OS X on Radio - NPR

karavite

karavite

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The Todd Mundt show on NPR has a segment on OS X and XP today. Previews have the "expert" stating too few software apps for Mac is its major drawback for years. I'm not sure I agree with that - I have everything I need! But they do say it is beautiful. If you miss the show, or don't have it on your local NPR station, it's at:

http://www.michiganradio.org/

However, it sounds like this could be one of those frustrating events causing us all to scream at our radios.
 
actually I have to strongly agree that the longtime problem with apple is lack of software. A prime example is following your link to the radio site. At this point I can only listen to it if I launch communicator from classic. Real player is notoriously slow in keeping up w/apple. For more evidence, look thru some of the posts on this site where people are looking for some program that will do what some pc program does. There are lots of examples of these. And last but not least take a trip to ANY store that sells pc and mac apps (including online stores) and the ratio of software titles is about 20:1 or higher! This is especially true with games where the ratio seems more like 50:1. I would also add that we suffer this same fate with third party peripherals. This is not all apple's fault of course and the many reasons behind it have been discussed some elsewhere on this site. On the other hand we don't have to worry near as much that we are going to lose everything when we open an email attachment. Virus writers don't find us to be a very lucrative market either!! I will agree with you that we pretty much have what we really need, but it would be nice to have more of what we want as well - after all, the mindless minions have almost everything they can dream of and more, often at a fraction of the cost.(we need a smilie for whining)
The greater thing you brought up with alerting us to the show is that people are talking about the mac again right now. Apple is back in the news and this will mean more people checking it out. As more and more people find they can't get the bitter taste of M$ out of their mouths, they will bite into a nice sweet apple. ;) It also appears that osx has joined us together with the other renegades - the unix/linux users. Now these guys and gals are a truly talented bunch when it comes to making things happen. They have had to be much more self reliant all along. I trust that they are going to do great things with us. I already see it happening. They seem to be doing more to help X along than our traditional software developers. the independent developers seem to be doing more to get the most out of this system than apple is. I know I am a lot less weary of downloading and trying new X apps than I was with the old systems. I am yet to try something that screws everything up like many freeware/shareware programs did in the past. Going beta is a lot more fun these days.
Oh well, as usual I am getting carried away talking about this so i will save the rest for a reply later. :cool:
 
You know, I almost mentioned the Real Player on Classic only problem, and fully realized the irony of my statement, but then I would have to have rewritten my original post, explain how I have *most* apps I really need...:D

I think you are right about the *nix developers as our new Mac friends. I'm a complete newby but (with help) have X up and running and just cannot stop trying out new apps. I love this stuff and it can only get better.

You are also right about Apple in the news - I think things are looking good.
 
I'm going to have to agree strongly on the newfound relationship of Apple and *nix geeks. We've always had something in common by being anti M$ together, but now the core technologies are the same.

The only problem is the hardware being different. I'd be interested to hear from *nix to Mac OS X converts as to speed issues. This may be the truest test of how we stack up hardware wise with Wintel machines. Not by running a Mac version and a not very closely related PC version of software and seeing which gets done faster, but by running *nix and Darwin versions of a program, which would be very closely related.

But regardless of how that turns out I think this could be a very fruitful relationship for both parties. If Apple were to instantly disappear OS X has made me comfortable enough with *nix that I know I'd easily run Linux before Windows if I were forced to get a PC.
 
first of all, there isn't one.

But, comparing the tasks I put to my FreeBSD/x86 boxen, G4 is slightly faster MHz for MHz than Pentium III; I ttribute that to bigger L2 cache. In all honesty, I would expect a Xeon to perform better, but these are even more expensive than Apple hardware.

Obviously, I have to qualify the tasks these machines perform: mostly byte-addressing, and string manipulation with a relatively small RSS and high locality of reference (i.e. caches help a lot, if the RSS fits in them). No floating point is done, and no vectorization is possible (i.e. not using stronger points of G4).

One thing OS X platform offers as an advantage is as follows: I can do my unix processing and produce MS-Word documentation at the same time, without bothering with VMware
 
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