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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 6:37:46 AM
I use a Pismo 400 with only 384mb of ram. I find OSX has been much better and increased my productivity and lessened the amount of crap I have to deal with on a computer. It doesn't crash. I don't have to quit apps. I can multitask. I can read my long bookmarks list and still have processing going on in the background. I get the spinning beachball but at least I can still use all the other apps on the computer. Why are stories like this so rampant on the new powerpage? Over the past couple of months more and more rantings have been posted. Save the internet some bandwidth and stop all these whiners... or at least pick the complaints a bit more carefully!

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 6:38:58 AM
Yea! Everyone knows Quark is the most professional app around! What could anyone do without Quark and Office?

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 6:41:53 AM
I have been saying that since X came out and everyone accused me of bashing Apple. I was just stating facts. Anyway, for simple everyday computing, I use Jaguar. When I need speed and performance, sorry Apple I boot into 9. Even with the occasional lock up and re-boot, I can get more done in 9 than X. BTW, my Mac is 6 months old so it is not too old or outdated

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 6:50:11 AM
I am a scientist, and regularly use a Unix application (ARB), running under X-windows, on a 15-inch screen G4 iMac. There is no Mac native version of this software. I am very pleased to use OSX and don't find it slow.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 6:58:33 AM
I understand people's concern about performance. But you also have to understand that Mac OS 9.x did not get its performance overnight either. Yes its been two years or so since 10.0 was released. But you have to realize that in terms of OS development, Apple has done a phenominal job so far. Apple will fix the performance issues. The performance improvements between 10.0 and 10.2.1 were great, even on my machine which doesn't have DP and doesn't even have Altivec. I'm sure there still TONS of optimizations that Apple hasn't gotten around to yet. Remeber that this OS is a way more complicated than 12 guys in a room working on mac os 1.x.

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I'm bored of rants
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 7:08:17 AM
This is just a boring, poorly written, rant (Don't you even read before posting?). I use Final Cut a lot, Office and graphics stuff daily and at the same time. The person who wrote this clearly cannot comprehend the benefits of multi tasking and stability. Some of my render files take 2 or 3 hours to complete. What do I do, leave my computer alone because it can only do one thing at a time? - no, I switch to Word and get on with admin or my PhD thesis, or work on the DVD Studio Pro project. Yes, it may be slower switching between apps (I never really noticed- you all need to get a life), but compare that nano second with the five or six crashes I used to have each day in OS9. Believe me, that is no exaggeration. I used to save things every moment, and towards the end I used to hate OS9. I'd rather work an OS with so much promise than one that's so clearly at the end of the line. I agree with the bloke above- stop publishing this rubbish, get back to the old days and stick to real mac stuff. Good solid bench tests are fine, but forget OS9- it's gone, dead, history and gasping its last breath. Look forward like the rest of us. And get out more.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 7:16:09 AM
It is a disappointment. OS X is significantly slower. At home it generally is not a big deal to have to sit and watch the spinning cursor time after time. At work we have a whole department delaying deployment because of the numerous issues still aparent in Mac OS X. Thats all fine -- all our applications work under OS 9 -- but come next year when it is time to start upgrading hardware some serious decisions will have to be made. Decisions that would never have been difficult in the past. And talk about productivity. My God what happened to file sharing? I know increased security is important but some balance with ease of use is required. File sharing under all previous versions of Mac OS was a no brainer. Under OS X its a nightmare.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 7:21:26 AM
So it takes a few seconds more to download some pix from a camera? Maybe. My overall impression of OS X is that a large number of routine operations are surprisingly faster than Mac OS 9. Then there are the operations you can't time, like navigating through servers and folders to find where those Nikon pix got stored. How much time do you allocate to each OS 9 operation to make up for the crashes? On balance I would say that OS X is faster in use. The only reason I don't use it full time is that certain modem and printer drivers aren't available. Yes, Pismo user is right, this discussion does not belong on powerpage.org, please put it somewhere else. Cheers Andrew

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 7:26:51 AM
I will live with the so-called speed issue on OS X. I am very happy with the speed when I consider all of the other benifits of OS X and related applications. I may not be using all of the high end applications like many other Mac users, but for what I want the computer to do, it does it very well and fast enough for the mean time. I am finding that I get more done just by using Sherlock 3 and Watson which aren't available anywhere else. If Apple continues to make the improvements like they have, OS X will be kicking some major butt in terms of what we can do and how fast we can do it. In the mean time, be patient. Apple has a lot of stuff they are "sitting on" until the economy kicks back in. Why introduce killer computers when nobody is buying them anyway?

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 7:27:55 AM
Eh. I'm going to have to agree, to a certain extent. What I hate most about OS X is the speed of the GUI. Yes, it's pretty, but it *really* shouldn't be so sluggish. So in that respect, OS 9 is a lot faster. On the other hand, I like the UNIX core, and the fact that there are so many software developers working on porting free software to the OS. But, sadly, I think my next computer will be a PC. Yes, OS X is cool. But Windows XP is multitudes faster on comparable hardware, and said hardware is a hell of a lot cheaper (and more likely to be compatable - I so tired of my *unsuppported* Sony 32X burner telling me it can't recognize CD's that worked just two seconds ago under OS X). A long time ago, Apple had something special - a fast machine capable of doing desktop publishing. Then they had Altivec, which, under very controlled environments, would trounce a PC doing Photoshop stuff. Now they've got a pretty GUI that slows down what should be a blazingly fast operating system, and which is unsuitable for desktop publishing environments, and which gets trounced by new PC's no matter how you stack the cards. So yes, I love my Mac. But I don't think I'll be buying another. G5, indeed. Hello, $4,000+ price-tag. Give me a break.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 7:28:59 AM
I push a lot of files through the network, so 8-12 MB (not Mb) per second transfer speed is the only saving grace for OS X. Wake up, peasants! Just run two systems side-by-side with the same application and compare X and 9.22. I dare you to tell me that OS X native application is faster.

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I am worried
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 7:30:31 AM
Apple really has the chicken-and-egg problem here, big time. They had to drop OS 9 ASAP to drive X application development and user adoption-- but the problem here is that, while X has made great strides since 10.0, 10.2 is only barely ready for prime time. As a system integrator who specializes in Macs, this upgrading nonsense is giving me sleepless nights and prematurely gray hair (literally). I have one client who drank the Kool Aid in July and moved to 10.1.x (very much against my advice to wait until ALL their damned critical apps were Carbonized) and I'm having all kinds of trouble solving their problems. The rest are still chugging along happily in OS 9.x, so I'll have time to better plan out how they should migrate. As if I didn't have enough to worry about having to support a still-unfinished OS, Quark has been pissing in my punch bowl at every turn-- first by being practically the only sticking point that mandates that the kludgey Classic crap has to exist on the machines I roll out, thus making my life more difficult. Now, they're going to force migration by making 6 an OS X-only version. I'm hoping this move pisses off the service bureaus enough that they're motivated to start supporting InDesign, since their systems will already be in upheaval. Quark needs to take a fall for all the crap they've pulled over the years. If I wanted all this frustration to be a part of my daily life, I would've become an MCSE. Apple, if you're taking away OS 9 in January, you need to get on the stick and make sure X is a lot more polished by then.

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Speed is relative
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 7:35:21 AM
Using an older Mac OS 8.6 computer makes you appreciate where OS X does give you an advantage. True multitasking especially when launching multiple apps and trying to use the computer at the same time really shines on Mac OS X while Classic Mac OS falls on its face. The time spent waiting for Mac OS 9 to let go long enough for the user to switch apps or work in the Finder is almost instantly recaptured in Mac OS X. Yes OS X will never be as fast as OS 9 on the SAME hardware, but its not the SAME OS. OS X is radically different, works much more efficiently with the resources it does have (CPU, I/O, drives) and has some tradeoffs (high RAM/disk space requirements). If you want a Photoshop filter to lock you out of the computer use Mac OS 9. If you want to reboot after IE dies, use Mac OS 9. If you want to get real work done without waiting for the damn computer to get out of the way use Mac OS X.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 7:48:22 AM
This article is right on target. I posted something similar over at MacNN and got flamed like crazy. Lots of people are in denial about this. I am in the the ad business and it is a really serious problem. My firm's Avid systems are now all PC-based, for example. Far from making inroads, the Mac will continue to lose ground in small, creative businesses if the performance issue is not addressed.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 7:52:22 AM
I would have been very surprised if MacOS X had been as fast as MacOS 9 in all respects. It's the same thing in the Windows world. NT is much slower than Windows 95 and 98. Windows 2000 is slower than the previous versions. Windows XP is a hog compared to Windows 2000... It's pretty logical that adding new functionality increases the system requirements. My "favorite" MacOS was MacOS 6.0.3 without "MultiFinder" or whatever they called it. I ran it on a Mac LC. It was so fast that I pressed the power-button, pulled out the chair to sit down, and before I had sat down, the system was ready to use. But I couldn't even run two programs at the same time, so I moved on to more powerful systems and more powerful Macs. Certain things are slower (like starting up) but, boy, can I do much more today.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 7:53:39 AM
I just want to echo what others have said. I don't sit at my computer with a stop watch, timing how long it takes to for a filter to do its thing. I get real work done. And bottom line is that I get more work done in less time when I'm working under OS X. I launch Photoshop and while the splash screen is up I'm also launching InDesign and preparing text in Word and collecting graphics and information from Mail and the web. In OS 9, I'd be staring at the Photoshop splash screen. That's the only benchmark I care about. (I'm on a G4/450 Sawtooth with 1GB RAM and a Radeon 8500 video card).

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 7:56:44 AM
After reading this article, I did my own test. I had iChat, Entourage, Explorer, ElectricImage Universe, MS Word, Quicktime Player and iMovie all going at the same time. I switched easily between them and never got a beachball. I have an older dual G4-450 with 10.2.1and feel it works very well. I have recently rebuilt my permissions as suggested in a recent Macintouch article: "Run the repair disk permissions script in disk utility on the boot drive. It will fix tons of permissions with numerous directories. Since following this advice I've seen a marked speedup in booting and help viewer as well as a snappier finder and no freezes!" I also run 10.2.1 on my 400Mhz Powerbook and don't see the beachball as described by the readers above. Maybe the difference is that I don't run Classic on either computer, so maybe that is the difference. In any case, I am very happy with 10.2.1

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:00:56 AM
Apple is FORCING us designers to 1) Buy upgrades to Quark at probably $399 or $499 knowing Quark, 2) Adjust to a new font handling system, 3) Live without Acrobat, 3) Learn a new OS feature, 4) Use features that don't improve performance for our job - Dock, moving trash, multiuser logins and related issues, new finder that lacks labels (which we use to prioritize jobs), This is not simply Apple giving us a new model car to drive. OSX is basic tools and apple wants us to throw all our tools away and start over new, just so they can claim death of a product that is key to revenue for hundreds of housands of publishers and art departments. Apple is making the biggest mistake ever by FORCING us to migrate. Now they're dipping into my revenue stream. It won't happen.

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Underlying Performance is fine...
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:04:10 AM
You've got to remember the incredible overhead that the OS X GUI is placing on OS X. Aqua is great but its memory bandwidth and processor utilization is significant. Apple is the only company right now that is actually utilizing todays hardware to actually *do* something. The reason OS 9/Windows is so fast is that it isn't actually doing anything other than the application task. OS X's "eye candy" is weighing it down. BUT IM NOT COMPLAINING! This is exactly why I have a Mac as my main machine. This is why I had an original 128k Mac- even though its kick-butt processor was weighted down by all that GUI overhead. A Mac by definition is more than speed. It is creating an elegant environment for getting work done. That elegance pays off in real productivity- the false sense of SPEED that OS 9 gives is totally illusory. Yes windows snap open and closed- but when the app crashes and you have to restart the whole machine to get stable again you are losing _minutes_ not _milliseconds_ - give me OS X any day of the week!

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes (OS 9 does not compete with XP)
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:07:29 AM
Mac OS 9 is no longer a competitive operating system. It gains its performance by being unstable and full of security holes. In the days when the competition was Windows98, this was fine (or at least comparable). Now that XP is the OS of choice in the PC community, Apple simply HAD to do better. OS X is the kind of modern, robust operating system that Macintosh has always needed. Of *course* there is a performance cost for this. Trust me, you WANT to pay this price. I was an early user of Macintosh computers, but switched when Windows based PCs won the performance race. Mac OS X has brought me *back* to the Macintosh (for everything but games, of course) since it is finally real enough to be a useful target for the software I work on. With a Unix core, and robust threading, I can write for OS X in much the same way I can write for other operating systems. Frankly, the Macintosh market share did not justify the kind of effort it would have taken to deal with OS 9.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: rhpetersen (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:12:26 AM
While I agree that OS-X is FAR more CAPABLE (and much prettier) as an OS, I use my Macs every day, all day to earn a living, and OS 9.2.2 is much faster. I don't need or want all of the "GeeWhiz" features like syncing a Palm, iPod, my Powerbook and the new fridge and microwave so I know what time dinner is. I want a computer and OS that deliver TRUE SPEED in Photoshop, Quark XPress and other NECESSARY apps and utilities. Apple may be concentrating on 'what sells', but, hopefully they will use that capital to pursue what is needed. I (we) understand the need to increase sales, but Apple needs to remember who the faithful are.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:12:59 AM
I'm a proffesional graphic and web designer, I've switched to Jaguar a month ago, and I have to go back to OS 9 because the performance of the system, for me it's imposible work in OS X, I use fireworks, Photoshop, Freehand, Dreamweaver. I agree with the article, it's totally true.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:14:53 AM
OS 9 and OS X aren't comparable end of sentence . it's like comparing the car at it's debute to the old trusty horse !

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:15:21 AM
This is nonsense. The OS X I use is many times faster than the OS9. Why? Because I am not spending half my day rebooting. I don't freeze up anymore, and if I have to restart a crashed app, it only takes a few seconds to have it back on. I can start from scratch, VPC5 and an application in 8 seconds. I can start other apps in even less time. This is where I measure speed and not if a dot shows up on my word processor 1 nanosecond faster in an old OS. Let us get real here. When OS X first came out two years ago, I jumped right on it. I have used it since then. Computer freeze was one very large headache. My headache is gone.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:20:44 AM
Let's see. A co-operative multi-tasking system is faster than a pre-emptive one? Think about it a minute.... that's it .... it's bound to be so for the foreground app. No other processes running stealing cycles from the foreground one unless it lets them. Why is this news to anyone? Application switching is faster in OS9. Again let's apply some logic here. In OS 9 one app is switched into the background, effectively losing it's ability to do anything unless it's given a few spare cycles, the other app is switched into the foreground taking over the whole machine, except when it wants to let other things do stuff. In OS X when you change the foreground application the background one can continue to do things at the same priority. The processor is shared. Why is this news? Apple aren't trying to sell OS X as being faster than OS 9. In fact it's unlikely that it will ever get to be as fast as OS 9. It will get faster though. Apple operating systems have usually got faster with point releases. IIRC 7.6 was faster than 7.5 as was 8.6 to 8.5 etc. OS X allows me to still be productive with my computer when one program has some heavy processing to do. For example I can still edit in Word whilst rendering video to MPEG-2. Under OS 9 I had to go and find a different computer to work on. It may take a little longer but overall I get more done. I'll stick with OS X.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:22:13 AM
Is this guy insane? His problem with Mac OS X isn't speed, it's system requirements. My old Lombard is a slug in Jaguar, but fairly useable in 9. Of course, I only use it to Rendezvous-share my USB printer. On the other side, I use a PowerBook G4 DVI 667 using Jaguar and a 933 MHz PowerMac G4 Quicksilver running 9 daily. No competition. The PowerBook, with its slower components, solidly rapes the Quicksilver. Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Final Cut Pro, anything. This article makes me sick. Yes, Mac OS X has high requirements, but if you meet them, it's heaven. Please remove this article from your respectable site!

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:24:07 AM
What pisses me off is Launching 'top' from the command line and seeing MS Word with 10% of the CPU, Flash with 15%, and PhotoShop with 15%. And they are doing absolutely NOTHING! Not 'multitasking' for me in the background Just sitting there idly waiting for me to use them. And during this, Adobe GoLive takes three seconds for mouse click to be registered. I have to train myself to add little pauses in everything I do because these poorly behaved Carbon apps all battle for CPU time to manage their broken event loops. OOOOOH it pisses me off. I have to go around and quit apps just because they all can't be running together. And there is no way to know either without firing up the command shell. My co-workers (all graphic designers) come over to my machine and when they see me working say "dude, why's your computer so slow?" As far as the Graphic designers go, Quark is a minor issue compared to fonts. Until 10.2 the font system was utterly broken. Over the years we've invested thousands of dollars in PostScript fonts. And none of them worked at all in X. How is this possible? PostScript fonts? Isn't this the core market of Apple and they don't have a working solution for graphic designers until the second year of release? Luckily it is no fixed but it still makes no sense to me why it was broken in the first place. Priorities are askew.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:24:41 AM
Nice little ill-informed chest thumping. Yes, if you spend your day resizing windows and gauging your performance on that benchmark, OS 9 is faster. For every other aspect - App Launching, Rendering, Copying Files, Searches, Web Browsing, etc. - OS X is faster. In many cases, you will need new hardware to benefit from these gains, but that's the cost of admission to new technology folks. Running OS X on a G4/500 is akin to running WindowsXP on a PII-500 - yeah, it'll run, but it's speed will be an issue. Quit yer whining, and buy a new DP867. Once you sell you current G4 on eBay, you'll probably only have to shell out about $1000 for the difference, and it will definitely be worth it.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:28:37 AM
What pisses me off is Launching 'top' from the command line and seeing MS Word with 10% of the CPU, Flash with 15%, and PhotoShop with 15%. And they are doing absolutely NOTHING! Not 'multitasking' for me in the background Just sitting there idly waiting for me to use them. And during this, Adobe GoLive takes three seconds for mouse click to be registered. I have to train myself to add little pauses in everything I do because these poorly behaved Carbon apps all battle for CPU time to manage their broken event loops. OOOOOH it pisses me off. I have to go around and quit apps just because they all can't be running together. And there is no way to know either without firing up the command shell. My co-workers (all graphic designers) come over to my machine and when they see me working say "dude, why's your computer so slow?" As far as the Graphic designers go, Quark is a minor issue compared to fonts. Until 10.2 the font system was utterly broken. Over the years we've invested thousands of dollars in PostScript fonts. And none of them worked at all in X. How is this possible? PostScript fonts? Isn't this the core market of Apple and they don't have a working solution for graphic designers until the second year of release? Luckily it is no fixed but it still makes no sense to me why it was broken in the first place. Priorities are askew.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:29:13 AM
I do and I don't agree with this article. Here's where it's on target. Apple needs to quit adding features to what is already an exceptionally full-featured operating system with a very strong user interface, and start focusing on performance. Like the GUI, for example. Apple has unnecessarily slowed it way down by making windows zoom in real time as you re-size them. Why not just revert to the OS 9/Windows XP system of showing the window's size through a dashed line as you resize? It would solve the problem immediately. Note that some software vendors, like Adobe, have already done this on their own initiative -- kudos to Adobe. The key components of a digital hub concept -- the iApps, Rendezvous with Windows, interoperability between cell phones, PDAs and so on -- are now all in place; so why not put some serious effort into making all these components work properly? I'm told there are still a few networking bugs, I know first hand that SCSI support is still a work in progress, and above all the printer drivers need work, most of all the part where it takes 15 seconds for the dialog box to come up when you select print, and another 10 seconds to hand off the print job. But OS X's stability and multitasking, in my experience, have by default addressed many of the performance problems. I recently had to rush off a bunch of 13x19 giclee prints to restock the gallery where I sell them as I balance my photo print sales/hobby with doing a PhD in political science. In OS X, once the image was handed off to the printer, it was not time wasted; I was able to go right on working in Photoshop, or in MS Word for schoolwork as necessary. And what's more the MS Word performance, even though I'm still stuck on Classic for Office for another month or so, didn't suffer badly while the actual printing was in progress. And that's on a G4/466, albeit with 1.25 GB of RAM and a fast hard drive. In OS 9, I'd have been tied up in a single task for a full day. Still, the pattern of my usage tends to include only one or two graphical apps at any time (Photoshop and InDesign), along with MS Word. Clearly, from this forum, when the equation changes to several graphical apps, there are problems in OS X that should not be occurring, given the system's stability in multitasking. I would assume that these problems derive a) from mixing Classic and Carbon applications and b) from those pokey printer drivers. As for delays in switching applications, I would hope that once everyone is migrated to Carbon, this problem will go away. Certainly, those apps that are already Carbonized on my computer seem to play nice with one another. In short, my message to Apple is Optimize! I trust that the upcoming 10.2.2 and 10.2.3 do this.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:29:52 AM
The base a test on downloading images from a Nikon D1 is a bad choice for comparison. Nikon last week announced a new version of their utilities for their D-series cameras, to be released in mid-November, which were written ground-up for OS X and Jaguar. The previous versions were very badly-done ports of the Wintel versions of these utilities - they ran poorly on OS X. A variety of graphics equipment manufacturers (Nikon, Epson, Canon, to name a few) were waiting for Jaguar to have stable Firewire and printer APIs before committing the resources to upgrade their software. If you go to some of the digital photography forums, folks who've had access to beta versions of this software say it's like night and day.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:30:03 AM
OS9 maybe faster than OSX but I don't use OS9 because it can't do what OSX does. I'm a software developer (Java/DB/web) and pre-OSX there was simply no way for me to run Apache/JBoss/Tomcat, MySQL/Postgre (Oracle =), and an editor all at the same time, or at all. The point I've always make to people when they ask me what kind of computer to get is that they should select which ever platform allows then to be the most productive. For some people they're not concerned about ease of use but instead are focused on pure speed, while for others the reverse is true. Some people need a specific application or a set of tools and that will dictate what platform they go with. Pre-OSX I wasn't able to really use my Mac for any serious work since it didn't support all the technologies I listed above so I used Win2k and Linux. If you need to to render images in Photoshop and lay out pages in Quark then stick with OS9, but for me OSX is the only way to go.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:32:41 AM
I push a lot of files through the network, so 8-12 MB (not Mb) per second transfer speed is the only saving grace for OS X. Wake up, peasants! Just run two systems side-by-side with the same application and compare X and 9.22. I dare you to tell me that OS X native application is faster.

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of course it's slower
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:33:08 AM
The fastest Mac I've ever seen is a souped up Mac II running system 6 that I ran across 2 years ago. That computer booted faster than any Power Mac ever made and what it could do it did very quickly. System 7 was slower than System 6 on a given machine, and also used a lot more RAM. And try running a Power Mac G1 (61-71-8100) on it's original OS and on OS 9. I think you will find 9 noticeably slower than what the G1 came with. Normally computers get faster and software gets slower, that's just the way things work in the computer industry. Windows is certainly no exception. The emperor has been walking around naked for years, no big news there. Steve Job's original Macintosh had so much of it's resources devoted to the GUI tha it could barely do anything, so that's not big news either. The Mac plus was about the third or fourth hardware release running Mac software. It represented the maturing of the hardware. Right now hardware is lagging behind OS X. To me that's the only problem with OS X, and it's a typical and predicable one.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:40:08 AM
I do and I don't agree with this article. Here's where it's on target. Apple needs to quit adding features to what is already an exceptionally full-featured operating system with a very strong user interface, and start focusing on performance. Like the GUI, for example. Apple has unnecessarily slowed it way down by making windows zoom in real time as you re-size them. Why not just revert to the OS 9/Windows XP system of showing the window's size through a dashed line as you resize? It would solve the problem immediately. Note that some software vendors, like Adobe, have already done this on their own initiative -- kudos to Adobe. The key components of a digital hub concept -- the iApps, Rendezvous with Windows, interoperability between cell phones, PDAs and so on -- are now all in place; so why not put some serious effort into making all these components work properly? I'm told there are still a few networking bugs, I know first hand that SCSI support is still a work in progress, and above all the printer drivers need work, most of all the part where it takes 15 seconds for the dialog box to come up when you select print, and another 10 seconds to hand off the print job. But OS X's stability and multitasking, in my experience, have by default addressed many of the performance problems. I recently had to rush off a bunch of 13x19 giclee prints to restock the gallery where I sell them as I balance my photo print sales/hobby with doing a PhD in political science. In OS X, once the image was handed off to the printer, it was not time wasted; I was able to go right on working in Photoshop, or in MS Word for schoolwork as necessary. And what's more the MS Word performance, even though I'm still stuck on Classic for Office for another month or so, didn't suffer badly while the actual printing was in progress. And that's on a G4/466, albeit with 1.25 GB of RAM and a fast hard drive. In OS 9, I'd have been tied up in a single task for a full day. Still, the pattern of my usage tends to include only one or two graphical apps at any time (Photoshop and InDesign), along with MS Word. Clearly, from this forum, when the equation changes to several graphical apps, there are problems in OS X that should not be occurring, given the system's stability in multitasking. I would assume that these problems derive a) from mixing Classic and Carbon applications and b) from those pokey printer drivers. As for delays in switching applications, I would hope that once everyone is migrated to Carbon, this problem will go away. Certainly, those apps that are already Carbonized on my computer seem to play nice with one another. In short, my message to Apple is Optimize! I trust that the upcoming 10.2.2 and 10.2.3 do this.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:42:03 AM
man oh man oh man. this writer is smoking crack. BIG deal if things take a few more miliseconds. GIVE IT TIME MAN its a relatively new OS and it KICKS OS 9's butt in every other important thing. How much time does it take to reboot your OS 9 box when your browser can't read a page and brings down your whole machine? I never never never have to reboot with 10.2 and I rarely if ever see the beach ball and I am a developer with photoshop, IE, BBEdit, Mail, Illustrator, Itunes all open and not to mention Apache web server and MySQL database running - try that on OS 9. I just wish these retro luddites would STOP YER WHINING and get with the next century already! OS X is a far far far better OS than 9 will ever be. heck win xp is a better os than 9. I will never ever use 9 again - i even REMOVED CLASSIC.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes (here's my OS10.1.5 comments)
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:42:28 AM
Agreed, although I'm running OS10.1.5 so perhaps some of my comments are no longer appropriate. Here goes anyway: I have a 500Mhz Tibook, and OSX suffers from the following problems: a) It breaks just about every human factors guideline, from unclear confirmation dialog buttons (Aqua is to blame) b) Sluggish behaviour c) Windows that take up far more space than under OS9 leaving little workspace on the desktop d) Fact it is near impossible to find anything, with files stuck in various folders and user areas. e) Very difficult to backup some files and folders due to permissions problems and bugs f) Various applications quit without warning, and while the OS may not crash, you still lose your work, and sometimes do have to do a restart. g) The windows do not resize preperly. OS9 was far nicer as a user experience and therefore OSX should have retained the OS9 GUI, while introducing the benefits of OSX's Unix based core. I am an interface, graphic and web designer by the way, and ALL the new OSX apps (Dreamweaver, Photoshop etc) are sluggish and the buttons are too fiddly to click because of the silly Aqua 3D effect. Awful! What were Apple thinking? Why didn't they hire a GUI expert? (Flames to alex@owonder.com) P.S. I will NOT pay >$100 to upgrade and 'fix' problems. It should be free, like it is when an auto manufacturer announces a recall due to problems during manufacturer. OSX is an unfinished product. (iPhoto and iTunes by the way are fantastic. And that is about it.)

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:42:40 AM
First off, a 500 mhz machine is really just too slow for good performance with OS X. I consider 700 mhz bottom line for this. Sorry, that's just the way it is. System 8 slowed my 040 system down a lot too, but that's what happens when you try to run newer software on old machines. It really all comes down to this. If you want a good user experience with OS X, you're going to have to buy a machine fast enough to run it properly. Excelsior!

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:43:41 AM
The common thread that I'm picking up is: previous users are clucking about sluggish performance issues, some very real and others not so real. Take a first time user on OS X. They don't notice anything wrong. It's perception. Unlearn your old habits and expectations and explore anew. It's different and shouldn't be compared to OS 9.xx. It's like comparing Wintel performance to Mac. It's different.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:44:24 AM
acceptable level of grammatical error (please have someone proofread your rants in the future), but lacks comprehension of fundamental concepts. C+

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:49:21 AM
If I compare Jag to 9 on my G4/500, yeah it's slower. Especially running any Adobe applications, which are unbelieveably slow in their UI. I am glad I don't have high production needs at the moment. But I do know I have to upgrade hardware at some point (January?). The nice thing with Jag is I don't worry about crashes anymore. Some things like the dock are more cute than they are efficient (bouncing icons that are hard to click) which are going to appeal to switchers more than pro-users. There was some good functionality in 9 that is missing (file handling)--perhaps those will be added back in as the code gets refined. Mail is better (I am ditching Outlook). I am now exclusively in OS X and like it, slow as it sometimes is. I agree, it's a chicken and egg scenario but we got to start somewhere.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:56:13 AM
I tried to go strictly X but certain things just keep me booting back to 9. The hit on Quake III Arena is too embarassing for me to play it in X online. I can't get my strobe scanner (scsi) to work in classic. My Epson (serial) printer also is very troublesome. I like X and will continue to use it once and awhile. I really like the terminal and am having a blast learning to use it.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:59:29 AM
I still don't get it. Remember System 6? It had less complicated UI than 7/8/9 and it's Finder ran much faster (it had less to do). But for the life of me, I don't remember a lot of people screaming about not wanting to run System 7 (well, they did - but not for two years). Look at the Mac Plus compared to a brand-new PowerMac - it's a little slower, but not as slow as you would get by just comparing the hardware. The UI bloats as the hardware does - always has, probably always will. Faster hardware = greater capabilities = more features = greater requirements. If the fastest possible speed is what's most important to you (features be damned) then go run System 6 with all extensions turned off. Trust me, it'll be really responsive, and make 9.2 look like a dog.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:01:07 AM
Well let's see shall we. I did a small test just now with my work dual 450 G4 with 512 MB RAM running Jaguar X.2.1. I have the following apps open: System Prefs, Internet Explorer, iChat, Mail, Address Book, Lotus Notes PR 6, Photoshop 7, Illustrator 10, InDesign 2.01, Excel v.X. All apps have open document windows showing. In Explorer's case, I have about 6 browser windows showing. Now for the test, I can switch between all apps and the app and all windows come to the front and ready in no time at all. Read: no beachball cursor when switching between open apps/windows. I also have a ton of files on my desktop in the Finder, and several Finder windows showing, including 7 mounted server volumes. Now, my system is not anywhere near top notch. A dual 450 with half a gig RAM is no slouch, but certainly not a beast by today's standards. I have to conclude that anyone having serious slowdowns with X is: a) running on too llittle RAM b) Using Classic with lots of crap open simultaneously (I've noticed some slowdowns with even just Classic launched, and no open classci apps) c) just using hardware that is too old to run X well, or d) needs to reinstall Jaguar/or OS X.whatever CLEANLY, and not on top of a bunch of older installs. That can cause major problems, from my own experience. Now, I will agree that 9 can be faster at some things, especially opening Finder windows, but the multi-tasking in X is what can't be beat. All the apps I mention above I launched in less than half the time, since I can ooen several apps at one time! And the stability in X trounces 9!! No crashes, WHATSOEVER. There's just so much more that X can do that 9 could only dream about doing. I'm sorry, but I just don't believe anyone that claims X is just too slow. Sure, back in the 10.0.0 days it was pretty bad, but people, let's not forget that X is really only a little more than 1 1/2 yrs old if you consider the March 2001 release date for 10.0. It's still young, and look at how far it's come already!! Give it just a nother 6 months to a year, and this whole discussion will sound totally ridiculous. In fact, it's already sounding pretty stupid even now!

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SteveJack said it here last Friday...
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:05:13 AM
"Apple's dirty little secret: sluggish Mac OS X still annoyingly slow" http://www.macdailynews.com/opinion/opinion_detail.mgi?id=216

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:09:00 AM
The analogy is an apt one, as everyone seems to be repeating the party line that 10.2 is "blazingly fast!". However, we heard the same breathless verbiage about OS X's debut and it wasn't true then and sadly it isn't true now. What we're seeing is the triumph of marketing over substance. If people stopped thinking about their os in the same way that they think about their sports teams, they might admit that stable as it is, it ain't snappy. Yes, 10.2 is an improvement, but after buying and installing Jaguar, I am now happily back in OS 9.2.2. I have now bought the preview version of OS X, the official release and two updates. They can sell updates until they run out of cat-names to use for codewords but I will not buy another until the day arrives that I need to buy new hardware. Probably the new IBM Power4 variant that is rumored to be released in late 2003. Until then, I'm sticking with 9.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:11:13 AM
*sigh* This used to be such an interesting site, now this sort of thing makes the front page?

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:11:37 AM
What pisses me off is Launching 'top' from the command line and seeing MS Word with 10% of the CPU, Flash with 15%, and PhotoShop with 15%. And they are doing absolutely NOTHING! Not 'multitasking' for me in the background Just sitting there idly waiting for me to use them. And during this, Adobe GoLive takes three seconds for mouse click to be registered. I have to train myself to add little pauses in everything I do because these poorly behaved Carbon apps all battle for CPU time to manage their broken event loops. OOOOOH it pisses me off. I have to go around and quit apps just because they all can't be running together. And there is no way to know either without firing up the command shell. My co-workers (all graphic designers) come over to my machine and when they see me working say "dude, why's your computer so slow?" As far as the Graphic designers go, Quark is a minor issue compared to fonts. Until 10.2 the font system was utterly broken. Over the years we've invested thousands of dollars in PostScript fonts. And none of them worked at all in X. How is this possible? PostScript fonts? Isn't this the core market of Apple and they don't have a working solution for graphic designers until the second year of release? Luckily it is no fixed but it still makes no sense to me why it was broken in the first place. Priorities are askew.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:12:25 AM
The analogy is an apt one, as everyone seems to be repeating the party line that 10.2 is "blazingly fast!". However, we heard the same breathless verbiage about OS X's debut and it wasn't true then and sadly it isn't true now. What we're seeing is the triumph of marketing over substance. If people stopped thinking about their os in the same way that they think about their sports teams, they might admit that stable as it is, it ain't snappy. Yes, 10.2 is an improvement, but after buying and installing Jaguar, I am now happily back in OS 9.2.2. I have now bought the preview version of OS X, the official release and two updates. They can sell updates until they run out of cat-names to use for codewords but I will not buy another until the day arrives that I need to buy new hardware. Probably the new IBM Power4 variant that is rumored to be released in late 2003. Until then, I'm sticking with 9.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:21:45 AM
Finally, someone has the cajones to post this. I'm expecting Apple will be calling/emailing soon... Yes, I use Mac OS X day in day out. Yes, I love the fact that the OS is extremely stable. Yes, apps crash (IE all the time...) and the system continues to hum along. That part is beautiful. BUT, come on. When you can feel that the OS is trudging along under it's own weight, it's sad. Resize an iTunes windows. Use iCal for crying out loud. iPhoto is gorgeous and stable, just pathetically slow. I don't understand how any of you can even fast in the same sentence as X. Really. Are you running 1 app at a time? I use Virtual PC on 9 and it's easily TWICE as fast as under X. I use Photoshop, Quark all running simultaneously and it's just brutal I tell you. Apple knows this. Yes, they do really. Look on their webpage for anything that compares the speed of OS 9 to the speed of OS X. You won't anything. They're going to simply ignore it. Machine config: Ti Book 667, 512 MB RAM. It's Stability AND Performance not Stability OR Performance.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:24:21 AM
Ed., this is a pretty long rant that includes no easily measurable, quantifiable data and one heckava lot of opinions. Some of this is user training. Whenever I see a user with 6 large ram eating programs open on their desktops running mac os of any variant, windows 98, windows 2k, or windows XP, I tell them that project management is the source of their performance and stability woes. Cut that stack down to the 2-3 programs you actually need to do a task and get that thing done.

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Re: Get over it!
by: JWegley (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:27:30 AM
Geez, what is the deal with Mac users lately? I use a 400mhz Indigo Imac with 512mb of RAM. I use photoshop, dreamweaver mx, mail, iCal, iMovie, IE, and Word. I usually have them all open at the same time and don't have the problems you have. Sure sometimes it lags but compared to OS 9, it's a dream come true. The memory usage and the stability is wonderful not to mention the pure multitasking. Honestly, I don't think this tripe should be printed as a "story." Mine works and works well.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:28:01 AM
People: Boot into 9. Run many apps in 9 for 2-3 hours. Switch to X and do the same. There's no way you can say that X comes close to 9 in terms of speed. Period.

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10.2 upgrade for $69 and UNIX
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:31:01 AM
For the person who was looking to upgrade from 10.1 to 10.2 for >$100 - search in dealmac etc and you will find an upgrade for $69. The most significant thing about OS X is UNIX - X marks the spot. In a year or so when Linux on the desktop has finally given up its ghost - what OS is going to be around for serious app development (please dont call VB and Visual C app development!) ?? One thing Apple needs to let the UNIX geeks know is that OS X is finally the UNIX desktop they have been looking for - plaster it in every UNIX magazine or site. Everything else comparing OS 9 to OS X is a rant similar to OS 7 to OS 9 "complaints" that people had - or 040 to PPC "incompatibilities" that was widely reported. In a year when most people have G4's and the pros have G5's - we can revisit this subject - until then stick to OS 9 if you have to. Bye AM

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:34:50 AM
As a full-ledged card-carrying mac-fanatic since 1989, I have to say I really LOVED OS 9.2.2 (and below. With the possible exception of 7.5.2). OS 9 was and IS STILL faster and more stable than anything in the Windows family, including Win2000, IMHO. And more friendly,too. But when I upgraded to 10.1, I knew I couldn't go back. I love OS X. It is AMAZINGLY stable and better than any other non-geek OS at multitasking. It is also beautiful and just a little bit less intuitive than older Mac OS's. As for speed? Application launch times and window dragging can be a little pokey, but not enough to really irritate me. I tend to just launch 5 o6 apps at once to get it all over with. As for APPLICATION stability-- not a problem for me so far. Just avoid 3rd party crapware.

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Nikon File Size
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:56:17 AM
The writer posted: "The test consisted of clocking download time of uncompressed image files from a Nikon D1 (professional digital camera) to two Firewire enabled computers (a maxed out stationary G4 and a standard issue Dell laptop) using Nikons proprietary software for image transfer. File sizes were at approximately 500-700MB each." I trust this is a typo: the largest files size that camera can generate is 17MB (3008x1960 RGB-TIFF). http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/nikon/d1x-review/index.html

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:56:18 AM
Get a life. Yep, this is a flame. Mac users have always payed a little extra for their Macs. In dollars, and raw performance. It what comes with ease-of-use, stability, and GUI with no equal. Your rant of, --pc users have more raw performance--, is old. This is the same arguement we heard about GUIs in the early eighties! This is the same arguement that we heard when Apple started to use color in the Finder. And now you're ranting it again. Get a life, get some work done, and try to get out a little more. Oh, and if you want raw performance. Just install Linux on your machine and avoid the gui. It'll scream. Will it be usable? I supose it depends on how 1337 u r. Chaos

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This site is becoming an author's bitchfest
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 10:00:57 AM
While I like this site, it seems more and more articles are poorly written rants. EVERY OS is SLOWER than the PREVIOUS OS. That is a fact of life. OS X is MUCH FASTER when you cosider that 1) Multi-tasking actually works, 2) No time lost to rebooting when something has crashed, 3) You don't have to save every document every 10 seconds to protect against crashing, and 4) processing ACTUALLY occurs when the mouse button is held down. So while SINGLE tasks such as menu-drawing, application switching, window resizing may be much faster the point of OS X is that OVERALL you will get much more work done OVERALL. This of it this way. A drag racing funny car may be much faster in a 1/4 mile than GT racer, but if you but them on a LeMans course and race them over a day who do you think will win? The GT car easily. Brute speed in a straight line (or single task) does not compare for every task. And if this site continues to publish poorly written rants then I will stop coming here. And NO, I do not consider every article critizing OS X or Apple a poorly written rant. If they are well written and and make sense, that is different.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 10:04:39 AM
BWAHAHAHAHA EVAN U MACERS ADIMT THET UR PUTERS R SLOE N CRAPY- U NED 2 GET A REEL PUTER LIK A DELL PC ICAN BILD 4 A FARCTOIN OF WHUT U MACERS HAFF 2 BYE FROM APPEL AN STEV JHOBES AN EYE CION GET FREE EMIAL FRUM HOTMIAL U SUKKERS BWAHAHAHAHAHA

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OSX good, apps need work
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 10:16:28 AM
OSX is great, it is a little slower but any new OS has a speed to new feature tradeoff. Apple is doing a great job enhancing it, they should keep plugging away with improvements. The apps on the other hand, especially UI response sensitive apps like graphic apps may need work to mature in the new OS. This may take time and real heavy duty graphics users my not like what they find at first. But this will improve over time and with faster hardware. For example I find I like Dreamweaver 4 in *classic* better than MX - it is more responsive. I think this is a result of poor optimization in MX which will improve over time - it may have already improve as I was using the free trail. OSX will be slower at some tasks but it just does not hang and freeze the way 9 does and that is a HUGE advantage worth the upgrade for most users. Rather that ripping OSX in general, which is silly - it is clearly better, it would be good to start getting real specific upgrade advice from professionals in each segment, graphics, video, audio, DTP, to see how apps are functioning and what hardware is needed to get satisfactory performance. That way production workers will know when the coast is clear to migrate.

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Let's all go back to 7.5.3...right?
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 10:27:44 AM
2 points: 1. If you could retool 7.5.x to run on a new PowerMac it would be the fastest thing around because it would be so light weight. I'm positive it would run circles around the "bloat" of OS 9. But why would you want to do such a thing. Not only would it be lacking in functionality, stability, appeal, and usability, but it would not sell at all. Software developers have(since the beginning of programming) been able to write programs that can bring hardware to it's knees. Thus you will always see software(including OS) that will push hardware to the limit. If OS X didn't push the hardware a little, then I would wonder how long it would last into the future. 2. I can open every application that I have(including Photoshop, Illustrator, Excel, Mail, Itunes, ETC) and swtich between the instantly. I only have a TiBook 500 with 512 megs of ram. Something else is wrong with your setup.

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It is way too slow
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 10:28:38 AM
I agree with the article completely. MacOS X is way too slow. The BeOS on my 8500/120 was much faster than MacOS X on a TiBook/667. No comparison, really. Even my 466MHz Celeron box is faster than my TiBook. It's depressing. The stability of MacOS X is good. The dock sucks. Speed sucks. Maybe if we were running faster CPUs it'd be adequate, though I doubt it. My next machine will probably be a dual CPU Athlon. :-(

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 10:28:40 AM
I run 10.2.1 on four machines: G4/400 (320MB RAM); G4/450 (640MB RAM); PB G3/233 (288MB RAM); and PB G4/667 (256MB RAM). It runs acceptably on all of them, including doing Photoshop 7.0.1 and InDesign 2.0.1 work on the Wallstreet while also working in Word or AppleWorks WP and listening to iTunes Radio. It is much less frustrating than working in 9 on a regular basis. I don't care as much about speed as I do on how much work I get done in a day. On the Wallstreet I have Classic and OS X on different partitions; otherwise, I've just been careful to clear useless junk off the hard drives and run disk utilities before each upgrade. One area where OS X has frustrated me is in peripheral support. Printing has been awful in some cases, and scanner support is bad, too. Plus my ultrawide SCSI card and RAID tower are useless in X, and a couple of heavy duty graphics cards are orphaned. Virtually all of this is overcome through the use of an older 7600 with a G3/500 upgrade used as a host for these things over Ethernet. It runs 9.1 and, as long as I do only one thing at a time, it gives me the umbilical to the past that allows me to be in X full time on the other machines. Kludge? Yes. Bothersome? No. I use the 7600 in this role once or twice a month. My motto: "Bitch less; work more."

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speed vs features
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 10:29:23 AM
as a general rule of thumb - for maximum speed use the software that was released at the same time as your computer was made. Dont upgrade software and your computer will feel as reponsive as the day you bought it - but it won't improve in terms of functionality either. Most people like new features in software and suffer a slower experience for the new OS or version, sometimes without really noticing it. OSX has a lot of new features, stability being them most prominent - I never have to reboot anymore. I would not go back. But I might not switch yet if I were a DTP pro. Each user has to find the right tradeoff for their hardware and usage.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 10:31:01 AM
I run 10.2.1 on four machines: G4/400 (320MB RAM); G4/450 (640MB RAM); PB G3/233 (288MB RAM); and PB G4/667 (256MB RAM). It runs acceptably on all of them, including doing Photoshop 7.0.1 and InDesign 2.0.1 work on the Wallstreet while also working in Word or AppleWorks WP and listening to iTunes Radio. It is much less frustrating than working in 9 on a regular basis. I don't care as much about speed as I do on how much work I get done in a day. On the Wallstreet I have Classic and OS X on different partitions; otherwise, I've just been careful to clear useless junk off the hard drives and run disk utilities before each upgrade. One area where OS X has frustrated me is in peripheral support. Printing has been awful in some cases, and scanner support is bad, too. Plus my ultrawide SCSI card and RAID tower are useless in X, and a couple of heavy duty graphics cards are orphaned. Virtually all of this is overcome through the use of an older 7600 with a G3/500 upgrade used as a host for these things over Ethernet. It runs 9.1 and, as long as I do only one thing at a time, it gives me the umbilical to the past that allows me to be in X full time on the other machines. Kludge? Yes. Bothersome? No. I use the 7600 in this role once or twice a month. My motto: "Bitch less; work more."

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 10:31:22 AM
Any person who has enough time on his hands to put a stop watch his computer....obviously has a computer fast enough to get his work done. Or needs to get a freaking life.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 10:41:12 AM
Pathetic. Just pathetic. This uninformed ignoramus should try actually using a few other systems and LEARNING a thing or two about how OS X works before he goes around making such ridiculous statements....

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 11:03:27 AM
Give me a break! Once again... many of you OS9 diehards just don't get it! Apparently, you are happy to keep on hanging new chrome fenders on your Model A (OS9.2.2) rather than buy a new car (OS10.2) which has more capabilities. There are a number of significant differences in these OS-es. First, the multi-threading and multi-tasking of OS 10.2 is light years ahead of OS9. OS9 is outdated in this regard. Period. Second, you say you run graphics professional apps for your work. So.. let's compare imaging models. OS9 is again outdated and not in the same league for accuracy. Why? The imaging model is antiquated. Quartz and Aqua in OSX is the newer version of Display Postscript. Ever work on NeXTstep (the forerunner of OSX)? In 1988 when it started shipping, it did things that the current Mac OS9.2.2 STILL cannot do! It is ridiculous that Apple had to keep OS9 around as long as it did! Lets get down to real world details.... even in NeXTstep... there is no such thing as paginating a document and having it print in any manner other than what was seen on the screen. Now, OSX's imaging model is the new version of this imaging model... with the same accuracy. There is no comparison between the imaging models of OS9 and OSX. But oops! You forgot to mention the imaging model comparison of OS9 vs. OSX in your editorial. People who are exacting with their work DO give a damn about the accuracy of the image and information that they see on their screen. OSX is acurate. OS9 is not. Period. I am sorry to say this... but it is time for "old" Mac diehards to get a grip... and realize the unthinkable for them... that OS9 is outdated. It must be replaced. There is no choice here... or Apple will cease to exist if all they do is keep hanging new chrome pieces on this Model A of an operating system called OS9. No matter what you do to OS9... it still has inherent limitations that make it uncompetitive in today's computing world. It had its day. But, it's day is long past. Time to move on, guys. -- JD

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Bottom line...
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 11:08:08 AM
Oh, c'mon folks. This writer has demonstrated some very valid issues. He is echoing what I've been hearing from almost all of my clients. Windows IS faster than X for graphics work. Get over it people. What can be done? Well, first of all. Those that need 9 will have to make due with the latest, pre X only hardware. No problem there. X will grow and get faster over the next year. New native ports will surface, and all will be good again. Change sometimes causes pain. It's a fact of life. I also love how many are now talking about 9 crashing so much. Before X, everybody boasted how MacOS was sooo stable and didn't crash like Windows, blah, blah, blah. 9 crashed alot sometimes, and no more or less than Windows did at the time. I work with every platform folks, and guess what.... they all work well sometimes, and sometimes they all suck. iPhoto is a slug with more than 1000 photos on board. X is a very good new OS. WinXP, 2000 and NT are very stable and fast. IRIX and Solaris are very, very good, and damned fast with graphics. Strong networking performance too. Good article - a true reflection of what real (working) people are experiencing. LISTEN people, shut your traps and LISTEN. Apple is not a god you have to pray to, Jeez. You won't go to hell if disagree.

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7.5.3 is MUCH faster!!!
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 11:14:13 AM
I would never use OS X!!! System 7 is way faster than OSX, so why would I want to use X? Geeze Apple. You shoulda stayed with os 6. It was the pinnacle of the Macintosh OS since it was the fastest version I ever used. Who needs multitasking anyway? And who needs more than 1 meg of RAM. This modern bloatware requires 128 meg just to RUN!!! Are you listening Apple? We don't want features and stability. We want speed. I have an idea. Drop the GUI, and free up some processor cycles.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 11:18:58 AM
Aqua interface in X IS SLOW. No doubt about that. It is the biggest shortcoming of X. But the day you can show me any other laptop that works as an industry-standard Unix webserver (Apache, PHP, MySQL, DNS, mailserver, etc.), can switch between a dozen different network configs on the fly, switch between single and dual screen modes on the fly when waking up, and run for months without locking up or crashing, I'll be interested. Until then, there's just no other OS that can compare - especially on a laptop. I think Apple needs to pour more resources into helping 3rd party software companies write and optimize software, but then again they can't seem to make Aqua run worth a crap. Try running XWindows on Darwin - no sluggish performance there! The sluggishness is all in the Aqua interface, not in the core OS. The sluggishness DOES hurt the viability of Macs. I hope Apple figures out how to make a fast GUI for X soon.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 11:19:45 AM
This is complete propaganda. We need to evolve from OS9! 64bit is around the corner, and sorry, you can't keep your OS9. If i get a stopwatch out there are definitely processes that are sluggish in OSX - but the time saved in actually having the machine multitask without coughing and not crash easily outweighs the 5 seconds I save in OS 9 doing something. Plus, OS9 is doing LESS to be faster. Lets run one of the old OSes from around 1990 - wow, it'll be snappy. OSX is the future, and bless Apple for implementing it and leading the way, as always. Have some fortitude and hang in there while this brave company gets us where desktop computing needs to go! os9 - pleeeze! spare me!

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 11:20:03 AM
Mac OS 10.2 is too slow, partially because of the immature state of Quartz optimization, and the lag in hardware performance. That said, it was *critical* that Apple move to a unix-based OS. They admitted in public statements that they could no longer find talent in the universities familiar with the MPW tools. OS 9 was a dinosaur with absolutely no future, while Unix gives us a foot in the door to critical scientific, engineering and business markets. It also has superior stability and scalability. Let's get OS-10 past its teething phase: the speed will certainly follow. Now Windows is the only dinosaur, and that's what we want for market share.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 11:23:54 AM
In many of the comments, nothing is mentioned about RAM. I have a B/W 400Mhz, a 400 Mhz iBook (2 USBs), a Blue Dalmation iMac, and a brand new 17" iMac. All are running Jaguar. All have varying degrees of spiffiness. Those machines with less RAM take a noticeable hit in speed. Those machines with lower MHz take a hit in speed. Those machines with low RAM and low MHz take the worst hit in speed. My new iMac is the fasted...512MB RAM and 800MHz with a fast video card. I would assume that Jaguar would get even better with Higher RAM, greater Mhz,, and faster videocard. My windows open and close rather crisply.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 11:30:13 AM
I have to agree with the articles tone from many perspectives. I think if you say something is great long enough, then it becomes truth, even if it isn't. I think a lot of what has been said and is said about OS X is that way. People have heard it so much that they start believing it. The author speaks the truth. I have tried to like 10 because I found so much to like about Apples previous products, but much as I have tried, I haven't been able to for many reasons, inclding many of the authors comments. I like the stability and networking speed I have found in OS X, but frankly, that is the only thing I have found to like. Those things are not enough to counter what I use every day I use the computer, the interface. As the author has said, the performance of OS X is substantially slower... VERY noticeable. Then there is the interface... Cute is not necessarily good. Instead of maintaining what was a very effective interface in OS 9, Apple chose to fix the part that wasn't broke. They made things hard to find and as a 16 year user of the Mac, hard to use. For me, things simply work easier in OS 9. They may work more stable on OS X, but for me, I have had OS 9 running literally for weeks without a crash. There is something else about OS X that is hard to explain or quantify as it relates to the GUI... It is fatigueing. I don't know if it is the antialiazing, I don't know if it is the presentation, but I notice that it is more challenging to work with OS X than it is on OS 9 or even that traitorous system, XP (GASP). I don't know what I am going to do come January, but I can tell you that this camper is finding it hard to remain 100% commited to Apple. After 16 years, I am not happy to say that.

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Let's boil it down...
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 11:34:12 AM
Mac OS X is slower ... it also does things OS 9 can't do. So it's a tradeoff. 'Nuff said.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 11:35:42 AM
What a strange article. Such a mess of ideas. Of course, OS 9 it's a lot faster concerning finder tasks like opening windows or scrolling. But beyond that, everything it's, at least, as fast in OSX compairing with OS9. And the amount of new technologies and reliability of OSX makes it a lot mor intersting than OS9. Remember that there are new powerfull app that now run under OSX like Maya that could never be possible to run under OS 9. And, as a scientist, there are lot's of good UNIX apps that i can use now in the same system that i write my text and edit my images. If you use any of those speed metter apps, you will notice that, in some cases, OSX it's a lot faster than OS9. The problem is that apple decided to use a graphical user interface (AQUA) that demands at least 10 times more power to render than the OS9 one. Don't make your comparisions only based on the interface's render speed ok. Test the speed of real job like 3D rendering, huge spreadsheet calculations and so and you will notice the time gain that you can get with OSX. In cinema 4D for instance, the same image tooked 9.31m minutes to render under OS 9 and 8.51m to render under Jaguar using the same machine and the same version of CInema's 4D (7.3). Try to do some test like this one and then post a honest article ok! Do you think that apple it's working to give us a worst system that we use to have?

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 11:42:10 AM
It is unfortunate that the author simply ranted in public instead of doing a little research and providing more light and less heat. OS 9 was sometimes faster. Certainly window resizing where you simply dragged the outline of the window was much faster. On the other hand, I really like the functionality of being able to see the resize in real time. Network performance, FW disk I/O, QT movie playing and others have gotten a lot faster. Memory management has gotten a lot better. In OS 9 if I ran more than six programs I knew I could expect a crash. Now I can play songs in iTunes (without skipping), download files without losing the connection, burn a CD without making a coaster and more at the same time. Last weekend I recorded two movies with a Formac Studio. Each a little over 20GB long. Later I compressed them to mp4 files. All without a hangup or a crash. I also noticed that QT 6 plays movies more efficiently than QT 5. I monitor the temperature of the CPU on my Pismo 500 and it runs cooler with QT 6. Jaguar was a significant speed increase for me. I noticed that in OW I can now read text as a slowly scroll the window. Previously the redraw made the text unreadable for a fraction of a second during a scroll. Contextual menus are much faster in OS X than in OS 9. Control click on something in X and the menu appears. In OS 9 it took five or ten seconds to appear. I do sometimes get the spinning beach ball on my QS 867 now that I have installed a second HD. I think the second HD is used less and so it spins more often. For some reason the Finder needs to search all your directories before processing some mouse clicks and I have to wait for that drive to spin up. This, and other ideas mentioned in other posts above, point to ways to speed up OS X. That would have been a more useful article.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 11:42:27 AM
It is unfortunate that the author simply ranted in public instead of doing a little research and providing more light and less heat. OS 9 was sometimes faster. Certainly window resizing where you simply dragged the outline of the window was much faster. On the other hand, I really like the functionality of being able to see the resize in real time. Network performance, FW disk I/O, QT movie playing and others have gotten a lot faster. Memory management has gotten a lot better. In OS 9 if I ran more than six programs I knew I could expect a crash. Now I can play songs in iTunes (without skipping), download files without losing the connection, burn a CD without making a coaster and more at the same time. Last weekend I recorded two movies with a Formac Studio. Each a little over 20GB long. Later I compressed them to mp4 files. All without a hangup or a crash. I also noticed that QT 6 plays movies more efficiently than QT 5. I monitor the temperature of the CPU on my Pismo 500 and it runs cooler with QT 6. Jaguar was a significant speed increase for me. I noticed that in OW I can now read text as a slowly scroll the window. Previously the redraw made the text unreadable for a fraction of a second during a scroll. Contextual menus are much faster in OS X than in OS 9. Control click on something in X and the menu appears. In OS 9 it took five or ten seconds to appear. I do sometimes get the spinning beach ball on my QS 867 now that I have installed a second HD. I think the second HD is used less and so it spins more often. For some reason the Finder needs to search all your directories before processing some mouse clicks and I have to wait for that drive to spin up. This, and other ideas mentioned in other posts above, point to ways to speed up OS X. That would have been a more useful article.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 11:50:35 AM
We made a test on the Propellerheads Reason (a Virtual Musid Studio package) board: Somebody constructed a song that got more and more CPU instense with time, and dozens of people with Macs or PCs sent in how far they got with their Machine. Notable that Reason is G4 optimized and Apple names it on its G4 page. Funny thing that came out: Only Megahertz matter, not CPU make, not OS, not Multiprocessors. So Macs are roughly 1/2 the speed of the fastest PCs currently. My guess is that the newly rumored 1.7GHz Macs will still be too slow. Here's the result: http://dynamo.propellerheads.se/board/general/index.cfm?fuseaction=displayMsg&displayMsg=51022 (free reg. req.)

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 11:50:51 AM
We made a test on the Propellerheads Reason (a Virtual Musid Studio package) board: Somebody constructed a song that got more and more CPU instense with time, and dozens of people with Macs or PCs sent in how far they got with their Machine. Notable that Reason is G4 optimized and Apple names it on its G4 page. Funny thing that came out: Only Megahertz matter, not CPU make, not OS, not Multiprocessors. So Macs are roughly 1/2 the speed of the fastest PCs currently. My guess is that the newly rumored 1.7GHz Macs will still be too slow. Here's the result: http://dynamo.propellerheads.se/board/general/index.cfm?fuseaction=displayMsg&displayMsg=51022 (free reg. req.)

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 12:18:25 PM
Yea, MacOS X may be slower than OS 9, but when I can do three or more things at the same time that I could only do one with in OS 9, 'nuff said.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 12:31:19 PM
If all you care about is how fast you computer finishes its work, then maybe you need to buy a Wintel PC (Mmmmmmm... 2.8 GHz). I find that at the end of the day I get more actual work accomplished using 10.2 than I do using 9.2 and that is the REAL bottom line.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 12:35:18 PM
If you want to run your Model A (OS9).. fine. Do it. I, for one, have been amazed that Apple could get away with shipping the "Classic" OS (9 in its current iteration) as long as it did. NeXTstep in 1988 blew it away. Taligent (had it shipped) blew it away. BeOS blew it away. Even the Lisa OS in 1984 did things that the "classic" Mac OS cannot do. And all this time... old-time Macheads were working with an outdated OS... and you kept buying into it and stuck your heads in the sand. Yup... for more than a decade (DOS and early Windows users are guilty of this as well). Time to move on. Run OSX... Linux... Sun... or even XP... but OS9 is a dinosaur. Listen... if you are happy with it... and it does what you need it to do.... great. Then stay with it. The point of all this is to use this tool called software to get your work done. I want a modern OS which allows me to do more work... better work... and give me capabilities that I never had before.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 12:35:20 PM
Productivity is all about doing x amount of work in the shortest time possible. From my first Macintosh SE to my next-to-last Macintosh PowerBook (Bronze Keyboard), my productivity has steadily increased. Well, at least through OS 8.5 or so - OS 9.x lost in stability what it made up for in functionality. I'm a graphic/print/web/multimedia designer, BTW. I bought a Dual 1GHz (Quicksilver) about eight months ago to replace the PowerBook, and have gone through all of the iterations of X on it. I also tried X on the PB (slow!) as well as on my old 9600/350 (with a 500MHz G3 upgrade). When looking only at X as the OS, my productivity has indeed gone up from the early versions of X. However, compared to what I could do under OS 8 or 9, I would say it's somewhat less - maybe 10-15% or so. Part of that's due to learning a new OS, but most of it's simply that apps are slower under X for my typical workflow. As an aside, I was hired about a year ago into a company that is standardized on Win2K, where I use a lot of the standard apps (PhotoShop, Illustrator, Director, etc.). While the hardware is quite noticably faster than my Dual 1GHz (we're running SGI ZX10 boxes with Dual P3 900MHz chips, 2GB RAM and RAID HDs), my overall productivity is about what it was with my PowerBook and OS 9 due to the Windows OS not being as productive for my workflow. The interface just isn't as ergonomic as OS 8/9 is/was. Simply saving an Illustrator file is a chore under Win2K where under OS 9, it is usually a quick one or two click affair. I've debated over whether to switch my wife's 500MHz iBook (Dual USB) to X (it's upgraded already - she still boots into OS 9), but for now will probably keep her on 9. There are still too many compatibility anomalies to deal with under X, and much of the software she uses to homeschool our kids requires Classic, if they indeed run at all under X. As other posters have noted, things will eventually correct themselves over time, but I cannot think of another transition Apple has put us through that has been so contentious or that has caused so much upheaval to users. For me, Macintosh is still a very viable platform, but not in the "insanely great" sense that I used to feel about it. I guess I'm getting too old now (40!) to get all fired up about the latest .x.x release of some utility, and just want to get my work done quickly. And for me, I simply can't get there as fast as I could before OS X.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 12:53:04 PM
I just want you to document what it is you were trying to show here: give me the actual download time in seconds of the image from the camera on: 1) macos 9 2) macos X 3) windows (version in article not given) no where in the article did the author state that he tried downloading from the camera with mac os 9, yet the whole point of the article, at least i thought, was to show how much slower os X is than os 9. I am not saying which os i prefer, or which one has been proven faster, i just want the author to back up his claims with indisputable numbers.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 1:20:41 PM
I mostly use my OS X box for development and as a network server, so I can't test this with all the applications you have above, but there are a few things you can try that may help your performance. I'd like to see if upping some of the kernel parameters boosts performance. Since I don't have Photoshop/Word/Illustrator/etc., I can't reproduce the problem (heck, I don't think I have any OS-X native software other than the OS itself and XFree86 and many toys for it). Before you get frightened away, changing kernel parameters with sysctl isn't going to kill your system -- unless you put them in a bootup script. If you screw something up, reboot and you'll be back to the system default. Most BSD systems put kernel tuning parameters in a file called /etc/sysctl.conf or /etc/kern.config, but I suspect this is /etc/kern_loader.conf on OS X (guess). start a command prompt become an administrator (> is the prompt - don't type it): > sudo -s look at your kernel parameters: > sysctl -a note that you can show restricted sets by typing in part of the name of the parameter. For instance: > sysctl -a kern > sysctl -a net Anyhow, try increasing some of the defaults and see if your performance is better: > sysctl -w kern.maxproc=1064 > sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=65536 you can increase try to increase network performance (if you need to) with some of the following: net.inet.tcp.sendspace=65535 net.inet.tcp.recvspace=65535 net.inet.udp.recvspace=65535 net.inet.udp.maxdgram=57344 net.local.stream.recvspace=65535 net.local.stream.sendspace=65535 kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=2097152 kern.ipc.somaxconn=8192 kern.ipc.maxsockets=16424 (also boost nmbclusters if you're running a big web server) I doubt any of those will fix your system speed, though (ethernet, maybe, OS, no). I suspect the biggest boost will be from messing with the kern.sysv settings, which mainly deal with virtual memory, but I haven't been able to do this with sysctl. I've seen examples of kern.sysv.shmmax set to 67108864 (max size of 64MB per page) and kern.sysv.shmall set to 4096 (4000+ pages of up to 64MB). The goal is to reduce the number of pages necessary for each application, and hopefully get a decent performance boost. I think that this is more of an issue on MacOS X than on other UNIX derivatives because it doesn't have a separate swap partition. It may be possible to set by putting these in a startup file (such as the one mentioned WAY above), but I don't know.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 1:24:33 PM
If I sit with a stop watch and compare how long it takes for a filter to run on a picture in OS 9 and OS X then OS 9 wins. If I compare the amount of work I get done each day then OS X wins. Which is more important? Obviously the malcontent who wrote this sorry piece believes the former is more important. I believe the latter is.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 1:24:51 PM
If I sit with a stop watch and compare how long it takes for a filter to run on a picture in OS 9 and OS X then OS 9 wins. If I compare the amount of work I get done each day then OS X wins. Which is more important? Obviously the malcontent who wrote this sorry piece believes the former is more important. I believe the latter is.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 1:25:20 PM
If I sit with a stop watch and compare how long it takes for a filter to run on a picture in OS 9 and OS X then OS 9 wins. If I compare the amount of work I get done each day then OS X wins. Which is more important? Obviously the malcontent who wrote this sorry piece believes the former is more important. I believe the latter is.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 1:25:35 PM
If I sit with a stop watch and compare how long it takes for a filter to run on a picture in OS 9 and OS X then OS 9 wins. If I compare the amount of work I get done each day then OS X wins. Which is more important? Obviously the malcontent who wrote this sorry piece believes the former is more important. I believe the latter is.

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benchmark? are you kidding?
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 1:36:40 PM
okay, so let me get this straight. you posted a review where the only benchmark comparison mentioned was transferring images from a digital camera using proprietary software? wtf? and how exactly is that a benchmark that's worth anything to anyone? come on, ppage. this is pathetic. if you're going to post a review about the speed of OSX, at least have someone who knows something about [computers, operating systems, much of anything] do the writing.. you want to keep using OS9? knock yourself out. and enjoy the multitasking you can do while rebooting!

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 2:04:51 PM
Yellow journalism at its finest. What happened to the Powerpage? It used to be a great source of info for the mobile Mac user.

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How many Hertz do you need?
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 2:08:50 PM
I'm sure there are people out there, who have powerful machines and still experience performance problems with whatever OS they run, because of the applications they run. I run Jaguar on my old trusty Wallstreet 266MHz with 192M Ram. It is perfectly ok for my needs - some word processing and some basic surfing. The only time I scream for more juice, is when I for one reason or other restart, but that's a rare event anyhow.

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500-700 MB camera file size???
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 2:15:16 PM
Yeah, right! >>The test consisted of clocking download time of uncompressed image files from a Nikon D1 (professional digital camera) to two Firewire enabled computers (a maxed out stationary G4 and a standard issue Dell laptop) using Nikons proprietary software for image transfer. File sizes were at approximately 500-700MB each. The largest file size on the D1X is 11.2 MB, using - High Res (3008 x 1960 ) YCbCr-TIFF image format. I guess Nimons new slogan "Got hard drives?"

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500-700 MB camera file size???
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 2:15:22 PM
Yeah, right! >>The test consisted of clocking download time of uncompressed image files from a Nikon D1 (professional digital camera) to two Firewire enabled computers (a maxed out stationary G4 and a standard issue Dell laptop) using Nikons proprietary software for image transfer. File sizes were at approximately 500-700MB each. The largest file size on the D1X is 11.2 MB, using - High Res (3008 x 1960 ) YCbCr-TIFF image format. I guess Nikons new slogan "Got hard drives?"

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 2:26:03 PM
Hey. Graphic professional here. YES...OS9 is much snappier when it comes to switching apps and opening and closing windows, but as one who uses Photoshop EXTENSIVELY each day I can attest to a magnificent/significant speed boost when working under a multiple processor setup. (in my case the original Dual 1GHZ).I mean there is NO comparison. I have to switch back to 9 occasionally to use a specific filter and the image processing time is SIGNIFICANTLY slower. Hey, I miss the way my desktop used to pop too, but just from a visual standpoint, X is so superior when it comes to displaying graphics it makes me feel like I'm working on a toy when I switch back to 9. Hey designers, don't let this post fool you, the ONLY way to move is up, not back. This is coming from a guy who had to switch an entire Art Department recently, whose people put their macs through the wringer on a daily basis, and so far EVERYONE is in love with the new system. Of course our 2 most used apps, Illustrator and Photoshop are coded to take advantage of the dual, and we are all on dual processors systems. Just my 2 cents worth

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 2:30:52 PM
damnit! apple wont support my classic II with Jaguar. How the hell am I supposed to use my 9" screen that years ago I paid $1500 for? WHERE CAN I GO CRY???? sucks to be you. if you don't like it, buy a pc. they like people who wine. microsoft won't care about you either. and for gods sake, QUIT BITCHING ABOUT OLD UNSUPPORTED HARDWARE. Surely you have a job, spend some of your money and modernize. Some no name scanner will not work. Mainstream peripherals people. sometimes you people really piss me off.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: SteamingPriest (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 2:32:10 PM
Nonsense! I have been using a Mac for 13 years, since I had a Mac Classic. Today, I use both a PowerBook G4 500 and a new 17" iMac 700. I use PhotoShop, GoLive, iMovie, iDVD, Office 10, AppleWorks, Quicken, and all the iApps from Apple, etc... I made the change on the first release. I did not like it and even thought of going back to 9 and dropping 10. Today, I prefer to not use 9 and can't wait for it to die. Since I installed the first release of 10 until today, I have only had 3 kernal panics. It is the most stable system on any platform. It is super fast and there is nothing out there that compares. Granted there are some small matters to work out. Like the latest version of Sherlock. It take way too long to load, but that has to do with the web. Thanks for all you did for us Classic MacOS, but it's time for you to move on!

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 2:53:13 PM
OS 10.2 on my brand-new Dual 867MHz G4 box is truly comparitive to my old Mac SE in terms of system responsiveness. Apologists, you should hush up; Apple is the vendor, not your employer. You pay them; they should perform. What Apple has released is truly an amazing OS in terms of features, compatability, and stability. However, that does not excuse a poor performer in terms of responsiveness. This has nothing to do with how often I or others who are frustrated "get out" and enjoy the life that you Apologists seem so hell-bent on bragging over... rather, it has to do with me wanting to have more time to access said life instead of waiting at a slowed-down machine. Author hit it on the head, and Apple should really be paying attention to this. $125 is a steep upgrade price for a downgrade in performance.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 3:05:13 PM
I just wonder if part of the problem is Carbon-based Apps? Carbon was supposed to be a migration tool and Cocoa was supposed to be the adoption tool. Unfortunately, there aren't many Cocoa-based apps that have the memory and usage footprints of Adobe products to test.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 3:25:53 PM
ill take that slower any day of the week. it isn't even that bad...and im on a g4 450 512ram 6:24PM up 9 days, 23:59, 1 user, load averages: 0.44, 0.25, 0.24 nuff said

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Re: I like my Jaguar
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 3:32:15 PM
My friends, I agree with some of the arguments regarding software installation sizes, load requirements and functions versus raw machine power. Older OSs are obviously more lightweight, and ultimately faster. Many of the arguments here compare apples to oranges. Look at an application like Quake: it runs great on my old 7300, runs wicked fast on my DP 450. What comparison has been done here? Nothing of value. I want to run Quake III Arena. When it comes to productivity, however, IÌd like to vote for my Jaguar. The truth, however, is that I get a lot more work done on the crappy Pentium III DeskPro IÌve got at work than I do on any of the Macs I have at home. ÏWhy,Ó you ask? Because the interface is basic; it bores me into actually performing my duties. I would vote for OS 9 over Jaguar too, for similar reasons. Tell me what you can do in OS 9 that you cannot do in Jaguar, and I may change my vote. Though Jaguar has the functions I perfer, the machines on which I run it arenÌt the newest. It runs great, but in no respects is is as snappy as OS 9. Too bad. IÌm looking forward to getting a new machine. Of course, it will run Jaguar fast, and run the crap out of OS 9.

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Re: If it ain't broke . . .
by: Zo-1 (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 4:17:03 PM
You named it: What Works. . .vs What Sells. It's inevitable. Steve and his buddy have the gift: hardware. But, as with most such people in charge, the vision becomes a tad grandiose. Slick hardware is slickm wonderful hardware. And I don't care *how* cool, *how* crashproof (is it?) X is, there is no bloody reason in hell for me to abandon ten years of Classic. I have 9.2.2 running on my Ti at a state of tweaked near-perfection. Not to mention crash-proof. (Well, okay, we'll leave Internet Explorer out of this.) And everyone is free to do the goddamn same. Never mind the speed issues, *or* the way X is about to forced on Mac buyers - what really creeps me out is this stuff about X being intentionally tweak-proof. Excuse me? Have they gone quite mad, in Cupertino? No, Apple, you cannot be all things to all people, nor control all users on all machines. I want my shareware, and more importantly, I want shareware development to *thrive.* This writer/power user will move to X when X is damn good and ready. By then, when it's *really* time - as opposed to when Steve-o thinks it's time (God, I hate marketing moves) - the speed bumps will be evened out and much else, no doubt. Meanwhile, glad you started this discussion. X has no clothes at all. Great, it's there for those who want and like it. Or for beginners, who won't know the difference. But I'm like going to toss away everything I know about Classic? The pleasure it is to use? The way using my tuned 9.2.2. helps my work as a writer? Really? Here's an oft-overlooked little factlet, in all the flap over OS X. 9.2.2 *works.* Duh. . .

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Speed Issues
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 4:29:11 PM
I've just transferred a whole office of macs from os9/quark to os x/indesign. I've been using os x for a whole year on my quicksilver 866. At no stage have I ever felt it to b slow. Ok, so it's not as snappy as OS 9, but it's so much more more polished. I do have two issues, however. Whilst InDesign is a lovely program, there is no excuse for the slowness of it. It's not OS X- photoshop, word excel are all fine, but InDesign is deadly slow. Secondly, OSX STILL crashes, especially when I run games or iMovie full screen- I am locked out of my computer. I have a nasty feeling that it's less stable than my dad's win 2000 machine. It shouldn't crash- this is a brand new jaguar installation, but i still get freezes on a year old machine- that should be unacceptable. I still love it though.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 4:46:16 PM
Powerbook Titanium 500 single processor / Jaguar... Mac user since 1986. I run Office, IE, Mail, Quicken, FTP (Transmit), Terminal, Graphic Converter, Canvas, QuickTime, Filemaker, Acrobat, Freeway, iApps, LaunchBar to switch apps, usually accumulate about 15-20 open apps. Leave them all open all the time. Never run classic except to scan. Reboot once every 3-4 weeks. System gets faster the more I use it. Almost never see a spinning beach ball. Extremely responsive. Instant on from sleep. No sluggishness of ui as far as I can tell. Type easy to read even if tiny. Slick. Gorgeous. Previews in the finder - fantastic. With LaunchBar app switching is near instantaneous and needs no mouse activity. For me Jaguar walks over OS9 and I would never dream of going back. Poorly written apps (mainly from Adobe) are the biggest problem. First version of Acrobat for 10.1 was about 10x slower to search a PDF for a given text string than the OS9 version. New version with Jaguar only about 2x as slow. This is not a multitasking issue but a coding optimisation issue. Another example is the difference between FaxSTF (slow, unreliable, buggy) and Page Sender (fast, intuitive, reliable). Light and day. Well-written apps, eg Graphic Converter, from guys who know what they are doing, are better to use in OSX than OS9. Try doing image manipulation in Graphic Converter with full-screen preview - works perfectly in OSX but unusable in OS9. So first fix coding of the slow apps. Apple needs to improve networking, resolve permission hassles more effectively, help programmers write better code, put LaunchBar in the system, and fix peripheral issues. For me Jaguar is way fast enough. Graphics professionals - complain to Adobe, not Apple.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 5:17:01 PM
Here we go again. Back to days of yore when Mr. J was at the helm and the computers lacked performance but oh so real nice. The market saw them as toys. Here was are today and somehow Apple has forgotten that computers are tools. Professionals want to get work done and no amount of marketing showing us how easy it is to make iMovies and us iPhoto will change that. Bravo! Go for the consumer market. More power to ya! But Steve, you're forgetting something and that something is the what built Apple. Hey, over here! It's your creative professional users. Somehow I get the feeling that Apple thinks we really give a @&!% about genie effects, drop shadows, rendered EVERYTHING. Besides being obnoxious (and for the most part less efficient usability wise) the UI in X is slow! slow! slow! We need it to work better and to work faster!! We need it to run apps where we don't need to wait for the menus to come up. We need font support that works. We need printing that works. We need something as good as OS 9 (yes, the old, dead, OS) and we need it now if Apple expects us to move to X for good. It is impossible to use OS X for real work and it's not Adobe's fault. I, for one, hope Mr. Jobs is listening as this is very quickly becoming an issue that will bite them in the bottom line!

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 5:20:43 PM
hmm. someone should start a petition for os x pro users so that apple will take notice. how about an os for the rest of us?

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 5:22:40 PM
To the person who said that BeOS on an 8500/120 outperforms his TiBook 667 in OSX: "That's nice, but what can you actually DO with BeOS?".

Game over.

John

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 5:22:41 PM
I have experienced slowness with other Adobe apps in OS X. To me they feel like a hack job. I hope Adobe optimizes their engines soon and make it a free update.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 5:25:09 PM
FORCED MIGRATION BACKLASH!

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 5:30:43 PM
Good point about the lack of customization too. What gives? Can't we even make the fonts a little smaller? Or are we all supposed to go out and buy Cinema displays?

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 5:52:14 PM
I have Ti Book 400 notice the speed differnce OS x and classic. Unfortunately and maybe fortunately I wasn't able to fully migrate to OS X because of the lack of software (Real player for example). I've still am using OS 9.2.2 for most of my work aand occasionally go to OS X. Have you notice that if you have a file saved in pictureviewer in OS 9 and then try to open it in preview it doesn't. Please explain to me about that. I'm waiting for Apple to fix most of these issues before I put more money down for a unstable OS. For now I'm sticking to OS 9.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 5:52:29 PM
I have Ti Book 400 notice the speed differnce OS x and classic. Unfortunately and maybe fortunately I wasn't able to fully migrate to OS X because of the lack of software (Real player for example). I've still am using OS 9.2.2 for most of my work aand occasionally go to OS X. Have you notice that if you have a file saved in pictureviewer in OS 9 and then try to open it in preview it doesn't. Please explain to me about that. I'm waiting for Apple to fix most of these issues before I put more money down for a unstable OS. For now I'm sticking to OS 9.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 5:58:48 PM
Wow.. there are some whiners here. I have a 10.2 Tibook 550 at home, an XP machine at work, and a second Win2K machine (AMB 1800XP) at home as well. In using all of these systems, I find the OSX system to be the most preferable. Have I tried the OS9? Yeah. Can I leave the machine on all day in OS9 and still have it function at the end of the day? No. Can I have Lightwave rendering in the background while painting in Photoshop in the foregrond? Ummm... no. OSX brings pre-emptive multitasking to the mac, as well as stability that is at least comparable (if not always better) than the XP or Win2K systems. And while the Win2K and XP systems MAY in fact be snappier at things like opening windows and switching tasks, the amount of time and money spent on mis-burned CDs and driver incompatibilities find ways to waste all that saved time. As for those people thinking that OS9 is somehow comparable, ideologically and technologically, to OSX, let me relate a short history. In medieval England, nobles were slow to adopt firearms on account of the fact that their peasant archers were able to shoot farther than the crude firearms of the time. I wonder if the British might have become an imperial power had they stuck to the longbow theory. OSX represents a completely different and essential design paradigm for the Mac, much as Xp does for the Windows world. OS9 is dead, and that's not Apple propaganda. It's the simple truth. MS killed Win98/ME 'cause it sucked. Apple is doing the same thing with OS9 for the same reason. It sucks. Incidentally, I would like to see the specs of the 'standard Dell notebook' the author refers to. If it's a 1.6-1.8 GHz brick-o-lead vs an 800MHz Tibook, the performance difference speaks volumes about the efficiency of hardware and hardware usage by the Mac vs. the PC.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 5:58:53 PM
Wow.. there are some whiners here. I have a 10.2 Tibook 550 at home, an XP machine at work, and a second Win2K machine (AMB 1800XP) at home as well. In using all of these systems, I find the OSX system to be the most preferable. Have I tried the OS9? Yeah. Can I leave the machine on all day in OS9 and still have it function at the end of the day? No. Can I have Lightwave rendering in the background while painting in Photoshop in the foregrond? Ummm... no. OSX brings pre-emptive multitasking to the mac, as well as stability that is at least comparable (if not always better) than the XP or Win2K systems. And while the Win2K and XP systems MAY in fact be snappier at things like opening windows and switching tasks, the amount of time and money spent on mis-burned CDs and driver incompatibilities find ways to waste all that saved time. As for those people thinking that OS9 is somehow comparable, ideologically and technologically, to OSX, let me relate a short history. In medieval England, nobles were slow to adopt firearms on account of the fact that their peasant archers were able to shoot farther than the crude firearms of the time. I wonder if the British might have become an imperial power had they stuck to the longbow theory. OSX represents a completely different and essential design paradigm for the Mac, much as Xp does for the Windows world. OS9 is dead, and that's not Apple propaganda. It's the simple truth. MS killed Win98/ME 'cause it sucked. Apple is doing the same thing with OS9 for the same reason. It sucks. Incidentally, I would like to see the specs of the 'standard Dell notebook' the author refers to. If it's a 1.6-1.8 GHz brick-o-lead vs an 800MHz Tibook, the performance difference speaks volumes about the efficiency of hardware and hardware usage by the Mac vs. the PC.

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this is not a mac!
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 6:07:53 PM
i booted into os9 today, prior to reading this article, and i noticed how speedy the os was! another thing i noticed was how clean it really was. i had used windows 2000 for a bit when apple management was insistent upon driving the company into the ground, and the same difference applies to xp versus 2000. stability in both instances is the key. but in the apple camp, we have not been using an upgreded mac os, we have been using a revised next os. i liked next, but in some ways i miss the mac os. i do hope that apple reads comments such as these with an open mind, because i think that it is possible to clean up the gui. getting things done is the differentiator, and with osx i am still more productive than with windows 2000, but not quite as productive as with os9. perhaps too much is in your face, and os9 was better at hiding things like the fact that it would crash all of the time!

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Feedback for Apple..... and old timers
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 6:10:11 PM
In case someone from Apple wades through this backlash and is looking for lessons to take away. 1. While the performance increase of X.2 over previous versions of X is appreciated... don't for a moment think you've done anything other than the minimally acceptable. 2. Instead of iFoo and iBar and IBaz perhaps someone could add a useful utility that would help nonUnix gurus diagnos problems when their applicatin mix working set is in conflict with the default vm parameters. No this isn't a tool that Gramdma is going to use everyday, but Grandma isn't the only consumer of your hardware. secondly swap partition collocated on same disk with the rest of the system when folks have large workset sets and active memory requirements. There isn't going to be a universally applicable kernel config. Perhaps you should look into specific install configuration parameters(e.g, ask question like do you running half a dozen applications with 100 MB data files all open simultaneoly? ) 3. Continuing the trend.... non sexy stuff counts alot also (especially when you NUKE the old reliable standby). If you are going to nuke OS9 you need to get on the stick helping folks with drivers and a slewe of the nonsexy programs that need to be present for folks to get their work done. If perhiphals are at a dead end as far as support .. then let folks know (and/or conjole the vendors of those product to get the word out). More than few software vendors have been reasonably waiting for more stable interfaces ( and/or system bug fixes ). 4. If you do stablize/tweak/bugfix the OS to the X.3 level by January.... that should be a freebie. Don't add iTetris , iCandy and state that it is another $100.00 to move up to what the OS really should have been in the first place. For old timers the feedback is ... 1. You need more resources to run MacOS X.2. specifically more RAM (mulltasking, microkernel-like, OSs ) and video processing horsepower (Aqua is very, expensive). Additionlly, if you're going to run some stuff that requires Classic that double so. [ I'm willin to bet that LinuxPPC zips along faster for unix specific stuff also.] The Unix kernel is going to take up more space the 0S9.0 cooperative services did. There is nothing that Apple can particularly do to solve that problem. If you could get a more stable OS for "free" they would have done it. They can't get over it. And when multiple programs are enable to run... they will. Resource oontention is just the price of doing business on OS X. 2. Yes, OS X.2 is more bleeding edge than the marketing hooo-haaa would have you to believe. The phrase "don't believe everything you read/see" comes into play here. 3. Yes, major OS upgrades are painful. Finally if you're old stuff works fine, why get you underwear all bunched up? [ Not that Apple wants to hear, but if it isn't broke don't fix it. ]

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Feedback for Apple..... and old timers
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 6:10:38 PM
In case someone from Apple wades through this backlash and is looking for lessons to take away. 1. While the performance increase of X.2 over previous versions of X is appreciated... don't for a moment think you've done anything other than the minimally acceptable. 2. Instead of iFoo and iBar and IBaz perhaps someone could add a useful utility that would help nonUnix gurus diagnos problems when their applicatin mix working set is in conflict with the default vm parameters. No this isn't a tool that Gramdma is going to use everyday, but Grandma isn't the only consumer of your hardware. secondly swap partition collocated on same disk with the rest of the system when folks have large workset sets and active memory requirements. There isn't going to be a universally applicable kernel config. Perhaps you should look into specific install configuration parameters(e.g, ask question like do you running half a dozen applications with 100 MB data files all open simultaneoly? ) 3. Continuing the trend.... non sexy stuff counts alot also (especially when you NUKE the old reliable standby). If you are going to nuke OS9 you need to get on the stick helping folks with drivers and a slewe of the nonsexy programs that need to be present for folks to get their work done. If perhiphals are at a dead end as far as support .. then let folks know (and/or conjole the vendors of those product to get the word out). More than few software vendors have been reasonably waiting for more stable interfaces ( and/or system bug fixes ). 4. If you do stablize/tweak/bugfix the OS to the X.3 level by January.... that should be a freebie. Don't add iTetris , iCandy and state that it is another $100.00 to move up to what the OS really should have been in the first place. For old timers the feedback is ... 1. You need more resources to run MacOS X.2. specifically more RAM (mulltasking, microkernel-like, OSs ) and video processing horsepower (Aqua is very, expensive). Additionlly, if you're going to run some stuff that requires Classic that double so. [ I'm willin to bet that LinuxPPC zips along faster for unix specific stuff also.] The Unix kernel is going to take up more space the 0S9.0 cooperative services did. There is nothing that Apple can particularly do to solve that problem. If you could get a more stable OS for "free" they would have done it. They can't get over it. And when multiple programs are enable to run... they will. Resource oontention is just the price of doing business on OS X. 2. Yes, OS X.2 is more bleeding edge than the marketing hooo-haaa would have you to believe. The phrase "don't believe everything you read/see" comes into play here. 3. Yes, major OS upgrades are painful. Finally if you're old stuff works fine, why get you underwear all bunched up? [ Not that Apple wants to hear, but if it isn't broke don't fix it. ]

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Feedback for Apple..... and old timers
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 6:10:58 PM
In case someone from Apple wades through this backlash and is looking for lessons to take away. 1. While the performance increase of X.2 over previous versions of X is appreciated... don't for a moment think you've done anything other than the minimally acceptable. 2. Instead of iFoo and iBar and IBaz perhaps someone could add a useful utility that would help nonUnix gurus diagnos problems when their applicatin mix working set is in conflict with the default vm parameters. No this isn't a tool that Gramdma is going to use everyday, but Grandma isn't the only consumer of your hardware. secondly swap partition collocated on same disk with the rest of the system when folks have large workset sets and active memory requirements. There isn't going to be a universally applicable kernel config. Perhaps you should look into specific install configuration parameters(e.g, ask question like do you running half a dozen applications with 100 MB data files all open simultaneoly? ) 3. Continuing the trend.... non sexy stuff counts alot also (especially when you NUKE the old reliable standby). If you are going to nuke OS9 you need to get on the stick helping folks with drivers and a slewe of the nonsexy programs that need to be present for folks to get their work done. If perhiphals are at a dead end as far as support .. then let folks know (and/or conjole the vendors of those product to get the word out). More than few software vendors have been reasonably waiting for more stable interfaces ( and/or system bug fixes ). 4. If you do stablize/tweak/bugfix the OS to the X.3 level by January.... that should be a freebie. Don't add iTetris , iCandy and state that it is another $100.00 to move up to what the OS really should have been in the first place. For old timers the feedback is ... 1. You need more resources to run MacOS X.2. specifically more RAM (mulltasking, microkernel-like, OSs ) and video processing horsepower (Aqua is very, expensive). Additionlly, if you're going to run some stuff that requires Classic that double so. [ I'm willin to bet that LinuxPPC zips along faster for unix specific stuff also.] The Unix kernel is going to take up more space the 0S9.0 cooperative services did. There is nothing that Apple can particularly do to solve that problem. If you could get a more stable OS for "free" they would have done it. They can't get over it. And when multiple programs are enable to run... they will. Resource oontention is just the price of doing business on OS X. 2. Yes, OS X.2 is more bleeding edge than the marketing hooo-haaa would have you to believe. The phrase "don't believe everything you read/see" comes into play here. 3. Yes, major OS upgrades are painful. Finally if you're old stuff works fine, why get you underwear all bunched up? [ Not that Apple wants to hear, but if it isn't broke don't fix it. ]

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Feedback for Apple..... and old timers
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 6:11:06 PM
In case someone from Apple wades through this backlash and is looking for lessons to take away. 1. While the performance increase of X.2 over previous versions of X is appreciated... don't for a moment think you've done anything other than the minimally acceptable. 2. Instead of iFoo and iBar and IBaz perhaps someone could add a useful utility that would help nonUnix gurus diagnos problems when their applicatin mix working set is in conflict with the default vm parameters. No this isn't a tool that Gramdma is going to use everyday, but Grandma isn't the only consumer of your hardware. secondly swap partition collocated on same disk with the rest of the system when folks have large workset sets and active memory requirements. There isn't going to be a universally applicable kernel config. Perhaps you should look into specific install configuration parameters(e.g, ask question like do you running half a dozen applications with 100 MB data files all open simultaneoly? ) 3. Continuing the trend.... non sexy stuff counts alot also (especially when you NUKE the old reliable standby). If you are going to nuke OS9 you need to get on the stick helping folks with drivers and a slewe of the nonsexy programs that need to be present for folks to get their work done. If perhiphals are at a dead end as far as support .. then let folks know (and/or conjole the vendors of those product to get the word out). More than few software vendors have been reasonably waiting for more stable interfaces ( and/or system bug fixes ). 4. If you do stablize/tweak/bugfix the OS to the X.3 level by January.... that should be a freebie. Don't add iTetris , iCandy and state that it is another $100.00 to move up to what the OS really should have been in the first place. For old timers the feedback is ... 1. You need more resources to run MacOS X.2. specifically more RAM (mulltasking, microkernel-like, OSs ) and video processing horsepower (Aqua is very, expensive). Additionlly, if you're going to run some stuff that requires Classic that double so. [ I'm willin to bet that LinuxPPC zips along faster for unix specific stuff also.] The Unix kernel is going to take up more space the 0S9.0 cooperative services did. There is nothing that Apple can particularly do to solve that problem. If you could get a more stable OS for "free" they would have done it. They can't get over it. And when multiple programs are enable to run... they will. Resource oontention is just the price of doing business on OS X. 2. Yes, OS X.2 is more bleeding edge than the marketing hooo-haaa would have you to believe. The phrase "don't believe everything you read/see" comes into play here. 3. Yes, major OS upgrades are painful. Finally if you're old stuff works fine, why get you underwear all bunched up? [ Not that Apple wants to hear, but if it isn't broke don't fix it. ]

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Feedback for Apple..... and old timers
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 6:11:29 PM
In case someone from Apple wades through this backlash and is looking for lessons to take away. 1. While the performance increase of X.2 over previous versions of X is appreciated... don't for a moment think you've done anything other than the minimally acceptable. 2. Instead of iFoo and iBar and IBaz perhaps someone could add a useful utility that would help nonUnix gurus diagnos problems when their applicatin mix working set is in conflict with the default vm parameters. No this isn't a tool that Gramdma is going to use everyday, but Grandma isn't the only consumer of your hardware. secondly swap partition collocated on same disk with the rest of the system when folks have large workset sets and active memory requirements. There isn't going to be a universally applicable kernel config. Perhaps you should look into specific install configuration parameters(e.g, ask question like do you running half a dozen applications with 100 MB data files all open simultaneoly? ) 3. Continuing the trend.... non sexy stuff counts alot also (especially when you NUKE the old reliable standby). If you are going to nuke OS9 you need to get on the stick helping folks with drivers and a slewe of the nonsexy programs that need to be present for folks to get their work done. If perhiphals are at a dead end as far as support .. then let folks know (and/or conjole the vendors of those product to get the word out). More than few software vendors have been reasonably waiting for more stable interfaces ( and/or system bug fixes ). 4. If you do stablize/tweak/bugfix the OS to the X.3 level by January.... that should be a freebie. Don't add iTetris , iCandy and state that it is another $100.00 to move up to what the OS really should have been in the first place. For old timers the feedback is ... 1. You need more resources to run MacOS X.2. specifically more RAM (mulltasking, microkernel-like, OSs ) and video processing horsepower (Aqua is very, expensive). Additionlly, if you're going to run some stuff that requires Classic that double so. [ I'm willin to bet that LinuxPPC zips along faster for unix specific stuff also.] The Unix kernel is going to take up more space the 0S9.0 cooperative services did. There is nothing that Apple can particularly do to solve that problem. If you could get a more stable OS for "free" they would have done it. They can't get over it. And when multiple programs are enable to run... they will. Resource oontention is just the price of doing business on OS X. 2. Yes, OS X.2 is more bleeding edge than the marketing hooo-haaa would have you to believe. The phrase "don't believe everything you read/see" comes into play here. 3. Yes, major OS upgrades are painful. Finally if you're old stuff works fine, why get you underwear all bunched up? [ Not that Apple wants to hear, but if it isn't broke don't fix it. ]

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Feedback for Apple..... and old timers
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 6:11:46 PM
In case someone from Apple wades through this backlash and is looking for lessons to take away. 1. While the performance increase of X.2 over previous versions of X is appreciated... don't for a moment think you've done anything other than the minimally acceptable. 2. Instead of iFoo and iBar and IBaz perhaps someone could add a useful utility that would help nonUnix gurus diagnos problems when their applicatin mix working set is in conflict with the default vm parameters. No this isn't a tool that Gramdma is going to use everyday, but Grandma isn't the only consumer of your hardware. secondly swap partition collocated on same disk with the rest of the system when folks have large workset sets and active memory requirements. There isn't going to be a universally applicable kernel config. Perhaps you should look into specific install configuration parameters(e.g, ask question like do you running half a dozen applications with 100 MB data files all open simultaneoly? ) 3. Continuing the trend.... non sexy stuff counts alot also (especially when you NUKE the old reliable standby). If you are going to nuke OS9 you need to get on the stick helping folks with drivers and a slewe of the nonsexy programs that need to be present for folks to get their work done. If perhiphals are at a dead end as far as support .. then let folks know (and/or conjole the vendors of those product to get the word out). More than few software vendors have been reasonably waiting for more stable interfaces ( and/or system bug fixes ). 4. If you do stablize/tweak/bugfix the OS to the X.3 level by January.... that should be a freebie. Don't add iTetris , iCandy and state that it is another $100.00 to move up to what the OS really should have been in the first place. For old timers the feedback is ... 1. You need more resources to run MacOS X.2. specifically more RAM (mulltasking, microkernel-like, OSs ) and video processing horsepower (Aqua is very, expensive). Additionlly, if you're going to run some stuff that requires Classic that double so. [ I'm willin to bet that LinuxPPC zips along faster for unix specific stuff also.] The Unix kernel is going to take up more space the 0S9.0 cooperative services did. There is nothing that Apple can particularly do to solve that problem. If you could get a more stable OS for "free" they would have done it. They can't get over it. And when multiple programs are enable to run... they will. Resource oontention is just the price of doing business on OS X. 2. Yes, OS X.2 is more bleeding edge than the marketing hooo-haaa would have you to believe. The phrase "don't believe everything you read/see" comes into play here. 3. Yes, major OS upgrades are painful. Finally if you're old stuff works fine, why get you underwear all bunched up? [ Not that Apple wants to hear, but if it isn't broke don't fix it. ]

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Feedback for Apple..... and old timers
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 6:12:07 PM
In case someone from Apple wades through this backlash and is looking for lessons to take away. 1. While the performance increase of X.2 over previous versions of X is appreciated... don't for a moment think you've done anything other than the minimally acceptable. 2. Instead of iFoo and iBar and IBaz perhaps someone could add a useful utility that would help nonUnix gurus diagnos problems when their applicatin mix working set is in conflict with the default vm parameters. No this isn't a tool that Gramdma is going to use everyday, but Grandma isn't the only consumer of your hardware. secondly swap partition collocated on same disk with the rest of the system when folks have large workset sets and active memory requirements. There isn't going to be a universally applicable kernel config. Perhaps you should look into specific install configuration parameters(e.g, ask question like do you running half a dozen applications with 100 MB data files all open simultaneoly? ) 3. Continuing the trend.... non sexy stuff counts alot also (especially when you NUKE the old reliable standby). If you are going to nuke OS9 you need to get on the stick helping folks with drivers and a slewe of the nonsexy programs that need to be present for folks to get their work done. If perhiphals are at a dead end as far as support .. then let folks know (and/or conjole the vendors of those product to get the word out). More than few software vendors have been reasonably waiting for more stable interfaces ( and/or system bug fixes ). 4. If you do stablize/tweak/bugfix the OS to the X.3 level by January.... that should be a freebie. Don't add iTetris , iCandy and state that it is another $100.00 to move up to what the OS really should have been in the first place. For old timers the feedback is ... 1. You need more resources to run MacOS X.2. specifically more RAM (mulltasking, microkernel-like, OSs ) and video processing horsepower (Aqua is very, expensive). Additionlly, if you're going to run some stuff that requires Classic that double so. [ I'm willin to bet that LinuxPPC zips along faster for unix specific stuff also.] The Unix kernel is going to take up more space the 0S9.0 cooperative services did. There is nothing that Apple can particularly do to solve that problem. If you could get a more stable OS for "free" they would have done it. They can't get over it. And when multiple programs are enable to run... they will. Resource oontention is just the price of doing business on OS X. 2. Yes, OS X.2 is more bleeding edge than the marketing hooo-haaa would have you to believe. The phrase "don't believe everything you read/see" comes into play here. 3. Yes, major OS upgrades are painful. Finally if you're old stuff works fine, why get you underwear all bunched up? [ Not that Apple wants to hear, but if it isn't broke don't fix it. ]

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 6:14:00 PM
I will take stability over speed ANY day. Thats why I run X.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 6:14:18 PM
I will take stability over speed ANY day. Thats why I run X.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 6:16:48 PM
I will take stability over speed ANY day. Thats why I run X.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 6:17:02 PM
I will take stability over speed ANY day. Thats why I run X.

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Double Triple Quadruple Posts
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 6:59:03 PM
dear powerpage. you need to write a select statement before an insert statement checking if the exact same data is already in the database. this will prevent users who reload the page from posting the same thing six times.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 7:01:40 PM
10.2 rocks stability-wise. As several people point out, sure, OS X can definitely be further optimized. I'm running it on a Dual G4/450 with 512 MB of RAM. It runs acceptably on that machine, and even so on my Pismo Powerbook G3, which has 640 MB. One tip I tried to help speed things up was to fix all the permissions, using Apple's Disk Utility. This seems to help a bit. Also, I've ditched Internet Explorer in favor of Chimera (Navigator). I tend to think IE and other MS apps tend to really slow my machine down, for some reason. (hmmmm....) I could never go back to OS 9. I like switching between my apps, and hate the cooperative multitasking that the classic OS has. I'm here for the long haul, and look forward to more updates (and yes, I agree, lets get a freebie speed-optimized update soon). Bob That PC Weenies guy http://www.pcweenies.com

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 7:36:23 PM
I am a webmaster. I have beenusing Macs since 1987. At first OS X seemed slower. Even updating all the way through to OS 10.2.1 I wondered what the speed issue is. Typically, I have Photoshop, Imageready, GoLive 6, Fireworks and an FTP client running. Is there a speed difference? Not particularly. Windows draw slightly faster in X, but in realtime performance, there's not enough of a lage to make a difference. Multitasking and multithreading more than make up for any speed issue. The notable exception is GoLive. It runs slower than Dreamweaver. We access or sites from remote volumes and GolLive seems to be slower in accessing these volumes. But, that's also true in System 9. I'll stick with Jaguar- It never crashes and rarely gets the beachball.

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10.2 v. 7.1
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 7:37:36 PM
At work today, a user donated her father's SE/30 to our department. After a year of daily OS X use, I was amazed by the performance of the compact. 6MB RAM? No problem. Sppedy. The finder screams. ClarisWorks runs like a dream. Though the SE/30 can't touch the responsiveness I got out of BeOS, it made me rethink my notions of OS X.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 7:46:09 PM
I got worn out reading all these comments, so I hope I'm not repetitious: So, is OS9 able to handle multiple processors? ... no. Talk about SLOW !!! What is the matter with you people?

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 7:50:31 PM
Apple would do betray of old apple`s frends by switching OS. If OS X loses the association of old mac OSs, OSX becomes another OS for old mac users, especially old heavy users. Their properties for old mac OSs are many immense sums of inteligent property and make some part of daily life or social works. Apple`s old friends are sick for leaving old mac for Apple`s compulsory execution. They (We) are not new "making switchers". Apple must protect old mac friends for Apple ethic. Do tops of apple have not plenty of ethics?

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:23:57 PM
After switching to OS 10.2 I experienced very slow application switching and launch times. After running the "repair permissions" in the disk utility program the problem has disappeared. Contrary to the authors experience I have found the performance of OS 10.2.1 to be quite comparable to OS 9.2. I'm running a 500 Mhz Ti Book.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:24:32 PM
After switching to OS 10.2, I experienced very slow application switching and launch times. After running the "repair permissions" in the disk utility program the problem has disappeared. Contrary to the authors experience, I have found the performance of OS 10.2.1 to be quite comparable to OS 9.2. I'm running a 500 Mhz Ti Book.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:24:48 PM
After switching to OS 10.2, I experienced very slow application switching and launch times. After running the "repair permissions" in the disk utility program the problem has disappeared. Contrary to the authors experience, I have found the performance of OS 10.2.1 to be quite comparable to OS 9.2. I'm running a 500 Mhz Ti Book.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:25:09 PM
After switching to OS 10.2, I experienced very slow application switching and launch times. After running the "repair permissions" in the disk utility program the problem has disappeared. Contrary to the authors experience, I have found the performance of OS 10.2.1 to be quite comparable to OS 9.2. I'm running a 500 Mhz Ti Book.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:25:22 PM
After switching to OS 10.2, I experienced very slow application switching and launch times. After running the "repair permissions" in the disk utility program the problem has disappeared. Contrary to the authors experience, I have found the performance of OS 10.2.1 to be quite comparable to OS 9.2. I'm running a 500 Mhz Ti Book.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:25:39 PM
After switching to OS 10.2, I experienced very slow application switching and launch times. After running the "repair permissions" in the disk utility program the problem has disappeared. Contrary to the authors experience, I have found the performance of OS 10.2.1 to be quite comparable to OS 9.2. I'm running a 500 Mhz Ti Book.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:25:51 PM
And speaking of speed....why the heck did Microsoft ever bring out Windows 95!!?? I thought Windows 3.1 was the BEST! It was fast, crashed occasionally, etc.... I'm willing to give Apple the benefit of a doubt and chalk the slowness up to growing pains. I mean, Windows 95 was dead slow when it first came out too...now XP is actually fairly snappy on decent hardware (note, I'm *not* comparing Windows to the Mac OS--that's just stupid...but the ideas behind the "big transitions" for each OS are similar). Personally, I do use Jag on a Pismo 500 PowerBook....it's a touch slow, sure, but I like the visual richness of working in X as well as the stability, Windows Networking compatibility, iApps (love iPhoto, iCal, and iTunes 3), Command Line utilities (love the ability to ssh into my servers and find out what processes are running or not), Faster Networking (OSX Personal Filesharing wipes the floor with OS 9 Personal Filesharing), availability of free UNIX-type programs (I haven't delved into this, but it blows me away the stuff Linux/UNIX guys can do with *free* software that often has way faster bug fix turnaround times than any of the major app developers), near-instant wake-ups, auto network connection sensing and switching, better compliance with TCP/IP standards (I'll often see my OS 9 machines have some problem with DNS stuff but my OSX PowerBook and the offices' Windows Boxes won't have any problems), and, again, the stability, the stability, the stability. In my entire time of using 10.1 and above, I've had no kernel panics and only twice have I actually had to restart the machine as a result of a crash or something. Under 9, I was *constantly* pushing the stability limits by doing lots of multitasking and often, I was let down....and when you're doing lots of multitasking and you get let down, you lose lots of work. Under X, I have no problems running Word, Excel, GoLive, Photoshop, GraphicConverter, iTunes, Mail, Server Admin, Macintosh Manager, BBEdit, OmniWeb, Explorer, and Chimera all at the same time (I often do Web authoring at the same time I'm administering my networks). If there's an extra few second pause in the switching amongst apps, I don't care. It's worth the few seconds here and there compared to waiting 2 minutes for the machine to reboot and whatever time it would take me to re-do the work lost when IE hung the machine, forcing me to restart, and losing work I had open in Photoshop and GoLive. I've got faith that Apple will make future versions of OSX much more efficient and speedy....we just must have patience. In a world of instant this and instant that, our society has become increasingly way too impatient....we're forgetting that something as complex as a modern, fast OS takes time to perfect. I do agree that OSX could have benefited from another year or so of optimizing, but Apple *needed* to show the world that it's ready to run with the big boys.....we needed protected memory, pre-emptive multitasking, and multithreading. Apple needed to dump it's 15+ year old Operating System and step into the 21st century with a core OS that would take it into the future. Call this a marketing tactic or a move to save Apple....it could be either. But, I'm sure if Apple were still pushing OS 9.9 these days, we'd be going to get Dells with XP. I guess for those that are still not satisfied, you can always type >console at your login box....it'll be *really* fast then.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:25:56 PM
After switching to OS 10.2, I experienced very slow application switching and launch times. After running the "repair permissions" in the disk utility program the problem has disappeared. Contrary to the authors experience, I have found the performance of OS 10.2.1 to be quite comparable to OS 9.2. I'm running a 500 Mhz Ti Book.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:26:19 PM
After switching to OS 10.2, I experienced very slow application switching and launch times. After running the "repair permissions" in the disk utility program the problem has disappeared. Contrary to the authors experience, I have found the performance of OS 10.2.1 to be quite comparable to OS 9.2. I'm running a 500 Mhz Ti Book.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:26:34 PM
After switching to OS 10.2, I experienced very slow application switching and launch times. After running the "repair permissions" in the disk utility program the problem has disappeared. Contrary to the authors experience, I have found the performance of OS 10.2.1 to be quite comparable to OS 9.2. I'm running a 500 Mhz Ti Book.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:26:53 PM
After switching to OS 10.2, I experienced very slow application switching and launch times. After running the "repair permissions" in the disk utility program the problem has disappeared. Contrary to the authors experience, I have found the performance of OS 10.2.1 to be quite comparable to OS 9.2. I'm running a 500 Mhz Ti Book.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 8:27:06 PM
After switching to OS 10.2, I experienced very slow application switching and launch times. After running the "repair permissions" in the disk utility program the problem has disappeared. Contrary to the authors experience, I have found the performance of OS 10.2.1 to be quite comparable to OS 9.2. I'm running a 500 Mhz Ti Book.

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So, what took YOU guys so long to figure it out?
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:03:52 PM
From my very first try at OSX I thought "wow, what a slow pig" and promptly shelved it for a while. When I bought my Tibook 667, 10.1 came preloaded but not as the boot drive. I played with and thought, "ok, a tiny bit faster but hey, still a really slow mamal that wallows in the mud." As more OSX apps came out, I gradually siwtched out until I was full time OSX. But at NO time did I ever think OSX was ANYWHERE near as zippy as OS9. I posted to the boards till I was blue in the face about WHY OSX was SO SLOW and why did people think it was acceptable. Sure, I love the stability and some of the new features and apps are killers and I guess there's really no turning back for me now. But c'mon Powerpage editors (and readers) did ANYONE think OSX or Jaguar was as fast as OS9?? Please!! I pretty much have accepted that tit'll be a future Powerbook I own that will take advantage of OSX, not this one. And yes, I agree that Apple needs to balance marketing w/ the performance but they need the glitz to sell the new boxes. So far, I think they're doing ok but they need to keep it up. I'd love to see regular software updates that give me little speed boosts as we go. As for games, sheesh. That's a sore subject. I still boot into OS9 for many mahy games. Warcraft 3,Medal of Honor, and many other intense games run 3 times faster of OS9 and OSX. This needs to be fixed ASAP.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:06:37 PM
Here i am watching an apple ad wondering why i have chosen to run my business on a computer system that demands i learn the unix command line to set up a mail server... i started with mac in 1984 to avoid this crap... i listen to their ads as satire now... their own mail server doesn't work... yet they charge $1000 for an update that also doesn't work... and then charge ANOTHER $1000 for a maintenance contract for the product that never worked out of the box. My network printer vendor tells me my users will never be able to access their print mailboxes in jaguar like they could in OS9, and using jaguar feels like a 50% processor downgrade. My users are unhappy and wonder why we continue to stick loyally by this crap. I begin to wonder as well. If i didn't own the place someone would have fired me by now.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:06:55 PM
Here i am watching an apple ad wondering why i have chosen to run my business on a computer system that demands i learn the unix command line to set up a mail server... i started with mac in 1984 to avoid this crap... i listen to their ads as satire now... their own mail server doesn't work... yet they charge $1000 for an update that also doesn't work... and then charge ANOTHER $1000 for a maintenance contract for the product that never worked out of the box. My network printer vendor tells me my users will never be able to access their print mailboxes in jaguar like they could in OS9, and using jaguar feels like a 50% processor downgrade. My users are unhappy and wonder why we continue to stick loyally by this crap. I begin to wonder as well. If i didn't own the place someone would have fired me by now.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:14:36 PM
os x is a bit slower than 9, but the tradeoff is worth it. when i have to use xp @ work, it runs slow as well. These new OSes are bloated, large, and tax our system's resources. Still, i would have a very hard time going back to 9 exclusively.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:14:53 PM
os x is a bit slower than 9, but the tradeoff is worth it. when i have to use xp @ work, it runs slow as well. These new OSes are bloated, large, and tax our system's resources. Still, i would have a very hard time going back to 9 exclusively.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:15:15 PM
os x is a bit slower than 9, but the tradeoff is worth it. when i have to use xp @ work, it runs slow as well. These new OSes are bloated, large, and tax our system's resources. Still, i would have a very hard time going back to 9 exclusively.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:15:32 PM
os x is a bit slower than 9, but the tradeoff is worth it. when i have to use xp @ work, it runs slow as well. These new OSes are bloated, large, and tax our system's resources. Still, i would have a very hard time going back to 9 exclusively.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:16:47 PM
os x is a bit slower than 9, but the tradeoff is worth it. when i have to use xp @ work, it runs slow as well. These new OSes are bloated, large, and tax our system's resources. Still, i would have a very hard time going back to 9 exclusively.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:17:09 PM
os x is a bit slower than 9, but the tradeoff is worth it. when i have to use xp @ work, it runs slow as well. These new OSes are bloated, large, and tax our system's resources. Still, i would have a very hard time going back to 9 exclusively.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:27:23 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:27:44 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:27:58 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:28:17 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:28:36 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:28:50 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:29:08 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:29:23 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:29:45 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:29:58 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:30:14 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:30:32 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:30:52 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:31:13 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:31:29 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:31:45 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:32:06 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:32:20 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:32:39 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:32:57 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:33:12 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:33:30 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Deal With It
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 9:33:45 PM
Deal with it. OS X will never be as fast, just as 7 was never as fast as 6. However, it does more, it is the future, and you will either become like one of those sorry museum caretakers preaching the joys of System 6, or you will embrace the future. That said, I'd like Apple to take a short break from wizzy apps and improve a few bottlenecks that make OS X less snappy. After their done with that, they should fire their Quality Assurance department and get one that can help them track and fix bugs the way they used to, because OS X is way more buggy than previous OS versions. Overall, they seemed to spend too much time adding eye candy to the interface and too little time making it work properly.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 10:09:41 PM
I have a PowerBook 667 with 1GB of RAM and OS X 10.2, and switching between Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, BBEdit and IE bring at most a 1 second delay (and yes, I have files open in each app). Don't know what the person that posted this story is doing, but I find OS X to far outperform OS 9 for what I do (and for what they have described they do). Managing massive numbers of files and large amounts of data used to crush OS 9. X blows through it with the greatest of ease.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 10:22:13 PM
Waaaagh.... Don't like it? Don't use it..

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 10:32:00 PM
Not a lot of people here seem to get it. Pre-emptive multitasking will never be as fast as cooperative multi-tasking... for the FRONT APP!!! Go to OS9, load MS Word, then launch another app. DVD Player is a nice choice because you can see very clearly what's happening. Play your DVD then switch to Word and start typing. Or instead of DVD player, render a Lightwave file. Now switch to OS X. Tell me now about performance. And for God's sake be a man and stop your whining.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 10:34:07 PM
Not a lot of people here seem to get it. Pre-emptive multitasking will never be as fast as cooperative multi-tasking... for the FRONT APP!!! Go to OS9, load MS Word, then launch another app. DVD Player is a nice choice because you can see very clearly what's happening. Play your DVD then switch to Word and start typing. Or instead of DVD player, render a Lightwave file. Now switch to OS X. Tell me now about performance. And for God's sake be a man and stop your whining.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 10:34:57 PM
Wow, can't wait to see the "I switch back to a 4 year PC cause' it was quicker than a new OS X machine". Haha.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 11:44:08 PM
Sorry, but I don't get it? I loaded IE, Mail, Apple Works, Illistrator, Photoshop, Word Excel and let Seti crunch some packets in the background with no beachball except when I resized the IE window. If the author wants to be taken seriously, post your benchmarks. Encode an MP3 file in both OS's. Compress a movie in both OS's. Run some photoshop filters in both OS's. Do anything that actually takes time on a computer and report back the performance between OS 9 and OS X. Then just for good mesure, do some things while encoding a CD to MP3 files and compressing a video (hell run a DVD video on each system while doing some of these things) and tell me about the speed of OS 9, and or the speed of the Dell windows PC. For the record I am on a G4 450 cube with an ATI Rage 128 video card 1.25GB ram and 120MB hd.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 11:44:26 PM
Sorry, but I don't get it? I loaded IE, Mail, Apple Works, Illistrator, Photoshop, Word Excel and let Seti crunch some packets in the background with no beachball except when I resized the IE window. If the author wants to be taken seriously, post your benchmarks. Encode an MP3 file in both OS's. Compress a movie in both OS's. Run some photoshop filters in both OS's. Do anything that actually takes time on a computer and report back the performance between OS 9 and OS X. Then just for good mesure, do some things while encoding a CD to MP3 files and compressing a video (hell run a DVD video on each system while doing some of these things) and tell me about the speed of OS 9, and or the speed of the Dell windows PC. For the record I am on a G4 450 cube with an ATI Rage 128 video card 1.25GB ram and 120MB hd.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/14/2002 - 11:57:21 PM
Dumb article. OS X is just better, and it isnt OS 9.5, ts a different OS. All these people running 27 apps at once - for gods sake close them down. I dont get crashes, I dont get problems, I just use my 667 dvi Pbook and its great. os9? well I like the look of the fonts better, but TinkerTool and other Haxies are taking care of that. Jaguar seems fine, stable, not much faster than 10.1.5, but thats OK. Havent had a SINGLE crash since I started using OSX. I like that, funnily enough. The PowerPage is having some kind of problem I think........

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 12:02:01 AM
This used to be a decent place to get information about mobile Macintosh computing. I see it's devolved considerably. Uninformed, poorly written tirades with no facts backing up the author's opinion, and no apparent relevance to mobile computing. What ever happened to Jason O'Grady? I'm deleting my powerpage bookmark now, I urge you to do the same if you're as fed up as I am with the lack of quality reporting.

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I've got your OSX benchmarks, Mr. Cube.
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 12:08:36 AM
It's true that OS9 cannot mulitthread and so on. So you can't do 10 things at once. But I am a production professional, and I don't do 10 things at once. I juggle a few aps, After Effects, Photoshop, etc... and I have a pretty good benchmark test, though Pavlov would appreciate it more than some geeks would. It's called HABIT! I work very fast. Just hiding an application, closing windows (especially in the horrible MAIL.app) or finding addresses and so on takes MUCH MUCH longer in OSX. Saving a file takes longer. Waiting for save dialogs to open takes longer. The dock animations take time. Opening and closing of menus take time. Switching between aps takes time. Try getting info. Every time you click on a radio button you have to wait for a dialog box to actually ANIMATE open!! MUCH MORE TIME than it takes on OS9. I know this because I spend a lot more time waiting on OSX, waiting for the computer to catch up with my keystrokes, waiting for IE, and dealing with wasted screen real estate on huge, chunky metallic GUI like itunes, or on large fonts I cannot shrink, or on poof animations and a dead slow dock. I don't care about rendering time- so what if OSX is 10% faster. Or 30% faster. When the computer is rendering, I'm playing the guitar. What I care about is that the computer is fast while I'm on it, while I'm navigating the GUI. And in that respect, I am totally stalled in OSX. There is no denying this.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 12:39:17 AM
It's the GUI, nothing more and nothing less that is slowing X down. I can't stand it. It's like Jaguar has had a few beers. Everything is ...just...s...l...o......w.......e.........r. Ugh! There simply is no snap like in 9. Every app suffers, every user suffers every hour they use the OS. Combined with relearning how to be efficient with the interface and get around the quirks of it and plain broken parts, makes this OS very painful to use. Apple has kicked 10.2 out the door with its 150 improvements, made a splash and that's fine. The marketeers and advertising goobers should have plenty of ammunition to shoot at Microsoft. Apple MUST now spend every waking moment optimizing, optimizing, optimizing.. No more lag, no more beachballs, no more stalls. (Why not re-tool things a bit so that 10.2 doesn't take such a hit running on an iBook. This thing is so tuned for Altivec on a G4 it makes using it with on my book is hideous.) We all have a need for speed. This is serious. My department is the last bastion of Macintosh in the company. I have 20 iBooks running on 9 and would love to swtich to X, but the speed hit is too much. The thought of what sort of learning curver our users face is enough to give me grey hair, too. I don't want to imagine explaining the new interface while the beachball spins and spins and spins...

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 12:39:34 AM
It's the GUI, nothing more and nothing less that is slowing X down. I can't stand it. It's like Jaguar has had a few beers. Everything is ...just...s...l...o......w.......e.........r. Ugh! There simply is no snap like in 9. Every app suffers, every user suffers every hour they use the OS. Combined with relearning how to be efficient with the interface and get around the quirks of it and plain broken parts, makes this OS very painful to use. Apple has kicked 10.2 out the door with its 150 improvements, made a splash and that's fine. The marketeers and advertising goobers should have plenty of ammunition to shoot at Microsoft. Apple MUST now spend every waking moment optimizing, optimizing, optimizing.. No more lag, no more beachballs, no more stalls. (Why not re-tool things a bit so that 10.2 doesn't take such a hit running on an iBook. This thing is so tuned for Altivec on a G4 it makes using it with on my book is hideous.) We all have a need for speed. This is serious. My department is the last bastion of Macintosh in the company. I have 20 iBooks running on 9 and would love to swtich to X, but the speed hit is too much. The thought of what sort of learning curver our users face is enough to give me grey hair, too. I don't want to imagine explaining the new interface while the beachball spins and spins and spins...

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 12:42:03 AM
Dear Joaqim, I've been using and programming computers for more than 30 years. I began on IBM with FMS and upgraded my skills continuously. I've kept up with an industry that began by trying to be a hobby and maturing into what is now one of the most contenious areas of Human endeavors Mankind has ever faced. That is of course, being the one about all of us thinking we're right about computers and really annoying those of us who actually do know what we're doing . Joaqin, at the risk of sounding like a flame, I disagree with you strenuously. At present, I'm using a iMac/400 with a DVD drive inside. I dare you to watch a DVD movie on MacOS-9 and then watch the same movie on MacOS-X.2 You'll find that macOS-X.2 does a much better job of operating with interuptions (like changing the volume or other modifier) while watching the film. Mind you, on my computer the DVD does its thing entirely in software, no hardware between the player, the software decompressor and the display and sound output. The point is, MacOS-X is a much better platform for functions that rely heavily on the multitasking scheme cooperating with driver integration. That's just a simple fact and you know it. Your own example was a totally offbase one. You compare the use of third party hardware interfaced with third party drivers as if there should be no difference in the driver's performance when you know damn well many driver programmers are good at optimizing drivers for Windows environments, but can do nothing exciting with the same application on a Macintosh. This problem is common and rampant. In terms of comparing MacOS-9 tools with their MacOS-X counterparts, there are specific cases where you can point to MacOS-9 and say "See it's faster", but remember my example of playing DVD movies. It can't work well in MacOS-9 because this is a clear case where the MacOS-9 doesn't cooperate well with it's own multitasking polling sheme in it's bid to coordinate itself with hardware and software drivers. It has never been able to do that well. It is one of the reasons why MacOS-9 got a stake through its heart over a month ago. Joaqin, you need to get more skilled. Your isolated case aproach to analysis of computer performance is nothing less that naive at best, and just plain wrong-headed at worst. Is Apple perfect? Hell no. I've always thought Apple should have bought out Microware and gotten the rights to OS9-68k and recoded it to PPC. Outcome the same, memory usage and performance better. Cost $50-million versus the $400 million Steve Jobs got for NextStep. But like you, nobody listens to me ! But if I have to take MacOS-X.2 instead; anytime, anywhere. It is in every way that matters to a hardware type like me much superior to MacOS-9. Paul Pollock

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 2:00:44 AM
When Apple moved from Motorola's 680x processor to PowerPC, things slowed down big time. Only after Apple moved to the G3 processor did things really speed up (PPC 601, 603, 604 processors were slow). I am hoping that after Apple moves to a much faster processor (and OS code is further optimized), we'll see the speed of OS X catch up to that of OS 9. Cheers, Derek Tom

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 2:01:00 AM
When Apple moved from Motorola's 680x processor to PowerPC, things slowed down big time. Only after Apple moved to the G3 processor did things really speed up (PPC 601, 603, 604 processors were slow). I am hoping that after Apple moves to a much faster processor (and OS code is further optimized), we'll see the speed of OS X catch up to that of OS 9. Cheers, Derek Tom

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 5:52:20 AM
As a Shell interpreting geophysicist who has used/uses Mac OS, Sun Solaris, Windows from 3.1 to 2000/NT, SGI IRIX, DOS, etc., I am most happy with Mac OS X. I have a G4 TiBook 550 with .5GB RAM. It always works. It is not the fastest performer out there, but it is more than fast enough. During my stint at Shell's research lab developing interpretation software (US patent 6012018, Presentation and Interpretation of Seismic Data) I became intimately acquainted with CPUs, graphics subsystems, actual performance and perceived performance. It became clear that there was a threshhold performance level after which paying for faster refreshes and redraws made no sense, and users began to spin CPU cycles to correct errors as they became more careless in their work. Productivity did not appreciably increase. In 1992 we needed an SGI Onyx machine with 2GB RAM and massive graphics cards to render our seismic in 3D. Today we do it on a SUN Blade desktop. Throughput and productivity are NOT the same thing. From what I see in the media today, many people mistake quantity for quality. Quality is Mac OS X: stable, solid, with support for a GUI and a main stream UNIX variant. Quantity is Windows: closed proprietary OS with more bugs and security leaks than can ever be fixed. And it crashes inexplicably on a regular basis, with no effective troubleshooting. I use Playststion 2 for gamespeed graphics and frittering away idle time. I use Mac OS X 10.2.1 when I need to get real work done. W.I. Hornbuckle

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 5:52:37 AM
As a Shell interpreting geophysicist who has used/uses Mac OS, Sun Solaris, Windows from 3.1 to 2000/NT, SGI IRIX, DOS, etc., I am most happy with Mac OS X. I have a G4 TiBook 550 with .5GB RAM. It always works. It is not the fastest performer out there, but it is more than fast enough. During my stint at Shell's research lab developing interpretation software (US patent 6012018, Presentation and Interpretation of Seismic Data) I became intimately acquainted with CPUs, graphics subsystems, actual performance and perceived performance. It became clear that there was a threshhold performance level after which paying for faster refreshes and redraws made no sense, and users began to spin CPU cycles to correct errors as they became more careless in their work. Productivity did not appreciably increase. In 1992 we needed an SGI Onyx machine with 2GB RAM and massive graphics cards to render our seismic in 3D. Today we do it on a SUN Blade desktop. Throughput and productivity are NOT the same thing. From what I see in the media today, many people mistake quantity for quality. Quality is Mac OS X: stable, solid, with support for a GUI and a main stream UNIX variant. Quantity is Windows: closed proprietary OS with more bugs and security leaks than can ever be fixed. And it crashes inexplicably on a regular basis, with no effective troubleshooting. I use Playststion 2 for gamespeed graphics and frittering away idle time. I use Mac OS X 10.2.1 when I need to get real work done. W.I. Hornbuckle

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 6:17:23 AM
Stupid article that lowered PowerPage's reputation. Jason O'Grady, I'm very surprised that this drivel is filling up your online content. Would all of you people that oppose OS 9 be happy if Apple simply didn't develop the Mac OS any further? Because that's what you're arguing for, plain and simple. Use OS 9 if you prefer it or use OS X if you prefer that instead. It's not a big deal. At least Mac users have a choice. At any rate, maybe Powerpage should have a Forums so that this kind of nonsense can reside permanently there instead. AJLind

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 6:17:53 AM
Stupid article that lowered PowerPage's reputation. Jason O'Grady, I'm very surprised that this drivel is filling up your online content. Would all of you people that oppose OS 9 be happy if Apple simply didn't develop the Mac OS any further? Because that's what you're arguing for, plain and simple. Use OS 9 if you prefer it or use OS X if you prefer that instead. It's not a big deal. At least Mac users have a choice. At any rate, maybe Powerpage should have a Forums so that this kind of nonsense can reside permanently there instead. AJLind@mac.com

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 6:30:29 AM
All that we're asking are 1 simple thing: let us be the ones to choose how the GUI runs for us! We want to be able to turn off all of the animation crap and just have it be functional. We want to be able to set priority to the application that is running in the front if we wish. We want to be able to customize how things work and make the OS usable our way! Why can't Steve get it?!!!

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 6:57:37 AM
The day of three computers on the desk top is here: Wintel OS X.2 OS 9.22 Having all three will make you much more productive than anyone on the planet.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 8:43:38 AM
I sure am hearing a lot of whining. Yes, OS X still needs further optimization, and of course it's fastest running on the newest hardware. But even so, I use it very successfully on a 533MHz G4 in a professional graphic design/digital production environment. QuarkXPress runs beautifully in Classic -- no complaints whatsoever. Illustrator 8 runs perfectly in Classic too; shame Illustrator 10 is such a dog (thanks to Adobe for adding so many useless features -- but AI10 under OS X does run better than AI9 under OS 9 -- still, what I want is a carbonized version of AI8). Quark and Illustrator 8 are the only apps I use Classic for at this point. Photoshop 7 in OS X is terrific -- rock-solid and not sluggish at all. All other apps I use regularly have been carbonized and run without a problem. So it's true that certain things under OS X aren't as speedy as they are under OS 9 -- but plenty of other things are far better in OS X. I'll take the stability and flexibility any day, thanks very much.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 11:12:08 AM
Yep, It's sluggish. But I have gained productivity by almost Never crashing. And it is SO much easier to configure than OS9.x. I'm a graphics professional and have been using OSX as my primary system since February. I've been using the same system folder all of that time. Updates to software are easy and I usually don't have to restart to use the updated software. I will use the new version of a "clean install" to go Jaguar in a day or two. GUI Sluggish?: Yes Productivity?: Much higher than under OS9.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 12:05:35 PM
I don't know how OS X compares to OS 9. I do know how it compares to Win98 and Redhat 7.2. Both Win98 and Redhat are faster. Like anytime a PC fans says "Yeah, but you're G4 chip is so slow compared to my P4 2GHz," we have to remember that raw speed isn't everything. Redhat was great for my profession (SSH, MySQL, PHP) but a pain to do daily activities like book keeping and web browsing for fun (Flash, Shockwave, Quicktime). Win98 was great for the daily stuff but unstable. OS X may not have the speed, but it's does my personal activities and my professional work. I would not own a Mac if not for OS X, simple as that. I bought my TiBook strictly because OS X offers the best of both worlds. It is noticeably slower than what I used to use. I may technically not get as much done, losing a few minutes each day, but the daily experience is MUCH better. I don't get frustated with crashes or constant configuring of conf files. I work and that's it.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 12:19:33 PM
MacOS 10.2 is like a frog sitting on a Venus Flytrap. The flytrap can bite and bite, but it won't bother the frog because it only has little tiny plant teeth.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 12:44:59 PM
wtf

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 1:17:11 PM
wtf

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 1:17:32 PM
wtf

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 1:24:50 PM
ballsack. that is all.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/15/2002 - 7:24:36 PM
Make it work. Then make it faster. Successful software engineering follows these precepts. We're on the right road now. Let's stay the course.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/16/2002 - 7:21:21 AM
Ha ha ha ha, good one, almost fell for it!

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So Speaks Taffin:
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/16/2002 - 7:31:39 AM
the bullet is enormous!!

jumping... is useless.

quit crying and tell Apple to get on the ball with its hardware. the software is great, it's the ass-backward, slow to adopt new standards/self sabotaging to keep the iLine from cannibalizing the PowerLine (um, DDR across the board, ANYONE?), and Motorola-dependent Apple hardware unit that's doing all of this. oh yeah, and the people complianing about a 2.5 year-old 500MHz machine not running the state of the art OS perfectly.

IBM will be our White Knight, if you cheap bastards will be willing to pay for their world-shattering processor.

now blow.

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So Speaks Taffin:
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/16/2002 - 7:31:57 AM
the bullet is enormous!!

jumping... is useless.

quit crying and tell Apple to get on the ball with its hardware. the software is great, it's the ass-backward, slow to adopt new standards/self sabotaging to keep the iLine from cannibalizing the PowerLine (um, DDR across the board, ANYONE?), and Motorola-dependent Apple hardware unit that's doing all of this. oh yeah, and the people complianing about a 2.5 year-old 500MHz machine not running the state of the art OS perfectly.

IBM will be our White Knight, if you cheap bastards will be willing to pay for their world-shattering processor.

now blow.

---

So Speaks Taffin:
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/16/2002 - 7:32:16 AM
the bullet is enormous!!

jumping... is useless.

quit crying and tell Apple to get on the ball with its hardware. the software is great, it's the ass-backward, slow to adopt new standards/self sabotaging to keep the iLine from cannibalizing the PowerLine (um, DDR across the board, ANYONE?), and Motorola-dependent Apple hardware unit that's doing all of this. oh yeah, and the people complianing about a 2.5 year-old 500MHz machine not running the state of the art OS perfectly.

IBM will be our White Knight, if you cheap bastards will be willing to pay for their world-shattering processor.

now blow.

---

So Speaks Taffin:
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/16/2002 - 7:32:35 AM
the bullet is enormous!!

jumping... is useless.

quit crying and tell Apple to get on the ball with its hardware. the software is great, it's the ass-backward, slow to adopt new standards/self sabotaging to keep the iLine from cannibalizing the PowerLine (um, DDR across the board, ANYONE?), and Motorola-dependent Apple hardware unit that's doing all of this. oh yeah, and the people complianing about a 2.5 year-old 500MHz machine not running the state of the art OS perfectly.

IBM will be our White Knight, if you cheap bastards will be willing to pay for their world-shattering processor.

now blow.

---

So Speaks Taffin:
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/16/2002 - 7:33:59 AM
the bullet is enormous!!

jumping... is useless.

quit crying and tell Apple to get on the ball with its hardware. the software is great, it's the ass-backward, slow to adopt new standards/self sabotaging to keep the iLine from cannibalizing the PowerLine (um, DDR across the board, ANYONE?), and Motorola-dependent Apple hardware unit that's doing all of this. oh yeah, and the people complianing about a 2.5 year-old 500MHz machine not running the state of the art OS perfectly.

IBM will be our White Knight, if you cheap bastards will be willing to pay for their world-shattering processor.

now blow.

---

Taffin speaks, again:
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/16/2002 - 7:51:48 AM
All that we're asking are 1 simple thing: let us be the ones to choose how the GUI runs for us! We want to be able to turn off all of the animation crap and just have it be functional. We want to be able to set priority to the application that is running in the front if we wish. We want to be able to customize how things work and make the OS usable our way! Why can't Steve get it?!!!

ever heard of System Preferences, namely the Dock's for turning off animated app launching and genie minimizing? ever heard of a "haxie" for customizing OS X until it looks and acts just like your OS Ninosaur? of course not. you're too busy crying and complaining to actually look for simple solutions to your problems (even when their banner ads are all over Mac sites and they get listed every day on VT). why can't Steve get it? why can't you get it? Steve's an insensitive prick running NeXt on a Dell, but at least he knows what he wants and gets it. all you know how to do is whine about what you want and pout when Apple doesn't hand it to you with an invitaition laser-engraved on a free iPod.

does baby want me to hold its hand and walk him over to http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/ ?

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/16/2002 - 8:39:01 AM
Sometimes when I feel like killing someone, I do a little trick to calm myself down. I'll go over to the persons house and ring the doorbell. When the person comes to the door, I'm gone, but you know what I've left on the porch? A jack-o-lantern with a knife stuck in the side of it's head with a note that says "You." After that I usually feel a lot better, and no harm done.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/16/2002 - 8:39:39 AM
The people in the village were real poor, so none of the children had any toys. But this one little boy had gotten an old enema bag and filled it with rocks, and he would go around and whap the other children across the face with it. Man, I think my heart almost broke. Later the boy came up and offered to give me the toy. This was too much! I reached out my hand, but then he ran away. I chased him down and took the enema bag. He cried a little, but that's the way of these people.

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Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/16/2002 - 8:40:10 AM
The people in the village were real poor, so none of the children had any toys. But this one little boy had gotten an old enema bag and filled it with rocks, and he would go around and whap the other children across the face with it. Man, I think my heart almost broke. Later the boy came up and offered to give me the toy. This was too much! I reached out my hand, but then he ran away. I chased him down and took the enema bag. He cried a little, but that's the way of these people.

---

Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/16/2002 - 8:40:37 AM
The people in the village were real poor, so none of the children had any toys. But this one little boy had gotten an old enema bag and filled it with rocks, and he would go around and whap the other children across the face with it. Man, I think my heart almost broke. Later the boy came up and offered to give me the toy. This was too much! I reached out my hand, but then he ran away. I chased him down and took the enema bag. He cried a little, but that's the way of these people.

---

Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
10/18/2002 - 1:21:09 PM
What the hell is up with this attitudue that we are asking too much from our 500 MHz G4's! This was the fastest PB speed a little more than a year ago folks, not two or three years for Christ sake. I don't think it's too much to ask that Apple provide something a bit snappier on these machines. I hear you when it comes to anyone trying to run X on a G3, but give me a break!

---

Re: Mac OS 10.2 Has No Clothes
by: Anonymous (IP logged)
3/21/2003 - 11:57:03 AM
Just tried the test with photoshop, illustrator, dreamweaver, safari, entourage and Xpress (classic) with substantial documents opened in all of them. Switching is instantanousely. I do not get the complaint about osx. I use it professional for about a year now and life could not be more wonderfull. Apart form that, crashes are very unfrquent, even with aplications. The real troublemaker I encoutered is Word in combination with Xpress (classic), they do not seem to like each other. For the fun of ot I even added word and indesign to the line up... still fast! And I am working on a PB G4-800 with 512 mb ram with a cinema display connected! Just imagine! The only thing might be I am running cron script to keep the system optimized about once a week. Try cocktail (http://www2.dicom.se/cocktail/index.html), it's free and you might like the performance boost! Resume, indeed macosx 10.2.4 has no clothes which makes it fast! But it can always be faster ;-)

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