When we rolled out Panther, there were many new features that would only work in 10.3. I think it took about three months for developers to start using those features with confidence.
And the momentum behind Tiger is considerably higher than it was behind the previous release.
The most recent version of Beagle is 0.0.9, which was released on April 7, 2005.
Giving your product a version number with two zeros in front of it really goes a long way toward inspiring customer confidence, you know?
Also from the Web site:
This page will take you through the steps involved in obtaining and installing Beagle. user: Nono just forget it, it's impossible anyway and if you DO get it to work you whole day is wasted already so you should not even try unless you want to waste your time.
You guys can't seriously be telling me this is Linux' answer to Spotlight, can you?
I hate to tell you this, but both of y'all got it wrong. We're learning a lot about our marketing here, and one of the things we're learning is that while ordinary people get Automator instantly, computer nerds don't. They tend to overthink it.
The fundamental object in Automator is the action. Think of an action like an old-fashioned Unix command-line utility like "sort" or "uniq." Each one has an input and an output, kind of like "stdin" and "stdout" but more discriminating.
Using Automator, you string together actions to create workflows. Workflows are kind of like pipelines. You start with one that generates some kind of output, then pass that output to another action, then to another, then to another.
Example: Let's say you have ten pictures on your desktop, and you want to resize them all and add metadata like a copyright notice, something that's common to all 10. You go to Automator and start with the "Get selected Finder items" action, then click on the "Scale images" action, then click in the "Add Spotlight comments to Finder items" action. When you select the files and run the workflow, it does what you want.
A more complex, real-world example. I use InCopy a lot. One of the things I always have to do is take an InCopy document, map styles to XML tags, export the document as XML, then run the resulting XML file through a little utility to strip out some InCopy weirdness that Adobe inserts. This is a fairly manually intensive process. I automated a chunk of it with an AppleScript about eighteen months ago when InCopy 3 first came out, but I still had to do the fiddly stuff by hand. Last fall, I created an Automator workflow that would let me call that AppleScript ("Run AppleScript" is an Automator action), then pass the output on to a pipeline of actions that processed it in just the way I needed. I now use that workflow several times every day.
Like I said, normal people get it pretty quickly. Geeks seem to try to overthink it, to think about it in terms of object models and scripting.
It's more than that. I've kinda given up on explaining why, though. Let me explain with an example.
A year ago, my friend George e-mailed me a funny picture of an elephant walking through snow. (It had snowed at a zoo. The picture was funny.) The other day, I wanted to see that picture, but I couldn't remember where I'd put it, or even if I'd put it anywhere at all.
I tried Spotlighting "elephant" and "snow," but the photo was probably named DCS1003 or something, and I never got around to annotating it with a caption or anything. So that didn't help.
Then I tried searching for George's e-mail address. That didn't help either, because George has sent me thousands of e-mails.
So I typed the following query into Spotlight: "George kind:image".
Poof. There was the picture. Spotlight knew to associate the picture with George because he's the one who e-mailed it to me. So it found it.
(This whole example was totally made up. But I just tested it on my Mac, and it really does what I said it does. George is not his real name, but part about the elephant is true.)
Mac OS X includes speech commands, not speech-to-text. You can't dictate to your Mac using the built-in software. So don't compare it to anything you talked about here; it's a different kind of solution.
That said, speech commands work amazingly well. You can click a file in the Finder and say "Mail this to (name from your address book)," and it opens up a Mail window with that address, the file attached, ready for you to type or just click "Send."
That's cool. That's really cool. No question. But you know what really blows me away? About two weeks ago, without really thinking about it, I did it while brushing my teeth. Seriously. I was sitting at my computer at home early in the morning, still half asleep, with my toothbrush in my mouth. I mumbled "Send the latest blah-blah file to person-so-n-so," which I have set up to trigger a Spotlight search to find the most recent copy of a specific file and e-mail it to the named contact. (I have to do this often enough it was worth automating.) I said this with my toothbrush in my mouth, with a mouth full of Crest. And it understood me.
Honestly, it kinda freaked me out a little. It was a very "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" moment.
(Just for fun, I tried it again, and it didn't work. I guess I was able to mumble it just right the first time, totally by random chance. Got lucky. Still a pretty funny moment.)
Your comment was a long, long, long list of incorrect statements and non sequiturs.
Maybe you should have a look at their current market shares on the fields outside servers.
Last month, our number was 3.6% of sales. Linux' was 1.1%. Gartner.
Of course, every time we actually look at the statistics, somebody hauls out the "But you can't count Linux!" thing. So what's the point of even going there?
Besides, I wasn't talking about rates of adoption. I was talking about rates of innovation. Linux has been utterly stagnant for five years now. Nobody's improving it. We're rolling out stuff like Open Directory, Core Data, Quartz, Spotlight, and so on and so on, stuff that makes an actual difference. With Linux...not so much.
IBM, Novell, Oracle or HP are thus probably suddenly getting mad and are sinking themselves at investing money for both free and commercial projects around the Linux platform
As a matter of fact, they are, yes. That's why IBM has recently become a tier-1 Apple developer; Oracle already was. HP resells our products, for crying out loud! And Novell? Well, nobody's ever accused Novell of being on the front of the technology curve.
Court action of the FSF against commercial products are pretty rare and only involve cases where licence was unilaterally broken (which is illegal).
Define "pretty rare." Every couple of weeks there's a story in the technology trades about another company getting accused of some heinous crime by the Gnu people.
Font rendering works perfectly under X for quite some time already
Um. No. Have you seen it? I mean actually looked at it? Looks like crap. There's this wonderful new technology that you guys might be interested in. It's called "electronic kerning." It's brand new; it was only invented about... um...forty years ago. You should totally check it out.
As for the system localization, it is also perfectly working, both with local codepages or Unicode formats.
I'm not talking about keyboard input or character sets. I'm talking about localization. You know, the ability to have your program switch from an English user interface to an Arabic or a Hebrew or a Farsi or a Chinese user interface based on the user's system-wide language preference. Linux has no facility for doing that, which is kind of okay, because if it did, there would be no facility for Linux applications to actually have localization built into them.
May I also remind you that launchd does not replace cron ?
Maybe you should read that quote again. No more cron, is what it says. The launchd service has replaced it.
Do we executed cron-style configuration files as a backwards-compatibility feature? Sure. But cron is no more. It doesn't run.
Destroy launchd configuration for critical services, and you'll get the same result.
Nope. If you remote all of launchd's configuration files, every last one up to and including the optional/etc/launchd.conf, the system will boot just fine. You can't render the system unbootable by screwing with launchd. Which is a big part of the reason for its existence.
Damaging one of the/etc/rcX isn't sufficient to prevent Linux from booting.
Try it sometime. You'll be unpleasantly surprised.
I never denied that OSX made great progresses in various fields. But so did Linux or the BSDs.
Money where your mouth is. Here's a totally random list of technologies, pulled right out of my head, that we've built into Mac OS X over the past six years, or that we've substantially improved since the NeXT days. Where's your comparable list for Linux?
Accessibility (we have systemwide services for people with vision and motor disabilities)
Cocoa (an Objective-C-based development environment that makes it possible to turn out first-class applic
And if I managed to install XCode that would be logical to have an ability to search through some basic system documentation?
Xcode and "man" manual pages have nothing to do with one another, so I don't see your point here. And "man" manual pages are not basic system documentation.
I'd say most of people who use Terminal.app and/or has XCode installed.
Again: Not a sentence.
At this point I'm going to have to say that I really don't have the foggiest idea what you're talking about. You started out by asking why Spotlight doesn't index "man" manual pages. I told you. From there, it's anybody's guess.
Yes, that's just what every user wants: to do a search for his kid's school paper on the environment and get back 5000 cryptic and meaningless documents that happen to mention "environment variables."
As soon as your copy of XP can keep two folders auto-sync'd over a network, then you give me a call.
Elaborate. In real time? With support for multiple users and conflict resolution? Or just applying deltas from one folder to another through some kind of periodic synchronization task?
I ask because, you know, SyncServer... oh, well, never mind.
It looks fine to me, just as XP does.
Really? Seriously now, all bullshit aside. Just man to man: Does it really? Does looking at four different typefaces of seemingly random sizes and weights feel okay to you? Or does it nag at you, kind of at the back of your mind, that something's wrong?
I'm wondering if I'm the weirdo, see.
Longhorn has a whole mess of security improvements
That's good. That's important.
it has smart folders that automatically look for documents matching parameters you specify
Yeah. So does Tiger. Today. (Well, on Friday night.)
it has the aforementioned network auto-sync feature that is sorely needed for anyone who owns multiple PC's
Yeah. So does Tiger. Today. (Well, on Friday night.) For that matter, Panther had it with iSync. Now granted, it might not be exactly what you have in mind -- it's one folder, called the iDisk -- but it's not like it's some revolutionary new idea.
People go nuts about a 0.1 incremental upgrade to the Mac OS
Well, I'm just taking a wild stab in the dark here, but I think that might be because it has all the stuff that you're waving your hands about here. That, and it's available today. (Well, Friday night.)
Longhorn is a far more important and comprehensive upgrade than Tiger
How can you tell? The list of features seems to change so frequently that nobody can be sure what it's supposed to do and what it's not.
I understand the concept of a temporary user interface. I really do. But there's temporary-around-the-office, and then there's temporary-in-front-of-outsiders, and they're two entirely different things.
What could possibly have possessed anybody at Microsoft to think that it would be okay to demo something this horrible, much less to actually give it to people?
I ask because I sincerely want to know. What the hell were you people thinking?
What normal user would touch inittab or/etc/rc.d/rc ?
None. Which is why they don't need to be there.
I mean please you inovate by removing the possibility to hack your boot scripts ?
Which way do you want to play this? Do you want to go with the "I want to edit them, therefore it's possible to screw them up, which is lame" approach, or the "Nobody wants to edit them, so removing them is no big improvement" approach? I can go either way. Just pick one.
Also what is this Open directory ? Might it be anything like openLDAP ?
Oh boy. I'm gonna go ahead and point out at this time that the mere fact that you have to ask the question is evidence that you're a little too far out of the loop to be complaining.
Open Directory is what we created to replace all those cryptic configuration files in the/etc directory: hosts, passwd, group, protocols, services, fstab, exports and so forth and so. It's a systemwide configuration service. It used to be called NetInfo, but two years ago we did a pretty massive rewrite and changed the name to Open Directory.
I have been using Linux sins 96, and the truth is that every year Linux gets more and more users, and more and more real world applications.
Rock on, dude. Don't let the fact that Linux is so far away from the current state of the art that you've never even heard of it get you down.
I just want some intelligent explanation as to why something that wasn't broken was fixed
Because we wanted to. What do you want from me?
You're clearly not in the mood for an intelligent discourse.
Oh, whatever, dude. You come at me with two assumptions that you pass out as if they were writ by God Almighty himself: That there was absolutely nothing to dislike about the old toolbar buttons, and that there's absolutely nothing to like about the new toolbar buttons. No room for differences of opinion there; just "It's bad," period, end of paragraph. And then you demand to know why it was changed, as if there can be any answer to that other than "We changed it because we wanted to."
And finally, you haul out the old, "Yeah, Tiger has hundreds of major and minor features, and would dramatically improve my computing experience. But I'm not gonna buy it because the toolbar buttons look different." As if anybody could ever, even for the tiniest fraction of a second, believe that.
And you say I'm not in the mood for "intelligent discourse?"
No, I meant PCI-X. We use AGP 8x Pro Wham Bam Bizzle, or whatever the hell it's called, for our GPUs. We use PCI-X for our expansion slots except in the low-end G5 which has regular old 64-bit/66 MHz PCI.
Yup. I don't know why I got the 130/180 thing mixed up, but my excuse is that I couldn't actually tell you what "130 nanometers" really means if you put a gun to my head. Not my job.
Why'd they take the "Do not eat iPod Shuffle" footnote off the website?
I didn't even know they did. I'm not in that group, so I don't get the memos. It might have been a really dramatic decision handed down from the highest levels, or it might just have been something very small. No idea.
But yeah, I agree. I kind of miss it too. On the other hand, the joke had kinda run its course.
Um. Okay. For myself, I'm not that big on ignoring somebody just because he didn't jump through the hoops necessary to sign up for a user account on an Internet message board. I'm way more into filtering based on content rather than on source.
I don't know if you're kidding or not, but that's been a very hot topic of discussion lately. Our product lines are as numerous as they've ever been since the Great Simplification. It's getting to be too much. But the problem is that every one of our product lines is selling well. A lot of people would love to kill off the eMac just because it's not cool, but it's selling like hotcakes!
I, personally, would love it if we could go back to the days of iMac/Power Mac, iBook/PowerBook. But the eMac and Mac mini have an important part to play. The balance between too many choices and not enough offerings is very hard to find, and we're constantly arguing about it around the water cooler, so to speak.
What else were you expecting? Do you want the toolbar buttons in cornflower blue?
You think Mail is ugly. That's fine. It's a free country. Lots of other people have a different opinion. What are you hoping for? Me to say, "Yeah, d00d, it totally sux?"
Actually, one thing I think is even more damaging to Apple than the "rumor mill" is the perceived stagnation of the PowerMac lineup.
We refresh our product lines roughly once every nine months. We've been doing it that way for years now. Why is this a surprise?
To an outsider (like a consumer in the market for a machine), what has changed in the G5 in nearly two years since its introduction?
Hopefully nothing. "Power Macintosh G5" is a brand item for us. We don't want to release a product and then suddenly drop it. Instead, we want to release a product and maintain it for several years, building brand recognition.
I guess we're just running up against a difference in business philosophies here. Companies like Dell (just to pick a well-known example) have vast product lines with hundreds of products. We sell about a dozen, and frankly that's a lot for us. Our approach goes like this: At any point in time, somebody can go into an Apple store (or online) and say, "I want a Power Mac G5." (Or iMac, or Mac mini, or whatever product.) From there, the customer will be given a few choices about how much they want to spend -- small, medium or large, basically. At that point, they walk out with a product that gives them good value and a good experience for the money they spent.
I understand that there are people out there who wish we did it another way. I understand that there are people out there who basically wish we just sold parts from a catalogue. But that's not our business model. Arguments of the form "But I'd buy one if so-n-so" don't really touch anybody here, because that's just not the way we want to do things. Other companies already to things that way. That's fine for them. We do things our way.
what they may fail to do is to entice any current G5 owners to upgrade to a newer model
According to market research, Mac owners buy a new computer about once every five years on average. We're a long way from expecting our Power Mac G5 owners to want to trade up.
Bottom line: We don't just roll out whole new products willy-nilly. Part of what we sell our customers is stability. One of the things you know when you buy a Mac -- most of the time -- is that the thing you buy isn't going to be just totally lame next month. The products we ship subsequently are going to be incremental improvements, not complete new things. That means that you can feel comfortable when you buy a Mac that your purchase isn't going to totally lose all its value in ninety days. It's one way we've engendered brand loyalty. Haven't you noticed that used Macs retain their value way better than used PCs? There's a reason for that.
Certainly true. I don't keep up with what the competition is currently shipping, but from what I've heard all the microchip manufacturers found the 180-90 transition to be more of a challenge than they expected.
But you know what? That's an excuse. A totally valid excuse, but an excuse. Bottom line: We "pre-announced" 3 GHz machines, sort of. That was a mistake. We copped to it.
Slashdot Mirror
How are you measuring that? It's possible that we have a utility that's showing memory usage misleadingly.
Dashboard clients are little Web Views, which means they rely on Web Kit. Web Kit is a shared framework; it only gets loaded into memory once.
It's possible that whatever you were using to measure that reported the memory usage of Web Kit once per Dashboard client, which is not correct.
When we rolled out Panther, there were many new features that would only work in 10.3. I think it took about three months for developers to start using those features with confidence.
And the momentum behind Tiger is considerably higher than it was behind the previous release.
Expect adoption of Tiger to happen very quickly.
From the Web site:
The most recent version of Beagle is 0.0.9, which was released on April 7, 2005.
Giving your product a version number with two zeros in front of it really goes a long way toward inspiring customer confidence, you know?
Also from the Web site:
This page will take you through the steps involved in obtaining and installing Beagle. user: Nono just forget it, it's impossible anyway and if you DO get it to work you whole day is wasted already so you should not even try unless you want to waste your time.
You guys can't seriously be telling me this is Linux' answer to Spotlight, can you?
I hate to tell you this, but both of y'all got it wrong. We're learning a lot about our marketing here, and one of the things we're learning is that while ordinary people get Automator instantly, computer nerds don't. They tend to overthink it.
The fundamental object in Automator is the action. Think of an action like an old-fashioned Unix command-line utility like "sort" or "uniq." Each one has an input and an output, kind of like "stdin" and "stdout" but more discriminating.
Using Automator, you string together actions to create workflows. Workflows are kind of like pipelines. You start with one that generates some kind of output, then pass that output to another action, then to another, then to another.
Example: Let's say you have ten pictures on your desktop, and you want to resize them all and add metadata like a copyright notice, something that's common to all 10. You go to Automator and start with the "Get selected Finder items" action, then click on the "Scale images" action, then click in the "Add Spotlight comments to Finder items" action. When you select the files and run the workflow, it does what you want.
A more complex, real-world example. I use InCopy a lot. One of the things I always have to do is take an InCopy document, map styles to XML tags, export the document as XML, then run the resulting XML file through a little utility to strip out some InCopy weirdness that Adobe inserts. This is a fairly manually intensive process. I automated a chunk of it with an AppleScript about eighteen months ago when InCopy 3 first came out, but I still had to do the fiddly stuff by hand. Last fall, I created an Automator workflow that would let me call that AppleScript ("Run AppleScript" is an Automator action), then pass the output on to a pipeline of actions that processed it in just the way I needed. I now use that workflow several times every day.
Like I said, normal people get it pretty quickly. Geeks seem to try to overthink it, to think about it in terms of object models and scripting.
It's more than that. I've kinda given up on explaining why, though. Let me explain with an example.
A year ago, my friend George e-mailed me a funny picture of an elephant walking through snow. (It had snowed at a zoo. The picture was funny.) The other day, I wanted to see that picture, but I couldn't remember where I'd put it, or even if I'd put it anywhere at all.
I tried Spotlighting "elephant" and "snow," but the photo was probably named DCS1003 or something, and I never got around to annotating it with a caption or anything. So that didn't help.
Then I tried searching for George's e-mail address. That didn't help either, because George has sent me thousands of e-mails.
So I typed the following query into Spotlight: "George kind:image".
Poof. There was the picture. Spotlight knew to associate the picture with George because he's the one who e-mailed it to me. So it found it.
(This whole example was totally made up. But I just tested it on my Mac, and it really does what I said it does. George is not his real name, but part about the elephant is true.)
Mac OS X includes speech commands, not speech-to-text. You can't dictate to your Mac using the built-in software. So don't compare it to anything you talked about here; it's a different kind of solution.
That said, speech commands work amazingly well. You can click a file in the Finder and say "Mail this to (name from your address book)," and it opens up a Mail window with that address, the file attached, ready for you to type or just click "Send."
That's cool. That's really cool. No question. But you know what really blows me away? About two weeks ago, without really thinking about it, I did it while brushing my teeth. Seriously. I was sitting at my computer at home early in the morning, still half asleep, with my toothbrush in my mouth. I mumbled "Send the latest blah-blah file to person-so-n-so," which I have set up to trigger a Spotlight search to find the most recent copy of a specific file and e-mail it to the named contact. (I have to do this often enough it was worth automating.) I said this with my toothbrush in my mouth, with a mouth full of Crest. And it understood me.
Honestly, it kinda freaked me out a little. It was a very "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" moment.
(Just for fun, I tried it again, and it didn't work. I guess I was able to mumble it just right the first time, totally by random chance. Got lucky. Still a pretty funny moment.)
Are you trying to offend me, switch topic or both?
Just trying to translate from "Atverd" to English, man.
I'm just wondering why man pages excluded from spotlight search.
I already told you. That's the point where you can stop wondering. Because now you have an answer.
Here is real example - I search for word "fork".
In fact, that is not a real example. If you were looking for the "man" manual page for "fork," you would open a terminal window and type "man fork."
Your comment was a long, long, long list of incorrect statements and non sequiturs.
...not so much.
... um ...forty years ago. You should totally check it out.
/etc/launchd.conf, the system will boot just fine. You can't render the system unbootable by screwing with launchd. Which is a big part of the reason for its existence.
/etc/rcX isn't sufficient to prevent Linux from booting.
Maybe you should have a look at their current market shares on the fields outside servers.
Last month, our number was 3.6% of sales. Linux' was 1.1%. Gartner.
Of course, every time we actually look at the statistics, somebody hauls out the "But you can't count Linux!" thing. So what's the point of even going there?
Besides, I wasn't talking about rates of adoption. I was talking about rates of innovation. Linux has been utterly stagnant for five years now. Nobody's improving it. We're rolling out stuff like Open Directory, Core Data, Quartz, Spotlight, and so on and so on, stuff that makes an actual difference. With Linux
IBM, Novell, Oracle or HP are thus probably suddenly getting mad and are sinking themselves at investing money for both free and commercial projects around the Linux platform
As a matter of fact, they are, yes. That's why IBM has recently become a tier-1 Apple developer; Oracle already was. HP resells our products, for crying out loud! And Novell? Well, nobody's ever accused Novell of being on the front of the technology curve.
Court action of the FSF against commercial products are pretty rare and only involve cases where licence was unilaterally broken (which is illegal).
Define "pretty rare." Every couple of weeks there's a story in the technology trades about another company getting accused of some heinous crime by the Gnu people.
Font rendering works perfectly under X for quite some time already
Um. No. Have you seen it? I mean actually looked at it? Looks like crap. There's this wonderful new technology that you guys might be interested in. It's called "electronic kerning." It's brand new; it was only invented about
As for the system localization, it is also perfectly working, both with local codepages or Unicode formats.
I'm not talking about keyboard input or character sets. I'm talking about localization. You know, the ability to have your program switch from an English user interface to an Arabic or a Hebrew or a Farsi or a Chinese user interface based on the user's system-wide language preference. Linux has no facility for doing that, which is kind of okay, because if it did, there would be no facility for Linux applications to actually have localization built into them.
May I also remind you that launchd does not replace cron ?
Maybe you should read that quote again. No more cron, is what it says. The launchd service has replaced it.
Do we executed cron-style configuration files as a backwards-compatibility feature? Sure. But cron is no more. It doesn't run.
Destroy launchd configuration for critical services, and you'll get the same result.
Nope. If you remote all of launchd's configuration files, every last one up to and including the optional
Damaging one of the
Try it sometime. You'll be unpleasantly surprised.
I never denied that OSX made great progresses in various fields. But so did Linux or the BSDs.
Money where your mouth is. Here's a totally random list of technologies, pulled right out of my head, that we've built into Mac OS X over the past six years, or that we've substantially improved since the NeXT days. Where's your comparable list for Linux?
Accessibility (we have systemwide services for people with vision and motor disabilities)
Cocoa (an Objective-C-based development environment that makes it possible to turn out first-class applic
Spotlight has preferences, isn't it?
That wasn't even a sentence.
And if I managed to install XCode that would be logical to have an ability to search through some basic system documentation?
Xcode and "man" manual pages have nothing to do with one another, so I don't see your point here. And "man" manual pages are not basic system documentation.
I'd say most of people who use Terminal.app and/or has XCode installed.
Again: Not a sentence.
At this point I'm going to have to say that I really don't have the foggiest idea what you're talking about. You started out by asking why Spotlight doesn't index "man" manual pages. I told you. From there, it's anybody's guess.
Yes, that's just what every user wants: to do a search for his kid's school paper on the environment and get back 5000 cryptic and meaningless documents that happen to mention "environment variables."
As soon as your copy of XP can keep two folders auto-sync'd over a network, then you give me a call.
... oh, well, never mind.
Elaborate. In real time? With support for multiple users and conflict resolution? Or just applying deltas from one folder to another through some kind of periodic synchronization task?
I ask because, you know, SyncServer
It looks fine to me, just as XP does.
Really? Seriously now, all bullshit aside. Just man to man: Does it really? Does looking at four different typefaces of seemingly random sizes and weights feel okay to you? Or does it nag at you, kind of at the back of your mind, that something's wrong?
I'm wondering if I'm the weirdo, see.
Longhorn has a whole mess of security improvements
That's good. That's important.
it has smart folders that automatically look for documents matching parameters you specify
Yeah. So does Tiger. Today. (Well, on Friday night.)
it has the aforementioned network auto-sync feature that is sorely needed for anyone who owns multiple PC's
Yeah. So does Tiger. Today. (Well, on Friday night.) For that matter, Panther had it with iSync. Now granted, it might not be exactly what you have in mind -- it's one folder, called the iDisk -- but it's not like it's some revolutionary new idea.
People go nuts about a 0.1 incremental upgrade to the Mac OS
Well, I'm just taking a wild stab in the dark here, but I think that might be because it has all the stuff that you're waving your hands about here. That, and it's available today. (Well, Friday night.)
Longhorn is a far more important and comprehensive upgrade than Tiger
How can you tell? The list of features seems to change so frequently that nobody can be sure what it's supposed to do and what it's not.
Maybe you can explain something for me.
I understand the concept of a temporary user interface. I really do. But there's temporary-around-the-office, and then there's temporary-in-front-of-outsiders, and they're two entirely different things.
What could possibly have possessed anybody at Microsoft to think that it would be okay to demo something this horrible, much less to actually give it to people?
I ask because I sincerely want to know. What the hell were you people thinking?
What normal user would touch inittab or /etc/rc.d/rc ?
/etc directory: hosts, passwd, group, protocols, services, fstab, exports and so forth and so. It's a systemwide configuration service. It used to be called NetInfo, but two years ago we did a pretty massive rewrite and changed the name to Open Directory.
None. Which is why they don't need to be there.
I mean please you inovate by removing the possibility to hack your boot scripts ?
Which way do you want to play this? Do you want to go with the "I want to edit them, therefore it's possible to screw them up, which is lame" approach, or the "Nobody wants to edit them, so removing them is no big improvement" approach? I can go either way. Just pick one.
Also what is this Open directory ? Might it be anything like openLDAP ?
Oh boy. I'm gonna go ahead and point out at this time that the mere fact that you have to ask the question is evidence that you're a little too far out of the loop to be complaining.
Open Directory is what we created to replace all those cryptic configuration files in the
I have been using Linux sins 96, and the truth is that every year Linux gets more and more users, and more and more real world applications.
Rock on, dude. Don't let the fact that Linux is so far away from the current state of the art that you've never even heard of it get you down.
I just want some intelligent explanation as to why something that wasn't broken was fixed
Because we wanted to. What do you want from me?
You're clearly not in the mood for an intelligent discourse.
Oh, whatever, dude. You come at me with two assumptions that you pass out as if they were writ by God Almighty himself: That there was absolutely nothing to dislike about the old toolbar buttons, and that there's absolutely nothing to like about the new toolbar buttons. No room for differences of opinion there; just "It's bad," period, end of paragraph. And then you demand to know why it was changed, as if there can be any answer to that other than "We changed it because we wanted to."
And finally, you haul out the old, "Yeah, Tiger has hundreds of major and minor features, and would dramatically improve my computing experience. But I'm not gonna buy it because the toolbar buttons look different." As if anybody could ever, even for the tiniest fraction of a second, believe that.
And you say I'm not in the mood for "intelligent discourse?"
I'm saying it again: Whatever, dude.
No, I meant PCI-X. We use AGP 8x Pro Wham Bam Bizzle, or whatever the hell it's called, for our GPUs. We use PCI-X for our expansion slots except in the low-end G5 which has regular old 64-bit/66 MHz PCI.
Yup. I don't know why I got the 130/180 thing mixed up, but my excuse is that I couldn't actually tell you what "130 nanometers" really means if you put a gun to my head. Not my job.
Thanks for the correction, though.
Why'd they take the "Do not eat iPod Shuffle" footnote off the website?
I didn't even know they did. I'm not in that group, so I don't get the memos. It might have been a really dramatic decision handed down from the highest levels, or it might just have been something very small. No idea.
But yeah, I agree. I kind of miss it too. On the other hand, the joke had kinda run its course.
Um. Okay. For myself, I'm not that big on ignoring somebody just because he didn't jump through the hoops necessary to sign up for a user account on an Internet message board. I'm way more into filtering based on content rather than on source.
But hey, whatever.
I don't know if you're kidding or not, but that's been a very hot topic of discussion lately. Our product lines are as numerous as they've ever been since the Great Simplification. It's getting to be too much. But the problem is that every one of our product lines is selling well. A lot of people would love to kill off the eMac just because it's not cool, but it's selling like hotcakes!
I, personally, would love it if we could go back to the days of iMac/Power Mac, iBook/PowerBook. But the eMac and Mac mini have an important part to play. The balance between too many choices and not enough offerings is very hard to find, and we're constantly arguing about it around the water cooler, so to speak.
What else were you expecting? Do you want the toolbar buttons in cornflower blue?
You think Mail is ugly. That's fine. It's a free country. Lots of other people have a different opinion. What are you hoping for? Me to say, "Yeah, d00d, it totally sux?"
Actually, one thing I think is even more damaging to Apple than the "rumor mill" is the perceived stagnation of the PowerMac lineup.
We refresh our product lines roughly once every nine months. We've been doing it that way for years now. Why is this a surprise?
To an outsider (like a consumer in the market for a machine), what has changed in the G5 in nearly two years since its introduction?
Hopefully nothing. "Power Macintosh G5" is a brand item for us. We don't want to release a product and then suddenly drop it. Instead, we want to release a product and maintain it for several years, building brand recognition.
I guess we're just running up against a difference in business philosophies here. Companies like Dell (just to pick a well-known example) have vast product lines with hundreds of products. We sell about a dozen, and frankly that's a lot for us. Our approach goes like this: At any point in time, somebody can go into an Apple store (or online) and say, "I want a Power Mac G5." (Or iMac, or Mac mini, or whatever product.) From there, the customer will be given a few choices about how much they want to spend -- small, medium or large, basically. At that point, they walk out with a product that gives them good value and a good experience for the money they spent.
I understand that there are people out there who wish we did it another way. I understand that there are people out there who basically wish we just sold parts from a catalogue. But that's not our business model. Arguments of the form "But I'd buy one if so-n-so" don't really touch anybody here, because that's just not the way we want to do things. Other companies already to things that way. That's fine for them. We do things our way.
what they may fail to do is to entice any current G5 owners to upgrade to a newer model
According to market research, Mac owners buy a new computer about once every five years on average. We're a long way from expecting our Power Mac G5 owners to want to trade up.
Bottom line: We don't just roll out whole new products willy-nilly. Part of what we sell our customers is stability. One of the things you know when you buy a Mac -- most of the time -- is that the thing you buy isn't going to be just totally lame next month. The products we ship subsequently are going to be incremental improvements, not complete new things. That means that you can feel comfortable when you buy a Mac that your purchase isn't going to totally lose all its value in ninety days. It's one way we've engendered brand loyalty. Haven't you noticed that used Macs retain their value way better than used PCs? There's a reason for that.
The 1.8 GHz Power Mac G5 is $1,499 because that is the price that we choose to charge for it.
Any other answer would be just a load of bullshit. Prices aren't rational. They're set entirely arbitrarily. Why beat around the bush about it?
Each refresh is the greatest thing ever and will change everything!
Which explains why our announcement of the new G5s is in a tiny corner on the bottom of our home page.
Sigh.
Certainly true. I don't keep up with what the competition is currently shipping, but from what I've heard all the microchip manufacturers found the 180-90 transition to be more of a challenge than they expected.
But you know what? That's an excuse. A totally valid excuse, but an excuse. Bottom line: We "pre-announced" 3 GHz machines, sort of. That was a mistake. We copped to it.
And yet we continue to take shit.
Meh. Nobody said life was fair.
Look, we've been hearing this promise for about 30 years now
And we're actually doing something about it, as opposed to the folks who have just cynically given up on it.
What's the problem?