>Yeah, except you can ONLY burn audio tracks - and ONLY from iTunes.
> What if that's not the only thing I want to burn? What then?
You reboot into the (included) Mac OS 9.1, and use the (included) Disc Burner software that is integrated with the Mac OS 9 Finder. Burning a CD is as easy as copying files to a floppy disk. This feature is supposed to show up soon in Mac OS X, probably in 10.1, sometime this summer.
has been coming out of iBook speakers for a long time. N2MP3 Pro makes Ogg Vorbis tracks, and Audion plays them. Others too.
It's cool to hear about people using the graphical loader in Open Firmware to dual and triple boot Linux, and/or BSD with a Mac. The first time I used that graphical loader to dual boot OS 9 and a developer release of OS X, I immediately thought of how Linux-friendly Macs have become. Apple's disk utilities also have a long list of partition schemes and formats for Linux. Unless your Mac is very new and drivers aren't prepared yet, it's so easy to work with Linux on a Mac. You can boot from a CD or boot from a FireWire drive.
Apple's current products are a whole level above anything that the PC cartel is making these days. It is hard to find a flaw in them except for the fact that Mac OS is in a transition right now, with Mac OS 9 being better than X for about half the things people are doing, and vice versa. In six months or so, any off the shelf Mac will be a tremendous system with a huge library of software, and easy to dual-boot Linux, too.
Earthlink will give you tech support if you are running Mac OS (I get my Ricochet from them). My Ricochet modem just connects via USB and appears to both Mac OS 9.1 and Mac OS X as a plain old USB modem, which you connect to with PPP. It took me a few minutes to use the Ricochet installer on Mac OS 9.1 (which doesn't actually install anything, just configures things) and then copy the settings to my Mac OS X box, but I could have set both up without the installer if necessary in a few minutes, because both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X include the modem script for Ricochet. I'm typing this on Mac OS X through Ricochet right now.
I pay $70 per month for unlimited access, and I connect at 480kbs here in North Hollywood. I haven't tried it anywhere else yet, but I hear the LA network is the newest (only came up last January or February) so I was told to expect to be faster here than elsewhere for the time being. 480kbs is faster than my last DSL was. It is a great, great service. I also had a phone briefly that had "Wireless Web" and it was a piece of shit. Besides the fact that the phone couldn't find the network all the time, the content and UI was garbage. It's not worth paying for, which is why most people don't pay for it. Ricochet works great, though... I encourage anyone who is on the fence with Ricochet to dive in... the water is fine. People see it and they don't believe it, wherever I go. One guy is like, "I pay $25/month for 50kbs dial-up at home, and you're telling me you pay $70 and you're in a coffee shop at 480kbs?" The modem was only $50, too.
... I blame the huge numbers of people who just continue and continue to be Microsoft's bitch and then whine about it afterward. If you build your business and/or career around Microsoft, if you rely on them at all for anything, then be prepared to shut up, bend over, and take it like a man from time to time. That is the price of admission to their market, and everybody knows it. Microsoft's business model is not a secret. There is a line of people from Washington state to Washington, D.C. with sore assholes, surprised looks on their faces, and a sob story to tell about being former partners of Microsoft, and I don't pity them one bit.
Microsoft did the bully work to clear vast tracts of Cyberspace of troublesome natives and trees, and if you want to build there, you can't reasonably complain when Microsoft puts Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, etc. on the currency. Either get your Passport account or stop sharecropping with Microsoft. There isn't a single thing that you can do with a Microsoft computer that you can't do better with a competing product, whether it's a Sun server, an Apple desktop, or Linux or BSD on just about any hardware. All Microsoft can offer you is their big bland market. If you want that, then fine, but don't kid yourself that you get to keep your soul.
There is no issue here. These are not Aqua-inspired graphics, or reminiscent-of-Aqua graphics, or graphics that look sorta like Aqua, these are Apple's graphics, copied and pasted, bit for bit, into a Stardock theme. This is not "look and feel", this is just plagiarism. Even the logos were left intact.
This is a re-implementation of Aqua on Windows. If I re-implement Apache on Windows, and I don't release the source, Slashdotters would be very interested in whether I used the original Apache source or not. If not, then OK. If I did, though, then I'm a dick, plain and simple. Taking someone else's work and calling it your own is being a dick.
How can anybody reasonably defend this? I clicked on a screenshot that the Stardock company said "walks the line" to see Apple's graphics, bit for bit. How is that "walking the line"? What would be "out of line" in that case... kidnapping a graphic artist from Apple and forcing him to make a Stardock theme for you?
> I would have NEVER guessed to put a CD or
> network share into the trash to unmount them.
That's why this is only a shortcut, for convenience. You actually would select the disc or drive and choose File > Put Away.
> Need Mr. Paperclip to get my floppy out ya know.
Macs haven't had floppy drives for years, and right now, as of this second, something like 80% of Windows users don't have protected memory either (any DOS version). If you compare how a Mac and a Windows box use removable media, I think you will find the Mac superior, especially if you have a Unix background.
> it reverts all your networking connections to the
> PRINTER port. No, it doesn't tell you that it did that.
Macs also haven't had printer ports for years. What you're talking about is an easy networking system that used the printer port before Ethernet was cheap enough. There is no equivalent generic PC system to compare it to. These days, and for the last three plus years at least, every Mac sold has Ethernet, and many have gigabit Ethernet.
> Yes, Win95 borrows graphical elements from the
> Mac, and several other GUI platforms. So? Pretty
> much every GUI following Parc has done the same.
Apple invented overlapping windows, pull-down menus, pop-up menus, drag and drop, double-clicking, resizable windows, and more. Most of the common GUI elements you interact with each day were invented by Apple engineers and just plain copied by everyone else. You probably wouldn't recognize the Xerox GUI as even being a GUI... it is far less sophisticated than even X Windows, which is also a Mac copy.
> and MS won't be interested in bailing them out
> a second time.
The incident you refer to only happened three years ago or so... you can find news stories on the Web about it still, I'm sure. Microsoft and Apple settled some long-standing issues out of court (one was the wholesale use of stolen QuickTime code in the now-defunct Video for Windows... tell me why AVI is now an "unsupported format" over at Microsoft?), agreed to share patents and technology, and MS invested a paltry -- paltry -- 150 million dollars in Apple to make the whole affair into something Wall Street could understand. At the time, Apple had over 1 billion dollars in cash on hand (they have over 4 billion dollars on hand today) so they were in no danger of going anywhere and did not need rescuing.
You know, you might think I'm an Apple fanatic who is ignorant of other computer platforms, but I'm not. I bought my first Mac in early 1999 after using Windows for almost 10 years, since 3.0 first came out. I regret every minute I used Windows, now... every IRQ conflict, GPF, DLL Hell, OS reinstall, config.sys, etc. It's worth it for Windows users to spend some time with Mac OS X on a new Mac and see what it has to offer. You'll probably find that most of the bad things that you've heard are untrue or taken out of context. And the rest of the bad things you've heard are fixed in Mac OS X. The people who are running Apple right now really, really know what they are doing.
Re:Mac vs. Linux = Apples vs. Oranges
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 2
I always find it funny when non-Mac users complain that the Mac has no software. Most of the "brand-name" apps that are out there started on the Mac and were ported to Windows, like Photoshop, Illustrator, Director, FreeHand, Word, Excel, QuickTime, and on and on. The rest of the "brand-name" apps are Mac and Windows, except for server and database stuff, which is usually Unix and Windows. Mac OS X runs pretty much everything out there that isn't Microsoft, and that means it runs all the best software. A Web developer using Mac OS X may only have three or four server packages to choose from, but one of them is Apache. A Web developer using Windows may have 10 server packages to choose from, but none of them are Apache. Do you see what I mean? There are also a selection of amazing Mac-only apps like Final Cut Pro and MetaSynth. Microsoft's Mac apps are also dramatically better on the Mac... you might not recognize them.
The impression that Windows has more software comes from the fact that Windows software is carried in retail stores, and from the fact that Microsoft lied for years about how many apps were available for Windows. They said 70,000. At one of the recent Microsoft court proceedings, it came out that 70,000 applications is more than have ever been written for all combined platforms in the history of mankind. The actual number was deemed to be "about 10,000", which is about the same number of apps that Apple says run on Mac OS. I've been using a Mac for two years and I still run into major apps that I didn't know were available, like Lightwave, which I saw recently at Macworld. I also saw Maya and Nuendo there, too, which are two apps that are coming to Mac OS X in a few months and have never been on the Mac at all. Software is plentiful on the Mac platform, especially so now that all the Unix stuff is coming over to Mac OS X.
I'm running Mac OS X Public Beta on an original iBook with a G3 300 in it, and 192 MB of RAM. This machine has much less performance than any PowerBook from the last year or so. I can run as many apps as I want, whether they're native or Classic. How much RAM does your friend have? You can put 256 MB more into a PowerBook for about $125 these days. Mac OS X Public Beta apparently gets very happy when you get into the 256 MB RAM area. The final 10.0 will probably be tuned to like less RAM, but RAM is so cheap now... 256 MB for $125 really maximizes the hardware investment you've already made.
Re:OSX for x86? Not going to happen...
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 2
The reason that Steve Jobs spends a lot of time on the UI at Apple events is the same reason that Sun focuses on reliability or MB/s and other such numbers at a Sun event: these things matter to their customers. If your Sun server can put out twice as many Web pages as an SGI, then that's going to save/make you money. Apple's users know that you can take the same hardware and software functionality and put a good UI on it and speed up the wetware (humans) dramatically. We're the slowest part of a computer system, but we're also the smartest... the UI is the vital connection between the hardware and wetware. If we could measure it in MB/s, maybe more people would understand. As it is, creative users flock to the Mac because they understand good UI from using paintbrushes and musical instruments. Mac users will buy an OS upgrade if you show them that the interface will save them time and trouble.
The BeOS model has not even been successful for Be. It's like you're suggesting that Apple follow the Edsel model. Also, Be used to follow something called the "Apple model". The Be model is Be's Plan B.
That's bullshit, or you would have bought a Mac by now. I know it and Apple knows it. No Mac OS X for x86.
Re:OSX on X86.. It was called NeXTSTEP/OpenStep
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 2
> What's changed since 1994?
People are serving Web pages out of their homes and need reliability and good multitasking. They are editing digital video and need good system throughput. They are hooked up to the Internet 24/7 and need security. They are overwhelmed by a mass of set-top boxes, wireless phones, PDA's, MP3 players, and need an interface that is simple and easy to use, and a hardware platform that deals with peripherals in a sensible way. Most of all, they are not using computers so much because they want to, but because they need to, and that really begs for a system that really works, and is also fun to use.
I don't know the details, but I think there is already a 64-bit path built into the PowerPC in some way. I read an article about it once, and the impression I left with was that you could sort of stamp a 32-bit PowerPC chip as "64-bit Ready". I think the bus is 64-bit or something. Motorola has a lot of stuff on this at their Web site.
I also read somewhere that 64-bitness is part of Apple's plans with Mac OS X as well. They know it's coming. Altivec is 128-bit already, of course.
You can't make any assumptions about the supported machines in 10.0, based on 4K17 or other Apple internal builds. Mac OS X Public Beta runs on older machines, because it has to, since its a public build. However, Apple have been using Mac OS X internally for quite a while... some of the servers running Apple.com are running Mac OS X, and many of their employees are using Mac OS X on their desktops. There is no reason for 4K17 to have the drivers for older machines. Drivers for old machines could easily be in an add-on package, which would clearly be labeled "unsupported". We're talking about machines that, if they were PC's, wouldn't run Windows 2000.
Re:A day late and a dollar short
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 2
> If you really think about it, there is nothing in an
> Apple (with the exception of the PowerPC chip)
> that is unique.
This isn't really true. You can find a PC that is comparably-equipped to a Mac, but what's important to the platform and to developers is that there are certain things that ALL Macs have. For example, Apple introduced sound and CD-ROM drives first, and then put them in all of their machines. Sound and CD-ROM drives were also available for PC's shortly after that, but it was years and years before a developer could rely on a PC having both of those features, which made it harder to truly exploit those features in the wider market. The mouse is another example. Before Windows 95, PC developers could not assume that you have a mouse.
These days, all Macs have Ethernet, so you can create a device or software for the Mac market that requires Ethernet and not have to include an instructional book on how to add Ethernet to your PC. Similarly, they all have FireWire, so you can develop an add-on that requires FireWire and know you have a good chunk of the current Mac market. Mac keyboards have always had two USB (ADB in the old days) ports, so you can make a joystick and count on the user just having to plug it into their keyboard. When they test their joysticks on the Mac, they're plugging them into the same keyboard that the users all have, so it's easy to troubleshoot the drivers or whatever.
A lot of these kinds of assumptions move the burden of getting things working off the user and onto the developer and Apple. In effect, the "computer" evolves to include a higher base set of capabilities, and then developers make software to exploit those capabilities as a whole. Sometimes knowing you can rely on Ethernet and FireWire both being there makes the whole more than the sum of its parts.
Re:Meaningful performance comparisons
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, but when Photoshop so plainly runs better on one platform, you don't ask why if you're a Photoshop user, you just use the better platform. Who cares if this or that or the other is the reason? That's why application benchmarks are so meaningful, never mind if geeks don't like them as much as compiler shootouts.
Photoshop is also a great app to use, even if you're not a Photoshop user, because so many apps these days use Photoshop plug-ins or similar computations when they work with bitmaps or do anti-aliasing. Even a Web browser is resizing bitmap images from time to time.
> MacOS X is based on GNU/Darwin which is
> currently being ported to x86.
Mac OS X is based on Darwin, which already runs on x86. I downloaded a Virtual PC "hard drive" disk image with DarwinIntel on it two or three months ago, so it's been running on x86 for a while. It is basically a BSD with a modified Mach kernel.
I guess Apple could have called Darwin "GNU/Darwin", or maybe "GNU/PCI/Darwin", since it does use a PCI bus and why wouldn't we put the name of every underlying technology right in the name of the OS? No disrespect to the GNU folks who have made so much good stuff possible, but a car's engine belongs under the hood, you know?
Re:Applications wouldn't work out
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 2
No, that really doesn't matter. A Mac OS X application is actually a folder that contains all of the application's resources and files, and it can contain multiple binaries as well. The GUI displays this folder as a single application that the user can interact with by moving it, renaming it, running it, dragging things onto it, or browsing its contents to get a look at the insides. Photoshop for Mac OS X on PPC would just have to get a bit bigger to also run on Mac OS X on x86. Mac OS X itself would choose and use the right binary at runtime. All the developer would have to do is compile the app twice, but many Mac software developers are used to making dual PowerPC/68k (so-called "fat") binaries already.
"Rhapsody" is Mac OS X Server 1.0 or 1.2, available for the past two years (type uname in Terminal on a Mac OS X Server box and it will tell you it is "Rhapsody"). Mac OS X will tell you "Darwin".
Mac OS X is not Apple's first "next-generation OS", just the first one that will really do the whole job. Promises made for Rhapsody don't count, same as Microsoft has been promising a single version of Windows for 5 years.
He said "IF you want OS X"... if vanilla BSD meets your computing needs, then good for you.
Mac OS X for x86 due soon, called "Windows 2002".
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 2
Mac OS X for x86 will be out sometime next year. It's called "Windows 2002", and it's from Microsoft. It runs Photoshop, it runs FreeHand, it runs Office... all Macintosh apps that are now available on x86 thanks to the fine people at Microsoft. Rather than BSD, you get DOS, but you can dual-boot BSD. Rather than Mac OS, you get Windows, but it also has a mouse pointer and icons. Rather than Apache, you get Microsoft Personal Web Sharing with a limit of 10 simultaneous users, but if you pay through the nose, Microsoft will flip a switch in the Registry for you and you can serve more users. Rather than a small, cool-running, superfast RISC chip with an amazing DSP co-processor, you get an overclocked beast the size of a paperback book with two or three huge fans, but x86 users know that these are all small compromises to make for the pleasure of buying your add-on hardware from umpteen different vendors in 148 countries around the world. In fact, the majority of people won't even notice the difference between the two versions, because they are ignorant.
Windows 2002 comes free with a computer system that will set you back about $800-$2500 complete. If you don't like it as much as the PowerPC version (called Mac OS X) then buy the PowerPC version, which is also available free with a computer system that will set you back about $800-2500 complete (unless you want a CD/DVD-RW combo drive, which is $1000 extra). The PowerPC systems do include such niceties as built-in antennaes, a single cable for the display, award-winning industrial design, FireWire, optical mouse, no legacy ports, free movie-editing software, etc, but the x86 version is available with snap-on colored panels, and occasionally comes in cases that look like melted marshmallows (hello, Compaq), and, as mentioned, it will work with add-on hardware from umpteen different companies. And remember, both versions of Mac OS X run pretty much the same brand-name apps.
It's all pretty simple when you ignore little details like API's and disk formats. Sure Mac OS X and Windows 2002 are different to us geeks, but geeks don't always make the purchasing decisions, do they? So, why would Apple go to all the effort of making an x86 Mac OS X when that's Microsoft's core business? So a cheap bastard with an eMachine can run a prettier and easier to use version of Word? NOT going to happen.
There are lots and lots of 3D artists who have a Unix box on their left and a Mac on their right, running Photoshop. Explain to me how they will resist a PowerBook G4 for $2500.
Carbon apps are just as native as Cocoa, and both kinds of apps live inside application packages that can contain multiple binaries. Whether a Mac OS X app is Carbon or Cocoa won't be a limiting factor in porting the OS.
Re:If they do it at all, it has to be soon
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 2
> BTW, adcritic.com doesn't have their commericals.
> Where are they
At apple.com... the new ones are easy to find, but the older ones take a bit of hunting. ftp.apple.com had a folder full of them at one point, and might still. Apple asked adcritic.com not to run their commercials, perhaps because Apple runs them themselves, and apple.com's statistics are important in PC Data's ranking of hardware-related sites.
Re:OSX? BeOS is the answer!
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 2
I know you're probably just trolling, but when BeOS reaches version 1.0, it would be interesting to do a bake-off with Mac OS X version 10.0. Be has some nice technology, but their desktop OS is not in the same league as Mac OS X. It is not even in the same league as Mac OS or OpenStep. Can it print, yet?
Slashdot Mirror
>Yeah, except you can ONLY burn audio tracks - and ONLY from iTunes.
> What if that's not the only thing I want to burn? What then?
You reboot into the (included) Mac OS 9.1, and use the (included) Disc Burner software that is integrated with the Mac OS 9 Finder. Burning a CD is as easy as copying files to a floppy disk. This feature is supposed to show up soon in Mac OS X, probably in 10.1, sometime this summer.
has been coming out of iBook speakers for a long time. N2MP3 Pro makes Ogg Vorbis tracks, and Audion plays them. Others too.
It's cool to hear about people using the graphical loader in Open Firmware to dual and triple boot Linux, and/or BSD with a Mac. The first time I used that graphical loader to dual boot OS 9 and a developer release of OS X, I immediately thought of how Linux-friendly Macs have become. Apple's disk utilities also have a long list of partition schemes and formats for Linux. Unless your Mac is very new and drivers aren't prepared yet, it's so easy to work with Linux on a Mac. You can boot from a CD or boot from a FireWire drive.
Apple's current products are a whole level above anything that the PC cartel is making these days. It is hard to find a flaw in them except for the fact that Mac OS is in a transition right now, with Mac OS 9 being better than X for about half the things people are doing, and vice versa. In six months or so, any off the shelf Mac will be a tremendous system with a huge library of software, and easy to dual-boot Linux, too.
Earthlink will give you tech support if you are running Mac OS (I get my Ricochet from them). My Ricochet modem just connects via USB and appears to both Mac OS 9.1 and Mac OS X as a plain old USB modem, which you connect to with PPP. It took me a few minutes to use the Ricochet installer on Mac OS 9.1 (which doesn't actually install anything, just configures things) and then copy the settings to my Mac OS X box, but I could have set both up without the installer if necessary in a few minutes, because both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X include the modem script for Ricochet. I'm typing this on Mac OS X through Ricochet right now.
... I encourage anyone who is on the fence with Ricochet to dive in ... the water is fine. People see it and they don't believe it, wherever I go. One guy is like, "I pay $25/month for 50kbs dial-up at home, and you're telling me you pay $70 and you're in a coffee shop at 480kbs?" The modem was only $50, too.
I pay $70 per month for unlimited access, and I connect at 480kbs here in North Hollywood. I haven't tried it anywhere else yet, but I hear the LA network is the newest (only came up last January or February) so I was told to expect to be faster here than elsewhere for the time being. 480kbs is faster than my last DSL was. It is a great, great service. I also had a phone briefly that had "Wireless Web" and it was a piece of shit. Besides the fact that the phone couldn't find the network all the time, the content and UI was garbage. It's not worth paying for, which is why most people don't pay for it. Ricochet works great, though
... I blame the huge numbers of people who just continue and continue to be Microsoft's bitch and then whine about it afterward. If you build your business and/or career around Microsoft, if you rely on them at all for anything, then be prepared to shut up, bend over, and take it like a man from time to time. That is the price of admission to their market, and everybody knows it. Microsoft's business model is not a secret. There is a line of people from Washington state to Washington, D.C. with sore assholes, surprised looks on their faces, and a sob story to tell about being former partners of Microsoft, and I don't pity them one bit.
Microsoft did the bully work to clear vast tracts of Cyberspace of troublesome natives and trees, and if you want to build there, you can't reasonably complain when Microsoft puts Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, etc. on the currency. Either get your Passport account or stop sharecropping with Microsoft. There isn't a single thing that you can do with a Microsoft computer that you can't do better with a competing product, whether it's a Sun server, an Apple desktop, or Linux or BSD on just about any hardware. All Microsoft can offer you is their big bland market. If you want that, then fine, but don't kid yourself that you get to keep your soul.
There is no issue here. These are not Aqua-inspired graphics, or reminiscent-of-Aqua graphics, or graphics that look sorta like Aqua, these are Apple's graphics, copied and pasted, bit for bit, into a Stardock theme. This is not "look and feel", this is just plagiarism. Even the logos were left intact.
... kidnapping a graphic artist from Apple and forcing him to make a Stardock theme for you?
This is a re-implementation of Aqua on Windows. If I re-implement Apache on Windows, and I don't release the source, Slashdotters would be very interested in whether I used the original Apache source or not. If not, then OK. If I did, though, then I'm a dick, plain and simple. Taking someone else's work and calling it your own is being a dick.
How can anybody reasonably defend this? I clicked on a screenshot that the Stardock company said "walks the line" to see Apple's graphics, bit for bit. How is that "walking the line"? What would be "out of line" in that case
> I would have NEVER guessed to put a CD or
... it is far less sophisticated than even X Windows, which is also a Mac copy.
... you can find news stories on the Web about it still, I'm sure. Microsoft and Apple settled some long-standing issues out of court (one was the wholesale use of stolen QuickTime code in the now-defunct Video for Windows ... tell me why AVI is now an "unsupported format" over at Microsoft?), agreed to share patents and technology, and MS invested a paltry -- paltry -- 150 million dollars in Apple to make the whole affair into something Wall Street could understand. At the time, Apple had over 1 billion dollars in cash on hand (they have over 4 billion dollars on hand today) so they were in no danger of going anywhere and did not need rescuing.
... every IRQ conflict, GPF, DLL Hell, OS reinstall, config.sys, etc. It's worth it for Windows users to spend some time with Mac OS X on a new Mac and see what it has to offer. You'll probably find that most of the bad things that you've heard are untrue or taken out of context. And the rest of the bad things you've heard are fixed in Mac OS X. The people who are running Apple right now really, really know what they are doing.
> network share into the trash to unmount them.
That's why this is only a shortcut, for convenience. You actually would select the disc or drive and choose File > Put Away.
> Need Mr. Paperclip to get my floppy out ya know.
Macs haven't had floppy drives for years, and right now, as of this second, something like 80% of Windows users don't have protected memory either (any DOS version). If you compare how a Mac and a Windows box use removable media, I think you will find the Mac superior, especially if you have a Unix background.
> it reverts all your networking connections to the
> PRINTER port. No, it doesn't tell you that it did that.
Macs also haven't had printer ports for years. What you're talking about is an easy networking system that used the printer port before Ethernet was cheap enough. There is no equivalent generic PC system to compare it to. These days, and for the last three plus years at least, every Mac sold has Ethernet, and many have gigabit Ethernet.
> Yes, Win95 borrows graphical elements from the
> Mac, and several other GUI platforms. So? Pretty
> much every GUI following Parc has done the same.
Apple invented overlapping windows, pull-down menus, pop-up menus, drag and drop, double-clicking, resizable windows, and more. Most of the common GUI elements you interact with each day were invented by Apple engineers and just plain copied by everyone else. You probably wouldn't recognize the Xerox GUI as even being a GUI
> and MS won't be interested in bailing them out
> a second time.
The incident you refer to only happened three years ago or so
You know, you might think I'm an Apple fanatic who is ignorant of other computer platforms, but I'm not. I bought my first Mac in early 1999 after using Windows for almost 10 years, since 3.0 first came out. I regret every minute I used Windows, now
I always find it funny when non-Mac users complain that the Mac has no software. Most of the "brand-name" apps that are out there started on the Mac and were ported to Windows, like Photoshop, Illustrator, Director, FreeHand, Word, Excel, QuickTime, and on and on. The rest of the "brand-name" apps are Mac and Windows, except for server and database stuff, which is usually Unix and Windows. Mac OS X runs pretty much everything out there that isn't Microsoft, and that means it runs all the best software. A Web developer using Mac OS X may only have three or four server packages to choose from, but one of them is Apache. A Web developer using Windows may have 10 server packages to choose from, but none of them are Apache. Do you see what I mean? There are also a selection of amazing Mac-only apps like Final Cut Pro and MetaSynth. Microsoft's Mac apps are also dramatically better on the Mac ... you might not recognize them.
The impression that Windows has more software comes from the fact that Windows software is carried in retail stores, and from the fact that Microsoft lied for years about how many apps were available for Windows. They said 70,000. At one of the recent Microsoft court proceedings, it came out that 70,000 applications is more than have ever been written for all combined platforms in the history of mankind. The actual number was deemed to be "about 10,000", which is about the same number of apps that Apple says run on Mac OS. I've been using a Mac for two years and I still run into major apps that I didn't know were available, like Lightwave, which I saw recently at Macworld. I also saw Maya and Nuendo there, too, which are two apps that are coming to Mac OS X in a few months and have never been on the Mac at all. Software is plentiful on the Mac platform, especially so now that all the Unix stuff is coming over to Mac OS X.
I'm running Mac OS X Public Beta on an original iBook with a G3 300 in it, and 192 MB of RAM. This machine has much less performance than any PowerBook from the last year or so. I can run as many apps as I want, whether they're native or Classic. How much RAM does your friend have? You can put 256 MB more into a PowerBook for about $125 these days. Mac OS X Public Beta apparently gets very happy when you get into the 256 MB RAM area. The final 10.0 will probably be tuned to like less RAM, but RAM is so cheap now ... 256 MB for $125 really maximizes the hardware investment you've already made.
The reason that Steve Jobs spends a lot of time on the UI at Apple events is the same reason that Sun focuses on reliability or MB/s and other such numbers at a Sun event: these things matter to their customers. If your Sun server can put out twice as many Web pages as an SGI, then that's going to save/make you money. Apple's users know that you can take the same hardware and software functionality and put a good UI on it and speed up the wetware (humans) dramatically. We're the slowest part of a computer system, but we're also the smartest ... the UI is the vital connection between the hardware and wetware. If we could measure it in MB/s, maybe more people would understand. As it is, creative users flock to the Mac because they understand good UI from using paintbrushes and musical instruments. Mac users will buy an OS upgrade if you show them that the interface will save them time and trouble.
The BeOS model has not even been successful for Be. It's like you're suggesting that Apple follow the Edsel model. Also, Be used to follow something called the "Apple model". The Be model is Be's Plan B.
That's bullshit, or you would have bought a Mac by now. I know it and Apple knows it. No Mac OS X for x86.
> What's changed since 1994?
People are serving Web pages out of their homes and need reliability and good multitasking. They are editing digital video and need good system throughput. They are hooked up to the Internet 24/7 and need security. They are overwhelmed by a mass of set-top boxes, wireless phones, PDA's, MP3 players, and need an interface that is simple and easy to use, and a hardware platform that deals with peripherals in a sensible way. Most of all, they are not using computers so much because they want to, but because they need to, and that really begs for a system that really works, and is also fun to use.
I don't know the details, but I think there is already a 64-bit path built into the PowerPC in some way. I read an article about it once, and the impression I left with was that you could sort of stamp a 32-bit PowerPC chip as "64-bit Ready". I think the bus is 64-bit or something. Motorola has a lot of stuff on this at their Web site.
I also read somewhere that 64-bitness is part of Apple's plans with Mac OS X as well. They know it's coming. Altivec is 128-bit already, of course.
You can't make any assumptions about the supported machines in 10.0, based on 4K17 or other Apple internal builds. Mac OS X Public Beta runs on older machines, because it has to, since its a public build. However, Apple have been using Mac OS X internally for quite a while ... some of the servers running Apple.com are running Mac OS X, and many of their employees are using Mac OS X on their desktops. There is no reason for 4K17 to have the drivers for older machines. Drivers for old machines could easily be in an add-on package, which would clearly be labeled "unsupported". We're talking about machines that, if they were PC's, wouldn't run Windows 2000.
> If you really think about it, there is nothing in an
> Apple (with the exception of the PowerPC chip)
> that is unique.
This isn't really true. You can find a PC that is comparably-equipped to a Mac, but what's important to the platform and to developers is that there are certain things that ALL Macs have. For example, Apple introduced sound and CD-ROM drives first, and then put them in all of their machines. Sound and CD-ROM drives were also available for PC's shortly after that, but it was years and years before a developer could rely on a PC having both of those features, which made it harder to truly exploit those features in the wider market. The mouse is another example. Before Windows 95, PC developers could not assume that you have a mouse.
These days, all Macs have Ethernet, so you can create a device or software for the Mac market that requires Ethernet and not have to include an instructional book on how to add Ethernet to your PC. Similarly, they all have FireWire, so you can develop an add-on that requires FireWire and know you have a good chunk of the current Mac market. Mac keyboards have always had two USB (ADB in the old days) ports, so you can make a joystick and count on the user just having to plug it into their keyboard. When they test their joysticks on the Mac, they're plugging them into the same keyboard that the users all have, so it's easy to troubleshoot the drivers or whatever.
A lot of these kinds of assumptions move the burden of getting things working off the user and onto the developer and Apple. In effect, the "computer" evolves to include a higher base set of capabilities, and then developers make software to exploit those capabilities as a whole. Sometimes knowing you can rely on Ethernet and FireWire both being there makes the whole more than the sum of its parts.
Yeah, but when Photoshop so plainly runs better on one platform, you don't ask why if you're a Photoshop user, you just use the better platform. Who cares if this or that or the other is the reason? That's why application benchmarks are so meaningful, never mind if geeks don't like them as much as compiler shootouts.
Photoshop is also a great app to use, even if you're not a Photoshop user, because so many apps these days use Photoshop plug-ins or similar computations when they work with bitmaps or do anti-aliasing. Even a Web browser is resizing bitmap images from time to time.
> MacOS X is based on GNU/Darwin which is
> currently being ported to x86.
Mac OS X is based on Darwin, which already runs on x86. I downloaded a Virtual PC "hard drive" disk image with DarwinIntel on it two or three months ago, so it's been running on x86 for a while. It is basically a BSD with a modified Mach kernel.
I guess Apple could have called Darwin "GNU/Darwin", or maybe "GNU/PCI/Darwin", since it does use a PCI bus and why wouldn't we put the name of every underlying technology right in the name of the OS? No disrespect to the GNU folks who have made so much good stuff possible, but a car's engine belongs under the hood, you know?
No, that really doesn't matter. A Mac OS X application is actually a folder that contains all of the application's resources and files, and it can contain multiple binaries as well. The GUI displays this folder as a single application that the user can interact with by moving it, renaming it, running it, dragging things onto it, or browsing its contents to get a look at the insides. Photoshop for Mac OS X on PPC would just have to get a bit bigger to also run on Mac OS X on x86. Mac OS X itself would choose and use the right binary at runtime. All the developer would have to do is compile the app twice, but many Mac software developers are used to making dual PowerPC/68k (so-called "fat") binaries already.
"Rhapsody" is Mac OS X Server 1.0 or 1.2, available for the past two years (type uname in Terminal on a Mac OS X Server box and it will tell you it is "Rhapsody"). Mac OS X will tell you "Darwin".
Mac OS X is not Apple's first "next-generation OS", just the first one that will really do the whole job. Promises made for Rhapsody don't count, same as Microsoft has been promising a single version of Windows for 5 years.
He said "IF you want OS X" ... if vanilla BSD meets your computing needs, then good for you.
Mac OS X for x86 will be out sometime next year. It's called "Windows 2002", and it's from Microsoft. It runs Photoshop, it runs FreeHand, it runs Office ... all Macintosh apps that are now available on x86 thanks to the fine people at Microsoft. Rather than BSD, you get DOS, but you can dual-boot BSD. Rather than Mac OS, you get Windows, but it also has a mouse pointer and icons. Rather than Apache, you get Microsoft Personal Web Sharing with a limit of 10 simultaneous users, but if you pay through the nose, Microsoft will flip a switch in the Registry for you and you can serve more users. Rather than a small, cool-running, superfast RISC chip with an amazing DSP co-processor, you get an overclocked beast the size of a paperback book with two or three huge fans, but x86 users know that these are all small compromises to make for the pleasure of buying your add-on hardware from umpteen different vendors in 148 countries around the world. In fact, the majority of people won't even notice the difference between the two versions, because they are ignorant.
Windows 2002 comes free with a computer system that will set you back about $800-$2500 complete. If you don't like it as much as the PowerPC version (called Mac OS X) then buy the PowerPC version, which is also available free with a computer system that will set you back about $800-2500 complete (unless you want a CD/DVD-RW combo drive, which is $1000 extra). The PowerPC systems do include such niceties as built-in antennaes, a single cable for the display, award-winning industrial design, FireWire, optical mouse, no legacy ports, free movie-editing software, etc, but the x86 version is available with snap-on colored panels, and occasionally comes in cases that look like melted marshmallows (hello, Compaq), and, as mentioned, it will work with add-on hardware from umpteen different companies. And remember, both versions of Mac OS X run pretty much the same brand-name apps.
It's all pretty simple when you ignore little details like API's and disk formats. Sure Mac OS X and Windows 2002 are different to us geeks, but geeks don't always make the purchasing decisions, do they? So, why would Apple go to all the effort of making an x86 Mac OS X when that's Microsoft's core business? So a cheap bastard with an eMachine can run a prettier and easier to use version of Word? NOT going to happen.
We're talking about Mac OS X, here, not 9.
There are lots and lots of 3D artists who have a Unix box on their left and a Mac on their right, running Photoshop. Explain to me how they will resist a PowerBook G4 for $2500.
Carbon apps are just as native as Cocoa, and both kinds of apps live inside application packages that can contain multiple binaries. Whether a Mac OS X app is Carbon or Cocoa won't be a limiting factor in porting the OS.
> BTW, adcritic.com doesn't have their commericals.
... the new ones are easy to find, but the older ones take a bit of hunting. ftp.apple.com had a folder full of them at one point, and might still. Apple asked adcritic.com not to run their commercials, perhaps because Apple runs them themselves, and apple.com's statistics are important in PC Data's ranking of hardware-related sites.
> Where are they
At apple.com
I know you're probably just trolling, but when BeOS reaches version 1.0, it would be interesting to do a bake-off with Mac OS X version 10.0. Be has some nice technology, but their desktop OS is not in the same league as Mac OS X. It is not even in the same league as Mac OS or OpenStep. Can it print, yet?