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NeXT Lives -- In Apple
mikey writes: "vnunnet.com has an
interesting article about Steve Jobs; his love for cubes, a bit of a history behind NeXT, why it failed, also why it was so way ahead of its time, also some Bill Gates stuff. All in all, a great piece, and to give Slashdot readers some insight into what was NeXT, and how now it has basically taken over Apple."
Seems to me you're more concerned about whether you can make a fast buck than anything else. Ever considered working for a living?
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
A lot of folks seem to have very rosy memories of the NeXT cube. I'll be the first to admit that software-wise, it was cool. The hardware, on the other hand, was not ``years ahead of its time.''
My educational institution got some of the first cubes out. They came with
I'll admit to having coveted the development environment. But I've never wished I owned that hardware.
Because they did for the imac. OK, maybe not the keyboard but close enough
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
The truth is that it wasn't anything to do with the specs for the G3. BeOS was able to run on G3's. It's the controller chips that Apple refused to release the specs for. And before anybody screams "well Linux got the specs" remember that only came about because Linux is not a commercial competitor to Apple (which Be are) and because linux does not run a Mac better than MacOS (sorry, but it's true) which BeOS does. Those people who are hoping that OSX will be available for x86 if Apple move over from Motorola would be wise to remember this. If Apple do start using x86 chips they'll introduce a hardware embedded component which means you will only be able to run it on an Apple machine. Why? Because Apple are a hardware company, first and foremost.
I have a three button Mac mouse, and the other two buttons are not useful at all. One gives you contextual menus without holding down CONTROL and the other allows you to create group selection boxes. There's just no point to three buttons when the whole system only requires on for everything.
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
Why does my NetBSD Macintosh hardware (an SE/30, a Quadra 800, a IIci) not boot directly into NetBSD, even now in the year 2001? It has to boot MacOS and there's a bootloader to get NetBSD running. Because Apple still maintains the booting of Mac hardware as a closely held trade secret.
Anybody who claims that Apple has 'opened' their hardware is a very, very sick comedian.
Hay thar.
As I recall hearing, IBM was set to use NeXT as its OS. A multi-million dollar deal was set up and agreed upon. A meeting was arranged between Jobs and an array of senior IBM executives to sign the contracts. As our Stevie was at the airport desk picking up his ticket, he suddenly changed his mind and went home, without even informing IBM. But then again he's never been noted for his manners.
Asside from cubes all NeXTs had floppy drives. In fact most cubes came with external SCSI floppy drives as well, but since they had magneto optical drives no one used them (that is until the MO drive failed in the 1st year).
--- I do not moderate.
Stop all of this bullshit - BeOS was on PowerPC for one big reason - Gasse thought he could sell the company to Apple. (Think about it - would any company that really wanted to be in the OS business target Macs as their sole platform?
Go read the history of Be, please. It started running on Hobbit processors in the BeBox. From there, a small stone's throw to PPC, because at the time, the hardware platform for PPC was relatively open for all. After a while, Apple upgraded to G3 and closed down the specs, cutting Be off. They moved to x86 and never looked back.
There's no use holding a grudge against Apple for not buying your precious OS, because you can still go and run it on a nice Ghz Intel box.
Who the hell is holding a grudge? My entire point for posting was to point out how much better off I think Be is for the future, compared to Apple.
"And like that
> yes Apple has just now started shipping faster
... the PPC 7410 in the PowerBook G4 only uses 7 watts, and it gives desktop performance. The machines that preceded it were also faster than their competition, and had five hours battery life also (10 hours with both battery bays filled).
> mobile processors. How long until they are way
> behind again?
Have you ever shopped for a notebook?
Apple has always had the fastest notebooks and the longest-battery life. Intel cripples their 40 watt chips to make slow 15 watt chips that run at half speed on batteries, AMD doesn't have a mobile offering, and Transmeta is having a troubled time of it, to say the least. All that work that Transmeta has done with emulation and code morphing is solely to create an x86 chip that uses 3-5 watts
On the iBook side, try and find another notebook with six hour battery life and a $1499 price tag (including office suite, FireWire, movie editing software, and DVD drive).
> I believe that platform has been at 500Mhz for the
> entire year of 2000.
The G4 chip was stuck at 500MHz, but in mid-2000, Apple started to put two in each machine. A dual 500MHz Mac is as fast as a 1GHz PC for most tasks, and much faster for some tasks, like encoding video.
You seem to think making an OS is simply to throw together various parts like "smalltalk and other systems" and - presto! - it's there. In reality, OSes are unusually difficult to create.
When they say NeXT was second to none, they mean it was second to no other OS. OTOH, you're comparing it against a hypothetical OS that *could* have been built from various parts, each of which was supercool. No such OS, of course, existed in the real world.
It doesn't make sense to pick the best of the bunch and say that it isn't as good as something that could have existed....
Give credit where it's due. NeXT was a brilliant system that failed due to business and marketing reasons.
Apple stole idea from Xerox, and put their own twist on it. MS did the same from Apple.
I'm amazed that this still comes up in every Apple thread. Get it straight: Apple licensed technologies from Xerox. As in "paid for."
the rest of your post is crap(you have no idea what the margins on the TiBook are, Apple doesn't make the PPC so the lack of a speed increase wasn't their fault), as is this part, but I take special issue with it anyway:
BTW, the 15.2" screen is measured diagonally. I don't care if it's wide or tall, 15.2" is bigger than 15", which is bigger than most laptop screens
OK, do you understand the concept of area? It is from like 4th grade math. On a laptop screen, height x width = area. area is the total amount of screen real estate you have, and is therefore the most important thing.
Now a 4:3 ratio(width:height), with a 15" screen, would mean the screen is 12 inches wide and 9 inches tall. That means the total area is 12x9=108 square inches
Now a 3:2 ratio with a 15.2" screen would mean the screen is 12.65" wide and 8.43" tall. That means the total area is 106.6 square inches, or smaller than a normal 15" screen. So no, it really shouldn't be signficantly(if at all) more expensive.
I've been a NeXT developer for over ten years. I've seen it /all/ -- the (for the time) mind-blowing hardware, the bad business decisions, the wrong turns and the beautiful, beautiful devleopment environment and OO frameworks. What a ride!
While some of the spirit of NeXT - an elitist, snobby, extremely weird and secretive company for rock star coders and Jobs cultists - lives on to a degree today at Apple, most of the really central people have either retired or scattered to the wind (Bud Tribble, William Parkhurst, Keith Ohlfs). Avie is still around, of course, but he and guys like Bertrand Serlet are really the last of the old guard. NeXT always had top-shelf engineers, though.
In truth, what really killed NeXT was Java. Although the Java 2 class libraries available today that have comparable peers in the NeXT Foundation/WebObjects/Enterprise Objects and AppKit frameworks are almost universally inferior to what Apple is going to ship as the "Cocoa" development environment on Mac OSX, Apple has largely squandered the promise of Cocoa already because it has sat on this rich legacy from NeXT while Java slowly took over the world of enterprise software development. Today, the few people who can be arsed to learn Objective-C don't even bother to put it on a resume. Very sad, but Apple's marketing team just never had the balls to fight Sun. As far as writing Cocoa apps in Java - why bother? Might as well write pure Java apps. Therein dies the last of NeXT.
All that said, I really miss the company. NeXT made some of the most exciting computer products ever released. That it was a dysfunctional organization and a money-losing operation is ultimately beside the point. I find it very sad that companies that made truly amazing machines, and tried to do extraordinary things (ie NeXT, SGI) were severely punished for it and gray box makers without a single idea in their heads (Dell, Microsoft) thrived. Oh well, that's the "genius of the market" for you.
In the end, I like to think of the company as a success anyway. NeXT computers will be in glass cases in museums a hundred years from now and people will still ooh and ahh at them. And if someone turns one on, bet your last nickel that the little matte black magnesium monolith will find some way to boot and run.
Say what you will about Steve Jobs and NeXT, but you won't see their like again in your lifetime.
Nightspore
I respect Apple's works but IMHO you're a bit overenthusiastic here.
Yes, the G4/G4+ has a small die size, but the die size is only one part of the equation.
Yelds is quite important too, and I believe that Motorola has quite some problems with its yelds.
And producing small volumes (compared with 80x86) doesn't help either for having a good price.
I agree that the 500 MHz PPC is fast but I disagree when you say that the clock was "artificially" increased to 1 GHz: Apple fans should really use a good benchmarck and compare SpecInt/SpecFP instead of PhotoShop..
Anyway, the G4 low power is really, really nice for laptop, it is a pity though that the G4+ has such a bigger power consumption: it won't be as good as the G4 for the desktop.
...more often than Shaft smacks hoes.
I've just got to figure out a way to work that phrase into my daily vocabulary. What a visual!
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
> Titanium is expensive.
Sorry, time for me to move on to a new thread with an Apple antagonist who has a clue.
That's true. When they announced "wide" screen, I was hoping for the HDTV-standard 16:9 (1.78:1), but instead we get a non-standard 3:2 (1.5:1) display. Oh well, it's not really that important for a computer display, I guess. As long as the DVD player software knows how to make maximum use of it, it's no big deal.
Free Hans!
It was a breakthrough in one important area: it made Unix easy to use. More specifically, it was a Unix system easy enough for one's grandmother could use. This isn't a "breakthrough" in the traditional operating systems sense, but it's something no other Unix system had done before. And other than OS X, and no Unix (or Unix-like) OS has done it since. Including Linux.
In the early '90s, after the NeXT cube came out, I started using Solaris, which Sun claimed they were going to sell to the masses. Compared to NeXTStep, it was pathetic. You couldn't even access a floppy disk without using obscure shell commands and/or su'ing to root. Linux today is better, but compared to NeXTStep it's still more of a challenge than it should be: there's still too much resorting to the shell and the editing of configuration files.
The reason that Be is no longer developing for PPC has nothing to do with closed hardware (G4/G4)...
If Be needed the specs, they just could take info from LinuxPPC, MkLinux (a weird os that made Mach handle Linux kernel API calls), or recently they just could get info based on Darwin (or any Opensource OS for PPC out there).
Be didint wanted to develop for the mac anymore because they had investments from intel, and because they didnt want it to be second to the mac os in a plataform were the principal reason to buy a hardwere that is a little more expensive is the OS.
The other reason is because now that Steve Jobs is calling the shots, his Job would be far more dificult than in the Amelio era, so was better to leave the PPC.
Jean Lui Gasee left Apple to found his own company, knowing that some day Apple would come to him (because they would need to repleace the aging MacOS) and beg for help
He was right... Apple did come, but he was stupid... he ask for to much (he tought he was the only choice, and didn't try to impress them)
He was wrong, because he wasnt the only choice, and the other guy realy impress Apple, (he was Steve Jobs, and he can convince anybody of anything he wants).
Not that Apple made a bad choice... I think OS X was a better choice. At the time when this decitions were made, Be OS Couldnt even print (it needed a lot of work)...
just to take issue with one of the points:
the higher end desktops actually use the 7450 processor(or G4+), which runs at up to 733MHz, as opposed the the 7410 in the lower end desktops and TiBook, which can only go up to 600MHz. the 7410 has a 4 stage pipeline and IIRC uses about 7 watts. the 7450 has a 7 stage pipeline(yeah, they increased it just like Motorola), a better Altivec unit(which means it absolutely cleans up in things like PS), and IIRC uses about 14 watts.
if you look at the heatsink/fan on the G4/733, you'll see that it's not going in a laptop - ever. now hopefully Apollo, the SOI version of the 7450, won't take too long to arrive. what that'll allow Moto to do is scale the processor in two directions. one thing you can do is up the clock speed by 30-35%. the other choice is to lower the power consumption by anywhere from 30-60%(the numbers we're hearing are varying a lot).
the upshot of all this is that we'll have faster G4s in the desktops and cooler G4s in the laptops. should be excellent
ok, lookie here... Apple is HEAVILY capitalised, has 8 BILLION dollars in cash reserves, more now than it ever has had and there are plenty of very large corporations of any stripe that would LOVE to be so intensely capitalised... oh yes, and the pc industry has had a slump lately, have you noticed? Apple happens to be part of that industry... Jobs killing Apple? not. Ain't gonna happen, as in 'never', get used to it.
I'm aware of the Hobbit and the PReP support. My personal theory is that Gassee thought he could sell BeOS back to Apple the whole time (or almost the whole time) the company was alive up to that point. The BeBox was a demonstration to Apple of a 'better' Macintosh.
When it came down to it, Gassse asked for too much money (your "Be passing on Apple?" comment in #28 is a load), and was forced to wander the forest of Intel hardware incompatibility.
Who the hell is holding a grudge?
You, for example, seem to be pretty unhappy about the no G3 support issue. If Apple's so dead in the future, why do you want their hardware?
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Any mirrors out there?
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
how it's not possible to place another single character, "2", where the year is represented in that date as a single character "1".
I would assume that the month is the "01" since that field will be going to "10" in decimal far sooner than we'll need two characters to correctly represent the unique year. What the hell are you talking about?
-PipTigger
Go Here
Internet appliances? Maybe Apple's not in that market because NO ONE IS BUYING THEM! Ever since the Internet became popular, people have been talking about all this Internet Appliance crap. We see lots of stuff at computer shows and then it's gone the next year. Replaced by nothing because they just don't sell. Internet appliances... bah!
Macintosh humor! MacComedy.com
Hehe, and he says he's replying to a troll... ;)
;)
Anyway, like the other two replys (currently) to this post say, Apple did *not* steal the idea from Xerox. The deal was that Apple sent I think three engineers to see the machine Xerox had. They were not allowed to play with it at all, a Xerox employee did stuff and they watched. Xerox had the very basics of a GUI, icons, windows, mouse. There was no 'desktop', and the windows were not able to overlap. In return, Apple gave Xerox $1 million in Apple stock, which at the time was skyrocketing. So Apple didn't steal anything from Xerox, only M$ from Apple.
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
Not correct. Ever since OS 8.6 the MacOS Nanokernel has been SMP. The macos runs as one thread on the nanonkernel (called the BlueBox) and is scheduled along with other MP threads.
This is why it was so easy to make Classic work on X. Except on X the Blue Box (Classic) is one pthread ( a direct mapping to a Mach kernel thread) on top of Mach/BSD.
indeed, Jobs ate crow at that resellers meeting (after his own fashion of doing so, that is)... and the characterisation by XBL of what Jobs had to say is as wrongheaded as can be... "Vas you dere?" Nope XBL, you weren't but i was and the room was, for the most part, overwhelmed by his acts of contrition (made, once again, in his own fashion) and plain talk... period, and end of story.
But he also regretted his failure to buy Microsoft in 1979, when he had the opportunity.
I'm going to keep hold of that quote to scare small children with.
Imagine the bastard child of M$oft and EDS !
Actually, I'm pretty sure that Be wanted $180 million or so, and Apple balked at that (they're worth less than half that today, after their IPO). Steve Jobs wanted $400 million for NeXT, but Gil Amelio thought that NeXT was worth it because they had a full-featured, mature, OS, third-party applications, customers, and leading people like Steve Jobs and Avi Tevanian. Be's OS was a beta that couldn't print, no multiuser, and had poor networking. Be had no incoming revenue at the time, and no customers.
Why do Be fans keep bringing this up? It's embarrassing to Be.
Regardless of what their machines are capable of or whether or not their current OS crashes more than Doze, we owe a great deal to this company.
*shrug*
Ok, you've got a good point there.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
it really is sad that MS has become so powerful in the wake of a slew of superior products.
geez, the motorola 68000. that was so far ahead of anything intel.
i mean, windows 3.1 was like $30 for an oem pack. MacOS was free, but ran only on macs. Unix cost a fortune, and even the cheapo versions (like coherent) had an aging X interface (no motif). X apps were 25-50K for a site license. MS Office was $200 or so.
Well, I hope OSX raises the bar for Linux. If there is a Intel release, Linux will undoubtedly take some ideas from it.
Being able to get Linux free may do to MS what MS did to Unix. Even a slightly inferior product, for a lot less $$, will win the market.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
-1: Troll +2: freakin' hilarious I count six errors in three sentences.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
It's interesting that you think Be is not dead now, but you think NeXT was dead in 1996. Be still has not matched NeXT's typical yearly revenue. There is a pretty good NeXT community ... many of the same individuals and companies that used and supported the technologies when they were owned by NeXT have continued to do so now that the technologies are owned by Apple. Mac OS X Server was released two years ago. Previously, that OS was called OpenStep, and before that, NeXTSTEP. It's a Unix with the same object-oriented API's Tim Berners-Lee used to create the World Wide Web, as well as a Mac compatibility environment that runs Mac OS 8.6 full-screen. It's going to be retired on March 24 along with Mac OS 9. Apple will have a single OS for both workstations and servers when they release Mac OS X.
once again, encyclopedic ignorance... preliminary indications are that Apple users are totally juiced about OS X, Apple could hardly supply enough copies of OS X beta to the faithful Mac users out there who bought well over 100,000 copies of a BETA OS. Processor speed is at 733 MHz. Apple is not getting killed in price points by ANYBODY, and the NEW G4 PowerBook represents more bang for the buck than ANY other laptop, PERIOD. Moto has NO plans to leave the PPC behind, nor will it cease to provide PPC chips for desktops. Darwin is Open Source. You are a moron, get that sharp object away from your eyeball. Have a nice day.
Yes, Apple has in fact opened their hardware in the eight (ten?) years since they manufactured the newest of the boxes you mentioned here. OpenFirmware IS open. The boot loader was not open in the past...now it is. Is this complicated? Is it even BAD? NetBSD works on your hardware, doesn't it? What's the problem here?
Look at the back of a new Mac and find a proprietary port. You won't find one. Look inside the box for proprietary ROMs. Not there. Again...what's the problem here?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I'm sure that I saw a colour Next. Got nothing to back that claim up with but my memory, but I remember thinking it looked a lot cooler than the VGA of the time.
So the Web was invented on a NeXT machine. That was new to me. What I missed in the article was another very significant NeXT user: id software. Doom was developed on NeXTs, and before Quake 2, all level design was apparently done on NeXTs: just have a look at the huge pile of Objective C that is QuakeEd. Carmack switched over to NT for Quake 2 development because you can't plug an OpenGL accelerator into a NeXT station. And IIRC, he wasn't too happy about it.
"When the NeXT Computer was launched in 1988 Jobs believed it would change the world of computing. In the end, the story of the NeXT cube became a study in failure. NeXT was a high-profile disaster, a computer system that the world admired but wouldn't buy."
The ironic thing about this is that the threat of NeXT did force others into massive innovation. One of Suns founders was convinced that NeXT would be the death of them if they didn't roll out more powerful computers, and the white paper that starting Sun on the path to developing Java came from a senior developer threatening to quit and work for NeXT.
If you can find the book "Steve Job's NeXT big thing" it's got a lot of information about how Jobs blew NeXT's chances of being a major force in the industry and how Sun steeped in to the (almost) exact place NeXT wanted to be.
When punk rock is outlawed, only outlaws will have punk rock.
Compared to how often Dolemite smacks hoes, that ain't shit, muthafucka.
http://www.dolemite.com
And for extra weird kung-fu goodness, complete with topless ninja ho's, find yourself a copy of Shaolin Dolemite. It is available at NetFlix, or at whichever DVD store you like. Blockbuster? Funk dat trick ass company.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
You don't have to reverse-engineer Mac hardware when the core of the Mac OS is open source. When there are additionally six open source Linux distributions that run on that hardware. Just admit to yourself that Be got it wrong on that one. The more you mention it, the less standing Be has in the eyes of the people listening to you.
... it's called "Open Firmware".
Macs basically have the exact same hardware in them as Intel computers, except for the fact that they use a PowerPC CPU from Motorola or IBM, and have some additonal features like 802.11 wireless networking and antennae, IEEE 1394 (Apple calls it "FireWire") busses, and they use a DVI-3 connector (Apple calls it "Apple Display Connector") for digital video instead of the simpler and more common DVI-1. These things are all standard items. Even the firmware is open
It's really too bad that Apple under Amelio decided to go with NeXT and not BeOS. I know that few may agree with what I'm about to say, but I feel that Apple's acquisition of, and eventual absorption into, NeXT, may prove to be a crucial disaster in Apple's career.
During my short stay at Caltech (another crucial disaster, but never mind that), I saw a number of NeXT boxes. They were very pretty...and not much else. An acquaintance of mine joked that the NeXT boxes in the undergraduate computer lab could have been replaced with those cardboard computer props that furniture stores use, and nobody would have been able to tell the difference. I also remember my astonishment at the hard drive space NeXTStep demanded, over 200 MB, I remember--this at a time when my personal computer had an 80 MB hard drive and I barely felt the need for more.
NeXT failed, deservedly; but now Jobs is back, fighting old battles, playing all the same old tricks. Release dates have been pushed back so many times as to become meaningless--remember, back in 1997, when Jobs had regained power, that Rhapsody was supposed to be the future? Functionality has taken second place in importance to Jobs's pedestrian notions of how computers ought to be pretty, e.g. his quixotic attempt to revive the cube. And system requirements have bloated monstrously. If Apple had gone with Be, they would have had an OS with a spare, functional interface, which booted in ten seconds and required not even 100 MB of hard drive space.
I do agree that Be's best chance was acquisition by Apple. That would have rendered irrelevant most of the problems which made BeOS such a poor competitor in the desktop OS market. Its paucity of drivers wouldn't have mattered, because it would have been running on proprietary hardware. It would have had an established audience with a small, but significant, share of the market.
It's too bad. Be and BeOS are still around, but the company seems intent on making one dumb mistake after another. Their ludicrous attempts to position themselves as players in nonexistent niche markets didn't convince anybody--BeOS wasn't a "Media OS" (whatever that is), and nobody outside of a few trade shows cares about "internet appliances". And just visit www.be.com these days--they barely admit that BeOS is one of their products.
hyacinthus.
I wonder what windowmaker GNUStep and Afterstep are doing in the linux world. They are trying to revive their beloved Nextstep on linux Boxes.
you dont know (not equal) to doesnt exist..
And guess what, before you know it, BeOS is already dead. Unless there is some kind of miracle happens (e.g. suddenly all MS emplyees died). Otherwise I really dont see BeOS will have any real acceptance in the future. In 1999-2000 some japanese computer manufactures tried to preload BeOS on their computer, but that just doesnt sell (Be got like NO market share).
Just face it Superior product (doesnt equal) to success.
lol so any BeOS lovers who tried to put down NeXTStep or MacOS please think carefully, BeOS has nothing to do with PPC anymore, you should start to jerk about window 2000 and ME (or CE also coz maybe finally BeOS will be competing with CE only)
And please, no one pull out the stupid integer performance tests and try and tell me 500Mhz PPC = 1Ghz x86!
If you do not want integer tests, how about a number crunching solution, that is perhaps equally optimised on both sides of the fence. How about Distributed.net client?
Some g4 rsults:
Power PC_7400_G4 433 3,903,000
Power PC_7400_G4 450 3,794,467
Power PC_7400_G4 500 4,383,581
Power PC_7400_G4 733 6,529,242
Some intel PIII results:
Intel Pentium III 1000 2,818,393
Intel Pentium III 850 2,379,094
Intel Pentium III 733 2,034,363
Intel Pentium III 500 1,383,202
Some TBird (AMD K7) reults:
AMD K7 Athlon Thunderbird 1200 4,283,940
AMD K7 Athlon Thunderbird 1000 3,549,885
AMD K7 Athlon Thunderbird 850 3,021,021
AMD K7 Athlon Thunderbird 450 1,589,342
I am not trolling, but i am trying to point out that for properly optimised code, you can get decent real world scientific FAST crunching from the G4 processors, even though they operate at 1/2 the clock.
How every version of MICROS~1 Windows(TM) comes to exist.
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
Yeah...makes you wonder...was it Gates himself that pushed/pulled Microsoft to where it is now or was it the market and Apple's decisions (not licensing to other boxen amongst other bonehead moves). I feel it was a combo of the two, but that a number of folks could have stood in Gates' place and made history. Heck...Perot was capable of beating Clinton in one state in Clinton's last election (in Utah, the year of the pitiful turnout). If he could do that, I'm sure he could sell mediocre software/OSes.
The questions that remains to me is...would the gluttenous trail of mangled companies be lesser or greater in Ross Perot's wake rather than Bill Gates' wake?
As for NeXT, I worked with an engineering professor at Utah State University who still used and swore by a NeXT box (dunno know if it was a NeXT cube or just the OS). I always wanted to play with it, but never got the opportunity. I'm looking forward to OS X, but will keep Mac OS and LinuxPPC running somewhere...and as far from WinDOS as I can.
Cheers
Galego
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
It's interesting that we're comparing the two companies, since their programming environments are similar in quite a number of ways.
Both Be and NeXT are very much OOP based, although I have to say NeXT takes the cake for using Objective-C - personally, one of my favorite languages, but more importantly, it's one of the very few *truly* object oriented [did somebody say Smalltalk?] languages.
Personally, I prefer Be for doing manual coding - that is, without NIBs/predefined UIs. The thing that gets me about NIBs is that I have no idea what the hell is going on when they load! Be gives me a little more control.
Alot of the frameworks are similar, especially in regard to network; I'm betting that's because of the BSD/Mach core that's underneat OS X. [Ok, so I'm having an OS X discussion here, not a NeXT one. Sosumi.]
Er, it's late, I'd write more, zzzz...
I also saw an example of DisplayPostScript being used to run a program residing on an x86 from a PPC machine. This had X.Windows beat all hollow. I'm hoping that a. those engineers are still at Apple (they had a great love for their work) and b. that you can still use zila and that D-PS trick on OS X.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
No, it's not faster for non-SMP tasks. I don't need SMP (yet) to run Word. HOWEVER, Phtoshop takes advantage of both SMP and Altivec. I've used Photoshop on a dual-G4 machine. It's amazing.
If my understanding is correct, it is not SMP you are talking about, but AMP or AsMP, as in Asymmetric. I have a feeling that is the correct name. It will not be untill OS X (March) ships that those who have Apple H/W can play with non beta SMP OS. (As a side note: I have a Duron on my desk and a Gen1 iBookSE that i carry around with me.)
How every version of MICROS~1 Windows(TM) comes to exist.
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
Those older systems do not have a BIOS or OS-independant firmware of any sort and can only and will only bootstrap MacOS from the internal ROMs. (Perhaps you can burn your own bootstrapping ROMs and replace the Apple one, which is usually socketed.)
If it's any consolation, even Apple's own Unix, A/UX, bootstrapped out of the MacOS.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Smokin Goat McGruff said "AMD doesn't even have a portable chip. Apple uses a full-power G4 in the new Titanium PowerBooks."
Yes they do. AMD K5-3+ is a moble chip, and they just released a moble version of the Duron.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Only for older Macs. Ever since the early PPC days, Apple machines have booted using Open Firmware. Anyone can write a bootloader for those machines. LinuxPPC did it years ago.
Anybody who claims that Apple has 'opened' their hardware is a very, very sick comedian.
No, they've just been paying attention a little more closely than you have.
Free Hans!
HTML Mail....Why?
For the same reason that books are not printed using only monospace courier type.
Death to the green-screen luddites!
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Can you guess who I am?
You have to look at one to understand. Here's this elegant little cube, sitting a few inches above your desk in a clear tube, more powerful than the large, traditional desktop computer next to it . . .
. . . and coming out of it is basically 3 plates worth of spaghetti, which connect it to keyboard, mouse, monitor, speakers, etc., flopping all over the desk.
You'll notice in the ads, they never show the cables. That's because the cube isn't nealy as cool-looking with them.
My Web Page
The headline for this article mentions that the original article discusses how now [NeXT] has basically taken over Apple, but I couldn't find anything that discusses the "reverse takeover". How Gil Amelio brought in Steve only to have Steve kick him out. How Steve put all his lieutenants into powerful positions in the company.
One interesting aspect of the takeover is that although a lot of former-NeXT people are in power and NeXT technology will be the operating system, it is Apple technology that is currently keeping the company afloat.
I've not had a floppy drive in my PC for a long, long time. It was just taking up space, so I removed it :)
...and it's under 2 right now, so wouldn't that mean you're out $15,000? :-). ;) :-).
Exactly. End of argument, you win--but hey, can't knock the optimistic attitude
don't worry, I bought some AAPL at $25, thinking it was a sure bet. there goes my Nomad Jukebox
Don't worry, they'll be back. I was going to buy Apple back in 1998 when they were at a (split-adjusted) $8/share (it was about $16 at the time, but they split 2 for 1 since). When the price was at $120, I was kicking myself for listening to my father (I had to...i was in 10th grade, i think, and had no money for investing). Now, I am moderately upset, but now is probably a good time to buy. If they deliver on the macworld promises, and demote the cube to a paperweight, they will have a fine year. Maybe we'll see some now "ihardware" at macworld ny in june. if not, it will be something else spectacular. love itunes
No Sony? You say you work for a company that makes chips for IA's and you haven't heard of the e Villa?
of course i've heard of it, but you didn't read very well. i told you that most designs hardly make it to production, and very few make it in the marketplace. perhaps the eVilla will, but it's no guarantee. i'll tell you that there are other projects in Sony that don't use Be however. which one of these will be sucessful, only time will tell.
- j
$NeXT = $Steve_Jobs * $dead_OS
$OSX = ($Steve_Jobs * $dead_OS) / ($legacy_hardware + $delay + $fear)
today: you win. the ND for free.
there were a significant number of design changes that motorola made to make the chip capable of 733MHz operation - check out the link here for a quick summation.
To me, what's funny is this:
The date is from your local computer. The web page uses a javascript funtion to show the date....
Anyway, point is...the "y2k+1" problem is on your end somewhere.
Be's press release - Be Announces Development of BeIA Client Software for Sony's New e Villa Network Entertainment Center
Sony's press release - SONY SIMPLIFIES -- AND MAXIMIZES -- THE INTERNET WITH NEW e Villa(TM) NETWORK ENTERTAINMENT CENTER
CNET - Sony trots out Web-browsing eVilla with Be OS
BeNews - Sony's eVilla "Network Entertainment Center" Uses BeIA
It's just Sony's entry into the IA market, and it used BeIA. But then, Sony are just a little company after all.... :P
i haven't heard anything about this, could you please post your source?
and there's a difference between "releasing the specs" and "devoting the manhours to aid in development." in the case of Be, it was closer to the latter.
- j
I think intels investment in Be is what pushed them to drop mac support. Just Maybe?
,it came with a magazine. ) It worked but I wasn't very impressed (underwhelmed).
As for dropping PPCI see linux is working fine on all macintoshes including dual processor ones. Why can't be do that? I don't really care either way, but they'res no software available on Be to make someone buy a mac then put Beos on it.
Of course Be can't compete on the desktop with MS because they don't have enough driver writers to write drivers because intel hardware is very varried and they're lots and lots of different stuff out there.
I tried Beos on an old mac (about 2 years ago
Choice is good though, so I wish Be well.
<blockquote>Quick! copy and paste any amount of text without touching they keyboard</blockquote>
<p>Ok... select, then drag & drop to another window/program... done.. next?</p>
> At the time Apple was shopping around, I wanted
> them to buy Be. Now I realize that if they would
> have, there would probably be no more BeOS for
> me to use. They would have ruined the Be
> community.
> There already was no more NeXT, so nobody
> looses out on that one.
Apple has sold more copies of Mac OS X Server (formerly OpenStep) than Be has of BeOS. There is, and always has been, a good community of people around the NeXT technologies, even after Apple bought them. They are pretty much at a fever pitch right now, with the upcoming release of Mac OS X.
> Steve Jobs is back, and right now he is cool. Let's
> see where is is in one year.
Have you read Steve Jobs' resume? He coined the term "personal computer" when the company he founded shipped the very first one. He's not exactly a one-hit wonder.
What's even more eerie, Apple and Nissan both use the same advertising agency (tbwa/chiat/day [they're obviously trying to tap into the *nix crowd]).
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I present the following quote from the article:
Yet there is perhaps more theatre than practicality in the Cube. Apart from the basic electronics, everything else, such as monitor, keyboard, speakers and even the amplifier and power supply, have to sit outside the box.
How on earth can the cube be considered impractical because they didn't shove a monitor, keyboard and speakers into it?
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
When Gates says "piss on it" he means "copy".
I suggest you look it up. Apple maintained their own Mach/Linux hybrid before Darwin.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
One of the things that made NeXT work so well was their "developers" app (whose name I can't remember). It made creating custom apps extremely easy. I couple of clicks and you had a customized clock app, couple more clicks and it would read slashdot. It was the best tool to come out of NeXT. Other apps are catching up, like Glade but few can make custom apps that painless.
PS. My alma mater's CS department had NeXT cubes running as servers up until 1999 when upgrading them for Y2K was going to be $400 a pop. They wisely chose to switch to Linux.
Check out Althea for a stable IMAP email client for X. Now with SSL!
No kidding. I'd never heard that before! I'll bet if that had happened, the computing world would be very different today. There probably would have been a severe personality clash between Gates and Perot, what with both of them being control freaks and all. That would have been something.
Free Hans!
I think what he intended to say is that his short is money in the bank. Your rally is not.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
//many of the same individuals and companies that used and supported the technologies when they were owned by NeXT have continued to do so now that the technologies are owned by Apple
FYI
This is a good site for a lot of the old Nexties, and the new Darwinists and OSXer's built on Webobjects and
is an old Next developer leading the fray into Cocoa development
Apple will never ship OS X for Intel until it's too late? The hardware is too expensive, and there's already a HUGE market out there for OSes running on Intel. They could truly give Microsoft a run for their money.
Some questions:
[1] How do you expect Apple to make money?
[2] How do you expect them to take on Windows on its home turf?
[3] How will OSX succeed without any apps (like Office, Explorer, etc)? The only ones that would run on x86 would be the old OpenStep apps. The others are far too processor-specific. Sure, they could come up with a Windows emulator, but what's the point? If you're going to do that, you might as well run Windows.
[4] The Mac loses a lot of its core value once you take it off native hardware. What is it that you like about OSX? Just the interface?
A lot of OSX's value is due to a wide variety of applications and tight intergration with hardware. You lose both of these with OSX86. But at least you'll have seventh OS to select from in lilo.
This simply doesn't make any sense if you look at the details.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
One of the things that made NeXT work so well was their "developers" app (whose name I can't remember)
Apple is now distributing a much-updated Interface Builder for free, along with all the other OSX dev tools like Project Builder.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
The Titanium case will actually cut down on many costs. [snip] By going to a hard, titanium "exoskeleton", you can eliminate one of the toolings by eliminating the inner skeleton.
That Titatium case is but paint over carbon-fibre exo-skeleton. The facts is Titatium is too dirty in raw metal form. It discolors and picks up oils in its finish. Painting Titanium controls this problem.
The problem was more a ratio between price and experience. be wanted ~300 Million for a new untested, yet promising OS, and Apple offered Next 430 million for a dying, yet battle tested OS.
What was most important though? Time to market. They released MacOS server about two years after they bought next. Not bad when you consider it took MS 8 years to dev NT.
to have that viewpoint that Apple keeps coming out with cool things even though they sell like ice cubes in Alaska
~5 million Macs a year. If my math is right (and it's requently not), that boils down to an an average of 9 or 10 Macs sold every minute. I think that's pretty good, however massively bigger the wintel figures may be.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Hey AC, you already posted this stuff 4 days ago in the "Jobs Plays it Frank" article. It doesn't make any more sense now than it did then. I don't suppose it would be worth asking why you are doing this?
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
That feature was called NX Hosting. It allowed you do remote desktop functionality a la X, but with quite a bit of added functionality. It was also much faster over a network, considering it wasn't pushing pixels, it was pushing PS.
Unfort, they pulled this functionality out of this version of OS X, but the underlying framework is there, they just need to tweak it for PDF, rather than plain jane PS. I expect someone will either hack it to work, or Apple will add it in a later version [release 2 or 3]
Blocklevel: Practical Information Architecture
When the NeXT came out, I was at Georgia Tech. Several guys in what was essentially the campus IT group got cubes, went to NeXT class, etc. Within a few months, most of them were relegated to being NFS and print servers for the Sun 3 boxes on their desks. I never saw anyone on campus make better use of the cubes.
I think what killed NeXT, in our case, was a combination of the Sun 3 and the Mac II. The Sun3 did everything we needed as an academic Unix workstation (though the NeXT eventually had an X server). The Mac II was the "consumer" machine for all the students that needed to write their term papers and resumes and forget to save them on floppy. The PC? What PC? We did have some IBM PS/2's that ran WordPerfect in DOS.
As neat as the NeXT was, everything was just too expensive. I think that for the price of one cube, we could have gotten at least two Mac II's or maybe even a Mac II and a Sun 3. Even the $50 price for a "floptical" disk was too much for beer-swilling students who usually just swiped a beat-up boot floppy from one of our diskless Mac SE's to save their only copy of their thesis.
I used to have this NeXT poster which stated "In the 90s, we'll probably see only ten real breakthroughs in computers. Here are seven of them." The seven:
- R/W Optical Disk
- The power of Unix (with a GUI)
- VLSI chips
- Postscript (display and printing)
- Digital sound
- Multimedia e-mail
- Object-oriented / visual development
So, how many of these were right? We may not have magneto-optical drives, but most of us have cd-burners. Even if you run NT or 2000, you have a very Unix-like OS (much more Unix-like than the MacOS, DOS, or Windows of 1990). VLSI chips was a gimme. Postscript may be the only loser on the list. Who doesn't have digital sound and look at what MP3s have done (the NeXT was the first place I saw pirated digital media files of CD tracks, btw). Multimedia e-mail may not be a huge hit for everyone, but it was a precursor to the web. The NeXT development environment in 1990 still beats a lot of current ones.So what are the other 3 or 4 breakthroughs?
Apples and NeXT boxes are extremely proprietary, difficult to service and poorly scalable.
I'm going to lose my mind. Will you please visit this page at Apple and tell me how Apple's G4 tower is not the easiest machine to service on the planet? Other than the chipset, what component in this box is proprietary? The PCI slots? The AGP slot? The PC133 DIMM slots that accept up to 1.5GB of RAM? The USB ports? The NVIDIA card? Perhaps it's the gigabit ethernet controller?
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
If Ameilio would have stayed at the helm, Apple would have been long-dead. Say what you will about the big fruit, but the mere existence of Apple helps stimulate the entire industry.
drag and drop isnt copy and paste, with copy and paste, you can keep pasting the text and in any window not just ones showing, its a bit hard to drag text into an app you havnt opend yet
Theres a statement in the article about the Apple chairman at the time not being able to come to terms with Be on using BeOS to replace the aging, cooperative multitasking system with a true preemptive multitasking design. I would really like to hear some details on the negotiations that took place between Be and Apple at that time. If you ask me, Be passing on Apple as a customer or an aquirer is right up there with CP/M or whatever it was passing when IBM came looking for an OS for the new PC...
Frank W. Miller
That's a great point, and I don't think that it can be emphasized enough.
Gasse's original marketing plan at Be, much like Jobs's plan at NeXT, was to target a Mac stronghold with his OS. For NeXT, it was education; for Be, it was creative professionals.
Be surged in popularity in the mid-nineties because of the Mac clone market; they were able to cut a deal with Power Computing to bundle their OS alongside the Mac OS. One of the exaggerated "benefits" of a Mac clone market was that Macs would be able to run multiple operating systems now, so suddenly Be was front and center. Even Mac magazines were bundling beta versions of BeOS on CD's.
Be had a fairly strong marketing plan for invading Apple's market; what they didn't have was a similarly strong plan for invading the PC market, where variety is the norm, not the exception. And on top of that, they squandered the 4 years that Apple took to get OS X out the door.
"Apple won't give us the information we need to sink the Mac OS!" Oh, boo hoo! What were you expecting?
It'd be pretty easy make Tivo like software. Tivo runs on PPC. :-) Linux PPC. It's really great for that camp, following along the scalability of linux.
Be is a visually appealing OS (IMHO, of course), and is easy to create simple apps with. Many of the aspects of it's OS design are great, as well.
Unfortunately, it came about in a time when there was already a standard (Microsoft). People who didn't want to use that standard, for whatever reason, still had Macs. To make matters worse, Linux was really starting to get a buzz, and drawing exactly the type of people BeOS would want.
And there were problems...It is closed source, so FSF types didn't want it. And old Amiga users didn't care about it after it went solely to the x86 platform. (It was originally supposed to be the new Amiga, or an OS styled after Amiga, or whatever.)
So they effectively alienated (almost) everyone they could sell to, and are now left as an example of what not to do, much like NeXT.
Windows 95 was also a rip-off of the NeXT interface, as well as the Mac interface. Windows has gotten more NeXT-ish as time goes on.
When I saw recently that Mac OS X now has a cool customizable toolbar API that works just like the toolbars in IE 5 for Macintosh, I thought Apple had ripped of Microsoft, but then a NeXT user informed me that these toolbars were in NeXTSTEP as well. Big surprise, I guess.
No, it's not faster for non-SMP tasks. I don't need SMP (yet) to run Word. HOWEVER, Phtoshop takes advantage of both SMP and Altivec. I've used Photoshop on a dual-G4 machine. It's amazing.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
head in the sand? doubtless. here in New York City, i know FEW people that use Wintel boxes except when they are forced to... they have Macs at home. again i say: Apple is so very heavily capitalised that it is just not going to fail, never. 8 Billion dollars in cash reserves says so. and you should do a bit of reading up on MacOS X, beats bloody hell outta BeOS.
*sigh* Why do I get the feeling Apple will never ship OS X for Intel until it's too late? The hardware is too expensive, and there's already a HUGE market out there for OSes running on Intel. They could truly give Microsoft a run for their money. OS X is stunning, yet I know Apple will refuse to ship it for anything but THEIR hardware, and this will be their downfall. It can't be as hard as they'd want us to believe can it? Darwin already boots on x86, I know that's the core OS, but it's a huge start. Don't do this again, Apple. Just ship the damned OS, advertise, and people will buy it. Talk to OEMs, demonstrate it, undercut MS if you have to, at least it will provide some competition and more than likely cut you a large slice of the market. Don't do this again.
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www.stallman.org is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) on FreeBSD
Say hello http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.vnunet.co m/Features/1112630+&hl=en
Quick! copy and paste any amount of text without touching they keyboard.
Why should I not use the keyboard? That is where my left hand is resting, esp. if I am using an application where I am likely to copy and paste text. This particular complaint comes down to what you are used too, you probably find using your left (keyboard) hand for those functions awkward and I find using my right (mouse) hand equally as awkward for the same reason - we are just more comfortable with what we are used to.
or how about useing a photo editor like photoshop useing 2 or more buttons and tell me its not a major convienance.
I can't imagine using a mouse at all to use a photo editor - you are missing a huge percentage of the functionality if you are not using a pressure sensitive tablet. And I don't see how only two buttons can be enough if you are stuck with a mouse. I use all of the keyboard modifier keys when I use photoshop - shift (constrains tools to 45% angles, straight lines etc.), control (contextual menus), option (modifies tools) and command (switches to the often used "move" tool) and all of these (except control) in combination (i.e. using the command key to temporarily switch from your current tool to the move tool in combination with the option key to duplicate rather than just move and shift to constrain movement to 45% angles). I don't see how you could fit 4 or 5 buttons to get similar functionality onto a stylus (or a mouse for that matter) - well I suppose you could fit that many but it wouldn't be very usable. I can just see myself having to hold the thing in my fist like a two-year old with a crayon so I can hold down all three stylus keys at the same time.
or so the joke goes around campus.
People think Microsoft is the answer. Microsoft is just the question, "No" is the answer.
The other element in the whole article is how much Mac OSX is similar to the main vision of NeXT, just from a software viewpoint alone. Never mind the hardware angle.
Talk about being ahead of the times.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The guy from the CNet article was guessing. He doesn't know the G4 book is a loss leader.
Apple very likely got a good deal on that display, seeing as how they are an investor in Samsung, (who is their supplier for LCD displays), so I doubt it's costing them as much as it would other manufacturers.
Free Hans!
In case you wanted to read what RMS had to say about that (among other things).
;>)
I was looking to see if Andy Tai's statement was true (it was stated so tersely I took it to be an unwarranted attack.
The NeXT software was an excellent and practical engineering achievement: it married Smalltalk-like object-oriented technology with the C language and a UNIX kernel. By industry standards (i.e., compared to Windows, MacOS, and UNIX) it also had good tools and a good development environment.
But it wasn't second to none. The NeXT machine, like the Macintosh that preceded it, mostly just took selected aspects from Smalltalk and similar systems and brought the to the masses on a more mainstream platform. But the originals actually arguably had better development tools and a better runtime.
The NeXT machine was a smartly packaged, excellent practical compromise. Jobs deserves a lot of credit for good taste and practicality. But it wasn't breakthrough or even particularly novel technology given the systems that preceded it by nearly a decade. And, of course, reasonable as it was technically, it was still considered too radical and too expensive by industry.
The real missed opportunity of the 1980's was probably Smalltalk. Sun had actually apparently considered bundling Smalltalk-80 with every Sun workstation sold, but the deal fell through. The world of computing would be a very different place if the graduate students of the 1980's and early 1990's had grown up with that software on their Sun workstations.
They are very expensive per megabyte. They are incredibly slow. And they are fragile. I've had more 3.5 hardcased floppies go bad than 5.25 truely floppy floppies. the problem is that apple ditched the floppy in hopes of letting a new standard come about but without actually offering or choosing the new standard.
yes, that may be so, but its still alot more steps then just , rightclick, copy, and im a win2k guy btw, linux copy and paste is horid I never said I knew it all, all I said was selecting text , right click copy is easy and more convienant then, select-file/copy or command-rightclick copy, as far as the macos file menu system, that may work for you but I typicly have more then one app open at a time and find it a pain to switch tasks just to see the file menu (I rarely overshoot the file menu )
on a side note the last time ive used mac os was like system 7something
Microsoft is a poor example to model your business on. Name one other company that has been successful using the Microsoft model, and then maybe Apple can model themselves after that company
;)
um try the entire video game industry. they loose money on hardware, and make it up with software sales and lisence fees.
or how about thoes digital vcrs , that also dont make much off the system and gain it all back on subscription fees.
web tv is the same deal, anyone can make a webtv box, but MS gets the subcriptions (im not sure if the hardware manufacture gets any % or what)
to say you cant make money on software alone is silly.
do you realy think anyone would use linux, if they had to buy all new hardware to run it, ok bad example
Stross was in a snit because he couldn't get the access he wanted to NeXT and Jobs when he was researching the book, so he just collected all the third-hand anecdotes he could find.
I'd love to hear him explain why he went off on that chapter-long hero-worshipping tangent about Sun, a company which certainly has at least as many skeletons in the closet as anyone else in the valley.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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Perhaps he meant GNU instead of Gnome... AFAIK, Window Maker (note the space between the words, added a couple years ago) is the only official Gnu window manager.
"Oh twap!"
AfterStep actually used to be CmdrTaco's fave window manager, before he sold out to the Enlightenment camp. Fun fact: Taco is the author of the dockable CD applet "ascd", which looks really cool but dumps core more often than Shaft smacks hoes.
Apple may be trying some NeXTstepish things with OS X, but IMHO they should instead bring back the NeXT tradition of awesome, sleek black hardware. It is my hope, even though I don't use Macs, that the iMac's successor embodies this aesthetic philosophy... but I'm not holding my breath; despite the fact that Jobs wants to appear rebellious and artsy, he will never again sell a machine whose external appearance might frighten their now-core userbase of little kids and grandmas.
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
Uhh...because they don't have to? Because they don't see any shareholder advantage to doing so? They're a corporation. Not only do corporations rarely share, they're explicitly designed not to. Darwin is an amazing departure from that structure. Man, if you're bitter about three megabytes, you're probably going to be upset about something else that Apple didn't explain to your satisfaction even if they DID release the specs. Don't like their hardware? Don't use it. Nobody's got a gun to your head here...
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Neither did Canon's PC ambitions. I told them before I left that they would fail due to being insufficiently compatible with the IBM PC. That was too bad too.
"Obtuse Anger is that which is greater than Right Anger" - Lewis Carroll
Thats tough talk from a guy whose investment is in the shitter.
You, for example, seem to be pretty unhappy about the no G3 support issue. If Apple's so dead in the future, why do you want their hardware?
Are you kidding? I've never owned or wanted any Apple hardware. I'm perfectly content with my 1Ghz Athlon Tbird, and before that my Celeron 300 OC'd to 450 for $100, and before that.... etc.
Where did I ever say I want their hardware?
"And like that
It never crashes? Whoa, there, buddy. I'm an editor on my school paper, and every other week we lay out the paper using PageMaker, which is an unforgivably-shoddy program, considering it costs an obscene amount, crashes nonstop and has a lame interface. Anyway, when PageMaker crashes, it takes the OS with it half the time. Netscape, IE and Word crash with similar frequency and similar consequences. Back in the day when all software and peripherals were made by Apple, it was true that it never crashed. Now, though, that's a total fiction. The best thing you can say for it in that department is that it's more stable than Windows, but that's not saying too much.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
Would anyone who has a cached copy be so kind as to post or mirror the text?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
And the chances that it will go to zero are infinitely higher than it going anywhere near the positive territory needed to get you rich.
I'm out of my short position on BEOS as I've already said - I don't need to make any more money than I already have riding it down.
I have a three button Mac mouse, and the other two buttons are not useful at all. One gives you contextual menus without holding down CONTROL and the other allows you to create group selection boxes. There's just no point to three buttons when the whole system only requires on for everything Quick! copy and paste any amount of text without touching they keyboard, or how about useing a photo editor like photoshop useing 2 or more buttons and tell me its not a major convienance. just becouse you can do something without buttons doesnt meen its ideal, hell you can set up win9x to not even use any buttons you can hit "enter" insted of clicking, that doesnt make it a good idea to do so there have been times ware ive gone hours on my pc without touching the keyboard thanx to that second button
Two years from now, when Mac users are running OS X 2.0 on 3GHz 64 bit G5s, and Be is running on Palm Pilots and cell phones, you tell me who is the future.
Well, it won't be palm pilots, but a derivative thereof, and it will be much more than just that (entertainment appliances, information appliances, kitchen appliances, you name it), but yes, if both those things happen, Be will be "the future" as you put it.
Let me give you a clue: there are more non-geeks than geeks. Therefore there is a bigger market for appliances than personal computers.
"And like that
If Apple ships OS X on Intel and directly competes with Microsoft, Microsoft will cut development of Office for Mac. End of Mac platform as a viable option. Have a nice day, Apple. It sucks, but that's the reality. (In addition, Apple is, has been, and always will be a hardware company.)
Be can't incorporate public code from Apple in their product without being forced to release their code or just give it up on Apple's say-so.
-- Steve van Egmond, b.math
"Apple, of course, was desperate. In 1996, its own operating system strategy was in chaos after the failure of Copland. Apple needed a true multi-tasking, multi-threaded OS to replace MacOS. The company couldn't reach an agreement with Be Inc over its BeOS system, so bought NeXT instead."
Look where all of this got BeOS... Instead of making a deal with Apple, they went out of the OS business entirely and into the only market left they hoped to find viability, internet appliances. I can't think of a more lame ending to such a sad story as BeOS. "The OS that dares to be." Right...
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
This isn't quite the same thing as Webster.app -- it uses the network instead of consulting a local dictionary. Personally, I like it better.
;-)
OmniDictionary
It still uses command-= though.
--
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
The GPL was not violated. The Ojective C compiler was a front end for gcc. It was not a derivative. It used no gcc code. It only used gcc, it did not derive from it. The GPL only covers the original work and derivatives, as defined by copyright law.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
It's a bit of a late reply, but that should be "the labour theory of value".
and you are not one of them, chump! i know plenty of sysadmins HERE in NYC that maintain wintel shitbox networx and they have Macs at home for DV editing and any number of realworld work tasks as well...
Think what you will of Bill Gates, but this just made me laugh...
Gates replied: "Develop for it? I'll piss on it." Which he duly did - metaphorically
lets hope Be open sources their OS and stuff when they pass on. . . hopefully some of it is still PPC portable. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
And let's not forget about Pixar
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
Technically, that's one link.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, post on Slashdot about it.
they *used* to have 4 billion, it is 8 billion now... c'mon, catch up... hit reload and get new data
Don't forget, Be is in the OS market now, and Apple's still playing like you have to control both the hardware and OS aspects. It's not 1984 anymore, guys.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Apple *was* willing to buy Be. THe problem was price: Be was demanding about twice what apple was offering. Even so, they might have been able to get it, until Apple found that they could buy next for what be was demanding. At the same price, it wasn't a hard choice . . .
And in hindsight, Apple got a hell of a deal, buying Jobs for $400M and getting Next thrown in with the deal . . .
The truth is that it wasn't anything to do with the specs for the G3. BeOS was able to run on G3's. It's the controller chips that Apple refused to release the specs for.
i don't pretend to have all the answers, but i was specifically told (by an Apple employee, granted) that the information Be wanted was information that they could have compiled/learned, but were more interested in having Apple do the work to get it together. do you have a source for the "controller chips" bit? i don't exactly know exactly which chips you mean by "controller chips" (as it's a pretty generic term). is it a custom ASIC that Apple makes? that would seem very strange. though i'm not that intimately familar with the innards of G3s.
still, i have a very hard time believing the Be story. first of all, Apple's side of the story was never told. in fact if i remember correctly the Be story was only told through the comp.sys.be.* newsgroups, and there was no "official" announcement. that sounds like an unfounded rumour to me.
i also can't believe they'd really be scared of a lawsuit: reverse engineering is completely legal, otherwise you wouldn't have IBM clones (thank you Compaq)! the story doesn't fit, and after what i heard from some people at Apple, i'd be more inclinded to believe it was a half-truth started by certain Be employees because they were bitter about the situation.
- j
if (year < 2000) {
if (document.all)
year = "19" + year;
else
year += 1900;
}
Looks like VAXGeek is running an older version of IE that fails the Y2K test.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Lets make sure we understand that there are very different philosophy with NeXT and Apple than with the "IBM"-esque pc's many of us use. Apples and NeXT boxes are extremely proprietary, difficult to service and poorly scalable. While they lack the diversity of traditional PC's they countered with a solid group of software and hardware that worked, which often made up for the lack of choice.
I'm surprised that Jobs has returned to the NeXT philosophy (and been successful with it). Perhaps it is the high profit margins of the we-package-everything in our niche market that has made it survive so well.
I have an old next box that I use occasionally, and I like it. I kind of hope that OSX will really bring that os style to the forefront. I hope, though, that OS X will be more open than NeXT...
-Moondog
- MkLinux is still available for older systems (NuBus based Power Macs, and I believe pre PowerPC systems).
Not quite. NuBus based PowerMacs, yes. Pre-PPC, no. That's Linux/mac68k's job. The rest of your post is right on though.There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
Something Neutral towards Apple? On SLASHDOT?
(Quickly checks CNN.com)
No, Hell hasn't frozen over yet. Hrm. Must be Katz's day off
Slashdot. Where bashing anything but Linux is not just a job, it's a way of life!
-------------------------------------------------
R/W Optical Disk = CDRW, DVD-R
UNIX = Linux, OS X
Postscript was actually a big winner in the 90's. Desktop publishing may have started in the late 80's, but it hit its stride in the 90's.
Add to that the fact that PDF is a variant of postscript, and it looks like PS has fared very well.
Digital Sound = MP3
Multimedia email = trying to imagine..."Hey, send me a big multimedia email attachment over my smokin' hot new 2400 bd modem!"
Object-oriented / visual development = yup.
The other three? How about...
* Networking in general (including the internet)
* The web (born on a NeXT computer)
* 3D animation
Clearly what RMS said disagrees with you. And the fact NeXT gives up indicates that gcc front ends are bounded by the GPL because (for the purpose of the GPL) they are derivatives of gcc.
If you are right, NeXT would not have given in to the FSF.
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people. Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
I absolutely need Unix for my work. I don't number crunch; nothing that element. I find new ways to bash numbers into submission.
At times, I drool over the next step features in OS/X, but at least for this machine, I won't be going that way
If I were designing these as classroom demos, though . . .
*sigh*
I wanted a NeXT cube back then, but it wasn't really something I could justify to run a law office
but I still wish I could have the next-step interface on the fortran compilers for hte mac . . .
And the chances that it will go to zero are infinitely higher than it going anywhere near the positive territory needed to get you rich.
Says you, and from what I've read of your past postings, I'm not real impressed by your understanding of this emerging market.
You know, back before Bill Gates was getting rich at Microsoft, some guys at IBM told him (and several others, like Jobs) that there was no market for personal computers for average people.
In other words, people that thought they were so smart, so on top of things, could not see the market that was sitting right beneath their noses.
So why in the hell would I believe little ol' you when it comes to the IA market?
"And like that
And old Amiga users didn't care about it after it went solely to the x86 platform.
Umm, that's strange, it is still PPC/x86. Be can't help it if there are just more x86 users than PPC. No doubt PPC will fade entirely from the Be landscape eventually (unless something drastic changes), but that's market dynamics, not a choice by Be to phase out PPC. (More like a choice by Apple to cut off Be from their specs.)
So they effectively alienated (almost) everyone they could sell to, and are now left as an example of what not to do, much like NeXT.
Are you kidding? I haven't read anything this ludicrous in weeks. Where shall we start?
1. The x86 market is so much bigger than the PPC market, it's scary. Be ported to this platform, while keeping PPC. A brilliant move, their number of users skyrocketed.
2. Microsoft owns the desktop market. Period. End of story. Be tried, but could not compete against their tactics with exclusive OEM deals.
3. Be has now shifted to a market where they can be hugely successful: IA's. They've already started showing off some of their new partners.
If Be follows your good idea, they should stay on a relatively obscure platform (PPC), target themselves towards Mac users running old hardware (since Apple will not share the G* specs), and eventually run out of money and die.
Yeah, you're right, much better plan!!
-thomas
"And like that
The most reasonable solution would be for Apple to open up. Open up its hardware specs and software ,ect. now there cheap ide drives , old ati video cards that were not good 3d cards new much less now ,
I see on the apple store some new models with geforce2mx and 733mhz cpus, bargin basement equipent for the pc world, costing upwards of 3600. if apple realy wants to get anyware, they need to alow clones, charge for the bios if they must, release a version of OSX that allows X apps to be ported to it easly (hey instint software library) and pritty much follow the MS model of money off software, not hardware and apple may have a chance. but apple wont do this, jobs is in a curent mode of , releasy shoddy equipment that looks cool, so that the slowly dieing off mac diehards with more money then brains buys a mac keeping the company afloat a few more years, hey maybe MS will just buy off the company next time
and this would make money for apple how? flame on baby
the same way MS makes money, the OS, charging people up the scsi, for outdated hardware isnt going to work much longer , macs used to be good hardware , scsi drives, high color screens
I'm neither an Apple nor a Be user (well, I use Macs at school, and they piss me off), but I think that Jobs is excellent for the company. Sure, he's a prick with a giant ego. That's a given. But he's also a guy with technological vision. He's not very good at business decisions, as far as I can tell (e.g. the thing with licencing Mac OS), but he's got cool ideas. He realizes that having a computer in pretty colors with an OS that's only marginally less shitty than Windows will sell absurdly well. It's true that Mac hardware is better than x86, at least in the CPU, but nobody really cares about that except nerdy types like us. No, what people care about is nifty-looking Pyrite and Tangelo and Puce and Cherimoya and whatever other weirdo colors they have, wrapping up non-rectilinear computers with optical mouse that are one big button. And nobody thought of doing that, or at least didn't do it right, until the iMac. Even the original Mac had kinda cool design, considering it was the 80s. So grandmas the world over are now deciding they can use a computer because it looks cute as a button, even though in fact Mac OS is no longer particularly easy to use or stable, and the computers are not especially well-priced. And us nerds all want them Cinema Displays.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
The problem?
Rooms full of old Mac hardware that would be prefectly good machines for an OS like NetBSD. Why will Apple not release the specs so we can recover and reuse some of it?
I am tired of having to have a 3 meg MacOS partition on my SE/30 in order to boot NetBSD.
Hay thar.
That URL didn't work for me but this one did http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.vnunet.co m/Features/1112630
It's too bad that no one really took NeXT's systems seriously. I think the main reason must've been that the NeXT was just too much ahead of it's time. I've used 'The Blackbox' before and I can say that some of its features were just amazing for its time. I can say without doubt that if Jobs was taken more seriously in the late 80s, common technology would be much farther advanced than it is today. Mabe they could have even put M$ out of buisiness. You never know. :-)
-----------------------------------------
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Perversely greped and groped by PowerPenguin
(More like a choice by Apple to cut off Be from their specs.)
I'm really, really tired of reading this nonsense. Apple has been shipping source code first for Linux, and then for Darwin, kernels that use Apple hardware! How much more information do you need, ferchrisakes?
Be, Inc. made a decision to stop pursuing Mac hardware, and the excuse that Apple stopped spending resources to help Be is a really flimsy excuse to hide behind.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Be had a fairly strong marketing plan for invading Apple's market; what they didn't have was a similarly strong plan for invading the PC market, where variety is the norm, not the exception. And on top of that, they squandered the 4 years that Apple took to get OS X out the door.
exactly, and i'd like to add that this is a good reason to argue against MacOS X on Intel machines (unless they're Apple-only, based on Intel processors). Be saw the x86 market as a huge sea where even if they got a little chunk of it, it would be better than half the Mac market. unfortunately for them they were lost in that sea, and couldn't build up enough market share to hit a "critical mass" and go anywhere. now they're suddenly "Internet Appliance" OS manufacturers. right. changing your corporate direction every couple of years is a good way to go bankrupt.
the fact of the matter is that Be was extremely bitter about the fact that they didn't get bought by Apple. they thought they had the greatest technology, and were doing Apple a favour by allowing them to use their OS. the whole story can be found in this bit out of the book Apple Confidential.
in retrospect, Apple was best to buy NeXT. NeXT was (and is) a great operating system that had time to mature and get a lot of the kinks out. Be had good technology, but it wasn't so good that it was leaps and bounds ahead of the rest, and the OS, as flashy as it may be, was still lacking in a LOT of necessary refinements. NeXT gave Apple a good solid UNIX foundation upon which to build MacOS X (which i think is a phenomenal operating system). also, bringing back Steve Jobs who inspired the iMac (and the recent resurgence of Apple) was worth the $427 million alone.
- j
That's silly. In the portable market Intel uses dumbed-down chips so they don't eat as much power. AMD doesn't even have a portable chip. Apple uses a full-power G4 in the new Titanium PowerBooks.
As for higher prices, don't buy one. x86 computer/parts manufacturers are a commodity. One single seller has no control over the price, they are price takers. Apple has a monopoly on the Mac side. That means they can charge the optimum price to maximize profits. Why should they lower prices to increase market share when chances are they'll make more money selling less hardware at higher prices? Apple is a price setter.
It is somewhat true that Apple has to compete with PCs, but not like PC manufacturers have to compete with each other.
"There are no cool guys in musicals." -- Coach McGuirk
Then how do you explain that QSSL have the same problems getting specs for apple hardware such as their new smp system?
The Acorn Archimedes kicked the crap out of the Amiga.
I didn't pay for my operating system either
Microsoft is a poor example to model your business on. Name one other company that has been successful using the Microsoft model, and then maybe Apple can model themselves after that company.
What is so hard about all this that you Unix guys can't get that the Mac user interface is designed from the ground up to use one mouse button? The menubar is at the top of the screen, and if you watch a Mac user work, you'll notice that they flick the mouse up to the File menu without looking, because the File menu never moves, and the hot area of the menu item extends to the top of the display, so you can't overshoot. You develop muscle memory. Same for the Edit menu. It's much faster to just go Edit > Copy than it is to right click, identify the option on the context menu, and target and click it.
... people who haven't used Mac OS don't get it, is all.
In addition, the keyboard shortcuts on the Mac are very uniform between apps, so many, many Mac users know the keyboard shortcuts for New, Save, Open, Close, Quit, Print, Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, Find, Find Again. These all work in all applications, uniformly. In Mac OS X, Command+Q (Quit) quits the current app, and Command+Shift+Q logs you out of the system. You just hold down the right shift and do the same Command+Q you're used to when quitting an app and you logout. It's easy to remember this stuff.
The Mac also uses more drag and drop than Windows or most other systems. You can drag a selection of text and drop it into a folder and it appears there as a text clipping that you can drag into another document to paste it there. Another reason not to use a right-click context menu.
Context menus are superfluous on the Mac UI, and if you like them, then buy a $15 USB 2-button mouse with scroller and that works just fine, too. This is not a big deal
When I switched from Windows to Mac OS, I bought a 2-button mouse right away, then replaced it with a 1-button later when I realized I wasn't using the second button. You can press the single button with two or three fingers, and that feels much healthier for my hand.
check out the date on the article: Friday 19 January 19101
can you say y2k+1 problem? i can
hahaha
actually, i can't.
------------
a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
> drag and drop isnt copy and paste
... please. No, you don't know it all.
You can drag and drop into a folder or onto the desktop to create a clipping. Then you can drag and drop that clipping into a million documents after that. Or, double-click the clipping and copy it to the clipboard and paste from there.
The combination of easy to hit menus that you can't overshoot, uniform key commands, and pervasive drag and drop is easy to use and becomes second nature. It's simplicity. It's Zen. You ought to try it before you criticize.
It's funny how a Linux guy would never stomach command-line tips from a Mac user, but Linux guys never hesitate to prounounce their own GUI theories to be much better than Apple's. A little humility
> I mean they made firewire years ago, and what
... huge. It's the standard method for moving digital video between devices, and is about to become the standard method for moving MIDI and digital audio, with Yamaha's mLAN, which uses FireWire. Every digital camcorder and VCR has FireWire. TiVo's and other set-top boxes have FireWire. All Macs have FireWire, except the bargain-basement iMac. The whole TV and movie industry is going digital, and they're doing it with FireWire and QuickTime. It's a tremendously successful technology.
> has it done since then?
FireWire is huge
I cannot claim to be proficient enough in Apple code to know what is needed for Be to legally get BeOS running on the G* platform, but I do know that when Be was focused on BeOS, Apple was not forthcoming with that information. The reason the Linux PPC crowd got it working was because they reverse-engineered the information they needed. It would not have been rational for Be to do that and open themselves up to lawsuits by Apple.
As for having the necessary source code shipping "for years" (huh?), where'd you hear that? Let's assume that what is available for Darwin is now enough for Be to port BeOS to G*... it's too late, they are focused on BeIA. Maybe down the road they'll re-evaluate, but it doesn't matter any more.
Apple made their bed, and now they'll lay in it. Instead of selling more hardware running BeOS and MacOS, they decided to try and screw Be.
Incidentally, I believe this pissing match started when BeOS was blowing away MacOS on the same hardware, back before G* closed them down...
-thomas
"And like that
What if the Objective C front end just produced standard C code, and the programmers had to set up makefiles to compile it for themselves? Would any program called by gmake now have to be GLPed?
For example, I found the program 'ECLiPt SSH Shell' on freshmeat, it's GPLed. Does that mean it's illegal to use it with a commercial SSH implemetation?
This example might not be completely accurate, but I hope you get the idea.
I can understand dynamic linking, but insisting that front ends are linking seems to limit free software more than it protects it.
The best book I have read about SJ/NeXT is "Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing" (out of print, get it from your library). This is the "anti-reality-distortion-field" book, and is very condemning of Jobs as a technician, leader, and businessman. While this book is very informative and well-written from these perspectives, it misses a very important perspective.
Those who condemn Jobs as a charlatan and a showman should try considering him from the perspective of someone whose ultimate goal is to make a serious impact on how people look at things, which is typically the role of the "artist" in a society. While Picasso was a bastard of a human being and made plenty of self-indulgent crap as well as revolutionary art, he deserves recognition for introducing powerful and influential new ideas to the culture at large.
So, I think that being the leading "artist for the computer world" is what Jobs is ultimately most interested in, much more so than any particular bottom-line, technical, or political goal regarding computers (though it obviously galls him that the role of "most influential" is not that same as "most successful and dominant").
Now, if someone wrote an analysis of Jobs' performance as an influence on society's changing attitudes and conceptions of computers and computing, I'd buy the book. Of course, the recent "gold rush" mentality has the entire computing community focused on $ and world domination, so I don't see anything not of that perspective coming soon.
Clearly what RMS said disagrees with you.
:-)
This won't be the first time
I wasn't there when Steve and Richard slugged it out. All I know is that Objective C was a *frontend* for gcc. That's even how RMS describes it, as a front end. Every front end I have ever seen was not a derivative of the back end.
front ends are bounded by the GPL because (for the purpose of the GPL) they are derivatives of gcc.
The GPL cannot and does not rewrite Copyright law. And the GPL clearly states that it operates under Copyright law. It doesn't matter a hill of beans what the purpose of the GPL is, front ends are not automatically derivatives of the back ends. I don't know whether or not Objective C was a derivatie of gcc or not, but judging from its description as a "front end", I can only surmise that it was not.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I think OS X will be one of the best dev platforms for Java.
Also note that Swing was originally IFC, which was basically a Java copy of NeXT's AppKit.
Certainly if your goal is to write a pure java app, then that's what you'll do. But if your goal is to write a Mac app -- writing it in Java/Cocoa will be a big productivity booster. (ObjC would be arguably faster / more productive, but people seem to be afraid of the Smalltalk-like syntax).
But with Apple's dev tools, and companies like WebLogic and Oracle out there that "could" with minimal effort port their systems to OS X, I think the NeXT frameworks have an interesting future.
-Stu
As someone with a NeXTcube currently sitting right next to me, running a screensaver, acting as a print server, and telling me the time, I'm excited about OSX because in it, I see NeXTStep ressurected. It's the only thing that Apple has ever done that's gotten me excited. With the coming of their new G4s (which, make no mistake, kick the living crap out of most any Intel processor out there) and their sleek laptops, I think that Apple has a fighting chance. Don't believe the FUD, Apple is doing okay. It's been a hard quarter for everybody. Don't think that this single quarter of loss is going to sink them.
/bin/truth is out there.
In fact, I'm one of those people that will jump ship from Linux to use OSX. It's got the right underlying guts (BSD 4.4), it's got a pretty interface, it's got a bad-ass programming environment. A macintosh can be a real programming platform, instead of the toy that MacOS has made it for so many years.
--
The
If you make money by shorting stocks you're providing a valuable service to the economy, just as much as any voluntary trade. It's like preventing people from hoarding when they ought to be selling.
If you think traders don't earn their money then you probably subscribe to the labour theory of money or similar BS.
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>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
What about the "They-blew-it" dept?
:)
I live with a Mac sympathizer, so I know what it's like to have that viewpoint that Apple keeps coming out with cool things even though they sell like ice cubes in Alaska. I do have a certain amount of sentimental feeling that wishes Apple to stay alive, as well as an eye for aestetics that really likes the computer models that came out in the past few years... but at the same time, I'd be pretty ignorant to say that a company should stay alive if I personally wouldn't buy anything they sold even though I could USE it.
Then again, the main point of this message wasn't to bash Apple... it was to make fun of timothy for coming up with a lame dept.
Cocoa rules, Swing drools.
Unlike Swing, Cocoa apps (written in Java or ObjC) will actually behave like mac apps. Swing apps on the other hand will act like windows emulators.
All the look and none of the feel.
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>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
From CNET News.com a few days ago:
"Something they are doing with this system--and it's something they have not done in the past--is being price sensitive with PCs," Sargent said. "If you compare PowerBook to PC notebooks, the price-performance just hasn't been there."
The entry-level Titanium model sells for around $2,600, making it about the cheapest notebook that packs a 15-inch display.
Dulaney scoffed at the pricing, wondering how Apple could make any money on the Titanium.
"It must be a loss leader," he said. "There's no way Apple can sell titanium casing and that large a display and make money on this."
He also faulted Apple for using titanium casing, calling it a marketing ploy. "Complete titanium is a waste of money," Dulaney said.
Apple's low-cost, low-profit approach is simply "a way to gain market share," Dulaney said. "They're probably afraid of losing their core graphics or advertising talent."
As for "That's silly. In the portable market Intel uses dumbed-down chips so they don't eat as much power. AMD doesn't even have a portable chip. Apple uses a full-power G4 in the new Titanium PowerBooks."
Notice I grouped Transmeta/AMD/Intel together. I meant them as a group. Transmeta is doing great things with mobile chip design, AMD is now working with them. Intel will be releasing their cobbled chip to compete.
Meanwhile, yes Apple has just now started shipping faster mobile processors. How long until they are way behind again? They have never been able to keep up. I believe that platform has been at 500Mhz for the entire year of 2000.
And please, no one pull out the stupid integer performance tests and try and tell me 500Mhz PPC = 1Ghz x86!
As for higher prices, don't buy one.
Yeah, me and 95% of all other computer users. And that's exactly the problem Apple has faced! Duh!
-thomas
"And like that
Yea right, and this is why OPENSTEP was such a success.
OS development is always subsidized, even Windows. There is no way Apple would make money selling OS X. OS X is merely a way to sell more hardware.
Are you seriously going to entertain the idea that PC makers will sell machines with OS X built-in?
Until people are prepared to pay for the cost of OS development it's all a pipe dream.
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>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
> Quick! copy and paste any amount of text without touching they keyboard
It's called drag+drop text moron.
copy+paste in X11 has to be the most moronic thing I've ever experienced. Drag+drop text is far superior if you want to avoid the keyboard.
BTW I have four buttons
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>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
The reason BeOS doesn't run on new Macs is that Gasse(sp?) hates Jobs. Simple as that.
Again, Be could have very easily used what LinuxPPC had done to get BeOS running on G3/G4s. I don't see LinuxPPC getting sued. Be chose not to. There was a post to this effect, I believe by an Apple engineer, that if Be took two people and worked for a week they could get BeOS running on the G3s.
Apple makes money on hardware, anyway, I doubt they'd care that much if Be stole away a few users.
I'm a mac user, and I have four mouse buttons, yet I agree with the general sentiment.
MacOS has the minimum requirement of one button, but that doesn't mean you can't use more. I have click, contextual click, double click, and click-hold. I probably use the double-click more than the others. I have the option of accessing the menu a la NeXT with a click but don't find it useful. I could assign any button to do anything.
IMO the X11 behavior wastes buttons. I can cut+paste without the keyboard and it only takes one button. Make a selection then drag it, effortless and more intuitive than X11's mindless button wastage.
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>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
NeXT/Apple and Linux/DOS?
Unless I'm severely mistaken, Apple's overriding philosophy has, generically, been to engineer towards excellence. Which lead to the adoption of SCSI over IDE, early on, and Motorola over Intel, wireless networking, and USB over serial, and to engineer those standards when none existed, like Firewire, or ADB, or fanless cubes, or optical drives, or using NeXT over Be, etc.
There is no IBMesque philosophy; each manufacturer, like Apple, has their own design goals. Some try to make nifty hardware, like Sony, some try to make high volume low margin devices, like Gateway or Dell, and some are just mediocre pieces of crap.
Apples today, at least, use standard memory, standard IDE drives, standard Firewire drives, standard USB buses, standard PCI and AGP slots, and standard networking protocols.
The only thing proprietary inside an Apple machine is the engineering done to make it possible; the chipsets, the ROMs, the motherboard layout, the CPU and logic, etc. I've always noticed how exacting the engineering inside Apples have been, ever since MacIIs.
Cannot talk much about NeXTs.
They lack the diversity? Excuse me? That's an irrelevant concept. Apple is a vendor and purveyor of PCs as much as Gateway. They purchase and compete for ATI chips against Dell, have to buy and use harddisks no different than IBM, compete against Sony for firewire implementations, Compaq for USB connectors, Micron for IDE interfaces, etc.
If you mean by lack of diversity that there weren't multiple manufacturers of Apples... well, there wasn't exactly many manufacturers of HP computers either. Nor could you swap CPUs, motherboards, or fans on an HP computer, today, with that of a Compaq. Try, HP sooo engineers their cases, it's almost custom.
HD, CD-ROMs, memory, CPUs, video cards, and sound cards, maybe. But with sound and ethernet increasingly being included on the motherboard, many of today's PCs are starting to look more and more like Apple's machines.
I dunno, I think you're over-generalizing with your comparison to Apple/NeXT and Linux/DOS.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Last I checked TiVo removed the firewire port (which can be added later, it's just a card).
Personally I think Apple should mkae TiVo-like software so I can use my mac as a TiVo. Make it AppleScriptabe too |-)
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>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
When Steve Jobs says "We fucked up," you don't tell him off. I was astonished that he'd say something like that, but it's exactly what I like to hear. The fact that he admits it is terrific, because it means maybe he isn't such a stubborn idiot as he has been in the past.
...what a loss-leader is?
That is the sweetest laptop I have ever seen, and there are a lot of people who agree. Apple is gonna make a fortune off those things.
You know that old saying, "We don't charge a dime for this product, but we make up for it in volume!"
And BTW, Apple is now at 733MHz, and should be going higher soon.
Well, I heard that a year or more ago with the last increase in speed... meanwhile Intel released Pentium 4 at 1.4Ghz, and they aren't stopping there, thanks to the x86 competition (Transmeta/AMD/Intel).
I realize comparing Mhz between PPC and x86 is not even keel, but still, why in the hell did it take Apple over a year to increase the speed?
BTW, the 15.2" screen is measured diagonally. I don't care if it's wide or tall, 15.2" is bigger than 15", which is bigger than most laptop screens. I.e. expensive. Titanium is expensive. Etc....
"And like that
Be, on the other hand, is on its deathbed. Worth a paltry $70 million dollars, Be is very near being delisted and will likely be delisted ion the next twelve months given the current trend in its stock. They're so succesful they can hardly stay in business. Given their brutalized finances and grim outlook, I can't figure out at all how you came to your absurd conclusions, but why not put your money where your mouth is and make a substantial investment in Be? Seriously, with a sizeable loan, you could end up owning a substantial part of the company. If Be is going to be the next Microsoft, you could easily turn $10 million now into $20 billion...but something tells me you know deep down that you are full of shit.
How the hell did this score at all!
Elephant: a mouse built to government specs
Has anyone got that 1984 Apple commercial archived? Not in Quicktime format, I would prefer a format that can play on any os, such as MPEG or the older AVI. Hell, convert it to DivX:) if you want.
The reason BeOS doesn't run on new Macs is that Gasse(sp?) hates Jobs. Simple as that.
Yeah, that truly makes sense. Gassee risks ruining his company because he doesn't like a former co-worker. Mm-Hmm...
Again, Be could have very easily used what LinuxPPC had done to get BeOS running on G3/G4s. I don't see LinuxPPC getting sued.
LinuxPPC and Be, Inc. are hardly the same thing. What happens if LinuxPPC gets sued? Perhaps the group disbands and forms elsewhere under different leadership.
What happens if Be, Inc. gets sued? Quite possibly, they are bankrupted in the process. (They are not exactly a big company with lots of money.)
There was a post to this effect, I believe by an Apple engineer, that if Be took two people and worked for a week they could get BeOS running on the G3s.
Well if we're going on hearsay, I also remember reading posts by Be employees that it could be done, but only by reverse engineering the code, something Be, Inc. did not want to risk, legally.
Apple makes money on hardware, anyway, I doubt they'd care that much if Be stole away a few users.
If this were actually how Apple felt, why not give Be the information they needed, without requiring them to reverse engineer the code and open themselves up to attack.
-thomas
"And like that
> "Poorly scalable ?" :-)
Any NeXT would come with a free app : Zila, allowing its applications to be multithreaded across a local network.
So, no.
I tried and this.... Damn! *R*O*C*K*S*
I could do a billing system in a week with a bunch of old NeXTstation.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
A tasty monkey. That makes you happy. And see things. Mmmm, monkey.
So, what is it that Jobs has against the poor floppy drive? I mean, look at the NeXT box, the iMac... Did he once lose some important file he saved on a floppy and take some oath to remove the from the face of the earth or something???
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Dulaney scoffed at the pricing, wondering how Apple could make any money on the Titanium.
Apple sells great products at high prices, and the analysts say the prices are too high. Apple sells great products at low prices, and the analysts say the prices are too low. I seriously doubt Apple is losing money on the PBG4. BTW, the 15" screen is a 3:2 ratio, so it's not really as big as a normal 15". IIRC, it's exactly the same height as the 14", but wider.
That is the sweetest laptop I have ever seen, and there are a lot of people who agree. Apple is gonna make a fortune off those things.
And BTW, Apple is now at 733MHz, and should be going higher soon.
The article did not mention but NeXT/Steve Jobs has the honor of being the first significant GPL violator. Jobs took gcc as the system compiler for NextStep. NeXT added Objective C support but tried to keep it proprietary. After a stand-off with the FSF/RMS NeXT donated the Objective C compiler to GNU.
Today gcc is still the system compiler of Mac OS X. Steve Jobs depends on the work of Richard Stallman for his OS.
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people. Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
Apple has shipped source code to make their machines run since before 1996. Every heard of MkLinux?!
MkLinux source for all machine (prior to NewWorld) were available during all of this crap. Be got money from Intel, so they didn't care about the Mac anymore.
It always amuses me the amount of non-macintosh people who seem to think that Job's decision to kill off the macintosh clone market was a poor business decision.
Unfortunately, as cool as it would be to have commodity mac hardware, the clone manufacturers weren't trying to compete against Intel architecture based manufacturers, but against apple itself. Considering that Apple makes most of it's money from hardware, this was one of the things that was killing the company.
Jobs did the right thing by cancelling the licensing scheme, as apple would have wound up going the way of IBM's PC business in the mid-1980's had they kept it going.
life is a canvas/and the paint is hope and promise/the world is ours/no one can ever take it from us.
You might think you've made yourself look quite insightful with your contrary hooey, but the internet appliance market is still nascent, and is potentially empty. The more people try to obsolete the PC, the more it becomes the center of the electronic home. Face it, a generalized computing device with lots of hardware, loadable software, and a complex OS is going to be part of computing in the home and business for at least the next twenty years.
So I should exchange my opinions for your guesses?
Again, I never said I thought the IA's would replace PC's. But people love devices that are specific to one task and do it well. I could use my PC as a DVD player, but I don't, it's a pain in the ass. I could use my computer as a TV (Gateway tried that), but I don't, because it's a pain in the ass. I could use my computer as a stereo, but I don't, because it's a pain in the ass.
Get the idea? A generalized component is powerful but not easy to use. It makes sense that the IA market will be huge, because there are more normal people than geeks, and normal people want things that are easy and fun to use. IA's can deliver this.
Be, on the other hand, is on its deathbed.
Yeah right! Apparantly you've been under a rock during their recent huge announcements. Sony being the biggest, but FIC is huge in Asia. Then there's Qubit, one of the first delivering untethered webpads. Compaq will be using Be. The HARP reference platform has been getting very favorable commentary, and rumors abound about who is using it (many think Compaq's upcoming stereo component will). How often have you seen companies like Sony work with a company that's on "its deathbed" for such an important part of their company plans? Sony has said they want the eVilla to be the center of the household devices.
Be is very near being delisted and will likely be delisted ion the next twelve months given the current trend in its stock.
What are you smoking? Be was down to around 50 cents a few weeks ago, before the recent announcements. They hit $3, and are now holding at $2 for the past week or so. The stock got so low because there was NO NEWS from Be, no one knew what to expect, if they had good partners for IA's, etc. Then they dropped the Sony bomb! They'd been working with them in secret since last March -- who else is Be hiding?
(Incidentally, how it works is you're given a warning by NASDAQ if you trade below $1 for ten straight days. You then have 3 months to trade above $1 for ten straight days to avoid delisting.)
They're so succesful they can hardly stay in business.
Yeah, been doing hardly staying in business for more than 10 years now, too. Must be doing something right.
Given their brutalized finances and grim outlook,
Grim outlook? They've announced great partners for this emerging market that could explode in the next few months and years. The market is not dominated by any other OS maker. They are poised to do very well. Their burn rate is low. They are focused and doing good work, judging by the announcements. Grim outlook???
I can't figure out at all how you came to your absurd conclusions, but why not put your money where your mouth is and make a substantial investment in Be.
I have, smart ass... $20,000. I've averaged down since $15, now own 5,000 shares. Why don't you put your money where your mouth is, and sell some calls for BEOS? When Be goes above $5 (and is marginable again), will you short it? If not, why not? They are on their deathbed, after all...
Seriously, with a sizeable loan, you could end up owning a substantial part of the company.
Well smart ass, since only a minority of the company shares are public, I'd say you're dead wrong.
If Be is going to be the next Microsoft, you could easily turn $10 million now into $20 billion...
You're probably right, except I don't have 10 million, only $20,000. Still, I'll be happy with turning that into a shitload of money, thanks a lot.
but something tells me you know deep down that you are full of shit.
I don't know about that, but I have been following computers for 20 years, and Be for 5, and have been reading everything I can get my hands on about the IA market and BeIA specifically. I'd say I'm a little more informed than yourself on the entire matter, especially judging by your ignorant comments posted here.
"And like that
You can find it here...
http://freshmeat.net/projects/charities.cron/
Remember the MkLinux project? It was originally sponsored in part by Apple, and the first release of it was available from Apple's own website starting in 1996. Support for G3s was added to the project in late-1997/early-1998 (see here for reference).
Free Hans!
Apple is non-existant here. Be is turning into a BIG player. (Sony, Qubit, Compaq, Intel, and FIC, to name a few recent deals.)
wow, you need a reality check. have you been following the embedded market at all? Be is a drop in the bucket. QNX, WindRiver WinCE and Linux all completely swamp Be in marketshare and in design wins. i work at a company that designs chips for the IA market -- i know it very well. i have yet to hear a single one of our clients (including Compaq and Sony) mention Be. they're all designing around Linux right now (and quite frankly, i think Linux is the best solution. i push it whenever possible).
the IA market is very volitile right now, and over 90% of the IA appliances, even from the big companies, don't make it to market, and of those that do, very few have taken off. so when you see these product announcements from Be, take them with a grain of salt. i'm not seeing Be in any of major designs that i've dealt with, so i highly doubt they'll be dwarfing Apple anytime soon.
i was a huge fan of Be, but their inability to choose a market segment (high end audio, no! high-end graphics! no, consumer workstations, no! internet applicances, yeah!) is making a complete mockery of the great concepts they've designed in the OS. i think the best thing to happen to them right now would be to go out of business and opensource their code. at least then their great ideas would find a niche, because it's obvious that their marketing crew can't figure out what to do with it.
- j
ooooh "disrespected" I'm sure apple is shivering in fear! So do you need to know a secret handshake to get in to the "Apple enemy list clubhouse"?
Motorola, is hurting and hopes to leave the desktop processor business. This week Motorola announced 2500 layoffs
okay explain how Motorola closing a factory in Harvard Illinois that makes cellphones means that Mot is leaving the desktop cpu biz? Let me repeat myself : a factory that makes cellphones. Designs cell phones? no. Designs processors? no. Design the cell phone's case? no. Design anything? no. And it isnt like Mot doesn't have other cell phone factories
The most reasonable solution would be for Apple to open up. Open up its hardware specs and software
and this would make money for apple how? flame on baby
Full-powered-no-compromise chips? Duron doesn't count.
"There are no cool guys in musicals." -- Coach McGuirk