Posted on 03/28/2007 6:51:38 AM PDT by Halfmanhalfamazing
An OS is just a big application.
How far back is software made for OSX compatible?
Most big software requires at least 10.2, which is where OS X somewhat stabilized. OS X itself was compatible with OS 9 only through a sort-of virtual machine, and is now compatible only with an API that is pretty close to the OS 9 API (OS 9 programs must still be partially rewritten to work on OS X).
Does Safari work on System 7?
Only OS X.
Essentially, Apple did what you're talking about. They realized that compatibility would be a nightmare, slowing things down, increasing errors, and resulting in bloat. That's why they started clean with OS X.
Microsoft could have done that with Vista and had a much better operating system in the end. Six years to make Vista. They could have written a new system from scratch in that time that uses the .NET APIs (killing Win32 and MFC). And instead of working on native backwards compatibility have those people work on a seamless VM (they already have Virtual Server) with embedded XP for those who need backwards compatibility.
Conceptually yes an OS is just a big application, but not really. And when it comes to making applications the OS is something else entirely, it's the platform (or platforms) your app is supposed to run on, it determines how you will write your application.
And yet the world doesn't seem to complain about Apple's line in the sand.
The problem MS runs into is the OS's version of downward compatibility. Something often ignored is that when a new version of an OS (again any OS, not just an MS thing) is being made they have to decide how many "old" applications should be able to be run on it. Intially when they were talking about Longhorn (the project name, nobody said Vista yet) they said it would have 0 downward compatibility, there was even talk of dumping the Windows name. But there was the predictible hue and cry, no matter wht MS does people bitch although in this case the complaints were right. Being the OS of the server farm they just couldn't do 0 downward compatibility, that would have put them in a position of forcing customers to upgrade both their client software (like Office) and server software (like Exchange and SQL) which would be incredibly expensive, this would cripple Longhorn's rollout. Not to mention the monopoly trouble they'd get into by rolling out an OS that "intentionally" broke ALL competing software. While I do think a clean break would have resulted in a better OS given MS's position in the market there was no possibility of them doing it, between irritated customers and renewing the monopoly suits it would have killed the company. Life is different when you own 80% of the marketshare than it is when you own 7%, there are a lot more butts that need kissing.
And the VM solution wouldn't have been real, remember the current wave of actually usable VM software from MS came out AFTER Longhorn started development, and while it's handy for some stuff I'm not sold on it as a production environment solution, there are too many potential gotchas when it comes to saving data. Had they only broken some downward compatibility it might have worked, but not with the OS breaking all existing productivity apps, what would be the point of upgrading to Longhorn if you're just going to run all your apps in a virtual version of XP? Better to not upgrade the OS and keep running your apps on real XP.
In that sense, OS X also ended support for earlier processors, nothing below a PowerPC G3. Leopard might actually end G3 support. Linux was also written for a minimum 386 at a time when everyone was still trying to be compatible with 286 and lower systems. I'm sure that helped.
Had they only broken some downward compatibility it might have worked, but not with the OS breaking all existing productivity apps, what would be the point of upgrading to Longhorn if you're just going to run all your apps in a virtual version of XP?
Good point. At least they could have done a wrapper the other way around. Right now a lot of old Windows code is there, in Vista wrappers. They could have made new Vista code with alternate Win32 wrappers (essentially a compatibility layer). The experience with Apple shows that this doesn't mean everyone will stick to the old API, as many want the rich features and easy programming of the new one.
Back on the VM, I wasn't thinking of a total VM. Launch an XP program and it will run a virtual environment behind the scenes to handle it, but you'll still use your regular hard drive. No virtual hard drive image, just a folder with a tweaked install of Windows XP that executes in a VM address space. Apple used something like this in its OS 9 compatibility mode, although Microsoft, being a couple years later, could have done even better and made it more transparent.
Open Source makes good money sense, for profit minded corporations, and for their profit minded customers.
It's not work for free, it's work for a different form of payment - share and share alike.
I (and/or the company I work for -- I'm being vague here) run alot of Open Source work side by side with proprietary work. Where I have a lead over my competition, and a particular expertise, it's proprietary and paid for in good old fashioned money. Where it's infrastructure or less bleeding edge, and not something that I have any paricular expertise in, but still depend on, it's Open Source. For Open Source work, I'm sharing the development with my peers at competitor companies.
I like to say, when involved in internal discussions over whether to Open Source a particular piece of software, or not, that it's not a matter of if, but when, it will be to our advantage to Open Source it.
Five years ago, I managed a group of developers, doing it all inhouse, proprietary. Now the group is gone, laid off, and I write the proprietary parts myself, and share the load with others for the Open Source work. My customers are getting better product, minus the proprietary lock in for much of it, for less money. And it's using the same infrastructure as what they buy from my competition, so it's a big win for them as well.
Any of my competitors that didn't make the switch in the area we sell are toast; they can no longer compete. Our customers get the benefit of a dozen world class experts in the area of their needs, for the cost of one such, whereas before they paid for a couple of experts and ten additional less experienced developers, for the cost of a dozen head count. And it's much easier now for customers with particular expertise of their own to build on top of what they get from vendors.
It's good old fashioned capitalism, by a different means.
Essentially, it's an intellectual property barter system.
The end quality of what customers get, and the pace of technology improvements, have both increased dramatically over what it was under the old fashioned, proprietary, model.
Even those I laid off are doing just fine - working in new companies, leveraging the rapidly increasing opportunities presented by Open Source infrastructure and technology gains to make money in new ways.
Unlike physical items, intellectual property is not a scarce commodity. An essential property of software is that sharing it increases its value in many cases. Imagine we are all out in the desert, in boats run aground, with a few gallons of water each. We would likely each hoard our water ration. But if water begot more water, and if we could each pour our few gallons over the side and float all boats in the newly rising sea, then that would change the entire economics of it.
Just because it is a different economic model doesn't mean its anti-capitalist.
Which isn't to deny that some Open Source advocates, such as Richard Stallman (rms), author of the key open source license, the GPL, aren't leftist or perhaps, I don't know, anti-capitalist.
This is the best pitch you can come up with?
Perhaps you can afford to buy new software and hardware within the planned cycles. I can't.
Wait, you're "halfamazing" but you need to beg? LOL
It's put out by a radical green party leftist. And here you are ready to defend it, like usual.
Except NEWBI3, he went around for weeks claiming on here all support of Windows 2K was ending, even though it doesn't till 2010. This whole thread is a joke, linux users are forced to upgrade more often than anyone, which is why they're so jealous of Microsoft on this issue and make up these ridiculous threads.
Well the 3 software companies with the highest income are Microsoft, Oracle, and Symantec. How has open source helped these companies, and their employees?
It's not work for free, it's work for a different form of payment - share and share alike.
Does that actually put food on the table somehow?
Any of my competitors that didn't make the switch in the area we sell are toast; they can no longer compete.
So unless you sign up for this free open source thingie, your business is doomed anyway?
The end quality of what customers get, and the pace of technology improvements, have both increased dramatically over what it was under the old fashioned, proprietary, model.
So all this cheap and apparently even free foreign stuff is just what we all need, you're saying?
Just because it is a different economic model doesn't mean its anti-capitalist. Which isn't to deny that some Open Source advocates, such as Richard Stallman (rms), author of the key open source license, the GPL, aren't leftist or perhaps, I don't know, anti-capitalist.
Thanks, then you'll understand my post and why I don't agree with yours hopefully. At least you seem to speak the facts and not try to baffle us with BS like so many of the linux crowd. Some of them are so far out they are probably the biggest hinderance to Linux of all.
I was not talking to you..
Open Source seems to have more advantages in smaller, more varied markets, where the development costs are higher per installed system, and more worth sharing. Open Source is also valuable in markets that are not primarily for software products, but are for other hardware or products where the software is secondary to the deal.
For an example, most of the Top 500 Supercomputing Sites are running Open Source software.
Open Source isn't really helping Microsoft at all, rather it is harming Microsoft, as Microsoft would be the first to admit, I suspect.
I don't directly sell the Open Source software I write. That goes into the Linux kernel, along with the work of hundreds or thousands of others. Then my employer takes that kernel, and some kick ass hardware we build, and some additional proprietary software we write, and sells some high performance computer systems.
It costs us less than it did 5 or 10 years ago to put an operating system on that computer, we provide a substantially better operating system than we could back then, and our customers appreciate the lower prices and improved interoperability, extensibility and absence of vendor lock in, over what they had 5 or 10 years ago.
Which is one of the most distressing things about it, that technology of that caliber is floating freely about the world.
Yes, proprietary software, your company still needs it as do all. Share the protocols, not the software itself.
It's a good model, and for some work, the best we have.
So is the Wal*Mart distribution and retail business model a very good for what they do. But I wouldn't want to impose that model on Amazon, Apple, McDonalds, Boeing, or the lemonade stand of the kid next door.
Healthy capitalist economies support a rich variety of business models. Most companies of any size blend multiple such models. This is all good.
Sure, in some previous decade, it would have been and should have been a capital offense of treason to publish such technology, firing squad at dawn. But now, that technology is one of the many essential elements of a blossoming of further technology and an essential element of yet more new business models.
Get real. Every bit of technology has its life cycle. You can (and jolly well should) bottle it up and gain proprietary or national advantage for a while, but eventually you are just being foolish, or worse, to impede it.
One never has a permanent edge in technology. You just keep getting to the new stuff first. The height of the technical secrecy walls does not matter so much as the speed of continued development.
And don't worry. I could give you, or the Chinese, the entire Linux kernel, as we do, and they would not have a chance of building what we can build for our good friends and allies, at the same time we built it. Sure, they will buy the other key pieces (illegally, but eventually) and copy it and steal it. By which time, we are another order of magnitude bigger, faster, and more powerful.
But not putting a few parts of that technology in the Linux kernel would have essentially killed some of the key development we are doing for the next generation, because continuing, as we did in the 1990's and before, to write all the software ourselves, would have cost too much, and taken too long, and not earned enough revenue from the current generation to pay for the next generation.
Meanwhile, one of our biggest enemies is left refurbishing grenades and AK-47's from the Russians and sneaking box cutters on board airplanes. They are so far behind the technology power curve it's silly.
And the other of our biggest enemies is right here in the good old U. S. of A., in its universities, news rooms, and houses of Congress, with full access to all this technology as distinguished American citizens. They are the Left.
Yes, those same far out leftists we were talking about. You should be spending your time trying to correct them, not me.
Nice in theory, but in practice the code is the only full spec of the protocols.
You have a lot better chance of maintaining that edge when you're not giving it away to others for free. That free software you say your company is benefitting from is also going straight to every communist dictator on the globe. Instead of them of having to beg borrow or steal it from us anymore, now they get it on a silver platter.
You don't have to share code to meet a protocol or a format spec. Sure borrowing someone else's implementation is the fastest way to deploy, but it's not required.
^^^^^^^^^^^I agree that planned obsolscence is bad but I can hardly fault apple for it^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Why?
Don't tell me that you'd sit there and say that planned obsolescence.......
Bad when Microsoft does it.
Good when Apple does it.
It doesn't work that way. That's like saying that pork filled bills.........
Bad when democrats do it
good when republicans do it
It just doesn't work that way. Either the activity is bad, or it's not.
^^^^^^^^^^^I will be upgrading the 10.5 as soon as its out on my 4 y/o powerbook..^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
So if apple had said screw you and not made 10.5 for PPC models would you all of a sudden be against planned obsolescence?
I'm just curious, I don't understand.
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