Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Ouch: Apple spanked by benchmarks.

[Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

> Uh...that's not what I see.  Seriously, Michael; what OS  X apps crash
> frequently for *you*?  I will note that I'm not (yet) happy with the
> stability of Safari on Tiger; that did seem to go backwards. 
> Similarly, Preview crashed twice on me with 10.4.0 (up from never on
> 10.3) but that's gone away now with 10.4.1.  The only other apps I've
> crashed since 10.4 hit were mplayer (on a malformed avi file mentioned
> on a previous thread), and osiriX 1.7.0 (fixed in 1.7.1).
>  
Finder, Font Manager, Firefox, Mozilla, IE, Safari, Terminal, iTunes, 
BBEdit, half a dozen different ftp clients, iTerm, and virtually every 
other app I use. Everything crashes. I'd think it was a hardware problem 
except that I've never had the OS crash. So I guess there is something 
in the OS that is fscked up and causing problems. I've noticed extreme 
problems especially under heavy network load. I do put the system under 
a lot more load than most users would and I use a wider set of apps.

To be fair - Windows does even worse for me and crashes frequently. I 
have a lot of bitches with Linux GUI apps too. I think GUI apps in 
generally aren't well written and aren't stress tested. That is one of 
my main complains with GUI enviroments such as Windows and OS X.

> I also never did figure out what you hate about OS X's interface that
> you couldn't change easily if you wanted to.
>  
You can't change hardly anything without third-party tools. It's at 
least as bad a situation as Windows in that regard. The entire interface 
is poorly designed. Things as basic as config files and standard UI 
behaviors are broken on OS X for no reason other than to be different.

> To sum up, I wouldn't doubt at all that there are things that Linux on
> Intel isn't better at, but this article seemed pretty surreal to me.
>  
The technical details were pretty good although I agree that different 
compilers should be tried and they should have included a profile of 
Linux on the Apple hardware.

I do think the comments about the kernel and threading issues is 
probably valid. For years it's been a known issue with that type of 
kernel and still people use that design. For some cases it makes sense 
as it can make the OS more stable and easier to maintain but to put a 
monolithic kernel on top of a micro-kernel essentially gives you the 
worst of all worlds. The analysis of OS X isn't surprising but I would 
have hoped they would have worked around such issues by now. They did 
mention FreeBSD had improved in this matter.. so possibly a future 
version of OS X will do likewise. The move to x86, that breaks 
compatibility anyway, would be a good chance to do this. The trouble 
doing so at any time they want just exposes a flaw in closed source 
software design. Opensource on the other hand can, and does, change 
things whenever needed. If required all the other software just gets 
compiled too.

I wonder about Apple's choice of switching to x86. It could be a good 
idea but they're making the change before seeing how these new PowerPC 
CPUs are going to compare. Also they are evidently choosing to use Intel 
CPUs which is just stupid since AMD CPUs are clearly better and have 
been for quite some time. I wonder if they are going to use whatever x86 
chips are available or are they going to be tied to Intel only and 
shipping Intel only?

It's important to remember that performance isn't much of an issue these 
days. Any modern computer is fast enough to run the apps that most of us 
need. It's mostly interesting to me because Apple hardware is on the 
expensive end of the market (though not the most expensive by far) and I 
am the kind of user that can bring any hardware to it's knees.

--
Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED>
http://kavlon.org

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