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Valve's Newell Thinks PS3 Needs To Be "Open Like a Mac"
Eraesr writes "Apparently Valve boss Gabe Newell thinks the PS3 needs to be more of an open platform, drawing a comparison to Apple's Mac platform. In an interview with 5BY5.TV, he said he would like to see the PS3 be 'open like a Mac' instead of being 'more closed like a Gamecube.' 'Platform investments, like the Mac, are difficult because you have to be aware of what direction that platform is moving,' Newell said, referring to the firm's recent move onto Macs with its titles and distribution service Steam. 'We need to target platforms that do a better job of looking like where we want to be in a few years.'"
To be fair, the developer tools on the Mac are free, unlike Microsoft's developer tools...
The Express Editions of Visual Studio are pretty darn usable; they're free. While what you said is not technically incorrect, it's also not being entirely honest IMO.
That and the Mac is pretty open. Darwin is open, and it's not restricted like an iPod/iPad or such. It's more open in many ways than Windows, though closed in some others (locked to apple hardware).
Not a sentence!
Open like a Mac? What does that mean? Its not like Apple is anymore open than MS is
Actually, Apple is a lot more open than MS is.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Judging by the sheer number of responses so far, many people here can't tell the different between iPhone/iPad and Mac. They are both made by Apple. Macs run OS X which is based on BSD. Mac OS X is composed of Darwin sub-system, Aqua GUI, and other libraries. Darwin is open source and is available under a BSD type license. Aqua is proprietary. Mac OS X runs on a lot of open source software such as BIND, bash, openSSH, etc. The Mac versions are available freely at http://www.opensource.apple.com/
The iPhone/iPad uses a variant of OS X. It is not open source and the release of Apps is tightly controlled. Developers are free to release to their own devices but must abide by Apple guidelines if they want to publish in the Apple Store.
Valve is referring to Macs not iPhone/iPad.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's not just Unix-parts that are open sourced by Apple. There's a lot more.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
You are completely misunderstanding that sentence. HFSX is incompatible with HFS+ because a filesystem B-tree sorts its keys in different ways depending on whether it is using case-sensitive or case-insensitive matching. As a result, at a volume format level, HFSX includes low-level changes that are incompatible with ancient tools that work with HFS+ volumes. If we were talking about a disk utility like DiskWarrior (which, incidentally, has supported HFSX since way back before it even became a GUI-selectable formatting option in the non-server version of Mac OS X)---an application that mucks around in the raw volume B-trees by accessing disk blocks directly, then yes, it would break when it encountered these volumes, and break massively. As a general rule, 99.99999% of application developers should not be anywhere near the low-level bits that the technote you referenced refers to.
We're not talking about software that works with the volume format directly here. We're talking about software that opens files by passing hard-coded path names with incorrect case. Such apps also don't work when your home directory is:
And so on. That incompatibility list is only going to get longer as time moves forward. These days, case insensitive filesystems like HFS+ are the exception, not the rule.
Moreover, Apple has never in any way even HINTED that not working on case-sensitive volumes is an acceptable practive, and even published Technote 2096 that basically says the precise opposite of what you're implying. Because the filesystem underlying iPhone OS is case sensitive, iPhone developers are strongly discouraged from building iPhone applications on case-insensitive HFS+ volumes. On case-insensitive volumes, the simulator can't catch bugs caused by case sensitivity mistakes, so when you finally get the app on an actual device and it fails miserably, you'll be scratching your head.
In short, if your app doesn't work on case-sensitive volumes, now would be a good time to fix it, particularly if you want iPhone developers, web developers, etc. to use your software.
No, this is like complaining about KDE running fine on an EXT3 volume, but crashing in bizarre, inexplicable ways when you migrate your system to EXT4. It's a sign that the developer couldn't be bothered to use correct capitalization in hard-coded filenames within their code. The ONLY relevant difference between case-sensitive and non-case-sensitive filesystems in Mac OS X is that if you write code that tries to load "~/Library/application support/whatever" instead of "~/Library/Application Support/Whatever", it will fail on the case-sensitive filesystem. The ONLY bugs it causes are entirely due to sloppy, bad coding on the part of the developer. Thus, software that won't work on HFSX volumes are like a giant shining beacon that screams "We don't know how to write software."
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.