Apple's APIs were not as bad as you make them out to be. Yes, there were some horrors, and some of the things you mention could be issues. But when well-written, a "classic" app was neither hard to program nor as unresponsive or as incapable as you suggest. Since some 85%+ of the old APIs live on in Carbon, obviously some folk felt they were worth keeping. It's true that there was a very definite "right way" to program around the original Mac OS, and many more "wrong ways" which could lead one not experienced in the art up the garden path at times.
Given the history of the OS and the fact that Apple had to basically make it up as they engineered it from scratch with very little prior art to draw on (Xerox PARC code was not used, as the original Mac OS was written in assembler and Pascal, not Smalltalk), the architectural choices are at least understandable if sometimes arcane. The design choices were forced by the very low power of the hardware they originally had to work with. Some of those design choices proved to be hard to scale. The main "crime" was that by the mid-90s they hadn't added protected memory and a proper VM system - it was doable in a manner compatible with the published APIs by then but they dropped the ball. The lack of pre-emptive multitasking wasn't such a major drawback in practice since most apps didn't need real-time responsiveness down to microsecond resolution and you could implement threads yourself if you needed to.
Like you I'm glad those days are behind me but unlike you I never found working with the system all that hard. I don't recognise the "hell" you describe - just a few rules you had to follow. If you used a C++ framework (like most people did after about 1988) all those things were taken care of. Windows 3.1 was no better, and in terms of the design of its APIs, in many cases much worse. There's no doubt though that the OS became a bit of a drag on the hardware especially during the early years of the PowerPC transition, with many parts emulated - BeOS showed what the hardware was really capable of!
My main gripes about the original Mac OS were:
the Menu Manager totally sucked with many 8-bit sized fields to save space but thus imposing many '256 max' limits on things
QuickDraw wasn't re-entrant
QuickDraw was limited to 16-bit coordinate system, which made long/large documents tricky to program
TextEdit was limited to 32K text buffer size and the QD 16-bit coordinates often hit you long before that, limiting you to a few thousand lines
No built-in timer event
some APIs were too complicated (QuickTime, Applescript, Publish and Subscribe, Component Manager)
some APIs were not complicated enough (original Event Manager, QD)
Leopard was launched here at 6pm in stores too - so nyah-ya!
One thing I am noticing having installed it is that a) Spotlight reindexes all your stuff and b) if you enable Time Machine it also does a heavy-duty initial copy. These two processes happening simultaneously hit the disk pretty hard and doubtless cause it to zap all over the place. The upshot is a lot of disk thrashing and rather stuttery performance on things like the dock animation for the first two or three hours. YMMV (MacBook 13" 2GHz here). I expect it to settle down after this - but still in that initial period as I write this.
Also, the initial run of the Set-up Assistant failed to recognise my existing wireless network, and got thoroughly confused when I tried to enter the information manually as it requested. In the end I simply quit it to find that by default Leopard had turned off Airport. Turning it on again found my network and connected without any problems, so if you run into this, just tell Setup Assistant to get lost and enable it yourself.
If translucency were so great in the real world, we would be printing on onion skin and writing on glass things.
Which many people do. Perhaps not you, but then again, transparency isn't hurting you, is it? Where translucency has been done very wrongly is in Vista, where, presumably to differentiate their product from OS X, yet to give it some "me too" eye candy, windows behind are BLURRED. WTF??? So, I can see through my top window but the text and anything in the windows behind is now unreadable and useless? Talk about missing the point! In the context of Vista, your observation may have a point - but in OS X, it doesn't.
From the 300+ Leopard features page:"Harness the power of Wikipedia when you're connected to the Internet -- built right into it's Dictionary. You get a great Mac OS X user interface with super-fast searching and beautifully laid out-results."
Anyone remember how the seat belt laws did the same thing? "They are for your safety".. " cant build a car without one".. "you gotta wear one or you violate the law"
People who think their freedoms are being somehow violated by being required to wear seatbelts are barmy. Feel free to exercise your freedom - and thereby do us all a favour by removing your stupid genes from the gene pool.
literally don't know ANYONE who does any math, whatsoever, in Excel. It's all tables and primitive databases. The guy in the next cube does some pretty graphs. That's as close as it gets.
That's it then, definitive proof. Microsoft can breathe easy tonight, because you don't know anyone who would be affected by this bug. Ego problem, at all?
The WATERMARK (granular matrix) sensor is an indirect method of measuring soil water. It is an electrical resistance type sensor, that converts the electrical resistance reading to a calibrated reading of centibars of soil water suction.
A meaningless claim. I just wrote a new OS! I installed it on my PC, taking installed base from 0 to 1 user in three minutes! That's the fastest growing OS on the planet!
One issue with developing on the mac is that you have to use a strange language called Object-C if you want to develop cocoa applications(which you do). Object-C is a bizare attempt at making C object oriented that was created before C++ was introduced
What a bunch of crap. First off, it's Objective-C, not Object-C, and guess what - it's C. It also adds about oh, I dunno, maybe four extra syntax elements that allow object oriented concepts to be rapidly implemented. Unlike C++, it's lean, easy to learn, much more dynamic, highly expressive and really quite a thing of beauty. Programmers who shy away from it because it's "different" are missing the point. Everyone I know who has dipped their toes in the waters of Obj-C has never looked back, not one of them (and I've met many). I don't have any first-hand experience of how it compares to.NET but I've heard it said by several respected programmers that it's much better. All the more remarkable for having existed since the early 80s. If this is "bizare [sic]" then give me bizarre over sane but dull and static any day.
I wish to god there was someone in the Democratic party with the balls to bring Rove, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and all the gang to justice. Letting these guys resign and skate away to enjoy the spoils of their crimes is just as deadly to our democracy as the crimes themselves, because our system of checks & balances and faith in the rule of law remain compromised. Impeach, try, and convict.
Hear, hear. Makes all that fuss about a cum stain seem all very quaint now doesn't it? WTF is going on????!!!
Yugoslavia, Sudan, Somalia, Kosovo, and even Iraq Br>
The difference was that in none of those cases did the Americans start it. The very big difference with Iraq 2 is that the Americans not only started it, they did so on a false premise, with no real strategy. In the cases you cite, it can be argued that America acted as peacekeepers rather than aggressors, though no doubt that depends on your point of view. However in Iraq 2, America is definitely seen as the aggressor, even by friendly nations such as the UK (I mean the citizenry, not the govt.) and have created the problem for themselves.
No-one likes to see so much death and destruction, be it American troops or Iraqis, but the blame is firmly on the head of Geoge W. and his corrupt cronies. If America's citizens have any shred of conscience left, they need to kick this dangerous incompetent out as soon as possible and take back their once great country and try and put it back together. It may already be too late however.
Those of us who marched against the war in 2002 (remember, there were millions of us, some of the biggest protest marches ever seen) take no pleasure at all in saying "we told you so".
...this performance trade-off is necessary to simply play an MP3
No it bloody isn't. As I stated in a comment the first time this story cropped up, I have a 600MHz G3 iBook that gives me 100% network speed while it's playing an MP3 across the local wireless network from another machine AND displaying a fairly graphics intensive visualizer. If a 6-year old machine can do this without breaking a sweat, why can't a new PC with a 2GHz+ processor and a much better graphics system do it? Clearly something is terribly broken in Vista, and no amount of spin can put a positive gloss on that. I don't wish to troll, but if Apple can do it, Microsoft at several times its size has no excuse.
Every single Microsoft OS ever released sucked more than the last one
So, Windows 1.0 was the best ever?;-) I suspect the usefulness versus annoyances/encumberment ratio of Windows probably peaked sometime during the XP era, though maybe 3.1 wasn't so bad after all.
I can have an MP3 playing which is being streamed wirelessly over the network from another machine, running its visualizer and still get full network speed from a browser or other net service. The bottleneck is my DSL connection.
This is on an iBook G3 running OS X 10.4 - an old slow machine with a 600MHz CPU. And still it doesn't break a sweat. Now tell me again why anyone on this planet should even bother with Vista?
Never mind what was the first released CD, what was the first you actually bought? Mine was the inevitable "Dark Side of the Moon" and also a performance of Holst's "The Planets". This was in 1988. The reason I came so late to the CD party was that the first ones were disappointingly crap.
I'd avidly followed the CD development story from about 1979 in publications such as "Electronics Today International" and was looking forward to a hiss-free format after carefully optimising tape and vinyl playback for years. So in the week when the first CD players went on sale in the UK (1983), a friend and I made the pilgrimage to the next town to get our first CD experience. The demonstrator was very proud to show off the (very expensive) equipment using the four discs that were actually available. I can't remember what all four were but one of them was Roxy Music's "Boys and Girls" album. With great anticipation I looked forward to the utterly hiss free inky black depths of noiseless music - but it wasn't there. The first thing I noticed was the tape hiss from the master and that just ruined the whole thing. Granted, it was quieter hiss than a typical home cassette, but not by that much. The next thing was the harshness of the sound - very brittle and "ringy" which again turned out to be a typical problem of first generation players.
The upshot was that I felt cheated by the CD hype - all that spreading marmalade on the discs they went in for on Tomorrow's World, et. al. The fact was that the sound quality wasn't "perfect" as claimed. Thus I stuck with vinyl for another 5 years until players were much cheaper, much better (they had oversampling playback by then) and there were far more titles available which had DDD production or at least remastered from better source material.
My CD collection went from 2 to about 300 discs in the space of about 3 years, but hasn't grown that much larger since. (Anyone remember the Virgin record store in Oxford street having its own CD pressing plant on show to the public behind glass? Oh it seemed so exotic back then!) I'm only on my second CD player (not counting CD playback on PCs etc) and that's only because the original 1988 one I bought eventually broke down a few years ago through overuse. While I still buy the occasional CD the rise of the format has coincided with both a declining interest in mainstream music and the ageing of my ears. To me the remaining great advantage of the CD is that it's DRM free, which sad to say is probably going to be its downfall.
A supposedly professional writer using a redundant phrase like this? The moron's a moronic moron more moronic than the winner of the 2007 world moron contest.
Windows is over. Its brief and lucrative (for some) flare of popularity was a result of other people's crimes, other people's choices, it's time to freakin' move on.
This is purely wishful thinking, unfortunately. I'm a Mac user by choice but at work I have to work in a mixed environment by necessity. Windows still has all the mindshare - my boss dismisses any other kind of computing as "swimming upstream" even though Windows problems cost him time and money every single day. (And as a businessman himself trying to compete in an open market I always find the "swimming upstream" comment odd - but there you go.)
Windows will be over one day though, that much is definite. So will Mac OS, Linux, etc - when it will happen I don't know but can you seriously imagine that platform wars will persist for another 100 years? 50, 25? They will go the way of AC versus DC, Morse versus, well, whatever Morse competed with - telephones perhaps. Gradually the OS will just fade away into the background where it belongs and all the data types that people use will be standardised. Roll on!
I frequently hear the old chestnut that the only reason Macs aren't infested with malware is their lack of market share. Whether true or not, it's a funny argument, especially if the person using it is defending their choice of Windows.
"I'm not going to use Mac because while it may be clean now, I could get covered in shit at any time!"
The creature was actually washed up in New Zealand, and was then moved to a facility in Tasmania for dissection. For those who are geographically challenged, New Zealand is a separate country some distance from Australia.
The simplicity of Graphics in JAVA is unsurpassed in any real language
LOLOLOLOL!!!
Ummm, what you're talking about is Java's classes , which is a class library, not a language. You can create similar class libraries in C++ or even assembler and they'd have the same advantages. That's why people write class libraries. I'd argue that OS X's Cocoa frameworks are much easier to understand and use than Java's, and no doubt there are plenty others out there equally good or better. Maybe before you embarrass yourself further (come back and read your comment in ten years time and cringe!) you ought to expose yourself to a few more environments.
Slashdot Mirror
...The Llonghorn disaster...
Yeah, they really shouldn't have relied on the Welsh computer industry, with their track record. (Silicon in the valleys, boyo?)
Given the history of the OS and the fact that Apple had to basically make it up as they engineered it from scratch with very little prior art to draw on (Xerox PARC code was not used, as the original Mac OS was written in assembler and Pascal, not Smalltalk), the architectural choices are at least understandable if sometimes arcane. The design choices were forced by the very low power of the hardware they originally had to work with. Some of those design choices proved to be hard to scale. The main "crime" was that by the mid-90s they hadn't added protected memory and a proper VM system - it was doable in a manner compatible with the published APIs by then but they dropped the ball. The lack of pre-emptive multitasking wasn't such a major drawback in practice since most apps didn't need real-time responsiveness down to microsecond resolution and you could implement threads yourself if you needed to.
Like you I'm glad those days are behind me but unlike you I never found working with the system all that hard. I don't recognise the "hell" you describe - just a few rules you had to follow. If you used a C++ framework (like most people did after about 1988) all those things were taken care of. Windows 3.1 was no better, and in terms of the design of its APIs, in many cases much worse. There's no doubt though that the OS became a bit of a drag on the hardware especially during the early years of the PowerPC transition, with many parts emulated - BeOS showed what the hardware was really capable of!
My main gripes about the original Mac OS were:
Leopard was launched here at 6pm in stores too - so nyah-ya!
One thing I am noticing having installed it is that a) Spotlight reindexes all your stuff and b) if you enable Time Machine it also does a heavy-duty initial copy. These two processes happening simultaneously hit the disk pretty hard and doubtless cause it to zap all over the place. The upshot is a lot of disk thrashing and rather stuttery performance on things like the dock animation for the first two or three hours. YMMV (MacBook 13" 2GHz here). I expect it to settle down after this - but still in that initial period as I write this.
Also, the initial run of the Set-up Assistant failed to recognise my existing wireless network, and got thoroughly confused when I tried to enter the information manually as it requested. In the end I simply quit it to find that by default Leopard had turned off Airport. Turning it on again found my network and connected without any problems, so if you run into this, just tell Setup Assistant to get lost and enable it yourself.
If translucency were so great in the real world, we would be printing on onion skin and writing on glass things.
Which many people do. Perhaps not you, but then again, transparency isn't hurting you, is it? Where translucency has been done very wrongly is in Vista, where, presumably to differentiate their product from OS X, yet to give it some "me too" eye candy, windows behind are BLURRED. WTF??? So, I can see through my top window but the text and anything in the windows behind is now unreadable and useless? Talk about missing the point! In the context of Vista, your observation may have a point - but in OS X, it doesn't.
From the 300+ Leopard features page:"Harness the power of Wikipedia when you're connected to the Internet -- built right into it's Dictionary. You get a great Mac OS X user interface with super-fast searching and beautifully laid out-results."
Oh dear.
Anyone remember how the seat belt laws did the same thing? "They are for your safety".. " cant build a car without one".. "you gotta wear one or you violate the law"
People who think their freedoms are being somehow violated by being required to wear seatbelts are barmy. Feel free to exercise your freedom - and thereby do us all a favour by removing your stupid genes from the gene pool.
literally don't know ANYONE who does any math, whatsoever, in Excel. It's all tables and primitive databases. The guy in the next cube does some pretty graphs. That's as close as it gets.
That's it then, definitive proof. Microsoft can breathe easy tonight, because you don't know anyone who would be affected by this bug. Ego problem, at all?
The WATERMARK (granular matrix) sensor is an indirect method of measuring soil water. It is an electrical resistance type sensor, that converts the electrical resistance reading to a calibrated reading of centibars of soil water suction.
That is, another proprietary format.
currently the fastest growing OS on the planet
A meaningless claim. I just wrote a new OS! I installed it on my PC, taking installed base from 0 to 1 user in three minutes! That's the fastest growing OS on the planet!
One issue with developing on the mac is that you have to use a strange language called Object-C if you want to develop cocoa applications(which you do). Object-C is a bizare attempt at making C object oriented that was created before C++ was introduced
.NET but I've heard it said by several respected programmers that it's much better. All the more remarkable for having existed since the early 80s. If this is "bizare [sic]" then give me bizarre over sane but dull and static any day.
What a bunch of crap. First off, it's Objective-C, not Object-C, and guess what - it's C. It also adds about oh, I dunno, maybe four extra syntax elements that allow object oriented concepts to be rapidly implemented. Unlike C++, it's lean, easy to learn, much more dynamic, highly expressive and really quite a thing of beauty. Programmers who shy away from it because it's "different" are missing the point. Everyone I know who has dipped their toes in the waters of Obj-C has never looked back, not one of them (and I've met many). I don't have any first-hand experience of how it compares to
But when business and government go hand in hand like they do in China, you'd also be naive to think they don't further each other's goals.
This is different from America in what way?
I wish to god there was someone in the Democratic party with the balls to bring Rove, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and all the gang to justice. Letting these guys resign and skate away to enjoy the spoils of their crimes is just as deadly to our democracy as the crimes themselves, because our system of checks & balances and faith in the rule of law remain compromised. Impeach, try, and convict.
Hear, hear. Makes all that fuss about a cum stain seem all very quaint now doesn't it? WTF is going on????!!!
Yugoslavia, Sudan, Somalia, Kosovo, and even Iraq
Br> The difference was that in none of those cases did the Americans start it. The very big difference with Iraq 2 is that the Americans not only started it, they did so on a false premise, with no real strategy. In the cases you cite, it can be argued that America acted as peacekeepers rather than aggressors, though no doubt that depends on your point of view. However in Iraq 2, America is definitely seen as the aggressor, even by friendly nations such as the UK (I mean the citizenry, not the govt.) and have created the problem for themselves.
No-one likes to see so much death and destruction, be it American troops or Iraqis, but the blame is firmly on the head of Geoge W. and his corrupt cronies. If America's citizens have any shred of conscience left, they need to kick this dangerous incompetent out as soon as possible and take back their once great country and try and put it back together. It may already be too late however.
Those of us who marched against the war in 2002 (remember, there were millions of us, some of the biggest protest marches ever seen) take no pleasure at all in saying "we told you so".
No it bloody isn't. As I stated in a comment the first time this story cropped up, I have a 600MHz G3 iBook that gives me 100% network speed while it's playing an MP3 across the local wireless network from another machine AND displaying a fairly graphics intensive visualizer. If a 6-year old machine can do this without breaking a sweat, why can't a new PC with a 2GHz+ processor and a much better graphics system do it? Clearly something is terribly broken in Vista, and no amount of spin can put a positive gloss on that. I don't wish to troll, but if Apple can do it, Microsoft at several times its size has no excuse.
Yeah, all dumbing down is perfectly justified because it's what people want - not to have to do any hard thinking or anything.
Every single Microsoft OS ever released sucked more than the last one
;-) I suspect the usefulness versus annoyances/encumberment ratio of Windows probably peaked sometime during the XP era, though maybe 3.1 wasn't so bad after all.
So, Windows 1.0 was the best ever?
I can have an MP3 playing which is being streamed wirelessly over the network from another machine, running its visualizer and still get full network speed from a browser or other net service. The bottleneck is my DSL connection.
This is on an iBook G3 running OS X 10.4 - an old slow machine with a 600MHz CPU. And still it doesn't break a sweat. Now tell me again why anyone on this planet should even bother with Vista?
Never mind what was the first released CD, what was the first you actually bought? Mine was the inevitable "Dark Side of the Moon" and also a performance of Holst's "The Planets". This was in 1988. The reason I came so late to the CD party was that the first ones were disappointingly crap.
I'd avidly followed the CD development story from about 1979 in publications such as "Electronics Today International" and was looking forward to a hiss-free format after carefully optimising tape and vinyl playback for years. So in the week when the first CD players went on sale in the UK (1983), a friend and I made the pilgrimage to the next town to get our first CD experience. The demonstrator was very proud to show off the (very expensive) equipment using the four discs that were actually available. I can't remember what all four were but one of them was Roxy Music's "Boys and Girls" album. With great anticipation I looked forward to the utterly hiss free inky black depths of noiseless music - but it wasn't there. The first thing I noticed was the tape hiss from the master and that just ruined the whole thing. Granted, it was quieter hiss than a typical home cassette, but not by that much. The next thing was the harshness of the sound - very brittle and "ringy" which again turned out to be a typical problem of first generation players.
The upshot was that I felt cheated by the CD hype - all that spreading marmalade on the discs they went in for on Tomorrow's World, et. al. The fact was that the sound quality wasn't "perfect" as claimed. Thus I stuck with vinyl for another 5 years until players were much cheaper, much better (they had oversampling playback by then) and there were far more titles available which had DDD production or at least remastered from better source material.
My CD collection went from 2 to about 300 discs in the space of about 3 years, but hasn't grown that much larger since. (Anyone remember the Virgin record store in Oxford street having its own CD pressing plant on show to the public behind glass? Oh it seemed so exotic back then!) I'm only on my second CD player (not counting CD playback on PCs etc) and that's only because the original 1988 one I bought eventually broke down a few years ago through overuse. While I still buy the occasional CD the rise of the format has coincided with both a declining interest in mainstream music and the ageing of my ears. To me the remaining great advantage of the CD is that it's DRM free, which sad to say is probably going to be its downfall.
...It's déjà vu all over again...
A supposedly professional writer using a redundant phrase like this? The moron's a moronic moron more moronic than the winner of the 2007 world moron contest.
Windows is over. Its brief and lucrative (for some) flare of popularity was a result of other people's crimes, other people's choices, it's time to freakin' move on.
This is purely wishful thinking, unfortunately. I'm a Mac user by choice but at work I have to work in a mixed environment by necessity. Windows still has all the mindshare - my boss dismisses any other kind of computing as "swimming upstream" even though Windows problems cost him time and money every single day. (And as a businessman himself trying to compete in an open market I always find the "swimming upstream" comment odd - but there you go.)
Windows will be over one day though, that much is definite. So will Mac OS, Linux, etc - when it will happen I don't know but can you seriously imagine that platform wars will persist for another 100 years? 50, 25? They will go the way of AC versus DC, Morse versus, well, whatever Morse competed with - telephones perhaps. Gradually the OS will just fade away into the background where it belongs and all the data types that people use will be standardised. Roll on!
Does it affect it is neighbours? What are you talking about? Oh, you meant its.
If you're going to comment on someone's grammar or spelling, make sure your own is correct.
I frequently hear the old chestnut that the only reason Macs aren't infested with malware is their lack of market share. Whether true or not, it's a funny argument, especially if the person using it is defending their choice of Windows.
"I'm not going to use Mac because while it may be clean now, I could get covered in shit at any time!"
"But you're already covered in shit".
"Errr... yes. But I'm sorta used to it..."
The creature was actually washed up in New Zealand, and was then moved to a facility in Tasmania for dissection. For those who are geographically challenged, New Zealand is a separate country some distance from Australia.
The simplicity of Graphics in JAVA is unsurpassed in any real language
LOLOLOLOL!!!
Ummm, what you're talking about is Java's classes , which is a class library, not a language. You can create similar class libraries in C++ or even assembler and they'd have the same advantages. That's why people write class libraries. I'd argue that OS X's Cocoa frameworks are much easier to understand and use than Java's, and no doubt there are plenty others out there equally good or better. Maybe before you embarrass yourself further (come back and read your comment in ten years time and cringe!) you ought to expose yourself to a few more environments.