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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
WINE = Wine Is Not an Emulator.
It is an API translation layer, not an x86 emulator. Thank you, drive through.
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
You have to remember though that WINE Is Not an Emulator. It allows Windows programs to run on Linux on the x86 platform but doesn't actually emulate the x86 processor.
So you could use it as a start for a new Mac emulator but you'd have to build the chip emulator to fit underneath that.
JP
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.
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.
Wine only translates from the Windows APIs into X11 and other such things. There is no x86 emulation done, which is one of the reasons Wine is so fast. In order for this to work on a Macintosh system, you'd either have to be using PowerPC Windows binaries (which there are few of) or you'd have to include an x86 emulation engine in Wine.
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
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. =)
Wine requires an x86 processor. It doesn't translate machine language instructions to the native set, and adding that functionality would be very much outside of the project's scope.
A wonderful idea, other than for the fact that Wine Is Not an Emulator. From the Wine FAQ:
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
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...
Qemu emulates an x86 chip (among other things). It runs WINE. It's been ported to PowerPC Linux. While it's still very young, it shows tremendous promise.
Now all it needs is a port to OS X. Any takers?
Given that Half Life 2 will require PC systems the likes of which we have never seen and that Virtual PC has no hardware 3D support at all I would say its a moot point all around. You cant use Virtual PC to play 3D games, not since the Voodoo 2 went out of style.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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.
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.
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.
- 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 !
Wine does not in any way, shape, or form, emulate the x86 processor architecture. You can compile wine on an apple and it won't help one bit. Cluebie.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Red is early alpha development colors
Blue means design complete or late development models, maybe even early production
Green is the traditional final production colours. You'll find after they have been shipping for a while that they'll have green motherboards
RST
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.
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.
Stuff a new Mac can do which a Windows PC (default software install on both) can't:
.pdf from anything one can print
;)
- make a
- Services
- Miller column browser for filesystem navigation
- AAT / ATSUI - play w/ Zapfino in TextEdit
- $10,000 worth of fonts (including non-Latin ones)
- Mail.app (decent and safe mail client)
- iApps (iTunes, iMovie, iCal, iSynch)
- colour calibration which really works
By contrast:
- is there any app in a default Windows install which can take full advantage of the spiffy OpenType version of Palatino bundled w/ Windows 2000 or later? (bummer that has Ariadne swash caps instead of the original Palatino swash letters---only available in hot metal, though I did a digital font for a friend who has said letterforms
Moreover, if one adds in d/l'ing and installing free (libre) software, Mac OS X draws even further ahead w/ stuff like TeXShop (pdf editor lite!) and EquationService.app.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I got a mac, because it's what works for me. I design websites and test them under VirtualPC with Windows 98 & XP along with Linux. Why should I have to buy three boxes to do what some $200 piece of software can do?
It's a big hassle to have three boxes under a desk, just to test a website. The cost justifcation isn't there, once you add kvms, and additional PCs.
m.kelley
life is like a freeway, if you don't look you could miss it.
Oh, and by the way, "integrated graphics" is a codeword for "cheap crappy graphics chip that satsfies Ma and Pa, but any serious gamer will disable in favor of his own card". Oops, there's no AGP slot on your PC-on-a-card!
What I want to see is Windows apps running as separate apps in separate windows, just like Apple's X11 does. Not one big window that pretends to be a screen. And no stupid Start menu. Even nicer would be to make the apps support a real menu bar (ditto for X11), but considering all the Windows apps that make the menu bar into a toolbar, this might be tricky.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
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.
Writing an emulator is a non-obvious problem if you want reasonable performance.
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?
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.
If you never used NeXTSTEP (or OS X for that matter), there is a cascading menu called "Services" that do a variety of interesting, useful, or totally useless things.
One such example is highlighting a word going to the services menu and getting the definition or highlighting text and putting it into an e-mail message.
Applications can add enhancements to the OS by providing services and placing them in this menu. I used them all the time in NeXTSTEP, but in OS X I find them a bit lacking and they pretty much go unused for me. In other words, it's a great tool in OS X, but needs more support.
The closest example I can think of in the Intel world is right-clicking on a file and selecting "Add to Zip file" for computers with Winzip installed. That would be very much like how services work.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Quick note: Microsoft's mac department doesn't port, they write from the ground up.
They tried doing just a port at one point, and brought the Mac community Word 6. It was so god-awful that Microsoft was losing customers in droves. That's when they created the current MacBU which writes good stuff. Office v.X is arguably much better than its Windows counterpart.
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
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
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
Not since the advent of the B&W, and before that Apple invited people to muck around inside. If you are basing your knowledge on 1984 information, then I have to question your opinion.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"