A PIII at 1.5GHz? You are an idiot. The 1.5GHz number is the chip that comes AFTER the iTanium, which is not even out yet, itself. They demoed a 1GHz PIII at a trade show, where IBM has been demoing 1GHz PowerPC chips for two years. In other words, that has nothing to do with what you can go out and buy.
There are miserably few 700MHz PIII's available now. So what? Bus speeds are almost always 100MHz, RAM is running around 100MHz. You're better off getting a 400 or 500 with twice the RAM, which is why Apple's desktops can take up to 2 gig of RAM.
Intel notebooks use heavily, heavily modified and stripped down versions of the desktop chips, and they even use a different scale in their published benchmarks that makes comparing desktop to notebook very difficult. (Desktops are rated in numbers while the notebook chips assign a 1 to the slowest chip and a 1.3, 1.4, etc. to the faster ones.) The original poster was saying the current G4 won't go in a notebook, and that's probably true, given that it was never designed to. Compare a mobile Intel chip and a G3 and a G4 and you'll see that the G4 is the odd one out.
oh my god you are completely ignorant and still posting. There is nothing as upgradable as a Mac. Their are two or three companies that pretty much only sell Mac CPU upgrades of every description.
My Mac is a blue G3 from early 1999 and I can unplug the 350MHz processor from its ZIF socket and put in any other G3 up to 800MHz whenever I want to. The 600's are around the corner and IBM says the 800's will be out early next year. Whatever the fastest G3 is at any time, it's always about $300.
I just put a new HD in the thing and it took me no time at all. The whole side of the machine unlatches to upgrade it, and the mobo is on the door and you can get to everything really easily, including the CPU. I copied the old drive to an external FireWire drive, put in the new drive, booted from a CD, ran Drive Setup (took a couple of minutes to partition and initialize the new drive) and then copied everything back from the FireWire drive and rebooted from the new drive. No need to reinstall the OS or screw with anything.
The thing will take a gig of RAM in four slots and has space for four hard drives and two removable drives (DVD and Zip in there). Three PCI slots (added one card) and USB (got seven devices on there now) and FireWire (four more). This thing is expandable out the wazoo. Plus, there's a G4 upgrade for it if I want to get that, and I could get a great price for it if I sold it because they retain their value so well. But I won't, because the thing is incredibly fast and beautiful and runs Mac OS X really well.
I also defy you to replace a mobo and CPU in a PC in 20 minutes. I defy you to even massage Windows into working reliably on the new mobo in 20 minutes (rebooting three or four times in a row and then once into Safe Mode usually gets all the new devices).
Man, you have to get a clue before you spout all this old, old FUD. Most Mac users have also used PC's, while the reverse is not true, so ask a Mac user about it before you make blanket statements.
> Yep, great innovation there... And look who's > using it. Apple, and... (Well, sony uses i.link, > witch is based on the same spec, and a few PC's > have IEEE.1394) And apple didn't develop > Firewire themselves, several companies did, > including Intel. Another product killed by > apple's braindead licensing terms... (Well, not > killed but severly slowed down)
You managed to be wrong on every point. I think you got all of your FireWire info from Slashdot posts.
Apple developed what became IEEE 1394. Their brand name for their implementation is "FireWire". If you want to use the name "FireWire" you pay them a licensing fee, because you benefit from their advertising. Sony's brand name for their implementation of 1394 is i.Link, but it's still the same tech. Sony just took out the power, so it uses a 4-pin instead of 6-pin connector. Not such a big deal because cables are really cheap, and you can get a 4-pin to 6-pin 10 meter cable for about $5. FireWire cables are all cheap and can be very long, one of the main advantages over SCSI, which uses parallel cables and connectors that are very expensive.
Besides being on all Macs (except the iBook) and on many Sony and Compaq PC's, 1394 is on EVERY digital camcorder and VCR, all of the hard disk based set-top boxes and on a range of peripherals including hard drives, CD-RW's, DAT's, etc.... anything that you'd normally use SCSI for. The 800mbs version is already ratified, and somebody has a wireless version now, but I can't remember who.
Intel's involvement is that they said they would support the standard, and then pulled out and offered the forever-forthcoming USB 2.
It's a truly great technology. I've had to screw around with USB devices before, unplugging and plugging once in a while, and of course you need a really good hub in order to add more devices. I've never had a problem with FireWire, and you just plug the next one into the last one, up to 63 on a "branch", no hub needed. FireWire devices just have two FireWire ports on the back and sometimes a power connector and that's it. It's a dream for audio/video people to plug-and-play so many devices and add storage so easily.
Oh, yeah, FireWire support is in the 2.4 Linux kernel. A year from now Slashdot will declare FireWire un-dead and truly amazing.
What's important is what API's you have. The BSD layer is there as well as the Classic, Carbon and Cocoa (updated OpenStep) API's. Mozilla for OS X is a Carbon UI, but the guts are BSD.
You also have Java 2 there. Lots of choices.
Classic apps (regular Mac OS =9 apps) don't run in a box or anything. They just don't look like the truly native apps (they look pretty much the same as they do on OS 9). The idea is that the system loads up the old Finder in the background at boot time or else waits until the first time you launch a Classic app, according to your preference.
Apple proposed some sort of standard for Linux/OS X binaries so that there'd be some interoperability. Don't know what the result was, though.
I don't think there will be an Athlon or Willemette portable. Those are big, hot, hungry chips. The G3 is closer in size to a 486 and is only warm to the touch after being on all day.
> People always compare macs to PC's running > windows. To me, the real comparison is macs to > SGI's. Both are visual/audio orientated OS's, > which Windows (and linux) are decidedly not.
But people generally run a lot of the same software on Windows and Macintosh, though. Before I switched to a blue G3 (when they first came out), I ran Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop, Flash, Director and Cubase on a Windows box. Now I run them all on my Mac (and they run shockingly better, I was really, really surprised). You can't run Cubase (and many other multimedia apps) on NT, though. Maybe Windows 2000, but not NT. And you don't run all these things on an SGI, of course.
Really, the closes thing to a CLI in Mac OS (pre-X) is AppleScript. Things that non-Mac users do with a CLI, a Mac user does with AppleScript.
You can record GUI actions to a script and then tweak the script, or just start from scratch if you like. Any kind of file management that is a kludge with a GUI can be scripted and run again and again in this way.
Of course, in OS X there is a traditional command line as well as AppleScript.
You won't have to reverse engineer ClearType (sub-pixel rendering) since the technology is very much in the public domain. Apple's patents on it (invented by Steve Wozniak) ran out just before Microsoft announced their implementation. The Apple II used this technique to make the display seem to have a higher resolution.
Apple's site is pretty big... if you go to their developer pages, you won't find the new tab bar either. What your saying is like saying that Hotmail should have the same layout as microsoft.com... some of apple.com is a consumer-oriented product, and some of it is not. The more consumer-oriented, the better looking. This is just a page about Linux, put up by one or two folks who like Linux.
> But you can't choose Linux and still, say, > play Quicktime movies. If Apple is so into > letting someone choose his/her OS, then are > they working on a Quicktime Player for Linux/ > PPC?
More to the point, why aren't YOU working on a QuickTime Player for Linux/PPC?
Re:Why shuld Apple do more than this ?
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> Look at Darwin, which essentially is > more of a pet project of Apple's core OS > developers (similar to MkLinux), then > something that is important to the core > of Apple.
Darwin is Mac OS X without the GUI. It's very important to Apple; hardly a pet project. By this time next year it will be on every machine they sell.
Re:LinuxPPC be acknowledged in other places by App
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> I doubt Jobs knows about such things, but they > sure are nice to see.
Steve doesn't use a Mac. He's been using NeXTStep/OpenStep/Mac OS X for over 10 years. Give the guy a break.
> No mention that MacOS X is built on top of > FreeBSD - "A Unix/Linux-like system"? > What is the point of this page if not to > cash in on the recent high profile success > of Linux?
The comparison is to explain to non-technical people that the guts of Mac OS X are like Unix and Linux... duh. How would you explain it to them? By explaining the networking and security model?
> They had a MacOS that ran on x86 before > Microsoft had Windows. Steve 'I'm a marketing > genius' Jobs of course killed the project. > Jobs will never allow MacOS on non-motorola/ > non-Mac platforms. He does not get and never > has gotten the concept of market share through > his head.
The only problems I see with your theory are:
1) Jobs left Apple in 1986. If they had an x86 Mac OS for him to kill at that point, that would be really weird considering that a Mac Plus and an 8088 IBM PC are pretty different creatures, and the two were fierce competitors in a personal computer market that included about ten other platforms (including the Apple II) and pretty much no processor headroom for emulation or other modern tricks.
2) Since Jobs came back to Apple, they haven't wavered in moving to standard after standard after standard, including regular VGA video connectors, no ROM on the mobo, USB, OpenGL, Unix/UFS/Mach/BSD, Firewire, AGP. Even PICT has been dropped in favor of PDF and QuickTime video is MPEG-4.
Still, I guess some people aren't going to be happy until every computer manufacturer is exactly like Compaq and all computers are x86-based and Linux compatible but don't come with an OS on them at all.
I think you can also get breakout in an easter egg on one version of Mac OS. I forget which, though. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Breakout while they were at Atari, didn't they?
Re:Oh no. if Apple adopts Crusoe, they'll kill it!
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How exactly is Firewire dead? Is anybody editing digital video without Firewire? Or is it that you figure the demand for editing digital video may diminish in the future somehow?
Between Apple, Sony and Compaq, Firewire is on about 20% of personal computers shipping today. It's on 100% of the digital camcorders ever made, it's on TiVo's set-top boxes, and there are numerous manufacturers of hard drives, DAT's, CD-RW's, etc. and even printers.
I can't find a single competing technology - let alone another open one. What counts for "dead"? Not having 90% of the x86 market? Not being implemented on Linux? (It's coming in the 2.4 kernel.)
Why am I responding to an idiot's flamebait?
Re:MacOS hardware and software problems and though
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I don't think the latest generation of Apple machines (slot-loading iMac, iBook and PowerMac G4) have any ROM on the mobo at all. Might even be more machines than that. Mac OS X definitely doesn't use this system, though.
> current display-hardware/resolution isn't > appropriate for such kind of icons.
There are lots of reasons the Mac OS X icons can scale between 16 and 128 pixels square:
The whole GUI can be resolution independent. For example, say your father is running his iMac at 640x480 because his eyes aren't great and he needs the 32x32 icons to be an inch tall. Under Mac OS X he could switch to 1024x768 and set the icon size preference so that the icons are an inch tall, which might be 64x64. Now the display is operating at a higher resolution and graphic elements and text are less jagged, but he can still see his icons. If you think of the above situation and replace his CRT with an LCD, it becomes even more important to be resolution-independent, because LCD screens really only operate well at one resolution setting... it's better to leave them on that setting and let the OS adjust the sizes of things.
Displays are getting bigger and higher-res all the time, so if you're starting a new OS, going to all the trouble of changing a lot of things, then why build in limitations by using low-res icons? Apple's biggest display is a 22 inch, 1600x1024 LCD flat panel. 32x32 icons on that thing are pretty small. Five years from now, they may have a display that's twice as big and four times the resolution.
When you save a Photoshop document on a Mac, the icon for the document is a little thumbnail of the image in the document; a preview. There are numerous utilities for changing the icons on individual images, QuickTime movies, Flash movies, etc. on Mac OS to thumbnails of their content (icons can be kept with a file on Mac OS). Currently, they can only be 32x32, which is okay, but if I could set a folder full of images to 128x128 that would be cooler. (I would still use smaller icons elsewhere of course.) The screenshots of OS X show image files with thumbnails and little icon badges superimposed to show the document is a QuickTime movie or whatever. If you compare a folder full of identical QuickTime icons with a folder full of thumbnails, it's really amazing how much time and trouble that saves you.
When you minimize a window to the dock on Mac OS X, supposedly (it's been rumored) the icon you see for the window is actually the window itself, scaled to 128 square or less. Processes keep running, so the dock itself could be a way to keep track of background tasks by monitoring their mini-windows. 128 square is big enough that you can get some useful info from that window about what it's doing.
When you copy and paste images in Mac OS 8/9, you're copying PICT images. With Mac OS X, you're copying PDF, so every application has the ability to output to PDF. This allows you have better inter-application communication between Mac apps, or between your Mac apps and your colleague's Windows machine when he receives a PDF from you.
Also, what's been released so far is a demo of a product that's going to ship in the summer and be properly released in January 2001, so the emphasis was on flash, not developer-oriented substance.
I read somewhere that Apple didn't license their PDF implementation from Adobe, but instead built it from scratch so that they could own it, being that it's such a fundamental part of the OS.
I think the specs and the standards are out there, but you'd have to build a free implementation from scratch as well.
> Is this really a good thing? Over at Web > Pages That Suck they call it Mystery Meat > Navigation
What makes sense on a Web page where almost everybody will be first time, transient users isn't necessarily the same for an OS GUI, and vice versa. You don't necessarily want to stare at + - etc. in every window you use, day in and day out. On a Web page, you're most often hiding the symbols from people who don't know what the buttons mean, because they just showed up from a million other Web sites with different navigation. On an OS, you're usually hiding them from people who do know what they mean because they've used the system before, and revealing them for the benefit of new users.
A cool feature of these hover buttons in Aqua is that when you hover over the widgets on a background window, the buttons sort of come forward on their own, so that you can close a background window without bringing it forward. That alone is worth using the rollover effect for.
The mix of "pro" and "consumer" goals doesn't scare me at all. I love that Mac OS X looks great and will probably be very easy for my non-geek friends to learn, and I make digital media; so I love that Mac OS X will be an amazing platform for viewing content.
If your needs put you in the "pro" camp, well if you can't find something to love in Cocoa, BSD, Mach, AppleScript, Quartz, QuickTime Media Layer, OpenGL, yada, yada, yada, then what do you want? This thing will run on HFS+ (with Unicode and 256 character filenames) or UFS. It will run Photoshop and it will run command line Unix apps. All of the older Yellow Box/OpenStep/Rhapsody/Mac OS X Server apps will be easily ported. It's a complete Unix with a proper structure for mounting volumes and a Unix command line (very new to the mainstream home PC). It will be easy for the power user to make OS X his or her own. You don't want or need Apple's help or permission. I'm sure glad they're making it easy for our grandmothers to get into Unix, though.
Apple acts as a guru to the newbie and the non-geek, but there has always been plenty of stuff to hack at and geek out on, and now there's going to be plenty more.
> which in turn would give Apple favourable > credentials in selling QuickTime server > solutions... which is where the money really > is.
Except for the fact that their QuickTime server solution is free and open source and runs on free and open source Linux or free and open source Darwin (Mac OS X without the GUI). Also, Apple's preferred server software is Apache, which is... free and open source.
> That may be true for Quicktime running > in the classic environment but is it true > for Cocoa or even Carbon? What is Cocoa > if not a Unix API?
QuickTime for OS X is Carbon, so it's basically still a "Mac app". I don't think running it on OS X has any effect on whether it might appear on BSD or Linux later on. Comparing to the move Apple made from 68k to PPC, Classic is like running a 68k app in emulation, Carbon is like recompiling your app for PPC. Cocoa is a whole other thing of course.
I'm not really sure why Linux users seem to be so down on Apple, although I guess there are a lot of users that see all non-Linux companies as the enemy. Installing and using Linux on a Mac is made easier by the fact that you can format drives with the Linux filesystem from within Mac OS (using Apple's Drive Setup) and you can choose your boot drive by holding down Option while you boot.
Apple's business is making easy-to-use computers for non-geeks, but they don't deliberately stand in the way of geeks doing what they do, and in some cases make it easier.
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A PIII at 1.5GHz? You are an idiot. The 1.5GHz number is the chip that comes AFTER the iTanium, which is not even out yet, itself. They demoed a 1GHz PIII at a trade show, where IBM has been demoing 1GHz PowerPC chips for two years. In other words, that has nothing to do with what you can go out and buy.
There are miserably few 700MHz PIII's available now. So what? Bus speeds are almost always 100MHz, RAM is running around 100MHz. You're better off getting a 400 or 500 with twice the RAM, which is why Apple's desktops can take up to 2 gig of RAM.
Intel notebooks use heavily, heavily modified and stripped down versions of the desktop chips, and they even use a different scale in their published benchmarks that makes comparing desktop to notebook very difficult. (Desktops are rated in numbers while the notebook chips assign a 1 to the slowest chip and a 1.3, 1.4, etc. to the faster ones.) The original poster was saying the current G4 won't go in a notebook, and that's probably true, given that it was never designed to. Compare a mobile Intel chip and a G3 and a G4 and you'll see that the G4 is the odd one out.
oh my god you are completely ignorant and still posting. There is nothing as upgradable as a Mac. Their are two or three companies that pretty much only sell Mac CPU upgrades of every description.
My Mac is a blue G3 from early 1999 and I can unplug the 350MHz processor from its ZIF socket and put in any other G3 up to 800MHz whenever I want to. The 600's are around the corner and IBM says the 800's will be out early next year. Whatever the fastest G3 is at any time, it's always about $300.
I just put a new HD in the thing and it took me no time at all. The whole side of the machine unlatches to upgrade it, and the mobo is on the door and you can get to everything really easily, including the CPU. I copied the old drive to an external FireWire drive, put in the new drive, booted from a CD, ran Drive Setup (took a couple of minutes to partition and initialize the new drive) and then copied everything back from the FireWire drive and rebooted from the new drive. No need to reinstall the OS or screw with anything.
The thing will take a gig of RAM in four slots and has space for four hard drives and two removable drives (DVD and Zip in there). Three PCI slots (added one card) and USB (got seven devices on there now) and FireWire (four more). This thing is expandable out the wazoo. Plus, there's a G4 upgrade for it if I want to get that, and I could get a great price for it if I sold it because they retain their value so well. But I won't, because the thing is incredibly fast and beautiful and runs Mac OS X really well.
I also defy you to replace a mobo and CPU in a PC in 20 minutes. I defy you to even massage Windows into working reliably on the new mobo in 20 minutes (rebooting three or four times in a row and then once into Safe Mode usually gets all the new devices).
Man, you have to get a clue before you spout all this old, old FUD. Most Mac users have also used PC's, while the reverse is not true, so ask a Mac user about it before you make blanket statements.
> Yep, great innovation there... And look who's
... anything that you'd normally use SCSI for. The 800mbs version is already ratified, and somebody has a wireless version now, but I can't remember who.
> using it. Apple, and... (Well, sony uses i.link,
> witch is based on the same spec, and a few PC's
> have IEEE.1394) And apple didn't develop
> Firewire themselves, several companies did,
> including Intel. Another product killed by
> apple's braindead licensing terms... (Well, not
> killed but severly slowed down)
You managed to be wrong on every point. I think you got all of your FireWire info from Slashdot posts.
Apple developed what became IEEE 1394. Their brand name for their implementation is "FireWire". If you want to use the name "FireWire" you pay them a licensing fee, because you benefit from their advertising. Sony's brand name for their implementation of 1394 is i.Link, but it's still the same tech. Sony just took out the power, so it uses a 4-pin instead of 6-pin connector. Not such a big deal because cables are really cheap, and you can get a 4-pin to 6-pin 10 meter cable for about $5. FireWire cables are all cheap and can be very long, one of the main advantages over SCSI, which uses parallel cables and connectors that are very expensive.
Besides being on all Macs (except the iBook) and on many Sony and Compaq PC's, 1394 is on EVERY digital camcorder and VCR, all of the hard disk based set-top boxes and on a range of peripherals including hard drives, CD-RW's, DAT's, etc.
Intel's involvement is that they said they would support the standard, and then pulled out and offered the forever-forthcoming USB 2.
It's a truly great technology. I've had to screw around with USB devices before, unplugging and plugging once in a while, and of course you need a really good hub in order to add more devices. I've never had a problem with FireWire, and you just plug the next one into the last one, up to 63 on a "branch", no hub needed. FireWire devices just have two FireWire ports on the back and sometimes a power connector and that's it. It's a dream for audio/video people to plug-and-play so many devices and add storage so easily.
Oh, yeah, FireWire support is in the 2.4 Linux kernel. A year from now Slashdot will declare FireWire un-dead and truly amazing.
What's important is what API's you have. The BSD layer is there as well as the Classic, Carbon and Cocoa (updated OpenStep) API's. Mozilla for OS X is a Carbon UI, but the guts are BSD.
You also have Java 2 there. Lots of choices.
Classic apps (regular Mac OS =9 apps) don't run in a box or anything. They just don't look like the truly native apps (they look pretty much the same as they do on OS 9). The idea is that the system loads up the old Finder in the background at boot time or else waits until the first time you launch a Classic app, according to your preference.
Apple proposed some sort of standard for Linux/OS X binaries so that there'd be some interoperability. Don't know what the result was, though.
I don't think there will be an Athlon or Willemette portable. Those are big, hot, hungry chips. The G3 is closer in size to a 486 and is only warm to the touch after being on all day.
> People always compare macs to PC's running
> windows. To me, the real comparison is macs to
> SGI's. Both are visual/audio orientated OS's,
> which Windows (and linux) are decidedly not.
But people generally run a lot of the same software on Windows and Macintosh, though. Before I switched to a blue G3 (when they first came out), I ran Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop, Flash, Director and Cubase on a Windows box. Now I run them all on my Mac (and they run shockingly better, I was really, really surprised). You can't run Cubase (and many other multimedia apps) on NT, though. Maybe Windows 2000, but not NT. And you don't run all these things on an SGI, of course.
Really, the closes thing to a CLI in Mac OS (pre-X) is AppleScript. Things that non-Mac users do with a CLI, a Mac user does with AppleScript.
You can record GUI actions to a script and then tweak the script, or just start from scratch if you like. Any kind of file management that is a kludge with a GUI can be scripted and run again and again in this way.
Of course, in OS X there is a traditional command line as well as AppleScript.
You won't have to reverse engineer ClearType (sub-pixel rendering) since the technology is very much in the public domain. Apple's patents on it (invented by Steve Wozniak) ran out just before Microsoft announced their implementation. The Apple II used this technique to make the display seem to have a higher resolution.
Apple's site is pretty big ... if you go to their developer pages, you won't find the new tab bar either. What your saying is like saying that Hotmail should have the same layout as microsoft.com ... some of apple.com is a consumer-oriented product, and some of it is not. The more consumer-oriented, the better looking. This is just a page about Linux, put up by one or two folks who like Linux.
> But you can't choose Linux and still, say,
> play Quicktime movies. If Apple is so into
> letting someone choose his/her OS, then are
> they working on a Quicktime Player for Linux/
> PPC?
More to the point, why aren't YOU working on a QuickTime Player for Linux/PPC?
> Look at Darwin, which essentially is
> more of a pet project of Apple's core OS
> developers (similar to MkLinux), then
> something that is important to the core
> of Apple.
Darwin is Mac OS X without the GUI. It's very important to Apple; hardly a pet project. By this time next year it will be on every machine they sell.
> I doubt Jobs knows about such things, but they
> sure are nice to see.
Steve doesn't use a Mac. He's been using NeXTStep/OpenStep/Mac OS X for over 10 years. Give the guy a break.
> No mention that MacOS X is built on top of
... duh. How would you explain it to them? By explaining the networking and security model?
> FreeBSD - "A Unix/Linux-like system"?
> What is the point of this page if not to
> cash in on the recent high profile success
> of Linux?
The comparison is to explain to non-technical people that the guts of Mac OS X are like Unix and Linux
> They had a MacOS that ran on x86 before
> Microsoft had Windows. Steve 'I'm a marketing
> genius' Jobs of course killed the project.
> Jobs will never allow MacOS on non-motorola/
> non-Mac platforms. He does not get and never
> has gotten the concept of market share through
> his head.
The only problems I see with your theory are:
1) Jobs left Apple in 1986. If they had an x86 Mac OS for him to kill at that point, that would be really weird considering that a Mac Plus and an 8088 IBM PC are pretty different creatures, and the two were fierce competitors in a personal computer market that included about ten other platforms (including the Apple II) and pretty much no processor headroom for emulation or other modern tricks.
2) Since Jobs came back to Apple, they haven't wavered in moving to standard after standard after standard, including regular VGA video connectors, no ROM on the mobo, USB, OpenGL, Unix/UFS/Mach/BSD, Firewire, AGP. Even PICT has been dropped in favor of PDF and QuickTime video is MPEG-4.
Still, I guess some people aren't going to be happy until every computer manufacturer is exactly like Compaq and all computers are x86-based and Linux compatible but don't come with an OS on them at all.
I think you can also get breakout in an easter egg on one version of Mac OS. I forget which, though. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Breakout while they were at Atari, didn't they?
How exactly is Firewire dead? Is anybody editing digital video without Firewire? Or is it that you figure the demand for editing digital video may diminish in the future somehow?
Between Apple, Sony and Compaq, Firewire is on about 20% of personal computers shipping today. It's on 100% of the digital camcorders ever made, it's on TiVo's set-top boxes, and there are numerous manufacturers of hard drives, DAT's, CD-RW's, etc. and even printers.
I can't find a single competing technology - let alone another open one. What counts for "dead"? Not having 90% of the x86 market? Not being implemented on Linux? (It's coming in the 2.4 kernel.)
Why am I responding to an idiot's flamebait?
I don't think the latest generation of Apple machines (slot-loading iMac, iBook and PowerMac G4) have any ROM on the mobo at all. Might even be more machines than that. Mac OS X definitely doesn't use this system, though.
> current display-hardware/resolution isn't
... it's better to leave them on that setting and let the OS adjust the sizes of things.
> appropriate for such kind of icons.
There are lots of reasons the Mac OS X icons can scale between 16 and 128 pixels square:
The whole GUI can be resolution independent. For example, say your father is running his iMac at 640x480 because his eyes aren't great and he needs the 32x32 icons to be an inch tall. Under Mac OS X he could switch to 1024x768 and set the icon size preference so that the icons are an inch tall, which might be 64x64. Now the display is operating at a higher resolution and graphic elements and text are less jagged, but he can still see his icons. If you think of the above situation and replace his CRT with an LCD, it becomes even more important to be resolution-independent, because LCD screens really only operate well at one resolution setting
Displays are getting bigger and higher-res all the time, so if you're starting a new OS, going to all the trouble of changing a lot of things, then why build in limitations by using low-res icons? Apple's biggest display is a 22 inch, 1600x1024 LCD flat panel. 32x32 icons on that thing are pretty small. Five years from now, they may have a display that's twice as big and four times the resolution.
When you save a Photoshop document on a Mac, the icon for the document is a little thumbnail of the image in the document; a preview. There are numerous utilities for changing the icons on individual images, QuickTime movies, Flash movies, etc. on Mac OS to thumbnails of their content (icons can be kept with a file on Mac OS). Currently, they can only be 32x32, which is okay, but if I could set a folder full of images to 128x128 that would be cooler. (I would still use smaller icons elsewhere of course.) The screenshots of OS X show image files with thumbnails and little icon badges superimposed to show the document is a QuickTime movie or whatever. If you compare a folder full of identical QuickTime icons with a folder full of thumbnails, it's really amazing how much time and trouble that saves you.
When you minimize a window to the dock on Mac OS X, supposedly (it's been rumored) the icon you see for the window is actually the window itself, scaled to 128 square or less. Processes keep running, so the dock itself could be a way to keep track of background tasks by monitoring their mini-windows. 128 square is big enough that you can get some useful info from that window about what it's doing.
When you copy and paste images in Mac OS 8/9, you're copying PICT images. With Mac OS X, you're copying PDF, so every application has the ability to output to PDF. This allows you have better inter-application communication between Mac apps, or between your Mac apps and your colleague's Windows machine when he receives a PDF from you.
Also, what's been released so far is a demo of a product that's going to ship in the summer and be properly released in January 2001, so the emphasis was on flash, not developer-oriented substance.
I read somewhere that Apple didn't license their PDF implementation from Adobe, but instead built it from scratch so that they could own it, being that it's such a fundamental part of the OS.
I think the specs and the standards are out there, but you'd have to build a free implementation from scratch as well.
> Is this really a good thing? Over at Web
> Pages That Suck they call it Mystery Meat
> Navigation
What makes sense on a Web page where almost everybody will be first time, transient users isn't necessarily the same for an OS GUI, and vice versa. You don't necessarily want to stare at + - etc. in every window you use, day in and day out. On a Web page, you're most often hiding the symbols from people who don't know what the buttons mean, because they just showed up from a million other Web sites with different navigation. On an OS, you're usually hiding them from people who do know what they mean because they've used the system before, and revealing them for the benefit of new users.
A cool feature of these hover buttons in Aqua is that when you hover over the widgets on a background window, the buttons sort of come forward on their own, so that you can close a background window without bringing it forward. That alone is worth using the rollover effect for.
The mix of "pro" and "consumer" goals doesn't scare me at all. I love that Mac OS X looks great and will probably be very easy for my non-geek friends to learn, and I make digital media; so I love that Mac OS X will be an amazing platform for viewing content.
If your needs put you in the "pro" camp, well if you can't find something to love in Cocoa, BSD, Mach, AppleScript, Quartz, QuickTime Media Layer, OpenGL, yada, yada, yada, then what do you want? This thing will run on HFS+ (with Unicode and 256 character filenames) or UFS. It will run Photoshop and it will run command line Unix apps. All of the older Yellow Box/OpenStep/Rhapsody/Mac OS X Server apps will be easily ported. It's a complete Unix with a proper structure for mounting volumes and a Unix command line (very new to the mainstream home PC). It will be easy for the power user to make OS X his or her own. You don't want or need Apple's help or permission. I'm sure glad they're making it easy for our grandmothers to get into Unix, though.
Apple acts as a guru to the newbie and the non-geek, but there has always been plenty of stuff to hack at and geek out on, and now there's going to be plenty more.
> which in turn would give Apple favourable
... free and open source.
> credentials in selling QuickTime server
> solutions... which is where the money really
> is.
Except for the fact that their QuickTime server solution is free and open source and runs on free and open source Linux or free and open source Darwin (Mac OS X without the GUI). Also, Apple's preferred server software is Apache, which is
> That may be true for Quicktime running
> in the classic environment but is it true
> for Cocoa or even Carbon? What is Cocoa
> if not a Unix API?
QuickTime for OS X is Carbon, so it's basically still a "Mac app". I don't think running it on OS X has any effect on whether it might appear on BSD or Linux later on. Comparing to the move Apple made from 68k to PPC, Classic is like running a 68k app in emulation, Carbon is like recompiling your app for PPC. Cocoa is a whole other thing of course.
I'm not really sure why Linux users seem to be so down on Apple, although I guess there are a lot of users that see all non-Linux companies as the enemy. Installing and using Linux on a Mac is made easier by the fact that you can format drives with the Linux filesystem from within Mac OS (using Apple's Drive Setup) and you can choose your boot drive by holding down Option while you boot.
Apple's business is making easy-to-use computers for non-geeks, but they don't deliberately stand in the way of geeks doing what they do, and in some cases make it easier.