With the number of worthwhile comments posted these days, I think by default *any* post should be -1. This way the moderators will only have to moderate the 2 or 3 non troll comments up rather than moderate down the other 80 posts.
Please don't. Nothing has happened yet, just an email that may have no basis in fact. The last thing needed right now is people getting vocal over this. Let's not piss Apple off until it's been decided if this is even an issue to be worried about. Comments like this are only going to help cause a problem when there might not even be one.
Companies are made of people. There are some folks at apple who believe in OpenSource, want to support the community, and want to take it as far as they can. There are others who think it's a big crock and won't want to consider it. Just like any big company, there are going to be factions that aren't always going to agree on what goes on. Life's a bitch, we'll have to see what happens.
BTW, Apple's earnings statements aren't proof enough that Jobs has brought apple back to profitability?
Check the site. Specifically, there is a list of all the included packages at http://www.publicsource.apple.com/projects/darwin/ projects.html.
Also, I don't think you can just get Mach and BSD. It's not like you can install FreeBSD and just throw a mach kernel on it. A little tougher than that...
Technically, there isn't really an openstep specification anymore. Well, there is, but I doubt it means much these days. Cocoa is the definative implementation of the artist formerly known as openstep, however. GNUstep's goal is to be 100% compatible. So does this mean an app will just work under GNUstep? Nope. They use different makefile formats for one. Easy enough, a utility could convert between the two. But Apple uses dynamically loadable interface components, currently stored in binary format, supposedly one day in XML descriptions. When it goes XML, GNUstep can probably use them. For the meantime, it won't work. Lastly, GNUstep isn't done. There's a lot of the GUI stuff that hasn't been implemented. A lot of it is there and doing quite well, but not where it has to be for 100% compatability. In all likelyhood it will be several years before GNUstep is complete enough that *any* OSX app could be recompiled.
Yes, thank you Mr Jobs for not open sourcing OpenStep long ago and for not supporting the free software community to make a free implementation. Yes, thank you apple for depriving developers of an awesome cross platform framework for building applications! Thank you for forcing us to use inferior and memory hogging Java if we want to easily implement something on more than one OS! Thank you for only making the current implementation available on MacOSX even though it already runs on Windows, and Solaris (and thus probably other unix based systems).
Actually, qt for OSX uses Carbon, which means it is essentially a macos app. It will not be any easier to port the OSX version than the MacOS8/9 version, unless they did something like port libCarbon to Linux, which would probably be even more of a job...
Multiple vendors sell systems that are hardware and software compatible with one another.
Erm... Ever used a PC? I don't buy the above statement at all, because more often than not major system instability is caused by device drivers. There are tons of horrid Windows drivers out there that completely screw your system, often making it difficult to configure and get your system properly working. Mac's, on the other hand, rarely have problems with drivers because everyone knows what hardware to expect, the systems are consistent and thus easier to support and write good drivers for.
Sorry, but I don't think PC's are better because they are open. It provdes some benefits (lower cost mainly) but causes a lot of headaches in getting a stable system. Apple doesn't have this problem, and many people are willing to pay a premium price (shrinking every day) to avoid it. If you're not, that's fine, choices are great on the market.
No, there are significant changes between Darwin and other BSD variants. Some of these are customized compilers, the system framework, netinfo, driverkit, customized mach kernel, and probably other things I'm forgetting...
Apple's Enterprise Object Framework is the best way I've seen. There's also the free GNUStep alternative GSDB. The downside with the GNUStep version is that there aren't a lot of drivers (postgress, sybase, and MSSQL at this point). EOF/GSDB completely abstracts everything and presents a true OO view of your data with no queries, transactions, or anything to worry about, the framework handles fetching and resource management.
Excluding that, your best bet is to keep operations on your data source sperate. Thing's like Perl's DBI are just a API abstraction and not a Database abstraction. The way around this is to seperate out all your data fetching functions so that all your app does is call things like fetchCustomerList(start, end). That way to switch DB's you just create a new DB module for the new DB and your application could care less.
Not to mention that NetBSD runs on PPC, I think there may be another of the BSD clan that runs on PPC as well, but I don't recall offhand...
Classic support would never work, unless apple also wrote a PC emulation mode into it which ain't gonna happen. Carbon probably would be out as well. Cocoa would be fine, Cocoa apps can already run on Windows, apple just doesn't make the Win32 Cocoa implementation available (although you get most of it with WebObjects). Of course, most Cocoa/OpenStep apps don't really use autoconf, so you would just pop it open in project builder, change the target, and hit build. Of course, since OpenStep supports FAT builds natively, it would be a trivial matter for software developers to just build it fat for intel/ppc and then the user doesn't have to worry about it at all.
After reading a number of posts, it looks like the device driver issues will be a problem for getting OSX on the PC platform, since it doesn't use XFree. Maybe Apple should make a XFree based version of OSX.
There's no point in that really. OSX uses a seperate backend display system to draw everything to the screen, this is really the only thing where most of the work needs to be done to run with a different graphics environment. There is already a yellow box for windows that allows Cocoa apps to run on win, I think you have to buy WebObjects to get it though, apple hasn't really decided what to do with it.
For example, the variations in GUI interface from product to product/release to release -- one has gnome and E, another KDE, and the newer stuff will have sawmill and gnome...these larger companies don't want to drop big changes on the employees whenever some distro changes their desktop functionality. The mac and Win GUIs are far more stable than the free/open systems.
I definately agree. I think the GUI on linux is really going in a bad direction in that there are too many parallel efforts. The desktop environment is really where linux sucks right now. Yeah, I said it. But, consider cut and paste. Cross-application cut and paste is pretty weak in linux. Sure, you've got the middle mouse button, but to paste a url from a terminal to netscape means you
- selected the test in the term - bring up netscape and click the middle button at the end of the url - delete the old url
This is not ideal. And what about cut and paste, and universal helper applications? These are things that Gnome and KDE are addressing, but how compatable are we talking? What if I want to run WindowMaker? Will I only get the benefits of gnome's app integration with gnome apps, and kde's with kde, etc?
What we really need, IMHO, is a standard for system wide application integration and communication rather than several competing efforts.
BeOS? It's not being used by enough people to be taken seriously. And the last time I looked at their developer area, I think I saw they lean toward objective C. Regardless of the qualities of the language, PHBs want to see C++ prominently displayed in the developer area, like it or not. They don't want to retrain the less gifted developers.
Well, there is Obj-C++ (shudder)... Obj-C is a great language and I really hope apple can begin to better market it rather than turning to Java. I know a lot of people don't take OpenStep stuff into consideration because of this crazy Obj-C thing, hopefully that will change...
The final issue is the toughest to face -- price. No one will like to hear this, but for OSX to rapidly gain acceptance, Apple will need to sell a $19.99 unsupported version. It's the only way to load the home and corporate desktop with this OS. Even the full version can't sell for $199. That's more than Win2K. And they can't sell it for $99; Linux and BSD will beat it to death as their desktops stabilize. They can't make it by selling it as a server OS for the back office only. That philosophy will lead to nothing.
I think more important is for them to beef up developer support and keep the dev tools free (interface builder and project builder). Interface builder is by far the best RAD GUI develpment app in existance. Project Builder is pretty cool, but supposedly there will be a beefed up version for OSX which will improve some of it's weaknesses. Anyway, I think the key to the success of OSX is getting developers interested in Cocoa and the OpenStep way of doing things. Microsoft got ahead because of great developer support, apple needs to do this now. Not charging for the tools and updating some of the old OpenStep docs will do a lot I think.
I don't think sales cost is really going to be a big deal at all. It will probably be under $100 as past versions were, and hopefully a good upgrade price. I really doubt a super low cost is going to help them make it much more of a success. Attracting developers is going to be the big thing. The more developers they have, the more apps they have, the more people will want to use OSX with advanced new apps, the more computers they sell... People aren't going to want to run out of date apps in the BlueBox forever, and I don't know how long anyone is going to want to maintain carbon apps...
The gcc port for PPC pretty much blows. If you do some benchmark under MacOS vs Windows on Intel, the mac will kick butt for the same processor speed (as it can do more per clock cycle). However, if you do something like run nbench on LinuxPPC vs Linux on Intel, the intel will probalby pull ahead because the compiler doesn't do optimizations very well for PPC. It kinda bums me out that I have this nice fast Mac but there's no real advantage using linux on it because the performance boost from the hardware just isn't there.
Hopefully some of apple's changes being incorperated to gcc will fix this, but I doubt it. The compiler on OSX Server isn't so hot either. Of course, it is based on a really old gcc, so I suppose it's possible that they've been tweaking up a moder and super fast gcc for OSX. one can only hope...
Darwin is an OS. Go check it out. It's not just a kernel. The only major thing missing from it is a windowing system. It includes a kernel, shells, compilers, drivers, servers, editors, etc etc. Please at least look into things before making uninformed statements.
a percent of the code? No, darwin includes most of the lower levels of OSX. The things it doesn't include consist mainly of the window system, Cocoa and it's frameworks, the bluebox, Carbon, and Aqua. Of course John Carmack has devoted himself to porting X to darwin with it already running on OSX Server, so I suspect it won't be long before we have a window system for it.
True, I'm not overly concerned about the processor speeds. Yet... Sure, AMD and Intel have 1 Ghz chips that you have to buy a dell or compaq server to get. Am I the only one who is a little worried about these chips? I mean, both companies announce they will have gig chips in like 6 months and then suddenly, wham they get into a pissing contest and they are here. Now, did they really bump up their release schedule 6 months without cutting any corners? I dunno... Plus with supply short on the higher speed PIII's, it's not that easy to get a super fast PIII.
Deals is with the security model. Since our university has a long standing kerberos implementation, the problem is how to mesh 2000 with standard custom in house kerberos software. It looks like so far, the answer is, forget it. 2k's kerb implementation isn't standard enough to make it an easy integration, which I'm betting is intentional... MS has "innovated" kerberos!
You're saying WO is crap, but the only reason you give is the lack of developers. I'm confused. There aren't as many developers out there, mostly all of the WO developers I know work on in house projects. But your average WO consultant is going to be a lot better than your average ASP consultant. I could probably walk down the street and find an "ASP Consultant" but that doesn't make me feel good about the technology...
Here's a shocker, WO isn't easy! If that scares you, go run to MS with their "Hey, anyone can do it!" products and increase the number of worthless MCSE's and ASP developers out there (It's so easy, anyone can do it poorly!). If you've never written WO apps before, you're damn right it's going to take work, and you actually have to learn. Imagine that. If you sit down two people with no ASP/WO experience and ask them to write an app, the ASP person will certainly succeed faster. If you sit down an experience ASP developer and an experienced WO developer and ask them to write an app, the time difference would be minimal and the WO would also have a completely seperated interface to ship off to the html designers and a database model that can be reused in your other applications (not to mention better performance in a much easier to maintain and modify package).
I fail to see how starting over indicates failure. All things grow old and you reach a point where it's doing a lot of things it was never intended to do. You can keep hacking away at the thing, but there comes a time when it's just better to start clean and get rid of all the junk that isn't needed any more. I think MS will be forced to do this soon, although I think they should have done it already. How long did it take them to get Win2k out? If they'd started clean from scratch they could have made a more efficient, more stable OS with probably half the amount of code.
Anyway, MacOS reached a point where continuing on the current base just wasn't logical (who wants to write pascal anymore?). Starting over does not mean MacOS was a failure, it just means that the current base had reached the end of it's usefullness. So what did they do? They took something they had been used for a while and was proven (NeXTStep, you want to talk about stability, NeXT was a rock) and started from there. Much like MS took their proven and stable NT core and used it to build a consumer OS. Now of course NeXT and MacOS are a lot different than NT and Win9x, but with 6 months until release and the only thing we know about it is from a developer preview, it's hardly time to assume that apple will be alientating their user base. There are many things I see I don't like in DP3, if it sucks when it comes out, I'll go back to linuxppc. Anything but windows...
By the way, I intend to take this "Comprehension 101" class when I make it to elementary school. I hope they offer it.
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With the number of worthwhile comments posted these days, I think by default *any* post should be -1. This way the moderators will only have to moderate the 2 or 3 non troll comments up rather than moderate down the other 80 posts.
Yeah, but the chapter on dynamically loadable kernel modules was a bit weak and they spent entirely too much time on cleaning your carburator
Please don't. Nothing has happened yet, just an email that may have no basis in fact. The last thing needed right now is people getting vocal over this. Let's not piss Apple off until it's been decided if this is even an issue to be worried about. Comments like this are only going to help cause a problem when there might not even be one.
Companies are made of people. There are some folks at apple who believe in OpenSource, want to support the community, and want to take it as far as they can. There are others who think it's a big crock and won't want to consider it. Just like any big company, there are going to be factions that aren't always going to agree on what goes on. Life's a bitch, we'll have to see what happens.
BTW, Apple's earnings statements aren't proof enough that Jobs has brought apple back to profitability?
Check the site. Specifically, there is a list of all the included packages at http://www.publicsource.apple.com/projects/darwin
Also, I don't think you can just get Mach and BSD. It's not like you can install FreeBSD and just throw a mach kernel on it. A little tougher than that...
Technically, there isn't really an openstep specification anymore. Well, there is, but I doubt it means much these days. Cocoa is the definative implementation of the artist formerly known as openstep, however. GNUstep's goal is to be 100% compatible. So does this mean an app will just work under GNUstep? Nope. They use different makefile formats for one. Easy enough, a utility could convert between the two. But Apple uses dynamically loadable interface components, currently stored in binary format, supposedly one day in XML descriptions. When it goes XML, GNUstep can probably use them. For the meantime, it won't work. Lastly, GNUstep isn't done. There's a lot of the GUI stuff that hasn't been implemented. A lot of it is there and doing quite well, but not where it has to be for 100% compatability. In all likelyhood it will be several years before GNUstep is complete enough that *any* OSX app could be recompiled.
Yes, thank you Mr Jobs for not open sourcing OpenStep long ago and for not supporting the free software community to make a free implementation. Yes, thank you apple for depriving developers of an awesome cross platform framework for building applications! Thank you for forcing us to use inferior and memory hogging Java if we want to easily implement something on more than one OS! Thank you for only making the current implementation available on MacOSX even though it already runs on Windows, and Solaris (and thus probably other unix based systems).
THANK YOU APPLE ONCE AGAIN!!!
Actually, qt for OSX uses Carbon, which means it is essentially a macos app. It will not be any easier to port the OSX version than the MacOS8/9 version, unless they did something like port libCarbon to Linux, which would probably be even more of a job...
Multiple vendors sell systems that are hardware and software compatible with one another.
Erm... Ever used a PC? I don't buy the above statement at all, because more often than not major system instability is caused by device drivers. There are tons of horrid Windows drivers out there that completely screw your system, often making it difficult to configure and get your system properly working. Mac's, on the other hand, rarely have problems with drivers because everyone knows what hardware to expect, the systems are consistent and thus easier to support and write good drivers for.
Sorry, but I don't think PC's are better because they are open. It provdes some benefits (lower cost mainly) but causes a lot of headaches in getting a stable system. Apple doesn't have this problem, and many people are willing to pay a premium price (shrinking every day) to avoid it. If you're not, that's fine, choices are great on the market.
1 million BC: 2 arms, 2 legs, 1 head
2000: 2 arms, 2 legs, 1 head with better technology
Evolution, it works for people, it can work for an OS too
No, there are significant changes between Darwin and other BSD variants. Some of these are customized compilers, the system framework, netinfo, driverkit, customized mach kernel, and probably other things I'm forgetting...
Cocoa is not an abstraction layer, it's an application development framework (i.e. collection of core classes) much like JDK, only worlds better.
Apple's Enterprise Object Framework is the best way I've seen. There's also the free GNUStep alternative GSDB. The downside with the GNUStep version is that there aren't a lot of drivers (postgress, sybase, and MSSQL at this point). EOF/GSDB completely abstracts everything and presents a true OO view of your data with no queries, transactions, or anything to worry about, the framework handles fetching and resource management.
Excluding that, your best bet is to keep operations on your data source sperate. Thing's like Perl's DBI are just a API abstraction and not a Database abstraction. The way around this is to seperate out all your data fetching functions so that all your app does is call things like fetchCustomerList(start, end). That way to switch DB's you just create a new DB module for the new DB and your application could care less.
Not to mention that NetBSD runs on PPC, I think there may be another of the BSD clan that runs on PPC as well, but I don't recall offhand...
Classic support would never work, unless apple also wrote a PC emulation mode into it which ain't gonna happen. Carbon probably would be out as well. Cocoa would be fine, Cocoa apps can already run on Windows, apple just doesn't make the Win32 Cocoa implementation available (although you get most of it with WebObjects). Of course, most Cocoa/OpenStep apps don't really use autoconf, so you would just pop it open in project builder, change the target, and hit build. Of course, since OpenStep supports FAT builds natively, it would be a trivial matter for software developers to just build it fat for intel/ppc and then the user doesn't have to worry about it at all.
There's no point in that really. OSX uses a seperate backend display system to draw everything to the screen, this is really the only thing where most of the work needs to be done to run with a different graphics environment. There is already a yellow box for windows that allows Cocoa apps to run on win, I think you have to buy WebObjects to get it though, apple hasn't really decided what to do with it.
For example, the variations in GUI interface from product to product/release to release -- one has gnome and E, another KDE, and the newer stuff will have sawmill and gnome...these larger companies don't want to drop big changes on the employees whenever some distro changes their desktop functionality. The mac and Win GUIs are far more stable than the free/open systems.
I definately agree. I think the GUI on linux is really going in a bad direction in that there are too many parallel efforts. The desktop environment is really where linux sucks right now. Yeah, I said it. But, consider cut and paste. Cross-application cut and paste is pretty weak in linux. Sure, you've got the middle mouse button, but to paste a url from a terminal to netscape means you
- selected the test in the term
- bring up netscape and click the middle button at the end of the url
- delete the old url
This is not ideal. And what about cut and paste, and universal helper applications? These are things that Gnome and KDE are addressing, but how compatable are we talking? What if I want to run WindowMaker? Will I only get the benefits of gnome's app integration with gnome apps, and kde's with kde, etc?
What we really need, IMHO, is a standard for system wide application integration and communication rather than several competing efforts.
BeOS? It's not being used by enough people to be taken seriously. And the last time I looked at their developer area, I think I saw they lean toward objective C. Regardless of the qualities of the language, PHBs want to see C++ prominently displayed in the developer area, like it or not. They don't want to retrain the less gifted developers.
Well, there is Obj-C++ (shudder)... Obj-C is a great language and I really hope apple can begin to better market it rather than turning to Java. I know a lot of people don't take OpenStep stuff into consideration because of this crazy Obj-C thing, hopefully that will change...
The final issue is the toughest to face -- price. No one will like to hear this, but for OSX to rapidly gain acceptance, Apple will need to sell a $19.99 unsupported version. It's the only way to load the home and corporate desktop with this OS. Even the full version can't sell for $199. That's more than Win2K. And they can't sell it for $99; Linux and BSD will beat it to death as their desktops stabilize. They can't make it by selling it as a server OS for the back office only. That philosophy will lead to nothing.
I think more important is for them to beef up developer support and keep the dev tools free (interface builder and project builder). Interface builder is by far the best RAD GUI develpment app in existance. Project Builder is pretty cool, but supposedly there will be a beefed up version for OSX which will improve some of it's weaknesses. Anyway, I think the key to the success of OSX is getting developers interested in Cocoa and the OpenStep way of doing things. Microsoft got ahead because of great developer support, apple needs to do this now. Not charging for the tools and updating some of the old OpenStep docs will do a lot I think.
I don't think sales cost is really going to be a big deal at all. It will probably be under $100 as past versions were, and hopefully a good upgrade price. I really doubt a super low cost is going to help them make it much more of a success. Attracting developers is going to be the big thing. The more developers they have, the more apps they have, the more people will want to use OSX with advanced new apps, the more computers they sell... People aren't going to want to run out of date apps in the BlueBox forever, and I don't know how long anyone is going to want to maintain carbon apps...
The gcc port for PPC pretty much blows. If you do some benchmark under MacOS vs Windows on Intel, the mac will kick butt for the same processor speed (as it can do more per clock cycle). However, if you do something like run nbench on LinuxPPC vs Linux on Intel, the intel will probalby pull ahead because the compiler doesn't do optimizations very well for PPC. It kinda bums me out that I have this nice fast Mac but there's no real advantage using linux on it because the performance boost from the hardware just isn't there.
Hopefully some of apple's changes being incorperated to gcc will fix this, but I doubt it. The compiler on OSX Server isn't so hot either. Of course, it is based on a really old gcc, so I suppose it's possible that they've been tweaking up a moder and super fast gcc for OSX. one can only hope...
Darwin is an OS. Go check it out. It's not just a kernel. The only major thing missing from it is a windowing system. It includes a kernel, shells, compilers, drivers, servers, editors, etc etc. Please at least look into things before making uninformed statements.
a percent of the code? No, darwin includes most of the lower levels of OSX. The things it doesn't include consist mainly of the window system, Cocoa and it's frameworks, the bluebox, Carbon, and Aqua. Of course John Carmack has devoted himself to porting X to darwin with it already running on OSX Server, so I suspect it won't be long before we have a window system for it.
True, I'm not overly concerned about the processor speeds. Yet... Sure, AMD and Intel have 1 Ghz chips that you have to buy a dell or compaq server to get. Am I the only one who is a little worried about these chips? I mean, both companies announce they will have gig chips in like 6 months and then suddenly, wham they get into a pissing contest and they are here. Now, did they really bump up their release schedule 6 months without cutting any corners? I dunno... Plus with supply short on the higher speed PIII's, it's not that easy to get a super fast PIII.
Deals is with the security model. Since our university has a long standing kerberos implementation, the problem is how to mesh 2000 with standard custom in house kerberos software. It looks like so far, the answer is, forget it. 2k's kerb implementation isn't standard enough to make it an easy integration, which I'm betting is intentional... MS has "innovated" kerberos!
Relatively yes, but absolutely not...
How's that for an answer...
What they hell did he say?
You're saying WO is crap, but the only reason you give is the lack of developers. I'm confused. There aren't as many developers out there, mostly all of the WO developers I know work on in house projects. But your average WO consultant is going to be a lot better than your average ASP consultant. I could probably walk down the street and find an "ASP Consultant" but that doesn't make me feel good about the technology...
Here's a shocker, WO isn't easy! If that scares you, go run to MS with their "Hey, anyone can do it!" products and increase the number of worthless MCSE's and ASP developers out there (It's so easy, anyone can do it poorly!). If you've never written WO apps before, you're damn right it's going to take work, and you actually have to learn. Imagine that. If you sit down two people with no ASP/WO experience and ask them to write an app, the ASP person will certainly succeed faster. If you sit down an experience ASP developer and an experienced WO developer and ask them to write an app, the time difference would be minimal and the WO would also have a completely seperated interface to ship off to the html designers and a database model that can be reused in your other applications (not to mention better performance in a much easier to maintain and modify package).
I thought pretty much any Win32 app other than games would run on Win2k fine, is that not true?
Is their LDAP....er, I mean Active Directory, implementation compatable within a standard LDAP environment, or did they "customize" it as well?
I fail to see how starting over indicates failure. All things grow old and you reach a point where it's doing a lot of things it was never intended to do. You can keep hacking away at the thing, but there comes a time when it's just better to start clean and get rid of all the junk that isn't needed any more. I think MS will be forced to do this soon, although I think they should have done it already. How long did it take them to get Win2k out? If they'd started clean from scratch they could have made a more efficient, more stable OS with probably half the amount of code.
Anyway, MacOS reached a point where continuing on the current base just wasn't logical (who wants to write pascal anymore?). Starting over does not mean MacOS was a failure, it just means that the current base had reached the end of it's usefullness. So what did they do? They took something they had been used for a while and was proven (NeXTStep, you want to talk about stability, NeXT was a rock) and started from there. Much like MS took their proven and stable NT core and used it to build a consumer OS. Now of course NeXT and MacOS are a lot different than NT and Win9x, but with 6 months until release and the only thing we know about it is from a developer preview, it's hardly time to assume that apple will be alientating their user base. There are many things I see I don't like in DP3, if it sucks when it comes out, I'll go back to linuxppc. Anything but windows...
By the way, I intend to take this "Comprehension 101" class when I make it to elementary school. I hope they offer it.