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FWB Admits RealPC for Mac OS X was Vaporware
reiggin writes "In a press release on their site, FWB's new management comes clean and says that the former management had been lying about an upcoming RealPC OS X release. Apparently, not one line of code had even been written. This is a huge disappointment for anyone looking for an alternative to the now-MS owned Virtual PC (which, incidentally, Apple and Microsoft have said will not initially run on a G5)."
There's always bochs. Open source too.
http://bochs.sf.net
SCO today announced they would be suing FWB, non-makers of the non-existant RealPC OS, over their use of SCO's intellectual property in their code. "Just like SCO, FWB has not written one line of code in this OS, and for that, they will pay." said SCO's lead attorney Michael Newstrom.
If we could get wine ported to mac os x, it may grow faster, being supported by the OS X crowd. In addition, it would have the benefit of greater Windows support for Linux.
"Honesty and openness with the user base is a cornerstone of the new management team. "
This strategy was struck upon after it was discovered that the previous strategy of dishonesty and disceit was not as effective as originally hoped.
Look out SCO!
air and light and time and space
Isn't it odd that Ms does not plan to relaese Virtual PC for the G5?
I mean it'd be good revenue if every mac user had to buy VPc and WinXP just so that they can play Doom3 or whatnot..
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
Somebody ought to get to work making emulator cards for the Mac that are essentially one of those mini PCs. It'd be pretty cool to have a true dual environment without having the emulation slowdown.
There were always a lot of questioning about whether they could legally even do what they were attempting to do. I believe they had sold the rights to the code some time earlier. That they could go from an old Sys8 era emulator to a OSX quality emulator in a few months seemed...too good to be true.
I appreciate that. I didn't know about this RealPC project, don't use a Mac, or had any interest in it, but the company is already a couple of notches ahead in my book for being so straightforward in their answer.
Zodiac Survey
HAHA!
Seriously, WTF? What kind of business practice is it to formally announce on your website and in press releases that "X is in late beta stage" when it hasn't even been started. I guess that's why they are the "ex" management team.
#include
int main()
{
}
now get to it!
If you look in photo there is a picture of the G5 motherboards which shows they have two different separate CPU connectors, not one like in most other dual macintoshes. Each connector will take one other of the CPU cards, which lets each have an independent bus to the board. In theory this would be good with something like RealPC or Windows on the G5, as you could have one half running windows and one half running MacOS still, AND NEITHER WOULD INTERFERE WITH THE OTHER as they would still have unique access to memory and things. Does anyone know if the motherboards in all G5 are still blue or is that just development?
this isn't 'look we lied', this is 'we're under new management'. Amiga was under new management for an entire decade, and it sent the platform into obscurity. That's not a score against Amiga, it's just the way the world works.
Actually I'm fairly sure that the union of the sets includes all the members from both sets. What is in question is the intersection of the two sets. Which is also probably fairly large.
"I am sorry to have to admit that apparently the company has been a party to vaporware when it comes to the claims regarding RealPC." "In reviewing the status, it was determined that the development cost including licensing fees made the project unattractive."
With the above statements in mind, and the rest of the article, it's almost like they passed around the idea of RealPC to see if there was enough interest.
So perhaps we can expect vaporware to be a new marketing approach?
Mac vs. PC aside, as an IT worker I'm glad I don't have to worry about yet another literal and figural can of worms in my department.:)
The other PC emulators are:
Bochs - Open source emulator with some nice features.
MS Virtual PC - Probably the best PC emulator on the Mac. Now owned by the evil Microsoft corporation.
the only reason wine works at a reasonable speed is that the 'emulated' platform is the same architecture as windows. i.e. x86 Linux.
And if you want a Non-MS Virtual PC solution, check out either Bochs, or Blue Label.
Blue Label is a nice, albeit slow, PC emulator for Mac OS 8/9.x. Sadly, Blue Label isn't Mac OS X native, either; but, for people using Mac on Linux, it works fine. I think it will work in Classic, too, so no worries. Bochs, on the other hand, is Mac OS X native; however, it's open source, and therefore takes some tinkering. It does work very well, however.
There -are- alternatives; you just need to look around. =)
"The previous management had made claims in press interviews and on the company website regarding the status and upcoming release of RealPC OSX claiming it was in late beta and about to be released...I am sorry to have to admit that apparently the company has been a party to vaporware when it comes to the claims regarding RealPC."
Reminds me of an old joke...
Stalin is dying, and summons Comrade Khrushchev to his bedside. Wheezing his last few words with difficulty, Stalin tells Khrushchev, "Comrade, the reins of the country are now in your hands. But before I go, I want to give you some advice."
"Yes, yes, Great Leader, what is it?" says Khrushchev. Reaching under his pillow, Stalin produces two envelopes marked 1 and 2. "Take these letters," he tells Khrushchev. "Keep them safely - don't open them. Only if the country is in turmoil and things start going bad, open the first one. That'll give you some advice on what to do. And, even after that, if things start going REALLY bad, open the second one." And with a gasp Stalin breathed his last.
Well, Khrushchev succeeded him, and sure enough, within a few years things started going bad - unemployment increased, crops failed, people became restless. Nikita decided it was time to open the first letter. All it said was: "Blame everything on me!" So Khrushchev launched a massive deStalinization campaign, and blamed Josef for all the excesses and purges and ills of the present system, and bought himself some time that way.
But things continued on the downside - Kennedy successfully rebuffed Soviet missiles in Cuba, unemployment increased even more, crops failed even more, the Politburo was unhappy with Khrushchev's leadership and upstarts like Brezhnev and Gromyko were threatening his credibility. So finally, after much deliberation, Nikita opened the second letter.
All it said was: "Write two letters."
What would a company get from lying? A extra year or two of publicity and interest? Once the truth comes out that they lied, they will lose all their customers. It is troubling that many executives think lying is an okay part of doing buisness. This is bad.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
It looks like they will have to put on another pot of coffee for some PC emulation software coders at One Infinite Loop.
Perhps they could take a page out of their Safari play book.
wow.. that is some serious vaporware..
I have seen vapor'ish-ware.. but not full blown diaphanous-pipe-dream-vapor-ware..
I think this calls for a new definition.. Perhaps "dream-ware" or "never-ware".. maybe "talk-ware"
And what is up with all the Apple news today?
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
So the liars get to cash in their stock valued with the market expectation of this updated product. Sadly, they'll get away with it too.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Do they mean, won't initially run with G5 optimizations? Because the G5 is supposed to be binary-compatible with the G4... or does it check your proc version and then refuse to run?
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
actually, no one from the former management is employed any longer at FWB... In fact, they have had almost a 100% turnover in the last month except for the contract programmers...
I'm not surprised. The whole "friendly computing" image that apple has crafted over the years is just that, an image.
Maybe they should pair up with Enron and Martha Stewart. =P
The power of Christ compiles you.
A Random Blog
Ugh!
I just had this terrible vision of a thousand foot Venn diagram towering over a blackened charred world lit only by buzzing corporate logos, displaying the visual for your assertion, supported on the backs of countless Discrete mathematicians who are happily writing proofs despite the onerous weight of what they bear...
Damn, this is good Diet Pepsi (the essential 12939 formula sans corn syrup).
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
Actually it was a hostile shareholder revolt. In fact the old management has been playing a lot of games (locking the new management out of offices, removing documentation, stealing computers, etc...). There was a nice little article about it written by the new manager (can't find the link now).
So could someone drop the "Insightful" mod off the parent comment, and add an "uninformed" one?
Comment from a logic nazi...
:)
The union of OLD and NEW management would consist of the set of OLD management plus the set of NEW management minus the intersection of OLD and NEW.
This has the curious property as follows:
count(OLD union NEW) >= count(OLD)
and
count(OLD union NEW) >= count(NEW).
So the size of the union would be at least as high as either group's size.
You obviously meant intersection, so I'll stop being a jackass...
Actually, I feel very sorry for the new management. According to this interview with the new CEO, the old management literally locked their offices, stole the equipment, and has generally made life for the new people a living hell. Although I suppose it's possible that the entire interview at that site was staged, and honestly do not know the background story behind the whole escapade, it does not appear to me as if this was a SCO-like deceptive tactic by the old managers to try to get out of a bind.
(Insert obligatory Duke Nukem reference here)
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
For more information please contact ceo@fwb.com
So you never have to update your address book when the CEO of the company changes, because it happens a lot...
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/sunpci/
In a related story, Lindon, Utah based SCO has sued software maker FWB for "allegedly using three Roman alphabet characters in its moniker." According to SCO chief Darl McBride, "we realized that IBM might have been copying our naming conventions by using the three-roman-character (TRC) advanced naming system, and clearly FWB is doing the same. I'm very disappointed that they have come to this." McBride also said that they might have to go after AT&T next because, "we're not sure yet, but our lawyer Mr. Boies has determined that the ampersand doesn't really count."
Bwahahahahaha!
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Wait, could it mean...? Holy shit!
The G3 and G4 series include support for both big- and little-endian modes. VPC uses assembly-level little-endian instructions for obvious performance reasons. The G5 is only big-endian. Poof.
Obviously the ex management had one goal in mind...pump the stock up and SELL. Mother f-kers. Put them in jail. Obviously that's against SEC rules.
I say shoot every fucking CEO/CFO in the country...that'll teach em!
Although still young QEMU already supports this, on PowerPC Linux no less. All it needs is an OS X port.
Here's quite an interesting interview with the new CEO that reveals just what a bunch of crooks the former management were. Interesting read:
c le _id_var=241
http://macdiscussion.com/article_show.php3?arti
Still, the WINE is slow thing is pretty much a myth now.
Go install fink. =)
What CPU and memory does it require? Can it work on G3?
Less is more !
Other news of today:
Duke Nukem Forever has gone into beta, according to a spokesman from 3D Realms: "[Duke Nukem Forever] is good on track, and we are looking forward to the moment the code comes out of beta stage and goes into production."
Rumors about a management buy-out by angry Duke Dukem fans were said to be "(...) completely unfounded and untrue (...)". There were reports of large groups of DNF fans, who collectively put $0.05 in their bank accounts when DNF was first announced; the plan was to use the accumulated interest for the management buy-out.
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
Shouldn't WINE run OK under MacOS X?
It took them until August 27 2003 to admit it. What was the hold up? Trying to figure out if the new management could maintain the lie?
Yay for ignorance! \o/
Seriously, Wine is speedy. The only slowness comes from the Win32 to X11 stuffs, everything else is essentially as fast as Windows.
...why the need for something like this?
Oh, I'm aware of lots of good reasons, but when Mac people speak up here, they make it sound like Macs have everything PCs have, and more, and better. Not to mention pricier.
So what's the fuzz about? Really.
MS is pulling another MS monopoly action - they are using their marketshare/IP-share in emulation to kill work on others! Those Bastards!
- install Bochs on your Mac;
- install Linux in that Bochs;
- install Wine in that Linux;
- compare the speed with direct Windows in bochs;
- ...
- no profit! just kidding
:)
Well, actual benefit of Wine in Bochs would be that you don't need actual distro of Windows. Or do you?Less is more !
One time I only had access to a windows-only scanner and I desperately needed to scan some files (onto my OSX box.) And after much head scratching and trying to figure out how in the world it could be possible... I realized I had Virtual PC and could install the device drivers in VPC, and have it access the scanner through USB emulation. I felt like I had just friggin cured cancer. It was a beautiful moment, enhanced by the fact that I stole the copy of VPC :) It's actually quite useful for very specific things, you'd be surprised. And I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, trust me. It's really infuriating that they've bought VPC (and probably won't develop it.) Seems like it's kinda against their anti-trust ruling. Oh wait, they ignore that anyway.
I'd bet they had a fully functional RealPC for MacOS X, that mysteriously 'vaporized' when they were bought out by MS. Now who's telling the truth?
I'm sure Microsoft would go for an OEM bundle approach on XP Home, so that would only add $30 or so (maybe less). What did the emulators cost?
The only downside to this approach is that it involves opening the case and inserting a card, anathema for many Mac people. The obvious answer is a micro-form-factor PC hooked up via Firewire 800, with some (simple) custom software to handle display on the Mac. This should go for under $300.
OK, now that we have a business plan, who's ready to hire me as CTO? :-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
You can Google for this vaporware and see promises from as recent as 2 months ago that everything is on track.
f wb /
This Mark Prewitt who was vice president of sales and marketing is caught pretty bad here.
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/06/10/
"Unfortunately, the same guys that do the development had to do the rebranding," said Prewitt. "We're all wearing different hats. We ended up ceasing development on it for about a week," he said."
Only a week eh? LOL.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
It won't run Windows binaries, because it merely provides the Win32 APIs. The hardware CPU still runs the actual code.
It can probably be used to compile native PPC binaries of Win32 apps, if you have the source code.
What year was it? Maybe 1982 or 1983... Lotus 1-2-3 was the hottest success story in the history of the personal computer.
Not just the trade press, but the the mainstream business press was raving about the hot new product, Ovation. It was going to have more rows and columns that Lotus ever dreamed of. It had fabulous screen shots and videos showing how it would work. And it had really, really professional management, MBA's all, who were doing the best job yet of raising financing--something like $7 million--lining up distributions deals with Tandy Radio Shack, and so forth and so on.
It was taken absolutely seriously by everyone from Byte to The Wall Street Journal. Everyone thought it would be a serious rival to 1-2-3.
The business geniuses who dreamed it up did everything right and didn't miss on a single detail. Oh, well, one little detail maybe--they never started development of the product.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
All right, I'll bite.
You obviously know NOTHING about porting. It's hundreds, nay, thousands of times more complex than your misguided and bizarre impression of it. Mac IE and Office are nothing close to an "easy recompile" of the Windows versions. If this were true, it would mean there'd be no point in not porting anything except for wanting to shut someone else out.
The most important difference is that Windows and Mac use vastly different APIs (Windows's is called Win32, I believe, and the Mac uses Carbon and Cocoa). All the API calls need to be changed, and a lot of data structures have to be changed to the other side's API-specific structures. There are also different interface demands (Apple has particular UI guidelines, like you have to have certain items under certain menus; Windows probably has something similar, but I'm not familiar with it). There's a lot more, but I've never ported anything, so I don't know offhand what it is, and it would go on for too long anyway. And that's certainly more than enough.
Anyway, you're an idiot. They can't just "recompile their software to run on the Mac if they [feel] like it"; that's what the whole Mac Business Unit is for, porting to the Mac. This is, of course, a totally different issue than what the poster is talking about. So, have a nice day!
Dan Aris
PS Yeah, I fed a troll. So sue me.
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Wine is an abstraction layer, not an emulator. WINE runs native x86 code. Last I knew the Mac wasn't an x86 machine.
It's faster to run apps on a slow PocketPC using XT-CE, say, than run them under Bochs with a fast Apple. Admittedly XT-CE only emulates up to a 80186 but it's better to emulate that than have something so slow you can't actually do anything useful with it.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
This is a special tag, it is number AF16E82R665TLS8.
Hawash pled guilty.
How am I suppose to play Duke Nukem Forever on my wife's new Mac?
Use Python
I always imagined that this product was vaporware. I'm willing to bet that FWB was just trying to get MS to pay them to not produce the product.
Everyone is missing the real reason no code was even made.
They were trying to figure out how to fake numbers that made it look like realPC ran faster than anything in the world!
Linux: Helping nerds look smarter since the late 90s.
informative
The next Windows releaase will be guarenetted to be bug free and work on 286+. Also it will be free. And fairies will becomign out of Bill Gates' Arse
rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Or even before that.
I seem to remember back in the MS-DOS days when the Macintosh was gaining market share. Two companies independently announced that they were each going to start developing a windowing environment to allow x86 machines to behave like the Macintosh. MS jumped in and said that they too, have been working on something like that, and (get this) they were almost done.
I haven't heard from the original two since then about any result of this (and I can't remember who they were). My guess is that they read MS's press release and gave up. After all, how could they compete when MS was obviously going to have first to market advantage and that they were, well, Microsoft?
I don't remember if MS actually released Windows on time, but I heard that Windows 1 was instantly rejected by consumers, and Windows 2 met a similar fate. I'm sure you remember what 3 was like.
And, even if they were working on it, they won't be any longer.
Come on, really now! Do you think M$ in any way, shape or form was going let such a product come into being or, if already existant, let it continue to live on in any company they owned? If so, I have a secure version of Windows Server 2003 to sell you!
Ok here is my 2 cents.
Bochs is a free X86 emulator.
Wine needs an x86 processor to work with windows aps.
Why can someone take them and put them together?
Write a simple linux distro to forward everything to Apple's x11.
What happened to my robot, I was promised a robot.
Orange Micro sold PCI card PC's for Macs for years, you can still check the specs on their discontinued product page. A cool idea but it never really caught on.
At this point buying a low end PC can be as much as $199.99 on a good sale day, with or without an OS. Sometimes you get lucky and Windows XX is on it.
The cost of Virtual PC is already close to $199. Unless having a PC is so visually unappealing that you can only have Apple's around.
I attempted to purchase something from OpenOSX, and never received anything. To their credit, they eventually refunded my money - but only after I resorted to vulgar screaming emails to whoever I could find. There certainly was nothing helpful on their site to address the problem.
Of course, now I'm glad I never got anything from them.
Microsoft like doesn't want to give more reasons for people to move to Apple's platform. VirtualPC is really a program for facilitating a transition to Apple's platform from Wintel. Of course, it's too early to jump the gun and say that Microsoft are being anti-competitive.
VirtualPC can't use the native 3D hardware accelleration. There are no plans to. Unfortunately, Microsoft removed the VirtualPC FAQ, so I cannot cite where this is stated.
As for Doom III... it will run on OS X. Carmac first demoed Doom III on OS X. He loves Apple's platform because of the uniformity, which eliminates many nightmares for a game programmer. Trust me, it will be native.
Join Tor today!
... and just as 3D Realms were porting Duke Nukem Forever for it.
Sure, you can mangle the endian in software, but it's such an expensive operation that needs to be done so often, that performance will be incredibly terrible.
I'd love to verify this myself... I've seen the registers in the older PPC's I've used (GP405), but would love to get a datasheet for the G5. Anyone have one?
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
The fact that Apple didn't buy Virtual PC is pretty good evidence why Apple will always be a second rate computer manufacturer. No business sense. I had an Apple ][+ and a Mac Plus, and fifteen years later, Apple is finally shipping computers that I would actually consider buying.
Bill gates admits Windows is a dying operating system. What can you do with windows that can't be done (better) with OS X? or Gnome for that matter? Besides hosting viruses I mean. Next windows release? Microsoft Trusted Virus Server!
TallGreen CMS hosting
...it still can't touch the Visualabs GroutFree Fiasco, which must go down as the all-time champion.
It sucked in that it was advertised as being a low-end card for gamers, but it really blew. @ a mere 200mhz, and not a true pentium (it was a WinChip), it only really ran stuff like DXBall, Quake1 and Myth2. It had a built-in nVidia TNT (it might have been a tnt2, I don't remember), too. I only wish that thing ran in OSX because it ran windows98 quite well, much better than I could emulate it even on my G3/450 when I got it.
The main thing I used the card for, though, was running the BackOrifice client so I could hack people's computers in my dorm and run the Quake3 level editors.
The whole reason I got it was because I was bitching that my computer sucked (it was only 132mhz!) and I wanted a video card so I could play games better, so my dad decided to get me this instead since he thought I should learn windows.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
I read with interest the amount of hype that came before this game (all the "suck it down" ads), along with juicy tales of internal squabbling and mass resignation of the dev team, and have to say that Daikatana came awfully close to being vaporware. Alas, it was not meant to be, and now future generations will be cursed with bootleg copies of this junk.
written by fabrice bellard(winner of 2 otcc contests).
that madman did a working c compiler and a x86 emulator that brings wine to the mac in one year?
(haven't tested it yet but it's released, altho the page is closed atm because of EU patent protests)
qemu/org.bellard.www , if you really need it. type it.
I wonder if Apple would be wise to adopt Sun's SunPCi PC-on-a-PCI-card strategy. All Sun requires is that the customer get their Windows license from somewhere else (Sun is most definitely not a Microsoft OEM).
Why worry about whether Microsoft will release their VirtualPC, when a PowerMac can have a genuine x86 CPU with dedicated RAM? I don't see why Apple can't resell Sun's own SunPCi cards with different branding and driver software. Actually that would be win-win (Sun gets higher volume, Apple gets a really really neat toy to sell their customers).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
So you're saying the earlier Apple models had support for
one little, two little, three little endians?
You know what?
Isn't the whole idea of going with a mac to get away from windoze? This is like saying the next product from Trojan will be a condom coated with sperm. Oh no, it was vaporware? Whoa is me.
Come on people, this is basic set theory. The union of two sets is not all the elements from both sets minus the intersection of both sets. The union of two sets is simply all the elements from both sets.
But you are correct in that the guy meant intersection. Your explanation of union just freaked me out.
Also, while logic and set theory share many concepts and relationships between them... logic and set theory are two different things.
What has Apple to do with FWB?
If I followed your logic, I could say: "Duke Nukem Forever was announced in 1998, and still not out! Microsoft, liars! ". That wouldn't be fair either, would it?
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
most quote and trading software is written only for the windoze platform, excepting the odd java ap. So if you like the mac platform better, and also happen to do a lot of photo/video/audio stuff after hours, you really do need something like this.
It is very sad to see a much needed tool become vaporware. I wonder if any for the open source emulators will be able to fill the void?
ObCarAnalogy: It's like complaining that a Ford Focus can't win the Indy 500. It's not designed to. It's basic transportation.
I've figured out how to get the best out of both worlds for my home network. I've got the iMac on the desk, and a PC in the basement running Linux. X11 on the mac - when I need a Windows app, I fire up VMWare on the Linux box, displayed back to the Mac. The Windows instance comes up in the VM, displayed on the Mac. I've got the cd/dvd drive on the Mac shared out to the windows instance in the VM on the Linux box, so I stick a disk in the mac, the PC sees it, and it all "just works".
Sounds complicated, but for the cost of one VMWare license (like 60 or 100 bucks), I've got a copy of Windows running native (not emulated), working fine with the mac for the display & cd drive.
I only use it for a couple of apps, but when I need to, I can get to it in a few seconds. Windows even seems like it behaves better in the VM than it does on the machine itself.
Because Plex86 is a virtualizer, not an emulator, much of Plex86 is written in x86 assembly language. How do I compile x86 assembly language for a PowerPC processor?
Will I retire or break 10K?
of course, if you consider it c++, you want to include cstdio and not stdio.h to be all namespace spiffy, but you knew that.
It is so unreasonable to ask why the user wants to do this thing?
Wine does not in any way, shape, or form, emulate the x86 processor architecture.
True.
You can compile wine on an apple and it won't help one bit.
False, for two reasons. First of all, if you have the C or C++ source for an application (under either a free software license or a so-called "shared-source" license), you can recompile it for any POSIX conforming target using Wine. Then, remember that some versions of SoftWindows (a version of RealPC distributed with a special OEM version of Microsoft Windows) had a traditional x86 emulator for user code but HLE'd much of the kernel code, especially the video driver; somebody might hack up a version of Wine that integrates with Bochs (hopefully after getting Bochs to dynamically recompile code).
Will I retire or break 10K?
what happened to that old pc card that you tossed in your mac to run pc programs? maybe there is some room there for something.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
You have reached a totality of oneness with incomprehensibility. Soon your material form will fade and you will achieve Nirvana.
"Services?" WTF?
And if it cost less than $10,000, then by definition the included fonts are not worth $10,000, because they are widely offered for sale for whatever you paid for them.
-Graham
In the interests of "full disclosure", how about signing your name to an accusation like that? At the very least, support it with something.
... but, as no open or free project really has anything to gain by throwing around baseless allegations, it does bear watching.
He (or she) did support their allegations with something: a reference to the web page of the fink project (who are making the accusations and presenting their evidence).
As to identifying themselves, in these days of barrotry and letigiousness, why the hell should they?
I on the other hand have no opinion on the veracity of these claims against OpenOSX
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I don't want to have to carry two laptops just so I can run that odd app for the other platform.
Will I retire or break 10K?
In light of the RealPC and VirtualPC problems, people may want to politely request that VMWare make their Workstation product available for Mac OS X:
feature-request@vmware.com
VMWare
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
Before everyone freaks out bear with me for a moment:
MS Excel was originally a Mac product. The GUI version of Word too. They were both built using an Apple tool called MacApp. When they were ported to Windows the solution was to stay on MacApp and run it under Windows. This kept on for years and years, even after Apple discontinued MacApp MS kept their own version going internally to support their products based upon it.
Thus for many versions MS Word & Excel were indeed pretty much the same under the hood on both platforms. Indeed this became a big problem for Mac folks when a version of Word looked & behaved too much like it's Windows brother (not cousin: "brother", heck "fraternal twin").
Eventually the effort of keeping the underlying platform going, the amount of customization required for each OS, etc. all finally made the common code base too much effort. That was when they finally made the break a few years ago and yeah, the Windows versions were solidly the flagship products and the Mac one's became re-implementations, albeit with access to the original code for guidance.
Some parts of Office were never common. PowerPoint on Mac was never very closely linked. Access never was brought over, ironically MS even recommends FileMaker on the Mac and builds in support for it on their Mac Office suite. Outlook, there's been a long and ugly history of sorta-products with a new version coming out recently but never has it been a peer with the Windows version.
None of the internet division code ever had anything in common on any platform, or with their Office division cousins for that matter (the boneheaded naming of "Outlook Express" atyer "Outlook" notwithstanding). Indeed when IE 5.0 for Mac shipped it was arguably a far better browser then IE 5.0 for Windows.
So yeah, in the case of the two leading MS Office components, going back a few years ago, there was a common code base and yes, it could have been characterized (loosely) as just a recompile away.
Nowadays that isn't the case at all, and indeed with both platforms having large libraries of components and APIs any "native" application is gonna need a serious rewrite for each platform. Ports from 'nix, easier to do if it doesn't mind being a 2nd class citizen, Java on MacOS X is pretty much peer, but outside of that it's a lot of work.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
When has vaporware ever been admitted so openly? Has anyone ever just plain admitted that they never even started developing something they'd previously claimed was in late beta? I'm trying to think of an example. I mean,
"We said it was almost done, but apparently we never had anyone working on it at all." Pretty danged total vapor.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Come on people, this is basic set theory. The union of two sets is not all the elements from both sets minus the intersection of both sets. The union of two sets is simply all the elements from both sets. But you are correct in that the guy meant intersection. Your explanation of union just freaked me out.
A = {1,2,3}
B = {2,4,6}
A+B = {1,2,2,3,4,6}
A intersect B = {2}
A+B-A intersect B = A union B = {1,2,3,4,6}
The union is the sum of elements in A+B, counted once. What he described is a rather common implementation for calculating this union on a computer. Humans tend to assume the "counted once" part, but a computer doesn't...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What does that have to do with running Bochs on OSX?
If you had a linux box with wine installed on it.
"Even better one of those computers on an pci card."
Could you ssh to it and use you mac only to display what ever the linux box forwarded to x11?
I'm not really sure how wine works but it seems that with gigabit ethernet there would be sufficient bandwidth to run applications in real time on a remote computer.
What happened to my robot, I was promised a robot.
Funny, I've never need a Mac Emulator on my Windows or Linux machines to run Mac software... must not be anything worth running on that platform....
RealPC worked OK in classic mode under X. It was a little buggy, but quite fast.
VPC is now X-native and I am relatively happy with version 5. I will probably have to upgrade when it breaks on 10.3.
In any event, to answer those who ask, VPC (and even RealPC) are better PCs than PCs.
1.) Buy Virtual PC from Connectix.
2.) Release upgrade, simply changing the logo and telephone numbers.
3.) Wait 6 months for it to become obsolete, and don't bother patching it.
Embrace, Extend, Eliminate -- only not so much the first, and a little lax on the second.
an AC said:
;)
>Which you can't change how it's sorted, brilliant!
In NeXT/OPENstep one can---presumably this infelicity will go away for Mac OS X at some point in time---in the meanwhile, just use rBrowserLite which does have a pop-up menu for changing the sorting order
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Indeed, that the last, best way to run Windows applications on Apple hardware is owned by Microsoft, OSX will flicker and fade. The most compelling feature of OSX has always been its ability to run Win32, Mac, and Unix software on platform. Now that's been limited to just Mac and Unix software, and very few Mac users are able and willing to compile their own software (The reason they went with apple to begin with was the GUI...). I predict that five years from now, Apple will be seen the same way as Amiga.
Uh, hu, what I think you meant to say was that windows apps under WINE are now nearly as fast as slow X11 apps. The couple of program i have tried to run under wine (Lotus notes, Excel, etc) are slow enough that It would probably be faster to reboot my machine into windows everytime I needed to run one of them and then boot back to Linux. The cold boot to start menu prompt in XP on some of the new machine here is less than 20 seconds.
Greetings,
The NEW management team does not include ANY members of the old management team and their employment with FWB Software has been terminated.
There is no union between the two sets, no intersection between the two sets, just two mutually exclusive sets.
The new management team is made up of myself (CEO) and Mark Hurlow (President).
I was previously - until a little over 1 year ago - a contractor then the author of several previously licensed software products (the products made by SubRosaSoft.com).
Mark was - until january - quality assurance and support for FWB.com for many years.
We both are shareholders (30% each) and removed the previous management team and all members of the staff because of our concerns with the RealPC product and 2 other products which were being sold contrary to the owners of their respective copyrights.
Your bet was a fair one, and would be quite expected to be true based on the facts you previously had at hand. It is my home that this assists a more accurate conclusion to be drawn.
Regards
Marko Kostyrko
CEO - FWB Software Inc
mod parent up! interesting solution. i suspect you can get pretty nice performance this way
top secret fwb facts :
the reason they have to claim not a line of code was written was because the engineers involved were contracted from the vitualpc team and thus... with legal restraints... they had to disavow using them and thus claim it was vapor.
they did start tot hire a few employees, but basically they lost all the best talent in 1995 and have been downhill since then (when they lost Jim Merkle the author of the good version of CD-ROm Toolkit).
In recent years FWB got in legal trouble for not reimbursing people they owed money to for software sales.
And FWB stiffed another contractor by the name of john Brisbin for about 15 thousand.
however.. softpc was not to be vapor ware. It was going to be the real deal... but they have a few pressures on them.
This was over at MacSlash:
"The new RealPC was fake and the VirtualPC was real, but now the new VirtualPC is owned by the folks responsible for the real PCs, and the RealPC is virtually toast."
And people say poetry is dead.
www.macgamer.com
1. Promote soon to be created Product.
2. ???
3. Profit!
Unless you can't take the truth.
PowerPoint was originally a Mac product, too. It was from the old Forethought, IIRC. Microsoft bought them back in 1987 and ported PowerPoint over to Windows. Aldus came out with Persuasion a short time later.
Forethought was also the original developer behind FileMaker as well, and sold it to Nashoba Systems. Then Apple bought FileMaker and assigned it to Claris.
And of course, as you already mentioned, Excel was originally a Mac-only product. The multiplatform spreadsheet they started with was Multiplan. I think Windows Word was a ground-up rewrite from the old DOS version of Word, though. In the same vein, I think Mac Word was originally a separate product, and then they tried to converge the two apps with disasterous results. That was one of the things that led to the MacBU being spun out and sent to California.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
QEMU is a project that is moving at a nice clip, using dynamic code-recompilation (decompile x86 into C, recompile using gcc).
...), caching it's results.
The author, Fabrice Bellard, is a madman. Anyone with experience and time should join his team. You can already run Wine on PPC (fast, because of dynamic translation), and they are very close to getting the Virtual Machine (an x86 virtual pc) running on PPC (it runs now on x86).
This project aims at not just being a contender for emulation, but eventually blowing all the competition away due to it's ability to recompile everything into native PPC (or MIPS or
There is a protest over European patents going on, but you can visit the project site at http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
It took us from July 7th to August the 27th to "admit it". Further to your question here are the reasons for the hold up.
January 24th two shareholders (the new management team) agreed to allow one of the other shareholders to purchase their shares, payment was agreed to take place 8 to 12 weeks from that date. Those 2 shareholders no longer worked for FWB awaiting completion of that agreement. Payment was never made many discussions took place as to why and when payment would be made. During that time (the previous management with respect to recent events) made a series of poor judgments.
July 8th a shareholder meeting was held to remove the previous management out of direct concern for the future of FWB software, a majority of shareholders agreed to remove the previous management. Previous management were not present at the shareholder meeting, then subsequently locked the office and refused the authority of the shareholders to remove them.
July 17th Honorable Thomas McGinn Smith of the San Mateo Supreme court judges that the shareholder vote was valid, that the previous management is to be removed, and that the new management was entitled to hold office.
Subsequently the previous management continued to lock the doors and contacted suppliers to claim the new management had no authority and was not to contacted.
Late July the new management with the help of a San Mateo Sheriff and a locksmith gain access to the office to find all pertinent company records, files, and computers had been removed.
August was spent attempting to define what had been done on RealPC from contacts made from reconstructing the company email records, and having meetings with relevant suppliers to find out what had been committed to and what had been completed.
August 26 the decision was made that it was potentially fatal to FWB to continue development and it was clear untruths have been told. In accordance with our policy on honesty and openness we immediately prepared the appropriate press release and published it.
Regards
Marko Kostyrko
CEO - FWB Software Inc
Well, you'd run everything (X11, WINE) that can run in native code in native code. It'd only be the stuff in the .exe itself that would be emulated. For code that mainly makes calls to the WIn API, like your run of the mill VB app, this might wind up being quite a bit faster than VPC, which has a faster emulator, but has to emulate EVERYTHING, even device drivers.
My video compression blog
yes but since slow x11 apps are faster than fast windows apps....
The place is still open. I don't know how.
hostile takeover???
the new management is part of the old management team - all they did was finally kick out 2 of the scumbags that were defrauding customers and the company
but where were these other managers when all this was going on and why was it allowed to happen at all?
are we to believe that these old managers that are now the managers are going to make everything wonderful now? why didn't they do something before????
the old management and new management were partners in management from the beginning
why didnt the new management do something about the old management when they were all managers together?
the 'interview' is nothing more than smoke and mirrors and deception to take any blame and responsibility off the old management that is now the new management
gets confusing doesnt it?
that is sort of contradictory isnt it?
there were press releases posted when the 'new management' team took over FWB, which includes everyone above, was posted some time ago - now you state that you were not part of the old management team? which is it?
I was NOT part of the old management team. It was originally intended in the old management team that I was to be the director of development, but this was never honoured by the previous management team. I left employment of the company in January 2003 and returned to the helm of SubRosaSoft.com Ltd until it was clear that I had to act to stop the previous management from destroying FWB (of which I was still a significant shareholder - albeit one that was kept quite in the dark).
Regards
Marko Kostyrko
CEO - FWB Software Inc
Check out this link. (Emulation.net - very cool site)
Your list was fine by me until you got to Mail.app. That app has got to be the most disappointly "half baked" thing I've seen in OS X to date!
For starters, it has issues with sending file attachments. Especially in the case of recipients using AOL (but not necessarily limited to AOL), photos attached to email sent from Mail.app aren't always viewable/saveable by the receiver. Apple, so far, denies this is a bug/issue - yet I've repeatedly witnessed this problem, as have columnists for Mac-centric magazines, who I've seen collecting information on this problem for write-up in future articles.
I'd also, personally, like to see Mail.app functionality extended to the ability to read/post to Usenet groups. OS X seems to be lacking a decent Usenet newsreader program. (Especially odd omission, considering even IBM's OS/2 used to include a newsreader application, years ago, and Microsoft has it built into Outlook Express.)
Show me the MONEY!
Show me the MONEY!
Show me the MONEY!
Show me the MONEY!
Mail.app works fine e-mailing files to my NeXT Cube ;)
:/ the fault here is not w/ Mail.app (MIME was based on NeXTMail after all), but w/ AOL---take a look at keyword MIME on AOL to see how broken they admit to this being.
Seriously, lots of things have problems sending to / from AOL 'cause of their (non) support of MIME---when I want to send something to an AOL user, I use my AOL account---usually it works
There were some pretty cool usenet clients for NeXTstep (AISTR it was NewsGrazer which innaugurated binary posts....), and NeXT^H^H^H^H Mac OS X affords a high enough level of app interoperability that one shouldn't lose anything in having a dedicated client. I'm pretty sure that newsreades for Mac OS X have been thoroughly discussed on comp.sys.mac.advocacy---you can check at http://groups.google.com
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
An example: The Australian Tax Office (ATO) has an electronic form for tax returns (which isn't too bad, surprisingly). The system requirements listed on the ATO's web site are:
PC: Windows 95 or higher, IE 5 or higher.
Mac: PPC running an emulator with Windows 95 or higher, etc (although my venerable VPC 2.1.3 running Win95 didn't work).
The question is: should I be more annoyed with the ATO for producing a web-browser based spreadsheet that only works with IE, or because they are forcing me to pay a fee to Microsoft (two really, one for VPC and one for Windows) in order to complete my taxes electronically? Admittedly, the purchase of a cheap PC could be counted as an accounting expense and claimed back (not that I even want a Windows box), but I do have a problem with a government body insisting I purchase the products of one specific company in order to comply with my legal obligations where it isn't a matter of safety.
While that's true about out-of-the-box features, the mac cannot do everything Windows can do regarding PDF creation.
Despite what you might think from the Adobe web site, if you want to make nice Microsoft Word PDFs including proper use of bookmarks -- the "table of contents" turned into bookmark shortcuts -- that's trivial on Windows but impossible on Mac. :-( I wish it were otherwise, but MS and Adobe haven't gotten their shit together to cooperate on this feature.
I'm a tech writer. I have Virtual PC just to do that when I need to. (And I'm mobile most of the time and so using a 'real pc' doesn't always make sense.)
When I did mostly web stuff for a living, I'd use VPC for verifying the most important web pages (home page, etc.) and the most complex pages in IE for Windows .... just to make sure. It's a good thing, cause there are differences occasionally.
Well, you can run WINE on Linux. Log into Linux over SSH, export the display back to the X11 server on OS X (you have to download X11 from Apple)
ssh -X anyone?
and it runs very fast, I think more efficient than Citrix...
Looks like the best part of you ran down the crack of your momma's as and ended up as brown stain on the mattress.
Yeah, I realize there are several teriffic newsreader programs for OS X. My point was, Apple should have included one to get new users started.
(I'm still not sure why my original post was labeled "flamebait" - as I think I'm addressing a very real concern.)
See this site for a bunch of people reporting problems with Mail.app and attachments:
http://www.macintouch.com/mail.app01.html
Reading usenet is outside of Apple's target market would be my guess as to why they don't---besides, one can always use dejaGoogle.
;)
Most of the problems strike me as pretty esoteric---and I think it's a good idea Apple keeps to a reasonable core functionality so as to leave room for third-party development.
There is GNUMail though, for those with an itch to scratch
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Yes, the performance is better running an x-displayed VMWare instance of Windows, than it does running it in Virtual PC. VMWare isn't an emulation, it's native execution on the pentium, so it's faster, *and* it doesn't slow down the other stuff the Mac is doing. It's not quite procedure-able yet, but with a bit of tinkering, it's working just fine. Frees up some desk space too.
See...same product but seemingly more support offered but I have not conducted business with this vendor. http://www.openosx.com/wintel/index.html
- Mail.app (decent, safe and SLOW mail client)