The author got the timeline wrong. Mac people didn't start abandoning the Mac when Apple made the 150 million $ deal with microsoft. They did it in 1995-96 when Apple was having insane quality control problems or in 99 when Steve killed the mac clones. The Mac people interrest in alternative OSes grew in 97-'98 when Apple was really into clonners. The BeOS was being built for most powerPCs and clones and later came Linux. When Apple nuked the clonners many were so pissed they tried to switch to the BeOS, but found the platform was dead without any hardware to run on (Apple has stopped Be from running its OS on new macs and BeOS for intel was still months away or had no software). Linux was a nice alternative and merging the mac refugees with the DOS refugees (who couldn't compute without some sort of shell) there begat Linux.
Convince a man by means of a clinical trial that hitting yourself in the head with a fish for long periods of time can reduce your colestorol, and he'll have a head ache for a lifetime.
This is irrelevent. The implication here is that outlook is being used or required to spread the virus. This is nonsence and a potentialy dagerous assumption!
I've always wondered in cases like that who has the copy. If you make a.mp3 copy of the songs you bought but had stolen does that make your copy leagal and the original CDs the copy? I mean information is information irespective of the medium. If you're paying for the privalige of owning a copy, if you make an (illegal) copy and someone steals your the original disk, does the disk that was stolen become the (illegal) copy?
Consider the following:
Two CD-R disks. Each one with the same information on it, but one was copied off the other. Which is the original? The term "original", with proper digital data looses all the conotations of "better" or "less corupt" or "higher fidelity". The only thing that remains is that one disk was copied before the other. If nobody knows which one is which then is there an original at all?
This does not match with my Mac experience. 1 months after getting my first computer (that's of all time) I had figured out how to re-install the system and done so.
"you have to set it up for her".. cause everyone has got an IT department in their basement..
I mean you have to install programs for her? good lord! and configure it! wow... Do you double click on the app and do dictation to? I know many people who can "use" computers this way.
Sometime around 1995 Apple's macintosh system went from the 680X0 architechture to the RISC base PPC achitecture. Since there were no applications incuding the MacOS itself that was written for this new architecture, at the PCC macs introduction, just about nothing was powerMac native. Despite this annoying problem, most casual software ran faster and the OS fealt far more responsive. Apple manged to do this by re-writting only a few routines in the MacOS. Basicaly they followed the 90/10 rule and re-wrote the most used 10% of the code.
This gave the first initial boost.
Later the gurus over at Connectix created this program called SpeedDouble which aimed to speed up you Mac by 2x. On power macs, one of the ways this was done was by using a super cool dynamic, re-compiling emulator that would save decoded instructions in a sort of cache and simply execute those instead of going through the emulation process all over again. This product wa smarketed as speeding up your Mac by 2X and while it didn't, the speed increase it offered was still remarkable enough to justify purchasing it (or at least pirtating it:-). I Still run its decendent to this very day on my old 5200. ) for most powerMac users. Later on Apple included its own version inside the so called PCI PowerMacs and up.
This was the second speed boost.
Over the course of the next few years, Apple embarked on an agressive OS development schedual which, among other things, brought more PPC code to the system. It was funn because the new PPC code would almost always cancel out the fact that the OS was slower because of these new features but if you read the littterature the OS was getting faster with each revision by leaps of bounds. If you follow the posts, Apple's OS should have become self aware sometime around 1999.
The funny things is, to this day, the MacOS stilkl have an absurd amount of 68k code left in it, yet it's faster than MacOS X by leaps and bounds despite the fact that MacOS X is 68k free...
Anyways.. As a memeber of the mac community up until recently, I've heard all sort of promissing emulation technologies. They never work. The best I've ever gotten i real world performance is 1/8 the speed. Forget it. This technology is not worth following. Go visit my web page to see new promissing technology:-)
When I was selling computers I got all sorts of flack for saying "actually" and correcting people. People don't buy computers based on any logical criteria as far as I can tell.
Typical person goes into a store says: "I'd like to buy a computer".
Sales persone says: "We're having a sale onm this one. It has a very low price and works well. It is a good deal"..
Persone: "Ok I'l have that one." then gets bragging rights since he got a good deal on his computer sinc ehe got it for X hudred less than his co-worker who bought a computer three months ago (wow, who da thunk it..)... The less you say about computer specs, the more likely people will buy.. This is why I quit that job.
He's fired most of his HI guys, I don't know why he'd listen to them for this one thing. When Jobs came back to Apple the Human INterface group was one of the first to be axed. I mean you can tell.. QT, Sherlock II MacOS X, all have serious UI problems...
If you do buy CD and don't use them to copy copyright materials.. you should just request the money back. I mean it's CD-R, you can't re-use them.. just show that there's no copyright stuff on the disk..
Of course this s still a guilty unti prooven inocent approach..
Yeah, I've heard rate going from 3 Mbs to 8Mbs.. the tech guys are full of it..
BTW: Whyd on't you like calling DSL modems, modems... I thought DSL modems modulate and de-modulate their signals... Unlike ISDN, that is... which is really just a digital interface box... I though the modulation and demoduklation in DSL modems is why they have such hidious first hop latency...
Sympatico high speed is good.. I have three computers connected (directly.. yum) to it and no one has complained so far... The service has never been down and the only problems I've had have been with the billing deparment typing in the wrong expiry date for the credit card 4 times... (butt heads)
Yeess.... It doesn't scale well, so I wrote my own
on
Gnutella Not Scaling?
·
· Score: 1
That's why I'm writting my own Gnutella network that does scale well. It scales very nicely. I'm doing it as my final year eng project.. I already have a working prototype but it could be better.. Anyways, you can bet your sweet ass that when it is finished, it will show up on Source Forge....
I got my Mac and it as the first computer I ever had.. After 1 month it died and I had to re-install the system.. I did this 3 times before realising that system software is very fragile. Now, 8 years later, I bought a PC.. I've never used windows before and installed it from scatch. It's easy. In fact, I find it somewhat ironic that people go out and buy a game like Myst or riven when the same types of puzzles can be found simply by fiddling around with your computer.
With all the changes to the OS GUI (a my computer icon, screwy desktop, no applemenu, file switcher just a bunch of icons, charging for a BETA, system software that requires 128 megs of ram!?) perhaps its time to change the apple icon on slashdot to steve jobs as borg:-)
Click on the disk press command-e Click on the disk press command-y Click on disk select put away fomr file menu Click on disk slect eject disk fomr the Special Menu Drag disk to the trash (for some reasone the most poular)
Click on disk press command option e (ejects the disk and leave it behind for disk-to disk copy wiht only one drive.. Try it one time.. you'll get to do the disk swapping fun) Command shift 1 (same eject and leave behind, note: commane -e does this in systems earlyer than MacOS 8.0....) Hold down option and select eject disk. poke a pin in the little hole to the left of the disk drive. note: Don't do this unless the disk is stuck.
Now.. You have all these ways... isn't ONE of them intuative for you:-)
While the mac can have pre-emptively multitaksed threads. It mostly uses something known as co-operative multitasking. This means the currently executing program gets to decided when it realease the processor (great for games, bad for servers:-)..).. This exists because the MacOS is a continuous opperating system going back to 1984 when a Mac only had 128k of memory and started up form a 400k floppy. In order to have programs that work on the new system and the old they invented this system of multitaksing. The 1984 bagae is also another reasone why modal dialog boxes block the CPU and freeze the interface. Apple has actually been buggering about wiht this problem ever since it first because apparent in system 6. In sytems greatter than 8.0 there's a set of additional routines for having dialogues that allow you to swithc tasks. Try any modern program that uses the Nativigational service API for opening and saving files and you'll see them. This is very multi-taskable. You can also use MacOS 9.0 for any lenght of time and see other types of dialogues that even allow multithreading. And the MacOS 9 Finder's famous "pasive dialogues"...
When you see the old style dialogues this is either because the program was made to run under system 7 or sometimes system 6 even or just hasen't taken advantage of the new API because the programmers don't want to since nobody really cares much about this issue outside of people using the MacOS as a low-volume server. This si a bit annoying for powerusers.
Anyways.. The next version fo the MacOS (version 10 or X whatever) is based on a Unix Micro-kernal based thing so it's completely different. You should read some of the things they're doing to allow programs of today to run on it... They have three APIS sets in there... The classic, Carbon and the re-vamped openstep API based on the ideas of objective C. it should be interresting.
Intuative simply means: works as expected; or is consistant wiht other things you've already experienced. In thia way it's possible for a computer to be intuative. All it has to be is internally consistant and use metephores from the real world or other situations the user might have already come into contact with. These two ideas work together to provide intuative behavior.
1) Self consistancy: The MacOS has traditionally worked to build a consistant enviroment.. ie: all programs have (or should have if they follow MacOS interface guildlines) a FILE mane and an EDIT menue with a QUIT and CUT COPY PASTE menue items irrespective of weather they even use them or not. There's standard keyboard shortcuts of Comamnd C for Copyu, Command W for close window and the best: comand Q for quit. This means you can start up a completely new application you've never seen and type in these keyuboard shortcuts (among many others) and know what the program will do. This goes to the very deffinition of intuative. All aspects of the MacOS try to do this. In fact things like the Quicktime movie player and "Sherlock II" have been reviled by most Mac Power users since they do not use the standard interface or interface behaviors. Also you'll note that when you drag something somewhere it's either a move, or if a move is not possible, a copy.. The MacOS doesn't have the (as far as I can tell) completely random behavior windows exibits whenever I try to move or copy something.. (A shortcut? Did I tell you to make a shortcut.. no, I said move you stupid thing.. oh so now you're going to move.. and what about now.. a copy.. great..)
2) Use realworld metaphores: I'm thinking specifically of things like the desktop, although this can also be found in the icons: use a pencil to draw.. Use something that looks like a notbook to store notes (notepad). There's a folder here that has a mini computer on it.. Oh that must be some sort of computer code... (system folder)... What about this document? (It's a word doc) it looks different than this document (appleworks doc),.. anwyays...
Making a computer easy to use typically is a question of making it intuative.. That was the original point of a GUI.. although now it's degenerated into more of a "scares user less than a command line" approach where the user is some sort of baby.. oh, the user drags to the desktop.. he really wants to make an alias.. we'll do that for him. Who's supposed to be in control here? This is the kind of thing that windows users have toruble with when comming to the mac.. the mac doesn't try to baby the user. it does what you want and what the user should expect should happen when they do that. anyways...
As for things like protected memory.. this si only usefull to programmers.. Most users I know of never use more than one app at a time so don't care if only one app goes down... At leats the MacOS tells them they should restart their computer now.
Pre-emptive multitasking. It would be nice but in typical usuase I never run into this problem... The MacOS multitaks just fine 90% of the time. To me, having a nice intuative interface is more usefull then having pre-emtive multitasking.. It's more powerfull. I can use any generic program in existance with hardly any learning curve. If you really want to see how having a good interface is powerfull check out the old Claris programs... Very strraight forward apps that any newby can use with some veyr powerfull abilities.. In the old claris works you can dump a Spreadsheet into any kind of other document.. for that matter a draw or paint or word prcessing doc too.. Sort of like OLE, but it runs on an 8Mhz mac SE, takes up 2 megs of ram and 2 megs of disk space... The best part is, it doens't interfear with new user's. You have to click on this button down near the zoom in- zoom out buttons... Anyways.. now that Apple has screwed all this up in AppleWorks 6... I'm sticking with 5.0...
As for the File System and other bottlenecks.. yes, these are a pain. I expect these are problems programmers are up against when they try to make a big-full featured GOOD app on the Mac. THis is the real reasone Apple is going to MacOS X.. It's better to program on. I mean, having to restart your computer evertime a program seg-faults is insane! AGGGH! And that's if it dies right away.. sometimes it only makes your system really unstable so it crashes in code that was corupted by your code.. anyways... MacOS X is for developers. I'm learning Objective C right now because I figure MacOS X will be the ultimate developement platform...:-) bye
Slashdot Mirror
The author got the timeline wrong. Mac people didn't start abandoning the Mac when Apple made the 150 million $ deal with microsoft. They did it in 1995-96 when Apple was having insane quality control problems or in 99 when Steve killed the mac clones. The Mac people interrest in alternative OSes grew in 97-'98 when Apple was really into clonners. The BeOS was being built for most powerPCs and clones and later came Linux. When Apple nuked the clonners many were so pissed they tried to switch to the BeOS, but found the platform was dead without any hardware to run on (Apple has stopped Be from running its OS on new macs and BeOS for intel was still months away or had no software). Linux was a nice alternative and merging the mac refugees with the DOS refugees (who couldn't compute without some sort of shell) there begat Linux.
Convince a man by means of a clinical trial that hitting yourself in the head with a fish for long periods of time can reduce your colestorol, and he'll have a head ache for a lifetime.
The number one selling game of all times, Myst, is not on the list. Hummm.. and did I miss unreal?
This is irrelevent. The implication here is that outlook is being used or required to spread the virus. This is nonsence and a potentialy dagerous assumption!
I've always wondered in cases like that who has the copy. If you make a .mp3 copy of the songs you bought but had stolen does that make your copy leagal and the original CDs the copy? I mean information is information irespective of the medium. If you're paying for the privalige of owning a copy, if you make an (illegal) copy and someone steals your the original disk, does the disk that was stolen become the (illegal) copy?
Consider the following:
Two CD-R disks. Each one with the same information on it, but one was copied off the other. Which is the original? The term "original", with proper digital data looses all the conotations of "better" or "less corupt" or "higher fidelity". The only thing that remains is that one disk was copied before the other. If nobody knows which one is which then is there an original at all?
This does not match with my Mac experience. 1 months after getting my first computer (that's of all time) I had figured out how to re-install the system and done so. "you have to set it up for her".. cause everyone has got an IT department in their basement.. I mean you have to install programs for her? good lord! and configure it! wow... Do you double click on the app and do dictation to? I know many people who can "use" computers this way.
Sometime around 1995 Apple's macintosh system went from the 680X0 architechture to the RISC base PPC achitecture. Since there were no applications incuding the MacOS itself that was written for this new architecture, at the PCC macs introduction, just about nothing was powerMac native. Despite this annoying problem, most casual software ran faster and the OS fealt far more responsive. Apple manged to do this by re-writting only a few routines in the MacOS. Basicaly they followed the 90/10 rule and re-wrote the most used 10% of the code.
:-). I Still run its decendent to this very day on my old 5200. ) for most powerMac users. Later on Apple included its own version inside the so called PCI PowerMacs and up.
:-)
This gave the first initial boost.
Later the gurus over at Connectix created this program called SpeedDouble which aimed to speed up you Mac by 2x. On power macs, one of the ways this was done was by using a super cool dynamic, re-compiling emulator that would save decoded instructions in a sort of cache and simply execute those instead of going through the emulation process all over again. This product wa smarketed as speeding up your Mac by 2X and while it didn't, the speed increase it offered was still remarkable enough to justify purchasing it (or at least pirtating it
This was the second speed boost.
Over the course of the next few years, Apple embarked on an agressive OS development schedual which, among other things, brought more PPC code to the system. It was funn because the new PPC code would almost always cancel out the fact that the OS was slower because of these new features but if you read the littterature the OS was getting faster with each revision by leaps of bounds. If you follow the posts, Apple's OS should have become self aware sometime around 1999.
The funny things is, to this day, the MacOS stilkl have an absurd amount of 68k code left in it, yet it's faster than MacOS X by leaps and bounds despite the fact that MacOS X is 68k free...
Anyways.. As a memeber of the mac community up until recently, I've heard all sort of promissing emulation technologies. They never work. The best I've ever gotten i real world performance is 1/8 the speed. Forget it. This technology is not worth following. Go visit my web page to see new promissing technology
When I was selling computers I got all sorts of flack for saying "actually" and correcting people. People don't buy computers based on any logical criteria as far as I can tell.
Typical person goes into a store says: "I'd like to buy a computer".
Sales persone says: "We're having a sale onm this one. It has a very low price and works well. It is a good deal"..
Persone: "Ok I'l have that one." then gets bragging rights since he got a good deal on his computer sinc ehe got it for X hudred less than his co-worker who bought a computer three months ago (wow, who da thunk it..)... The less you say about computer specs, the more likely people will buy.. This is why I quit that job.
He's fired most of his HI guys, I don't know why he'd listen to them for this one thing. When Jobs came back to Apple the Human INterface group was one of the first to be axed. I mean you can tell.. QT, Sherlock II MacOS X, all have serious UI problems...
I expect he's keeping it real... or something..
If you do buy CD and don't use them to copy copyright materials.. you should just request the money back. I mean it's CD-R, you can't re-use them.. just show that there's no copyright stuff on the disk..
Of course this s still a guilty unti prooven inocent approach..
Yeah, I've heard rate going from 3 Mbs to 8Mbs.. the tech guys are full of it..
BTW: Whyd on't you like calling DSL modems, modems... I thought DSL modems modulate and de-modulate their signals... Unlike ISDN, that is... which is really just a digital interface box... I though the modulation and demoduklation in DSL modems is why they have such hidious first hop latency...
Ha.. thats`'s just fuzzy grammer and syntax.. It's all lies.. ALL OF IT.. Bwahahah!
ha ha ha, unenlightened one.. as an elitist, I must laugh at your lack of education.
Sympatico high speed is good.. I have three computers connected (directly.. yum) to it and no one has complained so far... The service has never been down and the only problems I've had have been with the billing deparment typing in the wrong expiry date for the credit card 4 times... (butt heads)
That's why I'm writting my own Gnutella network that does scale well. It scales very nicely. I'm doing it as my final year eng project.. I already have a working prototype but it could be better.. Anyways, you can bet your sweet ass that when it is finished, it will show up on Source Forge....
I got my Mac and it as the first computer I ever had.. After 1 month it died and I had to re-install the system.. I did this 3 times before realising that system software is very fragile. Now, 8 years later, I bought a PC.. I've never used windows before and installed it from scatch. It's easy. In fact, I find it somewhat ironic that people go out and buy a game like Myst or riven when the same types of puzzles can be found simply by fiddling around with your computer.
Moral: Personal computers are evil.
Middle button paste is evvviilll!!!!!
stupid select-to-put-it-on-the-clipboard... grrr...
command-c command-v my fine furry feind...
I must agree.. Travel agents get veyr nice rates.
With all the changes to the OS GUI (a my computer icon, screwy desktop, no applemenu, file switcher just a bunch of icons, charging for a BETA, system software that requires 128 megs of ram!?) perhaps its time to change the apple icon on slashdot to steve jobs as borg :-)
...wehn you can use Gnutella or Myster (see my link) to get the files you want?
I bet you use outlook too.. *sniker*...
Well, PowerPC is the name of the chip so I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about. A chip being open? huh?
Apple is the company not allowing the BeOS to run on the G4.
There's other platforms that use PPC.. I'm thinkig baout CHRP and PReP... Of course, these are hardly contenders.
It's a Pity, because the BeOS's multimedia focus and the G4 are made ofr each other.. The price of politics..
1) Ejecting a disk.. all the fun ways:
:-)
:-) ..).. This exists because the MacOS is a continuous opperating system going back to 1984 when a Mac only had 128k of memory and started up form a 400k floppy. In order to have programs that work on the new system and the old they invented this system of multitaksing. The 1984 bagae is also another reasone why modal dialog boxes block the CPU and freeze the interface. Apple has actually been buggering about wiht this problem ever since it first because apparent in system 6. In sytems greatter than 8.0 there's a set of additional routines for having dialogues that allow you to swithc tasks. Try any modern program that uses the Nativigational service API for opening and saving files and you'll see them. This is very multi-taskable. You can also use MacOS 9.0 for any lenght of time and see other types of dialogues that even allow multithreading. And the MacOS 9 Finder's famous "pasive dialogues"...
Click on the disk press command-e
Click on the disk press command-y
Click on disk select put away fomr file menu
Click on disk slect eject disk fomr the Special Menu
Drag disk to the trash (for some reasone the most poular)
Click on disk press command option e (ejects the disk and leave it behind for disk-to disk copy wiht only one drive.. Try it one time.. you'll get to do the disk swapping fun)
Command shift 1 (same eject and leave behind, note: commane -e does this in systems earlyer than MacOS 8.0....)
Hold down option and select eject disk.
poke a pin in the little hole to the left of the disk drive. note: Don't do this unless the disk is stuck.
Now.. You have all these ways... isn't ONE of them intuative for you
While the mac can have pre-emptively multitaksed threads. It mostly uses something known as co-operative multitasking. This means the currently executing program gets to decided when it realease the processor (great for games, bad for servers
When you see the old style dialogues this is either because the program was made to run under system 7 or sometimes system 6 even or just hasen't taken advantage of the new API because the programmers don't want to since nobody really cares much about this issue outside of people using the MacOS as a low-volume server. This si a bit annoying for powerusers.
Anyways.. The next version fo the MacOS (version 10 or X whatever) is based on a Unix Micro-kernal based thing so it's completely different. You should read some of the things they're doing to allow programs of today to run on it... They have three APIS sets in there... The classic, Carbon and the re-vamped openstep API based on the ideas of objective C. it should be interresting.
Intuative simply means: works as expected; or is consistant wiht other things you've already experienced. In thia way it's possible for a computer to be intuative. All it has to be is internally consistant and use metephores from the real world or other situations the user might have already come into contact with. These two ideas work together to provide intuative behavior.
:-) bye
1) Self consistancy: The MacOS has traditionally worked to build a consistant enviroment.. ie: all programs have (or should have if they follow MacOS interface guildlines) a FILE mane and an EDIT menue with a QUIT and CUT COPY PASTE menue items irrespective of weather they even use them or not. There's standard keyboard shortcuts of Comamnd C for Copyu, Command W for close window and the best: comand Q for quit. This means you can start up a completely new application you've never seen and type in these keyuboard shortcuts (among many others) and know what the program will do. This goes to the very deffinition of intuative. All aspects of the MacOS try to do this. In fact things like the Quicktime movie player and "Sherlock II" have been reviled by most Mac Power users since they do not use the standard interface or interface behaviors. Also you'll note that when you drag something somewhere it's either a move, or if a move is not possible, a copy.. The MacOS doesn't have the (as far as I can tell) completely random behavior windows exibits whenever I try to move or copy something.. (A shortcut? Did I tell you to make a shortcut.. no, I said move you stupid thing.. oh so now you're going to move.. and what about now.. a copy.. great..)
2) Use realworld metaphores: I'm thinking specifically of things like the desktop, although this can also be found in the icons: use a pencil to draw.. Use something that looks like a notbook to store notes (notepad). There's a folder here that has a mini computer on it.. Oh that must be some sort of computer code... (system folder)... What about this document? (It's a word doc) it looks different than this document (appleworks doc),.. anwyays...
Making a computer easy to use typically is a question of making it intuative.. That was the original point of a GUI.. although now it's degenerated into more of a "scares user less than a command line" approach where the user is some sort of baby.. oh, the user drags to the desktop.. he really wants to make an alias.. we'll do that for him. Who's supposed to be in control here? This is the kind of thing that windows users have toruble with when comming to the mac.. the mac doesn't try to baby the user. it does what you want and what the user should expect should happen when they do that. anyways...
As for things like protected memory.. this si only usefull to programmers.. Most users I know of never use more than one app at a time so don't care if only one app goes down... At leats the MacOS tells them they should restart their computer now.
Pre-emptive multitasking. It would be nice but in typical usuase I never run into this problem... The MacOS multitaks just fine 90% of the time. To me, having a nice intuative interface is more usefull then having pre-emtive multitasking.. It's more powerfull. I can use any generic program in existance with hardly any learning curve. If you really want to see how having a good interface is powerfull check out the old Claris programs... Very strraight forward apps that any newby can use with some veyr powerfull abilities.. In the old claris works you can dump a Spreadsheet into any kind of other document.. for that matter a draw or paint or word prcessing doc too.. Sort of like OLE, but it runs on an 8Mhz mac SE, takes up 2 megs of ram and 2 megs of disk space... The best part is, it doens't interfear with new user's. You have to click on this button down near the zoom in- zoom out buttons... Anyways.. now that Apple has screwed all this up in AppleWorks 6... I'm sticking with 5.0...
As for the File System and other bottlenecks.. yes, these are a pain. I expect these are problems programmers are up against when they try to make a big-full featured GOOD app on the Mac. THis is the real reasone Apple is going to MacOS X.. It's better to program on. I mean, having to restart your computer evertime a program seg-faults is insane! AGGGH! And that's if it dies right away.. sometimes it only makes your system really unstable so it crashes in code that was corupted by your code.. anyways... MacOS X is for developers. I'm learning Objective C right now because I figure MacOS X will be the ultimate developement platform...