Posted on 03/30/2009 12:03:41 PM PDT by martin_fierro
Edited on 03/30/2009 1:00:06 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
Macs are on UNIX systems. I have a Power Mac PC with the OS X Tiger. :) =^..^=
I bought an Apple II GS. A few months later, Apple pulled all support to ‘Apple’.
I’ll never buy a Mac.
I am a FRper who uses a Mac.
I have a PowerMac PC, which for its age, has had 3 rejuvinations in the last few years. Had the hardrive replaced, a new keyboard/mouse, plus a few years before both, OS X Tiger. It is a duel processor, 450. Not bad. :)
Try again. Apple has a very open developer's program. They give out lots of handy tools and handles to make writing Mac applications quite simple. The only reason an "average home-based computer geek" couldn't do what you say - because they haven't tried. Remember, under the hood of OSX is the purring of a UNIX heart (FreeBSD to be precise).
And while the retail software isle may not be overflowing with Mac titles, the freeware/shareware world is ticking right along. There are many apps I run that my Window's friends ask where they can get it.... and I have to sadly say... here is the URL, but it is Mac only...
I for one, though a rather serious Mac fan, will not try to argue that - at least in the consumer market, Apple hardware is more expensive. The absolute cheapest new Mac Laptop - the Macbook 13" white, is about $300 more than a relatively similar PC laptop. OF course, that is initial cost of ownership. But I not only look at the front-end cost, I look at long-term cost. What is the anticipated life span of a piece of hardware. I have found in my own experience that Apple hardware, with few exceptions, lasts longer, and has fewer issues throughout that life. Add to that the unaccounted for costs of Windows ownership - in security software and other maintenance, and things come out a lot closer in actual cost over time. So it is then a matter of - which one then better meets my needs? For me, the answer is simple - Mac.
I get such a kick out of the “security by obscurity” joke. If there were any accessible security holes in OSX, they would be exploited. Name ONE hacker who is looking for machines to take control of/use for nefarious purposes that would just ignore millions of computers just sitting there with gloating users thinking security is a non-issue?
Answer - ZERO.
There are bugs written for far more obscure targets than OSX.
Yep - gotta love those .DLL issues!
Now THAT post gets the award for the most asinine post at it’s point in the thread...
Well, sure! I was trying for subtly asinine. Several hours and dozens of posts later, you proved I succeeded, eh?
Actually, there is a small (and shrinking) number of web sites and/or web tools that just won't work with ANYTHING but Internet Explorer (Exploder?) and ActiveX controls. This is actually a very lazy way of building such sites and tools.
My step-father who is in Real Estate was having fits with the MLI online tool because he wanted to throw IE away (had had so many bugs and issues related to IE). Unfortunately, he has had to keep IE because the MLI app just won't work with any other browser. And this is the root of most internet "incompatibilities" - and a good percentage of them are not actual incompatibilities, but lazy developers who write their sties to reject browsers identified as Apple. You can figure these out by changing the user agent in Safari or Firefox to answer back it is IE on Windows... many of those sites then work...
Not bad at all!! I’d love to get a new Intel Core MacBook Pro, but since my G5 iMac and G4 iBook are still working fine, I don’t want to spend the money at this time.
Check out this article on pcmagazine.com. It tells you how to put your operating system and office suite on a bootable thumb drive.
Toward the end of the article is a section on tiny office suites. I downloaded one that is amazing. It's called Tiny USB Office. It takes up 2.5 megabytes of space on your thumb drive. It includes a fully functional word processor, Excel compatible spreadsheet, a database, an outliner, a pdf tool, a .zip tool, email, ftp, flowchart, data encryption, notepad, msn instant mesager and more.
Plug one of these babies into any pc and you are up and running!
So let me get this straight. In 1992, you bought a computer that was introduced in 1986, the last in a product line introduced in 1977. And because of that, seventeen years later, you'll never buy a computer from a completely different product line.
Stand your ground, dude.
In ‘87 I bought a computer, and Apple dropped support a few months later. No new software, no new hardware, and they wouldn’t allow third party vendors to work upgrades either.
20+ years later, I still refuse to buy from them. And since my Windows laptops work fine, why should I?
Make that ‘89...my laptops all work fine, but my fingers sometimes make mistakes.
The IIGS was produced until the end of '92, and had OS updates until at least July '93. I've never known Apple to drop support for a product in "a few months," let alone three years before they stop selling it, so I'm a little dubious of your version of events.
You made me curious, so I did a bit of reading. This site http://apple2history.org/history/ah11.html seemed to have the most detailed info I could find on short notice.
Although the II GS was produced until 1992, the last ROM update was ROM 3 in August ‘89. ROM 4 was supposed to be released, but kept being delayed and never happened. In fact, prior to my buying a GS, the President of Apple USA had let slip the plan to kill it...later clarified as that they would continue support. In reality, by 1990, it was clear the II GS had no corporate support. Applied Engineering and others tried, but couldn’t overcome the inertia at Apple.
The fact that Apple continued to sell a computer (until 1992) they had no intentions of supporting with upgrades or new software, isn’t something to boast about. Some of the third party vendors tried to keep putting out new applications, but most saw the writing on the wall and quit as well.
I was in England at the time, but I never saw an OS upgrade. More to the point, it became hard to get any applications. AE wanted to put out upgrades to boost speed and capability, but Apple had put all their apples in the Mac cart.
If I had known more about computers at the time, I wouldn’t have bought an Apple. In its favor, the existing software was good enough that I ran our squadron’s training shop in 1991 using my home computer...the USAF was using something called Enable (IIRC), and it was so awful that we couldn’t get anything done.
I'm a PC developer who's been getting into Mac development. Damn it's easy compared to Windows. In Windows I have to push anything more than the tiniest bit of processing onto another thread just so the OS won't think the application's locked up. Ever see an app freeze, and moving a window over its window leaves this white box and you're told "Application Not Responding"? And after a while it comes back to life? Yeah, that. It's because the program was doing some crunching (or even just waiting for an external event that normally takes a millisecond but this time is taking much longer) on the main thread which, due to some insane OS architect somewhere, also runs the UI painting and has to respond to Windows asking it how it's doing.
As far as I've seen, the concept doesn't exist in OS X development. Sweet.
BTW, if a geek wants to get into OS X development, the full XCode development environment comes free on your OS X disk, no paying for the full Visual Studio, no using a crippled free version of Visual Studio.
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