Wrong answer. Windows NT on the Alpha ran in 32-bit mode. Yes, you heard me right - 32-bit mode. It completely _wasted_ the 64-bitness of the architecture, unlike certain _other_ OSes I won't mention *cough*linuxtru64openvms*cough*.
Well, USB devices have had some compatibility issues, mostly caused by the fact that the device makers got a bug up their collective butts and decided they needed to create their own protocols for a lot of devices, even though USB included well-written protocol standards for just about any kind of device. If they could have just stuck with the standards, you wouldn't have stupid Windows-only USB devices (of which there are more than a few, don't kid yourself).
I was hoping someone else would say this. Kee-rist, would it be so terrible to go with a STANDARD? OpenFirmware is an IEEE standard, after all, and in my experience, it's a hell of a lot better than anything else out there. If they're gonna kill the BIOS finally, I'm all for that - but c'mon, use a standard, instead of coming up with yet another, for no good reason other than "you can"...
I've worked as a computer technician in the past, and have seen the questionable quality of Western Digital drives in action (even before they stopped making SCSI drives altogether). The reliability of their drives was pretty poor - not to mention the Caviar 2-series drives, with the crap bearings, that died so fast. I remember RMA'ing and otherwise replacing a lot of them. Don't know about anyone else, but the words "enterprise-class" in the same sentence as the name "Western Digital" draw either puzzlement or laughter from me.
You _could_ implement a loader module that does a compatibility chainload for older operating systems. There's nothing stopping that. With the right code, an OpenFirmware for PCs could still boot DOS and Windows the traditional way, and also support more modern booting arrangements that forego all the real-mode crap.
You're telling me you don't think the backquote is still useful? On OS X, which is a Unix-alike, as is Linux, the backquote is still quite useful at a prompt, for taking the output of a shell command and using it in the command line of another. The tilde is useful as well, for jumping to home directories.
Removing keys from the standard keyboard layout isn't necessarily such a good idea, because of that - pretty much every "modern" operating system has some use for those keys, so removing them would harm more than it would help.
Actually no, those are bitmaps. The largest icon size is 128x128 or something, but the icons are not vector based. (I had that mistaken impression before I actually used OS X - I could see the icon pixelation if I cranked up the dock size a bit.
That's what sudo is for. Grant users or groups of users rights to do specific things as root (or anything, if you choose), and all they need is their own password - or an alternate password, if you setup PAM properly for it.
I'm one those weirdos who still doesn't like OS X, for a variety of reasons. I like Apple's hardware, particularly the G3 Pismo, and I'd love to buy one on eBay if I had the money - but Linux would have to go on it. Maybe NetBSD too, just for the hell of it. But MacOS X would only run in MoL, if at all. I just hate not having full control over my computer. I don't get control on Windows, but I do on Linux. Why would I want to use another platform where I don't get the control I want?
I think XFree is fine on the desktop - KDE3.1 does translucency effects like OS X does, and has anti-aliased fonts (yes, the old X glyph system sucks, that's why it's being replaced, and XLFDs are the devil). Phoenix has nicely anti-aliased fonts. I think it looks pretty decent - certainly nicer than Windows.
Besides, most people neither know about, nore care about, the lowlevel APIs that their GUI uses. Looks are more important to them. (I'd rather have a usable system, which might have something to do with why I like Linux.)
And Quartz doesn't use DPS, it uses PDF rendering technology, in cooperation with some stuff of their own.
OS X is no more Unix than Linux is. It's a Mach kernel with a BSD personality (not a BSD kernel), with userspace utilities scavenged from FreeBSD, NetBSD, and NeXTStep.
Unless you consider Linux to be a Unix, then I'll accept that.
We can't, smart ass. Well, we _could_ in theory, but Apple and Adobe wouldn't be very happy about it, considering Aqua uses proprietary technology from both companies. Not to mention the reverse-engineering effort it'd take to do it. It's not like Aqua is an open standard, unlike, say, the X protocol is.
Hm. Sounds suspiciously like a trojan horse to me. Doesn't anyone know the difference anymore?
A virus attaches itself to other executables, and propagates by having the executable it's attached to run. It can attach to most any executable, or some attach to the boot sector.
A worm uses networks to attack exploitable services, and propagates that way. It doesn't necessarily require human interaction to spread.
A trojan horse is a program that's designed to look legitimate, but has some ill intent. It propagates by people running it. It doesn't infect other executables, it depends on people passing it on.
I will blast their competence. Most of these people don't even properly audit their installs before they put them on the Internet - they leave everything open and running, which is just asking to get bent over. If someone's telling them to do something that's patently stupid, they should be explaining why it's a stupid thing to do, not just saying "well, I guess, if they want it..." - because usually they don't know WHAT they want or WHY they want it that way. Auditing and basic firewalling are necessities, unless you want to be mopping up after script kiddies all the damn time.
I don't like ISPs blocking ports either - the people running the servers should be taking care of it. Nothing beats discovering that your upstream kills SMTP connections that try to use AUTH because "well, gee, MS Exchange has a buffer overflow that can cause a DoS..." - WE DON'T RUN EXCHANGE. Tell the people whose boxes are broken to fix them, don't go breaking things for those who aren't vulnerable just because of someone else's stupid bug.
If admins were doing their jobs, that kind of crap wouldn't be necessary. Wake up, kids, and get it together. If your OS is buggy, and the "patches" break things, switch to another, better, platform. I don't care. But leaving things WIDE OPEN because someone might not be happy about it is asking for trouble you don't need.
Sysadmins who have been running "mostly-open" filter configurations may want to consider moving to a "mostly-closed" configuration: deny everything except services that have been cleared for use. Don't allow arbitrary connections.
Anyone who claims to be a "sysadmin" worth a damn should be doing this already. And not using Microsoft's stupid "firewalling" crap that happily leaves all the ports for their crap hanging wide open - on Linux, use iptables, on *BSD/Solaris/OS X, use IPFilter/ipfw/whatever, I'm sure most other major Unixen have some sort of solution available, and on Windows, either get a decent third-party software firewall, or get a hardware firewall.
Unfortunately, a lot of people are not even taking basic measures to harden their systems before putting them out on the Internet. Whatever OS you're running, you NEED TO KNOW how to harden it before it goes on the Internet. It's that simple. Not learning how is inexcusable, and ignorance is not a valid excuse.
Apple really needs to get it together in the way of documentation before I'd consider OS X a "practical" server platform. With Linux or *BSD, at least I have the source, so I can figure things out. With OS X, substantial portions are available in binary form only, and so it's kind of important that documentation is available.
Um, aren't the Raiders in Oakland now? WTF does LA care? Guess I'm confused. I mean, I saw the game (was over at some friends' place, mostly for the commercials and hangin' out), but I guess I don't see why people, especially people who aren't even in the same CITY that the team is BASED IN, should care so much.
On my Linux server systems, I install libsafe, and add it to/etc/ld.so.preload, so that every dynamically-linked program on the system (i.e., everything) is protected by it. If something tries to buffer-overflow a daemon, and happens to succeed, the library kills the program immediately. (It wraps assorted commonly-used C library routines with rigorous extra checking.) Worst case, the daemon dies, and has to be restarted, and I'll see what happened in the system logs.
Can you do that with Billware? Bet that would have protected a lot of systems...
Yeah, I like how they never point out that fact that these worms "only affect Microsoft products". Maybe because they don't know any better - or maybe it's just that they know which side their bread is buttered on, and like those advertising dollars.
Actually, the current Xine release supports all the formats you mentioned. It also plays SVQ3 video and QDM2 audio for Quicktime clips, and plays RealVideo with the Real binary codecs.
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Wrong answer. Windows NT on the Alpha ran in 32-bit mode. Yes, you heard me right - 32-bit mode. It completely _wasted_ the 64-bitness of the architecture, unlike certain _other_ OSes I won't mention *cough*linuxtru64openvms*cough*.
Well, USB devices have had some compatibility issues, mostly caused by the fact that the device makers got a bug up their collective butts and decided they needed to create their own protocols for a lot of devices, even though USB included well-written protocol standards for just about any kind of device. If they could have just stuck with the standards, you wouldn't have stupid Windows-only USB devices (of which there are more than a few, don't kid yourself).
Not LISP. Forth. Well, strictly speaking, it's called F-Code, which is basically a bytecode form of Forth.
I was hoping someone else would say this. Kee-rist, would it be so terrible to go with a STANDARD? OpenFirmware is an IEEE standard, after all, and in my experience, it's a hell of a lot better than anything else out there. If they're gonna kill the BIOS finally, I'm all for that - but c'mon, use a standard, instead of coming up with yet another, for no good reason other than "you can"...
I've worked as a computer technician in the past, and have seen the questionable quality of Western Digital drives in action (even before they stopped making SCSI drives altogether). The reliability of their drives was pretty poor - not to mention the Caviar 2-series drives, with the crap bearings, that died so fast. I remember RMA'ing and otherwise replacing a lot of them. Don't know about anyone else, but the words "enterprise-class" in the same sentence as the name "Western Digital" draw either puzzlement or laughter from me.
You _could_ implement a loader module that does a compatibility chainload for older operating systems. There's nothing stopping that. With the right code, an OpenFirmware for PCs could still boot DOS and Windows the traditional way, and also support more modern booting arrangements that forego all the real-mode crap.
You're telling me you don't think the backquote is still useful? On OS X, which is a Unix-alike, as is Linux, the backquote is still quite useful at a prompt, for taking the output of a shell command and using it in the command line of another. The tilde is useful as well, for jumping to home directories.
Removing keys from the standard keyboard layout isn't necessarily such a good idea, because of that - pretty much every "modern" operating system has some use for those keys, so removing them would harm more than it would help.
You mean, like "Airport Extreme?"
"Blackmail is such a dirty word. Let's call it extortion - the 'x' makes it sound cool." -- Bender
"I'm so pleased to accept this reward! I feel just like Kryten did when he was forced to wash 800 bedsheets as part of his sentence."
Does anyone know wtf he's talking about here? I seriously can't figure it out.
Actually no, those are bitmaps. The largest icon size is 128x128 or something, but the icons are not vector based. (I had that mistaken impression before I actually used OS X - I could see the icon pixelation if I cranked up the dock size a bit.
That's what sudo is for. Grant users or groups of users rights to do specific things as root (or anything, if you choose), and all they need is their own password - or an alternate password, if you setup PAM properly for it.
I'm one those weirdos who still doesn't like OS X, for a variety of reasons. I like Apple's hardware, particularly the G3 Pismo, and I'd love to buy one on eBay if I had the money - but Linux would have to go on it. Maybe NetBSD too, just for the hell of it. But MacOS X would only run in MoL, if at all. I just hate not having full control over my computer. I don't get control on Windows, but I do on Linux. Why would I want to use another platform where I don't get the control I want?
I think XFree is fine on the desktop - KDE3.1 does translucency effects like OS X does, and has anti-aliased fonts (yes, the old X glyph system sucks, that's why it's being replaced, and XLFDs are the devil). Phoenix has nicely anti-aliased fonts. I think it looks pretty decent - certainly nicer than Windows.
Besides, most people neither know about, nore care about, the lowlevel APIs that their GUI uses. Looks are more important to them. (I'd rather have a usable system, which might have something to do with why I like Linux.)
And Quartz doesn't use DPS, it uses PDF rendering technology, in cooperation with some stuff of their own.
For god's sake, it's Unix. On The Desktop.
OS X is no more Unix than Linux is. It's a Mach kernel with a BSD personality (not a BSD kernel), with userspace utilities scavenged from FreeBSD, NetBSD, and NeXTStep.
Unless you consider Linux to be a Unix, then I'll accept that.
We can't, smart ass. Well, we _could_ in theory, but Apple and Adobe wouldn't be very happy about it, considering Aqua uses proprietary technology from both companies. Not to mention the reverse-engineering effort it'd take to do it. It's not like Aqua is an open standard, unlike, say, the X protocol is.
Well, at least there are modules available to support the software modems in the new iBooks. Could be worse...
Hm. Sounds suspiciously like a trojan horse to me. Doesn't anyone know the difference anymore?
I will blast their competence. Most of these people don't even properly audit their installs before they put them on the Internet - they leave everything open and running, which is just asking to get bent over. If someone's telling them to do something that's patently stupid, they should be explaining why it's a stupid thing to do, not just saying "well, I guess, if they want it..." - because usually they don't know WHAT they want or WHY they want it that way. Auditing and basic firewalling are necessities, unless you want to be mopping up after script kiddies all the damn time.
I don't like ISPs blocking ports either - the people running the servers should be taking care of it. Nothing beats discovering that your upstream kills SMTP connections that try to use AUTH because "well, gee, MS Exchange has a buffer overflow that can cause a DoS..." - WE DON'T RUN EXCHANGE. Tell the people whose boxes are broken to fix them, don't go breaking things for those who aren't vulnerable just because of someone else's stupid bug.
If admins were doing their jobs, that kind of crap wouldn't be necessary. Wake up, kids, and get it together. If your OS is buggy, and the "patches" break things, switch to another, better, platform. I don't care. But leaving things WIDE OPEN because someone might not be happy about it is asking for trouble you don't need.
Sysadmins who have been running "mostly-open" filter configurations may want to consider moving to a "mostly-closed" configuration: deny everything except services that have been cleared for use. Don't allow arbitrary connections.
Anyone who claims to be a "sysadmin" worth a damn should be doing this already. And not using Microsoft's stupid "firewalling" crap that happily leaves all the ports for their crap hanging wide open - on Linux, use iptables, on *BSD/Solaris/OS X, use IPFilter/ipfw/whatever, I'm sure most other major Unixen have some sort of solution available, and on Windows, either get a decent third-party software firewall, or get a hardware firewall.
Unfortunately, a lot of people are not even taking basic measures to harden their systems before putting them out on the Internet. Whatever OS you're running, you NEED TO KNOW how to harden it before it goes on the Internet. It's that simple. Not learning how is inexcusable, and ignorance is not a valid excuse.
Ok, the next person who mentions Rosie O'Donnell on /. is going to get a serious beatdown. Makes me want to vomit just reading that.
I'm gonna go dig my eyes out with a spoon now.
Apple really needs to get it together in the way of documentation before I'd consider OS X a "practical" server platform. With Linux or *BSD, at least I have the source, so I can figure things out. With OS X, substantial portions are available in binary form only, and so it's kind of important that documentation is available.
Um, aren't the Raiders in Oakland now? WTF does LA care? Guess I'm confused. I mean, I saw the game (was over at some friends' place, mostly for the commercials and hangin' out), but I guess I don't see why people, especially people who aren't even in the same CITY that the team is BASED IN, should care so much.
On my Linux server systems, I install libsafe, and add it to /etc/ld.so.preload, so that every dynamically-linked program on the system (i.e., everything) is protected by it. If something tries to buffer-overflow a daemon, and happens to succeed, the library kills the program immediately. (It wraps assorted commonly-used C library routines with rigorous extra checking.) Worst case, the daemon dies, and has to be restarted, and I'll see what happened in the system logs.
Can you do that with Billware? Bet that would have protected a lot of systems...
Yeah, I like how they never point out that fact that these worms "only affect Microsoft products". Maybe because they don't know any better - or maybe it's just that they know which side their bread is buttered on, and like those advertising dollars.
Actually, the current Xine release supports all the formats you mentioned. It also plays SVQ3 video and QDM2 audio for Quicktime clips, and plays RealVideo with the Real binary codecs.