The ‘Tales of a BeOS Refugee’ seems to have touched a nerve. In the two weeks since it was published at
OSNews, I have received more than 500 email responses from users of Mac OS, BeOS, Linux, and Windows. Most of the responses were point-by-point rejoinders to facts and
observations in the original piece, some of them highly detailed. Because it was impossible to respond to everyone individually, and because I thought many people would appreciate being able to read some of the comments and my
reactions to them, I’ve assembled this addendum:
Reactions to “Tales of a BeOS Refugee”. The piece includes further clarifications and extrapolations on my ideas about the Creator code and application binding, plus dozens of miscellaneous notes and continued comparisons between BeOS and OS X. Many thanks to everyone who took the time to write. As always, comments are welcome, but no guarantees on responses.
I must say between your article and my past few months of looking at Mac magazines and sites I am about ready to get a laptop with OSX on it. I need a new laptop and OSX is looking pretty good, although I am still hoping AtheOS becomes something very useable this year. (Mostly IDE/CDROM and Desktop rewrite)
Anyone have any sites that carry shareware/freeware/opensource’d software apps for OSX? (ala Kamidake, freshmeat, etc)
Joe
iTunes’ database does not point to the inodes of mp3’s. The standard file handling uses special numbers to point to files and folders. These numbers are unique per partition. An inode has no such guarantee (it may be reassigned) and is thus unsuitable (a random new file can take the place of a deleted file). Using file numbers has big advantages over the use of paths (as in standard unix or Windows). I can for instance rename a file I’m editing in Word for Mac, the Windows-version makes me quit to do this (which is a big pain if you put versioning in the filename). Other examples are files that are being copied, you can just move them.
Another nitpick is that there truly are different OSA-languages in existence. Here’s a javascript scripting plugin: http://www.latenightsw.com/freeware/JavaScriptOSA/
And here you can find an experimental Tcl-OSA:http://www.louch.com/
But I think the lack of other languages is mostly because AppleScript is so simple and good. It’s so easy to read that most people can understand an applescript without resorting to manuals.
For whom is professionally interested in digital media,
I suggest to read also the comparative review “Dual Duel”
published in the last issue of Digital Video
( http://www.dv.com ): until the new generation based on
G5, Macintosh are still clearly inferior horsepowers.
The Macintosh ‘G4’ is not as inferior as some people might assume. If Motorola/IBM/Apple were to match Intel and AMD ‘MHz’ for ‘MHz’ (which is not the correct method to compare CPUs) then x86 would be in serious trouble!
check out some other performance tests here…
http://www.barefeats.com/pentium4.html
Enjoy 🙂
Methinks I’ll stick with BeOS and FreeBSD. Between the two I’m very happy and they both work great with old hardware. Saving money is always important, but lately it seems even more so. Scot’s articles have helped me decide that OS X is not worth the cost. It leaves much too much to be desired for me.
Joe: http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/
Damn! Just discovered on VersionTracker the new release of Moho 3.0,
one of the few quality programs ever realized for BeOS…
Before deciding to get OS X, read the reviews at Ars Technica.
I got interested in OS X after reading Scots first article, and then I started digging about to find some reviews. The ones on Ars Technica totally destroy it for me..
Two points stick out in my memory:
1] The standard install is 1GB. This is sooo bloated! QNX 6 is about 25mb, and BeOS is about 40mb!
2]It is so slow, you cannot even resize windows properly!
That article just totally turned me off…
I read the review in the DV magazine, and unfortunately JLG is right that the G4 didn’t finish ahead in a single benchmark. A more telling point however was that the speed of the G4 was at 800MHz, the Xeons were at 1.7 GHz and the Athlon was at 1.4GHz. On top of this, the Apple system had the slowest memory bus and the Xeons had (technically) the fastest memory bus. Apple is fixing that problem in one week (hopefully). Knowing that the memory bus speed had atleast a 50% bandwidth disadvantage, and the processors had a 50% speed disadvantage, you’d expect the Macintosh to get trounced.
In fact, the Mac was near the top of the pack in the Lightwave tests, and it fell behind in the Adobe tests, but not by a huge margin. It was generally interchanging between the Xeon and the K7, which means that it was vectorization optimizations that were bringing it down in the Adobe tests. I would hardly say that this makes a case not to buy a Macintosh for video editing.
I am not so concerned about the size of the install, after all there is a good deal of stuff included in the OS that dont come alongside others, but yes, its in the Windows range.
I am also concerned, like you, about the speed of the GUI.
I also didnt like the way Apple look upon metadata – if they continue doing that windows approach, they can as well skip the whole metadata.
Why oh why dont anyone learn from BeOS? Its so brilliant in many aspects, and yet its just the users who mourn and tear their hair off because its gone.
1. I fail to see the big hang-up on installation sizes. First of all 1 GB with all the developer tools and shipped applications is not necessarily bloat. Neither QNX nor BeOS shipped with the capabilities that OS X, nor did it have a full development and scripting environment. Command line compilers do not a development environment make. Furthermore, OS X’s “bloat” includes not only a C and C++ compiler but also Objective C, Perl, AppleScript and the latest JDK. It also supports not one but two coding API’s (Carbon and Cocoa). It also ships with an OS emulator (OS 9). Along side that it ships with a full blown MP3 player with HotSync capability to FireWire and USB MP3 players, a movie editor, a DVD player, basic configuration tools, web serving tools, et cetera. Neither BeOS nor QNX had all those capabilities in 60MB or less. Overall the install is comparable to Linux and Windows installs with similar feature sets, so 1GB is acceptable. A Darwin expert could tell you how stripped down it can get, in terms of file size, but I fail to see the point.
2. The ArsTechnica article never said it couldn’t resize a window properly with the release version of OS X. Ars has been covering OS X since before the public beta. They’ve been doing a great job at it too. They do claim that the window redrawing is slower than in Windows, but they never said it couldn’t do it properly. Also, the slowness is not something which impairs regular working habits. It is simple enough, go down to CompUSA and play with a Macintosh that has OS X installed. You’ll see that the window resizing is more than fast enough.
3. I think I’ve seen this post a few times elsewhere on OSNews, and it is posted anonymously. I guess that means that it is probably flame bate. So I guess I bought into it. On the chance that this is a legitimate grip, I figured I’d respond.
BeOS rulez! Nothing compares to BeOS GUI.
Costs too much to try Mac OSX. I’ve seen Windows XP at work, and I’m not impressed. A 200 MHZ pentium running BeOS runs circles around a 1MHZ P111 running XP. I’ll keep what works best, just wish we had a real web browser, Opera 6 sounds great, and what happened to the port of Abrowse from AtheOS? Oh well.
Hank – the 1gb install is without the developer tools. It is the ‘standard’ install. It seems very bloated to me.
Also, if you would be kind enough to read the Ars Technica article, on OS X 10.0 and 10.01, then you will realise how much of a problem the window resizing is! Unacceptably slow! On what is supposed to be a supercomputer!
I’ve read every Ars article on OS X since they first started covering it. I had to get every drop of OS X I could before it was released. I don’t have to read an article to make a statement on window resizing. I use OS X on a daily basis for all my tasks at home and speak from personal experience. The *only* time I’ve found the window resizing an actual problem was with JBuilder. I’ve never had a problem with it in Finder, Netscape or any other application for that matter.
OS X is ‘NOT GOOD’.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/23531.html
>>OS X is ‘NOT GOOD’.<<
If you actually believe the tabloids the Register dishes out, then you have a problem, they couldn’t print the truth if was given to them straight the gift horse’s mouth himself!
You have to take what the Register says with a grain of salt… helk I don’t even take what the Register says about Micro$oft seriously… and guess what I don’t even like M$ that much, though I can admit the articles are funny 🙂
CatBeMac:
Let me see if I’ve got this right: instead of taking the Register article and picking points and discussing what you think is wrong with it, you are critisizing the whole site, deeming the article ‘unworthy’?
If they critisize Mac, even though the Register team are great Mac fans, and many use Macs, they are just liars are they? So John Siracusa at Ars Technica and Bruce Tognazzini are liars too are they, even though they are Mac fans, and just want the best for the Mac?
Why is it that you cannot use your arguments to counter theirs, and instead resort to name-calling?
It is precisely this kind of response that makes Mac users seem like ‘zealots’ in the eyes of many…
I lost respect for The Register last summer over the crap articles they wrote on BeOS due to alot of it being just a bunch of bad gossip. And guess what I just read their article on Mircosoft’s ‘Windows VS Linux’ email from the Sales department and did not take that seriously and I don’t even like Microsoft that much as most people here will tell you. Call it what you will but the Register is a tabloid site plain and simple, though their articles bring much humor to the world of computing!!!