It still uses a microkernel, UNIX userland and permissions concepts, and has no root access enabled. Pray tell how this is even remotely similar to Windows using a BSD-licensed networking stack.
Mac OS X is a UNIX system as much as Linux is, i.e. in every meaningful way except trademarks.
Please indicate the vector that malware will take to attack a Mac. No network services running out of the box, and users are not running as root (hell, it's not even enabled). No system-wide settings accessible without authentication. So, how exactly is this mythical malware going to get on the box, execute, and bypass permissions?
Face it, security problems on Windows are because of poor design (and to be fair, SP2 was a HUGE step up). Just because there are more Macs does NOT mean there will be the same types of security problems.
I'm sorry, but no. Soft links are purely path based. Hard links are limited to being on the same volume by their design. Aliases combine the flexibility of hard links with the cross-volume nature of soft links (that's why the volume information is separated from the file information in an alias). Unix certainly had the basic idea first, but no other platform has something as "intelligent" as an alias. The only place they fall down is in the shell (we're waiting, Apple!).
Shortcuts are NOT the same as "soft links" or symlinks. If they were, then we could use them as a seamless part of a path. So if one application expects a directory "foo" and its files to be located at C:\ and one application expects the same file to be at C:\Program Files, a shortcut will fail. Symlinking it would work (and as I have discovered, Junction works quite well for this).
Mac OS X already does it the RIGHT way.
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Vista To Get Symlinks?
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· Score: 2, Informative
A symlink is a hack (as many others have mentioned) that relies on pathnames to find a file. This is almost criminally STUPID, since if the file is moved or renamed, the link will break. If any of the intervening folders change, it will break. All sorts of fragility has resulted ever since where things cannot be moved or else links will break.
Mac OS X (and all the way back to System 7 in 1990) did it right by creating aliases which use a two-factor plan to locate its target:
Check the file-id. This is roughly the same as the inode, and will remain the same if the file is moved or renamed. If it's been moved or renamed, then update the path (see step 2).
Check the full pathname. Similar to a symlink. If the original file is deleted, but a different file is located where it was last seen, update the file-id.
Aliases also store sufficient information about the volume they were located on that the Finder can mount the volume automatically (if it's on the network) or inform the user of exactly why it didn't work. This also allows aliases to cross filesystems, which symlinks can but hard links cannot.
This is why symlinks are such a stupid solution on UNIX, since that OS has no excuse - aliases could have been trivially implemented due to the dual-layer nature of the filesystem (inodes separate from hierarchy).
(Now, I agree completely with how sucky it is that the shell does not support them, and that aspect has been sucky since day 1. However, that has nothing to do with alias technology and everything to do with shell implementation.)
To try and forestall the Apple hand-wringing...
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Power-Light Power Chips
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· Score: 1, Insightful
...since this is an embedded processor, it likely won't have things like vector processing units (Altivec) or possibly even out of order execution (as I recall the XBox 360 dropped). Take that along with the fact that it's a couple years away, and it really doesn't affect Apple at all.
Network and power outages are not outside your control if your network is properly designed and funded. I work in hosting for a large company, and if you properly design your site for redundancy a network problem won't affect you (this includes multiple internet providers, etc), and you should have diesel backup for your datacenter for at least days, if not weeks. If ou can't do this, host in a datacenter that can. After that, it's all up to you for application development and proper QA/integration testing.
Bullet-proof commerce sites can be done, just not simply or cheaply.
I hate to break it to you, but the vast majority of the world couldn't care less about Free Software. I know it's important, the vast majority of people on Slashdot know it's important, but the rest of the world really doesn't care very much. The closest you'll see them get to it is free software (not Free), and perhaps open document formats. Hell, it's hard to get them to care about familiar concepts like copyright and patent law, much less esoterica like open source (and to them, it is esoteric).
Those who use technology (rather than just play with it for fun) focus on getting things done, rather than tweaking their uber-box. The Mac excels at this - it just works - without providing a million vectors for worms, spyware, etc as Windows does. Meanwhile, if you want to use it, you have a full BSD system sitting there with a nice ports system (choose Fink, DarwinPorts, or even Gentoo) and can use pretty much any Free software you want. The key is you only have to deal with this if you choose to. You'll never have to touch your/etc/fstab, or setting up a bootloader, fiddling with an xorg.conf, or any of that BS that comes with Linux.
As for engineering, I would say shipping mass-produced liquid-cooled systems and boxes with multiple discrete cooling zones counts for desktop engineering. The Mac Mini has yet to be matched (of course, if you can go a bit bigger the Shuttle offers a lot more). On laptops, features such as the ambient light sensing keyboard and scrolling trackpad are innovative, useful, and again just work. Technologies like USB 2.0, Firewire, DVD burners, 802.11g, Bluetooth are standard across the platform. Apple designs its own motherboards and chipsets (for now, anyway) - that's a hell of a lot different from Dell slapping some components together. Oh, and please tell us what these problems are that are caused by an "overstyled chassis design".
When they... do what I want them to do instead of what someone else wants them to do, then I will be very interested in how they look.
Agreed! And when they do what I want them to do, I'll be interested as well. What's that? You want them to do something different from me?
Seriously, everyone has different needs. At least in iTunes if I make no use of the music store, podcasts, or any of that - I just want to manage my music, thankyouverymuch - I can turn them off in the preferences, and never be bothered by them again.
If you need something more minimal than iTunes, look at WinAmp.
Other countries have proved its possible, and that it works better for more people than the way America does it. Will you really be so foolish as to let ideology stand in opposition to demonstrated proof of benefit to your own person?
Are you being anti-American? Unpatriotic even? Even... a terrorist?
Why is it that there is no provision for multiple people coming up with the same idea independently? In this case, NTP bought the rights to a patent from somewhere - that's fine. However, it certainly doesn't look as if RIM knew about this patent or maliciously used it - as others pointed out, they came up with the same obvious idea at the same time. The difference is then they actually did something with it.
History is rife with examples of people coming up with revolutionary things at the same time, just because the pieces were all falling into place and multiple people went "aha!" at once.
Maybe I'm trying to inject too much common sense into a legal argument, but wouldn't this squash a lot of this IP-squatting, if the law were to accept the idea that multiple parties could independently come up with a novel idea, and the first to actually DO something with it (license it, produce it, or otherwise make use of the idea) would be given priority on the patent?
The nationalism of the whole thing bothers me as well. Just for the sake of argument, say we had a Canadian company patent the same idea in their system a week before a US patent was filed. Does anyone really believe the US courts would uphold a foreign patent over one of their own? I place bets the foreign one would be ignored as having been granted under different standards, much the way the FDA doesn't recognize other countries' drug approvals.
Nevermind the Toshiba (not IBM/Hitachi) 1.8-inch hard drives had existed for quite some time before Apple made the iPod. Hell, IBM/Hitachi's Microdrive (later used in the Mini) had been out for years. No one else saw their potential, so prior to the iPod the best you could get was a Nomad, which used 2.5-inch hard drives. After all, capacity was everything, right? Apple took a huge risk on a completely new and unproven product and bought their remaining stock. What is "anti-competitive" here?
As for your last paragraph, Microsoft's "superior engineering"? Nevermind that Apple's entire history back to the Apple II (and the Wozniak-designed controllers) has been about superior engineering, and Microsoft's has always been about purchasing/licensing/controlling other software and making it "good enough", all the way back to Microsoft BASIC.
Before purchasing (or at least, before opening the box), check the bottom of the box for the serial number. Go to Apple Support and type in the serial number on the lower right to "check your waranty status". Old Mac Mini's come up as "Mac Mini". The new upgraded ones come up as "Mac Mini (Late 2005)".
Quick story:
So, I'm one of the savvy customers that knows about this, and walked into the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. After grabbing a sales guy, I describe the current specs, the mislabeled boxes, and even point him to both eWeek and ZDNet for sources - not exactly Think Secret. He steadfastly refuses to confirm anything - okay, it's what he's been told, but it's still insulting to deny something that is clearly true to a customer who clearly knows what's going on. I'm not asking to confirm they have an Intel Powerbook in the back, I'm looking for a widely reported speedbump, and don't really want to get something that is already obsolete for the same money.
I ask him if I can just check several Mini's serial numbers before purchasing them, so I know I'll get the "right" one. He refuses. Okay, I'll BUY a stack of Mini's, find a "right" one, and return the rest. He refuses to sell me the product, because it will make a lot of hassle to process the returns (hey, I thought I already tried to avoid that for him?). The final conversation went like this:
Me: "So, what you're telling me is I have to buy a Mini and not know what's inside?" Apple: "What you get will be at least what's on the box." Me: "I know that. But you won't allow me to determine if what's in the box is what I want." Apple: *shrugs* "I'll sell you a Mac Mini." Me: "But without knowing what the configuration is."
Repeat ad nauseum (and I was getting sick of it all right). Finally we struck a deal - give me one Mini, and I'll check it. If it's good, I'll take it on the spot. If it's not, I'll walk out. While he claimed they hadn't had a shipment "since July 25th" (at Apple's busiest store? Yeah, right), sure enough, that Mac Mini he produced was the "Late 2005" variety, and had all the improved specs.
So yeah, most consumers won't notice, and some will get a nice bonus. But it SUCKS ASS if you're actually knowledgeable, and can't purchase the system you want, even though they have it and are just stonewalling.
Pray tell what this "shitty emulation layer" is? It certainly isn't Classic, which runs the whole of OS 9 as a process (quite a nice feat enabling almost 100% compatibility), and it certainly isn't Carbon, which is a native API layer on par with Cocoa. I see no emulation in here, much less "shitty" emulation.
OS X is a completely different operating system in all respects than OS 9. Vista is nowhere near as fundamental a shift. The kernel is the same. The existing Win32 API's aren't going anywhere. All they're doing is adding a large number of (needed) new API's.
If a user is trying to do a simple task (play music, write a letter, send e-mail) then it should be a simple affair and they shouldn't need to know any of this. I have no idea how to personally repair my car, but that doesn't mean I can't drive it with some basic knowledge. Now, if you want to do complex things, then you'll need to really understand things, and the interface should make it possible (one of the reasons I love having the command line underneath OS X).
Since the 1970s and 1980s, their teachers pretty much gave up teaching in the name of boosting self-esteem.
There's nothing about having self-esteem that precludes learning. Some people are going to be more intelligent than others. Where the school system in the US has truly failed us is focusing "teaching" on passing random tests, rather than teaching someone how to think critically and learn new things for themselves. Facts and details will be lost in a week, concepts and critical thinking will last a lifetime.
Take history - who honestly cares what date something happened on? It's much more important to know what the causes and effects were, politically, socially, how it influenced later events, what possible other scenarios could have taken place, etc. Dates and factoids are not history.
You should take a look at their compositor architecture. Note how GL sits on top of quartz, not the other way around. That means that instead of quartz rendering to GL (which what glx11 was about), GL is rendering to quartz. This is not a 3d-accelerated compositing, nor is it compositing into GL...it only can be. However, there is no video hardware that can do it perfectly and be accelerated at the same time.
That's exactly what it does. All of the "windows" on the desktop are turned into textures and mapped onto flat rectangles; the final compositing, translucency, etc is all done in GL on the video card.
For example can you alpha blend a full screen video, and a full screen 3d game together? If your Mac can do it at full expected framerate, then I will conceed.
Yeah, you can. There were many reports of multiple DVD's playing, 3D renders running, all with multiple levels of transparent terminal windows on top of the whole mess. Ran without a hitch on Quartz Extreme (obviously, as you add more and more on, you'll need more than the base 16MB of video memory, but I haven't heard of anything stressing on a 32MB or better card). Even on my lowly iBook with a mobility GPU and 32MB of VRAM I can have as many translucent windows and such as I like and toss it on top of rendered 3D or other intense graphical content (movies, etc) - nothing blinks.
I cant find the screen shots at the moment, but here's a huge chunk of technical info on the current generation of Quartz Extreme from Ars Technica.
All of the slowdown is due to drivers not providing the hooks into accelerated frameworks. Since Apple should be the one writing the driver for the X11 -> displayPDF, they are responsible for the suckage of X11 on a Mac.
Interesting, considering that X11 is already 3D accelerated on Mac OS X, and still blows chunks compared to Aqua, which uses the same graphics subsystem.
"X11 for Mac OS X takes advantage of the Mac OS X Quartz graphics system to deliver hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D graphics. Quartz provides snappy scrolling speeds for text, live drag and resize of windows, as well as no-compromise 3D animation through OpenGL Direct Rendering."
Where is it on the Mac? AFAIK displayPDF uses 2d. The answer is -- there is a ton fo framework that needs to be placed...and support for legacy apps is quite hard.
Quartz Extreme. Sorta "been there, done that" for three years now (and in 16MB of VRAM, not the 256MB that Vista wants).
A year ago, they were still using bitmaps on the dock, and when it scales, it looks damn ugly. Where are vector icons?
True, no vector icons, but saying that a bicubic interpolation scaling is "ugly" is a tad ignorant. Do you think vector graphics look great at all sizes when rendered to a bitmap display? Hell no. They'll scale up really well (but since the Dock doesn't go beyond the native icon size of 128x128 it's moot there), but they scale down as poorly as anything else on a screen.
No one in their right mind would use Intel processors for desktop machines at the moment
Funny, I don't see Apple shipping any Intel desktops right now. I see them shipping Intel desktops sometime next year, and even later for their pro line. Coincidentally, this is when Intel will ship their Pentium-M-derived desktop chips, and their 64-bit versions. You will not see a Pentium-4-based chip in any production Intel Mac.
ALL of which is beside the point that the problem with the PowerPC seems to have been on the compiler side, not the hardware.
Where did you pull that little nugget from? The PowerPC was indeed a damn good processor, but it had issues ramping up its speed, lack of focus on the part of IBM and Motorola, and had significant supply issues of one kind or another almost constantly for the last 6 years. There is almost infinitely less risk of supply or focus issues from Intel.
Meanwhile, with Intel chips, Apple gets the Intel compiler (as Intel and Apple both have announced). So that problem (if it indeed is the case) is addressed as well.
Intel bunged them in the form of huge discounts, simple as that.
They probably did. Is there something wrong with that?
Agreed that this is a poor reason for a fork, but it sounds to me like he got very little assistance from the Gimp. If it's possible to do this all with data file changes, then maybe Gimp should ship with a "Photoshop profile" just like Word used to ship with "WordPerfect compatibility". If it can't be done via the data files, then we should ask why this is the case, and fix it.
By "remote apps", I assume you mean X11, as Aqua does not have the networking capabilities of X11. X11 is something of a second-class citizen on OS X (as shown by the parent post), but if you want it to perform better, talk to the xorg guys - it's largely their code in there. As for native apps, performance is excellent.
Meanwhile, where is an OpenGL-accelerated X11 and windowing system on Linux? Seriously. We've seen "tech demos" for well over a year now of wobbly windows and such; when is this going to be usable enough to make it into a distro? Not only will it help Linux in the looks department, but it will probably accelerate X11 a lot on host OS's that already have such accelerated windowing systems in place.
If you want to truly compete with Photoshop and other programs, you have to compete on two fronts - interface and functionality. The interface has to be usable by people on the entry-level for their tasks, and it can't get in the way of pros for theirs. If you want to compete with Photoshop, you're also competing with a massive amount of functionality wrapped in a passable but very refined interface.
The low-end is saturated with dozens of products, but especially Adobe's own Photoshop Elements (which people here like to ignore, probably because it usually costs $35 - it's easier to attack "a thousand dollars Canadian"). On the high-end, you have professionals with very exacting requirements and no time for hassles. These people live for 5-second reductions in processing time because they do it constantly. Anything that causes them to slow down even the tiniest bit will be a deal-breaker. The interface must be completely fluid.
Most open source projects aren't necessarily strapped for cash, but rather they have little focus or centralized planning. They suffer either from feature creep and bloated interfaces that make no sense, or a dearth of features due to lack of desire to implement what other people want. Cash won't make a bit of difference if the developers don't have focus, and I don't see that kind of emphasis on quality and interface refinement in the Gimp. "Good enough" isn't good enough.
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It still uses a microkernel, UNIX userland and permissions concepts, and has no root access enabled. Pray tell how this is even remotely similar to Windows using a BSD-licensed networking stack.
Mac OS X is a UNIX system as much as Linux is, i.e. in every meaningful way except trademarks.
Please indicate the vector that malware will take to attack a Mac. No network services running out of the box, and users are not running as root (hell, it's not even enabled). No system-wide settings accessible without authentication. So, how exactly is this mythical malware going to get on the box, execute, and bypass permissions?
Face it, security problems on Windows are because of poor design (and to be fair, SP2 was a HUGE step up). Just because there are more Macs does NOT mean there will be the same types of security problems.
The fact that it keeps being brought up should indicate something.
Just saying something is done doesn't make it any more done than it was before you said it, and this is most certainly NOT "done".
I'm sorry, but no. Soft links are purely path based. Hard links are limited to being on the same volume by their design. Aliases combine the flexibility of hard links with the cross-volume nature of soft links (that's why the volume information is separated from the file information in an alias). Unix certainly had the basic idea first, but no other platform has something as "intelligent" as an alias. The only place they fall down is in the shell (we're waiting, Apple!).
Shortcuts are NOT the same as "soft links" or symlinks. If they were, then we could use them as a seamless part of a path. So if one application expects a directory "foo" and its files to be located at C:\ and one application expects the same file to be at C:\Program Files, a shortcut will fail. Symlinking it would work (and as I have discovered, Junction works quite well for this).
Mac OS X (and all the way back to System 7 in 1990) did it right by creating aliases which use a two-factor plan to locate its target:
Aliases also store sufficient information about the volume they were located on that the Finder can mount the volume automatically (if it's on the network) or inform the user of exactly why it didn't work. This also allows aliases to cross filesystems, which symlinks can but hard links cannot.
This is why symlinks are such a stupid solution on UNIX, since that OS has no excuse - aliases could have been trivially implemented due to the dual-layer nature of the filesystem (inodes separate from hierarchy).
(Now, I agree completely with how sucky it is that the shell does not support them, and that aspect has been sucky since day 1. However, that has nothing to do with alias technology and everything to do with shell implementation.)
Please, do NOT use ACID!
Too late, dude. Whoa.
...since this is an embedded processor, it likely won't have things like vector processing units (Altivec) or possibly even out of order execution (as I recall the XBox 360 dropped). Take that along with the fact that it's a couple years away, and it really doesn't affect Apple at all.
Network and power outages are not outside your control if your network is properly designed and funded. I work in hosting for a large company, and if you properly design your site for redundancy a network problem won't affect you (this includes multiple internet providers, etc), and you should have diesel backup for your datacenter for at least days, if not weeks. If ou can't do this, host in a datacenter that can. After that, it's all up to you for application development and proper QA/integration testing.
Bullet-proof commerce sites can be done, just not simply or cheaply.
Wouldn't that make Baby Jesus cry?
What a complete and utter load of BS.
/etc/fstab, or setting up a bootloader, fiddling with an xorg.conf, or any of that BS that comes with Linux.
I hate to break it to you, but the vast majority of the world couldn't care less about Free Software. I know it's important, the vast majority of people on Slashdot know it's important, but the rest of the world really doesn't care very much. The closest you'll see them get to it is free software (not Free), and perhaps open document formats. Hell, it's hard to get them to care about familiar concepts like copyright and patent law, much less esoterica like open source (and to them, it is esoteric).
Those who use technology (rather than just play with it for fun) focus on getting things done, rather than tweaking their uber-box. The Mac excels at this - it just works - without providing a million vectors for worms, spyware, etc as Windows does. Meanwhile, if you want to use it, you have a full BSD system sitting there with a nice ports system (choose Fink, DarwinPorts, or even Gentoo) and can use pretty much any Free software you want. The key is you only have to deal with this if you choose to. You'll never have to touch your
As for engineering, I would say shipping mass-produced liquid-cooled systems and boxes with multiple discrete cooling zones counts for desktop engineering. The Mac Mini has yet to be matched (of course, if you can go a bit bigger the Shuttle offers a lot more). On laptops, features such as the ambient light sensing keyboard and scrolling trackpad are innovative, useful, and again just work. Technologies like USB 2.0, Firewire, DVD burners, 802.11g, Bluetooth are standard across the platform. Apple designs its own motherboards and chipsets (for now, anyway) - that's a hell of a lot different from Dell slapping some components together. Oh, and please tell us what these problems are that are caused by an "overstyled chassis design".
When they ... do what I want them to do instead of what someone else wants them to do, then I will be very interested in how they look.
Agreed! And when they do what I want them to do, I'll be interested as well. What's that? You want them to do something different from me?
Seriously, everyone has different needs. At least in iTunes if I make no use of the music store, podcasts, or any of that - I just want to manage my music, thankyouverymuch - I can turn them off in the preferences, and never be bothered by them again.
If you need something more minimal than iTunes, look at WinAmp.
Other countries have proved its possible, and that it works better for more people than the way America does it. Will you really be so foolish as to let ideology stand in opposition to demonstrated proof of benefit to your own person?
Are you being anti-American? Unpatriotic even? Even... a terrorist?
Why is it that there is no provision for multiple people coming up with the same idea independently? In this case, NTP bought the rights to a patent from somewhere - that's fine. However, it certainly doesn't look as if RIM knew about this patent or maliciously used it - as others pointed out, they came up with the same obvious idea at the same time. The difference is then they actually did something with it.
History is rife with examples of people coming up with revolutionary things at the same time, just because the pieces were all falling into place and multiple people went "aha!" at once.
Maybe I'm trying to inject too much common sense into a legal argument, but wouldn't this squash a lot of this IP-squatting, if the law were to accept the idea that multiple parties could independently come up with a novel idea, and the first to actually DO something with it (license it, produce it, or otherwise make use of the idea) would be given priority on the patent?
The nationalism of the whole thing bothers me as well. Just for the sake of argument, say we had a Canadian company patent the same idea in their system a week before a US patent was filed. Does anyone really believe the US courts would uphold a foreign patent over one of their own? I place bets the foreign one would be ignored as having been granted under different standards, much the way the FDA doesn't recognize other countries' drug approvals.
(Quite obviously, IANAL)
Nevermind the Toshiba (not IBM/Hitachi) 1.8-inch hard drives had existed for quite some time before Apple made the iPod. Hell, IBM/Hitachi's Microdrive (later used in the Mini) had been out for years. No one else saw their potential, so prior to the iPod the best you could get was a Nomad, which used 2.5-inch hard drives. After all, capacity was everything, right? Apple took a huge risk on a completely new and unproven product and bought their remaining stock. What is "anti-competitive" here?
As for your last paragraph, Microsoft's "superior engineering"? Nevermind that Apple's entire history back to the Apple II (and the Wozniak-designed controllers) has been about superior engineering, and Microsoft's has always been about purchasing/licensing/controlling other software and making it "good enough", all the way back to Microsoft BASIC.
Before purchasing (or at least, before opening the box), check the bottom of the box for the serial number. Go to Apple Support and type in the serial number on the lower right to "check your waranty status". Old Mac Mini's come up as "Mac Mini". The new upgraded ones come up as "Mac Mini (Late 2005)".
Quick story:
So, I'm one of the savvy customers that knows about this, and walked into the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. After grabbing a sales guy, I describe the current specs, the mislabeled boxes, and even point him to both eWeek and ZDNet for sources - not exactly Think Secret. He steadfastly refuses to confirm anything - okay, it's what he's been told, but it's still insulting to deny something that is clearly true to a customer who clearly knows what's going on. I'm not asking to confirm they have an Intel Powerbook in the back, I'm looking for a widely reported speedbump, and don't really want to get something that is already obsolete for the same money.
I ask him if I can just check several Mini's serial numbers before purchasing them, so I know I'll get the "right" one. He refuses. Okay, I'll BUY a stack of Mini's, find a "right" one, and return the rest. He refuses to sell me the product, because it will make a lot of hassle to process the returns (hey, I thought I already tried to avoid that for him?). The final conversation went like this:
Me: "So, what you're telling me is I have to buy a Mini and not know what's inside?"
Apple: "What you get will be at least what's on the box."
Me: "I know that. But you won't allow me to determine if what's in the box is what I want."
Apple: *shrugs* "I'll sell you a Mac Mini."
Me: "But without knowing what the configuration is."
Repeat ad nauseum (and I was getting sick of it all right). Finally we struck a deal - give me one Mini, and I'll check it. If it's good, I'll take it on the spot. If it's not, I'll walk out. While he claimed they hadn't had a shipment "since July 25th" (at Apple's busiest store? Yeah, right), sure enough, that Mac Mini he produced was the "Late 2005" variety, and had all the improved specs.
So yeah, most consumers won't notice, and some will get a nice bonus. But it SUCKS ASS if you're actually knowledgeable, and can't purchase the system you want, even though they have it and are just stonewalling.
Pray tell what this "shitty emulation layer" is? It certainly isn't Classic, which runs the whole of OS 9 as a process (quite a nice feat enabling almost 100% compatibility), and it certainly isn't Carbon, which is a native API layer on par with Cocoa. I see no emulation in here, much less "shitty" emulation.
OS X is a completely different operating system in all respects than OS 9. Vista is nowhere near as fundamental a shift. The kernel is the same. The existing Win32 API's aren't going anywhere. All they're doing is adding a large number of (needed) new API's.
Every time you hear someone say "I shouldn't have to read the manual to figure out how to use it!", you're seeing another example of the problem.
"Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay.
If a user is trying to do a simple task (play music, write a letter, send e-mail) then it should be a simple affair and they shouldn't need to know any of this. I have no idea how to personally repair my car, but that doesn't mean I can't drive it with some basic knowledge. Now, if you want to do complex things, then you'll need to really understand things, and the interface should make it possible (one of the reasons I love having the command line underneath OS X).
Since the 1970s and 1980s, their teachers pretty much gave up teaching in the name of boosting self-esteem.
There's nothing about having self-esteem that precludes learning. Some people are going to be more intelligent than others. Where the school system in the US has truly failed us is focusing "teaching" on passing random tests, rather than teaching someone how to think critically and learn new things for themselves. Facts and details will be lost in a week, concepts and critical thinking will last a lifetime.
Take history - who honestly cares what date something happened on? It's much more important to know what the causes and effects were, politically, socially, how it influenced later events, what possible other scenarios could have taken place, etc. Dates and factoids are not history.
I cant find the screen shots at the moment
Well, still no screen shot, but a bunch of more readable information. One things especially to note is CGDisplayUsesOpenGLAcceleration.
You should take a look at their compositor architecture. Note how GL sits on top of quartz, not the other way around. That means that instead of quartz rendering to GL (which what glx11 was about), GL is rendering to quartz. This is not a 3d-accelerated compositing, nor is it compositing into GL...it only can be. However, there is no video hardware that can do it perfectly and be accelerated at the same time.
That's exactly what it does. All of the "windows" on the desktop are turned into textures and mapped onto flat rectangles; the final compositing, translucency, etc is all done in GL on the video card.
For example can you alpha blend a full screen video, and a full screen 3d game together? If your Mac can do it at full expected framerate, then I will conceed.
Yeah, you can. There were many reports of multiple DVD's playing, 3D renders running, all with multiple levels of transparent terminal windows on top of the whole mess. Ran without a hitch on Quartz Extreme (obviously, as you add more and more on, you'll need more than the base 16MB of video memory, but I haven't heard of anything stressing on a 32MB or better card). Even on my lowly iBook with a mobility GPU and 32MB of VRAM I can have as many translucent windows and such as I like and toss it on top of rendered 3D or other intense graphical content (movies, etc) - nothing blinks.
I cant find the screen shots at the moment, but here's a huge chunk of technical info on the current generation of Quartz Extreme from Ars Technica.
All of the slowdown is due to drivers not providing the hooks into accelerated frameworks. Since Apple should be the one writing the driver for the X11 -> displayPDF, they are responsible for the suckage of X11 on a Mac.
Interesting, considering that X11 is already 3D accelerated on Mac OS X, and still blows chunks compared to Aqua, which uses the same graphics subsystem.
"X11 for Mac OS X takes advantage of the Mac OS X Quartz graphics system to deliver hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D graphics. Quartz provides snappy scrolling speeds for text, live drag and resize of windows, as well as no-compromise 3D animation through OpenGL Direct Rendering."
Where is it on the Mac? AFAIK displayPDF uses 2d. The answer is -- there is a ton fo framework that needs to be placed...and support for legacy apps is quite hard.
Quartz Extreme. Sorta "been there, done that" for three years now (and in 16MB of VRAM, not the 256MB that Vista wants).
A year ago, they were still using bitmaps on the dock, and when it scales, it looks damn ugly. Where are vector icons?
True, no vector icons, but saying that a bicubic interpolation scaling is "ugly" is a tad ignorant. Do you think vector graphics look great at all sizes when rendered to a bitmap display? Hell no. They'll scale up really well (but since the Dock doesn't go beyond the native icon size of 128x128 it's moot there), but they scale down as poorly as anything else on a screen.
No one in their right mind would use Intel processors for desktop machines at the moment
Funny, I don't see Apple shipping any Intel desktops right now. I see them shipping Intel desktops sometime next year, and even later for their pro line. Coincidentally, this is when Intel will ship their Pentium-M-derived desktop chips, and their 64-bit versions. You will not see a Pentium-4-based chip in any production Intel Mac.
ALL of which is beside the point that the problem with the PowerPC seems to have been on the compiler side, not the hardware.
Where did you pull that little nugget from? The PowerPC was indeed a damn good processor, but it had issues ramping up its speed, lack of focus on the part of IBM and Motorola, and had significant supply issues of one kind or another almost constantly for the last 6 years. There is almost infinitely less risk of supply or focus issues from Intel.
Meanwhile, with Intel chips, Apple gets the Intel compiler (as Intel and Apple both have announced). So that problem (if it indeed is the case) is addressed as well.
Intel bunged them in the form of huge discounts, simple as that.
They probably did. Is there something wrong with that?
Agreed that this is a poor reason for a fork, but it sounds to me like he got very little assistance from the Gimp. If it's possible to do this all with data file changes, then maybe Gimp should ship with a "Photoshop profile" just like Word used to ship with "WordPerfect compatibility". If it can't be done via the data files, then we should ask why this is the case, and fix it.
By "remote apps", I assume you mean X11, as Aqua does not have the networking capabilities of X11. X11 is something of a second-class citizen on OS X (as shown by the parent post), but if you want it to perform better, talk to the xorg guys - it's largely their code in there. As for native apps, performance is excellent.
Meanwhile, where is an OpenGL-accelerated X11 and windowing system on Linux? Seriously. We've seen "tech demos" for well over a year now of wobbly windows and such; when is this going to be usable enough to make it into a distro? Not only will it help Linux in the looks department, but it will probably accelerate X11 a lot on host OS's that already have such accelerated windowing systems in place.
If you want to truly compete with Photoshop and other programs, you have to compete on two fronts - interface and functionality. The interface has to be usable by people on the entry-level for their tasks, and it can't get in the way of pros for theirs. If you want to compete with Photoshop, you're also competing with a massive amount of functionality wrapped in a passable but very refined interface.
The low-end is saturated with dozens of products, but especially Adobe's own Photoshop Elements (which people here like to ignore, probably because it usually costs $35 - it's easier to attack "a thousand dollars Canadian"). On the high-end, you have professionals with very exacting requirements and no time for hassles. These people live for 5-second reductions in processing time because they do it constantly. Anything that causes them to slow down even the tiniest bit will be a deal-breaker. The interface must be completely fluid.
Most open source projects aren't necessarily strapped for cash, but rather they have little focus or centralized planning. They suffer either from feature creep and bloated interfaces that make no sense, or a dearth of features due to lack of desire to implement what other people want. Cash won't make a bit of difference if the developers don't have focus, and I don't see that kind of emphasis on quality and interface refinement in the Gimp. "Good enough" isn't good enough.
Very interesting given questions of how porn drives technology. The article, and the graph.