First of all as much as people complain about it being defferent from OS 9 it really isnt that different.
Thank goodness somebody else is conscious here. I thought somehow I was communicating with people living in a parallel universe where the OSX Finder windows were bordered with strings of popcorn or something.
Hope springs eternal with the mac fans, doesn't it?
Hope springs eternal for anyone hoping for a choice outside of Windows. But considering that Apple has $4 billion in the bank, and $11 in cash for every outstanding share (vs. $3 for Gateway and $1.75 for Dell), as well as quite product line and some impressive software technology, I don't think we're really in Armageddon mode here.
How tightly intregrated is Aqua to the OS? Apple's site shows a couple layers of APIs between Darwin and Aqua.
The OS is not (witness Darwin), the apps, however, are. Though the term "Aqua" is somewhat ambigous. It could mean the theme that Apple is currently using on its GUI layer, or it could be the GUI layer itself.
Perhaps OS X users might be happier with a port of X, running Enlightenment and eMac.
Yikes. I sort of doubt that. Mac OS X is much more than BSD running a pretty window manager.
I've been using and programming Macs for ten years, and now I'm sitting in front of it going 'What? Huh? How do I launch an application? Where did my icons go?' Talk about disorientation.
This is silly. You launch applications by double-clicking then. They're all stored in/Applications, which is accessible from the Go menu, or by hitting Command-4.
One of the frustrating things about the article, and about the Aqua controversy in general, is that the Nextstep/Openstep users were ignored. [...] IMO, users would have been better off if Apple had adopted Workspace.app, and junked the aging MacOS interface
...to make it more profitable, they'd really have something going!
I actually think Apple having a non-profitable quarter (first in ~11 quarters, BTW), is good thing for consumers. It will force them to drop the complacence act. This is a company that always provides better output as the underdog.
In the conference call, Jobs opening admitted that Apple botched a lot of things, which was refreshing to hear. Step one is realizing you have a problem...
Perhaps OSX will get support from Quark, Adobe, Macromedia, Kinetix and so on. But until it does, for me, it'll be little more than a nice distraction.
No "perhaps" about it. All of the companies you list are Carbonizing their apps (or possibly rewriting them in Cocoa). Though I've never heard of Kinetix. Perhaps you mean Connectix?
I lamented the lack of games
Also, there are substanially more new games coming out for the Mac now than there were just a few years ago. I think you'd be suprised.
and I had to use substandard office applications
I think this issue has completely whithered away with the release of Mac Office 2001. It's getting rave reviews.
going to an OS where you have to su, understand chmod
Not unless you're installing Unix software, which I doubt Mac admins are doing. And if they are, there's nothing Apple can do to shield them from that. Your mother certainly shouldn't be installing MySQL.
figure out why the OS won't let you empty the trash (even as root)
No idea what this means.
Personally, I think these differences will kill Mac OS X as a consumer OS. They did a decent job of hiding it, but nowhere near enough.
Since we're still in beta, I think you're speaking a bit prematurely. Or perhaps you meant "as it stands now."
Apple needs to realize that OS X is a GREAT power-user OS, but it SUCKS as a home/desktop OS, because my mother-in-law will never understand having to login.
Fine, she doesn't have to. She can have it startup without asking for a login.
Depends on what you mean by "Aqua." If you mean "Aqua" as in the theme, then you can probably get something that looks (though not works) quite similar to Aqua for Enlightenment. If you mean anything else, than the answer is that it's not very easy at all.
[Porting applications to Mac OS X has nothing to do with porting them to BSD.] Really? Gee. Before Apache supported Mac OS X Server, I told Apache that "you are a freebsd box" and Apache compiled fine.
I covered this in my post. Faceless applications (really, more servers than applications) such as Apache can use the BSD layer quite well. But the BSD part isn't going to help you get Adobe apps on Linux.
Given the progress of www.gnustep.org if one writes code with gnustep as a target, or thinks in terms of BSD-centric API calls, you *COULD* use the Mac OS codebase on other platforms.
Sure, but who's going to do this? Not Adobe.
WWDC 1998, Jobs announced the acceptance of YellowBox wasn't happening, so he renamed it to carbon/cocoa.
Carbon and Cocoa are completely different APIs. Carbon has nothing to do with Yellow Box (maybe this what you meant?).
Do you write for BSD/Unix (if you watch your system calls the code is a "simple port")
If you have a faceless server app, this is the clear choice. It makes no sense for desktop apps, however.
Continue to use carbon, and eventually have to move? (If Apple doesn't dump carbon at some point, think about Microsoft.
It's probably going to be five years bear minium before Apple even considers dumping Carbon.
By picking a UNIX porting path, you CAN get QNX/BSD/SCO/Solaris/SGI/DEC^H^H^HTru Unix/SYSV/HP-UX/Mac OS X/linux if you wish to work for it.
No you cannot. Let me put this another way: you cannot create a "real" native Mac OS X GUI application by using purely BSD calls. There is no X server included with Mac OS X, and there may never be. You can use the BSD layer to write faceless applications for Mac OS X. That's it.
Back when Adobe made Solaris versions of thier programs, Desktop publishing shops, all wanting faster machines, didn't want to get Solaris boxes. Why? A lack of other tools they are used to. No powerGoo, etc la.
Hehe. Sorry. POWERGOO? As a tool people are used to?:) It was a fun little toy, but that's about it.
If Apple is able to keep its user base on the move to BSD unix, eventually code will slide sideways to X86 based BSD, then X86 based *linux. So, just un-bind your underware.
Porting applications to Mac OS X has nothing to do with porting them to BSD. Mac OS X applications are generally written in/ported to Carbon (updated Classic Mac OS APIs, heavily architecture dependent) or Cocoa (Objective-C/Java apps using OpenStep foundation classes). Few Mac developers will encounter BSD while building an application. Today, the BSD component is most useful for getting stuff like MySQL, Apache and PHP up and running quickly. The only exception to this that I am aware of is Fizzilla. Fizzilla is a Mac OS X native port of Mozilla that uses Carbon for the front end drawing routines, and BSD for the threading and networking.
The problem of Adobe with a Mac OS X version would not be about the unix flavor but about the GUI. What to use ? Cocoa ? Carbon ? Don't think that a X11 version on Mac OS X would be viable.
Sorry to tell Adobe this, but MORE people use Linux than Mac. About %2 more. They just want to loose money.
Ummmm, no. Try again. Don't just grab random, out-of-context soundbytes and using them as the foundation of your opinion. The Mac community did that for most of the 90's and eventually people figured out it was the wrong approach.
Some organizations have been reporting equal or slightly higher marketshare for Linux that Mac OS. Marketshare is constantly in flux. Marketshare does not equal installed base, which is the number of people actually using machines. Apple has been building installed base for 16 years. Furthermore, I have yet to see a unanimous decision amongst various research companies that there is larger number of people using Linux as their primary desktop OS than Mac OS. And, personally, I don't expect this to be the case for while (though anything is possible). Sure, there are a lot of machines with Linux installed in them, but even if everybody in the world was running Linux on their webservers, that doesn't help Adobe one bit.
And outside of installed base, there are some other reasons why the Mac is a much more appropriate non-Windows platform for Adobe to invest:
Virtually all the professional 2D graphics/media people are on Macs, and OSX (Maya, OpenGL) may bring a hefty amount of 3D people as well
Mac has great font support, unmatched color calibration tools, and great publishing workflow tools
Quartz and Cocoa give Adobe a lot to look forward to
No sizeable portion of the Mac community hold a bias against developers that want to sell their products for profit
Most desktop Linux users have Windows installed as well, so Adobe might as well just develop for Win32
Don't misunderstand my position. I use Macs for desktop work, but my servers run Linux (for now). I've been using Unix in various for six years. But claiming that more people are using Linux than Mac as a desktop OS is a bit presumptuous. Also note that numbers can vary vastly from research firm to research firm. You need to average the results of all of them to get an idea of what's really going on.
just bought the PSone at Target (I get a discount). Now I can choose the best games and get them dirt cheap because some people think they are obsolete.
Speaking of bleeding edge, the Playstation 1 graphics are so jaggy that you can slice cheese on them. Sorry, I just can't take 1994 quality graphics anymore. But glad you can! One more PS2 for the rest of us.:)
and I don't see why it needs to be limited to 512MB/CPU, the PPC is, after all, a 64bit architecture - the "low end" RS-6000s can take up to 1GB/CPU, more on the big iron
I didn't think that PowerPC was 64-bit, at least not until G5; though Power (a relative) is. But I'm not CPU expert. Don't take my word for it. Regardless, I don' t think the RAM limitation of each node has anything to with that. The current G4 towers, for example, can go up to 1.5GB of RAM, and the high-end iMacs can go up to 1.0GB
So let's see, how many groups of people has Sony managed to piss off with this launch?
1) Customers: First and foremost, people cannot get these things, and they're going through an awful lot of trouble to. People have stood in lines for 8 hours or more and gotten absolutely nothing. Then some people (and dealers!) buy them and resell them after marking them up 200-300%. $800 for a PS2 is just ridiculous.
2) Retailers: Retailers have no idea how many units they're getting from Sony, when they're going to show up, and when they finally do, they tend to get much less than they're hoping for. One retailer I spoke to was supposed to get shipments on 10/26, but got zip. Retailers can't advertise the PS2 console, which makes them look really bad. PS2 is "the thing" to get this Christmas, and people are saving the bucks until one is available, which means retailers aren't making money in the meantime. These guys are trying to bring in 40% of the year's revenues in about 40 days. Sony is really causing problems here. Furthermore, imagine how tired clerks are of say "we don't have them, and we don't know when we will."
3) Developers. There are tons of units of PS2 game discs available for purchase. But how many people are going to buy them before they know they have a system?
4) Parents/Wives: PS2 are at the top of wishlists everywhere. Too bad most people are going to get one.
5) Media: Newspapers, TV networks and radio stations would love to sell ads to retailers boasting that they have PS2s to sell.
I just don't by the component shortage line that Sony's feeding us. If that were the case, why are there so many PS2s available in Japan? And despite this, Sony still has the balls to run PS2 commercials during prime time. The upside to all of this is that Sega will probably see increased sales, which means more competition in the market next year with a larger Dreamcast installed base. The truth is that Dreamcast games generally look as good as or better than PS2 games, and there are many more titles available. If only Dreamcast had the EA Sports titles...
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Additional functionality requires additional ram
on
No Love For Darwin?
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· Score: 2
I have 64MB of RAM, which was not the point I intended to make, Gnome/Sawfish on the same hardware does a much better job as far as speed goes. [...] It's not that I have this much RAM or that much, the point is what is OSX doing that requires so much extra time?
OSX is still in beta. The goal is to get the realistic minimum down to 64MB from the current 128MB. But that's not really the point. The point is this:
Get Darwin and an X server. Install gnome. I bet at this point, the terminal windows and MP3 player will open pretty damn fast on your 64MB iBook. So why not use just Darwin with X? Probably because you want QuickTime, Quartz, Carbon apps, Classic compatibility, font and color management, AppleScript, Java 2 support, GameSprockets, OpenGL, Cocoa APIs and everything else that Mac users and developers are expecting. So where do all of these things live? If they won't fit in milk bottles, then you're going to have to put them in ram.
If you want Mac OS X to work just like Linux + gnome/sawmill, you might as well use Darwin. But if you want all the functionality and mainstream apps that Mac OS currently enjoys, then you're going to have the resources to accomodate them. As I said before, optimization will take place before the 1.0 product ships, but it's probably not going to match a bare-bones GNOME/Sawmill/Linux installation.
And I don't agree that including GCC would make users feel compelled to compile everything? When was the last time you recompiled everything in Linux? I know I have compiled parts (X, Mozilla, etc.), but it does not mean that I have to compile X myself.
I think we're just going fundamentally disagree on this. I think having compilers installed (or even on the same CD) makes it too easy for developers to say "just compile it yourself," which just isn't an option for most current Mac users. I think it's safe the say that Jobs' people from NeXT have some experience in this area.
You can get a ton of dev tools for free from http://apple.com/developer/, including compilers, an IDE (Project Builder), a RAD app (Interface Builder), a Java class browser and plenty of other goodies. The total disk image is 66MB. Or for $200, they'll send you CDs every month for a year with everything you need to write software.
I understand you can write Apps for Mac that dont require a GUI - but Macs are more clearly a workstation machine [...]. Are you suggesting that Darwin will enable Mac developers to build server apps?
No, I think you misunderstood my point about "being better off as a Mac developer" with Darwin. The point is that when you write Mac OS X apps, you can look at the source, if necessary, to see what's going on in the bowels of the OS. As somebody mentioned, this is particularly important for companies such as Connectix that write emulators and other performance-sensitive software.
[Would you rather they have not released any source at all? ] Absolutely not - but I think Apple has 'a long way to go' in making OSX really open - and Im really hoping they do. I dont think they are being completely honest.
I think they'll do so if/when somebody comes up with a financially feasible approach. Simply replicating what Red Hat is doing ain't gonna fly. Apple basing their business off purchased support is absolutely contrary to the Mac philoshopy. And more importantly, it doesn't even seen to be working for a lot of other companies. I believe Apple will continue to realase open source software if it can be done without negatively impacting 1) financials or 2) the brand image. Darwin, Darwin Streaming Server, Netsprocket, and OpenPlay all fit into this category.
And besides - If the Cube becomes more reasonably priced
This was discussed at the last Apple conference call with analysts. There's a lower price model coming. They essentially admitted that they made a mistake in misjuding the market.
But this can't be true, because every 2 years Microsoft releases a brand new "look & feel" for Windows, and the tech writers lap it up like the capitalist lackey dogs that they are.
I believe this is so users feel they are actually getting something for their upgrade money. Something tangible. New DirectX drivers alone doesn't quite cut it.
or macos X (which does have what you propose, an/Applications directory, a/Settings directory - which i think are just symlinks to/bin and/etc anyway - but that's macos, a graphical OS)
Where are you getting this information? The good 'ol "I'll take a guess and just hope it's right" farm?:) Mac OS X has an/Applications directory for the graphical apps, and a separate/bin directory for the command line tools like cat, cp, tcsh, mv.
what would you rather type in, day after day after day, Applications or bin?
Since we're talking about GUIs, let's approach it from "what would you rather click on day after day." It doesn't matter, right? It takes a single click regardless of how long the directory name is. Besides why are you typing "/bin" everyday? You think after the first 86,400 times you'd put it in your path. And then there's file name completion.
There really seems to be this perception in some parts of the Linux community that the people will come to unix (the culture, not the OS), rather than unix coming to the people. In my opinion, it's that mentality that will slow progress. The people aren't going to change, unix will have to (as Mac OS X is already illustrating).
etc, you know what that means? 'etcetera'.. and that's exactly what all those little files in that directory are.
There's way too much stuff in there for it all to be considered "etcetera." How about a "/sysconfig" directory, perhaps even with subdirectories like/net,/startup,/dns. Calling the startup directory "rc" is just ridiculous. Here's a novel idea: how about files and directories are named something that makes their purpose intuitively obvious to the user? Maybe then normal people can actually navigate the filesystem without having to buy a book. Note: for broader acceptance, you will need these people.
un*x has evolved into this state to make hackers lives easier. it isn't wrong, far from it. its taken 20, 30, years to get to this stage. if people haven't got half a brain to read and understand, then they shouldn't be using it in the first place!
I have never really understood where this culture's elitist attitude comes from. As if it took us 5-20 years to learn all this stuff, so why should anybody else get off easy? Maybe unix has evolved to make hackers' lives easier, but guess what? It's time for it to evolve again. That is, unless you don't actually want choice outside of Windows.
If gcc was there, people would expect Mac users to compile their own software. This makes even less sense than expecting Windows users to compile their own software. You can download compilers along with an IDE and lots of other goodie from Apple (free membership in ADC required).
Also the load times for EVERYTHING were really bad, up to 15 seconds to load a terminal window sometimes, and that's one of the faster loading apps.
Having used Aqua for a couple days, I have to agree with you. It sucks. It is so damn slow compared to just about anything else I've tried in recent memory.
This has nothing to do with Aqua (as a theme) and everything to do with debugging code and incompete video drivers (and other display components). I imagine KDE and GNOME didn't have to go through this phase since X11 does it for them.
"It's as if we had hired a huge bunch of programmers for free," asserts Ernie Prabhakar, Apple's product manager for Mac OS X Server. "We'll have a final product with better performance and new features."
This is just a soundbyte so the press knows how do deal with the information. Remember where you took the article from: Macworld. Macworld readers don't care about stuff like licenses and kernels (although this printed as well).
But given Apple's lack of real participation in the open source community
Yeah, they've only given you an open source OS, an open source streaming media server, OpenPlay, NetSprocket and released it all under a license approved by the OSI. Oh, and one of their employees does work on Apache.
This quote exemplifies a fundamental misunderstanding of the open source process. We work on open source software because it's ours: it belongs to the community. We don't work on Free Software to make Apple rich.
If you really want commercial companies to release open source software on an ongoing basis, there has to be a balance in the expectations. It's silly to come down on Apple because they want to make money. They have shareholders. But at the same time, I don't think Apple really expects Darwin to "make [them] rich."
There are a variety of reasons Apple decided to do Darwin, but one of them is that Apple's VP of Engineering, Avie Tevanian (remember? one of the guys who wrote Mach, which was later given to the FSF?) felt that Apple should give something back to the community.
And we certainly don't work on open source software so that Apple can take our code, modify it, and prevent us from using the end result without paying--or certainly denying us access to work based off of our code.
I don't see how any of this is possible based on the license. If you do, please share. Yes, they copy things from Darwin and paste them in OSX, but they cannot cut things from Darwin entirely and put them only in Mac OS X. You and the community get to keep everything you make forever.
If Apple wants to benefit from the open source community, Apple has to participate in a larger way.
You make it sound as if Apple is complaining about the level of support Darwin has received. They are not.
Slashdot Mirror
But my main gripe with OSX is AQUA's quite apparent lack of speed
Did you use DP4? BELIEVE me, things are improving over time. Expect to see a speed increase with the next release (final or not).
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First of all as much as people complain about it being defferent from OS 9 it really isnt that different.
Thank goodness somebody else is conscious here. I thought somehow I was communicating with people living in a parallel universe where the OSX Finder windows were bordered with strings of popcorn or something.
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Hope springs eternal with the mac fans, doesn't it?
Hope springs eternal for anyone hoping for a choice outside of Windows. But considering that Apple has $4 billion in the bank, and $11 in cash for every outstanding share (vs. $3 for Gateway and $1.75 for Dell), as well as quite product line and some impressive software technology, I don't think we're really in Armageddon mode here.
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How tightly intregrated is Aqua to the OS? Apple's site shows a couple layers of APIs between Darwin and Aqua.
The OS is not (witness Darwin), the apps, however, are. Though the term "Aqua" is somewhat ambigous. It could mean the theme that Apple is currently using on its GUI layer, or it could be the GUI layer itself.
Perhaps OS X users might be happier with a port of X, running Enlightenment and eMac.
Yikes. I sort of doubt that. Mac OS X is much more than BSD running a pretty window manager.
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I've been using and programming Macs for ten years, and now I'm sitting in front of it going 'What? Huh? How do I launch an application? Where did my icons go?' Talk about disorientation.
/Applications, which is accessible from the Go menu, or by hitting Command-4.
This is silly. You launch applications by double-clicking then. They're all stored in
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One of the frustrating things about the article, and about the Aqua controversy in general, is that the Nextstep/Openstep users were ignored. [...] IMO, users would have been better off if Apple had adopted Workspace.app, and junked the aging MacOS interface
Consider the ratio of Mac users to NeXT users.
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...to make it more profitable, they'd really have something going!
I actually think Apple having a non-profitable quarter (first in ~11 quarters, BTW), is good thing for consumers. It will force them to drop the complacence act. This is a company that always provides better output as the underdog.
In the conference call, Jobs opening admitted that Apple botched a lot of things, which was refreshing to hear. Step one is realizing you have a problem...
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Perhaps OSX will get support from Quark, Adobe, Macromedia, Kinetix and so on. But until it does, for me, it'll be little more than a nice distraction.
No "perhaps" about it. All of the companies you list are Carbonizing their apps (or possibly rewriting them in Cocoa). Though I've never heard of Kinetix. Perhaps you mean Connectix?
I lamented the lack of games
Also, there are substanially more new games coming out for the Mac now than there were just a few years ago. I think you'd be suprised.
and I had to use substandard office applications
I think this issue has completely whithered away with the release of Mac Office 2001. It's getting rave reviews.
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going to an OS where you have to su, understand chmod
Not unless you're installing Unix software, which I doubt Mac admins are doing. And if they are, there's nothing Apple can do to shield them from that. Your mother certainly shouldn't be installing MySQL.
figure out why the OS won't let you empty the trash (even as root)
No idea what this means.
Personally, I think these differences will kill Mac OS X as a consumer OS. They did a decent job of hiding it, but nowhere near enough.
Since we're still in beta, I think you're speaking a bit prematurely. Or perhaps you meant "as it stands now."
Apple needs to realize that OS X is a GREAT power-user OS, but it SUCKS as a home/desktop OS, because my mother-in-law will never understand having to login.
Fine, she doesn't have to. She can have it startup without asking for a login.
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Shouldn't be too difficult to achieve ?!? Andy
Depends on what you mean by "Aqua." If you mean "Aqua" as in the theme, then you can probably get something that looks (though not works) quite similar to Aqua for Enlightenment. If you mean anything else, than the answer is that it's not very easy at all.
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[Porting applications to Mac OS X has nothing to do with porting them to BSD.] Really? Gee. Before Apache supported Mac OS X Server, I told Apache that "you are a freebsd box" and Apache compiled fine.
I covered this in my post. Faceless applications (really, more servers than applications) such as Apache can use the BSD layer quite well. But the BSD part isn't going to help you get Adobe apps on Linux.
Given the progress of www.gnustep.org if one writes code with gnustep as a target, or thinks in terms of BSD-centric API calls, you *COULD* use the Mac OS codebase on other platforms.
Sure, but who's going to do this? Not Adobe.
WWDC 1998, Jobs announced the acceptance of YellowBox wasn't happening, so he renamed it to carbon/cocoa.
Carbon and Cocoa are completely different APIs. Carbon has nothing to do with Yellow Box (maybe this what you meant?).
Do you write for BSD/Unix (if you watch your system calls the code is a "simple port")
If you have a faceless server app, this is the clear choice. It makes no sense for desktop apps, however.
Continue to use carbon, and eventually have to move? (If Apple doesn't dump carbon at some point, think about Microsoft.
It's probably going to be five years bear minium before Apple even considers dumping Carbon.
By picking a UNIX porting path, you CAN get QNX/BSD/SCO/Solaris/SGI/DEC^H^H^HTru Unix/SYSV/HP-UX/Mac OS X/linux if you wish to work for it.
No you cannot. Let me put this another way: you cannot create a "real" native Mac OS X GUI application by using purely BSD calls. There is no X server included with Mac OS X, and there may never be. You can use the BSD layer to write faceless applications for Mac OS X. That's it.
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MS had the opportunity and ability to port WinNT to PowerPC and Sparc(they did, a while ago)
NT was ported to PowerPC, but later dropped.
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Back when Adobe made Solaris versions of thier programs, Desktop publishing shops, all wanting faster machines, didn't want to get Solaris boxes. Why? A lack of other tools they are used to. No powerGoo, etc la.
:) It was a fun little toy, but that's about it.
Hehe. Sorry. POWERGOO? As a tool people are used to?
If Apple is able to keep its user base on the move to BSD unix, eventually code will slide sideways to X86 based BSD, then X86 based *linux. So, just un-bind your underware.
Porting applications to Mac OS X has nothing to do with porting them to BSD. Mac OS X applications are generally written in/ported to Carbon (updated Classic Mac OS APIs, heavily architecture dependent) or Cocoa (Objective-C/Java apps using OpenStep foundation classes). Few Mac developers will encounter BSD while building an application. Today, the BSD component is most useful for getting stuff like MySQL, Apache and PHP up and running quickly. The only exception to this that I am aware of is Fizzilla. Fizzilla is a Mac OS X native port of Mozilla that uses Carbon for the front end drawing routines, and BSD for the threading and networking.
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The problem of Adobe with a Mac OS X version would not be about the unix flavor but about the GUI. What to use ? Cocoa ? Carbon ? Don't think that a X11 version on Mac OS X would be viable.
Carbon and Cocoa aren't GUIs, they're API sets.
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Ummmm, no. Try again. Don't just grab random, out-of-context soundbytes and using them as the foundation of your opinion. The Mac community did that for most of the 90's and eventually people figured out it was the wrong approach.
Some organizations have been reporting equal or slightly higher marketshare for Linux that Mac OS. Marketshare is constantly in flux. Marketshare does not equal installed base, which is the number of people actually using machines. Apple has been building installed base for 16 years. Furthermore, I have yet to see a unanimous decision amongst various research companies that there is larger number of people using Linux as their primary desktop OS than Mac OS. And, personally, I don't expect this to be the case for while (though anything is possible). Sure, there are a lot of machines with Linux installed in them, but even if everybody in the world was running Linux on their webservers, that doesn't help Adobe one bit.
And outside of installed base, there are some other reasons why the Mac is a much more appropriate non-Windows platform for Adobe to invest:
Don't misunderstand my position. I use Macs for desktop work, but my servers run Linux (for now). I've been using Unix in various for six years. But claiming that more people are using Linux than Mac as a desktop OS is a bit presumptuous. Also note that numbers can vary vastly from research firm to research firm. You need to average the results of all of them to get an idea of what's really going on.
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just bought the PSone at Target (I get a discount). Now I can choose the best games and get them dirt cheap because some people think they are obsolete.
:)
Speaking of bleeding edge, the Playstation 1 graphics are so jaggy that you can slice cheese on them. Sorry, I just can't take 1994 quality graphics anymore. But glad you can! One more PS2 for the rest of us.
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and I don't see why it needs to be limited to 512MB/CPU, the PPC is, after all, a 64bit architecture - the "low end" RS-6000s can take up to 1GB/CPU, more on the big iron
I didn't think that PowerPC was 64-bit, at least not until G5; though Power (a relative) is. But I'm not CPU expert. Don't take my word for it. Regardless, I don' t think the RAM limitation of each node has anything to with that. The current G4 towers, for example, can go up to 1.5GB of RAM, and the high-end iMacs can go up to 1.0GB
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So let's see, how many groups of people has Sony managed to piss off with this launch?
1) Customers: First and foremost, people cannot get these things, and they're going through an awful lot of trouble to. People have stood in lines for 8 hours or more and gotten absolutely nothing. Then some people (and dealers!) buy them and resell them after marking them up 200-300%. $800 for a PS2 is just ridiculous.
2) Retailers: Retailers have no idea how many units they're getting from Sony, when they're going to show up, and when they finally do, they tend to get much less than they're hoping for. One retailer I spoke to was supposed to get shipments on 10/26, but got zip. Retailers can't advertise the PS2 console, which makes them look really bad. PS2 is "the thing" to get this Christmas, and people are saving the bucks until one is available, which means retailers aren't making money in the meantime. These guys are trying to bring in 40% of the year's revenues in about 40 days. Sony is really causing problems here. Furthermore, imagine how tired clerks are of say "we don't have them, and we don't know when we will."
3) Developers. There are tons of units of PS2 game discs available for purchase. But how many people are going to buy them before they know they have a system?
4) Parents/Wives: PS2 are at the top of wishlists everywhere. Too bad most people are going to get one.
5) Media: Newspapers, TV networks and radio stations would love to sell ads to retailers boasting that they have PS2s to sell.
I just don't by the component shortage line that Sony's feeding us. If that were the case, why are there so many PS2s available in Japan? And despite this, Sony still has the balls to run PS2 commercials during prime time. The upside to all of this is that Sega will probably see increased sales, which means more competition in the market next year with a larger Dreamcast installed base. The truth is that Dreamcast games generally look as good as or better than PS2 games, and there are many more titles available. If only Dreamcast had the EA Sports titles...
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Scott Stevenson
I have 64MB of RAM, which was not the point I intended to make, Gnome/Sawfish on the same hardware does a much better job as far as speed goes. [...] It's not that I have this much RAM or that much, the point is what is OSX doing that requires so much extra time?
OSX is still in beta. The goal is to get the realistic minimum down to 64MB from the current 128MB. But that's not really the point. The point is this:
Get Darwin and an X server. Install gnome. I bet at this point, the terminal windows and MP3 player will open pretty damn fast on your 64MB iBook. So why not use just Darwin with X? Probably because you want QuickTime, Quartz, Carbon apps, Classic compatibility, font and color management, AppleScript, Java 2 support, GameSprockets, OpenGL, Cocoa APIs and everything else that Mac users and developers are expecting. So where do all of these things live? If they won't fit in milk bottles, then you're going to have to put them in ram.
If you want Mac OS X to work just like Linux + gnome/sawmill, you might as well use Darwin. But if you want all the functionality and mainstream apps that Mac OS currently enjoys, then you're going to have the resources to accomodate them. As I said before, optimization will take place before the 1.0 product ships, but it's probably not going to match a bare-bones GNOME/Sawmill/Linux installation.
And I don't agree that including GCC would make users feel compelled to compile everything? When was the last time you recompiled everything in Linux? I know I have compiled parts (X, Mozilla, etc.), but it does not mean that I have to compile X myself.
I think we're just going fundamentally disagree on this. I think having compilers installed (or even on the same CD) makes it too easy for developers to say "just compile it yourself," which just isn't an option for most current Mac users. I think it's safe the say that Jobs' people from NeXT have some experience in this area.
You can get a ton of dev tools for free from http://apple.com/developer/, including compilers, an IDE (Project Builder), a RAD app (Interface Builder), a Java class browser and plenty of other goodies. The total disk image is 66MB. Or for $200, they'll send you CDs every month for a year with everything you need to write software.
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Scott Stevenson
I understand you can write Apps for Mac that dont require a GUI - but Macs are more clearly a workstation machine [...]. Are you suggesting that Darwin will enable Mac developers to build server apps?
No, I think you misunderstood my point about "being better off as a Mac developer" with Darwin. The point is that when you write Mac OS X apps, you can look at the source, if necessary, to see what's going on in the bowels of the OS. As somebody mentioned, this is particularly important for companies such as Connectix that write emulators and other performance-sensitive software.
[Would you rather they have not released any source at all? ] Absolutely not - but I think Apple has 'a long way to go' in making OSX really open - and Im really hoping they do. I dont think they are being completely honest.
I think they'll do so if/when somebody comes up with a financially feasible approach. Simply replicating what Red Hat is doing ain't gonna fly. Apple basing their business off purchased support is absolutely contrary to the Mac philoshopy. And more importantly, it doesn't even seen to be working for a lot of other companies. I believe Apple will continue to realase open source software if it can be done without negatively impacting 1) financials or 2) the brand image. Darwin, Darwin Streaming Server, Netsprocket, and OpenPlay all fit into this category.
And besides - If the Cube becomes more reasonably priced
This was discussed at the last Apple conference call with analysts. There's a lower price model coming. They essentially admitted that they made a mistake in misjuding the market.
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Scott Stevenson
But this can't be true, because every 2 years Microsoft releases a brand new "look & feel" for Windows, and the tech writers lap it up like the capitalist lackey dogs that they are.
I believe this is so users feel they are actually getting something for their upgrade money. Something tangible. New DirectX drivers alone doesn't quite cut it.
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Scott Stevenson
or macos X (which does have what you propose, an /Applications directory, a /Settings directory - which i think are just symlinks to /bin and /etc anyway - but that's macos, a graphical OS)
:) Mac OS X has an /Applications directory for the graphical apps, and a separate /bin directory for the command line tools like cat, cp, tcsh, mv.
/net, /startup, /dns. Calling the startup directory "rc" is just ridiculous. Here's a novel idea: how about files and directories are named something that makes their purpose intuitively obvious to the user? Maybe then normal people can actually navigate the filesystem without having to buy a book. Note: for broader acceptance, you will need these people.
Where are you getting this information? The good 'ol "I'll take a guess and just hope it's right" farm?
what would you rather type in, day after day after day, Applications or bin?
Since we're talking about GUIs, let's approach it from "what would you rather click on day after day." It doesn't matter, right? It takes a single click regardless of how long the directory name is. Besides why are you typing "/bin" everyday? You think after the first 86,400 times you'd put it in your path. And then there's file name completion.
There really seems to be this perception in some parts of the Linux community that the people will come to unix (the culture, not the OS), rather than unix coming to the people. In my opinion, it's that mentality that will slow progress. The people aren't going to change, unix will have to (as Mac OS X is already illustrating).
etc, you know what that means? 'etcetera'.. and that's exactly what all those little files in that directory are.
There's way too much stuff in there for it all to be considered "etcetera." How about a "/sysconfig" directory, perhaps even with subdirectories like
un*x has evolved into this state to make hackers lives easier. it isn't wrong, far from it. its taken 20, 30, years to get to this stage. if people haven't got half a brain to read and understand, then they shouldn't be using it in the first place!
I have never really understood where this culture's elitist attitude comes from. As if it took us 5-20 years to learn all this stuff, so why should anybody else get off easy? Maybe unix has evolved to make hackers' lives easier, but guess what? It's time for it to evolve again. That is, unless you don't actually want choice outside of Windows.
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Scott Stevenson
most importantly no gcc!
:)
If gcc was there, people would expect Mac users to compile their own software. This makes even less sense than expecting Windows users to compile their own software. You can download compilers along with an IDE and lots of other goodie from Apple (free membership in ADC required).
Also the load times for EVERYTHING were really bad, up to 15 seconds to load a terminal window sometimes, and that's one of the faster loading apps.
How much RAM do you have again?
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Scott Stevenson
Having used Aqua for a couple days, I have to agree with you. It sucks. It is so damn slow compared to just about anything else I've tried in recent memory.
This has nothing to do with Aqua (as a theme) and everything to do with debugging code and incompete video drivers (and other display components). I imagine KDE and GNOME didn't have to go through this phase since X11 does it for them.
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Scott Stevenson
"It's as if we had hired a huge bunch of programmers for free," asserts Ernie Prabhakar, Apple's product manager for Mac OS X Server. "We'll have a final product with better performance and new features."
This is just a soundbyte so the press knows how do deal with the information. Remember where you took the article from: Macworld. Macworld readers don't care about stuff like licenses and kernels (although this printed as well).
But given Apple's lack of real participation in the open source community
Yeah, they've only given you an open source OS, an open source streaming media server, OpenPlay, NetSprocket and released it all under a license approved by the OSI. Oh, and one of their employees does work on Apache.
This quote exemplifies a fundamental misunderstanding of the open source process. We work on open source software because it's ours: it belongs to the community. We don't work on Free Software to make Apple rich.
If you really want commercial companies to release open source software on an ongoing basis, there has to be a balance in the expectations. It's silly to come down on Apple because they want to make money. They have shareholders. But at the same time, I don't think Apple really expects Darwin to "make [them] rich."
There are a variety of reasons Apple decided to do Darwin, but one of them is that Apple's VP of Engineering, Avie Tevanian (remember? one of the guys who wrote Mach, which was later given to the FSF?) felt that Apple should give something back to the community.
And we certainly don't work on open source software so that Apple can take our code, modify it, and prevent us from using the end result without paying--or certainly denying us access to work based off of our code.
I don't see how any of this is possible based on the license. If you do, please share. Yes, they copy things from Darwin and paste them in OSX, but they cannot cut things from Darwin entirely and put them only in Mac OS X. You and the community get to keep everything you make forever.
If Apple wants to benefit from the open source community, Apple has to participate in a larger way.
You make it sound as if Apple is complaining about the level of support Darwin has received. They are not.
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Scott Stevenson