Slashdot Mirror
OS X Won't Be Fully Functional On March 24th
mduell writes: "Just saw this over on MSNBC. It looks like Apple rushed OS X to meet the deadline, and that many key features (like DVD playing and burning) won't be functional when it ships on the 24th of this month. Also, there won't be a big splashy introduction, perhaps one in the summer when Puma (OS X 1.1) comes out." Which is not to say that Mac owners can't watch DVDs -- if they are dual-booting, at least. The article gets into a few other gripes as well, but none sounds earthshaking to me.
BE? Why would they have done that?
Pooty tweet
That is because Apple turned off corn dumbs for the avagerage user.
This sounds EXACTLY like a beta test, except they're charging money for it AGAIN, and will most likely charge for the OS X 1.0 to 1.1 upgrade. Good marketing plan guys, release a product you know doesn't fully work and then charge your most devout followers twice over for it. Apple needs to reexamine it's approach to its users, this is like a slap in the face.
-Z
Now I'm off to the store to get some food before that damn nor'easter hits and ruins my spring break
It's just typical Microsoft bashing. Because Microsoft has invested some money into NBC, all of the NBC journalists have lost all journalistic integrity! Yeah right. Besides, the story came from ZDNet and MSNBC must have some kind of redistribution agreement.
See the CNet article. Not very encouraging.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Printing support in the beta was great for Postscript and networked printers, but for "commodity" inkjets it was very weak, and since Apple was putting the burden on Epson, etc. to write their own drivers, it didn't happen and doesn't seem real likely to happen quickly, particularly for older inkjets. What is the incentive on the printer manufacturer's part? They'd rather sell a new printer instead of write a driver for a printer they sold 3 years ago for $100.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
I'm waiting for OSX as fanatically as anybody, but here's why I can't use OSX on a daily basis:
:(
- I can't print
- I can't use my external USB drives, USB scanner, or SCSI CD-RW
- My 3rd-party mouse is barely functional.
Yes, I love running emacs in term windows and so on, but I need access to my devices. On the other hand, my spankin' new TiBook is just a toy for playing Diablo on until I get Darwin, so I NEED OSX. Lack of DVD support sucks, because that was going to be the coup-de-grace killersexycool thing I showed off to my Windows-weenie friends (and brother). I didn't want to have two partitions, I wanted to go all-out OSX. Looks like I can't until summer.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
The API for MP is part of Carbon, so go back into you hole. Another thing it is user friendly, just as much as pthreads is.
With Jobs at the helm? I doubt it!
If you put Apple on the same curve, you can expect to see a _really_ useful multitasking Mac OS in about 2004-2005. If the compress the curve (which they probably will, since they don't have parallel-track desktop and server OS's, but rather a single-track GP OS), you can expect to shave 1 - 1 1/2 years off that. So you won't see a really full featured Mac OS X until about 10.5, which should release late in 2002.
If they can't finish OSX until July, they should name the March release 9.9, and name the July release as OSX, and do the big ads in July.
"slashdot consensus". Time to switch drugs, my man. =)
they not pushing it out the door early, the OS is done, whats late is stuff like the DVD player s/w. which sounds like an app to me. its like saying Microsoft release Windows X early because Office Y is not ready.
plan 9
and hurd
are claimed to be the most advanced OSes
UNIX is old technology so heh !!
anyway let wait and see windows XP
cause if it dont crash , everything else will!!
sheep for the sheep human for the human i just wonna keep my soul alive
maybe he, like the majority of mac users, doesn't have DVD drive in his mac?
OH! Well, yeah. I guess if there is no OSX driver they should rasterise the PDF stuff on their own (the existing Preview app can turn PDF into TIFF files -- which it can screw up about as badly as ghostscript) and hand it off to the print driver in Classic....
i thought OSX PB has colorsync already?
Hardly. Before moving over to corporate sibling ZDNet, Matthew Rothenberg was director of online content at Mac Publishing LLC (MacWeek, MaCentral and MacWorld), and before that he was Senior News Editor at MacWeek itself. I don't think those credentials suggest anti-Apple bias.
It orginaly came from ZDNet, so they are just copying.
Hey, I've got a DVD drive on my PowerBook, too, and I appreciate everyone's "I want it all now" stance, but only to the point of reasonableness. A DVD drive is not a fundamental part of the computing experience, included or not, advertised or not. If you bought a $5000 computer (or even $2000) primarily because it plays DVDs, then you're a pretty sad case. It's an extra. I use the CD-ROM capabilities far more, and that works find under OS X.
And while appreciate, too, the frustrations of having to boot into OS 9, I'd like to toss out a gentle reminder that you don't have to upgrade right away. Wait a little. Let the cutting edge be dulled by others who will suffer for you, fill the message boards with their complaints and their bug reports and their whining, let them influence the next version with their wishes and their demands. You can wait until Mac OS X.II or X.IV or whatever and then get exactly what you want.
Your Mac OS 9.x doesn't die and disappear the day Mac OS X is released.
Why is it that some people who are willing enough to exist on the frontline of technology are unwilling to bear the small penalties of being there first?
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
Despite all the hype and the progress, OS X is a 1.0 release. I personally will buy OS X 1.0, because I'm not really affected by any of the issues (no DVD drive, desktop Mac, etc).
:)
But yes, I will dual-boot
Then they should rename it OS V or OS 9.999.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Every Mac I own has a DVD player. I've watched one DVD on a computer a year ago when my stereo was on the fritz. No big deal to me really. Unless of course the intent is to never offer support, which is something I haven't heard anywhere.
It would be nice to see it by the end of May though since I've got to fly to San Hose for WWDC and the plain flight is boring without the PowerBook and in flight movies.
OTOH It's funny to see major news outlets like MSNBC and CNet, etc... spewing more rumor and supposition than www.macosrumors.com.
The truth will set you free.
I've been pondering this too.
Gee, do I have too much time on my hands or what?
Roman numerals have no sense of radix point so you really can't do a decimal there. Were they invented?
Perhaps a fraction:
Mac OS X I/X ??
Not elegant.
Maybe using lower case!
Mac OS Xi
Microsoft not only owns a stake in MSNBC, but also in.. Apple..
Maybe Apple is deliberately throwing the game, then?
Maybe not though..
--
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
It's the same thing with every software development group rushing to meet a deadline - rush the product out the door, leave a few bugs in it, and pray the patience of your consumers doesn't give out before your programmers do
I expected better of Apple, though. This isn't Windows, after all, this is a company that has prided itself on stability, innovation, and creativity. To just push this out the door when prudence demands a few more weeks is just an attempt to boost stock value...too bad
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
Got to the article too late to contribute, so I'll say it here.
The DVD license prevents Apple from making a DVD player to allows the DVD frames to be captured off the screen. Previous DVD players from Apple break things like `screen snapshot' to prevent this.
This makes a DVD player more complicated. Not only do you have to play a DVD, but you have to prevent a bunch of other unrelated features from working. Just the sort of cross functional integration that is difficult to perform during rapid development.
You can watch DVDs on Livid while running an Aqua Enlightenment theme although you will probably get sued six ways from Sunday.
just a small note - the word is
no _native_ playback.
they've got all the older os9 stuff still there, _including_ DVD playback. it's just not redone in carbon yet.
Sitting Walrus Blog
Good! Time for another group to experience shitty DVD support!
Something that we all need to keep in mind, is that there's nothing uncommon about this. At the risk of getting flammed, this is something that M$ does, Apple has a tradition, and the Linux/Open Source community does this as well. Take a look at the 2.4 kernel and you'll see that there are things that did not quite make the deadline for the first release, but did however get included in future releases, I can think of several right off the top of my head, namely ReiserFS. I am by no means an Apple/Macintosh fan, but before the bashing begins, this should be something to keep in mind.
Trying is the First Step to Failing --Homer Simpson
"Which is not to say that Mac owners can't watch DVDs -- if they are dual-booting, at least."
I thought that the whole point of running a Mac was NOT having to deal with crap like that. You know, having a PC that just works right out of the box? I guess Apple is finally giving up and falling in line with the rest of the industry when it comes to shipping a screwed up OS with missing features.
What a shame.
Obviously you've never owned or upgraded a Mac.
Apple just released the FREE update 9.1 for Mac OS 9, over a year after they released Mac OS 9 originally. Before 9.1, there was the 9.0.4 update, also free. For OS 8, there was the free 8.1 upgrade, and OS 8.5 had the free 8.5.1 and 8.6 upgrades. Back in the Dark Times, OS 7.5 has so many free upgrades, it was sad (7.5.5 was finally stable-ish).
Apple has a "Software Update" control panel in the OS, to automagically download patches to OS components when they're released. How much does Apple charge for this service? NOTHING, you ignorant troll.
Apple has a GREAT record of not charging for minor OS updates. It's the relatively big ones that are for-pay upgrades.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Everyone has stomped on MacOS for years for being a cooperatively multitasked system, i.e. no pre-emption in the OS. However, there is an advantage to this sort of system that no one mentions: real time response from the application level; that is, an application can run for as long as it needs to run before giving up the CPU to the OS or to other apps.
Real time program response is key to being able to burn CD-ROMs without creating coasters (gotta deliver the bits to the burner before its buffer runs dry), playing any kind of audio or video without jerking or dropouts (again, gotta deliver the data in time!). And so on.
UNIX is a multiuser timesharing system down to its very core; all system resources are fairly allocated amongst the processes running on the system. Overload the system, and all processes slow down. Real time scheduling (e.g. letting one or more processes get a fixed size share of system resources without regard to the remaining load) has been anathema to the mindset of the typical UNIX Systems Programmer forever - after all, that means picking winners and losers in a resource allocation. It's not fair.
For a multiuser system, this is a perfectly good attitude to take. However, UNIX systems are now used in other roles where this is exactly the wrong attitude to take; for example: the single user workstation.
For the Single User Workstation, the user must be king: he decides what he wants to do with the system, and the system should respond as directed. This is what Apple calls "user centered design" and it has been part of their mindset for decades. This is why when the mouse stops moving in MacOS, you know that the system is dead; under UNIX, you might just be waiting for the X server to page back in.
What we in the UNIX community have been getting away with is just being a little careful about what we ask the system to do at a given moment; we play with "nice" and making sure that memory or CPU intensive things just don't get run at the same time. We've also been lucky that Moore's Law keeps giving us faster hardware, and unlike most of the rest of the software world, our OS and its basic set of utilities have not changed fundamentally in over a decade, so they really do run twice as fast on hardware that is twice as fast.
Unfortunately, this sort of system management is a geek's cheat; we can do it because we understand the system, and the consequences of various job mixes. Ma and Pa Kettle aren't as well educated as we, and so for them, it's high time that the applications and the OS begin to cooperate on questions of resource allocation.
In other words, there needs to be an API wherein an application can request some level of resources to guarantee the user real time response, and if the OS can't provide it (resource overcommit would result), then the application can sanely inform the user why it can't be run right now.
MacOS X is fundamentally UNIX at its heart, with all the fair-share multiuser system attitude that implies. The NeXT people who are now in charge of Apple are UNIX people. Unfortunately, this means they've missed the point I'm making here, and the existing MacOS market is just about to give them a serious reality check.
The biz about playing DVDs is not just about Hollywood wants for protection of their content; it's also about being able to do a real time thing in a fair-share scheduled OS.
From the article:
Among the other problems with the March release, sources said, is that it wont take full advantage of multiprocessing systems or new video accelerators, such as Nvidias recently announced GeForce 3 or ATIs Radeon. People who have systems containing these new graphics cards may not see a speed-up of 3D or 2D graphics until support is introduced with Puma [OS X 1.1].
Okay i can see that, plus it doesnt allow us to watch DVD's. Thats it?! Like any of us use the Mac as our primary means for viewing DVD's in the first place. Big whoopie do.
Apple did what i've watched a ton of /.ers suggest Mozilla do, finish the "core" of the product, ship the damn thing, then work on the small stuff in the next release.
Kudos to Steve Jobs for still shipping the product on time (for this target at least.. :-) and staving off the DVD/video issues for a few months - as the article also points out, not many programs are ready to run native under OS X (carbon) anyway, so why drop the whole release back? The lack of DVD playback is not a deal-breaker to many people, so ship the product, let us early adopters (beta testers received coupons for $30 off the $129 sticker price, BTW) use it, then continue to integrate fixes/DVD drivers as time goes on.
Go Apple, go! Now i will have two boxes that dont crash and provide a friendly terminal window on demand.
Sig line? We dont need no stinking sig line!!
Moderators need an additional choice: "Karma Whore" for people who cut-and-paste articles as their comments!
This only tells me that JLG was not shrewd enough in his dealings with Apple. If the threat of a lawsuit leads a OS company to drop support for an entire line of computers, and relegate itself to being a worthless OS (BeIA - that's funny! as my Baby Furby would say), then I wouldn't want that OS in the first place. Secondly, I don't understand the following BeOS has in the first place. I installed it -- then promptly uninstalled it. It was completely backwards and only had frame buffer support on a ubiquitous and generic accelerator chip (NeoMagic). That chip had been out a year (everything is that IBM puts in their thinkpads, so they can get refined drivers). It also didn't support a 3com ethernet adapter (3c579), and didn't support a ESS Solo 1 audio adapter. In final, all this hardware had open specs and drivers in Linux at the time, but were not supported in BeOS. I call that *completely useless*. I also call BeIA a running joke so that JLG can keep his burned-out operation in VC funds. I pity the VCs who are going to end up burning in a financial hell over his pooh OS.
TurboD
Just checking: You do know that the Beta has an expirity sometime in May or June, right? Best to use your upgrade coupon to 1.0 when the time comes.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Crippled? What leads you to believe the DVD is crippled. Right now there is no support for it in OS X (that's to either play DVDs from the internal DVD player or to write them.)
One of Apple's primary markets is in video editing and production with Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. Both of these are $1,000 products and neither of them, at this time, runs on OS X. There's no announcement of when they will, although NAB would be about the right time-frame for Apple to release them.
There's nothing crippled about either of these products.
I can only assume that what you want is a drive which is capable of, somehow, doing a perfect bit for bit copy of a DVD. To my knowledge the hardware provided by Pioneer will not allow this. It is, after all, not possible to author a DVD on a computer with either CSS, Macrovision, or Region support. These are written by the folks who press the DVD.
What you can make on a Mac is a completely open DVD -- and that's ALL you can make.
Is this, somehow, a bad thing? I don't think so.
I can't understand it.
iDVD and other things which are not functional is not part of an OS itself.
So, the title misleads.
Is the iDVD the only DVD player on MacOS X?
After all, would the company that freely distributes the means (and a great one at that) to play and burn MP3s really be bowing to industry pressure?
From the looks of it, iTunes will be avalible when mac OS X v1.0 comes out, no prob.
no one uses ?? no "REAL" Apps runs on ?? isn't it dead already ?? As I always said BeOS's only way to survive is to compete with WINCE. But no !!! all those BeOS trolls said that BeOS is so freaking good that it's better than Mac OSX, and OS X will die. Let's see how long do we have to wait for the announcement of the end os BeOS :) Or maybe Opensource of BeOS (somewhat like Mozilla) ?
Processor speed is stuck at 500 MHz.
Not. It's at 733
Motorola announced 10000 layoffs so far this year, 2/3 in their fabs.
Every semiconductor supplier is suffering.
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010227/2156.html
Apple's stock is in the tank.
So is Intel, Sun, Cisco, Dell, etc.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
One word: MSNBC. Emphasis on MS.
-lx
Um, was it Apple's decision? NO! This is a company that has taken the motto "Rip Burn Mix." Why wouldn't they want to do this with video as well?
Its a first generation product. Who else is letting ANYONE make DVDs? Perhaps its not a perfect implementation, but it is far beyond what anyeone is currently doing.
I suppose you also blame DVD players for following region encoding rules. Is their their choice?
I think we should take bets on how long it will take for someone to get around the copy protection on those things. I'm not aware of anything preventing someone from decoding a disc and encoding it without the region locking. (the only way it will burn.)
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Dual-Booting will not be a big issue for me to watch a DVD because watching a DVD is not a regular application -- meaning, you don't just up-and-run it. Anyways, I already have to reboot to watch a DVD using just Mac OS 9 because I have to switch off virtual memory - and that requires a reboot. And as someone said, maybe it will be sitting there on our idisks on the 24th - who knows?
Is this by the "BSD is dying" troll?
God. MS-NBC is a freaking propaganda machine, not a news source.. look at this article on XP. "Goodbye Mac snobs" ?? The article has less tact and maturity than most trolls on here..
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Give me a break. MS owns ~$300,000,000 worth of Apple right now which is not a very significant portion. Add on to it the facts that 1) it's non-voting shares and 2) they can't sell it until 2002.
How much does Apple have in cash alone?
"So go find another excuse besides cowardice."
HA! That's pretty funny coming from an AC...
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
So they are crippling OSX and breaking commonly used features?
when DVDs are playing, yes. right now if you take a screen shot in OS 9 while playing a DVD you get a magenta box where the DVD is playing. the OS isn't going to be "crippled" in normal use, but it is a requirement for the DVD application.
yes, it's lame, but don't blame Apple, blame the MPAA.
- j
Former Mac developer.
FYI, my "DVD player" is a Win2k box with a Sony DVD-ROM and a WinDVD software decoder. This is a pretty fast box, and WinDVD actually produces a better picture than most PCI hardware decoders I've seen, and is much cheaper. Yes, I'm a UNIX guy, and yes, I paid for Win2k, and no, I don't regret it -- I can play all the new games, watch DVDs, and only have to reboot it once a month. (And that's just to reclaim resources, not because it crashes.) The Win2k box is still mocked by my Sun boxes, but not as much as the Win98 games box was. :-) It really is quite a successful merge of NT4's [relative] stability and 98's game support.
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I like to watch.
How much does Apple have in cash alone?
according to their 2000 financials, they have about $1,191,000,000 in cash, but approximately $5,427,000,000 in cash and short-term investments (a few billion anyhow).
Apple didn't need Microsoft's money when they invested, the cash was to settle some lawsuits (including the GUI-ripoff bit). for what it's worth, Apple should have got considerably more than the 150 Million, but they had to cave to get a promise from Microsoft that they'd continue developing Office for the Mac. because really, if the MacOS can't open Word documents, it would never have even the marketshare it has now.
yeah, it sucks, but hey, aren't monopolies great!?!
- j
(Pssst -- don't forget now SCO is still trying to sell UW7 as "SVr5" UNIX! ;-)
And of course, there's nothing as loopy as the Solaris versioning. Solaris 8 is really Solaris 2.8, running the SunOS 5.8 kernel, and so on. :-)
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I like to watch.
They've really dug themselves a hole with the X thing, what with there being no Roman numeral for zero.
You make an intelligent point. The article seems to be taking the perspective of the consumer, who they are presuming to be somewhat dull and therefore ignorant to the origin of but simply noticing the result of the feature-leaveout, or the glitch, or the bug... whatever. They're ignoring, however, the bigger corporate-level picture that bugs occur due to indirect management decission (the decission to rush) whereas feature leaveout is due to direct management decission (the decission to omit certain items).
michael
/global33/
Speaking of which, does anyone have their print book yet? I'm ordering the hardcover next week...
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I like to watch.
You won't be able to play DVDs in Classic because the DVD player makes direct hardware calls to disable things like screenshotting, and to tell the video card to start decoding the DVD. Classic does not, and will not support this.
You would with one of these! :)
--GnrcMan--
This is, after all, a temporary inconvenince and should be fixed within a few months, according to reports.
Steve Jobs himself has mentioned many, many times during his keynote speaches that Apple won't be installing OS X on any of their machines until late Summer or Fall. Make sure your friend realizes that. That is when they expect people to migrate to OS X, but I think most consumers will go out and buy it right away. Dumb.
DVD playback is important to me too. My computer is my only DVD player, and most of what I watch is on DVDs. However, I can handle the slight inconvenience of dual booting untill Apple has a player ready. Hell, for all we know they may actually have one ready and sitting on our iDisks by March 24 or very soon thereafter. Just because it probably won't make the shipping CD doesn't mean that it doesn't exist at all.
And, btw, for the rest of the Slashdot FUD-mongers, it is only DVD playback that doesn't work. You can still use the drive. Hell, you can even read the file system of a DVD video. If you are willing to break the law (as crappy of a law it is, Apple won't break it), you can probably hack a way to watch DVDs without too much trouble. Apple just has to make sure they do it to the letter of the law.
As for the other concerns of the article, I cannot comment on sleep issues because my computer never sleeps. However, there have been a lot of comments on the MacNN forums stating that sleep works just fine. As for problems causing the system to hang, I doubt it. I personally was unable to crash the original PB, and I can only assume that stability has increased since then. IMNSHO, even the PB was better and more stable than any of the crap that Microsoft puts out, and the interface was much smoother than anything on any other *nix OS. It can only have gotten better since then. I don't know anything about the video stuff except that I am pretty sure that the Rage 128 pro cards (which are probably in 65%-70% of the G3 and G4 macs on the market, work just fine.
A LOT of people are saying that Apple should not ship an "incomplete" OS on the 24th. Well, the OS is pretty much complete. There may be a few applications that are extra, that may not ship, but the OS is there. And Apple needs to ship this OS so that software companies (who have been holding off porting their apps until the OS is finished) will get off their buts and write their software for OS X.
Anyway, most of this is old news. We already went through all of the FUD-mongering last week when c|net broke this "news". I'll tell you what. I'll make a deal with you. My copy of OS X is preordered, DVD or no DVD. I'll give you all a full report of what I think of it, what works, what doesn't, what is better than OS 9.1 or any other OS out there, and what is worse. I see MacOS X as a Good Thing(tm) and I will have it as soon as possible.
Cheers. ^_^
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
This is assuming that DVD player development and OS development have to happen in in series. Apple could have farmed off the development of a DVD player to some sort of outside shop. (probably one of the old NeXT developers.)
Carbon has a MP API, or Carbon has the MP API that Classic did? It was my understanding that a MP OS9 porgam had things that ran on the "not the main CPU", and those things could NOT talk to the filesystem, and they could NOT talk to quickdraw and in fact could NOT a whole lot of stuff.
Am I wrong? Is this some other past Mac MP API? Is this some wretched API I dreamed up on my own?
I'm totally willing to beleve that OSX has a MP API. I would be shocked if it didn't at least have the mach MP API, which was both better and worse then the POSIX one. I was talking about the OS9 API.
10-to-1 this is just another PR stunt by MS because they heard a rumor that someone said they overheard by the water cooler when this guy they don't know was talking about his sister who dates a guy who knew this kid who's uncle worked for the guy who is now working on DVD support for Apple.
All your base are belong to us.
You have no chance to survive make your time.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
You are totally wrong about the file system. In 9 you could call some of the File API in MP threads. In 8.6 these threads did not need be on a different processor than the main one.
I registered my bitches!
I registered my crack!
I registered SteveJobsLivesInMyClosetAndTellsMeThings.com!
Brownie points if you catch the reference.
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
Why not? Why don't you up and run it? Take a break from coding to watch the "smash the FAX machine" bit of Office Space? Or if you are making a comercial rewatch bits of the movie you are imitationg?
And even if it isn't a breif run of the player, why should you have to log out of five servers, bookmarke half a dozen web pages and tie up other work and play bits just so you can reboot and run the DVD player? That sucks.
I hope so. I'm allready sick of OS9. It makes my skin crawl to to have to boot it to do anything.
I was thinking X I they don't call it os "EX" they call it "Ten" so if the called it X I it would be "Ten One"
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
Yeah, but you'd kinda hope that after 4 years and two months of work on an already-existing OS (OpenStep), you could ship feature-complete.
Remember that Quake 3 is already out for Mac OS X.
That said, I do realize that most hard core gamers will not be among the early adopters of OS X, especially not without good accelerated video support.
Back in January 1997, when Next had just been bought, I figured it would be two-and-a-half years before Apple managed to release a consumer OS based on OpenStep, and three-and-a-half before it was mainstream.
So I expected that in roughly July of 2000, Mac OS X would be mainstream. Instead, a year later, Macs with OS X preinstalled will have barely started shipping.
But, hey, it's got translucent windows, right?
Sweet.... MacOS Xenon. :-)
(Maybe they shoulda used THAT for the codename)
myselfmusic
He writes "Decline and Fall of the American Programmer," predicting the death of the American software engineering establishment. His predictions don't come true, so he writes another book called -- you can guess, right? -- "The Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer" explaining how disaster was narrowly averted thanks to people following his sage advice.
An isolated incident? No, it's a congenital personality flaw. He later wrote "Time Bomb 2000" and moved out to the American Southwest after withdrawing his funds from financial institutions. His prediction: near doomsday. And after nothing happened? In an interview, he had two replies: 1. I guess people listened to what I was saying and 2. the shit can still hit the fan.
Summary: Yourdon is an ego-maniacal idiot.
You can't use HFS. It's HFS+ or UFS. HFS+ allows for 255 char name. OS X does NOT have the 31 char filename limit regardless of which fs format you choose.
This post is so true.
Mod Him up.
1. Most things port to Darwin (the BSD layer), but there are a few complications. One linux complication is that gcc sometimes does bad things when pressed to optimize. But I've played DVDs under Linux/PPC. 2. Many AC3 ports don't resample - most Mac hardware has 44.1Khz as the highest sampling rate, not the 48KHz DVDs use, so someone needs to add a decimator. Once that is done, you can get sound. 3. Apple didn't provide a BSD layer to the DVD, so you need to use IOKit to do the key exchange with the DVD player using a completely different set of calls. They are in the header, but switching over the ioctls isn't trivial. This is if you want to use X or XAqua. 4. Then you need to use the graphics calls. Since X already uses them there should be an easy access to the framebuffer. I would love an Opensource DVD player to beat an official Apple player to OS X.
I've heard a lot about this supposed crippling done by Apple to their DVD-R from people on Slashdot, and yet I've never seen any links or other evidence to back it up. Someone in a thread earlier said that the drive was crippled to only be able to record 60 minutes. This isn't a "crippling" of the drive. It's just the fact that 60 minutes is 4.7 GBs of MPEG2 video, and the DVD-R drive can't make double layered DVDs. If that is the only reason you are calling the DVD-R drive crippled, then I suggest you stop spreading FUD.
It probably should, but there are other major Unix systems that have similar screwy naming systems. System V, System V release 2, System V Release 3, System V release 3.2, System V release 4.
I guess Apple is finally giving up and falling in line with the rest of the industry when it comes to shipping a screwed up OS with missing features
Your joking, right? You don't consider multiprocessing, preemptive multitasking and memory-protection to be features? In my book, an OS lacking *all 3* of these features (eg MacOS) is the textbook definition of 'screwed up', as you put it.
-- The only thing holding MacOS together is all the bugs holding hands
I think the only way Apple is going to prevent being read the riot act when MacOS X is released is to offer a free MacOS X 1.1 Upgrade on CD-ROM to anyone who sends in their registration cards for the OS.
That way, when MacOS 1.1 (code-named Puma) becomes available in July 2001 end users will be sent a full update disc without having to jam Apple's servers trying to download the upgrade.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
This article (<http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0102/28.o sx.shtml>) on MacCentral starts off:
It is not a question of being able to do it or support it. The real problem is the threat of lawsuit. There is no one to sue with Linux, so they have nothing to fear. Unfortunately, there is apparently a lot of bad blood between JLG and Jobs and so Be felt that unless they had Apple's direct blessing (in the form of a willful handout of motherboard specs) that it wouldn't be worth the risk. Apple probably has more lawyers than Be has employees so they decided to keep working rather than waste their investors' money on an avoidable court battle.
Yes, Be killed off support for BeOS on the PPC, not Apple. But indirectly it was Apple's fault because they never said they *wouldn't* sue. And given that Be is a commercial company and JLG and Jobs aren't very friendly there was a very real risk that Be may have been attacked.
It's a simple explaination and I suspect it's very very close to the mark. I really don't think it has anything to do with Intel investing in Be or anything else other than legal politics. It's a shame because I'd love to be using BeOS on a nice fast G4 right about now, but I guess that's the way it goes. I'll have to stick to using it on a nice fast PC then.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
As I mentioned in my post, I am scheduled to have v1.0 on the 25th of March. :) My point was that as long as it is as good as or better than the beta, it will be good enough for me.
------
Can you play DVDs on Mac Linux yet? That'd be a good piece of PR.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
is here: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-201-4997526-0.htm l
Can anyone name any large peice of software (as in more than 10 people working on it) that has come out within 6 months of it's target reliece date fully functional?
It's a completely different story for operating systems like FreeBSD, GNU/Linux x86, and Windows NT. Your users run everything from beat-up old Cyrix 586's with full-length ISA sound cards to 1GHz Athlon Thunderbirds with GeForce2's to SMP PIII Xenon beasts with 2GB RAM and SCSI RAIDs. I think that if Apple were suddenly thrown into that jungle of legacy systems, competing CPU vendors, and the plethora of 3rd-party add-ons, they would even make Windows Me look good.
Apple's world is one of dull uniformity, and a paisley chassis can't hide that. I don't think they could cut it in the real world.
PS - Thanks for the pr0n!
--
--
I like to watch.
I just want to emphasize the following:
... CD."
"...probably won't..."
-and-
"...ship on the
Which, means that a.)there is the possibility that it will ship on the CD, and b.) if not, it still may be in our iDisks on the 24th. I'm sure I won't be alone in letting everyone know as soon as my copy arrives.
Cheers.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Geez, you'd think someone at Apple had seen the css-auth/decss code floating around, wouldn't you?
[/tongue in cheek]
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
It's certainly better for Apple to release a stable, core release of the OS than a full-featured buggy one. Of course, Apple could delay the entire release until every last feature is complete, even if the majority of the market will be happy with what is done now, but that would just be silly.
In case you're still not buying this, take a look at your at your neighboorhood Windows boxes... if everyone only used the newest releases, you shouldn't see anything but 2000 and ME, but (at least among my friends, school and work) I usually see 95, 98, and NT 4.
Oh, and by the way, Mac OS X ships with a free copy of Mac OS 9.1. Considering that this is the same company that simply stopped shipping internal (i.e. cheap) floppy drives; I'd say that it's a pretty big step towards providing true backward compatibility in the face of technological advancement.
Learn more.
*If you said "Apple," you're right, but let them worry about that.
Apple charges for a new OS about once a year. So the upgrade this summer will be free, and then the version next year will cost ~$100 again.
I realise it's originally a ZDNET article, but most media companies have this little thing where they note conflicts of interest. Like adding a tag line such as, "MSNBC is partly owned by Microsoft, who make a competing operating system, Windows."
A...
iTunes has already been carbonized, and is available on your iDisk! It apparently works better than it does on OS 9, which isn't suprising given that the MP3 player included with the public beta was pretty slick..
Shouldnt it be Mac OS X.1? That would make more sense.
If Apple delays their release even more chanses are I have got MOL and OMS running in Debain... they might lose a customer here... Hurry!
The DVD player does not work in Classic (I've tried it on the public beta). Classic can only read devices that OS X itself knows how to read; OS X does not let Classic get at any hardware devices directly.
I thought that DVD writing on the new MACs was crippled anyway, at least to the point that it didnt have access to certain CSS related regions of the disk. I heard, from elsewhere on slashdot, no less, that Apple had bent over backwards to get DVD Consortium support for dvd writing and authoring. I personally dont trust Apple's claims about the functionality of the new DVD features. All the important details are misssing, and it smells to me mostly of marketing hype.
Even if I completely trusted Apple not to mess up OS/X and the new macs, I would still be very leery of being an early adopter of a rushed product. Would you run out and buy a new computer from Compaq or Gateway with the latest beta build of Windows ME on it, in addition to never-before-seen hardware features?
Exactly.
Oh wait...
A.
as one of the authors of the article (though not in on the final edit), i can tell you that you have got quite a few things wrong.
first of all, the article was written for zdnet, not msnbc. if you checked either the byline at the top of the copyright at the bottom, you'd have noticed that. not that i know how it happened, but msnbc has a content agreement with zdnet that allows redistibuting content.
A: no, actually, you're probably thinking of being able to open non-carbonized applications in mac os x's "classic" environment. if you dual-boot back into mac os 9.1, you have no access to mac os x at all; it's as if you never installed the new os. agreed, being able to run old (actually, existing, at least at this point) apps in classic is a brilliant move, and it does work well despite various performance hits.
B: i'm glad you can get your powerbook to sleep and wake. what build are you running? as any programmer knows, newer builds might introduce regressions. and in any case, we never said "all powerbooks won't be able to sleep or wake" -- we said there will still be issues with some makes and situations. mazel tov that yours works.
C: DVD playing was indeed a key feature, esp in imacs, which were often pitched for that very features. in fact, i think most came with "a bug's life" dvds, at least until the latest models, which have instead cd-rw drives. it's esp a feature for powerbook users.
D: this comment makes no sense. first of all, we triple-sourced our information; of course i can't reveal those sources, but be assured they were first-hand. aside from ken bereskin admitting no dvd capabilities, care to refer to those "employees" and where they've gone on record? and why do you say we have "crappy information"? do you have info that contradicts ours? and what the hell are you talking about when you mention the pr department? we contacted apple to see if they wanted to expand or explain the information we possesed, and they said they couldn't comment on it. this is standard procedure in journalism.
E: this article _is_ the article that was on zdnet and cnet last week. welcome to the wonderful world of corporate synergy.
This is not to say that I am a total Microsoft lover. In its current implementation it is the best OS avaliable at least for desktop computing. Linux is relatively new in destop computing, and OS 9 lacked pre-emptive multitasking and virtual memory. Frankly, it sucked.
Nice subject there, eh? I could write for some big-deal news source like MSNBC with catchy title like that.
Anyway. I'm as excited about MacOS X as I am about Windows XP, which is to say, not at all.
Wow, MacOS is Mach-based and runs a modified FreeBSD kernel. Wow, look at Aqua. Wow, I can run Apache and Squid on a Mac now. Good for Apple.
But I don't care. I've got my FreeBSD box, and I'm not about to dump it for a proprietary solution like MacOS, especially since they've completely rearranged and gutted the standard FreeBSD system.
People say things like, "Good, now my grandmother can use UNIX!" Why is it so important that she use UNIX? My grandmother doesn't even use a computer. And you know what? She couldn't be happier.
Computers aren't nearly as pervasive in today's society as geeks like to think. I'm a network admin and a semi-professional programmer, so my life is based on computers. I'm not the average person, though. The average person doesn't need UNIX, and many people don't even need computers.
Society may run on computers, but individuals don't need to. Giving everybody UNIX (even if it's MacOS) isn't the solution to all our problems, and it won't change the lives of everybody you give it to.
In fact, giving people access to things like Apache can be a bad thing. There's already enough shit on the web right now. Do we really need every idiot who can say MacOS putting up more pointless content?
A new year calls for a new signature.
I'm probaby stupid for saying this, but there is a very easy way to get screen captures of DVD movies.
1. Pause the movie.
2. Use Application switcher to bring the Finder forward.
3. Hit the keyboard command for taking a screenshot. Make sure it's not the one that takes the front window shot.
I've taken shots of a couple movies using this method.
QED.
This OS won't go mainstream for another year, at least.
The plan is to ship OS X (whatever build) INSTALLED on all new Macs starting in the Summer of this year. That's about as mainstream as you can get!
Of course, it'll include full 9.1 for the Classic box, so it might be possible to just de-install X and boot 9.1 only.
No one will know until we get there.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
It is as credible as any mass media. But that's not all that credible. U have to decide for yourself. Peronally, if I really want to know what's going on in the US or the world, I ask friends.
People, it is really sad to see so many Slashdotters so blinded by Apple hatred that they fall for FUD hook, line and sinker.
1) This comes from MSNBC. We all know what the letters MS stand for. Can you really trust their journalistic integrity when reporting on a non-Microsoft OS? Don't you think there might be a wee bit of bias here?
2) They quote unnamed sources for most of their stuff. Apple is refusing to dignify their silliness with a reply.
3) It has been well known for months that the March 24th release date was for OSX alone, and that the apps and machines with OS X preinstalled were not coming out until July. This is *not* news, except perhaps to Microsoft who is still working on the stuff (merged Windows and networked lite Office apps) they were bragging about back in 1995. It is actually caution and common sense on Apple's part to make the first release of a brand new operating system to bleeding edge early adapters to give it a final shakeout before the big rollout in July. If they didn't and there were bugs, you'd all be flaming them for that.
4) For all of you who do not keep up with Apple's product line, they are moving away from offering DVD drives (except for the SuperDrive) and toward CD burners. That makes DVD a lower priority that other things. iDVD is a very new program, which is given away for free or bundled with their machines. Again, making available freebee programs for OSX is a lower priority than core operating system functionality. Being Slashdotters, I assume you know core operating system functionality from a hole in the ground.
5) Why are so many of you who wouldn't spend a dime on Apple hardware or OS X, caring about whether one can play a DVD with it or not?
Mary Leibach
Apple's biggest fans: Godzilla and Mothra
(Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla 2, Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla, Godzilla vs. Destroyah, Mothra 2, Godzilla 2000)
Pure FUD. The Public Beta already has SMP support in the kernel. See this forum where an ATI engineer confirms that Radeon 2d and 3d acceleration is in place.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
The article was based on a K66 build. A build that was over 2 months old. Do you really think Apple would release a OS unable to play DVD's!!!!! Please..
Cheers,
Tomas
===========
Before moving over to corporate sibling ZDNet, Matthew Rothenberg was director of online content at Mac Publishing LLC (MacWeek, MaCentral and MacWorld), and before that he was Senior News Editor at MacWeek itself. I don't think those credentials suggest anti-Apple bias.
Maybe anti-OSX bias, then?
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
I think what he means is that there is always room for improvment. The mach kernel is the basis for Dec Unix which can scale to quite a few processers.
Cheers,
Tomas
===========
There is a reason they called it a BETA!!!!!!!!!! It was for early adopters.
Cheers,
Tomas
===========
So which is it, a glitch or a choice on the part of Apple execs to rush the product out without features? In my-never-to-be-humble-opinion, a feature that has been left out is NOT a glitch, it may well be a flaw but a glitch is a different thing. New OS releases/updates always (at least in the case of MS and Apple) have bugs, which can be called glitches...but to call features intentionally left out of the release glitches confuses two seperate issues, as I see it.
This is all too common in the U.S. Our corporate mentality is driven by stock traders who buy on Monday and sell on Wednesday. Companies are hesitant to build much-needed manufacturing plants because the expense will hurt the bottom line on a quarterly report and their stock will tank. Large companies lay off thousands of people at a time because it boosts their stock price -- to hell with the human suffering of those employees and their families. Rather than being able to position their companies to be leaders in the next decade, CEOs are forced to scramble around on a quarterly basis to keep short-term profits up -- or risk losing their jobs.
This is the reason that we need short-term capital gains taxes that are so high as to be punitive. All stock shares should be non-voting until they have been held for a minimum of five years. We need to get back to a stock market where people invest in companies for the long haul (5 years or more) because they believe that the company has a future.
How many times are you going to post this same message, AC? I first saw this message contents posted at least a month and a half ago.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
You forget that the MacOS supported 68k until System 7.6. Also, all of the MacOS 1.0 SDK s still available to developers. For exapmple the 'NewWindow' C function, which renders "classic" windows in black and white is actually still available even under under OSX. It shouldn't be supported but because old programs use it, it still is. Apple has a great record of supporting old sofware as far as their OS is concerned. Could you run Warcraft I under Windows ME? Probably not, but under OSX it is possible.
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
Is this possible? Darwin is open source, and, from what I understand, it's possible to replace OS X's Darwin with a modified Darwin. So wouldn't it be possible to patch the video system to capture everything that comes through it? Since such a patch would have significant legitimate uses, I don't think the law could prevent its distribution.
Jobs didn't come back till after Apple decided to purchase Next instead of BE
So he didn't have a part in the decision. It was made before he returned
Consider the source...MSNBC.
As I said, might be totally valid, however one must also consider that MS probably has a bonus for every article bashing a competative OS.
C - OUT
- Sighuh?
That's because (at least this is what it looks like) as far as MacOS is concerned, the DVD window is just a gray square. The DVD software paints over that gray square with the DVD content. So when you take a screenshot, you get an image of that gray square. Now, when you open that image, guess what you get. If you open it immediately after taking the screenshot, it looks like you were successful. But now try moving the window around. Lo and behold, the image you thought you took a screenshot of is still dependent on the DVD player window. Try it and you'll see what I mean.
If there is a way, please prove me wrong! ;)
To e-mail me, replace my username and domain with what they each look like upside down.
I don't know why the lack of Apple DVD support is so awful. In all Windows releases, MS doesn't provide a DVD player. You have to buy one separetly. Apple will provide one in the future, and that's better than what MS provides. However, as a computer manufacturer Apple should be including a DVD player. But! Apple isn't shipping OS X on new computer on the 24th! By Summer or whenever they release computers with OS X standard, there almost certainly will be DVD support. What's the big deal?
I find this, on top of the lack of DVD support to be hugely funny.
The DVD playback thing is confirmed by Apple. The level of video driver support is pure speculation. Not the "may" and "source said" qualifications on this statement. There is a thread raging on OmniGroup's Mac OS X Talk list about how misleading this article is.
Apple drops the ball again and again and again, then delievers something as dumb as a computer in a colored case and their fans have their own Mardi Gras to celebrate the "innovation."
You've mastered flamebait!
How's this for innovation: incomplete SMP support
This is probably the most ridiculous claim of the article.
Newsflash everyone -- just because major sites carry a story doesn't mean it's accurate.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
M$nbc...
-
The only way that Apple can ever make a comeback to be used by people that are NOT in the graphics industry is to license their OS to be run on any hardware.
Ignoring for a second the user experience consequences of that, there's a basic question of how they're going to make money. The company generally brings in $6-8 billion a year, the vast majority of which is from the ~5 million hardware units they ship each year. If they're decide to sell software at $129 a pop, what's going to make up from the loss in revenue? Do you actually believe they would selling anything close to 50 million copies of OSX a year?
Remember, what you're suggesting is exactly what NextStep did. Look how well that turned out. One of Apple's core value propositions is that they make the whole package. This creates a seamless user experience for the customer. This is why many people like Macs in the first place.
That's the ONLY reason that Windows took off so many years ago, and Apple withered.
Things have changed a lot since then. How is Apple going to magically crack the grip that Microsoft has on all the hardware manufacturers as well as on itself?
If I could buy OS X to run it on my cheap-o generic Intel-based (actually, AMD based) hardware, I'd use it! In a heartbeat!
Great, but how many would use it as their exclusive OS if it couldn't run on the architecture-dependent Mac apps? You'd mostly get the NextStep apps. You sure as heck wouldn't get Office.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I would love to run Mac OS X on my G4, but im not gonna rush and buy a copy, and install it on my SERVER. That would be stupid. There isn't all the right ported software that i use to maintain and do every thing i do in Mac OS 9 yet. I will wait until Adobe makes a patch to run photoshop on X.
----------------
I am Moldy.
Once you're trapped inside you'll witness the power of this fully armed and operational OS...
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Hrrm, let's look at this here... unsupported hardware that's become industry standard
The article doesn't talk at all about unsupported hardware. The DVD drive works, as do all the video cards. The only thing that doesn't work is DVD video playback, and some mysterious "sources" talk about that OSX won't initially take full advantage of Radeon and GeForce 3. This is obviously a short-term issue, since Carmack's GeForce 3 demo was running on OSX.
numerous bugs and errors that can cause system hangs or freezes, those bugs are acknowledged by Apple, and they're saying that they really want people to just wait a few months for the real thing to come out.
Come again? Please point out these "numerous bugs and errors that can cause system hangs or freezes." The only thing that sounds anything like this in the article is the author's "sources" saying there are crashing bugs in the Setup Assistant -- not the OS. There are a number of qualifications on the statement in question, by the way.
This sounds EXACTLY like a beta test
If bugs are the qualification for a beta test, then every major OS in wide distribution is in beta.
How many people using Windows 2000 or Linux have a dual boot back into Windows ME or 98 so that they can run certain things better?
most likely charge for the OS X 1.0 to 1.1 upgrade
Highly unlikely if you look at the history of such things.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
From the tone of disbelief from the crowd, it seems that Macs are the only computers that do this. Aren't PCs crippled this way? Is seems a bit futile to plug the 3% hole and leave the rest open.
A. Dual-booting has always been an expected obligation until new versions of all the traditional Mac software are ported specifically OS X. Nobody but hack journalists are surprised. Most savvy Mac users consider this a real boon, as a kind of long-term protection measure for expensive software and years of skill investment. It eases the transition into the new Unix world.
B. As of the latest build, sleep functions on PowerBooks work perfectly, with two-second wake-up times. That's right: two seconds.
C. DVD playing is hardly a "key feature." DVD burning was *never* a key feature, nor was CD-RW. Until only recently this was always a third-party software opportunity.
D. That certain extra features will not be included is not a secret. Apple's been saying this for weeks: employees with real names and titles--not "sources"-- have been going on the record to point this out. Always interesting how much crappy information sounds like a real scoop if you conveniently can't dig up other places where Apple reps have gone on the record. Too easy just to accept the PR department's "no comment" without, say, reading stories on the exact same subject written elsewhere.
E. This article is a re-hash of an article that was on ZDNet and CNET last week. Notice the key bias words: inability, glitches, frustrate, annoying, frustrating, "not be able", "limit... usefulness", aggravation, lack. That's just in the headlines and first paragraph. Suspiciously like Linux reporting, eh?
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
Let's not forget: The article was written by msnbc, a joint-venture of NBC and - yes , Microsoft.
So, do I really think this is an objective piece of news?
No.
Will this article stop me from buying my fist Mac as soon as it ships with OSX?
No, surely not.
Microsoft can't write a good OS themselves, what should make me think that they can write a good article about one?
BTW, my current main OS is Debian Linux w/KDE2.1.
------
There are a lot of places in Mac OS X where they refer to Mac OS X 10.0 som I'm certain that it'll be called Mac OS X 10.0 in it's final release, and updates will be version 10.1 and so forth.
- Henrik
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.xine.sourceforge.n
cvs login
cvs -z3 co -P xine
I know that for X86 systems, I'm getting pretty much perfect (as far as I can tell) playback. It's better than WinDVD/PowerDVD anyway.
I have a Pismo and I am running Linux and MacOS9 on it since about half a year.
I had no experience in MacOS at all and I've got say that I was very dissapointed. Linux beats MacOS in every respect (especially stability) ALSO in usability (KDE is far better than MacOS Finder) and Plug&Play (Linux recognizes my 3 Button Mice, MacOS does not. Linux can use both integrated speaker and external sound simultaneously, MacOS cannot)
The ONLY things I am missing in Linux is a DVD-player and Quicktime.
I was looking forward to MacOSX because I hoped that I could run a decent Unix and don't have to reboot for DVD. (And now I'm dissapointed, again)
What advantages does MacOS X offer?
Both Linux and MacOS are Unix-based
both can run MacOS9 apps
and both can't play DVD-movies.
So why choose a 1.0 release instead of Linux which is tested for years on PPC now?
Roland();
Shouldn't it be Mac OS X.I?
Apple has been doing nothing but blowing it big time for more than a year now. I'd been an avid Apple fan for over 15 years, until just last year. The last two things I bought from Apple were an iBook 300 and MacOS X beta.
After seeing where Apple was going with OS X Beta, UNIX underpinnings or not, I felt that there simply were NO more advantages to having a Mac.
Now they blow it again, making promises they can't keep. Come on man, OS X wasn't that great to begin with, now they ship a half finished product?? That is sure way to lose even more people like me to Windows and Linux.
Brian http://www.assortedinternet.com
Troll article. One little sentence about "we are corperate partners with Microsoft" now back with the roast of an OS that threatens our corperate partner.
Anyone here that has read "The Fountainhead" realizes that there is a reason mediocre product prevail.
It is hundred times easier to convince someone that MS-Office crashed than it is to convince them that VI or JOVE crashed.
Just randomness.
--bucktug
I had a flame... but she had a fire.
it's an accurate description of the conditions and politics that create impossible project schedules.
The reason you should read it despite the source is that most of the good stuff in it is text Yourdon got from other people via email surveys.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Mod this gentleman up. This post is "Insightful."
The big deal is that apple is falling way behind, and they nead to do everything they can to impress. Seeing that they are a "media OS," the lack of DVD support is not encouraging.
Ahhh, the old troll about evil Intel coaxing Be into dropping PPC support. Be still supports the older PowerMacs which they have the hardware specs to. They don't support any newer Mac's because Apple won't release the specs.
... are currently incompatabile with Linux", "The dual processor model are currently somewhat unstable", "We are still waiting for information about the 2001 G4 models", "current kernels don't handle more memory than 660MB", 2000 PowerBook has no sound support.
Yes, I am quite aware that the LinuxPPC folks have maintained decent compatability. But, Linux has (unfortunately) always had to deal with hardware whose vendors are either neutral or hostile towards providing Linux developers with the needed information. That's fine. Linux users understand that that is part of the bargain if you want to run it. WinModems, decent 3D accelleration, decent sound support. The list of x86 hardware with poor support is significant.
Be, however, is shipping a commercial product for which they offer support. They had to make a business decision about whether or not it was worth their while to support hardware for which they did not have access to the specs. Had they chosen to support it, they would want to be able to know that they could support this years G4's. Something which LinuxPPC doesn't know yet. Hardware wise: "Any models with and ATI RADEON
So you can troll away with your lie that "the LinuxPPC guys have had NO problem keeping up", but the simple fact is that they have had problems. Be made the choice to avoid the support headaches that go along with trying to support undocumented hardware. Maybe the Intel investment did play a part in their decision, but the fact is that Apple made it clear to Be that they were not wanted and had Be stayed on the PPC they would almost certainly be facing the same hardware problems that the LinuxPPC folks are facing.
Well, all tech stocks seem to be in the tanks.
As for processor speed, the new G4s run at 733MHz, not 500MHz.
What alternative architectures are hurting Apple, PCI, AGP, USB, FireWire, PCMCIA, IDE?
As for Apple opening up their hardware, i don't know, maybe, it won't happen though.
As for their software, OS X is quite open, you even have GNUstep which is striving for Mac OS X compatibility.
This is an excellent book for developers working on projects gone wrong. It looks like this Apple project will continue to be a very bumpy ride. Author Ed Yourdon puts it this way:
Much of this description is eerily similar to Apple's OS X project. Almost a foreboding of things to come.It is not stuck on 500 MHz, and is not lagging that much behind. We now run at 733MHz, and faster prosessors are to be expected more frequently from Apple now.
GeForce 3 is not to be forgotten, and the G4 has some trix up the sleeve. The main attraction tho' is thill the operating system of the Mac. Take a look at: www.apple.com
- Knut S.
I'm getting an 8x DVD player so that I can watch that movie in 12 minutes. That makes the 5 minutes a much bigger deal :)
Drivers. As I write this from MacOS X Public Beta on my iBook, I wish I had a driver for my wireless ethernet card, and I wish I had a driver for my fire wire camera. I wish ATI would port their TV watching app so that I can watch TV under MacOS X on my G4 desktop with XClaim VR 128.
DVD? I hardly ever do that. A reboot will be tolerable.
Start Running Better Polls
Processor speed is stuck at 500 MHz
ahem.
Hell, iMacs are 600 MHz these days.
Not a bad troll otherwise, but getting the obvious stuff wrong is a pretty clear tipoff...
Hey, I've hung FreeBSD three times. No, wait. That's linux. No, wait, that's total. 1 FreeBSD and 2 Linux :)
Of course, it's taken me 4 years to do this . . .
The specs for Apple hardware is open. How do you think Linux manages to run on modern Macs - they conform to that CHRP spec.
Any company can go build a CHRP machine. IBM even tried to encourage it a few years ago. I don't think you'll find Apple licensing their OS to anyone for clones, but that doesn't bother me that much.
...I'd just like to be able to print! The Beta had no real support at all....
Printing support seems to be really sorely lacking. I've not heard HP say anything (yet) about releasing carbonised or X native drivers, so it looks like that dual boot is going to be very well used.
Chance are that I'll install it and not touch it much until sufficient support comes my way.
M.
OS X is more like Debian 3.0 than it is like kernel 2.4. People need to stop thinking of "new kernel" as "new stable platform". The distribution is the platform.
That said, I won't expect anything major will be intentionally left out of Debian 3.0, FreeBSD 6.0 or OpenBSD 3.0. The release sins of Microsoft and Apple do not apply to open source distributions.
Hands in my pocket
Come on, now. This OS won't go mainstream for another year, at least.
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Breakfast served all day!
Well, that's mostly true. When I worked at Be, I was told that I could write the stuff to support the newer machines on my own time if I wished -- and if it was deemed stable enough, it would be rolled in. I was starting to evaluate it. But, basically, they focused their energy on the non-PPC platform, which, imho, is a shame.
_Deirdre
I read this somewhere. MacCentral, maybe? It mentioned that with the new multitasking features of OSX, the DVD player can't get as much processor time as it needs for adequate playback quality. Which sounds like it means that a DVD player does exist, it's just not ready for primetime yet. I wouldn't have missed it anyway. That's what I've got a real DVD player for, and as a backup, a PSX2.
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I like to watch.
Among the other problems with the March release, sources said, is that it won't take full advantage of multiprocessing systems or new video accelerators, such as Nvidia's recently announced GeForce 3 or ATI's Radeon.
Limited support for MP, and broken graphics acceleration for the Radeon, which is over a year old now.
Hmm... Wasn't MP identified as a critically important feature a few months ago when The Pentium and Athlon doubled the clock speed of the fastest G4? Weren't Mac users overjoyed that their favourite tools were no longer going to require application-level support to run on more than one processor?
And can you imagine the new UI without video acceleration? Can you imagine doing realtime 3D at all without video acceleration?
Hands in my pocket
This is assuming that DVD player development and OS development have to happen in in series.
The important point is that completing the OS doesn't depend on DVD player completion. Whether the DVD player development was done in parallel or series (or a bit of both) doesn't matter if it's not done.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
I dropped $100 or whatever it was on one of the LE books, but I forgot that I did until you just mentioned it. ;)
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
The wakeup time on my Thinkpad is two seconds... did previous Powerbooks or versions of OSX have problems concerning this?
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Power Comuting is a formidable enemy? The people whose primary contributions to the Mac hardware platform were unsupported OEM CD-ROM drives, PS/2 keyboards, and the standard VGA port? (Okay, I'll give you the last one -- but Apple even ships those, now.)
I hear this argument a lot. I don't get it. Why would opening up Apple's platform lead to more support? The world already has Linux. Linux is much more mature on Intel hardware than on the Mac/PowerPC. Why would having a mature, open source OS that ran on Mac hardware make people want to concentrate their efforts on the Mac instead of Intel? Even if Apple made the Mac ROMs public domain, why would that inspire people to use them instead of the Intel platform, which currently has a larger installed base than any other form of PC hardware? Especially if you're talking about the consumer market (Apple's primary targer)The only reason Power Computing met with any success at all in the Mac clone market was because they sensed there was demand for lower-cost hardware that ran this closed source OS. Take away the closed source OS, and the need for the "clone" hardware goes away too.
The only reason for an open source Mac OS is because you don't think Apple's hardware is being used well enough. Take away Apple's hardware, and the need for the OS disappears as well.
What Apple is doing now with OS X is continuing to do what it does best -- try to provide the consumer with an all-inclusive computing platform. You buy Apple's hardware, you get Apple's OS. It's a packaged product. Just because it isn't currently well-suited for tinkering, doesn't mean it should be.
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Breakfast served all day!
A microsoft based web publication disses the next major Mac OS.
Oh, and that OS is based on unix. Huh... so a unix based system that's easy to use isn't liked by ms press... that is surprising.
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I'm not ashamed. It's the computer age, nerds are in.
They're still in, aren't they?
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I'm not ashamed. It's the computer age, nerds are in.
They're still in, aren't they?
There's actually nothing stopping a 3rd party to make the kernel run on their hardware and then letting people buy Mac OS X to install the GUI over it. Nothing except that they have to use PPC and give their patches to Apple that is.
link: http://www.opensource.apple.com/
Most Mac Evangelists would consider Steve Jobs to be indispensible to Apple's future. Apple NEVER canned his ass to begin with, did they?
Apple has never been a company to be able to pick which people will be good for computers (and Apple themselves) in the future. Gassée still around in the computer industry, and BeIA is just starting to take off. Pity the OS had to be put so far back on the backburner. (And I have to defend Jean-Louis, I use a quote of his in my sig to show that my posts are an opinion ;)
I'd own a Mac now if they still ran BeOS (I use 3 OS's: Windows, BeOS, and Linux. I'd happily replace Windows with OS X). However, Apple killed BeOS off on their platform. People will argue that Apple can't port OS X to Intel because they are a hardware company. If Apple are primarily a hardware company, why did they fear, and thus kill off, an operating system on their platform? If Apple make their money off hardware, wouldn't another OS attract people to their platform? I guess Apple want it both ways - total control of the hardware and the software, even though if they'd loosened up on the software side and just allowed BeOS to merly EXIST, their Macintosh sales would have been at least one unit higher - I'd be using a Mac right now.
But Apple don't want me to buy a Mac, because they don't want me running BeOS.
Windows Media Player WILL play DVD's, it's crude but works.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
If it's true, then normally I'd be inclined to say that there is no such thing as "bad publicity", and minor complaints such as these might even make more average users aware of OS X.
But, because this is an Apple product, things are different. Lack of DVD support may not sound like a big deal to the few Linux users and hoards of Linux-wannabes on Slashdot, but to the Mac-crowd, it is a big fucking deal. The only thing they've ever had to be proud of is excellent multimedia, and Apple will take a lot of heat if OS X ships without DVD. This may also turn away a lot of Windows users who are thinking of trying it out... I know a Windows (and sometimes Unix) user at the office who is really psyched about getting a Titanium G4 Powerbook when OS X is released, but I'd bet money that if he hears OS X can't play DVDs, he'll put off buying it. (And why shouldn't he? The wide-screen DVD player functionality is one of the most-hyped cool things about the Titanium G4 Powerbook.) I'd also bet money that if he puts-off buying it, he'll end up losing the excitement and he'll never buy it.
Some of you also seem to think that very few Mac users are even interested in using OS X so soon. Not so. I know several Mac users, and knowing their clannish nature and love of "shiny things", they'll all want to be the first on their block to have the latest MacOS. Something missing as basic as DVD support will be a huge turn-off. They'll think, "Hey, I guess everyone was right about how archaic Unix is after all! Apple let us down and backed a shitty technology." Once the press hears that even die-hard Mac zombies are unimpressed, there will be even less Windows users interested in taking it for a spin.
If Apple is smart (and I'm not holding my breath), they will not release OS X until it's really done. DVD support can't wait for the first service pack.
Personally, I'm a Sun guy. (And my Blade 100 will be joining the LAN next week, baby!) But... OS X really had me hoping that the Holy Grail (Unix with a pretty face) had finally arrived. I'll admit it; the hardware is dead sexy, and if they had software to match, I'd order a G4 Cube tomorrow. I think it'd be a crying shame if Apple started following Microsoft's practice of releasing software that needs a year's worth of service packs to be usable.
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I like to watch.
Ho ho, this piece is just an amusing example of FUD. I wouldn't expect anything else from M$... I simply can't help remembering the innocuous glitches win2000 suffered @ it's launch (and still does) The most amusing were: certain M$ mouses would wreck so much havoc to the point that the only solution was to REPEAT installation and not to attach the HW ever again. Same story for some NIC cards... but it probably was old outdated hadrware; pity it used to work before w200 (;-)) took posession of the machine. It's just a shame that M$ discontinued NT support now you'll have to FSCK your whole LAN... but that's just a minor glitch... DVD playback works great so when your office grinds to a halt you can watch the latest MPAA pill while waiting for the M$ drone to come (and tell you you have to upgrade everything down to the power cord ;-))
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
I love my PowerBook and all, but this has got me kinda edgy. DVD is a pretty big thing and I can understand why the press is reporting this. What I want to know is how many seemingly little things wont make it in this first release. Something like ColorSync may be of little use to a home user, but graphic artists depend on it. How much else will be missing from the initial release? I'm sure DVD support isn't the only thing.
In a related note, I still can't help but think about Copland. At first it was most likely going to support even my IIfx (68030 @ 40 MHz). Then it was going to require a PowerMac. Then it was canceled. Rhapsody/OS X was announced and would probably require a PPC 603 or 604 Mac. Now it's going to require a G3.
BTW, I know that Copland != Rhapsody/OS X, but did ya know that Copland, even with debug code, used less than 8 MB RAM in the DR0 release?
that MSNBC, 'a Microsoft-NBC joint venture' would be reporting problems with OSX with such flare. "early users will find a list of glitches that range from annoying to frustrating" and "Other gaps, ..., also will limit the new OS' usefulness to certain users", and thats just in the first paragraph)
There doesn't seem to be much missing. A little bit of DVD stuff, a few other small bits. In theory, they should do a free update when they've properly finished it :)
But being a long-suffering Windows user I wouldn't expect that. Microsoft would re-package the "full" version, call it Second Edition and charge $70 for the upgrade. Is this the kind of thing Apple would do, or would they make it free?
No, Apple did not kill off BeOS for their platform. BeOS killed off their OS for the Macintosh platform.
Oddly enough, this dropping of support came just a short while after a big investment by Intel.
The LinuxPPC guys have had NO problem keeping up with the Motorola chips and the Apple motherboards. Why should Be? Why, for that matter, couldn't they just look at how LinuxPPC handles all that stuff and reimplement for themselves?
Be perpetuates this little lie on and on, but make no mistake, JLG decided to go wholly Intel. Apple may not have been very cooperative with him, but he made the decision.
So Xenex, why don't you ask JLG why he doesn't want to run BeOS on the Mac platform? Why don't you ask JLG why they can't/won't keep up with Apple equipment when LinuxPPC and some BSD teams HAVE NO PROBLEM?
But let go of the idea that Apple killed BeOS on Macs. Apple didn't.
Didn't Steve demo dvd functionality when he showed of the OS at Macworld? Maybe they just need to get the version of OSX that was running on his machine.
This news is over a week old. Firstly it came from Maccentral.com .. then moved onto cnet (which is actually the article M$NBC used).
I'm not supprised MSNBC would run this on behalf of M$'s request. After all, I'm sure that M$ aren't happy that Apple claim OSX to be the most advanced operating system in the world, amoungst other reasons.
From a critical analysis point of view, the article is poor and only highlights weaknesses in the product (if they are even weaknesses comparitively) and does not give a rounded opinion of any strengths. Such articles can in all probability be dismissed as biased.
The operating system can only be really judged on its success once it has been released.
No matter how much I hate being an armchair businessman... I think Apple wishes it had purchased BE instead of going with NeXT.
How DARE they not give me something for free.
The only way that Apple can ever make a comeback to be used by people that are NOT in the graphics industry is to license their OS to be run on any hardware. It's as simple as that. That's the ONLY reason that Windows took off so many years ago, and Apple withered. If I could buy OS X to run it on my cheap-o generic Intel-based (actually, AMD based) hardware, I'd use it! In a heartbeat! Why can't Apple see this? Their hardware isn't as revolutionary or as fast compared with the Intel platform as it once used to be (remember when SCSI was considered cool stuff?). I can now buy a dual-processor Pentium 3 with SCSI, USB, etc. for less than a basic Apple box. If I could run OS X on it, I would.
How can Apple solve the chicken and egg problem? Apple can't ensure a solid OS release until there's a broad selection of apps in use and software companies don't want to release their products until the OS ships (no one wants to support a broadly used app on a beta OS).
So, what's the solution? Call the second beta a shipping release. Make it a pretty solid release with support for the stuff that really matters. Now Adobe and Microsoft can't hide behind a beta OS as an excuse for not releasing their apps.
Several months later, apps start rolling out and Apple releases 1.1 which fixes the bugs found and gets the polish features working.
How else could this possibly work? Even if the March 24th release were perfect in every sense, it would still not be worth switching to most people until critical apps start shipping.
Either way, the 24th release is for developers, hobbyists, Mac zealots, sys admins, curious Linux users, etc. The 1.1 release this summer is the first one that regular consumers should consider buying.
Maybe Apple does have the DVD software ready, but the MPAA has now decided that there is even better way to fustrate people - don't license to anybody Unix based.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
one of the authors of the article here.
first of all, _twice_ on that page it notes that the story is from zdnet, which has a content-sharing agreement with msnbc. dunno how that came about, but i can guaran-damn-tee you that we have never been told what to write or what angle to take on it. certain companies, especially fruit-named ones, have been agressive in attempts and others out of washington have been sugary sweet towards the same goal, but we really serve the readers and are proud of it.
actually, the maccentral article had only one of the issues -- lack of dvd support -- and we had that info days before, but we held onto it in order to triple-source, contact apple for confirmation or denail, research the other issues. also, one editor who shall not be named (who did not write the article) insisted on getting quotes from "power users" and analysts instead of just presenting the info and letting users decide how it would affect them.
though i will agree with you that the os can ultimately only be judged by the users. to that point, we had hoped to provide basic info potential users might appreciate before making their decision whether to migrate or not.
I own an iMacDVD and I never watch DVD's on it anyway. I've been using OSX since it's release and it rocks. The biggest problem new users will have is getting use to the new interface. I look foward to OSX 1.0.
Apple's stock is near it's 52-week low, but so are a lot of companies since the bubble hath burst. It's better to take a longer view.
Preliminary indications are that Apple users are not particularly interested in the complexity and sluggishness of Apple's latest operating system.
When are "users" ever interested in an OS? Pretty much the only time that ever happened was with Windows 95, and that was because of the press sucking of the teets of M$'s PR flacks.
Processor speed is stuck at 500 MHz.
Wrong.
Alternative architectures and software are killing Apple on features, price, and performance.
What you really mean is that generic boxen are killing apple on price. True. Features and performance, that's really, um, apples and oranges.
There are legions of corporations and individuals who have been disrespected by Apple...
This is true about any company, especially one that doesn't incorporate legacy hardware.
The main provider of Apple's microprocessor, Motorola, is hurting and hopes to leave the desktop processor business. Motorola announced 10000 layoffs so far this year, 2/3 in their fabs.
Most of Motorola's layoffs are in the cell phone hand-set sector. Secondly, it's hard to peg problems on Motorola's "Semiconductor Products Segment", because they provide parts to many other Motorola divisions (Iridium comes to mind). Also, remember that Motorola has about 130,000 employees.
Everyone does GUI and mice nowadays. Apple is left marketing decor. The most reasonable solution would be for Apple to open up. Open up its hardware specs and software so that where now exists little more than a corporate cult, there might exist a vibrant autonomous industry of developers, hackers, and hardware vendors.
You mean a vibrant, autonomous, industry like this one? Guess what? There are plenty of developers and hardware vendors for Macintosh, and almost everything they make works. Apple has already "opened up" where it counts, in Darwin.
" Among the other problems with the March release, sources said, is that it won?t take full advantage of multiprocessing systems or new video accelerators, such as Nvidia?s recently announced GeForce 3 or ATI?s Radeon. People who have systems containing these new graphics cards may not see a speed-up of 3D or 2D graphics until support is introduced with Puma."
I find this, on top of the lack of DVD support to be hugely funny. Apple makes themselves out to be focused on video production, then don't deliver DVD support. They claim to be focused on making their computers easy and fun to use, tout GeForce3 as evidence that they're a good entertainment platform, and then fail to deliver accelerator support. Apple's fanbase is like an abused wife that gets smacked around by her husband and then believes his apologies. Apple drops the ball again and again and again, then delievers something as dumb as a computer in a colored case and their fans have their own Mardi Gras to celebrate the "innovation." How's this for innovation: incomplete SMP support, incomplete 3D acceleration support, and NO DVD support at all from a BRAND NEW "modern" OS. Gee, I hope they were able toincluded support for QWERTY keyboards too...
Chris
Guys, you actually BOUGHT the M$NBC article?
They're only re-writing the reviews at Wincent.org focusing on negatives. Hmmm, now *whyever* would they do that?
*Fear: DVD and many other features lacking.
*Uncertainty: Users won't want to live without these features and will either suffer reboots or not use it.
*Doubt: NO ONE will use Mac Os X (pronouced 'ten.')and it will become a big failure the day it's announced. As a result, Apple will give up making computers once and for all, and resort to manufacturing Dalmation School Supplies and Translucent/Transparent Cube Office Supplies, the first of which shall be a kleenex box. Note, that the Office Supplies will be returned by users who don't want mold lines in their kleenex boxes.
Spreading FUD on the basis of Web sites using internal builds not ready for public consumption is ridiculous. I'm not surprised in the least to see M$NBC and ZdNET do it, because I can't consider them news sources of good repute.
<sarcasm> Oh, wait, I'm at slashdot, the goat-worthy news site!</sarcasm>
It's great to post positive news about emerging technology, and it's fine to post negatives about emerging technology, but posting FUD using information on INTERNAL BUILDS is wrong. It's not journalism, it's sensationalism.
Thanks, Slashdot Editors!
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Evidently, a Carbonized version of iMovie will not ship with MOSX 1.0 either. iMovie is an extremely important product for apple. Many new macs were sold based on the ease of DV editing with Firewire and iMovie. If Apple plans on preinstalling MOSX on new macs this summer, it better have support for apples core technologies. Anyone can run unix on a cheap PC or an old Sun, SGI, RS6k, NeXT etc. (for less than $300). Apple is selling unix that will run cheap commercial grade apps and will fully utilize apple's core technologies (Firewire, iMovie, FCP, iDVD (very cool) etc...) with the ease of setup and use that mac users expect. There are elements of MOSX that I long the be able to use on Linux, Irix or Solaris (try dragging a file nested in a zillion folders onto a terminal window) but ultimately I just want to be able to edit movies of my baby and her grandparents from my handycam without rebooting into MacOS9.
you seem to be missing one minor detail.
Not all macs have DVD accually I'd say MOST don't.
Mine does but I never even watched a DVD on it.
(I did use it to load SuSE on virtual PC )
I think Apple is doin the right thing releasing it now
JUST GIVE IT TO ME I WANT TO LOAD OS X !!!
http://Lenny.com
Processors are stuck at 733mhz, not 500...
considering the recent leap to 733, I'd have to say that processor speeds are not stuck at all.
Behind your Intel-driven expectations, perhaps, but not stuck.
You only concern yourself with Motorola's processor woes, ignoring the fact that IBM is taking over Apple's processor supply, in iBook, North American iMac, and later this year (don't ask me how I know, I can't tell you), the PowerMac and PowerBook.
Your reasonable suggestion isn't really that reasonable- you just want everything to open up, regardless of the impact.
IBM has opened up several valuable ideas, developed and contributed to open-source and free software technologies, and yet they don't open up *everything.*
Your argument is flawed and to see your incorrect statement of facts moderated at Informative only reveals the lack of your knowledge and the lack of the Moderator's knowledge on the subject.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
It's interesting to see how fast they can come up with a new hardware design concept but how long is it for them to realese a decent OS. Maybe software is not a thing for them.
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Je t'aime Stéphanie