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From: rca@cs.brown.edu (Ronald C.F. Antony)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: What do I want to see in the Apple of the 90's?
Message-ID: <23098@brunix.UUCP>
Date: 16 Dec 89 02:11:07 GMT
References: <7614@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu> <3326@hub.UUCP>
Sender: news@brunix.UUCP
Reply-To: rca@cs.brown.edu (Ronald C.F. Antony)
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
Lines: 61

I don't want to contribute to the general bashing here, but 
some things have to be said to this:


> NeXT is notorious for missing
> ship dates; they've missed the date for color before already.

NeXT has so far a pretty good record for KEEPING the things 
they promised. Including deadlines. The only time so far was
the 0.9 software release. But this wasn't due to the software
but because of a shipment of bad optical disks and NeXT was
just verifying that there are no bad disks delivered.
However don't make the mistake to take NeXT on what theu don't
say but only rumors. So far the official statement from NeXT
is still only "color/photorealism on the desktop for the 90's".
Not more, not less. Maybe there is in the meantime an announce-
ment for next year. But so far I never heared any fixed date.
Therefore NeXT can't be late, as they didn't promise anything.

> And don't
> get me going on the beta versions of Mach...

MACH is pretty stable, I get more often bombs on the Mac than
crashes on the NeXT. And anyway: 1.0 is NO longer beta.
SunOS 4.0.something has about the same stability as NeXT's
MACH. (Whatever this means, at least it has protected multi-
tasking, compared to the Mac... )

>Oh, how nice. Universities get it for dirt cheap. Sounds like Apple's deal.
>It's a marketing strategy, nothing more. Do you think Jobs would throw so
>much away of what he learned at Apple?

University or not, compare the same pricing, either business or
university pricing, and the NeXT will be cheaper than a
comparable Mac (if there exists such a thing).

On the rest (printer, color, etc) have been enough intelligent and
less intelligent remarks, so I'll skip that.

>Editor, Macker | Online Macintosh Programming Journal; mail for
>subscription
                  ^no wonder he is upset! Why don't you settle
                   down and publish a NeXT Programming Journal?

>Hire this kid  |
   ^ maybe, one day... But he will have to work on a NeXT :)


Does anyone know by chance how much international language
support is built into Postscript?
Does anyone know how international language support will be
implemented in future Unix releases? (I mean NeXT would be
stupid, if they would make a proprietary standard in this
respect. But if they had some technology they could licence it
to OSF.

Ronald
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man." - Bernhard Shaw | rca@cs.brown.edu or antony@cogsci.bitnet