[Lvlug] OS X

[jeff zartler]

Dann,

Sounds cool.  By any chance did you get contact information of someone from 
Apple who may be able to arrange a demo.  If so could you pass it on.  The 
LVCG still needs a program for the July 17 meeting at Mack Trucks.

Jeff

On Wednesday 18 April 2001 11:09 pm, you wrote:
> For those of you who do not know my opinion of the Mac OS, I really do not
> like it.  Nor do I like using an Apple computer, I just cannot get the hang
> of a one button mouse.  Nor was I ever turned on by the GUI interface.
> While others thought it was revolutionary, I felt it was clunky and
> limiting.
>
> Today I had the opportunity to attend an OS X launch party in King of
> Prussia.  It was held at the Imax theater.  I must say, this being my first
> Imax experience, I was really entralled by the theater.  There is a really
> need dinosaur movie coming out this summer called Tyranosaur in 3d.  But
> that aside...
>
> I attended the party with my supervisor and the big Mac pushing teacher in
> the district.  The even kicked off with highlights of OS X and some demos.
> About two hours into the presentation I came to the sudden realization that
> Windows is so dead.
>
> For those of you who do not know, OS X is the most recent turning point,
> and a very significant one, for Apple.  They went and redesigned their
> entire OS from the ground up.  The first thing they did was build it on
> Darwin and the Mach 3 kernel.  What does that mean?  Well, OS X is at its
> core, BSD Unix, and pretty darn solid.  Darwin is an open source OS
> available now for the intel platform, but with limited (read very) hardware
> compatibility.  On top of Darwin is Apple's GUI:  Aqua and some other
> technologies like Cocoa.  Aqua is very beautiful and functional.  The
> graphic depiction is second to none.  The interface retains most of the Mac
> look and feel, but has been beefed up a bit and more versital.
>
> Having a Unix backbone, OS X has adopted all the networking technology
> inherant with Unix.  The foremost network protocol is IP.  There is still
> support for Apple Talk, though.  OS X comes with Apache and is able to run
> Samba and just about any other app compiliable under FreeBSD.
>
> The presenters, all Apple reps, made it a point the awknoledge that Apple
> has adopted a more Open Source philosophy, and espoused the benefits of
> Open Source all the way.  It is too bad Aqua was not Open Source.
>
> There was much hype about OS X server, but no real demonstartion.  They
> focused on the ease of streaming QuickTime video and the addition of a GUI
> configuration tool for Apache.  It remains to be seen whether this tool
> will make it into the open source community.
>
> One nifty feature of OS X is that it comes with a developer disc.  This
> makes designing custom OS X (and earlier OS releases) a snap.  One
> demonstrator built a simple word processor in under 5 minutes with no
> coding necessary.
>
> I had the opportunity to play around with a couply of machines during the
> breaks.  One was a G3 running a 700mhz processor with 256 mbs ram.  I tried
> stressing it as much as I could.  While Itunes was playing an mp3 and
> displaying a visual front end with an OpenGL representation of the movie, I
> took the liberty of opening Word, Excell, Power Point, AppleWorks 6,
> Internet Explorer, Apple Script Tool, the movie maker, rendered a movie,
> played idvd, and a few other apps I cannot remember (basically anything I
> could find) and it all ran.  There was some stammering with the song (not
> too much) and I am sure the rendering was slowed a bit, but the machine did
> not come to a creeping halt nor did it crash.  OS X is truly a
> multi-tasking OS that is impressive.
>
> Having a Unix core means there is a terminal which defaults (I guess) to
> the c shell.  I played around in this for a bit.  I must now add, though, I
> was able to crash the system.  I was using a cube on the terminal when
> something funky happened.  The letter "l" kept repeating itself and locked
> me out of doing anything else.  A suspend of the machine (just placing a
> finger over the top of the cube, shutdown is activated by body heat) and
> this stopped the repetition, but did not revive the OS.  It required a
> complete reboot.
>
> OS X is sweet and Apple did not skimp on its current customers.  OS X has
> support for OS 9 software and comes with a copy of OS 9.  Applications not
> optimized or written for OS X run in classic mode.  Basically, OS 9 is
> booted right along side OS X to run the application.  Now you might be
> saying "This is all cool, but what about system overhead?"  Don't expect to
> run OS X on anything short of 128 mb ram.  You can get away with 64, but I
> would expect things could run really slow.
>
> For all its flash, OS X requires some heavy processing power and a chunk or
> Ram.  Even with the minimum, you could notice some lag in programs
> starting, but otherwise, they ran fine.
>
> One of the more inpressive demonstrations showed the creation of a PDF
> document containing some nice graphics of a boat and wave.  The graphics
> were enlarged, shrunk, and had tranparancy applied to them.  Some text was
> added also.  Anti-aliased fonts are very nice.  But whats more!  An OpenGL
> 3d window was opened that contained a bottle with a blank lable.  The pdf
> document was dragged onto the bottle and it became the label.  Different
> lightening effects were applied to demonstarte how a user can create simple
> 3d images.  The entire image was rotated 360.  As changes were made to the
> pdf document, they were reflected real-time on the lable of the bottle.
> Pretty neat.
>
> Last year our department decided and was able to convince the majority of
> the powers that be at the district to switch to an all PC platform.  On the
> verge of ordering 300+ PC's today we decided to seriously rethink this
> decision and will be looking at the possiblity of 300 Macs.
>
> Again, I am no real fan of the Mac OS operating system, but I was blown
> away by what I saw.  It still has the look and feel of a Mac on serious
> steriods, but I would take any one of those machines over a Windows box any
> day.
>
> I think Windows is in for a big downfall.  They aren't producing anything
> new and exciting.  Looking at all the "main stream" OS's available today,
> there seems to be only two that are not unix based:  Windows and OS/2.  I
> won't lump Novell into a Mainstream OS because it realy isn't and has been
> on its death bed for some time.  Although I will add, Novell is working
> closely with Redhat, even they see the light.
>
> While it seems everyone else is adopting open standards, MS is clamping
> down (see their proprietary sound format for an example).  I give it 5
> years or so, but I believe it will happen.  OS X is going to be big.  Linux
> and FreeBSD will increase in popularity as tools are designed for end users
> to more easily configure and install the operating systems.
>
> The good times are ahead.