And yet in spite of all these things you mention that existed in the late 90's, OSX 10.2 still smeared X11 in UI performance. I was a *rabid* FreeBSD desktop user in those days yet my jaw still dropped when I saw Quartz Extreme working the first time.
2D graphics acceleration has been around forever. Early attempts in XFree86 were more similar to hardware QuickDraw acceleration on classic MacOS than Quartz Extreme. Using OpenGL for compositing was introduced in OSX 10.2 and it was some time before that was seen in X11.
So yeah, Macs have had hardware accelerated graphics just as long as Linux, possibly even before Linux existed. This is part of the reason they were so awesome for the DTP and graphic arts fields for a long time. Hell, my Atari 800 had hardware graphics acceleration LOL
EDA apps are kind of a rarity on the Mac but they exist. Now that's a pretty extreme niche market but one that needs more attention. Funny that Xilinx ISE has a Linux version yet no Mac version.... when the market for a Mac version would probably be larger. Hell, it wouldn't take much to port.
In an academic environment VMWare is your friend in those cases because you can't simply run an alternative for OSX and get away with it in class most of the time and you're quite on your own if you decide to and run into problems.
There are various circuit simulators and layout tools however but you'll still probably really want VMWare around for that particular field.
Yes, Intel *helped* Apple gain more market share but people wouldn't be interested anyway if the "overpriced piece of shit" myth was true. In most typical fields, people have been able to "do their work" on Macs since the early 90's and they can coexist in a Windows domain quite nicely if you have a SysAdmin with a clue who isn't afraid to learn something outside of the "MS is god" comfort bubble. You can even manage them with AD.
Other than that, the people don't pay attention unless it's a hindrance. Which PPC was but Apple thought it was being different back in the 90s for whatever reason.
Not saying the Intel leap didn't make sense at the time but there was nothing wrong with PPC. The PPC601 and PPC604 absolutely SPANKED the early Pentiums. The later G3's were faster than the Pentium II. The G4 was faster than the Pentium III for a long time until the P-III finally got a severe clock speed advantage for a couple years. The G5 obliterated the Pentium IV performance-wise, especially in floating point.
The biggest issue is the PPC manufacturers (Freescale, Motorola, IBM) couldn't/wouldn't dump the R&D dollars necessary to improve power efficiency and they always lagged behind in clock speed except for the initial major CPU releases. Intel is simply "good enough" and fast. That does not make it a great architecture. Hell, even back in the 386/486 days the Motorola 68030 and 68040-based Macs were often faster at lower clock speeds. The PowerPC was a damn good architecture and still is.
I've seen several desktop workstation architectures come and go..... VAX, Alpha, m68k, m88k, PPC, SPARC (arguably not quite dead yet), PA-RISC, etc.... All of them had real measurable advantages over x86. But x86 is very common, thus lots of R&D dollars available to propel it to "good enough" status and let people run legacy x86 crap. That doesn't mean x86 is always better and people should ignore anything else. Personally, I like choice! Especially when the other choices are very innovative and compete on merit rather than existing market presence.
There probably is shitty windows only software that people need so badly, the fact that you've thought of two native apps doesn't magically solve that issue, niche applications will often be written very poorly and for only one platform. Why are you getting so excited about the possibility that users might want to buy a mac as just another shiny PC?
Yeah, there probably is. That was my point, they use those apps in Unity Mode with VMWare and use native apps the rest of the time normally. Most people trying to use it as simply a Windows box get confused by the different keyboard layout and multi-touch trackpad. So I imagine the cases where people buy a Mac just to run Windows on it are rare.
Strange niche business apps and hacked-together VB and Access stuff are very common use cases for VMWare. Not bootcamp generally.
Part of the promise of automation is that everyone would benefit... shorter hours... higher pay. This never materialized. So, I am fine with a level of socialism for those who are willing to work but cannot make ends meet.
Yep, it ended up being split two ways:
Option A.) Brutal hours at the same pay with less coworkers Option B.) No hours and no pay
I imagine companies are far more profitable due to the technology as well but the employees typically don't see any of that additional gain. I seem to remember health benefits being a whole lot more obtainable in the past as well. Now most lower-middle-class people with families simply can't afford it.
Considering that we recently had a significant minimum wage hike several years ago, I'm really not seeing much damage that was caused. I'm all for another increase.
Most of these places actively look for desperate adults and won't hire kids. You can't even work in most convenient stores in this state until you are 21 anyway.
The reason is, desperate adults have no options and are willing to be abused and deprived of benefits. A lazy kid can always go back to school.
The only time I see teenagers or young adults working in my area is during summer break. At that point, McDonald's might pick a few of them up but they don't last long. The average minimum wage worker I see in my area is in their late 30's to early 50's.
I work for a company that employs a LOT of minimum wage cashiers. I know the deal pretty well.
As one business learns they can treat their employees like crap, eventually the rest follow suit. That's why unions exist and we have a minimum wage in the first place.
Wages have not increased proportionally to the cost of goods. I know people making $36k/yr that can barely feed their kids and pay the rent on their......TRAILER.
I support wage increases across the board to coincide with massive cost of living increases the last decade. Companies don't have an inherit right to profit at the expense of their employees' well being. Many of the middle class don't even have health insurance and eat worse than those on food stamps. If the corporations have to take a profit hit, too f**king bad. When they start having NO profit, they have good reason to whine. I am not a commodity to be abused. The "go somewhere else" argument doesn't hold water when most other corporations decide to do the same thing and chant the same "you can go elsewhere then" line.
No, it was either sell shit and survive or stick with PowerPC and miss a product cycle or two. The later G5's are faster than the early Core Duo and first gen Core2 Duo machines, especially in floating point. Apple just knew IBM wouldn't be able to keep up and the cheapest option moving forward was Intel. And as a side bonus, people can run their Wintel shit.
There was NOTHING wrong with PPC except for the fact install started to acquire better fabs and got more of a clue which closed the gap too much for comfort.
The G5 STOMPED the Pentium IV which it was designed to compete against.
Regarding using KATE. KATE is a little too cumbersome for my taste, but it is freaking cool and extensible. Anyone who has gone through the effort of getting it set up would want to take it with them when they changed platforms. That is not an unreasonable expectation, esp when the platform is built on a Nix. Better native options? Maybe, but not to the GP.
Yet I installed kate and all it's dependencies with a simple "sudo port install kate" from command line this morning.
Your right, FINK kinda sucks and a lot of the packages in their repo are stale unless you use unstable branch and that's when dependency issues really start to show. I have had no worse of an experience with Macports than I have with APT. There's even GUI package managers for both package systems.
Are there some packages that aren't there because there were too many Linuxisms to port it easily? Yep. Those same packages have issues on FreeBSD systems as well.
Linux went from a decent UNIX clone to a wannabe Windows competitor and it's really starting to break app portability. Especially for larger packages like GNOME or KDE.
Maybe create a standard for USB serial interfaces that everyone can use? I think that already exists (the CDC).
Bingo. NIH syndrome will always bite you in the ass. Not using an open standard because you want people to think you're more unique and cool is just a recipe for needlessly blowing money, reinventing the wheel and causing people great pain such as this.
Personally, I think if they had sold the chips as "FTDI compatible" and have a link on the site or install CD to FTDI's driver download page instead of trying to brand them as FTDI chips this would be a non-issue. FTDI would simply have to compete.
They had GPU assisted rendering (first compositing, then full UI rendering) since what? 2005? I remember it was around 10.4 PPC. We have 10.10 now. Windows only figured it out on Vista and up. Linux STILL doesn't have it (Xgl was just compositing) unless you count hacks like glamour.
Actually, Quartz Extreme made its debut in MacOS 10.2 in 2002. So yeah, it's been a long damn time.
BBEdit and various ports of Emacs for starters but there's many more, even a native GUI. Or you could use XCode. Or Eclipse.
X11 is neither antiquated or stale. Sure, it has a long history having started in 1987.
It's quite stale. The protocol itself hasn't changed significant and has required kludge after kludge that pretty much breaks the whole reason for its existence. There's a reason Sun tried to push NeWS and NeXT was pushing its own Display Postscript-based window system that ALSO had network transparency (why Apple didn't keep this intact I'm not sure because it was pretty cool!). NeWS was OK for a proof of concept. NeXT's window system was downright awesome. The reason they weren't adopted for EVERY UNIX SYSTEM was the fact that A.) Postscript required an expensive license. B.) They were proprietary and X11 was essentially free.
However MacOS also has a long history, starting in 1976 with BSD (from which it's derived) and 1982 for ObjectiveC.
Actually, MacOS was an entirely in-house design. MacOS X was derived from NeXTStep which was a mutant Mach/BSD hybrid. One could also say Windows was stale because of lingering MS-DOS code.
OSX also didn't ignore the last 25 years of OS research and has evolved. X11 has simply had kludge after kludge piled on top.
For an example of what I mean, try getting an old NCD or IBM X-terminal to actually work in the modern age with modern X11 apps. If you don't have the same X11 library versions and likely X server version on both ends, prepare for some fun. Everything that was cool about X has been marginalized to make it easier to port 3D games, play video content and have nice looking fonts..... and be slower than most other windowing systems. It's time for it to retire.
If mere age of the original relases is a problem, then OSX is far more stale and antiquated than X11.
Clearly that's a silly argument, but you're obviously a mindless Fanboi/window system bigot.
Mindless Fanboi LOL No. I'm an experienced sysadmin who has dealt with just about every major UNIX variant still in existence and several that aren't.
I install common and mainstream utilities all the time. In fact, I just installed KATE with a single command to prove a point. And all I had to do is type "sudo port install kate". Like I said, either he's a troll or he's lazy and didn't do proper research and expected it to act like yet another Debian knockoff.
And it's no more complicated than any other UNIX. Like I said, if you only know how to stumble through an X11 GUI desktop environment with tools to hold your hand the entire way you do not have any true "SysAdmin" experience.
You'd have many problems, in fact probably more, installing a newer version of KATE on a STANDARD UNIX (HP-UX, Solaris, etc). Linux is not a standard UNIX system and a lot of open source packages have a lot of Linuxisms now. Systemd and crap like that is actually going to kill portability for things like desktop environments. Now, FreeBSD ports has it right but even they can't fix all the Linuxisms in things like GNOME and certain things just plain don't work or have limited functionality on other UNIX systems.
The OS and nice hardware integration alone makes it worth it to me. And it's not overpriced kit compared to EQUIVALENT PC hardware in a similar form factor, in many cases it's actually cheaper.
Really? Kind of funny since IBM was directly selling the Nazis punch-card tabulation machines and other tech to make their extermination of the Jews more efficient.
No, it'll probably get put in a picture frame and mounted on the wall or in a glass box never to see power again.
That's what happens when people with more money than brains buy a "piece of history".
Personally, I think "vintage" computers should be played with, experienced, and used. I let my kids play with my Atari 800 all the time. The Apple I wasn't real special either, the Altair was far more capable when well-equipped and had more historical significance. The only thing Apple brought to the table was a cheap 6502-based SBC. Something others had done already including MOS themselves.
I certainly wouldn't pay that much for one, even if I had billions in the bank. Especially for something that will ultimately be a display piece. Hell, if you're looking for something that looks cool and is arguably the worlds first personal computer, get a damn PDP-8/e, it'd be cheaper AND cooler looking.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously? Anyone still masochist enough for that "authentic experience"?
Nope, I either wait for a DVD release or I acquire it through other means if I want HD quality as I refuse to ever own a BluRay player.
And yet in spite of all these things you mention that existed in the late 90's, OSX 10.2 still smeared X11 in UI performance. I was a *rabid* FreeBSD desktop user in those days yet my jaw still dropped when I saw Quartz Extreme working the first time.
2D graphics acceleration has been around forever. Early attempts in XFree86 were more similar to hardware QuickDraw acceleration on classic MacOS than Quartz Extreme. Using OpenGL for compositing was introduced in OSX 10.2 and it was some time before that was seen in X11.
So yeah, Macs have had hardware accelerated graphics just as long as Linux, possibly even before Linux existed. This is part of the reason they were so awesome for the DTP and graphic arts fields for a long time. Hell, my Atari 800 had hardware graphics acceleration LOL
EDA apps are kind of a rarity on the Mac but they exist. Now that's a pretty extreme niche market but one that needs more attention. Funny that Xilinx ISE has a Linux version yet no Mac version.... when the market for a Mac version would probably be larger. Hell, it wouldn't take much to port.
In an academic environment VMWare is your friend in those cases because you can't simply run an alternative for OSX and get away with it in class most of the time and you're quite on your own if you decide to and run into problems.
There are various circuit simulators and layout tools however but you'll still probably really want VMWare around for that particular field.
Yes, Intel *helped* Apple gain more market share but people wouldn't be interested anyway if the "overpriced piece of shit" myth was true. In most typical fields, people have been able to "do their work" on Macs since the early 90's and they can coexist in a Windows domain quite nicely if you have a SysAdmin with a clue who isn't afraid to learn something outside of the "MS is god" comfort bubble. You can even manage them with AD.
Other than that, the people don't pay attention unless it's a hindrance. Which PPC was but Apple thought it was being different back in the 90s for whatever reason.
Not saying the Intel leap didn't make sense at the time but there was nothing wrong with PPC. The PPC601 and PPC604 absolutely SPANKED the early Pentiums. The later G3's were faster than the Pentium II. The G4 was faster than the Pentium III for a long time until the P-III finally got a severe clock speed advantage for a couple years. The G5 obliterated the Pentium IV performance-wise, especially in floating point.
The biggest issue is the PPC manufacturers (Freescale, Motorola, IBM) couldn't/wouldn't dump the R&D dollars necessary to improve power efficiency and they always lagged behind in clock speed except for the initial major CPU releases. Intel is simply "good enough" and fast. That does not make it a great architecture. Hell, even back in the 386/486 days the Motorola 68030 and 68040-based Macs were often faster at lower clock speeds. The PowerPC was a damn good architecture and still is.
I've seen several desktop workstation architectures come and go..... VAX, Alpha, m68k, m88k, PPC, SPARC (arguably not quite dead yet), PA-RISC, etc.... All of them had real measurable advantages over x86. But x86 is very common, thus lots of R&D dollars available to propel it to "good enough" status and let people run legacy x86 crap. That doesn't mean x86 is always better and people should ignore anything else. Personally, I like choice! Especially when the other choices are very innovative and compete on merit rather than existing market presence.
There probably is shitty windows only software that people need so badly, the fact that you've thought of two native apps doesn't magically solve that issue, niche applications will often be written very poorly and for only one platform. Why are you getting so excited about the possibility that users might want to buy a mac as just another shiny PC?
Yeah, there probably is. That was my point, they use those apps in Unity Mode with VMWare and use native apps the rest of the time normally. Most people trying to use it as simply a Windows box get confused by the different keyboard layout and multi-touch trackpad. So I imagine the cases where people buy a Mac just to run Windows on it are rare.
Strange niche business apps and hacked-together VB and Access stuff are very common use cases for VMWare. Not bootcamp generally.
Part of the promise of automation is that everyone would benefit... shorter hours... higher pay. This never materialized. So, I am fine with a level of socialism for those who are willing to work but cannot make ends meet.
Yep, it ended up being split two ways:
Option A.) Brutal hours at the same pay with less coworkers
Option B.) No hours and no pay
I imagine companies are far more profitable due to the technology as well but the employees typically don't see any of that additional gain. I seem to remember health benefits being a whole lot more obtainable in the past as well. Now most lower-middle-class people with families simply can't afford it.
Considering that we recently had a significant minimum wage hike several years ago, I'm really not seeing much damage that was caused. I'm all for another increase.
Most of these places actively look for desperate adults and won't hire kids. You can't even work in most convenient stores in this state until you are 21 anyway.
The reason is, desperate adults have no options and are willing to be abused and deprived of benefits. A lazy kid can always go back to school.
The only time I see teenagers or young adults working in my area is during summer break. At that point, McDonald's might pick a few of them up but they don't last long. The average minimum wage worker I see in my area is in their late 30's to early 50's.
I work for a company that employs a LOT of minimum wage cashiers. I know the deal pretty well.
As one business learns they can treat their employees like crap, eventually the rest follow suit. That's why unions exist and we have a minimum wage in the first place.
Wages have not increased proportionally to the cost of goods. I know people making $36k/yr that can barely feed their kids and pay the rent on their......TRAILER.
I support wage increases across the board to coincide with massive cost of living increases the last decade. Companies don't have an inherit right to profit at the expense of their employees' well being. Many of the middle class don't even have health insurance and eat worse than those on food stamps. If the corporations have to take a profit hit, too f**king bad. When they start having NO profit, they have good reason to whine. I am not a commodity to be abused. The "go somewhere else" argument doesn't hold water when most other corporations decide to do the same thing and chant the same "you can go elsewhere then" line.
It was hard but somehow we manag@#$%^&*@#$*&(*&#$ADSHJFHDKLJAF*(S*(&
NO CARRIER
install=Intel..... typo
No, it was either sell shit and survive or stick with PowerPC and miss a product cycle or two. The later G5's are faster than the early Core Duo and first gen Core2 Duo machines, especially in floating point. Apple just knew IBM wouldn't be able to keep up and the cheapest option moving forward was Intel. And as a side bonus, people can run their Wintel shit.
There was NOTHING wrong with PPC except for the fact install started to acquire better fabs and got more of a clue which closed the gap too much for comfort.
The G5 STOMPED the Pentium IV which it was designed to compete against.
Regarding using KATE. KATE is a little too cumbersome for my taste, but it is freaking cool and extensible. Anyone who has gone through the effort of getting it set up would want to take it with them when they changed platforms. That is not an unreasonable expectation, esp when the platform is built on a Nix. Better native options? Maybe, but not to the GP.
Yet I installed kate and all it's dependencies with a simple "sudo port install kate" from command line this morning.
Your right, FINK kinda sucks and a lot of the packages in their repo are stale unless you use unstable branch and that's when dependency issues really start to show. I have had no worse of an experience with Macports than I have with APT. There's even GUI package managers for both package systems.
Are there some packages that aren't there because there were too many Linuxisms to port it easily? Yep. Those same packages have issues on FreeBSD systems as well.
Linux went from a decent UNIX clone to a wannabe Windows competitor and it's really starting to break app portability. Especially for larger packages like GNOME or KDE.
Maybe create a standard for USB serial interfaces that everyone can use? I think that already exists (the CDC).
Bingo. NIH syndrome will always bite you in the ass. Not using an open standard because you want people to think you're more unique and cool is just a recipe for needlessly blowing money, reinventing the wheel and causing people great pain such as this.
Personally, I think if they had sold the chips as "FTDI compatible" and have a link on the site or install CD to FTDI's driver download page instead of trying to brand them as FTDI chips this would be a non-issue. FTDI would simply have to compete.
They had GPU assisted rendering (first compositing, then full UI rendering) since what? 2005? I remember it was around 10.4 PPC. We have 10.10 now. Windows only figured it out on Vista and up. Linux STILL doesn't have it (Xgl was just compositing) unless you count hacks like glamour.
Actually, Quartz Extreme made its debut in MacOS 10.2 in 2002. So yeah, it's been a long damn time.
Such as?
BBEdit and various ports of Emacs for starters but there's many more, even a native GUI. Or you could use XCode. Or Eclipse.
X11 is neither antiquated or stale. Sure, it has a long history having started in 1987.
It's quite stale. The protocol itself hasn't changed significant and has required kludge after kludge that pretty much breaks the whole reason for its existence. There's a reason Sun tried to push NeWS and NeXT was pushing its own Display Postscript-based window system that ALSO had network transparency (why Apple didn't keep this intact I'm not sure because it was pretty cool!). NeWS was OK for a proof of concept. NeXT's window system was downright awesome. The reason they weren't adopted for EVERY UNIX SYSTEM was the fact that A.) Postscript required an expensive license. B.) They were proprietary and X11 was essentially free.
However MacOS also has a long history, starting in 1976 with BSD (from which it's derived) and 1982 for ObjectiveC.
Actually, MacOS was an entirely in-house design. MacOS X was derived from NeXTStep which was a mutant Mach/BSD hybrid. One could also say Windows was stale because of lingering MS-DOS code.
OSX also didn't ignore the last 25 years of OS research and has evolved. X11 has simply had kludge after kludge piled on top.
For an example of what I mean, try getting an old NCD or IBM X-terminal to actually work in the modern age with modern X11 apps. If you don't have the same X11 library versions and likely X server version on both ends, prepare for some fun. Everything that was cool about X has been marginalized to make it easier to port 3D games, play video content and have nice looking fonts..... and be slower than most other windowing systems. It's time for it to retire.
If mere age of the original relases is a problem, then OSX is far more stale and antiquated than X11.
Clearly that's a silly argument, but you're obviously a mindless Fanboi/window system bigot.
Mindless Fanboi LOL No. I'm an experienced sysadmin who has dealt with just about every major UNIX variant still in existence and several that aren't.
I install common and mainstream utilities all the time. In fact, I just installed KATE with a single command to prove a point. And all I had to do is type "sudo port install kate". Like I said, either he's a troll or he's lazy and didn't do proper research and expected it to act like yet another Debian knockoff.
And it's no more complicated than any other UNIX. Like I said, if you only know how to stumble through an X11 GUI desktop environment with tools to hold your hand the entire way you do not have any true "SysAdmin" experience.
You'd have many problems, in fact probably more, installing a newer version of KATE on a STANDARD UNIX (HP-UX, Solaris, etc). Linux is not a standard UNIX system and a lot of open source packages have a lot of Linuxisms now. Systemd and crap like that is actually going to kill portability for things like desktop environments. Now, FreeBSD ports has it right but even they can't fix all the Linuxisms in things like GNOME and certain things just plain don't work or have limited functionality on other UNIX systems.
The OS and nice hardware integration alone makes it worth it to me. And it's not overpriced kit compared to EQUIVALENT PC hardware in a similar form factor, in many cases it's actually cheaper.
Oh, and you can run plenty of Linux and UNIX software on OSX as well. That opens up choice quite a bit.
What helped its popularity was compatibility with all those cheesy DOS business apps. More choices had nothing to do with it.
And most users hate choice, that's why they use IE and MS Office.
It's only socialist if you're very poor or in the top 1%. The rest of us are clearly the enemy.
Really? Kind of funny since IBM was directly selling the Nazis punch-card tabulation machines and other tech to make their extermination of the Jews more efficient.
Henry Ford was also an ardent Nazi supporter.
LOL Well played.
No, it'll probably get put in a picture frame and mounted on the wall or in a glass box never to see power again.
That's what happens when people with more money than brains buy a "piece of history".
Personally, I think "vintage" computers should be played with, experienced, and used. I let my kids play with my Atari 800 all the time. The Apple I wasn't real special either, the Altair was far more capable when well-equipped and had more historical significance. The only thing Apple brought to the table was a cheap 6502-based SBC. Something others had done already including MOS themselves.
I certainly wouldn't pay that much for one, even if I had billions in the bank. Especially for something that will ultimately be a display piece. Hell, if you're looking for something that looks cool and is arguably the worlds first personal computer, get a damn PDP-8/e, it'd be cheaper AND cooler looking.
functional institutions, and a democratic government that answers to the people.
Are they accepting US immigrants?