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The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix
riverat1 writes "After AT&T dropped the Multics project in March of 1969, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs continued to work on the project, through a combination of discarded equipment and subterfuge, eventually writing the first programming manual for System I in November 1971. A paper published in 1974 in the Communications of the ACM on Unix brought a flurry of requests for copies. Since AT&T was restricted from selling products not directly related to telephones or telecommunications, they released it to anyone who asked for a nominal license fee. At conferences they displayed the policy on a slide saying, 'No advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance.' From that grew an ecosystem of users supporting users much like the Linux community. The rest is history."
I can see some form of UNIX making it to the 22nd century and beyond.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
since the old versions were known as Version 5, Version 7, and so on.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Image from wikimedia of the UNIX Family Tree
The heydays ended ten years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_systems_used_on_top_500_supercomputers.svg
The culprit? Linux.
"in 2008 Microsoft confirmed a vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which affected some versions that were released in 2001"
i rest my case
I remember the first time I saw Unix, in 1976. The first step in installing it was to compile the C compiler (supplied IIRC in PDP-11 assembler) and then compile the kernal, and then the shell and all the utilities. You had an option as to whether you wanted to put the man pages online since they took up a significant (in those days) amount of disk space. Make was not yet released by AT&T so this was all done either by typing at the command line or (once the shell was running) from shell scripts.
Are you saying all gamers are idiots?
It's interesting how AT&T couldn't support it for this reason, because today, UNIX is at the heart of both iOS and Android, which run some of today's most popular telephones.
Several issues of the Bell System Technical Journal tell the story of UNIX, in their own words. This one in particular is interesting.
No, some gamers don't prefer Windows, they just boot it as a second OS to play.
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Well, if you read the Microsoft EULA, you'll notice that they don't promise bug fixes either. It just isn't advertised that way (although they definitely do supply advertising)... and sometimes the support just consists of "yes, I think that's unfortunate, too".
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I also prefer it as desktop OS, and not just for games. I use Linux on servers because that's where it shines best, but Linux in general either doesn't have the desktop programs I want or they're poor options. Like for example I love PHPEdit for editing php files, like I do with Visual Studio for .NET programs. Linux lacks compared to those, especially if you want to develop with C# or any other sane higher level language or for Windows. Another case is photo editing. There's both Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro along with several video editing programs and website designing programs like Artisteer. Those don't support Linux and there just isn't anything equivalent. Linux totally lacks on software catalog side of things. There just isn't any programs available.
Makes me wonder whether or not we'd be using as many Windows machines had the government allowed AT&T to sell and market Unix.
Yes, the camel surely looks elegant in the desert. But then again, fish don't climb trees.
Just because something works well in one area doesn't mean that it will function well outside of that area. This is why there will always be "other methods" for operating systems.
Hire me...
Makes me wonder whether or not we'd be using as many Windows machines had the government allowed AT&T to sell and market Unix.
We probably would. If ATT had been allowed to sell Unix, it almost certainly would have priced it way too high for IBM's taste.
Indeed, ATT tried selling a Unix-based personal computer (which, with typical former-Bell-System flair, they termed the "AT&T Unix PC") in the mid-80s, after they'd divested the local phone companies and could legally do whatever they wanted. It flopped, since it was obscenely priced at $5000, which was about twice the price of a fully-loaded DOS PC.
Unless you buy windows on a disk in a cardboard box, the only support you will get is some minimum wage tech in india employed by dell/hp/etc.
So (after probably sticking their tongue out at the lawyers who originally nixed the release) they released UNIX ... and were then sued by other computer companies for violating the "phones only" clause of the anti-trust agreement. AT&T also lost that battle.
So now it was law. They couldn't suppress the technology, but they couldn't market or support it because it wasn't directly phone- related. That's where they came up with the rather convoluted system where, for a nominal price ($1 for universities, and more ($20K, I think for companies), and signing a non-disclosure agreement, anybody could get a mag tape with a working system, and source code, a pat on the back and a 'good luck'.
ALL support was done by users (who, pretty early on got better at it than any company would have been) -- but the non-disclosure agreement meant that you couldn't just post a file with the fixed code in it... so that's where diff(1) patches came into play -- they exposed the fix without exposing too much of the source code. In some cases where patches were extensive, the originator of the patch would simply announce it and require people to fax a copy of the first page of their license before being emailed the fix.
AT&T was also rather pedantic about protecting their trademark, which resulted in people often using the UN*X moniker rather than include the trademark footnote at the end of their postings.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I've worked with windows -- first in 1996 and most recently December 2011. It is as user unfriendly now as it was in 1996.
I am even more lazy.
I just realize that a little bit of work upfront can save me more work later or even allow me to achieve something new with minimal effort.
Unix users are no less lazy. They're just a little smarter about it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Yeah, but what other OS would allow you to time travel backwards? From November 2011 to June 2011 . . .
Actually, KDevelop, Anjuita, SourceNavigator, Kylix are pretty good IDE for linux. And MSVS compared to Borland IDE (CodeGear now) sucks, to say it plainly.
Yes, the camel surely looks elegant in the desert. But then again, fish don't climb trees.
Just because something works well in one area doesn't mean that it will function well outside of that area. This is why there will always be "other methods" for operating systems.
Windows is such an incredibly fragile system - all eggs in one basket. While it made sense for mass sall of PCs with a single disk, by feat it left the programs, work, operating system, registry, swap space, all on one disk. You can choose to save your work done in various suites on other drives, but they are still fooling around with Drive C:, D:, E: etc. If I need to reinstall the OS I end up with such a massive corruption of drivers I'm almost better off starting from scratch, but I'd lose all my installed programs, because Microsoft likes to keep them all in Program Files on the C: drive, where the OS resides. I can move my memory swap to another physical drive, to relieve some I/O burden, but it's not well known how to do this. Having application, operating system files, swap file and work files all on one disk is such a horrible idea, particularly without even the benefit of partitions (to protect some files or installed applications during a re-install)
I configured my first Linux box to have a tidy spot for the OS and its sources, not too much bigger than necessary (safety factor of 2). Put swap file on its own partition and installed all applications on a separate physical drive, with workspace for each on separate partitions. Flexible. I can change my harddisk configuration with a minimum of fuss. Try that with Windows.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Your comment would be more convincing if Unix weren't infact running everywhere and doing a better job at it.
Microsoft sandbagged for a long time. The users suffered for it and a lot of needless extra costs were incurred because of it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
any other sane higher level language
Is Java an insane higher level language? What about Eclipse, which works well with a whole range of high AND low level languages?
There just isn't any programs available.
I find that most of my needs are met. In fact, a lot of the programs I use on Windows were ported from Linux. The only piece of software I pay for (a developers merge tool) had it's origins on Windows, but they sell a Linux port - presumably in recognition of the fact that so many professionals find Linux machines productive.
If you want to do C#, Monodevelop is available, although was distinctly inferior to it's Windows progenitor, SharpDevelop, the last I looked. But that's also true of Mono itself, IMHO. Aristeer is written in C#, so in principle there's no reason it couldn't be run on Mono / Linux, unless it uses some of the features that Mono hasn't caught up with yet.
For PHP (and a host of other things too) there's Komodo IDE (with it's free / Open counterpart Komodo Edit).
You probably have a point on the media side of things. But I think a media person could justifiably prefer OS X to Windows.
which obviously includes you because otherwise you would not have written:
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Seems like this sort of story always brings out the low number /.'ers. I remember one post in the last few years where each reply was by a lower post until someone showed up with a number under 1000. (If I remember right, lol. Memory is not my strong suit now. And the older I get, the less I can about that. lol)
While this was all happening, I was changing vacuum tubes in military crypto boxes. lol Hell, I remember my dad testing our TV's vacuum tubes at the A&P grocery store.
The good old ad hominem attack. I guess the truth hurts.
Don't worry, Ploettering and his merry band of audio-saboteurs are about to fuck that up too.
Last thing I heard from them wrt their latest concoction - "systemd" - was that configurations with more than one partition, specifically a separate /usr was "unsupported" and "not something that had a place in a modern computer."
Why do what these deluded jackasses have to say carry so much weight?
My first encounter with UNIX was learning it on a dialup system back in the days when CP/M was still the user operating system. It looked to me like a vast rolling trrainwreck that was continually evolved to keep it more or less functional. Teams of wizards surrounded it and made lots of money from its care and feeding. I became one of the wizards. But I still hated it. And do.
Unix is perfectly user friendly, it's just careful who it is friends with.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
'No advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance.'
I8-D
Also, try to find a Linux equivalent to WinMerge. There is none. KDiff is the closest you can get, but not close enough. I've been using Linux to compile Android kernels and WinMerge is perfect for getting a high level view what the various kernel devs (who don't use git properly) have done to the stock Samsung kernel source.
I resorted to Running WinMerge under Wine. It crashes whenever I do certain functions, but the native linux alternatives are so bad that I put up with it.
And don't get me started on gnome. Holy crap what an abomination. I used to enjoy the KDE 3.x series on my FreeBSD desktops. It was functional and relatively customizable, but this transition of the linux community to gnome boggles my mind, even with the clusterfuck that Kde 4.x series was/is. KDE 3.x is still better than the current Gnome IMO.
And before anyone replys, yes, I know I can choose a distro that uses KDE or install it myself. I've been around that block, and will be doing it again soon.
-1 Flamebait
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
photoshop can run in wine , there is a paintshop portable app which works perfectly in wine or on windows. It's not legal of course. Although there is no reason you couldn't buy a legal version with a licence. ...
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
No other argument is needed.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Unless you are a major corporation and have a contract with Microsoft the only support you get is reinstall-reinstall-reinstall, with Open Source you get to contact the developers directly ...
There's a talk from 1986 by Richard Hamming at Bellcore, about how to do great research, but it also ends up in a short discussion about the conditions there that led to UNIX:
http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
The whole talk is really excellent, and there's this theme in it that the really great things come from some unexpected places, by the compounding of seemingly unrelated character traits, work habits and organization dynamics.
At the end in the Q&A, Hamming gets into a short discussion with the host Alan Chynoweth about the origins of UNIX, evincing from Alan a favorite quote:
"UNIX was never a deliverable!"
expanded:
"Hamming: First let me respond to Alan Chynoweth about computing. I [was in charge of] computing in research and for 10 years I kept telling my management, ``Get that !&@#% machine out of research. We are being forced to run problems all the time. We can't do research because we're too busy operating and running the computing machines.'' Finally the message got through. They were going to move computing out of research to someplace else. I was persona non grata to say the least and I was surprised that people didn't kick my shins because everybody was having their toy taken away from them. I went in to Ed David's office and said, ``Look Ed, you've got to give your researchers a machine. If you give them a great big machine, we'll be back in the same trouble we were before, so busy keeping it going we can't think. Give them the smallest machine you can because they are very able people. They will learn how to do things on a small machine instead of mass computing.'' As far as I'm concerned, that's how UNIX arose. We gave them a moderately small machine and they decided to make it do great things. They had to come up with a system to do it on. It is called UNIX!
A. G. Chynoweth: I just have to pick up on that one. In our present environment, Dick, while we wrestle with some of the red tape attributed to, or required by, the regulators, there is one quote that one exasperated AVP came up with and I've used it over and over again. He growled that, ``UNIX was never a deliverable!''"
The article is well written but I am not sure they have checked their facts ... here is a direct quote from the article ....
"It even runs some supercomputers."
Now ... just head over to the TOP500 page (http://i.top500.org/stats) and sort by OS ..... I wouldn't call > 80 % just 'some supercomputers'
???
... if music be fruit of love, play on
Just wait for the next version...
" WinMerge 3 will be modern compare/synchronization tool. It will be based on Qt library and cross-platform. You can use the same tool in Windows and in Linux. "
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
... and its memory footprint is smaller than OS X or Ubuntu ...
[citation needed]
Really interested not trolling.
You should be aware that RTFM hasa different meaning in the Windows world: Reboot The Fucking Machine
Parent is correct:
$man rtfm
It's a manual on reading the fscking manual.
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If you are droning on about Photoshop then you are a poser that has no clue what Photoshop is used for. It's a canned Lemming Troll for idiots with no real clue.
I do my professional work with Photoshop. I wouldn't say I'm an artist (artists don't paint with computers), but I have very professional use for it. Yet you say I have no clue what it is used for. Care to tell me what it's good for, then?
Awesome!
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Come on dude, we're talking about server systems here, not desktop unix which isn't exactly a "consumer" product.
Not even if somewhere around 10% of desktops and laptops are running Un*x? Heck, some of them are even running trademarked UNIX.
Waite! Let me do a man on that!
> I have no doubt you can change your configuration, but you clearly spent too much time deciding how to layout your first Linux box.
Actually, that's the beauty of Unix. I don't have to be married to that initial layout. It is trivial for me to split and merge things pretty much anywhere and at will.
So, I can take the Windows-esque Ubuntu default and tweak it to my hearts content later.
Now I think that being able to blow away my boot partition and not touch "my data" is a really cool and useful thing. I can also preserve "apps" in much the same way in a manner that's similar to MacOS. If people with no taste don't see this, then that's their loss.
Even "Grannies" have personal data they are interested in protecting these days.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The reason Windows, Mac OS and pretty much all consumer and small business OSs became successes is because they were cheap. DOS and Windows, in particular, became dominant because of the OEM ecosystem. Support and bugfixes? Microsoft support has always been expensive, and bugfixes for the operating system didn't even become widely distributed until Windows vulnerabilities reached a level where Microsoft was essentially forced to come up with Windows Updates to dole out its bugfixes in a much easier way. When I first started out administering Windows NT based systems, bugfixes only came regularly with service packs, or if you installed them based on advice from Microsoft directly or via KB articles, or because some guy on randomtechforum.com told you "yeah, KB28342818122 will fix your problem." And earlier versions of Windows sure the hell didn't even have that level of support. Windows 95 or Windows 3.1 were what they were and about the only way you would get updates is if it was shipped with some piece of software that needed to update a DLL or other support file.
It little or nothing to do with support. Until Linux came along and basic took the expensive licensing and support costs associated with most *nix operating systems, *nix vendors didn't even give a shit about the PC market, and regarded PCs as glorified terminals when and where they had to connect to *nix-based systems. Still, even on the old Xenix system I administered, there were updates available, the last one I remember installing around 1992 or 1993 was a patch to fix hard-coded originator host names in UUCP bangpaths (and if that doesn't date me, nothing does).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
have you installed powershell yet? It helps a fair bit.
Ironically MicroSoft's first saleable OS was a flavor of UNIX called Xenix. But Xenix on 80286's was really lame compared to UNIX on a PDP-11 or VAX. UNIX wasnt really that efficient on a PC until the 80486s in the mid-1990s. That was fortunately the same time Linus started his version. MicroSoft sold Xenix to SCO after it developed MS-DOS. SCO patent-trolled it unsuccessfully for many years.
$ man rtfm
No manual entry for rtfm
> , and its memory footprint is smaller than OS X or Ubuntu
No it isn't. Not by a long stretch.
Set your sights a little lower. This is a monopoly product you are talking about. If you try to talk nonsense, all of use that are forced to use it by corporate overlords or have to fix computers for relatives are going to know that you're full of it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The "first brood" of high level languages- COBOL, LISP and FORTRAN- are well into their 2nd half century. I would not be surprised if they last a century along with UNIX and C.
Sandusky?
No brain, no pain.
Nice piece. A bit incorrect about multiplexing as Burroughs had released the B-5500/5700 in 1966 that allowed multiple terminals and running the CANDE ( Command And Edit interface) allowed batch jobs and terminals to run simulatinously, unlike IBM computers of the day which were batch orietented for almost 10 years later.
I paid for it myself. Like I said, I use it for work, so can pay too.
Valgrind and Git. I rest my case on software development tools.
Ah, so what you're getting at, is that while Unix-like OSes are well suited for multi-user text processing, workstations, desktops, servers, super computers, cell phones, and embedded industrial computers with realtime processing requirements they might not necessarily work everywhere?
^I'm with stupid.^
its memory footprint is smaller than OS X or Ubuntu.
Get real man, I have a working desktop Linux on a machine from 1998 which has only 96 megs of RAM and 266MHz CPU. Even XP wouldn't run on something that old. And with the right choice of desktop environment, the machine can still run a lot of modern desktop software.
The interfaces in Windows generally expose you to the old way of doing things.
Legacy issues are always a tough problem. That's why it's best to avoid them, or at least fix them sooner rather than later.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re: "major security vulnerability"
Yeah and cos Apache has hosted more than half the web for years that would make it a big fish for hackers to exploit... and the number of web hosts adversely affected by this bug are?
Whatever the number (small no doubt), has it crippled Apache's share of the web hosting pie?
I'm sure you get my point.
Download The Fscking Manual!
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Being that virtually everyone has dropped the idea of building their own OS, I expect we'll see that Unix-like operating systems will be the only choice in a few years, and most likely Linux will remain on top of that. Despite it not hitting the desktop like everyone had hoped, it's found it's niche in everything that needs processing power. Since people have become comfortable with Linux (Android) on their phones and tablets, I would see real expansion of that to desktops sometime in the next few years.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Not only that, but as long as I ignore/don't think of how I had done things in WinXP, I find that Linux (OpenSUSE 11.4 here) is very straightforward and simple.
It may help that before migrating from XP, I made effort to use open-source and cross-platform tools whenever possible. And it really paid off this year when I switched. (Yay! Year of the Linux desktop, for me at least.)
I dual boot Ubuntu and Windows 7. Ubuntu boots so fast that if I am not paying attention it is up before I realize it and log in is just as responsive. Windows 7 on the hand takes about double the time to the log in screen, and then there is a wait at least as long for the machine to become responsive enough to use.
Granted, this on a machine with only 2 GB of RAM. But running the same applications on each OS presents a world of difference (Remote Support Client [supports both OSes], Lotus Notes 8.5 full feature, Chrome Browser, Skype, plus a RDC client). Linux responses and functions, while I generally have to wait and be patient for Windows. Needless to say, I find myself only using Windows when I must (Microsoft Access mainly, but occasionally the RDC client since it supports Windows 7 and Server 2008).
But then to be fair, I am forced to run the bloated piece of crap called Symantec Endpoint Protection on the Windows 7 side of life. However, it doesn't excuse the poor performance prior to it starting.
Voting them all out of office, now that's change I can believe in.
So you prefer the programs that run on Windows, but I still don't hear an argument for Windows itself.
Well, gosh, that sounds like a fairly decent argument for Windows right there.
"Hi, I run Linux."
"And I run Windows."
"(Sneer) I'm super reliable. And free! And Open Source!!! (Angelic music cue.)"
"Oh, nice. What programs do you run?"
"Ummm, none. But I'm very, very stable while I'm sitting at rest, doing nothing!"
"Err, well, golly, isn't that nice..."
"You poor sucker. You're Windows. You BSOD all the time while you're running Photoshop."
"Well, actually, I haven't seen a blue screen of death in ages. Windows is pretty stable now. How about you? Stable, huh? No problems running Photoshop, I bet..."
"Umm, well, actually I can't run Photoshop. But anyone who wanted to get a team of coders and expert graphics editors together to dedicate a few years of their life could write an open source and free equivalent and it'd be lightning fast."
"But, look, I hate to press the matter, but what do you run now, not in the theoretical future?"
"Well, nothing. But I do it really, really well."
(Pats Linux on the head...)
Actually it might if you use the full disk encryption part of the endpoint. I do and it absolutely sucks, including the fact that if I boot my laptop on the docking station I have to open the laptop to do the initial login as my external keyboard does not work before the encryption is unlocked. Symantec Endpoint just plain sucks.
The problem with MicroSoft being more *nix like, is that leaves a migration path away from MicroSoft.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I have no doubt you can change your configuration, but you clearly spent too much time deciding how to layout your first Linux box.
I was sys admin on a few mainframes before Linux even existed. Picked up the wisdom of how those systems were configured and why. When I got my distro disks I spent about 30 minutes working out how I wanted it configured. Really wasn't something most newbs would understand, even with *ix builds/installs. Certainly not in any way close to the default, out of the box set up for Windows on any retailed or business configured PC I've ever seen - I'd wager 99.9% of all Windows PCs, to the present have massive I/O bottlenecks (not to overlook the pagefile is usually highly fragmented as process calls the filesystem to allocate and free up sectors rather than being created once of contiguous sectors, geez) and recovery issues, which happen more often than you are acknowledging, because many worms/viruses/trojans can only be fully recovered from with a fresh install. To read your words is to believe nobody has had much of a problem with malware and it shouldn't be an issue, so don't bother with firewalls or antivirus software.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"in 2008 Microsoft confirmed a vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which affected some versions that were released in 2001" i rest my case
It's not the bugfixes people want. It's the perception of bugfixes. Remember, perception is reality.
Your comment would be more convincing if Unix weren't infact running everywhere and doing a better job at it.
Microsoft sandbagged for a long time. The users suffered for it and a lot of needless extra costs were incurred because of it.
Microsoft catered to cookie-cutter installs. Most are express installs, no thought to performance, just a quick stall by whatever tech team is doing it and get it out the door. Good practices require thought, thoughtful configurations require training on the hows and whys, whereas drones are cheap to employ. Microsoft's approach was along the line of - "Just do it this way, nobody really cares or is likely to be impacted by our one-size-fits-all design". *ix, particularly Linux brought the ability to configure your desktop like a mainframe and take advantage of multiple drives for performance reasons.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Then stop using cmd and switch to powershell -- which also comes with windows 7.
Microsoft executives learned long ago that once they had the monopoly on desktop OS's and therefore the developers, if they made their system "unique" enough it would be very difficult and expensive to make Windows programs run on other operating systems. You don't get an elegant design from that business model and you never will.
Remember, the threat of cross platform development was the reason Microsoft went against OOP and build a layered interface based system. Abstraction was a threat to keeping developers tied to their APIs. They were quite aggressive at putting the cross platform C++ frameworks vendors out of business.
Just about the time Smalltalk was finally picking up steam along came Java and it's piggy back on the Internet( ie buzz ). But it was not long before that cross platform system was declared a threat to Windows and Microsoft went and did their own version even though they signed documents and licenses saying they would not. It took years for Sun to settle that and by then Microsoft had gutted Borland of it's top language engineers and directed them to come up with a competitor to Java and patented the stuff developers would find useful. They paid a "standards" org to declare part of their system an industry standard but you couldn't do much of any thing cross platform on what was even hinted as being open.
We'll never see Microsoft act anything like what it would have taken for them to adopt *ix practices because they exist only because they have a monopoly and they build everything to tightly tie developers to their platform. So if the current trend toward handhelds and portable devices continues it'll still be a very long time before Microsoft becomes a footnote and therefore it'll still be a very long time before those non-*ix systems such as theirs goes away. And remember, they have lots of cash to buy their way into lots of places. Over a billion for Nokia and for what? Windows Phone 7 is still with low single digit market share and then they'll be talking about Windows 8 and that'll be quite bloated compared to the Windows CE based WP7. But they've got like $50 billion in cash so they have enough for a very long time.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Heck, how'd that happen, after they lost their dangling participles?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I thought it was a Mach kernel and a BSD userland. How exactly that's quintessentially different from me installed Cygwin on my Windows machine and calling it a Unix machine is beyond me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/whatismacosx//arch.html
This is comical indeed, but not exactly accurate. I started dual-booting a couple of months ago, just to try it out. Frankly, there isn't much I can do on Windows 7 that I can't do on Xubuntu. There may be no Visual Studio but there is Netbeans. Everyone knows about the lack of gaming support. Even if I quit playing games, I'll probably never be able to replace Windows for one reason: Windows Media Center. I've tried MythTV and sadly, it doesn't come close. In fact, it downright blows in a lot of ways. Maybe someday I'll write a new UI for it but my skillz aren't quite there yet.
Apple is the largest UNIX vendor in the world right now...
Trolling is a art,
In order to be fscking, you must first understand fscking by typing "man fsck", or in your case; "info fsck".
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True enough, eventually one comes to try emacs and then they realize that platform lock is silly and needless.
But then, a creature composed of poodle legs on the left, horse legs on the right, a ducks bill, a camel hump, giraffe's neck, and a peacock tail with gills (and so aquatic) will never be an elegant creature in any environment.
What version of Symantec Endpoint Protection are you running? I work for the company, and we spent a lot of time focused on performance in the latest release.
It figures. A few engineers tricked the suits into letting them create something great and then a community around it, so the suits then spent the next 30 years trying to get their claws on it and trying to squash the community.
'No advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance.'
No advertising?
And they're not really selling "Android" the operating system - Google does that; they sell/offer it to their customers, who are, in this case, phone (and tablet) manufacturers. AT&T are selling phones that run Android (just as they sell phones that run iOS and Windows Phone).
I don't know whether AT&T or the phone manufacturer would be the ones responsible for providing support and/or bug fixes in this case.
Your new I can tell.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Nah, I've been reading /. since it started. If I'd registered when I started reading I'd have a four digit UID. (Smugness.) I'm just contrary...they keep me around for comic effect and to be provocative.
I have played with many flavours of Unix, Linux since '92 -- but the GUI is conflicted and never amounted to anything I will likely program. OS X is the best Unix that this old timer has used in my 23 years with the OS.
You might be interested in this: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/
I use git w/diff.external=winmerge and couldn't be happier
bite my glorious golden ass.
Is that why Windows has more bugs and is less reliable than Linux or Mac? MS has never placed a priority on bug fixes and usually uses bugs them as a selling point for users to upgrade to the next version (Windows ME to Windows 95 and Vista to Windows 7 for example.
As far as support is concerned, get your credit card out, just like you would if you were using Red Hat or Open Suse.
especially if you want to develop with C# or any other sane higher level language or for Windows
Of course Windows is a better environment if you are developing for Windows.
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When companies stopped buying big iron proprietary RISC servers to put in their datacenters and started putting commodity x86 servers instead, UNIX stagnated. Linux which was seen as a toy prior took advantage of this.
Yo dawg, I heard you like to RTFM, so I put an FM in the FM so you can RTFM while you RTFM.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You mean that Oracle, IBM, or HP don't offer bug fixes or support? We're talking about Unix now, not some Linux or BSD distro you might download from distrowatch. I find it pretty hard to believe that Oracle, IBM or HP won't support a corporation that buys $$$ worth of hardware & software from them.
But does two hours of pushing broom get an 8 x12 4 bit room?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Interesting, I did not know that. Just out of curiosity, does Canada get similar support to Windows, or are they also "other countries"?