You will find Sun marketing material in professional IT journals, at trade shows etc. They don't, in general advertise to the general public, because only a tiny proportion of the general public are in the position to sign PO's
The question is if the executives signing the POs read IT publications or attend trade shows.
I don't know anyone who actually *knows* something about computers and software or uses such things beyond games who has cool lights, uses html mail, wastes the time to skin their apps, wants a mac or has otherwise gussied up their systems to 'look cool'. Ok, a few want a mac, but only so they can see what they can do with darwin.
So the people who write software on/for Mac OS X, they presumably 'know something' about computers, yes?:)
It's not the impression I got from using it for several hours.
Wow, that is a long time.:) Seriously, I think you're missing the forest through the trees here. You're hyper-focused on a tiny island in a universe of what Mac OS X has to offer. It takes more than a couple of hours to realize that, though.
and it would be if I wasn't constantly waiting for the spinning beach ball or for windows to resize
Panther has serious improvements for things like this.
I really doubt that a Wallstreet G3/300 is significantly different to support than a Lombard PowerBook.
They're actually quite different at the ROM level, as someone else said. As long as Apple continues to introduce new computers (including various revisions and alternate configurations) it is going to have to slowly stop supporting software Mac OS X the older ones. Otherwise, the QA process would become unmanageable.
The alternative is to go the Microsoft route, overstating the supported configurations to sell more copies, and forcing the public to do much of the QA. Apple moves the window of supported machines forward so that it can ship a solid product in a reasonable amount of time with a good experience for the consumer.
That said, there has to be a business side to this too. For years, Wall Street came down hard on Apple for supporting machines for too long, because it meant less sales. Analysts didn't like the idea of people keeping a Mac for seven years because that's an incredibly long cycle to manage. That's the reality of the stock market. I believe "Wall Street" PowerBooks are five years old, right?
How is it FUD to use benchmarks that reflect the real software people run on their machines? You're saying Apple users don't run Quake, Word, etc.? That's not true.
Is anybody going to decide between a G5 and Athlon based on Word?
Quake, maybe. But I think the point is the benchmarks come off as testing system performance, but they're really benchmarking app efficiency. Maybe some lower-level tests would work better.
I can understand the reasoning behind testing Photoshop and Word, but the problem is they both represent old codebases for a different architecture (old Mac Toolbox).
There's been a lot of Carbonization work, and they run well from the user's perspective -- but if you watch top, they also waste a lot of CPU time even when idle. This makes them poor candidates for benchmarking the system itself. It would be nice if there was way to benchmark apps written for Mac OS X against counterparts written for Windows. Also, Panther is singificantly faster than Jaguar in many cases.
Premiere seems a particularly odd choice. Don't hold me to this, but I was under the impression that it has long been much slower than it should be on the Mac. Maybe that was After Effects. Also would have been nice if they used the newest version of Photoshop, which undoubtable is more tuned to Mac OS X.
If your definition of 64-bit is a 32-bit operating system around a 64-bit chip, then the G5 is a 64-bit platform. Mac OS X 10.2.7 (and the upcoming 10.3) is not a 64-bit operating system
Considering Panther's out in nine days, you may want to reserve final judgement. It seems clear the G5s were designed with Panther in mind.
In fact, we returned the G5 we got last week for a full refund (didn't have to pay the 10% open box fee either), after about 2 hours on the phone. Buyer beware.
Huh? So you returned it not based on your experience with the machine, but based the specs?
Well, whatever works for you.:) Was there something the machine could not do for you?
This is true. All else is not equal -- Mac OS X is far more complex, and is still quite young. Rough spots are still being smoothed out. Classic Mac OS was quite mature.
I guess we're not going to agree on this, but I really don't see how one can say Mac OS 9 is mature from an architecture perspective. Other parts of the system were mature perhaps, but not the guts, and not the frameworks. Which is why I say if you have machines that are crashing more running Mac OS X than Mac OS 9, then something is seriously wrong. In fact, if you have Mac OS X machines that are crashing on a regular basis at all, I think it's safe to say something's wrong.
Mac OS X's lowest levels are very solid, and with good reason. The foundation is an established, well-tested, well-designed architecture refined over a period of time at NeXT, Apple and the *BSD camps. I haven't had a Mac OS X machine crash on me in 2.5 years. As you might imagine, that wasn't the case for Mac OS 9.:)
As for rough spots, I guess it's subjective, but I've never used an OS that felt as polished or complete as Panther. I could (and have) even say that about Jaguar, although Panther solves a few specific problems Jaguar had.
Perhaps it was just because I used MacsBug, but I really didn't have any problem. A backtrace and the current app name is pretty solid.
I don't get the impression the original poster is a programmer, in which case, MacsBug is essentially useless.
Either way, you can get a backtrace from Mac OS X (without corrupting memory), so at worst case it's as good as Mac OS 9. The original poster suggested that it was somehow worse than Mac OS 9.
The orginal MACs (OS 9) were much more reliable then the current OS X
Something is seriously wrong with your hardware if you've had the experience of Mac OS 9 being more stable.
Fundamentally, Mac OS X protected memory spaces and modern frameworks/runtimes. Mac OS 9 is an antiquated architecture in which apps can write all over memory. There's no way this can result in a more stable system with all else being equal.
On the old MACs application would never crash with a hex dump and no indication where the problem lies
I think you've confused something somewhere.
Mac OS 9 gives you next to zero information about where the problem lies when an app crashes. About the best you can get is MacsBug spitting out raw memory contents. Under Mac OS X you have console and crash reporter, which contain some human-readable information.
I work in a large shop where MAC needed a lot of hand holding, let's now even talk about the issues with crashing when using FONTs on the MAC, Apple really blew it. Oh, but wait I can pay more money to check and organize my fonts in the hope that it will keep OSX from crashing!
What are you talking about here? Are you using the Classic emulation environment or something?
And even that's not perfectly accurate. Mach and BSD work together at the core of the OS. Mach is really in control at the lowest levels, and BSD jumps in at various parts for things like permissions, networking, filesystem support, etc.
If they want to access a file, they probably use Carbon or Cocoa file-access functions
That's true, yes. But both Cocoa and Carbon go down to the C-based CoreFoundation libraries for core functionality. CoreFoundation is part of Darwin.
If they want to have threads, they use Carbon or Cocoa thread functions, or they use Mach threads if they need something lower-level.
It's a little more complicated than that. These pages probably describe it best:
No, no, a thousand times no. Apple is ALREADY selling Macs faster than they can make them.
If they get more orders, they've buff up manufacturing and shipping. It's not like Apple wouldn't be able to make more Macs, it's just there's a critical mass to move from one tier of production output to the next.
Apple doesn't give a FLYING SHIT about market share.
Well, they do care about market share, of course. It just isn't their sole metric of success ala Dell or Microsoft. No question their overriding priority is creating a great product.
WHILE STILL releasing entirely new products (like the G4 iMac, the iPod, the iTunes Music Store, and the G5) and continuing to enhance their existing products on an aggressive timeline. That's FUCKING AMAZING, man.
Amen to that. The raw output has been mind blowing, pure and simple.
but paying the same for an upgrade from 10.2 to 10.3 as someone might pay to upgrade from Mac OS 9 to 10.3 is not
For technical reasons, Apple chose to go with a more conservative numbering scheme. The problem seems to be that buyers put way too much emphasis on the version number. For example, 10.2 brought Quartz Extreme, which was a massive leap for the graphics engine. This isn't something you'd typically find in a point release. These are major new features that require serious engineering.
Mac OS X 10.3 is actually Mac OS X 3.0. In fact, I have an early Mac OS X packing list that reads "Mac OS X 1.0", but they've since changed it to Mac OS X 10.0. Apple tried to address the point release stigma using "Jaguar" and "Panther", but there's still some confusion.
The bizarre dilemma Apple finds themselves in is that they've created this incredibly flexible architecture that allows them to make sweeping improvements very quickly, but it happens so fast that people don't think it's real. You can't win.
As for needing Panther to run future applications, yes, of course. Apple buffs up the frameworks, so better applications will result from the framework enhancements. The alternative is to just sit around and let other OS architectures catch up while not selling a new product. I don't think the advantages of this outweight the disadvantages at this point.
I've been using Xcode for a few months now, and it's definitely a big leap from Project Builder. Even the "beta" version of Xcode I got at WWDC was my preferred tool over the last release version of Project Builder.
There are a lot of features that aren't obvious on the surface, which is good because you can get started quickly, and dig deeper at your leisure.
The guy asks what's the party, at which point the head IT guy explains how they had magically consolidated the Active Directory groups from 70 to 4 thus
The funny thing about this too is that the IT guy looks completely worn out from his ordeal with the Microsoft software. Do you really want the type of software that suggests a party is in order after setup is complete?
I guess it's supposed to make the IT people feel empowered.
Talkback was created by a company called Full Circle Software. I did some work for them in 1998, and I believe they already had a license agreement with Netscape at that point. The initial work goes back quite a bit further.
By "practical", I mean functioning. If MS wants to violate a standard or leaves in known bugs, there is not much we can do other than work around them.
I suppose all of that is possible, but as of right now, CSS is totally practical (and functioning) as a cross-browser formatting tool. It's the meeting place of WinIE, Safari, Konquerer, Mozilla, Netscape, Camino, etc.
Microsoft could break it if they wanted, but I don't think this would necessarily net much benefit considering all the sites that currently use CSS, or are moving to it.
I take that to mean you consider using a few layers of tables to be "complex". OK, so be it.
Unless you're trying to support Netscape 3 and IE 3, you should be able to replace many (if not most) nested table configurations with CSS box equivalents, even on the older (4.x) browsers. At least that's been my experience.
If you want the largest audience possible, then using the latest web standards, such as promoted by Zeldman, is not what you want to do.
By that logic, nobody should write software for anything but Windows.
I think you've gone overboard in describing how backward compatible one has to be. Netscape 4 has a very small userbase at this point. And a visual browser (ie: not Lynx) that doesn't support CSS text colors is a true rarity.
There's been a long standing chicken and egg problem. Browser makers never beefed up their standards support until web authors started using CSS widely.
There are no practical "web standards" except for a trivial subset. The vast majority of users have MS-IE browsers, and IE only half-ass fallows "official" standards.
Huh?
How did you decide all of this? Have you looked at CSS at all?
Slashdot Mirror
You will find Sun marketing material in professional IT journals, at trade shows etc. They don't, in general advertise to the general public, because only a tiny proportion of the general public are in the position to sign PO's
The question is if the executives signing the POs read IT publications or attend trade shows.
- Scott
I don't know anyone who actually *knows* something about computers and software or uses such things beyond games who has cool lights, uses html mail, wastes the time to skin their apps, wants a mac or has otherwise gussied up their systems to 'look cool'. Ok, a few want a mac, but only so they can see what they can do with darwin.
:)
So the people who write software on/for Mac OS X, they presumably 'know something' about computers, yes?
- Scott
It's not the impression I got from using it for several hours.
:) Seriously, I think you're missing the forest through the trees here. You're hyper-focused on a tiny island in a universe of what Mac OS X has to offer. It takes more than a couple of hours to realize that, though.
Wow, that is a long time.
and it would be if I wasn't constantly waiting for the spinning beach ball or for windows to resize
Panther has serious improvements for things like this.
- Scott
I really doubt that a Wallstreet G3/300 is significantly different to support than a Lombard PowerBook.
They're actually quite different at the ROM level, as someone else said. As long as Apple continues to introduce new computers (including various revisions and alternate configurations) it is going to have to slowly stop supporting software Mac OS X the older ones. Otherwise, the QA process would become unmanageable.
The alternative is to go the Microsoft route, overstating the supported configurations to sell more copies, and forcing the public to do much of the QA. Apple moves the window of supported machines forward so that it can ship a solid product in a reasonable amount of time with a good experience for the consumer.
That said, there has to be a business side to this too. For years, Wall Street came down hard on Apple for supporting machines for too long, because it meant less sales. Analysts didn't like the idea of people keeping a Mac for seven years because that's an incredibly long cycle to manage. That's the reality of the stock market. I believe "Wall Street" PowerBooks are five years old, right?
- Scott
How is it FUD to use benchmarks that reflect the real software people run on their machines? You're saying Apple users don't run Quake, Word, etc.? That's not true.
Is anybody going to decide between a G5 and Athlon based on Word?
Quake, maybe. But I think the point is the benchmarks come off as testing system performance, but they're really benchmarking app efficiency. Maybe some lower-level tests would work better.
- Scott
Photoshop is a port to the PC from the Mac version
It was ported to Windows but it was also ported to Mac OS X. Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X architectures are light years apart.
I wonder if PCWorld included Classic launch time in their benchmark
ARE YOU SERIOUS? I didn't even notice that. Classic soaks up system resources like crazy.
- Scott
I can understand the reasoning behind testing Photoshop and Word, but the problem is they both represent old codebases for a different architecture (old Mac Toolbox).
There's been a lot of Carbonization work, and they run well from the user's perspective -- but if you watch top, they also waste a lot of CPU time even when idle. This makes them poor candidates for benchmarking the system itself. It would be nice if there was way to benchmark apps written for Mac OS X against counterparts written for Windows. Also, Panther is singificantly faster than Jaguar in many cases.
Premiere seems a particularly odd choice. Don't hold me to this, but I was under the impression that it has long been much slower than it should be on the Mac. Maybe that was After Effects. Also would have been nice if they used the newest version of Photoshop, which undoubtable is more tuned to Mac OS X.
- Scott
If your definition of 64-bit is a 32-bit operating system around a 64-bit chip, then the G5 is a 64-bit platform. Mac OS X 10.2.7 (and the upcoming 10.3) is not a 64-bit operating system
:) Was there something the machine could not do for you?
Considering Panther's out in nine days, you may want to reserve final judgement. It seems clear the G5s were designed with Panther in mind.
In fact, we returned the G5 we got last week for a full refund (didn't have to pay the 10% open box fee either), after about 2 hours on the phone. Buyer beware.
Huh? So you returned it not based on your experience with the machine, but based the specs?
Well, whatever works for you.
- Scott
This is true. All else is not equal -- Mac OS X is far more complex, and is still quite young. Rough spots are still being smoothed out. Classic Mac OS was quite mature.
:)
I guess we're not going to agree on this, but I really don't see how one can say Mac OS 9 is mature from an architecture perspective. Other parts of the system were mature perhaps, but not the guts, and not the frameworks. Which is why I say if you have machines that are crashing more running Mac OS X than Mac OS 9, then something is seriously wrong. In fact, if you have Mac OS X machines that are crashing on a regular basis at all, I think it's safe to say something's wrong.
Mac OS X's lowest levels are very solid, and with good reason. The foundation is an established, well-tested, well-designed architecture refined over a period of time at NeXT, Apple and the *BSD camps. I haven't had a Mac OS X machine crash on me in 2.5 years. As you might imagine, that wasn't the case for Mac OS 9.
As for rough spots, I guess it's subjective, but I've never used an OS that felt as polished or complete as Panther. I could (and have) even say that about Jaguar, although Panther solves a few specific problems Jaguar had.
Perhaps it was just because I used MacsBug, but I really didn't have any problem. A backtrace and the current app name is pretty solid.
I don't get the impression the original poster is a programmer, in which case, MacsBug is essentially useless.
Either way, you can get a backtrace from Mac OS X (without corrupting memory), so at worst case it's as good as Mac OS 9. The original poster suggested that it was somehow worse than Mac OS 9.
Best Regards,
- Scott
The orginal MACs (OS 9) were much more reliable then the current OS X
Something is seriously wrong with your hardware if you've had the experience of Mac OS 9 being more stable.
Fundamentally, Mac OS X protected memory spaces and modern frameworks/runtimes. Mac OS 9 is an antiquated architecture in which apps can write all over memory. There's no way this can result in a more stable system with all else being equal.
On the old MACs application would never crash with a hex dump and no indication where the problem lies
I think you've confused something somewhere.
Mac OS 9 gives you next to zero information about where the problem lies when an app crashes. About the best you can get is MacsBug spitting out raw memory contents. Under Mac OS X you have console and crash reporter, which contain some human-readable information.
I work in a large shop where MAC needed a lot of hand holding, let's now even talk about the issues with crashing when using FONTs on the MAC, Apple really blew it. Oh, but wait I can pay more money to check and organize my fonts in the hope that it will keep OSX from crashing!
What are you talking about here? Are you using the Classic emulation environment or something?
- Scott
OS X uses BSD as its base
And even that's not perfectly accurate. Mach and BSD work together at the core of the OS. Mach is really in control at the lowest levels, and BSD jumps in at various parts for things like permissions, networking, filesystem support, etc.
If they want to access a file, they probably use Carbon or Cocoa file-access functions
That's true, yes. But both Cocoa and Carbon go down to the C-based CoreFoundation libraries for core functionality. CoreFoundation is part of Darwin.
If they want to have threads, they use Carbon or Cocoa thread functions, or they use Mach threads if they need something lower-level.
It's a little more complicated than that. These pages probably describe it best:
Tasks and Processes
Threading Packages
Not trying to step on toes, just thought I'd fill in some gaps.
- Scott
Don't expect that porting Linux or FreeBSD drivers to Mac OS X should be trivial either
Depends on the type of driver. Mac OS X has used CUPS for printing since Jaguar, and Panther includes Gimp-Print.
- Scott
No, no, a thousand times no. Apple is ALREADY selling Macs faster than they can make them.
If they get more orders, they've buff up manufacturing and shipping. It's not like Apple wouldn't be able to make more Macs, it's just there's a critical mass to move from one tier of production output to the next.
Apple doesn't give a FLYING SHIT about market share.
Well, they do care about market share, of course. It just isn't their sole metric of success ala Dell or Microsoft. No question their overriding priority is creating a great product.
WHILE STILL releasing entirely new products (like the G4 iMac, the iPod, the iTunes Music Store, and the G5) and continuing to enhance their existing products on an aggressive timeline. That's FUCKING AMAZING, man.
Amen to that. The raw output has been mind blowing, pure and simple.
- Scott
p.s. xp home $199, xp pro $299
For that matter, you can get a five license "family pack" of Panther for $199.
- Scott
but paying the same for an upgrade from 10.2 to 10.3 as someone might pay to upgrade from Mac OS 9 to 10.3 is not
For technical reasons, Apple chose to go with a more conservative numbering scheme. The problem seems to be that buyers put way too much emphasis on the version number. For example, 10.2 brought Quartz Extreme, which was a massive leap for the graphics engine. This isn't something you'd typically find in a point release. These are major new features that require serious engineering.
Mac OS X 10.3 is actually Mac OS X 3.0. In fact, I have an early Mac OS X packing list that reads "Mac OS X 1.0", but they've since changed it to Mac OS X 10.0. Apple tried to address the point release stigma using "Jaguar" and "Panther", but there's still some confusion.
The bizarre dilemma Apple finds themselves in is that they've created this incredibly flexible architecture that allows them to make sweeping improvements very quickly, but it happens so fast that people don't think it's real. You can't win.
As for needing Panther to run future applications, yes, of course. Apple buffs up the frameworks, so better applications will result from the framework enhancements. The alternative is to just sit around and let other OS architectures catch up while not selling a new product. I don't think the advantages of this outweight the disadvantages at this point.
- Scott
I've been using Xcode for a few months now, and it's definitely a big leap from Project Builder. Even the "beta" version of Xcode I got at WWDC was my preferred tool over the last release version of Project Builder.
There are a lot of features that aren't obvious on the surface, which is good because you can get started quickly, and dig deeper at your leisure.
Good stuff.
- Scott
Does this mean Darwin comes with 10.3?
Mac OS X has always sat on top of Darwin.
- Scott
These $20 10.3 discs that everyone is talking about REQUIRE 10.2 INSTALLATION already on the machine.
That makes sense, doesn't it? Only people who bought machines recently (ie -- came with Jaguar preinstalled) are entitled to a $20 Panther upgrade.
- Scott
The guy asks what's the party, at which point the head IT guy explains how they had magically consolidated the Active Directory groups from 70 to 4 thus
The funny thing about this too is that the IT guy looks completely worn out from his ordeal with the Microsoft software. Do you really want the type of software that suggests a party is in order after setup is complete?
I guess it's supposed to make the IT people feel empowered.
- Scott
Talkback was created by a company called Full Circle Software. I did some work for them in 1998, and I believe they already had a license agreement with Netscape at that point. The initial work goes back quite a bit further.
More info on Talkback is available here.
- Scott
By "practical", I mean functioning. If MS wants to violate a standard or leaves in known bugs, there is not much we can do other than work around them.
I suppose all of that is possible, but as of right now, CSS is totally practical (and functioning) as a cross-browser formatting tool. It's the meeting place of WinIE, Safari, Konquerer, Mozilla, Netscape, Camino, etc.
Microsoft could break it if they wanted, but I don't think this would necessarily net much benefit considering all the sites that currently use CSS, or are moving to it.
- Scott
CSS in NS4 is broken.
Yes, but some things do work. As I recall (I could be wrong), basic box functionality is one of those things.
Numerous elements of stylesheets are not handled as expected.
Believe me, I know.
Also, NS4 crashes frequently when accessing CSS pages.
Lots of things crash Netscape 4. I think it's possible to isolate the most common crash involving NS4.
It is necessary to leave CSS disabled in NS4.
You've the first person I've heard from that thought so.
So NS4 is equivalent to a browser with no CSS
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree then. Basically, I think primitive CSS box support is better than deeply nested tables.
- Scott
I take that to mean you consider using a few layers of tables to be "complex". OK, so be it.
Unless you're trying to support Netscape 3 and IE 3, you should be able to replace many (if not most) nested table configurations with CSS box equivalents, even on the older (4.x) browsers. At least that's been my experience.
- Scott
If you want the largest audience possible, then using the latest web standards, such as promoted by Zeldman, is not what you want to do.
By that logic, nobody should write software for anything but Windows.
I think you've gone overboard in describing how backward compatible one has to be. Netscape 4 has a very small userbase at this point. And a visual browser (ie: not Lynx) that doesn't support CSS text colors is a true rarity.
There's been a long standing chicken and egg problem. Browser makers never beefed up their standards support until web authors started using CSS widely.
- Scott
There are no practical "web standards" except for a trivial subset. The vast majority of users have MS-IE browsers, and IE only half-ass fallows "official" standards.
Huh?
How did you decide all of this? Have you looked at CSS at all?
- Scott