What do you call something that provides a complete UNIX environment? A UNIX!
But concluding therefore that Mac OS X is merely Unix is not justified by the facts. [emphasis mine]
About 90% of your post implies (or outright asserts) that that's my claim. It's not.
It's no more accurate to say that Mac OS X is Unix than it is to say that it's NEXTSTEP or that it's Mac OS Classic or that it's pure Java. It incorporates all of these things.
Yes! OS X *is* all those things. OS X *is* a Mac OS Classic (when a full Classic system is included). It *is* a NEXTSTEP. It *is* a Java system. And it *is* a UNIX. See above, I'm not saying that Mac OS X is just a UNIX with a fancy theme, or anything like that.
[You list a lot of OS X that has replaced UNIX]
The list goes on and on.
You could list a billion ways in which OS X is *not* UNIX, but that won't make the ways that it *is* UNIX vanish. You are just attempting misdirection here.
We have our own kernel
Yes, it's called "xnu" and includes both Mach and BSD.
If you compiled xnu without any of the BSD kernel, and remove from OS X all of the BSD programs (libraries, command line programs, etc), will OS X still function properly?
You're coming across like a used car salesman trying to convince me there's not a hole in the hood, even though I can see it plain as day. Claims like, "oh, that hole isn't so big," or "that hole really won't affect the car's performance," or, "the hole was much bigger, but we've patched it up quite a bit," or "why focus so much on that hole? Look at the rest of the car!" don't make the hole go away.
OS X *is* a UNIX. It's also much, much more. Why is that so hard for you to admit? I mean, really, if it's *not* a UNIX, then what do you call that big UNIX-shaped hole in the hood?
String theory and quantium physics reliablity describes and predicts things?
String Theory: does not (it is currently not proper science, but is instead a model that, although elegant, is fundamentally useless) Quantum Physics: does (you are using a computer, aren't you?)
What does archaeology predict?
The past.
My point being is that each side (science/religion) thinks they are "correct". They are correct... within each of its axioms
In the most absolute sense, nothing is proveable and everything relies on faith.
That's metaphysics, and is thus unprovable. You can't prove your axioms (by definition), but you can test them to see if they are reliably useful.
How do I know that birds can fly? Because I see them flying?
Yes, and the fact that every well-reasoned test you can come up with shows that birds do, in fact, fly. That's science.
I talked to an ex-science teacher and his whole argument came down to "Occam's Razor". But how is this different from having your whole argument coming down to believing that "A God exists"? They both something that you are guiding your life on, either of which you really can't prove is correct/true/THE TRUTH.
One of them (science) reliably describes and predicts the real world. The other (faith) does not. *That's* the difference, and it's a very crucial one. If you're sick, do you want a hospital, or a priest? If you are hungry, do you pray for manna, or do you seek food? If you want to fly to the Moon, do you start the Apollo program, or do you give up because scriptures say you can't get there?
It all comes down to your axioms. Which axiom is more reliable for describing the universe: a holy book, voices in your head, mere speculation, or science?
I don't see how that follows. The only way you could possibly accept that is if you either (a) have a shocking ignorance about Mac OS X (I have no reason to believe that yet) or (b) expand the meaning of "Unix" until it's so broad it describes virtually every computer operating system.
Because you've pegged (a) and (b) to such extremes, neither are true.
I'll just give three ways why OS X is UNIX:
1. If you remove all of the UNIX parts, OS X stops working. 2. xnu, acronym aside, is part BSD (and I'm calling BSD a true UNIX, being a continuation of one of the two original branches of AT&T's original UNIX). 3. OS X is fully compatible with what is colloquially called UNIX
So, it provides a complete UNIX environment, it's based on a direct descendant of the original UNIX, and parts of that UNIX are critically integrated into OS X. You have to walk a pretty thin and tortured line to not call *that* "UNIX".
Mac OS X evolved from Unix.
True, but it's not yet a whole new species. Modern UNIX DNA is still active in OS X (to follow the metaphor). Agreed that OS X has a lot of atavistic, yet useful, UNIX parts, but some of them are yet integral to the organism.
I can see how, eventually, OS X might shed its dependancy on its UNIX foundation, at which time I'd agree it's no longer a true UNIX but instead something new that once was UNIX and has since transcended UNIX. At that point, it would be reasonable to say that OS X is *not* UNIX, but that it does provide a complete UNIX environment. We are not yet at that day.
To take a different tact, NeXTstep was a UNIX--NeXT's own brochures make this point clear. If OS X is no longer UNIX, there has to have been a time when the changeover occurred. In your opinion, which version of NeXTstep or OS X did that changeover take place?
A lot has happened since the NeXT days, a *lot* has been added to OS X, and a lot of UNIX dependancy has been replaced with Cocoa and other technologies, but OS X still sits atop, astride and astraddle UNIX.
It features many compatibility layers that make it possible to port Unix (including Linux) software. It is not Unix.
OS X does not merely provide a UNIX compatibility layer. OS X directly depends non-trivially on some of OS X's UNIX parts (the kernel, fsck, networking, some filesystem features, etc).
Since we are doing, (a) or (b), my take is that you are either (a) claiming OS X merely provides compatibility with UNIX, but does not rely, at all, on UNIX itself, or (b) provides so much above and beyond UNIX, that it's wrong to focus on such a small part of the OS as a whole.
There is a FLAC quicktime component, but I have never seen FLACs work in iTunes.
When you install a QuickTime component, iTunes gains the ability to play back that format (even video, although it will only play the audio). I've only used the OGG (Vorbis) component. The FLAC component should work just the same.
That's because by *every* measure but one, OS X is UNIX. That one measure is the only one that legally matters: Apple has not sought permission from the Open Group to use the UNIX brand. By every technological, historical, and ancestral measure, OS X is UNIX.
OS X has, at its very core, a BSD derivative (Darwin) which is a direct descendant of UNIX (unlike Linux, which is a clone of UNIX).
And don't forget the ad in Scientific American which read: Sends other UNIX boxes to/dev/null.
There are two primary reasons Apple is careful about calling OS X UNIX. The primary (or legal) one is that the Open Group sued Apple for violating its UNIX trademark.
The other is that Apple wants to differentiate OS X from the negative aspects of UNIX. OS X is *so* much more than UNIX, that in many ways, to call OS X "just another UNIX" underplays the NeXT/Cocoa- and Apple-derived technologies. It would be akin to calling Safari a "text reader".
So, it's sort of a "have your cake, and eat it, too" situation. Apple can simultaneously derive all the cachet of being a true UNIX, while mitigating the downsides. Which leads to statements like:
So you were simultaneously right and wrong. Neat, huh?
In other words: In some ways (all but one, actually) OS X is UNIX (and then some), and in some ways (one, really) it isn't. True and not true, simultaneously right and wrong. Neat? That wouldn't be my choice of word, but OK.
In other words, it's just like the iPod in that it uses a database.
What's the difference between running the "Recover Utility" and using one of the existing tools that does the same thing on the iPod? Not much.
There is absolutely no reason someone couldn't write a program (a perl script, even!), and stick it on the iPod. Then you could mount the iPod on *any* computer, copy songs over, then run the program (Mac, Linux, or Windows), just like you do with your Samsung player, and do it on any platform and any computer you want.
An infinitesimal number of iPod owners will ever go that route, though. iTunes is such a nice program, that there's no large demand for alternate ways of loading songs (Linux users being an obvious exception--but it's a pretty safe bet that most of them would just use iTunes if there was a Linux version).
If you have a very large collection, iTunes management is a nightmare.
then (about not using iTunes):
So of course I have to manage my library by hand.
I can't imagine how using iTunes can be a nightmare, but doing it by hand isn't.
You can end up with a music folder with hundreds and hundreds of folder, to the point where it is a headache to deal with. If you never look at your music folder - then it's fine I guess.
That's the whole point. iTunes essentially *is* your filesystem. Your standard tree-based filesystem is really poor for managing songs (quick, find that one Beatles song, oh, which album is it on again?).
With iTunes, you can still access your songs directly via the Finder/Windows Explorer (but any changes should be done through iTunes itself). You can even drag a song from iTunes and drop it (this will copy the file) somewhere if you want to do use it outside of iTunes.
I prefer this structure:
1st Letter of Artist Name/Artist Name/Artist Name - Album Name/Track Number - Track Name
That's the trade-off, isn't it? Easier song library management vs. fine-control over the filesystem structure. When iTunes first came out, I wasn't too keen on the idea of not being in direct control of the mp3 files and their folder structure, but *quickly* came to stop worrying and love the bomb.
Now, the idea of managing, by hand, thousands of songs... <shudder!>.
iTunes could do a great job for me, if Apple didn't miss to implement support for FLAC, Musepack, Monkey's Audio and some other formats.
iTunes supports FLAC, OGG, and any other format for which there is a QuickTime plug-in. Unfortunately, QuickTime plug-ins are (it's said) really annoying to program. The release of QT 7, though implies that this might change for the better.
Unfortunately Apple made the design flaw that you can't simply drag audio files in a special folder and they are useable, so I have to install iTunes to put music on my iPod.
This is intentional. When the iPod came out, the main HD-based player was the Nomad, which suffered from horrible performance. This was because the songs were just stored as files with no database. The reason the iPod can search through many thousands of songs instantaneously is because of its song database, which iTunes creates (you actually don't need iTunes for this--any program can read/write the iPod database).
You could easily write a program that lets you just drop songs on it from your filesystem, which will automatically copy them to the iPod, and update the database.
Uh, Fink does exactly what you're describing, except it uses/sw instead of/opt.
DarwinPorts does the ugly shoe-horning cludge. Fink is elegant.
No, DarwinPorts installs in/opt/ (/opt/local/, in fact).
DarwinPorts is more elegant than Fink (I think you've confused DarwinPorts with someone else who I won't name here). Fink is simpler to use, though, but being available as a.dmg may change that.
Going from 1080i HD to 720p HD is downsampling. It's kind of odd to call it anything else. In the process, you upsample from the 540 image, but that was the whole point of the story.
Instead of starting from the interlaced fields, you could deinterlace them into 1080p frames at 30fps, then downsample directly to 720p. Your initial post in this thread used a true fact to come to a false conclusion. Grasping at straws and trying to change the subject won't make that conclusion true.
Today at the airport I saw a $100 bill, but left it lying there. It's just not worth it.
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Sweetest Thing [April 25th, 2005]
Bono stopped by for a visit. You can never tell what he's thinking though. I think that's why he wears those sunglasses. Ballmer kept trying to iChat me like every five minutes trying to talk with Bono, but I didn't didn't want to completely negate the Bono's coolness, I know how he can get when he's excited.
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Tiger Fever! [April 29th, 6:31PM]
Just installed Tiger (waiting for the FedEx truck was *torture*!). I can't believe how great it is. I can't stop hitting F12. Oh, and Spotlight! I'll post a more in-depth review later. Until then, check out the one at Ars Technica, it's really good.
Actually, it's not downsampled, it's upsampled (you have 60 "540p" fields per second, upsampled to 60 720p frames per second).
You've left out a dimension.
Should have bought a 1080i screen then!
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When is 720p Not 720p?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
If the broadcast is 1080i, and your display isn't 1080i, I don't think it's logical to assume the quality of the downsampled video will be equivalent to a true 720p broadcast.
When I get around to buying a HD television (not any time soon, I do all my televisioning on my computer), it will be a true 1080i (are there 1080p televisions?) display so I'll know I'm getting the full potential of HD.
Unless I'm strapped for cash, of course, in which case I'll just suck it up and know my 720p won't be the best thing for watching 1080i content on.
On the plus side, it's important to get the facts out there for the consumer, who will likely (although not logically) assume he's/she's getting more than they really are.
(about being able to sue Apple for damages) Really? This would be very interesting:):)
In all fairness, I'm not a lawyer. It just seems that if someone violates your patent, you'd be able to recoup all related costs. However, the law hasn't always followed my sense of reason and right-and-wrong!
About the KDE getting huffy about a license.. well I'm a KDE developer and have done a tiny bit coding with mdnsresponder but we are hoping to see what the gnome guys produce as a replacement.
It was meant as a little joke, given KDE's use of Qt, which has caused some issues due to the dual-license nature of Qt, and the fear that Trolltech could revoke the license, or otherwise leave KDE hanging (not entirely unlike what happened with BitKeeper).
I realise what you are saying, but can you imagine handing out CD's and saying "Here use this nice new kde live cd! You can use it as long as your company doesn't sue apple!"
That would make for a humorous CD handout session, but there are plenty of strange license requirements in your standard Linux distro. It's not like your average users are all going around bringing patent suits against Apple.:-)
I would wholeheartedly support a campaign to get Apple to limit the scope of the patent lawsuit exception to apply solely to software patents.
Socialism in it's purest form (which is what I've been try to explain) take place in a volentary orginization in the absence of law.
Well, that's the cause of two problems. 1. Socialism (and Capitalism, etc), don't actually exist in their purest forms. 2. The form of Socialism I've been referring to is the kind that the extreme right tends to decry.
When you enforce socialism against the will of the people through the redistribution of wealth and free market intervention (again, even if against only one person), you effectively have communism. And yes, you can have a democraticically ellected communistic government.
By that definition *any* government spending that isn't unanimously supported by the people is Communism. By that definition, every government that has ever spent *any* money is Communist, which make the word useless.
Communism is a structure, not an act. It's a form of government, not a singular act of government.
I'm not against rail technology, however I am against supporting a failed business model.
There's a distinction to be made here. I'm against, in general, supporting a failed business model. But in order to have passenger rail service in America, it seems, we need to grant Amtrak money.
So my support of Amtrak isn't to help some failing corporation to survive, but instead to ensure passenger rail service. If a private organization can do it, and do it at least as well as Amtrak, then I'm all for it.
If we are going to continue to support this rail system, the goverment should at least swallow up Amtrak and form "offically" into another government orginization
Amtrak *is* a part of the government. It's a corporation created by Congress.
Being that Amtrak is a corporation of the private sector and receiving government subsidies to stay afloat, then you too should have no problem with the president granting contracts to Halliburton. Even more so, at least Halliburton is a profitable company of the private sector.
See above. I don't believe in spending government money unless the desired goals aren't being adequately met by the private sector. I'm not against giving contracts to Halliburton, but I am against the way the whole mess is being done. Halliburton has been profiteering at the expense of the taxpayer (and by 'profiteering', I don't mean, 'making a profit', I mean *gauging* the American public). Amtrak might have a lot of problems, but profiteering isn't one of them.
You personally however, seem to have something againt republicans based on your previous posts.
You've got that partially right. I'm not against Republicans per se, but I am against the way the current crop are acting. It's my belief that their problems stem from a philosophical flaw they hold. The flaw is that they see things as either/or, black/white, and they ignore nuance as though it's merely an illusion.
Your comparison of Amtrak with Halliburton, for example, ignores nuance. If you say, "I'm against the war" to the Republicans it means, "I hate the troops" and it's nothing of the sort. Just like saying, "what Halliburton is doing is not just bad, but bordering on criminal" becomes, "I don't think the government should contract out to the private sector." The differences really are there, the nuance really exists.
I do get what you're saying though, it's just that Spotlight is an integral part of Mac OS now (just like the Apple menu).
-Spotlight does not index hidden folders. I've got this great desktop search app, yet it won't index ~/.xchat2/xchatlogs, even if I sym or hardlink it.
Slight correction: Spotlight does index hidden folders (the "hidden" flag on HFS). It does not index dot files/folders.
Two solutions for you:
1. Move xchatlogs to somewhere else, then symlink *that* into ~/.xchat2. 2. Configure xchat to store its logs somewhere else. If you want the logs folder to remain hidden, you can hide it with "SetFile -a V" (SetFile is installed with the Developer Tools, and is stored in:/Developer/Tools/)
Also, I imagine it's a hidden setting somewhere to toggle searching dot files/folders.
-The neat-looking RSS visualizer screensaver has to pull from Safari, and not NetNewsWire
It also only polls from one feed. But to solve your problem, of course, you can just put the feed you want into Safari.
Right, but what you said is: "their right to it would be revoked if they sue apple for anything at all."
That's a whole different reason.
Say now Apple violates one of IBM's hardware patents.
What should IBM do now?
If the patent is important enough, IBM should sue Apple. They'd lose the license to the APSL code, but if the patent is important enough, and the violation clear enough, Apple can be held liable for the resulting damages, including the damages incurred by the revocation of the APSL licensed code.
Think about it. If it's an important patent, Apple won't want to nick it for their PowerBooks (for example) and risk being forced to stop selling their PowerBooks indefinitely. So, in practice, I don't see this being a problem.
Which is, as I understand it, the same situation any OSS project is in with IBM's patent gift. What if Apple uses an IBM granted patent in Darwin? Apple won't be able to sue IBM either, without the resulting consequences.
Agreed, though, Apple should limit the scope to software patents.
And the BSD folks are more libertarian like you say - exactly why they are even less likely to accept such draconian licencing.
You've got libertarian backwards. They *support* corporate rights, which is why the BSD license lets a corporation use their code in proprietary software.
Btw as for reimplementing, yeah it can be done. Both gnome and kde development on zeroconf is pretty much waiting for the reimplementation of mDNSResponder.
mDNSResponder doesn't have to be compiled into GNOME or KDE (KDE getting huffy about a license?). You run it like you do bind, and nsswitch.conf takes care of redirecting lookups (you get it for free in GNOME, no recompiling required). As for GNOME advertising services, they *should* just tie into the system mDNSResponder daemon, but if they want to compile the code in, yeah, they have to re-implement. That's not a big deal. In that case, the reason isn't because the license states you can't sue over patents, but that it's not GPL compatible, which puts the APSL in the same boat as just about every other OSS license aside from the GPL and the BSD licenses. No big deal, and that's the way it's *supposed* to work in OSS. Different implementations of the same thing for different reasons. Various MTAs, many DNS servers, and yes, many ZeroConf servers. As long as the protocol is open (and it is), then there's no worry that Apple's mDNSResponder will "embrace and extend", breaking GNOME's built-in ZeroConf services.
The only concern I have is how bloody ugly/unreadable the config files are. There's so much noise from the tags that one's hard pressed to read the entries. I don't care if there's an editor for it, when I have to do it by hand with a text editor the file format's fluff gets in the way.
That sounds like a complaint made up to have something to complain about.
The idea is that you *don't* edit plists by hand, but if you have to, you can.
So, under all normal circumstances, you do things via preference panes, plist editors, the "defaults" command, etc. But if things are hosed and all you have is a boot floppy or CD with vi on it, you *can* recover the system back to a fully operational state. And more to the point, launchd helps minimize the potential for being in such a hosed state.
All this is academic, of course. The question to ask is how often do people find OS X to be in a hosed state, where the system is unrecoverable without resorting to such extreme measures? And how often does this happen in Linux? The answer for OS X is essentially "never", and under Linux it's "every now and then".
So perhaps your trepidation is because you are used to having to fix a hosed Linux system by hand via a boot floppy?
Re:Submitter is confused - Mod parent offtopic.
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Does launchd Beat cron?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Hmm, I cannot see Sun or IBM, both hardware manufacturers, using code that their right to it would be revoked if they sue apple for anything at all.
That clause only refers to patents, and if Apple first sues you, you can sue back and not violate the APSL.
Although I can't find the details, I believe IBM's grant of patents to the OSS community has a similar requirement. The reasoning is that while most legitimate technology companies realize software patents are fundamentally foolish, they also realize they *must* acquire patents to use as defense against being sued for violating patents. If everyone is in patent violation, any lawsuit opens the doors to MAD. At least, that's the idea.
Back to Apple. The APSL grants the recipient of the code to use any relevant patents. In exchange for that "gift" (same as IBM's patent "gift"), you have to agree not to use patents against Apple. You still can, though, if you decide the infringement is serious enough to stop using ASPL licensed code.
On the whole, this is a good thing. Although it doesn't *eliminate* software patents (Apple can't do that, only Congress can), it does make them even less likely to be abused.
BSD people... I would guess they feel the same as the linux people - but that's just a guess.
The FSF says there's no problem with joining in with an APSL project. They do say you can't copy code between APSL and GPL licensed code, though, but that's pretty much the case with almost every OSS license and the GPL.
The Linux folks (not quite as unified as is being implied, but let's just generalize here for simplicity) have no problem including non-GPL software with their distributions. They also don't tend to take out patents (and especially don't sue over them!), so this clause isn't an issue.
The BSD folks are like the Linux folks, except more unified, and a bit more libertarian WRT the licensing of software.
And if you don't like the license, you can just re-implement launchd as a GPL or BSD licensed program. It duplicates effort, and I don't think the license is so unpalatable as to motivate such an undertaking, but the technology is pretty exciting. The license is a valid OSS license, so let's take advantage of it! (Ubuntu, I'm looking at *you*)
I've used Apple's mDNSResponder and Darwin Streaming Server under Linux, and it doesn't taint the license of any Linux (kernel or distribution) code, and really works *great* for the tasks at hand.
If Apple ever decided to take an adversarial stance with the OSS to any large extent, well, just remember that SCO was pretty cool back in the day.
I believe you can just download the x86 iso, and install darwinports. That'd pretty much give you a BSD-like distro of Darwin with not quite-so-many available packages, but all the cool unixy features of OS X, including launchd, right?
Of course, this isn't as simple or as organized as installing Debian, but, well, it's there for the downloading.
Slashdot Mirror
>So, it provides a complete UNIX environment
Exactly
What do you call something that provides a complete UNIX environment? A UNIX!
But concluding therefore that Mac OS X is merely Unix is not justified by the facts. [emphasis mine]
About 90% of your post implies (or outright asserts) that that's my claim. It's not.
It's no more accurate to say that Mac OS X is Unix than it is to say that it's NEXTSTEP or that it's Mac OS Classic or that it's pure Java. It incorporates all of these things.
Yes! OS X *is* all those things. OS X *is* a Mac OS Classic (when a full Classic system is included). It *is* a NEXTSTEP. It *is* a Java system. And it *is* a UNIX. See above, I'm not saying that Mac OS X is just a UNIX with a fancy theme, or anything like that.
[You list a lot of OS X that has replaced UNIX]
The list goes on and on.
You could list a billion ways in which OS X is *not* UNIX, but that won't make the ways that it *is* UNIX vanish. You are just attempting misdirection here.
We have our own kernel
Yes, it's called "xnu" and includes both Mach and BSD.
If you compiled xnu without any of the BSD kernel, and remove from OS X all of the BSD programs (libraries, command line programs, etc), will OS X still function properly?
You're coming across like a used car salesman trying to convince me there's not a hole in the hood, even though I can see it plain as day. Claims like, "oh, that hole isn't so big," or "that hole really won't affect the car's performance," or, "the hole was much bigger, but we've patched it up quite a bit," or "why focus so much on that hole? Look at the rest of the car!" don't make the hole go away.
OS X *is* a UNIX. It's also much, much more. Why is that so hard for you to admit? I mean, really, if it's *not* a UNIX, then what do you call that big UNIX-shaped hole in the hood?
String theory and quantium physics reliablity describes and predicts things?
... within each of its axioms
String Theory: does not (it is currently not proper science, but is instead a model that, although elegant, is fundamentally useless)
Quantum Physics: does (you are using a computer, aren't you?)
What does archaeology predict?
The past.
My point being is that each side (science/religion) thinks they are "correct". They are correct
Correct.
what/who is to say which axiom is "correct"?
Reality and reason.
In the most absolute sense, nothing is proveable and everything relies on faith.
That's metaphysics, and is thus unprovable. You can't prove your axioms (by definition), but you can test them to see if they are reliably useful.
How do I know that birds can fly? Because I see them flying?
Yes, and the fact that every well-reasoned test you can come up with shows that birds do, in fact, fly. That's science.
I talked to an ex-science teacher and his whole argument came down to "Occam's Razor". But how is this different from having your whole argument coming down to believing that "A God exists"? They both something that you are guiding your life on, either of which you really can't prove is correct/true/THE TRUTH.
One of them (science) reliably describes and predicts the real world. The other (faith) does not. *That's* the difference, and it's a very crucial one. If you're sick, do you want a hospital, or a priest? If you are hungry, do you pray for manna, or do you seek food? If you want to fly to the Moon, do you start the Apollo program, or do you give up because scriptures say you can't get there?
It all comes down to your axioms. Which axiom is more reliable for describing the universe: a holy book, voices in your head, mere speculation, or science?
I don't see how that follows. The only way you could possibly accept that is if you either (a) have a shocking ignorance about Mac OS X (I have no reason to believe that yet) or (b) expand the meaning of "Unix" until it's so broad it describes virtually every computer operating system.
Because you've pegged (a) and (b) to such extremes, neither are true.
I'll just give three ways why OS X is UNIX:
1. If you remove all of the UNIX parts, OS X stops working.
2. xnu, acronym aside, is part BSD (and I'm calling BSD a true UNIX, being a continuation of one of the two original branches of AT&T's original UNIX).
3. OS X is fully compatible with what is colloquially called UNIX
So, it provides a complete UNIX environment, it's based on a direct descendant of the original UNIX, and parts of that UNIX are critically integrated into OS X. You have to walk a pretty thin and tortured line to not call *that* "UNIX".
Mac OS X evolved from Unix.
True, but it's not yet a whole new species. Modern UNIX DNA is still active in OS X (to follow the metaphor). Agreed that OS X has a lot of atavistic, yet useful, UNIX parts, but some of them are yet integral to the organism.
I can see how, eventually, OS X might shed its dependancy on its UNIX foundation, at which time I'd agree it's no longer a true UNIX but instead something new that once was UNIX and has since transcended UNIX. At that point, it would be reasonable to say that OS X is *not* UNIX, but that it does provide a complete UNIX environment. We are not yet at that day.
To take a different tact, NeXTstep was a UNIX--NeXT's own brochures make this point clear. If OS X is no longer UNIX, there has to have been a time when the changeover occurred. In your opinion, which version of NeXTstep or OS X did that changeover take place?
A lot has happened since the NeXT days, a *lot* has been added to OS X, and a lot of UNIX dependancy has been replaced with Cocoa and other technologies, but OS X still sits atop, astride and astraddle UNIX.
It features many compatibility layers that make it possible to port Unix (including Linux) software. It is not Unix.
OS X does not merely provide a UNIX compatibility layer. OS X directly depends non-trivially on some of OS X's UNIX parts (the kernel, fsck, networking, some filesystem features, etc).
Since we are doing, (a) or (b), my take is that you are either (a) claiming OS X merely provides compatibility with UNIX, but does not rely, at all, on UNIX itself, or (b) provides so much above and beyond UNIX, that it's wrong to focus on such a small part of the OS as a whole.
There is a FLAC quicktime component, but I have never seen FLACs work in iTunes.
When you install a QuickTime component, iTunes gains the ability to play back that format (even video, although it will only play the audio). I've only used the OGG (Vorbis) component. The FLAC component should work just the same.
That's because by *every* measure but one, OS X is UNIX. That one measure is the only one that legally matters: Apple has not sought permission from the Open Group to use the UNIX brand. By every technological, historical, and ancestral measure, OS X is UNIX.
/dev/null.
OS X has, at its very core, a BSD derivative (Darwin) which is a direct descendant of UNIX (unlike Linux, which is a clone of UNIX).
And don't forget the ad in Scientific American which read: Sends other UNIX boxes to
There are two primary reasons Apple is careful about calling OS X UNIX. The primary (or legal) one is that the Open Group sued Apple for violating its UNIX trademark.
The other is that Apple wants to differentiate OS X from the negative aspects of UNIX. OS X is *so* much more than UNIX, that in many ways, to call OS X "just another UNIX" underplays the NeXT/Cocoa- and Apple-derived technologies. It would be akin to calling Safari a "text reader".
So, it's sort of a "have your cake, and eat it, too" situation. Apple can simultaneously derive all the cachet of being a true UNIX, while mitigating the downsides. Which leads to statements like:
So you were simultaneously right and wrong. Neat, huh?
In other words: In some ways (all but one, actually) OS X is UNIX (and then some), and in some ways (one, really) it isn't. True and not true, simultaneously right and wrong. Neat? That wouldn't be my choice of word, but OK.
In other words, it's just like the iPod in that it uses a database.
What's the difference between running the "Recover Utility" and using one of the existing tools that does the same thing on the iPod? Not much.
There is absolutely no reason someone couldn't write a program (a perl script, even!), and stick it on the iPod. Then you could mount the iPod on *any* computer, copy songs over, then run the program (Mac, Linux, or Windows), just like you do with your Samsung player, and do it on any platform and any computer you want.
An infinitesimal number of iPod owners will ever go that route, though. iTunes is such a nice program, that there's no large demand for alternate ways of loading songs (Linux users being an obvious exception--but it's a pretty safe bet that most of them would just use iTunes if there was a Linux version).
If you have a very large collection, iTunes management is a nightmare.
then (about not using iTunes):
So of course I have to manage my library by hand.
I can't imagine how using iTunes can be a nightmare, but doing it by hand isn't.
You can end up with a music folder with hundreds and hundreds of folder, to the point where it is a headache to deal with. If you never look at your music folder - then it's fine I guess.
That's the whole point. iTunes essentially *is* your filesystem. Your standard tree-based filesystem is really poor for managing songs (quick, find that one Beatles song, oh, which album is it on again?).
With iTunes, you can still access your songs directly via the Finder/Windows Explorer (but any changes should be done through iTunes itself). You can even drag a song from iTunes and drop it (this will copy the file) somewhere if you want to do use it outside of iTunes.
I prefer this structure:
1st Letter of Artist Name/Artist Name/Artist Name - Album Name/Track Number - Track Name
That's the trade-off, isn't it? Easier song library management vs. fine-control over the filesystem structure. When iTunes first came out, I wasn't too keen on the idea of not being in direct control of the mp3 files and their folder structure, but *quickly* came to stop worrying and love the bomb.
Now, the idea of managing, by hand, thousands of songs... <shudder!>.
iTunes could do a great job for me, if Apple didn't miss to implement support for FLAC, Musepack, Monkey's Audio and some other formats.
iTunes supports FLAC, OGG, and any other format for which there is a QuickTime plug-in. Unfortunately, QuickTime plug-ins are (it's said) really annoying to program. The release of QT 7, though implies that this might change for the better.
Unfortunately Apple made the design flaw that you can't simply drag audio files in a special folder and they are useable, so I have to install iTunes to put music on my iPod.
This is intentional. When the iPod came out, the main HD-based player was the Nomad, which suffered from horrible performance. This was because the songs were just stored as files with no database. The reason the iPod can search through many thousands of songs instantaneously is because of its song database, which iTunes creates (you actually don't need iTunes for this--any program can read/write the iPod database).
You could easily write a program that lets you just drop songs on it from your filesystem, which will automatically copy them to the iPod, and update the database.
Uh, Fink does exactly what you're describing, except it uses /sw instead of /opt.
/opt/ (/opt/local/, in fact).
.dmg may change that.
DarwinPorts does the ugly shoe-horning cludge. Fink is elegant.
No, DarwinPorts installs in
DarwinPorts is more elegant than Fink (I think you've confused DarwinPorts with someone else who I won't name here). Fink is simpler to use, though, but being available as a
NERDS. stuff that MATTERS!
Sports? bah...
"Bah" for sports, sure, but not cyborg sports!
Unless you're going to argue
I'm not the one making an argument here, you are.
Going from 1080i HD to 720p HD is downsampling. It's kind of odd to call it anything else. In the process, you upsample from the 540 image, but that was the whole point of the story.
Instead of starting from the interlaced fields, you could deinterlace them into 1080p frames at 30fps, then downsample directly to 720p. Your initial post in this thread used a true fact to come to a false conclusion. Grasping at straws and trying to change the subject won't make that conclusion true.
Not worth my time [April 20th, 2005]
Today at the airport I saw a $100 bill, but left it lying there. It's just not worth it.
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Sweetest Thing [April 25th, 2005]
Bono stopped by for a visit. You can never tell what he's thinking though. I think that's why he wears those sunglasses. Ballmer kept trying to iChat me like every five minutes trying to talk with Bono, but I didn't didn't want to completely negate the Bono's coolness, I know how he can get when he's excited.
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Tiger Fever! [April 29th, 6:31PM]
Just installed Tiger (waiting for the FedEx truck was *torture*!). I can't believe how great it is. I can't stop hitting F12. Oh, and Spotlight! I'll post a more in-depth review later. Until then, check out the one at Ars Technica, it's really good.
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You don't need a license to use your own software. A license comes into play when you distribute your software.
Maybe, but vertical resolution is where you notice it anyway.
Doesn't change the fact that it's still downsampling.
Actually, it's not downsampled, it's upsampled (you have 60 "540p" fields per second, upsampled to 60 720p frames per second).
You've left out a dimension.
If the broadcast is 1080i, and your display isn't 1080i, I don't think it's logical to assume the quality of the downsampled video will be equivalent to a true 720p broadcast.
When I get around to buying a HD television (not any time soon, I do all my televisioning on my computer), it will be a true 1080i (are there 1080p televisions?) display so I'll know I'm getting the full potential of HD.
Unless I'm strapped for cash, of course, in which case I'll just suck it up and know my 720p won't be the best thing for watching 1080i content on.
On the plus side, it's important to get the facts out there for the consumer, who will likely (although not logically) assume he's/she's getting more than they really are.
(about being able to sue Apple for damages) :) :)
:-)
Really? This would be very interesting
In all fairness, I'm not a lawyer. It just seems that if someone violates your patent, you'd be able to recoup all related costs. However, the law hasn't always followed my sense of reason and right-and-wrong!
About the KDE getting huffy about a license.. well I'm a KDE developer and have done a tiny bit coding with mdnsresponder but we are hoping to see what the gnome guys produce as a replacement.
It was meant as a little joke, given KDE's use of Qt, which has caused some issues due to the dual-license nature of Qt, and the fear that Trolltech could revoke the license, or otherwise leave KDE hanging (not entirely unlike what happened with BitKeeper).
I realise what you are saying, but can you imagine handing out CD's and saying "Here use this nice new kde live cd! You can use it as long as your company doesn't sue apple!"
That would make for a humorous CD handout session, but there are plenty of strange license requirements in your standard Linux distro. It's not like your average users are all going around bringing patent suits against Apple.
I would wholeheartedly support a campaign to get Apple to limit the scope of the patent lawsuit exception to apply solely to software patents.
Socialism in it's purest form (which is what I've been try to explain) take place in a volentary orginization in the absence of law.
Well, that's the cause of two problems. 1. Socialism (and Capitalism, etc), don't actually exist in their purest forms. 2. The form of Socialism I've been referring to is the kind that the extreme right tends to decry.
When you enforce socialism against the will of the people through the redistribution of wealth and free market intervention (again, even if against only one person), you effectively have communism. And yes, you can have a democraticically ellected communistic government.
By that definition *any* government spending that isn't unanimously supported by the people is Communism. By that definition, every government that has ever spent *any* money is Communist, which make the word useless.
Communism is a structure, not an act. It's a form of government, not a singular act of government.
I'm not against rail technology, however I am against supporting a failed business model.
There's a distinction to be made here. I'm against, in general, supporting a failed business model. But in order to have passenger rail service in America, it seems, we need to grant Amtrak money.
So my support of Amtrak isn't to help some failing corporation to survive, but instead to ensure passenger rail service. If a private organization can do it, and do it at least as well as Amtrak, then I'm all for it.
If we are going to continue to support this rail system, the goverment should at least swallow up Amtrak and form "offically" into another government orginization
Amtrak *is* a part of the government. It's a corporation created by Congress.
Being that Amtrak is a corporation of the private sector and receiving government subsidies to stay afloat, then you too should have no problem with the president granting contracts to Halliburton. Even more so, at least Halliburton is a profitable company of the private sector.
See above. I don't believe in spending government money unless the desired goals aren't being adequately met by the private sector. I'm not against giving contracts to Halliburton, but I am against the way the whole mess is being done. Halliburton has been profiteering at the expense of the taxpayer (and by 'profiteering', I don't mean, 'making a profit', I mean *gauging* the American public). Amtrak might have a lot of problems, but profiteering isn't one of them.
You personally however, seem to have something againt republicans based on your previous posts.
You've got that partially right. I'm not against Republicans per se, but I am against the way the current crop are acting. It's my belief that their problems stem from a philosophical flaw they hold. The flaw is that they see things as either/or, black/white, and they ignore nuance as though it's merely an illusion.
Your comparison of Amtrak with Halliburton, for example, ignores nuance. If you say, "I'm against the war" to the Republicans it means, "I hate the troops" and it's nothing of the sort. Just like saying, "what Halliburton is doing is not just bad, but bordering on criminal" becomes, "I don't think the government should contract out to the private sector." The differences really are there, the nuance really exists.
-Spotlight icon unremovable from menu bar
/Developer/Tools/)
You can't remove the Apple menu either.
I do get what you're saying though, it's just that Spotlight is an integral part of Mac OS now (just like the Apple menu).
-Spotlight does not index hidden folders. I've got this great desktop search app, yet it won't index ~/.xchat2/xchatlogs, even if I sym or hardlink it.
Slight correction: Spotlight does index hidden folders (the "hidden" flag on HFS). It does not index dot files/folders.
Two solutions for you:
1. Move xchatlogs to somewhere else, then symlink *that* into ~/.xchat2.
2. Configure xchat to store its logs somewhere else. If you want the logs folder to remain hidden, you can hide it with "SetFile -a V" (SetFile is installed with the Developer Tools, and is stored in:
Also, I imagine it's a hidden setting somewhere to toggle searching dot files/folders.
-The neat-looking RSS visualizer screensaver has to pull from Safari, and not NetNewsWire
It also only polls from one feed. But to solve your problem, of course, you can just put the feed you want into Safari.
Hope that helps with a few of your issues.
a task switcher code-named XPose.
Shouldn't that be "XPoseur"?
But it isn't restricted to just software patents.
Right, but what you said is: "their right to it would be revoked if they sue apple for anything at all."
That's a whole different reason.
Say now Apple violates one of IBM's hardware patents.
What should IBM do now?
If the patent is important enough, IBM should sue Apple. They'd lose the license to the APSL code, but if the patent is important enough, and the violation clear enough, Apple can be held liable for the resulting damages, including the damages incurred by the revocation of the APSL licensed code.
Think about it. If it's an important patent, Apple won't want to nick it for their PowerBooks (for example) and risk being forced to stop selling their PowerBooks indefinitely. So, in practice, I don't see this being a problem.
Which is, as I understand it, the same situation any OSS project is in with IBM's patent gift. What if Apple uses an IBM granted patent in Darwin? Apple won't be able to sue IBM either, without the resulting consequences.
Agreed, though, Apple should limit the scope to software patents.
And the BSD folks are more libertarian like you say - exactly why they are even less likely to accept such draconian licencing.
You've got libertarian backwards. They *support* corporate rights, which is why the BSD license lets a corporation use their code in proprietary software.
Btw as for reimplementing, yeah it can be done. Both gnome and kde development on zeroconf is pretty much waiting for the reimplementation of mDNSResponder.
mDNSResponder doesn't have to be compiled into GNOME or KDE (KDE getting huffy about a license?). You run it like you do bind, and nsswitch.conf takes care of redirecting lookups (you get it for free in GNOME, no recompiling required). As for GNOME advertising services, they *should* just tie into the system mDNSResponder daemon, but if they want to compile the code in, yeah, they have to re-implement. That's not a big deal. In that case, the reason isn't because the license states you can't sue over patents, but that it's not GPL compatible, which puts the APSL in the same boat as just about every other OSS license aside from the GPL and the BSD licenses. No big deal, and that's the way it's *supposed* to work in OSS. Different implementations of the same thing for different reasons. Various MTAs, many DNS servers, and yes, many ZeroConf servers. As long as the protocol is open (and it is), then there's no worry that Apple's mDNSResponder will "embrace and extend", breaking GNOME's built-in ZeroConf services.
The only concern I have is how bloody ugly/unreadable the config files are. There's so much noise from the tags that one's hard pressed to read the entries. I don't care if there's an editor for it, when I have to do it by hand with a text editor the file format's fluff gets in the way.
That sounds like a complaint made up to have something to complain about.
The idea is that you *don't* edit plists by hand, but if you have to, you can.
So, under all normal circumstances, you do things via preference panes, plist editors, the "defaults" command, etc. But if things are hosed and all you have is a boot floppy or CD with vi on it, you *can* recover the system back to a fully operational state. And more to the point, launchd helps minimize the potential for being in such a hosed state.
All this is academic, of course. The question to ask is how often do people find OS X to be in a hosed state, where the system is unrecoverable without resorting to such extreme measures? And how often does this happen in Linux? The answer for OS X is essentially "never", and under Linux it's "every now and then".
So perhaps your trepidation is because you are used to having to fix a hosed Linux system by hand via a boot floppy?
Hmm, I cannot see Sun or IBM, both hardware manufacturers, using code that their right to it would be revoked if they sue apple for anything at all.
That clause only refers to patents, and if Apple first sues you, you can sue back and not violate the APSL.
Although I can't find the details, I believe IBM's grant of patents to the OSS community has a similar requirement. The reasoning is that while most legitimate technology companies realize software patents are fundamentally foolish, they also realize they *must* acquire patents to use as defense against being sued for violating patents. If everyone is in patent violation, any lawsuit opens the doors to MAD. At least, that's the idea.
Back to Apple. The APSL grants the recipient of the code to use any relevant patents. In exchange for that "gift" (same as IBM's patent "gift"), you have to agree not to use patents against Apple. You still can, though, if you decide the infringement is serious enough to stop using ASPL licensed code.
On the whole, this is a good thing. Although it doesn't *eliminate* software patents (Apple can't do that, only Congress can), it does make them even less likely to be abused.
BSD people... I would guess they feel the same as the linux people - but that's just a guess.
The FSF says there's no problem with joining in with an APSL project. They do say you can't copy code between APSL and GPL licensed code, though, but that's pretty much the case with almost every OSS license and the GPL.
The Linux folks (not quite as unified as is being implied, but let's just generalize here for simplicity) have no problem including non-GPL software with their distributions. They also don't tend to take out patents (and especially don't sue over them!), so this clause isn't an issue.
The BSD folks are like the Linux folks, except more unified, and a bit more libertarian WRT the licensing of software.
And if you don't like the license, you can just re-implement launchd as a GPL or BSD licensed program. It duplicates effort, and I don't think the license is so unpalatable as to motivate such an undertaking, but the technology is pretty exciting. The license is a valid OSS license, so let's take advantage of it! (Ubuntu, I'm looking at *you*)
I've used Apple's mDNSResponder and Darwin Streaming Server under Linux, and it doesn't taint the license of any Linux (kernel or distribution) code, and really works *great* for the tasks at hand.
If Apple ever decided to take an adversarial stance with the OSS to any large extent, well, just remember that SCO was pretty cool back in the day.
It's definitely not Linux. Or wouldn't be, if it existed. Which I have to say that it doesn't.
Sure it does, it's right here: Download Darwin
I believe you can just download the x86 iso, and install darwinports. That'd pretty much give you a BSD-like distro of Darwin with not quite-so-many available packages, but all the cool unixy features of OS X, including launchd, right?
Of course, this isn't as simple or as organized as installing Debian, but, well, it's there for the downloading.