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An Answer To "What is Mac OS X?"
XCube writes: "'What is Mac OS X?' is a fascinating article over at KernelThread.com. According to Amit Singh it's a hacker-over-friendly answer to that question and a low-level taste of Apple's OS. The extensive article covers many details on Mac OS X: history, Mac firmware & boot loader, system architecture, kernel, startup, file systems, app environments, programming facilities, available software, and more. A great read if you are interested in Mac OS X, though some stuff is too technical methinks. On second thought, this may be a better read if you're *not* interested in Mac OS X! The author says he wrote it to introduce Mac OS X to the Linux User's Group at his work."
Carbon. This is a set of procedural C-based APIs for Mac OS X that are based on the old Mac OS 9 API (actually dating back as far back as Mac OS 8.1)
To nitpick: actually, a lot of the Carbon APIs go as far back as System 1.0 -- most of QuickDraw for example.
Bzzzt! Nice, but I have work to do RIGHT NOW.
--- Ban humanity.
Folks it just seems to me that Mac OS X relies heavily on Adobe (Photoshop, Illustrator, Go live, et al) and Microsoft (Office, Outlook, Messenger, Media player, el al). Then pretty much everything is either proprietary apple software or free GNU tools. To me it just doesn't justify the profound cost of owning an Apple.
+++ David Watts 5495 0.0 0.5 1888 884
Well, then I'm thinking your best bet is to go out and find yourself a used blue and white G3 (can be had very reasonably priced on ebay IF you take your time and don't rush it) and follow that with a CPU upgrade. They're coming down to a fairly comfortable price for those machines. Get that B&W going about 500Mhz and add Panther. Don't worry about the price of Panther (I figure if you're going to pirate XP then why pay for Panther?) and you got your firsthand look at OSX.
I pretty much did it that way and then decided I loved this shit enough to give them $3K to see it run on their new machines. I'm not the least bit disappointed either.
Everybody's different but as far as I'm concerned to hell with Windows and screw waiting on Linux to get it's collective desktop shit together. OSX beats both.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I'm sorry, I'm not using Linux because it's a strong desktop (it's good enough for me, i'd call it adequate). I don't fight to get the latest software, I use what works and don't need to have the hottest, newest bits running through my processor. Most security updates are irellevant as I have hardly any services running, but I update the ones I need. If I had accesories, i'd make sure they worked with Linux before buying them, or were from a company who has a history of devulging enough specs for people to write device drivers themselves.
I use personally use Linux to get away from the liscensing nonsense that MicroAppleSunSoft tries to cram down my throat and sockets. They force too much upon me. It's my hardware, not theirs. I use Linux because it is Free. I use OSX at work and MS-Windows at work because I have to. What management decides is out of my control.
"...without a call to your other Linux buddies..."
Half the fun of Linux is the community built around it.
OK, it might not make you switch, but note that this guy admits to using OS X for only 3 years or so, and he's gained quite an understanding of it.
Maybe you should try Linux again, has it been 3 years? I've had very few problems with the latest hardware and software. Now I do have an ibook laying around, its a nice machine and fink+osx is powerful, but I have yet to see a good reason to switch to OSX from Linux. Yes the gui is prettier and there are more solid desktop apps but strangly enough, I actually prefer XFCE 4 to more fully featured desktop enviroments.
So, if you really wanted to, you could spend less than $500 and have an OS X machine on your desktop to play with it and see if you're interested in going further.
This isn't so much true anymore. Macs are excellent at digital music, and a LOT of consumers are into that. Nothing touches Mac for digital video, and consumers are really starting to get into that.
The biosciences community is in love with Apple, and universities are sitting up and taking notice ever since Virginia Tech made the #3 supercomputer with fewer processors and a fraction of the cost of the number 4 Xeon-based cluster (and now that G5 Xserves are out...).
I believe it was an Apple executive who recently said: When you own all the niches, you own the market. This is the plan I see Apple working toward.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
I guess I'm suprised that UNIX just accepted the CDE and never really extended it to be something really cool. At its base OS X is BSD, and Panther actually comes with a version of X one could install. Personally I like OS X, but macs hardware is just to expensive for a poor man like me. IMHO Mac OS X is the uppermiddle class mans extra friendly UNIX. I'll take Linux cause I'm poor ;-)
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
And this was the way some proprietary software was going for a while. In the beginning, it was unclear how copyright applied to software, so the proprietarists came up with licensing instead. Like humans coming down out of the trees, this is generally been regarded as a bad move. But once it became clear that copyright applied to software, some proprietarists thought it silly to saddle their users with contracts, or to spend years in court arguing that "read-to-agree" schemes constituted contractual assent. They didn't want to control their users, they just wanted to make sure their software wasn't redistributed. Standard copyright law (plus an attached disclaimer of warranty) was all they needed.
I think Borland was the first major software vendor to use a copyright-based proprietary license (the famous "book" license). Some other companies followed suit, Apple included. Unfortunately, the old unilateral-contract-based schemes required hordes of lawyers, and lawyers love nothing better than to control other people.
Apple's proprietary software is still proprietary. But it's in a completely different class then Microsoft software. Nothing is being crammed down anyone's throat. While I still prefer Free Software, I have no problems buying and using proprietary software if the license terms are based on copyright rather than on some lawyer's delusion of how the world should work.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Um, what crappy widgets, and what horrible fonts?
Widgets are the domain of the toolkits, and I think Qt's are quite pretty. And FreeType is a much better font-renderer than the Apple one. Apple's renderer hints too little (leading to uneven color weight on normal-res screens) and Microsoft's hints too much (very forced, distored glyph shapes). Freetype has a nice mix balance between contrast and proper glyph shapes.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I think I'd really like OSX if it has this one tiny, but, to me, invaluable feature...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
becasue sometimes free is to expensive. To explain. I don't have time to learn to load FreeBSD on intel or PPC. I don't have time to try and find all the great apps that already come with MacOSX. I don't need to spend my time trying to figure out how, I would rather just do. I think the entire Linux Community is awesome, but as a linux head I spend to mcuh time trying to find a way to get things to work in UNIX/Linux when Apple just did all that for me for $90-129 dallors depending on wher eyou purchased it. That is why. Free in some cases means 40 - 200 hours of work and that is time I could be spending gaming, writing, or just plain relaxing doing other stuff. Plus you can't beat all the other cool stuff Apple offers. Dude....???
David Vasta iSeries(AS/400) Admin & Junkie
OS X supports all hardware going back to their various G3 models, which means pretty sizable number of processors, laptops, video cards, motherboards, USB devices, firewire devices, printers, audio hardware, etc. etc.
This is still awfully few compared to the number of devices for the number of things that Linux can talk to.
Also, USB (as long as the hardware is HID-compliant) support is free. The USB mouse is going to be supported -- the USB SmartHome X10 controller may not be.
Sure, Linux and Windows still support your 1996 video card, but maybe it's time to invest a wee bit more money in your hardware setup?
Dammit, it's exactly this kind of thinking that irritates me about Apple. No, I bought the thing, it works fine, I don't need more performance at the moment, and so I don't see why I should pay even more because Apple found it profitable to not support something.
May we never see th
A couple times per year I check in on the GNUstep stuff. I'm always suprised to see there are still people working on it... doing stuff... but I can never figure out what the purpose of it all is.
... I mean, what the hell is it for? Are there any applications that let me "do stuff" which make me more productive?
I mean, you never hear anything about GNUstep. There are no distros that I know of that use it on the desktop. Hell, to this day I'm not 100% sure what exactly GNUstep is or what it does. I mean, is it a X11 replacement? Something like KDE/GNOME? Some widgets? Just some API's?
They really need to do some marketing legwork here because right now the whole project is off in some dark corner (as it has been for many years). Maybe collaborate with some other well-known projects or something.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
This is the answer I never saw properly answered, and I hoped the article would.
Why combine the loss of performance and added complexity of Mach with the lack of flexibility of a single (BSD) server?
One could be lean with a single BSD server, or flexible with Mach and a multiple server system like the Hurd. But XNU gives one the worst of both worlds as I see it...
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
If we are talking about device driver comparsion, here is an interesting paper Linux Device Driver Emulation in Mach describing how Mach can use Linux's device driver without changing the device driver code. Mach which powers the Mac OS X is a very flexible micro-kernel OS. A lot of neat trick can be done with it. I wonder if there is an effort in Darwin to bring this enmulation to Darwin.
I'm not sure how long you've been using Macs, but I've watched that gap closing rapidly in the last few years. Game companies have shown and startlingly renewed interest in getting the Mac versions out either simultaneous with the PC version or hot on the heels of. I can't think of many top games that haven't had a Mac version out in a matter of days.
There are still some, however, I admit. One issue to consider is that some game companies wait to see if a game is big enough to bother porting to the Mac. True, that causes some lag, but it effectively weeds out most of the garbage and if you're a casual game player, that's a small blessing. I've played a lot of the games that PC users brag about having and IMO, it's not impressive. It's like the old Dennis Miller quote about KMart clothing (you know, back before he became Bush's little bitch): "Dontcha love these cheap clothing stores? Two of shit... is shit. If they really wanna fuck you, they'll give you three." Lots of shitty games doesn't mean much to me. I'd rather deal with a gap in the release times and know that most of what's available is actually worth buying.
And yes, I'm well aware of Half-Life, but those kinds of situations are few and far between.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Mac hardware hasn't been special since PCs went to the PCI bus and apple hardware stopped having the drivers in rom on the card. NuBus was a paragon of autoconfiguration equalled by no one but the Amiga. But now that drivers are in the software and not adapter ROM, that advantage is nonexistent.
It's also worth pointing out that until the G5, apple hardware has had poor bus architecture and slow memory buses. So while the designs are supposedly clean (I have a yosemite so I know that is a lie; I am also familiar with the IIfx, which didn't even follow Apple's standards, let alone anyone else's, and even needed a nonstandard SCSI terminator) they have usually been dated. The G5 is an exception; it sure would be nice if OSX were 64 bit though. Apple finally has the superbadass hardware, and their OS doesn't even take full advantage of it. By the time they have a 64 bit OSX, AMD's hammer chips will have come down further in price, and XP-64 will be running on them, and they'll squander their "lead" once more.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
OS X is the UNIX desktop Linux has been trying to be for 10+ years now. If OS X came out for x86, would the drive for desktop Linux effectively die?
"Sufferin' succotash."
This is, of course, subjective. Since I win my daily bread as a C++ and Ruby coder, I'll leave it as obvious which language I prefer to work in.
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