I would love to see the future history of these guys:
- someone who spent $799 on a Lindows.com notebook - someone who spent $849 on an eNote with MS XP Home - someone who spent $999 on an Apple iBook
That would be like really seeing where the rubber meets the road in consumer information technology. From my experience the iBook will cost less and do more over the working lives of these machines. The iBook is a top quality motorcycle as opposed to a cheap car.
> ou need(ed) urlscan: > http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default. > asp?url=/technet/security/tools/tools/urlscan.asp
> And a clue how to admin a box. Usually you learn about > the tenets of how it works BEFORE you use it on the net. > Your issue is 100% admin error, not Microsoft.
BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT. You might think it's not, but it is. These systems are not sold to card-carrying, beard-wearing UNIX admins, they are sold to everyday working-people and small business and whatever other unfortunates didn't fucking know to get a Mac. AND, rather than an easy, automatic update system like Apple's, or a geek-friendly but you can trust it system like other UNIX, Microsoft has this outrageous update system that even they have blamed when Hotmail went down under some known bug that they themselves hadn't patched.
If you go right now and get Mac OS X Server instead of Windows 2000 Server, Mac OS X itself will check with Apple daily or weekly or monthly or never (your choice) for patches, and the system will install them itself. This update system is years-old, pre-dating Mac OS X even, and I have watched it painlessly update scores of Macs through about five Mac OS 9 updates and about 30 Mac OS X updates (10.1.1 to 10.1.2 for example, or an openSSH patch a day or so after a vulnerability is found, or whatever). I'm telling you right now that a 7th-grader with an iBook she got from school can run a secure Apache Web server over her DSL without ever installing any patches, and all she has to do is click one button to start the server. Surely, given that real-world condition, a server system from Microsoft that costs thousands and thousands in software licenses and labor to deploy shouldn't be so fragile that an admin has to check a Microsoft Web site every day to see how messed up their server might be.
This is a scandal, people. Just because you've enjoyed watching Linus et al rebuild 1970's computing from the ground up for free over the last few years doesn't mean you can apologize for Microsoft's 1980's style security policies here in 2003. We don't just network now, we Internet, we Wi-Fi, we Bluetooth, we hot-plug cameras and 20 types of storage and then we pick it up and move to somewhere else and connect to a bunch of stuff there. If Apple can make their OS UNIX-compatible, across their whole line, from kids computers to video workstations to recording studios to artists and QuickTime servers and Web servers, then why can't one plain Microsoft server weather a little time connected to the big bad old Internet (ooh, scary) all by itself?
Microsoft is never really held responsible because if you do that, you have to admit that Steve Jobs was right, and IBM was right, and Linus Torvalds was right, and your CTO was wrong to spend the last five years filing your company with shitty DOS boxes just so you could get your nuts into an even bigger Microsoft vice.
I'm telling you, if you have run one of Apple's new systems for even a day, just taking it for a test drive, kicking the tires, so to speak, then you will probably get a huge sinking feeling that 90% of the industry is just sitting there scratching their asses and trying to figure out how they can sell you yet another POTS modem, or yet another hub of some kind, while Apple actually built the desktop platform for the future. You get trustworthy computing from Apple because they stand by EVERYTHING. They build it right, they sign their name on it, you pay one price and you get a complete system that does what they said it does and keeps on doing it in spite of the fact that the Internet was invented.
Windows is not just screwed up at the core level, in the kernel and security and such. It's also screwed up at the application platform level. Microsoft just bought VirtualPC so that they can build it into Windows 2003 Server so that their users who actually can't migrate their NT stuff to XP can run virtual NT's on Windows 2003. In other words, the user's application installations are so fragile that they have to move forward with an entire emulated Pentium computer and their whole NT OS wrapped around them in software. When you can't even add or remove apps in a proper way, what kind of platform is that?
Yeah, but can I plug a Windows computer onto that POTS and get it onto the Internet reliably without professional help? And if I do, how much of a risk do I have that any data on the machine is public? What code is running on their in my house, every second that it's on?
The UNIX community has already solved so many of the issues that are facing the Windows platform, and what UNIX didn't solve, the Mac community did. To see Microsoft still doing a "what, me?" thing in 2003 is really sad. It would be halfway acceptable if Windows XP had the security of Mac OS X, but it doesn't. A $999 Apple iBook is more secure than a $10,000 Windows server. Apple is dishing out notebooks to school children with better security, privacy, and reliability than any Microsoft product, ever.
I first read that as "secure", then noticed it was "obscure".
Their quality is just so low. When you are inventing new ways to be untrustworthy, to use as an excuse that nobody can be 100% trustworthy is really poor form. It's like saying no program can be bug-free so don't even do any beta testing or QA.
Anyway, Windows is done like dinner. Microsoft buying VirtualPC from Connectix was the final chapter for NT. There will be a follow-up to the X-Box that runs VirtualPC and runs all the DOS and NT legacy-code in that safer environment on top of a "trustworthy" (Palladium) OS that you can't get into at all and that will be a feature. A few years ago Microsoft stopped picturing Compaq machines in its ads and started putting in their own Microsoft PC concept designs, which look like X-Box. What Apple just did with Mac OS X in an open, UNIX way, Microsoft is going to do in a Microsoft way, with X-Box and VirtualPC. If you've run VirtualPC on Mac OS X, then you already get the idea of Windows-on-UNIX, because you've seen the Blue Screen Of Death in a little window and you can just reboot the window. It's obvious that all of Microsoft's thunder is just about some little puny software. It all runs inside one Mac application. If Windows gets hosed, you trash the little virtual disk file and get a fresh one off the VirtualPC install CD and it's like having a new computer. So why is it so hard to admin a "real" Windows system?
DVD's are 4+GB, hard disks are 100+GB, so why wouldn't you want your CPU to be able to talk to more than 4GB of RAM? 32 to 64 bits is an exciting transition because you go from 4GB of RAM (which is small enough that you could fill it with the contents of one DVD) to an enormous amount that we can't even imagine filling yet.
It's just that the transition to 64-bits seems like more trouble than it's worth if you use Wintel stuff. That's because Intel's 64-bit chips sucks, AMD's is not out yet, and Microsoft is not even UNIX-compatible yet, and certainly isn't stable, even on the IA32 platform. For PowerPC we are just going to slide right into 64-bits and 3D and video and audio and scientific visualization workstations that move ridiculous amounts of data in real-time.
Your Microsoft-trained brain is looking for complexity where there is none. It really is an XML file. It is not an XML file with a single tag called full of encoded data. Apple's software is not hostile to third-party developers or to geeks or to users. Microsoft's software is by definition hostile to other software and so must also be hostile to the user and to geeks. That's the price you pay for saving $200 on a Gateway vs. an Apple: you get to be Microsoft's little sister and you start to think like Microsoft's little sister.
This is what the industry has been waiting for. Somebody built a better PowerPoint, and not only is it miles better even in just production values (slides and images fade in and out, OpenGL transforms automatically, etc), but it has a very open (XML) file format, AND it imports and exports PowerPoint. It is also cheaper and easier to use than PowerPoint, and running Apple software on Mac OS X you can actually EXPECT the app not to crash. Not ever. I say this from experience.
A word processor and spreadsheet are EASY compared to Web browser, presentations, and database software, which Apple already has released (Safari, Keynote, Filemaker). Filemaker is already the desktop database for Mac MS Office users.
You have to actually try this new generation of software from Apple to get what the fuss is about. The interfaces are amazing, and the programs are very, very smart. They do all kinds of stuff for you that you don't notice except that the work comes out better and you enjoy yourself while you're doing it and the stuff is RELIABLE.
On a Mac, you can scan, capture prints, print to multiple printers, view your work on multiple displays, work on images in multiple applications, and still maintain perfect color calibration all along, because the computer itself has had color calibration built in for years and years. The hardware, OS, and application platform knows that the user wants to really see what is in his or her work. On the PC, this STILL is not so. What is the point of rendering your work a little faster if it is compromized by artifacts such as every color being wrong?
> If RAW photo and Photoshop batch processing are > important in your workflow, then speed is what > you need
Batch processing is the LEAST important Photoshop benchmark BY FAR. Here's why: as a Photoshop user, you sit in front of your work; examine it; decide to make a change to it, then you use a tool or command to make that change, then you WAIT while the computer does that change and displays the results for you. You have to wait because you don't necessarily know the next step you're going to take until you see the results of the last. That wait is the wait that we want to get rid of as Photoshop users. This is why the PowerPC has a bunch of special features for rotating and sizing graphics very quickly, because those are hugely CPU intensive and you do them all day long in any kind of creative workflow, still or video graphics especially. For batch processing, I turn it on and it runs in the background all day while I don't notice, or I run the batch on an older machine that is dedicated to that, or run the batch overnight. That is not what wastes ARTIST TIME, which is the most expensive part of a graphics workflow.
This article is crap. It is like a Tom's Hardware Guide To Digital Photography that talks all about seconds and MHz and nothing about color, style, art, workflow, creativity, and professional OUTPUT.
Kids: do not buy Microsoft game consoles and try to do real work on them. You will be frustrated unless you are using MS Office or just text-editing. That is all PC's are good for unless you are a part-time CS guy or have a geek around that you can abuse whenever Windows needs its dick sucked a little bit.
This kind of article makes Bill Gates get a chubby. "See? Our 9 pound notebook with a 70 watt CPU that constantly throttles back and 1.5 hour battery life and DOS2000 OS can pull data off a CF card slightly faster than a one-inch thick Mac with a 14 watt RISC CPU, UNIX, Mac, and 5 hour battery life. And the PC is $200 cheaper and comes with almost no decent software and almost no guarantees. What a value. Look, I put a picture on the screen! Wow!"
Come out of the 20th century, Slashdot geeks. Apple just launched a $3000 notebook that's 1" thick, has a 17" TFT screen, built-in Bluetooth, built-in 802.11g (note the g), built-in FireWire 400 and FireWire 800, DVI-VGA-S-Video out, 24-bit audio in and out, Mac OS X (now with X11 and KHTML-rendering Web browser), iLife (nothing on the PC is nearly as good as this, you have to see to understand), slot-load SuperDrive (DVD-RW, CD-RW), 5-hour battery (that's with the CPU running full-speed) and weighs 6 pounds. I don't know how anyone can seriously compare the Mac and PC platforms anymore. It's the 21st century: we don't carry big beige boxes or gasoline generators (to run Dell notebooks) in the field.
This article is like looking at the world of digital photography through a pinhole. Look at the bigger picture. There are a billion little reasons, like JPEG2000 only being supported on Mac OS X so far, like the way your photograph looks REAL on Mac OS X and an Apple display. The contrast and color balance just can't be done on a PC. There isn't one made that can do it and there never has been. They're not building for those customers over at Wintel, whereas Apple is. Bill Gates shows you a goo-gaw so you think the PC is the uber-PC, but then the features don't show up or don't work when they do. DirectX is no CoreAudio, for example. The same is true at every level of the two systems. You suffer so much in so many ways on a PC ? to say that it's OK because you can read your CF card a little faster is just so amazing. The built-in assumption is that you already have a PC and are willing to I.T. it. Why? Why? Why? What Apple ships just in software with a new machine is worth the system price. The hardware is basically free.
Safari has a number of UI elements that replace tabs. Snapback in the address field and search fields takes you back to where you started surfing. You can also drag links to the Bookmark bar and then drag them off again easily, like a little shelf. The little book icon on the left of the Bookmark bar switches the window to a view of your Bookmarks and History, like lifting up a page to look at a TOC. Plus, it is FAST. I find myself just surfing rather than opening up a bunch of windows because pages appear instantly.
Also, the menubar is pervasive, so the History and Bookmarks menus are right there all the time in the same place. Safari also shows the URL's in your Address Book in the Bookmarks menu, so even without tabs, you find yourself having lots of clickable links right away, and plenty of room to put more.
I think the idea is that what Safari renders, it renders just like Gecko, but it doesn't necessarily have the same level of CSS support as Gecko. Maybe that is coming, or maybe they're not worried about that since the browser is very lightweight and very fast and everything looks great in it.
I use a Mac because that's where the creative tools are. Way too many people think that Mac and Windows are the same because there are lots of Mac/PC applications, but they're not the same at all. Digidesign's Pro Tools runs on both Mac and Windows, but it's been running on the Mac for much longer and with more features, and all of the pro-level plug-ins are Mac-only. So, all of the #1 hits done with Pro Tools are also Mac-only. Similarly, Quark runs on Windows, but most of the plug-ins are Mac-only, and color management, advanced typography, a PostScript renderer, and PDF workflow are built-in to the Mac, so most of publishing runs on Macs. Many other mainstream creative applications are only a few versions old on Windows, and five or six versions more mature on the Mac.
It's just that the technology is so much better than any other platform when it comes to creative stuff of any kind (art, music, video, design). If you replace "Windows PC" in this article with "typewriter" and then read it again you'll see how it looks to a Mac user. No, we're not anxious to trade our multimedia audio/video/graphics workstations with great UI and amazing stability for IBM Selectrics. As a creative workstation, Windows makes a shitty typewriter. That's all there is to it. The rest is window dressing, with non-Mac users wondering what the buzz is about.
Aliases aren't file system links, they're links to the file by a special number each file gets (I think it's called a node number). The user can rename the target file and the alias will still point to the target. This aspect of HFS+ is also what lets you rename MP3 files (for example) and iTunes will still know that a song is the same song. It's like the computer is using its own naming convention (long unique numbers) which frees up file names for the user to do as they please. You can rename and move apps and documents on the Mac and stuff keeps on working.
> As long as harddisks don't improve drastically in > speed or RAID becomes standard, I don't see GBit as > neccessity.
RAID is standard on the Mac. You open Disk Utility and set it up with a few GUI switches.
I routinely move huge amounts of data between my PowerBook and PowerMac. They both came with gigabit Ethernet standard, and theh ports also do their own sensing so you don't need a crossover cable. Apple was ahead of the curve going to 10/100 just like they are ahead of the curve going to 10/100/1000 because their customers work with lots of data for desktop users. DV movie clips, huge print jobs, multitrack audio. Macs keep their value and get used for many years longer than you would expect, and it's stuff like this that does that. Gigabit Ethernet has been standard on pro Macs for 18 months or so and those machines are going to be great servers later on, with their FireWire and 802.11 antennaes and Gigabit Ethernet and lots of empty PCI slots.
My PowerBook usually has two FireWire drives hooked up to it while I'm working, and my PowerMac has 4-6 drives hooked up at all times, so the big pipe between the machines means no waiting for data no matter where it is.
Up in the GUI, you add functionality to apps with scripts and plug-ins. AppleScript is in full swing right now, and the History panels in Adobe and Macromedia and other apps make scripting available to everyone. This has always been the command line of the Mac, and you can use AppleScript to create an application that essentially runs other applications as if it were a user, performing routine or repetitive tasks. When you see it in action, it's quite brilliant, with documents opening up in an application and changing, importing other data, saving, then the document opening in another application and being treated. It's great.
This is the software layer between the hardware and the rest of the software on the computer. Darwin runs on Macs and on some Intel systems. It's not some loose pieces of Mac OS X that fell under a particular license; it's the core OS, the really technical part of the operating system that you interact with from the command line. This would have been the whole operating system before graphical interfaces, but now it's the geeky filling inside the candy coating of Mac OS X. Transparency is really valued in this core part of the Mac OS, and ease-of-use often takes a back seat to maintaining traditions and functionalities that have been proven to work. So, in Darwin, there are folders with names like/etc and/bin, there are traditional UNIX tools, there's the file system, the Hardware Abstraction Layer and all this stuff is open so that it can be scoured for bugs, and so that this vital software layer that is the spine of the computer can't be held hostage by a single party, or be made deliberately incompatible with other technologies, or run tasks without the user's knowledge. Darwin is also progressive and modern, with XML configuration files, a simplified directory structure, and ZeroConf networking that makes small, industry-standard IP networks configure themselves.
Mac OS X - Professional and Consumer Desktop
Darwin for PowerPC plus closed-source software from Apple and other vendors, including a great graphical user interface. The emphasis in this version of Mac OS is ease-of-use, simplicity, and good looks. Huge features of the machine may only be exposed to the GUI in one little easy-to-use widget, enabling the user to understand and harness a lot of technology quickly and easily. Huge simplifications benefit the non-technical or new user: an application and all of its files go in a single folder that is presented to the user as a single icon that they can run, move, rename, or peek inside with the use of a contextual menu. There are hundreds of features, but they're presented to the user in such a simplified and friendly way that you can take it all in very quickly. I just read the instructions today for making Mozilla your default browser, and on Mac OS X it is "Go Apple Menu > System Preferences > Internet > Web > Default Browser, press Choose and select the Mozilla icon in your Applications folder." Figure out what it is on your platform and compare. Note that the user is not picking the browser off a list, whether stock or generated... they are picking the single icon called 'Mozilla' that is in their Applications folder. Whole layers of complexity are just not there to trouble you or to decay as the software installation matures. The Mozilla icon is actually a folder with all of the files and images and whatnot that Mozilla requires, and all you have to do to 'install' it is to place it in the Applications folder, provided your user account has the right to do so. Most apps just come as a single icon on a CD or a Disk Copy image (Macs mount disc images as if they were really on media... basically, you open a disk image and it is made into a RAM disk and mounted).
Mac OS X Server - Media, Web, Workgroup Servers
Mac OS X optimized for server use instead of desktop use. It's particularly suited to serving QuickTime, MPEG-4, and other streaming media. Apache is the Web server, and all the UNIX stuff you'd want is there or can easily be added. The GUI layer has a number of easy-to-use configuration and administration tools. Licensing compared to Windows is very cheap thanks to use of open source software, and there is also no client access license.
> Yeah. Another Processor. Cool. Even more Mhz and > stuff. Ye-haw. Now I can run poorly written, crappy > software even faster.
It's sad that you think the software you use is poorly written. I love my software. I hardly ever have an application crash, and never have a system crash. Check out the Mac platform. There is a lot of really great stuff going on here. I'm using Emagic Logic and Ableton Live on Mac OS X 10.2 and it is fucking GREAT. Amazing software. All three have yet to crash on me at all, and I've been using Live for over six months, daily, all day.
Codex The Sloth is so far off on his Mac knowledge that he is in troll territory. Give us a break. Read something before you post. So many times people who only have experience with x86 make fools of themselves publicly by assuming that the myriad problems of the Intel platform exist on other platforms as well. No, they don't.
> Clearly you have a short memory. The "emulated" > 68k mode of PowerPCs (which were also supposed to be > waaay faster) weren't because the emulator didn't fit in > the cache. And for christ sakes, who the hell believes > what chip companies say about speed anymore?
The very first PowerMacs ran 68K software faster than it had ever been run before. You are completely wrong.
The 32-bit compatibility mode your'e talking about is an Intel thing, to make up for the fact that they've been bolting things onto their chips for 20 years, going from 8-bit to 32-bit currently. PowerPC is younger and benefits from a much more mature industry when it was designed. There are already 64-bit POWER chips, and some parts of the current 32-bit PowerPC are 64-bit and some are 128-bit. The switch to 64-bits was designed into PowerPC.
"Classic" Mac software runs in a partial emulator (some hardware is emulated, but not the CPU) on Mac OS X because Classic Mac apps have a 20 year history... they're just too different from modern apps to run natively on a modern system (different event model, different multitasking model). Similarly, "Classic" Intel apps (32-bit x86 architecture) are going to run in a special mode on 64-bit chips because they are just too different from modern ideas about chipmaking. After 20 years, you have to scrap some things, which means you don't get perfect compatibility.
The important thing to remember is that Apple has been on their current CPU for only a little more than five years, and on their current OS for only two years. They are RISC, they are 64-bit, they are UNIX, and they are ready for the future like nobody else. Every Mac sold for the past two years has had a Wi-Fi slot in it and antennaes built-in, as well as FireWire, and also Gigabit Ethernet on all pro machines for the past 18 months or so. The platform is in a great place for the future. In fact, that's the only thing holding Apple back for the past few years... they've been so future-focused (Mac OS X) that many of their traditional user base are still using three and four year-old machines while they're currently selling to "Switchers" and UNIX people.
The PowerPC architecture has been 64-bit from the start. There is no 32-bit to 64-bit transition. Current PowerPC chips already have some 64-bit and some 128-bit portions. The architecture is less than 10 years old, and it started at 32-bits... the designers knew that they would want 64-bits later. There are 64-bit POWER chips already, and they are all related (they have the same instruction set). This is not like Intel, whose 32-bit chip grew out of a 20 year-old 8-bit chip.
In addition, Mac applications are actually special folders that can contain just about anything a developer likes, including multiple binaries, one for each platform or whatever, so these kinds of transitions can be hidden from the user with a patch at the worst. Apple just rewrote their entire OS over the last five years, so I'm sure the idea of 64-bit computing was on their minds. Steve Jobs is also the CEO of Pixar, and I'm sure the Pixar programmers know how to take advantage of 64-bits... maybe you're used to seeing the consumer side of Apple and don't realize the kind of resources that their pro desktop users are into. Audio and video means great big files, huge amounts of data... the platform is ready for 64-bits.
The iMac G4/800 runs Quake III at high-quality 1024x768 just a couple of fps slower than the Gateway Profile P4/2.8GHz. They are also very, very close on a suite of Photoshop tests. Go and sit in front of the iMac you want at an Apple Store and do some of the things you do and see how it feels. They are very fast, ridiculously reliable and stable machines that are a joy to use, and you'll be three years ahead of where you are now in DVD authoring and DV editing and digital photography. Also, they are ergonomic, attractive, rugged, and the fan is quieter than a hard drive (so you don't hear it at all).
The reason for that is to keep your password secure. Let's say someone is running a "fake" login dialog box that will capture your username/password. Well, they can't because ctrl-alt-del is written into the keyboard driver, WinNT always intercepts it, so NT's dialog box will be the only program that can be activated by ctrl-alt-del. Make sense?
That's the excuse, not the reason. The reason is that the PC's firmware is decades old in some places and can't prevent a false login box. Open Firmware (IEEE 1275) on Apple, Sun, and other machines doesn't suffer from this problem.
One additional point: I can teach almost anyone to play a hand drum musically in almost no time at all because we are used to moving our hands around to hit things. The hands already have the skill and you just have to teach the music. To learn to play the piano musically, though, the person will probably have to build up their finger dexterity quite a bit... in other words, their hands need to be taught new skills as well as learning the music. The one-button mouse doesn't ask more from the user's dexterity than what most people have from their regular life skills.
Think about other things you do with your hands and compare to a one-button slam and point mouse with no finger aiming or dexterity required at all, and to a three-button scroller mouse. Pick up a rock and throw it, write with a pencil, point and press with an Apple mouse. EVERYONE can do these things. What are the analogies for the three-button scroller mouse?
Another point is that point-click-response is easy to see on a Mac. Go up to any Windows system and press the "wrong" mouse button for a task and see how confusing that could be to someone who doesn't have experience with it.
Finally, Mac OS X has support for up to 32 mouse buttons, so go nuts at Fry's and use whatever you want. Context menus are pluggable, so if the one you want isn't there, make it yourself or get it from somebody else.
> I really can't understand why so many Mac users object to multi-button mice > and the mousewheel, outside of dogmatism.
Remember that most Mac users have used Windows for real work, while most Windows users have not used a Mac at all. When you talk about dogma, we Mac users have seen more than our share of Windows users going through life the hard way... come on.
Apple's Pro Mouse doesn't have any buttons. It sits in your hand and you point and press either your whole hand or one finger, two fingers, whatever, and get a click. It becomes second nature.
I don't have any research to support this, just my own experience, but it seems like the hand has enough brains to take on the simple function of pointing and clicking and that means your brain doesn't have to do that. If you overload the hand, though, with multiple controls, then the brain has to get more involved in mousing. So on a Mac you just think "point, click" and your hand does it very naturally, develops a habit of flicking the cursor up to the menus and such. With a two-button mouse, now you are working individual fingers, e.g. pointer finger on left button, index on right... the mouse is not a part of your hand anymore like with a one-button mouse.
Another point about the one-button mouse... the fact that it is standard means that the computer itself and all Mac apps can be navigated with just one button. If you are on a desktop PC you say "so what?", but if you are using a stylus on a graphics tablet then you are happy to only have to press one button, if you are controlling the computer by voice or gesture (both built-into Mac OS X) then you are also going to gain from only NEEDING point and click. Touch screens, etc. So multiple buttons on a mouse is like a hack that won't scale, and MS Windows requires that second button for some stuff (amazing). On any other pointing device, the other buttons are even less useful and even more in the way. Most trackballs are nightmares of ergonomics just so they can fit a lot of buttons on there and convince somebody who spend $50 last year on a two-button trackball to spend $60 this year on a three-button trackball.
When my wife switched to a Mac, she got a two-button mouse and tried to do all the same things as in MS Windows until I told her that all of the commands are just in the menus at the top. She expected that only some commands would be there and some wouldn't. She started using a one-button mouse and going to the menus for every command and she was much faster and happier with that. You don't have to pick a method first, and the mouse hand just points and clicks so it gets a "mind of its own" (our hands have more brains in them than many animals, actually) and the cursor starts to seem like it just appears in the menubar when you want it. She is totally disinterested in context menus and key commands now. It's all menubar and drag and drop, which were both invented by Apple and were both in the original Mac.
>> Apple has found that using one menu at the very top increases productivity.
> They found that out 20 years ago using a tiny 7" screen and a GUI that only allowed one > application on the screen at the same time, with test subjects who had never been exposed > to a WIMP interface before. I would have to say that research simply does not apply in > current times where multitasking operating systems are standard, all current GUIs display > more than one application at a time, and even the cheap 15" displays support 1024x768 > pixels of screen resolution. The single menu bar is an annoying relic.
Apple quite publicly remade itself between 1997 and today. Mac OS X is a complete rewrite. I am sure the single-button mouse and single menubar were the subjects of many conversations and much research and demonstration inside Apple between then and now. What went on in the 1980's may still be important to you, but I doubt it had too much influence on Steve Jobs et al as they planned Apple's place in the world in the 21st century. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple in 1986, remember? He left with Apple's "Big Mac" project and turned it into NeXTSTEP. For the single menubar to survive the OpenStep > Mac OS X transition means it must have impressed somebody recently. They didn't do all this work to get to now and suddenly say "oh, shit, the MENUBAR! How did we miss that?". If you've USED both methods, the Mac way will likely feel better to you. It's also AMAZING for newbies (you teach them where the File menu is ONCE) and right now most of the world barely qualifies as newbies when it comes to computers.
I don't buy that there's a single thing in Mac OS X that isn't either how Steve wants it or it is on its way there. You can say you don't like it, but I don't think you can say it has anything to do with the 1980's. All the widgets and controls changed their appearance between 10.1 and 10.2... so much has changed in the last few years that I can't believe there was any impassable technical obstacle that kept them using a single menubar. The Mac didn't really used to have toolbars, and now there is a standard toolbar available for any window to use... couldn't they have provided a menubar there, too? An optional one, maybe? I really don't think anything stopped them from going with multiple menus except that it is not better in real use. When I see someone working on Windows today they look very cautious in their mousing to me... they are carefully targeting everything, they are looking a lot and waiting and then clicking... they are not operating in the intuitive, playing-a-musical-instrument way that I and others do on our Macs.
Slashdot Mirror
I would love to see the future history of these guys:
- someone who spent $799 on a Lindows.com notebook
- someone who spent $849 on an eNote with MS XP Home
- someone who spent $999 on an Apple iBook
That would be like really seeing where the rubber meets the road in consumer information technology. From my experience the iBook will cost less and do more over the working lives of these machines. The iBook is a top quality motorcycle as opposed to a cheap car.
> ou need(ed) urlscan:.
> http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default
> asp?url=/technet/security/tools/tools/urlscan.asp
> And a clue how to admin a box. Usually you learn about
> the tenets of how it works BEFORE you use it on the net.
> Your issue is 100% admin error, not Microsoft.
BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT. You might think it's not, but it is. These systems are not sold to card-carrying, beard-wearing UNIX admins, they are sold to everyday working-people and small business and whatever other unfortunates didn't fucking know to get a Mac. AND, rather than an easy, automatic update system like Apple's, or a geek-friendly but you can trust it system like other UNIX, Microsoft has this outrageous update system that even they have blamed when Hotmail went down under some known bug that they themselves hadn't patched.
If you go right now and get Mac OS X Server instead of Windows 2000 Server, Mac OS X itself will check with Apple daily or weekly or monthly or never (your choice) for patches, and the system will install them itself. This update system is years-old, pre-dating Mac OS X even, and I have watched it painlessly update scores of Macs through about five Mac OS 9 updates and about 30 Mac OS X updates (10.1.1 to 10.1.2 for example, or an openSSH patch a day or so after a vulnerability is found, or whatever). I'm telling you right now that a 7th-grader with an iBook she got from school can run a secure Apache Web server over her DSL without ever installing any patches, and all she has to do is click one button to start the server. Surely, given that real-world condition, a server system from Microsoft that costs thousands and thousands in software licenses and labor to deploy shouldn't be so fragile that an admin has to check a Microsoft Web site every day to see how messed up their server might be.
This is a scandal, people. Just because you've enjoyed watching Linus et al rebuild 1970's computing from the ground up for free over the last few years doesn't mean you can apologize for Microsoft's 1980's style security policies here in 2003. We don't just network now, we Internet, we Wi-Fi, we Bluetooth, we hot-plug cameras and 20 types of storage and then we pick it up and move to somewhere else and connect to a bunch of stuff there. If Apple can make their OS UNIX-compatible, across their whole line, from kids computers to video workstations to recording studios to artists and QuickTime servers and Web servers, then why can't one plain Microsoft server weather a little time connected to the big bad old Internet (ooh, scary) all by itself?
Microsoft is never really held responsible because if you do that, you have to admit that Steve Jobs was right, and IBM was right, and Linus Torvalds was right, and your CTO was wrong to spend the last five years filing your company with shitty DOS boxes just so you could get your nuts into an even bigger Microsoft vice.
I'm telling you, if you have run one of Apple's new systems for even a day, just taking it for a test drive, kicking the tires, so to speak, then you will probably get a huge sinking feeling that 90% of the industry is just sitting there scratching their asses and trying to figure out how they can sell you yet another POTS modem, or yet another hub of some kind, while Apple actually built the desktop platform for the future. You get trustworthy computing from Apple because they stand by EVERYTHING. They build it right, they sign their name on it, you pay one price and you get a complete system that does what they said it does and keeps on doing it in spite of the fact that the Internet was invented.
Windows is not just screwed up at the core level, in the kernel and security and such. It's also screwed up at the application platform level. Microsoft just bought VirtualPC so that they can build it into Windows 2003 Server so that their users who actually can't migrate their NT stuff to XP can run virtual NT's on Windows 2003. In other words, the user's application installations are so fragile that they have to move forward with an entire emulated Pentium computer and their whole NT OS wrapped around them in software. When you can't even add or remove apps in a proper way, what kind of platform is that?
Yeah, but can I plug a Windows computer onto that POTS and get it onto the Internet reliably without professional help? And if I do, how much of a risk do I have that any data on the machine is public? What code is running on their in my house, every second that it's on?
The UNIX community has already solved so many of the issues that are facing the Windows platform, and what UNIX didn't solve, the Mac community did. To see Microsoft still doing a "what, me?" thing in 2003 is really sad. It would be halfway acceptable if Windows XP had the security of Mac OS X, but it doesn't. A $999 Apple iBook is more secure than a $10,000 Windows server. Apple is dishing out notebooks to school children with better security, privacy, and reliability than any Microsoft product, ever.
I first read that as "secure", then noticed it was "obscure".
Their quality is just so low. When you are inventing new ways to be untrustworthy, to use as an excuse that nobody can be 100% trustworthy is really poor form. It's like saying no program can be bug-free so don't even do any beta testing or QA.
Anyway, Windows is done like dinner. Microsoft buying VirtualPC from Connectix was the final chapter for NT. There will be a follow-up to the X-Box that runs VirtualPC and runs all the DOS and NT legacy-code in that safer environment on top of a "trustworthy" (Palladium) OS that you can't get into at all and that will be a feature. A few years ago Microsoft stopped picturing Compaq machines in its ads and started putting in their own Microsoft PC concept designs, which look like X-Box. What Apple just did with Mac OS X in an open, UNIX way, Microsoft is going to do in a Microsoft way, with X-Box and VirtualPC. If you've run VirtualPC on Mac OS X, then you already get the idea of Windows-on-UNIX, because you've seen the Blue Screen Of Death in a little window and you can just reboot the window. It's obvious that all of Microsoft's thunder is just about some little puny software. It all runs inside one Mac application. If Windows gets hosed, you trash the little virtual disk file and get a fresh one off the VirtualPC install CD and it's like having a new computer. So why is it so hard to admin a "real" Windows system?
DVD's are 4+GB, hard disks are 100+GB, so why wouldn't you want your CPU to be able to talk to more than 4GB of RAM? 32 to 64 bits is an exciting transition because you go from 4GB of RAM (which is small enough that you could fill it with the contents of one DVD) to an enormous amount that we can't even imagine filling yet.
It's just that the transition to 64-bits seems like more trouble than it's worth if you use Wintel stuff. That's because Intel's 64-bit chips sucks, AMD's is not out yet, and Microsoft is not even UNIX-compatible yet, and certainly isn't stable, even on the IA32 platform. For PowerPC we are just going to slide right into 64-bits and 3D and video and audio and scientific visualization workstations that move ridiculous amounts of data in real-time.
Your Microsoft-trained brain is looking for complexity where there is none. It really is an XML file. It is not an XML file with a single tag called full of encoded data. Apple's software is not hostile to third-party developers or to geeks or to users. Microsoft's software is by definition hostile to other software and so must also be hostile to the user and to geeks. That's the price you pay for saving $200 on a Gateway vs. an Apple: you get to be Microsoft's little sister and you start to think like Microsoft's little sister.
This is what the industry has been waiting for. Somebody built a better PowerPoint, and not only is it miles better even in just production values (slides and images fade in and out, OpenGL transforms automatically, etc), but it has a very open (XML) file format, AND it imports and exports PowerPoint. It is also cheaper and easier to use than PowerPoint, and running Apple software on Mac OS X you can actually EXPECT the app not to crash. Not ever. I say this from experience.
A word processor and spreadsheet are EASY compared to Web browser, presentations, and database software, which Apple already has released (Safari, Keynote, Filemaker). Filemaker is already the desktop database for Mac MS Office users.
You have to actually try this new generation of software from Apple to get what the fuss is about. The interfaces are amazing, and the programs are very, very smart. They do all kinds of stuff for you that you don't notice except that the work comes out better and you enjoy yourself while you're doing it and the stuff is RELIABLE.
On a Mac, you can scan, capture prints, print to multiple printers, view your work on multiple displays, work on images in multiple applications, and still maintain perfect color calibration all along, because the computer itself has had color calibration built in for years and years. The hardware, OS, and application platform knows that the user wants to really see what is in his or her work. On the PC, this STILL is not so. What is the point of rendering your work a little faster if it is compromized by artifacts such as every color being wrong?
> If RAW photo and Photoshop batch processing are
> important in your workflow, then speed is what
> you need
Batch processing is the LEAST important Photoshop benchmark BY FAR. Here's why: as a Photoshop user, you sit in front of your work; examine it; decide to make a change to it, then you use a tool or command to make that change, then you WAIT while the computer does that change and displays the results for you. You have to wait because you don't necessarily know the next step you're going to take until you see the results of the last. That wait is the wait that we want to get rid of as Photoshop users. This is why the PowerPC has a bunch of special features for rotating and sizing graphics very quickly, because those are hugely CPU intensive and you do them all day long in any kind of creative workflow, still or video graphics especially. For batch processing, I turn it on and it runs in the background all day while I don't notice, or I run the batch on an older machine that is dedicated to that, or run the batch overnight. That is not what wastes ARTIST TIME, which is the most expensive part of a graphics workflow.
This article is crap. It is like a Tom's Hardware Guide To Digital Photography that talks all about seconds and MHz and nothing about color, style, art, workflow, creativity, and professional OUTPUT.
Kids: do not buy Microsoft game consoles and try to do real work on them. You will be frustrated unless you are using MS Office or just text-editing. That is all PC's are good for unless you are a part-time CS guy or have a geek around that you can abuse whenever Windows needs its dick sucked a little bit.
This kind of article makes Bill Gates get a chubby. "See? Our 9 pound notebook with a 70 watt CPU that constantly throttles back and 1.5 hour battery life and DOS2000 OS can pull data off a CF card slightly faster than a one-inch thick Mac with a 14 watt RISC CPU, UNIX, Mac, and 5 hour battery life. And the PC is $200 cheaper and comes with almost no decent software and almost no guarantees. What a value. Look, I put a picture on the screen! Wow!"
Come out of the 20th century, Slashdot geeks. Apple just launched a $3000 notebook that's 1" thick, has a 17" TFT screen, built-in Bluetooth, built-in 802.11g (note the g), built-in FireWire 400 and FireWire 800, DVI-VGA-S-Video out, 24-bit audio in and out, Mac OS X (now with X11 and KHTML-rendering Web browser), iLife (nothing on the PC is nearly as good as this, you have to see to understand), slot-load SuperDrive (DVD-RW, CD-RW), 5-hour battery (that's with the CPU running full-speed) and weighs 6 pounds. I don't know how anyone can seriously compare the Mac and PC platforms anymore. It's the 21st century: we don't carry big beige boxes or gasoline generators (to run Dell notebooks) in the field.
This article is like looking at the world of digital photography through a pinhole. Look at the bigger picture. There are a billion little reasons, like JPEG2000 only being supported on Mac OS X so far, like the way your photograph looks REAL on Mac OS X and an Apple display. The contrast and color balance just can't be done on a PC. There isn't one made that can do it and there never has been. They're not building for those customers over at Wintel, whereas Apple is. Bill Gates shows you a goo-gaw so you think the PC is the uber-PC, but then the features don't show up or don't work when they do. DirectX is no CoreAudio, for example. The same is true at every level of the two systems. You suffer so much in so many ways on a PC ? to say that it's OK because you can read your CF card a little faster is just so amazing. The built-in assumption is that you already have a PC and are willing to I.T. it. Why? Why? Why? What Apple ships just in software with a new machine is worth the system price. The hardware is basically free.
Safari has a number of UI elements that replace tabs. Snapback in the address field and search fields takes you back to where you started surfing. You can also drag links to the Bookmark bar and then drag them off again easily, like a little shelf. The little book icon on the left of the Bookmark bar switches the window to a view of your Bookmarks and History, like lifting up a page to look at a TOC. Plus, it is FAST. I find myself just surfing rather than opening up a bunch of windows because pages appear instantly.
Also, the menubar is pervasive, so the History and Bookmarks menus are right there all the time in the same place. Safari also shows the URL's in your Address Book in the Bookmarks menu, so even without tabs, you find yourself having lots of clickable links right away, and plenty of room to put more.
It's a great browser.
I think the idea is that what Safari renders, it renders just like Gecko, but it doesn't necessarily have the same level of CSS support as Gecko. Maybe that is coming, or maybe they're not worried about that since the browser is very lightweight and very fast and everything looks great in it.
I use a Mac because that's where the creative tools are. Way too many people think that Mac and Windows are the same because there are lots of Mac/PC applications, but they're not the same at all. Digidesign's Pro Tools runs on both Mac and Windows, but it's been running on the Mac for much longer and with more features, and all of the pro-level plug-ins are Mac-only. So, all of the #1 hits done with Pro Tools are also Mac-only. Similarly, Quark runs on Windows, but most of the plug-ins are Mac-only, and color management, advanced typography, a PostScript renderer, and PDF workflow are built-in to the Mac, so most of publishing runs on Macs. Many other mainstream creative applications are only a few versions old on Windows, and five or six versions more mature on the Mac.
It's just that the technology is so much better than any other platform when it comes to creative stuff of any kind (art, music, video, design). If you replace "Windows PC" in this article with "typewriter" and then read it again you'll see how it looks to a Mac user. No, we're not anxious to trade our multimedia audio/video/graphics workstations with great UI and amazing stability for IBM Selectrics. As a creative workstation, Windows makes a shitty typewriter. That's all there is to it. The rest is window dressing, with non-Mac users wondering what the buzz is about.
Aliases aren't file system links, they're links to the file by a special number each file gets (I think it's called a node number). The user can rename the target file and the alias will still point to the target. This aspect of HFS+ is also what lets you rename MP3 files (for example) and iTunes will still know that a song is the same song. It's like the computer is using its own naming convention (long unique numbers) which frees up file names for the user to do as they please. You can rename and move apps and documents on the Mac and stuff keeps on working.
> As long as harddisks don't improve drastically in
> speed or RAID becomes standard, I don't see GBit as
> neccessity.
RAID is standard on the Mac. You open Disk Utility and set it up with a few GUI switches.
I routinely move huge amounts of data between my PowerBook and PowerMac. They both came with gigabit Ethernet standard, and theh ports also do their own sensing so you don't need a crossover cable. Apple was ahead of the curve going to 10/100 just like they are ahead of the curve going to 10/100/1000 because their customers work with lots of data for desktop users. DV movie clips, huge print jobs, multitrack audio. Macs keep their value and get used for many years longer than you would expect, and it's stuff like this that does that. Gigabit Ethernet has been standard on pro Macs for 18 months or so and those machines are going to be great servers later on, with their FireWire and 802.11 antennaes and Gigabit Ethernet and lots of empty PCI slots.
My PowerBook usually has two FireWire drives hooked up to it while I'm working, and my PowerMac has 4-6 drives hooked up at all times, so the big pipe between the machines means no waiting for data no matter where it is.
Up in the GUI, you add functionality to apps with scripts and plug-ins. AppleScript is in full swing right now, and the History panels in Adobe and Macromedia and other apps make scripting available to everyone. This has always been the command line of the Mac, and you can use AppleScript to create an application that essentially runs other applications as if it were a user, performing routine or repetitive tasks. When you see it in action, it's quite brilliant, with documents opening up in an application and changing, importing other data, saving, then the document opening in another application and being treated. It's great.
Basically, there are three levels of Mac OS now:
/etc and /bin, there are traditional UNIX tools, there's the file system, the Hardware Abstraction Layer and all this stuff is open so that it can be scoured for bugs, and so that this vital software layer that is the spine of the computer can't be held hostage by a single party, or be made deliberately incompatible with other technologies, or run tasks without the user's knowledge. Darwin is also progressive and modern, with XML configuration files, a simplified directory structure, and ZeroConf networking that makes small, industry-standard IP networks configure themselves.
... they are picking the single icon called 'Mozilla' that is in their Applications folder. Whole layers of complexity are just not there to trouble you or to decay as the software installation matures. The Mozilla icon is actually a folder with all of the files and images and whatnot that Mozilla requires, and all you have to do to 'install' it is to place it in the Applications folder, provided your user account has the right to do so. Most apps just come as a single icon on a CD or a Disk Copy image (Macs mount disc images as if they were really on media ... basically, you open a disk image and it is made into a RAM disk and mounted).
Darwin - Core OS
This is the software layer between the hardware and the rest of the software on the computer. Darwin runs on Macs and on some Intel systems. It's not some loose pieces of Mac OS X that fell under a particular license; it's the core OS, the really technical part of the operating system that you interact with from the command line. This would have been the whole operating system before graphical interfaces, but now it's the geeky filling inside the candy coating of Mac OS X. Transparency is really valued in this core part of the Mac OS, and ease-of-use often takes a back seat to maintaining traditions and functionalities that have been proven to work. So, in Darwin, there are folders with names like
Mac OS X - Professional and Consumer Desktop
Darwin for PowerPC plus closed-source software from Apple and other vendors, including a great graphical user interface. The emphasis in this version of Mac OS is ease-of-use, simplicity, and good looks. Huge features of the machine may only be exposed to the GUI in one little easy-to-use widget, enabling the user to understand and harness a lot of technology quickly and easily. Huge simplifications benefit the non-technical or new user: an application and all of its files go in a single folder that is presented to the user as a single icon that they can run, move, rename, or peek inside with the use of a contextual menu. There are hundreds of features, but they're presented to the user in such a simplified and friendly way that you can take it all in very quickly. I just read the instructions today for making Mozilla your default browser, and on Mac OS X it is "Go Apple Menu > System Preferences > Internet > Web > Default Browser, press Choose and select the Mozilla icon in your Applications folder." Figure out what it is on your platform and compare. Note that the user is not picking the browser off a list, whether stock or generated
Mac OS X Server - Media, Web, Workgroup Servers
Mac OS X optimized for server use instead of desktop use. It's particularly suited to serving QuickTime, MPEG-4, and other streaming media. Apache is the Web server, and all the UNIX stuff you'd want is there or can easily be added. The GUI layer has a number of easy-to-use configuration and administration tools. Licensing compared to Windows is very cheap thanks to use of open source software, and there is also no client access license.
> Yeah. Another Processor. Cool. Even more Mhz and
> stuff. Ye-haw. Now I can run poorly written, crappy
> software even faster.
It's sad that you think the software you use is poorly written. I love my software. I hardly ever have an application crash, and never have a system crash. Check out the Mac platform. There is a lot of really great stuff going on here. I'm using Emagic Logic and Ableton Live on Mac OS X 10.2 and it is fucking GREAT. Amazing software. All three have yet to crash on me at all, and I've been using Live for over six months, daily, all day.
Codex The Sloth is so far off on his Mac knowledge that he is in troll territory. Give us a break. Read something before you post. So many times people who only have experience with x86 make fools of themselves publicly by assuming that the myriad problems of the Intel platform exist on other platforms as well. No, they don't.
> Clearly you have a short memory. The "emulated"
... they're just too different from modern apps to run natively on a modern system (different event model, different multitasking model). Similarly, "Classic" Intel apps (32-bit x86 architecture) are going to run in a special mode on 64-bit chips because they are just too different from modern ideas about chipmaking. After 20 years, you have to scrap some things, which means you don't get perfect compatibility.
... they've been so future-focused (Mac OS X) that many of their traditional user base are still using three and four year-old machines while they're currently selling to "Switchers" and UNIX people.
> 68k mode of PowerPCs (which were also supposed to be
> waaay faster) weren't because the emulator didn't fit in
> the cache. And for christ sakes, who the hell believes
> what chip companies say about speed anymore?
The very first PowerMacs ran 68K software faster than it had ever been run before. You are completely wrong.
The 32-bit compatibility mode your'e talking about is an Intel thing, to make up for the fact that they've been bolting things onto their chips for 20 years, going from 8-bit to 32-bit currently. PowerPC is younger and benefits from a much more mature industry when it was designed. There are already 64-bit POWER chips, and some parts of the current 32-bit PowerPC are 64-bit and some are 128-bit. The switch to 64-bits was designed into PowerPC.
"Classic" Mac software runs in a partial emulator (some hardware is emulated, but not the CPU) on Mac OS X because Classic Mac apps have a 20 year history
The important thing to remember is that Apple has been on their current CPU for only a little more than five years, and on their current OS for only two years. They are RISC, they are 64-bit, they are UNIX, and they are ready for the future like nobody else. Every Mac sold for the past two years has had a Wi-Fi slot in it and antennaes built-in, as well as FireWire, and also Gigabit Ethernet on all pro machines for the past 18 months or so. The platform is in a great place for the future. In fact, that's the only thing holding Apple back for the past few years
The PowerPC architecture has been 64-bit from the start. There is no 32-bit to 64-bit transition. Current PowerPC chips already have some 64-bit and some 128-bit portions. The architecture is less than 10 years old, and it started at 32-bits ... the designers knew that they would want 64-bits later. There are 64-bit POWER chips already, and they are all related (they have the same instruction set). This is not like Intel, whose 32-bit chip grew out of a 20 year-old 8-bit chip.
... maybe you're used to seeing the consumer side of Apple and don't realize the kind of resources that their pro desktop users are into. Audio and video means great big files, huge amounts of data ... the platform is ready for 64-bits.
In addition, Mac applications are actually special folders that can contain just about anything a developer likes, including multiple binaries, one for each platform or whatever, so these kinds of transitions can be hidden from the user with a patch at the worst. Apple just rewrote their entire OS over the last five years, so I'm sure the idea of 64-bit computing was on their minds. Steve Jobs is also the CEO of Pixar, and I'm sure the Pixar programmers know how to take advantage of 64-bits
The iMac G4/800 runs Quake III at high-quality 1024x768 just a couple of fps slower than the Gateway Profile P4/2.8GHz. They are also very, very close on a suite of Photoshop tests. Go and sit in front of the iMac you want at an Apple Store and do some of the things you do and see how it feels. They are very fast, ridiculously reliable and stable machines that are a joy to use, and you'll be three years ahead of where you are now in DVD authoring and DV editing and digital photography. Also, they are ergonomic, attractive, rugged, and the fan is quieter than a hard drive (so you don't hear it at all).
The reason for that is to keep your password secure. Let's say someone is running a "fake" login dialog box that will capture your username/password. Well, they can't because ctrl-alt-del is written into the keyboard driver, WinNT always intercepts it, so NT's dialog box will be the only program that can be activated by ctrl-alt-del. Make sense?
That's the excuse, not the reason. The reason is that the PC's firmware is decades old in some places and can't prevent a false login box. Open Firmware (IEEE 1275) on Apple, Sun, and other machines doesn't suffer from this problem.
One additional point: I can teach almost anyone to play a hand drum musically in almost no time at all because we are used to moving our hands around to hit things. The hands already have the skill and you just have to teach the music. To learn to play the piano musically, though, the person will probably have to build up their finger dexterity quite a bit ... in other words, their hands need to be taught new skills as well as learning the music. The one-button mouse doesn't ask more from the user's dexterity than what most people have from their regular life skills.
Think about other things you do with your hands and compare to a one-button slam and point mouse with no finger aiming or dexterity required at all, and to a three-button scroller mouse. Pick up a rock and throw it, write with a pencil, point and press with an Apple mouse. EVERYONE can do these things. What are the analogies for the three-button scroller mouse?
Another point is that point-click-response is easy to see on a Mac. Go up to any Windows system and press the "wrong" mouse button for a task and see how confusing that could be to someone who doesn't have experience with it.
Finally, Mac OS X has support for up to 32 mouse buttons, so go nuts at Fry's and use whatever you want. Context menus are pluggable, so if the one you want isn't there, make it yourself or get it from somebody else.
> I really can't understand why so many Mac users object to multi-button mice
... come on.
... the mouse is not a part of your hand anymore like with a one-button mouse.
... the fact that it is standard means that the computer itself and all Mac apps can be navigated with just one button. If you are on a desktop PC you say "so what?", but if you are using a stylus on a graphics tablet then you are happy to only have to press one button, if you are controlling the computer by voice or gesture (both built-into Mac OS X) then you are also going to gain from only NEEDING point and click. Touch screens, etc. So multiple buttons on a mouse is like a hack that won't scale, and MS Windows requires that second button for some stuff (amazing). On any other pointing device, the other buttons are even less useful and even more in the way. Most trackballs are nightmares of ergonomics just so they can fit a lot of buttons on there and convince somebody who spend $50 last year on a two-button trackball to spend $60 this year on a three-button trackball.
> and the mousewheel, outside of dogmatism.
Remember that most Mac users have used Windows for real work, while most Windows users have not used a Mac at all. When you talk about dogma, we Mac users have seen more than our share of Windows users going through life the hard way
Apple's Pro Mouse doesn't have any buttons. It sits in your hand and you point and press either your whole hand or one finger, two fingers, whatever, and get a click. It becomes second nature.
I don't have any research to support this, just my own experience, but it seems like the hand has enough brains to take on the simple function of pointing and clicking and that means your brain doesn't have to do that. If you overload the hand, though, with multiple controls, then the brain has to get more involved in mousing. So on a Mac you just think "point, click" and your hand does it very naturally, develops a habit of flicking the cursor up to the menus and such. With a two-button mouse, now you are working individual fingers, e.g. pointer finger on left button, index on right
Another point about the one-button mouse
When my wife switched to a Mac, she got a two-button mouse and tried to do all the same things as in MS Windows until I told her that all of the commands are just in the menus at the top. She expected that only some commands would be there and some wouldn't. She started using a one-button mouse and going to the menus for every command and she was much faster and happier with that. You don't have to pick a method first, and the mouse hand just points and clicks so it gets a "mind of its own" (our hands have more brains in them than many animals, actually) and the cursor starts to seem like it just appears in the menubar when you want it. She is totally disinterested in context menus and key commands now. It's all menubar and drag and drop, which were both invented by Apple and were both in the original Mac.
>> Apple has found that using one menu at the very top increases productivity.
... so much has changed in the last few years that I can't believe there was any impassable technical obstacle that kept them using a single menubar. The Mac didn't really used to have toolbars, and now there is a standard toolbar available for any window to use ... couldn't they have provided a menubar there, too? An optional one, maybe? I really don't think anything stopped them from going with multiple menus except that it is not better in real use. When I see someone working on Windows today they look very cautious in their mousing to me ... they are carefully targeting everything, they are looking a lot and waiting and then clicking ... they are not operating in the intuitive, playing-a-musical-instrument way that I and others do on our Macs.
> They found that out 20 years ago using a tiny 7" screen and a GUI that only allowed one
> application on the screen at the same time, with test subjects who had never been exposed
> to a WIMP interface before. I would have to say that research simply does not apply in
> current times where multitasking operating systems are standard, all current GUIs display
> more than one application at a time, and even the cheap 15" displays support 1024x768
> pixels of screen resolution. The single menu bar is an annoying relic.
Apple quite publicly remade itself between 1997 and today. Mac OS X is a complete rewrite. I am sure the single-button mouse and single menubar were the subjects of many conversations and much research and demonstration inside Apple between then and now. What went on in the 1980's may still be important to you, but I doubt it had too much influence on Steve Jobs et al as they planned Apple's place in the world in the 21st century. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple in 1986, remember? He left with Apple's "Big Mac" project and turned it into NeXTSTEP. For the single menubar to survive the OpenStep > Mac OS X transition means it must have impressed somebody recently. They didn't do all this work to get to now and suddenly say "oh, shit, the MENUBAR! How did we miss that?". If you've USED both methods, the Mac way will likely feel better to you. It's also AMAZING for newbies (you teach them where the File menu is ONCE) and right now most of the world barely qualifies as newbies when it comes to computers.
I don't buy that there's a single thing in Mac OS X that isn't either how Steve wants it or it is on its way there. You can say you don't like it, but I don't think you can say it has anything to do with the 1980's. All the widgets and controls changed their appearance between 10.1 and 10.2