Why would I pay good money for a second machine when I can make the one I have dual-boot for free?
Because dual booting is a bloody nuisance.
If you develop for both machines, you're forced to duplicate development environments. If you have 2 machines and a preferred tool, e.g. Xcode/Eclipse/Emacs - whatever - you can use solely that editor and use cross-compile tools. You don't have to maintain configuration settings for each OS or use different development tools because one program isn't available for one OS.
I don't know what sort of software you write but if it's any kind of client-server requiring a database/web/application server its much nicer to have a dedicated deployment machine, not to mention a CVS, or similar, repository. (Even if that physically corresponds to your linux client box).
Then there's the possibility that you're in the middle of something and want to run a piece of software that only exists in your other environment. Reboot, make the change and reboot again.
Believe me it's much less hassle to have 2 machines.:)
I wonder if the Oracle X86 Linux binaries can be made to run on the Intel Macs under BSDs Linux emulation?
Well, I'm certainly no expert but I believe compat_linux does its work in the netbsd kernel. So XNU would need to be modified to support loading linux binaries. A task for the OpenDarwin community?
Then there's news bulletins and documentaries where an English translation is loudly superimposed over the top of native speaker. You can still hear the tones of the person they're interviewing but it's drowned out due to the translation.
All because television programmers dumb down content because the average television viewer is perceived to be "too stupid" to concentrate on subtitles. I'll take subtitled content any day...
They've previously gotten MacOS9 programs to run in MacOSX
The OS9 --> OSX transition happened with full source code and experts from both the 'Classic' and NeXT environments.
Just imagine 150 engineers working full time on Wine.
150 engineers x $100K salary cost (a very conservative estimate) = $15Million/year. Do you honestly think it's justifiable to spend $15M on reverse engineering a competitor's product?
As for DirectX 9 games, again the issue is about promoting alternatives to Windows. In this case OpenGL.
People have suggested too that Apple pour large amounts of money into OpenOffice.org. The code is open but directly benefits Sun through StarOffice. Apple already have their own productivity applications in iWork...
These projects are theoretically possible but in the mind of Apple not commercially productive when the R&D could be spent improving OSX and homegrown solutions.
their latest gimmick instruction set add-on (SSE7 or whatever we're up to now)
SSE3, I believe. SSE4 is no doubt on the horizon, primarily because Apple users will note that Photoshop doesn't seem as zippy as when it was optimised for altivec.:)
I believe the problem as for x86 is again third party software such as flash and Java. Historically neither have had 64bit binaries from their vendor.
For Java, Sun has said, in the short term at least, they won't go to the trouble of releasing the necessary software for 64bit - Java Plugin and Java Web Start. IIRC, the method of installation for 64bit Solaris (SPARC) is to install the 32bit JRE (which has the plugin and web start) and then install the 64bit JRE over top.
This stifles usage of x86-64 with a 64bit OS if a 32bit compatibility module is needed. Too many hoops to jump through. AMD have had Athlon 64 for how many years now???:( Methinks they'll only make the effort when 64bit Vista arrives.
I wonder what proportion of a universal binary is platform specific and not images and other resources.
I guess in these days of high speed connections, big hard disks and DVD installs universal binaries aren't such an issue. But I remember having a 2400 baud modem and a 68k Mac. It was a nuisance having multiple CPU support then. First one spent ages waiting for a.sit.hqx file to download, decode and decompress. Then strip out the PowerPC binary so it wouldn't fill up a 40MB hard disk.
If you're using darwinports it's not an issue because the application will be optimised for OS24Ever's machine. For intel machines Fink should be smart enough to download binaries in the following order:
x86(Native)
Universal
PPC(Rosetta)
(Unless of course you have an intranet package cache for multiple machines - in which case you might prefer to always download universal).
Which raises an interesting point about universal binaries. How many binaries will gcc/xcode target in a universal binary? There's the 2 major architectures (x86/powerpc) BUT G3 (no altivec), G4 (altivec), G5(64-bit), x86(32-bit) and x86-64(64bit in the not too distant future). So, already 5 CPU types for which a compiler can optimise. Not to mention optimisations for dual-core/dual CPU machines.
[Aside, for any Java apps you may run: Java gets a lot of flack for being slow but Sun's Hotspot is able to compile on the fly, at runtime, native code for a CPU from a single binary (bytecode). The optimisation is done in the Java Virtual Machine rather than the application binary]
You see if there's a universal binary, chances are it won't be optimised for your CPU architecture. Where a software provider gives you the source, in this case an open source project, darwinports (pkgsrc/portage etc) is your best bet. Not to mention it will, hopefully, compile shared libraries for gecko. So that if you happen to use another mozilla app like thunderbird - less to download, less memory consumption.
The question remains, much as we like to poke fun at them, whether your average Mac user can be bothered with such details when drag and drop installers exist. Perhaps integration with Software Update would help.
Yep, Word and Excel were staples of 68k Macs long before their Windows counterparts.
In a sense it was the Mac that kept MS in the game as far as office suites. Their experience in writing GUI apps on the Mac gave them a great edge over WordPerfect and Lotus during the transition from DOS to Windows.
And x86 PCs generally don't use OpenFirmware; Macs do on PPC.
Speculation surrounds Apple's rumoured x86 release (some rumours claim this month) whether they will adopt Intel's EFI, an OpenFirmware substitute.
Intel has been working on EFI for 7 years. Traditional PCs typically ship with BIOSes because of legacy operating system and hardware support. Apple would have no such problems due to building a new platform. Plus, particularly in the notebook space, designs will be heavily influenced by Intel.
My point in mentioning Apple? That other manufacturers may follow suit once any quirks are worked out and Vista ships.
There's already a linux bootloader, elilo for EFI, developed originally for Itanium.
most of the current Australians are actually descended from the guards
Hmmm, population wise most Australians came as free settlers. For example, for the 1850s Victorian goldrushes or fleeing economic hardships following WWII or refugees from more recent wars.
I'm merely pointing out that Java people shouldn't feel left out in the perception that GTK+ is somehow a C library that runs only under X11. Someone has gone to the trouble of creating JNI wrappers so it can be used like any 'normal' Java API.
Each toolkit has it's strengths and weaknesses, e.g. with some SWT platforms such as Win32 and GTK+ receiving more attention that OS X.
At the end of the day, you're programming to an API. Thought experiment: What if programming to the GTK+ API proved to be more productive and pleasurable to coding to the SWT API? And what if the GTK backends to X11, OSX and Win32 were of overall more robust than SWT? Then a thin JNI layer over the C libraries is a minor piece of the puzzle.
A good degree of effort has gone into porting GTK+ to non X11 platforms, most recently BeOS. The point of the article is to assert that it is a valid API to build cross-platform applications. Perhaps even in Java!
I'm not hear to bash SWT - It's a Java toolkit that is an alternative to Swing, but then so can GTK+ be.:) However, be aware it has been a toolkit initially developed specifically for eclipse while GTK+ has been used widely for 1000s of applications, so its scope is broader. Hence GTK+ may in fact be a richer and more mature API, with IBM adding features to the SWT toolkit only as eclipse requires.
An alternative strategy: instead of open sourcing a microsoft application perhaps use an open source win32?
Regular slashdot readers woule be aware that the 'red box' dream of rhapsody is to some degree being realised in the form of Darwine, itself based on wine
Don't hold your breath relying on Microsoft to be a good Mac community member and open sourcing this 'legacy' browser. If true IE compatibility is required then at least in theory it is possible to run the real thing under wine in OS X.
The advantage of this strategy is that by contributing to wine's completeness, other Windows applications will be runnable within OS X.:)
Sure you'll be running a Windows app, but you'll be able to browse all the IE-dependant intranet webapps your Windows XP colleagues use, from the sanctity of your Mac environment.
5. Intellectual property concerns. In its current state the code may contain code which is subject to patents owned by Microsoft or in turn licensed from another company. The effort to purge the code of such dependencies for public release might not be worth their effort.
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Because dual booting is a bloody nuisance.
If you develop for both machines, you're forced to duplicate development environments. If you have 2 machines and a preferred tool, e.g. Xcode/Eclipse/Emacs - whatever - you can use solely that editor and use cross-compile tools. You don't have to maintain configuration settings for each OS or use different development tools because one program isn't available for one OS.
I don't know what sort of software you write but if it's any kind of client-server requiring a database/web/application server its much nicer to have a dedicated deployment machine, not to mention a CVS, or similar, repository. (Even if that physically corresponds to your linux client box).
Then there's the possibility that you're in the middle of something and want to run a piece of software that only exists in your other environment. Reboot, make the change and reboot again.
Believe me it's much less hassle to have 2 machines. :)
Well, I'm certainly no expert but I believe compat_linux does its work in the netbsd kernel. So XNU would need to be modified to support loading linux binaries. A task for the OpenDarwin community?
Worse is when films are dubbed so vocab needs to be matched to lip movements.
Or when actors of a different nationality to their characters are cast merely because they speak English.
Then there's news bulletins and documentaries where an English translation is loudly superimposed over the top of native speaker. You can still hear the tones of the person they're interviewing but it's drowned out due to the translation.
All because television programmers dumb down content because the average television viewer is perceived to be "too stupid" to concentrate on subtitles. I'll take subtitled content any day...
There was some speculation that Apple would release the iBook range as 'MacBook' and the PowerBook range as 'MacBook Pro'.
Clearly 'Pro' = 'Prototype'.
So, when the real models ship, there will simply be the MacBook 12", the MacBook 15" and the MacBook 17".
The OS9 --> OSX transition happened with full source code and experts from both the 'Classic' and NeXT environments.
Just imagine 150 engineers working full time on Wine.
150 engineers x $100K salary cost (a very conservative estimate) = $15Million/year. Do you honestly think it's justifiable to spend $15M on reverse engineering a competitor's product?
As for DirectX 9 games, again the issue is about promoting alternatives to Windows. In this case OpenGL.
People have suggested too that Apple pour large amounts of money into OpenOffice.org. The code is open but directly benefits Sun through StarOffice. Apple already have their own productivity applications in iWork...
These projects are theoretically possible but in the mind of Apple not commercially productive when the R&D could be spent improving OSX and homegrown solutions.
Xserves will be using Iitaniums now???
rosetta - PPC --> x86.
darwine - x86 --> PPC.
But now Macs are x86 too... :)
SSE3, I believe. SSE4 is no doubt on the horizon, primarily because Apple users will note that Photoshop doesn't seem as zippy as when it was optimised for altivec. :)
What you need is an emulator, e.g. Basilisk II
I believe the problem as for x86 is again third party software such as flash and Java. Historically neither have had 64bit binaries from their vendor.
:( Methinks they'll only make the effort when 64bit Vista arrives.
For Java, Sun has said, in the short term at least, they won't go to the trouble of releasing the necessary software for 64bit - Java Plugin and Java Web Start. IIRC, the method of installation for 64bit Solaris (SPARC) is to install the 32bit JRE (which has the plugin and web start) and then install the 64bit JRE over top.
This stifles usage of x86-64 with a 64bit OS if a 32bit compatibility module is needed. Too many hoops to jump through. AMD have had Athlon 64 for how many years now???
I guess in these days of high speed connections, big hard disks and DVD installs universal binaries aren't such an issue. But I remember having a 2400 baud modem and a 68k Mac. It was a nuisance having multiple CPU support then. First one spent ages waiting for a .sit.hqx file to download, decode and decompress. Then strip out the PowerPC binary so it wouldn't fill up a 40MB hard disk.
If you're using darwinports it's not an issue because the application will be optimised for OS24Ever's machine. For intel machines Fink should be smart enough to download binaries in the following order:
(Unless of course you have an intranet package cache for multiple machines - in which case you might prefer to always download universal).
Which raises an interesting point about universal binaries. How many binaries will gcc/xcode target in a universal binary? There's the 2 major architectures (x86/powerpc) BUT G3 (no altivec), G4 (altivec), G5(64-bit), x86(32-bit) and x86-64(64bit in the not too distant future). So, already 5 CPU types for which a compiler can optimise. Not to mention optimisations for dual-core/dual CPU machines.
[Aside, for any Java apps you may run: Java gets a lot of flack for being slow but Sun's Hotspot is able to compile on the fly, at runtime, native code for a CPU from a single binary (bytecode). The optimisation is done in the Java Virtual Machine rather than the application binary]
You see if there's a universal binary, chances are it won't be optimised for your CPU architecture. Where a software provider gives you the source, in this case an open source project, darwinports (pkgsrc/portage etc) is your best bet. Not to mention it will, hopefully, compile shared libraries for gecko. So that if you happen to use another mozilla app like thunderbird - less to download, less memory consumption.
The question remains, much as we like to poke fun at them, whether your average Mac user can be bothered with such details when drag and drop installers exist. Perhaps integration with Software Update would help.
Yep, Word and Excel were staples of 68k Macs long before their Windows counterparts.
In a sense it was the Mac that kept MS in the game as far as office suites. Their experience in writing GUI apps on the Mac gave them a great edge over WordPerfect and Lotus during the transition from DOS to Windows.
[overlooking the word 6 debacle]
When NeXT was a separate entity, OPENSTEP ran in Windows.
Perhaps they could dust off the code and use the Cocoa APIs. One less framework to maintain.
Not everyone uses a mac for games, final cut and MS Office.
Apple notebooks are quite popular with developers who abhor Windows. Gosling, for example.
She couldn't see the irony in her favourite film being Clueless, despite the fact that such a dialect originated when her own parents were teens!
So what would get around this problem? An expansion slot interface.
My digital camera does this with an SD card, readable with any card reader.
e.g. sell the wrist band with flash, or without.
of course I'm no marketer, so the economics escape me.
Speculation surrounds Apple's rumoured x86 release (some rumours claim this month) whether they will adopt Intel's EFI, an OpenFirmware substitute.
Intel has been working on EFI for 7 years. Traditional PCs typically ship with BIOSes because of legacy operating system and hardware support. Apple would have no such problems due to building a new platform. Plus, particularly in the notebook space, designs will be heavily influenced by Intel.
My point in mentioning Apple? That other manufacturers may follow suit once any quirks are worked out and Vista ships.
There's already a linux bootloader, elilo for EFI, developed originally for Itanium.
I always thought Chicago was the Windy City? :)
Well, distros such as Ubuntu are trying to address this.
DVDs can play back using xine, though the distro itself won't include the codecs for legal reasons.
NT4 was released in 1996, after Windows 95; you were waiting for NT5 before 4 was released?
Hmmm, population wise most Australians came as free settlers. For example, for the 1850s Victorian goldrushes or fleeing economic hardships following WWII or refugees from more recent wars.
Each toolkit has it's strengths and weaknesses, e.g. with some SWT platforms such as Win32 and GTK+ receiving more attention that OS X.
At the end of the day, you're programming to an API. Thought experiment: What if programming to the GTK+ API proved to be more productive and pleasurable to coding to the SWT API? And what if the GTK backends to X11, OSX and Win32 were of overall more robust than SWT? Then a thin JNI layer over the C libraries is a minor piece of the puzzle.
A good degree of effort has gone into porting GTK+ to non X11 platforms, most recently BeOS. The point of the article is to assert that it is a valid API to build cross-platform applications. Perhaps even in Java!
I'm not hear to bash SWT - It's a Java toolkit that is an alternative to Swing, but then so can GTK+ be. :) However, be aware it has been a toolkit initially developed specifically for eclipse while GTK+ has been used widely for 1000s of applications, so its scope is broader. Hence GTK+ may in fact be a richer and more mature API, with IBM adding features to the SWT toolkit only as eclipse requires.
Try to keep an open mind, yeah? :) :)
Regular slashdot readers woule be aware that the 'red box' dream of rhapsody is to some degree being realised in the form of Darwine, itself based on wine
Don't hold your breath relying on Microsoft to be a good Mac community member and open sourcing this 'legacy' browser. If true IE compatibility is required then at least in theory it is possible to run the real thing under wine in OS X.
The advantage of this strategy is that by contributing to wine's completeness, other Windows applications will be runnable within OS X. :)
Sure you'll be running a Windows app, but you'll be able to browse all the IE-dependant intranet webapps your Windows XP colleagues use, from the sanctity of your Mac environment.
You left out:
5. Intellectual property concerns. In its current state the code may contain code which is subject to patents owned by Microsoft or in turn licensed from another company. The effort to purge the code of such dependencies for public release might not be worth their effort.
Indeed, GTK+ for instance. :)