NeXTSTEP was pretty far beyond the contemporaneous X11 offerings and NT probably through at least NT 4, and numerous reviews from the period state as much. (They also remark on the very steep price, but it's arguable that Jobs wasn't a really good businessman until he returned to Apple.) Your point about Cutler, and most of the points you're trying to make, was lost in your own hyperbole and overeagerness to fight Slashdot's institutional bias against Windows.
The only reason we're talking about NeXTSTEP is because you wanted to argue architectures and APIs in the first place. Like it or not, OS X IS directly descended from NeXT's codebase, and it's a testament to that codebase that the core APIs remain similar even if a substantial portion of the code behind the scenes has changed. By your own admission, Microsoft has changed Windows more often and more drastically than Apple has OS X, and all it's bought them is a couple months of clear technical superiority. DirectX 10 may be a strong technical advantage, but it's one that matters to a vanishing portion of the desktop market. All the other new bells and whistles in Vista are superficially different from the alternatives that are available or will soon be available, and your arguments have done little to convince me otherwise.
The logic is that NT 3.1 Workstation shipped in 1993 and NeXTSTEP 1.0 shipped in 1989 (with 0.9 publicly available on a limited basis a year before that). If you want to quibble over the fact that Dave Cutler jumped ship to MS in 1988, fine, but then you have to recognize that he wouldn't ship anything for five years AND that development on NeXTSTEP began less than a year after Jobs and his chosen five executives left Apple in 1985. Windows NT was in no way, shape, or form the first robust multiuser GUI workstation.
Besides the filesystem red herring that you rightfully disputed, and the multi-user paradigm which others have already called you out on, what you're telling me is that DirectX 10 is the sole selling point of Vista. That ensures Microsoft's dominance in the PC gaming market alone, something that was never in question. Even in the console market, their developer tools and APIs give them a selling point, but they can hardly dominate that market when Nintendo is out-innovating them, undercutting them (and still making a profit), and bringing scads of new people into the market that were never the least bit interested in the traditional console paradigm that Microsoft's offering is a shining example of.
DirectX 10 means fuck-all for most desktop users. GPU-accelerated or no, Apple already tried the ubiquitous-transparency eye candy four years ago and discarded it. It's ultimately superficial and distracting, but it's the first thing you notice when you walk up to a Vista computer. Other than that, it's pretty much the same old Windows. That's why Microsoft chose to tie DX10 to Vista when they could've just as easily released it on its own, as they've done with previous DirectX iterations. They know that the vast majority of their sales come from OEM purchases, so to make a few extra bucks off upgrades, they needed a hook to draw in those customers who are on the leading edge of technology and are willing to blow a significant amount of money on upgrades... meaning your hardest-of-the-hardcore gamers. I'd wager you're one of those, because practically nobody else would be frothing at the mouth to get ahold of Vista, or really have much reason to be any sort of a Windows enthusiast.
The flip-side of that argument: How long can the supposed monopolist keep selling at a loss to sustain control of the widget market? They'd have to have one hell of a huge war-chest to keep it up every time somebody showed up to compete. Eventually, somebody with a war-chest just as big is going to show up and price their product profitably, then wait for the fools selling at a loss to bleed dry. That's why you'd enter the market: if you can stick it out long enough, somebody at your competitor is going to come to their senses and realize that control of the market is not worth the mounting losses.
On old hardware, I typically find myself reaching for FreeBSD before anything else. I came into possession of an old Pentium 133 with a CD-ROM drive that couldn't be booted from directly. The only Linux that would install was Damn Small Linux, and I disliked its behavior of booting from an image on the hard drive rather than installing to its own filesystem on the hard drive, so the next candidate was FBSD. It installed and ran great... the only caveat was that the 1GB hard drive was too small for a ports-tree install. Ever since then, I've kept FBSD handy at all times for whenever I run into an old machine.
You can in fact do WINE for free, it's been supported on OS X since sometime in the 0.9.2x versions. However, you are correct that you don't get any of the helper stuff (you pretty much have to figure out how to launch your app using command-line WINE), and compatibility isn't as good as CrossOver -- there's no Direct3D support at all, as far as I can see. Of course, you don't get the same user support that Codeweavers gives you either. Plus you have to compile it yourself (meaning you need the dev tools installed), since there's no installer package yet. I just have it installed for the PokerStars client, but for someone who needed more extensive support or was running a mission-critical app, Crossover Mac is probably well worth it.
Deep Space Nine is widely considered the best Trek series, and its last four seasons centered around an ongoing story about a major war that the Federation stood a major chance of losing. One could perhaps argue that it wasn't as big a success as TNG or TOS, but all the data I've ever seen indicated that it did as well as TNG in first-run syndication. (Then Spike ran it into the ground after it was removed from syndicated reruns, but such is the nature of the modern TV market.)
And it set the stage for even more interesting story possibilities, although they haven't been explored. As far as we've seen, Starfleet has always been balanced between its military aspect and peaceful exploration. Right up till STVI, the balance was almost dead even: there was a state of cold war with the Klingons, but you also had Kirk and his contemporaries doing their 5-year missions of exploration. During TNG, one can argue that the balance had swung heavily towards the explorers (although there is that Cardassian war immediately pre-TNG that we didn't get to see). DS9 chronicled a sudden and severe shift toward militarism. The warships that the grandparent poster wanted to see being spit out have already been spat out. The Defiant was mass-produced, even though its sole purpose is as an overpowered gunship. TNG told us that the initial run of Galaxy-class ships was limited to 9, and DS9 shows us a whole lot more than that, all of them heavily armed and doubtless assembled on an accelerated total-war production regimen.
So even though the Federation won, how does it go back to the fleet full of peaceful explorers we saw during TNG? There's the essential conflict that sets up the premise of such a story. Add to that the fact that there's a gigantic power vacuum in Romulan space since Picard's vinyl-fetishist clone murdered the Senate, and throw in a few TOS-style devious-bastard Klingons who don't like Martok because he's too buddy-buddy with the Federation, oh, and those Section 31 guys too, and we have a recipe for a very interesting story that is equal parts action and commentary on human nature.
So an entertaining and thoughtful follow-on to TNG-era Trek is certainly possible (although maybe not in the exact fashion the GPP was thinking about), and it could be a solid draw for both nerds and casual fans alike with happy memories of TNG and DS9. But such ideas aren't under consideration because executives would rather find a gimmick that they think would bring in a lot of people all at once. Case in point, a prequel movie which recasts the two most recognized Trek characters out there (and make no mistake, there will be an infinite amount of nerd rage on this point), or the proposed Web-based miniseries which completely overthrows the Trek universe to give us "Star Trek as YOU'VE NEVER SEEN IT BEFORE!"
In all seriousness, though, if this has Kirk and Spock at the Academy, it is 100% guaranteed to feature a scene in which Kirk rigs the Kobayashi Maru simulator.
OS X was great back in 1990, too, when it was called NeXTSTEP and used a Display PostScript backend. Just because an established technology is old doesn't mean it's worthless.
They may well do it, but at the same time, they will make it just hard enough to use Windows for it to be annoying, and if people want it easy, they'll subtly recommend purchasing Parallels or VMware. That's what Boot Camp does. I have Windows installed, but I only use it for a couple games, and it's annoying to boot into Windows just for that. Under your idea, a few Windows PC customers may well buy an Apple primarily for Windows with OS X as an extra bonus, but Apple would stand to benefit if they could convince those users to switch over to OS X full time.
Some people are of the opinion that Apple is treating Windows like they treated OS 9 when OS X first came out, and that's a dead-on description. Releasing Windows with new Macs would be a carrot-and-stick approach to convincing Windows users to switch to OS X. Except in this case, the stick tastes better than the carrot.
They only locked out diesels after, I think, 2001 or 2002. My family purchased two diesel New Beetles brand-new here in CA (and they're both still going). In addition, VW was able to sell a few V10 TDI Touaregs with particulate filters here this past year due to transitory emissions regs.
Anything NeXT you can get your hands on
on
Good Vintage Computers?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This would be particularly interesting, since you can point out to the Mac users in your audience (and there's bound to be more than a few) that most of the basic concepts behind OS X were laid down in 1989. The downside is that a NeXT machine is likely to eat up your entire $600 budget and more.
There are so many other, better plot threads they could pick up, but instead they base everything on a premise out of one of the least scientifically plausible episodes of Voyager, a series which was already stretching it past the breaking point, even for Star Trek. Good job completing Star Trek's metamorphosis into pop crap, guys.
Apple did not, strictly speaking, completely change their platform in the same sense that the grandparent poster is describing. They bought NeXT and engineered Carbon as a bridge between NeXT's existing platform and the Mac OS. In other words, they didn't rebuild everything from the ground up. Their attempts to do this failed, as did Microsoft's pre-NT attempts to replace the DOS/Windows combination. So the question is, is there a (preferably closed-source) OS on the market today that Microsoft could "embrace and extend" in a similar way to what Apple did with NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP? I don't think so. Plus what keeps Windows on top is its tremendous application base. There's not much reason for them to switch away from the NT kernel and Win32+.NET, especially since such a project would almost certainly be an engineering clusterfuck orders of magnitude larger than Vista.
just because they believe it will somehow "protect" them if 69 ninjas suddenly attack them.You marginalize the importance of self-defense, when there are quite a few people who stand to benefit from having a personal weapon available to them... such as, for instance, residents of inner cities where murder rates are typically at their highest. By taking legal guns out of urban areas, you might prevent a few crimes a year, yes, but the criminal enterprises that form the core of illegal activity in such areas are importing and selling weapons right alongside drugs. Even then, you look at someplace like England, which not only has a gun ban but more draconian self-defense laws, and you see crap like "happy-slapping" where lowlifes get away with harassing innocent people because they're unsure what will happen if they try to fight back. Limiting individuals' options for self-defense is not a good course to set a society on, and it can be a significant side effect of attempting to impose civilization from above.
Funny, I don't recall being able to buy arbitrary quantities of Polonium down the street from my local drug dealer (liquor stores included).And poor Doc Brown thought that in 1985, plutonium would be available in every corner drug store.:(
Michael Okuda was one of the design consultants on this game, and seemed to be pretty heavily into it. Now they've announced that he's also leading the production team on the new CGI versions of the original series. It seems like they are doing those in a fairly compressed timeframe, meaning that most of his time will probably be devoted to TOS rather than this game... and the game's quality, production schedule, or both will end up suffering.
Slashdot Mirror
But Astroglide is water-based...
NeXTSTEP was pretty far beyond the contemporaneous X11 offerings and NT probably through at least NT 4, and numerous reviews from the period state as much. (They also remark on the very steep price, but it's arguable that Jobs wasn't a really good businessman until he returned to Apple.) Your point about Cutler, and most of the points you're trying to make, was lost in your own hyperbole and overeagerness to fight Slashdot's institutional bias against Windows.
The only reason we're talking about NeXTSTEP is because you wanted to argue architectures and APIs in the first place. Like it or not, OS X IS directly descended from NeXT's codebase, and it's a testament to that codebase that the core APIs remain similar even if a substantial portion of the code behind the scenes has changed. By your own admission, Microsoft has changed Windows more often and more drastically than Apple has OS X, and all it's bought them is a couple months of clear technical superiority. DirectX 10 may be a strong technical advantage, but it's one that matters to a vanishing portion of the desktop market. All the other new bells and whistles in Vista are superficially different from the alternatives that are available or will soon be available, and your arguments have done little to convince me otherwise.
When the hell was VMS a desktop OS?
The logic is that NT 3.1 Workstation shipped in 1993 and NeXTSTEP 1.0 shipped in 1989 (with 0.9 publicly available on a limited basis a year before that). If you want to quibble over the fact that Dave Cutler jumped ship to MS in 1988, fine, but then you have to recognize that he wouldn't ship anything for five years AND that development on NeXTSTEP began less than a year after Jobs and his chosen five executives left Apple in 1985. Windows NT was in no way, shape, or form the first robust multiuser GUI workstation.
Besides the filesystem red herring that you rightfully disputed, and the multi-user paradigm which others have already called you out on, what you're telling me is that DirectX 10 is the sole selling point of Vista. That ensures Microsoft's dominance in the PC gaming market alone, something that was never in question. Even in the console market, their developer tools and APIs give them a selling point, but they can hardly dominate that market when Nintendo is out-innovating them, undercutting them (and still making a profit), and bringing scads of new people into the market that were never the least bit interested in the traditional console paradigm that Microsoft's offering is a shining example of.
DirectX 10 means fuck-all for most desktop users. GPU-accelerated or no, Apple already tried the ubiquitous-transparency eye candy four years ago and discarded it. It's ultimately superficial and distracting, but it's the first thing you notice when you walk up to a Vista computer. Other than that, it's pretty much the same old Windows. That's why Microsoft chose to tie DX10 to Vista when they could've just as easily released it on its own, as they've done with previous DirectX iterations. They know that the vast majority of their sales come from OEM purchases, so to make a few extra bucks off upgrades, they needed a hook to draw in those customers who are on the leading edge of technology and are willing to blow a significant amount of money on upgrades... meaning your hardest-of-the-hardcore gamers. I'd wager you're one of those, because practically nobody else would be frothing at the mouth to get ahold of Vista, or really have much reason to be any sort of a Windows enthusiast.
The flip-side of that argument: How long can the supposed monopolist keep selling at a loss to sustain control of the widget market? They'd have to have one hell of a huge war-chest to keep it up every time somebody showed up to compete. Eventually, somebody with a war-chest just as big is going to show up and price their product profitably, then wait for the fools selling at a loss to bleed dry. That's why you'd enter the market: if you can stick it out long enough, somebody at your competitor is going to come to their senses and realize that control of the market is not worth the mounting losses.
On old hardware, I typically find myself reaching for FreeBSD before anything else. I came into possession of an old Pentium 133 with a CD-ROM drive that couldn't be booted from directly. The only Linux that would install was Damn Small Linux, and I disliked its behavior of booting from an image on the hard drive rather than installing to its own filesystem on the hard drive, so the next candidate was FBSD. It installed and ran great... the only caveat was that the 1GB hard drive was too small for a ports-tree install. Ever since then, I've kept FBSD handy at all times for whenever I run into an old machine.
You can in fact do WINE for free, it's been supported on OS X since sometime in the 0.9.2x versions. However, you are correct that you don't get any of the helper stuff (you pretty much have to figure out how to launch your app using command-line WINE), and compatibility isn't as good as CrossOver -- there's no Direct3D support at all, as far as I can see. Of course, you don't get the same user support that Codeweavers gives you either. Plus you have to compile it yourself (meaning you need the dev tools installed), since there's no installer package yet. I just have it installed for the PokerStars client, but for someone who needed more extensive support or was running a mission-critical app, Crossover Mac is probably well worth it.
Deep Space Nine is widely considered the best Trek series, and its last four seasons centered around an ongoing story about a major war that the Federation stood a major chance of losing. One could perhaps argue that it wasn't as big a success as TNG or TOS, but all the data I've ever seen indicated that it did as well as TNG in first-run syndication. (Then Spike ran it into the ground after it was removed from syndicated reruns, but such is the nature of the modern TV market.)
And it set the stage for even more interesting story possibilities, although they haven't been explored. As far as we've seen, Starfleet has always been balanced between its military aspect and peaceful exploration. Right up till STVI, the balance was almost dead even: there was a state of cold war with the Klingons, but you also had Kirk and his contemporaries doing their 5-year missions of exploration. During TNG, one can argue that the balance had swung heavily towards the explorers (although there is that Cardassian war immediately pre-TNG that we didn't get to see). DS9 chronicled a sudden and severe shift toward militarism. The warships that the grandparent poster wanted to see being spit out have already been spat out. The Defiant was mass-produced, even though its sole purpose is as an overpowered gunship. TNG told us that the initial run of Galaxy-class ships was limited to 9, and DS9 shows us a whole lot more than that, all of them heavily armed and doubtless assembled on an accelerated total-war production regimen.
So even though the Federation won, how does it go back to the fleet full of peaceful explorers we saw during TNG? There's the essential conflict that sets up the premise of such a story. Add to that the fact that there's a gigantic power vacuum in Romulan space since Picard's vinyl-fetishist clone murdered the Senate, and throw in a few TOS-style devious-bastard Klingons who don't like Martok because he's too buddy-buddy with the Federation, oh, and those Section 31 guys too, and we have a recipe for a very interesting story that is equal parts action and commentary on human nature.
So an entertaining and thoughtful follow-on to TNG-era Trek is certainly possible (although maybe not in the exact fashion the GPP was thinking about), and it could be a solid draw for both nerds and casual fans alike with happy memories of TNG and DS9. But such ideas aren't under consideration because executives would rather find a gimmick that they think would bring in a lot of people all at once. Case in point, a prequel movie which recasts the two most recognized Trek characters out there (and make no mistake, there will be an infinite amount of nerd rage on this point), or the proposed Web-based miniseries which completely overthrows the Trek universe to give us "Star Trek as YOU'VE NEVER SEEN IT BEFORE!"
In all seriousness, though, if this has Kirk and Spock at the Academy, it is 100% guaranteed to feature a scene in which Kirk rigs the Kobayashi Maru simulator.
OS X was great back in 1990, too, when it was called NeXTSTEP and used a Display PostScript backend. Just because an established technology is old doesn't mean it's worthless.
They may well do it, but at the same time, they will make it just hard enough to use Windows for it to be annoying, and if people want it easy, they'll subtly recommend purchasing Parallels or VMware. That's what Boot Camp does. I have Windows installed, but I only use it for a couple games, and it's annoying to boot into Windows just for that. Under your idea, a few Windows PC customers may well buy an Apple primarily for Windows with OS X as an extra bonus, but Apple would stand to benefit if they could convince those users to switch over to OS X full time.
Some people are of the opinion that Apple is treating Windows like they treated OS 9 when OS X first came out, and that's a dead-on description. Releasing Windows with new Macs would be a carrot-and-stick approach to convincing Windows users to switch to OS X. Except in this case, the stick tastes better than the carrot.
They only locked out diesels after, I think, 2001 or 2002. My family purchased two diesel New Beetles brand-new here in CA (and they're both still going). In addition, VW was able to sell a few V10 TDI Touaregs with particulate filters here this past year due to transitory emissions regs.
This would be particularly interesting, since you can point out to the Mac users in your audience (and there's bound to be more than a few) that most of the basic concepts behind OS X were laid down in 1989. The downside is that a NeXT machine is likely to eat up your entire $600 budget and more.
There are so many other, better plot threads they could pick up, but instead they base everything on a premise out of one of the least scientifically plausible episodes of Voyager, a series which was already stretching it past the breaking point, even for Star Trek. Good job completing Star Trek's metamorphosis into pop crap, guys.
Any options for a browser plugin for OS X?
Apple did not, strictly speaking, completely change their platform in the same sense that the grandparent poster is describing. They bought NeXT and engineered Carbon as a bridge between NeXT's existing platform and the Mac OS. In other words, they didn't rebuild everything from the ground up. Their attempts to do this failed, as did Microsoft's pre-NT attempts to replace the DOS/Windows combination. So the question is, is there a (preferably closed-source) OS on the market today that Microsoft could "embrace and extend" in a similar way to what Apple did with NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP? I don't think so. Plus what keeps Windows on top is its tremendous application base. There's not much reason for them to switch away from the NT kernel and Win32+.NET, especially since such a project would almost certainly be an engineering clusterfuck orders of magnitude larger than Vista.
just because they believe it will somehow "protect" them if 69 ninjas suddenly attack them.You marginalize the importance of self-defense, when there are quite a few people who stand to benefit from having a personal weapon available to them... such as, for instance, residents of inner cities where murder rates are typically at their highest. By taking legal guns out of urban areas, you might prevent a few crimes a year, yes, but the criminal enterprises that form the core of illegal activity in such areas are importing and selling weapons right alongside drugs. Even then, you look at someplace like England, which not only has a gun ban but more draconian self-defense laws, and you see crap like "happy-slapping" where lowlifes get away with harassing innocent people because they're unsure what will happen if they try to fight back. Limiting individuals' options for self-defense is not a good course to set a society on, and it can be a significant side effect of attempting to impose civilization from above.
Funny, I don't recall being able to buy arbitrary quantities of Polonium down the street from my local drug dealer (liquor stores included).And poor Doc Brown thought that in 1985, plutonium would be available in every corner drug store. :(
The G3 AIO would've been ATI Mach64 graphics. So yeah, pretty weak.
Borg versus goatse, hivemind dies horribly.
The ramming scene in Nemesis actually used a physical model of the Ent-E's saucer. Everything else was digital, though.
American Graffiti was based on his life in Modesto, CA, not Fresno. Just a small nitpick.
They are saving Core 4 for the eventual return of NetBurst.
They could get some serious publicity if they had Captain Jack himself on board.
Michael Okuda was one of the design consultants on this game, and seemed to be pretty heavily into it. Now they've announced that he's also leading the production team on the new CGI versions of the original series. It seems like they are doing those in a fairly compressed timeframe, meaning that most of his time will probably be devoted to TOS rather than this game... and the game's quality, production schedule, or both will end up suffering.