the points is where he lists "Microsoft Office". You don't have to like it, I don't even like it, but that's the way it is."
Actually, that's not the way it is.
Macs run Microsoft Office you know, Excel was developed on the Mac and ported to Windows.
Perhaps I should have said "significantly less than $20". A bit of checking around mobile device manufacturers has shown that the total cost of implementing bluetooth per device is about $5 USD, for a production run of 1,000 devices.
And don't forget that you still need to have a TCP/IP stack and an ethernet driver somewhere besides in that card. (Although, WAP also needs a TCP/IP stack...)
Bluetooth implementations appear as a serial device once paired, which is quite a lot simpler to design circuits for.
Besides, as I said in my original message, the savings for manufacturers come in a variety of ways. It's safe to assume that the PCMCIA card you showed is at least half-full of components and antenna(e), so it would cost significantly more to a volume manufacturer to implement.
Bluetooth and 802.11 are not mutually exclusive, and I'd love to have wireless ethernet in my t68i, I'm just trying to say that bluetooth is a very attractive proposition to manufacturers, particularly when you're trying to out-shrink and out-feature your competitors at the same time.
Look at it this way, if I was manufacturing half a million phones and I could have bluetooth on them for 50c or 802.11b for 55c or a combination of the two for $1 - I'd have to justify the extra $25,000 to gain 802.11b and lose bluetooth, or an extra $500,000 to have both. Alternatively, you could probably employ a few extra engineers for the same price.
Slashdot Mirror
And therein lies the difference - I referred not to the idea that no one might have a use for such features, but that typical users who might benefit from it don't need it. A typical desktop sits in one place, with the same net connection for months at a time. A typical laptop moves between home and work, sometimes getting used on the train/bus/whatever, requiring really only two profiles (AC/wired and battery/netless) and no need to rapidly switch between them
:)
The location manager is not valuable to me not only because it increases speed, it is more an ease of use issue. It may not be of much use on a desktop system, but on a laptop it allows me to have an OFF profile where the wireless and wired networking hardware is powered off completely to save battery, then turn the settings to home (wireless, no DHCP)/work (wired, no DCHP)/Automatic (wired & wireless DHCP) at the click of a button. I have used Unix and Windows on laptops, and found the networking situation to be far more annoying when moving between disparate networking environments.
I use 4 different locations, and I don't regard my setup as being particularly unusual, I've contacted two of my friends to ask them what they have in their location manager. One of my friends, a writer, uses 4 locations on her iBook, (dialup/work/DHCP/off), and another friend who is an admin at a university who uses 3, (wired/wireless/off). It certainly seems to me to be the rule rather than the exception that mobile users have a stack of locations. Is it any coincidence that most of the people I know with laptops have [retro/up/side]graded to Macs?
For a desktop system, the location manager can allow you to make a temporary persona to connect to a game lan, or to the network in the office. It allows you to retain your original networking settings and change back to them instantly, so while it's not amazingly useful, it can come in handy.
Location manager is not neccessary by any means, but it is certainly an improvement that I'd miss if I switched back to any other OS, and is a valuable addition that possibly can't be appreciated unless you have an opportunity to make use of it. For instance, there's not much (if anything) that you can't do without a GUI, but most people I know would prefer to at least have the option to use a GUI.
While we're on the subject of splitting hairs like pedantic twits, It's OS X or Mac OS X, not OS/X.
All of the things you mention sound vaguely useful, for someone clueless about the actual workings of their machine.
/etc/resolv.conf line and change the nameservers, and then go to the preference pane for internet settings and change my cache settings every single time I move my laptop between the office and home.
Hmm, so if I were 'clueful', rather than moving to the top of my screen, I'd much rather click on the terminal and type in a line to set my new network address, a line to delete the default route, a line to add a new default route, and then edit the
Not every network in the world has DHCP on it, the location manager bundles all of this stuff up in a nice, easily accessible script. Thank you for accusing me of being clueless you gormless twat.
under OS-X, 90% of the "useful" progs run setuid root anyway, so again, you basically have every user a superuser. Why switch between equally useless (or open to abuse, depending on your perspective) accounts?
I also take issue with the idea that most useful programs run with root priviliges, this statement makes me wonder if you've ever laid eyes upon an OS X machine in your life, but more disturbingly, it makes me wonder what you actually meant by your statement.
Is there some new found study linking the percentage of programs running as root with security?
I certainly haven't found anything that allows me to do things I shouldn't be able to do, and programs that require root priviliges usually seem only to want the priviliges to accomplish the task they require before dropping back to normal user. The fact that OS X has a system wide consistent interface for doing this inside a GUI makes it MORE secure than most other Unix systems, which just choke when this happens, thus requiring you to run the program with root priviliges, making your system insecure if you have to leave it unattended for any length of time.
In case you were wondering, my OS X machine shows 70% of it's tasks running with non-root privilige, while my OpenBSD machine shows only 43% of it's tasks running with non-root privilige, therefore I conclude that Mac OS X is more secure than OpenBSD. Logic supplied by pla.
For the purposes of this post, I'll assume that we are including unix work alikes like Linux under the umbrella of Unix
/etc/inittab on any other Unix and comment out all of the lines that start virtual terminals except one, that doesn't stop it from being a Unix system, nor does it stop it being multiuser.
3 /c ocoa_history_one.htmlm /pub/a/mac/2002/05/10/c ocoa_history_two.html
I don't think you understand much about this subject. Mac OS X is a multi user system from the ground up, as much as any other Unix system, the only thing that is NOT multi user about it at the moment is the GUI.
If you go into
You are confused about what makes a system into a Unix system. The architecture of Mac OS X is a lot like every other Unix system (but for a few technical changes to abstract the OS from the hardware, and make it easier to write low level OS plugins, and binary device drivers) until you reach the GUI level.
If I take Linux or BSD or Solaris or HP/UX or AIX or Tru64 and put a GUI on it that is not the X Window System, it doesn't stop being a Unix machine.
It seems like you think Apple took Mac OS 9, stuck a Unix layer like Cygwin on top and are trying to call it a Unix system, This is not the case. If anything, compatibility with Mac OS 9 is the thing that is tacked on and "not supposed to be there".
If you want to read all about Mac OS X's history, so that you can fully understand it, and not seem like an idiotic troll when posting on the subject try reading something like these two O'Reilly articles on the history of Mac OS X.
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/05/0
http://www.macdevcenter.co
Anyway, rest assured that Apple didn't take their old OS and tack on new features to make it Unix, they took Unix, and tacked on new features to make it compatible with Mac OS.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a better solution actually be to use larger intake apertures and slower moving fans with larger blades to actually correct the noise problem at it's source rather than getting a (cheap?) badly designed case and lining it with noise absorbing material?
I know that the bigger, slower moving fan solution works on CPU coolers, so why not with the whole case. As long as the intake and exahaust holes in the case don't create too much turbulence this idea should work.
Of course your computer would probably end up looking like swiss cheese, but considering that most people are more than happy to put up with a beige block, I'm sure a beige block with 20 billion holes drilled in it would go down just as well.
Yeah, they couldn't have ATI seeing exactly how they cheat on 3Dmark.
Yeah, they couldn't have ATI seeing exactly how they cheat on 3dMark tests.
Oooh... where can I get this PPC emulator from?
Then fucking ignore them dickhead, how is it in any way affecting you or anyone you know that Apple are saying that their machines have the fastest CPU in some ill defined category?
Has anyone you know cancelled their order for a dual Opteron or dual Xeon machine and ordered a G5 instead?
Even if this did happen, how would it affect you or anyone else here?
Apple claiming their machines are the fastest doesn't suddenly mean you have to buy one, nor does it make any other machines slower. The only people that this could possibly adversely affect are intel and AMD, who I'm sure will happily sue Apple if they think that they have caused any loss of profit by spreading false information.
What about AMD's questionable and blatant lies calling their 1.7Ghz CPU a 2000+ XP
Or intel releasing a processor that MHz for MHz was slower than the last generation.
All of these companies lie when they're trying to market to desktop users. For one thing they figure we're too stupid to check the numbers for ourselves, and for another they think we'll be swayed by having bigger numbers flashed in front of us.
Apple count on spec, AMD on their PR ratings, and intel on GHz.
It's not much different than an auto company giving you the horsepower, torque, weight, drag coefficient, top speed and quarter mile statistics about their vehicles. It doesn't tell you whether the car is going to get you to work any quicker on Monday morning.
"This geekness went way to far, I really think this must stop, and they should be put in jail."
For wanting to run Linux on the Xbox? or for offering to refrain from releasing code that will allow anything to run on the Xbox, signed or not. In return for a signed OS loader?
These guys may be acting unethically, but they can not yet be proven to have broken any laws. If and when they release an exploit that allows unsigned content on the Xbox, they may have violated the DMCA, but that only applies if they are in the US.
Most other countries rightly allow consumers the freedom to modify things that they paid for in any way they see fit, providing it does not endanger the safety of other people.
Show me a fruity coloured mac I can get from the Apple store.
To be fair, MS do release a lot of service packs, but they just tend to fix things that MS should have got right the first time. :D
Firstly, I'll clarify my point from the first message.
I have formed the opinion over the years that no company can compete in x86 space while Microsoft has the power it currently has over PC manufacturers. I believe that that's the reason why BeOS, OS/2, PC Geos and DR-DOS died (by the way, I've used all of the former).
"Dell's equipment may not be as slick as Apple's, but it works really well, and they've been selling the hell out of them for years. And like it or not, MS has made good progress with its OSs. I'm no MS fan, but XP is "good enough" for the buying public, just like PCs are good enough."
By crap hardware, I don't mean Dell. I mean $5 network cards from a chain store, $30 taiwanese motherboards etc. I don't give a shit about the aesthetics of the computer I use as long as it has a querty keyboard and the X and Y axis of the mouse isn't inverted, to be honest.
"Your argument about other doomed OSs has no relevance. BeOS died from lack of apps, not because it was based on Intel platform."
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the x86 platform, in fact I like Dell servers running a Unixy OS, I'm saying that no company can compete on the x86 platform because Microsoft can force them out of the business instantly by using strongarm tactics against the PC manufacturers. I base this opinion on the fact that they have done it every other time a commercial OS competitor has come along trying to swipe the crown jewels from them.
"You sound like yet-another-rabid-Machead. If Apple didn't want to support every peripheral in the world, they could produce an approved hardware list. Microsoft did that for NT, and other OS vendors do that for Linux. And anyway, nowdays it's largely up to the hardware vendors to write the drivers for the OS. All Apple would have to do is review/approve/certify them."
If it was left up to the hardware vendors to supply drivers for linux, you'd have a choice of Framebuffer, nVidia or ATI video cards, 3com network cards, no mice as far as I know, no sound cards, no USB devices etc etc etc. There never was a scanner driver made for BeOS as far as I know...
Hardware manufacturers might support Apple, but their primary focus would always be on windows. It most likely wouldn't improve driver support, but it would increase the number of people who put crap hardware in their computers, and then expect it to work in OS X because it works in Windows.
As it is, Apple get Apple specialised hardware manufacturers because the platform is sufficiently different electronically to prompt the companies into action. I'm convinced that companies that produce PC hardware don't support Linux because they've already done a driver for x86 and don't see why they should do it again.
"Regarding reliability, despite my dislike for MS, I have to say my office development machine (running XP Pro on a Dell P4 workstation) runs flawlessly. I never reboot it, at least not often enough to even remember. It's up for at least 30+ days at a time. Of course, my RedHat 9.0 running on the Dell P4 workstation beside it stays up even longer, but it doesn't see as much day to day use."
That's nice. I have three machines here running windows, used by the rest of the household, two laptops, and one machine slapped together out of parts bought from a nearby computer supplier. The two laptops have hardly any problems, but I did have all manner of problems with expansion cards in the white box.
This is what I'm talking about. The laptops have wireless cards in them, apart from the fuss of getting them set up with WEP (had to resort to 56bit in the end to get it running) they work pretty flawlessly.
I'm arguing this point to you. When you buy a computer from Dell or Gateway or Compaq/HP, you get something that someone has taken a reasonable amount of time to test and make sure the parts all work together well. When you buy a box and slap it together yourself, you don't know whether the problems come from the hardware/drivers or the
Except that if Apple did move to AMD/Intel, they'd have to dump all the classic and carbon apps, and become a new OS with no support. The same awesome strategy that saw BeOS achieve such mammoth success.
What an awesome way to bring in a bunch of new users- chuck away all the old ones. OS X could join the glorious ranks of MS/intel competitors like DR-DOS, PC Geos, OS/2 and BeOS!
Plus they'd be inundated with whingeing users wanting to know why their windows only scanner doesn't work with OS X when they're using a PC,
Plus! with the tremendous advantage of having to support every piece of shit network card and graphics chipset under the sun, they'd be able to take advantage of the same legendary performance and stability offered by Wintel PCs today.
Your genius is wasted on Slashdot, go and apply for a job as a CEO at a multi-millon dollar company today!
I love the Mac, but I certainly wouldn't say that Apple have been "pulling away for some time now" unless I was talking about what I think Apple's PR people have been doing while trying to play down the G3 & G4's speed deficiencies. :D
It especially doesn't make sense the way they go after schools - they target kids when they're young, which is smart, but I expect they lose a lot of them when they get out of grade school because of ownership costs, which is less smart.
:)
Don't you remember how everything was cooler when you were young. Everything was bigger, shinier and brighter.
Apple's bean counters are counting on people to reminisce fondly about their younger days, and how nice it was playing educational games on a Mac, when their copy of MS Word crashes for the fourth time this week and takes out the whole OS and the 40 page document they just created because the hard drive lost an interrupt while swapping.
Meanwhile Microsoft churn out another upgrade that is even less stable and secure than the last version. Their bean counters are counting on users not noticing that most of the advanced features in their OS are place-holders put there for purely illusory purposes like spoilers on Honda Civics.
Computer marketing makes me feel so ill I want to throw away my PowerBook and use FreeBSD on a Taiwanese motherboard from a company I've never heard of. It pays not to think about it too hard.
Classic Mac apologism at work. All the Mac users I know (well, all one of them ignoring slashdot) are treating this like christmas come early, but for the longest time the party line seemed to be "who needs speed when you have MacOS X" or whatever. Of course before that it was "ho hum, another day, another supercomputer" - will Mac users please decide whether they care about speed or not? The story changes every few years!
I can't speak for anyone else, I put the OS before cost and speed issues. I accepted that there would be downsides to owning a Mac (Apple as a vendor, less speed, more price) and as a bonus at the time, I couldn't buy a laptop with a combo drive and a 15" screen from anyone else. But the real reason I bought a Mac was because I've always wanted a NeXT machine since I drooled over their OS and hardware back in 1988. I dropped my OS of choice (Linux) in favour of OS X, even though I could have copied my apps and data over to another x86 laptop more easily.
Also, have you considered that the reason that people are getting excited over the PPC970/G5 is because if this was a PC-Land announcement, AMD or Intel would announce that their 64bit CPU is ready for production, then sometime later Microsoft would announce their 64bit OS, then sometime after that, motherboards and full systems would begin appearing.
Apple, being a sole supplier are able to save their hype and release it all at once. They haven't officially announced a G5 machine yet, so on the 23rd, Apple fanatics get a new OS, a new CPU, a faster bus, USB 2.0, firewire 800, SATA, and Airport Extreme in desktops all on the same day. Worth getting excited about if you're in the market for an OS X machine, and a pretty major announcement by anyone's standards.
State your source. :D
Don't use IE Mac then.
Think of the OS as one of the structural components in an engineering project, you wouldn't choose failure prone materials even if they were cheaper because that's a false economy at best, and a possible risk to peoples lives at worst.
The computers in a nuclear power plant may well only send signals to say "vent radioactive gas", but if the operating system locks up because of a stray interrupt, or the CPU locks up because someone said F00F, the consequences could be catastrophic.
The Software is crucial, the OS is crucial and the hardware is crucial for any computer system to keep operating as it should. I think that's a fair generalization.
Ever heard the saying that a chain is only as important as it's weakest link?
"Not that I think turning down free equiptment is a good thing. You can always use them as standalones for the art dept, or some for some other function, but Schools are charged with preparing students for employment, essentially. And when these kids get employed, they will most likely be using PCs, regardless of OS."
I'd argue that modern Macs at least as relevant as a Windows based desktop PC to any kind of vocation that works with enterprize level computing hardware.
Even x86 based server hardware bares little resemblance to desktop machines, so if that hardware is being used to run a Unix, Linux or BSD flavour then the experience using Microsoft Office on a desktop PC is going to be of little to no value at all.
Mac OS X is based on BSD, people experienced with modern Macs are more likely to feel at home with a Unix based OS than someone who's never used a Unix machine their life.
"I question the wisdom of turning down a free computer, but realistically, the student putting MacOS on the "Proficiency" section of his resume is only adding a feather in his cap. A dirty, weather beaten feather. The part that will score the points is where he lists "Microsoft Office".
You don't have to like it, I don't even like it, but that's the way it is."
Actually, that's not the way it is.
Macs run Microsoft Office you know, Excel was developed on the Mac and ported to Windows.
A student whose resumé states they are experienced in using both Macs and Windows is probably going to do better when showing his resumé to a prospective employer. This school isn't talking about throwing away their PCs in favour of free Macs.
Oh, you must mean UCB
Bullshit.
There is no way to enable PgUp and PgDn in Apple's terminal, I challenge anyone to prove otherwise.
Perhaps I should have said "significantly less than $20". A bit of checking around mobile device manufacturers has shown that the total cost of implementing bluetooth per device is about $5 USD, for a production run of 1,000 devices.
And don't forget that you still need to have a TCP/IP stack and an ethernet driver somewhere besides in that card. (Although, WAP also needs a TCP/IP stack...)
Bluetooth implementations appear as a serial device once paired, which is quite a lot simpler to design circuits for.
Besides, as I said in my original message, the savings for manufacturers come in a variety of ways. It's safe to assume that the PCMCIA card you showed is at least half-full of components and antenna(e), so it would cost significantly more to a volume manufacturer to implement.
Bluetooth and 802.11 are not mutually exclusive, and I'd love to have wireless ethernet in my t68i, I'm just trying to say that bluetooth is a very attractive proposition to manufacturers, particularly when you're trying to out-shrink and out-feature your competitors at the same time.
Look at it this way, if I was manufacturing half a million phones and I could have bluetooth on them for 50c or 802.11b for 55c or a combination of the two for $1 - I'd have to justify the extra $25,000 to gain 802.11b and lose bluetooth, or an extra $500,000 to have both. Alternatively, you could probably employ a few extra engineers for the same price.