> It's not perfect though. Uninstalling by dragging to trash still leaves little folders and files in the Library folder, > including in the Cache folder and Preferences folder in most cases.
Yeah but they are text files with stored preference settings. Leaving them there is much less harmful than accidentally deleting something you need later. If you want to get rid of them, though, it is easy to identify them either manually or with Spotlight (by searching for the trashed app's name or developer).
Also when you run an uninstaller in MS Windows it still leaves cruft in the Registry which is more potentially damaging to the system than the left-behind preference files on the Mac. And just the fact that you're not dealing with an installer on the Mac means one less app that can mess with your system.
> Get real, some people simply cannot afford an $1100.00 computer and make do with whatever > they can find on Dell.com.
That's a completely bullshit argument.
In the first place, you can do a Mac mini for $500-$700 and it comes with lots of valuable, full-license software that the $500-$700 Dell doesn't have. There are also used Macs for sale on eBay and they are easy to buy because if you add a retail Mac OS X Tiger you can very easily figure out the exact capabilities that a particular used system will have once you're running it. An iMac from 2003 running Mac OS X Tiger is a known quantity. Yes, you have to add RAM just like every single time you buy a computer from anyone, whether it is new or used.
Second, it is common for an Apple customer to buy a Mac for about $1000 and use it for 3 or more years very productively, without spending a single penny more. On the other hand, it is common for a Dell customer to buy two $500 systems over that same time period and they have to buy software or hardware accessories to do anything but the most basic stuff, AND they are probably dealing with MS Windows.
Apple is selling systems with Intel's latest Core CPU's for $500 and they are fully loaded with hundreds of dollars worth of real software as well as niceties such as an Apple Remote and ultra-compact design. Get over the Macs cost too much and Macs cost more arguments. People are pouring their money down the drain with Microsoft and Dell et al and you're counting pennies on a thick, robust, full-featured entry-level Mac?
Gigabit Ethernet and optical digital audio in and out are commonplace on the Macs of the past few years. I work in two different studios and both have Gigabit networks. My PowerBook G4 from 2001 has Gigabit Ethernet. In the Mac market, making and moving 100+ GB files is an every day all day thing for many years now.
The audio ins and outs that Apple uses on its computers and on things like the AirPort Express base station are combination analog/digital jacks. Apple standardized on these a while back so that they could give the user both analog and digital audio in and out in two small jacks. It is a great solution for the whole platform because third-party music and audio gear can do a lot with a stock Mac without requiring the user to jump through hoops. Podcasting is just one example of an application that makes good audio in and out much more valuable to the average home or business user outside of a music and audio context. Recording vinyl LP's into iTunes is another application where many users will appreciate their MacBook's excellent sound capabilities.
Apple makes sure the user has a complete set of tools so that no matter who they are or what they do they can INCREASE their capabilities. People always do stuff with their Macs that they didn't think they were going to do when they bought them.
Macs are crashing about once a year for non-technical end users doing really interactive stuff like Photoshop or real-time stuff like Digidesign Pro Tools. I really don't think Apple has anything to be ashamed of right now. Not only has Mac OS X served Apple's core user base, but they've attracted Unix people and are now in a great position to attract MS Windows users.
Self-healing? I have two Macs running all the time in a small music studio and I do almost no maintenance on them. Every few months I run Disk Utility on the startup disk, and every 18 months I wipe the startup disk and put on a new major version of the OS. Each Mac crashes once a year and is just fine after a reboot. I am a very happy customer.
>[ZFS] joins two traditionally separate concepts: file systems and > volume management.
Mac OS X disk images are whole volumes stored as single files. You open one and it mounts just like attaching an external hard drive. They can also be AES-128 encrypted, or data-compressed, or both. They can be HFS+, UFS, FAT, or a DVD or CD master. They can be writable or read-only. The icon looks like a document with a hard disk stored in it, or a "virtual hard disk."
It's not done the same way as ZFS, but in practice I have hundreds and hundreds of volumes stored in one HFS+ partition. Only some are mounted at any one time, but when they are they are full-fledged volumes like any other. I can mount all of them if I want.
All you have to do to create a disk image is drop a folder on Disk Utility. Boom. It's as fast or faster than creating a zip file, but has the advantage of including hidden files, metadata, icon resources, and other stuff that gets skipped by many backup or archiving utilities.
> a lot of interesting stuff becomes possible, such as the fast file system creation
It takes just a few seconds to erase a disk and initialize it with HFS+, including the creation of the file system. Even on a really big disk you are in and out of Disk Utility in no time. It is so short that you don't budget any time for it, you just do it when you need to. It takes longer to read the "all data on this volume will be destroyed" message than the actual disk activity that follows.
Fast file system creation is one of the things that make disk images possible. You couldn't use disk images as your archive format if it took all day to make one.
The problem with any debate involving HFS+ is that the volume format has an undeservedly bad rep. One reason for this is that it was introduced with Mac OS v8, yet many key features lay essentially dormant until 3-5 years later with Mac OS X. Everybody thought HFS+ had a 31-character filename limit, but that was a Mac OS 9 limitation, not an HFS+ limitation.
Another reason for the bad rep is that HFS+ was developed specifically for graphical desktop computing, whereas many other volume formats are optimized for enterprise computing, or servers, or other priorities. To many geek eyes HFS+ appears to be doing many things the "wrong" way. For example, every file on an HFS+ disk is identified not only by filename but also by node number, so the user can rename or move a file or application (even while they are open or running) and the system and apps continue to find it by the node number. This is why you can close iTunes, move your whole music library folder to a new location on the disk, and then open iTunes and it will still immediately find all of your audio files, even though each and every single one now has a different pathname. This is actually the most underrated feature of the Mac... for over 20 years these HFS nodes have been responsible for an almost unimaginable amount of non-problems and non-support-calls. It makes the Mac appear to be 1000x more intelligent than other computers in everyday use.
> Apple could simply port (or rebuild!) Cocoa and its toolkits, for Windows > Pull out the BSD kernel, and what is OS X?
It is so much more than any one thing, which is why it's a great system.
For example, compare the way that Apple introduced the UNIX security model to their application platform (in 2001) to the way that Microsoft intends to do it (in 2007). Mac users hardly noticed the transition, while here is what Paul Thurrott says about User Account Protection (UAP) in Microsoft Vista:
> UAP is a sad, sad joke. It's the most annoying feature that Microsoft has ever added to > any software product, and yes, that includes that ridiculous Clippy character from older > Office versions. The problem with UAP is that it throws up an unbelievable number of > warning dialogs for even the simplest of tasks. That these dialogs pop up repeatedly for > the same action would be comical if it weren't so amazingly frustrating. It would be > hilarious if it weren't going to affect hundreds of millions of people in a few short > months. It is, in fact, almost criminal in its insidiousness.
That is just one example of a problem with Windows that can't be fixed by hiding it somewhere on a Mac. And the above is about Vista, which isn't even out yet, and already people are disappointed by it. Building more stuff on Windows is not the answer.
The comparison between OS/2 and Mac OS X is that Apple was successful in creating a bridge between their legacy application platform and their new application platform and IBM was not.
For Apple, this happened a few years ago when they released the first version of Mac OS X. It had a handful of native API's and it could also run "Classic" Mac apps (1984-1999) in a box similar to how OS/2 ran Windows and DOS apps.
If Apple starts running Windows XP applications in Aqua it will be the second time around for them. I think they will do it the same way. You'll be required to have a Windows XP SP2 disc to run "WinClassic" in Aqua (on Intel) just like you have to have a Mac OS 9 v9.2.2 disc to run Classic in Aqua (on PowerPC). Using the authentic old system means the apps run as expected and it makes the whole thing a modular and optional install. Users will prefer native apps because they look better, run better, have modern security, don't require a Windows disc, are easier to install and maintain, and for many other reasons.
Day one with your first Mac you could be running Firefox, Apache, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto all natively. After a few years it will be hard to imagine installing Windows on your NEXT Mac.
> It's still not the best solution, though. What I'd really like to see is the means to run whatever OS's > application directly in OS X, without having to run the OS.
That's missing the point, though. Applications run best in the environment for which they are designed... in which they were created. To run Mac OS 9 applications you first launch Mac OS 9, and to run Windows XP applications you first launch Windows XP, even if you are doing so on Mac OS X. As long as you have a native API for developers to port to then the legacy operating system is just a bridge to give developers time to catch up and then ship new apps that no longer need the legacy system.
One nice thing with Mac OS X is that you don't get stuck like this. You can buy a system and then a year or two later you can buy an OS upgrade and an iLife upgrade (for less than $200 total) and wipe your hard drive and install both of those discs and you are basically looking at a new Mac. You won't be missing any drivers, you won't lose any features, and everything will just work. In fact, it will be faster, because every version of Mac OS X has been faster on the same hardware than the previous version.
Also it is so easy to install Mac OS X and iLife (even with an optional disk initialization first) that pretty much anyone can revitalize a Mac in this way. This is one reason the resale value has typically been high for Macs. You can buy an old Mac and the newest OS and put the two together and get a new Mac, with all the hardware working and no extra drivers needed.
Leopard (Mac OS X v10.5) was announced at WWDC 2005 as being due at the end of 2006. At the time this was the same date that MS Windows Vista was supposed to ship however it has fallen behind again.
This July is WWDC 2006. There will probably be a beta of Leopard for developers at that time so they can get their software ready.
The schedule has been every 18 months since v10.2 was released.
> No 68K programs I used ran better under emulation
The first PowerPC chip was so much faster than the last 68k chip that it was possible at the time to upgrade to a new machine and have your old apps run faster even though they were no longer running natively.
It's like the new MacBook Pro runs PowerPC apps like a G4 1 GHz which is a huge drag if your last machine was a dual G5 2 GHz, but if you upgrading from a PowerBook G4 667 MHz to a MacBook Pro then all of your apps will be faster, even the ones that are not native.
> I think they'll wait a few months/years to get their sales up, and then cut out the rug and say, > we don't support Windows any longer on our hardware.
I think it is much more likely that they will fully support Windows XP for quite some time but won't support Vista. They can cannibalize XP, but compete with Vista. It is possible for Apple to create a Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard that is better at running Windows XP applications than Windows Vista is.
I think what Apple will do over the next few years with Intel/Windows is just like what they did in a few years ago with PowerPC/Mac OS Classic. From their perspective, it is just another legacy system to adopt like a library so you can run the applications.
The biggest drag about switching from Windows to Mac can be upgrading all of your applications all at once. If you can buy a Mac and keep running all of your old apps, then you can upgrade or replace each application at the end of its upgrade cycle, for example replacing Photoshop v9 for Windows with Photoshop v10 for Mac when v10 is released instead of buying v9 for Mac in between. Also it can take about a year for someone to find an upgrade or replacement app for every last little thing as they switch their primary environment from Windows to Mac and if they can keep running their old apps during that time it is much easier on them.
One new feature that is for sure is that there will be one version of the OS and one install disc for both PowerPC and Intel. Right now in 10.4 they are separate systems and discs but they are currently merging into one, with the PowerPC code still part of iTunes on Intel and the Intel code showing up in iTunes on PowerPC and the same thing going on everywhere. When Leopard ships it will be one OS again like Panther was, just now with fat binaries everywhere.
Rumors have it there will be a database file system and support for really, really big displays.
It would be fun to see a Classic-like system for running Windows apps rootlessly on the Mac OS X (Intel) Desktop. The same way that Classic used an existing Mac OS 9 installation, the Intel-based counterpart would boot an existing Windows installation within a virtual machine and composite it on the Desktop using the same techniques as Classic did. So you could buy a Mac and keep using your Windows as you transition your apps and files and such. Since the CPU is native x86 the Windows software should run at 90% of the CPU speed just like Classic apps. However if you are running Windows XP that came out in 2001 so your 2006 Core Duo based Mac will be your fastest Windows ever, even floating on the Mac OS X Desktop.
Their competition is the fast times of the tech industry itself. Microsoft or not, in 10 years everyone will be using all-new computers. Microsoft has two products, MS Windows and MS Office, both from 1985, both showing their years. What are they going to do to force those products onto tomorrow's computers?
Mac OS X isn't going to run on all the weird stuff out there. It's enough to switch from PowerPC Macs to Intel Macs without emulating Microsoft's worst technical mistakes. The job that Microsoft has taken on may not even be possible. Their locked in hardware makers and white box cloners don't give a shit about the software and Microsoft doesn't care about the hardware and the user is playing a technical russian roulette whenever they buy a new system. It might all work or it might not. It might work for a while then stop. Nobody tested the whole system. Nobody is standing behind the whole system. On a Mac you forget that the Bluetooth is actually a little subsystem on a chip somewhere inside because you don't ever have to configure the driver, you just use the little Bluetooth system menu to USE the Bluetooth. The computer is totally integrated, functional, and remains functional. The sound NEVER stops working. You don't ever, ever, ever have to even use the term "video driver" that is already in there.
Steve Jobs just said recently that if Microsoft wants to play in the digital music space they'll have to make their own iPod. They won't be able to push WMA on people and lock everybody in at the software level like a parasite. They will have to make an actual product, not part of a product that they then leverage into a new monopoly with all of the makers of the rest of the product. Steve Jobs is of the opinion that you should sell the customer one integrated widget and take responsibility for the whole thing, no matter what features are done in hardware and what features are done in software and whatever else. If the Apache Web server in my Mac stops working I can call AppleCare and they will help me get it working, not direct me to the Apache foundation or the manufacturer of one component of my Mac such as the OS.
Fundamentally, and at a very core level, Apple doesn't like the commodity PC market because it is technically bad. They see a very messy system making awful computers and nobody taking responsibility, and then at Apple they have worked their asses off to make a tremendous system with everything included and charge you one low price. I really think that Steve Jobs feels that if you can't see the value in a Mac over a Dell right now, Core Duo to Core Duo, Mac OS X vs Windows, then he doesn't want you as a customer. You will only come into the community and start stealing software and complaining that your Windows programs don't run. Fuck you. The Mac community is getting along just fine without and has been for over 20 years. There is tons of application software including all the long-time Mac favorites that have since been ported to Windows like Photoshop, Illustrator, Word, Excel and others.
Mac mini is $599 and comes with $400 of real software, not bullshit "lite" versions. MacBook is going to be $999. The iMac is an outstanding machine it is $1299 with everything included. There is just no good reason to offer somebody a $200 retail box of Mac OS X for their Pentium4 and whatever cheap and funky shit it has in it from Acer or somebody.
> OS X is just BSD with a fairly standard (though usable) GUI on top of it
Man, that's just dumb.
First, the "just BSD" crack is FUD direct from Bill Gates in 1990 when he called NeXTSTEP a "warmed over UNIX". The BSD part of Mac OS X is OPTIONAL and is there because it is SO FUCKING USEFUL TO EVERY USER. The BSD API is just one of at least five major API's and it is not even the recommended or most commonly used one. Not to knock BSD at all, I am a huge fan and running Apache next to Dreamweaver and Photoshop and Flash and QuickTime is just awesome. But BSD is not Mac OS X.
There are many overt and subtle innovations in Mac OS X:
- the whole GUI is done in the GPU now... the shadows are really shadows, the textures are really textures, the windows are really objects not just empty rectangles you fill with fake shadows and bevels - I bought the Panther (v10.3) upgrade just for Exposé and it was worth it plus a whole lot more... ridiculously good window management - Tiger's (v10.4) launchd is how every UNIX will do it in 10 years - XML configuration files throughout - standardized multimedia (QuickTime movies with Sorenson codec replaced with MPEG-4 movies with H.264 codec) - complete multichannel digital audio mixer, instruments, effects (CoreAudio, CoreMIDI) for use by any application - object-oriented drivers (if you buy an Intel-based Mac right now some of the drivers you will be running are PowerPC and are being translated by Rosetta in real-time)... so much more.
> Nobody's going to buy a hard disk with the OS preinstalled either.
One of the PPC Linux distributions is sold this way. You buy the external FireWire hard drive from them and plug it into your Mac and boot with the Option key held down and then choose the new drive as your startup disk from the boot menu (holding down Option at boot time displays the boot menu on Macs) and then your system boots Linux from the new disk. When you are done with Linux you can shutdown and then Option+boot the system again and choose your system's internal drive with Mac OS X off the boot menu.
When Apple's boot menu finds a bootable Linux disk it puts a little Tux on there it is sweet.
When you compare Mac OS X v10.1 through v10.4 it is amazing how the newer ones actually look like newer versions of the older versions. If you are used to Panther or Tiger and you look at a Jaguar screenshot it is obviously Mac OS X but it just looks "old". The newer versions are tightened up in so many ways, not just look but also features, where things are. These days something like the AirPort (WiFi) system menu has a few more options on it but it looks the same and functions the same and is in the same place as it was in Jaguar. Same with the Apple menu, Dock, System Preferences, Finder (for the most part), Desktop, windows and controls, most of the included applications and utilities. Even the default desktop picture is similar but evolves slightly each release. There is a tremendous amount of user consistency in Mac OS X.
This site compares GUI's using a large library of screenshots: GUI Guidebook
For the programmer, rather than various flavors of Windows API, Mac OS X just offers you a choice of procedural API, object-oriented API, BSD API, Java API, X-Windows, Web/JavaScript, QuickTime. You use whatever API makes most sense to you for that project and you get a lot of stuff for free from the system and you can make a really polished product that runs for weeks and weeks on a stable system.
A big consistency thing is key shortcuts. From the very beginning, Apple established some sensible standards like Command+S for Save and Command+P for Print and Command+O for Open. In the intervening 22 years applications on the Mac have used these standards so they are very commonly used. Once you learn one, it pays you back in many situations in many applications. At one point, Microsoft even added the Mac shortcuts to MS Windows and that's what most Windows users use today (Control+C for Copy, Control+X for Cut, Control+V for Paste are direct from the Mac for example). There are lots of examples like this where Apple took a moment to design a functioning system and then the developer community added to and improved the already-functioning system using Apple's stuff as a sort of living guideline along with lots of documentation where Apple will actually say "do it this way (unless you have a good reason not to) and your users will already know how to work your application".
> OK things that matter to uses in software in the last 15 years
> 1) integrated office suites so skills translate across multiple products
The Apple Lisa in 1983 had an integrated, built-in office suite where all the key shortcuts and menu commands and ways of doing things matched EXACTLY.
Two years later in 1985 you could buy MS Word and MS Excel and some friends for your Mac. That is 21 years ago, not 15. I know people who have been writing books in MS Word non-stop for 20 years with full GUI and mouse and WYSIWYG. For them, MS Word v1.0 and MS Word 2004 are very similar and direct descendants. The fact that it took 10 years for Microsoft to put a GUI and mouse onto MS Word on the PC does not qualify this as being an interesting development of the last 15 years.
> 2) drag and drop
OH MY GOD drag and drop was invented at Apple in 19 fucking 80 and shipped with the Lisa in 1983 and the Mac in 1984 as a deeply integrated key system feature available to all applications and in a complete set of circumstances and with consistant operation. That is 26 years ago, not 15. Hold down Option (alt) as you drag to make a copy is Mac 1984.
3) cut and past working for complex objects
Again, Lisa 1983 or Macintosh 1984 or NeXT 1990. All more than 15 years ago. During the heyday of desktop publishing which is the late 1980's it was common to cut and paste ridiculously complex data from place to place it was a key feature. Cut and paste (the real cut and paste with scissors and glue) is a key publishing feature so nobody had to explain the digital cut and paste to publishers when they moved to desktop publishing. And yes they want to cut and paste blocks of formatted text with complex typefaces and ligatures and embedded photographs and vector diagrams. And they want to paste it from application A to application B and yes it works on the Mac and has forever.
> 4) Object linking and embedding
There is a one hour video floating around the Internet that shows Steve Jobs in 1992 demo'ing a NeXT workstation and about 10 minutes of it is on "object linking and embedding". He creates a single document on a NeXT system, then browses a mixed network of NeXT, Sun, and MS Windows machines and embeds documents from each of the other operating systems into the document on the NeXT system. Then we watch the document on the NeXT system update in real-time as the embedded documents are modified on the various other computers by users in other buildings using entirely different platforms. So a user in accounting saves a document on their MS Windows machine and in another building the NeXT system updates the embedded chart in the annual report a few seconds later.
That is 14 years ago and it was not new then, and it was not Microsoft again.
> 5) multitasking really working
I know a guy who uses Photoshop on Windows XP and I use Photoshop on Mac OS X and we are both pros, we were talking shop and he asked me don't I find that Photoshop takes too long to start up? And I'm like I don't know it starts up when I login and then runs for weeks so why would I care? He says aren't you worried about system resources? Don't you want to quit Photoshop sometimes to run other stuff at full speed? I'm like if I quit Photoshop how will I open and edit the next image I encounter they are everywhere in print, Web... lots of images. He says get a lightweight image editor that opens quickly so you don't need to keep Photoshop running or launch it to do one little thing. I think he is insane but I guess I should be thankful he is such lousy competition. The energy he is spending launching and quitting apps and tracking "system resources" is energy I put into my work.
> 7) 3D desktop (I'll answer)
This is a Mac thing, circa 2003. It's called Quartz Extreme. The whole GUI is done in 3D in the video card. The shadows and textures on Mac screens are being drawn in the video card now. The 3D space is as wide as the screen, as tall as the screen,
Windows 95 was special because 3.1 was such utter crap. The big feature in Windows 95 was that the GUI was going to start up automatically and be on all the time. Wow! And this was 1995, mind you, only 11 years after the Mac and only five years after NeXT.
> In the free world, GIMP does what Photoshop does
Please stop doing that, it is a disservice to the GIMP authors. It's like when people say Java can easily replace C. Only if you squint really hard and you have an axe to grind. It's like saying you can go ahead and chuck GCC and everybody just use MS Visual Basic it is the same.
In the free world, GIMP does what GraphicConverter does. GraphicConverter is $39 Shareware on the Mac for the last 10 years. My IT guys swears by it... all he wants is Terminal and GraphicConverter and Firefox and he is good to go for everything.
However, me... I use Photoshop professionally all day every day and can't for the life of me figure out why anybody uses anything else. Yes it costs a bit of money to get started but then after that you pay $150 every 18 months and it continues to kick ass and gain new professional features. You have the whole art kit there... it's like having a full set of pastels rather than one box of eight colors. The complete thing is more than the sum of its parts. And I can create a file with it and know it will be a professional-level file, not something with the mask inverted or an old kind of TIFF compression or stored with an unusual endian-ness or something.
There is an interactive element to the tools and tablet with Photoshop that is not matched anywhere else. People sometimes focus on the Filters but that is less than 10% of my daily work. The painting and selection tools, history/undo features, compositing features, automation, color management and many other features are much more interesting and useful. Support for PCX images is lacking but not missed while support for 16-bits per channel camera raw images is available and greatly appreciated.
When people even imply that Linux/GIMP is similar to Mac OS X/Photoshop it is just strange. Like saying a TV and computer are the same because they both have displays. Like an iPod and PSP are the same they are both handheld computers. In all cases these are incredibly complex systems with very different behaviors.
There are plenty of anecdotes from people who had great meetings and great business relationships with Steve Jobs. He is brusque and used to being around very smart, very capable, very talented people. It rubs some people the wrong way but he is not your life counselor and is not trying to be.
What really matters is the work. Look at Apple since 1997 and what they have built it is outrageous. Anyone involved with that deserves respect and Steve probably earned his share.
> Reality: ---> Microsoft won because everybody else gave up. ---
The reason everybody else gave up was because Microsoft was cheating. There are only so many times you can play a game against a cheat before you lose interest. Without a fair chance to win it is hard to put in your best effort. It is not that Microsoft is a tough competitor, driving people out of markets with better products, but rather that they are anti-competitive: they will not compete with you. They will break the law before they will compete with you. No matter how well you do in the race, Microsoft gets the gold.
If you remember a few years ago when a figure skater's boyfriend hit a rival skater in the knee with a pipe before the Olympics, that is what Microsoft is like. Instead of trying to win on the ice they club the real winner in the knee with a pipe. Then a lot of their users apologize for them... well, those other companies gave up. They couldn't compete with mighty Microsoft. Why didn't they just work harder?
15 million in today's dollars is 200 million in 2025 dollars. So movies will still cost 200 million.
They will probably feel more "indie" though because they will be made by smaller teams and there will be more of them (both teams and movies).
This is sort of funny coming from Lucas, isn't it? He is a major innovator in making a movie's money back. Every little spaceship they designed for the Star Wars movies flies over and over again in games and toys. Theoretically, you could put the spaceship designers in your games and toys company and then you could make a movie with those spaceships for 15 million dollar and it would have a tremendous advantage over another 15 million dollar movie.
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> It's not perfect though. Uninstalling by dragging to trash still leaves little folders and files in the Library folder,
> including in the Cache folder and Preferences folder in most cases.
Yeah but they are text files with stored preference settings. Leaving them there is much less harmful than accidentally deleting something you need later. If you want to get rid of them, though, it is easy to identify them either manually or with Spotlight (by searching for the trashed app's name or developer).
Also when you run an uninstaller in MS Windows it still leaves cruft in the Registry which is more potentially damaging to the system than the left-behind preference files on the Mac. And just the fact that you're not dealing with an installer on the Mac means one less app that can mess with your system.
The Eject key is on the keyboard with the other buttons, dumbass.
> Get real, some people simply cannot afford an $1100.00 computer and make do with whatever
> they can find on Dell.com.
That's a completely bullshit argument.
In the first place, you can do a Mac mini for $500-$700 and it comes with lots of valuable, full-license software that the $500-$700 Dell doesn't have. There are also used Macs for sale on eBay and they are easy to buy because if you add a retail Mac OS X Tiger you can very easily figure out the exact capabilities that a particular used system will have once you're running it. An iMac from 2003 running Mac OS X Tiger is a known quantity. Yes, you have to add RAM just like every single time you buy a computer from anyone, whether it is new or used.
Second, it is common for an Apple customer to buy a Mac for about $1000 and use it for 3 or more years very productively, without spending a single penny more. On the other hand, it is common for a Dell customer to buy two $500 systems over that same time period and they have to buy software or hardware accessories to do anything but the most basic stuff, AND they are probably dealing with MS Windows.
Apple is selling systems with Intel's latest Core CPU's for $500 and they are fully loaded with hundreds of dollars worth of real software as well as niceties such as an Apple Remote and ultra-compact design. Get over the Macs cost too much and Macs cost more arguments. People are pouring their money down the drain with Microsoft and Dell et al and you're counting pennies on a thick, robust, full-featured entry-level Mac?
Gigabit Ethernet and optical digital audio in and out are commonplace on the Macs of the past few years. I work in two different studios and both have Gigabit networks. My PowerBook G4 from 2001 has Gigabit Ethernet. In the Mac market, making and moving 100+ GB files is an every day all day thing for many years now.
The audio ins and outs that Apple uses on its computers and on things like the AirPort Express base station are combination analog/digital jacks. Apple standardized on these a while back so that they could give the user both analog and digital audio in and out in two small jacks. It is a great solution for the whole platform because third-party music and audio gear can do a lot with a stock Mac without requiring the user to jump through hoops. Podcasting is just one example of an application that makes good audio in and out much more valuable to the average home or business user outside of a music and audio context. Recording vinyl LP's into iTunes is another application where many users will appreciate their MacBook's excellent sound capabilities.
Apple makes sure the user has a complete set of tools so that no matter who they are or what they do they can INCREASE their capabilities. People always do stuff with their Macs that they didn't think they were going to do when they bought them.
Macs are crashing about once a year for non-technical end users doing really interactive stuff like Photoshop or real-time stuff like Digidesign Pro Tools. I really don't think Apple has anything to be ashamed of right now. Not only has Mac OS X served Apple's core user base, but they've attracted Unix people and are now in a great position to attract MS Windows users.
Self-healing? I have two Macs running all the time in a small music studio and I do almost no maintenance on them. Every few months I run Disk Utility on the startup disk, and every 18 months I wipe the startup disk and put on a new major version of the OS. Each Mac crashes once a year and is just fine after a reboot. I am a very happy customer.
>[ZFS] joins two traditionally separate concepts: file systems and
... for over 20 years these HFS nodes have been responsible for an almost unimaginable amount of non-problems and non-support-calls. It makes the Mac appear to be 1000x more intelligent than other computers in everyday use.
> volume management.
Mac OS X disk images are whole volumes stored as single files. You open one and it mounts just like attaching an external hard drive. They can also be AES-128 encrypted, or data-compressed, or both. They can be HFS+, UFS, FAT, or a DVD or CD master. They can be writable or read-only. The icon looks like a document with a hard disk stored in it, or a "virtual hard disk."
It's not done the same way as ZFS, but in practice I have hundreds and hundreds of volumes stored in one HFS+ partition. Only some are mounted at any one time, but when they are they are full-fledged volumes like any other. I can mount all of them if I want.
All you have to do to create a disk image is drop a folder on Disk Utility. Boom. It's as fast or faster than creating a zip file, but has the advantage of including hidden files, metadata, icon resources, and other stuff that gets skipped by many backup or archiving utilities.
> a lot of interesting stuff becomes possible, such as the fast file system creation
It takes just a few seconds to erase a disk and initialize it with HFS+, including the creation of the file system. Even on a really big disk you are in and out of Disk Utility in no time. It is so short that you don't budget any time for it, you just do it when you need to. It takes longer to read the "all data on this volume will be destroyed" message than the actual disk activity that follows.
Fast file system creation is one of the things that make disk images possible. You couldn't use disk images as your archive format if it took all day to make one.
The problem with any debate involving HFS+ is that the volume format has an undeservedly bad rep. One reason for this is that it was introduced with Mac OS v8, yet many key features lay essentially dormant until 3-5 years later with Mac OS X. Everybody thought HFS+ had a 31-character filename limit, but that was a Mac OS 9 limitation, not an HFS+ limitation.
Another reason for the bad rep is that HFS+ was developed specifically for graphical desktop computing, whereas many other volume formats are optimized for enterprise computing, or servers, or other priorities. To many geek eyes HFS+ appears to be doing many things the "wrong" way. For example, every file on an HFS+ disk is identified not only by filename but also by node number, so the user can rename or move a file or application (even while they are open or running) and the system and apps continue to find it by the node number. This is why you can close iTunes, move your whole music library folder to a new location on the disk, and then open iTunes and it will still immediately find all of your audio files, even though each and every single one now has a different pathname. This is actually the most underrated feature of the Mac
> Apple could simply port (or rebuild!) Cocoa and its toolkits, for Windows
> Pull out the BSD kernel, and what is OS X?
It is so much more than any one thing, which is why it's a great system.
For example, compare the way that Apple introduced the UNIX security model to their application platform (in 2001) to the way that Microsoft intends to do it (in 2007). Mac users hardly noticed the transition, while here is what Paul Thurrott says about User Account Protection (UAP) in Microsoft Vista:
> UAP is a sad, sad joke. It's the most annoying feature that Microsoft has ever added to
> any software product, and yes, that includes that ridiculous Clippy character from older
> Office versions. The problem with UAP is that it throws up an unbelievable number of
> warning dialogs for even the simplest of tasks. That these dialogs pop up repeatedly for
> the same action would be comical if it weren't so amazingly frustrating. It would be
> hilarious if it weren't going to affect hundreds of millions of people in a few short
> months. It is, in fact, almost criminal in its insidiousness.
That is just one example of a problem with Windows that can't be fixed by hiding it somewhere on a Mac. And the above is about Vista, which isn't even out yet, and already people are disappointed by it. Building more stuff on Windows is not the answer.
The comparison between OS/2 and Mac OS X is that Apple was successful in creating a bridge between their legacy application platform and their new application platform and IBM was not.
For Apple, this happened a few years ago when they released the first version of Mac OS X. It had a handful of native API's and it could also run "Classic" Mac apps (1984-1999) in a box similar to how OS/2 ran Windows and DOS apps.
If Apple starts running Windows XP applications in Aqua it will be the second time around for them. I think they will do it the same way. You'll be required to have a Windows XP SP2 disc to run "WinClassic" in Aqua (on Intel) just like you have to have a Mac OS 9 v9.2.2 disc to run Classic in Aqua (on PowerPC). Using the authentic old system means the apps run as expected and it makes the whole thing a modular and optional install. Users will prefer native apps because they look better, run better, have modern security, don't require a Windows disc, are easier to install and maintain, and for many other reasons.
Day one with your first Mac you could be running Firefox, Apache, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto all natively. After a few years it will be hard to imagine installing Windows on your NEXT Mac.
> It's still not the best solution, though. What I'd really like to see is the means to run whatever OS's
... in which they were created. To run Mac OS 9 applications you first launch Mac OS 9, and to run Windows XP applications you first launch Windows XP, even if you are doing so on Mac OS X. As long as you have a native API for developers to port to then the legacy operating system is just a bridge to give developers time to catch up and then ship new apps that no longer need the legacy system.
> application directly in OS X, without having to run the OS.
That's missing the point, though. Applications run best in the environment for which they are designed
> I still run Win98 on my Sony laptop.
One nice thing with Mac OS X is that you don't get stuck like this. You can buy a system and then a year or two later you can buy an OS upgrade and an iLife upgrade (for less than $200 total) and wipe your hard drive and install both of those discs and you are basically looking at a new Mac. You won't be missing any drivers, you won't lose any features, and everything will just work. In fact, it will be faster, because every version of Mac OS X has been faster on the same hardware than the previous version.
Also it is so easy to install Mac OS X and iLife (even with an optional disk initialization first) that pretty much anyone can revitalize a Mac in this way. This is one reason the resale value has typically been high for Macs. You can buy an old Mac and the newest OS and put the two together and get a new Mac, with all the hardware working and no extra drivers needed.
Leopard (Mac OS X v10.5) was announced at WWDC 2005 as being due at the end of 2006. At the time this was the same date that MS Windows Vista was supposed to ship however it has fallen behind again.
This July is WWDC 2006. There will probably be a beta of Leopard for developers at that time so they can get their software ready.
The schedule has been every 18 months since v10.2 was released.
> No 68K programs I used ran better under emulation
The first PowerPC chip was so much faster than the last 68k chip that it was possible at the time to upgrade to a new machine and have your old apps run faster even though they were no longer running natively.
It's like the new MacBook Pro runs PowerPC apps like a G4 1 GHz which is a huge drag if your last machine was a dual G5 2 GHz, but if you upgrading from a PowerBook G4 667 MHz to a MacBook Pro then all of your apps will be faster, even the ones that are not native.
> I think they'll wait a few months/years to get their sales up, and then cut out the rug and say,
> we don't support Windows any longer on our hardware.
I think it is much more likely that they will fully support Windows XP for quite some time but won't support Vista. They can cannibalize XP, but compete with Vista. It is possible for Apple to create a Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard that is better at running Windows XP applications than Windows Vista is.
I think what Apple will do over the next few years with Intel/Windows is just like what they did in a few years ago with PowerPC/Mac OS Classic. From their perspective, it is just another legacy system to adopt like a library so you can run the applications.
The biggest drag about switching from Windows to Mac can be upgrading all of your applications all at once. If you can buy a Mac and keep running all of your old apps, then you can upgrade or replace each application at the end of its upgrade cycle, for example replacing Photoshop v9 for Windows with Photoshop v10 for Mac when v10 is released instead of buying v9 for Mac in between. Also it can take about a year for someone to find an upgrade or replacement app for every last little thing as they switch their primary environment from Windows to Mac and if they can keep running their old apps during that time it is much easier on them.
Mac OS X v10.5 is called "Leopard".
One new feature that is for sure is that there will be one version of the OS and one install disc for both PowerPC and Intel. Right now in 10.4 they are separate systems and discs but they are currently merging into one, with the PowerPC code still part of iTunes on Intel and the Intel code showing up in iTunes on PowerPC and the same thing going on everywhere. When Leopard ships it will be one OS again like Panther was, just now with fat binaries everywhere.
Rumors have it there will be a database file system and support for really, really big displays.
It would be fun to see a Classic-like system for running Windows apps rootlessly on the Mac OS X (Intel) Desktop. The same way that Classic used an existing Mac OS 9 installation, the Intel-based counterpart would boot an existing Windows installation within a virtual machine and composite it on the Desktop using the same techniques as Classic did. So you could buy a Mac and keep using your Windows as you transition your apps and files and such. Since the CPU is native x86 the Windows software should run at 90% of the CPU speed just like Classic apps. However if you are running Windows XP that came out in 2001 so your 2006 Core Duo based Mac will be your fastest Windows ever, even floating on the Mac OS X Desktop.
Their competition is the fast times of the tech industry itself. Microsoft or not, in 10 years everyone will be using all-new computers. Microsoft has two products, MS Windows and MS Office, both from 1985, both showing their years. What are they going to do to force those products onto tomorrow's computers?
Mac OS X isn't going to run on all the weird stuff out there. It's enough to switch from PowerPC Macs to Intel Macs without emulating Microsoft's worst technical mistakes. The job that Microsoft has taken on may not even be possible. Their locked in hardware makers and white box cloners don't give a shit about the software and Microsoft doesn't care about the hardware and the user is playing a technical russian roulette whenever they buy a new system. It might all work or it might not. It might work for a while then stop. Nobody tested the whole system. Nobody is standing behind the whole system. On a Mac you forget that the Bluetooth is actually a little subsystem on a chip somewhere inside because you don't ever have to configure the driver, you just use the little Bluetooth system menu to USE the Bluetooth. The computer is totally integrated, functional, and remains functional. The sound NEVER stops working. You don't ever, ever, ever have to even use the term "video driver" that is already in there.
Steve Jobs just said recently that if Microsoft wants to play in the digital music space they'll have to make their own iPod. They won't be able to push WMA on people and lock everybody in at the software level like a parasite. They will have to make an actual product, not part of a product that they then leverage into a new monopoly with all of the makers of the rest of the product. Steve Jobs is of the opinion that you should sell the customer one integrated widget and take responsibility for the whole thing, no matter what features are done in hardware and what features are done in software and whatever else. If the Apache Web server in my Mac stops working I can call AppleCare and they will help me get it working, not direct me to the Apache foundation or the manufacturer of one component of my Mac such as the OS.
Fundamentally, and at a very core level, Apple doesn't like the commodity PC market because it is technically bad. They see a very messy system making awful computers and nobody taking responsibility, and then at Apple they have worked their asses off to make a tremendous system with everything included and charge you one low price. I really think that Steve Jobs feels that if you can't see the value in a Mac over a Dell right now, Core Duo to Core Duo, Mac OS X vs Windows, then he doesn't want you as a customer. You will only come into the community and start stealing software and complaining that your Windows programs don't run. Fuck you. The Mac community is getting along just fine without and has been for over 20 years. There is tons of application software including all the long-time Mac favorites that have since been ported to Windows like Photoshop, Illustrator, Word, Excel and others.
Mac mini is $599 and comes with $400 of real software, not bullshit "lite" versions. MacBook is going to be $999. The iMac is an outstanding machine it is $1299 with everything included. There is just no good reason to offer somebody a $200 retail box of Mac OS X for their Pentium4 and whatever cheap and funky shit it has in it from Acer or somebody.
> OS X is just BSD with a fairly standard (though usable) GUI on top of it
... the shadows are really shadows, the textures are really textures, the windows are really objects not just empty rectangles you fill with fake shadows and bevels ... ridiculously good window management ... so much more.
Man, that's just dumb.
First, the "just BSD" crack is FUD direct from Bill Gates in 1990 when he called NeXTSTEP a "warmed over UNIX". The BSD part of Mac OS X is OPTIONAL and is there because it is SO FUCKING USEFUL TO EVERY USER. The BSD API is just one of at least five major API's and it is not even the recommended or most commonly used one. Not to knock BSD at all, I am a huge fan and running Apache next to Dreamweaver and Photoshop and Flash and QuickTime is just awesome. But BSD is not Mac OS X.
There are many overt and subtle innovations in Mac OS X:
- the whole GUI is done in the GPU now
- I bought the Panther (v10.3) upgrade just for Exposé and it was worth it plus a whole lot more
- Tiger's (v10.4) launchd is how every UNIX will do it in 10 years
- XML configuration files throughout
- standardized multimedia (QuickTime movies with Sorenson codec replaced with MPEG-4 movies with H.264 codec)
- complete multichannel digital audio mixer, instruments, effects (CoreAudio, CoreMIDI) for use by any application
- object-oriented drivers (if you buy an Intel-based Mac right now some of the drivers you will be running are PowerPC and are being translated by Rosetta in real-time)
> Nobody's going to buy a hard disk with the OS preinstalled either.
One of the PPC Linux distributions is sold this way. You buy the external FireWire hard drive from them and plug it into your Mac and boot with the Option key held down and then choose the new drive as your startup disk from the boot menu (holding down Option at boot time displays the boot menu on Macs) and then your system boots Linux from the new disk. When you are done with Linux you can shutdown and then Option+boot the system again and choose your system's internal drive with Mac OS X off the boot menu.
When Apple's boot menu finds a bootable Linux disk it puts a little Tux on there it is sweet.
When you compare Mac OS X v10.1 through v10.4 it is amazing how the newer ones actually look like newer versions of the older versions. If you are used to Panther or Tiger and you look at a Jaguar screenshot it is obviously Mac OS X but it just looks "old". The newer versions are tightened up in so many ways, not just look but also features, where things are. These days something like the AirPort (WiFi) system menu has a few more options on it but it looks the same and functions the same and is in the same place as it was in Jaguar. Same with the Apple menu, Dock, System Preferences, Finder (for the most part), Desktop, windows and controls, most of the included applications and utilities. Even the default desktop picture is similar but evolves slightly each release. There is a tremendous amount of user consistency in Mac OS X.
This site compares GUI's using a large library of screenshots: GUI Guidebook
For the programmer, rather than various flavors of Windows API, Mac OS X just offers you a choice of procedural API, object-oriented API, BSD API, Java API, X-Windows, Web/JavaScript, QuickTime. You use whatever API makes most sense to you for that project and you get a lot of stuff for free from the system and you can make a really polished product that runs for weeks and weeks on a stable system.
A big consistency thing is key shortcuts. From the very beginning, Apple established some sensible standards like Command+S for Save and Command+P for Print and Command+O for Open. In the intervening 22 years applications on the Mac have used these standards so they are very commonly used. Once you learn one, it pays you back in many situations in many applications. At one point, Microsoft even added the Mac shortcuts to MS Windows and that's what most Windows users use today (Control+C for Copy, Control+X for Cut, Control+V for Paste are direct from the Mac for example). There are lots of examples like this where Apple took a moment to design a functioning system and then the developer community added to and improved the already-functioning system using Apple's stuff as a sort of living guideline along with lots of documentation where Apple will actually say "do it this way (unless you have a good reason not to) and your users will already know how to work your application".
> OK things that matter to uses in software in the last 15 years
... lots of images. He says get a lightweight image editor that opens quickly so you don't need to keep Photoshop running or launch it to do one little thing. I think he is insane but I guess I should be thankful he is such lousy competition. The energy he is spending launching and quitting apps and tracking "system resources" is energy I put into my work.
> 1) integrated office suites so skills translate across multiple products
The Apple Lisa in 1983 had an integrated, built-in office suite where all the key shortcuts and menu commands and ways of doing things matched EXACTLY.
Two years later in 1985 you could buy MS Word and MS Excel and some friends for your Mac. That is 21 years ago, not 15. I know people who have been writing books in MS Word non-stop for 20 years with full GUI and mouse and WYSIWYG. For them, MS Word v1.0 and MS Word 2004 are very similar and direct descendants. The fact that it took 10 years for Microsoft to put a GUI and mouse onto MS Word on the PC does not qualify this as being an interesting development of the last 15 years.
> 2) drag and drop
OH MY GOD drag and drop was invented at Apple in 19 fucking 80 and shipped with the Lisa in 1983 and the Mac in 1984 as a deeply integrated key system feature available to all applications and in a complete set of circumstances and with consistant operation. That is 26 years ago, not 15. Hold down Option (alt) as you drag to make a copy is Mac 1984.
3) cut and past working for complex objects
Again, Lisa 1983 or Macintosh 1984 or NeXT 1990. All more than 15 years ago. During the heyday of desktop publishing which is the late 1980's it was common to cut and paste ridiculously complex data from place to place it was a key feature. Cut and paste (the real cut and paste with scissors and glue) is a key publishing feature so nobody had to explain the digital cut and paste to publishers when they moved to desktop publishing. And yes they want to cut and paste blocks of formatted text with complex typefaces and ligatures and embedded photographs and vector diagrams. And they want to paste it from application A to application B and yes it works on the Mac and has forever.
> 4) Object linking and embedding
There is a one hour video floating around the Internet that shows Steve Jobs in 1992 demo'ing a NeXT workstation and about 10 minutes of it is on "object linking and embedding". He creates a single document on a NeXT system, then browses a mixed network of NeXT, Sun, and MS Windows machines and embeds documents from each of the other operating systems into the document on the NeXT system. Then we watch the document on the NeXT system update in real-time as the embedded documents are modified on the various other computers by users in other buildings using entirely different platforms. So a user in accounting saves a document on their MS Windows machine and in another building the NeXT system updates the embedded chart in the annual report a few seconds later.
That is 14 years ago and it was not new then, and it was not Microsoft again.
> 5) multitasking really working
I know a guy who uses Photoshop on Windows XP and I use Photoshop on Mac OS X and we are both pros, we were talking shop and he asked me don't I find that Photoshop takes too long to start up? And I'm like I don't know it starts up when I login and then runs for weeks so why would I care? He says aren't you worried about system resources? Don't you want to quit Photoshop sometimes to run other stuff at full speed? I'm like if I quit Photoshop how will I open and edit the next image I encounter they are everywhere in print, Web
> 7) 3D desktop (I'll answer)
This is a Mac thing, circa 2003. It's called Quartz Extreme. The whole GUI is done in 3D in the video card. The shadows and textures on Mac screens are being drawn in the video card now. The 3D space is as wide as the screen, as tall as the screen,
Windows 95 was special because 3.1 was such utter crap. The big feature in Windows 95 was that the GUI was going to start up automatically and be on all the time. Wow! And this was 1995, mind you, only 11 years after the Mac and only five years after NeXT.
> In the free world, GIMP does what Photoshop does
... all he wants is Terminal and GraphicConverter and Firefox and he is good to go for everything.
... I use Photoshop professionally all day every day and can't for the life of me figure out why anybody uses anything else. Yes it costs a bit of money to get started but then after that you pay $150 every 18 months and it continues to kick ass and gain new professional features. You have the whole art kit there ... it's like having a full set of pastels rather than one box of eight colors. The complete thing is more than the sum of its parts. And I can create a file with it and know it will be a professional-level file, not something with the mask inverted or an old kind of TIFF compression or stored with an unusual endian-ness or something.
Please stop doing that, it is a disservice to the GIMP authors. It's like when people say Java can easily replace C. Only if you squint really hard and you have an axe to grind. It's like saying you can go ahead and chuck GCC and everybody just use MS Visual Basic it is the same.
In the free world, GIMP does what GraphicConverter does. GraphicConverter is $39 Shareware on the Mac for the last 10 years. My IT guys swears by it
However, me
There is an interactive element to the tools and tablet with Photoshop that is not matched anywhere else. People sometimes focus on the Filters but that is less than 10% of my daily work. The painting and selection tools, history/undo features, compositing features, automation, color management and many other features are much more interesting and useful. Support for PCX images is lacking but not missed while support for 16-bits per channel camera raw images is available and greatly appreciated.
When people even imply that Linux/GIMP is similar to Mac OS X/Photoshop it is just strange. Like saying a TV and computer are the same because they both have displays. Like an iPod and PSP are the same they are both handheld computers. In all cases these are incredibly complex systems with very different behaviors.
There are plenty of anecdotes from people who had great meetings and great business relationships with Steve Jobs. He is brusque and used to being around very smart, very capable, very talented people. It rubs some people the wrong way but he is not your life counselor and is not trying to be.
What really matters is the work. Look at Apple since 1997 and what they have built it is outrageous. Anyone involved with that deserves respect and Steve probably earned his share.
> Reality: ---> Microsoft won because everybody else gave up. ---
... well, those other companies gave up. They couldn't compete with mighty Microsoft. Why didn't they just work harder?
The reason everybody else gave up was because Microsoft was cheating. There are only so many times you can play a game against a cheat before you lose interest. Without a fair chance to win it is hard to put in your best effort. It is not that Microsoft is a tough competitor, driving people out of markets with better products, but rather that they are anti-competitive: they will not compete with you. They will break the law before they will compete with you. No matter how well you do in the race, Microsoft gets the gold.
If you remember a few years ago when a figure skater's boyfriend hit a rival skater in the knee with a pipe before the Olympics, that is what Microsoft is like. Instead of trying to win on the ice they club the real winner in the knee with a pipe. Then a lot of their users apologize for them
15 million in today's dollars is 200 million in 2025 dollars. So movies will still cost 200 million.
They will probably feel more "indie" though because they will be made by smaller teams and there will be more of them (both teams and movies).
This is sort of funny coming from Lucas, isn't it? He is a major innovator in making a movie's money back. Every little spaceship they designed for the Star Wars movies flies over and over again in games and toys. Theoretically, you could put the spaceship designers in your games and toys company and then you could make a movie with those spaceships for 15 million dollar and it would have a tremendous advantage over another 15 million dollar movie.