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Developer Tools For MacOS X
Vizer writes: "Apple is shipping CDs with the development tools for MacOS X to its developers. Not only that, but the tools will be downloadable in mid-October. Details are on the Apple Developer Connection site. This jives well with what we've been told in the past by Apple, about how MacOS X will eventually ship as two CDs, one of which is just the basic user installation and the other CD full of developer tools.
And yes, developing for MacOS X is very familiar to anyone who has done some BSD programming, except that the paths are all different and HFS+ volumes are case-insensitive. Having the terminal window with access to various unix utilities is great, and nearly all of my un-ported apps run in the compatability environment without complaint. No OS crashes, no problems other than finding out where Apple hid all the preferences and utilities.
No, I don't want to go back."
So I am sitting here at home reading slashdot on my home machine and also logged into my osx machine at work via SSH. While it is only a terminal window I can still fork with anything on the machine I want too. I am currently learning where everything lives. Now I use the MacOS, Linux, Solaris, and NetBSD everyday and I know that it took time to figure out where each of them put things. OSX is same yet it makes much more sense. Now why didn't anyone think to put code libraries, preferences and the such in the System library before now. Things the need to be executed at startup in the startupItems. Wow that was hard to figure out. Applications in the applications folder. Ahh. And by the way they don't have to be in there. I have my personal apps in a folder in my home directory. If I put them in the Apps folder then if someone else logs in a the console the don't see them.
If people have a problem with a feature or interface gizmo get off your ass and fix it. That is why apple released this as a BETA.
I think after everything is said and done people will still hate it because they are predisposed to hating anything Apple makes. Kind of like people hating what Jon katz writes because of the fact he wrote it. But that is another story.
That is quite a lengthy pathname, but it is still only 128 characters. This CVS tree contains over 45000 files, so paths of this length are long enough to support a large document structure. I can't see how a 255-character path would be limiting in practice.
There is also a lot of good and well designed hardware being sold. This is because the market for PC's is HUGE. With multiple companies all competing with each other for a piece of the pie, it is inevitable that not all the products will be of the same quality.
I've worked as a PC technician off and on since the late 80's, so I think I know a thing or two about their hardware. You buy good quality stuff and you're not going to have problems, at least no more than you'll have with a Mac. I don't think I have to tell you that not all the Macs Apple made were of the best quality. Remember the performa line? Remember the powerbook 1400 series? Or the powerbook 5300's that could catch fire when you charged the battery? Apple has also made some very good quality products as well. PC products vary in quality too. Ever hear of PC-Chips? They make the most God awful cheap garbage motherboards ever to curse the world. Ever hear of Tyan or Asus? They make very high quality boards that I'd be proud to put in a system. This is how things usually go when consumers have a choice. The same holds true for other things such as TV's, stereos, shoes, automobiles, sheet rock, mayonaisse, etc etc.
So if you've been bitten by cheapy parts or systems in the past then I do feel sorry for you. But don't please don't jump to the conclusion that you got bit because it was a PC that did the biting.
Also Apple is going to have a harder time hitting that well defined target you speak of as time goes by.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
My feeling about this is that when builing a GUI app using some one elses application framework it's the design of the framework that's important, not the implementation language.
I had a NeXT for a few years, and the application builder was really good - way ahead of its time. There are very few comparable mainstream environments available today (and they didn't exist then) -Borland C++ Builder and Delphi: Delphi is Object Pascal, C++Builder uses the pascal GUI library and makes heavy use of the borland __closure extension. The Smalltalk environment would be another example. None of these use straight, portable(?) C++.
I don't think you can compare the NeXT/Apple application framework to QT, MFC, MOTIF etc (ie current C/C++ frameworks.) because of the dynamic / graphical nature of the NeXT/Apple GUI design environment
Besides, late binding (a significant feature of Objective C) can be good for GUIs.
"Why was he so stupid? When told that his mind could change his response was: How? Why?" - John Cage.
Not really. Apple is making no efforts at all to woo Open Source developers since they know that for most of them it's an all or nothing strategy. They're just trying to be nicer to their existing developers by giving them access to parts of the system they wouldn't previously have had.
Most of the people working on Darwin are Apple employees. If you really think that not being Open Source is a death knell, then you really don't understand how the market works or how common, non-techie users think at all.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Time will tell if that money apple is charging for their OS will buy enough brain power to compete against windows. So far the open source developers have made a go with linux and BSD. My guess is that charging a few bucks for an OS is a loosing proposition when MS has a few billion to throw around. If SUN, netscape/aol, borland can't do it how do you think apple will?
Also remember that Bill G makes a couple of hundred dollars for every mac sold. Once people find out that by making improvements to darwin they are actually putting money in Bills pocket how much will they want to participate?
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
--
1. PowerPlant is complicated? Really, go write a metric conversion program with just toolbox calls. Now go and do it in PP. Love that PowerPlant!! Or you could just move to maczoop
2.Who says you have to use Cocoa? Carbon is perfectly legit and that carbondater is sure a neat little tool.
3. Sure, poop on java. It's a valid option for lightweight or network savvy apps... and it helps aleivate that tough-to-port-to/from-winders blues.
2 1337 4 u!
Also keep in mind that Bill Gates makes money of off evey mac sold. Once this little tidbit becomes better known I doubt Apple will attract many linux or bsd developers.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
You seem to be confused as to how case-insensitive files actually work.
On, say, Linux, you create a file called FOO. Then you create a file called foo in the same directory. No problem. When you want the first one, you refer to it as FOO, and the second one as foo.
Now on MacOS, you create a file called FOO. Then you try to create a file called foo in the same directory. BZZT! That file already exists. Do you want to replace it?
So you see, the situation you outline can never happen. FOO and foo are actually the same file.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
>>It defaults to running inetd, nfsiod, portmap, and a couple of other things.
>So?
Security comes to mind!
>>They have discarded way to many Unix conventions for my liking. They have come up with their own method of 'controlling' services.
>Good, it's better.
In what way is it better? How do you know it's better? Sounds like you haven't even used it.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
You've apparently never used a case-insensitive system, have you? Try creating 'bAR' and 'Bar' in the same directory. Try creating them in seperate directories and moving them to the same directory.
Case insensitivity creates ambiguity in file names. There is no functional reason why I should be able to create both 'MyReport.latex' and 'myreport.LaTeX'. Having both is a workflow problem in determining which is which. There can also be problems with accidentally creating new files when you meant to overwrite an existing one. A case-insensitive filesystem helps average users avoid getting themselves into such a mess.
The main reason to have a case-sensitive filesystem is to support the generation of randomly named temp files, such as 'GBVhX88r' and 'gbVHx88R'. The names carry no semantic meaning, but having a case-insensitive filesystem complicates the hashing functions generally used to create such temp files. The only real reason to support filenames like that is when for when knowing the semantic meaning of a filename is unimportant.
This is good for server systems, but the advantage in simplifying the creation of such files is outweighed by the possible confusion and ambiguity for common user-oriented tasks. This is why most consumer OSes, such as the Mac and Windows use case-insensitive file semantics. Most server OSes, where the user is not as important, are case-sensitive.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Everyone keeps saying that MacOS X is the OS for everyone else (i.e. not Unix users). Fine . . .
Those people WILL NEVER open a shell, go look for a config file and hack it with vi.
The people that will do that are the people that already know Unix. And remember the saying about Unix is that the learning curve is steep, but you only have to climb it once. OS X would make us climb it again . . .
And I'm not just complaining becasue it's different. I truly believe that somethings work, and changing them does not have a positive benefit. There is a certain amount of knowledge about Unix and they way things work. If you are going to tout the fact that it's built on top of Unix, etc, etc. Then do it the Unix way. Moving configuration and startup files to different directories doesn't accomplish anything. They're still shell scripts and flat files - leave them be.
I was really rooting for OS X to be a great OS. Apple could still fix a lot of these things, but I doubt if they will.
One major problem is that the definition of upper and lower case is language and locale specific. It's a mess. It will only get worse with the adoption of Unicode. A case sensitive file system is much simpler and cleaner.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I was just at an Apple recruiting event yesterday, and they obviously had a demo of OS X. The presenter was also a recent graduate from my college (Carnegie Mellon). Of course, he knew that most of the people in the room were used to Linux and command line interfaces.
:)
To prove that OS X was not just a nifty a GUI, but an honest-to-god POSIX-compliant BSD-based distribution, he opened up a terminal window and proceeded to type in the following:
emacs foo.c
Then, in emacs:
#include
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
printf("Hello world!\n");
}
^X^C
Then back in the terminal:
make foo
./foo
I think when he did that, the amount of applause that filled the room was the most applause a terminal window has ever gotten
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
Where do we get details on what it's like to develop GUI apps for Mac OS X? What're the tools like?
... (still using Linux as my server and web platform)
Details! I want details, before I go out and spend $400 on an ADC Select membership... I'm *REALLY* looking forward to the possible switch away from Win32 as my client OS to Mac OS X for everything
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
and it aint so bad. If you can get over the silly GUI and colors it's actaully not a bad OS. It shows it's UNIX roots off in path names, and still is easy to use like OS 7-9. Seems very stable, and installed first time no sweat in about 5 minutes. That damn Dock is a PITA though, should autohide like in windows. Funny how the MAC OS is becoming more 'Windows' like, and Windows is becoming more MAC like, but never the twain shall meet!
I still haven't managed to figure out what the differences are between: /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin
/usr/sbin, /usr/local/sbin
/usr because /usr might be on a different partition/disc
/bin,
/sbin,
/bin: stuff essential for system booting (can't be on
/usr/bin: normal binaries
/usr/local/bin: non-distribution binaries (aka non-RPM, non-DEB, etc etc)
/sbin: system binaries (not supposed to be on the average users path), needed for booting
/usr/sbin: system binaries (not supposed to be on the average users path)
/usr/local/sbin: system binaries, not installed via the package manager
--
Ian Peters
So.. what's the easiest way to get bash installed and running? Since there aren't any dev tools available, does someone already have a compiled bash for MacOS X?
You can get dev tools by following the instructions here.
You can grab bash here .
Hi. Check out IBM's website. You might actually begin to know what you are talking about. To be quite honest, now that OS X is out, even just a beta, to prove it's not a joke, I'm switching over. I am SICK SICK SICK of x86 Hardware that sucks, blows, and otherwise makes me pay sizable amounts of money for crap.
The G4 boxes (not the cubes) have come down in price. Just because they say "400 mhz" dosen't mean they suck. In fact, the G4's, at present speed, are very competetive on the modern market. Further, apple boxes cost more because they have more cool stuff in them. USB, Firewire, DVD RAM stuff is expensive, but apple makes them available for a reasonable price. Of course they overcharge for RAM, but hey no one is perfect.
You're just upset because you want something for your x86 box. Why? To avoid spending money? Fat chance of that working. To avoid losing linux maybe.. ok, I could see that being a concern. A false one, LinuxPPC is in great shape.
Apple can afford to bide a bit of time here, when everyone comes time to buy their next computer, they'll find for less than $300 more, they can get a far superior piece of hardware and monitor, with a terrific GeekMeetsTrendy OS. I don't see how they can go wrong NOT porting it.
- Paradox
Man of the C!!!
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
x86 is the standard? For what? Mom and Pop Desktops? You should know that that's just not the only market out there. Even more importantly, at some point, if Intel/AMD type chips are going to evolve, they are going to have to move beyond x86. It's not a brilliant architecture by any means, and fixing all its problems is going to break your "standard." Why can't Apple compete with that? They're doing pretty darn well for what they face: a massive network externality.
Then somebody's going to eat your lunch.
"Using the Cocoa interface will net you an OS X-native application, but I don't think you'll get anything more than if you used C++ and the Carbon APIs."
This has got to be the most pig-ignorant thing I've seen any of you Mac luddites post in the three years you've had to get your shit together and learn something.
Let me tell you something, sport: I was a mac developer like you. I knew the Mac toolbox *cold*, and I had memorized all the little tricks like rowBytes isn't really rowBytes in a color pixmap until you mask off the fucking high bit.
I knew how to beat up my desktop file to accept a new icon. I built my own main event loop, and reams of code to cut-and-paste for all kinds of repetitive crap, which I carried from project to project, never realizing how much of a pain in the ass it was.
I switched to NeXT machines in 1990, and within a month, I was more productive with NeXTSTEP than I had *ever* been on a mac. Within the year, I could do any given task on a NeXT system in about 1/3 the time that it would have taken on a Mac.
Look at Create, by Stone designs (Two developers, one year in the latest re-write, which made it 1/3 the code size of the OpenStep version); OmniWeb by Omni group (something like five developers, working in their SPARE TIME between consulting gigs), which puts Netscape and IE to SHAME, and Glyphix, (two developers, one full-timer who was still learning the tools, and one part-time mentor, written in under one man-year) and BE AFRAID.
Now, kindly pull your head out of your ass, learn five new keywords, and try to save your company from irrelevance. Flash is a cool product, but the simple fact is that three people with one year each of NeXTSTEP experience each could duplicate it in a month.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
OS X is suppose to be pronounced 'Oh Es Ten', but it sounds so much better when it is pronounced 'Ohhh Sex'.
I have Mac and PC hardware and I don't want to see a port of OS X to Intel. Whine all you want about "overpriced Mac hardware", it is a well defined target and allows Apple to do a nice job of software/hardware integration. I wouldn't wish PC hardware support on my worst enemy, there is just too much poorly designed and incompatible crap being sold.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
*/sbin: statically linked binaries (for when your system is fscked or you have no libraries)
--
Peter
The problem is that a PC operating system has to support all of the hardware, both good and bad, plus there are too many variations in the hardware. This caused many problems for IBM when they moved from supporting OS/2 only on genuine IBM PC/AT and PS/2 computers to supporting OS/2 on everything that claimed to be PC compatible. Apple could produce a version of OS X that was only guaranteed to run on a specific, tightly specified Intel system, but that just eliminated the vast majority of existing Intel systems. Getting the hardware vendors to write the drivers isn't a solution. Even Microsoft has problems getting hardware vendor support for Windows NT and Windows 2000.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
> There is nothing that prevents someone from
> having all of their files in one case. If all of
> the files are in one case, then how can anyone
> complain?
It's not just the files that I create, though, is it? I don't create every file and program on my system. I get files from elsewhere - and there are a zillion programs that come with a Linux distribution that have mixed-case names for no good reason.
And the GUI argument doesn't make sense, either - if you wind up with a directory of stupidly-named files using case to differentiate them, it's going to take awhile even in a GUI to figure out what's what. There's no reason to have that feature other than to be obtuse, as far as I can figure out. Noone in this conversation has come up with an answer that's sufficient to put this kind of burden on the user. No wonder people hate the command line!
And if, as you say, we're all moving to the lowercase roman alphabet anyway in the future due to unicode, we might as well start altering the file system now, huh? That way we'll be unicode-ready that much sooner.
From an engineer at Macromedia:
:-)
Unless you're Adobe or Intuit, Apple doesn't want to hear from you.
Well, Macromedia too, but that's beside the point.
At this year's WWDC, I spoke up in the developer feedback forum regarding the developer support. Documentation suffers a bit compared to other commercial platforms (yes, Windows). It's not exactly easy to get good basic docs from Apple if you're a first time developer. "Toolbox Essentials" and all do fine, but they still aren't anything like "Programming Windows", etc. on the Dark Side.
I do know that Apple's developer fees do get put to good use. The tools and support you get are top notch. OS betas and pre-release versions are available and shipped monthly. You can't ask for much more. As far as the price is concerned, well, those "steep hardware discounts" and all were during darker times at Apple. If you think about what the company makes money on, it doesn't make sense to give away your two core sources of income. If you could get hardware discounts by paying a $100/year developer fee, you'd suddenly have a flood of developers that thought C was just the third letter of the alphabet.
Don't get discouraged by Apple's developer program. The costs are on par with Microsoft's (only MS has a bit more software to offer for the Universal subscriber), the documentation is growing daily on their site (which is free at developer.apple.com) and you can provide good, solid feedback through their ADC-only e-mail lists. The WWDC is also a good place to provide feedback.
--
Greg Norz
Software Engineer - Enabling Technologies
Macromedia
can anbody present an example of legitimate use of two files in the same directory named identically save for case?
.C, for C source it is .c so someone could reasonably have a foo.C and foo.c in the same directory.
/etc/rc.d, I will change the first letter to lowercase, this is a somewhat common technique. Although this isn't an example of two files identical save for case, it is an example of where case sensitivity is desired.
One of the naming conventions for a C++ source file is
When I want to turn something off in
How do you reconcile your previous statement of "Apple is not a company I can morally approve of" with your current statements "I wholly support it for others", "I have nothing against Apple", and "I appreciete what apple has done"? I may be an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy that can barely grasp the the modern notions of morality, but I am completely bewildered by what you mean by the term. If you do not morally approve of Apple, how can you have nothing against them? Isn't moral disapproval *something* against them?
But I choose not to run their software, as I would rather be free.
I must further ask, if you like your friends why have you recommened slavery, subjugation and domination for them? Don't you want them to be free as well?
In case the above sarcasm doesn't make sense, let me put it another way. If I step into a small box and shut the lid, I have certainly lost some freedom. In terms of standing up and stretching, let alone walking to the refrigerator, I am most unfree. But I am still a free man, because I can get out of the box anytime I want to. Every choice we make limits our freedom in a very real sense. Likewise, with Apple software the user can choose not to use it at any time. But full moral and political liberty (free speech) still belongs to the user.
Your friends will be just as free as you in the moral sense whether the use Apple software or not.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
"If you like Free Software so much, why dont you quit your job?"
I never told the poster to quit his job. I've seen your type of posts on slashdot before. You types just can't grasp the notion of illustrating the absurd by being absurd.
Of course I am not an immoral person because I haven't given all my food away to the homeless and starved in their place! But this is the metaphorical equivalent of what the previous poster wanted Apple to do. He called them immoral because they haven't given away 100% of their software.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
To be fair, you really have to take all software: free and otherwise, and treat it with an equal hand. This includes comparisons between "good" and "not good" commercial software, as well as the occasional "good"/"not good" free software debacle (usually resulting when someone strays only slightly from GPL or other licenses).
If I was totally narrow-minded, I would have missed out on Windows 2000, which I think is one of the most robust platforms for hardware ever. I would have also missed out on Linux. Point is, saying a company is morally wrong for trying to make a buck off software is... well... wrong.
Particularly when some of us are or will be making our livelihoods on software sales (coming out of college soon, hardware simply isn't where it's at).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
What's the problem with having
/sbin
/usr/bin, /usr/local/bin
/usr/sbin, /usr/local/sbin
/Applications
/System
/Preferences
as opposed to
/bin
/boot &
/etc
is it just that it's different that makes it wrong? Mac's aren't and won't be targetted at unix jockey's, they're computers for the rest of "us".
I still haven't managed to figure out what the differences are between:
/bin,
/sbin,
Apple's just trying to make sure that their users never have to deal with stuff like that.
There is a myth that it is faster, but it is not: it would be if Unix used a sensible string format, but nul-terminated strings have to go a byte at a time anyways.
Just wanted to comment on this one part of your post (and don't take this as a flame)-- it's not a myth, case sensetive searches are faster than searches that ignore case. The simple reason is that in a search that ignores case, BOTH values must be converted to uppercase or lowercase before being compared using a REP CMPSB assembler statement. However, for searches that are case sensetive, you don't need to process uppercasing/lowercasing the values to be compared, you can just execute the comparison immediatly.
Also consider the implications of Unicode or multibyte character sets, and the fact that uppercasing or lowercasing a string isn't as simple as it used to be in 8-bit ASCII-days.
It may not be a huge performance hit, but it's definately slower at some point.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
How do you define small? How do you define big? What constitutes an appropriate size for a user base?
With the introduction of the PowerPC, in one year, Apple became the largest vendor of RISC machines on the planet.
With the introduction of OS X, Apple will become the largest vendor of Unix machines. Apple will ship more copies of OS X in the next twelve months than have shipped copies of Linux since day dot.
If its sheer numbers you want, their user base is some twenty-five million machines that are manufactured durably, reliably and usably.
Unlike a server farm where a lucky few (now there's a REAL niche for you,There ONLY seven or eight million sites running Unix & Linux) who sit over some impressive technology, each of those machines is attended to by a single person trying to do something else for a living.
If you want something really dreadful to ponder. The number of Web Servers on the planet will more than double in the coming year. All running on Macs.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Just finally managed to get OSX PB installed (turns out the installer doesn't like processor upgrades yet... go figure; worked just fine in DP4). On the whole, I love this thing. The best things...
/usr, and tmp aren't too bad, but after two years in Linux I still haven't figured out what /etc stands for).
/mnt directory, Linux-like. There's actually a very good reason for this one. Currently, drives are mounted at the root level. Thr major directories are mounted there too. Now, if the user has named a drive such that the name conflicts with one of those directories, the system gets confused and it seems as though neither is shown (according to reports I've already seen out there). This is a particular problem since "Applications" is a common name for a second hard drive or partition (and suddenly, the apps stop working).
1) Aqua. I didn't like it at first, but it grows on a person. The Graphite variant was a welcome addition (distracting the eye during graphics work is a legitimate concern), though it would be a good idea to make the three window widgets of varying brightness in this mode (they actually are in standard Aqua already, but the colors are carefully chosen so you don't notice the difference unless you can't see the color). Could be more configurable though.
2) The Dock. Again, I hated this at first, and I still have my reservations, but it's growing on me. I do wish there were an option to make it vertical and glue it to the right edge of the screen, but there are already Dock replacements that can do that.
3) Directory names that make sense. Ditto for the new directory structure. Like Unix, but without the just plain wierdness of some of the names (/bin,
4) Not only the command-line, but the fact that the Terminal is only an option. I use it, but most users never need it, and by including it standard you would cause some developers to create OSX-specific apps that require it (this is still done on Win32, despite M$'s attempts to try and hide it). I'll get blasted for this one, I know, but command-lines aren't the Mac way of life, and to ever require an average user to work with one would be disastrous. But at the same time, totally denying anyone access to it would be bad for the Unix subsystem. This is a good compromise: it's there, but only if you want it to be. (NOTE: it's still standard in the betas, which makes sense, but if I remember right is being relegatd to an option in the final release).
5) The System Preferences app (analogous to the old Control Panel) is very nice; the layouts are much better than their old OS9 counterparts. A few things still need to make it in (like the monitor calibration assistant, the ability to configure multiple network interfaces, and more screensavers) but then again, this is beta, so it's expected that a few things will be missing.
6) Two-button mouse support, native. Don't believe me? Try using a multibutton mouse in any Cocoa app. Doesn't work in Carbon or Classic yet, though (see the next list).
7) Application Services. Too bad there aren't more of them yet (though I'm sure they will be), but if NeXTStep and even OSX Server are any indication, this has the potential for some seriously cool stuff.
8) QuickTime previewing for media files in Column view (or, for that matter, Column view itself). I hope this will be extensible to other types of files where appropriate.
9) What list like this wouldn't be complete without mention of the multitasking and memory management? I do worry that programmers will use this as a safety net and not debug their programs properly, as has happened at least to some degree on every OS I've ever seen that has these features (the MacOS system may crash more often, but in my experience apps crash less frequently there than in any other OS I've worked with... except those that were direct MacOS ports, or that have ports to MacOS. And yes, studies have been run confirming this). However, these features are still important
X) Finally, gotta love the X. Though I do wish you'd stop with the "ten" stuff like this was the same MacOS we've been using for sixteen years. It isn't, so just make a clean break and pronounce it like a letter of the alphabet; give the name real differentiation. Besides which, it sounds much cooler. A minor gripe, perhaps, but one which should be considered at least for marketing purposes. Or is there a trademark out there that prevents the use of the x pronunciation? And yes, I apologize for the cheesiness in using X as a list number, though it does make the columns line up more nicely.
There's some room for improvement, though (good thing this is a beta, so there's still lots of time to improve)...
1) More security. At the absolute least, use password shadowing (is there any legitimate excuse not to do this anymore?) Preferably also better GUI control of daemons/"services" and processes, though this isn't as big a deal (I'll write the frontend myself if I have to).
2) Hardware compatibility. Nuff said. Particularly in the areas of SCSI and serial support; keep in mind that the G3Beige still had these ports, and it's supposed to be supported. At least support all its standard equipment.
3) Fix the themeing. Or take it out. I don't care which myself; if they leave it in, great, if they take it out then someone else will write software to do it (knock knock... Mr. Landweber? Hello?). But the current half-done implementation doesn't cut it (the NextStep theme hack, for example, only works for some windows).
4) Drive icons on the Desktop. Where they belong (on Macs anyway).
5) Internally, mount drives in a
6) Fix Carbon to allow it the same access to GUI functions as Cocoa (or at least similar access). Top priorities: get them on the same wavelength Appearance-wise, get two-button mouse working at least in Carbon (if not Classic also), and no resizing over the Dock (unless autohide is turned on). Try to do this for the other OS functions if feasible, but the interface at least is imperative.
7) Finish QuickTime 5.0. Again, nuff said.
8) For crying out loud, don't give the default user root acces! Let them create an Administrator password in the install, then have them create a separate user account for themselves (again, all still in the installer). And if they try to login as root, let them do it, but warn them of the dangers.
9) Drop shadows on the windows are really disorienting. Give the user the option to turn 'em off (or at least shrink the shadow), or better still only put them on the active window (where they do make some sense). Ditto for the fading windows and genie minimization (for the record I'd turn off the genie effect, shrink the window dropshadow and put it on the active window only, and leave the fading menu as is).
X) Stop requiring reboots for things like network config changes. This is Mach, and thanks to Mach's architecture this shouldn't be necessary. Even hardware drivers can load at runtime. Make it so the OS never needs to reboot (except when the machine itself must be powered down and a few other extraordinary circumstances, lke upgrading the Mach kernel itself) and you'll have a massive selling point, because none of the major desktop operating systems out there today can make that claim.
----------
We got a copy of the public beta today and installed it. There's an installation option to choose between HFS+ and a "unix filesystem". (I believe it is UFS.) We tested it, and it is properly case-sensitive. So, for those who care to install MacOS X with a sane filesystem, the option is there.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
I am sorry that you got moderated down.
Perhaps a more precise way to phrase your question would be: can anbody present an example of legitimate use of two files in the same directory named identically save for case? I indeed would be extremely interested in such an example, and have never seen one in my life.
There is perhaps nothing more frustrating in using computers than typing "vi makefile" and being presented with a screenfile of tildes instead of the contents of "Makefile". It is unfortunate that the computer is not smart enough to understand what I meant.
Being a VMS user, I like file names which are in all-caps, with one dot, and a version number. The all-caps look makes it look dry and technical (which I much prefer over Unix's cutesy, friendly use of lower case and mixed case)
Windows NT's filesystem with preservation is perhaps the best compromise for most users (and Windows 98's almost-but-not-quite case preservation is not).
Unfortunately, due to the pervasiveness of Unix (e.g. for web servers), most computer users, even extreme newbies, have been conditioned to believe that everything should be case sensitive. There is a myth that it is faster, but it is not: it would be if Unix used a sensible string format, but nul-terminated strings have to go a byte at a time anyways.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
When Windows 95 just came out, I heard about it having a 255-char limit on filenames. My friend in high school (that's where I was at the time, believe it or not) made a comment, which sounded something along the lines of the following. MacOS already provides 32 chars for a filename, and 255 seems like overkill. Is this a pissing contest?
Well, it turns out that the 255-char limit is for the full path of the file, including the drive letter, colon, backslash, path, and the filename. In MacOS (and probably every other decent operating system/file system) you can create a virtually unlimited tree of directories. In Windows, you can't. You're limited by 255 characters.
And one would think that since they were fudging the file system in NT5 (aka W2K) anyway, they might as well fix that limit. Nope. It's still there. I tested it myself. And 255 characters really isn't that much. I got an error on the fifth node of the tree, with slightly longer than average directory names.
--
Macworld Magazine has said that LinuxPPC is a faster server than OS X Server. That is not OS X beta, though I imagine that it's still true, based on what I've read. Microkernel vs. native kernel, basically, plus the GUI is always optional with Linux. (He says as he types this in Gnome and Netscape...)
We may not have the pretty interfaces, and definitely don't have Steve Jobs, but so far, we seem to have one thing they don't: speed.
Cheers,
Jason Haas, LinuxPPC Inc.
Haaz: Co-founder, LinuxPPC Inc., making Linux for PowerPC since 1996.
-- haaz.
With Unicode the mapping of upper to lowercase can be extremely complex, and potentially two file systems or programs would use different algorithims, resulting in very difficult to understand errors and potential security problems.
And there is nothing "user friendly" about case insensitivity. The average user picks a file by clicking on them!
Here's another way to look at things. If you run BSD, but want a better GUI, then you could theoretically buy a Mac and run OSX. All your apps will work, and you'll have the benefits of Apple's much-praised UI. If you have a problem with any of the other aspects of the mac, read this.
I am against OS X on Intel, for all the reasons that other people have specified. Is there an anti-petition anywhere? I want to sign it.
--
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
In order to do C-ish things in Smalltalk, you have to do a bit of work. In order to do more Smalltalk-ish things in Objective C (e.g. adding methods are subclasses at run-time), you might have to do a bit of work. It's a trade-off and I think it's a very good one.
Personally, though, I'd choose Objective C over Smalltalk even if they were effectively the same, just because I hate Smalltalk syntax so much :)
OS X natively supports running off HFS+ and UFS drives, and reads and writes HFS and FAT(16, possibly 32) drives. HFS+ is case insensitive, but of course case preserving. You deal with case insensitive file systems just like Mac and Windows people have been doing for the last decade and a half. UFS is case sensitive, like most unix style file systems. It's got advantages for servers, but Classic can't run off it. Carbon Apps can, though. So, use it for servers you don't need to run Classic Apps on, and use HFS+ for desktops for compatibility.
Take a walk over to Stepwise ... a grand central station for those who use NeXT/Openstep. Read a few editorials and opinions and you'll begin to pick up on a simple fact: Apple seems to be alienating Obj C developers, pushing the use of Java instead (C++ developers should have no trouble with Java).
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
I actually would consider this a problem. How many people are getting broadband connections who are entirely clueless about security? Those people probably can't afford a pricey firewall just for their Mac - what should they be doing?
D
----
For around thirty dollar you can start developing for MacOS X. That is a great deal which ever way you look at it.
the FSF does not take any rights away from me
You do not have the right to any non-GPL derivative, no matter how free and permissive you make it. You can't even create a public domain derivative of GPLd works. If RMS believes that software should not be owned, then why does he restrict me from creating unowned derivitives of the works he himself says he does not own?
As you yourself impied, if I give someone your software in such a way to violate your license, you still have your software.
If, after becoming familiar with what your opponent says...
What intellectual sophistry to assume that anyone disagreeing with you is ignorant of the topic! You're completely ignoring Locke, who has much to say on the nature of property. Just as a repeal of government trespass laws would not negate the existance of land property, neither would a repeal of the government copyright laws affect the ownership of software in any way. For a radical look at a world where software is owned in the absence of any government recognition of it, see Intellectual Property Rights Viewed As Contracts. This paper also has some very good references coming off of it as well.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Not true. Darwin contains far more than "borrowed" BSD code. There's Core Foundation, NetInfo, AppleTalk, IOKit, and more. And aside from Darwin there's Quicktime Streaming Server and OpenPlay. Apple was not obligated to "give back" anything, but they have chosen to release more than they took.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
XML does not a good configuration file make.
Its as if, because Apple used XML, their configuration files are somehow superior? Oh yeah, I just love typing this crap all day long:
....
Damn, I got tired of it anyways. Yes there are config tools, but that just makes it a pain in the ass to manually configure stuff if the tools fail or are unavailable.
My point is, XML is being horribly abused right now. It's really quite sickening the amount of wasted storage space being used for tags, when a few extra lines of code to parse a simple configuration file would do.
XML makes a lot of sense for passing data between apps that were developed independently, or are hosted on heterogenous systems and networks. But the use of XML as a config file grammar is just OVERKILL.
Another uninformed news article. Sigh.
Have you seen the developer tools? They are the NextStep ones that provide great UI modelling, seperation of UI code from business objects, enterprise level database design and the best framework I've ever seen.
No, you were probably thinking of emacs and gcc (which is used to do the actual compiling)
Come on Slashdot, do some research for christ sakes.
[)amien
Well you see that in and of itself is a problem. Artists and musicians aren't computer people. Some people are BOTH artists/musicians and computer people, but an artist/musician is not automatically someone who uses a computer. So how are they a market? I do hope not trying to compete in a niche market which doesn't even exist. If thats their business plan they they're already dead, just not broke yet. Instead of trying to regain some lost market share among a group which isn't big enough to support the company anyway, they should be working to gain a share of the mainstream market.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Yes but DVD is not used for the same purpose that VHS is. VHS is there so you can record television programs and movies. DVD is there so that MGM can sell you a prepackaged movie with great quality sound/video. The only way that VHS is going anywhere is if there is a viable replacement for it, which DVD is not.
Now I know that there are DVD recorders out there somewhere. I also know the cost about as much as a decent used car, so they're hardly an option for mainstream use.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Go take a look at how GNUstep is progressing. We've made *tremendous* progress in the last year, and MOSX has heightened our visibility and brought more developers our way. We have alphas of ProjectCenter.app (our PB.app clone) and Gorm.app (our IB.app clone). We have those robust directory structures (/System, /Local, and /Network). We have the cool Application bundles implemented (with localization and cross-platform support). We have a fully structured makefile system. Applications and Objective C frameworks from NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, and MOSX are being ported. New applications are being written from scratch. In short, GNUstep is really beginning to snowball. Check it out!
Did you know that betamax was BETTER than VHS? But that didn't mean squat. Sony tried to control and license Betamax while VHS was an open standard. So what happened? VCR manufacturers made and sold VHS units and Betamax died a horrible death.
Better doesn't mean squat if it isn't compatible with the existing standard. This is something that firms have had to learn the hard way over and over again.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
You won't. OPENSTEP is available for Windows. And if you want a Free solution, GNUstep is portable. All that needs to be done is a Win32 backend for the AppKit. Foundation works already.
although not '100% pure java' , I was wondering
if Apple has any plans of providing Java APIs
to programmers.
i'd love to write some 'native' MacOSX apps but
would like to program in my preferred language -
ie: Java.
For a full discussion of the altenative implementation, see:
6 /part1.html
http://people.netscape.com/ftang/paper/unicode1
Complicated? Yes. Usable on small/underpowered hardware? Yes. (a 1k memory requirement is not excessive!). Performance wise? If we look at Western European languages, about 10% of chars are non-ascii, its about 4 times as slow. For non-European languages, its roughly *30* times as slow.
I would really really not thank anyone who made fopen 30 times slower (yes I know I'm assuming the comparison is the slow step here).
DNS has gone for the half-way house - the I18N version is case-sensitive for non-US-ASCII languages.
What worries me about MacOS X is the whole new Objective C interface. Creating a new API is one thing; creating a new API in a different language is another. Apparently, certain advanced features of the GUI will only be available to you if you use the Objective C interface which is seems to be a way that Jobs can keep his NeXT dream alive.
I'm not a Mac developer, however at work our Mac developers have no interest in porting their application to the new API in Objective C. I can't imagine it would be extremely easy to port and maintain Windows applications, most of which are written in C++ to it either. For developers who are just starting out, writing their software in Objective C makes it very difficult to port to Windows locking them into the OS.
Now Objective C might be the greatest language since latin, but the simple fact of the matter is that in GUI arenas, C++ currently dominates.
Just curious what the opinions of others are out there.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
>can anbody present an example of legitimate use of two files in the same directory named identically save for case?
The Perl makefile?
If that was fixed, I would switch to a case insensitve in a second. I also would like to see space insensitve as well so my mp3 collection is easier to deal with. It seems that even maodern xargs is broken with spaces.
... and someone who may yet go back, I can speak with a little experience here. Apple has a flaky history when it comes to pleasing its developers. I remember back when all it took was a small annual fee, and you had full access to all alpha/beta releases from their ADC site, plus steep hardware discounts. These days, Apple's implemented a tiered system whereby the more you pay, the more benefits you receive, but the more you pay, the lower the benefit/return ratio is.
When I first got in with ADC, I was a starving college student who could barely pay the interest on his student loans, much less pay for the latest and greatest Apple hardware to test the software I was writing (some pretty sophisticated finance software, back before I started consulting in an unrelated field -- if anyone's interested, give me a holler). Here I was, struggling to develop software that Apple's platform desperately needed, and Apple recognized this and subsidized my hardware through ADC. If they hadn't, I can assure you I would've had to give up the ghost and quit my dream.
But what are young developers today to do? Unless you're Adobe or Intuit, Apple doesn't want to hear from you. If you have several thousands of dollars to throw at an upgraded ADC membership, then you're lucky. We're not all so fortunate.
Cheers,
Froid
No, you can't even REP CMPSB a case-insensitive string; that's my point. With a C string, you don't know ECX ahead of time. So you have to go a byte at a time whether you're case sensitive or not, because C is braindead.
Even a descriptor based compare has the potential to be faster. This:
continue:
mov eax, dword ptr [esi]
xor eax, dword ptr [edi]
and eax, 20202020
jz difference
add esi, 4
add edi, 4
loop continue
is case insensitive, and MUCH faster than the fastest case sensitive compare for C strings:
continue:
mov al, byte ptr [esi]
cmp al, byte ptr [edi]
jne difference
cmp al, 0
inc esi
inc edi
jne continue
Because it loads dword's instead of byte's.
But if you're using a real (non-C) language, you can of course do it case sensitively REP CMPSD (which IS much faster than case insensitive). But if you're using C, there's no penalty for case sensitivity.
Historically, Unix was case-sensitive to evade the overhead of having to convert cases to do lookups on file filesystem, which preserved cases in filenames. This differs in behavior from NTFS, which preserves case, yet is case insensitive when referring to a file (unless you're running in POSIX mode).
It is a promise that says "If you contribute to this code you will always have access to it".
But you and I will always have access to it no matter if we give back or not, or even if MegaCorp comes along and closes up their copy of it. The "protection" clauses in the GPL are completely unnecessary to protect the code so long as the license cannot be revoked. The simple MIT license or even public domain is sufficient to protect the rights of the user.
The purpose of copyleft is not to protect the software, because the software cannot be damaged. Rather the purpose of copyleft is to protect the sensibilities of the authors.
Without that pledge, I cannot contribute my time without fear that I will have to recontribute that time all over again when I next need to access that software.
Let's argue from the point of a Free but non-copylefted software. What could Apple possibly do to the FreeBSD code base that would ever limit your access to it? They cannot revoke the license from you because they are not the owner. An neither can BSDi revoke your license because they don't have a revocation clause in the license. In short, you have nothing to fear (but your sensibilities) for contributing to the non-copylefted FreeBSD.
as you do when you patent things
I was talking about copyright and source code, which are much different things than patents. I am wholly against patents applied to algorithms and formulae. Patents are the only area where an author can take away your genuine liberties with respect to free speech and the creation of software. Don't assume that because I disagree with you in one area that I must also disagree with you in all other areas. Leave that silly illogic to the political arena.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
This is a great precedent for a commercial OS vendor. Free (as in beer) development tools! Be did this and was wonderful. Now that a more mainstream OS is doing maybe some other vendors will do the same.
Where do you get off calling me an idiot when you define "successfully competing" as having 5 percent of the market. Right now linux has a bigger market share then the mac does. That's not me saying that go check the stats yourself.
Oh well I sould not be insulted when someone with so little grasp of reality calls me an idiot.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
Why don't you study the market a bit you may come across as more intelligent.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Since when have Macs NOT given software errors? Since when have any systems not given software errors? The myth that Macs have some kind of magic stability is patently false. They're every bit as flaky and unstable as Windows based PC's.
The reason Macs don't tend to have resource conflicts is there's never been much stuff available for them hardware wise to begin with that didn't plug into the SCSI or serial ports. How is that an advantage? The PCI based powermacs only worked with a relative handful of cards, ones which the makers were willing to write mac drivers for. IRQ conflicts can be a pain, and they still are even after PCI was supposed to have fixed them for PCs, but I'd rather go through that pain and have a wide selection of components to choose from than not be able to get something I want for my system.
Apple HAS made shoddy drivers. Remember the problems they had a few years ago with their drivers for IDE hard drives? OS8 shipped with bad drivers that made systems such as the 6500's unstable. Having a bad serial port driver is one thing, or even a video driver that isn't quite perfect. But having a bad disk driver is pretty bad. They did fix it very quickly, but not before several customers brought their systems back because they didn't work.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
X86 is the standard for computers made by companies such as Acer, Compaq, Dell, E-Machines, Gateway, HP, IBM, etc etc. Go to any company that isn't a graphic design firm and you'll find X86 based computers. They are the standard because they own 95% of the market. That is what defines a standard, what the majority chooses to use.
Simply because there is a small percentage of users who go with something else does not mean x86 is any less the standard. There are still betamax VCR's out there that some people do use. You can still find them. Does that mean that VHS has some kind of valid competition? I don't think so.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
disk space is cheap.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Okay, lets see your BASIC version. Did you do all the ISO-8859-1 characters? How about the MicroSoft characters between 0x80 and 0xA0? How about alternative 8-bit character sets? How about the German double-s? OOPS!
What happens when we have a secure service that wants to check if a file will be overwritten and it's test does not exactly match what the file system uses to check for filename equality. What happens when it's test is done on two file systems, or on a local cache that accidentally has a different algorithim htna the remote disk? Guess what? Can you say SECURITY HOLE?
This has absolutely NOTHING to do with making user-friendly searches. There is nothing that prevents an application from searching for all possible case variations or using far more complex things like spelling correction to find files. Get it?
The average user does not care and would NEVER notice case-sensitivity. In fact the average user does not see anything wrong with having several files with the same name (possibly something that should be supported somehow). You are talking about convienence for a COMMAND.COM user, even Unix shells have filename completion nowadays making filename complexity irrelevant.
I'm not sure you're getting the type of case-insensitivity I'm meaning.
It's like on (dare I say it) a Windows system, sorta. When you name a file, the case that appears to you maintains the case you originally specified. When you create or refer to a file, though, it's normalized to lower case.
Thus, case IS maintained, because it would still have all it's uppercase characters when doing a directory listing, etc. I'm not sure your 'indirect stability' is much of an argument.
As for flexibility - when doing searches, just like you should have in programs now, you'd have the option of case sensitive or case insensitive search, there would be no difference at ALL in searches, etc, because the code that would effect this would be in the file system - the normalization of allowed filenames in a given directory would determine what can and cannot be created, and when you're looking for something, the filesystem would match it correctly if you said "gimme foo", and there was only "FOO" in the directory - you'd get "FOO". When you edit FOO, foo is edited and updated correctly.
If you rename "FOO" to "foo", it would then appear as "foo" in directory listings.
So, case IS preserved, it's just how case is being used in the INTERFACE of the system that is being effected, and is what my entire point is all about.
It seems most people participating in this little subtopic seem to agree with me, others don't understand how it would work, and it _seems_ that the ones who understand yet still disagree are only worried about the programming complexity involved.
All I can say to that last point is - if Mac & Windows can do it, it can't be all _that_ terrible difficult, now can it?
If we want Linux and the BSDs to become acceptible to desktop users, this may become a BIG sticking point, IMO.
There is an online petition for Apple to port OSX to x86 here. I think this is something they need to do. Their ability to compete using proprietary hardware which is more expensive than commodity PC's is only going to worsen as time goes by.
They should leverage the PC and gain a portion of its massive market instead of trying to hold on to their own separate market, which is tiny in comparison and progressively getting smaller.
A new OS isn't going to be enough to convince very many to replace their hardware. But offer that new OS for the hardware they already own and you'll have yourself some customers. Customers equal money and market share and Apple needs all it can get of both.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I've never understood why so many UNIXheads think case-sensitivity is a GOOD thing. Yes, I'd like the files to have upper and lower case in them for the sake of appearance, but I'd rather NOT have it case-sensitive for matching, etc.
Does anyone have a GOOD reason to have a case-sensitive file system? If so, please enlighten me...
Dude, those monitors are just Sony Trinitrons.
We get them from Dell too. Apple sticks their label on them, Dell sticks their label on them, otherwise they are identical.
I will never buy OSX until I can build my own hardware for x86 prices to run it on. Then I will buy it immediately.
I wonder if that day will ever com e...
Everything I hear from people is how much they love OS X. Where is everyone else?
/Applications, /System and /Users. Application configuration files and resources all get bundled into one place for each App.
I installed it on a G3 PowerBook with 128M of RAM. I liked it at first. But the more I used it and the more I got into the details, the less I like it.
GUI:
The thing is not fast by any means.
Just minimizing a window into the Dock would use 75% of my CPU.
They got rid of 'window shading'.
The menus - formerly one of the most consistent aspects of the MacOS - lose much of their consistency.
I think the whole Aqua thing is too 'bubbly and sweet' - of course that's just aesthetic, so I won't hold that against them.
Underneath:
It defaults to running inetd, nfsiod, portmap, and a couple of other things. To exacerbate this problem there is no GUI method of turning off these services, and the only command line method is 'kill'. To get these services to not start at boot required hacking config files (after 30 minutes of searching to find them).
They have discarded way to many Unix conventions for my liking. They have come up with their own method of 'controlling' services. They discarded the standard rc format.
They have added all kinds of odd directories like
I could go on, but I think I made my point. I use Unix and Macs and like them both for different reasonse. OS X is not Mac enough nor Unix enough for me to like it at all.
I just don't think Apple get's it . . . hopefully they'll get a clue.
Keeping in mind that this only measures new license shipments (AKA boxes sold) it should be safe to presume that each box shipped is probably installed on multiple server and of course there are the uncounted downloads to consider too. My guess is that linux probably has around 10% of the desktop market.
IDC goes on to say IDC expects Microsoft's and Linux's shares of COE [client operating systems] shipments to grow by several points during the next five years and Apple to retain its current share, although its new COE (a public beta release is expected this fall) could pull up Apple if users approve of it.
Even if this research is full of crap and you have better numbers from some independent entity (please post the url) do you still maintain that having 7% of the desktop (your number) and 0% of the server market is "competing successfully" with MS?
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
If anyone has a MacOS (7-X) system up and running already and wants some tools right now, they can follow the instructions from MacAddict on how to copy the Darwin versions of g++ and company over to MacOS. For those interested in other BSD apps on OS X, keep an eye on MacAddict's Ports page.
Recursion (n): See recursion
> double the possible number of files in a given dir?
Well, if you mean double the possible number of CONFUSINGLY-NAMED files in a directory, yeah, I guess some people would find that useful. Sorta.
I'd bet that there are a LOT more people who find that irritating than useful, though.
Apple is not a company I can morally approve of... I cannot use without feeling dirty.
...and goes back to his Debian GNU/Linux machine
what a terribly small world you must live in when your morality depends on giving away 100% of your property. Out here in reality I can give a meal to a homeless person and not be decried evil because I didn't give him my refrigerator, and I can give a hundred buck to the MDA and not be accused of immorality for not handing them my bank account. Does the homeless person feel dirty because I only gave him a sandwich? Does the MDA feel dirty because I haven't quit my job and volunteered full time? Of course not!
Apple giving back to the FreeBSD community isn't good enough for you types. Opening up (also known as freeing) other of their own code isn't good enough. It seems you want all or nothing. Well that's not how the world works. If you don't like it, then don't use it. But don't call them immoral or their users dirty. The real immorality is your self-righteousness. Listen, there is a lot more to morality then your petty licensing issues.
It's not the ownership of their software that concerns you, because every software except public domain is owned. Even the FSF copyrights their own software. It's not that, it's just that you haven't been given the number of permissions to use the code that you would like. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just a price that you (and I) don't want to pay. But don't call it a case of morality. That's just bogus.
How did I know that was coming?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
How much will it Cost (when done)?
Apple tried to minimize the use of licensed technologies so the cost will be lower than the current OS X Server. A good example of this is the replacement of the Display Postscript display interface with Display PDF (an open standard). Most people in the know expect Apple to charge $99 for a shrink wrapped copy of OSX. It will, of course, be bundled with machines when it comes out.
Why not release a i386 version of OS X?
This seems like a no brainer but I (and many others) feel that this would be very bad for Apple right now. There are a lot of reason to NOT do this now. What about Objective C?
From the mouth of our Mac and Novell developer... 'Objective C is very easy for anyone with C or especially C++ experience to pick up'. He feels that a good C++ programmer could get up to speed in a couple of weeks.
i386 Hardware is better!
I just got 6 dual G4 450MHz machines in with Apple 17" monitors. They are incredible. The quality is superior to any PC I have ever seen. The monitor is PERFECTLY flat... we used a straight edge!
In general (as a supervisor of a PC and Mac repair department at a large University Computer Center) I feel that the quality of Apple components is generally better than that of other manufacturers. Most of my experience is with Dell and Omnitech machines (Omnitech is big in Corporate sales). I have, however, suffered through all kinds of PCs from all the major, and some very minor manufacturers.
As for performance, the new G4s run RC5 at 8MKeys/second. If they were the top of the line, dual 500s, they would do 9MKeys/second (my single G4/500 does around 4.6MKeys). I *believe* (that means I could be wrong
Crunch, Crunch, Crunch
And the Mac platform is monopolistic how?
If anyone is emulating Microsoft's monopolistic practices, it's the FSF and its brothers-in-arms, who give away code (below the cost of developing it) in order to stifle competition from other, for-profit organizations.
The GPL ironically stifles what it attempts to create: freedom. It dangles the carrot of free (of charge) code but then beats the programmer with the stick of forced source redistribution. I don't know about you, but I don't believe that one should attach strings to the gifts one gives; it's in bad taste and does violence to the autonomy of those foolish enough to accept them. (This is why I either release code into the public domain or use a BSD-style license.)
The GPL embodies an oppressively moralistic, world domination minded ideology that seeks to convert, destroy, or render irrelevant all things inconsistent with its extreme beliefs.
Ask anyone whether Apple has any chance (or even realistic expectation) of taking over the world, and you'll get a resounding "No!" Ask them the same of the FSF and its fellow travelers, and people aren't so sure. Who is the greater threat to choice?
You put words in my mouth, sir.
I cannot personally use it, due to it's license.
I wholly support it for others, however. I have recommended it to several of my friends, who do not have the same views as myself.
I have nothing against Apple, and would applaud their efforts. MacOS X is a good system. I like NextStep.
It is much better than Win9x, and more free. I respect and support this.
I appreciete what apple has done for the community, and I acknowledge the positive effect they have had.
But I choose not to run their software, as I would rather be free. This is my choice, as running Non-free software is yours.
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This message brought to you by Colin Davis
Colin Davis
Apple took free stuff (BSD) and mucked around with it some and gave it back!. Hardly some great act of generocity. I don't want to belittle what they did but let's be honest here they only gave back what they took in the first place.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
Who's the nitwit that marked that Flamebait? In a language like English where upper and lower case letters resemble each other so much, there's a pretty darn solid argument to be made that case preserving but insensitive is the most user friendly way for a file system to act.
Or maybe I'm just a lazy typer, too.
We've got the same ISA we've had from the seventies, keep in mind.
Is that good? Last I checked, Microsoft and Intel were busy trying to chuck all the legacy baggage out of the Intel archetecture... ISA bus, serial ports, parallel ports right now, x86 in the future. And isn't the instruction set only pertinent if you're doing assembly level coding? I thought that C abstracts you from knowing the intracacies of a given processor?
The reason I don't use Mac hardware is you can only get it from Apple (who charge A LOT!), and you can't buy, say, boxed processors and motherboards and build it yourself at a lower price.
A lot isn't really a lot anymore... you can have a kick ass system for under $2000, or a pretty usable iMac for under $1000. You can't really compare eMachines' offerings to PPC G4's...
Oh, and CPU isn't everything. Mac hardware is behind in terms of bus speed, RAM clock, and the AGP spec. So nya.
Ummm... Mac's were the FIRST mainstream platform to move to 64-bit PCI. Yeah, their memory ONLY clocks at 100 MHz... that's not a big step down from 133, which is just beginning to surface... And, really, what's the difference in performance between a 2x AGP card and a 4x version of the same card? Can joe user tell? can you in a blind test? or is it what? 3 fps in quake?