response 35 of 68:

Feb 23 05:37 UTC 2009

I got Russian working with links browser (which is graphical with embedded
images but uses console fonts).  And Russian streaming audio.  A 486 would
be perfect for this but we don't have any left.

response 37 of 68:

Feb 23 16:38 UTC 2009

humm. I run FreeBSD and drive a Jeep. Okay.

response 39 of 68:

Feb 23 20:02 UTC 2009

We measured energy use and a 486 beats a 386 or a pentium.  The earliest
pentiums were less energy efficient than slightly later ones.  Faster cpus
use more energy.

response 41 of 68:

Feb 24 04:55 UTC 2009

Less than a 486?

response 43 of 68:

Sep 8 22:47 UTC 2009

Has anybody else upgraded to Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) yet?  I did,
the day it was released.  Risky move, I know - did it for 10.5 but
ended up going back to 10.4 (Tiger) until certain issues were
resolved.  But advance reviews indicated that Snow Leopard was
largely glitch-free and involved mostly under-the-hood revisions,
not user interface stuff, so I took a chance.

Overall I'm really pleased with Snow Leopard.  It takes up less
disk than Leopard (saved me about 7 GB).  The system boots faster -
just over a minute, instead of the 2-3 minutes that Leopard took.
Applications open and close faster - especially noticeable in the
Mail app.  Time Machine backups are faster.  Although there are no
radical changes to the user interface, there are some nice
enhancements.  For example, the the Airport drop-down menu displays
signal strengths for the networks it can see.  Also, when you open a
dock folder in "grid" view, you can go to subfolders and stay in
grid view (which should have been the case all along, of course).

Snow Leopard runs only on Intel Macs, and so marks the end of Apple
support for the Power PC architecture.

For an exhaustive detailed review of Snow Leopard, see John Siracusa's
writeup in Ars Technica:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars

response 45 of 68:

Sep 9 11:30 UTC 2009

I'll check out the Micros item.

OS X 10.5 was a bit flaky when it first come out, but that was
a couple of years ago.  There have been several updates, and the
current version is quite solid.  With 10.5, Spotlight works pretty
well, and you also get Time Machine, Apple's great incremental backup
system.  I wouldn't hesitate to upgrade to 10.5 at this point.
However, if you have 3rd party software that's important to you,
it's probably wise to check first that it runs under 10.5.

response 47 of 68:

Sep 9 14:32 UTC 2009

Yep, 10.6 uses significantly less disk space than 10.5.  That's the
opposite of the way things usually go with an OS upgrade.

Part of the savings is due to dropping Power PC support.

response 49 of 68:

Sep 10 13:19 UTC 2009

(Way more than will fit onto a 3.5" floppy disk.)

response 51 of 68:

Sep 12 18:31 UTC 2009

I'm still running 10.5 on a machine that came with it.  I've been
holding off on 10.6 until some of the inevitable bugs fixes come out. 
10.6.1 is out now, but I'm still not particularly motivated to implement
the change.

I think that when I do go to 10.6, I'll first wipe my Time Machine drive
and do a Carbon Copy Clone, and then start fresh with Time Machine after
the upgrade.  Aside from the speed, I should save a bunch of disk space
on backups.

response 53 of 68:

Sep 13 02:22 UTC 2009

What is Time Machine?

response 55 of 68:

Sep 13 12:38 UTC 2009

What do you back up other than personal data?  

response 57 of 68:

Oct 4 13:43 UTC 2010

By the way, Snow Leopard is up to 10.6.4 now and extremely stable.

I've been reading David Pogue's excellent book "Mac OS X Snow
Leopard: The Missing Manual".  In spite of the fact that I've been
an OS X user for over six years, I've learned quite a bit from
it.

Keyboard shortcuts in particular.  For instance, you get useful
extra info about your wifi connection if you hold down the 'option'
key when clicking on the Airport icon in the menu bar.  Or notice
what happens when you press 'option' when the Apple dropdown menu
is visible.  Clicking on a application in the dock while holding
down 'option' or 'command' or 'option+command' also has useful
effects.  And there are key combinations for logging off, sleeping,
restarting, or shutting down without confirmation, if you're in
a hurry.

Okay, so I'm a keyboard trivialist.  But I find that keyboard
shortcuts, once they become familiar, can really speed up my work.