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)."

Comments

There's always bochs

[Anonymous Coward]

There's always bochs. Open source too.
http://bochs.sf.net

Re:There's always bochs

[Organized Konfusion]

there is also plex86, which is quite nice if you want to emulate Linux/x86 but not much else works.

Re:There's always bochs

[pajamacore]

To go along with that, there's a decent Aqua GUI for Bochs--Wintel by OpenOSX.

Re:There's always bochs

[Anonymous Coward]

In the interest of full disclosure, OpenOSX has been accused of stealing intellectual property from the Fink project. While there's no conclusive information about this accusation out there, there's plenty of evidence on the Fink project web site, and no response to the contrary from OpenOSX. So it's wise to make careful decisions about whether or not one should support OpenOSX in any way, including using their software.

Re:There's always bochs

[cerberusss]

There's always bochs

While I agree that Bochs is very nice, the installation is hard, the interface is very oldfashioned and most importantly, it's barely workable because it's so damned slow.

Re:There's always bochs

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah and there's also a bottle of molasses sitting in my kitchen cupboard.

It runs about as fast as Bochs.

Re:There's always bochs

[irritating environme]

Much like Konqueror and Safari, If Apple had half a brain, it would devote a good team to brushing up Bochs to perfection.

Re:There's always bochs

[Jon Abbott]

Hey, with the G5, maybe Bochs will finally run fast! [ducks for cover]

Re:There's always bochs

[max_zorn]

Unfortunately, this is vaporware.
I got suckered into ordering the CD.

Save your money, OpenOSX is a piece of shit.

MZ

SCO sues FWB for copyright infringement

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

New Strategy!

[PopeAlien]

"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!

That's OK...

[Meat Blaster]

If you want to run real PC software, why not get a real PC? It's only like $300 for something that'll run ten times faster than any Apple emulated environment.

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.

Re:That's OK...

[RocketScientist]

Because a $300 real pc wouldn't fit into my laptop bag, and would likely weigh more than 6 pounds.

Re:That's OK...

[stratjakt]

If you need to use PC applications why did you buy a mac? Or, what can a mac do that a PC cant? All the aesthetics and battery life discussions aside, you leave me the impression that the laptop you have doesnt do something you need it to.

I'll get modded flamebait, but big deal. Its like buying a PS2 because you want to play Zelda the Wind Waker.

Re:That's OK...

[questionlp]

If the person is a web designer or a programmer and needs to test to see how the site renders or the program compiles/runs outside of the Mac environment?

I think it would be really nice to be able to develop and test web sites on a lone laptop or system... mostly on the go.

The other use of it is if the company is primarily Mac and has a handful of PCs for some functions, being able to test and support PCs under a virtual environment would be nice. Sure it won't be as fast, but it's still an option.

Then you have companies that require software that will only run on PCs... by being able to run the software within a window rather than setting aside space for another monitor/keyboard/mouse and PC unit... that can be quite helpful if desk space limited.

Re:That's OK...

[Jeremy Erwin]

The occasional use of an obscure, unported windows program should not necessarily dictate one's choice of platform.

Re:That's OK...

[WillAdams]

Stuff a new Mac can do which a Windows PC (default software install on both) can't:

- make a .pdf from anything one can print
- 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

Re:That's OK...

[mkelley]

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.

Re:That's OK...

[RocketScientist]

Wow. Mozilla ate the post I had written.

To answer your question, here's the short list of what I need VPC for:

1. SQL Server Management Tools: Enterprise Manager, ISQL/W, and so on.

2. Outlook to Exchange 5.5 integration. Yeah, Entourage works great for Exchange 2000, but it still don't work worth talking about against Exchange 5.5.

3. Testing sites on IE 6. It's just wacky enough to need separate testing.

4. Various Windows network admin apps (User Manager, Share Management, Server Manager).

All told, I get into it once or twice every 3 or 4 weeks. It's not like buying a PS2 to play zelda, it's more like buing a Torx screwdriver: I don't use it often, but when I need it, I REALLY need it, right then. Am I in it all the time? Nope. But I use it enough to justify buying it (err...making my employer buy it :) )

Hope that clears things up.

legal rights?

[WatertonMan]

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.

Wow...honestly in business.

[Brendan Byrd]

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.

here you go kids, a start

[Anonymous Coward]

#include

int main()
{
}

now get to it!

Re:here you go kids, a start

[tjwhaynes]

[bigjocker@anacreon tmp]$ gcc test.c -Wall -o test test.c: In function `main': test.c:5: warning: control reaches end of non-void function [bigjocker@anacreon tmp]$

Good thing it didn't compile. If it had, we'd discover whether you have . in your PATH. If you do (why?) you might find that a lot of scripts now throw a wobbly and do interesting things to your system.

Don't EVER create a program called 'test' in your PATH.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Re:here you go kids, a start

[PetoskeyGuy]

"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."

They already had that part, but they had to rebrand it remember.

/** RealPC
*
* TODO:
* Write Program
*/

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
cout << "Hello World, from RealPC";
exit(0);
}

And it only took them a week

Re:here you go kids, a start

[coolmacdude]

Apple will go bankrupt before it will write a function called NSWindowsEmulator.

Re:Wine?

[bmetz]

WINE = Wine Is Not an Emulator.

It is an API translation layer, not an x86 emulator. Thank you, drive through.

Re:Wine?

[JPRelph]

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

G5 motherboard photos

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:G5 motherboard photos

[rebeka thomas]

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

Re:Now isn't *that* a surprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Botched Marketing Experiment?

[Aikido Al]

"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.:)

Other PC emulators

[iJed]

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.

Re:Other PC emulators

[jandrese]

I don't know if MS owning VirtualPC is such a bad thing. MS obviously has an interest in stelling their software on Macs, and they're the only ones who have a hope of getting all of the undocumented "features" of Windows right (just look at how much progress the Wine project has made for comparison). The danger here is that VirtualPC will become good enough to run MS software, though not as good as the regular PC version, and then stop, leaving all of those third party application developers out in the cold on the Mac (a market they probably didn't even really consider important in the first place). MS could even subtly break the emulator to prevent most non-MS software from running correctly. Still, selling Windows licenses to Mac users is just too good for MS to pass up.

Re:Other PC emulators

[Minna Kirai]

and they're the only ones who have a hope of getting all of the undocumented "features" of Windows right

VirtualPC doesn't need to know anything about Windows(r) features. VirtualPC emulates an Intel ("x86") computer, which you can then install a full (paid) copy of Windows on. One could also install Linux, FreeBSD, or other operating systems.

But now that Microsoft is selling VirtualPC, the above conditions might change. They will probably bundle a special Windows version, and discourage use of others. We might expect it'll become more difficult to install non-Microsoft OSes on top of the emulated environment.

MS obviously has an interest in stelling their software on Macs,

That's not obvious at all. They have 2 goals: sell software, and improve the ubiquity of Windows (which helps sell even more software later). Supporting users of Macs boosts the first goal, but not the second. Microsoft would be better off if there were only one seller of desktop computer OSes.

VirtualPC, in the nearterm, won't really encourage Mac users to buy MS software. The most popular MS programs (Word, Powerpoint, etc) are already sold in native Mac versions. MS has announced no plans to cancel development of Mac Office.

The real danger is the opposite of what you suggested- not that VirtualPC will work poorly with 3rd party software, but that it'll work too well. What if Microsoft uses VirtualPC to convince other software vendors (mainly Adobe) to downsize or eliminate their Mac software divisions? If companies can sell programs to Mac users without writing Mac code, why would they bother to program for two separate platforms?

Then, once Mac-specific development is good and dead, Microsoft can discontinue VirtualPC and kill Apple completely.

(Naturally, they have motivations to keep Apple alive... they wouldn't have to take the plan through to completetion. It could be just another club in their bargaining arsenal)

Re:Wine?

[metatruk]

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.

Re:Odd that no VPc for G5

[nacs]

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..

You won't need any sort of emulation to play Doom 3 on the Mac. Doom 3 will be released natively for Win/Lin/Mac platforms.

Bleh

[Squidgee]

Before y'all go blaming Apple, this isn't Apple; instead, it's a different company.

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. =)

Blame it on the previous guy

[FearUncertaintyDoubt]

Recent management changes at FWB has led to a major evaluation of the status of development work including Realpc...

"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."

Re:Blame it on the previous guy

[emptybody]

Actually the joke is Three letters.

The Company President is leaving after a particularly grim period. On the eve of his departure, he speaks with his successor telling him that if he has any problems there are three envelopes in the desk that were presented to him when he took the reigns of the company and that he should open one of them if he really needs help.

A year goes by and the company is having serious problems that our hero cannot resolve.
He opens the First envelope and reads:
"Blame your predecessor."

He does this and is able to circle the wagons and work with existing management to resolve the problems.

2 more years pass and again the company is in dire straits. He opens the Second Envelope and reads:
"Accept the blame for yourself."

He does this and is yet again able to circle up the wagons and working closely with management and employees is able to resolve the impending crises and bring the company back from the brink.

A few more years pass and we find our hero sitting at his desk gazing at a sealed envelope. The company is failing. people are leaving in droves. He has done all he can. With his last glimmer of hope he opens the third envelope and begins to read:

"First, prepare three envelopes..."

Re:Wine?

[iapetus]

A wonderful idea, other than for the fact that Wine Is Not an Emulator. From the Wine FAQ:

Is Wine an emulator?
Fortunately, no.Wine provides low-level binary compatibility, but currently only for OSes running on Intel-compatible chips.

Re:Now isn't *that* a surprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Wine?

[Anonymous Coward]

QEMU is just such a chip emulator.

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?

Re:Odd that no VPc for G5

[Kenja]

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.

Re:Wine?

[.com b4 .storm]

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.

That'd be pretty hard to do, I imagine, since Wine relies heavily on the x86 architecture. I suppose someone could come up with an x86 translation or emulation layer, or something. That could sit between Wine and the PowerPC it's running on. I'm not sure how feasible this idea is, though... Just a thought off the top of my head. Any Wine coders out there that can enlighten us on such possibilities?

Re:Now isn't *that* a surprise?

[demo9orgon]

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).

Re:Now isn't *that* a surprise?

[larkost]

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?

Re:Odd that no VPc for G5

[pajamacore]

Unlike the G3 and G4 processors, the G5 does not support pseudo little endian mode, which boosts performance when emulating Pentium architecture. I think it's more a case of rewriting lots and lots of Connectix code than just not planning on doing it.

Re:Now isn't *that* a surprise?

[BlueGecko]

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.

Re:Wine site still open

[tomhudson]

poster wrote:

On another more disturbing note I just went to http://www.winehq.com/ and it's been closed?! Anyone know the story behind that?

It's not closed - if you read the page, it gives a link to the site's main page as well as telling you that, in 20 seconds, you'll be redirected to a site to fight software patents if you don't click the link.

Re:Wine?

[pork_spies]

There is a protest in Europe today about the use/granting of software patents. Hence the closure of the site is temporary.

Vaporware?

[siskbc]

(Insert obligatory Duke Nukem reference here)

Generic CEOs

[fizban]

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...

Re:Wine?

[zulux]

There mab be somthing though...

Wine with it's own .DLL's recompiled for Apple, and Boch for all the code in the rest of a Win32 app might be fast enough for a lot of apps out there.

For example, I have a crappy database front-end written in Win32.

It spends most of it's time in ODBC and calling Windows .DLL for forms and reports.

If Wine on OSX had nativly compiled .DLLs for the ODBC, Win Forms and Report printing - there's barly anything left in my app. Just some crappy business logic - if that part ran ten times slower in Boch, nobody would notice.

Re:Wine?

[OmniVector]

funny that this is posted on winehq.com then. as someone else said, you'd need to hook wine into an x86 emulation engine, but apparently that's being worked on.

pseudo little-endian mode

[frankie]

Since this article doesn't even include a link about VPC, I can't curmudgeonly tell you to RTFA. So...

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.

Re:pseudo little-endian mode

[frankie]

G5 still implements full little-endian mode

Sorry if I mis-phrased my explanation; the last time I did assembly programming was a decade ago on MC68k.

The exact missing capability is called pseudo little-endian mode. According to some old documentation, this will "make memory appear to the processor as true little-endian by playing with the addresses of load/stores, but without reversing any bytes. The result is a fast, simulated little-endian world, but it's not true little-endian in memory - numbers do not have reversed bytes, but their starting addresses are changed."

CEO Interview

[Srsen]

Here's quite an interesting interview with the new CEO that reveals just what a bunch of crooks the former management were. Interesting read:

http://macdiscussion.com/article_show.php3?artic le _id_var=241

Re:not a line of code...

[Glock27]

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"

The term is "slideware" meaning someone made up a presentation, but that's about it... ;-)

And what is up with all the Apple news today?

Apple is doing some really great things lately. My next few thousand or so of hardware money is likely headed in that direction.

Other news...

[leomekenkamp]

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.

Wine through Bochs

[axxackall]

1. install Bochs on your Mac;
2. install Linux in that Bochs;
3. install Wine in that Linux;
4. compare the speed with direct Windows in bochs;
5. ...
6. 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?

Time for hardware fix

[Glock27]

G5s have PCI-X slots. Someone should make an ~$200 x86 card with sufficient performance to run Windows. Perhaps a low-power AMD Duron plus integrated graphics and up to, say, 1 GB RAM (256 MB standard). Mass storage could come from some virtualized Mac resources...perhaps Samba. Low-power Athlons could be used for upscale versions with more performance.

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? :-)

Re:Time for hardware fix

[b1t r0t]

I guess you don't remember the 486 cards from the old days. It was a stunning flop. Too expensive, too underpowered, and almost nobody cared. It was cheaper, simpler, and more flexible to duct tape a real PC to the side of the box and add a KVM switch.

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.

Re:Time for hardware fix

[SengirV]

The only downside to this approach is that it involves opening the case and inserting a card, anathema for many Mac people.

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.

Re:Wine?

[stratjakt]

Bochs register-by-register emulation is going to be faster than VirtualPCs dynarec core? And then adding WINE and X11 to the fray?

You think that's going to be faster?

Cheaper, sure. In the same way that dog turds are cheaper than chocolate bars.

Funny

[bogie]

You can Google for this vaporware and see promises from as recent as 2 months ago that everything is on track.

This Mark Prewitt who was vice president of sales and marketing is caught pretty bad here.

http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/06/10/f wb /

"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.

Then you never saw Ovation.

[dpbsmith]

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.

What in the world are you smoking?

[danaris]

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.

Re:What in the world are you smoking?

[kherr]

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.

Re:Wine?

[DNS-and-BIND]

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.

Crap

[Sir Rhosys]

How am I suppose to play Duke Nukem Forever on my wife's new Mac?

sorta done before

[boomerny]

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.

Why does it matter?

[moankey]

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.

OpenOSX is iffy

[Whumpsnatz]

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.

Pfft.

[Jerk City Troll]

Isn't it odd that Ms does not plan to relaese Virtual PC for the G5?

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.

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..

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.

SunPCi

[pmz]

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).

Re:SunPCi

[WatertonMan]

I wonder if Apple would be wise to adopt Sun's SunPCi PC-on-a-PCI-card strategy.

Apple actually did this at one time. They had a DOS card I believe for one of the Quadra models. (I think it was an early 486)

Today though I don't think that would be too wise a move. After all Apple wants people to port software. If people can run the software without the port, then Apple loses. Also one can effectively do this right now through the ethernet card using Microsoft's remote PC services. I have an old PIII I'm using as a server which I control from my Mac when I need the occasional PC program.

Wrong!

[Jagasian]

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.

Re:Bochs Wine

[WatertonMan]

Bochs would be way too slow. Virtual PC does a lot of things to get even the speed it does. The reason it doesn't work on the G5 is because it was the sole program to use a little known feature of PPC chips to help it emulate x86 code. (Basically dealing with endian issues - the x86 and PPC store their numbers in different ways) This feature was dropped by IBM with the G5.

Writing an emulator is a non-obvious problem if you want reasonable performance.

Assembly language

[yerricde]

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?

Re:Apple should have bought VirtualPC

[johnnyb]

Actually, that would be bad business sense. Why do that when they can just devote a few engineers to Bochs to make it faster?

Even better, with 8-20 engineers, they could probably finish out the Wine API and combine it with Bochs so that users could run Windows apps without paying any extra money at all, and it would cost Apple a few million less.

In the case of some parts of MS Office, was right

[maggard]

Well, actually with MS Office it wasn't so black & white as you present. Until a few years ago the Win & Mac version of MS Office, components like Word & Excel, were indeed 'just recompiled for the other platform'.

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.

Re:Congratulations!

[rworne]

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.

Re:Now isn't *that* a surprise?

[FWBSoftware]

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.

Summed up perfectly

[coreytamas]

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.

QEMU is the future

[Corpus_Callosum]

QEMU is a project that is moving at a nice clip, using dynamic code-recompilation (decompile x86 into C, recompile using gcc).

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 ...), caching it's results.

There is a protest over European patents going on, but you can visit the project site at http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/

Re:Now isn't *that* a surprise?

[FWBSoftware]

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.

Re:Now isn't *that* a surprise?

[FWBSoftware]

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).

Known past & present PC Emulators

[Steve Cowan]

Check out this link. (Emulation.net - very cool site)