> People just don't like Dictators.. Don't ask me why...
What, like Linus Torvalds? He and Steve Jobs both publicly answered the question, "what's wrong with Microsoft?" by answering, "they have no taste". A "dictator" can be a great asset to a computing platform... when I buy a new Mac (I bought a new one today) I know that somebody had to get it past Steve Jobs first... it's great quality control. Also, Steve Jobs and the people around him have a history of driving the industry forward, and it's exciting to watch that happen.
As for defending the look of the Aqua GUI and having letter-happy lawyers, I'm inclined to cut a company a little slack when they have been competing with Microsoft for 20 years. Apple is hardly AOL Time Warner, or even Disney. Apple's computers are the most standards-based boxes you will find anywhere, hardware and software both.
It would be cool if the dual-boot Windows/Linux users would give Apple a look before they send in their next payment to Microsoft. If you are happy in Linux full-time, then great (lucky for you!), but it seems hypocritical to me to dual-boot Linux and Windows and disparage Mac OS X.
Latency is how long it takes audio to get from the inputs to the outputs, via the computer. If it's not low enough, you'll hear a delay effect. Macs have the lowest latency, Linux is a close second when not under load, and a distant second when under load, while Windows sounds like it is in a cave.
Latency is a big issue to music and audio people who want to use a computer in their work.
Avid is already being hurt by Final Cut Pro, which costs only $1000 and runs on any recent Mac. It's chump change for what the system can do. The G4 is perfect for these kinds of computations, too.
Pro Tools systems are sold and supported by Digidesign, complete. If you have a problem with a system, you should talk to Digidesign. If you are having repetitive crashes, then you have a problem there somewhere.
For Apple's part, they spent the last five years writing a completely new operating system that doesn't crash, and released it over six months ago. What more do you want from them, to rewrite Pro Tools as well? They did in a way, because Mac OS X includes a complete modern, multichannel audio and MIDI subsystem that supports 32-bit floating point files (infinite headroom, no clipping, easier to process, they are the new standard). Any Mac OS X app can take advantage of these features for free. That stuff is there because the people who need it are using Apple's products, and have been for decades.
As if Windows never crashes... sheesh.
Right now, Mac OS 9 is still the best place to do music and audio, but when the apps flip over to Mac OS X, it's going to be a whole new world for us guys. The great interface, super stability, the best apps, and the new audio and music subsystem and plugin formats. The multitasking and buffered windows and excellent memory management are also going to make for a great improvement.
The Nintendo Game Cube also uses PowerPC processors, but you wouldn't expect to run Mac OS X on it. Same with BeBoxes, IBM's workstations, Kodak cameras, etc. You need all kinds of stuff beyond the same CPU.
The iMac also has a VGA out, so it is easy to add a second display and use both at once. Think of it as a computer with a secondary 15" display built in.
The G3 is not sub-par... it's a really great chip, very small and low-power, so no fan. I'm running Mac OS X right now on an older PowerBook with a G3/400 and it's just great. The $799 iMac has a faster desktop hard drive and a faster CPU than this machine, so it is a fine OS X machine if you give it some more RAM, which is cheap.
> Apple: I don't WANT a computer built into the
> monitor. Why don't you release an "iMac-Lite"
> as a G3 cube for $500?
Because they include a lot of stuff with every Mac. Every one has FireWire, and iMovie, and a PostScript interpreter, PDF printing, multiple languages, lots of great fonts, Java2, optical mouse, so much more. The software bundle is real software, not demos or LE stuff or stuff that you can't upgrade later. Not only will you use the bundled software, but they will become some of your favorite applications ever (iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, Mail, and QuickTime are just joys to use). Also, the machines update themselves automatically from Apple's servers, and you get free online storage and streaming servers and such, and OS upgrades are frequent and easy to install, and they add features that users have asked for. It takes money to keep the whole boat floating, though. The $799 iMac is already kind of a recession special... Mac OS X, iMovie, AppleWorks, and an optical mouse are almost half that by themselves, when you buy them separately.
> Apple isn't in the business of producing
> end-to-end products and services.
Yes, they sell lots of end-to-end stuff. They sell camcorders as an option with an iMac, and that gives you a complete system for DV editing for under $1500, everything included, even FireWire cable and free streaming video service. CNN just bought millions of dollars worth of Apple's mobile journalism bundles, which is everything you need to make broadcast quality video on the go (PowerBook, Final Cut Pro, FireWire cable, DV camcorder). They have bundles for schools that include wireless base stations, desktops, servers, notebooks, notebook carts, and even a software called PowerSchool that does all the record-keeping and sends report cards to parents by email and whatnot. If you go to apple.com or one of their stores and buy a camcorder and a mid or high-end PowerMac, you have everything you need to shoot a movie, edit it, make a DVD interface, encode it into MPEG-2, and burn it to a DVD video disc. They even sell Apple-branded DVD-R blanks, and Mac OS X's Finder can burn data CD's and DVD's so you can archive your work. If iDVD isn't enough for you, Apple has a pro counterpart to it called DVD Studio Pro as well.
Really, you couldn't be more wrong. They are one-stop shopping for many industries. It saves you so much time and trouble, it's not funny. You get a working system out of the box, so you can easily see as you go where a third-party upgrade of some sort might help your work... like you decide that you want to get Roxio Toast and make really funky CD formats... so you get Toast and if it doesn't work, you know it is Roxio's fault because you can burn CD's in the Finder... you know your drive works, your computer works. It makes things a lot easier.
By default it is in the lower right of the screen in Windows XP, for the first time ever. This is significant because Microsoft agreed not to put a trash can in the lower right of their interface during one of their court cases over copying stuff over the years, and this agreement just ran out recently.
That's the new Apple, man. Standards everywhere. Even if you have to see it to believe it, once you see it you won't believe it (you get me?). They can match acronyms and buzzwords and standards with anybody out there. A lot of people who would never have used a Mac a few years ago are buying iBooks now and enjoying all the Mac GUI and apps coming along with their UNIX, for a very low cost. You can install an X-Windows app and get your hands all dirty, and then run it side-by-side with an app that you "installed" by dragging one "fat" file to wherever you wanted and opening it. Apple are really simplifying things and creating an even more transparent computing experience, where you just think of what you want to do and then do it, whether that's editing video or shell scripting, and the computer is up to the task. It's a great platform. The best desktop ever, no doubt.
Microsoft's Mac products are made by a separate unit in Silicon Valley... not in Redmond. IE:mac (as it's called) has a rendering engine of its own called Tazman that's as compliant as Gecko, and the browser uses JavaScript, plug-ins, and Java. The interface is Mac OS X -style, even in the Mac OS 9 version. If you are ever cursing at IE Windows for shitty rendering, just remember that Bill Gates owns a super-standards-compliant rendering engine already.
Many Mac users have come to think of the Microsoft Mac Business Unit ("Mactopia") as a separate company that builds Microsoft-compatible products for the Mac. Of course, no company could ever do that without being owned by Microsoft, but you ignore that illegal distortion of the free market and focus on the products, you are happy to have the option to become "Office-compatible" (for a publisher, say) without having to run Windows.
I think Apple has plenty of patents. They have always done a lot of research. FireWire is pretty famous lately. Mac OS X is full of cutting-edge technology. MPEG-4 is QuickTime, basically. Since Apple bought NeXT they have been firmly on a path to open standards, in every software and hardware component. Even the BIOS-equivalent in their machines is a stardard that Sun also uses. Choosing NeXT over BeOS was symbolic of this. I think Steve Jobs has confidence in Apple's ability to survive on a level playing field. Where Microsoft is doing everything it can to control the very Internet, Apple gave up a lot of control of their whole core OS in order to be interoperable. Apple is free to innovate at a much higher level, with FireWire, DVD authoring, ease of use, graphics, audio, etc. In 6-12 months there will be such a difference between a Mac and everything else for creative applications... Aqua apps have access to BSD, Cocoa, Carbon, Java2, QuickTime, CoreAudio (32-bit float, unlimited channels), CoreMIDI (1ms latency routing, mLAN support), FireWire, USB, PDF, a PostScript interpreter, AppleScript (user-level recordable interaction between GUI apps), Quartz, object-oriented dynamic drivers, UNIX (true multiuser with POSIX permissions), Unicode, XML, much more. People are building apps right now on Mac OS X that just can't be built anywhere else... very few of the apps that you actually go out and buy Macs just to run are ported yet (Pro Tools, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro). Those apps are going to work so well on Mac OS X that it will have people's jaws dropping. The DVD Player application in 10.1 is already doing that, with its performance and high-quality and amazing multitasking... it's just the first of many apps to bring that kind of quality and stability and multitasking to all corners of digital media creation.
QuickTime is the most complete multimedia there is, which is why MPEG-4 is based on it. Real has a server and a player, and Microsoft has a server, a player, and an OS monopoly, but QuickTime is in cameras, audio apps, music apps, Web authoring apps, animation tools, DVD authoring tools, DV editors, and open source streaming servers on every major platform. It supports almost every image, video, and audio format in existence, along with animated images and Flash movies. It has a built-in software synth with DLS. For $29 you can author with QuickTime Player Pro just by cutting and pasting and exporting. QuickTime is one of the major reasons why creative people use Macs. While Microsoft was trying to get their developers to support a GUI, Apple had their developers integrating their apps with QuickTime, so you can move media back and forth between apps as files or with the clipboard and get great results.
Almost every video you can find on the Web was in QuickTime format at some point in it's life. There aren't any other vendors with this kind of technology. It may be possible to do digital video without Apple, but it's not something you'd do by choice.
If you want to run QuickTime on Linux, here's how.
Guys... file the QuickTime-on-Linux stuff away with the one-button mouse crap and the entire phrase "proprietary hardware". You're only hurting yourselves by regurgitating all the Microsoft FUD we are forced to swallow every day. Shit it out, instead. Go to an Apple Store and touch some of this stuff. Apple is firing on all cylinders right now, and it's something to see. You can make movies and DVD's with drag and drop on a stable UNIX with ridiculous graphics and media support. It's outstanding. You could share one of these computers with your grandmother and both be happy.
10.1 ROCKS! The great reviews are not hype. The multitasking and the performance make it seem like the operating system is doing everything effortlessly. It's a pleasure to use.
> Now would someone please port LILO to mac?
> The Open Firmware on Macs/Suns is maddening
> enough to deal with and dinking with bootX made
> LILO look like a piece of cake.
Since 1998, OpenFirmware has had a graphical boot loader that shows all of the Mac OS, Mac OS X, and Linux bootable volumes attached to a system as pretty icons if you boot a Mac with the Option key held down. Then you click a volume with your mouse and click a right-facing arrow to boot from that volume. You can even attach FireWire storage at this point and refresh the list and boot from that. The Linux volumes have a cool Penguin icon on them. It's a really nice system.
The LinuxPPC people might be interested in PPC vs x86 Linux testing, but for most of Apple's customers, it is better to show a DVD being software encoded (not decoded) in 2x on a G4 867 or 1x on a dual 800 with very high quality, or show a video clip being readied for the Web twice as fast as a P4 1.7, or show a Photoshop workflow that goes by twice as fast on the Mac box. These are the ways that Macs are twice as fast, and that's why audio, video and graphics people use them. The G4 has a co-processor built-in (Altivec) that is designed to make audio, video, and graphics apps run much faster. That's why those tasks are faster on Macs. It is very simple.
Now, there are other tasks that Macs weren't optimized for that may be faster on x86, or code that was built for x86 and runs better on x86. Doesn't really matter to the Hollywood crowd, though. Doesn't matter to the newbie who wants three simple steps to the Web. The academic question of "which is faster at doing PC-based tasks, a Mac or a PC?" is just not interesting when you can make a DVD on a Mac in a few minutes of work and an hour of background encoding (Compaq's solution takes 4 times longer and is much, much lower quality, on a P4 1.8... harder to use, too).
Classic is "transparent" (windows floating along with Aqua windows) so that you can drag and drop things from Classic to other apps, and so that the user has only one desktop area. Disks showing up separately in Classic and Mac OS X would be hard for many users. Also, Classic may get further integrated into the UI later as it matures. Hopefully they will provide a non-dual boot version when people aren't typically dual-booting at all anymore, and it will just be built into the system like Carbon and Cocoa are and the user won't have to turn Classic on and off. There are a lot of Enhanced CD's and such that expect Classic Mac OS, and this is how Apple can support that in the future.
There is a 5% performance hit running an app in Classic instead of natively, but there are lots of upsides that make up for this. For example, when you switch to Mac OS X, your browser (at least) immediately goes native and can't crash any other app. Java goes native, disk utilities and other apps included with the OS go native, so even if you are running a couple of big apps in Classic (like Photoshop and Dreamweaver), those apps are isolated from the others, and you can optimize Mac OS 9 for those two apps. Also, Classic.app is a Mac OS X app, and takes advantage of better memory and multitasking, so Mac OS 9 thinks it has 1GB of RAM no matter how much you actually have.
Besides, the 5% performance hit goes away when you get your next Mac or one of today's very cheap RAM upgrades. It's a small step back in order to take a big step forward.
The 10.1 UI is much better again than previous. The extensible System Menus replace the Control Strip and previous system menu implementations, and it will be easy for someone to make an app-launcher menu that you just drag into the menubar and drop where you want it and use it (there is already ScriptMenu.menu on apple.com that provides a pervasive menu for launching AppleScirpt, Perl, and shell scripts). Put the Dock on the right side, and it feels very much like a vertical floating application palette in 9, and the Finder's icon sits where you're used to your hard drive being, and a click on it opens your Home folder.
The Dock still needs work (the elegance of the System Menus is sort of embarrassing it), and I'd like to see the Application Menu merge with the other "application menu" that you get when you click-and-hold an app in the Dock, then the File menu wouldn't move around.
Tell Apple what you don't like. They have been listening really well. They added a PostScript interpreter to 10.1 because people asked for it. Now you can output PDF or PostScript from any Mac OS X app that's been updated for 10.1.
Filename extension hiding is also not so bad. They do so many smart things that in day-to-day operation it will be better for most people this way. You won't ever have to type an extension or even look at one if you don't want to (once the apps catch up a bit), but if you do want to, they are also easy to access. File Type and Creator still work on HFS+ volumes (BBEdit is not adding filename extensions yet and it works fine) so you can still work in the old way if you want to.
10.1 rocks. Fast, stable, incredibly full-featured, incredible standards support. A very pleasant place to work. On a PowerBook, it is really something to see.
There was a demo at Apple's WWDC last year of a 1983 beta of MacPaint running in Classic on Mac OS X 10.0. Pretty cool that OS X can support an app going that far back.
MacPaint was quite revolutionary in its time, like iMovie and iDVD are today. Photoshop and similar apps are basically much more advanced big brothers of MacPaint, with many of the same UI conventions and procedures. A lot of digital artists got turned on first with MacPaint.
IE for Mac and IE for Windows have nothing in common. Different codebase, different UI, different rendering engine (on the Mac, it's called Tazman and it is totally standards-compliant). Pages look pretty much identical in IE Mac and in Mozilla.
There were three stages to Microsoft's Mac support: 1) they only made Mac apps (Word, Excel, etc), then 2) they ported their Mac apps to Windows and then sort of ported them back to the Mac (which flopped badly and Word 6.0 for Macintosh was called "a major embarrassment" by Bill Gates); and then in 1997 they formed the Macintosh Business Unit (MBU) after Steve Jobs made up with Microsoft and tried to bury the past. Since then, Microsoft's Mac apps have gotten more and more Mac-like with each revision, to the point now where Office X (also "10" like Mac OS X) for Mac OS X is Apple's poster child for a great third-party Mac OS X app (the floating panels even swoosh out of the menus like windows do out of the Dock). It's like Microsoft is an Apple subcontractor, making the browser and high-end office suite for Apple, to their specifications.
They also have easy installation and uninstallation on the Mac. IE for Mac OS X is a single icon that you can either use or put in the Trash and that's that. You can move it or rename it if you want to as well. Same with Word X and the other Office apps. Easy to manage because they don't put files all over the system.
I even kind of like Word X, and I've been cursing Word for years (my publisher forces me to use it, like most publishers, because they want stuff submitted in Word format, with all of the trimmings like tracked revisions and comments and such).
Still, even though MacAddict Magazine just did a very favorable write-up of the MBU and the 185 people who work there, there's a bad taste in your mouth when you use Microsoft stuff that is really a drag. It will be there until MS starts acting their age and size (like IBM does). A company as big as MS has to go out of its way to be interoperable at every possible level, and listen to its customers' needs instead of dictating the one true way it will be. Learn to be gentlemen and ladies, for everybody's sakes.
> Sorry, but you get paid for the end product, if you
> do graphic arts, then gimp can do it for you
Why is it that it's never a graphic artist saying this?
> (just take a weekend of your own time and learn
> it, it's so close to photoshop now it aint funny)
It is so close to Photoshop in ways that a hobbyist can appreciate. GIMP is not on the cutting-edge of graphic design and publishing.
> as for webdesign if you dont code your html by
> hand then I am agast
That opinion is about five years out-of-date. These days you mock it up in Dreamweaver and then customize the code as required by hand or with another tool, and Dreamweaver leaves the hand-written code alone. I'd rather write scripts that automate Dreamweaver than write Web pages. The people who make Dreamweaver have researched a lot of common browser bugs and Dreamweaver takes steps to work around them. Why would I want to keep up with the lastest bug in IE just so I can code everything by hand instead of just the important stuff?
The first music sequencers only produced robotic music, and the first design-oriented HTML editors only produced crappy code. Both of these things have long since changed. If you get robotic music out of Cubase 5 and crappy code out of Dreamweaver 4, it is your own fault. The tools are advanced enough now that you have control over things.
> you can do everything (except non linear video
> editing) on linux that you do on your mac... so
> what's your excuse again?
Pro audio, QuickTime authoring, Flash authoring, DVD video authoring, easy drag-and-drop data CD and DVD burning (I make lots of big files, so a $6 4.7GB DVD-R that burns in 20 minutes with no effort to make it is very important), print graphics (no CMYK color in GIMP), and huge, huge, huge workflow advantages that come from common key shortcuts, application conventions, support for all common audio, video, and graphics formats, the best clipboard on a personal computer, scriptable/recordable GUI and high-level interapplication communication, PDF as a common format between all apps, drag-and-drop of one icon to "install" an app, or drag-and-drop to the Trash to "uninstall", amazing hardware support with drivers included in the OS so stuff just hot-plugs and you go (like a graphics tablet, or a precision mouse as a second mouse, or a whole USB/FireWire audio interface, camera/camcorder, or a hard disk).
All of this stuff saves me lots and lots of time and provides very important functionality and capabilities. A Mac is a very important tool in many industries... it would take years of work to make Linux competitive for those users, and why should the people who are making Linux want to do that when Apple is doing a good job of it already? This stuff will appear in Linux one day if the people who use and make Linux want to build it in, but it is not there now.
Coders and geeks can go ahead and make their own operating system that's optimized for coders and geeks. When Apple says that they make systems for "the rest of us", they mean people who aren't coders and geeks and can't make their own operating systems, or don't want to. Apple's customers are more interested in the fact that Mac OS X includes color-matching throughout the OS and hardware, and supports every type of font out of the box (including Windows-formatted TrueType fonts) than whether the compiler is free enough or whatever. That's for coders and geeks to worry about.
Really, Linux and Mac OS X both exist for different reasons, and they're quite complemetary. I use Mac desktops and notebooks, but my Web server is Linux. If you're doing something for which Linux is well-suited, and you have the expertise and time to set it up, it's a no-brainer. Especially when you are in a situation where you set it up once and replicate it on box after box after box with no licensing fees or associated paperwork (that is a huge advantage). It's not going to swap one-for-one with a Mac box for most users anytime soon, though.
What's overkill about the OS X GUI? It makes as much sense to build a GUI on PDF now as it did to build one on plain bitmaps in the 1980's. All of today's publishing applications are building in PDF support, and Apple saved everyone time and trouble on the Mac by building PDF into the system, so that it's "free" for any application to use. There's a PostScript interpreter built-in now, too, as of 10.1. It's not overkill for Apple's customers, and it's not slow. The clarity and sharpness of graphics on this system is amazing. They wrote the graphics system from the ground up to be what it is... it's not window dressing on an old system.
> Then you become a poser, just running Linux
> to be cool or l33t while you must defer to another
> OS like Windows or MacOS to actually do anything.
That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is that some user's needs are covered by having support for Linux applications, and some user's needs are covered by having support for Linux and Classic Mac applications (Mac-on-Linux). Some users (most of Apple's customers) are better served by having a one-click installer that installs support for Classic Mac apps, updated Mac apps, NeXT/OpenStep apps, Java2, and BSD Unix into their computer so that almost any developer has a quick development path to Mac OS X and can offer Mac users a range of software products with a Mac GUI and Mac conventions (standard key shortcuts, drag-and-drop or one-click install, etc). Different people have different needs. Cheers to the Mac-on-Linux guys and their users.
> so other people can build OSS apps to playback
> those movies, like what people have done for MP3
> or MPEG
What's wrong with MPEG? QuickTime Player also plays MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 movies. You can publish MPEG movies and they play all over. Codec problems are hardly unique to QuickTime. I've come across many AVI files I couldn't play, even on Windows. QuickTime is the Unix of multimedia... it's a shame to knock the architecture because one of its plug-in codecs is not open. There's so much more to QuickTime.
> Hell, I'd love to have a Mac at my home, but
> not for a price that would make my parents broke!
Desktops start at $799 and include OS X, an optical mouse, display, FireWire, speakers, AirPort antennas (to act as a base station for notebooks), etc. Notebooks start at $1299 and are subnotebook-sized, and include OS X as well as FireWire, built-in AirPort (802.11b) antennaes, 5-hour battery. You also get the best consumer movie-editing software, digital camera software, excellent CD/MP3 ripping/burning software. Really good stuff that you'll enjoy using. Also a creatively-oriented office suite and a few really good games. You can't tell me that's not cheap.
> For example, why did Apple limit all the licensing
> agreements so noone could manufacture a Mac
> clone?
Steve Jobs said it was because the world doesn't need another Compaq. Turns out we didn't even need the one we already had.
> But the only thing they've returned back is the
> kernel, which is of very little practical use
They returned back a complete open source Unix called Darwin. It runs on Macs and on x86. It is great for standard things like Apache and Perl, and also includes QuickTime Streaming Server for serving streaming video. You can run X-Windows on there if you like. It is a very big hunk of Mac OS X (about 150MB). People are buying OS X for their current Mac, and putting Darwin on the old Mac they had in the closet and using it as a development server at zero cost. If they have a compatible Intel machine, they can use that, too (seeing "Welcome to Macintosh!" on an x86 system was a real trip the first time.) Apple have also returned changes to compilers and such, and hired open source developers to work on Darwin and BSD. They also opened code for gaming controllers.
Shipping millions of computers with Mac OS X on them also puts Apache, Perl, emacs, BSD Unix onto computers that kids commonly find in their homes and schools. Lots of kids will use Apache rather than IIS because all Macs now ship with this great, great software. You can also do and learn a bunch of different developer stuff on Mac OS X... Java2, Cocoa, Carbon, BSD, Perl, AppleScript (this is recordable scripting of GUI apps and documents with plain English syntax that you save as applications), HTML/JavaScript, QuickTime, WebObjects, CGI, whatever.
I'll leave it to you to detail Microsoft's attitude towards open source, seeing as Microsoft is Apple's main competitor. I mean, think about it.
> I'm sure it's fine by them as long as they've got
> their revenue.
What a bizarre attitude to take about Apple. Are you sure you're not thinking about Microsoft? Microsoft uses BSD-licensed code as well, you know, but they don't advertise it and they don't give anything back at all, from what I understand. Further to that, they have called open source software a cancer and un-American and other such ridiculous propagandist terms.
People who contributed to BSD Unix and Apache and all the other fine community software are to be thanked and respected for their efforts, but so are the coders at Apple who developed other aspects of a modern computer platform. So are the financial people at Apple who found a way to give so much value, take so many risks, and still keep the company so healthy. This stuff is so cheap, and it's so good. Every new app that arrives only makes it even better.
> why didn't Apple just offer to pay him for the project
They asked him not to copy their graphics. Why would they want to instead pay him to copy their graphics? If Apple wanted a Mozilla theme based on Aqua they would give that job to the team of people who make graphics for Mac OS. Somewhere there are some high-quality Photoshop files created by the original artist that are the best source of GIF's for Mozilla.
It would look half-assed anyway, though, unless Mozilla also has background scroll widgets and such. The title bar is actually proper Aqua, so it gets translucent at the right times already, but scroll bars in the foreground window are different than scroll bars in background windows on Mac OS. Also, the Aqua scrollbars look wider than Mozilla's (unless that's variable when making a Mozilla theme).
This seems like the least outrageous example of corporatism ever discussed on Slashdot. We're talking about a Bay Area technology company founded and run by a bearded vegan asking a "free software" Linux user not to distribute his clone of the public face of a nascent product that is perhaps the most mainstream open source project ever.
How diabolical.
No wonder nobody fully believes the truth about Microsoft when free software people also see Apple as the enemy. Trying to pretend like Apple and Microsoft are even playing in the same league of evil is a joke. Like the subject line implies, Apple is not even as evil as Adobe. Give me a break.
What this guy should do is make a distinctive skin of his own and give it over to his favorite distro so they can make it their default, and give Mandrake Linux or whatever a face that says "Mandrake Linux". Ask yourself for a second whether Apple might have a good tactic for introducing new technology even to Windows users.
> if I make fried chicken for my friends and family
> with the 11 herbs and spices similar to Kentucky
> Fried Chicken's batter recipe , based on my
> experience with the Colonel's product,
... then that would be fine. I think the problem here is actually analagous to creating a perfect imitation of the distinctive red and white KFC bucket, and then sending the plans and images out over the Internet so that people can print and fold and serve their own chicken to the family in a cool KFC bucket. Or so they can order a cheaper brand of take-out chicken, and still put it in the bucket. These buckets look like KFC buckets, with the signature imprint, but they always contain non-KFC chicken. I can see how KFC would like it better if you just came up with your own bucket design and distributed that instead.
Another analogy would be if you were making car bodies of BMW cars that fit over some other kind of car and made them look like BMW's. The people at BMW would have to be like, WTF?
What if you made shells for Dell notebooks that made them look like PowerBooks? Would it be understandable for Apple to ask you not to do that anymore?
> then KFC-
> Pepsico lawyers can come to my employer and
> demand that he seize the hd on my laptop and
> discover if I am storing their
Didn't Apple just ask him to not skin Aqua? I didn't see anything about threatening anybody's employer or taking computers. Presumably, he could go ahead and release the skin and then they would have to take him to court if they thought it was worth it. Then they ask the next guy not to make a skin and they can point out that they also asked this guy... no special treatment. You can make 50 different Aqua skins and keep them on 20 different computers all around your house and it's not illegal. In this case, Apple asked the guy not to put an Aqua skin for X-Windows out on the Web, not to turn in his technology and surrender his human dignity.
Firebaal... I'm sorry, man, but you're really off-base here.
Apple computers feature more support for standards than any other system. From the OpenFirmware (IEEE 1275) that boots the system to the PDF window server, every place where a standard component or protocol could be used, it is used. Hardware includes AGP, PCI (4 empty 64-bit slots in every PowerMac), DVI, VGA, ATA, SCSI, USB, FireWire (IEEE 1394), AirPort (802.11b), Gigabit Ethernet, etc. Software includes PDF and PostScript output from any application, WebDAV, UFS, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, DV capture and editing, viewing of every common graphics format, playback of every common audio format, DVD-R and CD-RW data burning, CD to MP3 ripping, DVD video disc authoring, DVD video disc playback, Java2, QuickTime, Apache, Perl, 5.1 surround sound, 32-bit float audio (the first OS to support this pro audio format), MIDI, mLAN, ColorSync, Cocoa (OpenStep), Carbon (support for traditional pc apps like MS Word and Macromedia Dreamweaver), BSD Unix. This is all off the top of my head. Go to apple.com and check it out.
> Pricewatch.com... eBay.com
You might think that there is no Mac software or hardware, but you are wrong. The hardware is most of the same stuff you use on Windows, but on the Mac it is easy to install and you don't need drivers (Apple collects them now and ships them with the OS so stuff just works). Excluding games, the software is 75% the same as Windows (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Word, Excel, etc) and often comes in the same box, and there are equivalents for the other 25% (Apache instead of IIS, Final Cut Pro instead of EditDV, Java2 instead of C#, etc). For games, you just get the hits (Tony Hawk 2, Alice, Sims, Quake III, etc), and sometimes about six months later, but you usually also get additional features and less bugs. It's fine for a lot of people... don't think of the hardcore gamer, think of the average person who just wants to grab the Sims and play with it without worrying about how to install it (on the Mac, you just drag-and-drop or one-click to install).
> This is why IBM Compatible computers have the
> majorty of the computer market
IBM-compatible computers have the majority of the market because that's what Microsoft runs its operating systems on, and Microsoft does whatever it takes to get a majority of the market. All the things that we hear about now that Bill Gates is a celebrity have been going on since day one. In the DOS days, Microsoft stole code from Stacker, included it in MS-DOS, and put Stacker out of business. By the time the court case was done, all the software in question was obsolete and Stacker stayed out of business. There are a thousand stories like that.
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> People just don't like Dictators.. Don't ask me why...
... when I buy a new Mac (I bought a new one today) I know that somebody had to get it past Steve Jobs first ... it's great quality control. Also, Steve Jobs and the people around him have a history of driving the industry forward, and it's exciting to watch that happen.
What, like Linus Torvalds? He and Steve Jobs both publicly answered the question, "what's wrong with Microsoft?" by answering, "they have no taste". A "dictator" can be a great asset to a computing platform
As for defending the look of the Aqua GUI and having letter-happy lawyers, I'm inclined to cut a company a little slack when they have been competing with Microsoft for 20 years. Apple is hardly AOL Time Warner, or even Disney. Apple's computers are the most standards-based boxes you will find anywhere, hardware and software both.
It would be cool if the dual-boot Windows/Linux users would give Apple a look before they send in their next payment to Microsoft. If you are happy in Linux full-time, then great (lucky for you!), but it seems hypocritical to me to dual-boot Linux and Windows and disparage Mac OS X.
Latency is how long it takes audio to get from the inputs to the outputs, via the computer. If it's not low enough, you'll hear a delay effect. Macs have the lowest latency, Linux is a close second when not under load, and a distant second when under load, while Windows sounds like it is in a cave.
Latency is a big issue to music and audio people who want to use a computer in their work.
Avid is already being hurt by Final Cut Pro, which costs only $1000 and runs on any recent Mac. It's chump change for what the system can do. The G4 is perfect for these kinds of computations, too.
Pro Tools systems are sold and supported by Digidesign, complete. If you have a problem with a system, you should talk to Digidesign. If you are having repetitive crashes, then you have a problem there somewhere.
... sheesh.
For Apple's part, they spent the last five years writing a completely new operating system that doesn't crash, and released it over six months ago. What more do you want from them, to rewrite Pro Tools as well? They did in a way, because Mac OS X includes a complete modern, multichannel audio and MIDI subsystem that supports 32-bit floating point files (infinite headroom, no clipping, easier to process, they are the new standard). Any Mac OS X app can take advantage of these features for free. That stuff is there because the people who need it are using Apple's products, and have been for decades.
As if Windows never crashes
Right now, Mac OS 9 is still the best place to do music and audio, but when the apps flip over to Mac OS X, it's going to be a whole new world for us guys. The great interface, super stability, the best apps, and the new audio and music subsystem and plugin formats. The multitasking and buffered windows and excellent memory management are also going to make for a great improvement.
The Nintendo Game Cube also uses PowerPC processors, but you wouldn't expect to run Mac OS X on it. Same with BeBoxes, IBM's workstations, Kodak cameras, etc. You need all kinds of stuff beyond the same CPU.
The iMac also has a VGA out, so it is easy to add a second display and use both at once. Think of it as a computer with a secondary 15" display built in.
... it's a really great chip, very small and low-power, so no fan. I'm running Mac OS X right now on an older PowerBook with a G3/400 and it's just great. The $799 iMac has a faster desktop hard drive and a faster CPU than this machine, so it is a fine OS X machine if you give it some more RAM, which is cheap.
... Mac OS X, iMovie, AppleWorks, and an optical mouse are almost half that by themselves, when you buy them separately.
The G3 is not sub-par
> Apple: I don't WANT a computer built into the
> monitor. Why don't you release an "iMac-Lite"
> as a G3 cube for $500?
Because they include a lot of stuff with every Mac. Every one has FireWire, and iMovie, and a PostScript interpreter, PDF printing, multiple languages, lots of great fonts, Java2, optical mouse, so much more. The software bundle is real software, not demos or LE stuff or stuff that you can't upgrade later. Not only will you use the bundled software, but they will become some of your favorite applications ever (iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, Mail, and QuickTime are just joys to use). Also, the machines update themselves automatically from Apple's servers, and you get free online storage and streaming servers and such, and OS upgrades are frequent and easy to install, and they add features that users have asked for. It takes money to keep the whole boat floating, though. The $799 iMac is already kind of a recession special
> Apple isn't in the business of producing
... like you decide that you want to get Roxio Toast and make really funky CD formats ... so you get Toast and if it doesn't work, you know it is Roxio's fault because you can burn CD's in the Finder ... you know your drive works, your computer works. It makes things a lot easier.
> end-to-end products and services.
Yes, they sell lots of end-to-end stuff. They sell camcorders as an option with an iMac, and that gives you a complete system for DV editing for under $1500, everything included, even FireWire cable and free streaming video service. CNN just bought millions of dollars worth of Apple's mobile journalism bundles, which is everything you need to make broadcast quality video on the go (PowerBook, Final Cut Pro, FireWire cable, DV camcorder). They have bundles for schools that include wireless base stations, desktops, servers, notebooks, notebook carts, and even a software called PowerSchool that does all the record-keeping and sends report cards to parents by email and whatnot. If you go to apple.com or one of their stores and buy a camcorder and a mid or high-end PowerMac, you have everything you need to shoot a movie, edit it, make a DVD interface, encode it into MPEG-2, and burn it to a DVD video disc. They even sell Apple-branded DVD-R blanks, and Mac OS X's Finder can burn data CD's and DVD's so you can archive your work. If iDVD isn't enough for you, Apple has a pro counterpart to it called DVD Studio Pro as well.
Really, you couldn't be more wrong. They are one-stop shopping for many industries. It saves you so much time and trouble, it's not funny. You get a working system out of the box, so you can easily see as you go where a third-party upgrade of some sort might help your work
By default it is in the lower right of the screen in Windows XP, for the first time ever. This is significant because Microsoft agreed not to put a trash can in the lower right of their interface during one of their court cases over copying stuff over the years, and this agreement just ran out recently.
That's the new Apple, man. Standards everywhere. Even if you have to see it to believe it, once you see it you won't believe it (you get me?). They can match acronyms and buzzwords and standards with anybody out there. A lot of people who would never have used a Mac a few years ago are buying iBooks now and enjoying all the Mac GUI and apps coming along with their UNIX, for a very low cost. You can install an X-Windows app and get your hands all dirty, and then run it side-by-side with an app that you "installed" by dragging one "fat" file to wherever you wanted and opening it. Apple are really simplifying things and creating an even more transparent computing experience, where you just think of what you want to do and then do it, whether that's editing video or shell scripting, and the computer is up to the task. It's a great platform. The best desktop ever, no doubt.
Microsoft's Mac products are made by a separate unit in Silicon Valley ... not in Redmond. IE:mac (as it's called) has a rendering engine of its own called Tazman that's as compliant as Gecko, and the browser uses JavaScript, plug-ins, and Java. The interface is Mac OS X -style, even in the Mac OS 9 version. If you are ever cursing at IE Windows for shitty rendering, just remember that Bill Gates owns a super-standards-compliant rendering engine already.
... Aqua apps have access to BSD, Cocoa, Carbon, Java2, QuickTime, CoreAudio (32-bit float, unlimited channels), CoreMIDI (1ms latency routing, mLAN support), FireWire, USB, PDF, a PostScript interpreter, AppleScript (user-level recordable interaction between GUI apps), Quartz, object-oriented dynamic drivers, UNIX (true multiuser with POSIX permissions), Unicode, XML, much more. People are building apps right now on Mac OS X that just can't be built anywhere else ... very few of the apps that you actually go out and buy Macs just to run are ported yet (Pro Tools, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro). Those apps are going to work so well on Mac OS X that it will have people's jaws dropping. The DVD Player application in 10.1 is already doing that, with its performance and high-quality and amazing multitasking ... it's just the first of many apps to bring that kind of quality and stability and multitasking to all corners of digital media creation.
Many Mac users have come to think of the Microsoft Mac Business Unit ("Mactopia") as a separate company that builds Microsoft-compatible products for the Mac. Of course, no company could ever do that without being owned by Microsoft, but you ignore that illegal distortion of the free market and focus on the products, you are happy to have the option to become "Office-compatible" (for a publisher, say) without having to run Windows.
I think Apple has plenty of patents. They have always done a lot of research. FireWire is pretty famous lately. Mac OS X is full of cutting-edge technology. MPEG-4 is QuickTime, basically. Since Apple bought NeXT they have been firmly on a path to open standards, in every software and hardware component. Even the BIOS-equivalent in their machines is a stardard that Sun also uses. Choosing NeXT over BeOS was symbolic of this. I think Steve Jobs has confidence in Apple's ability to survive on a level playing field. Where Microsoft is doing everything it can to control the very Internet, Apple gave up a lot of control of their whole core OS in order to be interoperable. Apple is free to innovate at a much higher level, with FireWire, DVD authoring, ease of use, graphics, audio, etc. In 6-12 months there will be such a difference between a Mac and everything else for creative applications
QuickTime is the most complete multimedia there is, which is why MPEG-4 is based on it. Real has a server and a player, and Microsoft has a server, a player, and an OS monopoly, but QuickTime is in cameras, audio apps, music apps, Web authoring apps, animation tools, DVD authoring tools, DV editors, and open source streaming servers on every major platform. It supports almost every image, video, and audio format in existence, along with animated images and Flash movies. It has a built-in software synth with DLS. For $29 you can author with QuickTime Player Pro just by cutting and pasting and exporting. QuickTime is one of the major reasons why creative people use Macs. While Microsoft was trying to get their developers to support a GUI, Apple had their developers integrating their apps with QuickTime, so you can move media back and forth between apps as files or with the clipboard and get great results.
Almost every video you can find on the Web was in QuickTime format at some point in it's life. There aren't any other vendors with this kind of technology. It may be possible to do digital video without Apple, but it's not something you'd do by choice.
If you want to run QuickTime on Linux, here's how.
Crossover Brings QuickTime to Linux
Guys ... file the QuickTime-on-Linux stuff away with the one-button mouse crap and the entire phrase "proprietary hardware". You're only hurting yourselves by regurgitating all the Microsoft FUD we are forced to swallow every day. Shit it out, instead. Go to an Apple Store and touch some of this stuff. Apple is firing on all cylinders right now, and it's something to see. You can make movies and DVD's with drag and drop on a stable UNIX with ridiculous graphics and media support. It's outstanding. You could share one of these computers with your grandmother and both be happy.
10.1 ROCKS! The great reviews are not hype. The multitasking and the performance make it seem like the operating system is doing everything effortlessly. It's a pleasure to use.
> Now would someone please port LILO to mac?
> The Open Firmware on Macs/Suns is maddening
> enough to deal with and dinking with bootX made
> LILO look like a piece of cake.
Since 1998, OpenFirmware has had a graphical boot loader that shows all of the Mac OS, Mac OS X, and Linux bootable volumes attached to a system as pretty icons if you boot a Mac with the Option key held down. Then you click a volume with your mouse and click a right-facing arrow to boot from that volume. You can even attach FireWire storage at this point and refresh the list and boot from that. The Linux volumes have a cool Penguin icon on them. It's a really nice system.
The LinuxPPC people might be interested in PPC vs x86 Linux testing, but for most of Apple's customers, it is better to show a DVD being software encoded (not decoded) in 2x on a G4 867 or 1x on a dual 800 with very high quality, or show a video clip being readied for the Web twice as fast as a P4 1.7, or show a Photoshop workflow that goes by twice as fast on the Mac box. These are the ways that Macs are twice as fast, and that's why audio, video and graphics people use them. The G4 has a co-processor built-in (Altivec) that is designed to make audio, video, and graphics apps run much faster. That's why those tasks are faster on Macs. It is very simple.
... harder to use, too).
Now, there are other tasks that Macs weren't optimized for that may be faster on x86, or code that was built for x86 and runs better on x86. Doesn't really matter to the Hollywood crowd, though. Doesn't matter to the newbie who wants three simple steps to the Web. The academic question of "which is faster at doing PC-based tasks, a Mac or a PC?" is just not interesting when you can make a DVD on a Mac in a few minutes of work and an hour of background encoding (Compaq's solution takes 4 times longer and is much, much lower quality, on a P4 1.8
Classic is "transparent" (windows floating along with Aqua windows) so that you can drag and drop things from Classic to other apps, and so that the user has only one desktop area. Disks showing up separately in Classic and Mac OS X would be hard for many users. Also, Classic may get further integrated into the UI later as it matures. Hopefully they will provide a non-dual boot version when people aren't typically dual-booting at all anymore, and it will just be built into the system like Carbon and Cocoa are and the user won't have to turn Classic on and off. There are a lot of Enhanced CD's and such that expect Classic Mac OS, and this is how Apple can support that in the future.
There is a 5% performance hit running an app in Classic instead of natively, but there are lots of upsides that make up for this. For example, when you switch to Mac OS X, your browser (at least) immediately goes native and can't crash any other app. Java goes native, disk utilities and other apps included with the OS go native, so even if you are running a couple of big apps in Classic (like Photoshop and Dreamweaver), those apps are isolated from the others, and you can optimize Mac OS 9 for those two apps. Also, Classic.app is a Mac OS X app, and takes advantage of better memory and multitasking, so Mac OS 9 thinks it has 1GB of RAM no matter how much you actually have.
Besides, the 5% performance hit goes away when you get your next Mac or one of today's very cheap RAM upgrades. It's a small step back in order to take a big step forward.
The 10.1 UI is much better again than previous. The extensible System Menus replace the Control Strip and previous system menu implementations, and it will be easy for someone to make an app-launcher menu that you just drag into the menubar and drop where you want it and use it (there is already ScriptMenu.menu on apple.com that provides a pervasive menu for launching AppleScirpt, Perl, and shell scripts). Put the Dock on the right side, and it feels very much like a vertical floating application palette in 9, and the Finder's icon sits where you're used to your hard drive being, and a click on it opens your Home folder.
The Dock still needs work (the elegance of the System Menus is sort of embarrassing it), and I'd like to see the Application Menu merge with the other "application menu" that you get when you click-and-hold an app in the Dock, then the File menu wouldn't move around.
Tell Apple what you don't like. They have been listening really well. They added a PostScript interpreter to 10.1 because people asked for it. Now you can output PDF or PostScript from any Mac OS X app that's been updated for 10.1.
Filename extension hiding is also not so bad. They do so many smart things that in day-to-day operation it will be better for most people this way. You won't ever have to type an extension or even look at one if you don't want to (once the apps catch up a bit), but if you do want to, they are also easy to access. File Type and Creator still work on HFS+ volumes (BBEdit is not adding filename extensions yet and it works fine) so you can still work in the old way if you want to.
10.1 rocks. Fast, stable, incredibly full-featured, incredible standards support. A very pleasant place to work. On a PowerBook, it is really something to see.
There was a demo at Apple's WWDC last year of a 1983 beta of MacPaint running in Classic on Mac OS X 10.0. Pretty cool that OS X can support an app going that far back.
MacPaint was quite revolutionary in its time, like iMovie and iDVD are today. Photoshop and similar apps are basically much more advanced big brothers of MacPaint, with many of the same UI conventions and procedures. A lot of digital artists got turned on first with MacPaint.
IE for Mac and IE for Windows have nothing in common. Different codebase, different UI, different rendering engine (on the Mac, it's called Tazman and it is totally standards-compliant). Pages look pretty much identical in IE Mac and in Mozilla.
There were three stages to Microsoft's Mac support: 1) they only made Mac apps (Word, Excel, etc), then 2) they ported their Mac apps to Windows and then sort of ported them back to the Mac (which flopped badly and Word 6.0 for Macintosh was called "a major embarrassment" by Bill Gates); and then in 1997 they formed the Macintosh Business Unit (MBU) after Steve Jobs made up with Microsoft and tried to bury the past. Since then, Microsoft's Mac apps have gotten more and more Mac-like with each revision, to the point now where Office X (also "10" like Mac OS X) for Mac OS X is Apple's poster child for a great third-party Mac OS X app (the floating panels even swoosh out of the menus like windows do out of the Dock). It's like Microsoft is an Apple subcontractor, making the browser and high-end office suite for Apple, to their specifications.
They also have easy installation and uninstallation on the Mac. IE for Mac OS X is a single icon that you can either use or put in the Trash and that's that. You can move it or rename it if you want to as well. Same with Word X and the other Office apps. Easy to manage because they don't put files all over the system.
I even kind of like Word X, and I've been cursing Word for years (my publisher forces me to use it, like most publishers, because they want stuff submitted in Word format, with all of the trimmings like tracked revisions and comments and such).
Still, even though MacAddict Magazine just did a very favorable write-up of the MBU and the 185 people who work there, there's a bad taste in your mouth when you use Microsoft stuff that is really a drag. It will be there until MS starts acting their age and size (like IBM does). A company as big as MS has to go out of its way to be interoperable at every possible level, and listen to its customers' needs instead of dictating the one true way it will be. Learn to be gentlemen and ladies, for everybody's sakes.
> Sorry, but you get paid for the end product, if you
... it would take years of work to make Linux competitive for those users, and why should the people who are making Linux want to do that when Apple is doing a good job of it already? This stuff will appear in Linux one day if the people who use and make Linux want to build it in, but it is not there now.
> do graphic arts, then gimp can do it for you
Why is it that it's never a graphic artist saying this?
> (just take a weekend of your own time and learn
> it, it's so close to photoshop now it aint funny)
It is so close to Photoshop in ways that a hobbyist can appreciate. GIMP is not on the cutting-edge of graphic design and publishing.
> as for webdesign if you dont code your html by
> hand then I am agast
That opinion is about five years out-of-date. These days you mock it up in Dreamweaver and then customize the code as required by hand or with another tool, and Dreamweaver leaves the hand-written code alone. I'd rather write scripts that automate Dreamweaver than write Web pages. The people who make Dreamweaver have researched a lot of common browser bugs and Dreamweaver takes steps to work around them. Why would I want to keep up with the lastest bug in IE just so I can code everything by hand instead of just the important stuff?
The first music sequencers only produced robotic music, and the first design-oriented HTML editors only produced crappy code. Both of these things have long since changed. If you get robotic music out of Cubase 5 and crappy code out of Dreamweaver 4, it is your own fault. The tools are advanced enough now that you have control over things.
> you can do everything (except non linear video
> editing) on linux that you do on your mac... so
> what's your excuse again?
Pro audio, QuickTime authoring, Flash authoring, DVD video authoring, easy drag-and-drop data CD and DVD burning (I make lots of big files, so a $6 4.7GB DVD-R that burns in 20 minutes with no effort to make it is very important), print graphics (no CMYK color in GIMP), and huge, huge, huge workflow advantages that come from common key shortcuts, application conventions, support for all common audio, video, and graphics formats, the best clipboard on a personal computer, scriptable/recordable GUI and high-level interapplication communication, PDF as a common format between all apps, drag-and-drop of one icon to "install" an app, or drag-and-drop to the Trash to "uninstall", amazing hardware support with drivers included in the OS so stuff just hot-plugs and you go (like a graphics tablet, or a precision mouse as a second mouse, or a whole USB/FireWire audio interface, camera/camcorder, or a hard disk).
All of this stuff saves me lots and lots of time and provides very important functionality and capabilities. A Mac is a very important tool in many industries
Coders and geeks can go ahead and make their own operating system that's optimized for coders and geeks. When Apple says that they make systems for "the rest of us", they mean people who aren't coders and geeks and can't make their own operating systems, or don't want to. Apple's customers are more interested in the fact that Mac OS X includes color-matching throughout the OS and hardware, and supports every type of font out of the box (including Windows-formatted TrueType fonts) than whether the compiler is free enough or whatever. That's for coders and geeks to worry about.
Really, Linux and Mac OS X both exist for different reasons, and they're quite complemetary. I use Mac desktops and notebooks, but my Web server is Linux. If you're doing something for which Linux is well-suited, and you have the expertise and time to set it up, it's a no-brainer. Especially when you are in a situation where you set it up once and replicate it on box after box after box with no licensing fees or associated paperwork (that is a huge advantage). It's not going to swap one-for-one with a Mac box for most users anytime soon, though.
What's overkill about the OS X GUI? It makes as much sense to build a GUI on PDF now as it did to build one on plain bitmaps in the 1980's. All of today's publishing applications are building in PDF support, and Apple saved everyone time and trouble on the Mac by building PDF into the system, so that it's "free" for any application to use. There's a PostScript interpreter built-in now, too, as of 10.1. It's not overkill for Apple's customers, and it's not slow. The clarity and sharpness of graphics on this system is amazing. They wrote the graphics system from the ground up to be what it is ... it's not window dressing on an old system.
> Then you become a poser, just running Linux
... it's a shame to knock the architecture because one of its plug-in codecs is not open. There's so much more to QuickTime.
> to be cool or l33t while you must defer to another
> OS like Windows or MacOS to actually do anything.
That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is that some user's needs are covered by having support for Linux applications, and some user's needs are covered by having support for Linux and Classic Mac applications (Mac-on-Linux). Some users (most of Apple's customers) are better served by having a one-click installer that installs support for Classic Mac apps, updated Mac apps, NeXT/OpenStep apps, Java2, and BSD Unix into their computer so that almost any developer has a quick development path to Mac OS X and can offer Mac users a range of software products with a Mac GUI and Mac conventions (standard key shortcuts, drag-and-drop or one-click install, etc). Different people have different needs. Cheers to the Mac-on-Linux guys and their users.
> so other people can build OSS apps to playback
> those movies, like what people have done for MP3
> or MPEG
What's wrong with MPEG? QuickTime Player also plays MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 movies. You can publish MPEG movies and they play all over. Codec problems are hardly unique to QuickTime. I've come across many AVI files I couldn't play, even on Windows. QuickTime is the Unix of multimedia
> Hell, I'd love to have a Mac at my home, but
... Java2, Cocoa, Carbon, BSD, Perl, AppleScript (this is recordable scripting of GUI apps and documents with plain English syntax that you save as applications), HTML/JavaScript, QuickTime, WebObjects, CGI, whatever.
> not for a price that would make my parents broke!
Desktops start at $799 and include OS X, an optical mouse, display, FireWire, speakers, AirPort antennas (to act as a base station for notebooks), etc. Notebooks start at $1299 and are subnotebook-sized, and include OS X as well as FireWire, built-in AirPort (802.11b) antennaes, 5-hour battery. You also get the best consumer movie-editing software, digital camera software, excellent CD/MP3 ripping/burning software. Really good stuff that you'll enjoy using. Also a creatively-oriented office suite and a few really good games. You can't tell me that's not cheap.
> For example, why did Apple limit all the licensing
> agreements so noone could manufacture a Mac
> clone?
Steve Jobs said it was because the world doesn't need another Compaq. Turns out we didn't even need the one we already had.
> But the only thing they've returned back is the
> kernel, which is of very little practical use
They returned back a complete open source Unix called Darwin. It runs on Macs and on x86. It is great for standard things like Apache and Perl, and also includes QuickTime Streaming Server for serving streaming video. You can run X-Windows on there if you like. It is a very big hunk of Mac OS X (about 150MB). People are buying OS X for their current Mac, and putting Darwin on the old Mac they had in the closet and using it as a development server at zero cost. If they have a compatible Intel machine, they can use that, too (seeing "Welcome to Macintosh!" on an x86 system was a real trip the first time.) Apple have also returned changes to compilers and such, and hired open source developers to work on Darwin and BSD. They also opened code for gaming controllers.
Shipping millions of computers with Mac OS X on them also puts Apache, Perl, emacs, BSD Unix onto computers that kids commonly find in their homes and schools. Lots of kids will use Apache rather than IIS because all Macs now ship with this great, great software. You can also do and learn a bunch of different developer stuff on Mac OS X
I'll leave it to you to detail Microsoft's attitude towards open source, seeing as Microsoft is Apple's main competitor. I mean, think about it.
> I'm sure it's fine by them as long as they've got
> their revenue.
What a bizarre attitude to take about Apple. Are you sure you're not thinking about Microsoft? Microsoft uses BSD-licensed code as well, you know, but they don't advertise it and they don't give anything back at all, from what I understand. Further to that, they have called open source software a cancer and un-American and other such ridiculous propagandist terms.
People who contributed to BSD Unix and Apache and all the other fine community software are to be thanked and respected for their efforts, but so are the coders at Apple who developed other aspects of a modern computer platform. So are the financial people at Apple who found a way to give so much value, take so many risks, and still keep the company so healthy. This stuff is so cheap, and it's so good. Every new app that arrives only makes it even better.
> why didn't Apple just offer to pay him for the project
They asked him not to copy their graphics. Why would they want to instead pay him to copy their graphics? If Apple wanted a Mozilla theme based on Aqua they would give that job to the team of people who make graphics for Mac OS. Somewhere there are some high-quality Photoshop files created by the original artist that are the best source of GIF's for Mozilla.
It would look half-assed anyway, though, unless Mozilla also has background scroll widgets and such. The title bar is actually proper Aqua, so it gets translucent at the right times already, but scroll bars in the foreground window are different than scroll bars in background windows on Mac OS. Also, the Aqua scrollbars look wider than Mozilla's (unless that's variable when making a Mozilla theme).
This seems like the least outrageous example of corporatism ever discussed on Slashdot. We're talking about a Bay Area technology company founded and run by a bearded vegan asking a "free software" Linux user not to distribute his clone of the public face of a nascent product that is perhaps the most mainstream open source project ever.
How diabolical.
No wonder nobody fully believes the truth about Microsoft when free software people also see Apple as the enemy. Trying to pretend like Apple and Microsoft are even playing in the same league of evil is a joke. Like the subject line implies, Apple is not even as evil as Adobe. Give me a break.
What this guy should do is make a distinctive skin of his own and give it over to his favorite distro so they can make it their default, and give Mandrake Linux or whatever a face that says "Mandrake Linux". Ask yourself for a second whether Apple might have a good tactic for introducing new technology even to Windows users.
> if I make fried chicken for my friends and family
... no special treatment. You can make 50 different Aqua skins and keep them on 20 different computers all around your house and it's not illegal. In this case, Apple asked the guy not to put an Aqua skin for X-Windows out on the Web, not to turn in his technology and surrender his human dignity.
> with the 11 herbs and spices similar to Kentucky
> Fried Chicken's batter recipe , based on my
> experience with the Colonel's product,
... then that would be fine. I think the problem here is actually analagous to creating a perfect imitation of the distinctive red and white KFC bucket, and then sending the plans and images out over the Internet so that people can print and fold and serve their own chicken to the family in a cool KFC bucket. Or so they can order a cheaper brand of take-out chicken, and still put it in the bucket. These buckets look like KFC buckets, with the signature imprint, but they always contain non-KFC chicken. I can see how KFC would like it better if you just came up with your own bucket design and distributed that instead.
Another analogy would be if you were making car bodies of BMW cars that fit over some other kind of car and made them look like BMW's. The people at BMW would have to be like, WTF?
What if you made shells for Dell notebooks that made them look like PowerBooks? Would it be understandable for Apple to ask you not to do that anymore?
> then KFC-
> Pepsico lawyers can come to my employer and
> demand that he seize the hd on my laptop and
> discover if I am storing their
Didn't Apple just ask him to not skin Aqua? I didn't see anything about threatening anybody's employer or taking computers. Presumably, he could go ahead and release the skin and then they would have to take him to court if they thought it was worth it. Then they ask the next guy not to make a skin and they can point out that they also asked this guy
Firebaal ... I'm sorry, man, but you're really off-base here.
... eBay.com
... don't think of the hardcore gamer, think of the average person who just wants to grab the Sims and play with it without worrying about how to install it (on the Mac, you just drag-and-drop or one-click to install).
Apple computers feature more support for standards than any other system. From the OpenFirmware (IEEE 1275) that boots the system to the PDF window server, every place where a standard component or protocol could be used, it is used. Hardware includes AGP, PCI (4 empty 64-bit slots in every PowerMac), DVI, VGA, ATA, SCSI, USB, FireWire (IEEE 1394), AirPort (802.11b), Gigabit Ethernet, etc. Software includes PDF and PostScript output from any application, WebDAV, UFS, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, DV capture and editing, viewing of every common graphics format, playback of every common audio format, DVD-R and CD-RW data burning, CD to MP3 ripping, DVD video disc authoring, DVD video disc playback, Java2, QuickTime, Apache, Perl, 5.1 surround sound, 32-bit float audio (the first OS to support this pro audio format), MIDI, mLAN, ColorSync, Cocoa (OpenStep), Carbon (support for traditional pc apps like MS Word and Macromedia Dreamweaver), BSD Unix. This is all off the top of my head. Go to apple.com and check it out.
> Pricewatch.com
You might think that there is no Mac software or hardware, but you are wrong. The hardware is most of the same stuff you use on Windows, but on the Mac it is easy to install and you don't need drivers (Apple collects them now and ships them with the OS so stuff just works). Excluding games, the software is 75% the same as Windows (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Word, Excel, etc) and often comes in the same box, and there are equivalents for the other 25% (Apache instead of IIS, Final Cut Pro instead of EditDV, Java2 instead of C#, etc). For games, you just get the hits (Tony Hawk 2, Alice, Sims, Quake III, etc), and sometimes about six months later, but you usually also get additional features and less bugs. It's fine for a lot of people
> This is why IBM Compatible computers have the
> majorty of the computer market
IBM-compatible computers have the majority of the market because that's what Microsoft runs its operating systems on, and Microsoft does whatever it takes to get a majority of the market. All the things that we hear about now that Bill Gates is a celebrity have been going on since day one. In the DOS days, Microsoft stole code from Stacker, included it in MS-DOS, and put Stacker out of business. By the time the court case was done, all the software in question was obsolete and Stacker stayed out of business. There are a thousand stories like that.