Yes, Mac is cool, Mac means good and stable hardware, Mac means perfect graphic integration (compared against Linux) and many other things.

But a vast majority of OsX users i know are essentially programmers and technicians which only bought a mac because OsX can run X11 applications and you can compile most Linux/BSD stuff on it! It takes more effort to let it run on a Mac, but at least you can.
The fact that you could only run native Mac Software up to OS9 and can not even compile most ANSI-C stuff really was a showstopper for almost all now-Mac users i know.

Elliotte Rusty Harold Says:
>In my experience many open source projects … are actively hostile to making necessary
>changes to enable truly native Mac applications.
In the early 90ties I worked a lot with a Mac Quadras and also with a NeXT cubes at the TU Wien, and since OsX essentially is NeXT what do you mean with “truly native Mac applications”?
After a quick glimpse building a OsX app to me looks much more like building building a Unix application than building a OS8 or OS9 application.

Now though I have to get a mac again, and I have to choose between a slow expensive macbook, with a smaller screen that my old laptop even though it’s twice as expensive, or a desktop that may or may not run Ubuntu, and costs 3 times what a pc desktop costs. Oh, and if the computer fails, I can’t keep the monitor and replace the computer, because they are both in the same housing.

But I know one thing, I’m not buying Microsoft Office. OpenOffice is great. Yes, it is slower to start up and uses more memory, but it is fantastic and free and open source and has even more features than Microsoft Office such as save as pdf.

If Apple wanted to be the “best” platform for java (like it said it wanted to be) or the best platform for OpenOffice or for 3D or for games or for multimedia, they could have simply used some of their engineers to do it, but they didn’t and have always lagged in all those areas. See: http://createdigitalmotion.com/2007/04/26/why-is-apples-support-for-java-multimedia-so-poor/#more-1668

So, now that you apparently have the power to control the actions of major corporations, try to use it responsibly, OK?

Mac OS X port officially supported by Sun !
Sun Microsystems joins porting effort for OpenOffice.org for Mac

spooky!

If Macs had been that important to the web’s growth or the dot.bomb, I might agree with Elliotte because the incontestable truth is the Mac is the platform of choice for artists who could give a fig about the deep geekery of computer science. Unfortunately, it tends toward being a boutique platform and there is nothing wrong with that because particularly in the States, the same people who buy SUVs buy Macs and there is a healthy profit margin. Even in the early days of VRML as one commenter noticed, those with CAD/CAM backgrounds best understood the real reasons to make a 3D standard for the web, and that was not a Mac strength. Anytime the Mac users want an X3D browser for their machines, they can campaign Jobs, or wait for the current vendors to get one ready. There are a couple of projects for that going on as we speak.

What the American web pundits who declared VRML dead or a failure weren’t noticing it the uptake in Europe and European universities. Even after the dot.bomb and pre-SL, VRML communities running on Blaxxun servers were running with fair numbers. There has never been a time when there wasn’t a commercial VRML browser available. There has never been a time when significant commercial work wasn’t being done with VRML.

VRML failed in the imaginations of the Americans, most particularly, in the minds of those who think Silicon Valley is the rightful center and heir of all commercial web projects and that is not just silly, it’s provincial. The French, the Germans and the Russians all have going companies based on VRML. Most of them have made the switch to X3D and one is holding out on X3D while simultaneously duplicating the nodes they like in X3D into their own fork of VRML. All are doing good business. VRML/X3D comes down to the applications, so if the question is does it succeed like HTML, the answer is no and it never will. No graphics format or framework ever has or ever will. We tried to tell Pesce that but he was enjoying his celebrity. What failed? Celebrity failed. It is a bad idea to measure oneself or any technology by ‘fortune and men’s eyes’. This is the problem Elliotte and Clay Shirky have with VRML. This is the problem Silly Valley has with it.

X3D is doing even better and that is good because as the money is looking better, the campaigns to privatize 3D on the web have gotten more attention and are extremely well-funded using all the standard tricks of network-marketing using social media. But that is going on in almost all of the core web technologies through increased private equity purchasing and stacking the boards of the companies and consortia. The next ten years will be very telling on those who espouse one set of values for their own personal favorites and could give a fig about the rest. Sad but so.

Few things are more fun that rehashing old debates, no?

If VRML/X3D is gaining, then I’m glad for you and that community.

I posted to rebut ERH’s assertion that lack of Mac support was a large cause in the demise of VRML. That simply wasn’t the case. Said as a person who has always loved Macs (I worked for an Apple dealership while in jr high, saved for a year to buy my own Apple IIe, played with the Apple III, Lisa, and first Macs, currently typing on a PowerBook G4). Where Mac got sideways with the CAD and 3D community is lack of software support which was due to lack of commodity accelerated graphics. If AutoCAD, MicroStation, etc, users had Macs, then VRML would have been on Mac too.

It’s easy to criticize, hard to create. So in arguing against ERH’s theory, I felt it only fair to post my own, to allow him to rebut me.

Cheers, Jason

Fortunately, really good tools are dirt cheap or free now and thanks to the efforts of ISO and the W3DC, the IP stayed unencumbered. Those that knee the standards effort in the groin need to grow up and understand how the web really works. This isn’t gibonian cyberspace. This is a business built on values and it is the values that kept it alive when the money and the thin-skinned left to do Flash.