> I wanna be able to firebug, addblock and a host of other stuff that, if not available in chrome while most of google works fine with ff, then its useless to me.
The WebKit team has an equivalent (in some ways better, in some ways inferior â" I prefer it overall) to firebug built into the browser. I don't know if Google intends to pull some of that open source code over to Chrome, but I don't see why not since they already have a fairly advanced task management window.
I can't see Google doing an adblock feature, it would probably trigger a class-action lawsuit, but *every* browser has some kind of built in or third party adblock solution, so it's only a matter of time â"Âhow long depends on how many people are using chrome.
> I thought it pictures quite well the fact that Chrome will have a huge way to go against firefox if they cannot take some of firefoxes most popular extensions features and offer them in chrome.
I agree with you that google doesn't seem to care as much about extensions as the mozilla team, but do they need to? Why should google make another firefox? Better to put their own development muscle behind firefox.
I see Chrome as a stable, secure and simple browser (like IE and Safari) that is suitable to be pre-installed by PC manufacturers, Linux distros, schools and so on. For that, Chrome is looking very promising.
When you load one of my webpages, it usually reads about 300 different tiny files to process the request.
A drive like the one in TFA (if used for a webserver) is likely to be reading a few thousand different files every second, each one is on a different location on the disk and no way to determine which file will be read next.
SSD drives have shown to be multiple orders of magnitude faster than the most advanced hard drives available today for web servers.
Of course it does! And since it's faster, it handles large web apps better than V8.
It's important to remember that SquirrelFish Extreme/V8 are javascript *language* engines, they are not javascript api or dom implementations. The actual behavior and features of both Safari and Chrome are identical, since they're using the same code in that area.
It's the engine for translating ascii text into raw cpu instructions that varies between Safari and Chrome, and if you take the latest beta versions of those two browsers, then WebKit is the faster one.
"possibly not even reached 2 or 3 million yet"? Bulshit
Just this week, apple announced they sold 6.8 million iphones in the last three months, bringing them over their 10 million unit goal a full quarter earlier than they projected on the day they announced the iPhone.
Apparently by default it will only run apps that have been digitally signed by the marketplace system (which requires the developer to prove that they have a real address/phone number).
But there is a setting in one of the config screens to disable that protection, so you can run any executable. Once you tick that box, you should be able to go to any website and download apps like you can on a PC.
What the Australian ISP's are saying is that ISP's are looking into charging content providers *because* their "one price for all customers" business model is flawed.
In Australia, you pay for your 40GB/month at 8Mbit/s. If you want more downloads, you pay more. If you want faster speeds, you pay more. It's simple.
ISP's here aren't complaining about users who have bit torrent downloading all day over their 24Mbit/s connection, because that user is paying them enough money to cover the cost. And as a result, ISP customers in australia know that they will get the full speed they're paying for, and they can self monitor how much usage they're going through by logging into the ISP's website, and even buy more if they need it this month "shit! I downloaded 25GB of movies on iTunes yesterday and there's still 3 weeks left in this month! I can either be shaped to 64Kbit or pay a once off fee of $10 for a few extra GB for this month"
I'm a programmer at a company that has an SEO department, and our SEO is nothing like what you're describing.
At our company, SEO means:
1) Making sure there aren't any mistakes in the code, for example images with missing alt/title tags or homepages that have less text than other pages on the website (which means search engines probably won't link to your homepage). We call these mistakes, because the guys writing the html are supposed to make sure these things are covered in any website, but sometimes we miss an alt tag, or a client insists on a splash page. Also we often do SEO for websites built by other web developers.
2) Installing tools like google analytics, to track how people go through the website: it's not how much traffic you get to a website that matters, it's how many sales/leads/bookings you make. With the right tools, you can find out how many people who click the "checkout" button never fill in the form on the next page, which might be caused by anything from too many fields, to confusing instructions/privacy policy, to a submit button that isn't clearly visible, to a javascript bug that breaks the website for 10% of visitors. Using tools like google analytics, you can often increase the profit a website makes, without increasing traffic.
3) Managing adwords campaigns. Have you ever used adwords? In theory anyone can do it, but in reality it's an extremely complex system and if you know what you're doing you can get better results for the same budget. Our SEO guy spends a lot of his time just tweaking people's ads to figure out what keywords are effective. And he's not trying to get more visitors, he's trying to get more sales/bookings/leads. Which means when he measures the effectiveness of an ad he's looking at how many *sales* came from the ad. "The BEST hotel in Sydney!" will get more clicks than "Cosy & Affordable hotel in Sydney", but (assuming your hotel is cosy and affordable) the"cosy" ad will lead to more sales. Everyone who clicks the "best" ad will have a different idea of what "best" means, and a huge percentage of your visitors will just hit the back button after seeing the photos on your website.
Ads are not evil, they help fund great web services.
These days, a good SEO company is about improving the effectiveness of your website and marketing, not spamming the web to find new ways to bring in customers.
Are you on crack? You can't install custom software on a mac? Bullshit.
or use an ipod for data storage out of the box.
Shuttleworth isn't talking about ipods, he's talking about mac os x. Same company, but a different product, different industry and different business model from ipods.
What is wrong with wifi? You don't need a router to communicate between your laptop and an iPhone, it only takes a few seconds to set up an ad-hoc network on OS X, I assume windows is similar.
I've only worked a little with WebKit (the open source part of safari), but from what I've seen I'd be surprised if it forces the 'shell' to do any network-related code.
WebKit almost certainly does the actual download, the shell would only be responsible or displaying a progress bar to the user.
It would only take a few hours to make a 'usable' browser on top of WebKit, and a couple of weeks to make a very good one. All the complicated stuff is open source.
Converting the registry to xml is not the same as plist/bplist. A binary property list is exactly the same file format as the xml property list, they are completely interchangeable. Binary property lists are only used when disk space is a concern, a 10MB binary property list is likely to be 80MB in XML.
They are exactly the same format, and you use the same tools to edit them (property list editor in the gui, the 'defaults' command from the cli, and the property list serialization api's from within a program).
Do you know anything about OS X? Virtually all configuration files are xml "property lists", except for the occasional binary property list (which are much more efficient for large files and can be converted to/from xml without a single command).
The gui is just as separated from the rest of the OS as it is on linux. All of the flashy gui features, like time machine, spotlight, etc are just primitive overlays on top of command line tools, and the command line tools will almost always let you do a ton more than the gui allows.
Except that it doesn't. I use Linux mostly, but I work in a physics research lab that uses exclusively* macs. We still use several G4s with OS X 10.3.9. I can't install network printers on half of them, for no apparent reason. I can't mount them using firewire on newer macs. No error messages, it just stalls.
Ask around on forums, I'm sure it can be worked out. As someone who uses linux, surely you don't have a problem with doing research to fix something?
We got two new iMacs last month. One of them turns off randomly.
Warranty?
Both of them crash randomly when we use our analysis software (a two-year old powerpc program).
Just a thought, maybe that's because your analysis software is shit?
The OS is so slow it's nearly unresponsive (to me, the people that only use macs don't have a problem with it).
Slower than many linux distros is probably true, but "unresponsive"? You're either running crap software or don't have beefy enough hardware to run it.
On a related note, the iMac makes no hard drive noise, so I can never tell if it is just slow in responding, or if I didn't double click fast enough.
You're talking bullshit. When you double click something, there is an animation that you can't possibly miss. Unless you're talking about third party software, which must be pretty crap if it gives no feedback when you do something. And the default double click speed is very slow, so I find it hard to believe that you sometimes "don't double click fast enough" but you can change it in system prefs.
File sharing is a pain to figure out.
You have a list of servers that are auto-discovered, you click on one of them, the files come up. Alternatively you run the 'connect to server' menu item and type in the server's address. To become a filesharing host you tick a box named "personal file sharing" in the "sharing" section of system prefs, then drag files into your public folder. That's hard to figure out? wtf?
I can't easily change my icon theme without buying third party software.
The most popular software for doing this used to be an open source app (which still works perfectly), but virtually all icon/theme artists use proprietary file formats now... I agree, it sucks.:(
Don't get me started on the usability of the single menu bar.
OK, I won't. Personally I only use the menubar once or twice a day (i use the keyboard for everything on mac and windows, and none of the linux machines I use regularly have X installed), so I couldn't tell you which menubar system I prefer. I wish I could turn them off altogether.
I can't find any easy way to uninstall Garage Band, et al, so that the automatic updater stops bothering me about them.
Right click on garage band, select move to trash. Done, it's uninstalled.
I can't find a way to move windows between desktops ("spaces"), and all new windows seem to open on the same desktop that the program originally opened on, making multiple desktops virtually useless.
Drag a window to the edge of the screen, it will move to the next space. Or if you use hotkeys to change spaces, "grab" the window (start dragging it) and hit your hotkey, it will move to the space. Or if you use the expose-show-spaces-thing, open it up and drag a window to another space. In system prefs you can assign programs to specific spaces.
I need third party software to have an automatically changing desktop wallpaper.
Define "automatically changing". Depending on what you mean, this may be built in.
Our IT guy told me that to take apart the iMac you have to buy suction cups from Apple to pull the glass off before you can unscrew the case.
I'll admit I've only ever replaced ram, which takes seconds (most of the time spent waiting for it to shutdown/start up) and doesn't involve anything
I run windows almost daily in Virtual PC (Internet Explorer 6/7/8 test beds) on one of the last PPC PowerMacs apple made, which is one of the fastest PPC machines you can buy. Believe me, emulating an x86 chip on a PPC chip is dog slow no matter how fast your machine is.
It works, and it works well. But if you're going to use it more than 10 or 20 minutes a day, you're better off buying a second machine (with a KVM or Synergy) if you want to run windows and OS X but don't have an Intel mac.
If that was all there was to it, why wouldn't they have stopped using Windows already?
The other change is that Mac OS X can now run windows in a VM almost as if there was no VM with parallels or vmware. This drastically reduces the risk to move to another platform, though it means a rise in costs until they can drop windows altogether.
when it comes to doing real work, I find life is much more simple on a linux box. Whenever I use my laptops for real work, it's via forwarded X sessions over SSH.
I couldn't disagree more. If your work is similar to mine, then I think the Mac OS X Terminal (especially v2.0) is much better than any linux terminal I've ever used. It has proper copy/paste, proper tabs, drag/drop support, fairly good mouse integration, can store the password to an encrypted ssh-key in the keychain (so you can have encrypted private keys without ever typing in your password), is incredibly customizable... etc etc
I'm not aware of any other console that even comes close to the built in OS X terminal for features and "workflow".
I did do some investigating before writing my post. According to wikipedia, FireFox 3 is the first release of FireFox to pass Acid 2, and unless I'm miss-reading the title of TFA, FireFox 3 is still in development.
There's nothing "long" about the dev cycle of WebKit, it's in stable development with no big features being worked on and no architectural changes in the works. Just bug fixes, performance improvements and gradual standards compliance additions. Apple will release Safari 3.1.1 or 3.2 whenever they decide there's enough improvements to be worth the hassle of making PR announcements. When they release Safari 4.0, it will almost certainly ship with Mac OS X 10.6, and there will likely be a simultaneous minor version update to Safari 3, bringing it to the same WebKit release as Safari 4.
WeKit is just the rendering engine, it's not tightly coupled with Safari the way Gecko/Firefox is. Major safari updates are always about new GUI features (RSS in 2.0, "webclip" in 3.0, etc). Better standards compliance/performance is a sideline feature for Safari, that's for the WebKit team to work on.
Firefox and IE only just now pass Acid 2 in their *development releases*. They're several months, if not years behind WebKit and Opera.
I believe it's different on linux/windows, but on Mac OS X the Objective-C compiler actually extends on top of C++, which has the advantage of giving us C++ style comments (I'm serious, it's the only C++ feature I use often). And, it means you can embed C++ code inside your Objective-C classes and import C++ files into your project, which is mostly used for performance optimisations (C++ does more at compile-time, so calling methods on objects is a tiny bit faster) and cross-platform code.
So, your typical Obj-C mac programmer will know at least some C++ code, and most good ones will be an expert in C++.
If you compare gmail's servers to the sum of all the clients connected to it, then yes: the server could be considered "lightweight". And all of the user interaction is happening on the client, which could be considered "distributing the workload".
Tell me, what exactly do you achieve by having A/V software? The only advantage I can see is to avoid restoring from a recent backup.
You spend hours researching which one to install, then buy the software (assuming it's not free), install it, configure it, keep it upgraded, put up with the speed issues it will bring as well as all of the false positives that any good security software will cause.
And for what? So that if you are attacked, which has pretty much never actually happened to anyone on a mac in the last 8 years, there will be a *chance* that you might be protected by your A/V product?
Just buy an external drive and use apple's Time Machine (or a third party equivalent). Restoring from good backup software takes an hour or so at tops. Much much less time than you will spend maintaining your A/V product. From a productivity perspective, I would need to be infected at least twice in a 12 month period before I'd even consider installing A/V software on my mac. Anything less and it would be a waste of time. Time I could spend working for paying clients (or discussing random crap on/.).
Show me a case where A/V actually had some benefit, and then I'll take you seriously. Until then, sorry: you don't have a leg to stand on.
It doesn't take much for this--it appears to be the default setting (just looked on a very new Mac Mini.)
If an application contains a . in it's filename (except in the.app), then the show/hide extension setting is always disabled for that file. Try it yourself, rename any app on your system to ".doc", it will suddenly appear as ".doc.app". In addition, if you download any application the first time you run it you are prompted with a "this application was downloaded from the internet and you should be careful" message. If that doesn't trigger alarm bells, nothing will.
You're correct that people are in danger without typing any password. A spam mailer or key-logger does not need admin privileges to run on OS X. It does need admin to run while you're not logged in though, and also if it wants to hide effectively, which it will need to do if you decide to install an anti-virus after you've been infected (or, if Apple releases a security update to detect the malware).
OS X is not perfect, but the underlying architecture is structured to make anything but the most trivial malware quite difficult. Any well educated and cautious user is safe without any anti-virus. Everyone else is not safe, but until there is evidence of an actual threat, I will continue to recommend to friends and family that they should not install any anti-virus. I can always tell them in 6 months that they should install something.
Instead I tell people to be careful about what they install and to have a good backup system.
Finally, I'm not convinced of the benefits of a flash harddrive. If they are saving weight, that's nice (although I'm not sure they are lighter). However, it's a pretty small drive, and it is a myth that flash drives are faster. Flash drives have better random access, but slower sequential access, and most accesses are sequential. Things are going to seem *slower* moving to flash, not faster.
From what I can see, the only disadvantage to an SSD/flash card is the price. Typical flash cards are slow and have very short lives, however I've seen articles on Toshiba's 64Gb and 128GB flash cards (the 64 GB one is in the mac book air, and perhaps this lenovo as well) that imply sequential read speeds of 100MB/sec and life times as long as 50 years under typical use.
Even if those numbers are totally blown out of proportion, they are still far better than you can expect from the best hard drive. But the price is outrageously expensive, I would never buy anything with a large SSD card simply because I know they could drop the price by several hundred dollars simply by using a hard drive.
But it's great to see they're starting to ship them, I'm happy to let the early adopters pay for the effort to make them cheaper.
It wouldn't be nearly as difficult as you think. If I search for "text editor" and don't click anything, but 10 seconds later search for "mac text editor" and push the arrow on TextMate, then doing a search for "web ide" might give higher priority to the ones that run on a mac. That would hardly require a fancy AI. It's a piece of cake next to many of the algorithm's google is already using.
I realize they're not doing this now, but it's the next step if customizing your results goes big. Google is already altering results per-user based on your IP address. If I search for "transport", one of the front page results is transport.qld.gov.au, which is the transport department for my state.
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> I wanna be able to firebug, addblock and a host of other stuff that, if not available in chrome while most of google works fine with ff, then its useless to me.
The WebKit team has an equivalent (in some ways better, in some ways inferior â" I prefer it overall) to firebug built into the browser. I don't know if Google intends to pull some of that open source code over to Chrome, but I don't see why not since they already have a fairly advanced task management window.
I can't see Google doing an adblock feature, it would probably trigger a class-action lawsuit, but *every* browser has some kind of built in or third party adblock solution, so it's only a matter of time â"Âhow long depends on how many people are using chrome.
> I thought it pictures quite well the fact that Chrome will have a huge way to go against firefox if they cannot take some of firefoxes most popular extensions features and offer them in chrome.
I agree with you that google doesn't seem to care as much about extensions as the mozilla team, but do they need to? Why should google make another firefox? Better to put their own development muscle behind firefox.
I see Chrome as a stable, secure and simple browser (like IE and Safari) that is suitable to be pre-installed by PC manufacturers, Linux distros, schools and so on. For that, Chrome is looking very promising.
When you load one of my webpages, it usually reads about 300 different tiny files to process the request.
A drive like the one in TFA (if used for a webserver) is likely to be reading a few thousand different files every second, each one is on a different location on the disk and no way to determine which file will be read next.
SSD drives have shown to be multiple orders of magnitude faster than the most advanced hard drives available today for web servers.
Of course it does! And since it's faster, it handles large web apps better than V8.
It's important to remember that SquirrelFish Extreme/V8 are javascript *language* engines, they are not javascript api or dom implementations. The actual behavior and features of both Safari and Chrome are identical, since they're using the same code in that area.
It's the engine for translating ascii text into raw cpu instructions that varies between Safari and Chrome, and if you take the latest beta versions of those two browsers, then WebKit is the faster one.
"possibly not even reached 2 or 3 million yet"? Bulshit
Just this week, apple announced they sold 6.8 million iphones in the last three months, bringing them over their 10 million unit goal a full quarter earlier than they projected on the day they announced the iPhone.
Apparently by default it will only run apps that have been digitally signed by the marketplace system (which requires the developer to prove that they have a real address/phone number).
But there is a setting in one of the config screens to disable that protection, so you can run any executable. Once you tick that box, you should be able to go to any website and download apps like you can on a PC.
What the Australian ISP's are saying is that ISP's are looking into charging content providers *because* their "one price for all customers" business model is flawed.
In Australia, you pay for your 40GB/month at 8Mbit/s. If you want more downloads, you pay more. If you want faster speeds, you pay more. It's simple.
ISP's here aren't complaining about users who have bit torrent downloading all day over their 24Mbit/s connection, because that user is paying them enough money to cover the cost. And as a result, ISP customers in australia know that they will get the full speed they're paying for, and they can self monitor how much usage they're going through by logging into the ISP's website, and even buy more if they need it this month "shit! I downloaded 25GB of movies on iTunes yesterday and there's still 3 weeks left in this month! I can either be shaped to 64Kbit or pay a once off fee of $10 for a few extra GB for this month"
I'm a programmer at a company that has an SEO department, and our SEO is nothing like what you're describing.
At our company, SEO means:
1) Making sure there aren't any mistakes in the code, for example images with missing alt/title tags or homepages that have less text than other pages on the website (which means search engines probably won't link to your homepage). We call these mistakes, because the guys writing the html are supposed to make sure these things are covered in any website, but sometimes we miss an alt tag, or a client insists on a splash page. Also we often do SEO for websites built by other web developers.
2) Installing tools like google analytics, to track how people go through the website: it's not how much traffic you get to a website that matters, it's how many sales/leads/bookings you make. With the right tools, you can find out how many people who click the "checkout" button never fill in the form on the next page, which might be caused by anything from too many fields, to confusing instructions/privacy policy, to a submit button that isn't clearly visible, to a javascript bug that breaks the website for 10% of visitors. Using tools like google analytics, you can often increase the profit a website makes, without increasing traffic.
3) Managing adwords campaigns. Have you ever used adwords? In theory anyone can do it, but in reality it's an extremely complex system and if you know what you're doing you can get better results for the same budget. Our SEO guy spends a lot of his time just tweaking people's ads to figure out what keywords are effective. And he's not trying to get more visitors, he's trying to get more sales/bookings/leads. Which means when he measures the effectiveness of an ad he's looking at how many *sales* came from the ad. "The BEST hotel in Sydney!" will get more clicks than "Cosy & Affordable hotel in Sydney", but (assuming your hotel is cosy and affordable) the"cosy" ad will lead to more sales. Everyone who clicks the "best" ad will have a different idea of what "best" means, and a huge percentage of your visitors will just hit the back button after seeing the photos on your website.
Ads are not evil, they help fund great web services.
These days, a good SEO company is about improving the effectiveness of your website and marketing, not spamming the web to find new ways to bring in customers.
Are you on crack? You can't install custom software on a mac? Bullshit.
Shuttleworth isn't talking about ipods, he's talking about mac os x. Same company, but a different product, different industry and different business model from ipods.
What is wrong with wifi? You don't need a router to communicate between your laptop and an iPhone, it only takes a few seconds to set up an ad-hoc network on OS X, I assume windows is similar.
I've only worked a little with WebKit (the open source part of safari), but from what I've seen I'd be surprised if it forces the 'shell' to do any network-related code.
WebKit almost certainly does the actual download, the shell would only be responsible or displaying a progress bar to the user.
It would only take a few hours to make a 'usable' browser on top of WebKit, and a couple of weeks to make a very good one. All the complicated stuff is open source.
Converting the registry to xml is not the same as plist/bplist. A binary property list is exactly the same file format as the xml property list, they are completely interchangeable. Binary property lists are only used when disk space is a concern, a 10MB binary property list is likely to be 80MB in XML.
They are exactly the same format, and you use the same tools to edit them (property list editor in the gui, the 'defaults' command from the cli, and the property list serialization api's from within a program).
Do you know anything about OS X? Virtually all configuration files are xml "property lists", except for the occasional binary property list (which are much more efficient for large files and can be converted to/from xml without a single command).
The gui is just as separated from the rest of the OS as it is on linux. All of the flashy gui features, like time machine, spotlight, etc are just primitive overlays on top of command line tools, and the command line tools will almost always let you do a ton more than the gui allows.
Except that it doesn't. I use Linux mostly, but I work in a physics research lab that uses exclusively* macs. We still use several G4s with OS X 10.3.9. I can't install network printers on half of them, for no apparent reason. I can't mount them using firewire on newer macs. No error messages, it just stalls.
Ask around on forums, I'm sure it can be worked out. As someone who uses linux, surely you don't have a problem with doing research to fix something?
We got two new iMacs last month. One of them turns off randomly.
Warranty?
Both of them crash randomly when we use our analysis software (a two-year old powerpc program).
Just a thought, maybe that's because your analysis software is shit?
The OS is so slow it's nearly unresponsive (to me, the people that only use macs don't have a problem with it).
Slower than many linux distros is probably true, but "unresponsive"? You're either running crap software or don't have beefy enough hardware to run it.
On a related note, the iMac makes no hard drive noise, so I can never tell if it is just slow in responding, or if I didn't double click fast enough.
You're talking bullshit. When you double click something, there is an animation that you can't possibly miss. Unless you're talking about third party software, which must be pretty crap if it gives no feedback when you do something. And the default double click speed is very slow, so I find it hard to believe that you sometimes "don't double click fast enough" but you can change it in system prefs.
File sharing is a pain to figure out.
You have a list of servers that are auto-discovered, you click on one of them, the files come up. Alternatively you run the 'connect to server' menu item and type in the server's address. To become a filesharing host you tick a box named "personal file sharing" in the "sharing" section of system prefs, then drag files into your public folder. That's hard to figure out? wtf?
I can't easily change my icon theme without buying third party software.
The most popular software for doing this used to be an open source app (which still works perfectly), but virtually all icon/theme artists use proprietary file formats now... I agree, it sucks. :(
Don't get me started on the usability of the single menu bar.
OK, I won't. Personally I only use the menubar once or twice a day (i use the keyboard for everything on mac and windows, and none of the linux machines I use regularly have X installed), so I couldn't tell you which menubar system I prefer. I wish I could turn them off altogether.
I can't find any easy way to uninstall Garage Band, et al, so that the automatic updater stops bothering me about them.
Right click on garage band, select move to trash. Done, it's uninstalled.
I can't find a way to move windows between desktops ("spaces"), and all new windows seem to open on the same desktop that the program originally opened on, making multiple desktops virtually useless.
Drag a window to the edge of the screen, it will move to the next space. Or if you use hotkeys to change spaces, "grab" the window (start dragging it) and hit your hotkey, it will move to the space. Or if you use the expose-show-spaces-thing, open it up and drag a window to another space. In system prefs you can assign programs to specific spaces.
I need third party software to have an automatically changing desktop wallpaper.
Define "automatically changing". Depending on what you mean, this may be built in.
Our IT guy told me that to take apart the iMac you have to buy suction cups from Apple to pull the glass off before you can unscrew the case.
I'll admit I've only ever replaced ram, which takes seconds (most of the time spent waiting for it to shutdown/start up) and doesn't involve anything
Yeah, because that works really well for W3C, who spend decades discussing every tiny change.
Users usually do not know best, and if they do, it's probably time to fork the project under better developers.
I run windows almost daily in Virtual PC (Internet Explorer 6/7/8 test beds) on one of the last PPC PowerMacs apple made, which is one of the fastest PPC machines you can buy. Believe me, emulating an x86 chip on a PPC chip is dog slow no matter how fast your machine is.
It works, and it works well. But if you're going to use it more than 10 or 20 minutes a day, you're better off buying a second machine (with a KVM or Synergy) if you want to run windows and OS X but don't have an Intel mac.
If that was all there was to it, why wouldn't they have stopped using Windows already?
The other change is that Mac OS X can now run windows in a VM almost as if there was no VM with parallels or vmware. This drastically reduces the risk to move to another platform, though it means a rise in costs until they can drop windows altogether.
I couldn't disagree more. If your work is similar to mine, then I think the Mac OS X Terminal (especially v2.0) is much better than any linux terminal I've ever used. It has proper copy/paste, proper tabs, drag/drop support, fairly good mouse integration, can store the password to an encrypted ssh-key in the keychain (so you can have encrypted private keys without ever typing in your password), is incredibly customizable... etc etc
I'm not aware of any other console that even comes close to the built in OS X terminal for features and "workflow".
I did do some investigating before writing my post. According to wikipedia, FireFox 3 is the first release of FireFox to pass Acid 2, and unless I'm miss-reading the title of TFA, FireFox 3 is still in development.
There's nothing "long" about the dev cycle of WebKit, it's in stable development with no big features being worked on and no architectural changes in the works. Just bug fixes, performance improvements and gradual standards compliance additions. Apple will release Safari 3.1.1 or 3.2 whenever they decide there's enough improvements to be worth the hassle of making PR announcements. When they release Safari 4.0, it will almost certainly ship with Mac OS X 10.6, and there will likely be a simultaneous minor version update to Safari 3, bringing it to the same WebKit release as Safari 4.
WeKit is just the rendering engine, it's not tightly coupled with Safari the way Gecko/Firefox is. Major safari updates are always about new GUI features (RSS in 2.0, "webclip" in 3.0, etc). Better standards compliance/performance is a sideline feature for Safari, that's for the WebKit team to work on.
Firefox and IE only just now pass Acid 2 in their *development releases*. They're several months, if not years behind WebKit and Opera.
I believe it's different on linux/windows, but on Mac OS X the Objective-C compiler actually extends on top of C++, which has the advantage of giving us C++ style comments (I'm serious, it's the only C++ feature I use often). And, it means you can embed C++ code inside your Objective-C classes and import C++ files into your project, which is mostly used for performance optimisations (C++ does more at compile-time, so calling methods on objects is a tiny bit faster) and cross-platform code.
So, your typical Obj-C mac programmer will know at least some C++ code, and most good ones will be an expert in C++.
If you compare gmail's servers to the sum of all the clients connected to it, then yes: the server could be considered "lightweight". And all of the user interaction is happening on the client, which could be considered "distributing the workload".
Tell me, what exactly do you achieve by having A/V software? The only advantage I can see is to avoid restoring from a recent backup.
You spend hours researching which one to install, then buy the software (assuming it's not free), install it, configure it, keep it upgraded, put up with the speed issues it will bring as well as all of the false positives that any good security software will cause.
And for what? So that if you are attacked, which has pretty much never actually happened to anyone on a mac in the last 8 years, there will be a *chance* that you might be protected by your A/V product?
Just buy an external drive and use apple's Time Machine (or a third party equivalent). Restoring from good backup software takes an hour or so at tops. Much much less time than you will spend maintaining your A/V product. From a productivity perspective, I would need to be infected at least twice in a 12 month period before I'd even consider installing A/V software on my mac. Anything less and it would be a waste of time. Time I could spend working for paying clients (or discussing random crap on /.).
Show me a case where A/V actually had some benefit, and then I'll take you seriously. Until then, sorry: you don't have a leg to stand on.
If an application contains a . in it's filename (except in the .app), then the show/hide extension setting is always disabled for that file. Try it yourself, rename any app on your system to ".doc", it will suddenly appear as ".doc.app". In addition, if you download any application the first time you run it you are prompted with a "this application was downloaded from the internet and you should be careful" message. If that doesn't trigger alarm bells, nothing will.
You're correct that people are in danger without typing any password. A spam mailer or key-logger does not need admin privileges to run on OS X. It does need admin to run while you're not logged in though, and also if it wants to hide effectively, which it will need to do if you decide to install an anti-virus after you've been infected (or, if Apple releases a security update to detect the malware).
OS X is not perfect, but the underlying architecture is structured to make anything but the most trivial malware quite difficult. Any well educated and cautious user is safe without any anti-virus. Everyone else is not safe, but until there is evidence of an actual threat, I will continue to recommend to friends and family that they should not install any anti-virus. I can always tell them in 6 months that they should install something.
Instead I tell people to be careful about what they install and to have a good backup system.
From what I can see, the only disadvantage to an SSD/flash card is the price. Typical flash cards are slow and have very short lives, however I've seen articles on Toshiba's 64Gb and 128GB flash cards (the 64 GB one is in the mac book air, and perhaps this lenovo as well) that imply sequential read speeds of 100MB/sec and life times as long as 50 years under typical use.
Even if those numbers are totally blown out of proportion, they are still far better than you can expect from the best hard drive. But the price is outrageously expensive, I would never buy anything with a large SSD card simply because I know they could drop the price by several hundred dollars simply by using a hard drive.
But it's great to see they're starting to ship them, I'm happy to let the early adopters pay for the effort to make them cheaper.
It wouldn't be nearly as difficult as you think. If I search for "text editor" and don't click anything, but 10 seconds later search for "mac text editor" and push the arrow on TextMate, then doing a search for "web ide" might give higher priority to the ones that run on a mac. That would hardly require a fancy AI. It's a piece of cake next to many of the algorithm's google is already using.
I realize they're not doing this now, but it's the next step if customizing your results goes big. Google is already altering results per-user based on your IP address. If I search for "transport", one of the front page results is transport.qld.gov.au, which is the transport department for my state.