> Because the hardware support in OSX is rather finite, it won't just 'install on a typical PC'.
Based on the developer builds, people were estimating that OS X would run unmodified on about 50-60% of new PCs, including almost every new Dell. So, let's not overstate the problem.
If I recall correctly, at first people were buying ROMs from Apple parts dealers, and Apple got angry about this and made it so the ROMs were no longer available, and they may have even threatened to sue, although I can't remember. . When I was in school, some asshat Amigan would go around to the labs and steal all of the ROM SIMMs out of the Macs. (And not the expensive RAM or CPUs.) And Apple was a total bitch about replacing them -- IIRC we had to send the Macs back to the factory so they could install a SIMM.
Except, since Apple is just shipping stock Intel motherboards and processors, there's very little mystery about how to copy the "end-to-end experience". Given the right hardware certification program, it could work.
Actually, I believe he got one thing right at least -- Apple and Microsoft have a handshake agreement that keeps them off each other's toes. If Apple got into the commodity OS market, the Mac version of MS Office probably would go away pretty quickly.
I did miss the crack coming out before the game was delivered through steam. And so did a few million Bittorrent users. It was only widely available some weeks later.
Yes, we missed out on paying a huge IBM tax on single-user machines that would have been intentionally crippled to keep them away from IBM's midrange systems. That would have been great.
Instead, PCs developed real server hardware and real server OSes (including Linux and Windows NT), that IBM would never have provided (and didn't, until the market forced them to change their ways).
Good for you, but I had a fair number of driver issues with early versions of OS X on my PowerBook G3, some of them intentionally caused by Apple. The Mac world is not total perfect driver nirvana.
OK, even if they can't prevent YOU from doing whatever you want with OSX, they certainly can use copyright law to prevent Dell or any other PC Clone company from shipping it pre-installed.
No, ISA was under a government-mandated Reasonable And Non-Discrimatory hardware license program which dated from the minicomputer wars of the 1970s. Every PC clone vendor paid IBM several dollars per PC up until the late 1990s when the patents finally expired.
IBM supposedly developed MicroChannel several years earlier and sat on it until they could get the Reagan DOJ to let them out of their consent decrees. That's why MCA was not under RND licensing (ie, not only was it more expensive, IBM could have used it to force clone vendors to buy OS/2.)
Well, I thought they were both good games. I just thought it was funny that the hive mind decided Doom 3 was super boring, while driving an airboat around doing nothing for 15 minutes was the height of game design.
It does make sense. Right now the vast majority of OS X users are Mac owners, so they "protect their investment" by heading onto the internet and saying great things about the software. Some pirate, on the other hand, has nothing invested in it, and will play with it for 10 minutes before starting talking crap about it. (Because unlike what Mac users tell you, nothing's perfect.)
It's the Doom 3 Effect -- Millions of people bittorrented the game 3 days before it hit retail shelves, and then felt like they had to justify the reason they didn't want to pay for it. So the overwhelming reaction was negative. Meanwhile, Half-Life 2 was DRM delivered to paying customers, who of course had a overwhelmingly positive reaction.
Translation: A lot of your existing applications won't run
Translation: You are spreading FUD. The idea is to present a fake c:\windows that poorly written programs can pretend to write to without breaking them.
It was IBM, but they were also under Anti-Trust scrutiny that placed a lot of restrictions on their business. Another example: They were forced to license things like ISA and VGA to PC clone manufacturers for a very low price.
... Assuming that Unix and Apple break backwards compatibility for security reasons and not just simple expediency. Care to provide any examples? (other than rsh:)
I think that's a fair suggestion, and in fact that's part of Microsoft's backcompat strategy on the server-level with Virtual PC. Admittedly Vista does come with a bunch of sandbox/virutalization stuff, but at some point you really just have to run Win95 in an virtual machine.
Perhaps they have bad memories of OS/2 running 'legacy' software in the so-called "Penalty Box" and are afraid of OS/2ing themselves. Or maybe the lack of COM/DDE interop would break more things that it would fix.
Your points are completely diminished by your over-the-top hyperbole and blatent flamebait that you insist on using.
Mac OS X with a strong focus on providing modern security features
OS X has a nice implementation of classic Unix permissions, but nothing "modern" like is found in Solaris or Linux.
Here's the ultimate test of OS X's security: Apple designs a feature which, when you visit a web page, Safari would automatically download a Disk Image file, mount it, and then run any program from it.
Now get this: Even with the front-door wide open, Nobody exploited it! A couple weeks later, the patch comes out, and everyone forgets about it. When Microsoft does something like this, millions of machines get raped.
No, OS X's security is still mainly the "Marketshare Firewall", which is why Apple themselves refused to make an issue of it. Jobs understands that Malware is just like CAD programs or Project Management software or other categories of warez that do not exist on OS X -- it is a popularity issue first and foremost.
Exactly. Check Apple's own hype page on Rosetta, and there's a list of Apple's own software that won't run. And that's not even mentioning third party programs or any and all classic MacOS stuff.
This was a design flaw, so even if they did rewrite from scratch, they would be just like WINE and end up with the exact same bug. The only option would be to kill WMF as a legacy format, and that would mean old software would fail to work.
And I'm half-waiting for someone to discover that MacOS X's PICT file format handler has a similar bug. Although OS X security holes are very rarely exploited by the vulgar sorts of script kiddies and spam merchants.
As if Apple and Linux Distros aren't always hawking a new version loaded with shiny new doodads. Either you are a Debian Stable & IBM mainframe user, or you seriously need to get a sense of perspective on things.
Well, that's Apple's sell -- you can buy a shiny new Mac that comes with a webcam, iLifem and iWork and does almost everything Grandma needs right out of the box. Consumers shy away from buying software separately, but when it's built into the box cost, they're happy about it. Just god forbid that you are running a print-production workflow on Quark 4, or love Word 5.1, use Outlook 2001, or did any custom development for OS 9.
Look flameboy -- don't you think bringing up Windows ME is slightly ironic while Apple is plungering MacOS 9 down the toliet? At least WinME software still runs.
No, Apple needed a rewrite, couldn't do it themselves, and bought someone else's legacy problems. Of course, I wouldn't expect a coherent historical view of things from a guy who's post boils down to OOG SAY MACS GOOD WINDOWS BAD. OOG BREAK HEAD WITH INTEL IMAC.
Anyway, there's nothing wrong with OS X -- you just get all the legacy code with none of the backward-compatibility, that's all.
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> Because the hardware support in OSX is rather finite, it won't just 'install on a typical PC'.
Based on the developer builds, people were estimating that OS X would run unmodified on about 50-60% of new PCs, including almost every new Dell. So, let's not overstate the problem.
If I recall correctly, at first people were buying ROMs from Apple parts dealers, and Apple got angry about this and made it so the ROMs were no longer available, and they may have even threatened to sue, although I can't remember.
.
When I was in school, some asshat Amigan would go around to the labs and steal all of the ROM SIMMs out of the Macs. (And not the expensive RAM or CPUs.) And Apple was a total bitch about replacing them -- IIRC we had to send the Macs back to the factory so they could install a SIMM.
Thank you Captain Nitpick, but there are indeed people running leaked developer builds of OS X on non-Macs.
Except, since Apple is just shipping stock Intel motherboards and processors, there's very little mystery about how to copy the "end-to-end experience". Given the right hardware certification program, it could work.
> No single sentence escaped error
Actually, I believe he got one thing right at least -- Apple and Microsoft have a handshake agreement that keeps them off each other's toes. If Apple got into the commodity OS market, the Mac version of MS Office probably would go away pretty quickly.
The reason people believe that Microsoft is keeping Apple in business out of benevolence. (That's what Apple wanted them to think)
I did miss the crack coming out before the game was delivered through steam. And so did a few million Bittorrent users. It was only widely available some weeks later.
Yes, we missed out on paying a huge IBM tax on single-user machines that would have been intentionally crippled to keep them away from IBM's midrange systems. That would have been great.
Instead, PCs developed real server hardware and real server OSes (including Linux and Windows NT), that IBM would never have provided (and didn't, until the market forced them to change their ways).
Good for you, but I had a fair number of driver issues with early versions of OS X on my PowerBook G3, some of them intentionally caused by Apple. The Mac world is not total perfect driver nirvana.
OK, even if they can't prevent YOU from doing whatever you want with OSX, they certainly can use copyright law to prevent Dell or any other PC Clone company from shipping it pre-installed.
No, ISA was under a government-mandated Reasonable And Non-Discrimatory hardware license program which dated from the minicomputer wars of the 1970s. Every PC clone vendor paid IBM several dollars per PC up until the late 1990s when the patents finally expired.
IBM supposedly developed MicroChannel several years earlier and sat on it until they could get the Reagan DOJ to let them out of their consent decrees. That's why MCA was not under RND licensing (ie, not only was it more expensive, IBM could have used it to force clone vendors to buy OS/2.)
Well, I thought they were both good games. I just thought it was funny that the hive mind decided Doom 3 was super boring, while driving an airboat around doing nothing for 15 minutes was the height of game design.
It does make sense. Right now the vast majority of OS X users are Mac owners, so they "protect their investment" by heading onto the internet and saying great things about the software. Some pirate, on the other hand, has nothing invested in it, and will play with it for 10 minutes before starting talking crap about it. (Because unlike what Mac users tell you, nothing's perfect.)
It's the Doom 3 Effect -- Millions of people bittorrented the game 3 days before it hit retail shelves, and then felt like they had to justify the reason they didn't want to pay for it. So the overwhelming reaction was negative. Meanwhile, Half-Life 2 was DRM delivered to paying customers, who of course had a overwhelmingly positive reaction.
Translation: A lot of your existing applications won't run
Translation: You are spreading FUD. The idea is to present a fake c:\windows that poorly written programs can pretend to write to without breaking them.
It was IBM, but they were also under Anti-Trust scrutiny that placed a lot of restrictions on their business. Another example: They were forced to license things like ISA and VGA to PC clone manufacturers for a very low price.
... Assuming that Unix and Apple break backwards compatibility for security reasons and not just simple expediency. Care to provide any examples? (other than rsh :)
I think that's a fair suggestion, and in fact that's part of Microsoft's backcompat strategy on the server-level with Virtual PC. Admittedly Vista does come with a bunch of sandbox/virutalization stuff, but at some point you really just have to run Win95 in an virtual machine.
Perhaps they have bad memories of OS/2 running 'legacy' software in the so-called "Penalty Box" and are afraid of OS/2ing themselves. Or maybe the lack of COM/DDE interop would break more things that it would fix.
Your points are completely diminished by your over-the-top hyperbole and blatent flamebait that you insist on using.
Mac OS X with a strong focus on providing modern security features
OS X has a nice implementation of classic Unix permissions, but nothing "modern" like is found in Solaris or Linux.
Here's the ultimate test of OS X's security: Apple designs a feature which, when you visit a web page, Safari would automatically download a Disk Image file, mount it, and then run any program from it.
Now get this: Even with the front-door wide open, Nobody exploited it! A couple weeks later, the patch comes out, and everyone forgets about it. When Microsoft does something like this, millions of machines get raped.
No, OS X's security is still mainly the "Marketshare Firewall", which is why Apple themselves refused to make an issue of it. Jobs understands that Malware is just like CAD programs or Project Management software or other categories of warez that do not exist on OS X -- it is a popularity issue first and foremost.
Exactly. Check Apple's own hype page on Rosetta, and there's a list of Apple's own software that won't run. And that's not even mentioning third party programs or any and all classic MacOS stuff.
> You can run classic under rosetta.
Well, the entire Mac community seems to think otherwise, but whatever you say, Mr Linkless AC.
This was a design flaw, so even if they did rewrite from scratch, they would be just like WINE and end up with the exact same bug. The only option would be to kill WMF as a legacy format, and that would mean old software would fail to work.
And I'm half-waiting for someone to discover that MacOS X's PICT file format handler has a similar bug. Although OS X security holes are very rarely exploited by the vulgar sorts of script kiddies and spam merchants.
As if Apple and Linux Distros aren't always hawking a new version loaded with shiny new doodads. Either you are a Debian Stable & IBM mainframe user, or you seriously need to get a sense of perspective on things.
CMU BSD/Mach was originally a research OS from the mid 1980s. I believe it is older than the WinNT kernel, which was started around 1990 or so.
Classic is dead on Intel. So enjoy it until you buy a new, non-legacy Mac.
Well, that's Apple's sell -- you can buy a shiny new Mac that comes with a webcam, iLifem and iWork and does almost everything Grandma needs right out of the box. Consumers shy away from buying software separately, but when it's built into the box cost, they're happy about it. Just god forbid that you are running a print-production workflow on Quark 4, or love Word 5.1, use Outlook 2001, or did any custom development for OS 9.
Look flameboy -- don't you think bringing up Windows ME is slightly ironic while Apple is plungering MacOS 9 down the toliet? At least WinME software still runs.
No, Apple needed a rewrite, couldn't do it themselves, and bought someone else's legacy problems. Of course, I wouldn't expect a coherent historical view of things from a guy who's post boils down to OOG SAY MACS GOOD WINDOWS BAD. OOG BREAK HEAD WITH INTEL IMAC.
Anyway, there's nothing wrong with OS X -- you just get all the legacy code with none of the backward-compatibility, that's all.