Over the course of the day, MOSR staff has been digging on what's up with
OS X. Among the most
notable tidbits we dug up:
If you're planning to develop for the Yellow Box, you can put down your
Objective C manual
now. It's time to start learning Java, according to Apple representatives.
ObjC will continue to
be the best way to do things, but Apple plans to push compiled,
platform-specific Java as the
way to program for the Yellow Box.
OS 10 Server will be supported only on PowerMac G3s -- Desktop, Minitower,
or El Capitan.
Yosemite or Gossamer motherboards. This means no Powerbooks and no iMacs.
However,
reportedly those and many other machines which DR2 ran on should work,
even though they
may need a bit of a hacking job.
Developers can expect to be shipped copies of Server. These copies may not
have everything
from the full $995 Server CD, but they should have everything a developer
would need to
developer OS 10 apps.
Yellow Box for Windows is expected to be alive indefinitely. However, OS X
for Intel is all but
dead -- and finally, Apple is admitting it. Don't expect Apple to ship any
full operating systems
for Intel x86 in the forseeable future.
Carbon will be the major part of OS 10 that Apple is going to be promoting
in the near term, to
speed the migration of users and developers, but expect the Yellow Box to
get significantly
more marketing muscle after a substantial percentage of Mac users move over.
There is a fifty-transactions-per-minute limitation on the copy of
WebObjects that ships with
OS 10 Server. This effectively makes WebObjects an evaluation copy for
most purposes.
Sun's "Jini" technology, which allows Java applications to access devices
like printers and
networks across many platforms, will be on OS X Server.
Although QuickTime for OS X is well along, it won't be fully
feature-compatible with QuickTime
4 until OS 10 Consumer ships, because Carbon is required for full
functionality.
From the get-go, OS 10 was designed with Symmetric Multiprocessing in
mind. Expect
world-class symmetric multiprocessing support in Consumer.
For users concerned about Server's security: Apple has worked so hard on
OS 10 security
that they have had numerous dealings with the National Security Agency
(NSA) -- apparently
they're worried that OS 10 is *too* secure :-)
While not everything is perfect, it seems that Apple is making the
difficult choices well, and that OS 10
will finally be brought up to its potential sooner rather than later.
--"All human beings are aware of the same truth. The difference is in the way that we distort it." - Woody Allen, Deconstructing Harry