That's not born out by the numbers. The first dual-core Opterons will arrive at clock speeds of 1.8, 2.0, and 2.2GHz.
Note also that he original Opteron processor debuted two years ago today at speeds up to 2GHz. Two years later, the same processors are available at 2.6GHz--only a 600MHz increase. So Apple's incremental speed increase doesn't look so shabby by comparison.
I don't know what the numbers are for Intel off the top of my head. I expect its a similar story.
Intel & AMD may have got to dual-cores first, but they are hardly making any real industry waves yet. Its going to take time to build volumes and for app vendors to tune for them. We all know that a dual-core PowerPC chip is in the works, and it will arrive soon enough to keep Apple in the game.
When Apple bundles an application, if you don't like it you can easily swap it out. Hell, even the Safari Web Browser Preferences, has a drop down "Default Web Browser" menu, allowing you to choose any other web browser you've got installed on the system. And if I want to delete Safari without any impact to the system, I can.
Can you do that in MS WIndows? Certainly not without fucking around under the hood, and the official Microsoft line is that you can't and shouldn't try.
Oh yeah, I remember those as a kid too. Scared the hell out of me as well. If I remember right it was the only Dr Who story line that they either didn't repeat, or they cut it short because of the number of complaints they received from parents. It was giving the kids nightmares.
Of all the Dr Who monsters, the Green Death maggots were the scariest. Though those large spiders that attached themselves to your back and took over your mind were a close second.
Bear in mind that Tiger has been compiled using the Apple optimised version of the new GCC 4. GCC on PowerPC has so far not been as efficient as IBM's own PowerPC compilers, so there has been scope for improvement.
Given the amount of time that Apple's engineers have had to work on this deficit, along with the over all code improvements in GCC 4, and quite probable they've managed to find some extra performance from somewhere.
Never mind all the other profiling and tune ups they've been working on in the last year.
Not to mention the fact that it can't place Post Codes correctly. If I enter mine, it points to a place about 100 yards away, in someone's back garden! Not even on the road, never mind my street or my house.
Man, I so totally agree with you on that one. I've not used SuSE since 7.2, so I've no idea if its improved, but SuSEConfig was something I learned to hate. And why did Yast always insist on reconfiguring every dam component when all I did was update one tiny part of it.
In contrast, I really like Redhat's organisation of rc files. Everything under/etc/sysconfig and hand editable.
Gracious, I've not thought about that mail reader for many many years. It must be 10-15 years old easy. As I remember it was written by a guy who eventually stopped developing when he joined Netscape in their early days. Don't remember his name.
It was a GUI app based on Motif, and was the first MUA I ever saw that implemented the concept of "Virtual Mail Folders". I was completely blown away by it at the time.
And now, here I sit on my Mac all these years later and I'm waiting for Apple to give me that functionality back again with Smart Mail Folders in Tiger. Hmm... deja-vu.
The main motivation for upgrading a system is because the workload you place on your old once increases and you need something faster to cope with it. So maybe its time now for him to buy a new PC. Just about anything you can get these days, even the cheapest PC you can buy is going to be an order of magnitude faster than that. Stick 512MB+ of memory in it and he's going to really notice the difference.
There's no sense in staying with an old system just for the sake of it. If its performance is getting in the way, get something faster. Prices are so low these days there really is no reason not to.
The simplest example is copy-and-paste. You can always do this. But the X-Windows scheme is quick and simple (and doesn't involve the keyboard at all); just three quick clicks or a click-swipe-release-click. OSX is materially slower, though slightly faster sometimes than Windows.
The one thing I never liked about X-windows cut'n paste is that it's too easy to mis-click and loose what you've selected (with no warning) and have to go back and re-select it again. Or to 'bounce' click on paste and write out the buffer contents twice. It just feels too flimsy. I was very grateful when KDE & Gnome came along and offered me the choice to use RMB cut/copy/paste, or Ctrl-X/C/V.
It's also habit forming, and I know I can rely on that habit to perform those operations whether I'm on Linux, Windows (hardly ever) or OSX. I just prefer it that way. Now I use OSX on the desktop exclusively and I enjoy the same functionality, with the exception on OSX being Cmd-X/C/V instead of ctrl.
Similarly, linux and other X-Windows systems implements focus-follows-pointer, and doesn't insist on raising a window when it gets focus. This is a huge time saver when you get used to it. As far as I can tell, neither Windows nor OS X permits this.
Focus-follows-mouse.... yack!! It's way too easy for the mouse to get accidentally nudged (by you or someone else) and to loose your current window focus. And then whatever you were typing just disappears down the bit bucket, or even worse, into the neighboring app window the mouse just landed in. No.. focus-follows-mouse the devils own invention. Mac OS X is safer without it.
And they don't have a way to lower a window either; in X-Windows it's a single click. This means that you can push a window to the bottom when you're done with it, and get quickly to the next window. With Windows or OS X, you have to go through a real song and dance to locate and raise a hidden window (which you often didn't want to hide).
OSX has "Hide" and Expose features which more than make up for this. Want to get a window out of the way or empty your screen a bit, just use Cmd-H. Click on the App icon in the Dock to bring it back again.
Expose really comes into its own I find when you use the Hot Corners to activate it. I've set my top left corner to expose windows belonging to the current live app. The top right corner to expose all windows on the desktop, and the bottom right to expose the bare desktop itself. You don't even have to take your hand off the mouse, just flick it into the appropriate corner then click the window you want to use. Very easy, and very quick.
And I suppose your dick's longer than mine, your dad can beat up my dad, and you've more hair on your chest too.
Why don't you come out from hiding behind that AC curtain and provide some hard facts to back up your outrageous claims, instead of wallowing in ad hominem and hearsay.
That you claim to be able to go from typing in a window on one desktop, then switching to another desktop while typing uninterrupted, without even pausing to to make sure your input focus on the second desktop is correctly placed; to me is both stupid and unbelievable. Besides, it would in no way be typical usage behavior of 99.9% of the people who use computers. And after 17 years in the industry, 13 of them working exclusively on Unix systems, I know what I'm talking about. And I'm certainly going to believe my own observations over your fantastic claims.
Have you actually used Desktop Manager? It may beat Linux in terms of visual effects, but in terms of usability it is far inferior. In particular it most certainly does not have all the features of the Linux equivalents as you claim
Yes, I'm using it now. And it has all the features I can think of, bar two. One you mentioned Pager window content (which is not a show stopper, or even one that took much notice of on X11) and the other (dragging windows between desktops) is being addresses by the maintainer. Again, that's not a show stopper as there are 4 other ways to move windows from one desktop to the next.
The first problem is that switching isn't fast enough. On Linux I can hit a hotkey to switch desktops and immediately follow it with some typing and the desktop will indeed instantaneously put the keystrokes into the new desktop
I don't know about your system, but on mine (with transitions disabled) switching desktops is so fast that it's done before I can get my fingers back to their normal typing position. Whether I use the mouse, or Hotkey combos. So that point is completely invalid for me.
Note that the above feature is much less useful in click-to-focus mode as opposed to move-to-focus mode, and the Mac can't even use the latter focus mode unless you add yet more third party software
Not relevent to me. For the many many years I've used X11 windowing environments (Motif, KDE, Gnome) I've always turned off what you call "move-to-focus mode". It's way too easy for the mouse to get accidentally nudged (by you or someone else) and to loose your current window focus. And all that super fast typing you were talking about earlier just disappears down the bit bucket, or even worse, into the neighboring app window the mouse just landed in. No.. "move-to-focus mode" is way too dangerous, it's the devils own invention. Mac OS X is safer without it.
That quote completely captures the essence of why Desktop Manager will never be the equal of virtual desktops in Linux
LOL. Never is a very long time. And I'll bet that in the early days you could read lots of similar comments dotted around the code of the earlier Linux Desktop pagers. The truth is that with Desktop Manager, I can be just as productive as you on your Linux Desktop.
1) Max OS X also has another ace up its sleave. It's called Hide. If you've too many apps on the screen and you want to clear it up a bit, hit the Command-H keys and it hides all the windows for the current live app. They don't go into the minimized portion of the dock, they just vanish. But the app is still running (the black triangle below the app icon in the doc shows this).
Too much trouble for you to hide multiple apps? No problem. Select the app you want to keep and go to the first Menu item for that app on the menu bar. Select Hide Others and every other app on the desktop gets hidden in one fell swoop.
2) Download Desktop Manager. It's a Virtual Desktop app just like any you get on Linux, only better. At 322KB it takes minutes to download, then you click on the.dmg (disk image) file to mount it and drag it into your apps folder. No messing with rpm, etc. No dependency hell with libraries, just drag & drop and it works. It's released under the GPL License so its free. It has all the features of its Linux equivalents, but in addition is has some very cool optional transition effects from screen to screen. These are:
- Cross Fade - Zoom - Reveal (a powerpoint like slide effect) - Slide - Warp & Fade - Swap Over (very cool - old screen shrinks into the distance, new screen zooms towards you) - Cube (also very cool - uses the same "switch user" rotating cube effect to switch screens) - Warp
Plus... you can still use the Exposé and Hide tools right along with your Virtual Desktops.
Open up the System Preferences app. On the "Internet & Network" row, click the "Sharing" icon. Look down the Services list for "Remote Login" and enable it. Done !
Autoupdate keeps on telling me I need 40mb of updates for an iPod and I don't own one.
Highlight the update when it appears in the list, then goto the Update menu option and choose "ignore update".
Image and font rendering isn't as good as pango/xorg
You have sky high standards mate. Image & font rendering are stunning on Mac OS X, and from the few pango'd screenshots I can find I can't see any difference
Expose is nice but more of a gimick than a useful feature
Huh? You're joking. Try using Mac OS X for some real work and get your screen a bit busy. Multiple terminal app windows, a brower or two, mail, etc and you'll soon discover just how useful it is. Especially if you map the Hot Corners of the screen to the different functions. Parking my mouse pointer in my Top Left corner exposes all app windows in the same group. Top Right exposes everything. Bottom Right exposes the Desktop, and Bottom Left turns on the screen saver.
I'll give you the point about the DVD Region locking. Discovered that pain in the ass when I went to the USA recently and grabbed a DVD in the airport to keep me amused on the flight back. Only allows you to switch Regions 4 times before you're stuck. Boo hiss:-(
Don't you think you're being just a touch nit picky with the rest though?
Plus you don't get anything like the amount of built in software with your Shuttle + Windows, compared to a Mac Mini. To get the same features as iLife 05 and iWork 05 on the Shuttle would add several hundred more $$'s to the retail price.
The fact is that no console has managed to maintain a lead over PCs in terms of hardware, simply due to the fact that PCs have much faster release cycles than consoles
Btw, that's the conclusion... the index if you want to go back to the start for a detailed view is at the bottom of the page.
If this guy is right, no one who develops games for this puppy is going to cross-platform it with a PC, cos the PC architecture will be way too slow (and employ different programming techniques) to make it worth their while.
I'm a bit puzzled as to the purpose of this port. What apps does KDE have that you can't find multiple flavors of available for Mac OS X already?
Does this actually do anything useful for the Mac user base, or is this just a case of a bunch of hackers doing something fun, for the sheer pleasure of it? Not that there is anything wrong with that of cause.. it's probably 95% of the driving force behind all Open Source projects.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh
Hmm
That's not born out by the numbers. The first dual-core Opterons will arrive at clock speeds of 1.8, 2.0, and 2.2GHz.
Note also that he original Opteron processor debuted two years ago today at speeds up to 2GHz. Two years later, the same processors are available at 2.6GHz--only a 600MHz increase. So Apple's incremental speed increase doesn't look so shabby by comparison.
I don't know what the numbers are for Intel off the top of my head. I expect its a similar story.
Intel & AMD may have got to dual-cores first, but they are hardly making any real industry waves yet. Its going to take time to build volumes and for app vendors to tune for them. We all know that a dual-core PowerPC chip is in the works, and it will arrive soon enough to keep Apple in the game.
You can't blame people for assuming
Hmm... how does that aphorism go
"To assume, makes an ASS out of U and ME"
Spoken by someone who's obviously never even been in the same room as a MacMini, let alone tried using one.
When Apple bundles an application, if you don't like it you can easily swap it out. Hell, even the Safari Web Browser Preferences, has a drop down "Default Web Browser" menu, allowing you to choose any other web browser you've got installed on the system. And if I want to delete Safari without any impact to the system, I can.
Can you do that in MS WIndows? Certainly not without fucking around under the hood, and the official Microsoft line is that you can't and shouldn't try.
Oh, and Apple isn't a monopoly either!
Will be interesting to see if they've improved it in Tiger.
Must be a slow work day too, as we're all reading them
Thankfully your views are in the minority. I loved it (so did everyone I know) and can't wait for the next series to air.
Oh yeah, I remember those as a kid too. Scared the hell out of me as well. If I remember right it was the only Dr Who story line that they either didn't repeat, or they cut it short because of the number of complaints they received from parents. It was giving the kids nightmares.
Of all the Dr Who monsters, the Green Death maggots were the scariest. Though those large spiders that attached themselves to your back and took over your mind were a close second.
Bear in mind that Tiger has been compiled using the Apple optimised version of the new GCC 4. GCC on PowerPC has so far not been as efficient as IBM's own PowerPC compilers, so there has been scope for improvement.
Given the amount of time that Apple's engineers have had to work on this deficit, along with the over all code improvements in GCC 4, and quite probable they've managed to find some extra performance from somewhere.
Never mind all the other profiling and tune ups they've been working on in the last year.
Not to mention the fact that it can't place Post Codes correctly. If I enter mine, it points to a place about 100 yards away, in someone's back garden! Not even on the road, never mind my street or my house.
The lack of street numbers limits it a bit too.
Then pick another distribution, cos Ubuntu is not for you.
LOL
I wish I still had my unused mod points from yesterday. You could have the lot for that little gem.
The one thing that's missing from your story.
Maybe you'll learn the most important lesson of your computing career from all this
Then when it f*cks up
There's no excuse for not taking backups before upgrading a system. It's basic, common sense, good practice.
Man, I so totally agree with you on that one. I've not used SuSE since 7.2, so I've no idea if its improved, but SuSEConfig was something I learned to hate. And why did Yast always insist on reconfiguring every dam component when all I did was update one tiny part of it.
In contrast, I really like Redhat's organisation of rc files. Everything under
* ML (some random IMAP reader)
Gracious, I've not thought about that mail reader for many many years. It must be 10-15 years old easy. As I remember it was written by a guy who eventually stopped developing when he joined Netscape in their early days. Don't remember his name.
It was a GUI app based on Motif, and was the first MUA I ever saw that implemented the concept of "Virtual Mail Folders". I was completely blown away by it at the time.
And now, here I sit on my Mac all these years later and I'm waiting for Apple to give me that functionality back again with Smart Mail Folders in Tiger. Hmm
K6-2 400
The main motivation for upgrading a system is because the workload you place on your old once increases and you need something faster to cope with it. So maybe its time now for him to buy a new PC. Just about anything you can get these days, even the cheapest PC you can buy is going to be an order of magnitude faster than that. Stick 512MB+ of memory in it and he's going to really notice the difference.
There's no sense in staying with an old system just for the sake of it. If its performance is getting in the way, get something faster. Prices are so low these days there really is no reason not to.
The simplest example is copy-and-paste. You can always do this. But the X-Windows scheme is quick and simple (and doesn't involve the keyboard at all); just three quick clicks or a click-swipe-release-click. OSX is materially slower, though slightly faster sometimes than Windows.
The one thing I never liked about X-windows cut'n paste is that it's too easy to mis-click and loose what you've selected (with no warning) and have to go back and re-select it again. Or to 'bounce' click on paste and write out the buffer contents twice. It just feels too flimsy. I was very grateful when KDE & Gnome came along and offered me the choice to use RMB cut/copy/paste, or Ctrl-X/C/V.
It's also habit forming, and I know I can rely on that habit to perform those operations whether I'm on Linux, Windows (hardly ever) or OSX. I just prefer it that way. Now I use OSX on the desktop exclusively and I enjoy the same functionality, with the exception on OSX being Cmd-X/C/V instead of ctrl.
Similarly, linux and other X-Windows systems implements focus-follows-pointer, and doesn't insist on raising a window when it gets focus. This is a huge time saver when you get used to it. As far as I can tell, neither Windows nor OS X permits this.
Focus-follows-mouse
And they don't have a way to lower a window either; in X-Windows it's a single click. This means that you can push a window to the bottom when you're done with it, and get quickly to the next window. With Windows or OS X, you have to go through a real song and dance to locate and raise a hidden window (which you often didn't want to hide).
OSX has "Hide" and Expose features which more than make up for this. Want to get a window out of the way or empty your screen a bit, just use Cmd-H. Click on the App icon in the Dock to bring it back again.
Expose really comes into its own I find when you use the Hot Corners to activate it. I've set my top left corner to expose windows belonging to the current live app. The top right corner to expose all windows on the desktop, and the bottom right to expose the bare desktop itself. You don't even have to take your hand off the mouse, just flick it into the appropriate corner then click the window you want to use. Very easy, and very quick.
And I suppose your dick's longer than mine, your dad can beat up my dad, and you've more hair on your chest too.
Why don't you come out from hiding behind that AC curtain and provide some hard facts to back up your outrageous claims, instead of wallowing in ad hominem and hearsay.
That you claim to be able to go from typing in a window on one desktop, then switching to another desktop while typing uninterrupted, without even pausing to to make sure your input focus on the second desktop is correctly placed; to me is both stupid and unbelievable. Besides, it would in no way be typical usage behavior of 99.9% of the people who use computers. And after 17 years in the industry, 13 of them working exclusively on Unix systems, I know what I'm talking about. And I'm certainly going to believe my own observations over your fantastic claims.
Have you actually used Desktop Manager? It may beat Linux in terms of visual effects, but in terms of usability it is far inferior. In particular it most certainly does not have all the features of the Linux equivalents as you claim
Yes, I'm using it now. And it has all the features I can think of, bar two. One you mentioned Pager window content (which is not a show stopper, or even one that took much notice of on X11) and the other (dragging windows between desktops) is being addresses by the maintainer. Again, that's not a show stopper as there are 4 other ways to move windows from one desktop to the next.
The first problem is that switching isn't fast enough. On Linux I can hit a hotkey to switch desktops and immediately follow it with some typing and the desktop will indeed instantaneously put the keystrokes into the new desktop
I don't know about your system, but on mine (with transitions disabled) switching desktops is so fast that it's done before I can get my fingers back to their normal typing position. Whether I use the mouse, or Hotkey combos. So that point is completely invalid for me.
Note that the above feature is much less useful in click-to-focus mode as opposed to move-to-focus mode, and the Mac can't even use the latter focus mode unless you add yet more third party software
Not relevent to me. For the many many years I've used X11 windowing environments (Motif, KDE, Gnome) I've always turned off what you call "move-to-focus mode". It's way too easy for the mouse to get accidentally nudged (by you or someone else) and to loose your current window focus. And all that super fast typing you were talking about earlier just disappears down the bit bucket, or even worse, into the neighboring app window the mouse just landed in. No
That quote completely captures the essence of why Desktop Manager will never be the equal of virtual desktops in Linux
LOL. Never is a very long time. And I'll bet that in the early days you could read lots of similar comments dotted around the code of the earlier Linux Desktop pagers. The truth is that with Desktop Manager, I can be just as productive as you on your Linux Desktop.
Ok
1) Max OS X also has another ace up its sleave. It's called Hide. If you've too many apps on the screen and you want to clear it up a bit, hit the Command-H keys and it hides all the windows for the current live app. They don't go into the minimized portion of the dock, they just vanish. But the app is still running (the black triangle below the app icon in the doc shows this).
Too much trouble for you to hide multiple apps? No problem. Select the app you want to keep and go to the first Menu item for that app on the menu bar. Select Hide Others and every other app on the desktop gets hidden in one fell swoop.
2) Download Desktop Manager. It's a Virtual Desktop app just like any you get on Linux, only better. At 322KB it takes minutes to download, then you click on the
- Cross Fade
- Zoom
- Reveal (a powerpoint like slide effect)
- Slide
- Warp & Fade
- Swap Over (very cool - old screen shrinks into the distance, new screen zooms towards you)
- Cube (also very cool - uses the same "switch user" rotating cube effect to switch screens)
- Warp
Plus
30-15 to Mac OS X
No SSH server
Open up the System Preferences app. On the "Internet & Network" row, click the "Sharing" icon. Look down the Services list for "Remote Login" and enable it. Done !
Autoupdate keeps on telling me I need 40mb of updates for an iPod and I don't own one.
Highlight the update when it appears in the list, then goto the Update menu option and choose "ignore update".
Image and font rendering isn't as good as pango/xorg
You have sky high standards mate. Image & font rendering are stunning on Mac OS X, and from the few pango'd screenshots I can find I can't see any difference
Expose is nice but more of a gimick than a useful feature
Huh? You're joking. Try using Mac OS X for some real work and get your screen a bit busy. Multiple terminal app windows, a brower or two, mail, etc and you'll soon discover just how useful it is. Especially if you map the Hot Corners of the screen to the different functions. Parking my mouse pointer in my Top Left corner exposes all app windows in the same group. Top Right exposes everything. Bottom Right exposes the Desktop, and Bottom Left turns on the screen saver.
I'll give you the point about the DVD Region locking. Discovered that pain in the ass when I went to the USA recently and grabbed a DVD in the airport to keep me amused on the flight back. Only allows you to switch Regions 4 times before you're stuck. Boo hiss
Don't you think you're being just a touch nit picky with the rest though?
Plus you don't get anything like the amount of built in software with your Shuttle + Windows, compared to a Mac Mini. To get the same features as iLife 05 and iWork 05 on the Shuttle would add several hundred more $$'s to the retail price.
The fact is that no console has managed to maintain a lead over PCs in terms of hardware, simply due to the fact that PCs have much faster release cycles than consoles
Ah, but have you read any of the reviews recently about the new IBM-Sony Cell architecture. Try reading this one and lets see if you're still singing the same tune:
Btw, that's the conclusion
If this guy is right, no one who develops games for this puppy is going to cross-platform it with a PC, cos the PC architecture will be way too slow (and employ different programming techniques) to make it worth their while.
I'm a bit puzzled as to the purpose of this port. What apps does KDE have that you can't find multiple flavors of available for Mac OS X already?
Does this actually do anything useful for the Mac user base, or is this just a case of a bunch of hackers doing something fun, for the sheer pleasure of it? Not that there is anything wrong with that of cause