istara there are a lot of feature additions/improvements in 10.3 you might want to take a look here
And if you really don’t want to upgrade systems, can’t you get an archived older version of PGP?
Bookmark this thread, so you can trot it out the next time some asshole responds to a Windows problem thread with “Get a Mac.”
You really want to go down that road? For every Mac thread like this, there will be 20 Windows threads that the Mac people can trot out. And the complaints contained therein will not always be as simple as what is in this thread.
Let’s just not go there.
“Daddy, what’s a Blaster virus?”
“Nothing for us to worry about, son.”
If that’s the best anti-Mac statement you can make here, then you wasted your time and some perfectly good oxygen.
Go focus your energies on Linux; they’re apparently the bigger immediate threat to the empire.
For what it’s worth, the jump from 10.1.x to 10.2 incorporated a whole lot of “hmm, on second thought let’s not do this task this way” stuff on the lower levels. Routines were ditched in favor of others. Even the underlying BSD core went through a bit of a hop. So a rather large list of things broke under 10.2 that had been working under 10.1.5, or were released for 10.2 and won’t run under 10.1.5 or earlier.
That’s because it’s still a pretty new venture. I doubt that Apple is going to reinvent all its wheels every couple years like that. Indeed, Panther (10.3) appears to be a lot more backwards-compatible with 10.2, and I have yet to set my sights on a program or utility and then discover that it only works under 10.3.x.
I stuck with 10.1.5 for a very long time (until this November, in fact) because of the enormous number of things I’d gotten working just right which were going to break as soon as I installed 10.2. And in fact I have yet to get sendmail reconfigured and the X11 environment reinstalled and all the X11 programs recompiled. (PITA). At this point I’m contemplating upgrading to 10.3 before even bothering with all that. (Sendmail for instance will be swapped out for postfix under 10.3)
I feel your pain but at least this time around I think there’s more to it than “Aha, we can make you fork over more money, we’ll get software vendors to require the newer OS and then charge you money for it”.
And, re: the numbering scheme – I think they just want to stick with 10.something as long as possible, because of the visual-conceptual pun on “X” as in *nix and X11 and so on. MacOS 11 (or XI?) just doesn’t have the same panache.
I like it because I think version numbering of damn near all software has gotten way out of hand. MacOS 9 was just a later version of System 7, as was MacOS 8. Adobe has now gone the way of Microsoft and is assigning code letters instead of numbers, but they ratcheted Photoshop up to 7 or 8 when many of the steps from Photoshop 3 to the current day were not deserving of more than a decimal point. And what’s AOL at nowadays, 9? 13? Little changes that just made a decimal point’s worth of difference back in the AOL 2 era (2.5, 2.6, 2.7) became full version number changes somewhere in there. So I’m kind of happy that the MacOS is not touting itself as MacOS 13 or something.
Hell, they kept releasing new versions of System 6 for six years while the release date of System 7 kept slipping, and still topped out with version 6.0.8 – yeah, not even 6.1. I like that. Save the big numbers for when you do something really substantial.
You’re missing the point, or I didn’t make it clearly enough (probably the latter) - ditto to yosemitebabe. The O/S flame wars make no sense precisely because there’s no such thing (at least, not yet) as an operating system that is bullet-proof, impervious to security breaches and viruses, simple for the average computer owner to install and maintain, and compatible with all the applications that the owner wants to use.
Windows problems are well-known, and legion, but whenever someone asks for help with a problem with Windows, there’s some moron piping up with “Get Linux,” or “Get a Mac,” as if that’s the solution to the problem. The truth is that Linux has its own shortcomings (judging from some of the threads I’ve seen about it, just choosing the right flavor and getting it installed can be a bear), as do the various iterations of Mac operating systems (hey, just read AHunter3’s post, immediately following yours - for the average computer user, it enters “eyes-glazing-over” territory pretty quickly.)
Just watch, however: I predict that within 24 hours, someone will post a message here saying that “Oh, Linux is simple - just download the xyz package, and it will install without any problems, and will run flawlessly.” The reason this is bullshit is that it’s anecdotal. Someone else will pop up and swear up and down that it would never take days to rebuild the O/S on a Mac. Tell that to my neighbors, who spent more money, at $50 an hour, paying a “Mac expert” to try to get their Mac to behave than a new machine would have cost - lots of reloads, rebuilds, and so on!
I could respond by saying that my WinXP never gives me any problems at all. Does that mean that WinXP is the perfect O/S? Certainly not. It just means that what I do with my PC has never forced me to deal with WinXP’s trouble spots. In other words, dumb luck.
Will we ever get to the point that a home computer is just a simple appliance - turn it on, and it works? Damn, I hope so. But anyone who claims that we’re there already is very, very confused!
Ours was incredibly easy and simple, from System 1 in 1984 to MacOS 9 just a couple years ago. It may not have been crashproof and it was never the right kind of robust to be a good server OS, but it sure was user-friendly and reliable as a single-person workstation OS.
Wanna move your entire OS to a new and bigger/faster hard disk? Just drag the System Folder from Disk A to Disk B and let it copy, then select the new disk as your startup disk and reboot. Hosed your existing installation so bad it won’t boot up any more? No biggie, grab a fresh copy of the System file and the Finder file and replace the existing copies; if that didn’t work, there were a finite and reasonable number of other files (a few prefs files, a few resource “enabler” files) you might try replacing. You didn’t have to nuke and reinstall your entire OS just because it stopped booting!
Wanna boot from a different medium, including perhaps media that didn’t exist when your computer was invented? Drag the System Folder onto it (or burn it there if it’s CD or DVD). You could boot the classic MacOS from damn near anything. No complicated hardware tweaking necessary. Boot from CD, Zip disk, Jaz disk, Bernoulli disk, magneto-optical disk, external SCSI hard drive, floptical drive, ATA drive connected via USB, Firewire drive, iPod, digital camera flash card, DAT tape drive, WORM drive, Travan tape, diskimage sitting on a computer down the hall? It’s a Mac, it’s a copy of the MacOS, of course it will. If someone created a Mac-compatible SCSI or FireWire peripheral that could read 1960s-era punch cards, and you had MacOS 9 encoded on punch cards, it would probably boot from that.
With MacOS X, we’ve, uhhh, caught up with you Windows folks (not to mention you Unix folks). Now we, too, have hundreds of thousands of obscure little files on our hard drive and a much pickier and at least in some cases a much more fragile and limited relationship of hardware to OS. I can boot my elderly PowerBook in MacOS X if MacOS X is installed on a partition no greater than 8 gigs and locate within the first 8 gigs of the drive and the drive is the internal ATA hard drive. Making a bootable CD is a minor nightmare with “permissions” issues and delicate issues regarding the circumstances under which OS X will boot from a CD (my accelerator is incompatible, for instance). Now we, too, have an OS sufficiently complicated that if it stops running most of us are reduced to reinstalling the damn thing and crossing our fingers and hoping the installer doesn’t nuke all our settings and preferences, not to mention customizations and modifications.
You want a home computer that’s just a simple applicance, turn it on and it works? Buy a IIci on eBay and put System 7.0.1 on it. Easier than most of the electrical appliances in your kitchen. Ain’t gonna be the fastest box in town but it can do email and browse the web and do word processing and spreadsheets (and translate to and from the latest formats although it can’t run those versions itself).
By and large, though, I think those days are gone. The casual hobbyist who knew every file on his or her computer and could tweak and fix and customize with ease is fast going the way of the shade tree auto mechanic who could set timing and dwell by wrench and ear and didn’t ever need to turn the car over to the professional auto mechanics.
(I will confess to envy and wariness of Unix geeks. I don’t think most of you know Unix as intimately as I knew the classical MacOS, but you sure know MacOS X better than I do. I’ve been reduced from a competent geek to an end user of the sort who knows just enough to be a menace and frankly I don’t much care for it.)
I should also say that while, like most Mac freaks, I think the overall Mac experience is much better than what you get with a PC, the progress on the PC side of the fence over the years has been remarkable. [snide voice] Of course, given your starting point, you had so far to go [/snide]. But seriously: using MS-DOS instead of Macintosh System 6/7 was like driving a car blindfolded while your passenger verbally described what they saw out the windshield. Ever since Windows95, though, you’ve had a tolerable GUI and a proliferation of sensible standards. I can use a PC although I rarely do; I don’t much enjoy it (those damn “application windows” drive me beserk) but the PC isn’t the “tool of the devil” that it was in the bad old days. Many of us Mac folks don’t tend to acknowledge that due to primacy (“we had it first and the Mac should have blown the PC away back when all they had was DOS”). I’d still hate to be stuck using a PC on a day to day basis but for the most part my days of openly denigrating PCs as vastly inferior machines is over.
AHunter3, your synopsis certainly takes me back! After spending the early 1980s with minicomputers (DEC PDP 11/23s running RSX-11M, and a huge AT&T 3b5 running Unix), my first encounter with “personal” computers in the late 1980s consisted of an office full of Macs - IIci’s and IIcx’s (I don’t remember which O/S we were running - too many systems ago).
They were almost bulletproof (I say “almost” because the disk drives in the IIcx’s had a habit of refusing to spin up in the morning - opening the case and gently tapping the center of the drive with the handle of a screwdriver was enough to “wake” them!). I never really got to know what was going on “under the hood” of the O/S, so to speak, because I never had to. The GUI was straightforward and intuitive. Once in a while, we’d get the “bomb,” but usually while trying to do something perverse with a database or desktop publishing package.
Moving from that environment into an office full of IBM PCs and their clones, running DOS and Multimate (a word-processing program that has, deservedly, been completely forgotten), was like being exiled to Bulgaria. A quantum leap backwards, to put it mildly.
If the Mac folks hadn’t gotten greedy, and tried to wangle an extra $1000-$1500 out of each machine (compared to the price of the IBM PC), they would have ended up being the dominant players. (I seem to recall an interview with Steve Jobs in which he pretty much admitted that they slit their own throats by getting a little too avaricious.) Maybe by now, Apple would be the one facing antitrust suits.
Windows 3.1 was the beginning of the catch-up game. Win95 was a big improvement, but it was prone to suffer from nervous collapse at unpredictable and inopportune moments.
I think that by the time Win98SE was in place, it had become a dead heat. I’ve got friends using Mac 9.2 (?), and frankly, it seems clunky compared to Win98, Win2k, and WinXP. I haven’t had the chance to play with Mac OS X, so I wouldn’t venture an opinion about the state of the competition at this point.
Of course, users are capable of screwing up almost any machine. My brother-in-law manages to make a hash of his PCs regularly. The computer shop to which he takes his problems is run by an infinitely patient Chinese woman. The last time he had some troubles, he took the PC to her, and said that he had probably done something wrong. Her priceless reply, delivered in quiet deadpan: “You do lots things wrong.”
Jeepers, Early Out. If it takes you five paragraphs to explain what you meant, then yeah, it’s safe to say you didn’t make your point clear. 
In all seriousness, I agree with what you’re saying, but I don’t think it needed to be said here. In all likelihood this thread wasn’t going to turn into a platform war.
If you’ll permit me a slight hijack. I’ve used all sorts OS’s. I may be younger than some comp geeks, but my first system was a VIC-20. As to the vulnerabilities of different OS’s, they ALL have them. So why is Windows in the spotlight and most often hit with viruses and worms? Because that’s what most people run.
Here’s an analogy. Say 90% of the world drives a Corvette. The other 10% drives an Audi. Both can be broken into and stolen, but which one will be the focus of thieves? Also, those that write this crap to foist on us are one of two types. 1. A failed computer hack lashing out from his parent’s basement. or 2. Some loner wanting to make a name for himself. If you’re either, why go for the less used platform? Make a splash!
Not to ding a fellow Mac user too much, but methinks AHunter3 is over-glamorizing the Good Ol’ Days of pre-MacOS X life.
Yes, it’s true, I can’t identify all the assorted little files that are now sitting in my /Library (MacOS X’s core OS file tree). On the other hand, I’m also looking at my MacOS 9’s System Folder, and there are a lot of assorted little files that I can’t identify, either (especially in the Extensions directory). What’s “ENI Communications Extension”, or “NetSprocketLib”, or “STF”, fer crissakes? If I didn’t need Classic Mode to run Quicken (I’m too cheap to buy the newest version), I’d nuke the System Folder and not care — but as it is, you can find fiddly obscure system files on both sides of the MacOS fence.
On the other hand, compared to its predecessors, MacOS X definitely feels damn near indestructible. I can run a dozen programs at once without a second thought, I can kill one misbehaving program without worrying that the rest of the computer will go down with it, I can install or remove several hundred fonts in real-time without restarting anything … in short, I can bang the living daylights out of my pokey little iMac with abandon, because nothing I do will screw up the computer. I work with $10,000+ Sun workstations and high-end Dells that aren’t as reliable as my Mac these days.
Yeah, the days of an amateur hobbyist who knew every nook and cranny of his computer are probably gone. Then again, I don’t know every nook and cranny of my car’s engine, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a ride that’s faster and more comfortable that what folks had to endure just a few decades ago…
Given how rare Mac viruses are these days, anyone who can write a successful one is guaranteed to make a splash, just by being the first.
Besides, Microsoft is still the target of hackers even when they aren’t the market leader. Apache web servers outnumber Microsoft IIS by about 3:1, but there’s still a lot more malware for IIS than for Apache. As any burglar knows, when looking for a house to rob, pick the easiest target.
Well, I don’t know enough of servers to comment on that. I was strictly talking about the OS on everyday PC’s. And if someone is going to risk a few years in prison, I still think they’re more likely to hit 5x the PC’s under WinOS than MacOS. Of course, this is opinion.
Yes. Just like you had to pay to upgrade from Windows 95 (Windows 4.0) to Windows 98 (Windows 4.1) or from Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) to Windows XP (NT 5.1).
98 and 2000 are not in the same family.
Me was not in any way related to 2000.
And yes, XP was a big jump from Me, comparable to the jump from OS 9 to OS X.
However, in terms of underlying technology, there wasn’t that much of a jump from Windows 2000 (NT 5) to Windows XP (NT 5.1), and that cost you at least $90… and $190 if you wanted to “pro” version.
Probably about a year. Apple tends to roll out a release of the OS every 12 to 15 months. Since OS 10.3 came out in October, that would put 10.4 somewhere in the fourth quarter of 2004 or the first quarter of 2005.
Unless the continue to slow the schedule.
Though whether the next release will be 10.4 is anyone’s guess. Apple came close to releasing Panther as Mac OS X version 11.0, as evidenced by an early (and quickly replaced) image of the Panther CD on the OS X website. Clearly Apple is beginning to think that the structural changes and GUI enhancements are moving the OS towards a new full version number (though I expect the OS X moniker to remain). I suspect that the OS that includes the rumored new file system will be the moment when they finally make the switch to OS X v11.0.
98 and 2000 are not in the same family.
Me was not in any way related to 2000.
And yes, XP was a big jump from Me, comparable to the jump from OS 9 to OS X.
However, in terms of underlying technology, there wasn’t that much of a jump from Windows 2000 (NT 5) to Windows XP (NT 5.1), and that cost you at least $90… and $190 if you wanted to “pro” version.
rjung:
Yeah, I’m well aware that there’s quite a different between System 3.0 with its System Folder consisting of six individual files and no subfolders, and MacOS 9.2, and I’m glad I learned the basics back in the six-file era so I could absorb the rest as the layers of complexity developed. Still, without looking anything up, STF is from FAXStf and is obviously the driver for “printing” to FAX and/or for patching the Chooser so as to allow fast-printer-switching to FAX when you hold down the Option key before going to the File menu to select “Print”. NetSprocketLib is one of the shared library files (“lib”) usually associated with gaming (“sprocket”) and therefore usually, though not always, unnecessary for everyday operation, although since it pertains to networking I’d pull it and then try connecting and fetching some email. “ENI Communications Extension” I don’t recognize but from the name I know its another patch to the communications toolbox for some networking chore, so same advice for that one. I know all three of these are extensions and therefore that the computer will boot without them. I know if I take them out of this particular folder and reboot they will be disabled. I know if I change my mind and want to re-enable them I just throw them back in the Extensions folder. I know I can create an Extensions set in the Extensions Manager that lacks these three, and another that contains them, and thereby make it possible to toggle back and forth between running with them and running without them.
MacOS X is just plain different. Not only are there a zillion more files (and very little carry-over of knowledge acquired by years of using earlier versions of the MacOS), but in addition the typical troubleshooting procedure often looks something like this –
Open such-and-such plain text file which looks like an INI file from a Windows PC and scroll around in it until you find a line that looks like “kextOBSCUREFunction_X [Disabled]” and change where it says “Disabled” to “Enabled”, then add a new line that says " Enable ParamFromHell0367594855X15A". You’ll have to do your editing with that delightful Terminal-based text editor “pico” instead of BBEdit or unless you log in as root, which you have to enable in the first place, or run BBEdit as a superuser process, which requires entering a really messy keyboard command that looks like a cat just walked over your keyboard. Save your work by entering the highly intuitive “save file” keystroke (Control-O). Hope you didn’t make any typos. Now build the binary from the text file which is used as source material by an obscure program you never realized you had, by entering another one of those cat-on-keyboard command line instructions.
sudo `r -h build make install /System/Library/Esoterica/Something/aaa_zzz.kext/Contents/MacOS/aaa_zzz /Library/usr/bin/libidiot.aaa_zzz.bin -x -y -z or something like that.
Type that, hit return, notice that nothing happens onscreen, and hope for the best. With any luck you’ve baked a new binary casserole from modified ingredients and put it in the right place, replacing the old one, with the right permissions and stuff. Now all you’ve gotta do is refresh the cache because otherwise the OS will read from the cache and ignore the changes. (another 72-character command line instruction). Now reboot and hope you didn’t redirect video display to Cincinatti or chmod a rwxrw_r__ file to rwxrwxrwx by accident or do everything exactly correct according to instructions that were obsolete as of the last build of the BSD core unless you edit the path statement or something.