RTFA this time - it's worth it. And get Ben, Asa, and crew to give him a call - not because they need help, but because I think he's honestly on the same wavelength as they are and a fresh perspective can be a good thing. The issues he raises, while relatively minor, are worth addressing.
Nice taking that one post on a blog out of the context of the rest of the posts. The problem is not that something triggered it, the problem is that it exists to be triggered in the first place. Most people don't like purchasing a box/service to allow them to "take back control" of their TV viewing, only to had said control taken away again.
Buy a Treo 650, and it will do these two things very, very well. The extremely well-done contact integration and Palm software support is icing on the cake. Best damn thing I've bought all year, hands down.
No, since they can only infect 68K code (hell, some of them use files as vectors that haven't existed in over a decade, like WDEF A). No PowerPC viruses were ever written. Even if there had been such virueses, the most they could hope to do is infect Classic, which is not running most of the time, and like the rest of OS X generally has no network ports open. I'll skip the rest, as many other posts have gone into Mac OS X's lack of vectors in great detail.
Re:Waiting for apps isn't annoying, focus stealing
on
GNOME 2.12 Released
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· Score: 1
Mac OS X acts the way you want. I frequently launch Photoshop and then switch out to do something else. Photoshop (or any other program) finishes loading in the background and stays out of my way until I want it.
The polar opposite to this behavior is, of course, Windows, which steals your keyboard focus constantly.
(Why the hell am I responding to such an obvious troll?)
Software? Show me something for the Mac where there isn't a Windows version that as good or better.
iDVD. iPhoto. The entire iLife integration between each other and third party applications (take a look at Toast 7). How about the fact that all of these things are not only extremely high quality apps, but they're free with the system?
Hell, even the Microsoft suite of applications has a markedly better interface on OS X than it does on Windows.
Why is it I have to restart X to change my mousepointer? How about if I want to switch the panel clock from 24ht time to 12hr time? Why the heck would that require a restart of the GUI?
Um, what OS are you talking about, OS X or Linux? OS X has never done anything even vaguely like you're mentioning, all the way back to the pre-beta developer releases. Hell, I don't think any modern Linux GUI does anything like this either.
I'll talk to you once I manage to get the spyware off of my fiance's computer. She's an educated user, Firefox, no IE, good security settings, and suddenly the damn thing is full of Aurora/ABetterInternet and its dozen or so cohorts. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get rid of that damnable thing (ABetterInternet)? Microsoft Antispyware, AdAware, and Spybot can't kill it. Booting into safe mode and running them won't kill it. Trying to remove it manually won't kill it. It uses randomized registry entries and DLL's, NT services, undeletable files. It took a full day, a half dozen bits and pieces, and a lot of work to make it "go away". And then it appeared a few days later spontaneously.
Bullshit like that is why I use a Mac. Spyware, adware, viruses, and trojans do not exist. You can go on with your FUD of "Security? Talk to me when your OS has 95% of the market share" all you want. The fact of the matter is the crap just doesn't exist over here.
The real tipping point comes when you do refresh your hardware, whether it's due to an OS upgrade or otherwise. Why shouldn't Mac OS X (especially when it's on Intel) be a direct competitor to Windows at that point in time?
I especially expect people on the fence to consider buying Intel Macs when they are available. They can keep their existing Windows installation, and dual boot to Mac OS X. It makes it much easier to migrate a piece at a time, instead of in one huge shift (expense, software, learning the ins and outs, etc).
That has a whole lot more to do with the fact that Michael Spindler was running the company. That's when OS development went down the tubes (Copland), hardware went down the tubes (ten bajillion Macs that were configured the same, yet had different model numbers - Performa, anyone?), no marketing at all, no strategy, etc. Everyone was being told to develop for Copland (which was going to break all kinds of software), Apple developed several large software packages that went nowhere (PowerTalk, QuickDraw GX, PlainTalk) and started losing money hand over fist to clone makers. Yeah, they managed to do all of that in the 1994-1996 era, which is after PowerPC and prior to Amelio/Jobs.
None of that has a damn thing to do with the 68K to PPC transition, which was one of the smoothest the industry has seen. Your software "just worked", albeit slightly slower. By the second generation of PowerPC, emulated software ran faster than on the original hardware (jumping from 40Mhz to 120Mhz in a year and a half didn't hurt things). If you used Codewarrior (the savior of Apple at that time) then a checkbox made your code PowerPC native. The System 7 transition (32-bit clean, virtual memory, 32-bit QuickDraw, aliases, etc) was FAR worse than the 68K->PPC transition, yet that didn't scare off developers.
So, as someone who not only lived it but was paying attention, please take your FUD and misinformation and politely shove it.
To reach the desktop. You know, it's still starting services in the background. A distro could do this just as well, but they have chosen to not present the user with the desktop until the system is fully loaded.
And numerous HCI studies have shown people value responsiveness over necessarily "real" speed. After all, what is preemptive multitasking other than a way to keep responsiveness while processing a lot of other things (and dammit, I know there is a lot more to it - I'm not looking at "Design of the UNIX Operating System" and "Modern Operating Systems" on my bookshelf for nothing here)? Linux has its philosophy; other systems used to handle things that way and abandoned it. Meanwhile, it still doesn't cover the abysmally serial nature of the Linux boot. Mac OS X flew when they parallelized the boot process (was that Jaguar or Panther - I forget).
Maybe you are thinking about the C++ name mangling change? But that wasn't a glibc change, that was a GCC change
I freely confess my ignorance of the specifics. I just know that whenever I go to update things in Gentoo, or in synaptic in ubuntu, or whathaveyou, more often than not I have to update a dozen seemingly unrelated packages because the new version of foo required an updated library of bar, and a whole bunch of programs dependent on bar suddenly need to be updated. Maybe it's just me, but I see a lot of similar comments and complaints.
You can do that on Linux too. Just statically link your app.
Then for God's sake, do it sometimes! I know, then you miss out on fixes and security exploits and such that could be fixed in one shared library, but this is seriously hell at times.
Bullshit. You forgot about the registry, components, Application Data, etc.
I said not many apps are single files (especially on Windows). On the Mac, I really can freely copy an application from one computer, and the vast majority of the time it Just Works. No hidden support files of whatever for most apps. Larger apps like Photoshop, yes (although even Microsoft Office can be copied by dragging its folder - everything it needs is right there).
That binary compatibility comes at a cost in terms of maintenance, and is important to very few users who have special-case requirements. Limited manpower means it is prioritized very low at this time compared to things like having hardware drivers that actually work. It's a growing pain, nothing more.
Then please get the Linux community to quit posting "This is the year of Linux" every damned year. It's not until these issues are recognized and accepted as legitimate.
What a load of FUD and bullshit. All I'm going to point to is the two very successful transitions Apple has pulled off with 68K->PPC and OS 9 -> OS X, not to mention the flood of early reports that every damn app people run in Rosetta runs just fine. Photoshop, Office, they all just run.
Please, come up with more than FUD for your doom and gloom scenario.
Oh, I don't know. I don't think the majority of the market cares if it's 32-bit or 64-bit, especially the consumer segment. Seriously, name one app that a consumer will run that will run into the 4GB memory limit? Maybe video editing, and programs like that have generally already found ways to work around such limitations. Pro equipment needs it, sure, but that is slated for 2007, which fits in quite nicely to the published roadmaps.
As cool as it sounds, 64-bit just doesn't mean much for most people. It's not urgent in as many areas as the 16/24 bit transition to 32-bit was.
If you went to the pain of adding Altivec enhancements by hand, then you're probably going to have no problem recoding them for Intel's SSE and such. Most major products are cross-platform and have this code written already, and most minor products just used compiler optimizations. Either the hard work is already done, or Intel will do it for them, gratis.
And as I said elsewhere, nearly every program has a G3 codepath, so Rosetta will run them just fine. Those that really got a significant boost from the G4 will be hurt the hardest, so those will be the ones you upgrade first to Intel native versions. Since such apps clearly have made an investment in the platform and have a need for speed, they're also the most likely to be ready first.
Thanks to G3's holding down the low-end of Apple's line for so long, nearly every app on the market has a G3 code path (otherwise you'd be dumping an awful lot of relatively recent iBooks, iMacs, eMacs, etc). Rosetta simulates a G3; the application will simply take the G3 instruction path and run fine, just a tad slower. Emulating a vector instruction set like that across platforms would have been hell, and likely slower than the G3 codepath in the first place.
Only applications that are G4-only will have any trouble (damn few outside of Apple, and theirs are already Intel optimized).
Wait, you're complaining about the kernel not being as fast to boot? Are you seriously saying Linux is fast at that, with it's bloody serial boot process, initrd's, slow as hell SCSI detection (for those who have it)?
Am I trolling? No. I have a Dell PowerEdge 2300 2x400Mhz server sitting here, and two 800Mhz laptops. The Dell has a 6-drive SCSI RAID I/O subsystem (ServeRAID 3L, 6 x 9.1GB Seagate drives), and better bus speeds than the laptops. The laptops each load Windows (Thinkpad T21) or Mac OS X (iBook G3/800Mhz) in under a minute. The Dell takes a leisurely 5 minutes to boot Gentoo, Fedora, etc, taking a long time just to post (SCSI adapters, mostly), but then at least a minute and a half before reaching "INIT 2.85 booting" or somesuch, and then another minute or so after that. Windows on the same box takes (again) about 30 seconds to a minute after post.
As for the CLI vs GUI, haven't we fought this enough? You can of course come up with a bajillion bizarre completely unrealistic examples that can only be done with a command line. I can come up with many simpler examples that are BETTER done with a command-line. What the original poster referred to were the bajillion things in Linux that would be BETTER done with a GUI (or best, a GUI wrapped around CLI apps). After all, what's the point of all of these piecemeal UNIXy apps that can be chained together if someone can't put a decent GUI on top of common operations and text files? If I *force* you to use a GUI, that's bad. However, if you *force* someone to use the CLI, it's every bit as bad.
Finally, ABI. This isn't all that kernel specific, so it's not really germane; what breaks things isn't the kernel as much as things like glibc. And then once you upgrade a critical thing like that, you have to upgrade EVERYTHING else. I'm sorry, but you just don't see BS like that on Windows, Mac OS X, or anywhere else. That's just painfully fragile, and leads to the upgrade hell that turns people off to Linux.
On Windows and Mac OS X, I can download an app as a single file (not all the time) and it just works. I can copy an app from one system to another (or even when upgrading systems) and it just works. In most cases, I can even copy kernel extensions from one system to another, upgrading at the same time, and it all still works (sadly, the ext2fs driver was one exception to this). There is true binary compatibility there, and this just doesn't exist on Linux.
The one thing Intel is doing that IMHO is wrong is changing the definition of performance from clock speed to performance/watt. This tells us nothing of the performance of the processor or the power required to run it. Instead we should have two basic measurements for all processors: performace and power consumption. Most people are able to do simple calculations such as division on their own or with a calculator. The is no need to hide the actual performance from the end users.
Actually, this is great for end users. If you stick with the two numbers above, all Intel (and others) have to do is emphasize one (performance). Even if they list both, the whole "bigger is better" effect takes over and people will see higher numbers on one, and not care that they just melted a shaft to China.
With this,t improve your overall number, you have to either significantly increase performance at the same speed, or maintain performance at lower power, both of which are desireable outcomes. It drives the right kind of development and behavior.
Except a lot of people will be turned off by such a crippled OS. Look how well Windows XP Starter Edition (or whatever it was called) did. Apple wouldn't risk tarnishing their image in such a way.
Wow, so your projects have a couple full time engineers. Guess what - Microsoft has hundreds if not thousands of them working on their projects, and they are all marching to the beat of the same drummer. Whether or not you like the direction they're heading, they are all working together to make a truly integrated product. Linux and OSS development does not do this, but rather takes pride in its lack of consistency and direction.
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RTFA this time - it's worth it. And get Ben, Asa, and crew to give him a call - not because they need help, but because I think he's honestly on the same wavelength as they are and a fresh perspective can be a good thing. The issues he raises, while relatively minor, are worth addressing.
Anything I type here won't add to it.
Nice taking that one post on a blog out of the context of the rest of the posts. The problem is not that something triggered it, the problem is that it exists to be triggered in the first place. Most people don't like purchasing a box/service to allow them to "take back control" of their TV viewing, only to had said control taken away again.
Buy a Treo 650, and it will do these two things very, very well. The extremely well-done contact integration and Palm software support is icing on the cake. Best damn thing I've bought all year, hands down.
It's not entirely rosy for Mac users. I don't think OS X has any particular protection against Word macro viruses (e.g. Melissa).
Mac OS X doesn't, but Microsoft Office does. Moot point.
What kind of a company would spend millions on BeOs, and then stop selling the technology?
Palm makes money.
No, since they can only infect 68K code (hell, some of them use files as vectors that haven't existed in over a decade, like WDEF A). No PowerPC viruses were ever written. Even if there had been such virueses, the most they could hope to do is infect Classic, which is not running most of the time, and like the rest of OS X generally has no network ports open. I'll skip the rest, as many other posts have gone into Mac OS X's lack of vectors in great detail.
Mac OS X acts the way you want. I frequently launch Photoshop and then switch out to do something else. Photoshop (or any other program) finishes loading in the background and stays out of my way until I want it.
The polar opposite to this behavior is, of course, Windows, which steals your keyboard focus constantly.
One wrong keystroke, and you've just moved dozens (if not hundreds or thousands) of incorrect files. Good luck undoing that mess.
I tend to find "use cases" like this extremely contrived, just like the author's silly little photo example.
(Why the hell am I responding to such an obvious troll?)
Software? Show me something for the Mac where there isn't a Windows version that as good or better.
iDVD. iPhoto. The entire iLife integration between each other and third party applications (take a look at Toast 7). How about the fact that all of these things are not only extremely high quality apps, but they're free with the system?
Hell, even the Microsoft suite of applications has a markedly better interface on OS X than it does on Windows.
Why is it I have to restart X to change my mousepointer? How about if I want to switch the panel clock from 24ht time to 12hr time? Why the heck would that require a restart of the GUI?
Um, what OS are you talking about, OS X or Linux? OS X has never done anything even vaguely like you're mentioning, all the way back to the pre-beta developer releases. Hell, I don't think any modern Linux GUI does anything like this either.
I'll talk to you once I manage to get the spyware off of my fiance's computer. She's an educated user, Firefox, no IE, good security settings, and suddenly the damn thing is full of Aurora/ABetterInternet and its dozen or so cohorts. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get rid of that damnable thing (ABetterInternet)? Microsoft Antispyware, AdAware, and Spybot can't kill it. Booting into safe mode and running them won't kill it. Trying to remove it manually won't kill it. It uses randomized registry entries and DLL's, NT services, undeletable files. It took a full day, a half dozen bits and pieces, and a lot of work to make it "go away". And then it appeared a few days later spontaneously.
Bullshit like that is why I use a Mac. Spyware, adware, viruses, and trojans do not exist. You can go on with your FUD of "Security? Talk to me when your OS has 95% of the market share" all you want. The fact of the matter is the crap just doesn't exist over here.
The real tipping point comes when you do refresh your hardware, whether it's due to an OS upgrade or otherwise. Why shouldn't Mac OS X (especially when it's on Intel) be a direct competitor to Windows at that point in time?
I especially expect people on the fence to consider buying Intel Macs when they are available. They can keep their existing Windows installation, and dual boot to Mac OS X. It makes it much easier to migrate a piece at a time, instead of in one huge shift (expense, software, learning the ins and outs, etc).
That has a whole lot more to do with the fact that Michael Spindler was running the company. That's when OS development went down the tubes (Copland), hardware went down the tubes (ten bajillion Macs that were configured the same, yet had different model numbers - Performa, anyone?), no marketing at all, no strategy, etc. Everyone was being told to develop for Copland (which was going to break all kinds of software), Apple developed several large software packages that went nowhere (PowerTalk, QuickDraw GX, PlainTalk) and started losing money hand over fist to clone makers. Yeah, they managed to do all of that in the 1994-1996 era, which is after PowerPC and prior to Amelio/Jobs.
None of that has a damn thing to do with the 68K to PPC transition, which was one of the smoothest the industry has seen. Your software "just worked", albeit slightly slower. By the second generation of PowerPC, emulated software ran faster than on the original hardware (jumping from 40Mhz to 120Mhz in a year and a half didn't hurt things). If you used Codewarrior (the savior of Apple at that time) then a checkbox made your code PowerPC native. The System 7 transition (32-bit clean, virtual memory, 32-bit QuickDraw, aliases, etc) was FAR worse than the 68K->PPC transition, yet that didn't scare off developers.
So, as someone who not only lived it but was paying attention, please take your FUD and misinformation and politely shove it.
To reach the desktop. You know, it's still starting services in the background. A distro could do this just as well, but they have chosen to not present the user with the desktop until the system is fully loaded.
And numerous HCI studies have shown people value responsiveness over necessarily "real" speed. After all, what is preemptive multitasking other than a way to keep responsiveness while processing a lot of other things (and dammit, I know there is a lot more to it - I'm not looking at "Design of the UNIX Operating System" and "Modern Operating Systems" on my bookshelf for nothing here)? Linux has its philosophy; other systems used to handle things that way and abandoned it. Meanwhile, it still doesn't cover the abysmally serial nature of the Linux boot. Mac OS X flew when they parallelized the boot process (was that Jaguar or Panther - I forget).
Maybe you are thinking about the C++ name mangling change? But that wasn't a glibc change, that was a GCC change
I freely confess my ignorance of the specifics. I just know that whenever I go to update things in Gentoo, or in synaptic in ubuntu, or whathaveyou, more often than not I have to update a dozen seemingly unrelated packages because the new version of foo required an updated library of bar, and a whole bunch of programs dependent on bar suddenly need to be updated. Maybe it's just me, but I see a lot of similar comments and complaints.
You can do that on Linux too. Just statically link your app.
Then for God's sake, do it sometimes! I know, then you miss out on fixes and security exploits and such that could be fixed in one shared library, but this is seriously hell at times.
Bullshit. You forgot about the registry, components, Application Data, etc.
I said not many apps are single files (especially on Windows). On the Mac, I really can freely copy an application from one computer, and the vast majority of the time it Just Works. No hidden support files of whatever for most apps. Larger apps like Photoshop, yes (although even Microsoft Office can be copied by dragging its folder - everything it needs is right there).
That binary compatibility comes at a cost in terms of maintenance, and is important to very few users who have special-case requirements. Limited manpower means it is prioritized very low at this time compared to things like having hardware drivers that actually work. It's a growing pain, nothing more.
Then please get the Linux community to quit posting "This is the year of Linux" every damned year. It's not until these issues are recognized and accepted as legitimate.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Okay, I give up. Someone tell me what the hell this viral sig line is about.
What a load of FUD and bullshit. All I'm going to point to is the two very successful transitions Apple has pulled off with 68K->PPC and OS 9 -> OS X, not to mention the flood of early reports that every damn app people run in Rosetta runs just fine. Photoshop, Office, they all just run.
Please, come up with more than FUD for your doom and gloom scenario.
If there is a mistake...well, you should have used the 'Preview' button!
Yes, yes I should have.
Oh, I don't know. I don't think the majority of the market cares if it's 32-bit or 64-bit, especially the consumer segment. Seriously, name one app that a consumer will run that will run into the 4GB memory limit? Maybe video editing, and programs like that have generally already found ways to work around such limitations. Pro equipment needs it, sure, but that is slated for 2007, which fits in quite nicely to the published roadmaps.
As cool as it sounds, 64-bit just doesn't mean much for most people. It's not urgent in as many areas as the 16/24 bit transition to 32-bit was.
If you went to the pain of adding Altivec enhancements by hand, then you're probably going to have no problem recoding them for Intel's SSE and such. Most major products are cross-platform and have this code written already, and most minor products just used compiler optimizations. Either the hard work is already done, or Intel will do it for them, gratis.
And as I said elsewhere, nearly every program has a G3 codepath, so Rosetta will run them just fine. Those that really got a significant boost from the G4 will be hurt the hardest, so those will be the ones you upgrade first to Intel native versions. Since such apps clearly have made an investment in the platform and have a need for speed, they're also the most likely to be ready first.
Thanks to G3's holding down the low-end of Apple's line for so long, nearly every app on the market has a G3 code path (otherwise you'd be dumping an awful lot of relatively recent iBooks, iMacs, eMacs, etc). Rosetta simulates a G3; the application will simply take the G3 instruction path and run fine, just a tad slower. Emulating a vector instruction set like that across platforms would have been hell, and likely slower than the G3 codepath in the first place.
Only applications that are G4-only will have any trouble (damn few outside of Apple, and theirs are already Intel optimized).
Wait, you're complaining about the kernel not being as fast to boot? Are you seriously saying Linux is fast at that, with it's bloody serial boot process, initrd's, slow as hell SCSI detection (for those who have it)?
Am I trolling? No. I have a Dell PowerEdge 2300 2x400Mhz server sitting here, and two 800Mhz laptops. The Dell has a 6-drive SCSI RAID I/O subsystem (ServeRAID 3L, 6 x 9.1GB Seagate drives), and better bus speeds than the laptops. The laptops each load Windows (Thinkpad T21) or Mac OS X (iBook G3/800Mhz) in under a minute. The Dell takes a leisurely 5 minutes to boot Gentoo, Fedora, etc, taking a long time just to post (SCSI adapters, mostly), but then at least a minute and a half before reaching "INIT 2.85 booting" or somesuch, and then another minute or so after that. Windows on the same box takes (again) about 30 seconds to a minute after post.
As for the CLI vs GUI, haven't we fought this enough? You can of course come up with a bajillion bizarre completely unrealistic examples that can only be done with a command line. I can come up with many simpler examples that are BETTER done with a command-line. What the original poster referred to were the bajillion things in Linux that would be BETTER done with a GUI (or best, a GUI wrapped around CLI apps). After all, what's the point of all of these piecemeal UNIXy apps that can be chained together if someone can't put a decent GUI on top of common operations and text files? If I *force* you to use a GUI, that's bad. However, if you *force* someone to use the CLI, it's every bit as bad.
Finally, ABI. This isn't all that kernel specific, so it's not really germane; what breaks things isn't the kernel as much as things like glibc. And then once you upgrade a critical thing like that, you have to upgrade EVERYTHING else. I'm sorry, but you just don't see BS like that on Windows, Mac OS X, or anywhere else. That's just painfully fragile, and leads to the upgrade hell that turns people off to Linux.
On Windows and Mac OS X, I can download an app as a single file (not all the time) and it just works. I can copy an app from one system to another (or even when upgrading systems) and it just works. In most cases, I can even copy kernel extensions from one system to another, upgrading at the same time, and it all still works (sadly, the ext2fs driver was one exception to this). There is true binary compatibility there, and this just doesn't exist on Linux.
The one thing Intel is doing that IMHO is wrong is changing the definition of performance from clock speed to performance/watt. This tells us nothing of the performance of the processor or the power required to run it. Instead we should have two basic measurements for all processors: performace and power consumption. Most people are able to do simple calculations such as division on their own or with a calculator. The is no need to hide the actual performance from the end users.
Actually, this is great for end users. If you stick with the two numbers above, all Intel (and others) have to do is emphasize one (performance). Even if they list both, the whole "bigger is better" effect takes over and people will see higher numbers on one, and not care that they just melted a shaft to China.
With this,t improve your overall number, you have to either significantly increase performance at the same speed, or maintain performance at lower power, both of which are desireable outcomes. It drives the right kind of development and behavior.
Since a blackout would likely take out your upstream provider as well, having a battery backup wouldn't necessarily keep you online.
Except a lot of people will be turned off by such a crippled OS. Look how well Windows XP Starter Edition (or whatever it was called) did. Apple wouldn't risk tarnishing their image in such a way.
Wow, so your projects have a couple full time engineers. Guess what - Microsoft has hundreds if not thousands of them working on their projects, and they are all marching to the beat of the same drummer. Whether or not you like the direction they're heading, they are all working together to make a truly integrated product. Linux and OSS development does not do this, but rather takes pride in its lack of consistency and direction.
Given that Apple was working on Mac OS (classic) for Intel in 1991, that doesn't make 1993 all that groundbreaking either.