Mac OS X Solutions for Stereographic Applications

SavoWood writes "In a realm which was (IIRC) SGI-only, a new tennant has moved in. It looks like the molecular biologists et al of the world will be able to send their SGIs off to the pasture and forget about the $500/yr. software updates, in favor of running their stereographic applications on Darwin/Mac OS X. A sales rep from Apple just sent me a press release with the link to StereoGraphics, a company that makes stereoscopic visualization products. Now, to send this message into the meat shredder of why you should do everything on SGI and how Darwin is just a playtoy... *GRIN*"

Re:Huh?

[Bastian]

(I realize the above is a troll, but I'm bored at work so I'll bite at it.)

1) SGI has not swapped out Irix and MIPS. They sell Linux/x86 and NT/x86 equipment in addition to Irix and MIPS. If you want the good stuff, you still gotta use Irix.

2) Openstep is NOT a Unix. It's a programming toolkit, just like GTK+ and Cocoa. (heck, Cocoa basically is Openstep.
Even if you were to argue that Nextstep was the most advanced Unix at the time, you would have an uphill battle. Its GUI was the best ever made, but things under the hood weren't as beautiful - I would use a NeXT as a workstation, but never a server.

3) Apple has NOT filled the gap made by SGI. Cheap ass x86 hardware has.

4) Back to OpenStep - OpenStep isn't Mac OS X. Mac OS X's API is based on OpenStep, and they both use a Mach kernel. Virtually everything else is different.

5) What in the @$#@(#@$&@!$@#% does Quicktime have to do with servers?

6) They need higher-end hardware to meet the exhaustive demands Aqua is more like it.

Re:A Unique Darwin Application?

[mkiwi]

Darwin is actually what Mac OS X users to do its dirty work. Darwin is the collective name of the Mach-O kernel and BSD4.4.

The kernel controls everything and the bsd layer is essential for software development. Without the BSD layer, the mac could not compile regular unix software or compile any software made in project builder.

What you refer to as "Mac OS X" is actually the quartz rendering layer and an application called the finder.

The point is that Darwin and Quartz make an incredible combination, making application development really nice. Someone could add a library that did the same work as Quartz's, but there's absolutely nothing that can compete with Quartz's rendering capabilities.

There's no comperable product on the Windows or the UNIX/Linux side, but anything built on a plain-old darwin system can have a regular kde/windowmaker/gtk/etc. with standard xfree86 libraries and headers.

Apple's new X11 server can replace the stardard Aqua window manager, if you know how. If you don't know how, you have no business even touching that functionality.

Another point: darwin can be run in its purest, UNIX form with xfree86. Startup will display the standard logging that anyone would see in a Linux system instead of the Apple logo. This can be done even if Mac OS X is installed, if you know how. Again, if you don't know how, you probably have no business complaining about Mac OS X.

Darwin w/ KDE can, and has been done successfully, on many systems, including my system. However, if one has the hardware to use Mac OS X and all its assorted components, what is the point of using software than isn't nearly as nice as Mac OS X?

its software, not glasses thats missing

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually there have been stereo glasses available some time. More than one company has offered this. For example genomix.fr was a company that made a molecular graphics software for OS X. it went bust (I fergit the other company's s name right now) the problem has been that software like pymol, and divers for the video systems have not supported them.