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Interview with Jordan Hubbard About DarwinPorts
Gentu writes "OSNews hosts an interview with Jordan Hubbard (of Apple, OpenDarwin, and FreeBSD fame) where they discuss DarwinPorts and how they compare to Fink. There is also a hint from Jordan that there might be some of the FreeBSD 5.x advancements to be found in Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) that is coming out, reportedly, this autumn."
I agree, that is a bit steep for a 1-year upgrade, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt on pricing before we start vilifying them. As for cost, I thought Mac-heads were supposed to be used to paying 2-3 times typical cost for stuff. (NO, that's NOT flamebait!)
The question is also, can you keep using 10.2 when 10.3 comes out? I suspect so. In fact, I kind of like the way this works - they release a new upgrade every year, but probably the last 3-4 years of upgrades work perfectly. This way, though, there is a *new* version of Mac OS out whenever you upgrade. That's pretty cool. So the only people who really get gouged are people who feel like they have to have an updated OS every year, which you couldn't even get from M$ if you wanted it. (Yeah, service packs don't count ;))
I've been using Macs since 1984, but I've given up now. The only reason I'm keeping my Mac is to run legacy apps.
Interesting, I wouldn't even touch the damned things until 10.2 came out...
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
If I want a Unix with spotty peripheral support and availability of applications, my choices are Linux and MacOS.
Spotty peripheral support? The only reason Windows has better peripheral support than either of those two is that hardware vendors supply drivers, and they supply drivers for the OS with a 90% installed base -- Windows.
But more and more peripherals are being supported under Linux and MacOS X. Some by reverse-engineering, but many hardware vendors are now stepping up to the plate and providing Linux and MacOS X drivers.
If you want to support Linux or MacOS X, then only buy hardware from those manufacturers that provide drivers. For instance, HP has open source (BSD license) drivers available for CUPS, LinkSys provides drivers for Linux (at least) for some of its products, etc.
If you don't like that OSes other than Windows have inadequate or missing driver support -- use your OS of choice and VOTE WITH YOUR WALLET and buy peripherals from vendors that provide Linux or MacOS X drivers, rather than whine and complain that Linux and MacOS X have spotty peripheral support. Or, better yet, get down and dirty and start reverse engineering products and coding your own open source drivers.
My journal has hot
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It is the hardware that currently prevents me from switching.
Guess what, it's that same hardware that currently keeps Apple in business... An x86 Mac is never going to happen.
Although they no doubt keep Mac OS X running on multiple platforms internally (it makes good sense from an engineering point of view), an x86 Mac is not in Apple's interests - 2 minutes after Apple released an x86 Mac + Mac OS X for x86, someone would have the OS running on some generic non-Apple hardware. Once that happens, nobody is ever going to buy an Apple machine when they could get their own box for less money.
And there just isn't a market in selling OS software on the x86 platform - the vast majority of people either get Windows free with their hardware, or rip a copy off from a friend. The number of people who pay for their copy of Linux/Be/etc is nothing like enough to keep a company the size of Apple in business, even assuming that every non-Windows person decided to buy Mac OS X instead.
A common suggestion is that Apple could build in some kind of dongle into the system to prevent the OS being modified to run on a generic box. The point this misses is that the only system like this which would ever work is the one they already use - their dongle is the Mac.
Nae bother
Back to OSX... No, I have not switched to "the dark side" yet. I am waiting for Apple to natively support x86, which shouldn't be too complicated considering that the software they used to build the operating system is relatively portable. I would be all over an x86 Apple iBook. It is the hardware that currently prevents me from switching.
Then you'll be waiting a long long time. Why on earth would Apple ever switch to x86? The power use is astronomical, the architecture is ungainly, ALL mac software would have to be ported (and believe me, that's no easy task), and it would lose all the hardware advantages it has - altivec, fast FPU instructions, the RISC-ish architecture.
Apple has the PPC970 coming out from IBM, which will be (relatively) low power, fast, support vector instructions, and run at a 900 MHz DDR bus, to name a few. Why on earth would they throw away speed, compatibility, and reliability just to have a processor that's only better in name and for a few applications. Nonsense.
Accept it. x86 is not going to happen, nor should it happen. It would suck, period. The machines wouldn't become any cheaper, they wouldn't become any faster, and the battery life would be cut in half if not more. Bad bad ugly idea.
--Dan
I spend all day on Linux at work as a sys-admin for an environment with about 5,000 linux boxes. I still look forward to going home to my Mac OS X machines. As impressive an accomplishment as Gnome and KDE are, they just don't meet my standards.
- type 'e' in the search box and hit return
- cmd a to select all
- cmd delete to trash them
this has the advantage too that you can see what you are about to trash, you cmd z to undo that move to the trash, or you can pick thru your trash and selectively put back any files you didn;t mean to trash. try doing that with rm -r *e*nice you have both options tho..
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
I hear you. This was my primary decision for springing for a new G4 last year, instead of building my usual "god box" to run some free *NIX on. I have no reason to run Windows at home, so there was no "switch" involved.
I'll admit I got a little tired of hacking and tweaking to get the CD burner to work, the 3D card to work, the sound card to work... Sure, I got things to work (mostly, or until the next kernel update) and I still consider it fun to tweak a Linux box. But it's less fun the older I get.
-- clvrmnky