[R-SIG-Mac]OS X and OS 9

[Jan de Leeuw]

1. Since September OS X is the default when booting a new Mac.

2. Starting January 2003 new Macs will not be able to boot into
OS 9 any more (Classic will still work).

3. Application developers (Mozilla is a prime example, R is another)
are slowly starting to drop support for Carbon, which means you
cannot run their applications in OS 9 (or Classic) anymore.

4. Those who port on the cheap (such as Matlab and IDL) use
Darwin/X11, which only works if you boot into OS X (or at least
into Darwin). Same is true for substitute office suites such as
OpenOffice.

5. Big developers with extensive cross-platform code bases (Micro$oft,  
Adobe,
Metrowerks, SAS, Stata, SPSS) will continue to support Carbon for a  
long time
(which means their apps will run under OS 9), but even there
expect a shift in the long run to Mach-O (i.e. OS X only).

6. There is an increasing number of full-blown applications written in
Java/Swing (Thinkfree Office, jFig, jPicEdt, metagraf, jPython).
These only run properly in OS X.

7. The thousands of open source Unix programs (all of GNU, all
of GNOME, all of KDE) that have been ported to OS X and are
available from automatic package managers such as fink,
GNU Darwin, and darwinports can only be used in OS X.

===
Jan de Leeuw; Professor and Chair, UCLA Department of Statistics;
Editor: Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Journal of Statistical  
Software
US mail: 9432 Boelter Hall, Box 951554, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1554
phone (310)-825-9550;  fax (310)-206-5658;  email: deleeuw@stat.ucla.edu
homepage: http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu
   
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           No matter where you go, there you are. --- Buckaroo Banzai
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