Apple Crippled Its DTrace Port

Linnen writes in to note that one of developers of Sun's open source system tracing tool, DTrace, has discovered that Apple crippled its port of the tool so that software like iTunes could not be traced. From Adam Leventhal's blog: "I let it run for a while, made iTunes do some work, and the result when I stopped the script? Nothing. The expensive DTrace invocation clearly caused iTunes to do a lot more work, but DTrace was giving me no output. Which started me thinking... did they? Surely not. They wouldn't disable DTrace for certain applications. But that's exactly what Apple's done with their DTrace implementation. The notion of true systemic tracing was a bit too egalitarian for their classist sensibilities..."

Comments

Eagles have nothing to do with this

[Quiet_Desperation]

Is "egalitarian" the Slashdot word of the day today?

Classist Apple? Anti-egaliitarian IBM tolls?

[Malevolent Tester]

Fuck me, it's like a Student Union bar in here. What next, comrades, do we storm the Winter Palace or just go and sell some copies of Socialist Worker?

Re:Classist Apple? Anti-egaliitarian IBM tolls?

[martinX]

I say we hold a meeting to draft a resolution. Brian, you take the minutes.

Re:And as quick as it is reported

[Reverend528]

Thank god apple has a thriving community that is constantly working to fix apple's design decisions. Someone should try building an OS that's entirely community supported. Imagine how productive they would be without apple working against them.

Re:Great!

[Sponge Bath]

...my quest for a legion of Mac zombies

It might be easier to just attend a Macworld conference.

gcc -ideo ramshackle world.cpp

[Quiet_Desperation]

Are you kidding?

This is Slashdot where "paper or plastic" is an epic struggle directly and immediately affecting the fates of billions!

BILLIONS, I tell you! BILLIONS!

Re:DRM bad, but "classist sensibilities"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Flamebait? That's right Mac sycophants, mod the truth down since you can't debate it.

Slashdot Headline Accuracy?

[aberkvam]

The article says, "To say that Apple has crippled DTrace on Mac OS X would be a bit alarmist..." So what is the Slashdot headline? "Apple Crippled Its DTrace Port"

Nice...

Re:And as quick as it is reported

[msuarezalvarez]

wooooooosh

Re:And as quick as it is reported

[zr-rifle]

Joke --------------------> Thinking Computer

. . . . . . . . You

Evil bit

[flyingfsck]

Together with careful use of the Evil Bit by malicious coders, we will have complete security in Apple system software.

Re:And as quick as it is reported

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the Linux community is very productive. How many distros do they have?

Re:Luckily...

[Kjella]

/*
* If the thread on which this probe has fired belongs to a process marked P_LNOATTACH
* then this enabling is not permitted to observe it. Move along, nothing to see here.
*/

So... written by a slashdot reader? Don't know of many other places that displays that message on a regular basis.

Re:And as quick as it is reported

[meringuoid]

How many distros do they have?

Going by namechecks on Slashdot, three. Ubuntu, Fedora, and Gentoo. But I don't think anyone's ever finished installing Gentoo.

What a tragedy

[Slashcrap]

It's a real shame that you can't trace iTunes. I was all set to reverse engineer it and use the code to make my own total fucking abortion of a media player. Now I'll have to settle for grafting a horrible GUI onto Mplayer, removing most of the supported formats and making it sleep without releasing the CPU 90% of the time. If I can work out some way to reliably fuck up the contents of the user's iPod, then I doubt anyone will notice the difference.

It will be tricky to make the Windows port twice as horrible though. Maybe I can get it to punch the user in the face every ten minutes?

Re:And as quick as it is reported

[nilbud]

Where can I download the wooooooosh.iso?

it's a slippery slope to genocide, folks

[commodoresloat]

Come on, this isn't a class struggle. It's Big Business trying to protect their intellectual property. DRM sucks, this is yet another way in which it degrades computer systems. But Apple's just being a company, and their hack to DTrace is actually good coding. Dislike their choice, sure. But there's no epic struggle for humanity here. First, they crippled DTrace, but I did not use DTrace, so I did not speak up.
Then, they came for gettytab, but I did not speak out, because I was happy with Apple's default terminal configuration.
Then, they came for snort, but I was not worried about intrusion detection so I did not speak up.
Next, they came for mkdep, but I did not speak out, because the maid does all my compiling.
Sadly, when it came time for them to use killall, there was nobody left to speak up for me!

Re:Apple is not a monopoly!!!1!!1

[Anonymous Coward]

forgot the ruby slippers...

Re:DRM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your analogy is crippled, and your attempts at modification were certainly not ideal.

Re:And as quick as it is reported

[rubycodez]

if gentoo ever stops compiling, I gotta try that install thing next

Re:And as quick as it is reported

[Anonymous Coward]

How does Steve's dick taste, anyways?

To use a famous bit of cricket sledging... "I don't know, ask your wife"

Bill Gates is his fan base.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gates is his fan base.

Re:And as quick as it is reported

[TheThiefMaster]

You have to be careful what you download, as "woooooosh.iso" is an old version.