Apple's Boot Camp

Originally Posted by Merv Burger

There's equal amounts of things that would make a user confused/wonder why the fuck they chose a way to do something/etc., etc. in OS X, Windows, and Linux.

To deny this would mean you're naïve. Or maybe even stupid.


What the fuck are you even saying.

That may be your $.02, but exchange rates say otherwise.

Hey, to each his own. No need to get so defensive all the time. I respect your point of view. Maybe you should try doing the same.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I'm not really trampling over your point, either. I just don't understand what you're saying.

Except for the first part, that's just an inane loop-around that really doesn't matter.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

What I meant was that, in my opinion, XP asks alot of your attention as a user. Not only when it comes to settings (e.g. drivers, network settings, etc) but also security (e.g. Spam, spyware, viruses, ...) or those annoying little things like when you disconnect a network cable you constantly get that little pop up window at the bottom right corner that just keeps coming back. There are more things but I can't really think of them. XP basically has the ability to really get on my nerves, whereas OSX has never once done that.

Again, just my opinion, because you probably have a million things to say that would completely undermine this post.

I was speaking idiomatically.

OS X exposes functionality in a graceful, well-designed, and more often than not in an easy-to-understand way. Windows obfuscates functionality behind wizards and helpers and basically hand-holds a user most of the time. Whereas Windows is always popping up some "helpful" notification at me from the system tray or trying to "dumb down" something complicated by adding a wizard, OS X just makes it simple and logical in the first place.

Which is to say that overall OS X is more friendly to both new users AND power-users. For those who are relatively new, OS X makes life pretty easy to understand. You've got the Dock, you've got the Applications folder, you put your documents in the Documents folder, your music in iTunes, your pictures in iPhoto, etc. For the experienced power-user, you can do basically what you want with your system without being confronted by a lot of helpers or wizards—you can just DO shit.

The sort of object lesson of this is OS X's Terminal. Obviously OS X has a UNIX heritage—it's essentially BSD on a Mach microkernel with a lot of Apple enhancements and a pretty face. A new user can use OS X and never need to know all that. But an experienced user or UNIX jockey can jump right down into the Terminal and get into the guts of the system to do all the usual stuff they can do elsewhere... AND they can run Photoshop or Final Cut or other big-name apps natively.

That's the long version of what I believe MagicalVacation was trying to express.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Funny, cless, how I can type open the terminal on windows too! How about that one, eh. And I even have my choice of cmd, bash, and monad, depending on what form of rape I feel like undergoing today.

In other news, AE7 is still just as buggy and slow as shit on Apple as Windows. (A way of saying the third-party differentiation just isn't there, and that's where 90% of my work gets done.)

FELIPE NO

@ Cless
You've done you homework on that OS for sure. Please, tell me about package management.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by Cyrus XIII

@ Cless
You've done you homework on that OS for sure. Please, tell me about package management.

If you're referencing Linux-style package management for OS X, both Fink (based on Debian's apt-get/dpkg system) and DarwinPorts (obviously based on BSD's Ports system) are available for those who need tools typically distributed through those sorts of channels. I'm not a user of either, as I deal mostly with OS X GUI apps, which are (obviously) pre-compiled binaries distributed using disk images.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by foxyshadis

Funny, cless, how I can type open the terminal on windows too! How about that one, eh. And I even have my choice of cmd, bash, and monad, depending on what form of rape I feel like undergoing today.

In other news, AE7 is still just as buggy and slow as shit on Apple as Windows. (A way of saying the third-party differentiation just isn't there, and that's where 90% of my work gets done.)

So the command line, or terminal in Windows is as important as it is on *nix?

What is AE7? The acronym doesn't ring a bell. But if that's all you use, and they haven't made their program for shit on OSX or Windows, then the only difference is which OS you like using more.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Now I'm considering getting a MacBook Pro. Although I'm gonna wait till the prices go down or when my local Apple Store is having a sale. I have only a iMac G5 running OSX 10.4 and I read the reviews for Boot Camp. That's why I'm considering getting a MacBook Pro now.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by PUG1911

So the command line, or terminal in Windows is as important as it is on *nix?

It entirely depends on what you need to do.

If you do programming, you'll need the command line (like you'll need the terminal in *nix,) in order to compile your programs into executables. You can't just double click on a .cpp, .class or perl script and expect it to just run.

I'd pretty much say the command line in Windows is about as equally important as the terminal in *nix OS's (this is especially true with various flavors of Linux moving towards automatic package managment applications, like Synaptics in Ubuntu.)

Quote:

What is AE7? The acronym doesn't ring a bell. But if that's all you use, and they haven't made their program for shit on OSX or Windows, then the only difference is which OS you like using more.

He might be referring to Adobe After Effects 7.

Now, don't throw Final Cut at him, because you can't compare software between Windows and OS X when one of them doesn't have the software.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Although he could say that software which serves a purpose on one operating system and isn't available on the other operating system is better than whatever software is available for the other operating system.

I don't really see any reason why an average user shouldn't get a Mac now. Sure they're expensive, but you definitely get what you pay for. I figure the issue of Windows-only games will become a moot point now that OS X runs on x86, although I suppose DirectX is still an issue. But it shouldn't take too long for WINE to be ported to OS X.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Magic

Although he could say that software which serves a purpose on one operating system and isn't available on the other operating system is better than whatever software is available for the other operating system.

Yeah, except he's talking about software available for both OS X and Windows.

I just find it very retarded and unfair to compare software when what you're comparing just doesn't exist on the other platform. You'd have to broaden the topic, first.

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Final Cut Pro is Premier's equivalent, there's really no replacement for AE out there. I do like FCP better than Premier Pro, however, in some cases a lot better. Sadly, avisynth is still windows-only, so that gets the nod by default.

In most cases all the useful software that isn't provided by Apple is available roughly equally for both OSes, especially free software. What isn't, usually divides more into comprehensive (and often quick to use) commercial packages for windows, or small command-line utilities for nix systems. (Fontforge being a major exception I use a lot.)

I'm pretty much immune to the UI differences between the two, except that it takes about 20 minutes to get into the flow when I switch after some time away. Some things are better in each. Personally? I hate having to hit a different key for every variation of yes/no dialog out there. I love being able to use y or n in windows programs when I know the question but haven't memorized the answers.

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by foxyshadis

Final Cut Pro is Premier's equivalent, there's really no replacement for AE out there. I do like FCP better than Premier Pro, however, in some cases a lot better. Sadly, avisynth is still windows-only, so that gets the nod by default.

avisynth is a pathetic hack of an outdated video framework that blows. As a frameserver, it's clever, but reference movies in Quicktime can accomplish at least the frameserver bit of it. I'm assuming you use AE and avisynth for anime fansubbing... which is one of those awfully specialized fields (that is to say, not a professional one at all representative of the "real world").

As for AE replacements, there are plenty. In fact, AE is the bottom rung when it comes to motion graphics/compositing software. Motion is, overall, a better motion graphics package, and in the compositing world it's Discreet's line of products (Combustion up through their Flame/Inferno hardware-software combos... bought out by Autodesk I think) for TV/commercial or quick-turnaround work, or Apple's Shake for feature films. There are a few other software-only compositing solutions I'm not as familiar with and whose names escape me at the moment.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

No, cless, I use it for semi-pro video editing, local shit and not film though. Some of the cleanup filters developed for it literally surpass anything I've found in commercial packages. I can get a damn frameserver anywhere. (loooooooooool quicktime. wtf?) And it's free and fast; video gets too expensive too quickly, especially 3rd party AE and Premier plugins. The upgrade to FCP studio isn't steep, so I'll check out motion, but I can't really jusify dropping another grand or three on Autodesk just to find out they suck just a little less than AE. And back to the point of this thread, they're also not mac exclusives.

How exactly is video editing awfully specialized, when macs have always catered to multimedia composition and editing? That's their fucking specialty. Or did you mean fansubbing? Most of them are hacks and neophytes, but they still fall into the bottom of the general video ecosystem.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Cless

OS X exposes functionality in a graceful, well-designed, and more often than not in an easy-to-understand way. Windows obfuscates functionality behind wizards and helpers and basically hand-holds a user most of the time. Whereas Windows is always popping up some "helpful" notification at me from the system tray or trying to "dumb down" something complicated by adding a wizard, OS X just makes it simple and logical in the first place.

Which is to say that overall OS X is more friendly to both new users AND power-users. For those who are relatively new, OS X makes life pretty easy to understand. You've got the Dock, you've got the Applications folder, you put your documents in the Documents folder, your music in iTunes, your pictures in iPhoto, etc. For the experienced power-user, you can do basically what you want with your system without being confronted by a lot of helpers or wizards—you can just DO shit.

The sort of object lesson of this is OS X's Terminal. Obviously OS X has a UNIX heritage—it's essentially BSD on a Mach microkernel with a lot of Apple enhancements and a pretty face. A new user can use OS X and never need to know all that. But an experienced user or UNIX jockey can jump right down into the Terminal and get into the guts of the system to do all the usual stuff they can do elsewhere... AND they can run Photoshop or Final Cut or other big-name apps natively.

That's the long version of what I believe MagicalVacation was trying to express.

Yes. That was my point, but I'm not a professional Mac-Head. I only know the basics and a little bit of the underlying architecture, but it ends there. Thanks for clearing it up.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by foxyshadis

No, cless, I use it for semi-pro video editing, local shit and not film though. Some of the cleanup filters developed for it literally surpass anything I've found in commercial packages. I can get a damn frameserver anywhere. (loooooooooool quicktime. wtf?) And it's free and fast; video gets too expensive too quickly, especially 3rd party AE and Premier plugins. The upgrade to FCP studio isn't steep, so I'll check out motion, but I can't really jusify dropping another grand or three on Autodesk just to find out they suck just a little less than AE. And back to the point of this thread, they're also not mac exclusives.

How exactly is video editing awfully specialized, when macs have always catered to multimedia composition and editing? That's their fucking specialty. Or did you mean fansubbing? Most of them are hacks and neophytes, but they still fall into the bottom of the general video ecosystem.

QuickTime isn't just QuickTime Player. On the Mac it's an entire video framework, and a damn sight better one than AVI. As for AVIsynth filters, I'd assume most are open-source since they're free (though yes, not all free things are open source). Seems to me it wouldn't take too much work for them to be ported to the AE plugin framework, which is shared amongst programs like combustion and Shake as well. I mean, in the end, it's "video in > operations (settings) > video out." I'm surprised the people developing avisynth plugins haven't bothered to make them available within other software. As for Combustion, Autodesk offers a 30-day free trial. Download it and see what you think.

And yes, I meant fansubbing is awfully specialized, and by that I mean "basically restricted to very specific, AVI-reliant Windows-only utilities" and populated by people who aren't very overall experienced with video.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I'm definitely getting a MacBookPro now. Mac OS X and the possibility of Vista and a Linux distro? Come on now, does anything else really beat that?

Has anyone heard anything about getting Vista to run on it?

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Well, considering that Vista doesn't exist yet and that the beta will be nothing like the final...

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I don't think Vista will run on it... The boot camp has been designed for existing Windows XP versions. Isn't Vista going to have a very different architecture? Or is it going to be similar...

Double Post:
Also, I found this on CNET today.

Quote:

Apple released Boot Camp today, a free download that lets you run Windows on an Intel-based Mac. The 83MB download is available as beta software, and Boot Camp will be included in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard later this year. We don't, however, expect to see Windows preinstalled on Macs anytime soon (Apple makes it very clear it will not support Windows). Interest in running Windows on a Mac has been evident ever since Steve Jobs announced the Intel-based iMac this past January, and it reached a crescendo last month with various contests for finding a hack to run Windows on an Intel Mac. Boot Camp, therefore, isn't the first time the world will see Windows running on a Mac, but it certainly makes the process much easier.
We installed Boot Camp on the iMac Core Duo; the software will also work with the Mac Mini and the MacBook Pro. Before we could run the app, we first had to update our iMac to Mac OS X 10.4.6, followed by a quick firmware update. We were then prompted to burn a disc of Windows drivers (for the iMac Core Duo's video and audio adapters, peripherals, wired and wireless networking adapters, and so on), which are included in the Boot Camp download. After ejecting our newly minted driver disc, Boot Camp then asked us how we'd like to partition our iMac's 250GB hard drive. The default was a paltry 5GB for Windows; we upped it to an even 100GB, then inserted a Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2 disc. Note: You must supply your own copy of Windows; you can use either Home or Pro, but Apple's documentation states that it must include SP2. The Windows installation proceeded per its norm, the iMac restarted, and we were looking at the strange site of the glossy white iMac framing the familiar XP Bliss wallpaper. It's alive!

A quick scan of the Device Manager showed that we were a few drivers short of a full deck. We installed the contents of the driver disc that Boot Camp had us create, which filled in most, but not all, of the gaps. We were still missing a USB driver and a PCI driver, along with some unknowns. From our first pass with Windows on the iMac, however, the system appeared to be fully operational. We were able to connect to our LAN and the Internet, and even play a game of Minesweeper.

What Boot Camp doesn't let you do is run both operating systems at the same time. You must shut down one before booting to the other. Whichever OS you had running last will boot upon the next start-up. To halt that from happening, simply hold down the Alt-Option key while the system powers on, and after a few seconds, you'll be presented with a gray start screen with two images of hard drives: choose the one of the left for Mac OS or the one on the right for Windows.

Boot Camp also installs an icon labeled Startup Disk in the Control Panel in Windows and in the System Preferences window in Mac OS. It opens a window that lists the Mac OS and Windows XP partitions. Choose one to shut down the current OS you have running and boot to the other. Switching between the two operating systems was fast and easy. Also, Windows appeared to be stable; it crashed only once when we were investigating DirectX settings, not an unusual occurrence on any Windows-based PC.

There's more to this than playing Minesweeper on a Mac, of course. Aside from the wow factor, Boot Camp, especially when it becomes a standard feature of the Mac OS, should usher in a new era for the Mac platform. Though you'll need to pony up for a copy of Windows, your Mac will be able to run any software that its PC competitors can run, not too mention all the Apple apps that PCs can't run. With Boot Camp, for example, you can run the iLife apps and the latest 3D game, say, F.E.A.R., on the same system.

As surprising as the Boot Camp development might be, the performance results are decidedly boring. Given the Intel processor and motherboard, the iMac Core Duo's performance when running Windows was right about where we expected compared to other Windows PCs'. On CNET Labs' Photoshop CS test, it trailed dual-core PCs from Dell and HP, but only by a small percentage. We didn't expect it to top either of these systems, given their more powerful Pentium D 900-series desktop processors. Compared to the same iMac Core Duo system running Mac OS X, the system showed a large but not unexpected jump in performance with Photoshop. Where the iMac Core Duo in Mac OS X took 6.5 minutes to complete the test, because it must use the Rosetta translation software, the same system running Windows XP Pro took less than 3 minutes.


Adobe Photoshop CS test (in seconds)
(Lower times are better)
HP Pavilion Media Center TV m7360n
143
Dell XPS 400
151
Apple iMac Core Duo (Windows XP Pro)
169
Apple iMac G5
216
Apple iMac Core Duo (Mac OS X)
390
We're also not shocked by the iTunes, video-encoding, and Doom 3 tests. As it was written with the Mac OS X in mind, iTunes has historically run slower on Windows PCs. The same holds true for the iMac hardware running Windows: the Windows partition on the iMac took 26 seconds longer to finish our test. Our Sorenson video-encoding test looks much better on the Windows partition than on the OS X side for the same reason the Photoshop results skewed in favor of Windows: Sorenson runs natively in Windows XP and is emulated via Rosetta in OS X.


Apple iTunes 4.7.1.30 MP3-encoding test (in seconds)
(Lower times are better)
Apple iMac Core Duo (Mac OS X)
86
Apple iMac Core Duo (Windows XP Pro)
110
Dell XPS 400
110
Apple iMac G5
111
HP Pavilion Media Center TV m7360n
124


Sorenson Squeeze 4 video-encoding test (in minutes: seconds)
(Lower times are better)
Dell XPS 400
232
Apple iMac Core Duo (Windows XP Pro)
256
HP Pavilion Media Center TV m7360n
262
Apple iMac G5
311
Apple iMac Core Duo (Mac OS X)
1440
The release of Boot Camp doesn't change our opinion of the iMac as a gaming system. No matter which OS you run, its weak ATI Radeon X1600 graphics chip, which shares memory with the system itself, isn't going to deliver high frame rates. The iMac Core Duo performed better under Windows than under OS X (25.9 frames per second vs. an even less playable 16.2), but we still don't recommend it for serious 3D gaming.


Doom 3 (Custom Demo) (in fps) (Higher scores are better)

Doom 3 1,024x768 4XAA 8XAF
Dell XPS 400
46.6
Apple iMac Core Duo (Windows XP Pro)
25.8
Apple iMac Core Duo (Mac OS X)
16.2
Apple iMac G5
11.7
HP Pavilion Media Center TV m7360n
2.7

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?