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Top Ten Mac OS X Tips for Unix Geeks
Lisa writes "There are big differences between Mac OS X and
Unix machines. In this MacDevCenter article, Brian Jepson has assembled ten
tips to help achieve a smooth transition from Unix to OS X."
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from the um,-install-debian-instead? dept
Wouldnt that defeat the purpose of using OSX?
I'm kidding, I'm kidding... jeez...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
It's Command/Control/Restart, not Control/Alt/Delete
had a brief segment last night showing the top 10 Mac OS X killer tips.. the link is here with some nifty tricks for your Mac..
If you're looking here for something insightful or thought provoking, you're probably looking in the wrong place.
I did not (and still don't?) now have anything against MacOS X but that articles makes it sounds like everything is turned up side down. Really, I had the belief that Mac OS X is just about same as everything else *nix. However, this article did good work in convincing something else.
I run entirely Solaris and Linux as my desktop environments. My wife has an iBook with OS X (not Jaguar yet). I do most of the administration on it for her, which has been fun since I hadn't used a Mac since 1989...and OS X is the most usable (for me) that I've found. I could almost use it as a workstation...except for screen real estate issues. I'm amazed that there seems to be no default way of running virtual screens in OS X -- which keeps me from being able to work effectively when I have to wade through dozens of terminal sessions on one box (and 'screen' isn't sufficient).
Short of running one of the X11 WMs described, does anyone have a native Aqua virtual window tool?
> The question that arises is not how to convert but WHY for God's name?
.. a bummer.
Because all other OS's go beep beep beep and eat your paper, and it was a really good paper. then you have to do it again and its not as good because you did it fast this time which is...
That and saving Christmas.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
And while Aqua is not open source, quite a few of the other components are. Like Darwin and all of it's parts. And everything you can get with Fink. And XDarwin (the XFree86 implementation). And all of that stuff. Working correctly, and with eye candy too.
The first is to select the file in the Finder, and drag it to a new location while holding down the Option and Command keys (or select Make Alias from the File menu). This creates a Mac OS alias that Cocoa, Carbon, and Classic applications can follow. However, Unix applications will ignore those links, seeing them as zero-byte files.
You can also create a link with ln or ln -s. If you use this kind of link, Unix, Cocoa, Carbon, and Classic applications will happily follow it.
I have no knowledge of the reasons for this design decision, but why isn't it just "All links are symlinks, no matter where they came from"?
Having links that the gui creates be incompatible with the command line, but having links the command line makes be compatible with the gui, just creates complication.
Apple's been on this site before... The Interface Hall of Shame
Pssst! It's because we wish to sounds divinely unprejudiced. This is a safe way of doing it while holding our defenses. *...dont tell anyone else*.
It's a directory dammit! Not a freakin' folder!!!
Thank you.
Now back to your regularly scheduled beowulf "jokes", first posts, goatse.cx links, trolls and astroturfers.
http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=149 96&db=mac
You are correct in what you're saying about Apple. Things would be a lot worse - in fact, we might not have much at all, just MacOS 7.xx on more expensive hardware. Or the PC revolution might not of happened at all. Who knows - and it's all academic anyway. Apple could not now - nor will they ever - have too much power in the PC space, so we can play with thier toys without needing to worry about feeding a monster.
That being said, OS/X is in of itself cool. It's pretty, stable, reasonably fast and it is *nix under the eye candy. Geeks like that. Being an Apple product is secondary to the fact that it's a really nice OS.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Ah, that's where you're wrong. Most Slashdot readers only masquerade as Open Source advocates, while their real agenda is "Anything But Microsoft". Thus, they have no problem advocating OS X (in fact, they can even lie to themselves that they are advocating open source, because the Darwin core is open), because at least it's not Windows, right? Oh, but wait ... chance are, they'll be using Internet Explorer on their new Mac, and will be using Office as well. Hrm. Maybe I should revise the above statement and say that their agenda is "Anything But Windows"?
There's an editting error on the 2nd and 3rd lines of the table of directories in the article.
.trash - This directory contains files that have been dragged to the Trash.
./vol - This directory maps HFS+ file IDs to files.
AFAIK, it should read:
Isn't it suposed to be ~/.trash - in your user directory?
I don't own a Mac but I see 'em on the Sreen Savers.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
IMHO, X + fink + OroborOSX is the best enviorment imaginable. Yes it's expensive, no it's not quite Unix, but wow!
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
That reads like a logical fallacy. According to Rob, most Slashdot readers never post. It'd be more accurate to say "most Slashdot posters". Even then, there are wildly divergent belief systems in place. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that a significant portion of Slashdot readers were interested in useful, attractive mergers of proprietary and Open Source software.
how to invest, a novice's guide
Another "feature", at least in 10.1 is the 255 char line limit the Terminal has. This pops up in shell scripts at the worst times without warning.
Shareware ($20.00), but you can use it with two windows as nagware.
Your post lives up to your name:
Sanity
Overpriced compared to what, exactly? Some beige box held together with duct tape? Probably so. Compared to equitable hardware (INCLUDING quality of internal parts and after-purchase support) probably not.
Score: -1 (Redundant)
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
In no particular order: /bin, add it to /etc/shells, and change root's shell and your shell. /home from somewhere. /etc 'cause most of that stuff is ignored.
* Forget tcsh and get bash, copy it to
* Go to The Fink Package Database and snag a ton of cool Open Source apps.
* Mount
* Usually stay away from
* Forget sudo and enable root access (I forget how, I don't have an OS X box in front of me), then use su.
* Don't delete ~/Library, that's where all your preferences are saved.
* Load XDarwin in rootless mode and run x2x way cool.
* Get the absolute latest autoconf, automake, etc that recognize Darwin.
* Don't forget to click "Require Password" in your screen saver.
* Put your own pictures in, er, somewhere in your home directory (don't remember where) so the screen saver can display them in its slide show.
Now if only the WM had "focus follows mouse" and iTunes played Ogg Vorbis.
One: under item 2 he states you need to change Login Options once root has been enabled; this is not true--Jaguar automatically provides an "Other" button that allows you to log in as root.
Two: people really should learn to use NetInfo.
Lies about crimes
Yes, Apple does get a better response these days... and why shouldn't it? They've clearly got a clue since OS9, and while not everything is open source, much of it is. They also seem committed to standards and interoperability. While Microsoft is busy mangling standards so that customers are compelled to buy other Microsoft products to assure everything works, Apple has become a vendor that actually cares about playing well with others.
My day job still requires me to write code for Windows, and I've got an old box loaded up with Red Hat's distro at home... but it's the iBook I have the most fun with these days, digging into Cocoa. It is pretty and a pleasure to use, yes, but under the hood it's packing a serious OS with a BSD pedigree.
The iBook may have cost more than a Windows laptop, but I feel it was worth it... especially in light of a very good set of developer tools that came with the unit, the equivalent of which would have set me back several hundred dollars with Windows.
If you think Slashdot is an Apple love-in without merit, go back and find praise predating recent versions of OS X. Slim pickings, I'd say.
Good grief. Can't this just be a "news for nerds" site? Who said Slashdot needs/wants/has a political agenda?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Warning: Virtual Desktops.app is not yet compatible with 10.2.
Remember? I am a Unix geek and as such I don't buy any eye candy. Normally I deal with serious data processing stuff. And I don't buy hardware args as a reason - I've already got G4 to run Gentoo Linux.
So, is there any *REAL* serious reason?
Less is more !
Their suggestion to use sudo is good advice for *any* Unix, not just MacOS X. Since I started to use it, I've reduced the time I spend as root by 80%, which probably reduces my chances of making a really ugly mistake by the same amount. I have to shake my head when I see people who do all their work in Unix as root -- it is only a matter of time before you make some fatal typo.
On the other hand, their advice to use tcsh/bash as a sudo command is poorly thought out. How is that any better than su? Better to use sudo with a few simple commands and scripts that need root for 80% of cases, and use su for the rest.
The question that arises is not how to convert but WHY for God's name?
So you can stop wasting time making the computer work, and actually get something done?
In the time that I've been useing it, OS X has been getting more unixy, and I think it will continue to be so.
Get the powerbook. OS X will make you very happy.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
I use machines running Jaguar every day, and, just as one expects, when you choose "Shutdown" from the Apple menu the computer... get ready for this... shuts down. It's really not that difficult, but, seeing as most here come from the unintuitive hell that is X11, I can imagine that you may be braindamaged enough for the obvious to escape you.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
Those 'non-unix' ways of doing things are to support backward compatibility mostly with older apps and previous OS versins (ie 'classic'). If you're going to be lagacy-free, and chances are you will if you're switching from unix, getting around the differences is pretty easy: I always hide files with the ".", I always use unix style symlinks, except for quick and dirty desktop shortcuts, when I might use alias.
The only thing that surprised me was cp and mv, which didn't copy Mac 'resource forks' but these aren't used in OS X native apps, so it's probably a non-issue.
The tips in this article seemed very helpful to me, I think I may order the book.
"That naive cube! How long must I suffer this!" --Sheldon J. Plankton
No political agenda?
ROTFLMAO
You name it, OS X has it (or can get it with Fink).
I read on Microsoft's web site that you can only use roman numerals in OS X.
This space intentionally left blank.
Maybe I should revise the above statement and say that their agenda is "Anything But Windows"?
Speak for yourself. My agenda is 'anything but Lindows'. That Walmart is the white devil.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Did you read the parent post?
Perhaps I should rethink my way of doing things and switch to using sudo for my own account as well. Are there any gotcha's or other reasons why using sudo in this fashion is not recommended in FreeBSD, linux, or AIX?
I'm afraid a transition away from UNIX and toward MacOS X will be a step down for a long time to come.
UNIX supports, in its open source forms, a larger and more powerful variety of platforms than Apple makes, and in its closed source forms runs on much higher end systems.
Want a workstation OS? Great. Get MacOS if it makes you happy. Tinker with FreeBSD/Linux if you like to be a geek.
Don't waste time thinking MacOS is the answer to everything. Don't waste other people's time trying to convince them it is.
// -- http://www.BRAD-X.com/ --
Friend, FreeBSD isn't UNIX. UNIX is a trademark, and FreeBSD can't be called UNIX.
Besides Mac OS X contains a complete FreeBSD 4.4 distribution-- it is, in fact, a superset of FreeBSD-- so OS X is just as much a UNIX operating system as FreeBSD is.
I write in my journal
I think you'll find that most people aren't Open Source advocates in the sense that RMS is. I'm happy to puchase/use closed source stuff provided that:
1) it is worth how much I pay
2) they are generally open in other ways (file formats, etc.)
You'll find that most people on Slashdot like Apple because they have really cool ideas, and actually INNOVATE. Microsoft on the other hand hardly innovates much at all, but to their credit they do buy up businesses that innovate so for the most part the end user can't tell the difference. At the very core of things, people on slashdot like Mac OSX because it looks cool and it's UNIX.
I bet if you looked at the access_logs for Slashdot, you would find more Windows systems accessing the site than Linux/BSD systems. I have never seen a real advocation of Open Source operating systems on commodity hardware on Slashdot outside of the 'RMS Appreciation Society' crowd. Plus you can run Open Source OSes on many "non-commodity" hardware systems from DEC, Sun and Apple.
Byte for Byte, Mac OS X kicks the rear end of the Open Source desktops. Why? Because not only can it run great closed source apps like M$ Office and Adobe Photoshop, it can also run Open Office and the GIMP. Best of both worlds. I wouldn't run it on a server (yet - XServe is sweet) because Linux and BSD are cheaper solutions and wouldn't want to waste the great Apple hardware which looks better on my desk than a closet.
Don't get dis Mac OS X because you can't afford Apple hardware. I can't afford a top of the line Ferrari, but that doesn't make it a crappy car.
People might like to think that Apple is somehow better than Microsoft, but trust me - if they had Microsoft's monopoly, their behavior would be no better, in fact, given that they would have a monopoly on hardware too - things would be much worse.
Trust you? Why? Because you are parnoid? Sheesh! You still have a choice. Microsoft got their "monopoly" because people liked their products and bought them not because they were the only game in town. Apple has done very well at 5% -- they are not going broke any time soon.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
But they DON'T have MS's monopoly, and so therefore they actually innovate and improve their products. Linux, on the other hand, does a good job of scratching other people's itches. I'm not a programmer, nor do I wish to become one, and the slapdash nature of the Linux/FreeBSD/whatever UI is not appealing to me. No dis, mind you, it's just not for me.
The MS monopoly is the critical distinction. Me, I'm not a zealous open-source advocate. I think it's a good system and a good philosophy, but I am willing to pay for good quality, well designed software and hardware. Apple gives me that. Microsoft does not. Linux sure doesn't, either.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
OSX - a closed source operating system
/. to promote your dark overlord, please say so.
Can you say "open"?
People might like to think that Apple is somehow better than Microsoft
If you work for Microsoft and are trolling
In the meantime, Apple is better than Microsoft, and not just "somehow". They have better software, better hardware (althought I am using a microsoft mouse with my mac...I love the little wheel), their stuff looks better, works better, is more innovative, etc.
I've been using Macs and PCs since the 80's, I've followed the evolution of both, I'm not some one-side zealot. I'm telling you: The only things Microsoft has over the mac are 1-Popularity (more people use it because more people use it, vicious circle), 2-Cheap ass hardware (you get what you pay for), and better CD management (but the floppy thing is lamer than a one-legged lemur). Oh, and 4-Wheely mice (although they do make mac drivers for 'em, yay!).
if they had Microsoft's monopoly, their behavior would be no better
There are so many things wrong with this sentence, I'm having trouble replying. Ok, lets see...
Many people HATE microsoft, while many people are just in love with apple. Why is that? Because of Microsoft's behaviour. The very behaviour that led them to a monopoly position. So if Apple had the same attribute as Microsoft (a lousy attitude and a monopoly), people's attitude to Apple would be the same as it is towards Microsoft. Big fat DUH.
Your FUD bothers me.
You can't take the sky from me...
Are you positive about that? When I bought my last machine, it came with 10.2 installed, but the developer tools hadn't been installed at the factory. It had /usr/bin/bash on it.
I write in my journal
don't you know that Apple is cheaper - you just have to compare um, apples to apples... for example... compared with a Ferrari, Apple is cheaper.
wanna irritate a 'switching' unix geek?
create root owned directory called "-p" or some suitable switch-like string
you can't delete it, or move it, or rename it.
rm -rf "-p" nope
rm -rf \-p nope
rm -rf '-p' nope
rm -rf * nope
try mv, ls, chown, chmod, anything! it won't let ya do it. And even when authenticated as an admin the finder won't delete it.
Finally I was able to chown -R from a higher level directory and then whack it via finder. But what a PIA!
I hate to get into a price war, BUT:
My put-together PC:
-2.2GHz AMD Athlon XP w/133+MHz FSB & 533MHz motherboard bus (benchmarked to be equivalent to a 2.8GHz Pentium 4)
-1GB PC2100 DDR SDRAM
-3x60GB ATA-133 Drives & motherboard supports ATA RAID 0, 1, & 0+1
-DVD-ROM Drive
-48x/24x/48x TDK CD-RW Drive
-NVidia GeForce4 dual-display w/128MB DDR (No bundled displays) & motherboard supports AGP 8x
-Cool Blue/Silver Aluminum display case with 6 fans
-6 USB, 2 FireWire, 6 channel digital/optical audio, 1 CF/SM card reader
Price: $1,555.00
A roughly equivalent Mac that isn't too overpriced from store.apple.com on 10/25/02:
-Dual 867MHz PowerPC G4 w/133MHz system bus
-1GB PC2100 DDR SDRAM
-2x120GB ATA-100 Drives (this was the closest they had to my 60gb boot drive and 120GB RAID data drive)
-2X DVD-ROM + 16x/10x/32x CD-RW Drives (again, the closest I could get)
-NVidia GeForce4 dual-display w/128MB DDR (no bundled displays)
-I assume at least 2 USB and 2 FireWire, but their site doesn't say; I also assume no 6 channel digital/optical sound or a compact flash/smart media reader
Price: $3,249.00 (sorry, subtract the special $110.00 "Promotion Savings" from that price)
A roughly equivalent Dell system:
-2.8GHz Pentium 4 w/533MHz system bus
-1GB PC2100 DDR SDRAM
-1x120GB ATA-100 Drive (closest I could get)
-DVD-ROM Drive
-48x/24x/48x CD-RW Drive
-ATI Radeon 9700 Pro dual-display w/128MB DDR (no bundled displays)
-I assume at least 2 USB and added a 3 port firewire card; Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound; no CF/SM reader
Price: $2,182.00 (subtract a $100 rebate from that price)
Now what were you saying about "where's the overpriced hardware"??? I think the answer to that question is obvious.
Of course, there are a few things people could take issue with, like:
-- Oh, but a PowerPC is so much faster than a Pentium 4! Especially 2 of 'em!
Answer: Yeah, right -- prove it.
-- Oh, but you can't run Mac OS X on a PC! And, Apple has better tech support!
Answer: I don't want/need OS X because I can pick from a half-dozen other arguably better OS's; and Apple's "support" is rated time-and-again as being far below Dell's support level.
I just can't see how a rational human being can state that Macs have closed the price gap. If anything, they've widened it! And I owned only Macs for 9 years!!!
I'd add that you can also have hard links and symlinks in ext2fs, and various types of "link files" (.lnk, .pif) plus symlinks + "junctions" on ntfs.
So this kind of design is accepted across the industry.
"it uses NetInfo instead of /etc/hosts, /etc/group and /etc/passwd"
/etc/passwd) is consulted before NIAgent (which looks up info in NetInfo).
Kind of. The big change in 10.2 was that now the FFAgent (for using traditional flat files like
This is actually really convenient. It gives people the choice of either method as well as allowing you to use flat files to override settings in NIAgent and DNSAgent (which yeah, looks up DNS...) you can check the LookupOrder by running lookupd in debug mode.
lookupd -d
and then typing "configuration" at the lookupd prompt.
This article at macdevcenter was lame. A much more useful link for people coming from another unix to OSX is The Rosetta Stone for UNIX.
Or just browse MacOSXHints for an hour...
i don't read slashdot anymore.
why the enthusiasm for encouraging people to switch to OSX - a closed source operating system made by the poster-child for locking people into overpriced hardware?
Because OS X seems to deliver on all of the promises that Linux has been making for years.
While I love open-source software, I switched to a Mac because I got sick of waiting for the open source community to start making a useable desktop. Linux and the BSDs are fantastic on servers, but whenever I used either as my primary machine I found myself wrestling with the system a lot more than I wanted to. I don't want to learn the intricacies of my Xfree86 config files. I don't want to find where Red Hat hid Apache today. I just want to fire up my Dev Tools/Word Processor/Photoshop and get to work. I got away from Windows because I was sick of fighting with my machine. Why would I want to go back to that?
OS X is the first system since BeOS that does all the unixy stuff that I want without sacrificing aesthetics or ease-of-use. Overall the system is clean, intuitive, and I don't have to wrestle with it on a daily basis. Amazingly, it doesn't seem to sacrifice any flexibility or power for its' simplicity. When Linux makes me as productive as OS X, I'll go back in a second. Until then, you can pry my iBook out of my cold dead fingers.
This
They reorganized almost everything, so that everything from cp (only "ditto" copies metadata) to shutdown (not rewritten to care about Apple's replacement for /etc/init.d) to /etc/passwd (user information is now stored in "the NetInfo database") is now useless, and worse, vestigal (!), but everything new they introduced makes the previous unix "non-naming schemes" and disorganization look great by comparison. ".vol" is where trashed files go? It's ".DS_Store" rather than ".Finder Settings"? For that matter, why on earth are we still prepending periods to hide files? Or hiding /usr and /tmp at the application level rather than having a legacy emulation layer and just doing it right? Aliases don't work at the "unix level," and symbolic links work everywhere, but we're once again back to things that break when you move the target... This is the freakin 21st century here.
It may appear to work, and it may crash less than OS9, but from a design point of view, OSX is an anathema. This article just makes it clearer: OSX is, not a port of MacOS or an enhancement of Unix, but a bloody (and fatal?) collision between the two, where both lost what clarity and integrity they had by attrition to the other. A great opportunity to do a new system right was squandered by what appears to be terrifyingly sloppy-looking engineering.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
I don't think that's going to happen, and I think Apple is shooting themselves in the foot with that assumption. UNIX users like open systems: that come from multiple vendors and have open specifications. If they didn't, they would have moved to Windows long ago.
Sure, there are some UNIX users that really go for the OS X pretty look and are happy with a BSD-like system call interface and a C compiler. But I think for the most part, OS X enjoys popularity among UNIX users only to the degree that it is UNIX compatible. If Apple wants to be in the UNIX market in the long term, rather than just receive a brief shot in the arm from a few UNIX converts, they need to make a long-term commitment to interoperating more with UNIX systems, and they need to give up dreams of "transitioning" UNIX users to Mac OS X.
Nah
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Macs are definitely more expensive, but it's not quite as bad as your numbers indicate. You ordered extra RAM and hard drives from Apple; *never* do that, their markups are insane. A stock dual 867 with a GeForce 4Ti is $2050. From third parties, get 1 GB of ram for $250, 2 80 GB drives for $250, a Firewire CD-RW for $150, and you're at $2700 with a better system than you got from the Apple store. Still more than the Dell, but the difference is reduced by half.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
> OSX - a closed source operating system
:P
Can you say "open"? [opendarwin.org]
This is misleading. Darwin is the most ho-hum part of OS X, because all of its Unix-like functionality is reproduced in other kernels (BSD, Linux, etc). The interesting parts are the GUI and the APIs that let it run Mac-specific software. These are all proprietary.
There are too many problems with your other FUD for me to even contemplate responding.
I see a lot of people complaing that OS X is supposedly a lot different from Unix. Well, hate to break to the Linux fanatics out there, but it is a lot CLOSER to Unix than Linux. Remember that Linux is not actually Unix, but a Unix-like operating system. OS X is Unix. It is BSD through and through. OS X is more Unix than Linux will ever be.
I hate to point out nitpicky but important points (OK, well no I don't) but:
"a transition away from UNIX and toward MacOS X"
That's sort of like a transition away from birds but towards ducks. Here the author is assuming MacOS X is somehow not a *NIX... an assumption that's been proved wrong here many times before. MacOS X is a subset of UNIX, just look up any UNIX history.
Sadly, even the original story submitter made this mistake: "There are big differences between Mac OS X and Unix machines." Sorry, that's not correct unless it's specified what other type of UNIX we're comparing OS X to.
After all, even the O'Reilly article author himself says "These tips will show you the differences between Mac OS X and other flavors of Unix" (my emphasis) MacOS X is a UNIX. Let's get it straight.
This program has exactly the same limitation of Space.app: Windows from one program can only be displayed in one workspace. So, for instance, you can't have Terminal windows open in more than one workspace.
It works by hiding the applications on a desktop, when you move from desktop to desktop.
If this is acceptable to you, Space.app does it for free. But it's a poor solution for those of us used to real virtual window managers.
lookup does not run in single user mode, but runs in multi-user mode (the normal mode of operation).
The files are actually kind of wrong as of 10.2, as the flat files do get consulted in multi user mode, and do so before the NetInfo database does.
ie,
See how 'FF' gets consulted before 'NI' ? This means that the flat file does get looked at. 'DNS' is self explanatory, and 'DS' stands for Directory Services like LDAP...
i don't read slashdot anymore.
Obviously the dollar-sign is a parser character right? Watch this:
Right? Okay...
Hmmm, obviously the - is not a character that the shell thinks is special, it just passed it straight through to echo
Ah, there's your reason, putting a backslash in front of a character that isn't otherwise parsed by the shell, just passes that char on through to the program.
If you pass a -- (two-dashes) to a GNU-ish (getopt and friends) program it'll stop parsing commandline options, and accept things like -p as an argument, and not a commandline option.
HTH!
When this story was posted over at MacSlash, somebody replied with a tip of their own, which I've found to be quite nifty.
What it involves is logging out, then logging back in as user ">console", with no password. You might have to select "Other User" or whatever that option is called, on the login screen. That'll allow you to skip Aqua, and just have a nice full-screen terminal to work with, instead.
CmdrTaco did, in this NYTimes article. He said he "still considers the site his own personal soapbox" [para]. Given his new TiBook, I think we're going to see more and more stories like this.
our entire development department and company backend is 100 percent linux (mostly RedHat). we just hired a new developer whose laptop is running OSX.
since he was going to be a remote user, he attempted to get his laptop up to speed with the necessary compilers, python modules and other development pieces.
after two days, he gave up in frustration, went to the nearest CompUSA, bought a new laptop and installed RedHat 8.0.
now, he is a happy, development camper.
now, i don't know much about OSX. so my question is, can OSX easily be used as a competent developer platform?
of course for the sake of keeping up, here's my top ten:
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
to be Unix(tm), you have to have the Open Group certify you as being Unix (tm), which involves forking over cash. Apple is a member of the Open Group, and OS X is certified Unix (tm). (Free|Open|Net)BSD, however, are not Unix (tm).
BTW - GNU's Not Unix either.
You probably can't tell the difference between a Rolls Royce and a Ford Fiesta either.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I used to think what you say above, until I bought a Mac.
Have you ever owned a Mac or had a close look at one, inside and out? It's beautifully engineered. Every surface finished nicely, lots of thought given to things like cable management and noise reduction, easy access to parts that are meant to be user-accessible (not much on an iMac, just about everything in a G4 tower).
I once had a Compaq Presario that required me to _remove_the_motherboard_from_the_case_ to add memory! (Yes, that's what their tech support said to do.) Unbelievable.
Homebrew machines tend to be more accessible, but watch out for the sharp edges on that metal case! and have plenty of twist-ties handy for the cables on any Intel-type box.
I feel that OS X is the best desktop Unix around now (I used to say that about Linux), and it runs only on Mac hardware. My Mac is worth every penny of its price to me.
In other words, Apple is taking a big step here and embracing open-source about as much as you can expect a big corporation to do. Sure they don't give away the whole farm, but they are promoting an environment which is at least friendly to open-source even if it isn't 100% open.
Sapere aude!
"Because OS X seems to deliver on all of the promises that Linux has been making for years."
Since when did "Linux" made any promises? Linux is just a kernel, and the developers just do whatever they like. They didn't made *any* promises.
Usable desktops? That's up to the GNOME and KDE projects and distributors. Say whatever you want, but GNOME and KDE, as of version 2.0 and 3.0 are very much usable, and more than usable enough for normal usage.
"I don't want to learn the intricacies of my Xfree86 config files."
You don't have to! Your XF86Config is setup automatically by RedHat/Mandrake/SuSE/FooBar's auto-hardware-detection-installer!
"I don't want to find where Red Hat hid Apache today."
You don't have to! Applications->System Tools->Service Configuration -- now how hard was that? (and the average user doesn't even want to run a webserver!)
"I just want to fire up my Dev Tools/Word Processor/Photoshop and get to work."
Login --> Applications->Office->AbiWord --> start being productive. Was that hard? I don't think so.
Really, "Linux"'s usability is heavily underrated. People seem to be stuck with those "omfg I have to edit 3000 text files to get it working!"-mentality from a few years ago.
OS X may be o-so-userfriendly, but don't underrate Linux as some kind of usability nightmare that can't be used to get anything done.
The word you're looking for is "obsession". One possible reason is that Apple is actually making bold products (again). Starting from the original iMac, the G3/G4 tower, G4 Cube, iPod, Cinema Display, the new iMac, and of course MacOS X all pack powerful features in well designed packages. Their pricing might prevent some from actually buying, but geeks admire this sort of engineering adventures.
Have you forgotten the latest DMCA drama over iDVD?
Uh, why should iDVD support third party hardware? Third party vendors should write their own software, and compete with Apple hardware and iDVD as a complete hardware and software package. Now, the DMCA is a terrible law, and should be struck down, but I don't see why anybody should pay for the development of iDVD so that it helps somebody else sell hardware.
Note, however, that rigging MacOS X so third party drivers won't work, for example, would be crossing the line.
Have you forgotten how Apple eats up app developers by bundling similar features into the OS?
This does suck. However, one of MacOS X's (valid, I think) selling points over Windows is the combined power of its bundled apps. Even if Apple consciously limits the power of these apps, inevitably they will hurt competition, because the novice users will no longer purchase an e-mail app, MP3 player, and so on. Why should Watson be exempted from competition?
This is actually one thing in which I agree with Microsoft. You cannot draw a line where the OS ends and the applications begin. The ways they sought to exclude Netscape (threatening hardware manufacturers) is illegal, but the very act of improving Windows with IE is not.
Having said that, since Apple is not in Microsoft's position, they should think hard about what their apps are doing to their few but loyal developers. Microsoft can afford not to care.
But how come recently every sneeze in Cupertino becomes a fever at Slashdot?
Because nothing in the PC world is exciting at all. CPU gets faster. Bus gets faster. Big deal. About the most interesting thing happening is case modding.
...but from a design point of view, OSX is an anathema. This article just makes it clearer: OSX is, not a port of MacOS or an enhancement of Unix, but a bloody (and fatal?) collision between the two, where both lost what clarity and integrity they had by attrition to the other.
What? Have you actually *used* it? How about this explanation instead: they've managed to create one unified operating system that keeps some very diverse users happy. If you're an end-user technophobe, what you see is a very nice, clean, end-user system, far nicer than Windows, and without the 10 years of cruft that OS9 had accumulated. On the other hand, if you understand computing, you have a complete Unix-ish system, again, without a lot of the cruft that other Unix systems have accumulated. The Apple engineers deserve major kudos for keeping the "collision" under control as well as they did... they of course have backward compatibility to deal with, too.
Yes, the file copy stuff is a little ridiculous, but geez, the complaints on that level are pretty few, considering how much elegant functionality there is in there otherwise.
I don't really mind a little karma whoring here and there; I suppose I've been guilty of it myself on a few occasions. The sheer banality of a lot of the high-ranked comments sometimes gets to me, however. (Granted, if meaningless numbers on a message board impacts my happiness, I really ought to take a break from slashdot for awhile
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
My mother has a name brand PC, it cost about $1000 when it was new. My mother-in-law has an iMac. It cost about the same.
The monitor on the iMac is way way way sharper, and edges and corners can be used.
The built in speakers on the iMac while they suck suck less then the speakers on the PC. I expect the sound hardware on the iMac is better too, but I don't know 'cause the speakers on the PC hide it.
Other then that, I don't see a reason the hard drive on the Mac would work better, or the RAM.
But hey, who cares about all that crap. The absolute most important thing? I get next to zero help calls about the Mac. It Just Works. Really. Honest. When they buy hardware that has a Mac sticker on it and plug it in the it doesn't screw up all the existing settings. They don't seem to get a bizzilion little auto-start crap-lets every few months. They don't end up with some commercial software they buy overwriting half a dozen important system files with some other version of the files an having stuff no longer work.
In short the Mac does the most important thing possible: it doesn't screw up as much as a windows box.
To me it is worth the extra money to hear from my relatives less. Or in a less cynical mind, to hear them talk about interesting stuff when I hear from them, not about computer problems.
Now maybe you want the fastest CPU in Mhz, I just want the one that "does the job" the fastest. "Does the job" includes time for the user to figure out how to do the job, and the time lost if it crashes part way through. For me "does the job the fastest" is frequently a Unix box. I mean if I do it a lot, I probably already wrote a program to do it, and I've been using Unix forever, so that'll be a Unix program. I'm not most people though. Most people can (gasp!) get stuff done faster on a box that coddles them. So a Mac or a Wintel box. And of the two? It seems the Mac really does a better job way more offen then people think.
Don't beleve me? I tell you what, for the price difference between my in-law's iMac, and my mom's PC will you take her tech support calls?
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Go to VersionTracker and do a search for MouseZoom. It'll speed up both mice and trackpads far beyond the Apple defaults.
Bash shell is included in 10.2
[Computer:~] acomjean% bash
bash-2.05a$ yes
y
y
y
y
y
From The Apple Store the base price of the low end tower model (the one you used) is $1,699.00
That includes the following:
Power Mac G4 Dual 867MHz w/133MHz system bus
That is the base model.
I would buy that base model with AppleCare added on (about $269) and get any extra drives or memory separately from a third party vender.
The price is reasonable if you don't buy Apple RAM or hard drives other than one size bigger than the base.
[bast:~] lemke% ls /bin/*sh
/bin/bash /bin/csh /bin/sh /bin/tcsh /bin/zsh
That is from this machine running 10.2.1.
Not entirely true.
bash is the default "sh" shell (for scripts).
However, the default "user" shell is tcsh.
Now that's an argument that I can understand. And it makes perfect sense if I was buying a Mac for my mother. However, I am not buying a Mac for my mother, and I don't run Windows on my PC. This article was about UNIX users switching to the Mac, and I just don't see the draw. If I was a Windows user I imagine that I would be dying to pay extra for something that works, but I am not a Windows user.
I'll quickly cede the point that an "Out-of-the-box" linux install is a hell of a lot more usable than it was two years ago. "Usable" is kind of a sad benchmark for your desktop, though. After years of development, I should certainly hope that GNOME and KDE are usable. We really should be shooting for something a little higher. Open source is *barely* keeping up with Windows on the ease-of-use front, and Windows kind of sucks.
Let's bring some real-world examples into this. Say I want to connect to a remote printer on the same network segment.
They'll all work, but Red Hat is the most difficult to use of the three. The *BSDs are even worse. It's a similar story when dealing with mobile computing or wireless networking.
My original point was that the pseudo-closed Macintosh makes me a heck of a lot more productive than any OSS desktop ever did, and I haven't had to give up any of the power of unix. That's why so many people are jumping ship to OS X. Your arguments don't say that Linux is better, only that it'll do. In order to win on the desktop, OSS is going to have to do a lot better than that.
This
One correction.
The iBook is one of the few products Apple makes that costs LESS than comparable Windows laptops (the others generally will cost about the same or more, probably more).
I say comparable because any Windows laptop costing less than the iBook is last years model.
The reason this happens is that unlike desktops, you can't get away with commodifing the innards as you have to design custom parts for a lot of the pieces to fit inside that small case.
In other words laptops are tightly integrated.
Well it's a Unix machine other people can use? Oh, wait, that just means other people will fight you over it. Not so good.
Hmmmm, well last time I tryed to run Unix (other then OSX) on a laptop it didn't do so good. I mean when I buy a desktop I make sure it only has good parts with drivers for the Unixlike OS I'm going to run. On a laptop it is way harder to control everything. Buy a Mac laptop, any of the current ones, and many of the old ones, and it all works. That's nice. To me it's worth paying the extra that a Mac laptop costs. Plus, well, the TiBook really does rock.
As far as the desktops go? Well they seem over priced to me. I mean, sure, being able to pop open the side and swing the motherboard down and not be in a maze of cables is nice. Being able to slide in a new drive is nice. Not cutting yourself on something every time you fiddle with the machine, that's just nice. But I don't do that real frequently (I mean it would get in the way of my uptime!), so I don't see payin' a whole bunch extra for that!
Now a whole bunch of the place I work for uses MS Office, and can't be dissuaded from it. It is nice being able to run Office and look at the crap they send. That's hard to do on most Unixes, but not OSX. Of corse that costs more, but...
Hmmmm, what else? Well it does worth with dirt cheap USB photo printers, and it has nice photo manipulation software. Er, what do you mean I'm the only geek with a digital SLR? Ah well, not compelling to the masses then :-)
To be honest while I love free software, and even write it frequently, sometimes being able to shell out some money and get a nicely polished chunk o' software is nice. I can do that in OSX, I can't do that very much in Linux or FreeBSD.
It's even nicer in OSX because not only can I pay out $700 of PhotoShop, I can use the GIMP. I can keep using it until I'm sure PhotoShop is $700 better. So far I'm still using it. If I had Linux on a Wintel box I wouldn't really get to change my mind! It wouldn't be $700 for PhotoShop unless I could stomach Windows to run it under. Stomach Windows and not have any services running on the Unix box other stuff depends on. Plus maybe have to buy Windows. Ick! Nope, I would rather overpay on the Mac then buy Windows!
Sure I write real servers in real (and painful!) C++. I hack together a ton of Perl scripts. But....sometimes...I just want to fire up Civ III, and should I have to boot windows for that? Sometimes I want a web browser that renders most of the web correctly, should I have to fire up windows for that? (er, and Mozilla didn't work good 'nuf when I bought the Mac...now it's the browser I use most...'cept when I use OmniWeb). Sometimes my cable ISP dies and I have to convince them to fix it. For that I need to run a supported OS. Guess what, "Unix" of all flavors is absent from that list, except...OSX. Those are all good reasons to have a Mac.
There are good reasons not too. My Mac is outnumbered 5 to 1 by non-Mac Unix boxes in my house. 3 to 1 if you ignore the Unix machines managing my TV. Maybe 15 to 1 if you count all the computers I own but am not using! (my C=64 is in a box somewhere...and I insist that it is a computer, even if it is so outclassed by not only my Palm, but even my cell phone that it's not funny!)
Any you know what? Those arguments don't have to convince you to buy a Mac, just get you to see that people that do buy one might not be nuts.
Oh, and your mom needs a Mac. Now. Go get her one. You do love her don't you? Come on now...
Er, sorry, according to Apple's EULA I have to let Steve Jobs control my body 5 minutes a year. Hey, it's still better then what Bill wants....
Don't you mean, switch from Unix to begin using Unix? Last time I checked the open group still said OS X is a unix OS.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Okay, I can understand that. I have started to play with digital photography and it would have been nice to simply go to the store and look for hardware with an Apple on it. As it stands my Epson printer and HP camera work perfectly with Linux, but I did have to do a little shopping around. And I totally agree about the laptop bit. Linux on laptops is a pain in the posterior. And don't even get me started on font issues. Honestly, before OpenOffice came out I didn't give a flying fig for fonts, but OpenOffice isn't even useable unless you get some fonts from somewhere, and installing the fonts and getting them to work took me an entire day (the first time).
Now that I see where you are coming from I would love to get my Mom a Mac. Unfortunately my father is working on a book (with lots of pictures and wacky layouts) and MS Word simply wouldn't hold up under the stress. Corel's WordPerfect seems to be doing all right for now. I told my father that if he has to call me again for help I am going to force him to switch to LaTeX. I don't suppose WordPerfect is available for Mac OS X? Don't tell me that the version of MS Word for Mac OS X is better than the Windows version either. For one thing, I don't believe it. For another he has nearly 800 pages in WordPerfect format and everytime he so much as adds a letter to one of the early pages it screws up the entire layout. I would rather die than help him switch to anything but LaTeX.
1) You're in for a rude shock if you think there is any such thing as an unbiased viewpoint.
2) The GUI and other components may not be open source, but notice even you have to make the distinction between the GUI and the whole OS. That says something doesn't it? ANd since when was being opensource the measure of the quality of a product? How many programs do you use that aren't open source? Are they bad programs because they aren't opensource?
3) Is it so hard to believe that Apple has produced a product which people are interested in?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Let's hear it again for geek social skills. No wonder people keep them locked up in the room with the servers.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
um... most of the PCs I see today are still white, or grey or biege. No aluminum, no black (except the dells).
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
They probably should replace cp with their own program that copies all the data on an HFS disk, but I can at least understand why it does not work.
Removing all shell processing is what Windows does. The main benifit of this is you can do a command like "rename *.a *.b" which is considered a much better argument than the one you presented for this design. However there are serious deficiencies, mostly that there is no way for a shell to do scripting-like things and change the arguments. Solving this usually results in worse scripting than even Unix has, because you must now "quote the quotes" so they are passed through, or your sample commands cannot be sent.
Also there is no easy way to name a file with spaces in it. This is usually solved by having a library routine in the program to strip the quotes. If this is done after switches are identified then it will work like you like, but you quickly run into nastiness like trying to make a C-compiler switch like -I"file with spaces" where you must mix the switch removal and quoting. Most results I have seen are exactly like the Unix shell and do not allow the commands you typed in to work either.
The alternative solution would be to pass a "quoted" flag with the words in argv, does anybody know of any system that does that?
If the infrastructure is present there is no reason you couldn't right it yourself... I mean how hard could it be to capture a shutdown event and then delay it until a set of scripts have been run. Sounds more like a lack of initiative to me.
BTW what is so different about an application with a GUI asking you if you want to quit before the shutdown and a daemon doing the same? Currently when I shutdown my OS X box while running an app it will do this (ask if I want to quit). If I say no/cancel the shutdown is aborted.
All the pieces are there they just aren't being implemented in these daemons.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Most third party mouse products have control panels as well... Kensington has the best IMHO though MacAlly and Microsoft IntelliStuff do as well. These will let you customize your mouse as much as you want with programmable buttons/scroller, speed curve manipulation/vector control, and chording speeds...etc. You can even use 3 button mice....
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I couldn't agree more. In fact, last time I was home I did split up his document, and that certainly helped. The problem is that I am five hours away, and my dad is the type that jumps in and reads the instructions afterward.
All things considered though, WordPerfect is holding up fairly well. I don't think I have the strength to teach Dad to use a DTP app, and WordPerfect has been pretty good at building a table of contents and an index. The entire document is something like 1.2G and with enough memory WordPerfect will open the entire expended document.
Not that I would trade it for Emacs and LaTeX though, plain text is a blessing on documents that big.
Uh - what's wrong with enthusiasm? Last I heard, CmdrTaco and Hemos were both using OS X on PowerBooks, and Taco called OS X 'the missing piece of the puzzle'. Where's the conflict? Seems to me someone is flamebaiting, fearful that the unrevered RMS might find himself in a jam. And as for paying for stuff that works - isn't that exactly what Linus himself told RMS not too long ago?
People speaking highly of OS X usability are not fanatics or Linux Puritans - they just want to get the job done on quality hardware, and nothing does it like OS X on a Mac. End of story.
The Rixster
Of course I've "*used*" it. I've spent quality time with people who are programming against it, and I've read much of the developer literature. I see a lot of ambivalence about OSX. I don't think the OS9 cruft is eliminated; I believe that it's all still there, both in the Classic emulation layer and in the APIs which (in earlier drafts I read were simple, beautiful, and well-organized, very Java-like) Adobe forced Apple to cruft up to make native ports of their software easier... and then took their sweet time with those native ports to boot.
/usr at the application level means that the user is guaranteed to see it at some point and be confused... I don't understand why they didn't approach unix more like they approached classic. With some containment. Seems like that would have been simpler, more much compatible, easier to use...
You said: "without a lot of the cruft that other Unix systems have accumulated," but I have no idea what you mean. What unix cruft is gone? Are you talking about X11 being replaced by Aqua? From my point of view, all the bad things about Unix are still there, and worse, new unix-esque crap has been piled on top of it, often conflicting, and badly, to add to the confusion that Unix already is.
I think the ditto issue is emblematic of the entire conflict between unix and OS9; they've met, and they've been joined by a confusing and unfortunate kludge which everyone who uses the system is guaranteed to run afoul of. Copying files is about the most basic and fundamental activity you get into in an OS - that's not a little detail you overlook. Why not just modify cp to copy metadata if it exists, or make cp a link to ditto? Or the passwd file being superceded (at least in "some cases," I'm sure) by another database... My rule on this stuff is that if you're going to fsck with the password file, you'll break a lot of old code, but once you do replace it, you take the old piece out... the only thing worse than broken old code is broken old code that thinks its working.
There are more complaints I didn't even get into. The incredible performance hit of scattering metadata of various kinds in what seems like dozens of flat files, so that the UI chains up thousands of seeks all over the disk, parsing XML and doing lots of complicated crap just to show you the contents of a folder or the properties of an application... And then apparently tying everything up in the layout loop... Have you tried resizing windows? It's tragic. And then there's the fact that Apple seems to have abandoned the superior use of metadata it once had; I see gnr9ng.xyz files scattered everywhere, not legacy stuff but new stuff created by Apple, as if it's a DOS box... IOW, turning their back on one of the earliest and best ideas in the Mac: type and creator information, instead of goofy abbreviations and naming conventions that are super-easy for the user to run afoul of.
My big complaint with them is rather than boxing up traditional unix organization and features (which have no place on a desktop Mac, IMO), they made MacOS into a Unix clone, and an annoying one, because there's a bunch of important differences and gotchas and thus hassles actually porting and running unix software, since they did change quite a bit, even if they didn't fix it... meanwhile hiding
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
OS X is a certified Unix, but to most people, that is absolutely meaningless.
Now where being a Unix(-like), Linux has it where it counts(and so does *BSD). GNU/Linux & BSD work and behave like you'd expect a Unix OS to, from the gui(X) down to the command-line.
So, while OS X is a certified Unix and Linux/BSD are not, Linux/BSD meet peoples' expectations of how a Unix OS should work much more than OS X.
On the other hand, I'm not saying that OS X shouldn't do things it's own way, in fact in many areas they've done a good job of making things better for most(ie. desktop users) users while at the same time keeping the system more robust that OS9 or Windows and comparable to more traditional Unix(-like) systems.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I work for an IT dept. for a Comm Arts. college at a major university. We have both Macs & PC's, and they are about equal in numbers, maybe slightly more Macs. The university offers classes from time to time, and my boss went to an intro Unix class so he could learn some new tricks for OS X, which we just installed in our labs over the summer. At the end of the class, the instructor asked if there were any other classes they thought the university should be teaching. My boss told him "yeah, you should teach an OS X oriented unix class". He then found out that 5 of the 12 people in the classroom were there because they were already running OS X, and another 4 were there because their dept. (I think it was one of the Biology depts.) were switching over to OS X because a lot of the old Unix apps were being ported over to OS X. So 9 out of 12 were there for OS X. I wonder if this is a trend at the university level?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Heh, I was just hoping for a +1 Funny for the Monty Python reference :)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Taco and Hemos are probably using DONATED TiBooks.... can you say "free advertising"?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Besides Mac OS X contains a complete FreeBSD 4.4 distribution-- it is, in fact, a superset of FreeBSD-- so OS X is just as much a UNIX operating system as FreeBSD is.
You are correct that neither FreeBSD nor OS X are UNIX 95 or UNIX 98 certified by the Open Group.
However, OSX is certainly not a superset of FreeBSD . OS X runs on top of Mach. Try compiling FreeBSD kernel modules for Darwin... Sure Darwin i a pretty good 4.4 BSD kernel simulator, but please don't confuse the simulation with the real thing. Way down at the bottom, you're using the Mach threadin model instead of the BSD 4.4 model.
Don't get me wrong... I love the idea of microkernels. For about a week I tried running my machine with a userland port of Linux 2.2.20 for the L4 Hazelnut microkernel. Props to NeXT and Apple for making a microkernel OS. Windows NT was originally intended to be a microkernel, but then all kinds of crap got migrated into the kernel for performance reasons. Microkernels are hard to pull off... MS could't do it, the GNU folks are still trying to do it (G_d bless 'em). Unfortu ntely, Mach is the CISC of microkernels and can rightly be called "micro" only in its delegation of tasks, not in its footprint. There's a push to move the HURD to L4, and you'd see a significant speed improvement if someone ports Darwin to L4 (and also ports a recent L4 implementation to PPC).
Hey, has anyone tried porting the old MkLinux stuff from GnuMach 68k to Apple's Mach PPC flavor? Then you could, at least in theory, run both Darwin and the Linux personality simultanously, one of the unutilized benefits of a microkernel. "Puh-leeze, you have dual AMD Hammers? I have a dual personaity microkernel on dual PPCs!" Speaking of advantagesof microkernels, was anyone yet implemented a "userland-only reboot" where you kill off all userland programs, including the BSD personality and then re-load the BSD personality and everything on up? That's one thin I liked about BeOS: the networking stack was a bit flakey, but you could kill it off and restart it because it wasn't part of the kernel. Hopefully Apple will stat to modularize Darwin in that way. You'd get absolutely insane stability if you had a watchdog component that would restart the other Darwin components if they startd to flake out. The other parts of the system would only think that disk latency or network latency had momentarily jumped to 10 seconds or so, with a few dropped packets and failed reads. A minor library change would even hide thefailed readsand dropped packets from the apps by checking with the watchdog component and retrying automatically when things were functional again. This is much prefferabe to, say a BSOD from a while(1{{printf("\t\b\b\\t");};
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
Wow. Well, you make some pretty good arguments here; when you add all that up, it does sound pretty bad. But it doesn't get away from the fact that OSX works damn well in practice, and, in the 10 months that I've been working with it daily, I can't say that any of the issues you bring up have caused me any problem at all. In fact, it's head-and-shoulders the most usable OS I've ever worked with.
Three possible reasons for that:
1) I'm the designers' ideal user - I think Mac when I'm holding the mouse, and I think Unix when I'm in the terminal, and I don't tend to mix up my thinking (for example, I make symlinks when I want symlinks, and aliases when I want aliases). Maybe this isn't typical behaviour...
2) Or, the designers did a really good job of usability testing, which may explain why the elegant architectures you talk about in the early drafts got changed in the later releases?
3) Or, my use of OSX is light enough that I don't encounter the conflicts very much. I work mostly in Python/Zope/XML, and the iApps; I'm not writing applications or compiling much of anything. But, where would that put me on the standard distribution of OSX users? Certainly not out on the fringes.
I can't help but read your critique as primarily a theoretical one. But, I'll grant you that if the theoretical flaws are as you say, the hacks that are holding it together won't last for long. Time will tell, especially as we watch Apple release versions.
Just thought I would point out some inacuracy in your statements about iMac vs low end x86 hardware. After reading this post, I hope you will be convinced that the iMac hardware is not superior, or even comparable to equivilently priced x86 hardware...
"The monitor on the iMac is way way way sharper, and edges and corners can be used."
You can buy a $150 monitor off the street that does 1024x768 at 85+ Hz refresh. The iMac monitor (the best CRT iMac) can only do 1024x768 at 70Hz. Get a clue, 70Hz is NOT USEABLE!!!! Go talk to your eye doctor and he will tell you straight out that the iMac CRT is not safe to use at its highest resolution. (I did, he told me to avoid anything less than 80Hz, though most people I know try to get above 90)
The iMac CRT is effectively limited to 800x600, which is a joke for a modern machine.
"The built in speakers on the iMac while they suck suck less then the speakers on the PC. I expect the sound hardware on the iMac is better too, but I don't know 'cause the speakers on the PC hide it."
It is doubtfull that the iMac speakers suck less than the PC ones. You can purchase any type of speakers for the PC you want, as well as for the mac. I will admit the iMac built in speakers are among the top for quality of default speakers in all-in-one's, they are NOT superior to most name brand[dell/gateway] OEM's default external speakers. As far as the sound hardware, that all depends on the machine you buy. I can say for sure that you can get better sound with a PCI card in a PC for ~$50 than the iMac will offer in the near future. Though, the possibility exists to have an external sound device (ie, SB Extigy, etc..) that interfaces via USB port. These types of devices are the only possibility of high quality/features sound in an iMac. These devices also START at $200 price point.
"I don't see a reason the hard drive on the Mac would work better..."
I don't either. In fact, the iMac hard drive is a 5400RPM drive to keep heat and noise down. In most x86 systems, the hard drive is cooled properly by having airspace near it, and/or having it mounted on thick metal which is part of the chasis to dissipate the heat(unlike the iMac), and operates farther away from the user (noise constraints), so it is a 7200RPM drive with much much much more performance (the G4 towers offer 7200RPM drives as well, but you are comparing an iMac, and so am I)
"I don't see a reason the [RAM] on the Mac would work better..."
I don't either. In fact, on the iMac, it uses SDR SDRAM. On the CRT mac, it is a 64 bit 100MHz bus. I believe on the LCD, it is 133MHz 64bit bus. It's hard to find a 100MHz bus on modern x86 hardware today, and PC133 is on its way out the door. Most x86 machines have 100MHz or 133MHz 64bit DDR memory (effectively 64bit at 200 or 266MHz) or more even at the sub $999 price point.
The rest of your post seems somewhat correct, though slanted. I guess that is what happens when people that don't know much about hardware get really vocal about it. Oh well...
As for support calls, FYI, Apple charges your CC if you want to call their tech support line if the machine is older than 30 days. Even for hardware failures (they refund the CC if they later determine it was actually a failed piece of hardware). BTW, that is also the worst end user support in the industry.
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
Not quite - for years Linux has been promising an open, free and flexible desktop. So far we're getting there, but we never gave a timeframe for it. Nobody ever said (or nobody who knew what they were talking about anyway) - we'll be done in 3 years. It'll never be "done", that's just the nature of it.
It should also be noted that making a totally flexible desktop with pluggable UIs is a hell of a lot harder than simply providing one. For instance, the vFolder menu system is generated dynamically depending on how the distro/user/desktop wishes the menu to operate. Everything has to be standardized, because you've got at least 4 or 5 desktops that people want to use, so your technologies have to accomodate that.
Finally, note that Apple have thrown far more resources into the desktop than RedHat/SuSE/volunteers have combined. That's life - the Linux desktop is still under construction. It will be really really great, one day. Promise.
Amazingly, it doesn't seem to sacrifice any flexibility or power for its' simplicity. When Linux makes me as productive as OS X, I'll go back in a second. Until then, you can pry my iBook out of my cold dead fingers.
No, you sacrifice lots of flexibility. If we ignore dodgy 3rd party hacks, OS X has no flexibility in its UI at all, it can't even be themed, let alone change the window manager etc. If you find the defaults work great for you, fantastic, but don't confuse that with flexibility. And of course, OS X is not free - you use it now and life is good yes? But you are slowly being locked into it. You're assuming that it'd take no effort to switch back to Linux, but what are you going to do with all the data generated by Mac only apps? I dunno, beats me.
Until then though, you can help us out by not whinging about things that ceased to be relevant years ago - I've never had to alter the XFree config files, it's all automatic, and is getting more automatic all the time. The long term aim of the X developers is to eliminate the config files entirely. You've made your choice because you think the Mac is easier than Linux, but I have the opposite opinion, yet you don't see me saying "when OS X is themable and has a pluggable WM then I'll switch in an instant" do you? It's not helpful.
You would have done much better off had you left the completly fall tech support accusation at the end.
The rest of your post had several obvious flaws in it, but I'm ignoring those.
You get 1 year of support with the purchase of any new Mac. You can expand that to three years (several "leading" vendors don't allow that anymore -- for any cost) for $249.
From every report I've seen they have either the best or are in the top three for end user post sale support. Perhaps you would like to cite a specific report saying otherwise since I have already disproved the claim that lead to your assertion. I might go and dig up a report to counter you then.
I live in a giant bucket.
You sir are wrong. But you can think what you like. Telephone tech support ends at 90 days. You can extend it via Apple Care Protection Plan to 3 years. (OOPS, I MADE A MISTAKE, I SAID 30 DAYS, BUT IT IS ACTUALLY 90 DAYS!!! sue me)
Proof that you are a posting incorrect and inflamatory information with your +2 bonus:
"You can use this telephone assistance for 90 days from the date of purchase for most Apple products. Please be prepared to provide the product's serial number." apple.com
I'm sorry you are wrong, but you are. Shit happens, and it doesn't always happen to the right people (then again, sometimes it does:)
Go dig up your reports, Apple computers come with 90 days telephone support. CC# required thereafter. Read your warranty. Call up tech support. See what they say. Don't misrepresent what is reality.
"The rest of your post had several obvious flaws in it, but I'm ignoring those"
Care to point out the problems? There are no "obvious flaws" in my post. Everything technical listed is accurate and unslanted. If there are some spelling or gramatical errors I missed, I'm sorry. If you can't back up your statements, then why bother posting?
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.