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Hacking Mac OS X
Bill Hamm writes "DB is carrying a deep interview with Jonathan Rentzsch, who created an open source technology to allow other developers to inject their code into any running process to alter its functions and written papers for IBM to program the PowerPC correctly. The interview is huge and technical, and all over the place in terms of content. Some of the things discussed are the reasons for corporate America's resistance to buying from Apple, software optimization, the importance and history of 10.4's Core Data, why WebObjects is no longer relevant, the status of PowerPC compilers, and why Mac OS X's Finder should be killed off."
...that the "hacking" in "Hacking Mac OS X" is referring to "hacking" in the traditional sense, not "cracking".
And for more on mach_inject, referred to in the summary, see Jonathan Rentzsch's website...and an interesting list of mach_inject and mach_override users.
As for the Finder, it may be true it was a "compromise" of sorts between the NeXT world and the Mac OS world. But it wasn't necessarily the social compromise between "personalities" within Apple it's pained to be; it was likely more of a technical one. It's not perfect, and it's woefully inadequate for some tasks that involve managing thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of files. But it's still more than sufficient, and there's no reason to completely junk it: it can continue to evolve and be improved upon.
The interviewee argues that WebObjects is still relevant, and the fastest way of coding Web Applications, but is in danger of becoming irrevelevant if Apple do not update it soon!
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so basically is this just like dynamically open sourcing running operations?
...or did i just completely misunderstand that entire thing?
allowing users to modify whatever's running? interesting idea, and might be useful for developers who would like the ability to code in real time and see their changes implemented as they make them....
I wouldn't be surprised if Core Data apps don't get AppleScriptablity for free-to-cheap circa 10.5.
Seems like this is the promise of Automator - once every app can understand Applescript, every app can interact with every other, without the user.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
To understand the basic complaint about the OS X Finder look at this ArsTechnica article.
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Doubling the size of your IT department in order to deal with technical problems is MORE expensive...
Which, many believe, is exactly the conspiracy that IT pushes on management. Bad computers justify their very jobs.
I suggest you read Slashdot
The interview is huge and technical, and all over the place in terms of content.
A huge technical interview on Slashdot?
A guess that means no one will read it, but everyone has an opinion.
Those compaints are from before 10.3 came out, which is when the OS X Finder took several leaps forward.
Also, most of the article seems to be about pimping an alternative design ideas (mainly credited to Tog) which don't sound better than the current design in any way whatsoever (IMHO, YMMV, uh... IANAL.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I'm sure a thousand people can (and will) list a hundred complaints each, but I'll give you just one, albeit one that would be *very* easy for them to fix: why the fuck can't I sort by name|date|size|type|label|whatever in column view?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Nice comment, too:
The Army reading list
The dock works well for what it is designed to do. Quick launch access to Applications you put their. Quick look to see which Applications are running.
Yes there are more advanced application launchers out there. But the normal users won't need/use them. Save these specialized launchers for the shareware market.
I live off a PowerBook. I totally live the PowerBook lifestyle. Between a condo, office and the farm, ongoing presentations at PSIG and CAWUG, train rides, plane rides and on-sites, it's just easier to keep everything inside one machine that goes with me and has anything.
at the risk of being mod'd flamebait... this just oozes Apple marketing speak. seriously... "powerbook lifestyle"? i'm a proud owner of a PowerBook G4 1Ghz 1GB RAM 80GB HD... but i don't live the "lifestyle"... i use it because it gets the job done. same reason i use a (patched) XP and FreeBSD 5.2.1 box with KDE at work. it gets the job done. sometimes, just sometimes, the zealotry among the apple users makes me just a weee bit quezy...
I use Path Finder as a drop-in replacement for Finder. It's a nice improvement over the standard finder, and its many options and side panels can be turned off to suit your preferences. I really like the drag n' drop 'holder', and showing directories grouped separately from normal files is just a good idea (haven't figured out how to do this with finder, what a pain!)
Take a look at this on IBM compilers on mac os x. According to SPEC ratings int performance is 11% to 50% faster using xlc and floating point is apparantly even better. Most of the performance gains are over 50%. Apple of all people can afford a compiler to at least compile their own OS on. The free software side of me in the other hand is happy that they are choosing to improve the gnu compiler instead but it honestly doesn't make any sense to me since they can get a practicaly free huge performance gain on a relatively cheap purchase of a compiler.
-bloo
John Siracusa of Ars Technica has written up a very fine article about the problems with the OS X finder. I'd give my opinions on the matter, but I have to get back to work.
so long as you're going to argue by exaggeration and BS, then businesses have avoided Macs because they're run by retards and easily swayed by the herd instinct to go with Microsoft.
look at academics - Mac use there is enormous, because academics are intelligent enough to choose the best. they also use computers to do actual computer work, not just the occasional email and word document.
I guess that's why there are Mac users, Windows users and X users -- for my part I find it incomprehensible that there are people who prefer the Windows paradigm of stacks of windows they blindly Alt-tab through, or having all their open Word or Excel documents globbed together in a giant opaque square. And I don't see why those globs are more attractive in the office than at home. But I'm glad we have a choice.
By the way, when people bitch about Mac usability by complaining about the drag-disks-to-the-trash issue that was resolved a decade ago and has always been a non-issue for any user I've ever seen -- the absence of any second criticism tends to make their point in the opposite direction of intended...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Like hell. I moved my least techical users (Sales and execs) to Macs and haven't had a support request in months. The ROI is very much worth the increased price tag over your typical Wintel box/laptop. The stability and lack of malware are some fo the more obvious benefits but don't forget the lack of forced upgrades, no antivirus licensing to worry about. Not to mention IT issues a Mac and completely forgets about it since there are no support issues. A Mac might be out of place if you're a Windows admin trying to lock down your users with draconian Group Policies but for those of use with servers to run that don't want to spend our time worrying whether or not our users can browse certain sites or install programs of their own, Macs are freaking great. I have idiot Sales guys running around the world with 70 day uptimes on their Macs. And not 1 complaint.
This guy is way out there
To understand the basic complaint about the OS X Finder look at this ArsTechnica article.
Which is essentially asking for a finder that works like the spatial Nautilus (this isn't surprising given that spatial Nautilus was designed based on this series of Ars Technica articles). We all know how well spatial Nautilus was recieved. I don't think you can win - there is no "better" only "different".
In the end I quite like what Nautilus has ended up with - you can pick or choose between the two options, and both are reasonably (if not exceptionally) well implemented.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
As a desktop admin at a site with over 300 macs, I can assure you that the os x finder is pretty much universally disliked by longtime mac users. They have a hard time getting used to it, and try to do OS 9 type things with it, like leaving everything on the desktop , or making data folders on the root level of the hard drive. If I could banish column view from ever rearing its ugly head, I would. Yes finder, I want every frickin filename truncated to fit in that stupid little column. The dock is nice, but why does it have to be anchored to the sides of the workspace? I'd much rather float it. Or perhaps the new thing of 10.3 piling up icons on top of each other when at least half of my desktop is empty annoys people? You know what I'd really love? A launch terminal button on the force quit dialog (apple-option-escape) so I could kill processes and shut down cleanly when the finder decides that it is not responding and no amount of "finder relaunches" will do a damn thing.
music lover since 1969
I was going to mod you down for this bit "Mac designers were so proud of multitasking that windows didn't maximize automatically -- hardly making efficient use of screen real-estate. (See! There are multiple apps running behind this window!)." but decided the post had some worthwhile things overall.
I suppose it's a usage debate, really, but it always made sense to NOT maximize Windows in the MS-OS's way. It's disgustingly wasteful. With higher res displays, one should not be asking for a wider view of a single window, but how one can use that space for multiple windows. That's efficient multi-tasking, in my opinion. Not having one giant square blocking everything else from view.
No it didn't.
It's a well known fact that the term "hacker" did not originally apply to the people that media now calls hackers.
Cracking refers to people who break into computer systems using nefarious means. Ie Kevin Mitnick is mentioned on the wikipedia page, as he should be since he is probably the worlds most notorious cracker.
Just because the media says it, doesn't mean it's true. And if a cracker ever refers to him/herself as a hacker, you can rest easy because all your base will not belong to them. Anyone worth their merit knows the correct definition and differentations between cracking/hacking/spidering/phreaking/etc.
And just in case you all are too lazy to read the links... Linus Torvalds is listed as a famous hacker. This is the true definition of the term. It's not because he ever broke into computer systems, it's because he's a good programmer.
Also of note is that in the computer science community the word "hack" has gone on to have a somewhat negative connotation. For example, "Dude this code is such a hack." Although this refers more loosely to the "hack and slash" programming methodology... which often results in ugly code that is held together very loosely.
However, an ugly code "hack" and the word "hacker" are distinctly different. Please refrain from falling prey to false assumptions based on media in the future.
How is it that when business users all use the same machine, it's becuase of herd mentality, but when academics do, it's an example of sound judgement. In either case, the end user is not making the decision on the OS. Those decisions are made institutionally.
Also, in my experience in academia, most users in the humanities use the computer for word processing and email. Are there CS depts that use Mac's as their primary desktop? I would imagine it's Windows or Nix.
Business users have much higher demands than the average academic user (at least on the desktop).
I agree with the comment about Version Control and Finder. I use TortoiseSVN on win32 and love it. When I code on my mac, I greatly miss this significant integration.
The beauty of TortoiseSVN (CVS) is that they integrate to the Windows Explorer, which is in turn used by *most* applications in windows for managing files allowing the version control to be very well integrated with the entire operating system.
Unfortunately on Mac the only decent graphical way of managing Subversion is through eSVN, although there are other projects out there, this one shows the most promice ( I have not actually tested on Mac yet though.
If Apple could allow for Icon overlays and adding of file attributes similar to Windows Explorer it would be a huge improvement to the usability of OSX for GUI based hacking.
For Core Mac'ers - Checkout the activity on TortoiseSVN project on tigris.org. There is a huge amount of activity on this project as it is widely used by a very diverse group of hackers. Unfortunately a differentiator on the side of win32.
JsD
Corporate America is risk-averse. With Microsoft, they get their OS from a single company, but they have a wide range of hardware choices. Furthermore, it may be a single software company, the software company is a monopolist, is extraordinarily wealthy, and will hang around for a long time.
With Apple, they have only a single source for both their hardware and software. The hardware range is limited and prices are essentially fixed by Apple. The operating system is used by only a few percent of computer users, and the application programming interfaces are neither a de-facto standard nor are they open source or conform to other open standards.
If Apple wants to catch on more widely, they either have to make their entire software platform open (probably ditching at least Quartz), or they have to create a third party PPC market (which they can share with Linux). If they don't do either, they won't be growing much more.
Ok feel I feel I need to address this.
1) I use my iBook everyday in my "corporate America" Job
2) 'Mac' is not a company
. Error messaging was minimal ("sad mac"? please.)
3) the 'sad mac' was to indicate a hardware failure of some type, and it gave a diag code to lookup. Im not sure what kinda of failure code you are looking for from the built in ROM software. Perhaps you would like a blue screen filled with unintelligible register contents?
4) Ejecting a disk, well then I ask should there have been a separate 'eject media' icon?
5) One button mouse. Dont like the mouse go buy a 2 button mouse. they work just fine. However i get the distinct impression you dont use a mac anyway.
6) Auto sizing windows: this behavior is a personal preference, Some windows I want large, some not. Based on your previous comments you seem to be upset that Apple makes some choices for the user that are personal preferences, but when they dont make this one you are upset about that also.
Mac offered compatibility with windows networking very late in the game
7) Im not sure im getting the point of this one. If the complaint is that Apple (see #2) didnt add windows file sharing until osx, this seems to miss the point of this screed about 'Corporate America'. From a corporate network POV, the server is supposed to be set up to talk to the clients, the clients have no onus to be peer to peer compatible with other clients, otherwise you lose the central control that is predominant in the corporate arena. Of course to be fair you would also have to complain that PC work stations haven't added any non MS windows compatibility.
I can only assume by your context that you mean wintel x86 as corporate workstations, so I have to base my comments on that assumption. I suppose its possible you mean some stripped down unix workstation from like 1998.
You claim to 'like' macs, but your things you dont like seems to be picayune at best. For all of these things that you believe that would get in the way of your 'corporate' workflow, it seems as if you have never tried to do such a thing to begin with.
I feel that you are using this 'corporate' thing as a bag you can fill up with a bunch of complaints and use it to bolster your beliefs.
It's surprisingly simple. You know the Burger King motto "your way"? Apple's motto has always been "our way", and this simplicity, while it makes things easier for Apple, is a royal bitch for business customers. Further, Apple has always focused on "how can we control this to minimize our work" instead of "how can we help the customer?"
It used to be that if your Mac broke down and you were a business, an independent (but Apple certified) technician, maybe even one on your premises and employed by you, could ring up Apple, get the replacement part (it could even be done electronically, way back in the mid 90's, gasp!) and you'd be in business the next day. Many Apple resellers stocked common repair parts. As long as you had a serial number that wasn't out of warranty, nobody asked any questions. I got a free bezel to my 8500 when it broke, simply because the model wasn't old enough yet to be out of warranty. Two days later my new bezel was at the local Apple reseller. When I lost the end-cap on the hinge of my old powerbook, the university Apple technician took my serial number, and the next day tossed me a bag of 6.
Nowadays, Apple Stores are pretty much the only game in town thanks to preferential prioritization on severely limited inventory and (borderline illegal) price fixing.
They don't, for the most part, stock replacement parts. They don't do anything but the most basic repairs. Independent technicians can get certified by Apple (for thousands of dollars, which gets you self-study materials and 6 months access to Apple's internal support DB) but unless you meet a whole bunch of criteria (like moving around a half million dollars of product a quarter, carrying boatloads of insurance, etc) you don't qualify to be a reseller, and ONLY RESELLERS can order parts OR have access to Apple's internal technical support database OR perform "warranty" repairs. When I had one of the tiny little plastic feet replaced on my PB 17" a few months ago, I had to wait for half an hour while the Genius (broken sticky feet = Genius level) clicked through endless menus on the apple website, printed out about 10 pages, half of which I had to initial or sign to "authorize" the warranty repair, and the other half I got to keep (oh boy.) Replacing the foot took...2 minutes.
So, the short of it is that unless you bought Applecare AND you have a desktop (on-site service for laptops is not done under any circumstances; you've got to wait several days just to get it to them, because they have to ship you a box first), you're dumb shit out of luck for fixing your Mac quickly.
Want another example? If I'm a small business, I can get an account rep assigned from Dell, Gateway, etc. Even if I only buy a machine once a month- and it's been my general experience that they do a decent job at remembering who you are. Apple? You can buy 100 Macs a year and still not get anybody at Apple to say "boo" to you, because there's no such thing as direct sales. The best they can manage are "regional" business liasons, and they don't remember you from a goddamn hole in the wall.
Still not enough? If your Dell, Gateway, or HP breaks, out of warranty, you can call up that company's parts department and get a replacement. Apple? Nope. Sorry. You have to send your machine to the one Apple service center in the country (Texas) which will cost you a minimum non-refundable $250+ just to "look at it". They're infamous for wrecking unrelated parts and damaging stuff, and you can pretty much foget any data on the system...and how many of us have the facilities to back up 60GB? Not me.
As mentioned before- independent techs can't get parts. Customers certainly can't. Even Apple employees can't get parts- an employee said if he wants a personal system fixed, he has to take it to a repair center on the Apple "campus". So there's a huge "black market" in parts, often times from used machines that were bought on ebay and ripped apart for their guts because they're worth their weight in gold as parts.
Please help metamoderate.
What is amazing me most is the fact the someone has moded this up
People this is a trol and a very old one that has been posted a great deal.
from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_troll
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
And unfortunately, those corporate workers all have kids in school. They lobby their towns to buy PCs that will 'prepare their kids' for work. I know someone who deals with this, and he's always being confronted by parents who are angry that the school system just bought another Mac lab.
I suggest you read Slashdot
For years Mac's windowing/subwindowing functions required multiple open windows on a screen to explore subdirectories.
No they didn't. You're just showing your ignorance.
Replace "PowerBook" with "laptop" and it makes perfect sense. It's not about the brand name, so much as the flexibility that a portable offers. Some people, upon buying a laptop, get rid of all their desktops and live off of the notebook. It becomes a "lifestyle," inasmuch as your work files, eMail, calendar, address book, etc. are all on a single machine. Like the Blackberry lifestyle, or the Palm Pilot (remember those?) lifestyle, or the cell-phone lifestyle.
For the longest time, Mac-heads used "PowerBook" to mean "laptop" the way some people use "Kleenex" to mean "facial tissue."
If you want to add it, there's a "Path" button that can be applied to the Finder toolbar. Use the "Customize Toolbar..." menu item and drag the "Path" button to the Finder toolbar.
A better choice in my opinion, though, is to command-click on the window title. That's been a feature of the Mac Finder since System 7.
Or, they don't make/sell crap? Which one is it? Everytime /.ers do these comparisons it seems that the prices are at worst comparible to similar spec'd Win machines. Yes yes, you can build cheaper boxen, great. But I don't think this is what TFA is talking about.
Now, does the receptionist/accountant/sales person need a Dual 2.5 G5? Hell no. An iMac would even be overkill. But, a Mini IMO may be a nice alternative, especially if you have a room full of CRT's laying around like more and more IT departments are acquiring these days (LCD upgrades at my last two places of employment). Sure, you absolutely can buy cheaper PC's than $500, and many wouldn't need the built in FW, Radeon 9200, iLife, etc... that go into the final price of the Mini (throw in a keyboard and mouse too), but take away admin costs (if all hell breaks loose on an any of our Macs, I can reinstall a clean version of the OS in 20 minutes without touching the user space or installed apps) and it more than makes up for it IMO. Now, enter the OS intuitiveness wars below:
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
You will need a copy of OS X Server, but that's only $500 or $1,000. What BOFH can't hide that expense amount in a budget request? Especially if it means sticking it to those pesky Mac users!
For even more fun, treat your Mac users as if they were children needing supervision with Parental Controls -- no more sending messages to random users, no typing unapproved URLs into Safari, no running unapproved applications. Even better, the Parental Controls are built into every copy of OS X! What more can a BOFH ask for?
Bah!
More "It's still not done the Tog way, therefore it sucks" whining.
The core complaint:
Any window can still be "transformed" from a "file browser" to a "regular folder" and back again at any time.
I call that a Good Thing. The only possible objections are based on old-school MacOS Human Interface Dogma^H^H^H^H^H Guidlines zealotry.
Let me know when Ars starts complaining about something that matters.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
For years Mac's windowing/subwindowing functions required multiple open windows on a screen to explore subdirectories.
... um ... WRONG.
This has been untrue since System 5, circa 1989. Certainly pre Windows 3.0.
Mac designers were so proud of multitasking that windows didn't maximize automatically -- hardly making efficient use of screen real-estate.
This is a bizarre remark... drug induced?
1) Macs had overlapping Windows before they had threading.
2) The first multi-tasking implementation (beyond desk accessories) involved multiple virtual screens (no overlapping applications).
Many applications remember the state you set them in when you last used them and reinstate it when launched. Some don't. The same applies in Windows, with the exception that (a) it's easy to force maximization if you know a bit, and (b) Windows maximizes windows to fill the screen whereas the Mac maximizes windows to show as much as possible, but no more than required. I don't see how the latter is a less efficient use of screen real estate than filling the screen with a largely empty window.
So
Mac never attempted to price their machines competitively for corporate America
I assume by "Mac" the writer means "Apple". In fact, Apple has offered many price-competitive computers, e.g. the Classic, the SE, the IIcx, the IIsi (the Mac mini being the most extreme example). It's not like the IBM XT was priced under the Apple II.
In any study of TCO I've read (e.g. from Gartner) you'll see Macs have a lower TCO than Wintel boxes. I would assume TCO matters to corporate America -- but only when comparing non-Apple options.
I'm still trying to figure out how it was posted on /. It's sure to just confuse a bunch of people who read the summary and think it's all about how 'the finder sux'... which is the shortest section in there. What's weird is I'd never noticed that hiding the Finder toolbar and sidebar changed the window from bushed metal to aqua look! While I have to admit that's stupid, I'm not sure it's a reason to toss the whole thing ( just make it all one or the other... I hate brushed metal, so I'd make it aqua, but just pick one, Apple! ).
Of course, I'm in the 'why the hell would you want to hide the toolbar and sidebar' camp, and thus don't often see the aqua-look windows unless I'm undoing something some old-time can't-learn-anything-new all-this-useful-file-navigation-stuff-confuses-me OS 9 user did. I guess that just shows my NeXT vs. Mac OS bias. For me, the Finder is not the biggest problem in OS X. It's the Menu bar. I've realized that it's not so great on larger screens. It's perfect for the Mac Classic screen, but it's not what people look at to figure out what the active application is. I promise, if there's a flashing cursor in a text field, the user is _sure_ that's the active application, they're not looking at the menu bar... it's a broken interface designed for a 9-inch screen. I'd say that's my NeXT bias, but I've spent a lot of time watching people use OS X, and they do _not_ pay attention to the menu bar, which ultimately makes it just a bit of lost screen real estate. Too bad that's the one thing that's not likely to change about Mac OS. Otherwise, OS X is the best thing _ever_.
2) Most of the support calls I fielded in the week I had that job were not OS specific, but along the lines of "How do I do a mail merge?"
3) A lot of companies use applications that are specific enough in scope that there aren't any ports to linux or Mac. If Company X NEEDS to use Product Y and Product Y is only availble for Windows, then Company X is going to use Windows, and x86 hardware. It's that simple
Free MacMini
Going into terminal and killing the Finder would not help it recover from a fucked up network volume anyway. What's going on is that the Finder is halted and waiting for a response from the network file system driver in the kernel, and *that* is halted waiting for a response from a remote server that is probably never going to arrive. In order to keep everything in synch (I assume it's trying to avoid the driver returning data to internal process accounting structures that no longer exist, or trying to kill the driver within the kernel itself), NOTHING can kill the frozen Finder, up to and including kill -9.
Apple has had *so long* to get the finder *perfect* and it's still not nearly as good as it could be.
looks-wise: when going from 9 to X, they threw a lot of babies out with the bathwater. consider active and inactive windows. in OS 9: foreground window had 3d effects all around it. EVERY OTHER WINDOW was solid light grey and a 1-pixel darker grey outline, period. no question about which was which. in OS X, it's waaaay too overly-cutely-designed and too subtle to be useful. OK, so the drop shadow is a bit smaller? great, that'd be tought to see even if my desktop picture *weren't* black. And the stoplight buttons are not there? OK, thanks. and the titlebar text goes from dark grey to medium grey? OK, super. OS 9 made the state of the computer *obvious.* OS X hides it behind pretty-but-subtle cues.
And the performance isn't nearly what it could have been. Every use BeOS? You make a file on the desktop from within an app, boom, it appears in the background instantly. OS X: make a file or folder, click on the desktop to (hopefully) force a redraw, and a moment later (on a dual-G5) it'll show up. Editing a file that you can see in a window in list view? Save it and BeOS updates the 'date modified' column in the background instantly. OS X? Click the file and it'll update. And the Finder is especially lazy about updating disk usage when you have the 'calculate folder sizes' option checked. C'mon, Apple... I had BeOS R3 for Intel and PPC in *1998*! It's 2005 now! Want me to send you my old CDs?
perfect quote: "Finder X is the compromise between the Mac OS folks and the NeXT folks. Neither won, everybody lost."
great quote: "the entire bastardized notion of switching from metal to aqua and hiding the sidebar when clicking on the toolbar chiclet in the upper right-hand corner. Bonus: notice how if you click on the extreme right of the chiclet and try to switch back, you fail -- the window theme switch moved the chiclet slightly to the left and now you've got to follow it. Gag. Folks, this type of stuff makes Gnome look good."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
"..and why Mac OS X's Finder should be killed off."
Precisely, one of the reason I find OSX so annoying to use; this 'Finder' assumes software is somehow lost already. A debilitating metaphor to say the least..
Or instead of Apple dropping Quartz, which is a huge part of their appeal (to both users and developers), the Open Source community should start working on and in GNUstep, which is an API-alike of the same technologies that OS X is based on.
Hell, APIs aren't protected I.P., you could make Quartz-compatible APIs for X11 and add them to GNUstep.
It would serve us better to emulate the good things we see out there, not knock them down to our level.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
>I would like to know more about it.
www.python.org
>What is it good for?
It's good for general-purpose programming, particularly if you need the end result to be cross-platform.
It's extensible with all kinds of 3rd party libraries available. It's a much better fit for many types of work than is Perl, and arguments have been made that it is more efficient and easier to learn than Java.
>Any drawbacks?
Like Java, it's a bytecode-interpreted language, so to-the-metal programming isn't really possible.
>How to learn it?
It's quite easy to learn, even as a first programming language. It's extremely easy to do certain kinds of complex things (you name it) because there are so many modules available. This is something that Python shares with Perl and Java, of course, but python programmers argue that it's altogether easier to work with.
I was on the fence, until some production code rolled in my company that was written in Python. It's a success story for the folks involved, and the quality of their work and the speed at which it was completed, really speaks for itself.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
If it's not lost, how come you are looking for it in the first place?
At least "Finder" implies you will actually find something you are looking for. Consider please the term "Explorer" which implies a long journey, at great cost and possibly without success at the end. Nothing could be more apt to describe Explorer and the annoying little dog that couldn't find drugs in a reggae bands luggage.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
how many of us have the facilities to back up 60GB?
If you need 60G worth of data, you need facilities to back up 60G worth of data. Data that isn't backed up doesn't exist, it's vapor, patterns in the clouds, sandcastles before a storm.
Hie thee down to CompUSA and get a $100 USB or Firewire external drive at the very LEAST. If you're a business, DLT tape drives give you reliable and ROBUST backups.
Sheesh.
I am a semi-technical guy who talked almost all of his friends onto Automobiles. They are pretty much non-technical people and Horse and Buggys with reins was a perfect match for them. I am in the process of updating everyone's vehicle to automobile and No ONE likes the interface, with its knobs and dials and ugly design (only airplanes are uglier). Also, EVERYONE HATES THE RADIO and finds its default behaviour insulting. Not to mention that the way the blinker behaves makes it very hard for many people to use the blinker while changing lanes. I realize that there is always some resistance to change, but this goes way beyond that. I think we really messed this up by not thinking the design through. They are trying to make the interface do all things in many ways at the expense of the simplicity it used to have.
Where are you getting prepress software for free?
So a better question than "Why doesn't Corporate America use Macs" might be "Why don't we?"
I use Wintel because my corporate overlords use Wintel and have really annoying applications that are harder to use than a good browser interface that I need to use to get my official email and do my timecard and the like.
These applications provide zero value. Nobody likes them, even the MCSE guys who are total Wintel zombies, but they keep you chained to the Wintel desktop.
But I have enough of a rep and enough goodwill at this place that they let me use my Mac next to my PC, and so I spend most of my time on my Mac. I use Wintel, like I use toilet paper or dishwasher detergent, when I need it. I work on a Mac. But for most people at big businesses, well, that's not an option. Hell, we get slammed enough for using non-approved browsers like Firefox...
While I don't have a formal definition it basically means a programming language where you have a sequence of statements.
Most languages widely used are imperative languages, such as C/C++/C#/Jave/Perl/whathaveyou.
An example of another type of language is functional programming languages such as ML, Miranda and F#.
I believe Lisp is generally considered a functional language, but it also supports sequences of statements so I guess it really is a mix.
I'm a bit rusty on this subject, so if someone wants to correct me on this then please go ahead.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
In his original paper there's a missing step:
1. Discover the original function's address.
2. Test the waters.
3. Make the original function writable.
4. Allocate the escape branch island.
5. Target the escape island and make it executable.
6. Build the branch instruction.
7. Optionally allocate and engage the reentry island.
8. Atomically:
a. Insert the original first instruction into the reentry island.
b. Target the reentry island and make it executable.
c. Swap the original function's first instruction with our custom-built branch instruction.
Missing step?
9. Make the original function non-writable.
If you've not used a declarative language, try playing around with Prolog. It's not always fast, but sometimes you can do things in two or three lines of Prolog code that would take tens or hundreds of lines of imperative code.
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The Mac OS Finder has an internal database which stores meta information on files. It mostly handles what creator types and file types map to certain applications, but it performs other duties as well. The idea is that each file has a 4 byte creator type which says what application created it and a 4 byte file type which classifies what type of data is contained within the file. When you open a file the Finder does a lookup to find out how the file should be treated and what application should be notified of the action.
Occasionally this database would get out of date, would require compacting, or would be come corrupted. To rebuild it all you needed to do was to get the Finder to restart and then hold down the option and command keys. The Finder would then take a few seconds to recreate the database and clear up any issues.
Rebuilding the desktop fixed most of the problems that Mac OS was prone to. The rest of the problems were either bad preferences, a bad system extension, or bad hardware. Typically the first step in diagnosing a Mac OS problem was to first rebuild the desktop database, then reset the PRAM (a set of preferences retained between reboots), then test to see if there was corrupt preferences, then system extensions, then hardware. Overall you usually caught problems quickly and they were easy to correct.
You can read a bit more about rebuilding the desktop here
Currently under Mac OS X the desktop database is much more advanced. It uses different methods to keep track of files and auto-corrects problems that used to hang up the Finder. Thus you do not have to worry about rebuilding the desktop database under Mac OS X. In fact the entire Mac OS X operating system is much more stable than the pre-Mac OS X systems.
Sapere aude!
The real problem is that interprocess communication under UNIX isn't very good, was added late, isn't portable, and isn't used much. So apps tend to be monolithic, and intercommunication takes place at a very high level, like CORBA, XSLT, or Java RMI, if at all.
So trying to interpose new features at a lower level tends to involve horrible hacks. In the DOS era, there was "hooking" interrupts (a concept faithfully replicated in all Microsoft's OSs to date.) Then came "injecting DLLs." Now there's this.
One of the sad things about UNIX/Linux is that the original concept of little intercommunicating programs has been lost. Because the original intercommunication mechanism (pipes) was so weak, the concept didn't generalize.
I often wonder how different the history of UNIX might have been if, when you invoked a program, you got results back. You get to pass command line arguments and environment variables into a subprocess, but all you get back is a status code. This one-way model permeates the UNIX world. It's one reason that shell scripts and makefiles tend to be so blind.
What's needed is a sane approach to interprocess subroutine calls. Multics had this. QNX has it. Mach has support for it, but nobody uses it much.
Fair enough...kind of. "database independent" is a dangerous term. Almost as dangerous as a senior database architect who is unfamiliar with abstraction. You can have reasonable database independence with optimizations for prevelent databases. The system can be database independent while performance isn't.
I don't think it was right to mod you down as a troll, but since this article is about Macs, a lot of Mac users with mod points will take exception to your obviously flawed comments.
That said, the bulk of your comment refers to old Classic Mac OS, not Mac OSX, which is now in its 4th year of existence. The rest is just plain ignorance and proves you know almost nothing about Macs in general, even less about Mac OSX, and have never heard of the $400 Mac mini or the fact that you can plug any 3 button mouse into OSX and get all the usual functionality.
In fact, the only part of your comment which might have a point is about maximising windows, but given that all apps at least maximise to fit the current content, I think it boils down to a matter of taste.
And when you make a comment complaining about how the Mac zealots modded you down, think about how you would respond if someone posted a comment comparing modern Macs to Win 3.1.
It's not that I don't like finding files, it's that I keep losing them again.
Apple needs to come up with something like Trapper Keeper, so I won't lose my files. Apple could even replace Jeff Goldblum with Rosie O'Donnel. Yeah, I know. That last bit is brilliant.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.