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Apple Businesses

Apple Delays Mac OS X 225

Mad Browser writes:"MacNN is reporting that Apple has delayed MacOS X again until January 2001. They are also reporting that a public beta of OS X will be available this summer. Jobs also said that WebObjects deployment licenses would go from $50,000 to $700. " QuickTime 5 is also tentatively going to be out this summer, as well.
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Apple Delays Mac OS X

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  • My guess is they're ADDING things instead of there being something messud up with it...
  • by pb ( 1020 )
    I see two features and no misfeatures.

    Some people see two misfeatures and no features.

    Some people don't like or don't understand X. :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • Time to boot up the Mac again. It hasn't been used much since I got a SB Live Platinum and GeForce DDR in the main system - now the PC is a better DVD player than the Mac it pretty much gathers dust.

    I'll be waiting eagerly for my DP4 CD in the mail. And if it turns out to be as disappointing as DP3 was, there'll soon be a cheapish G4 450MHz for sale. Expressions of interest are invited, I'm not that confident :-) And if it turns out that Apple really have pushed the real product back to 2001, I'll never touch an Apple product again.

    Copeland, Raphsody, BeOS and X - it's like being a member of a cult that repeatedly predicts the coming of a saviour.

  • I take personal exception to this comment.

    I am Ryan Meader, President of Black Light Media Inc. [macosrumors.com] and I would like to point out that not only do we at Black Light Media Inc. [macosrumors.com] get things right mots of the time, we also get them before anyone else.

    Who was it that first reported that there would be Apple Country retaliers all over the country? Us - Black Light Media Inc. [macosrumors.com] - that's who.

    Who was it that told you about the cool new enclosures of Pismo... Piiiissssmooooo.. PPIIIIIISSSSSSSMOOOOOO AARRGGGHH!!!!!!!!! I'm CUMMMMMMMMMMINGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!

    sorry. We at Black Light Media Inc. [macosrumors.com] really like the Pismo and its cool new case design. In fact, we think its better than all of the prevoious Powerbook models.

    In short, if you don't stop messing with me, I may be forced to send my girlfriend after you [mosr.net], and we both don't want that.
  • Apparently when Steve Jobs got the job, he rounded up all the top marketing people and started asking questions -- "I'm student - which should Mac I buy, the 4400 or the 5300 or the 6500? Should a business user buy the 7300 or the 8600? How about any of these 39 clones? Which is faster - a 300Mhz 603 or a 200Mhz 604?" and so on.

    The marketing guys all scratched their heads, and Apple has been down to a handful of models ever since.
    --
  • I guess I meant "any terminal interface to UNIX is more intuitive". But I also could have said "a brick is more intuitive", or "a Chinese water torture device is more intuitive".

    (I mean, really, who would ever devise a system where folders can't have folders in them? That's just broken. It's like running DOS 1.0 with multiple disks...)

    In any case, 'intuitive' is what you make it, since it's all based on past experience anyhow. :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • Mediaplayer is more of a worm. It seems like anything i install wmp gets installed too. I happen to have 6 different ms mediplayers. I'm afraid to trash any because i'm afraid it'll break something

    It isnt like wmp doesnt hijack files...actually this is a case where ms can be blamed -even when ms gets shafted by QT- if windows had a better way of associating files with applications it wouldnt happen (of course then ms couldn't hijack the files at their whim.)
  • thatmustbewhyyoudon'trunasuccessfulbusinesscuzyoud on'tunderstandhowitworks
  • NOT! \n\n OS X is built from bsd unix an OS where everything is essentially a text file, all you have to do to get it back is to remove the text file that controls the gui, leave nothing in it's place and it reverts itself, replace it with another one and the ui changes, at least that's how it was with dp3 I hope they don't remove that.....
  • Just beacuse your getting something done, dosn't mean your doing it in the most efficent manner. In the case of MacOS, you are not.

    I am certan, that when MacOSX comes out with a command line, you'll use it a lot. Regardless of the quality of the GUI.
  • Apple's previous modern OS attempt, Copland, was killed in '96 because it was going to take too long to get it out the door. But you've gotta wonder if it really couldn't have beaten OSX by now.
  • Actualy, when talking about ethernet cards, a MAC is an address. I'm sure the 'A' stands for Address, and M probably for macine. C == 'code'?
  • how many times is someone going to bitch about having install over the internet, and how many times is someone going to have to point out this URL...
    http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/support/

    You can skip the forms and go directly to the downloads.

    http://down load.info.apple.com/private/qt/us/win/QuickTimeIns taller.zip [apple.com]
    http:/ /download.info.apple.com/private/qt/us/mac/QuickTi me_Installer.smi.bin [apple.com]

  • Why? NT's really not that bad... It's instability is blown WAY out of proportion here on slashdot...

    I can point to a certain "romantic" worm that has made its way through the internet recently that will pointedly refute that statement.

  • From what I have heard, they got some negative feedback about the GUI, so they are making some changes. That's fine, If it comes out in september, I'd buy in september, If it comes out in January, I'll buy it then. No sweat, I have my BootX and LinuxPPC, I'm happy so far.
  • >In any case, posters, don't waste bandwidth >spewing your vaporware crap. When
    > an open source software is delayed you all say >it's because development is done the "right" way >and will be released when it's ready. When a >company delays software that isn't ready you all >scream vaporware.

    Maybe because when a OpenSource project is released as stable it is and it doesn't have any bugs,or they're fixed in hours?.
    And as for Apple they released in a year and a half about 6 revisons of MacOs8 and OS9 with no
    huge improvements(well except the memory usage
    which increased considerably from the 12 MB OS8.0 to 24MB OS9).Now this is something you can trust
    in a OS.
    Note:I don't have anything against the Apple Hardware,it's far more quallity than the PC one
    at the same price but they still have to prove
    that they cam make a good OS overall.

  • ...that I can run lynx [darwinos.org]!!!...

    Disclaimer: I have really been waiting fomr MacOS X since the first QT-movies and screenshots were available at http://www.apple.com/macosx/theater/ index.html [apple.com] and I use lynx everyday and I love it, but lynx for MacOS X !? Dis gotta be some sort of subtle joke!!! :-)

    Thank you.
    //Frisco
    --
    "At the end of the journey, all men think that their youth was Arcadia..." -Goethe

  • And there is a huge gap in the story in the film. It claims that MS gave DOS to IBM, when they first gave them OS/2, and then released DOS in competition.

    What the FUCK!?!?!?

    If you're going to complain about people getting there facts wrong, you should at least try to get the facts correct yourself.

    IBM initially wanted to put the CP/M OS on there PC's, witch were going to compete with the Apple II, the first widely developed PC. They were going to put MS Basic on the system for a development environment. (Intergalactic) Digital Research, the company that made CP/M wasn't really that interested in licensing the OS to IBM (or something), so Microsoft bought QDOS (quick and dirty OS) renamed it DOS (Disk Operating System), and licensed it to IBM. IBM didn't get an exclusive license, and the rest is history

    OS/2 was worked on by both MS and IBM as there 'high-end' OS, but M$ abandoned the project for Windows. IBM tried to support OS/2, but ultimately failed.
  • The WO price drop will be a boon to WO developers. We are currently developing on WebObjects and it is *sweet*, unfortunately, there are only about 4000 developers worldwide right now.

    Hopefully this will get some more people developing on WO.

    Still waiting for the O'Reilly WebObjects book though...
  • by tbo ( 35008 ) on Monday May 15, 2000 @09:48AM (#1071446) Journal
    Here's a (not so brief) history of Apple's attempts at a modern operating system:

    A Brief History of Apple

    Pink, announced in 1989, was Apple's first public attempt at producing a modern operating system. After IBM joined the Pink project, it was renamed Taligent and spun off as a separate company. Taligent meandered aimlessly, and was killed in 1995. In 1993, before the final death of Taligent, word began to leak out of Apple that a new OS project, codenamed Copland, was underway.

    In 1995, with the death of Taligent and the imminent arrival of Windows 95, Apple began hyping Copland and its successor, Gershwin. Apple demonstrated Copland at WWDC, and promised full preemptive multitasking and protected memory support in Gershwin, with partial support in Copland. As the estimated release date for Copland slipped from 1995 to 1996 to 1998, it became apparent that Copland had gone very wrong. Copland was killed in 1996, and replaced by a plan to gradually add many of its promised features to the Mac OS. Many of the UI changes and some of the other, more minor changes were indeed added with Mac OS 8. Unfortunately, the much-needed preemptive multitasking and protected memory features never made it into the Mac OS (even Mac OS 9 lacks these features). The Copland strategy underwent a few more twists, but none had a major impact besides generating rumors and wasting Apple's resources. There were also rumors that Apple would acquire Be and use its BeOS as the basis of the new Mac OS, but this possibility was soon discounted.

    Apple acquired NeXT in December of 1996. NeXT, founded by Steve Jobs after his ousting from Apple in 1985, had a modern OS called NeXTSTEP with many of the technologies Apple needed. With NeXT came Steve Jobs, who soon regained control of Apple and his former position as CEO. Apple announced Rhapsody, which was to be a port of NeXTSTEP to the PowerPC, with a Mac-ified UI and the Blue Box for running classic Mac applications. Rhapsody was renamed Mac OS X Server (to distinguish it from Mac OS X), and was Apple's first attempt at a modern OS that actually shipped. Mac OS X Server targeted the small to medium server market, and did reasonably well. Although easy to set up and use by server standards (a few Linux distributions are getting very good, too), Mac OS X Server is not suitable for use as a consumer OS. Interestingly, some of the development releases of Mac OS X Server would run on Intel-based systems in addition to PowerPC-based machines.

    When it became apparent that Adobe and other key software companies were not willing to spend years porting their software to Rhapsody, Apple was forced to make yet another attempt at producing a modern OS suitable for consumers. Called Mac OS X, it combines the modern features and architecture of Rhapsody/OS X Server with a new UI (Aqua) and an application environment called Carbon that simplifies porting current Mac applications to Mac OS X.

    Mac OS X combines elements of the current Mac operating system (Carbon, QuickTime), components of NeXTSTEP which are themselves drawn from other operating systems (Mach, portions of BSD), and entirely new components, such as Aqua and Quartz.
  • Correction. Altivec provides 32 128 bit registers that can be individually treated as:

    4 32 bit floating point numbers

    4 32 bit signed/unsigned integers

    8 16 bit signed/unsigned integers

    16 8 bit signed/unsigned integers

    AltiVec provides extremely powerful SIMD instructions, and even special instructions targeted at graphics (convert between 16 bit and 32 bit pixels with one instruction).

    AltiVec also provides a very cool vector permute unit/instruction [motorola.com].

  • I would critique your post point-by-point, but you've already gotten a good one. Sorry, I was out partying with my friends, not learning more about the UNIX CLI. :)

    Maybe I should explain my background here. I started out on Apple ][e's and C64's. All we had was text. I learned to hunt-and-peck, and later to touch-type. I learned BASIC programs, and I saw Windows-like "graphical interfaces" like GEOS: all the functionality of Windows 2.0, with about 5% of the system requirements or less.

    Later, I learned DOS. Ever since I tried to use 'fdisk' to format a disk in the beginning, and had to rebuild my system from scratch, (which isn't that hard if you have a System Disk, a DOS Disk, and know how to read the manual that came with software back then...) I developed a strict policy towards reading *all* the documentation for any new DOS commands I encountered. :)

    Probably around Windows 3.0 and DOS 6.0, I noticed that there was a trend towards including less and less documentation and instructions on how to actually *use* the software. Since I used the "on-line help" in programs a lot, and played around a lot, I didn't really mind, but I guarantee you a lot of other users who didn't have the time or the energy to do this were short-changed in the process, and now we have users who don't get a manual, and apparently don't have time to read what is on the screen right in front of them.

    I don't profess to understand this, because I learned from an early age, in MS-DOS, that if you don't understand what's going on, one day your hard drive will be nuked, and it will be all your fault. That's the lesson that Microsoft taught me about computers, and I think it is a good lesson that when combined with appropriate documentation can be a powerful teaching tool.

    So... When Windows '95 came out, this disturbing lack-of-documentation trend continued, making Windows resemble nothing more than a Mac with a useless vestigal DOS box that didn't do anything really helpful. Don't get me wrong, I loved DOS, but I found myself writing useful commands in Pascal that I later found out were standard UNIX commands... So I switched to Linux.

    First, I learned about SunOS, because my friend Simon was in charge of the Suns we had. They were mystical, and complex, and powerful. But all you really have to tell someone who wants to learn is a few simple commands, most notably 'man'. Once you learn the documentation system, there's really no excuse not to learn everything else.

    Now, at this point, all those "easy to use", "User Interface Zealots" who somehow think that MacOS 8.6 or the original release of Windows '98 were the first *real* Operating Systems ever are probably foaming at the mouth. "Documentation?", they say, "It should be easy to use!".

    Well, of course it's easy to use. But sometimes you have to learn how. If you stuck me on a tricycle and gave me no directions, maybe I could learn how to ride it by myself. If you stuck me on a bicycle, and gave me no directions, I'd probably be clueless. But if you taught me how to use it, I'd be eternally grateful that now I have a fast, efficient, non-polluting form of transportation and exercise. And if it had multiple *speeds* that I learned how to use, well, I'd be in heaven.

    Is learning how to use a complex tool in the first place so bad? Remember, you had to do this for any Operating System sometime.

    Once, I didn't know how to type this:

    LOAD "*",8,1

    Or this:

    [Control]-[Alt]-[Delete]

    Or this:

    [Control]-[Open-Apple]-[Delete]

    (or [Control]-[Pound]-[Power] or whatever; Apple's keyboard commands are horribly inconsistent!)

    For that matter, once I didn't know how to doubleclick.

    Many users today do not know the difference between single-clicking, double-clicking, or right-clicking, and simply do them all until something "works". Just try to tell me they don't need some documentation! Maybe they never sat through the "Tutorial" that's buried somewhere in their Oh-So-Easy-To-Use GUI OS. It took me forever to find that thing under Windows, on a system *designed* for entry-level users! I had to look through their cryptic, badly-indexed help system, so it could tell me to find the CD and put it in! So the Tutorial could tell my Clueless User what a CD-ROM Drive was in the first place!!

    Maybe a "Quick Reference" card might have been advisable in that situation. Or, God Forbid, a real Paper-And-Ink Printed Dead-Tree MANUAL!

    So, yes, you can't get any work done until you've had someone walk you through using the thing for several hours. On *ANY* system, if you want to be able to use it decently.

    And on a Mac or Windows, you might NEVER be able to do even moderately complex tasks. Or you might never know that it's possible, how you should go about doing it, what to do when "dragging things" doesn't meet your organizational needs, etc., etc. Usually the answer is, "find a shareware program that implements a tiny piece of useful functionality that's already built into UNIX but that I don't know about yet."

    My classic example here is splitting and joining a file. In UNIX, there are a couple of powerful ways to do this. There's the split tool, which is made for this. But nothing split does couldn't be done by dd instead, possibly with some help from sh. Also, the regular, old cat command, which isn't much more powerful than the DOS type command except that it has wild-card support, and UNIX implements pipes properly, can be used to join files.

    In DOS, there's one, cryptic command that is generally considered the right way to join files, no good way to split files, and the type command is castrated, and there's no indication of how you'd do any of this stuff in the first place, anyhow.

    On the Macintosh, not only is there no notion of splitting and joining files, but there is no hint of even what a file really is besides a pretty picture, without being at least an intermediate Macintosh user. After that, the user is expected to find some third-party utility, and read the help and documentation on that program to figure out how to split a file. But if it's too confusing, don't worry, you can choose "Less Options" and all that clutter will go away. Just ask your friend who knows about computers...

    Anyhow, you get the point, and I'll be happy to talk about these or other issues. But do you understand my perspective better, now? :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • No, you can actually use the Metrowerks CodeWarrior compiler, which can make an earnest attempt at Altivec compilation. That is, if you set your target to an Altivec application.
  • Pretty cool. I know the renderer is available on Linux, and I have heard rumors of the whole shebang. You can have desktop machines running OS X and an farm of Linux boxes rendering. If only they had an alpha compile...

  • Release of Mac OS X Beta to Developers: 90% Although sources have been unusually noncomittal about specific ship dates on Beta, the timing is right and the release is by all appearances very nearly ready to go.

    According to announcements, they ARE close to releasing a Beta to developers. At least, if you consider developers a subset of the public. "This summer" is indeed pretty vague, but it's approximately similar to "real soon."

    Also, at least some folks in the the developer program have had previews in various incremental states for some time now. Developer updates happen every so often. The announcment did not exclude the possibility of releasing new stuff to developers, soon, or even today. It just may not have been announced as the public "beta".

    Your post smacks simply of rancor towards Apple and the Mac Rumors press.
  • > When a company delays software that isn't ready you all scream vaporware.

    Uh, and I suppose you never want to hear about new software then? I think it's great when I read about stuff like this on slashdot, then I have a clue when it may be released. I also think that when software or drivers come out before they are ready, it sure makes the makers look incompitent or unprepared. Example: when ATI released their drivers for the ATI TV Wonder card I recently purchased, the install part of the software is far from working correctly. This is very dissapointing to me, and I would have preferred not even having the product until it actually works. But, that's just me I guess...
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15, 2000 @09:52AM (#1071453)
    nice quip. Here's another one:

    Linux UI reaches functionality of late-80's user interface!

    Sunnyvale, CA - Linux has finally met the interface standards of the early 1980's. A proud crew of Linux developers stood inside their home-offices proclaiming the superiority of their latest efforts. "Our code stomps Windows 3.1!" one exclaimed over IRC. "Our interface is so good that those Windoze 3.1 users will be drooling with envy!"

    "It's so good, that I only use the command line every 10 minutes!" gushed another. "In another 10 years, the command line will be obsolete!"

    "The current release of Linux user interfaces is a great leap forward," said one unnamed developer. "However, there is still much work to be done. Our ten-button mouse driver still needs work, and we need some more donated hardware to finish off the teledildonics driver. Plus, the vast majority of users still can't figure out how to start up the desktop."

    "On the other hand, progress is great! We just got some great work from a bunch of five-year-olds who took a Logo course at their kindergarten, and we're rolling a Logo-based UI engine into the next release. This'll allow kids to customize their user interface by using standard Logo primitives and turtle graphics. How cool is that?"

    Industry analyists who cover the Linux market were overjoyed at the new GUIs. "The addition of a GUI that meets or exceeds Windows 3.1 is a fundamental value-add to the Linux solution offering, and makes Linux a strong contender in the low-end enterprise space" said Rob Towner, analyst at HypoMania securities. "And future plans call for one that meets or exceeds the 95 shell! That's amazing!"

    Others were not so sanguine. "BFD. It's crap." posted one anonymous poster on slashdot. "The phrase 'Linux UI' is as much of an oxymoron as, well, it's just moronic. W1nd00z!"

  • > Even KDE and gnome don't give you either the interface consistency or the attention to detail of the Mac cerca 1990. For all their technical bells and whistles, KDE and Gnome are still ugly, clumsy, and poorly designed.
    This looks like flamebait. In my brother's uni, all student-accessible computers are Macintoshes, and I get lots of complaint from him about the poor GUI of Mac, and their stupid 1-button mouse, etc. Talking about user consistency, have you take a look at latest Quick Time's interface: it broke lots of standard for application interface, misuse widgets, and is now on the Interface Hall of Shame [iarchitect.com]!

    >> Linux *started* with at least the functionality of a late-80's user interface as soon as X compiled on it.
    > Hmm... system wide, consistent cut and paste? A decent graphical file browser? Consistent keyboard shortcuts for common commands? multiple monitor support?
    Multiple monitor support in 80's interface? in Win3.1? Ah! And for the "decent graphical file browser" stuff, existing ones on other platform weren't much handy at all.

    > The fact is that most people don't have the time or the interest to learn the Unix CLI. Doing so is no small undertaking-- it takes days to become even basically functional, and months to master all its nuances. I can sit down in front of a Mac app I've never seen before, and start using effectively almost immediately. I can do that because Apple has worked hard to ensure that developers follow certain conventions in interface design, so that new apps work the same as my old ones. CLI's expect you to memorize an entirely new set of flags and options with every command.
    I came to Linux with DOS experience, and didn't even need to learn basic command. The "entirely new set of flags of option" is what GNU long option fought. A brief look at `apps --help` is generally sufficient.
    Moreover, Learning Unix CLI's subtle nuances is useful only for shell script porgrammers. Other just need to know the ls, cd, rm, cp, mv, mkdir and rmdir command.

    > As for cutting and pasting, I'll take real cut-and-paste with a real clipboard any day. The standard X cut and paste is a nasty hack that should have died 10 years ago. I shouldn't have to worry about accidentally highlighting text before I've had time to paste copied text to its destination. And if Unix had a standard keyboard shortcut for "paste" you wouldn't lose more than a quarter-second in pasting.
    That's why desktop environment like KDE and GNOME do have their own clipboard. And they do have standard keyboard shortcut: in KDE, Ctrl-X/C/V for cutting/copying/pasting. Only statically-linked motif apps like Netscape don't follow this scheme (use Alt instead of Ctrl). But Netscape is crap anyway, long live Konqueror [konqueror.org].

    > And forget it if you're planning on working with images, souds, video, spreadsheets, or even formatted text-- those are just too frivolous for our manly command line interface and our handy dandy middle-button paste.
    if you want to display them while you're in runlevel 3, yes. But CLI's asset is it allow things complicated, boring and repetitive to be done by a script. Piping, extracting, redirecting output to input after modified it automatically by a Perl script. You can make pretty impressive stuff done this way, and it was how CLI was intended to be used. Of course, most things are easier to do with a GUI, but how can you ask for a GUI image viewer to display all images on a particuliar partition without some CLI tricks. I think all users use CLI in a terminal windows, and switch to it only when they need to.

    Of course, some things may looks complicated to do with these tools. But these are things that are far more complicated to do in a Mac or Windows environment without these tools. If you don't like them, or don't know how to handle them, you can live without. There are these "ugly, clumsy and poorly designed" KDE and GNOME for user-friendly graphical computing. If only MacOS and Windows 98 were as "ugly, clumsy and poorly designed", they would be more useful.

  • The 80287 was only a math co-processor. It did not have any of the MMU and v86 features that made the prefered platform. A '286 to '386 upgrade required a new motherboard.

    Possibly, you were thinking about the 487SX, which really had the full functionality of a 486DX (when a 487SX was present, it disabled the main 486SX). Or possibly you were thinking of certain early 80386 motherboards which were designed to allow an 80287 rather than the 80387 (which arrived much later than the '386)

    Or possibly, you have know idea what you are talking about.
  • want an easy way around that? Set your clock forward a couple of years, then launch a quicktime movie, say "later" when it asks you to buy, then close the movie and set your clock back. werked for me until i bought the full version which is an excellent peice of software, at $30 i've seen shareware do less for that price.
  • Check the benchmarks and you'll see that the G4 500Mhz is toasting the 1Ghz Athlon in a great deal of tests.
  • For anyone that has played with any of the developer releases, it is obvious that OSX is not ready for the "plug and play" crowd. The look and feel of it are so radically different that the average mac user will vomit. Its a nice OS, it needs some more drivers for non-Apple hardware, but most of all it needs to provide the user with a look and feel that they are used to. The docking hooha is not a desktop and running os9 in a compatibility mode is a loser...
  • I think you'll find that backwards compatability on the Mac is considerably more than on Windoze.
  • Please learn spelling before you post in a public forum.

    Its "It's perfect though, now that Apple's OS is starting not to suck, their hardware is 500Mhz in a new box?"

    not this:

    "It's perfict though, now that Apple's OS is starting not to suck, there hardware is 500Mhz in a new box."

    There are plenty of fourteen-year olds on Slashdot already, contributing to the general level of ignorance and fanaticism. Please don't add to it.
  • Maybe Darwin + OPENSTEP + Quartz + Quicktime + a few random bits. Quartz replaced the DPS of OPENSTEP, and omitting it from the list minimizes its importance to OS-X

    Unfortunately, display ghostscript isn't quite ready for prime time, and although GNUStep is making progress, it still has some work to go.

    I suspect that you are measuring OS X against Linux. Your view of how good OS X depends on how good a Unix-line environment it is. And then everything un-Unix like gets discarded as irrelevant.
  • Sorry, I apologise. Obviously my source was wrong. I was told that Microsoft never released DOS to IBM until after they'd given them OS/2, which was disaster.

    Anyway, I'll get to the bottom of the matter with a few entries in google.
  • amen to that. I can't stand the shared menu myself, as I think it's highly confusing. But since there are those who do like it, what they ought to do is what KDE does, & let the user choose.

    There was a review of OS/X linked from slashdot awhile ago that discusses all the points I could think of. Another is that the mac needs to ship with a genuine 2-button mouse, out of the box.

    The thing that bugs me about OS/X is the fact that they've made all the config files only configurable from a proprietary hierarchal database (similar to the M$ registry). I would rather be able to `vi` from telnet or ssh.

  • A few of my friends up at Purdue and I toyed with a beta we *found* and it was great, but it functioned very stabily (i.e. ran starcraft.) That was back in '98. Now we wait till 2001?
  • My mouse is usually gonna be in the window of the app I'm currently talking to, so having the menus in that window is good.

    Not true. Because it's on the edge of the screen, I can hit the Mac menubar with a single flick of my wrist, no matter where the cursor is now. In fact, it generally takes *longer* to hit menu items in Windows than in Mac OS, even if the cursor is much closer to the Windows menu. Hitting a Mac OS menu is near-instantaneous once you get used to not having to slow down as you get near the menu.

    Plus you save screen space by not having multiple menus.

    Mac menus also have subtle details that make it work better: Go to a menu that has a submenu, and go down to the title of one of the submenus. Notice that if you move your pointer down and diagonally toward the submenu, that submenu stays open. (Assuming you don't go too fast) If you move your mouse in any other direction, that submenu pops closed. There are a lot of things like that: subtle details that Mac users take for granted to that the rest of the computing world hasn't bothered to implement right.

    Also, closing the last window of an app doesn't kill the app. That really gets me, and I blame the shared menu for it.

    This is a personal preference, but there are a couple of advantages to this. One, the application-centric (rather than window-centric) model prevents multiple copies of the same app from running. Second, command-Q kills off the whole app, whicl alt-F4 only kills one window. Thirdly, there are times when you want to close the current window and relaunch it. This is much easier if the menu bar stays in place. Fourth, it cuts down on the clutter in the application menu (task bar) I have five items in my application menu at the moment. I'd have 10-15 if every window were listed.

    With that said, there are downsides-- it's an issue of personal taste. But it's hardly a basis on which to choose an OS.
  • I use PC hardware now. And I have a choice of Windows, Linux, BSD, Be, OS/2, QNX, etc.

    I use MacOS hardware now. And I have a choice of MacOS, Linux, BSD, Be, OS X Server, OS X (soon), PlayStation (via VGS), Windows 95/98/NT/2000 (via VirtualPC), etc.
  • > Check the benchmarks and you'll see that the G4 500Mhz is toasting the 1Ghz Athlon in a great deal of tests.

    Read those same benchmarks and you'll see they are only comparing a few Photoshop plugins. Altivec is fine, I guess. But it is only a limited set of instructions (a la 3dnow! and SSE) and can only be programmed using ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE.

    Apple would be better served if they went into the consumer settop internet box business. They have only a paper future in the PC world.


  • Well, you could always hack on OSX DP3 (or DP4, though I have heard it's out there, I haven't seen it yet)

    Guess what.
    Because DR4 is so stable Apple is calling it a Beta.
    DR4 doesn't exist, it is now called MacOS X beta(*).
    Which means that with any luck MacOS X will be released within half a year (which happened with all the previous versions).
  • 500mhz, in a new box? I don't think so, not when a 1ghz Athlon costs like $300 or something.

    Please read this article on The G4 vs. K7 [arstechnica.com], then check your prices [cpu-1.com] on the K7: $769 for the 950mhz (probably $1k for the 1Ghz?).
  • AFAIK, Microsoft has already carbonized IE and OE. From there, it isn't a far stretch to port it to Cocoa.

    As for Office, Office 2001 is presumably carbonized as well. I don't think any major software development house isn't currently in the process of carbonizing their Macintosh apps (at least) I know that we are writing to the carbon API right now.
  • Yes, that was really annoying. I not long ago refused to use QT, especially now that M*dia Player supports movs.
    Of course, now I feel justified in using W*ndows (please, no shouting) despite all of the M*c OS users going on about how much easier M*c OS is to use and how much better it is at detecting hardware and installing drivers etc. Well maybe it is but I've now got W*ndows set up just the way I like it and it hasn't crashed for ages so I'm ver<CONNECTION TERMINATED>
  • by Darchmare ( 5387 ) on Monday May 15, 2000 @10:00AM (#1071472)
    This really isn't that big of a departure from Apple's previous stategy.

    Before, they were going to release a final beta now and ship sometime this summer. However, they weren't going to bundle the OS with their hardware until January of '01.

    The only difference now is that they're re-labeling that initial 1.0 release a beta and stilling bundling it with their hardware in January '01. To be perfectly honest, to anyone who has seriously used OSX DP3, this makes perfect sense. The user interface had a long way to go before it'd make a decent successor to OS9. If they had released anything even remotely like DP3 as a final product, they'd have been filleted by the Mac press and userbase.

    It seems they have taken the criticism to heart, and might be fixing some of the stupider elements (ie. the dock) which possibly providing a replacement for some of the gaping holes (ie. the lack of an Apple menu or something similar). As a bonus, they released another beta today and will release another sometime this summer.

    This is a Good Thing, IMHO. No use making people buy something labeled a release when in all reality it's a beta. There's no way Apple was going to have something release-quality within 6-8 months of DP3...


    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Every time macs get mentioned on here, it always goes something like

    Mac user: Mac's rule, linux sucks
    Linux user: Mac users are just too stupid to use a real comuter
    Mac user: Maybe they just aren't stupid enough to beat their heads on the wall to get things done
    linux user: Yeah, go back to your gay ass traslucent fish tank looser

    (repeat for 2.4 hours)

    How about this, you're both idiots! The only people who ever bother to get into this stupid insult fest are the idiots who have nothing better to do and no desire to consider that everybody has a preference. Mac users aren't too stupid to use a real computer. Linux users aren't masochistic. Now everyone shut the fuck up.
  • Does it rum MacOS software? That's the real reason people need it. Like myself. There are too many Mac apps that I need to run (QuarkXPress, Photoshop, Freehand..etc.). Thanks but no thanks.
    --
  • Up until QT4, you could download a copy and install it on multiple desktops. Now you have to connect every machine to the internet and download the thing 800 times. That's assuming you can even do it through a firewall (it usually bombs). I guess they really want you to pay for "Quicktime Pro" just to play damn movies. Losers.
  • I need to run emacs on my Macs, so that I can say to my friends, "I edited that file in emacs," and they could say, "You are an idiot."

    Then I can say, "Aww, man, I thought it would make me cool." And then they'd say, "Shut up already."

    Then I'd sit in my chair and just feel dumb until the Finder crashed, so I'd have something to do.

    < tofuhead >

  • OK, offtopic, but the 20th century began in 1901. The 21st century begins in 2001.

    Jeff
  • OpenDoc was not cross-platform, but an object-based API. Apple's idea was to have applications that were completely moduled and interoperable.

    The reason it flopped was because the press and endusers never really understood it.
  • As a Maya user (not much of an artist), I have JUST ONE WORD FOR THIS: UNFREAKINBELIEVABLE!

    I had to check the HTML for includes links outside aliaswavefront.com... I thought they had been HACKED! LOL...

    This is very good news for the Mac folks and MacOS X in general. It's also good news for ME. My company is SynaPix, and our software ties in with Maya over the LAN. This in all probability means we will be geting our first Mac :-D

  • Heck, if all I ever needed was a few Windows applications, and the interface was good enough for me, I could run those too, either with Wine or VMWare, or with some Windows-esque window manager.

    A window manager is not an interface. A lousy interface with a pretty face is still a lousy interface. An interface is measured by its consistency, it's simplicity, its elegance, and its power, not by where the buttons are and what color the title bar is. Window managers are amusing, but no matter how good they are, they can't overcome the inadequacies of bad applications and lousy OS-level GUI API's.

    Linux *started* with at least the functionality of a late-80's user interface as soon as X compiled on it.

    Hmm... system wide, consistent cut and paste? A decent graphical file browser? Consistent keyboard shortcuts for common commands? multiple monitor support?

    Granted, those aren't all specifically interface issues, but they are closely related. Linux *still* doesn't have a lot of the features that Mac users take for granted. Even KDE and gnome don't give you either the interface consistency or the attention to detail of the Mac cerca 1990. For all their technical bells and whistles, KDE and Gnome are still ugly, clumsy, and poorly designed.

    My interface is so good, I use the command line all the time.

    Good for you. And I bet you spent months learning it. And I'll also bet that when you get a new program, you have to read pages of documentation to figure out how to use it. And I'll further bet that you are in the top 5% on the geekiness scale in the general population.

    The fact is that most people don't have the time or the interest to learn the Unix CLI. Doing so is no small undertaking-- it takes days to become even basically functional, and months to master all its nuances. I can sit down in front of a Mac app I've never seen before, and start using effectively almost immediately. I can do that because Apple has worked hard to ensure that developers follow certain conventions in interface design, so that new apps work the same as my old ones. CLI's expect you to memorize an entirely new set of flags and options with every command.

    As for cutting and pasting, I'll take real cut-and-paste with a real clipboard any day. The standard X cut and paste is a nasty hack that should have died 10 years ago. I shouldn't have to worry about accidentally highlighting text before I've had time to paste copied text to its destination. And if Unix had a standard keyboard shortcut for "paste" you wouldn't lose more than a quarter-second in pasting.

    And if I want to cut and paste something other than text, I'm just out of luck.

    Of course, I'd rather get work done. I hate to break it to you, but that's what that "User Interface" is for: to get stuff done.

    Correct. Which is why most X GUI's suck so much-- you can't get any work done until you've had someone walk you through using the thing for several hours, and it takes week before you're able to do even moderately complex tasks.

    And forget it if you're planning on working with images, souds, video, spreadsheets, or even formatted text-- those are just too frivolous for our manly command line interface and our handy dandy middle-button paste.
  • One of the main resons I don't use a Mac instead of my wintel box is 'cause Macs are so damn expensive. Sure, they're high quality. But I'm not that rich. For the price of a G4, at the very lest, I could get a 1gighz Athlon (i hope i'm right there, but of not, u get the drift).

    If you would actually compare prices you would find that this is not the case. Sure it used to be true, but not any more.

    Go to Dell and Apples web pages and put together a basic workstation (G4 400/PIII 600, 256MB RAM, 18GB SCSI is what I used to compare prices, since I consider that minum spec for a machine here at work). Now compare the price of the two, remember that you have to pay extra for DVD and firewire from Dell. Notice how similar the prices are?

  • I'll agree with you about the Holiday season, but I think I'll have to disagree on the academic year thing. As most schools start in the Fall, I would expect them do to their major purchasing/installing right at the end of the school year (May/June) to give them the summer to get product and install it. (That's how it works for the schools I've been involved with, at least).

    Well, okay, but a move from July to January is then just as bad from the "upgrade the OS over the summer" front. Meanwhile, I was talking more about student purchases than departmental ones. Department/institutional purchases usually work around site-licensed software (i.e., Microsoft), and so the release date is also less relevant. But students are the ones who purchase the games and other products that come from smaller developers. Students are also the new "front line" of advocacy. Missing the student purchase window could be a pretty bad thing.

  • Will this public beta version expire (must set back system clock with OS 9 boot disk to boot the system again) when Mac OS 10 is scheduled to be released?
  • IN David Foster Wallace's 1996 classic, Infinite Jest , set in or about 2010, it describes Pink-2 as Microsoft's first Post Windows Operating System. I thought DFW was just making it up, but now I know where he got it from.

    Although I think the idea of M$ dropping Windows for an Apple related OS is about as likely as gigantic packs of mutant hamsters overrunning New England.

  • and then spend $500 on photoshop for windows

    Are you saying The GIMP [gimp.org] isn't advanced enough yet? It runs just fine for me on Sindows 98.

    x11(which generally is much too ugly for a mac user to stand

    Or the Aqua themes for GTK [themes.org] and Sawmill [themes.org] that look so not ugly, Apple is suing?

    lets see is it "#start x", "#start x windows", hmmmmm how about

    How about gdm? 100% GUI from startup to shutdown.

    # tell application "X" to open

    Interesting... I wonder why nobody has made a CLI shell for Mac OS yet, based on AppleScript and the Open Scripting Architecture.

  • http://devworld.apple.com/tec hpubs/macosx/macosx.html

    Click on the Objective-C framework reference. I think the three-language API will be just fine... at least Apple's finally lost the Pascal version APIs... hopefully...

    They have a good PDF tutorial on ObjC as well.
  • by yerricde ( 125198 )

    features and misfeatures of X. (running graphical programs on other machines on the network, no integration of graphics into the kernel, etc.)

    I saw two features and no misfeatures. Aren't buggy video drivers running in kernelspace one of the problems that make Windows NT Workstation (and Windows 2000 Professional) so unstable?

  • I got sick of waiting and developed a component object model for web application development in Java. It's called Tapestry and will be released as open source on SourceForge as soon as I can my damn company to open a port for ssh in our firewall!

    We're using it for development of customer web applications already and we like it. Don't have a good Object Relational bridge yet (to do it as right as EOF is very, very, very hard ... my first attempt wasn't good enough).

    You can find out more at:

    http://tapestry.primix.com/tapestry

    Off topic? Of course ... but this is just one example of how Apple has screwed up; they've let thier best, most marketable technologies languish. They also have a habit of screwing thier supposed partners. Our shop is very, very happy to be able to do WebObjects style development without having to deal with Apple.
  • If they do make an intel version. I really hope that thay also have the brains to make it possable to run it from within windows.

    Don't hold your breath on this fantasy. Apple makes most of it's money selling hardware. For them to do what you suggest would be suicide.

    The problem with SoftMac is that they are VASTLY overstating their software compatability. Almost all current versions of Mac programs are PowerMac only, which SoftMac doesn't support. This makes it useless except for use with software that any Mac user would consider long ago obsolete.

    The claim of 80% of the speed of a 68040 on an Althon K7 is pretty poor, too. The 68040 topped out at 33 MHz! Given the architecture advantages of newer CPUs, this means the emulation is running at an effective 1/200th or so of the native CPU speed. This would CRAWL with anything like modern software. It would be like running Windows 98 on a 486-33 PC.

  • the PUBLIC RELEASE is occuring late this summer (as previously scheduled) as a "public beta" rather than a 1.0, ala W2K

    But will this beta expire? "This public beta version of Mac OS X has expired. To start your computer, purchase and install the official release version. It is now safe to switch off your computer."

  • X Windows runnings on top of Darwin

    So they have an X server on OS 10. Does this mean "OS X" is no longer false advertising, specially in the "Mac OS X Server" department?

    Now all XFree86.org needs to do is get its server running on OS 10 (if it works on iMac and G4 under netbsd-ppc it'll be no sweat); then it'll really be OS X.

  • Hmm, I didn't know that, and my copy of Windows Media Player also knows QuickTime files. Unfortunately, it seems to be unable to deal with any modern codec ;-( Even the annyoing I-contact-home-without-asking feature doesn't work:

    Unable to download an appropriate decompressor. (Error=80040200)
  • How many times has this been said in other Apple related stories???

    Seems like everytime Apple is mentioned on Slashdot, SOMEONE will start b*tching about this.

    FACT: Apple does NOT own *all* of the code in Quicktime.

    Portions of QT are licensed from other vendors. In particular, the Sorenson codec, which is responsible for live QT streaming, is NOT Apple's intellectual property. No Sorenson, no streaming QT... No Sorenson, no super-high-quality QT like the Star Wars trailers.

    A handful of other components are licensed technology, but Sorenson is the biggie. Without the Sorenson codec, you might as well be using Quicktime Three, rathar than four or five.

    Now, since Apple does not own the code; do you think they are going to open-source it and intentionally expose themselves to the resulting lawsuits?

    For all the mistakes that Apple has made over the years, I don't think giving away someone else's copyrighted code will be one of them... not anytime soon anyway.

    And that's why there is no Quicktime for Linux. And that's why there WILL NOT be Quicktime for Linux anytime soon.

    Wanna complain to someone? Go to Sorenson and convince them to open-source their codec. If you are sucessful (I doubt it), you will have made a big step (perhaps the biggest) towards a Linux version of Quicktime.

    john
  • It would be a deathwish to release OS X without Office, since it is aimed at people that already have Macs, and want the ease of use of a major Office suite.

    Au contraire! Microsoft Office will run in the Classic environment (code-named Blue Box), which is essentially an emulator running Mac OS 9 that runs transparently on Mac OS X. No nifty UNIX features, but it'll run.

    Remember when Apple transitioned from m68k to PowerPC? They wrote a 68040 emulator and built it into the OS so 68k apps would still run (MUCH more slowly than PPC-native apps, and slower than on 68040 boxes), and everybody was happy - most people never knew the difference. how many people realized that a 68040 has more in common with a Pentium than a PowerPC? To the user, the PowerPC was just an upgrade. Mac OS X will be the same way, and if anybody can pull it off, Apple's the one.

    Micro$oft has said, I believe, that MS Office 2001 will not be Carbon-compliant, although I can't imagine why. I suspect they'll change their mind. Porting from the traditional Mac OS Toolbox to Carbon is supposed to be easy; that's the whole point of Carbon.

    --

  • Like hell they will: they've KILLED the Mac IE team. Not that I use IE- I refuse- but MacInTouch has been running information about this for days. There are PR people lying about it, it might even be possible that something will be put back together to pretend nothing happened, but evidently the whole Mac IE team got broken up and reassigned to other projects.

    It amazes me that anyone ever trusted these people- certainly one can't depend on Office either, much less IE. They would cheerfully do just the same thing to their own Windows users if they wanted to sell 'em W2K apps all over again. Given the opportunity they'd jack prices up to boot.

    There won't be Carbon Office- there won't be _any_ further Mac IE much less Carbon- MS has gone into 'crazed frothing madman mode' and will do as much damage as it can before being 'killed' (as it considers a breakup/regulation to be). This is not a slam to the many good developers and decent people who happen to work for MS. They're no doubt fine people- but the Mac IE team is still history- good people _cannot_ set the tone for a monopoly, they are merely allowing it to persist in its behavior by colluding with it.

    Death of the Mac predicted: film at 11, every six months for the last 15 years ;) this, too, shall pass...

  • by Tokerat ( 150341 ) on Monday May 15, 2000 @02:12PM (#1071544) Journal
    From what I've seen, Apple may need the time. As much as I'm pissed about yet another delay from them, I agree that work needs to be done. There is quite a bit going on at Apple, everything from the hardware to the core of the OS is undergoing a change at this point. I'm suprised they had the spare staff to work on the 9.0.4 upgrade, seeing as the entrie OS is being redone almost from nothing for OSX...

    From what I've seen at the time of DP3 and comparing that progress to the expected release date, I'd say give them the extra time and MacOSX will be that much better. It will also give the Darwin Open Source project more time, which means nothing but a more stable, feature rich OS. Besides, after buying MacOS9, I'd be kind of upset at it being obsolete after 6 months.

    The Mac is good, but it could still use the work to be adequate for the future.

  • like having colored buttons for close, restore, minimize. instead of graphical icons.

    Symbols (+ -) appear when you mouse over the buttons.

    To make a "cool" looking interface for marketing reasons. Instead of practical reasons.

    Marketing reasons is an odd way to put it. Perhaps reasons that people that hack around in gdb all day don't really care about. People like cool looking interfaces. There is a small, vocal group of people that think the OS should forever stay like Mac OS 9, but watching Aqua in action is an amazing experience. It makes Enlightenment look 10 years old.

    Someone mentioned that there might be a Mac OS X for Intel

    I can't see how this would make any sense right now. People just took way too much license with Darwin running on Intel.

    If they do make an intel version. I really hope that thay also have the brains to make it possable to run it from within windows.

    How in the world would this work? That's no different than expecting Linux to run from within Windows.

    - Scott


    ------
    Scott Stevenson
  • by sarcastro ( 14549 ) on Monday May 15, 2000 @10:31AM (#1071547) Homepage
    how many times is someone going to bitch about having install over the internet, and how many times is someone going to have to point out this URL...
    http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/support/
  • A friend of mine at the Alias|Wavefront offices here in Toronto told me about today's announcement of Maya for OS X [aliaswavefront.com]...sounds pretty tasty!
  • Does this mean VOB playback even in the 'evaluation copy'? Or does VOB contain anything beyond 'pure' MPEG-2?

    Highlights of the new version include MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 codec support, both encoding and decoding, as well as support for both local and streaming playback of those formats.

    Does anyone here already have an evaluation copy of the Java 2 SDK? Any benchmarks? Opinions?!
  • As much as I'm drooling, however, from the angle of Apple's future, this delay is probably a very good thing. Rushing out the release before the OS (or the apps for it) are ready gives the press opportunities to slam it into the ground. The longer developers have to polish it, the better it will be when the wrappers come off. The more apps developers support it (with Carbon or Cocoa apps), the better the package feels to the end user.

    There is some truth in what you say: stable is certainly a very noble goal. But the problem with the revised release schedule timing is that Mac OS X now misses two key purchasing deadlines.

    The first key deadline is the start of the academic school year, when Apple has traditionally run specials and tried to get new and returning students to buy that Mac. Now those Macs won't be running Mac OS X.

    The second key deadline is the Christmas shopping season, which is also over before January 1. I do expect Apple to ship a ton of Macs for next Christmas. (My guess is that the next rev of the iMac will come with a DVD ROM/CD-RW drive that will cure the "no floppy, no back-up" problem.) But now none of those Macs will be running Mac OS X, either.

    Now, the reason why this is a problem is that if those Macs were shipping with OS X, then people would be asking for and buying the new applications that were written for the Cocoa environment. But if they've just shelled out for the Mac and the available, probably Classic apps, I'm not sure they'll upgrade very quickly to Mac OS X or Mac OS X apps. And if I were a smaller Mac OS X developer, that would make me feel pretty skittish.

    And, if I were a hardware buyer not totally sold on the Mac anyway, I'd probably have less incentive to buy one rather than some random Win2K box. I'm not sure that shipping late is a move that Apple can really afford right now.

  • I apologise for the previous post, I forgot to change it to "plain old text"

    >Carbonizing an app doesn't make it any closer to Cocoa. Cocoa evolved from the very different Openstep API. Carbon evolved from the old Toolbox API. The two are almost totally unrelated.

    That's the whole point. It still is OS X Native, even though it is not cocoa. This is the beauty of OS X vs. Rhapsody. Developers do not need to rewrite their code to gain the benifits of OS X. They just need to make it conform to carbon specs.

    As for newly written apps, they should be in cocoa.

    >However, I've heard lots of developers on the net rant about how great the Openstep API were and how easy it is to develop - some non-programmer journalist wrote an article a few years back about supposedly being able to go from, not knowing how to program, to writing a full-featured word processor program in something like 2 hours, using Openstep.

    Actually, their word processor was as full featured as, say, word 2.0. Which IS full featured compared to simpletext. I'm sure Office will be much longer to move to carbon.

    OpenStep is great. Objective - C rules! In fact you can develop with Obj C and use the GCC compiler.

    There is even a project called GNUStep that is open source (although not complete) version of the Openstep (cocoa) libraries.
  • Mac OS X now misses two key purchasing deadlines. [start of the academic school year and Christmas]

    I don't understand why anyone thinks shipping software before Christmas is such a huge deal. January 2001 is after Christmas 2000 but still before Christmas 2001. Until the end of civilization there will be a continuous succession of holidays and school openings. Do what's right for the software, ignore the calendar.

  • Uh. You do in fact realize that Photoshop's CMYK color modeling is SUBTRACTIVE?!? Start working with it and see how that messes with your head :) I put together CMYK separations for some posters I was doing, which I was accustomed to using Curves to adjust the tonal balance. Using Curves on CMYK was so weird (most notably, to lighten the balance you had to pull the curve down instead of up, to lessen the ink rather than increase the light!) that I ended up doing all my adjustments in Levels just in order to keep my brain from exploding :) there's a reason many plugins won't operate in CMYK.

    Mind you, I fully expect that linux hackers will eventually put just as good a subtractive color model into the GIMP (to equal photoshop it would have to be doing internal calculations and conversions in LAB color which has a greater gamut than either CMYK or RGB), but in order to do that, they need to understand what is actually involved :) you think there weren't scarily smart geeks involved in coming up with Photoshop? Hint: Photoshop originated in _Industrial Light & Magic_, not MS or Corel. Photoshop _is_ GFX geekness concentrated into one program. In order to beat it you have to take it seriously, not scoff at it.

    I look forward to eventually hearing about GIMP hackers (or whoever) getting really GFX-geeky with all sorts of different color models and LAB as a base for conversions- I don't think any of that fundamental technology is patented, because LAB didn't come out of Silicon Valley, nor did ink and printing presses ;) it'd be a little harder to get Pantone colors (and all the other color houses) in there, as I'm sure you have to pay Pantone to be allowed to refer to specific Pantone colors. But on the whole, it is possible. But no fscking way are you going to be able to do prepress on an additive color model with a hacked-up grey channel. *g* the very concept, to a GFX geek, sounds like what Linux hackers would think of a 'dozer saying "You can get Windows 95 to multitask better than unix, because it is preemptive!" Uh, no no no ;)

  • I think the point they are trying to make is OS X does a much better job of making the hardware interface invisible with all their features. If you've used computers long enough to have first made the transition from a CLI to a GUI you would get their meaning better. From what I have seen of OS X unless you call up a terminal you're pretty much abstracted entirely from the hardware you're using.
  • by FascDot Killed My Pr ( 24021 ) on Monday May 15, 2000 @09:28AM (#1071565)
    Apple Puts Off Joining 20th Century Until 2001.


    --
    Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
  • That's about right. Effectively, Apple has been claming to be about a year from shipping a new OS for most of the last decade. Each time they blew it, another group of developers gave up on the Mac.

    Copland actually made it to an early developer release, and there's an excellent Apple Press book, MacOS 8 Revealed [amazon.com], which describes Copland in detail. (Amusingly, Amazon.com is still selling this book, resulting in some strange reader comments.) Copland was supposedly killed because it ran old MacOS apps in a compatibility box with its own window. That was a killer limitation at the time, because Microsoft was threatening not to upgrade Office for the Mac to use the new API. MacOS X isn't really much better in this area, but Apple now has a deal with Microsoft, so Office will supposedly be upgraded if and when Apple ever gets a new OS out the door. I'm not holding my breath.

    Apple had three other major false starts in the application API area:

    • Bedrock This Apple/Symantec effort was supposed to provide a cross-platform API (Mac and Windows). Killed by Symantec, which decided that fighting MFC was hopeless. I still have a Bedrock CD.
    • OpenDoc This Apple effort was supposed to provide a cross-platform API (Mac and Windows). Killed by Steve Jobs. OpenDoc got to the point that applications using it shipped.
    • A/UX Apple's UNIX port. Ran Mac apps in a protected partition, slowly. Release 1 sucked, but 2 wasn't all that bad. Apple's first "server capable OS". 68K; never really made it to the PowerPC.
    The end result of these debacles was far fewer Mac developers and, today, about 4% market share. Apple is profitable only because of major cutbacks; their market share is way below mid-90s levels.
  • As loath as I am to admit it here, I like Apple. I prefer their hardware, and for some situations, I prefer their OS. My home machines are dual boot Mac/Linux PPC boxen. Which means I am looking forward to getting my claws on a BSD based MacOS.

    As much as I'm drooling, however, from the angle of Apple's future, this delay is probably a very good thing. Rushing out the release before the OS (or the apps for it) are ready gives the press opportunities to slam it into the ground. The longer developers have to polish it, the better it will be when the wrappers come off. The more apps developers support it (with Carbon or Cocoa apps), the better the package feels to the end user. And, probably, the better the reviews come off.

    A September release would be premature. As a developer, I know that without question... but I really wish I had the opportunity to hack with it a while before the release...
  • Um, photoshop does those little preview icons in windows.
  • Where does this conception come from that Macs are super expensive boxes that only the l337 can afford. If you ever take a gander at the scores the G4s get compared to Intel and AMD's chips they manage to keep up the pace with chips that have twice the clock speed. Why the hell would you want an OS to run inside an OS? There's only a small handful of instances where it would make sense. You sure are uninformed.
  • Stop trippin' over the fact that the OS isn't going to be shipped pre-installed as 1.0 until 2001. In fact that was the original rollout schedule outlined in January. The only thing that has changed (as mentioned at the WWDC) is that the PUBLIC RELEASE is occuring late this summer (as previously scheduled) as a "public beta" rather than a 1.0, ala W2K. So basically nothing has been delayed; rather the naming convention has changed. All Macs will have OS X pre-installed by Jan 2001 (as version 1.0). Boy, you rabid anti-Apple trolls have to control your flame-reflexes and analyze the context of news, rather than jump wildly after reading one headline.

    -----
    Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
  • 'Why would you use an Apple product?'

    Ehm..ehm...maybe because both Gnome and KDE are fucking ugly and uncouth, even when compared to Windoze?

    Maybe because the hardware rocks, the OS is comfortable, as in contrast with Linux(PPC)?

    Maybe because everyone uses Windows?

    Maybe because I like Apple, for they have always been at the spearhead of innovation and originality in the computer industry, whatever anti-UI, command-line dinosaurs like yourself may think, with your mainstream hardware, using fscking Windoze when nobody's looking, like I suspect most of Slashdot is doing.

    Maybe because there are plenty of people like you, and that I enjoy pissing them off.

    Maybe because I like translucent plastics?

    (OK, I didn't really mean that last one....)
  • by pb ( 1020 ) on Monday May 15, 2000 @10:48AM (#1071596)
    I don't know why I reply to these things, but...

    Linux *started* with at least the functionality of a late-80's user interface as soon as X compiled on it. I'm currently using Netscape with fvwm2 on Solaris, but it looks the same on Linux, and it hasn't changed any (for me!) for the past four years or so.

    The interface looks at about the level of Windows 3.1, except that it has menus on the root window, four virtual desktops, (no pager; I access them through Ctrl+Arrow Keys) and all the features and misfeatures of X. (running graphical programs on other machines on the network, no integration of graphics into the kernel, etc.) Also, if I wanted it to look or act different, I could change it easily. :)

    If I wanted an integrated desktop environment, there are several to choose from. Heck, if all I ever needed was a few Windows applications, and the interface was good enough for me, I could run those too, either with Wine or VMWare, or with some Windows-esque window manager, (qvwm, fvwm2-95, icewm, whatever) or even the Mac with mlvwm (Gack!).

    My interface is so good, I use the command line all the time. I just wish I had a three-button mouse, 'cause having a dedicated button for pasting is really handy. For that matter, a 10-button mouse might be reccomended for die-hard Emacs users, or people who like chorded keyboards, but they aren't readily available, or popular.

    I would love to have a Lego-based UI. That would be a pretty cool component-building interface, and Windows, GNOME and KDE all seem to be getting pretty component-happy. And as Logo was based on LISP, there are some Window Managers and programs that have similar groundings in their extension language. (sorry folks, no turtle. You could add it to The Gimp, but then it'd be in Scheme. :)

    Windows 3.1 is an okay GUI, but an xterm is still much more intuitive. And a terminal still meets or exceeds the Win '95 shell. But if I want slow graphical eye-candy, I can always grab the latest 10MB themes for Enlightenment, run it with GNOME, install all the latest apps, run them all at once, take a screenshot, and gloat. And then change the theme, and watch the Windows users say "WTF??!!! How did you change that???!!!!"...

    Of course, I'd rather get work done. I hate to break it to you, but that's what that "User Interface" is for: to get stuff done.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • i would say one of the main reasons the Mac was a relative failure compared to windows was that Apple spent too much time dicking around with crazy pet projects, and too little time on any serious business or marketing strategy.

    Lots of funky technologies were breeding in the R&D labs, and some of them actually became quite useful (working at apple in the day would have kicked ass), but the majority of ideas like the Pippin were just frankly stupid and ignorant of what customers (who pay the bills at the end of the day) really wanted.

    Now the reverse is true and it seems apple is nothing BUT slick marketing. Well, swings and roundabouts, eh? But remember, Apple has never been very good at getting an OS out on time. System 7 was in vapour for quite a while, and as for Copland, well, erm... So comparing the 'crap era' versus 'good era' marketing days, it seems that nothing really changes in Cupertino.

    The only reason Apple is alive today is because of the iMac, which is basically a customer driven marketing tool. I bloody hate it when coders say that marketing gets in the way of 'good product'.

    yes, it gets in the way of elegant and efficient software/hardware (what is important to engineers of course, for good reason) but the 99% of people buying iMacs do so because of the marketing, especially since MacOSes are pretty underspecced in terms of geek features compared to, say, Linux, and the hardware pricier than a bog standard PC.

    Anyway, I know it was just a wee joke but I felt compelled to swim against the tide again.

    Moof!
  • Face it, Linux isn't hurting Apple's bottom line at all. The strengths of the Mac OS are all of Linux's weaknesses. The large number of first time computer users and Windows converts buying new iMacs FAR outweighs the numbers that they might be losing to Linux.

    Let's not forget too that most Mac users that might get interested in Linux dual boot instead of abandoning the Mac totally. Linux only helps sell Macs because of the small PPC Linux following.
  • Ah grasshoppa, you do not undastand. The Quicktime port to win32 is more than just a recompile. The win32 port is muuuuuuuuuuuuch of the Mac API ported to win32 which is a faaaaaairly uniform system. Porting to a Linux distro would cost them a good deal of time and money being that you would have to port all of the API layers to yet another OS, one which doesn't really have a standard configuration and then make it work with X.
  • I harken back to the days of Quicktime 2 and 3. There were tons of apps that used Quicktime (all different versions) that could never figure out you already had it installed. It seems like every game you bought before 1996 came with Quicktime. Those were the days!
  • by toupsie ( 88295 ) on Monday May 15, 2000 @09:33AM (#1071613) Homepage

    It is amazing how often Slashdot gets burned by the Mac Rumor Web Sites. From now on, I would suggest that Slashdot completely ignore the ignorant and always inaccurate MacOSRumors web site. The fool that runs the site was been missing the mark nearly 100% on the release of MacOS X and is causing untold damage to Apple by firing everyone up for a non-event such as the WWDC release of MacOS X beta. The only thing notable about MacOSRumors is when it actually gets something right!

    What Apple did release was MacOS X DP4 which MacOS Rumors falsely claimed had already been released to "select developers".

    Here is the actual text from MacOS Rumors saying that MacOS X Beta was going to be released today, er, um 90% chance it would be released today.

    From MacOS Rumors:
    Release of Mac OS X Beta to Developers: 90% Although sources have been unusually noncomittal about specific ship dates on Beta, the timing is right and the release is by all appearances very nearly ready to go.

    Slashdot: Stick to the facts and please ignore the rumor web sites. They are an absolute waste of electrons!

  • It was actually announced at WWDC. You can view the press release [apple.com] on Apple's web site at http://www.apple.com/pr/libr ary/2000/may/15macosx.html [apple.com]

    Robert Chin
  • They wouldn't need to rewrite GIMP just to hack in CMYK. They'd just figure out a way to link a grayscale (K) channel to an RGB (aka [1 1 1]^T - CMY) channel. And if you want prepress, that's why there's something called "plugins." It would be really cool if some fella made a plugin adapter (Lesser GPL) that let WinPhotoshop plugins run in WinGIMP. Any takers?
  • Hmmm... Maybe this is targetted at a different audience? There *are* people who don't want to build a box and some of us out there have to support hundreds (even thousands) of them. Wouldn't it be nice to have a stable Unix based computer that could go out of the box?

    Linux can be tweaked to achieve this but Apple gives a rich user experience that Linux just hasn't gotten yet.

    DB
  • I need to ask for my new machine rather quickly. I *must* have *nix. If OS X works, and has a good fortran compiler, I'm tempted to go that way. If it doesn't, it's x86 and FreeBSD. (Either one will irk the computer folks where I'm going :)

    BUt what does "public beta" mean? Sign up, and maybe they send it? Anyone can download? A spare CD hidden in the computer case?
  • If they release it as final this summer, and everyone hates the GUI, they have to apologise when they fix the UI.

    If they release it as beta, and everyone complains, they can say that they were listening to their beta testers when they fix the interface in v1.0.

    This lets them save face.

    Also, if we look at recent rumors...

    Microsoft isn't making Office OS X Native until they finish OE & IE.

    It would be a deathwish to release OS X without Office, since it is aimed at people that already have Macs, and want the ease of use of a major Office suite.
  • I really hope that they are changing the GUI on Mac OS X, From what I've seen, and from all the reviews I've read, They've really boched it up a bit. e.g. like having colored buttons for close, restore, minimize. instead of graphical icons.

    I hope they arn't doing what I think they're doing, That is: To make a "cool" looking interface for marketing reasons. Instead of practical reasons.

    Linux just dosn't have the apps I need at the moment. And Apple is lagging a bit too behide (and too expensive) for me. Which is why I'm stuck with win98 Until someone wakes up.

    Which brings me to another issue. Someone mentioned that there might be a Mac OS X for Intel.
    I really hope apple go ahead with this, as I think it would be a big help to them. One of the main resons I don't use a Mac instead of my wintel box is 'cause Macs are so damn expensive. Sure, they're high quality. But I'm not that rich. For the price of a G4, at the very lest, I could get a 1gighz Athlon (i hope i'm right there, but of not, u get the drift).
    And I'm sure I'm not the only who's been put off a Mac because of the price.

    If they do make an intel version. I really hope that thay also have the brains to make it possable to run it from within windows. If that happened... My problems would be solved.

    BTW, Emulators.com [emulators.com] Have SoftMac, which can emulate up to a Mac Quadra with Mac OS 8.1
    The clame that they can get ~50-60% clock speed on a pentium or celeron. And ~80-90% on a Athlon k7 And up to a gig of RAM. And It can run in a window, or full screen.
    They also talk about possable linux versions, and a PowerMac emulator.

  • I'll agree with you about the Holiday season, but I think I'll have to disagree on the academic year thing. As most schools start in the Fall, I would expect them do to their major purchasing/installing right at the end of the school year (May/June) to give them the summer to get product and install it. (That's how it works for the schools I've been involved with, at least).

    What does suck about Apple's product announcements is that they almost always land during MacWorld - which are pretty much exactly the wrong times. It's either the end of summer or after the start of the year...

    Move those dates backward 2 months and you're right on, IMHO (assuming the announcement also means release). Clearly, finding good dates for announcing/releasing product is difficult, especially when many companies/schools have fiscal years that don't coincide with calendar years.


    -ben

  • by Noke ( 8971 ) on Monday May 15, 2000 @09:46AM (#1071651) Homepage
    I hope they don't make Quicktime 5 a virus like QT4 was. When you install it, it takes it upon itself to 'attatch' itself to all audio & video formats. Uninstalling won't help. Everytime you want to use it, you get a nag screen asking you to buy it. The evil empire's Media Player doesn't do that!

    Quicktime is just as bad as real player IMO. Quicktime and Realplayer should be apart of the antivirus software detection scehemes.

Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

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