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Apple Releases macOS 10.12 Sierra Open Source Darwin Code (9to5mac.com)
An anonymous reader writes:Apple has released the open source Darwin code for macOS 10.12 Sierra. The code, located on Apple's open source website, can be accessed via direct link now, although it doesn't yet appear on the site's home page. The release builds on a long-standing library of open source code that dates all the way back to OS X 10.0. There, you'll also find the Open Source Reference Library, developer tools, along with iOS and OS X Server resources. The lowest layers of macOS, including the kernel, BSD portions, and drivers are based mainly on open source technologies, collectively called Darwin. As such, Apple provides download links to the latest versions of these technologies for the open source community to learn and to use.
I know several friends plagued with the latest macbook and looking for an alternative, but dont want to sacrifice the reliability of the OS. BSD is an excellent choice, and Darwin helps to inform the more inquisitive mac user that there are alternatives if you can tolerate reimaging the machine, or buying different and sometimes less sexy hardware.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Open source is fine and dandy, but the real killer feature is being able to easily fix a bug in the OS yourself, deploy and test to yourself, and share with others.
How easy is it to do that with Apple's OS these days?
Actually, most of those things should be true. Charities wouldn't be necessary if government properly taxed the wealthy and provided a universal basic income. Voting should be mandatory. I can't think of a single valid reason why organ donation shouldn't be mandatory, you're dead, you're not using it any more, you and your family members should have no say whatsoever. And vaccinations should absolutely be mandatory unless they're medically contraindicated.
And it should be illegal to sell software without source code.
This is an interesting argument. On the one hand, getting something for free can lead to laziness and complacency. Yet, somehow we let children go for nearly 18 years sometimes without earning a paycheck. Oh, sure -- some get an allowance for chores or get a paper route -- some even flip burgers in their teens, but really it's not enough to live on. It's as if we let their wealthier parents take care of all their basic needs, but they can go out and earn discretionary income if they're motivated enough! Why, it's pure Leninist Communism on the family-scale!
Or, you know. Maybe in a world where human physical labor is obsolete and even many white collar jobs are now obsolete, maybe we should prepare for a world where just about every job is obsolete, and the rich, wealthy owners of the land and corporations can afford to use the immense wealth built on robot labor and Artificial Intelligence to let everyone have their basic needs tended to with a tiny bit of discretionary money to buy their products so that the whole system doesn't collapse under its own weight. Because if you have an AI/robot workforce and so does every other company on the planet, no one has a real paycheck to buy products, so the economy collapses and your AI/robot infrastructure crumbles b/c it's useless to make things for people that can't afford your products.
Hyperbole? Nope. China is replacing their human workforce with robots. Read that again and let it sink in a bit. China, where workers are paid less per year than many Americans make in a week has decided to replace thousands upon thousands of human beings with robots... b/c it's cheaper. Self-driving cars are going to be a thing in the next 5 to 10 years -- so much for those 2 Million American trucking jobs plus another few million taxi drivers... and Uber/Lyft. I've seen whole departments shelled out to the core to be replaced with automated systems. The other day, I saw a robot tattoo artist! Seriously, it scans your body, preps the needle, and will do a complete sitting for a tattoo given the design. There is no job that's safe. Legal Clerks are being replaced with automation. Nurses, pharmacists. Even surgeons. The more creative and nuanced the job, the longer the hold-out... but it's coming. The information age made globalization possible, but the AI age will make global massive joblessness a reality -- Who would hire a human being if an AI and/or robot could do the job cheaper, faster, for longer, and more reliably?!?!? Most kiosks cost around $30K -- and McDonald's is rolling those out nation-wide to replace people that used to take your order (or at least prevent them from having to hire more than a couple people capable of taking your order per site) Many auto-manufacturing robots are cheaper than union labor. In the USA, we have union workers sitting in seats on robot arms and the arm moves the worker to the place for them to screw the bolt in. In foreign plants... that human is replaced by a robot hand that does the job better. How long before the unions break down and let the USA plants do the same?
Apple's still sitting on serious bugs. Examples: One that's been around for many revisions of the OS is the abjectly borken UDP implementation; Apple's version of a supposedly broadcast protocol... that can only have one listener... brilliant. Linux and windows handle this just fine, too. One new in 10.12 is they borked Qt's tooltips and menus, which have worked since 10.6.8 through 10.11... and are now blank. There are plenty more. Those are just recently (and still) irritating here, so they're on my mind.
They leave bug reports untouched for months and years, but they always have time to flatten our fucking icons and implement idiotic crapola like "App Nap", don't they?
Fucking borken shit. I'm learning to really despise them. Apple: If you can't fix what you HAVE, then for Christ's sake, don't move on to a new version. All you're doing is producing a trial of borken shit. Which then the damn developers, who are SUPPORTING YOU, YOU IDIOTS, have to spend multiply redundant sets of wasted time trying to work around.
Damn it. They're going to turn my sorry ass back into a Windows developer if they don't straighten up and fly right.