PC Mag Gives Panther 5-Star Rating 206
Cycline3 writes "The subject says it all. PC Mag gave the big black cat a five-out-of-five star rating. I really like Panther, but I never would have imagined that this would happen. Pretty cool. PC users take note!"
you never? (Score:4, Insightful)
PC Mag has been giving good reviews to apple products for a long time. Here is a link [pcmag.com] to a review of 10.1 (4/5 stars).
I also don't understand the surprise. What would a PC user find wrong with a mac? It's similar enough to windows to be usuable. I don't use apples because I don't like the lack of 3rd party hardware and the more limited upgradability. There is nothing wrong with the OS.
Re:you never? (Score:5, Insightful)
Regardless, I've noticed that the defining feature of a great number of computer users is that they freeze up in the face of anything new or different. I imagine it's the same mechanism that gave rise to those interesting statistics about how Windows 3.1 users learned Windows 95 more slowly than people who were just learning to use a computer.
So all in all, I gotta say that there is one huge glaring thing that a lot of PC users find wrong with Macs: they aren't PCs.
Re:you never? (Score:2)
Why do you blame this on just PC users? The reverse is also true. Plenty of Mac users don't like Windows because Windows lacks some nifty Mac features.
Re:you never? (Score:2)
Yeah, like style, ease of use, consistent user interfaces, great included applications, impressive system stability, lack of viruses, good security, beautiful and functional hardware...
:-)
Honestly though, use whatever you want but be sure to try everything with an open mind. I will totally admit that Windows has come a long way with Windows XP and in some ways it is better than Mac OS X. Obviously a lot of people a
What the hell are PCs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why are we letting "personal computer" become synonymous with Windows? That's certainly not good for competitors. Why does Apple say the iPod is available for Mac and PC when they really mean Mac, Windows, and anything else you can hack to work with it.
Re:What the hell are PCs? (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft, of course, has proven
Re:What the hell are PCs? (Score:2)
Yeah, I mean, I'm typing on a mac in Canada, and I really wish I could say the truthfull "I'm typing on a PC in America" without being misunderstood, but alas, evil prevails and words get twisted.
Re:What the hell are PCs? (Score:2)
Although, with the latest generation of iPods [dockable], I don't even think they make the distinction between W vs. M.
Just a clarification
Re:you never? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:you never? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm curious to know what hardware you're talking about? These days anything I'd buy to plug into my PC I seem to be able to plug into my Mac as well and the Mac generally does a better job of recognising and talking to the crap I plug into it.
I'm talking about stuff like printers, cameras, scanners, etc.
Re:you never? (Score:2)
Seriously, while exterior peripheral support is great on Macs, the support for a lot of internal hardware (really mostly just PCI and AGP cards) is lacking.
But I can't remember the last time I needed to stick a new PCI card in my PC, let alone my Mac.
Re:you never? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:you never? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:you never? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why what's wrong with Mac cases? My G4 case, as you know, has a fold down side making upgrades and repairs that mush easier. It also has a place for a pad lock, to keep your ram safe from a would be thief, plus it has an area to attach a cable that will lock the entire computer to something. And don't forget the ever helpful handles. I just wish the G5 case also folded down, oh well, it looks like it's still easy to get inside of.
Maybe I'm being ignorant, but
Re:you never? (Score:2, Funny)
Just ignore him. All PC users feel the need to replace bits of their computer that they're not happy with.
Re:you never? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:you never? (Score:2)
I love the design of the G4 cases, but there is one thing that really sucks big time: they are noisy. My MDD case vibrates so much it causes a clearly audible hum. When I press the door firmly against the case, the hum stops. A different case would be a nice thing now...
Re:you never? (Score:2)
The hard disk bracket is connected with one very small low-profile philips screw in an awkwardly-placed recessed counter-sunk hole. I've stripped a number of these screws. I've taken to moving the hard disk from the bottom position in the bracket to the top position so the screw could be replaced with a standard screw with a deeper head.
Past that, I have no complaints about the b/w G3, G4, or quicksilver cases and I've worked on a lot of them.
Now, I can rant on
Re:you never? (Score:1, Informative)
Webcams? (Score:1)
Oh, and Apple [apple.com]. Dumbass.
Re:you never? (Score:2)
Not that I'm the original complainer, but...
It ticks me off that I can't plug in any video card I want.
How about sound cards - I dunno.
How about any cards?
There are plenty of USB devices that won't work (radio receivers and the like).
Re:you never? (Score:3, Insightful)
the future is USB audio/MIDI interfaces for those who don't need ridiculously low latency and FireWire audio/MIDI interfaces for those that do. even digidesign makes outboard pro tools systems
Re:you never? (Score:2)
Until the Mac has > 10% of the marketplace (wouldn't that be nice), all those mac-only boards will be more expensive than their PC equivalents.
Remember when Mac memory was different from PC memory? Didn't that suck? Remember when Mac keyboards were different from PC keyboards (ADB, etc)? Didn't that suck? Yeah, you could buy both, but the Mac ones were more expensive, and you didn't get all the same choices.
I want the same for vid cards, etc.
Re:you never? (Score:2)
Cheaper is exactly the issue. If I had a billion dollars, I could buy anything I wanted for the Mac.
Availability is all about cost.
The components may or may not get cheaper, but they are available, and they will probably not become compatible any time soon.
PCI is a standard. VGA is a standard. OpenGL is a standard. Etc. What compatibility are you talking about?
Re:you never? (Score:2)
For development, we put our chip (PCI on one side) on a board and it talks to a PC just fine. And while I've n
Re:you never? (Score:2)
Monopoly hardware... (Score:3, Insightful)
What I don't like is the fact that Apple is the sole manufacturer of the hardware required to run the OS. Monopolies tend to create weird pricing and reduce innovation. It still seems to be a fact that Apple hardware price/performance ratio is poor compared to intel/amd-based hardware (but let's not go deeper into that dark alley again).
Re:Monopoly hardware... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I'll concede that Apple's pricing is unappealing, but you must be thinking of some other company (*cough*Microsoft*cough*) when you mention "reduce[d] innovation". I think that even the most strident Apple-hater would agree that Apple's is innovative.
D.
Re:Monopoly hardware... (Score:2)
I find it hard to believe that Apple has putting as much effort into that as e.g. Dell or other PC-manufacturers that face fierce competition.
Re:Monopoly hardware... (Score:2)
This is not 100% true anymore for Dell than it is for Apple with the exception of software development.
Dell is NOT a favorite company of mine, but they do spend a great deal of money on innovation in hardware and production quality. The last, something Apple should invest a little more in.
On the other side, Dell doesn't have to spend the R&D on software like Appl
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Monopoly hardware... (Score:2)
Ever own a dictionary? They're easy to use, handy to have around, and relatively cheap. When used judiciously, can help prevent foot-in-mouth disease.
Re:Monopoly hardware... (Score:2)
Apple does more than their fair share, but I our test labs see more 'new' concepts from the MS R&D labs than Apple. Whether you like MS or not, they are putting Billions in research.
Since the NT initiative (which was a non-user side of OS engineering and architecture originally 'the guts of a new OS') to the OS/2 interface that IBM put in OS/2 2.0, and on to the Windows
Still waiting for mine (Score:2)
Expose is worth gold... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Expose is worth gold... (Score:2)
Isn't expose just a way to solve something which other UIs like Gnome doesn't have (window clutter)?
Or if I have understand it incorrectly please explain to me what it does.
Re:Expose is worth gold... (Score:2)
The OS X is a multi-taks GUI environment. It lends itself to users doing many things at the same time, and keeping track of those many things.
Expose simply takes that paradigm a step farther. It does much more than manage window clutter. It allows you to be more effective at multitasking with your
Re:Expose is worth gold... (Score:2)
I don't know what KDE and Windows you've been using, but it's not the same ones I've been over the past few years. (Sorry, I never really used Gnome).
Seriously, how do the force you into doing one thing at a time? I can't alt-tab through running apps? I can't have 14 things running on my XP workstation next to me?
Hogwash.
It lends itself to users doing many things
Certainly, it lends itself far better w/ Expose then it did with earlier versions.
Wouldn't
Re:Expose is worth gold... (Score:2)
The very idea of using a key to alt-tab through running apps is an example of this. You make a discreet change from one single-task to another.
The Mac user doesn't use the alt-tab as much, because his windows are fr
Re:Expose is worth gold... (Score:2)
Re:Expose is worth gold... (Score:2)
It doesn't solve or even address window clutter. It solves finding the window you want.
For example when I code I normally use two terminal windows, one on the left for the code, one on the right to run the program in the debugger, look at the output, or even bring up man pages. Expose doesn't get in the way of that, it still lets me
Re:Expose is worth gold... (Score:2)
Re:Expose is worth gold... (Score:2)
Not true. Not true in the least.
My Mac destkop runs at 1920x1440 and even with that much real estate, there are still plenty of overlapping windows. And sometimes it's a pain to locate the one you want without a featur
Re:Expose is worth gold... (Score:2)
Sounds to me like they didn't calibrate the battery, because the battery life on them is a LOT better than that.
Re:Still waiting for mine (Score:3, Informative)
These are features in Panther that will only become apparent as developers release products that use them. By buying Panther you're getting more than is immediately apparent.
Re:Still waiting for mine (Score:2)
Wow. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wow. (Score:2)
Re:Wow. (Score:1)
That said: Malcolm X had nothing to do directly with the Panthers. Malcolm was assassinated in February of '65 and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was formed in Oakland in '66, in response to police violence and repression against blacks in the community. The Panthers drew a large amount of inspiration from Malcolm's example,
Re:Wow. (Score:2)
Uh, right - on the other hand, given that he was a fairly smart guy, he may well have realised that the "X" stands for ten, the Panther is because all the Mac OS X releases are named after big cats, and the box is black for the same reason the Jaguar box had faux-Jaguar
5 stars? (Score:1, Interesting)
Journalistic integrity requires that you never give a product with know issues 5 stars.
Re:5 stars? (Score:3, Interesting)
Me thinks you have an odd notion of "journalistic integrity."
Re:then what's the point of having the 5th star? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:then what's the point of having the 5th star? (Score:1)
Re:then what's the point of having the 5th star? (Score:2, Funny)
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
http://www.mcpmag.com/newsletter/article.asp?Ed
Re:then what's the point of having the 5th star? (Score:1)
Re:then what's the point of having the 5th star? (Score:1)
So what happens if I have a power failure?
Re:then what's the point of having the 5th star? (Score:2)
Laptops are more vulnerable to casual theft and may well have confidential data on them - MI5 had a rash of stolen laptops a year or so ago - so encryption there makes a lot of sense. Of course a laptop with a fully charged battery has it's own UPS which is nice.
Re:Power Failure? (Score:2)
The problem is FileVault is intended to work even if you want to encrypt your 15G home directory and your loptop only has a 20G disk. Clearly it has to do some removal of files as it goes.
As far as I can deduce from the w
Re:then what's the point of having the 5th star? (Score:2)
No, it's easy. Either hit Cancel on that dialog (and any others), return to your applications and save or switch to your application while the dialog is open and use the save dialog - the application should close once the save dialog is dismissed.
If Windows
Re:then what's the point of having the 5th star? (Score:2)
No, it won't. I've left systems sitting with that "This application is not responding" dialog for _days_ without anything being killed. You are complaining about non-standard behaviour.
The OS has the "smarts" - that's the whole point of the dialog
Re:then what's the point of having the 5th star? (Score:2)
Control-C (or was Control-Y?) always worked!!!
Re:5 stars? (Score:1)
Re:5 stars? (Score:2)
You mean Panther runs on PCs?!? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm going to be really pissed if it doesn't run on my 233 MHz Pentium II though. And does it *really* need 128 megs of RAM? Can't I skate by on 64? And $129? It should be free to anyone who bought a computer in the past three years.
That's just my small percentage of an opinion.
Moving beyond Expose, let's talk about Preview... (Score:4, Interesting)
As expected, the reviewer points out that Expose is really, really cool. More interestingly to me, he also points out that Preview is much improved as well. I used to think it sucked, but now I've made it my default PDF viewer.
The most exciting thing about Preview, though, is that it's easy to predict that its beautiful new "Find" function will make its way into things like Safari. Seriously, "Find" is so good that it has pretty much changed the way I rifle through the dozens of PDFs of journal articles I have on my disk. Like, I can actually find what I'm looking for. :-)
Re:Moving beyond Expose, let's talk about Preview. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Moving beyond Expose, let's talk about Preview. (Score:3, Interesting)
And I'm really hoping that if they do, they also offer a way to tell Safari not to render PDFs inside the browser - I went through some effort to keep the Acrobat Reader plugin from working on Windows, because, for many PDFs, if it's big enough for me to read, it's too big to fit in a browser window and show the entir
Re:Moving beyond Expose, let's talk about Preview. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Moving beyond Expose, let's talk about Preview. (Score:2)
Re:Moving beyond Expose, let's talk about Preview. (Score:2)
You probably don't hate it as much as you say you do. Do you want your browser to display plain text externally? How about gzipped HTML files? I'm guessing you'd want these displayed by the browser.
I think what is more important is how well the interaction model for the particular document type fits with the browser's. PDFs are jarring becaus
Re:Moving beyond Expose, let's talk about Preview. (Score:2)
Not that this would interpret the PDF streams inside the document; that would be less trivial.
Re:Moving beyond Expose, let's talk about Preview. (Score:2)
In some ways, yes. At least for me, however, it'd be worse than just showing the document in Preview - and, in the area about which I complained, namely the space taken up by the browser and PDF view toolbars not being available to show me the page I'm viewing, no better than the Acrobat plugin. (Yes, I know Cocoa uses PDF natively. That's presumably how Preview displays it.)
How to disable it in Mozilla? (Score:2)
Re:Moving beyond Expose, let's talk about Preview. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Moving beyond Expose, let's talk about Preview. (Score:2)
You're obviously some kind of pathetic geek. :-) More seriously, that *is* very nice, but I should point out that some of the TeX documents I tried playing with turned out to be unsearchable by Safari; is this possibly caused by the fact that they were created in an odd fashion (didn't use pdflatex or something?). Is there s
Re:Moving beyond Expose, let's talk about Preview. (Score:2)
Probably...
Is there something special you should do with your LaTeX to make sure it "plays nice" with more advanced PDF readers?
If your problem is with plain text searches, then make sure you have ligatures (where pairs of letters like fl are run together in a single character) turned off. If you are just not getting the table of contents in the bookmarks window, then the most likely cause is that you haven't used the hyperref package, which creates these
My Experience... (Score:5, Insightful)
The complainers will be the loudest of the bunch, and yes there are a few kinks. But note the firewire problem was an issue with the hardware chipset, not apple's programming. Obviously people like me, the happy ones are not going to get the headlines.
Re:My Experience... (Score:2)
In short: WORKSFORME
Re:My Experience... (Score:1)
It's just the opposite for me. I can see dozens of other Macs that are on the same cable modem subnet. Just for snicks I've tried connecting to a few, but no one is using an easily guessed account and password.
Written before the big problems surfaced? (Score:4, Insightful)
Minus two glaring faults that affect only certain users, Panther looks very good. And Apple will resolve the problems, albeit tardily. But the bottom line is: when you're costing people data loss, do you deserve a 100% rating.
Re:Written before the big problems surfaced? (Score:2)
Owner? No. [1394ta.org]
reviews... (Score:4, Insightful)
As for my review... I can't imagine life without it... using Preview this past weekend must have saved me and my fiancee a few hours searching through loads of PDF annual reports. -Rob
Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Interesting)
--
However, something somewhat unrelated... I installed Panther on my mac at work on friday, and my co-worker approached me, and was watching the progress and he said "so when do you put in the serial #?" and i said "No serial #". And he looked at me funny, and said "How do they know you aren't giving copies to your friends?" So the only response I could get out was "i guess when the users of a product don't hate the company that makes it, the honor system works."
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:2)
Macintosh may be a different platform, but still is a personal computer.
...or you could just use the language in the way it's defined, by a de facto standard, the way all natural languages are defined. And you could admit that it was "hackers" who defaced your website while you were eating some tasty "crackers" with cheese.
No one seemed confused at the presidential debate last night when the "Mac or PC" question was asked, insisting that a Mac was a PC too. So yeah, I'd say you're the one missing some
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:2, Insightful)
If Apple were to get draconion with product registration, people would be inclined to find a more convenient computing platform, and that would deprive Apple of hardware sales.
As it is, the costs for OS updates are simply a way to keep the
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:2)
5 stars Compared to what? (Score:2, Insightful)
If they gave Windows 2000 Professional 1 star, then 5 for Panther is a an absurdly high rating.
If their ratings are based on this being $129 for an upgrade from 10.$lastversion it's a quite high rating.
If their ratings are based on this being $129 for an upgrade from 9.2.2 it's reasonable.
On it's own, it's fairly meaningless.
Aqua issue (Score:1)
But after that, things went smooth. My iBook feels like reborn again !
Re:Aqua issue (Score:3, Funny)
man, if you'd reviewed Windows98 it'd have been a -78 stars.
Re:Aqua issue (Score:2)
Yesterday was my first day of switching (Score:2, Informative)
I absolutely love this thing and while I still am an admin on a Windows network here at work, I think I am done with Windows on my own.
I have increasing problems with Windows and having increasingly fewer reasons to hate Macs.
As of OS X 10.3 and Xcode, I now have very few reasons to dislike it.
The only few gripes that I have right now are:
1) The aluminum keyboard feels like dragging my nails on a chalkboard if my nails (esp thumb)
Re:Yesterday was my first day of switching (Score:2)
If you click on a URL that leads to an FTP site, Panther opens a new Finder window with the FTP site mounted like a network drive.
You can also cause this to occur by using Command-K in the Finder and entering the FTP URL in the resulting dialog.
Re:Yesterday was my first day of switching (Score:2)
I don't know if this answers your question, but if you cmd+F, (or choose Find... from the menu), the words you searched for Google is in the Find dialogue. It can be annoying because those words show up in other Cocoa apps' Find dialogues, but can be useful.
As a wo
Re:Yesterday was my first day of switching (Score:2)
Cut your nails ;)
I have long nails and so does my girlfriend. We have not had this kind of trouble on our PowerBook 17".
Re:Yesterday was my first day of switching (Score:2)
Oh, I don't use the laptop to view the movies. I connect it to the TV (with included S-video) and watch them there.
To quickly make it recognize the TV, press cmd-F2. Use presentation mode in QuickTime (cmd-shift-f) or switch video device in VLC. Or just hit F7 and turn on mirror mode (you might want to change resolutions depending on wether you use NTSC or PAL).
Best of luck with your new mac. I added you to my friends-list here.
Re:Yesterday was my first day of switching (Score:2)
In Finder, Go -> Connect to Server, type in ftp://some.site.tld/path
Read-only, which is probably a good thing since password is sent clear-text.
I agree with Jeppe... (Score:2)
~Philly
Re:BFD (Score:1)
Um, ok. Lets imagine you have a job reviewing software. First you wouldn't apply for such a job if you didn't love using computers. In fact you wouldn't get hired if you didn't act enthusiastic during your interview. Now imagine you have a pile of software sent to from various venders-- for free. What are you going to do? Read the boxes, hell no. Your going to play with every piece of software for an hour or more,
Re:Panther problems (Score:2)
For another, I'm a code-geek. Roughly half of what I do, I do in
And last, when I plug my camera in, when I go to a new wireless spot, when I close the lid with the machine still on to go to sleep, the shit just works. Every time.