talkmagic.co.uk

seige wrote:Sounds a lot like Mac OSX. Buy a Mac, and out the box you can:

1. Record and edit video
2. Catalogue your photos, edit and manipulate them
3. Author and burn DVDs
4. Convert, organise and sort music MP3s
5. Use printers, devices etc. WITHOUT drivers in most cases—plug and play!
6. Write documents using word processor layouts
7. Work with generating PDF files from ANY application
8. Create music with professional standard software
9. Have fun!

Yup, SUSE 10 does all that out of the box too. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder why people who need Office and multimedia functionality start with XP as a base at all when there are Mac and Linux platforms that do it all for free.

seige wrote:1. Record and edit video - Cinelerra
2. Catalogue your photos, edit and manipulate them - gthumb
3. Author and burn DVDs - K3B
4. Convert, organise and sort music MP3s - tutorial
5. Use printers, devices etc. WITHOUT drivers in most cases—plug and play! - but of course!
6. Write documents using word processor layouts - OpenOffice 2.0
7. Work with generating PDF files from ANY application - comes with Ubuntu.
8. Create music with professional standard software - tutorial
9. Have fun!

Not that I've used all of those...thanks Google!

Tomo wrote:Yup, SUSE 10 does all that out of the box too. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder why people who need Office and multimedia functionality start with XP as a base at all when there are Mac and Linux platforms that do it all for free.

I thought the same thing when I saw OpenOffice - it does pretty much everything that Office does and costs £0! I challenge y'all to find one thing you can do with XP that you can't do with Linux (and don't say run XP!) (OK, some games).

Kati

Arthur wrote:I am an embedded programmer, and have many compilers for many different processors.

I've never had a compiler which wouldn't run in a windows environment, but I've not seen more than one or two which would run on a mac. There are usually compilers available for Linux, but the complexities in setting them up always seem enormous.

Although XP is fantastic in terms of reliability (months without reboots for me), the protected mode kernel inhibits one when creating your own apps and makes it a lot less fun to play with a PC in this way. I imagine macs to be as bad in this respect.

It would be nice to give all a good, fair appraisal, but windows runs everything I need, and the others don't.

I guess its like that with specialist software tools, as opposed to more generic software apps.

Hmmm... programming on the PC is easier, granted. But we're talking usability here, not flexibility.

Macs are built around the idea that everything is uniform... the machine is designed by the coders who design the OS. It's an integrated platform.

Whereas, Windows is far more generic, mainly due to the huge amount of hardware permutations which it has to cope with. Hundreds of manufacturers all adding 3rd party components, and glued together with an operating system.

That's really the core difference between a PC and a Mac—a Mac is truly designed by Apple from the ground up: hardware AND software.

I agree totally about coding and compiling. Mac 'ports' of many applications and games are easier with OSX though, although many programmers and software producers simply don't feel the need to get their hands grubby and compile for an 'alien' OS.

Oh, and by the way, my Mac here at work has been 'up' for 812 hours. It's not been off since the start of the working year

katrielalex wrote:I thought the same thing when I saw OpenOffice - it does pretty much everything that Office does and costs £0!

Yup, and it produces PDF format documents too - important if you intend to publish and sell ebooks of effects for instant download.

katrielalex wrote:

seige wrote:1. Record and edit video - Cinelerra
2. Catalogue your photos, edit and manipulate them - gthumb
3. Author and burn DVDs - K3B
4. Convert, organise and sort music MP3s - tutorial
5. Use printers, devices etc. WITHOUT drivers in most cases—plug and play! - but of course!
6. Write documents using word processor layouts - OpenOffice 2.0
7. Work with generating PDF files from ANY application - comes with Ubuntu.
8. Create music with professional standard software - tutorial
9. Have fun!

Not that I've used all of those...thanks Google!

Tomo wrote:Yup, SUSE 10 does all that out of the box too. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder why people who need Office and multimedia functionality start with XP as a base at all when there are Mac and Linux platforms that do it all for free.

I thought the same thing when I saw OpenOffice - it does pretty much everything that Office does and costs £0! I challenge y'all to find one thing you can do with XP that you can't do with Linux (and don't say run XP!) (OK, some games).

Kati

Yes... and Mac OSX machines come with all that installed, all written by Apple. Consistency of UI, and each and every application shares info with another.

Something I forgot is phone syncronisation. Once click phone backup (USB or Bluetooth), and sync of phonebook.

Oh, how I love ANYTHING which isn't Windoze

I agree, OSX is good. Only problem is that it's not open-source and it's not free...

But Windoze is bad, we agree

Kati

Arthur wrote:I've never had a compiler which wouldn't run in a windows environment, but I've not seen more than one or two which would run on a mac. There are usually compilers available for Linux, but the complexities in setting them up always seem enormous.

Like most flavours of Unix, Mac OSX comes with its own development environment. Apples commitment to its development community is huge. For example when Steve Jobs announced that the new Intel Macs were shipping, an update to the XCode environment was posted same day which allowed developers to start compiling universal binaries.

I don't know of any other company which would have supported its developer community, through the transition from PowerPC to Intel in the way Apple have done.

katrielalex wrote:I agree, OSX is good. Only problem is that it's not open-source and it's not free...

Actually, the core of OSX is open source. Its called Darwin. Take a look here http://developer.apple.com/darwin/.

Indeed, the 'core' at the heart of OSX is open source.

And contrary to belief, has been for quite some time.

I could argue until I am blue in the face (and indeed, I have constantly argued the toss in the Mac/PC supremacy thing for about 15 years now), but the fact still stands that until you've tried Apple, you'll never know what you're missing.

It would seem that geeks and tech-head PC users may never see the light, but for sure, anyone in the industries I work in (Web, Graphics, Video, Music) heartily vote Mac as their platform of choice.

As for OSX not being free: neither is Windows. In fact, in terms of value for money, Mac OSX is cheaper than Windoze. Secondly—there's no yukky authentication etc. And thirdly, you get an UPGRADE—not a bug ridden, multi-versioned, virus plagued archaic system.

Ooops, there I go again...

(Foot, meet mouth. Mouth, here's foot...)

seige wrote:Then, it was further developed by Apple, and first used in their Macintosh machines.
Micro$oft then later 'borrowed' the hard work done by Xerox and Apple and (IMHO) bastardised it and called it Windows.
.

That isn't what happened

Bill Gates was working with a company that was developing what we now no as Windows (I can't remember the name), but it wasn't getting anywhere. The OS was originally going to be for people in the work place. The company were going to scrap the whole project, but Gates said that he wanted to do it so they gave it to him for free. Then he developed it into Windows.

I thought what you said aswell Seige, untill I was speaking to my Dad about computers and stuff, and the subject of how Microsoft started came up. then he went on to explain the above.

Anyway, I typed a load of c*** (not the best) after ^^, so I deleted it

Kev, I think you'll find the Xerox/Apple/Windows progression to be accurate

Kev the following link may be instructive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_GUI

Ok I was wrong

Good article, Paul. Nice find.

Nice also, to note, that Windows is still playing catchup to Apple's OS: Vista sounds cunningly close to how Mac OSX is already operating

And with the iPod still keeping Gates chomping at the bit (He's still after his holy grail—the iPod Killer) it seems that the Microsoft 'Smiths' are still trying to keep up with the Apple 'Joneses'.



Oh, and by the way, I actually used to WORK on a Mac 512k machine with a mono (not even greyscale) 9 inch screen. No hard drive, the operating system (similar to what you see in the pic at the top of the Wiki article) was loaded from Floppy. Once the OS loaded, the floppy was ejected, and you could proceed to load an application (another floppy!). THEN you could load your documents (EJECT—ANOTHER FLOPPY!).

What a GODSEND it was when we finally bought our first 20Mb external hard-drive, and could boot the OS, applications and client files all from one drive.

I actually used to typeset and use Photoshop on that machine. Oh how times have come on.

And as far as a fan or heatsink goes, the all-in-one Mac 512 (which in modern terms was like an iMac—monitor, CPU et al all in one box) had one major problem over it's 2 years with us: overheating.

But those clever bods at Apple still get my vote.

As for nostalgia, I still have the 512—and inside it's casing, in the plastic moulding, are all the signatures of the development team.

Now, I bet nobody here has a PC from the mid 80's which they still treasure?

Hey, at least we missed punch cards, but only just.

Yes, and isn't vista awfully like OSX. There was a great flash demo on one of the Mac User sites. It was a presentation of the new features in Vista. It was in fact a slideshow of OSX.