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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 think you could have abbreviated that to "The finder is BUTT" without losing any accuracy. Seriously, I think Windows Explorer is better, and that must have been difficult for Apple to accomplish.
Second, I think Samba needs more work.
Well YOU just won the understatement of the year award! Samba implementation on the mac has been pretty spotty. I've had some issues with disconnects between the "apple" username and the "BSD" username, with the result that I simply couldn't use samba for certain user accounts. That has to change. Also, I can't mount stuff by hand really well from command line with mount -t smbfs. If I do, it will recognize it and give me a mounted volume icon. But then, if I go to eject it, it hangs with the SBOD (spinning beachball of death), and I have to force quit finder. Not cool.
Also, if they would change the way they do aliases/links, that would be good. It should be integrable with unix, and now it's not. I want to be able to create an alias under Mac OSX, and then, when I mount that volume under samba from a linux/windows machine, I want it to be navigable (if the alias is a directory). Right now, apple aliases don't work like that, and just show up as a file in samba. Not so good. I want aliases, in the future, to be implemented pretty much as symlinks.
So when you get down to it, FIX SAMBA!!! ;)
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
OS X is not based on FreeBSD. Its based on 4.4 BSD. The kernel is not the BSD kernel, it is Mach. The only BSD parts of Darwin are the userland tools which are generally inferior to the GNU ones. And all of the source released by Apple is under the APSL, not the BSD license (the APSL is far more restrictive than the BSD license).
I almost always noticed the exact opposite comparing my old 7500/150 (604e) and my old work 200MHz Pentium Pro (Both had 1GB Fast SCSI drives, I think the mac was a Quantum Fireball and the PC was a Matrox of some kind).
:). How do you justify a $300 OS (OEM ~$129, but off the shelf around ~$300 - assuming the Pro/Business editions)? I've made sure I get a new processor and motherboard with that $300, just to get the OEM version (and still save money). I usually need Word and Excel, so save another $200-300 by getting the OEM, as well (no, OpenOffice won't do - my manager likes to add features to the forms that aren't supported by OpenOffice yet).
The thing is, unless you've got a pristine, unfragmented drive with no bad sectors and a clean install of the OS, performance can easily be different using the exact same hard disk. Macs running OS 9 or earlier, like PCs running pretty much any OS, get bloated and slow in time due to massively sized registry or finder entries (the bigger it is, the longer it takes to search). For Macs running OS 9, you usually end up rebuilding the desktop (hold cmd-opt on boot) and defragging the drive (using a third party product like Norton Utilities). For Windows PCs, you use registry cleaning (regclean) and disk defragment tools (and eventually reinstall the OS, in my experience). Old disks get bad sectors, which are often found in write verification, so the computer may be spending several minutes testing and eventually invalidating a particular sector in the disk.
btw, it sounds like the mac has some extension conflicts, or is possibly running too many (basically a driver conflict). There are programs to deal with that, but I haven't used OS 7/8/9 in so long, I have no idea what they are, anymore. I seriously doubt OS-X would have that problem, but OS-X isn't supported for 8600s.
My current PC smokes my mac (OS-X box) in copy tests by about 3-1 (it feels about that at least - I haven't done any time tests or anything), but it also has over a GHz process advantage and the disk has an 8Mb cache (as opposed to the 1MB cache on my mac disk) - not to mention the drive being about a year newer. Both are 80GB/7200RPM drives. Interestingly enough, I get even faster (feeling) copies running Linux on either...
Honestly, it's not about faster and cheaper, though - if it were, you'd be using Linux or FreeBSD on an Intel-based platform (heck, I usually do - unless I have to do some word/excel crap for work or want to play a game
Now I'll defend commercial OSes a bit - the way I justify it, to a degree, is that Windows and MacOS are easier to use than Linux/FreeBSD/others. The other way I justify it is that many of the cool/useful games/applications can only be run on Windows or Mac, which requires purchasing that or those OSes. I think Apple has done by far the best job of abstraction and simplification of the OS objects (applications are self contained and not the collection of files you see on Windows or UN*X, for example), which is why many find it the easiest to learn. Microsoft, on the other hand, is easier to use than most UN*Xes, and fakes a lot of the application abstraction by using desktop and start menu shortcuts (and therefore, isn't _too_ much harder to use than macs). Microsoft did a wonderful job of wooing developers in the mid-90s and has built an impressive software base. Linux (and UN*X in general) pretty much fragmented into a bunch of interfaces (so lacks consistency), has a mixed software base, and lacks a consistent upgrade path (RedHat and Debian have made progress in fixing this, but neither is perfect, IMO). It also lacks the ease of use, especially for set up. I can train my mom to use KDE, but train her to install linux? Forget it. Some packages have improved, but I still get asked questions like how I want my disk partitioned, and most of my computer savvy friends (from a user standpoint) don't know what that means, so do you think my mom could figure it out (she's not exactly a computer idiot, either)? We're talking fundamental stuff, but it's still beyond the scope of the average user.
feels more powerful and closer to the system
It's strange that you want to get the feeling of being more powerful from an operating system utility. You must be quite powerless in real life.
I know that many people claim they make the majority of their money from their hardware. But i'm not so sure about this anymore. Ever open up a Mac lately? Turn over the main board and you will sure enough find an intel nic. The only thing they make anymore is the nifty case, keyboard, and mouse. They resell the rest and i'm not so sure the profit margin is what everyone thinks it is. Its more plausible to me that when you buy a new mac, you are paying the suggested retail price for all the software included in one plus a small markup on the hardware. Just my 2 cents.
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!