Yup if you include the NeXT days then OSX is indeed a decade old.
And if you exclude all the NeXT technologies that were dropped in favor of new ones (DPS, etc), and then figure the start date for the brand spanking new stuff (Carbon), it's closer to the original four years.
About the only things left over from NeXT are the kernel (which underwent a huge round of updates with pretty fundamental core changes anyway), and the beginnings of what is now Cocoa (which has expanded and grown waaaaaay past what it originally was as OpenSTEP).
I am excited by this "Unixy" ideology. I wonder how large apps like Photoshop will fair against specialized apps. I think of large apps as being frameworks. Photoshops masking tools are good but there is always that better plugin. And so on and so on and so on. Soon the plugin companies will realize that they can "glue" their apps together using some of the tech that Apple has created and they will be freed from being "just" a plugin. I still like to Opendoc principal of binding many smaller apps/processes into a flexible sum.
Longhorn is the extension of "wizards" it wants to grab your hand and lead you everywhere but of course only hitting the "MS approved" spots on the way to your destination. No thanks Bill.
I've heard many people on these boards and others talk about the technology called "OpenDoc".
Nope took almost 4. SJ came back to the fold in what 97 and Public Beta hit in 2000 after some Preview Releases.
Remember that before they bought NeXT and started on what is now OS X, Apple's "Next Generation OS" development was floundering for a number of years on abortive attempts such as Copland. Looks like Microsoft is having many of the same problems now on their attempts.
It does seem strange. The article mentioned a high turnover rate as one of the deciding factors to jettison Avalon. I had always thought that once M$ assimilated you into the collective, you were there for the duration.
most people at MS are contractors,the few that arent many of them are management, or get rich and leave. Microsoft also even in their office apps, does not know what half the code does, so they tack on and leave old code in because if they remove it, even if they cant see that its being used, the software no longer works(main reason for example that excel still features ms excel 4 macro language capability, it isnt for compatibility, its because they couldnt get rid of it
WinNT was delayed many many years, long enough that MS had to keep extending their win 95 codebase.
If you are reading a tech article where the author is suprised by longhorn's delays, then it is probably a good idea to disregard the whole article as somewhat uninformed. An elementery grasp of the complexity and history of OS development makes Longhorn's progress look par for the course.
Windows Nt was out way before windows 95. Windows 95(orignally called windows 4.0) was supposed to be out over a year before it actually came out. basically every microsoft os is supposed to be, according to microsoft all knew re-writes and all new stuff, and each version is nothing more than what I would consider a small update. remember whister and all that was supposed to have? nada, win2k, xp, now longhorn. all minor updates that originally were supposed to be "the best most complex OS ever made and re-written from the ground up", its called MS-BS
To those of you who are programmers out there. Can you explain to me why a company with as much money and personnel working on Longhorn as MS has, why they seem unable to get the job done in a reasonable time? Seems very strange to me.
Simple: It has nothing to do with the number of developers, nor the skill or intelligence of those developers.
If the guys dictating strategy and doing architectural work suck, it doesn't matter how much talent they throw at a problem. An elegantly implemented piece of crap is still a piece of crap.
MS has fallen into a trap of their own making: On the one hand, they're so fat with cash and talent that every project becomes a big, complicated, do-everything megawidget (see: OneNote); on the other hand, their monopoly is sustained by the same old same old, so they can't revisit their basic interface or applications without opening the playing field up to competitors by enraging their user base.
[edit: what Kickaha said ++]
It would seem that the DOJ's refusal to break up the MS monopoly they have
remember whister and all that was supposed to have? nada, win2k, xp, now longhorn. all minor updates that originally were supposed to be "the best most complex OS ever made and re-written from the ground up", its called MS-BS
It's called "FUD", and many years ago IBM was forbade from using it. Just successfully doing that would have been an incredibly powerful ruling from the courts. Innovation would have had a chance in the Windows world.
Windows Nt was out way before windows 95. Windows 95(orignally called windows 4.0) was supposed to be out over a year before it actually came out. basically every microsoft os is supposed to be, according to microsoft all knew re-writes and all new stuff, and each version is nothing more than what I would consider a small update. remember whister and all that was supposed to have? nada, win2k, xp, now longhorn. all minor updates that originally were supposed to be "the best most complex OS ever made and re-written from the ground up", its called MS-BS
Yep. I was referring to the fact that NT wasn't finished enough to become the replacement that it was intended. All sorts of technologies didn't arrive until later versions of the NT family. Most of these were features popular with consumers but not critical to business boxes. Microsoft would have loved to put all of their tech into a single OS but quickly discovered that this is Herculean task.
I think this speaks more toward the complexity of OS development than toward any sort of short-coming by Microsoft.
I think it's their metadata importer/indexing standard, but I could be mistaken.
No...OpenDoc was an old Apple framework created as a competitor to OLE for System 7.5. Remember Cyberdog? It was built on OpenDoc. Steve killed it shortly after he came back to Apple.
I think it's their metadata importer/indexing standard, but I could be mistaken.
Why doncha Google it?
If I remember right (Wikipedia seems to agree) OpenDoc was almost a new philosophy by Apple of how documents and applications relate. The idea was that your work is centered around documents, not the applications that make them, and the computer should behave the same way. Instead of opening your document in a WP program, you'd open a WP program in your document. And maybe your document has images that can open a graphics editor, or tables that can open a spreadsheet. Instead of being monolithic dinosaurs, applications would be small, focused things, which do one thing well; the document becomes a container for all these little applets. It's almost sort of the UNIX philosophy of "small programs that do one thing well but that all work together marvelously", extended to the office desktop environment. But the idea never took off; instead, Office took over, and OpenDoc died a lonely death.
Someone who knows more about it than me can tell me if I'm wrong, though.
Kickaha and Amorph couldn't moderate themselves out of a paper bag. Abdicate responsibility and succumb to idiocy. Two years of letting a member make personal attacks against others, then stepping aside when someone won't put up with it. Not only that but go ahead and shut down my posting priviledges but not the one making the attacks. Not even the common decency to abide by their warning (afer three days of absorbing personal attacks with no mods in sight), just shut my posting down and then say it might happen later if a certian line is crossed. Bullshit flag is flying, I won't abide by lying and coddling of liars who go off-site, create accounts differing in a single letter from my handle with the express purpose to decieve and then claim here that I did it. Everyone be warned, kim kap sol is a lying, deceitful poster.
Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.
Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
You've gout your terms all screwed up. FUD: is Fear, Uncertainty and Dissent, something a competitor or troll uses when bashing a product or company. IBM got tweaked in the early "Vaporware" era, where they tried to use overly ambitious press releases as a way to hold up sagging stock prices, even when they knew they would be unable to deliver.
This is exactly what Microsoft does: vaporware. This is why it's frustrating and stagnates the whole industry. When were the features of Longhorn first announced? How many other companies could have been working on them but no longer felt it was economically viable?
I would guess that Microsoft is in anti-trust violation by doing this. They shouldn't be allowed to pre-announce software by any more than six months and should have to pay out the wazoo for every day they're late.
If I remember right (Wikipedia seems to agree) OpenDoc was almost a new philosophy by Apple of how documents and applications relate. The idea was that your work is centered around documents, not the applications that make them, and the computer should behave the same way. Instead of opening your document in a WP program, you'd open a WP program in your document. And maybe your document has images that can open a graphics editor, or tables that can open a spreadsheet. Instead of being monolithic dinosaurs, applications would be small, focused things, which do one thing well; the document becomes a container for all these little applets. It's almost sort of the UNIX philosophy of "small programs that do one thing well but that all work together marvelously", extended to the office desktop environment. But the idea never took off; instead, Office took over, and OpenDoc died a lonely death.
Someone who knows more about it than me can tell me if I'm wrong, though.
you're essentially right, but the real reason why opendoc was destined for the scrap heap wasn't those heading the project, it was consumer demand and how the consumer typically spends his/her money. the common opendoc example was to make some sort of mini-word processing applet-esque application. then if you wanted a spellchecker, you could buy one and add it on. and then in the halcyon dream of this era, there would be spell-checker manufacturers competing for the best spell-checker.
of course, there are a few glaring holes that makes this a non-profitable business direction. first of all, you're not goin to get competition over small applets. you might have one or two companies that make 'em. i mean, once you're spelling is checked, it's friggin' CHECKED.
also, opendoc was during aa day when high-speed internet access was going through its birthing throes, and getting an isdn line to your business required divine intervention. hell, at the time, i thought i was blazing at 33.6. so, at the time, where would you buy these applets? online? doubtful. few people had confidence in even getting online (remember, the imac effort to get people online came after opendoc), much less actually giving away credit card info online. maybe the retail store? who's going to try to get their spell-checker boxed and shipped in the hopes someone will buy it. plus, companies don't exactly like to make seven hundred trips to the store (or wherever) to buy add-ons whenever they realize they are missing something. they are what microsoft caters to... and "everything in the same box" crowd.
and third, as much as i am loathe to say this, as i have sveral friends and one family member in the programming development world, you make a profit off of upgrades. period. just like int he real world, it is 300% more difficult to get someone to buy a NEW application than it is to get them to just upgrade their old one. and again, if the applet philosophy heeld true to "small applications doing one thing well," then once that applet does its one thing as well as possible, then the only thing left to do is... you guessed it, ADD FEATURES.
edit: in a perfect world, if you made a great opendoc component, it could be reused everywhere, but from a larger developers standpoint, why make an application that lacks full functionality? that's a hard sell. you could make the case that apps like photoshop have had plug-in architecture for a long time, but a good counterargument could be made that technically, there's not a heck of a lot you can't do with photoshop, and many plug-ins simply make functions that would take several steps and a lot of knowledge in channels, methematics, etc. to pull off the same thing.
edit: by the way, if you hadn't noticed yet, adobe will soon find themselves painted into a feature-bloated corner, too. the added features to photoshop and illustrator seem like tacked on macros or, int he case of dimensions for illustrator, force-fed applications into the wrong environment. adobe and macromedia are now trying desperately to get into new markets, a bit too late (adobe, see: video and sound) and trimming down current larger apps to make more revenue streams (macromedia, see: flex, breeze, contribute, etc.)
honestly, in the next three to five years, i see a cottage industry BLOSSOMING from all the feature bloat that windows (and other software vendors, as mentioned above) has made in their applications making their way, in surgical, methodical strikes, into our own OS. if it makes sense for apple to do it, they will add it in. if not, they'll let the smaller developers take those ideas and port them over as well, as there will be a huge demand for competing smaller products on the mac, where the din of clashing retail boxes won't be so confusing to joe sixpack consumer at your local compusa.
i mean, hell, if i am a developer starting out, if i have a great idea, or if i can just steal a great idea from a windows app, i can suddenyl be a VERY big fish in a small pond on the mac, and then when the rest of the developers start coming over with cross-platform stuff, i'll have a huge head start.
Comments
Originally posted by the cool gut
What have any of their OS's brought to the table??
Touche'
Originally posted by hmurchison
Yup if you include the NeXT days then OSX is indeed a decade old.
And if you exclude all the NeXT technologies that were dropped in favor of new ones (DPS, etc), and then figure the start date for the brand spanking new stuff (Carbon), it's closer to the original four years.
About the only things left over from NeXT are the kernel (which underwent a huge round of updates with pretty fundamental core changes anyway), and the beginnings of what is now Cocoa (which has expanded and grown waaaaaay past what it originally was as OpenSTEP).
Originally posted by shetline
Because software is notoriously resistant to being rushed along regardless of how much money or personnel you throw at it.
This is the answer.
Originally posted by hmurchison
I am excited by this "Unixy" ideology. I wonder how large apps like Photoshop will fair against specialized apps. I think of large apps as being frameworks. Photoshops masking tools are good but there is always that better plugin. And so on and so on and so on. Soon the plugin companies will realize that they can "glue" their apps together using some of the tech that Apple has created and they will be freed from being "just" a plugin. I still like to Opendoc principal of binding many smaller apps/processes into a flexible sum.
Longhorn is the extension of "wizards" it wants to grab your hand and lead you everywhere but of course only hitting the "MS approved" spots on the way to your destination. No thanks Bill.
I've heard many people on these boards and others talk about the technology called "OpenDoc".
What is it exactly?
Mike
Originally posted by hmurchison
Nope took almost 4. SJ came back to the fold in what 97 and Public Beta hit in 2000 after some Preview Releases.
Remember that before they bought NeXT and started on what is now OS X, Apple's "Next Generation OS" development was floundering for a number of years on abortive attempts such as Copland. Looks like Microsoft is having many of the same problems now on their attempts.
Neil.
a.k.a. Arnel
Originally posted by opuscroakus
It does seem strange. The article mentioned a high turnover rate as one of the deciding factors to jettison Avalon. I had always thought that once M$ assimilated you into the collective, you were there for the duration.
most people at MS are contractors,the few that arent many of them are management, or get rich and leave. Microsoft also even in their office apps, does not know what half the code does, so they tack on and leave old code in because if they remove it, even if they cant see that its being used, the software no longer works(main reason for example that excel still features ms excel 4 macro language capability, it isnt for compatibility, its because they couldnt get rid of it
Originally posted by dfiler
WinNT was delayed many many years, long enough that MS had to keep extending their win 95 codebase.
If you are reading a tech article where the author is suprised by longhorn's delays, then it is probably a good idea to disregard the whole article as somewhat uninformed. An elementery grasp of the complexity and history of OS development makes Longhorn's progress look par for the course.
Windows Nt was out way before windows 95. Windows 95(orignally called windows 4.0) was supposed to be out over a year before it actually came out. basically every microsoft os is supposed to be, according to microsoft all knew re-writes and all new stuff, and each version is nothing more than what I would consider a small update. remember whister and all that was supposed to have? nada, win2k, xp, now longhorn. all minor updates that originally were supposed to be "the best most complex OS ever made and re-written from the ground up", its called MS-BS
Originally posted by MacsRGood4U
To those of you who are programmers out there. Can you explain to me why a company with as much money and personnel working on Longhorn as MS has, why they seem unable to get the job done in a reasonable time? Seems very strange to me.
Bad project management.
and a new, vastly simplified API that makes coding Windows forms much like writing a web page.
Can anyone say "Interface Builder since 2001"?
Originally posted by Amorph
Simple: It has nothing to do with the number of developers, nor the skill or intelligence of those developers.
If the guys dictating strategy and doing architectural work suck, it doesn't matter how much talent they throw at a problem. An elegantly implemented piece of crap is still a piece of crap.
MS has fallen into a trap of their own making: On the one hand, they're so fat with cash and talent that every project becomes a big, complicated, do-everything megawidget (see: OneNote); on the other hand, their monopoly is sustained by the same old same old, so they can't revisit their basic interface or applications without opening the playing field up to competitors by enraging their user base.
[edit: what Kickaha said ++]
It would seem that the DOJ's refusal to break up the MS monopoly they have
done a major disservice to Windows users
Originally posted by The General
remember whister and all that was supposed to have? nada, win2k, xp, now longhorn. all minor updates that originally were supposed to be "the best most complex OS ever made and re-written from the ground up", its called MS-BS
It's called "FUD", and many years ago IBM was forbade from using it. Just successfully doing that would have been an incredibly powerful ruling from the courts. Innovation would have had a chance in the Windows world.
Originally posted by The General
Windows Nt was out way before windows 95. Windows 95(orignally called windows 4.0) was supposed to be out over a year before it actually came out. basically every microsoft os is supposed to be, according to microsoft all knew re-writes and all new stuff, and each version is nothing more than what I would consider a small update. remember whister and all that was supposed to have? nada, win2k, xp, now longhorn. all minor updates that originally were supposed to be "the best most complex OS ever made and re-written from the ground up", its called MS-BS
Yep. I was referring to the fact that NT wasn't finished enough to become the replacement that it was intended. All sorts of technologies didn't arrive until later versions of the NT family. Most of these were features popular with consumers but not critical to business boxes. Microsoft would have loved to put all of their tech into a single OS but quickly discovered that this is Herculean task.
I think this speaks more toward the complexity of OS development than toward any sort of short-coming by Microsoft.
Originally posted by MPMoriarty
I've heard many people on these boards and others talk about the technology called "OpenDoc".
What is it exactly?
Mike
I think it's their metadata importer/indexing standard, but I could be mistaken.
Why doncha Google it?
Originally posted by Placebo
I think it's their metadata importer/indexing standard, but I could be mistaken.
No...OpenDoc was an old Apple framework created as a competitor to OLE for System 7.5. Remember Cyberdog? It was built on OpenDoc. Steve killed it shortly after he came back to Apple.
Originally posted by Placebo
I think it's their metadata importer/indexing standard, but I could be mistaken.
Why doncha Google it?
If I remember right (Wikipedia seems to agree) OpenDoc was almost a new philosophy by Apple of how documents and applications relate. The idea was that your work is centered around documents, not the applications that make them, and the computer should behave the same way. Instead of opening your document in a WP program, you'd open a WP program in your document.
Someone who knows more about it than me can tell me if I'm wrong, though.
Originally posted by Towel
Someone who knows more about it than me can tell me if I'm wrong, though.
I don't think I'm up to that....
Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.
Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
FUD = Fear, Uncertainty, and Disinformation. I've also heard the D as 'Doubt'.
Originally posted by AirSluf
You've gout your terms all screwed up. FUD: is Fear, Uncertainty and Dissent, something a competitor or troll uses when bashing a product or company. IBM got tweaked in the early "Vaporware" era, where they tried to use overly ambitious press releases as a way to hold up sagging stock prices, even when they knew they would be unable to deliver.
This is exactly what Microsoft does: vaporware. This is why it's frustrating and stagnates the whole industry. When were the features of Longhorn first announced? How many other companies could have been working on them but no longer felt it was economically viable?
I would guess that Microsoft is in anti-trust violation by doing this. They shouldn't be allowed to pre-announce software by any more than six months and should have to pay out the wazoo for every day they're late.
Originally posted by Towel
If I remember right (Wikipedia seems to agree) OpenDoc was almost a new philosophy by Apple of how documents and applications relate. The idea was that your work is centered around documents, not the applications that make them, and the computer should behave the same way. Instead of opening your document in a WP program, you'd open a WP program in your document.
Someone who knows more about it than me can tell me if I'm wrong, though.
you're essentially right, but the real reason why opendoc was destined for the scrap heap wasn't those heading the project, it was consumer demand and how the consumer typically spends his/her money. the common opendoc example was to make some sort of mini-word processing applet-esque application. then if you wanted a spellchecker, you could buy one and add it on. and then in the halcyon dream of this era, there would be spell-checker manufacturers competing for the best spell-checker.
of course, there are a few glaring holes that makes this a non-profitable business direction. first of all, you're not goin to get competition over small applets. you might have one or two companies that make 'em. i mean, once you're spelling is checked, it's friggin' CHECKED.
also, opendoc was during aa day when high-speed internet access was going through its birthing throes, and getting an isdn line to your business required divine intervention. hell, at the time, i thought i was blazing at 33.6. so, at the time, where would you buy these applets? online? doubtful. few people had confidence in even getting online (remember, the imac effort to get people online came after opendoc), much less actually giving away credit card info online. maybe the retail store? who's going to try to get their spell-checker boxed and shipped in the hopes someone will buy it. plus, companies don't exactly like to make seven hundred trips to the store (or wherever) to buy add-ons whenever they realize they are missing something. they are what microsoft caters to... and "everything in the same box" crowd.
and third, as much as i am loathe to say this, as i have sveral friends and one family member in the programming development world, you make a profit off of upgrades. period. just like int he real world, it is 300% more difficult to get someone to buy a NEW application than it is to get them to just upgrade their old one. and again, if the applet philosophy heeld true to "small applications doing one thing well," then once that applet does its one thing as well as possible, then the only thing left to do is... you guessed it, ADD FEATURES.
edit: in a perfect world, if you made a great opendoc component, it could be reused everywhere, but from a larger developers standpoint, why make an application that lacks full functionality? that's a hard sell. you could make the case that apps like photoshop have had plug-in architecture for a long time, but a good counterargument could be made that technically, there's not a heck of a lot you can't do with photoshop, and many plug-ins simply make functions that would take several steps and a lot of knowledge in channels, methematics, etc. to pull off the same thing.
edit: by the way, if you hadn't noticed yet, adobe will soon find themselves painted into a feature-bloated corner, too. the added features to photoshop and illustrator seem like tacked on macros or, int he case of dimensions for illustrator, force-fed applications into the wrong environment. adobe and macromedia are now trying desperately to get into new markets, a bit too late (adobe, see: video and sound) and trimming down current larger apps to make more revenue streams (macromedia, see: flex, breeze, contribute, etc.)
honestly, in the next three to five years, i see a cottage industry BLOSSOMING from all the feature bloat that windows (and other software vendors, as mentioned above) has made in their applications making their way, in surgical, methodical strikes, into our own OS. if it makes sense for apple to do it, they will add it in. if not, they'll let the smaller developers take those ideas and port them over as well, as there will be a huge demand for competing smaller products on the mac, where the din of clashing retail boxes won't be so confusing to joe sixpack consumer at your local compusa.
i mean, hell, if i am a developer starting out, if i have a great idea, or if i can just steal a great idea from a windows app, i can suddenyl be a VERY big fish in a small pond on the mac, and then when the rest of the developers start coming over with cross-platform stuff, i'll have a huge head start.