Apple is not the only company talking about the "Megahertz Myth". Intel uses it to sell it's Xeon chips to businesses at much lower clock rates and higher prices than the P4; Intel uses it to explain why Itanium runs at 800MHz; AMD's new chip runs at 1.5GHz, but they say it outperforms a 2GHz P4; Alphas run at 1GHz but are acknowledged to be much faster than a P4; Sparcs run at 900MHz, yet are also acknowledged to be better performers than a P4. There is also a precedent from the old Intel/AMD/Cyrix Pentium days, when the "P-rating" was born because the top-MHz chips were not the top performers. With the whole industry using the same process, and the P4 standing head-and-shoulders above everyone else in both MHz and pipelines, it's not hard to imagine that it's an underperformer. You don't have to ask Apple about that.
Apple does real world demonstrations of Photoshop and Media Cleaner Pro. If you are working with images at all (in graphics, video, Web browsing even), then the calculations (such as resizing or blurring an image) that Photoshop is doing faster on the Mac are germaine (Photoshop's filters are even used in other graphics apps). If you are doing any kind of encoding or encryption, then the Media Cleaner Pro demos are germaine (the Mac took a clip from tape to Web, then played the clip for the audience, and the Intel machine still wasn't done encoding yet). The files for the Media Cleaner Pro demos are just whatever movie trailer is newest (last time was Spiderman). Apple also demonstrated realtime, high-quality MPEG-2 encoding on their fastest PowerMac at the last Macworld. There is no counterpart on a Pentium for them to benchmark against. These are the things Apple's customers do with Macs, which are built to run these kinds of apps. Apple just demonstrates that their machine is better for those users. What, exactly, makes you think you know better?
TechTV was also skeptical, and they recreated an Apple demo, pitting a G4/733 against a P4/1.8GHz and the Mac won. TechTV is not a Mac-friendly site, and indeed they had openly disparaged Apple's test before they did their own version. They called it a draw, but add up the numbers and you'll see that the G4 finished the overall set of tasks faster.
The reason they use the word "myth" is that it is a falsehood that people WANT TO BELIEVE. It would be great if the 1.8GHz P4 was really twice as fast as a 900MHz PIII, but it is not. At the same time, it's easy to point at the lower clock-speed of the G4 and get in some good Mac-bashing. Unfortunately, it just shows that you're an idiot who hasn't used both platforms. If you had, you'd hold your tongue. I mean, if P4-based machine were doing these huge CPU-intensive tasks twice as fast as Macs, then why are people still buying Macs? Photoshop and Media Cleaner Pro are mature apps with the same features on both platforms. In these fields, time is money, and what hardware you buy is almost irrelevant. The cost of switching is nothing if you get to go twice as fast once you get there, yet people who have to encode hours of video everyday are not trading in their Macs for P4's. Two of the three PowerMac models come with DVD burners and MPEG-2 encoding software built-in, and people are making high-quality DVD's at home now, in 2x or real-time. That's very heavy computational lifting.
> If Apple and Adobe are in collusion to produce exactly
> one fast MacOS app, that's life,
Ha ha ha ha. Mac users wish that we got such treatment from Adobe. They are seen as spending too much time on their consumer-level apps for Windows, while Mac-based pros pay the bills and get much less attention. Photoshop is not more highly optimized for the Mac. It is running full speed on Windows, too.
Apple also does encoding shootouts with Media Cleaner Pro. People are editing broadcast-quality video on PowerBooks with Final Cut Pro. Music systems are running more tracks and plug-ins than Intel systems. The things I do each day on a PowerMac simply can't be done on Intel. The same software is there but it doesn't perform.
> but anyone claiming PPC CPUs are faster than IA32
> CPUs while omitting "but only if you spend your
> life running Photoshop" is being awfully dishonest.
People who continue to insist that Photoshop is some kind of strange island of an app are the ones being dishonest. Today's software spends a lot of its time working with images. Most people are running Graphical User Interfaces, right? Video-editing is like graphics editing but with lots more images. Every graphics app runs Photoshop plug-ins. As I mentioned, the comparisons are not just done in Photoshop, but also in other apps. Altivec is not just one little add-on to the G4. The chip in my PowerMac has 11 Altivec units. Apple very definitely sat down some time in the past and decided to optimize their systems for modern desktop computing: graphics, video, audio. It shows in their systems. But the G4 also kicks ass on distributed.net, along with sub-1GHz Alphas and other processors that don't have too many pipelines like the P4.
> Final Cut Pro was cited as an industry "standard"
> (though I doubt any industry consortium or
> standards body specifies it
No, just more people use it. You have to know about video to know how good Final Cut Pro is. It is replacing $30,000 workstations for some people; for others, it's letting them work on a notebook for the first time. You have already watched hours of TV that was done exclusively in Final Cut Pro on Macs. CNN is all over it. Everybody is all over it. Imagine Linux and Apache rolled into one, but for video-editing people instead of server admins.
> Nor did they invent video encoding, though I don't
> know enough about a DVD filesystem to know
> whether anything there was tricky
First, you have to encode the video into MPEG-2. Apple's low-end PowerMac does this in very high quality, in software, at 2x (a first... very, very fast). The high-end PowerMac does it in a realtime (another first). Then you have to design and implement an interface for the DVD. When you start a DVD, you're really in a menu system that access video. Once all that is done, then you have to burn the DVD itself. Not only does Apple provide really great professional-level tools for all of this that are thousands of dollars cheaper than the competition, they also have a HOME version of it all, called iDVD. It's outrageous. For years people have been talking about the brick wall that home video enthusiasts were seeing with digital and the DVD, because suddenly you needed to edit, encode, make menus, and burn discs and each of those things were independently thought to be out of reach of the consumer before Apple put it all together and solved all of the problems at once. The $2499 PowerMac comes with all of this INCLUDED. One year ago, you would have needed well over $10,000 and a year's training. It's outstanding stuff. DVD players are in 1 in 5 homes or something... as the SuperDrive gets more inexpensive and makes its way into the iMac and DVD players proliferate, this will be an even bigger story for Apple.
Ad agencies do all their work digitally, but up till about six months ago, when they wanted to show a clip to a client, they put it on analog video tape. Now they put it on DVD using Apple's tools, and it's cheap! Very, very cheap.
Not to mention that video comes out of the camera over FireWire (Apple invention) and is easily handled in Mac OS through QuickTime (Apple invention), and is easy for consumers to edit with iMovie (also Apple's).
> PC owners have learned not to pay high markups
> for innovative
They have learned how to pay high costs for IT support. They have learned that you can get Outlook viruses through email and blame them on Unix hackers instead of Microsoft.
> (translation: proprietary, incompatible, and rapidly
> obsolescent) integrated hardware; you'll find plenty
> from IA32 software vendors.
Apple uses the same hardware. A PowerMac has PCI, ATA, DRAM, etc. What's different is that the old BIOS of the x86 is OpenFirmware on the Mac (includes a nice graphical boot loader); the P4 is replaced with a G4 that's better for media tasks, and instead of Windows, we use Mac OS X, which is better for media tasks. What is so hard to understand about the fact that the resulting system is better for media tasks? Most consumers these days are using their computers for media tasks... MP3 encoding is just one example.
> making (someone else's) portable software
> environment viable might have been innovative
It's hard to call NeXT "someone else" when speaking of Apple. The NeXT project started at Apple, and left with Steve Jobs and a bunch of other people. Then it came back to Apple, along with Steve Jobs and a bunch of other people. NeXT systems used the same serial ports and connections as Macs, and the same CPU's. In a sense, you could say that Mac OS forked when Steve Jobs left, and it's being reunited right now after a few years of Mac OS / Mac OS X existing next to each other as entirely different products.
> , but they killed NEXTSTEP/Intel to protect their
> monopoly margins.
They killed Cocoa for Windows to protect Microsoft's monopoly margins and ensure that Microsoft wasn't going to stop making Office for Mac (even though Microsoft makes hundreds of millions of dollars in profit off that product every year). Microsoft also wanted Apple to kill QuickTime, a technology that's used by content creators in audio, video, etc. Even if this hadn't come out at the MS trial, I don't think anybody really believed that Microsoft would tolerate Apple deploying their new API onto both Windows and Mac. No way.
Would you ask a musician to set up your Linux server? No. So don't act like you know more about Macs than the next guy. You look at the components that are typically in an x86 and compare them to Apple and find Apple lacking, but you're not looking at all the other stuff. Innovative and productive software that's enabling people to do things they never could, FireWire, gigabit Ethernet, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, wireless antennas, etc.
> If you think Apples are expensive in the USA..
> boy, you should see the rest of the world.
Isn't that also true of Compaq's, Dell's, IBM's, etc? You pay more because there are often huge import taxes that have to be paid to get a machine into the person's country. In some places, computers are taxed to pay for environmentally-conscious disposal of the components later. In other words, it costs to bring a CRT into the country because it's a mess that will need cleaning up later.
> It so happens that apple only posts tests on
> Intels, and only tests on photoshop
First, they do demonstrations with Photoshop and with Media Cleaner Pro. In Photoshop, they run scripts that are essentially recordings of every action a user took during a whole project. They use the movie poster from whatever new movie just got added to QuickTime's movie trailer site. It's like a complete graphics-editing showdown. Those tasks are the same transformations you'd be applying to images if you were editing in Painter, or Fireworks, or any other app that edits graphics. The same filters are used in all of the graphics apps. If you edit images or video, you are impressed by the results of these tests. That's why people are running their business on Macs in those fields. Final Cut Pro is the most popular pro-level video editing software, and it runs only on the Mac.
Media Cleaner Pro is demonstrated taking video from tape to the Web. Macs can encode streaming video and MPEG at ridiculously fast speeds (realtime in software on the high-end PowerMac, with super high quality, 2x on the low end PowerMac). Encoding and encryption are some common tasks that benefit from the same strenths that are shown in the Media Cleaner Pro tests.
> which is
> optimized for macos.
Just the other day here on Slashdot we heard from an Adobe guy who said one person did the Mac optimizations for the last rev of Photoshop, while the Wintel optimizations were done by two teams of coders, one from Adobe and one from Intel. Apple puts Photoshop 6 against Photoshop 6 with the same RAM, hard disk, graphics card, etc. Then they put Media Cleaner Pro 5 against Media Cleaner Pro 5 on similar hardware. The only thing different is that you swap the G4 for the P4, and Mac OS for Windows. The Mac spanks Wintel in these tests.
> I said attitude... Maybe a G4 really is the best
> thing scince the microchip, but even if it is, it's
> not Apple's doing.
Apple, IBM, and Motorola are the PPC partners. It's not the tight-knit club it once was or maybe was supposed to be, but Apple contributes quite a bit to PowerPC development. Certainly, more than any other personal computer maker, who don't even make their own motherboards most of the time.
> Truth is, Apple isn't a stable company right now,
One unprofitable quarter in the last three years. Over 4 billion dollars in cash in the bank. They sold more notebook computers last quarter than any other quarter in Apple's history.
> they're way to dependent, on IBM (for PPC
> processors),
They get PPC processors from both IBM and Motorola.
> and on NVidia (for releasing video cards first).
Not sure what that means. nVidia stuff is the same hardware on either platform. Only the drivers are different. There is as much difference between Windows 98 and Windows 2000 with nVidia cards as with the Mac.
> Perhaps apple is the best for content creation,
> on the low level, but SGI's are running lower
> costs now (used machines), and these things
> run for 3 months uptime overclocked!
There are plenty of people with both a Mac and an SGI on their desks, because they don't overlap in capabilities, except for Mac OS X with Maya. You can't run Photoshop on SGI, you can't run Dreamweaver, Office, etc.
I'm surprised you recommend SGI when you mention that you think that Apple is unstable business-wise. A lot of people think that Mac OS X running Maya actually delivers on the promises that SGI made with their NT machines. You combine all the content creation stuff onto one box, and you're still on Unix, running Apache, Perl, etc.
> M$ Office will work on Mac OS X when the
> "Classic" environment is running. It will be
> OS X native sometime this year.
It's shipping in October and has already been announced and demonstrated. Even the price has been announced.
If you upgraded to Mac OS X the very first day it came out, and then got Office 10 for Mac OS X the very first day it comes out, you will have run Office in the Classic Environment for a total of six months. Considering that Office 2001 runs better in the Classic Environment than it does native on Mac OS 9, that's pretty good. It's the only Classic app on the machine I'm using right now, so it has the Classic Environment to itself and it couldn't be happier.
One cool thing that many non-Mac users don't know is that Microsoft's Mac Business Unit is separate from the Windows division. Their Mac apps are head and shoulders above their Windows apps. Internet Explorer on Mac OS X is ONE FILE that you can move wherever you want to, or trash in a blink. It has the most standards-compliant rendering of any browser, according to the Web Standards Project. No VBScript and ActiveX. Office has Mac-style panels that speed up formatting and other tasks. Word and Excel started on the Mac, of course. Office 10 for Mac OS X is kind of a big deal historically or sentimentally, because we actually had all 10 releases on the Mac (on Windows the first three were 2, 6, 7).
> Uh, how many have you got? - I count ONE
> consumer level sound card available for mac -
> SoundBlaster. That's IT. There aren't any!
Every Mac made since about 1991 has had on-board sound equivalent to an add-on SoundBlaster card. In addition, every Mac made since about 1993 has had a wavetable software synth in it, so Mac users were spared the cheezy FM synth MIDI files that SoundBlaster users enjoyed through 1997.
There is only one consumer PCI audio solution for the Mac, but there are numerous USB audio solutions for $20-$40. I have a Griffin iMic that you can hide in your hand. To use it, you plug it into the Mac keyboard and either talk into it or plug a line-in into it. There are also semi-pro USB audio solutions for $200-$500 or so. What makes them better for the consumer is that instead of plugging a PCI card into the inside of the computer and then installing drivers and then plugging an analog mic into the PCI card, all the Mac user has to do is plug in the USB microphone and that's it. Mac OS already has support for USB audio built-in. No drivers to install.
For professionals, the main PCI audio solution is Digidesign's Pro Tools, which you can run on any PowerMac, or on one particular IBM workstation and that's it. The IBM version is sort of legendary... Digidesign apparently sells it, but nobody uses it. There are top ten hits that were made on tape, and there were top ten hits that were made without tape. If they were made without tape, then they were made with Digidesign Pro Tools on a Mac. End of story.
There are also pro PCI cards from Yamaha, eMagic, Event, and dozens of others. There are also professional FireWire solutions from Mark of the Unicorn now, and more coming. Yamaha's mLAN is the front-runner to replace MIDI, and it runs over FireWire and support for it is built into Mac OS X. The MIDI ports that are found on all digital musical instruments will gradually be replaced by FireWire over the next few years. FireWire is already on digital camcorders, VCR's and things like TiVo. It's where we're moving because most of the time, people prefer to hot-plug a single cable between two devices and having them just work over popping the box and handling bare cards and installing drivers.
> Hope you like it, DannyiMac, because it's soldered
> on, and there's no way to add another.
Thank-you, jchristopher, for another ignorant Mac-bashing troll (seek help, man). PCI solutions require a PowerMac, but you can use the USB or FireWire solutions with any Mac, including iMacs, iBooks, and PowerBooks. As I mentioned above, there are cheap USB ones, semi-pro USB ones, and pro-level FireWire ones. It is very common in the music industry to see PowerBooks being used as portable music studios. The iMac has the same expandability. Microsoft doesn't want you to know that, but hey. Get a Mac and a FireWire hard disk and plug them together and they just work, no installing anything (even if the disk is running FAT32). FireWire audio is the same and it's hot, especially with the PowerBook G4 running audio software so well.
> the G4 tower, the only Mac with any real
> expansion options, STARTS at $1699. That is
> too much to pay for a low end, expandable
> computer.
It's not a low-end computer. Apple doesn't make any low-end computers. The G4 tower you're picking on for $1699 has FireWire, GIGABIT ethernet, wireless antennaes that enable it to be a base station for Wi-Fi, an optical mouse, a graphics adapter with DVI and VGA, 1.5GB RAM capacity, and 4 EMPTY PCI slots (see how many you have empty over at Dell once you've added FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet, and wireless networking to a box). It also has iMovie, iTunes, iDVD and Mac OS X. Out of the box, it is already a semi-pro video editing solution.
Have some humility, man. You're obviously not a music and audio person. Macs are the dominant computer platform in music and audio, graphics, and video. They simply can do things in those fields that can't be done with any other machine, and they've been doing those things for YEARS and YEARS. People have been running recording studio's with Macs since the 1980's. I know a guy who still uses a 1989 Mac for writing music.
I hope you aren't a Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails fan. Those guys don't just use Macs, they get out and prostelytize as well. Throw your CD's away if you can't stand the idea of people using anything but Dells.
> What if I want to add optical 5.1 sound out so I
> can play my DVDs on my stereo system?
That's an esoteric request considering that you can get 5.1 decoding built into just about any kind of home entertainment component you want... DVD, receivers, etc. Where is the 5.1 audio being created? On Macs. Sorry, buddy. Hell, Mac OS X supports 5.1 within CoreAudio. You could sit down and write your own 5.1-capable application in a week, because the guts are all there just like text rendering is there for word processors. Then you can use the same hardware that pros use to author the 5.1 to listen to it, if you want.
You are so far out of your league on this, it's just not even funny. Well, maybe it's funny.
> The program has been eternally stuck in the era
> of unprotected memory- since the 80's
First, you're talking about the previous version of the Mac OS. The current one has a Unix kernel. Most Windows users still use Windows 98 (Windows Magazine recommends against using Windows Me at all). Microsoft says Windows 95/98/Me have protected memory and preemptive multitasking, but apps routinely bring the system down, and you can't format a floppy in the background and keep working. It's all bullshit. Most Windows users are still running DOS, even today. There are all kinds of software and hardware products that won't work with Windows 2000.
> Apple will finally be upgrading to the quality of
> windows 95 with OS X. Wow what an
> accomplishment! *golf clap*
No, man... that's just not true. For the past few years, both Apple and Microsoft have had desktop operating systems that you expect to reboot three times a week, and server operating systems that you expect to reboot three times a year. And I am being generous to Microsoft there... I don't think anybody ever got three reboots a year out of NT 4. Both companies are now transitioning all of their users to a similar base as their server OS. All the promises that Microsoft made with Windows 95 about DOS being gone are about to finally start to come true this November with XP. With Apple, the transition started in March 2001 with Mac OS X and will go until March 2002. With Microsoft, the transition will start in November 2001, and go on forever. The reason that Windows XP Home Edition runs everything as root is so that it can run ALL of the Windows software and hardware... the Pro edition won't. Maybe in the NEXT Windows revision.
> And my G3 Blue-and-white, aka Yosemite,
> aka The Fisher-Price computer (the latter
> nickname was bestowed by my hubby)
> still looks and feels like it came from the future,
> even though I've had it since 1999.
Just recently I had someone ooh and ahh at a Yosemite that I have, and their exact words were "it looks like it's from the future". She was talking about the look of the machine, but it is still quite current otherwise as well. Even though it's two years old, it has a 15" flat panel display, built-in Ethernet, built-in FireWire, built-in USB, no legacy ports, 16MB graphics card, can take 1.5GB of RAM, and runs Mac OS X quite happily. I got a new PowerMac recently, but I kept the Yosemite as well. I don't recall ever keeping a two year old PC around voluntarily. The Yosemite is compact and capable and really beautiful. It has over a hundred gigabytes of storage in it (4 internal hard drive bays) and over a hundred gigabytes more attached to it by FireWire (80GB FireWire Maxtors are $200 now) and is working now as a server. With 1.5GB of RAM and 60 or so spaces left on the FireWire bus, it still has room to grow. You can pop out the CPU and put a new one in, too, in about three minutes, because the mobo is on the drop-down door. It's paid for itself many times over, too.
For about the past 18 months, Apple's been shipping PowerMacs with gigabit Ethernet and wireless antennaes built-in (so they can act as base stations for wireless LAN's). Those are the kinds of features that make a machine long-lived, along with high RAM capacity, FireWire, etc.
> The Dimension line changes rapidly, and is geared
> towards home users.
It comes and goes in three months because it's already the old stuff. The parts in those home systems are leftovers from last year's pro systems. If you could track the technology up the product line, you'd find that hardware configuration is as old as any Mac model ever gets.
> If you're looking for long-term
> availability of the exact same model, you need
> to buy the Optiplex computers
As soon as somebody has some real work to do, they pay a little more and get better stuff.
There is the reason why Apple's products don't go up and down in price like a flea market. Apple doesn't have a low-end commodity box. Time and time again people say Apple's products are expensive, but those are people who can't find a low-end box at apple.com to compare to something they found at a screwdriver shop, or essentially got on clearance at Gateway. With Apple, you get a complete solution at every price point they offer, with all the stuff built-in so you don't have to add it yourself later and mess with drivers and such. The Mac OS X system requirements was a single Web page with pictures of all the computers that can run Mac OS X! If your computer is pictured there, you can install OS X and it will work. You can't sell that to people for clearance prices.
Also, IT departments may like to track the ins and outs of what graphics adapter is at the perfect price/performance point this week, but IT departments generally just know and promote Microsoft. Often, Macs are purchased and supported by people who actually use them, even within large companies. That you can go to apple.com and easily find any updates for "iMac (Summer 2000)" because all iMacs sold that summer were the same is an important feature. Swap stuff in and out during that product's life and you have to make the user compare serial numbers to decide what graphics driver they need or whatever. It's just too much of a drag for people who also have real work to do.
Everybody knows you get hosed on additional RAM from brand-name computer vendors. You can fill up any Mac from TransIntl.com for a few hundred dollars just by picking out your Mac model from a list that I believe usually includes pictures. Macs can all take a lot of RAM, and that extends their working lives quite a bit.
This article is talking about Mac OS X, not the price of Macs. And the BSD guy who wrote the article actually finished with a plea for people just to actually TRY a Mac before they pass judgement, and there are still cats here saying "Macs cost too much". No wonder Apple is opening their own stores. $1299 for a fully-featured, beautifully designed and built 5-pound, 1.3 inch thick notebook computer with 5-hour battery life, CD-ROM, FireWire, the best movie-editing software there is, complete MP3 software, built-in wireless antennas, video mirroring, TV-out, 10x7 display, with a state-of-the-art Unix-based OS with Java2, and there's still a guy out there who can complain that Macs are too expensive. It is quite amazing. What does Apple have to do, come to your house and show it to you in order to get a fair shake?
The G4 PowerBook is one-inch thick and has a 15.1 inch wide-aspect display. It has 5-hour battery life and can take 1GB of RAM. You have to see one to appreciate that it is a brick of metal that you can then open up to see a huge, perfect LCD display. Running Mac OS X, it's the state-of-the-art in computing. You can get one for $2500 and they include a free FireWire CD-burner and printer for that price, too. It looks like a boutique computer, but it is not. Apple's price points are the same ones that everybody else uses, they just don't sell stuff with a bunch of things stripped out.
There are guys here on Slashdot that still drool over old Sun notebooks. Apple's stuff today is a thousand times more advanced than those old notebooks, and they are still Unix workstations if that's what you want.
Professionals typically use name-brand computers. The price of a graphics workstation from Apple, Dell, IBM, Compaq, etc. is all the same. You pay a few thousand dollars and up for whatever machine makes you comfortable and productive. Adobe still makes more money on their Mac products than their Windows and Unix products combined, though.
Macs are clearly faster for Photoshop (tested by multiple parties, including such Mac-unfriendly sites as PC Magazine and TechTV), but what a lot of people don't realize is that the Photoshop and Media Cleaner Pro shootouts that Apple does are run by scripts that are really the condensed workday of a user. It's not just a few specific tests in Photoshop, it's hundreds of tasks. Every step the user took as they created the movie poster, or transferred the video from tape to the Web. Common graphics tasks like resizing an image are the same in Photoshop or Final Cut Pro or Internet Explorer or Word or wherever... in fact most graphics applications use Photoshop plug-ins themselves, so the tests apply directly. The shootouts that Apple does with Media Cleaner Pro carry over to MP3 encoding and encryption. Lots of people are buying computers to do those kinds of tasks. Macs are optimized for those tasks throughout the whole system, and getting moreso fast with a major new system update every six months.
The whole industry is using the same process for their CPU's. There's no magic happening with the P4 except for marketing magic. I know you think you know better, but you're just looking ignorant here. There's a reason why people aren't rushing out to buy P4-based systems... they're all bark, no bite.
It's a USB modem that uses PPP, my man! I have one running on Mac OS X right now. I'm talking to you through it. The only operating systems that they offer telephone support for are Windows and Mac OS, but surely Linux/BSD people can figure out how to connect a PPP modem? It is exactly the same as if the Ricochet modem were a 56k hooked to a landline.
If a new kind of padlock technology is invented, surely locksmiths will study it and discuss it and work to understand it? That's what they do.
I lost my house key once and I called a locksmith and he picked the lock in a few seconds. I was pretty happy at the time to get into my house, but I remember thinking "Wow, who knew it was that easy to get into a locked house?!" The illusion of invulnerability is shattered. Deal with it. It was only an illusion in the first place. A lock is only a deterrant. If my landlord had had the locksmith arrested for violating a law about not messing with his company's locks, then we would have a similar situation to the Skylarov case, except that my landlord would have to be in another country. People could not get into their own eBooks to have them read aloud by screen-readers and such. Dmitri's company helped them to access their own information. Dmitri himself just talked about locks with other locksmiths at a locksmith convention.
Is a locksmith a good guy for answering my call and letting me into my house for a reasonable fee, or is he a bad guy for just plain picking a lock? Is there absolutely no possible reason, under any circumstances, for ever picking a lock? Is our technology so advanced?
I am amazed and saddened at the ignorance that is being displayed by the US government about technology, in this case, and also with Microsoft Outlook and Office viruses, and Code Red and others. How many times can suits and cops get up in public and display their complete ignorance about a matter before they learn just a little bit of humility at least? Not to mention learning about technology. I mean, get more than one opinion on a subject. Do some research. I fear that suits and cops will only continue to ask other suits and cops for answers about technology, instead of asking geeks. Geeks and regular Joes and Janes will pay the price for that. Atlas Shrugged looks better every day.
Ok you had me untill this part mate, and that's going way too far. Sorry to tell you, but the hassle of deleting and not opening annakournikova_jpg.vbs doesn't quite compare to some woman getting beaten by her husband. Not to mention the fact that it's nobody's fault that you get a virus except the prick who wrote the virus. Not microsoft's, and not even your less pooter-savvy mate who thought he was gonna see anna's tits. If enough people used a standard linux desktop for it to be worthwhile, more people would write virii for linux. As linux's popularity grows, so will virii begin to appear, or I'll eat my hat.
He didn't compare the severity of Microsoft viruses to the severity of wife-beating; he compared the emotional dependence of the victims of both upon the perpetrator of both. In other words, he is trying to answer the question "what keeps them coming back for more?"
Windows XP Home Edition runs everything as root. How can you apologize for that? They have said that user accounts and permissions are too complex for the consumer, yet both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X have user accounts and permissions. Mac OS 9's are of the training-wheels variety, but Mac OS X is full-bore, hardcore Unix. iMac users are getting by, so surely Windows users can adjust? The reality is that bad network security is good for Microsoft, because they never get blamed, only "Internet hackers" get blamed, and they want us all to use MSN anyway, not the Internet.
As for your argument that popularity is the only reason Microsoft operating systems are virus-riddled, that is bunk. There are 25 million or more Macs out there, and there are lots of people who would love to stick it to Apple because they think Apple is on some kind of high horse. Why are there only a handful of Mac viruses? The system is completely scriptable, so there are tools there. But the worst Mac viruses all run in Microsoft software on the Mac. If you don't have Microsoft software, then you are susceptible to less than half of the viruses that run on the Mac.
Blaming virus writers is easy, but think of it this way: the guy who wrote "Melissa" simply sat down at his computer, wrote a document in Microsoft Word, and emailed it as an attachment to another user. He didn't cut through a chain-link fence, he didn't pick a lock, he didn't hack somebody's password; he just wrote a Microsoft Word document. One of the features of Microsoft Word documents is that they can include tables; another is that they can include scripts that send emails. Who is to say that using one feature is not a crime and using the other one is? Ignorant politicians and cops who believe Microsoft and their apologists. There were no Windows programs until Microsoft created the Windows API that provides the environment for them, and there were no Outlook viruses until Microsoft created an environment that demands them. If there is no security in that environment, then you can't expect things to be secure. If you leave your flashy sports car running and unattended with the doors unlocked, you have to share some of the blame when someone takes it for a joyride. Microsoft is practically begging people to write these viruses, which is the point of the article. They can't be this stupid... they are doing it on purpose to give Unix itself a bad name. To make the world so scary that their users will cling to Microsoft's skirt like frightened children.
Sometimes these updates are also available with magazines.
I think it's hard to complain about paying $129 for OS X part I and $20 for OS X part II. Software almost always goes alpha, beta, point-zero, point-one. The point-zero can be thought of as "beta for the users" if you like. It is necessary to get the software out into the real world in order to get feedback from users so you can include that feedback in point-one.
Mac CPU's run an average of 7 watts. Even G4's. The 733-867 MHz G4's take more power, but the two 800's in the top-end Mac COMBINED require less than 30 watts. A 1GHz Athlon needs 60 watts, and the P4 needs 70 watts. Those are different requirements, and I'm sure computer designers look at that. The one fan in the box (which is already seen as a bug by most Mac users) is probably enough when your CPU runs that cool... it even turns off when the machine sleeps. I've never heard of anybody selling chassis fans to Mac users.
Lots of Macs out there in music and audio, and in video, with all their slots loaded, and multiple FireWire and USB devices attached as well. Now that I think of it, the power supply in my PowerMac is also powering the Cinema Display. Must be adequate for the task.
It is a nice enclosure. It never feels like you're opening up the machine to "service" it... you just open it up and everything seems to be right where you'd want it to be without any peering or reaching or searching. Working on the front drive bays is sort of a drag, but not moreso than any other case. Your hard drives go in the bottom, anyway, and that's what you end up messing with, along with the RAM and PCI. You can fit four hard drives in, and they are all still easy to get at. How many removable drive bays do you need when the machine comes with a DVD-RW/CD-RW? The second one will stay empty unless you are forced to use Zip disks or similar. The handles are nice, too. It's a solid box.
I would like to see all manufacturers take such signature looks with their hardware. SGI, IBM, and Apple do a good job of this. You can recognize their stuff quite easily from a distance. You have to put your glasses on to tell most other stuff apart. I mean, you are going to make a lot of boxes anyway, so take a chance on making something new and beautiful.
I sympathize with GIMP-pride, but comparing it to Photoshop in any way is a pointless exercise that does a great disservice to the GIMP. The GIMP still has a ways to go to compete feature-wise with any of Adobe's "consumer" image-editing apps, never mind Photoshop.
Imagine you are recommending an open-source DR-DOS as a replacement for Mac OS X... that's the level of the divide between the GIMP and Photoshop. If you're not someone who uses Photoshop all day, you can't begin to imagine some of the things that people routinely require out of Photoshop.
I can't wait until the GIMP is a Cocoa app, though. If it has a standard Aqua UI (just as important as working with standard file types), it will be useful to a lot of people, especially in schools and other settings where budgets are tight and people want to make Web graphics. I hope the developers are also going to use QuickTime to give the GIMP the ability to open and save all the various file types.
> The new iMacs all just have a CD-RW drive...
> no DVD or combo drive in ANY model. Bit of a
> disappointment there.
You are talking about iMacs, but the original poster was talking about PowerMacs. The PowerMac models, go CD-RW, DVD-RW/CD-RW, DVD-RW/CD-RW. These aren't "combo" drives, but "SuperDrives"... you can record DVD's as well. I have one and they work great. Takes 20 minutes to put 4.5GB of data on a $10 disc. Making a video DVD is actually possible, and even easy, with the included iDVD software. The $2499 model with SuperDrive is a great value... you get an awful lot included, especially given that SuperDrives go for $800-$1000 alone.
> Using Photoshop and Media Cleaner Pro! That is
> the only reason that the G4 was faster than
> the Intel 1.8Ghz machine. Put linux on both and
> compile a kernel and lets see who is faster.
The G4 is kicking the P4's ass in modern computing tasks like encryption, encoding, graphics, music and audio, and video. Software MPEG-2 encoding is at 1x on the Mac platform now. That is all you need to know.
Note that the Mac that won the tests today was only the middle model of the PowerMac line. There is a faster one than that as well.
Which is faster: a 500MHz Alpha or a 1000MHz PIII? The Alpha is 10x the chip of a PIII. Comparing MHz alone is useless. Apple is shipping machines that are very, very fast. There are a lot of people out there who are very happy with the work that these fast Macs are enabling them to do. iDVD 2.0 does the MPEG-2 software encoding in the background while you set up your DVD's menus. This is powerful stuff.
> The current MS Word descended from Word for Windows, which was a rip-off of Ami
Microsoft Word 1.0 was a Macintosh application. Before the Mac, MS only made languages and MS-DOS. Word and Excel are Mac apps originally. All the Word for Windows, Ami, WordPerfect for Windows stuff came much later. EVERYBODY copied Word for Macintosh when they moved their apps from character-based to graphical on Microsoft operating systems, but Microsoft did it way earlier. I think the first version of Excel on a Microsoft operating system was actually for DOS, but it included a Windows runtime that made it look like it was running in Windows 2.x. Once Windows 3.0 took off, you can imagine how easy it was for Excel for DOS users to go to Excel for Windows on Windows 3.0. WordPerfect took years and years to go from 5.1 for DOS to 6.0 for DOS. In the meantime, Windows was all over the place, and Microsoft had a cheap, cheap competitive upgrade to Word for Windows and the full WYSIWYG editing (or something that looked like it) that people wanted from seeing the Mac do it for the past 6 or 7 years at the time.
Microsoft's dominance in office software is not about the features or the ease of use, it's just that office workers need to share their work with co-workers, and they are used to doing that with a haphazard system of sending MS Office documents of differing versions to each other by email. The documents sometimes carry viruses, and they still send them around. The documents often contain private information and previous revisions that are accessible to anyone with a plain text editor, and they still send them around.
If you create a better system for people to do office work and share it with their fellows, that is what will replace MS Office. It would most likely be HTML and XML based, and leverage the Internet and company network heavily. It would run on every platform, and be cheap. It will do all kinds of things for the user that Office is not doing, removing whole levels of complexity. It will have to be available as an open source BSD-style licensed library that EVERYBODY can use to make their app a part of the office workflow. Sort of like what MS Office would look like if you really made it take advantage of the Internet... it would have to be open to the user plugging into a translation dictionary that wasn't made by Microsoft, it would have to open a Word document and then save it as a Word document, or open a WordPerfect document and save it as a WordPerfect document, (all this without every asking you to save a document in the app's OWN format) and it would also have to promote a new, common, open format so that we could do away with the past cruft. That would be software that actually does what Office users need. (Mac OS X may be providing the groundwork for this with the object-oriented Cocoa environment, Services, AppleEvents, QuickTime translation, and more.)
A new office system to replace MS Office will have to look at the needs of Office users and satisfy them in a way that MS never can... very open, very compatible, easy to use, reasonably priced. Good security, no viruses (can you believe!), and respect for the user's humanity would also be a nice bonus. It is there for the taking. A key is to stop thinking "word processor", "spreadsheet", etc. and just think of a user sitting down to do some office work at a fast, stable machine that's always connected to the Internet. Those machines are available all over running BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, and some versions of Windows. What can you do to enable office people to get their work done better and easier than they can by starting up MS Office? What can you do to enable collaboration between users, regardless of what company developed their software?
It has nothing to do with the actual application, and/or its ease-of-use. It has everything to do with the fact that MS Office file formats are THE method that people use to collaborate on documents over the Internet. They send these things around in emails like they weren't full of hidden, private information, the last ten versions of the document, and carrying viruses.
Imagine that your boss sends you a Word document, with the revisions tracking features on, and you open it up in OpenOffice, work on it, save it, send it back to him, and he opens it in Word and it is garbled. You and OpenOffice are going to be blamed. Much better to just suck it up and use Word from the start, then when something goes wrong with the document (something almost always does) you will be able to say, "hey, I'm using the newest version of Word, here, it must be somebody else's fault."
What's needed is PERFECT support for the newest Microsoft file formats, available as a BSD library or something, so that anybody could hook it up to their app and everybody would be able to read and write this common format FLAWLESSLY. Failing perfection, it will go nowhere. It is useless to anybody unless it is guaranteed to work just like the newest version of Office. That way a person can use it while knowing that they are not going to destroy a Word document that comes across their desk during their daily work by opening it in OpenOffice or whatever they prefer.
I like to write in BBEdit, but I have to paste the stuff into Word before I give it to a publisher, and then work in Word on any edits that were made, once the document comes back to me. Can't see a way out of that yet.
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Apple is not the only company talking about the "Megahertz Myth". Intel uses it to sell it's Xeon chips to businesses at much lower clock rates and higher prices than the P4; Intel uses it to explain why Itanium runs at 800MHz; AMD's new chip runs at 1.5GHz, but they say it outperforms a 2GHz P4; Alphas run at 1GHz but are acknowledged to be much faster than a P4; Sparcs run at 900MHz, yet are also acknowledged to be better performers than a P4. There is also a precedent from the old Intel/AMD/Cyrix Pentium days, when the "P-rating" was born because the top-MHz chips were not the top performers. With the whole industry using the same process, and the P4 standing head-and-shoulders above everyone else in both MHz and pipelines, it's not hard to imagine that it's an underperformer. You don't have to ask Apple about that.
Apple does real world demonstrations of Photoshop and Media Cleaner Pro. If you are working with images at all (in graphics, video, Web browsing even), then the calculations (such as resizing or blurring an image) that Photoshop is doing faster on the Mac are germaine (Photoshop's filters are even used in other graphics apps). If you are doing any kind of encoding or encryption, then the Media Cleaner Pro demos are germaine (the Mac took a clip from tape to Web, then played the clip for the audience, and the Intel machine still wasn't done encoding yet). The files for the Media Cleaner Pro demos are just whatever movie trailer is newest (last time was Spiderman). Apple also demonstrated realtime, high-quality MPEG-2 encoding on their fastest PowerMac at the last Macworld. There is no counterpart on a Pentium for them to benchmark against. These are the things Apple's customers do with Macs, which are built to run these kinds of apps. Apple just demonstrates that their machine is better for those users. What, exactly, makes you think you know better?
TechTV was also skeptical, and they recreated an Apple demo, pitting a G4/733 against a P4/1.8GHz and the Mac won. TechTV is not a Mac-friendly site, and indeed they had openly disparaged Apple's test before they did their own version. They called it a draw, but add up the numbers and you'll see that the G4 finished the overall set of tasks faster.
The reason they use the word "myth" is that it is a falsehood that people WANT TO BELIEVE. It would be great if the 1.8GHz P4 was really twice as fast as a 900MHz PIII, but it is not. At the same time, it's easy to point at the lower clock-speed of the G4 and get in some good Mac-bashing. Unfortunately, it just shows that you're an idiot who hasn't used both platforms. If you had, you'd hold your tongue. I mean, if P4-based machine were doing these huge CPU-intensive tasks twice as fast as Macs, then why are people still buying Macs? Photoshop and Media Cleaner Pro are mature apps with the same features on both platforms. In these fields, time is money, and what hardware you buy is almost irrelevant. The cost of switching is nothing if you get to go twice as fast once you get there, yet people who have to encode hours of video everyday are not trading in their Macs for P4's. Two of the three PowerMac models come with DVD burners and MPEG-2 encoding software built-in, and people are making high-quality DVD's at home now, in 2x or real-time. That's very heavy computational lifting.
> If Apple and Adobe are in collusion to produce exactly
... very, very fast). The high-end PowerMac does it in a realtime (another first). Then you have to design and implement an interface for the DVD. When you start a DVD, you're really in a menu system that access video. Once all that is done, then you have to burn the DVD itself. Not only does Apple provide really great professional-level tools for all of this that are thousands of dollars cheaper than the competition, they also have a HOME version of it all, called iDVD. It's outrageous. For years people have been talking about the brick wall that home video enthusiasts were seeing with digital and the DVD, because suddenly you needed to edit, encode, make menus, and burn discs and each of those things were independently thought to be out of reach of the consumer before Apple put it all together and solved all of the problems at once. The $2499 PowerMac comes with all of this INCLUDED. One year ago, you would have needed well over $10,000 and a year's training. It's outstanding stuff. DVD players are in 1 in 5 homes or something ... as the SuperDrive gets more inexpensive and makes its way into the iMac and DVD players proliferate, this will be an even bigger story for Apple.
... MP3 encoding is just one example.
> one fast MacOS app, that's life,
Ha ha ha ha. Mac users wish that we got such treatment from Adobe. They are seen as spending too much time on their consumer-level apps for Windows, while Mac-based pros pay the bills and get much less attention. Photoshop is not more highly optimized for the Mac. It is running full speed on Windows, too.
Apple also does encoding shootouts with Media Cleaner Pro. People are editing broadcast-quality video on PowerBooks with Final Cut Pro. Music systems are running more tracks and plug-ins than Intel systems. The things I do each day on a PowerMac simply can't be done on Intel. The same software is there but it doesn't perform.
> but anyone claiming PPC CPUs are faster than IA32
> CPUs while omitting "but only if you spend your
> life running Photoshop" is being awfully dishonest.
People who continue to insist that Photoshop is some kind of strange island of an app are the ones being dishonest. Today's software spends a lot of its time working with images. Most people are running Graphical User Interfaces, right? Video-editing is like graphics editing but with lots more images. Every graphics app runs Photoshop plug-ins. As I mentioned, the comparisons are not just done in Photoshop, but also in other apps. Altivec is not just one little add-on to the G4. The chip in my PowerMac has 11 Altivec units. Apple very definitely sat down some time in the past and decided to optimize their systems for modern desktop computing: graphics, video, audio. It shows in their systems. But the G4 also kicks ass on distributed.net, along with sub-1GHz Alphas and other processors that don't have too many pipelines like the P4.
> Final Cut Pro was cited as an industry "standard"
> (though I doubt any industry consortium or
> standards body specifies it
No, just more people use it. You have to know about video to know how good Final Cut Pro is. It is replacing $30,000 workstations for some people; for others, it's letting them work on a notebook for the first time. You have already watched hours of TV that was done exclusively in Final Cut Pro on Macs. CNN is all over it. Everybody is all over it. Imagine Linux and Apache rolled into one, but for video-editing people instead of server admins.
> Nor did they invent video encoding, though I don't
> know enough about a DVD filesystem to know
> whether anything there was tricky
First, you have to encode the video into MPEG-2. Apple's low-end PowerMac does this in very high quality, in software, at 2x (a first
Ad agencies do all their work digitally, but up till about six months ago, when they wanted to show a clip to a client, they put it on analog video tape. Now they put it on DVD using Apple's tools, and it's cheap! Very, very cheap.
Not to mention that video comes out of the camera over FireWire (Apple invention) and is easily handled in Mac OS through QuickTime (Apple invention), and is easy for consumers to edit with iMovie (also Apple's).
> PC owners have learned not to pay high markups
> for innovative
They have learned how to pay high costs for IT support. They have learned that you can get Outlook viruses through email and blame them on Unix hackers instead of Microsoft.
> (translation: proprietary, incompatible, and rapidly
> obsolescent) integrated hardware; you'll find plenty
> from IA32 software vendors.
Apple uses the same hardware. A PowerMac has PCI, ATA, DRAM, etc. What's different is that the old BIOS of the x86 is OpenFirmware on the Mac (includes a nice graphical boot loader); the P4 is replaced with a G4 that's better for media tasks, and instead of Windows, we use Mac OS X, which is better for media tasks. What is so hard to understand about the fact that the resulting system is better for media tasks? Most consumers these days are using their computers for media tasks
> making (someone else's) portable software
> environment viable might have been innovative
It's hard to call NeXT "someone else" when speaking of Apple. The NeXT project started at Apple, and left with Steve Jobs and a bunch of other people. Then it came back to Apple, along with Steve Jobs and a bunch of other people. NeXT systems used the same serial ports and connections as Macs, and the same CPU's. In a sense, you could say that Mac OS forked when Steve Jobs left, and it's being reunited right now after a few years of Mac OS / Mac OS X existing next to each other as entirely different products.
> , but they killed NEXTSTEP/Intel to protect their
> monopoly margins.
They killed Cocoa for Windows to protect Microsoft's monopoly margins and ensure that Microsoft wasn't going to stop making Office for Mac (even though Microsoft makes hundreds of millions of dollars in profit off that product every year). Microsoft also wanted Apple to kill QuickTime, a technology that's used by content creators in audio, video, etc. Even if this hadn't come out at the MS trial, I don't think anybody really believed that Microsoft would tolerate Apple deploying their new API onto both Windows and Mac. No way.
Would you ask a musician to set up your Linux server? No. So don't act like you know more about Macs than the next guy. You look at the components that are typically in an x86 and compare them to Apple and find Apple lacking, but you're not looking at all the other stuff. Innovative and productive software that's enabling people to do things they never could, FireWire, gigabit Ethernet, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, wireless antennas, etc.
> If you think Apples are expensive in the USA..
> boy, you should see the rest of the world.
Isn't that also true of Compaq's, Dell's, IBM's, etc? You pay more because there are often huge import taxes that have to be paid to get a machine into the person's country. In some places, computers are taxed to pay for environmentally-conscious disposal of the components later. In other words, it costs to bring a CRT into the country because it's a mess that will need cleaning up later.
You're so off base here, I just had to respond.
> It so happens that apple only posts tests on
> Intels, and only tests on photoshop
First, they do demonstrations with Photoshop and with Media Cleaner Pro. In Photoshop, they run scripts that are essentially recordings of every action a user took during a whole project. They use the movie poster from whatever new movie just got added to QuickTime's movie trailer site. It's like a complete graphics-editing showdown. Those tasks are the same transformations you'd be applying to images if you were editing in Painter, or Fireworks, or any other app that edits graphics. The same filters are used in all of the graphics apps. If you edit images or video, you are impressed by the results of these tests. That's why people are running their business on Macs in those fields. Final Cut Pro is the most popular pro-level video editing software, and it runs only on the Mac.
Media Cleaner Pro is demonstrated taking video from tape to the Web. Macs can encode streaming video and MPEG at ridiculously fast speeds (realtime in software on the high-end PowerMac, with super high quality, 2x on the low end PowerMac). Encoding and encryption are some common tasks that benefit from the same strenths that are shown in the Media Cleaner Pro tests.
> which is
> optimized for macos.
Just the other day here on Slashdot we heard from an Adobe guy who said one person did the Mac optimizations for the last rev of Photoshop, while the Wintel optimizations were done by two teams of coders, one from Adobe and one from Intel. Apple puts Photoshop 6 against Photoshop 6 with the same RAM, hard disk, graphics card, etc. Then they put Media Cleaner Pro 5 against Media Cleaner Pro 5 on similar hardware. The only thing different is that you swap the G4 for the P4, and Mac OS for Windows. The Mac spanks Wintel in these tests.
> I said attitude... Maybe a G4 really is the best
> thing scince the microchip, but even if it is, it's
> not Apple's doing.
Apple, IBM, and Motorola are the PPC partners. It's not the tight-knit club it once was or maybe was supposed to be, but Apple contributes quite a bit to PowerPC development. Certainly, more than any other personal computer maker, who don't even make their own motherboards most of the time.
> Truth is, Apple isn't a stable company right now,
One unprofitable quarter in the last three years. Over 4 billion dollars in cash in the bank. They sold more notebook computers last quarter than any other quarter in Apple's history.
> they're way to dependent, on IBM (for PPC
> processors),
They get PPC processors from both IBM and Motorola.
> and on NVidia (for releasing video cards first).
Not sure what that means. nVidia stuff is the same hardware on either platform. Only the drivers are different. There is as much difference between Windows 98 and Windows 2000 with nVidia cards as with the Mac.
> Perhaps apple is the best for content creation,
> on the low level, but SGI's are running lower
> costs now (used machines), and these things
> run for 3 months uptime overclocked!
There are plenty of people with both a Mac and an SGI on their desks, because they don't overlap in capabilities, except for Mac OS X with Maya. You can't run Photoshop on SGI, you can't run Dreamweaver, Office, etc.
I'm surprised you recommend SGI when you mention that you think that Apple is unstable business-wise. A lot of people think that Mac OS X running Maya actually delivers on the promises that SGI made with their NT machines. You combine all the content creation stuff onto one box, and you're still on Unix, running Apache, Perl, etc.
> M$ Office will work on Mac OS X when the
> "Classic" environment is running. It will be
> OS X native sometime this year.
It's shipping in October and has already been announced and demonstrated. Even the price has been announced.
If you upgraded to Mac OS X the very first day it came out, and then got Office 10 for Mac OS X the very first day it comes out, you will have run Office in the Classic Environment for a total of six months. Considering that Office 2001 runs better in the Classic Environment than it does native on Mac OS 9, that's pretty good. It's the only Classic app on the machine I'm using right now, so it has the Classic Environment to itself and it couldn't be happier.
One cool thing that many non-Mac users don't know is that Microsoft's Mac Business Unit is separate from the Windows division. Their Mac apps are head and shoulders above their Windows apps. Internet Explorer on Mac OS X is ONE FILE that you can move wherever you want to, or trash in a blink. It has the most standards-compliant rendering of any browser, according to the Web Standards Project. No VBScript and ActiveX. Office has Mac-style panels that speed up formatting and other tasks. Word and Excel started on the Mac, of course. Office 10 for Mac OS X is kind of a big deal historically or sentimentally, because we actually had all 10 releases on the Mac (on Windows the first three were 2, 6, 7).
> Uh, how many have you got? - I count ONE
... Digidesign apparently sells it, but nobody uses it. There are top ten hits that were made on tape, and there were top ten hits that were made without tape. If they were made without tape, then they were made with Digidesign Pro Tools on a Mac. End of story.
... DVD, receivers, etc. Where is the 5.1 audio being created? On Macs. Sorry, buddy. Hell, Mac OS X supports 5.1 within CoreAudio. You could sit down and write your own 5.1-capable application in a week, because the guts are all there just like text rendering is there for word processors. Then you can use the same hardware that pros use to author the 5.1 to listen to it, if you want.
> consumer level sound card available for mac -
> SoundBlaster. That's IT. There aren't any!
Every Mac made since about 1991 has had on-board sound equivalent to an add-on SoundBlaster card. In addition, every Mac made since about 1993 has had a wavetable software synth in it, so Mac users were spared the cheezy FM synth MIDI files that SoundBlaster users enjoyed through 1997.
There is only one consumer PCI audio solution for the Mac, but there are numerous USB audio solutions for $20-$40. I have a Griffin iMic that you can hide in your hand. To use it, you plug it into the Mac keyboard and either talk into it or plug a line-in into it. There are also semi-pro USB audio solutions for $200-$500 or so. What makes them better for the consumer is that instead of plugging a PCI card into the inside of the computer and then installing drivers and then plugging an analog mic into the PCI card, all the Mac user has to do is plug in the USB microphone and that's it. Mac OS already has support for USB audio built-in. No drivers to install.
For professionals, the main PCI audio solution is Digidesign's Pro Tools, which you can run on any PowerMac, or on one particular IBM workstation and that's it. The IBM version is sort of legendary
There are also pro PCI cards from Yamaha, eMagic, Event, and dozens of others. There are also professional FireWire solutions from Mark of the Unicorn now, and more coming. Yamaha's mLAN is the front-runner to replace MIDI, and it runs over FireWire and support for it is built into Mac OS X. The MIDI ports that are found on all digital musical instruments will gradually be replaced by FireWire over the next few years. FireWire is already on digital camcorders, VCR's and things like TiVo. It's where we're moving because most of the time, people prefer to hot-plug a single cable between two devices and having them just work over popping the box and handling bare cards and installing drivers.
> Hope you like it, DannyiMac, because it's soldered
> on, and there's no way to add another.
Thank-you, jchristopher, for another ignorant Mac-bashing troll (seek help, man). PCI solutions require a PowerMac, but you can use the USB or FireWire solutions with any Mac, including iMacs, iBooks, and PowerBooks. As I mentioned above, there are cheap USB ones, semi-pro USB ones, and pro-level FireWire ones. It is very common in the music industry to see PowerBooks being used as portable music studios. The iMac has the same expandability. Microsoft doesn't want you to know that, but hey. Get a Mac and a FireWire hard disk and plug them together and they just work, no installing anything (even if the disk is running FAT32). FireWire audio is the same and it's hot, especially with the PowerBook G4 running audio software so well.
> the G4 tower, the only Mac with any real
> expansion options, STARTS at $1699. That is
> too much to pay for a low end, expandable
> computer.
It's not a low-end computer. Apple doesn't make any low-end computers. The G4 tower you're picking on for $1699 has FireWire, GIGABIT ethernet, wireless antennaes that enable it to be a base station for Wi-Fi, an optical mouse, a graphics adapter with DVI and VGA, 1.5GB RAM capacity, and 4 EMPTY PCI slots (see how many you have empty over at Dell once you've added FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet, and wireless networking to a box). It also has iMovie, iTunes, iDVD and Mac OS X. Out of the box, it is already a semi-pro video editing solution.
Have some humility, man. You're obviously not a music and audio person. Macs are the dominant computer platform in music and audio, graphics, and video. They simply can do things in those fields that can't be done with any other machine, and they've been doing those things for YEARS and YEARS. People have been running recording studio's with Macs since the 1980's. I know a guy who still uses a 1989 Mac for writing music.
I hope you aren't a Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails fan. Those guys don't just use Macs, they get out and prostelytize as well. Throw your CD's away if you can't stand the idea of people using anything but Dells.
> What if I want to add optical 5.1 sound out so I
> can play my DVDs on my stereo system?
That's an esoteric request considering that you can get 5.1 decoding built into just about any kind of home entertainment component you want
You are so far out of your league on this, it's just not even funny. Well, maybe it's funny.
> The program has been eternally stuck in the era
... that's just not true. For the past few years, both Apple and Microsoft have had desktop operating systems that you expect to reboot three times a week, and server operating systems that you expect to reboot three times a year. And I am being generous to Microsoft there ... I don't think anybody ever got three reboots a year out of NT 4. Both companies are now transitioning all of their users to a similar base as their server OS. All the promises that Microsoft made with Windows 95 about DOS being gone are about to finally start to come true this November with XP. With Apple, the transition started in March 2001 with Mac OS X and will go until March 2002. With Microsoft, the transition will start in November 2001, and go on forever. The reason that Windows XP Home Edition runs everything as root is so that it can run ALL of the Windows software and hardware ... the Pro edition won't. Maybe in the NEXT Windows revision.
> of unprotected memory- since the 80's
First, you're talking about the previous version of the Mac OS. The current one has a Unix kernel. Most Windows users still use Windows 98 (Windows Magazine recommends against using Windows Me at all). Microsoft says Windows 95/98/Me have protected memory and preemptive multitasking, but apps routinely bring the system down, and you can't format a floppy in the background and keep working. It's all bullshit. Most Windows users are still running DOS, even today. There are all kinds of software and hardware products that won't work with Windows 2000.
> Apple will finally be upgrading to the quality of
> windows 95 with OS X. Wow what an
> accomplishment! *golf clap*
No, man
> And my G3 Blue-and-white, aka Yosemite,
> aka The Fisher-Price computer (the latter
> nickname was bestowed by my hubby)
> still looks and feels like it came from the future,
> even though I've had it since 1999.
Just recently I had someone ooh and ahh at a Yosemite that I have, and their exact words were "it looks like it's from the future". She was talking about the look of the machine, but it is still quite current otherwise as well. Even though it's two years old, it has a 15" flat panel display, built-in Ethernet, built-in FireWire, built-in USB, no legacy ports, 16MB graphics card, can take 1.5GB of RAM, and runs Mac OS X quite happily. I got a new PowerMac recently, but I kept the Yosemite as well. I don't recall ever keeping a two year old PC around voluntarily. The Yosemite is compact and capable and really beautiful. It has over a hundred gigabytes of storage in it (4 internal hard drive bays) and over a hundred gigabytes more attached to it by FireWire (80GB FireWire Maxtors are $200 now) and is working now as a server. With 1.5GB of RAM and 60 or so spaces left on the FireWire bus, it still has room to grow. You can pop out the CPU and put a new one in, too, in about three minutes, because the mobo is on the drop-down door. It's paid for itself many times over, too.
For about the past 18 months, Apple's been shipping PowerMacs with gigabit Ethernet and wireless antennaes built-in (so they can act as base stations for wireless LAN's). Those are the kinds of features that make a machine long-lived, along with high RAM capacity, FireWire, etc.
> The Dimension line changes rapidly, and is geared
> towards home users.
It comes and goes in three months because it's already the old stuff. The parts in those home systems are leftovers from last year's pro systems. If you could track the technology up the product line, you'd find that hardware configuration is as old as any Mac model ever gets.
> If you're looking for long-term
> availability of the exact same model, you need
> to buy the Optiplex computers
As soon as somebody has some real work to do, they pay a little more and get better stuff.
There is the reason why Apple's products don't go up and down in price like a flea market. Apple doesn't have a low-end commodity box. Time and time again people say Apple's products are expensive, but those are people who can't find a low-end box at apple.com to compare to something they found at a screwdriver shop, or essentially got on clearance at Gateway. With Apple, you get a complete solution at every price point they offer, with all the stuff built-in so you don't have to add it yourself later and mess with drivers and such. The Mac OS X system requirements was a single Web page with pictures of all the computers that can run Mac OS X! If your computer is pictured there, you can install OS X and it will work. You can't sell that to people for clearance prices.
Also, IT departments may like to track the ins and outs of what graphics adapter is at the perfect price/performance point this week, but IT departments generally just know and promote Microsoft. Often, Macs are purchased and supported by people who actually use them, even within large companies. That you can go to apple.com and easily find any updates for "iMac (Summer 2000)" because all iMacs sold that summer were the same is an important feature. Swap stuff in and out during that product's life and you have to make the user compare serial numbers to decide what graphics driver they need or whatever. It's just too much of a drag for people who also have real work to do.
Everybody knows you get hosed on additional RAM from brand-name computer vendors. You can fill up any Mac from TransIntl.com for a few hundred dollars just by picking out your Mac model from a list that I believe usually includes pictures. Macs can all take a lot of RAM, and that extends their working lives quite a bit.
This article is talking about Mac OS X, not the price of Macs. And the BSD guy who wrote the article actually finished with a plea for people just to actually TRY a Mac before they pass judgement, and there are still cats here saying "Macs cost too much". No wonder Apple is opening their own stores. $1299 for a fully-featured, beautifully designed and built 5-pound, 1.3 inch thick notebook computer with 5-hour battery life, CD-ROM, FireWire, the best movie-editing software there is, complete MP3 software, built-in wireless antennas, video mirroring, TV-out, 10x7 display, with a state-of-the-art Unix-based OS with Java2, and there's still a guy out there who can complain that Macs are too expensive. It is quite amazing. What does Apple have to do, come to your house and show it to you in order to get a fair shake?
The G4 PowerBook is one-inch thick and has a 15.1 inch wide-aspect display. It has 5-hour battery life and can take 1GB of RAM. You have to see one to appreciate that it is a brick of metal that you can then open up to see a huge, perfect LCD display. Running Mac OS X, it's the state-of-the-art in computing. You can get one for $2500 and they include a free FireWire CD-burner and printer for that price, too. It looks like a boutique computer, but it is not. Apple's price points are the same ones that everybody else uses, they just don't sell stuff with a bunch of things stripped out.
There are guys here on Slashdot that still drool over old Sun notebooks. Apple's stuff today is a thousand times more advanced than those old notebooks, and they are still Unix workstations if that's what you want.
Professionals typically use name-brand computers. The price of a graphics workstation from Apple, Dell, IBM, Compaq, etc. is all the same. You pay a few thousand dollars and up for whatever machine makes you comfortable and productive. Adobe still makes more money on their Mac products than their Windows and Unix products combined, though.
... in fact most graphics applications use Photoshop plug-ins themselves, so the tests apply directly. The shootouts that Apple does with Media Cleaner Pro carry over to MP3 encoding and encryption. Lots of people are buying computers to do those kinds of tasks. Macs are optimized for those tasks throughout the whole system, and getting moreso fast with a major new system update every six months.
... they're all bark, no bite.
Macs are clearly faster for Photoshop (tested by multiple parties, including such Mac-unfriendly sites as PC Magazine and TechTV), but what a lot of people don't realize is that the Photoshop and Media Cleaner Pro shootouts that Apple does are run by scripts that are really the condensed workday of a user. It's not just a few specific tests in Photoshop, it's hundreds of tasks. Every step the user took as they created the movie poster, or transferred the video from tape to the Web. Common graphics tasks like resizing an image are the same in Photoshop or Final Cut Pro or Internet Explorer or Word or wherever
The whole industry is using the same process for their CPU's. There's no magic happening with the P4 except for marketing magic. I know you think you know better, but you're just looking ignorant here. There's a reason why people aren't rushing out to buy P4-based systems
It's a USB modem that uses PPP, my man! I have one running on Mac OS X right now. I'm talking to you through it. The only operating systems that they offer telephone support for are Windows and Mac OS, but surely Linux/BSD people can figure out how to connect a PPP modem? It is exactly the same as if the Ricochet modem were a 56k hooked to a landline.
If a new kind of padlock technology is invented, surely locksmiths will study it and discuss it and work to understand it? That's what they do.
I lost my house key once and I called a locksmith and he picked the lock in a few seconds. I was pretty happy at the time to get into my house, but I remember thinking "Wow, who knew it was that easy to get into a locked house?!" The illusion of invulnerability is shattered. Deal with it. It was only an illusion in the first place. A lock is only a deterrant. If my landlord had had the locksmith arrested for violating a law about not messing with his company's locks, then we would have a similar situation to the Skylarov case, except that my landlord would have to be in another country. People could not get into their own eBooks to have them read aloud by screen-readers and such. Dmitri's company helped them to access their own information. Dmitri himself just talked about locks with other locksmiths at a locksmith convention.
Is a locksmith a good guy for answering my call and letting me into my house for a reasonable fee, or is he a bad guy for just plain picking a lock? Is there absolutely no possible reason, under any circumstances, for ever picking a lock? Is our technology so advanced?
I am amazed and saddened at the ignorance that is being displayed by the US government about technology, in this case, and also with Microsoft Outlook and Office viruses, and Code Red and others. How many times can suits and cops get up in public and display their complete ignorance about a matter before they learn just a little bit of humility at least? Not to mention learning about technology. I mean, get more than one opinion on a subject. Do some research. I fear that suits and cops will only continue to ask other suits and cops for answers about technology, instead of asking geeks. Geeks and regular Joes and Janes will pay the price for that. Atlas Shrugged looks better every day.
Ok you had me untill this part mate, and that's going way too far. Sorry to tell you, but the hassle of deleting and not opening annakournikova_jpg.vbs doesn't quite compare to some woman getting beaten by her husband. Not to mention the fact that it's nobody's fault that you get a virus except the prick who wrote the virus. Not microsoft's, and not even your less pooter-savvy mate who thought he was gonna see anna's tits. If enough people used a standard linux desktop for it to be worthwhile, more people would write virii for linux. As linux's popularity grows, so will virii begin to appear, or I'll eat my hat.
He didn't compare the severity of Microsoft viruses to the severity of wife-beating; he compared the emotional dependence of the victims of both upon the perpetrator of both. In other words, he is trying to answer the question "what keeps them coming back for more?"
Windows XP Home Edition runs everything as root. How can you apologize for that? They have said that user accounts and permissions are too complex for the consumer, yet both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X have user accounts and permissions. Mac OS 9's are of the training-wheels variety, but Mac OS X is full-bore, hardcore Unix. iMac users are getting by, so surely Windows users can adjust? The reality is that bad network security is good for Microsoft, because they never get blamed, only "Internet hackers" get blamed, and they want us all to use MSN anyway, not the Internet.
As for your argument that popularity is the only reason Microsoft operating systems are virus-riddled, that is bunk. There are 25 million or more Macs out there, and there are lots of people who would love to stick it to Apple because they think Apple is on some kind of high horse. Why are there only a handful of Mac viruses? The system is completely scriptable, so there are tools there. But the worst Mac viruses all run in Microsoft software on the Mac. If you don't have Microsoft software, then you are susceptible to less than half of the viruses that run on the Mac.
Blaming virus writers is easy, but think of it this way: the guy who wrote "Melissa" simply sat down at his computer, wrote a document in Microsoft Word, and emailed it as an attachment to another user. He didn't cut through a chain-link fence, he didn't pick a lock, he didn't hack somebody's password; he just wrote a Microsoft Word document. One of the features of Microsoft Word documents is that they can include tables; another is that they can include scripts that send emails. Who is to say that using one feature is not a crime and using the other one is? Ignorant politicians and cops who believe Microsoft and their apologists. There were no Windows programs until Microsoft created the Windows API that provides the environment for them, and there were no Outlook viruses until Microsoft created an environment that demands them. If there is no security in that environment, then you can't expect things to be secure. If you leave your flashy sports car running and unattended with the doors unlocked, you have to share some of the blame when someone takes it for a joyride. Microsoft is practically begging people to write these viruses, which is the point of the article. They can't be this stupid ... they are doing it on purpose to give Unix itself a bad name. To make the world so scary that their users will cling to Microsoft's skirt like frightened children.
IE for Mac will still have Java. It also uses JavaScript instead of VBScript, and has its own rendering engine that fully supports Web standards.
Sometimes these updates are also available with magazines.
I think it's hard to complain about paying $129 for OS X part I and $20 for OS X part II. Software almost always goes alpha, beta, point-zero, point-one. The point-zero can be thought of as "beta for the users" if you like. It is necessary to get the software out into the real world in order to get feedback from users so you can include that feedback in point-one.
Mac CPU's run an average of 7 watts. Even G4's. The 733-867 MHz G4's take more power, but the two 800's in the top-end Mac COMBINED require less than 30 watts. A 1GHz Athlon needs 60 watts, and the P4 needs 70 watts. Those are different requirements, and I'm sure computer designers look at that. The one fan in the box (which is already seen as a bug by most Mac users) is probably enough when your CPU runs that cool ... it even turns off when the machine sleeps. I've never heard of anybody selling chassis fans to Mac users.
... you just open it up and everything seems to be right where you'd want it to be without any peering or reaching or searching. Working on the front drive bays is sort of a drag, but not moreso than any other case. Your hard drives go in the bottom, anyway, and that's what you end up messing with, along with the RAM and PCI. You can fit four hard drives in, and they are all still easy to get at. How many removable drive bays do you need when the machine comes with a DVD-RW/CD-RW? The second one will stay empty unless you are forced to use Zip disks or similar. The handles are nice, too. It's a solid box.
Lots of Macs out there in music and audio, and in video, with all their slots loaded, and multiple FireWire and USB devices attached as well. Now that I think of it, the power supply in my PowerMac is also powering the Cinema Display. Must be adequate for the task.
It is a nice enclosure. It never feels like you're opening up the machine to "service" it
I would like to see all manufacturers take such signature looks with their hardware. SGI, IBM, and Apple do a good job of this. You can recognize their stuff quite easily from a distance. You have to put your glasses on to tell most other stuff apart. I mean, you are going to make a lot of boxes anyway, so take a chance on making something new and beautiful.
The blue PowerMac G3 came out in January, 1999, six months or so after the iMac shipped, so it's been about two and a half years.
I sympathize with GIMP-pride, but comparing it to Photoshop in any way is a pointless exercise that does a great disservice to the GIMP. The GIMP still has a ways to go to compete feature-wise with any of Adobe's "consumer" image-editing apps, never mind Photoshop.
... that's the level of the divide between the GIMP and Photoshop. If you're not someone who uses Photoshop all day, you can't begin to imagine some of the things that people routinely require out of Photoshop.
Imagine you are recommending an open-source DR-DOS as a replacement for Mac OS X
I can't wait until the GIMP is a Cocoa app, though. If it has a standard Aqua UI (just as important as working with standard file types), it will be useful to a lot of people, especially in schools and other settings where budgets are tight and people want to make Web graphics. I hope the developers are also going to use QuickTime to give the GIMP the ability to open and save all the various file types.
> The new iMacs all just have a CD-RW drive...
... you can record DVD's as well. I have one and they work great. Takes 20 minutes to put 4.5GB of data on a $10 disc. Making a video DVD is actually possible, and even easy, with the included iDVD software. The $2499 model with SuperDrive is a great value ... you get an awful lot included, especially given that SuperDrives go for $800-$1000 alone.
> no DVD or combo drive in ANY model. Bit of a
> disappointment there.
You are talking about iMacs, but the original poster was talking about PowerMacs. The PowerMac models, go CD-RW, DVD-RW/CD-RW, DVD-RW/CD-RW. These aren't "combo" drives, but "SuperDrives"
> Using Photoshop and Media Cleaner Pro! That is
> the only reason that the G4 was faster than
> the Intel 1.8Ghz machine. Put linux on both and
> compile a kernel and lets see who is faster.
The G4 is kicking the P4's ass in modern computing tasks like encryption, encoding, graphics, music and audio, and video. Software MPEG-2 encoding is at 1x on the Mac platform now. That is all you need to know.
Note that the Mac that won the tests today was only the middle model of the PowerMac line. There is a faster one than that as well.
Which is faster: a 500MHz Alpha or a 1000MHz PIII? The Alpha is 10x the chip of a PIII. Comparing MHz alone is useless. Apple is shipping machines that are very, very fast. There are a lot of people out there who are very happy with the work that these fast Macs are enabling them to do. iDVD 2.0 does the MPEG-2 software encoding in the background while you set up your DVD's menus. This is powerful stuff.
> The current MS Word descended from Word for Windows, which was a rip-off of Ami
Microsoft Word 1.0 was a Macintosh application. Before the Mac, MS only made languages and MS-DOS. Word and Excel are Mac apps originally. All the Word for Windows, Ami, WordPerfect for Windows stuff came much later. EVERYBODY copied Word for Macintosh when they moved their apps from character-based to graphical on Microsoft operating systems, but Microsoft did it way earlier. I think the first version of Excel on a Microsoft operating system was actually for DOS, but it included a Windows runtime that made it look like it was running in Windows 2.x. Once Windows 3.0 took off, you can imagine how easy it was for Excel for DOS users to go to Excel for Windows on Windows 3.0. WordPerfect took years and years to go from 5.1 for DOS to 6.0 for DOS. In the meantime, Windows was all over the place, and Microsoft had a cheap, cheap competitive upgrade to Word for Windows and the full WYSIWYG editing (or something that looked like it) that people wanted from seeing the Mac do it for the past 6 or 7 years at the time.
Microsoft's dominance in office software is not about the features or the ease of use, it's just that office workers need to share their work with co-workers, and they are used to doing that with a haphazard system of sending MS Office documents of differing versions to each other by email. The documents sometimes carry viruses, and they still send them around. The documents often contain private information and previous revisions that are accessible to anyone with a plain text editor, and they still send them around.
... it would have to be open to the user plugging into a translation dictionary that wasn't made by Microsoft, it would have to open a Word document and then save it as a Word document, or open a WordPerfect document and save it as a WordPerfect document, (all this without every asking you to save a document in the app's OWN format) and it would also have to promote a new, common, open format so that we could do away with the past cruft. That would be software that actually does what Office users need. (Mac OS X may be providing the groundwork for this with the object-oriented Cocoa environment, Services, AppleEvents, QuickTime translation, and more.)
... very open, very compatible, easy to use, reasonably priced. Good security, no viruses (can you believe!), and respect for the user's humanity would also be a nice bonus. It is there for the taking. A key is to stop thinking "word processor", "spreadsheet", etc. and just think of a user sitting down to do some office work at a fast, stable machine that's always connected to the Internet. Those machines are available all over running BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, and some versions of Windows. What can you do to enable office people to get their work done better and easier than they can by starting up MS Office? What can you do to enable collaboration between users, regardless of what company developed their software?
If you create a better system for people to do office work and share it with their fellows, that is what will replace MS Office. It would most likely be HTML and XML based, and leverage the Internet and company network heavily. It would run on every platform, and be cheap. It will do all kinds of things for the user that Office is not doing, removing whole levels of complexity. It will have to be available as an open source BSD-style licensed library that EVERYBODY can use to make their app a part of the office workflow. Sort of like what MS Office would look like if you really made it take advantage of the Internet
A new office system to replace MS Office will have to look at the needs of Office users and satisfy them in a way that MS never can
> Why is MS Office so popular?
It has nothing to do with the actual application, and/or its ease-of-use. It has everything to do with the fact that MS Office file formats are THE method that people use to collaborate on documents over the Internet. They send these things around in emails like they weren't full of hidden, private information, the last ten versions of the document, and carrying viruses.
Imagine that your boss sends you a Word document, with the revisions tracking features on, and you open it up in OpenOffice, work on it, save it, send it back to him, and he opens it in Word and it is garbled. You and OpenOffice are going to be blamed. Much better to just suck it up and use Word from the start, then when something goes wrong with the document (something almost always does) you will be able to say, "hey, I'm using the newest version of Word, here, it must be somebody else's fault."
What's needed is PERFECT support for the newest Microsoft file formats, available as a BSD library or something, so that anybody could hook it up to their app and everybody would be able to read and write this common format FLAWLESSLY. Failing perfection, it will go nowhere. It is useless to anybody unless it is guaranteed to work just like the newest version of Office. That way a person can use it while knowing that they are not going to destroy a Word document that comes across their desk during their daily work by opening it in OpenOffice or whatever they prefer.
I like to write in BBEdit, but I have to paste the stuff into Word before I give it to a publisher, and then work in Word on any edits that were made, once the document comes back to me. Can't see a way out of that yet.