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Emulator Maker Rants About Microsoft & Apple
hojo writes: "There's a good (somewhat long) discussion from Darek Mihocka at this link to Emulators.com describing his problems dealing with trying to emulate Macs on buggy Windows operating systems. He gives a nice dissertation regarding why he think Mac OS X is a Bad Idea (TM), how Intel has screwed up with their marketing-driven engineering, and how Microsoft has impeded his ability to get things done with the introduction of new bugs in Win Me. He's a brilliant programmer and worth listening to--one of the greatest assembly language wizards out there, period."
Emulator Man sounds like a sorry chump. Who does he think he is dissing just about everyone and every thing as if the world revolves around what he thinks. Sure he may be able to slap some serious code together, but his "real world" opinion seems extremely out of touch. Somebody help the man --or at least point him in the direction of a good social therapist
The $30 for osx isnt a marketing ploy, the money is to assure that everyone and thier dog isn't out there playing with the beta.
The more people (and dogs) that use the beta, the more bugs will be found...
They want to have money to sort through the feedback, and they need to make sure that there will be no novice users installing it on their system. (and screwing it up royaly).
Most novice users will PAY MS or Apple for their OS even though Linux/BSD are available and FREE.
Main point: they want only serious beta testers.
I would argue that free OS'es are beta tested more "seriously" than commercial ones. I personally have found fewer annoying bugs in Linux than Win98 (a memory leak requires rebooting the Win98 box every 3-5 days while the Linux box keeps going like the Energizer Bunny!).
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You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
$238095 a year for a coder? You must be paid extremely well where you work.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Apple and MSFT have specifically rewritten their new Operating Systems to target the problems that have been leveled at them
... which also includes the apps --- like iMovie and Maya. Now I don't want to get into a war about which platform has the best price/power/stability/availability etc etc. --- but ever since QuickTime came out, that little 3 fps video in a 160x120 box has been just dying to grow up. Today I had a play with iMovie on a cube, and it was sweet.
Sure they're trying to sell more hardware with resource hungry animated gui's, which are, ehm, 'non essential', but we'll use that power for real work anyway...
Small is beautiful. Small can be elegant and lightweight, but MOSX is a three headed dragon (Classic/Cabon/Cocoa) in a big dress (Aqua) with a pair of jet skis (QuickTime, OpenGL) sitting on a tank (BSD) with custom tracks (Mach)... (my analogy powers falter...) and it all does a job and it ain't ever going to be 'small'.
So while I respect the author's points (and I believe his observations are accurate), they are not the whole picture. Just today I was shocked at the amount of memory I overheard a salesperson recommending to a likely home user, on the basis that in a year any less would be 'useless', but it reminds me of how every day I see four seater metal boxes drive past with three seats empty.... (ow! offtopic!)
Seth
Asking for 192MB ram for basic hassle-free use of a desktop computer seems pretty much to me. Before, computer geeks were fond of backward compatibility and reuse of hardware/software. Now, it seems that Mr. Everybody should buy a new computer every 2 years.
.sig
Well, i got great news... it is not in Mr. Everybody's habits to buy a 1500$ piece of hardware every 2 years (not a new piece that makes something else, but a piece of hardware they will do almost the "same" thing with). Yes, backward compatibility draws back tech. But no backward compatibility draws back the wide acceptance of tech.
Compact disks are quite old, but they are still in use and will be for quite some time... people still use walkmans and tape decks... etc. etc.
Reading about the new Mac OS X made me interested in it... and i am still interested... but I think that there are many good points in the article and it didn't feel to me like it was a pissed off 7 years old that wrote it.
phobos% cat
phobos% cat
cat:
I have to admit, I can't think of a single reason why anyone would want that. What "killer" Mac apps are not available for the PC that you would want to run an emulator to use?
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Yeah right..A PDC on a 486..get real, uncle fucker...Try that when you have 12,000 desktops doing authentication
If you want real good support of your old legacy softtware, buy an old computer. Mac SE's can be gotten for under $50 and 286 - 386's probobaly just as cheap. Probably cheaper than the software he pedals. Onward with new technology!!!
What nobody has mentioned yet, is that in the Mac Emulation Community, nobody is taking him seriously.
Meanwhile Microcode Solutions is working on iFusion which will be a Macintosh PPC Emulator which will emulate an iMac on first the PPC Amigas, and then PCs. http://www.microcode-solutions.com
Microcode Solutions? That would be Jim Drew of Emplant fame, no?
He is also an old-timer. Made hardware emulation boards, diskette drive controllers to read different floppy formats, software emulators.
There is many a flamewar to find in old archives of comp.sys.amiga.emulators over delayed products, wild claims and the like. Seems like he has got his act together with Fusion, though.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
One of the points he tries to make in his letter is that Apple is wrong for cutting out older users. That is the whole problem with the Wintel architecture. Everything supports legacy code. The original Pentium would be so much faster if it didn't have to support the old x86 code that Microsoft needed in order to not rewrite DOS. So, when Apple is working on the next version of an operating system, they don't try to force legacy support. Did Apple force IBM and Motorola to have hardware support in the PowerPC to run 68k code? No. That's the key. Keep things simple and new.
BZZZT! WRONG!
On the Mac OS X server box, uname -a says Rhapsody. So, yes it *IS* Rhapsody....because uname gives you information about the system, including its name. If its name was Mac_OS_X, Darwin, or Jobs_my_God it would say that. Instead it says rhapsody.
I can understand your confusion, being mis-lead by Apple marketing.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
If your talking about a bad rom chip on your motherboard, that is a pretty well documented problem with the powerpc performa line. Take it to any apple authorized repairshop, and they will fix it. for free. Takes like 5 minutes. I had the same problem with my 6220, and finally got it fixed when an OS upgrade refused to install because of the bad ROM chip. Hope that helps
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
It actually booted, and you could sort of play solitaire. but it was tough.
so this was very educational to all concerned, especially as that box actually meets the original minumum requirements of win95.
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"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Bloat? Its not even out of beta yet! (Geez Louise, talk about knee-jerk griping.)
It will run on my iMac fine (G3/233 w 96MB RAM, 10GB HD...) And on my Beige (G3/300 w 128 MB RAM, 10GB HD...)
I run OS9 & LinuxPPC on my dual boot 7200/75 w/48MB RAM, 4.5 GB HD) and I still run System 7.0 on my 512ke (68k/8 w 2MB RAM, 20MB HD. Now THAT is long lasting hardware!)
Don't bitch about APIs unless you're the compiler writer who's got to write all those API docs into header files.
You remind me of a client I had who throught that structured code was just a fad and he was going to write his Fortran the same as he always did. (I think they, uh, forcably retired, yeah that sounds better, retired the guy.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
One is a rather nimble operating system with an extremely lightweight GUI (compare others with similar functionality).
If you want to run Word you should check the system requirements on Word's box - i'm pretty sure it's greater than those on the NT4.0 box.
You don't complain when it takes 20 minutes to start X on your wrist watch, do you?
Windows 95 wasn't allowed to ship until it ran almost as fast as OS/2 and Win3.1 on a 4Mb machine and faster on 8Mb.
I particularly enjoyed this part of the rant:
Which, translated, means:
"Apple has worked some incredible engineering magic to get programs written for a completely different operating system and toolbox to run under unix.
"Holy shit! Unix!! Apps written for the Mac run in frickin' UNIX!
"Apple's compatibility is nothing short of miraculous and it's only a few percent slower. But then, we'd expect that from the company that migrated its entire userbase from one CPU family to another eight years ago with barely a hiccup. Anyway, well-written programs from the last five years will surely work, and in fact almost any program will work if the programmer was properly careful and followed Apple's guidelines.
"The only drawback is that programs will run a few percent slower."
Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.
I suspect what this fellow is upset about is that Apple is providing a kick-ass OS early next year that, at a single stroke, makes every Mac bought in the last few years much more valuable. That must really kill his bottom line. Betting against Apple's engineers is risky business.
That iMac you picked up two long years ago? Buy the new OS and cram it full of RAM. Total cost: maybe a little over $100. Effect: you're running a much slicker, more powerful, memory-protected OS that still runs all your old programs (and new ones) with the beauty and elegance of the Macintosh.
I realize Apple's continually raising the bar makes it hard for people like this guy to try to make money off disgruntled Mac owners (of which there are very few). I sympathize and I have huge respect for his programming skills.
But he's in the wrong business. Go make some money, dude. Stop assuming that Apple's going to throw you a freebie by screwing up.
These criteria are irrelevant. Nobody cares if a modern desktop OS runs on 8-year-old hardware. By definition, a desktop machine is something you spend money on to make it work well, because you interact with it eight hours a day.
I have a 486 too. It's a Linux network gateway. Duh.
(Disclaimer: I bought Apple stock when the press collectively decided Apple Just Doesn't GET IT, which then doubled in value when everyone regained their sanity and realized Apple makes the best fucking desktop OS in the known universe. My MacOSX beta arrives Monday.)
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
Actually when NT 4.0 was first released back in 1996, the company I was at was deploying it to 486 computers.
What we had was a PS/2 Model 77 with a 486DX2/66. They currently ran OS/2 Warp on 16 Megs of RAM and a 200 meg HD(with Apps on network), but we were upgrading to 32M and a 1 Gig HD(with Apps local).
They actually ran OK. Not great, but OK. The SCSI harddrives certainly helped.
Most companies when they first migrated to NT4 did so on computers with 32M of RAM, usually P133 machines.
But yes, if you look at the computers you can buy today and how cheap they are, it doesn't make sense to try to run something that old and slow.
But back in '96/'97 computers were cheaper, but sitll not real cheap. A new P133 desktop with 32M of Ram, 1 gig drive, 15" monitor was around $2500. So there was a move to economize on what you had versus buying new.
I remember a number of years ago on Usenet Darek would violently attack people who said anything other than glowing about his company or products. In a few cases he basically said "Fuck off!" to his customers, using colorful language. He's a great programmer, but understand that he likes to rant and stamp his feet.
I don't see your point. If you don't say this to defend him, then why say it at all? It's totally irrelevent to the topic. If the purpose is (although you say it's not) to defend him, then it's pointless anyway, as it doesn't make his rant any more cogent.
What's the relevance of a 7 year late OS? Apple makes good computers, but the bottom line is that the OS has been prehistoric.
Totally irrelevent to his rant.
Apple is now trumpeting OSX with its amazing features like protected memory and preemtive multitasking, but those are features near 30 years old, features that (gasp!) even Windows has.
Again, totally irrelevent to his rant.
Yes, if I were a Mac user, I would complain about no real multitasking.
Yet again, totally irrelevent to his rant.
Why not quote a marketer about technical issues? Oh yes, that never happens.
The fact that it has happened before does make his doing it the least bit more valid.
-Pete
The move to cut off the clones in Mac OS 8.0 was an unfortunate necessity. The clones were devouring Apple's revenue, and the move to open up the Mac market to clones honestly should've never been made.
I disagree. I used to work for a Mac shop (the advertising dept of a retail store chain) and I really liked the Mac (except for the #%&^*@ one-button mouse). I was looking forward to buying a clone to run the software I used at work (mainly Photoshop and Quark Xpress).
Had clones been available I would probably have a Mac among the multiple x86 machines I have now. No clones meant no Macs for me, as Apple hardware is relatively expensive (compared to an x86) due to the fact that Apple has a monopoly on it.
Apple should've looked hard at just how much influence IBM has over the PC market before doing that.
Sure, IBM does not have as much influence on the PC market as it once did, but it still has a huge influence on the mainframe market. That in spite of the fact that you can get clone mainframes! IBM found out that it was easier to make money as a software/support company than a pure hardware company.
The big problem is that at that point Apple had wanted to move from being mainly a hardware company to becoming a more of a software company, so clones fit that strategy. Of course being a software company meant that Apple would have had to compete in the open market, and that would killed them as they did not have a "killer app" that would have ensured their success as a software company (well maybe NextStep but that is another story).
When Apple started doing badly, it was easy to jerk the clone makers around (which sucked because they had just given them them licenses to clone just a few months earlier) and revert to being a hardware monopoly once again. And that, my friends, is the main reason I have never owned (and probably will never own) a Mac...
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You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
because they lack the direction to actually use a Mac right, of course they will have problems!
:->
Oh, so there is a *right* way and a *wrong* way to use a Mac!
And I thought that the Mac was supposed to be the "easy to use" computer!!!
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You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
Likewise all those users 'left behind': who cares? Home users don't buy software, they steal it.
Actually, they only copy it. Stealing implies taking the owner's original copy of the software so he is left with nothing. Copying the software leaves the owner with his original software, so technically it hasn't been "stolen" from him.
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You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
- Color calibration. This is very obvious but what the hey. 1.8 gamma works very well- gamma correction is global throughout the OS and not just confined to an app or two (the calibration instructions for Photoshop on Windows involve, among other things, opening an image in IE and the same image in Photoshop and adjusting them until they match! WTF?)
- Applications. There's an awful lot of cheesy little GFX and audio and midi apps out there for Mac. Some of the cheesiest ones are the best ones. There's been a lot of little flybynight companies making amazing things for Mac and vanishing. I still have some of those products and they still kick butt. First one that comes to mind is HVS Color- a bizarre color reduction Photoshop plugin that has a formidably geeky control panel letting you weight the algorithms various ways. There's 'Megalomania', a really old MIDI patch-bay program that lets you do really nutty things like patch every other note through feedback delay pitch shifters with random velocity changes
:) I make frequent use of SoundEffects 0.9.2 (dunno if it ever reached 1.0!) which is a fantastic digital audio editor that has some wild bandpass/cut filters for it and is a whole audio workshop for free download. So much of this is wacked in some way and yet, how cool it is and how useful it can be...
- Stability. No, I don't mean 'not crashing' more's the pity- put it this way. I only very recently got a CD-R and began making backups of my critical files. Why? Because I knew enough about patching together working MacOSes that I honestly felt the machine could not die in such a way that I lost data. (Doh!) The funny part is, when a partition _did_ eat itself so severely that all the files went bye-bye, I freaked for a minute, then went in with Unerase and salvaged all the 'resource' files: which happened to contain _all_ the 'clipping' files that I'd been keeping important notes in. Every last one! And later I dropped them all on a creator-type-changer app and turned them all right back into clippings again and they all work as if nothing had happened. I am, needless to say, seriously sold on using clippings to keep important bits of textual data in now
:)
- Related: repairability. Most of the Mac graphics people have actually learned as much voodoo as they'd need to run Linux- it's just different sorts, just enough to be able to maintain their own machines in all emergencies. A guy charging a lot to do GFX work on a Mac might still have it crash on him but very likely can recover from just about anything in less than three to six hours. If you're on deadline that's very important. This is something Linux can offer as well as it also lends itself to being maintained by the user (given a pro user).
- Built-in functionality: I'm on an older powermac. Having built-in SCSI is probably why I got stupid and believed my disks could not die
;) it also does a great job doing demanding audio or video capture stuff. The audio circuitry gets very close to Digi third-party boards- it's quite a ways beyond Sound Blaster levels, must be using better ADCs or something.
- Damn near realtime capabilities- this is the flip side of the well known Mac lack of PMT. If the menu doesn't respond to your click, oh how tiresome. However, if the menu doesn't respond to your click because you're doing _midi_ sequencing and to run system tasks would make a MIDI event happen many milliseconds late- that's very different. If you've ever sequenced on a Mac so slow that it takes 10 seconds to not even completely redraw the screen- meantime pumping out hard, solid, perfectly timed MIDI information to your synthesizers- then you'll understand. I now have an older 68040 mac dedicated to MIDI. It's overkill
:) by the same token, on the Powermac demanding video or audio capture is a cinch- it just freezes up the machine until it's done. CD burns, ditto- all these sorts of things essentially say 'I am realtime priority!' and seize the machine to make sure they don't have a single bobble. Which is surely annoying- but if they _are_ super high priority, then those processes are right.
- Fun stupid stuff: I noticed that the GIS crew have already put 'Gravite' on their audio workstation Mac. It's a control panel that makes icons dangle under your pointer when you pick them up. Also you can fling them using a hotkey and if you let go the key as it hits the trash, it actually places the icon in the trash! I'm currently running Kaleidoscope and Smoothtype (extremely heavy theming and antialiasing, respectively- heavy theming means the designs can be entirely ludicrous and fanciful) which are quite good at dispelling the relentless sameness of MacOS. There's lots of other interface hacks, some dreadful and fatal and others innocuous. All can be installed and uninstalled just by dragging icons around and rebooting- when I lost the HD it was after something like two years of relentless hammering and altering on the same system, without ever starting afresh. I understand Windows boxes slow to a crawl after a couple years of continuous use with lots of installing and altering and breaking and fixing
:)
Ok, that was _way_ more than you ever wanted to know. I'd just like to confirm this complaining emulator writer in one thing- if you get a mac get an old one on eBay! Never assume that you must upgrade upgrade upgrade- you're better off identifying stuff that you want to do and building a system around it. Most software that's worth a crap _won't_ make you change or patch your system- if it tries, get rid of it, run Macsbug and if it installs stuff and says 'Reboot now (OK)' and there's no 'no, that's not OK!' button, cackle and hit 'cmd-power' and drop into the low level debugger and go 'es' (escape to shell) and get rid of whatever got added.But I digress. Anyhow you can probably get an entire mac for less than he'd be selling that emulator for :) try 7500/7600/8500/8600/9500/9600 on ebay, that was a good line. No performas ;)
you begrudge them a few lousy quid because - oh yes - they're all capitalist bastards...
Oh, I see, you don't HAVE to get the beta. It is strictly an economic decision.
What I find more of a nerve is that Linux vendors can charge almost the same amount of money without adding any significant level of code to what is supposed to be a free product.
Pot. Kettle. Black. Again, it is strictly an economic decision. You don't HAVE to pay any Linux vendors. Download the OS for free and check out Freshmeat for free applications...
And if we want to use MacOS X as a measure of Beta status, then please tell me when Linux reaches pre-Alpha and I'll be happy to fork out that cash.
If you'll pull your head out out your arse you will see that Linux (and BSD) are fairly mature right now. Some parts are in alpha/beta state (<ver 1.0) but the stable kernel is at 2.2.x/2.4.x now.
As for being happy to fork out cash for Linux, remember "a fool and his money are soon parted"
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You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
My $.02 adjusted for inflation:
One. I run Virtual PC (admittedly on a Powerbook 500Mhz with 320 MB RAM) with perfectly acceptable speed. That includes RedHat Linux 6.2 (with X-Windows), Win95, Win98, WinNT 4 Workstation & Server, and even Windows 2000 Advanced Server. My department is 99.5% PC and it is impossible to avoid M$. I've even taken native PC drive images and put them right into VPC, not only with no difficulties, but actually had it run better than people who have put the same image on their own native PC. Two small problems: When VPC sharing the Mac's ethernet interface you can't access drives shared by the VPC's OS. And I can't install Solaris 8 8^[
Two: My bet is that MacOS X will turn out to be at least as important as the PowerPC is/was to Apple, possibly as much as the original Macintosh. It will bring all that nifty *nix software I've been envying since I first installed Linux on a PC. MacOS X will allow Macintosh faithful to have the best of both worlds (with VPC, the best of all worlds), and not be left behind in Linux's inescapable world domination.
No whining: Not even that MacOS X doesn't support Airport yet, or my slightly old work 9600+G3upgrade. Or even (probably never) my personal ancient Performa 5200CD. I know Airport support will be coming for my PB and I'll buy MacOS X beta or final the moment it does. It's on its way, finally! Yay!
The author seems to think OS X is going to require a 1 GHz G4 with 256M. Like most beta releases, the current beta is a memory and CPU hog. The release version should be noticeably smaller and faster. I don't see why it wouldn't run at a reasonable speed on an iMac with a memory upgrade.
Windows NT will run on a 486 or Pentium with 16M of RAM, but it is so slow that you will slit your wrists while waiting for a program to load and start running. It really needs 64M and 128M is what gets installed in NT systems where I work.
OS X is not going to run well, or at all, on some older Macs. Fine, stick with your current version of MacOS. Nobody is holding a gun to your head, forcing you to upgrade your system.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Besides that, Be was written from the ground up. I'd like to see MS port Win98 to the Macintosh... that would be funny for some reason (if not a complete waste of everyone's time)... So there's a REASON we were talking about Be running on both platforms... yeah. [end semi-rant]
it has features.
whee!
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Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
From the article, an Apple representative says its to buy back seven years of development costs.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
He wrote:
"The other type of user, the "cutting edge power user" for lack of a better term, to them money is no object, buying a new computer every year is no object, buying new software every year is no object, and just plain being a victim of marketing hype is a way of life. This is the kind of person who buys a fancy race car or a translucent computer without thinking about functionality and practicality. This is the kind of person who will run out and buy Mac OS X for the same of running Mac OS X without knowing anything about it or knowing why they're buying it. And I have come to the conclusion that we really do not wish to market to this type of brainless individual. A school on a fixed budget looking to upgrade their computer hardware is not going to make such rash purchases. We've sold to a lot of schools, we know what their needs are, and having the latest bleeding edge technology is not it."
Umm...emulating Mac OS in Windows will never qualify as "the latest bleeding edge technology." 'Nuff said.
He also wrote:
"Congratulations Apple, you will finally (next year?) offer the same OS technology that Linux and even Windows users have enjoyed for years. Real multitasking. Ooooh."
This is a half-truth. While OS X does add functionality that Win/Lin users have had for a while, it goes much, much further. Maybe you discount user experience as fluff, but I'm here to tell you that a gunner is only as good as his gun.
Here's a guy who wants Apple to stick with OS 9- versions and he's complaining that OS X is not enough of a leap ahead. What a loser!
> BZZZT! WRONG!
... but the uname on "Mac OS X" is "Darwin". It's a different OS than "Mac OS X Server". Mac OS X is what you get when you allow Mac OS X Server and Mac OS 9 to breed. It's a combination of Apple's two OS trees, in the same way that Windows 2001 ("Whistler") is supposed to be the unison of DOS and NT operating systems and users.
> On the Mac OS X server box, uname -a says
> Rhapsody. So, yes it *IS* Rhapsody.
Yes, it is
Yes, it's a little confusing, but not confusing like the fact that Windows 2000 is not really an update of Windows 98.
Well, seeing as MacOS 9 can run apps writtien for as far back as System 6 with, for the most part, I'd say you're pretty much covered for all Mac apps since then, and that's a good 5-6 years.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Don't let Darek hear you talk like that! He'll whine your ear off.
His rant started off with some serious stretching of the truth, saying that Mac OS X won't run on anything older than 2 years old. This is simply untrue, as my Desktop G3 will be three years old in just two months, and runs Mac OS X beta just fine, thank-you. The exaggerations continue as he relates his 'history' of Apple obsolescing hardware.
In summer 1997, Apple sent around a notice that various ancient machines from the early to mid-80's would no longer be supported. Wow! Can't get a motherboard for a 12 year old machine anymore, but you can still get a motherboard for a 11.5 year old machine? Those bastards! Believe me, no one cared, in September 1997, that they could no longer buy a replacement motherboard for a Mac Plus that they bought in 1985.
He also cleverly reverses the usual stance that Macs have longer half-lives than PCs, and then accuses Apple of obsolescing hardware with OS releases. The first OS released that would not run on EVERY Mac was 7.6, and the only ones that were left out were the original Macs, Mac Plus, Mac SE, Mac SE-30, and the Mac II line. Boo fucking hoo.
Backwards compatibility means new hardware can run old stuff--old hardware running new stuff is forwards-compatibility. And Macs have backwards compatibility up the wazoo. You can, for instance, run ClarisWorks version 1 on a G3, and it works just fine. If you got ClarisWorks version 1 included with your 10 year old Mac, then no one has forced you to pay to upgrade it to run on your new Mac.
Many people complain about legacy code in their Wintel operating systems dragging down their latest and greatest chips, and this loon is complaining in the other direction. Most Mac owners are glad that Apple has the balls to dump support for old hardware in favour of getting the work done on the new stuff. This is true progress--and not just marketing hype.
The simple answer to confronting marketing hype, and to avoid your machine becoming obselete, is to look within yourself. Just because OS X beta is out now, doesn't mean that you have to run out and buy it. And just because a new OS is released doesn't stop your current Mac from remaining functional. Does my old Mac LC 630 still do everything that Apple promised it would, when I bought it in 1994? Yes. Did I have to buy a new G3 to continue the existing functionality. No. I bought one because I wanted one. If an old Mac falls in the forest, does it make an obsolete sound?
I think that our friend Darek -- faced with the difficult proposition of un-announcing some products that he has been demoing at shows -- lashed out at Microsoft, Intel, and Apple out of intense, personal feelings of guilt. While he apparently didn't promise that the new products would ship, by demoing them at a series of trade shows, he has certainly inferred that they would.
The mental process is the same that takes place in a small child who is caught with his/her hand in the cookie jar. "Well, I know I was taking cookies without asking, but Billy broke your vase last week, and Suzy told a lie to the teacher, and Johnny says the 'F' word, and Intel's new chip doesn't work, and Microsoft is evil, and Apple is trying to make money off selling new stuff!"
Mike van Lammeren
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
It's been quite a while since I've posted or even had the time to read an article's comments in-depth, and I just have to say that for an article which had the potential of causing a bloody and mindless flamewar, these comments are some of the best thought out and informative that I've seen. It's nice to see self-government working once in a while!
Good point. (If legacy support "flaws" are really what's holding up the 1GHz Pentiums, rather than fab problems, component density, or all the other things that commonly delay chip rollouts.)
Still, the decision to include such support was Intel's in the first place. Presumably, they see some value to doing this (eg: the increased market-share from backward compatibility) or else they wouldn't have done it.
I never said anything about price gouging, though the author certainly seemed to. But even when they do make a clean break, they still can't meet their own release dates, despite the fact that they're no longer bogged down with legacy support.
I think it boils down to a question of whether you value compatibility or technical superiority more. Both have their advantages -- and their place -- certainly.
I think the author believes that, for the consumer market at least, compatibility is the better choice. In fact, the author seems to view this as almost a moral imperative!
I wouldn't go that far, myself. But I do think it makes sense from a marketing/business point of view. Compatibility-> Larger software market-> $$$
This makes a bit less BIZ sense, however, if the software (OS) vendor is also the hardware maker... That makes me wonder if Apple isn't doing this just to sell more shiny new boxes.
Personally, I really don't care much about Apple in general. My own experience with OSX(Server) thus far has not filled me with great expectations. And neither does Apple's (or MSFT's, for that matter) track-record with delivering "innovations" in OS design...
I just wish Adobe (and all the other creators of really cool commercial software) would start supporting Linux. Then I wouldn't have to worry about MSFT and Apple anymore at all... and neither would they!
--jrd
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Youre just jealous because I bought Apple stock at $13 a share and now its at $52
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these! Oh...damn...screwed up again
I've noticed that really old Mac software (84-85) has better compatibility than the sorta old stuff (88-93). I always figured that the first wave was totally by the book, where the later stuff used undocumented APIs and various hacks (eg 32-bit dirty stuff) to get 10% better performance back when that was really important.
For virtually the entire 7.0 series, a few programs broke with each patch update. After umpteen updates, almost none of your old software would work anymore. Sure, LoadRunner '84 still runs, but none of your software from 1992 does.
As for making MacOS a "better product" -- I dunno. It certainly was cheaper for Apple to go on their way and accidentially break stuff than to do it the Microsoft way and regression test to hell and attempt to be bug-compatible with 10 year old software (except when it's politically expedient to intentionally break a competitor's program.) Most of MacOS's software breakage didn't bring any obvious benifits to the end user.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Just because Darek Mihocka says it takes 192 megs of RAM doesn't mean its true. Everything in this article should be taken with a grain of salt. I'm writing this on OSX Beta running on a machine with 128 MB of RAM and I have no problems. So far I've been able to open and run every application, mostly Classic apps, with no complaint. And this is just the Beta, which you can reasonably expect to be a bit bloated. The actual release should only require 64 MB (although 128 will be recommended). That could change, but that is the current target and I think they can hit it.
Also, that minimum requirement, as some one else mentioned, is for a great user experience. Windows 2000 with the required 64MB is dog slow.
n8_f
"The article told him so."
He shouldn't believe everything he reads on the internet.
Mike van Lammeren
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
Now only if someone makes a PowerPC code-morphing layer for Crusoe...
Can't decide if you are trying to gain some points from moderators as funny, or loose some as troll, but, I gotta respond.
I don't agree with your comment really. See, I'm stuck in a Windows based environment at work - Windows NT 4.0. And no, my machine doesn't crash daily, or require reboots, with a minor exception - a couple of the MMI development packages require reboots when I install or uninstall them (they don't play well together - what a PITA!)
So, I run Windows NT on Windows NT under VMWare. I never have to reboot the base NT OS that's running. But even better - I get to run a Linux machine at the same time. Some people run the idea of VMWare down (IE - why not just get another box) but it's great for applications like this - multiple differently configured Linux installs in one machine, differently configured NT installs on one machine - each with the software that can't seem to get along with each other. I don't have to have 6 machines on my desk, and I don't have to switch between them, etc. My box does have some horsepower, but, not as much as some people on here I'm sure (Dual PII/350 with 256 MB RAM, and a bunch of HD space).
So - for your comment about it being a bad idea? Heck no! It works great, and it's damned stable. I like Linux, and I keep it loaded on the box too - I just don't use it as my base OS :-)
Only downside? It's not speed (2 Linux sessions and 2 NT sessions running at the same time usually only take 4% of processing power unless they are doing something CPU intensive), resources (running low? Hit suspend on one you aren't using at the moment, and restore it when you need it!), or anything like that. Just the fact that it does mean that you have to pay for NT ;-) (And in my case, I do have on 98 session on it too. Can't remember why anymore...)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
Despite the fact that the Mac and Unix are essentially polar opposites
I'm completely Mac-ignorant, so excuse me if I'm incorrect, but I was under the impression that MacOS was initially based on Minix, and still was. Is this incorrect?
I couldn't have said it better myself, although I've tried before.
:)
I too believe in emulation and in eventually running whatever I want (resources permitting) on one computer. Right now, I could run the first computer I ever had (the Commodore 64) flawlessly, as well as the Apple II, the Amiga, the original Macintosh, the original PC, anything Nintendo ever made, thousands of arcade games...
Well, it's incredible what can be done, but of course you eventually run into some resource limitations. It sounds like this emulator might be sluggish on the new machine I just bought, (800Mhz Athlon, 128MB RAM) let alone an older one, so that's out of the question right now. Of course, I'd want a Linux port too, although it'd be *interesting* to try to run this on top of VMWare. (much like it was interesting to try to run Executor on top of Soft Windows back in the day: Executor was pretty speedy; Soft Windows is not....)
I was wondering if someone would try to run a PowerPC emulator on x86; I didn't think all the registers would map very well, but I guess a lot of them would end up cached or renamed or whatever, nowadays. I think the Merced would be a much better platform for this sort of emulation, but it's not really there yet, as noted, so that'll be years off at least.
And yes, Apple's history continually disgusts me. But what disgusts me more are the people who forget what they do and have always done, and keep going back, like battered software consumers. I never liked the tactics Apple used, and I'm not going to pay the "Apple Tax" just to try out their technology. If BeOS can run on my machine, so can MacOS X, and if they don't want to sell it to me, that's their loss.
It would be entirely to their benefit for a product like this to come to fruition, because then I might get to try their technology, and see what they have to offer. But it doesn't look like they care, and so many people have stopped coding for speed or size and are just trying to get products out the door that it's pitiful what ends up getting released. If the MacOS interface looked like the implementation looked like, no one would use it. I guess you could say the opposite about Unix, too.
I was amused by the whole Intel crisis; so many people are depending on them, and they're trying way too hard in the x86 war; they just need to calm down and get back to basics, and make a kick-ass next generation processor. But if someone takes that away from them (preferably some combination of IBM, Transmeta and AMD, in my dreams...) I wouldn't miss them at all.
Finally, thank you, Slashdot, for this article. For once I can be proud, and say "This is news for nerds! This is stuff that matters!" How often does that happen? Well, not nearly enough.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'm sorry but you just don't have much of a clue. If they didn't wan't Darwin running on x86, they certainly wouldn't be encouraging people to develop it. And everything I've read leads me to believe that the parts of OS X that live on top of Darwin are all platform independent.
In other words, it's quite likely that in a year or two you are going to be able to run Darwin on your x86 box, and do an upgrade to OS X. Apple may or may not support it as a hardware config but I'm sure that an equivalent to RedHat will be formed to pick up any support dollars that Apple leaves on the table.
This very fact kills any demand for an OS X emulator for x86 because you will just be able to run it native and who is going to fork out more money for less performance?
This rant is hardly stuff that matters. As for news for nerds, it's only news for the ignorant
DB
The other type of user, the "cutting edge power user" for lack of a better term, to them money is no object, buying a new computer every year is no object, buying new software every year is no object, and just plain being a victim of marketing hype is a way of life.
I find you have trouble affording a new computer every year, unless you have a well-paid job. You have to be clever to get high-paid jobs.
This is the kind of person who buys a fancy race car or a translucent computer without thinking about functionality and practicality.
I don't find this. I find they tend to be the sorts of people who'se home machines have 4 10,000Rpm 72GB SCSI hard disks, without thinking about how noisy they'll be.
This is the kind of person who will run out and buy Mac OS X for the same of running Mac OS X without knowing anything about it or knowing why they're buying it.
Personally, I'd like to see what Mac afficinados (sp?) are on about without spending money on a Mac that might suck. Lots of graphics people use macs; I want to know why.
And I have come to the conclusion that we really do not wish to market to this type of brainless individual.
Excuse me for being interested in your product. Looks like I'll have to get myself an entire mac then.
Michael Tandy
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
If I remember right, he also got into a major pissing match with another Mac emlulator creator. (I can't remember the name) It worked similar to his SoftMac which uses a software ROM, and at the time, he only had the hardware ROM on a ISA card. He said the hardware was better because it was more legal.
-- ERICmurphy -- www.jabber.org for open-source, XML-based IM
If your field of work is computers, and you can't afford to drop 4 grand a year on a new system, maybe you're no good at your job? I personally choose not to buy a new one each year because I don't need it, but I found you comment about affordability disingenous.
Blar.
This guy writes emulators for a living. He hates Mac OS X. In trust, this shouldn't be all that surprising, after all, Mac OS X is based on BSD. There are thousands of free BSD-compatible programs out there, and from the reports so far, the majority will compile and run on Mac OS X without any code editing at all. This therefore negates the need for emulators; why emulate something when you can just recompile the source for the system you're running on?
Having said this, his point about backwards comptibility is certainally vaild, but might the best decision for him therefore to write a BSD-based Mac OS 9/8/7 emulator allowing Mac OS X people to run their old apps?
-- Piracy is a vicitmless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
I don't really understand why this is news or why it is even a big deal. If some emulator writer is having difficulty writing emulators on or for Macs or Wintel boxes, it isn't the fault of MSFT, Apple or Intel but instead it is his fault for basing his business on the whims of third party companies whose business decisions he has no control over.
The author goes on and on blaming other companies for assumptions that he makes, instead of correctly realizing that the basing business decisions on the behavior of others who are not under your control or whom at least you do not have direct access to is folly of the highest order. Blaming the architecture of Mac OS X and Windows Millenium is a coward's way out. The truth is Apple and MSFT are under no obligation to make their Operating System's easy for Joe Random Hacker to emulate.
Apple and MSFT have specifically rewritten their new Operating Systems to target the problems that have been leveled at them in the past (multitasking in Apple's case, instability in MSFT's case) and did not and should not have considered whether the improvements to their Operating Systems suddenly make emulation software more difficult to write.
This guy claims to have been writing emulators for fourteen years, but the sheer cluelessness of this rant is outright amazing. He doesn't even know quite what an emulator is, as evidenced by the fact that he thinks OSX's Classic environment is an emulator. In reality, it's no more an emulator than Wine, Plex86/VMWare, MOL, OS/2's Windows compatibility environment, and so on. These are all virtual machines, but they are not emulators due to the fact that they make no attempt at imitating hardware. This is why you cannot run Wine on LinuxPPC.
Then, he talks about Apple's horrendous OSX and how it obsoletes every Mac over two years old. Wrong again. While it is true that most older machines will not run OSX, Apple has provided a means of forward-compatibility for many older machines via CarbonLib. This allows Carbon apps to run all the way back to OS8.1 (which is itself a free upgrade from 8.0). Since most existing Mac apps are likely to choose Carbon rather than Cocoa (this only makes sense, since it's far less work to port and will still run on the earlier OS), these machines will continue to run most current applications. This happens to include every PowerPC-based Mac ever made, all of the clones, and a healthy chunk of 68K-based machines with PPC upgrade cards. That's a lineage of over seven years for the OOC-based machines alone. I'd love to see anyone run Win2K or WinME on a seven year old machine at a reasonable speed.
Then, the lovely bit about PC's not going obsolete every two years. In the Windows world, they basically do (the Linux world is far less affected by this phenomenon), due to a vairety of factors. It should be noted that according to recent studies, the average useful life of a Mac was four years, the average Wintel box only two. Sadly, no Linux results were posted (they may not have been studied).
Oh, and the bit about MacOS being based off of two-decade-old technology. Guess what: the technology Win9x is based off of is very nearly as old (older, even, if you count the operating systems off of which DOS was based); whatever M$ may do to hide the fact even WinME is still little more than a bloated, overglorified DOS shell. WinNT/2K is a different matter entirely, but he was focusing on WinME, so I will too.
Also, forgive me if I don't buy his claims of G4 performance on a PC. All claims of which processor is faster aside, emulation takes tons of processing power. Even in best-case scenarios, you could only emulate a processor running at a fraction of the clockrate of the host machine. On a 1-GHz P3, you might be able to get up to the speed of a low-end Blue G3, but I doubt even that. Likewise, on a 500-MHz G4, you might manage a 300-MHz Pentium if Apple's speed claims are true, and more likely you'd be lucky to get a P233's performance.
This is a shame. This guy makes some fine emulators. But it seems he got cocky, bit off more than he could chew with the PPC emulator, and is now trying to pin the blame on Apple and Microsoft for his own mistakes.
----------
And, out of curiosity, are you implying that you think that novice should use Linux/BSD? I know people that have a hard enough time on Mac.
And I am in no way trying to argue that Windoze dosen't have bugs, or is worth strange unpoastable things for that matter, but I have almost been running OS X on my system for a week and I have never had to reboot the system.
seth
They will make a total of about $10mil max on the beta, that in no way pays back the 400 mil spent on NeXT.
Everything is written into a memory buffer, and dumped to screen when needed. In addition the 'dirty-rectangle' method is used to cut down on buffer/screen writes.
Speed depends on the system/environment your running. I'd suggest a P166 or better. Java under Netscape4 with Linux is incredibly slow.
-- Hob - Java Spectrum Emulator
It split since it was last $13, so you bought shares at $13 which are now worth $104.
sorry for the harsh subject ... but i'm a mac consultant. i need to have OS X down cold by the time it comes out "for real," so i ordered it and a new iMac at the same time, for purposes of testing the OS.
i spent about $1600, which isn't all that much for a system that will last at least 3-4 years. so perhaps apple's plan is to get some customers to buy new hardware to run the new OS (apple gets most of its revenue from hardware, remember). i think i'm living proof that's true. and it helps us all -- i remember the whining when win95 came out.
related story: my then-employer upgraded to POP/SMTP mail. we had a server in-house and had to install quickmail pro on all the desktops. they all accepted it except for two old 386's. my boss just screamed at our consultants because they couldn't get TCP/IP to work under win3.1.
i always thought he was a bit of a moron to get so angry. asking older technology to do what new technology does is folly.
one can be penny-wise and pound-foolish, and i fear the logic behind this rant is a good example. i hope everyone just ignores it.
Mindy: "Well...desserts aren't always right." Homer: "But they're so sweet!"
A number of people on the MacAddict forums have actually run X on systems with 64MB RAM, and claim to be satisfied with the result. Now, perhaps Apple is just doing a good job managing expectations, but so far, so good.
If you take the author's pronouncements entirely seriously, you'd come to the conclusion that no computer company should ever release a radically new OS.
I, too, found it very strange that he talked about running NT on a system with 16MB RAM. I remember running NT 4.0 on a 32MB system and I had to upgrade RAM to 48MB for it to be barely decent. In fact the realistic hardware requirements for each new Microsoft OS strain the capabilities of most hardware out there. The Windows 2000 requirements were quite comparable to those for OS X, and Windows 2000 compared to Windows NT 4 is a much less radical change than OS X compared to OS 9.
I'm typing this on OS/X right now, and I'm definitely looking forward to switching to it as my primary OS, as soon as they can get video editing software working. (That's what I'm spending most of my time on the machine for).
By the way, here's a maddening OS/X problem I'm having - when I type fast, it seems to be eating about every 5th to 10th character. Grrr. Anyone know what's going on?
D
----
Interesting to note, I have a Quadra 840av (7 years old) which is still quite responsive under MacOS 8.1, has full 16-bit sound (decent DAC) and can write CDs at 8x speed *from it's original HD*...
I also have a PowerMac 8100, which I recently upgraded with a G3 CPU card (best £400 i spent yet) and an 18Gb HD... it can now play any game/program written more than 2 years ago, and it's a 6-year-old machine.
This is the *big* advantage of Macs - they just keep going, and you can upgrade them with a couple of components and they keep being as useful as a brand-new machine (if not quite as fast). Admittedly, one can throw together a PC for next to nothing and stick Linux on it (the PC i did that to is incredibly useful in it's own right), but it's not the same. Example: I have a P166/MMX on a "good" m/board from the day... and because I fitted extra RAM which took it over 64Mb, the L2 cache doesn't work any more. How lame is that?
--- The key to knowledge is not to rely on people to teach you it ---
Let's hope his market niche doesn't dry up any more.
.88 magnum -- it goes through schools.
--
It's a
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Why did you choose that quote to illustrate it?
The "problems" referred to in the original post (which I was referring to in the segment you quoted) were multitasking and stability -- both of which Linux has in spades.
As for the "hardware upgrade treadmill", you're right of course. ...sorta like saying cars are an "incompatible" upgrade from horsecarts. ;-)
Still, when an OS company changes its flagship product over to a completely new platform, casting aside millions of potential legacy-hardware-owning customers, it's bound to raise eyebrows.
I don't know how tightly OSX is bound to this hardware platform (though they say Darwin runs on x86 now), but it seems like it ought to be possible to get at least some form of it running on these "slightly older" machines the author is talking about. (But of course, that would bring up a Windoze-like "balkanization" of the OS, too.)
I agree the author of the article is a little out-there, but he does make some good points, I think.
YMMV...
--jrd
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Well, a world without Apple would be a world without Firewire, an awesome piece of nerd tech if I've ever seen one. What IEEE specs have Dell, Gateway or Compaq come up with?
I certainly wouldn't be happier without the ability to hook up video cameras,VCRs, computers, etc. on a cheap I/O system that doesn't need to be mediated by a computer.
This, all by itself, justifies Apple's ccontinued existence.
DB
While I agree with the gist of your comment, there's no real reason to believe the above - nothing about preemptive multitasking per se increases the hardware requirement over a singletasking system (the overhead is generally miniscule). Lots of people have written multitasking OSes for the 6502, for instance.
Real memory protection, a different issue, does require some sort of executive memory management unit within or external to the CPU. It'd probably also like a CPU that has at least a supervisor and user mode. But I suspect by "hardware" you meant more memory, CPU speed, and I/O bandwidth, and those aren't required.
> I know people (me, for instance) that would gladly
.exe that someone sends me, or making Windows screenshots for computer books (which is what I mainly use it for). If you just run the emulator full screen, it's not really that good as an everyday computer.
> pay 600$ for such an emulator.
Not many people will do this, though. A $799 iMac with Mac OS X, Appleworks, no fan, solid keyboard, and an optical mouse, is a real machine that will sit there and give you solid performance for a long time to come. A PC + $600 emulator + $99 copy of Mac OS X, even if you already have the PC, is just a toy that's waiting to break with the next Windows or Mac OS rev, or your next hardware update.
I run Virtual PC once in a while on my Mac, and if you use 98lite to un-integrate IE and put the Windows 95 shell in there, you can get really acceptible performance, but you're basically running a five year-old OS on an emulated equivalent of a Pentium 200. You're not running next year's OS and trying to emulate a PIII or G4. Even so, it's good for Web site testing, safely running the occasional
Virtual PC fullscreen on an iBook, though, is the one and only x86 notebook with six hour battery life and antennaes built-in. Sort of like what Transmeta's doing.
Actually, your 8600/300 does run Mac OS X, it's just not on the supported hardware list.
Take a look at Xappeal.org. They have a long list of older macs that they have run OS X on that aren't on the official Apple list.
DB
I couldn't have said it better myself, although I've tried before.
I'm not surprised considering how much of the article was filled with FUD and uninformed nonsense.
This guy's speed claims are just so much bunk. The same guy who claims that his emulator will run at the same speed as a real Power Mac G4 claims that Windows NT runs just fine on a 486/33. Whatever. Anyone who has actually seen this tried knows what a joke it is. I'm sure, though, if you're used to emulating machines that were already slow, then you're used to sluggishness.
The reason why Apple dumped support for legacy Macs with Mac OS 8.0 was because of the continuation of attempts to scrape out all the m68k code from the OS. Mac OS 8.0 was the first version of the Mac OS to have a 100% PowerPC-native Finder. Apple had warned that when the Mac OS hit 8.0 (originally as Copland) that m68k machines would no longer be supported. Users knew that this was coming. Even though Mac OS 8.0 didn't do all that Copland promised, the timeline for m68k obsolecence was well-known in the day.
The move to cut off the clones in Mac OS 8.0 was an unfortunate necessity. The clones were devouring Apple's revenue, and the move to open up the Mac market to clones honestly should've never been made. Apple should've looked hard at just how much influence IBM has over the PC market before doing that. However, this was yet another bone-headed move from the Scully administration that Amelio and Jobs had to clean up.
I remember. I was there.
His claims about Mac OS X show just how uninformed he is. The claims of sluggish, broken emulation in the Classic layer have been refuted by many who have actually had experience with the system. (A few apps, oddly enough, act more responsively under Classic in Mac OS X than in Mac OS 9.0.4 itself!) The only real things that are broken in Classic are those that require raw access to the hardware below the system or that muck about in areas of the system that they shouldn't be.
Well, good! That's a modern OS doing its job. Those kinds of application need to be replaced with better written ones. Too much backwards compatibility for people who refuse to modernize their code is the bane of Windows and the x86 processor family.
Also he whines about memory requirements without fully considering the fact that Mac OS X Beta is Beta! It's not the trimmed and optimized final version that will be shipping. The 128 MB requirement, with 192 MB suggested, is probably not the final system requirements. Most of the reason for this huge requirement is the Classic environment. Yes, that's right. Mac OS X requires huge amounts of RAM because it runs an emulator. You didn't think that they could emulate an OS that allows unprotected access into low global system memory without allocating it its own memory space to work with, did you?
The very suggestion that Mac OS X won't run on the machines it was promised to is bull. There isn't a G3 or G4 based machine that can't get up to 128 MB of RAM today. Even the old revision A iMacs can get up to 384 MB with 2 SO-DIMM sockets. The G3 system with the least RAM expandability is the first G3 PowerBook. It can only go up to 160 MB, well within Apple's requirements. Even iBooks can get 320 MB of RAM.
"Oh, no. I don't have enough RAM in my machine. It must be obsolete! Damn Apple and their evil marketing. Now I have to buy a whole new machine." Come on! Upgrading a 3 year old machine to run Mac OS X is less than $300 for most people. That's nothing in the PC world. Try running Windows 2000 on an average machine from 3 years ago. It's not going to be very usable. Apple is making a suggestion for having a usable system. Wait, I forgot. "NT 4.0 works on a 486." Riiiight...
That brings me to his claims that no one has to upgrade their machines in the PC world. That's perfectly true. You don't have to run the latest version of Windows or Office. You don't have to run the latest games. You don't have to run anything that didn't come out within 1-2 years of your PC purchase. You might want to, but system requirements in the PC world have followed Moore's law more than CPUs themselves. It isn't until the past two years or so when most software started to only require a 233 MHz Pentium II or higher. The higher cost of PC maintenance is a well-known phenomenon. Even average home users upgrade at least 1 or 2 components of their system per year.
Finally, thank you, Slashdot, for this article. For once I can be proud, and say "This is news for nerds! This is stuff that matters!" How often does that happen? Well, not nearly enough.
This wasn't news. The only news involved is that he's pitching a hissy-fit and giving up on his product. This was just a little uniformed rant that happened to agree with your opinions. Considering the kind of articles you've griped at in the past, I'm not surprised you consider an open flame full of anti-Mac half-truths and FUD to be newsworthy.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Also emulating an emulator is guaranteed to be slow.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
"The Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98 that you can still buy today for your Pentium III will still run on your 10 year old 486. We do this ourselves here in the test lab. We run NT 4.0 on a 33 MHz 486 with 16 meg of memory. And guess what? It runs. It works. We even run Windows 95 on an 8 meg 386/20."
Yeah, but you can't play quake and Word95 will probably take 10 years to load - not to think of boot-up time.
You guys should stay with dos or linux on those machines.
Your original iMac will be able to run MacOS X very reasonably. Why do you think it wouldn't?
Who said MacOS X won't run on your Computer? I have a beige G3 233 overclocked to 266 MHz and it runs " in a reasonable way". I am using IE 5 while listening to mp3s and compiling some *nix programs in the background. That doesn't piss me off at all :-)
Well whaddya know, there already is one. It's called Basilisk II. http://www.uni-mainz.de/~bauec002/B2Main.html
Works in Linux, Windows, BeOS, and AmigaOS.
Also, VMWare is x86 only and WINE is not an emulator.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
He makes the claim that his company runs NT 4.0 on a 486 33 with 16 megs of memory in the lab. The problem with this is that although it will technically run, it will be extremely slow.
Microsoft claims on the box that NT will run on this type of hardware, but don't believe it. Managers at my company, who are NOT technically astute, made the mistake of believing what they read on box. We had to load NT 4.0 on a DX2-66 with 32 megs and SHOW them how slow it ran before they would believe us. Imagine trying to use word when what you type shows up on the screen seconds after you type it and the hard drive is swapping so much you expect it to melt. That's what NT is like on a 486.
Also, the Mac Plus didn't come out in 1984.
This stuff is off topic somewhat, but I just wanted to point out that there are several technical errors in the article. They are small errors, but annoying nonetheless.
For example, he also makes the claim that you should run windows 98 on a 486. Only if you've got the patience of a zen master. Windows 95, especially the A revision, will run on a 486 at usable speeds if you've got at least 32 megs of memory. Windows 98 however is much more resource hungry.
Once again, I know these are small issues but I just wouldn't want anyone to get the idea you can run newer OS's on older hardware.
Oh do you want to add all of the hardware that support was dropped for in Win2000 vs WinNT ?
In our home "upgrade" we lost support for a whole pile of hardware that was in use in WinNT. All of this stuff was swopped with the Linux Box, and was fine over there.
MS does drop support for stuff, its not just Apple...
Infact I am not unhappy about the dopping of the hardware support, it would just be nice to be informed in advance of finding that the NIC does not work - AFTER you have spent an hour installing the new OS....
Not Fragile
Not only that, but all the other first that Apple has had in their lifetime. Like first commercial system to use a mouse. (Yes I know PARC invented it, but if no one would have sold it, what was the point?) Or first to use a 3 1/2 inch floppy (Apple IIc). First (and only) to have a true plug and play networking protocol (Appletalk). First computer that doesn't require a fan (iMac). First OS (and only for plug and play) to support multiple monitors showing different stuff. If you want an example of how much Apple has affected the market recently, walk into Staples and count how many different things you can find that have come out in iMac colors. Not just computer equipment, but chairs, staplers, just about anything you can imagine. Apple is and has always been at the forefront of innovative design in computers. Granted not everything they came out with was a good idea or caught on (remember PowerTalk adn QuickDraw GX?), but they still were pushing ahead.
It is unforgivable that you are not aware it is Sergeant Schultz, not Colonel Klink, who knows "abzolutely nuttzing."
You are right. I will go hang my head in shame now.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The real reason behind this rant, is the new $799 iMac. Back when a new low-level Mac was over $2000, his emulation product made sense for some people. When the iMac was introduced in 1998, the price was $1300 each, still high to run one or two old programs. In a few months, MacMall will probably sell the new iMac/350 with an extra 64Mb of RAM for $800. Older iMac models (and even used G4s) are well under $1000 each. A Macintosh that can run MacOS 9 or OS X on a real G3/G4 chip for that price, kills his market. A used iMac/233 $500 all-in-one machine can take up little space to run the few Mac applications a PC-only company or school needs. Connect it to an ethernet PC network (with its 10/100 port) and give it an IP address. It can run MacOS 8.6 or 9 and older/current Mac titles. Add in 64MB of RAM ($70 now), and it should run MacOS X (1.0) and all the newest software. Why buy a slow emulation program? I believe his SoftMac product costs $300 and requires a $100 ROM ISA card. Apple has priced many of their new hardware products (and at the same time their older products in the used market) into the sub-$1000 range. Some of the original iBooks are even breaking this barrier. Can his SoftMac emulation software run on a notebook? Not quite. The use of USB, IDE hard drives, VGA ports, PC100 RAM, Firewire (on some models) and so on makes many pieces of hardware cross-platform. No need to throw out that PC monitor or hard drive. A used $900 G4/350 in a PC company or school can use PC parts to run Mac titles or OS X at speeds a 900Mhz Pentium running Mac emulation would dream of. Especially if it is Photoshop - even the Windows version. A low cost Mac puts him out of business. Why would he put the effort into PowerPC emulation if all PowerPC hardware is so cheap?
Wow. It works. And the old interactive fiction games :)
Wondering how are you handling the screen drawing? It looks like the screen is being slowly drawn, and the time to draw the screen is making it feel slow.
Perhaps you can draw into a memory buffer and then blit it at once to the screen?
Just wondering.
You may accuse me of talking about a very limited field, but I need to do multi-language word processing, and in that market there is practically nothing on the PC market that comes even close to the comfort and ease of Nisus Writer 5.1.3 on the Macintosh with Apple's Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Japanese language kits installed under MacOS 9. The closest thing in terms of output quality is TeX; the closest thing in terms of input ease is MS Office 2000 under Windows 2000, but the hardware requirements are terrible. Nisus runs fine on an old $100 PowerBook 170 (albeit under OS 7.6, for which language kits exist as well, though), while for Office 2000 you need something in the $1000-and-up range.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Any computer with a colored enclosure will run Mac OS X just beautifully, and many previous models will, too. The final requirement is said to be 64MB of RAM, although they may make it "128MB if you want to run Classic apps". Very, very few people are running Mac OS 9 in only 64MB of RAM because its VM is so bad you usually have to turn it off. Many, many people have 128 or so already, and even with that, they can only run two or three apps on Mac OS 9. On Mac OS X, they will use that same 128MB of RAM to run ten apps at a time, easy.
One of the nice things about Mac OS X that many Slashdotters may not know is that you simply install it onto the same HFS+ disc as Mac OS 9, and it moves the contents of your hard disk into a folder called "Mac OS 9" and uses those contents when you run Classic. The Startup Disk preference in Mac OS X then offers you the choice of "Mac OS X" or "Mac OS 9". If you click on "Mac OS 9" and then reboot, you are back running Mac OS 9 like nothing ever happened. Even though the system and every one of your apps has moved, it still works (moving apps is typical on the Mac, but I don't know about moving the system folder). The "Startup Disk" method has been in Mac OS for years and years (enabling you to boot from any disk) so this process will be familiar to many users. It's going to be easy to dual boot for a while if you have a troublesome app that won't run in Classic. No partitioning, no formatting, no reinstalls of Mac OS 9, no separate disk required. It's very well done.
Change "everything" to "anything" and I think you're right on the money.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Dude, that was sarcasm. I hate it when people can't get that without my having to use tags. I've seen Windows NT 4.0 on a 486 that some clueless techs installed on a computer at my mom's school because they were order to update the OSes on machines in the classrooms. It's hideous. Reread my response with the thick layer of criticism that I laid on it.
BTW, Windows NT won't run on a 386. I know because those idiots tried it.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
It would have been educational if he was factually correct. Unfortunately, he wasn't. OS X runs on far more machines than are on the official list.
DB
What the anonymous coward said is right, my friend has the exact same problem.
Hmm, a computer science student that uses an original iMac as their primary development system?
Strikes me as just a little bit fearsome. iMacs seem to work just fine for grandma to plug in ( 2 easy steps! ) or 5 year old Suzy to use, but I'm not sure it would be my first choice. Be careful, you might get your geek credentials revoked if word gets out.
You can't even be a decent gamer on that setup - what kind of comp sci students are they raising these days?
Does this guy know when to shut the h*** up?
I have a Mac Performa 400, a Mac SE, a Mac PB 145B, and a Quadra 800, all of which could be considered 'classic' Macs in the sense of how old they are.
I can take the software from any of them (remember, the Mac doesn't have a registry and these are the days before Microsoft liked to spew Mac versions of DLLs and crap all over the hard drive when you installed Office or Internet Explorer), copy it over LocalTalk to my Powerbook 3400 running MacOS 8.6 and it will work _perfectly_ with no problems. My Powerbook 3400 rarely crashes, even with old software, and is like a model of why Apple's systems are superior. Even my insanely buggy Performa 5215CD (yes, the one with the bad motherboard part that causes it to crash randomly) runs classic software like Microsoft Works 1.0 and Stunt Copter (remember that game? One of my favorites).
Most times people who say Macs suck have never even really used one, and because they lack the direction to actually use a Mac right, of course they will have problems! It would be like me, an avid anti-Windows person ripping out kernel32.dll from Windows 98 and then giving it a bad review because it refused to boot.
Go looking for problems, your gonna find em.
Brielle
darek says that his business runs on people who were forcibly superannuated during the 030 purge but still want access to old mac apps and data.
then he laments the bulk of OSX and the inability of even fairly recent consumer macs to run the new system.
i think his complaints are justified. there's no reason why a bsd-based os shouldn't scale down to older machines gracefully. but there's a huge flaw in his argument.
shouldn't he be delighted that another generation of mac users are going to be left in the cold? some of them will defect to windows, just as the 030 people did, and then they'll want to run their cuddly OS8 apps and read old files using his emulator.
the last thing he needs to do is run OSX: his product is for people who decide against it. so if he's right, then he should be making an imac/pre-g3 emulator asap.
it's nice to revisit the spirit of 97, but it's a silly rant really.
The point (I believe) was that those actions are bad because they constitute a hardware upgrade treadmill that breaks compatibility and limits choice.
What's funny about this statement is that companies are constantly stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to backwards compatibility. Intel's x86 architecture is primarily flawed due to it's support of legacy crap. MSFT's operating systems were largely unstable due to supporting legacy 16-bit applications as well as shitty third party drivers.
Yet when these companies make a clean break and design a new architecture that works better, people like you start to scream about how they are gouging the consumer by not supporting all sorts of brain dead legacy crap.
I guess that goes to show that you can't please everyone.
Most of these requirements stem from the fact that to run older applications, it has to run an emulator. If you don't plan to run classic apps, you can probably run it on any G3 with 64 megs of ram. Hell, you could probably put it on a PowerPC too as long as they still leave that unsupported option in the installer.
Yes yes, this sucks for some people, but life is tough. Everyone wanted apple to modernize their OS, so they did. I think they did a pretty good job with it. I'm not happy that it took so long, and I'm not happy that it's a pain to migrate too, but I would rather have a cool rock solid OS that makes it a bit harder to run my older software than some half assed attempt at updating MacOS. Change? Yes, I'm ready for a change.
Well, they have this thing called Mac OS X. I'm surprised you haven't heard about it.
-Pete
I'd agree on that - except for one thing : MacOS X does have something that makes it very different from other OSs, which is a 2D vector graphic engines. Scaling back and forth large 32 bit/pixel images, turning them around at non-orthogonal angles, applying alpha-transparency animations, etc... eats a whole lot of memory and CPU ressource (but is definitely cool)
I'm curious, what app were you going to write that Apple is now going to miss out on?
He sounds like every ignorant mac/windows/linux/whatever basher to ever post to *.advocacy.
por ejemplo:
a 7 year late OS?
relevance? Apparently tossed in just to tarnish.
Real multitasking. Ooooh.
This is a complaint?
As one Apple engineer explained to me this morning, Apple needs to cover their development costs
Quoting engineers about marketing issues? Inappropriate appeal to authority,Why not quote a marketer about technical issues?
why I feel Windows ultimately won out over Mac OS in the mass market despite sleazy underhanded marketing by both Apple and Microsoft
This sentence makes no sense, and apparently was constructed just to use the words sleazy and underhanded in the same sentence as Microsoft and Apple.
Mac OS 8.6 and earlier are not even supported in emulation, leading me to wonder how compatible the "classic" mode even is
mud-slinging. "They don't do A, so I wonder if they don't do B!" Even though they freely state they don't do A. This is followed closely by
even Microsoft does not pull stunts like this
so now his speculation about "how compatable the classic mode is" has turn into a "fact," and such a low one that even Microsoft doesn't do it.
etc. etc. etc.
-Pete
How is $29.99 too much for a beta product. Typically to get a beta version of the next version Mac OS you had to pay Apple something along the lines of $500 to get access to development versions and sign an NDA. $30 seems cheap if you want to get a jump on the next latest and greatest version of the OS.
.
I replaced my lovely but lousy Apple Pro keyboard with a new microCONNECTIONS lime cosmetic horror story, and about 90% of the problem magically cleared up. The other 10% seems to be an IE4 for MacOS X problem that other people have seen.
... if it would only play nice and not bring down my system - it's done that twice so far.
Time to get OmniWeb working
D
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2 1337 4 u!
A revision A and revision B iMac both have two SO-DIMM sockets. Due to space constraints, one socket can take a 2" SO-DIMM, but the other one can only take a 1.5" SO-DIMM. You can get a 256 MB 2" SO-DIMM and a 128 MB 1.5" SO-DIMM to max out at 384 MB of memory in your machine. That's more than enough for Mac OS X Beta.
The guy who wrote the article is talking out of his ass. Like Colonel Klink from Hogan's Hero, he "knowz abzolutely nuttzing." The Beta system requirements are likely to be higher than those of the final version, but you can expect them to be a little high too. The main reason for this is that you need to support both the memory needed for the straight Mac OS X environment and the Classic environment. You're effectively running two seperate OSes at once. The Classic environment is a resource pig because of that.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
> The old rhapsody even ran on 180mhz PPCs before...
> what now... they are too slow?
The original Rhapsody HAD to run on 180MHz PPC's, because that was the best it had at that time. If it ran too slow, you took some shit out. This is a new OS being built to take Apple through the next ten years without major changes. Yes, they're going to push today's machines a little bit. This is a Unix that (by release) shouldn't ever have to be rebooted, even when you add some funky hot-plug hardware (obviously, you have to power down to add a PCI card). It also allows you to dynamically add or remove fonts from the system without even restarting your apps.
There are lots of things it's going to do that aren't so important that you couldn't take them out if you HAD to run on a 180MHz PPC, but since the vast majority of the users of this OS will be G3+ (I mean, the lowliest iMac is a G3/233), then why not do more for the user?
Also, for non-Mac users to get some perspective, as far as the ubiquity of the machines, the equivalent to "G3 with 128MB of RAM" would be "Pentium II with 64MB of RAM". On average, Macs have more RAM in them because of the lousy VM in Mac OS 9, so these two machines are the PC and Mac workhorses of the past few years. Pentium II with 64MB of RAM is a realistic minimum for getting real work done with Windows 2000, and Windows 2000 does not also run an entire copy of Windows 98 in order to ensure maximum compatibility.
I'll have to agree with you that Basilisk II is currently the best mac emu out there, but... you have to admit, when Fusion first came out, it was "the cat's meow". When I first got it, I dusted off my old 68040 mac, pulled out the SCSI drive(which had System 7.5), plugged it into my PC, and fired up Fusion with no problems. It ran all my apps (Office, older quicktime, and some games like Aperion) no problem. I haven't tried it with System 8, but I have heard that people have had problems. I'm quite happy with Basilisk II now. I will definitely give Fusion another shot if they make good on their PPC version, which is promised by then end of the year. Regards, -ab
actually he said shoplifting.
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+&x
It seems more of a rant on OS X than anything else. I agree wholeheartedly: paying $25 for a beta OS is ridiculous.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
AAPL was at 12 about 3 years ago. It surged up to ~150. Then it went back down to around 90 eariler this year, at which time it split. The numbers at quote.yahoo.com and other sites were adjusted for this split, and, as a result, the numbers look lower. He simply speculated that past events would have affected stock prices, looked at a chart and said "Aha! I'm right!" All that "I told you so" stuff is BS. I know this because I bought 200 shares ~3 years ago at 16 and now have 400 at ~55. Also, would you buy software from a person who thinks OS advancement is bad and running NT 4 on 33 MHz 486 is a perfectly acceptable setup? For that matter, would you listen to him anymore, or just back away slowly?
It started looking a little suspicious from this point onwards: "Apple has to keep putting disclaimers on their software to not use it for critical applications" as if they were the only software manufacturer covering their asses this way.
Then it was confirmed. A lot of ranting about MacOS X based on pure speculation rather than knowledge. "Mac OS 8.6 and earlier are not even supported in emulation, leading me to wonder how compatible the "classic" mode even is." Why not test it instead of ranting? It might have been worth considering that the classic environment was developed to run MacOS 8.6 originally. It was 8.6 which shipped with the first version of the BlueBox (in MacOS X Server). Without even having tested the OS he then claims "Poor backward compatibility for old apps".
As for obsolesence, we see a lot more old macs in use here than PCs. Why? Because they do what they are supposed to well, with essentially the same OS and software that was on them when they were new. Not everyone 'buy' this upgrade whenever possible philosophy.
Your original iMac will be able to run MacOS X very reasonably. Why do you think it wouldn't?
The article told him so.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Now, I don't know if anyone here recalls this, but NeXTSTEP ran on a 33-Mhz Motorola 68030 with 8 megs of RAM. So there's no reason Mac OS X should require a 500 Mhz G4 with 256 Megs of RAM except for the fact that Apple wants to sell hardware to their customers.
Have you read ANY documentation on Mac OS X? It ain't NextStep. NextStep, for example, doesn't have to emulate Mac OS 9, which eats gobs of ram and cpu.
And yes, Apple does want to sell hardware to their customers.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Huh? Classic works remarkably well. In fact, it really sets new standards in emulation (it helps to be on the same native processor). Virtually all apps run, except those that require low-level hardware access. Apple has gone to great extents to be backwards compatible. Look what it did with Carbon. With Carbon did 90% of the work for porting ancient Mac apps to Mach. That's amazing stuff.
;)
And this is true of Windows NT for running older (Win16 and DOS) applications as well. The Emulators guy made the comparison of Mac OS X vs. Mac OS 9 as being analagous to Windows 9x vs. Windows NT. The statement you made there shows that this comparison is true. OF COURSE if you have applications that do direct hardware access on a platform that has protections to not allow this...those applications aren't going to run. It only makes sense.
My journal has hot
I can understand the point about using assembler for speed critical areas, but all software contain code of a different nature.
Assembler is fine for coding processor emulation, but what about all the general management code that glues it all together? Surely not.
Java doesn't produce 15Mb executables by the way. Try my own emulator Java based Spectrum Emulator at the bottom of this comment.
-- Hob - Java Spectrum Emulator
From reading the article, it looks like the author hasn't even used the Mac OS X public beta yet, so in my mind, has very little room to criticize it. Comments from the article:
Apple is doing it again. By raising the bar so high - you need a minimum of a 128 megabyte G3 or G4 based Mac just to run Mac OS X
That's what you need to run the beta. I think the goal for 1.0 is 64MB. And unlike some other company's stated minimum requirements, these are actually realistic. I've had 6-10 apps (some Classic) open all day today, and the machine didn't flinch (which is vast departure from DP4). I have a Blue G3/400 with 128MB of RAM. It's not horribly old system, but even a G4/350 (not a typo) is faster.
You're cut off. In talking to Apple reps today I learned that the 128 megabyte limit is a bare bones minimum that even they don't recommend. 192 megabytes is the practical minimum.
All I can say is this isn't my experience (though, again it was with DP4).
The beauty of PCs, and why I feel Windows ultimately won out over Mac OS in the mass market despite sleazy underhanded marketing by both Apple and Microsoft, is that PCs don't go obsolete every 2 years! Any given PC can run a wide range of DOS and Windows releases.
This statement is really ironic is so many ways. But let's focus on one point. The reason that old PCs can run new versions of Windows (95/98/Me) is that Windows/DOS itself is old. So are the processors that power them (x86). The only real improvements have been end-user features. The same is the case on the Mac side of the world. Up until Mac OS 8.5 and 9, very little had changed in the system itself. I once heard an ex-Apple engineer joke that in the years since he left the company, the employee directory had changed more than the API documentation.
Mac OS X is a huge leap forward. Spend some time with the system and you'll understand. If you want the same basic infrastructure on less hardware, download Darwin (PPC or x86). If you want all the fancy extras, you need hardware to power it. Mac OS X has to emulate Classic as a matter of everyday life. That's no simple task, and it requires some ram to do it.
Is the hardware that Apple supports for Mac OS X a bit steep? Yes. But bear in mind Apple also cares about something called user experience. Microsoft may list a 486 processor on their box as a reasonable minimum. But even if it installs/boots on such hardware, you ain't gonna be a happy person. Apple wants the people who purchase Mac OS X to have a positive experience. This may mean not "supporting" older, more quirky hardware, even though the OS may still install on it.
BTW: I had a Pentium 166 that tried to run Windows 95 and some games on it (Total Annihilation, Quake II) on it. It wasn't pretty.
And people leave and the Mac market shrinks. They use some fancy advertising to win people back.
Please. Apple's engineering group alone has done amazing things in the last three years. Give credit where credit is due.
I predict a mass exodus of Mac users as a result of the arrogant and irresponsible policy Apple has created for Mac OS X. Poor backward compatibility for old apps.
Huh? Classic works remarkably well. In fact, it really sets new standards in emulation (it helps to be on the same native processor). Virtually all apps run, except those that require low-level hardware access. Apple has gone to great extents to be backwards compatible. Look what it did with Carbon. With Carbon did 90% of the work for porting ancient Mac apps to Mach. That's amazing stuff. Rhapsody was not slated to do this, btw, which is why it was a Bad Idea.
Added to the insult of having to pay to beta test.
Nobody's holding a gun to his head.
I just installed the Mac OS X public beta yeterday, and it is an amazing piece of work. Despite the fact that the Mac and Unix are essentially polar opposites, Apple has blended the two in a strikingly graceful way. Despite all the potential for culture clash, things frequently just work the way you expect them to.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I forgot my Atari ST when they quit making them. It became a dead market. Why develop software for computers that are no longer made? Emulators are always crappy. They never work quite right.
This bone head says WinMe is buggy but he can't seem to actually identify any. He seems to feel the performance drop from Win98 on the same hardware is a problem. Actually WinMe is for computer novices. It does not allow bad dlls to be installed. It is very pro-actively protective of system files. This is not a bug.
Why on earth would anyone want a WinME emulator for anyway? What is the point?
Just thought I'd point that out
Here is the e-mail I sent to this guy...It pretty much sums up my rants:
"After seeing Mac OS X and seeing Apple repeat its 1997 strategy, I predict a mass exodus of Mac users as a result of the arrogant and irresponsible policy Apple has created for Mac OS X. Poor backward compatibility for old apps. Requiring hundreds of dollars of memory upgrades and possibly even processor upgrades. Added to the insult of having to pay to beta test."
So why then has Apple already sold 80,000 copies of Mac OS X Beta by last Monday, September 18th? What is it that you suggest Apple do to move on to a modern operating system while still maintaining speedy backward compatibility? Win 95,98, and 2000 all have a DOS underlying, what's wrong with having a Mac OS 9 underlying as well?
Secondly, this is a beta. There is still code to be optimized. I'm sure that your Win 95 machine running on a 386/20 with 8mb does not run very responsively. Obviously, a 386/20 with 8mb of RAM is below the sys requirements that MSFT released for Win 95, and the same thing can be done for Mac OS X. You CAN run Mac OS X on your 300mhz/604 it's just not recommended or supported. If you called up Microsoft complaining about Windows 95 running on your 386/20 do you think they'd care? No because it was below the min. system requirements.
Thanks for your time.
I'd be interested in knowing how Apple started to work on Pink in 1986. Wasn't Pink the superstud OS response to superstud PowerPC CHRP?
If you disagree then it must be overrated, redundant or trolling.
Is this the same guy who did all that great Atari ST stuff back in the day? The name sounds very familar.
What makes you think geeks don't go out drinking on Friday night?
The revolution will NOT be televised.
There is another Mac Emulator for Linux besides Basilisk.. There is Executor at http://www.ardi.com It is not so much a Mac Emulator as a MacOS Emulator, and has the benefit of not requiring an illegal image of a set of Mac ROMS to operate. Nor does it require a copy of MacOS. There is also the Mac on Linux project: http://www.maconlinux.org And I believe vMac also runs on Linux: http://www.vmac.org Regards, Al Hartman (Macintosh Emulation List Host) http://www.topica.com/lists/MacEmuList My Homepage http://www.geocities.com/alhartman Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life. - William Blake
Now that's what I call an 'x86 virtual machine'!
:)
Dude, that beats the hell out of a DOS box.
I need to try VMWare again, now that I have 128MB of RAM and a lot more HD space; if it supports my DVD drive, (as I've heard people say it might) I might get to reclaim 2GB of former Windows partitioning, and burn that worthless FAT.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
> You do of course know that "G3" is a subset of
> "PowerPC"
> The second and third sentences of your post, taken
> together, make no sense.
This is just idiom getting in the way of understanding.
There were two distinct PowerPC models before the G3, but they weren't actually called "G1" and "G2". The G3 was a big improvement on the previous models, so Mac users just called CPU's "G3" and "PowerPC" (read, "plain PowerPC") to distinguish whether you had a much-faster G3 or not.
*sigh* Another crappy OS from Microsoft. C'mon, who's really surprised?
A friend of mine has installed ME recently (morbid fascination, I guess), and among the multitude of bugs he's encountered is a problem with the MOUSE CURSOR algorythms. If you move the cursor left and right very quickly, it starts to go up and down! You'd think they'd figured out that crap by now...
Also pretty humerous was the ZDTV on-air attempt at installing the OS. One wanted to install from scratch, the other was upgrading. Neither one could accomplish the task. Yeesh.
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Ok, even if he was trying to emulate MacOS and not the PowerPC archetecture in general, and even if it was MacOS X and not Darwin (the kernel...no more) that booted on x86 you'd still have the problem of getting a PowerPC binary to run on Intel hardware. Which is what he did.
never before have i read a more well-written, thought-out letter that does nothing more than bitch, moan and whine about basically everything and everyone in the computer industry.
:)
apple, for taking time to perfect a next generation OS, as well as making that next generation OS unsupported on 10 year-old macs. i'll admit this is something that goes against apple's tradition of computers that ran for years past their realistic limits, but it's a step that needs taking - supporting mac my IIci as well as my G3 on the same OS is not something the new Apple can afford to do. after all, and i keep saying this, Apple is a hardware company. let me repeat: Apple is a hardware company. if intel wrote OSes, do you think IntelOS2000 would run on anything less than a P3? widgets, people..
and another thing, he mentions mac OS 7.5 - which is almost entirely 68k code. the reason the newer mac OSes don't run on your 68k macs of 10 years ago is because Apple had the balls back then to switch their entire line from CISC 68k to RISC powerPC and migrate their OS to all powerPC native code - which he still can't emulate, even now.
microsoft, for writing a buggy OS that breaks his assembly-level hacks. pick your battles, my friend.
and how the bloody fuck do you get NT to run on a 386 with 20 megs of RAM? maybe you consider booting (in about a day and a half) then dropping to debugger/BSOD "running" but i doubt any NT app will run usefully under such conditions. all this really tells us is how similar the new PC hardware is to the old PC hardware - golly, when they say X86, they really mean X86, huh...
Intel, for releasing, then recalling their buggy P4s, and generally being slower than AMD. again, pick your battles. and again, for being behind schedule on their next generation processors - itanium/ia64 or whatever. if Intel had hit every announced date on their roadmap, we wouldn't be having this discussion
it's a good thing this guy doesn't write emulators that run PC software on Macs, or else he'd have firebombed Motorola by now.
and AMD, for being a niche player and not having the production facilities to pump out as many gigahertz athlons as Intel can P3s.
let's see, who else does he mention? oh. his customers and even worse, potential customers for not sharing his vision.
oh well. i'll stick to virtual PC on my G3 - connectix doesn't bitch when microsoft releases a new OS, it just runs - and WINE on my linux box, which i can run in emulation under virtual PC if i feel like it
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
I can make a web browser with just ONE LINE of code....
/usr/local/netscape/netscape &
- Complete with navigation buttons, scroll bars, the works!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
that domain-specific expertise isn't necessarily fungible to other domains.
--- only for the squeamish
> but it seems like it ought to be possible to get at
... those forms are called "older versions of Mac OS".
> least some form of it running on these
> "slightly older" machines
Some form of Mac OS X can already run on every Mac in existence
Today's machines can handle a great GUI and a great kernel. On yesterday's machines, you have to sacrifice the great GUI (older BSD boxes) or the great kernel (older Mac boxes) and just use what you got. Still, the BSD user with older hardware can run Apache like a champ without missing the GUI, and the Mac user with older hardware can run Photoshop like a champ, without really missing preemptive multitasking. Newer machines can do both, and Mac OS X is an example of that, so it requires a G3/200 or whatever. That's an oversimplification, but I hope you get what I mean.
If somebody gets Darwin up and running on an older Mac, then they could probably hack together a Mac OS X install on it as well. Might be lots of work, though, considering how fast and cheap new machines are, and how well many old Macs work, even with their older Mac OS, or running BSD if you want that, instead. It might be time better spent getting drivers together for new peripherals.
One minor recommendation - if you have the cash, go with a dual processor system for VMWare. While my machine is a dual PII system, what I did was install VMWare on the machine, reconfiged NT real quick for one processor (which is a pain) and installed a 'default' NT setup. NT only checks for multiple processors when you initally install it - anything after that requires some hacking around to make work. Then, after creating the default NT install, I put the 2nd processor back in, and reconfigured the machine again. Why go through so much of a pain? Well, if one of the NT sessions happens to be compiling something or any other really CPU intensive operations, it can still only take over one CPU completely, which means you never notice preformance degredation on the rest of your system :-)
It works fine without dual proccessors, but, it just makes it that much cooler.
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
Brillant wizards don't rant about something bad; they do something about it. period.
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
mac os based on minix? (blink)
no, the original mac OS was a graphical system, could actually network, and was not the pet project of a computer science professor looking to teach his students how to write an OS in one semester.
tho there is a version of minix that will run on old toaster macs, called macminix. try it some time. the experience is somewhat surreal.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
I don't remember him ever bitching that MSFT's and Apple's actions are bad because they make emulation difficult. On the contrary, he's already got a working prototype of the thing, which has been demoed at several shows already.
The point (I believe) was that those actions are bad because they constitute a hardware upgrade treadmill that breaks compatibility and limits choice.
His mentioning the fact that you can't emulate a 1GHz OS on a 500MHz Celeron is merely emphasizing the fact that OSs which require herculean hardware are going to have a very limited market share... for both native installations and for emulation. Not wanting to jump on that bandwagon of limited market share sounds like good business sense to me.
Of course, one could argue that the lemmings will continue to chase the light at the end of the treadmill -- as they have done in the past with horrifying reliability -- and that there will be significant market share... at least for the OS manufacturers. But in terms of "business sense", I'd go for the open-ended, backward compatible market, and take advantage of all that legacy hardware -- whose owners can probably afford to purchase an OS upgrade (or emulation software) a lot more easily than a whole new high-end system.
Personally, I'd like to know why these two huge companies (with greater resources than a lot of smaller countries) can't make an OS that solves these "problems" without requiring a hardware platform that costs more than any car I've ever owned!
Hell, Linux can do it...
I need an aspirin...
--jrd
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Then another part of his confused rant was about the software & hardware industries. He is sick of products being late! Well, for whatever reason this guy seems to think that he is alone. And then once the software is available the hardware requirements are outrageous. Once again, this guys seems to think that the is the only that notices this and cares. I guess he is upset people are not willingly to write everything in assembler so that they can throw away portability and embrace of tight hardware manipulation. I just obviously do not see the light, feel free enlighten me.
On anoter front, I've been saying Microsoft has been holding this industry back for years with their crappy technology. News that Windows ME doens't work correctly doesn't surprise me in the least. Maybe dude here is just more optimistic.
You know what this article reads like? It reads like a "We missed all our deadlines and it's everyone else's fault" whine. Personally I start the "They're (the suppliers we depend on) are going to be late" thing early. I've never seen one hit deadlines. Expecting any of Microsoft, AMD, Apple or Intel to hit their deadlines is unrealistic. Expecting them ALL to hit their deadlines is just plain silly.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm no assembly wizard, so I don't know if it's reasonable to expect OS X native (especially if they're actually using AltiVec) apps to run at near-native speeds while being emulated on another platform. It seems like you'd suffer a significant slow down just from the emulation, not to mention the lack of the 128 bit goodness of AltiVec.
So why are your customers trying to emulate an application that is OS X only? (They must be, why else run an OS X emulator?) It must be because it's actually an important function within their organization. If that's the case, why pay somebody to sit around watching a progress bar? If you can run even 50% faster by running on a Mac you can save a ton of time, and time is money, by just buying a Mac.
I recently pondered upgrading from my 604e to a shiny new G4. I began considering things like what I use my computer for, how much I get paid to do it, and the kind of performance increase I hoped to get with the new machine. It's hard to know for sure in advance, but it looks like the new machine would pay for itself inside a couple months. It seems like similar considerations would indicate that trying to emulate a G4 running OS X is a waste of money, since the lost time will add up month after month after month. In the long run, no emulation is very cost effective. That is, if you're actually emulating something that's neccessary to your job function, and doing so on a regular basis. (But I say this without having shelled out any money for emulators. Maybe for some minor tasks it pays off, but what minor task can only be accomplished by emulating OS X?)
So I agree with Mr. Wizard that emulating OS X is a lost cause in terms of making him any money. Maybe next year.
This public beta will help all those small developers who haven't had a chance or can't afford to get seeded copies of OS X an opportunity to port their apps and utilities over.
If Apple were smart, they would supply AppleWorks 6 to people who buy OS X because the more people that have to boot classic because they need to use old versions of Word or AppleWorks, the more problems there will be. Also, as soon as Office works well under Carbon along with IE and OE, having to boot into classic will be a thing of the past for many people. Apple needs to work on Adobe, Macromedia, Quark et. al, because as many people have said before, graphics users will stick to OS 9 if they have to boot into classic anyway.
remy
http://www.mklinux.org
http://www.dartmouth.edu
Apple was at Carnegie Mellon this week to recruit. They extensively demoed OS X, particularly the developer environment. I watched an engineer build a web browser in 15 lines of code.
The new toolkit is amazing-it has solid, fast code for tons of stuff, from linked lists and hashes to parsing HTML. Objective C is amazing. It comes with an amazing front end onto gcc/gdb, a terminal that allows drag and drop, and you can even boot into a console if you login as >console
My point? It's not just BSD+ a GUI; it actually is something revolutionary. And it also runs with very few problems, even in beta, classic software well. Apple Engineering has developed rigorous standards for their code-their goal is that everything execute as efficiently as possible.
So before you start complaining about it, check it out. I think it's will be the most stable, full-featured, easy-to-program OS ever.
The guy who wrote the article is talking out of his ass. Like Colonel Klink from Hogan's Hero, he "knowz abzolutely nuttzing."
It is unforgivable that you are not aware it is Sergeant Schultz, not Colonel Klink, who knows "abzolutely nuttzing."
To keep in tone with a few of the other more rabid comments I've read under this article, I shall now assert, (don't take it personally, I don't really mean any of it, it just seems to be de rigueur here)(what's with you Mac guys anyway? you don't see Linux people getting all fanatical like that over little technical details) that this lapse proves you have no right to post anymore anywhere, to speak publicly, to procreate with those idiot's genes of yours, even to breathe the valuable air any more, etc., etc.
Have a nice day!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
the gist of the article is "we got screwed by our vendors promises' that didn't pan out." Hahahahaha! Welcome to corporate computing!
What it sounds like is sour grapes, and a power-user betrayed syndrome. MacOSX? Who cares? If you make $XXX/hr w/photoshop on a dual g4, no way you're gonna move to OSX unless there's a compelling reason. Duh. Likewise all those users 'left behind': who cares? Home users don't buy software, they steal it. And they don't do much anyway. A little AOL, a little napster, a little AIM, maybe a stolen copy of word/excel, maybe print shop deluxe. Only hardware and AOL makes money of that segment.
And it's not like a box is useless because it can't run the latest and greatest. It's ironic that the dude doesn't understand that; after all, he makes emulators for defunct OS's. Photoshop 2.0 can edit just as well as photoshop 5.0, unless you want the hairy stuff. Heck, I personally run Word for Windows 2.0, because Word 2000/1997/whatever suck.
Don't listen to the marketing hype! don't listen to the beautiful songs of the marketeers! Listen to what you need to do.
--- only for the squeamish
I would personally like to see a mac emulator for linux, I have fond memories of older Mac software from many years ago, much of it share/freeware that I really enjoyed playing around with. And there was one program in particular I'd like to play with in emulation. There was this program that basically made the energizer bunny run across your screen, neat by itself but if it was installed on multiple machines on an appletalk network it would run from machine to machine. This was both funny as hell and annoying. Funny if you were on the "master" computer that could trigger it, annoying if you were trying to use the other computers, really annoying if you happened to be the monitor of a computer lab that had this installed, and embarassingly annoying if you were the lab monitor and the one who installed it. What I would love to do would be to run several copies of MacOS whatever (7.x i think) on the same PC, setup a virtual appletalk network for them and trigger the bunny. Scary that this is the first thing I thought of when I saw "Apple" and "emulator" together.
Hmm I wonder how well this would run under VMWare, or maybe with WINE
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
You mean Rip Van Winkle...sorry.
This nonsense about "my computer is better than your computer" that raged through the 80's and still lives on today is just counter productive and wasteful.
Uhh.. right! Where does this guy think we'd be without competition? If I just stood by while all my friends got more and more powerful computers, I wouldn't be able to keep up with them. I think this guy needs to get his head out of his ass!
Mocks Apple for finally offering proper multitasking/memory protection in OSX...then in the very next sentence bitches how easy it is to lock up a MacOS9 system. Well DUH!
Bitches at the delays, recalls, and limited availability of 1GHz processors. Hello? Since when was the hardware industry obligated to perform to your every whim? This is bleeding-edge stuff...have you considered the simple possibility that it's just not ready for prime time yet? No...he wants it NOW, and has to throw a tantrum when they can't deliver.
I could go on, but it's just inane and tiring. Maybe this guy can program with the best, but he can't put up a coherent argument about anything. Sounds like he just woke up in a bad mood one day and decided to rant at the whole world.
does this guy even use the operating system he's trying to emulate?
if he did he'd realize there's no validity to his claim that OSX won't run older software. if it runs under OS9, it'll run in classic. and, if i'm not mistaken - and i'm not - the one piece of code that gets used more often than any other, and optimized more often as well, is the 68k emulator written into the OS in the days of system 7 (.5 i think). why? well, as i've said before, the OS in those days was entirely 68k code, and as powerPC architecture was introduced, bits and pieces were recompiled as PPC native, but not all of it.
and none of the software was. hence, the system-level software emulation of 68k on PPC. and, by golly, it's still there in OS9 - and hence classic.
there's nothing like building in backward compatibility that's backwardly compatible.
who's this guy's potential customer base again? those wanting to run 68 mac apps? let them buy a new mac.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
I'm getting really sick of all this moaning about Apple charging for OS X Public Beta. It's good to have your principles, but keep a sense of scale will you? Apple have been trying for 10 years to replace MacOS with something a little bit more modern. 10 years! Now they have something that really works. And you begrudge them a few lousy quid because - oh yes - they're all capitalist bastards... 8-)
So please, please shut up. This is a momentous moment in computing, which isn't remarkably cheap all things considered. Ok - we thought we'd have 3D working environments by now, but as the classic 2D interface paradigm goes, this is the pinnacle of its development. The best operating system in the world today and then some. It's worth the cash...
What I find more of a nerve is that Linux vendors can charge almost the same amount of money without adding any significant level of code to what is supposed to be a free product. And if we want to use MacOS X as a measure of Beta status, then please tell me when Linux reaches pre-Alpha and I'll be happy to fork out that cash.
With MacOS X, I also don't have to wait 6 weeks for them even to ship my CD to me, have my e-mails completely ignored, and get no apology, like I did with Linux PPC Inc... (just thought I'd slip that in because I'm still pissed off with that useless organisation). Apple - and I was a little wary because they don't have a great reputation for customer service - shipped it in just 2 days. That makes me very happy.
Clebin
Personally, I'd like to know why these two huge companies (with greater resources than a lot of smaller countries) can't make an OS that solves these "problems" without requiring a hardware platform that costs more than any car I've ever owned!
This article is the stupidest thing I have seen posted on Slashodot. The fact of the matter is that as long as Moore's law is in operation people buying new computers are going to get faster machines than what was available a year ago. Software vendors are in a very competitive marketplace, so they HAVE to take advantage of the power of these machines to compete - otherwise their rivals are going to run them out of business by offering more features. This is ESPECIALLY critical in the gaming industry. The software industry is FULL of stories of bankrupt companies driven out of the market because they fell behind. If the new software doesn't run so well on old hardware, well the fact of the matter is that there is no magic out there.
Most consumers buy the software they need when they buy thier computer, and DON'T EVER upgrade their OS. The real market for Apple and Microsoft for the new OS's is with people buying new systems. And the crap in this article about two year old machines not being able to run Mac OS X is utter bullshit. Mac OS X runs just fine on an iMac or a beige G3. It MAY even run on any PCI Mac with an CPU upgrade, however I haven't investigated this yet - that would make it available to anyone with a machine bought in the past 6 years.
All this yapping is B.S. - if you have an old computer USE THE SOFTWARE THAT WAS WRITTEN FOR IT! THat old software will run fine on the hardware it was designed for.
Even Linux as it is today has a hard time running on older hardware - someone running Gnome on 486 with 32 MB of RAM is going to have severe problems. And that old story about running a Linux on a 486 in a closet for your gateway DOESN'T work if you are using Fast Ethernet.
The fact of the matter is this guy is an idiot - he has had his business hurt because he has a business model that is very vulnerable to the rapid changes that occur in the computer market, and is trying to create the impression that it's not his fault, but rather someone else's fault. But it just ain't so.
Pink was originally the superstud OOOS to respond to NeXT.
Later on it got transformed into a superstud universal microkernel that would run OS/2 and MacOS 'personalities' on PPC hardware. Apple dumped the idea, but IBM shipped some betas of OS/2 for PPC.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
with your Whine?
Give me a break. This was pure rant/FUD/BS. Go back in you hole and emulate that.
The point (I believe) was that those actions are bad because they constitute a hardware upgrade treadmill that breaks compatibility and limits choice.
MacOS is a better product than it would have been had backwards compatibility been more rigorously maintained. Repeat as needed.
Anyway, good old code still runs. I have games (traditionally the easiest-broken apps) for Mac written in *'84* that work just fine on my G4.
His mentioning the fact that you can't emulate a 1GHz OS on a 500MHz Celeron
"1GHz OS"?
Apple and MSFT have specifically rewritten their new Operating Systems to target the problems that have been leveled at them in the past (multitasking in Apple's case, instability in MSFT's case) and did not and should not have considered whether the improvements to their Operating Systems suddenly make emulation software more difficult to write
So, improving one's own software is a Bad Thing(TM) now, just because some whiny third party developer doesn't like the added complexity of the changes? He *wants* MacOS to have bad multitasking and Windows to be unstable, just because it's harder to emulate a properly-multitasking or stable OS than a highly modal or buggy one? That's absolutely ridiculous.
Personally, I'd like to know why these two huge companies (with greater resources than a lot of smaller countries) can't make an OS that solves these "problems" without requiring a hardware platform that costs more than any car I've ever owned!
I can make this claim too, but only because I've never owned a car. No home computer EVER made by Apple (barring upgrades to ridiculous amounts of RAM or whatever) has at any time had MSRP > 10k US ($9,995 for the Apple III, IIRC), and I know of no case in which the top-of-the-line box from Apple was ever required to run the latest OS from Apple. The VAST majority of Macs in history (at least, ever since I can remember getting prices quoted in ads) have been under $4k Cdn, about $2700 US nowadays. I suppose you only buy used cars?
Zahlman Q. Namlhaz, esq. {:> "Zahl Incorporated - the Last Word in Everything(TM)"
And how much does 256 MB of RAM _cost_ today? Someone needs to wake Rumpelstiltskin.
The (poorly researched and written) diatribe railing about the difficulty of emulating PowerPC instructions on Pentium class machines is just somebody's wake up call that hardware emulation only works as long as the processors are in equivalent classes. (Well, a duh....)
:-) I don't even think much of his assessment of M$ and Intel either (granted Intel's having teething pains with Itanium.)
The G4 is not in the same class as the Pentium. AltiVec adds a vector processor. That means that while emulation is possible, it will run orders of magnitude more slowly. It runs orders of magnitude more slowly on G3s that don't have AltiVec either.
As for his rants on OS X... Yo! What does this have to do with hardware emulation? He's raggin' on the BSD Unix foundation (Sic 'em boys!
The introduction of the PowerPC saw the dissemination of hardware emulation so that the OS could be ported from the M68k architecture PDQ.
The PowerPC version of the OS is now entirely separately compiled binaries thanks to some fancy compiler writing by the people at MetroWorks.
(Fat apps carry M68k forks and PPC forks, same API, entirely different code for entirely different platforms.)
Give this kid's term paper a C-
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
"Oh My GOD, it seems Apple has made their latest OS version SIMD-optimized for their AltiVec instruction set! We can't possibly emulate that! Our software will be way too slow to run Mac OS X! Quick, guys, let's figure out a way to save our asses and blame someone for this!"
I mean come on, this guy is bashing Apple for not supporting the 680x0 platforms until end of time, stopping the cloning, charging for beta software, and having this beta software available only for high-end Macs.
Well, the simple truth is that unlike Emulators, Inc, when other companies encounter trouble, they do something about it instead of writing rants. Apple has made upgrading to their current line of computers as desirable as possible. They look better, are a lot faster, and with Mac OS X, operate better than earlier Macs -- and people are lining up to get them.
The alternate history scenario with cloning, Mac OS 8 and beige 604e boxes would have killed Apple in no time (remember when people were counting the days?). But I guess that would've been magnificient for the Mac emulation business!
Marko Karppinen
Apple has been working on a next-generation OS of some sort for TEN YEARS. That's right, ten. Early on, there was Pink/Taligent, then Copland, then Rhapsody, then OS X...
It also pisses me off that my iMac (one of the originals) won't be able to run OS X in any reasonable way. I'm a comp sci student. I can't afford to go out and buy a new G4. If I can't run OS X, I can't develop for it, or learn to develop for it. Apple has probably just lost a developer here...
Finally, the fact that Macs have been stuck at 500 MHz for a year is just pathetic. I know it's Motorola's fault, but still...
On the other hand, my iMac will work for Linux (or maybe even that PPC OpenBSD port that's underway). Hmm.....
I'm sure Apple has its reasons for making the requirements of OS X so high. I think they made the wrong trade-offs. I would much rather have an OS that runs and is stable, than one that does nifty genie effects when I click the pretty buttons.
Then they also cut off about 50 million users in one fell swoop by releasing Mac OS 8, no, not the Rhapsody/X Mac OS 8, but the "Mac OS 7.7 renumbered to 8.0" Mac OS 8.0. In that step, they raised hardware requirements steeply, cutting off all 68000 68020 and 68030 based machines, and even some 68040 machines. Basically, if you bought a machine before about 1995, you were out of luck. Either upgrade or become obsolete! Microsoft and Apple stopped supporting the older machines, as did other major software vendors. You want to run the latest Photoshop? Throw away your $5000 Quadra 950 and buy a $5000 Power Mac was the attitude.
Apple didn't cut off anybody. Like Windows 95/98/ME, Mac OS is largely compatible through previous generations. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you could get most off-the-shelf apps today to run under virtually any flavor of OS 7. Besides, the changes in OS 8 were mostly cosmetic and slowed down older computers; System 7.5.5 was incredibly stable and still serves many Mac users just as well.
The beauty of PCs, and why I feel Windows ultimately won out over Mac OS in the mass market despite sleazy underhanded marketing by both Apple and Microsoft, is that PCs don't go obsolete every 2 years! Any given PC can run a wide range of DOS and Windows releases. And similarly a given OS runs on a large variety of machines. Windows 95 runs on the slowest 386 (a 14 year old computer now!) to the fastest AMD Athlon. DOS, good old MS-DOS, has run on every PC over the past 20 years. This great backward compatibility is what has made PCs the standard computer.
Excuse me for a moment...
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...(wipes tears from eyes)
Whew. Ok, I'm back. Um, remind me again exactly how many MAJOR computer companies have as their target market folk who upgrade their systems every 14 years? Are these people on anyone's radar screen?
Besides, you fail to appreciate two very salient points: 1) This is only a BETA; repeat after me, MAC OS X HAS NOT SHIPPED YET, and 2) Last I saw, Mac OS 9 was still available in retail outlets. In fact, Apple is reportedly prepping an OS 9.5 release for early next year to sell ALONGSIDE the OS X release, much the same way that MS sells WinME alongside Win2K, for people who aren't ready to upgrade.
Once you install Mac OS X, say goodbye to backward compatibility. Only Mac OS 9 is supported in emulation, (or "Classic" mode as they call it) and so Mac OS 8.6 and earlier are history as far as Apple is concerned.
Why do you care about OS 8.6 emulation? Since OS 9 shares it's codebase with OS 8.6, OS 9 will run most Mac apps fine, just like WinME runs most Win98 apps just fine.
Besides, if you've got an atomic wedgie because OS 9 won't run your app, why in the world are you thinking about upgrading to OS X?
What is really troublesome, however, are the many misstatements. First and foremost, no one has to use download OS X . The only people who will do this are the developers, the people who actually want to beta test, and those stupid people mentioned in the rant. When it does ship, Apple is going to try to make it fit in 64MB, just like OS 9. I don't necessarily believe them, but I have not seen a operating system from Apple or MS in the last few years that runs well on less than 128 MB. If someone wants OS X right now, then there is going to be a price to pay. It always cost more to be the first, and only the truly pathetic whine about it.
Second is the total lack of understanding, dare I say ignorance, of the differences in the business models between Microsoft and Apple. I suspect that these differences have something to do with the fact that Apple has generally sold total solutions, while Microsoft has only sold individual components. In any case, Apple has generally been happy to orphan some systems, while Microsoft has generally tried to provide some sense of backward compatability. It is clearly in Microsoft's best interest to provide backward compatibility as they only make money if they sell the operating system. It is easier to sell a new operating system if it runs the legacy applications. Likewise, it is in Microsoft's best interest to write applications, and to get others to write applications, that run only on the latest operating system. Again, users will be forced to upgrade to the new OS if they want to use the new applications. And, as has been established, it is in Microsoft's best interest to promote emulators, so that they can increase the sales of the operating system.
Conversely, Apple just wants to sell new machines. If a customer does not want to buy a new machine, that is fine. They can run the old software. The old software, say system 7.5 with that beautiful version of MS Word, or MacWrite from the early 90's, is generally going to be stable enough. Apple got their money, and they do not do free support for ancient machines. I myself have a 16 MHz Performa that still functions for writing and email. However, if the user wants the latest and greatest thing, they are going to have to upgrade to a new machine every few years. It is no different in the Windows world. I don't know many people who people who use a Intel machine for more than a few years. The only difference is that Apple does not need to create the illusion that such a thing is possible. Apple orphaned the Apple //, the 68K Macs, and now the original PPC's. It's not such a big deal. I don't see anyone running 100 MHz Pentiums. Sure, they could if they wanted to. But, as I said, I still run a 16 MHz 68040. On the other hand, Apple does make an effort to encourage applications that will run a wide variety of Apples. There is a lot of software out there that only requires a fast 68K, or at wost a PPC, and System 7.5. One of the most notable exceptions is MS Office. Finally, it may not be in Apples best interest to have emulators for their OS. No machine sales mean less profit.
So, there are no fundamental problems with the business model of MS or Apple. Most of the problems with the competitors of MS can be traced to the now judged, although waiting for appeal, illegal activities of MS. I do agree that there is little difference between desktop computers. I have been saying that for years. Give me a computer, give me a compiler and I will figure out how to write a program. The differences are not al that great. But just because there are no fundamental technological differences between desktop computers, does not mean that there are not fundamental business differences.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black