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Tiger Early Start Kit
EccentricAnomaly writes "If you can't wait until next spring for the official release of next version of Mac OS X, Apple is offering a Tiger Early Start Kit to those willing to pay $500 for an Apple Developer Select Membership. And if you don't want to spend the money, they've also added a developer overview page describing some of the guts of Mac OS X v10.4."
There's some nasty NDA business going on.
You can't even talk to other devs about Tiger if you have it.
Wow the guys over at Everquest will be jealous!
The advanced drawing capabilities of Quartz are exposed to the Web Kit environment through a set of modular extensions to HTML. This will let you draw beautiful user interfaces using JavaScript.
This has got to be the coolest new feature, considering how weak DHTML currently is. I could be wrong, but adding support for other APIs doesn't seem like it would be too hard. I'd love to finally be able to ditch Win32.
Sorry, but until they have some new lower-power and cooler G5 chip it will never be in a Powerbook. Even the new iMac has big fans in it.
Only Apple releases security patches for Jaguar, so your argument makes no sense. You're not paying for security, you pay for features. If you don't care about the new features then you obviously have no incentive to upgrade and you can keep your money. Not hard.
Moof.
Realistically, how much of a gain would student developers get by developing for Tiger over Panther? It makes more sense to learn to program on a released OS than on a beta one. What if something goes screwy? Do you blame it on the OS or your inexperience?
...is that you do not talk about developer releases. Hence, the NDA. It's not nasty, as another poster observed. All it requires of you is to have one nice cup of Shut The Fuck Up after another until the final release.
That said...
Select membership gets you access to pre-release software, one incident of support from developer tech services, one hardware discount, and issues of the operating systems when they're finally released at no additional charge.
The way I look at it, $500 gets you the OS release that's bound to take place during your year's membership, and you can easily save far more than the difference when you buy a Macintosh system through the developer discount program. Being able to get assistance directly from Apple when you have a coding issue is a boon. The rest is icing on the cake.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
Close... You almost corrected yourself. Microsoft charged for Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 and so on. Mac charged for OS 8, 9, X, X.1, etc.
If you're mad because they're charging for two operating systems that both start with 10, you might as well be mad at MS for charging for 95, 98 and ME separately.
Win 95
Win 98 = Win 95.1
Win ME = Win 95.2
Win NT
Win 2000 = Win NT.1
Win XP = Win NT.2
Win 2003 = Win NT.3
Mac OS 10
Mac OS 10.1
Mac OS 10.2
Mac OS 10.3
Get the picture?
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
Apple doesn't DRM their OSes... You do not receive(nor required to enter on install or later) a activation/product key.. I believe you are given an optional 'registration' type mini-survey that gets sent to Apple, but no personal information is sent, nor is it required.
Apple doesn't care if you pirate it. They want you to buy it, they make multi-licenses and such a sweet deal and make it worth the money for single licenses. However, Apple makes money on the hardware, and the more users on the latest version of their OS, the less they have to support the old version and the more they can move forward.
You've got to charge for something like this. Otherwise non-developers will sign up just to play with the pre-release OS, and get the hardware discount. You have to price it at a level where professional developers are not put off, but non-developers aren't tempted. With non-developers being quite willing to pay $125 for a new OS version, it has to be significantly higher than that. I'd say somewhere in the $300-$1000 range is sensible. Why not $500, it's a nice round number?
The reason they charge $500 is to keep dumb ass comments like yours from clogging up the professional developer forums.
Sounds pretty good, the only thing more I would ask for are...
A Developer commentary track:
{booting OSX} "Ding! Welcome to the developers edition of OSX. I'm Joe Schmo, lead designer of Aqua, and with me I have Jim Bob of Core Graphics. We've got some great stories here for you! You'll see that it's starting up services, let me tell you about a time old Jim was writing one of those and the power went out after a fifteen hour coding session..."
And of course "Deleted comments - too hot for public release!"
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is how business works. You have to make an investment to make money. Also, even if you're a student, if you're using it for commercial purposes, doesn't that break the terms of the student discount, requiring you to pay for the commercial membership anway?
I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
This isn't a beta, it is a developer preview for ISVs to get their hands on the new technogies and target them. The price is because Apple had to make a cut at some point and spend developer and QA resources to polish up a release that will never sell in general availability. These developers cost money, and they need to be paid. Developers have a much higher threshhold for prices than the general public does. Can you really say to your CEO "well, we can save $300 and change if we have all of our developers just sitting around for 6 months, and let's not worry about the competition that's going to have a 6 month head start either...".
The price also acts as a filter. Joe Schmo will not get this. Only ISVs and hard core techies will get this. This filters a lot of support calls, and probably makes them hugher quality as well, since any bugs in the DP may affect the ISV's ability to make money, so it's in his financial interest to make the bug process as clean as possible.
Seriously, AIX stands for "Ain't Unix."
/usr/lib. Put shared libs in /usr/foo/lib and there is no way to make AIX search that lib path! And yes, we have support from IBM. Their solution was to symlink our libs to /usr/lib. Yuck.
All the "high end virtualisation, monitoring and enterprise volume management" that AIX includes does not make up for basic, fundamental problems with things like shared library handling. Everything is fscking hard coded to
Also, the fact that IBM doesn't update their Open Source repository is inexcusable. Try compiling apache on AIX sometime. It isn't fun. Actually try compiling any open source software on AIX.
Now, if you are an IBM drone, you will say, "you should buy their integrated Websphere." But, the problem with this is vendor lock-in. AIX is worse than fscking Windows for vendor lock-in.
Some of IBM's consultants are really bright, unfortunately you need that. Extensive experience with Linux/*BSD/Solaris/Irix is NOT enough to adequately anticipate/fix problems that crop up with AIX.
At a small shop, AIX is just a pain in the ass. At a big shop with ~1,200 AIX servers supporting >35,000 desktops in a whole bunch of locations (don't ask) it's a nightmare.
Ironically, there is nothing that we do with AIX that we couldn't do better/cheaper with Linux. Hell, we could probably get better support for it too. I suggest that the era of Big Iron in the enterprise is over. Cluster cheap linux blades.
I'm sick of the Slashdot IBM fanboy syndrome. There are plenty of companies to be excited about (like Apple!). There are plenty of operating systems to evangelize (like Linux or *BSD!). AIX/IBM are not the horse to bet on. They suck worse than almost any other vendor.
Oh yeah, Lotus/Domino sucks just as much as MS Exchange.