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Apple Crippled Its DTrace Port

Posted by kdawson on from the nothing-to-see-here dept.

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..."

7 of 476 comments (clear)

  1. Classist Apple? Anti-egaliitarian IBM tolls? by Malevolent+Tester · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

    --
    If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
  2. Re:And as quick as it is reported by Reverend528 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --
    Badass Resumes
  3. Re:Great! by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...my quest for a legion of Mac zombies

    It might be easier to just attend a Macworld conference.

  4. gcc -ideo ramshackle world.cpp by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  5. Slashdot Headline Accuracy? by aberkvam · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...

  6. Re:And as quick as it is reported by nilbud · · Score: 5, Funny

    Where can I download the wooooooosh.iso?

    --
    never let a man put his dirty how-do-you-do into your bajingo
  7. it's a slippery slope to genocide, folks by commodoresloat · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!