Macs are in movies and TV because they often look better than other brands of computers, and because the people who make movies and TV shows overwhelmingly use Macs in their daily work. Half the time, if a person is using a PowerBook in a commercial, it actually belongs to somebody in the production process. You see them much more often with the logos obscured than with them showing.
The PowerBook, particularly... with the Apple logo blanked out, it's the default "generic notebook computer". It's a nice, curvy, plain, black machine that photographs well, is all.
I've been running Mac OS X for months now, but I wait for John Siracusa's articles almost as expectantly as I wait for new releases of the OS. Seems like a lot of others also feel the same way. His articles are still the best introduction for the technical user to Mac OS X.
Also, you have to give some credit to Ars Technica. On many sites, this would have been a 20-part series, cut to pieces and released a bit at a time, so you get a sip everyday but never drink.
I've been running Mac OS X Public Beta for the last couple of weeks, too (running it right now, posting from IE 5 for Mac OS X). No need to reboot, no system freezes. Very useable performance on this G3 300 iBook with 192MB RAM and 4MB of video RAM, but not snappy like Mac OS 9. Amazing multitasking, font support, graphics, audio, MIDI. IE, QuickTime, Shockwave, Flash, and POP/LDAP mail are already here. There is so much good tech that it's amazing. App bundles make so much sense.
BUT, the UI is a train wreck. Not the way it looks, which is beautiful, but only skin deep. I'm talking about the way it functions and how useful it is for a variety of tasks. It's unbelievably bad. Give me a Mac GUI, or give me a NeXT GUI, but not this monster. You can't open a folder anymore (gone between DP4 and Public Beta) so you're always stuck in these huge browser windows. Sometimes I just want to open a folder and have it show up where I left it so I can get on with my work. Never mind if I'm using a big display, a little palette window is a little palette window, and list-view Finder windows are drag and drop palettes for me. I always have one or two next to a document window with clipart or script snippets in them. No way to do this in Mac OS X. Amazing stuff. Company after company has copied the Mac Finder since it came out, and Apple ports the source code of the real thing and makes a mess of it. What's bothersome is not that there is stuff missing (it's a beta) but that there is crappy replacement stuff that's far along. If you're going to change it between 9 and 10, you have to have a better reason than "a bunch of us used to work at NeXT". It's got to be demonstrably better... you're asking all these people to learn a new method for things they've been happily doing for years without complaint, except that they want more stability, which OS X has in droves.
The columns browser is great in the Open and Save dialogs, and it's great when I want to open up a big window and browse around... previewing files is amazing in columns, but why take a good thing and make it bad by trying to make it do too much? Give me a columns browser, and the ability to open up list and icon view folder windows like on Mac OS 9 and newbies will use the former, and power users will use both.
Seeing only 21 characters of a filename is a bug I can't wait to see gone, either. Suddenly we have 255 character names, but we can only see 21 characters, except through heroic means (opening an Inspector or a Terminal window, or clicking on the name to get ready to change it). Mac OS 9 allowed 32 characters and displayed 32 as well, and that's better UI. On Mac OS 9, you grab a file and it "feels real", but in Mac OS X, you never forget that you're looking at an abstraction in a browser, just like Windows.
> The Apple menu is one of the WORST elements in
> MacOS. It is NOT obvious it's a menu
Well, it's on the menubar, which also has an Application menu that can be toggled between name and icon. There are also plenty of apps with iconic menus: StuffIt, Navigator, ViaVoice, Spell Catcher, and Mac OS X's Desktop, which has an iconic Application menu, and an iconic Keyboard menu (that shows the flag of the language you're using, if you turn it on).
The fact that an icon or name on the menubar has always been a menu is the major source of the complaints about the Apple icon in Mac OS X. It's an icon that sits right next to the Keyboard menu in some cases, but you click it and it's not a menu.
Since you've got to learn the Application menu in Mac OS 9, learning the Apple menu is not such a stretch.
> Carbon itself is a good thing, and was necessary,
> but it distracts ISV's from what they SHOULD be
> doing, and that's porting apps to Cocoa.
Carbon and Cocoa will have equivalent functionality eventually, even Services. Whether a developer chooses one over the other is a personal thing. There are 10,000 Mac applications that are almost-Carbon, and comparitively few NeXT apps that are almost-Cocoa. Unsurprisingly, more Mac users are interested in the apps they already use, and they want them immediately, not after a year of exhaustive porting.
Telling a user that OmniWeb is superior to IE because the former is Cocoa and the latter is Carbon is doing them a grave disservice. A good app is a good app. A lot of the Cocoa stuff that's currently out is very un-Mac-like and won't necessarily be an instant hit with many Mac users.
No, no, no... how old are you? The original affront was that the Apple II came ALREADY ASSEMBLED instead of in a kit. Just about the time that died down and everybody admitted that maybe already assembled computers were actually a good thing, THEN they introduced the Graphical User Interface and the sealed box with no slots. Only took a year after that to get X Windows, and a couple more to get the first version of MS Windows, but the sealed box with no slots has only become a "well... duh" in the past couple of years.
Well, iMovie 2.0 would be an impulse purchase for an iMovie 1.0 user. The new mouse or keyboard might be an impulse purchase. Same for AppleWorks, or a Mac OS upgrade, or Mac OS X Public Beta, which shipped about the same time they added the 1-click to their site. These things are all $49-$99.
> Apple is just now (after 15 years) producing an OS
> with multitasking,
Apple has marketed three operating systems since 1984. A/UX had mulititasking and protected memory, and so does Mac OS X Server. What they are doing now with Mac OS X is the same thing that Microsoft has been trying to do for years: bring their "consumer" base onto their "pro" OS, and dropping the old OS that lacks hardware abstraction and other niceties that weren't possible with the hardware from a few years ago. For Apple, this means combining Mac OS X Server and Mac OS 9. For MS, this means combining Windows 2000 and Windows ME. Apple will actually get their consumer userbase onto protected memory and preemptive multitasking before Microsoft does (Whistler is not due until October 2001, and this is MS we're talking about... that means July, 2002). The difference between Apple and MS is that Apple doesn't put Mac OS X Server features on their Mac OS 9 literature, whereas MS is happy to describe some kind of uber-Windows, implying that you can play games or use USB on NT 4 for example, and implying that Windows 98 has protected memory and preemptive multitasking.
> and they are doing it by taking the (25 year old) BSD
> kernel.
BSD is not the kernel of Mac OS X. The Mac OS X kernel is based on Mach. It has a BSD layer so that it can talk to the Internet with BSD's TCP/IP, and run Apache natively. Also, as old as BSD is, it is updated constantly, and the methods it uses are thoroughly modern.
> NT has been doing this, multithreading and a
> reasonable filesystem to support multiuser
> computing since launch in 1993(?).
So what? Have consumers and graphics professionals (Apple's markets) been using NT at all? No. NT is also NOT a true multiuser OS.
> It's wasn't great. It's getting better. IIRC, System 7
> was the first MacOS to have task *switching* built
> in...
So what? When System 7 came out, most people were running DOS without Windows. Most people are still running DOS today, only with Windows 95, 98, ME.
> To the table - Xerox.
As soon as you mention Xerox in a discussion about Apple, you have proven you are not really having a discussion... that you're just trolling. It's like making a comparison to Nazis on Usenet. How many people bought Altos? How much Alto software was ported to the PC (notable Mac ports are things like Word, Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator, Director, FreeHand). I guess its Apple's fault that the Alto mouse required a trained professional just to clean it, and the Alto didn't have pull-down menus or overlapping windows. If I build an electric car so good that every other company copies it and gasoline becomes a thing of the past, will you say I didn't achieve anything because shitty electric cars have been available for the past five years? Gimme a break.
No, man... the whole basis for their patent wasn't the actual one click, it's the idea that you sort of have an always-open order that you just add things to with one click, and then cancel items later within 90 minutes, as opposed to adding things to a shopping cart and then finalizing the order.
The complete process IS innovative, but a patent and exclusive rights to it for 25 years? Hmm...
It seems like Apple licensing it has moved the discussion forward. Everybody stopped talking about it, and only Amazon was doing it. Now we have a case where we can see how licensing this plays out. Are they charging Apple a penny-per-sale, or did Apple pay a flat fee for the right to use it forever, or for so many years? If Amazon charged a reasonable price and gave source code or implementation help, it's not nearly as bad as an unreasonable price with no code that's just basically a tax.
In the end, though, responsibility for all these bad patents can be laid firmly at the feet of the US patent office and the US gov't. Blaming Apple is not going to change the fact that bad patents exist. They wanted a one-click store and they had to pay Amazon... they're victims bad patents, not co-conspirators.
You are killing me. FireWire's not on YOUR motherboard, so it's not successful? Who cares about YOUR motherboard, other than you, exactly?
Do you think video itself is on the way out, or do you think that analog video and editing is about to enjoy a comeback? Digital video is "video"... you know what I mean? That's all there is. There are very few people working with analog when you can buy an iMac for $999 that does more than a $10,000 analog video setup, with no loss of quality for each generation, and you can surf the Web and play games on that iMac, too, as a bonus. DV is here to stay, and it moves around over FireWire. Period. There are way too many devices for this to change. Critical mass has been reached. There's a CNN correspondant who travels with a Sony DV camera and a PowerBook, and all he sends CNN is the finished three-minute report or whatever. No room full of people and racks of VCR's and effects. That's the future of news coverage.
The coming broadband World Wide Web is going to be full of video, and unless you want big business making all of it, you have to get a camera, FireWire and some DV editing software and learn how to make some yourself. It's YOU who is being left behind, not FireWire.
> The moral: it's not Apple's fault, though I still don't
> consider it successful enough.
What could be more successful than being 1) the IEEE standard, 2) the ONLY method? EVERYBODY who is doing anything with DV has at least one FireWire device, and probably two or three, and that includes everybody from the first-time iMac DV buyer to George Lucas working on Episode II.
> Apple has innovated what exactly? They stole the
> GUI from Xerox PARC
There are about 10 or 20 books detailing the development of the Lisa and the Macintosh at Apple, and not a single one says that Xerox did all the work. The Alto didn't have pull-down menus, it didn't have overlapping windows, there was no concept of "double-click", no concept of "dragging", no concept of "dropping". The Xerox mouse had to be cleaned continuously, and cost hundreds of dollars to make. Apple did years and years of research, some of which included ex-Parc people who left to join Apple so that they could have their work wind up on people's desks instead of in a museum. Give it all a rest! Everybody with half a brain has read some books, or interviews with the principle players, and knows what really went on. I mean, read a book, godamit.
What went on to become NeXT actually started at Apple, and Steve Jobs took the team and the project (code named "Big Mac") with him when he left. Does that mean that Apple of 1985 should get credit for the NeXT Cube of 1989?
Someday, someone will market a computer with a fly-around 3D interface. Will we say that's not innovative, because we saw the same thing in a movie one time?
Apple developers have had their CD's for about a week now. It's a two-CD package: one is Mac OS X Public Beta (same as what users get when they order from Apple) and the other is all of Apple's development tools and some documentation.
The Apple Select developer program is pretty good. For $400 (used to be $500) per year, you get 5 "seed keys" which you can pass on to free-membership developers, so you get 35 CD's a year and access to streaming video of WWDC and such, while your four friends get all the beta software and developer tools mailed to them. You and four other people could have been running Mac OS X since DP2 for $100 each, basically. Most people see the $400 or $500 and don't realize you're really signing up a workgroup.
And yes, you can continue to develop for Linux or whatever for free, but you can charge more for your Mac software, so $400 per year is not that much. Also, you get a coupon for $100 off CodeWarrior as well, and discounts on hardware and software, and access to Apple's testing labs and things like that. If you have Mac OS X titles, Apple also has all kinds of cross-promotion things, where they'll feature you on their Web site or whatever.
You can compile Java natively on Mac OS X, can't you? And do something to it (Swing?) to get it to use Aqua? I think when you do this it looks and acts just like any Mac OS X native app.
I'm not that into Java, but I keep seeing things about Mac OS X's Java support that sound like it goes above and beyond the call with Java. Maybe that's what Tenon is referring to.
Also, there may be Mac users who want to run this stuff, but are happier to pay Tenon a modest fee to deliver it already working, rather than have to mess with anything themselves.
> but it seems like it ought to be possible to get at
> least some form of it running on these
> "slightly older" machines
Some form of Mac OS X can already run on every Mac in existence... those forms are called "older versions of Mac OS".
Today's machines can handle a great GUI and a great kernel. On yesterday's machines, you have to sacrifice the great GUI (older BSD boxes) or the great kernel (older Mac boxes) and just use what you got. Still, the BSD user with older hardware can run Apache like a champ without missing the GUI, and the Mac user with older hardware can run Photoshop like a champ, without really missing preemptive multitasking. Newer machines can do both, and Mac OS X is an example of that, so it requires a G3/200 or whatever. That's an oversimplification, but I hope you get what I mean.
If somebody gets Darwin up and running on an older Mac, then they could probably hack together a Mac OS X install on it as well. Might be lots of work, though, considering how fast and cheap new machines are, and how well many old Macs work, even with their older Mac OS, or running BSD if you want that, instead. It might be time better spent getting drivers together for new peripherals.
> You do of course know that "G3" is a subset of
> "PowerPC"
> The second and third sentences of your post, taken
> together, make no sense.
This is just idiom getting in the way of understanding.
There were two distinct PowerPC models before the G3, but they weren't actually called "G1" and "G2". The G3 was a big improvement on the previous models, so Mac users just called CPU's "G3" and "PowerPC" (read, "plain PowerPC") to distinguish whether you had a much-faster G3 or not.
> The old rhapsody even ran on 180mhz PPCs before...
> what now... they are too slow?
The original Rhapsody HAD to run on 180MHz PPC's, because that was the best it had at that time. If it ran too slow, you took some shit out. This is a new OS being built to take Apple through the next ten years without major changes. Yes, they're going to push today's machines a little bit. This is a Unix that (by release) shouldn't ever have to be rebooted, even when you add some funky hot-plug hardware (obviously, you have to power down to add a PCI card). It also allows you to dynamically add or remove fonts from the system without even restarting your apps.
There are lots of things it's going to do that aren't so important that you couldn't take them out if you HAD to run on a 180MHz PPC, but since the vast majority of the users of this OS will be G3+ (I mean, the lowliest iMac is a G3/233), then why not do more for the user?
Also, for non-Mac users to get some perspective, as far as the ubiquity of the machines, the equivalent to "G3 with 128MB of RAM" would be "Pentium II with 64MB of RAM". On average, Macs have more RAM in them because of the lousy VM in Mac OS 9, so these two machines are the PC and Mac workhorses of the past few years. Pentium II with 64MB of RAM is a realistic minimum for getting real work done with Windows 2000, and Windows 2000 does not also run an entire copy of Windows 98 in order to ensure maximum compatibility.
Any computer with a colored enclosure will run Mac OS X just beautifully, and many previous models will, too. The final requirement is said to be 64MB of RAM, although they may make it "128MB if you want to run Classic apps". Very, very few people are running Mac OS 9 in only 64MB of RAM because its VM is so bad you usually have to turn it off. Many, many people have 128 or so already, and even with that, they can only run two or three apps on Mac OS 9. On Mac OS X, they will use that same 128MB of RAM to run ten apps at a time, easy.
One of the nice things about Mac OS X that many Slashdotters may not know is that you simply install it onto the same HFS+ disc as Mac OS 9, and it moves the contents of your hard disk into a folder called "Mac OS 9" and uses those contents when you run Classic. The Startup Disk preference in Mac OS X then offers you the choice of "Mac OS X" or "Mac OS 9". If you click on "Mac OS 9" and then reboot, you are back running Mac OS 9 like nothing ever happened. Even though the system and every one of your apps has moved, it still works (moving apps is typical on the Mac, but I don't know about moving the system folder). The "Startup Disk" method has been in Mac OS for years and years (enabling you to boot from any disk) so this process will be familiar to many users. It's going to be easy to dual boot for a while if you have a troublesome app that won't run in Classic. No partitioning, no formatting, no reinstalls of Mac OS 9, no separate disk required. It's very well done.
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Yes! The Mac is still the best computer to use while high. This is a definite advantage when they are in so many art and music studios.
Macs are in movies and TV because they often look better than other brands of computers, and because the people who make movies and TV shows overwhelmingly use Macs in their daily work. Half the time, if a person is using a PowerBook in a commercial, it actually belongs to somebody in the production process. You see them much more often with the logos obscured than with them showing.
... with the Apple logo blanked out, it's the default "generic notebook computer". It's a nice, curvy, plain, black machine that photographs well, is all.
The PowerBook, particularly
You want OS X with a MORE modern look? What would that look like? Quake?
> How much marketing has Transmeta done?
What, aside from marketing, has Transmeta done?
It's weird to piss on marketing and champion a company that hasn't shipped a product yet in the same breath.
> Sure, it's got a new skin, but the interface hasn't
> changed since 1984.
If only this were true about Mac OS X. Mac users are gung ho on the Unix guts, but the rewrite of the interface is not that popular.
What you said DOES apply beautifully to X-Windows, though, if you change the date to 1985 or 1986.
I've been running Mac OS X for months now, but I wait for John Siracusa's articles almost as expectantly as I wait for new releases of the OS. Seems like a lot of others also feel the same way. His articles are still the best introduction for the technical user to Mac OS X.
...
Also, you have to give some credit to Ars Technica. On many sites, this would have been a 20-part series, cut to pieces and released a bit at a time, so you get a sip everyday but never drink.
Thanks, John
I've been running Mac OS X Public Beta for the last couple of weeks, too (running it right now, posting from IE 5 for Mac OS X). No need to reboot, no system freezes. Very useable performance on this G3 300 iBook with 192MB RAM and 4MB of video RAM, but not snappy like Mac OS 9. Amazing multitasking, font support, graphics, audio, MIDI. IE, QuickTime, Shockwave, Flash, and POP/LDAP mail are already here. There is so much good tech that it's amazing. App bundles make so much sense.
... you're asking all these people to learn a new method for things they've been happily doing for years without complaint, except that they want more stability, which OS X has in droves.
... previewing files is amazing in columns, but why take a good thing and make it bad by trying to make it do too much? Give me a columns browser, and the ability to open up list and icon view folder windows like on Mac OS 9 and newbies will use the former, and power users will use both.
BUT, the UI is a train wreck. Not the way it looks, which is beautiful, but only skin deep. I'm talking about the way it functions and how useful it is for a variety of tasks. It's unbelievably bad. Give me a Mac GUI, or give me a NeXT GUI, but not this monster. You can't open a folder anymore (gone between DP4 and Public Beta) so you're always stuck in these huge browser windows. Sometimes I just want to open a folder and have it show up where I left it so I can get on with my work. Never mind if I'm using a big display, a little palette window is a little palette window, and list-view Finder windows are drag and drop palettes for me. I always have one or two next to a document window with clipart or script snippets in them. No way to do this in Mac OS X. Amazing stuff. Company after company has copied the Mac Finder since it came out, and Apple ports the source code of the real thing and makes a mess of it. What's bothersome is not that there is stuff missing (it's a beta) but that there is crappy replacement stuff that's far along. If you're going to change it between 9 and 10, you have to have a better reason than "a bunch of us used to work at NeXT". It's got to be demonstrably better
The columns browser is great in the Open and Save dialogs, and it's great when I want to open up a big window and browse around
Seeing only 21 characters of a filename is a bug I can't wait to see gone, either. Suddenly we have 255 character names, but we can only see 21 characters, except through heroic means (opening an Inspector or a Terminal window, or clicking on the name to get ready to change it). Mac OS 9 allowed 32 characters and displayed 32 as well, and that's better UI. On Mac OS 9, you grab a file and it "feels real", but in Mac OS X, you never forget that you're looking at an abstraction in a browser, just like Windows.
> [1] i dont want to call it X. X is a windowing system.
And a letter of the alphabet, and a roman numeral 10. So what?
> The Apple menu is one of the WORST elements in
> MacOS. It is NOT obvious it's a menu
Well, it's on the menubar, which also has an Application menu that can be toggled between name and icon. There are also plenty of apps with iconic menus: StuffIt, Navigator, ViaVoice, Spell Catcher, and Mac OS X's Desktop, which has an iconic Application menu, and an iconic Keyboard menu (that shows the flag of the language you're using, if you turn it on).
The fact that an icon or name on the menubar has always been a menu is the major source of the complaints about the Apple icon in Mac OS X. It's an icon that sits right next to the Keyboard menu in some cases, but you click it and it's not a menu.
Since you've got to learn the Application menu in Mac OS 9, learning the Apple menu is not such a stretch.
> Carbon itself is a good thing, and was necessary,
> but it distracts ISV's from what they SHOULD be
> doing, and that's porting apps to Cocoa.
Carbon and Cocoa will have equivalent functionality eventually, even Services. Whether a developer chooses one over the other is a personal thing. There are 10,000 Mac applications that are almost-Carbon, and comparitively few NeXT apps that are almost-Cocoa. Unsurprisingly, more Mac users are interested in the apps they already use, and they want them immediately, not after a year of exhaustive porting.
Telling a user that OmniWeb is superior to IE because the former is Cocoa and the latter is Carbon is doing them a grave disservice. A good app is a good app. A lot of the Cocoa stuff that's currently out is very un-Mac-like and won't necessarily be an instant hit with many Mac users.
> You can keep your pitiful imitations, thank you.
Stop trolling. Even an idiot knows that the Apple menu predates the Windows Start menu by about 10 years.
No, no, no ... how old are you? The original affront was that the Apple II came ALREADY ASSEMBLED instead of in a kit. Just about the time that died down and everybody admitted that maybe already assembled computers were actually a good thing, THEN they introduced the Graphical User Interface and the sealed box with no slots. Only took a year after that to get X Windows, and a couple more to get the first version of MS Windows, but the sealed box with no slots has only become a "well ... duh" in the past couple of years.
MKLinux as an alternative to Mac OS X? Maybe for text editing or for playing with Unix, but if you have other work to do, you need a bit more.
Well, iMovie 2.0 would be an impulse purchase for an iMovie 1.0 user. The new mouse or keyboard might be an impulse purchase. Same for AppleWorks, or a Mac OS upgrade, or Mac OS X Public Beta, which shipped about the same time they added the 1-click to their site. These things are all $49-$99.
If you're calling WebObjects wobbly, you need to find out what WebObjects is, first.
> Apple is just now (after 15 years) producing an OS
... that means July, 2002). The difference between Apple and MS is that Apple doesn't put Mac OS X Server features on their Mac OS 9 literature, whereas MS is happy to describe some kind of uber-Windows, implying that you can play games or use USB on NT 4 for example, and implying that Windows 98 has protected memory and preemptive multitasking.
... that you're just trolling. It's like making a comparison to Nazis on Usenet. How many people bought Altos? How much Alto software was ported to the PC (notable Mac ports are things like Word, Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator, Director, FreeHand). I guess its Apple's fault that the Alto mouse required a trained professional just to clean it, and the Alto didn't have pull-down menus or overlapping windows. If I build an electric car so good that every other company copies it and gasoline becomes a thing of the past, will you say I didn't achieve anything because shitty electric cars have been available for the past five years? Gimme a break.
> with multitasking,
Apple has marketed three operating systems since 1984. A/UX had mulititasking and protected memory, and so does Mac OS X Server. What they are doing now with Mac OS X is the same thing that Microsoft has been trying to do for years: bring their "consumer" base onto their "pro" OS, and dropping the old OS that lacks hardware abstraction and other niceties that weren't possible with the hardware from a few years ago. For Apple, this means combining Mac OS X Server and Mac OS 9. For MS, this means combining Windows 2000 and Windows ME. Apple will actually get their consumer userbase onto protected memory and preemptive multitasking before Microsoft does (Whistler is not due until October 2001, and this is MS we're talking about
> and they are doing it by taking the (25 year old) BSD
> kernel.
BSD is not the kernel of Mac OS X. The Mac OS X kernel is based on Mach. It has a BSD layer so that it can talk to the Internet with BSD's TCP/IP, and run Apache natively. Also, as old as BSD is, it is updated constantly, and the methods it uses are thoroughly modern.
> NT has been doing this, multithreading and a
> reasonable filesystem to support multiuser
> computing since launch in 1993(?).
So what? Have consumers and graphics professionals (Apple's markets) been using NT at all? No. NT is also NOT a true multiuser OS.
> It's wasn't great. It's getting better. IIRC, System 7
> was the first MacOS to have task *switching* built
> in...
So what? When System 7 came out, most people were running DOS without Windows. Most people are still running DOS today, only with Windows 95, 98, ME.
> To the table - Xerox.
As soon as you mention Xerox in a discussion about Apple, you have proven you are not really having a discussion
No, man ... the whole basis for their patent wasn't the actual one click, it's the idea that you sort of have an always-open order that you just add things to with one click, and then cancel items later within 90 minutes, as opposed to adding things to a shopping cart and then finalizing the order.
...
... they're victims bad patents, not co-conspirators.
The complete process IS innovative, but a patent and exclusive rights to it for 25 years? Hmm
It seems like Apple licensing it has moved the discussion forward. Everybody stopped talking about it, and only Amazon was doing it. Now we have a case where we can see how licensing this plays out. Are they charging Apple a penny-per-sale, or did Apple pay a flat fee for the right to use it forever, or for so many years? If Amazon charged a reasonable price and gave source code or implementation help, it's not nearly as bad as an unreasonable price with no code that's just basically a tax.
In the end, though, responsibility for all these bad patents can be laid firmly at the feet of the US patent office and the US gov't. Blaming Apple is not going to change the fact that bad patents exist. They wanted a one-click store and they had to pay Amazon
You are killing me. FireWire's not on YOUR motherboard, so it's not successful? Who cares about YOUR motherboard, other than you, exactly?
... you know what I mean? That's all there is. There are very few people working with analog when you can buy an iMac for $999 that does more than a $10,000 analog video setup, with no loss of quality for each generation, and you can surf the Web and play games on that iMac, too, as a bonus. DV is here to stay, and it moves around over FireWire. Period. There are way too many devices for this to change. Critical mass has been reached. There's a CNN correspondant who travels with a Sony DV camera and a PowerBook, and all he sends CNN is the finished three-minute report or whatever. No room full of people and racks of VCR's and effects. That's the future of news coverage.
Do you think video itself is on the way out, or do you think that analog video and editing is about to enjoy a comeback? Digital video is "video"
The coming broadband World Wide Web is going to be full of video, and unless you want big business making all of it, you have to get a camera, FireWire and some DV editing software and learn how to make some yourself. It's YOU who is being left behind, not FireWire.
> The moral: it's not Apple's fault, though I still don't
> consider it successful enough.
What could be more successful than being 1) the IEEE standard, 2) the ONLY method? EVERYBODY who is doing anything with DV has at least one FireWire device, and probably two or three, and that includes everybody from the first-time iMac DV buyer to George Lucas working on Episode II.
> Apple has innovated what exactly? They stole the
> GUI from Xerox PARC
There are about 10 or 20 books detailing the development of the Lisa and the Macintosh at Apple, and not a single one says that Xerox did all the work. The Alto didn't have pull-down menus, it didn't have overlapping windows, there was no concept of "double-click", no concept of "dragging", no concept of "dropping". The Xerox mouse had to be cleaned continuously, and cost hundreds of dollars to make. Apple did years and years of research, some of which included ex-Parc people who left to join Apple so that they could have their work wind up on people's desks instead of in a museum. Give it all a rest! Everybody with half a brain has read some books, or interviews with the principle players, and knows what really went on. I mean, read a book, godamit.
What went on to become NeXT actually started at Apple, and Steve Jobs took the team and the project (code named "Big Mac") with him when he left. Does that mean that Apple of 1985 should get credit for the NeXT Cube of 1989?
Someday, someone will market a computer with a fly-around 3D interface. Will we say that's not innovative, because we saw the same thing in a movie one time?
Apple developers have had their CD's for about a week now. It's a two-CD package: one is Mac OS X Public Beta (same as what users get when they order from Apple) and the other is all of Apple's development tools and some documentation.
The Apple Select developer program is pretty good. For $400 (used to be $500) per year, you get 5 "seed keys" which you can pass on to free-membership developers, so you get 35 CD's a year and access to streaming video of WWDC and such, while your four friends get all the beta software and developer tools mailed to them. You and four other people could have been running Mac OS X since DP2 for $100 each, basically. Most people see the $400 or $500 and don't realize you're really signing up a workgroup.
And yes, you can continue to develop for Linux or whatever for free, but you can charge more for your Mac software, so $400 per year is not that much. Also, you get a coupon for $100 off CodeWarrior as well, and discounts on hardware and software, and access to Apple's testing labs and things like that. If you have Mac OS X titles, Apple also has all kinds of cross-promotion things, where they'll feature you on their Web site or whatever.
You can compile Java natively on Mac OS X, can't you? And do something to it (Swing?) to get it to use Aqua? I think when you do this it looks and acts just like any Mac OS X native app.
I'm not that into Java, but I keep seeing things about Mac OS X's Java support that sound like it goes above and beyond the call with Java. Maybe that's what Tenon is referring to.
Also, there may be Mac users who want to run this stuff, but are happier to pay Tenon a modest fee to deliver it already working, rather than have to mess with anything themselves.
> but it seems like it ought to be possible to get at
... those forms are called "older versions of Mac OS".
> least some form of it running on these
> "slightly older" machines
Some form of Mac OS X can already run on every Mac in existence
Today's machines can handle a great GUI and a great kernel. On yesterday's machines, you have to sacrifice the great GUI (older BSD boxes) or the great kernel (older Mac boxes) and just use what you got. Still, the BSD user with older hardware can run Apache like a champ without missing the GUI, and the Mac user with older hardware can run Photoshop like a champ, without really missing preemptive multitasking. Newer machines can do both, and Mac OS X is an example of that, so it requires a G3/200 or whatever. That's an oversimplification, but I hope you get what I mean.
If somebody gets Darwin up and running on an older Mac, then they could probably hack together a Mac OS X install on it as well. Might be lots of work, though, considering how fast and cheap new machines are, and how well many old Macs work, even with their older Mac OS, or running BSD if you want that, instead. It might be time better spent getting drivers together for new peripherals.
> You do of course know that "G3" is a subset of
> "PowerPC"
> The second and third sentences of your post, taken
> together, make no sense.
This is just idiom getting in the way of understanding.
There were two distinct PowerPC models before the G3, but they weren't actually called "G1" and "G2". The G3 was a big improvement on the previous models, so Mac users just called CPU's "G3" and "PowerPC" (read, "plain PowerPC") to distinguish whether you had a much-faster G3 or not.
> The old rhapsody even ran on 180mhz PPCs before...
> what now... they are too slow?
The original Rhapsody HAD to run on 180MHz PPC's, because that was the best it had at that time. If it ran too slow, you took some shit out. This is a new OS being built to take Apple through the next ten years without major changes. Yes, they're going to push today's machines a little bit. This is a Unix that (by release) shouldn't ever have to be rebooted, even when you add some funky hot-plug hardware (obviously, you have to power down to add a PCI card). It also allows you to dynamically add or remove fonts from the system without even restarting your apps.
There are lots of things it's going to do that aren't so important that you couldn't take them out if you HAD to run on a 180MHz PPC, but since the vast majority of the users of this OS will be G3+ (I mean, the lowliest iMac is a G3/233), then why not do more for the user?
Also, for non-Mac users to get some perspective, as far as the ubiquity of the machines, the equivalent to "G3 with 128MB of RAM" would be "Pentium II with 64MB of RAM". On average, Macs have more RAM in them because of the lousy VM in Mac OS 9, so these two machines are the PC and Mac workhorses of the past few years. Pentium II with 64MB of RAM is a realistic minimum for getting real work done with Windows 2000, and Windows 2000 does not also run an entire copy of Windows 98 in order to ensure maximum compatibility.
Any computer with a colored enclosure will run Mac OS X just beautifully, and many previous models will, too. The final requirement is said to be 64MB of RAM, although they may make it "128MB if you want to run Classic apps". Very, very few people are running Mac OS 9 in only 64MB of RAM because its VM is so bad you usually have to turn it off. Many, many people have 128 or so already, and even with that, they can only run two or three apps on Mac OS 9. On Mac OS X, they will use that same 128MB of RAM to run ten apps at a time, easy.
One of the nice things about Mac OS X that many Slashdotters may not know is that you simply install it onto the same HFS+ disc as Mac OS 9, and it moves the contents of your hard disk into a folder called "Mac OS 9" and uses those contents when you run Classic. The Startup Disk preference in Mac OS X then offers you the choice of "Mac OS X" or "Mac OS 9". If you click on "Mac OS 9" and then reboot, you are back running Mac OS 9 like nothing ever happened. Even though the system and every one of your apps has moved, it still works (moving apps is typical on the Mac, but I don't know about moving the system folder). The "Startup Disk" method has been in Mac OS for years and years (enabling you to boot from any disk) so this process will be familiar to many users. It's going to be easy to dual boot for a while if you have a troublesome app that won't run in Classic. No partitioning, no formatting, no reinstalls of Mac OS 9, no separate disk required. It's very well done.