Dear Apple Customer,

The following products shipped on 10/22/2003. Transit time will
depend upon whether you have chosen standard or premium freight
options. If your order is shipping standard freight, it should arrive
within 2 - 5 business days of shipment.

Product # Product Description Qty Ext Price
__________ ________________________________________ ____ ________________

_________________________________________________________________________
M9228LL/A MAC OS X PANTHER 10.3 RETAIL FAM PK-USA

I am going to be sad and drive to nearest decent apple shop in glasgo saturday morning and get it.

At first I was thinking what a cheek it was for Apple to bump up the minor version up and charge such a high price for the upgrade. Then I realised that Microsoft do exactly the same thing but just give it a totally different name and then call it new and improved

I can get it at my campus computer store for $69 (or so I hear). What's retail?

What's retail?

$129 although there are some deals already. MacConnection has it for $99 after a $30 MIR for example. Or you could just buy a new computer and get it for free

-Mike

$129 from the adverts I've seen

$129 normal, $199 for family pack (5 licenses)

Darwin SCULLY.WV.CC.cmu.edu 7.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.0.0: Wed Sep 24 15:48:39 PDT 2003; root:xnu/xnu-517.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc

Lucky bastards .. it's sitting outside my house right now .. I just have to finish up the day and rush home to it

Oh look at that

Right before i get it where does the apple keep things like e-mails and safari book marks incase it goes tits up when installing

I did "archive and install". My user account was left completely untouched, e.g. "where it already was".

Everything is in your Users folder. Feel free to back that up to DVD or something to save your e-mail and such.

The install should be pretty painless with the archive and install option as said above.

i must say that expose is absolutely brilliant

On the tiny 12 laptop screen it works wonders

Yeah -- I think so also ... I remapped mine to Fn (which doesn't get much action on my Pismo) so i can expose with my left hand and select the new foreground window with my right hand ... seems to work out well.

Uh. We don't really want to know about you exposing with your left hand

More on topic, I had a go with Panther in a shop today. There doesn't seem to be that much of a radical change over the previous versions that is readily visible anyway. I do admit that I haven't really used OSX much however. Very nice work by Apple on OSX though. I'm still a Linux & Windows guy though unfortunately

I guess I should keep my exposing to myself ...

Notable changes:
Exchange support in Mail app
Expose = too cool
Finder = /much/ better
Fast user switching = very cool (i don't have to logoff if my wife wants to check her email)
Bunch of UI refinements

those are the big ones ...

My main development and gaming box is currently WinXP. I am seriously considering a 17" powerbook as my replacement development computer though. As far as Linux goes, my two servers run Linux mainly because it's just plain cheap ... Other than that it doesn't really offer that much that is compelling over OS X (and OS X offers a /lot/ compelling over Linux). IMHO of course ...

ms

Yeah. I noticed the Finder and UI changes and quite liked them. I don't use OSX enough to even touch on the other upgrades.

I use Linux for servers and Windows for workstations. OSX would be nice for servers but I don't really need the fancy Apple GUI.

The Apple Xserve also looks really nice for server gear but is just added expense. This is because most of the time the servers will be sitting in a rack somewhere and I don't really need to stare at the front too much

If I had an XServe, I'd have a webcam on it just so I could see it in the server room!

I'm assuming nobody here has been bitten by thisyet, but I figured I'd link to it anyway in case someone is going to install Panther anytime soon. I'm not a Mac guy, but I figured I'd pass it along.

Yeah I saw that in my blog reading yesterday ... pretty damn terrible sounding bug. It seems like bugs that catastrophic are pretty rare for apple -- very shocking to see.

ms

It seems like bugs that catastrophic are pretty rare for apple -- very shocking to see.

Well, maybe they're trying to follow the leader and be more like M$ these days.

Man, I'd hate to be the one responsible for that bug that Jobs comes hunting down.

There's another bug in Panther but it's not quite as bad as the Firewire one. There is a The Register article on it. It's basically a certain situation where stored passwords get corrupted.

The Apple Xserve also looks really nice for server gear but is just added expense. This is because most of the time the servers will be sitting in a rack somewhere and I don't really need to stare at the front too much.

Trust me. There are people who care about how their servers look. I had a rather upset customer over the fact that the DLT drive mounted in the server didn't line up flush with the front face, due to a mismeasurement of where the screw holes were placed on the server.

Oh, and just to add to the Panther comments. Fast User Switching, done right. It's rather nice, and I personally use it to switch to my "Work" desktop when at work, or back to my "Home" one at work. Unlike Windows XP, OS X dosen't disable this feature if you are part of a domain. And I have domains at home and work, so I have never used XP Fast User Switching.

Yeah, I love the fast user switching feature the most of the new features. I only wish that the video card in my old PowerBook would support the cool rotating cube. It just changes screens without any cool animation - but oh well.

I haven't experienced any of the bugs yet that have been described in the forums. I'm glad, though, that I don't have an extrenal firewire drive.

- trs

Yeah, I love the fast user switching feature the most of the new features.

You all realize us windows people have been enjoying fast user switching since XP came out years ago, right? Then again the unix people have been alt-F switching between virtual terminals for I don't know how many years.

Matthew

Then again the unix people have been alt-F switching between virtual terminals for I don't know how many years.

If you're talking about text-mode virtual terminals, I first remember using this feature in SCO Xenix running on a Compaq PC/AT clone back in 1986. I wouldn't be surprised if it went back farther than that.

--dan.

Yeah, I'm a windows person, too. But I wouldn't know about the user switching in XP since my machine is the member of a domain. I believe Jobs, himself, gave credit to XP for implementing it first. Of course, he then claimed that Apple just did it better.

Now, remote desktop built-in... that's an XP feature I'd still like to see in OS X.

- trs

Remote desktop is built into Panther (Check the Sharing system preference). The client however, is not free.

VNC?

VNC works decently, but in general the Apple or Microsoft remote desktop solutions preform much better, due to being able to know the display, and do certain operations client side, instead of server side and shipping the graphical changes across the network connection. VNC for example does not do well with certain OS X effects, like sheets, or minimizing a window.

Apple Remote Desktop doesn't manage anything particually well. Its performance and painfully slow redraw leave me convinced that it's just VNC underneath. In adddition the client interface is like something out of System 6 and isn't very Mac OS X-like at all.

Windows Remote Desktop seems to work in a completely different way and is the first MS technology I've used where I've actaully been impressed and thought 'this is way better than what Apple have'. I use to connect to my headless XP test box from my Mac and sometimes forget I'm not using a real monitor connection.

I agree, remote desktop/terminal services for windows is awesome. The fact, too that MS makes the remote desktop client for mac is phenominal. It's great to be able to administer my 2k server from my powerbook. And for fun, I like to leave the client running so as to confuse the hell out of my girlfriend when she tries to use my computer. - trs

Of course, Microsoft didn't write most of the terminal services/remote desktop stuff, Citrix did...

Ah ha. I knew it was too good to be true. MS could never build something that actually does what it set out to do and works elegantly, without unnecessary configuration and stress.

MS could never build something that actually does what it set out to do and works elegantly, without unnecessary configuration and stress.

Not quite true, I think Excel and .Net are the two exceptions...

...though of course the marketing department should have been shot for taking a amazing technical product like .Net and confusing the hell out of everyone by adding the .Net name to every product in their range, idiots!

I've just been sitting here trying to think of another MS product that meets your criteria, but I can't. All the ones that are half decent were bought from other people...

Excel and .Net are the two exceptions...

So MS developed Excel in-house originally, unlike Word and Access just for example?

Excel was started in house, yes. It actually started on the Mac rather than the PC. For a long time the Excel team didn't even use Microsoft's own C++ compiler to build their software. They had their own compiler to target both Windows and the Mac.

I know Access was bought in from outside. I'm fairly sure that Word (as in WinWord) was in house though, not that the first version did much.

Even VB was not started in house. Neither were Visio, SQL Server, Flightsim, SourceSafe, DOS etc, etc

They certainly are good at buying up other people's code...

One of my Microsoft books (Code Complete I think?) mentions that originally the Mac and Windows codebases were actually different for Excel. The Mac team would port the majority of the code from the Windows port and add whatever was necessary to get it going.

It then goes on to give a good example of feature creep. The original spec to add colour to a cell stated that the colour tag should be at the start only and was invalid everywhere else. The colour parser however happened to allow the colour tag to be anywhere. They then extended the spec as it was "free feature". This turned out to be a bad thing as the formula parser didn't expect colour tags in the middle of a formula and crapped out in subtle ways.

The author of book ported the feature from the Windows branch of the code over to the Mac branch. When testing he came across these bugs and assumed that something was broken in his port. He went back to the Windows port and found the same bugs so in the end they had to insert a bunch of kludges to handle it as it was now part of the spec.

The Mac version definitely came first, in fact it was there before Windows existed:

http://dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html