"dennis@home" wrote in message
...

I bet half the stuff you run is open source ("linux") too.

and

I prefer vanilla SVR5 myself as its easy to write STREAMS modules if you
need near to real-time response like you do in telephone exchanges.

Seems deeply strange to me that somebody who is claiming to be a unix
programming guru (the implication of the latter statement) doesn't
understand the difference between open source and linux.

clive

wrote:

On Sep 25, 1:50 pm, (Steve Firth) wrote:
wrote:
On Sep 25, 1:13 pm, (Steve Firth) wrote:
wrote:
applause

So how many Macs have you used over what sort of period of time?

Enough to know taht I agree with the assertion.

No, go on, how many and what versions of the OS? Try not avoiding the
question.

It's irrelevant,

Not at all, it's germane.

even if I'd never tried any, I could still agree with TNPs assertion.

Oh you could, but then you'd be an empty headed blagger with no idea
what he was talking about.

"Clive George" wrote in message
...
"dennis@home" wrote in message
...

I bet half the stuff you run is open source ("linux") too.

and

I prefer vanilla SVR5 myself as its easy to write STREAMS modules if you
need near to real-time response like you do in telephone exchanges.

Seems deeply strange to me that somebody who is claiming to be a unix
programming guru (the implication of the latter statement) doesn't
understand the difference between open source and linux.

I understand that Linux is a kernel which is a copy of the interfaces in
unix but not the actual code (I have seen the source for both BTW but I no
longer have a source tape for either).
I also understand that most people don't know what linux is and I don't want
to confuse them.

BTW I never claimed to be an expert it was Huge.. the fact that I have been
designing bits of hardware, software and systems for longer than he has been
in IT doesn't make me an expert, anymore than he is.




BTW STREAMS is easy, you should try it some time. The last system I
designed used STREAMS modules to implement part of the application as it was
too slow to keep switching to user space when data arrived. I wouldn't say
its a good idea as it removes what bit of security Unix has but if you test
it carefully and know what you are doing it works. The systems are still
running in BT exchanges AFAIK.

What I find hard is C++; java is easy, C is easy, PLM is easy, even
assembler for x86 is easy but I really hate C++ for some reason.

I learnt to program with Fortran on a CDC3300 BTW, punching cards using a
portapunch was a bit boring and you could only get 40 columns on a card.
Things were much better when I got access to TSO instead of using batch for
everything.

But there you go the early days were full of problems that the kids these
days just don't understand.

On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:15:59 UTC, "dennis@home"
wrote:

SunOS is a lot like Linux you know.

Apart from being a totally different kernel code base, that is.

--
The information contained in this post is copyright the
poster, and specifically may not be published in, or used by
http://www.diybanter.com

Steve Firth wrote:

John Rumm wrote:

Less hardware support? Less than XP, but more than Vista. You can
generally find most of the hardware you need though.

I don't see that as true. What hardware is there that cannot be used
with a Mac or for which there is not a suitable alternative?

There will be plenty of specialist stuff for which there is no
equivalent - lab gear, device programmers, in circuit emulators etc.

In most other cases there may well be a suitable alternative, one just
needs to take more care when buying. Support for legacy hardware will be
patchy with OSX as it is with later windows versions.

I have a mix of devices scanners, printers, keyboards, monitors,
projectors, internal and external hard drives, the list is endless, all
bought for use with a PC, some of them up to fifteen years old, all of
them work with the Mac.

Much stuff that sits on SCSI, firewire, USB etc ought to be usable.
Sometimes it comes down to economics though. For example I had to
abandon a decent scanner (Epson GT8000) when I moved to Win2k/XP only
simply because Epson chose not to update the drivers. Silverfast however
did do a driver for it, at four times the cost of a replacing the scanner.

Out of curiosity, how is the mac handling RS232 devices? Does it
recognise the various RS232 to USB adaptors? (which IME have
difficulties working correctly on XP in many cases - I had to buy three
to find one that let me use my old Wacom tablet)

As far as printers go, so far I haven't found one that the OS doesn't
recognise and install the drivers for automatically.

When I bought a new Sony Alpha camera I plugged it into the Mac, the Mac
noticed I had a Sony Alpha and configured itself to accept Sony RAW
files in iPhoto. What more do I need?

Don't know. I was not trying to start a holy war, just commenting that
there will be less supported hardware on macs than for XP. There is not
usually any need for this to be a major show stopper. Compared to vista,
OSX has an advantage at the moment.


--
Cheers,

John.

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"John Rumm" wrote in message
...

Out of curiosity, how is the mac handling RS232 devices? Does it recognise
the various RS232 to USB adaptors? (which IME have difficulties working
correctly on XP in many cases - I had to buy three to find one that let me
use my old Wacom tablet)

I found the cheap £6 one from ebuyer worked very well on XP.
I haven't tried it on this Vista machine yet.

On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 16:19:25 UTC, Huge
wrote:

On 2007-09-25, Bob Eager wrote:
On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:15:59 UTC, "dennis@home"
wrote:

SunOS is a lot like Linux you know.

Glad to see "dennis" has totally justified his killfile entry.

Apart from being a totally different kernel code base, that is.

And about a zillion other things.

Agreed. But that's enough for starters!

Bob [UNIX since v6]
--
The information contained in this post is copyright the
poster, and specifically may not be published in, or used by
http://www.diybanter.com

John Rumm wrote:

Out of curiosity, how is the mac handling RS232 devices? Does it
recognise the various RS232 to USB adaptors? (which IME have
difficulties working correctly on XP in many cases - I had to buy three
to find one that let me use my old Wacom tablet)

There are some good USB/Firewire to RS232/RS422/ etc devices around.
I've not needed anything like that myself so I've not paid much
attention, however ucsm had a long wibble about them recently and the
conclusion seemed to be that it's not a problem, but the more obscure
Taiwanese stuff probably won't have a Mac driver available.

"Huge" wrote in message
...
On 2007-09-25, Bob Eager wrote:
On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:15:59 UTC, "dennis@home"
wrote:

SunOS is a lot like Linux you know.

Glad to see "dennis" has totally justified his killfile entry.

You don't like the truth?


Apart from being a totally different kernel code base, that is.

And about a zillion other things.

Well its a bit out dated but the way it works is similar.

But as you have kill filed me its doesn't matter.
Bye.

John Rumm wrote:
Steve Firth wrote:

John Rumm wrote:

Less hardware support? Less than XP, but more than Vista. You can
generally find most of the hardware you need though.

I don't see that as true. What hardware is there that cannot be used
with a Mac or for which there is not a suitable alternative?

There will be plenty of specialist stuff for which there is no
equivalent - lab gear, device programmers, in circuit emulators etc.

In most other cases there may well be a suitable alternative, one just
needs to take more care when buying. Support for legacy hardware will be
patchy with OSX as it is with later windows versions.

I have a mix of devices scanners, printers, keyboards, monitors,
projectors, internal and external hard drives, the list is endless, all
bought for use with a PC, some of them up to fifteen years old, all of
them work with the Mac.

Much stuff that sits on SCSI, firewire, USB etc ought to be usable.
Sometimes it comes down to economics though. For example I had to
abandon a decent scanner (Epson GT8000) when I moved to Win2k/XP only
simply because Epson chose not to update the drivers. Silverfast however
did do a driver for it, at four times the cost of a replacing the scanner.

Out of curiosity, how is the mac handling RS232 devices? Does it
recognise the various RS232 to USB adaptors? (which IME have
difficulties working correctly on XP in many cases - I had to buy three
to find one that let me use my old Wacom tablet)

As far as printers go, so far I haven't found one that the OS doesn't
recognise and install the drivers for automatically.

When I bought a new Sony Alpha camera I plugged it into the Mac, the Mac
noticed I had a Sony Alpha and configured itself to accept Sony RAW
files in iPhoto. What more do I need?

Don't know. I was not trying to start a holy war, just commenting that
there will be less supported hardware on macs than for XP. There is not
usually any need for this to be a major show stopper. Compared to vista,
OSX has an advantage at the moment.


Well a 5 year old scanner and A1 plotter both failed utterly to work
correctly on MAC OSX.

It runs half the speed of the comparable PC on twice the RAM and I tried
just about every draw program that had a free trial only to find that
none of them supported laser cutters or worked half as well as Corel draw.

I find it slower to use as you ALWAYS have to move the mouse to the
screen top to access a menu.

Its dead slow on printing due to everything going raster to postcript to
raster.


Its very pretty and easy on the eye, but frankly, its not a deal of use
to me except as a word processing web/email and text editing platform.

The tricky stuff gets done on the PC still.

I was extremely disappointed frankly. Even the unix aspects have been
well smothered under GUI goo. Or a gooey GUI.

The fact that MAC users seem oblivious to their problems seems analagous
to Drivel and his combis, or the rampant 'we think a Dyson at 250quid is
better than a 50 quid panasonic' sort of attitude.

It all right, is a mac. If all you need is MSoffice and web/email.

But its few good features are utterly overwhelmed by its total lack of
3rd party support and the high price attached to it in terms of hardware
and peripherals.

On Sep 25, 9:01 pm, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

It all right, is a mac. If all you need is MSoffice and web/email.

But its few good features are utterly overwhelmed by its total lack of
3rd party support and the high price attached to it in terms of hardware
and peripherals.

Mac owners are 'in the fold' as in sheep fold. Baaaa!!!

cheers,
Pete.

On 2007-09-25 17:13:28 +0100, John Rumm said:

Out of curiosity, how is the mac handling RS232 devices? Does it
recognise the various RS232 to USB adaptors? (which IME have
difficulties working correctly on XP in many cases - I had to buy three
to find one that let me use my old Wacom tablet)


There has been an issue with drivers for some USB adaptors when used
with OS/X on the Intel platform. It seems to depend on the chip used.

I've been using the Keyspan one pretty much daily for over a year. It
has Intel drivers from the vendor and I've had no problems at all with
it.

It will also switch elegantly in and out of guest environments such as
Parallels and VMWare with the Windows driver coming into play.

I have one or two legacy Windows applications requiring serial
connectivity that I run on one or other of these environments and they
work as well (or as badly) as they ever did on Windows.

On 2007-09-25 00:42:16 +0100, The Natural Philosopher said:

I have found that Mac people don't want to hear the truth

Actually I do, which is why I switched to using one over a year ago.
I haven't regretted doing so.

- that a Mac is in fact juts a over priced PC

With the Intel platform, that could be argued to an extent


running a prettier
and slightly more stable windowing system that runs slower, has less
hardware and software support,

I wouldn't say that the OS/X windowing attracts me on grounds of
prettiness. Usability is certainly superior in things like
Spotlight, which is a far better search facility than the Windows
thing, operates far faster and produces results from which it is easy
to drill down further. There are a few simple things such as the one
button to clear all desktop windows out of the way in order to check
something.

It's *substantially* more stable than any Windows environment that I
have used, even with basic applications on that. Starting snd
suspending is fast and works properly on OS/X and for weeks on end.
I just ran 'uptime' on my MacBook Pro (i.e. time since last reboot) and
it's at over 8 weeks.

In terms of speed, and here I am talking about user experience rather
than artificial benchmarks, OS/X and applications is far faster than
Windows. Previously, I had a 3GHz notebook PC with 2GB memory. The
MBP is 2GHz, but dual core and same memory. Even from a cold start
I can have booted OS/X, have logged in, have all system services
started and into Apple Mail while the PC is still loading up.
I haven't needed to do anything in terms of system or application
recoveries, registry fixes or reloads of the operating system.

Having less hardware support is an advantage. It means that
optimisations can be done, as they have been and also that there is a
known platform. There is plenty of commercial, or low cost or free
software out there for OS/X.

I have one or two legacy Windows applications, but these run very
adequately and inexpensively on VMWare. In itself that is useful,
because I can have a preconfigured virtual machine stashed away and
when Windows inevitably breaks copy it into place and be going again
immediately.


but otherwise is just after all another bloody computer..

That's true of course. For my usage, which is typical mobile usage
in one sense but technically onerous in others, OS/X is a very good
environment. I would have chucked the thing away and switched to
using Linux on a PC platform by now if not. Certainly I wouldn't
return to use of Windows as a main platform.

Andy Hall wrote:
On 2007-09-25 00:42:16 +0100, The Natural Philosopher said:

I have found that Mac people don't want to hear the truth

Actually I do, which is why I switched to using one over a year ago.
I haven't regretted doing so.

- that a Mac is in fact juts a over priced PC

With the Intel platform, that could be argued to an extent


running a prettier
and slightly more stable windowing system that runs slower, has less
hardware and software support,

I wouldn't say that the OS/X windowing attracts me on grounds of
prettiness. Usability is certainly superior in things like
Spotlight, which is a far better search facility than the Windows thing,
operates far faster and produces results from which it is easy to drill
down further. There are a few simple things such as the one button to
clear all desktop windows out of the way in order to check something.

It's *substantially* more stable than any Windows environment that I
have used, even with basic applications on that. Starting snd
suspending is fast and works properly on OS/X and for weeks on end.

Lucky you. if I sleep i lose all my network drives.

I worked pretty hard to eliminate all but waht I needed from my 98
setup. It was stable mostly, eventually it would rn out of RAM and need
a reboot. every two days or so usually. Its now XP and is a shade
better. But apps still crash of course.



I just ran 'uptime' on my MacBook Pro (i.e. time since last reboot) and
it's at over 8 weeks.

I shut mine down to save power. Well its an old G4.


In terms of speed, and here I am talking about user experience rather
than artificial benchmarks, OS/X and applications is far faster than
Windows. Previously, I had a 3GHz notebook PC with 2GB memory. The
MBP is 2GHz, but dual core and same memory. Even from a cold start
I can have booted OS/X, have logged in, have all system services started
and into Apple Mail while the PC is still loading up.

Yup..unless teh NAC goes 'filseystem check' in whih case it takes aroudn
7 minutes to boot, its a up a bit quicker than the PC. It runs slower
tho. Similar hardware. I tends to go into 'bugger off I am dong
somethimg' spinning disk mode from time to time while it pages something
in our out.

I haven't needed to do anything in terms of system or application
recoveries, registry fixes or reloads of the operating system.


I never needed to do that on a PC either. Bu then I didn't install
loads of crapware.

Having less hardware support is an advantage. It means that
optimisations can be done, as they have been and also that there is a
known platform.

That is straiight out of the marketing lessons no 1 "how to persent a
probelm as an advantage"

There is plenty of commercial, or low cost or free
software out there for OS/X.

Shame none of it is much use isn't it?


I have one or two legacy Windows applications, but these run very
adequately and inexpensively on VMWare. In itself that is useful,
because I can have a preconfigured virtual machine stashed away and when
Windows inevitably breaks copy it into place and be going again
immediately.

And how much did THA lots cost you? my PC owes me nothing and neither
does this Mac., They are both obsloete, upraded and rehashed to avoid
spending cash on bloody computers.


but otherwise is just after all another bloody computer..

That's true of course. For my usage, which is typical mobile usage
in one sense but technically onerous in others, OS/X is a very good
environment. I would have chucked the thing away and switched to
using Linux on a PC platform by now if not. Certainly I wouldn't
return to use of Windows as a main platform.

Depends on what 'main' means.

I do three things with computers. Set em up and program and configure
them, for which the Mac is good enough - just..its go a decent enough
telnet, and it just about runs a halfway decent text editor.

Bugger around bull****ting on the net, which its also reasonably good
at, and writing, which provided I close everything except WORD is
reasonable as well.

And do engineering and graphic type design, for which the Mac has proved
to absolutely and utterly useless. It wont drive the very expensive
plotter. No software exists that allows me to do what I want on it
easily or cheaply, and it cant understand my scanner either. Neither can
the two simulators I want run on it: They need windows, and without
buying a ****ing expensive Intel Mac, that's simply not on.

And printing is very slow. Sure i could spend a fortune on a gigahertz
processor equipped postcript printer to ratserside postcript, and a
gigahertz processor equipped mac to turn te rasters into postcript to
sent to teh expensive printer over a 100batseT network connection, but
frankly te PC does the job faster on a paralell port plotter.


When I compare the two platforms its perfectly obvious that they are
both deeply flawed. The PC is at least ubiquitous, fast and cheap, and
does the job, except when it crashes. Its optimised for silly features.
The mac is less able to do the job, but its sort of luxury feel. Its
like owning a jaguar versus a kit car. Actually the kit car needs
constant attention, and is unreliable, but its faster and uses less
petrol. The jaguar is expensive, reasonably reliable, but costs a
fortine to run and doesn't corner that well. Nor get you there any
faster n traffic: ty just fallters yu whilest you drive it.

Linux? thats a luton bodied transit with a desel engine in it. Nothing
to look at, and if you want it specialised, you have to mod it yourself,
but its stability personified, and chugs away 24x7 doing very boring but
necessary work.

If there is any system that I actually LIKE, its Linux. Shame it isn't
up to most of what I need to do either..

"dennis@home" wrote in message
...

"Clive George" wrote in message
...
"dennis@home" wrote in message
...

I bet half the stuff you run is open source ("linux") too.

and

I prefer vanilla SVR5 myself as its easy to write STREAMS modules if you
need near to real-time response like you do in telephone exchanges.

Seems deeply strange to me that somebody who is claiming to be a unix
programming guru (the implication of the latter statement) doesn't
understand the difference between open source and linux.

I understand that Linux is a kernel which is a copy of the interfaces in
unix but not the actual code (I have seen the source for both BTW but I no
longer have a source tape for either).
I also understand that most people don't know what linux is and I don't
want to confuse them.

You're in a thread arguing about nerdy stuff - I think it's safe to assume
that anybody still participating is unlikely to be confused about what Linux
actually is.

(and you still haven't really explained that you know the difference between
linux and open source)

clive

On 2007-09-25 23:51:25 +0100, The Natural Philosopher said:

Andy Hall wrote:

It's *substantially* more stable than any Windows environment that I
have used, even with basic applications on that. Starting snd
suspending is fast and works properly on OS/X and for weeks on end.

Lucky you. if I sleep i lose all my network drives.

Really? How are they mounted and to what as the server?



I worked pretty hard to eliminate all but waht I needed from my 98
setup. It was stable mostly, eventually it would rn out of RAM and need
a reboot. every two days or so usually. Its now XP and is a shade
better. But apps still crash of course.



I just ran 'uptime' on my MacBook Pro (i.e. time since last reboot) and
it's at over 8 weeks.

I shut mine down to save power. Well its an old G4.


In terms of speed, and here I am talking about user experience rather
than artificial benchmarks, OS/X and applications is far faster than
Windows. Previously, I had a 3GHz notebook PC with 2GB memory. The
MBP is 2GHz, but dual core and same memory. Even from a cold start
I can have booted OS/X, have logged in, have all system services
started and into Apple Mail while the PC is still loading up.

Yup..unless teh NAC goes 'filseystem check' in whih case it takes
aroudn 7 minutes to boot, its a up a bit quicker than the PC. It runs
slower tho. Similar hardware. I tends to go into 'bugger off I am dong
somethimg' spinning disk mode from time to time while it pages
something in our out.

Mmm... Perhaps that's a G4 issue. I'll try forcing a filesystem
check and see how long it takes, but have never seen this long a boot
time even after a cold power off.





I haven't needed to do anything in terms of system or application
recoveries, registry fixes or reloads of the operating system.


I never needed to do that on a PC either. Bu then I didn't install
loads of crapware.

Neither did I apart from Office.


Having less hardware support is an advantage. It means that
optimisations can be done, as they have been and also that there is a
known platform.

That is straiight out of the marketing lessons no 1 "how to persent a
probelm as an advantage"

Normally I would agree with you. However, PCs are all about
commodity hardware upon which the majority of people install or have
installed for them a proprietary "operating system" from Microsoft and
usually applications from Microsoft as well.

There is very little to choose between the hardware vendors anyway. It
either gets fixed by partial or full replacement.

For the user, most of the investment is in time to fix the software
when it breaks or in getting it to work reliably or at all with
combinations of hardware in the first place. In that respect having
something that is known to run on a defined platform is a distinct
advantage.

OTOH, at least OS/X is based on a reasonably open environment. One
can add and run or add compile and run most Unix based material, for
example.
Even if one doesn't do that, it becomes a comparison between one
vendor's proprietary environment and another's.

So overall, for my use I think it's well worth sacrificing the hardware
vendor choice



There is plenty of commercial, or low cost or free
software out there for OS/X.

Shame none of it is much use isn't it?

Depends what you want. I've never found any problem in finding
something for what I've needed.




I have one or two legacy Windows applications, but these run very
adequately and inexpensively on VMWare. In itself that is useful,
because I can have a preconfigured virtual machine stashed away and
when Windows inevitably breaks copy it into place and be going again
immediately.

And how much did THA lots cost you?

Very little. VMWare costs $79.99 at the moment.



my PC owes me nothing and neither does this Mac., They are both
obsloete, upraded and rehashed to avoid spending cash on bloody
computers.


but otherwise is just after all another bloody computer..

That's true of course. For my usage, which is typical mobile usage
in one sense but technically onerous in others, OS/X is a very good
environment. I would have chucked the thing away and switched to
using Linux on a PC platform by now if not. Certainly I wouldn't
return to use of Windows as a main platform.

Depends on what 'main' means.

Of course. I mean for my major professional use where there is
business criticality.


I do three things with computers. Set em up and program and configure
them, for which the Mac is good enough - just..its go a decent enough
telnet, and it just about runs a halfway decent text editor.

Bugger around bull****ting on the net, which its also reasonably good
at, and writing, which provided I close everything except WORD is
reasonable as well.

And do engineering and graphic type design, for which the Mac has
proved to absolutely and utterly useless. It wont drive the very
expensive plotter. No software exists that allows me to do what I want
on it easily or cheaply, and it cant understand my scanner either.
Neither can the two simulators I want run on it: They need windows, and
without buying a ****ing expensive Intel Mac, that's simply not on.

And printing is very slow. Sure i could spend a fortune on a gigahertz
processor equipped postcript printer to ratserside postcript, and a
gigahertz processor equipped mac to turn te rasters into postcript to
sent to teh expensive printer over a 100batseT network connection, but
frankly te PC does the job faster on a paralell port plotter.

This all sounds very much like issues of trying to run newer generation
software or requirements on older generation hardware.





When I compare the two platforms its perfectly obvious that they are
both deeply flawed. The PC is at least ubiquitous, fast and cheap, and
does the job, except when it crashes. Its optimised for silly features.
The mac is less able to do the job, but its sort of luxury feel. Its
like owning a jaguar versus a kit car. Actually the kit car needs
constant attention, and is unreliable, but its faster and uses less
petrol. The jaguar is expensive, reasonably reliable, but costs a
fortine to run and doesn't corner that well. Nor get you there any
faster n traffic: ty just fallters yu whilest you drive it.

Linux? thats a luton bodied transit with a desel engine in it. Nothing
to look at, and if you want it specialised, you have to mod it
yourself, but its stability personified, and chugs away 24x7 doing very
boring but necessary work.

If there is any system that I actually LIKE, its Linux. Shame it isn't
up to most of what I need to do either..

Whichever way, I think that one ends up spending money. I know
people who are dual booting Linux and OS/X on their Macs for certain
jobs and running Linux under VMWare for others. That can be
reasonable as well. Does depend on what you do, though.

dennis@home wrote:

"John Rumm" wrote in message
...

Out of curiosity, how is the mac handling RS232 devices? Does it
recognise the various RS232 to USB adaptors? (which IME have
difficulties working correctly on XP in many cases - I had to buy
three to find one that let me use my old Wacom tablet)

I found the cheap £6 one from ebuyer worked very well on XP.
I haven't tried it on this Vista machine yet.

Price does not seem to be a factor. I had one that installed, but the
tablet driver would not recognise the tablet on it. I had another that
worked fine but would blue screen the PC every few hours. Finally I
bought one on ebay for £0.01 from hong kong, and it has worked well since.

--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

Andy Hall wrote:
On 2007-09-25 23:51:25 +0100, The Natural Philosopher said:

Andy Hall wrote:

It's *substantially* more stable than any Windows environment that I
have used, even with basic applications on that. Starting snd
suspending is fast and works properly on OS/X and for weeks on end.

Lucky you. if I sleep i lose all my network drives.

Really? How are they mounted and to what as the server?



SMB to a Linux server, or servers. TCP conns need to be 'kept alive'

NFS is probably better, but I loathe it.


Yup..unless teh MAC goes 'filesystem check' in which case it takes
around 7 minutes to boot, its a up a bit quicker than the PC. It runs
slower tho. Similar hardware. I tends to go into 'bugger off I am dong
something' spinning disk mode from time to time while it pages
something in our out.

Mmm... Perhaps that's a G4 issue. I'll try forcing a filesystem
check and see how long it takes, but have never seen this long a boot
time even after a cold power off.


Bootng is alas assumed to be from a cold power off or it's not booting
is it?





I haven't needed to do anything in terms of system or application
recoveries, registry fixes or reloads of the operating system.


I never needed to do that on a PC either. Bu then I didn't install
loads of crapware.

Neither did I apart from Office.


Point taken

Having less hardware support is an advantage. It means that
optimisations can be done, as they have been and also that there is a
known platform.

That is straiight out of the marketing lessons no 1 "how to persent a
probelm as an advantage"

Normally I would agree with you. However, PCs are all about commodity
hardware upon which the majority of people install or have installed for
them a proprietary "operating system" from Microsoft and usually
applications from Microsoft as well.


Mmm. I am not sure how accurate that assesment is..but the mots pepl I
know are very computer literate and do very advanced things with their
computers: What is on the machins OS wise tends to reflect the use to
which it wll be put.

The graphic artists have Macs.
The software developers have Linux or Windoze.
The kids with the games have PC's.



There is very little to choose between the hardware vendors anyway. It
either gets fixed by partial or full replacement.

For the user, most of the investment is in time to fix the software when
it breaks or in getting it to work reliably or at all with combinations
of hardware in the first place. In that respect having something that
is known to run on a defined platform is a distinct advantage.

OTOH, at least OS/X is based on a reasonably open environment. One can
add and run or add compile and run most Unix based material, for example.
Even if one doesn't do that, it becomes a comparison between one
vendor's proprietary environment and another's.


But not that easily: The GUI interface is extremely specialised: sure
you can run X11 but that rather defeats the point of having the Mac at all.

So overall, for my use I think it's well worth sacrificing the hardware
vendor choice



There is plenty of commercial, or low cost or free
software out there for OS/X.

Shame none of it is much use isn't it?

Depends what you want. I've never found any problem in finding
something for what I've needed.

I spent over 4 weeks ****ing around with ths Mac to see what its limits
were, and was extremely frustrated to find that they were basically massive.

Its become a simple writing desk. Its pleasant enough at that.




I have one or two legacy Windows applications, but these run very
adequately and inexpensively on VMWare. In itself that is useful,
because I can have a preconfigured virtual machine stashed away and
when Windows inevitably breaks copy it into place and be going again
immediately.

And how much did THA lots cost you?

Very little. VMWare costs $79.99 at the moment.



No, with the Mac and the rest of it? Printers/plotters/scanners etc.


my PC owes me nothing and neither does this Mac., They are both
obsloete, upraded and rehashed to avoid spending cash on bloody
computers.


but otherwise is just after all another bloody computer..

That's true of course. For my usage, which is typical mobile
usage in one sense but technically onerous in others, OS/X is a very
good environment. I would have chucked the thing away and
switched to using Linux on a PC platform by now if not. Certainly
I wouldn't return to use of Windows as a main platform.

Depends on what 'main' means.

Of course. I mean for my major professional use where there is
business criticality.


It the business critically depends on something that simply doesn't run
on a Mac, then the business runs windows.

Millions of businesses run windows. its 'good enough'



I do three things with computers. Set em up and program and configure
them, for which the Mac is good enough - just..its go a decent enough
telnet, and it just about runs a halfway decent text editor.

Bugger around bull****ting on the net, which its also reasonably good
at, and writing, which provided I close everything except WORD is
reasonable as well.

And do engineering and graphic type design, for which the Mac has
proved to absolutely and utterly useless. It wont drive the very
expensive plotter. No software exists that allows me to do what I want
on it easily or cheaply, and it cant understand my scanner either.
Neither can the two simulators I want run on it: They need windows,
and without buying a ****ing expensive Intel Mac, that's simply not on.

And printing is very slow. Sure i could spend a fortune on a gigahertz
processor equipped postcript printer to ratserside postcript, and a
gigahertz processor equipped mac to turn te rasters into postcript to
sent to teh expensive printer over a 100batseT network connection, but
frankly te PC does the job faster on a paralell port plotter.

This all sounds very much like issues of trying to run newer generation
software or requirements on older generation hardware.


And yet an upgrade to XP found all the older kit working flawlessly.




When I compare the two platforms its perfectly obvious that they are
both deeply flawed. The PC is at least ubiquitous, fast and cheap, and
does the job, except when it crashes. Its optimised for silly
features. The mac is less able to do the job, but its sort of luxury
feel. Its like owning a jaguar versus a kit car. Actually the kit car
needs constant attention, and is unreliable, but its faster and uses
less petrol. The jaguar is expensive, reasonably reliable, but costs a
fortine to run and doesn't corner that well. Nor get you there any
faster n traffic: ty just fallters yu whilest you drive it.

Linux? thats a luton bodied transit with a desel engine in it. Nothing
to look at, and if you want it specialised, you have to mod it
yourself, but its stability personified, and chugs away 24x7 doing
very boring but necessary work.

If there is any system that I actually LIKE, its Linux. Shame it isn't
up to most of what I need to do either..

Whichever way, I think that one ends up spending money. I know people
who are dual booting Linux and OS/X on their Macs for certain jobs and
running Linux under VMWare for others. That can be reasonable as
well. Does depend on what you do, though.

Well I have all three here now. Linux is for the server, because its
rock solid at that.

Macs for ****ing about and to run my wifes typography stuff, which it
runs well enough.

PC for my engineering stuff, which Macs don't even get out of bed for.

I think the 4 machines here haven't cost much more than a grand..well
maybe this mac was more when it was bought.

Very little has been bought new. A lot is cast offs from affluent people
who don't want a 5 year old machine.

Pete C wrote:

On Sep 25, 9:01 pm, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

It all right, is a mac. If all you need is MSoffice and web/email.

But its few good features are utterly overwhelmed by its total lack of
3rd party support and the high price attached to it in terms of hardware
and peripherals.

Mac owners are 'in the fold' as in sheep fold. Baaaa!!!

The ones following the flock are those who buy M$.

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

[snip]

Well a 5 year old scanner and A1 plotter both failed utterly to work
correctly on MAC OSX.

Sounds like ********. Even an Medion (Artek rebadged) scanenr with no
support for OSX is running happily with my Macs. As to the plotter I
haven't had one fail to work, and I wonder if the weasel word here is
"properly" and in what context.

It runs half the speed of the comparable PC on twice the RAM

Nope that really is ********.

and I tried just about every draw program that had a free trial only to
find that none of them supported laser cutters or worked half as well as
Corel draw.

If you think that Corel Draw works well, or even that it works then you
have a screw loose.

I find it slower to use as you ALWAYS have to move the mouse to the
screen top to access a menu.

Nope that's merely psychological quirk, you think it is slower, it's
actually faster, and when using Windows and other GUIs with menus tied
to window bars it takes longer to find the menu than it does if the menu
is fixed.

Its dead slow on printing due to everything going raster to postcript to
raster.

More ********.

Its very pretty and easy on the eye, but frankly, its not a deal of use
to me except as a word processing web/email and text editing platform.

The tricky stuff gets done on the PC still.

"I'm used to a PC and I can't be arsed to think."

I was extremely disappointed frankly. Even the unix aspects have been
well smothered under GUI goo. Or a gooey GUI.

The fact that MAC users seem oblivious to their problems

Mac, it's short for Macintosh. And what problems do you refer to? MY
2.4GHz MBP runs faster than any of the Vista machines I've tried.

seems analagous
to Drivel and his combis, or the rampant 'we think a Dyson at 250quid is
better than a 50 quid panasonic' sort of attitude.

It all right, is a mac. If all you need is MSoffice and web/email.

I don't use MS Office.

But its few good features are utterly overwhelmed by its total lack of
3rd party support and the high price attached to it in terms of hardware
and peripherals.

More ********.

If you want to do laster cutting you should be speakign to Axon (Newport
IoW). They were the first company to introduce laser cutters operated by
a personal computer in the UK, they have been resolutely Mac ever since
they started work. Most sail lofts seem to use them.

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Well its an old G4.

Thus setting your complaints about "slow" in context. It's faster than
the comparable PC which would be a P4.

On Sep 26, 1:45 pm, (Steve Firth) wrote:
Mac owners are 'in the fold' as in sheep fold. Baaaa!!!

The ones following the flock are those who buy M$.

M$ is the Big Bad Wolf!

cheers,
Pete.

Pete C wrote:

On Sep 26, 1:45 pm, (Steve Firth) wrote:
Mac owners are 'in the fold' as in sheep fold. Baaaa!!!

The ones following the flock are those who buy M$.

M$ is the Big Bad Wolf!

Nope, it's just mass-market crap sold to people who don't know much
about what they buy.

On Sep 26, 3:40 pm, (Steve Firth) wrote:
Pete C wrote:
On Sep 26, 1:45 pm, (Steve Firth) wrote:
Mac owners are 'in the fold' as in sheep fold. Baaaa!!!

The ones following the flock are those who buy M$.

M$ is the Big Bad Wolf!

Nope, it's just mass-market crap sold to people who don't know much
about what they buy.

Macs are overpriced trendy crap sold to people who don't know much
about what they buy...

cheers,
Pete.

"Clive George" wrote in message
...
"dennis@home" wrote in message
...

"Clive George" wrote in message
...
"dennis@home" wrote in message
...

I bet half the stuff you run is open source ("linux") too.

and

I prefer vanilla SVR5 myself as its easy to write STREAMS modules if
you need near to real-time response like you do in telephone exchanges.

Seems deeply strange to me that somebody who is claiming to be a unix
programming guru (the implication of the latter statement) doesn't
understand the difference between open source and linux.

I understand that Linux is a kernel which is a copy of the interfaces in
unix but not the actual code (I have seen the source for both BTW but I
no longer have a source tape for either).
I also understand that most people don't know what linux is and I don't
want to confuse them.

You're in a thread arguing about nerdy stuff - I think it's safe to assume
that anybody still participating is unlikely to be confused about what
Linux actually is.

(and you still haven't really explained that you know the difference
between linux and open source)


Well like you say there shouldn't be a need to explain it here which is why
it was in quotes the first time I mentioned it as I knew it wasn't really
what Linux was that we were talking about but it was what many people think
is Linux.

As for the difference between Linux and open source then Linux is a tiny bit
of open source that does similar to the Unix kernel in as much as it has the
same interfaces and similar behavior. Is that enough or do you want the full
works?

"Andy Hall" wrote in message
...

Very little. VMWare costs $79.99 at the moment.

No windows then?

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
Andy Hall wrote:
On 2007-09-25 23:51:25 +0100, The Natural Philosopher said:

Andy Hall wrote:

It's *substantially* more stable than any Windows environment that I
have used, even with basic applications on that. Starting snd
suspending is fast and works properly on OS/X and for weeks on end.

Lucky you. if I sleep i lose all my network drives.

Really? How are they mounted and to what as the server?



SMB to a Linux server, or servers. TCP conns need to be 'kept alive'

NFS is probably better, but I loathe it.

NFS is awful.
It has all sorts of locking problems that you have to watch out for.

"Pete C" wrote in message
ups.com...
On Sep 26, 3:40 pm, (Steve Firth) wrote:
Pete C wrote:
On Sep 26, 1:45 pm, (Steve Firth) wrote:
Mac owners are 'in the fold' as in sheep fold. Baaaa!!!

The ones following the flock are those who buy M$.

M$ is the Big Bad Wolf!

Nope, it's just mass-market crap sold to people who don't know much
about what they buy.

Macs are overpriced trendy crap sold to people who don't know much
about what they buy...


There is nothing wrong with a Mac if it does what the user wants.
The same goes for any machine and OS combination.
Its personal choice.
What is wrong is people saying any one system is crap just because they
don't like it without any regard as to what is suitable for the other users.
One size does not fit all.

On 2007-09-26 09:43:07 +0100, The Natural Philosopher said:

Andy Hall wrote:
On 2007-09-25 23:51:25 +0100, The Natural Philosopher said:

Andy Hall wrote:

It's *substantially* more stable than any Windows environment that I
have used, even with basic applications on that. Starting snd
suspending is fast and works properly on OS/X and for weeks on end.

Lucky you. if I sleep i lose all my network drives.

Really? How are they mounted and to what as the server?



SMB to a Linux server, or servers. TCP conns need to be 'kept alive'

NFS is probably better, but I loathe it.

Depends what you are doing. I've never had an issue so I presume that
any connections re-establish on their own which seems reasonable.





Yup..unless teh MAC goes 'filesystem check' in which case it takes
around 7 minutes to boot, its a up a bit quicker than the PC. It runs
slower tho. Similar hardware. I tends to go into 'bugger off I am dong
something' spinning disk mode from time to time while it pages
something in our out.

Mmm... Perhaps that's a G4 issue. I'll try forcing a filesystem
check and see how long it takes, but have never seen this long a boot
time even after a cold power off.


Bootng is alas assumed to be from a cold power off or it's not booting is it?

Sorry, just to be clear, I should have said unclean shutdown meaning
pressing the power tit and holding it rather than a clean shutdown.







I haven't needed to do anything in terms of system or application
recoveries, registry fixes or reloads of the operating system.


I never needed to do that on a PC either. Bu then I didn't install
loads of crapware.

Neither did I apart from Office.


Point taken

Having less hardware support is an advantage. It means that
optimisations can be done, as they have been and also that there is a
known platform.

That is straiight out of the marketing lessons no 1 "how to persent a
probelm as an advantage"

Normally I would agree with you. However, PCs are all about
commodity hardware upon which the majority of people install or have
installed for them a proprietary "operating system" from Microsoft and
usually applications from Microsoft as well.


Mmm. I am not sure how accurate that assesment is..but the mots pepl I
know are very computer literate and do very advanced things with their
computers: What is on the machins OS wise tends to reflect the use to
which it wll be put.

The graphic artists have Macs.
The software developers have Linux or Windoze.
The kids with the games have PC's.

The third would also include most people with a corporate provided
computer and build to run on it, so I suppose this is an accurate
description.





There is very little to choose between the hardware vendors anyway. It
either gets fixed by partial or full replacement.

For the user, most of the investment is in time to fix the software
when it breaks or in getting it to work reliably or at all with
combinations of hardware in the first place. In that respect having
something that is known to run on a defined platform is a distinct
advantage.

OTOH, at least OS/X is based on a reasonably open environment. One
can add and run or add compile and run most Unix based material, for
example.
Even if one doesn't do that, it becomes a comparison between one
vendor's proprietary environment and another's.


But not that easily: The GUI interface is extremely specialised: sure
you can run X11 but that rather defeats the point of having the Mac at
all.

Yes and no.

X runs easily and natively on the Mac and performs rather well. I
actually use it every day. On PCs it's rather variable, depending on
the X server used and the underlying hardware.




So overall, for my use I think it's well worth sacrificing the hardware
vendor choice



There is plenty of commercial, or low cost or free
software out there for OS/X.

Shame none of it is much use isn't it?

Depends what you want. I've never found any problem in finding
something for what I've needed.

I spent over 4 weeks ****ing around with ths Mac to see what its limits
were, and was extremely frustrated to find that they were basically
massive.

Its become a simple writing desk. Its pleasant enough at that.




I have one or two legacy Windows applications, but these run very
adequately and inexpensively on VMWare. In itself that is useful,
because I can have a preconfigured virtual machine stashed away and
when Windows inevitably breaks copy it into place and be going again
immediately.

And how much did THA lots cost you?

Very little. VMWare costs $79.99 at the moment.



No, with the Mac and the rest of it? Printers/plotters/scanners etc.

Printers, scanners etc. are needed either way so that's a wash.




my PC owes me nothing and neither does this Mac., They are both
obsloete, upraded and rehashed to avoid spending cash on bloody
computers.


but otherwise is just after all another bloody computer..

That's true of course. For my usage, which is typical mobile usage
in one sense but technically onerous in others, OS/X is a very good
environment. I would have chucked the thing away and switched to
using Linux on a PC platform by now if not. Certainly I wouldn't
return to use of Windows as a main platform.

Depends on what 'main' means.

Of course. I mean for my major professional use where there is
business criticality.


It the business critically depends on something that simply doesn't run
on a Mac, then the business runs windows.

Millions of businesses run windows. its 'good enough'

That is truly concerning.

The old adage was "Nobody got fired for buying IBM"

The sequel was that they didn't get promoted either.





I do three things with computers. Set em up and program and configure
them, for which the Mac is good enough - just..its go a decent enough
telnet, and it just about runs a halfway decent text editor.

Bugger around bull****ting on the net, which its also reasonably good
at, and writing, which provided I close everything except WORD is
reasonable as well.

And do engineering and graphic type design, for which the Mac has
proved to absolutely and utterly useless. It wont drive the very
expensive plotter. No software exists that allows me to do what I want
on it easily or cheaply, and it cant understand my scanner either.
Neither can the two simulators I want run on it: They need windows, and
without buying a ****ing expensive Intel Mac, that's simply not on.

And printing is very slow. Sure i could spend a fortune on a gigahertz
processor equipped postcript printer to ratserside postcript, and a
gigahertz processor equipped mac to turn te rasters into postcript to
sent to teh expensive printer over a 100batseT network connection, but
frankly te PC does the job faster on a paralell port plotter.

This all sounds very much like issues of trying to run newer generation
software or requirements on older generation hardware.


And yet an upgrade to XP found all the older kit working flawlessly.

Didn't for me and Vista is reputed to be diabolical.






When I compare the two platforms its perfectly obvious that they are
both deeply flawed. The PC is at least ubiquitous, fast and cheap, and
does the job, except when it crashes. Its optimised for silly features.
The mac is less able to do the job, but its sort of luxury feel. Its
like owning a jaguar versus a kit car. Actually the kit car needs
constant attention, and is unreliable, but its faster and uses less
petrol. The jaguar is expensive, reasonably reliable, but costs a
fortine to run and doesn't corner that well. Nor get you there any
faster n traffic: ty just fallters yu whilest you drive it.

Linux? thats a luton bodied transit with a desel engine in it. Nothing
to look at, and if you want it specialised, you have to mod it
yourself, but its stability personified, and chugs away 24x7 doing very
boring but necessary work.

If there is any system that I actually LIKE, its Linux. Shame it isn't
up to most of what I need to do either..

Whichever way, I think that one ends up spending money. I know
people who are dual booting Linux and OS/X on their Macs for certain
jobs and running Linux under VMWare for others. That can be
reasonable as well. Does depend on what you do, though.

Well I have all three here now. Linux is for the server, because its
rock solid at that.

Yes, or FreeBSD



Macs for ****ing about and to run my wifes typography stuff, which it
runs well enough.

PC for my engineering stuff, which Macs don't even get out of bed for.

I probably wouldn't dispute that.

I think the 4 machines here haven't cost much more than a grand..well
maybe this mac was more when it was bought.

Very little has been bought new. A lot is cast offs from affluent
people who don't want a 5 year old machine.

On 2007-09-26 13:45:32 +0100, (Steve Firth) said:


Nope that's merely psychological quirk, you think it is slower, it's
actually faster, and when using Windows and other GUIs with menus tied
to window bars it takes longer to find the menu than it does if the menu
is fixed.


... not forgetting the dock.

On 2007-09-26 21:17:20 +0100, "dennis@home"
said:


"Andy Hall" wrote in message ...

Very little. VMWare costs $79.99 at the moment.

No windows then?

No. The license is required for that whether it's on a PC or a VM.

On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:14:44 UTC, "dennis@home"
wrote:

As for the difference between Linux and open source then Linux is a tiny bit
of open source that does similar to the Unix kernel in as much as it has the
same interfaces and similar behavior. Is that enough or do you want the full
works?

Broadly similar interfaces...try building the same program for Linux,
and one of the few real Unix systems, and you'll find out the
differences.

--
The information contained in this post is copyright the
poster, and specifically may not be published in, or used by
http://www.diybanter.com

On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:55:57 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

SMB to a Linux server, or servers. TCP conns need to be 'kept alive'

NFS is probably better, but I loathe it.

Depends what you are doing. I've never had an issue so I presume that
any connections re-establish on their own which seems reasonable.

Actually, NFS is stateless and connectionless. That's one of the reasons
locking is so hard, and why caching is also problematical.
--
The information contained in this post is copyright the
poster, and specifically may not be published in, or used by
http://www.diybanter.com

"Bob Eager" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:14:44 UTC, "dennis@home"
wrote:

As for the difference between Linux and open source then Linux is a tiny
bit
of open source that does similar to the Unix kernel in as much as it has
the
same interfaces and similar behavior. Is that enough or do you want the
full
works?

Broadly similar interfaces...try building the same program for Linux,
and one of the few real Unix systems, and you'll find out the
differences.

If you stick to the common stuff you will be OK most of the time, well maybe
if you follow the portability rules.
Having seen how many variables there are in some of the makefiles just for
different distros which should be similar you soon realize that even if it
is supposed to be the same it may not be. Fortunately I no longer program
for Unix at work and I certainly don't at home.

On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:29:46 UTC, "dennis@home"
wrote:

"Bob Eager" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:14:44 UTC, "dennis@home"
wrote:

As for the difference between Linux and open source then Linux is a tiny
bit
of open source that does similar to the Unix kernel in as much as it has
the
same interfaces and similar behavior. Is that enough or do you want the
full
works?

Broadly similar interfaces...try building the same program for Linux,
and one of the few real Unix systems, and you'll find out the
differences.

If you stick to the common stuff you will be OK most of the time, well maybe
if you follow the portability rules.
Having seen how many variables there are in some of the makefiles just for
different distros which should be similar you soon realize that even if it
is supposed to be the same it may not be. Fortunately I no longer program
for Unix at work and I certainly don't at home.

Which is why we have the dreaded GNU autoconf. I stopped programming for
UNIX years ago, but still do quite a bit on FreeBSD and (occasionally)
Linux. We use true UNIX at work, but I don't program for it there.

--
The information contained in this post is copyright the
poster, and specifically may not be published in, or used by
http://www.diybanter.com

In article ,
"Bob Eager" writes:
On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:55:57 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

SMB to a Linux server, or servers. TCP conns need to be 'kept alive'

NFS is probably better, but I loathe it.

Depends what you are doing. I've never had an issue so I presume that
any connections re-establish on their own which seems reasonable.

Unfortunately, many peoples' only or main experience of NFS
is one of the Linux implementations, which have never been up
there in quality and functionality compared with the commercial
unix implementations.

Actually, NFS is stateless and connectionless. That's one of the reasons
locking is so hard, and why caching is also problematical.

With the first NFS version, this was partly true. The locking
protocol wasn't stateless though. However, NFS has evolved over
20 years to the point where none of the above is true anymore.

Unfortunately, Linux has not benefitted so much because its
NFSv4 implementation is really poor, to the point where people
often disable it just to get NFS to work on Linux (falling back
to NFSv3).

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]

In article ,
"Bob Eager" writes:
On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:15:59 UTC, "dennis@home"
wrote:

SunOS is a lot like Linux you know.

Apart from being a totally different kernel code base, that is.

;-)

As someone who's worked on both (although more on the SunOS
kernel than on Linux), I'd have to say there's not much that's
similar.

If you're a user using, say, Gnome on Solaris and Linux,
then they look pretty similar I suppose.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]

Bob Eager wrote:
On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:55:57 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

SMB to a Linux server, or servers. TCP conns need to be 'kept alive'

NFS is probably better, but I loathe it.
Depends what you are doing. I've never had an issue so I presume that
any connections re-establish on their own which seems reasonable.

Actually, NFS is stateless and connectionless. That's one of the reasons
locking is so hard, and why caching is also problematical.
and why it survives a network outage or a machine going down.
And why it screws up royally if a machine editing a file leaves a lock
on it and goes down..

Andy Hall wrote:
On 2007-09-26 13:45:32 +0100, (Steve Firth) said:


Nope that's merely psychological quirk, you think it is slower, it's
actually faster, and when using Windows and other GUIs with menus tied
to window bars it takes longer to find the menu than it does if the menu
is fixed.


.. not forgetting the dock.


On windows what I want is in icons on the screen, and n a mac its in the
dock. No difference really.

If I need something else in either case I have to use a finder type tool.

No..the mouse movement up to the extreme screen top s a pain, as is
finding a subwindow buried behind other windows.

Andy Hall wrote:
On 2007-09-26 13:45:32 +0100, (Steve Firth) said:


Nope that's merely psychological quirk, you think it is slower, it's
actually faster, and when using Windows and other GUIs with menus tied
to window bars it takes longer to find the menu than it does if the menu
is fixed.

Yup, I always found that with my Amiga.... (being able to make multiple
selections from a menu using the alternate mouse button was handy as
well ;-)



... not forgetting the dock.




--
Cheers,

John.

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