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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.
"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
#include
int main()
{
}
now get to it!
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
Because a $300 real pc wouldn't fit into my laptop bag, and would likely weigh more than 6 pounds.
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.
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.
"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."
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?
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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?
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.
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.
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.
- tristan
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.
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
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
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)
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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