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Looking Back at MacOS on x86
nutt writes "The MacSpeedZone's Apple Confidential column has a good Article which looks back at what happened to Apple's Star Trek project, (which was to "boldly go where no Mac had gone before." ... Intel hardware.) Its a very good read, and makes one wonder where Star Trek is now? The Article says the NDA's on the engineers was lifted in late 1997. It would be _very_ interesting if something like this could get out to the OSS.
Note: Darwin currently compiles on Intel hardware."
My friend, I hate to burst your bubble over there, but -- and I am not saying this to start a flamewar -- Apple hardware is fucking expensive. Not just plain expensive, it is FUCKING expensive.
Case in point: I am moving to a new company in a few weeks, and I was told that I could choose between an Apple and an Intel clone. Just out of curiosity, I checked up on some prices; an apple machine with all the trimmings came out to over 8 THOUSAND dollars. That's without the 4000 dollar display! A comparable machine (equals 1Ghz, 512 megs ram, yada yada) on the x86 architecture runs about 2500 dollars less.
I'm sorry to say that an apple machine is just too bloody expensive with too little gain. Parts are expensive to replace, support is hell to get, here in Israel at least, and the initial price is too high.
While the Apple machines look nice (and they do!), I don't want to pay that much for that little. Not only that, but MacOS X isn't out yet, and I wouldn't want to work on OS 9. (It's just as crash happy as Windows, don't let anyone tell you otherwise).
Clock for clock, the G4 may wack a p3/4/athlon, but dollar for dollar, that Apple machine is getting smacked in the hoopla like nobodies business.
(Don't even start me on the iMacs, no Graphic designer, decent or otherwise, would work on that machine.
Rami
--
rJames.org - illustration
You need Windows? Reboot.
Funny, this also seems to be the case on my Windows-only computer. Quite often, in fact.
;)
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Apple doesn't have to release a version that runs on *every* generic Intel box out there - they can make Apple-branded boxes that use Intel hardware.
One of the main reasons Mac OS is stable is that Apple controls the hardware environment. A PC box can have a near-infinite combination of random hardware of varying quality - half the time when my Windows box goes flakey it's the crappy sound card (or whatever) I got at a CompUSA free after rebate sale.
So, to compete with Windows in megahertz-hype marketing wars, Apple could bring out their own cool Intel or Athlon based machines. The best of both worlds, so to speak.
Soupwizard
---
Twelve Step "How to Mountain Bike" Program:
Step One: Falling and Hurting Yourself A Great Deal
That's like saying Mitsubishi would be monopolistic if they only ship Eclipses with their own stock stereo.
Apple considers their product a combination of OS and hardware. Big deal. You can delete the contents of your Mac's hard-drive and install Linux if you'd prefer. Heaven forbid they decide what is in their own product.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
If I'm not mistaken, the ability to re-compile Carbonised applications to run on Mac OS X is via use of Frameworks (libraries + headers etc).
Is there anything stopping Apple from providing a Carbon Framework with a Windows runtime?
At the moment, with WebObjects, you get a heap of other cross-platform frameworks.
This would enable Mac developers to re-compile their Carbon MacOS apps to run on Windows.
If it works with your hardware
Mind you, that's a _big_ if there. Their scsi support range is a joke right now, as is the NIC support. This pretty much rules out my running it on any of my machines, all of them with standard hardware which Linux uses perfectly well.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Never happened. MS wanted the Mac OS on Intel so they could sell apps and tools. The OS market was tiny back then. DOS didn't make that much money by comparison with Mac apps and the savings over having to write for two OSs and develop Windows and OS/2 would have made up the loss in DOS income. Plus it would have cut IBM out of the picture which would have been a nice bonus as IBM was throwing their weight around and killing the MS market.
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
Accurate except that in 1985, Microsoft had already been working on Windows for two years. And had been stuck with dealing with IBM for a painful four years.
For that kind of price, why don't you get a PROPER computer?
Get yerself a beefy Alpha box instead.
--
Peter
No, it doesn't, unless you count eight milestones ago as "running".
The attempt to bring it up to date that began in June has slammed headlong into an add-on limitation in the BeOS kernel. Be chokes on code written as a small executable that loads lots and lots of modules, instead of as a monolithic megaprogram -- and the modularity is a major Mozilla feature.
A workaround has been proposed which will hopefully work, since correcting the problem would require either a total rewrite of Mozilla or a massive rewrite of the Be kernel.
MacOS, Windows, OS/2, OpenVMS, and 7 Unicies/Unix clones can handle it, however, and M17 is available for them.
Steven E. Ehrbar
"Why should a physicist writing a paper have to know about files and directories?"
Well, he shouldn't. If you're going to abstract something away, ABSTRACT THE FUCKER AWAY. Get rid of it, don't let the user touch it (except through a proper administrative interface). Don't just slap a bit of useless chrome (Program Manager, Start Menu) over the filesystem and then the first time J. Random Luser wants to install a program or open a file that's not in the 10 recent files dangling off the Start Menu, he's got to know about Files And Directories...
Of course, if you could persuade people to actually PUSH F1 and READ THE FUCKING MANUAL...
But then, if you could do that, your name's probably Jesus Christ and you spend your days walking on water anyway.
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Peter
That's one benchmark, based on a couple of operations in a single application. Benchmarks like that tend to present a skewed view of the reality of the situation. In real-world, Joe Six-Pack usage, the G4 is competitive but a similarly-priced PC system will be faster. As the other respondent said, I could easily rig other benchmarks to show just about anything I wanted.
And, by your own admission, "most people who use macs are doing graphic/design work"...so, if they want to use a G4-based Mac, fine. But that has absolutely no bearing on whether or not the G4 is "twice as fast" in general case, real world computing.
Wherever there's a will, there's a motorway.
This is two kids at each end of the yard going "yah boo sucks to you too".
Because each of these "operating systems" locks up totally while you're copying files to the floppy disk drive...
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Peter
Basically, Apple used their patent library as a blackmail threat and Microsoft got freedom from future litigation at a good price.
Whether there were any patents that actually were infringing has never really been decided. The litigation costs would have cost about that much anyway. Again, nobody ever charged that there was theft of code. Patent infringement can occur when two groups develop similar products and one gets the patent first.
Adobe is like the second or third biggest software maker in the world. Everybody competes with them on something. They sell a billion dollars worth of Mac software per year, though ... they can stand a little competition from Apple in DV editing.
Apple bought Final Cut Pro from Macromedia, so the thing was going to come out from somebody at some point. It wasn't even like somebody at Apple started Final Cut Pro.
There are a few hints of this in the above posts, but logically, the time is not right to announce OSX on Intel. OSX will be introduced next year without a lot of native apps. Many of the apps that are optimized will be based on carbon, which won't port over to Intel.
However, new apps (or those developed for with Cocoa) would run on an Intel port. The work to make OSX run on Intel is not what's holding Apple back from releasing an Intel based OSX box. Millions of Mac users with PPC legacy apps who would cry havoc if they could not run their apps on OSX is the real holdup.
About one year after OSX is out, most of the major apps should be ported over to OSX. Apple can then release an Apple branded Intel based OSX box. Run all your PC software, and gain the power of OSX as well on a duel boot Apple machine. This would be a no brainer for most customers. They would get a Apple OSX box, and an Apple branded Intel compatible windows box. How long do you think it would take for developers to start testing compatibility on Mac Intel HW?
My guess is that OSX on Intel is coming, but not until a good core set of apps is available that will compile on Intel. Then, it's just a matter of managing the migration and cashing the checks. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to imagine Apple's box sales doubling with such a box.
As far as cannibalizing sales, Apple could use a Rom or special motherboard check to make sure that OSX did not run on non Apple hardware. Gives a person a good reason to stick with an Apple brqanded box (in addition to the rep for quality).
Don't worry about it :) you PC guys so often are! One gets used to it :)
I've got three macs: a 7100 - too old for BeOS, a PowerBook G3 - too young for BeOS and a PowerMac G3 - too young for BeOS. Great PowerPC-support.
BeOS/PPC was dead the moment Apple refused to buy Be.
DR DOS.com and DR DOS.org have more information on DR DOS.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
I think it's a pitty mac os X will never run on intel.
Mac OS X Server DP1 does run on Intel. Apple killed it. Internally, it's a sure bet they have Mac OS X running on Intel currently, and probably Alpha, too. Will we ever see it? Probably not.MacOS was clearly superior to Windows 3.x. Hell, MacOS 7 was superior to Windows 95/98 in just about every way imaginable.
Um, MacOS 7 didn't do memory protection nor preemptive multitasking, right?
When your clueless office-mate asks you "how did Microsoft's practices hurt me?" you can point to the MacOS on Intel that never was and say "here's something you might have wanted that Microsoft made damn certain you couldn't get."
Hmm... The BeOS guys surely aren't too glad that every Macintosh must be bought with MacOS either.
-jfedor
Fusion started on the Amiga. :)
Syllable : It's an Operating System
...that Darwin has been compiled for the Intel target, but the compilation itself was done on a PPC box.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
They killed it. Maybe I should put my CDs of DP1 for Intel up on eBay . . . :-)
Why would apple want to make MacOS available on the PC platform? Apple is in the business of making computers. The whole thing: a tight, integrated product. Steve Jobs wants access to every nook and cranny of the product. And that's what makes a Mac a quality product. It's not just the OS, it's the package. -Erik
> and most were forced to write detailed
> specifications and white papers instead of
> concentrating on writing code.
Even though reducing Mac hardware sales could have been a decisive reason not to carry on the Star Trek project, I still think it also lost much of its inertia because of such a constraint.
Big projects usually involve lots of Quality Insurance features which have a negative impact on people's motivation:
- Lots of paperwork to do prevent coder from focussing on what they are here for (coding, yep...).
- Dividing the project tasks in subcategories remove its role's transversality.
- Innovation is led by initiative. Allocating some specific subtask to a coder is a right way to reduce the global vision of the project it otherwise would have had, hence their opportunity to share their visions laterally across the project hierarchy instead of up then down.
- BTW, increasing the project staff increases the costs and also reduces each bonus part. this is not that good for motivation.
So, with a few people coding there could still have been this sparkling emulation which would have let them do some amazing stuff.Each time I was confronted to a similar situation we had the same problem.
Solving this issue is a choice to make:
Quality or Innovation ?
Securing or Pioneering ?
This is a manichean problem, there's no long-term compromise and Star Trek may have made its way if coders had not lost their motivation doing administrative tasks.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
That IS the issue.
Um, MacOS 7 didn't do memory protection nor preemptive multitasking, right?
Nor does Windows 3.x, 9x. It doesn't support true preemptive multitasking nor a real memory protection model in order to maintain backward compatibility; everything runs in ring 0. It's true that MacOS 7/8/9 shares these limitations with Microsoft's Win9x/ME brethren. However, MacOS has a far superior interface to Windows (INHO). I'll give but one flagrant example:
Windows 3.x abstracted the filesystem away from users through the use of "Program Groups", which had no relation to the filesystem whatsoever. For this reason, many Windows users never learned basic filesystem concepts, such as directory hierarchies. This model continued in Win9x through the use of the "start" button, even though explorer provided access to the filesystem. To this day I know many Windows users who have NO IDEA what the difference is between a directory and a file, and don't care. This means that when they lose files in the filesystem they have no way to find them again.
MacOS represents the filesystem as a set of folders within folders. Let's not even get into a debate on the superiority of HFS to FAT... filesystem metadata support under HFS is so superior to FAT it's just a joke.
That said, I won't consider buying a Mac until they release OS X. I am a UNIX weenie and have been using UNIX since the '80s. NeXTStep is probably the best operating environment I've ever used.
Finally, even given that your argument were true: how does this change Microsoft's anti-competitive and exclusionary licensing behavior with the hardware integrators. Are you arguing that because Win9x has "preemptive multitasking" that Apple should not have been given entry into the market?
I would have to disagree. Even the modern Mac OS 9 is plagued by stability problems and does not have pre-emptive multitasking. Mac OS can't do more than one thing at a time. A simple clogged local hub while plugged in, and your Mac slows to a crawl while it tries to talk to a local AppleTalk server. You can't do ANYTHING while it waits for the network.
Quite basically, Mac OS could never multitask. Mac OS X will change this however.
When he talks about software and hardware integration, he's not talking about dongles. When you push the setup button on an Apple display, for example, you get the Mac OS Monitors Control Panel, customized for that display, including ColorSync, and an assistant that helps you to calibrate your display correctly. If you use that same Apple display with a PC, the setup button brings up a simple on-screen display from the display itself. You don't have access to ColorSync or anything. That kind of thing is a feature that people pay Apple the extra money for. Take that stuff away and you might as well run Windows, because the experience will be similar.
Digidesign is similar to Apple in this way. Rather than offer separate audio hardware and software, Pro Tools is an all-in-one thing. They take the current PowerMac and they add both hardware and software and turn it into a world-class digital audio workstation. They do the same for one particular high-end model of IBM PC running Windows NT. They don't support installing their stuff onto a generic PC because the increase in variables destroys their ability to add value. If you're going to have to troubleshoot glitches, you might as well just run the cheapest box and Windows and Cubase (nothing against Cubase, which I also use).
Both of these companies serve markets that are willing to pay a little more for somebody to go the extra mile. That is not the x86 PC market.
VMware isn't an emulator. You'll have to get an x86 if you want windows with VMware. You haven't convinced anyone to get linux.
You guys are looking to the wrong idea for your dream system... I have a conspiracy theory for you to chew on.
Current Macs ship with 2 processors, and Mac OS X is going to be released with full support for two processors. This doesn't seem like much, until we come up with the ultimate piece of vaporware. Make me right, Connectix!
How difficult would it be to provide:
1. Realtime linking of core OS files from a full, licensed install of Win95/98 or Linux (most likely installed to a virtual drive for reference use only)
2. Dynamic, uniprocessor binary code conversion for x86 binaries (Windows and Linux)
3. Execution of dynamically converted code on second processor
MacOS and Be are currently the only Operating Systems with a tight enough control over distribution configuration to make this viable, but it IS a viable option. I want someone to do this! We've had VirtualPC for years, so why can't we do multiprocessor support and OS integration?
This is where SMP starts to make sense...
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
They haven't *officially* killed it yet, but it looks like they're merging OS X client and OS X server into just plain OS X.
Server was very powerful...great alternate server platform for those that wanted to get away from NT and couldn't handle UNIX or Linux without pains. I'm sad that they're axing the more advanced features.
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"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
> I guess I was overzealous in my attack on
> Apple. Hehe.
It's even worse. With the Mac, you also got:
Gigabit Ethernet
FireWire
two separate USB busses
iMovie 2.0
an optical mouse
ColorSync (and Photoshop plug-ins)
Altivec (and Photoshop plug-ins)
AppleScript
space for up to 2GB of RAM
an easy open case for when you add more RAM, or another hard drive (you still have space for two more).
Not to mention that Type 1 font support and the ability to open almost any image type are built into Mac OS.
People who don't need or want that stuff (most Slashdotters) are happy with a generic PC, and think Macs are expensive by comparison, but if those "extras" make an artist or musician twice as productive, or enable a beginner to do DV editing instead of not, then a Mac doesn't seem expensive anymore.
The other reply is correct, G4 is a nice processor but the marketing numbers Apple floats are complete, unadulterated bullshit.
/. forget is that most people who use macs are doing graphic/design work.
I don't know about you, but when I saw the dual G4/500 vs P3 1Ghz photoshop test....well, it was pretty obvious. True that's only one app, but what people on
If there is anyone who doubts, MacOS 8 can run on x86 platforms. The program that does it is called FUSION PC. I dont see why Apple hasnt done a x86 conversion.
~ Detonating a nuclear device within the city limits will result in a 500 dollar fine.
The Uber Nerd
Am I mistaken, or did Bill call Intel Chicken?
the boy named Griff asked "What's matter, McFly? Chicken?"
IBM makes copper G3's and G4's, as well as their Power4 series of PowerPC-based chips.
The PPC market is pretty big, actually. PPC chips are in cameras, set-top boxes, the new Nintendo Game Cube, and lots of other things. Anything where power is an issue, because these chips all use a fraction of the power (and generate a fraction of the heat) of the other chips they're compared to (that's why the iBook gets 5-6 hours of battery life).
I bet there are two or three PowerPC chips in your home right now, but you just don't know it.
Apple was quiet about it, but news reports of the time indicated that a large chunk of QuickTime code ended up in Video For Windows via a small third party contract house.
It was (apparently) a clear case of copyright infringement, not patents. Apple also apparently had a judge willing to issue an injunction against Microsoft shipping certain products if the settlement talks fell through. One of those products could have been Windows 95.
Apple was hush-hush about it because they wanted to settle and get Office and IE. Part of the complications was they also wanted to get Microsoft to commit to Copeland (and later OSX), and Microsoft wanted certain things too.
The notion that Apple was going to go out of business with Microsoft's help is bullshit. They still had money in the bank, and Microsoft had nothing to do with fixing their fucked-up product strategy and production problems. Former CEO Spindler covers much of this stuff in his book, but old San Jose paper reports were also interesting.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Actually, the iBook definitely doesn't have a fan, and it runs very quietly. When the hard drive spins down, it is silent. I've heard that the PowerBook does have a small fan, but my wife has a new one and when the hard drive spins down, it is also completely silent. I certainly didn't see any fan when I put in the AirPort card and RAM.
Fans are definitely the loudest part of a computer, though. I do notice the difference when I use a PowerMac as opposed to an iBook, even though the PowerMac has a much quieter fan than the IBM PC I used to use (which actually had two fans).
Do you mean that the code has become more tied to the hardware, or just that Apple's stopped talking about supporting other platforms? There's a difference.
Not in the case of Apple. They've hyped the hell out of projects that see 1 month of R&D and never ship a product. In this case, they had a working technology they dropped. Cross platform is as dead as a freakin' Newton. Make any other plans, and you're just gambling, with crap odds at that.
[WO vs ObjC]
I don't see where you read in a comparison. If anything, I was comparing Java with ObjC, and my Basic take on that would be, "Don't look to Apple if your focus is Java, since other platforms have better support and Apple marketing may just decide to focus on C# instead, or whatever language gets the hype next." Yes, ObjC is still very usable for native apps, but some of the beauty with WO is that you could use the same object frameworks (for which I find ObjC to be a much more capable language than Java) you created for your desktop ordering software as part of the web site ordering system. With WO 5.0 Apple is saying "pure Java only", which is a big "fuck you" to those of us who were actually using the existing technology like it was intended.
I know marketing is a dirty word around here, but a platform without developers is not a happy platform.
Then Apple is building a very unhappy platform. There are few enough developers without Apple pissing us off. If marketing were just marketing, they could easily have said "pure Java", but they added the "only", which cripples the technology, and will ultimately cripple Apple. Who in their right mind is going to buy an Apple machine for Java development when there are so many other, better choices out there? Apple should be pushing ObjC as much as Microsoft is pushing C#, with the line from marketing being, "Yeah, we got great Java support, but [ObjC/C#] is what you really want to use to get an advantage over your competition for your next-generation applications."
Well, shit happens. They almost went out of business. They had to revamp plans. If you promise something that will unknowingly cause your demise and you later discover that it will, it's generally okay to reneg on the deal.
There is something of an analogue to nice, a shareware (uncrippled) utility called "Peek-a-Boo" (it's also an analogue to ps, top, and kill). It's not preemptive multitasking on the Mac, of course (except between threads), but I gather it's possible to modify the number of ticks a background app gets because they all go through the same event handler loop, and that loop can be patched. What can't be changed is the scheduling for the *frontmost* application, which always gets as much or as little time as it wants. You can find Peek-a-Boo ST 1.5 at http://www.clarkwoodsoftware.com/
Virtual PC would lose a significant portion of their business. People won't need to virtually run Windows under MacOS anymore, as they would be able to simply dual boot their system. You need Windows? Reboot.
Virtual PC is too much of a Mac selling point for them to allow this to go by quietly. I expect to hear something from them.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
I don't know about your computer, but the main source of the annoying high-pitched noise from my desktop box are the high RPM harddisks, not the fans. And low-RPM harddisks are not entirely quiet either, so my guess is that the cubes, cool as they may be, are *not* totally quiet.
But I'll of course concede that any moving part less in a machine situated within earshot helps.
Just my 0.2E-32
Alexander Wilkie
I think it's likely that MS would have killed Office for the Mac. Remember, MS threatened to kill Office once before that, too. MS threatened to kill Office if Scully didn't give them the "perpetual license" to the look and feel of the Mac for Windows. The Mac was pretty vulnerable to not having applications at the time, and Apple conceded. (see Linsmeyer's book, "The Mac Bathroom Reader")
This resulted in the major reason why Apple later lost their look/feel lawsuit against MS. Apple gained the dubious honor of Microsoft admitting that they copied the look/feel in a private document, Microsoft got a license to steal from Apple wholesale for Windows 95, and the consumers gained a true innovation in computers: the trash can being renamed the recycle bin!
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Actually, there were a couple of rumors on http://www.mosr.com a while ago that said that Mac OS X may be in the works for Intel processors.
Also, i remember some old rumors about the Yellow box (Cocoa) in Mac OS X and that Yellow Box was to be a cross-platform for Intel and PPC processors!
Interesting...
-Håkan
Yes, I realized that. Kinda bums me out a little bit - I'd love an absolutely quite computer. I've read stories about totally quiet iMac clusters (hard drives must have spun down). Sounds (ha, ha) neat.
However, speed differences aside, I much prefer working on my fan-less PowerBook 1400 than my not fan-less Blue and White G3 simply because of the noise difference. Both, obviously, have hard drives. Maybe notebook hard drives are quieter (spin slower due to power constraints?).
cygnuhchur
Finally, even given that your argument were true: how does this change Microsoft's anti-competitive and exclusionary licensing behavior with the hardware integrators. Are you arguing that because Win9x has "preemptive multitasking" that Apple should not have been given entry into the market?
I never said that, I just didn't agree with the statement that MacOS 7 was superior to Windows 9x
"in just about every way imaginable".
-jfedor
I happen to like having that Apple logo plastered all over my cpu and monitor. It lets me know that no matter what, I've got good hardware inside that box; Hardware that is compatible and works properly with the OS.
Personally, I think Apple is wrong to believe that hardware sales would be incredibly hurt w/ a port of the OS to intel. Certainly they may shrink a little, and almost certainly wouldn't grow, but there are a lot of users like myself that would continue to buy it because we need that power and that stability.
Anyway that is my two cents. My new G4 should be here soon.
*nothing clever to say here*
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
>Apple got $300 Million under the table, $100
>Million over the table
Where do you get your numbers?
I assume the "over the table" cash you refer to is actually the $150 million of non-voting stock that gates purchased. Or was there another public cash settlement.
But for the "under the table" payment, where do you get the $300 million figure? Whenever I've read about the Apple/gates cease-fire, I've always seen the phrase "undisclosed sum" to describe the rest of the settlement. Was the value of this ever actually disclosed?
A link would be really cool if there is a legitimate source, or is the $300 million figure from a Mac rumours site, and subject to the dubious reliability of those sites?
thanks
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
My Win 98 box is pretty stable and fairly quick on load times, especially IE5. Windows runs well if you know how to use it and don't expect it to do the impossible. Apple producing the hardware and OS is not bad business, the hardware is theirs afterall. Why isn't SGI chided for their old machines running IRIX which they produced or someone tell Sun they ought to stop packaging Solaris on their hardware or else you Linux fanatics will do something crazy.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The OS running a computer does not mean shit in the real world. You may have religious devotion to a certain kernel and library base or just version of a certain kernel but in the real world where people need to do work, the OS means shit. The OS is for running the hardware, it is what takes your high level commands and smashes them down into something silicon circuits can understand. Porting OS X to x86 hardware would not be all too difficult. The problem lies in where the real work gets done, the applications. Linux could be the best OS ever but if a company or individual needs or wants a program not available on Linux, they won't regard it much if at all. This is what is rarely understood when I see this shit about OS X being ported to x86 or some other chipset. As it stands, OS X will be running on G3 and G4 processors and on standard configuration Macs. If a company wants to write a video editing suite or office suite, they know what hardware they'll have available and also know which special things they can add due to the G4's vector processor. How many programs do you see for Windows with SSE, MMX, or 3DNow! instructions embedded in them? Not a whole lot huh. With the Wintel PC market it is next to impossible to know what sort of configuration to expect so you throw out some lowest common denominators and hope for the best. No one would program anything for OS X on x86 hardware, there is just too much to chance and too many possible configurations available. OS X's port to x86 is also beset by problems with drivers. Just count how many times you've had trouble finding Linux or Windows drivers for a piece of hardware, times that by 20 and you can imagine how difficult said process would be to find OS X drivers. Stop bitching and expecting things to be ported to every piece of electronics ever invented, I'm not boycotting the fact that I can't run Palm OS on an ENIAC.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Interesting that you mention the YB, 'cause that's the one colour that Apple has so far not used for the iMac. Word is they wanted to avoid the association with "lemons". Also, I believe Berke Breathed has prior art on the "Banana" computer.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
Actually, there is a special database (the Desktop DB). It's just updated automatically, so most people never need to know about it (especially since it doesn't tend to get corrupted like it used do in the earlier days of System 7). This is possible because of the underlying architectural decision to use unique application "creator" types and filetypes that aren't part of the filename, and the higher-level objects and tools that are built on those concepts (bundle resources etc).
It's also not true that there aren't absolute paths stored - there are. But they're a fallback, and they're not stuck with silly drive letters (or with changeable mount points, which is weakness of absolute symbolic links on Unix): Changes can be repaired automatically because file aliases and "alis" resources store multiple, redundant methods of finding a target, and the Alias Manager tries them successively when one fails. There are open file ID's (somewhat equivalent to inodes), folder IDs in the B*tree (equivalent to pretty much nothing on UFS or ext2fs), volume names, volume partition IDs and device types for when a volume has been renamed, and file names, type/creator info, and yes, paths for when the other methods fail. If something changes and a file can't be found the other methods are used to find it, and when that succeeds the alis resource is updated with the new, fresh information (so the path or whatever was used won't be needed next time and redundancy is restored).
All of this means that I can rename a file and the link doesn't break, because paths aren't the only method or even the first one used - but alternately I can trash a file or an entire application folder (say with an upgraded version of an app) and replace it with one of the same name *in the same path* and the link still doesn't break, even though the old file ID is gone (the path is used to find the new one). Only when all of these tricks are exhausted with no joy do you have to see the "delete/fix manually" dialog. It's a pretty good system, but it's not yet fully clear how some parts of it will work under Mac OS X and on UFS filesystems. NeXT-style app and folder bundles can provide a lot of it, and there was an interesting article by Fred Sanchez linked to from slashdot on the subject a while back.
Now I understand what you were saying. My apologies for the misunderstanding.
I'm not sure that Java is a bad choice for Apple. It's been around long enough that I think it might not be a passing fad -- though I'm not saying I'm sure. Anyway, I'm under the impression that pushing obscure languages works better for monopolies, while underdogs want to stress compatibility, interoperability, and openness.
As for their decision to drop ObjC support: I can see why you're offended. That seems like a typical Apple foot-shooting bit.
Oh, one other thing -- about the cross-platform OS. Of course one shouldn't base any plans on the emergence of a cross-platform OS from Apple, but that doesn't mean there's no chance for the future. Maybe they just don't want to piss off Microsoft yet.
--
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Not only that, but back around 1984-1985, Microsoft threatened to pull the plug on Excel for Macintosh if Apple went ahead and released some kind of " Visual Basic " avant la lettre for Macintosh, which would have made developping visual, event-driven apps for the Mac very easy.
Apple killed the " Visual Basic ". And "got" Excel.
I've got a novel idea. Linux is open source, which means it's possible to tinker with or modify the OS and many of its apps as one sees fit. The real strengths and beauty of MacOS has been its consistent and well thought out interface, its robust way of dealing with metadata and configuration files, and the fact that most mac programmers put a value on UI design and easy of use that most programmers simply don't have. Technically, there's really nothing preventing anyone from taking all these OS and UI design ideals from MacOS and modifying GNOME and linux code to the extent that it copies these ideals. Or in layman's terms, porting MacOS to Linux. For example, if there's were some hypothetical source file for some hypothetical GNOME feature called Gnome App Helper, which provides a hypothetical default framework for creating really crappy ripoffs of the crappy windows UI, one could hypothetically modify that framework to create default UI's resembling MacOS'. Any GNOME program that linked against this new version of the GNOME library could hypothetically produce programs with mac-like interfaces. To duplicate the highly robust mac metadata model, one could hypothetically create some modified version of ext2 that generates resource and data forks. Certainly all these things seem hypothetically possible.
The million dollar question is--is this all just hypothetical?
Long live Clarux the PengiunCow!!!
That's why Apple should go with IBM (for non-alitvec ppc's) or Compaq (if they did happen t owant to go alpha) for their chips...
They should buy chips only from companies that use those chips themselves, and therefore have incentive to make progress with them. I don't know how Motorolla got into the PowerPC alliance in the first place, except they probably were used to selling apple's chips, so they wanted to continue doing so, no matter what.
Motorolla's very intent on capturing the embedded markets, while IBM is thrusting the Power architecture into workstations, servers, and I believe mainframes. Which company is shoing more commitment to going down the roads that apple wants to travel down?
Apple machine that I would work with
------------------------------------
2 500Mhz G4
512Meg SDRAM
2 36 GB Hard drives
NO DISPLAY
DVD-ROM
2 Rage 128 PCI cards (about the same price as a Matrox dualhead..)
No Modem
Standard keyboard, mouse, software, etc.
Support
=================
TOTAL = $6248
Dell machine that I would work with
-----------------------------------
Dual 800Mhz Xeons
512 Megs RDRAM
Matrox G400 Dualhead
2 36Gb HD
Windows 2000 (no option to not select!)
No monitor
12X DVDROM
Service, keyboard, mouse, etc.
==============================
TOTAL = $6027
I guess I was overzealous in my attack on Apple. Hehe.
Rami
--
rJames.org - illustration
And there were a couple of rumours that Steve Jobs was running for president. .= "pinch of salt"
You'll just have to wait for solid-state hard disks to hit the market for total silence!
"I will crush you like a tiny ant"
Why was this moderated as informative? The guy doesn't even tell how he got the amount of 8k.
:-)
Note: if you really want to compare the price between Mac and PC don't take the prices of the Apple Store, that's the MOST EXPENSIVE prices around. Example: for 500 Mb of RAM, AppleStore charges $1050, shop around the web and you can get that for half the price. Same goes for HD and all the accessories.
Also he claims "Parts are expensive to replace". Those days Macs parts are the same as PCs except for the CPUs and the cases. You can even use Microsoft keyboards on your Mac (MS just released the drivers). RAM is PC100 SDRAM, HDs are IDE, graphics are AGP, ports are USB, Firewire and VGA. Now tell me, how could the parts be more expensive?
Finally let's do a real comparison:
From AppleStore, a "bare" (64 Mb of RAM, 20 Gb of HD, DVD-ROM & gigabit ethernet, no monitor) PowerMac G4 with two 500 MHz G4 processor comes to 2450 US$. That's quite far away from 8000.
From Dell, a "bare" (128 Mb RAM, 30 Gb HD, 100bT ethernet, no monitor) DIMENSION XPS B SERIES with a 1Ghz Pentium III comes to $2120
So the Mac is more expensive by 330 bucks for roughly the same hardware configuration (sure you have slightly more RAM and HD in the dell, but the Mac has gigabit ethernet). That's 15% of the value of the Dell. In my book 15% difference is not "fucking more expensive".
Besides I like the case of the Mac much better
I really would like the myth that Macs are insanely expensive to die. Sure they are a bit more expensive but nothing to lose sleep over.
Janus
Windows 3.x abstracted the filesystem away from users through the use of "Program Groups", which had no relation to the filesystem whatsoever. For this reason, many Windows users never learned basic filesystem concepts, such as directory hierarchies. This model continued in Win9x through the use of the "start" button, even though explorer provided access to the filesystem. To this day I know many Windows users who have NO IDEA what the difference is between a directory and a file, and don't care. This means that when they lose files in the filesystem they have no way to find them again.
This of course, being one of the biggest superiorities of Windows as compared to Macintosh. Why should a physicist writing a paper have to know about files and directories? We don't ask programmers to know about Gauss's law when using a monitor.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
I had trouble sleeping the first couple of nights when it was down to one machine in my room..
the MacOS had something like 'nice' though so to do that, MacOS would have to be a preemptive multitasker, which it's not.
And of course, back when the Apple II was Apple's bread and butter (well until '86 at least) MS threatened to pull their BASIC that Apple had licensed unless they gave something up... possibly the original Windows 1.0 UI agreement, though I don't recall offhand.
What amazes me is that Apple would keep letting MS do this so often.
-- 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.
Microsoft does seem to have gone out of their way to avoid the OS's native services in Office (up to and including '98). Thankfully the IE team (apparently largely ex-Claris types) is a bit more open minded. In most cases anyone who would store a path as a text string instead of just calling the Alias manager (requiring much less actual coding as well as the other attendant benefits) is either clueless, or has a political reason to screw up in advance.
Unix is a different environment, with lots of different tradeoffs; you'll find when you've switched to OS X that some things will simply change so much that you won't miss the old behaviour. It's true that there are a few nice things in HFS that will be missed (the ability to almost instantly search for files on a volume with tens of thousands of them, for instance), but there are some pretty cool things in Unix too (like the hardlinks an AC mentioned, and no, there's nothing like them on the Mac - an open file or application can be moved around and renamed, but for different reasons - there's still exactly one pathname per file, not two, not zero (meaning an open file can't be deleted from the directory).
You're right about there being less absolute pathing now that I think of it, though - another reason for that is that there's a parallel namespace for a lot of folders in the System Folder (which can be anywhere because of an HFS feature) and the root of a volume (like the Documents or Applications folders). "spcl-extn" or something like that refers to the Extensions folder, for instance. But I suspect the real reason for that was originally to provide for localisation, because an abstraction layer is required to allow those names to be different in all the locales the OS is sold in. Good layered & abstracted design tends to reap unexpected benefits. But that's another reason not to worry too much about Unix - in terms of well-abstracted OSes, it's still way ahead of the current Mac OS (W2K isn't even a contender).
You can't run a VM in a VM, read their FAQ,
also I've tried it, and had to re-install linux cause it screwed my kernel
Uh, well, one problem.
Windows was already being worked on in 1985, and had at least a year or two of work in it.
Windows real "shot in the arm" came not out of Apple's refusal to clone Macs, but out of the constant dull, throbbing headache that was Microsoft's relationship with IBM.
IBM wanted a different direction for OS/2 than Microsoft wanted, from square one until the end of their relationship. This led Windows NT (or should I say OS/2 2.0?), but the more traditional Windows development certainly received a lot more attention because of all this animosity.
Remember, Microsoft has a "Not Invented Here" streak a mile wide...
Moof!
er, single user input thread, or single message queue? or both?
don't have the stats handy, but if you wanna go ask Dale in OS-DEBATE on Fidonet (yes, it still exists and we're still at it) I'm sure he'll give you either the stats or the program used to to test it.
basically it just writes randomly to 1,000,000 memory locations it doesn't own, and checks how many produce a GPF. Win9x sucks bad, OS/2 and NT whip it's arse, but NT comes out ahead of OS/2 by double (though the difference of a few dozen in a million attemps is jack all really).
And [G4] doesn't ship in the iMac
AMD Athlon (the closest x86 equivalent to PowerPC G4) doesn't ship in those all-in-one eMachines-type boxen either.
or any of Apple's portables.
Do you see an Athlon laptop? An Alpha laptop? A Sparc laptop? No. G4 is a workstation/server-oriented processor; it uses too much power and produces too much heat to be practical in a mobile device. If "portable" is extended to "any computer that can be moved from desk to desk very easily" which is often one of the main uses of laptops, would a Power Mac G4 Cube with an LCD qualify?
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Actually, only the iMac and the Cube are fanless...Apple hasn't yet found a way to make their portables fanless.
:P
I don't know about the iBooks, but my new PowerBook G3's fan doesn't turn on at all unless the processor temperature exceeds 160+ degrees...far above it's normal operating temperature of around 115-130. The only sound that it puts out is from the IBM TravelStar, 2.5 inch HD, which is rather noisy, all things considered, or the DVD drive when in use.
It should be noted that the Cube and the iMacs are convection cooled. The reason that the iBooks, and PowerBooks aren't fanless is because it's a wee bit hard to convection cool something that's horizontal in design. Still, Apple's portables require very little cooling assistance from the fans, if at all. Unlike my 500 MHz PIII Sony Vaio's fan, which NEVER turns off
-----
"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
The two words that best describe you are as follows:
"Windows Troll"
Spend some time actually using the current Mac OS before you dis it, because obviously you have little idea what you're talking about.
-----
"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
Ummm... do you have any documentation that proves this? My understanding is that OS/2s protected memory had no problems whatsoever, just the OS had a major deficiency with the single user input thread.
You, of course, are right.
Leaving our the obvious fact that you'll have to buy all of the parts yourself, and then install them.
===
I cut and pasted this from another reply that I did. This proves that you were right and with your solution of buy minimal and then add on, you could probably get FUCKING good prices. (heh)
==
Apple machine that I would work with
------------------------------------
2 500Mhz G4
512Meg SDRAM
2 36 GB Hard drives
NO DISPLAY
DVD-ROM
2 Rage 128 PCI cards (about the same price as a Matrox dualhead..)
No Modem
Standard keyboard, mouse, software, etc.
Support
=================
TOTAL = $6248
Dell machine that I would work with
-----------------------------------
Dual 800Mhz Xeons
512 Megs RDRAM
Matrox G400 Dualhead
2 36Gb HD
Windows 2000 (no option to not select!)
No monitor
12X DVDROM
Service, keyboard, mouse, etc.
==============================
TOTAL = $6027
I guess I was overzealous in my attack on Apple. Hehe.
====
I bend to your will, mighty Janus.
Rami
--
rJames.org - illustration
Clock for clock, the G4 may wack a p3/4/athlon, but dollar for dollar, that Apple machine is getting smacked in the hoopla like nobodies business.
Moreover, at least AFAIK, there isn't a G3/4 chip out faster than 500 mhz, right? And given that we have STABLE 1.1 ghz Athlons shipping in decent quantities, the faster PC platorm out there right now (umm, the GeForce2 Ultra isn't out for Mac either, yet, right?) would be an IBM clone.
With Windows 95, Win16 apps ran in a single VM and were cooperatively multitasked so they'd run in the 3.x WinApp environment (not a bad design in a limited hardware situation - hence both MS and Apple choosing it back then) but Win32 apps each got their own VM and their own memory space. Again, not running in Ring 0.
As for the Program Manager not being a file manager. Right. That's the point. Program Manager was a launcher just like the button in the lower left corner of Windows 9x or most Linux shells. The file manager in Windows 3.x was, surprise, File Manager.
I'll skip commenting on the rest of the post since you don't bother giving any "facts" to refute but just personal preferenced.
Please, if you are going to post guesses, at least try not to pretend to be authoritative.
Nor does Windows 3.x, 9x. It doesn't support true preemptive multitasking
3.x doesn't, Win9x does. You may be thinking of the GDI - which isn't the OS, just part of the interface.
a real memory protection model in order to maintain backward compatibility; everything runs in ring 0
ring 0 goes wayyyy beyond memory access (which IS protected), while most core OS functions are ring 0, you apps are not, so it's hardly 'everything'
FWIW, NT performs better at protecting memory than OS/2 does, and based on the praise of OS/2, that's gotta be some solid protection. Of course, stability of an OS is more than memory protection.
The original (pre lawsuit) GEM was a very close clone of the Mac UI. However, it didn't support multitasking. It's a shame Gary Kildall folded when Apple sued. The outcome wasn't that clear.
Jobs turned him down since it would have hurt Apple hardware sales and Apple was a hardware company.
Gauss' law is a bit harder concept than directories. And it really helps to know the difference between files and directories. If you e.g. can manage directories you can create a file system hierarcy, which helps you when you store a lot of different kinds of information. I am an computer geek, but still when I drive a car, I want to know what those tiny lights on my dashboard mean, in case they light up.
--
when everyone gives everything,
when everyone gives everything, then everyone everything will get
This would get Apple a chunk of the huge x86 market and still let them keep the fat hardware revenue stream. If Apple just made their own x86 computer that wasn't compatible with all the other IBM PCs, it wouldn't have bought them anything except they'd owe alliegence to Intel rather than Motorola.
Guh. Shuttup, troll.
People like you make me sick (and give people like me a bad name).
The G4's a fine proc, and AltiVec allows it to be faster than x86 procs for specific tasks, but wonder processor it is not. And it doesn't ship in the iMac or any of Apple's portables.
. ..
This is a ridiculous argument on it's face simply because MaxOS X is a completely redesigned OS based on Mach and BSD, not the original MacOS codebase. That Apple isn't (formally) supporting older PowerPC hardware is no surprise, though I bet that getting the core OS to run on most PowerMacs won't be terribly difficult. Look, I've never bought a Mac. The last computer I bought from Apple was a II/e, so don't think I'm biased in Apple's favor -- but I think your argument simply doesn't hold water.
Hrm, they were probably thinking, "Gee, it really sucks that Motorola can't make all the PowerPC chips we need...Intel x86's are cheap...why not?"
:^)
BTW, that's the same problem they're having today. That's why they're talking about it *again.* Stay tuned.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
"nice beige"?? hehe. Sometimes plain and simple is nice... like plain white cotton panties. :-) But I would rather have an interesting looking computer.
I think the point here is that if Apple dropped all of its current hardware for Wintel PC hardware, it would be grubbing in the dirt like all the other makers to sell their product for $300 after the Microsoft Network rebates :P
Frankly, I expect they'd earn DIRT on their hardware sales, and even less on OS sales.
On top of that, they'd be forced to support the absurd amount of Wintel hardware. 2/3s of the problems with Windows and the thing that slows down a lot of Linux users is the non-standard hardware. This causes problems in configuration, OS level support of certain products, and instability do to the plethora of hardware the OS would need to support.
All-in-all, going Wintel would be the worst decision Apple could make at this point, I believe, as much as I would personally LOVE to see an x86 version of OS X for my Windows friends.
-----
"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
The thing is, there is already an x86 compiler on the MacOS that creates more efficient x86 code than most x86 native compilers. Furthermore, this compiler is already owned by nearly everyone who develops for the Mac, because it is included in CodeWarrior, the MacOS's leading development package. Given their history, Metrowerks (the makers of CodeWarrior) would likely make it very easy to recompile for MacOS on x86. The biggest stumbling block in doing this right now is that the Mac Toolbox is not availble on x86. Naturally, this problem would go away if MacOS was available on x86.
I have to point out that as of two years ago, Apple has been working to gradually remove all non-essential non-standard hardware from their computers, beginning with the mice and keyboards. If I take the mouse and keyboard from my iMac and plug it into a Win98 box, it'll say "Windows has detected new hardware and is installing drivers", make me click a dozen OK buttons, and then it'll work just fine. Only one button on the mouse, and the Alt key is in a slightly odd place, but otherwise it's fine. Similarly, I could take (say) a Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer, plug it into my iMac, download and install the driver s, and go play Unreal Tournament.
Apple has removed their non-standard ADB interface, their non-standard 8-pin mini-DIN serial ports, and their DB-15 monitor connector, and (unfortunately) the on-board SCSI controller that most Windoze lusers wouldn't recognize if it bit them. They've added USB (marketed heavily by Intel and Microsoft), FireWire (IEEE 1394, compatible with Sony's i.Link), AirPort (IEEE 802.11b, compatible with Lucent's WaveLan), switched to standard HD-15 SVGA, switched to an ATAPI DVD-ROM and ATA/66 hard drive (to be ATA/100 in a few months), and they come with a v.90 modem (a real Linux-compatible hardware modem, unlike most PCs these days) and 10/100 Ethernet (with gigabit optional). What's non-standard about that?
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
And as Gassee has pointed out, not only were they having to pay a lot in royalties, Microsoft also has agreements forcing the OEM's to keep other OS's "hidden" from the user if they are bundling windows on the machine...
-thomas
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
I thought that originally Apple wanted developers to use either Java or Objective C to code for Rhapsody/OS X, but when they balked, they (Apple) focused on cleaning on the Mac OS API, which ended up creating "Carbon". Correct?
Correct. Apple's previous management wanted companies like Adobe to rewrite all their software in Objective-C. Jobs (perhaps with influence from people like John Warnock) realized this was a Bad Idea. Apple then canceled Rhapsody, took what was left of it and shipped it as Mac OS X Server/Darwin. Around the same time, Apple announced Mac OS X and Carbon.
Apple would love people to use Cocoa (Java/Objective-C) APIs, but Apple had to build a brige for people that had 15 years of Mac OS C code lying around. That bridge is Carbon. Carbon is basically a cleanup of all the Mac OS APIs. Apple has bolted this subset of APIs onto Mac OS X/Mach. According to Apple, most Mac apps are already 90% Carbon compliant. That extra 10% are old, crusty APIs that should no longer be used. Once an application is Carbon compliant, it can run "natively" on Mac OS X, as well as Mac OS 9.x (and perhaps 8.x) if CarbonLib is installed.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
A number of designers and engineers developed a modular Macintosh called Jonathan, which could have x86, 68K and Apple II modules, around the mid eighties. The idea was that the PC module could run MSDOS but make it easy to upgrade into the Mac module, where people would find the Mac OS much more enjoyable.
In the end, the project was killed inside Apple for the same reasons Star Trek was-people feared that more customers would find the PC side better, and the Mac OS wasn't enough to keep them. The hardware element of Apple has always been such a strong, strong force in that company-the same mindset that killed clone Macs, modular Macs, and anything else that would jeopardize the Macintosh's purity through commoditizing its hardware.
Hell, custom hardware is a strong force in any specialized firm-SGI, Sun, HP, IBM...I suppose.
Calum
I think the point here is that if Apple dropped all of its current hardware for Wintel PC hardware, it would be grubbing in the dirt like most other PC makers to sell their product for $300 or **FREE** after the MSN rebates from hell :-P
Frankly, I expect they'd earn DIRT on their hardware sales, and even less on OS sales.
On top of that, they'd be forced to support the absurd amount of Wintel hardware. 2/3s of the problems with Windows and the thing that slows down a lot of Linux users is the non-standard hardware.
This causes problems in configuration stages, OS level support of certain products, and instability do to the plethora of hardware the OS would need to support.
All-in-all, going Wintel would be the worst decision Apple could make at this point, I believe, as much as I would personally LOVE to see an x86 version of OS X for my Windows friends.
-----
"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
Last I heard, Apple was big into native-code-compiled Java, rather than the byte code variety.
When you take the Virtual Machine part out of it, Java's syntax is pretty well thought out -- I could think of worse languages to have a platform tied to.
Seems like pushing native-compiled Java could ultimately be a good way to win some bad enemies over at Sun, though.
Breakfast served all day!
No... IBM still makes them. When Motorolla decided that they'ed like to increase the complexity by adding the AltiVec engine, IBM parted ways and focused on boosting G3 clockspeeds, and developed the G4 sans Altivec unit, as far as I've heard.
Skimming through their product lines:
Most of the RS/6000 series uses the POWER3 series, but the RS/6000 43P Model 150 uses a PowePC 604e. And the Power series is really just the PowerPC's bigger brother.
Compare that to Motorolla, who dumped all the computers based on their own chips out of the building so they could make way for Intel based systems...
VMWare is x86-only, but there are other emulators for other platforms (such as SheepShaver for PPC, inside of which you could run VirtualPC on Mac OS).
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
The new $799 iMacs are out; more expensive than a comparable PC but the cheapest Mac Apple's ever released.
If you REALLY like beige, simply buy an old beige G3 from someplace like PowerMax, or get a newer G3 or G4 and transplant it into a standard ATX case.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Microsoft committing to a new version of Office was the first company announcing any faith in Apple having a future and even then it didn't look like Apple would be around long enough for it to ship. The MS deal was the first step in bringing Apple back from the abyss. You want a villain in all this, look at pre-Jobs Apple management or all the "Mac Loyalist" app vendors that abandoned Apple before Microsoft showed that maybe Apple wouldn't die.
Actually, there was a guy from Apple claiming that it was unfair Microsoft practices that caused one version of QuickTime/Win not to install correctly. His testimony was fairly amusing when Microsoft showed that Apple's code didn't didn't bother using the well documented (and used by every Windows app out there) for registering handlers for specific file types. Apple fixed the bug in their code and it installed fine after that.
What your forgetting is that back then Apple was running on 68k MOT processors. The move to PowerPC did require a recompiling, so it had no distinct upsides over moving to x86.
/nutt
Apple did a very good job of masking this need for recompiling, by introducing FAT. When Compiling to FAT, you would get a binary that could run on both PPC and 68k.
So really, it wouldn't have been much harder to make a FAT format spanning 68k and PowerPC...
And that is the textbook definition of a vertical monopoly. (Microsoft is being charged as a horizontal monopoly by comparison)
Actually, only the iMac and the Cube are fanless...Apple hasn't yet found a way to make their portables fanless.
AFA building a business on fanless systems, though...keep in mind that the only reason Apple can create the cases they do is that they are pouring more money into case design than the overwhelming majority of case manufacturers could afford to do. However, once an Apple case hits the street, there's nothing to prevent the small time vendors from stealing Apple's ideas, ala Microsoft, just so long as they don't deliver a case that looks identical to Apple's.
Apple can't patent convection, after all.
The answer is beige paint, my friend. If you are careful of cooling considerations, appropriate protheses can be sculpted from styrofoam to make the iMac all angular and pretty. Add a few fans for that soothing white noise and you got yer dream box, dewd!
-toddhisattva
> Mac OS X [...] has become increasingly Mac hardware specific.
Do you mean that the code has become more tied to the hardware, or just that Apple's stopped talking about supporting other platforms? There's a difference.
> They're also dropping Objective-C, their most useful foundation technology in my opinion, for future versions of WebObjects.
Objective-C doesn't even compare to WebObjects. One is a programming language, the other is a kind of middleware. Apple is pushing Java bindings to the OPENSTEP^WYellow Box^W^WCocoa APIs, but I believe the ObjC bindings will still be usable. From a marketing perspective, this makes a lot more sense than trying to get everyone to learn ObjC. I know marketing is a dirty word around here, but a platform without developers is not a happy platform.
--
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
I guess that was Apple's own "monopolism". Maybe they eventually decided that if you want to use MacOS you should buy THEIR computers...
or any of Apple's portables.
Do you see an Athlon laptop? An Alpha laptop? A Sparc laptop? No. G4 is a workstation/server-oriented processor; it uses too much power and produces too much heat to be practical in a mobile device. If "portable" is extended to "any computer that can be moved from desk to desk very easily" which is often one of the main uses of laptops, would a Power Mac G4 Cube with an LCD qualify?
TYLTK (Thought You'd Like To Know) The G4 PowerBook comesout in January!Speed Doubler was an enhanced 68K emulator for PowerPC. Not all Mac apps would be open-source; they'd have to run 68K binaries some time (68K Mac binaries were very common back then before the age of PowerPC). This Intel-based Mac OS would require emulation of the 68K CPU in order to run popular Macintosh software.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Whatever happened to the Rhapsody (MacOS X Server) on Intel project??
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Then wouldn't Darwin be like Star Trek: The Next Generation. Ooh, and then for DS9 you'd need MacOS for Alpha servers (cause they just sit there), and then for Voyager you'd need the MacOS on WinCE/Palm devices. And then we'd need movies for each (Pirates of Silicon Valley, perhaps?).
That's easy to say that Apple lost "world domination" if they had only shipped the Mac OS on Intel. I'm sure Microsoft would have sat back and let them do it, too. If Apple had released something like that, Microsoft would have just pulled the plug on Microsoft Office for the Mac, and guaranteed that people would have stuck with them anyway. They've done that sort of thing before when they threatened to kill Office for the Mac if Apple didn't adopt Internet Explorer. Then Apple would have been left with having to compete their hardware platform with commodity hardware from Intel clones without Microsoft's tepid support.
I'll admit that putting the Mac OS on Intel would have gone a long way towards acceptance of the Mac because people wouldn't have to invest in hardware to try out the system. However, Apple would have suffered the same problem as they did with the later clones. The Macintosh is an integration between hardware and software, and running the software on generic hardware waters down the Mac quite a bit. With that, the Mac would lose a lot of its distinction, and I don't that would have helped Apple's business any.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
..To go where no mac has ever gone before (intel)...
X-files music is required, much as I hate embedded midis. Doo doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo da....
Kris
botboy60@hotmail.com
Nerdnetwork.net
Kris
botboy60@hotmail.com
Nerdnetwork.net
MacOS was clearly superior to Windows 3.x. Hell, MacOS 7 was superior to Windows 95/98 in just about every way imaginable. That it was never ported and sold as a product may be a success and notch in Microsoft's belt, but it's one of the best examples of how Microsoft's (mis)behavior hurt consumers, and in so doing damaged the American economy. When your clueless office-mate asks you "how did Microsoft's practices hurt me?" you can point to the MacOS on Intel that never was and say "here's something you might have wanted that Microsoft made damn certain you couldn't get."
And that's NOT a level playing field...
MacOS X on Intel probably would blow the value prop of the Mac. The Cubes and the G4 towers are cool, but still roughly double the price of an equivalent PC. If MacOS X on Intel only ran half as well, you'd still be getting your money's worth.
Rhapsody DR2 for Intel was a precursor to MacOS X, and its story backs up my assertion. Rhaptel only ran apps compiled against OpenStep or the BSD layer, and it was a weird combination of Macisms and the OPENSTEP GUI, but hey, it was more or less the next-generation Mac on Intel!
If you liked the price/performance value proposition of Mac clones, you would have liked running Rhaptel on your PC boxen. Some benchmark software showed that a native-compiled MacOS on a Pentium Pro 200 ran just as well as it did on a PowerPC 604 200--and at half the price!
Macs are cool, but clearly MacOS X is a competitive advantage that Apple intends to keep for itself on its own hardware.
Would you like to touch my monkey?
GEM/XM does multitask; I don't know if it was released in the 1980s, but it is downloadable now. For GEM apps it works like MultiFinder on the Mac; for DOS apps it's like the DRDOS Task Manager.
A lot of the look-and-feel changes between GEM/1 and GEM/2 verge on the petty. Apparently only Apple were allowed to have shading in the title bar for the active window. And only Apple were allowed to have scrollbar thumbs that went to the edge of the scrollbar. And having the Desk menu (Apple menu) on the left rather than the right was obviously something Apple would never have allowed to fall into enemy hands.
if x86 ran even more of the market than it does now would there have still been the same competitive pressures that forced Intel to go for broke in increasing performance?
there were sparc laptops, the sparcbooks
Apple hardware is plenty varied and is one of the reasons linux has taken a while on Apple hardware (the other reason being a smaller user base). Apple doesn't have major contenders in the PowerPC computer market, so what they say, goes.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
...and I was just getting ready to support your statement by detailing the numbers showing how my G4/500 cost me more than my Ultra10.. Oh well..
Where the value of X-Mailer: is the true measure of a man...
Blue box equalled MacOS apps on Rhapsody PPC(now carbon)
Yellow box equalled NextStep/OpenStep apps on Rhapsody
Red box was only fabled to exist which would run Windows apps on Rhapsody x86
Consider that it was Bill Gates, in 1985, who approached Apple management first about them needing to enter the clone market, and he had several big manufacturers lined up. Apple Refused.
Microsoft then started work on Windows, and eventually succeeded in creating a graphical environment within which to run their applications.
Furthermore, Gates prefered the Motorola architecture, which explains that statement.
Make no mistake about it - it was Apple's arrogance that created Windows, so to speak, more specifically John Sculley's lack of brains.
Harry
I'd bet that Apple's 68K Emulator was used heavily in Star Trek. MacOS is laden with non-portable 68K assembly and pascal code. In the early days of the PPC switch, 90% of the OS was running in emulation, including such critical bits as the SCSI and Networking subsystems. Even today, they haven't shipped a 100% native OS, and won't until OSX.
If you thought System 7.1.2 on a Performa 6100 was slow, now imagine it on the average low rent 486SX-33 of the day. Ow.
Of course, doing a FAT-style transition to x86 would have been possible, but from a marketing standpoint it would be stupid. "Port to Intel", "Port to PPC", "Support the 68K installed base". Most software companies would probably have done nothing, and Apple would have been forced to make 060 machines.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
However, should apple ever port Mac Os X, there would be no technically sound reason to buy apple hardware anymore (at least not at the prices they currently sell it).
Answer: AltiVec. The PowerPC G4 processor used in all current desktop Macintosh computers (Power Mac, Cube, iMac) is twice as fast as Pentium II/III even without AltiVec, but AltiVec provides a sh*tload of 128-bit vector power for Photoshop filters. And there's no x86 frontend overhead on the PowerPC (like there is on the Pentium II/III and Athlon, both of which run x86 in hard emulation) so more of the die can be used for power instead of bassackward compatibility.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
"What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death."
As the article hints at, it would make no sense for Apple to release an Intel version of the MacOS, because all of the existing Mac software has been compiled for a PowerPC (or a Motorola 68K series). The Star Trek project mentioned in the article is source-compatible, not binary-compatible, so every software manufacturer would have to recompile all of their code for the x86, and some would have problems, and many just wouldn't bother. The biggest issue would not be with the major applications like Photoshop and Excel (I have no doubt Apple could talk Adobe and Microsoft into supporting any new type of MacOS they come out with) but the thousands of free, shareware, or small commercial applications that people wouldn't bother to recompile.
When Apple switched from the 68K to the PowerPC a few years ago, not only was the PowerPC many times faster and able to emulate the 68K in real time, but it was the only significant change to the hardware, so many programs which accessed low-level MacOS hardware on the 68K still worked on the PowerPC. Also, Intel/PC hardware is too varied. Remember how long it's taken Linux to get support for all of the different PC hardware out there?
The Cubes and the G4 towers are cool, but still roughly double the price of an equivalent PC.
Remember: the G4 is about as fast as a PIII of twice the clock speed (remember the snail commercials?).
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
..................................
Cunning linguists
BTW, I've seen GEM. Nice shell, much smaller than Windows (4x1.44M). Too pity.
---
Every secretary using MSWord wastes enough resources
About the only thing I can think of for using MacOS with x86 is for cheap servers or something. The great thing about Apple doing both the OS and the hardware is the fact that they can tightly integrate them.
When a switch by Apple was made to USB, they made the switch both in hardward and in software at the same time thus making a smoother transition. Same goes for Firewire, etc.
Would MacOS on x86 REALLY make a better computer?
I doubt it.
If Apple had continued to develop this, improving stability and porting more software to the platform, then M$ may not be in the dominant position it is today. This would also mean that the whole personal computing world could be focused on cheap x86 technology, rather than being fragmented betwen two different architectures
We would also have a lack of real choice. The beauty of nice, standardized Mac hardware is that it is far more likely to just work then hardware in the x86 world. I like to have that option available to me rather than being stuck in a situation where you have to buy x86 if you want a computer.
Besides, look at all the standards that Apple pioneered and eventually brought to the x86 marketplace: 3.5" floppy drives, built-in ethernet, SCSI, affordable/practical wireless networking, software power control, FireWire. Heck, it even did a lot to popularize USB for Intel. It's amazing to me that even to this day that most x86 machines don't come with ethernet built in, yet almost all Apple machines (even laptops) have had that for years and years. Additionally, Apple's now shipping gigabit ethernet standard on the MP G4s.
No, I contend that it's a good thing we have the Mac hardware platform. It's brought real choice and innovation to the market.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Let's assume that you, by chance, were converted to the average Windows user. This is how about 99% (okay, not quite) of the world is. The Apple users and the Windows users rarely get along - they consider each other morons. The Mac people think that they have something stable, easy-to-use, and convenient. The Windows people, however, think the Apple people are morons who can't figure out how to use computers.
So, sitting in front of your Windows box, you're reading this Slashdot news thread, and wondering if you would install Apple if you could. You'd probably think "OF COURSE NOT! That would be admitting that I've been wrong all my life in using Windows. Plus, I'm really smart. I know how to use Windows. Anyone can use MacOS."
So, while I personally would jump at the chance to wipe out some Windows partitions, most Windows users, unless they're really fed up (more so than usual), are not going to want to. It's a shame that Microsoft was able to accomplish this.
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
A conversation with a typical MAC HEAD goes like this:
Me: "Why don't you like intel processors?"
Mac Head: "They only have four registers!"
...as if the Mac Head I'm talking to that uses his mac to tweak GIFs all day for some website cares about the instruction set of the machine. I mean, does it matter if there's it can only XOR and BNE, as long as it runs all your software fast enough?
That being said, I think Apple wasted a lot of time being slave to its oddball processors. And on a related topic:: Just think how much money they would have saved, for example, if they supported PC standard Mice and Keyboards? They could have leveraged CHEAP chipsets and still slapped their own nice case on them.
--- Speaking only for myself,
Just running the PPP dialer and netscape was enough to crash it every few hours of use. Now its running linux, and its rock solid, so it evidently is not a hardware problem.
I would expect this type of behavior out of Mac OS 7.x, or perhaps even 8.x. I would certainly not expect it out of Mac OS 9. Assuming you are running some Mac OS 9.x version, and you are consistently crashing "every few hours," then there is something wrong -- and I don't think you should be so quick to assume that your experience mirrors that of the rest of the userbase. If my G3 crashed every few hours, I certainly wouldn't be using it.
I'm not saying Mac OS 7.x-9.x is as stable as Linux, but I routinely have it up on my G3 or PowerBook for several days at a time before shutting it down overnight.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Blue box equalled MacOS apps on Rhapsody PPC(now carbon)
A believe Blue Box was more akin to the Mac OS X "Classic" environment -- basically Mac OS 8/9 in emulation.
Carbon, however, being an API rather than an environment, can actually take advantage of Mac OS X's modern features (protected memory, multitasking, multiprocessing, etc), whereas Blue Box could not. This was largely why Rhapsody was a bad idea, and why Carbon was created.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Objective-C doesn't even compare to WebObjects.
You need to learn to read. Having eyes is a good foundation for parachute jumping, but the two are not equivalent.
Hamish
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Who cares?! Go get just about _any_ computer. Do not pay any attention to who makes it (It can be Apple, x86, Alpha, Solaris, etc.)
Install Linux on this computer. (Note - if you're going to be using floppies during the installation, you may want to avoid the Macs, which have moved away from floppy drives!) Now, under Linux, you can run Windows "for real" by using VMware. Then, you can add another product for Linux that emulates MacOS. So you're now running _three_ OS's at once. If you're in the mood for setting new records, there's also a program named XCoPilot, that emulates the PalmPilot.
So the issue is moot - just get Linux. :-)
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
I think it's obvious that Apple's main revenue comes from their hardware sales (as someone else already mentioned) and this is the key reason why they aren't trying to sell MacOS for x86 machines. If they did that, they'd simply be an OS vendor and they'd be in direct, head-to-head competition with Microsoft. They'd probably have a hard time convincing themselves that that's a good business move. They'd either come out on top and be much wealthier than they are now or they'd lose big time. They're probably happy where they are now.
Anyway, to the main point of this post: lately Apple has been moving their entire hardware line towards requiring NO FANS. Only their G4 towers require a fan right now; no fans in the Cube, Powerbooks, iBooks, or iMacs. No way they could continue this trend with an x86 processor inside.
I think this is a MAJOR selling point for Apple hardware and I can't understand why they aren't screaming it from the rooftops. Well, while I don't understand it, I'm not really surprised, Apple has a history of doing great things without letting anybody but the already converted know about it. Personally, having to use my computer all day everyday, I would (and will) pay quite a bit extra for a machine that doesn't emit a constant fan noise.
cygnuhchur
Actually novell did have a seperate product DR-Dos which was later sold to Caldera along with an anti trust suit against microsoft for changing MS-Dos in unfair ways or some such. I even have a DR-Dos 7.0 disk I got from caldera at a show a while back. I believe DR-Dos is still big in the emmbedded market.
Government is the abdication of your responsibility to a faceless bureaucracy. Anarchy(absence of government)is the a
More details on the Star Trek project can be found in Jim Carlton's Apple book. It makes sickening reading, but it's one of the most interesting reads I had in quite a while. It's really quite unbelievable to see just how many times one company can keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Great Idea since 95% of the desktop computers are Intel based. Gee, when did someone get hit by a clue bat? Colored plastic, colored shamstic. Populate tthe world on the most ubiqutous hardware platform and you win the game.
Wait a minute, sounds familiar (Windows)...
-Wes Yates, Cybernetic Entomologist
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
Apple's past maps directly to their fututre, it seems. When they bought NeXT, they got a nice multi-platform system, not just at the OS layer, but at the application layer as well. Since then, the have reworked it into Mac OS X, which has become increasingly Mac hardware specific. Darwin might run on Intel, but that's like having the Linux kernel cross platform but no libraries or applications. Just like its NEXTSTEP predecessor, the first developer preview of Mac OS X had an Intel version, but Apple dropped it after that. Now they say they're no longer supporting application-level cross compilation to Windows (aka, Yellow Box). They're also dropping Objective-C, their most useful foundation technology in my opinion, for future versions of WebObjects.
In the early 90's I ditched Apple for Linux because I needed a base OS that actually worked well. In the late 90's I went back to Apple (but not for my server! :-) by way of NeXT with every hope that Apple would have the resources to take the NeXT technology in the right direction. Here I sit in the early 00's looking again at Linux and being pleased with how far GNUstep has come.
The nature of the application market requires cross platform support these days. Apple continues to snub their developers when they make these kinds of decisions. Unless they start making better decisions, they may well end up as the "Also Ran" that some people have been calling for the last 15 years. Sad but true.