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Apple OS X, BSD and Jordan Hubbard
We've had a number of posts noting that Boston.com's digitalMASS has a very decent article on Apple's OS X, BSD and Jordan Hubbard.
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Well, as one who runs multiple platforms and multiple os' thereon, I must say i have found it to be extrodinary. I have 3 pc boxes running some combination of 4 or 5 os' and 2 TiBooks and an imac running OSX10.1.
I am, as a direct result of OSX, dumping all but one of the pc boxes completely (and adding a new G4 Tower (need that DVD burner)). I'll keep one just to have a strong box to run the occasional game *not* emulated (for obvious reasons). I have no need for the others any more...quite frankly, OSX simply runs rings around the vast majority of what is out there for day to day use blended with abject power.
Just great...and way to much fun to play with....
/rootrot
I've been a Linux user for seven or eight years now, and I had never even considered picking up a Macintosh until the release of OS X. OS X 10.1 sold me -- it's an absolutely fantastic piece of software.
.. everything you need to be productive.)
There's a complete BSD environment going on underneath everything in OS X (you can pull up a terminal and poke around) with all the benefits that that brings -- ease of development with GNU tools, fantastic memory management, rock solid stability, multi-user ability, and a horde of other features that Microsoft can only dream of. However, you'd never know this using the OS casually, because on top of everything is a beautiful, seamless GUI that holds everything together and hides the implementation details. The OS X window manager is gorgeous, and fully functional (much more oriented towards multiple applications than OS 9 and earlier ever were,) complete with everything that you could expect, along with a lot of eye candy.
Overall, I'm immensely impressed with OS X. All the features of a standard UNIX, with the added bonus of a fantastic GUI, and good application support (Photoshop, Office, IE,
Check it out if you get the chance.
And SuSE 7.3. Their PowerPC release is sitting on the shelf at Fry's, tempting me daily.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Having been a long time user of MacOS, NeXTstep/OpenStep, and Windows I can honestly say OS X is pretty slick. Each platform has it's ups and downs, even OS X has rough edges. But it's nice to be able to dig down to the core of the beast and do (mostly) what you want. Here is a machine on which I can easily install gcc, compile the latest apache, perl, and php. And yet still run the latest version of MS Office (Office v.X) and Adobe Photoshop. No VMware required.
That said, it's easier to approach the OS from a NeXT mindset, not an Apple mindset. This is not your father's Mac OS. It's a totally new beast. (in a good way)
True, it is proprietary, but with over a million Macs sold each year (in both consumer and pro lines -- not to mention the used market), I don't feel too locked in. It's certainly better than being in a much smaller "traditional" unix market (ie, HP-UX on HP PA-RISC or AIX on IBM RS/6000).
Apple may build the machines, but there are MANY sources for accessories and upgrades. Common IO standards (PCI, AGP, IEEE-1394, USB, HD15 monitor, etc) are great as well.
My only beef is the proprietary connector on the Apple LCD monitors (which, is actually based on a draft of some obscure standard that never took off). But at least DrBotts makes an adapter.
seems hard to believe that he had to struggle to land the job at Apple, as such a prominent OS developer. I would have thought that the more successful/visible open source developers would have their pick of jobs at any firm... and Hubbard would be especially well suited to work on OSX, since it's based on freebsd. i bet he's just being modest...
Gaming? Real gaming takes place in a text window. Mac's got those too.
Only thing I'm missing is apps with hidden extensions that auto-launch from my mail apps. I don't really miss them that much, though.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Around here, most of the new Apple users are former SGI-using 3D artists, Amiga holdouts, and even PC users tired of the Microsoft Tax. Let me tell you, when reinstalling Mac OS after overhauling 250 3-year-old Macs with new hard drives and more ram, it's sooo nice to install an OS that doesn't require a CD key.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
I've been a linux user for almost 6 years, and generally laughed at Macs (the whole one-button thing, etc.)
I wanted to find a nice laptop that would run linux, and even had a dell for a few days. Then, a friend of mine introduced me to Macs, and, in particular, the Tibook. You can see it yourself - overall, its probably the single best piece of hardware engineering imaginable.
And OS X really is awesome. I'm not into having the point-and-click interface myself, and love the console. But OS X really is nice to use. Its networking support is amazing, and works right out of the box. Support for sleep is great too.
Right now, from what I can see, the biggest problem with OS X is the lack of a decent DivX player. (4.11 tends to desync in about a second). Otherwise, it's awesome. And, if you really can't let go of blackbox or whatever (like me), there's the XDarwin project that lets you run X on top of OS X. So far, I've only tested the default twm, which runs fine. But using the apple developer tools you can compile any window that's been ported (I believe at least gnome and afterstep have been), and run it there.
Certain products are still not quite ready for OS X, but the situation is improving rapidly. I have to disagree with one of the posts below - its not about being "productive"; one could easily do that in Linux. (I refused to run IE, and will
NOT be getting Office). But it is a sincerely nice operating system to use, and the hardware is definitely going to be a computer legend.
Regards,
trurl
For me, Macs don't mean gaming, web browsing, or things like that.
The latest "sneakypeaks" of OmniWeb 4 do just fine for me. True, MSIE 5.1 (the Mac OS X version) and OmniWeb feel a bit sluggish compared to MSIE on Mac OS 9 or Windows. Next round will probably be a lot more optimized. I do a lot of Photoshop, but I also develop dynamic web content in perl and php on my box. I also have fully native versions of MS Office, too... Office v.X on the OS X machines and Office 2001 on the OS 9 machines. I don't feel like I'm missing much. I've played a few Mac (and Windows) games. I like my Dreamcast, PS2, and GameCube moreso, though (much like my old Sun days when I used SPARCstation 20 for work and an SNES for play).
Bringing UNIX to the desktop is a new approach and a novel idea. It may well work. If it does, then maybe MS will have a competitor.
It is certainly worth a try. Considering pending legislation in America and the way things are going there, this may be what saves open source.
Zero Sum (don't amount to much). [root@localhost]
Essentially, I spent the last ten years of my life shackled to Microsoft products with the all-too-infrequent practical use of Linux. As Microsoft's business practices continue to get ever more predatory, and the Microsoft operating systems become increasingly marketing tools rather than productivity tools, I decided that it was about time to try something new.
I found an inexpensive, new iBook, and bought it. An "icebook" with a 500Mhz G3 processor, I've been quite happy with it so far. The construction of the iBook is quite decent, with a few common blemishes in the casing and a few mechanical defects reported. However, the real shining star of Apple's lineup has got to be OS X. This BSD alteration (Or enhancement, or bastardization, or annexation, call it what you will.) is positioned in the perfect place to bring intelligence back into the use of personal computers. Functionally, OS X is a wonderfully complex yet artistically presented program interface which does an admirable job of concealing the true nature of things from the average Macintosh transitional user, while providing an extremely high amount of flexibility for the more technically oriented. With the Macintosh userbase, there's actually a very devoted core that could use the help and assitance of open source efforts despite the problems with Apple in regards to certain areas of the system. (The interface, primarily)
Projects suck as Fink, an excellent tool for porting unix applications to the OS X environment are a great start, but what will really help Apple prove a real challenge to Microsoft is the conscious effort by Open Source developers to port applications to Apple hardware so seamlessly, that the average user won't even have to know that The Gimp was actually a unix application.
This is where Apple has succeeded as a core business, making computing simpler for the artistically, rather than the technically minded. The best thing Open Source can do is aid the Apple userbase in proving that the Mac is a viable alternative. Yes, Linux and BSD themselves as well as all the other systems out there, deserve to continue to be the primary focus of most efforts. But it just may be that the most effective way to open up the operating systems market will be to back the entrenched underdog.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Further, you need to do more research about your arguments. Open source zealots may never bother to check copyright law, but companys really -have- to defend their copyrighted stuff every single time. If they don't they risk losing the rights to it. In addition, Apple -doesn't- own the Sorensen codec: they license it. They can't control whether or not it is open sourced. Finally, your arguments about aqua and other core technologies are ludicrous. People should be very clear: Apple is a commercial company, which means they need to make real -money-. If everything is free, why would anyone pay for the OS? What would cover development costs. The OS is comparatively cheap, because of hardware, but it is still the corner stone of Apple's business. People can get the base Darwin for free, just like linux. If you want the extra stuff Apple worked so hard on, you're just going to have to pay for it.
This is a great start, and I hope that it is very sucessful and prompts other commercial companies too start to champion open source. Value added solutions can be viable business models.
What does it say about the open source model that a lack of interest from any single developer can be such a punch to the gut for a project, especially when it's something this widely used (and therefore, I assume, developed)? I'm not a troll trying to say "open source sucks" or anything, but this weakness might be one of the things that contributes to corporate heebie-jeebies about Free software. I guess perhaps I think open-source mavens don't acknowledge this readily enough, or have a good way to deal with it.
Yeah. And I really get pissed at RMS refusing to open the RealVideo codec.
Ummm... hate to tell you, but Apple doesn't own Sorensen. I believe it's owned by (da da da dum!) Sorensen. And yes, Apple has asked Sorensen at least to release a Linux binary, and they declined. Maybe it's time to ask again ("Mommy, Daddy, why do we celebrate Sorensen day?" "Because, honey, that's when we all gather round and ask Sorensen to release their codec for Linux so that the majority of the world can use it. Now be quiet, and eat your emacs pudding... if you wish hard enough, St. IGNUcius with give you Free-as-in-speech Gifts tonight under the CVS tree." )
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
What does any of that have to do with compiling apache, perl and php?
I was just pointing out how OS X is more "unixey". But, you win -- Windows rocks, MacOS sucks. End of thead. NO CARRIER
Recently Jordon Hubbard show the FreeBSD developers a tool at Apple used to debug NFS. You can see details here
I would advise that you simply have to try it to
find out.
I found using MacOSX to be somewhat like using
BSDi and Mac OS Ten Server. I am primarily a
Linux user and I find the BSD toolsets to be just
different enough with new, missing, different
command switches that it slows me down. I end up
downloading and installing the GNU tools. I also
dislike the excessive use of capital letters in
the naming of its directories. I end up
symlinking them to lowercase names. They do
leave the standard unix directories pretty much
intact. The desktop was pretty stunning and could
do interesting effects, but I have to delve into
the command line quite a bit. It just was not
compelling enough to switch. It is hard to teach
an old dog a new trick.
I'm a diehard Linux geek, and I find OS X quite to my liking.
I recently bought an iBook with OS X. At first it was meant primarily to be a secondary console, and an experiment in the Macintosh world. But recently I've found myself using OS X for more and more of my daily computing.
OS X is not without its flaws; the package system stinks, the X server (XFree86 port actually) is a little slow, and porting applications can be a bit of an inconvenience, but the environment is pleasant to use, and the underlying UNIX system is easily accessible.
After installing bash, XFree86 (XDarwin), GTK+, GIMP, and XEmacs, OS X leaves little to be desired.
OS X goes all out with antialiasing; almost all fonts rendering is antialiased, which makes Web surfing and document reading much more pleasant. The graphics system certainly takes a toll on the system's performance, but in my opinion it's worth it.
Please do not judge OS X from versions prior to 10.1. 10.0's performance was horrible. It has gotten much faster.
Apple: PLEASE bring back springloaded folders -- OS X needs them!
-John
Apple also has the following opensource projects:
Quicktime Streaming Server
Openplay and Net Sprocket
Common Data Security Architecture (CDSA)
HeaderDoc
Documentation
Also Apple has summited source back to projects like Apace and GCC.
Linux runs just fine on modern Macs.
I recommend Yellow Dog Linux, in particular.
Macs are basically PC hardware with PowerPC processors instead of x86. For instance, my iBook has an IDE hard drive and an ATI Rage 128 video chipset (which XFree86 supports). The audio chip is a Texas Instruments part. Documentation is available from TI, and there is a Linux driver.
-John
Apple has asked Sorensen at least to release a Linux binary, and they declined.
J'Accuse! Point us to a reputable URL for this claim, or forever hold your tongue. I have never seen anything but stonewalling from Apple in the available data.
Apple pays Sorenson serious money to make their codec available only on the platform(s) of Apple's choice.
"Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy; but I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven; for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." --Matthew v. 43-48.
- Dan I.
Apple has suceeded where others after years of trying have failed. They have created a Unix with an interface intutive enough that you could give OS X to your grandmother and not be hounded by calls. Honey how do I....
Now if Apple would get a clue and drop their prices they could gain some serious marketshare in the business commmunity.
I cannot - I am not an Apple user (my last box was a Mac LC, but I loved the Apple ][). I seem to recall it being revealed in an interview... which would make sense, as I read Jobs' interviews for the same reason I listen to Jello Biafra - I may not agree with him, but he's got charisma, and a good deal of thought goes behind some of his directions. At any rate, it was awhile back, and I may be in error. I do not think so, but it would not cause me to melt into a puddle screaming "What a world!" if it were the case.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Do you mean Star Trek? That died in the early 1990's.
Basically, try out VPC again, it has come a long, long way. It doesn't even require a separate IP anymore.
See this mailbox and search for "LMbench/results" (they apparently didn't archive back that far in their web archiving thing, so you have to checkout the mbox).
It will give you lmbench numbers for the same 400MHz Powerbook G4 running Linux, NetBSD, and OS X (2 diff versions). Granted, lmbench numbers probably only impact practicality and useability...
The summary: Linux out performs the others on the same hardware.
Feeding a troll, perhaps, but this is factually incorrect. Apache's license is fairly similar to that of BSD- Apple was not forced to release anything for Apache.
-bugg
I use FreeBSD at work. It's awesome. I also use OS X daily at home and at work. And really, I can't see much difference between the Darwin core (pure opensource) and FreeBSD in terms of out-of-the-box functionality, except that several of the utilities and bsd apis are dated (no localtime_r, for example). That's not a big deal really, it's Apple's goal to keep Darwin in sync with FreeBSD, and anything that you are missing (as an application developer), there's not too much stopping you from getting sources and compiling it yourself.
My point is, Apple is shipping a fully capable open source OS. I'm talking about Darwin, not OS X. This is what Jordan is working on. If anything, it aims to succeed FreeBSD. FreeBSD is nice and all, but it's got everything that makes a modern Unix, which is exactly what keeps its market penetration small. It doesn't have the attention that Linux has to keep it growing.
The difference that Darwin has is the incredible number of NEW ideas that make a NEW OS. Darwin isn't just another BSD. Apple has learned a lot having several OS projects fail (you have to admit, you do learn a lot that way), and the good stuff has gotten into the Darwin core.
There are things like XML and Unicode support at the base level of the OS. XML is used to describe everything in the sytem, it's basically the conf file format of OS X for everything that doesn't have too many legacy dependancies (for example, fstab is still there, but from what I can tell, it isn't the source of the information at boot time- NetInfo generates it. mount et. al will use fstab still). High-level, object-oriented frameworks are available with at the base level of the OS through CoreFoundation. CoreFoundation is basically the core of the OpenStep Foundation framework without Objective-C. It's pure C. Everything in the core of OS X is written with CoreFoundation- it provides the XML and Unicode support (this means kernel modules, etc). Every string you use is a Unicode-capable string. The powerful array and dictionary 'classes' you use can be converted to and from XML (simple data archiving and unarchving, and human readable too). And you can download and install CoreFoundation onto Linux/FreeBSD if you want to.
I can hear people in the background yelling 'OMG! They're butchering BSD!' No, their upgrading and replacing some very old systems with new ones. They're replacing them with things that fit the needs of modern workstations, not just servers. Things like 'ls' and 'more' aren't touched. They're user utilities, and pretty irrelevant at the OS level (and fairly irrelevant for Apple anyway, because a cool ls isn't too useful in OS X).
You can check out Darwin yourselves from www.opensource.apple.com. You'd probably have more fun with Linux/FreeBSD for a few years, though. While Darwin doesn't have everything it needs to make a long-time *nix user happy, it does have everything it needs to bring all the power of Unix to the masses.
Even before Rhapsody was remade into Mac OS X, I remember Mac OS Rumors article about a rumor (surprise surprise) that what is now Darwin would be available free to universities, simply because Avie Tevanian wanted to give back to the community (as the BSD license doesn't force you). Well, they gave everything back to everyone, and then some.
I'm not saying that Apple is all good, but so many people really underestimate what Darwin is and what it stands for.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
His speech basically came down to "open source failed to do anything on the desktop, and without proprietary, commercial vendors like Apple it will never go anywhere either". He almost sounded like he ment to say "only Apple can make UNIX a success on the desktop", but he explained all he ment to say was open source couldn't, when I asked him about that.
Martin Konold, who like me was present to hold a speech about KDE, responded that KDE already deliver all the stuff Jordan Hubbard was talking about, even before OSX was on the shelves.
The "open source developers can only developer for themselves and never think of end-users" view is just not true. GNOME and KDE prove that every day. Knowing these projects only exist respectively 5 and 4 years, while Apple (and Microsoft) have been in the desktop market for a much longer time gives me plenty of confidence and hope that open source can definitely bring UNIX to the desktop. Just imagine what KDE X (pun: OS X) and GNOME XP (pun: Windows XP) will look like.
Well, of course Sorensen can be blamed, but only partially.
What about the content providers who have decided to provide the content in ONLY Sorensen format, with no way for someone who just wants an mpeg to download it, or no way for someone on a non-supported-by-quicktime platform to view it - period.
Such exclusive deals are made specifically for the purpose of forcing propagation of Quicktime (on Windows). Everyone else be damned. And that's not Sorensen's fault. It's Apple that wants Quicktime everywhere. Can't blame them for wanting that, but you CAN blame them for taking a page out of Bill Gate's HOWTO manual for "ruining the internet for everyone who chooses a different platform".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I guess the point is; it's a powerful strategy, forcing a player format by constraining content. But I think most people here will agree that we'd rather see a player format win on it's technological merits.
Quicktime does do that - but since everyone else seems to be playing the content forcing game, Quicktime has to as well.
Back when Quicktime was THE standard for video on the internet, when CNN presented content exclusively on Quicktime, it was obvious. Then Microsoft gave away servers and software to CNN to get them to switch over to WIMP. And here we are.
Real Media? what's that? Oh that audio format that also sometimes plays really tiny grainy pictures about the quality of an animated GIF? Real is irrelevant.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I have a TIBook with OSX, and I have to say that both are fantastic.
I'm a long time UNIX user (who like most others also has to run NT at work), having used mostly Solaris and Linux with some dabbling in other variants. I've always been a big fan of the Mach microkernel as well, so for me OSX is a perfect fit. As others have mentioned "fink" is a good way to get started installing some of the more common UNIX utilities, but quite a lot is already there. They also have put some work into making nice GUI's for many common networking utilities like netstat and ping. Imagine being able to set up your mom's box with sshd and be able to fix things remotley!
Another great benefit is that all of the development tols are free - it's a large download to be sure but you can order it if you need to. I haven't gotten the chance to do much development with it yet, but it's nice to have it there. I also love how easily OSX (and really macs in general) support multiple monitors, I have a 21" at home and USB keyboard/mouse all hooked into a docking station (by BookEndz). I just bring it in and I can use both screens for development, or just a single screen if I'm out somewhere else.
One last note is that if, for some reason, you just have to have Word and other MS Office products, they are all there and produced by a totally seperate group at Microsoft. I myself have been resisting as long as possible getting this just on principal, but am starting to weaken - after all, if there is a group at MS with a clue about UI should one not support them? Anyway, having MS Office means that it would be totally feasable to put a Mac OSX box in at work in place of a PC, if you were so inclined.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
ahem - say WHAT?
Oh, you didn't know that AppleScripts can be attachments to mail messages, and run automagically from Outlook, and have misleading file types assigned.
It's just that nobody's written an AppleScript email virus. Yet.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
In effect, all Linux proper is is an OS kernel. Everything on top of the kernel is something that is bolted on independently of any kernel development. Thus Slackware is the Linux kernel plus "all sorts of stuff Patrick Volkerding added;" Red Hat Linux is the kernel plus "all sorts of stuff they added;" ditto for SuSE, Debian, Mandrake, ad infinitum.
With the BSDs, there's quite a lot of additional "environment" that is tightly tied to kernel development so that you've got a "base system" that is defacto-standardized that is capable of, for instance, recompiling itself.
With Linux, you've got to add in whatever that is needed that isn't in the kernel in order to do that yourself.
With that larger basis of "stuff" surrounding the kernel, a whole lot of the arguments "Red Hat puts the files here; Debian puts them there" just plain go away. The "Linux Standard Base" effort where they're trying to standardize where a bunch of the basic stuff goes and what it does is an effort that would be ludicrously irrelevant amongst the BSD folk; they started off by standardizing the user space stuff that LSB is fighting over.
Then there's Ports. Ports is sort of the BSD equivalent to Debian's apt-get or perhaps the Red Hat-oriented autoRPM . Except with a difference: With Ports, the approach is not to download binary packages, it is rather to download the sources, pull in any patches needed for Ports integration, and then compile it all.
That's got the demerit that it's a lot more work for your poor, overworked CPU.
However, it has the merit that if you compile libraries and packages, together, on your system, with the same compiler, the sorts of "DLL Hell" that people suffer from when they grab RPM files from here and there just can't happen. The libraries will necessarily be compatible with the applications because the applications were compiled with and for the precise set of libraries you have on your system.
This means that if there are any challenges in getting programs to compile, you'll hit them. That being said, since the folks collecting and maintaining the Ports will indeed hit those issues, they're likely to have patches in place so that by the time you see the code, it should compile cleanly.
In effect, the crucial concept involved in all of this is that the BSD packaging paradigm is that everything should be readily compilable and recompilable, from the ground up. The classic "make world" will compile all the base tools, the kernel, all the kings horses, and all the kings men, and what you get at the end is that every single component in the "world" (which is the base system; the stuff below Ports ) has been rebuilt locally.
It's all using Makefiles, and can be downloaded using CVS, so the details are all visible. None of the controversies of "well, the Red Hat kernel compiles include some special patches, and getting at them is a bit challenging...."
Big-time learning opportunity.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a skunk works somewhere inside apple with this already being worked on, but not because Apple is all of the sudden going to become a software company.
Apparently Jobs was mighty pissed at Motorola because the PowerPC chips weren't scaling (in terms of Mzh) as quickly as the x86 machines. There were rumors that if things continued at that rate that Apple would switch its machines over to an x86 arch. (with maybe Transmetta for laptops). Now, assuming that was true I wouldn't have expected the new systems to have been standard x86 machines. I would suspect they would have been incompatible with WinTel boxen. Apple is a hardware/software company and would want to control the hardware platform as well.
Since it looks like Motorola has solved some of the speed issues (the new G5s are supposed to be blazing if the Reg is to be believed) I doubt any x86 port of aqua would ever see the light of day.
Now people have known that BSD was going to be the core of OS X for at least three years. To create this false "Apple vs. Open Source" strawman merely to knock it down is lazy writing, and this late in the game it's actively insulting for anyone even remotely familiar with BSD or OS X. This is "Look at me! Look at me!" writing that needlessly draws attention to itself, something real writers don't need to do.
Indeed, this paragraph mars what is otherwise a reasonably adequate column. But at least it's not as irritating as the average Jon Katz column. Speaking of which, I see that more votes have been dropped from the dump Katz poll. The numbers don't even add up anymore...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
The argument for cancelling Copland (the original MacOS 8) was that it was going to take another year to make it work, and buying NeXT would get the new OS up faster. A similar argument was advanced against BeOS. That was, what, in 1996?
The MacOS really needed a new layer underneath, but UNIX/Mach wasn't a great match. I'm not suprised it took Apple almost five years to make them play together.
The original MacOS only supported one app at a time, and the addition of "multitasking" was a horrible hack internally. No memory protection, no process dispatching, no interprocess communication, and no way to reliably get an app that crashed cleaned up without a system crash. Developers used to call it the Mess Inside. Apple desperately needed a new kernely, and it should have happened around 1992 or so, by which time all new Macs had enough hardware for a good protected-mode OS. Basically, Apple was nine years late with their new OS, which is part of why Apple tanked.
I once wrote an entire dial-up PPP implementation for the MacOS, called "Simple PPP". It was not fun.
I have been a fan of mac hard ware for a long time now but have never bought any. This is because its so closed. I can't go buy a MotherBoard for the G4 and put it in my case. Well I could but I would be buying it from Apple. I think thay could of stomped Microsoft and Intel if thay where more open with their HardWare. I know I would buy a G4 and the likes if I could costomize it like I can X86 stuff. But then with the new Athlon's and P4's(which suck) G4's are looking less and less sexy.
OH and I am still mad at them for what thay did to BeOS.
011000011001111
Oh man, have you got issues or what? You're only going to give Apple respect when they start shipping Debian as the default OS? Hah! Hah! You need a major dose of reality. Perhaps some debrainwashing is in order as well.
Apple has contributed back TONS of software to the community. The BSD license said they didn't have to give anything back at all, but Apple did. The opened up their entire base OS. They have provided patches, fixes and enhancements to BSD. They work with BSD developers on a daily basis. But all you can do is complain that it isn't Debian. Go crawl back in your hole.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
XP has rock solid stability, better hardware support, multi user ability (including logging on graphically with multiple users - Apple can only dream of that).
And so does OSX. Legendary BSD stability, best consumer hardware bar none, a true multiuser OS underneath. The stability and multiuser aspects have been with BSD for twenty years. The hardware aspects have been with Apple for almost the same amount of time. During that same time period Microsoft coudln't manage to get a stable OS until a few months ago, and the PC platform evolved into the world's biggest kludge.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Quite frankly, I really don't care WHAT my pc looks like - as long as it does what I want it to do - and if I'm using a Mac, that means graphics and multimedia ONLY.
Of course the appearance of my computers has no bearing on their function, although I do occasionally get compliments on my server's paint job. My PC does what I want (it's a server that occasionally doubles as a desktop system), and my iMac does what I want (all my desktop needs). My 486 even does what I want - an extra test box I can play with, and the only floppy drive in the house.
Graphics and multimedia? I have no Adobe or Macromedia software installed, save Acrobat Reader and the Flash and Shockwave plug-ins of course. I do have some music software, but so does my friend on his PC.
For me, Macs don't mean gaming, web browsing, or things like that.
I don't spend much time playing games; the one I play most is Unreal Tournament. Looking forward to Quake 4 and Warcraft III. I'm writing this with Mozilla 0.9.6 (yes, I sometimes use nightly builds, but keep the milestones around too). Of course I use BB Edit to write HTML and Perl code. For me, this is what Macs mean, and I'd be surprised if they didn't fit the vast majority of your needs too.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
The propietary hardware will always hold me back from a mac. I like having the ability to install any OS on my machine.
Nice nonsequitur.
And what machine runs "any OS"?
My TiBook has MacOS X.x, MacOS 9.x, Darwin, Windows 98 (via VPC).
If I wanted to I could install various distros of Linux (PPC and, with VPC, x86), but with OSX's Unix underpinings I don't need to.
I'm currently running VPC v4.x. If I were to get a copy of VPC 3.x I could load Solaris and BeOS (support was removed with version 4). But I've no need for them.
A quick check at Emulation.net shows a variety of emulators. I counted 34, plus emulators for game consoles, calculators, and handheld devices.
I have no idea if those emulators are useful. The only one I've used is the PalmOS emulator.
Even with this there are plenty of OS's that I can't run. MPE/iX and OS400 are two that I've worked with in recently.
Please tell me what machine can run any OS, and where I can purchase one. Theoretical Turing Machines don't count.
Steve M
Apple at least has a chance to push past that and get to the meat'n'taters of selling apps built on a real multitasking protected memory O/S. Building on 'nix clone was a biz decision, not a political one. MicroSofts unity of vision (at least as presented outside the company) gives it enormous advantage over what should be an insurmountable enemy of open source fanatics working their asses off for nary a penny. Except for Divide and Conquer. MicroSoft didn't have to divide the 'nix community, its quite capable of doin' that itself... of shootin' itself in the feet, kneecaps and elbows.
Here's hopin' that a strong market presence can bring some unity to the open source community, even if it is starting off with a few baby steps.
iCab is another excellent browser. I find it much faster rendering web pages than OmniWeb 4 (though I haven't tried the latest "sneakypeak").
It's worth noting that the new free devtools that ship today include Applescript Studio, which, though I've only started glancing at the documentation, appears to be a really cool RAD tool for doing Delphi/VB/whatever-style protoyping and/or vertical-market stuff. People who have been playing around with it are quite impressed.
top, vi etc are all there. /usr/bin is where CLI programs go. MacOSX GUI programs go into /Applications. This is so that if you don't want to use a command line, you don't see any CLI apps (/usr is invisible to the GUI by default). A Terminal window sees all though.
There is no need for the quotes around "console". It is not some lame DOS ripoff that Apple put there for marketing purposes. Open a term window and you'd be hard pressed to tell it apart from FreeBSD except for directories like /Applications being there.
Yes it is the Dev tools (Cocoa, Carbon, C++ compilers, etc). Side note: When NeXT was selling this, the dev tools were several hundred dollars, $700 IIRC. Apple is GIVING them away. Of couse some here would ignore that and gripe that they're not open source *sigh*. Sort of. The OS and unix CLI stuff is Darwin. It's open and can be downloaded separately for free for PPC and x86. It has no GUI but you can install XFree86 if you want. The rest of MacOSX is only for PPC and is a set of closed source libraries and applications.Yes, you can't change the source. Apple is a NASDAQ company and must make money. They have to keep some things in-house. The Cocoa environment is EXTREMELY good though and by subclassing etc you can override a lot of defaults, not that it's usually necessary though. Apple did a good job the first time. If you want to see how some things are implemented, check out GNUStep, an open source implementation of Cocoa for Linux.
Good, object orientated frameworks mean that you don't have to see the source to have flexibility. Check out the Cocoa docs.
I always love reading Slashdot posts about Apple because a thousand people who haven't even touched a piece of Apple hardware in 5 years come forward and bitch. Yes, the Macintosh is a propietary platform, yes, the hardware is more expensive. The fact of the matter is though that there isn't a better end user experience in the world.
Hey kids, you get what you pay for. Remember that little blurb about Linux only being free if your time is worth nothing? It's true and no computer commercially available today is as fast and easy to get rolling as a Mac. It might not be the king of the benchmarking circuit or the cheapest possible solution but the people giving their money to Apple aren't flushing it down a toilet as some would like to have you believe.
It must lock you into the Mac hardware platform, even though it is in desperate needs of larger user installed base.
Apple isn't in desperate need of anything. They have BILLIONS of dollars of cash and enough customers to stay in business pretty happily.
Would they like more? Of course. Who wouldn't? Are they on the ropes? No way.
"Apple Computer: Proudly going out of business for 20 years!"
Apple will lose money from its reduced hardware sales, but once OSX for x86 reaches a critical mass of user base, then it can ship OSX to the major PC providers like Dell or Compaq.
Apple will never, ever do this. When you buy Apple you aren't buying an OS, you are buying an experience -- hardware and all.
Have you ever looked closely at a Mac? You'll see that the CD-ROM's own front panel is covered up by a panel on the Mac's case. This prevents you from accessing whatever controls might be on the actual CD-ROM: play button, headphone jack, volume control. Why does Apple do this? To utterly control your hardware experience. If they kept the CD uncovered, the available controls would change when they changed CD-ROM vendors... sometimes the Play button might not be there; who knows.
A company that won't let you see the headphone jack on the Toshiba CD-ROM they bought that quarter CD-ROM isn't going to let you try and install OSX on some commodity hardware Frankenputer.
(not that I can talk too much sh!t about Frankenputers, I have 4 & 1 Mac too.)
I run both yellow dog linux (kernel 2.4.10 at the moment) with ext3fs and mac osx 10.1 on my dual g4.
Linux/KDE/Gnome definitely 'feels' more snappier the Mac OS X Aqua.
I've had linux freeze my box more than a few times. Probably related to VM, probably would be fixed when I go to the latest kernel with the better VM. OS-X 10.1 has never crashed on me.
Benchmarks of some computationally intensive altivec code for some reason show linux 10% faster. Strange, maybe the gcc compiler for OS-X has some optimizations disabled internally.
I personally like them both very much. Porting linux apps to OS-X can be a bitch especially if they want to create shared libs. Shared libs are completely different.
I also wish that OS-X could mount my ext3 partition.
--jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
OS X is not without its flaws; the package system stinks
AARRGH!
NeXT's package system was wonderful, and it's a tragedy that Apple abandoned it for that pax-based kludge that can destroy linked directories.
Scott Anguish explained in great detail what's wrong with the new Installer.app. You can find the story at stepwise.com.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If you follow the freebsd-hackers list you probably saw a message from Jordy some days ago talking about NFS stability. This leaded to a thread with Matt Dillon, who has fixed 3 serious bugs, one of them in the softupdates code. For me, this is quite a serious contribution to the FreeBSD code, not that he has forgotten about it. Also, guess which OS does freebsd.apple.com run?
One aspect of OS X that seems to have gone largely underreported is the decision to distribute developer tools with the operating system. The developer tools include the Project Builder IDE and Interface Builder GUI constructor, as well as gcc, gdb, cvs, make, perl, and the Java JDK.
The integration with Java is alone remarkable; full Cocoa bindings means that your Java applications are no-less "mac-like" than apps implemented in c/c++/objective-c. The file-bundle structure (executables are packaged in hierarchical directories with resources and XML files providing metadata) completes the encapsulation: a Java app looks and launches just like any other.
On the other hand, you can double-click ".jar" files, and programs that use AWT or Swing, and run them as well.
Providing the facility to write first class programs "out of the box" is an important, if unheralded, aspect of Apple's "open" philosophy. It's a form of user empowerment. It may not go far enough to please the proponents of some open source ideologies, but for the great majority of personal computer users it represents more freedom than they know what to do with. I think it could have a significant effect in introducing people to programing. IANA Windows programmer, but my impression is that the barrier to entry is considerably higher.
Yeah, you can run TS, but it's unstable as can be. I went to TechED last year, and MS gave a seminar on ways to automate the rebooting of your TS farms, because they needed to be rebooted at least once a week. Wow, that sounds really good!
We use TS at work, and have 5 users on the machine all day. It'll go a couple of months and then need a reboot. The reboots are mostly needed to fix the stupid Print Spooler service. It apparently can't take printers popping on and off as people come and go.
If they REALLY opened everything up, they wouldn't have a product to sell.
Get real and live with the fact that Apple's giving developers a LOT of open source data - but for them to open every technology, open the Mac and everything else is rediculus and stupid.
This is the future of open source -- partial and profitable.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
LOL! Doing something like this has been the holy grail of the open source desktop environments, and I think you trivialize both their work and Apple's work with that statement.
I also don't know where you get the idea that Apple "ditched development and server utilities". Yes, the DevTools are on a second disk, which you can optionally install. This isn't a bad idea since <gasp> many desktop users are not developers. So how are the server utilities crippled? The primary difference I see is that in OS X if I want to start up my Apache server with typical settings for serving my personal webpages, I open System Preferences, click on Sharing, and click the Start Web Sharing button, only needing to pop a terminal for tweaking the server, most of which I could probably do in a GUI text editor like BBEdit Lite.
Finally I must point out that having a system that they could mistake for a weird version of windows (not exactly the model interface itself) when used only for opening one application is not an achievement of the magnitude of having a system that they could have painlessly setup and configured all aspects of themselves.
If you want to setup servers, compile all your apps, muck around with source code, or uber-tune your window manager interface, then yeah, Linux (or bsd, or whatever) will be complicated. Take all that crap away, and setup a system with a standard graphical interface, and it can be just as easy and friendly as a Mac.
Or you could build Mac OS X, and have a system that lets you do the vast majority of your work easily, including GUI tools for development and servers, and lets you pop a terminal for any tweaks you might need to do under the hood. Lets face the fact that Linux can not be as easy as Mac OS X in terms of total experience, that's not what it was designed for, although open source desktop environments may get it there one day.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
The problem is that it's true. I've tried twice to install Linux (PPC first, then intel), and failed both times. Linux sure isn't doing much for me on the desktop.
I don't think it's really the open-source developers' fault. It's just that there's too much hardware out there that only loosely supports a particular set of standards, and a lot hardware developers refuse to share the info with open-source developers.
The obsession with running Linux is doing real harm to the open-source community. It ghettoizes open-source apps. It's as if there was an art gallery with beautiful paintings in it, but every time you tried to go there, the roads were closed and the subway wasn't running.
I really don't see it as a problem with software usability. I run GIMP and Freeciv on MacOS X, and although they're a little harder to use than commercial software sometimes, you just have to read the documentation. IMHO, the real problems have to do with the OS-hardware interface.
Find free books.
I hope that Jordan Hubbard being employed by Apple does a little bit to speed the development of the PPC FreeBSD port. Linux on PPC has some serious issues (most notably random lockups, due to which I had a very important ext2 partition NOT survive an fsck the other day, causing me to lose about a week and a half of work). 2.2 was much more stable, but 2.4 performs significantly better.
:) I'm probably going to end up reinstalling OS X.1 on my laptop sometime in the next few days, just because I can't trust the Linux kernel on PPC, which is a shame because I use Classic apps fairly frequently and Mac-on-Linux runs much better than OS X's Classic on lower-end hardware (I'm running a Powerbook G3 Wallstreet, 292mhz, 192MB RAM). Maybe I'll take a crack at writing a decent virtual desktop enabler. But DAMMIT, I want FreeBSD :( Oh well. I'll probably just end up running OS X with Xfree86 most of the time.
I would love to run a more solid OS on my Powerbook, but the FreeBSD port isn't in a useable state yet, and OS X has a few interface issues that just make it COMPLETELY unuseable for me. First of all, the menu bar at the top of the screen. While I understand the appeal, it breaks any hope of using sloppy focus - you can be in a situation where you simply can't get to the menu bar of an app without crossing over another application's window, which would give it the focus and change the menubar. Sure, you could rearrange the windows so you can get up to the menubar, but that's an annoyance and kinda annuls the main point of using sloppy focus in the first place (speed)! Second of all, and this is a minor bitch because it can be easily fixed, I need GOOD virtual desktop support. Space.app just doesn't cut it. I need virtual desktops to switch quickly and to have FUCKING HOTKEYS! Third, and again, this is easily fixed (but I'm surprised it hasn't been yet) - how about a decent native terminal emulation? Terminal.app is shit! My terminal application should NOT eat my page up/page down keys.
*deep breath*. Ok, now that I've gotten that off my chest...
Writing this was not fun.
Doing background work under the original MacOS was ugly. Underneath, the MacOS was almost as dumb as DOS. No CPU dispatching, no threads, and no waiting in a thread. Instead, there were all those wierd "task" types; "system tasks", "timer tasks", "vertical blanking interrupt tasks", etc., each with a different set of restrictions on what they could do. New task types (multiprocessor tasks, Open Transport tasks) were added over time. The whole "task" mess was far more complicated than a standard CPU dispatcher would have been.
So I was really looking forward to the new MacOS. I gave up waiting in the mid-1990s and switched to Windows NT 3.51.
Why don't they tap into a nice pre existing user community instead of going it alone all the time?
They did tap into a nice preexisting community, the FreeBSD community. Just because it isn't *your* community is irrelevant.
I mention Debian because it's distrobution method is superior.
Roughly on par with the FreeBSD distribution method. OpenPorts exist for OSX. Fortunately, neither it, nor apt-get, are the default package management system for the typical Apple user. Whew!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
but I don't things like the NVidia drivers will work. (which means no 3d accerated games/apps)
What! You mean that NVidia makes the world's only 3D video card? Dopey me for not buying this year's mandatory video hardware.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
OS X is architected on top of Mach to keep Apple stockholders from asking why Apple paid $400 million for NeXT, bailing out Steve Jobs and his buddies.
No. OSX is architected on top of Mach because OSX is NeXTSTEP, and NeXTSTEP was always built on top of Mach. The decision to use Mach was a sound one, as proved by NeXTSTEP/OpenStep's durability and portability across many diseperate architectures over 15 years after its birth.
The argument for cancelling Copland (the original MacOS 8) was that it was going to take another year to make it work
No. The argument for cancelling Copland was that it was never going to work. Copland was a horrible idea to begin with, and rapidly became the textbook example of an out-of-control, death-ship project. By the time Hancock performed the mercy-killing, Copland was over three years behind schedule, and what little in terms of development SDKs had dribbled out of Apple had been universally panned by developers.
The MacOS really needed a new layer underneath, but UNIX/Mach wasn't a great match. I'm not suprised it took Apple almost five years to make them play together.
No. Apple had functional, usable builds of Rhapsody (OpenStep on PPC with a MacOS Classic look-and-feel, and "Blue Box" fullscreen OS8 emulation) within a year of the NeXT acquisition. I personally used such a box in early 1998; it was quite slick. This product was later released as "MacOS X Server 1.0".
The reasons that OSX "consumer" didn't ship until much later were twofold: First, Apple listened to feedback from their existing developer base, and realized that they were risking alienating a substantial amount of them by trying to force an immediate migration to the OpenStep APIs. (Adobe, in particular, dug in their heels and threatened to discontinue Photoshop development for MacOS.) In response to this, Apple had to develop the "Carbon" API layer, which was a substantial effort. Second, Apple made the decision to take the time to re-engineer the user interface and display layers ("Aqua" and "Quartz"), on the (likely) theory that the MacOS UI needed a facelift.
Apple desperately needed a new kernely, and it should have happened around 1992 or so, by which time all new Macs had enough hardware for a good protected-mode OS.
Blame IBM. Apple had a new base OS technology in 1992. It was called "Pink", and ironically was very similar in conception to OpenStep. Unfortunatly, as part of the original Apple/IBM/Motorola alliance, Pink was given over to IBM, who renamed it "Taligent" and promptly buried it.
Basically, Apple was nine years late with their new OS, which is part of why Apple tanked.
Ah. I was not aware that "tanked" could also be used to mean "wildly profitable in a year when Dell, Compaq and HP are hemmorhaging money." Fascinating.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Let me guess: you worked at IBM, circa 1993-98? Sir, you have my sympathies, but chill the fuck out.
That's crap! It was *NOT* given over to IBM.
Taligent was a separate corporation
Let's get real for a second here. Yes, Taligent was, on paper, an independent company. In reality, as you yourself point out, Apple lost interest in the project shortly afterward, and IBM was in the driver's seat for the majority of its history, and the failure of any of Pink's technology to ship on any platform until years after its irrelevance was assured can be laid largely at IBM's feet.
Apple's mistake was to spin Pink off as an external entity when they really had no interest in using an OS that they didn't completely own. The mistakes after that one were IBM's and Taligent's own.
given the challenge of taking the best OO tech from IBM and Apple and turning out a next-gen OS and cross-platform API. The Pink team was *part* of that effort.
Correct. I don't recall saying anything contradictory to this.
IBM *S H I P P E D* it for AIX and put it in beta for OS/2.
...the former being promptly ignored, and the latter, well...
I think we are largely in violent agreement here. Apple and IBM both spent a good chunk of the 90s strangling their own best technology initiatives in the cradle, while Microsoft laughed all the way to the bank. Taligent, I suspect, failed inside of IBM for the same reason that OS/2 did: because IBM is not so much a unified company as a stiched-together group of fiefdoms, and in the final analysis the portion of IBM that had no interest in challenging Microsoft seriously on the desktop was the one that got to make the critical decisions. (It's ironic that you mention CommonPoint shipping for AIX, as AIX is now undergoing the same crib-death treatment at the hands of the pro-linux/S390 crowd -- listening to IBM sales reps try to explain their unix strategy these days is alternatively hilarious and depressing.)
IBM offered and negotiated TWICE to buy out the floundering Apple and make it their consumer division! Again, Apple balked.
Sorry, but this was the right decision on Apple's part, even then. OS/2 Warp's fate made it crystal clear what Apple's destiny would be as a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM: a lot of pretty talk, followed by inevitable destruction. (See also: "Any part of Lotus other than Notes" and "AT&T buys NCR.")
Apple did NOTHING but piss away one opportunity after the next throughout the '90's. It was too egotistic to accept Copland was going NO WHERE until a certain Hancock, a former IBM exec, came in and had the testicular fortitude to end it and look for something else.
Quite. Please read my post again with your jerking knee taped down -- I said pretty much exactly the same thing about Hancock. (The phrase I used was "mercy killing.")
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Oh boy did they ever. Every once in a while, I try to amuse myself by listing all of the next-gen OS projectst that Apple started and then abandoned in one form of completion or another since the release of System 6. There were a lot of them.
...and that's just off the top of my head. Any former Apple developers are welcome to chime in and add to the list.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Photoshop "Classic" runs in Classic no matter what you do. It doesn't suck that much more in OS X than in OS 9. Although there's a bit of a disconnect from running the different application environments under OS X, if Photoshop or some Mac OS 9 element that it's dependent upon die then you don't lose your browser, email, and any other native apps (Illustrator, FreeHand, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, MS Office, etc). Photoshop is almost certainly coming out for Mac OS X in January, 2002, and a lot of the people who will use it already know that all of their other apps are already native.
Part of Photoshop's delay may be the plug-ins. They have to be recompiled, so the average user will want updates of all their plug-ins (many will be free upgrades, just carbonized versions with the same features). I heard that Adobe wanted a longer beta with Photoshop so that third part plug-in developers would be ready to ship alongside Photoshop. So they can release Photoshop for Mac OS X and say that it's ready to use today, right now.
Just some random kibbitzing here:
/usr/libexec/config* .
OS X is not without its flaws; the package system stinks
Yeah, Apple's native packaging system is a nightmare. Luckily, you're not stuck with it: InstallerVISE is available for OSX Carbon/Cocoa apps, and fink just completely rocks for bsd/x11 apps.
the X server (XFree86 port actually) is a little slow
That'll change. Right now, as far as I know, XDarwin is entirely a software framebuffer -- no hardware accelleration support at all. I'd expect that to change soon for geforce-based macs, and eventually for radeon-based ones.
and porting applications can be a bit of an inconvenience
If you're just trying to compile a pre-existing autoconf-based unix package and it's being balky, there's a magic trick that will solve a good deal of your problems:
mv config.sub config.sub.dist
mv config.guess config.guess.dist
ln -s
If that doesn't work, the canonical answer is usually, "Check fink." Someone has probably already ported whatever it is you want.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Perhaps you misunderstood the 'unix application' reference. Microsoft Office for Mac OS X is a unix application as much as the GIMP is, just not a very portable one. It's not perceived to be a unix application because the interface conforms to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and it just works. If somebody slogged through all the successful open source projects out there and created UI's that not only conformed to one set of guidelines but the *same* one, open source applications would begin to understand what a difference it makes not to have to learn or remember all those different ways of doing the same thing.
As a practical matter, you can do all that work and maybe make Linux get in the same league as Apple in a decade or so, maybe not because you'd have to do a lot of rigorous research into making those guidelines *good* and if you have to issue major revisions along the way, you'd have to herd the open source cats into following each new revision of the guideline just to make things interoperable and consistent. Apple did it by diktat and by force but they did it and from a user perspective, strong-arming the programmers so that at least one of the ways to make things work was the standard way was a great leap in useability. Is there a way to replicate this in the open source movement? I don't think so. At least there isn't one separate from taking those UI guidelines and adopting them for GIMP and the rest of the open source A team.
Feel free to provide some sort of alternate methodology.
"The teminal is not so great. It does an appalling job of color support."
Since all the low level code is freely available and open source, the development tools cost no money, it should be a snap to make a better terminal replacement (there are other problems with the app besides the color support, like load speed). So what's keeping you?
DB
There is cocoa for x86. It's called gnustep. http://www.gnu.org/software/gnustep/
If you need to run a Windows only application, try Virtual PC or Bochs for Mac OS X.
The first versions of Word and Excel ran on the Mac, and it's been running there for 10 uninterrupted versions, through 68k, PowerPC, and now Mac OS X. Worrying about Office is as pointless as worrying about Apple. Both seem to be in very good shape, so fire away, get the best kit that's out there for the job. The Apple stuff is dynamite and they're only just getting the "new Mac" going now, with all the traditional "Mac" software arriving native for Mac OS X week after week (Office, Illustrator, VirtualPC, ViaVoice, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Commotion ... all shipping in the last few weeks). Anyone who is shopping for a new computer really owes it to themselves to hit an Apple Store if at all possible before they commit to an XP box. There's so much interoperability now, and your USB and FireWire and PCI peripherals generally transfer over just fine, too. Even though you have to upgrade your software, you'd have to do that under XP, anyway. The best versions of many mainstream apps are on the Mac. Even Office is much better on the Mac. None of these ever-changing disappearing menus and no product activation watching your hardware for a chance to disable the product.
Can't wait for Dreamweaver to run native next to Apache, though. The Macromedia apps could be really good on Mac OS X, with good standards support (Fireworks' native format is PNG, for example). Fits in with a lot of the philosophies behind Mac OS X's design.
Are you really running Apache for Windows?
There's so much more to the Mac platform than what could be ported to Intel. I had a friend in my studio last night who was looking at the computers (a PowerMac G4 and a PowerBook G4) and he was totally blown away by the fact that I've been making data DVD's as easily as floppies, 4.5GB on a $6 disc in 20 minutes, for almost a year, and that our AirPort (802.11) base station is 18 months old. It was also his first time seeing FireWire in action, and seeing the notebook hard drive mounted on the PowerMac via Gigabit Ethernet also blew him away. All this stuff is just built-in and just works on Macs. It has so much to do with the hardware and not just the software. You can plug two Macs together via FireWire and use one of them as a FireWire hard drive for the other, enabling really, really easy admin work (just mount the target machine as a hard drive on your own notebook, and install or configure what you want to, then unplug the target machine and boot it up).
In short, the platform itself is really starting to show the benefits of a lot of good planning from Apple over the past few years. You can expect TV out, mirroring or second displays, gigabit ethernet, FireWire, AirPort. It's there and the OS makes it all just work. The commodity hardware model won't support a platform like this, even if MS disappeared tomorrow.
You don't know anything about Apple. Check out apple.com first, try out the machines, talk to the users, then you will have at least half a clue at least.
The reason Apple needs to have lawyers who are quick on the trigger is that they are one of the very few companies that really comes up with new stuff and makes it work. They're copied far and wide, most famously by Microsoft and Microsoft's hardware cartel. Get past a few FUD stories that you read on the Internet and check out what the real story is.
Please man pkg_create(1), pkg_delete(1), pkg_info(1), pkg_update(1) and pkg_version(1) for more information.
As a side benefit, these binary packages are built FROM the ports tree every day by the kind people at freebsd.org.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
Jesus, man, just because it's on the Web doesn't make it true. Just because it's not on the Web doesn't make it untrue. Get a grip.
Apple has done fine by Linux. They contribute code to open projects, including GNU stuff, they are on their third or fourth UNIX OS now. Apple's (GUI) disk management utility has six or seven Linux-specific disk formatting and partitioning options you can choose and you're ready for your Linux install. Not to mention that you can boot a Mac from any attached storage (ATA, FireWire, iPod, USB, Zip, CD, etc) so it's easy to have Linux on a second drive or a tenth drive in addition to Mac OS or Mac OS X. Also, when you boot a Mac with the Option key held down, you get a boot loader from Open Firmware that will identify bootable Mac OS, Mac OS X, and Linux systems on attached storage. Volumes with Linux systems on them get a cute Penguin icon, it's really quite nice. People who run LinuxPPC are fucking in love with it, and good for them. These guys are like the happiest guys at Macworld Expo all the time, running around talking about it a mile a minute with other LinuxPPC users.
Personally, I hate when Linux is compared to anything else. To me, the strength of Linux is to provide a free, geeky alternative that follows a few years behind the commercial stuff and makes sure that they don't sit around and sell the same shit to people year after year. It's like, once Linux can do it, it's available for free to anybody with some time and smarts, so if we want to charge for it, we'd better add some serious value. Apple adds some serious value, while at the same time you don't lose the benefits of community software. The BSD heritage of Mac OS X is shouted out at Apple, while Windows uses the BSD TCP/IP stack and Microsoft doesn't want you to know that.
Finally, to the comment "Darwin isn't enough", I would have to say, "what have YOU contributed?" QuickTime Streaming Server is also out there for free and open source, and it's cutting edge stuff. Real and MS charge you a lot to get that functionality running on a closed Windows platform. Apple also developed QuickTime, TrueType, FireWire, and lots of other stuff that has benefited and will benefit community software developers and users.
You can use Apache for a million years and you are never forced to contribute code. SkepTech, you yourself may have used Apache and never contributed code. Apple has contributed code. End of story. You're confusing "forced to make your contributions public" with "forced to make contributions".
> "doesn't have half the hardware at the same price"
... ALL Macs include a lot of stuff that isn't standard on Windows machines, and then you look only at the specs you're familiar with and write-off the other stuff like it's useless extras. It's not useless extras when all of the machines on your platform have them, though, because developers build on them and users learn how to use them. From the Mac side, it's the reverse. We look at Wintel prices, think at first that they're low, then we start to say, "how much to add FireWire to that machine? where do I get drivers? will they work later if I upgrade Windows? will they work with a range of FireWire devices (storage, cameras, media devices)? who do I complain to if it doesn't work right?" and then we do the same for AirPort (802.11) and pretty soon the Wintel machine is looking a lot more expensive, in money but especially in admin time, especially later when you can't find drivers or a firmware update or whatever. Once you see a 2GHz P4 crawl through Photoshop filters and encoding jobs, the Wintel system definitely doesn't seem so cheap anymore. Those are some empty megahertz, man.
> That's not trolling?
No, it's not trolling. The iBook is $1299 and has FireWire, TV out, VGA out, Ethernet, 56k modem (not Winmodem), 5-hour battery, 1024x768 display, built-in antennaes for 802.11, and you can add a $99 wireless networking card into a slot under the keyboard. Windows notebooks in that price range don't usually have built-in ethernet, never mind a real modem, antennaes, FireWire, and forget about the battery life (less than two hours on Dells, less than three on Compaq). iBooks generally run silent, too, with the fan coming on only in hot climates, and all the software you need to enjoy the hardware is already there and working.
That's part of the reason Macs seem expensive when you're used to looking at Wintel prices
One of the things that the Apple Desktop Connector (ADC) doesn't get credit for is that it solves a real problem with DVI displays that involves AC grounding. I forget the exact details, but either the display has to be plugged into AC power before you connect the DVI plug to the graphics adapter, or else the display should NOT be plugged into AC power until after you connect the DVI cable. This can fry displays, apparently.
With ADC, power and DVI are together, and this apparently solves the problem and extends the life of the display. You can't plug them in the wrong order, so the display is grounded when it first gets a spark out of the DVI connector.
I really like ADC. My PowerMac is in an equipment rack with music and audio gear, and all I have to do to set it up is plug the mouse into the keyboard, the keyboard into the display, and the display into the computer, which itself is already connected to AC power in the rack, and gets Internet over 802.11. I have almost zero setup with this rig. It takes no time at all to do, and you don't have cables going everywhere. The converter to turn ADC into plain DVI is only $20 or something, so you can still use a PowerMac with a plain DVI display if that's your preference, and VGA is on the back of PowerMacs, too (and all other Macs as well). But if you use an Apple display, you get the bonus of having one less power supply and USB hub to worry about.
It's a great connector. It saves me time and trouble again and again and again. My Cinema Display has basically just been a part of my PowerMac, with no configuration or calibration or controls needed, because it's always connected via USB as well (impossible to forget with everything on one cable). I just plugged it on there and it worked and has worked ever since.
How much really valuable IP have you given away? Where can I download it? And while we're at it, who pays your rent?
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Even if Apple didn't give away any really interesting code (and they have), I would be happy with them, just for making a BSD-based operating system with a lot of nice native GUI applications and a promise of more to come.
The open-source part is just gravy -- they did it primarily because it benefits them and their users, and I respect that.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
An AC wrote:
> So why now?
Why, oh why, did you choose *that* day to make *that* posting? Five years ago, on December 14th, 1996, Mothra Leo resurrected a charred dead sapling, and made to grow into a mighty Apple tree. Did you not see Friday afternoon, the sun displaying a bite like that of the Apple logo? Did you not hear Godzilla's mighty roar echoing over Japan? Or the crack of the egg heralding Mothra's rebirth? Or the meteor showers that accompanied Ghidrah's return (yeah, he promised Mothra to behave this time, but can she really get him to give up Windows for the Mac)?
> *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic
> circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD
> keeps losing market share but why?
The OS X boxed version, which is based on BSD, outsold the Windows 2000 upgrade for its first two months out, and placed number 8 out of the 10 top selling PC (not Mac specific) business software packages for those months (March and April 2001). OS X has been shipping on every Mac sold since last May. Decline? Hardly. And you haven't seen anything yet. Wait until 2002, when OS X gets to run on 1.6 ghz G5's with gigabit firewire!
> The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come
> back from the grave.
Mac OS: gave its last gasp circa 1995-1996 when Apple did its impression of a burnt cinder. Apple and its beloved OS are quite fine now, thanks to timely intervention by Mothra and Steve Jobs. See above comment on OS X, Mac OS's remarkable child (sired by *BSD).
UNIX: as a whole presumed finished (again back in 1995-1996), when the NT steamroller came to town promising to erradicate that old outdated OS. Linux, the *BSDs, and OS X have changed all that.
OS/2: supposed to be dead. Doesn't seem to care, though.
NeXT: died, I think, in the 80's or early 90's (wasn't paying that much attention to it at the time -- silly me). IP was sold to Apple, and parts (such as Cocoa, kernal, etc.) used in OS X. User groups for the old system have simply switched over to OS X, with some grumbling.
> As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed
> OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death
> shround over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone;
"Lightning shines on wavey beach, and all clouds are made right:
Happiness appears!"
From "Infant Girl" song in "Mosura" (1961 - japanese version only) - my translation
logout writes:
;)
> There are already numerous OSX applications available in open or
> closed source form.
And it also runs most OS 9 applications, and Java 2 Swing applications.
> I still have to run Windows 2000 to use some commercial application
> and I could not get rid of it.
Virtual PC is releasing its OS X version, so you can run that app in the Windows 2000 emulator. You can also get a Linux emulator, or install Linux for PPC on a separate partition.
> You always have to buy a new Macintosh to use Apple's OSX.
Well, I'd have to buy a new PC to run Windows XP, or a new PC to run Linux (my old Linux box doesn't do fun things like USB). Taking home an OS box with a manual and a disk don't do a whole lot of good if you don't own any or new enough hardware to run it on. Joe Sixpack usually buys hardware + OS, and if he ever considers getting an OS upgrade, he either finds a smart friend or family member, or takes his computer in to the nice(?) folks at CompUSA to take care of that highly technical operation for him. Remember, a lot of Joe Sixpacks have trouble with simple drag and drop operations (like my boss, the owner of a tech company), and probably dump everything on their desktop.
> You want to develop an application for OSX? You'll never see it
> running on Intel platform or whatever, because Apple won't port
> Cocoa to other platofrm than Apple's Mac.
Well, you could develop it in Java and have it run everywhere Java runs (in theory, that works out in fact nicely with the PC Java apps I've tried under OS X). Or you could go for a compatiblity library like Qt, and run your program in OS X, Windows, and Linux. Go into CompUSA, and compare the Mac section to the PC section. There are a lot of titles in common. For instance, The Sims now seems to run under Windows, OS 9, OS X, and Linux (in a Mandrake box I think).
> I think Apple must port its entire OSX product into Intel platform.
> Apple will lose money from its reduced hardware sales, but once OSX
> for x86 reaches a critical mass of user base, then it can ship OSX to
> the major PC providers like Dell or Compaq.
Yeah, like that would work. Which of the three: Apple, Dell, and Compaq, are not in bad shape due to the collapse of the PC market? Apple. Which one is the only one not shipping on an Intel platform? Apple. Sounds to me like Apple is the one doing something right, hardware platform-wise.
> Apple is losing a best chance of conquering the Intel user base,
> surfacing themselves as a major competitor against Microsoft. But it
> rather chose to live with Microsoft and keep their realms separate.
The December 3rd Time ad did not sound like Apple was keeping their realm separate from Microsoft. Apple was directly comparing themselves to Microsoft, in no uncertain terms. The Intel PC market is crumbling. PC's themselves show no innovation that would compel a user to buy a new one. Microsoft is perched above the PC makers like a great big tick, sucking them dry. That is Microsoft's powerbase, the base of their core monopoly that they extend to everything they do. Any vender that walks into this situation in good financial health, with an innovative software/hardware combination that compels people to buy will grab marketshare with every sale. That is all Apple has to do, and come this spring, will they ever have the software and hardware! As the economic recovery gains steam, Apple will be able to sell more, while all the PC side has is more icky beige boxes with more ugly Windows XP (with that nasty tick staring at you the whole time you use it - yuck!). HP/Compaq merges, and CompUSA stares at all that blank shelf space wondering if (gasp) they will have to use it to expand the Apple section. Meanwhile at 27+ Apple stores, bouncy employees show happy mall shoppers what fun new things their Macs can do. That old PC base caves in on one side, and the nasty old tick goes splat (yuck!). If they are smart, the remainder of the PC market catches a clue and has a hasty conference with software developers and those Linux folks, tossing Windows altogether.
Hopefully, when the dust settles, OS X, Linux, and other OS's are competing happily, finding new ways to work together, and generally living happily every after. Billy Bob Gates is off in a corner whining "Waaa, I wanna rule the world!". (Maybe the DoJ may finally decide that since he doesn't have any power anymore, they will feel safe enough fining him for being an illegal monopoly meanie.
OS X, the Apple of Mothra's Aqua eye.
irony: having to comment AppleScript code. . . :)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
He's referring to the Be party-line that Apple wouldn't let them have tech specs on the G3 to stifle Be. Nevermind that mklinux was being published on the FTP site at the time. Be thought if they jumped to Intel they would take over from Microsoft so they used the G3 issue as a smoke-screen.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Have you ever heard of OpenFirmware? No, I see you haven't. It's the thing that most Linux distributions on the Mac use to boot. Neat huh?
Why do you speak with certainty about Apple an their hardware when it's obvious that you don't follow the company, and don't have any experiece with their products?
all parts of MacOS X that aren't in Darwin
What's in Linux that isn't in Darwin? Apple never had to Open Source anything, expecting them to opensource everything, and complaining is being unreasonable.
Look it's the Quicktime file format! Make your own player.
More Open Source projects at Apple.
As for my supposed lack of experience with Apple products, I used to be a developer of Macintosh software.
Macs have been using open firmware for a long time now, expertise in the workings of the Mac Plus do not translate well onto modern hardware or software. Anyway, "used to be" doesn't lend you much credibility when commenting about Apple's recent activites, especially after the ignorance you displayed in your comment.
BTW, you don't flame well. Try harder next time, or not at all.