What version of Mac OS X do you use? (redux)

Wiki pages · Post by **Thargoid** » Fri Sep 04, 2009 9:03 am

Sounds like the old-style light bulb dilemma. It's perfectly possible to make one that never blows, so last forever and you get no follow-up market. So (until they were recently outlawed by the EU) all incandescent bulbs were engineered with a failure point in them so they had a limited lifetime...

Also similar with some Japanese cars. Great things, but lousy for the dealers as they're so damn reliable the after-sales market for (non-accident) repairs is almost nil as they don't break down usually.

Post by **Eric Walch** » Fri Sep 04, 2009 9:11 am

Thargoid wrote:
Sounds like the old-style light bulb dilemma. It's perfectly possible to make one that never blows, so last forever and you get no follow-up market. So (until they were recently outlawed by the EU) all incandescent bulbs were engineered with a failure point in them so they had a limited lifetime...

That a bit different as a bulb costs only about 0.50 euro and uses on average for about 12 euro value on energy until failure. Making it lasting longer means reducing the efficiency. On the whole it is cheaper to raise the efficiency on behalf of the lifetime.

ClymAngus · Post by **ClymAngus** » Fri Sep 04, 2009 9:39 am

Like I said difficult to swallow. But as I'm coming to realise inevitable in this current cultural and financial regime. If it's a toss up between the best solution and the most profitable solution then chances are.........

Now some might accuse me of being a bit of a conspiracy nut and that's fair. But 199 times out of 200 if you follow the maximum revenue then that's the solution offered. Which is not necessarily the best solution available, but it's the only one your going to get.

Mind you I can talk I'm currently reconditioning a g3 to act as a server. It's so old that if anyone tried anything cheeky it'll just fall over.

Chaky · Post by **Chaky** » Fri Sep 04, 2009 9:47 am

That is an old story.

I remember reading about how some influential industrialists back in 50's openly discussed future strategies and concluding that lesser-quality products will make more revenue than higher-quality counterparts, which was based on mass-consumption.

There's a saying (British, I think) that goes:
I'm not rich enough to buy cheap stuff.

Post by **Cmdr James** » Fri Sep 04, 2009 9:57 am

ClymAngus wrote:
If it's a toss up between the best solution and the most profitable solution then chances are.........

I still disagree, best is not a single dimensional consideration. Is it best for oolite to take advantage of modern hardware and lose backward compatability, or is it best to maintain compatability and lose funtionality?

Depends on your viewpoint, of course "best" is about balance in an imperfect world.

JensAyton · Post by **JensAyton** » Fri Sep 04, 2009 12:44 pm

Cmdr James wrote:
It may be possible for someone to set up a non xcode build for older osx, just like the ones for windows and linux, but again its a compromise, a dev spends some time doing that instead of making the game better.

Actually, I intend to downgrade the 1.73-maintenance branch project to Xcode 2.5 (which works in Snow Leopard) today.

ClymAngus wrote:
Like I said difficult to swallow. But as I'm coming to realise inevitable in this current cultural and financial regime. If it's a toss up between the best solution and the most profitable solution then chances are.........

The problem is that you’re assuming that the best solution is the backwards-compatible one. In general, this is not true. Dropping the complexities required to maintain backwards compatibility allow a program to use newer, better techniques to implement better features faster with less code (and thus, with fewer bugs). Backwards compatibility is a cost, not just because it takes programmer time to implement and test, but because it makes the whole program worse. This is not a problem that would go away with a different “cultural and financial regime”; infinite expenditure would not take the problem away. Dropping support for old systems used by a small handful of people does. The fact that those people are extremely unlikely to buy new software just makes the decision a bit easier for commercial entities (which is why essentially no commercial software produced today supports 10.3.9, but Oolite 1.73 does, at its overall detriment).

The most dramatic example of this is Microsoft Internet Explorer. Modern web technologies allow sites to provide better, clearer interaction in less code using less bandwidth and less processor resources on the billions of client computers. However, the market dominance of Internet Explorer, combined with Microsoft’s dedication to continued compatibility with buggy sites, means that these techniques can’t be widely deployed – probably not for a decade or so after being developed.

As a result, the web is worse not just for those clinging to Windows 98 with Explorer 6, but for everybody. We’re stuck with buggy, low-quality Flash, unhelpful forms with inflexible controls, and every web site using the same four fonts, effectively forever.

goran · Post by **goran** » Fri Sep 04, 2009 12:57 pm

I'm now one pretty worried PPC user.

JensAyton · Post by **JensAyton** » Fri Sep 04, 2009 1:16 pm

goran wrote:
I'm now one pretty worried PPC user.

Muahahaha!

Actually, I’m not even tempted to abandon PowerPC (or 10.4). There might have been a slight temptation if Oolite was still Mac-only, but maintaining compatibility with GNUstep is a far bigger issue than maintaining compatibility with 10.4… at least until 10.7’s developer tools drop the SDK.

What I said about Internet Explorer cross-pollinated with some other threads, and made me think about all the verification, warnings and errors we’ve added to Oolite over the test releases. Oolite 1.65 would read a whole lot of broken plists and either accept them without complaint, or crash. Oolite 1.73 will complain at length and either make the best of it, or reject the nonsense. If we’d had the goal of making Oolite MNSR silently accept everything Oolite 1.65 does, we’d have a less robust game and it would be harder to make robust expansions for it.

Website · Post by **DaddyHoggy** » Fri Sep 04, 2009 2:14 pm

Ahruman wrote:
As a result, the web is worse not just for those clinging to Windows 98 with Explorer 6, but for everybody. We’re stuck with buggy, low-quality Flash, unhelpful forms with inflexible controls, and every web site using the same four fonts, effectively forever.

Cling? Cling! I don't cling! I have a finite budget and limited resources - so I have an old PII-300 laptop that runs Windows 98SE, that is used predominantly for surfing the web and word processing.

However, time and technology has marched forward sufficiently that I've now been given a "worthless" PIII-650 that can run XP and so I've moved on (finally!) because I can.

However, this mass culling of a technology does and is happening - The UK analogue TV switch off is happening the first 3 UK TV regions have had the analogue signal pulled last month the rest of the country will follow suit over the next year or so and the whole country will then benefit as then the level of signal of the digital broadcast can be boosted as it won't interfere with a now non-existent analogue signal.

By 2014 the analogue radio signals will be killed off and be DAB only even though 99% of all UK cars still have analogue radios and by 2014 its estimated that this will still be over 80% (based on replacement rate of old cars for new(er) cars and proportion of those that have a DAB radio fitted)

Sometimes it takes something as big as a Government to force the issue - unfortunately the Internet transcends such boundaries.

Note: Considering what dreadful code M$ Frontpage creates, code that often ONLY IE6 seems to display ~~properly~~ as intended, I'm not quite sure who is actually to blame on what the Internet is currently offering in the shape of content!

Post by **Cmdr James** » Fri Sep 04, 2009 2:20 pm

If the culprits are IE and Frontpage, then I think its pretty clear that microsoft is in the hotseat for blame

JensAyton · Post by **JensAyton** » Fri Sep 04, 2009 2:27 pm

DaddyHoggy wrote:
Cling? Cling! I don't cling! I have a finite budget and limited resources - so I have an old PII-300 laptop that runs Windows 98SE, that is used predominantly for surfing the web and word processing.

To be clear, I don’t object to people using ancient systems. I do object to people using ancient systems and expecting new software to magically work on them. :-)

Oh, and the Xcode 2.5 thing worked out OK. It’s now possible to build the maintenance branch for 10.3.9, as long as I don’t do anything adventurous like trying to edit a file. Oolite 1.73.x will continue to support 10.3.9; Oolite 1.74 will not.

ovvldc · Post by **ovvldc** » Sat Sep 05, 2009 8:45 am

DaddyHoggy wrote:
Cling? Cling! I don't cling! I have a finite budget and limited resources - so I have an old PII-300 laptop that runs Windows 98SE, that is used predominantly for surfing the web and word processing.

I am pretty sure there are more modern, more stable operating systems that still (barely) run on a system like that.

Best wishes,
Oscar

Diziet Sma · Post by **Diziet Sma** » Sat Sep 05, 2009 8:55 am

Damn Small Linux comes to mind..

Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram
Run fully in RAM with as little as 128MB (you will be amazed at how fast your computer can be!)

Website · Post by **DaddyHoggy** » Sat Sep 05, 2009 6:37 pm

Diziet Sma wrote:
Damn Small Linux comes to mind..

Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram
Run fully in RAM with as little as 128MB (you will be amazed at how fast your computer can be!)

The same laptop does also run Fiesty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04) albeit with no sound (despite reading every forum on the subject and trying every fix and fiddling with files no novice linux user should have to fiddle with - it still doesn't work) and therefore I can access the internet on this ancient but otherwise useful machine via FF - but that wasn't very supportive of my argument was it!?

Damn Small Linux looks pretty good, I'm looking at Kubuntu for the PIII