Slashdot Mirror
Another Look At OS X
mduell writes: "Apple has been close to their golden master copy of OS X for a week or so, but they've still been making nightly builds to squash the rest of the bugs. These last minute copies have all sported a "Build 4K78" in their info window, and many of them have been leaked to outside sources. Reviewers who got their hands on the system wrote extensively about how 4K78 was horrible, yet today resellers across the world received boxed copies marked as 4K78. This article explains what happened, as well as explains how many bugs to expect, and why Apple dropped the ball on a few features (like DVD)."
That article is BS. The retail version is bit by bit, byte by byte identical to 4K78 shipped to devs. Here is a post from MacNN forums explaining the situation(was a reply to the same article):
-----
No this is wrong, and I've already contacted the author. The article about 4K78 couldn't be more wrong. There was one single, unique build of 4K78 and that's it. The Developer RC CD and the final Retail CD have identical bytecounts, checksums, creation and modification dates, etc. Apple/NeXT's versioning system had ONE unique build number per build, and that is it. Between builds, there can be modifications and builds of components, but each full build with an associated build designation is the only one there is. Now: there were some 4K78's floating around the net that had been imaged with Disk Copy rather than Toast that won't show proper sizes and dates. But any properly created images and/or actual, official CDs will all be identical. There are NO CHANGES, in any way, from the Developer RC CD to today's Retail CD. I don't know how more pointedly to put it. Some people actually go so far as to say Apple is tricking you by making the Retail CD "look like" the Developer RC, even though it's really different. You have to be fucking kidding me. The bottom line is Apple does not have dozens, several, or even two builds of 4K78. There is one, and it was accepted as RC, accepted as GM, and accepted for manufacuring. There WERE NOT daily builds of OS X after RC was declared. 4K78, in its single incarnation, was the end of the line. If people want to *believe* that the Retail 4K78 is different from the RC 4K78, great. But it's not true. Posting articles like this further confuses the issue. The MAIN reason 4K78 was left in was so that people could see FOR SURE that the Retail was the same as the RC: that's the WHOLE PURPOSE of a build number - to uniquely and certainly identify a build. It started out with people being convinced that there were 4K8* series builds (there were never, and never will be, 4K8* builds. Future OS X development will happen in totally different build trees with different versioning, milestones, etc.), with people wanting to believe there was something oh-so-much-better than OS X 4K78. Then, when people were finally convinced that what was in the boxes was 4K78, build number in the About Box and all, they said "maybe Jobs will announce something on the 21st". When nothing was announced on the 21st, they started grasping at straws, making up ridiculous stories about how there were many many different 4K78's and the developer 4K78 was an internal debug version and the retail version is some magical optimized version rebuilt several times, yet still maintains the 4K78 designation and was even designed to LOOK identical to the developer RC to throw people off, with fake checksums and all?? It defies logic. And well it should, because none of it is true. 4K78 is 4K78 is 4K78, period. What's in peoples' boxes this Saturday is identical in every way to what developers received 3 weeks ago. And it's a great release; enjoy.
PS - Doesn't anyone realize what a support nightmare having multiple builds with the same build number would be. That's just rediculous. For the LAST TIME: any (legitimately obtained) copy of 4K78 is the same as ANY other 4K78.
THE MAC OS X DEVELOPER RELEASE CANDIDATE 4K78 CD IS IDENTICAL IN EVERY WAY TO THE MAC OS X 10.0 RETAIL 4K78 CD. THERE ARE NO DIFFERENCES WHATSOVER.
The author of the article was kind enough to respond, and conceded that it was just a "theory", i.e. he hasn't compare the CDs himself. Additionally, he's more referring to illegally obtained builds of of hotline and carracho, which could be fake, improperly imaged, etc. All REAL 4K78's out there, i.e. ones obtained legitimately from Apple, are CERTAIN to be identical.
Despite the tone of occasional disappointement at "missing" features (so write it or port the Linux version,) I'm glad to see that /.-ers are more concerned about the new qualities of the OS than its short comings.
Jobs was right. Just like Apple became the largest unit sales seller of RISC machines within one year of the introduction of the PPC boxes, Apple will become the largest unit sale seller of Unix boxes within one year of the introduction of OS X.
That's twice Apple has accomplished a complete change of supporting architecture without throwing the baby out with the bath water.
M$ must be feeling a little ill after failing at least twice to get off the x86. The coming 64 bit machines (needed to handle biometric information to turn packets on the 'net "black," and make life much, much harder for the "script-kiddies,") will wipe M$ off the map.
The OS Wars are over. Unix won.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I think there needs to be a new moderation category for ill-informed repetitive posts like this - "Nuke". It would take all five moderation points to perform, and could only be done once a month. The effect would be the removal of the post, the canceling of the user account and/or IP that generated the post, and removal of all other messages from that poster/IP. It would also launch an IRC bot that would make constant disparaging remarks about the user in a variety of forums.
Then, we would cease to hear from people that do not realize the mac supports USB mice and thus three button mice - with wheels.
A side note - the Mac ALSO supports single button mice, so it is actually superior to just about anything else by virtue of supporting a wider range of mice. Can you imagine trying to use a single button mouse in X? I guess you don't care about usability of systems at all, yet another reason why we need a NUKE moderation.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have been using it for about 4 weeks (Got build 4k73 when it was first released).
With exception of a the occasional IE crash (not OS crash) the system ran without a hitch. I had it on a iBook which is a relatively slow and old machine. (Especially when compared to my Dual PIII 800 SCSI 166 running Debian SID with KDE).
I am not one of those people that need DVD playback. I have a DVD player and TV for that. I just need good Java support and a decient terminal and X windows. OSX gives me all of that.
My G4 just arived this week and now all I need to do is buy a Gigabit ethernet for my Linux box and I have one of the coolest development environments I could ask for. (Linux apps for server and Java profiler...) I was able to get JBuilder 4.0 Enterprise for Windows actually working on OSX.
I was quickly able to get wget, vim, Lynx, Python and Perl working fine on the machine and was quite comfortable. As far as the Unix side of things, the only problem people might find is that the directory structure is a LITTLE bit different than what you are used to. (Still has
But the nice thing is now I can run Photoshop, JBuilder, IE, Mozilla, Netscape, iMovie (Which is actually a DAMN cool program
But OSX most importantly stays out of my way and just lets me work.
Also the fact that Apple is packaging everything needed to do full development is pretty neat. They are starting to learn that they will get market acceptance with empowerment of the programmer.
I am also happy that OSX allows me to very openly work in a heterogenious environment as Windows and the old MacOS seem to do the exact opposite. I see it as Linux, BSD, etc just gained a great ally.
--------------------
Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?
What, a distribution CD-Rom for buggy software? First, all software of any complexity has bugs -- always. There are only three kinds of programs, those with bugs you knows about, those with bugs you don't know about, and those with both.
Fixes to software do not change this. A fix of a bug you know about can at best change a type A or type C program to a type B program.
Nobody has been in this business for very long who does not understand this.
So, the question isn't whether the distro is buggy -- the question is whether the distro works well enough that known bugs can be repaired by updaters, ideally through the network. If we can install it, boot it, get online, download the updaters, and run them, the distro did its job.
Physical distros serve two purposes -- (1) to serve as a token of ownership; and (2) to serve as a vehicle to reduce the amount of time/bandwidth necessary to install the software.
I assume OSX, as delivered, will be a type C program. It will have bugs and megabugs. I also presume that Apple did sufficient Q/A to assure that the installation and updating processes will work. If so, thats all that it needs to be.
To the naysayers, what is the alternative? Can anyone suggest a fully-tested on-time bug-free distribution CD?
If using Linux (and participating in the community) for 5+ years now has taught me anything about OS development, it's that there is always more to do, whether it's adding support for new technologies, improving SMP, debugging, etc. Regardless of the bugs currently present in OSX, I still consider it to be a huge step forward for Apple, just as I considered the 2.4 kernel (bugs and all) to be a huge step forward for the Linux community.
Besides, I'd rather see Apple release OSX 1.01 two weeks from now, than wait 6 months for the first "service pack", eh?
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein