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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."
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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?