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Interview Jordan Hubbard, Apple's BSD Tech Manager
Stigmata669 writes "Over at MacSlash the editors have managed to schedule an interview with Jordan Hubbard, Engineering Manager of the BSD Technology Group at Apple to answer questions about BSD, and Darwin in the context of Mac OS X. The interview is being conducted in the Slashdot style, so comment and in a week they will have the highest moderated comments answered. The specific article is here."
If there is one app that shouldn't crash...
how do I log in again?
...and slashdot does?! Anti-Apple posts aren't always moderated down on MacSlash (some of their news stories are direct criticisms of Apple!), but anti-linux/open source always is on Slashdot.
The interview is dated June 20, 2002. And I'm pretty sure it was posted on slashdot somewhere around then as well...
What are you? Some kind of Open-Source Nazi Communist?
As someone who is on both forums I have to say I think Slashdot's is much more fair. I've rarely gotten modded down for flamebait for critical comments of open source projects, or positive comments about Microsoft when they are justified. Unjustified positive comments about open source do get modded up on slashdot and unjustified negative comments about microsoft get modded up. Similarly for modded down comments.
So the system is highly biased but livable. You can have a debate on slashdot.
MacSlash though is completely biased. The moderation makes no attempt to allow for debate.
As a relatively "old" MacSlash user I'd have to agree that I see that, too. Heck I've been modded down there for simply acknowledging that I've had a bad experience with Apple. I mod fairly when I get the points, but there are many zealots in that community. "Back in the day" it was pretty nice though, maybe before they had ~1000 users.
Constitutionally Correct
Kinda funny when the best place to disscuss Apple stuff is not on an Apple realted site, but in the small section of a non-Apple realated site.
It goes to show how bad Mac zealots really are. Even the Linux zealots aren't as bad ;)
I think that certain group of Mac users just take life too seriously. Steve is not god, and their iMacs are not really temples of worship. Apple's just a company that's a bit better than some of the others around at the moment.
ditto. i too have been modded down as troll for simply saying i made a mistake in buying a PCI g4 and not waiting a month for the AGP G4. the mods on macslash are idiots.
Heh, for more on the same topic (Mac zealots ruining the world) head over to Ars.
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
I think you are close to hitting it right on the nose. I am a mac guy thru and thru, and I much prefer Slashdot, especially in the past 6 months or so. I think most of the reaction on Macslash is due to the fact that it's main population and audience is not the Alpha Geeks like Slashdot. Most of the people spend all day at work hearing people with no clue about computer belittle the Mac. I like most Slashdotter's can launch into a technical argument to make their heads spin, but most of the people on Macslash just have to grin and bear it for fear that some MCOL (Microsoft Certified Operating Lifeform) will come and take there computer away. MacSlash is the only place they can go to keep from getting flamed to death for every comment they make.
You may be right a sort of: the Linux crowd has contempt not fear for their enemies and thus treat them better :-). In any case now that the alpha geeks like mac I think the mac people should be OK.
I think part of the problem is the sheer amount of repetitive whining that gets posted there. Every thread seems to be an open invitation for comments about OS X's performance issues, or the need for a reboot after some OS updates, or the price of the hardware and/or the latest OS update.
The fact of the matter is, these arguments have been hashed to death. Posting yet another "OS X is slow" comment to the board is not an enlightening, informative, or funny addition to the conversation. It doesn't get modded down *because* it's true, it gets modded down *despite* having an element of truth to it, because it's just another tiresome attempt to start the same old arguments that most of us are sick to death of hearing.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
Yes --- and Mac Ach should be held as the shining example to the rest of the Macintosh community: e.g., the recent thread posted by someone who switched to a Mac but just didn't like it. Did he get jumped on like he would on basically any other forum? Hell no. Instead, the replies were more on the line of "Well, at least you tried" and "Hey, don't give up on us yet". Entirely positive, entirely constructive, and very humble. It's an excellence community.
Those aren't the sorts of issues I'm talking about. I can understand why those get modded down; they are obvious trolls.
I'll give you my most recent example from yesterday. There was a discussion of clustering and I stated that I didn't believe clustering was a useful short term objective for Apple because:
a) Its expensive, i.e. outside the range of hardware Apple normally sells
b) It requires a great deal of skill of implement properly, i.e. ease of use is not important to people implementing clustering
c) Its generally meant for mission critical applications; and few of any of these are generally run on Apple hardware.
This got modded offtopic. Now I certainly can understand someone disagreeing with me and believing that clustering would be useful as a near term objective (though I have yet to hear any good reason; the closest I got was a guy who had a reason based on not knowing the distinction between distributed processing and clustering). I can't understand the reason for this being modded down.
Absolutely I consider this simple bias. Nonsense which is pro apple gets modded up and good stuff which is seen as anti (and frankly I didn't really consider this to be anti) gets modded down. This has nothing to do with performance issues, or whether Apple costs an extra $200 or so.
Does Apple want to penetrate new markets, and grow their market share? It seems to me, an Apple outsider, that they do not.
Apple has a wonderful product, especially for engineers doing digital signal processing (DSP) and/or embedded processing work. The Altivec just blows away the Pentium and the Athlon for DSP and low power consumption (FLOPS/Watt). It is a fantastic advantage to have the same CPU on your desktop that is in the system you are developing for.
However, Apple's product is not so wonderful from an Apple Outsider's view. Apple seems to be sticking to some of their historical design decisions (one-button mouse, laptop ADB keyboards) for mostly "religious" reasons. I understand that Apple must keep their existing customer base, but there is an entirely new customer base (Engineers doing DSP and /or embedded development) now possible that Apple seems to be ignoring. I believe Apple could target this new market without sacrificing their current graphic designer market.
The new potential market has a huge amount of legacy development on traditional Unix systems that they do not want to abandon. They want to be able to use all of their X-Window programs (bad as they are), their vi and emacs editors [with the Ctrl key in the right place], etc. Therefore, if Apple wants to target this market, they must provide choice. If Apple wants the Unix/DSP/Engineering market, they need to reduce the impediments for those people to "switch".
Here are a few things Apple could do to accelerate the switch and gain themselves additional market share:
If Apple did any of those things, they would appeal to the experienced Unix/DSP/Embedded Engineers, and open up a new market for themselves. Why not try to capture this market away from HP/Sun/IBM/etc.?? Why not pursue this strategy in light of the fact that Apple will likely have even higher margins selling into the Unix/DSP/Embedded/Engineering Market than they do selling to their current (and small) market?
that sucks man
Looking at the main MacSlash page, I see no stories about clustering. Maybe your post (and the one you answered to) were offtopic?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Though your answer depends on your definition of clustering.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
There was a discussion of clustering and I stated that I didn't believe clustering was a useful short term objective
I read that post, and it wasn't posted in a discussion about clustering, it was posted in the Hubbard interview thread. The subject of that thread isn't how you or I would answer the questions that are posted, it's whether you or I think they're good interview questions.
Your post is a good example of what I said above. It didn't get modded as offtopic *because* what you said was true, it got modded as offtopic because, *despite* having some truth to it, what you said was completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
A couple things from an Apple User. 1.Apple seems to be sticking to some of their historical design decisions (one-button mouse, laptop ADB keyboards). Nope. Apple uses USB for all it's keyboards and mice. Yes they still have the one button mouse, but the keyboard can be remapped at will (in fact you can get DVORAK for OS X pretty easy off VersionTracker.) ADB connectors for mice and keyboards are available, but hard to come by since Apple ditched that standard in 1998. 2.Produce systems that give the user a choice between "Mac Look-and-Feel" and "Traditional Unix Look-and-Feel" when the system is first powered up and/or when the OS is first installed. You already can. Hold down the Apple (command key is the "real" name for it) and the S key at start up. This allows you to start from the command line and the GUI will not load on the computer. Launching X-windows from this environment is pretty easy, or any other GUI that runs on Darwin is pretty easy, though getting such environments is not as easy as going to Veriontracker and d/ling them. 3.Why not try to capture this market away from HP/Sun/IBM/etc.?? Have you looked at Apple's Open Source partners? much less their hardware partners? IBM makes the G3 and probably will be putting the Power 4 in next years towers. Sun got Open Office to work on a port for OS X so that Office v.X wasn't our only industrial office suite. HP had print drivers out of the gate on day 1 for OS X. These groups are supportting OS X with their help. Apple can be a bit crazy at times, but they rarely bite the hands that feed them. 4. and Lastly : if using a one button mouse and having to use both hands on one computer are such a problem for you, then buy a different mouse. if you just sank $1500 to 3000 on a new computer, will the $15 for a two-button USB mouse really kill you? When I switched to the Mac a year and a half ago, I constantly tried to right click. Then I realized I always have two hands. With the control and command keys I had many more options, and a finer control than I did with two buttons. try it some time and you may like it.
TANSTAAFL
Are you involved with the x86 port of Mac OS X (Marklar)? What information are you willing to release about the Marklar project?
Wow, my html sucks. sorry about that.
TANSTAAFL
Mac slash has moded me down for agreeing with the moderator. Go figure.
First, OS X supports two-button-mice *natively*. You can buy any non-apple off-the-shelf two-button USB laser mouse for ultra cheap and plug it in any not-too-old mac laptop's *two* USB ports. If there is a 3-button USB mouse out there, i bet you it'll just work on a mac laptop (or desktop), in the worst case you might have to install a vendor-supplied driver.
Apple hardware has *for years* supported USB peripherals, and that includes mice AND keyboards.
ADB serial ports for keyboards have been gone for a WHILE. As far as keyboard remapping, there is a slew of 3rd party OSX shareware and "how-to's" out there that'll help you do just that. Keep in mind that the Alpha Geek Community is switching in *strides* over to OS X, thereby building a very strong support-base. Check out a couple of my switching experience stories to give you a small idea of *some* of the slew of cool things you can do with OS X.
Futhermore, Apple hardware has been increasingly following mainstream peripheral and other device specifications: VGA monitor ports, ATA drive controllers, PCI extension slots. You can pretty-much buy a mac, gut it out, and fill-it up with non-apple components. But at least you have a base system that *just works*, and works well at that.
Please define "Unix Look and Feel". Are you talking about Solaris CDE? Are you talking about GNOME? KDE? I've got X11 and a slew of window managers and other X11 apps installed and running on OS X, using Fink. I would highly recommend that you get used to OS X's Aqua interface which is quite intuitive and powerful.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
If by alpha-geek, you mean the most skilled, you are becoming correct.
However, we still have plenty of real-live trolls that consider themselves alpha-geeks. They don't know anything, I'm shocked that they can tie their shoelaces, but when they walk by the iBook in my cube, they say, "Why would you want such a stupid computer. It looks girly and it only has one mouse button."
So when I see that stuff online, I chomp at my bit. For no good reason, of course, but it drives me crazy.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
Anyway, his point about laptop mouse buttons is perfectly correct: Apple will not let you have an internal trackpad with two buttons. He said nothing about peripheral mice.
However, dual button trackpads require two hands to use comfortably, at which point modifier keys are superior anyway. Requiring two separate skus for single and dual button laptops would be retail suicide. If you're doing intensive mouse work on a laptop, and you need 2+ buttons, no currently offered trackpad will fill your needs. A two button trackpad is a doily on a warthog.
His point about laptop ADB keyboards is also correct. The laptop in my 600 mHz iBook has an ADB keyboard, which poses several limitations that he describes accurately.
He also surmises that this is because of "religious reasons," which is braindead. There is no apple-faithful desire for adb keyboards. It's surely a cost issue.
His point about Unix look-and-feel is particularly braindead, though. You *can* have the Unix look-and-feel. X11 on MacOS X is free and easy.
His implication that these changes would enable them to dominate the massive "Unix/DSP/Embedded/Engineering" market are absurd. The internal adb & 1 button trackpad have *nothing* to do with that market. They need mice for their work anyway. The X11 issue is dealt with. That particular market is not that special. They are already making huge strides there.
Whatever. Now I've been trolled too.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
sorry, so i'm not too clear on what the limitations of an DB keyboard are? can't he still re-map his keyboard?
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
ack i meant to say ADB. sorry
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Not really. The point of the thread was to pick questions and given that clustering isn't useful for Macs I don't think it should have been one of the 10 questions. That ain't off topic.
He can re-map *most* of his keyboard. There are some things you can't do. Some of the shareware/freeware remappers discuss these issues.
It's still a troll. "I can't remap the 'fn' key thus Apple is ignoring my market segment" is incorrect, whether or not there's a missing feature.
I wouldn't be surprised if PC laptops have serial keyboards too. They're just probably more generic and more reconfigurable. I imagine USB keyboards might easily require more electricity and be mroe expensive. A tiny manufacturing cost increase often forces much larger retail costs.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
You wrote, and I quote, "Clustering is expensive, time consummming for very skilled people and is generally only useful for mission critical software. Given that it is also a total bear to write and that the other BSD's are working on it why would Darwin take this on? What does it add to Mac? I guess I'm having trouble "imagining the possibilities"."
There's nothing in what you posted that addresses the topic at hand, which is whether or not the question of clustering should be included in the interview with JH. Your own opinion regarding the usefulness of clustering on the Mac, regardless of its merits, has no bearing on that particular discussion.
given that clustering isn't useful for Macs
That's not a given, it's just your opinion. But the real problem, and the reason for the "off-topic" moderation, is that you posted it despite the fact that the topic at hand was not an open discussion of the merits of clustering. That discussion will come later, if the question makes the cut. If at that point you wish to discuss the merits of JH's answer, that would be an appropriate thread in which to post your opinion on the subject.
I'll admit, it's a rather fine distinction. The point is, the first round of posts in any "Ask whoever" discussion is for selecting questions to ask, not for attempting to answer them. The time and place for a more general discussion of the subjects asked about, and of the interviewee's replies to the questions, is when the replies are posted.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
Outside of evaluating questions how do you select which questions to act.
Why does this anonymous post remind me of the *BSD is dying troll? Maybe it's all the random boldface and the only tangentially relevant whines, but I really think this would be a much stronger post with a gratuitous reference to Kreskin, or even better, some ominous predictions of imminent demise on the order of "Red ink flows like a river of blood"....
Most of Mac OS X is FreeBSD, with Mach underpinnings to do the machine-dependent stuff. Memory management is also done by Mach. How does Mach's memory management stack up against the VM system in straight FreeBSD?
Apple's going after the server market in a big way, for the first time in Apple's history. Mac OS X Server is their flagship (heck, their only) product in that department, and you'd think with FreeBSD's popularity, it'd be a slam dunk.
But on closer inspection, we see that the file system used in Mac OS X is, preferentially, HFS+. Now, UFS/FFS (aka the file system as performed by Kirk McKusick) has been tuned to within an inch of its life for close to 20 years to be able to do this, whereas, as far as I can tell, HFS+ is a) proprietary and b) hasn't ever been used seriously as a server file system before, having lived most of its life on desktops.
Soooooooooo...... what's with HFS+? How much of a performance hit, if any, do we take in using it instead of UFS? What would we see if we benchmarked the two of them in an "average" server?
The current OS X offering is more than a little schizophrenic. To wit, life in the Terminal app is ignorant of a whole bunch of stuff that's Apple-specific. If you tar up a bunch of files and untar them elsewhere, or even copy them, you can kiss the resource forks goodbye. The BSD side of the house doesn't even know that resource forks exist. And this is only one of the areas where Apple's worldview and BSD's worldview collide.
What about this? Are we going to see a system with a unified vision of life, both via Aqua and the shell?
It can be argued that Aqua's window system is a great deal more advanced than X. Heck, Rob Scheifler would probably agree with this. It's got a much more modern imaging model, is much more powerful, has a more unified architecture, and doesn't have 82 layers of cruft to fight through.
Only problem is, it's not network-aware. You wanna run a window on a foreign system, you either install X, and give up on remoting Aqua services entirely, or use Macintosh Manager, which does god-knows-what.
Sun dumped SunView 1 pretty damn quick when it became evident how mind-bogglingly useful X was in comparison. Can you comment on when we might see Aqua take the same step? Is it desirable?
...I was still doing the magazine column, so you could tell me in private that you weren't going to answer the more embarrassing questions? :-)
but it was off topic,,,,,,
Th post was to gather questions for JH, and all you did was complain about clustering....that was off topic.
Ask a question, and move on. All you did was bitch.
It's an Apple site, ok. People want to use Macs. That is opposite of your opinion, so stop trolling and move on.
Yes and I was indicating I thought the question was a bad question; that's on topic. And just to add I think Macs are terrific that doesn't mean I think developing clustering should be a priority for Apple. I don't think developing better ditect graphics support for games should be a priority for the Z-OS group either. Not every type of OS enhancement is appropriate for every platform.
This might get me modded down here.
Actually, I use both MacSlash and Slashdot and the moderation on both is awful.
On MacSlash I got modded down for replying to a troll (REALLY modded down, like -2), and I consider that mod abuse.
On Slashdot I've been modded down sometimes for really strange reasons.
In essence, on both forums you have to be very careful otherwise you get modded down.
uhm, you people do realize that the actual interview and question-posting takes place on macslash.org, and not here on slashdot in this article? right?
oh yeah, and as others have pointed out, macslash moderation is a joke.