Re: List of Applications Not Compatible with Leopard

On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 03:23:38 -0800, Daniel Johnson wrote
(in article <13lvh5nnsqibmfd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

"George Graves" <gmgraves2@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:0001HW.C3846F6F07190A3CF0182648@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Tue, 11 Dec 2007 14:01:42 -0800, Daniel Johnson wrote
(in article <13lu2623v3jg64c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

If you don't care about compatibility, OS X Leopard does seem a lot more
acceptable.

This is incorrect. I have lots of files created on Classic versions of Mac
Apps. They open perfectly under OSX versions. This is more than one can
say
about Microsoft. Word, for instance, not only has poor compatibility
between
different versions of itself, it's not even fully compatible between
different versions of Windows!

This is, of course, to laugh.

You can laugh if you want to, but if you had to deal with Word documents that
fall apart when opened with Office 2007 and Vista, you wouldn't be (laughing,
that is).

There's no point trying to make claims like this. Apple's incompatibility
problem is so awful and so unambiguous that even the most enthusastic
deceptions won't be able to disguise it.

[snip]
Windows still supports DOS apps. That's software from 25 years ago;
that's a
lot more compatibility than you got from Apple, ever.

It's not needed.

More precisely, anyone who needs it has already left for Windows. Or Unix.
Or *anything else*.

Oh bull***. Almost nobody needs it and if they do, they just don't upgrade
to Leopard. And very few Mac users ever leave for Windows and there's no
reason to leave for Linux, because practically anything that will compile for
Linux will compile for OSX just as easily.

That leaves Apple with the slice of the consumer market that, while these
still want compatibility, don't care all that much.

I know any number of DOS-based programs that won't run under
Vista's DOS layer. Can you say OrCAD? I knew you could.

That's still miles better than Apple's record here. And "Classic" Mac
software covers stuff *much* younger than DOS apps. It gets well into the
Win32 era.

Fine, except nobody cares. All Mac software has been upgraded to OSX - years
ago. And unlike you cheap mamser Windows users, most Mac owners keep their
apps up to date.

Classic Mac OS was the default OS for Apple through 2001. It's only been
6
years. And now... *zero* compatibility. None. At. All.

It's not required.

It is if Apple will ever get the Mac's marketshare off the floor.

What makes you think this is so important to marketshare? People who are
buying Macs for the first time don't have any legacy Mac software. Why would
the Mac's ability to run it have any impact whatsoever on a computer user
switching platforms (the only way that any appreciable marketshare will be
gained by anyone).

People who are still using Classic apps aren't likely to
upgrade to a new OS when they haven't even bothered to upgrade their
applications.

Why should they *want* to replace their apps, anyway?

To add new features and capabilities. Why else?

You are exaggerating the importance of this. Apple produces
environments to allow old software to run under new OS or hardware
paradigms
as transitional courtesy to its users. They gave Classic users 6 years to
upgrade to OSX versions. That's very accommodating of them, I would say.

I'm not aware of any other desktop OS with such a poor performance in this
area.

I'm not aware of anybody else on this planet, other than you, who considers
this all that important.

I'm sure that by 2012, they will have dropped Rosetta too and PPC-based
apps
won't run on Intel Macs any more. Anyone who expects otherwise simply is
not
being very realistic.

Anyone who expects otherwise needs to move to Windows. :D

Why? So that they can run legacy software that they don't have because they
were on the Mac before? You aren't making much sense here. Only people who
HAVE legacy software care about legacy support. Obviously if one switches
platforms, one has NO software for the platform to which they are moving.


Whatever you may say against MS's compatibility, it just pales against
*that* degree of awfulness.

Its not awful. It's called progress, and don't you think that you Windows
users aren't paying dearly for all that backwards compatibility either,
because you are.

In what way?

All of that baggage and ancient code that MS has to bring forward with each
new iteration. It makes the OS unnecessarily bloated, makes it easier to
break (as if Windows isn't already as fragile as an 80 year old grandma's
bones).

How about the huge difficulties all 64-bit machines seem to have? These
things seem unable to operate transparently.

I have not actually heard about these "huge difficulties"; but then
people
mostly use 32-bit Vista. Because it has better compatibility, you see. It
can run DOS and Win16 applications.

You see, 99% of the user base doesn't CARE that it runs DOS and Win16
apps.

Oh, that's certainly wrong. It's true that casual consumers don't care about
that too much, but businesses certainly do. That's more than 1% of the
market, to be sure.

That's wrong. Businesses don't care about old software because few of them
run it. Most companies have cadres of support personel running around, busy
as little beavers keeping people's computers up to date.

And everyone cares about running *recent* apps. You know, year 2000 stuff
that Macs can't run anymore.

Everybody with a Mac has already updated everything. If they haven't, they
can still install Classic, it just doesn't come with the OS any more. Apple
seems to find keeping the OS streamlined to be more important than being able
to run legacy software from the dark ages. I used to have lots of legacy
software. I found that I never used it. The important apps were updated, the
ones that aren't supported have been replaced with similar apps that are. It
just not an issue.

[snip]
Well, there are lots of things that make Windows superior, but
compatibility
is pretty high on the list.

Depends on how you define compatibility.

"Your existing applications continue to work going forward"

Cross platform, Windows is awful.
They have proprietary formats that cannot be parsed by similar programs on
other platforms (Visio is a perfect example, here. MS has never released
any
info about Visio's native file format, so that people using Omnigraffle
Pro
(the Mac equivalent of Visio) on the Mac can't open Visio files unless
they
are saved in the Visio file exchange format (and nobody bothers to do
that).

In this respect, Windows is very like the Mac, and is unlike Unix.

But I wouldn't call this being "cross platform". This is usually called
being "open", these days.

[snip]
But at the least, Apple's performance on compatibility is lousy.
Microsoft
is much better.

This is wrong. Apple goes out of its way to "play well" with other
systems.

No. They do raid open source projects for parts, but that's not really the
same thing. They have *not* openly documented their document formats,
however.

You don't know what you're talking about.

Admittedly, nobody cares about Apple's documents, only their DRMed music.
They haven't opened that either, naturally.

But MS is trying to be more 'open' in the Unixy sense, and if they don't
measure up to the real Open Source movement in this regard, at least they
still beat Apple.

I doubt it. OSC can run those Unix and X11 apps directly.

Microsoft doesn't even give the subject of cross platform compatibility
lip
service. If you mean backwards compatibility,

Which, obviously, I did! :D

Then use the correct terminology. :->

there are huge chinks in MS' armor there, as well.

Perhaps 'huge' is overstating it.

You might be able to still run some DOS programs (is
there anyone who cares?) but open a older Word document with lots of
graphics
and/or scientific and engineering characters (ASCII256+) in it and watch
it
fall completely apart!

I can find no reference to "ASCII256+", and I don't know what it is. Word
has used Unicode for a very long time, and still does.

ASCII256+ obviously means those ASCII characters ABOVE the 255 that are on
the Windows keyboard. Unicode support doesn't seem to matter here. Open a
document with lots of special characters in another version of word from the
one with which it is made or on another version of Windows, and watch those
characters get replaced with little square, empty boxes.


I would guess your problem is actually font related- your ancient document
uses an ancient font that you do not have anymore for those 'scientific and
engineering characters' and so they are not rendered, or and rendered with a
substitute (wrong) font. This will throw all your metrics off as well.

Correct except that the fonts don't have to be different, just on a different
version of Word or Windows.

Vista, I think, also wins on stability. The drivers have improved a lot,
and
I, at least, am no longer having stability problems from them. But even
when
I did have those problems, with early drivers, Vista itself would rarely
crash. It would restart the driver and carry on- and my open applications
would never notice. No other OS can match that today.

How about one that NEVER crashes? In my book, never crashing beats "rarely
crashing" hands down, every time. OSX NEVER crashes and I've been using it
on
three computers since OSX v.1.0. (that's 2001).

I have seen it crash, even down to the 'gray screen of death'. Apple's
drivers are pretty good- as good as the better Windows ones, and a lot
better than the crap Vista had in the first few months. But it just panics
if they fail.

I have only seen a kernel Panic once and that was due to faulty DRAM. OSX is
the most stable OS I've ever encountered.


Which is suprising, actually. The technology MS is using to make video
drivers restartable is a Mac OS X style window server ("dwm.exe"); I know of
no reason why Apple could not also have made their Window Server restartable
without disturbing running apps.

Since it doesn't crash in the first place...

I don't think that you have a very good grasp of what real computer
compatibility in the workplace means because MS is quite poor at it.

I, at least, do not confuse openness with backwards-compatibility.

At least I don't use the term "compatibility" when I actually mean "legacy
support".

Even
Microsoft itself has its hardware engineers running Unix and much of the
technical material that they produce was produces in simulation and
schematic
capture programs running under Unix.

It could be so. In the end, you run the OS that runs your apps, period.

Backwards compatibility means that the OS *continues* to run your apps, even
as you upgrade things.

When they try to port that stuff over to
standard document formats on Windows (FrameMaker, MS Word) they have
nightmares like you wouldn't believe. Why? Because Windows makes no effort
to
play well in a multiple OS environment.

This is, again, to laugh.

Fools seem to laugh a lot.

That's the REAL worth of
compatibility, the ability to share INFORMATION cross-platform and from
software iteration to software iteration, not the ability to run some
obsolete software from the stone ages.

"Run some obsolete software from the stone ages" is what people want.

WHO? So far, only you seem to find this characteristic a deal breaker.

The
openness you desire is something else they want, but they don't want it as
much as they want their stuff to keep working.

Corporations don't have applications
that are that old. It's simply not worth the support nightmares for them
to
do so.

Of course they do.

Remember, we are only talking about 6 year old apps here. Mac OS Classic
apps.

Which nobody runs. If the do, they keep earlier versions of of OSX or they
install Classic on Leopard. I don't see the big deal.



--
The only reason that the air we breathe is free, is because the corporate
world has been unable to figure out a practical way to meter it.

.

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