Raskin's criticisms of OSX and its rejected opportunities have received ample support from every independent authority on UI design; for one example, you can drop these in your browser.
http://asktog.com/columns/034OSX-FirstLook.html
Like Raskin, Tog worked on the early Mac at Apple, so I don't see how he could be independent.
I think only if they start making OS X available to intel/amd architecture.
There's no money in that and there are tons of hurdles to surmount to get there.
I can't imagine a single windows 9x/XP user NOT moving over to a system that is both *nix and Apple.
The vast majority of computer users in the world don't care about whether their OS is Unix based or not. Developers do, though -- and that's key.
Plus, would these people run Mac OS X if there was no Office, Outlook or Explorer for it? Do you think Microsoft would seriously port their software to x86 Mac OS X?
"An easy to use and new user friendly Unix client with Plug and Play adaptability?"
A lot of this value comes from the fact that Mac OS X runs on standardized hardware. You lose a good chunk of this value by moving to a non-standardized hardware platform.
As I struggle to get my new Digital camera to work with my PC (it works fine with my mac, after 30 seconds GARRRH) I realize how much easier my life would be with mac OS X on my AMD system.
It's not software magic that makes Macs easier to configure -- it's the tight integration between hardware and software. John Carmack has talked about this in the past -- how the standardization made it cheaper to port to the Mac.
Photoshop has morphed itself into the sole arbiter of workstation performance.
I don't think you realize exactly how many of those who purchase G4s run Photoshop almost exclusively. What should they benchmark? Kernel compile times?
In the absence of actual innovation...
Interesting you say that. From my perspective, Apple and Sony seem to be the only personal computer makers on the planet left actually creating new products. iDVD? iMovie? Final Cut? Ti PowerBook? New iBook? Um... Mac OS X?
What type of innovation have other PC makers offered this year?
PC Guy sez: My 1.8 Gigahertz monster will crush your 866 Mhz weenie machine! Photoshop sucks.
What does the PC Guy say about the dual G4/800?:)
PC guy sez: Your fruity colored box looks like a toy. Behold my case mods!
The stuff isn't so fruity at the moment -- take a look at the Ti PowerBook, the new G4 tower, and the iBook. These things are just flat out sleek. Only the iMac is colored at the moment. Of course, this will all change eventually.
Yes, I realize this was all in fun.
- Scott
Re:Favorite Carmack quote:
on
Mac Rants
·
· Score: 2
Carmack put this in his.plan file shortly after beginning development mac development of q3a.
I rebooted my mac system more times the first weekend than I have rebooted all the WinNT systems I have ever owned
This was obviously referring to Mac OS 9, and it was justified. By contrast, he and at least one of his co-workers are quite taken with Mac OS X.
I don't think *any* free software should be ported to Apple's user interface API (Cocoa?)
Cocoa is one of the sets of APIs available to developers. Others are Carbon, Java and raw BSD.
It seems to be missing much of the basic funtionality of X11
Oh, the irony of this statement.
i.e. network tranceparency.
Quartz (the window server/graphics API) does not, at this time, have remote display capabilities. Considering everything that had to be done for the first release of Mac OS X, and taking the target audience into account, it's not surprising that this wasn't a high priority.
But that's about where it ends. Quartz is quite full of functionality.
If Apple wants to pay for free software to be ported to their proprietary interface, that's their business. Expecting the comunity to do it for them is unreasonable.
Another poster addressed this, but just to reiterate -- Apple probably doesn't care all that much if OpenOffice runs on Mac OS X. I mean, they might promote it at the Mac OS X site, but they're not in desperate need of another office suite. MS Office is the biggie, and Apple makes the alternative -- AppleWorks. These are both built FOR the Mac. They're probably going to provide much a better end user experience than Unix-dervied OpenOffice ever will. The idea is to do a for users/by users port of OpenOffice so there's a free alternative.
I just don't see how it benifits free software to port to OSX.
So more poeple can run it?
It might be useful to build a Cocoa wrapper for X11. That would enable code written for OSX to run on Real Linux/Unix.
You probably want GNUStep, but it's not exactly finished.
In other words, as long as your willing to do whatever the hell the customer wants and you get it done on time, you can deliver half-ass code and the customer will still love you to pieces
In the short term, perhaps. But in the long term, lack of well-designed infrastructure will come back to haunt you (or at least your customers). Customers are not just paying for you to spit something out, most are also relying on your experience. Clients believe when they pay you to build something for them, that you are providing them with a quality product. You may be able to get away with delivering "half-ass" code, but I wouldn't recommend it.
I think the better approach is to properly manage expectations and educate them on the development process. After that, they may sometimes still request a "quick and dirty" solution, which is their choice.
This will not happen unless Apple cuts its hardware prices by 50%. Then they will be merely competitive with PC's.
I think you're off by a significant amount on the price difference. Make sure you're comparing machines with equivalent features.
Cut prices even more and they might gain sales.
Apple isn't just an assembly service like so many grey box makers. They actually develop products. This takes money and this is why Apple's gross margins are higher. Sony has a similar approach.
BTW: Razor thing margins on cheap x86 don't seem to be a fantastic business model these days. VA has dumped its hardware, and Compaq has come close to doing the same. More units sales do not necessarily mean a more succesful business or a more healthy industry.
Better yet, Apple could license its OSX to other hardware vendors, who could make powerful competitively-priced feature-laden microcomputers
Apple makes the complete product -- that's the value proposition. Not just the OS, not just the hardware. They build computers.
Besides, show me one other company besides Microsoft that has made a solid business out of licensing x86 OSs.
Well, it was a system that didn't offer better-enough performance from an iMac for the price. I think the lowend G4 towers were about the same price as the Cube. So all the cube had going for it was "style".
The hardware was actually pretty buff when it came out, but there were two main issues:
[1] You could get a dual G4 tower for slightly more than a Cube
[2] When it comes to desktops, I suspect consumers equate bigger with more powerful
The Cube had more than style, though. It was quite and took up much less space. This things are actually significant to a lot of people.
I quote to you Hastings's Law: Adequate and cheaper wins against better but more expensive.
Isn't this more a theory than a law? Anyway...
Regardless of how many units are sold, "adequate and cheaper" cannot sustain an industry long term. To me it seems "better and expensive" is what actually drives most progress. But volume is what drives costs down.
I'm also not convinced the problem with the Cube was one merely of price, though that was clearly a major issue. It was at a really strange place in the product line. I don't think consumers knew who it was targeted at.
The Cube has exactly two things going for it: it looks cool, it is silent
Well, another major one is that it takes up very little space at 8" cubed. This means that it can go in places that are not practical for other computers.
Well, the other bad thing about OS X is that unless you have a high-end G3 or G4 with 256+ megs of ram, the thing runs like shit.
Obviously, this isn't a very technical explanation. If you're not running Classic frequently*, a G3/400 + 128MB DIMM ($899 + ~$50) should be very comfortable. At 256MB, you should be very happy regardless of what you run.
There are some aspects of the OS that take additional resources because they are much more complex than equivalents in Mac OS or the typical X11 window manager. For example, under Quartz, every window has a backing store, which takes a bunch of memory. Additionally, Quartz considers the compositing attributes of all windows on the screen before rendering, which is what enables the transparency features -- although this means it takes slightly longer to render. Quartz also anti-aliases all text sent to the screen. But the results (for apps that use Core Graphics for text) are several mangitudes better than what I've seen on Mac OS 9 or Windows
Apple is taking advantage of advances in hardware to provide new functionality to users and developers. These parts of the OS are very new, and still have room for optimization. It's also been said that Quartz does things that video cards are not used to accelerating, so everything is being shifted to the CPU. Both of these issues will improve over time.
As of today, there are plenty of areas of Mac OS X that perform substantially better than their Mac OS 9 counterparts. Virtual Memory is vastly better, the Java VM is not only worlds faster and stable but supports JDK 1.3, OpenGL is faster, file I/O is generally faster, TCP/IP is faster. The biggest problem areas are Quartz and Carbon, which are the newest core pieces of the system.
I imagine a plain Darwin installation running XFree will probably perform very similarly to some sort of BSD or Linux distribution on the same hardware. But you're not going to have a lot of things that are present in full-fledged Mac OS X. You will ultimately trade off functionality and features for resources.
(* Classic is the Mac OS 9 compatibility environment for Mac OS X. It's very well integrated with native apps, but has an unending hunger for system resources. As more native apps show up, the less need there will be for Classic, and memory requirements for running a given number of apps should drop dramatically.)
All those nifty little things like the genie effect take loads of CPU
Type this in the terminal:
defaults write com.apple.Dock mineffect scale
Rather than the relatively "expensive" genie effect, this gives you a very simple animaton when you minimize a window.
Apple took BSD and built a new GUI with some nifty features to make the Mac community accept it. Don't get me wrong I love BSD and I think that OS X will be good for it. But really how much did Apple do here?
BSD is a major part of Mac OS X, but it's not like Apple took FreeBSD and slapped a GUI on top of it. In Mac OS X, BSD provides:
- The process model (PID, signals)
- Unix security model (users, permissions)
- posix threads
- BSD sockets
- unix tools and libraries
Apple created:
- Quartz: window server, graphics library, 2D rendering, printing system
- Cocoa: incredible object-oriented development environment
- NetInfo (open source): Mac OS X's distributed auto-configuring network services system
- OpenGL implementation
- Java implementation
- QuickTime - used for all kinds of graphics stuff
- Carbon: APIs that Mac toolbox apps can be ported to to take advantage of modern OS features (represents a HUGE amount of work on Apple's part)
- Classic: An environment that allows the vast majority of exist Mac applications to run on Mac OS X
- All the system-level and user-level glue that allows all this stuff to work seamlessly together for the masses
Mac OS X's kernel is a modified version of Mach 3.0.
Now, if PS2 games could be played on generic hardware on the Linux OS, that would be impressive, but Sony will fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening.
I think this is sort of the wrong way to look at it. PS2 is not at all like an x86 box. It has one core 128-bit RISC chip and two vector processors. The best software written for PS2 is going to take full advantage of all of these guys.
So yes, Sony would probably try to block PS2 games from running on generic hardware, but I suspect it's a non-issue for the most part.
I would just really really like to avoid being forced into a non-verbose display. By default your bootup sequence should have full verbosity turned on
Perhaps yours should.:)
Assuming you want your OS to become mainstream, you better start letting go of these things that make it decidely ugly and confusing. By default, it should display general high-level information ("starting networking") and provide errors only. Most people don't need to know the filesystem was mounted as read/write.
People aren't going to change for Unix. Unix will have to change for people (as Mac OS X demonstrates).
Most of the comments that have been modded up have been of the "relax, it's no big deal" variety. This is completely wrong. The issue isn't that this one guy is forced to use Passport. It's a sign of things to come -- sneaking this in under the radar of unsuspecting citizens. I think it's safe to assume Microsoft is going to end up requiring everyone to use Passport in order to use services like Hotmail.
By doing this, they are going to artificially grow their user base by leveraging the web monopoly, which was leveraged from their browser monopoly, which was leveraged by their OS monopoly. This is illegal, because it prevents new entries into the market. It reduces choice and increases the amount of control that a single corporate entity has over the population.
Technology is so complicated that the general populous has no idea what they're doing. Things like this don't get nearly as much attention as political activity but the reprocussions will eventually have just as much impact on our lives. Once the user base gets large enough, they are going to claim the largest membership numbers for this type of service, and will convince other corporations that they have to get on board to survive. It's a perpetual cycle until someone slaps their ass down.
All of this is concerning because it's obvious that Microsoft has no self-control in terms of how far they will go to establish things like HailStorm and Passport. They don't want to bother with whether consumers actually want these services. It's easier to just sign a bunch of deals and use various other corporations to do the enforcement. Some people claim that Passport is a natural way to log into various Microsoft services, and therefore shouldn't be questioned. Trojan horse, folks! Microsoft wants other sites to adopt Passport. Do you think they're give a damn when an ActiveX control is required to log in?
The most important issue here is one of scale. All of this behavior wouldn't be nearly as big of a deal if Microsoft wasn't already a hulking juggernaut. Implementing a prioprietary authentication service isn't dangerous if your company isn't that big. It's up to the market to decide if it's worthy to be adopted. But when you're as big as Microsoft you can force standards on people whether they want them or not.
Look folks, Apple is a hardware company. That's were they really make their money. People buy their boxes in order to get the Mac OS. If they could run the Mac OS on cheaper x86 boxes many of them would choose to do so. Of course many people would still buy Titanium PowerBooks and iBooks for other reasons, but fewer.
That's sort of the picture the mass technology media has painted, but I think the reality is considerably more complex than that. There's not really enough room to explain the whole thing here but the essence of the issue is that Apple creates complete products. They are not merely an OS vendor, nor are they a hardware assembly service.
As far as I can tell, Apple and Sony are the only desktop hardware companies left actually developing products -- which is why their machines cost more. There are hardware companies that mainly buy components, put them all together, and try to charge slightly more than what it cost them to build the machine. We have plenty of these types of companies.
Mac OS X for x86 would give some people people immediate, short-term gratification, but I think it would really kill one of the industry's key sources of innovation in the long term. Bottom line: there's little reason to create Mac OS X applications when the same people have Windows-capable (or Linux-capable) hardware. The result: lack of differentiation, and lack of progress. 50% of the population thinks Apple's software sells the hardware, the other 50% thinks that the hardware sells the software. It's neither. It's a symbiotic relationship -- they rely on and complement each other. But this isn't immediately obvious to the user. They take these things for granted, and just see it as part of "the computer."
For example, the PowerPC runs at lower temperatures and uses less energy than its x86 counterparts. This is why several of Apple's machines are fanless, and substantially quieter as a result. And it does this so while providing more performance per clock cycle.
Few actually seem to notice, but Apple is in the process of creating substantial long-term value in the company. Revamping the OS, reinventing the hardware, fixing the advertising, opening retail stores, creating (free) industry-leading developer tools, and releasing open source software. These are all elements of building infrastructure. One by one, they're removing the barriers in front of them. They're in this for the long haul. Relegating them to an x86 OS vendor would dash any hope of true variety in commercial computing options.
(Voline, I realize your comment was not meant to be anti-Apple)
Slashdot Mirror
Maya started shipping at MWNY
They started taking orders then.
- Scott
Raskin's criticisms of OSX and its rejected opportunities have received ample support from every independent authority on UI design; for one example, you can drop these in your browser.
http://asktog.com/columns/034OSX-FirstLook.html
Like Raskin, Tog worked on the early Mac at Apple, so I don't see how he could be independent.
- Scott
Once drivers are made for Darwin, they can be easily ported to other flavors of LINUX
Darwin uses I/O Kit. I assume this is quite different from what Linux uses.
- Scott
Graphically, OS X is dissapointing. It's ok but not great looking.
Ummmm... what?
It's slow and has responsiveness bugs.
It's 1.0.
There isn't anything there that hasn't been done before in other operating systems.
I don't see how one could say that after reading SystemOverview (2.6MB PDF file).
- Scott
I think only if they start making OS X available to intel/amd architecture.
There's no money in that and there are tons of hurdles to surmount to get there.
I can't imagine a single windows 9x/XP user NOT moving over to a system that is both *nix and Apple.
The vast majority of computer users in the world don't care about whether their OS is Unix based or not. Developers do, though -- and that's key.
Plus, would these people run Mac OS X if there was no Office, Outlook or Explorer for it? Do you think Microsoft would seriously port their software to x86 Mac OS X?
"An easy to use and new user friendly Unix client with Plug and Play adaptability?"
A lot of this value comes from the fact that Mac OS X runs on standardized hardware. You lose a good chunk of this value by moving to a non-standardized hardware platform.
As I struggle to get my new Digital camera to work with my PC (it works fine with my mac, after 30 seconds GARRRH) I realize how much easier my life would be with mac OS X on my AMD system.
It's not software magic that makes Macs easier to configure -- it's the tight integration between hardware and software. John Carmack has talked about this in the past -- how the standardization made it cheaper to port to the Mac.
- Scott
Photoshop has morphed itself into the sole arbiter of workstation performance.
I don't think you realize exactly how many of those who purchase G4s run Photoshop almost exclusively. What should they benchmark? Kernel compile times?
In the absence of actual innovation...
Interesting you say that. From my perspective, Apple and Sony seem to be the only personal computer makers on the planet left actually creating new products. iDVD? iMovie? Final Cut? Ti PowerBook? New iBook? Um... Mac OS X?
What type of innovation have other PC makers offered this year?
- Scott
I bought MacOSX as soon it was available, I gave up on it, because I had to switch to MacOS9 to play DVDs.
You can swtich back next month.
- Scott
PC Guy sez: My 1.8 Gigahertz monster will crush your 866 Mhz weenie machine! Photoshop sucks.
:)
What does the PC Guy say about the dual G4/800?
PC guy sez: Your fruity colored box looks like a toy. Behold my case mods!
The stuff isn't so fruity at the moment -- take a look at the Ti PowerBook, the new G4 tower, and the iBook. These things are just flat out sleek. Only the iMac is colored at the moment. Of course, this will all change eventually.
Yes, I realize this was all in fun.
- Scott
Carmack put this in his .plan file shortly after beginning development mac development of q3a.
I rebooted my mac system more times the first weekend than I have rebooted all the WinNT systems I have ever owned
This was obviously referring to Mac OS 9, and it was justified. By contrast, he and at least one of his co-workers are quite taken with Mac OS X.
- Scott
Good work. Except you're obviously not a Mac loyalist -- you were way too easy on Apple.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
I don't think *any* free software should be ported to Apple's user interface API (Cocoa?)
Cocoa is one of the sets of APIs available to developers. Others are Carbon, Java and raw BSD.
It seems to be missing much of the basic funtionality of X11
Oh, the irony of this statement.
i.e. network tranceparency.
Quartz (the window server/graphics API) does not, at this time, have remote display capabilities. Considering everything that had to be done for the first release of Mac OS X, and taking the target audience into account, it's not surprising that this wasn't a high priority.
But that's about where it ends. Quartz is quite full of functionality.
If Apple wants to pay for free software to be ported to their proprietary interface, that's their business. Expecting the comunity to do it for them is unreasonable.
Another poster addressed this, but just to reiterate -- Apple probably doesn't care all that much if OpenOffice runs on Mac OS X. I mean, they might promote it at the Mac OS X site, but they're not in desperate need of another office suite. MS Office is the biggie, and Apple makes the alternative -- AppleWorks. These are both built FOR the Mac. They're probably going to provide much a better end user experience than Unix-dervied OpenOffice ever will. The idea is to do a for users/by users port of OpenOffice so there's a free alternative.
I just don't see how it benifits free software to port to OSX.
So more poeple can run it?
It might be useful to build a Cocoa wrapper for X11. That would enable code written for OSX to run on Real Linux/Unix.
You probably want GNUStep, but it's not exactly finished.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
In other words, as long as your willing to do whatever the hell the customer wants and you get it done on time, you can deliver half-ass code and the customer will still love you to pieces
In the short term, perhaps. But in the long term, lack of well-designed infrastructure will come back to haunt you (or at least your customers). Customers are not just paying for you to spit something out, most are also relying on your experience. Clients believe when they pay you to build something for them, that you are providing them with a quality product. You may be able to get away with delivering "half-ass" code, but I wouldn't recommend it.
I think the better approach is to properly manage expectations and educate them on the development process. After that, they may sometimes still request a "quick and dirty" solution, which is their choice.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
More importantly, will any of them offer static IPs and a decent upstream? My DSL is bound to drop out from under me sooner or later
At which point you will be free to chose DSL service from your local phone monopoly.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
This will not happen unless Apple cuts its hardware prices by 50%. Then they will be merely competitive with PC's.
I think you're off by a significant amount on the price difference. Make sure you're comparing machines with equivalent features.
Cut prices even more and they might gain sales.
Apple isn't just an assembly service like so many grey box makers. They actually develop products. This takes money and this is why Apple's gross margins are higher. Sony has a similar approach.
BTW: Razor thing margins on cheap x86 don't seem to be a fantastic business model these days. VA has dumped its hardware, and Compaq has come close to doing the same. More units sales do not necessarily mean a more succesful business or a more healthy industry.
Better yet, Apple could license its OSX to other hardware vendors, who could make powerful competitively-priced feature-laden microcomputers
Apple makes the complete product -- that's the value proposition. Not just the OS, not just the hardware. They build computers.
Besides, show me one other company besides Microsoft that has made a solid business out of licensing x86 OSs.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Well, it was a system that didn't offer better-enough performance from an iMac for the price. I think the lowend G4 towers were about the same price as the Cube. So all the cube had going for it was "style".
The hardware was actually pretty buff when it came out, but there were two main issues:
[1] You could get a dual G4 tower for slightly more than a Cube
[2] When it comes to desktops, I suspect consumers equate bigger with more powerful
The Cube had more than style, though. It was quite and took up much less space. This things are actually significant to a lot of people.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Good job Apple, too bad it was DAMNED EXPENSIVE
Initially, yes. But not at $1300.
and kinda broke a lot
I know several people that are very happy with them. If you're going strictly on media coverage, well, you know how they are.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
I quote to you Hastings's Law: Adequate and cheaper wins against better but more expensive.
Isn't this more a theory than a law? Anyway...
Regardless of how many units are sold, "adequate and cheaper" cannot sustain an industry long term. To me it seems "better and expensive" is what actually drives most progress. But volume is what drives costs down.
I'm also not convinced the problem with the Cube was one merely of price, though that was clearly a major issue. It was at a really strange place in the product line. I don't think consumers knew who it was targeted at.
The Cube has exactly two things going for it: it looks cool, it is silent
Well, another major one is that it takes up very little space at 8" cubed. This means that it can go in places that are not practical for other computers.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
A cube is the most Nazi of all shapes - an utter surrender of beauty to uniformity.
I'm sorry, but the Cube is a gorgeous machine. Although I like the idea of a spherical floating computer like someone else mentioned.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Well, the other bad thing about OS X is that unless you have a high-end G3 or G4 with 256+ megs of ram, the thing runs like shit.
Obviously, this isn't a very technical explanation. If you're not running Classic frequently*, a G3/400 + 128MB DIMM ($899 + ~$50) should be very comfortable. At 256MB, you should be very happy regardless of what you run.
There are some aspects of the OS that take additional resources because they are much more complex than equivalents in Mac OS or the typical X11 window manager. For example, under Quartz, every window has a backing store, which takes a bunch of memory. Additionally, Quartz considers the compositing attributes of all windows on the screen before rendering, which is what enables the transparency features -- although this means it takes slightly longer to render. Quartz also anti-aliases all text sent to the screen. But the results (for apps that use Core Graphics for text) are several mangitudes better than what I've seen on Mac OS 9 or Windows
Apple is taking advantage of advances in hardware to provide new functionality to users and developers. These parts of the OS are very new, and still have room for optimization. It's also been said that Quartz does things that video cards are not used to accelerating, so everything is being shifted to the CPU. Both of these issues will improve over time.
As of today, there are plenty of areas of Mac OS X that perform substantially better than their Mac OS 9 counterparts. Virtual Memory is vastly better, the Java VM is not only worlds faster and stable but supports JDK 1.3, OpenGL is faster, file I/O is generally faster, TCP/IP is faster. The biggest problem areas are Quartz and Carbon, which are the newest core pieces of the system.
I imagine a plain Darwin installation running XFree will probably perform very similarly to some sort of BSD or Linux distribution on the same hardware. But you're not going to have a lot of things that are present in full-fledged Mac OS X. You will ultimately trade off functionality and features for resources.
(* Classic is the Mac OS 9 compatibility environment for Mac OS X. It's very well integrated with native apps, but has an unending hunger for system resources. As more native apps show up, the less need there will be for Classic, and memory requirements for running a given number of apps should drop dramatically.)
All those nifty little things like the genie effect take loads of CPU
Type this in the terminal:
defaults write com.apple.Dock mineffect scale
Rather than the relatively "expensive" genie effect, this gives you a very simple animaton when you minimize a window.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Apple took BSD and built a new GUI with some nifty features to make the Mac community accept it. Don't get me wrong I love BSD and I think that OS X will be good for it. But really how much did Apple do here?
BSD is a major part of Mac OS X, but it's not like Apple took FreeBSD and slapped a GUI on top of it. In Mac OS X, BSD provides:
- The process model (PID, signals)
- Unix security model (users, permissions)
- posix threads
- BSD sockets
- unix tools and libraries
Apple created:
- Quartz: window server, graphics library, 2D rendering, printing system
- Cocoa: incredible object-oriented development environment
- NetInfo (open source): Mac OS X's distributed auto-configuring network services system
- OpenGL implementation
- Java implementation
- QuickTime - used for all kinds of graphics stuff
- Carbon: APIs that Mac toolbox apps can be ported to to take advantage of modern OS features (represents a HUGE amount of work on Apple's part)
- Classic: An environment that allows the vast majority of exist Mac applications to run on Mac OS X
- All the system-level and user-level glue that allows all this stuff to work seamlessly together for the masses
Mac OS X's kernel is a modified version of Mach 3.0.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Now, if PS2 games could be played on generic hardware on the Linux OS, that would be impressive, but Sony will fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening.
I think this is sort of the wrong way to look at it. PS2 is not at all like an x86 box. It has one core 128-bit RISC chip and two vector processors. The best software written for PS2 is going to take full advantage of all of these guys.
So yes, Sony would probably try to block PS2 games from running on generic hardware, but I suspect it's a non-issue for the most part.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
When Linus starts thinking about changing boot messages, that must mean the rest of the kernel is perfect 8)
No, he just spawned a new thread.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
I would just really really like to avoid being forced into a non-verbose display. By default your bootup sequence should have full verbosity turned on
:)
Perhaps yours should.
Assuming you want your OS to become mainstream, you better start letting go of these things that make it decidely ugly and confusing. By default, it should display general high-level information ("starting networking") and provide errors only. Most people don't need to know the filesystem was mounted as read/write.
People aren't going to change for Unix. Unix will have to change for people (as Mac OS X demonstrates).
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Most of the comments that have been modded up have been of the "relax, it's no big deal" variety. This is completely wrong. The issue isn't that this one guy is forced to use Passport. It's a sign of things to come -- sneaking this in under the radar of unsuspecting citizens. I think it's safe to assume Microsoft is going to end up requiring everyone to use Passport in order to use services like Hotmail.
By doing this, they are going to artificially grow their user base by leveraging the web monopoly, which was leveraged from their browser monopoly, which was leveraged by their OS monopoly. This is illegal, because it prevents new entries into the market. It reduces choice and increases the amount of control that a single corporate entity has over the population.
Technology is so complicated that the general populous has no idea what they're doing. Things like this don't get nearly as much attention as political activity but the reprocussions will eventually have just as much impact on our lives. Once the user base gets large enough, they are going to claim the largest membership numbers for this type of service, and will convince other corporations that they have to get on board to survive. It's a perpetual cycle until someone slaps their ass down.
All of this is concerning because it's obvious that Microsoft has no self-control in terms of how far they will go to establish things like HailStorm and Passport. They don't want to bother with whether consumers actually want these services. It's easier to just sign a bunch of deals and use various other corporations to do the enforcement. Some people claim that Passport is a natural way to log into various Microsoft services, and therefore shouldn't be questioned. Trojan horse, folks! Microsoft wants other sites to adopt Passport . Do you think they're give a damn when an ActiveX control is required to log in?
The most important issue here is one of scale. All of this behavior wouldn't be nearly as big of a deal if Microsoft wasn't already a hulking juggernaut. Implementing a prioprietary authentication service isn't dangerous if your company isn't that big. It's up to the market to decide if it's worthy to be adopted. But when you're as big as Microsoft you can force standards on people whether they want them or not.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Look folks, Apple is a hardware company. That's were they really make their money. People buy their boxes in order to get the Mac OS. If they could run the Mac OS on cheaper x86 boxes many of them would choose to do so. Of course many people would still buy Titanium PowerBooks and iBooks for other reasons, but fewer.
That's sort of the picture the mass technology media has painted, but I think the reality is considerably more complex than that. There's not really enough room to explain the whole thing here but the essence of the issue is that Apple creates complete products. They are not merely an OS vendor, nor are they a hardware assembly service.
As far as I can tell, Apple and Sony are the only desktop hardware companies left actually developing products -- which is why their machines cost more. There are hardware companies that mainly buy components, put them all together, and try to charge slightly more than what it cost them to build the machine. We have plenty of these types of companies.
Mac OS X for x86 would give some people people immediate, short-term gratification, but I think it would really kill one of the industry's key sources of innovation in the long term. Bottom line: there's little reason to create Mac OS X applications when the same people have Windows-capable (or Linux-capable) hardware. The result: lack of differentiation, and lack of progress. 50% of the population thinks Apple's software sells the hardware, the other 50% thinks that the hardware sells the software. It's neither. It's a symbiotic relationship -- they rely on and complement each other. But this isn't immediately obvious to the user. They take these things for granted, and just see it as part of "the computer."
For example, the PowerPC runs at lower temperatures and uses less energy than its x86 counterparts. This is why several of Apple's machines are fanless, and substantially quieter as a result. And it does this so while providing more performance per clock cycle.
Few actually seem to notice, but Apple is in the process of creating substantial long-term value in the company. Revamping the OS, reinventing the hardware, fixing the advertising, opening retail stores, creating (free) industry-leading developer tools, and releasing open source software. These are all elements of building infrastructure. One by one, they're removing the barriers in front of them. They're in this for the long haul. Relegating them to an x86 OS vendor would dash any hope of true variety in commercial computing options.
(Voline, I realize your comment was not meant to be anti-Apple)
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu