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Ars Technica Reviews MacOS X DP4
Mad Browser writes: "Ars Technica has posted a review of the recently released-to-developers MacOS X DP4. Check it out." Rather than concentrating on Aqua, this article is typical Ars -- it gets beneath the surface to consider the mechanisms for printing, screen display and more. As the writer points out, DP4 is not itself OS X, but only a snapshot of OS X as it matures.
You forget though...
BSD has a pedigree, it's one of the original UNIXes.
Linux is a mutt; but a well-engineered mutt.
Darwin is Mach + BSD layers. It will make Darwin more portable, but not necessarily the rest of Os-X (ie classic/carbon/quartz/aqua). Indeed, Darwin on x86 is already a reality.
The price for this setup is indeed a speed hit.
Tom
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
Couldn't get the review...
:)
Is the ports collection available? I also wonder how open it is. I've been hearing rumbling about a FreeBSD for the PowerPC.
The ports and the ease of CVSupping lured me away from linux. Apple would need these to lure me from FreeBSD.
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:)
:)
Actually, XFree86 4.0, and the numerous extensions to X are gradually transforming it into something pretty reasonable. However, dumping it entirely isn't an option, unless everyone starts using Qt or GTK -- since those can be ported to other GUI systems.
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Windows 2000 already enjoys that title.
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Yes. You didn't read the Ars Technica article, did you?
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You assume that backwards compatibility and the elimination of the "ugliness" of a commandline-first system are mutually exclusive. They are not.
MacOS X has a shell, and has all sorts of commandline tools available for it. DP4 includes a GUI-based development environment which seamlessly relies on gcc and gdb. The developer need never touch a command line. The user need never touch a command line.
You can however download all your favorite commandline programs, compile them, and run them to your heart's content.
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Read the Ars Technica article. Library handling is RADICALLY different, and eliminate most of the problems commonly associated with shared libraries. Configuration files are in XML. The filesystem has been restructured.
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Agreed. But in this case, Apple is producing a better Unix, and a better MacOS all at once. All the cruft from Unix/BSD is being eliminated, the interface is modern, administration can be done ENTIRELY from the GUI.
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MacOS 9 already supports multi-user desktops. I set up my mom's iMac so that she and my dad have seperate logins and can't screw things up. They double-click their names, speak their password and go ff to do whatever they want. I have an account with admin priviledges...
I have heard many things that encourage me that Apple understands this, and may therefore be the first to create a Unix-stable, xerox-style operating system. I have also seen many things that discourage me, because they indicate Apple is buying the benighted notion that BSD-compatibility is worth a damn to their business. It is not. Let me repeat: it is not. And furthermore, it will eviscerate the utility of the MacOS. Do you hear me, Tevanian? Hide that damn shell. Hide it somewhere where we will never find it.
Unix users are smart, self-reliant people. We can find plenty of ways to get our jollies without mastering our problems onto millions of MacOS CD's.
MrJoy.com -- Because coding is FUN!
Project Builder is basically a GUI front for several compilers. AFAIK the only way you can get it is by using Aqua and I would assume PB will come with OS X.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Clarify when you say "controls hardware". Apple uses most if not all the same specs and stardards as anyone else. They just have a limited set of devices they ship inside their boxes. This is beneficial to them as developers because they know exactly what drivers are needed for a particular (unmodified) model of computer. This is why MS doesn't support OEM copies of Windows. The OEM is responsible for the hardware they stick onto the motherboard and it would be hideously expensive for MS to handle all service related issues on said hardware. Apple, SGI, and Sun all control their hardware and software manufacture so don't spend nearly as much as MS or Redhat would supporting an enormous variety of hardware configurations.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Heaven forbid a human being should ever change his mind about anything. We all know that the world is black and white and that anybody who is not marching lock step along some ideology or another is obviously not qualified to lead a country in the modern age.
War is necrophilia.
I'm curious to what extent OS X users are going to be cut off from the Linux world. One of the main reasons I'm excited about Linux is that I want to throw off the shackles of Microserfdom. I want to erase MS Word from my Mac's hard disk, download a free, open-source word processor, and never look back. Is OS X's use of BSD heading it down a blind alley? Are all GUI apps written for Linux going to be completely unusable on OS X?
Find free books.
Port Sherlock 2.....
(Apple Rules.)
Babar
tcd004
The page to get the classicmenu app says this in the purchasing section:
At this stage in the game, Classic Menu is being made freely available in unrestricted form to give a helping hand to other developers trying to get a day's work done on Apple's newly-emasculated interface
Anyone care to comment about why they feel it is emasculated?
(Also I love MacOS but was it ever all that Masculine? and yes i know they mean reduced in power)
Actually, XFree86 4.0, and the numerous extensions to X are gradually transforming it into something pretty reasonable.
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X will never be reasonable. Not the XFree team's fault - good work built on a bad foundation. People will sooner or later have to throw it all out. Legacy apps can work in through a box or a wine-like emulator.
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Yes. You didn't read the Ars Technica article, did you?
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I did.
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You assume that backwards compatibility and the elimination of the "ugliness" of a commandline-first system are mutually exclusive. They are not.
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Actually, I disagree with that statement specifically. I am saying that unix is broken. /lib is bogus. libc is bogus. /etc is bogus. password files are bogus. /dev is bogus. There are huge assumptions built into the codebase about a number of fundamentally bogus things, from the bogus filesystem hierarchy to the bogus libraries to... you guessed it... the necessity of a command line and a terminal. And curses, no less!
Not that I don't love Unix anyway. Not that I don't use it every day. But if you think millions of Mac users are going to start loving it because Steve Jobs tells them to... you are going to have to give me your dealer's phone number.
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Library handling is RADICALLY different...
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Yes, yes. This is part of what's so encouraging! I love it! It's the right thing. But... is it all good work? Or is some of it still going to leave people having fits?
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MacOS 9 already supports multi-user desktops.
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These "little details" matter. It needs to be disabled by default, in acknowledgement of the fact that an overwhelming majority of users won't use it, and could in fact get bitten by it. A million little details occur to me. Multi-user computers are fundamentally more complicated than single-user computers. That's complexity no one should have to put up with unless they ask for it. And even if they demand it, woe to the person who should offer them the unix security model in return.
Your comments are good. Thanks!
We're on the road to Tycho.
There are a lot of things in UNIX which are still very good, and which should go on in whatever new OS we make, such as the POSIX standard which, it seems, is getting supported almost everywhere. Things like preemptive multitasking, protected memory, true multi-user environments, named pipes, and quite a few other things should obviously be kept. But I think that beyond those basic things we should start over. If we were to create an OS which was going to truly be for the average consumer, we'd want to add things like a unified document format tag in files and dynamically-loadable drivers (à la QNX)--things which currently don't exist in UNIX, and for various reasons would be quite hard to add. Mac OS X has done a lot to add these things to UNIX, but I question whether or not, had OS X not had NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP herritage, whether OS X would use UNIX. Because the fact of the matter is that, when you implement all of those changes, you really don't have a UNIX box anymore in the traditional sense, but rather something totally different that's loosely based on UNIX technology. Whether there's any particular reason to start with UNIX to implement features like what you're asking, rather than to start from scratch or with another system, is something I would seriously question before the Open Source Community (tm) undertakes a project like this.
Meanwhile, about your complaint about X being the GUI: I think most people agree that X has major problems. Where I think most people fail to see something is that X isn't the only thing that is wrong with Linux GUIs. Linux GUIs are currently pretty much clones of either Windows95/98/NT/2000, Mac OS, or similar environments. Those GUIs were never designed for a UNIX system. If you want to build a GUI for a consumer system, those may be the way to go, but if you want to have a GUI for Linux, you should work to design a GUI from the ground up that is actually suited to Linux. What's better suited for Linux? I don't know. Maybe we just haven't figured out what aspects of Windows95's interface just aren't suited to Linux, which aspects are, and which ones we might be able to learn from but by counterexample and should start anew. Maybe what we need is something like Squeak's Morphic. And there's the definite possibility that a GUI just isn't suited for Linux--at least in its current state. But my point is that the problem lies deeper than X; it lies with the current way we're trying to marry Linux to a GUI.
I balk at the fact that it's being written by unix hackers - ex-NeXT or not. Be's signal failing in my mind was its cowardly inability to lose its unix compatibility to aim for something higher. Huge missed opportunity.
Yes, I know a unix kernel does not a unix make. Although it goes a long way in it's unmodified state. But this is obviously not the only part of unix Apple is including.
"but if they have an inittab file, and if they use init scripts, I bet it'd be a laughably simple exercise on their part to make an account called "dumbuser" and have the rc.M file su as dumbuser..."
Oh that's laughable, all right. The only simple part in this, though, is making Windows look like the HAL 9000.
But seriously, thanks for your comments.
We're on the road to Tycho.
Damn, and I used up all my moderator points yesterday.
Thanks for a very concise and well-spoken explanation of the exact point I've tried to make (much less successfully) to people complaining about "Think different"'s grammatical "error."
Excellent.
(Although your *'d sentences in the look examples are not at all ungrammatical:
This AIBO uses a CCD camera for its vision. That one looks differently...
...for instance. I leave the other as an exercise for the reader.)
--
In all fairness to MacOS and Windoze, it's kinda hard to tell whether a crash is really a crash of the OS or the GUI. X has died on my SPARC multiple times, but I just kill it and keep going...
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
I don't think that Gassee said those. I think that BeDope made those up.
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Visit
Very well written. Another reply noted that he got a bounceback from hi@apple.com. The article on Ars Technica specifies MACHI@APPLE.COM for feedback to apple relating to interface issues.
If you're this particular about grammar, how can you stand to read Slashdot in the first place?
The author does take certain aspects of the UI to task, and I really don't blame him. He is fair about it, rather than some reviewers who choose to do nothing but flame and complain. His arguments are well thought out and written, and he brings out certain concerns that, frankly, make sense. If you only read one article (or series of articles) on OS X, this should be the series.
______________________
A recent discussion on the Darwin development list:
:-)
From Creed Erickson at Apple:
>Hello all. I read somewhere (don't remember where right off) that
>terminal.app would not be included in the consumer release of Mac OS X,
>presumably for fear that novice users could/would dork up their system.
This is the first I've heard of it, but "they" rarely consult "us" about such decisions
AFAIK, we intend to ship Terminal.app with the general release. Whether it is installed by default is another issue.
From Justin Walker at Apple:
On the subject of product content, I'll say the following: first, the various rumor pages and alleged news services have consistently misrepresented, confused, and butchered any information that we've put out, so I'd err on the side of ignoring whatever you read that isn't from Apple.
Second, we havn't made any specific statements about what will and won't be in a "consumer relase" of Mac OS X. However, Apple surely does not want to build in any reliance on, or requirement for, mechanisms like Terminal. We have said that BSD will be part of Mac
OS X, because that's what our code is built on. Beyond that, there's little to say at this point.
From Hary Wilke:
just put it in the "folder of death", apple extras.
it will live very nicely with other amazing yet underused things like applescript.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Look folks,
I'm on page 3 and the article is really getting interesting but it's really slowing down when I try to go on.
Could you please hold off until I finish reading it?
Thanks very much,
Darby
---CONFLICT!!---
George
Lazy linking isn't new... I put my threshold at +2, and then the trolls are there when I need them...
The Ars review page "Inside Quartz" conjectures on one piece of Windows technology that seems to be a target based on what was said but not named in the Core Graphics Rendering docs from Apple.
To quote John Siracusa (the author)...
"I don't know about you, but one word immediately springs to mind: DirectX. Well, obviously only the portions of DirectX that deal with screen drawing, but it's clear that Apple has designed Mac OS X's graphics subsystem to be as flexible as possible. And with QuickDraw, QuickTime, and OpenGL already implemented, I'm hard-pressed to name another API (other than X, which is already in the busy hands of Darwin hackers) that would be implemented in the future. This is pure speculation at this point, of course, but if it does come to pass, remember that you heard it here first."
P.S. Screenshot?
We're on the road to Tycho.
Systems can advance and use box or application layer emulation to do legacy work. It is already working for Linux, and Apple is obviously gambling on it. So I see no significant excuse for the rest of us not to have a sane, modern organizational and functional paradigm.
We're on the road to Tycho.
AU/X was an impressive system at first glance. However, once you went out and played with it, you found that it had quite a few notable problems.
:-)
First of which, the "MacOS Look & Feel" was quite detached from the UNIX core. It was, quite simply MacOS running as a process on the UNIX server. In the first few versions, a modified MacOS 6 was included. In later versions, a modified MacOS 7 was included. This arrangement was very familar to anyone who had used Apple MAE (Macintosh Application Environment) product. MAE was a similar product that allowed you to bring up a classic MacOS environment on a SunOS or HP-UX workstation.
While it did give users the MacOS look and feel, it didn't give them much more. MacOS processes were still cooperatively scheduled inside the MacOS process. A crashing process would wipe out the whole environment. This was not good.
Even worse was the developer support for the environment. The UNIX environment had a few APIs to access the Mac Toolbox, but it did not have nearly the API set required to make the rich graphical environments that Mac users wanted. Coming back to my first point, is that even if you had written an A/UX graphical app, if the Mac environment crashed, so did your graphical app, eventhough it was running in a protected memory space.
Basically, what Apple had shipped was an OS that gobbled up RAM and only ran on the high-end machines, such as the Mac II (only if you had installed the upgrade PMMU chip) or the IIx. These setups cost $8,000 for a base system. The 8Mb of recommended RAM was enormously expensive in 1988. Why would users buy it? It made their hardware slower and their massive memories useless. Whereas MacOS 7.1 would only use up 2 Mb, A/UX would gobble up all 8 Mb when the MacOS environment was running. To it's credit, one of the good things that A/UX did do was virtual memory. It would dynamically allocate memory to the MacOS environment as it was used. You still had to give all of the MacOS applications hard memory allocations, but the environment would expand itself as needed.
Oh, there was one more thing. When it was first released, most "classic" MacOS applications wouldn't run in the MacOS environment. The MacOS environment required that applications be "32-bit clean". In the System 6 days, there were many apps that weren't- including many popular ones. This problem would pop up when system 7 came along, but by then most developers had revved their apps to be clean. Before system 7 was released, it became well known if you could get your app to run on AU/X, you could run on 7. Thus, A/UX did serve as an important development tool.
That's all I have right now.
I remember dropping textures onto 3D solids back in 93, but at that time it wasn't BeOS. Matter of fact, I distinctly remember it was Nextstep running Renderman....
It was targeted towards "high-end" servers, though why you'd be running them on one of those Macs is beyond me (the older Macs weren't very fast, even for their time). Does that description sound familiar?
No, it doesn't sound familiar, because that's not what Apple's saying. You need to pay more attention to what Apple does say. This was true of Mac OS X *Server,*, but OSX Server was more a technology demonstration and a way of getting some extra revenue than a separate product. What this article was about was Mac OS X, which is a replacement for the Mac OS and intended to be put on all Macs starting next year.
OS X looks nothing like Unix from the user perspective, and is not for "high end" machines.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks for A/UX was the resistence of Apple users to switching to Unix, even an Apple Unix.
That's because A/UX was transparently Unix, while OS X hides the command line completely. The standard install will likely not even include a command line utility.
Because Apple is using BSD code, and because ever-increasing numbers of Unix users come from Open Source Unix backgrounds, the success of OS X is largely tied to the success of Open Source.
What?
I really don't know what to say here, since it's obvious you don't have a clue what you're talking about. OS X was developed almost entirely by Apple engineers, and they have the resources to continue to do so even if the OSS community entirely ignores them.
And there users aren't going to adopt OS X because it's based on BSD. They're going to adopt it for the same reason they adopted systems 9,8, and 7-- because it's the next upgrade to their operating system. The fact that it's Unix under the hood has no negative effect on its attractiveness to Mac users unless Apple doesn't hide those underpinnings well enough.
But if OSS fails, where will the Unix gurus be?
Who cares? "Unix gurus" are not a target Apple market. They sell primarily to graphics professionals, education, and home users. None of those users give a rat's ass about users, and most of them probably won't know a command line if it bites them.
Apple is not hitching themselves to Open Source. They are taking advantage of the OSS movement in hopes of cutting development costs and improving their product. They are also contributing valuable code to the OSS community. But they will be able to get along just fine if OSS flops.
I don't find it that amazing. It's really hard work, involves a need for real research (the sort that requires real money) and I don't think that "someone in our own open source community" is up to it. There's a reason why most people use commercial OS's, and that, I'm afraid, is because they're the only ones an average human can use right now.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
Once the Darwin level is ported to intel, most of the remaining higher level items (the rest of MacOS X) would follow with relative ease.
I always figured that one of the big problems with porting mac-os-anything to the Intel platform would be that Apple tightly controls hardware. The drivers for my Diamond MX300 sound card have to come from somewhere, I don't think you can just magically throw Quartz and everything else on "Darwin for Intel" and play Mac QuakeIII.
-Erik
-Erik2.*That looks differently.
"Look" (like "be" or "seems") is a copula verb; this is very different from "think"! (think of the sentences "That is different" vs. "*That is differently")
Semantically, "different" in sentence 1 modifies "that", not the verb. In "Think different", "different" modifies the verb.
- "Adverb", in most traditional grammars, is just a category to throw in words the grammarians don't know how to classify into other categories. Lots of weird words get classified as adverbs that a linguist wouldn't put together in the same category. For example, among adverbs there are sentence-modifying words like "occassionally", verb phrase modifiers like "quickly", adjective modifiers like "very", which are syntactically and semantically different.
- Morphosyntactically speaking, many linguists consider that "true adverbs" are just a special kind of adjective, with a special inflection. Morphology is not my specialty, so I can't tell you much there.
- Many languages lack adverbs distinct from adjectives.
- Even with that, in languages that do have adverbs, it is very common in the spoken varieties to use adjectives in their place. In Spanish, for example, I'd more normally say "El corre rápido" (He runs fast) instead of "El corre rápidamente" (He runs "fastly").
- This last thing happens also in French and many other languages-- adjectives are used in speech where grammar says that adverbs should occur. You've run into a phenomenon of language change that occurs independently in many languages.
My advice: take it easy. Grammar rules are supposed to help communication; they are a means, not an end, and it is perfectly justifiable to break them if your target audience will accept it.I'm really antsy to hear some resolution to the question of how much BSD userland will find its way into the final release of OSX.
There have been conflicting reports as to whether there will be an option to install a BSD "layer" under Aqua accessible by the user. Everybody's in agreement on the kernel, but nobody seems to know how many BSD commands will be available to the user.
Anybody have thoughts?
-carl
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
Hear, hear. Give us pre-emptive multitasking first, and make it work, then do something with the UI.
In fact, I've become persuaded that changes to the UI should be left to third party shareware developers. All but one or two of the UI changes since System 6 that I use were first offered as shareware system extensions (pop-up folders being the only exception I can think of, and I could be wrong about that, too). And even then, some of the best ones from system 6 (who remembers Super Boomerang?) didn't make it into the OS until 8.5 or 9.0.
I'm with you here. Aqua is a clear sign that Apple isn't making the UI choices that we users want. Let the elite users make them, and let natural selection sort them out. Then implement the best in a future release.
Of course, this approach functions the other way, too: If Aqua really blows livid chunks, then third party system extensions will fix it. But to me, that appears to be an ass-backwards way to operate. It's got to be the more expensive way.
I can see the fnords!
Frankly, a lot of the English grammar rules you seem to cling so strongly to were just born out of irrational prejudices of academics that didn't know much about language, and wanted English to be more "logical" and "latinate".
Double negations? You'll find a few in Shakespeare. Split infinitives, stranded prepositions? I think you can find very ancient examples of these too. Also, as I say in another post, the traditional category of "adverb" is very vague, and in many unrelated languages you see trends torwards a collapse of the difference between adverbs and adjectives.
I don't want to imply that normative grammars are no good-- only that many grammar rules for English are plain stupid, and that many "grammatical mistakes" in English have been around for centuries, way before the rules to proscribe them were created.
This Beast, this NewOS we're talking about may end up being only a remote relative of Unix, but maybe it should feel like Unix, if not for any other reason, just to be able to use the huge codebase of C/C++ code out there that's already been written for Unix.
It may sound like I am contradicting myself here, but I am really not. Unix is full of crud right now. And there are two ways to get rid of crud: 1) What BeOS or AtheOS have done; clean slate, only use portions of Unix design that you like, 2) What Apple did: Use a Unix framework and layer-by-layer remove crud, replacing it with better code of your own.
Because of the dynamics of OSS one of the rules of CatB is, in order to get people to work on a big OSS project, that some of the functionality needs to be there: i.e. shit has to work, so people can play with it. The overhead to do method (1) this way becomes much, much greater than method (2).
So, let's look around: what components are out there in OSS Unix-land that one can re-use in this NewOS w/o compromising on technology or design?:
The Linux kernel and device drivers; or if you want to be more cutting edge, the GNU HURD kernel. I'd go with Linux, because of the widespread device support.
GCC
Qt and/or GTK on the GUI front. I dunno how dependant they are on X, or if they abstract X functionality well.
There are gaping holes in this, of course, but it's much easier to start with something that already works, modify it to work under your very best design, and as components and functionality come in, you can potentially remove the old, aging components and put in new ones (e.g. swap the Linux kernel with a Mach-derived microkernel). I actually think most of this can be done starting with a Linux distro.
BTW, I don't want a great *consumer* OS. I think that distinction (between consumer and business, server and workstation) is bogus. A good design should scale; it should handle being a server just as well as being a workstation for Mom.
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
there are alot of issues with DP4 that need to be address (particularly the Dock) but it's getting better and more Mac-like. there is even a utility out now that gives you back the MacOS Apple menu. Look here: classicmenu.
--
Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
Yes, basically - although I'd guess OSX does it more transparently.
Many amiga C/C++ compilers were set up to compile code that deliberately emulated unix-style linking by doing all the OpenLibrary() calls in a segment executed before main(), in effect making any possible linking failures happen at program startup, rather than bombing out 15 minutes into using the program. Macro Asm programmers, by contrast, tended to only open the librarys when needed - more memory-efficient that way.
It depended on whether the programmer thought it was more useful to have (a) a partially funcional program, or (b) nothing at all if the program wasn't fully functional.
In unix, you have the same choice ( via dlopen() ) , but the default is the (b) rather than the (a). This fits in with the unix philosophy of stringing together small tools with pipes, since a partially functional tool might feed garbage output into the next in the chain.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
telnet 127.0.0.1
MacOS X 4.4 BSD
login:
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
I think that the release of MAC OS X is going to stir up the media a lot when it is released. Its great that a company is taking an open source project and using it for their commercial software. If things turn out right, peolpe could realize the potential of open source software. Python, IPMASQ, starcraft
I'm pretty sure you can already do this.
I don't do anything repeatedly enough to warrant scripting in those applications, but, with Photoshop for example, you can send it a "do script [name its native script]" and it'll do it. Since MacPerl supports quite a few AppleEvents, you could probably kludge around the problem by, say, having Perl activate Photoshop and Smile or the Script Editor, then pause, then type and run a "do script", and save the output onto the desktop, where Perl or AppleScript (or Python) could dispose of it however you like. Since I'd never do this I haven't really figured it out (obviously!), but it seems possible.
And, though the name escapes me, I know there's a telnet-ish Mac script-by-web program available for free or cheap that supports whatever scripting additions are present in the box you're talking to, so it's very extensible. (Check out macscripter.net (I think; might be "-scripters") for hundreds of OSAXen.)
MacPerl responds to "do script [name]" too, so you can add however many layers of handoffs you need to make it run smoothly (or just more fun).
Wish I had an excuse to try it!
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
I've to say that MacOS X is the first OS since BeOS to really make me want to drop Window$. It looks sleek, is nicely designed and powerfull. I'm very glad Apple didn't just put a GUI on top of X, which would have really been a mess. And with Applie behind it there should be plenty of apps (not just the unix apps like Apache or vi, but apps my grandmother can use everyday)
If you were getting paid to come up with a new slogan for Apple, would you pick one that pisses of every English major who hears it?
If you answered yes, you are a fucking moron.
Are these the same english majors who think we should apply Latin grammer to english?
Really though, you're going way overboard. I know an english major who likes the whole Apple campaign. Mabye it's because she is so smitten with her iMac.
tcd004
= Here are my Microsoft and AICN parodies, where are yours?
What I've heard is that Apple had A/UX for about the same reason that Microsoft had Xenix (IIRC).
For a while the govt. wouldn't buy computers unless they could be POSIX compliant. So people who wanted Macs were allowed to buy them because they could run A/UX on it. They didn't, but that's what they had to do to get around the restriction.
More recently, this has been lifted. Which is not necessarily good - I like the idea of POSIX - but that's why A/UX vanished into deep space.
This is what I heard anyway.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
BSD (Berkeley) is a traditional flavour of linux.
SYSV (System 5) is the other traditional flavour. (AT&T)
So... Linux is a hybrid of both. Solaris is SYSV. Old SunOS4.0 was BSD. All the freeBSD's are BSD.
And...
The new Mac OS-X is built on top of a BSD kernel. (Note, saying it's BSD doesn't mean it's the exact same code, just that it's descended from BSD)
So.. the reason OSX is a *big* deal is because it *IS* unix, with a Mac desktop, that can run Mac apps. And also.. unix apps. And they open sourced their kernel...
Derived from solaris? Where did you get that crazy idea?
SunOS in the pre-solaris days (before 5.0) was BSD flavoured. It was derived from BSD. BSD predates it.
When sun started calling it solaris (SunOS 5.x + Xsun +Openwin) SunOS was sysv.
BSD was absolutely not derived from solaris....
Uhh... they could run most of those too.. for years now......
Oh. Did you miss the fact that Mac OS-X *IS* macOS and *IS* Unix, at the same time? Oh...
Let me tell you.. if windows was a) built on top of a unix kernel, with real normal gnu userland tools, and source and b) had a proprietary windows interface on top of it, that was also x compliant, and supported win32... the world would be in trouble.
If MS did this.. WHOAH!
More self-fulfilling prophecy. No one develops for the Mac, so no one uses the Mac, so why should I develop for the Mac? Hmm, maybe if you did develop for Macs, there'd be more software that would attract more users, that would attract more developers.
If platform X (whatever that is) is the superior platform on its own merits, take the leap and build for it! Why just follow the herd? Think for yourself. Think Different.
Back on topic, though, the idea of loadable bundles is very cool. It sounds much more extendable and flexible than current methods in either Windows or Linux. If it works as seamlessly as it sounds it will, the user experience should be terrific.
Constitutionally Correct
lazy linking has been around for a while, and it's known on the MacOS as "weak linking." The article goes into it for a bit, but the basic idea is that no shared object is loaded until referenced.
What the article didn't talk about is this: you can check at runtime to see if a library is present, and perform or not perform actions depending.
For example, take PAM. Right now, you have to compile for PAM or not for PAM (or DES, or whatever). Aggravating. With weak linking, you'd link against PAM, then check at runtime to see if PAM is around.
The benefit of this is that you can drop PAM on the box anytime, and bang...PAM is used. This assumes, of course, that the developer does the check every time instead of caching the result. Oh well.
Essentially, it makes shared libraries the equivalent of plug-ins. If the functionality is present, it's used. If not, then no problem. All you need are the headers and stub libraries, and you're off & running.
Not that I am an expert on BSD, but having done a little investigating it appears that most (if not all) of the current BSD distributions can run most Linux code, in some cases better than Linux due to the memory management advantages BSD has over Linux. Therefore depending on how much of the BSD code is implemented in OS X I would guess it is entirely feasable that it will be capable of running most Linux apps.
You can already send apple events to applications using perl with the Mac::AppleEvents and optionally the Mac::Glue modules.
Writing a command line program to send that information is possible. And those tools could be run by a shell.
The Mac Finder continuously polls the directories on disk for any of its open windows, looking for new or changed documents. Any program displaying files can do this. Some programs are either poorly written and forget to, or are designed to be more efficient and don't waste the CPU cycles.
>Has Apple learned anything from A/UX? Perhaps. But they likely forgot it.
one thing they learned would by running classic macos as a unix process
>One of the biggest stumbling blocks for A/UX was the resistence of Apple users to switching to Unix, even an Apple Unix.
I thought one of the biggest stumbling blocks was the fact that a/ux was based on system V and as such had to pay at&t or whoever. the $600-800 price tag probably turned off a lot of mac users. The 60 pounds of documentation probably turned off others. Others were probably turned off by the fact that a/ux wasnt taken very seriously by apple(look at how few macs it'll run on and though a/ux was updated i think twice the 'classic mac' was never updated - stuck at system 7.0.1)
from the a/ux about box : "It's clever, but is it art?"
It is not the individual pieces that are proprietary. I was under the impression and you seem to more about it than I do that only Apple could get the G3 and G4 series of processors and I thought the old clone makers were not getting the the inside specs to make the system 100% compatible. I thought this was the reason that people are not making Mac clones anymore (along with the fact that they can no longer bundle a pre-installed OS with the thing). If this is not the case, please correct me further. I actually enjoy gaining new information as opposed to being one of those people that only wants to hear what they already know. That is why many of my comments were posed as questions.
I also never asserted that the Mac OS X was NOT the better mousetrap. The deal was that I was asserting that we in the Open Source community could take the big leap inspired by the new OS to think out of the box and build something revolutionary as opposed to just something that does what the current range of OS GUI interfaces do.
ACK
Ahem. I understand English grammar, and its capitalization rules, quite well thank you. However, I resent your inclusion of me into your little supercilious group. You can bait and troll all you want, but leave me out of it.
Oh, and by the way, if you fully commanded the basics of English grammar, you'd know that any word that serves to modify a verb is, by definition, an adverb no matter how it's spelled. The element of style abused by "Think Different" is called usage. And sometimes people do indeed intentionally abuse style in the name of art. It may not be good art, but since when have we denied artistic license to marketdroids?
I can see the fnords!
>i am the most l33t mac user in the universe coz
>my mac dual boots into Linux and uses psh (PrimOS
>shell-like)
Damn. For a second I thought I had found someone else who uses the Perl shell, currently at 0.0.8.
Actually, if you look at Xfree86, KDE and Gnome, it is amazing what can be done in an open source project.
That is the very reason that I do not understand why big players like RedHat, Caldera, VaLinux and Corel don't pick their projects and put some serious money and extra man power in not just getting Gnome or KDE up beyond what other operating systems are currently doing at this time in terms of interface. More so they could all pool money to improve different aspects of Xfree86. Listen I know that RedHat has supported Gnome but even this fine project has a ways to go before it becomes more than a fine interface for X windows and becomes a truly revolutionary interface moving the whole interaction between user and the system forward.
BTW, my wife seems to have no problem getting around in KDE. I don't personally like the interface but she does seems to be able to use it quite well. I believe that the distributions have a ways to go before they understand the needs of the end user instead of the usual geek/server crowd. After a bit of setup, she was playing Eric's Ultimate Solitaire, using KICQ, getting email through XcMail, dialing out through Kppp and
getting online to her favorite boards to post with Netscape.
ACK
In fact, the slogan makes the cut grammatically when you phrase it like the bumper sticker: Think Snow. The slogan asks not that you "think differently" but that you should think of a Macintosh as "Different". Think Advertising.
-- See you on the Funway!
Thanks, I'd never seen a C compiler that did all the openlibrary() calls at the start, I always did them by hand and opened pretty little requesters saying "You need this library".
Another question though. With the Amiga's OpenLibrary () call, once the library was opened, you could just call functions in that library as if they were just normal functions. Can you do this with dlopen (), or do you need to go through the process of looking up the function before using it?
/me decides to read man dlopen later
Oh, my. A 168-page 'overview.' Yes, I could either read it to acquire the clue, or you could print it out and use it to beat a clue into me. I think the latter would be faster.
[/sarcasm] Nonetheless, I am sincerely grateful for the link.
I can see the fnords!
1.
:^) While you may balk about the fact that the new system is based on Mach/BSD, and further based on OpenStep, there's a lot of room to work here. The finished system probably won't resemble UNIX. BeOS has some charateristics that make it vaguely resemble a UNIX system, beyond the POSIX-compliant libraries, even, but it's not a UNIX system.
>Mac users do not want unix. They want a stable MacOS.
(snip)
2.
>They do not want to "log in" to their powerbook.
1. Mach is a kernel. BSD is a kernel. It's a vehicle for building an operating system. MacOS has a kernel, quite frankly. I've been told Win98 has a kernel, although it's a bit cobbled together.
The point is, a UNIX kernel != UNIX.
2. Who's "they"? Personally, I'd want this functionality--unless someone uses some sort of rescue boot disk, then one would have to log in to get this.
I don't know a damn thing about MacOS X, but if they have an inittab file, and if they use init scripts, I bet it'd be a laughably simple exercise on their part to make an account called "dumbuser" and have the rc.M file su as dumbuser, then start the GUI. It's possible to do this with X11R6 under Linux (although I've never done it; I like to have multiple accounts on my home machine. One for me, one for my wife.)
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
They do not want to "log in" to their powerbook.
They will not necessarily have to "log in" to their powerbook(s), iMac(s), or G4-MP PowerMac(s). There is currently an option in the root preferences instructing the machine to login as a specific user on startup.. This is fine for home users, but at a university, or in a business the login window is a nice addition to the OS.
My Mac User Group got to see a demo of DP3 a while ago, and what impressed me was how stable it was, even at only a developer preview. More stable than the current Mac OS? Definitely. Read the Ars Technica article: The author notes that Mac OS X's classic environment feels faster and more stable than good ol' OS 9. The features do indeed need work, but the OS is very stable. I, for one, can't wait.
Every few months, there's a big Apple event, such as Macworld or WWDC and Apple spends a week talking about Mac OS X and/or new hardware. Both of these are unique and interesting and can make for five days straight of Apple-related stories. If you're not interested in them, block Apple-related stories in your user profile.
1) Mac OS is a WORK IN PROGRESS. Don't loose sight of that - when you read a RUMOR on something considere the sources -- also jumping to conclusions is beneficial to no one and only serves to futher confuse the issues and facts.
2) MacOS X is built on BSD. Apple took BSD and build a "Darwin", a new BSD variant. This is why is is opensourced.
Atop Darwin, you have Quartz (2D Graphics), Open GL, Clasic/Carbon, Cocoa, java, Aqua, etc
3) Terminal, the interface to the MacOS X command line, etc will be there for the "l33t" users who want them, BUT Apple strongly expresses that a no time shall the user ever be REQUIRED to interact with the low lever command line interfaces of MacOS X. So what does the mean?
This means, that Apple does not want me and other developers to expose that level to the end user in our programs. This is a HI (Human Interface) guidline. I could write an app that is fully command line based and sell it if I wanted to. The command will stay. All of BSD will be there and what you don't have you can download and compile till you puke your guts out.
4) Apple is even building their own command line tools -- there are tools to compile applescript at the command line, and even the new project Builder is a GUI to gcc, gdb, jdk, etc -- so all that kewl BSD underpinning is being leveraged by a great GUI.
Basically alot of the kewl AQUA stuff is built atop a unix command line util.
5) AQUA is a Work in Progress. I attended the Aqua Feedback Forum at WWDC 2000 and let me tell you that ALOT OF DEVELOPERS had ALOT to say about what they did and did not like in DP4. I would fully expect either DP5 (if they make a DP5) or the public beta to have alot of these suggestions in place.
They were VERY interested in the feed back, it was video taped, and there was an Apple Rep feverously typing notes into his powerbook.
Of the record alot of the Apple developers said they are listening and working on all suggestions. Just make sure they are sent to Apple.
For example- complains, suggestions, etc for the MacOS X Human Interface (AQUA) should go to:
HI@apple.com
Send them email -- don't rant about it in a public forum. Apple may or may not read it.
Can you actually expect them to spend hours trolling the net for suggestions and feedback!?
6) between now and the PUBLIC beta is the time the give Apple Feedback. When they release the public beta you will have EVERY oppertunity to give them feedback on what you like and do not like. If you fail to then you have no reason to complain.
It is much like you complaining that George W Bush is elected president, when you did not even go out and vote.
[btw i hate both Gore and Bush, but I trust Bush less than Gore]
7) Apple told every developer over and over in session after session to GIVE FEEDBACK TO APPLE. If WE (developers) do not give them feed back we are just bitching to the wrong folks. We need to tell THEM - NOT /., etc.
8) I would suspect that Intel / Window users might have pleasant surprises in store for them after MacOS X is shipped to consumers.
You see, MacOS X could be ported to other processors. Once the Darwin level is ported to intel, most of the remaining higher level items (the rest of MacOS X) would follow with relative ease.
9) I would suggest those of you who want to see MacOS X get ahold of a someone who has it -- I am sure you can find a Mac user with MacOS X lurking around somewhere.
Sit down, open a terminal window, download something GNU and try to gmake, gcc, etc it.
10) Get involved in the MacOS X Public when it comes out -- and remember to give Feedback, Feedback, Feedback.
Enjoy.
You don't need UNIX gurus for OS X! Only OS X Server for that matter which will shortly be an EOL product after Jan 2001. OS X's increased success may have something to do with OSS, but Apple will get along fine if OSS fails. Remember Aqua and Quartz are still proprietary and Apple will still pay people to develop the OS... even the OSS portions. A/UX wasn't designed to be that easy nor was it designed to replace MacOS. MacOS X is designed to replace the MacOS.
Ah, problem is that all those win apps don't follow a human interface standard, and would not be adopted at the rate the the developers would like.
just the opposite should happen. Develop in cocoa and the apps port to windows (and bsd?).
Hell, develop in java and swing. Better java apps are coming out. I've seen them in development. Just because corel couldn't do java office apps, doesn't mean that others could not develop good java apps for other software niches.
Let me tell you.. if windows was a) built on top of a unix kernel, with real normal gnu userland tools, and source and b) had a proprietary windows interface on top of it, that was also x compliant, and supported win32... the world would be in trouble.
Let me assure you that the only trouble would be the drop in productivity as all windows developers experienced simlutaneous spontaneous orgasms.
Trust me on this one.
--Shoeboy
(former microserf)
If you read the article before reading the posts about that article, you'll be better informed.
The Ars article that this Slashdot story is about is part 4 in a series. Reading 1 through 4 pretty much makes you a Mac OS X expert.
Of course, technically you're right. But what about the expression, "think big?" There's a vernacular precedent for using adjectives as nouns. And it certainly makes sense to nearly every English-speaker who hears it. There's no need to call anyone "a fucking moron." Think broad.
>Replace "a lot of supposed intellectuals" with
>"everyone who understands the basics of english
>grammar" and you have my point.
English grammar is a myth! It is a total and complete myth that English has a formal structure! The concept of "English grammar" is nothing more than retroactive continuity by those who fear something that cannot be predicted or described in minute detail. Formal grammar is a dying holdover from the days of scientific determinism.
My god, why the hell can't people understand that if your words can convey your meaning, it doesn't matter *how* you convey it? Language is a means, not an end. It is merely a tool to be used, not a law to be upheld or an idol to be worshipped on a pedestal!
I will boldly split infinitives! I will end a sentence with a preposition! I will dangle participles! I will do all these things because I damn well feel like talking like a human being! If you can understand what I'm saying, then the job of language is accomplished!
EOR
But I agree on your other point, the job of that ad campaign *was* to sell computers to morons. Anyone who buys one gets what they deserve. I feel sorry for the folks who have to use them at work.
Richard Stallman, in the GNU manifesto.
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Visit
Different doesn't modify the verb, it's the object of the verb (that is, in this case, a noun). That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
............ i am the princess you are the cheese
AFAIK this has been theoretically possible since 7.5.1, thanks to OSA (what many folks refer to as AppleScript.)
:^)
AppleScript is more than a scripting language; it's also a framework for allowing scripting languages (tcl can be used; others can too, although I've not done this) to interface with apps.
Heh, I believe that the former production manager of the paper I work for has something set up similar to what you describe. Not from a Web browser, but he can be at his laptop anywhere and simply start fiddling around with our machines. Interesting possibility, though, of having all these things built into the system, rather than going with 3rd party software....
...maybe we'll see an anti-trust lawsuit against Apple then. Unfair bundling of Internet-based software.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
But, yes, Apple's method should avoid the need
to ever reboot (at the expense of disk space).
That's the beauty of it -- at this point in
computing history, I'd argue that disk space
is far cheaper than time wasted rebooting.
This is most likely not relevant at all, yet I thought it was kind of funny (= If you browse the AppKit IDE at Apple'a developer documentation, you read straght from a framewok, look at this:
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/System
- Knut S.
Problem is that you're not actually making changes in MacOS 9 to make it MacOS X; that would be impossible.
Instead, you're adapting NeXT, and changing it to be more Mac-like. Thus the Dock, which I believe is a NeXT feature, replaces several different MacOS 9 features that were never written for NeXT.
D
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I suspect the reason that Unix and Win2k have accumulated so much cruft is that they have tried to be all things to all people. Apple can afford to strip away the crap because they know their target audience. Mac users don't want a bizarre GUI which runs on one machine and displays on another. They don't want obscure text formatting languages which don't let you specify how your document should look. They don't want to be able to run scientific simulations they wrote in FORTRAN in the 1970s. They want a Mac. Not a Beowulf cluster, not a palmtop, not a workstation. A simple, functional personal computer.
The day free software developers are prepared to abandon scalability is the day they start writing the free MacOS X.
The dock functionality is available to developers. Go write AppleMenu.app, ApplicationMenu.app and ControlStrip.app. Then kill the dock. If that's what users want, that's what they'll use.
I support Apple removing bloat from the "Desktop." In the framework of OS X, it makes more sense to have multiple slim applications dedicated to user-desired functionality.
I think that if you go around and check out what people understand when faced with "think different", you will find that they interpret different as a modifier of the verb, not as an argument of the verb.
Anyway, do you have any syntactic arguments to support that different is a noun? It would be a pretty bizarre occurrence, IMHO.
Is the lazy linking in the article the same way that the Amiga used to do linking?
There is an article on Low End Mac about how Slashdot is prejudiced against Apple news. Don't you all think that it's time for this religious war to end, now that Mac OS X is a flavor of Unix? Both camps have a lot to learn from each other. We should rally together to topple Windows domination.
a prophet on the burning shore
The point was they are making a big deal about facilities that already exist on other OS's being the default. Instead of getting load time failures you now need to make specific checks the first time you use any external libraries. Sure there are cases where you need some form of runtime loading. My point was these already exist and are a special case used somewhat rarely and they need programmer interaction if they should fail.
/DELAYLOAD linker option in VC should always be complemented in code by one of the failure methods that are documented.
I may have misunderstood, but I think your example of NT/9X is somewhat bogus. If the application is designed 'correctly' you should have a 'translation' library which is where the decisions are made. Depending on the install you should decide which 'translation' library to use. Your application can then load the appropriate library at load time (maybe what you meant by run-time). Your application will fail to load in this case if it cannot find either dll. With this lazy linking scheme the application will load then the programmer will need to explicitly make checks to see if the library exists before making use of the library calls. BTW the
I see this as the same kind of stupid thinking that left C programmers with the need to check return codes everywhere. How many application programmers out there are going to make a check before the first use of a library (that is always suppost to be there) to see if it exists? If there is some kind of exception handling mechanism defined how many applications are going to be able to gracefully fail (and allow the user to resume what they were doing) when one of an application's critical libraries is missing?
Again I make the claim that it is better to fail before the user has done any work then it is to start up, let the user get some work done, and then fail because the application cannot handle a library load failure. In other words what advantage do they get by inverting the default(static/dyanamic load time binding optional dynamic runtime binding) behavior every other OS uses?
Why are OpenSource development tools the RightWay? Don't you people care about funtionality? I get Visual C++ for an absurdly low student discount, and I greatly prefer it to using KDevelop, because frankly, VisualC++ is much better. I also prefer the MS compiler to gcc because it optimizes my code better! If you like the OpenSource ideal above all else, then an open compiler is the RightWay (TM) for YOU. If you like speed and functionality above all else, and the most funtional at the moment is a closes source app, then that app is the RightWay(TM) for you. I frankly don't like Linux, for example. It has a nice community, a nice development model, but it just rubs me the wrong way. I do, however, see why lots of people like it. I agree that the RightWay(TM) is whatever works for them. Linux, BSD, BeOS, whatever, they are all the RightWay(TM) if they work the RightWay(TM) for you.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The "loadable bundles" method of modularization seems far superior to the use of DLLs that need to be registered, and require the computer to be rebooted, in order to install.
Great, glad you think so. Remember that because it is going to come up later in my post.
The new UI is good-looking, but the lack of customization features is disappointing.
I think the UI will be very customizable. From Ars: "You can still move or rename Extras.rsrc in DP4 and end up with a somewhat spotty approximation of the old platinum interface. No, I'm not going to screenshot it again. Yes, this means that themes will be possible. No, this does not mean that Apple will release the specs for such theme files."
I've also read info from previous DP's about modifying things such as window zooming (defaults write com.apple.finder ZoomRects NO) and using Interface Builder to directly edit Extras.rsrc. To me this all sounds like the novice users will have an endless variety of freeware/shareware products to customize their UI, and more advanced users can do it themselves. It's a shame Apple can't please everyone, but the door is far from closed in this respect.
As always, Apple brings a great product to the table--nonetheless, I still refuse to buy one of their products.
I've heard it before and it makes no more sense today than on any other day.
In my mind, the benefits of an open system and a larger user base make the WinTel platform superior for product development. If Apple were smart, they would try to make it easier to port Windows applications to OS X.
Mac users are not hurting for apps. If ones entire platform choice is based on a specific software package, then by all means choose accordingly, but otherwise lack of software is not a problem for Mac users. Where there is a gap, one can always use Virtual PC. Most other popular aps like MS Office already have fine Mac versions. And why should the Mac OS always be a slave to poorly ported windows software? Instead of ports, Apple is trying very hard to serve the dev community by introducing better environments such as Cocoa.
From Ars Techica:
Previously known as the "Yellow Box", and as the OpenStep APIs before that, Cocoa is the most modern API in Mac OS X. The name change from Yellow Box to Cocoa is yet another horrible computer industry pun centered around the Java programming language. It's meant to highlight the fact that all of the Yellow Box APIs are now accessible via Java as well as Objective C.
Cocoa is NEXTSTEP's native API updated for the modern world and made accessible via Java. As any old NEXTSTEP developer will tell you (at length) if given the chance, NEXTSTEP had technology in the 1980's that's just beginning to appear in mainstream computing today: object reuse, sophisticated message passing, network transparency, runtime binding, clean separation of the UI from the "business logic", and platform independence."
I've read a lot of good about Cocoa, it may be worth a look.
In my mind, the benefits of an open system and a larger user base make the WinTel platform superior for product development.
More application developers write for Windows than for the Mac, and bridging the gap between the two platforms and promoting more software development would do far more to improve the Mac platform than simply making their machines technically superior.
Okay, you've already admitted that the loadable bundles are far superior to DLLs. And that the machines are becoming 'technically superior', so why not use some of this insight of yours and consider the possibility that these innovations along with all the other nice features under the hood of OS X could one day redefine the landscape of the computer world. Perhaps you should reconsider your quantity over quality way of thinking. Microsoft's time on top may not only be limited to the Justice Department's legal proceedings, with open source, and now OS X, the future of the modern OS and consumer choice has never been brighter.
BUT the real question is: Why isn't anyone in the Open Source World doing this? Why isn't anybody cleaning up the kruft that is Unix/Linux/BSD? I don't want any more
Apple has shown the way; bundles kick ass. XML for system configuration kicks ass. OSS can copy that design and improve on it:
XHTML for documentation; searchable, anotated documentation that can be tied back to the Internet --damn it, that's where "errata" belongs: as a link to my local manual; not buried in some "knoweledge base" somewhere.
Protected userland documents that are *not* tied to some a priori defined hierarchical structure. I want a 'soup' of documents I created that can be searched, sorted, sliced and diced by a local search engine.
I want a system that can introspect for a change; I want PHP to be able to find Apache by itself, configure it and itself (after asking of course) and, while it's at it, do the same for MySQL. OOP is not just for GUIs: System-wide, componentized configuration a la OSX extended even further.
X needs to be thrown away; just dump the whole ugly freaking mess. It belongs somewhere to access remote Unix machines, but it does not belong as the main layer under my GUI. BeOS (and AtheOS) has shown the way. Can we get the AtheOS GUI code and plug it in under Qt or GTK?
This is OSS: enough coders and the problems *will* be solved...
[Rant Off]
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
NAh remember MS stands by its own mediocre software and swears it is the better more efficient and more advanced way to do things. They actually believe a VMS-based OS such as NT is superior to UNIX-based OS's. Why does their OS still crash... (for semi-unprovoked reasons not legitimate hardware errors). If they could write one piece of code that would cause a STOP Error to become a WHOA error instead and warn the user to shutdown, and/or throw out the bad data completely and keep going from where they left off, they'd be able to have a leg up on UNIX. Why is it so hard to recover from an unhandled kernel exception for instance? Anyone with some useful data please reply to ajwdsp@cloud9.net. I think a goal for Linux should be to do the same thing in the rare event of an OOPs or Panic.
I'm so very tired of hearing this, from the pro-Mac camp as much as from anybody else. Has no one but me ever heard someone say think thin? Should they be saying thinly instead?
This is a marketing slogan, not a thesis paper. It does not have to be a complete sentence, nor does it have to be proper English. Witness Suzees All-Nite Donut Drive-Thru.
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get your war on
I don't understand what advantage this offers over the normal method of resolving all the symbols at load time, and then demand paging the actual library code into shared memory. The only significant difference I can see is this allows your application to startup and run for 5 minutes and then crash when it discovers that it cannot resolve a symbol because the library is missing. Under normal circumstances the application won't even start, if it can't find all of its libraries, which solves the problem before the user manages to get any work done that can potentially be lost.
On the other hand in the rare case that its a good idea to resolve a library at runtime most OS's provide the ability to 'dynamically' load libraries as needed with coder interaction. This allows the code path to deal with cases where the library fails to load. Look at the LoadLibrary/Ex call in the WIN32 SDK.
MacOS is arguably superior to Windows in user interface, and it's definitely far more attractive to look at. This may seem like a trivial point, but bear in mind that you likely spend more time with your computer nowadays than with your girlfriend, and I'd say few guys don't care about their girlfriend's looks.
The attraction of MacOS X is that it should bear the best attributes of its two parents: Reliability and stability from BSD, and ease of use and consumer accessibility for MacOS.
The way I see it, it can definitely give Windows a run for its money, since the essential applications are there (Office, Photoshop, etc), and the environment should be both slick and stable.
D
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I don't know much about the desktop use, but A/UX was used with their "high end" Appleshare Pro servers.
I found it pretty impressive. It definitely was a better server environment than MacOS was -- for one thing the Berkeley file system was way better than HFS. It was very easy to administer too. Plus it chock full of all the usual Unix goodness. You could run practically all the important open source stuff like Perl and gcc, and you could easily do the usual internet services like e-mail, ftp and DNS. Plus you had a nice GUI on top of a preemtively scheduled and memory protected OS. At the time was way ahead of anything in the Microsoft line up at the time in terms of sophistication. Performance was quite good considering the hardware. I think if A/UX were available on modern hardware and open sourced, it could be contender today.
Unfortunately, Apple flipped the bird at all its A/UX customers when they switched to PPC; they didn't port A/UX and didn't give Appleshare Pro users any kind of upgrade path. I spent weeks pleading with various people at Apple to cut some kind of deal with my Appleshare Pro customers. These were the customers that bought into the most expensive Apple stuff; I thought they should at least get the same upgrade rights that people who opted for lower end solutions did.
I can honestly say I've never met with such shocking indifference to customers in any company I've ever worked with. Their smug security that the customers would roll over and take whatever Apple dished out was absolutely stunning to behold. They didn't even have the decency to pretend to be embarassed or sympathetic. They simply didn't give a shit, even if the customer had just paid a premium for a dead end product on Apple's say so.
This was one of the seminal events that turned me from an Apple supporter to an Apple detractor. Later it became clear that they extended the same attitude towards their developers as well. I could go on for pages about the bad things they did to developers.
Today I wouldn't develop for the Apple platform unless I could do it as a free side effect of developing for Win32 or Unix. Maybe it doesn't make sense to hate a corporate entity; maybe everyone's different over there. But I definitely have a once-burned-twice-shy feeling about that company.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If you were getting paid to come up with a new slogan for Apple, would you pick one that pisses of every English major who hears it?
If you answered yes, you are a fucking moron.
Thanks,
--Shoeboy
(former microserf)
Anyone care to put together a list/explanation of the points I'm not quoting that support the "Bad News" part?
-----
---
For the longest time, I have been harassed by PC users, Linux advocates, and NT whiners. And now? Now I have a BSD-powered operating-system! Looks like it's my time to shine!
---
Dude, don't be an ass. You're giving the rest of us Mac users a bad name.
Everyone else:
We disown this guy, and claim no affiliation to him. If he shows up in our 'camp', it's only because he is tagging along. We'd much rather he went away.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
If you don't buy that, you can go for the implied "of things that are" in the slogan. Apple would want you to think in the same way, but of different things (like, say, a sealed chunk of amorphous plastic with an embedded monitor, a "keyboard," and a "mouse").
Hope this helps!
--
New empires...began ebbing and flowing all over the place like Moon Pies on a hot sidewalk.
..!!in an intastella burst i am back to save the universe!!
When he says that the success of OS X is tied to the success of OSS, that implies he is saying one of two things: either they will run out of developers if OSS dies, or that they will run out of users if they don't embrace the open source model. Since it was not clear what he meant exactly, I wanted to address both pissibilities.
Besides, his quote above seems to imply that OS X was developed as open source in the first place, when in fact all the important pieces were written by Apple (or Next) privately and only open sourced after they were largely complete.
Fine. You get a dock for free. That's great. But don't tell me it's a replacement for a pop-up folder full of aliases. By doing so, I'm given the impression that Apple (i.e., Jobs) doesn't care about the user experience and would rather promote a pet feature. I use pop-up folders heavily. I have a desktop aliases pop-up folder with almost 100 application aliases. Some actually point to applications. Some are preferences files or documents that open applications. But generally they are there so that I can drag and drop icons onto the alias, just as if I had a cluttered desktop full of application icons. And it allows me to maintain my applications and documents in a sensible directory arrangement.
Now tell me how I am going to get this arrangement out of OSX? The dock doesn't appear to robustly support more than a dozen icons or so. And even if they do alter it, it still can't do that job as elegantly as a pop-up folder full of aliases. So I'll just go back to my old System 7 habit of a desktop full of pictureless icons tightly stacked at the bottom of the desktop. (Heck, why am I complaining? I can't even get that kind of efficiency out of my NT workstation.)
I can see the fnords!
They call it Sherlock.
Mac OS X
DB
Ever since the NextStep buyout by Apple this has seemed like a good idea. The idea of an all-encompassing friendly GUI wrapped around an industrial based Unixed system. But why has it taken so long? The work needed to make it backwards compatible was done a looong time ago. Apple has needed a new OS for longer than I care to go into. So, why has it taken Apple so long to pick up the ball and really run with it?
Listen, I understand that the corporate emphasis has been on the success of making cute little boxes and all. I know that and it works for them. Yet, it is amazing that someone particularily in our own Open Source community hasn't taken the clue and built an easy to use windowing interface for the end-user and left the procrastinating Apple in the dust. As long as there is a terminal and GNU commands to be taken and Xfree86 for those who want to go bare-bones then the geeks out there will be happy. Apple for once has the right idea. Make the system easy to use for the end luser and built on top of a system made to take loads of punishment.
If they were not so tightly tied to their proprietary hardware I would say that Apple had a chance of taking some steam out of the Linux community. However, because they are so stingy with their technology they have no chance of that even if they give part of the OS away. I hope that the UI gives the GNOME and KDE folks some ideas.
I hope even harder that they will take the hint and try to move the interface forward as opposed to just copying the coolest ideas from this or that other OS. Our whole movement has been about making the better mousetrap. Maybe it is time to do one-upmanship on the Apple folks and reinvent the mousetrap all together.
ACK
That first hit of crack is generally on discount/free as well. The problem with MS dev tools is the same as the problem with most MS products, they are working hard to lock you into using only their products. In the case of development tools they have a history of also tweaking your code so that it is not portable or not as efficient on other platforms (see the whole J++ mess for great examples). In other words, by using their tools you become a co-conspirator in the march to MS world domination.
You speak about the 'RightWay(TM)' as whatever works for each person. I believe that the argument over which way is right is about what are appropriate criteria for determining what works best.
How much is code portability worth to you? How much is the peace of mind that the IDE vendor isn't sabotaging your code behind your back worth to you? Do you even think these things are issues?
DB
> The one thing that always bugged me about Macs was the lack of a terminal. OK, the GUI says the file is there, but I never believe anything till I see it in ls...
The beauty of the (Classic) Mac OS is that there is no CLI. The Mac OS and Finder are not simply shells ontop of a pre-existing substrate interface (ie, Windows Explorer, KDE/Gnome, etc...). If the Finder says it's there... it's really there! There's no way for it to get out of synch with the disk. (short of a disk error, and in that case a CLI utility would have the same problem)
This is the same issue that people seem to forget when they talk about customizability and installing/deinstalling software. (and what will be so beautiful if the "bundles" thing really takes off). On a Mac, if I don't want to run quicktime, I just (physically) drag the "Quicktime" files out of the extensions folder... Presto! Restart and Quicktime is deinstalled. Don't want Apple Guide? Do the same thing.. Built-in web sharing? Find-by-Content indexing? Automatic Time synchronization? Use the same method...
When something is designed to be used by a GUI, it will find alternate methods to do whaat You all might think can only be done efficiently by a CLI.
Sure, grep is great, but can you toss out 24 arbitrary uniquely-named documents in a 256-item folder all at once with rm ?
Don't diss the interfaces... they each have their advantages...
------------
"...and Maddest of all, to see Life as it Is, and not as it Should Be."
Well good for you. In this case (since you need to develop palm apps) gcc is the RightWay(TM) for you, now isn't it?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
Reflection & Cybernet
Oh, I agree-- making it a separate application is better than integrating it into the finder. But that still means I have to run a little script to kill the dock every time I log in.
At a minimum, there should be an option to disable the dock cleanly. And they shouldn't take away the other UI features until they're sure they have a good improvement.
Just a quick note about pop-up folders: Yes, they were indeed a third-party development that was afterwards re-implemented by Apple. I don't recall the name of the utility, but I do distinctly remember installing it from a CD that came with either MacUser or MacWorld. The tabs were customizable in size and appearance, and I remember including my modified tabs in an OS 7.6.1 screenshot I sent to one of the old-school customized Mac screenshot galleries. (I believe it was webintosh.com, circa 1996, now macobserver...)
Whatever. =)
< tofuhead >
It is still the dark of night.
</lib is bogus. libc is bogus. /etc is bogus. password files are bogus. /dev is bogus. There are huge assumptions built into the codebase about a number of fundamentally bogus things, from the bogus filesystem hierarchy to the bogus libraries to... you guessed it... the necessity of a command line and a terminal. And curses, no less! >>
First off, the directory heirarchy has been rearanged into something that makes much more sense. Second off, you never need to access a commandline in the upcoming MacOS X. Period. End of discussion.
The commandline is there only for those who want it. ALL administrative tasks can be handled (and indeed, are BEST handled) from the GUI.
<<Not that I don't love Unix anyway. Not that I don't use it every day. But if you think millions of Mac users are going to start loving it because Steve Jobs tells them to... you are going to have to give me your dealer's phone number. >>
From the perspective of a Mac user, not that much has changed. You have Aqua, and you must log in, and there's more stuff that you can configure but that's about it.
<<Or is some of it still going to leave people having fits? >>
Apple has done a remarkable job of hiding what little is left of "Unix" under the GUI.
<<These "little details" matter. It needs to be disabled by default, in acknowledgement of the fact that an overwhelming majority of users won't use it, and could in fact get bitten by it. A million little details occur to me. Multi-user computers are fundamentally more complicated than single-user computers. That's complexity no one should have to put up with unless they ask for it. And even if they demand it, woe to the person who should offer them the unix security model in return. >>
First off, the added complexity of having to log into a Mac is trivial. You double-click your name, and type or speak your password. Anyone who has ever used an e-commerce site is familiar with the concept.
Second off, while under the hood a multi-user system is fundamentally different, the end user experience need not be very different.
My parents are using an iMac with MacOS 9, set up for multi-user login. They have no problems with it. They log in, and then from then on it is just a Mac.
-JF
MrJoy.com -- Because coding is FUN!
Would you buy hardware manufactured by "Suzees All-Nite Donut Drive-Thru?"
--Shoeboy
(former microserf)
And READ THIS PDF
This is the Same Manual that was handed out in printed form with MacOS X DP4 at WWDC to developers.
It is a GREAT read for those of you who have a clue -- or want one ;-)
Anyone gonna get this one right? BSD is older than Linux by a decade and a half, and there's a lot of story there that it doesn't seem like anyone still remembers...
:-) ). At that point, people started banging on the Unix kernel all over, and the Open Source culture as we know it began.
Okay, flames off. Grab some cocoa and rally 'round, and ol' Uncle Brian gonna tell you about some other guy named Bill and his friends...
Unix didn't really become Unix until John Lions wrote the Lions book (and any Slashdotter who doesn't have a copy should be shaken mercilessly until enough money to either buy or photocopy a copy falls out; about US$30 should do it for a legit copy, and a trip to Kinko's would be much cheaper, not to mention totally appropriate if you know the story
It's easy enough with all the Linux hype these days to lose sight of where it all began, but here's the story: back around '76, when AT&T shipped Unix V6, the University of California at Berkeley got its hands on a source license and its students started hacking away at it. Somewhere along the way, BSD supplanted TENEX and its proprietary brethren as the OS running the backbone of the then-ARPANET; as a result, it became THE wide-area network OS for the eighties. Software such as the BSD TCP/IP stack (still the standard outside the Linux world) and sendmail are still at the core of much of the net, and most of it came out of Berkeley.
Along the line, many of these students struck out on their own (most notably Bill Joy at Sun), and when they went off to build their workstation systems, they took BSD with them, thus bringing about systems such as SunOS and HP/UX, as well as several that are now long forgotten; not only was the BSD license in effect a donation to the public domain, the code itself was something that the engineers themselves had developed, which was more than could be said about the multiple permutations of Unix coming out of Murray Hill, NJ. BSD even came to the PC, in the form of Bill and Lynne Jolitz' 386BSD, a precursor to the modern BSD designs.
The modern BSD era began in 1994, when UC-Berkeley's Computer Science Research Group, disbanded a few years earlier, regrouped to finish the BSD story at Berkeley. The release they made was called 4.4BSDlite, and was actually quite widely available in bookstores at the time. It consisted of a CD-ROM containing a mostly-complete AT&T-free source tree (with a few unreplaced but critical AT&T files removed) and four books containing man pages and other docs.
This event is what created two of the four modern BSD variants (FreeBSD and netBSD); OpenBSD was a fork off of netBSD that stressed security concerns, while the newest major variant, Darwin/MacOS X, came out of Apple's post-acquisition merging of NeXT's Mach/BSD hybrid OS and the 4.4lite codebase. BSD was also the base for OSF/1, the only major variant of which is Compaq's Tru64 Unix.
Today, I think BSD is viewed as a one-off, a newcomer in a world dominated by Linux. I suspect most of the history I've just related simply isn't all that well known anymore, and it certainly isn't media-friendly (what, no underdog-makes-good? No flashy technology? No David-vs.-Goliath? HACKERS?! Not interested, sorry...). This is a shame; that's why I'm posting this.
I think the reason that BSD persists today (apart from having about the best TCP/IP stack available) is because it's a link to the past that most commercial Unices haven't preserved. By running a BSD, you're expressing solidarity with some random hacker poring over a third-generation photocopy of the Lions book on a brand-new VAX twenty years ago. And hey, I prefer penguins to daemons myself, but that's a connection that we Linux users can't make.
Saying that BSD is related to Linux is wrong on many levels. Apart from both being open-source Unices, there is no real connection. Linux is its own beast, and I think over the long term it will eventually evolve away from its Unixness somewhat. Minix, now freed from its old copyright restrictions, will probably morph into an embedded-systems OS; I'd love to see it on a WinCE (MinCE?) unit, for example, since it's just about the perfect size. But BSD will still be carrying the Free Unix torch years from now. Long may it.
/Brian
ARSTECHNICA MAKE IMPORTANT POINT ABOUT HOW AQUA INTERFACE VERY GOOD FOR NEWBIES, BUT LIMIT EXPERIENCED USERS!! APPLE DOING RIGHT THING IN MAKING GLITTERY INTERFACE WITH FEW MOVING PARTS, BECAUSE HELP NEW USERS AND MAKE THEM NOT WORRY!! BUT NOT EVERYONE IS NEW USER!! MANY PEOPLE USE MACOS BECAUSE DETAILS OF MACOS BEHAVIOR MAKE WAYS THEY CAN USE FILES AND INTERFACE MOST EFFICIENTLY, AND SOME OF THEM LIMITED GREATLY BY LACK OF THINGS LIKE POPUP FOLDERS AND DRAG&DROP APPLICATION MENU!! OOG UNDERSTAND IMPORTANT NOT INCLUDE MANY CONFUSING FEATURES TO BLAST NEWBIES, BUT OOG NOT THINK NECCICARY REMOVE FUNCTIONALITY ALTOGETHER!! OOG THINK POSSIBLE MAKE DISTRACTING FEATURES DISABLED BY DEFAULT, BUT STILL THERE FOR POWER USERS!!
OOG THINK APPLE NEED TO REALIZE FLEXIBILITY IS IMPORTANT!! CONSISTENT USER INTERFACE IS GOOD, BUT SHOULD ALLOW USER TO CUSTOMIZE INTERFACE IF USER IS CAPABLE OF HANDLING IT!! IN LINUX, OOG HAVE ULTIMATE FLEXIBILITY BECAUSE DISPLAY INTERFACE OF X , WINDOW MANAGER, WIDGET LIBRARIES AND DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT ALL SEPERATE MODULAR PARTS!! OOG CAN CHOOSE WHAT NEEDED!! SOMETIMES PARTS NOT WORK TOGETHER AND ACT REDUNDANT, BUT OOG CAN TWEAK THEM TO MAKE WORK!!! OOG HAPPY!!
OOG WOULD LIKE APPLE TO MAKE FLEXIBILITY LIKE LINUX IN FINAL MAC OS X!! OOG SEE APPLE GOING SLIGHTLY THAT WAY BY MAKING DOCK SEPERATE APP!! BUT NOT ENOUGH SIMPLY MAKE FUNCTIONALITY POSSIBLE AND EXPECT THIRD PARTY DEVELOPERS TO FIGURE OUT ON OWN!! APPLE NEED HELP THIRD PARTY DEVELOPERS FIGURE OUT!! MAYBE EVEN RELEASE CODE FOR THINGS LIKE POP-UP WINDOWS AND APP SWITCHER TEAROFF UNDER ASPL, SO CAN BE PORTED TO MAC OS X EVEN THOUGH APPLE NOT PORT THESE THINGS!! APPLE NEED ANTICIPATE EXPERIENCED USERS ARE GOING TO NEED INTERFACE MORE IMMEDIATELY POWERFUL THAN AQUA!! APPLE ALSO NEED ANTICIPATE NOT EVERYONE LIKE HORIZONTAL LINES WITH ALTERNATING SHADES OF GRAY AND TEXT ON TOP!! OOG NOT LIKE THOSE LINES!! HURT HEAD!!! OOG NOT LIKE UNNECCICARILY PANED INTERFACES OR ANYTHING WASTING SCREEN SPACE!!! BUT AQUA BUILT AROUND IDEA OF USING ALL SCREEN SPACE POSSIBLE!! THIS GOOD FOR SOME PEOPLE, BUT STILL LOOK AT AQUA HURT OOG HEAD!!
APPLE NEED ANTICIPATE WHAT USERS WANT!! APPLE NEED REALIZE WHEN UPGRADE TO MAC OS X, MANY USERS TRY TO HACK INTERFACE!! APPLE NEED TO ACCOMODATE USERS AND RELEASE APPEARANCE THEME API, AND MAKE BEGINNINGS OF API FOR REPLACEMENT TO THINGS LIKE DOCK AND MAXIMIZE BUTTON TO PLUG INTO!! OTHERWISE MANY OF APPLE'S MOST EXPERIENCED CUSTOMERS WASTE LOTS OF TIME, AND THEN STILL LIVE WITH QUIRKY INTERFACE WITH STRANGE BUGS BECAUSE HACKS NOT DONE RIGHT, AND INCOMPATIBLE WITH SOME APPLICATIONS BECUASE HACKS WORK AROUND OS RATHER THAN GOING THROUGH IT!!!
AT VERY LEAST, IF APPLE GOING TO IGNORE NEEDS OF EXPERIENCED USERS IN INTERFACE, APPLE NEED TO GUIDE INTERFACE HACKERS!!! EVEN IF APPLE NOT IMPLEMENT THESE THINGS THEMSELVES, NEED TO ENSURE THAT INTERFACE HACKS GO SMOOTHLY!!! WOULD BE VERY SAD TO SEE QUARTZ DISPLAY TECHNOLOGY SHACKLED PERMANENTLY TO LIMITED INTERFACE!!! WOULD ALSO BE SAD TO SEE HUNDREDS OF MANHOURS WASTED IN REVERSE-ENGINEERING INTERFACE SO HACKS CAN BE MADE, SINCE TIME COULD BE MUCH BETTER SPENT IN MAKING SHAREWARE FOR NEW OS!! OOG THINK IT NOT IN BEST INTERESTS IF ALL OF PROGRAMMERS INTERESTED IN MAKING WORKAROUNDS FOR AQUA RATHER THAN MAKING SOFTWARE TO EXTEND OS X FUNCTIONALITY!!
OOG THE OPEN SOURCE CAVEMAN!!! OOG BREAK HEAD WITH OPEN SOURCE CD!!!
DLL's do not require the computer to be rebooted after an install. It is only required when upgrading a DLL that the system is using. But, yes, Apple's method should avoid the need to ever reboot (at the expense of disk space).
As far as registering DLL's, a name - location registry is essential to allow use the loading of DLL's by name(or GUID, in the case of COM). It's a great feature of DLL's, not a hinderance.
Not quite. Mach and the BSD kernel on OSX live in the same kernel address space. While the BSD kernel does use the Mach interfaces, it is a direct call, and not done through Mach IPC. If there is a speed hit at all in MacOSX it will be very minor.
This explanation comes straight from Apple, I was in attendance at the WWDC Mac OS X kernel session. They (Apple) realized that using a pure MicroKernel was great for academic research, it was not great for a Consumer OS.
For one thing--great review! I honestly can't remember the last time I read such a good review of a product as complex as OS-X.
Second--great product! The one thing that always bugged me about Macs was the lack of a terminal. OK, the GUI says the file is there, but I never believe anything till I see it in ls...
More--standard UNIX command-line tools. Powerful stuff like grep underneath a shiny GUI. A nice development IDE which runs on top of opensource development tools...which is 100% The Right Way (tm).
I've never owned a Mac, but I am seriously considering purchasing one of these things whenever they come out. And I'm willing to wait as long as it takes. Paradigm shifts aren't developed overnight...It looks to me like Apple has a real next-gen OS on their hands. I think Jobs has really given them a kick in the ass. I think OSX will continue to surpass Windows in its GUI, and finally better it with its power.
Hats off to Apple!
BTW, Star Trek has been boldly splitting infinitives for a few decades, but you don't see English majors throwing hissy fits on /. over it...
Sorry--I was an English major, and it doesn't piss me off. This isn't a thesis paper we're discussing--it's a marketing slogan. There's a time and place for nitpicking the fine points of grammar, and there's a time to relax and say...it works.
In this case, 'different' is a flat adverb. Don't understand? I'll let this bit from William Safire explain it:
Got it now?
Think well. ???
Using a noun to modify a verb? That's what I'd call 'thinking different.' ^_^
--
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Let me ask you one thing.
When NeXTStep came out, I thought its name was really proper. THAT was the OS of my life. Crafted to rock. Designed to grow.
When Apple bought NeXT, we all were eager to see the Next Big Thing. But (almost) nothing developed.
Now it looks like something's REALLY coming out of the hat. But the question is: seems to me that NeXT didn't make it at first but it's getting its way now. Don't you feel this way? And if you do, what are the reasons in your opinion? I always believed NeXTStep was just too smart to cope with 80's hardware, for a start. But I see there's other issues, like the REAL NEED for a gentler, stabler OS.
Another thing I'd like people to focus on with more precision is that OSX IS NOT Free/OSS software. Darwin is (and in questionable terms AFAIK).
Still I'm wetting my pants. And whether Apple succeeds or not, one thing is clear IMO: Steve Jobs IS The Man!
(I adore that guy)
13-4=54/6
The "loadable bundles" method of modularization seems far superior to the use of DLLs that need to be registered, and require the computer to be rebooted, in order to install. The new UI is good-looking, but the lack of customization features is disappointing. As always, Apple brings a great product to the table--nonetheless, I still refuse to buy one of their products.
In my mind, the benefits of an open system and a larger user base make the WinTel platform superior for product development. If Apple were smart, they would try to make it easier to port Windows applications to OS X.
More application developers write for Windows than for the Mac, and bridging the gap between the two platforms and promoting more software development would do far more to improve the Mac platform than simply making their machines technically superior. It would be a pleasure to write for Mac, but I am unwilling to bear the extra cost of developing for two platforms and rewriting a lot of code. Apple, pave a path for us to migrate along and we will come...
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
Dammit! I want my OS X! Damn developers, always gettin' stuff first! :o)
Got Rhinos?
Granted I love Apple news, but is it me or has ever since VA Linux bought Slashdot via Andover.Net, Apple news has been showing up on Slashdot almost daily? I used to remember the sniggles and jokes thrown at Apple before the buyout. But now it almost appears that Slashdot is as pro-Apple as it is pro-Linux. It might be that CmrTaco and crew have gotten past the one button mouse thingy that appears to confuse most Windows/Linux users.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Let's hope so.
"Apple has done a remarkable job of hiding what little is left of "Unix" under the GUI."
I would make the point that most of what is identifiably "Unix" is the problem. From the security model to the file/device paradigm to most of POSIX, it's a big mistake.
When someone can claim "BSD compatibility," thus enabling a user to compile a unix tool on the system, this implies all kinds of things - that assinine system logger, the presence of an /etc/password file, or runlevels, startup scripts, /dev, /lib and /bin, setuid bits and the list goes on, all the way down to the presumption of stdin, stdout, and stderr. All of these things represent functionality that has abstract significance, as you always need to communicate with your users, system facilities, and so forth; too bad most of it is only relevant to more esoteric aspects of large, by some measures ancient, GUI-less multi-user systems, and none of these particular methods (inexplicably enshrined in the whole body of unix code and libraries) represent anything more than decades-old klugery.
What I have been saying is that Apple needs to thoroughly and vigorously discard these quaint old artifacts of the VT100 days. If it means breaking "direct" sideways-compatibility with Unix applications, then fuck the unix applications. Now, no complaint is worth a damn without pointing out the right way to do things:
If the core of the operating system is stable and featureful, boxed emulation of a unix environment (allowing the use of legacy unix apps in MacOS X) will not seem so strange anymore. No one runs Unix in a box on Win98 or WinNT: you would get all of the new admin complexity with none of the reliability or security gains. On MacOS X, if it's done right, it would no longer seem so strange. Then Apple's server play could benefit from the Unix codebase. But unless it's properly isolated out, and MacOS X itself is kept from being tainted by any attempts at direct, API-level "Unix compatibility," you _will_ have problems. The distinct roles of the system need to be architecturally acknowledged.
"First off, the added complexity of having to log into a Mac is trivial... Second off, while under the hood a multi-user system is fundamentally different, the end user experience need not be very different."
As I said in another post in this thread, even given that Mac users as a whole are demanding multi-user functionality, which I find hard to believe (Apple's "target audience" doesn't understand that colored fruit is actually a menu, let alone its particular, constantly evolving significance), woe to those who should offer them the unix security model in return.
"Multi-user" means different things to different people. To your parents, it means having different preferences folders in the system folder. To unix users, it means something radically different. Can I access another user's files? Can they access mine? What about resources on the hard drive? Is there an "administrator account"? Is it called (chuckle) "root"? Can a non-root user install software? Will others be able to use it? Will it end up in a centralized location, or in that user's home directory? Wait... what's a "home directory?"
I have no answers to these questions yet. These issues intersect with Unix compatibility issues, of course, because the body of Unix software assumes this level of complexity. So my question is, does Apple expect to pass it off on their users, just so that it'll be a little easier for people to port Apache, or Oracle, to OSX?
I really don't know myself why I care, but for Apple's sake, I hope they haven't been foolish enough to make a trade-off that short sighted.
We're on the road to Tycho.
I agree with King Babar.
I suppose it would make more sense for Apple's slogan to say:
Think 'Different' (Like, think 'pink', or think 'panache' or whatever)
Instead of:
Think Different
In other words, Apple is not telling you HOW to think, its telling you to think of the concept "different" as opposed to the McDonald's/McBarney/McWindows/McAOL conformity world we live in. Or, should I say, "confomity world in which we live?"
Which brings me to another point: There's no need to get into an argument over semantics (esp. when it comes to marketing slogans!), when the english language is constantly changing anyway. Like, do you say pail or bucket? which is correct? both. And do you say his, her or their in the following: "one does not talk with [x] mouth full"...? I say 'their', because its neutral. I'm sure plenty of people use adjectives to modify verbs, and maybe they're more right than you think?
Powerbook G4/1.5GHz 12", Toshiba Satellite 1135-S1554
Use of bold-faced application name in place of small application icon - He admits this is much clearer for novice users and "according to Eric Schlegel of Apple, the eventual goal is to allow the application menu to take the form of an icon, an icon plus a name, or just name, according to the user's preference." Doesn't sound like a problem to me.
Useless Apple Logo - "The Apple logo at the center of the menu bar remains (and remains non-functional), but blessedly disappears in DP4 when an application's menus extend past it." Not a solution, but at least it no longer breaks the system.
Finder is now Desktop - Aside from a learning curve for the Mac veterans, "Calling it the Desktop makes more sense and, thankfully, does not hurt experienced users."
DP4 includes Preference Panels - "This is quite an improvement over DP3"
You can "Kill" the dock - In addition to improved organization of the dock (apps on left, everything else on right), and the return of the bottom 4 screen pixels (previously used for underlining active apps), you can send a "Quit" Apple Event to the dock. How much can you complain about a feature you can turn off? Seems like the next logical step to make the dock a Preference option.
So, he has some (valid) points about the Dock still (Icons aren't obvious tiles - only the icon itself is clickable), but other than that, where's the "Bad News" the heading promises? Sounds to me like they could (and possibly are trying to) respond and fix his every complaint and he'd still be upset about the new User Interface.
-----
If Apple releases Cocoa for Win32 and Linux, it becomes the ideal environment for cross-platform application development - and since the best of those platforms is Mac OS X on PowerPC, more app support means Apple sells more hardware, which just might be enough to convince them to do it.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Bzzzttt. What about Genera, the operating system of ages-old LISP Machines?
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
Reflection & Cybernet
not to mention apps writen in carbon, will have all of os x pluses, but can also run natively in os 9 do to the carbon lib. AppleWorks 6 is one of these apps. you can run it fine in os 9, and it runs fine in os x too, no launching of the bluebox, and its gui gets aquaized too.
Live EVERY week... Like it's Shark Week
It is obvious that mating a mature, modern kernel with a reasonable user interface is the finish line of a marathon which pretty much every systems player is hurtling desperately towards.
- Linux will beat X to death until it is impossible to see through the bloody pulp on your screen. Then (one day, I pray) they will replace it with something sensible.
- Microsoft will keep dumping code into the DOS/Win95/Win98/WinNT/Win2k landfill until they've made the largest functioning (?) program ever created.
- And Apple... Apple is somewhere in between. Smart enough to use BSD (only Linux would have been smarter
;-). Smart enough to discard X. But are they smart enough to discard ALL that which makes Unix awful?
I realize it seems easy in principle. I understand that it is in fact desperately hard. Put yourself in that systems engineer's shoes. It is painful beyond measure to take a perfectly good Unix like BSD and then toss out backwards compatibility with all your Unix apps just so that Mac users all over the world won't wake up one day and discover they need to log in as "root" and find their files buried somewhere deep inside a directory called "/usr/home/root/.msword/c|/WINDOWS/MyDocu~1/". They put up with it every day. You can almost hear them screaming here in New York. "Let those bastards eat CAKE!" So what if unix filesystem hierarchies, library handling systems, common executable namaes, and so forth seem exactly as half-assed and hair-brained as they are...My point is simply this: Mac users do not want unix. They want a stable MacOS. They want it no matter how much all those NeXT people flatter themselves. They do not want to "log in" to their powerbook.
I have heard many things that encourage me that Apple understands this, and may therefore be the first to create a Unix-stable, xerox-style operating system. I have also seen many things that discourage me, because they indicate Apple is buying the benighted notion that BSD-compatibility is worth a damn to their business. It is not. Let me repeat: it is not. And furthermore, it will eviscerate the utility of the MacOS. Do you hear me, Tevanian? Hide that damn shell. Hide it somewhere where we will never find it.
Unix users are smart, self-reliant people. We can find plenty of ways to get our jollies without mastering our problems onto millions of MacOS CD's.
We're on the road to Tycho.
Think differently and use a fucking adverb you fucking morons.
... but it's not Apple marketing.
Ah yes. We must be consistent with other common phrases involving "Think" and an adjective, such as "Think LARGE", "Think HARDLY", and so forth.
There certainly is a moron here who has no grasp of the vernacular
Mac OS X has BSD and is BSD just as much as any set-top/pda/virginconnect box running Linux is Linux.
./configure and make/gmake of it. Nothing stopping anyone from taking the ports collection of FreeBSD and patching code to run on Mac OS X.
UserLand is what you
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Apple could certainly support MacOS X without any help from you or me; they employ an original Mach architect as senior technical management.
As to the argument that no one will be able to use MacOS X because there is Unix under the hood, well, you don't know what you are talking about.
If MacOS is anything like NEXTSTEP, your mom could administer a Mac network. NEXTSTEP isn't like Linux distributions, or, for that matter, traditional Unix products, that require a battery of arrogant gurus just to keep things up and running.
NEXTSTEP, the precedessor to MacOS X, pretty much administered itself; you could accomplish almost all sysadmin tasks from a well designed set of coherent and intuitive applications. These admin tools made NEXTSTEP in many ways easier to administer than MacOS or Windows.
From what I have seen, MacOS X is only going to improve on NEXTSTEP, which is still one of the easiest to use and administer OSs ever made.
"I thought I could organize freedom. How Scandinavian of me."
g/grammer/s//grammar/g
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Hm. So will I be able to take AfterEffects from this G4 and run it under OS X? .. And what about reverse compatibility.. Since OS X is built around BSD, will that have any effect on porting (Mac) applications to *nix?
air and light and time and space
"Let me assure you that the only trouble would be the drop in productivity as all windows developers experienced simlutaneous spontaneous orgasms."
LOL
Okay, now that was funny.
Can you say, "Comma splice?"
OK, let's look at this more closely. Shoeboy seems to suggest that Apple marketeers are morons because they are using an adjective ("different") to modify a verb ("think"). The other possibility is that the construction "Think different" is, in fact, different from what Shoeboy thinks it is. Or, maybe it is a pun. Or, a more figurative use of language.
Consider the following examples:
In the above, I have marked with an asterisk those sentences that I think are actually ungrammatical in English. A question mark denotes a sentence that is either dubious, or is unlikely to mean the same thing as the unmarked version.
Shoeboy might notice that the "adverb" versions of these sentences look strange (not "look strangely"). They seem pretty weird. I don't have time to provide a full lesson on the syntax of the "look" construction and its friends. Suffice it to say that the rules for when and where you use adjectives and adverbs with verbs that can take fuller complements concerning the state or existence of the subject are not as clear as Schoolboy might wish to believe.
Now, what that has to do with "Think different" is that "think" is a verb that often takes a complement that expresses the existence or state of some entity. Also note that in a sentence involving ellipsis, that you can get non-imperative sentences with phrases like "think different" in them pretty easily, and even imperative versions with a little bit more effort:
Compared to other Wintel offerings, do you think Apples' products are the same or different?
So, I maintain that Apple's slogan really doesn't stretch current American usage much beyond (if at all beyond) it's current state. Now, you might argue that most readers are not likely to come up with the above dialogue at the drop of a hat. And I agree. But the whole point of advertising is to make a striking statement that gets people to pay attention to you. Now, some people try to do this just by being provocative for no obvious reason. Shoeboy does this, for example, by using repetitive obscenities:
More sophisticated people might use some kind of verbal trick, pun, or game to achieve the same effect. And it is usually more effective.
Does anybody think Apple's ad writers are just the same as the drones who write, say, Dell's ad copy? Think different.
Babar
What I really want to know is if we'll be able to write shell scripts (or perl!) to script Mac apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark XPress, or Final Cut.
Applescript is OK for some tasks, but not all apps respond to it and most have their own individual commands you have to discover.
It would be great if there were a standard library to interface with these things. Now imagine being able to run these apps via telnet, or a Web based interface...
Those were some pretty scathing comments by Gassée. Sounds like sour grapes to me though. He doesn't understand that MACOSX is still the winner in terms of important things like open-ness and support (hard and soft).
Plus, Gassée is probably a lot more savvy then Jobs, wait til slashdotters get ahold of a MP G4 OSX box.
<//-------------//> /. but you can tell it was designed by programmers..."
"I like
As long as I have the option of working in multiple windows, as opposed to single-window view- COUNT ME THE HELL IN! this is going to be the best step forward for Mac users since the Chooser! Now how about booting it off a nice cheap AMD chip...
http://www.clango.org
Don't need it. OS X's Cocoa API already supports distributed software.
--
This space unintentionally left unblank.
What I find most interesting about OSX is that it sits on top a "micro-kernel" mach, ala MKLinux and HURD (?). I'd like to know more about how this works?
I have heard its supposed to make porting the OS easier by having systems called handled by the Kernel as an abstraction layer to the hardware (price = some speed). I think If you port the kernel you can port the OS. Might this make multiprocessors in one box more efficent?
And what exactly is the "Darwin" part? Does it include the MACH Kernel or just the BSD layer that sits on top.
more questions than answers I'm afraid..
/aram
Hello,
The next gen Mac OS is a Mach/BSD operating system. Apple, when they bought NeXT, started building OS_X on NeXTStep also a Mach/BSD OS.
Also, BSD is a bit older than Linux.
Tom
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
Hmm.... I think you are missing the point by a long way here. The major difference in this case is that this is not 'Unix with a graphical interface', but the next version of MacOS, which happens to be built on a BSD-like base. In other words, it's not a half-hearted attempt at a second OS to handle servers where the primary OS would be inadequate - it's the primary platform for the Mac community. There will be no choice about upgrading to MacOS X, once it has taken pride of place on every shipping Mac.
What's Open Source got to do with it? Granted, Apple are jumping on the bandwagon a bit with Darwin, but they hardly depend on it for their OS development! It is only in this latest DP release that they have used the Darwin kernel. Why on earth would they not be able to support their product? Their head of technology wrote the Mach kernel in the first place. It's like saying Microsoft can't support Windows. Oh, hang on... no you must be right after all...