Welcome to the first Low End Mac Mailbag column. I used to do these
once in a while when I was the only Mac Daniel columnist, but the idea
of the mailbag column has really fallen by the wayside here - if not
for Charles W. Moore, we'd hardly ever see reader email on Low End Mac.
I definitely receive enough email to do this regulary, and a mailbag
column provides additional incentive for trying to keep up on the daily
deluge of email. I hope you'll find the letters and responses help
clear some things up, while at the same time they may raise whole new
questions.
Don't Buy the New 'Books Quite
Yet
In response to Don't Buy the New
'Books Quite Yet, Christopher writes:
There's a very simple workaround for making an emergency OS X boot
disk.
you can use BootCD, which can be found here < http://www.macfixit.com/staticpages/tul/BootCD.dmg.sit>
to make a bootable OS X.2 CD.
On that CD, there's a RAMdisk on which you can place an OS X
compatible system utility; I rather like MicroMat's Drive 10.
The whole process takes a while, and OS X is reeeeeeally slow
running from a CD, but it works, and this method has saved my iBook
from disaster.
I'm currently waiting for my one laggard app (Propellerheads
ReCycle) to come to OS X, and then I'm never booting into
OS 9 again.
Thanks for the information, but the linked version of BootCD didn't
work with Jaguar. I found the CharlesSoft website,
downloaded BootCD v51, and created a bootable OS X CD. You're
right - it's excruciatingly slow.
Alas, the only X compatible utilities I have are Norton, and they
cannot be copied to the CD and made to work, nor can the be installed
to the disk image.
Glad to hear Drive 10 is working for you. I'd still prefer to wait
until Alsoft has an X bootable version of DiskWarrior.
The Longer Apple Sticks with Motorola,
the Behinder They Get
In response to The Longer Apple
Sticks with Motorola, the Behinder They Get, Michael Jardeen
writes:
I am of two minds on this - one thing is clear, Apple must do
something about the mess that is its ever slower processors.
IBM has the advantage of providing compatibility that allows for a
very simple migration to the new processor. The down side; and the big
reason why I would almost prefer to see Apple go with AMD, is that is
once again saddles Apple with being at the mercy of one company for
it's chips. The move to AltiVec and Motorola has been part of the
problem over the past 4 years. Who's to say that IBM will be any
better?
By going with AMD, Apple leaves itself open to using Intel chips,
and it partners with a company that really would love to have Apple's
business. It also partners with a company in an open competitive
market. It becomes tied to the forward movement of that market. This
means that Apple has the advantage of riding the coat tails of a larger
market. With IBM they once again get tied to the corporate politics of
a company that could simply decide to move in a whole different
direction.
The downside of course is that it introduces a whole new migration
issue. For that reason I would suggest that Apple go with IBM for it's
consumer and mainstream computers. On the server side, I would dump the
existing Xserve, and go AMD on future models. The reason is that
migration in the server market would be much simpler since there is a
much smaller list of programs that you need to convert. With X11 Apple
is open to a whole new generation of software. If the servers are a
success, then I would look at the rest of the business. The nice thing
is that it would give Apple real hands-on experience in that market,
and gives them an even stronger ace in the hole.
Steve Jobs has hinted that Apple might be willing to port OS X
over to another hardware platform once the migration to OS X is
complete. At this point, all Macs shipping prior to January 2003 boot
into OS 9, and a lot of people who have classic Mac hardware have
not yet made the transition to OS X.
The next question is which AMD processor would Apple go with, the
current Athlons, which are essentially improved copies of Intel's
Pentium line, or their forthcoming 64-bit CPU? I'd suggest that Apple
would be best off completely avoiding porting OS X to any x86 chip
and hold off for 64-bit processors, whether that be IBM's PowerPC 970,
AMD's Opteron, or Intel's compiler-straining Itanium.
This would give Apple an equal footing with Linux and Windows on new
hardware platforms as the industry moves ahead. Still, I think there
would be a mutiny it Apple abandoned the PowerPC platform.
I'm far less concerned about IBM as a single source, since the company
has married its future to the PowerPC and Linux, than Motorola as a
single source, since they are much more of a consumer oriented company
that doesn't even make computers.
In another interesting development, IBM and AMD are teaming
up on chip development. We do live in interesting times.
OS 8.6 Booting Problem on an iMac with
OS X
Partly in response to Mac OS X and a
Beige G3 and several related articles, Tim Galvin writes:
I upgraded [my 233 MHz
iMac] to OS X (thanks in part to your site information - thanks!).
There appears to be a small item overlooked in most discussion forums.
I am operating with two partitions in my new 40 GB hard drive. The
first 8 GB partition is required for OS X to function in this
model. Your site and most others agree on this point. The second
partition is loaded with my current OS 8.6.1 (or OS 9 when I get
it).
OS X runs fine.
However, I have tried to boot into OS 8.6.1 by holding down the
"Option" key (supposed to allow system start up selection on power up)
which it ignores and goes to OS X. Selecting OS 8.6.1 in the
second partition in preferences for OS X causes system to hang in
limbo on restart. I found an Apple Knowledge Base article on the
B&W G3 that
indicates the "New World ROM program" in that model will never look
beyond the first partition for the operating system. I assume this is
my problem as well. I am going to eventually try OS 9, but I am
betting on the same result. At least with OS 9 I can run in the
same OS X partition. No sites have addressed running OS 8.6.1 in
the same partition as OS X so I probably won't try that.
The iMac has pretty much the same ROMs as the B&W G3. Early
Macs with "New World" ROMs had some limitations that later Macs didn't.
This is why models such as the early iMacs and B&W G3 can only boot
from an IDE drive if it is smaller than 8 GB or is installed on a
first partition of 8 GB or smaller.
Yours is the first story I can recall about not being able to boot the
classic Mac OS from a different partition, though. When you partitioned
the hard drive and installed Mac OS X, did you tell it to install
Mac OS 9 drivers to the hard drive? If not, this may explain the
problem booting from OS 8.6 on your iMac.
If not, perhaps some of our readers can shed light on the issue.
Thoughts on Apple's Mail
Application
In response to my comments about Apple's Mail program in Fulfilling the Promise of Aqua and the Quartz
Rendering Engine, Tom writes:
You've probably received many emails on this subject, but in Mail go
to customize toolbar under the View menu. You can add font size
increase and decrease icons. Also, one can select under the Format
---> font ---> bigger or smaller.
Like you, I prefer other mail apps to Mail. Mail is OK, but there
are better programs.
I'm using Mail with my mac.com email address at present. It does
live up to the promise of catching spam, and adding the Bigger and
Smaller icons makes it easier to read the occasional email with too
small text, but I have not warmed to the program yet. I'm still using
Claris Emailer (in classic mode) for the bulk of my email and PowerMail
for a few other accounts.
Errors in Article about Aqua
Also in response Fulfilling the
Promise of Aqua and the Quartz Rendering Engine, Pierre Igot of
Applelust writes:
Hi there,
Too many errors in your latest article on Aqua...
But Finder windows are also cluttered by things like the Computer,
Home, Applications, and Favorites icons in the Toolbar --
Incorrect. Mac OS X can be configured by the end user so that these
icons never appear and the Finder behaves more like the OS 9
Finder. The user can choose whether these icons are visible or not.
except for the Applications icon, I'd never used any of these until
I started writing this article. I guess it's time I stopped just using
Jaguar and read a book about it. Maybe then I'll find out why some site
pages also appear up there.
Only because you put them there. There's no way that they could have
been added by anyone other than the end user.
Aqua really is beautiful, but do these icons have to be so large?
Why can I only choose between this size of icon and no icons at all -
why not a smaller set of icons?
Apple must be working on this. Smaller icons are already available
for more standard tool bars, like the ones in System Prefs or Mail.
Just cmd-click on the Toolbar button (oval-shaped button on the right)
to toggle between the various settings. The Finder doesn't support this
yet, presumably because it uses its own code for its tool bars.
Hopefully Apple is working on this.
Yes, the options are still limited (either large or small icons),
but I suspect that this is something that will change in the future, as
more displays with higher resolutions become available.
I've done some fiddling with type and icon size. I find 11 point
type is both easy on the eyes and relatively compact - although with
the classic Mac OS, the same could be said of 9 point fonts such as
Geneva. And regardless of how small a font I choose in my view, those
gorgeous icons showing folders, the desktop, etc. stay the same size,
so I can't actually see more items in the window.
Not sure what window you are referring to here. Icon size in Finder
windows is entirely customizable, through Finder Prefs (default) and
View Prefs (single window settings).
If I can change the size of icons some places, why can't I change
them at the top of the Finder windows or when I view items as a list?
Why are some icons fluid and others fixed?
Agreed.
If Aqua is really so fluid, why don't all of Apple's application
programs take full advantage of it? For instance, instead of simply
making text one step larger or smaller with a button in Safari, why not
give us a slider that lets us dynamically change the displayed font
size on the fly? That's something no other browser on the planet has
(as far as I know).
It's an idea - although sliders have their drawbacks too.
Considering how many websites have too small text, Safari would be
a great place to add this, especially as it's a beta where we expect to
see innovative improvements. (Has anyone ever run across one where the
text is too large? Why is it that nobody seems to make their text
larger than your default size, but so many want to make it smaller -
and sometimes so small that you can't read it?)
It's a PC vs. Mac thing. 10 point fonts in Windows look about as
large as 12 pt fonts in the Mac OS. And some web designers use absolute
font sizes - which is completely idiotic, but unfortunately quite
common.
Ditto for Mail, a program I really have not taken a liking to at
all yet. I received on email in a small display typeface that was
almost impossible to read. If Mail has a way to increase the size of
type in a received message, I certainly couldn't find it.
There is a way (View>Customize Toolbar...), but it's only
available for HTML/rich-text formatted messages. If the message you
received is plain text, then it's using the default font size you
specified in your prefs. If it's HTML/rich text, it uses the font size
specified in the message formatting (if any) - and then the
Smaller/Bigger buttons become available.
Maybe some day they'll even give us the option of selecting an
interface as sparsely practical as we had with the classic Mac OS.
Compared to Windows XP, the Mac OS X interface is already pretty
sparse!
Pierre
Regarding your first point, I was complaining that OS X
doesn't let me choose smaller icons - it's either the size Apple gives
you or nothing at all. As you note later, a lot of other things in
OS X support different icon sizes, so maybe it's just a matter of
time before Finder windows do.
I still don't know how those document icons got into the top bar of the
Finder windows, but after deleting a dozen or so, I've finally rid
myself of them. Time to read a book on OS X and figure out why it
happened in the first place.
We designers have got to stop trying to force us to see type at a
specific size, whether that's in points, pixels, or something else.
What's the point of allowing a user to select a preferred default font
size when the website they visit can completely ignore it. (Low End Mac
is tied to the visitor's default font size, something we point out
every time someone asks why our fonts are so big.)
As far as I know, iCab is the only
browser that allows you to override type sizes on the pages you visit
regardless of how they are specified. Safari has a neat feature
also - you can specify a minimum type size for displayed text, although
you have to use a third-party utility to access this feature at
present.
As for comparing OS X with Windows XP, let me just say that I'm in no
position to make such a comparison. I don't do Windows.
Musings on Musings
Also in response to Fulfilling the
Promise of Aqua and the Quartz Rendering Engine, Ed Hurtley
writes:
First, you may not be able to resize the icons on the Finder's icon
bar, but you can customize it in other ways. Go to the View menu and
click 'Customize Toolbar' (Most OS X applications have
customizable toolbars the same way). From there you can add or delete
toolbar icons, make the icons appear as just icons, icons & text,
or just text.
Now that I've got that 'helpful hint' out of the way (I'm sure
plenty of people have written the same thing) time to comment on the
substance of the article.
I had thought about why the system has such defined view sizes
before, but never in such a simple way as to add a zoom slider. It is
not only logical (iPhoto even does it), but it is intuitive and
elegant. That would solve lots of complications. Replacing the
large/small text buttons in Safari with a small slider would be very
nice. (Especially if it can be used to override Web pages hard-coded
text sizes.) The OS itself already supports smooth zooming of this
kind, in the 'Zoom' feature of the Universal Access system preference
panel. (It's painfully slow and ugly on my Rev. A G3 with unsupported
video, but it is amazingly smooth and graceful on a G4 with Quartz
Extreme.)
The other thing that I had been thinking about is the varied
resolutions in use today. I don't specifically mean the number of
pixels (which is what is commonly referred to by 'resolution') but by
the number of pixels per inch. Once upon a time, in the land of
fixed-frequency monitors, Apple's monitors were all fairly close in the
number of pixels per inch. A 13" monitor was 640 x 480, a 16" was 832 x
624, and a 21" was 1152 x 854. This made it so that no matter how much
screen real estate you had, an icon was about the same size (0.25"
wide) But now with the varied LCD screens of different ppis (from the
12" iBook and PowerBook's 105ppi to the iMac 15" and (apparently
discontinued) Studio Display 15" 85ppi) we have it so that icons and
text that are the same 'size' (point size) are wildly different in
physical sizes. Graphic design and layout programs never quite get the
size right, so 100% zoom is never quite 100%.
Now that Apple has gone 100% LCD (I'm ignoring the old G3 iMac and the bastard-child
eMac), they know
exactly how large the display area of the computer is. They should have
an option to set the display at a fixed size. (For example, an option
to make all icons '0.5" wide'. That way when you move from your iBook
to your iMac, your screen has the same feel. Yeah, the iBook will have
less usable area, but it won't feel like you need a magnifying lens
just to read.)
Oh well, that's my thought. And that's why I like your articles,
they provoke my own thought process to come up with these long and
rambling diatribes.
Thanks for your kind words. When I write, I hope readers will not
just read my words, but think through my thoughts and form their own
response to them. The same goes for site content in general, which is
why we sometimes have pro-Wintel pieces, the Lite Side, and those crazy rumor parodies from Anne
Onymus. Vive la Think Different!
When I worked in book publishing, it would have been a real blessing to
be able to somehow scale the display so a 6" by 9" page would be
precisely that size on the screen. Even the classic Mac OS had the
ability to not map points to pixels, but it was never really
utilized. The same pretty much goes for OS X today. (I wrote an
article on this topic four years ago, Resolution Independent Display.)
In my current line of work, online publishing, it's not terribly
important how many points per inch are being displayed or how
physically large an icon is. I'm sure there are fields and types of
software where that would be important, however, and I suspect that
buried somewhere in the recesses of Aqua is the ability to deal with
the actual number of points per inch (or cm).
My hope in posting this article is that Apple will ask whether scalable
icons in the Finder and a slider control might be reasonable additions
to Aqua and their applications - especially the Safari browser. While I
don't see a slider completely replacing Bigger and Smaller icons (this
is particularly true for those with motor skill issues), it would be a
nice alternative.
True Fluid GUI
Another email in response to Fulfilling the Promise of Aqua and the Quartz
Rendering Engine comes from Ray Boehmer:
The biggest problem with Aqua is the bitmapped UI elements. Although
changing the various icons seems fluid, there are actually several
sizes of bitmapped icons, and each one is sized through a limited
range.
Now since Aqua is based on display PDF, I don't see why the
interface couldn't be comprised entirely of vector elements. That would
make everything scalable via sliders.
Then, display resolutions could be unlocked from their range of
72-96 dpi, in favor of much higher resolutions. Fonts and elements in
the UI could be set to physical size instead of pixels, all independent
of monitor resolution.
We'd have to give up our photorealistic icons and widgets, though.
Actually, that might just bring the interface full circle to the
original Mac's simplicity.
Just something to think about...
Upgrading a Beige G3
Garry C. writes in response to my advice in Speeding up a Beige G3:
Read your piece on upgrading old G3s. I'm currently running OS 8.1
on a beige G3/266
desktop with the standard 4 GB Quantum Fireball hard drive, and I
need a bit more more room. I'm kind of a novice at this, but I can't
see ever needing more storage at this point, and a 40 GB drive seems
like the right amount.
I may attempt OS X sometime in the future as well as a G3 ZIF
upgrade per your article. But for now, the drive listed below is
available this week for $59.99 (after the $30 rebate). I'm wondering if
you consider this a worthy replacement (if indeed it's the right kind),
or should I be looking at another unit. Your thoughts and
recommendations are most welcome and anticipated. Thank you very much
in advance for your reply and for your help in keeping us older Mac
owners in the loop.
The drive in question is a 40 GB 7200 rpm Maxtor with a 2 MB
buffer and <9 ms average seek time. The drive is rated for Ultra100
and can transfer 100 MB/sec - about six times as fast as the beige G3's
bus can handle data. It's really overkill unless you plan to add a
faster IDE controller card, such as the Acard Ahard mentioned in my
article.
One further benefit of the Ahard is that you will not need to partition
the drive with a first partition under 8 GB if you want to use
OS X. The Ahard makes the Mac see the IDE drive as a SCSI drive,
so that limitation disappears. So you gain that benefit in addition to
an Ultra66 interface, which is four times as fast as the one built into
the beige G3. (For the record, the drive itself probably never reaches
100 MB/sec - 40 MB/sec is far more typical in the real world.)
If you're not planning on adding a faster controller card, you'll
probably be very happy with a 5400 rpm hard drive. Those should be
available for even less.
Moore's Law or Knight's Law?
Del Miller, a regular contributor to Mac Opinion, writes
in response to The January 2003 Power
Mac G4 Value Equation:
Just a minor nit to pick here...
In your article "The January 2003 Power Mac G4 Value Equation" you
use Moore's Law to describe the rate of increase in processor clock
speed.
But Moore never said anything about clock speed - he was referring
solely to the number of transistors on a given die. While there is an
inherent signal propagation speed advantage from more closely spaced
transistors, the switching speed of the gates follows a completely
different physics and there is no real reason to expect that transistor
density and processor clock speed should continue apace.
The fact that Intel managed to hit the Moore's law rate with clock
speed was because of architectural decisions that were largely
unrelated to Moore's law.
The point of your article was, of course, the comparison between
Intel and Motorola in the clock speed race and you make that case
pretty clear. Tying that to Moore's law though is a bit of
non-sequiter.
The rest of the story was very good, as usual.
And moments later, he sent this:
Right after I hit the send key, a further thought occurred to me...
Moore's Law is not really a law (that is it isn't based on any property
of physics) but rather an observation that Moore once made about the
then current growth rate of transistor density - specifically the Intel
chips of the day. The fact that it has roughly held to the present day
even surprised Gordon Moore.
Your story about Intel clock speeds increasing at the same rate as
Moore's Law describes no less valid an observation than Moore's.
I think you must be talking about Knight's Law! You're missing a
chance for lasting fame!
Moore's Law (yes, really an observation, but everyone calls it a
law) predicted doubling of circuit density every 2 years, later revised
to 18 months.
Denser circuitry implies higher speeds, since the electrons have to
travel shorter distances, so this could be considered a corollary to
Moore's Law. It's not original to me - people have been applying
Moore's Law to CPU speed for at least a decade now.
Why the 1 GHz $1,499 Power Mac Is a
Better Value than the Dual 867
In response to the same article, where I suggested that the Dual 867
MHz Power Mac G4 was a better value at $1,499 than the new Single 1 MHz
model, a reader who wished to remain anonymous writes:
Dear Mr. Knight,
The Dual 867 was hampered by other things:
- no QuickBooks
- only 32 MB of VRAM by default
- build to order SuperDrive is cheaper on the 1 GHz and 1.25 GHz
model at only $200
- no FireWire 800
- no Airport Extreme support
- permission issues of switching to Mac OS 9
- not all programs are dual processor aware, or able to take
advantage of Mac OS X's multithreading.
- no included latest version of iDVD.
- and a noisier fan system.
The single processor while not able to do multithreading would match
the dual processor on all tasks that don't do multithreading.
Not to mention it is $200 cheaper, meaning for the same price of a
dual 867 you can now have a tower with a built-in SuperDrive.
Sincerely,
anonymous
I didn't realize there was software that the dual 867
couldn't run that would run on the single processor
machine.
According to Apple, 32 MB is all that's needed for Quartz Extreme to
run at full efficiency.
Yes, you can add the SuperDrive to the single CPU 1 GHz Power Mac G4
for $200, but how many people buying an entry-level computer are
burning DVDs? Without a SuperDrive, the presence or absence of iDVD is
a moot point, since that is the only drive iDVD supports.
As for FireWire 800, what FireWire 800 items are there that an
entry-level G4 user might buy? I can't think of any.
As noted in Extreme Wireless for Older
Macs, you can add a PCI card with 802.11g for under $100. That's
less than Apple charges for the AirPort Extreme module.
I don't know what you're referring to when you mention "permission
issues of switching to Mac OS 9." In my book, being able to boot
into Mac OS 9 (for instance, to run diagnostics) is a benefit, not
a drawback.
Not all programs are not dual processor aware or unable to take
advantage of multithreading. Mac OS X itself does, as does much of
the OS X native software. And, as noted in my article, dual 867
MHz processors are on average 50% more efficient on tasks that support
dual processors than running the same tasks on a single processor
1 GHz system.
Further, even if a particular application doesn't support multiple
processors, the OS and other applications do, which means that by them
running more efficiently, the program that uses a single processor is
also able to function more efficiently.
I hadn't heard that the new Power Macs had a different cooling system
than the previous generation.
I stand by my claim that while they last, the dual 867 MHz Power Mac G4
at $1,499 remains a better value than the new single processor
1 GHz model at the same price.
Well, that's plenty of mail for one day. Come back Wednesday when we
open the Low End Mac mailbag again to see what's inside.
Dan Knight has been publishing Low
End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.
