It's plum ironic that you read all about Linux, BSD, Solaris, hacking, personal freedoms, and all other sorts of stuff on Slashdot, and yet no one ever seems to be able to get it right, or care to try very hard, when it comes to the Mac OS or Mac OS X. Even the initial post didn't seem to me to have looked very hard to see if there IS a Mac OS X version of Office.
I wrote the MacNN article which sparked this thread last year, and saw a complete and total lack of understanding in most of the following posts. The tone of the followups expressed a lack of understanding on Apple's part for using BSD and not Linux - that Apple is not savvy enough to be in business, etc. This thread has reinforced that most dotters don't really understand what Mac OS X IS.
-++-
Mac OS X is NOT Unix. Mac OS X is NOT *NIX, or Linux. The architecture of Mac OS X is focused on leveraging the Mach kernel to provide services, do VM, handle threads, and more. Then, the tools on top of that are crafted to the Mach kernel, such as all applications being a Mach thread, and networking through BSD sockets. There is no compatibility layer which speaks Mach, there is only Mach.
Perhaps the work to change this would not revolutionize the field of Computer Science, but there is no true reason for Apple to switch, and having application *NIX personalities is a feature almost no "Mac" user would ever care about.
Quartz is not X11. X11 is a protocol, Quartz is an API. The better analogy would be Quartz and KDE - both of which feed a display engine, and provide widgets and graphical tools. Without getting into a side by side comparison, which you choose is going to be a matter of choice as to which you like better.
But, Microsoft worked hard to leverage the Quartz API for many of the features in Office - graph generation being the primary target, so a good amount of work would have to be done to reengineer major parts of the display engine just to get around these sections.
Consider further, if you will, how hard it has proven to be for most programming firms to take a Win32 application to the Mac using the Mac Toolbox (aka Classic) or even Carbon, much less fine-tuning it's graphics for the platform. The more impressive quick translation applications for Mac OS X have been written in Cocoa, the framework that has evolved from the NextSTEP/OPENSTEP frameworks/APIs, and Cocoa isn't even close to being link Carbon.
With the Mac Office codebase written in Carbon/Classic, it would take quite a while for any porting to take place, and in such time, I am confidant a newer version of Office would have already been released...
-++-
I'm not saying Slashdot should become, overnight, more Mac OS X conscious, but really...no one would spare the whip on someone who said Linux and Windows were the same since they are both operating systems...
This is /. material?
on
Mac Rants
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Having covered Apple and the Macintosh community with a top-three visited Macintosh resource site and run my own Mac OS X site, I find it silly that the inference is that this discussion doesn't take place every single day.
Discussions amongst people who find Mac vs. Windows, RISC vs. CISC, Apple vs. anyone else cuz Apple sux, or any of these types of completely "to your own taste" topics are really sad when they are cast as "a good discussion starting piece" when the starting point is years in the past, and the journey has been beaten to death.
The G4 vs. Pentium tests are not for/.ers, and you all know that to be true - they are for the Mac zealots (zealot, n. - one who engages warmly in any cause, and pursues his object with earnestness and ardor) and for such magazines as PC Magazine where Apple efforts to keep its moderate mindshare by using the trade show equivalent of the "bully pulpit."
When "[Adobe Photoshop 6 is] an application highly optimized for the G4 and known to have problems on the Pentium 4" is used against the G4 and its apparent ease of exploitation and quality of performance at particular clock speeds and the article gets/.'d, it makes me wonder how low the individual requirements of objectivity and lack of bias have shrunk amongst the "digital learned"...
Slashdot Mirror
It's plum ironic that you read all about Linux, BSD, Solaris, hacking, personal freedoms, and all other sorts of stuff on Slashdot, and yet no one ever seems to be able to get it right, or care to try very hard, when it comes to the Mac OS or Mac OS X. Even the initial post didn't seem to me to have looked very hard to see if there IS a Mac OS X version of Office.
I wrote the MacNN article which sparked this thread last year, and saw a complete and total lack of understanding in most of the following posts. The tone of the followups expressed a lack of understanding on Apple's part for using BSD and not Linux - that Apple is not savvy enough to be in business, etc. This thread has reinforced that most dotters don't really understand what Mac OS X IS.
-++-
Mac OS X is NOT Unix. Mac OS X is NOT *NIX, or Linux. The architecture of Mac OS X is focused on leveraging the Mach kernel to provide services, do VM, handle threads, and more. Then, the tools on top of that are crafted to the Mach kernel, such as all applications being a Mach thread, and networking through BSD sockets. There is no compatibility layer which speaks Mach, there is only Mach.
Perhaps the work to change this would not revolutionize the field of Computer Science, but there is no true reason for Apple to switch, and having application *NIX personalities is a feature almost no "Mac" user would ever care about.
Quartz is not X11. X11 is a protocol, Quartz is an API. The better analogy would be Quartz and KDE - both of which feed a display engine, and provide widgets and graphical tools. Without getting into a side by side comparison, which you choose is going to be a matter of choice as to which you like better.
But, Microsoft worked hard to leverage the Quartz API for many of the features in Office - graph generation being the primary target, so a good amount of work would have to be done to reengineer major parts of the display engine just to get around these sections.
Consider further, if you will, how hard it has proven to be for most programming firms to take a Win32 application to the Mac using the Mac Toolbox (aka Classic) or even Carbon, much less fine-tuning it's graphics for the platform. The more impressive quick translation applications for Mac OS X have been written in Cocoa, the framework that has evolved from the NextSTEP/OPENSTEP frameworks/APIs, and Cocoa isn't even close to being link Carbon.
With the Mac Office codebase written in Carbon/Classic, it would take quite a while for any porting to take place, and in such time, I am confidant a newer version of Office would have already been released...
-++-
I'm not saying Slashdot should become, overnight, more Mac OS X conscious, but really...no one would spare the whip on someone who said Linux and Windows were the same since they are both operating systems...
Having covered Apple and the Macintosh community with a top-three visited Macintosh resource site and run my own Mac OS X site, I find it silly that the inference is that this discussion doesn't take place every single day.
Discussions amongst people who find Mac vs. Windows, RISC vs. CISC, Apple vs. anyone else cuz Apple sux, or any of these types of completely "to your own taste" topics are really sad when they are cast as "a good discussion starting piece" when the starting point is years in the past, and the journey has been beaten to death.
The G4 vs. Pentium tests are not for /.ers, and you all know that to be true - they are for the Mac zealots (zealot, n. - one who engages warmly in any cause, and pursues his object with earnestness and ardor) and for such magazines as PC Magazine where Apple efforts to keep its moderate mindshare by using the trade show equivalent of the "bully pulpit."
When "[Adobe Photoshop 6 is] an application highly optimized for the G4 and known to have problems on the Pentium 4" is used against the G4 and its apparent ease of exploitation and quality of performance at particular clock speeds and the article gets /.'d, it makes me wonder how low the individual requirements of objectivity and lack of bias have shrunk amongst the "digital learned"...