Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] [OT] To upgrade Mac OSX or not?
On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 09:53:38AM -0600, Skip Montanaro wrote: Here's the rub. Apple seems to rather quickly drop support for what appear (numerically) to be minor releases. 10.1 is long gone. I have 10.3 on my G5 and 10.2 on my laptop. I'm loathe to buy 10.3 at this point for my laptop because 10.4 is in beta (right? Apple offered a preview version of 10.4 to me for $500 recently). I figure as soon as I buy 10.3, 10.4 final will be released. 10.3 will start to corrode and I'll be stuck again with old software once again. 10.3's popularity was a lot greater than 10.2's; also, the time between 10.3 and 10.4 was considerably greater. I imagine it'll last you longer than 10.2 did, but you may find yourself wishing for 10.4 in a few months. Only now I have two Macs, so the costs are double. Not quite; you can get a family pack good for up to 5 machines owned by an individual or family for less than twice the price. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/BE6NKA/104-1061095-1859926 It seems that Apple's upgrade policy almost forces me to buy new versions as soon as they are released. If I snooze when new releases come out I quickly get left in the dust and wind up either skipping a version or upgrading right before the next release. (This has happened to me in the past.) I really hate to say this, but in this respect backward compatibility in Windows seems to be much better. Am I missing something? Only that Mac OS X started out a lot less mature than recent versions of Windows, and is evolving a lot faster than Windows, so often the reason why a new Mac OS X version is required is that the functionality simply didn't exist in the prior version. Yes, backwards compatibility in Windows is better than Mac OS X, with most products I see still supporting back to Windows 98, and some requiring Windows 2000 (released December 1999, to use one definition). Mac OS X 10.0 wasn't even released until March 2001. I used 10.0, but had to reboot into Mac OS 9 a lot. 10.1 (September 2001) was a marginal improvement, but not a paid upgrade; still I couldn't use OS X full-time. 10.2 (August 2002) was the first version I voluntarily gave other people to use, and 10.3 (October 2003) the version I gave my mother. 10.4 is unlikely to be released before April 2005. Note that the time between releases continues to increase. I doubt Mac OS X is ever going to see Windows' multi-year release cycles, but you can expect better backwards compatibility in future. -- Nicholas Riley [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley ___ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] [OT] To upgrade Mac OSX or not?
Am I missing something? Charles Umm . . . Software Update? Software Update won't take me from 10.2 to 10.3. I'm as Software Updated as I can be on my laptop, but it's still 10.2. Skip ___ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] [OT] To upgrade Mac OSX or not?
On 1/25/05 8:13 AM, Skip Montanaro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Am I missing something? Charles Umm . . . Software Update? Software Update won't take me from 10.2 to 10.3. I'm as Software Updated as I can be on my laptop, but it's still 10.2. You made it sound as if this was something happening to you on a weekly or monthly basis: It seems that Apple's upgrade policy almost forces me to buy new versions as soon as they are released. If I snooze when new releases come out I quickly get left in the dust and wind up either skipping a version or upgrading right before the next release. So it's understandable that Charles thought you meant ..x releases. You're talking about major upgrades that are now coming every 18 months or slower. It's hard to snooze through those, especially with all the hoopla that accompanies one. It also seems you're being misled by the 10.x numerology or pretending to be, into imagining the major OS steps are what appear (numerically) to be minor releases. The cost alone should tell you otherwise. Of course you're just joking. The differences between each of 10.1 to 10.2, 10.2 to 10.3, and form the sound of it, 10.3 to 10.4 are bigger than OS 8 to OS 9 was, by quite a long way. The reason for the small points is surely just that Apple is still branding OS X as an entirely separate operating system form what came before. I imagine they'll stick in the 10.x region for a while yet. -- Paul Berkowitz ___ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] [OT] To upgrade Mac OSX or not?
- Original Message - From: Skip Montanaro [EMAIL PROTECTED] This is probably a bit off-topic for this list, That's OK. This list is the only one I'm on where folks that seem to really understand OS-X reside as well. It seems that Apple's upgrade policy almost forces me to buy new versions as soon as they are released. It's not so much their policy, as the fact that they have been making major changes, very frequently. This is a good thing, as 10.1 had, at best the quality of a beta version. I really hate to say this, but in this respect backward compatibility in Windows seems to be much better. I'm no fan of windows, but you are absolutely right. Backward compatibility is much better than it has been for OS-X. Of course, it took Windows to get to NT 5 (Win 2000) to be worth using at all. Apple did somethuing similar, but got to 10.3 MUCH faster, once they got started! Am I missing something? You're missing the fact that OS-X is a propriatary product, and they therefore have you by the b**ls. If you want to run software like that, you need to accept that fact. Apple has a long history of great products, with occasional losers, a dedicated user base, and jerking that user base around once in a while. From how I read your post, your only real objection is that Apple is making you pay for all these upgrades. That's one thing I like about Linux. Change is rapid, and backward compatibility is no better, but at least I don't have to pay a bunch of money each time I upgrade. As others have pointed out, the number of changes between the 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 upgrades have been enough to justify calling it a new version, and charging for it. However, they have been rapidly released. I think free upgrades for say, three years would be reasonable. On the other hand, some folks like to license software more as a lease. Perhaps $100/yr isn't too much for the use of OS-X. -Chris ___ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] [OT] To upgrade Mac OSX or not?
On Jan 25, 2005, at 7:53 AM, Skip Montanaro wrote: This is probably a bit off-topic for this list, but is the only Mac-specific mailing list I subscribe to, and Mac OSX versioning seems to affect MacPython and many apps built with it. I was prompted to write after seeing Brian Lenihan's post about PySol for Mac OSX. Visiting the page I saw 10.3 only. *sigh* Yet another app I can't run on my laptop. I might be misremembering, but I thought Python on 10.2 was an optional install. I know 10.3 has Python 2.3.0 installed by default, so that is what I built PySol with. I have a stand-alone version which uses Python 2.5, so it should work with whatever you installed on 10.2, but I believe you need a framework build of Python. Bob will correct me if I am wrong. Bob is right: I know how to cross-compile using Apple's tool chain, but I have no idea how to make a 10.2 compatible app bundle using py2app and I have no interest in investing the time to find out how. Markus got annoyed by some people's rather loose behavior with his source code (and their even looser interpretation of what forking and GPL compatibility mean) and jerked everything but the code to PySol and the pysolsoundserver from his site. If you take my modified tarball of his code and get the data files from one of my disk images, you can build a version compatible with your system. The pysolsoundserver uses SDL, SDL_mixer, and smpeg. Markus has provided a configure file and a setup.py.in for the sound server which will work with a little minor tweaking (fix the paths, if necessary). There was a bug which prevented PySol from starting if the sound server could not be imported, but I fixed it so the sound server is now optional, but recommended. ___ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
