Why must the OpenSource movement do the 'support' coding of Darwin while Apple keeps the GUI closed Source?
Because that's how they're going to make money (of all things)?
here is Apple (or someone speaking in their interest) saying "Why arent you guys helping us build Darwin?"
In Apple's defense, they haven't officially bitched about lack of support. This is just a ZDNet column. I think Apple's just fine with the community doing whatever they want with Darwin. I don't think they feel the community really owes them anything (except making their own CDs). Sure it's not exactly what you want, but it's a huge step in the right direction. They've gone a a lot further than Microsoft or Sun has. I mean, you're getting a fully-functioning OS for free (sans an X server). And if you're a Mac developer, you're much better off now.
Would you rather they have not released any source at all?
This brings to question - MAC OS/X is aimed at the server market
Really? Who said that? It's certainly wasn't Apple. Oh, wait maybe you mean Mac OS X Server, which is currently an entirely different product. And furthermore, Mac OS X Server is aimed at the Mac server admin. It's not going up against Solaris.
This also rises another question - whats with this "Lets make unix idiot proof so all the stupid people can use it."
What do you mean "what's with" it? It's a good idea. And just because you don't know about ifconfig doesn't mean you're stoopid. Why should people be forced to deal with that stuff if they don't want to?
KDE anyone?
If you honestly think KDE and Mac OS X are equivalent in terms of concept and technology, you need to do more research.
Sorry to bust all the redhat users' bubbles but unix will NEVER be suitable for the desktop.
You'd better actually try Mac OS X before you say that again.
Microsoft and its programmers own the desktop till the end of time.
First, this is a silly statemnt, but secondly, this has nothing to do with Unix being suitable for the desktop. I think you're mixing up cause and effect.
Why, oh why, do I insist on responding to AC flamebait?
I use ie 5.0 at work all day long and a number of differnet versions of Netscape 6.0, Mozilla M18, Mozilla nightly build (from last week) and Netscape 4.5 at home and I can say without any shadow of doubt in my mind that ie blows the rest away.
It may be true that the IE application is more robust, but the IE rendering engine lacks a lot of the W3C standards support that Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine boasts. Supporting W3C standards means that we won't all be forced to use Windows just to view ESPN.com.
So the solution is for somebody to take Gecko, and build a better application around it.
This "OSX on x86" seems to show up almost as often as Apple being purchased by Sun.
I don't think anyone has a religious attachment to the assortment of microelectronics that make up the PowerPC chip. It's just a chip, after all. The issue is that there are some fundamental hurdles to overcome if Apple was to release an OSX on x86 and not have the shareholders lynch Jobs. None of which I've seen the osxonintel.com people address, by the way:
1) Profits: How does Apple succeed by competing directly with Microsoft and Linux on the same hardware? How do they differentiate? Much of Apple's core value to its customers is because of the tight integration of the hardware and software.
2) User experience: How does Apple maintain the Mac ease-of-use with such a plethora of x86 hardware to support?
3) Applications: All of the legacy Mac apps (Carbon and Classic) are processor-dependent. A great OS is useless without applications.
4) Product introductions: Apple is currently able to rapidly introduce new technologies in both the hardware and software simultaneously to get products to market quickly. These include FireWire, Airport and many other low-level improvements that don't have sexy names. Waiting for hardware manufacturers to get their act together would hurt Apple.
Some of this may be solved by Apple creating a proprietary machine, much like a current Mac, but with an x86 chip instead of PowerPC. That may solve all the problems except #3. How do you run current Mac apps, especially those that are so sensitive to performance like Final Cut Pro? I know all Slashdotters think that a Pentium III 1.2GHz is worlds faster than a G4/500, but in real-world use, this just doesn't seem to be the case. This seems to be especially true for media-intensive applications that the G4 was designed for. And there's only so fast Office is going to launch. Regardless of which chip is faster, it's clear that the x86 is not a significantly faster chip to emulate a G4 in any sort of reasonable manner. The only solution, therefore, would be for Apple to build some kind of hybrid machine with both a G4 and Pentium/Athlon on board.
And then there's the most basic question: why? Yes, Intel has continually ramped up the megahertz of the Pentium (as has AMD), but the G4 has held its own in real-world performance. The biggest issue to tackle is the perception problem that Motorola has created by not upping the clock rate of the G4 in about a year. But Apple has addressed this somewhat by shipping MP systems at the same price as single CPU machines. And while this power is not really exploited by Mac OS 9, Mac OS X (the topic of conversation) was built for SMP. In that case, you can get a system with two fully-utilized G4s on board for $2500, the need for an x86 system is greatly deemphasized.
Finally, there is this weak but persistant argument that as soon as Apple releases Mac OS X for x86, their marketshare will explode because everyone already has the hardware. I flat out just don't buy that. Sure, maybe hobbyists would pick it up, but with no apps (Office and IE, for example), it's useless for real work.
Anyone remember when Power Computing used to kick their ass performance-wise in the PowerPC realm?
This was largely an illusion due to volume differences. Power Computing sold maybe 200,000 machines in their entire lifespan. Apple seels about 1 million per quarter. When you have such low volume as Power Computing, you can announce products and ship them much sooner.
They have a reasonably strong OS, they have a lead in multimedia software, yet they have refused to acknowledge plans to capitalise on the huge x86 OS market. I don't get them.
Exactly. You do not understand their core customer base. The Mac users would not be tolerant of the hardware nightmares that are associated with x86 hardware. Not to mention losing all Mac applications (they are processor dependent).
Just because it's they way you personally think things should be, doesn't mean it the best thing for the platform, the company or the userbase.
How do you qualify that? They have about 4 billion in the bank, have been profitable for the past -- what -- 11 quarters, and sell a million machines every quarter.
Always was until IE 5.0. NS 6.0 is more standards compliant than IE 5.5. Why all the bad press. Why doesn't this guy blast IE?
Microsoft gets bashed regularly by standards groups such as WaSP. But it's very possible that Microsoft is not supporting standards for political reasons. Mozilla's purpose, on the other hand, is to fully support standards. Worse yet, some of these issues have been addressed by engineers, but Netscape won't allow the patches to be included with 1.0. That's the kicker.
Personally I would prefer that most sites stop using all this extra JUNK. Probably less than one out of 50 sites actually use things like javascript for something that can't be done with plain HTML.
If you think that, I feel you may be rather uninformed on the issues. JavaScript isn't important for fancy special effects. It's important for functionality in the documents. How are you going to make live changes to a page without JavaScript? Use VBScript instead? The idea is that we move away from this idea of reloading the entire damn page anytime the content has to change, and instead just make incremental trips back to the server. This saves on server load, bandwidth, client load, etc.
If I want to know what you are selling a Palm m100 for, I just need the dollars-and-cents field, but not buried in an antialiased gif placed with a CSS popped up with javascript after baking a dozen cookies and redirecting you 20 times all this taking 15 minutes to download on DSL or cable modem.
CSS popped up? CSS defines styles for static documents.
Besides, what if you want to change your selections on accessories for the Palm. Would you rather recalculate your total price live, or take another trip back to the server and reload the entire page. JavaScript (or rather, ECMAScript) enables the former.
In order to build the next generation of web applications, we need some standards to work with. Expecting every site to use static HTML 3.2 pages for the rest of time is insane. Web sites should be rich, functional applications. They don't have to be flashy, load pages in all cases, but neither should they be wooden carts with square wheels.
Come on. 6.0 doesn't need to be perfect. No first release of a commercial product ever is.
It doesn't have to be perfect, but it does have to fully and correctly support the standards that it set out to. This was the whole idea behind Gecko in the first place.
There, you ship it today and then fix it tomorrow.
Maybe you can do that with SQL databases and Java runtimes, but you cannot do that with web browsers. Because once they release a browser with bugs in the rendering engine, you have to work around those bugs for the next two or three years.
Even more ridiculous is that some of these bugs have already been fixed, but Netscape won't put them in the final release!
Reading this really gives an interesting insight into how the Linux community thinks that Microsoft perceives them. Yes, I realize the email is a joke, but there are enough references that strike me as distorted thinking. But on to the main point:
"Bill" says:
"While 5 percent is not a threatning number to Microsoft, it is important to remember that Linux is sitting on more desktops than MacOS at this point."
Things to note:
1) "Linux sitting on more desktops than Mac OS" implies that Linux has a greater installed base, it does not. Apple has been building an installed base for 16 years. It sells approximately a million machines per quarter. Linux may catch up to Apple's installed base some day, but it has not yet. Market share refers to number of machines sold in a given time period. Even if Apple suddenly had 85% marketshare, Windows would still be the dominant OS for some time.
2) "Linux sitting on more desktops than Mac OS" also implies that they 5.6% number is purely desktops, not servers. Last time I checked, this is not the case.
3) The vast majority of Mac users only have one OS installed, or at least two versions of the same OS (OS 9 + OS X). However, many Linux users also a Windows partition. This is significant.
I'm all for seeing both Linux and Mac OS X succeed. I use both. I think choice is good.
Will you give up your $90k job for $35k to work for USPTO?
The solution to this is to axe the $200-300k (or whatever it is) that US Senators bring in per year, after they retire and put that into things like raising salaries on USPTO employees and maybe something like, I dunno, teachers.
If you need a super-heavyweight database system, go with Oracle, or MS SQL. (The latter will never happen, no matter how good SQL Server is because/. will never admit Microsoft may have a good product)
MS SQL may or may not be a good database (it must be better than Access, right?:), but it only runs on NT/W2K, and that's a deal breaker for me.
You do realize how ridiculous that sounds considering that 1) this has been said since 1986 2) Mac marketshare has been increasing recently?
It can't compete with Durons/Athlons/Thunderbirds, PIII, PIV, SMP
Actually, that's the funny part. Despite popular slashdot belief, G4s do quite a admirable job of competing with processors at twice their clock speed. You'll note that IBM, Sun, etc. do not freak out that they sell high-end machines with low-megahertz processors in them. The real problem is that Motorola has not shipped faster chips in about a year. As for SMP, the G4 was designed with SMP in mind, as was OSX. You can get a dual G4 for $2500.
The reason Mac lost is that they didn't realize the power of the commodity marketplace.
Or maybe consider the option that Apple isn't really about that type of product. Do we really need another generic box maker?
AMD is now doing SMP
PowerPC has been doing SMP since the 604 days. This isn't that impressive.
Motorola will be out of the PPC business withing 2 years
Hopefully.
Why do you think they are stuck at 500 Mhz?
Because their fabrication process sucks. IBM had to come in and save the day.
Right. No interest in going furuther.
They just unveiled the G4 Plus at 1GHz. No idea when this will end up in an Apple machine, though.
Motorola pulls out and Mac will croak.
Strong words for somebody who has never run a multi-billion dollar computer company before (I'm assuming:).
It doesn't. OSX is not, and will not be, a Unix flavor. It is a proprietary user environment running on top of the Mach kernel.
That'a bit misleading, as it acts very much like a Unix flavor in a number of ways. Certainly much more than NT ever will. The fact that it is based on Darwin says a lot, and Darwin is nothing if it is not Unix. I'm not qualified to compare OSX to Irix, though. There are a number of articles on the web as to how good of a Unix MOSX is. Such a topic is beyond the scope of a single post.
If only the G4 cubes didn't have hairline cracks in their clear plastic casings
Whatever they are, it's not too suprising that they showed up. Nobody has tried to make a computer like this with these materials before. It's hard to blame engineering for shortcomings in an experimental product. It's easy to blame PR for the way they dealt with it.
If only the G4 cube had a fan so it wouldn't overheat like a toaster.
Ummmm, I actually haven't heard of any of the cubes overheating. PowerPCs take much less power and generate much less heat than most other chips.
If only it had capacity for a true RAID cage
I think this may be outside of Apple's target market.
If only the G4 cube had an SVGA connector
Agreed.
If only it had room for more than 2 DIMMs.
Hmmm, size sacrifices have to be made somewhere to shrink the case. Otherwise, why not get a tower?
Fact: Apple recommends 192 Megs of memory as a realistic minimum
Where did you get this so-called "fact?" 128MB works great. And remember, this is still pre-release unoptimized code. The goal is to get it down to 64MB by 1.0.
Windows 95 box that I use for web surfing. It has 32 Megs of memory. It runs on a Cyrix 5x86-120 (sort of a 486-DX-120). It flies.
Windows 95 is hardly comparable to OSX. A lot of the aforementioned requirements for OSX go into supporting the Classic environment which is an entirely different OS. If you think Win95 is better overall than OSX, then feel free to continue using it.
But this is a moot point since OSX on Intel isn't good business sense right now.
Not that this number really makes sense, because you can't really buy a single-processor G4/500 machine anyway. Only the G4/400 comes in a single CPU flavor.
You don't put two engines in the car. You take out the Volkswagon engine and replace it with a Porche engine.
I was actually just sort of poking fun at the metaphor, being that a car has no real use for two engines, though a computer does have a real use for two CPUs.
Your entire comment is really some flamebait/ material for the books, but let's focus on one point:
the biggest problem that people have with your new 'supercomputer' is that there are cracks in the cheapass translucent case
It's isn't "cheapass." It isn't as if they took a G4 and tossed it in a rubermaid container and put it on store shelves. This was a technically challenging machine and case to make. Like the iMac, Apple had develop new processes to produce these things in mass quantity. Nobody has actually tried to make a computer like this before (especially without a fan!). It's largely experimental. As a result, it's hard to blame Apple for some problems only becoming apparent after wide distribution. It's like security holes in software -- they only show up after wide use.
What Apple can be blamed for is they way they are dealing with the issue. They could be doing it much more gracefully. I don't have a Cube, so I'm not going to make any judgement about whether those are cracks or mold lines showing up in the casing. You know how human mentality is -- one person finds what they think are cracks and suddenly everybody thinks they have cracks.
Also note that many other Macs with translucent plastics do have actual bonafied mold lines, such as my PowerBook.
it's just a new face to the standard Macintosh Operating System. [...] The mac has never, and even with OS X, still doesn't let me at the guts of the OS like Windows [...] or Linux does. [...] If something goes wrong with the startup of MacOS, you have no real idea what went wrong, you just have to restart and hope for the best. [...] From everything I've seen and read, OS X is just a new face on an old standard.
You really are really remarkably uninformed.
Mac OS 9 and earlier were a completely different architecture. Mac OS X runs on top of Darwin, which is open source operating system based on the Mach kernel. Mac OS X has a BSD personality layer and comes with Apache, SSH, Perl, TCL and Java 2 -- all preinstalled. Non-essential services are disabled by default for security reasons.
The startup process is driven by the scripts in/System/Library/StartupItems/ (or thereabouts), which sends messages to the console which are displayed on the pretty startup screen. Furthermore, if you like, you can simply hold down "v" (verbose) during startup and see all the geeky debugging output about the startup process like you see in Linux.
See? Ease of use and power don't have to be mutually exclusive.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry... I missed this part in my other post:
Why must the OpenSource movement do the 'support' coding of Darwin while Apple keeps the GUI closed Source?
Because that's how they're going to make money (of all things)?
here is Apple (or someone speaking in their interest) saying "Why arent you guys helping us build Darwin?"
In Apple's defense, they haven't officially bitched about lack of support. This is just a ZDNet column. I think Apple's just fine with the community doing whatever they want with Darwin. I don't think they feel the community really owes them anything (except making their own CDs). Sure it's not exactly what you want, but it's a huge step in the right direction. They've gone a a lot further than Microsoft or Sun has. I mean, you're getting a fully-functioning OS for free (sans an X server). And if you're a Mac developer, you're much better off now.
Would you rather they have not released any source at all?
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
The way I see it: OSX's most exciting parts are the GUI.
Sort of. Another angle is that it's a Unix OS that actually runs Mac apps with close to zero speed penalty and tight integration.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
This brings to question - MAC OS/X is aimed at the server market
Really? Who said that? It's certainly wasn't Apple. Oh, wait maybe you mean Mac OS X Server, which is currently an entirely different product. And furthermore, Mac OS X Server is aimed at the Mac server admin. It's not going up against Solaris.
This also rises another question - whats with this "Lets make unix idiot proof so all the stupid people can use it."
What do you mean "what's with" it? It's a good idea. And just because you don't know about ifconfig doesn't mean you're stoopid. Why should people be forced to deal with that stuff if they don't want to?
KDE anyone?
If you honestly think KDE and Mac OS X are equivalent in terms of concept and technology, you need to do more research.
Sorry to bust all the redhat users' bubbles but unix will NEVER be suitable for the desktop.
You'd better actually try Mac OS X before you say that again.
Microsoft and its programmers own the desktop till the end of time.
First, this is a silly statemnt, but secondly, this has nothing to do with Unix being suitable for the desktop. I think you're mixing up cause and effect.
Why, oh why, do I insist on responding to AC flamebait?
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
I use ie 5.0 at work all day long and a number of differnet versions of Netscape 6.0, Mozilla M18, Mozilla nightly build (from last week) and Netscape 4.5 at home and I can say without any shadow of doubt in my mind that ie blows the rest away.
It may be true that the IE application is more robust, but the IE rendering engine lacks a lot of the W3C standards support that Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine boasts. Supporting W3C standards means that we won't all be forced to use Windows just to view ESPN.com.
So the solution is for somebody to take Gecko, and build a better application around it.
- Scott.
------
Scott Stevenson
This "OSX on x86" seems to show up almost as often as Apple being purchased by Sun.
I don't think anyone has a religious attachment to the assortment of microelectronics that make up the PowerPC chip. It's just a chip, after all. The issue is that there are some fundamental hurdles to overcome if Apple was to release an OSX on x86 and not have the shareholders lynch Jobs. None of which I've seen the osxonintel.com people address, by the way:
1) Profits: How does Apple succeed by competing directly with Microsoft and Linux on the same hardware? How do they differentiate? Much of Apple's core value to its customers is because of the tight integration of the hardware and software.
2) User experience: How does Apple maintain the Mac ease-of-use with such a plethora of x86 hardware to support?
3) Applications: All of the legacy Mac apps (Carbon and Classic) are processor-dependent. A great OS is useless without applications.
4) Product introductions: Apple is currently able to rapidly introduce new technologies in both the hardware and software simultaneously to get products to market quickly. These include FireWire, Airport and many other low-level improvements that don't have sexy names. Waiting for hardware manufacturers to get their act together would hurt Apple.
Some of this may be solved by Apple creating a proprietary machine, much like a current Mac, but with an x86 chip instead of PowerPC. That may solve all the problems except #3. How do you run current Mac apps, especially those that are so sensitive to performance like Final Cut Pro? I know all Slashdotters think that a Pentium III 1.2GHz is worlds faster than a G4/500, but in real-world use, this just doesn't seem to be the case. This seems to be especially true for media-intensive applications that the G4 was designed for. And there's only so fast Office is going to launch. Regardless of which chip is faster, it's clear that the x86 is not a significantly faster chip to emulate a G4 in any sort of reasonable manner. The only solution, therefore, would be for Apple to build some kind of hybrid machine with both a G4 and Pentium/Athlon on board.
And then there's the most basic question: why? Yes, Intel has continually ramped up the megahertz of the Pentium (as has AMD), but the G4 has held its own in real-world performance. The biggest issue to tackle is the perception problem that Motorola has created by not upping the clock rate of the G4 in about a year. But Apple has addressed this somewhat by shipping MP systems at the same price as single CPU machines. And while this power is not really exploited by Mac OS 9, Mac OS X (the topic of conversation) was built for SMP. In that case, you can get a system with two fully-utilized G4s on board for $2500, the need for an x86 system is greatly deemphasized.
Finally, there is this weak but persistant argument that as soon as Apple releases Mac OS X for x86, their marketshare will explode because everyone already has the hardware. I flat out just don't buy that. Sure, maybe hobbyists would pick it up, but with no apps (Office and IE, for example), it's useless for real work.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Anyone remember when Power Computing used to kick their ass performance-wise in the PowerPC realm?
This was largely an illusion due to volume differences. Power Computing sold maybe 200,000 machines in their entire lifespan. Apple seels about 1 million per quarter. When you have such low volume as Power Computing, you can announce products and ship them much sooner.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
They have a reasonably strong OS, they have a lead in multimedia software, yet they have refused to acknowledge plans to capitalise on the huge x86 OS market. I don't get them.
Exactly. You do not understand their core customer base. The Mac users would not be tolerant of the hardware nightmares that are associated with x86 hardware. Not to mention losing all Mac applications (they are processor dependent).
Just because it's they way you personally think things should be, doesn't mean it the best thing for the platform, the company or the userbase.
Nobody gets rich selling just hardware.
Sun seems to do okay.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
At this stage, Apple is running on dry
How do you qualify that? They have about 4 billion in the bank, have been profitable for the past -- what -- 11 quarters, and sell a million machines every quarter.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Always was until IE 5.0. NS 6.0 is more standards compliant than IE 5.5. Why all the bad press. Why doesn't this guy blast IE?
Microsoft gets bashed regularly by standards groups such as WaSP. But it's very possible that Microsoft is not supporting standards for political reasons. Mozilla's purpose, on the other hand, is to fully support standards. Worse yet, some of these issues have been addressed by engineers, but Netscape won't allow the patches to be included with 1.0. That's the kicker.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Personally I would prefer that most sites stop using all this extra JUNK. Probably less than one out of 50 sites actually use things like javascript for something that can't be done with plain HTML.
If you think that, I feel you may be rather uninformed on the issues. JavaScript isn't important for fancy special effects. It's important for functionality in the documents. How are you going to make live changes to a page without JavaScript? Use VBScript instead? The idea is that we move away from this idea of reloading the entire damn page anytime the content has to change, and instead just make incremental trips back to the server. This saves on server load, bandwidth, client load, etc.
If I want to know what you are selling a Palm m100 for, I just need the dollars-and-cents field, but not buried in an antialiased gif placed with a CSS popped up with javascript after baking a dozen cookies and redirecting you 20 times all this taking 15 minutes to download on DSL or cable modem.
CSS popped up? CSS defines styles for static documents.
Besides, what if you want to change your selections on accessories for the Palm. Would you rather recalculate your total price live, or take another trip back to the server and reload the entire page. JavaScript (or rather, ECMAScript) enables the former.
In order to build the next generation of web applications, we need some standards to work with. Expecting every site to use static HTML 3.2 pages for the rest of time is insane. Web sites should be rich, functional applications. They don't have to be flashy, load pages in all cases, but neither should they be wooden carts with square wheels.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Come on. 6.0 doesn't need to be perfect. No first release of a commercial product ever is.
It doesn't have to be perfect, but it does have to fully and correctly support the standards that it set out to. This was the whole idea behind Gecko in the first place.
There, you ship it today and then fix it tomorrow.
Maybe you can do that with SQL databases and Java runtimes, but you cannot do that with web browsers. Because once they release a browser with bugs in the rendering engine, you have to work around those bugs for the next two or three years.
Even more ridiculous is that some of these bugs have already been fixed , but Netscape won't put them in the final release!
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Reading this really gives an interesting insight into how the Linux community thinks that Microsoft perceives them. Yes, I realize the email is a joke, but there are enough references that strike me as distorted thinking. But on to the main point:
"Bill" says:
"While 5 percent is not a threatning number to Microsoft, it is important to remember that Linux is sitting on more desktops than MacOS at this point."
Things to note:
1) "Linux sitting on more desktops than Mac OS" implies that Linux has a greater installed base, it does not. Apple has been building an installed base for 16 years. It sells approximately a million machines per quarter. Linux may catch up to Apple's installed base some day, but it has not yet. Market share refers to number of machines sold in a given time period. Even if Apple suddenly had 85% marketshare, Windows would still be the dominant OS for some time.
2) "Linux sitting on more desktops than Mac OS" also implies that they 5.6% number is purely desktops, not servers. Last time I checked, this is not the case.
3) The vast majority of Mac users only have one OS installed, or at least two versions of the same OS (OS 9 + OS X). However, many Linux users also a Windows partition. This is significant.
I'm all for seeing both Linux and Mac OS X succeed. I use both. I think choice is good.
Be informed.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Will you give up your $90k job for $35k to work for USPTO?
The solution to this is to axe the $200-300k (or whatever it is) that US Senators bring in per year, after they retire and put that into things like raising salaries on USPTO employees and maybe something like, I dunno, teachers.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
If you need a super-heavyweight database system, go with Oracle, or MS SQL. (The latter will never happen, no matter how good SQL Server is because /. will never admit Microsoft may have a good product)
:), but it only runs on NT/W2K, and that's a deal breaker for me.
MS SQL may or may not be a good database (it must be better than Access, right?
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
The Mac is dying.
:).
You do realize how ridiculous that sounds considering that 1) this has been said since 1986 2) Mac marketshare has been increasing recently?
It can't compete with Durons/Athlons/Thunderbirds, PIII, PIV, SMP
Actually, that's the funny part. Despite popular slashdot belief, G4s do quite a admirable job of competing with processors at twice their clock speed. You'll note that IBM, Sun, etc. do not freak out that they sell high-end machines with low-megahertz processors in them. The real problem is that Motorola has not shipped faster chips in about a year. As for SMP, the G4 was designed with SMP in mind, as was OSX. You can get a dual G4 for $2500.
The reason Mac lost is that they didn't realize the power of the commodity marketplace.
Or maybe consider the option that Apple isn't really about that type of product. Do we really need another generic box maker?
AMD is now doing SMP
PowerPC has been doing SMP since the 604 days. This isn't that impressive.
Motorola will be out of the PPC business withing 2 years
Hopefully.
Why do you think they are stuck at 500 Mhz?
Because their fabrication process sucks. IBM had to come in and save the day.
Right. No interest in going furuther.
They just unveiled the G4 Plus at 1GHz. No idea when this will end up in an Apple machine, though.
Motorola pulls out and Mac will croak.
Strong words for somebody who has never run a multi-billion dollar computer company before (I'm assuming
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
It doesn't. OSX is not, and will not be, a Unix flavor. It is a proprietary user environment running on top of the Mach kernel.
That'a bit misleading, as it acts very much like a Unix flavor in a number of ways. Certainly much more than NT ever will. The fact that it is based on Darwin says a lot, and Darwin is nothing if it is not Unix. I'm not qualified to compare OSX to Irix, though. There are a number of articles on the web as to how good of a Unix MOSX is. Such a topic is beyond the scope of a single post.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
If only the G4 cubes didn't have hairline cracks in their clear plastic casings
Whatever they are, it's not too suprising that they showed up. Nobody has tried to make a computer like this with these materials before. It's hard to blame engineering for shortcomings in an experimental product. It's easy to blame PR for the way they dealt with it.
If only the G4 cube had a fan so it wouldn't overheat like a toaster.
Ummmm, I actually haven't heard of any of the cubes overheating. PowerPCs take much less power and generate much less heat than most other chips.
If only it had capacity for a true RAID cage
I think this may be outside of Apple's target market.
If only the G4 cube had an SVGA connector
Agreed.
If only it had room for more than 2 DIMMs.
Hmmm, size sacrifices have to be made somewhere to shrink the case. Otherwise, why not get a tower?
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
here, this is an X server for OS X, without the VNC overhead
Xtools looks nice nice, but it will also set you back about $200.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Fact: Apple recommends 192 Megs of memory as a realistic minimum
Where did you get this so-called "fact?" 128MB works great. And remember, this is still pre-release unoptimized code. The goal is to get it down to 64MB by 1.0.
Windows 95 box that I use for web surfing. It has 32 Megs of memory. It runs on a Cyrix 5x86-120 (sort of a 486-DX-120). It flies.
Windows 95 is hardly comparable to OSX. A lot of the aforementioned requirements for OSX go into supporting the Classic environment which is an entirely different OS. If you think Win95 is better overall than OSX, then feel free to continue using it.
But this is a moot point since OSX on Intel isn't good business sense right now.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
But check out the typical desktop price: C$5,300
3 3
Eh? The page I'm looking at says:
"Typical desktop: C$3,800 (US$2,500)"
http://www.cpuscorecard.com/top_cpus.htm#IP3-11
Not that this number really makes sense, because you can't really buy a single-processor G4/500 machine anyway. Only the G4/400 comes in a single CPU flavor.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
You don't put two engines in the car. You take out the Volkswagon engine and replace it with a Porche engine.
I was actually just sort of poking fun at the metaphor, being that a car has no real use for two engines, though a computer does have a real use for two CPUs.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Your entire comment is really some flamebait/ material for the books, but let's focus on one point:
the biggest problem that people have with your new 'supercomputer' is that there are cracks in the cheapass translucent case
It's isn't "cheapass." It isn't as if they took a G4 and tossed it in a rubermaid container and put it on store shelves. This was a technically challenging machine and case to make. Like the iMac, Apple had develop new processes to produce these things in mass quantity. Nobody has actually tried to make a computer like this before (especially without a fan!). It's largely experimental. As a result, it's hard to blame Apple for some problems only becoming apparent after wide distribution. It's like security holes in software -- they only show up after wide use.
What Apple can be blamed for is they way they are dealing with the issue. They could be doing it much more gracefully. I don't have a Cube, so I'm not going to make any judgement about whether those are cracks or mold lines showing up in the casing. You know how human mentality is -- one person finds what they think are cracks and suddenly everybody thinks they have cracks.
Also note that many other Macs with translucent plastics do have actual bonafied mold lines, such as my PowerBook.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
What it sadly is is another attempt by apple to exploit their users' ignorance.
And how, pray tell, are they exploiting users' ignorance by developing OSX?
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
it's just a new face to the standard Macintosh Operating System. [...] The mac has never, and even with OS X, still doesn't let me at the guts of the OS like Windows [...] or Linux does. [...] If something goes wrong with the startup of MacOS, you have no real idea what went wrong, you just have to restart and hope for the best. [...] From everything I've seen and read, OS X is just a new face on an old standard.
/System/Library/StartupItems/ (or thereabouts), which sends messages to the console which are displayed on the pretty startup screen. Furthermore, if you like, you can simply hold down "v" (verbose) during startup and see all the geeky debugging output about the startup process like you see in Linux.
You really are really remarkably uninformed.
Mac OS 9 and earlier were a completely different architecture. Mac OS X runs on top of Darwin, which is open source operating system based on the Mach kernel. Mac OS X has a BSD personality layer and comes with Apache, SSH, Perl, TCL and Java 2 -- all preinstalled. Non-essential services are disabled by default for security reasons.
The startup process is driven by the scripts in
See? Ease of use and power don't have to be mutually exclusive.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
There is one small difference...A Volkswagen Beetle allows you to build in a Porsche engine...
Show me a Beetle with two engines installed.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson