> Also, with no OS X Lion Server release, and with the XServe and XServe RAID > long dead, Apple's focus on any sort of business market seems to have gone > out the window (not that they ever really had much of one to begin with...) > though there could always be some surprises with Apple cloud services in the > future. The times, they are a changin'.
Business services? I would never, ever recommend to any business that they rely on Apple supplied functionality for their product. Not given the complete death-kill of all their database / web services. DBKit EOF Web Objects Full Objective C access for Java First class native citizenship for Java (Heck, decent graphics performance on Java) Direct to Web Direct to Java Client Heck, complete death of any support for older stuff. The first indication I saw that Mac Os X could run NextStep programs was when they announced removal of support for NextStep. There are still programs out there that never got an intel upgrade (closed source, naturally), and the complete lack of intel emulation support (lets recall: The power system was originally supposed to be able to emulate both the 68000 family and the 386 family, so that a single hardware could unify both competing systems. Right?). Basically, Apple is saying, "Rebuy everything you use every 5 years". I'm sorry, I want to purchase what I use, not have ongoing rental expenses. Put simply: PPC hardware was sold relatively recently. We are still in the functioning expected lifetime of the PPC hardware. But the software has been clobbered. Major language upgrades, not back ported? Major changes to the compiler? Significant OS level improvements? Major changes to the basic libraries? Seriously, just adding in the GCD / Code block support would do wonders. IPv6 functioning? There's no good reason not to give PPC machines one more OS kernel push, even if you don't add in any of the end-user new goodies. There's no good reason to say "We're not supporting cross compiling/universal binaries anymore", other than "The libraries/kernel can't do it", and there's no good reason not to do that. Apple has shown that they will end-of-life a product while it is still within its lifetime. I do recommend using an Apple-hosted VM for running Microsoft Windows. I would never run MW on bare hardware again, just because ** stupid idiotic System Restore is a complete disaster ** and you need to be able to undo what you did if something does a complete mess us. And I love Time Machine for backups, even for making backups of Windows :-). (In fairness, I think both Parallels and VMWare do their own snapshotting now.) I would never personally use Microsoft Windows as my primary OS. There's just too many flaws and problems. But I do run into cases where people need specific MW programs with no alternatives (actually, I think it's now websites that are IE only; all the programs I can think of have mac versions now. You could probably WINE anything that still doesn't.) Multi-touch Vs. mouse: I'm hoping that multitouch will address the flaws of mouse usage. Lets face it: The mouse was originally designed for one thing, and then used for something else. We've got a new input-dominated I/O device; lets see if it gets used in a good, proper manner. Seriously. _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list MacOSX-talk@omnigroup.com http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
