Subject: Re: Ease Of Use and Hardware Support (WAS: Linux Laptops)
From: Timothy A. Seufert (tas@mindspring.com)
Date: Thu Mar 07 2002 - 17:36:17 MST
At 4:51 PM -0600 3/7/02, Robert Brandtjen wrote:
>On Thursday 07 March 2002 03:59 pm, Timothy A. Seufert wrote:
>> I just read through the Macintouch reader reports on 10.1.3 to see if
>> your comments were substantiated. Usually if any problem comes up
>> you will see it in the Macintouch reports, especially if it is
>> something that affects a particular class of user and Apple seems to
>> be unresponsive.
>
>well - here is one person's report:
>http://www.lowendmac.com/archive/01/1221.html
Robert. I was talking about your contention that Apple is actively
trying to degrade the beige G3 with a recent update.
Yes, there is stuff missing, as that article discusses. Such as lack
of a floppy driver, and no support for serial printers (which affects
anybody with a serial printer, BTW -- that's not beige specific, as
you might want to use one with a USB-to-serial adapter on a newer
Mac). But these things have been that way from 10.0.0 onwards.
>and a link to an article describing the resultant class action lawsuit:
>http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0201/31.g3osx.php
>
>pretty lame to throw out a video driver that was there in OSX 1.2 as well as
>OSX 10 beta (whatever that means)
What are you talking about? That link said nothing about such a driver.
It's a common misconception that OS X has absolutely no support for
the Rage Pro chip. It does actually have a driver which supports 2D
acceleration. What it does not have support for is the movie/DVD
playback acceleration functions (YUV->RGB transform and smooth
scaling) and 3D. I don't remember OS X Server 1.2 having any support
for the latter two.
Speaking of which, I doubt any drivers from OS X Server 1.x survive
in MacOS X 10.0 onwards. Apple created a new driver architecture and
moved to it partway through the MacOS X 10 beta releases. This
required them to port or wholly rewrite all drivers.
Another sweeping change was the replacement of the old NeXT style
Display Postscript based Window Server with the new Quartz system
based on PDF.
It's not commonly appreciated, but in general there was a HUGE amount
of rewriting of major subsystems done between the Rhapsody era and
MacOS X 10.0.0.
-- Tim Seufert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Thu Mar 07 2002 - 17:51:29 MST