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Mac OS X Beta To Come Out Sept. 13
A reader writes "At his keynote at Seybold today, Steve Jobs announced that Mac OS X beta will ship on September 13th. More details at MacNN's site." This is the beta - but the Sept. 13th beta launch is the first day of Paris Mac Expo, meaning that it probably will happen. He also confirmed that they are on target for an "early 2001" release of OSX.
in other news, leaked photos of the new OSX server reveal it to be large, black monolith.
A beta microsoft product is a compileable piece of code.
Every other project/company I've known hasn't had the bug problems of microsoft.
I bet it will be about as stable as a final version +service packs copy of NT!
I'd bet my bottom dollar on it, any takers?
Hey, I noticed the BSD demon was used instead of that shiny, blue Apple logo. Since OS X is built upon BSD, does that mean Apple hardware stories will get the blue apple, while Apple software (specifically OS X) stories will from now on get the demon attached?
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
The real question is, why is there a BSD deamon as the story icon? This is Apple news.
There is no x86 version of OS X, nor will there be. Apple makes its money on hardware. Jobs does like to keeps his options open, however. You never know what might happen if the PPC coalition falls apart.
Darwin, OTOH, can run on x86. Perhaps that's what you were thinking of.
Constitutionally Correct
" ...I wonder tho if they'll find the guy in the beta program that leaks it to a pirate group..."
I'll bet that Apple just might be serializing each individual copy of the beta... all those millions of copies! (not just serial numbers on the packaging, mind you, but burying unique identifiers within the binaries themselves. That is a pretty huge task, you can't just burn a single image onto the disks, each image has to be unique.)
Apple has been acting aggressively paranoid over the last couple years. A step like this would allow them to spot & sue the offending pirate immediately. just download the pirated copy and look up who it was registered to. hmmm....
-=(V)0(V)0cr0(V)3=-
A couple of points...
;)
1) MOSX (the semi official short) is based on BSD as it is what the OS'es it's been build on was based on (all that NeXT stuff
2) DPS is out. It's been replaced by a PDF based imaging model that's been build without using Adobe code. So it's free of that license fee Adobe used to charge NeXT.
That means apps for OS X can be recompiled, with no changes, and run on Linux and any other GnuSTEP enabled platform - that was the whole goal of OpenSTEP, to allow write once - compile anywhere type development, with a simple and elegant OO variant of C.
Are you sure this is still the case? From what I understand, there have been some considerable changes to the API since OpenStep.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
GNUstep, from what I can gather, seems to have been keeping up with the Cocoa API changes. Note that this is *only* Cocoa, not Carbon. So you have to use the Cocoa API to make an app that'll run on GNUstep. But if you're careful to do this, it just might be possible.
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It will be availalbe for $15-$20 for a CD. So much for *free*! On September 3, ten days before the release date, you can order it through the Apple store.
I am Slad.
READ MY LIPS, no more missed release dates!
Wow, does anyone even remember Steve Jobs promising that when he took over 2+ years ago? Seems like it's been forever.
I seem to remember a promise of the next-generation of macOS scheduled in spring on 99, not 2001. Wasn't it Steve who said "The software industry has gotten a very bad reputation for being late, and Apple is going to change that around!" What happened to that? I remember mac freaks praising Jobs. Where's the critism now?
And it keeps happening. "Beta in the spring!" "Beta in the summer!" "September mabye?" And then there was "Final release for x-mas 2000!" "Final release January!" "Um, next spring possibly?" Yeah right. Maybe next fall.
I know people who think the world of Apple, and I'll admit I'm a fan, but anyone screaming their perfection and moral triumph aught to get with the picture or shut the heck up. Apple fell from the tree a long time ago. They are now a giant corporation, and like most, are filled with worms and rotting from the inside out.
Now let the flames roll in!
http://kered.org
What's even more interesting is that the alternate theme is not Apple's previous "Platinum" theme but a new one. As Platinum is already supported under Aqua in "Classic" applications this means that there will now be three different UI's shipping - Platinum under Classic, the default "lickable" under Aqua and it's alternate "Graphite".
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
But so far running OSX on high end hardware only produces medicore performance. It takes a lot of horsepower to this baby march. I'm eager to see if this "beta" version is an improvement.
This is something I noticed as well, but apparently these are more due to high-level issues rather than the OS/kernel itself. For example, I believe the Cocoa and Java libaries are still being optimized, which explains why the little applets take so long to launch. At least at some point, some of those sample applications (TextEdit, I think?) were actually Java apps, so the JVM loads first, then the application. I would not be suprised if this was still the case with DP4, and possibly even in the final public release.
The OS itself is obviously a quite capable system performance-wise. It does an admirable job serving pages via Apache from what I've seen. It just seems that some of the higher level user-level stuff needs tweaking, which is probably what most of the debug code is attached to, anyway. I don't imagine the BSD layer, etc are changing nearly as much.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Actually, it is based on Mach with the 'BSD tools'. Where 'BSD tools' often means GNU tools.
The September release will be a rather open beta, so that's not a big deal. If laptop hard drive prices drop below $15 per Gb, I'll expand my Wallstreet and give it a whirl. But it'll probably be full of bug catcher code and be too slow for serious use.
The Developer Preview releases that have been going out for a while now -- those are private, so of course they're all available on Hotline and various WareZ sites. One fun quirk: its Open Firmware thinks different than regular MacOS. So I've been having great fun with idiots who post to comp.sys.mac.misc that they can't uninstall OS X. Since the only people who should have it right now are serious Mac programmers, anyone asking that question is a pirate kiddie.
PDF files (better known as Adobe Acrobat documents) are already used online extensively, but present some problems for use as an HTML replacement. One, they're not designed to be loaded incrementally, so while small documents would download fairly quickly, larger ones would drag on and on for a long time. Two, their support for linking, bookmarking, etc. is basically just a hack Adobe added in later version.
Well, its predecessor OpenStep 4.2 is okay on a 25MHz, 68040 w/ 40MB RAM (my NeXT Cube at home).
Apple engineers have posted ibformation on it running adequatly on old Power Mac 6400s, I think they were to comp.sys.next.advocacy, and OpenStep for Intel on modern hardware is by all accounts amazingly quick/responsive (``windows vanish'').
Statements by people running DP4 have been almost wholely positive---especially those with G4s (apparently a lot of the Quartz imaging takes advantage of Altivec in innovative and elegant/efficient ways).
William
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Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
OS X is actually looking like one of the more "platform-friendly" systems hitting the market these days. Its BSD roots should give it access to both the full arsenal of BSD-native code, and to some sort of Linux "port" system. The Carbon API gives it compatibility with traditional Macintosh applications, and Cocoa has the full OpenStep spec. Finally, the Java layer supports both the full Java 2 runtime environment, and a set of Java wrappers for the Objective-C OpenStep API and libraries.
Sorry to burst your bubble but there's a lot of MacOS X that's still very PPC-centric. Much of it could be ported and it's even likely that much of it is being ported but doubt there's either a running version of it or that your buddy has it.
-- Michael
Why do I even bother to respond to the Anonymous Cowards bragging about their friends software?...
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Question is, will it run on my SuperMac clone with Newer Tech G3 upgrade?
Can you ride a bike across a tightrope?
You could probably figure out a way to do it, but I wouldn't recommend it.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I know a lot of companies that would be happy to have their core products be even a portion of Apple's "spares"...
I think there's a reason that Apple funded MkLinux for several years, then dropped it: they wanted the experience with a Mach microkernel-based, *NIX OS on the PowerPC platform. They got it, and now have been able to roll that into Darwin. Hence, the decent core OS performance and stability.
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Methinks OS X/x86 will happen only when Apple has some reason to think it won't instigate the cancellation of MS Office for Macintosh.
Should we be reading this as saying:Methinks OS X/x86 will happen only when Microsoft get split.
G
While GNUstep has been more or less keeping up with the changes to the OpenStep API made in Cocoa, there are going to be issues, and a porting from Cocoa to GNUstep while be more than a re-compile. Not a major pain in the arse, methinks, but not a 10 minute just-run-make jobbie. For one, the GNUstep Distributed Object classes (NSConnection and friends) do not follow the same protocol (the methods) as the Cocoa version. I'm sure there are other differences, but as Cocoa is totally finalized, they might catch up.
Mac OS X uses Display PDF now, not Display PostScript. This actually also might effect the porting of applications between GNUstep, Cocoa, and OpenStep. With GNUstep and OpenStep, you can put straight-up PostScript code in your app- Cocoa wouldn't know what to do with this. This isn't a big problem, though.
It is also a beautiful interface, now, from the eyecandy point of view. They've taken the Step interface (see Windowmaker and Afterstep) and combined it with the good ol' Mac menubar. That bar at the bottom... it's the Dock.
What are you talking about on this one? While Mac OS X does resemble the OpenStep UI in some ways, in the ways that WindowMaker and others implements, it's almost nothing like it (title bar, general look of widgets). I would agree that Aqua is beatutiful, and more importantly, quite functional- but for those of you who want a more classic NeXT interface, check out MacThemes, which has begun to document the Mac OS X theme format.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
RedHat/GNOME/KDE & crew have a loooong way to go before they match the user experience of OS X. It will be hard to even try to match level that since Apple controls the hardware too.
Throw in all the standard OSS tools (gcc/gmake/perl/apache/etc..) and what is there for a geek not to like too?
Mac OS X seems really cool, unfortunately Apple needed this about 4 years ago. Still, OS X makes me seriously consider picking up a mac (ibook perhaps) just to play around with it.
http://www.key3media.com/seyboldseminars/sf2000/pr esentations/keynotes/apple/jobs.html
Should help clear up some of the confusion about, e.g. ``Pro Mode''/Graphite Aqua.
William
PS - mentioned this before, but www.macthemes.org says in their Developer notes that themes for Mac OS X are quite feasible.
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Check here for a recent evaluation of the PPC market for Apple & it's alternatives.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Both of you are, in a sense, correct; OS-X/Darwin will look very much like a standard BSD system to the userland application/programmer, but the low-level architecture is different, due to the Mach microkernel. Unlike a the Linux kernel, Mach doesn't include its device drivers in kernel memory space. Instead, they're run as processes, which can be started, killed, and swapped while the system is running.
It carries a performance penalty, obviously, since the kernel has to communicate with more processes to accomplish even basic I/O. However, it also gives the entire OS an added level of flexibility and (potential) stability, since well-written drivers won't take the system down even if their code crashes and dumps.
The 'BSD' side of OS-X's personality comes from the choice of that platform to fill out the needed higher-level services to make the system complete. Once you're up to finished applications, there should be only minor differences between OS-X and any of the other main BSD derivatives.
I see.
Would you care to explain how it is that the PPC Linux developers (www.yellowdoglinux.com, www.linuxppc.com, www.penguinppc.org) are able to develop an OS for these machines for which specs are not available?
Or, let's review the imaging model? How long did it take Be to get _printing_ as a capability of the OS? Similarly, color management, and other high-end publishing features are absent from BeOS.
And then there're the developer tools. Compare and contrast the number of apps which are available for BeOS with those for NeXT/OPENstep---rather sobering, no?
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Is there really much money in porting OS X to x86? There's so much competition for the high-end desktop/low end server in x86 platform. You've got Win NT/2000, Linux, BSD varieties, etc. Besides, porting an entire OS and all of its applications to another processor type is not easy, nor cheap (if I recall, there are a lot of people working on LinuxPPC, and the alpha linux platform). It's probably not worth the development time to them.
Apple makes loads of money by selling it's proprietary hardware. If people like Mac OS X, they have to buy Apple hardware, more money for Apple. If you can have Mac OS X for x86, why would someone want to spend a fair amount more for the PPC/G4 technology when processors and hardware for AMD/Intel is much cheaper? Even a few people posting about this article say they're now considering buying Mac hardware to try out this BSD based OS. If Apple markets Mac OS X well enough, they'll increase sales in their hardware significantly.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
That's something I'm curious about - Apple got rid of X and replaced it with Display PostScript, right?
I can't live without my xemacs, and yet with it, MacOX X would be my dream OS - enough applications to use in the real world, but stable enough for me to use for Unix/Linux web site development.
Many thanks for any thoughts? Incidentally, the reason I'm saying xemacs instead of regular emacs is that I like the proportional font support built into XE.
D
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Will the beta come with a boot manager like Lilo, and if not, how do you select which OS to use if you have two?
Is there going to be some kind of partition manager, or do I need to buy a separate hard drive for OS X?
I'm going to be buying one of the dual/500 Macs and would just love to try the beta on it.
D
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Whenever a Steve Jobs keynote comes up, the Mac faithful start feeling breathless anticipation because most of the times he speaks, he has a spectacular, world-beating announcement to make.
And with his July announcement of the multi-processor G4s and the Cube, the collective WOW! pasted a smile on the face of every Mac enthusiast.
Now, it would be only natural to think that there wasn't really any time for anything of significance, with less than a month between this one and the last. After all, I only saw my first Cube last night(*).
But the public has great expectations for Steve, because, after all, Steve is the Godlike figure who saved Apple from irrelevence, disaster, and tiresomeness. Steve the Great can do anything, they say!
So everyone expects something exciting when he speaks, however much Apple tries to diminish expectations.
Hope that helps explain the curious phenomenon.
D
(*) The CUBE: Yes, it's as stunning a looker as you've heard -- but the store ruined the effect by paring it with an off-brand Beige monitor. For shame, guys! No more Beige! [laugh]
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How do you define high-end hardware - what machines are you running it on?
D
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It would take a fool to cover that bet.
:) ]
I used the *alpha* release of 7.0 on my main machine ten-eleven years ago. It was more stable than what I've come to expect from microsoft.
[note--I really haven't used anything later than 7.1 (except to find that 7.5 wouldn't cut it on a IIci), so I have no position on the stability of 7.5-9.x
hawk
Actually, stuff like Photoshop can use the second proc. MacOS isn't single processor, it just doesn't use them very well.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It'll probably put a significant dent in Linux's use on the Mac platform. Most Mac users use Linux just because it's a modern OS that runs on their hardware and doesn't cost $500 like Mac OS X Server does. I've already moved my CGI development to the Mac OS X developer preview.
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This space unintentionally left unblank.
Now, Darwin is our core OS kernel. It is the mock microkernel surrounded by 3 BSD Unix
I think he means FreeBSD
Please note that BSD is just a Mach subsystem. The VM is still controlled by the Mach kernel.
cpeterso
No. Basically Be just got pissed because Apple wasn't subsidizing them. It's no coincidence that Intel made their big investment around then.
Once again - explain:
LinuxPPC
Yellow Dog Linux
Darwin
MkLinux
*BSD (a few variaties I believe)
Debian
SUSE
...all having, or announcing, PowerMac distributions.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Oh, and another thing:
Why would Apple mind if Be made their OS for Mac hardware?
Think about it:
1. A MacOS user buys a Macintosh so they can run their OS of choice. Apple gets $XXX.XX for the computer and a copy of the MacOS.
2. A BeOS user buys a Macintosh so they can run their OS of choice. Apple gets $XXX.XX for the computer and a copy of the MacOS. User buys BeOS as well.
See those X's up there? They'd be equal. Apple loses no money in the deal, and it's quite likely BeOS users would gravitate to the more powerful (read: more profitable for Apple) hardware anyhow.
The only thing Apple might lose is a little 3rd party support. Big deal. It's not likely they'd have lost, and probably would have gained more in additional profits if it came to that to deal with it.
Face it - Be did what it did because they wanted to do it anyhow. They were lured by the siren cry of Wintel's market penetration, but have basically lost themselves in a sea of mediocracy in trying to keep up with drivers. Bad mistake, but don't blame it on Apple. Instead of coding millions of drivers Be could have been making the BeOS even cooler.
(and yes, the BeOS was/is really really cool, but that's not what this is about...)
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Not all sigs have to be related to technology. The whole point of a sig is to put something interesting as it relates to you - a quote or something. Maybe even a link to your web site. I don't recall seeing any guidelines on what you can and can't put in your sig on Slashdot. Perhaps you'd like to point them out for us?
Until then, he can keep his sig.
For the record, I think religion is pure BS. But that doesn't mean I should tell him what he can have on his sig.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Remember how Apple spent $400 million buying NeXT so they wouldn't have to wait for the BeOS to be finished?
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Apple's changes to the OpenStep API are being actively tracked. Some of it hasn't been implemented yet because Apple hasn't released enough information (NSSound, for example). There's discussion on whether WebObjects will ever be compatible because of patent issues. There's hope, but who knows?
I think I had 7.1.0.1, or maybe 7.1.1, on my powerbook 180. That's as far as I went. I found lyx, and how well it did on equations, and that was the end of the line for macs and I; I've been all-unix since.
My only fear about MOSX is Carbon. I'd like to see Apple's considerable developer base switch to Cocoa (making Objective C, OpenStep, and thus GNUstep more popular). I fear that Carbon may give too many developers reason to simply "coast".
Be, couldn't have incorporated open source developments into their OS and remained proprietary.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
In the three in a half years since they bought next, and all of the work that they did on that OS, they could have added many of these features to Be's OS.
If six different Linux distros are able to support the Mac, what's Be's problem?
Six different distros, one kernel. It's the kernel that does all of the work, the distro is just clothes for the laborman.
Be couldn't have incorporated any of the open source code from the linux kernel without opening their entire OS.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I saw Mac OS X Server for sale 2 weeks ago at Fry's electronics in Arlington, TX. Why would they be selling it BEFORE the beta even comes out? Something is not right here
You're confusing Mac OS X Server with Mac OS X. Mac OS X Server was introduced 1.5 years ago (contrary to the claim that Apple has never shipped a modern operating system). MOSXS is based on somewhat a somewhat similar technology foundation (BSD, Mach), but Mac OS X is considerably more advanced in every significant way, and upon final release, will be aimed at consumers, as well as power uses, developers and server admins.
Also, the original concept for "Rhapsody" is what exists today in Mac OS X Server.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
For me, the question was "Why do non-unix systems take so long to go to sleep/wake up?" My thought is that it's a result of a convoluted non-modular design that doesn't allow you to isolate what needs to occur during a sleep cycle (really, not much more than synching disks and taking care of some peripherals).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
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Maybe I missed something, but isn't that what they _are_ doing right now?
(Tracker keeps getting better and better. 3D support is in. Security is next.)
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Having used the BeOS since DR8 and every major release since, I can say that while BeOS may be getting cooler, it's not getting cooler at any rate like it used to.
And much of its coolness is being pushed into the whole IA thing. I'm not sure how 'cool' that is though - most of the BeOS' main benefits are wasted on an internet appliance.
And really, if we haven't learned from Larry Ellison, this whole internet appliance thing isn't quite what it's cracked up to be...
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Oh, don't get me wrong. I have no illusions that Apple was jumping toward Be offering any and all help they could give. I imagine Apple didn't really give a damn, or at best were mildly interested. Apple is a bit of a niche player, but Be was (and is) a niche player. I mean that in the nicest way possible. Cool things tend to come from niches.
But I just don't see Apple going out of their way to hurt Be. For the before mentioned reasons (they would profit at least a little bit), and because they had bigger fish to fry at the time.
That's probably what happened. Pre-Jobs Apple was spilling money all over the place. Random R&D with little market application potential, dead end projects, far too many product lines with little focus, shitty tech support, dampened product quality, and a whole lot of bad morale and press. It's quite likely that Be got a little extra help and special treatment early on, but in the end they had to be ignored due to budget constraints. Apple was losing far too much money to waste engineer times on only limited returns.
What would this have meant to Be? Apple wouldn't go out of their way to do anything, but they weren't going to bother documenting things as much or answering phone calls from frustrated Be employees. Be would have had to reverse-engineer the specs themselves. Apple wouldn't actively try to derail them, but they'd still be on their own.
Would that have killed Be? I don't think so. Others have been doing the reverse engineering thing and Apple has more or less ignored them. Be would have also benefitted from the more open nature of recent Apple hardware (believe it or not - a lot of proprietary crap has been thrown out from the B&W G3s onward).
It's also possible that they would have had a hell of a time reverse engineering Apple's hardware designs, and gotten their ass kicked by riding that platform. That may have been reason enough to switch to X86, but they shouldn't be saying Apple held out on them.
In the end, I think it's pretty apparent that X86 didn't do what they wanted it to do. Maybe switching over just delayed the inevitable, but whenever a company has so many 'focus shifts' it is usually a bad sign (Apple is a perfect example of this). With luck they may get lucky, but right now it just looks like they're getting desperate.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Be careful what you ask for, is all I say.
If simply making your beliefs known in a public forum is not tolerated, that can go both ways. If we don't allow those with Christian beliefs to have their opinions, we could very well be the next to be censored.
Yes, Christianity has a long history of suppressing those with dissenting views. That's precisely the reason why I don't care for people trying to suppress others like this. If you wish to undermine someone's beliefs, the best way is to provide a clear difference.
And no, Slashdot doesn't specifically say 'religious drivel here'. But it also doesn't say 'GPL proponent here' or 'pro-Mac sentiment here' - but that's all accepted. If you're going to censor someone for having religious views, you're opening up all sorts of other opinions.
In the end, only CmdrTaco and others can make that decision. Until they come up and state what can and can not be put in a sig, you should just ignore it.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
I'm not sure what you're trying to get at. All the guy had was a quote from a book. I hardly find that to be offensive.
If you have a problem with the religion itself, join the club. But if we censor fairly benign quotes, are we any better than the Catholic Church or any other historical oppressors?
Either way, a lot of crap goes into Slashdot that doesn't pertain to technology. Sigs in particular aren't really even meant to be 'on-topic' (otherwise, they wouldn't be universal to all topics).
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just because its a public forum doesen't mean I can say whatever i want
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Sure you can, as long as it's not illegal or against the rules of the place you're posting it. If you can point us to a guideline for the content of signatures on Slashdot, I'll be more than willing to concede this argument.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff