Then again, the bacteriophages can also mutate and adapt (unlike antibiotics). I've seen that documentary as well and when those researchers encountered bacteria their pahges couldn't handle, they simply went "fishing" in the sewer waters of their own facility to collect new ones.
I think you may be thinking of the Universal Declaration of Children's Rights (not sure whether it's called exactly that way in English though). It would really surprise me if the US hadn't ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (then again, everything is possible these days:)
The concepts that all people are created equal and have certain intrinsic rights are more than just some concept some 18th-century land-owner thought up for the heck of it. It is a reasoned, logical conclusion after looking at the world around us. If you care to try to argue against the idea, please do.
I'm not arguing against that idea, I'm arguing against the idea that the exact definition of those rights in the US constitution and its amendments is the only one and true definition of those rights.
Government abuses come about when the government has too much control over the people. Will this new law be abused by government? Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but assuming it won't ever be abused is foolish.
Pretty much every law can be abused by government. And if they don't already have such a law, they will create one (Patriot Act anyone?). We've already had anti-hatespeech laws since World War II and as I said, this is just an attempt to extend that idea to new communication media, not to make the restrictions stronger.
You missed the whole "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" concept again.
Absolutely correct, and I still do. I don't believe in a concept of creation that grants you any rights. It's the society around you that does. This society came up with those rules based on its own history, to prevent bad things that happened to them in the past from happening again and to attempt to promote "good" things.
That society of course has different levels. First of all, there are your parents/family, and based on your parents you may have different "rights" when you grow (some kids are allowed to have as much candy as they want, others only after diner). Next, there may be the town, then the province, state, country, religion, world, universe (?)...
Because there's some sort of hierarchy (though not an absolute hierarchy that's the same for everyone, e.g. where religion comes in the picture can vary a lot), rights that have been accepted by society at a higher level (e.g. the country) can't be taken away from you at a lower level (your parents). You can get extra rights that aren't granted by an level above though (there's no right to bear arms in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but even if it were ratified by the US, nothing would stop them from giving that right to their citizens).
The US Constitution doesn't give me the right to own a gun, my ability to pick up a gun, operate it and understand its operations gives me that right. The only thing that government can do is prohibit the exercise of rights granted us by biology/divinity/whatever.
I think I'm starting to see your point: you want to say that because you're a human being that can think for itself, everything you can do is implitely your right to do. Is that correct? In that case, the question is of course: where do you draw the line of where your rights end and another persons rights begin. I mean, although you may have the capability to shoot someone with your gun simply because he annoys you, the government took away that right because that would seriously "hamper" the other persons right to live.
So now, I think we're back at the society level I was talking about above: at this point, it's society (and its representatives, the government) that decides where your rights end and another persons rights begin.
Like I said, history recycles. Did it ever occur to you that the freedom of speech is one of the first things a totalitarian regime eliminates? Or am I imagining all those book-burnings in Nazi Germany?
Are you trying to say the ends (real or imagined) justify the means?
I wasn't arguing about whether or not banning hate speech was a good thing (read my post again, I nowhere say it was right to ban it that the US is wrong by allowing full free speech rights). I explicitely tried to keep out of that debate because imho, whether you agree with one view or another won't change because of arguments. I think it's simply a matter of culture/upbringing, you maybe even could call it indoctrination:)
You've been learning all your life about how important total free speech is and what not having free speech could lead to (and has lead to in the past). I've been learning all my life what bad things the Nazi's did (my grandfather was a soldier in WWII and managed to escape from a train en route to a concentration camp), how they used their ingeniously constructed propaganda to rally the people behind their distasteful ideas and as such, what can happen and has happened if you don't *try* to stop such things before they become too strong.
Again: I'm not saying that these laws are the best way to prevent such things from happening (I really wouldn't know what would be the best way that is practically achievable), it's just the idea behind them and abolishing those laws without anything "stronger" coming in their way, would look like giving up the fight against those ideas (although it wouldn't necessarilly be that).
I only was trying to make US citizens see why stopping the "war on hate-speech" in Europe is not so simple, because there's a very big symbolic meaning attached to it (just like there is a very big symbolic meaning attached to the amendments in the US... It's not just about those rights, it's about what happened before those rights were guaranteed and why they were enacted).
Better yet, "curbing the rights of the people regarding what they could say" and "stopping speech" sounds like two ways of saying the same thing. How are they not?
I think you missed my point here, you're taking it too litterally. I wanted to say that those anti-hate speech laws weren't enacted with the goal of gettting total control over the people, but with the intention of protection of certain minorities. You're correct that a limitation of free speech, whether it's hate-speech or any other kind of speech, is still a limitation of speech no matter how you look at it. I was talking about the intentions, the reasoning behind those rules (and again, it's is possible that those intentions will be totally perverted in the future and abused to no end, but, also again, I really think whether or not you have a law like that doesn't matter anymore when the government wants to oppress the people).
I hope this cleared up some things regarding my views...
The first ten amendments to the United States constitution list inalienable, human rights bestowed upon us by our creator
That is your (and probably a lot of other people's) view, but that is not a fact. That you state it as a fact probably bothers a lot of non-US people quite a bit more than the actual contents of those amendments (and it's probably also that attitude that the original poster refers to).
There is also a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but it's by the United Nations. It's the result of a consensus that was reached among pretty every country in the world, as opposed to the amendments you refer to (those were the result of a conseus among the Founding Fathers and probably the people of the USA).
I think it's all a matter of culture. Personally, this directive (at least the idea behind it) doesn't bother me that much (though I don't think it's technically feasible in an effective, sound and completely accurate way). It's after all a more or less logical extension of the anti-hatespeech laws we already have). The idea behind it has (imho) nothing to do with control or going to a totalitarian superstate or so. It's all about culture and history...
The US has been occupied for a long time and the Founding Fathers did not want to risk that the people would ever again be oppressed by the government, so they made the carrying of guns a fundamental right (at least, that's the way I understand things).
In Europe, people didn't want such horrible things as the holocaust to happen ever again, so to help prevent that they banned all sorts of hate speech, since that was what the Nazi's used to rally the people against the rest. This wasn't about curbing the rights of the people regarding what they could say, but to try to stop speech that promotes the limitation of freedom of other people (YMMV of course, but that's the intention).
Neither is a real solution to the "problem" they want to prevent, but nevertheless a lot of people hold on to them because their symbolic significance is quite big. Just like getting rid of that (the fourth?) amendment would be interpreted as "Ok, now they're coming for us because they want to take away our rights to carry weapons", stopping the crussade against hate-speech in Europe would pretty much signify "Well, the holocaust wasn't that bad after all, who cares if a couple of people start again with spreading such crap and other hate speech".
Re:Moshe Bar compares OS X to Linux
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 1
FWIW, the main reason for the overall speed boost in Jaguar is because of the use of gcc 3.1 to compile everyting instead of 2.9x. Afaik they haven't solved the "problem" with the PC-relative addressing yet (you can disable it when building an application, but that doesn't help for all shared libraries and frameworks).
The results are right here. Note that these tests were performed before the low-latency and pre-emption patches were available, so things may be (a lot) better on the Linux front by now.
Another interesting tidbit to read (use login/pass "archives", without the quotes) is this.
The reason the kernel is slower than under Linux, is mainy that the Mac OS X kernel is designed to deliver the best overall performance, not the best optimal performance. This means that when you put a machine under heavy load, the speed of those kernel operations under Linux takes a sharp nosedive (way below the Mac OS X numbers), while those of Mac OS X stay more or less the same. This is quite important for semi-realtime applications such as audio/midi processing, digital video etc.
The fact that it is based on a microkernel doesn't matter, because the Mac OS X kernel is not a microkernel anymore. The whole kernel runs in one address space (so no message passing between different kernel components), just like in Linux. They still kept the different parts of the kernel more or less distinct in the source, but this is simply for easier maintenance.
Funny you should ask that, those are the only graphics benchmarks Apple posts on their main site for each of their machines. It's at the bottom left of this page for the new iBook (49 fps for the 800MHz model) and at the bottom right of this page for the PowerBook (76 fps for the 1GHz model).
Don't forget that (almost?) all European countries charge quite a bit of VAT (all that healthcare etc doesn't come for free!) In Belgium that's 20.5% on luxury items (which includes electronic products), I guess it's similar in other EU countries.
Start it (start the application XDarwin from the Applications folder)
Do one of the following
ssh -X login@remote_box from within one of the opened XTerms
setenv DISPLAY:0; ssh -X login@remote_box from within Terminal
start the X application remotely
Now what's so different with regards to any other *nix box?
I don't know the exact steps you have to take to remotely run an X session on the OS X box, but at least one thing you may have to do is to enable X11Forwarding explicitly in/etc/sshd_config.
Finally, kep in mind that you *cannot* run Aqua apps remotely using X11.
No, it will definitely not make those things go a away or prevent them, just like a law that allows most people to carry guns will not really make a country more safe or prevent government oppression. It's just history: the US has been occupied for a long time and the Founding Fathers did not want to risk that the people would ever again be oppressed by the government, so they made the carrying of guns a fundamental right (at least, that's the way I understand things).
In Europe, people didn't want such horrible things as the holocaust to happen ever again, so to help prevent that they banned all sorts of hate speech, since that was what the Nazi's used to rally the people against the rest. This wasn't about curbing the rights of the people regarding what they could say, but to try to stop speech that promotes the limitation of freedom of other people (YMMV of course, but that's the intention).
Neither is a real solution to the "problem" they want to prevent, but nevertheless a lot of people hold on to them because their symbolic significance is quite big. Just like getting rid of that amendment would be interpreted as "Ok, now they're coming for us because they want to take away our rights to carry weapons", getting rid of those hate-speech laws would pretty much signify "Well, the holocaust wasn't that bad after all, who cares if a couple of people start again with spreading such crap and other hate speech".
I don't know how things are in the US, but here in Blegium if you patent something but don't "use" it (e.g. implement the stuff you describe in your patent and market it) for a number of yearts (I thought it was two, but I'm not sure), the patent office can force you to license it to third parties who are interested in actually bringing to market what you patented.
This regulation is there to make sure companies don't invent something that's better than anything that's out there, but wait with actually using their invention because e.g. they already have most of the market and as such aren't inclined to improve their product, but at the same time they don't want this technology to be used by their competition. So it's some kind of consumer protection (within X years, the consumer will have access to the invented stuff if it's usefull and marketable).
So if this rule also exists in the US, this guy could actually be forced to license his patents to Microsoft (or anyone else) if they want it. They even don't have to challenge it. It'll still show the licensee's "true intentions" of course, but still...
You really don't get it. Darwin == the BSD code they "took from the community". Do you really think there's so much BSD code in Aqua? Or in the Finder? Or their OpenGL framework?
Additionally, they also work on GPL code (gcc being the most known) and of course also give back things there (even if they didn't want to, they'd have to). The result is that gcc 3.x has much better PowerPC code generation, from which Linux and *BSD on PPC machines can benefit greatly as well.
Finally, they also opensourced several things they wrote from scratch, like their CSDA and ZeroConf (RendezVous) implementations.
Exactly. Given that programs which are highly optimized for AltiVec can already achieve higher performance on the current crop of G4-based Macs than on much higher clocked x86 compatibles (even though these Macs have a quite limited memory bus architecture that doesn't allow the processor to realise its full potential), I think a PPC970 with a 900MHz bus will be able to achieve monstruous performance numbers in some cases.
Couple that with the fact that large parts of Mac OS X are AltiVec optimized (lots of functions from the standard C library like memcpy, the OpenGL framework, the CoreAudio framework,...), I think the real world performance of (Apple) systems using this processor may lie quite a bit higher than what you would expect from just looking at the SPEC scores.
No, Mac OS X's UFS implementation does not yet have softupdates. It's not a top-priority for them either, since most of their users use HFS+. It's been presented as a good OpenDarwin project by Apple engineers on multiple occasions though.
All the "mac gui things" are also processes. You may want to subscribe to a mailing list (such as macosx-admin) and actually mention what the problem is that you are having, it might help.
Do you really think Macs cost more than most PC's just because of the processor? The G4 isn't that expensive, most of the extra cost comes from the fact that Apple sells less boxes and ass such needs higher margins to be able to fund its R&D (Dell doesn't have 28% margins on its products, believe me). An Apple 80x86 box would probably still cost as much as the current PPC Macs and you'd stil be bitching...
First of all, it's kernel, not "kernal":) Second, the Mach kernel has nothing to do with BSD and nothing's been ripped off. The Mach kernel was developed at the Carnegie
Mellon University School of Computer Science, among others by Apple's current head of development. I suggest you to read this (go to that url and click on the "show frames" button to get an overview of the index). Note that some images aren't included correctly in that document.
This won't work, since the games consist of 80x86 machine code instead of PowerPC machine code. While you could implement the Win32 API on a PowerPC, the games themselves are still intel binaries. BSD or not has nothing to do with it. FWIW: Mac OS X does not have a BSD kernel, it has a Mach kernel. Only userland is part FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
Ever heard of GNUStep? No, you won't get the shiny Aqua interface, but the Cocoa corefoundation is available in a free implementation. Of course, there's no binary compatibility and most apps released for Mac OS X are closed source, but that is not Apple's fault. When you would use closed source Linux apps which aren't available on the Mac (or even open source ones, but which e.g. contain a lot of 80x86 assembler, which rely on GNU libc pecularities or extensions and which are full of direct syscalls), you'd have exactly the same problem. That doesn't mean Linux is some evil scheme to lock in all users though.
I really don't see any evil Apple scheme of embrace-and-extend here, like Microsoft often does. I mean, it sounds like you hold it against them that they are mostly compatible with software coming from other Unix'es. If you want to code cross-platform, nothing stops you from doing that on Mac OS X, just like nothing stops you from doing that on Linux. Likewise, you can create closed-source or hard-to-port apps for both OS'es. The fact that there are more of the latter for Mac OS X isn't Apple's fault, it's because that's the way most companies that produce software for consumer OS'es work.
Now we see Apple intruducing a whole desktop system for Unix without any open specifications.
Umm, they say they try to be as POSIX compliant as possible. I think that's a pretty good spec.
If apple are going to play with other Unixes please do it with other Unixes and release those specs.
The Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X are open source and based on things that have been open source for ages: the mach kernel, parts of FreeBSD (most userland stuff), NetBSD and OpenBSD. As you can see, they *are* doing "it with other Unixes".
Did you even read that benchmark page? They didn't check the Photoshop performance (ever seen Photoshop run on Sun hardware?), but file server performance. For that, they used Macs with Photoshop that mounted a drive from the different servers that they tested and then did the tests you mention on those mounted drives to find out how good the servers handle the load resulting from this (ie. what the max throughput is, how well the performance scales if multiple clients connect at the same time etc).
Bottom line: it was indeed a very specific benchmark (they even explcitely mention that): a file serving benchmark.
Slashdot Mirror
Then again, the bacteriophages can also mutate and adapt (unlike antibiotics). I've seen that documentary as well and when those researchers encountered bacteria their pahges couldn't handle, they simply went "fishing" in the sewer waters of their own facility to collect new ones.
I think you may be thinking of the Universal Declaration of Children's Rights (not sure whether it's called exactly that way in English though). It would really surprise me if the US hadn't ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (then again, everything is possible these days :)
I'm not arguing against that idea, I'm arguing against the idea that the exact definition of those rights in the US constitution and its amendments is the only one and true definition of those rights.
Pretty much every law can be abused by government. And if they don't already have such a law, they will create one (Patriot Act anyone?). We've already had anti-hatespeech laws since World War II and as I said, this is just an attempt to extend that idea to new communication media, not to make the restrictions stronger.
Absolutely correct, and I still do. I don't believe in a concept of creation that grants you any rights. It's the society around you that does. This society came up with those rules based on its own history, to prevent bad things that happened to them in the past from happening again and to attempt to promote "good" things.
That society of course has different levels. First of all, there are your parents/family, and based on your parents you may have different "rights" when you grow (some kids are allowed to have as much candy as they want, others only after diner). Next, there may be the town, then the province, state, country, religion, world, universe (?)...
Because there's some sort of hierarchy (though not an absolute hierarchy that's the same for everyone, e.g. where religion comes in the picture can vary a lot), rights that have been accepted by society at a higher level (e.g. the country) can't be taken away from you at a lower level (your parents). You can get extra rights that aren't granted by an level above though (there's no right to bear arms in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but even if it were ratified by the US, nothing would stop them from giving that right to their citizens).
I think I'm starting to see your point: you want to say that because you're a human being that can think for itself, everything you can do is implitely your right to do. Is that correct? In that case, the question is of course: where do you draw the line of where your rights end and another persons rights begin. I mean, although you may have the capability to shoot someone with your gun simply because he annoys you, the government took away that right because that would seriously "hamper" the other persons right to live.
So now, I think we're back at the society level I was talking about above: at this point, it's society (and its representatives, the government) that decides where your rights end and another persons rights begin.
I wasn't arguing about whether or not banning hate speech was a good thing (read my post again, I nowhere say it was right to ban it that the US is wrong by allowing full free speech rights). I explicitely tried to keep out of that debate because imho, whether you agree with one view or another won't change because of arguments. I think it's simply a matter of culture/upbringing, you maybe even could call it indoctrination :)
You've been learning all your life about how important total free speech is and what not having free speech could lead to (and has lead to in the past). I've been learning all my life what bad things the Nazi's did (my grandfather was a soldier in WWII and managed to escape from a train en route to a concentration camp), how they used their ingeniously constructed propaganda to rally the people behind their distasteful ideas and as such, what can happen and has happened if you don't *try* to stop such things before they become too strong.
Again: I'm not saying that these laws are the best way to prevent such things from happening (I really wouldn't know what would be the best way that is practically achievable), it's just the idea behind them and abolishing those laws without anything "stronger" coming in their way, would look like giving up the fight against those ideas (although it wouldn't necessarilly be that).
I only was trying to make US citizens see why stopping the "war on hate-speech" in Europe is not so simple, because there's a very big symbolic meaning attached to it (just like there is a very big symbolic meaning attached to the amendments in the US... It's not just about those rights, it's about what happened before those rights were guaranteed and why they were enacted).
I think you missed my point here, you're taking it too litterally. I wanted to say that those anti-hate speech laws weren't enacted with the goal of gettting total control over the people, but with the intention of protection of certain minorities. You're correct that a limitation of free speech, whether it's hate-speech or any other kind of speech, is still a limitation of speech no matter how you look at it. I was talking about the intentions, the reasoning behind those rules (and again, it's is possible that those intentions will be totally perverted in the future and abused to no end, but, also again, I really think whether or not you have a law like that doesn't matter anymore when the government wants to oppress the people).
I hope this cleared up some things regarding my views...
That is your (and probably a lot of other people's) view, but that is not a fact. That you state it as a fact probably bothers a lot of non-US people quite a bit more than the actual contents of those amendments (and it's probably also that attitude that the original poster refers to).
There is also a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but it's by the United Nations. It's the result of a consensus that was reached among pretty every country in the world, as opposed to the amendments you refer to (those were the result of a conseus among the Founding Fathers and probably the people of the USA).
I think it's all a matter of culture. Personally, this directive (at least the idea behind it) doesn't bother me that much (though I don't think it's technically feasible in an effective, sound and completely accurate way). It's after all a more or less logical extension of the anti-hatespeech laws we already have). The idea behind it has (imho) nothing to do with control or going to a totalitarian superstate or so. It's all about culture and history...
The US has been occupied for a long time and the Founding Fathers did not want to risk that the people would ever again be oppressed by the government, so they made the carrying of guns a fundamental right (at least, that's the way I understand things).
In Europe, people didn't want such horrible things as the holocaust to happen ever again, so to help prevent that they banned all sorts of hate speech, since that was what the Nazi's used to rally the people against the rest. This wasn't about curbing the rights of the people regarding what they could say, but to try to stop speech that promotes the limitation of freedom of other people (YMMV of course, but that's the intention).
Neither is a real solution to the "problem" they want to prevent, but nevertheless a lot of people hold on to them because their symbolic significance is quite big. Just like getting rid of that (the fourth?) amendment would be interpreted as "Ok, now they're coming for us because they want to take away our rights to carry weapons", stopping the crussade against hate-speech in Europe would pretty much signify "Well, the holocaust wasn't that bad after all, who cares if a couple of people start again with spreading such crap and other hate speech".
FWIW, the main reason for the overall speed boost in Jaguar is because of the use of gcc 3.1 to compile everyting instead of 2.9x. Afaik they haven't solved the "problem" with the PC-relative addressing yet (you can disable it when building an application, but that doesn't help for all shared libraries and frameworks).
Another interesting tidbit to read (use login/pass "archives", without the quotes) is this.
The reason the kernel is slower than under Linux, is mainy that the Mac OS X kernel is designed to deliver the best overall performance, not the best optimal performance. This means that when you put a machine under heavy load, the speed of those kernel operations under Linux takes a sharp nosedive (way below the Mac OS X numbers), while those of Mac OS X stay more or less the same. This is quite important for semi-realtime applications such as audio/midi processing, digital video etc.
The fact that it is based on a microkernel doesn't matter, because the Mac OS X kernel is not a microkernel anymore. The whole kernel runs in one address space (so no message passing between different kernel components), just like in Linux. They still kept the different parts of the kernel more or less distinct in the source, but this is simply for easier maintenance.
For those winmail.dat files, get TNEF's enough, then you can decode them.
At 1024x768x32bpp on a laptop?
Funny you should ask that, those are the only graphics benchmarks Apple posts on their main site for each of their machines. It's at the bottom left of this page for the new iBook (49 fps for the 800MHz model) and at the bottom right of this page for the PowerBook (76 fps for the 1GHz model).
Don't forget that (almost?) all European countries charge quite a bit of VAT (all that healthcare etc doesn't come for free!) In Belgium that's 20.5% on luxury items (which includes electronic products), I guess it's similar in other EU countries.
- Install Mac OS X version of Xfree86 4.2.x
- Start it (start the application XDarwin from the Applications folder)
- Do one of the following
- ssh -X login@remote_box from within one of the opened XTerms
- setenv DISPLAY
:0; ssh -X login@remote_box from within Terminal
- start the X application remotely
Now what's so different with regards to any other *nix box?I don't know the exact steps you have to take to remotely run an X session on the OS X box, but at least one thing you may have to do is to enable X11Forwarding explicitly in /etc/sshd_config.
Finally, kep in mind that you *cannot* run Aqua apps remotely using X11.
Mac OS X adds both local and remote GUI admin tools, which are quite good.
No, it will definitely not make those things go a away or prevent them, just like a law that allows most people to carry guns will not really make a country more safe or prevent government oppression. It's just history: the US has been occupied for a long time and the Founding Fathers did not want to risk that the people would ever again be oppressed by the government, so they made the carrying of guns a fundamental right (at least, that's the way I understand things).
In Europe, people didn't want such horrible things as the holocaust to happen ever again, so to help prevent that they banned all sorts of hate speech, since that was what the Nazi's used to rally the people against the rest. This wasn't about curbing the rights of the people regarding what they could say, but to try to stop speech that promotes the limitation of freedom of other people (YMMV of course, but that's the intention).
Neither is a real solution to the "problem" they want to prevent, but nevertheless a lot of people hold on to them because their symbolic significance is quite big. Just like getting rid of that amendment would be interpreted as "Ok, now they're coming for us because they want to take away our rights to carry weapons", getting rid of those hate-speech laws would pretty much signify "Well, the holocaust wasn't that bad after all, who cares if a couple of people start again with spreading such crap and other hate speech".
I don't know how things are in the US, but here in Blegium if you patent something but don't "use" it (e.g. implement the stuff you describe in your patent and market it) for a number of yearts (I thought it was two, but I'm not sure), the patent office can force you to license it to third parties who are interested in actually bringing to market what you patented.
This regulation is there to make sure companies don't invent something that's better than anything that's out there, but wait with actually using their invention because e.g. they already have most of the market and as such aren't inclined to improve their product, but at the same time they don't want this technology to be used by their competition. So it's some kind of consumer protection (within X years, the consumer will have access to the invented stuff if it's usefull and marketable).
So if this rule also exists in the US, this guy could actually be forced to license his patents to Microsoft (or anyone else) if they want it. They even don't have to challenge it. It'll still show the licensee's "true intentions" of course, but still...
Additionally, they also work on GPL code (gcc being the most known) and of course also give back things there (even if they didn't want to, they'd have to). The result is that gcc 3.x has much better PowerPC code generation, from which Linux and *BSD on PPC machines can benefit greatly as well.
Finally, they also opensourced several things they wrote from scratch, like their CSDA and ZeroConf (RendezVous) implementations.
Exactly. Given that programs which are highly optimized for AltiVec can already achieve higher performance on the current crop of G4-based Macs than on much higher clocked x86 compatibles (even though these Macs have a quite limited memory bus architecture that doesn't allow the processor to realise its full potential), I think a PPC970 with a 900MHz bus will be able to achieve monstruous performance numbers in some cases.
...), I think the real world performance of (Apple) systems using this processor may lie quite a bit higher than what you would expect from just looking at the SPEC scores.
Couple that with the fact that large parts of Mac OS X are AltiVec optimized (lots of functions from the standard C library like memcpy, the OpenGL framework, the CoreAudio framework,
No, Mac OS X's UFS implementation does not yet have softupdates. It's not a top-priority for them either, since most of their users use HFS+. It's been presented as a good OpenDarwin project by Apple engineers on multiple occasions though.
All the "mac gui things" are also processes. You may want to subscribe to a mailing list (such as macosx-admin) and actually mention what the problem is that you are having, it might help.
Do you really think Macs cost more than most PC's just because of the processor? The G4 isn't that expensive, most of the extra cost comes from the fact that Apple sells less boxes and ass such needs higher margins to be able to fund its R&D (Dell doesn't have 28% margins on its products, believe me). An Apple 80x86 box would probably still cost as much as the current PPC Macs and you'd stil be bitching...
Now, back on topic...
This won't work, since the games consist of 80x86 machine code instead of PowerPC machine code. While you could implement the Win32 API on a PowerPC, the games themselves are still intel binaries. BSD or not has nothing to do with it. FWIW: Mac OS X does not have a BSD kernel, it has a Mach kernel. Only userland is part FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
I really don't see any evil Apple scheme of embrace-and-extend here, like Microsoft often does. I mean, it sounds like you hold it against them that they are mostly compatible with software coming from other Unix'es. If you want to code cross-platform, nothing stops you from doing that on Mac OS X, just like nothing stops you from doing that on Linux. Likewise, you can create closed-source or hard-to-port apps for both OS'es. The fact that there are more of the latter for Mac OS X isn't Apple's fault, it's because that's the way most companies that produce software for consumer OS'es work.
Jonas
Jonas
Bottom line: it was indeed a very specific benchmark (they even explcitely mention that): a file serving benchmark.
Jonas