Posted on 05/27/2005 10:53:28 AM PDT by Swordmaker
I have been Macified. After not owning a Macintosh for more than 12 years I finally decided that the undeniable coolness and beauty of the hardware and particularly of OS X meant that it was time to get religion!
The beast, which arrived a couple of weeks ago, is a Power Mac G5 with dual 2-GHz processors and 1.5G bytes of RAM running OS X Tiger. What a gorgeous piece of engineering! It is an elegant design even under the hood: When you need to take off the side to, for example, add extra RAM, one latch frees the panel. And all the subsystems are plug-ins, making it incredibly easy to work on. Heaven.
Then when you run up OS X, again, wow. The operating system has a remarkable polish - just as if someone had thought about the design as a whole rather than finding and assembling a collection of spare parts and forcing them to fly in formation.
Anyway, back to the Macification: First I fooled around checking out all the cool new features. Tiger has a lot of really well-implemented new stuff that makes it significantly more powerful.
Next I decided to load my photographs into iPhoto. My photo collection is fairly large, weighing in at 14,618 files for a total of 18.7G bytes.
I copied the files to the Mac from my Windows desktop, an XP system that is misbehaving to the point where it is time to wipe it and start again. < digression > It is amazing that XP systems can get to a condition where it is easier to erase and re-install everything than diagnose and fix what's wrong. < /digression >
So now that I had the image files on the Mac I could start loading them into iPhoto. All seemed to go well with iPhoto doing its indexing and thumbnailing, then it finished - crash.
I restarted iPhoto. The program ran for a couple of minutes then, thud! I re-imported the photos. IPhoto finished the import, stayed up again for a couple of minutes, then thud. In the middle of this the 10.4.1 release of OS X came out, which apparently included some iPhoto improvements, but nothing I could find mentioned the problems I was seeing. I applied the upgrade and resorted to clearing out about 5,000 pictures and iPhoto seemed to become stable again.
Now, let's review: This was a brand-new machine, the system detected no problems and iPhoto hadn't been used before, but handling just less than 15,000 images made it blow up. And I thought Mac applications were generally considered to be better than Windows applications. Evidently this is not the case.
According to discussions I've had on lists and in Apple forums, there's no obvious explanation for my problems with iPhoto. According to Gary Stock, CTO of Exfacto: "From a Mac perspective, the surprising part is that iPhoto even tried, rather than warning you when you crossed some threshold or advising you to reduce the dataset."
Exactly! Which makes me think the problem is more fundamental than bad error-handling in the application, unless you are willing to believe that Apple's programmers are not very skilled.
From my experiences with Windows and now OS X, maybe when it comes to sophisticated, multimedia applications it doesn't matter what platform we're using. It may be the case that humans are not capable of creating stable software for the level of complexity required.
Maybe there's a sort of code-complexity limit that we have crossed in the latest generations of computer systems that makes software stability probabilistic rather than deterministic. If so, it makes for some interesting implications for systems engineering.
To begin with, managing systems in the future might be more like psychiatry than programming.
Despite these snafus I still love the Mac. It is just that my illusions are shattered.
Condolences to backspin@gibbs.com.
Sorry, you are wrong. Obviously you never used an OSX Macintosh. You read something about the dual booting and made an assumption based on ignorance.
While it was possible to dual boot into OSX or OS9 on earlier OSX Macs, it has not been the case since the introduction of the G5s. Apple provided this to allay the concerns of current users about the move to OSX that bore NO RELATIONSHIP to all preceding Mac OSes. In addition, there were, at first very few native OSX apps. By providing the ability to boot into the old OS, Apple assured that ALL apps that worked under what would be called "Mac Classic Mode" would be available to users during the inevitable changeover.
HOWEVER, from day one, it was possible to run the legacy applications from within OSX...in "Classic mode" which was a Mac OS9.2 emulator running as an application under OSX. There was no need to boot into OS9 unless you wanted to. Surprisingly, the OS9 classic mode was actualy FASTER than OS9 Native running on the same computers! No one had to spend $600 to upgrade their PhotoShop to be able to run it in OSX."
I had several hundred applications on my old OS9 system that I moved over to my OSX installation merely by copying my entire Applications folder... I then started going through them, one by one, checking if they worked... they did. In fact, I have applications from 1987 that work perfectly fine.
Concerning Apples great software applications, they had to develop iLife to appeal to casual users. Apple had nothing to bundle with their computers.
More ignorance, Solitary. Apple has always bundled software with their consumer level computers...
But I guess with Apple releasing 4 major "upgrades" to OS X in the last 18 months doesn't mean they aren't patching holes in the OS? They're just hiding their crap under a bed of roses. But of course, Apple users have to purchase their patch's as upgrades.
Uh, Solitary, did I miss three upgrades in the last 18 months? Apple has introduced three major upgrades to OSX since its introduction almost five years ago.
Secunia was roundly panned by the industry for several breathless press releases about the vulnerability of Mac OSX... It was pointed out that Secunia wanted to sell Mac anti-virus software. Most of their security issues required a concatenation of events highly unlikely to occur on a Mac with a default OSX installation. In other words, they were loaded with "Ifs". If this happened and then this happened, then if a malicious server was present on your local network then if you rebooted your computer after installing and granting permission to run a malicious program, then, and only then, could the Mac be compromised. Many of them were laughable.
Who says there has never been a "creditable" breach of OS X?
Anyone who is knowledgeable of Macs... and Unix.
The reason why OS X is so "secure" is that it's a niche player (5% market share).
Ah! The "Security by Obscurity" excuse. Of course. Right. There are currently more than 14,000,000 OSX Macs... according to Newsweak, there are 25,000,000 but we know about Newsweak's fact checking, don't we... installed throughout the world. Last year hackers wrote viruses attacking a ROUTER/HARDWARE FIREWALL with an installed base of 39,000, the Witty worm was written targeting an installed base of under 400,000 computers and infected EVERY one of them in 45 minutes, there are viruses out there that target specific pieces of hardware and or software with a far smaller installed base than the 14,000,000 Macs. Many crackers work for fame... and think of the fame that would attach to the cracker who violated the inviolate Mac!
Even before OSX, Macs were generally pretty secure... in fact, in February of 1997, a Swedish company offered a 100,000 Kronor ($16,500 US) for anyone who could "Crack the Mac". The prize went unclaimed despite thousands of attempts during the two months the contest ran. Recently an American company offered $50,000 ($100,000 if someone from Norton was the successful invader) in a similar contest which was canceled in less than two days when someone pointed out that they were encouraging the commission of a felony!
Well, Apple will tell you its unexpandable as well... but they want you to buy a new Mac instead of upping your old one!
Her high school students might agree with you...
She can literally have them thrown into solitary if they don't behave.
You made my point for me, when OSX shipped; you had to use the dual boot capability to use your legacy software! So what’s the difference if later versions of the Mac and OSX could run legacy software in a different mode? So now you just had to run an emulator for your legacy apps? Oh joy….
More ignorance, Solitary. Apple has always bundled software with their consumer level computers...
No…what I said is that there are very few third party applications to go along with the Apple for them to bundle with the Mac. Apple had to develop iLife to appeal to the average consumer. How about this…go to Best Buy, Circuit City, Sears, Walmart, CompUSA or Fry’s and see how third party applications are available for the Mac? Walk down the isle of a Best Buy and see how many applications are available for Windows. How many printers, digital cameras, scanners, digital camcorders bundle software for the Apple? Not drivers, but software. I bought a Canon digital camera two months ago and it has a great software bundle, none which will work with a Mac. Sure it has the Mac drivers, but nothing to edit, make albums or stitch pictures for panoramas, just the Mac drivers.
Sorry, OSX was released in March 2001, I guess an upgrade at $130, you may want to forget that…I understand the Searchlight feature in Tiger is excellent, it’ll actually searches text in Acrobat files…Google, Yahoo and Microsoft desktop search utilities already offer that and their free.
Most of their security issues required a concatenation of events highly unlikely to occur on a Mac with a default OSX installation. In other words, they were loaded with "Ifs". If this happened and then this happened, then if a malicious server was present on your local network then if you rebooted your computer after installing and granting permission to run a malicious program, then, and only then, could the Mac be compromised. Many of them were laughable.
Those same “Ifs” security threats are what account for about 90% of all Windows security alerts. Of course it’s like the liberal “MSM” media, it’ll be over blown when it happens to nasty old Microsoft and Windows, hushed up when it happens to Apple.
Solitary, READ the rest of what I posted in Post 81:
Swordmaker - "HOWEVER, from day one, it was possible to run the legacy applications from within OSX...in "Classic mode" which was a Mac OS9.2 emulator running as an application under OSX. There was no need to boot into OS9 unless you wanted to. Surprisingly, the OS9 classic mode was actualy FASTER than OS9 Native running on the same computers! No one had to "spend $600 to upgrade their PhotoShop to be able to run it in OSX.""I had several hundred applications on my old OS9 system that I moved over to my OSX installation merely by copying my entire Applications folder... I then started going through them, one by one, checking if they worked... they did. In fact, I have applications from 1987 that work perfectly fine."
Now how does that make "your point"? Apple included the dual boot to allay fears that OSX in Classic (an application that runs under OSX) would not run ALL of the legacy apps that existed. It was not just in "later versions" of OSX; Classic was available from "day one" in OSX.0. So now you just had to run an emulator for your legacy apps? Oh joy….
Again read what I wrote:
"...OS9 classic mode was actualy FASTER than OS9 Native running on the same computers!"
On my system, because I have a legacy app that I use quite often, OS9 Classic is always running in the background... it starts up during the OSX boot. It is transparent for me to use any legacy app.
I bought a Canon digital camera two months ago and it has a great software bundle, none which will work with a Mac. Sure it has the Mac drivers, but nothing to edit, make albums or stitch pictures for panoramas, just the Mac drivers.
That's very strange... one of my Mac business clients uses Canon digital cameras and all of them came with Mac software... up to and including his new Digital SLR which came with Canon's Digital Photo Professional. He regularly stitches panaramas on his OSX Mac.
Again this massive Apple conspiracy of silence about Mac security exploits... where are they, Solitary.
Name them.
Point us to an article about Mac Malware in the wild where users have been impacted.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.