Yeah, on a mac the viruses just WORK, you don't have to worry about finding drivers or system crashes to prevent viruses from running optimally, and they offer easy drag and drop installations, right?
In FreeBSD you have to specifically install compatibility layers to run binaries from a previous major release cycle, maybe someone more in the know could say if you can actually still run binaries compiled against 1.x in 7.x.
The problem with linux is... it's not an operating system, it's a kernel. A linux distro is an actual operating system, there's actually projects like Belinix that feature a different kernel, (in this case the opensolaris kernel) with the gnu user-space tools on top of it, if you wanted to, you could with some effort probably take the linux kernel and put freebsd user-space tools on top of it.
A lot of the projects that people complain "need to be standardized", "need to work better together", aren't even linux only projects. Firefox and Opera run on OS X and Windows plus a variety of other platforms, Gnome, KDE, and Xfce can run on any system that can run a suitable Xserver, including at least Solaris and FreeBSD. NFS originally came from Solaris, Xservers predated the linux kernel by at least a decade. Why should this projects be particularly well integrated with linux kernel development when they aren't done by the same people, or even people who have the same goals?
And you know what? If you install KDE on freebsd, it works and is configured the same way it's configured on a linux distro (up to patches and compile options, of course) If you install firefox on Windows it has the same user interface as it does on OpenSolaris. I don't think the future of computing is going to be dominated by one "standardized" kind of linux distrubution, but rather by cross-platform portable applications and hardware.
So, I exagerated a bit, and in reality there are some people who are working on commercial, mass-consumption open source projections, and there are some people who are trying to write easy-to-use software, but the majority of OSS developers are un-paid volunteers and I think it's just un-fair for users to demand "we need feature X yesterday!". My computing experiance really improved when I went from Windows to linux not becuase things have been any less finicky or liable to break, but rather becuase my perceptions have changed from "why doesn't this expensive piece of crap, work?" to "well, this isn't perfect, but I'm really glad someone took the time to make this".
No. YOUR attitude is the problem. Joe user is not ENTITLED to a free operating system, if he wants a nice usable OS designed to be used by idiots he already has two choices he can buy from the local computer store. If Joe paid money for support to Red Hat or Canonical, then maybe Joe would have the right to complain the operating system isn't good enough for him. OSS is designed by people who want to design software, not by people who want their software to be widely used.
More or less, I'm not a great expert on the matter myself. Since OS X has an X11-compatibility layer (called "Quartz") if you've got an implementation of graphics output that will work with Xorg, it should also work on a Mac. There's plenty of other parts of the code where you might have to worry about something that will execute fine on Linux or OS X but not vice versa, but probably significantly less places than w/ either OS compared to Windows.
It would be nice maybe if freeBSD's UFS2 could be adopted, thanks to the BSD licensing anyone could implement it in their kernel so, in principle, it's a perfect fit. There's two sticking points though:
1) Getting people to adopt it and
2) Getting people to adhere to a standard implementation so that that it IS actually a portable filesystem. (look at what happened w/ UFS1)
More or less you're right but:
Mac OS X is based off the XNU kernel which is an actual unix kernel which inherits code from BSD, and might even contain some code from the
original distrubtion of unix from At&t. Apple claims their operating system is "genuine unix", and it probably fullfils some set of certification requirements (Almost definitaly POSIX), at the same time, however, Apple built alot of extensions on top of thier base system, including their own graphics server (although they also support X11 apps), that would be absent in any other unix.
Linux is a kernel, originally intended as a minix replacement, which eventually grew into a unix clone, the GNU project had set out to clone unix from day one. Linux inherits NO code from the original At&t unix operating system, and very little, if any code from BSD pre-dating the 3 *bsd projects. Linux is not quite posix compliant, and probably never will be. On the other hand, Linux sort of "feels" like unix in a way Mac OS X doesn't, from a users perspective (well, from my perspective, anyway).
Yeah, and they were using a Solaris Release Candidate as well, to really make a fair comparison, you would, I think, want to use actually official "production" releases of each operating system.
In the end, the results don't really seem to stand out a whole lot, except that Solaris does signifacantly better on a couple benchmarks, and then significantly worse on others.
It worked, but not very well, when the requirement was dropped from the sticker, of course Intel saw no reason to actually make it work well-enough to release. Sueing over this would be like sueing... I don't know, let's say Apple for producing iPods that you can't install rockbox on. Just becuase you produce hardware that theoretically can support some feature, doesn't put you under any LEGAL obligation to provide drivers for that functionality.
Of course, you're more than welcome to get pissed off at Intel and stop buying thier products.
Yes, they do run Vista Home Basic, which is clearly "Vista" since Vista is right in the name, they can't handle the Aero interface which becuase of Hardware limitations, since "Home Basic" doesn't come with Aero anyway, this isn't an issue.
Now I don't know what happens if you try to install one of the fancy versions of Vista, becuase I haven't tried, but maybe you can, you just can't run Aero. Now the hardware is marked as "Vista Capable", and it IS capable of running at least "Vista Home Basic", but some people thought this meant "I can install any version of Vista on this computer and use all the features".
I don't really have an opinion about who's right in this case, I hope Microsoft loses, just becuase I have a grudge against them, but honestly, "Vista Home Basic" is a version of "Vista" so you can certainly argue these computers were "Vista Capable". On the other hand, "Vista Home Premium" is also a version of Vista and, even if you could install it (which I'm not sure is possible) you certainly can't run it with all features enabled. So is a "vista capable" label misleading?
I don't know. But this is what the court case is about deciding, and the KEY disputed point really is about labelling hardware sold w/o a graphics card that can render Aero as "Vista Capable".
Hopefully, any developers dropping out due to having devote time to commercial projects will be offset by contributions by bored newly un-employed programmers.
I have actually gotten youtube to work with swfdec. At the moment youtube is not working, again, which might be becuase of the latest flash update, but hopefully the swfdec team will catch back up.
IE is bloated in terms of dependancies, Firefox may depend on Xulrunner, Opera may depend on Qt, Konqueror may depend on KDE, and Epiphany may depend on Gnome, but IE and Safari are the only browsers that depend on an entire operating system. (uh... I guess Chrome does too, but Google said they were gonna fix that)
Maybe this is it, personally, when Chrome was announced and then I heard about Andriod, things suddenly made sense; Google wanted it's own web-browser for it's mobile device platform... trying to conquer the rest of the embedded market isn't much of jump, and maybe it even makes sense, but it's still not so clear to me how google ends up profitting from a move like this. Information mining? Does this somehow make it easier to provide targetted advertising?
What strikes me as funny here is the "Being an Xfce user, my personal favorite is Epiphany." What does that have to do with anything?
Opera is nice but it's proprietary, konqueror runs snappy and has a good interface, but seems slow on loading pages, epiphany is usable but... well, I have this notion it's buggy but this might becuase I'm used to using it on a Debian install that probably hasn't been updated in 2 years.
My personal favorite, actually, is probably links II. The only problem is that it can't handle java or flash, so I still need to have firefox or opera around.
Also, Debain and the GNU project sort-of forked firefox already:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceweaselhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat
I think Ubuntu is thinking about forking the project to, although, up to now, they've had some special arrangement that let them package firefox with out rebranding.
Well, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)#OpenDarwin and form your own how much apple contributes back to the community. Actually, on reading this, I saw that there's a current project to get an OSS Darwin project going again, last time I looked things were DOA.
As far as thing go for me, the only good thing I get out of Apple is CUPS, but that was originally developed Easy Software Products,
Other apple products do not play so well w/ third party OS and/or apps such as:
- the ipod
- the iphone
- others?
My opinion, when push comes to shove:
Apple's NOT doing the same thing as Red Hat or Novell, they've provided a few things to the community, and they provide a lot of base-level code for thier OS, but I don't really think they work with the community or care what they do. Apple makes their own design decisions, based on what they think is best for them as a company. Red Hat and Novell do the same thing, but since they're working with gpl products and more "providing a service" vs. "providing a product" it makes more sense for them to work with upstream projects, and they do contribute back to the community as a whole. I don't really see Apple doing this, or really caring so much.
Despite the occassionaly scalding comments fromLinus or Theo, I think there's a lot more of a spirit of cooperation amongst *bsd and linux, and even OpenSolaris, and certainly there's some degree of cooperation amongst major linux distros, even if they're all competing against each other. Meanwhile, Apple keeps OS X off in a sheltered little corner. Maybe I'm wrong, this is just the impression I get.
Ultimately, hopefully, the issue which will get the defendants in trouble will not be that they sold the keylogger software OR that they provided tutorials on how to trojan it into unwitting victims computers, but rather that THEY stored illegally obtained software on THIER server.
Otherwise, this sets a dangerous precident where someone decides that software which potentially has valid uses, is declared illegal. (It's convoluted but you can imagine a case where someone might have a legitimate use for using keylogger software) It's like the whole "right to bear arms thing", just becuase someone shoots his neighbor doesn't mean guns should be illegal. (they should be, IMO, but this isn't the reason)
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Yeah, on a mac the viruses just WORK, you don't have to worry about finding drivers or system crashes to prevent viruses from running optimally, and they offer easy drag and drop installations, right?
Not true, Nvidia suggested to users who complained thier cards didn't work in Vista that they should just use XP.
In FreeBSD you have to specifically install compatibility layers to run binaries from a previous major release cycle, maybe someone more in the know could say if you can actually still run binaries compiled against 1.x in 7.x.
The problem with linux is ... it's not an operating system, it's a kernel. A linux distro is an actual operating system, there's actually projects like Belinix that feature a different kernel, (in this case the opensolaris kernel) with the gnu user-space tools on top of it, if you wanted to, you could with some effort probably take the linux kernel and put freebsd user-space tools on top of it.
A lot of the projects that people complain "need to be standardized", "need to work better together", aren't even linux only projects. Firefox and Opera run on OS X and Windows plus a variety of other platforms, Gnome, KDE, and Xfce can run on any system that can run a suitable Xserver, including at least Solaris and FreeBSD. NFS originally came from Solaris, Xservers predated the linux kernel by at least a decade. Why should this projects be particularly well integrated with linux kernel development when they aren't done by the same people, or even people who have the same goals?
And you know what? If you install KDE on freebsd, it works and is configured the same way it's configured on a linux distro (up to patches and compile options, of course) If you install firefox on Windows it has the same user interface as it does on OpenSolaris. I don't think the future of computing is going to be dominated by one "standardized" kind of linux distrubution, but rather by cross-platform portable applications and hardware.
OS X, AIX, Solaris, FreeBSD, how many binaries do you think will work on 3 out of 4 of these?
So, I exagerated a bit, and in reality there are some people who are working on commercial, mass-consumption open source projections, and there are some people who are trying to write easy-to-use software, but the majority of OSS developers are un-paid volunteers and I think it's just un-fair for users to demand "we need feature X yesterday!". My computing experiance really improved when I went from Windows to linux not becuase things have been any less finicky or liable to break, but rather becuase my perceptions have changed from "why doesn't this expensive piece of crap, work?" to "well, this isn't perfect, but I'm really glad someone took the time to make this".
No. YOUR attitude is the problem. Joe user is not ENTITLED to a free operating system, if he wants a nice usable OS designed to be used by idiots he already has two choices he can buy from the local computer store. If Joe paid money for support to Red Hat or Canonical, then maybe Joe would have the right to complain the operating system isn't good enough for him. OSS is designed by people who want to design software, not by people who want their software to be widely used.
More or less, I'm not a great expert on the matter myself. Since OS X has an X11-compatibility layer (called "Quartz") if you've got an implementation of graphics output that will work with Xorg, it should also work on a Mac. There's plenty of other parts of the code where you might have to worry about something that will execute fine on Linux or OS X but not vice versa, but probably significantly less places than w/ either OS compared to Windows.
It would be nice maybe if freeBSD's UFS2 could be adopted, thanks to the BSD licensing anyone could implement it in their kernel so, in principle, it's a perfect fit. There's two sticking points though:
1) Getting people to adopt it and
2) Getting people to adhere to a standard implementation so that that it IS actually a portable filesystem. (look at what happened w/ UFS1)
More or less you're right but: Mac OS X is based off the XNU kernel which is an actual unix kernel which inherits code from BSD, and might even contain some code from the original distrubtion of unix from At&t. Apple claims their operating system is "genuine unix", and it probably fullfils some set of certification requirements (Almost definitaly POSIX), at the same time, however, Apple built alot of extensions on top of thier base system, including their own graphics server (although they also support X11 apps), that would be absent in any other unix. Linux is a kernel, originally intended as a minix replacement, which eventually grew into a unix clone, the GNU project had set out to clone unix from day one. Linux inherits NO code from the original At&t unix operating system, and very little, if any code from BSD pre-dating the 3 *bsd projects. Linux is not quite posix compliant, and probably never will be. On the other hand, Linux sort of "feels" like unix in a way Mac OS X doesn't, from a users perspective (well, from my perspective, anyway).
No, ideally it becomes a Linux/*BSD/Solaris/MacOS X game.
Where's the year of the linux desktop?
Yeah, and they were using a Solaris Release Candidate as well, to really make a fair comparison, you would, I think, want to use actually official "production" releases of each operating system.
In the end, the results don't really seem to stand out a whole lot, except that Solaris does signifacantly better on a couple benchmarks, and then significantly worse on others.
It worked, but not very well, when the requirement was dropped from the sticker, of course Intel saw no reason to actually make it work well-enough to release. Sueing over this would be like sueing ... I don't know, let's say Apple for producing iPods that you can't install rockbox on. Just becuase you produce hardware that theoretically can support some feature, doesn't put you under any LEGAL obligation to provide drivers for that functionality.
Of course, you're more than welcome to get pissed off at Intel and stop buying thier products.
Yes, they do run Vista Home Basic, which is clearly "Vista" since Vista is right in the name, they can't handle the Aero interface which becuase of Hardware limitations, since "Home Basic" doesn't come with Aero anyway, this isn't an issue.
Now I don't know what happens if you try to install one of the fancy versions of Vista, becuase I haven't tried, but maybe you can, you just can't run Aero. Now the hardware is marked as "Vista Capable", and it IS capable of running at least "Vista Home Basic", but some people thought this meant "I can install any version of Vista on this computer and use all the features".
I don't really have an opinion about who's right in this case, I hope Microsoft loses, just becuase I have a grudge against them, but honestly, "Vista Home Basic" is a version of "Vista" so you can certainly argue these computers were "Vista Capable". On the other hand, "Vista Home Premium" is also a version of Vista and, even if you could install it (which I'm not sure is possible) you certainly can't run it with all features enabled. So is a "vista capable" label misleading?
I don't know. But this is what the court case is about deciding, and the KEY disputed point really is about labelling hardware sold w/o a graphics card that can render Aero as "Vista Capable".
No,the point is that a machine INCAPABLE of running Aero should not be labelled as "vista capable". That's the ENTIRE basis of the lawsuit.
Becuase you can! ... oh, I guess you can't.
Hopefully, any developers dropping out due to having devote time to commercial projects will be offset by contributions by bored newly un-employed programmers.
I have actually gotten youtube to work with swfdec. At the moment youtube is not working, again, which might be becuase of the latest flash update, but hopefully the swfdec team will catch back up.
IE is bloated in terms of dependancies, Firefox may depend on Xulrunner, Opera may depend on Qt, Konqueror may depend on KDE, and Epiphany may depend on Gnome, but IE and Safari are the only browsers that depend on an entire operating system. (uh... I guess Chrome does too, but Google said they were gonna fix that)
Maybe this is it, personally, when Chrome was announced and then I heard about Andriod, things suddenly made sense; Google wanted it's own web-browser for it's mobile device platform ... trying to conquer the rest of the embedded market isn't much of jump, and maybe it even makes sense, but it's still not so clear to me how google ends up profitting from a move like this. Information mining? Does this somehow make it easier to provide targetted advertising?
What strikes me as funny here is the "Being an Xfce user, my personal favorite is Epiphany." What does that have to do with anything? Opera is nice but it's proprietary, konqueror runs snappy and has a good interface, but seems slow on loading pages, epiphany is usable but ... well, I have this notion it's buggy but this might becuase I'm used to using it on a Debian install that probably hasn't been updated in 2 years.
My personal favorite, actually, is probably links II. The only problem is that it can't handle java or flash, so I still need to have firefox or opera around.
Also, Debain and the GNU project sort-of forked firefox already:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceweasel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat
I think Ubuntu is thinking about forking the project to, although, up to now, they've had some special arrangement that let them package firefox with out rebranding.
contribute very strongly back to the community?
Well, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)#OpenDarwin and form your own how much apple contributes back to the community. Actually, on reading this, I saw that there's a current project to get an OSS Darwin project going again, last time I looked things were DOA. As far as thing go for me, the only good thing I get out of Apple is CUPS, but that was originally developed Easy Software Products, Other apple products do not play so well w/ third party OS and/or apps such as: - the ipod - the iphone - others? My opinion, when push comes to shove: Apple's NOT doing the same thing as Red Hat or Novell, they've provided a few things to the community, and they provide a lot of base-level code for thier OS, but I don't really think they work with the community or care what they do. Apple makes their own design decisions, based on what they think is best for them as a company. Red Hat and Novell do the same thing, but since they're working with gpl products and more "providing a service" vs. "providing a product" it makes more sense for them to work with upstream projects, and they do contribute back to the community as a whole. I don't really see Apple doing this, or really caring so much. Despite the occassionaly scalding comments fromLinus or Theo, I think there's a lot more of a spirit of cooperation amongst *bsd and linux, and even OpenSolaris, and certainly there's some degree of cooperation amongst major linux distros, even if they're all competing against each other. Meanwhile, Apple keeps OS X off in a sheltered little corner. Maybe I'm wrong, this is just the impression I get.
Ultimately, hopefully, the issue which will get the defendants in trouble will not be that they sold the keylogger software OR that they provided tutorials on how to trojan it into unwitting victims computers, but rather that THEY stored illegally obtained software on THIER server. Otherwise, this sets a dangerous precident where someone decides that software which potentially has valid uses, is declared illegal. (It's convoluted but you can imagine a case where someone might have a legitimate use for using keylogger software) It's like the whole "right to bear arms thing", just becuase someone shoots his neighbor doesn't mean guns should be illegal. (they should be, IMO, but this isn't the reason)
... seriously