Ah! It's about time the Slashdot community
recongnized NeXT. So many Linux and *BSD
users are oblivious to NeXTSTEP (and later
OpenStep, Rhapsody and Mac OS X). The
GUI, Objective-C, the programming framework,
and Unix and Mach. They're a dream to use!
The GUI: Pure gold, man. In many ways,
the NeXT GUI is far more elegant and functional
than even the Mac OS GUI- CDE and other
WMs and environments for X11 come nowhere
even close.
Objective-C: A much better object
oriented C than C++. More like a cross
between C and Smalltalk than some tacky
add on to C. Elegant, simple, and a minimal
syntax change to regular C. Dynamic like
Smalltalk, but retaining the run-time
speed of C. Objective-C's dynamic nature
allowed for great products like ActiveDeveloper
and Joy Developer which allows Obj-C users
to develop apps interactively like Smalltalk
or Python, whereas C++ is about as static
as it gets.
Programming Framework: Killer API. A rich
class library of support classes like
the mutable array (what?! you're still rolling
your own?) and dictionary (or hash-table)
as well as the AppKit, the means of creating
GUI apps. Also, distributed objects were a no
brainer with the Foundation framework which
was a part of NeXTSTEP. It's a good thing to see this framework brought to the masses in the form of GNUstep.
Not to mention the IDE... InterfaceBuilder
and ProjectBuilder are two tools which the
world just recently cought up with. All
of these ideas you see in most modern IDEs
were invented for NeXTSTEP.
Unix and Mach: What can I say? Geeks dig it.
Mach allows for some funky IPC action, and
if you wanted, you could always drop into
tcsh if that's where you feel more at home.
The truly great part? You didn't have to
know how to use a shell to get work done.
If you didn't know Unix, you could still have
all of the power of Unix exploited by this
wonderful OS.
I still use my cube when I can, for lighter-weight
computing, something I choose over my Power Mac G4 or a
PC running Linux whenever I can.
$25?! Good lord! I payed $250 for my cube (mono and non-turbo) about a year ago... Like old Macs (as opposed to old PCs), they still can pull in a pretty fair price.
No, OpenStep for Solaris for will not work with Linux. It doesn't include a Display PostScript server, but relies on the DPS extensions of Sun's X Server. Also, OpenStep for Solaris only works with Solaris on SPARC hardware, not Intel, and iBCS does emulate SPARC processor. I doubt it'd work with Display GhostScript as a substitution, but those of you using Linux on a SPARC might want to try it.
It's kind of neet to try, but is of limited usefulness. Even though you can run X and OpenStep apps side by side on OpenStep/Solaris, they don't integrate that well, and a lot of OpenStep apps are only distributed for OpenStep/Mach for black and white (m68k/intel) boxes.
What I'm hoping for in the future is a language which surpasses Smalltalk in it's simplicity, elegence and splendid design. Smalltalk does have it's issues (slowish runtime), but in many ways, the peak of language design has reached it peak - in 1980. Twenty years have passed since Smalltalk-80 was made public, and about thirty years since resarch on what would be come Smalltalk started at Xerox PARC.
And after all this time past, all the pionerring research done at Xerox PARC which lead to Smalltalk and the modern GUI, nothing new has come up. We've got Java, and now, C#, nothing but half-assed attempts at Smalltalk flexibility, but catering to those who cannot think past C's syntax.
It's a shame, and it doesn't seem to be getting better- Stanford's Self project was interesting, and also responsibile for a lot of new ideas and techniques, but has not really bloomed. Often do I look around for new languages, new ideas in language design, and it seems it's all just the same ideas being rehashed.
I love Smalltalk as a language, but I'm ready for something just plain better to come along. Perhaps Smalltalk is just too good that it'll be another 20 years before the rest of the world catches up with it.
Man! These suckers have ethernet on them! I can't wait until someone gets Linux up on one of these d00ds- can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?!?!?!
A lot of people are ripping on this without having any experience with it, automatically associatng it with everything crappy about Java. Although I'm not an Amiga enthusiast, I think this thing has a lot of potential, and I'm eager to try it. Of course well done hand-coded native assembler is and will always be faster- but with the speed of computers today the flexibility a system like this promises makes up for time.
A while back I saw some benchmarks of Java on TAO Elate (year+ ago? Before all this Amiga stuff) and it looked quite fast- a lot faster than the then-current Java VMs.
Every programming language or framework that makes life a thousand times easier for programmers (both during design and coding) always gets a load of crap from people cranky about it being slow. After all these years, it has become evident to me that the time of assembly programmers and spartan C coders is worth almost nothing. Either that, or they have a K&R book shoved too far up their bums.
In closing... well, I'd like to say that before you get the twitch to start freaking out about the speed of asm or C compared to something which alleviates a programmer from mundane and obnoxious porting or running after memory leaks, give this, and languages and frameworks which provide similar benefits, as much of an unbiased try as you can.
Aaron >> "Steve Jobs said two years ago that X is brain-damaged and it will be gone in two years. He was half right." -- Dennis Ritchie
However, Smalltalk has an equally powerful object model, and it uses the more friendly infix notation (let's face it, prefix notation is unreadable to anyone but Ubergeeks).
Then quite looking for that non ACL CLOS implementation and use Smalltalk!:)
The state of language design these days is down right depressing. The world can't seem to move beyond all of those silly Algol-derivatives like C, C++, Java, and now C#, making Smalltalk- a language designed throughout the 70s and finialized as Smalltalk-80 in 1980- still the height of language design.
What does C# add to Smalltalk, and contribute to the the innovation of language design? Not much. It has "attributes," which are nothing more than embedded XML comments; COM integration (good if you're on Windows, but you could always use Dolphin Smalltalk for that; SOAP integration (Dandy, but it's available for almost every language around); compilation (you can do this with Smalltalk MT); and the ability to regress back into C-pointer mode to write "unsafe" code, to make sure the incompetent GC doesn't eat your objects (which were never rooted, probably by an incompetent programmer).
Many of these things are neat and useful, but reek of the sad state of language design nowadays, and available elsewhere with or without add-on packages.
What's almost as sad, is that a lot of programmers are in awe at the power of C# and Java, with their heads too buried in the sand of C's syntax to see the innovations that Smalltalk
(cf. Squeak) made 20 years ago.
Why is it that whenever a novel device is reported to be able to run Linux in some way or form, some schmuck always says "Man! A Beowulf cluster of these would be sweet!"
No, this shouldn't stop. When someone violates an NDA, legal action is justified. End of story.
Furthermore, Cobalt wouldn't have likely sued Apple about the Cube vs. the Qube. Cobalt probably thought they could get away with it, as when those Apple G4 Cube pics were posted Apple could've lost their copyright, making a sue-job by Cobalt cheap, easy, and very profitable.
Many of you Apple nay-sayers can whine all you want, but you would most likely do the same if it came down to it.
Uh, no. The number of buttons is not analogous to having as and brake pedals. As part of how you use a car, you need both pedals. Not having a right mouse button is more like not having a clutch- which is not necessary for all kinds of cars. It depends on how the transmission (or the operating system) was designed- no one argues that automatic transmissions are "design flaws," rather, they're a way to make driving a car easier.
Having a good amount of experience using the Mac OS, Windows, and various user-end Unix interfaces, I can say that the Mac OS doesn't need a second mouse button. It was designed to only require one, although for those who prefer, right-clicks (or control-clicks) do bring up contextual menus.
Windows and many Unix GUIs, on the other hand, require a second, or third mouse button. That, my friend, is a design flaw. That's not to say the right and middle button should not be there, but they shouldn't be a necessity just to do simple things, which is often the case with Windows.
That's not to say Apple shouldn't have the option of a two or three buttoned mouse- I'm sure it would come in handy for their Photoshop-using "Pro" crowd (...and me too).
Aqua is little more than a theme defining look and feel, not the windowing system. The windowing system is called Quartz, or, simple enough, Window Server.
Apple has reported to developers as one of the past WWDCs that they've left the hooks for remotability in Quartz. It could be free software (beer or liberty) or commercial which takes advantage of this, who knows. Furthermore, it's inevitable that a VNC client and server are developed, and you can always turn on the telnet daemon or install your own ssh daemon. Admins which need these features can certainly figure out how to do something like compile ssh.
Heh. IBM's lowend AIX boxes crack me up. Those non-Mac users who whine about Mac hardware being too expensive should have a look at IBM's "Unix Solutions" catalog. I was doing just that the other day at work, and IBM is charging $5000 for a system which is made of Mac hardware of three or four years ago. 233 MHz 604e, 6 MB SCSI-2, blah, blah. I suppose you're paying the $4500 over a used Mac with that for AIX. Take your pick.
The bad news: I don't think OS X DP4 will install on any NuBus or PCI 603 or 604 based Macs. The good news: Darwin runs on some of these platforms (604/PCI, maybe more), and as Apple incorporates these changes into Mac OS X, it will install on these machines. Furthermore, someone could probably hack out support for NuBus machines for Darwin as well, thereby making it possible to run Mac OS X on these machines.
It is now and has been for a while the main point of Darwin is hardware support. What most people realize is that this hardware support doesn't just mean support for perephrials but systems themselves.
Want Mac OS X on your 110 MHz 601 NuBus box? Lift the NuBus support information from MkLinux sources and adapt them to Darwin. While this isn't a non-trivial cut and paste job, and the version of Mach which MkLinux uses is different than that in Darwin/OS X, that similarity makes it not only quite possible, but a project which would probably not take all that long.
Apple may not have made up pretty spec sheets about it's hardware for you, but it put all the documentation you need in MkLinux, so quit whining about it not being an "open platform" when it's been in your lap the whole time.
I am one of these Linux to Mac converts. I used Linux as my primary OS since 1995, then finding NeXTSTEP, OpenStep and Rhapsody a few years later. I began to use OpenStep for a lot of general computing, but sadly, a lot of what I wanted to do had to be done under Linux (POSIX support was flaky in NeXTSTEP and dropped in OpenStep). I much preferred the clean OpenStep environment and API to the schizofrenic nature of Linux.
This went on until early 2000. I sold my Linux/x86 box and bought myself a G4, expecting to use Mac OS X Server in the interim. I started off using Mac OS X Server most of the time, but for somethings (games) I had to go into Mac OS 9. As one who hates rebooting, even for the sake of switching to another OS, I began using Mac OS 9 more and more, and was honestly surprised how decent it was, not from a UI standpoint, but that it actually did crash a lot less than Windows.
I too expect some Linux users (and Windows users, for that matter) to switch to the Mac when Mac OS X comes out. For me, OS X allows me to do all the things I did/do on Linux (program in Python and Squeak, among other things) but allowing me to shut out all the Unixisms and just get work done if needed. At the same time, I can always just drop to a shell if I want. It is this which I think will attract more like me to the Mac. I know they'll enjoy it just as much as me.:)
While it isn't FP, Squeak is a Smalltalk system which is somewhat of it's own desktop environment. Not only does it have many features of a modern GUI system, it also has many other functions which are usually part of an operating system, like multi-tasking and process management.
It has been ported to bare metal a couple of times (to an embedded Mitsubishi SH3 chip, and x86) and can stand alone like it's own OS. Also, work it being done by me to get it working via the Linux framebuffer (the current Linux/Unix version requires X), so you could easily have a version which would be it's own OS on almost any archetecture.
Squeak Smalltalk itself runs on many platforms- including, but not limited to: Mac OS (classic), Mac OS X, Linux and most other Unixes, the Acorn RiscOS, Windows 95/NT, and DOS (graphics via VESA). The Smalltalk image file is binary compatible as well.
Also, since this is about FP, there has been recent discussion of FP, Aspect Oriented Programming, MOP, and similar concepts on the Squeak mailing list now. Smalltalk also has block-syntax which is similar to lambda.
It stems from NeXTSTEP, which used a native GUI because X was not ready for the real world when NeXT needed it to be. That, and Jobs and the NeXT engineers hated it. X, by NeXT standards, is still not ready for the real world. Jobs once said that he expected it to die within two years of NeXTSTEP's release. A quote comes to mind- "Steve Jobs said two years ago that X is brain-damaged and it will be gone in two years. He was half right." - Dennis Ritchie. (And does anyone know if Aqua is network transparent like X? I've never used NeXTSTEP or OpenSTEP so I'd be keen to know). In NeXTSTEP and OpenStep, the Window Server was network transparent, not unlike X, via a facility called NXHost (later renamed to NSHost). Quartz (the Window Server in Mac OS X, Aqua is just a defined look and feel, with the possibility of other "themes) lost this ability, but Apple has reported that there are still hooks for this, and a third-party could very well add it. Not just through something like VNC, but in a network transparent way like NS/NXHost or X. Aaron
So? W and MicroWindows are running on another smaller and cheaper PDA. X on a PDA? Who cares? Let's not bring all of our X baggage with us into the PDA world, which requires mostly PDA-specific apps... Look into W, MicroWindows/Nano-X and Squeak for better GUI alternatives for a PDA. Squeak is exceptional in the sense that it can scale from the PDA, to the desktop, to the server.
GNUstep is progressing, contrary to the author's statement that it's in eternal limbo. It is moving, albeit slowly, and has picked up quite a bit in the last year, as the OpenStep API is once again in the spotlight, in the guise of Apple's Mac OS X. Want it to move faster? Lend a hand! No open source project moves forward without the help of volunteers!
Also, the author seems to be under the impression that GNUstep doesn't rely on X. Although it's quite possible to write a new back-end to interface it with Berlin, or any other graphics archetechture (it was designed with that forethought), it currently uses X (with a Display Ghostscript extension) as a display medium. GNUstep is cool, but as of now it certainly is not a replacement for X, and that's not it's primary intent.
Aside that, the article hit the bull's eye. I'm happy to see that Slashdot sucked it up and posted it; too many *BSD and (in especial) Linux users think that X is the epitamy of cool, simply because you can have 'l33t things like enlightenment. Bah!
In Minneapolis, we have the Twin Cities Free Net, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing and showing people in lower-class neighborhoods how to use the internet. It's a completely text-based service which serves the lowest common demoninator through lynx and pine, which means it works on any computer with a modem. If someone wants to join, but doesn't have a computer, we have a supply of text terminals with 2400 modems- slow, certainly, but enough to do text-based browsing and email.
Also, education, as I'm sure many people have pointed out. Menoting to kids in "need" (or just any kid who needs some direction), teaching at schools, especially in lower income areas, the list goes on and on.
I for one don't know if these rumors are true or not. But what I do know is that Ryan Meader, webmaster of MacOSRumors has been known not only to make up his "stories," but has, in the past, faked such requests from Apple, in order to drum up hits and support his claims.
Editors: We went over this last time a story pointing to MOSR was posted. MOSR is not trustworthy, and I'm surprised Slashdot would rather slap up such a story for little more than kicks.
Self didn't pioneer most of these concepts, even though they were apart of it. Smalltalk did, with the exception of JIT compilation.
JIT compilation became a part of VisualWorks a while ago... Sometime in the early 90's? I can't recall. But the rest of these features were first invented in Smalltalk, and then borrowed for Self.
...and look at what Carmack's saying about making the Mac using Mac OS X his main platform, on which there is no Direct X. Doom was developed on NeXTSTEP, and ported to other platforms after that, and Carmack's been saying since the first release of Rhapsody DR1 that if Mac OS X sized up to what it's grand-dad NeXTSTEP offered, he'd jump the NT ship to use it again.
All anyone is ever concerned about is making this or that license compatible with the GPL. I use Linux and other GPL'd pieces of software on many of my machines, and respect the efforts of GNU, the FSF, and those who produced GPL'd software, but it's the GPL which needs to be changed to be come compatible with other licenses.
It's just that just I've seen software which combines software developed under the Apache, BSD, and MPL licenses, and it all just works. But when you introduce the GPL, you've got a problem. Most open source licenses can all cooperate, but the GPL always introduces a problem with licensing.
Naughty naughty! Porting between high-level APIs is likely a pain in the ass. I wasn't talkinga about doing that. Reread my post.
What I said, is that Apple's Cocoa API and GNUstep's API are almost the same. The whole point of GNUstep is to reimplment the OpenStep API (now called Cocoa).
Porting between Cocoa on Mac OS X and GNUstep (when it's mature) won't be hard. It's the same API.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah! It's about time the Slashdot community recongnized NeXT. So many Linux and *BSD users are oblivious to NeXTSTEP (and later OpenStep, Rhapsody and Mac OS X). The GUI, Objective-C, the programming framework, and Unix and Mach. They're a dream to use!
The GUI: Pure gold, man. In many ways, the NeXT GUI is far more elegant and functional than even the Mac OS GUI- CDE and other WMs and environments for X11 come nowhere even close.
Objective-C: A much better object oriented C than C++. More like a cross between C and Smalltalk than some tacky add on to C. Elegant, simple, and a minimal syntax change to regular C. Dynamic like Smalltalk, but retaining the run-time speed of C. Objective-C's dynamic nature allowed for great products like ActiveDeveloper and Joy Developer which allows Obj-C users to develop apps interactively like Smalltalk or Python, whereas C++ is about as static as it gets.
Programming Framework: Killer API. A rich class library of support classes like the mutable array (what?! you're still rolling your own?) and dictionary (or hash-table) as well as the AppKit, the means of creating GUI apps. Also, distributed objects were a no brainer with the Foundation framework which was a part of NeXTSTEP. It's a good thing to see this framework brought to the masses in the form of GNUstep.
Not to mention the IDE... InterfaceBuilder and ProjectBuilder are two tools which the world just recently cought up with. All of these ideas you see in most modern IDEs were invented for NeXTSTEP.
Unix and Mach: What can I say? Geeks dig it. Mach allows for some funky IPC action, and if you wanted, you could always drop into tcsh if that's where you feel more at home. The truly great part? You didn't have to know how to use a shell to get work done. If you didn't know Unix, you could still have all of the power of Unix exploited by this wonderful OS.
I still use my cube when I can, for lighter-weight computing, something I choose over my Power Mac G4 or a PC running Linux whenever I can.
$25?! Good lord! I payed $250 for my cube (mono and non-turbo) about a year ago... Like old Macs (as opposed to old PCs), they still can pull in a pretty fair price.
No, OpenStep for Solaris for will not work with Linux. It doesn't include a Display PostScript server, but relies on the DPS extensions of Sun's X Server. Also, OpenStep for Solaris only works with Solaris on SPARC hardware, not Intel, and iBCS does emulate SPARC processor. I doubt it'd work with Display GhostScript as a substitution, but those of you using Linux on a SPARC might want to try it. It's kind of neet to try, but is of limited usefulness. Even though you can run X and OpenStep apps side by side on OpenStep/Solaris, they don't integrate that well, and a lot of OpenStep apps are only distributed for OpenStep/Mach for black and white (m68k/intel) boxes.
What I'm hoping for in the future is a language which surpasses Smalltalk in it's simplicity, elegence and splendid design. Smalltalk does have it's issues (slowish runtime), but in many ways, the peak of language design has reached it peak - in 1980. Twenty years have passed since Smalltalk-80 was made public, and about thirty years since resarch on what would be come Smalltalk started at Xerox PARC.
And after all this time past, all the pionerring research done at Xerox PARC which lead to Smalltalk and the modern GUI, nothing new has come up. We've got Java, and now, C#, nothing but half-assed attempts at Smalltalk flexibility, but catering to those who cannot think past C's syntax.
It's a shame, and it doesn't seem to be getting better- Stanford's Self project was interesting, and also responsibile for a lot of new ideas and techniques, but has not really bloomed. Often do I look around for new languages, new ideas in language design, and it seems it's all just the same ideas being rehashed.
I love Smalltalk as a language, but I'm ready for something just plain better to come along. Perhaps Smalltalk is just too good that it'll be another 20 years before the rest of the world catches up with it.
Now for the compulsory:
Man! These suckers have ethernet on them! I can't wait until someone gets Linux up on one of these d00ds- can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?!?!?!
A lot of people are ripping on this without having any experience with it, automatically associatng it with everything crappy about Java. Although I'm not an Amiga enthusiast, I think this thing has a lot of potential, and I'm eager to try it. Of course well done hand-coded native assembler is and will always be faster- but with the speed of computers today the flexibility a system like this promises makes up for time.
A while back I saw some benchmarks of Java on TAO Elate (year+ ago? Before all this Amiga stuff) and it looked quite fast- a lot faster than the then-current Java VMs.
Every programming language or framework that makes life a thousand times easier for programmers (both during design and coding) always gets a load of crap from people cranky about it being slow. After all these years, it has become evident to me that the time of assembly programmers and spartan C coders is worth almost nothing. Either that, or they have a K&R book shoved too far up their bums.
In closing... well, I'd like to say that before you get the twitch to start freaking out about the speed of asm or C compared to something which alleviates a programmer from mundane and obnoxious porting or running after memory leaks, give this, and languages and frameworks which provide similar benefits, as much of an unbiased try as you can.
Aaron >> "Steve Jobs said two years ago that X is brain-damaged and it will be gone in two years. He was half right." -- Dennis Ritchie
However, Smalltalk has an equally powerful object model, and it uses the more friendly infix notation (let's face it, prefix notation is unreadable to anyone but Ubergeeks).
:)
Then quite looking for that non ACL CLOS implementation and use Smalltalk!
The state of language design these days is down right depressing. The world can't seem to move beyond all of those silly Algol-derivatives like C, C++, Java, and now C#, making Smalltalk- a language designed throughout the 70s and finialized as Smalltalk-80 in 1980- still the height of language design.
What does C# add to Smalltalk, and contribute to the the innovation of language design? Not much. It has "attributes," which are nothing more than embedded XML comments; COM integration (good if you're on Windows, but you could always use Dolphin Smalltalk for that; SOAP integration (Dandy, but it's available for almost every language around); compilation (you can do this with Smalltalk MT); and the ability to regress back into C-pointer mode to write "unsafe" code, to make sure the incompetent GC doesn't eat your objects (which were never rooted, probably by an incompetent programmer).
Many of these things are neat and useful, but reek of the sad state of language design nowadays, and available elsewhere with or without add-on packages.
What's almost as sad, is that a lot of programmers are in awe at the power of C# and Java, with their heads too buried in the sand of C's syntax to see the innovations that Smalltalk (cf. Squeak) made 20 years ago.
Why is it that whenever a novel device is reported to be able to run Linux in some way or form, some schmuck always says "Man! A Beowulf cluster of these would be sweet!"
No, this shouldn't stop. When someone violates an NDA, legal action is justified. End of story.
Furthermore, Cobalt wouldn't have likely sued Apple about the Cube vs. the Qube. Cobalt probably thought they could get away with it, as when those Apple G4 Cube pics were posted Apple could've lost their copyright, making a sue-job by Cobalt cheap, easy, and very profitable.
Many of you Apple nay-sayers can whine all you want, but you would most likely do the same if it came down to it.
Uh, no. The number of buttons is not analogous to having as and brake pedals. As part of how you use a car, you need both pedals. Not having a right mouse button is more like not having a clutch- which is not necessary for all kinds of cars. It depends on how the transmission (or the operating system) was designed- no one argues that automatic transmissions are "design flaws," rather, they're a way to make driving a car easier.
Having a good amount of experience using the Mac OS, Windows, and various user-end Unix interfaces, I can say that the Mac OS doesn't need a second mouse button. It was designed to only require one, although for those who prefer, right-clicks (or control-clicks) do bring up contextual menus.
Windows and many Unix GUIs, on the other hand, require a second, or third mouse button. That, my friend, is a design flaw. That's not to say the right and middle button should not be there, but they shouldn't be a necessity just to do simple things, which is often the case with Windows.
That's not to say Apple shouldn't have the option of a two or three buttoned mouse- I'm sure it would come in handy for their Photoshop-using "Pro" crowd (...and me too).
Aqua is little more than a theme defining look and feel, not the windowing system. The windowing system is called Quartz, or, simple enough, Window Server.
Apple has reported to developers as one of the past WWDCs that they've left the hooks for remotability in Quartz. It could be free software (beer or liberty) or commercial which takes advantage of this, who knows. Furthermore, it's inevitable that a VNC client and server are developed, and you can always turn on the telnet daemon or install your own ssh daemon. Admins which need these features can certainly figure out how to do something like compile ssh.
Heh. IBM's lowend AIX boxes crack me up. Those non-Mac users who whine about Mac hardware being too expensive should have a look at IBM's "Unix Solutions" catalog. I was doing just that the other day at work, and IBM is charging $5000 for a system which is made of Mac hardware of three or four years ago. 233 MHz 604e, 6 MB SCSI-2, blah, blah. I suppose you're paying the $4500 over a used Mac with that for AIX. Take your pick.
The bad news: I don't think OS X DP4 will install on any NuBus or PCI 603 or 604 based Macs. The good news: Darwin runs on some of these platforms (604/PCI, maybe more), and as Apple incorporates these changes into Mac OS X, it will install on these machines. Furthermore, someone could probably hack out support for NuBus machines for Darwin as well, thereby making it possible to run Mac OS X on these machines.
It is now and has been for a while the main point of Darwin is hardware support. What most people realize is that this hardware support doesn't just mean support for perephrials but systems themselves.
Want Mac OS X on your 110 MHz 601 NuBus box? Lift the NuBus support information from MkLinux sources and adapt them to Darwin. While this isn't a non-trivial cut and paste job, and the version of Mach which MkLinux uses is different than that in Darwin/OS X, that similarity makes it not only quite possible, but a project which would probably not take all that long.
Apple may not have made up pretty spec sheets about it's hardware for you, but it put all the documentation you need in MkLinux, so quit whining about it not being an "open platform" when it's been in your lap the whole time.
I am one of these Linux to Mac converts. I used Linux as my primary OS since 1995, then finding NeXTSTEP, OpenStep and Rhapsody a few years later. I began to use OpenStep for a lot of general computing, but sadly, a lot of what I wanted to do had to be done under Linux (POSIX support was flaky in NeXTSTEP and dropped in OpenStep). I much preferred the clean OpenStep environment and API to the schizofrenic nature of Linux.
:)
This went on until early 2000. I sold my Linux/x86 box and bought myself a G4, expecting to use Mac OS X Server in the interim. I started off using Mac OS X Server most of the time, but for somethings (games) I had to go into Mac OS 9. As one who hates rebooting, even for the sake of switching to another OS, I began using Mac OS 9 more and more, and was honestly surprised how decent it was, not from a UI standpoint, but that it actually did crash a lot less than Windows.
I too expect some Linux users (and Windows users, for that matter) to switch to the Mac when Mac OS X comes out. For me, OS X allows me to do all the things I did/do on Linux (program in Python and Squeak, among other things) but allowing me to shut out all the Unixisms and just get work done if needed. At the same time, I can always just drop to a shell if I want. It is this which I think will attract more like me to the Mac. I know they'll enjoy it just as much as me.
While it isn't FP, Squeak is a Smalltalk system which is somewhat of it's own desktop environment. Not only does it have many features of a modern GUI system, it also has many other functions which are usually part of an operating system, like multi-tasking and process management.
It has been ported to bare metal a couple of times (to an embedded Mitsubishi SH3 chip, and x86) and can stand alone like it's own OS. Also, work it being done by me to get it working via the Linux framebuffer (the current Linux/Unix version requires X), so you could easily have a version which would be it's own OS on almost any archetecture.
Squeak Smalltalk itself runs on many platforms- including, but not limited to: Mac OS (classic), Mac OS X, Linux and most other Unixes, the Acorn RiscOS, Windows 95/NT, and DOS (graphics via VESA). The Smalltalk image file is binary compatible as well.
Also, since this is about FP, there has been recent discussion of FP, Aspect Oriented Programming, MOP, and similar concepts on the Squeak mailing list now. Smalltalk also has block-syntax which is similar to lambda.
It stems from NeXTSTEP, which used a native GUI because X was not ready for the real world when NeXT needed it to be. That, and Jobs and the NeXT engineers hated it. X, by NeXT standards, is still not ready for the real world. Jobs once said that he expected it to die within two years of NeXTSTEP's release. A quote comes to mind- "Steve Jobs said two years ago that X is brain-damaged and it will be gone in two years. He was half right." - Dennis Ritchie. (And does anyone know if Aqua is network transparent like X? I've never used NeXTSTEP or OpenSTEP so I'd be keen to know). In NeXTSTEP and OpenStep, the Window Server was network transparent, not unlike X, via a facility called NXHost (later renamed to NSHost). Quartz (the Window Server in Mac OS X, Aqua is just a defined look and feel, with the possibility of other "themes) lost this ability, but Apple has reported that there are still hooks for this, and a third-party could very well add it. Not just through something like VNC, but in a network transparent way like NS/NXHost or X. Aaron
So? W and MicroWindows are running on another smaller and cheaper PDA. X on a PDA? Who cares? Let's not bring all of our X baggage with us into the PDA world, which requires mostly PDA-specific apps... Look into W, MicroWindows/Nano-X and Squeak for better GUI alternatives for a PDA. Squeak is exceptional in the sense that it can scale from the PDA, to the desktop, to the server.
GNUstep is progressing, contrary to the author's statement that it's in eternal limbo. It is moving, albeit slowly, and has picked up quite a bit in the last year, as the OpenStep API is once again in the spotlight, in the guise of Apple's Mac OS X. Want it to move faster? Lend a hand! No open source project moves forward without the help of volunteers!
Also, the author seems to be under the impression that GNUstep doesn't rely on X. Although it's quite possible to write a new back-end to interface it with Berlin, or any other graphics archetechture (it was designed with that forethought), it currently uses X (with a Display Ghostscript extension) as a display medium. GNUstep is cool, but as of now it certainly is not a replacement for X, and that's not it's primary intent.
Aside that, the article hit the bull's eye. I'm happy to see that Slashdot sucked it up and posted it; too many *BSD and (in especial) Linux users think that X is the epitamy of cool, simply because you can have 'l33t things like enlightenment. Bah!
In Minneapolis, we have the Twin Cities Free Net, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing and showing people in lower-class neighborhoods how to use the internet. It's a completely text-based service which serves the lowest common demoninator through lynx and pine, which means it works on any computer with a modem. If someone wants to join, but doesn't have a computer, we have a supply of text terminals with 2400 modems- slow, certainly, but enough to do text-based browsing and email.
Also, education, as I'm sure many people have pointed out. Menoting to kids in "need" (or just any kid who needs some direction), teaching at schools, especially in lower income areas, the list goes on and on.
I for one don't know if these rumors are true or not. But what I do know is that Ryan Meader, webmaster of MacOSRumors has been known not only to make up his "stories," but has, in the past, faked such requests from Apple, in order to drum up hits and support his claims.
Editors: We went over this last time a story pointing to MOSR was posted. MOSR is not trustworthy, and I'm surprised Slashdot would rather slap up such a story for little more than kicks.
Self didn't pioneer most of these concepts, even though they were apart of it. Smalltalk did, with the exception of JIT compilation.
JIT compilation became a part of VisualWorks a while ago... Sometime in the early 90's? I can't recall. But the rest of these features were first invented in Smalltalk, and then borrowed for Self.
...and look at what Carmack's saying about making the Mac using Mac OS X his main platform, on which there is no Direct X. Doom was developed on NeXTSTEP, and ported to other platforms after that, and Carmack's been saying since the first release of Rhapsody DR1 that if Mac OS X sized up to what it's grand-dad NeXTSTEP offered, he'd jump the NT ship to use it again.
OpenGL isn't dying. At least, it won't from id.
All anyone is ever concerned about is making this or that license compatible with the GPL. I use Linux and other GPL'd pieces of software on many of my machines, and respect the efforts of GNU, the FSF, and those who produced GPL'd software, but it's the GPL which needs to be changed to be come compatible with other licenses.
It's just that just I've seen software which combines software developed under the Apache, BSD, and MPL licenses, and it all just works. But when you introduce the GPL, you've got a problem. Most open source licenses can all cooperate, but the GPL always introduces a problem with licensing.
Naughty naughty! Porting between high-level APIs is likely a pain in the ass. I wasn't talkinga about doing that. Reread my post.
What I said, is that Apple's Cocoa API and GNUstep's API are almost the same. The whole point of GNUstep is to reimplment the OpenStep API (now called Cocoa).
Porting between Cocoa on Mac OS X and GNUstep (when it's mature) won't be hard. It's the same API.