My understanding of OS X is that it's neither BSD nor MacOS at the 'core'. It's a mach kernel that runs several different user space modules, including NextStep/OpenStep/Yellow Box/Whatchmacallit, a BSD user space for traditional Unix compatiblity, the entire legacy MacOS running in some sort of VM (blue box), and a new MacOS-influenced API called Carbon (that allows pre multitasking and protected memory) so that existing Mac apps can be ported easily.
The question is: Which API does QuickTimeX run on? My guess is that it's not the BSD API (too bad for Linux), and instead either OpenStep or Carbon. If Apple is going to support QuickTime for Linux, they will probably have to create a seperate Unix/X Window application.
5) Software is not a problem. If you have someone in-house developing software, I would sincerely hope that they know how to recompile.
You should be aware that porting between Windows and MacOS is not simply a recompile. And that's assuming you even have a cross platform dev environment, which the two biggest for this kind of work (VisualBasic and Delphi) are not.
A few weeks ago there was a discussion on Macintouch about how ODBC support for MacOS has essentially disappeared. That pretty much tells one that in-house application development on the Mac is pretty near death.
5)Software development costs. You can't chuck a working bit of in-house software because Marketing wants Iwhacks..
This problem has always been the killer for Macs in corporations. Most shops just have too many bits of VB and Access and DBase and so on to make Macs really feasible. While most places realize that intranet apps are the 'right way', the only way to solve this problem is emulation which is just another layer of compexity to support.
Furthermore, historically, most corporate e-mail systems were single platform. Nowdays you have IMAP and Lotus Notes and a cutdown version of Outlook, but there's still a large number of ccMail shops out there.
And finally, despite the fact that Apple has moved towards open standard networking, there's still a large number of support issues on Novell and Microsoft networks. While Mac support might not crash the server (like it did in the old days of Novell 3), it's something that the administrator needs to support that he'd rather not.
On top of that add minor incompatibilities in MS Office, getting Mac-savvy technicians, building cross platform remote access solutions, places where you still need to route appletalk, the inevitable missing applications or file converters, and you get the idea.
So, while I can sympathize with the folks who would really rather have a Macintosh (or even a Linux system) on their desk, it's totally understandable from an IT perspective why it's unfeasible. The concept (standardization) is right on. The execution (usually Windows 9x) is the problem.
Nearly 40 years along in the development of computer technology and we have arrived at a point where the most potent selling point of a new machine is the way it makes you feel psychologically to have it on your desk.
Like the 1920s when General Motors blew past Ford by offering cars that actually came in different colors and styles? It's actually suprising that computer companies took so long to figure this out. (Although IBM has been trying with it's cool black equipment.)
It's also no shock that Apple is the first to figure this out. They've probably got the largest user base of people who don't really know or care anything about the inside of the computer. Something has to convince them to replace their crusty old Performas.
History backs you up on this, if one looks at Apple's Pippen console. By the time it made it out, it's 75Mhz PPC603 and whatever minimal memory it had didn't look that appealing to game developers.
A game console has to have a pretty considerable shelf life, and a 500Mhz PII/K7 is going not look very appealing in 18 months. Sure you could play Quake 3, but there not going to be a large incentive there for the PC game houses who will be chasing the 1.5 Ghz chips and god knows what video and sound cards. --
But the reality for a company like Compaq is that they are more likely to sell x86 based NT servers than Alpha based ones, especially when it is perceived that Alpha is expensive.
I always thought that Compaq should put an Alpha system in a nice beige Proliant rack case and call it something ike the Proliant 9000A - "the fastest Windows NT server" or something. IT Managers are otherwise falling over themselves to buy huge NT boxes, it's just that for some reason Alpha hardware has seemed unknown and scary.
Note that I was referring to the fetishes of Slashdot editors more that I was talking about OS/2. I should have added [(4) It's not a new OS], which explains Slashdot's fixation on Be, Mac OS X, and so on.
But to address your points in particular: - Nobody here thinks Be or Solaris or OS/400 is free software. - Linux is a nearly perfect clone of Unix. Apologies if calling it unix offends your delicate sensibilities, but most people consider it a unix variant. - Microsoft didn't steal any OS/2 code. At the time of the breakup, both MS and IBM got rights to each others projects - DOS, Windows 3, and OS/2 2. - I didn't attempt to post any facts - just 100% opinion. Babbling a bunch of nonsense about System V not being BSD and accusing Microsoft of stealing something that they own looks pretty silly too.
The Novell comparison really isn't fair. WordPerfect Office always was and still is considered a very competitive product with Microsoft.
The short story is that Novell screwed themselves over by forgetting to ship a product that supported TCP/IP until 1998. One can hardly blame WordPerfect for that. The long story involves their bumbling with System V UNIX and tendancy towards meglomanical delusions. (Well, maybe the Sun comparison is not that far off...) --
If by "most NT users" you mean workstation users, you're right. However, the big sell for a chip like Alpha is on the server side, and there are/were plenty of Alpha NT server apps. Such as MS Back Office, which probably accounts for 50%+ of NT server installations. --
Blame MS for shooting themselves in the foot. No more NT/Alpha means no more "Scalablity Days" and no more even pretending they can compete in the midrange until they get a working Merced OS out.
Of course, Microsoft self-destruction should be popular around here. --
Right on. So poor little Be supposedly couldn't reverse engineer Apple's G3 motherboard. But they do manage to figure out how to reverse engineer around the various bugs and defects for the gazillion PC motherboards and BIOSes out there.
I would love to see IBM sink some money into Be to keep BeOS/PPC alive, but would imply that IBM would actually have to support the PPC platform beyond the point of just re-releasing some old motherboard specs. --
(1) it's commercial (2) it's not Unix (3) it's partially owned by Microsoft
Essentially, OS/2 doesn't exist in the "Linux world" (as you put it), so it's no real shock that Slashdot isn't all over an OS that most people aren't even aware is still in production.
(I know it's unfair, but OS/2's fate as a nitch OS has been sealed for a long time. Blame IBM, Microsoft, fate, timing, whatever. Expecting "News for Nerds" to pickup on news which only interests what can be fairly called a legacy user base is a little odd. There's not much AS/400 or VMS news here either, and those plaforms are growing much faster than OS/2 is right now.) --
MS/IBM Lan Manager (Also resold by 3Com as 3Open or something) was an OS/2-based product which failed to gain much significant marketshare. It would be long forgotten, except that Windows NT uses the same networking layer.
It certainly works very differently from NetWare, for one it ran NetBEUI and NetBIOS-over-TCP/IP. If you wrote your DOS app on the LanMan APIs, you're pretty much stuck on either DOS, OS/2, or Windows. (These were the days before 'WinSock' - APIs were pretty much NOS-specific.)
I think the guy's concern is that they is no NetBEUI support in Linux, and the MS DOS TCP/IP software cuts pretty significantly into your 640K.
(One solution might be to look at the book "Unauthorized Windows 95" by Andrew Schulman . In the book he describes how to use Win95 to create a 32-bit version of DOS, complete with protected mode networking.) --
Wasn't IBM's big mistake putting the 384K ROM space at the top of real memory, instead of the bottom? My understanding is that IBM did it this way only because that's how Apple did it (top 16K of the ]['s 64K.) --
Well, to be fair both MS and IBM thought DOS was going to be dead meat under 286+ machines and attempted to replace it. Of course, the replacement, OS/2, was a disaster until about 1992. Then someone at MS figured out that they could kluge a protected mode extender onto DOS and tell IBM to screw themselves, and most PCs are still running with that solution (Windows) to this day, making everyone's head hurt.
On the other hand, load up WP 4.2 and Lotus 1-2-3 2.x -- You can still get a lot of work done with 640K. --
Unfortunately, outside of fantasy land, Windows users have a choice of 4+ office suites backed by major vendors (MS, Corel, IBM, and now Sun). Unix has been slowly dieing on the desktop for years, and the selection is thinner. (Of course, Linux is changing this fast.) And you still have to pay for upgrades, etc.
Maybe I'm dumb, I don't see how the Unix I/O philosophy really helps office suite users. Furthermore, it seems that the MS COM stuff is much more pervasive on Windows than any equivlent on Unix.
(Don't take this as an anti-Unix rant - it's just that if you spend a good chunk of your day inside of a commercial office suite, right now you're much better off in Windows or MacOS than unix. What I would like to see is the KDE and Gnome efforts at Office apps come to open source fruition.) --
So, why does Microsoft even bother making Win2000 run on 32-bit machines? Why not start out 64-bit? This is especially true if you are targeting the "enterprise" market and their high-end go-fast servers
It's important to note that Alpha has been a key propaganda weapon for Microsoft to argue that NT is competitive with the big unix iron. Many of their boasts (such as 10,000 POP3 users on Exchange, or TerraServer - the 'worlds largest' on-line database.) derive from running NT on some very high-end Alpha equipment. The bottom line is that I can't belive MS would drop Alpha development because doing so would make NT/2000 look half as fast as far as the marketing department is concerned.
As for "64-bit ready", it's not the software, but the hardware. If MS ever gets a 64-bit OS and applicaitons out the door, you get a free performance boost with your NT/Alpha box. Of course, it seems that Microsoft is munging the 32 to 64 bit transition as bad as they munged the 16 to 32 bit transition. --
I wonder if anyone has any specific examples of the 'inconsistancy' of Windows. I've used both Windows and the Mac extensively, and while the Mac is prettier, the consistancy pretty much seems the same.
The only specific problems I've seen on Windows are:
+ Dragging an icon in the explorer does different things in different places - better to just right-drag and make sure that it does the right thing.
+ The Windows standard file dialog is confused by shortcut icons. Microsoft is too retarded to fix this prominent bug.
+ Some older programs don't have a File menu, instead having a Game menu or something. Some Mac apps have this problem too.
+ MS Office has it's own standard file dialog. Why? Who knows. (Some Mac apps also do this.)
+ The IE-based Explorer doesn't seem to remember view settings very well.
On the other hand, the Mac is not free of problems --
+ Toolbars are often absent or inconsistantly implemented. Chalk this up to MS giving away toolbar widgets with VC and VB, which means that most Windows apps have similar toolbars.
+ Many Mac applications don't recognize keys on an extended keyboard. I think Apple owns this - their standard controls don't seem to support Ins, Del, Home, and End.
+ Keyboard navigation is very inconsistant if you try to do anything other than Cut/Copy/Paste/Quit.
In short, the Mac's UI advantages largely lie in system features which make it easier to configure your computer. I don't see that the actual applications are all that much better or more consistant than Windows. --
I thought there was some speculation that 64-bit NT would ship on the Alpha sometime next year, before Merced can make it out the door. I wonder if NT/Alpha is really being killed, or Microsoft is just picking up all the development under some secret back-slapping deal.
Regardless, Compaq/DEC needs to start marketing the hardware better at people who buy large x86 servers.
As for Alpha applications, it seems that there are very few workstation apps, but server applications seem aplenty. Specifically, all of the Microsoft stuff (SQL, Exchange, etc) runs on Alpha. --
Don't blame the Open Group directly - blame the stakeholders in the Open Group, aka the commercial UNIX vendors (Sun, IBM, HP, et al.)
There's a good argument there that the UNIX boys have decided to roll over and play dead on the desktop. Stagnating X development is just part of the problem. Why bother improving the capabilitites of your clients when you can make boko bucks selling huge database servers to serve Windows clients? Nothing, until Microsoft starts to eat your server lunch. --
Where do you think the press gets these dates? Not Microsoft, certainly.
I recall reading some MS marketing material (aka for press consumption) about "Cairo", aka NT 5, aka Windows 2000 in *1994*. This isn't the press speculating about a release 5 years into the future - this is Microsoft speculating. --
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding of OS X is that it's neither BSD nor MacOS at the 'core'. It's a mach kernel that runs several different user space modules, including NextStep/OpenStep/Yellow Box/Whatchmacallit, a BSD user space for traditional Unix compatiblity, the entire legacy MacOS running in some sort of VM (blue box), and a new MacOS-influenced API called Carbon (that allows pre multitasking and protected memory) so that existing Mac apps can be ported easily.
The question is: Which API does QuickTimeX run on? My guess is that it's not the BSD API (too bad for Linux), and instead either OpenStep or Carbon. If Apple is going to support QuickTime for Linux, they will probably have to create a seperate Unix/X Window application.
5) Software is not a problem. If you have someone in-house developing software, I would sincerely hope that they know how to recompile.
You should be aware that porting between Windows and MacOS is not simply a recompile. And that's assuming you even have a cross platform dev environment, which the two biggest for this kind of work (VisualBasic and Delphi) are not.
A few weeks ago there was a discussion on Macintouch about how ODBC support for MacOS has essentially disappeared. That pretty much tells one that in-house application development on the Mac is pretty near death.
--
5)Software development costs. You can't chuck a working bit of in-house software because Marketing wants Iwhacks..
This problem has always been the killer for Macs in corporations. Most shops just have too many bits of VB and Access and DBase and so on to make Macs really feasible. While most places realize that intranet apps are the 'right way', the only way to solve this problem is emulation which is just another layer of compexity to support.
Furthermore, historically, most corporate e-mail systems were single platform. Nowdays you have IMAP and Lotus Notes and a cutdown version of Outlook, but there's still a large number of ccMail shops out there.
And finally, despite the fact that Apple has moved towards open standard networking, there's still a large number of support issues on Novell and Microsoft networks. While Mac support might not crash the server (like it did in the old days of Novell 3), it's something that the administrator needs to support that he'd rather not.
On top of that add minor incompatibilities in MS Office, getting Mac-savvy technicians, building cross platform remote access solutions, places where you still need to route appletalk, the inevitable missing applications or file converters, and you get the idea.
So, while I can sympathize with the folks who would really rather have a Macintosh (or even a Linux system) on their desk, it's totally understandable from an IT perspective why it's unfeasible. The concept (standardization) is right on. The execution (usually Windows 9x) is the problem.
--
Since the Mach parts have the source released in Darwin, and apparently the x86 stuff is in there.
--
Nearly 40 years along in the development of computer technology and we have arrived at a point where the most potent selling point of a new machine is the way it makes you feel psychologically to have it on your desk.
Like the 1920s when General Motors blew past Ford by offering cars that actually came in different colors and styles? It's actually suprising that computer companies took so long to figure this out. (Although IBM has been trying with it's cool black equipment.)
It's also no shock that Apple is the first to figure this out. They've probably got the largest user base of people who don't really know or care anything about the inside of the computer. Something has to convince them to replace their crusty old Performas.
--
History backs you up on this, if one looks at Apple's Pippen console. By the time it made it out, it's 75Mhz PPC603 and whatever minimal memory it had didn't look that appealing to game developers.
A game console has to have a pretty considerable shelf life, and a 500Mhz PII/K7 is going not look very appealing in 18 months. Sure you could play Quake 3, but there not going to be a large incentive there for the PC game houses who will be chasing the 1.5 Ghz chips and god knows what video and sound cards.
--
Microsoft has supposedly been working on Win64 (for the alpha) since 1994 or so. One would hope that they nearly have something by now!
--
But the reality for a company like Compaq is that they are more likely to sell x86 based NT servers than Alpha based ones, especially when it is perceived that Alpha is expensive.
I always thought that Compaq should put an Alpha system in a nice beige Proliant rack case and call it something ike the Proliant 9000A - "the fastest Windows NT server" or something. IT Managers are otherwise falling over themselves to buy huge NT boxes, it's just that for some reason Alpha hardware has seemed unknown and scary.
--
(Late I know)
Note that I was referring to the fetishes of Slashdot editors more that I was talking about OS/2. I should have added [(4) It's not a new OS], which explains Slashdot's fixation on Be, Mac OS X, and so on.
But to address your points in particular:
- Nobody here thinks Be or Solaris or OS/400 is free software.
- Linux is a nearly perfect clone of Unix. Apologies if calling it unix offends your delicate sensibilities, but most people consider it a unix variant.
- Microsoft didn't steal any OS/2 code. At the time of the breakup, both MS and IBM got rights to each others projects - DOS, Windows 3, and OS/2 2.
- I didn't attempt to post any facts - just 100% opinion. Babbling a bunch of nonsense about System V not being BSD and accusing Microsoft of stealing something that they own looks pretty silly too.
--
The Novell comparison really isn't fair. WordPerfect Office always was and still is considered a very competitive product with Microsoft.
The short story is that Novell screwed themselves over by forgetting to ship a product that supported TCP/IP until 1998. One can hardly blame WordPerfect for that. The long story involves their bumbling with System V UNIX and tendancy towards meglomanical delusions. (Well, maybe the Sun comparison is not that far off...)
--
If by "most NT users" you mean workstation users, you're right. However, the big sell for a chip like Alpha is on the server side, and there are/were plenty of Alpha NT server apps. Such as MS Back Office, which probably accounts for 50%+ of NT server installations.
--
Blame MS for shooting themselves in the foot. No more NT/Alpha means no more "Scalablity Days" and no more even pretending they can compete in the midrange until they get a working Merced OS out.
Of course, Microsoft self-destruction should be popular around here.
--
Right on. So poor little Be supposedly couldn't reverse engineer Apple's G3 motherboard. But they do manage to figure out how to reverse engineer around the various bugs and defects for the gazillion PC motherboards and BIOSes out there.
I would love to see IBM sink some money into Be to keep BeOS/PPC alive, but would imply that IBM would actually have to support the PPC platform beyond the point of just re-releasing some old motherboard specs.
--
Oog, through misfortune, I had to work with OS/2 2.1 -- **$300** for the TCP/IP stack. And one wonders why so many people run Windows NT.
And the WPS was so unstable that we ended up booting into command prompts on the server, but that's a different story...
--
(1) it's commercial
(2) it's not Unix
(3) it's partially owned by Microsoft
Essentially, OS/2 doesn't exist in the "Linux world" (as you put it), so it's no real shock that Slashdot isn't all over an OS that most people aren't even aware is still in production.
(I know it's unfair, but OS/2's fate as a nitch OS has been sealed for a long time. Blame IBM, Microsoft, fate, timing, whatever. Expecting "News for Nerds" to pickup on news which only interests what can be fairly called a legacy user base is a little odd. There's not much AS/400 or VMS news here either, and those plaforms are growing much faster than OS/2 is right now.)
--
MS/IBM Lan Manager (Also resold by 3Com as 3Open or something) was an OS/2-based product which failed to gain much significant marketshare. It would be long forgotten, except that Windows NT uses the same networking layer.
It certainly works very differently from NetWare, for one it ran NetBEUI and NetBIOS-over-TCP/IP. If you wrote your DOS app on the LanMan APIs, you're pretty much stuck on either DOS, OS/2, or Windows. (These were the days before 'WinSock' - APIs were pretty much NOS-specific.)
I think the guy's concern is that they is no NetBEUI support in Linux, and the MS DOS TCP/IP software cuts pretty significantly into your 640K.
(One solution might be to look at the book "Unauthorized Windows 95" by Andrew Schulman . In the book he describes how to use Win95 to create a 32-bit version of DOS, complete with protected mode networking.)
--
Wasn't IBM's big mistake putting the 384K ROM space at the top of real memory, instead of the bottom? My understanding is that IBM did it this way only because that's how Apple did it (top 16K of the ]['s 64K.)
--
Well, to be fair both MS and IBM thought DOS was going to be dead meat under 286+ machines and attempted to replace it. Of course, the replacement, OS/2, was a disaster until about 1992. Then someone at MS figured out that they could kluge a protected mode extender onto DOS and tell IBM to screw themselves, and most PCs are still running with that solution (Windows) to this day, making everyone's head hurt.
On the other hand, load up WP 4.2 and Lotus 1-2-3 2.x -- You can still get a lot of work done with 640K.
--
Unfortunately, outside of fantasy land, Windows users have a choice of 4+ office suites backed by major vendors (MS, Corel, IBM, and now Sun). Unix has been slowly dieing on the desktop for years, and the selection is thinner. (Of course, Linux is changing this fast.) And you still have to pay for upgrades, etc.
Maybe I'm dumb, I don't see how the Unix I/O philosophy really helps office suite users. Furthermore, it seems that the MS COM stuff is much more pervasive on Windows than any equivlent on Unix.
(Don't take this as an anti-Unix rant - it's just that if you spend a good chunk of your day inside of a commercial office suite, right now you're much better off in Windows or MacOS than unix. What I would like to see is the KDE and Gnome efforts at Office apps come to open source fruition.)
--
So, why does Microsoft even bother making Win2000 run on 32-bit machines? Why not start out 64-bit? This is especially true if you are targeting the "enterprise" market and their high-end go-fast servers
It's important to note that Alpha has been a key propaganda weapon for Microsoft to argue that NT is competitive with the big unix iron. Many of their boasts (such as 10,000 POP3 users on Exchange, or TerraServer - the 'worlds largest' on-line database.) derive from running NT on some very high-end Alpha equipment. The bottom line is that I can't belive MS would drop Alpha development because doing so would make NT/2000 look half as fast as far as the marketing department is concerned.
As for "64-bit ready", it's not the software, but the hardware. If MS ever gets a 64-bit OS and applicaitons out the door, you get a free performance boost with your NT/Alpha box. Of course, it seems that Microsoft is munging the 32 to 64 bit transition as bad as they munged the 16 to 32 bit transition.
--
I wonder if anyone has any specific examples of the 'inconsistancy' of Windows. I've used both Windows and the Mac extensively, and while the Mac is prettier, the consistancy pretty much seems the same.
The only specific problems I've seen on Windows are:
+ Dragging an icon in the explorer does different things in different places - better to just right-drag and make sure that it does the right thing.
+ The Windows standard file dialog is confused by shortcut icons. Microsoft is too retarded to fix this prominent bug.
+ Some older programs don't have a File menu, instead having a Game menu or something. Some Mac apps have this problem too.
+ MS Office has it's own standard file dialog. Why? Who knows. (Some Mac apps also do this.)
+ The IE-based Explorer doesn't seem to remember view settings very well.
On the other hand, the Mac is not free of problems --
+ Toolbars are often absent or inconsistantly implemented. Chalk this up to MS giving away toolbar widgets with VC and VB, which means that most Windows apps have similar toolbars.
+ Many Mac applications don't recognize keys on an extended keyboard. I think Apple owns this - their standard controls don't seem to support Ins, Del, Home, and End.
+ Keyboard navigation is very inconsistant if you try to do anything other than Cut/Copy/Paste/Quit.
In short, the Mac's UI advantages largely lie in system features which make it easier to configure your computer. I don't see that the actual applications are all that much better or more consistant than Windows.
--
I thought there was some speculation that 64-bit NT would ship on the Alpha sometime next year, before Merced can make it out the door. I wonder if NT/Alpha is really being killed, or Microsoft is just picking up all the development under some secret back-slapping deal.
Regardless, Compaq/DEC needs to start marketing the hardware better at people who buy large x86 servers.
As for Alpha applications, it seems that there are very few workstation apps, but server applications seem aplenty. Specifically, all of the Microsoft stuff (SQL, Exchange, etc) runs on Alpha.
--
Good thing the folks over at FSF didn't think the way you do, or Linux would never have existed.
--
Don't blame the Open Group directly - blame the stakeholders in the Open Group, aka the commercial UNIX vendors (Sun, IBM, HP, et al.)
There's a good argument there that the UNIX boys have decided to roll over and play dead on the desktop. Stagnating X development is just part of the problem. Why bother improving the capabilitites of your clients when you can make boko bucks selling huge database servers to serve Windows clients? Nothing, until Microsoft starts to eat your server lunch.
--
Where do you think the press gets these dates? Not Microsoft, certainly.
I recall reading some MS marketing material (aka for press consumption) about "Cairo", aka NT 5, aka Windows 2000 in *1994*. This isn't the press speculating about a release 5 years into the future - this is Microsoft speculating.
--