i haven't heard anything about this, could you please post your source?
and there's a difference between "releasing the specs" and "devoting the manhours to aid in development." in the case of Be, it was closer to the latter.
I agree that the 500 MHz PPC is fast but I disagree when you say that the clock was "artificially" increased to 1 GHz: Apple fans should really use a good benchmarck and compare SpecInt/SpecFP instead of PhotoShop..
i don't understand why people pass off the Photoshop benchmark as useless. i think it's a lot more useful than an integer or floating point benchmark.
i don't understand the way people around here (and people in general) buy computers. do you buy your cars based entirely on horsepower? or do you buy one on which meets your needs best? most of the time a computer user lets their processor sit idle (say while surfing the web). if so, then why is speed speed speed paramount? of course speed is important, but "speed" in computers is not black and white, faster and slower. consider my situation:
i own a Mac. most of the time my computer sits there while i traverse files, surf the web, telnet to linux boxes (or drop to the terminal in MacOS X), read email, and write word processing documents. the rest of the time i spend using Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Image Ready and GoLive.
so which processor fits me best? the one that can crunch Integers the fastest (Intel/AMD), or the one that's opitmized to beat the shit out of Intel/AMD in Adobe applications? even though the vast majority of the time my CPU sits idle, the few times i really need that speed is when i'm using something like Photoshop.
so quit passing off the Photoshop benchmark as a useless statistic.
the G4 is a great chip, mostly because of the Altivec engine. i'm going to start watching DVDs on my computer more often: oh look! the Apple DVD player is going to be Altivec enhanced! that means i'll get a great, clear picture from my software DVD decoder. the "Photoshop" benchmark represets an "optimized for Altivec" benchmark, and this benchmarks is far more important to me than a simple integer benchmark.
if you don't think you need a G4, that's fine. but don't pass of this benchmark as useless for everybody just because it doesn't fit your needs.
the jist: Be thought they were Apple's only choice, so they played hardball. Apple's due dilligence valued them at about $50 million, be wanted about 3 times that, and Gasee added to that a very arrogant attitute in all negotiations. the rest is history.
Be had a fairly strong marketing plan for invading Apple's market; what they didn't have was a similarly strong plan for invading the PC market, where variety is the norm, not the exception. And on top of that, they squandered the 4 years that Apple took to get OS X out the door.
exactly, and i'd like to add that this is a good reason to argue against MacOS X on Intel machines (unless they're Apple-only, based on Intel processors). Be saw the x86 market as a huge sea where even if they got a little chunk of it, it would be better than half the Mac market. unfortunately for them they were lost in that sea, and couldn't build up enough market share to hit a "critical mass" and go anywhere. now they're suddenly "Internet Appliance" OS manufacturers. right. changing your corporate direction every couple of years is a good way to go bankrupt.
the fact of the matter is that Be was extremely bitter about the fact that they didn't get bought by Apple. they thought they had the greatest technology, and were doing Apple a favour by allowing them to use their OS. the whole story can be found in this bit out of the book Apple Confidential.
in retrospect, Apple was best to buy NeXT. NeXT was (and is) a great operating system that had time to mature and get a lot of the kinks out. Be had good technology, but it wasn't so good that it was leaps and bounds ahead of the rest, and the OS, as flashy as it may be, was still lacking in a LOT of necessary refinements. NeXT gave Apple a good solid UNIX foundation upon which to build MacOS X (which i think is a phenomenal operating system). also, bringing back Steve Jobs who inspired the iMac (and the recent resurgence of Apple) was worth the $427 million alone.
The truth is that it wasn't anything to do with the specs for the G3. BeOS was able to run on G3's. It's the controller chips that Apple refused to release the specs for.
i don't pretend to have all the answers, but i was specifically told (by an Apple employee, granted) that the information Be wanted was information that they could have compiled/learned, but were more interested in having Apple do the work to get it together. do you have a source for the "controller chips" bit? i don't exactly know exactly which chips you mean by "controller chips" (as it's a pretty generic term). is it a custom ASIC that Apple makes? that would seem very strange. though i'm not that intimately familar with the innards of G3s.
still, i have a very hard time believing the Be story. first of all, Apple's side of the story was never told. in fact if i remember correctly the Be story was only told through the comp.sys.be.* newsgroups, and there was no "official" announcement. that sounds like an unfounded rumour to me.
i also can't believe they'd really be scared of a lawsuit: reverse engineering is completely legal, otherwise you wouldn't have IBM clones (thank you Compaq)! the story doesn't fit, and after what i heard from some people at Apple, i'd be more inclinded to believe it was a half-truth started by certain Be employees because they were bitter about the situation.
No Sony? You say you work for a company that makes chips for IA's and you haven't heard of the e Villa?
of course i've heard of it, but you didn't read very well. i told you that most designs hardly make it to production, and very few make it in the marketplace. perhaps the eVilla will, but it's no guarantee. i'll tell you that there are other projects in Sony that don't use Be however. which one of these will be sucessful, only time will tell.
Apple is non-existant here. Be is turning into a BIG player. (Sony, Qubit, Compaq, Intel, and FIC, to name a few recent deals.)
wow, you need a reality check. have you been following the embedded market at all? Be is a drop in the bucket. QNX, WindRiver WinCE and Linux all completely swamp Be in marketshare and in design wins. i work at a company that designs chips for the IA market -- i know it very well. i have yet to hear a single one of our clients (including Compaq and Sony) mention Be. they're all designing around Linux right now (and quite frankly, i think Linux is the best solution. i push it whenever possible).
the IA market is very volitile right now, and over 90% of the IA appliances, even from the big companies, don't make it to market, and of those that do, very few have taken off. so when you see these product announcements from Be, take them with a grain of salt. i'm not seeing Be in any of major designs that i've dealt with, so i highly doubt they'll be dwarfing Apple anytime soon.
i was a huge fan of Be, but their inability to choose a market segment (high end audio, no! high-end graphics! no, consumer workstations, no! internet applicances, yeah!) is making a complete mockery of the great concepts they've designed in the OS. i think the best thing to happen to them right now would be to go out of business and opensource their code. at least then their great ideas would find a niche, because it's obvious that their marketing crew can't figure out what to do with it.
I cannot claim to be proficient enough in Apple code to know what is needed for Be to legally get BeOS running on the G* platform, but I do know that when Be was focused on BeOS, Apple was not forthcoming with that information. The reason the Linux PPC crowd got it working was because they reverse-engineered the information they needed. It would not have been rational for Be to do that and open themselves up to lawsuits by Apple.
BULLSHIT. i am sick and tired of hearing this drawn out crap about Apple "refusing to give Be the specs" for the G3s.
let me explain something to you: there's no magical book at Apple that's labelled "specs for the G3 for operating system writers." sure there are specs for their parts, and all the information is available, but it would take some serious man-hours to compile it all to make it available to a 3rd party.
Be came along and basically said to Apple "please, go out of your way to use your engineering resources to compile all the specs to your machines neatly so that we can support it." Apple said, "why should we spend our engineering resources to help you?" Be then left the PPC platform (something they were planning on doing anyhow) and blamed Apple for the whole incident.
let's face it, Gasee isn't a big fan of Jobs. and it isn't Apple's job to bend over backwards an support Be. the whole "lawsuit" line and "reverse engineering" was a bullshit line by Be to try to slam Apple on the way out of PPC. after the clones were killed, they actually had to WORK to support the G3 platforms, and they didn't want to do it. period, end of story.
i was a HUGE fan of Be, and even had an original BeBox. i was also a fan of NeXT, and used a NeXT Cube at my school for years. i followed this whole thing very closely, and even lived in Menlo Park (where Be's HQ is located) while this whole Apple-vs-Be war was going on. i don't claim to have all the answers, but i do know that the line Be employees were feeding people was mostly bullshit, done out of spite. Apple was not in the wrong on this one.
meanwhile Be moved over to x86 and instead of being a great operating system on a great chip in a small market, became swamped in the sea of x86. they're not going to make it anywhere. i now work for a company that supplies a fair number of chips to the embedded (including IA) market, and let me tell you, NOBODY is talking about BeIA. the big IA OS: Linux. Be dug their own grave, and none of it was Apple's fault.
The easy answer is that Apple is involved in the open source community, and appears to be strongly committed to releasing their own software as open source, and contributing changes back to other projects whose software they use.
woah woah woah, hold on a minute. are you trying to tell us that Apple isn't pure evil? that can't be possible! the slashbots can not be wrong! heretic!!
developing (open source) software for it for over two years.
that's great, and i hope to see more open source developers start using MacOS X. i think it's a promising platform to create some really good open source software for a large (desktop user) market. i'm looking forward to developing for MacOS X.
Just recently, I aquired a dual-G4/500MHz machine
that's a very nice machine.
Oh, and I absolutely LOVE the G4 hardware. The instant I openned the case, I thought "Damn, why didn't anyone else think of this!?" You really have to see it to understand, though.
...
G4 hardware is still on the expensive side
these two thoughts are related. i find with Apple hardware you do pay a premium for the "intangibles" (such as that amazing case) and lots of extras (like the gigabit ethernet you have in your machine). the trick is, if those intangibles and extras aren't something you want, then Macs look quite expensive. of course, if they are something you want, then they're right in line. they're definitely not for all people, that's for sure.
You will be able to do every fucking thing you want to a mac running mac os X
you're actually quite right. Apple has never really gone out of their way to keep users from editing things, but they haven't opened it up on purpose either. there's already a lot you can do with the MacOS, and MacOS X looks to be even more cutomizable.
for starters, just about everything is stored in (text based) XML files on the hard disk. there have already been a lot hacks to do all sorts of interesting things (and as you mentioned, getting the old NeXT Step interface back on Cocoa apps is one of the more interesting ones). lots of other functions (like the position of the dock) can be changed using the defaults command from the Terminal.
the more i delve into it, the more i realize that MacOS is actualy quite customizable. Apple hasn't purposefully hidden anything, but they haven't published anything either: but hey, that's part of the fun!:) so while it's never going to be as customizeable as Linux, it's right up there, and i think there could be a lot of great things to hack onto it. Mac developers seem quite resourceful, so i'm really looking forward to the hacks that appear after the final release.
the only problem i can see is that i'll need a second Mac to screw around with. otherwise it'll end up like my Linux box is right now: refusing to boot and giving me nasty kernel messages (gotta get around to fixing that:).
don't even bother; it's not worth it. one of them will just come back with some stupid "mom & pop" store quote for a Pentium III (or a Dell, now that i've said it:) and then add a little statement passing off Altivec as a "toy" that only Photoshop people care about.
most people here don't think that ease of use, fewer driver conflicts, quality hardware, Altivec, pleasant design, great software like iMovie or the ability to just get work down without fucking around with the computer to be worth a premium. that's fine, to each their own. for the rest of us, there's a G4 with MacOS X.
and as a note about the speed difference between x86 and PowerPC: i love playing around with my Linux box, and i use Windows at work. but it boggles my mind how much faster i get work done on my Mac compared to my Linux box, or my Windows laptop at work, and how much less time i spend trying to fix crashes, conflicts or doing troubleshooting.
so this is what i wonder: if i get work done faster on my Mac than i do on any other machine (due to the reasons i've outlined above), what difference does the benchmarked speed matter? if i'm getting my work done faster, doesn't that mean it's a faster machine? it means enough to me to keep using my Mac, and i've come to realize that for what i do, there's absolutely no other machine that comes close.
yeah, that's what i was thinking. this was already discussed (flamed?) in Dumping LinuxPPC For MacOS X? among others. i've aready gone on into great detail about my thoughts on that matter in the other articles.
i figure it works like this: if you already have a Mac, then you should run MacOS X as your OS on your workstation. if you've got an old Mac just dying to be a server, Darwin is probably the best fit in the future, LinuxPPC for now.
if you've got an x86 box, or if what you do doesn't work nicely with Altivec, then use Linux on your x86 box. MacOS X does not, and will not anytime in the forseeable future, run on your x86. that's probably fine, as Linux is designed for x86 first, and is a good solution for that hardware.
as everybody has been saying, what Jobs said in his meeting with resellers isn't really news for slashdot. however if you read the rest of the article, especially the 2nd page, there are some good quotes about the importance of the DVD burning capabilites of the high-end G4s. this actually is interesting news.
it hasn't really been talked about much, as burning DVDs is not something any of us would be planning on doing (unless we're pirating DVDs). but if you look past the WaReZ kiddies, you'll realize that this is actually an important technology.
from the article:
"I'm starting to think this is as important as the LaserWriter was to desktop publishing.... It's revolutionary." while i hardly think it's "revolutionary," it is important.
up until now, mastering DVDs (that can play on consumer-level players) has been prohibitivly expensive. now Apple has made this available to a huge market for a measly $3500. i personally know many people at advertising agencies and training firms that would love to put their material on DVD as opposed to VHS, but have been holding off until the price comes out of the stratosphere.
considering the fact that in the past Apple has had the highest markup on their most expensive machines, i think they're going to rake in a lot of cash from this machine. this is also a great use of the Alitvec engine on the G4, and one of those (few) situations where it really does run considerably faster than a P4. at any rate, it's a good move for Apple.
i've been a fan of infiltration.org for a while now: that's probably because i live in Toronto, where a lot of the "infiltration" on the site is being done. the pictures of Toronto's Subway Tunnels are amazing (including an abandoned station i never knew about). plus i had no idea how many strange things were hidden in the Royal York Hotel!
i've read most of the articles over in great detail, but i'm still too chickenshit to go down into the Subway tunnels myself. phrases like "allowing just barely enough room for a human to press up against the wall and let a train whip past" don't exactly make the situation any better.
but it's great that some people are doing this and making the pictures and information available to the rest of us on the web! it's definitely a site worth reading.
lots of trolls write up responses in advance. slashdot's topics are very cyclical, so it's pretty easy to write up a "response" at any time and change it slightly in time to post it in the first 20 posts.
i don't troll slashdot, as there are more interesting places to troll, but i have been known to write responses in advance.
of course this one, as Shoeboy pointed out, was a cut'n'paste. i actually did the same thing on another message board recently with Shoeboy's (presumably) original "Jeff Bezos nearly ruined my Christmas" rant. it went over very well! so hats off to Shoeboy: he writes (or at least, harvests) some absolutely classic trolls.
excuse my ignorance, but is this not a normal feature of Linux/Windows? i've been a user of both for a long time, but i've never tried to hook up more than one pointing device to any computer i own but the Mac. right now i have 2 mice and 1 trackball on my Mac and they work very nicely together, however i can't seem to get my Windows Laptop at work allow the mouse and trackpad functioning at the same time. perhaps this is why? maybe i'll bring in one of my USB mice to give it a try.
anybody know of a hack to get two pointing devices to work in Windows at the same time? it could also be this piece of shit no-name brand laptop i'm stuck with at work too. i should get my employer to give me real laptop.
Aside from the mouse button "debate", I'd be curious to know what/. readers thought about the differing approaches GUI mouse operation in *nix/MacOS/Windows.
i'd like to see a discussion of this as well: of course, this is completely off-topic for this story. perhaps in a future article.
just a quick note: one of the things i really like about the MacOS is that the pull-down menus are at the top of the screen. as mentioned in your link, this can be accessed "at least five times faster" than an equivalent Windows (or Linux) pull-down menu that's attached to the top of the window. it's also convenient to be able to tell which program is in the forground by looking at the name in the titlebar.
but yes, it deserves a full discussion sometime:). btw: thanks for the link!
yeah yeah yeah, Macs only have one mouse button: big deal. sure it's a pain in the ass if you're using Linux, but the MacOS (including MacOS X) is designed to operate effectively with only one mouse button.
i hated it at first too, so when i bought my first Mac a few years ago (after using Linux and Windows exclusively) i ran out and bought a 3-button mouse. i found however, that after using the MacOS for a while you start to realize that if things are designed with a 1-button mouse in mind, using the standard apple mouse actually made things more convenient. to this day i have two mice plugged into my computer: the standard Apple mouse and a 4-button scroll mouse. i use the 1-button mouse the most, as it's just so much more convenient (and easier on the carpal tunnel) to just click one mouse button, esecially when i'm using photoshop or illustrator. in fact, the only time i use the 4-button mouse is when i'm web browsing as it's got the scroll wheel and the metakey-click combinations map to convenient functions in IE 5.0.
so in closing quit your bitching. it's been discussed here before that if you want to run Linux, you should be using an x86 anyhow. if you're buying a Mac, you'll probably want to (eventually) run OS X, and it works perfectly well with only one button. you can still of course attach an external x-button USB mouse, but again, i find that using the one button is pefectly convient the majority of the time. it's certainly no reason dismiss the Titanium Powerbook G4.
every single reply to this post has said the same thing: "i think it's the laser" or "the laser has something to do with it." do you people not bother to read the other comments before you post? if there have been 10 comments saying "i think it has something to do with the laser," why add an 11th?
think people.
anyhow, i think it has something to do with the lasers they use in DVD players.:)
i've alwasy been a fan of not using capitals, ever since my BBS days in the mid 80s. i actually started doing it because the left-shift key on my Tandy 1000EX gave out, and i got used to just ignoring it:). i continued doing it later out of habit, and because i find it makes messages look less formal, and more like a casual conversation (though you'll never see me skimping on grammar, that's a totally different story).
still, if i'm *ever* writing an email for work, or anything remotely professional, i'll take that extra time to hit that shift key over there. i can't believe that a CEO, addressing his entire company about something as important as a merger, would use lowercase throughout his message. very strange indeed (and unprofessional to boot!). but then i also would be disgusted if a CEO didn't wear a suit and tie on a regular basis. maybe this is the new way of thinking? casual dress and lowercase Is?:)
Slashdot Mirror
i haven't heard anything about this, could you please post your source?
and there's a difference between "releasing the specs" and "devoting the manhours to aid in development." in the case of Be, it was closer to the latter.
- j
I agree that the 500 MHz PPC is fast but I disagree when you say that the clock was "artificially" increased to 1 GHz: Apple fans should really use a good benchmarck and compare SpecInt/SpecFP instead of PhotoShop..
i don't understand why people pass off the Photoshop benchmark as useless. i think it's a lot more useful than an integer or floating point benchmark.
i don't understand the way people around here (and people in general) buy computers. do you buy your cars based entirely on horsepower? or do you buy one on which meets your needs best? most of the time a computer user lets their processor sit idle (say while surfing the web). if so, then why is speed speed speed paramount? of course speed is important, but "speed" in computers is not black and white, faster and slower. consider my situation:
i own a Mac. most of the time my computer sits there while i traverse files, surf the web, telnet to linux boxes (or drop to the terminal in MacOS X), read email, and write word processing documents. the rest of the time i spend using Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Image Ready and GoLive.
so which processor fits me best? the one that can crunch Integers the fastest (Intel/AMD), or the one that's opitmized to beat the shit out of Intel/AMD in Adobe applications? even though the vast majority of the time my CPU sits idle, the few times i really need that speed is when i'm using something like Photoshop.
so quit passing off the Photoshop benchmark as a useless statistic.
the G4 is a great chip, mostly because of the Altivec engine. i'm going to start watching DVDs on my computer more often: oh look! the Apple DVD player is going to be Altivec enhanced! that means i'll get a great, clear picture from my software DVD decoder. the "Photoshop" benchmark represets an "optimized for Altivec" benchmark, and this benchmarks is far more important to me than a simple integer benchmark.
if you don't think you need a G4, that's fine. but don't pass of this benchmark as useless for everybody just because it doesn't fit your needs.
- j
i'm sorry i didn't notice this original message earlier. i posted it already in this thread, but it might be hard to find.
if you're looking for the whole story between Apple and Be, the full details can be found in this piece out of the book Apple Confidential.
the jist: Be thought they were Apple's only choice, so they played hardball. Apple's due dilligence valued them at about $50 million, be wanted about 3 times that, and Gasee added to that a very arrogant attitute in all negotiations. the rest is history.
- j
Be had a fairly strong marketing plan for invading Apple's market; what they didn't have was a similarly strong plan for invading the PC market, where variety is the norm, not the exception. And on top of that, they squandered the 4 years that Apple took to get OS X out the door.
exactly, and i'd like to add that this is a good reason to argue against MacOS X on Intel machines (unless they're Apple-only, based on Intel processors). Be saw the x86 market as a huge sea where even if they got a little chunk of it, it would be better than half the Mac market. unfortunately for them they were lost in that sea, and couldn't build up enough market share to hit a "critical mass" and go anywhere. now they're suddenly "Internet Appliance" OS manufacturers. right. changing your corporate direction every couple of years is a good way to go bankrupt.
the fact of the matter is that Be was extremely bitter about the fact that they didn't get bought by Apple. they thought they had the greatest technology, and were doing Apple a favour by allowing them to use their OS. the whole story can be found in this bit out of the book Apple Confidential.
in retrospect, Apple was best to buy NeXT. NeXT was (and is) a great operating system that had time to mature and get a lot of the kinks out. Be had good technology, but it wasn't so good that it was leaps and bounds ahead of the rest, and the OS, as flashy as it may be, was still lacking in a LOT of necessary refinements. NeXT gave Apple a good solid UNIX foundation upon which to build MacOS X (which i think is a phenomenal operating system). also, bringing back Steve Jobs who inspired the iMac (and the recent resurgence of Apple) was worth the $427 million alone.
- j
yeah, it's a joke. raves, get it?
- j
The truth is that it wasn't anything to do with the specs for the G3. BeOS was able to run on G3's. It's the controller chips that Apple refused to release the specs for.
i don't pretend to have all the answers, but i was specifically told (by an Apple employee, granted) that the information Be wanted was information that they could have compiled/learned, but were more interested in having Apple do the work to get it together. do you have a source for the "controller chips" bit? i don't exactly know exactly which chips you mean by "controller chips" (as it's a pretty generic term). is it a custom ASIC that Apple makes? that would seem very strange. though i'm not that intimately familar with the innards of G3s.
still, i have a very hard time believing the Be story. first of all, Apple's side of the story was never told. in fact if i remember correctly the Be story was only told through the comp.sys.be.* newsgroups, and there was no "official" announcement. that sounds like an unfounded rumour to me.
i also can't believe they'd really be scared of a lawsuit: reverse engineering is completely legal, otherwise you wouldn't have IBM clones (thank you Compaq)! the story doesn't fit, and after what i heard from some people at Apple, i'd be more inclinded to believe it was a half-truth started by certain Be employees because they were bitter about the situation.
- j
No Sony? You say you work for a company that makes chips for IA's and you haven't heard of the e Villa?
of course i've heard of it, but you didn't read very well. i told you that most designs hardly make it to production, and very few make it in the marketplace. perhaps the eVilla will, but it's no guarantee. i'll tell you that there are other projects in Sony that don't use Be however. which one of these will be sucessful, only time will tell.
- j
Apple is non-existant here. Be is turning into a BIG player. (Sony, Qubit, Compaq, Intel, and FIC, to name a few recent deals.)
wow, you need a reality check. have you been following the embedded market at all? Be is a drop in the bucket. QNX, WindRiver WinCE and Linux all completely swamp Be in marketshare and in design wins. i work at a company that designs chips for the IA market -- i know it very well. i have yet to hear a single one of our clients (including Compaq and Sony) mention Be. they're all designing around Linux right now (and quite frankly, i think Linux is the best solution. i push it whenever possible).
the IA market is very volitile right now, and over 90% of the IA appliances, even from the big companies, don't make it to market, and of those that do, very few have taken off. so when you see these product announcements from Be, take them with a grain of salt. i'm not seeing Be in any of major designs that i've dealt with, so i highly doubt they'll be dwarfing Apple anytime soon.
i was a huge fan of Be, but their inability to choose a market segment (high end audio, no! high-end graphics! no, consumer workstations, no! internet applicances, yeah!) is making a complete mockery of the great concepts they've designed in the OS. i think the best thing to happen to them right now would be to go out of business and opensource their code. at least then their great ideas would find a niche, because it's obvious that their marketing crew can't figure out what to do with it.
- j
I cannot claim to be proficient enough in Apple code to know what is needed for Be to legally get BeOS running on the G* platform, but I do know that when Be was focused on BeOS, Apple was not forthcoming with that information. The reason the Linux PPC crowd got it working was because they reverse-engineered the information they needed. It would not have been rational for Be to do that and open themselves up to lawsuits by Apple.
BULLSHIT. i am sick and tired of hearing this drawn out crap about Apple "refusing to give Be the specs" for the G3s.
let me explain something to you: there's no magical book at Apple that's labelled "specs for the G3 for operating system writers." sure there are specs for their parts, and all the information is available, but it would take some serious man-hours to compile it all to make it available to a 3rd party.
Be came along and basically said to Apple "please, go out of your way to use your engineering resources to compile all the specs to your machines neatly so that we can support it." Apple said, "why should we spend our engineering resources to help you?" Be then left the PPC platform (something they were planning on doing anyhow) and blamed Apple for the whole incident.
let's face it, Gasee isn't a big fan of Jobs. and it isn't Apple's job to bend over backwards an support Be. the whole "lawsuit" line and "reverse engineering" was a bullshit line by Be to try to slam Apple on the way out of PPC. after the clones were killed, they actually had to WORK to support the G3 platforms, and they didn't want to do it. period, end of story.
i was a HUGE fan of Be, and even had an original BeBox. i was also a fan of NeXT, and used a NeXT Cube at my school for years. i followed this whole thing very closely, and even lived in Menlo Park (where Be's HQ is located) while this whole Apple-vs-Be war was going on. i don't claim to have all the answers, but i do know that the line Be employees were feeding people was mostly bullshit, done out of spite. Apple was not in the wrong on this one.
meanwhile Be moved over to x86 and instead of being a great operating system on a great chip in a small market, became swamped in the sea of x86. they're not going to make it anywhere. i now work for a company that supplies a fair number of chips to the embedded (including IA) market, and let me tell you, NOBODY is talking about BeIA. the big IA OS: Linux. Be dug their own grave, and none of it was Apple's fault.
- j
The easy answer is that Apple is involved in the open source community, and appears to be strongly committed to releasing their own software as open source, and contributing changes back to other projects whose software they use.
woah woah woah, hold on a minute. are you trying to tell us that Apple isn't pure evil? that can't be possible! the slashbots can not be wrong! heretic!!
- j
i don't know Macs best. in fact, i've been Windows user since 3.1, and a Linux user since 1994. i've only been a Mac user for a year and a half.
so there Mr. Smartypants.
- j
developing (open source) software for it for over two years.
that's great, and i hope to see more open source developers start using MacOS X. i think it's a promising platform to create some really good open source software for a large (desktop user) market. i'm looking forward to developing for MacOS X.
Just recently, I aquired a dual-G4/500MHz machine
that's a very nice machine.
Oh, and I absolutely LOVE the G4 hardware. The instant I openned the case, I thought "Damn, why didn't anyone else think of this!?" You really have to see it to understand, though.
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G4 hardware is still on the expensive side
these two thoughts are related. i find with Apple hardware you do pay a premium for the "intangibles" (such as that amazing case) and lots of extras (like the gigabit ethernet you have in your machine). the trick is, if those intangibles and extras aren't something you want, then Macs look quite expensive. of course, if they are something you want, then they're right in line. they're definitely not for all people, that's for sure.
- j
You will be able to do every fucking thing you want to a mac running mac os X
you're actually quite right. Apple has never really gone out of their way to keep users from editing things, but they haven't opened it up on purpose either. there's already a lot you can do with the MacOS, and MacOS X looks to be even more cutomizable.
for starters, just about everything is stored in (text based) XML files on the hard disk. there have already been a lot hacks to do all sorts of interesting things (and as you mentioned, getting the old NeXT Step interface back on Cocoa apps is one of the more interesting ones). lots of other functions (like the position of the dock) can be changed using the defaults command from the Terminal.
the more i delve into it, the more i realize that MacOS is actualy quite customizable. Apple hasn't purposefully hidden anything, but they haven't published anything either: but hey, that's part of the fun! :) so while it's never going to be as customizeable as Linux, it's right up there, and i think there could be a lot of great things to hack onto it. Mac developers seem quite resourceful, so i'm really looking forward to the hacks that appear after the final release.
the only problem i can see is that i'll need a second Mac to screw around with. otherwise it'll end up like my Linux box is right now: refusing to boot and giving me nasty kernel messages (gotta get around to fixing that :).
- j
Makes you wonder why they didn't just use BSD in the first place.
amen.
- j
don't even bother; it's not worth it. one of them will just come back with some stupid "mom & pop" store quote for a Pentium III (or a Dell, now that i've said it :) and then add a little statement passing off Altivec as a "toy" that only Photoshop people care about.
most people here don't think that ease of use, fewer driver conflicts, quality hardware, Altivec, pleasant design, great software like iMovie or the ability to just get work down without fucking around with the computer to be worth a premium. that's fine, to each their own. for the rest of us, there's a G4 with MacOS X.
and as a note about the speed difference between x86 and PowerPC: i love playing around with my Linux box, and i use Windows at work. but it boggles my mind how much faster i get work done on my Mac compared to my Linux box, or my Windows laptop at work, and how much less time i spend trying to fix crashes, conflicts or doing troubleshooting.
so this is what i wonder: if i get work done faster on my Mac than i do on any other machine (due to the reasons i've outlined above), what difference does the benchmarked speed matter? if i'm getting my work done faster, doesn't that mean it's a faster machine? it means enough to me to keep using my Mac, and i've come to realize that for what i do, there's absolutely no other machine that comes close.
- j
no Apple discussion here would be complete without one of your posts. (tips hat)
- j
yeah, that's what i was thinking. this was already discussed (flamed?) in Dumping LinuxPPC For MacOS X? among others. i've aready gone on into great detail about my thoughts on that matter in the other articles.
i figure it works like this: if you already have a Mac, then you should run MacOS X as your OS on your workstation. if you've got an old Mac just dying to be a server, Darwin is probably the best fit in the future, LinuxPPC for now.
if you've got an x86 box, or if what you do doesn't work nicely with Altivec, then use Linux on your x86 box. MacOS X does not, and will not anytime in the forseeable future, run on your x86. that's probably fine, as Linux is designed for x86 first, and is a good solution for that hardware.
- j
as everybody has been saying, what Jobs said in his meeting with resellers isn't really news for slashdot. however if you read the rest of the article, especially the 2nd page, there are some good quotes about the importance of the DVD burning capabilites of the high-end G4s. this actually is interesting news.
it hasn't really been talked about much, as burning DVDs is not something any of us would be planning on doing (unless we're pirating DVDs). but if you look past the WaReZ kiddies, you'll realize that this is actually an important technology.
from the article: "I'm starting to think this is as important as the LaserWriter was to desktop publishing.... It's revolutionary." while i hardly think it's "revolutionary," it is important.
up until now, mastering DVDs (that can play on consumer-level players) has been prohibitivly expensive. now Apple has made this available to a huge market for a measly $3500. i personally know many people at advertising agencies and training firms that would love to put their material on DVD as opposed to VHS, but have been holding off until the price comes out of the stratosphere.
considering the fact that in the past Apple has had the highest markup on their most expensive machines, i think they're going to rake in a lot of cash from this machine. this is also a great use of the Alitvec engine on the G4, and one of those (few) situations where it really does run considerably faster than a P4. at any rate, it's a good move for Apple.
- j
i've been a fan of infiltration.org for a while now: that's probably because i live in Toronto, where a lot of the "infiltration" on the site is being done. the pictures of Toronto's Subway Tunnels are amazing (including an abandoned station i never knew about). plus i had no idea how many strange things were hidden in the Royal York Hotel!
i've read most of the articles over in great detail, but i'm still too chickenshit to go down into the Subway tunnels myself. phrases like "allowing just barely enough room for a human to press up against the wall and let a train whip past" don't exactly make the situation any better.
but it's great that some people are doing this and making the pictures and information available to the rest of us on the web! it's definitely a site worth reading.
- j
lots of trolls write up responses in advance. slashdot's topics are very cyclical, so it's pretty easy to write up a "response" at any time and change it slightly in time to post it in the first 20 posts.
i don't troll slashdot, as there are more interesting places to troll, but i have been known to write responses in advance.
of course this one, as Shoeboy pointed out, was a cut'n'paste. i actually did the same thing on another message board recently with Shoeboy's (presumably) original "Jeff Bezos nearly ruined my Christmas" rant. it went over very well! so hats off to Shoeboy: he writes (or at least, harvests) some absolutely classic trolls.
- j
ps: macs rule. you can all eat my ass.
excuse my ignorance, but is this not a normal feature of Linux/Windows? i've been a user of both for a long time, but i've never tried to hook up more than one pointing device to any computer i own but the Mac. right now i have 2 mice and 1 trackball on my Mac and they work very nicely together, however i can't seem to get my Windows Laptop at work allow the mouse and trackpad functioning at the same time. perhaps this is why? maybe i'll bring in one of my USB mice to give it a try.
anybody know of a hack to get two pointing devices to work in Windows at the same time? it could also be this piece of shit no-name brand laptop i'm stuck with at work too. i should get my employer to give me real laptop.
- j
Aside from the mouse button "debate", I'd be curious to know what /. readers thought about the differing approaches GUI mouse operation in *nix/MacOS/Windows.
i'd like to see a discussion of this as well: of course, this is completely off-topic for this story. perhaps in a future article.
just a quick note: one of the things i really like about the MacOS is that the pull-down menus are at the top of the screen. as mentioned in your link, this can be accessed "at least five times faster" than an equivalent Windows (or Linux) pull-down menu that's attached to the top of the window. it's also convenient to be able to tell which program is in the forground by looking at the name in the titlebar.
but yes, it deserves a full discussion sometime :). btw: thanks for the link!
- j
yeah yeah yeah, Macs only have one mouse button: big deal. sure it's a pain in the ass if you're using Linux, but the MacOS (including MacOS X) is designed to operate effectively with only one mouse button.
i hated it at first too, so when i bought my first Mac a few years ago (after using Linux and Windows exclusively) i ran out and bought a 3-button mouse. i found however, that after using the MacOS for a while you start to realize that if things are designed with a 1-button mouse in mind, using the standard apple mouse actually made things more convenient. to this day i have two mice plugged into my computer: the standard Apple mouse and a 4-button scroll mouse. i use the 1-button mouse the most, as it's just so much more convenient (and easier on the carpal tunnel) to just click one mouse button, esecially when i'm using photoshop or illustrator. in fact, the only time i use the 4-button mouse is when i'm web browsing as it's got the scroll wheel and the metakey-click combinations map to convenient functions in IE 5.0.
so in closing quit your bitching. it's been discussed here before that if you want to run Linux, you should be using an x86 anyhow. if you're buying a Mac, you'll probably want to (eventually) run OS X, and it works perfectly well with only one button. you can still of course attach an external x-button USB mouse, but again, i find that using the one button is pefectly convient the majority of the time. it's certainly no reason dismiss the Titanium Powerbook G4.
- j
every single reply to this post has said the same thing: "i think it's the laser" or "the laser has something to do with it." do you people not bother to read the other comments before you post? if there have been 10 comments saying "i think it has something to do with the laser," why add an 11th?
:)
think people.
anyhow, i think it has something to do with the lasers they use in DVD players.
- j
i've alwasy been a fan of not using capitals, ever since my BBS days in the mid 80s. i actually started doing it because the left-shift key on my Tandy 1000EX gave out, and i got used to just ignoring it :). i continued doing it later out of habit, and because i find it makes messages look less formal, and more like a casual conversation (though you'll never see me skimping on grammar, that's a totally different story).
:)
still, if i'm *ever* writing an email for work, or anything remotely professional, i'll take that extra time to hit that shift key over there. i can't believe that a CEO, addressing his entire company about something as important as a merger, would use lowercase throughout his message. very strange indeed (and unprofessional to boot!). but then i also would be disgusted if a CEO didn't wear a suit and tie on a regular basis. maybe this is the new way of thinking? casual dress and lowercase Is?
- j