Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: OS Xi, Sarge, Statistics
It still feels like a strange dream that they're really switching. An anonymous reader writes "With our latest Unix (MacOS-X) vendor's switch to x86, I figured now would be a fine time to revisit an old MIT Graduate Student Beer announcement from 2001."
Also, samchung writes "CoolTechZone has its latest article up that discusses the possibilities of Apple's protection on x86 hardware to prevent users from running the Mac OS X on non-proprietary hardware."More fuel: Reality Master 101 writes "Michael Robertson, CEO of Linspire posted an editorial talking about his disappointment that Apple wasn't embracing generic hardware. But the really interesting part was that he states, "My sources say that Jobs is going to use Intel's cryptographic technology called LaGrande to make sure OS X will only boot on Apple-branded hardware. This is a similar technique to the one that Microsoft used to make sure Linux could not be loaded on Xbox..." I'm still not sure how they'll do this with an open source Kernel." They're clearly part of the Linspire marketing effort, but Robertson's messages, including this one, are usually pithy and worth reading.
Hey, you could always wait for a service pack. An anonymous reader submits "Because of an error in a configuration file, Debian Sarge, released June 6th, does not have security updating enabled by default. ZDNet Australia reports that after several years of testing, the release team's error caused a significant delay in deployment. Steve Langasek, of the release team, says, 'Whoops, don't go pressing those 10,000 copies of [3.1] just yet.' Fortunately, the error may be fixed quite easily, and an update is expected within several days. OSNews also covers the story.
Sticker shock alone could defeat the other drivers. josemunizn writes "Remember the Honda FCX, from a Slashdot article in '03? Well the New York Times has an automotive review of a week-long, unsupervised test drive of the Honda. Choice quote: 'In most important ways, the FCX feels ready for prime-time combat on the world's roads.'"
Carry the one, subtract 5, voila! An anonymous reader writes "WinMX and Limewire are the most popular P2P apps? That's what NPD group claims in its research on iTunes covered on Slashdot yesterday. But as Jon Newton points out on P2Pnet and MP3 Newswire, the entire premise that more people use iTunes over the file sharing networks is 'nonsense.' With sites like Slyck.com reporting eDonkey alone has over 4.5 million concurrent users and P2P research firm BigChampagne saying in the U.S. in May an average of 6,290,327 people were logged onto the p2p networks at any given moment, how can iTunes' 1.7 million downloads over an entire month put them anywhere near the top? Zeropaid has also chimed in on these claims and even CNET is now questioning the results it reported in its original article on the NPD research."
Catching up to the 3rd parties who have caught up with the competition. An anonymous reader writes "For the impatient or those few not ready to adopt Firefox, there is now another option to get tabs. BetaNews reports, 'Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser will not have to wait until IE7 to experience tabbed browsing. MSN has shipped a new build of its MSN Search Toolbar that adds basic tabbed browsing support to IE6. But the feature is not fully integrated into the browser, instead relying on the toolbar to create tabs.' Here's an article including a screenshot.
The note at the top of every 3.1 download page:
/etc/apt/sources.list for "http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates" rather than an active entry for "http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates", and thus will not get security updates by default. This was due to incorrect Release files on the images.
/etc/apt/sources.list, look for any lines mentioning security.debian.org, change "testing" to "stable", and remove "# " from the start of the line.
Note: 3.1_r0 CD image problem
A bug has been discovered in the 3.1_r0 CD/DVD images: new installs from these images will have a commented-out entry in
If you have already installed a system using a 3.1r0 CD/DVD image, you do not need to reinstall. Instead, simply edit
If you installed other than from a CD or DVD (for example, netboot, or booting from floppy and installing the base system from the network), you are not affected by this bug.
These new 3.1_r0a images correct this flaw. We apologise for the inconvenience.
On another note, I wanted to start downloading the 3.1 ISO set for Sparc, but none of the US mirrors have 3.1 ISO sets, and the root server is giving out 404's. Perhaps they're all still busy updating? At this point, I don't think bit-torrent is propagated well enough to be faster than HTTP/FTP, and jigdo only puts the load on your workstation by opening 9,000 connections on your box to go download little bits of Debian.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
There's no Open Firmware on the new machines. The developer docs say that apps requiring it won't be supported, and the developer systems from Apple just have a Phoenix BIOS on board. See http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ for a breakdown.
Apparently, the machines boot Windows just fine. No hacking required to install it at all, it seems.
Wasting your time since 1997.
Please tell me if there are any other problems, this was the first time I heard about these 404s. Btw, saying which links will help even more, in this case I'm guessing at the powerpc isos?
As a total Apple n00b, I haven't been able to figure out how to turn on sub-pixel font rendering for my LCD monitor. I get the impression that the OS is supposed to be smart enough to turn it on by itself, but nothing happens. The totally stripped-down control panel dialogs in OSX don't give me anything to work with to try to fix it.
Bottom line: for me, the Linux fonts look beautiful, the Apple fonts look like ass. Oh well.
Otherwise, the "patch" would be to manually add the security.debian.org line in sources.list after installation. Just like it says in the errata in the grandparent to this comment.
I've tried all the settings: Standard, light, medium, strong. All of them == the exact same fuzzy grayscale-only antialiasing. Maybe the settings on this machine somehow got hosed before I got it, but that's not supposed to happen on a Mac, right?
The more I think about it, the more I believe the Pentium M is the single most important chip technology released by any chip maker in the past decade. More important than the P4, more import than the AMD K7 or K8 (!), more important than the G3, G4, or G5. (I'll ignore the embedded market).
:)
I'd sworn off Intel chips, especially w/ the P4 and Intel's other blundering and bullying. But you gotta have respect for the Pentium M, to so successfully fill an important market niche (lower power/lower heat) where Intel had essentially NO viable contender before. Think about it; Transmeta, Cyrix, VIA, AMD, even the various PowerPC makers all used to laugh at Intel's offering, and then the Pentium M came along. And now, Intel will probably own the laptop market for quite some time to come. Well, okay, they already did, but until the Pentium M, they never deserved to.
I'm still amazed at how versatile the descendants of the Pentium Pro have turned out to be, and as a Mac user, I'll probably end up with a Pentium M based Mac laptop in the future, and not have to cringe at the prospect.
That said, I wish AMD the best of luck, because I truly think they helped Intel to reform its ways a little (my last Intel chip was the 300Mhz Celeron w/ onboard cache; nearly everything since, until the Pentium M, has been embarrasing, IMO) And hopefully, there will also be many an application for the IBM Power descendants as the years go by.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
When I first saw that I thought that maybe they did it this way so the development machines can be ready sooner and the x86 Macs that are sold to consumers will probably have Open Firmware. However, later on in that page there's a link to an Apple page that says "Macintosh computers using Intel microprocessors do not use Open Firmware." Apple also says that disk partitioning will be different. I guess the "Mac" will have a PC BIOS and the standard PC partitioning scheme.
CPUs advanced.
At the time the Pentium was a snail.
Just like AMD can claim the P4 is a snail.
But come this time next year, perhaps Intel can claim Athlons are 'snail like'.
Now they don't need to claim the P4 is a snail because they'll be using Intel's latest and greatest. And if AMD is better, well, they always have the option of selling those too.
And... where do you get that Apple claims that OS X never crashes? Can you link? Because I can't find it.
GPL Deconstructed
One could speculate on why they didn't, but they didn't, as the Universal Binary Programming Guidelines document (which anybody who wants to speculate on whether Apple's switching to x86 or, to use a favorite wrong guess of many folk, licensing Intel to make PowerPC chips, or on whether they're using OpenFirmware in the x86 machines, or..., should read before they speculate in public) says.
Apple has not said they will never license OS X to other PC manufacturers.
On Monday, answering questions about x86 Macs, Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller said, "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac."
So, while there may be some question as to whether that means "We will take technical measures to prevent it from running on non-Apple computers", or just "our license agreements will prohibit it from running on non-Apple computers", it's pretty clear that Apple won't be licensing OS X to other PC manufacturers.
Correct. PowerPC was designed as a 64-bit ISA from the start. The only difference between 64-bit and 32-bit PowerPC chips is the size of the registers, the MMU and some extra instructions for manipulating 64-bit integers natively.
x86-64, in contrast is a 64-bit hack built on top of a 32-bit cludge on top of a 16-bit ISA. As well as being 64-bit, AMD64 adds some extra registers (almost half as many as PowerPC, woohoo), which makes code faster, in spite of the 64-bit penalty (it takes longer to load a 64-bit value than a 32-bit one, and code with 64-bit pointers takes up more cache space).
OSX isn't a 64 bit operating system
OS X Tiger is a 64-bit OS. Because PowerPC64 was designed to be compatible with PowerPC32, it is possible to run 32-bit code on it. One of the most commonly used pieces of 32-bit code is the windowing system. This is 32-bit because graphical applications rarely need more than 4GB of address space[1], and so it makes no sense to slow all of them down for the few that do.
[1] They might, however, need to spawn compute processes which handle more than 4GB of data.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"If your Mac Tiger app is 64 bits, you're screwed. Won't even run in the emulator."
Two points.
First, there aren't any Mac app's that I know of that _require_ 64-bit CPU's, because they won't run on G3's and G4's, which means most Mac's, all laptops, etc. So app's that take advantage of 64-bit instructions also have a 32-bit version of the code.
Second, while the Universal Binary Programming Guidelines do only talk about the IA-32 instruction set, but it clearly supports 64-bit data types, and MMX/SSE/SSE2/SSE3, and I'd be stunned if it weren't possible to run 64-bit code on 64-bit x86's. Admittedly the 64-bit picture on Intel is a bit more complicated than on PPC (since the various x86 chip companies had different 64-bit stragies), but Apple's got a year to work it out. And, for what it's worth, rumor has it that Apple got MacOS X to compile on the Alpha at one point, which should have cleared up the dependencies on 32-bit code.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
The problem is you then have OpenFirmware emulation baked into system years after Mac users stopped caring about OF. And by 2006, EFI will be mainstream, so other than these developer boxes, BIOS is a non-issue for Mac users.
I actually expect driver code to change quite a bit, if only because vendors will want to keep their Windows and Mac drivers closer together.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.