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Good work. Except you're obviously not a Mac loyalist -- you were way too easy on Apple.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

I don't think *any* free software should be ported to Apple's user interface API (Cocoa?)

Cocoa is one of the sets of APIs available to developers. Others are Carbon, Java and raw BSD.

It seems to be missing much of the basic funtionality of X11

Oh, the irony of this statement.

i.e. network tranceparency.

Quartz (the window server/graphics API) does not, at this time, have remote display capabilities. Considering everything that had to be done for the first release of Mac OS X, and taking the target audience into account, it's not surprising that this wasn't a high priority.

But that's about where it ends. Quartz is quite full of functionality.

If Apple wants to pay for free software to be ported to their proprietary interface, that's their business. Expecting the comunity to do it for them is unreasonable.

Another poster addressed this, but just to reiterate -- Apple probably doesn't care all that much if OpenOffice runs on Mac OS X. I mean, they might promote it at the Mac OS X site, but they're not in desperate need of another office suite. MS Office is the biggie, and Apple makes the alternative -- AppleWorks. These are both built FOR the Mac. They're probably going to provide much a better end user experience than Unix-dervied OpenOffice ever will. The idea is to do a for users/by users port of OpenOffice so there's a free alternative.

I just don't see how it benifits free software to port to OSX.

So more poeple can run it?

It might be useful to build a Cocoa wrapper for X11. That would enable code written for OSX to run on Real Linux/Unix.

You probably want GNUStep, but it's not exactly finished.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

In other words, as long as your willing to do whatever the hell the customer wants and you get it done on time, you can deliver half-ass code and the customer will still love you to pieces

In the short term, perhaps. But in the long term, lack of well-designed infrastructure will come back to haunt you (or at least your customers). Customers are not just paying for you to spit something out, most are also relying on your experience. Clients believe when they pay you to build something for them, that you are providing them with a quality product. You may be able to get away with delivering "half-ass" code, but I wouldn't recommend it.

I think the better approach is to properly manage expectations and educate them on the development process. After that, they may sometimes still request a "quick and dirty" solution, which is their choice.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

More importantly, will any of them offer static IPs and a decent upstream? My DSL is bound to drop out from under me sooner or later

At which point you will be free to chose DSL service from your local phone monopoly.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

This will not happen unless Apple cuts its hardware prices by 50%. Then they will be merely competitive with PC's.

I think you're off by a significant amount on the price difference. Make sure you're comparing machines with equivalent features.

Cut prices even more and they might gain sales.

Apple isn't just an assembly service like so many grey box makers. They actually develop products. This takes money and this is why Apple's gross margins are higher. Sony has a similar approach.

BTW: Razor thing margins on cheap x86 don't seem to be a fantastic business model these days. VA has dumped its hardware, and Compaq has come close to doing the same. More units sales do not necessarily mean a more succesful business or a more healthy industry.

Better yet, Apple could license its OSX to other hardware vendors, who could make powerful competitively-priced feature-laden microcomputers

Apple makes the complete product -- that's the value proposition. Not just the OS, not just the hardware. They build computers.

Besides, show me one other company besides Microsoft that has made a solid business out of licensing x86 OSs.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Well, it was a system that didn't offer better-enough performance from an iMac for the price. I think the lowend G4 towers were about the same price as the Cube. So all the cube had going for it was "style".

The hardware was actually pretty buff when it came out, but there were two main issues:

[1] You could get a dual G4 tower for slightly more than a Cube

[2] When it comes to desktops, I suspect consumers equate bigger with more powerful

The Cube had more than style, though. It was quite and took up much less space. This things are actually significant to a lot of people.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Good job Apple, too bad it was DAMNED EXPENSIVE

Initially, yes. But not at $1300.

and kinda broke a lot

I know several people that are very happy with them. If you're going strictly on media coverage, well, you know how they are.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

I quote to you Hastings's Law: Adequate and cheaper wins against better but more expensive.

Isn't this more a theory than a law? Anyway...

Regardless of how many units are sold, "adequate and cheaper" cannot sustain an industry long term. To me it seems "better and expensive" is what actually drives most progress. But volume is what drives costs down.

I'm also not convinced the problem with the Cube was one merely of price, though that was clearly a major issue. It was at a really strange place in the product line. I don't think consumers knew who it was targeted at.

The Cube has exactly two things going for it: it looks cool, it is silent

Well, another major one is that it takes up very little space at 8" cubed. This means that it can go in places that are not practical for other computers.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

A cube is the most Nazi of all shapes - an utter surrender of beauty to uniformity.

I'm sorry, but the Cube is a gorgeous machine. Although I like the idea of a spherical floating computer like someone else mentioned.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Well, the other bad thing about OS X is that unless you have a high-end G3 or G4 with 256+ megs of ram, the thing runs like shit.

Obviously, this isn't a very technical explanation. If you're not running Classic frequently*, a G3/400 + 128MB DIMM ($899 + ~$50) should be very comfortable. At 256MB, you should be very happy regardless of what you run.

There are some aspects of the OS that take additional resources because they are much more complex than equivalents in Mac OS or the typical X11 window manager. For example, under Quartz, every window has a backing store, which takes a bunch of memory. Additionally, Quartz considers the compositing attributes of all windows on the screen before rendering, which is what enables the transparency features -- although this means it takes slightly longer to render. Quartz also anti-aliases all text sent to the screen. But the results (for apps that use Core Graphics for text) are several mangitudes better than what I've seen on Mac OS 9 or Windows

Apple is taking advantage of advances in hardware to provide new functionality to users and developers. These parts of the OS are very new, and still have room for optimization. It's also been said that Quartz does things that video cards are not used to accelerating, so everything is being shifted to the CPU. Both of these issues will improve over time.

As of today, there are plenty of areas of Mac OS X that perform substantially better than their Mac OS 9 counterparts. Virtual Memory is vastly better, the Java VM is not only worlds faster and stable but supports JDK 1.3, OpenGL is faster, file I/O is generally faster, TCP/IP is faster. The biggest problem areas are Quartz and Carbon, which are the newest core pieces of the system.

I imagine a plain Darwin installation running XFree will probably perform very similarly to some sort of BSD or Linux distribution on the same hardware. But you're not going to have a lot of things that are present in full-fledged Mac OS X. You will ultimately trade off functionality and features for resources.

(* Classic is the Mac OS 9 compatibility environment for Mac OS X. It's very well integrated with native apps, but has an unending hunger for system resources. As more native apps show up, the less need there will be for Classic, and memory requirements for running a given number of apps should drop dramatically.)

All those nifty little things like the genie effect take loads of CPU

Type this in the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Dock mineffect scale

Rather than the relatively "expensive" genie effect, this gives you a very simple animaton when you minimize a window.

- Scott

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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Apple took BSD and built a new GUI with some nifty features to make the Mac community accept it. Don't get me wrong I love BSD and I think that OS X will be good for it. But really how much did Apple do here?

BSD is a major part of Mac OS X, but it's not like Apple took FreeBSD and slapped a GUI on top of it. In Mac OS X, BSD provides:

- The process model (PID, signals)
- Unix security model (users, permissions)
- posix threads
- BSD sockets
- unix tools and libraries

Apple created:

- Quartz: window server, graphics library, 2D rendering, printing system
- Cocoa: incredible object-oriented development environment
- NetInfo (open source): Mac OS X's distributed auto-configuring network services system
- OpenGL implementation
- Java implementation
- QuickTime - used for all kinds of graphics stuff
- Carbon: APIs that Mac toolbox apps can be ported to to take advantage of modern OS features (represents a HUGE amount of work on Apple's part)
- Classic: An environment that allows the vast majority of exist Mac applications to run on Mac OS X
- All the system-level and user-level glue that allows all this stuff to work seamlessly together for the masses

Mac OS X's kernel is a modified version of Mach 3.0.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Now, if PS2 games could be played on generic hardware on the Linux OS, that would be impressive, but Sony will fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening.

I think this is sort of the wrong way to look at it. PS2 is not at all like an x86 box. It has one core 128-bit RISC chip and two vector processors. The best software written for PS2 is going to take full advantage of all of these guys.

So yes, Sony would probably try to block PS2 games from running on generic hardware, but I suspect it's a non-issue for the most part.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

When Linus starts thinking about changing boot messages, that must mean the rest of the kernel is perfect 8)

No, he just spawned a new thread.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

I would just really really like to avoid being forced into a non-verbose display. By default your bootup sequence should have full verbosity turned on

Perhaps yours should. :)

Assuming you want your OS to become mainstream, you better start letting go of these things that make it decidely ugly and confusing. By default, it should display general high-level information ("starting networking") and provide errors only. Most people don't need to know the filesystem was mounted as read/write.

People aren't going to change for Unix. Unix will have to change for people (as Mac OS X demonstrates).

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Most of the comments that have been modded up have been of the "relax, it's no big deal" variety. This is completely wrong. The issue isn't that this one guy is forced to use Passport. It's a sign of things to come -- sneaking this in under the radar of unsuspecting citizens. I think it's safe to assume Microsoft is going to end up requiring everyone to use Passport in order to use services like Hotmail.

By doing this, they are going to artificially grow their user base by leveraging the web monopoly, which was leveraged from their browser monopoly, which was leveraged by their OS monopoly. This is illegal, because it prevents new entries into the market. It reduces choice and increases the amount of control that a single corporate entity has over the population.

Technology is so complicated that the general populous has no idea what they're doing. Things like this don't get nearly as much attention as political activity but the reprocussions will eventually have just as much impact on our lives. Once the user base gets large enough, they are going to claim the largest membership numbers for this type of service, and will convince other corporations that they have to get on board to survive. It's a perpetual cycle until someone slaps their ass down.

All of this is concerning because it's obvious that Microsoft has no self-control in terms of how far they will go to establish things like HailStorm and Passport. They don't want to bother with whether consumers actually want these services. It's easier to just sign a bunch of deals and use various other corporations to do the enforcement. Some people claim that Passport is a natural way to log into various Microsoft services, and therefore shouldn't be questioned. Trojan horse, folks! Microsoft wants other sites to adopt Passport . Do you think they're give a damn when an ActiveX control is required to log in?

The most important issue here is one of scale. All of this behavior wouldn't be nearly as big of a deal if Microsoft wasn't already a hulking juggernaut. Implementing a prioprietary authentication service isn't dangerous if your company isn't that big. It's up to the market to decide if it's worthy to be adopted. But when you're as big as Microsoft you can force standards on people whether they want them or not.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Look folks, Apple is a hardware company. That's were they really make their money. People buy their boxes in order to get the Mac OS. If they could run the Mac OS on cheaper x86 boxes many of them would choose to do so. Of course many people would still buy Titanium PowerBooks and iBooks for other reasons, but fewer.

That's sort of the picture the mass technology media has painted, but I think the reality is considerably more complex than that. There's not really enough room to explain the whole thing here but the essence of the issue is that Apple creates complete products. They are not merely an OS vendor, nor are they a hardware assembly service.

As far as I can tell, Apple and Sony are the only desktop hardware companies left actually developing products -- which is why their machines cost more. There are hardware companies that mainly buy components, put them all together, and try to charge slightly more than what it cost them to build the machine. We have plenty of these types of companies.

Mac OS X for x86 would give some people people immediate, short-term gratification, but I think it would really kill one of the industry's key sources of innovation in the long term. Bottom line: there's little reason to create Mac OS X applications when the same people have Windows-capable (or Linux-capable) hardware. The result: lack of differentiation, and lack of progress. 50% of the population thinks Apple's software sells the hardware, the other 50% thinks that the hardware sells the software. It's neither. It's a symbiotic relationship -- they rely on and complement each other. But this isn't immediately obvious to the user. They take these things for granted, and just see it as part of "the computer."

For example, the PowerPC runs at lower temperatures and uses less energy than its x86 counterparts. This is why several of Apple's machines are fanless, and substantially quieter as a result. And it does this so while providing more performance per clock cycle.

Few actually seem to notice, but Apple is in the process of creating substantial long-term value in the company. Revamping the OS, reinventing the hardware, fixing the advertising, opening retail stores, creating (free) industry-leading developer tools, and releasing open source software. These are all elements of building infrastructure. One by one, they're removing the barriers in front of them. They're in this for the long haul. Relegating them to an x86 OS vendor would dash any hope of true variety in commercial computing options.

(Voline, I realize your comment was not meant to be anti-Apple)

- Scott

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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

That and also the fact you need at least a 600 G3 so that desktop navigation doesn't take all day.

RAM is more important than CPU power, and the biggest consumer of memory is Classic, the Mac OS 9 compatibility environment. As more apps become native, the need for Classic should deminish.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Is that for real? Ok, they will be one of the largest, but I would have thought that Sun would have been largest, if not SCO (from what I've heard, a lot of people still use SCO Unix, even if new shipments are low). Anyone got any figures on this?

Apple tends to sell roughly 4-5 million machines a year on average. Although that was a bit lower in the last couple of quarters due to the downturn in the economy, their new Ti PowerBooks and iBooks appear to be big hits (having trouble finding one for my sister at the moment). It looks like they sold at least 150,000 copies of Mac OS X to users the first weekend it was out back in March.

I don't know how this compares to Sun, HP, etc in terms of unit sales.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

the Classic environment (where OS 9 apps run) takes awhile to load, but once it's running, it's just there and mostly swaps out. This is necessary for viewing PDF's, using SimpleText, and a couple other things still, but new OS X stuff is coming out frequently

There's an OSX native version of Acrobat available for download, and Apple's built-in Preview app gives you no-frills PDF viewing as well. And why are you using SimpleText? TextEdit is a much better RTF editor, and you can use BBEdit or a million other plain text editors.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

now-familiar archaeologist/scholar as adventurer. (Why are all of these archaeologists so rich in movies? And so brave?)

I can answer that.

Because the a poor, fearful archaeologist would only have enough funds and courage to venture to the end of the street. It's going to be difficult to find the ruins of ancient civilizations there.

- Scott

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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

The type of things Disney does today is so much more diverse that it's hard to compare it to its 1950s counterpart.

Personally, I don't care if Disney the corporation fell off the face of the earth. Just save their feature animation department. They are absolutely phenominal when it comes to that.

- Scott

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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Illogically, it is more standards compliant. And faster. And smaller. How do the Mac and Windows versions of IE differ? has a good explanation of not only how they differ, but why they differ (directly, yes, they're completely different). IE5/Mac is definitely better than IE5 and, in terms of speed and size at least, Netscape 6. Mozilla might be going more smoothly now, though -- I haven't seen any comparisons of Mozilla 0.9.x to IE5/Mac.

OSX has to deal with a much smaller supported hardware set (Macs) than Windows 2000 (or Linux, BSD, and BeOS for that matter). Taking this into account, one might see where Apple's OS developers could spend more time on the front end of the install, instead of needed more effort put into the supportive foundations of the hardware detection.

Not only would the UI designers and driver developers be in totally seperate departments and under different budgets, but Microsoft has effectively infinite resources.

- Scott

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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Or do Mac users like being told what hardware to buy?

I think you're missing the forest here: the hardware is 50% of the reason people buy Macs to begin with. Mac hardware is industry leading in many areas. No, not every area.

Apple was the first to build an all-USB machine. As far as I know, it also was the first to have built-in 3.5" drives, ethernet, SCSI, wireless anteneeas, FireWire. It's also pioneering low-energy and fanless operation. And the tower cases are the easiest to open and work with out of anything I've ever used.

Apple's hardware isn't flawless, but it's not like most Mac users are saying "I want Mac OS X, but oh shit I have to buy a G4 to run it." That's part of the whole package. Apple is a systems company. If you don't like it, then go buy a PC running Windows or Linux. Or build your own, and recompile your kernel every 38 days. That's fine. But not everyone wants that.

- Scott


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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Furthermore, it cant possibly be to hard to get Mac OS X native applications to run on a Mac linux distro

This is a big misconception. Just because both Mac OS X and Linux have Unix-like cores, does not mean that it's easy to port Mac OS X GUI apps to Linux. The APIs are completely different. Mac OS X doesn't use X11 nor GNOME/KDE, for example.

Some people point out up GNUStep as a possible bridge for Cocoa apps to get to other Unix distros, but I'm not sure how well that really works, especially since things have changed since the OpenStep days.

But Carbon apps (Photoshop, Office, Dreamweaver, IE) are not going to end up on Linux anytime soon.

- Scott

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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Meaning, I could present content without having to reload the darn page every time I query

If it's used in that way, yes. But there's still the problem that the format is only machine-readable. That's a big problem.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

I'm not looking for the most flashy web site. I'm looking for the web site that loads fastest, gives me the information I want, and lets me click the Exit button without flashing a million things in my face.

"Dave, your interest in art is irrational."

You probably don't like books with pictures, either. :)

Believe it or not, there are people that like sites that look nice (gasp!) and want more than raw text. If we were computers, we wouldn't care -- but since we're human, we can appreciate art, entertainment and creativity. Especially when we're crawling through some really boring material.

Now granted, there are times when the site design is so out of control that it actually hampers your ability to get to what you need. But surely there is a happy medium between russian submarine and parade float.

Personally, I don't use much Flash, largely because the format forces me to use applications I don't particularly like, and makes dynamic content generation either difficult or expensive. However, the extremist viewpoint that websites are just about information, and that design is irrevalent is really wearing thin. If that was the case, I think it would have been gopher that caught on, not HTML.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

The orginal version 10.0.0 had no openssl or openssh.

Yeah, but the public beta did have OpenSSH and OpenSSL. The first retail release did not have crypto because not everything got worked out with the government in time.

I've been told that the reason older versions of OpenSS[H/L] were included with the update was the same reason -- it takes time to get approval for newer software. I'm not sure how true this is, just what I was told.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

You're right - maybe I, like 90% of the population, don't know what DV is. Or care.

But if they've bought a video camera in the last -- what -- three years, then they already have DV. This number is only going to increase over time. There's really no point in dealing with non-DV formats if you want to end up outputting to DVD, because the quality will suffer to much in the process. As for why you'd want to output to DVD, see my other response higher in the thread.

DVD has sold well not because of better resolution, but because of 5.1 sound.

Hmmmmmm.

You make the bad assumption that everyone is looking to buy a new camcorder, but many people are happy with their VHS, 8mm, and even betamax cameras.

Until they buy something else, which is inevitable for most people who own this stuff in the first place.

I'm sure, thanks to Sony, firewire won't go away for a long time. It will die a slow and painful death like beta, DAT and MD.

And it will die at the mercy of....? Everybody significant is backing DV/FireWire. Dell provides FireWire options, right? Apple and Sony ship it standard on their machines, and it's built into just about every video camera made in the last several years. Do you know how fast people are buying these things? Microsoft is also backing FireWire in Windows.

And I have made my own videos, all 3 of them over the last 10 yrs. I consider myself an average user. I sure as hell don't want to buy a new camera, computer, and media to edit a video once every 3 yrs, why would anyone else?

You will need a new camera. You don't need to buy a new computer, you just get a FireWire card. And you're going to buy new media anyway, which is pretty cheap.

iMovie, DV, D8, all of it is fine technology. As was beta and MD. But if the average joe doesn't want to fork over the extra money for it, how long will your product last?

You make it sound like there's something else you can buy today. Realize if you walk into a consumer electronics store and buy a video camera, you're getting a DV camera. This has been the case for a while. People still have non-DV equipment, but that's going to fade through attrition. Eventually, something will replace DV as well.

This I can guarantee you: the market is not going to return to High-8.

Their market research consists of Mac addicts, so Mac fans get what Mac fans want. Nevermind that non-Mac users don't care for any of it.

What does this have to do with to do with DV?

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Let's recap.

The retail version, Mac OS X 10.0, was released on March 24. The 10.0.1 update followed about 1-2 weeks later. This was mainly bug fixes and minor performance enhancements. This update was anticipated. On May 1, 10.0.2 was posted. This brought CD burning in Tunes, a fix for a possible ftp daemon exploit, and some updates to the mail client. Again, not an unexpected update. Apple had announced this would be coming.

I suspect the point at which people were a bit suprised is when 10.0.3 showed up a few days ago. It had only been about a week since the last update. This was probably an unscheduled update. The main (and perhaps, only) purpose of this update was to fix a bug where HFS+ volumes would not list the entire contents of directories in certain situations with many (>300) files.

Here's some details that I think were missed:

o The 10.0.3 update incorporates everything in 10.0.2
o The updates are optional
o You can configure your machine to check for updates automatically or manually
o Apple eventually posts the updates as self-contained archives

It's not surprising that the Mac people would be surprised and perhaps distraught at the idea of frequent updates. It was not unusual for updates of Mac OS 8/9 (aka "Classic Mac OS") to break applications/extensions or cause them to behave erratically. This was largely due to the architecture. However, I don't think some poeple realize how drastically different the architecture is in Mac Os X.

Previously, Apple would let bugs (even some relatively serious ones) go unfixed in Mac OS 8/9 until the next scheduled update. This was probably due to the fact that the operating system was a mountain of procedural spagetti code dating back to 1984. Not only did this make things hard to fix, but putting out one fire might cause another to flare up.

Now that Apple is working with a reasonable software foundation, they can move updates out the door much more swiftly, and with less fear that they're going to tumble the house of cards. I think this is a good thing, especially when update addresses a filesystem bug. But the Mac community is not exactly known for embracing change with open arms...

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Steve Job's glittery eye candy provides little functionality

I doubt you've used OSX for any extended period of time (if at all), otherwise you probably wouldn't be saying that. They really thought the UI out. There are a number of very clever improvements in the functionality of the UI.

too many CPU cycles to render it.

Yeah, it's really hard to put a bitmap on the screen. Come on, this is 2001. I think we can afford to "waste" a few cycles on drop shadows and transparencies. Not everything has to look like TVWM.

The fact that it lacks stability means Apple has a piss-poor staff of people admining their programmers.

Ummmm, I haven't see a kernel panic on OSX yet. I ran the public beta for 7+ months. I'm running the GM on three separate machines. Not everyone is having problems. They might just be hardware issues that have to be ironed out. Heck, I've seen poor hardware cause Solaris to panic.

There is NO EXCUSE for such a lame product!

I agree. Fortunately, Mac OS X is a great OS.

- Scott

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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Thanks for explaining why the system requirements for Mac OSX are so ludicrous.

Mac OS X's requirements are "so ludicrous" because it has to run two OSs at once: Mac OS X itself and Mac OS 9 via the "Classic" environment. If you're only running native apps (which the are relatively few at this second, but many are coming this summer), then you'll probably do just fine on 64MB of RAM. Last time I checked, this is pretty comparable to GNOME or KDE.

- Scott


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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

"Ooooh...the Linux guy HATES OS X! He must be threatened by it!" media frenzy. That single out-of-context quote, combined with "Linux as insofar failed to bring UNIX to the desktop, which is what Apple believes OS X WILL do", makes it even worse.

This is, unfortunately, how many journalists work. They try to stir up controversey. They must think the facts are boring. I think these people are in the wrong line of work. They should be writing soap operas.

- Scott


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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

MSIE under Mac OS X is a *Carbon* app. This means that it runs the same binary as on the usual MacOS.

Not all Carbon apps can run under both the old (Mac OS 8/Mac OS 9) and the new (Mac OS X) architectures. There are two types of Carbon apps: CFM/PEF and dyld/Mach-O. Both run under OSX, OS8/OS9 can only run the former.

I believe the version of MacIE included with Mac OS X 1.0 is Mach-O. It is only designed to run under OSX.

- Scott

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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

I agree with you for the most part, except here:


a) go see the thing demoed somewhere when it comes out

b) don't buy it.

Simple, ne?


Not quite this simple. Making the XBOX appear better than it is (whether this actually happened or not) might make people less interested in PS2. This would be akin to saying the next version of NT will have a bunch of features, just to prevent people from investing in Linux, Solaris, etc. This is why vaporware sucks.

- Scott

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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

How many times are you going to post this same message, AC? I first saw this message contents posted at least a month and a half ago.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Mach has real time capabilities. This is highlighted specifically in Apple's developer documentation.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Is the iDVD the only DVD player on MacOS X?

iDVD is an authoring tool. It's used in conjunction with the DVD-R drives in the new PowerMacs.

The thing limiting the DVD playback under OSX is unlikely to be the fact that the little DVD player app isn't ported. That could probably be done in very short order. I would imagine it has more to do with the decoding functionality.

- Scott

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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Wow, MacOS is Mach-based and runs a modified FreeBSD kernel.

That's sort of a contradiction in terms. Mach is the kernel. FreeBSD is used for core networking, process model, and some other low-level things.

"Good, now my grandmother can use UNIX!" Why is it so important that she use UNIX?

So she doesn't end up having to use Windows?

There's already enough shit on the web right now. Do we really need every idiot who can say MacOS putting up more pointless content?

Yes. Imagine if you had access to the things that all of those people know.

- Scott

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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

I'm sure that MSNBC heard a rumor that DVD support MIGHT not be ready by the release

The lack of DVD video playback is real. Apple confirmed it. The rest of the stuff in the article is questionable, though.

- Scott


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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Hrrm, let's look at this here... unsupported hardware that's become industry standard

The article doesn't talk at all about unsupported hardware. The DVD drive works, as do all the video cards. The only thing that doesn't work is DVD video playback, and some mysterious "sources" talk about that OSX won't initially take full advantage of Radeon and GeForce 3. This is obviously a short-term issue, since Carmack's GeForce 3 demo was running on OSX.

numerous bugs and errors that can cause system hangs or freezes, those bugs are acknowledged by Apple, and they're saying that they really want people to just wait a few months for the real thing to come out.

Come again? Please point out these "numerous bugs and errors that can cause system hangs or freezes." The only thing that sounds anything like this in the article is the author's "sources" saying there are crashing bugs in the Setup Assistant -- not the OS. There are a number of qualifications on the statement in question, by the way.

This sounds EXACTLY like a beta test

If bugs are the qualification for a beta test, then every major OS in wide distribution is in beta.

How many people using Windows 2000 or Linux have a dual boot back into Windows ME or 98 so that they can run certain things better?

most likely charge for the OS X 1.0 to 1.1 upgrade

Highly unlikely if you look at the history of such things.

- Scott

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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

My guess is that MacOS X v1.0 only will be sold on Apple's online store

Um, no. MacWarehouse is already advertising it.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

The only way that Apple can ever make a comeback to be used by people that are NOT in the graphics industry is to license their OS to be run on any hardware.

Ignoring for a second the user experience consequences of that, there's a basic question of how they're going to make money. The company generally brings in $6-8 billion a year, the vast majority of which is from the ~5 million hardware units they ship each year. If they're decide to sell software at $129 a pop, what's going to make up from the loss in revenue? Do you actually believe they would selling anything close to 50 million copies of OSX a year?

Remember, what you're suggesting is exactly what NextStep did. Look how well that turned out. One of Apple's core value propositions is that they make the whole package. This creates a seamless user experience for the customer. This is why many people like Macs in the first place.

That's the ONLY reason that Windows took off so many years ago, and Apple withered.

Things have changed a lot since then. How is Apple going to magically crack the grip that Microsoft has on all the hardware manufacturers as well as on itself?

If I could buy OS X to run it on my cheap-o generic Intel-based (actually, AMD based) hardware, I'd use it! In a heartbeat!

Great, but how many would use it as their exclusive OS if it couldn't run on the architecture-dependent Mac apps? You'd mostly get the NextStep apps. You sure as heck wouldn't get Office.

- Scott

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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

I find this, on top of the lack of DVD support to be hugely funny.

The DVD playback thing is confirmed by Apple. The level of video driver support is pure speculation. Not the "may" and "source said" qualifications on this statement. There is a thread raging on OmniGroup's Mac OS X Talk list about how misleading this article is.

Apple drops the ball again and again and again, then delievers something as dumb as a computer in a colored case and their fans have their own Mardi Gras to celebrate the "innovation."

You've mastered flamebait!

How's this for innovation: incomplete SMP support

This is probably the most ridiculous claim of the article.

Newsflash everyone -- just because major sites carry a story doesn't mean it's accurate.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Mach, which is the core of the Mac OS X (and NextStep) kernel, was not written by Apple employees. Tevanian was one of the developers of Mach, yes, but there were many others. Mach was developed at CMU before Next even existed, and the guy who actually headed the Mach project (Rick Rashid) is a VP at Microsoft.

I was aware of all this (except the bit about Rick), but the fact that Tevanian was one of the key people really makes it seem like he has a right to use the code for projects at Next and Apple without getting too much flak for it. In fact, even if he hadn't worked on Mach, he would still be allowed to use it. Granted, I should have been more specific about the fact that Tevanian was not the only developer.

Do you have URL that describes the development of Mach -- the people involved and the project itself?

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

I know computers aren't just for guys, but you should realize that I would think a computer with Transformers written on the side would be equally silly and tacky.

That would KICK ASS! Although I'd definitely want one with the Thundercats logo.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

but if May 98 is right, forget that patent... previous art... Remember that 'MS Plus' for win95

Microsoft has their own theme patents. That's what makes this whole thread so absurd.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Here is another idiot that thinks MS is going to take over the computer world.

Thanks for the personal insult.

By a lot of accounts, they already have taken over. It's more a matter of taking it back now.

If you want to compete than build something that average JOE can use.

That's exactly what Apple is doing. In fact, Apple is the teacher in this area, Microsoft is the student.

- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Yes - a lot of OS-X is built on open standards but Apple's system is not standard (it doesn't even have X-Windows for god's sake)

A lot of people feel this is a good thing. If you want to run X Windows on OSX, you are free to. Either way, far more of OSX is based on open standards -- or outright open source code -- than Windows*.

and apple did not even create large portions of it

This is incorrect. Apple/Next employees wrote the kernel, the Cocoa frameworks, the Carbon frameworks, the Classic compatibility environment, the window server, the rendering libraries, QuickTime, Quartz, NetInfo, all the application services, the OpenGL implementation, the I/O Kit -- the list goes on.

The only parts that weren't created by Apple or Next employees were the BSD portions. Much of BSD will be an optional install in based Mac OS X, except for the core networking and threading and such. Next/Apple took BSD but has given all kinds of things back (listed in my previous post) that were not previously available to the community. From what I can tell, the BSD community isn't too upset about any of this, and many are actually quite enthused.

Furthmore, they continue to invest in the Mach/BSD environment. This, like everything else in Darwin, is available to the community. Anybody can go and download this stuff. Yes, you have to notify Apple if you change it. Big deal!

- Scott

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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

How about they actually produce a better product for a reasonable cost to consumers?

Right. History has shown the superior product always wins over the inferior one with superior marketing. Yep. But this really doesn't have anything to do with the topic. Microsoft has patents on theming stuff as well. Big deal.

I just find it constantly amazing how anyone who can even entertain the notion that freedom and computing have ANY relationship to Apple Corp.

Apple sells hardware and software as a single package because it makes the final product far more coherent. For them, the money is in the hardware. This is why they can give away iTunes and all the web-based iTools services for free (with no banner ads). However, it's the integration of the hardware and software that makes the machine easier to manager and provides the value proposition.

Microsoft isn't probably going to open source anything anytime soon, but Apple has open sourced all kinds of stuff. QuickTime Streaming Server, NetInfo, I/O Kit, OpenPlay/NetSprocket, and of course, Darwin. While Darwin it is based on Mach 3.0/BSD, Apple is continually pouring money into Darwin development as the core of OSX, and the community reaps the benefits. Also note that Apple's VP of Software Engineering (Avie Tevanian) was one of the core architects of Mach.

Bash Microsoft all you like, but let's not forget that it was those evil folks that made it possible for the seperation of the hardware from the OS.

Out of the frying pan into the fire...

Microsoft is doing everything in their power to lock you into a single software platform. Long term, the hardware is probably irrelavant. Oh sure, you'll have all sort of hardware to choose from -- handhelds, desktops, laptops, cell phones, appliances. But if Microsoft has its way, they'll all run Windows.

By contrast, a substantial amount of OSX is built on open standards -- TCP/IP, Apache, NetInfo, OpenGL, I/O Kit, Java, BSD, Mach. With Windows, you have to deal with NetBios, WINS, IIS, DirectX, ActiveX, and kernel source that nobody can look at.

It is a good thing that there are open hardware platforms available? Yes. Is Apple evil for having a standardized hardware/software platform? No. It's just a different approach that has distinct benefits for both the developer and the user. Look up some of Carmack's comments on how much more cost effective it is to develop and test for the Mac because of the standardized hardware.

I wouldn't want a world in which Apple sold all computers, nor would I want one where either Windows or Linux is the only only OS.

- Scott

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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu