> I know people (me, for instance) that would gladly
> pay 600$ for such an emulator.
Not many people will do this, though. A $799 iMac with Mac OS X, Appleworks, no fan, solid keyboard, and an optical mouse, is a real machine that will sit there and give you solid performance for a long time to come. A PC + $600 emulator + $99 copy of Mac OS X, even if you already have the PC, is just a toy that's waiting to break with the next Windows or Mac OS rev, or your next hardware update.
I run Virtual PC once in a while on my Mac, and if you use 98lite to un-integrate IE and put the Windows 95 shell in there, you can get really acceptible performance, but you're basically running a five year-old OS on an emulated equivalent of a Pentium 200. You're not running next year's OS and trying to emulate a PIII or G4. Even so, it's good for Web site testing, safely running the occasional.exe that someone sends me, or making Windows screenshots for computer books (which is what I mainly use it for). If you just run the emulator full screen, it's not really that good as an everyday computer.
Virtual PC fullscreen on an iBook, though, is the one and only x86 notebook with six hour battery life and antennaes built-in. Sort of like what Transmeta's doing.
> BZZZT! WRONG!
> On the Mac OS X server box, uname -a says
> Rhapsody. So, yes it *IS* Rhapsody.
Yes, it is... but the uname on "Mac OS X" is "Darwin". It's a different OS than "Mac OS X Server". Mac OS X is what you get when you allow Mac OS X Server and Mac OS 9 to breed. It's a combination of Apple's two OS trees, in the same way that Windows 2001 ("Whistler") is supposed to be the unison of DOS and NT operating systems and users.
Yes, it's a little confusing, but not confusing like the fact that Windows 2000 is not really an update of Windows 98.
> Flash is a cool product, but the simple fact is that
> three people with one year each of NeXTSTEP
> experience each could duplicate it in a month.
The point that the guy was trying to make is that if you develop for Windows and Macintosh, Cocoa is almost useless to you. It doesn't matter if you were able to do 10 times more work in the same time if you have to go and redo all that work for the Windows version. Flash running on Mac OS X using Cocoa is not as profitable just yet as Flash running on Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2000, Mac OS 8, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, even if you build it in 1/10th the time. There are only 100,000 end users right now (of Mac OS X Public Beta) who can run your Cocoa software, and almost every one of those will take Flash over Create because that's what they've already learned to use and they don't give a shit if you coded it in DNA.
Cocoa is great, and yes, one day the whole world will probably work this way, but think of all the non-Cocoa man-years of code that's out there for Mac OS X to run, and all the users anxiously waiting for that code so that they can keep their current tools, workflows, and skill sets. That's the priority right now.
Personally, I can't wait to see the first pure-Cocoa, one-man, must-have shareware title, though. It is amazing what a few cats can get together and do with these API's. It's not right for everybody, yet, though.
No, that isn't true. It's a pretty good marriage of both. You run on HFS+, you don't need filename extensions, and all the multimedia is QuickTime. The key shortcuts and 99% of the GUI conventions are Mac-based, and you can navigate it with a single-button pointer. Six months out of the gate, most of the apps it runs will be Mac apps. Even the Dock and file browser have pre-NeXT Mac OS 8 equivalents (floating application palette and the Launcher), so it's a lot more natural to add them to Mac OS than many people think.
Right now, the NeXT apps are already there, and all the BSD stuff, but when the Mac apps arrive in Carbon en force, it will be much more obviously a Mac. The Public Beta is about 200% more Mac than DP4, which is about four months older.
> Hey now wait a minute.
> Apple took free stuff (BSD) and mucked around
> with it some and gave it back!. Hardly some
> great act of generocity. I don't want to belittle
> what they did but let's be honest here they
> only gave back what they took in the first place.
Darwin includes a lot more than BSD. Have you run it?
> Time will tell if that money apple is charging for
> their OS will buy enough brain power to compete
> against windows.
Yes, OS X is new, but Apple is not new, and the Mac is not new. Mac OS X is not part of some new experiment to see if a non-Windows consumer OS is viable. They already have a successful non-Windows consumer OS. Since Microsoft is in all of Apple's markets, they are already competing successfully against Microsoft in those markets.
As far as brainpower, they are in better shape than ever. Mac OS X will allow them to leverage all the good tech they've had hidden away for the past few years. They are using lots more standard tech instead of re-inventing the wheel. They now have a very, very stable, rapid-development platform that they can build on.
> How does the coverage of the two compare? Are
> the wireless transmitters essentially the same?
> (Both seem to use Orinoco Silver cards, though
> the RG-1000's card isn't removable.)
The cards are the same, so they probably have the same range, but the 1.2 version of the AirPort software seemed to increase the range quite a bit, so software may be a factor. I get plenty of range from AirPort. I have a big apartment, but the signal is strong throughout. I take an iBook into the backyard all the time and no problem.
> 3. The Orinoco FAQ says that about 30 clients
> can be supported by a single RG-1000. Apple's
> specs suggests 10 clients max. Has anyone used
> more then 10 clients with an Apple Airport and if
> so how well did it work?
Apple installed 18 or so AirPort Base Stations in the Marcone Conference Center for their World Wide Developer Conference, and were able to serve 400 simultaneous users. There was an article about this on their Web site (may still be there).
The 10 per station number is just a low guarantee. Under the worst conditons, you could still run 10 notebooks off one base station. Under decent conditions you can put more on there.
Some things the Dell is probably missing compared to the Mac:
FireWire ports... the G4 has two independent FireWire busses with 400Mbs each, and you can hot-plug digital camcorders, hard drives, CD-RW drives and more
iMovie 2.0 is bundled for free
Gigabit Ethernet
space for 1.5GB of RAM
easy-access case where the whole mobo is on the door
Mac OS X Public Beta preinstalled along with Mac OS 9
Optical mouse
Mac OS X comes with more apps and more useful apps than Windows, including Apache, HTMLEdit, Sketch, ColorSync, QuickTime, Sherlock, real-time spell checker that all apps can use, print-to-PDF, StuffIt Expander (how can Windows still not have a Zip decompressor built-in?)... and it can run third-party Mac and Unix apps
Plus de style
To me, that's worth $380. Easy DV is amazing. Adding a new hard drive to your system in a few minutes with FireWire is amazing. Adding RAM or a PCI card in less than a minute is amazing. Once these things are made that easy, you don't want to give them up.
> I would be thrilled to hear that there is a real
> package management scheme built into Mac OS X.
> Is there?
Nine out of 10 apps on Mac OS 9 just installs to its own folder and lives quietly within there, following all the rules so the user can move or rename the apps or folder if they want to. The 1 out of 10 that sprays files everywhere drives users nuts, and leads to some of the problems Windows has, except I don't think I've ever had Mac app A overwrite a library from Mac app B or from the system.
Mac OS X uses "application bundles", similar to NeXT. They are folders containing everything an app needs to run, but they appear as if they are a single application file to the user. The user can move them around the disk, rename them, and interact with them by double-clicking, drag and drop, etc. Installing means just dragging the bundle from a CD to the hard disk, or decompressing an archive and then double-clicking the app, just like on Mac OS 9.
The truly great thing is that the bundle has spots for binaries for multiple platforms, and for resources for multiple languages. So you can make one app bundle that will run on any Mac OS X machine, whether PPC or not, using the user's preferred language. The sytem just uses the files it needs and ignores the others.
Also, the system has a central libraries folder, and if the libraries in the central folder are newer than those in an app's bundle, the system uses the newer ones.
> the ability of newbies to explore and learn
> programming has been somewhat inhibited).
Also, the requirement that newbies keep dev tools on their systems, download automatic updates for the same, or worry about a cracker using the compiler to take over Mom's Web and email machine has been severely inhibited.
And Gigabit Ethernet is an option on Cubes, too. There will be lots of design shops with G4 towers as servers and G4 Cubes as clients. It's really going to revolutionize some workflows. Suddenly, all the big files that artists work with seem small when you're moving stuff around that fast.
> Back in the day when Apple was popular, Apple II
> computers came with two flavors of Basic
> interpreters (Integer Basic and Bill's Applesoft)
> and a mini-assembler, along with instructions on
> how to use them.
That was also back in the day when a much higher percentage of users were also programmers, and there was no World Wide Web to make it easy to distribute tools from a Web site.
These days, including AppleScript with the OS and asking people who want to go further into development to get the latest tools from a free Web site doesn't seem so harsh.
Mac OS has a feature called Software Update that contacts Apple for a list of OS updates. Should every graphic designer and musician on the planet have to look at a list something like this:
gcc 3.4a
bash 7.1
ProjectBuilder 5.2
Every time they want to make sure their video driver is up-to-date?
Imagine for a moment that Adobe suggested they include a few hundred megs of Photoshop in Mac OS X, waiting to be unlocked once you pay Adobe for it. That would actually be more useful for many current Mac users than including the developer tools.
Mac OS X Server came out in early 1999. It's at 1.2 now. When Mac OS X is released, there will just be the one Mac OS X, though.
You can think of it like this:
Windows 2000 + Windows ME = the long-awaited "unified" Windows
Mac OS X Server + Mac OS 9 = Mac OS X (the long-awaited "next-generation Mac OS")
Both Microsoft and Apple are working towards having "one OS", and then adding more things on top for high-end versions. The future of Mac OS X Server will probably be as an add-on for the same Mac OS X being run as a desktop OS.
MS said quite some time ago that they Carbonized IE (already shipping in Mac OS X Public Beta) and then decided to go with Cocoa for Office. I guess most of the Mac-specific work is building the interface, and Cocoa makes that really easy.
Yes, but how much would you charge to build one for ME?
Of course, I want the thing to be quiet, so you'll have to build it without a fan. I can't leave it on all the time in my house if it's really noisy.
And I don't want it to be in one of those generic beige boxes. Makes me feel like I'm a business man, or that I'm living in an office. Ugh.
Of course, I want to be able to call you with problems for the first few months. I don't mind paying a nominal fee, like $35 or so per incident (may span multiple phone calls) later in the computer's life. I may call at inconvenient times, though.
I also want you to keep track of all the driver updates for the computer you build for me and create a system whereby my computer can check if there are new ones and install them automatically (like Mac OS 9 does and Mac OS X will), and I want these updates to just Work. Not that Windows Update crap that you have to sign up for, and which installs useless MS apps that wreck your other apps.
I also want you to stay on top of current events and technology and be ready with new stuff when I need it. Things like Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 wireless networking, and FireWire. Tell me what it is, make it easy to use, and then show me how to use it.
Building computers for yourself is a fine thing, and I used to do it, too (got tired of it and use a Mac now, though). If you want to do it, then fine, but spare us with comparisons of your own personal price point and Apple's. Please. I know you're good with a toolkit and wrist-strap, but you're going to have to do better than that in order to complain that Apple is overcharging.
Before Apple bought NeXT, their short list of candidates for the "guts of the next-generation Mac OS" were NeXT, Be, Solaris, and NT. Bill Gates bugged Gil Amelio big time to go with NT, apparently. What finally nixed MS was that Gil felt that MS hadn't actually presented any good technical arguments... any time an Apple engineer presented a sticking point like endianness, the MS guys just said things like "don't worry, we'll work that out, sign the contract". NeXT did well with Amelio because they came in and really detailed how their technology worked instead of talking only business.
> The biggest issue for mac porting darwin/os-x to
> the x86 would be the loss of their hardware market.
No, the biggest issues are:
1) Most Mac software is full of PPC-specific code, and you can't call something Mac OS if it won't run Mac software. OpenStep x86 did not exactly light the PC world on fire.
2) Microsoft makes most of its money from two things: porting its own Macintosh software such as Word and Excel from Mac to x86, and copying other people's Macintosh software on x86, so that Mac OS becomes Windows, QuickTime Player becomes Windows Media Player, and iMovie becomes Windows Movie Maker. What can x86 users get from Apple that they can't already get a shitty version of from Microsoft for a little less money?
> They do not make a single piece of silicon in the
> computers, and do not sell much of anything that
> benefits the x86 community hardware wise
They design and take responsibility for every part of the computer. Sometimes they make the tech (FireWire, case designs), sometimes they use existing tech for interoperability or economics (PCI, USB, BSD, 802.11), sometimes they buy another company for the tech they need (NeXT, and that DVD-authoring company they just bought). Certainly, they put more work into a box than any x86 manufacturer.
If you're suggesting that you can replace Mac hardware with x86 hardware and not notice the difference, all you have to do is place a PIII cartridge next to a PowerMac Cube. How the hell are you going to fit that inside there? It's running a full-speed G4 chip with 1MB L2 cache that only needs 11 watts, and is the size of a Pentium chip (the original Pentium chip). The Cube would have to be twice the size and have a fan to run a desktop x86 chip (45 watts). It would have to be a quarter of the performance to run a mobile PIII (15 watts).
There are also no x86 machines with integrated antennae, and none that can give you 5-6 hours on one battery.
> porting to x86 would allow current mac harware
> buyers to get the same operating system they love
> on cheaper hardware.
This didn't work for NeXT, or else why did they merge back into Apple?
Apple's stuff is competitive price-wise with Gateway, Dell, and all the rest. It's about to get moreso when Mac OS X replaces Mac OS 9. Apple's competitors offer Windows ME, or you can pay $200 more for Windows 2000. Certainly, the Mac user with Mac OS X is getting more for their money than a Windows ME user.
Only x86 users think Macs are too expensive. Mac users can't wait to drop their money down for a Cube or an iBook or whatever.
> steve jobs will most likely kill the efforts for a port
> (i've heard rumors that darwin/os-x has been ported
> and is sitting/tied-down in a lab somewhere,
> screaming to be released).
Successfully booting Darwin on Intel was announced TODAY and was the result of a lot of open source volunteer work. If Apple already has Darwin running on x86 machines in their labs, it would be a pretty crappy thing to release Darwin PPC as open source and ask people (they did ask people) to start porting it to Intel.
The rumors you've heard are because there are a few PC's at Apple that run OpenStep or Rhapsody. When Steve Jobs took over the CEO job at Apple, the first thing he did was replace the Mac in the CEO's office with a PC running OpenStep. Later, Rhapsody developer releases ran on x86 as well. A janitor sees a Dell running something non-Windows and thenext thing you know everybody thinks Mac OS X runs on Intel.
> If Compaq would push Alphas (which DEC didn't
> really, and they got bought) every other processor
> could die. (x86 which should, G4, ia64, sparc(64))
Except for the fact that an Alpha needs something like 70 watts and gives off a correspondingly high amount of heat. The G4 500 needs only about 11 watts, and the G3 needs only 5 or 6. PIII mobile chips are as little as 15 watts. This is not important for servers, but for fanless desktops, and mobiles, it's very important. Apple makes fanless desktops and mobiles (except the one fan in their tower machine that is primarily there for the four or five hard disks you can put in there), so Alpha's are not suitable for them at all.
Lots of people love the Alpha and think that it's only marketing that's kept it from the mainstream, but there are technical reasons as well.
VPC 2 can be considered to be a different "machine" than VPC 3, as far as I know. Virtual PC 3.0 is only $40 or something (with IBM PC DOS included), so it's worth upgrading. VPC 3 uses the Mac networking (instead of having only the PC or only the Mac connected to the Internet), supports USB, AppleScript, runs Windows 2000 and Red Hat Linux 6, and is faster, too.
Man, it's fun to play with... needs to be ported to Mac OS X, though, because it won't run in the Classic environment (quite deliberately, apparently... Connectix need to make whole different optimizations).
Man, I know you love BeOS, but you're embarrassing yourself. BeOS and Mac OS X are not even in the same league. I used BeOS for a while and I really liked it compared to Windows, but the things that are missing become quickly apparent to most people. If it satisfies your needs, then great. I would like to see BeOS go on forever. I like the company and I like the community. I like Scot Hacker. There are even two or three good songs about BeOS. BeOS users are mostly happy and Windows users mostly aren't, and that says something.
However, there are only about 100,000 BeOS users, according to Be. Apple ships 100,000 Macs every couple of weeks, in a slow quarter. How can Be really compete with Apple in this case? Many people would tell you "open source", but Mac OS X is even more open source than BeOS. Darwin is running on x86 as of today, thanks to that.
As far as technology, once you get past the file system, and the fact that you can build your own BeOS box out of carefully-selected generic PC hardware, then you run out of reasons to recommend BeOS over Mac OS X. Mac OS X supports more tech "buzzwords" than BeOS (things like Java2 and WebDAV), is more open source, runs more apps (even without Classic), and will have more users sometime around the middle of next week. Mac OS X is already being preinstalled by Apple as an option on G4 machines, and BeOS hasn't shipped preinstalled for years.
Be made a lot of noise a few years ago because both Windows and Mac OS were stuck in ruts. R4 looked pretty good in many ways against Windows 98 and even NT 4, which lacked an astonishing number of things itself. The whole Copland/Gershwin/Rhapsody thing almost took Apple out of the picture entirely. Be seemed to be the only one with any forward momentum at that point in the race for a "modern OS". Since then, though, Linux, Windows 2000, and Mac OS X have each become impressive realities, and BeOS hasn't changed all that much, except to become BeIA.
> Do the benchmark, and publish the result.
Benchmark what? Digital video editing? Pro-level Web design? Browsing the Web with JavaScript, HTML 4.0, CSS 1.0, Flash, Shockwave, and QuickTime? Serving Web pages over TCP/IP? Rendering with OpenGL? Running Java 2 apps? Porting software from Mac OS Classic, BSD, OpenStep? These are the things Apple is designing Mac OS X to do quickly and easily, but you just plain can't do these things with BeOS. Maybe you just want to see a comparison of how fast you can copy 1000 files from one volume to another? Well... alright.
Once again, good luck with BeOS. What it does, it does well, and it makes people happy and productive. Why pretend that it's something that it's not, though? That just works against it in the long run.
Well, if you compare PowerMacs with the new legacy-free PC's, you find that they're almost exactly identical, except for the processor. Compaq, Dell, and IBM have machines that have USB ports, FireWire ports, PC100 RAM, AGP video, ATA hard disks, DVD-ROM drives, and no old-style parallel and serial ports, no PCI slots... and so does Apple.
If Darwin PPC already knows how to talk to USB and FireWire devices, isn't it just a matter of porting that stuff to Darwin x86? They're the same USB and FireWire devices being used on both platforms.
That is an excellent point. One million free betas means nothing to developers, because you know a lot of those won't get installed or used. One million sold at $30 shows that there is real, active interest in Mac OS X, and also probably pretty near one million users who can run OS X software.
Actually, this way you can almost guarantee that the actual installed base will be more than the units shipped, because Mac users will pass the CD's around a bit. If all goes well in the first month or two, a second level of adopters will get in with a friend's help and CD.
Slashdot Mirror
> I know people (me, for instance) that would gladly
.exe that someone sends me, or making Windows screenshots for computer books (which is what I mainly use it for). If you just run the emulator full screen, it's not really that good as an everyday computer.
> pay 600$ for such an emulator.
Not many people will do this, though. A $799 iMac with Mac OS X, Appleworks, no fan, solid keyboard, and an optical mouse, is a real machine that will sit there and give you solid performance for a long time to come. A PC + $600 emulator + $99 copy of Mac OS X, even if you already have the PC, is just a toy that's waiting to break with the next Windows or Mac OS rev, or your next hardware update.
I run Virtual PC once in a while on my Mac, and if you use 98lite to un-integrate IE and put the Windows 95 shell in there, you can get really acceptible performance, but you're basically running a five year-old OS on an emulated equivalent of a Pentium 200. You're not running next year's OS and trying to emulate a PIII or G4. Even so, it's good for Web site testing, safely running the occasional
Virtual PC fullscreen on an iBook, though, is the one and only x86 notebook with six hour battery life and antennaes built-in. Sort of like what Transmeta's doing.
It split since it was last $13, so you bought shares at $13 which are now worth $104.
> BZZZT! WRONG!
... but the uname on "Mac OS X" is "Darwin". It's a different OS than "Mac OS X Server". Mac OS X is what you get when you allow Mac OS X Server and Mac OS 9 to breed. It's a combination of Apple's two OS trees, in the same way that Windows 2001 ("Whistler") is supposed to be the unison of DOS and NT operating systems and users.
> On the Mac OS X server box, uname -a says
> Rhapsody. So, yes it *IS* Rhapsody.
Yes, it is
Yes, it's a little confusing, but not confusing like the fact that Windows 2000 is not really an update of Windows 98.
> Flash is a cool product, but the simple fact is that
> three people with one year each of NeXTSTEP
> experience each could duplicate it in a month.
The point that the guy was trying to make is that if you develop for Windows and Macintosh, Cocoa is almost useless to you. It doesn't matter if you were able to do 10 times more work in the same time if you have to go and redo all that work for the Windows version. Flash running on Mac OS X using Cocoa is not as profitable just yet as Flash running on Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2000, Mac OS 8, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, even if you build it in 1/10th the time. There are only 100,000 end users right now (of Mac OS X Public Beta) who can run your Cocoa software, and almost every one of those will take Flash over Create because that's what they've already learned to use and they don't give a shit if you coded it in DNA.
Cocoa is great, and yes, one day the whole world will probably work this way, but think of all the non-Cocoa man-years of code that's out there for Mac OS X to run, and all the users anxiously waiting for that code so that they can keep their current tools, workflows, and skill sets. That's the priority right now.
Personally, I can't wait to see the first pure-Cocoa, one-man, must-have shareware title, though. It is amazing what a few cats can get together and do with these API's. It's not right for everybody, yet, though.
> The whole thing is NeXT
No, that isn't true. It's a pretty good marriage of both. You run on HFS+, you don't need filename extensions, and all the multimedia is QuickTime. The key shortcuts and 99% of the GUI conventions are Mac-based, and you can navigate it with a single-button pointer. Six months out of the gate, most of the apps it runs will be Mac apps. Even the Dock and file browser have pre-NeXT Mac OS 8 equivalents (floating application palette and the Launcher), so it's a lot more natural to add them to Mac OS than many people think.
Right now, the NeXT apps are already there, and all the BSD stuff, but when the Mac apps arrive in Carbon en force, it will be much more obviously a Mac. The Public Beta is about 200% more Mac than DP4, which is about four months older.
> if i give someone my refridgerator
He will receive a compressor, a few wires, and a set of incomplete, plain text instructions detailing how he can turn those into a working appliance.
For $75, Red Hat will read those same instructions to him over the phone.
> Hey now wait a minute.
> Apple took free stuff (BSD) and mucked around
> with it some and gave it back!. Hardly some
> great act of generocity. I don't want to belittle
> what they did but let's be honest here they
> only gave back what they took in the first place.
Darwin includes a lot more than BSD. Have you run it?
> Time will tell if that money apple is charging for
> their OS will buy enough brain power to compete
> against windows.
Yes, OS X is new, but Apple is not new, and the Mac is not new. Mac OS X is not part of some new experiment to see if a non-Windows consumer OS is viable. They already have a successful non-Windows consumer OS. Since Microsoft is in all of Apple's markets, they are already competing successfully against Microsoft in those markets.
As far as brainpower, they are in better shape than ever. Mac OS X will allow them to leverage all the good tech they've had hidden away for the past few years. They are using lots more standard tech instead of re-inventing the wheel. They now have a very, very stable, rapid-development platform that they can build on.
> How does the coverage of the two compare? Are
> the wireless transmitters essentially the same?
> (Both seem to use Orinoco Silver cards, though
> the RG-1000's card isn't removable.)
The cards are the same, so they probably have the same range, but the 1.2 version of the AirPort software seemed to increase the range quite a bit, so software may be a factor. I get plenty of range from AirPort. I have a big apartment, but the signal is strong throughout. I take an iBook into the backyard all the time and no problem.
> 3. The Orinoco FAQ says that about 30 clients
> can be supported by a single RG-1000. Apple's
> specs suggests 10 clients max. Has anyone used
> more then 10 clients with an Apple Airport and if
> so how well did it work?
Apple installed 18 or so AirPort Base Stations in the Marcone Conference Center for their World Wide Developer Conference, and were able to serve 400 simultaneous users. There was an article about this on their Web site (may still be there).
The 10 per station number is just a low guarantee. Under the worst conditons, you could still run 10 notebooks off one base station. Under decent conditions you can put more on there.
Some things the Dell is probably missing compared to the Mac:
... the G4 has two independent FireWire busses with 400Mbs each, and you can hot-plug digital camcorders, hard drives, CD-RW drives and more
... and it can run third-party Mac and Unix apps
FireWire ports
iMovie 2.0 is bundled for free
Gigabit Ethernet
space for 1.5GB of RAM
easy-access case where the whole mobo is on the door
Mac OS X Public Beta preinstalled along with Mac OS 9
Optical mouse
Mac OS X comes with more apps and more useful apps than Windows, including Apache, HTMLEdit, Sketch, ColorSync, QuickTime, Sherlock, real-time spell checker that all apps can use, print-to-PDF, StuffIt Expander (how can Windows still not have a Zip decompressor built-in?)
Plus de style
To me, that's worth $380. Easy DV is amazing. Adding a new hard drive to your system in a few minutes with FireWire is amazing. Adding RAM or a PCI card in less than a minute is amazing. Once these things are made that easy, you don't want to give them up.
> I would be thrilled to hear that there is a real
> package management scheme built into Mac OS X.
> Is there?
Nine out of 10 apps on Mac OS 9 just installs to its own folder and lives quietly within there, following all the rules so the user can move or rename the apps or folder if they want to. The 1 out of 10 that sprays files everywhere drives users nuts, and leads to some of the problems Windows has, except I don't think I've ever had Mac app A overwrite a library from Mac app B or from the system.
Mac OS X uses "application bundles", similar to NeXT. They are folders containing everything an app needs to run, but they appear as if they are a single application file to the user. The user can move them around the disk, rename them, and interact with them by double-clicking, drag and drop, etc. Installing means just dragging the bundle from a CD to the hard disk, or decompressing an archive and then double-clicking the app, just like on Mac OS 9.
The truly great thing is that the bundle has spots for binaries for multiple platforms, and for resources for multiple languages. So you can make one app bundle that will run on any Mac OS X machine, whether PPC or not, using the user's preferred language. The sytem just uses the files it needs and ignores the others.
Also, the system has a central libraries folder, and if the libraries in the central folder are newer than those in an app's bundle, the system uses the newer ones.
> the ability of newbies to explore and learn
> programming has been somewhat inhibited).
Also, the requirement that newbies keep dev tools on their systems, download automatic updates for the same, or worry about a cracker using the compiler to take over Mom's Web and email machine has been severely inhibited.
And Gigabit Ethernet is an option on Cubes, too. There will be lots of design shops with G4 towers as servers and G4 Cubes as clients. It's really going to revolutionize some workflows. Suddenly, all the big files that artists work with seem small when you're moving stuff around that fast.
> Back in the day when Apple was popular, Apple II
> computers came with two flavors of Basic
> interpreters (Integer Basic and Bill's Applesoft)
> and a mini-assembler, along with instructions on
> how to use them.
That was also back in the day when a much higher percentage of users were also programmers, and there was no World Wide Web to make it easy to distribute tools from a Web site.
These days, including AppleScript with the OS and asking people who want to go further into development to get the latest tools from a free Web site doesn't seem so harsh.
Mac OS has a feature called Software Update that contacts Apple for a list of OS updates. Should every graphic designer and musician on the planet have to look at a list something like this:
gcc 3.4a
bash 7.1
ProjectBuilder 5.2
Every time they want to make sure their video driver is up-to-date?
Imagine for a moment that Adobe suggested they include a few hundred megs of Photoshop in Mac OS X, waiting to be unlocked once you pay Adobe for it. That would actually be more useful for many current Mac users than including the developer tools.
Mac OS X Server came out in early 1999. It's at 1.2 now. When Mac OS X is released, there will just be the one Mac OS X, though.
You can think of it like this:
Windows 2000 + Windows ME = the long-awaited "unified" Windows
Mac OS X Server + Mac OS 9 = Mac OS X (the long-awaited "next-generation Mac OS")
Both Microsoft and Apple are working towards having "one OS", and then adding more things on top for high-end versions. The future of Mac OS X Server will probably be as an add-on for the same Mac OS X being run as a desktop OS.
Office will be Classic and Cocoa. No Carbon.
MS said quite some time ago that they Carbonized IE (already shipping in Mac OS X Public Beta) and then decided to go with Cocoa for Office. I guess most of the Mac-specific work is building the interface, and Cocoa makes that really easy.
> And for $1500 (us) I just built
Yes, but how much would you charge to build one for ME?
Of course, I want the thing to be quiet, so you'll have to build it without a fan. I can't leave it on all the time in my house if it's really noisy.
And I don't want it to be in one of those generic beige boxes. Makes me feel like I'm a business man, or that I'm living in an office. Ugh.
Of course, I want to be able to call you with problems for the first few months. I don't mind paying a nominal fee, like $35 or so per incident (may span multiple phone calls) later in the computer's life. I may call at inconvenient times, though.
I also want you to keep track of all the driver updates for the computer you build for me and create a system whereby my computer can check if there are new ones and install them automatically (like Mac OS 9 does and Mac OS X will), and I want these updates to just Work. Not that Windows Update crap that you have to sign up for, and which installs useless MS apps that wreck your other apps.
I also want you to stay on top of current events and technology and be ready with new stuff when I need it. Things like Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 wireless networking, and FireWire. Tell me what it is, make it easy to use, and then show me how to use it.
Building computers for yourself is a fine thing, and I used to do it, too (got tired of it and use a Mac now, though). If you want to do it, then fine, but spare us with comparisons of your own personal price point and Apple's. Please. I know you're good with a toolkit and wrist-strap, but you're going to have to do better than that in order to complain that Apple is overcharging.
Before Apple bought NeXT, their short list of candidates for the "guts of the next-generation Mac OS" were NeXT, Be, Solaris, and NT. Bill Gates bugged Gil Amelio big time to go with NT, apparently. What finally nixed MS was that Gil felt that MS hadn't actually presented any good technical arguments ... any time an Apple engineer presented a sticking point like endianness, the MS guys just said things like "don't worry, we'll work that out, sign the contract". NeXT did well with Amelio because they came in and really detailed how their technology worked instead of talking only business.
tell application "Finder"
display dialog "hello world"
end tell
> The biggest issue for mac porting darwin/os-x to
> the x86 would be the loss of their hardware market.
No, the biggest issues are:
1) Most Mac software is full of PPC-specific code, and you can't call something Mac OS if it won't run Mac software. OpenStep x86 did not exactly light the PC world on fire.
2) Microsoft makes most of its money from two things: porting its own Macintosh software such as Word and Excel from Mac to x86, and copying other people's Macintosh software on x86, so that Mac OS becomes Windows, QuickTime Player becomes Windows Media Player, and iMovie becomes Windows Movie Maker. What can x86 users get from Apple that they can't already get a shitty version of from Microsoft for a little less money?
> They do not make a single piece of silicon in the
> computers, and do not sell much of anything that
> benefits the x86 community hardware wise
They design and take responsibility for every part of the computer. Sometimes they make the tech (FireWire, case designs), sometimes they use existing tech for interoperability or economics (PCI, USB, BSD, 802.11), sometimes they buy another company for the tech they need (NeXT, and that DVD-authoring company they just bought). Certainly, they put more work into a box than any x86 manufacturer.
If you're suggesting that you can replace Mac hardware with x86 hardware and not notice the difference, all you have to do is place a PIII cartridge next to a PowerMac Cube. How the hell are you going to fit that inside there? It's running a full-speed G4 chip with 1MB L2 cache that only needs 11 watts, and is the size of a Pentium chip (the original Pentium chip). The Cube would have to be twice the size and have a fan to run a desktop x86 chip (45 watts). It would have to be a quarter of the performance to run a mobile PIII (15 watts).
There are also no x86 machines with integrated antennae, and none that can give you 5-6 hours on one battery.
> porting to x86 would allow current mac harware
> buyers to get the same operating system they love
> on cheaper hardware.
This didn't work for NeXT, or else why did they merge back into Apple?
Apple's stuff is competitive price-wise with Gateway, Dell, and all the rest. It's about to get moreso when Mac OS X replaces Mac OS 9. Apple's competitors offer Windows ME, or you can pay $200 more for Windows 2000. Certainly, the Mac user with Mac OS X is getting more for their money than a Windows ME user.
Only x86 users think Macs are too expensive. Mac users can't wait to drop their money down for a Cube or an iBook or whatever.
> steve jobs will most likely kill the efforts for a port
> (i've heard rumors that darwin/os-x has been ported
> and is sitting/tied-down in a lab somewhere,
> screaming to be released).
Successfully booting Darwin on Intel was announced TODAY and was the result of a lot of open source volunteer work. If Apple already has Darwin running on x86 machines in their labs, it would be a pretty crappy thing to release Darwin PPC as open source and ask people (they did ask people) to start porting it to Intel.
The rumors you've heard are because there are a few PC's at Apple that run OpenStep or Rhapsody. When Steve Jobs took over the CEO job at Apple, the first thing he did was replace the Mac in the CEO's office with a PC running OpenStep. Later, Rhapsody developer releases ran on x86 as well. A janitor sees a Dell running something non-Windows and thenext thing you know everybody thinks Mac OS X runs on Intel.
> If Compaq would push Alphas (which DEC didn't
> really, and they got bought) every other processor
> could die. (x86 which should, G4, ia64, sparc(64))
Except for the fact that an Alpha needs something like 70 watts and gives off a correspondingly high amount of heat. The G4 500 needs only about 11 watts, and the G3 needs only 5 or 6. PIII mobile chips are as little as 15 watts. This is not important for servers, but for fanless desktops, and mobiles, it's very important. Apple makes fanless desktops and mobiles (except the one fan in their tower machine that is primarily there for the four or five hard disks you can put in there), so Alpha's are not suitable for them at all.
Lots of people love the Alpha and think that it's only marketing that's kept it from the mainstream, but there are technical reasons as well.
VPC 2 can be considered to be a different "machine" than VPC 3, as far as I know. Virtual PC 3.0 is only $40 or something (with IBM PC DOS included), so it's worth upgrading. VPC 3 uses the Mac networking (instead of having only the PC or only the Mac connected to the Internet), supports USB, AppleScript, runs Windows 2000 and Red Hat Linux 6, and is faster, too.
... needs to be ported to Mac OS X, though, because it won't run in the Classic environment (quite deliberately, apparently ... Connectix need to make whole different optimizations).
Man, it's fun to play with
Man, I know you love BeOS, but you're embarrassing yourself. BeOS and Mac OS X are not even in the same league. I used BeOS for a while and I really liked it compared to Windows, but the things that are missing become quickly apparent to most people. If it satisfies your needs, then great. I would like to see BeOS go on forever. I like the company and I like the community. I like Scot Hacker. There are even two or three good songs about BeOS. BeOS users are mostly happy and Windows users mostly aren't, and that says something.
... alright.
However, there are only about 100,000 BeOS users, according to Be. Apple ships 100,000 Macs every couple of weeks, in a slow quarter. How can Be really compete with Apple in this case? Many people would tell you "open source", but Mac OS X is even more open source than BeOS. Darwin is running on x86 as of today, thanks to that.
As far as technology, once you get past the file system, and the fact that you can build your own BeOS box out of carefully-selected generic PC hardware, then you run out of reasons to recommend BeOS over Mac OS X. Mac OS X supports more tech "buzzwords" than BeOS (things like Java2 and WebDAV), is more open source, runs more apps (even without Classic), and will have more users sometime around the middle of next week. Mac OS X is already being preinstalled by Apple as an option on G4 machines, and BeOS hasn't shipped preinstalled for years.
Be made a lot of noise a few years ago because both Windows and Mac OS were stuck in ruts. R4 looked pretty good in many ways against Windows 98 and even NT 4, which lacked an astonishing number of things itself. The whole Copland/Gershwin/Rhapsody thing almost took Apple out of the picture entirely. Be seemed to be the only one with any forward momentum at that point in the race for a "modern OS". Since then, though, Linux, Windows 2000, and Mac OS X have each become impressive realities, and BeOS hasn't changed all that much, except to become BeIA.
> Do the benchmark, and publish the result.
Benchmark what? Digital video editing? Pro-level Web design? Browsing the Web with JavaScript, HTML 4.0, CSS 1.0, Flash, Shockwave, and QuickTime? Serving Web pages over TCP/IP? Rendering with OpenGL? Running Java 2 apps? Porting software from Mac OS Classic, BSD, OpenStep? These are the things Apple is designing Mac OS X to do quickly and easily, but you just plain can't do these things with BeOS. Maybe you just want to see a comparison of how fast you can copy 1000 files from one volume to another? Well
Once again, good luck with BeOS. What it does, it does well, and it makes people happy and productive. Why pretend that it's something that it's not, though? That just works against it in the long run.
Well, if you compare PowerMacs with the new legacy-free PC's, you find that they're almost exactly identical, except for the processor. Compaq, Dell, and IBM have machines that have USB ports, FireWire ports, PC100 RAM, AGP video, ATA hard disks, DVD-ROM drives, and no old-style parallel and serial ports, no PCI slots ... and so does Apple.
If Darwin PPC already knows how to talk to USB and FireWire devices, isn't it just a matter of porting that stuff to Darwin x86? They're the same USB and FireWire devices being used on both platforms.
That is an excellent point. One million free betas means nothing to developers, because you know a lot of those won't get installed or used. One million sold at $30 shows that there is real, active interest in Mac OS X, and also probably pretty near one million users who can run OS X software.
Actually, this way you can almost guarantee that the actual installed base will be more than the units shipped, because Mac users will pass the CD's around a bit. If all goes well in the first month or two, a second level of adopters will get in with a friend's help and CD.