Well, the way government purchasing contracts go, Apple's put themselves in a much better position. Before, they would not be allowed to bid on certain contracts because of the Universal Access thing. Now they can.
I read somewhere today that UA was quite good, but was provided in Easy Access from Berkeley Systems, later maker of the flying toasters screen saver. I don't know why they dropped the ball on this, but I think it was sometime around System 8, wasn't it?
It *is* possible to purchase Macs that compete well on price with the PC boxes, all things considered. Just look at the iBook.
But there is another factor that's kept Macs out of federal life to a big extent: the law on universal access, formerly known as handicapped access in less enlightened times.
Specifically, mandates in Section 508 (29 USC 794d) of the Federal code, require computers purchased by fed agencies (not to mention their websites and more) to be fully accessible to people with vision problems, etc.
With Jaguar, Jobs claimed at WWDC that its "universal access features go well beyond fedarally mandated standards."
Translation: "We screwed ourselves, but now we're fixing that."
In other words, with this upgrade, the OS includes Quartz for magnification so the magnified screen is relatively resolution-independent. Zooming in on text would show you a fully anti-aliased font at whatever font size you needed, not just pixelated magnified clunkiness. Apple is apparently also shipping screen-reading software with Jaguar, and it works for interface parts (menus, windows), for documents or any text under the mouse. Keyboard navigation (remember "Sticky Keys" and Easy Access Software way back when?) is back, this time for Classic apps, not just Cocoa ones.
Altogether, these changes make it legal now for Apple to compete for federal purchasing contracts. This flaw in Apple's operating systems before now, maybe more than the SAA, was to blame for the relatively poor marketshare in government offices. At least now that has a chance of being changed.
That being said, I still don't like Congress all that much, just on general principles. I hope they get hammered, too. But Apple's not completely pure, either. Is anyone?
that a new, education-only Mac has generated more than 400 comments here? When the normal comment rate is something like 15-40?
If there's this much buzz among this group, I'm wondering if the eMac isn't going to be a monster hit in education for Apple, and will probably make it to the consumer (low-end) market by summer.
I think I'll buy some stock..
It might also be a good, cheap Unixy machine (he cackles, rubbing his greedy little hands together) for students and starter developers to practice on without having to tinker all night to get it to run. Muahahahahahaha!/runs away laughing maniacly.
I borrowed a copy for a secretary in the office who was making the switch to OSX (with my help.) She did pretty well without any manual, but I didn't have the time to spend as much time with her as she needed. I asked her to test-drive Pogue's OSX Missing Manual for me, to see if it helped with the newbie stuff she was asking me about, and asked whether she thought others in the office would find it useful. She liked it, and said it was easy to find answers when she got stuck. In fact, she bought her own copy.
I've used it a couple of times, too, as I'm not all that good with cli stuff yet. He's got some simple directions in there for that, too.
Overall, I'd recommend it; it's both well-written and it covers most of the basic bases. It's worth the $25, especially if you have relative newcomers who are trying to get up to speed.
It may be a fake PDA, it may not. We'll find out in a few days.
But here's a slightly paranoid thought: why does this German website need to register visitors before showing the videos and pics? Is it just a way to keep Apple Legal out, or to moderate server load, or are they harvesting emails for some other marketing purpose? I used an alias user ID address to my domain, like I used to do with those solitication cards that fall out of magazines.
I'm real curious to see who is going to start sending more spam to my fake "iWalk" user ID.
This whole argument about what makes a Unix is pointless.
Was Pinnochio a real little boy before the incident with the large sea creature?
Are you the same person in all respects, that you were when you were 5? (For those of you who ARE 5, well, you get the point.)
Just remember the old maxim:" the enemy of my enemy is my friend." All this infighting is like volunteering for a circular firing squad, while a certain company is readying the release of XP and.NET and laying plans for buying the internet.
OK, maybe that last part is hyperbole, but you get the point. Why not spend your energies developing what's needed for the platform of your choice, but keep an eye on cooperating with other Unices. Otherwise, the concept of "open source=sharing" seems to be infected with the same proprietary instincts as the corporate world.
Here's a news flash: Apple makes its living off of selling hardware, mainly, and doesn't particularly care whether you like it or not. (I'm sure you're not crushed by this reality, either. right?)
They're just trying to survive the game they've chosen to play.
Don't forget, just for balance's sake, that you're watching a company that's in the process of trying to come back from the near-dead of 1997 still, and lost a TON of money last quarter. They're surrounded by competitors who dance with glee every time they screw something up, and are hammered for just about everything -- for missing ship dates, for shipping on time but without certain features, etc. .
So, make your judgments about what kind of things you want to support, but judge them on their own terms, too. They live or die by hardware sales. To a great extent, OSX is important to them and their shareholders (I are one, by the way), because it will drive more hardware sales. They just don't have the human resources to do everything, all at once, so in context, I'd say it's perfectly rational to limit themselves to a finite number of machine types. If they followed your advice, they'd never get anything out of the door.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but the other post is right, dammit. It's an image from the sample images that come with Photoshop. If anyone is pissed, it's probably Adobe. Still, the XP 'look' is as good as any previous design of a Windows OS. And I mean that.
What have you been smokin'? they look nothing alike-- other than the dock is also in the shape of a horizontal rectangle along the bottom of the screen. I can see all kinds of suits now, we'll call them the "Geometry Wars"
Um, they didn't exactly "test" this in a scientific sort of way. I know. I talked to the guys at the booth at MacWorld.
What they did was sneak someone over to the Apple booth with a CD. He popped the CD into the machine and rebooted with the C key held down. It didn't work, so he ran away. He got balls and came back later. He stuck around a bit longer this time, setting it to boot from the CD. It booted up with the Linux screen.
At that point, he bent down and his friend took a picture. Then, the PowerBook manager from Apple saw what was happening and came racing over. Just as the manager was getting ready to reboot it or pull the plug, they popped out the LinuxPPC CD and took off running.
The fact that it booted means that all of those things will probably work without a problem, since it's basically the same logic board design as the cube. If they don't work at the moment, I'm sure they will soon, so I woudln't worry about it.
check out Hannibal's interesting info at Ars Technica. It appears Apple is hiring developer for an active project to do just this.
But what about something more sinister?
on
Microsoft Cracked
·
· Score: 1
I haven't read all of the posts-- haven't been able to get into/. for the past hour --but a thought occurs to me.
Aside from the commercial implications -- breathtaking, at the very least-- or just the classic image of the Mighty One fallen, aren't there some security implications here?
I feel a little paranoid at even bringing this up, but since 95% of the world's desktop and other computers run on a variation of Windows, and the code has been used in God knows what else, wouldn't the crackers have given themselves enormous leverage to wreak havoc on everything from the telephone system, to air traffic control worldwide, to the gas pump at the local 7-11, to the train system in London?
It reminds me of what would happen if some kind of wheat blight starts to sweep through the hybridized, genetically non-diverse, non-resistant food crop for much of the world, depriving billions of food.
Am I wrong, or should we all be very worried right now?
By "unfinished," I mean the little things, such as how it's too easy to trigger the dock (I usually have it hidden until needed) by waving the mouse down in that area of the screen. I forget it's there and while working on a window, accidentally have the dock to deal with. I also don't like the fact that it's centered. I like John's suggestion in the ArsTechnica review that it be anchored to left or right of the screen.
Don't get me wrong, I like most of what I see in OSX beta. It's just that I know that it'll grow a lot as it matures.
It's a bit hard to come down too hard on OSX for being too arty, since it's only a beta at this point and I expect that a lot of things will be fixed in the 1.0 release based on feedback like that in Ars technica's article (see my link above; I'm too tired to put it in again.) Nevertheless, I think it's fair to evaluate the effect of the "artiness" on the user experience now, but still realize that there's some work to be done. I've been running a copy of the Beta for two weeks on two different machines, and my overall reaction is that it's pretty cool, even though I miss some of the GUI features of OS 9. The Apple menu concept, where you can store stuff you use all the time, is a case in point. The dock is a very interesting piece of work, but it feels unfinished. I'm used to the NeXT window system of displaying files and paths, and kind of like it, so I'm not put off by that option in OSX, but it seems harder to organize files the way I want than in OS9. Still, I have to keep reminding my self that this is a new animal, and that refinements are going to happen. I used 7.5 until 8.0 came along, and then 8.1, then 8.5 and 8.6 and jumped to OS 9 as soon as I could. Each step was an improvement in the experience.
After all, every OS interface has gone through several generations of evolution to get to where it is now. I've been using Macs and PC's since '85 or so, and can't believe now how clunky they were then, and how elegant they are now, relatively speaking. But I also remember being blown away by how they worked, even way back then. Life is a journey, not a destination, yadda, yadda, yadda.
So, to get back to your basic question, I guess I'm saying that the day-to-day features will come. They're not all there now, but if Apple has shown anything, it's that they care about the user experience and will fix things in due course. I'm just not that worried. In the meantime, I'll have to get more done in OS9 than OSX, but over time I'll gradually work more and more in the new environment. It just doesn't concern me that everything is not 100% perfect yet.
Sgt. Pepper didn't have any impact whatsoever on my parents, only on people my age at the time. The parallel with only Geeks caring about an OS rollout is apt, in that both events are aimed at a targeted demographic, not the entire population of th world. And that's enough.
I'm constantly amazed at how some people insist on taking their own biases/assumptions/bassackward notions/sheer ignorance-- or plain old laziness -- impose this warped world view on others in some sort of sarcastic rhetorical flourish, and then hammer the unfortunate target for sins he/they never committed.
I believe Apple and OSX ought to be judged on what THEY claim they're trying to do, instead of being bashed for something this group THINKS they're doing.
Same goes for Microsoft, or anyone else for that matter.
Jobs doesn't make a secret of his core message about the company: "Apple is all about exploring the intersection of art and technology," he said at Macworld in New York. "It's in our DNA." Read that again...... Does it say anywhere that they're trying to build the fastest servers in the world, or hope to run spreadsheets better than anyone else? Hell, no. Someday they might do both, now that they're launching a new OS with some serious strengths, but that's not what their first priority is. "Exploring the intersection between art and technology" is what they care about most. For anyone who thinks that's stupid, stop reading now, because this is not the company for you. Fine. Good luck in your chosen work.
For those of you are still reading, try thinking about what he said on it's own terms. It seems to be a consistent and honest statement of his beliefs. I'm assuming that normally intelligent people who need an enterprise server will pick Linux, all else being equal, as most people know that it's stupid to try to drive a nail with a wrench.
Similarly, it seems patently unfair to judge Apple and OSX on claims the company never made. If, for instance, Apple rolled out OSX today and said: "We're going to take on NT and Linux in the enterprise server market with this baby," then it would be fair to take this claim apart on that basis. But they didn't say this, and won't.
Maybe there are a lot of tech-oriented people who've never thought about how technology and design ought to be pulled together, but does that mean we shouldn't ever consider it? Their uncles were the same ones who ridiculed the GUI in the first place, 25 years ago. Then processor speed caught up, RAM got cheap, as did bigger hard drives, and the efficiency arguments didn't mean as much any more. Won't improvments in hardware keep trying to catch up to what software writers can think up? There's always this back and forth, with advances in one area forcing improvements in others.
Another point is that Jobs has called OSX "the future of the Macintosh." Judge it on that basis, not on how much the old OS sucks, would you? This is the first rollout of a completely new (if you don't count the BSD layer) consumer operating system for a long time. How well has the rollout gone so far? What does the OS offer in the way of improvements over the old, and is that going to be enough? Did you read the careful review over at Ars Technica?
If you don't care what happens over in Cupertino and with Macs, you are, of course, free to ignore the thread and move on.
If OSX fails to live up to it's own promises, that may be sad for some of us, but in the grand scheme of things, that's tough luck, isn't it? Call it Digital Darwinism. Only the successful code survives.
I'm one of those of whom you speak, a long-time Mac user who diddled around with LinuxPPC on a dare, and who's running OSX pb at the moment. It's not reasonable to make the broad generalizations you did. Just because Mac users have not HAD to tinker with the plumbing doesn't predict the future of a whole group of people who number something upwards of 30 million. The fact is, a polished GUI lets me get more work done in a given time (I'm a writer, editor, designer and run a small business) than you could, doing the same things, despite the once-a-day crashes. I think the CLI is fascinating (I've been running MOSXServer for over a year), but the GUI Admin tools from NeXT/Apple are far superior in most ways, in that they let me do 99% of what I need to do without the CLI, and one hell of a lot faster.
Actually, I believe you are complaining because it's different. That's fine, if you'd actually spent enough time really USING OSX pb to have an informed opinion. Perhaps you have, but I get the feeling that you're just popping off.
Personally, I liked what I saw of Linux, and use Windows in VirtualPC. We're all better off if more good ideas are allowed to compete in the marketplace. But would it be too much to ask to avoid trying to kill the baby in the bassinette?
As one other poster said here: "Repeat after me: BETA". Frankly, this is the best damned beta version of anything I've ever used. If it's only going to get better from here, I'm going to enjoy the ride.
Um, don't look now, but mySQL - PHP - Perl and WebObjects already runs on OSXS, and will run on OSXP. Apache is already there. (I'm running on this machine right now, as a matter of fact., in the OSX beta. I just got it and haven't bothered to install mySQL yet, but I will) I know that other DB vendors are offering products for OSX, including Front Base, OpenBase and db2. To see what apps are already ported to OSX, check out Stepwise's site, and go to the "SoftTrak" section.
I haven't heard if Oracle is prepping a version, but since Larry is on the Apple board and is Steverino's best buddy, it's more than an even bet they are going to offer it as soon as the new OS starts to penetrate the enterprise market a little.
Here's progress. The Darwin site referenced above is running Apache 1.3.4 on MOSX. A lot of Apple's sites are still running on Solaris, but it's apparent now that they're willing to trust the family jewels to their own stuff. Cool.
In addition, I believe this page is clear evidence that MOSX can eventually be ported to Intel hardware, whether to put the fear of god into MOTO, or just do the prudent thing and keep some options open should MOTO be unable to goose the PPC chips over 500-600Mhz.
I don't read Windows hype, I don't read BE OS's hype, and aside from/., I don't read Linux hype. I do read Mac OSX hype, however,:-), and I've gotta say the landscape is gonna be more than a tad different after January 2001, when OSX(ten) ships. At the very least, there will be an honest-to-god modern consumer alternative to Windows and the fractured-ness that is Linux that even a/.-er can love.
Slashdot Mirror
I read somewhere today that UA was quite good, but was provided in Easy Access from Berkeley Systems, later maker of the flying toasters screen saver. I don't know why they dropped the ball on this, but I think it was sometime around System 8, wasn't it?
But there is another factor that's kept Macs out of federal life to a big extent: the law on universal access, formerly known as handicapped access in less enlightened times.
Specifically, mandates in Section 508 (29 USC 794d) of the Federal code, require computers purchased by fed agencies (not to mention their websites and more) to be fully accessible to people with vision problems, etc.
With Jaguar, Jobs claimed at WWDC that its "universal access features go well beyond fedarally mandated standards."
Translation: "We screwed ourselves, but now we're fixing that."
In other words, with this upgrade, the OS includes Quartz for magnification so the magnified screen is relatively resolution-independent. Zooming in on text would show you a fully anti-aliased font at whatever font size you needed, not just pixelated magnified clunkiness. Apple is apparently also shipping screen-reading software with Jaguar, and it works for interface parts (menus, windows), for documents or any text under the mouse. Keyboard navigation (remember "Sticky Keys" and Easy Access Software way back when?) is back, this time for Classic apps, not just Cocoa ones.
Altogether, these changes make it legal now for Apple to compete for federal purchasing contracts. This flaw in Apple's operating systems before now, maybe more than the SAA, was to blame for the relatively poor marketshare in government offices. At least now that has a chance of being changed.
That being said, I still don't like Congress all that much, just on general principles. I hope they get hammered, too. But Apple's not completely pure, either. Is anyone?
If there's this much buzz among this group, I'm wondering if the eMac isn't going to be a monster hit in education for Apple, and will probably make it to the consumer (low-end) market by summer.
I think I'll buy some stock..
It might also be a good, cheap Unixy machine (he cackles, rubbing his greedy little hands together) for students and starter developers to practice on without having to tinker all night to get it to run. Muahahahahahaha! /runs away laughing maniacly.
I've used it a couple of times, too, as I'm not all that good with cli stuff yet. He's got some simple directions in there for that, too.
Overall, I'd recommend it; it's both well-written and it covers most of the basic bases. It's worth the $25, especially if you have relative newcomers who are trying to get up to speed.
It may be a fake PDA, it may not. We'll find out in a few days.
But here's a slightly paranoid thought: why does this German website need to register visitors before showing the videos and pics? Is it just a way to keep Apple Legal out, or to moderate server load, or are they harvesting emails for some other marketing purpose? I used an alias user ID address to my domain, like I used to do with those solitication cards that fall out of magazines.
I'm real curious to see who is going to start sending more spam to my fake "iWalk" user ID.
Was Pinnochio a real little boy before the incident with the large sea creature?
Are you the same person in all respects, that you were when you were 5? (For those of you who ARE 5, well, you get the point.)
Just remember the old maxim:" the enemy of my enemy is my friend." All this infighting is like volunteering for a circular firing squad, while a certain company is readying the release of XP and .NET and laying plans for buying the internet.
OK, maybe that last part is hyperbole, but you get the point. Why not spend your energies developing what's needed for the platform of your choice, but keep an eye on cooperating with other Unices. Otherwise, the concept of "open source=sharing" seems to be infected with the same proprietary instincts as the corporate world.
They're just trying to survive the game they've chosen to play.
Don't forget, just for balance's sake, that you're watching a company that's in the process of trying to come back from the near-dead of 1997 still, and lost a TON of money last quarter. They're surrounded by competitors who dance with glee every time they screw something up, and are hammered for just about everything -- for missing ship dates, for shipping on time but without certain features, etc. .
So, make your judgments about what kind of things you want to support, but judge them on their own terms, too. They live or die by hardware sales. To a great extent, OSX is important to them and their shareholders (I are one, by the way), because it will drive more hardware sales. They just don't have the human resources to do everything, all at once, so in context, I'd say it's perfectly rational to limit themselves to a finite number of machine types. If they followed your advice, they'd never get anything out of the door.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but the other post is right, dammit. It's an image from the sample images that come with Photoshop. If anyone is pissed, it's probably Adobe. Still, the XP 'look' is as good as any previous design of a Windows OS. And I mean that.
Actually, it reminds me of a nautical design done for the Gap.
What have you been smokin'? they look nothing alike-- other than the dock is also in the shape of a horizontal rectangle along the bottom of the screen. I can see all kinds of suits now, we'll call them the "Geometry Wars"
What they did was sneak someone over to the Apple booth with a CD. He popped the CD into the machine and rebooted with the C key held down. It didn't work, so he ran away. He got balls and came back later. He stuck around a bit longer this time, setting it to boot from the CD. It booted up with the Linux screen.
At that point, he bent down and his friend took a picture. Then, the PowerBook manager from Apple saw what was happening and came racing over. Just as the manager was getting ready to reboot it or pull the plug, they popped out the LinuxPPC CD and took off running.
The fact that it booted means that all of those things will probably work without a problem, since it's basically the same logic board design as the cube. If they don't work at the moment, I'm sure they will soon, so I woudln't worry about it.
Beg pardon??? I'll have you know we Americans descend from people who have been kicked out of some of the finest countries of Europe. So there.
So are hostile AC's who can't sign their own names.
check out Hannibal's interesting info at Ars Technica. It appears Apple is hiring developer for an active project to do just this.
Aside from the commercial implications -- breathtaking, at the very least-- or just the classic image of the Mighty One fallen, aren't there some security implications here?
I feel a little paranoid at even bringing this up, but since 95% of the world's desktop and other computers run on a variation of Windows, and the code has been used in God knows what else, wouldn't the crackers have given themselves enormous leverage to wreak havoc on everything from the telephone system, to air traffic control worldwide, to the gas pump at the local 7-11, to the train system in London?
It reminds me of what would happen if some kind of wheat blight starts to sweep through the hybridized, genetically non-diverse, non-resistant food crop for much of the world, depriving billions of food.
Am I wrong, or should we all be very worried right now?
Don't get me wrong, I like most of what I see in OSX beta. It's just that I know that it'll grow a lot as it matures.
It's a bit hard to come down too hard on OSX for being too arty, since it's only a beta at this point and I expect that a lot of things will be fixed in the 1.0 release based on feedback like that in Ars technica's article (see my link above; I'm too tired to put it in again.) Nevertheless, I think it's fair to evaluate the effect of the "artiness" on the user experience now, but still realize that there's some work to be done. I've been running a copy of the Beta for two weeks on two different machines, and my overall reaction is that it's pretty cool, even though I miss some of the GUI features of OS 9. The Apple menu concept, where you can store stuff you use all the time, is a case in point. The dock is a very interesting piece of work, but it feels unfinished. I'm used to the NeXT window system of displaying files and paths, and kind of like it, so I'm not put off by that option in OSX, but it seems harder to organize files the way I want than in OS9. Still, I have to keep reminding my self that this is a new animal, and that refinements are going to happen. I used 7.5 until 8.0 came along, and then 8.1, then 8.5 and 8.6 and jumped to OS 9 as soon as I could. Each step was an improvement in the experience.
After all, every OS interface has gone through several generations of evolution to get to where it is now. I've been using Macs and PC's since '85 or so, and can't believe now how clunky they were then, and how elegant they are now, relatively speaking. But I also remember being blown away by how they worked, even way back then. Life is a journey, not a destination, yadda, yadda, yadda.
So, to get back to your basic question, I guess I'm saying that the day-to-day features will come. They're not all there now, but if Apple has shown anything, it's that they care about the user experience and will fix things in due course. I'm just not that worried. In the meantime, I'll have to get more done in OS9 than OSX, but over time I'll gradually work more and more in the new environment. It just doesn't concern me that everything is not 100% perfect yet.
Sgt. Pepper didn't have any impact whatsoever on my parents, only on people my age at the time. The parallel with only Geeks caring about an OS rollout is apt, in that both events are aimed at a targeted demographic, not the entire population of th world. And that's enough.
I believe Apple and OSX ought to be judged on what THEY claim they're trying to do, instead of being bashed for something this group THINKS they're doing.
Same goes for Microsoft, or anyone else for that matter.
Jobs doesn't make a secret of his core message about the company: "Apple is all about exploring the intersection of art and technology," he said at Macworld in New York. "It's in our DNA." Read that again. ..... Does it say anywhere that they're trying to build the fastest servers in the world, or hope to run spreadsheets better than anyone else? Hell, no. Someday they might do both, now that they're launching a new OS with some serious strengths, but that's not what their first priority is. "Exploring the intersection between art and technology" is what they care about most. For anyone who thinks that's stupid, stop reading now, because this is not the company for you. Fine. Good luck in your chosen work.
For those of you are still reading, try thinking about what he said on it's own terms. It seems to be a consistent and honest statement of his beliefs. I'm assuming that normally intelligent people who need an enterprise server will pick Linux, all else being equal, as most people know that it's stupid to try to drive a nail with a wrench.
Similarly, it seems patently unfair to judge Apple and OSX on claims the company never made. If, for instance, Apple rolled out OSX today and said: "We're going to take on NT and Linux in the enterprise server market with this baby," then it would be fair to take this claim apart on that basis. But they didn't say this, and won't.
Maybe there are a lot of tech-oriented people who've never thought about how technology and design ought to be pulled together, but does that mean we shouldn't ever consider it? Their uncles were the same ones who ridiculed the GUI in the first place, 25 years ago. Then processor speed caught up, RAM got cheap, as did bigger hard drives, and the efficiency arguments didn't mean as much any more. Won't improvments in hardware keep trying to catch up to what software writers can think up? There's always this back and forth, with advances in one area forcing improvements in others.
Another point is that Jobs has called OSX "the future of the Macintosh." Judge it on that basis, not on how much the old OS sucks, would you? This is the first rollout of a completely new (if you don't count the BSD layer) consumer operating system for a long time. How well has the rollout gone so far? What does the OS offer in the way of improvements over the old, and is that going to be enough? Did you read the careful review over at Ars Technica?
If you don't care what happens over in Cupertino and with Macs, you are, of course, free to ignore the thread and move on.
If OSX fails to live up to it's own promises, that may be sad for some of us, but in the grand scheme of things, that's tough luck, isn't it? Call it Digital Darwinism. Only the successful code survives.
Actually, I believe you are complaining because it's different. That's fine, if you'd actually spent enough time really USING OSX pb to have an informed opinion. Perhaps you have, but I get the feeling that you're just popping off.
Personally, I liked what I saw of Linux, and use Windows in VirtualPC. We're all better off if more good ideas are allowed to compete in the marketplace. But would it be too much to ask to avoid trying to kill the baby in the bassinette?
As one other poster said here: "Repeat after me: BETA". Frankly, this is the best damned beta version of anything I've ever used. If it's only going to get better from here, I'm going to enjoy the ride.
I haven't heard if Oracle is prepping a version, but since Larry is on the Apple board and is Steverino's best buddy, it's more than an even bet they are going to offer it as soon as the new OS starts to penetrate the enterprise market a little.
In addition, I believe this page is clear evidence that MOSX can eventually be ported to Intel hardware, whether to put the fear of god into MOTO, or just do the prudent thing and keep some options open should MOTO be unable to goose the PPC chips over 500-600Mhz.
don't appologize for the pangs of growth , Grasshopper. This glimmer of awareness is but the first step to healing..... Ommmmm
I don't read Windows hype, I don't read BE OS's hype, and aside from /., I don't read Linux hype. I do read Mac OSX hype, however, :-), and I've gotta say the landscape is gonna be more than a tad different after January 2001, when OSX(ten) ships. At the very least, there will be an honest-to-god modern consumer alternative to Windows and the fractured-ness that is Linux that even a /.-er can love.