For longer games, there is a nice feature
on
PSP Launch Coverage
·
· Score: 1
Check it out, if you just flick the power switch on your PSP, it will go into sleep mode. The game pauses and your PSP turns "off". Flick it again and it comes back up where you left it.
This is a godsend for RPGs. If you're on a road or plane trip and you need to say, go to the bathroom or hitch a cab, you can leave it off for a long time and not worry about it.
Some GBA games did this, and the DS sorta does this, but the PSP seems to have it built right into the hardware.
Recently, my developer group and I fork bombed ourselves by accident. It was pretty funny how it worked.
We dev in C++, which is pretty evil, but hey... we make it work. Anyways, we were writing a server that forks off child processes which handle FTP data transfer.
One day, we come into the box and find it barely usable, error messages pouring into the log about how the process table was full. We manage to get a shell on the machine and look, there are about a ZILLION copies of our server running, the ps took forever to complete.
Why? Well it turns out the child process was throwing an exception, and this exception wasn't caught in the child code, so instead it went back into the child's copy of the SERVER code, where it ate the exception with a harmless log message and went back to status quo. Only, it re-entered as a server.
So now we'd have two servers, and it was practically garunteed that when they both tried to transfer and erase files, one would be late and get an exception from our file-manip library. Boom, another set of children form, becoming servers.
It took us awhile to figure out how so many servers were being spawned, but we felt pretty sheepish once we did.
If you follow the link in the article to the original entry from security focus, you'd see that malicuous remote user comprimised a machine that was patched up to current.
Seriously, if you're letting people log onto your PC and run fork bombs, you have far greater problems than a lack of resource limits in the default install.
Look, you seriously misunderstand something here. Run a server long enough and it gets very likely that even with the latest patches, you will get attacked. If someone breaks into your box, exactly how much power do you want them to have?
The ability to bring the machine to a screeching halt with an attack that dates back to the Land Before Time is not a feature! It is a security hole and it's every bit as important to fix as your exterally visible holes.
Because, one of these days some cracker is going to get the drop on your box. You'd better hope your box is ready for that.
Bluetooth mice are not so cheap. Keep that in mind before you go pricebashing. $50-$70 depending on quality is a pretty reasonable price range for a bluetooth mouse.
I really think that OS X doesn't need middle-mouse paste support. In fact, I'd be angry if it ended up having it.
Middle-mouse pasting is one of the great evils of X-Windows. It's extremely obnoxious to use in all but the simplest of cases. It's great when you want to pull, say, a URL from one window to a terminal for use for wget, but the problem is going the other way. Oftentimes I want to take one selection and replace it with the contents of the pasteboard.
This is much harder to do right in the middle-mouse-pasting scheme.
Demanding that OS X mimic X11's pasting rules is ridiculous. It'd be a huge step backwards.
Unless you're shopping for bargains online, $60ish is about what you'll pay for a good full size bluetooth optical mouse these days. And they're actually rather hard to find. Most retail joints seem stunned at the very idea that I'd want a full size bluetooth mouse. I just want to reduce my desk clutter, but they keep asking me how it will fit in my laptop case.
And yes, it will be bluetooth. How do I know? Apple's invested a lot into making bluetooth a part of the mac experience. Lots of macs come with bluetooth now, and they have an excellent bluetooth keyboard and mouse already.
jcr13, I feel your pain. I've hit the exact same wall and bounced in nearly the same fashion.
There are tons of examples of OCaml code out there, but whenever you try and use them you'll find they're written for elegance, not for any real-world metric. It makes for good propaganda, but not much help for anyone trying to do anything real. Asking for help and showing this code in most communities results in a series of curt, bitter responses from many members of the community.
So even though all kinds of arrogant Ocaml and functional programmers are coming after yor for "spreading lies", don't despair. You're not the only one to make this observation about the community.
I use WinXP every day at work, and every time I try to do anything more than basic web browsing or exceed-ing into our linux dev boxen, I find the taskbar painfil to use.
The Dock is such a better piece of UI it's not even funny. Tog's angsty rants be damned. The dock is actually usable, clean, and almost never confusing. This is in sharp contrast to the hideous nightmare of the XP taskbar. You never know how XP is going to organize your tasks next. Will it collapse? Will it move things? Will it get angry if I add another mini-launcher icon? Are there any mini-launcher icons obscured because that little pane doesn't autoresize when I add things?
And the world of pain you can experience by making that thing taller? Oh god. The horrors. And I pray that you're prepared to do a lot of guesswork, because thosebars are NEVER long enough to give you any real data. And what happens when you use an app supporting MDI? Suddenly, your cluttered taskbar has no clue what's going on, so it isn't even like the taskbar is smarter than the dock.
The Dock may not be what you expect it to be, but when used for what it's designed for, it's a very useful tool.
If you do require window-specific switching, try using Witch.
Did you think I'd forget what you said in this post?
You obviously didn't know this before hand, when you wrote that post. It's good that you're doing some basic googling now. It's bad that you're trying to pretend like you never messed up in the first place. No one here is going to fall for it.
What, did you think I'd forget the post that I responded to? I think maybe you need more coffee. Or less. I'm not sure which.
You're claiming a link from a device to another device, but you seem to know almost nothing about either. This would be like me writing a long dissertation about how the British Monarchy evolved, and then go, "It's a damn shame women can't participate in that."
So maybe you just forgot. The order is research, then talk.
You fool, you've let your tinfoil hat slip off! Now, they know that you know!
Run, hide, go before the black Apple's iHelicopters drop iJackbooted iThugs down on your mom's roof! Your imminent incarceration is only minutes away! Write your manifesto on the wall? No ink? Improvise!
Or, maybe we could come back to reality for a moment. Take your meds and calm down for a second.
Lots of tools let you sync with the iPod. Apple is not going to make an mp3 player that filters content. If they were, they'd be doing it allready. But they aren't, because the concept itself is absurd.
And even if they could do it without an absurd about of development, it would ruin the iPod. The iPod wins by being a sexy, easy-to-use, high quality player. If Apple nerfs it, then it stops being what people want at all the work that Apple's done to control the online music market will vanish in a puff of smoke.
We aren't using iTunes because it's an Apple product. We're using it because it's one of the best music players/managers out there.
I can't believe you're having this big BS fest where you claim to be privy to the origins of a device, but you haven't even bothered to read up on Apple's version.
It seems you've got a case of the stupids. So let me help you by doing your research for you. This is a summary from daveschroders comment. To quote his quoting:
[The information about Apple's unreleased products] is stolen property, just as any physical item, such as a laptop computer containing the same information on its hard drive [or not] would be. The bottom line is there is no exception or exemption in either the [Uniform Trade Secrets Act] or the Penal Code for journalists--however defined--or anyone else.
[...]
The public has had, and continues to have, a profound interest in gossip about Apple. Therefore, it is not surprising that hundreds of thousands of 'hits' on a Web site about Apple have and will happen. But an interested public is not the same as the public interest."
There. See?
The rules are simple. You can disclose Trade Secrets when they serve the public interest. But you can't disclose Trade Secrets because the public is interested. There is some leeway in here, but that's good.
Didn't I tell you and all your kind to stay in your hole? Hole. Now. Go. Don't speak, just go.
Apple... um... didn't win against journalism. Hell, the fact that bloggers are or are not journalists didn't even enter the equation there. The Judge left that to Daily Show skits and CNN talking heads.
Heck, Apple didn't even really try and stop Nick from posting Apple-related news. What they did do is compel him to reveal his sources, which were illegally sharing Trade Secrets.
This was pretty clear from, you know, the fucking artciles linked of the thread you posted.
And you can try and equivocate what MS and Apple did all you want, but in the end it's BS. You can move Safari to the trash and not destroy your system, and all the apple apps honor your default broswer settings.
Pre-anti-trust-allegations, such was not true of Microsoft. This distinction is important to make because what MS did pre-anti-trust was evil.
Man. I made a mistake showing that transcript here. It seems that most slashdot readers are suffering from a total failure to understand the context of that.
MINIX was designed to be reasonably portable, and has been ported from the Intel line to the 680x0 (Atari, Amiga, Macintosh), SPARC, and NS32016. LINUX is tied fairly closely to the 80x86. Not the way to go.
Andrew Tanenbaum wrote Minux from scratch. And he was absolutely correct when he said it was more cross-platform than Linux was at the time this conversation took place. The guy wasn't misinformed at all. Linus doesn't even refute that statement!
As for the other quote? It's a damn shame x86 has existed as long as it has. It's probably one of the dirtiest, ugliest, most obnoxious specs in use today. It's survived because of market factors, not technical factors.
I am sorry but I used to work with similar preachy academic types and I find it hard, both then and now, to take anything that say seriously. As the saying goes "those that can do, those that can't teach" I think that works well here.
You realize that Linus used Minux as a base for Linux, right? That Linux would not be what it is today without what Tanenbaum did?
The point of the quote I gave was not to make some sweeping statement about Linux, snero3. The point was to show that Linus may not be the most impartial judge of the mach microkernel, which he says sucks. People have argued either side of this old argument for years, which is why it's still archived.
Yes, let's do so: "Poignantly contrary to what was expected or intended"
One would expect that one of the most successful OSs in recent history would get an A, not an F. One would expect that Andrew Tanenbaum, who's written a textbook that practically everyone interested in writing an OS has read, would recognize that Linux would be a success. But, contrary to that expectation he did not.
Thank you sir, please try again. Sheesh, "What a maroon."
Tanenbaum isn't wrong here. He's right to a degree. In the abstract, the microkernels make a lot of sense. In the real world, performance concerns and architectural concerns sometimes force us to do the less-than-perfect thing.
Good engineers are people who can do the less-than-perfect-thing and still end up with a good product.
But, keep in mind the context of that conversation I liked. It was entirely inside an academic community and it was long before Linux took off, or before it was even much more than one of many blips on the radar. It was mostly used by graduate students in need of a hackable OS at the time, and some hobbyists.
So saying Good Grades == Bad Engineer is not only wrong, it's a wrongness that will land you with a lot of slipshod engineers who don't know the right thing that they base the practical thing off of.
Windows is only a success if you define success by adoption, which is misleading.
Windows isn't a success because many people use i. That's a consequence. It's a success because they had a right-time-right-idea moment and have been riding that into the ground ever since.
Linux isn't a success because many are using it. That's a consequence. It's a success because it runs on lots of hardware, is relatively easy to develop for, has a relatively open model for commitment, and because it has the wholehearted backing of the open source movement.
It's ironic that one of the world's most notable names in operating systems would still have given it an F in a graduate class.
The Windows-B point is the crucial one. It didn't always work. In fact, with MS products, it never worked.
Also, you can delete Safari without hosing your system. Deleting IE before the anti-trust-case had some, let's say "interesting", consequences.
You're right though. In this case the approaches are similar. This is probably why MS got away with it. They slightly altered what would otherwise be a Good Thing to further their agenda, and when questioned just blamed engineering mistakes.
I dunno if you use a Windows machine for business, but if Outlook and Excel and your other collab tools don't honor your default browser settings, you might as well not have a different browser. Apple Mail, the Cocoa library, Address Book, Help Viewer, and even the WebObjects dev tools all honor your default API setting.
So, to summarize: MS did it but it penalized users and developers. Apple did it without penalizing users for thier choices and aiding their developers.
Oh, and it's not like Apple's choices are locking anyone out. OmniWeb, a competitior to Safari in the higher end browser market, uses WebKit for their rendering. So no, it's not evil. Sorry, try again next time!
The irony is that one of the most successful OSs in recent history, and the de-facto center of the modern OSS world, would have gotten a failing grade.
Long ago, long before most folks were using Linux, Linus got into a fight with Andrew Tanenbaum about Linux and its design as a monolithic kernel. This is one of the more famous debates of linux lore, so it doesn't hurt read it and its annotations.
The quick summary is that Andy Tanenbaum proclaimed Linux dead way back in '92, saying, "While I could go into a long story here about the relative merits of the two designs, suffice it to say that among the people who actually design operating systems, the debate is essentially over. Microkernels have won."
Linus on the other hand much preferred the monolithic design of linux, for a variety of reasons. Mr. Tanenbaum even went so far as to imply that Linux wouldn't be a passing project for his class. Ironic, no?
Even so, Tanenbaum did and still does have some good points about the Mach microkernel. I can't exactly imagine Torvalds is the most impartial judge of the mach microkernel.
This isn't that complicated, why do people keep getting it wrong? Apple is doing a good thing with Safari, and in fact makng it easier for people to benefit from it without using it.
Safari's rendering engine, called WebKit in OSX (and KHTML everywhere else), is a library that Safari thinly wraps. WebKit is provided as a service to other OS X developers which lets them render HTML easily. Many parts of the OS use WebKit, but that's no different from any other system library. Nor is its use mandatory.
Safari itself is just a thin wrapper and pref setter on top of WebKit. Safari can safely be deleted and reinstalled at user whim. The only odd thing about Panther is that the Default Browser selection preference is in Safari, not in SystemPreferences. In Jaguar, this was different. I'm not sure what prompted the change, but hopefully they'll move it back in Tiger.
Mac OS X will respect your default browser preferences to the letter. You will recieve no penalty for using FireFox. Other apps will invoke FireFox if that is your default browser. Other apps will only use WebKit if they want an easy way to display HTML. An example of this is the NetNewsWire 2 Beta. Even when they use WebKit internally, when I call out to my default browser it invokes FireFox.
This is in sharp contrast to the IE issue, where for all intents and purposes there was no real default browser setting. Many apps (including MS apps) always opened links in IE, even when Netscape might have been your preferred browser.
Ahh Slashdot. First, let's mention this link which you were evidently too busy to provide. It links to two papers on how to tune for the G5. That way, someone can verify what I'm saying.
The problems you're talking about are not the AltiVec's fault, and the AltiVec instruction set is still stable. Code will still run very quickly even if you don't optimize for the G5. But, let me bring a quote from one of those linked papers:
Of course, your code may still need to be restructured to handle the increased latencies of the G5 Velocity Engine pipeline. Avoid small data accesses. Due to the increased latency to memory, the longer cache lines, and the nature of the CPU-to-memory bus, small data accesses should be avoided if possible. The entire system architecture has been designed to optimize the transfer of large amounts of data (i. e. maximize system memory throughput). As a side effect, the cost to handle small accesses can be very high and is quite inefficient.
See, the problem you're complaining about is a problem with any port to the G5, or really any port from a slow-thin-memory-access system to a fast-wide-memory-access system. It has nothing to do with your AltiVec code. It just has to do with tuning for a larger L2 cache and and faster FSB rather than a slow FSB and a huge L3 cache.
So let's not blame AltiVec for this. Except for a brief change in policy in the 745X G4, it seems like the AltiVec invocation has been stable for quite awhile.
Everytime MS has a security bug that causes millions in damage, MS gets a little bit more egg on their face.
So now we have Bill Gates and co. coming out and saying, "Windows is our #1 priority." Everyone feels better, because hey... Bill's on the case right?
Then, out of left-field, it turns out that Windows is vulnerable to an exploit that's practically ancient in the biz. And what if you can get through the firewall somehow? Or what if you're cruising around wireless networks on a laptop?
This kind of one-shot lockup is something from the dark ages of computing. Everyone's confidence in MSshould be lowered even further.
Slashdot Mirror
Check it out, if you just flick the power switch on your PSP, it will go into sleep mode. The game pauses and your PSP turns "off". Flick it again and it comes back up where you left it.
This is a godsend for RPGs. If you're on a road or plane trip and you need to say, go to the bathroom or hitch a cab, you can leave it off for a long time and not worry about it.
Some GBA games did this, and the DS sorta does this, but the PSP seems to have it built right into the hardware.
Recently, my developer group and I fork bombed ourselves by accident. It was pretty funny how it worked.
We dev in C++, which is pretty evil, but hey... we make it work. Anyways, we were writing a server that forks off child processes which handle FTP data transfer.
One day, we come into the box and find it barely usable, error messages pouring into the log about how the process table was full. We manage to get a shell on the machine and look, there are about a ZILLION copies of our server running, the ps took forever to complete.
Why? Well it turns out the child process was throwing an exception, and this exception wasn't caught in the child code, so instead it went back into the child's copy of the SERVER code, where it ate the exception with a harmless log message and went back to status quo. Only, it re-entered as a server.
So now we'd have two servers, and it was practically garunteed that when they both tried to transfer and erase files, one would be late and get an exception from our file-manip library. Boom, another set of children form, becoming servers.
It took us awhile to figure out how so many servers were being spawned, but we felt pretty sheepish once we did.
Look, you seriously misunderstand something here. Run a server long enough and it gets very likely that even with the latest patches, you will get attacked. If someone breaks into your box, exactly how much power do you want them to have?
The ability to bring the machine to a screeching halt with an attack that dates back to the Land Before Time is not a feature! It is a security hole and it's every bit as important to fix as your exterally visible holes.
Because, one of these days some cracker is going to get the drop on your box. You'd better hope your box is ready for that.
A corded mouse is cheap, sure.
Bluetooth mice are not so cheap. Keep that in mind before you go pricebashing. $50-$70 depending on quality is a pretty reasonable price range for a bluetooth mouse.
I really think that OS X doesn't need middle-mouse paste support. In fact, I'd be angry if it ended up having it.
Middle-mouse pasting is one of the great evils of X-Windows. It's extremely obnoxious to use in all but the simplest of cases. It's great when you want to pull, say, a URL from one window to a terminal for use for wget, but the problem is going the other way. Oftentimes I want to take one selection and replace it with the contents of the pasteboard.
This is much harder to do right in the middle-mouse-pasting scheme.
Demanding that OS X mimic X11's pasting rules is ridiculous. It'd be a huge step backwards.
Unless you're shopping for bargains online, $60ish is about what you'll pay for a good full size bluetooth optical mouse these days. And they're actually rather hard to find. Most retail joints seem stunned at the very idea that I'd want a full size bluetooth mouse. I just want to reduce my desk clutter, but they keep asking me how it will fit in my laptop case.
And yes, it will be bluetooth. How do I know? Apple's invested a lot into making bluetooth a part of the mac experience. Lots of macs come with bluetooth now, and they have an excellent bluetooth keyboard and mouse already.
jcr13, I feel your pain. I've hit the exact same wall and bounced in nearly the same fashion.
There are tons of examples of OCaml code out there, but whenever you try and use them you'll find they're written for elegance, not for any real-world metric. It makes for good propaganda, but not much help for anyone trying to do anything real. Asking for help and showing this code in most communities results in a series of curt, bitter responses from many members of the community.
So even though all kinds of arrogant Ocaml and functional programmers are coming after yor for "spreading lies", don't despair. You're not the only one to make this observation about the community.
I use WinXP every day at work, and every time I try to do anything more than basic web browsing or exceed-ing into our linux dev boxen, I find the taskbar painfil to use.
The Dock is such a better piece of UI it's not even funny. Tog's angsty rants be damned. The dock is actually usable, clean, and almost never confusing. This is in sharp contrast to the hideous nightmare of the XP taskbar. You never know how XP is going to organize your tasks next. Will it collapse? Will it move things? Will it get angry if I add another mini-launcher icon? Are there any mini-launcher icons obscured because that little pane doesn't autoresize when I add things?
And the world of pain you can experience by making that thing taller? Oh god. The horrors. And I pray that you're prepared to do a lot of guesswork, because thosebars are NEVER long enough to give you any real data. And what happens when you use an app supporting MDI? Suddenly, your cluttered taskbar has no clue what's going on, so it isn't even like the taskbar is smarter than the dock.
The Dock may not be what you expect it to be, but when used for what it's designed for, it's a very useful tool.
If you do require window-specific switching, try using Witch.
Did you think I'd forget what you said in this post?
You obviously didn't know this before hand, when you wrote that post. It's good that you're doing some basic googling now. It's bad that you're trying to pretend like you never messed up in the first place. No one here is going to fall for it.
What, did you think I'd forget the post that I responded to? I think maybe you need more coffee. Or less. I'm not sure which.
Move along.
You're claiming a link from a device to another device, but you seem to know almost nothing about either. This would be like me writing a long dissertation about how the British Monarchy evolved, and then go, "It's a damn shame women can't participate in that."
So maybe you just forgot. The order is research, then talk.
You fool, you've let your tinfoil hat slip off! Now, they know that you know!
Run, hide, go before the black Apple's iHelicopters drop iJackbooted iThugs down on your mom's roof! Your imminent incarceration is only minutes away! Write your manifesto on the wall? No ink? Improvise!
Or, maybe we could come back to reality for a moment. Take your meds and calm down for a second.
Lots of tools let you sync with the iPod. Apple is not going to make an mp3 player that filters content. If they were, they'd be doing it allready. But they aren't, because the concept itself is absurd.
And even if they could do it without an absurd about of development, it would ruin the iPod. The iPod wins by being a sexy, easy-to-use, high quality player. If Apple nerfs it, then it stops being what people want at all the work that Apple's done to control the online music market will vanish in a puff of smoke.
We aren't using iTunes because it's an Apple product. We're using it because it's one of the best music players/managers out there.
I can't believe you're having this big BS fest where you claim to be privy to the origins of a device, but you haven't even bothered to read up on Apple's version.
Bad argent. No cookie for you.
The rules are simple. You can disclose Trade Secrets when they serve the public interest. But you can't disclose Trade Secrets because the public is interested. There is some leeway in here, but that's good.
Didn't I tell you and all your kind to stay in your hole? Hole. Now. Go. Don't speak, just go.
Apple... um... didn't win against journalism. Hell, the fact that bloggers are or are not journalists didn't even enter the equation there. The Judge left that to Daily Show skits and CNN talking heads.
Heck, Apple didn't even really try and stop Nick from posting Apple-related news. What they did do is compel him to reveal his sources, which were illegally sharing Trade Secrets.
This was pretty clear from, you know, the fucking artciles linked of the thread you posted.
Crawl back in your hole.
Outlook and and Excel didn't honor it.
And you can try and equivocate what MS and Apple did all you want, but in the end it's BS. You can move Safari to the trash and not destroy your system, and all the apple apps honor your default broswer settings.
Pre-anti-trust-allegations, such was not true of Microsoft. This distinction is important to make because what MS did pre-anti-trust was evil.
As for the other quote? It's a damn shame x86 has existed as long as it has. It's probably one of the dirtiest, ugliest, most obnoxious specs in use today. It's survived because of market factors, not technical factors.
You realize that Linus used Minux as a base for Linux, right? That Linux would not be what it is today without what Tanenbaum did?The point of the quote I gave was not to make some sweeping statement about Linux, snero3. The point was to show that Linus may not be the most impartial judge of the mach microkernel, which he says sucks. People have argued either side of this old argument for years, which is why it's still archived.
Yes, let's do so: "Poignantly contrary to what was expected or intended"
One would expect that one of the most successful OSs in recent history would get an A, not an F. One would expect that Andrew Tanenbaum, who's written a textbook that practically everyone interested in writing an OS has read, would recognize that Linux would be a success. But, contrary to that expectation he did not.
Thank you sir, please try again. Sheesh, "What a maroon."
And your response is *exactly* the wrong one.
Tanenbaum isn't wrong here. He's right to a degree. In the abstract, the microkernels make a lot of sense. In the real world, performance concerns and architectural concerns sometimes force us to do the less-than-perfect thing.
Good engineers are people who can do the less-than-perfect-thing and still end up with a good product.
But, keep in mind the context of that conversation I liked. It was entirely inside an academic community and it was long before Linux took off, or before it was even much more than one of many blips on the radar. It was mostly used by graduate students in need of a hackable OS at the time, and some hobbyists.
So saying Good Grades == Bad Engineer is not only wrong, it's a wrongness that will land you with a lot of slipshod engineers who don't know the right thing that they base the practical thing off of.
Windows is only a success if you define success by adoption, which is misleading.
Windows isn't a success because many people use i. That's a consequence. It's a success because they had a right-time-right-idea moment and have been riding that into the ground ever since.
Linux isn't a success because many are using it. That's a consequence. It's a success because it runs on lots of hardware, is relatively easy to develop for, has a relatively open model for commitment, and because it has the wholehearted backing of the open source movement.
It's ironic that one of the world's most notable names in operating systems would still have given it an F in a graduate class.
The Windows-B point is the crucial one. It didn't always work. In fact, with MS products, it never worked.
Also, you can delete Safari without hosing your system. Deleting IE before the anti-trust-case had some, let's say "interesting", consequences.
You're right though. In this case the approaches are similar. This is probably why MS got away with it. They slightly altered what would otherwise be a Good Thing to further their agenda, and when questioned just blamed engineering mistakes.
I dunno if you use a Windows machine for business, but if Outlook and Excel and your other collab tools don't honor your default browser settings, you might as well not have a different browser. Apple Mail, the Cocoa library, Address Book, Help Viewer, and even the WebObjects dev tools all honor your default API setting.
So, to summarize: MS did it but it penalized users and developers. Apple did it without penalizing users for thier choices and aiding their developers.
Oh, and it's not like Apple's choices are locking anyone out. OmniWeb, a competitior to Safari in the higher end browser market, uses WebKit for their rendering. So no, it's not evil. Sorry, try again next time!
The irony is that one of the most successful OSs in recent history, and the de-facto center of the modern OSS world, would have gotten a failing grade.
Long ago, long before most folks were using Linux, Linus got into a fight with Andrew Tanenbaum about Linux and its design as a monolithic kernel. This is one of the more famous debates of linux lore, so it doesn't hurt read it and its annotations.
The quick summary is that Andy Tanenbaum proclaimed Linux dead way back in '92, saying, "While I could go into a long story here about the relative merits of the two designs, suffice it to say that among the people who actually design operating systems, the debate is essentially over. Microkernels have won."
Linus on the other hand much preferred the monolithic design of linux, for a variety of reasons. Mr. Tanenbaum even went so far as to imply that Linux wouldn't be a passing project for his class. Ironic, no?
Even so, Tanenbaum did and still does have some good points about the Mach microkernel. I can't exactly imagine Torvalds is the most impartial judge of the mach microkernel.
This isn't that complicated, why do people keep getting it wrong? Apple is doing a good thing with Safari, and in fact makng it easier for people to benefit from it without using it.
Safari's rendering engine, called WebKit in OSX (and KHTML everywhere else), is a library that Safari thinly wraps. WebKit is provided as a service to other OS X developers which lets them render HTML easily. Many parts of the OS use WebKit, but that's no different from any other system library. Nor is its use mandatory.
Safari itself is just a thin wrapper and pref setter on top of WebKit. Safari can safely be deleted and reinstalled at user whim. The only odd thing about Panther is that the Default Browser selection preference is in Safari, not in SystemPreferences. In Jaguar, this was different. I'm not sure what prompted the change, but hopefully they'll move it back in Tiger.
Mac OS X will respect your default browser preferences to the letter. You will recieve no penalty for using FireFox. Other apps will invoke FireFox if that is your default browser. Other apps will only use WebKit if they want an easy way to display HTML. An example of this is the NetNewsWire 2 Beta. Even when they use WebKit internally, when I call out to my default browser it invokes FireFox.
This is in sharp contrast to the IE issue, where for all intents and purposes there was no real default browser setting. Many apps (including MS apps) always opened links in IE, even when Netscape might have been your preferred browser.
Not everything is an evil conspiracy.
The problems you're talking about are not the AltiVec's fault, and the AltiVec instruction set is still stable. Code will still run very quickly even if you don't optimize for the G5. But, let me bring a quote from one of those linked papers:
See, the problem you're complaining about is a problem with any port to the G5, or really any port from a slow-thin-memory-access system to a fast-wide-memory-access system. It has nothing to do with your AltiVec code. It just has to do with tuning for a larger L2 cache and and faster FSB rather than a slow FSB and a huge L3 cache.So let's not blame AltiVec for this. Except for a brief change in policy in the 745X G4, it seems like the AltiVec invocation has been stable for quite awhile.
Everytime MS has a security bug that causes millions in damage, MS gets a little bit more egg on their face.
So now we have Bill Gates and co. coming out and saying, "Windows is our #1 priority." Everyone feels better, because hey... Bill's on the case right?
Then, out of left-field, it turns out that Windows is vulnerable to an exploit that's practically ancient in the biz. And what if you can get through the firewall somehow? Or what if you're cruising around wireless networks on a laptop?
This kind of one-shot lockup is something from the dark ages of computing. Everyone's confidence in MSshould be lowered even further.