I don't think the hidden folder is even there for "copy protection", at least not primarily. It separates iPod's day-to-day file storage from the rest of the drive, so that when you plug in an iPod as a hard drive, the hard drive appears to be empty in Finder, ready for you to use, even if it has 3GB of MP3's stored on it by iTunes. This kind of thing really, really helps non-technical users, and is pretty classic Apple. Obviously, the technical user has no problem working around this if they want to, just set the folder to not be invisible.
Please... please... no more CLI vs GUI arguments. These days, you can have both if you want them, but in 1984, technology dictated that you choose one or the other. Let it rest. I... am... falling asleep... just typing... this.
> In MacOSX, this feature has been usefully
> implemented once to my knowledge.
What about the rounded corners of windows, the translucent volume and brightness adjustment meters, the translucency of dragged icons so you can see your drop target?
It's gimmicky to make an entire window partially transparent, but it's not gimmicky to use 32-bit graphics, or masks. Without a mask, a graphic is just a plain rectangle.
On the Mac, Command+clicking a window enables you to drag it around, no matter what its stacking order (Mac OS 9 or X). Also, clicking a window widget works no matter what the window's stacking order, on Mac OS X.
QuickTime 5 also supports skinning the "player", so that your whole QuickTime movie floats on the desktop, any shape, any size, any use of transparency that you want. Audion is a Mac MP3 player that has always had great transparency features, but under OS X it doesn't have to do all the work itself.
There's too much focus in these posts on the idea of rectangular windows being made translucent. Most of the time, a mask has fully transparent areas that make the whole image appear to be non-rectangular. Mac OS X windows are not even rectangular, their title bars have rounded edges. That is a much better use for masks than just making everything translucent. An "alpha mask" is an 8-bit image, but most posters here are thinking of situations where you would have a solid gray mask, making the graphic translucent from top to bottom. Ugh.
Another good use for transparency is seen when you press the keyboard volume controls on a Mac. A nearly-transparent overlay appears near the bottom of the display with a small meter that shows where the volume is and how you're changing it. It doesn't block what you're doing, or even stop you from reading what's under it, but provides great feedback to your actions. Same with the brightness controls, and with Sticky Keys if you have them activated.
Anything that doesn't appear to be completely rectangular is using a mask. A coder would focus on "alpha-blending" API's, but an artist is just like, "ho-hum, a mask". Most objects in the real world are not perfectly rectangular. If you want to represent those objects on a display, you need to use a mask. It's so basic and elemental and necessary that to argue against transparency in a GUI is missing the bigger picture. Every GUI before Mac OS X is prologue. We are in a time where the graphics adapters and CPU's can handle real graphics, even in a file manager, if the software is done right.
Yes, it's done in hardware. The GPU and Altivec are both contributing to the calculations that are necessary to put Aqua on the display. Altivec was designed from the beginning to do these kinds of calculations. Before they were GUI features, they were features of users' documents, in Photoshop and Final Cut Pro and others. Final Cut Pro runs something like twice as fast on a G4 (with Altivec) as on a G3 (without Altivec). Pro video editors routinely work on PowerBooks.
All this talk about Mac OS X "not having hardware acceleration for transparency" is plain wrong. It comes from an Apple engineer talking about Aqua in mid-2000 or so and saying that there are some functions that currently can't be accelerated BECAUSE THE GRAPHICS PROCESSORS DON'T ACCELERATE THEM YET. The NVIDIA or ATI chips just don't do those calculations. However, on the Mac, the G4 chip has an Altivec co-processor that DOES do these kinds of calculations, because these calculations are the very things that legions of artists and video editors do everyday all day with Mac software. In other words, Mac OS X is designed to meet the needs of its users, and its GUI also takes advantage of that graphics power. Same hardware that can finish a whole day of work in Photoshop in half the time it takes a P4 to do the same is being put to work in the Mac OS X GUI.
I recently got a new PowerBook G4, and when I hooked it up to a second display under Mac OS X 10.1, the second display was clearly not hardware accelerated and was much slower. In Mac OS X 10.1.1, which came out just after this notebook, the acceleration for the second display was added, and it is an obvious improvement. I mean, if an NVIDIA card can accelerate Quake, don't you think it can accelerate Aqua? Aqua is full of the same kinds of OpenGL calls and methods.
So, to sum it up: current graphics hardware accelerates the functions it is designed to accelerate on both platforms (it's the same hardware, after all), while on Windows, the CPU picks up the rest, and on Mac OS X, Altivec and then the core CPU picks up the rest. Combined with the efficient, modern design of the Mac OS X window manager, it's trivial to have real drop shadows on windows in Mac OS X, not tricks or hacks necessary. Especially with the great multitasking, the user is not being robbed of CPU cycles on a modern machine. I don't know that I've ever felt CPU hungry in Mac OS X, running on a PowerBook G4 and PowerMac G4. The other day I had something rendering in ArtMatic in the background, another thing rendering in Bryce in the background, with both apps hidden, and I was working in the Finder and forgot that both those things were going on, and this is on a notebook. If I stopped what I was doing, my renders would finish a little faster, but who cares? I just want to keep working and let the computer use the cycles I'm not using to do those renders. Mac OS X's GUI is not quite as snappy as Mac OS 9's on the same hardware, but Mac OS X's GUI doesn't stop for anybody... you get the responsiveness no matter what you're doing in the background.
A side note: don't believe anything you hear about Macs from anyone who hasn't used them to do real work. Every other Windows user has a strong opinion on the Mac and absolutely nothing relevant to say. You can try a Mac all day long at the Apple Store (that's what they're for), so there really is no excuse for just contributing ignorant noise to the conversation. (I'm not speaking of any specific post in this thread, just in general about the level of actual information contained in any conversation about Macs amongst people who haven't used them.)
The reason that Mac OS X users will call the Windows 2000 method a hack is that we've used both. Almost every Mac user bumps into Windows from time to time, and many of us run a copy in Virtual PC because it's easy and cheap (VirtualPC is like $50).
What you see on the screen in Mac OS X is a proper composite of multiple 32-bit images (a 32-bit image is a 24-bit image with an 8-bit mask that specifies 256 levels of transparency), just like an artist would make. The composite that you see on the display is made in real-time by the window manager and is totally buffered. It is just as easy for an app to be 50% opaque (a 50% gray mask) as it is to be 100% opaque (a black mask). There are no "tricks". On Mac OS X, the drop shadows are not constantly recalculated and redrawn... they're just a feature of a buffered window... part of a 32-bit bitmap.
The difference is like comparing lighting effects from Photoshop with lighting effects in Maya. In Photoshop, you can take a 2D image and play with a filter until your 2D image looks like it's got a sun shining on it (typically you do this to get a little extra texture). In Maya, you put a sun in the sky and everything just gets lit up correctly.
Even a pedestrian look at Mac OS X's graphics will show you that it is a major advance over what has come before. Instead of giving an app a space on the display to write to, apps write into their own windows, and those windows are composited with all other windows in real-time. Windows are totally buffered, so apps don't have to redraw anything, just draw it and leave it. What this means is that if you make the top window translucent, you automatically see what's underneath it, because there really IS something "underneath" it. The window manager is really treating windows as objects that have an "altitude" above the desktop and other windows. The foreground window seems to float above the others, because it has a larger shadow.
I'm a graphics pro, so this stuff in the GUI makes sense to me. Each app just makes a 32-bit graphic, and the window manager composites them, just like you would do if you were compositing a bunch of graphics in Photoshop or Fireworks. Once a graphic is 24-bit, it has all the colors you can see. Once you add an 8-bit mask (making a 32-bit image), you can easily layer that image with any other image and it just works. The way Mac OS X does things means that drop shadows and things aren't constantly recalculated and redrawn (like in Windows OS), and are not too much harder to do than the one-pixel "shadow" that Mac OS 9 windows have (and Windows OS, too, if I remember correctly).
This is the future of GUI's, because it is the future of graphics. Mac OS X is ready for someone to write a Finder replacement that looks like a video game. Zooming and transforming and 3D is trivial. Maybe we will see more of this from Apple now that Windows XP is basically feature-frozen for a long while, and Apple is about to actually start pushing and advertising Mac OS X, since we're only a few months away from the 9 to X transition being complete.
Not sure what you're talking about with drivers. On the Mac, we don't mess around with that. My PowerMac has an NVIDIA adapter with 32MB of RAM, and my PowerBook has an ATI adapter with 16MB of RAM and everything works great on both machines. I've been playing Alice on the PowerBook and it looks and feels great. On the PowerMac especially, the GUI is like butter. It doesn't have quite the snap of Mac OS 9 on the same hardware, but it is very responsive and feels very solid (and doesn't crash), so it feels like working with real objects. Very pleasant way to work. I keep the icons set at 128x128 all the time, and I don't have to open image files to see what they look like. Fabulous. You can lay out all your work in front of you in Finder, and easily see what a whole project looks like.
Mac OS X's GUI is definitely accelerated by the graphics adapter, on almost all supported machines. The 10.1.1 update enabled hardware acceleration for the second display on my new PowerBook G4 (which was released just before 10.1.1), and you can see the difference. What you're thinking of is that there are some functions that the GUI does regularly that are not accelerated, because they're ahead of what the hardware can presently do. In the future, they'll gain further acceleration as the people who make the graphics hardware (NVIDIA and ATI) add those kinds of functions to their products.
As far as I know, the major use of "vectors" in Mac OS X is transforming the edges of bitmaps. So you have a window that is stored by Mac OS X as a bitmap (which is why apps don't have to redraw them), and when you minimize it, its shape is transformed in real-time using 3D stuff. In Office X (version 10, like Mac OS X), when you open or close the formatting palette, it "genies" out of the menu item so that you get the picture that it is something you can toggle open or closed with that menu item. That's the kind of stuff Apple has riddled Mac OS X with, and developers are only just starting to get their heads around it.
As for the performance issues, these effects in Mac OS X are done like movies, so that a transformation that's supposed to take.5 seconds takes.5 seconds on pretty much any machine. Faster machines might show 12 individual transforms in that time, while an older machine might show 3 or 4, but it makes sense either way. This applies to windows being minimized, and things like dialogs fading in and out. In Mac OS X's Mail application, when you switch to a new message, the contents of the preview pane fade out and then back in quickly with the new message, so you see the computer responding to your action.
Yeah, transparent windows are old news on the Mac, but what's nice with Mac OS X is that they've raised the bar system-wide to 32-bit images (24-bits of every color we can see, plus an 8-bit mask for pro-level compositing). Similarly, "native audio" is 32-bit floating point, which is then "next" pro standard, which is also easily composited without any headroom or distortion considerations... instead of clipping, the decimal point is just moved to hold the higher number, so you don't have to "mix down" every time you make a new audio file. Setting the bar up high like this elevates all of the platform's apps. Very enjoyable stuff. As a user, you can also commit yourself to storing your graphics and audio in full 32-bit and know that you're going to have a lot of flexibility in the future.
All Macs come with iTunes and FireWire. You can easily hook on more than 11 FireWire hard disks, and iTunes is happy to rip to AIFF and work only with uncompressed audio. It's UI is a pleasure to use to archive lots and lots of music. I have about 800 albums archived in iTunes and can find any song in a second or two. For a couple of grand, you can get an iBook and a couple of 80GB FireWire drives, and you'll be able to edit movies and surf the Web or play DVD's and do other things with it as well.
Why should the court specify what the schools are going to get? If this is a penalty, it should be a blank check donation that schools can spend on anything they want, as long as it's non-Microsoft. It's not a penalty unless some of Microsoft's money and market share goes to their competitors. If a school already has a Linux setup, they'll want more stuff to go with that; if they already have Apple stuff with PowerSchool and carts of iBooks, then they will want more of that. If they have all Microsoft stuff, in part because of Microsoft's illegal actions, then they will have an opportunity to see what they've been missing with some other stuff.
Also, it would be a good penalty to have Microsoft pay for a UNIX/Mac training course that's offered free to MSCE's that want it. In other words, you paid to become an MSCE before Microsoft's actions were brought to light, and now you have a free way to upgrade your skills to other tech and round out your knowledge and maybe stop pushing MS kit because it's all you know.
Another penalty would be free Windows 3.11 for any machine that can run it. These machines are out there, and often they are junk only because of software licensing. They ALL had DOS because of Microsoft's illegal licensing (pay for DOS whether you want it or not), so it's not like Microsoft didn't already get a cut of the cost of these machines originally. Apple has offered System 7.5.5 for free for years, and that is much higher functionality than Windows 3.11. That's why there are so many old Macs still doing functional work, and even being sold around on eBay to do functional work. The equivalent PC's (late 486's and early Pentiums) are going to the dump, or sitting in the basements of office buildings. Microsoft recently hassled a charity for collecting these and putting Windows 3.11 on them for kids. That's not right. If their software weren't so much more fragile than the hardware, these machines would still be functional (in other words, you'd turn them on and they'd be as good as the day they first went into service).
I used Ricochet inside a tank-like commercial building with aluminum ceilings and got the highest connection rate. This was in North Hollywood. When I signed up, the guy said the biggest myth about Ricochet was that it was only good outdoors, or while you were moving. It can do that, too, but if your house or apartment or office was in a coverage area, then it will likely work fine.
I even used it in my house right on the edge of San Francisco, and used it coming over the Bay Bridge from Oakland, and it got a signal right as we came off the San Francisco side of the bridge, so San Francisco seems pretty well covered. There are like 17 big hills here, so you can put stuff like this on top of the hills and get everybody.
Even if you use it indoors most of the time, it's still a great deal. You don't have to hook your house or apartment up to the Internet, just hook yourself up with a PC Card in your computer. Taking it to the library was really great, or working at a coffee shop or whatever.
I just got a new PowerBook, and I keep looking at the PC Card slot and wishing there was a working Ricochet modem in there 24/7. I used to think I'd just use Ricochet forever myself, combined with 802.11 when I bump into a network. Between the two systems you can go to a lot of places and be connected without having to fall back on the phone modem or regular Ethernet.
I don't think there's anything wrong with having two different systems, either. Eventually, they'll fit 802.11 and Ricochet onto one chip/card and the computer could use whatever is available automatically. In the meantime, if one system doesn't scale well enough or has some other problem (like Ricochet is having now), then the other fills in the gap. Seems like some people think that they have to be against Ricochet because they like AirPort.
That Xerox link is a lousy example of the origins and history of overlapping windows, considering that the Alto didn't have overlapping windows. The Alto just divided the screen into side-by-side regions, same as Windows 2.0 did about 10 years later.
iTunes is part of Mac OS X. If Apple had an application/OS split, then the iTunes folks would be in the OS camp. It comes with Mac OS X, and parts of it are in the system itself (CD burning stuff) and need to be updated by an installer. That's what the installer is for. Most apps do come on disc or disc image, so the installer is very rarely used.
> Its a virus - it hides behind a legitimate
> program, performs some sort of check, then
> delivers a payload. If thats not a virus,
> then i don't know what is. Just because
> Apple may 'claim' its a mistake, is no
> excuse. People have gone to prison for
> less so i say, give them a big fat law
> suit.
> you're generaly held responsible for
> the damage you do.
But in this case, the "you" is the user. The user downloaded and installed a software package that happened to have a bug in it, and in so doing, they may have lost data and have to restore from backups. End of story.
Software bugs are a Fact of Life. They weren't invented yesterday.
The ironic thing here is that the Mac OS X installer is rarely used... iTunes 2 is maybe the third app I've ever had to run the installer for. Most apps just come in a disk image, and you mount the image and drag and drop the app where you want it to live. Or they come on a CD or DVD and you drag them to the hard drive in the same way. I prefer that over running the installer and letting it have free reign over the system.
Steve Jobs said in a recent keynote that Apple prefers MP3 for digital music because it's open and interoperable and it's what people are already using. The players are out there, the software is out there.
iPod loads up its 32MB of RAM with the tunes it needs and sleeps the hard drive while it plays those tunes, to save power. 32MB is like 20 minutes or so at 160kbs, which is the bit-rate Apple prefers and uses when it talks MP3 (the "1000 songs" feature is based on 1000 160kbs MP3's). Apparently, they have been more successful with the power consumption and battery life than even they hoped. In the iPod intro video, you can see where Jon Rubenstein (Apple's hardware tech boss) says "eight hour battery" and they dubbed over "ten hour battery" later, and now reviewers are saying their demo units are getting 12 hours of playback on a single charge.
So, given that the hard drive is sleeping much of the time, I would guess that they just use the standard Toshiba drive in the way that Toshiba recommends, without complicating things.
I switched from Windows to Mac a couple of years ago, and it was the best tech decision I ever made. We put in a $299 AirPort Base Station almost two years ago, and it made getting on the Internet transparent. I just bought a PowerBook last week, took it out of the box, turned it on, and it was already on the Internet, before I had so much as plugged a power cable into it. For years, adding more storage has meant just getting a FireWire drive and plugging it in and going. I am way more productive, and working with rich media is a joy because the whole system is oriented towards that. QuickTime has been there as a rosetta stone for media files since 1991 or something, so even the most popular text editor for the Mac (BBEdit) can display audio and video and picture files you drop on it. The audio subsystem in Mac OS X is unprecedented, like having Cubase built-in for other apps to build on top of.
Since I switched, most of my friends and family have switched to Macs and we are all happier than ever before. I don't get calls about "Windows won't print!" and "there's no sound!" and "Windows is mysteriously crashing!" etc etc anymore. My 56 year-old aunt tried to record her music for two years on a high-end desktop PC and never got it to work right, and then she recorded a song and made an iMovie around it on her first day with a PowerBook. She put the movie on the Web in streaming video, just working with the built-in tools that came with the box, and she had never put anything on the Web before. Even the Web space and streaming server space was included with the price of the box. Once people start iMovie, they just "get it" right away. It's amazing to watch them work with no help required and turn out cool stuff.
I still have one close friend who calls me with Windows problems. Recently, she had one of those Outlook viruses that sends out your personal files to your address book, and she basically stopped using her computer for a long while because she was so frustrated by the privacy violation that it represented. She already uses a Mac at work, and when she found out that Mac users just rolled merrily through Y2K, Melissa, I Love You, Code Red, Nimda, etc she decided to get a Mac, too, and is shopping for one right now. An educated consumer is Microsoft's worst problem, because they have been lying to people for years. My friend realized she had enough computer-savvy to trust her own decision to pick the best computer for her needs, and it was a Mac. A few years ago she would just get the "safe" choice.
> Face it, both Apple and Wintel are good
> at what they do
Sure, but a lot of people are out there trying to make Windows PC's do the things that Macs are good at, like working with audio, video, graphics, or easy plug and play reliable operation for the home user. Some of them are even doing that professionally because their IT guys are all MSCE's who want to "standardize" on MS in order to "cut costs". Ha ha ha ha ha. So stupid. Like it fucking matters to make IT guys happy! Think about the users and their productivity and your core business why don't you? Too many people are being shoe-horned into the Windows platform just for interoperability, when (ironically) a cross-platform industry is the only thing that will ever guarantee interoperability. You can now run the same software on Linux, Solaris, Irix, and Mac OS X with very little trouble at all, while on the other hand, MSN (the ISP) starting trying to block non-Microsoft browsers the other day. I mean, think about it.
This article is about how iPod is not as expensive as it first appeared, once you see how much better it is at what it does than its competition. The same is true for all Apple products... there is lots of hidden value because you get a lot of stuff included, and then the whole is more than the sum of its parts because everything works together so well (burning data DVD's from the Finder like they were floppies is a good example) and the interface is so good. Look a little more deeply into a Mac and you'll find out that it has tons of VALUE. Massive bang for the buck. It's worth checking out if you haven't already. Make sure that it's not for you, so that you don't find out later that it is for you and regret missing these exciting years on the platform.
There is no other computer where you can run Mac OS X and Windows XP together, while also running Mac OS 9 apps and UNIX apps. I write tech books, and I do all of the Mac and Windows screenshots on a PowerBook, and have for years. Many authors do this. Very convenient. VirtualPC is a great Web testing ground, and it's very mature on the Mac and works really well. VirtualPC is essentially free when you buy it with Windows included, and it enables you to run any software you can find on the Web in Mac OS X. Still, I only run a Windows app for non-testing purposes about once a year. So much Windows software is crap. 300 shitty icon editors.
There is plenty of native software for Mac OS X already, and the marquee apps have all either shipped, been demoed, or been announced. Besides, Mac OS X runs Mac OS 9 apps better than Mac OS 9 in most cases... people aren't suffering too much on Mac OS X. In a year or so Classic will be mostly a distant memory, anyway.
> MacOSX is not the next evolution of MacOS
> 7-8-9-etc, it is an entirely different operating
> system.
No, that's not true at all. The Carbon API is on both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, and the same apps run in both places, on the same hardware, with the same users. There is plenty of Mac in Mac OS X.
What is so hard about "Mac OS X (version 10.1, build 5L14)"? The "Mac OS X" is for users and marketers, and the "version 10.1, build 5L14" is for developers and geeks. Everybody is happy.
It's not a 2.5 inch notebook drive. The iPod itself is too slim and too narrow for a notebook drive. A plain FireWire drive based on this particular unique 5GB super-slim hard disk is also $399. The additional music playing features are free. The storage in iPod is totally cutting-edge.
It's a cool product that takes advantage of the fact that FireWire has been standard on Macs for a long time. Sending media files through the keyboard port is a bug. I'm glad Apple made this so obvious by fixing the bug. This is just 1.0, too, and it looks pretty good to me.
Some of the cool things that you may not know about iPod: you can boot a Mac from it (9 or X), and you can capture DV directly to it from any device that can generate an audio or video DV stream (such as a camcorder).
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I don't think the hidden folder is even there for "copy protection", at least not primarily. It separates iPod's day-to-day file storage from the rest of the drive, so that when you plug in an iPod as a hard drive, the hard drive appears to be empty in Finder, ready for you to use, even if it has 3GB of MP3's stored on it by iTunes. This kind of thing really, really helps non-technical users, and is pretty classic Apple. Obviously, the technical user has no problem working around this if they want to, just set the folder to not be invisible.
Please ... please ... no more CLI vs GUI arguments. These days, you can have both if you want them, but in 1984, technology dictated that you choose one or the other. Let it rest. I ... am ... falling asleep ... just typing ... this.
> In MacOSX, this feature has been usefully
> implemented once to my knowledge.
What about the rounded corners of windows, the translucent volume and brightness adjustment meters, the translucency of dragged icons so you can see your drop target?
It's gimmicky to make an entire window partially transparent, but it's not gimmicky to use 32-bit graphics, or masks. Without a mask, a graphic is just a plain rectangle.
On the Mac, Command+clicking a window enables you to drag it around, no matter what its stacking order (Mac OS 9 or X). Also, clicking a window widget works no matter what the window's stacking order, on Mac OS X.
QuickTime 5 also supports skinning the "player", so that your whole QuickTime movie floats on the desktop, any shape, any size, any use of transparency that you want. Audion is a Mac MP3 player that has always had great transparency features, but under OS X it doesn't have to do all the work itself.
There's too much focus in these posts on the idea of rectangular windows being made translucent. Most of the time, a mask has fully transparent areas that make the whole image appear to be non-rectangular. Mac OS X windows are not even rectangular, their title bars have rounded edges. That is a much better use for masks than just making everything translucent. An "alpha mask" is an 8-bit image, but most posters here are thinking of situations where you would have a solid gray mask, making the graphic translucent from top to bottom. Ugh.
Another good use for transparency is seen when you press the keyboard volume controls on a Mac. A nearly-transparent overlay appears near the bottom of the display with a small meter that shows where the volume is and how you're changing it. It doesn't block what you're doing, or even stop you from reading what's under it, but provides great feedback to your actions. Same with the brightness controls, and with Sticky Keys if you have them activated.
Anything that doesn't appear to be completely rectangular is using a mask. A coder would focus on "alpha-blending" API's, but an artist is just like, "ho-hum, a mask". Most objects in the real world are not perfectly rectangular. If you want to represent those objects on a display, you need to use a mask. It's so basic and elemental and necessary that to argue against transparency in a GUI is missing the bigger picture. Every GUI before Mac OS X is prologue. We are in a time where the graphics adapters and CPU's can handle real graphics, even in a file manager, if the software is done right.
Yes, it's done in hardware. The GPU and Altivec are both contributing to the calculations that are necessary to put Aqua on the display. Altivec was designed from the beginning to do these kinds of calculations. Before they were GUI features, they were features of users' documents, in Photoshop and Final Cut Pro and others. Final Cut Pro runs something like twice as fast on a G4 (with Altivec) as on a G3 (without Altivec). Pro video editors routinely work on PowerBooks.
No, it's not slow.
All this talk about Mac OS X "not having hardware acceleration for transparency" is plain wrong. It comes from an Apple engineer talking about Aqua in mid-2000 or so and saying that there are some functions that currently can't be accelerated BECAUSE THE GRAPHICS PROCESSORS DON'T ACCELERATE THEM YET. The NVIDIA or ATI chips just don't do those calculations. However, on the Mac, the G4 chip has an Altivec co-processor that DOES do these kinds of calculations, because these calculations are the very things that legions of artists and video editors do everyday all day with Mac software. In other words, Mac OS X is designed to meet the needs of its users, and its GUI also takes advantage of that graphics power. Same hardware that can finish a whole day of work in Photoshop in half the time it takes a P4 to do the same is being put to work in the Mac OS X GUI.
... you get the responsiveness no matter what you're doing in the background.
I recently got a new PowerBook G4, and when I hooked it up to a second display under Mac OS X 10.1, the second display was clearly not hardware accelerated and was much slower. In Mac OS X 10.1.1, which came out just after this notebook, the acceleration for the second display was added, and it is an obvious improvement. I mean, if an NVIDIA card can accelerate Quake, don't you think it can accelerate Aqua? Aqua is full of the same kinds of OpenGL calls and methods.
So, to sum it up: current graphics hardware accelerates the functions it is designed to accelerate on both platforms (it's the same hardware, after all), while on Windows, the CPU picks up the rest, and on Mac OS X, Altivec and then the core CPU picks up the rest. Combined with the efficient, modern design of the Mac OS X window manager, it's trivial to have real drop shadows on windows in Mac OS X, not tricks or hacks necessary. Especially with the great multitasking, the user is not being robbed of CPU cycles on a modern machine. I don't know that I've ever felt CPU hungry in Mac OS X, running on a PowerBook G4 and PowerMac G4. The other day I had something rendering in ArtMatic in the background, another thing rendering in Bryce in the background, with both apps hidden, and I was working in the Finder and forgot that both those things were going on, and this is on a notebook. If I stopped what I was doing, my renders would finish a little faster, but who cares? I just want to keep working and let the computer use the cycles I'm not using to do those renders. Mac OS X's GUI is not quite as snappy as Mac OS 9's on the same hardware, but Mac OS X's GUI doesn't stop for anybody
A side note: don't believe anything you hear about Macs from anyone who hasn't used them to do real work. Every other Windows user has a strong opinion on the Mac and absolutely nothing relevant to say. You can try a Mac all day long at the Apple Store (that's what they're for), so there really is no excuse for just contributing ignorant noise to the conversation. (I'm not speaking of any specific post in this thread, just in general about the level of actual information contained in any conversation about Macs amongst people who haven't used them.)
The reason that Mac OS X users will call the Windows 2000 method a hack is that we've used both. Almost every Mac user bumps into Windows from time to time, and many of us run a copy in Virtual PC because it's easy and cheap (VirtualPC is like $50).
... they're just a feature of a buffered window ... part of a 32-bit bitmap.
What you see on the screen in Mac OS X is a proper composite of multiple 32-bit images (a 32-bit image is a 24-bit image with an 8-bit mask that specifies 256 levels of transparency), just like an artist would make. The composite that you see on the display is made in real-time by the window manager and is totally buffered. It is just as easy for an app to be 50% opaque (a 50% gray mask) as it is to be 100% opaque (a black mask). There are no "tricks". On Mac OS X, the drop shadows are not constantly recalculated and redrawn
The difference is like comparing lighting effects from Photoshop with lighting effects in Maya. In Photoshop, you can take a 2D image and play with a filter until your 2D image looks like it's got a sun shining on it (typically you do this to get a little extra texture). In Maya, you put a sun in the sky and everything just gets lit up correctly.
Even a pedestrian look at Mac OS X's graphics will show you that it is a major advance over what has come before. Instead of giving an app a space on the display to write to, apps write into their own windows, and those windows are composited with all other windows in real-time. Windows are totally buffered, so apps don't have to redraw anything, just draw it and leave it. What this means is that if you make the top window translucent, you automatically see what's underneath it, because there really IS something "underneath" it. The window manager is really treating windows as objects that have an "altitude" above the desktop and other windows. The foreground window seems to float above the others, because it has a larger shadow.
I'm a graphics pro, so this stuff in the GUI makes sense to me. Each app just makes a 32-bit graphic, and the window manager composites them, just like you would do if you were compositing a bunch of graphics in Photoshop or Fireworks. Once a graphic is 24-bit, it has all the colors you can see. Once you add an 8-bit mask (making a 32-bit image), you can easily layer that image with any other image and it just works. The way Mac OS X does things means that drop shadows and things aren't constantly recalculated and redrawn (like in Windows OS), and are not too much harder to do than the one-pixel "shadow" that Mac OS 9 windows have (and Windows OS, too, if I remember correctly).
This is the future of GUI's, because it is the future of graphics. Mac OS X is ready for someone to write a Finder replacement that looks like a video game. Zooming and transforming and 3D is trivial. Maybe we will see more of this from Apple now that Windows XP is basically feature-frozen for a long while, and Apple is about to actually start pushing and advertising Mac OS X, since we're only a few months away from the 9 to X transition being complete.
Not sure what you're talking about with drivers. On the Mac, we don't mess around with that. My PowerMac has an NVIDIA adapter with 32MB of RAM, and my PowerBook has an ATI adapter with 16MB of RAM and everything works great on both machines. I've been playing Alice on the PowerBook and it looks and feels great. On the PowerMac especially, the GUI is like butter. It doesn't have quite the snap of Mac OS 9 on the same hardware, but it is very responsive and feels very solid (and doesn't crash), so it feels like working with real objects. Very pleasant way to work. I keep the icons set at 128x128 all the time, and I don't have to open image files to see what they look like. Fabulous. You can lay out all your work in front of you in Finder, and easily see what a whole project looks like.
Mac OS X's GUI is definitely accelerated by the graphics adapter, on almost all supported machines. The 10.1.1 update enabled hardware acceleration for the second display on my new PowerBook G4 (which was released just before 10.1.1), and you can see the difference. What you're thinking of is that there are some functions that the GUI does regularly that are not accelerated, because they're ahead of what the hardware can presently do. In the future, they'll gain further acceleration as the people who make the graphics hardware (NVIDIA and ATI) add those kinds of functions to their products.
.5 seconds takes .5 seconds on pretty much any machine. Faster machines might show 12 individual transforms in that time, while an older machine might show 3 or 4, but it makes sense either way. This applies to windows being minimized, and things like dialogs fading in and out. In Mac OS X's Mail application, when you switch to a new message, the contents of the preview pane fade out and then back in quickly with the new message, so you see the computer responding to your action.
... instead of clipping, the decimal point is just moved to hold the higher number, so you don't have to "mix down" every time you make a new audio file. Setting the bar up high like this elevates all of the platform's apps. Very enjoyable stuff. As a user, you can also commit yourself to storing your graphics and audio in full 32-bit and know that you're going to have a lot of flexibility in the future.
As far as I know, the major use of "vectors" in Mac OS X is transforming the edges of bitmaps. So you have a window that is stored by Mac OS X as a bitmap (which is why apps don't have to redraw them), and when you minimize it, its shape is transformed in real-time using 3D stuff. In Office X (version 10, like Mac OS X), when you open or close the formatting palette, it "genies" out of the menu item so that you get the picture that it is something you can toggle open or closed with that menu item. That's the kind of stuff Apple has riddled Mac OS X with, and developers are only just starting to get their heads around it.
As for the performance issues, these effects in Mac OS X are done like movies, so that a transformation that's supposed to take
Yeah, transparent windows are old news on the Mac, but what's nice with Mac OS X is that they've raised the bar system-wide to 32-bit images (24-bits of every color we can see, plus an 8-bit mask for pro-level compositing). Similarly, "native audio" is 32-bit floating point, which is then "next" pro standard, which is also easily composited without any headroom or distortion considerations
All Macs come with iTunes and FireWire. You can easily hook on more than 11 FireWire hard disks, and iTunes is happy to rip to AIFF and work only with uncompressed audio. It's UI is a pleasure to use to archive lots and lots of music. I have about 800 albums archived in iTunes and can find any song in a second or two. For a couple of grand, you can get an iBook and a couple of 80GB FireWire drives, and you'll be able to edit movies and surf the Web or play DVD's and do other things with it as well.
Why should the court specify what the schools are going to get? If this is a penalty, it should be a blank check donation that schools can spend on anything they want, as long as it's non-Microsoft. It's not a penalty unless some of Microsoft's money and market share goes to their competitors. If a school already has a Linux setup, they'll want more stuff to go with that; if they already have Apple stuff with PowerSchool and carts of iBooks, then they will want more of that. If they have all Microsoft stuff, in part because of Microsoft's illegal actions, then they will have an opportunity to see what they've been missing with some other stuff.
Also, it would be a good penalty to have Microsoft pay for a UNIX/Mac training course that's offered free to MSCE's that want it. In other words, you paid to become an MSCE before Microsoft's actions were brought to light, and now you have a free way to upgrade your skills to other tech and round out your knowledge and maybe stop pushing MS kit because it's all you know.
Another penalty would be free Windows 3.11 for any machine that can run it. These machines are out there, and often they are junk only because of software licensing. They ALL had DOS because of Microsoft's illegal licensing (pay for DOS whether you want it or not), so it's not like Microsoft didn't already get a cut of the cost of these machines originally. Apple has offered System 7.5.5 for free for years, and that is much higher functionality than Windows 3.11. That's why there are so many old Macs still doing functional work, and even being sold around on eBay to do functional work. The equivalent PC's (late 486's and early Pentiums) are going to the dump, or sitting in the basements of office buildings. Microsoft recently hassled a charity for collecting these and putting Windows 3.11 on them for kids. That's not right. If their software weren't so much more fragile than the hardware, these machines would still be functional (in other words, you'd turn them on and they'd be as good as the day they first went into service).
I used Ricochet inside a tank-like commercial building with aluminum ceilings and got the highest connection rate. This was in North Hollywood. When I signed up, the guy said the biggest myth about Ricochet was that it was only good outdoors, or while you were moving. It can do that, too, but if your house or apartment or office was in a coverage area, then it will likely work fine.
I even used it in my house right on the edge of San Francisco, and used it coming over the Bay Bridge from Oakland, and it got a signal right as we came off the San Francisco side of the bridge, so San Francisco seems pretty well covered. There are like 17 big hills here, so you can put stuff like this on top of the hills and get everybody.
Even if you use it indoors most of the time, it's still a great deal. You don't have to hook your house or apartment up to the Internet, just hook yourself up with a PC Card in your computer. Taking it to the library was really great, or working at a coffee shop or whatever.
I just got a new PowerBook, and I keep looking at the PC Card slot and wishing there was a working Ricochet modem in there 24/7. I used to think I'd just use Ricochet forever myself, combined with 802.11 when I bump into a network. Between the two systems you can go to a lot of places and be connected without having to fall back on the phone modem or regular Ethernet.
I don't think there's anything wrong with having two different systems, either. Eventually, they'll fit 802.11 and Ricochet onto one chip/card and the computer could use whatever is available automatically. In the meantime, if one system doesn't scale well enough or has some other problem (like Ricochet is having now), then the other fills in the gap. Seems like some people think that they have to be against Ricochet because they like AirPort.
That Xerox link is a lousy example of the origins and history of overlapping windows, considering that the Alto didn't have overlapping windows. The Alto just divided the screen into side-by-side regions, same as Windows 2.0 did about 10 years later.
iTunes is part of Mac OS X. If Apple had an application/OS split, then the iTunes folks would be in the OS camp. It comes with Mac OS X, and parts of it are in the system itself (CD burning stuff) and need to be updated by an installer. That's what the installer is for. Most apps do come on disc or disc image, so the installer is very rarely used.
> Its a virus - it hides behind a legitimate
> program, performs some sort of check, then
> delivers a payload. If thats not a virus,
> then i don't know what is. Just because
> Apple may 'claim' its a mistake, is no
> excuse. People have gone to prison for
> less so i say, give them a big fat law
> suit.
Are you listening to yourself?
> you're generaly held responsible for
... iTunes 2 is maybe the third app I've ever had to run the installer for. Most apps just come in a disk image, and you mount the image and drag and drop the app where you want it to live. Or they come on a CD or DVD and you drag them to the hard drive in the same way. I prefer that over running the installer and letting it have free reign over the system.
> the damage you do.
But in this case, the "you" is the user. The user downloaded and installed a software package that happened to have a bug in it, and in so doing, they may have lost data and have to restore from backups. End of story.
Software bugs are a Fact of Life. They weren't invented yesterday.
The ironic thing here is that the Mac OS X installer is rarely used
Steve Jobs said in a recent keynote that Apple prefers MP3 for digital music because it's open and interoperable and it's what people are already using. The players are out there, the software is out there.
iPod loads up its 32MB of RAM with the tunes it needs and sleeps the hard drive while it plays those tunes, to save power. 32MB is like 20 minutes or so at 160kbs, which is the bit-rate Apple prefers and uses when it talks MP3 (the "1000 songs" feature is based on 1000 160kbs MP3's). Apparently, they have been more successful with the power consumption and battery life than even they hoped. In the iPod intro video, you can see where Jon Rubenstein (Apple's hardware tech boss) says "eight hour battery" and they dubbed over "ten hour battery" later, and now reviewers are saying their demo units are getting 12 hours of playback on a single charge.
So, given that the hard drive is sleeping much of the time, I would guess that they just use the standard Toshiba drive in the way that Toshiba recommends, without complicating things.
I switched from Windows to Mac a couple of years ago, and it was the best tech decision I ever made. We put in a $299 AirPort Base Station almost two years ago, and it made getting on the Internet transparent. I just bought a PowerBook last week, took it out of the box, turned it on, and it was already on the Internet, before I had so much as plugged a power cable into it. For years, adding more storage has meant just getting a FireWire drive and plugging it in and going. I am way more productive, and working with rich media is a joy because the whole system is oriented towards that. QuickTime has been there as a rosetta stone for media files since 1991 or something, so even the most popular text editor for the Mac (BBEdit) can display audio and video and picture files you drop on it. The audio subsystem in Mac OS X is unprecedented, like having Cubase built-in for other apps to build on top of.
... there is lots of hidden value because you get a lot of stuff included, and then the whole is more than the sum of its parts because everything works together so well (burning data DVD's from the Finder like they were floppies is a good example) and the interface is so good. Look a little more deeply into a Mac and you'll find out that it has tons of VALUE. Massive bang for the buck. It's worth checking out if you haven't already. Make sure that it's not for you, so that you don't find out later that it is for you and regret missing these exciting years on the platform.
Since I switched, most of my friends and family have switched to Macs and we are all happier than ever before. I don't get calls about "Windows won't print!" and "there's no sound!" and "Windows is mysteriously crashing!" etc etc anymore. My 56 year-old aunt tried to record her music for two years on a high-end desktop PC and never got it to work right, and then she recorded a song and made an iMovie around it on her first day with a PowerBook. She put the movie on the Web in streaming video, just working with the built-in tools that came with the box, and she had never put anything on the Web before. Even the Web space and streaming server space was included with the price of the box. Once people start iMovie, they just "get it" right away. It's amazing to watch them work with no help required and turn out cool stuff.
I still have one close friend who calls me with Windows problems. Recently, she had one of those Outlook viruses that sends out your personal files to your address book, and she basically stopped using her computer for a long while because she was so frustrated by the privacy violation that it represented. She already uses a Mac at work, and when she found out that Mac users just rolled merrily through Y2K, Melissa, I Love You, Code Red, Nimda, etc she decided to get a Mac, too, and is shopping for one right now. An educated consumer is Microsoft's worst problem, because they have been lying to people for years. My friend realized she had enough computer-savvy to trust her own decision to pick the best computer for her needs, and it was a Mac. A few years ago she would just get the "safe" choice.
> Face it, both Apple and Wintel are good
> at what they do
Sure, but a lot of people are out there trying to make Windows PC's do the things that Macs are good at, like working with audio, video, graphics, or easy plug and play reliable operation for the home user. Some of them are even doing that professionally because their IT guys are all MSCE's who want to "standardize" on MS in order to "cut costs". Ha ha ha ha ha. So stupid. Like it fucking matters to make IT guys happy! Think about the users and their productivity and your core business why don't you? Too many people are being shoe-horned into the Windows platform just for interoperability, when (ironically) a cross-platform industry is the only thing that will ever guarantee interoperability. You can now run the same software on Linux, Solaris, Irix, and Mac OS X with very little trouble at all, while on the other hand, MSN (the ISP) starting trying to block non-Microsoft browsers the other day. I mean, think about it.
This article is about how iPod is not as expensive as it first appeared, once you see how much better it is at what it does than its competition. The same is true for all Apple products
There is no other computer where you can run Mac OS X and Windows XP together, while also running Mac OS 9 apps and UNIX apps. I write tech books, and I do all of the Mac and Windows screenshots on a PowerBook, and have for years. Many authors do this. Very convenient. VirtualPC is a great Web testing ground, and it's very mature on the Mac and works really well. VirtualPC is essentially free when you buy it with Windows included, and it enables you to run any software you can find on the Web in Mac OS X. Still, I only run a Windows app for non-testing purposes about once a year. So much Windows software is crap. 300 shitty icon editors.
... people aren't suffering too much on Mac OS X. In a year or so Classic will be mostly a distant memory, anyway.
There is plenty of native software for Mac OS X already, and the marquee apps have all either shipped, been demoed, or been announced. Besides, Mac OS X runs Mac OS 9 apps better than Mac OS 9 in most cases
> MacOSX is not the next evolution of MacOS
> 7-8-9-etc, it is an entirely different operating
> system.
No, that's not true at all. The Carbon API is on both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, and the same apps run in both places, on the same hardware, with the same users. There is plenty of Mac in Mac OS X.
What is so hard about "Mac OS X (version 10.1, build 5L14)"? The "Mac OS X" is for users and marketers, and the "version 10.1, build 5L14" is for developers and geeks. Everybody is happy.
> Then why don't OS X versions start at 1.0, ... like every other software?
> 1.1, 1.2,
How about because it's the tenth version of Mac OS? The version before Mac OS X is Mac OS 9.
It's not a 2.5 inch notebook drive. The iPod itself is too slim and too narrow for a notebook drive. A plain FireWire drive based on this particular unique 5GB super-slim hard disk is also $399. The additional music playing features are free. The storage in iPod is totally cutting-edge.
It's a cool product that takes advantage of the fact that FireWire has been standard on Macs for a long time. Sending media files through the keyboard port is a bug. I'm glad Apple made this so obvious by fixing the bug. This is just 1.0, too, and it looks pretty good to me.
Some of the cool things that you may not know about iPod: you can boot a Mac from it (9 or X), and you can capture DV directly to it from any device that can generate an audio or video DV stream (such as a camcorder).