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Apple's Darwin Runs XFree4 155

Posted by Hemos from the cool-demonstrations dept.
Mneme writes "Looks like Apple finally has the open source core of MacOS X up and running on Intel boxen. We'll have to wait until the WWDC is over before we'll get our hands on it, but it's still a very pleasing development. Check out a story about the demonstration, or click below to read the message from the Darwin Developer's list.

Here's the message from the Darwin Development mailing list:

Date: Tue, 16 May 2000 01:11:51 -0700 (PDT)
From: Dave Zarzycki
To: darwin-development@public.lists.apple.com
Subject: FYI: Monday's Darwin demos at WWDC
Message-ID:

On Monday, Fred [Sanchez] and I had the pleasure of demonstrating two very interesting Darwin developments.

First, we demonstrated Darwin running on Intel. Now I know that many of you are interested in this development, and I can probably predict many of your questions (where do I get it, how do I install it, where do I get the source, etc). Please exercise patience as we sort out the details. As you might imagine, we're very busy with Apple's WWDC.

Second, we were able to demonstrate X11 (XFree86 4.0 to be exact) running on Darwin's native I/O architecture IOKit. I had a lot of fun doing this port, which was loosely based off of John Carmack's port of XFree86 3.3 to AppKit on MacOS X Server. What I don't think most people realize, is that it only took a few days to do the port. X11 isn't as hard as some of you might think! ;-)

Please exercise patience with the above, we're very busy with WWDC. We'll try and push the necessary information out as soon as I can.

davez

--
Dave Zarzycki
MacOS X & Darwin
Apple Computer, Inc.

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Apple's Darwin Runs XFree4 More

Apple's Darwin Runs XFree4

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  • Re:Someone help me out here (Score:3)

    by PenguinX ( 18932 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @04:51AM (#1069819) Homepage
    As much of a Linux bigot as I am, now a "major" desktop player that conforms to the "major" - binary software developers (such as Adobe, Quark, etc.) will have to begin developing in Unix-like environments. This will mean that a step to PPC or x86 BSD/Linux or gads Solaris is really easy. MacOSX will redesign the ease of use for Unix and as terrifying as it may be to behold -- that is what sells. Because of this there may yet again be cross platform games, and a software store that you walk into and see not only Microsoft this and that but MacOSX games, productivity, and other software Linux games, and BSD games.

    (I know the games are what we want the most ;>)

    MacOSX is standing up to the Wintel duelopoly, and saying "screw you - there is a better solution". Apple has been noted for "shaking up the market" before, and if they can pull it of if they suceed then software companies will be forced to develop for a wide diversity of platforms.

    Sound like a good reason? ;-)
  • Actually, what got Galileo in trouble with the church is his application of his heliocentric theory to the Bible. He had ticked off a great many people (think Stallman cubed) including his greatest supporters, the Jesuits. All in all it wasn't the proudest moment of the Catholic Church which is probably one reason why they eventually apologized. The Pope (JP II) actually ordered the issuing of two commemorative stamps as I recall as penance.

    W/regards to the torture statements, this happened in some cases but the relevant rules on such trials forbade it. Galileo was tried in Rome right under the noses of those cardinals who wrote the rules. You can be pretty sure (and most serious scholarship supports this) that they didn't do anything but go strictly by the book on procedural matters (including torture or threats thereof).

    Galileo ended up under house arrest and was limited to one servant but had no limitations on visitors. Not good, not an acceptable imitation of Christ that we are called to do as Christians, but not the bloodthirsty, ignorant savagery that some people make it out to be.

    DB
  • The inerrancy of all translations of the Bible is simply not the case as any serious scholar could tell you. Early church set the canon and generally kept things stable until the protestants came along and threw out seven books! Even among protestants, there are many translation differences amongst the various denominations and that doesn't even go to the more unusual issues raised by the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses (I would pay to be called on by both groups simultaneously).

    Ignoring the wounds in Christ's body caused by the disunity of his followers is not fitting for a true christian.

    DB
  • You can't have your cake and eat it too. You certainly can have Apple quality components (after all these are commodities at this point)but do you get them at a discount to the Apple price?

    What you don't get at any price without Apple is a bunch of flaming anal-retentives concentrating on all the little details to make the hardware/software combo work nicely together so you don't have to worry about it. Now some people put the value of that little fact at $0 and that's OK, that's not Apple's market. But for the other 95% of people it does have a monetary value and Apple's growing marketshare is demonstrating that it more than covers the price difference for like quality x86 hardware.

    DB
  • OK, MacOS X may be better than Linux in some areas. But that will not stop me using Linus's kernel. But the problem is, as a Linux user what may i gain from the delelopment of MacOS X? Somebody metioned games. But Wine and Loki are already doing good progress. I am more concerned with multimedia thing... By the way what happened to the MPEG 4 Coded contest anybody has news?
  • Do you really think that Steve Jobs will be junking the NetBoot technology that he hyped not too long ago? I don't think so. NetBoot implies a server. It may be the current Mac OS X client on steroids but there will be a Mac OS X server.

    DB

  • I don't necessarily agree, but I'll leave it at that.

  • Re:Apple Reality Check (Score:3)

    by MacOSNeedsDeath ( 140242 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @08:43AM (#1069826)
    Mac OS X Server uses a Mach 2.5 kernel with NeXT extensions. It is to Mac OS X as BSD 4.4 is to Linux. It is a kindred spirit in some ways, but it is a completely different OS.

    Mac OS X uses a Mach kernel based on the same OSF Mach 3 kernel MkLinux used.

    OS X is not like NT, with a server and a workstation version. OS X Server is OpenStep with a poor faux-Mac interface and nonstandard networking administration tools. OS X will replace Server.

    Apple originally said that hardware would ship with OS X in January 2000, not December 2001 - where did you get that date?

  • Well, I'm sure you're basking in the "kudos" that being such a wag has earned you,

    If you thought it was a wag, you missed the point. You might be entirely correct about Darwin and evolution. I certainly can't say that you aren't, although I personally don't believe it. But if you use arguments like those, you aren't going to convince anyone, because they don't make sense. Which was what I was trying to point out by turning them them on their heads. If you think what I said was blasphemous against your religion (saying bad stuff for no reason), then what you said was blasphemous against science.

    and the righteous self-satisfaction that is Satan's reward for those who blaspheme. But I'm sure you don't believe in the Devil either, after all his greatest success was in convincing people that he doesn't exist, and that they could commit acts of evil without endangering their immortal souls.

    Hum. Personally I like to be nice to people. I don't like to rob banks. I like to think that I do this for a better reason than that I might not get to Heaven. Isn't it better for me to help a poor person because I want to, than for someone to do the same thing because they think it will earn them Cosmic Credit?

    Science is the Devil's tool of choice for corrupting people through such fallacies as "freedom" and "choice". There is no freedom - you must live your life as God has decreed and following in His wise teachings, otherwise you will be drawn downwards into Hell upon your death, there to eternally repent your sins.

    Science never said anything about freedom or choice: that was philosophy. Science says stuff about how fast things fall down, and how to make aeroplanes stay up. Don't knock science until you're prepared to repent of having central heating, piped water, a house with a roof, a car and so forth, none of which would be here without the basic principles of science. Even God's own very beautiful cathedrals are made using scientific principles to keep the roof up where it belongs.

  • Really, just because there's terminology and people working on something doesn't mean that there's anything to it

    Quite, and the "proof of the pudding", as they say, is in the eating. When an advanced meditation master is hooked up to a machine that monitors his brain activity, and that monitor shows that he is deeply asleep and fully awake at the same time, then you have scientific evidence that there is something to it.

  • Excuse me, I meant "Apple originally said that hardware would ship with OS X in January 2001, not December 2001"
  • It has nothing to do with "hate", it's idiotic and FUNNY!

    So if the Anonymous Coward had said "I get a kick out of these posts making fun of idiot Jews," you would not find it shockingly offensive? Really? Most reasonable people would, given the bloody history of hostility towards people based on religious beliefs.

    Sorry, but not everybody can take bigotry as lightly as you do.

  • First of all, the Lady Hope story [ediacara.org] (deathbed recantation) is a myth; see the link. I'm curious, though, as to why you would "absolutely *love* to bring this up in a BIO class?" Even if it were true, it has absolutely nothing to do with the validity of the theory. I am certain you agree that if Copernicus and Galileo had recanted their theories of heliocentrism on their deathbeds, the Earth would not have magically become the center of the Universe at the time of their death(s).

    Scientific theories rise and fall on the basis of how well they explain current observations and predict future ones. In this regard, biological evolution has an excellent track record. They do not rise and fall on the basis of how well-liked they are or who "believes" in them. After Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a member of British society wrote "Let us hope that what Mr. Darwin writes is not true .. but if it is, let is hope that it does not become well-known." It occurs to me that this attitude sums up a lot of the anti-science activism we see today; if we cannot get evolution banned from classrooms, then we must spread lies and misinformation about it (the Lady Hope deathbed myth being an easy example.)

    Anyway, just some things to think about.
  • Hmm... definately stinks of urban legend.

    Think about what you would do if you were Apple and discovered that your MacOS ran faster when ported to x86. It would seem to me that you would simply slighlty cripple the code. As long as you never resleased the source code, you could make the Motorolla hardware appear faster than the x86 hardware. That way you could sell your x86 version of the OS and make some money. If people liked the OS, thier next hardware purchase would be a Motorolla-Mac in order to run the OS faster. You could actually use the OS to win converts to your hardare, even if the x86 hardare ORIGINALLY ran the OS faster. Of course, this ploy goes out the window with the open-souced Darwin.

    The alternative would be to waste the man-hours already invested in porting the OS by scrapping the project.

    Karl

    I'm a slacker? You're the one who waited until now to just sit arround.

  • Oh my god Who would have ever dreamed. X windows running on another version of UNIX. What a day in history
  • Yes, please do stop with all those nasty mac stories, they remind me that my OS doesnt have as nice a front end as I might like. You do of course realize that people have been predicting apples demie almost since it was started. Lisa would be apples doom, the Mac would kill Apple, Apples draining market share would kill it, the lack of a modern OS will destroy apple, the iMac would finish off Apple. So you can understant my skepticism about you crying wolf about their demise. Ill believe Apple is dead when they close their offices at 1 infinite loop.

  • How about the other way around? (Score:4)

    by ceswiedler ( 165311 ) <chris@swiedler.org> on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @04:52AM (#1069835)
    ...can I run the Mac GUI instead of XFree on my Linux box?

    Yeah, yeah, free software and all, long live KDE and Gnome, but Mac does GUIs well. If they sold their GUI alone as a windowmanager, I'd snap it up.

  • This could kill MS easily (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If I could use a simple OS like MAC on x86 I would be there. Linux is great, but, I don't see my Mom installing it by herself and using it. She has used MAC though. OS X looks like it is a good strong OS with one of the best GUIs ever. Why use MS at all? Truthfully why would you use Linux?
  • Remember Linux for Apple ][ or 8080 - not a lot of use but was done just for the sake of it.

    I know ELKS runs on old x86 hardware and coldfire on a lot of 32bit processors whithout mmu but I believe the ports you mentioned were just a april first joke.....

    Jeroen

  • You're confusing "MacOS X" and "Darwin." Yes, Darwin is a part of MacOS X, but I really don't think Apple will ever release MacOS X (a commercial PowerPC only product including Quicktime, QD3D, etc) for Intel. Darwin is really only the kernel and basic C libraries for MacOS X.

    Now if you're asking "Why would I want to run Darwin on Intel when there are Linux and the BSD's?" that is a different question. Maybe you are an enthusiast who likes to run a buch of different OS's. Maybe doing so will make it easier to port a Mac app you have source for to *nix systems. (I don't know.) Maybe you just wanna be l33t.

  • It is not at all improbable that with proper
    training one may control parts of one's body that
    normally is not under active control. This does
    not require any kind of trancendental view of how
    the universe works. If you could show me an
    advanced meditation master levitating, or
    something similarly amazing, then we really would
    have some 'proof of the pudding'
  • If you could show me an advanced meditation master levitating, or something similarly amazing, then we really would have some 'proof of the pudding'

    I'm sorry, but that sort of thing is just too rare, if it does occur.

    This does not require any kind of trancendental view of how the universe works.

    Which universe are you talking about...? The physical "stuff" of matter and energy, or the universe of your conscious experience... which in addition to what your senses report to you, also includes the mental sphere of thoughts and concepts. If you want to talk about "the Universe", you cannot leave out the internal aspects of mind. A transcendental experience doesn't necessarily have to be just about saving on air fares. When J.C. said "Turn the other cheek", it wasn't because he thought it was a good idea. Rather, his own immediate experience was that He was Everywhere, and as such to strike another was to strike himself.

    The Buddha also reported about what life is like when lived, experienced, beyond the concepts of time and space. Just as my everyday experience is that I am an individual separated from the world, the Buddha nature is separateless, timeless, and therefore Eternal.

    And they left behind instructions on how to attain such experience, just as a scientist gives you instructions on how to operate a microscope in order to experience, and therefore confirm for yourself the reality of germs.

  • Well I suppose a rationale that was TCO analysis would say that net savings is the benefit itself. Though you pay a bit more up front, you save money over the machine's lifetime, the machine has a longer lifetime, and the worker is more productive during that lifetime -- to restate my previous points in reverse order. I don't think you can say, "Owning brand X makes more profits!" so simply. There are reasons for higher revenues (higher productivity) and reasons for lower expenditures (less downtime, fewer required upgrades). Both contribute to the bottom line (profits).

    I guess what I'm trying to say is that lower TCO == higher TNBO. They are inverse ways of looking at the exact same thing.

  • The bible wasn't written by God, it is the word of God as revealed to humans and written down by humans. And if you can't admit that humans are prone to errors then you need to have your head examined.
  • My apologies if I sound ignorant; I'm not a scientist and have no more than a casual interest in biology. I certainly don't mean to imply that I have all the answers, only that some of those who profess to have the answers are sadly mistaken.

    About as interesting as the fact that the first Americans came to America from Europe and yet there are still Europeans!

    Those Europeans chose, for whatever reasons, to leave Europe and move to the New World. A living thing doesn't choose to mutate into a different species! The concept of evolution is generally that a new species is better suited to its environment than the original species, and the original species is eventually eliminated through natural selection (because the new species is better adapted to survival). Am I missing something?

    If your religion satisfies you and you do not wish to learn the scientific theories that man has put forth, then that is your decision, but you should at least refrain from attempt to speak about those theories in an intelligent manner.

    I'm certainly open to an intelligent discussion on the matter, although this is probably not the most appropriate forum (we're straying a bit off-topic....).

    Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Fred Phelps are not accurate resources when it comes to biology.

    Jerry Falwell, PAt Robertson and Fred Phelps are not accurate resources when it comes to religion, either. ;-)

    You may be surprised to find out how far removed your conceptions of "puddles of goo" and "in-between species" are from reality.

    Forgive my use of non-technical terms. Again, I'm not a biologist.

    Perhaps you can tell me, though, what did bats evolve from? Do you have any idea? Perhaps you can consult one of those textbooks you've got lying around; I don't have any handy at the moment.

    --

  • As for Windows 98 driving USB sales I have one little thought to pop that bubble - safe mode. It kind of blows when your USB keyboard won't register with your OS when you are trying to recover from a crash.

    Just pop into the BIOS and enable legacy USB keyboard support and the USB keyboard will work everytime. Yes even in Safe mode, DOS, Linux, NT etc.

    Please don't get me wrong I'm not a Mac basher, I just don't like the iMac, even my Mac using friends dislike them. My beef is that I just don't think the iMac is very innovative, from a marketing perspective maybe, but not technologically and that's what really counts not coloured plastic.
  • Well, with Mot improving PPC at a breakneck snails pace, x86 porting would put the fear of got into mot and possibly convince them to get thier act together (seeing as how AMD and IBM seem to have no problem doing a great job with mot's technology). I don't think Apple wants to support multiple hardware platforms, it's costly and could fork their SE resources. With Darwin being open, Apple has a pointy stick to use on any of it's vendors who don't play ball. "we don't need technology x, geeks have already gotten our OS to run on technology y, so get your head out of your ass or you'll get no more $ from us." It's leverage for apple, and it helps consumers by widening Apple's R&D efforts.
  • Honestly, could you give me an example of a low end consumer PC of any company that is innovative technologically? The high end is where all the new tech gets introduced traditionally.

    DB
  • I thought SATAN was a network security tool...
    ;P

  • > What? The sound? Video? Motherboard?
    > There are better peripherals out there.
    > What does that leave that "rocks"? That
    > pretty case?

    Off the top of my head, here are some of the hardware features you get with a PowerMac that you don't usually find on a typical PC:

    - 1 MB cache
    - can take up to 2 GB of RAM
    - CPU is smaller, takes less power, and doesn't need a fan
    - because it runs so cool, the (one) fan in the box is very small and quiet
    - two independent FireWire busses (400mbs each)
    - two independent USB busses (1.2mbs each)
    - wireless networking option for $99 extra
    - built-in 10/100 Ethernet
    - both VGA and digital video connectors
    - booting from any drive attached to your system, even FireWire (hold down the Option key while you boot, and you get a screen that shows an icon for each drive so you can choose one)
    - easy-access case exposes the whole mobo with one switch
    - built-in (non-Win) modem
    - three empty PCI slots (as much as you can get a PC with more slots, often you put a NIC, modem and SCSI/FireWire in there right away, while those are already built-in on the PowerMac)
    - nice styling and attention to detail (matching bezel for Zip drive, for example)
    - integration with the OS, so that hot plugging, power management and hardware detection are excellent, and the Apple System Profiler utility can give you a very detailed listing of your hardware
    - handles
    - on/off switch on the keyboard
    - high quality keyboard with a USB hub providing two ports for a mouse and a joystick
    - extraordinarily crappy mouse, good only as a conversation piece

    There's a reason why there are so many happy Mac users: they make good stuff.
  • ...it wouldn't make his theories wrong. P.
  • Just curiosity.

    Why would I run MacOS X on intel when I can already run Linux or one of the BSDs? All I can think of is "to make porting to MacOS X on Mac easier".
    --
    Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
  • True enough, I just wish the Mac crowd would stop proclaiming the iMac as innovative, it isn't. The word 'innovative' is getting abused quite a bit lately. Just look how MS throws it around.
  • It *is* innovative, just not in the traditional nerd sense. Making people feel better and increasing the universe of computer users through those non-geek innovations of enhancing user experience is an innovative process.

    This impacts geeks indirectly, it's not a non-event. Every geek idea has to fight for a critical mass of users before it becomes commercially viable or at least interesting (imagine how boring slashdot would be with only 5 users 2 of them chanting hot grits). As the universe of computer users expands the number of applications/ideas/technologies that can reach critical mass increases and the entire utility of the internet increases as these computers come online.

    DB
  • Since the Cocoa APIs are NextStep (including Objective C, ProjectBuilder, etc.), porting GNUStep would seem to be a waste of time...

  • Go Darwin! (Score:3)

    by toupsie ( 88295 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @04:36AM (#1069854) Homepage

    For all the blasting of Apple, I find it very cool that they are allowing the core of MacOS X to migrate to other platforms. If and when Apple allows Quartz, Aqua and the other various high level components for MacOS X to migrate, then the Joe Average Windows consumers (not you Linux Boxen Elite) might have an OS worth moving too. For as much as I love Linux for serving files, I really would not feel comfortable moving my Windows based employees to this great platform and expect them to hit the ground running as I have when moving them to a Mac.

    Maybe in the future, Linux will hit the Joe Average Masses but I think MacOS X Intel might beat Linus to the punch. 20 Years of UI research at Apple is hard to combat but those Eazel folks might surprise us all.

  • just not in the traditional nerd sense

    My point exactly, it's not a technologically innovative machine, hence my comment on it borrowing a lot from the PC, but it maybe from a marketing perspective.
  • The christian bible is no different from books
    of greek mythology, the Qu'ran, the Bahagavad
    Gita, any of the Sutras, the Upanishads,
    Dianetics, the Torah, etc.
    Old texts full of stories about fanciful notions
    that people have managed to form cults around.
    Many of them make bizarre factual claims about
    angels, centaurs, spirits, avatars, and other
    imaginary beings that *surprise* are no longer
    around now that we have the ability to disprove
    them. In our age of science, we fortunately can
    nip religions/cults that make magical claims that
    pertain to modern times in the bud. Hundreds of
    'psychics', 'magicians', and other mystics have
    been shown to be the frauds that they are. Deal
    with the facts, and toss aside your outmoded
    belief systems, deities, and other such cruft.
  • Steve Jobs... Let's look at his track record. He was kicked out of Apple in the first place because he couldn't manage it. He founded NexT, but couldn't turn it into a viable company. Not even his GOOD NAME could sell his computers. NexT discontinued its hardware line, then sold it's software line to Apple because it couldn't be sold elsewhere. Here we are going on 5 years since the sale AND STILL NO NEW OPERATING SYSTEM. If I spent $600 million and ended up with nothing, I would be screaming bloody murder (or at least FRAUD). I can't believe it took 5 years and many millions of dollars to create OS X Server from NexT/Rhapsody. Something is very wrong here.

    Regarding the Apple Clones. I would rather keep my money in my pocket rather than give it to Apple. The clone manufacturers proved that you can make and sell a Mac for much less money than Apple. With competition, the consumer WINS all the time. By revoking the clone licenses, Apple did all computer users a disservice.

    Apple leads the pack? With what? Pretty colors? If I want pretty colors on my PC, a can of spray paint is MUCH cheaper! Serveral cans can yield many more designs. Why stop there? Why not paste bumper stickers on it? The idea of the modular computer has been around since the TRS-80 model III. No floppy drive? We can debate this forever, but doesn't excluding a floppy just remove an option for the consumer?

    I submit that Apple's comeback is due largely to a good economy in which people don't mind spending a few extra dollars for an expensive gadget, as useful as it is.

    I don't hate the Mac platform; I just question Apple's business choices and motivations.
  • No, I don't see them opening up the Quartz sources, but... with all the talk of the world needing a brand new imaging model to replace/extend X11, wouldn't it be great if Apple published the specs for such an API? (Apple specifically chose PDF for the base because there are no licencing issues, as there were for Display Postscript). If they did, it would leave the door open for developers to write compatible implementations, and perhaps situate Apple as the leading force in a new standard.

    Of course, any 'competing' implementations wouldn't actually be competing, because they would run on (likely) different hardware and (certainly) a different OS. Of course, NeXT tried this with OpenStep, didn't they? I've never heard of any other implementations other than GNUStep, and it's still pretty far from prime time. Perhaps Apple would have an easier time since they are higher profile, and many developers see them as 'getting it'.
  • So does this mean that we could run OS X on an x86 machine?

  • Re: Compatability? (Score:3)

    by naasking ( 94116 ) <naasking AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @04:58AM (#1069860) Homepage

    Neither. X was ported over to Darwin because one console is practically useless to do any coding. Right now Darwin has absolutely no graphical interface whatsoever, so usability was limited.

    Now with X up and running, alot more developers may begin to see Darwin as a viable platform for development and porting. That was the goal. To get a fully functional and usable system.


    -----
    "I will be as a fly on the wall... I shall slip amongst them like a great ... invisible ... THING ... !"
  • As for the name "Darwin", I think that it should be fairly well-known, at least among the Evangelical community, that Darwin recanted his "theory" of "evolution" on his deathbed.

    If this is true, then quote your source. I'm not doubting you. I would absolutely *love* to bring this up in a BIO class, but I will not do it "just because an AC on /. said so"

  • OSX on Intel and M$ vs DOJ (Score:3)

    by yuriwho ( 103805 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @04:59AM (#1069862)
    It was rumored that Apple made a quiet "deal" with M$FT not to port OSX to Intel in exchange for continued Office support on the Mac. Perhaps Apple is really getting ready to become a software company now in light of the DOJ vs M$FT rulings. I don't think they would loose that much in hardware sales if support and drivers for the Mac hardware were kept superior during full rollout of the x86 versions of the OS. If they start making serious money selling an x86 based OS (or GUI, Aqua + quicktime + finder etc.) they could bring the level of support up.

    It would be a big gamble but one with potentially huge payoffs. I can dream can't I ;-)
  • Just because a company adapts to a changing software development paradigm doesn't mean they are desparate. If it was anybody but Apple, you'd be lauding them for their forward thinking. SGI is in the same boat, as are a number of other companies. Sure, there are many who are just jumping on the bandwagon but thats the nature of revolutions - the bandwagon starts, people jump on, and who knows where it ends up.
  • I refer you to someone's previous post:

    >At this point in time, the only people buying
    >Macs are luddite print designers and people with
    >a fetish for colored plastic.

    Mac sales are actually increasing in 'Luddite' areas such as first time buyer *CUSTOMERS*, the 'normal joes'. You may not think such people deserve a computer, but at least Apple is catering for them with something they want - in a *CUSTOMER* focused appliance with all the traits they will ever need or want.

    If the zealots love it too then all the better. Every platform needs zealots. Come on, your statement that all closed source platforms will die sounds more like the words of a Linux zealot than of someone who has an open point of view.

    App support has previously been Apple's key weakness. With a multiplatform OS, the range of apps is bound to increase, since the user base is bound to expand beyond those who just upgrade their existing Mac box, even if only slightly at first.

    Now the OS will go on any machine, but for some customers will be best on the 'premium' Mac boxes that I assume will be sexier looking and sold/specced with a *CUSTOMER* focus and good support.

    So there is no reason why the Mac cannot survive, or thrive. I think in the end it will, because Apple is at last getting the marketing right. Marketing = listening to CUSTOMERS and giving them what they want.

    In an area where hardware and software is getting more and more homogenized anyway, that's todays killer app... not Quark Xpress. (I always preferred Pagemaker anyway)

    Moof!
  • While I realize that it is perhaps not "News for Nerds", which seems to be defined as "Anything that goes with the /. crew's Christian prejudices", I definitely think that this is "Stuff that matters".

    Those of you who follow these "Jesus" and "God" stories should be aware of the scientifically shaky ground on which they rest. Science has no need for messiahs or "Gods" when it was DNA that did it all along. Likewise, the notion that there are some sort of "commandments" that must be "obeyed" is absurd: Humans evolved out of dust, so will some prominent "theologist" please explain to me where God comes in? Sorry, but nowhere in my text book does it state that "God created the world".

    As for the name "Jesus", I think that it should be fairly well-known, at least among the scientific community, that Jesus recanted his "theory" of "religion" on his cross. Hopefully, the worms enjoyed eating him up. But probably not. If you think that Jesus or "religion" can save your Eternal Soul, please continue in your Christian ways. But if you are capable of understanding reason and common sense, you'll know that True Knowledge comes through the Understanding of Science, and cease your idle deity-worshipping. This whole Jesus business makes me uneasy. Perhaps they will name their next word processor "God"? How much more anti-atheist can you get?

  • Mac OS X on Intel (Score:3)

    by Frac ( 27516 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @05:00AM (#1069866)
    Two articles of interest (read them first):
    Motorola, IBM - cold warriors [theregister.co.uk]
    Darwin on x86 - Apple's Intel interest [theregister.co.uk]

    Given that it's the Register for God's sake, we should take the news with a lot of salt. But their analysis seems well-founded, so Apple flirting with the idea of getting Mac OS X running on the x86 architecture doesn't seem too impossible. Getting Darwin to run on x86 is certainly a big step, and who knows - maybe Apple will get go the SGI-way of building highly-customized x86 machines if the IBM-Motorola partnership falls apart.

    Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)

  • Re:Neither flame nor troll (Score:3)

    by Dandy ( 2564 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @05:00AM (#1069867) Homepage

    "Why would I run MacOS X on intel when I can already run Linux or one of the BSDs?" The question could just as easily be, "Why run NetBSD on Intel when I could run Solaris x86 on Intel? Or the GNU Hurd? Or plain old Mach with the standard BSD personality?" Why run any Unix-like OS on your PC instead of any other? The answer is different strokes for different folks. All the various Unix-like OSen are just different enough from each other to make some people prefer one over the others.

    Ok, that probably was not the answer you were looking for, so let me mention some of the technical features that MacOS X sports which you won't find in Linux or *BSD. The biggest difference that I can think of is the I/O and driver model that MacOS X uses. The IOKit is an OO framework for developing and making use of I/O and hardware drivers that was created from scratch by Apple mainly becuase FreeBSD's I/O subsystem didn't support the dynamic "plug-and-play" functionality that Apple wanted. Another big advantage that MacOS X has is its scalability to multi-processor machines. This is entirely due to the use of Mach as the core microkernel. One of Mach's original design goals was to be highly scalable on both closely coupled (a la SMP) and loosely coupled (a la Beowulf) multi-processor systems, and it shows in Mach's extensively multi-threaded and modular nature. There are also supposedly lots of fun things you can do with Mach's message passing/IPC facilities, but I don't know too much about that.

  • There is something out there that is not strictly technological, but also not marketing which I'm labelling the user experience. What's the value of a system where everybody uses the same clipboard, where all generic keyboard equivalents match, where all the little things fit in just so... This is obviously going to change from person to person but the artistic enhancements that separate Macs out from the PC crowd aren't marketing, they are physical aspects of the machine or they are methods of software interactivity that PCs just don't get.

    There is something else out there, perhaps it's user experience, perhaps it's craftsmanship, I don't know how to come up with the right word but I *do* know that the innovation of the iMac is neither marketing or technology.

    DB
  • You know what, it's just a computer. One that I particularly don't find interesting. The iMac was a deliberate marketing attempt by Apple to regain market share by aiming it at newbies (not that there's anything wrong with that). To call it anything else is ridiculous. If you still think I'm missing it, so be it, I don't think there's anything to catch.

    This has been fun, DB, this my last post to this thread, so take care.
  • I think you miss the point. The point is that it's the message that's being ridiculed, not the messenger.

    Okay, this is turning into a very pedantic argument, so I'm not going to drag it out much further, except to say this...

    That post said nothing at all to "ridicule" creationism or any other unusual beliefs. Instead, it was nothing but a bigoted comment directed at a group of people. Read it again.

    If you were sitting in a bar, and made a comment about how fun it is to pick on "idiot blacks" or "idiot Jews" or even "idiot gays", you'd better know how to fight, because comments like that would probably start one.

    Hmmm, my third comment on the same way-off-topic thread... looks like I have been trolled.

    Oh well.


  • creationists may resort to unsubstantiated theories, but science too has
    its religious zealots. it happens when people don't just use the
    scientific method as a tool for understanding things, but declare that it
    is the only valid method for understanding things.

    science is really good at explaining: a moves becasue force b acts on a,
    and this happens because that happens, and this interaction occurs because
    of this or that phenomenon. but science is only left with explaining an
    endless chain of cause and effect, but never gets to the root of the
    problem.

    i can give you an endless discussion on the physiological processes
    involved in getting the neurotransmitters to fire in the synapses of the
    brain, and the electro-chemical reactions which travel through the nervous
    system, and the contraction and expansion of muscle tissues according to
    chemical laws...

    BUT to simply explain by this why an arm moved in the way it did instead
    of another says absolutely nothing about the INTENTION or WILL behind the
    fellow who brought all those physiological processes into motion by the
    fact that he wanted to throw a stick for his dog to fetch. science
    explains HOW things work very well, but it is blind in one eye, because it
    knows nothing about CAUSES.

    for causes, we have to first start with our own selves. how does it come
    to be that i am self-consciously aware? the fact of our own conscious
    existence precedes any theory that science can make up about the
    phenomenon, and therefore this aspect can never be done away with or
    ignored. science doesn't like to dabble in these questions, but they won't
    just go away -- not so long as you and i, and all these humans continue to
    exist as sentient beings, the question as to how this came at all to be in
    the first place will persist longer than any science concocted within the
    frame of our conscious existence.

    "Our conception of nature is clearly striving toward the goal of
    explaining the life of the organism according to the same laws by which
    the phenomena of inanimate nature must also be explained. General laws of
    mechanics, physics, chemistry are sought for in the bodies of animals and
    plants. The same sort of laws that control a machine must also be
    operative in the organism-only in immeasurably more complicated and
    scarcely com-prehensible form. Nothing is to be added to these laws in
    order to render possible an explanation of the phenomenon we call life....
    The mechanistic conception of the phenomena of life steadily gains ground.
    But it will never satisfy one who has the capacity to cast a deeper glance
    into nature's processes. Contemporary researchers in nature are too
    cowardly in their thinking. Where the wisdom of their mechanistic
    explanations fails, they say the thing is to us inexplicable... A bold
    thinking lifts itself to a higher manner of perception. It seeks to
    explain by higher laws that which is not of a mechanical character. All
    our natural-scientific thinking remains behind our natural scientific
    experience. At present the natural-scientific form of thinking is much
    praised. In regard to this, it is said that we live in a
    natural-scientific age. But at bottom this natural" scientific age is the
    poorest that history has to show. Its characteristic is to hang fast to
    the mere facts and the mechanistic forms of explanation. Life will never
    be grasped by this form of thinking because such a grasp requires a higher
    manner of conceiving than that which belongs to the explanation of a
    machine." (Rudolf Heidenhain, November 6, I897)
  • Er... you misread my post. I said that they were not quite the same. Check again.

    Also, the Reformation martyrs seldom had "different" texts (or churches to burn, for that matter).

    Prior to the invention of the printing press, texts were too expensive for normal folks to get their hands on, and most would-be reformers had to teach everything verbally, which meant that their message did not spread very far before they were martyred. (The word "martyr" comes from Justin Martyr, who's ashes were scattered to the wind after he was slowly killed for his rabble-rousing against the Roman Church.)

    Martin Luthor had the advantage of pushing for reform in a post-Gutenberg world. He wrote everything down and proliferated his writings all over Europe... so even if they killed him, they would never manage to supress his ideas.

    Come to think of it, we are kind of following in Luthor's footsteps when we mirror cphack. :)

  • Oh man...what I wouldn't give to be able to do this...

    I mean, they ran it on a bloody 486!!! Imagine what this System 7 port would be like on a Celeron or something!

    It prolly didn't work well...but ah, what might have been had Apple stuck with it!

    MK-H
  • Well the facts of this deal are $150MM investment in Apple preferred for an agreement which included MSFT Office for the Mac support for 5 years the rumor of the deal was that Apple had new material that would potentially support a reopening of the infamous look & feel case the cynical view of the deal was that by keeping Apple alive, MSFT avoided monopoly suit (wow- that really worked) I have a hard time believing that MSFT was forthcoming enough to admit that OS X could displace windows on to the x86 OS future- my personal belief is its a migration strategy for corporations- get them to convert OS 1st and the boxes will follow. As long as you can maintain a superior performance level on PPC (think Altivec aka Velocity Engine), you can migrate people over time with lower upfront cost than the full box upgrade plus, think of all that they learn while they try to get the thing working on x86 crap
  • But have they actually improved the hardware relative to a PC's given performance vs. cost? In other words, would I spend an extra $500-$700 for a cute little tangerine box on my desktop? My answer is NO. The hardware platform may be a good one (even the best), but I'm not going to pay a huge price for a marginal increase in hardware quality.

    Regarding the operating system, there are other things a true multitasking system can do rather than keep concurrent applications open. Microsoft (and I KNOW this is a bad example) keeps lots of background tasks in the systray that scan the hard drive, re-index files, defrag the disk and notify you of low disk space. Most of this I find useless, but what if you had background tasks that surfed the net for you for movie tickets or graphics, or that downloaded your latest bank statement, or paid bills? What if you could move your PC to the basement next to the water heater and string network cable and windows terminals to various rooms for your family to use?

    More powerful machines in the future are probably more likely to run more intelligent and sophisticated background applications than multiple simultaneous desktop applications. Call it bloatware, but in a competitive computer market, differentiation and performance mean survival.

    Apple's survival lies in better software. Hardware can be mass produced overseas. Software is more easily shaped to hardware. THAT should be the direction Apple should be going.
  • If you think evolution is stupid, what do you think natural selection does? Since
    you made a point of differentiating them, I assume you had a reason.


    Natural selection is simply a drift of the gene pool within its current bounds, or maybe with a few genetic mutations, nothing major. Evolution drastically increases this to include the addition and removal of entire chromosomes. Basically, anyone (human or otherwise) who has been born with an extra pair of chromosomes cannot have children. There have certainly been no documented cases of such a thing happening with even a possible survival enhancement under any circumstances. Minor genetic shifts _cannot_ account for the theory of evolution. In fact, most of the noted physical changes in Animals throughout history are actually better explained by diet and environment than by genetics, except for small shifts in the quantity of a gene in a gene pool (not in the genes themselves). Basically, the idea of slow evolution has been discredited because of fossil evidence, and the evidence which supports a "fast" evolution theory is better supported by diet and environment than genetics.

  • Imagine Apple selling a proprietary GUI to run on top of Linux. Distributors could pay Apple to have it be part of their distribution.

    This wouldn't work. You cannot wedge a GUI on to a system which is not designed for that GUI. You could offer a window manager that looked like a Mac (hey, mlvwm!), but a window manager does not a GUI make.

  • What is a typical PC?

    The only capability/feature that Apple has is that small cool CPU. The rest is easily attainable with a PC.

    The motherboard is the key. If you're comparing Apple to some low end machine built on a cheapo motherboard, then sure, Apple wins. IMHO, a good mobo has at least 6 PCI/ISA slots and an AGP. With that as a start, Apple "quality" is easily attained.

    FWIW, I used to really be behind Mac. I still have two of them but, I think my money is better spent if I build my own (PC) machine(s).

  • WINE and Loki are in some way comparible to having a good media API? Dude have you played Quake 3 on a Linux box? Why do you need to gain something from Darwin, you haven't contributed to its development in the slightest of ways.
  • Sadly, the first thing I thought of was "What Would Darwin Code?"

    :)

    :wq!

  • OSX demo'd to high end PC makers (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    it is a persistent rumor that apple has demo'd a full working version of MAC OSX to a select group of high end PC makers. They even have quicktime spots in the boot sequence to allow for licensing information. Since Rhapsody, OSX has worked on INTEL and i would not be surprised if sooner or later the full OSX is released for only high end PCs which conform to specific hardware specs - ie. OEM only kinda deal. Apple has to cover itself in case the future of the PPC is in jeopardy...by porting darwin to intel, apple gets a jump start on driver development and getting the nitty gritty stuff out of the way.... just a thought...
  • According to the book I read (I think it was Apple by good 'ol Gil), the intel port was dropped because it was at the same time Apple was moving to PowerPC, and management didn't think they could successfully push two independent hardware platforms.
  • See Dandy's answer to your original post, he's saying exactly what I meant.

    --
  • While Apple has obviously given up trying to dethrone Windows (a good move, the constant taste-test like advertising did little to build brand), and as a result has become profitable again.

    The iMac is the best selling computer now, two years running.

    Steve Jobs changed the face of computing - he (re)introduced design and styling as an aspect of the purchase. Wintel cloners took twelve months to catch up to this, as well as other Mac innovations like widespread use of USB (which if you remember was originally derided).

  • Now that Mac OS 10 can run XFree, calling it "OS X" is no longer misleading. Forgive me if I sound a bit weird, but to me "Mac OS X Server" suggests X11 ported to Mac OS.
  • Apple has done nothing to substantially improve the Mac platform where it really counts. The defining quality that makes a Mac a Mac is the Operating System.

    Funny, I've always thought just the opposite. Mac hardware rocks, but I just wish they'd get rid of the OS. :)

    I've had the opportunity to play with OS X just a little bit, and I was quite impressed. Never got to really *push* it, but it seemed snappy and it was nice to see *NIX on Mac hardware while retaining the ability to run all the old MacOS software.

    :wq!


  • Uhm, use Enlightenment as your window manager and check out Aqua-DR16 from e.themes.org [themes.org] - works for me and looks real sweet :)
  • MacOS X has been shipping for well over a year. MacOS XServer is available at your local Apple Vendor or direct from Apple. What everyone is talking about is the MacOS X Workstation implementation.

    As far as I know, there is no "MacOS X Workstation"; The product currently known as Mac OS X server will be junked when Mac OS X is released. There's no two OS strategy, aside from maintaining OS 9 for legacy machines and applications.

  • I agree that your question is valid, and not "flamebait", as one moderator has branded it.

    One reason why you might be interested in MacOS X is if you were one of the handful of fans of the old NeXT cube. The NeXT environment was very popular with a lot of geeks, particularilly developers. The new Apple GUI borrows a lot of concepts from that design.

    It is difficult to give you a solid reason for chosing it over, say, Gnome-on-RedHat, because we end up getting into a lot of religious debate if we go down that road.

    Bottom line is, some people will dig it and use it, some will hate it and flame it, some will tinker with it, and some will ignore it. Same as anything else.

  • Considering the relationship betwen Darwin and MacOS X, the amount of work to get the upper layer working on Intel is probably not that much. Most of the work would probably be centered around the QA testing. Remember, before MacOS X was on the Power-PC platform it was quite happily working on the Intel platform, in the form of OpenStep.
  • the hell can people say Mac/PPC is a dying platform? The G4e is almost ready for production which means >500mhz and two vector units along with some other goodies like a smaller die size and lower power consumption (G4 Powerbooks baby). I think the real reason Mac decided to release Darwin's source was that they were using lots of stuff from the BSD 4.4 kernel and MkLinux, having some parts open while others are closed would be rather stupid. Open code also means a huge number of programmers can get ahold of it and fix problems or us it to write really tight application code that takes full advantage of the kernel's features. If any platform is in danger of dying I think it would be x86. Intel is abandoning it entirely and AMD is extending it up to 64-bits. AMD is sticking with it because they don't yet have the cash to go and make their own architecture (they have the know-how but not the mula unfortunately). Now that storage is on the cheap CISC architecture is just kicking because people are used to it. To make up for efficiency x86 chips need much higher clocks to keep up with high power RISC chips, now people want mucho processing power.
  • Actually, it wouldn't be that hard. Just build the Cocoa (nee YellowBox (nee OpenStep (nee NeXTStep))) libraries and the Quartz display server for linux. Porting couln't be that bad, especially if you pushed the acceleration into some library that everybody (including X11) could benefit from, like XAA or GGI. There shouldn't be any "wedging" required.
  • extraordinarily crappy mouse, good only as a conversation piece

    I think I've said this before, but it is worth repeating:

    I agree that the Apple "hocky puck" mouse sucks. Nevertheless, it's a remarkably cheap USB mouse that works.

    Since it is a given that I am going to use my personal favorite mouse anyway, I would really hate it if they included a very expensive mouse that I didn't want.

    This way, lightweight users get the "free" mouse that they insist when they buy the computer, and I am not forced to pay an extra $50 for a mouse I don't like. Everybody wins.

  • Got a bad feeling I'm being trolled here... but what the heck.

    Let's look at his track record. Yes, lets. He became a multi-millionaire by teaming up with Woz to introduce the first complete consumer PC to the world (the Apple II). Then he ran with an idea from PARC that Xerox didn't know how to use and created the first consumer GUI (Macintosh), and gave us personal computers that could do easy peer-to-peer networking long before Ethernet became a standard (AppleTalk).

    After getting booted from Apple as a result of losing a power struggle, he went on to create a company that broke new ground in object-oriented programming (NeXT), and run one of Hollywood's most successful digital animation shops (Pixar).

    While he was off making even more millions, the wise executives that fired him ran Apple into the ground. Apple went from being the Number 1 desktop computer maker in the world to a pathetic sub-5% market share.

    When he came back, he took a design concept that was going nowhere (the CHIRP-based "thin client"), and had it rebuilt into the best-selling consumer system in the world (the iMac), and returned the "doomed" and "beleagured" Apple Computer company to profitability, against all expectations.

    Not a bad track record, if you ask me.

    Apple leads the pack? With what? Pretty colors?

    USB implementation. Firewire. Cheap wireless networking. Desktop publishing. Streaming video. Next question, please.

    ...doesn't excluding a floppy just remove an option for the consumer?

    No. It gives an option to the consumer. If you want a floppy, you can connect one via USB or internally. If you don't want to spend money on legacy hardware, you don't need to buy it. Even on my PC's and LINUX boxes, I only use floppies for emergency system restoration. Macs (and new PC's) can boot from CD, so a 1.4 MB disk is pretty much worthless.

    I submit that Apple's comeback is due largely to a good economy

    Bzzt. Thanks for playing. Apple may have recovered during the "Clinton" boom, but they went into the dumper during the "Reagan" boom. Obviously there are other factors at work here, like quality, marketing, and yes, even pretty colors.

    Macs may not be the way to go for most of us on this forum. Most geeks are better off using LINUX PC's for most tasks... but stop flaming over religious issues.

  • The christian bible is no different from books of greek mythology... In our age of science, we can nip religions/cults that make magical claims ... 'psychics', 'magicians', and other mystics have been shown to be the frauds that they are. Deal with the facts, and toss aside your outmoded belief systems, deities, and other such cruft.

    You are exactly half right, and half wrong.

    Before we had the benefit of the scientific method, we believed all sorts of rubbish about hanging dead chickens outside people's doors. Whole cultures just swallowed these beliefs without checking that any of it was real. The scientific method hadn't been born, and all of that magical-mythical babble was just Pre-Rational. Today we are at the Rational level, or at least nearly :-) , where we look for objective ways of measuring and verifying our theories. Thus we put men on the moon, proving the objective reality of our knowledge.

    But the story, or rather, the World doesn't stop there. Because just as the Rational perspective went way beyond the Pre-Rational, there is also a Trans-Rational level that goes beyond the Rational. This Trans-Rational domain is also a level of knowledge, and it cannot be grasped by Rationality.

    So before you dismiss the scriptures for their mythical content, you should be aware of their esoteric content, which you will not understand using Rationality. In other words, you have to know how to read it, and for that you need Trans-Rational (not Pre-Rational !) awakening.

    It's what Ken Wilber has called the "Pre-Trans" error... and we see it typically in bookshops with so-called "Mind-Body" sections, which lump together crystals and tarot cards with Krishnamurti and the Dalai Lama!

    Regarding the "facts", I suggest you check out The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion [amazon.com]. The author mekes it very readable, and he's the world's foremost scholar on the subject.

  • Re:What is the comparative performance? (Score:4)

    by jht ( 5006 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @05:09AM (#1069896) Homepage Journal
    I can recall a story from long ago and far away that once upon a time apple had an earlier version of one of their OS recompiled and running on and intel platform.

    they dropped the project because it ran a bit faster than their own official Apple hardware, and they didn't want to shoot themselves in the hardware department.

    There was a project to port MacOS to Intel, called "Star Trek" internally if I recall. And from what I remember of it, they had amazing initial success getting the OS up and working, and most of the functionality implemented. "Most" is key here. It was pretty fast (though PowerPC itself had a big performance lead at the time, Apple's supporting architecture was dog-slow), but there were still a good amount of key features not implemented yet at the demo point. Apple's good at getting an OS project most of the way there - it's the last 25% or so that kills them.

    Ultimately, Apple decided to stick with PowerPC, and they have since based their hardware on faster stuff that's comparable to the state of the art in PC hardware (100 MHz bus, AGP, ATA-66, etc). So an Intel port for the "classic" MacOS (which is what Star Trek was) wouldn't be relevant and a waste of time and resources. That said, OS X on Intel would be a different story, and if Apple ultimately supported OS X native and Carbonized MacOS (through emulation - a recompile would be a killer) apps on an OS X Intel port, it would probably be a Good Thing. But they need to concentrate on their own platform before they give serious thought to a port. The fact that Darwin (the core of OS X) runs on Intel helps show that it's not too far from their minds.

    - -Josh Turiel
  • If they sold their GUI alone as a windowmanager, I'd snap it up.
    The more I think about it, the more I realize there's a lot money to be made in that proposition. Imagine Apple selling a proprietary GUI to run on top of Linux. Distributors could pay Apple to have it be part of their distribution. With a little advertising, it could conceivably be the most popular distro ever.
    BTW, I'm not saying I would LIKE this situation. I recognize that it would set back the cause of free software. It's just food for thought.

  • 20 Years of UI research at Apple is hard to combat but those Eazel folks might surprise us all.

    well, given how Andy Hertzfeld is a co-founder of the whole eazel thing, i don't know if they'd be trying to "combat" apple's UI...

  • To sum up both articles of the Register, the PowerPC Alliance is having dissenssion, so Apple has developed ports to x86 platforms in case the PowerPC goes down. Darwin on x86 is an emergency exit for Apple, but won't concretized in a true full-fledged Mac OS X as long as PPC aren't doomed.
  • Apple does not feel any competition from X Window applications -- their primary high-end market is graphic designers who aren't exactly rushing to to the GUI hodgepodge of Unix systems. Quartz is a solution which Apple hopes will improve their standing in the graphics market, and Aqua is just something flashy that might improve their marketshare.

    In fact, I'm sure Apple is happy that it's now possible to run X apps on their system -- it might solve a couple people's problems (Look - I can run the Gimp!), and sell a few more boxes.
    --
  • Star Trek was the System 7 on x86, but it never made it to anyone outside of Apple really.

    In its infancy, MacOS/X was called Rhapsody and was mostly OpenSTEP code with a MacOS flavor and some virtual machine work done. What most people don't remember is that it ran on X86 (And indeed NeXTstep/OpenSTEP run on X86 fine) I know because they sent me a beta of it.

    It also sucked compared to the PPC version. In both speed and functionality. It was a project destined for the grave from the beginning which I found very sad when running it. Maybe my hopes are going up a little bit since it seems to still be around a bit.

    ~GoRK

  • Re:Compatibility? (Score:3)

    by Draoi ( 99421 ) <.draiocht. .at. .mac.com.> on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @05:26AM (#1069912)
    ... is Aqua something that actually runs on X11
    Aqua runs on what Apple is calling Quartz [apple.com]. This is based on Adobe's PDF format. So, nope, not X11, and I'm guessing Apple won't be in a big hurry to open Quartz sources anytime soon ...

    Pete C
  • I KNOW this a troll, but I'll bite >>It's time to face it people. The Mac is dying, and it won't be around for much longer. Uhm, No. 14 straight profitable quarters. 14 straight quarters of unit sales and gross margins growing qtr over qtr. The iMac continues to sell well. iBook is a smash hit, as is the G4. >>Up until recently it survived barely through the virtue of a single program - Quark Xpress - and Photoshop and Illustrator and Dreamweaver and Flash and Final Cut and Avid and lots of other stuff. btw, where is your postscript support again? >>but those days are over and the Mac, and Apple with them, are destined to become a thing of the past along with all other closed source architectures. Pretty smart of them to open it up then, isn't it. They now use standard RAM, got rid of the ROM, use PCI bus, standard through and through. On the sw side, they are opening up as much as they can. Guess you have not used any Macs recently. >>Why else would Apple of all companies be turning to open source? It can only mean that they are desparate enough to forego their usual money-grabbing licensing tactics, and that they want the whole "cool" image that has made Linux so popular with the corporate types. Either bitch at them for being closed OR bitch at them for going open. You can not have it both ways. >>They reckon that if they can become popular with the zealots, then they can push the lifespan of their product another five or more years beyond what it otherwise would have been. Actually, they want to be popular with non-zealots. Tehy want the newbies and the casual windows users. We in the Mac camp have our own zealots, and some us are trying to shut them up too. BTW, you sound just liks a linux zealot. Pity. People should ave more of a life than to get attached to a hunk of plastic and silicon. >>After all just look at the Amiga - an outdated computer that would have died completely 10 years ago under normal circumstances, but there is still a hardcore of zealots still trying to convince people (and themselves) that it is still a viable platform. And what is the basis for this comparison. Amigas kicked ass, got mismanaged and thrown around from corp to corp, pillaged for the tech and left for dead. Tho, I guess it is a good thing others like "dead" projects. Remember, Unix was declared dead years ago. Wrongly no doubt. As Twain said, "the rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated." >>This story shows that the core development team of their new OS realises that the Mac will die - they want to have an x86 version ready so that they will still be able to find work after the Mac inevitably dies. Not with iMacs selling this well. They will release Darwin, because they HAVE TOO. They will release Aqua and Quartz when you pry it out of their cold dead hands. Not that this will happen in your lifetime. Go back under the bridge. Tom Dutton (username = B-B) Too lazy to log in right now.
  • Darwin: Mach kernel + *BSD + Apple's driver model.
    Aqua: PDF-based graphic engine relying on Darwin services, basis for the two main OS X APIs-
    Carbon: Macintosh Toolbox APIs that suck less.
    Cocoa: {NeXT|NEXT|Next|Open|OPEN}{Step|STEP} 6.0
    (5.0 was Rhapsody, aka "Mac OS X Server 1.0")

    Mac OS X Consumer 1.0: Distro of all of the above plus a basic application/utility suite, all prettified up to pass the grandma test (note how S. Jobs was crowing yesterday about the 28% of Apple sales that are to people buying their first computer). It is currently unknown what access to the BSD command line will be available -- in DP3 Terminal.app was only installed for the administrator by default, haven't installed DP4 just quite yet.

    Mac OS X Server 2.0: Presumably will be Consumer 1 plus BSD applications and services, many probably with Cocoa GUIs on top. This is the one for geeks, not Consumer, which those who whine about no CLI in Consumer are stupid for forgetting.
  • OK, lots of Slashdotters are really out of touch with the Apple & the Mac market. Here's a few points to keep folks on the reality track:
    • Apple is a hardware company. MacOS is simply another way of selling their boxes.
    • Apple is not interested in becoming a OS vendor. They have a closed platform to develop for and know their limitations: the wild-'n'wooly world of Intel x86 boxes is not a profitable place for them. They've stated repeatedly and has the numbers to back it up: they're not going to become an OS vendor. They're more likely to start selling hairdryers (or the fabled iBrator) then shrink-wrapped MacOS-X-for-Intel-x86 at Wal-Mart.
    • The chance of Apple opening up Quartz, Carbon, Cocoa, QuickTime, or Aqua to Open Source or GPL is something approaching nil. These are the technologies Apple has paid a pretty penny to develop and their customers pay a premium to use. If you were an Apple stock-holder would you want them to do so?
    • Apple never had "clones" (Apple's proprietary "Toolbox" embedded in a ROM stopped that.) They did have a "licensing program" with which they attempted to reach markets that Apple itself couldn't. They killed the program when the licensees started to savage Apple's core markets. Apple was loosing money on both the licenses and on the lost sales - not a smart move for a company and one they eventually stopped. Oh - and Power Computing? it was about to collapse anyway as it's financials proved out.
    • Apple is again over 5% of the market and growing quickly. That doesn't mean they're about to challenge MS's OS dominance but they're going strong and expanding their market. That's not bad for a company that was written off a few years ago.
    • Darwin is not the same as MacOS X - it's simply the Next-derived Mach kernel and support services. Yes, it's the base layer, but it's not the goodies. Getting it to run in Intel x86 is no great feat - NextStep was ported to 5 CPU's already including Intel x86 (PowerPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS.) All Apple's done is maintained that Intel x86 portability for the kernel. The big question would be if Apple could do the same for the other layers such as the Quartz rendering layer or the Aqua interface. Without those you've just got a very nice, very mature formerly-commercial Mach implementation - hot but not MacOS X.
    • MacOS X has been shipping for well over a year. MacOS XServer is available at your local Apple Vendor or direct from Apple. What everyone is talking about is the MacOS X Workstation implementation. While everyone's been staring at that hand though Apple's been busy learning and tweaking with the Server version so when it finally ships the rest they'll have it nailed.
    • Porting to Darwin won't be any more difficult then porting to any other BSD. With X now in place it'll be that much easier to use an interface. The big question will be how easy it'll be to make those same apps work through the Quartz/Aqua layers and become "native". If it's as straightforward as it now appears then Apple may have a tremendous position sitting at the crossroads of the market.
    • Don't ignore the contributions Apple can make to the market as a whole. They've already pioneered the use of XML for putting a uniform graphical interface on the notoriously idiosyncratic *nix config files.^1 They also provide a great transition market for ISV's heading towards the *nix market but wanting to go through a more traditional platform. This could well be the *nix for "the rest of them" (the non-geek population.)
    • As to behind schedule - well the beta is indeed going to be a few months behind schedule. How does this affect the rest of the timeline? Well, Apple hasn't changed their "will ship pre-installed in December 2001" commitment. Furthermore with Apple's Unified Motherboard Architecture finally in place (gone are the days of 50 models a year all with unique slots and ROMs and bus variations!) this looks like a legitimate possibility.
    • Finally, remember Apple has been a massive developer of cool ahead-of-their-time technologies. Apparently Jobs has been going through the warehouse and pulling some of these off of the shelf now that they've a strong OS and a massively powerful CPU to ride upon. Expect to see some surprises coming out from Apple - Jobs is ever the showman and no slouch when it comes to hot tech.

    -- Michael

    1. Yes, some invariably CS Sophomore will pop up saying *they* thought of whatever, in this case XML-based forms for providing a uniform interface to the various config files years ago and mebbe they even have a few lines of code somewhere - well it didn't really happen then and Apple has now made it so. That alone is "A Good Thing".

  • Compatibility? (Score:3)

    by molog ( 110171 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @04:40AM (#1069926) Homepage Journal
    Was this done to bring over Unix apps to Darwin/MacOS X, or is Aqua something that actually runs on X11? Well it definitely looks like Darwin can be considered a full fledged BSD system now but what is Apple really trying to do?
    Molog

    So Linus, what are we doing tonight?

  • Apple produces superior hardware (how many more of early Apples are still running today comparing to 8x80s? why Apple gets so much more kick out of a MHz?) and people are putting (subjectively) superior OS on the HW just to get more juice out of it + of course, the hack value. Remember Linux for Apple ][ or 8080 - not a lot of use but was done just for the sake of it.

    __________________________________________

  • This url [apple.com] has source. If you haven't already you'll have to register for a password with Apple.
  • Why would I run MacOS X on intel when I can already run Linux or one of the BSDs?

    I think a large part of it is that "you" aren't the target audience for this. The people who benefit from Darwin, at least for now, are the ones already invested in NeXT, coding for it and runing businesses with it.

  • Make use of legacy hardware? (Score:5)

    by Croaker ( 10633 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @05:52AM (#1069941)
    <wildassguess>

    How about this... say Apple is making a play for the server market (go ahead, say it!). Let's suppose an IS administrator is sold on the Apple OS X server platform but... he has a server room full of x86 legacy hardware. Ripping out all of those machines and replacing them with new Mac hardware, while great for Apple, would put the cost of moving over to the Mac platform out of reach.

    Along comes Darwin, which for many server-level tasks looks like OS X. The Apple folks can sell the IS folks on upgrading their exisitng x86 hardware to Darwin, making it interoperate with the new OS X servers, and down the line the customer will very likely replace the x86 hardware with more capable and more compatible Macs.
    </wildassguess>
  • If you were running the company it would have been shut down by now...instead of rising out of it's ashes like it did and do such a 180 degree turn around.

    Apple is doing better today than it EVER did. They have total focus on what they're doing and so far they've done no wrong with Jobs at the helm again.

    Killing off the clones was the best thing they could have done, as all the little clone companies out there were just stealing business away from Apple itself, instead of helping them.

    They're also out there leading the pack again instead of trying to play catch up. You may think the iMac and the iBook are simply gimmics...if that's the case then why are they such a resounding sucess? You can hem and haw all you want but the facts speak for themselves: the iMac is a sucess! Love it or hate it, it's still a sucess! Say it's just eye candy or that it not having a floppy drive all you want: it's STILL a sucess!
  • I use PC's at home and at work, but am really more of a UNIX person in my heart (using Linux at home and work where and when I can).

    But, I would argue strongly that Apple still offers a better quality and easier to use product (at the consumer level) than just about anything in the PC world.

    For example, you can't beat the dead simplicity of the iMac with almost no cabling to fiddle with and a design that makes it semi-portable for dragging about the house. If you want to drag the thing out to your porch for a few hours, it's not too hard with the iMac and a pain in the rear if you have a PC (yes, I know you could use a laptop - but that's a lot of money for such a luxury).

    In the G4, they have a very nice machine that is also really easy to expand - why can't PC's be that well laid out and simple to open!

    I agree with another poster that it's really the software that's holding them back - OS X sounds like a great system, and I think I'll look into trying out the beta at home when it comes out.

  • One of the biggest advantages of running MacOS X on the Intel core is the ability to join the slobbering masses of MacOS advocates. Think of the joy of not only being a Linux Zealot but doubling up with being a MacOS Zealot as well! :)

    You are right. It really doesn't make much of a difference for the Intel crowd since MacOS X/Darwin is a *BSD Unix system. How many *BSD distros are their already for Intel? It only really makes a difference if Apple allows Quartz and Aqua and the other components of the full MacOS X distro to migrate.

  • This may be an Urban Legend (TM)

    I can recall a story from long ago and far away that once upon a time apple had an earlier version of one of their OS recompiled and running on and intel platform.

    they dropped the project because it ran a bit faster than their own official Apple hardware, and they didn't want to shoot themselves in the hardware department.

    so this raises the question of what is the current performance compared between hardware platforms, and is this even relevant anymore.

  • Who says that a story posted on Slashdot has to have something to do with the furthering of Linux? Darwin looks pretty cool as an OS in its on right and has zilch to do with Linux. If anything, it's helping BSD gain wider acceptance. It's Darwin's spotlight, not Linux's.
  • It doesn't matter if it is or not, because Darwin isn't really supposed to be an OS in it's own right. Some people (namely Carmack) had an affinity for OSX and decided to contribute to its base OS. Aside from that, Darwin has some cool features, namely the kits.
  • Thanks to the information posted by respondents, I was able to find an Email newsletter archive that had an interest synopsis of the Apple Star Trek Project. It is found in TransWarp #14 [baynet.de], dated about 1997.

    Here it is in full, as they took it from the Mercury News

    APPLE'S STAR TREK PROJECT

    Previous Apple coverage

    Published: Nov. 1, 1997
    BY JODI MARDESICH
    Mercury News Staff Writer

    What do you think? Cool technology or simply a flight of fancy? Would the 'Star Trek' project have changed Apple's fortunes? Five years ago, a stealth group of engineers from Apple Computer Inc. and Novell Inc. took on a challenge many thought impossible: to make the Macintosh operating system run on Intel Corp. processors.

    They raced toward a prototype deadline of Halloween 1992. They made it, but in mid-1993, the project -- dubbed Star Trek -- was killed by political infighting. Today, having lost five crucial years, struggling Apple is again thought to be moving toward Intel processors.

    Thursday evening, the group reunited to reminisce and to contemplate what might have been. If Apple had upstaged Microsoft's Windows 95 with a Mac OS for Intel computers, would Microsoft software now control nearly 90 percent of all PCs?

    All the Trekkies have left to show of the project is an old hard disk drive with the still-operable code; a postmortem video; an outdated business plan; a technical manual; and the traditional project T-shirt, with its Star Trek ``communicator'' emblem on the front and, on the back, a depiction of a crazed guy gouging his eyes out with a pencil.

    And they have their memories.

    They began in the summer of 1992, when a group of four from Novell and 14 from Apple quietly moved into a building facing Intel Corp.'s Santa Clara headquarters. Each was supplied an office, a Mac, and a PC donated by Intel. To this day, few outsiders have known of the group's existence.

    For the engineers, the lure was a technically challenging project. For Mark Gonzales, a Harvard MBA freshly back from a rejuvenating sabbatical, it was a risky but potentially revolutionary project. ``We weren't sure if it was a good idea to run on Intel,'' said Fred Huxham, who left Apple in 1995. ``Mark had these grand plans. He thought people would at some point buy a new OS, and it could be Star Trek.''

    For Fred Monroe, working on the project was a heady experience. At 22, just out of college, he got to travel to Japan and to show the software to future Apple CEO Michael Spindler and a top NEC Corp. executive. Because he was so young, he felt he had something to prove.

    ``We worked like dogs. It was some of the most fun I've had working,'' said Monroe, co-founder with Huxham of FredLabs Inc., a software company in San Francisco.

    Because they made their Halloween deadline -- having completed a prototype in just three months -- they got bonuses of $15,000 to $25,000 and were sent, on Apple's dime, to Cancun.

    In December 1992, a few team members showed Apple's board their top-secret project and got an immediate OK to continue.

    Novell executives, hoping for a weapon to blunt Microsoft's growing dominance in the computer industry, were stunned at the progress. Darrell Miller, a former Novell vice president, kept exclaiming, ``I can't believe it,'' Huxham said. ``He was going nuts.''

    In the end, it wasn't technical difficulties that derailed the project. It was internal politics, especially the loss of key backers.

    Star Trek's biggest supporters were Roger Heinen, an Apple vice president hired away by Microsoft in the middle of the project, and John Sculley, Apple's CEO, who was forced out not long after. At the time, Apple was switching its software from the Motorola 68000 processor to the PowerPC, and executives were concerned that bifurcating their efforts could sink both projects.

    There were a few other roadblocks: Apple tried to persuade computer makers to include the operating system on their PCs, but found resistance. Gonzales, the project manager, and a few others took the software on the road.

    They stopped at Dell Computer in Texas, where they showed Star Trek to founder Michael Dell. Dell was impressed, but told Gonzales bluntly that unless it was free, Dell wouldn't be able to use the promising operating system because Dell was paying Microsoft for its Windows OS for each computer his company shipped, regardless of whether the computer shipped with Windows.

    They also would have had to convince applications software developers to rework their applications so they could run on the new system. Huxham maintains this task wouldn't have been too time-consuming.

    ``There were definitely some tricky problems left, still,'' Huxham said. ``I still believe we could have finished and it would have been interesting, if nothing else.''

    If they had kept to their schedule, the developers figure they could have beaten Windows 95 to the market by a year.

    After the dinner Thursday, Huxham hooked up his Intel 486-based computer to an Apple monitor and turned it on. While going through the boot-up process, the system kept hitting snags. One particularly ominous error message flashed: ``Missing Operating System.''

    ``I thought that's what we did,'' one of the Trekkies said in dismay.

    After several attempts, Huxham's magic worked: The computer played the familiar chord that signals the Mac starting. The smiling Mac graced the PC's screen.

    A mouse click later, these words appeared: ``Star Trek: Boldly Going Where No Mac Has Gone Before.'' Or since.

  • Eeeps - mistake.

    Make the ship date for Mac OSX Consumer pre-installed January 2001 (not 11 months later.)

    Actually, a bit more on ship dates. I'd like to note that Next was usually quite good about getting things out on schedule and back under Jobs Apple's ship-dates and product-avialability have improved dramatically.

    -- Michael

    ps - For the l00sers who constantly post to every story saying "Please explain this to me" or "What does XYZ mean" fer Cthulus-sake this is news for GEEKS on the freaking WEB! Just how damn hard is it to actually look up something on your own? It's not like your ass has to ever even leave it's comfy chair... If you're lost with things like Carbon, Cocoa, Darwin, etc. then why not just go to the obvious place like apple.com or at least to a search engine before bleating out your ignorance.

    Sorry, but every time an interesting story comes out 30% of the postings are from folks who couldn't be bothered to actully read the reference material before compulsively posting and another 30% are from folks too lazy to make at least an attempt to look up something for themselves (hint: your butt is at the end of your thumb!)

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